The Great Refactoring
Coding shenanigans and other nerdy musings
The Breath of Fire 4 Pain Tour Project
10/Dec/2023
Breath of Fire, is a traditional JRPG series by Capcom to which I have a complicated relationship. I’ve ONLY really played 3 and 4. Briefly tried 1 and 2 but they never really gave me any sort of foothold. Whatever themes or story the game immediately presented me felt just painfully generic and when the game then sent me loose on what seemed to be a very unguided adventure with that background I just slid right off. There was nothing there which was prompting me to stay in any way.
3 and 4 are much more straightforward with how they lead you into the story they want to tell. I remember playing 3 back in original hardware even, in the old PSX days, and 3 is a fantastic game. Not without its failings but there’s just SO MUCH that is SO GOOD. If nothing else, the entire first act of the game and how it propels you toward the next arc of the story is, honestly, a bloody lesson in storytelling. But 3 is not in the number of the title here, is it?
Breath of Fire 4 is COMPLICATED. It lives rent free in my mind forever, I am simply unable to stop thinking about this game. And there’s good reasons for it. I am able to describe Breath of Fire 4, with opinions that are sincere, in a way that is likely to make anyone reading/hearing those opinions feel like “oh wow, this sounds amazing, I must give it a go!”
In fact, let’s do it right now!
What's a Breath of Fire 4? (thematic spoilers in this section)
Breath of Fire 4 is about dragons. This is why these games are names “Breath of Fire” to begin with, and in Breath of Fire 4 dragons are actually REALLY interesting.
Dragons, here, are gods. They are summoned by people who imbue them with a wish or desire. This wish becomes a driving force for the dragon in question who manifests this wish into the world not only deliberately, but also due to a magical property which is, really, what defines dragons.
Dragons have a certain “gravity of fate”. When other beings are “around” dragons, their fate ends up becoming tangled and entwined with that of the dragon. Through this entanglement, they also become drawn towards the wish that drives the dragon.
The main character of the game, Ryu, happens to be a dragon… well, he’s half of a dragon. Many many years ago, some people summoned a dragon with the wish for a world without war, but the summoning didn’t quite work out correctly, and as such, they ended up summoning HALF a dragon. Only part of its essence made it through. This dragon was Fou-Lu, and he went on fulfilling that wish by creating an empire which would span the entire world. United under one nation, these peoples would have no need to wage war, or so the idea goes.
This was actually going well for Fou-Lu but since he was missing half of his essence he started running out of magical power. So he gave it his best shot and had a mausoleum built where he would hibernate until such time as the rest of his essence makes it into the world and/or his magic recovered so that he could continue the work. And after appointing a new emperor to take care of things for the time being, went to sleep.
When Ryu manifests into the world, Fou-Lu wakes up but they’re nowhere near and each have their own stuff to deal with. Turns out the current emperor doesn’t want to step down and let Fou-Lu take the reigns again. Worse yet, they’re trying to kill Fou-Lu for real. Ryu has his own problems to deal with which mostly include learning all of this stuff about dragons, helping his friends with their own issues and running away from assassins himself. Since they’re the same being, the people from the Empire reckon if they kill Ryu, Fou-Lu probably just dies too. At the very least, that would ensure he can never become a complete dragon. In game, this manifests as you playing both sides of the story. While you mostly play with Ryu, every once in a while the story switches over and you play through whatever is happening to Fou-Lu at that point. In this way you get to experience both of their journeys, as well as the difference between how the whole current situation looks both within the Empire, where Fou-lu is, and in the kingdoms of the continent where Ryu wakes up in.
Both Fou-Lu and Ryu are also drawn to each other in a subtle way. They are fated to once again join and become one whole dragon and they both know this. So the game builds up toward this confrontation. But ALSO this disparity in their paths ends up making both Ryu and Fou-Lu become fundamentally opposed people and their philosophical discrepancies are the actual core, the central theme in Breath of Fire 4.
Throughout his journey after waking up, Fou-Lu is betrayed by the people he wishes so desperately to save. They attack him and hunt him relentlessly. People who sympathise or help him are seen as both traitors and potential tools to hurt him with. The emperor and his men will spare absolutely no effort in their quest to kill Fou-Lu and rid the empire itself from being entangled by his own godlike dragon soul. Throughout Breath of Fire 4, you follow Fou-Lu’s descent into despair and sorrow. By the time you reach him for the final confrontation between the two protagonists, there is nothing left in him but pain and resentment at being so thoroughly betrayed by the people he loved so deeply. Fou-Lu has changed his approach. He will rid the world of war by ridding the world of people. Their willingness to cause harm to others and themselves cannot be contained. While they are around, they will cause pain. He’s going to weed out this evil by its root.
Ryu, conversely, is the counterpoint to this story and viewpoint. Ryu believes that, in spite of all this capacity to do harm, humanity HAS value. People are worth believing in. For every moment of pain, every choice to do evil, there is also kindness and trust and love being put forth and defeating even a world that seems intent on rejecting those concepts.
