Breath of Fire really suprised me when I first played it. I didn't expect much, especially with it being by Capcom of all people, but I was pleasently supprised.
This game is a primitive RPG, with no way of telling what equipment does unless you check your stats and no help at the shops for determining if the wares are more powerful than your current equipment, etc. Battles are the standard turn based style and enemies are randomly encountered. You also are forced to go through quite a few button presses in battle to enter your commands, but there is a handy auto-battle feature for low level encounters that is much appreciated. The game could have done with a cursor memory and a more streamlined interface.
Another problem is the translation. Capcom must have felt they had little ability to translate a heavy text game into English, the translation was done by Square. Square generally does a good job with translations, but that does not seem to apply to their efforts on games that are not their own. Either that or the Japanese version really did have all of the town's residents repeating the same lines... which seems unlikely. When every person in the town says "Thank you for your help, please celebrate with us" you feel very little drive to find them all and talk to them and it lesssens the town experience somewhat. Square also left the text boxes the original size, resulting in items called things like "PSPR" and you won't have any idea what it is or who can equip it.
But onto the good parts! The game is large and the world map just feels right. Also, on the world map, there are day and night cycles that can affect the types of enemies encountered, as well as various wildlife that you can acually hunt and some fishing points as well. Your different characters have different abilities on the overworld map as well. This is a very well done aspect of the game. In those ways, and in the level designs and story/plot ideas, the game actually feels very modern. And within battle various characters can fuse to form powerful combo critters, become dragons, and lots of other cool stuff. You also get 8 characters total that can be swapped outside of battles, and they are all useful in and out of battle in some ways. The towns are well designed and often quite unique, you can even run a business with one of your characters to make some extra cash and get some cool items if you stand behind his trade counter. The world is full of secrets for those who explore well.
This game is very fun and rewarding, as well as strangely compelling. I would recommend Breath of Fire to any fan of traditional RPG's. This is a game in many ways ahead of its times and a true classic that should not be missed.
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