VIDEO GAME REVIEW
BREATH OF FIRE - DRAGON QUARTER
By Xythar Darkmoon

With Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter's release, Capcom's Breath of Fire series moves into its fifth instalment and its first on the PS2. Dragon Quarter, however, could not be more different to its predecessors, even more so than Final Fantasy 8 was (comparisons between the two will be inevitable, but I won't make any here because they're really very different types of games). In my opinion, the previous Breath of Fire games epitomised everything that was generic about the RPG genre, having plots spread thin over a game padded with a fetch-quest gameplay architecture and an average turn-based battle system. But all that's about to change, and for the better.

The first thing that should perhaps be said about Dragon Quarter is that it is a very battle-focused game. This is not a traditional RPG with a world map to explore or very many NPCs to interact with. Dragon Quarter is almost entirely dungeons, and those dungeons are almost entirely battles. The game has a total of about four or five very small towns generally consisting of one to three areas and a very small number of NPCs. The only real purpose of Dragon Quarter's towns is to provide a place for the game's recurring vendor characters to appear, and considering that they often appear between dungeons as well the towns really seem more like a token nod towards the accepted RPG formula than anything else.

Considering that too high a focus on battle can ultimately be the kiss of death for many RPGs, how does Dragon Quarter manage to almost entirely focus on battle and still provide such an excellent experience? The answer is that Dragon Quarter's excellent battle system makes battle more interesting than in the vast majority of other RPGs. I'm very impressed that Capcom of all people took the battle systems, an aspect which has seemingly only been an afterthought in the previous games in the series, and made the battles this RPG's best feature and not just a way to lengthen playtime.

Firstly, in what I find to be a very pleasing decision, random battles have been eliminated. Visible enemies now roam the dungeons, and in an additional touch of realism which I don't recall seeing in any other RPG's encounter system yet, what you see is what you'll fight - unlike in many other RPGs where that one enemy you see on the map somehow undergoes instant mitosis to form three enemies by the time you enter battle. The transition to battle is almost seamless in Dragon Quarter - while the game still employs the quick screen blur & fade out, when the screen fades back in you'll see that while you've switched to battle mode (if you do this by striking the enemy with your weapon, you receive an extra turn with the character in question), you're still in the same area. The fact that Dragon Quarter, unlike most other RPGs, doesn't transport your character to some extraplanar area to do battle adds immensely to the strategy that may be employed both in and before battle.

Capcom have wisely capitalised on their encounter system by including the "PETS", Positive Encounter and Tactics System. I don't think they really needed to have come up with an acronym for it, but the premise is simple enough. Before battles even start, you have the chance to seize the upper hand by throwing items such as meat to attract the enemies to a particular point, or dynamite to damage them. You can even set a bomb outside of battle, then start the battle and lure the enemies into its marked explosion radius, then detonate the bomb and damage the enemies severely. Even the humble Fresh Meat is a component in more strategy than simple enemy avoidance - if you enter a room full of numerous but weak bats for instance, rather than having to attack them all one by one you can throw meat to cluster them together, begin battle, and the enemies will remain close together and will easily fall to area-effect abilities. Similarly, groups of tough enemies may be separated and taken on one by one. One character's gun allows you to initiate battle from a distance, and with this you are sometimes able to trap short-range enemies before the battle has even started for an easy victory.

All that, and I haven't even covered what happens inside the battles yet. In battle, your characters have an allotment of AP that they receive every round. Don't confuse this with the AP of the previous Breath of Fire games that was basically MP under a different name. In Dragon Quarter, AP is used for both moving and attacking. Dragon Quarter's battles do indeed employ a positional aspect that is not that commonly found in RPGs of its nature. Each character has a maximum radius of movement per turn, but moving within that radius also costs an amount of AP that is determined by how far away your destination is in a straight line. AP is not "spent" on moving until you perform an action - you're free to carefully position yourself before then and the game will show you how much AP will remain if you choose to move to any particular point. You can even reset yourself to your exact starting position if you change your mind.

When you are within range of an enemy, you may then use the attacking skills you have equipped on your weapon, which again cost AP (10, 20 or 30 depending on the skill's level). Different weapons have different ability slots available, which adds to choice and customisability. While you cannot change skills in battle, you may change to one of the additional two weapons each character may carry, which can contain different skill sets for different situations. Most attacking skills (generally those that do damage and not other effects) may be chained together in a nicely strategic combo system which lends importance to what skills you have equipped and where, as well as what you choose to use with the AP available to you. When you end your turn, any AP left is carried over to the next (up to a maximum of double your standard AP) allowing you to build larger combos. Unlike Xenogears's much maligned combo system, Dragon Quarter's does provide an incentive to store energy for a turn as combos receive a cumulatively increasing damage bonus with every skill used in sequence.

