Welcome back to the breath of fire series retrospective, My name is Fade Dragontear
and 5 years ago I paid tribute to one of my favorite gaming franchises of all time, Breath
of fire.
They were my first ever scripted videos and although they were rough and unpolished I
had a lot of fun spending the better part of a year playing through the series and sharing
my thoughts about why I love breath of fire as a whole.
At that time the Breath of Fire series was a long dormant franchise and there was extremely
little hope of ever seeing a sequel, So at the end of the retrospective, I sent a plea
to Capcom to reconsider
the franchise..
Almost exactly a year after that video's release, news surfaced about Breath of Fire 6 and I
and the rest of the internet were super excited for a few moments until we collectively realized
that it was mainly being developed for mobile devices.
Early gameplay videos confirmed the skepticism, clearly this again would be a massive departure
from the series roots, and possibly one of the biggest disappointments and falls from
grace in jrpg history.
Be careful what you wish for right, So let's take a look at the sixth entry in the series
that was released over a decade after the previous game.
Right off the bat I want to clarify that I don't read or speak Japanese, so I have very
little understanding of the plot this time around.
I can confirm that there is indeed a plot, for the first time in the series we follow
a non blue haired protagonist
Ryu
or Ryu or whatever you want to call him is a different character this time apparently.
Anyway, your custom made character and a party of various animal people do stuff and fight
bosses.
The game basically plays out like other mobile jrpgs, there's a world map and you pick a
location, pay some stamina or crystals or whatever see a short story segment then enter
the play area.
Most of the gameplay boils down to progressing along a linear hallway and fighting things
by clicking and waiting for cooldowns.
Sometimes the game will throw in a curve ball like defeat x amount of enemies or a survive
until the end of the timer kinda thing.
There's no feeling of space or exploration.
Just a hallway painted to look like a forest or a cave, or whatever.
The gameplay feels very shallow, like I said, just clicking and waiting for cooldowns.
However, the Dragon form makes a return, where after collecting enough blue gems the player
can transform into a hybrid form, which allows you to click and wait for cooldowns but with
a more elaborate animation.
Other things from previous entries in the series also make cameo returns,
I
do have to give credit where credit is due, the fishing minigame is pretty well done,
and I feel if i had any comprehension of the language, there might be a lot more subtle
or plot related nods back to previous games in the series that I'm not quite catching.
There seems to be a pretty elaborate plot going on independent of the gameplay, I wasn't
able to make it extremely far in but there were a few voice acted segments which seemed
pretty well done.
Strangely, This is a front runner for one of the best soundtracks in the series..
I'd say it's a close call between this and 4.
Also, for the first time in the series, multiplayer is present, so up to four players can traverse
a linear hallway while clicking and waiting for cool-downs together.
Fun fun fun
Without being able to comment on the plot, all I can say is that on a gameplay level
this simply doesn't do any justice to the games created decades ago which I loved.
It very much feels like just a generic mobile game with some breath of fire paint slapped
on top paying no attention to what made the franchise enjoyable in the first place.
With any semblance of level design or a battle system at least attempting to feel like the
original series I might have given this a pass, and if by some miracle it gets translated,
I might give it a second look.
But as it stands it's not really worthy to carry the title of breath of fire and It's
doubtful that we'll see any kind of localization or even a fan-translation of this title, and
even more doubtful that we'll ever see a fully fledged Breath of Fire sequel that stands
up to the early series anytime in the future.
It's a hard reality for fans of the series like myself, but some may still hold out hope
for the future.
For now this once again concludes our series retrospective, I'd like to thank my friends
from Serenial as well as the folk from the jrpg subreddit and discord for helping me
out in various ways with the production.
Once again this was Fade Dragontear, and maybe it's time to start thinking about doing a
retrospective for another classic series.
Until then, thanks for watching guys!
Peace out.