Breath of Fire V
Dragon Quarter

Reviewer Chi Phan	Story	6/10
	Characters	5/10
	Graphics	7/10
	Music	7/10
	Gameplay	8/10
	Extras	10/10
	Final Score	7.2/10

One of the biggest complaints I had with the Breath of Fire series is that it's all the same. One game after another. From the fishing game to the Fairy Colony to the use of the same character names like Ryu and Nina. The basic concept of a Breath of Fire game is always the same. Ryu, a dragon boy and Nina, a princess from Wyndia. After so and so number of Breath of Fire games, you kind of get tired of the same old stuff over and over again. And you have to wonder why doesn't Capcom try something new with the Breath of Fire series. Don't they realize that this once great series is now faltering on the fact that it's the same elements over and over and gamers out there are starting to tuned out to this series? Only the die hard fans seem to still remain faithful. Well...much to my surprise, Capcom actually got the message and did something totally new and different with Breath of Fire V. This may get new fans interested in the series again or it may pissed off the loyal fans who don't like this new look and style. What do I think? Hmm....

Who is this child? Friends never again. We find the world of Dragon Quarter takes place in a distant future where mankind is living deep underground. It appears that the surface of the world is no longer liveable due to a disaster. Here deep within the underground world, you find a city called Sheldar. This city is run by the government known as Regent and protected by the military group known as the Rangers. Here you find two Rangers, Ryu 1/8192 and Bosch 1/64 setting out on a mission to guard a train transport carry a cargo. Each Ranger is identify by a Ratio number to determine their ability and rank. Ryu being rank 1/8192 is pretty much a no name grunt. During the transport of a secret cargo, the train was attacked by an anti-government Trinity member named Lin. With the train destroyed, both Ryu and Bosch ended up separated. Bosch thinking that Ryu was killed headed back to the city to report the incident. Ryu on the other hand ended up in a cavern sector and decides to make his trek back to the city as well. Here near the train crash site, Ryu encountered the secret cargo. It turns out that the cargo was a little girl with wings named Nina. Nina quickly took a liking to Ryu and decided to stick with him. Not that she had a choice. The rebel Lin also stranded in this cavern sector encounter both Ryu and Nina on her trek back to her base. Lin and Ryu decided to put their differences aside and team up to make their way out of the cavern sector. During the journey back into the city, Ryu encounter Bosch again. This time Bosch was ordered to kill Nina, the cargo. Ryu will have none of that and the two former friends clashed. The fight ended in the death of Ryu. But to the dismay of Bosch, Ryu display an unusual power and transformed into a Dragon upon his death. Bosch quickly retreated after this. Ryu too was surprised by this. Where this Dragon power came from and how he got it was unknown to him. But putting that aside, Ryu headed into the city. To the top of the city that is, to the place where Nina came from. Here Ryu learned that Nina is an artificial life form created to be experimented on whether or not she has an ability that can help mankind better survive the underground environment. But Nina was a failed experiment. She is dying and can no longer live in the harsh underground environment. The government has decided to eliminate Nina. Ryu on the other hand decided to take Nina to the surface. Since Nina can't survive the underground environment then it would be better if she was up on the surface. So with that decision made, Ryu and Lin headed off on a long trek to the surface. Of course it's not that easy, the Regents who controls the city and holds the keys to the surface world won't allow it so they decided to use all means necessary to stop Ryu from reaching the surface. From here on out, the story of Breath of Fire V is told. Now overall this is a fairly short story. And it's also a story that has a few plot holes in it. Some of the plot holes can be attributed to the fact that not all of the story cut scenes will be revealed until you replay the game a few times. But on the other hands, some of the plots still doesn't seem to come together very well. The story from my point of view doesn't really clearly define the roles of the Dragons in this game. In all the other previous Breath of Fire games, I understand the reason and purpose of the Dragons. But here I have yet to understand the meaning and importance of the Dragons in this game. I also fail to understand the logic on why Nina would get better if she was up on the surface. I mean the reason why mankind is living underground is because the surface has been destroyed due to a disaster. The air is no longer breathable, rivers are gone, and trees no longer exist on the surface. Hence mankind needed in live underground now. But yet Nina is somehow suppose to get better by living in the surface where the air is no longer breathable? I fail to understand that logic at all behind Ryu thinking. I also don't seem to understand the motivation behind Bosch wanting to kill his friend all of a sudden. That seem to me to be a little out of character all of a sudden. The story also don't really seem to clearly established the relationship between the government and the rebel forces. Why is the government so bad? Beats me. Not to mention who and what the Regents are individually. Other than the fact that the Regents are the ones that runs the government. There's just so many plot holes that this isn't a very good story overall. This is the worst Breath of Fire story out of the entire series.

