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Breath of Fire II review

Game: Breath of Fire II
Platform: SNES
Genre: Turn-Based RPG (Fantasy)
Developer: Capcom
AKA: Breath of Fire II: Shimei no Ko (JP)

Reader review by sgreenwell

Date unavailable

Breath of Fire 2 is boring to play. No matter what surprises the story throws at you, no matter how eager you are to get further into the game, the battles just totally throw you off track. Combined with sometimes idiotic character development and selection, and Breath of Fire 2 goes from an excellent game to barely above average.

First, the story, by far the strong point of Breath of Fire 2. You play the role of ''The Hero'', who's default name is Ryu (the game is made by Capcom, go figure). Your mother is from the dragon clan, and turned into a dragon one day in the past to save your village from destruction. However, one day, after an incident, you're seemingly swept away to an entirely new world... Or is it? A very tight storyline throughout, at least the main plot.

Where the game bogs down is combat. There's a LOT of it. And I don't mean ''a lot'' in a little sense, I mean ''every 2 steps you fight'' kind of a lot. Combat is neither quick or easy either. It's strictly turn-based, you hit they hit. The enemies are needlessly difficult, and there's often too many of them. It slows down the pacing of the game to a crawl; you can easily lose sight of the storyline.

And although the story is great, often times it leaves you very uninformed. It will tell you to do something, then give you no idea how to do it. This happens at least three times in the game; no amount of talking to townspeople will help you, just random luck in finding the place that you're supposed to be in.

The difficulty of Breath of Fire 2 is a dramatic change from Breath of Fire 1. The first game was often too easy, but it moved fast. Despite moving fast though, it was still very long, and had good story and character interaction. Breath of Fire 2 is insanely difficult, with very tough normal fights, and INSANELY tough boss fights. It's one of the few role playing games that are linear that require you to level up.

There's some extras in the game, but they're just that, extras, and can't coverup the games' flaws. During the course of the game, you build your own town, and you can also hunt and fish for valuable items. The main character can also find several types of Dragon Magic, by far the most impressive effects of the game. There's also three endings to the game. However, as long as you make the save game in the right spot, there's no real reason to play through the entire game again just to get the good ending.

Graphically, Breath of Fire 2 still suffers from ''short and fat'' syndrome. Mainly, all the characters appear to be short and fat. There's actually a little bit of difference between characters, but only in width. The huge Ox Rand looks about the same size-wise as the hero. Other than that, there is good battle animation, and the characters are colorful. However, there's a bit of a hazy look to everything; not much is bright.

The music of Breath of Fire 2 is fairly simple. It can't compare to other games of its time, such as Final Fantasy 2 and 3. There's the traditional reptitive dungeon music, and also the evil bad guy music. Mute this game and play a good compact disc instead.

Overall, Breath of Fire 2 is a very promising game, if you play just the introduction, where no fighting is involved. However, once you get into the main combat of the game, Breath of Fire 2 quickly loses its appeal. Stick to the better old skool role playing games, such as Earthbound, Breath of Fire 1, and the Lufia games.

Rating: 3/10

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