A Breath of Fresh Fire
So, I wrote a Twitter thread during the 22nd anniversary of Breath of Fire III, a JRPG for the original Playstation. It was kind of impromptu and off the cuff and really just focused on why it sticks out in my memory, both as an adult and when I played it as a kid. A few of the thoughts I articulated in that thread in their turn inspired a few thoughts about why I’m such a big fan of BOF III specifically (though I do enjoy the first and second games too), so I decided to bring my thoughts to Medium and expand on them a bit.
As I say in the first tweet in the thread, BOF III was a “tastemaker” for me in terms of setting up my feeling and expectations around JRPGs (the other being Tales of Symphonia a little while later) but the true depth of that statement actually goes a lot further than the thread implies. In thinking about the game for this piece, I’ve realized that some foundations about how I think about JRPGs and what I like about them came from this game— and reveal a little of what I’d like to bring to a JRPG that I make someday.
This piece will reiterate and expand on a few things from the original Twitter thread, so if you’ve read it already, some of these points will seem familiar. There will be some spoilers for the game, so be forewarned.
There are three things I’m going to talk about here in terms of their deeper impressions on me: the music, the gameplay (more specifically, something called the Dragon Gene system), and a major theme in the game’s storyline.
By the time I’d first played BOF III, I was no stranger to the idea that game music could be great; I’d cut my teeth on Pokemon Red and Link’s Awakening, and to this day I have fond memories of both of those games’ music. But BOF III was, so far as I can recall, my first JRPG on the original Playstation, and that exposed me to a level of sophistication that I wasn’t ready for at all.
Akari Kaida and Yoshino Aoki are the two composers that put this soundtrack together; both of them had already been at Capcom for a few years prior to BOF III’s release in 1997, but this was their first major project, and they took it on together to come up with a sound that I haven’t heard in any other games I’ve played since then. I’m not great with genres of music, so I couldn’t really name what BOF III’s style is (I’ve heard electronica as one descriptor, jazz as another), but I know it isn’t something I’ve heard again since playing it. With some intentional exceptions, a lot of the music is very chill in instrumentation and tempo, and for me it was a big adjustment considering most of what I’d been playing before this point.
Here are a few of my favorite non-battle themes, just as examples.
The normal battle theme is somewhat subdued compared to what you might expect, too, if a bit faster-paced — just enough so to get you excited, but not very aggressive or high-energy.
As a kid, these got stuck in my head and never really left, but the song that I remember the most distinctly is the next one. After going through an intensely hellish dungeon (literally in a volcano), you come to the exit, only to be blocked by an old man who summons up two lava snakes basically and fights you to this theme.
Aside from the fact that this geezer and his pets basically ran me over multiple times, I think what made this track a standout for me was the tension inherent in it despite how much more subdued and mellow the instrumentation and tempo was. It fit the identity of the game’s music so far, with sounds I’d never heard before and not a lot of haste, but it was still compelling, and memorable. In that moment of gripping my controller and literally trying to kill Scylla and Charybdis while trying desperately not to die, fighting for every turn I could get out of the fight, “DONDEN” was pretty much perfect.
While music isn’t really my strong point as a game designer, I think that BOF III opened my mind to the idea that game music didn’t have to always be high-energy and fast to be good, or even to convey specific moods. All of the emotion and tension and awe is still there, but the pace is slick, cool, and calm.
Prior to this game, my main understanding of JRPG gameplay, or more specifically JRPG combat, came from two games in particular: Dragon Warrior Monsters and Pokemon. Pokemon gave me the crash course in tactics, strategy, and systems (albeit on a one-by-one basis), while DWM helped me understand how to take what Pokemon started me on and apply it to 3-on-3 fights.
Where BOF III made its mark on me was the Dragon Gene system, and how that basically meshed both of the things I’d already learned into a whole new animal.
Breath of Fire’s general claim to fame in the JRPG world is the ability for Ryu, the main character, to turn into a dragon. BOF III’s Dragon Gene system basically lets you mix and match up to 3 Dragon Genes mid-combat to create a dragon form of your choice. Want a dragon with automatic counter-attacks? The Defender Gene’s got you sorted out! Need to breathe ice but haven’t found the Frost Gene yet? Flame Gene + Reverse Gene and you’re good to go! Need to be a big tank? Miracle Gene time! Mixing more genes will inevitably shorten how long you can hold the form for, but also gives you an opportunity to get stronger or more specialized forms with the right combinations.
