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You know, for a second attempt at an RPG, by a company that doesn't make RPGs, Breath of Fire 2 is surprisingly good and a huge improvement over their freshmen effort. In music, a band's credibility is usually based on the success of their sophomore outing and I kind of feel that rule applies to video games as well. Released the same year as FFVI in Japan and nearly a year after the U.S. release of the same game. BoFII is a bit like Lufia 2, where it came late to the party and had to compete in the West with some of Square's stronger titles. Thankfully for me, I had caught the RPG bug by this point, and was gobbling up any JRPG I could get my hands on for the SNES. This was another game recommended to me by the same friend who got me into Sly Cooper, and this was my first Breath of Fire game as I had missed the first entry and never had much interest to check it out until a few years later.
Set several generations after the events of the first game, the warring Dragon Clans have disappeared into myth along with the Goddess Myria. In the small isolated village of Gate, a boy named Ryu lives with his father and little sister in the local church. Shortly after his sister Yua was born, Gate was attacked by demons and Ryu's mother died in the attack. His father fought off the beasts with his magic, but it was the untimely arrival of a massive dragon that saved the village, and the beast eventually perched itself over the mountain that overlooks the village and entered a deep slumber. Yua goes to the dragon and sleeps by it because she has dreams of her mama when she does so, when Ryu tries it, he has a terrible nightmare about a demon instead. When Ryu wakes from the dream, he finds that not only has his father and sister vanished from the village, but everyone in town doesn't know who he is either. He's taken in by the church as an orphan and meets an orphaned Grasslander (Dog people) named Bow, who travels from town to town, getting taken into the churches and then looting the place before disappearing. With no place to go, Ryu and Bow leave the town together and end up in a cave when the weather turns. Inside the cave, Ryu is confronted by the demon in his nightmare and it attacks...
Ten years later, Bow and Ryu have now become full fledged Rangers, a Guild that specializes in any kind of duty for a price, from house cleaning to monster slaying, they are the people to call for. Their first assignment is to find a local girls pet. After the successful mission, Bow is met in the middle of the night by a local nobleman who want him to break into the richest man in town's manor in order to steal back an item the rich man had stolen from the noble. Bow's attempted robbery fails when another thief beats him to the chase and Bow is left as the fall guy. Now running from the law, Ryu helps Bow escape and embarks on a journey to find the real thief, a girl with bat like wings named Patti. Ryu will meet many people on his journey and slowly comes to discover a nefarious plan by demons who are corrupting evil humans and sowing discord and chaos across the land.
Though technically a direct sequel to the first game, you can be forgiven for feeling like Capcom pulled an FF and simply kept a few legacy elements while changing around everything else. There are only a few callbacks to the original, and though the second title in the Myria Trilogy, not only does she not show up, but BoFIII doesn't even really bother to make any mention of anything from this entry, though it liberally borrows some thematic elements from it. The plot is pretty unique, though some elements have been overused by future RPGs. One thing that still blows most peoples minds about this game is that it was one of the few non-Western RPGs to make it to the West with a plot concerning a corrupted church. I want you to think about that, Nintendo of America wouldn't let FF use the word Holy because it might offend someone, but they completely let Capcom make a game about a Church secretly trying to resurrect a demon god and using their phony religion to con people into helping them. I'm not even going into all of the game's poorly hidden adult materials like the boy crazy witch being named Nympho, or how you have to fish a ring out of a toilet she's was throwing up in because she was drinking too much over her guy problems. There is also the part where the first shaman meets you and due to her risque dress, she basically propositions you like she was a hooker. Me thinks that Square and a lot of other companies back then could have gotten away with a lot more if they realized that NoA's bark was worse than their bite.
BoFII's plot also has a bit of a mood whiplash. The opening is pretty chilling and raises a lot of uncomfortable question, but then the game just skips ten years down the road and your first mission is played totally for laughs. On the journey to find the thief, you save one characters life from being murdered in a gladiatorial arena, learn that Nina has been exiled and shunned by her family due to her black wings, and save a town overrun by demons that are literal Aliens style face-huggers of which it's possible to kill their victims instead of saving them. All of that ends up being followed up with a farcical chapter where you have to help Jean prove he's the prince of his own home after an imposter sneaks in and takes his place... except Jean doesn't seem to mind that he's no longer a prince, and the town people know it's an imposter but either don't care who is in charge or some prefer the more competent imposter. I don't even want to go into the Queen of Tunlan who is becoming fat due to being possessed by demons and you have to travel inside her body to exorcise them.
The game has it's dark moments, especially in the beginning and end points, and whenever you really get to go into certain characters backstories like Nina's exile, Rand running away from home, and Sten's survival guilt for surviving a war without his unit; but the game is also just filled with some serious slapstick comedy. While I appreciate my games not to be too serious, BoFII walks a thin line and often crosses the line with ridiculousness, but if you can look past that, or are simply not bothered by such things, you'll find a really good story with fun characters. The game has three possible endings, and I honestly think the bittersweet normal ending is superior to the happily ever after Best ending.
After the very vanilla BoF1, it's pretty astounding to see how much of an improvement BoFII is. While the original had some overly simplistic game mechanics and was fairly unbalanced, one of the interesting strengths of the franchise has been the fact that Capcom really didn't know what they were doing back then, and so the game is filled with some really interesting gameplay ideas that seem unheard of for it's era, largely because Capcom didn't really know any better. This usually works really well for the games and helps set them apart from more traditional Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, as well as the many clones they created.
