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Ignoring the fact I'm the only person living in reality, I'll agree with Kanno. BoF II was done so well in so many respects, it doesn't seem much was lost due to the bad translations.
That said, it wasn't to bad by SNES day standards. As many great games that came out on that systems, it's pretty notorious for bad translations.
It may have been because I was about 7 when BoFII came out, but I played the hell out of it and felt almost no impact from the scenes due to the translation. Found out later I wasn't the only one. Especially when you get about halfway through the game and people just speak Engrish for the rest of the game, to varying degrees.
I'll also say that BoF3 came out a mere year and a half or so later (before I turned 9) and I understood that game's story pretty well.
I understand the story in II a lot more now, due to having owned and played the JP version, as well as going through the US versions a bunch more times.
SNES did have a few badly-translated RPGs but it was mostly stuff like Secret of the Stars, which were at the low end for SNES RPGs. Back then, of course, everybody wanted the newest Square games and they got praised out the ass for at least having decent translations (ironically, Ted Woolsey wrote the scripts for games like FFVI and a few others. How the hell, only a year before FFVI came out, did he manage to botch up the script for BoF1? I don't think the character limit excuse would fly here either. Maybe it would. But he got around that with VI at least).
Breath of Fire got looked over for a couple of years because while it was a Capcom series, and a great one at that, one of the big complaints in the early days was the translation; the first game was assumed to be a Square game, due to them publishing it and putting their name on the box, and people assumed it'd have a great script.
Didn't stop BoF from doing moderately well but I'd say that's one of the reasons 3 and 4 did better. That and the fact that RPGs were more mainstream by then.
If you ask me I'd say the darkest BoF games are 3, 5, and 4 (I'd say 2 is almost tied with 4). Despite 3's funny moments, there were many things that happened that struck me in the soul. Namely, when you fight Balio and Sunder the first time and Rei and Teepo disappear. The graphics, the music, and the dialogue really gave off an unnerving atmosphere.
Before that, when they killed the Nue and found out she was trying to feed her cubs (which she didn't realize were already dead) was pretty depressing too. And the whole game just goes on like this, with a funny moment here and a depressing one there. And it's a thoroughly great ride all the way to the end. The ending is really bittersweet. Like Wolf said, Myria was trying to help, she was just kinda militant about it.....
5's darkness is pretty obvious. There are very few funny moments in the game, you spend the whole game pretty much trapped underground, and Nina's backstory about (SPOILER)being an air purification unit, built pretty much sole for that purpose, but ironically needing to get some fresh air basically or face dying underground was pretty dark, as well as the whole rivalry between Ryu and Bosch, which pretty much spirals out of control not too long after you start the game.
4 had Yohm and his army trying to kill Fou-Lu basically from the get-go, the whole thing with the Hex, Cray standing trial, the main characters having trouble with the Fou empire, and later-game events such as Fou-Lu going off the deep end (repeatedly I might add! :jess: ) and when the crew finally discovers what happened to Elina, and the whole subplot with Yuna (which I wish Capcom were able to flesh out; they couldn't because of time constraints), add up to one hell of a dark game.
Found these on YouTube and thought they would be fun:
Breath of Fire
Breath of Fire II
Breath of Fire III
Breath of Fire IV
Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter