Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 395: Breath of Fire III & IV

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

By request of Andrew Duff, we jump back into the Breath of Fire series to look at other two traditional entries in the series: Breath of Fire III & IV for PS1. Splice some dragon genes with Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Nadia Oxford, and Patrick Kulikowski! Art by John Pading. Edits by Greg Leahy. 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 week in Retronauts, it's a real dragon quest. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 395-5 of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, echoing loudly in your ears. And this episode is brought to you by a patron. Patron, Andrew Duff, has requested a few things.

And finally, the one we were able to realistically. handle with our knowledge and so forth is a follow-up to the Breath of Fire episode, which was 380, and this is Breath of Fire 3 and 4, the PlayStation duo. And yeah, apparently Breath of Fire is kind of popular with our listeners. The first Breath of Fire episode got great engagement. That is how you measure everything these days. That is the metric. And when I requested people write in with opinions for this episode and the following episode we'll be recording Wario Land for and shake it.

We got a ton of letters for these two games, not so many for Wario. So that's probably why we don't see any more Wario games, but it doesn't explain why we don't see any more Breath of Fire games. But we're not here to speculate about that, especially since we have a special guest this episode who is forbidden from such speculation in public. Please introduce you.

yourself not the voice of fandom not speaking for Capcom. Right. So this is Patrick Kulakowski. And yes, I actually do work for Capcom USA, but I am primarily here as a Breath of Fire fan boy and not so much as a Capcom rep. So let's not say primarily. Let's say entirely. Entirely.

As a Bertha Fire fan, just I don't want to get you in trouble. Nothing that Patrick says on this episode indicates in any way an opinion held or plans maintained by Capcom USA, Capcom of Europe, or Capcom Japan. No one at Capcom knows anything about Breath of Fire except Patrick. Well, I don't want to say that, but for the purposes of this episode, sure. Did I take it too far? Maybe, maybe. But anyway, yes, Patrick, you have been a huge cheerleader for the series for as long as I have

known you on the internet. And it just seemed, you know, appropriate to bring you. in for this. And I'm grateful that Capcom was like, yes, please go talk about this franchise that sometimes people get angry up about. It's fine. That was actually pretty cool of them. A lot of companies, a lot of publishers would not be okay with that at all. So I am grateful to Capcom and so grateful, in fact, I won't make any negative comments about Brother Fire Six. Also, who do we have this episode calling in from Canada? I am Nadia Oxford, the second half of the Axe of the Blood God RPG podcast, and I can say what I damn well, please.

You can. You don't represent anyone except Nadia Oxford and the Ax of the Blood God podcast. I represent me, myself, and I, and Cat. We are a unit. Are you? Okay. So what you say here can be held against Cat. Absolutely. Everything. Everything I say to the Brista down the street, that could be held against Cat, too. there's there's some real uh yeah i'm sure some real blackmail material happening in that coffee shop anyway um yeah so thanks to andrew duff for requesting this topic and thanks to capcom for being like yeah it's cool and thanks to uh everyone who wrote in for this topic so with that said we're going to jump right in and talk about breath of fire three if you would like to catch up with this

episode like i said episode 380 of retronauts published a couple of months ago was on Breath of Fire one and two, and we cover those games pretty thoroughly, although I believe Patrick has some things he might want to throw in or correct along the way, being the exceptional Breath of Fire fan that he is. I mean, it's hard to talk about the first two in just like a one one and a half hour podcast or whatever. So there are things that I felt like could have been included, but it's like, then you'd be talking all day, so it's fine. Yes, and we are on a strict schedule.

We are not, like, our parents get very upset if we use up, if we're down in the basement too long. That's fine. Yeah, so anyway, I would ask, actually, Nadia, were you on the first Breath of Fire episode? I can't remember. Yes, I was. Okay, I thought so. So you've talked about your experiences with Breath of Fire, but Patrick has not. Patrick, how did you become a fan of Breath of Fire so, such a huge,

fan that you were like, I'm going to go get a job at Capcom. Oh. Well, so Breath of Fire One was my first RPG that I received as a kid. It was a Christmas 95 gift from my dad. Very random gift. So little did my dad know he set off this crazy fandom within me. But being my first RPG, it really, like, inspired me. I wasn't used to that sort of game.

I went into it thinking it was going to be. like a Zelda clone or something like that and it was completely different. I found myself in a random encounter battle, had no idea what I was doing, had to read the manual to understand how term-based combat actually worked and from there like the rest is history I think. But the following year I got Breath of Fire too as a birthday gift and that one shot my like passion for the series like way up because of all the upgrades to like the plot, the characters and and whatnot, so...

But it did terrible things to your understanding of the English language. I mean, I felt that despite the translation, Breath of Fire 2's plot was very much understandable all the way through. I never felt super confused by what was going on. Granted, yeah, some of the nuance could have used some work, but I was, I never felt lost playing that game or anything. I actually wrote a thing on US Gamer

about how, I would be playing the game quite recently, And I realized, yeah, despite its really awful translation, it really does have an interesting take on the whole kill God thing. I mean, I think you like me, that was probably your first experience killing God in a JRP. Yeah, for sure. And I think also for that time, like it came out in 94 in Japan and 95 here in the States. And I feel like you didn't really have that sort of kill God thing in RPGs at the time. No, no, absolutely not. Maybe, of course, Japan had Shin Megami

Tensei beforehand. And Final Fantasy Legend. That's true. That's true. You can chainsaw God in the face. God is a little Amishman in a hat, as that one comedian said. That's pretty rad. I mean, Ryu slashes God in the face at the end of two, which I thought was pretty incredible.

And you see blood. And you see blood. Rated kids to adults, by the way. Yeah, because that was the reason I think that we finally got Brother Fire 2 is like after the implementation of the rating systems, it was Nintendo's just like, okay, put whatever you want on our systems. We don't care anymore. It's out of our hands.

Right. I figured it was like, oh boy. I figure it was more lax at that point. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, Breath of Fire 2 shot my passion for it way up. And then lo and behold, I see I come across an EGM issue of that comes with an E3-1997 supplement. And it has this tiny, tiny screenshot of Breath of Fire 3, which was my first exposure or learning that a third game was being made. and my heart froze, and then it sank to see that it was only coming to PlayStation. And so my thoughts as a Nintendo kid where how am I a new N64 owner going to convince my parents to get me a PS1?

Yeah, same. And funny enough, it didn't happen for me until like 1999, but VOF3 ended up being my second game right after Final Fantasy 7. And in the lead up to all of that, I would just pour over all the max. magazines that covered Breath of Fire 3, like tips and tricks, game pro, any sort of info. I even bought the Prima strategy guide and read through the entire thing because I was so hyped for this game and spoiled myself in the process. Yeah, I was going to say, that's quite a story to spoil yourself on because it really takes a twist in the second half.

It really does, yeah, but whatever, I was a kid, I was silly, and I was just super amped about this game, so. And how about you, Nadia, with Breath of Fire 3? Did you play it when it was brand new or did you come around to it later? I came around a little later. I did get my PlayStation a little bit after my M-64s.

I had to wait. But you do not remember this, I'm sure. I wrote a story about Breath of Fire 3, how I came across it for Toasty Frog Zine. And... I just dug those up the other day, actually. They're on my bookshelf at work now. Oh, beautiful.

Yeah. I'll have to go... I'll have to flip through that and find it. You'll have to find it because basically Breath of Fire 3, as I said, it was kind of my, on this article I said, was my entry into adulthood and not in the greatest way possible. I had a really terrible job in a kennel that sold dogs for massive massive profit. And we're talking about like really badly bred dogs. Like, for

example, the Taco Bell Chihuahua was the hottest thing. So we had so many like just awful to really sick animals that we'd sell off. And it was a really depressing job. I was really awful. I'd deal with dead animals all the time. And when I tried to kind of tell you, tell my parents, hey, this is really kind of ruining me. This is a terrible job. They're like, well, you have to stick to it because you're an adult now. I just turned 18. And so that was their logic. So I eventually ended up buying Breath of Fire three at least, hey, I'm making this money. I'm miserable. I may as well, you know, be miserable with a game. And yeah, I really just adored the game, not just because of the circumstances I was in, but also just because

still some of my favorite sprite work ever done has a not the greatest story, but a really interesting story, I think really different. Like I said, it takes a twist in the second half. It has a really, a soundtrack that really grew on me. It took time, but it really did, like, I really love it now. And the isometric view, something about it just, I think it just really makes me feel warm and happy. So it's not a perfect RPG. It has a lot of problems, like random encounters being kind of out of control. But overall, I really, really loved the world presented. Yeah, Breath of Fire 3 was one of the first post-final fantasy 7 wave of RPGs to reach the U.S.

