Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter

I would never had thought that somebody would manage to design a role-playing game which is too hard for me to play. But BoF5 (European version) for the PS2 manages this easily by adding two little tweaks to the game: There is no healing, and you can't save the game.

BoF5 is the first RPG I know in which there is no healing spell at all, and where you can not rest to regain hitpoints. The only way to regain hitpoints in this game is to use healing kits, but those are few and far between. In fact, instead of spending your money on new armor and weapons, you are well advised to spend it all on healing kits instead. Oh wait, then you don't get better armor and weapons and die anyway.

Console games often have save points, you can't save just in the middle of the dungeon, you need to find a save point. That is okay if there are enough save points, like in the Final Fantasy series. The Baldurs Gate series even has twice as many save points as necessary. In BoF5 the save points are very few, you might need to cross 10 dungeon levels before finding the next one. And then when you reached the save point, you might still not be able to save, as that also requires a save token, and those are rare. The US version has a temporary save option, so you can at least quit the game and restart at the same place, even if that temporary save file was deleted after loading. The European version does not even have that, you are probably supposed to leave the console running.

Other than that, BoF5 is a not very special RPG. You start at the bottom of deep underground world, and the story line tells you that you need to reach the top, leading to an endless dungeon crawl. Graphics are cell-shaded and not bad, but rather dark. Gameplay is real-time in the dungeon, then switches to turn-based in the battle. A neat twist is that whoever gets his hit in first on the real-time map, gets one extra turn in turn-based.

The selling point of the game is that you can transform your main character into a powerful dragon. Unfortunately, if you use that option, your D-counter goes up from 0%. And with every transformation you have a chance equal to your D-counter percentage of losing the game, so you can't use it in anything but the most difficult boss battles.

As you will be losing the game rather often, you will be happy to hear that you can restart after dying. And with restart, I mean restart from the very beginning. You get to keep your current equipment, half of your money, and half of the party xp you didn't spend, so on the next try it gets easier, and you get a bit further before dying and restarting again. And when you restart the game, you get to see some cut scenes that you didn't see the first time around. But I don't know if many people will feel really motivated to restart again and again, until they reach the end of the game. I probably won't play BoF5 until the end, it is simply too frustrating.

Unless you are a power gamer and seriously underchallenged by other games, keep away from Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. Especially the PAL version that does not have the temporary saves.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:08 AM Permanent Link