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Sacred Reviews: Breath of Fire-Origins
thesacredlobo- 04/26/2024 11:29 PM
- 28 views
Intro
"Breath of Fire:Origins" is a turn-based RPG as well as a fan game based on the Breath of Fire series of video games that was being developed by wariovswario. A developer who appears to have only hung around the site a few months before disappearing and leaving his/her/their only project either on an unannounced indefinite hiatus or unofficially cancelled considering this project hasn't seen an update in over a decade. Of course, like a lot of old demos on this site why this project was left in it's current state was never explained, but if I had to guess based on the quality of the content in the demo. I'd be willing to wager that the developer realized how hard it would be to make the epic length fan game they were aiming for so they ultimately lost interest in the project.
Story
Summary
The game kicks off with us playing as a druid whose just turned 18 and awakened his spiritual animal, a mythical red dragon. Of course, being a druid the main character can turn into his spirit animal and use the powers of the red dragon against his foes. Of course, to test our abilities we head to the forest North of town in order to hunt down a rare red slime. After that the player returns to their friend's house in order to pick up their spiritual partner, a talking blue slime, before going on another hunt in a cave hidden in the depths of the forest where the player absorbs the power of the Eldritch and thus gains a new dragon form. The player then returns to town and meets a friend that just happens to be a girl and agree to help her explore some old ruins where were introduced to another druid whose absorbed a cursed gene and is turning into a weretiger. In order to stop her transformation we need to get the Itachi herb which can only be found on the Island to our North in a cave comprised entirely of hard rock. At any rate upon getting the herb and bringing it back we learn about a tournament involving the various dragon clans and decide to participate. Of course, the demo ends before the tournament begins.
Stregnths/Weaknesses
To be honest, I really can't think of any narrative strengths this project has going for it. After all, it suffers from poor pacing issues, boring characters, and a metric ton worth of bad dialogue. To make matters worse this game attempts to explain elements of the series that really don't need an explanation and the explanations it does offer are pretty bad and raise a whole host of questions. Like how do you absorb the DNA of being comprised of spirit? And why are we following around a random druid when it's pretty clear even within the confines of the demo that the Light Dragon clan exists in this game's setting as well? And why introduce an explanation for Katt, Jean, and other demi-human characters in the series that center around them being cursed druids?
Gameplay
On the gameplay front the game is your standard turn-based RPG for the most part. Though instead of using the default drop down system the developer opted for a system based on the Wild Arms series where you need to hold down an arrow key in order to select an option besides your basic attack. As for the transformation techniques. To be honest, I really didn't bother with them besides the red slime fight since there is a character in your house that gives the player's party a free level up every time you talk to him. Plus the transformations in this game are incomplete as far as I can tell so your character just floats a bit in the air when you do transform which makes the entire process rather lame.
To make matters worse most of the fights in this game involve weak enemies that can barely scratch your party anyway. So fights in this game are really boring and one-sided. And this only gets worse when you gain access to your spirit partner Rob since he can use moves that blind or paralyze an enemy for free. And these skills even work on the game's second boss. So it's possible to turn the second boss into a complete and utter joke.
Graphics
Graphically the game relies heavily on the RTP for RPG Maker VX. As such the game really isn't that visually interesting in my opinion since I've seen all of the enemies in this game dozens of times already. In fact, the most interesting aspect of this game graphically is just how bad the mapping is in this game. It's pretty obvious this was wariovswario's first game since it's filled with overly large town maps with points of interest so spread out from one another that it makes getting any where way more time consuming than it should be. To make matters worse buildings tend to be filled with large sections of blank space or stuffed with multiple copies of the same item forming three by three or even five by three blocks. The developer also doesn't make use of objects like flowers, bushes, skeletons, and whatnot. As a result the maps in this game are extremely boring since your almost always looking at a large swath of the same tile. This is especially true of the game's dungeons which are all mazes with narrow hallways that are a single tile wide that open up into chambers with nothing in them for the most part. To make matters worse some of these mazes are used in areas that don't even have enemy encounters so their only purpose is to help pad out the demo's runtime. Suffice to say the mapping in this game is really bad.
Sound
On the sound side of things the game makes use of a lot of music ripped from various video game soundtracks such as "Atelier Iris 3: The Grand Phantasm" and "Zelda: Twilight Princess". To be fair, this is pretty common within this community, but you'd think a game based on the Breath of Fire series would use music from that series. I'm not trying to say the music sucks, but it really doesn't suit a fan game.
Conclusion
At the end of the day "Breath of Fire: Origins" suffers from a lot of issues common to games by first time developers. As such it's really not a surprise this game is rather poor in terms of quality. This isn't to say these issues couldn't have been addressed by wariovswario over time if he/she/they had stuck around, but as it stands this demo really isn't worth checking out in my opinion. Oh well, I suppose I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed that a good fan game based on this series will pop up some day.
