77. Breath of Fire IV
Capcom, 2000: PS4. Points: 218 Votes: 5 Previous rank: 50
Cards on the table, I adore this game. I had it at number 4 and ranked it above any other PS1 title. I’ve been racking my brain for a way to write about it that isn’t just lauding it with superlatives—to get at why I find it so impactful. It’d be easy to go on about the quality of its plot, theme, characters, gameplay, exploration, music, or especially Capcom’s masterful and extensive spritework. But none of that would get at the heart of why this game in particular hits in a way different from other luminaries from the same era.
The word I keep coming back to is “nuanced.” I don’t just mean that the game is nuanced in those categories of plot, theme, etc. (though it is), but something in a larger sense. Breath of Fire IV is very much a traditional JRPG expressed in the traditional style: bird’s-eye-view perspective of a globetrotting quest peppered with random encounters and fleshed out with some light character-building, featuring a story about the power of friendship as expressed via textbox-heavy story scenes or through a copious array of minigames. It’s fairly bog standard as far as this style goes. I think that’s important because Breath of Fire IV exhibits just what this style can accomplish when attended to with care, craft, and nuance.
To understand what I mean, take a look at the game’s opening scene (begins at 2:01, if the embed doesn't timestamp properly). We start on the sound of wind blowing across a vast and trackless desert, then hear the clank and rumble of a sandflyer starting. First-person narration in text gives us just the barest orientation. An unidentified ‘we’ have left the castle and are crossing the desert to search for missing sister Elina. This narration is presented in three paragraphs. In between the first and the second we fade up on the very moment of sunrise as the camera pans to the left revealing a predawn desert vista. In between the second and third paragraphs the sandflyer emerges from the left side of the frame, persenting the first view of our protagonists Nina and Cray aboard a wondrous flying ship. Both are unusual characters, with Nina sporting a pair of bird’s wings from her back like an angel and Cray a thick tiger’s tail.
Despite this game normally taking place from a bird’s-eye three-quarters perspective, this shot is framed from the side, where the horizon line and star-scattered sky ape an appropriately cinematic aspect ratio for the game’s opening image. The sandflyer is a simple model of bulky polygons, but painterly textures endow it with detail and presence. Of particular note is the way Capcom’s artists have used a muted color palette and painted shadows into their textures to give the game an illustrated quality, somewhere between storybook watercolor and French clean-line. Practically, the painterly approach to textures allows for rich and detailed locations to be realized out of simple models, and seamlessly incorporates the 2D sprites into the 3D environments. Here, the 2D sprites have been cleverly positioned so their three-quarter perspectives are masked by the flyer’s railing so that they appear to be standing in profile. A light flashes in the sky above and between their heads and a shooting star streaks downward past Nina’s face, catching her attention. A quick cut brings us to the standard bird’s-eye view, where Nina comments on the star. She must have taken it as a sign or omen for she seeks reassurance from Cray, who in response makes an oath they’ll find Elina. This is the first appearance of dialog, which is presented in tastefully designed text-boxes that evoke a slip of parchment. Portraits of the characters accompany the text, and between the close-up view of their expressions and various nods, gestures, and body expressions painstakingly animated into their sprites we get a real sense of the ‘acting’ achieved in this game, where much tone and voice can be intuited from non-verbal cues.
We fade to black for a moment, then up on a stunning shot of the blistering dawn as the sandflyer emerges out of shimmering heat and crests the horizon. The game’s first musical accompaniment matches the appearance of the flyer with a high flute trill, then the main melodic line and thematic leitmotif begins as the sound of wind drops away and experientially we’re in a montage where we see conversation but hear no dialog, a kind of distant place, further back from the in-moment action, where thematic tone takes primary position. A series of shots, again dynamic and nonstandard, depict the flyer’s passage across the desert, including one very dramatic one from a high angle featuring a lizard scampering away from the vehicle’s disturbance. As the music crescendos, the flyer blazes past in a quick 180° pan and shoots off towards the horizon. Fade to black for the chapter 1 title card and the reveal of a column of light, which we don’t know of yet, but represents the emergence of a new Endless and the impact it will have on the world’s destiny, as the music fades with a note of mysterious poignancy.
Whew! That’s all just a brief two minutes out of the game’s many hours. But throughout the whole length of the experience there are many such displays of artistry and craft. The game sits in a goldilock zone between depiction and iconography, turning all the limitations of the JRPG form and the Playstation’s capabilities into rich clay from which to craft its story. Perhaps ‘mature’ is the better word for the game. Not mature in the sense of crass and rowdy content of a teenage audience, as the word is sometimes used, but mature in the sense of artistic growth. Here is a game that uses the unique and singular tools of JRPG storytelling with skill and confidence to present a quiet and nuanced game that I can’t help but receive as an exemplar of the form.
