Why Breath of Fire 3 has the best villain in JRPGS
...and why the dragons had to die
Intro
Is there any genre, in any medium, more riddled with bad villains than JRPGs? You all know the type, and it’s hard to escape the feeling it’s the same guy (and it’s usually a guy) in all of them: some maniac with quasi-religious overtones who’s decided the world is nothing but misery, so he’s going to kill everyone to end their suffering and do them a favor. It was okay when Kefka did it back in 1994, but by now the hat’s so old you’d need an archaeological dig to find it.
Personally I’m not sure we need designated ‘villains’ in the first place. Maybe the JRPG genre needs them more than movies or books, since there’s something so delightfully cathartic about finally getting to unload on the idiot who’s been taunting you all game. Fair enough, but can we get something other than this one motivation? Having a working brain on top would be a bonus.
As it happens, my favorite villain of all time also comes from a JRPG. A villain with motivations that are relatable and make sense. A villain who’s both immensely powerful and the most vulnerable person in the game’s world. A villain who makes such a good case it could be argued the player is the actual villain, and at any rate the one who risks destroying the world when it’s not in danger, just to get out of having to take one for the team.
The game in question? Breath of Fire 3, part of a long-dormant Capcom series that usually gets a bad rap for being “generic”, when it gets any attention at all. There’s some truth to that, but I also think it’s an exaggerated criticism. The series sticks close to the genre basics in many ways, but at its best it also does some very interesting and ambitious things.
In this article, I’ll make the case for why the goddess Myria is by far the best villain in JRPGs, and why she might even be right. Needless to say, this piece will contain huge spoilers for Breath of Fire 3 and to a lesser extent the rest of the series, so proceed with caution if you intend to play it yourself.
Breath of Fire in context
Breath of Fire consists of four mainline games and one of those weird mid-2000s reboot-sequels that upended everything while keeping the base concepts. I kind of miss when game devs would do stuff like that rather than churn out endless rehashes. Anyway, the first two games are conventional medieval fantasy 2D JRPGs on the Super Nintendo. The first is utterly unremarkable in every way, the second is decent but held back by random encounters and the worst English translation this side of Zero Wing. We’ll get to the third, which made the jump to the PS1, using 3D environments and 2D sprites. These three form a (very, very) loose trilogy of sorts.
Breath of Fire 4 kept the same engine and game systems as 3, but changed the setting, cast and art style. It’s a fine game, but suffers from an overabundance of filler, slow combat and a meandering story. On the plus side, it has Fou-lu, a Final Fantasy-style badass with long hair who everyone who isn’t me thinks is the best villain in the series.
BoF: Dragon Quarter came out on the PS2 in 2002 and killed the series. It happens to star a couple characters named Ryu and Nina, and the story deals with creatures it calls “dragons”, but otherwise it’s a completely different beast. Unlike the cheery fantasy of the earlier games, this one is a relentlessly bleak post-apocalyptic sci-fi story, a tone it captures very well. The tactics-like combat system is a lot of fun too. Unfortunately it committed the one cardinal sin gamers will never, ever forgive: it had a global time limit, meant to encourage replays. The hate for this conceit almost felled as mighty a titan as Majora’s Mask, so poor DQ never had much of a chance here. It’s also one of the hardest and most unforgiving JRPGs around, unless you know how to cheese it, which surely didn’t help.
On its part, I suspect BoF3’s main problem was existing in the Final Fantasy 7 era, and in general using 2D elements in a time when anything 2D was deeply out of fashion. Still, it probably cost less to make than FF7’s intro FMV alone, and clearly did well enough for a sequel. It also looks much better today, even if the 3D is shockingly primitive to modern eyes.
Other than the occasional robot or magitek-powered flying town, the first two games were strictly traditional fantasy. BoF3 not only trades the medieval fantasy for more of a Victorian feel, it also opts for what we might as well call the “Might and Magic” route: we start in a peasant village and end the game fighting robots shooting laser beams in an orbital space station. Along the way we fight feudal ghosts named after business concepts, get shanked by horse bandits, confront a mad scientist who turns into a shroom monster in a bid to resurrect his dead mother, help an accountant beat up a burly sailor to woo the girl of his dreams, fight Australian unicorn-dolphins1, steal beef jerky from lumberjacks and draw water from the most annoying and useless well in the entire universe. You know, as you do in JRPGs.
Presented like this, BoF3 sounds like a very wacky game. That’s not untrue, but it also has a darker core. Much of the silliness is driven by gameplay needs, like having to have a boss monster or padding out the run time. And boy, is there a lot of filler in this one. That said, the core story is surprisingly strong, and the somber moments tend to land very well. To unpack that, it’s time to talk about said story.