"Breath of Fire:Origins" is a turn-based RPG as well as a fan game based on the Breath of Fire series of video games that was being developed by wariovswario. A developer who appears to have only hung around the site a few months before disappearing and leaving his/her/their only project either on an unannounced indefinite hiatus or unofficially cancelled considering this project hasn't seen an update in over a decade. Of course, like a lot of old demos on this site why this project was left in it's current state was never explained, but if I had to guess based on the quality of the content in the demo. I'd be willing to wager that the developer realized how hard it would be to make the epic length fan game they were aiming for so they ultimately lost interest in the project.
Story
Summary
The game kicks off with us playing as a druid whose just turned 18 and awakened his spiritual animal, a mythical red dragon. Of course, being a druid the main character can turn into his spirit animal and use the powers of the red dragon against his foes. Of course, to test our abilities we head to the forest North of town in order to hunt down a rare red slime. After that the player returns to their friend's house in order to pick up their spiritual partner, a talking blue slime, before going on another hunt in a cave hidden in the depths of the forest where the player absorbs the power of the Eldritch and thus gains a new dragon form. The player then returns to town and meets a friend that just happens to be a girl and agree to help her explore some old ruins where were introduced to another druid whose absorbed a cursed gene and is turning into a weretiger. In order to stop her transformation we need to get the Itachi herb which can only be found on the Island to our North in a cave comprised entirely of hard rock. At any rate upon getting the herb and bringing it back we learn about a tournament involving the various dragon clans and decide to participate. Of course, the demo ends before the tournament begins.
Stregnths/Weaknesses
To be honest, I really can't think of any narrative strengths this project has going for it. After all, it suffers from poor pacing issues, boring characters, and a metric ton worth of bad dialogue. To make matters worse this game attempts to explain elements of the series that really don't need an explanation and the explanations it does offer are pretty bad and raise a whole host of questions. Like how do you absorb the DNA of being comprised of spirit? And why are we following around a random druid when it's pretty clear even within the confines of the demo that the Light Dragon clan exists in this game's setting as well? And why introduce an explanation for Katt, Jean, and other demi-human characters in the series that center around them being cursed druids?
Gameplay
On the gameplay front the game is your standard turn-based RPG for the most part. Though instead of using the default drop down system the developer opted for a system based on the Wild Arms series where you need to hold down an arrow key in order to select an option besides your basic attack. As for the transformation techniques. To be honest, I really didn't bother with them besides the red slime fight since there is a character in your house that gives the player's party a free level up every time you talk to him. Plus the transformations in this game are incomplete as far as I can tell so your character just floats a bit in the air when you do transform which makes the entire process rather lame.
To make matters worse most of the fights in this game involve weak enemies that can barely scratch your party anyway. So fights in this game are really boring and one-sided. And this only gets worse when you gain access to your spirit partner Rob since he can use moves that blind or paralyze an enemy for free. And these skills even work on the game's second boss. So it's possible to turn the second boss into a complete and utter joke.
Graphics
Graphically the game relies heavily on the RTP for RPG Maker VX. As such the game really isn't that visually interesting in my opinion since I've seen all of the enemies in this game dozens of times already. In fact, the most interesting aspect of this game graphically is just how bad the mapping is in this game. It's pretty obvious this was wariovswario's first game since it's filled with overly large town maps with points of interest so spread out from one another that it makes getting any where way more time consuming than it should be. To make matters worse buildings tend to be filled with large sections of blank space or stuffed with multiple copies of the same item forming three by three or even five by three blocks. The developer also doesn't make use of objects like flowers, bushes, skeletons, and whatnot. As a result the maps in this game are extremely boring since your almost always looking at a large swath of the same tile. This is especially true of the game's dungeons which are all mazes with narrow hallways that are a single tile wide that open up into chambers with nothing in them for the most part. To make matters worse some of these mazes are used in areas that don't even have enemy encounters so their only purpose is to help pad out the demo's runtime. Suffice to say the mapping in this game is really bad.
Sound
On the sound side of things the game makes use of a lot of music ripped from various video game soundtracks such as "Atelier Iris 3: The Grand Phantasm" and "Zelda: Twilight Princess". To be fair, this is pretty common within this community, but you'd think a game based on the Breath of Fire series would use music from that series. I'm not trying to say the music sucks, but it really doesn't suit a fan game.
Conclusion
At the end of the day "Breath of Fire: Origins" suffers from a lot of issues common to games by first time developers. As such it's really not a surprise this game is rather poor in terms of quality. This isn't to say these issues couldn't have been addressed by wariovswario over time if he/she/they had stuck around, but as it stands this demo really isn't worth checking out in my opinion. Oh well, I suppose I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed that a good fan game based on this series will pop up some day.
