In this review, we learn some moves in the Playstation game Breath of Fire IV. We find out how well this RPG game plays.
This game was released in 2000 and is the fourth game in this series.
We know quite a bit about this series at this point. We first played the original Breath of Fire and found it to be a very solid game. Next up, we played Breath of Fire II. That game also wound up being a very solid game. After that, we tried Breath of Fire III. That game wound up being our first disappointment, barely earning a passing grade. Still, we decided to try this game to see if this game turns things around for the series.
The story is that Nina and Cray have set out to find Nina’s sister, Elina. While flying in their sandflier to get to their destination, the sand dragon hits their vehicle, tossing them onto the desert sand. Nina decides to work her way to the city. Cray isn’t sure about this, but decides to give her a sword for protection while he stays behind to guard the broken sandflier.
While Nina works her way to town, she encounters a crater with a merchant trying to escape. When Nina investigates the crater, she suddenly slides in and becomes stuck. While figuring out how to get out, she suddenly realizes she’s not alone.
The story is split between the main characters and another character, Fou-Lu. Fou-Lu is the first emperor. After uniting the different countries, he goes to sleep for centuries, awaiting the arrival of someone. The game picks up when Fou-Lu awakens again.
While this game does play a lot like previous Breath of Fire games, there is certainly some notable exceptions. For one, you now have the ability to jump between small gaps while exploring. This adds a certain amount of free movement in the game itself.
In addition, while you have an overworld, the game is more restricted to a point to point system. This is much different than the free range overworld movement from the previous game. The game, however, retains the random fields via the “?” indicator while walking between points. If you hit the cross button while seeing this indicator, you can explore that area further. Most often, it’s just a simple square of land with random encounters (and an item pickup most of the time). Sometimes, however, these locations contain special things to discover such as fishing spot locations or even the occasional special collectible secret. So, these are certainly worth checking out.
Battles themselves are quite similar to previous games. You have your typical HP system. Additionally, you have AP that you can spend on magic spells. Not all special abilities cost AP, but most do. After you win, you earn experience points that counts towards getting to the next level. In addition, you get zenny which is the in-game currency.
A feature that has been tweaked in this game is the ability to learn special moves or simple spells. If you choose to defend, you might get lucky and an enemy will attack using a special ability. Each time this happens, you get a chance to learn it and add it to your inventory of abilities. One such ability is “burn” which is a simple fire attack.
One thing that is new is the ability to combine spells. Sometimes, if you find the right combination, you can cast multiple spells between characters. These spells can combine and become a much more powerful spell. An example is combining a fire attack with a wind attack to get a fire and wind damaging attack. The game encourages you to figure out different combinations through experimentation.
Eventually, you get to a village. A fully featured village will have an inn for resting, an item shop for buying usable items, and a weapon shop for buying the latest equipment upgrades. A difference in this game (compared to previous games), however, is the fact that there is a bartering system. If you happen to have fish on hand, you can use that fish to trade for items. Some of these items are quite unique, so fishing can be a very worth pursuit as you progress.
Camping also makes a return. At almost any point on the world map, you can exercise your ability to sleep. Like the last game, anyone who fell in battle will have their maximum HP reduced. This cannot be recovered while camping and requires an inn to restore.
Another returning feature is the ability to move learned skills from one character to another. It requires an aurum to accomplish, but gradually, this type of item becomes quite plentiful, so you’ll probably only have to worry about saving aurum towards the beginning of the game.
Another returning feature is masters. If you find a master, you can opt to learn under them. Not only will you gain a special ability, but also the chance to learn other special abilities after meeting specific requirements. You have to speak to them in order to collect that ability. In addition to this, you’ll also be assessed special bonuses (and sometimes penalties) on stats as you level up.
Some masters specialize in physical capabilities, so you’ll get a boost in HP, power, and maybe even defence. Unfortunately, this means you can get a penalty in wisdom, CP, and total AP in the process.
Conversely, you could get a master that specializes in magical capabilities. As a result, you might get a bonus in wisdom and AP, but also get a penalty in something like agility, attack, max HP, and/or defence. This all depends on the master you happen to get.
Note that some masters require you to make a certain achievement before they will take you under their wing. So, finding a master along the way may not be enough to add them to your collection.
As hinted to before, there is a fishing mini-game that you can play at many points throughout your adventure. There are not only multiple fishing spots, but also fishing location types. Examples include river fishing spots, lake fishing spots, and ocean fishing spots. Each fishing spot will have their own set of kinds of fish you can get.
To fish, you are required to have at least one rod and one form of bait. While there are only a handful of rods you can get to help you succeed in fishing, there are a lot of different kinds of bait you can get. Some bait only stays on the surface, netting you certain kinds of fish that like to swim on the surface. Other kinds of bait sink to the bottom, allowing you to get a bottom-feeding fish.
Fish have varying properties associated to them. Some fish can heal up your HP. Others can restore your AP. A few can cure certain conditions and there are a few that can be used as a one-time use weapon.
Of course, fish can be used to barter for items with certain merchants. Often, it requires a certain combination of fish to get those items. Often, the harder to find fish will net you some of the better items in the game. Fishing does require a lot of patience to say the least.
Fishing itself requires technique. After you find a spot, you can cast at certain angles and power. This allows you to get certain distance. Aiming at certain features can b very useful as some fishing spots have signs offering you hints on where to fish. Additionally, there is certain techniques that you can use to increase the chances you get a bite. Generally, you listen to the music and time movements to the BPM of the music. Use the D-pad to move the bait around to attract the fish.
