Breath of Fire III is a JRPG. This PSP version is a port of the original that was released for the first PlayStation. The game is a classic JRPG through and through, from the story to the battle system to the game structure. It follows the character Ryu, who wakes up with no memory and is befriend by the local thieves Rei and Teepo. After causing mischief, the trio is forced to do some good in helping to eliminate the monster that had lately been destroying crops. The game is presented in an isometric view, which makes the controls annoyingly confusing. You use the d-pad to move but it feels very imprecise, especially when going down a ladder or wanting to get an exact spot. The analogue stick doesn’t help either. The camera angle can be moved slightly but will snap back into place. This is probably the worst part of the game and will take some time to get used to. The game is split between dungeons and the world map. The battle system on the other hand will be familiar to anyone. It had random encounters but it doesn’t transition to a separate battle screen. Instead, it will take a few seconds to load the enemies in. It’s a turn-based system and each character can attack, use an item, use magic or defend. Its menu based and can be clunky at times. The most unique aspect of the battle system is how you can change the form your party takes. There are three preset forms, attack to boost attack power at the cost of defence, defence to boost defensive power and normal for a neutral form.
The game does not hold your hand in terms of telling you where you need to go next. You just need to explore yourself to see where you go, and where you can’t. The game is linear though. Dungeons can be annoying as there is no in-game map, and as always with random encounters, they can be an impediment and a disincentive to explore. There are gimmicks and puzzles in dungeons that you need to solve and overcome to progress. In what is possibly one of the worst design decisions of the game, to progress the story in several places, you will need a specific character’s ability. Each character has a different one, and this means you will need to change out your party. There are obscure ways to move forward, like needing a specific character to talk to the NPC or interact with an object deep within a dungeon. The game in no way tells you any of this so you could just be scratching your head clueless on what you need to do to move onto the next section.
Unfortunately, the game is slow, from battles to story to just about everything. During battles, you’ll be waiting for the animations to slowly finish. For the story, it felt like the characters were repeating the same thing again and again, requiring backtracking in a few places. There is a severe need for quality-of-life improvements. The game tends to keep removing your characters, artificially lengthening the game as you take longer to defeat enemies. It loves to reshuffle your characters with no warning, screwing up your party and formation, requiring you to go into the menu and change it every single time. The amount of grinding required is ridiculous given how little experience enemies give. It feels unfair when you are severely underleveled compared to a boss who will wipe all progress of the dungeon that you’ve just gone through. It is such a poor design with no excuse for the developers to do this except to just make it artificially harder.
There are so many little things with the game that annoys you. it’s cheap and stingy with healing, whether that’s HP or status effects. Yes, you can heal with spells but there is no easy way to recover MP and dungeons usually do not allow you to save at all. There are no spells that you can easily get to cure most status effects, forcing you to rely on expensive items. While the graphics are surprisingly good for a PS1 / PSP game and is actually rendered in 3D, it constantly hides stuff with its isometric camera angle, which all too often includes story progression objects. There are mandatory minigames that are terrible and underbaked. The controls will constantly work against you, being unorthodox and extremely annoying. The whole game ends up being a giant fetch quest one after another. The characters constantly get distracted on doing these pointless filler quests, grinding the whole game to a halt. The encounter rate is absurdly high at times and there’s no way to reduce that down.
The game takes around 30 to 40 hours to complete, and it’s really only the last ten hours or so where there’s a lot more story. Given the short time, it’s quite condensed and doesn’t justify the amount of boring filler before it. After suffering through the high evasion monsters, monsters that spam status effects, and everything else that tests your patience, it is definitely underwhelming. Overall, Breath of Fire III did not age well. It has all the flaws of the JRPGs from the PS1 era and exemplifies them. The story is slow and keeps it glacial pacing all the way to the end. All potential it had will be lost when you do yet another pointless fetch quest that adds little to the story. The random encounter rate would be fine if not for the pitiful experience points, so you’ll lag behind in levels. The abundance of annoying enemy traits makes grinding a massive chore. The lack of direction and guidance on what you need to progress, including some obscure ways to progress, means it’s a frustrating and annoying game. It’s just terribly designed in a lot of places and if it wasn’t for nostalgia, then it would have been received even less well.
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