The childhood act
We’re most concerned with the end of the story here, but I’d like to briefly recap the events leading up to it for context. And also because I think BoF3 does some interesting things with it along the way, worth looking at in their own right.
The game has a very clear two-act structure. Act one follows our hero Ryu as a preteen boy, tossed around by the whims of fate and bullied by an often cruel world. After a time skip, act two follows Ryu as a young adult who’s come into his full heritage as one of the most powerful beings in the world. Free from the petty troubles of his childhood, he can now ask that perennial question, “who am I, really?”.
Unfortunately the game does start off with a painful double whammy of cliché. Not only do we open with our main character waking up, it also turns out he’s the last of his kind(TM). And also kinda-sorta the Chosen One. So make that three for three, I guess. Thankfully most of what follows is more intelligent and less rote.
At least he doesn’t wake up in bed. As the intro crawl tells us, the BoF3 world is going through an industrial revolution based on a kind of magical ore made of dead dragons and other magical creatures, which works as a transparent petroleum stand-in, only cooler. Our child hero Ryu gets a literal rude awakening when two miners use explosives to open the crystal he’s been suspended in for hundreds of years.
One of the main gimmicks of the BoF games is that the main character can change into a dragon form, and in this one Ryu starts off transformed and quickly makes barbecue of the poor miners who woke him up. He escapes the mine, ends up alone in a forest, reverts to human form and is eventually adopted by a teenage cat-boy named Rei, who moonlights as the local Robin Hood when he isn’t hunting boars with throwing knives (as you do in JRPGs). Rounding out our Merry Men is the unfortunately named Teepo, another preteen foundling whose main role is to be obnoxious and make bad decisions.
Silly as all this is, there’s also a surprising note of realism to the premise. Or maybe a “deconstruction”, as TV Tropes would call it. While it’s all bright and cheery in presentation, the game goes out of its way to show how rough it would actually be for a trio of young boys to survive on their own in this kind of society, and how hard they have to fight and scrounge for every scrap of food. It’s easy to feel for them and the desperation of their situation even as they make some obviously bad choices. Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of looking beyond the next meal.2
The gang’s happy-go-lucky Robin Hood adventures come to a hard stop when they get on the bad side of the local lord, who has connections to the mafia. Yes, seriously, the honest to goodness mafia. Two fine upstanding representatives of organized crime, Balio and Sunder, show up and beat our heroes senseless in a famously unwinnable battle.3 When Ryu comes to, he’s all alone in the world, with no friends and nowhere to go.
This part is great. Cheerful cartoonish visuals aside, the game really sells how lost and miserable poor Ryu is here. His pitiful crying is downright heartbreaking, especially since he’s been presented as such a sweet and naive kid so far. It’s also a good contrast to how powerful he gets later, and helps make this story feel like a long, epic journey both in time and space. For once even the gameplay gets in on it, since the player can no longer rely on the more powerful Rei as a crutch, and has to make do with a single character rather than a full party of three.4
After this focused and intense opening chapter, the game slows down a lot, and the story starts to meander in classic BoF fashion. There’s no need to recap all this stuff, but basically, we keep running into those awful horse brothers, who first try to take advantage of Ryu’s dragon powers as a novelty attraction for a quick buck and then make his life a living hell at every turn on principle after he humiliates them. We also get some new party members, so we can run around dungeons and fight random encounters and do all that JRPG stuff in between being harassed by the horse guys. Unfortunately this isn’t a game with a strong cast, and none of these characters are especially interesting. One is a literal sapient onion who has no dialogue and only functions as a battle unit and light comic relief until the very end of the game. So yeah, the plot is the attraction here, no the exquisite character work. At least not in the player party.
While they’re not on the level of Myria, Balio and Sunder are also very effective villains. They’re greedy and more than a bit dim, but they also have this predator cunning and sense for unethical profit. In other words, these guys are the poster boys for petty, banal evil, and that’s something we rarely see in a genre as flamboyant and theatrical as JRPGs. It’s not that they’re sadists or anything. They just don’t give a single fuck between them. Maybe they wouldn’t stab children for fun, but if they can get some easy money by shoving a sword in the back of a ten year old, they’ll do it every time. A lesser game would make them dumb comic relief. While they do have shades of that role, they’re so dangerous and so tenacious the story forces us to take them seriously in spite of their stupidity.
Many JRPGs seem have teenagers or children as their main cast by blind convention, but in practice these characters rarely feel especially childlike. They do adult jobs without batting an eye, travel the world without parents and wield oversized swords and cosmic spells. In contrast, the first act of BoF3 feels more purposeful here. It shows us these young children scrambling to survive in a world that’s too big for them, being constantly hounded by adults who want to hurt and exploit them. Rather than escaping through plucky hijinx, they barely scrape by on cleverness and dumb luck, until it runs out and they’re outmaneuvered. Playing as these youngsters in this awful situation really helps us feel their vulnerability.
