YMMV / Breath of Fire II

• Arc Fatigue:
  • Clearing Bow's name, during which several, more important story events happen before it could even reach its conclusion. The heroes will finally catch up with the thief in SimaFort. Thing is, because a rather long story event takes place there, not to mention the sheer size of the place, there's a chance the player might not even realize that their quarry is even there.
  • If clearing Bow’s name is the gold medal, talking to the Wise Tree is the silver. You’re told to talk to it to figure out what’s going on with the forest, which requires a Grass Man. Upon obtaining one, you talk to the tree only to realize you need the Therapy Pillow, which requires you to go to Highfort and get their flute…
• 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 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 SimaFort weren't also where you find the thief you've thus far spent the whole game searching for.
• Breather Level: The next major dungeon after the brutal and fairly dark Highfort sequence is going into the Tunlan queen’s body. In contrast to the previous dungeon, you can back out at any time to go get supplies, the enemies are far easier, and the mood is generally lighter.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Nina of this game is considered to be the best incarnation by the series's fans. This version of Nina is praised for her cool design with the black wings, not being a Damsel in Distress as her introduction has her fighting off her enemies, and her tragic backstory.
  • Katt is likely the most popular character in the entire franchise not named "Ryu" or "Nina" (at least if one goes by the amount of fanart online), part of which might have to do with the fact that she's Popular with Furries.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• 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. This is made even worse when the spells in question are Def-Up or Pwr.Down. The reduced damage will make it harder to kill these enemies, which means the fight will take even longer, which also means these enemies get more chances to use these spells, prolonging the fight even further.
  • 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.
• Once Original, Now Common: 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.)
• Padding: The Capitan portion is rather guilty of this. After saving the villagers from the well, Ray offers to bless Township, meaning you’ll have to backtrack across numerous towns to get there. After this, you make a lengthy return trip to Capitan, just long enough to be warped back to Township and told to find a carpenter…in Capitan, yet again, which necessitates yet another backtrack. Oh, and this is all before you get any characters who can use the Warp spell.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Providing homes in Township is a sorely limited experience. You're only given six residences maximum, and potential tenants are tied to a particular house; if you let a Lazy Bum occupy a house where a merchant is scripted to go, too bad, so sad, hope you didn't save afterwards. On top of this, one of the best tenants, Baretta, pretty much requires you to make a beeline straight for her as soon as the option to house tenants is given, since her inventory is determined by how many plot events she has been present for, rather than just how far into the game you are.
• Special Effect Failure: The good ending, wherein Ryu's father crashes Township onto the final dungeon to seal it away forever. However, the effect is simply superimposing the sprite in front of the background layer — the "buried" door still has an obvious opening.
• 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 a 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.
  • Terapin/Goncharo at the bottom of the well: he hits hard, is faster than even Katt unless you’re overleveled, and can attack the whole party with impunity. This comes well before you have any sort of all-party healing or dragon abilities.
  • Kuwadora in SimaFort, much like Goncharo, comes packing a ton of speed and an all-party attack. Also, his attacks will randomly one-shot you.
  • If you’re trying to save Ganer, the Guardeyes are very much this. You’re locked out of using your strongest dragon transformations and most powerful spells because they hit Ganer too. Also, your attacks default to targeting Ganer, so if you don’t keep an eye on the Guardeyes’ hit points, it’s entirely possible that you merc the old guy by accident.
• That One Level:
  • Highfort is an unforgiving level. It begins with a Point of No Return, then you lose three characters and are forced to spend most of the dungeon as Sten, who has to deal with a Duel Boss and wandering through a maze full of Random Encounters (including horsemen who love to spam Death) - hope you had the foresight to use him a fair bit before now given how Leaked Experience isn't a thing in this game. Even after the party reunites, you can still be accidentally warped back to the entrance by stepping at the wrong platform. To makes things worse, there are two bosses in the end, one of which has a powerful Typhoon spell which deals heavy damage to the whole team.
  • The Memory Tower is a maze-like level with an inverted Fog of War, as you can see everything but the area around you (which is half of the screen), forcing you to memorize the exact layout of the place while dealing with random battles.
  • 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 (and also if they are removed from the party for whatever reason, ie in cutscenes). Best part? There are no save points until you reach Dologany/Dragnier!
• That One Sidequest: Learning the "Boombada" spell requires you to donate over 2000 coins at the Namanda shrine during your first visit there, then return to play an incredibly difficult Rhythm Game, where you have to memorize sound beats and press either A or B at the right moment to play the song.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The shaman fusions can empower your characters with new abilities. However, of the 6 different shamans, 3 of them can only be found when there's less than about 10% of the game left. There are 69 successful fusions possible, and fully two-thirds of them can't be used for anything but the final dungeon and some end-game grinding.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: Bow's name in the English version is a Punny Name (him being a crossbow-wielding dog), but since the two terms his name is a pun with ("bow-wow" for dog noises and "bow" as in the weapon) have separate pronunciations in English, English speakers are forced to pick one side of the pun when pronouncing his name.

---