“What ever happened to Breath of Fire?”

There’s something to be said for solid fundamentals, and for the longest time, that’s some of the greatest praise one could offer the Breath of Fire series. After all, the first four games are solid JRPGs at their core, but they remain close to the basics that make the genre work. You’ve got a varied cast of characters, plots grounded in fantasy, turn-based combat with plenty of options, and, naturally, a little grinding here and there. The furthest the series went in an innovative direction might be Breath of Fire IV, which features an unusual dual-protagonist perpsective as its plot hook as well as a unique Middle Eastern and Asian-inspired setting. In the end, though, even this was relatively conservative by JRPG standards. Capcom knew what this series did well, so they stuck to it.

Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter goes in a wholly different direction. Sure, we’ve still got a dragon-boy, a winged girl and some of the series’ usual standbys…but the colorful, whimsical worlds of past entries in the series are no more. Here, we’re in an underground civilization, the last refuge of humanity after an apocalyptic event rendered the world’s surface uninhabitable. In this world, people’s station in society is determined by their D-Ratio, a fraction measuring a person’s compatability with draconic bioweapons. This entry’s rendition of Ryu is a low-level government grunt called a Ranger charged with spelunking through the dystopia’s tunnels and sewers performing monster cleanup and completing odd jobs.

Ryu’s low D-Ratio of 1/8192 ensures that he’s going nowhere in life. That changes when he meets Dragon Quarter’s rendition of Nina, a bio-engineered waif with a pair of winglike air purifiers grafted onto her back. While the intention was for Nina to help clean the increasingly poisonous air underground, the process is taking its toll on her body. Ryu ends up accompanying Nina on a desperate quest to reach the surface and save her life.

If that sounds a little grim by Breath of Fire’s standards, well, you’re right. This is a game about cramped spaces and scarcity. Areas are small and tight; the few times you see the sky, it’s an artifical mockery of the real world painted on the ceiling of a settlement. Healing items are uncommon. Money to buy more is hard to come by. Your limited inventory space will stymie your ability to carry all the gear you’ll need regardless, since you’ll also have to ensure you’ve got bait and traps to distract the mutant monsters throughout the underground. Even the items you’ll need to use to save the game (outside of single-use suspend saves) are rarely in ample supply. Even the monsters themselves are a limited resource, as defeated monsters are gone for the rest of the playthrough.

Combat, meanwhile, typically has the three protagonists – Ryu, Nina and rebel gunslinger Lin – pitted against overwhelming odds in claustrophobic quarters. There’s a scrappy, guerilla feel to battle, with a system that’s something of a hybrid between turn-based and strategy RPGs. Characters have a set amount of action points that are spent on movement and attacks. Positioning and preparation are vital given the large number of enemies in a given battle and their tendency to overwhelm your characters.

Even the way magic and items are handled is a swerve away from the norm. Nina’s still got magic, for instance, but it takes the form of deployable mine-like glyphs that Ryu and Lin can push enemies into for damage. This is also effective with bait and traps, allowing you to get your Rube Goldberg on and set up complicated ambushes. Activating a key skill to make everything come together is highly satisfying. You’re also able to customize and modify your characters’ gear by attaching skills, increasing their capabilities over the course of your playthrough.

Regardless, there’s only so much to go around. It’s entirely possible you’ll find yourself cornered, stuck against impossible odds without enough supplies to make it through. Dragon Quarter understands this eventuality and this is where the Scenario Overlay, or SoL, system comes into play. When it looks like things are hopeless, you’re able to restart the game and take things from the top. You’ll keep your customized gear, money, distributable party-wide experience and a few other things, but you’re starting over from the beginning. It’s a last-ditch option. To put it another way, it’s what you do when, well, you’re SoL. At least the monsters you’ve defeated respawn.

This is central to the Dragon Quarter experience, as it’s a tough game and you’re bound to have to use SoL from time to time. In fact, you’re encouraged to do so, as future playthroughs will feature expanded story content, and after finishing the game you can even increase Ryu’s D-Ratio to unlock new scenes and areas. The prominence of this system means that Dragon Quarter’s closest kin might not be the rest of the Breath of Fire games at all – it might actually be survival horror zombie-fest Dead Rising, which has essentially the same save-and-restart scheme. That’s unsurprising, given Dragon Quarter director Makoto Ikehara’s position on that game’s development staff.

What if, despite all this, you still don’t have enough juice to get through the game? That’s fine; there’s one last little twist that can help you make it through Dragon Quarter’s toughest moments. Early in the game, Ryu gains access to the D-Dive ability, this game’s take on the dragon transformations from the other Breath of Fire games. Much like in those games, it’s incredibly powerful. While in D-Dive, Ryu hits like a truck and can charge up power to hit like ten more trucks. He’s even got an enemy-annihilating breath weapon that can do essentially infinite damage. Once this is unlocked, you can go nuts with it. Line up some baddies in a hallway and let loose. Indulge yourself a little.