After many hours of side trips and deadly cat and mouse with Balio and Sunder, the main plot finally picks back up at the end of the inevitable tournament arc. We’re introduced to vagabond Buddhist monk-slash-gargoyle demon Garr, the resident badass who also knows Balio and Sunder from earlier dealings with the mafia. At this point the horses have our heroes in captivity again, making them fight in the inevitable tournament. Garr declares he’s going to enter, and that he wants Ryu and friends as his prize if he wins. He wipes the floor with Ryu in another unwinnable battle, then sets him free after some exposition in the arena lobby.
It’s an interesting twist that the intimidating Garr is the first nice adult we’ve seen. The game does some light teasing about whether he’s actually in cahoots with the horses or has some nefarious purpose of his own, but it turns out Garr is actually a decent guy, which I like.
This is actually where the main plot begins, in the sense that the plot thread that will carry us all the way to the end starts right here. And in fact, you could make a strong argument Garr is the main character, not Ryu. He’s the one who sets the main plot in motion in both halves of the game, and he’s the one who goes through the main character arc of the story. Of course, Ryu doing the silent protagonist thing doesn’t help, but he still doesn’t have anything like the centuries-long redemption arc Garr goes on. In any case, I’d say Garr is by far the most interesting and developed character in the main party, not that it’s a high bar.5
Garr is the first person we’ve met who actually knows something about Ryu’s people, called the “Dragon Clan” in the first two games and more liberally translated as “the Brood” here. He tells Ryu to meet him at a place called Angel Tower if he wants to learn more about them. For the first time since NcNeil village, we have an objective, rather than simply running for our lives. The BoF plague of filler strikes again, though, since there’s still a quarter left of the first act before we can get there and progress the plot. This translates to many hours’ worth of shenanigans, including the aforementioned accountant and Aussie dolphin.
Still, we do get one of my favorite scenes first. Of course Balio and Sunder can’t let us go, so they set up an ambush, as the cowards they are. I love the sprite work here. It’s great in the whole game, but there’s something about these ridiculous funny animal thugs playing with their knives and smoking their pipes with their 1920s edgy hats and coats that makes me smile every time. The word ‘ruffian’ was made to describe these guys. They’re somehow both enormously silly and intimidating at once, like if someone got the idea to do a darker and edgier Wind in the Willows.
Just as the horse brothers gloat, the camera pans behind the party, and we see Garr casually strolling in, having beaten the absolute crap out of all the ten-cent gangsters. Then he officially joins the party, and we finally, finally get to even the score against those obnoxious horses. In another neat touch, they unceremoniously die for real this time, and that’s that.
Hours of riveting JRPG’ing later, we get back to the story as the party reaches the bottom of Angel Tower.6 Garr tells Ryu to come with him into the last room while the others wait outside, and it turns out the tower is a dragon graveyard. It gets worse when Garr reveals the reason all those dragons died was that they fought a war against the goddess Myria, the goddess he happens to serve as an immortal warrior-monk. Oops. A terrible war the dragons instigated with their aggression, naturally. Now that he’s found the very last dragon, he can finally go to his eternal rest as a stone statue after he’s done his duty and killed Ryu. Cue boss battle.
Every story could use a good betrayal or two, and I think this one works well. For one thing, it’s not immediately obvious. It’s actually kind of rare for full-on party members to turn on you in a JRPG, since players don’t like having their toys taken away from them. Garr has also been a consistently good and gentle presence so far, in spite of how he looks. It’s also effective in a thematic sense. Poor little Ryu has been nothing but nice, and return he’s been beaten, stabbed, humiliated and treated like dirt at every turn other by everyone other than Nina and Momo. He’s been betrayed by adults over and over again, so when he finds this weird surrogate parental figure, why wouldn’t Garr turn on him and try to kill him just when he’s started to let his guard down?
Most importantly, like his boss, Garr has sensible motivations. Even when he does something as terrible as trying to murder a child, and a child we’ve been playing as for twenty hours and built a lot of empathy with at this point, we can understand why he does it. Unlike Balio and Sunder, he’s not a bully, a coward or a base opportunist. He takes no pleasure in this, it’s simply his duty, one he’s been following for hundreds of years. It’s his religion. Later, we come to learn he has been having doubts for a long time, but he forces himself not to listen to them. As bad as his actions are, this is still relatable and human.
Maybe Garr would have done well to take a page out of the horse brothers’ book, though. Since he just had to do his dramatic reveal and attack Ryu among the bones of his ancestors, some dragon spirits rise up and save our hero through the power of deus ex machina. Or maybe the power of Garr grabbing the idiot ball. Which comes out to more or less the same thing. Either way, the result is that Ryu turns into? merges with? a giant ghost dragon and disappears, before act one ends with a cryptic nightmare sequence and a fade to black.