And, you know, these days we take role-playing game localizations from Japan for granted because so many of them happen. It's hard to heap up. But, you know, the 90s, that was not really the case. And Breath of Fire was one of the few series that actually made it over pretty consistently. But it just seems like after Final Fantasy 7 came out and, you know, once the writing was on the wall that it was going to be a huge, huge game, we really saw a ton of RPGs localized in 1998. And I think a lot of people got into them expecting, hey, it's going to be like Final Fantasy. it's going to be like bleeding edge technology and movies and 3D and like cyberpunk and it really wasn't. Most of these games were not like that at all. And so I don't know, I think I was kind of

guilty of that. As much as I enjoyed the games before Final Fantasy 7, I was, I just felt like, wow, this, you know, Final Fantasy 7 really pushed some boundaries and really wanted to take the RPG in a different place than swords and sorcery. And so anytime I went back, you know, to the subsequent RPGs that would come out that didn't really go as far as Final Fantasy 7, which was most of them. I just felt like, I don't know. This is a little disappointing. And this was one of those. I feel like if I were to replay it now, which I really ought to do at some point, I would really enjoy it a lot more than I did at the time. But at the time, you know, I wanted something that was a bit more daring, either technologically or narratively.

And so, you know, I was one of the few people who was like, oh, Saga Frontier, this game's weird, I like that. And now everyone's come around to it. Now people are like, oh, yeah, Zaga Frontiers, cool. I like this game. But that wasn't the case in 1998. Whereas this one, I played all the way through, but it really kind of felt like I was forcing myself.

And I just kept waiting for something to happen and it didn't. But, you know, so it goes. It's fine. That's really on me and not on the game. I think it is a very solid RPG that just happened to kind of not be what I wanted it to be at the time. But in hindsight, there's a lot I like about it. And it really does feel like it just is cut from that pure, wonderful Capcom mold, you know, that cloth they were using in the late 90s, you know, the great, great sprite work like you saw in their CPS2 and

CPS3 games and a kind of inventive semi-fantasy, semi-futuristic, semi-old-fashioned world with a kind of a lot of world building behind the scenes that isn't necessarily right there up front. And at the same time, you know, also very traditional in a lot of ways. You know, it has still turn-based combat and it's a fixed viewpoint. It's not like Final Fantasy 7 where the camera's like, whoa, zooming around. look at your characters from all sides. It's like, no, it's, it's breath of fire. So you're looking at your characters facing off in a line against the bad guys from kind of a three-quarters perspective, sort of behind and to the side of them.

That's just how it is. And that's like it kind of, it kind of knows what it is. And it says, let's, let's take what this is. And instead of being something different, let's just be, be this game and do it the best that we can. And, you know, Breath of Fire 4 takes that even further with even more impressive. of visuals and a much more intricate story and world building. And so, yeah, I really see these two games as being part of a whole. And I feel like, you know, it is a good time for me to reevaluate them and give them more of a fair shake than I did back in the day. I think you being a Megaman Legends fan, you can probably agree that the game, like, came out around the same time as Legends. And it really kind of shows like both games, I always felt like shared an identity in a way. Well, I mean, we can talk about the talent here, but there was a lot of Mega Man and Mega Man Legends talent drawn into the Breath of Fire games from, that's Capcom Division 3, I think. And the director of this game was Makoto Ikehara, who had directed, designed, I guess it was the title, Breath of Fire One and Two, and Mega Man Legends.

He was one of the key creative personnel behind Mega Man Legends. And then we'd go on to make Breath of Fire 4 and Dragon Quarter. So, yeah, they, you know, it's all part of a continuum, basically. Yeah. Basically, yeah. I will say Breath of Fire 3 is the type of game that you need to set aside a lot of time to. And it's not something you can just try to blow through and just quickly get it over with. Nope, it's a slow burn.

Yeah, it's very much a slow burn. And it does demand your time. I think I clocked in by the end of the game, like 60-ish hours. That was about my take, too. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't dig around and do a lot of side quests and stuff. I don't know if there are that many side quests to do,

but I pretty much took a direct path to the game. I didn't, you know, like do super critical path, but at the same time, I also didn't say, well, I'm going to soak in this a little longer and go grind for levels and master all the skills and things like that. I was just like, yeah, I've got other RPG. to play. So I'm just going to play through this one, see what the story goes to

and call it today. And that was about 60 hours. So a pretty big game. Three admittedly has a lot of padding. Like that seaside town, I can't remember the name of it, but I want to die every time I go to it because we're stuck there forever. Rapala. You're back and forth, that stupid town so freaking much. Like half the game takes

place in that damn town. So there is an interesting Schmupulations recently translated an interview from 97 from a Japanese magazine with the developers of Breath of Fire 3. And there are some interesting nuggets they say in there in regard to how they draft out the game's plot and whatnot.

But basically they have like a rough outline where they would connect some interesting dialogue from the town NPCs up with that larger story idea. But then they felt that if they overwork the story too much in the beginning, it would end up constraining their creativity. So as a writer, Ikehada said that he didn't try to dictate exactly what they should do and that it was more important to them that the overall game is fun and that sometimes, like, they might just think of a cool map or story idea

that might not tie into the overarching plot, but they would still add it in for six in a way. So the more I read through those interviews, the more I was like, okay they go with a sort of orthodox RPG mindset but then they also don't want to like always dictate what the team should do and if anyone has like a creative idea that may not tie to you know reuse quest for self-discovery or anything but if they think it works and it's fun then they just put it in whether you call that shoehorning or not I mean that's up to everyone else to decide but yeah I wouldn't say shoehorning so much as

just, you know, not, not being, I would say, overly aggressive with editing. A lot of, a lot of this kind of collaborative process is throwing a lot of ideas out there and then saying, all right, this is great, this is great. But this seems like it's, you know, kind of off in the weeds. Do we really need this? Maybe we should prune this. It sounds like they didn't do so much of that. It was just like, hey, if you've got an idea, like a scenario for these folks, let's do it.

Let's see what happens. So, you know, that's fine. Yeah, it's an interesting approach for sure. Yeah, yeah, that's one way to put it. So let's see. Other key personnel, Yoshinori Takenaka, who worked on as a producer, Pocket Fighter, Mega Man X4, Mega Man 8, Super Puzzle Fighter 2, Turbo, Hironobu Takashita, who worked on Breath of Fire 4, Dragon Quarter, Mega Man 9, Zach and Wiki.

So right there, you kind of see, like, just look at those games. and compare them to Breath of Fire 3, and you really see where this comes from. The lead artist was Toru Yamashita, who had been an artist on Mega Man Legends, but also Resident Evil Zero, and Kirby's Air Ride, of all things. Kirby's Air Ride, eh?

That was on Moby games. I was like, huh, okay. Wow. Wacky. Why not? I mean, yeah, like Kirby, Pecco, are they really that different? Exactly, yeah, they're both kind of squishy.

They have similar feet, sort of. They're round. They're sort of cute, weirdly destructive. Yeah. Have, you know, connections to godlike beings. I think it works. Yeah, I can see that. Let's see.

Character designer Tatsuya Yoshikawa had done work on a bunch of Mega Man X games. Oh, boy, yeah. Yeah, Mega Man 7. Wow, yeah. And went on to do, you know, more Mega Man games. Further Breath of Fire games, Zach and Wiki again. Gravity Rush 2 and Ultimate Marvel versus Capcom

and then the composers Oh go ahead Patrick No I was just going to say The most recent thing Yoshikawa did He left Capcom eventually But worked as freelance He helped design the Devil May Cry 5 characters Oh really?

Yeah All right And composers There were two composers Yoshino Aoki Who had worked on Mega Man Battle and Chase Megaman then would go on to work

on Mega Man Battle Networks, two, three, five, and six, and more recently, Final Fantasy 15, and Akari Kaida, who had worked on Street Fighter Alpha, Night Warriors, Cyberbots, Resident Evil, Mega Man and Base, a lot of, yeah, a lot of these kind of, like, Capcom arcade games. So I feel like working in an RPG was pretty different. They did eventually work on Mega Man Battle Network. So you got a little into the, oh, and Okami. So you get a little of that RPG adventure eventually. But this was kind of stepping out. And it is a really unique soundtrack. It's, uh, it is. Yep. So good. Like when people were complaining about the Marvel versus Capcom 2 soundtrack and how it went into jazz, I was like, yeah, the Capcom already did that with

Breath of Fire 3. So what's the problem here? And not just jazz, a lot of that. I almost feel like there's a lot a pet shop boys in there, too, just being a pet shop boys fan. I hear it in the guild music. Yeah. Machine Town music. It's very, very pet shop boyish to me, which is great. Huh. It's very, I think, uh, I think, uh, Kida referred to it as like jazzy pop in a way. Yeah.

It's kind of like a hybrid of jazz and pop. But, um, I loved how three was very much a huge break from the typical orchestral sound, not a, not just a Breath of Fire one and two, but just JRP's in general. And then even Breath of Fire, too, had, like, Mega Man X-styled battle themes and whatnot. But this was just full-on, like, pop, vibrant, jazzy stuff. And Kaido was very adamant about giving the game that sort of soundtrack due to its colorful visuals. And she just simply wanted to break away from the classical conventions of GRP music. And I thought it worked out wonderfully for this game.

