Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter for PlayStation 2

Breath of Fire; Dragon Quarter is my dream RPG. Everything falls into place quite nicely. It is a fine day indeed when an RPG's shortcomings are just a matter of wasted potential rather than fundamental design errors. What's more, this is accomplished while adding a new twist to the genre.

BOF:DQ starts out unassumingly enough. A natural disaster has forced the entire population of an (unnamed) Earth-like planet underground. The underground complex, called Shelter, is a bunch of settlements connected by a series of twisting tunnels and passages. The ultimate goal of Ryu, the main character, is to save the life of a winged cleaning genic (monster) named Nina by exposing her to fresh air, as opposed to the perpetual smog of Shelter's unforgiving environment.

One very cool aspect of Dragon Quarter's world is the fusion of story and mechanics that lies in the D-Ratio system. Each inhabitant of Shelter is assigned a D-Ratio at birth, in the form of a number 1/n, where n is some power of 2. The closer the fraction to 1, the higher the person's social standing in the world. People with higher social standing tend to live closer to the surface and have access to more and better resources such as energy. The game does a great job of portraying this as Ryu and friends move toward the surface.

As I mentioned, the D-Ratio isn't just a decorative story element. Ryu's D-Ratio begins at 1/8192 (pathetic social standing), but once you beat the game, you can play through the game again with a better D-Ratio. How much better depends on your performace during the previous playthrough. Getting through the game quicky, not saving often, and finishing with higher levels are just some of the things that affect the D-Ratio. The higher D-Ratio allows you to enter new areas that are inaccessable to "Low-Ds". There are a couple of sore spots with this system, though. One is that some characters' reactions to Ryu are predicated on his low social standing. When you play through the game again, those reactions don't change at all, even if Ryu's D-Ratio is now 1/4 (the best possible). Also, all the locked areas can be accessed with a D-Ratio of 1/256, so challenging yourself to get the best D-Ratio isn't rewarding except as bragging rights.

The other major mechanic, the Scenario Overlay System, is also a fusion of a storytelling system and a gameplay mechanic. At any time during the game, you may "SOL Restart" or "SOL Restore". Restarting is just that. You restart the game. Restoring lets you load from your last "hard save" (as opposed to "soft save", which can be made anywhere, but is erased when you load it). You may be asking "why would I ever want to do that unless I died?" Well, BOF:DQ's difficulty curve is constructed so that you will almost certainly be unable to complete the game on your first playthrough. At some point, you're going to be too weak to stand up to the enemies you're facing and/or run out of resources such as money or items. What's neat is that restarting or restoring doesn't leave you empty-handed. After each battle, you gain "Party XP", which can be allocated to any party member as you see fit. If you restart, all of this Party XP will still be there, waiting to be allocated. Restoring allows you to keep a portion of this Party XP. The net result is that you will start stronger on each playthrough. What's more, you can store items in a limited-space "storage locker". Any items you have equipped or stored in this locker will still be there when you restart or restore.

But wait! That's not all! If you restart the game using SOL Restart, you will see new story scenes that add to the storyline as you play through again. This system is ingenious, but terribly underutilized. I would have preferred that not only do you see new scenes, but new story branches become available so that each playthrough leads to new possibilities. They should also have tied the SOL system to the D-Ratio system, so that new events would be unlocked depending on D-Ratio. I think that as it stands, most people will be annoyed at having to replay the game for too little SOL reward.

Not as ingenious, but still very cool are the battle and trap systems. The battle system is mixture of the Grandia and Xenogears battle system. Each character has Action Points (AP) based upon his or her level. You can use these action points to move freely on the battle screen or use an Attack Skill. You can keep moving or using skills as long as you have AP. If you have nothing to do, you can save your AP and have it added to your base AP total for the next turn, much like Xenogears. Which Attack Skills you have depends solely on the weapon you're using. Much like FF7's materia system, you equip Attack Skills to slots on your equipped weapon. The number of slots varies from one to nine, depending on the quality of the weapon. Capcom did a good job of allocating skills to each character so that each has a different role. Ryu uses short-range sword skills, Lin, an agent of the anti-government subversive group Trinity, uses medium-range gun attacks, while Nina is very weak, but can hit enemies pretty much anywhere on the battle screen.

The trap system allows you to start the battle before the battle even begins, or alternatively, avoid fighting all together. If you want to avoid battle, just throw some meat near the monsters. The monsters will go eat the meat and ignore Ryu until they've finished it. Alternatively, if you're feeling sadistic, you can poison, confuse, or damage the monsters before the battle even starts!

Graphics are also gorgeous. Capcom decided to go for a muted cel-shaded flavor. The dull colors and the indistinctness of cel-shaded graphics give everything a sort of dingy look to it, which is perfect for a game set completely in a post-apocolyptic underground.

Music is composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, famous for his work on Final Fantasy Tactics. The orchestral base punctuated by industrial sounds in some tracks fits the mood perfectly. Even if the game's premise doesn't sound appealing, I recommend buying the soundtrack on its own. It's just that good.

There are a couple of problems that should be mentioned other than the SOL/D-Ratio problems mentioned above. First, the game is quite short, beatable in 15-20 hours (including replays). Some people may be put off by this. Second, don't bother reading the manual, as it isn't worth the paper it's printed on. In a game with so many unusual mechanics, a top-notch manual is absolutely essential. It's disheartening that Capcom dropped the ball here.

BOF:DQ is a game with lots of great ideas. Players willing to try something new should really give this one a try. I hope that Capcom decides to make a sequel to this game in the same style, with a greatly expanded storytelling system. That would truly be RPG heaven.