Power of a Dragon This is the smallest and the most dullest cast of characters in the entire Breath of Fire series. The cast of characters is basically made up of 4 main characters. 3 party members and 1 so called bad guy. Ryu, Nina, Lin, and Bosch. Nina is just a kid and doesn't really talk at all. A far cry from other previous princess Ninas. And the fact that this Nina is an artificial life form gives her no background history at all. So you can scratch out any character developement on Nina. That leaves 3 characters left to work on. Ryu, the main character has no personality at all. Oh he speaks here and there but in terms of a distinctive personality that separate him from the others, there's none here. We know he's a Ranger but other than that, we know nothing else. Why is he a Ranger? What is his friendship with Bosch like? Does he have any past history? Nothing is really explained about Ryu other than that he's a Ranger and he wants to help protect Nina. That's too vague of a character developement for a lead character. The same can apply for Bosch. Bosch is a Ranger and Ryu partner. But what sort of partner is he to Ryu? Is there a deep friendship there? There can't be much there cause it didn't take long for Bosch to become the main bad guy in the story. But why is Bosch the main bad? Why does Bosch all of a sudden have this hatred for Ryu and a sudden desire to kill his friend Ryu at all costs? These are some of the things that needed to be developement more on Bosch's character. For the first 10% of the game, Bosch is acting within character as Ryu friend and partner. But then for the rest of the game, Bosch seems to be acting out of character. And this doesn't really get explained alot. Lastly we come to Lin. Lin a rebel member of the anti-government group called Trinity. Fine. But why is Lin a member? What reason does she hate the government for? Did the government do something to her? Does she have a family? Where is she from? These are the things that her seem to character lack. Overall you have 4 characters that are grossly under-develope with no real unique personalities at all. You also don't have the group interacting with each other much in a way of finding out who they are within each other. This is something that most rpgs have. Where you see your party group at one point or another rest together and talk about each other's past to learn about one another. You don't see that here. You can excuse Nina but you can't excuse the other characters. There wasn't any character here that I care for. They all seem very depressed to me in this game.

My Super Gun! Graphics in this game isn't too bad. But it's not great either. The settings in this game is it's own worst enemy. Since Dragon Quarter is about an underground society, you're not going to get a rich and beautiful world to help show off the graphics. What you're getting is a dark world with numerous dungeons. It's not like there's a sky and sun in this world. And for that, the entire designs of Dragon Quarter is dungeons and dungeons. There are a few towns here if you can even call them towns. Everything is done is a 3-D cel-shaded subterranean environment. Where everything is in dark colors. Sometimes too dark for my taste. The character designs are done in a semi-animated looked. I wouldn't call them full japanese animated look. The designs of the characters don't really blend too well with the 3-D background and you can fully see the black outline of these cel-shaded characters. The drawback of using cel-shaded graphics on characters is the fact that there's this big bold black line that outline the characters. Good cel-shading would be able to minimize it within the 3-D background so that you don't notice the bold black line that outlines the characters. The artwork designs on the characters themselves aren't as good as I like. There are two japanese animated scenes. At the opening and at the ending of the game. The opening I wasn't too impress with. But the ending was a rich and beautiful animated scene. But there aren't any in-game animated scene which is a shame. That's about it. I wasn't very impress with the game graphics. Is it the fault of the game developers or is it due to the settings of Dragon Quarter? Or maybe both? I mean you can't show off the rich graphic of a game if the game takes place in a dark, dark underground world.

The Fury of Ice There are about 48 different tunes in this game. Most of them are dungeons and battle tunes. The main theme on all of these tunes is base on a danger clock countdown that the end is near. A prime example of this is the main Dragon Quarter opening theme. This is properly the best one that I like and one that I identify the game with. But to be perfectly honest, while I'm playing the game, I don't really notice the music that much. All these dungeons and battle themes all sound the same to me. There aren't any really good story theme in this game. But that can be expected since this isn't really a story driven game. Good music comes from the story as it's the music that define how the gamers emotion should be during that key story scene. And without a strong story to help back up the music, the music will falter. Three months after finishing this game, you'll probably won't remember any single musical tunes from this game at all. LOL. It's not bad, just nothing that really grabs you. Not to mention not enough variety of tunes for me. And when I say variety, I don't mean give me ten different battle tunes. LOL.