I think it fits the overall vibe of it. It distressed me at first. I was not a fan because I was a really big fan of Breath of Fire 2's rocking music and then to hear like the jazz. It did take a while for the soundtrack to grow on me, but it really did in the end, even though the green forest soundtrack is really kind of a direct lift of Chrono Trigger. Yeah, it's the one, I was going to say, that was that was the one connection to an existing JRP. That was that was pretty much taken straight out. But then, you know, Chrono Trigger did get its fusion jazz, acid jazz, or, arrange album Brink of Time. So it's all, it's all in a continuum here. And I mean, let's face it,

Chrono Triggers took the wall and turned it into a game soundtrack. That's true. I think Kaida knows Mitsuda, the composer of Chrono Trigger. So there is that connection. I'm sure, yeah. It's a small world over there. Absolutely. In that industry. Um, okay, so anyway, that's kind of the background behind Breath of Fire 3. Now we should talk about the game. We talked a little bit about the visuals, but first let's talk about how this game is connected or isn't connected to the first two games. because there did seem to be like a pretty direct continuity between one and two, whereas this game feels like it has a very different world.

Like it takes place in a completely separate world from Breath of Fire one and two. And yet, it also seems to have some pretty meaningful connections to the first two games. Absolutely. It definitely has some really, not nearly as strong as one and two, which blatantly says like the character or descendants from the first game. But one thing that's really interesting about Breath of Fire 1, 2, and 3 is if you talk to the Windians, the winged people, you'll find that over time they lose their ability to fly. Like from Breath of Fire 1 to 2, it was because they kind of enter married. Riu married Nina, so that dilated the bloodline.

And then 3, they lose their wings entirely, except for Nina, who has like kind of these wings on her back that don't really work. But the thing that's interesting about that is they mention that they're not afraid of height. it's just an innate thing that they have so they say like well maybe it's because our ancestors used to have wings so yeah there there is definitely that connection there but it's a lot more subtle than it was between the first two games I will say

though the game starts up before you even see the title screen you see a scrolling mural of the Breath of Fire One characters fighting the goddess Miria who was originally localized as tier in the first game for some reason yeah and so

it does actually hit you over the head with like from from the get go of hey there's a connection of breath of fire one with this game um two that i think there's less of a connection to two there's some like cameos here and there from those characters but uh later on as you progress through the story and you get to drag near uh the the dragon clan's hometown or the brood as they're called the brood here uh you actually get to see them you're all you saw in the beginning uh opening scene of the game and uh and it kind of connects a bit more I almost feel though

like it's less about them talking about the Breath of Fire 1 characters and more just about Miria because she does spoilers turn out to be the big bad of this of this game so yeah the Breath of Fire 3 when you think about it though maybe we'll get into this in more detail

but it's really more of a game that tells a bunch of small stories versus one big stories almost really to kill a mockingbird in that way where it's several little stories that lead up to a climax I mean the first lesson you learn is don't F with the Mafia. That's your

first story art. So true. Especially if they're horse bros. They're horse bros, you are in trouble. Don't mess with them, man. That's so sad that when you think about it. I really actually like Ray. I think he's a great character. He's a very, very bad influence, but he tries to be a good dad

to these orphans that he adopted. And again, that involves him effing with the mafia and really pissing everyone off because, but they thought they were doing something good because they're still kids, they're naive. They don't really know how the world works, but no, they realize, well, you can't just rob from the rich and give to the poor, unfortunately, because someone richer is going to get really angry about it and probably mess you up. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so this is

probably a good point to mention the fact that the game begins with Ryu as a kid, as a tyke, a little, a little sprout. He's a wee lad. So you actually spend a lot of the game with Ryu in his sort of juvenile form. And Nina also is a little kid. And Ray is the thief that they meet is a teenager. And yeah, so you had kind of the Zelda Ocarina of Time thing going on half a year before Aquarina of Time showed up in the U.S. So take that Nintendo. I have to say it's the way the game starts off to is really unique in that Ryu as a kid is still in his dragon form a whelp like a baby dragon and he's encased in crystal a chrism as it's called in the universe and a couple of miners basically blow that up to try to get him out of it and that wakes him up and

he ends up going on a killing spree essentially yeah and you as the player end up torching a number of the miners within the cave before getting knocked out and shipped off on on like a railroad or whatever I guess what's funny about that is it it doesn't take very long to get to the breath of fire of the game because literally the first battle you're torching two miners

one who funny enough looks like Mogu and the other one and another one that looks sort of like a bow from the first game yeah harsh yeah the opening here the way it sort of unfolds, reminds me a little bit of Dragon Quest 5. Yeah. You know, you start out as the main character as a kid. I mean, obviously, that's a much more tragic story than this is, you know, from a personal standpoint.

Like here, Ryu never knows his dad. There you have to, like, watch your dad get murdered and then be sold into slavery until you're a teen. That's harsh. Yeah. Here, you know, you have a lot of adventures as a kid, as a Welp, drag. with Teenage Ray and your other childhood companion, Tipo. And as you guys said, you know, you kind of fall in with a rough crowd, the horsemen, Bario and Ballio and Sunder.

Baleo and Sunder. Yeah. And, you know, eventually you do kind of work your way free from their influence when you meet a gargoyle dude named Gar who like literally just murders them for you in a Coliseum that they try to force you to fight into. But then Gar tries to murder you too. He's like, oh, dragon got to kill it. And that kind of activates the time skip where Ryu escapes again and disappears and then turn the hands of time forward and everyone's older. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I always like those little time skips. But I will say that I feel like I totally get

where you're coming from with Dragon Quest 5 being like one of the most tragic games ever. I totally agree. I feel like Breath of Fire does Three does touch that a bit though because again, the mafia even though you beat them eventually, like they scatter you to the winds. They burn your house down. Ray, spoilers here,

Ray thinks you're dead. He thinks Tepo and you died because of his like neglect. So he kind of becomes a recluse and becomes, he learns how to use his wear tiger form and uses it to hunt down people of Sin City who are where the mafia stationed. When he do find him again,

it turns into Cody from Street Fighter Alpha. He turned exactly. He turned exactly into Cody from Street Fighter Alpha. And when you do join up with him again, he's just never the same. Like he's clearly been like kind of scarred and traumatized. And that's really a shame because before he's such like a kind of a fun, sunny character. And just he's been become so angry and sad that it, even though he realized, okay, Ryu's fine. But Tipo, when you find out what happens to him, that's even sadder. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, he's just never the same character ever. But man, that Weir Tiger form is amazing, and it has such a cool mechanic where...

Yeah, if you can control it. If you can control it, but you can learn how. It's so amazing. Yeah, it is pretty cool. I will say the first time the game kind of throws the player for like an emotional loop is the first big mission that Riu, Tippo, and Ray are tasked with by Bunyan is to murder a new, this chimeric, like creature that's terrorizing the locals of the McNeil Village and when you finally go to do the deed you kill it and it dies standing on its two feet blocking like a cave behind it and the player doesn't even have to investigate this part

they can leave the cave and be on their merry way but if they do go into the cave that it was protecting you find out there were dead cubs of the new that it was trying to protect it's like this like gut-wrenching like slap in the face of like oh oh, this thing was merely just trying to protect its cubs that it didn't even realize we're dead already in a way, trying to, like, care for them and feed them. And here you are slaying it or whatever. And yet you have a real choice because it's hunting all the animals.

It's killing all the crops and everything like that to provide for these dead animals. And I think basically the quote, the money quote from Ray is what sums up everything in these situations where it's like, man, don't that beat all? Yeah, yeah, it doesn't just beat all. What else can you say? It's like, so it goes. Yeah, yeah. So there are these interesting moments of like moral ambiguity within the story of like, are the people I'm controlling doing the right thing? And that also ties into the end of the game too with the final boss. Yeah, I was going to say like after the time skip, I think things become even more sort of murky and nebulous. You know, as you explore the world and you kind of build your party, you have Momo, the academic nerd mole girl.

who has a little robot named Honey. She's cute. There's Gar who eventually joins up with you, even though he tried to kill you earlier. There's Pecco, the little onion dude, who is, you know, like a mutant Kirby or whatever. There's a few other characters. But really, like, as you explore the world,

you learn more about kind of its history. And this is where kind of Breath of Fire 3 diverges a lot from the first two games in that there's a lot of history to this world. And there are a lot of you know, kind of advanced ruins that you really didn't see in the first two games. Cities

and ports and things like that. More advanced technology. I think there's like a big tower, if I remember right? It's been a while since I played. Yes, Angel Tower. Yeah. And like, you know, there was this level of technology that exists in this world and has existed that you just didn't see a breath of fire one

and two. And, you know, a big part of the technology was directed toward, if I recall, Hall Wright, preventing the desert on one of the continents from expanding. And eventually, you know, the desert got out of control. And so basically there's an entire continent that's more or less unlivable. And it's because of sort of the events that the Dragon Clan were involved in. And, you know, going on to spoil the entire story, like when you fight the final boss,

the final boss isn't even evil. The final boss is like, I'm trying to do what's best for the world. And when dragons are around, it ruins everything. So I'm going to destroy you, or you can, you know, just agree to stay here and not be part of the world and not make the world worse. Like, you have your choice, but I can't let you go. And so, you know, you can either actually do the dragon quest one thing and choose to just basically live there and die. And that's the downer ending. Or you can fight the goddess.

and who knows what that causes, what happens there. But at the same time, you know, there is another presence in the world, the Igstrelsyl, the world tree, igresil, okay, the world tree. And it's sentient. You talk to it sometimes, you know, it can be one of your training masters. And it does speak to Miria when you're in the final battle and says, like, hey, you're a goddess, but you're overstepping your bounds. And, you know, you have to let the more.

