Journey from the Depths

You'll have to forgive me for the style of this entry. I was reading a lot of Action Button Dot Net before I wrote this review, and while I didn't take anything from their article for this write-up, I was influenced by their hyperbolic style, probably more than was strictly healthy. Any influence at all is probably more than is strictly healthy, but that's an argument for another day.

Now then...

Properly speaking, this is Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. The numeral was removed from the American version of the game, probably so as not to scare off newcomers who might have wondered if they needed to be well-versed in the particulars of the preceeding four to properly enjoy this one.

They didn't.

Dragon Quarter is related to the previous games by the most tenuous of threads. It's an example of Capcom moving in a completely different direction. This isn't just innovation or improvement. It's the reinvention of the franchise. It's as if they tried to find out how much they could change and still get away with it. Take the core concepts - Ryu, Nina, powerful dragon transformations - and throw out the rest. All of it.

What's kept has been changed. Instead of Ryu, Nina is the silent one. And the transformation into a dragon, relatively penalty-free before, is now dangerous, leading relentlessly to the erosion of both Ryu's sanity and his soul. This is perhaps to offset the stupdendous power the transformation offers.

The little that remains is, really, the only thing the previous games had in common, aside from plot continuity. And most of that sounds like it was lost in translation - literally - by localizers for whom "maintaining internal consistency" ranked dead last on their list of priorities.

It would be interesting to speculate why Capcom did what they did with the franchise, but I don't really know anything about that decision, and honestly, I don't really care. What I care about is that somehow, in the process of breaking all the established rules and conventions which dictate what a Breath of Fire game is all about, they made the best Breath of Fire game I've ever played, maybe my favorite RPG ever.

Considering the corporate structure of the video game industry these days, it's hard for me to imagine how a company like Capcom can make a game I enjoy as much as Dragon Quarter, except maybe by accident.

The story of the game is Spartan, a little bit linear, but more layered than anything. It's not quite the epic romp-and-tromp through generic fantasy landscapes that series fans are used to. It goes something like this:

In the distant past, mankind created dragons as biological weapons. These powerful creatures quickly rampaged out of control, ravaging the landscape and rendering the world uninhabitable. The surviving remnant of mankind dug deep beneath the earth to eke out a living in a subterranean society. This society is ruled by a council of Regents, and everyone in it is given a number, called a D-ratio, which determines their status and position relative to everyone else.

The main character, Ryu 1/8,192, is a Ranger. Essentially, this means he is the government's muscle, taking on a wide variety of dangerous or otherwise unpleasant tasks. He's a low-ranking grunt, and because his D-ratio is so low, this is as high as he is likely to rise in the world. His partner, Bosch 1/64, is also a Ranger. However, in Bosch's case, this is only a temporary position. With his D-ratio, he could potentially be a Regent himself one day. His tenure as a Ranger is just a small, early step on his road to greatness. He treats Ryu relatively well, if a bit condescendingly, probably because he doesn't feel at all threatened by his low-D partner.

The pair are assigned to guard a cargo train heading for the BioCorp labs. Unfortunately, the normal transportation is currently down, so they have to hoof it.

Along the way, they run across the rotting corpse of a giant dragon spiked to a wall. Ryu experiences a brief mental fugue, wherein it seems that the dragon is speaking directly to his mind to tell him that he has been chosen for...something. It's not very clear to him at first. He brushes it off, and continues on his not-so-merry way with Bosch.

They make the train just in time, but it seems like they're both having a bad day, because there's an agent from the rebel organization Trinity who uses a well-placed rocket to destroy the tracks, derailing the train and sending it - Ryu included - to the bottom of a chasm. From there, he runs across the winged child Nina, who is incapable of speaking, and decides for the time being that he should look after her. Later, he is ambushed by Lin, the Trinity agent who destroyed the train, who is after Nina on behalf of Trinity. Her motives (and Trinity's) are unclear. Is this a kidnapping or a rescue? Does Lin even know? Distrustful, Ryu determines to protect Nina. This single decision puts him on a collision-course with fate, as he decides that he must attempt a task no one before him has successfully managed.

