Breath of Fire 5: Dragon Quarter

It looks like I’m never going to even post anything to this if I stick to personal things I’d tell any of my friends. (look how much has been posted so far!) So I think I’ll start using it as a place to review games.

I managed to finish this in about 30 hours. I suspect someone who is good at the game could play it start to finish in 8 hours though. It’s a rather short game, but what it loses in Length, it definitely makes up for in replay value. The Scenario OverLay system makes for a very interesting game.

Everyone in the BOF:DQ world has a number, these numbers go from ¼th down. the lowest i’ve heard of is 1/8192, which is where your character starts out. The lowest dreg of society, just managing to scrape his way up to a Ranger grunt.

You can increase this number… But to do so you have to clear the game. First, whenever you clear the game, you go back to the start with a new DRatio, depending on how well you did on the prior revision. Also, at any point in the game you can “Give Up” and go back to the start again. This may sound like a bad thing, but you get to keep “Party EXP” and your gold, along with any weapons and skills you have. By giving up, you have to redo much in the game, but you increase how easy it is in the next cycle. Basically, it helps you climb higher each time you restart.

Party EXP is another thing. It’s bonus experience points that you get when you do well in battles. instead of being split between your characters though, it goes into a Party exp pool. You can distribute this exp as you want between your characters. The catch is, EXP your characters have doesn’t get carried over on a restart, while the Party EXP does. So it’s a choice between making your current run easier, and making future runs easier.

The last twist that the game throws at you is the D-Counter, and the Dragon mode with Ryu. The dragon form is so insanely powerful in this game, that you can basically kill just about any boss or enemy in the game in one hit. The flip-side to this is that as you use the dragon, you lose your humanity a bit. you have a counter that is slowly counting up to 100%, on how much the dragon has consumed your character. You can basically skip any boss with it, but possibly at the cost of making it impossible to beat the game on this cycle. Once you hit 100%, it’s all over.

Also, each time you start back at the beginning, you unlock new story bits. You have to beat the game several times to unlock the entire story. Many areas of the map only open up once you’ve increased your D-Ratio.

I finished my first complete run! I went from 1/8192 to 1/1024 on this trip. I’m looking forward to going through it again, although I think I’ll try to beat FFX first. :)