Breath of Fire III is a continuation of Capcom’s prestigious Breath of Fire series. Players take control of Ryu, a boy who can turn into a dragon, as he makes his way through life and tries to find out about his history.
Full Review
Breath of Fire III Review
By, Tony Ames
Backdrop
.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.
The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).
Gameplay
Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.
The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.
Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.
Combat
Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.
Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.
Fresh Features
Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.
To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)
Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.
Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.
Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.
Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.
Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.
In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.
Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.
Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.
Time for Completion
Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.
Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.
Shortcomings
While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.
From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.
The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.
The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.
Final Word
We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!
Final Grade: B
1998 was a slim year for Playstation owning RPG players. While Nintendo fans had the excellent Ocarina of Time and the wildly addictive Pokemon games, the Playstation owners had but three; the later renowned cult favorite Xenogears, the ground-breakingly cinematic Parasite Eve, and the somewhat forgettable, yet highly enjoyable, Breath of Fire III. Well, perhaps highly is overstating the matter, but Breath of Fire III is definitely a worthwhile game for anyone that’s already played all the truly stellar games out there.
Breath of Fire III looks basically the same as several other games released at the time, using sprites on a polygon background. Neither are particularly flashy, but they get the job done. There is a bit of a hitch with Breath of Fire III’s execution though; the background is laid at such an angel that, combined with stiff character movement, makes walking in a strait line and facing the right direction more of a chore than it should be. There are also a few spots where objects obscure the players vision. Not a lot, but enough to irritate.
Which is a little bit like the sound effects in Breath of Fire III. Many of them are voice samples… which were left in Japanese, and are never heard outside of battle. Although, I may not have noticed if I had, because I found myself frequently humming the battle music, even well after turning the game off for the day. I’ve heard better battle music, but for whatever reason Breath of Fire III’s just stuck with me. The rest of the soundtrack was generally unimpressive though, leaving the game’s audio unremarkable overall.
Almost as though to make up for this, Breath of Fire III does spice up exploration with the occasional puzzle. However, they’re of the “Examine object [obstacle] with character [someone]” variety, and do little more than force you to place certain characters in your party for certain tasks. This is annoying, because few dungeons include points where you can alter the makeup of your party, meaning you have to trek outdoors to get the necessary man or woman for the job. Why the developers didn’t spot how much an annoyance this is and include the ability to alter your party on the fly is beyond me.
What they developers did do well was create an ability system that allowed the player some control over the progress of the party, yet didn’t penalize a player who didn’t want to mess with it and just played the game. This is mainly achieved using Masters. By meeting certain requirements, you can get a handful of people to take your party members as Apprentices. An apprenticed characters stat growth is altered, and if they visit their Master periodically, they can learn new skills from them, though these range from ‘handy’ to ‘useless’. Augmenting this is the Dragon Gene system. Like others of the same name, the hero Ryu can morph into various dragon forms. As you progress, you find a total of 20 different ‘genes’ that are combined to determine what kind of dragon the transformation results in. With the ability to combine up to three different genes at a time, that’s a lot of variety. At the same time, though, simple one or two gene combinations are often perfectly brutal in their own right. Now, beyond all this Breath of Fire III uses tried and true turn-based combat, with a neat quirk that allows for characters with enough of a speed advantage to get free turns on the enemy/slower party members. Yes, this is hardly novel, and doesn’t come up much to boot, but it’s a good platform for the different ability systems to work on.
What’s nice is that the characters manage to be distinct in the process, both in turns of natural abilities and in plot. Breath of Fire III makes a solid effort of giving each character some screen time and a hint of depth, or at least personality. Ryu is something of a blank slate, being a silent hero, but his companions are reasonably interesting, and overall likable. A few seem to almost drop out of the story at several points (the heroine Nina is probably worst in this regard), but there’s nothing that really drew me out of the game.
The plot doesn’t fare as well in this. Mostly because it’s overall fairly standard, which made it harder to really stay ‘in’ the game. It started off more promisingly- Ryu, as a boy, is found by a bandit named Rei and his friend Teepo. Rei, being much older and a fellow orphan, feels compelled to take care of him, so he teaches him how to survive stealing and such. What was nice about this segment of the game was that it was amusing and felt very genuine. Later, the group becomes separated and a series of misadventures lead to Ryu stepping up to smite evil. Although this does progress logically enough, it also felt somewhat forced, probably because of the “it is your destiny” feel much of it had. Which doesn’t make for a bad game, it just tarnishes the great start somewhat. One or two dropped plot threads don’t help, either.
Breath of Fire III is easy about 75% of the time. The rest of it is populated with bosses that require a fair amount of preparation, a few resets, and a dash of pure luck. Outside the main quest, there are a handful of major sidequests and a couple other odds and ends. They can eat up a fair bit of time if you let them, but they’re still sidequests. Barely doing anyway, Breath of Fire III is fairly average in length, my final clock time being 31 hours.
The ups and downs of Breath of Fire III balance each other out quite a bit, but at the end of the day I really did enjoy myself while playing it, and most people that enjoy a classically styled RPG should agree with that sentiment.
Final Verdict: 74%
