Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 380: Breath of Fire I & II

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Nadia Oxford, and patron Alex Meyers activate their podcast genes and fuse into a super-form conversation about Capcom's first serious attempt to enter the role-playing fray with the Breath of Fire games for Super NES. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This weekend, Retronauts, a breath of fire is a great excuse for some Final Fantasy Tic Tacs. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronaut's episode. Oh, I forgot to look at the episode number. It's a really big number. It's very, very large. We've been doing this for a long time. And yet, somehow I don't think we've ever had an episode dedicated to this topic. So we are breaking new ground. And I have to admit that, okay, it looks like it's 380, episode 380. I have to confess that we would not have broken this new ground, if not for the fact that this is a patron request. So we'll begin this episode by letting our patron speak up and then we can do the proper introductions for the rest of the crew. But yes, who are you and why are we talking about this topic?

Hi, everybody. My name is Alex Myers. And we're talking about breath of fire because it's criminally underrated. and no one talks about it anymore. There were five games that came out in the sixth one that never actually happened. Wink, wink, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, there was no sixth breath of fire. No, definitely not.

It was not a thing. And then, you know, and I was actually, because I listened to a lot of podcasts while I'm working, and I've gone back through the entire pantheon of retronauts at this point. And yeah, there was never anything out of breath of fire. You would talk about it now and then as like a, remember that piece of garbage game? And I was always like, how dare? And so I thought, well, I'm going to pay money and force you to talk about it. So here we are.

Yes, but you're paying money, and yet we don't have to be nice about it. So get ready for a fun episode. No, I'm kidding. I actually don't have any acts to grind with Breath of Fire. I have opinions about the series, but it's kind of in that tier where I don't have extremely strong feelings in favor of it, but I also am not really opposed to it. So with that said, I am Jeremy Parrish hosting this episode. And in addition to myself and Alex, we also have the U.S.

usual rabble out in San Francisco, well, Berkeley, I guess. Thank you. Hey, it's Bob Mackie, and I have breath of coffee. It's a real problem. Good thing we are, good thing we are socially distanced. And finally, up in Canada. Hi, it's Nadia Oxford from Canada. I am actually happy to be on this episode because I am also quite pro breath of fire. While I do acknowledge it's flaws, I just kind of love the series. And I'm happy to give it a little bit of love. And I am proud of myself for recognizing that fact about you. Even though I don't know I've ever actually heard you say, like, I love Breath of Fire.

I just knew when this episode came up, Nadia would be the right person to talk to. Did you not? Dear Parrish, do you not remember the time I wrote a Breath of Fire 3 article for your Toasty Frog Zine? How could you forget? I am wounded. You know, it's nothing personal. I don't remember most of what I wrote for the Toasty Frog Zines. It's been a long time.

and I've covered a lot of ground since then. So, yes, you need to address that complaint to someone who is, you know, in a different life, some other human being than myself. Anyway, yeah, I'm not actually the original Jeremy Parrish. Like Breath of Fire's Ryu, I actually am the same person. There's a person named Jeremy Parrish who comes along, you know, once every generation and has the same abilities and look and personality, but it's not the same person. The dragon wearing a nice hat.

Yes, I'm actually like the third one. Yeah, you know, Breath of Fire was doing that way before Zelda did, if you think about it. Yeah. Was it, though? Because Zelda, you had Zelda, you know, a link to the past before Breath of Fire. So they think it's- I just mean the idea of like the main character is kind of the same, but not really. But is it, you know? Yeah, I think, I think not to get too deep into this, but I think Winwaker was the first one to posit that theory.

That could be incorrect. I'm sure if I am someone will let me know. time, because I just remember Gannon swearing revenge on Link's descendants. I mean, I just always assumed that like the Zelda in the third game was different than the Zelda in the first game because the storyline just didn't make any sense with the time gaps and everything. But this is not a Zelda episode. What are we doing talking about the Zelda timeline in an episode that has nothing to do with the legend of Zelda? Dear Lord, this is terrible. No, we should be focused on Breath of Fire.

Because as it happens, we are recording this the day after the series 28th anniversary. By total coincidence, I just happened to see someone on Twitter yesterday say, hey, happy 20th anniversary to Breath of Fire. And I thought, well, that's a co-winky dink. And yet, despite that, when I called for people to submit letters to talk about Breath of Fire, only two people replied. So that is probably why Capcom no longer makes Breath of Fire games. It has some very loyal fans, but not a whole lot of them. So, anyway, Breath of Fire, before we go into the actual discussion of Breath and Fire 1 and 2, that's the focus of this episode. I really don't think we can do justice to all five games in a single episode.

So I kind of see like this, you know, Breath of Fire 1 and 2, maybe sometime down the road, do a 3 and 4 episode. And, you know, Dragon Quarter, that's so weird and unique and interesting that it really doesn't. does merit its own episode. So for the time being, Breath of Fire 1 and 2, what was your first experience with Breath of Fire? Alex, why don't we start with you? Since you are the man of the hour,

the guest of the show, the source of all discussion for the next hour and a half? Great. Well, so my first experience of Breath of Fire was actually Breath of Fire 2. I went back and played the first one after the fact. So I have three older brothers.

And so as the youngest boy, I kind of just watched them play a bunch of games as I grew up to the 90s. And so I watched them play Breath of Fire too. And I was like, this game looks amazing. And I never got to play it on my own until they were in high school and like too cool for, you know, games and stuff. And so probably a couple years after it came out. So it must have been like 96, 97, some around it when I first played it. And it just kind of blew my mind because I grew up in this very – we'll talk about this later when we talk about the story. But, you know, I grew up in this very conservative Christian house.

oh dear and so playing a game where it's like religion's bad dude like what if the pope and what if God was a demon I was like my eight year old brain was like what and so like that really stuck with me

and I played a bunch of JRP's and that story has been regurgitated a million times but I went back and played the first one several years after I think I played it during like when emulation was a big thing like ROMs and stuff

were a big thing in like the late 90s you know and then I played it by one and I remember going back to the first one after the second one, I was kind of like, oh, this is kind of a little rinky-dink little, this is not nearly as good as the second one. So I played it maybe only once or twice all the way through, but I played the second one probably, oh gosh, like 20 times. It's my favorite JRP of all time. Not the best JRP, mind you, but my favorite.

Do you play it with the original localization, or do you prefer to use, like, fan-translated versions? So this is going to make me sound like real snooty. So I lived in Japan for 12 years, And so I worked as a translator interpreter. So I just play it in Japanese. Cool. I mean, that's not snooty. That's just like making good love choices. Yeah.

All right. So, yeah, you mentioned that going back to the first game after the second, it did seem kind of rinky dink. And I feel like that's kind of the breath of fire cycle, where the first game is kind of like, huh. And then the next game is a much improved version of that. You get the same with three and four. And just imagine how good a breath of fire six could have been.

if they had actually followed up on Dragon Quarter. Can you imagine like a Dragon Quarter, too? What would that have looked like? I guess it would have looked like Dead Rising. But, you know, with the Breath of Fire system, like the world in place, I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, Nadia, what about you? You're another fan of the series.

What engendered this love for you? Well, I actually also started with two, and I went back to one quite a bit later. But yes, I started with two. And the interesting thing about Breath of Fire, too, is that it came out at a time when Nintendo really backed off with its censorship because ESRB was out. It was 1995. They were killing themselves trying to get the NCC4 out

on time. They didn't care. So yes, you start up this game, like Alex said, and you immediately have this demon telling you something about killing God and being God's strength. And it was just like, whoa, this is a system that previously JRP is like, like I've said many

times, Final Fantasy 6 was a story about the apocalypse, and Ted Woolsey was not allowed to use the word die. And suddenly this game was using not like terrible swear words or mild swear words and a whole plot about killing God and God is bad and being Jewish

we kind of have a weird relationship with God to begin with like we know he's kind of an asshole and we just accept it so I wasn't necessarily shocked with the idea of killing God but it was just really interesting to me and of course at the time I didn't know that as Alex said that was such a regurgitated plot for a lot of anime and RPGs but seeing it for the first time it was certainly it certainly made

an impression on me plus I love dragons so cool. So all this talk about killing God, it should be noted that we're recording this episode on Easter Sunday. So the point that we can take away from this is that it's okay to kill him because he'll come back a few days later. This podcast is blasphemy and our listeners are all a party to this. They're all accessories. All right, Bob, how about you? I do have mixed feelings about the series. I am a supporter of it though because I rented the first two games and I liked all RPGs, but something about them didn't click with me. I think it's because in the second game, I didn't understand what was happening because the

translation is just so, so bad. So terrible. Three and four, I tried to get into, and I bought them, and those didn't click with me, but I really, really got into Dragon Quarter, which is a much different game, and it was just like the early advent of the rogue like that was happening then, that a lot of people don't understand, but it really clicked with me. But the series as a whole, I think there's some really cool stuff going on in that, which other RPGs would do. But for me, I just consider it to be RPG loaf. That is just a

unremarkable calorie intake of RPG content. And it's not good. It's not bad. It's just like it's there. And you can play it. And it's satisfying in some ways. But I feel like it's a reaction to RPG popularity. It's not coming from any kind of sincere place. So I feel like that is what's holding it back from being truly great. Yeah, I think there is something to that. I think there is something to that. I think there is, you know, the kind of origins of the series are not necessarily like someone had a deep and abiding passion for role-playing

games and said, I have the best idea. It was more like, well, this is a really popular genre. And it took Capcom, you know, like seven years after Dragon Quest took off, you know, and launched in Japan to come out with this RPG. Like this was their very first, apparently, traditional RPG. You had, you know, you had some action RPGs like Magic Sword, which has kind of like creative connections to Breath of Fire. You had Destiny of an Emperor, which was kind of a traditional RPG, but then it also had strategy battles.

So it kind of went off in its own direction. And I feel like this was them kind of saying, like we really need to plant a flag in this very popular genre that we just haven't touched because we're much more of an arcade company. And, you know, so they, I think they do play it kind of safe. They did play kind of safe with these games,

But at the same time, they did say, like, hey, let's put some interesting systems in here. Let's try some new things that are a little different. So, yeah, so it is, it's not like a Golden Sun game where it's just like the basically the baseline lowest common denominator you can get for a Japanese role playing game. It's just like, you know, shovel it out. I do feel like there is some effort that goes into this. You have great soundtracks in the early games by Yokoshima, some really nice character art. I love the in-game, like the combat viewpoint, the isometric viewpoint. It's very distinct.