THIS clash is the core of Breath of Fire 4. The story build up both sides of this argument through each of its protagonists and, in the end, they stand face to face, both wanting to unite, to become complete, but also both wanting for their own point of view to be what they stand for as a god. An ending that seeks to bring an answer to a question the game spends its entirety building both sides of.
And if this all doesn’t sound like a gem of a story to be told through a game, I… I dunno. What do you even like? Do you like stories? At all? I mean, even if you don’t, there’s still a soundtrack that is absolutely banging and some absolutely gorgeous art throughout!
So what's that about pain, then?
So all of these ideas are nice, pretty great even, but Breath of Fire 4 just nosedives, like, 90 degrees into the ground. Sticks the landing through riding the bloody normal vector! And it does this through a few different ways but easily, I think, the worst one is a constant issue in story heavy games
If your protagonist is silent, then they can't drive your story
That’s right! I neglected to mention until now but that whole philosophical divide happens between a character that goes through an intense and well developed story arc and a brick that happens to be around stuff that happens while everyone pretend he’s the most special boy
Ryu doesn’t have a speaking part, he’s a silent observer throughout his entire side of the story and it’s just really REALLY awkward when every other cutscene just centres around him because he’s there. His nature as a dragon makes things happen around him but Ryu never really DOES anything himself, never expresses any opinion… he’s just standing there
I’ve LONG disliked silent protagonists as a general concept. And no, “you get to project yourself into the character” doesn’t work because the way to do THAT properly is to have you express yourself through your character. I’ve played MANY hours of Baldur’s Gate 2 and that protagonist is NOT silent. That’s a protagonist with a character you get to build yourself. Ryu just isn’t a character
This is not a thing that’s exclusive to Breath of Fire, which is all silent protagonists. This is often a problem for The Legend of Zelda, for example. Breath of the Wild is a good example in that every cutscene link is in would immediately be made WAY better if you just remove link from the cutscene and let the actual characters drive the story
But it’s not like having a silent protagonist is a demerit in and of itself, as much as I generally don’t like them. Breath of Fire 3 actually manages to have a way more expressive Ryu, even if he is equally silent. It’s nowhere as egregious as 4. And it also uses another trick: the story of Breath of Fire 3, later on, gets its reins taken by Garr, a different, fuller character. Ryu still has reason to be involved but it kind of lift the veils a little bit, he’s not really DRIVING the plot. Conversely, the best Zelda to me is easily Majora’s Mask and a large part of it has to do with the fact that the story of that game is not ABOUT Link. He’s an external observer. And then things can actually work on their own terms
Breath of Fire 4 just doesn’t do these and then wants to end by having this non-character be the key a philosophical argument about the value or lack thereof of humanity. There’s a passionate speaker to one side and a brick in the other one. I wonder which one will make the more compelling argument. This is not a game that really thinks about this choice. It just kind of wants to the player to pretend there’s a character and an argument where there are none. It’s lazy and hamstrings the game’s chances at trying to engage in the theme it spends so much time setting up
The poor case for Ryu's argument anyway
There’s a second issue here in which, even if you discount this whole thing with Ryu being a cardboard cutout people haul around while they’re experiencing the story, I just don’t see how we’re supposed to think his story represents a counterpoint to Fou-Lu’s resentment
This just doesn’t add up. Ryu doesn’t get QUITE as bad a deal as Fou-Lu but his story is also a string of horrors, betrayal and hurt being inflicted for reasons often vain and petty. His side of the story is not as bad but it’s far from great. I said before that Ryu never expresses any opinions but that’s not QUITE correct. He DOES have one instance of unbridled rage at the cruelty of man so… well…
My impression of the game was that, getting to the end, I, the player, felt that Fou-Lu was, you know, obviously wrong. The game itself, however, just didn’t give me a counterpoint for it. You’re asked to deny his self-destructive rage and I couldn’t find WHAT in Ryu’s story is supposed to be a basis for that disagreement, other than his friends being generally nice people
Other than relying on external standard morality, I don’t see how the game expects us to actually disagree with Fou-Lu and not just go with the bad ending
No respect for the player's time and aggression through minigames
These, perhaps, are smaller, less direct and intense points but they were still things which were painful to deal with when I first played this game. The first is that everything just seems to take SO LONG. Battles in particular I remember just being “PLEASE PLEASE CAN I JUST LEAVE NOW?!?” while multiple end screens slowly went by in succession. Running into a fight, something you’ll do A LOT OF in this regular random encounter JRPG is a punishment for YOU, the player. I wonder how much of my game time was just furiously mashing through menus desperately trying to get back to playing
There’s also a super insidious and, frankly outraging, hidden growth mechanic in the game. As the game progresses, you unlock more and more dragon forms for Ryu (and Fou-Lu). These give you some of the best abilities in the game and each can be upgraded. The way you upgrade them is through a hidden system of minigame score thresholds. No, for real
Each form has a minigame secretly attached to it. If you play the minigame and reach the score threshold, the next time you transform into said dragon form, it gets upgraded to its “tier 2” version
Nothing in the game tells you this and they basically all suck. This is a type of game design trope that I myself usually refer to “japanes BS”. Not exclusive to them but common in a lot of JRPGs from that 90’s/00’s era, I guess. Just some out of left field, random grindy thing that’s frustratingly difficult seemingly just to pad the play time. If you’ve played Final Fantasy 10, for example, you can lump in most of the final weapon hearts here. “Dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row. There is no counter or any indicator of whether you’ve reached the threshold”. It’s just BS
Casual racism? Sure, why not!