There are a lot of little tricks that you can use with the Dragon Gene system that let you express multiple options for the situation at hand, and this is in addition to Observation and Master-Apprentice systems that let you learn skills by 1) watching enemies do them or 2) picking them up via move tutoring from NPCs that also affect your stat growth. I didn’t use Observation or Masters that much when I was a kid, though, because there was an immediate payoff and vibrancy to the Dragon Gene system that was really fresh to me, coming from games where success in fights came from either exploiting type advantages or grinding up a team strong enough to beat most random encounters. There was something really cool about being able to say, “OK, I need fire in this fight but I don’t have a spellcaster for it — oh I can just switch to Fire Whelp and toast these suckers.”
Even though I was (and am) prone to analysis paralysis, especially in high-pressure situations, the foibles of the Gene system really gave me an appreciation for what I think of as “immediate, open-ended decision making”. It wasn’t just the number of Gene splices available that made the system good, it was how those individual Genes were set up to let you (try to) put together what you needed right then and there. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn’t, but the options were always there. There was always this strong sense of personal style given to you, and though there were later ways to break the game over your knee with the right tweaks, figuring out how to do that was always the fun part.
The storylines in the games I played before BOF III were relatively straightforward, and aside from a few pointed instances, never really challenged the way I thought about the world as a 9-to-14 year old kid. Go be a Pokemon master. Save the world from an alien space tick. Break the dragons out of weird jade statues.
BOF III’s main strength plot-wise, though, comes through one of its recurring themes around power and its use. How this theme was presented blew my mind as a kid, even though the really salient points I’m going to talk about later flew over my little head at the time.
The first major storyline in BOF III after the first 20 or 30 minutes of gameplay involves a monster called a Nue. This Nue is basically attacking people in the woods, seemingly at random, and appears to have hunted out the entire forest. On top of that, it’s a bad season for crops, so everyone’s hungry and everyone’s broke. At this point, Ryu has basically been adopted by two thief orphans, Teepo and Rei, and the three of them are sent off to hunt down the Nue by a lumberjack called Bunyan, who clowned all three of the boys but good when they tried to steal from him.
The boys chase the Nue up a mountain and fight it at least two or three times. After the last battle, where it retreats to its cave only to literally die standing up in front of it, the boys learn that the Nue was hunting for its dead cubs, unwilling or unable to accept that they’d died. The ethics of that decision are seriously discussed after the fact — yes, now the Nue will stop hunting food that it doesn’t need, but they still killed a creature that was just trying to take care of its family. The game uses this moment to set one of the major themes: power has the potential to do great, almost irreparable harm, even when it’s used with good intentions, if you’re not careful.
Now, this kind of plot point (also known as Monster Is a Mommy, for any fellow TV Trope readers) isn’t really groundbreaking in and of itself. But as a kid, this was the first time I’d ever had a game pose a difficult situation like that to me, let alone had a game make me complicit in how that situation turned out. I was just as annoyed as the boys were when chasing down the Nue, and whatever satisfaction I had from finally beating it left a bad taste in my mouth when I realized I’d killed a parent hunting for food.
After this, the boys now have a reputation as the heroes of the village. The forest is way more vibrant and full of animals to hunt. Everything seems good. Then, the boys meet up with this guy named Loki, who convinces them to rob the crooked Mayor McNeil by infiltrating his gigantic mansion and distributing his money to all the people in town.
Here — right after literally living through a demonstration of how using your power without all the facts can put you in a situation you can’ t fix as easily as you’d l ike— Ryu, Teepo, and Rei let themselves get talked into this scheme, pull it off successfully, and when all’s said and done? Everyone in the village is pissed at them. Even more so than when the boys were robbing them.
As a kid, that turnaround was mind-blowing to me. Why wouldn’t the townspeople be happy to get money from that jerk mayor? Why are they all edgy? We did the right thing, right? Then, Bunyan passes on some information that they didn’t know (again): the jerk mayor is in over his head with some real bad dudes, and robbing the mayor means that by proxy, the boys have robbed said bad dudes. By the time the boys start to realize just what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into, their treehouse is on fire and two anthropomorphic horsemen have beaten the crap out of them.
Ryu eventually wakes up alone at Bunyan’s house. Teepo and Rei are nowhere to be found.
