Illusion of Gaia: What is Life, What is Evolution, and Why Does Being Swallowed by a Leviathan Turn You Into a Leviathan?

If there was a Venn diagram of my interests, I'm guessing Illusion of Gaia would pop in somewhere near the middle. As an avid Indiana Jones fan, I'm all about globe-spanning archaeological action adventures. If they're all connected to some massive revelation that could cause the rescue/doom of the Earth, all the better (But don't just say, "Aliens!" as the cause, please). On the other end, there's the spiritual side with the anime Haibane-Renmei, where angel-like people wander a town in the afterlife with no memory of how they got there and less idea of how to make their next step. Somewhere in-between is Illusion of Gaia, a Super Nintendo action RPG from 1993 that is weirdly meditative on the nature of evolution and existence, even if the only adequate translation knocks the high-mindedness down a few notches.

Published by Nintendo in the States, the game was a creation of the famous Enix development team Quintet. Even though many of them came from the Falcom company having created the more workmanlike Ys games, they were no strangers to making action RPGs with a higher mindset. They'd already done Actraiser where you're God slowly trying to heal a world taken over by Satan (And don't let Nintendo of America's 90's censorship tell you otherwise). Around wonderfully scenic action sequences, it mildly dipped its toes into exploring how people interacted with a deity they knew was exceptionally real and could do fantastic or terrible things to them. IoG was even a follow-up to Soulblazer in an unofficial trilogy.

While Soulblazer was a bit mechanical in its approach, it still had an addictive quality to rebuilding the world piece by piece and moments of thoughtfulness. However, Illusion of Gaia was something special, even against its significantly more ambitious follow-up Terranigma. Terranigma did occasionally lose itself, like when you traverse through a haunted castle to rescue Christopher Columbus with the help of a black kid on a skateboard while being pursued by a, "ME CHINESE. ME MAKE JOKE," of a caricature villain. All of this is true. I would say they weren't particularly sensitive to other races and cultures, but Quintet studios and a Japanese city are actually in Terranigma and they stereotype themselves, so....

Anyway, for answers as to why Illusion of Gaia felt like a richer experience, it didn't take a whole lot of research. Below the title screen is a list of names normally I wouldn't pay attention to. Along with composer Yasuhiro Kawasaki (Who we'll get to eventually), there's Moto Hagio, manga pioneer and creator of such works as They Were Eleven, doing the character designs. While not unheard for manga artists to work on games (Enix in fact had another successful series that did the same thing. Dragon Warrior Quest or something...), it was still unusual. The other name is novelist Mariko Ohara, the first female, Japanese sci-fi author to get published in the United States. For kicks, I read her one novel that got traction on this side of the Pacific. It's about a shape-shifting military weapon that escapes the lab it was held in, finds its way into the abusive household of a woman author who made an exact AI copy of her daughter she killed through starvation and neglect, and the weapon is chased by a military where they have a Being referred to in capital letters reserved for God that sends soldiers through time including Its mother who HASN'T GIVEN BIRTH TO IT YET. The book sticks out is what I'm saying.

Added to the world building done by Quintet's Yuko Miyazaki, the more literary origins provide an extra layer to the experience. While there is certainly a good bit bit of characterization and plot that feels missing if it were to be in a, say, book (Hi, Seth), there is a level to the game that truly gives serious thought about what it is about. There are themes and motifs that are implemented way more than I'd seen in a game up to that point except maybe Phantasy Star II (Another RPG with a scenario by a woman), but with less dry, grindy spots and fewer over-designed mazes (Mu is way too big, but other than that...). Illusion of Gaia was also a title that dared put more than a dash of ennui and melancholy into the whole experience instead of simply applied dramatics, which is out of the ordinary for a mid-era Super Nintendo game, especially one so built on action.

But before all that, we must get our bearings for the audience unfamiliar with the work. Illusion of Gaia is an action RPG in the style of Zelda. However, instead of a fictional fantasy world, this is a fictional version of the real world circa 1600 or so. Humanity has gotten to the point where exploration is widespread and everyone is trying to piece together the mysteries of the many lost civilizations. Instead of finding answers, most explorers discover torment and death with ruins full of monsters and traps.

In this world where real-life and mythical wonders are geographically shuffled about at random, we come to our main character Will, the apparent sole survivor of a lost expedition to find the Tower of Babel, of which the crew included his mother and father. With no memory of what happened, he is mysteriously returned to his home village South Cape with telekenesis and psychic abilities, while at the same time, access to a portal of closed space where he speaks to the giant face of Gaia, the spirit of the earth. Despite all of this, Will lives a somewhat normal life with his grandparents and hangs out with a boys club which includes the mature Lance, spoiled and portly Erik, and shy, nerdy Seth. Gaia warns Will of an incoming calamity that threatens all life on the planet at the same time the king of the land sends a representative to demand Will's family surrender a family heirloom. With no idea where it could be, Will is imprisoned on suspicion of intentionally keeping it from the king, but is helped out first by the princess Kara who is running away from home to rebel against her horrible parents, and second by Lilly, who comes from an invisible village of flower sprites of which Will is a descendant. I realize this all seems like I just filled out a mad-lib, but I promise you most of it comes together in a reasonable manner.

