An enjoyable story and has old school JRPG charm.
Breath of Fire IV continues continues along these lines by giving us a story presented in a charming fashion but one that also has a darker,brutal side to it.
Breath of Fire IV shows you the story from the perspectives of two different characters.
One is a blue-haired boy named Ryu who transformed from being a dragon into a boy and can transform back into a dragon and Ryu has no memory of who he is.
The other is Fou-Lu who created a powerful empire 600 years ago and that still currently rules much of the world.Many centuries ago Fou-Lu wanted to bring peace to the world but after he awakened from a long sleep he has much different plans in mind.
However,the story begins with a blonde-haired woman who is a princess of a kingdom outside the Fou-Lu empire who has wings and who can fly named 'Nina' who is searching for her sister with the help of a man named 'Cray' who is her sister's lover and they're traveling through the desert on board some hovercraft and I won't say how they met Ryu but he joins Nina and Cray in search of Cray's sister and their search will take them to numerous towns looking for clues to where she went or might be but they cross into Fou Empire territory and become fugitives so basically they're on the run from Fou army captain Russo and his soldiers while still trying to find Nina's sister.
Sometimes the story switches to Fou-Lu's perspective and he's trying to find Ryu(I won't explain why because it will be a spoiler)and Fou-Lu is also a fugitive and Fou-Lu's past and true identity and quite something.
As you'd expect,lots of other characters come in the story,and the story feels like an epic adventure and is presented in a way so it's charming,epic and so it's well-paced and so the emotional moments have more of an impact.You'll also travel to the kingdom Nina is from too.
The story shows the cruel side of humanity and has some big twists.
The gameplay is old style JRPGameplay that involves turn-based battles,random enemy encounters,traveling to different towns and interacting with NPCs and these are things that I love.
What makes the game's battle system unique is you can substitute party members in/out of battle(you can use 3 characters in battle but you can have a higher number of characters in your party and you can choose to switch them in/out for strategic benefit and the fact you're restricted to 3 battle members but you can substitute characters in/out of battle makes battles more strategic(just like in Final Fantasy X).
Ryu can also transform into a dragon to perform powerful attacks for periods of time,which adds more depth to strategy and is spectacular to watch.
You can also chain attacks together.
I like how world has cultural diversity because the Fou-Lu empire is influenced by Asian culture but there's towns with Arabian style culture and the world has a mixture of Asian and Arabian style music.
The artstyle for the game is charming,characters and environmental objects have a nice style to them and nice use of color.I think Scias physical apperance has a nice mixture of charm and toughness because of his dog features and dress style.Cray looks charming too with his cat features and reminds me of Rei from Breath of Fire III.
Breath of Fire IV was one of the games that helped me become a JRPG fan(FFVII and Breath of Fire III turned me into a JRPG fan and Breath of Fire IV gave me more reason to love the JRPG sub-genre with it's mixture of charm and emotional story telling and great story presentation.