The rest of the game centers around Ryu trying to find Teepo and Rei, which eventually evolves into trying to understand why he’s the only person left that can turn into a dragon. Most of the antagonists are people who have used their power to selfish, misguided ends, or let it control and corrupt them toward said ends. Ryu always stands out as an amazing counterpoint to them because he never deliberately uses his power to harm first, and he almost never lets it dictate how he responds to a situation — it’s always in defense of others or himself that he strikes out with it.
Though a few people try to play the angle that power corrupts, including God herself, to Ryu, it is always re-emphasized that how one chooses to use that power, especially if they’re careless with it, is a bigger factor in if it corrupts you or not. The one time Ryu’s power runs away with him, he nearly kills a party member that attempted to betray him for the sake of fulfilling his mission to exterminate all dragons. Said party member ultimately comes back after after a multi-year timeskip as penance for what he did and as thanks for being spared.
There are three main contrasts to Ryu’s example which demonstrate that point. First is Rei, who also rejoins the party after the timeskip. He attacks Ryu in his berserk were-tiger form, and has to be talked out of the years-long revenge bender he went on, maiming and killing people after the horsemen brothers split him up from Teepo and Ryu. He forgot the lesson that the boys learned from the Nue and from robbing McNeil, and has paid for it with overwhelming self-doubt and a few hints that he thinks of himself as little more than a wild animal playing at being civilized.
Second is Teepo, who resurfaces near the end of the game as the only other dragon left in existence. Unfortunately, he’s working for God, and attempts to make Ryu agree to live in God’s Eden forever, never leaving, out of fear that he can’t be trusted with his power. When that fails to work, Teepo turns into a dragon himself and tries to kill Ryu, failing miserably and dying as a result. Much like Rei, he made a choice about how to use his power — or rather, how not to use it. Rather than acknowledge it and use it carefully, he came to fear it, and let it be turned into a corrupt tool for someone else to use.
Third is God herself: she was afraid that the dragons’ power was “too great for her small world”, despite the fact that they hadn’t done anything bad with it, and so had them wiped out, keeping the world in tech stasis by never allowing humans to freely study old technology in its full capacity. The game allows Ryu to either agree with her and remain locked away in Eden forever, or take a stand against everything she represents to let people decide their future on their own.
Though I didn’t know all of this as a kid since I didn’t finish the game, the threads of it were still all over the parts I did play, even the dolphin picking on a bunch of fairies for shining a lighthouse light in his face (spoilers, it wasn’t the fairies, and the dolphin’s just a jerk). The antagonists’ abuse of their power is a common thread throughout the game, and they lose to Ryu because he has figured out how to use his power responsibly and does so against them. Power itself is never the bad thing in Breath of Fire III — it is always the misuse of power at fault, and those that learn the lesson that Ryu did from the Nue and from losing his childhood friends are the ones that are redeemed. Those that don’t learn die for it.
Until playing this game and having this experience, I didn’t realize that a game could have a storyline with these kinds of lessons and details baked into it. I didn’t know that I could actually feel so invested in going from point A to point B just because I wanted to know why people were so afraid of Ryu’s power when he never used it to hurt anyone.
I said earlier that Pokemon and Dragon Warrior Monsters taught me the basics of battling and strategy as a kid. But what they couldn’t teach me — and what I really needed to learn, even if I’m only able to articulate it now as an adult— was that games could have difficult, somewhat complex storylines, with plot points that didn’t always end happily, just like books did. More importantly, though, I needed to learn that games could leverage that to give you a reason to reflect on your own behavior in a way that not many other mediums could, by letting you have an active stake in how events resolved even if it meant that you were the one putting those events into motion. I didn’t have reason to really think about the game’s themes too deeply as a kid, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realize that even though I can’t turn into a dragon, I do have some power of my own, and that I do have a responsibility to use it wisely. It’s a heavy message for a game marketed to teenagers, but not a bad one really.
Critically and commercially, Breath of Fire III didn’t break any records or set the world on fire. Most outlets gave it an average score and praised or at lesat positively nodded to most of the things I gushed about here (except maybe the music). But for me, it was really something special: my first real look at the next step above an entry-level JRPG, my first experience with a game that knew how to convey its story while giving me agency, and a game that invited me to play with its systems. I’m thankful that it introduced me to both the rest of the BOF series and gave me a new viewpoint on the genre at a time when I was most receptive to it.
Thanks to Creative Uncut for providing basically all of the official game art you see here.
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