And you don't see that in a lot of JRP's. And usually when you do, they're like strategy RPGs, like tactical or battle, ogre battle. Ogre battle, yes. So yeah, I feel like, you know, they didn't necessarily come at this saying, let's reinvent the genre. It was more like, let's do a good, solid bread and butter kind of RPG. And like I said, you know, they would kind of plant their flag with the first game. on a platform, and the second game would build substantially on that and really up the bar for visuals and for mechanical complexity and so forth.

Yeah, I don't think it's really... I'm sorry, go ahead and Nadia. I was just going to say, I don't think it's really fair to call it, like, you know, kind of an empty-calorie RPG. It really does have its own systems. Like, there aren't too many games where you can look at it and instantly say, okay, yeah, that's from X series. And Breath of Fire, even though it looks very different from game to game, you can just kind

look at it and know this is a Breath of Fire game. And especially with three, they really did a fun job with the dragons, like implementing dragons into the combat, like the gene splicing system for three is still a great deal of fun. Sometimes it's completely useless, but you just want to sit there and make like a dragon tiger. And the fact that you can is so much fun to me. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I said it's my,

a birthart two is my favorite J.R.G of all time. And I mean, from a gameplay point of view, almost every breath of fire game, except Dragon Quarter because it's very different. But, like, the main four RPGs, if you want to call them that, is like, yeah, the gameplay is extremely basic. Like, you're really not doing a whole lot that's, like, different or unique or whatever. But I guess for me, the thing that I love most about the games as a whole, but certainly the second one is more of the world and the characters, because it's so vibrant and so unique. And all the monster designs have so much cute personnel.

It's like this weird, like, kawai, kind of, like, cute, but also, like, menacing at the same time. It's kind of hard to explain, but, like, just the way the characters look and the way the world looks. Yeah, the music and just kind of like what you do in the game is like in the second game. We'll talk about us a little bit. It's like you go to so many places. You go inside of a woman's body and like her stomach and then you go to like a place with nothing but frog people. There's so many places you go and things you do that it's really unique in the setting, whereas the gameplay is extremely, you know, generic. Yeah, the setting for Breath of Fire, the series in general has a surprising amount of world building behind it.

There are different tribes, like you have the dog tribes called the Grass Runners, the cat people are called Warren, the shell people. The armadillo people like ran there called the Shell Clan. And yeah, they all have their own villagers, their own culture, their own, like, even their own way of fighting. And I really appreciate that attention to detail. It's one of the reasons I'm actually very sad that Capcom went back to that style for six. Like we had the grassrunners, we had the Warrens. We had that very cartoony kind of Breath of Fire 3 style, but it was on mobile and it died.

And everybody is sad because of it. I actually, I like those elements. I like the parties that are full of animal people because I feel like so many RPGs just fill the party with boring humans and I like games like this and Shining Force and Final Fantasy 9 where everyone in your party is just a complete mutant. Yeah. I prefer that. I was just thinking that.

Yeah, like 5-A-6, for example, is a great game and you get like Umaru and Mugel and that's kind of it. Everyone else is just a human, but the breadth of fire games, like, there's like no humans in your party ever, basically. Yeah, even Ryu is a, he's a half dragon. Well, like it turns on the game. Two, he's a half dragon. I don't know about one.

Yeah, I don't know. Remember the Lord exactly. But yeah, it's like in your party, you get like a frogman and a cat girl and an armadillo guy and a fish guy and a, it's like, so unique. There's even an asparagus guy. There's a, it's a human asparagus. Like what art? There's, there's an onion in three. Yeah. We have a

playable. They really stretch the definition of animal people. There's a playable pangolin in this game. What other game has that? Exactly. You know, one thing that Bob said, I want to go back to really quickly, it's a little bit off topic, but like, yeah, I remember when Dragon Quarter came out and it was so different and so weird, I was like, this isn't what I wanted. This is

dumb. But like, thinking of it now, like, games like that or like as your dreams from earlier you know it's like this kind of like roguelight type of games that nowadays would probably be super popular in the indie scene but at the time we'd like for me like I thought it was so weird I was like why do I have to start over if I die this is garbage and now is like roglecks are my favorite genre so like what do you yeah I'd like to get I'd like to give breath of fire five another shot because I didn't give it a fair shot the first time around because I was we were just talking about how enchanting the world was and in five they just kind of got rid of a lot of that I think

Lynn is still a warren like she has a tail but that's all you really get for a connection to the previous games and I was just you know what I'm really not into this I'm really not into the idea of turning into a dragon but then like number one there's only one form number two you can you can kill yourself by becoming

a dragon and there's a really horrible death scene where if you let the dragon take you over you literally explode and the dragon comes out of you it's like a silhouette but it's really bloody sounding and awful and I was not a fan of Dragon Quarter but in this age where Hades is so popular and all the and other roguelikes and rogulights. Yeah, I'd like to give

it another try. Yeah, I think I think it's worth mentioning that if you stop and think about it, Breath of Fire really does bear significant. I feel like a key part in in the explosion and popularity of roguelite games because, you know, the the first four games were just traditional RPGs, but then you had Dragon Quarter and, you know, that had that sort of restart system, the dragon half system, whatever was, no, dragon half is something else, whatever it was called. The D meter, I think.

The D meter, that's it. Yes. And so that did really lean into the Rogue Light concept and, you know, like restarting and everything. And then that same team went on to create Dead Rising, which was really sort of the first mainstream game that was really popular

and was ballsy enough to say, oh yeah, if you die, like if you run out of time, you got to start over. You got to start a fresh game. Like you can carry some stuff over into that. But, yeah, there is, you know, this element of permanent death here. Yeah.

And, you know, from that point, like, people don't really talk about Dead Rising when they talk about the, you know, kind of the boom and popularity of rogue likes and rogue lights. But it's poised right there, like 2006, 2007, right before it really hit it big with Spalunky and everything. And I feel like it kind of primed the pump. So, you know, in that sense, I think Breath of Fire deserves some credit for kind of, you know, paving the way for a game that then would go on to. help further pave the way. Yeah, Dragon Quarter

was certainly ahead of its time. I'd like to really give another try. So I did not mention how I personally got to be acquainted with Breath of Fire, but it's actually not a very exciting story. I rented it when it first came out in Super

Nias, the original, and said, oh, that's kind of neat. I like this. And then after a couple of days, I had to take it back, having gotten like halfway through the game. so maybe like a year later, two years later, I found a used copy and bought it, but unfortunately it was kind of a bad time in my life, so I didn't really enjoy much of anything at that point.

So I wasn't really taken in by this game. So I didn't touch Breath of Fire 2 until many years later and haven't really spent as much time with it as it deserves. But I did play all the way through Dragon Breath of Fire 3, which I just kept waiting for it to become awesome, and it never did. It was always just like it just felt like it had this. It was kind of like Zinogers.

It had this potential to just really, you know, take off and be wild. And it just, it never did. But that jazz soundtrack. Oh, the soundtrack. It's cool. That's a different story altogether. Great soundtrack. But yeah, it just never quite clicked with me.

So then I didn't play four because I was so impressed with three. And then Dragon Quarter, I've played some of, but not nearly enough. So this is kind of like a. 50% pile of shame type of series for me. I would say that Breath of Fire 3 and 4 is like peak Capcom, Pixar and Spritework. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Those games are 4. Four is amazing, just beautiful to look at. I actually purchased both games last summer just like the PlayStation Originals just to be able to play them, you know, in RGB on a nice PVM, CRT television. Wow, that's a lot of three-letter acronyms.

You know, just really play them in like the best possible visual quality. I don't know when that will actually happen, but in theory, it could because I just wanted to, like, you know, have these beautiful games on hand to play anytime I want, in theory. So I'm looking forward to that day somewhere down the road 50, 60 years from now. It'll be great. Something worth noting about Breath of Fire, the first game, and this kind of hangs over its reputation and its legacy in a lot of ways in the U.S. Is that it was not published here by Capcom.

And I think this kind of speaks to what Bob was saying about this being RPG Loaf. It was actually brought over by Squarespaceoft. And for a lot of people, there is this kind of baked in resentment because we got this quote unquote instead of Final Fantasy 5. I don't think that's really fair, but, you know, this would have like in terms of bandwidth for them as a small publisher to localize and publish 1993, 94 would have been the ideal time for them to release Final Fantasy 5 in the U.S. right before Final Fantasy 6, which came over as three, and they didn't.

They skipped over it. So people look at Breath of Fire, which came in that slot, that kind of in-between slot with Final Fantasy 2 and 3, the U.S. versions, and say, well, if it weren't for Dragon or Breath of Fire, we would have gotten Final Fantasy 5. How dare that game. People said that about like all Squarespace game in that point in time, though. Like, same of the quest, of course. And eventually it became also the same thing with Secret of Evermore.

Oh, why don't we have Sweakintet at 2 3 because we have this piece of garbage? And it wasn't really fair to any of the games because. is as we all know, just localizing a game, especially back then, like the amount of time and money that would go into what was essentially at the time, still a very niche genre. So I don't blame Square Enix for taking kind of the shorter route for giving us some content, but a lot of people did, as he said. Yeah, I don't think this was the shorter route exactly, but I think they looked at what they had with the Final Fantasy 5, and they looked at the existing American RPG fan base, the console

RPG fan base. And they said, you know what? Final Fantasy 5 just is not a good fit for the market that exists right now. It's a very kind of plain looking game, very small sprites. Like the battle sprites, they look cool, but not animated. Very complex. It has very, very intricate systems. It's pretty unflinchingly difficult. If you know how to game it, sure, you can just crush things, you know, everything that stands in your path. But all that flexibility, all the things we love about Final Fantasy 5 for a market that had only really been used to like the super vodlerized Final Fantasy 2 or Mystic Quest. And, you know, games along those lines, Dragon, you know, Dragon Quest, Dragon Warrior 3, 4, like Final Fantasy 5 was a massive step in complexity above

that. But at the same time, it was pretty ugly by comparison to Breath of Fire. Breath of Fire is a nice looking game. It has really nice sprites, that isometric perspective. It has, has, you know, really enjoyable music. And it's very approachable. Like, it's systems, it has some stuff going on under the hood, but that stuff kind of comes along later. And it never becomes overwhelming. It never becomes too complicated. Like, the most complicated thing really is the fusion system, which revolves around one character and then, you know, like four other characters. Can it kind of be the modifiers there? That's really as complex as it gets. And, you know, as a result of that, I think they just said, you know, if we bring Final Fantasy 5 over, it's not going to do well.