“But you just went on about how this game’s about scarcity!” you cry, and I gently shush you. That’s right, I did. See, the thing I neglected to mention is that when you unlock D-Dive, a little D-Counter also appears in the corner of the screen. It starts at 0%, and from then on it’s constantly ticking up as you run around, fight and explore. Nothing you can do will make it go back down. Tick, tick, tick, the D-Counter is always slowly climbing up, and it’ll go up much more quickly if you use D-Dive or Ryu’s special enemy-avoiding Dash ability. You won’t like what happens when it hits 100%.

Time itself is a resource as well, after all. If you stay away from D-Dive, you’ll have more than enough to make it through the game. Sometimes, though, there’s a lot of tough enemies that might chew through your items. Sometimes bosses are a little tougher than you might expect. Dragon Quarter offers you a Faustian bargain in these situations: give in, unleash the dragon and you’re guaranteed to win. That breath weapon will fire as long as you want, allowing you to instantly defeat bosses if you’d like…and constantly ticking up the D-Counter all the while. Gluttons will quickly find that the SoL system awaits with a trip right back to the start of the game.

It’ll probably come as no surprise that this isn’t what anybody asked for. This iconic turn-based JRPG series was now, for lack of a better way of describing it, some bizarre fusion of survival horror mechanics and tactical RPG combat. Still, Dragon Quarter’s style and gameplay remain unique. It’s easy to recommend it as an oddity that doesn’t play like pretty much anything else around. There’s just not a lot else quite like it.

That doesn’t mean it was the kind of success the series needed, though. In fact, Breath of Fire went into hibernation for over a decade after Dragon Quarter’s release. You can’t keep a good dragon down, though, and in 2016 a new Breath of Fire hit the scene. Breath of Fire 6 was the latest in a long-running, beloved series of turn-based RPGs…so of course, it was a gachapon-focused mobile game. You can imagine the reaction to this news.

It’s difficult to get a reliable impression of Breath of Fire 6 given it was never released in the West. Mobile games were never particularly well-received by the Western core gaming audience – a sentiment eagerly reciprocated by mobile game developers, who were far more anxious to get a piece of the nascent casual games sector and didn’t hesitate to say so – so the community’s response tended to be a little on the hyperbolic side. What’s objectively true, though, is that Breath of Fire 6 went to the great dragon graveyard in the sky only a bit over a year after it launched, remaining online from July 2016 to September 2017. This was especially unusual given the era in which it was released. By comparison, Final Fantasy: Record Keeper, a similar game in the same niche, lasted a whopping seven years, running from 2015 to 2022.

What we do know about Breath of Fire 6’s gameplay based on what footage remains isn’t promising. It’s a light action-RPG of the sort that’s common these days, focused on bite-sized missions, auto-attacking, cooldown-based skills and, well, basically nothing anyone enjoyed from any of the other games in the series. Gone are the first four games’ turn-based gameplay and myriad of battle options, gone are Dragon Quarter’s survival and tactical elements, and in their place we’ve got a cute art style and a pretty clear push toward pulling characters from the game’s gachapon system.

Much like Dragon Quarter, it’s hard to say that anyone wanted this. Unlike Dragon Quarter, it’s equally hard to say that anyone was surprised with how much they loved it. Without the opportunity to go hands-on with Breath of Fire 6, it’s difficult to say whether this was a diamond in the rough, but the signs don’t look too good. The most significant of those signs, of course, is the fact that Breath of Fire 6 is the last game we’ve seen from the franchise. In fact, outside of the Internet rumor mill offering tidbits like Ryu being considered as an option for ill-fated fighter Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, it’s basically the last we’ve seen of Breath of Fire at all.

Does that mean it’s the end of the series? That’s hard to say. Capcom, at one point, was the Konami of its era: the monolithic example of how a studio could go wrong, the ultimate villain of Japanese game development, the whipping boy of Redditors everywhere, etc. Then, over the course of a few years, it seems they found their way once more, breathing new life into Monster Hunter, Mega Man and even Street Fighter. Modern Capcom is held in fairly high regard and has reliably put out pretty decent products.

Does this mean Breath of Fire might one day make a return? I’d certainly suspect it’s possible. After all, if a phoenix can rise from the ashes, would it really be that much of a stretch to think a dragon could too?

Cory G. believes the pen is mightier than the sword…well, depending on how sharp the pen and sword are. A child of the ’90s and a prolific writer, he strews his work about like Legos made of words, just waiting for your brain to step on them. He enjoys a devilish challenge, so when it comes to talking about some of the more difficult games out there, you might just run into the Infernal Accountant Mage. Some advice: hold on to your soul around this guy, and don’t sign anything. Read more at popzara.com.