Breath of Fire II

The game starts out, dreamlike, in a small border village 500 years after the events of the first game. You play a small boy named Ryu (ring a bell?) who is looking for his lost sister. After finding his sister and reuniting her with pops, Ryu wanders around a bit and returns home--and that's when things really start to get interesting. To go further than that would risk spoiling the story, but we can say that the plot is really topnotch this time around and has three alternate endings.

Graphically, the game is a huge jump from the original. The towns are larger, the character sprites are more detailed, and the field map is gorgeous. You see weather effects such as rain and drifting clouds, wandering animals and jumping fish, and plants blowing in the breeze. If you have any experience with the best 16-bit RPGs for the SNES, like Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger, you get the idea.

The characters are completely new in the series, and have brand-new skills. The only exception is Ryu (who isn't the original Ryu, but basically has the same skills). Like the original Breath of Fire, certain areas of the game are only accessible by using the skills of your party members. For example, one of your members can turn into a frog, and can ferry you across rivers and streams.

Among the changes to Breath of Fire II is that fishing and hunting have bigger roles; they're now minigames that require technique and reward with items that can advance the story. An animated monster image shows up on the field menu to give you an idea how often you'll encounter the baddies--nice for avoiding all those random battles. There's also the new Guts stat, which will sometimes allow a character to fight even when he should be knocked out. The two coolest additions are town creation (where you get to build and populate your own town), and the new fusion system, which allows your characters to "fuse" with shamans that you encounter, thus joining and augmenting their powers. In a nutshell, this game improves upon the best parts of the original. --Bryan Karsh

Pros:

• Character fusion
• Fishing and hunting minigames
• Town creation
• Save anywhere
• Trade items via link cable
• Improved graphics, sound, and music

• Ryu doesn't actually make contact when he attacks

The game play is incrediable, characters are customizable with how you interact with them during conversions and how you fuse them with shamans.

The graphics are gorgeous for this little handheld system. You can watch night turn into day and the battle's are more clean and flow better.

If you do not like getting into those constant random battles that other rpg games offer. You can put it on auto fight so that you do not have to deal with pushing all the buttons to go though so many pointless commands.

The music is not repetitive like most rpg's. You can just sit there and listen to the music and not want to break the stereo in the game boy after 5 minutes.

Probably the best feature i have ever seen is a thing called quick save. How many times have you and a gamer have been in the middle of a dungeon that would take up to 10-15 minutes to get out and either your parents are telling you dinner is ready or that you have to go to catch a movie. Well everybody will apprecaite quick save becasue all you have to do to save is just go to the menu screen click quick save and then you can power down the gameboy. No running to a certain area like in all final fantasy's.

I recommend this game to every gamer who hates buying games that the beat to quickly and can never save when they want to.

And parents, you can buy this game for your children because it will keep them busy on those long summer drives and vacations so that you won't have to deal with them. And they can save when ever you want them to stop playing. No more excuses about not being able to stop because if they did not save they would lose all their hardwork.

a must for the kids and parents.


a GREAT storyline..   April 5, 2002
13 out of 17 found this review helpful

I don't know about you, but storyline and gameplay is the most important aspect of the game to me. Good music and graphics are a plus but it doesn't make or break a game.

I played the Super Nintendo version and the storyline is amazing. Keep in mind this is a pretty old game and it's not like the Final Fantasy games you might have played. It's a little slow and pretty difficult but when you beat the game, you will not feel disappointed.

There are 3 possible endings depending on how you play the game. There's also a dozen characters to choose from and lots of secrets. In your Township, you can combine your characters with elemental shamans to give them new skills and abilities as well as make recipes and rest up.

Let's just say if you liked the old Final Fantasy games on SNES, you will LOVE this game. Almost the exact same thing.


An Incredible Part of the Breath of Fire Series   July 3, 2002
Mary L. Nash-pyott (Illinois, United States)
8 out of 12 found this review helpful

The first Breath of Fire game I picked up was Breath of Fire III for the PSX. I loved it and it continues to be my favorite of the entire series. But it sparked my interest - this was the third installation in the series, right? What about the previous 2? So I set out on a search.
I couldn't manage to get my hands on either of the original cartridges for the first 2 BoF games for under 50 dollars, so instead I went the illegal route and downloaded the ROMs of both. And by the time I was 15 minutes through the 2nd one, I was hooked.