What all this setup amounts to is Will and his friends along with Kara and Lilly must travel the ruins of the world to find six mystic statues (Dolls in the Japanese version. Not "epic" enough for us, I imagine....). From The Great Wall to the Pyramids, there is a secret connection between all of them that also involves a comet that has passed by every 800 years for the past 3,200 years, destroying every existing civilization when it does. To help combat the many challenges the ruins present, Will can transform into Freedan, an adult knight who yields more powerful attacks and a different skillset, or the inhuman bio-weapon Shadow. Along the way, Will and his companions grow up and learn much about themselves and the world around them. According to Ohara, Stand By Me was a popular movie in Japan at the time, and it and the Stephen King short story it's based on were influences for the game's more coming-of-age sections.

Now would probably be a good time to talk about my general feelings before getting into the mix of weird and academic. Normally, you would get even-handed critic voice from me, but I love this game. It's so good in ways that are both easily appreciated and under appreciated. The graphics are big and bright, and while the animation is limited to 3 or 4 frames most times to prevent the infamous SNES slowdown, they are detailed enough to get the gist of every character from looking at them. The controls are responsive and let you do cool things like jumping off of roofs, beating the crap out of monsters with a flute, and sliding into vampires for significant damage like you're an out-of-control baseball player. There's not much variety in the combat, but it does its job. Yasuhiro Kawasaki's music starts with an amazing theme that is worthy of "Raiders March" comparisons, and while it doesn't reach the consistent highs of your Secret of Manas or Chrono Triggers, it is extremely solid soundtrack and doesn't lack for standout tracks. It is astonishing something this well put together is Kawasaki's only major work and he just sort of vanishes off the face of the Earth; Well, in Western media, anyway. Any person not given a laser focus or god status on this side of the Pacific can get lost in the indifference, especially with the drive needed to translate pieces about them in the print-driven 90s.  There is a Sound Cloud with his name and a version of the Great Wall theme, but I can't verify it's him. Cool tunes, though.

And the adventuring! Flying gardens, an undersea palace, and the Tower of Babel! Going to all the ruins of the world and discovering their secrets is invigorating, even if it's a sorta' fakey fantasy version of them where there's a mountain of mushrooms somewhere in-between. The mode 7 map traveling gives the right amount of living an Indiana Jones film joy. Each ruin has a different experience to keep the game fresh, and even if Mu's gets tedious with an unfair boss challenge to top it off, it still has rad moments like the mysterious figures in the shrines that lower the water. It's so exciting to actually go places that just aren't color-swapped tilesets of the previous area with genuine mystery, aura, and wonder.

The overall story could've been told better and the translation is simplistic with many noted mistakes. Enix made and/or published games over here that had a rash of awkwardly-localized scripts (They released a game re-titled Paladin's Quest that was about two main characters who were magic users and neither could be described as lawfully good knights), and since there was a beta you can find on the internet that showed it existed in English before Nintendo took over publishing, it's safe to assume Nintendo just took their wonky translation and only changed names and other choice bits. However, there is this method to the entire project that lets the player draw out their own conclusions and feelings I've rarely experienced in any form of media. Answers to many of the questions are there, and some are better buried than others. What I discovered in my most recent play is the heavy hints that the Incan spirits you release from a ship trapped in a cave is that these were possibly a failed attempt to stop the comet and Will and Kara may be reincarnations of the heroes. There's enough material to give solid footing, but there's also enough left to interpretation to have fun with it, and I love work like that. The only problems arise when they simply drop plot threads unceremoniously, especially when they're going somewhere.

The characters aren't particularly deep. They have a certain universal quality and rarely step beyond it. Will is made to appeal to the average teenage boy, Lance is the older kid who has to keep everyone in line, Kara is the spoiled princess who has to learn to be more mature, and so on. There isn't much done to differentiate them from what you'd normally experience. Ohara did say she was proud with what she could do with Lilly and Kara in the midst of the mostly male-oriented world of gaming to where two women covering the story and world building had to make everything as appealing to boys as they could. There is the slight inversion of expectations where tomboy Lilly is the character who has to stop journeying to be with the person she loves, and princess Kara in mostly pink gets to be the Knight of Light who combines with Will's Knight of Shadow to become the Phoenix that fights the final boss. Still, most of what the characters do is what is generally expected. And then there's the curious case of Seth.

I suppose now is when we get to the heavy duty analysis, and it will be spoiler territory from here on out. At the beginning, you have the option of visiting the houses of each of the boys. The one that leaves the biggest impact is Seth's, where you open the door just before a chair is thrown out of it. Seth's parents are in the middle of a hated fight, and these happen often according to Will's narration. Seth is the nerd of the party who isn't given much to do besides be the smart one. He's mainly shoved in the back for what little time he has. While you would think Seth has some sort of arc where he faces the damage that his potentially abusive have done to him, I cannot begin to tell you about how that's not what they did....

