Breath of Fire IV

Breath of Fire IV – (personal opinion) The sequel of the game that had lured me to the RPG for the very first time. I was definitely surprised with the outcome of this game. I didn’t expect much of a sequel to the third chapter, not because I didn’t like it (because I really loved it), but because I knew it didn’t have the success I hoped it could have. But this game surpassed my previsions and, for me, it surpassed the quality of its ancestor. The main hero and his love are always the same people, only changing the hair and the garments. This in my opinion is a great quality of originality in these series of games.
But on with the criticism… From my point of view there is a whole panoply of improvements to this game that where constructed upon a great revision of Breath of Fire III. One of them is the graphical work, which almost didn’t change, but changed enough to make the game much more interesting and cool. Still with 2D characters and 3D scenario, the makers of this game surely wanted to keep in mind the tradition behind the arts of the BOF3, but they wanted to, somewhat, improve the graphics, so what they did was turn some of the magic, dragon summons, and the dragons the main character transforms into, into 3D. I can gladly say that I like transforming the main character in the BOF3, but they even changed the transformation design in the BOF4, to which now I love transforming the main character and his nemesis. In terms of sound, the music is very good (I particularly like the combat music when you play with Fou-Lu), like the BOF3 music (in which the combat tunes were always excellent), with a similarity that both of these games have in the main moments of the game songs that derivate from a principal tune that, for me, is the main song of the game.(Another exclusivity for BOF).
Other things of interest have been added to this game, such as minigames to proceed with the plot; the summoning of Dragons, which was unheard of in the third chapter; the creation of magic combos which can increase the damage given to un opponent was an excellent feature, the detail of mixing a water magic with an earth magic to make a mud attack is filled with potential to make the next BOF’ even better (which didn’t occur), or the ability to attack monsters with a poisonous magic and afterwards make an attack that becomes poisonous because of the previous attack is nothing short of fantastic in a game. The only thing that I can find that was not constructive when this game was created is that the about 30 crystals I had mentioned in BOF3 to make the main character transform into a dragon have disappeared. This is a shame, because before there were a great variety of transformations we could use (which is always a good thing in any game, God knows how I like variety, especially in terms of women, but that’s another story), and know we can only have about 6 different dragons to turn into (and one of them is everything but a dragon (that’s right, I’m talking about Punk)).
But in the end, this is a mere one inch stain in a house sized cloth. 4 thumbs up for BOF4.
A classical (and yet new) RPG adventure


RZ RATING: (1 to 10): 9.5

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