You know, you need to basically de-escalate. And she won't. So, you know, it's, it's not like she wants to conquer the world. It's pretty much the opposite. But at the same time, you know, there's the question of like, is she overstepping her bounds? Is it wrong for Ryu to be free and to live his life when it can potentially be the source of calamity? So, yeah, there aren't any clear answers in this game. And that is something looking back, I really respect. about it. At the time, it felt kind of underwhelming. It felt like a pop out to me at first.

But yeah. But now I see like that's actually much more of a narrative tradition in Japan, not to give you clear endings, not to say, oh, you feel good because you'll won. But to say like, well, you know, a victory, but at what cost? Yeah. It is interesting how Miria in the first game is just portrayed as this goddess of destruction. Yeah, exactly. That will just

be used for the purpose of destroying the opposition or whatnot, but in this one, she's like the over-carrying mother who doesn't want anything bad to befall humanity and we'll do whatever it takes, whether that's conjuring up a desert to and making like in the industrialized area of the world like obsolete and then of course employing guardians to basically commit genocide against the dragon clan and what god it's a lot of deep stuff and i i do like that there is some ambiguity to it like are riu and co really doing the right thing um but uh the way i see it is in in my view i i've always felt like miria yeah she's overstepping her bounds she's taking things too far let let people figure things out for themselves and i mean even her best

intentions aren't going to work out in the end because uh number one frankly one my favorite parts in the game is in Cliff when you fight Gar's friend, and that's when you first kind of realize what the guardians were about and how they feel about what they were told to do, which is, again, slaughtering all the dragons committing genocide. You actually at one point find a number with Gar's name beside it, and he's like, that's how many dragons I killed. Yeah, an angel tower. An angel tower. Yeah, that was super chilling. And that's when Gar finally turns on the child Ryu and you fight him right before the time skip.

But Miria is interesting when you, yeah, the first game, She was very evil, no real question about it. Second game, I think Death Offend is her offspring, so the same thing going on there. But three, it's like, she's like, I want to protect humans. I want them to, like, stay as they are. But that's not going to do anything because one of the reasons I find Breath of Fire 3's world so fascinating is because as you get deeper into the game, you find these towns that are, you have this technology washing up on their shores, and they're using it. And they're building things out of it. And I don't think she likes that, but they're still doing it.

Yeah, yeah, like you can't stop. civilization's progress in those in those regards. Basically for better for worse. Yeah, for better for worse. All right. So that's plenty of discussion about the story. I would like to talk about some of the game mechanics. Because, you know, it is very much a descendant of Breath of Fire one and two, but it adds a lot of new stuff. Or, you know, it builds on the things that had come before. So actually, let's talk about the fishing mini game first. Because Breath of Fire always, you know, from the very beginning you had the field actions and could catch fish and so forth. But people often point to Breath of Fire. the Fire 3 is fishing and say like, this is it. This is the peak of fishing mini-games in RPGs. Like every, every RPG that has had a mini-game where you fish, which is a whole lot of RPGs, has just been grasping at this one and falling short.

The only one that even comes close to touching it for me is Stardu Valley's. I sat there and I caught every damn fish in the game, including the whale. I think that's like the, again, like the white whale, excuse the expression. And what's really cool, about the fishing game, too, is that it's so useful because the stuff you catch is worth a lot of money if you don't want it. Some of it actually does, like, powerful in-game actions, and he can trade it to, I can't remember the name of the trader, but he can give you some super powerful weapons and armor if you have the patience to sit there and fish for a whale like an idiot like I did. And I had the patience. I love that mission. Isn't the merchant like a gobi kind of fish dude?

He's a gobi. Manilos, yeah. Manila race. And you catch him by like using coin as a bait. Yeah, and it's so perfect. It's such a glow up. The fishing system is such a glow up in three from one and two. Yeah, absolutely. Like one was just you press a button and you either catch it or you don't. Two was a little more nuanced in that like a side, side view and you're reeling the lore in and whatnot. But three just takes it to a whole other level where you basically, once you cast your line and you can basically time your movement of the lore to create like,

bonuses which will attract the fish to bite and will even attract ones that your flimsy early game rod can't reach just yet and when the fish bites it goes into this like fighting meter battle where you have to keep this meter on a fish icon at all times to make sure it doesn't slip away and it's just like a very intense fight of like moving that cursor like left to right left to right making sure you're enveloping the fish in this. green meter. The dinging sound is still a stressor for me.

The dinghing sound that you get when you overstress things. Yeah, yeah. There's that ding that occurs. And then you have this amazingly deep-voiced fishing there. This game adds in a bunch of Sega CD-style, like lunar-style voice clips in combat. But the best voice clip is, get ready. Get ready? Yeah, get ready.

Is it a question? It's a question, like, okay, you want to fish or not? Right, right. I think my favorite from the narrator was after you catch something, he's like, very good. Very good. Great. Yeah, there's a kind of like Sega, you know, Sega bass fishing or Sega Virtua fishing kind of vibe to it. It's very good.

I respect it deeply. I respect the way Japan really puts care into their fishing mini game. I think that's very important. Yeah, some would argue it's still one of the best. The only other fishing game I put a little bit of time to was Final Fantasy 15. It did. It did pretty good. I thought it was almost on par with what the OF3 offered for me. But one funny connection there is like you have the composer Yoshino Aoki who worked on three and fours soundtrack. She also did the fishing music to Final Fantasy 15, which I thought was a really interesting cross-section there.

If nothing else, the thing I love it most about Final Fantasy 15's fishing is the way that Noctus just whips out the rod the same way he would have soar, just totally abusing his power. Good for you. Yeah. So, like I said, it's been a while since I've played, but I'm thinking, if I'm correct, am I remembering right that this game does away with the world map skills? So world, field actions?

Well, there are field actions. Like, Ryu can slice on the field. You can actually mug people in this game. You can literally slash at NPCs and like a little zenicoin will pop out and they won't react to it, of course, or anything. thing. But yeah, so there are field actions. Like Ray can pick locks and Nina can shoot like magic out of her wand to activate like a puzzle. Echo headbutts, trees, that sort of thing.

Right. But they're more integrated into the, to the actual design of the dungeons and so forth as opposed to, you know, in Breath of Fire one, especially, where it was just like, hey, you want to catch some meat, let's go hunting. Right. I did. I do miss the hunting. So it feels like, yeah, there's scaled down a bit. Um, yeah. But you have some other changes that are pretty significant. You have the camping element, but you also have just a lack of random battles, which, thank God. On the world map, yeah. I think Three's world map is like one of the best JRP world maps you get out.

Where there's no random encounters, you're this little chibi Ryu moving around the screen. and if you want to get into fights to like grind Zenny or experience every so often you take a few steps an exclamation point will appear over a reuse head and you can choose to then enter like a generic battlefield to fight roam around, fight monsters you might even find like a random

randomly generated item or two. Yeah, yeah. It's like kind of a, it's the kind of battle system I appreciate most where you fight on your own terms and as you said it gives you that little bit of a bonus by finding items that maybe sometimes even weapons and armor that will you know just give you make you feel good for finding it and you have to search to find it sometimes and that's when you run into more enemies but that's how you level up it's it's a nice feedback loop it is yeah and then the camping thing is is neat in that you can talk to your party members there get their feedback on like the current plot beat that's going on but they can also point you into the right direction so if you You haven't played the game in a while or whatever. You can just go camping and talk to them and figure out what you need to do next.

Yeah, and I like how camping actually works like an inn, but it's not perfect. If you want to fully heal, you have to pay money. But if you need to, like, restore your hip points and most of your magic point, you can camp, but you still, certain status elements won't be cured, certain, like, things that lower your hip points permanently until you go to an inn. Like, that'll still remain. Right. But, yeah, it's a good way to just kind of catch your breath. Right.

You need to give them a comfier sleep. They do. No sleeping in a tent. Yeah. So one of the critical elements of the combat system is that you now have masters you can train with. They're kind of like the shamans of the previous games, but they also kind of work like Final Fantasy Six's Magisite, where each character can train with a different master, and that will confer stat bonuses on level up. You can switch around your masters. You can only have one at a time, if I'm remembering right?

Yeah. But, you know, per character. Yeah. So, you know, there's, I don't think there are any masters that are just like, hey, everything, every, every stat is going to grow. It's like, hey, do you want to specialize in magic or in speed? What do you want? Because that's what I can help you with. Strength, you know.

So you have to kind of specialize and you can switch around to, to vary things up and buff up areas where your characters might be falling weak. But they also teach you battle formations. which are kind of like auto-selected, not auto-selected, but like, how do you describe formations? Well, basically, Breath of Fire too had them, but it was like limited to these four formations,

and they all had very specific stats to them. Like the first two characters in the formation in line will have like a higher attack power, but there's always trade-offs to that. In three, it's more like, depending on which character is in the line one character in the forefront may have a higher attack power or my go-to was always the defense line

because it just raised everybody's defense regardless of what position they were in and then you can unlock a few more formations through one of the masters in the game and of course probably the most important trademark element of combat is reuse ability to transform into a dragon, which is very, very, like, intricate in this game. Yeah.

