Game: Breath of Fire IV
Breath of Fire IV is an entry in the Japanese Role-Playing Game genre (spoilers below). The game was released about an aeon ago, which is also approximately how long it took me to finish it. It has lots of interesting ideas, but it ultimately has a pacing problem that disrupts the experience and, depending on one’s temperance, makes for an annoying exercise in rage-quitting.
The big picture view of the story is that people, in their recklessness and greed, have summoned otherworldly beings into their world, thinking they can control them. One such being, named Fou-Lu, became emperor and helped the empire expand its holdings. Though the summoning was flawed causing Fou-Lu to eventually fall into a centuries-long slumber. He can only be awakened and restored to his full powers by merging with his other half, Ryu, who is one of the main characters.
Ryu’s becoming revitalises Fou-Lu and the rest follows from there. The story has a promising start. You are presented with two of the other main characters, Nina and Cray, who are on a mission to find Nina’s sister, Elina. They get stranded in the middle of the desert as their vehicle breaks down. Ryu then appears out of nowhere, with no recollection of who he is and of what has transpired. He joins Nina in her quest to find spare parts for their vehicle and they eventually stick together until the very end.
At some point, the story switches to the awakening of Fou-Lu who is immediately confronted by an army bent on killing him. When you play as Ryu and Nina, you become aware of how weak they are in the opening stages of the game. Whereas Fou-Lu already is a force of nature who is, nevertheless, supposed to be in a greatly weakened condition. You do not yet understand the story, as it is revealed to you little by little, though you can sense that something grand is bound to happen.
The change from Ryu to Fou-Lu is an effective story-telling device. It takes place a few times throughout the game. It makes you ask questions about who those characters are and what their connection may be. It also gives you a sense of scale. Where Ryu is feeble, Fou-Lu is potent. While Fou-Lu is ancient, Ryu is young. There is a thread through space and time that binds the two.
Whatever momentum those scenes build up is undone by tricks and gimmicks. The game does a poor job of keeping you focused. Ryu, Nina, and Cray, are caught up in what essentially is a recursive fetch quest. They need this trivial thing, which requires the completion of that mundane task, which involves this other person in that different place, which means that such and such troubles have to be addressed, and so on. There is the stated goal of finding Elina, though it goes through so many forgettable stages that you can easily lose track of what is happening in this world.
Compounding the problem are the random and frequent enemy encounters, which are typical of JRPGs. Those force you into battle where you have to engage in turn-based combat. You go through menus to input your commands and decide on your strategy. Attacks involve animations that cannot be skipped completely. You end up seeing the same motion and magic spell over and over again. Additionally, the game adds a unique mini game to each part of the story. You have to complete it in order to advance. They are not difficult to figure out, though they add to the impression that you are being pulled in different directions.
About half way through the story you have a good sense of what is going on and what your final objective is, assuming you did not get distracted or lost your patience in the meantime. You travel to the capital to find Fou-Lu and set things right. The journey there follows the same pattern of completing one fetch quest after the other and of testing your commitment with yet more mini games.
Fou-Lu is on a killing spree to eliminate humanity even though he has been the beneficiary of benevolence at each stage of the story. He is of the view that people are a lost cause. Indeed, if we think of all the terrible things humans have a capacity for, we can imagine why an exalted being would think lowly of us. Though I am sceptical of this premise, as a being that is clearly superior to our kind would have a more profound understanding of our state. It would not seek to kill us for our frailties of character, in the same way a human loves and respects a dog even though dogs cannot do all the things human are capable of.
At any rate, the battle comes down to a matter of perspectives through gameplay that ramps up in difficulty. Do we cleanse the land of people or do we let them do what their condition renders inescapable with the hope that they will eventually sort things out? Note that both of these involve elements of good and evil: to give people a pass means that they will keep committing terrible deeds, though to annihilate them is a terrible deed unto itself. Fundamentally, this is a matter of assessing the degree of admixture between the analytical extremes of good and evil, but not of circumventing it altogether.
This story is at least as old as the myth of Prometheus. There the titan whose very name means “forethought” trusted humanity with knowhow, symbolised as the art of wielding fire. The gods, much like Fou-Lu, thought this was dangerously naive because humans do not have the maturity to handle fire responsibly—and, indeed, we frequently destroy each other with fire, literally and figuratively. Though we also wield fire to keep babies warm, build houses, and make culture happen. Punishing those positive traits because of the negative ones is fundamentally flawed judgement, for it assumes that there can exist a world without admixture. Both Prometheus and the gods agree with this premise. Their disagreement consists in how exactly to manage said admixture.
What we are now experiencing is the vision of Prometheus in vivo, else Ryu’s superordinate end in the story: to let people continue despite their flaws. This is also depicted through Nina’s positivity and even Cray’s self-restraint in the face of anger-inducing challenges. Nina shows peerless resolve through compassion, while Cray exhibits mental fortitude which is especially important for a man of his raw strength since a strong man with a weak character is likely to contribute to the detriment of himself and of others. We are capable of breaking and of making things. To break is to make, to make is to break, for all that is present is transfigured as such in arrangements that remained to be transfigured anew.
What I like about Breath of Fire IV is the setting of dragons in a plane of reality that is not native to them. They too contribute to this admixture by having both a benign and deleterious influence on the world. The dynamic between the two halves of Ryu and Fou-Lu is a powerful narration tool. The empire’s more sinister ambitions are presented effectively and are made to stand in juxtaposition to the main characters’ virtues.
The game, nonetheless, suffers from severe flaws in execution. The story does not advance at a steady pace. Fetch quests make the adventure last much longer than it needs to, without being especially engaging in their own right. The narrative is disrupted frequently and several gameplay elements feel unpolished. All these amount to a potentially frustrating experience or, at least, an intense test of patience. I give it a passing grade, though I am relieved that it is over and that the dragons have finally left us alone in our struggles.