Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter (PS2) Gameplay Sample

If you ever wonder "What ever happened to Breath of Fire?" Well, Dragon Quarter happened. Capcom went with a new, strange direction with the franchise that got mixed reviews. While the Gamefaqs user reviews seem to be pretty high, but also a mixture of really low user scores as well, the mainstream reviews were similar with some giving it decent, average, or low scores. This was kind of a polarizing game, and I'm guessing it didn't sell that well either.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this game as this is the furthest I have ever played into it. As you can see, at the end of the footage, I died, and I didn't know the game was OK with that, and it was actually a design choice to either let you restart the game from the beginning, keeping all your stats, or let you lose some stats, and reload from your last save point. All I knew is that I was getting worked by the enemies in the very first area of the game.

I was starting to think I sucked, or was doing something completely wrong because the very first enemy encounters, generally the easiest to get you started in any RPG were kicking my butt. I didn't realize till after I died at the end of this sample that they were supposed to be absurdly hard, because you aren't supposed to just fight them on your way to the next area, you are supposed to grind, die, come back and replay, grind and die some more and work your way up the really hard way. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that, it seems a bit tedious to be honest, however, I haven't played far enough into the game to see it the grind is worth the reward in the end.

They definitely took the franchise into a way different direction, alienating fans, and not doing much to bring in new fans either, so I guess it is safe to say that Dragon Quarter killed the BoF franchise (I guess BoF6 came out in 2016 only in Japan to android, Ios, and PC ), or maybe the waning interest in JRPGs killed it. Hard to say really. I can't tell if this is a good game, or a bad game, but it's definitely an interesting one to say the least.