After releasing an Incan ship from its centuries-old prison as a result of finishing the first major dungeon, the ship is almost immediately attacked by a sea beast known as the Leviathan (Improperly translated as Riverson in the American release). Seth is thrown off the ship with the rest of the kids, but unlike the rest of them, he is eaten by Leviathan, which turns him into a Leviathan. You meet him later traveling through an underwater tunnel when he contacts you by banging on the walls using Morse code. Then after explaining his situation, he vanishes from the game except for a short appearance near the end where he's with the characters who died and became immortal spirits; Except it's never established that Seth dies. It is by far the most baffling part of the game.

Reading Ohara's novel Hybrid Child provides a few answers. Even though it's a pathetically small sample size, there are heavy themes in both works about existing as a human and inhuman simultaneously. In escaping the military, the protagonist military weapon attains sentience and has to assume various forms in violent and freakish fashion to be free (It's like Short Circuit if Johnny 5 ate and became Ally Sheedy in the first ten minutes of the movie), and then runs around experiencing vignettes of humanity in the way distant future. In the novel, survival is paramount, and there are no qualms about turning into a winged fairy that can fly into space. However, the only ones who are seriously against its existence are the rigid hierarchy of the military as well as some characters who are ashamed of their own limitations (One robot attempts suicide because it wants to see heaven.). A thread between the book and the game is sometimes existence is an exceptionally painful experience that will transform you into something you don't recognize, and sometimes, it just stops for no rhyme or reason.One of the first characters to have a point-of-view is the first to die.

In one of the few interviews to be translated into English Ohara did about Illusion of Gaia, she says the themes were of boys discovery of self, conflicts with their parents, and becoming adults. Some of this is more explored than others, with Will and Kara's journey to adulthood feeling like it has an arc, and Kara standing up against her parents' tyranny registering as thin to the point of nearly being forgotten until a sudden showdown with a proxy assassin. Granted, you get to see someone burned alive in a SNES game published by the normally reserved Nintendo of America, but it doesn't properly build up to feel like it's earned that payoff. John Friscia argues the Jackal is far more of a vital piece to the puzzle than I do, so you can head on over to his nice article to hear that side of it.

However, there is a more fascinating theme about the nature of evolution and survival. In the limited time Seth shows up as Leviathan, the party debates about whether it's a terrible outcome, or whether they merely think so because it's not the norm in the eyes of humans. I do wonder how much material had to be dropped for the sake of the story to be streamlined into game form because this seemed to be going somewhere. With Ohara's other work considered, it also might just be a note that sometimes what you have to do to survive is horrifying and alien to what you used to be, and the nature of evolution is every step forward means leaving something behind. Don't think Darwin had that in his notes.

From the start, Illusion of Gaia has a series of encounters that wrestle with the different types of living brought about by either the comet that's altered the evolution of humanity, or simply the melancholy of everyday living. The most standard is Freejia, a city that has a beautiful front with flowers and posh inns supported by a literal backstreet of slave trading. Pretty basic indictment of the machinations that led to our modern world and reflected on Will in laborers that are exactly the same age as him and have lived a far worse life. As you push farther, you cross paths with the family of an explorer you found dead in an Incan trap still hopeful that he's coming home where you're given no option to tell them what happened, leaving them permanently oblivious to his fate. Eventually, you get to experience the other end of this tragedy, where you see the explorers begin their journey with so much confidence only to discover their skeletons when they run afoul of cannibals and the mysterious Angkor Wat. For as many stories as we get of the people who made their incredible journeys and came back, IoG emphasizes the many more who were swallowed by the unknown.

Illusion of Gaia's more tantalizing details are how it uses science fiction to ask more questions of our existence and evolution. There is an undercurrent of how massive suffering can cause abrupt and brazen evolution in people, not all for the better. The survivors of Mu after the comet destroyed it had to spend what must've been decades building an undersea tunnel to land. When they were done with their journey, they were changed to a different species of humans the game calls Angels. They look and occasionally act human, but their human emotions have eroded away, and they cannot be in sunlight long before "their spirit leaves them." They spend their time dancing and trying to remember what it was to feel human. There is an artist who can give them an emotional essence in their painting, but their subject turns into the painting and is lost. Even with the iffy translation, one gets the feeling they were aware of the side effects of this artist's works and still allowed him to continue, and it's not until Will has to rescue Kara from becoming a painting that it stops.

If I may run the risk of reading way too much into this, the suggestion here is that the evolution through mass suffering causes a deep rift in our humanity.  Long wars, plagues, and famine can create people who we don't recognize as people and can't exist the same way again. Some arguments say the strife causes great art, such as Picasso's "Guernica," depicting the aftermath of Nazi bombing practice on a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. But the art replaces the people who would've been alive had it never occurred. As a person living through horrific and often dehumanizing times right now and my empathic side being constantly overloaded, am I going to be like the Angels who can only listen to the music that used to bring me joy and mimic what it was like when I was happy?