Like, people are going to ding it for the graphics and they're going to say, this is too hard. I don't get it. This is stupid. This is bad. Why do we bring over a game that just, it looks nice and people can just pick it up and intuitively grasp it. It's got dragons. It's got animal people. It's got some fun stuff where you can like hunt for meat on the overworld.

You know, it's just got some ideas built into it that I think will go over well. So they brought it over and it did fine. Also, it should be noted that Square's localization bottleneck at the time was one guy, Ted Woolsey. And looking at the timeline here, he probably would have went from localizing this to localizing Final Fantasy 6 in a month. So he had a lot on his plate. Yep. Yeah, and, you know, they didn't have a lot of time. They didn't have a lot of resources.

This game was, you know, the localization of Breath of Fire one takes a lot of dings. There's this kind of built-in aggression. Like, people really go agro toward Ted Woolsey for. for whatever reason. But we actually got a letter from someone that, you know, I'll read parts of it later. I don't want to drag this person, but like they like just ranted against Ted Woolsey's translation.

We're talking about how terrible it was. By the same time, they were like, and you know, I don't mind the localization in Breath of Fire too. It's fine. It's great. I really love it. I'm like, that should be reversed. Strike that reverse.

Yeah. Yeah. So for whatever reason, yeah, like Ted Woolsey is just this magnet for controversy. I don't get it. But, you know, he did a fine job with Breath of Fire. As someone who, like I said at the beginning, I worked in a translation interpretation. I worked for a very large pharmaceutical company. So I had to translate a lot of like manuals and technical documents, things like that, which is super fun. Just kidding. No, it's not. But the thing about translation, I've never done a game. So it's not exactly the same. But I can speak to the idea that, like, you know, translating Japanese to English is actually very difficult because sentence structure is completely different. Trends of phrase are completely different. Just the way that they refer to things is very different.

And so translating is one skill set. And then creative writing is a separate skill set. And back in the 90s, right, like translators also had to be creative writers. Yes, exactly. To make it sound cool and funny and whatever. But under budget constraints and time constraints and the fact that, like you said, back in the 90s, most companies didn't have anyone or they had just like one dude who was a in like a broom closet or something.

And so here, translate this whole game in two months. And so, and they, you know, they give them like Excel spreadsheets to have no context and just the words and you're like,

make it makes sense. And so, yeah, a lot of these games back then, the trends, people like Ted Woolsey or, you know, people at the time,

it's like, they got a lot of flack for having really bad translations and all that, but it's like, I mean, I don't think anyone could have done better under the same constraints. Oh, yeah,

absolutely. And having done game localization work, you know, I helped 84 localized, Saga Scarlet Grace a couple of years ago and even working on a part of that, that was months and months of work. And, you know,

even for, you know, modern systems like Switch and PlayStation 4, there were still just tremendous constraints on the amount of text we could put in there. Like, we were given Excel spreadsheets and said, like, everything has to be like less than 50 characters

total. Yeah. And it has to break in certain places. And so you're trying to take all this information and not only, you know, like we're given a raw translation and told, like, you know, make this good, make this, you know, something that's not just like a straight machine translation, you know, well, not that they do machine translation. But, you know, just like the very direct translation where there's no nuance to it, no, no kind of color added. And, you know, to try to make it like sound like real, like the way real people talk. But at the same time, you know, get personalities across. Get regional dialects in there. Yeah. Yeah. And. I'm editing a game, sorry, I'm editing a game myself currently and I realized, yes, even in this modern age of localization, it is not an easy task. It makes me appreciate Ted Woolsey all the more because it's like, as you said, get this character personality cross, but do it in less than 50 characters. You're still limited. And plus, don't forget to justify your text. Yeah, it sounds like we've all done localization on this podcast. And I did it for Atlas 10 years ago. And some things you think would be a given aren't like word. We didn't know if we'd have word wrap for the first two months of the project, then suddenly we can do word wrap. Because word wrap doesn't matter in Japanese, but it does in English, obviously.

So little things like that that should be a given aren't in localization, even as late as the 2010s. Right. And on top of that, we're talking about super NES cartridges. So data was extremely precious storage space. And Japanese text is much more compact in, you know, ROM form than English is. because you can express complex ideas in a couple of kanji characters, whereas you need like several words to get that across,

and each word has letters. So, you know, he had to do things like compact each name to fit into four character spaces because you could have four characters for the Japanese names, but those are entire syllables. So effectively, you could have names that, you know, if you translated them into English,

would be like 10 letters long, but everything had to fit into four letters for the character names. he was just dealing with constraints like that. I don't want to get into like Ted Woolsey was cool, even though he was. I guess still is. But yeah, like basically the original point was Squarespaceoft really, I think, kind of had to make a difficult decision. Like, do we bring our own baby over or do we adopt someone else's child and treat them like our precious son and, you know, just try to make the best of it? And they, I think they did what they thought was right for the market at the time. And, you know, it probably was as much as I love Final Fantasy 5. I think if I'd played

Final Fantasy 5 and, you know, rented that instead of Breath of Fire, I'd have been like, where's the story? Like, look at that story. You know what I mean? How come my guys can only, like, punch and use items? Yeah, exactly. I was going to ask, do you think it was Capcom that brought this, shop this around? I assume they brought it to Nintendo, too, because the only Nintendo and Square were translating these big RPGs at the time. Yeah, that's possible. They could have... My guess was Capcom says, we don't have the resources for this.

We don't want to create a big localization department. Who in America does this kind of thing that could assist with the publishing and localization? Sorry. No, I was just going to say it was probably just one of those like E3 type encounters where people are having lunch together. And they're like, yeah, we want to do this, but it's not going to work. And someone at Nintendo's like, actually, you know what? I know some guys, we should talk to them. They could probably set something up.

You know, things like that happen. And I've heard all kinds of stories about how stuff like that happens. Like, you know, Blaster Master Zero exists because of a conversation like that. So it's just, you know, connections, people making, you know, deals with each other, helping each other out. There's a lot of that in the games industry. So however it happened, you know, it's cool because I don't think Capcom would have localized this game on their own. And I definitely don't think the translation would have been as good as what Square Soft gave it. So, you know, I'm happy that that, that,

that worked out, even if it meant we didn't get Final Fantasy 5 at the time. But on the other hand, we did get Final Fantasy once I think the world, the English language world, was better primed to appreciate its majesty. So, you know, it all works out. It does. In the end, it all worked out. All right. So let's talk about the original breath of fire and not just its localization and its publishing circumstances, but the actual game itself. So this game debuted in April 1993 in Japan and was localized about 15, 16 months later in the U.S., August 1994. which was a pretty typical turnaround time for text-heavy, you know, work-intensive role-playing games

that required extensive, not just localization, but also programming. So, you know, it was still pretty relevant at the time. 94 was right before Final Fantasy 6 came out here, right before Donkey Kong countries. So the NES, Super NES was really kind of in its peak of excellence, in my opinion. Like, 94 was a good year for Supernian. by far, if not the best.

Thanks at least to Final Fantasy 6. And as you said, DKC. So, as I mentioned, it was the company's first traditional RPG. And the team that put it together, according to Moby Games, was like 20 people. But the weird thing is, four of those people were the planners or designers, which is the equivalent of a director. And from what I can tell, it kind of seems like they did the thing where each part of the game, each component of the game, had a different director. I could be wrong about that, but it really seems like kind of looking at the specialties, you know, you had like basically a story director, a combat system director, a world systems director,

that sort of thing. So let's go through the main, like the lead talent here because I think they kind of give a sense of, one, where these people were coming from and kind of what their influences were their previous experience, but also kind of gives you a sense of how small Capcom actually was, even during the 16-bit era, because like when you stop and you look at all these games that you remember playing, a lot of them were made by the same people. And you're just like, wow, how did they get that many, like, you know, how do they make that many games? So first off, you have Yoshinori Takenaka, who was the designer, director on Duck Tales, Destiny of an

Emperor. So right there, you have the kind of RPG connection. He was a guy with, you know, role-playing systems and mechanics experience, even though it was more strategy-focused. He worked on both Mega Man 3 and 4 and X, and had done work on Magic Sword, the sort of action-R-PG arcade game

with like a very D&D-ish kind of vibe. Like I kind of feel like Magic Sword would be gat the Capcom D&D games a couple of years later. Yes, definitely. Yeah, like a shot over Mastara and Tower of Doom. Those are excellent,

excellent games, which in turn begat Dragon's Crown. So the line goes on. Magic Sword's kind of the midpoint between Black Tiger and the D&D games. So a lot of

kind of an RPG vibe to it, even though it is pretty much a simple action hack and slash. All right. Next up you have Yoshinori, another Yoshinori, Kawano. And this was actually his debut project at Capcom. But he would go on to be the director for Mega Man Legends

and Dead Rising. So right there, there's a real through line in his work. And this kind of like, I don't know, interesting. I'm going to stop talking and let someone else speak up

about the interesting things here. Wait. No one hasn't been to add. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. It just goes to what you were saying about how like the Dragon Quest games kind of came along,

or Dragon Quest, my goodness, the Breath of Fire games came along and then the Dead Rising. I was saying that the Dragon Quest. Dragon Quarter. That's why I said that Dragon Quarter was a thing. And then, you know, Dead Rising kind of was very similar from a system's point of view as that game. And so the fact that the same guy kind of went from one to the other kind of leads, it gives credit to what you're saying. Yeah, I would, I would love to interview Kiwano someday. But every time I've

reached out, Capcom said, quote unquote, we have to decline this opportunity. I'm like, that's kind of BS. They're admitting it's an opportunity. That's pretty rude. Anyway, there's another person credited for design direction on this game, and I could not find anything about them. Maybe I just wasn't looking at the right places, but Pukuchi. And this person is only credited for directing, designing this game, and for testing Mega Man 6, which came out the same year on NES. So I don't know what that means. Like, what was their role? What were their bona fides aside from like they tested, they were the super tester on Mega Man 6?