You have basically a matrix of transformations activated by acquiring different genes throughout the game, dragon genes. And there's a whole lot to keep in mind when you transform into a dragon. It's not something you can just, like, say, yeah, I'm going to be a dragon now and win every fight. It's kind of a, not a limited resource, but it's very expensive. It is. In terms of ability points, and transforming into dragons can make Ryu very powerful in certain circumstances. It's not always like an instant win.

If you transform into the wrong dragon type, a lot of dragon forms have elemental affinities, you can actually put yourself at a disadvantage. Either in terms of like your attacks don't do anything against certain enemies or you're super vulnerable against certain attacks. So there's a lot to factor in. and that's in addition to just the cost of transformation. Yeah, I would say it's definitely an improvement over twos where in Breath of Fire 2 you use a dragon form and it saps all of reuse AP and you have to work towards restoring all as AP to get the best possible hit damage from the dragon attack again. But in this one, you can transform and you can pick different forms, all shapes and sizes

and whatnot, and then, like, commit them to memory so you can reuse them more quickly. But each turn after you, in addition to the AP cost of, like, him performing a dragon breath or something, it saps AP from re-use each turn. So you can't have it forever. It'll eventually sap until he has to revert back to human forms. Yeah, but you have a lot of control over the dragons, which I think is a really, really cool element of the game. Like, you put, if you use one dragon gene, you turn to a whelp who, can still be like enough of a boost

to get you through a really tough battle without like a huge sacrifice to your AP but what's really cool is the game uses so many transformations you're probably never going to use but they look so amazing like the Tiamet transformation that uses all your party members

same with the behemoth transformation my favorite though is there's a whole bunch of dragon forms that people don't know about with the fusion gene where you fuse with one character in your party and you get some really neat looking designs And it's like Momo turns into like this mechanical dragon with like a weird smokestack. My favorite though is you fuse with, you can't fuse with Gar at all, which is a great little detail. But you can fuse with Ray and turn to like this tiger dragon.

It's really amazing. Right. Yeah, there's a lot of promotional art of that wear tiger dragon, which I thought is really neat. Yeah, that's a nice little thing to focus on. Yeah, I distinctly remember using the Kaiser Dragon form in the final battle. And that still sticks with me. I feel like I mentioned this in the previous episode, but I saved up all my hourglass powers,

or the items, the freeze time for everyone but the wielder. And I had like three of those when I entered the final battle. They're really scarce, and I just never used them. And I got to the final battle, I was like, can I freeze the final boss? And it turns out you can. So Ryu basically got like nine free turns as Kaiser Dragon. So that was the fight. That was it.

Yep. You can totally cheese that fight. I just annihilated God. and basically, like, she didn't get to move. I feel, I'm very sorry, God. What's interesting about the Kaiser form is that there's a regular Kaiser form that is actually not the true one, and you don't have, like, control of it. But then there's the true Kaiser form, which is, like, the ultimate form of the game.

But you need a very specific gene in combination with the rest to actually create it. Yeah, that's one thing I never understood it completely. Like, I do know the Kaiser, if you use it by itself, it's like kind of a wild card that turns like uncontrollable, kind of like Ray when he's in wear tagger form, but that one gene, I don't know if they ever tell you you need it. I think it's the failure gene or something. Yeah, I think it was called for the failure

of the gene, yeah. So that's very strange because the Kaiser was such a, first of all, it's interesting how the Kaiser looks pretty similar from game to game. That's reuse a final dragon form, so there you go in terms of continuity. But yeah, I do like how, whereas it was kind of a necessity

to beat death oven in two and three, it's more like, well, if you can figure out the secret of this weird, cool-ass dragon, it's all yours, but until then, well, good luck. gameplay and design of Breath of Fire 3 before we start moving ahead to Breath of Fire 4. I thought it was neat that you could learn enemy skills in battle. It was sometimes a crapshoot, but there was like an examine icon that you can use and you can learn that enemy skill. And if a character learns it that you don't want them to have that skill,

that's what the camp is for. You use this item called Skillink to transfer the skill over to another character. And that's kind of in the same line of like the skills you receive from Masters as well. The other neat thing is even though you don't create your own town per se in this game, like township from Breath of Fire 2, this one does something in the form of like a fairy colony. Right. Where the player basically instructs fairies to build, research jobs, and run the place and open shops, casinos, things like that to enhance the gameplay and whatnot.

That's after you beat up a pink doll. That was a weird part of the game. The dolphin. I wanted to mention the dolphin. There's so much humor and gags in Breath of Fire 3 that I love. There's like this mutant. You have to mercy kill by like activating a conveyor belt to send them into the lava. And as that's playing, you hear like, do-dun, do-dun, like Terminator 2 or whatever.

I never noticed that. I got to look back at that. It's hilarious. And maybe, you know, mercy-killing is not the funny part. The funny part is you hit the wrong switch on the conveyor belt and it's him in the other direction and he's like no the other way i'm trying to die for god's sake yeah and then the dolphin is this whole other thing where he he's terrorizing the fairy colony and you have to take care of him but when he comes up to ryu momo and nina he acts all sweet and nice in front of them

when they walk away he changes his demeanor and starts squirting riu with water and starts taunting him in an australian accent referring to like momo and nina shilas and um Once the scene is over, the game basically, in a text box goes, for those players who don't speak Australian, we have provided an English translation of the previous scene. Do you want to replay the scene? If you hit yes, it'll replay that entire scene with the dolphin speaking in just like typical American English or whatever.

Which I thought it's, this never happens like ever again in the game. It's such a random, humorous moment. But I learned that in the Japanese version, and this is just an example of like clever localization. In the Japanese version, the dolphin is, instead of speaking Australian per se, he was speaking in a Kansai dialect, which is a Japanese dialect local to Osaka where Capcom is. It's always Osaka.

It's always Osaka. It always gets the craft on for it's like, what's her name for Azumanga being a southerner. Well, in fairness, Capcom is based in Osaka. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So it's a little bit of... Yeah, yeah, they're kind of poking out of themselves, yeah. Yeah, basically.

It just feels like a lot of animating and games that I play, like not just Capcom, always like, ha-ha, Osaka accent, and it's just like, it's just funny to me. But I was wondering, actually, what he did say and what accent he was speaking in the Japanese version. And of course, I was thinking it's got to be Osaka. And of course, it was Osaka. Pretty great. All right, so this was released on PlayStation in September 97. in Japan and in like April, May 1998 in America, then later in Europe that year.

But it was reissued on PSP as one of several PS1 classics, before the PS1 classics line, you know, kind of remade, re-engineered for PSP that we never saw in the U.S. because Sony, you know, of U.S., Sony C-EA was like, old games, that sounds stupid, who we want those? Yeah. We don't want the PSP to just be like a PS1 porting machine. So we missed out on a lot of stuff like this, Swigated 1 and 2, Mega Man Legends 1 and 2, kind of sucks. But fortunately, this version, was it the PSP game or was it the PS1 game that was released on PlayStation Network to play on Vita? I think it's the PSP game. PSP. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It only took 10 years later, but it happened. Yeah. And it's a darn shame because just to wrap up on my end, I wanted to say how this Breath of Fire 3 still has like the best sprite work I've ever seen. The only thing that comes close to we get into. And it does so much little visual storytelling. Like there's a scene where Ray is trying to get from one roof to another and he slips. And he just does this great thing where he does like this scattered like brained cat thing where he runs down.

on the roof and leaps over and it's like, oh, okay, I'll just pretend I meant to do that. And it's the one time they use this scene in the game, like these animation frames. And of course, making sprites is not a small endeavor. The fact that they took all this time to do that, just for those little psych gag is fantastic. And the game is full of things like that, like unique little touches that really tell the story of what the characters are like, especially child Ryu and child Nina. One really cute touch that I've noticed is that when Ryu is new to the game and fighting, he kind of screams and turns away when he waves the sword wildly.

But once he meets Nina and has to start protecting her, that's when he starts to get more confidence and he doesn't turn away and scream. He actually attacks the enemy head on. Right. I thought that was such a nice touch. A lot of fans love to bring that up of just to show the kind of attention to detail that the spright work has. It's pretty great. There's even a scene where like Momo was dealing with some adult business and child Nino Riu and Nina are fighting in the background. it's kind of pushing each other around and laughing.

And again, that's just one scene where you see all these unique animations and you never see them again. Right. Yeah, I think Nina like teases Ryu and he starts like crying for a moment, like crying animation. Well, like Momo is talking to that Repsul scientist guy about something serious. Yeah, it's pretty good. Hi, we're Nice Games Club, the show where nice game devs talk gaming and game development. Topics include programming, design, tools, and more. also do interviews and one of our game jams. Listen to Nice Games Club, wherever you get to your...

