Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9580 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Capcom
• Released on: 2003-11-28
• Platform: PlayStation2

Manufacturer's Description
Set in an underground world that time has forgotten, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter takes players on a journey to the surface of the earth. An ecological catastrophe has devastated the planet, forcing a civilisation to settle and live in the ancient underground city Shelter. Generations have passed since man has seen the sky and no one has any recollection of how life once was. Ryu, a Ranger from the underground world, is on a routine patrol assignment when he has a sudden "awakening" and is determined to discover what the above world has in store. Follow Ryu, and other members of the underground society, as they fight their way to the surface against a multitude of monsters and adversaries.

Customer Reviews

A challenge...or a trial
Breath Of Fire Dragons Quarter has to be the most complex and difficult RPG I have ever played. It's the only game in the series I have tried, and I decided to play it as I am a fan of RPG's in general, but I wasn't prepared for such a steep learning curve. Maybe if you know the series you will find it easier, but I spent the whole first section of the game having no idea of what I was doing. It doesn't help that the game manual is very hard to understand, I was referring to it all the time, but seldom found answers to the questions that were confusing me.
Basically, the game plays like a standard RPG, with strings of dungeons, interpspaced with "towns". You only have three playable characters (except for the first mission) so you can concentrate your level building quite easily. The battle system itself is quite cool, as it requires that you take into account positioning and distance in all your strategies. Players can run around on the battlefield at will within a specified range, but it consumes points that would otherwise be put towards combat, so you will be playing very tactically a lot of the time, which I found a lot of fun. You have to learn different skills as the game progresses, and then attach them to your weapons and armour to use in battle (a bit like "Materia" in Final Fantasy 7). But the attacks that you dish out only prove really effective if you use the games "combo" system, and it was this that I really struggled with. In addition to this, the many different types of weapons and armour on offer have a bewildering range of benefits and drawbacks that make assembling a selection of "best" equipment impossible. Again, it's all really poorly explained in the manual, and highly confusing to understand. However, there is an even bigger drawback to the game, in my opinion, which is the Dragon Counter. Once you reach a certain point in the game, the lead character takes on the ability to assume a hugely powerful dragon form, which potentially makes every battle a pushover. The drawback? Once you get this ability, a timer appears in the corner of the screen for the rest of the game, counting towards 100. Any use of the dragon form speeds up the counter drastically, and the penalty for reaching 100 is Game Over-permanently. Yes thats right, if you use the power too freely or take too long to play, your characters will die and you have no choice but to restart the whole game from the beginning. There is no way to stop or reverse the counter, and once you get towards the last stage of the game where the final bosses can only be beaten with dragon form attacks, if you don't have a pretty large chunk of counter left over, you simply can't finish the game. Its a hugely unfair and crippling mechanism to have, and one that almost made me give up even after I had worked really hard to get a long way into the game. Think you can just do lots of levelling up to become invincible even without resorting to the dragon? Sorry, this is a linear game...there are no random encounters and no way of revisiting dungeons that have been cleared. Plus, saving is done by means of consumable save tokens, which are far too scarce, as are the save points themselves, so just making it through a lot of the stages is hard enough. To make the game so difficult and then make you scared to save because you are getting low on tokens is just plain mean.
I'm being very negative here, but let me add that I did enjoy some aspects of the game. The graphics look great, and the plot is intriguing, with characters that are very believable. Hmm...I've not left the game with many plus points there!
In conclusion then, a fine looking game with dynamic battles and a good storyline, crippled by a massive penalty for using the best skill in the game. I suppose in accordance with the plot, in which the dragon form is literally eating the players life away from within, it makes sense that there should be a steep price for using its power, but this is too much. There is a restart system to soften the blow in which you retain certain attributes and gain access to new areas when you restart (the instructions say you will get more out of the game by playing it over several times), but that’s not good enough for me. I worked hard and replayed many sections to be able to make it to the end credits just once, and I don't feel much like going through it again. Be warned.

Abolutely amazingly original and addictive, but....
I haven't played this much, but i have to say that what I've played so far is amazing, loading i cool and smooth, the gameplay is brilliant, and the batle system is original, but surprisingly does not overexagerate. The one feature I have come to despise is the D-counter, a timer that counts down as you go through the game, and when you use certain powerful attacks, when it reaches 100 the game is OVER. Thankfully there is a system ("SOL") which allows you to restart games with some experience and items from last games, although this hardly merits replaying time and time again as is needed. My advice- go for it, but be prepared to do some serous replaying.

Not an RPG!
Imagine playing Final Fantasy and having,very few savepoints that need tokens to use,the inability to equip new equipment unless you're in a locker,very little money and nothing to buy anyway and worst of all fixed amount of monsters/XP so you can only level up so far and then compound it by having rooms you can't leave until you've defeated everything and a time limit for the rest of the game and you'd only be halfway to how bad this is,it is one of the most overly complex/aggravating rpgs I've ever played.
Everything about it is mind blowingly perverse,I've never played a B.O.F game before and even though the previous ones are different I think I'll rack up some more hours/days on FF 12 instead of this garbage.
It makes out in the manual that you can 'restart' the game with your current stats etc..but restarting is literally that,you may have well have just turned it off and on again,restoring is just like loading a saved file,if you've got one,with half your stuff missing!
It just reminds me of those speed runs through games,how fast can you finish it without saving/using an item/dying etc..
COBBLERS!!