Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

March 11, 2021

I suppose I'll start with the negative, the game at times suffers from linearity. Especially for a title that expects you to occasionally turn in your badge and gun to start effectively from scratch at the beginning of the line. Also, although befitting the overall story of the game, the art style is fairly dark and feels like you're fumbling your way through a poorly lit warehouse for the majority of your 20+ hour excursion.

Those shortcomings can be forgiven as the package as a whole remains fairly compelling. The story is simple, you are a grunt in a force tasked with maintaining the status quo. You and a partner take on a transport mission that goes awry. From that mistake, you learn that the system you've been fighting for is actually not what it had seemed to be. Because of this you realign your goals with a rogue revolutionary as she tries to liberate a humanoid science experiment against all odds.

This story is wrapped in a handful of interesting play mechanics, an odd save system that allows you to carry stats through restarts, an battle system that lacks random encounters and instead lets you bait and trap opponents before encountering them, and the dragon counter.

The dragon counter is simple enough on paper. Each time you use a special ability (i.e. overpowered), the counter goes up. If the counter fills, your game ends. As that counter sits with you constantly on the screen through your entire play-through it becomes a silent omnipresent entity that ultimately will define your entire experience. For myself--a player that is overly cautious with the tools at my disposal--it was a badge of pride to keep it low at all costs, yet later the d-counter became a source of embarrassment as I had to lean on those powers with more occasion.

The game is filled with plenty of these small little intricacies that feel unique to the title even almost 20 years after its release. If you're an RPG fan it would be hard to not recommend this as a must play if only to explore the boundary pushing that was on display here.