Capcom is not a company I associate with turn-based RPGs, so I was quite curious about how good Breath of Fire 2 would actually be. On that score, I was pleasantly surprised. Breath of Fire 2 is not revolutionary or groundbreaking and doesn't match some of the heavyweights in the genre, but it has plenty of charm (especially when it comes to characters), just as much heart, a surprising amount of successful humor and pretty entertaining scenarios to boot. Most of all, it's a very fun experience that doesn't take itself too seriously, all the while packing an emotional punch later in the game that might take you by surprise.
The story is pretty batsh!t insane when you really think about it, but apart from an extremely clumsy localization job, I thought it was fairly well-executed. In Breath of Fire 2, you are a young boy named Ryu. After being effectively "forgotten" by your own town, you meet up with an orphan pup named Bow. After fleeing the town, you and Bow venture into a cave and have a brief encounter with a demon before the game fast-forwards ten years. Ten years later, Ryu and Bow are mercenaries who do odd jobs for money. One day their comfortable life goes awry when Bow is asked by a client to steal treasure from the richest man in town, who presumably stole a valuable relic from Bow's employer. During the "heist," another thief steals the relic first and Bow is caught red-handed as the "thief." Thus begins your journey to find the real thief and clear your friend's name. Weirdly enough, this simple premise soon turns into an epic struggle against you and a demonic church called St. Eva that is posing as a righteous institution in order to achieve world domination. It's a very weird story, but it kept me entertained and you meet some incredibly charming characters along the way like Katt, the feisty pantsless fighting feline and Jean, a head-in-the-clouds frog Prince who is more of a dreamer than a leader. There are many more characters with charming, distinct personalities, but I won't spoil the surprise. Meeting new characters will probably be one of the funnest aspects of the game for most players.
The story does a lot of things right, but it does one major thing wrong: the translation. It is downright poor. In fact, in some places, it is so awkward that the dialogue can sound downright infantile at times. Luckily, the story and characters have so much heart that their personalities and dialogue shine though the badly-executed translation. However, the translation problems extend to items descriptions and the like. One gets the feeling that the localization of Breath of Fire 2 was badly rushed.
Poor translation aside, Breath of Fire 2 manages to do what few games do well: include humor that's actually funny. There are some scenarios in this game that will have you chuckling and a few that will have you outright laughing. One would think that a game with such a bad translation would botch every joke that it attempts, but the game's humor is more situation-based than anything, which allows it to sidestep the shoddy translation. There's also a lot of humor in which the physical movements of the game's great-looking sprites is a key factor.
Although the game generally doesn't take itself seriously, there are some seriously emotional moments later in the story that are surprisingly effective at tugging at the heartstrings. Again, the developers use the animations of the sprites to convey emotion in a powerful way.
The game's scenarios are entertaining and quirky and generally made me want to keep playing, but there are a few problems with the game's pacing. One of these is the lack of a fast-travel option (you do get a warp spell later in the game, but it comes way too late), leading to a good amount of tedious backtracking. Another is that the game sometimes makes you go from location to location when the developers could have easily automatically warped you to certain places to cut down on the traveling. It's also not helpful that the game doesn't have a small map of the over world, which makes finding locations a chore at times because the map is very big. Furthermore, on more than one occasion the game doesn't give you a clear idea of what to do next, which can be pretty frustrating.
The dungeons in this game are well-designed and have some moderately entertaining puzzles. The only complaint I have is that some areas have way too many random encounters and your fight-repellant item (called a "smoke") doesn't really help much. Still, the dungeons are pitch-perfect in length and never overstay their welcome. This does a lot to offset some of the game's aforementioned pacing issues.
The combat is good, but it's a little simple. It's basically a conventional turn-based system. Some characters specialize in physical attacks while others are adept at magic. You'll want to balance your team with physical attackers and magic users to maximize its effectiveness. One thing I liked about the simple combat system is that it really highlighted one of my favorite aspects of JRPGs and that is the fact that the most important part of prevailing in difficult encounters is to heal at the right time. Since enemies can take quite a lot of hit points in a single blow if they land critical blows (which they do often), some of the more intense encounters requires the player to heal at exactly the right times. This kind of back and forth in which the player must figure out when to heal and when to attack is great fun.
That being said, Breath of Fire 2 is not a difficult game by any means. Like many other JRPGs, there's an initial period of difficulty when your level seems too low to venture into dangerous areas and you don't have a lot of money for healing items, but once you're over that hill, the game settles into a comfortable difficulty that I found slightly easy, but not overly so.
One of the highlights of Breath of Fire 2 is the game's side diversions. You can fish, build up a town by recruiting residents, hunt, cook, etc. These mini-games are rather simple, but most good mini-games are simple and I found them to be pretty fun overall, especially the hunting game. The best thing about these diversions is that you can get some of the most useful items by participating in them. In fact, the best weapon for your main character is found in the fishing mini-game.
The visuals in Breath of Fire II greatly contribute to the game's charm. They are not as detailed or as artistic as the ones in Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI, but they are vibrant, the sprites have tons of character, and the overworld is huge and pleasant to look at, which is a must considering you spend so much time traveling through it. Furthermore, the game has day and night cycles, which I thought was a nice touch.
The music is good, but it won't rock your world. Some of it is quite distinctive while other tracks are forgettable. On balance, there are enough good tracks to compensate for the trite ones. Sound effects, on the other hand, are quite well done.
Breath of Fire 2 is not among the upper-echelon of JRPGs, but it will seriously surprise you with its charm, its humor, and just how fun it is. If you like turn-based RPGs, especially 16-bit ones, but are tempted to pass over this game because of the lack of fanfare around it, resist that temptation. This is a game that anybody who likes fun JRPGs with disarming emotional moments should play.
GAMEPLAY: 4/5
DESIGN: 3.5/5
STORY: 4/5
VISUALS: 4/5
PLAYABILITY: 4/5
VALUE: 4.5/5