Breath of Death VII: The Beginning: Reanimated
Taking the torch from its 14-year distant Xbox Live Arcade predecessor, the tongue-in-cheek Breath of Death VII: The Beginning, “Reanimated” is an unsubtle parody of classic JRPGs. As the title suggests, the game has been literally “Reanimated” – dragged from the annals of history and visually overhauled. The music has received a punch up, too, with a new soundtrack that’s almost too good for the game.
I’ve been playing the exhaustively named Breath of Death VII: The Beginning. Reanimated.
It’s an endearing if uncomplicated RPG.
The game itself? It’s… fine. Endearing, even. Don’t expect anything revolutionary, since this is a faithful remake of the original and that didn’t take any risks either. It’s an extremely low-frills, classic turn-based style RPG with – gasp – random encounters that I decided to try and breeze through on “Easy.” It turns out that on “Easy” you can still get absolutely steamrolled by a regular random encounter, and even after spending some time overlevelling I was still finding things challenging. When I first started the game I decided to venture out into the wide world, exploring and attempting to over-level and it worked for a good half hour until I was wiped and discovered all that progress was lost. A second attempt to do the same resulted in me getting rekd at every encounter- at which point I decided to engage with the game properly.
The secret sauce was party members. Most battles seem scaled for larger parties with multi-target attacks and after picking up my first party member in the very obvious village right at the very start things got easier. After that, any time I found myself roadblocked by the random encounters in an area I’d go and find the additional party member I needed. Around the 2 hour mark the balance seemed to tip in my favour- a full (four members) party seems to make all the difference and at this tipping point it’s possible to simply out DPS enemies with regular attacks, conserving mana for when you really need it.
Life regens at the end of a fight but many is scarce so I played the whole game like this…
And that leads me nicely into perhaps the biggest flaw in how the game plays – mana. Regen happens at the end of a battle, whereupon you receive fully replenished hitpoints and – depending on your choices made while levelling up – some amount of mana. This amount will always fall greatly short of how much you might use in a typical battle, and there are few opportunities to recover that shortfall. As a result I found myself avoiding mana-based attacks as much as possible, reserving it for emergency healing and boosting single-target DPS in the occasional boss-battle. Since all but one of your party members can be downed at the end of a fight, and you’ll still fully recover there’s really nothing to lose with a crude, brute-force approach. This was made more apparent once I discovered I could save anywhere. Before every fight? Sure why not! Dying takes you back to the title screen, but I was determined to overcome the game with sheer stubbornness.
As a result of this very mana-shy battle technique I found myself barely engaging with the combo system. It’s crude but effective- stack up basic attacks to build up a combo multiplier and unleash massive damage with a finisher.
Picking a spell, passive or stats upgrade at each character level up is interesting- lets me lean into my YOLO and wipe half the party build. Mob management is useful though!
Levelling up is, for the most part, automatic with characters gaining increased stats with every new level, followed by an A/B choice of upgrade. This upgrade might boost some specific stats over others, or it might give you a great single-target DPS option versus a spell that covers multiple targets. Your strategy – mine was hit everything all the time all at once – will guide your choices here, and mine overwhelmingly favoured survivability so I could soak up damage while I ground down enemies with basic attacks. Again it’s a crude approach, but it worked.
If you’re wondering why I skipped over random encounters with nary a comment, Breath of Death has something interesting to add to this mix. Reminding me somewhat of Earthbound where battles just don’t happen when you’re far too overpowered for them to be interesting, Breath of Death will simply run out of battles. Every area has a limit and if you’re tired of running into random fights as you negotiate the frustratingly maze-like levels (more than once I’ve loaded a save and been completely, totally lost) then you can just trigger fights over and over until you’ve burned through the limit. If, like me, you’re a fan of the mindless catharsis of grinding through turn-based battles you’ll no doubt enjoy this in a perverse fashion.
It is full of silly jokes and is very much a parody of its genre.
Trying Breath of Death together is that thread of humour, at it’s core it’s a parody of JRPGs and you’ll get silly nods to JRPG quirks like party members “forcibly joining” your party. There’s also no shortage of silly dialog and while the plot is thin on the ground, it takes itself about as unseriously as you’d expect.
If you love the grind and want an uncomplicated, but great looking and sounding game in which to waste a few hours then you might want to give Breath of Death VII: The Begin… I’m not writing all that! Give it a try or Wishlist it on Steam for the inevitable sale.
Dead & Breakfast
You can also find the original on Steam, along with the apparently better Cthulu Saves The World I grabbed it for 50p a couple of days ago out of sheer curiosity but haven’t got ’round to playing it yet.