 While the Angel Village tells the story of the survivors of these catastrophes, the Moon Tribe appears to represent the people who cause the suffering. While some experimented with the comet as a way to make life better, the comet's nature is a massive weapon of destruction created in an ancient war between advanced civilizations. The people who are exposed to the light who aren't obliterated become spirits who live forever. They lose almost all general experience of life and simply exist. They are not-so-secretly one of the villains (Especially if you've played Soulblazer where their sprites are literally demons that attack you), and they have an ultimate goal of complete obliteration with a certain disdain for humans. Will eventually meets his cousin Neil, an inventor who is the heir to an incredibly wealthy shipping company Rolek. When Will makes it to Euro, Rolek's headquarters, he uncovers a slavery ring that eventually leads to Neil's parents, who were murdered and replaced by members of the Moon Tribe.

Since I'm going out on all the limbs here, the Moon Tribe are the people who believe destruction and suffering are key to evolution. War causes us to invent so many items that are useful, after all. Slavery and subjugation are vital to building a world with comfort, such types would say. Even though they do create beings like the camel with the comet's light, the massive loss of life and culture from the destruction of these civilizations loom large over the world. That these beings seek ultimate annihilation would suggest this isn't the proper path. In fact, this path literally perverts the evolution of the world in Illusion of Gaia, causing a population that is far less advanced. Destroying the comet and stopping this cycle causes the world return to its "normal" evolution, which is modern times.

So what is the path? Reincarnation is a big theme in this trilogy, which suggests it's not easy and fraught with failure. What keeps you moving in the game is general human empathy and self-sacrifice to ease suffering. Setting the Inca free, Kara's pig Hamlet choosing to die and be food for the cannibal villagers who only did what they did out of necessity (Yeah, it's a WEIRD scene), and Lance going to the Great Wall of China to find a cure for his father's illness are all things that propel the plot forward. What ultimately solves everything is, of course, love (Cue 1930's silent film crescendo). Will's mother and father turn into spirits similar to the Moon Tribe, but maintain their humanity due to their love of their son. Will and Kara are descendants of Dark and Light knights respectively who used to war against each other combined into one force for the survival of humanity. That is the force that ultimately wins.

I'll stop because this is mainly my experience with the game, and I'd like you to have yours and share your own one day. What I hope is this little bit of my interpretation shows the wonder of Illusion of Gaia, even 25 years after I first played it. I keep discovering more and more each time I return, even as it's something I probably put more of myself and my thoughts into than the people who made it. Those are the best works though, right?

Breath of Fire II: Dive into the Toilet and Find Out Why You Shouldn't Ask God for Things

Breath of Fire II is one of the best games ever made. I'm a person who's lived with this belief for well over a decade, and I even find it hard to believe I said that. When I took a deep dive through the SNES library in the mid '00s, there was serious nostalgia busting, but when I returned to this one, I found to my shock how much it not only held up to a certain extent, but what a truly wild and special ride it was. The weird part is few truly realized it at the time of its release (Including me); perhaps because the SNES was at the end of its lifespan, or the punishing difficulty kept people at arm's length, or the slapdash translation made it seem more primitive than it really was. I can't even say if its glow as a rebellious strike to the core of Nintendo's censorship policies at the time (Even post-Mortal Kombat 2) is intentional. After all, maybe Nintendo of America was simply asleep at the wheel because they had more boxy, 64-bit fish to fry. Hell, I don't think why I love it is based on intentional design choices. This is perhaps the best David Lynch styled video game ever made... and it was likely a complete accident that it turned out that way.



Regardless of how it came to be 95% or so intact in North America even with a beyond stilted localization, Breath of Fire II is a JRPG where a hungover witch at a bar accidentally drops a plot-important ring into a toilet and you have to dive in after it, Trainspotting style. Keep in mind in Harvest Moon released afterwards, the town drunk literally is having juice all day according to the American localization (Both were K-A, the Kids-to-Adults rating at the time. Keep this in mind). On the other end, we have a series of events alluding to the dark side Christianity where the hand of assistance comes with the price of obliterating cultural and individual identity in ways that lead to corruption rather than enlightenment. There is obviously a gap between its means and its goals that can cause a wicked case of tonal whiplash. However, if taken as a gift, a game where its eclectic cast figure out the sinister secret behind the followers of God after racing to find ingredients for an insect cooking contest can be seen as something truly special.

It may seem like I'm spoiling the secret, but I feel the opening shot where a giant, threatening eyeball opens in extreme closeup while its owner screams, "You must become God's strangth" is already framing certain aspects negatively (And I'm pretty sure breaks rule #7 on Nintendo's standards and practices right off the bat). The only thing more obvious would be the bloodline of blue-haired lead Ryu if you know basic Japanese.