I'm going to assume it was a square person moonlighting. They needed extra money. Could be. I don't know. Maybe that was Hironobu Sakaguchi. Just loved some Mega Man 6. Good man. I might be wrong.

You have to correct me for wrong, but wasn't this like during the kind of early to mid-90s? I think a lot of game companies, especially Capcom, where it's like they wouldn't really have credits in the game. They wouldn't really credit people outright. Yeah, they would have like names like Bungo and Monkey. everyone yeah everyone in this game is credited synonymous pseudonymously yes they've got a pseudonym so like yoko shimumura is credited as composer as p p i i with a little musical note behind it and kha enafune did a lot of the character designs he's under his usual name of the enough king bun bun did the soundtrack so yeah everyone had a pseudonym but you know most of those pseudonyms have kind of come out and have been kind of publicized and people know who the these people were now, except Pukuchi. So the final director in this game was Makoto Ikehara. And like Kowano, this was also his debut.

I assume his maybe, yeah, anyway, their debut. And Ikehara would also work on a lot of the same projects as Kewano, including Mega Man Legends and Dead Rising. So, you know, I kind of feel like they, I don't know if they deliberately work together or if they were just kind of lumped together by the company. I think it kind of worked more toward the latter than the former in those days. But in any case, they brought a lot of this kind of like wonderful world building and very accessible gameplay with a lot of heart and charm to it to the games they created.

So you can kind of see things taking shape here. And I mentioned Kaji Inafune, who apparently did a lot of the early character designs and illustrations, but was evidently reassigned to other projects by his. boss. I assume he was pushed over to Mega Man X and they were like, hey, make this weird super cop game in space a Mega Man game. And his role was assumed by Hironori Matsumura, who I'm not familiar. I didn't know that. I thought his character designs carried through through the whole game. I didn't know he was kind of pulled off in the middle of the project. Well, I mean, you know, a lot of character designs are kind of struck out. You know, they're defined at the beginning of

the project usually. So I think, I think the early work that he did, like you look and you can definitely see he did the box art. Absolutely. And a lot of the character designs are definitely his. Like, I don't think anyone's doing the Inafune fingers, but, you know, you can still tell it's his art styles. I fear to ask, what are the Inifune fingers? You know, when they hold out their hand in Mega Man, the Mega Man characters, like the

bosses hold out their hands and they put their middle and ring fingers together, but then their thumb and pointer finger and pinky are all splayed out. No, I can't unsee this now because I'm looking at the, I'm thinking the Mega Man X box art. Yeah, that's right. He always, he, like, I think he wants to draw, you know, like four-fingered cartoon characters, but that's kind of a little bit verboten in Japan. Oh, right. He does, like, the Disney style cartoon characters.

So instead of, like, doing four-fingered characters, he draws them with five fingers, but then sticks two of the fingers together. So he kind of has that Disney effect, Mickey Mouse Hands, without actually crossing that line. That is amazing. But you're right. I'm never going to unsee that. Thank you very much for that, Paris. I appreciate it.

I can't believe. you're not aware of Inafuna hands. I'm familiar with Yowie hands, but what would Yaui Inifuna Hans look like? They would be just like, you could probably like ride them around like a spaceship. They would just be hop on the back

and fly around. It's a reverse idea for Final Fantasy 14 confirm. It's a reverse live long and prosper or what he's doing on the cover there. Basically, yeah. I work in animation now, and it's funny looking at different artists' hands in the way they do hands because like, yeah,

Some people stick certain fingers together. Some people have them all separate. There's another common thing that a lot of people do in anime and games as well, where they have the last three fingers are together and the index finger and thumb stick out. So it's kind of like the colloquial term for that is called win and dowdy, one finger outy. And you don't know how to draw a hand. You're like, well, just put three of them together, stick one finger out. All right, so now that we've discussed the hand tendencies of KG Inofune, we can move along to talk about how Breath of Fire plays.

And I've talked a lot. So I'm going to stop monologuing and give some other people some oxygen. Well, it is a very... Alex. Maybe Alex can jump in. Alex is paying. I don't want to... Well, I mean, I can speak to Breathfire too a lot.

One, I'm not quite as familiar with, but I mean... I mean, it's pretty much the same thing mechanically. Sure, it is a very basic der PG as far as, like, there's random encounters, and you talk to people in town to get your next quest, and usually, you know, there's no, like, not a lot of sophisticated map type thing. So, like, it's, you know, going back to plays the games nowadays, it's actually kind of hard because, like, there's no, like, there's no point. Like, we're still spoiled now, you know?

Like, but, like, you have no idea where it's just supposed to go, what it's supposed to do with this random encounters every like four steps and it's it's very basic you attack you use magic you heal you run that's it yeah and you do have the option rio is a dragon he's part of the dragon tribe there's a dark dragon tribe and the light dragon tribe and you can just imagine which one's evil i won't spoil it for you but the dark dragon tribe attacks the light dragon tribe in the beginning of the game and i think rio's sisters either capture or killed sarah and you can turn into a dragon during battle and this eats up your AP or MP as you probably better know it.

And you're making this trade-off every time you do this. Do you become a super-powerful dragon and just kind of wipe out your ability points while doing it? Or do you stick to being a pretty good warrior? Because Ryu and all the games is a swordsman who can usually use some decent magic. So you have to make that choice between, okay, am I going to just dragon out today? Or am I going to just stick to a good old sword on board and a little bit of healing magic? and kind of balancing that gameplay dynamic in all of the games is always interesting to me. Yeah, I will say it's interesting to look at the story of, I mean, most of the Breathfire games,

but especially the first one. Like during this time, I guess Breathfire 1 came out, yeah, 93 and 94, but like, you know, during this time, there was definitely this focus on like really kind of surprisingly mature and dark kind of stories. Like, you know, in 5'I-C-4, for example, right, you're playing like the dark night guy and then you, like, destroy a whole village with the bomb thing. Or, like, in this game, it's like, at the very beginning, your whole village gets destroyed.

Your sister gets killed or captured one of the two, and you have to, like, go rescue her or, like, avenge your town. It's like, it's really kind of mature and dark, especially compared to what you were saying, Jeremy, before about howm I see five. Howm I see five is generally a pretty upbeat, kind of happy type of game for the most time. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the game, everyone is a princess. Right. And, yeah, it's all, like, very happy ending. Just, you know, oh, the wind stopped.

Let's go on an adventure and see why. But, yeah, as far as game mechanics go, Breath of Fire 1, I'm Earth Fire 2 also, maybe less so, but Breathfire 1 specifically is, as you say, your notes here is a very meat and potatoes RPG, which I agree with. It is very basic. It's a good, I think it's a respectable first entry.

Yeah, it really doesn't do anything, like, it doesn't do anything different than like Dragon Quest 1, really, you know? Yeah, I was thinking about just the initial meeting for this RPG, if I could be a fly on the wall in this Capcom office, them writing on a whiteboard, We can do this. We can make an RPG. What are 10 things that are in an RPG go?

Okay, Overworld, got it. Day night cycle. We got that. Dungeons, got it. Party members. Yep, we know. Okay, we know how to make an RPG. Let's go.

And we can fill in the blanks later. I feel like they weren't trying to break new ground. They were just saying, we can do this. We can make an RPG. And then two is the one where they try to be a little more experimental. Yeah. As, as Jeremy mentioned, like, this is Capcom's first actual JRPG. So they probably literally did just list everything that they needed and then just went with that.

At some point, someone was like, wait a minute. guys, what if it's a dragon quest? But here's the thing, you are the dragon. Yeah? Yeah. Works for me. Uh-huh. But actually, like, even that, that's an element that kind of goes back to Dragon Quest.

Because in Dragon Quest 4, Maya has the ability Puff, which allows her to turn into a dragon during combat. And she's kind of like out of control and very powerful, but you don't have a lot of direct, say over how she acts and that it actually goes back to Dragon Quest 3 Pardon me

Dragon Quest 3 barging through There is a spell I don't know what it was localized to but in the original localization it was called B Dragon

and yeah your sage I think can task to it and turn to a dragon and as you say they kind of go out of control and they can breathe fire or they can hit

for a lot of damage but you can control your transformation in some of the Breath of Fire games and one I think you can and two you just blow all your magic point

and summon a really weak-ass dragon that sucks. And three, of course, is all about managing, like, your dragon genes. And four and five, I don't really know as well, so I can't comment on those. So that's kind of one of the interesting innovations, I guess. The kind of somewhat unique elements is making the main character a dragon. But also, as we mentioned before, all the characters are Demibeasts except one of them. There's a human who's just a human. He's like the lonely, weird guy.

all characters have unique combat or exploration functions. So just about every character can do something that's unique either in battle or when they're out on the field. Like I said, the asymmetric combat view was pretty unique. There is a Chun Li cameo. That's a selling point. That was a big deal back at the time. People were like, did you know about the secret? You can see Chun Li and Dragon in Breath of Fire.

I keep calling a Dragon Quarter or Dragon Quest or something. Breath of Fire, yes. It's just a little throwaway thing, but Nintendo would totally do that with Super Mario RPG. They're like, look, Samus, but, you know, those of us, those who knew, we knew. Oh, yeah, Capcom did that first. And Capcom put the Hodokin and Mega Man X and stuff too, so they would do that a lot. You mentioned the one human character, and in this game, Capcom was pretty thoughtful, or at least Squarespace off, was pretty thoughtful for 1993 in changing the race of this character

because it was kind of an unflattering depiction, originally. And they're pretty forward-thinking for that early in game localization. Yeah, Karn is, in this Japanese version, he's this kind of ashy gray skin tone, but then he has very large, fleshy pink lips, which I don't think was meant to be a racial caricature. It's more like, you see a lot of characters with those big fleshy lips in Japanese cartoons, and it usually means, like, this is kind of the tough, dumb guy. Yeah, and he was a thief, as I recall. Yeah, but the way it looked was definitely not good and would have raised some eyebrows. So the localizers just changed his skin tone and, you know, he's fine. I think his hair is also like not traditionally like white hair either.