Graphics - 7/10
The graphics are pretty bad by today's standards, what with games like Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2 on the market. But comparing them to other SNES games, they could be a LOT worse. The scenes were colorful, and the sprites for the characters were attractive. Towns looked different depending on if it was night or day, which was pretty impressive for games made in the SNES era. All in all, be thankful for this when questioning the graphics: at least they don't look like a class of kindergarteners built the entire game out of milk cartons while covered in flesh-eating slugs.

Music - 6/10
The music was a mixed bag, I'll admit. There were a few good ones, like 'Silence of the Sands' that set the mood pretty well, but most of the others just didn't inspire a whole lot of emotion in me. None of the music was mindnumbingly horrible, mind you, but it certainly didn't make me go out on an mp3 downloading spree.

Storyline - 9/10
This is without a doubt Breath of Fire II's strong point. It goes extremely slowly until 3 or 4 hours into the game - then it starts getting interesting. Saying any more would spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it through, but it's amazing to say the least.

Gameplay - 8/10
The battle system is standard RPG fare - turn-based, HP to keep track of health, MP to use magic, etc. Nothing to write home about. Some of the battles can be real challenges if you haven't grown an obscene amount levels or lack the right healing items/magic, but that's part of the fun sometimes. After a few hours of gameplay, you gain control of a town that you can build on and populate with characters all over the world. Perhaps my favorite part of the game is the ability to combine your characters with 'Shamans' to increase their power. If you hit the right combination, your character even changes form - some of those forms are, for lack of a better word, quite impressive.

Things That Don't Fit Into Any Other Category - 8/10
BoFII is filled with mini-games and other things to do, like hunting and fishing. Though I didn't really participate often in either of those things, it was still an interesting diversion from the storyline every once and awhile.
Characterization in BoFII, while not amazing, is still better than BoF1. By the end of the game, I identified with all of the characters - yes, even Jean. They each had their own personalities, but the poor translation didn't do them justice. And the Nina of this game is the only Nina out of the entire series that doesn't annoy me to the point of wanting to rip my eyes out so I didn't have to read any of their dialogue.

Overall, Breath of Fire II is far from a disappointment. If you like RPGs and appreciate the old classics, I definitely recommend picking this up.


Ahh! Need Water! O_o   October 19, 2004
Talduras (USA)
6 out of 10 found this review helpful

Breath of Fire 2 was originally released for the Super Nintendo. Somehow, I managed to miss it when I had that system, so buying it on the GBA seemed like a natural move considering I'd heard a little about it from other gamers who played it, as well as some online reviews.

...This was a poor game to start the system off with (yes, this was my first GBA game)...

I know this was a direct port of the SNES version, so I went into this knowing it would retain SNES quality. For the most part, graphics and sound are average here. Nothing super extravagant, but nothing too bland either (sound is a bit below-average, though).

Gameplay is what killed me throughout playing this. Comparing this to several other RPGs (anything from Dragon Warrior games, to Final Fantasy games and so on). I'm still not able to figure out where this one went wrong. Here are my guesses, though:

- Horribly high amount of random battle encounters (and they even have an icon that tells you how high your probability of lots of encounters are).
- Unbalanced gameplay. Combat is more of a chore in this game compared to any other old school RPG.
- Weak attacks. A huge majority of the characters are practically useless, and what's even worse is the shaman system employed partway through the game, which fixes some of these issues, is dispersed if your characters get too low on HP. Not to mention most of the spell casters good attacks are just magic, and even then Ryu (the main character) still does more damage than them.
- Over-reliance on certain attacks. Even though most RPGs tend to make you favor certain attacks, this one does it to the point of monotony.
- Poor exploration. Somehow, this world just wasn't all that enjoyable to journey across. In fact, somehow even the residents of the world aren't that interesting either. A shame, because it had lots of potential in my eyes because of the interesting diverse races (such as the winged people of Windia, and the dragon clan).

There are only two reasons I don't outright give this game the lowest score ever. For one thing, the story was quite interesting (even though the translation seemed to be mauled a bit). For another, it had a bit of humor in it, but nothing worth writing home about.

So, to sum this up, I cannot recommend this game to anyone. Whether you've been playing RPGs since before they were cool, or never heard of them, it would be best to skip this. There are lots of other much better RPGs on the GBA.