Dragon Quarter has no attack skills that automatically hit all enemies, only area-effect skills of varying shapes and sizes. This works remarkably well with the positional battles - as well as the aforementioned "clustering enemies together with Fresh Meat" trick, there also exist several skills that push or pull enemies away from the caster. These work beautifully with one of the battle system's best features - magic circles. These trap spells are cast by a particular character and then remain on the battlefield until they are triggered by an enemy, which they generally cause good damage and possibly status effects to. One of the most satisfying tactics to execute is to lay three overlapping circles behind and enemy and then use a knockback skill to hit the enemy into them for heavy damage. You can even then lay more circles in front of the enemy and pull them back towards you, into the traps again, or simply fence off small areas of the battlefield (not too much however as you can only have three circles down at once). Overall, the battle system is deep and strategic and manages to stay interesting for most of the game.

I did say "most", because considering the sheer amount of battle you do in Dragon Quarter, it's likely it will get a little repetitive by the end. This will by no means ruin the game for you - Dragon Quarter does, after all, lack random battles - but as you basically spend the game exploring the (thankfully automapped) random dungeons and fighting the many enemies each one, you will see a lot of it, especially in the occasional "danger room" where you are forced to kill all the enemies before you can leave. While the dungeons do not have any puzzles at all, they manage to retain the addictiveness often found in dungeon crawlers as you keep hacking your way through that one more room to see what treasure is in the box in the distance.

You won't be able to check too many boxes without backtracking, because Dragon Quarter's item capacity is pretty limited at the start - it does, however, increase as you find additional backpacks throughout the game. All equipment you find in dungeons must be identified (and resides in your item pack until then) by taking it back to the nearest set of vendors. At this point it can be stored in the (far larger) equipment locker. The practical result of this is that you will have to backtrack reasonably often (especially when there are generally no save points inside dungeons) but this isn't as bad as it would seem when you realise that Dragon Quarter's enemies stay dead when killed and without them, dungeons don't take long to stroll through at all. The reasons for the limited item capacity become clear when you realise that using items in battle costs no AP at all - therefore, any of your characters can use as many items as they like on their turn.

Items are in fact the only means of healing in the game (excluding one skill that restores a very small amount of HP to the user) - even the traditional RPG inns are absent. However, if you sell unnecessary equipment you should always have enough money to buy what you need, and it's really quite unlikely you'll die as long as you don't run out. This is fortunate considering the infrequency of the save points, as was briefly mentioned above. In most cases you can backtrack whenever you feel you need to save, but saving before boss battles can sometimes be troublesome if you don't know one's coming up. There is one point near the end of the game where you have to play for about 2-3 hours and beat two boss battles without saving. Fortunately, you do not have to do so in one sitting, because Dragon Quarter implements an excellent "temporary save" feature. At almost any point in the game, you may choose Quit from the menu which will save your exact position and return to the title screen, from which you can turn the PS2 off. Load the save later, and it is deleted after loading (meaning all the temporary save cannot be used as protection from death). An identical system was previously implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, but I welcome its appearance in any game.

Making a "hard" save (that is, one at a save point that isn't deleted when you load it) consumes a Save Token, of which there are only a limited number in the game. However, this is much less of a problem than you'd think. Why? Well, by knowing how to use the game's SOL system (more on that later), you can save as much as you like at any point where item storage is possible. You simply save (don't bother doing this unless you only have 1 token left), store anything you want to keep in the item locker (which unfortunately only has 10 slots for the whole game, but I found it was enough), then you choose Give Up from the menu and SOL Restore to get your save token back. This probably belongs more in a FAQ than a review of the game, but so little people seem to know this (I honestly have not seen a single other review for the game that tells the user the vital information that saving actually isn't limited) that I feel it's my duty to inform you. I initially thought myself that saving would be limited and intended to pass up the game for that very reason (I detest limited saving) but fortunately I was told on the board the information I have outlined above, and that was a major reason for me to buy the game at all.

So, what is this SOL system that I mentioned above? Well, those who played Xenogears may remember many cutscenes during the game that made absolutely no sense except on a subsequent playthrough after beating the game, as they referred to people and concepts not outlined until closer to the end. Dragon Quarter also contains such scenes, but Capcom have decided to hide them until later playthroughs in order to provide an incentive for replay value. At the end of the game (or indeed at any point during the game) you can choose to begin the game again. Your equipment, skills, money, party experience and stored items carry over - your character experience and items do not. (Party experience is a shared pool of experience that can be shared between your characters, much like in Valkyrie Profile.) There's little point to starting over midway through the game in almost all cases, but the additional option to carry experience and such back to your most recent save has many applications, including the "unlimited save" trick detailed above and also leveling your characters up, if you like to do that. The main point is that after beating the game, you may play it again with additional revealed storyline scenes.