Wherever you get to your podcast. You get there. Or at nicegames.club. And we're back, folks, with another episode of Nasty Labs. Nasty Labs. It's a show hosted by me, Kinsey Burke, and my dumb-ass friend, Mark. Nasty Labs. This twice-monthly show about game development, Japan life,

being nice to people, and hey, maybe a few other things. Nasty Labs is a product of ChewaiLabs Brand Incorporated and now available for three easy payments of 4269, only on the Greenlit podcast network. All right, so, Breath of Fire 3, pretty great. Now on to Breath of Fire 4, which came along about two and a half, three years later. A pretty big gap between releases there was also a PlayStation game, but this was different. because this was a PlayStation game that actually arrived in the U.S. after the PlayStation 2

launch. And I guess it was slightly after the PS2 launch in Japan also, April of 2000. So, you know, it landed a little differently. I think expectations were different. And you know, there were a lot of great RPGs released here in 2000,

2001. That kind of got short shrift because you know, the next generation mentality took hold. Everyone was like, I've got to get my missile launching system before Saddam Hussein does and, you know, play whatever the hell was on PS2 early on. Not a whole lot. But the bouncer. Yes, the bouncer. That 45 minutes of delight. Yes. So, so I feel like Breath of Fire 4 kind of was largely overlooked at the time. Certainly I overlooked it. But did the two of you overlook? look at? No, but I did get it late. It came out, yeah, November in the U.S., and I actually didn't get it until my birthday. I always received Breath of Fire games for my birthday. That was kind of the thing. Yeah, I got it in like March 2001, so a little later. I did, I definitely

overlooked it. And to be frank, it's not a game that I've played a whole lot because I've tried. And even though I adore the graphics, I think they're fantastic, and I'd really like to get more into the game. I don't like the 360 degree turning like map. Like in Breath of Fire 3, it's hard to explain, but in Breath of Fire 3, you had limited control over your isometric view where you can like hold down a trigger button and kind of skew things back and forth to see what you're missing behind corners. With Breath of Fire 4, you can use the shoulder buttons to turn maps all the way around and see where you're going. And that just number one made me feel quite motion sick. Number two, I just feel like it makes the maps.

feel more confined, whereas Breath of Fire 3, okay, yes, the maps were smaller, but the way the osmetric view was fixed made you realize, okay, I don't feel like I'm really confined here, but I don't know, I just can't really deal with the way Breath of Fire 4 moves, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, it does allow for more rotation of the camera in like four different angles. So there is a lot of like, especially in tight spot, like tight villages, there is a lot of moving that around just to find certain NPCs, talk to. to them, that sort of thing, yeah. And that just makes me too motion sick.

And it was really bad, especially in there's, early on, there's a dungeon that's basically a ghost town. And you have to do a lot of rotation to see where you're going and what you're doing. I just couldn't hack it. Right, right. Yeah, that is a pretty big difference, like a node-based rotation versus free rotation. Yeah. It definitely changes the experience.

And I feel like the free rotation doesn't work so well when you have characters who are based on sprites as opposed to like a fully 3D thing. Yeah, like, it's the difference between Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy 12. You know, like, it's one of those, the sort of fixed rotation works a lot better than free rotation. I'm glad they set those up the way they did. And I get the desire to be like, no, you can, you can, you know, freely move through this world. But yeah, it's not always, it's not always great. Like the fixed approach gives it the feeling more of, you know, like the 2D game.

where you have kind of a predefined relationship with the world, whereas with the full 3D, it opens things up more and just feels less guided and less focused. Yeah, and it's a shame because I actually really adore the battle scenes. I think they look fantastic. The art's really wonderful. Yeah, it's a big upgrade. Yeah, you keep saying Breath of Fire 3 has the best spray work.

But man, Breath of Fire 4 looks so good. It's just beautiful. I mean, this is like Capcom at the height of their 2D sprite creating powers. Like, this was, you know, the era of Street Fighter 3, Third Strike and things like that. You know, Jojo's Bizarre adventure, just like gorgeous, gorgeous animation. And they applied that to an RPG. And, oh, it looks beautiful. And on top of that, it's paired to a really intricate story.

Like, there is, but this is by far the most complex, uh, lore of any Breath of Fire game, even though it still seems to kind of build on what it'd come before. It also feels like, you know, this world is complete and whole in and of itself, and there's a lot of history. Yeah. Another neat thing is going back to the sprites is the, it's more of a muted pastel sort of color to the sprites and not as bright as three. Not as bright in anime and cheerful as three was. Yeah. I mean, eventually you'll come into environments that are more colorful and tropical in the game but it starts off kind of like more

drab like you're in the desert and I thought that was an interesting environmental shift from previous games I mean you definitely had a lot of desert to contend with in Breath of Fire three kind of kind of infamously

the desert of death or whatever it was called like yeah yeah that was those were some dark times that's that's actually a section of the game that can kind of kill a playthrough What, I guess the unfortunate thing is that when you, when you started out, you're given the correct directions from the guide that tells you what to do, but then he says he'll write it down for you. When you read the, when you read the notes, one of the directions is incorrect. I don't know if it's intentional or not, or it could be very well a typo, but where he says to go east when talking to you, he writes down to go west

in the written notes. Maybe he hates you. It could be that. I've heard both ways that it's a mistake and that also that was written that way in the Japanese. So I don't know. It could be intentional, yeah. But it's definitely like a really cruel place to have that kind

of misdirection because when you're in that desert, the longer you're out there, you can like permanently lose hit points from your max hit point tally. Like it debilitates your character. It's, you know, like playing a rogue-like and encountering a vampire who, you know, drains levels or something. It's, it's brutal. Like, don't, don't leave me

stranding it out here. I guess, uh, I didn't struggle as much with others, but that's because I'm, I was one of those players that just stuck to the strategy guide and, yeah, I just, but that is also a segment of three that you absolutely should probably use a guide for to to save some time. I downloaded, I famously downloaded an FAQ, and I don't even download, sorry. I printed it because, like, 90s. Yeah, so thankfully, there's nothing quite like that in Breath of Fire 4. And instead, the story is, it's structured even more interestingly than Breath of Fire 3, where Breath of Fire 3 is basically like childhood Ryu, adult Ryu.

This shifts perspectives, and there are parts of the game where you don't even see Ryu, which is very different for a Breath of Fire game. Yeah, you have an alter ego to Ryu. Fuloo. And so the scenario will switch between his story and Nina's story and Fulu's story. So you kind of get a glimpse of both characters' lives in a way. Pretty neat. So do you want to talk a little bit about what Fulu is and how he ties in with the story? Because I feel like, you know, this kind of, it kind of carries forward the concept of the light and the dark dragons from the original Breath of Fire, but in a more direct way and one that the you know, has much more of a personal tie as opposed to like, you belong to a clan.

Whereas this is, this is much more like, hey, this is, you know, this is your liquid snake here. If you want to bring MGS into it, sure. Yeah, the interesting thing is, so from the get-go, breath of fire four is, in a sense, its own world. It's very different from the first, whereas you can make points to connect one, two, and three together in the same world. for is just it's completely different like its own own thing and you basically you have a western empire the the foe empire and the eastern kingdoms the interesting thing is the foe empire is kind of modeled after like feudal china east asia that kind of a aesthetic and the eastern kingdoms are like a mix of medieval europe and the middle east and so uh basically the the story goes that uh it actually

The story starts with Nina and her friend Cray, two of the main characters. And they're basically out on a sand ship looking for Nina's sister, Alina, who has gone missing while she was on a diplomatic mission. There's sandfire crashes. Nina comes across Ryu, transformed from a dragon, and then they befriend each other and kind of work together to figure out what to do. And meanwhile, Fo Liu, he is basically an ancient god emperor of the faux empire. like from several centuries ago.

After being asleep in a tomb, he reawakens and he needs to find his other half, that being Ryu, to become full and assume the throne again. And basically his goal is to reunite the continents. Of course, though, as you play through Folu's story, he sees what humanity is capable of, their terrible misdeeds, and that grows into more like,

kill all humans, I hate that sort of thing. And to throw lots of wrenches into everything, Fulhu is being pursued by the current Fou Empire's general Yom, who is basically, he wants to get rid of him in a sense. The current Fou Empire does not want their current emperor to lose his position and whatnot. And in the middle of that, yeah, Folu wants to find Riu. Riu also wants to figure out what the deal is with Fulu

and what's his purpose in the world and whatnot. but Dune eventually learns all the dangers of Folu and what he's trying to do and that sort of thing. So yeah, there's a lot of like political intrigue and that sort of thing into it. It can be a bit much to follow, but there are a lot of like incredible moments in the story in terms of like some of the awful things the faux empire does to be at like a town or or to Riu like that sort of thing. So it is quite a departure from Breath of Fire 3, which was more about humanity scrabbling from the ruins, the ashes of like past dragon wards and stuff like that to, and they kind of make their own little societies. Like, they don't really have an

overseeing empire or a king unless you count like Wendia, which is kind of off doing its own thing. Well, kind of, but I mean, you know, again, I haven't really played that much of this game. But my understanding of the story is that Folu, uh, specifically like, as Dragon Emperor, was kind of holding his empire together and had plans to unite the entire world, but basically kind of ran out of dragon juice and had to go to sleep. Yeah, he had to do the Odin sleep and recharge for a few centuries. And so there, you know, there is the idea of the Folu Empire as kind of the great unifying force, but without Folu's influence, it's kind of fallen into disarray and infighting.