A quest for knowledge
The second half of the game opens an unspecified number of years later7, in the same mine where it all began, now all abandoned and eerie. The same room, even. We cut right to Garr pursuing a little green dragon puppy, and no points for guessing who. He slams Ryu with his spear again, then has the audacity to immediately ask for his forgiveness. No matter what the player chooses, Garr gives Ryu back his gear and promises an explanation as soon as they get going, since a place full of dragon ghosts isn’t a great place for him to hang around.
I’m not a huge fan of this transition. It’s way too abrupt for such a wrenching change. We’ve already had a shock at Angel Tower, so I think some breathing room would be good. And while I like the idea of starting at the bottom of the mine and fighting our way out in theory, I think some buildup to the reunion between Ryu and Garr would have been much better here.
If it were up to me, I’d have done the timeskip, then cut to the player controlling Garr on the surface. Give us a mini-adventure where we get to roam the overworld8, talk to NPCs at the mine and Syn City, then make us go down those spooky mineshafts room by room, fighting random encounters and all that JRPG stuff. That would make for better pacing, build curiosity and let us process the events at the tower a bit, plus give us some sympathy for Garr. That’s the curious thing about video games. It’s so hard not to root for a character you’re playing as, at least a little bit. And if we can’t have solo Garr for gameplay reasons, just give us Momo and Peco, since they hop right back into the party later with little fuss later anyway.
Anyway, what follows is nothing less than the most pivotal scene of the story. In this one brief conversation, the game lays the foundation for the whole second act. Garr talks about how the duel at Angel Tower confirmed his suspicions: the Brood let themselves be exterminated, and if they’d fought back, Garr and co. would have been wrecked in short order. So why didn’t they fight back? And, more importantly, he goes on to ask the one driving question of the entire story, one that in my opinion should be up there with “what can change the nature of a man?” as the most iconic one in gaming:
In one sense, this scene is kind of rough. It feels short and clipped for something so momentous, and it’s not helped by the fact that one of the people in the conversation can’t talk. It’s also still too hot on the heels of the dramatic events at Angel Tower for my tastes. This bit should probably have come a little later, maybe when Nina and Rei are back in the party.9
Those gripes aside, it’s still very effective. For starters: note how this is a goal our main characters set themselves just because they feel like it. For once we’re not reacting. The world’s not in danger, and we’re not duty-bound to save it from some maniac with silly hair. Or to put it in John Michael Greer’s terms, we’re not fighting “the war against change”, while the villain is the active force who tries to upend the status quo. At this point we’re not setting out to change the world at all, but simply to learn more about it and our place in it. That’s so much more interesting and mature as a story premise, at least in my opinion.
As a bonus, it also solves many of those annoying gameplay and story disconnects. Sure, we can take all the time we want and mess around with sidequests and loot. Why not? The world isn’t burning, we’re just on a roadtrip. For once it makes sense that we’re easily defeating all these super-powerful creatures or single-handedly taking down the mafia, since Ryu is already the most powerful person in the world. He just wants to know why, and to figure out the implications of that power.
After spending the whole childhood arc being kicked around by Balio and Sunder, it’s very cathartic to be in charge of our own destiny. On top of all this, the story now has a juicy mystery to dangle in front of the player. Or: it’s a quest for knowledge, not a quest for power. That’s a very intriguing path for a JRPG of all things to take.
Journey to the Lost Shore
Unfortunately the adult part of the game is rather uneven. It starts strong before it comes down with a nasty case of Filleritis that includes some of the worst examples in the genre. The main plot is both elegant and simple in its construction, but it also features a good contender for the dumbest plot twist of all time. Still, I can forgive it for that. Hell, I can even forgive it for the well minigame. Barely.
Once Ryu and Garr get out of the mine, there’s lengthy episode that culminates in them finding out that Rei survived the attack on the treehouse all those years ago thanks to his secret Weretiger power, and that he’s been fighting the mafia ever since. Nina has also been using her privileges as a royal to unravel the mafia from that end. When the mafia boss is dead, they both join up. We then pick up Momo and Peco10 after a perfunctory chat, and the party is complete. Then it’s time for lots and lots and lots of filler.
In brief: Garr wants to go back to Angel Tower in order to summon Myria and ask her some hard questions. She doesn’t bother to show up, which means we’re going to have to come to her instead. So far the game has been very sparse with specifics about her, and I don’t think we even know her name yet at this point. Here it begins to pull the curtain back a little: she apparently exists in the physical world and lives on the other side of the world, across an ocean and a massive desert. Getting there will be the impetus of the next rest of the game.