We start with Ryu as a boy in an idyllic village portrayed in black and white living with his sister and father after his mother died in a monster attack years ago. However, his sister tells him that he can have dreams of his mother if he naps near the head of the giant dragon that saved the village and went into a deep sleep (The subtle hints keep coming). Instead, he dreams of the giant eyeball from the opening and awakes to find the world is in color now, his sister is gone, their father replaced with a pastor named Hulk, and everyone in the village doesn't recognize Ryu anymore. The church still lets him stay the night, but a child thief and anthropomorphized dog Bow convinces him to leave the village with the candlesticks from the church's guest bedroom in tow. A rainstorm, a cave, and some bad choices in following an obvious threat lead to a horrific conclusion to the night that becomes a recurring nightmare for Ryu as he grows into a teenager.



After life on the streets, Ryu and Bow seem to have settled into a reasonable existence as Rangers, a profession that has been hampered by everyone hiring them to do their laundry or clean their house. Their first case is not quite that pedestrian, but it does involve finding a lost pet... that may have wandered into a mountain pass with harpies. It's here where the game begins to hit you with its odd sense of humor; modestly at first. Bow refuses to do the job until he finds out it's a cute girl with wings offering the job, but after battling the harpies who seem to be just as much fighting each other as they are you, and then having a run-in where you come in-between a homeless man and giant cockroaches who both want to eat the pet, you might find that the game is a little unconventional when it comes to scenario writing.

At this point, I'll stop the play-by-play with the plot because most of the fun is in experiencing HOW the story gets where it's going. Basically, Bow takes a side gig to rob one of the richest men in town at the behest of the other richest man in town (Named Kilgore and Trout, and I have no idea how a Kurt Vonnegut reference fits into ANYTHING here), is beaten to the punch by a girl with bat wings, but is still framed for the theft. The first quarter of the game involves trying to clear Bow's name through a series of off-the-wall events that leads to the creation of your party. Your crew includes Nina, a princess of a winged race, a huckster of a talking monkey named Sten, simple-minded-but-nice Rand whose race is based on armadillos, and Katt... the one that's an anthropomorphic cat.

Along your trails to find the real criminal, a giant frog is kissed by a maiden and becomes a human-sized frog as a result. Ryu has a job interview with a director of H.R. who is a hulking man chained to a wall who shouts, "Education? Hobby? Talent!?" before attacking. Demons designed like the xenomorphs from Alien "possess" children who wander into a seemingly empty well. What even is this game?!



It's hard to label what Breath of Fire II is trying to do because I'm unsure if the makers were completely conscious of it. It's too outright goofy to be surrealism and it's too serious to be any kind of satire. This was not one of the titles that gets a lot of nostalgia press coverage about its making, and if it does, it doesn't get translated over here, so getting an answer from the creators is a smidge difficult. However, one of the main minds of the Breath of Fire series is Yoshinori Kawano, who is perhaps best known as the executive director of the Dead Rising series, which also has moments of pure horror mixed with outright silliness. This certainly explains why there was a town named Romero in the first game full of people who rose from the grave. This game seems to be having fun with itself, occasionally inserting inspiration from something the creators enjoy, while lightly hinting with a sardonic smile at the absolute horror show to come in the creature designs that go the extra mile in portraying unhinged evil.

Keep in mind this was still during a time when game narratives were evolving. There aren't a ton of aspects in the actual design that suggest what they're going for. This was simply made to be a really good RPG for the SNES, and its features were more created to be selling points than to support themes in the story. The core gameplay is pure turn-based RPG with random encounters tweaked and improved from the first game which, despite its unique trappings, was just a "boy with a special destiny takes on an evil empire" game. One new feature is a mood tear, which tells you how the characters are feeling towards you or if they're feeling anything at all (A purple hue is reserved for pure evil). Cool, but it doesn't really do much for the story. There's a night and day time progression in which the importance drops after the first continent. You can build your own village, populate it with the people you choose (Or a cat that just sleeps in its own house and does nothing of value but create other cats to run around the home), and choose the architecture, but the execution is primitive and there's no reason why this feature needed to be in this game. Besides getting the good ending, you're not missing much if you ignore it. The menu has a little creature that tells you how likely a battle is in your next step, but you'll only make decent use out of it a couple times because it's almost always at full alert.



The closest feature that possibly ties to a theme is the Unification system. You can combine party members and shamans to create powerhouses. What this might mean is your party's diversity becomes something far more powerful than the ultimate enemy, which is using its influence to erase individuality and create a world of homogenized, mindless dolls that simply exist to feed its master. But that is a stretch, considering it doesn't answer many of the questions it generates, like who these "combined" people are. What are their personalities now that they are multiple people in one body? Is anyone dominant or is their personality split between the interests and behaviors of the people involved? The game doesn't even pretend to answer. There's really some indication that I'm reaching with the introduction of the system, where a woman picks you off the street and describes unification entirely in sexual innuendo before getting shooed away by her grandmother to properly explain it. It's rated K-A! Your ten-year-old brother is allowed to hear about the wonders of two people or more fusing into one! This game was clearly vetted by the ratings board!