He must, despite phenomenal resistance, get out of this subterranean dystopia, and take Nina with him.

If the goal of most console role-playing games is to allow the player to escape for several hours into a fantasy world, then Dragon Quarter is an ironic game. Its main theme - and the goal of its characters - can be boiled down into a single word: Escape.

Story aside, arguments about Dragon Quarter as a game almost inevitably devolve into semantics. Is it sparse or streamlined? Lacking in features, or daringly minimalist? The answer - there is a right one and a wrong one, I think - is that the game is streamlined and minimalist. It is lean.

You could whine, endlessly, about the lack of optional nonsense. There are no side quests to complete, no hidden characters to recruit, no secret gizmos or special doodads to be acquired. There is the fairies' ant colony to manage, but that is completely - completely - peripheral. You can't farm enemies for experience (except by "breaking" the experience system), and you can't grind for items.

Which is just as well. All of this crap is no more than baggage at best, a hindrance at worst, and it misses the point of the game. From the standpoint of the story, you shouldn't want to explore. The world is depressing and oppressive. Your goal is to get out. To do that, you have to go up. And up. And up. The game's world, with its dull colors, cramped corridors and refuse-filled corners, is not made for exploration. It's a horrible place, filled with lean and awkward-looking people. You would pity its inhabitants, if they were real, because the only reason anyone is there is because, so far as any of them are aware, there is no choice.

While I mentioned Chrono Trigger's brevity some little while ago, I should point out that it has nothing on Dragon Quarter, which can be beaten in ten hours or less, once you know what you're doing. It accomplishes this brevity in a couple of different ways.

One of them is to simply strip out every single thing that is unnecessary. Everything, and I don't just mean the side-quests most RPGs are content to offer.

Overworld? Forget it. You're trying to go up to the overworld.

Towns? There are maybe five or six, and are basically just places to buy things. The "shops" are three Shop Girls, who seem to know where you plan to be and, somehow, arrive there before you. Other than that, towns are basically just breathing space, a place to relax between the stretch of dungeon you just fought your way out of and the one you are (with some trepidation) preparing to enter. The game is one big, linear dungeon, although in a sense, it's wrong to even use that word. The world is just that hazardous.

One of the other nice things about Dragon Quarter - there are many - is its lack of pretension. There's never a point where you find your characters slinging popular philosophy at each other, none of the hope-versus-ultimate-nihilism conflict that a lot of other RPGs seem to embrace. There's little if any detectable grandstanding between opponents; the characters do not act as if they are playing for the camera, or for the audience, or for anyone at all. They act like people, and not the superhuman sort who normally populate RPG parties, whose idealism or willpower or "inner strength" can conquer all. When Ryu asks his opponents why they can't just let him go, it's real because he means it. He's been fighting constantly against physical opponents, struggling internally all the while against an entity that threatens to consume his very soul, and he is bone-achingly tired. There's no reason why anyone should want to stop him; he sees no point in it, and wonders (quite logically) if it wouldn't be easier for his enemies to just let him go on his merry way. It's not as if his wanting to reach the surface, all by itself, is hurting anyone, intentionally or otherwise.

The cutscenes, in this context, are not good because they're elaborate setpieces. They're good because they help to explain the development and the background of the characters. They help illustrate the hows and whys of what is happening.

And they do it quickly. Outside of the final cinema, and maybe the opening cutscene, I can't think of a single one that's more than a minute or two long. So they never feel intrusive, never really interrupt the experience or break up the flow.

The dark and oppressive atmosphere of Dragon Quarter is rare for an RPG. It's more along the lines of a survival horror game (a genre which, coincidentally, Capcom is often mistaken for inventing, and which they certainly pioneered). But the atmosphere is not esablished and sustained by aesthetics alone. The gameplay gets in on the player-oppressing action just as well.

