Trivia / Breath of Fire

• Development Hell: As it relates to dedicated home gaming consoles and handhelds, the entire series has essentially been in Development Hell since 2003 or so.
  • Camelot Games in particular (who has done game development for Capcom and is best known for the Golden Sun series) expressed repeated interest in writing a new Breath of Fire, though Capcom never bit at the offer.
  • In a different flavour of Development Hell, the PSP port of III ended up as a No Export for You (though region free and easily imported) for North American audiences thanks to Sony Entertainment US's port requirements.^note Which call for at least 20% new content; SEUS essentially declared the PSP port of III didn't have enough "new" content to be released in North America Of note, no other division of Sony Entertainment has this strict of a rule on console ports...
  • There are also licensing issues surrounding I (for which Square did the translation) which may complicate any further remakes and ports.
    • Good news for this one, at least: with the launch of the Nintendo Switch's SNES Online library, the first game is available again, complete with Squaresoft and Capcom logos.
  • Even cameos related to Breath of Fire seem to be stuck in Development Hell, as noted in the Capcom vs. listing.
• Dummied Out: Plenty of stuff has been found buried within the code: I has unused items, spells and locations; II has unused spells; III has unused spells, voice clips, a few items and a chunk of unused dialogue; IV has unused spells and some items, one of which was a bonus from a Japanese magazine.
• Fan Translation: II's translation was rather poorly done, with bland dialogue and many references removed. So a retranslation patch was made, rewriting the script from the ground up and adding some features the original lacked, such as a dash button. It also restored features the German translation (which served as its base) removed, such as the ability to buy items in bulk.
  • Scanlation has also been done with much of the material in official artbooks and manga adaptations, particularly the manga adaptation of IV (largely because, of course, the artbooks were Japan-only and the manga has not yet been licensed in English).
• No Export for You: The PSP-port of III. Maddeningly, even though it was translated into complete English for an European release, Sony's US division requires a content increase of 20% for a rerelease; so even though it was originally intended to be released Stateside, Sony gave them the shaft...
  • Two Gaiden Game sidestories to IV plus two other IV-related spinoffs (a port of the Fishing Minigame and a Great Dalmuti/Millionaire game with BoF IV chars) never have been released outside Japan for the same reason (Japanese smartphone only).
  • The Windows port of IV was, similar to the PSP port of III, only released in Europe and Asia. This, unlike the situation with the PSP-port of III, was apparently Capcom's decision.
  • Breath of Fire, as a series, does have a decent amount of written spinoff material (in the case of manga adaptions of I and II, this even goes into Expanded Universe territory, and definitely so with the artbooks in later games). And pretty much with the exception of game playthrough guides, every bit of it is Japan-only. The sole exception is with the Comic Blade Avarus manga adaptation of IV, which has a licensed Chinese translation via Tong Li Publishing (as of September 2009) and a licensed French version published by Ki-oon (as of February 2010). Needless to say, hope is springing eternal there will eventually be a licensed English version as well, and there is an active effort by the English-language BoF fandom to get potential licensees interested.
  • Breath of Fire VI was a mobile-only live-service online title. It was never released outside of Japan and shut down after less than two years, making it so far the the first (and only) game in the series that was never released in the west, and also the only one that can no longer be played in any form at all.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Presently the case for Dragon Quarter (the only game in the franchise that so far has never been re-released), Fan Translation I with the non-Woolseyism names, Fan Translation of II, III in North American markets.
  • The entire franchise was in this state in North America for the better part of 8 years, save for I and II's GBA ports and II's Wii Virtual Console re-release (the last game in the franchise was released in 2003 and, thanks to SEUS, the remake of III ended up being No Export for You). IV saw re-release on Play Station Network as a "PSOne Classic" in September 2011, but has never had a non-PSN re-release in North America; Breath of Fire III has still not seen a North America re-release, not even as a Classic. Fortunately, the European PSP version of III is playable on North American PSPs due to the lack of region encoding.
  • Nintendo, for their part, seem to value the first two Breath of Fire games (originally released for the Super Nintendo), with re-releases appearing on all of their consoles since the introduction of the Virtual Console; they appear on Wiiware (covering both the Wii and Wii U), 3DS Virtual Console, and the Switch's SNES catalogue for Nintendo Online subscribers. Unfortunately, they have less to bargain with after II, so the latter games in the series haven't seen a rerelease in (as of the time of writing) at least a decade.
  • The Comic Blade Avarus Comic-Book Adaptation of IV is technically in this state in non-Francophone, non-Cantonese territories and is only available in English and Portugese via Fan Translation.

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