Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

It's nice to see the occasional role-playing game that isn't formulaic, something that shows the developer took some time to create a plot worth living in a game worth playing. Dragon Quarter: Breath of Fire does that so surprisingly well and in so many different ways, it almost transcends the RPG genre.

In Breath of Fire you take on the role of Ryu, a ranger in the buried world of Deep Earth. In Ryu's world a persons importance is measured by their D-Ratio which both identifies who they are and their latent potential. Unfortunately, Ryu's is exceptionally low ' until me meets the dragon that infuses Ryu with special abilities and cranks up his D-Ratio. Unfortunately, as the game progresses the D-Ratio increases until it finally kills him, unless you can stop it.

The game is set in a rich 3D environment created with beautifully drawn cel-shaded characters and well rendered backgrounds. Most of the game is played from a third-person perspective, zooming-out during combat phases to allow for a wider view of the battleground.

One of the big pluses of this RPG is that you don't have to engage every single creature or bad guy you see, and none of them appear out of thin air. You can try to rush through or past bad guys or even use Ryu's ranger abilities to lay traps that can damage, kill or immobilize the baddies while you sneak by. Combat in Breath of Fire offers several new twists to typical RPG frays. If you swipe a monster during your dungeon crawl before it touches you the game rewards you with a bonus attack in combat. Once in combat you use action points, which vary depending on character, equipment and levels, to maneuver your characters and choose attacks. Breath also offers combo attacks, allowing you to string together a chain of different skill level attacks to multiply the amount of damage.

This incredibly lengthy game is made much harder by a difficult, and at times frustrating, save system that only allows saves at certain spots in the game and only when you have a save token. Unfortunately it's relatively rare for these two events to both occur at the same time, which means you have to play very cautiously and not take on everything you see. Luckily, the game allows you to run away from most battles, with just a loss in money. The game also allows for temporary saves, which means you can save the game to go to sleep, but when you restart in the morning it will erase the data after it is loaded.

Another interesting new twist in Breath of Fire is something it calls the Scenario Overlay System, which basically means you can start the game over with your saved characters. Better still the second or third time through the game allows you to access areas you couldn't get to the first time around and gives you a chance to see new events. It's a clever way to build in replay value that works.

Dragon Quarter: Breath of Fire is a role-playing game that manages to capture all of the magic and addictiveness of RPGs without all of the repetitive and annoying elements that seem to perpetually plague this genre. This is a game worth owning, playing, replaying and keeping.

Longtime Breath of Fire fans are in for a shock--this fifth installment of the always good (but rarely great) role-playing franchise abandons nearly every gameplay element the series is known for. A giant kingdom to explore? Nope, Dragon Quarter takes place exclusively in a cramped, postapocalyptic underground cave-no forests, rivers, or mountains to traverse this time. What about the giant cast of lovable characters? Sorry, you'll only get three party members to play with here. OK, at least you'll be able to relax by fishing, like in the past four games, right? Not a chance. The only water you'll find here is flowing through a trash-strewn sewer.

So, what does Dragon Quarter offer? Well, something entirely different. It's a survival-RPG that blends traditional role-playing concepts with gameplay ideas straight outta survival-horror games like Resident Evil. You still have the basic tenets of RPG-dom, including hit points, experience points, equipment, magic, and turn-based battles. But now those old-school ideas are coupled with such a severe level of difficulty that you'll be forced to avoid overly difficult battles, conserve healing resources, and find items in order to save (much like RE'S typewriter ribbons) just to stay alive. And if you do die, you're forced to make a colossal decision that could send you all the way back to the start of the game (scope the sidebar for the scoop).

Conceptually, it's truly groundbreaking stuff, but it's so daring that some of the leaps don't exactly work smoothly. However, if you're in the market for something funkily fresh and devilishly hard in the RPG realm, investigate Dragon Quarter.