So I think they were really going for something there, not understanding the stereotypes they were dealing with. Oh, I didn't notice the hair. He is kind of like kinky hair. So yes, good localization change. The one other interesting thing here that I totally forgot about. out. I don't know who added this, but bosses survive for a few turns even after their life bar is completely drained. I hated that. It was like the worst thing. That was me. I added that. And it's an interesting idea, but it's not actually a good one because it just seems arbitrary. I don't know if it's a random number that is generated after you, you know, land the last blow to see how long it will take after that. But it felt like the game was just gaslighting you. Yes. It was so frustrating. Why not just make the life bar extend as long as it needs to be a stupid?

stupid idiots. It's like if he wanted to be kind of a gimmick once in a blue moon when you're struggling with a really tough boss and it's like, oh, he's still standing. Oh, this is so intense. That'd be fine, but it's not like that. I think pretty much every boss is just hangs in there and you don't know how long they're going to hang in there for and it's really terrible. Yeah, if they'd done it with a boss that was like undead or could like bring himself back to live, like if there's a reason why it was happening, it'd be kind of cool, be like, oh, it's a surprise. But like, yeah, every boss you fight like never dies until it decides to. It's so weird. It's like, okay, I'm gone. I'm good. You guys take care. Bye.

talked about how they all have sort of unique and interesting designs. But one of these sort of interesting things about the Breath of Fire cast is that a lot of these characters either show up in future games or like echoes of them show up in future games. So three in particular really stand out, Ryu, Nina, and Blue, or Dase, depending on the version you're playing. There's always a character named Ryu and there's always a character named Nina. And they're not the same character, but it is kind of like that link Zelda thing that Alex mentioned earlier, where Ryu is always, you know, as you can tell by his name, a dragon, and Nina is always a basically like a winged girl. She's like a blonde lady who can fly or, you know, has some vestigial wings or

something. And then Blue, or Dase, is a Naga who is actually the same character all throughout the series and actually has a really big role in Dragon Quest. Or, or, you know, that Breath of Fire three. Breath of Fire Three. What have I done? But yeah, a lot of the other characters just kind of pop up, you know, in the sequels or you see like references to them or so on and so forth. So yeah, are there any characters that particularly stand out in anyone's minds? I know Bobby mentioned the pangolin, Mogu. Yeah, I just didn't even know what that animal was when I was playing it.

I thought he was an armadillo for the longest time. Is he, I guess he's part of the Shell Clan, like the one. that exists across a Breath of Fire 1, 2, and 3 I always thought he was a mole and it was a pangolin. Yeah, the mole is Mogu,

and then, yeah, I also like, I just like the goofy characters because you don't really see characters like this in an RPG as playable characters, also the goldfish guy. Oh, yeah, the goby.

Yeah, he's like kind of part of the merchant race because you see those fish people a lot in 2 and 3 and they're always there to sell you things. I forgot that you could play as one in the first game.

Yeah, and in some of the future games, reuse ability, special field ability in this game is to go fishing and you can like pull up stuff from the oceans. This is like, this might actually be the origin of fishing minigames in RPGs. So that's another innovation. God bless. I love fishing mini games. But in a lot of the sequels, when you go fishing,

sometimes you'll, instead of pulling up an item, you'll pull up a fish merchant and they'll sell you unique stuff. So that's a kind of fun throwback here. But yeah, Goby is kind of the Tornaco of the game. group. Yeah, exactly. I love Tornaco. Yeah, and Breath of Fire 3, it was extremely interesting because you had to look for him.

You could kind of recognize him amongst the fish, and your bait would have to be a coin, and you'd throw the coin bait out, and you'd catch him, and he would sell you unique items. So that was a great way to get better equipment for harder parts of the game, just to kind of advance yourself a little bit, if you take that little extra bit of effort, frankly, Breath of Fire 3 is fishing, is one of my favorite fish. mini-games in an RPG period. So toss a coin to your fisher?

Toss a coin to your fisher, oh, value. Oh, God. Breath of Fire, I have to say one thing is extremely interesting about it is the character of Nina because in the first game, she is, of course, the princess of Wendia. She has wings, and all the people in her tribe

can turn into great birds. Breath of Fire, too, she still has wings, but the people of Wendia have lost the ability to turn to a bird at will. You have to go through a whole ceremony to do it now. And the reason why that happened is because you go through this dungeon and Breath of Fire 2 and you find out that the original Nina, like you talk to her, and she says she married the first Ryu and that kind of watered down their blood. And so I guess they're

part dragon now. Either way, that doesn't really manifest. The point is they lost that ability to fly. And then in three, you see she has these wings that are just totally for show. She doesn't fly at all. nobody in Wendia has wings but it's interesting to note that the people there say that they have no fear of heights and they all take jobs like doing things like roofing and stuff because no one else will do it I thought that was just a really neat little touch

yeah it's kind of like you know you're saying the Ryu and the Nina they're not the same people but I guess they technically kind of sort of are at least Nina is descended from the original Nina technically Rio I guess is maybe not but like yeah they are kind of they're connected in a way that

makes a little more sense than the Zelda timeline, I suppose, but it's still kind of halfway developed, I think. So I think, what did I ask before? Oh, right. Do you have any particular favorite characters from this first game? I kind of put words into Bob's mouth, but, yeah, like, does anyone really stand out? For me, the standout was always Bo, the Hunter.

Just because I thought it was so cool to put this guy as the lead of the party, then go out into the overworld, and you can kind of tromp through woods that the other party members couldn't go through and then little animals will pop up like deer and stuff. I guess you can get into the morality of like, is it okay for Goofy to hunt Pluto?

But you can hunt these animals with Bo's Bow and take them down and they become items like food and that sort of thing, you know, consumables. So that was a really cool touch. Like something that added some a little bit of dynamism to the world, the overworld, which normally is, you know,

an RPGs of this era was, the overworlds were basically just like, you are a tiny person sprite moving around a not-to-scale map and getting into random encounters while you try to get to another place. But this actually gave you a reason to go out and actually, you know, explore the world and, you know, try to find interesting animals or try to pass their new areas with this party member. So I really appreciated that. Yeah, you could hunt and Breath of Fire too as well.

And I don't know if it was the case in one, but I do know that hunting was extremely useful early in the game because you could sell the meat that you hunted. And it was actually went for a really good price and you could buy some pretty powerful armor that way early in the game. Karn is also an interesting character because he's the guy we were talking about earlier with the ashy gray skin. His ability, one, he can pick locks in the overworld or the, you know, like while leading the party in towns and stuff. But also he's the guy who can fuse with other characters. So basically you kind of take two members of your party, him and someone else, and put them together to create, you know, a sort of diminished party roster. But then that other character that they fused into is much more powerful, has more hit points, more abilities, more strength.

And depending on which character you fuse with, you gain different abilities. So it's kind of a neat touch that, you know, takes a character who you might not necessarily want in your party because he's not super useful in combat on his own. but it gives him some utility much greater than, you know, his baseline abilities. Yeah, and that fusion system will be revisited in future games, of course, not just to Riu and the Dragon, but also Breath of Fire, too, has a shaman, so I'm sure we'll get into that. So, you know, other than the, you know, kind of the characters and the systems we've talked about, breath of fire is a pretty straightforward game. Like, you know, it's the, the war between the dragon clans, and there was a goddess whose name, differs in every single game, although she's always

a presence, and you actually fight her at the end of Breath of Fire 3? Yes, you caught yourself there. Good job. Got it. Yes. You fight her at the end of Breath of Fire 3. She is basically the final boss. My main memory of that final battle is that it was the easiest final battle I've ever thought because there's an item that will freeze time for everyone except the wielder, and I never used them in combat, and I came across like three throughout the game. So I just, like, froze time, turned Ryu into a really powerful dragon

and destroyed her before anyone else could take a turn. So that's, you know, that is a god that does not deserve to come back three days later. That's a pretty difficult little god. I love the way you destroyed her. First of all, I've never done that. Second of all, I love the fact you did it that way because her whole existence is about how she's terrified of the dragons and how powerful they are. And she's worried that they're going to become like these almighty world destroyers. And you just, you proved her right. You turned to a dragon and just eviscerated her. Good job.

I mean, sometimes you just got to. Yeah, that's fair. I believe she's the final boss of the first one, too, isn't she? Yes, in her offer. I've never actually finished the first one, but I'm going to take Nadia's word. Yeah, she's the boss of the first one. Right. And the fighter again and the third one, yeah.

Yeah, and Death Evan is her, the second one is her offspring. On the Hardcore Gaining One On the Hardcore Gaming One-on podcast, we ask the tough questions. Rayman, whatever that may be. Is that really so bad? Like, is he even alive? Like, do we know? He, he might be like it.

Desires, Cal, does he have any dreams? We're ranking the top games of all time, and it's not a task we take lightly. There are three battle toads. Rashed, Zitz, and Pimple, and they're all skin problems. Two of them are the same skin problem. This has always bothered me. Zitz, rash, and eczema. You know what I mean?

It's like, even that makes more sense. Arcore Gaming 101. Twice a week, every week. Subscribe at greenlitpodcast.com. This is Snake. Hey Snake, it's Sam. Who are you? Sam, from the brand new PlayStation podcast, Polygod and Symphonies.

Is that so? Yeah, it's a podcast that's exploring the PlayStation Library. Impossible. Well, not really. Each week, we take a game, play it, and then we rank it, and our grand list of games. Is that right? Yeah, it's available on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. I didn't mean to sound sarcastic.

That's okay. Just check out. out Polygon Symphonies, the PlayStation podcast from the Greenlit Network. When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month or even your year, we'll be there for you. I'm Ryan. The line is always a duck to me. And I'm Mark. How are you doing? We're a podcast of two friends watching Friends. We're living every episode of the TV show in all its glory, delving behind the scenes and discussing all our favourite moments. Join us as we get reacquainted with some old friends and hopefully make some new ones along the way,

only on the Green Lit Podcast Network. Thank you. So, yeah, that's pretty much it for Breath of Fire. And now we can talk about the second Breath of Fire, which is called Breath of Fire 2. Who'd have thought? So this came out in December 1994 in Japan. And one year later, December 95 in the U.S. I think it also came out in Europe.

that Europe and Nintendo consoles is, it's very, like, it's a rock relationship. It's the world of hurt. Yeah, it's just sadness everywhere. But this is interesting because it is a direct sequel to Breath of Fire set 500 years later. You don't see a lot of that in JRP's. I mean, I guess Dragon Quest did the thing with the original Loto trilogy. But other than that, usually it's just kind of like,

hey, here's another game, no relation to the original story. But the systems are similar. So that's pretty cool, right? But yeah, this is a direct sequel. So, in my opinion, this game introduces two really, really interesting things. I guess three, if you want to count the religion thing, bad Pope no biscuit. So, yeah, Catholicism is the real bad guy. But, but, yeah, like mechanically, you have the shaman system, which we can talk about in greater depth.