It’s worth noting that this part is an actual plothole, as far as I can tell. When we meet her at the end of the game, Myria is nothing if not eager to talk to Ryu. Why would she refuse to answer the call here, saving us twenty more hours of gameplay? Later events will also show that she has the power to transport people across the ocean to her location (somehow), so if she needed Ryu to be at the orbital station, she could have spirited him there directly. There’s nothing stopping her from offering him the endgame choice right here at Angel Tower. Just about the only explanation I can think of is that she hoped Ryu would die along the way, so she could wash her hands of the dilemma of dealing with him.
In one sense, we’ve gone from the cool quest for knowledge to a more mundane “get to the last level” type objective. Still, some of the mystery lingers. We only know that we have to get across the ocean, but no one in recorded history has ever been, and no one has any idea what’s waiting on the other side. In between all the filler, this next part of the game does have the party solving the mystery of how to get across.
Personally I really enjoyed this part. To me it’s an enticing mystery, maybe because we have to so little to go on. Our only scrap of info is that an automated cargo ship occasionally makes the voyage, and that machines wash up on the shores of our local Inner Sea.
Turns out there’s also a legend about a person who made the crossing, and after some of the silliest fetch quests known to gaming, we finally catch up with him:
This guy is a bit of a let-down. He has the personality of wet paper, a bland character design and answers all our questions about the mythical lands across the sea with basically “I dunno lol”. He’s no great navigator either, since he simply hitched a ride on the cargo ship. That’s easy from the Kombinat side, but not so much here, since the thing apparently never docks at Junk Town or Raphala.11 The solution isn’t especially elegant: just ram it. Still, it works and gets us onboard.
The Black Ship doesn’t live up to its romantic name or reputation. It’s a bogstandard gray metal dungeon with some annoying puzzles and subpar boss fight, but at least it has good music. While it could have been used better as part of the story, I did like how it hammered home the sense of leaving the familiar. The party has no idea what they’ll find, and they’ve all chosen to leave their lives behind, maybe for good. That’s a strong declaration of loyalty to Ryu. And even in gameplay terms, it feels like we might be stuck out here for a while, even if the savvy player knows we’ll get a way to revisit our Masters eventually for gameplay purposes.
Either way, the ship docks at the Lost Shore, and the last act of the game begins.12 It’s a nice touch how we start inside the town of Kombinat before we get to see the overworld properly. The town is all warehouses, bland Jetsons rejects and robots, and everyone there seems subdued and lifeless. No one has any useful info, or much of anything at all to say. And then the game teases even more by sending us directly to the camp screen for a lengthy chat before we’re finally allowed a wider glimpse of this new world. Still, it’s a real ‘wham’ moment when the game lifts the curtain after all the anticipation.
The sense of isolation and being far from home is palpable, especially since there’s no way to backtrack yet in gameplay terms. I’ve always thought it’d be neat if the game had the guts to commit to this and actually never let us go back after this, or at least not until right before the end.
In any case, it’s clear something has gone desperately wrong with this part of the world. The somber, haunting overworld music has felt a tad out of place against the cartoonish visuals ever since Dauna Mine, but here it suddenly makes sense. This place is what they were composing for all along. The effect here is rather like Chrono Trigger’s 2300AD: we go from bright colors to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Only this one feels less dramatic and more mundane, somehow. Like the world wasn’t destroyed in a grand cataclysm, but rather allowed to sink into neglect and die a gentle death.
Then we find a teleporter and go right back to Junk Town. Seriously. It’s as jarring as it sounds, even if it leads to an interesting conversation about why this world is the way it is, and the mystery deepens. What caused the desolation over there, and is Myria sending us machines? Why? The end result is that we can come and go freely between the old and the new worlds, but this is purely a gameplay security blanket. From here on out, all the action is at the other continent, and we’ll never need to do anything in terms of the plot in the green world we came from.
Now that we have access to the teleporter network, we can get to the next part of the Lost Shore, where we find a whole town of Brood survivors.13 For some reason they have fantasy architecture rather than the Jetsons stuff.
This whole part is sadly dumb, in multiple ways. First, it introduces a bunch of “Ryu is the chosen one” BS. Second, while I’m not a huge fan of the “last of his kind” trope, this place does undermine it pretty hard. Third, the whole existence of Dragnier opens a nasty plot hole in itself, as we’ll get to a little later. Fourth, it exists primarily to tie this game in with the first one, which is a terrible idea in every way, which I’ll also rant about later. Plus, it feels like a diversion and a speed bump that doesn’t add much, just when the plot should speed up. The people at Dragnier can’t give us any juicy revelations (other than the stupid BoF1 mural), since the story needs to save the remaining ones for the upcoming finale.