So remember how Fou-Lu and Ryu are in different places when they wake up? Fou-lu is within the empire he founded, which lies in a continent to the west. Ryu is on the one to the east that has all sorts of different kingdoms
Now, these kingdoms aren’t all good, but the empire is very unequivocally evil. This japanese made game takes pains to show us how evil the “Empire in the distant continent to the west” is. The one with the immortal god-emperor that wanted to unify the whole world but has been turned onto by his own people. This empire has nukes, by the way and… OH BOY! Wait until you find out the details on the nuke
Oh, yes, also everything in the evil empire looks like this
I WONDER IF THEY WANTED TO REFERENCE SOMETHING, HERE…
Yeah, this is just pretty shit. There’s no real saving grace here
So why play this again?
Breath of Fire 4 is a game with some really good ideas but which botches them SUPER hard. Every time I was playing Ryu I think I was mostly just angry or annoyed at the game. The ending was a massive let down because I could see the potential of everything they tried to build just going basically entirely to waste
Plus the fishing minigame isn’t even good this time around
So why bother? Shouldn’t I instead play Breath of Fire 3 and ACTUALLY finish it this time? That’s right, I never did make it across the finish line. Made it to essentially the last dungeon at least twice and then just slid off as the game ran out of steam. But generally I have a way higher opinion of that one!
And there’s a couple of reasons
I have a mouth and it must scream
The first one is THIS, essentially, this poist. As must be obvious by now, I HAVE OPINIONS on Breath of Fire 4. They are STRONG opinions and they CANNOT BE SILENCED. It’s a thing that’ll bubble up to the surface and every once in a while, as I bring it up in yet another Mastodon rant thread
So I wanted to talk about them and examine them with more care. I want to replay this game but, this time, WITH all of this in mind. Go through it while actively thinking about all of this. I also want to take the opportunity to reexamine whether all of this would hold up after this closer examination. Maybe I just shaped my memory into hyper focusing into these frustrations and the game deserves a kinder opinion? Or maybe, nah, it’s even more infuriating knowing all of this is how it ends up going! Who knows?
And the second reason is more personal, perhaps even insidious
The gravity of fate
I have my own fantasy scenario that I’ve been working on for many many years and despite that, some basic concepts are still not really well-formed. I’m undecided about exactly what I want to do or what sort of vibe I want to put forth with these things
But one day, while thinking about those, I remembered Breath of Fire 4’s dragons: How they are imbued with a wish and their existence envelops and entangles the fate of people around them, drawing them towards that same wish. A natural, innate property of their being
And there’s something there. In this whole idea there’s something really interesting and cool that I can adapt, change and repurpose. I want to find out what that is. I want to take the magnifying glass and the screwdriver to this thing and turn it inside out. But, alas, half remembered things won’t do. So, there’s only one way
If I must play Breath of Fire 4 again, then let it be a lesson to us all!
“Misery loves company”, so they say. Also this whole process of looking at things and examining them is pretty fun. If I’m going to put myself through this once again, then why not make my own little spectacle out of it
Tomorrow, 10th Dec 2023, I’m going to start streaming this playthrough. I want to go through the game and talk about how I feel when it comes to these and other different aspects. The goal is to stream every Sunday afternoon
This is why I’m writing this post. When I’m done with the game I want to come back and see how much of this still stands. But I won’t necessarily be alone through this. My first playthrough took me somewhere between 40 and 50 hours, so this should be fun for quite some time. And, if you feel like it, join in and have some fun
I’m still not sure what I’ll do in the end when it comes to this revisiting. Whether I’ll edit the recordings later on and make a video about it, or whether I just write about my opinions again in the end… Regardless, this is the plan:
Play again through Breath of Fire 4, thinking about and commenting on the story and the themes they build. Stream and record the entire thing. Pay particular attention to dragons and how they’re built in the game and later one come back to see how much of the opinions in this post hold up
I’ll be announcing these streams on Mastodon and will be streaming on Twitch, so you know where to keep an eye on if you want to try and catch them live
Let’s have some fun… for science!