Furthermore, upon beating the game you are ranked according to several criteria (such as the speed at which you completed it, what level you were, and how much of the map you uncovered) and given a new "D-Ratio" which will most likely be better than the ratio of 1/8192 you begin with. A better D-Ratio will allow you to access several more optional areas in the game's dungeons, and will also power up Ryu's best weapon. While the D-Ratio ranks go all the way up to the coveted 1/4, 1/256 is all you need to access everything and it's pretty easy to get on a first playthrough. However, for those who desire the challenge, the quest for 1/4 adds plenty of replay value to the game, which is fortunate considering the game's relatively short length - most people will beat it in 20-30 hours their first time through, and it's possible to beat it in under 8 (required to get the D-Ratio of 1/4, in fact). D-Ratio, however, is the less infamous of the two game concepts here that starts with a "D".

The other? That would be the D-Counter. The D-Counter is a percentage at the upper-right corner of your screen which appears after an early event and from then on, only rises. The D-Counter rises by 0.01% every twenty or so steps and 0.01% every normal round of combat. Ryu at this point also receives some special abilities (anyone who's played a Breath of Fire game before will most likely know what they are) and using them increases the D-Counter much more quickly. There is absolutely no way to lower the D-Counter, and if it reaches 100%? Game over. If you save with the D-Counter so high that it makes beating the game impossible, then you'll have to SOL Restart, so be forewarned. This, however, honestly isn't as bad as it might sound. Ryu's powers basically allow you to spend about 10% or so of the D-Counter to win any battle. Obviously if there was no limit on how much you could use them, the game's challenge factor wouldn't be very high. The game is very beatable without using them at all, so I would personally suggest you do so - although you'll have enough to skip a few tough battles if you really can't manage them any other way. While the D-Counter does increase by tiny amounts even if you abstain from using Ryu's powers, technically putting a "time limit" on the game, it really isn't enough to be any kind of a concern. I backtracked frequently and generally took my time and I reached the final save point with under 30% on the counter. It's like being told you have a 200-hour time limit to beat a 40-hour game - it really doesn't matter in the end. The only people who I can see the D-Counter being a problem for are those who enjoyed this aspect of Ryu in previous games, because it's not really the focus of gameplay this time like it used to be. But then, I've already established that this game is nothing like its predecessors, although I would say it's a change for the better.

Dragon Quarter's storyline is... minimalist, if anything. It has one of the shortest overall scripts I've seen, with not too much dialogue. The storyline is, as the trailer describes it, "a tiny tale of time". There is no world to save here, merely a goal to achieve. What is this goal, and do they achieve it? You'll have to play to find out. The storyline, while not containing anything that made me actually dislike it, also doesn't really have much in the way of shocking plot twists or revelations. There are some well-done scenes, but overall this is definitely a gameplay-focused RPG.

Dragon Quarter advances the series in yet another way by finally moving to 3D character models. They are cel-shaded, although the cel-shading is not quite as extreme as that found in Wild Arms 3 or The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. While the character design can take some getting used to and the characters probably won't look like you expected them to, it's not bad. Facial expressions are textured on in a similar manner to, say, Suikoden 3 as opposed to Final Fantasy X. Some facial expressions can look a little strange sometimes, but on the whole it's acceptable. While Dragon Quarter won't win any awards for graphics, there is little about the graphics which I hated, either. They work, and that's about all that can be said. The game also contains two beautifully cel-shaded FMVs.

Capcom hired Hitoshi Sakimoto (whose previous works include the soundtracks to Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story) to compose Dragon Quarter's soundtrack, and Sakimoto has outdone himself to produce what is definitely his best work to this date. Dragon Quarter's soundtrack has some absolutely fantastic tracks and is simply excellent overall. About the only complaint I had at all is that the two regular battle themes used are some of the weaker tracks, and when you consider that you'll be listening to them for the vast majority of the game, better music should have been picked for that role. Annoyingly, a track which I felt would have made an excellent regular battle theme was only used in two battles in the entire game, which was really quite unfortunate. However, other than that, Dragon Quarter sports one of the best soundtracks I've seen in quite a while.

To conclude, Dragon Quarter is an unexpected gem and a game I would recommend to anyone who enjoys a good gameplay-RPG and doesn't specifically hate any of the unique features that Dragon Quarter brings to the genre. You will most likely have to do some FAQ reading before playing, because the manual is quite frankly terrible and I can see the initial complexity as turning many players away when they've barely started. But once you've got the game worked out, it excels. You could potentially beat it once in a rental, but this is certainly a game worth owning, and one you'll likely enjoy if you're careful not to impose expectations on it. Try to forget what series it is a part of, and you'll do fine.

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