Now to discuss how the game plays. It's quite good for a SNES RPG with a couple obvious stumbling blocks. The graphics are lively with a wide amount of animation that gives plenty of character to the villagers (The merchants update their ledgers when you buy from them) and extra work was put in to give the world some life. There's a single, minor battle that takes place at a bar where they take enough care to put a background specifically for that fight, and many backdrops in battles will have movement instead of being static. Tonally, the music is fine, but there're a small handful of tracks and the main half-dozen will get you reaching for Spotify relatively quickly. The battle system itself is pretty standard, but you will be dealing with it in most of your gameplay sessions since the encounter rate is HIGH. You'll need the experience since the game starts off on the hard side. has some insane difficulty spikes, and a few cheap enemy features like "Eggbeater," which allows an enemy to attack twice. Death also reduces your bank account by half in a game where making money is already a pain. You're in the world of savestates now, so the consequences can be stemmed a bit. However, the first game was hard as nails, and while the second is more polished and eliminates the HORSESHIT SECOND HP BAR FOR BOSSES *ahem*, it still maintains the difficulty.

No conversation of Breath of Fire II can be had without broaching upon its utter disaster of a translation. Whether it be the numerous misspellings, overly literal translation of everything to the point where everyone sounds like an alien learning human speech, or the, "Just... WHY?" of it all, it either adds a certain charm to the game or a dark cloud depending on your perspective. For me, it gives a layer of weird that ups the eccentricity of an already bizarre game. You will be turned away from a circus tent after the sun has set with the vague comment, "It sleeps at night." The population is made up of almost fever dream characters like a wizard's assistant who works out when nobody's watching or an old man who rides dolphins. Of course, when it trips you up because it makes it unclear where you need to go next due to the awkward dialogue, it's not so enjoyable. The game does use red text to underline important plot points and characters (Or to make deadpan jokes), so it only stumbles a few times, even if it's one of those bit-era games that is a bit too ambiguous as to where to go too often. If you wish to play it in non drunken English, there is a language patch you can attach to a ROM if you so choose.



The biggest problem with getting around is the back-and-forth, unnecessary additional steps, and what isn't properly explained in-game. Early on, after you save a village from creepy, underground demons, you have to go back to Bow's hiding place to get an update on his status. However, then you have to go back to the demon village to get a carpenter to help start the process of building your own town, which then requires you to go BACK to Bow's hideout, and then return to the village that formerly had the demons a final time to move forward. Keep in mind this is with a high encounter rate without an item called Smoke that doesn't even help that much, and you need a special ability the character Sten has to move across certain cliffs that nobody ever tells you he has or how to use it. They expected you to have the instruction booklet and to actually read it.

Even when you have a clear-cut idea, there are complications. Given a quest to get a grass creature from a circus, you find the circus has moved to an island. You can't travel across the ocean, so you need something to help you. What they want you to do is remember a guy you helped has a whale cakes and cave touring shop, so you have to go there, find out there's an actual whale slumbering underneath that can transport you, and at the advisement of an old man and two dolphins, you have to go into the whale to defeat an evil doll it ingested that is keeping it asleep. Then when you use the whale to travel across the ocean, you have to make a deal to get the new party member by catching a rare monster. To do this, you have to go to the woods to not find the creature, but the bait in which to attract the creature. And then... you know what? You get the idea. It's a lot of extra steps.



I have advice for anyone who is intrigued by the content, but struggles with the game:

1. Keep a guide handy. It's not one where you have to read it intensively, but when you need a push in the right direction, including some, "I didn't know you could do that!" moments, it's a good quality of life thing to have on the side.

2. Keep in mind some characters have a special move they can perform on the overworld by pressing Y. You can scroll through your party using L/R. Half of them involve optional hunting/fishing things you can do, but there are ones you NEED, like Jean swimming through lakes or Katt slamming things open with her quarterstaff.

3. LEVEL UP STEN. Sten is kind of a half-formed character, battle wise. He has speed, but his attacks are relatively weak and you can only use magic four times at best without resting early on. There are better choices even when he joins your party. HOWEVER, he has a story important quest that involves him being stuck in a palace and defeating a relatively strong enemy by himself in three turns or less. If you are not prepared for this, unlike Rand's solo combat moment later on in the game, you will have to restart everything. Keep him up-do-date on leveling and save yourself a headache.

4. Items over healing spells. Money can be hard to find, but herbs are cheap and you can buy 9 at time near the start. Your major healer leaves the party early for a good while, and you will either have Ryu, whose magic points are limited, or Rand, who is the slowest party member and will be likely the last to act in a battle. Having the fastest characters keep items on hand (Katt. You need Katt) will save a lot of unnecessary deaths and retreats since revival items are at a premium and only one character can have a revival spell early on.