To get there, we need to cross an enormous desert. This minigame finished off many a player, and there’s little fun or interesting about it. About the best that can be said is that the BoF4 version is even worse.
At the other end, we find a village of stereotypical desert nomads. I find it amusing how the game hasn’t cared at all about issues like how these people across the sea can speak our language and use our currency, but now all of a sudden it has them using broken English or Japanese for cheap laughs.14 They tell us of ancient ruins to the north: the fallen metropolis of Caer Xhan in the English version, or the much more prosaic “ancient city” in Japanese.
It’s probably the most impressive structure we’ve seen on the world map, but the playable location doesn’t measure up. Maybe they were running out of budget at this point. We soon find ourselves at Orbital Station Myria, the lengthy final dungeon. And at the end, we come face to face with the goddess herself...but not before the worst plot twist in gaming.
A cascade of idiocy
So it turns out Teepo also survived the fateful battle against the horse brothers, and that he’s also a member of the Brood. He also happens to be here, without a care in the world about the desert, the ocean or any of that stuff. Can we ask him how he got past any of those obstacles, or how he got here? Dream on. This cheeky idiot didn’t even have the courtesy to kill off the bosses for us along the way.
The reason he’s here is to make Myria’s case for her, before we even get to meet her. This is a problem both for me and the game, since that means we’ve already heard what she’s going to say in advance, and already know her motivations, so it’s both repetitive and fails to work as a dramatic reveal. Teepo refuses to budge, so in the end we’re forced to kill him to grab his keycard so we can get to Myria.
This scene really brings out my inner Shamus Young.15 As he might have put it, every single thing about this is wrong and dumb, on every level, in every possible way. It’s a brute-force shock moment that opens multiple plot holes, doesn’t work thematically, messes with the pacing and undermines the much better scene with Myria in multiple ways. And if they absolutely had to do this, at the very least have Teepo show up after we’ve been talking to Myria for a while, as her trump card. I could easily live with having a random generic boss fight here instead.
How the hell did he get here, anyway? This part would still be stupid even with an explanation, but I’d still like one. Too bad one isn’t forthcoming. My pet theory is that he used the teleporter underneath Wyndia Castle, but that one was inactive until we turned it on later in the story. Maybe Myria turned it on for him and then turned it off? Further, how did she even know about him? She’s willing to go so far out of her way to get in touch with this idiot and whisk him across the ocean and desert, but when Ryu actively wants to speak with her, she can’t be bothered to answer the divine phone at Angel Tower? Come on now.
Not a single thing about this development makes sense in any way. It also shows Balio and Sunder as hilariously incompetent in hindsight, when all three of their victims survived. (Also mighty convenient how all three of them happened to wake up and walk off at different times to miss each other, but that’s the kind of small fry I could let the game get away with this plot twist was good otherwise.)
When the purple-haired idiot finally turns into a key card, we can put all this idiocy behind us and move on to the much smarter showdown with Myria.
The protector of the world
Again, I love how different this feels from the usual JRPG final boss showdown. Instead of chasing the villain across the map as he causes devastation, we find her calmly waiting. We’re not here to fight, at least not necessarily, even if Ryu has a lot of to avenge. No, we just want answers. Why did the Brood have to die, when they were harmless pacifists?
Incredibly, Myria’s answer is logical and makes sense. An uncomfortable amount of sense, in fact. Long ago, the people of Caer Xhan destroyed themselves in a vague war, and this is why most of the world is desert now. In the aftermath, Myria was the most powerful being in the world, and she created the Outer Sea to protect the Wyndia continent from the encroaching sands.16 When she realized how powerful the Brood were, she feared they’d end up causing a similar disaster, so she felt she had to destroy them first.
Of course, there’s a lot of objections you could make here. Preemptive attacks aren’t usually seen as justified in warfare or personal self-defense, for instance. And we are talking about the systematic extermination of a people here, most of them innocent civilians. Myria’s actions are clearly heinous.
On the other hand: all it’d take is one dragon abusing his or her powers. We’ve seen how strong Ryu is throughout this journey, in a rare case of gameplay and story complementing each other. He could easily have become a supervillain if he’d wanted to.
This also fits with the idea that Myria is benevolent in her way, but also flawed. She’s kind of neurotic and overprotective. It’s easy to get the sense she never wanted her power, and feels burdened by all this responsibility. Without getting too far into real-life politics, she overemphasized safety and erring on the side of caution, which is an all too human inclination. Still, with what the game gives us, you could at least make a plausible case she had a point. That’s miles better than some maniac wanting to destroy the world. She comes across as genuinely remorseful for having to kill even one person.
