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.
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