Once you hook a fish, you have to keep the meter within the indicated box along the bottom of the screen. Too loose and the fish will get away. Too tight and you’ll break the line. Either way, you lose the bait in the process. After you set the hook, it’s all about reeling in the fish in question.
A fairy mini-game system also makes a return in this game as well. After you reach a certain point in the game, a mini-game will open up. No worries finding it, the mini-game will more or less find you. Much like the previous game, you are pretty much tasked with issuing orders to fairies to create a whole village.
You start the game off with three fairies. You can set them to build houses or find food. It’s important to give fairies a food supply and the game will offer good ideas on what you want to do.
As you build up the village, you’ll be able to give spare fairies a chance to take up jobs. This includes running a weapon shop, running an inn, running an item shop, finding items, composing music, offering a mini-game chance, or even setting up an aurum shop. There are lots of different options and you won’t be able to use them all unless you shuffle between them.
Some shops will offer certain levels. A weapon shop, for instance, can be built up to a certain level. At that point, the shop will have a full set of weapons. The thing, however, is that you can place more than one fairy in a shop. In fact, you can get a maximum of three fairies. So, you can actually more or less go beyond the original level and even get different sets of items to purchase.
Happiness plays a role in this game. You have to figure out which task the fairies will be happy with. If, for instance, you set a fairy in an item shop, and that fairy is happy, then you can get some great items up for sale. Conversely, if you place a fairy in an item shop that isn’t happy, then you might only wind up with fertilizer items. So, a fairy’s happiness is something to keep an eye on. This can be tracked while giving orders (full heart indicates happiness while an empty heart means, well, the opposite).
Generally speaking, this is definitely a game with a lot of complex moving parts. It’s not really an issue towards the beginning of the game, but the further along you are, the more you have to keep track of. Ordinarily, this would be a problem for most games. In this game, it just tells you about how much grinding you have to do. If you don’t really focus too closely on growing your magical pool or obtaining skills from masters, then you may need to work on grinding a bit. If you work on all the different elements that helps build characters up, then you may get to the end of the game without any grinding at all.
Either way, you can always just level up your characters enough so you can power through the game regardless, so it’s not such a huge deal. So, how in-depth you want to play really is up to you. For me, I wound up not really focusing too heavily on masters. The skills I got, besides drowse, didn’t really have a huge impact on my overall strategy in this game.
A minor issue I did have with this game is the controls at times. In battle, for instance, when switching between characters, you have to wait for the game to load the sprite before performing an action. If you decide you’d rather perform a melee attack instead of a special skill, then you have to load the previous sprite, then load the other sprite again. So, this didn’t help with the overall smoothness of the game.
Additionally, controls were a bit dodgy when it came to ladders. You can very easily get down part way of a ladder only to have your character suddenly move back up again.
Finally, making your character face different directions can be quite annoying at times. This game proved to be a bit better than the previous game, but you still had to wrestle with the controls a bit. So, controls were still a bit dodgy in this game even though they have been somewhat improved this time around.
On a positive note, I did like the number of mini-games thrown in. Some were a bit annoying (crane game) while others were actually quite interesting (the wisp mini-game). Either way, the mini-games did add much needed variety to this game.
Balancing, overall, was quite good. The only exception to this is the zenny. I found it annoyingly difficult to afford the latest equipment as it generally required a fair bit of grinding to get there. It wasn’t the end of the world that I didn’t get the latest in equipment, but it did prove to be annoying when I started to sense that my characters were struggling to survive certain random encounters (I didn’t even bother trying to figure out how to defeat that rider enemy for obvious reasons).
Generally speaking, this is one of those games that I found to be entertaining enough to get to the end of the game, but not one of those games I found overly exciting. If you don’t happen to have anything better to play, you could do a whole lot worse than to play this game, really. Some things have been improved over the previous game, but this game does have its flaws. Controls and minor balancing issues are two examples of this.
Graphically speaking, this game is an improvement over the previous game. Some characters have a nice pseudo-3D look to them which is nice. There is also some decent graphics to be had in this game. The thing is, this game was released in 2000. In this same year, games like Rush 2049, Ridge Racer V (A Playstation 2 game), and Perfect Dark 64 were also floating around at the time. It’s quite hard to look at this game and say it has amazing graphics. There is a good variety of environments to be found here this time around, so that is being taken into consideration. So, I’ll say it’s passable, but nothing spectacular.
Audio is an interesting thing to judge this game on. On the one hand, the music is generally OK, but nothing amazing. On the other hand, this game has a lot going on for quantity. Really, you’re looking at probably more than 2 hours worth of music in this game. In addition to this, there are a few small speech samples thrown in. Overall, I’d say it’s decent. It’s not amazing for a game of it’s time, but it’s not bad either.
Overall, this is an OK game. It’s one of those games you play when you have nothing really better to play and feel like killing time. This winds up being not a bad choice. The controls do have their flaws and the balancing of zenny leaves a bit to be desired. It has passable graphics and the audio is half decent. An OK game all around, but nothing to get overly excited over.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Defeated Tyrant with Ryu at level 39. Party levels ranged from level 37 to 39.
Game points: 28,698
General gameplay: 18/25
Replay value: 6/10
Graphics: 6/10
Audio: 3/5
Overall rating: 66%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