However, things get a bit murkier as we go on. First, Myria simply wipes the party’s memories and teleports them back home. I like how this shows that we are actually going up against someone with godlike power, and that she has other tricks than brute strength. This is undone with another left field plot twist, where it turns out Peco is also Yggdrasil, the Tree of Wisdom and another sort-of deity, who teleports the party right back and gives Myria a lecture about trusting her metaphorical children to make their own way now.
Unlike the BS with Teepo, I kind of like this in principle. It’s a neat idea: the party caught between the plotting of these two gods over the fate of the world, with Yggdrasil playing the long game. It just doesn’t work very well because it’s so jarring. I think this would have been much better if it’d been revealed or at least hinted at earlier, which would also have given Peco a much-needed personality and purpose other than hitting enemies.
In the end, Myria offers Ryu a choice: surrender his powers and stay at the Station forever, like Teepo, or fight her and die. Again, this would have been so much more effective if Teepo showed up now. Instead, his death has already hardened us against this argument, and agreeing feels like a waste in the face of it. To the game’s credit, we do actually get the choice to agree with her, which I really appreciate. This leads to a brief alternate ending. Going along with it would have made so much more sense if it also involved saving Teepo’s life, though.
Another problem here: why did so many Brood let themselves be killed, rather than accept these terms? She could clearly offer it en masse, as Dragnier shows. More problematic: why is Dragnier still a thing, if these are her terms? If Ryu gives up his powers, why couldn’t he live there among his own kind? Or even with Nina back in Wyndia? Why does he have to stay at the Station, other than for Drama(TM)? That’s what so frustrating about this part: so many excellent ideas, along with a lot of sloppiness.
A selfish choice
If the player refuses Myria’s terms, the game proceeds to the final boss and the “real” ending. This mostly features the party wandering the desert, trying to figure out what to do now that the world is rudderless and leaderless. The game implies there might be nothing to hold back the desert now, but it’s hard to tell if this is true or Myria worrying too much again. Either way, the game presents this as growing up: the people of the world don’t need Myria as their surrogate parent anymore, even if no one got to vote on this, and there’s now nothing stopping Ryu (or his descendants?) from using their dragon powers for evil ends if they want to.
All this is pretty standard and not too interesting. No, the real good part of this ending happens before, as the party escapes the collapsing Orbital Station.17 The dying Myria reverts to her usual non-final boss form, and in another refreshing change of note for the genre, she isn’t angry or spiteful. She’s mourning. And not for herself, but for her world, which she still feels beholden to protect. Not only that, she does something most JRPG villains would never dream of in between their cackling fits: she doubts herself. And again, she’s right: fate did put her in a very unpleasant dilemma. Overcome with sorrow and helplessness, she cries out with the best line in the entire game, and for my money one of the best in the entire genre:
Damn. This genuinely gives me chills. A reluctant god, herself reduced to begging and throwing herself on the mercy of the divine. Even someone so powerful, someone who should know so much, has no idea whether real gods exist. That’s a strong way to show how immense, how weird and how inexplicable the universe is. Myria is so godlike she has the power of a whole world at her command, but the secret of true divinity still eludes her. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but for me this is such a powerful moment.
The helplessness is also very relatable, the screaming desire to know: so how the fuck should I have handled it, then? She’s not saying she was right, only that she did her best, and that that might not have been enough. It also reinforces the “growing up” theme: unlike Ryu and co., she clearly can’t, but even in the end, she cries out for a parent instead.
In another one of those “profound to jarring” moments, her sister Deis teleports in. Somehow. Like the Peco-Yggdrasil thing, this is another idea that’s cool in theory, but way too late and underbaked to work here. The game did establish a connection between them earlier, but Deis as a character got far too little attention. If it were up to me I’d have made her a full party member, especially since she was one in the first two games.
In any case, Deis goes on to assure Myria the world will be fine. She basically takes’ Yggdrasil’s side in the argument and makes the same arguments, but it’s not as hard to hear coming from her.18 Then they both go down together with the Station, and I’d like to think they were hugging, if the graphics could show it without more expensive one-off animations.
Even if the world will be fine, note that unlike most JRPGs, we’re not making a noble choice here. We’re making a selfish choice. Yes, it’s framed as allowing humanity to “grow up”, but it’s not like Myria is a dictator. Most people have no idea she exists at all. Her only intervention, other than killing the Brood and creating the Outer Sea, is to send the occasional machine across the ocean. There’s an implication she’s holding back the development of advanced technology to prevent another war, but the game never shows her doing this in any sort of hands-on way. Momo seems to think she and her colleagues can reverse-engineer the machines if Myria goes away, but there’s nothing stopping them from trying already. They also have no clear plan for how to do this, or any way to transport machines across the sea. On the contrary, Myria is the one who’s been taking care of that and even made an effort to provide them with what machines they do have.
