Breath of Fire II/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Awesome Music: "Owaranai Ai", the awesome promo song used for the Japanese commercial of this game, was added in the fan translation done by d4s.
  • Bizarro Episode: The SimaFort scenario is profoundly silly in what is a fairly serious game. It involves tracking down an ex-girlfriend and collecting ingredients for a cook-off, all in an attempt to prove a Jean's identity as prince of SimaFort, about which only one person cares in the first place (Jean's sister Petape), and the chain of events are never again mentioned outside of once, vaguely and in passing, during a recap of the game's possessed bosses. The sequence could be edited out without disrupting the plot if it weren't also where you find the thief you've thus far spent the whole game searching for.
  • Complete Monster: Habaraku outdoes all in cold-blooded bastardly.
  • Evil Is Cool: Barubary/Barbaroi.
  • Freud Was Right: Look at Deathevan's true form. See all those toothy snakes coming from his crotch? Also qualifies as Getting Crap Past the Radar.
  • Game Breaker:
    • The hidden character Deis/Bleu. You can have her join your party as soon as you have access to the whale, and you get her at level 35 (for comparison, being around level 20 at this point is overleveled, albeit slightly). She has access to all of the best offensive spells in the game from the moment you get her, except for four of them, and she learns these four at levels 36, 37, 38, and 39 respectively. And her special ability heals her to full health at no MP cost... the only downside is a Defense debuff that wears off after the battle ends. And as she levels up, it gets beyond ridiculous. Other characters can typically expect to gain 7 or 8 points in their best stats, 1 or 2 in their worst, and roughly 4 on average. This character, when going from level 37 to 38, gains +15 HP +15 MP +15 Strength +15 Stamina +15 Agility +12 Wisdom +14 Luck. This is not an extreme example. This is normal for her. She gets +15 everything at least twice, and maybe it would be more if the stats weren't already capped by the point it could be possible. The only downsides are that she is a Guide Dang It! to acquire and that she cannot bond with shamans (generally the way to power up your characters)... but really, she doesn't need to.
    • You can have the cooking carpenter create all the wisdom fruits you could ever want, Ryu's dragon powers become far more potent. Throw in unlimited money and stat-boosting items, and the rest of the game is a cakewalk.
    • You can have the aforementioned cook produce permanent stat boost items around the midpoint of the game. The easiest and quickest boost to get only requires you to have a certain Township resident (Daiye, who can be found in Windia and sells all of the fish in the game). Take a quick jaunt over to the nearby city of Guntz, buy as much Fire Spice as you can, then sail back to the Township and stock yourself up with as much Tuna as you can carry and go to town crafting Stamina boosts. You can have a max-defense character in half-an-hour or less.
  • Goddamned Bats: Any enemy that has stat-modifying spells like Def-Up. Such enemies almost always come in groups of two or greater, and all of these spells share an animation that takes 8-9 seconds to go through, which is much longer than most spells in the game. Since the enemy AI prioritizes such magic above everything else, they will spam it with impunity in the first few rounds of the fight, meaning a single round of combat can take almost a whole minute to finish.
    • Probably the singular most annoying enemies in the game are the Ganets/Ganimedes from Infinity, which also fall in the category above. Not only do these things take a lot of effort to kill due to their high defense, healing, and immunity to magic, but they can come in groups of up to five. It's not unheard of for a fight like this to go on for six minutes due to having no choice but to slowly pick them apart one by one.
  • "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: Rather hard to believe that this game was actually pretty dark and ballsy for its day. Likewise, it can be hard to believe that the Corrupt Church and Church of Evil was actually something almost never seen in games before at the time (same with Lunar: Eternal Blue and Shin Megami Tensei, although many people didn't know about the latter until the internet, and in the case of the former, the Playstation version is a little more known).
  • That One Boss: Algernon and her two flunkies. One flunky will heal a single person for 100 HP, while the other hits the party for about 30 damage per turn. Killing the flunky will grant you 1 turn of relaxation before it regenerates. You can't keep up with that kind of damage or healing so early in the game, so you have to juggle between killing the flunkies, healing yourself and killing the boss.
  • That One Level: The first half of Infinity, the final dungeon. The enemies are a massive step up from the rest of the game and come in droves, the random battle frequency is as bad as ever, and it just keeps going and going. It feels like the enemies were balanced for parties full of perfect-fusion characters... but several of them spam Death, and it's as accurate for them as it is you. And characters lose their fusions when they die. Best part? There are no save points until you reach Dragnier!
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Breath_of_Fire_II/YMMV?oldid=1601104"