Back to the actual content. Sorry, it's simply a difficult game, and a little help goes a long way. So what was I leading up to? Ah yes, how this all adds up to a David Lynch JRPG. Well, what are the aspects Lynch works are known for? The dream-like atmosphere where people don't talk like humans, for one. There's plenty here. I've already mentioned the translation that, from what I understand, actually has most of the content in save a few cuts here and there. However, it's done in such a way like, "Rude Fellows Disappear" with the capitalization and everything. It often reminds me of scenes like Mulholland Dr.'s movie-within-a-movie discussion where there it is the constantly repeated line, "This is the girl."

The conflicts are goofy, but taken mostly seriously enough that nobody addresses the stupidity elephant in the room. The frog prince Jean being replaced by a fake that looks nothing like him has a bit where the people are so laid back and uncaring (As is he) that only his sister is on his side. This feels like some kind of satire that would fit well within a Lynch film even if it's not intended. And the characters occasionally feel like something from Twin Peaks, too. Staying with Jean, much of his personal troubles come from trying to confess his love to the witch Nimufu, who kidnapped people to try to solve her loneliness and turned them to stone out of her own self-loathing when, surprise, they fear her for abducting them. Jean's confession of love and offering of the ring that proves his royal blood to prove it is met with complete disbelief by Nimufu. Might I add that Nimufu is doing a bunch of this under the pressure of impressing her classmates for an upcoming witch school reunion. It's bizarre, but it strikes an emotional chord that normally doesn't get hit.

So we have weirdo characters doing offbeat things as the game strolls through a familiar genre. Now what else does David Lynch do? There are melodrama story hooks that are often used to reel in the viewers. Sten is a former soldier dealing with survivor's guilt, and Nina was born with black wings, deeming her cursed and banished by everyone in her kingdom. But these are minor elements in comparison what qualities are most remembered: The transfer into a waking nightmare. This is even sort of set up by a quest in which you must find a therapy pillow for a tree and enter its dreams to find the truth of what's happening to the world. Of course, this is a mighty coincidence since the game was out BEFORE Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. were even made, but as I've said, I don't believe many of the connections were intentional.



Throughout the game, the party faces off with bosses that transform from seemingly ordinary people. A corrupt arena owner who fixes fights and stimulates deathmatches to satisfy the audience's bloodlust. The leader of a family of thieves who has taken to the even less honorable trade of holding children ransom. Numerous characters who are either trying to stifle or assume power in various nations tell them they did it for God. The connection that runs underneath most of them is St. Eva's church.

 If you couldn't tell by now, this is one of those JRPGs; a predecessor to the Xenogears of the world, if you will. I don't have anything against these Godslayer games, but most of the time, let's just say I haven't been impressed with them. Xenogears says a lot of things... and that's the problem. It goes off on so many directions that's it's hard to pin down anything concrete besides, "God bad. People need to be in charge of their own destiny." Yeah, God does suck when They kill thousands by crashing a spaceship, and manipulating the evolution of a planet for their own needs while the people who reap its benefits do cruel zombie experiments under the guise of religious organization meant to protect the people (If I got minor details wrong... I don't care). For actual heavy duty analysis on Xenogears, you're going to have to pay me. I'm not playing through that mess again on my time. Visit this website for a comedic look at the many head-scratching things about Xenogears made by someone who has an affection for it. Final Fantasy Tactics is a bit out of my wheelhouse as I personally am not big on Yasumi Matsuno's brand of grindy tactical RPG, and once I learned where the story was going, it didn't do much to surprise the me who took a couple semesters of European history.

All right, we're digging into the "fun" part of this article which I'm sure many will be many angry at. You know what, some of these people are celebrate putting tens of thousand of children into concentration camps to make them feel safe, and worship a man who has as much of a chance of making it to Heaven as a camel making it through the eye of a needle according to their own messiah. As a Lutheran built on the fundamentals of pointing out the hypocrisies and abuses of the church, if they can't handle another opinion, or can't even be on the same street as another religion because they're barbarians opposite the religion that launched the Children's Crusade, fuck 'em.



So what makes Breath of Fire II different, especially given the first half of its narrative and scenario are mostly episodic larks? This is weird personal story time. When I replayed BoF II in college, I had a college acquaintance who was deep into some near-cult religious business. They followed the rules devoutly, cowered in fear when they were slightly out of line, and were judgmental on the lives of others who lived by other creeds. And for what did they do all of this? So God would give them a boyfriend. That was it. Their entire motivation. I did not talk to her much after that, and I heard she hadn't much improved when she broke with the cult when God didn't "grant" her what she wanted. The experience had given her nothing that made her a better person.

That episode of my life happened as I was at the point in BoF II where the party realizes they need to fully investigate St. Eva's Grand Church, and in visiting the community outside of it, found a formerly lonely boy who tells them not only did they have friends, but the grace of St. Eva saw to it he had his very own girlfriend. There are similar stories throughout the town, but you don't have much time to absorb it as when you try to leave, not only does it become the town from In the Mouth of Madness where you cannot escape, but suddenly, everyone gets very cold and their facades crumble to reveal they're soulless puppets of what they used to be. So, fair or unfair to the other games where Japanese game makers stick their tongues out at Western religion and show how many books (Including, most importantly, the Gnostic verses) they've read, the title where there is a boss named Algernon in which its flower is woman-shaped used to lure men to consume is the one that clicked for me. For those not in the know, I assure you that is not what Flowers for Algernon is about.



