Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter Revealed the Ugliness of RPGs in Stripping Them to Their Bare Essentials
Deep in the bargain bin, you’ll find some forgotten experiments from the early days of the PlayStation 2, namely genre exercises from the likes of RPG big names such as FromSoftware, Konami, and SquareSoft. These games are largely lost to time, perhaps thanks in part to the relatively slow unit sales for the system in its first year. Buried amongst its peers, Capcom’s Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter stands as a titan championing these strange ideals, boldly deconstructing the RPG while still remaining firmly within the confines of what one can be.
In contrast to its more conventional fantasy predecessors, Dragon Quarter dabbles with science-fiction and even horror. It takes place about a kilometer underground in a bunker society of people who fled the surface after an ecological disaster. Instead of traveling through lush biomes and quaint little towns, the setting is almost oppressively sterile, guiding you through metal-plated warehouses and abandoned dormitories. These desolate hallways are staunchly guarded by a governmental police force (“rangers”) who mostly deal with rogue genetically modified animals, who are bred for food. At the game’s start, Ryu, a low-ranking grunt, is sent to deal with a rising counter organization that seeks to undermine the rangers in an attempt to upheave the presiding caste system which segregates not only the rangers but all of society into arbitrary socioeconomic spheres based on their predicted lifetime merit, measured as a fraction called a “d-ratio.”
Despite Ryu’s abysmal d-ratio, he manages to link his consciousness to a dragon. We come to learn the ratios represent the likelihood that a person might be able to do this, and society structured itself around this concept because of a prophecy in which a hero might champion humanity to the service again with the unwieldy power bestowed by the dragon. Pairing with the dragon rapidly siphons Ryu’s life expectancy, though, represented by the “d-counter” on the HUD. The d-counter constantly raises, and when Ryu uses his extremely powerful new abilities, it climbs exponentially, portending his inevitable death. The game then becomes a race for Ryu and his two companions to make it to the surface alive, in hopes of saving his new friend Nina who needs clean air to survive.
In essence, Dragon Quarter is a dungeon-crawler with occasional pit stops to stock up on weapons and items. Combat is turn-based, but more closely resembles a strategy RPG in many ways. You have limited movement and actions for each turn, measured by the same gauge, and attacks are positional and able to be chained into arcane combos, some of which reveal hidden properties when deployed. There’s a level of risk-and-reward with most actions—you can play fast and loose with your inventory or reserve your precious resources for desperate times, of which there will be many. On your first run, every battle feels incredibly high stakes; not only are resources scarce, making healing a tenuous privilege, but saving is only allowed through obtainable tokens which are random drops throughout the dungeon. You could potentially lose quite a bit of progress if you’re not careful, and coupled with the d-counter, the chances of getting a game over are much higher than usual.
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