Like the first game, you will acquire nine party members with their own strengths and skills. Ryu is an all around brawler with a special skill that allows him to restore a certain percentage of his health if it succeeds. Bow is a combat medic with a risky blow skill that will either do 1hp of damage or critical hit. Katt is a glass cannon fighter with the highest agility and strength in the game with an ability to draw enemy fire towards her. You get the picture. In addition to these special FFIV style skills, most of the party can use some form of magic they learn by leveling up. There are some quirky character building elements within all this much like FFIV such as Katt pulling a Tellah/Naruto by learning all three of the highest level elemental spells in the game at a ridiculously early level, but not having enough AP to cast it. This is something that is brought up in the story due to her being kind of a simple ditz who wants to learn really powerful spells, so it makes sense she would teach herself overpowered moves despite not realizing she is incapable of using the spells. Sten the Highlander (Monkey People) has a play dead move which actually plays into his backstory. There are some really clever nods and tying in of the gameplay and story which I quite appreciate.
The party members are far better balanced than the original, with most of the cast having clear design purposes and roles to play in combat. Suffice to say, party configuration plays a big role in building a well rounded fighting unit. Yet the game has a few interesting ideas that really shake up what could have been a ho-hum formula with the Shaman System. At a certain point in the game, Ryu will meet a Shaman and her grandmother who deal with Shaman Fusion. There are six shamans in the world, each representing one of the four classical elements plus light and dark, and with them, you can fuse them with party members to confer up benefits like minor stat improvements or even a complete transformation that changes the characters appearances, stats, and skills. With this system, the game technically has 18 unique playable characters as the transformed characters can be radically different from their original. Jean the Frog is a perfect example as he is a slow tanky fighter mage who specializes in debuff magic. His special skill allows him to attack all enemies but with a very weak attack. His Holy Knight Fusion Form is pretty fast, far more melee orientated than his original form and his weak group hitting attack is exchanged for a powerful group hitting sword slice that will either miss or kill everything, making him a mini-Odin. It's a very interesting mechanic that is only hampered by some tedious rules that can make them impractical at times, but it's still super fun to play with.
Another unique feature of the series is that most of the party members have a unique map skill that can be used to help travel the world or collect items you can use. Bow can hunt wild animals with his Crossbow in special hunting ranges that appear on the map occasionally, Katt can destroy objects with her staff, Sten and Jean gain important skills that help you to reach normally inaccessible parts of the map or dungeon, and Ryu retains his unique skill of fishing, which has been changed from a silly gimmick from the first game into a full fledged mini-game which is surprisingly difficult but incredible rewarding since the fish can be used for a variety of purposes and he can fish up treasure and Manillo merchants as well. Some skills just make traveling easier, but the hunting and fishing mini-games help to break up the monotony of combat and help the player gain valuable healing items so they can free up their Zenny for equipment instead.
Speaking of mini-games, BoFII may have introduced the concept of town building to a standard RPG. I know DQIII had you help build a town but most of it was plot relevant and beyond naming it, you didn't get much say in it. This game allows you to build a town and search the world for people to live in it, which results in special shops or gifts to help you out. Even the look of the town can be customized based on which carpenter you hire to make the town and each form has a unique feature such as the basic home offering a restaurant where the carpenter's wife can cook items into stat raising ones, or the Mogul/Arabian design let you play the carpenter at a special board game for prizes. Making this even more complicated is the fact that you only have room for six residents, but their are twenty-four to choose from, with sets of four only being able to live in a particular house, so if you let the guy who sells you fish into the town, you can't recruit a character who would open a bank or one that would let you listen to all of the games music. Some residents can even permanently increase stats or teach characters abilities outside of their normal spell repertoire. It's a giant Guide Dang it, but frankly most of the game is in some places. I actually missed Ryu's second set of dragon forms due to them being completely optional and the teacher being squirreled away in an odd place. Yet, I feel it's one of the more interesting things about this game, it's incredible deep despite coming across initially as a pretty by the book adventure and I still discover new things in the game with every playthrough.
I will also point out that BoFII easily has some of the best sprite work of almost any SNES RPG. I think Chrono Trigger may offer a challenge an even then, I feel BoFII's battlefield models might be some of the best in the business. They are incredibly fluid in their animation and all of the enemy designs and animations help make battles more visually interesting than the static battle systems of other RPGs at the time. The music is also really catchy, and while it lacks some of the quieter pieces I usually prefer in my soundtracks, the rocking battle themes and upbeat catchy music that Capcom is good for still keep this game an audio treat.
The one major blemish this game suffers from is a terrible localization. The first game was localized and published in the West by Square, which anyone familiar with the FFIV translation will know how great they were back then...So Capcom took the plunge and did it themselves, with some questionable results. It may not be the worst translation I've seen, but like FFII (IV) it can be pretty bad in some places and I would advise checking out a fan translation if you can. It had a port on the GBA, but in addition with poor audio and visuals like many SNES ports for the system, Capcom didn't seem to bother taking this as an opportunity to give it a better translations so they largely just reused the old script with only a few minor changes. The more I think about it, the more I feel like this game really needs a remake. It has several great ideas that are only diminished by questionable balance rules and the devs being pretty new to RPGs in general. A remake could fix the script and potentially refine the gameplay into something pretty cool, but considering how indifferent Capcom seems to be to the franchise, we'll likely never see this happen.