BREATH OF FIRE IS FUCKING TERRIBLE, PART I

I am doing this review as a public service.  I want you to read this, and from that, realize you should never play this game regardless of any misguided retro charm, or bizarre desire to START FROM THE BEGINNING of some mediocre rpg series.

A few days ago, I started playing Breath of Fire for the Game Boy Advance.  Originally it was for the Super Nintendo.  This was its boxart, and WORRYING SIGN NUMBER ONE:

I decided not to play the snes version, not because of CHUNK MCHUGEPALM and his rapeface, but that doing some research revealed that the GBA version literally doubled the amount of EXP and gold gained per defeated enemy.  This was WORRYING SIGN NUMBER 2, as any game that so spectacularly botched its required grinding in the original iteration probably has other issues.

Oh boy. 

It's hard to pin down, halfway through this game, the worst part of things.  The "story" is probably the worst thing, and as I'm going to post more updates on what a mess this game is, I should probably start with all of the other problems.

I think the most obvious problem is the goddamned pace of this game.  I recently bought a new gamepad, and mapped the emulator's "fast forward" button to the right trigger button.  This was a response to Golden Sun, which has some really really languid cutscenes (I want to cut the person that thought that good storytelling was having character sprites have emoticon bubbles over their head while repeating a plot point for the umpteenth time).  But the worst thing is that, for all of Golden Sun's faults, it is a goddamned rollercoaster Bruckheimer fuckdaze compared to Breath of Fire.

Everything in Breath of Fire just has weird little delays going on.  Pushing start to go to a menu has a half-second of empty space.  Fights are an eternal back-up at a traffic light, each attack taking an infuriating space to clear.  Apparently in a bid to save the sanity of a new generation of gamers, the GBA programmers included a run button.  That's right: in the SNES version, you had to walk everywhere.  As a surreal anachronism, or warning, holding down B lets you purists walk.

But it's not just technical delays.  I'm no great RPG expert, but I've always looked askance when reviewers whine THE ENCOUNTER RATE IS THREE STEPS PER BATTLE about certain games.  Usually, the complaint is a fairly large exaggeration, at worst you're actually going to be dealing with a random battle once every screen, or twenty steps or so.  But hey, Breath of Fire is ready to show you the truth.  While it's not always as bad, I've gone through certain caves where I went two steps before I had to face yet another pack of evil flies as I try to find my way out of my fifth identical hallway.  To be fair, there are extremely cheap items that remove encounters, but the insane grinder monkey in me refuses to utilize them unless the XP gain is negligible or I'm completely fucking lost.

Which slickly leads me to my next point: the dungeon design is so goddamned bad.  I'm wracking my head to think of worse dungeons in RPGs, but it's so far an utter blank.  Generally, I'm used to designers of bad dungeons at least having the common decency of making them short (ala Golden Sun).  Even the caves Breath of Fire take over five minutes to get through,  thanks both to the aforementioned awesome encounter rate and just the general unending corridors of the same texture without any variation.  Even the maps I drew for my imaginary rpg starring my cats when I was eight had more verve. 

Here, I am including a FASCINATING DEMONSTRATION (mute the first video, unless you like autistic commenters and/or hate awesome japanese music) of what I am talking about.  I'd like to note two things here:

1) This dungeon is the second-most interestingly designed dungeon I have seen.
2) The most interestingly-designed dungeon was literal carbon copy of this dungeon (even the weird placeholder floors), except the water was replaced by LAVA!  Holy fucking shit.

A side effect of generally being stuck in endless hallways with absolutely no landmarks is that you will frequently get lost as shit.  The constant enemy interruptions also ruin things monumentally.  The whole thing is like some awful videogame interpretation of Kafka with floating blue bird pin things replacing the laconic gatekeeper.  Oh, and as a special fuck you, some dungeons won't even give you an automatic exit once you get Mission Critical Item #42, forcing you to try to remember everything in reverse, as there is apparently no "warp out of dungeon" spell or item, which is especially confusing as the game does give you a town warp spell when you're in the overworld (one of the very few "convenience" additions to the game).

Graphics are whatever.  Not exactly awful, but certainly unimaginative.  Towns are actually worse than dungeons as you will run into houses with the exact same layout, including placement of chests and hidden items. Enemies haven't already descended into alternative palette hell, so kudos for that, Capcom, I guess.  I've given up listening to RPG music since Fugazi gives me far more inspiration to murder evil fleas and amoebas than whatever lame themes you babies consider to be music.

Of course, I'd be willing to forgive all this shit if the combat was genuinely interesting, or at least treated party members as vaguely different units requiring different commands and tactics to maximize efficiency.  As we'll see in the next part, any hope for this is false and what were you thinking, you dirty disgusting little piggy?