But it's basically taking the Karn concept and really expanding it to everyone. And then the township, which is really, really cool and makes me wish I'd spend more time with this game because it's it just seems so far ahead of its era it was yeah basically township was you could build your own town and you had a choice between three carpenters and

whichever carpenter you chose not only determined what your town looked like but also the shops that it had and you could recruit people into your shops and they could give you all sorts of bonuses and some of them could break the game nowadays I would say if you're playing the game you're looking up township definitely consult an FAQ

because the game does not really give you any hints on what's good and what's bad, but you could really make yourself a crazy-ass town that could fly in some instances, but that's a whole other story. Well, yeah, there's a guy you can get in your town that at the late stage of the game, you can buy

these items from him that will increase one of your stats by one permanently, and so you can just, you can literally give yourself like max stats if you wanted. Is he the cook? I think it's the cook who breaks the game. I think it is the cook, yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I'm curious to know more about the flying thing, because apparently it's called township because your town literally can become a ship but it doesn't have to

like it's not a mandatory thing so in the game at the very end of the game well okay i guess at the very beginning of the game you play rio as a kid with your little sister and then um this you are taken in as like orphans by this like dude for not orphans sorry but you're taking your dad is like this um just church priest father guy and then he apparently you know dies quote unquote in the beginning, but you actually can find him or you fight him later in the game as a boss. He's like, he's hooked up to this like machine. And if

you kill the machine but you don't hurt him, then he's alive and then he goes into your town. And then if you find an engineer lady in the back of this secret bookcase in a separate town and late game, she turns your township into a flying town. And then your, your dad

uses his like power to power the town or whatever. And that's also how you get the best ending in the game too. Yeah. Here's the thing about the introduction of Breath of Fire, too. It's really creepy. I'm sure Alex knows what I'm talking about here, but when you do the first bit of the game,

they show you this strolling text, this introduction, it comes into his really amazing music. Even though the localization is terrifically bad to the whole game, the way that they write this introductory paragraph as scrolling is just has the strangest, most flowery language I've ever seen in an RPG, practically. And I would advise you to look it up because it's just the way this game begins is, yes, you begin and you're Ryu and you're a kid and you have a sister and you have a father who, even though he's a priest of this religion that turns out to be awful, is actually a very loving, nice father. You all go into kind of the back area of the town where there's a dragon sleeping and the dragon is considered good luck and you find out why later.

But the dragon, spoiler, is Ryu's mother. and you're kind of invited to take a nap and, you know, just stay there for a bit. And if you take a nap, number one, you dream of the demon and it's really terrifying because it just pops up and pops away. Number two, you wake up, everyone's gone, you leave this little area with the dragon. You go back to the town and nobody recognizes you and your father is gone. And they're all saying, who are you and they're being really hostile towards you? And it's actually, as someone who kind of has that fear, like a little phobia, that kind of thing, it just scared the crap out of me when I was a kid.

And yes, your father's gone, your sister's gone, you don't know where they are. Your only option is to talk to the priest who's now running the church, and he says, I've never heard of your father before, but you can stay here as an orphan. And that's how your adventure begins, and it's unsettling. I was going to say, Nadia, I was reading the very good Legends of Localization article about Breath of Fire, too. And the reason why that intro text is so well written is because it came pre-localized. It was the one bit of text in the game that was already in English, and it was subtitled in Japanese in the original release. So you're hit up front with really good dialogue, and then it immediately goes away.

And I'm sure we'll talk about it more, but when I played this game at 13 or whatever, I had started to learn, you know, this is how games are made, games are translated, a lot of them come from Japan. And in the past, when a game was poorly translated and I was a little kid, I thought, well, I don't understand what's happening, but I'm a kid and I'm not paying attention, and it doesn't matter. But it was this game, I think the first time I stood back and said, this game is badly translated.

And when I saw the fishing rod called a Lod, and I think the description is, be used for fishing. I knew something was wrong. Something was off, especially coming because I played this game after Final Fantasy 6, which of course had a legendary localization. And, yeah, I was just like,

these people didn't know how good they had it. But yeah, the thing about the intro, yeah, it's interesting how the intro was also in English in the Japanese version. So whoever wrote that did a really good job. And then they're like, oh, thanks,

that's all the English we need. We're done with English. My English was exhausted by. Yeah, exactly. But also, like, the thing about Bethfire 2 that I love, besides everything,

is like, the intro to the game is so good. Like, it is. It is. It is. Like,

you start off as a kid and you kind of learn a little bit about the world. Bithr3's kid intro is much more extended than the second one. But, like,

I love that idea where, like, you start off as this kid and you fight monsters with like sticks and rocks and stuff and you kind of learn about the world and because you're a kid it's like you know everything is stronger than you and everything's bigger than you and everything's whatever

and then you become an adult and kind of figure out like what was that thing that happened when I was a kid because I feel like as adults like I played it as a kid I guess I'm not sure how old Ryu is in the beginning of the game probably like six or eight or something like that and so I was a kid as well and so having a game that started a kid it was immediately interesting to me So like, oh, this is like, I can like self-insert into this game.

And then he gets killed and I was like, oh, I hope that doesn't have it to me. But then when it gets like swiped by a butterberry. But anyway, and then he kind of grows up and then it's like, you know, what was that weird thing that happened as a kid? Because I think as adults, we all kind of had those like weird things happen when we were kids where you're like, what was that, you know, my parents were doing or that this was happening or what was this thing that happened as a kid. And so kind of seeing that in the game, I thought was very interesting. And also, yeah, how it's very dark and foreboding. and it's like, the world is full of darkness, kid, here you go. And then you start the game.

Like, I just love that so much. All right. All right, so I think we've kind of given the proper setup for Breath of Fire 2, but, you know, mechanically, it generally works about the same. But the big difference is that you no longer have just one dude who can morph into super characters by using another party member. Instead, basically every character can team up with a shaman. And there are different shamans throughout the world. I don't know how many, it's like six or something that have, I guess, different elemental affiliations and so forth. And,

you know, talking to them, basically you can unlock different transformations for each of your characters. And, you know, each character has kind of like an optimal, um, shaman connection. So some characters work better with like the fire shaman. Some characters work better with, you know, someone who boost their strength or something. And it gives you the, the kind of ability to experiment and tinker around and kind of see what works best in battle. Uh, though, of course, Ryu still transforms into dragons, but looking at the notes, it looks like that ability is borked and really sucks. Yeah. Basically, in Breath of Fire 2, Ryu can, I don't know if he summons a dragoners or if he transforms into them. All I know is when you use a dragon power, everyone

on the field disappears and this dragon sprite comes down and nukes everything. You can summon the puppies, quote unquote, which are little dragons that shoot, you know, fire breath or ice breath or lightning. And then you can summon adult dragons when you're an adult. and then you can summon much later in the game towards the end of the game, you can summon the Kaiser Dragon or the Gold Dragon as it's translated as for some reason. And yeah, there's supposed to be elemental attacks

and they wipe out all your magic points and they don't have that elemental attachment to them. So you're just basically hitting the enemy with a really powerful neutral attack, which isn't bad, but not really worth all your magic points. And the thing with Breath of Fire games is it is not as simple as going to a store and buying an ether to restore your magic points.

It's always a kind of a difficult endeavor using rare items. Like I think you have to use something called wisdom fruit in Breath of Fire too. And not only does it restore just, you know, a little bit of your magic points, but also takes some of your hit points as well to restore that magic. Oh, I love that. Love that. It's really fantastic. So, yeah, I wind up just not using the dragons most of the time. Doesn't Nina have an inherent ability in combat where she can restore her AP naturally?

Every character has their own kind of special combat ability, and I think that's hers. Yeah, that is hers. And reuse is that he can restore a little bit of his HP, or if you're lucky, he'll restore all of it with his guts ability. And just for the sake of semantics, he does transform into the dragon, according to the Breath of Fire Complete Official Worksbook. He does transform into the dragon. Okay, but either way, like, he's really bad at being a dragon in this game. Yeah, it's not very good. But he's good at fishing, so that's got to come for something.

With the fishing minigame, it's funny how to get Riu's best sword, you have to fish at this one very specific spot that you can only land on at the very end of the game, and then you have to fish there and get this, like, super heavy chest that you have no hint of why it's there or even how to get it. It's just so weird. That sounds suitably opaque, just the kind of systems that make RPG so chewy and baffling. the party in this in this game is even more interesting than in the first one I like that there's a character named bow but it's not the original bow he's a dog not a

wolf and I can't I don't know if his name is supposed to be bow or bow it's B-O-W so it could be like bow wow but it could also be bow and arrow because he is an arranged attacker so is he bow or bow perhaps it's both it's a pun it's one of those clever plan words I would not expect this localization to be savvy enough to actually make a pun successful fully, but maybe they did by accident. All I know is that Bo or Bow or whatever we want to call him is actually a really cool character to have early in the game

but then something happens with him that he's out of your party for a huge chunk of the game after that and then he returns. By the time he returns, it's like, well, dude, I've already gotten used to all these other characters. I'm really sorry, you're going to have to sit this one out. And the thing that kills me about this particular

quest where he's, that's right, he's framed for thievery. And the reason why, because... It lives in a trash can, yeah. Yeah, he lives in a trash can answer that. But it's all has to do with a rivalry between the two characters named Kilgore and Trout. And I'm like, why is there a Bonica reference in this terrible, terrible translation? Not to mention you fight a flower named Algernon later on in the game. And I'm just like, thank you for referring to these books while giving me the worst translation I've ever had in my life.

I think that's really fantastic. It is a weird slap in the face, isn't it? It really is. Kielgor and Trout, though, I love that. So in addition to his vanishing from the party for a while and coming back and being kind of useless, which I've seen in other games, and I really hate when that happens. Sten, the monkey is the character who's basically like potentially a point of no further progress if you don't, you know, kind of build his levels up. Is that right? I know there is a character you have to play solo for a while in his own dungeon.