Breath of Fire II's ultimate villain is a demon sealed by Ryu's mother in a cave. To gain the energy required to escape, he uses his underlings who escaped in an earlier weakening of the seal to disguise themselves as humans to gain a following, and as people are brought to the "St. Eva"religion, the demons drain their energy and eventually take their souls. The Christianity aesthetic is all over St. Eva from the church designs to the priest and nuns to the capital G. What strikes me here is the approach actually pokes at what causes most of the moral rot that unfortunately exists within many Christian organizations. Again, I have no idea how much was done to intentionally hit on these points or if everything just happened to have lined up. It was amazingly prescient of so many things, right up to the phenomenon of mega churches in the Eva Grand Church at nearly the point mega churches started exploding into popular American culture.

What it hints at is there's very little spirituality in the approach to Christianity suggested here. It's a transaction; I'll be good, believe in God, and spread His word, and God gives me things. There's no actual desire to improve oneself, and being nice comes with a price tag instead of simply being a good person. It's simply a set of  rules and mantras that people say they follow more than actually following because hey, as long as they do this one thing in church that grants forgiveness, that's all that needs to be done. All of this would be fine if their ultimate goal wasn't to make everyone exactly like them.

As the second half plays out, Rand's mother Daisy is a farmer badgered by a holy knight who wants her to give her land to St. Eva. Daisy flatly turns them down as she's fine with her land and practices another religion. When you do a sidequest to deliver her donation to that other religion (Which seems to be some kind of odd, Buddhist-ish temple) in hopes for a good harvest, she is promptly kidnapped and her name shows up suspiciously signed on a paper that allows the church she was against to take her property. It is not enough that they have to exist everywhere, but other religions and the people who believe in them must either be reformed or erased. A random Youtuber I forget (And don't want to dignify them by remembering) said one of the best parts of BoF II is that is has these issues without "forcing" race into their JRPG. I'd hate to burst the bubble on his analytics, but what do you think these anthropomorphized armadillo and tiger people represent, and what is this all about if not parts of Christianity going across the ocean, erasing culture, and sometimes stealing people? There is a part of the plot where people visit a church and are vanished, sometimes across continents, and there is literally a demon whose sole job is to erase everyone's memories of their previous lives and make them loyal patrons of St. Eva instead.



What about the nice people who follow such religions who are genuinely good people and are into St. Eva make themselves and others better people? They exist in this game. You occasionally cross paths with Ray, a preacher for St. Eva who is far more into the Christianity that Jesus would've called his own. I wish they had done more with him as after the truth is revealed, he kind of disappears from the story. When he is involved, however, he is a decent character who actually helps you with some of the things St. Eva might've been involved with, like saving an entire village from being taken over by underground demons. Then there's Ryu's own father Ganer, who is a pastor for St. Eva, marries a woman who practices the Dragon Clan's religion, and he not only respects her religion, but in a flashback, also worships at the dragon shrine with his wife.

Sadly, these characters are used as either obedient tools or to amplify the power of the church. In the case of Ganer, it's literal as he's hooked to a machine that increases the soul-sucking abilities of the demons. Despite Ray's good intentions, he ultimately becomes an enemy to the party after a big reveal where two lovers with the resistance are murdered in the middle of Eva's Grand Church surrounded by chanting parishioners who are no longer individuals, but slaves to a routine with no self-awareness of what actually happens in front of them. Even with the best of intentions, these people get caught under a giant machine of a religion that was more about increasing power than spiritual truth and individual betterment.

But this is simply an interpretation of a game where, in the credits, the members of the resistance against God are mostly named after Disney characters. You can do what you please with it. You can say it's all actually another 90's joke about how Michael Eisner is Satan. These credits also call the female engineer you need to get the good ending of the game A. Titi Efcup, a joke name underlining how the makers might've had issues with women at the time, enhanced by the resistance leader Tiga who just kind of takes Katt out of your party at one point because he thinks he's in love with her. Look at the mountains of text above and the various swerves from heavy topics to... a boob joke. Welcome to the wild ride that is Breath of Fire II. Your admission cost is the potential of 15 enemy encounters in one room if you don't have the Smoke item.



Oh hey, Enzo Ferrari credited below a reference to the Right Said Fred song, "Don't Talk, Just Kiss." Please take all of this seriously. I get the feeling they wanted to reference "I'm too Sexy," but perhaps even my theory Nintendo standards and practices wasn't paying attention was wrong and they thought it was too sexy for this game. OKAY, I'M DONE GOING BACK AND FORTH ON THIS RIDE NOW. I'VE DONE ENOUGH. BYE.