Your party is pretty fragile, as RPG parties go. Strategic combat is not simply emphasized or encouraged. It is required. There are no true "fodder" enemies, as there are in so many Final Fantasies. You can't get away with attacking mindlessly until your enemies are dead, because the regular enemies you run up against are often quite capable of giving just as good as they get. Carelessness in combat will get you speedily mauled. You are required to determine and exploit elemental weaknesses, limit the scope of your encounters and use the environment to your advantage.

And the strategy here is more organic than in games like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea. Those games offer you the opportunity to bypass any need for strategy through grinding levels or finding the right pieces of equipment so that your party becomes a troop of unstoppable god-men, annihilating everything. There's a sort of gleeful enjoyment to be taken from that style of play, I suppose; the knowledge that you can demolish the opposition with relative security. So long as you remain patient enough to spend a few hours in random encounters occasionally, "being stronger" is the only tactic you need.

Dragon Quarter doesn't allow for such measures. Strength alone isn't strategy enough to win, mostly because it's more or less impossible to just muscle your way through. Ryu is capable of it in his dragon form, but there is a trade-off.

As he draws on the power of the dragon, Odjn, that has chosen him, its grip on his soul grows tighter. This is shown by the D-counter in the upper right corner of the screen. It starts at 00.00%, and increases gradually throughout the game. Every couple dozen steps, it will increase by .02%. Late in the game, that increase only requires about ten steps. Transforming and using the various powers of the dragon form causes the gauge to jump with terrifying speed.

There is no way to bring the D-counter down, ever. It simply sits up there at the top of the screen, slowly rising, even if you never use it at all, reminding you that every use brings you that much closer to prematurely ending the game. It rather effectively negates the satisfaction its raw power would otherwise inspire. You look at the counter and think, "This is what 'inevitability' means."

But while Dragon Quarter is always difficult, it's never quite unfair. Its Scenario Overlay (SOL) System allows you to restart the game at any time, while still carrying over your Party XP (assignable experience points), and equipment, allowing you to start the game with a minor edge which may make it easier to get the hang of things the next time around. You're offered the same option upon dying, with the alternative of doing a SOL Restore, which does the same basic thing as a SOL Restart, sending you back to your last hard save instead of the beginning of the game. And as you progress, you unlock new cutscenes which can be viewed the next time you start from the beginning.

Maybe it's easiest to think of the SOL System as a kind of modified New Game Plus.

And yet, for all that this game does right, it isn't likely to see any sequels.

RPG fans are just about the most static bunch of gamers in the world. They have definite ideas about what makes a franchise, and they get bent out of shape when someone mucks around with the formula. We are talking about people who are perfectly content to play the same thing over and over again in different iterations. Aside from various technical improvements, they deplore any change made to their beloved franchises, and react violently to it. Part of the reason I'm so eager to trumpet the virtues of Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is because it is a genuinely excellent game, but so many people pass it up because it's vastly different not only from other, more "traditional" RPGs, but from everything else in its franchise. Most people seem to want to write it off as some sort of bizarre, failed experiment. Most of the people I know are RPG players, and out of all of us, I am one of two who owns a copy. And I practically had to bully the other guy into buying his copy.

As has been covered elsewhere, there is something wrong with the state of gaming today. Part of it, yes, is game directors' frustrated movie-making ambitions coming to the fore. That's part of the problem with games like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. The other part of the problem is the people who only want the same thing over and over again, and who take deep and personal offense to the idea of change and experimentation. If games like Metal Gear Solid 4, Final Fantasy XIII - really, most or all of the big franchises - are part of what is wrong with gaming, Dragon Quarter is part of what's right. If those others are the problem, then Dragon Quarter is the solution. Lean, streamlined, filled with purpose, deeply challenging yet equally rewarding. And that reward does not come in the form of some gigantic cinema scene at the end, a prize for the willingness to spend hours meandering the globe, talking to NPCs and selecting "Attack" countless times in countless battles. The reward comes in the form of a strong and constant sense of accomplishment, because every step forward, every victory in battle, is an achievement that you as the player have earned.