And, you know, the fact that the empire looks at the risen foaloo, like their leader, their founder, the guy that they named the empire for, and they're like, yeah, we can do without him. We're doing fine without you, thanks. So they're the ones who actually want to kill God in this one, in a sense. But then to throw another wrench into everything, you have this character, Lord Una, this occultist, who is fascinated with like experimenting and basically manufacturing gods and that sort of thing.

And he has his own nefarious purposes for what he wants to do to like Ryu and Fulhu. And you also find out, you know, the fate of Alina under him, which is like a very gut-wrenching moment in the game. So yeah, there's a lot of things at play here. Folu, in his journeys, you see he actually befriends a human

a farmer girl mommy who cares for him after he's like chased and injured by the foe empire and that's where like fo lu even shows like a bit of uh vulnerability of like actually maybe thinking oh he not all humans are are that bad but then of course you know the farmer girl helps him escape um and then she's basically punished by being sacrificed for this weapon of mass destruction that the faux empire is creating a caranade. It's like this giant cannon that

uses human souls basically to power or whatever. And so he sees that happen of her being sacrificed to attack him essentially. And that basically causes him to snap. Humans suck again. Yep,

nope. Human suck. I resent my previous position. Exactly. And so, and then then the story kind of takes the shape of, okay, Ryu, Kray, Nina, their robot armor, Ershin, Sayas, and Ursula, they all team up together to put a stop to this, essentially. So this game makes some, I would say some pretty significant changes while it still is like unquestionably a breath of fire game. The way a lot of the elements play out really feels like Capcom was trying to sort of, you know, modernize the design of it.

And in some ways, kind of move toward the RPGs you would see like during the PS2 era, the PS3 era, where, you know, you have like a simplified overworld and things like that. you know that would that would enter the final fantasy series with uh final fantasy 10 really where it's just like yeah no no overworld map anymore it's just kind of uh an adventure yeah i thought that was interesting that the world map is a lot simpler it's like dash lines on a on a map connecting you between points and that sort of thing so perhaps not as in depth as threes um it does do a few like interesting enhancements to like this some of the systems carried over over from three, like, I know combat-wise, so you still have your random encounters.

And even though in three, combat took place in the same field, there was no screen transition. Four kind of goes back to one-and-two's way of, like, screen transition, and you're in, like, a battle screen, essentially, but while still retaining the field sprites. But I think what I really liked about Force Combat was the fact that you may have only had three people in a main party, but you could switch out willy-nilly at any point.

You had your back row and your front row, back row being the passive characters, front row being the combatants, and you can switch them out at any turn. And switching is a free action, right? It's a free action, yeah. So you can switch someone in and attack, yeah. Final Fantasy 10 would do this like a year later.

Yeah. Wow. I always thought that was interesting. Just, just, or Squares off, I guess, just totally ripping off breath of fire. Well, if you want to go even further Breath of Fire one allowed you to switch characters out mid-battle.

It just didn't... That was published by Squarespace. There you go. Wow. Oh, snap. But, yeah, it didn't have as much nuance as it had here. Yeah, and on top of that, they implemented this combo system where essentially you could tie skills

and magic together to create these like enhanced overpowered spells and basically build up a combo meter so you could try to like build up like a 15 hit or 20 hit combo, that sort of thing, simply by like starting off with like a wind spell by Nina, then Ryu initiates a burn spell, which combines to create like this wind, fire combo and whatnot.

So it was interesting to see how they went about, like changing about combat or making it a little more exciting, that sort of thing. Right. And they totally drop the dragon gene concept, right? Yeah. There are genes, but they're, Yeah, but they're not for creating new dragon forms. They're basically, they're more for, like, summoning dragons.

So when Ryu turns, goes into his dragon form, he's still a humanoid. He's just, like, a bit more powerful. And then from there, you can choose either dragon attacks, which are, like, a cutscene of him turning into a dragon, or you can summon a dragon god, which is similar to, like, a Final Fantasy, summon sort of attack. So, yeah, it's all more like based on the animations and you're not like an active, full-on dragon during a turn. But what I was saying earlier about how Breath of Fire 4 moves more toward the sort of modern contemporary style, I guess, of RPGs. You have animations in combat when you do summons, which is a big step away from what had come before. Yeah.

And a lot of things are modeled in 3D as well. Some of the bosses are 3D, and the dragons themselves are also 3D modeled as opposed to 2D sprites. I think that's why I earlier considered Breath of Fire 3, like, the best-looking sprite game, because, like, I always thought that Breath of Fire 4 use a lot more polygons. Still has great sprites, I got to be wrong. Yeah, it was like the occasional boss and a whole bunch of dragons that used the 3D models, which, yeah, kind of clashed with the 2D sprites. But that said, though, there are a lot of unique, like, 2D NPC sprites and whatnot and so on. Another thing four does a lot of is a lot more mini-games than three. You have, like, you're digging mini-games.

You even can go on a sand flyer at one point, and it turns into, like, a 3D racing game, almost, on, like, the sand dunes. But how's the fishing? That's what I want to know. So the fishing, it still has, like, the tech system from three, but it's a bit. bit more you have a bit more control where you cast your line so you go into a fishing area and it can be a pond a lake or an ocean and you and you basically go up to that body of water and you cast your line or you can turn around and cast it into the other lake behind you that sort of thing but well something i've never been able to try yet because i haven't gotten my hands on it is it actually has fishing

controller support which uh which i guess i'm i'm assuming that controller only works on like native PS1 not so much PS2 or 3 or anything like that. I would think it would work on PS2 that would have compatibility with PS1 controllers. You might be right, yeah. But that's something I've never tried and I really want to.

Me too. Bucket list item for Rutherfeyer 4. And it also had the fairy colony brought over from 3 as well with a few enhancements here and there. So yeah. Lots of the systems from 3 basically brought over and just kind of

improved upon upgraded. mailbag and move through that really quickly. Any final thoughts on Breath of Fire 4? I don't mean to give it short shrift, but a lot of it is kind of elements carried over from Breath of Fire 3. So we've kind of covered the bases with Breath of Fire 3. Maybe a few things on the characters. Ershin is probably one of my favorites in this game. She's known as Master in Japan, but she's basically a sentient mechanical robot armor that she refers to her. in the third person in dialogue.

She's very kooky. She laughs at inappropriate times. Like, in moments where the party almost gets devoured by a monster, she starts laughing. She also has a rocket punch in battle, which is pretty unique for a breath of fire. And she's just super, super silly and weird and kind of a very endearing part of the game. And it turns out that she harbors the spirit of Dease, also known as blue from the previous games. So there's a connection there in that she basically harbors her spirit and she's been summoned into this world to, like, guide Ryu on his quest.

That explains a lot. She would laugh at, like, a monster to devour the body. Right. So the interesting thing is even though Dees is within Ershin, Urshin is still somehow sentient and separate from Dees. So, like, they may be in the same, like, body, but their thoughts are also different. certain ways. It's kind of an interesting split personality that they share. And I guess another fun facet of the game is Sias. He's this lanky grassrunner swords dog. He's so cool. Holy crap.

He's super cool. This bright green robe, long katana. And what's interesting is in the Japanese version, he basically slurs all his speech because he's drunk all the time. So he's a drunk swordsman. He's that style, but... Who's also a dog? Who's also a dog? But in the Western version, this was changed to... He wasn't actually drunk in the Western version. He was just a stutterer.

This awkward stuttering person, which I thought was an interesting change. Interesting touch, I guess, but I guess even then he couldn't have perpetually drunk characters without courting controversy. It could be that, yeah. Just a quick question for you, because you

would know this. Was Momo a grass runner? I think so. I think most fans would assume that Momo's a grass runner because I thought I read somewhere that like yeah the male grass runners look like that particular the dog who you just mentioned

I can't remember his name and the females of course look a little more human so yeah Momo's like animal type is hard to I know Jeremy referred to her as like a mole-ish kind of thing but I don't even know how

like what the accurate animal comparison would be yeah I just went with mole because their name is Mo Mo Mo Mo, which you see with mole characters in Japanese media sometimes. Right. What's funny is MoMo is actually in Breath of Fire 4, albeit as a like a cameo master. And when you talk to her, she mentions as if she had warped there from another dimension

further fueling the idea of like, this is totally a separate world from the world of the previous games. Interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, because just a previous game, even though the link could be kind of tenuous, they never really broke out the, hey, this is a whole other dimension thing. Yeah, yeah. And I guess my final comment on four is just the music. It does return to like the orchestral styles of one and two, but interestingly, Yoshino

Aoki, who returned from three, incorporated like Middle Eastern and Asian folk music. So like you hear a lot of like sitar and didgeridoo. kind of style stuff. Even one of the boss themes is basically like Citar meets breakbeat. It's like a very 2000 thing to do. That is. Even thinking like Dino Crisis 2 had a lot of breakbeat going on

and it came out the same year. So I thought that was an interesting touch. And basically Aoki, like when composing the music, she reflected the styles of like the faux empire, you know, having that Asian influence and the Eastern kingdoms being like, a mix of medieval Europe and the Middle East, so you hear a lot of, like, the brass and the violins, but also sitar and that sort of thing. And I really like that, you know, it may not be

the jazzy pop of three. I mean, that's three's wheelhouse, but for also, even though it returns to the orchestral form, it still does something new and unique with it. So, all right. So with that said, let's make a quick journey through these letters. I don't think we can do all of them. There's a lot. Alex Reid of Fire 4 is one of my favorite games ever, certainly my favorite PS1 RPG. I recently revisited as an adult and I was struck by the aesthetic cohesiveness of the whole

thing. It's got to be one of the nicest looking RPGs to use that three-quarter perspective, 2D sprites on 3D background look. The character sprites are detailed and beautifully animated, while the backgrounds do a wonderful job of turning the PS1's shivery polygons into a dense, believable world. Breath of Fire 4 drops you into its world and leaves you to figure things out for yourself. The setting clearly had a lot of thought put into it, but Capcom are happy to let you find out about it at your own pace. It's a breath of fresh air in a genre that nowadays is a bit too fond of drowning you in a torrent of lore. That's a good point.