It's over my friend. Even heroes must fall. Game Information    Genre: Traditional Rpg    Publisher: Capcom    Disc: 1 DVD Disc    Memory: 240 KB    Players: 1 Player Mode    Vibration: Yes    Dual Analog: Yes    Digital Control: No    Rating: Teen    Release: February 2003 The gameplay is very different in this game. For your first time playing it, it's going to be a little bit hard. Unlike previous Breath of Fire game, this is a dungeon crawling game. Save points and healing options are very limited to none existence. Your main objective is to go from one small local town through numerous dungeons to reach another small town port. Then repeat the process again. There's no world map to explore at all. Each of these dungeons can be fairly short to long. There's no random battles but instead you can see monsters roaming about. That's the good news as for the most part you can fairly avoid monster battles if you need to. There are three things that will work against you though. Save points are next to nothing in this game. You'll only find a save point in a town. Problem is that it might take anywhere from 5-10 dungeons before the next town shows up. That's scary as nothing worse than playing close to 10 dungeons and dying. And having to do it all over again. Now you can do a temporary save anywhere all the time. But the temporary save get's erase each time you load it. Meaning that each time you die, you can only load from a real save point from town. Oh and it get's worst on the save part. Even if you're in town and there's a save point, you need to have a save token inorder to save. Problem is that save token is a rare thing to have in this game. So even if you're in town and there's a save point and you have no save token, you're screwed. The sad thing is that you can't buy save token. You can only find them in dungeons. For your first game around, this will be one of the most painful feature in the game that will annoy the heck out of you. Now if that doesn't scare you then check this out. There are no INNs to sleep in or any healing magic or revival magic in this game. Ouch. Your only means of healing and reviving is from items. This means that all your concentrated money will be mostly going to buying these healing stuff. Money is already hard to come back and the fact that you need to spend most of your money on healing items means you can't spend it on weapons and armors. This makes fighting against monsters even more harder. What's even worst is that your inventory bag that you carry around is limited to 5 items per page. Each party member represent one page. You can have up to 10 page by the end of the game but early on, you're limited to 3 pages and a maximum of 15 items to carry. What you find in dungeon will be limited to what you can carry. These are the thing that you need to know before you make your trek into the long dungeons ahead. The gameplay sound pretty bad doesn't it? And it is on your first time around. It get's alot easier on your second time around when you can import your Party Experience and weapons from your first game over. Other key features are listed as the following: Skills and Combos: Skills and combos are the staple of your offensive attacks. Inorder for you to attack you have to have a skill. No skill means no ability to attack. You can gain skills from skill that are already attached to your equipment as a default skill or you can steal them from enemies or get them from treasure chests. Once you learn a skill you will need to attach it to your weapon or shield. Putting together a string of combos attack will consist of various different skills. This is important to do as each time you follow up a skill with another skill, you gain an added percentage increase in damage attack. A good 9+ combo attacks can net you over 1000+hp damage. Of course the number of combos you can get off depends on the number of Ability Points available for you to use. Try to master good combos and skill early on. Traps: Since you see monsters roaming about, you want to be able to get the surprise attack on them and get an extra turn. Or maybe there's too many monsters roaming about and you need to lure some of them away from the group so you can have an advantage. This is where traps come in handy. Traps range from fresh meat to lure monsters to come toward you so you can get the jump on them or from bombs where you can throw the bombs at monsters to low their hp before engaging them in battle. Learning how to use the various traps to your advantage is something a true gamers should take to heart. Party Experience: Next to the regular experience that each party member gets after a battle, you get another kind of experience called Party Experience. You can get Party experience through battles and by collecting them as items. Party Experience is an extra pool of experience gathered together. You can then distribute these party experience to whatever party member that you want. This is great if you want to level your party up some more or if you want to level a particular party member to the same level as your other party members. Party Experience is very important so use them carefully. They are most usefull in the extra bonus dungeon. SOL System: This is known as Scenario Overlay System. Throughout the game's story cut scenes, there will be times where a SOL will be flashing at the bottom of the movie cut scenes. This indicate that there's an extra hidden cut scene that needs to be unlock. Some of these cut scenes can be unlock by giving up afterwards and restarting the game from your last save point after watching the cut scenes with SOL. While other cut scenes can only be unlock after you finish the game and restarting a new game with a SOL Start. This helps the added replay value as you try to unlock the full story behind Dragon Quarter. D-Counter: This is a doomsday Dragon clock. You start off with a 0% on your clock. Once that clock reaches 100%, your game is over period. There is no way for you to reverse the clock countdown. The clock percentage increase is base on the number of steps you take and the number of times you transform into a dragon and use dragon abilities. There are two purpose for D-Counter. One is to stop cheaters who want to spend hours leveling up. And the second one is to stop cheaters from transforming into Dragon form all the time. Since your Dragon form is all powerful and you can't really be harm in Dragon form, the game disencourage you from using Dragon form. Your Dragon form is so powerful that you can kill the end game boss within seconds just like that. It would be no fun if all you do is transform into Dragon and kill everything in sight. For that purpose this D-Counter is set up so that you try and play the game without having to transform into a Dragon. D-Ratio: This is the rating of Ryu. You start off on your first game with a ratio of 1/8192. Your ratio is calculated base on certain criterias in the game. Such as map completion, how many hours it takes for you to finish the game, to your average level. Once you finish a game and start a new game from SOL, you will get a new ratio. Why is this Ratio important? Well throughout the game, certain areas of the dungeon will be closed or blocked off to you base on your Ratio. If you are able to meet the Ratio requirement then you can gain access to that area that you couldn't before. The highest Ratio to earn is 1/4 also known as Dragon Quarter. This will mean that you have to replay the game several times inorder to achieve a Dragon Quarter. There's no doubt that this is the most unique and different Breath of Fire game ever. The gameplay for the most part isn't too bad and can be considered pretty good. The only thing that kills the enjoyment is the lack of save points in this game. The SOL system is unique but it can also be annoying after awhile. Then there's also a fact that you don't have any Inns to sleep in and no healing magic. Which makes your enjoyment of the game even less. I would classify this game as hard on your first time around. And to be honest, my first time around, I didn't really enjoy this game that much. But on a second try, things are a little bit easier and my enjoyment and understanding of the game was greater. You really can't appreciate this gameplay unless you played it a second time. And I recommend all gamers to at least give this game a second try before forming a final judgement.