Okay. You have to take him back to his hometown. only have to fight like his old army rival or whatever. I mean, to the game's credit, there is an underground part where you can level stand up on his own, but like it takes a really long time. Yeah, it really sucks. And I was really surprised, frankly, to have this really funny, silly monkey character. And he'd take him back home and you find out he's part of a really warlike race that's

bent on conquering a lot of land. So other characters are Spar, the Asparagus person we talked about earlier, who, he seems interesting because it sounds like I haven't played enough of this game to have gotten Spar before, but it sounds like he's the one character who has a lot of useful shaman forms. And one of his forms is basically

like, oh, they took this design and they made Pecco from Breath of Fire 3. Like he is just Pecco. There's Rand, I guess that's the pangolin, Bob was talking about, the armored armadillo. His special ability is that he could turn into

a tiny armadillo. I like that. It's Like my superpower is that I'm a huge bruiser, but now I'm very, very tiny. I'm a little guy. Rand's a really cool character. I'm a little guy. I've got glasses. Rand is a really cool character because, yes, he's like kind of the big tank. But he's also a healer and he's not fantastic at it, but he's really great to having a pinch.

And I like tanks that can heal. They're very handy. Yeah. And then you have Kat, who is a character who probably deserves a little bit of conversation. I feel like a lot of people experience their sexual awakening playing breast The Fire, too, and looking at her portrait, because she is the only character in, I think, in any of these games, who basically only wears, like, a tiny top. She doesn't really wear clothes. And I know, like, these are, these are all animal people. These are all animal people.

But, like, if you're going to, if you're going to do that thing where it's like, well, I've got fur, so I don't need clothes. Like, you've got to be more consistent about it. Because otherwise, it's just like, hey, there's this one really pervy character who's just walking around with her naughty bits out. They're very hairy, naughty bits, but like she's still, she's still naked most of the way. They knew what they were doing. They absolutely knew what she was doing, what they were doing. They saw all the garage kits they would sell in the future. You know, between cat and a goofy movie, like, my Google search history makes a lot more sense now. And then finally, there's Jean, the frog man. I guess he's named Jean, which is a very French-sounding

name because he is a frog. That's... Oh, ha, ha, racist. Yeah. Is it racist or? Insensitive either way. Okay, there you go. Yeah. I like frog people, though.

He can turn into a huge frog. I do, I do. Yeah. He can turn into a huge frog. He's not as cool as frog from Corona Trigger, but actually, come to think of it, Corona Trigger's frog can also summon a giant frog. That's right. So it seems to be like, yeah, it's like a thing.

Like, hey, if you, if you are an RPG frog, you are going to mess some people up by crushing them beneath a giant amphibian. And I have to give Jean credit because his giant frog form on the overall world is a really fast way to travel through that stupid, stupid, stupid, old, that's full of random encounters and it's really exhausting. Rand can do a thing where he rolls up and

travels that way across the overall without encountering anything, but he's hard to control and if he hits something, which he will, you'll almost guarantee he'd get an encounter. So Jean is just a better alternative to him. True. So I did a quick scan before recording this episode, and I can't actually find the creative team responsible for this game.

Apparently they were not credited. Oh, that sucks. I don't know. Oh, that's a shame. Alex, it sounds like you've read the Japanese Complete Works book. Do they credit developers for Breath of Fire too? But I'm looking on the wiki for the fandom wiki. There's nothing there.

I looked at Moby Games and there's a localization like port team credit for the Game Boy Advance version, but not the Super NES version. It's very strange. Yeah, I don't see any list of, it just has, it names the producer of the, whole series apparently, but yeah, it doesn't really go into details of like who did what exactly. It's mostly about the game lore and character descriptions. That's interesting. It's important.

Like I was saying before, you know, back of the day, it's like people just didn't get credited and then we don't we know who some of like the main people are but like, you know, games are made by tons of, tons of small people, you know, quote unquote. And we have no idea who they are, yeah. Yeah, it's weird. This game doesn't apparently even have

a credits role. So, so, No, that's right. When in the credits roll, you see the character's names, the characters that you met. And I just remember vividly that there was a scene where they show you like some of the, some throwaway thieves that you met earlier in the game. And they were all named after Disney characters. Like you had Gaston, you had goofy, you had Mickey. It was really weird. That's a lawsuit way to happen.

Before we move on, I did want to bring up the Dragon Tier, which is another thing they added to this game from the first game that I don't think is in the other games. No. And the Dragon Tier, what it is, it's this kind of like a mood ring sort of thing that's on the screen when you talk to certain NPCs, and based on their feeling towards Ryu, it'll turn a different color. And there are, I think, seven or eight different colors. It's kind of too complicated, but it's an interesting idea that's not really executed super well. But Fan Gamer does have a T-shirt designed by a Nina, not the Nina from the game, that you can buy. So there is actual Breath of Fire 2 merch available now that's licensed. I have that shirt. It's a really great shirt. It's really. I get compliments on it all the time. It's really colorful. It's really nicely done. The Dragon Teer, one thing I have to say for it, you mentioned that when you talk to people,

the Dragon Teer color changes according to their outlook towards Riu with black being, I want you to die, and Rainbow being like your practically soulmates. I mentioned earlier when Ryu leaves that back area with the dragon and enters his town and finds nobody knows who he is. Not only that, but when you talk to them, the dragon tier color is like either black or blood red, so you know they're really hostile toward you,

even though they don't know who you are. It just adds to the creep factor. So, yeah, I'm looking at the ending to the game on VG Museum, and it's very weird. It's like they name all the characters in every town or something. Yeah. It's really bizarre. There's a lonely witch whose credit is nymphomani.

She must be really lonely. She actually lures you into her tower. later on in the game and yes it is extremely obvious what she wants to do with you and again that was one of those things a little bit shocking to me because that was not in previous SNES RPGs that's for sure it feels like the employees I was saying about the story too there's things about breathfire too that like as like a 90s kid growing up playing these games it's like yeah there's some at the time I noticed it was very mature and then

yeah probably every once every year every two years I go back and play through Breathfire too and it's like yeah as an adult it's like oh my goodness there's a lot a lot of a lot of wink-wink, nudge moments in this game, you know? Yeah, this is very interesting. I've never seen a list of characters quite like the, or a list of credits quite like this. But it's just like every single NPC in the game gets a credit. And then you also get credits for like the, what is this?

The joking monkey, this Sten Legacy. And the dark wing is Nita Windia. That's right. because she has black wings. That's a whole thing with her character. She was exiled for having black wings because she was considered to be a bad omen. And that's actually one of the more emotional parts of the game

despite the terrible, terrible translation is when there's a flashback where her wings come in because apparently Wendy and have their wings come in later in adulthood. And her wings come in and she's so excited about it, but everyone's just shunning her. And she asks her father, why aren't you glad for me? Why aren't you happy? And they basically send her away because they have to.

Oh, so she's like Eco. Yes. I was going to say, it's also interesting how later in the game when, so, you know, you have Ryu and Yuwa his sister and then they all disappear. And then when you meet Ryu's sister again later as Patty, she also has like dark bat wings. That's right. She has like the, they don't say outright, oh, this is your sister when you meet Patty. But she has that, she looks like Ryu. And she has those dragon wings, which insinuates like her kind of half dragon heritage, I suppose.

I think the females of the dragon clan have wings because much later in the game when you're descending into the infinity which is the worst dungeon in RPG history and you kind of meet the halfway point you see the town where the dark dragons and light dragons have kind of teamed up because death heaven is threatening to surface

and destroy everyone. That's when you find out that like Ryu is half dragon like his mother ascended to the surface, fell in love with his father, had kids, blah, blah, blah. And she has wings. And you see like her wings are visible. And I think all the females in that area have visible wings. So I guess that's a, yeah, I guess Paddy's wings came out the same way.

That's a nice little hint there. I didn't even realize that. I also wanted to mention that these games did get re-released on Game Boy Advance in the early years of that system. And that's where I played the most of them. And there were some improvements in the gameplay. But the biggest crime against humanity was they kept Breath of Fire 2's localization the same in 2002. There should have been a class action lawsuit. But I still played it.

I still played it. part of the problem. Yeah, I bought these games on GBA and tried to play them, but I just couldn't deal with the localization at that point. I was just like, you know what, we're better than this. We deserve better than this. It doesn't have to be this way. The game serves better than that. But I will, I will say to Capcom's credit, they have been pretty good about keeping these games sort of in the public eye available to the public. You can buy them, yeah, as you mentioned on Game Boy Advance, and I believe they've been on every virtual console so far. Definitely on 3D.

Yeah, they're on, they're on Nintendo Online. Yeah, they're on Switch. Yeah, they're on Switch on Nintendo Switch Online, which we talked about before this episode started. So, yeah, that's pretty good accessibility. Like, that's a wide variety of Nintendo platforms that give you access to this. You know, some of those are still currently active. I would say if you want to have these games to keep, I would get the 3DS or WiiU virtual console versions because at some point, you know,

Nintendo Switch Online is a service and it will go away. You don't actually have, you know, guaranteed access to those games. But, you know, there's much more accessibility for these two games than there are for the sequels. Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter has never been reissued. And Breath of Fire 3 was ported to PSP in Japan, released in Europe and not brought to the U.S. because at that point, I believe Sony, CEA was like ports of PS1 games on the PSP.

How dare you? That would diminish the value of this console, this amazing system that is definitely not just a port machine for PS1 games. So that was one of like a, you know, along with Mega Man Legends 1 and 2 and Sweenit in 1 and 2, just games that we never got the remakes of for

PSP, even though some of them had pretty good improvements. but I think both Breath of Fire 3 and 4 are available as PS1 classics by the time this episode comes out another week or two these are going to go away really fast so please grab them quickly because otherwise

they're pretty expensive and I bought my copies for a pretty decent premium last summer and that was before the crazy pandemic and had really hit retro gaming. So let's see. Oh, yeah. Like literally this game is coming or this episode is coming out the day, I think the last

day that PS1 classic is available. So if you're listening to this on Patreon, you've got a week. And if you're listening to this on the public feed, get out there now. Do it. Do it. Do it. There's no time to waste. What are you listening to this podcast for?

Also, weirdly. I love him to ask you about retro games. It makes me happy. Weirdly enough. I want nothing more than Breath of Fire 3 and 4 on Switch. I would pay anything to you. Sorry about me too.

