PixlBit

Original Release Date: 9-11-1997 (Japan), 4-30-1998 (USA)

By the mid-90's, the dominant narrative in Japanese video gaming was the RPG rivalry between Square and Enix. Almost every year the entire industry's release schedule was organized so as to avoid clashing with Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, including Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games themselves. The two RPG titans and their console hosts, Nintendo during the 16-bit era and Sony during the 32-bit era, were making so much money from RPGs that eventually even Japan's arcade giants wanted in on the action.

Breath of Fire filled the RPG niche for Capcom. This series had its start on the SNES (Square USA published the first game in the US), and  it is known for two things - sticking strictly with plain-vanilla RPG conventions with regards to storyline and RPG mechanics, and characters drawn with all the bright colors and detail that Capcom applied to Mega Man and Street Fighter. BoFIII was my first encounter with the series, and its graphics and sound look like typical Capcom fare.

Every Breath of Fire game has a main hero named Ryu, paired with a princess named Nina, in the same way virtually every Zelda game has a Link and, in one shape or form, a Zelda, and like Link and Zelda, Ryu and Nina possess certain characteristics from game to game. Ryu - partly an homage to the fighting mascot and partly a not-to-subtle hint about what he is, as "ryu" means "dragon" in Japanese - is always a silent protagonist with blue hair, and always an orphaned member of the Dragon Tribe, a tribe of people with the power to transform into dragons that's associated with a terrible cataclysm in the past. Nina is always of the winged Fae tribe, rulers of a kingdom called Windia, and generally ends up in love with Ryu. In every Breath of Fire game, Ryu and Nina join up with a motley collection of heroes of wildly bizarre appearances - we're not talking stock Western RPG races like elves and dwarves, we're talking cat-people, rabbit people, dog people, giant armadillo people, and mutant onions here - to defeat common RPG enemies and battle against well-intentioned but misguided gods, in the first three games being a malevolent, childlike female deity named Myria, in order to make them see the evil of their ways and leave the world to its own devices. 

Breath of Fire III, the first of the series for the PlayStation, is no different. As the game starts, you (as Ryu) are imprisoned in a matrix of crystalline energy and discovered by coal miners, who are startled to find what they think is a dead baby dragon in their crystal ore, and are even more shocked when the baby dragon comes to life. At this point, you go on a miner killing spree until you are subdued by a crane to the back of the head and crated up to be shipped off to a circus somewhere by train. You escape, and are adopted into a family of orphan thieves living in a poor village who make the mistake of robbing the local organized crime syndicate. Then your adventure really begins. The world of Breath of Fire III is a semi-industrialized medieval world, and typical of Japanese RPGs (as well as a few non RPGs like Mega Man Legends) made in 1997-98, all the technology humanity uses is thousands of years old, and humanity is dependent upon archaeologists to excavate it for repairs, as they somehow have no real knowledge of how the stuff works or how to manufacture it. It turns out that the goddess Myria, afraid that humanity will go and blow itself again, is controlling the flow of machines to human society, as well as trying to stamp out the last remnants of the Dragon Tribe.

Pictured above is BoFIII's main cast. Ryu and Nina are there, of course, accompanied by Rei, a thief of the Woren (tiger) tribe, who takes in young Ryu at the beginning of the game and is later discovered to be a full-blown were-tiger; Momo, an eccentric female scientist of the Grassrunner tribe (the females look like women with rabbit ears, while Grassrunner males like Bow from BoFII look like basset hounds) look  who fights using heavy artillery; Pecoros, a mutant onion found in a toxic waste dump, and Garr, a gigantic winged beast who rescues Ryu and friends from gangsters, only to turn out to be one of the Guardians, a tribe of warriors sworn to protect the goddess Myria and destroy the Dragon tribe, although Garr eventually begins to realize the Guardians may have been mislead about the Dragon Tribe and seeks to question Myria about whether they are truly "evil." The antagonists aren't too spectacular, in general, but two early enemies, the horse-gangsters Balio and Sunder, are genuinely ruthless and sadistic in their relentless pursuit of Ryu and Nina until they are rescued by Garr. The game starts during Ryu's childhood, and halfway through, skips ahead to his adult life, similar to Ocarina of Time - on that note, BoFIII shares another distinct similarity with Ocarina in that Ryu's voice was provided by Nobuyuki Hiyama, who provided the famous whoops and yells of the adult Link in the N64 Zelda games. 

Graphically, BoFIII looks like a Capcom game. In contrast to the grainy, low-resolution sprites typical of PlayStation games, Capcom used large, colorful, well-drawn, higher-resolution sprites for the characters and enemies, with exaggerated cartoon animations used during battles. The backgrounds are 3-D rendered, and the texture-mapping is fairly detailed as well; the game uses an isometric perspective with very limited rotation compared to the ability to freely rotate the camera in FF Tactics and Xenogears; this leads to frustration, as one of the puzzles that you must solve to complete the game is rendered extremely frustrating by the inability to judge where different objects are in relation to one another. Overall, the game's visuals are quite well done, although there are no CG or anime FMV scenes.

Even the sound tags BoFIII as pure Capcom. The game's soundtrack would be right at home in any Street Fighter game, and the battle sound effects are likewise lifted from the same sound library Capcom used for fighting games. Although the soundtrack lacks the orchestral flair of Square's offerings, I enjoyed it enough to put it on my iPod; it's rather jazzy and upbeat. 

As for the game itself, Capcom always played it safe with Breath of Fire, using a straight turn-based system with no action-y frills, unlike Final Fantasy or Tales. However, Ryu's dragon-transformation system is quite well-done. You can find various "genes" in the game that can be combined during the transform command to change Ryu's appearance and give him different abilities while he's transformed into a dragon. While transformed into a dragon, Ryu fights alone, but is extremely powerful and durable (usually). He loses a set amount of MP on each turn while he is transformed, depending on the genes used; the more powerful the form you use, the faster he consumes, and he automatically reverts to human form, with your other active party members rejoining him, when his MP are depleted. For this reason, it's important to pair him early on with a master that provides bonuses in MP (pairing a character with one of the "masters" found throughout the game's world changes their stat growth at level-ups), as winning many later boss battles are dependent upon Ryu's dragon form due to their punishing difficulty. It's unfortunate Capcom didn't balance this a little better.

I've recently revisited my PS1 copy of Breath of Fire III (as of this posting, here in 2014). Breath of Fire III didn't stand out a great deal back in the days of Final Fantasy 7 and 8 and any number of other great Square PS1 RPGs, but in 2014, away from their blinding glare, it's a much better game than I remembered it being back in the day. Mind you, I didn't dislike it, it just wasn't quite a "WOW!" product back then. Now, I'm seeing BoFIII's good points in a much sharper light. It had some fairly excellent sprite-based graphics for its time. Its 3D backgrounds weren't bad even if the isometric view did kind of screw with the interface at times.  The turn-based battle system was rather engaging, particularly with Ryu's dragon genes. And the music, composed by the female duo of Akari Kaida-Groves and Yoshino Aoki, is catchy in the same way that Street Fighter tunes are. In fact, Ms. Groves composed quite a few tracks for Street Fighter Alpha and Resident Evil.  Its storyline was the type of Japanese retro-futurism popular in those late-90s RPGs, an aesthetic I've always rather enjoyed. So it was definitely an experience worth revisiting. Sadly, the game was never released on PSOne Classics for PS3/PSP, but it did get a disc-based release for PSP in Europe, however, which is in English, and isn't region-locked.