Yes, I agree. I like the breath of fresh air. That's very appropriate for this episode. Thank you for inserting that. Yeah. Brian Root says, I think both of these hold up better than most PS1 JRPs. I don't think I can choose which one I like better, as they each do different things better than the other. Both have great fishing minigames, but I think Ford does it best with its improved mechanics and diverse fishing locations. Both have good soundtracks, but for completely different reasons. I think Three's overarching mystery about the extinction of the dragons is better than reused Journey in 4, but Folu's story is fantastic.

And of course, 3's dragon gene system is wonderful and inventive, especially compared to the lackluster of transformations in 4. However, 4's party switching combo-making battle system is better than 3's regular combat. I highly recommend that JRP fans check out both games on PSP or Vita. That is correct. You can download Breath of Fire 4 as a PS1 classic. Yeah, so it'll work on PS3 as well. All right, a long one from Jay Thompson.

Breath of Fire 3 was one of my first rentals as a very late PS1 owner, and while it didn't look as pretty as some of the RPGs I was playing on the system, it blew me away for how complex it was. A lot of people focused on the dragon gene system, but what actually ended up hooking me was the master student system where your character studied under NPCs to learn abilities based on completing certain tasks. Parts of this mechanic have actually stuck with me to this very day.

One early master requires that you have a certain amount of weapons to start studying her. As a kid, I'd just instinctively sold off stuff I no longer used to make money, so I had to skip by this essential master. Ever since then, I've instinctively hoarded equipment to always make sure that I was prepared for situations like that. It took me a while to B3 via frequently restarting it after numerous rentals and eventually just buying it, and I don't think I loved it in the end, but it was a satisfying experience. I think they're referring to Delonzo the master in three, which the earliest tip I can give you in starting Breath of Fire

3. After you torch Gary and Mogu in the beginning check their burnt corpses because they have a melted blade item and that goes towards your count for DeLonzo requiring you to have like 15 weapons before she teaches you anything. I've never studied under

her because I never have the weapons. I always forget I always held them off. She was important in that I think you could learn steal from her eventually which was great when Ray was not with you with his pilfer skill and whatnot. But she also raised the accuracy of

the character under her. So it was ideal for Momo to be under Delonso because Momo can't hit anything for Foss out of a barn. Even with like she has like an accessory you can put on her and it doesn't help very much. Yeah the Artemis cap and she still misses. She still sucks.

I think it's it has to be a gag like you know she's she's very absent minded and that sort of thing so maybe it fits in with character, but that bazooka may look awesome, but it also misses a lot. Yeah, and it's very handy because you can change out the chrism for elemental

chrisms. That's great, but it misses I have to say one thing about Breath of Fire 3 is so many of his dungeons are a slog, and Momu's Tower is the worst one by far. There's a lot of tricky puzzles in that way. Yeah, the puzzles, and there's things like, oh, push this block, but the lot is not like a great really

hard to explain, like it doesn't really lock on very well, like, things feel very random when you push them, very loose. Yeah, I definitely needed guides for the puzzles in three. Yeah, like I said, GameFaQ, print, there goes my laser. Well, I had my Prima guide, which,

I feel like most people who had the Prima Breath of Fire 3 strategy guide, it had a very weak binding to it, so it would just fall apart. So, I have one that's just like pages. It's not even to call it even a book right now, it's hard to say.

Just a folder full of pages there. Basically, yeah. All right. We're actually. All right. We're actually kind of running along time. So there's a lot of letters. I'm going to put the rest of these away for a future mailback episode. I just, yeah, there were a lot of letters, like a lot of letters. And I don't want to do everyone who wrote in a disservice.

So please look forward to a mailback episode sometime down the road. But thank you, everyone who wrote in clearly a lot of opinions, mostly positive, some negative, about Breath of Fire 3 and 4. So clearly games that really landed with people. And again, I think that kind of gets to its time and place where, you know, it was just after Final Fantasy 7. A lot of people were like role-playing games, menu-based combat, this is very interesting and different. And we're very open and receptive to the style of game. And, you know, a lot of people who were pretty young at the time.

So very sort of these, you know, influential, meaningful experience. as formative, I would say. So good on Capcom for striking at developing minds and praying on those formative children. Yes, that's exactly what it is. It's predatory. Anyway, that I think wraps it up for our conversation about Breath of Fire three and four. Someday, we will probably tackle Dragon Quarter. But I would like to play more of that game before we do that episode because it's really cool.

And I've just never had time to really sit down with it. every time I have messed with it, I'm just like, I am so into this. And then life happens and I don't get to play the rest. It was definitely ahead of its time. So I really want to give it another try before I go making any judgments on it. Please do. It's one of those games that at first I couldn't get into and then I gave it a fair shake the second time around and I fell in love with it. I promise that we will cover that game before civilization collapses due to insurrection or climate change or pandemic. That is my guarantee to you.

We will talk about Dragon Quarter before our world experiences a Dragon Quarter-style apocalypse. All right. We all move undergrad. Yes. Or Maria conjures the desert. It's happening. It's already happening. All right.

So that's it for this episode. If you enjoyed listening to us talk about Breath of Fire 3 and 4, you would probably enjoy listening to us talk about other old video games. And the good news is that Retronauts creates a lot of podcasts every month about old video games. You can find them at Retronauts.com on various podcatchers at the Greenlit Podcast Network. And you can also support the show and get early access to each episode, each Monday episode, by supporting and pledging for the show. yes, at patreon.com slash retronuts.

$3 a month gets you early access to every Monday episode at a higher bit rate quality than on the public feed and no advertisements or cross-promotions. But if you want to throw in a couple of extra bucks each month, you also get patron exclusive episodes every other Friday. You get access to our patron discord where lots of cool conversations about old video games happen. I post there sometimes, you know,

try to check in once a day or so. And also every weekend, there's a This Weekend Retro column and mini podcast by Diamond Fight. So that's a lot of extra content for the $5 patron level. I'm not saying that you should do that, but I actually am. Yes, you should do that. All right. So, Patrick, where can we find you on the internet, not speaking for your employer, having personal independent opinions that do not represent a corporation's interest?

So I have a few things I could plug here. Well, on Twitter, I'm at Patrick KUL, Patrick Cool. On YouTube, I am known as VG Drum, where I do drum covers of video game tunes. And on that game music note, I've been a regular member of my buddy, Brett Elston's VG Empire podcast, celebrating game music. We actually had a Breath of Fire episode way back in 2014 before I even joined Capcom, so check that one out. And I wanted to give a special shout out to my friend Livnott, who she spearheads the Breath of Fire fan community pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, which are things that I started like a decade ago or so. And I guess my final plug is the Breath of Fire 1 to 5 soundtracks are actually on Steam since last summer. So go get those.

All right. And Nadia. I can be found on the Axel of the Blood God RBG podcast that you can support us at patreon.com forward slash Blood God Pod. And we have a free episode that goes out every week, but it's a week behind our regular episodes. And if you subscribe at the $5 level, you can get the, basically, the episodes when they come out, add free, subscribe at the $10 level for a special podcast. Like, for example, we just wrapped up the Pantheon of the Blood God podcast. about Shin-Megami Tensei Nocturn and talked about whether or not

it deserves to be regarded as the best of the best in the genre. And I will not tell you what we said because I think you should support us and find out for yourself. And we also talk about Lord of the Rings and how that's affected RPG development and storytelling in the past several years.

We reviewed the Witcher series on Netflix. So yeah, we have a whole bunch of stuff going on and we really, really love it if you support us. And we also have a cool Discord that's full of a lot of final Fantasy 14 nerds. So come on home. Nice. All right. And finally you can find me, Jeremy Parrish. On Twitter as Gamesbite, you can find me doing stuff at limited run games. This podcast does not express any opinions related to limited run games. I am also independent of my employer.

But I do write a lot of stuff there. So there's a pretty good chance that if you buy one of our CEs, you're going to open it up. And there's a book that I put together. And of course, You know, I've got my video series, NES works, et cetera, on YouTube. Just look up Jeremy Parrish on the internet. OneR and Parrish. You'll probably find a lot of stuff. Hopefully nothing bad. Anyway, that wraps it up for Breath of Fire.

So hopefully you didn't feel like this podcast was Dragon. A. Thank you.