That's okay. No, I was going to say, weirdly enough, Breath of Fire 4 came out on PC in America as well. I actually bought the PC version because it got marked down really fast. Interesting. And it was a good point. Yeah,

I did not know that. That was when Capcom was putting things like Mega Man Legends on PC. It was a strange time. Right. That weird crazy time in the 90s or 2000s or whenever the hell it was. That was the 90s hangover. Yeah. All right, before we wrap this episode,

I did want to read the two letters that we got. We get letters in the mail. We're going to read them to you now. First from a person named Dragon Quarter, and their actual email name was like Ryu 1 over 8,000-something. So, like, they're... At hotmail.com, I hope. Yahoo.

Geo-Cities. Beauty. Yeah, so basically this person really loves Dragon Quarter. Thanks for doing a Breath of Fire Retronauts episode. It is one of my favorite series ever. Breath of Fire One was my first RPG. So there's a lot of nostalgia for me since it taught me to play JRPs. And I think that was really the Target Square I was looking for when they,

the audience they were looking for when they localized the game. So, you know, that's working as intended. Looking back, I think it was a decent first foray into RPGs for Capcom, who were still pretty new to the genre at the time. some of the things I still appreciate about one or the day-night cycle determining whether NPCs were asleep or not, being able to temporarily stave off random encounters with the Marvel 3 item, how every character served a unique purpose in gameplay, like Nina could eventually fly, Bo could hunt on the world map and walk through forests, Karn could lock-pick,

etc. I also really liked how the world map theme changed a few times as the plot progressed with a battle theme changing halfway through the game. It kept things fresh. Breath of Fire 2, by comparison, was a huge upgrade over 1, if you ask me. It has some of the nicest sprites and animation on the Super NES surpassing even some of square sprites at the time and I think it innovated with its shaman fusion system

that let you more of your characters into really cool upgrades of themselves. It also had an innovative town building mechanic that felt pretty novel at the time before its successors and Sweenitin expanded on it. Yeah, I meant to mention how many games have had a township-like element.

Sweak it in with its capitals, you know, Dragon Quest 9 with the end through street pass. There's probably a few others someone can name. Also, the flying town is like, that's, that's Final Fantasy 8th Garden right there. Ah. I also think... I also think... Sixth with the flying castle, too. Sorry. Or not the flying castle, the underground. The one that, like, moves to the sand. Oh, right, right. Yeah. The time that moves.

Yeah. Figure out. I also think Breath of Fire 2's secret evil church trope was unique for its time before that sort of plot twist was regurgitated in later RPGs. It felt very novel, dark, and surprising, and I'm amazed Capcom was able to get away with it on Super NES. There's a ton of heart-wrenching character. or backstories and character deaths, too. Perhaps Inoway's policies were more lax in 1995. Also from Livnet, I'm very excited to hear about the coming podcast of Breath of Fire. As a series, it is very close to my heart.

I don't know exactly how close you are to the series, but I can tell you that I've spent many of my years admiring everything that had to do with it. I love the series, and it may try out other games than JRP's. While I do think the first game might not have aged well, I still love the hell out of it and the second game. To me, Capcom always tried to go for something different and excited. be it very difficult themes or subjects the way the series presents their characters or how meaningful they turn out to be. I believe one of the big issues you may talk about will be the translation or

the text. I was able to learn that the staff in charge of the translation were really crazily pushed for time. And while I agree, Breath of Fire 1 was lacking in some areas, Breath of Fire 2 was very deep in an emotional ride with the plot, despite its issues. I'm not a native English speaker, so I always assumed that was why I was not too sensitive to some errors. But I will protect, I guess, defend the text by saying it was more than enough to make the experience full and complete, feeling the right type of emotions you should feel at the right time. You can probably guess that Breath of Fire, too, is my most beloved game of all time. I can't wait to see what you will come up with, but I do hope you will be gentle with the series

in the review. For a lot of us, it means more than just a game. Whoops. Yeah, there weren't. Oh, true. I just said whoops because I was kind of mean. Only to the localization, really. I mean, I will point out that there was a fan re-translation, and usually those things are unbearable, but in this case, I think it's necessary.

So if you actually want to play it and understand it, that might help you out a lot. But again, these games are very, very available if you have a switch. Yeah, so there weren't a lot of people who wrote in about Breath of Fire, but the ones who did were very, very supportive, very effusive about the series. Like, it clearly means a lot to them. And, you know, the folks who became fans of the series really carry a torch for it. And, you know, the fact that this is a patron requested episode, I think kind of speaks to that. So, you know, Alex, I think we'll give you the final word here before we do our outroes and let you weigh in with your thoughts. Well, I mean, I'm just, you know, yeah, I'm just glad that we could finally give it the respect it deserves, more or less.

I mean, it's like you were saying, it was probably never a best-selling game and it probably didn't really do Well, like most people probably have never even heard of it, even people who grew up in the 90s and played video games. But, yeah, it's just so different and unique. Like, we talked about how every character is like an animal person, sort of. And then, like, with a really surprisingly deep and dark kind of story that goes on with it, lots of different systems that go on, like, where, you know, the actual combat mechanics itself are very simple.

But, like, we talked about that far too, where you have, like, the shaman system. And you have to, like, go hunting for these, like, different shamans. And when you find one, it's like, it's like this huge like Eureka moment where it's like, oh, I want to try this with everything now. And like there's so much fun to be had in the game. And yeah, it's like it's really sad that such a well-made game, I mean, you know, translation notwithstanding, but the game itself is pretty well made. And the fact that that series has just kind of disappeared, like it came and went and like,

yeah, you know, doing retronauts and you put out a request for letters and you get like, you know, only a couple. And it's kind of like, yeah, it's not a super popular game, but the people who love it, like myself and Nadia, apparently, it's like, you just, you really love it. You know, when it, when it hooks you, it really gets you. All right. Well, Alex, thank you very much for your time and for your request and your patronage. As I mentioned before, this is a patron request. episode. So I guess

you know, as we wrap up here, I'll explain what that means. Basically this podcast is funded and supported through Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts. And we have a few slots available basically a couple of times a year for people to request topics and for

people to appear on requested, co-hosted segments. And those are, those fill up pretty quickly, but every once in a while, one comes free. So keep an eye on the Patreon. And in the meantime, you can still support the show at, you know, a lower tier by going to patreon.com slash retronauts. And every, let's see, every Monday, we publish an episode a

week in advance of the public episode at a higher bit rate quality than on the public bead with no advertisements or cross promotions or anything like that. So that's one thing the Patreon access gets you. The other thing, if you go for the $5 a month tier, get It's extra episodes every other Friday. Those are a patron exclusive. You only get a little tiny preview on the public feed. Just a taste of it to make you realize what you're missing. Oh, yeah, we're pushers.

And also in addition to that, you get weekly columns every weekend by Diamond Fight that have little mini podcasts with them. And we have some plans for the future, ways to expand and grow some exclusive content. So keep watching or I guess listening and keep supporting. the show. Anyway, that's patreon.com slash retronauts and Alex. Why don't you let us know where we can find you on social media if indeed you would like to be found? I mean, I guess I used to be pretty active on Twitter, not so much anymore. I mean, I have a YouTube channel but it's not gaming related whatsoever, so I don't think anyone will listen to this would care at all about it. But if you care enough, it's just my name, Alex Myers, A-L-E-X-M-U-I-E-R-S.

That's my full-time job now as a YouTuber, I guess you'd say. But that's just where you can find me, I suppose. You're an influencer? I guess some would call me that, I suppose, yes. That's exciting. Okay. Let's see. Nadia, where can we find you on this wide world of internet?

I am the co-host of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast, and that is at patreon.com forward slash blood god pod. we have a, we kind of ripped off Retronaut's idea where we have a, a free podcast that goes out every week, but the week before that you can get a current ad free version of the podcast. We have different tiers that you can support and we also have our donation tiers, sorry, our request tiers is the same as Retronauts does. I don't know what the, I don't know what the status of that will be at the time of this recording, but hey, go and check. Maybe you'll get lucky. And we would love to have you on the pod, talk to. us about whatever you like. In the meantime, we would just like to have you listen to our weekly show, our special shows, and I hope you support us because we really like talking about RPGs. And when Cat lets me loose to talk about Brother Fire, I usually don't shut up

as this podcast has proven. Me too, though. Yeah, I agree. It's good. It's good to not shut up about Breath of Fire. And Bob. Hey, everybody. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo, my other podcast. You might know about them, but they're Talking Simpsons, the Chronological Exploration of the Simpsons. And What a Cartoon where we talk about a different cartoon from a different series every week. You can find those wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

Sign up there for access to early podcasts and tons of mini-series episodes. As of this launching of this episode, we are still doing Talk King of the Hill, our mini-series about King of the Hill. We're in season two of that. So you can only get that at the Patreon. So check it out at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on the internet, doing stuff. with Retronauts here with limited run games. That's my day job, doing stuff for them. You'll open up packages from them and you'll find words for me. It's great. And of course, I also have my YouTube channel where I do talk about video games and am not an influencer. I don't have nearly enough followers for that. But if you are interested in old video game stuff, I do cover NES, Super NES, Sega games, etc., etc. So that's just my name, Jeremy Parrish. And did I say that I'm on Twitter as GameSpite?

Maybe not, but I am. So there you go. And I did misspeak earlier. I thought that the PS3, PSP, and PlayStation Vita stores would be closing May 31st. But actually, I lied. As of this public posting, you have five weeks to get your PS3 and PSP games. July 22nd, 2021 is when PS3 and PSP go offline. And then Vita goes off 2021, although there's no breadth of fire games on PSC.

Vita, so it doesn't matter. But yeah, the PSP games are relevant. So buy those virtual console games for Breath of Fire 1 and 2 on 3DS or Wii U. Get yourself the PSP versions of the PlayStation 1 classics of Breath of Fire 3 and 4. And you've got yourself pretty much a party except for Dragon Quarter, which you're just going to have to go on to eBay and play on PS2 or emulate or something. Anyway, that's it. That's Breath of Fire 1 and 2.

We talked quite a bit about these games. and hopefully you enjoyed the conversation. Hopefully, Alex, you feel like we did this topic justice and feel like your patronage was money well spent. I do. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for requesting this episode. This topic was a lot of fun,

and I enjoyed revisiting these games and look forward to another episode in a week. So there we go. Podcast done. I am going to go brush my teeth because I've got breath of fire. Thank you. I don't know.