Review: Breath of Fire 1

What a fun game!

The first time I booted this game was on ZSNES on my Mom's old PC in the early 00s or late 90s. I think I was in 10th grade and man I did NOT get it. I don’t think I ever progressed past the first room. Honestly that was probably for the best. With so little direction, and even less communication, baby Teddy would have been crushed by this game. As a grown man I had to look up very few things but I’m confident that was mostly luck and momentum. If I'd taken a day or two off this game I would have ended up so lost I would have had to start over. After so many years I can finally say I beat the game. Once with minimal Googling and the second time looking up requirements for the "good ending." I beat the boss once then loaded up a save state and spent another hour to get everything I needed for the true boss fight. In total I ended up spending just under 24 hours playing. I enjoyed the game quite a lot despite it’s flaws.

Since I didn’t look up most things I spent a lot of time wandering which means I leveled up quite a bit before tackling story sections. As I got near the end of the game it became more linear and I went from over leveled to under leveled quickly. I think you're supposed to be level 40ish by the end as one of the last party members I gained was this level, but I was level 29 going into the last dungeon. I didn't even have a multi target healing spell until I was almost to the final boss. I was a very happy bear when I got it. I’d been using items to fill this purpose and they were dropping off in effectiveness as my HP values got higher. Despite being underleveled the difficulty felt just about perfect. I found myself strategizing during fights to balance defense and offense. In spite of their low levels some characters had obscenely powerful options that I leveraged to stay in the fight. I also had some of the best equipment since I'd been exploiting the auction hall mechanic with save states. Yeah I'm a cheater but wasting hours on an RNG isn't my idea of fun. Also the save states mostly just sped up the process as I didn’t go so far as to try to find RNG manipulation setups to get specific items. I’ll admit I did use save states to make sure I got the best prices but I never used states to cheese any encounters. THAT'S the fun part.

In combat most of the enemies were predictable but fun to fight anyway. Most enemies felt dangerous even when I was overleveled so I had to pay attention despite being able to clear most battles in a single turn. I remember specifically fighting some boogers who would use AOE magic if they were at red health and I almost got game over’d a few times because of my own critical hits undermining my damage strategy. Kind of awesome when 2 or 3 characters go down because of one mistake starting a scramble to save the fight. Bosses left a bit to be desired as they were basically regular enemies with a bigger health bars. Many bosses also had an invisible health bar on top of that. I found this cool at first but it got old pretty quick. You "beat" them and they just refuse to die for a while until you beat them again. I couldn't discern any "trick" to this, you just keep hitting them until they die with no visual indicator of how long that will take. I’ll admit though that early in the game it introduced tension to the end of battles since the margin of error was smaller. That tension was dependant on my not expecting the elongated fight however. By the end of the game I learned to just expect it especially if the boss had any dialogue before the fight. Sometimes bosses also changed strategies slightly but it was never enough to force my strategy to change. I’d usually just end up healing a bit more often if anything. This didn’t ruin the game by any means but it didn’t add much either in my opinion.

Another gameplay element I’d like to touch on was was the inventory system. No sorting options, limited space, and permanent items that simply ate up precious inventory slots. It was awesome. Anyone who’s a Resident Evil 4 attache case enthusiast will understand why this was fun. I took organizing my items very seriously. It was so satisfying. A few times I wound up dreading cleaning up my items page. After a long time away from the storage in town my inventory would end up a mess from items that popped haphazardly into by bag as I found them. Once I worked up my nerve and started sorting the bag I would slip into strategizing. I often lost track of time as I moved things around looking for that perfect layout. I always ended up very happy with my newly organized bag and would step back into exploration feeling refreshed. Another cool feature was you can sort items mid battle so if I was using a particular stack of items unexpectedly, or a reusable attack item, I’d often move them into an easier to reach position. I was worried about the menu design at first but instead of being tedious it ended up being a genuinely enjoyable part of the game.

Breath of Fire’s story was definitely basic, but in the best way. You're a legendary hero, and you go do hero stuff to save your sister and the world. Each NPC and playable character had their own little motivation and backstories. Even though the stories were shallow, grammatically questionable and predictable these characters ended up charming me. It’s like when you go to a Fast & Furious movie. You know what’s coming; a kinda brainless straight forward car racing movie with a focus on the action rather than the rest of the “stuff” stories need. Breath of Fire is kind of the Fast & Furious of SNES JRPGs. It gives you every beat of a JRPG you’d expect without keeping you from playing the game. It was a good time straight through and I walked away knowing a lot about the lore even though minimal time was spent on exposition.

Despite sticking to the JRPG playbook Breath of Fire was wholly original and did some unique things. There was a metroidvania-esque progression where new party members opened up new areas with their particular skills. Breath of Fire also went out of its way to undercut some well established tropes of the genre. It created moments where players are purposely set up to think “Oh this is the part where THIS area opens up to me” only to completely pull the rug out from under the characters and have the party end up stranded instead. Very fun and obviously deliberately targeted at players who are intimately familiar with common tropes of JRPGS.

I often play through a series of games one at a time from the beginning which brings me to the real reason I played Breath of Fire 1. I thought Breath of Fire 4 on PS1 looked cool and wanted to make sure I really understood Breath of Fire as a series before playing it. Theres something about the little nods and references that brings an extra layer of charm to sequels that I don’t want to miss out on. I’ll definitely be trying 2 since 1 was such a good experience and I hope it lives up to the original and fixes a few of the shortcomings as well. This is a long road though so it might take me a while before I play Breath of Fire 4. So anyway: Breath of Fire 1 was okay! If you haven’t tried it I’d fully recommend it. It’s currently available as part of the SNES package of Nintendo Switch Online and there are … other ways of getting it as well 🏴‍☠️. HMU on Discord if you need help figuring out a way to play. Drop by my about page if you want to support! Hit me on Twitter if you have any comments! Thanks for reading! Best luck!