Score: 8/10

To reach for the sky. It's all about the replay here. In fact sometimes I think the entire concept of the game is base on the extra replay value. In terms of extra sidequests that you can do in the game itself, there's not much. Everything is centered on one thing, the Fairy Colony which is the staple traditional of the Breath of Fire series these days. This time around things are much different from the previous Fairy Colony that appeared in other Breath of Fire games. While it is still called a Fairy Colony since the Fairies are the one that are running and controlling it, the colony is really an ant colony since it's the ants are doing the building and creating shops inside the colony. The concept of this mini game is that you hire numerous Ants to expand the colony and open up different kind of shops. Once you are able to expand your colony to the fullest, you can then proceed to buy items from these shops that you wouldn't normally be able to get anywhere else in the game. You can also have shops that make money for you. This is the best place to earn your money and get good equipment for your party. But that's not all. One of the room inside your colony is a room called Kokon Horay. The Kokon Horay is really a 50 floor dungeon inside your Fairy Colony. It's one of the hardest thing to do in the game but it's also the best and only place to get the rarest skills and equipment for your party. Trying to complete this 50 floor dungeon will take at least 6 hours of gameplay without any save point. Only the strongest players would want to do this. So on the surface you have a Fairy Colony and a 50 floor dungeon as your sidequests option. It's looks small but in reality it's very time consuming to do. Now once you finish the game the first time around, you can then do a SOL new game where all your skills, weapons, Party Experience and money get ported over to your new game. This should give you an incentive to replay the game again. But that's not all. Due to the SOL system, by replaying again you can have access to more extra story cut sequences that weren't shown in the game when you first play it. This also will give you more closure to the full story behind Dragon Quarter. Access to areas that you couldn't access before in the game due to your low ranking as a Ranger will become available to you as well. In fact, you may be required to replay the game more than 2 times to be able to unlock all the extra story cut sequences and locked areas. The good news is that since the game takes about 25 hours the first time, a replay game will take maybe only less than 8 hours if you have all your strongest weapons ported over as well as Party experience. It's all about the replay value here. Whether or not you want to replay this game 3 or 4 times is up to you.

I give Capcom great points for trying something new with the gameplay for a change. Unfortunately the gameplay isn't perfect. It still needs some improvement in certain areas. But then again not many gameplay can be perfect. However, the drawback with this game is the story and character developement which I find very disappointing and the worst of all the Breath of Fire games. If there's another Breath of Fire game, I like to see a better cast of characters and a much better storyline. If you want to try something unique and new then this game is the one to get but don't expect much of a story to draw you. Final Score: 7.2/10 Time to complete: over 25 hours not including the bonus dungeon. Difficulty: Hard Favorite character: None Best fighter: Ryu Most useful character: Lin Best music theme: Opening theme Coolest feature: Ant Colony Best advice: Save your healing items Best defensive skill: Steal Best trap: Fresh Meat Also try: Grandia Xtreme Up next: XenoSaga