Besides, even if she were, you could argue she’d be right there too, haha. She does nothing to stop people developing art, architecture, culture, farming or anything else they tend to value. It’s an interesting question if she’d intervene if someone tried to start a rival religion, but it’s hard to say. She never seems to care much about people worshipping her. Myria is presented more as a burned-out and remote manager who’s far above concerns like that.
Going by what the game presents, I’d say Yggdrasil is wrong: the party is making a selfish choice by killing her, by basically saying Ryu’s right to be as he is trumps everyone else’s safety. It’s understandable they’d feel that way, but it’s also a choice that’s harder to defend once you move the lens outside of Protagonist-Centered Morality, as TV Tropes calls it.
There’s one last fly in the ointment we have to address here. It’s pretty obvious someone at Capcom intended this game to be a canonical sequel to BoF1 and 2. I refuse to accept this. It doesn’t work at all with what we’re shown in the game, and makes a total hash of the most interesting parts of the story for no gain. That is, in BoF1, Myria was a typical evilly evil for the sake of it JRPG villain. If she is the same character, she has to be lying here, and only killed the Brood because she felt like it. That’s not especially interesting. It removes all the delicious moral nuance and makes it a typical black and white cartoon.
Besides, I can’t help feel the writer here either agreed with me or had never played BoF1 to begin with. Why would they put in a cutscene where Myria lies for fifteen minutes, with motivations she wouldn’t have? The world of BoF3 doesn’t feel at all like the one from the first games, and this story loses a lot and gains nothing by connecting them. There’s a mural at Dragnier showing the party from the first game, and an NPC talking about how they once fought an evil goddess. That’s it. It feels very shoehorned in, and I prefer to just ignore it, since that interpretation makes BoF3 vastly better.
Anyway, that wraps up Breath of Fire 3. An uneven and sometimes clumsy story, but also one with a lot of heart, and some surprisingly mature ideas. I’m more drawn to the “even the god of this world is an uncertain girl who has no idea what she’s doing and makes it up as she goes along” theme than the “growing up and letting go” one, but either way this is a JRPG out of the ordinary if you can look past the surface elements.
Or Kansai-speaking, in the Japanese version
Even if the gameplay undermines this in usual fashion, since we can kill a few monsters and get enough money to feed an army for a year
In fact, this battle is the one thing people tend to remember about this game. It spawned a surprising number of urban legends about ways to win it
Not that big a deal when you can buy healing herbs for pennies, but still
Rei is the other candidate. He has a great design, but gets overshadowed by the plot and never really deals with his traumatic past much
Yes, I know it’s a tower, but for some reason the dungeon is actually the cellar underneath it. Don’t ask me why :P
I’ve always been unreasonably annoyed the game has to be coy about this. Especially when it feels like it’s intentionally teasing. The script never specifies, but my headcanon is 10 years, with Ryu and Nina going from 10-11-ish to around 20, Rei from 16 to 26 and Momo maybe 21 to 31 or so. Note that Rei is young enough he gets a new sprite, while Momo doesn’t
Especially fun since we’ve never had the chance to explore the overworld around Dauna Mines before this
Not least because I’d like to see how Nina and Rei would react to all this
I still think they could have sprung for a new outfit for Momo, if nothing else
It’s been a while, so maybe I’m forgetting details, but what does the Black Ship actually do in the Inner Sea, anyway?
“The Lost Shore” is such an amazing and romantic name for a location, and it fits the place perfectly. I love it. In general the translation is really on-point and creative for this game, especially considering it’s from the same era as “this guy are sick” et al. Still, I was disappointed to see it was something the translators completely made up: in Japanese it’s the much more prosaic “distant land”
You get to see Dragnier on the world map before you can enter it. Way back when I first played this game, I thought it was another sci-fi town, and interpreted the green tents as dumpsters or something, haha
That said, if you ever watch JRPG speedrunner Zheal’s streams of this game, he does a magnificent “I AM REGRETTABLE!” impression that makes it all worth it :) (On a side note to the side note, I used to be a regular there years back, and much of this article was inspired by lengthy discussions about Myria in his chat. Very much a stand-up guy, and worth a visit if you enjoy speedruns…even if BoF3 in particular really sucks as a speedgame :P)
Still my hero when it comes to anything video game critique-related
The game never tells us how she ended up as a deity, unless you buy the BoF1 connection. I think someone theorized way back she was an engineered life form created by the Caer Xhanians before they blew themselves up, which is a neat idea
Because every self-respecting JRPG has to end with a load-bearing boss
Also, if she was on Yggdrasil’s side all along, couldn’t she, y’know, have warned us about the whole teleport and memory wipe combo? Would have been handy to know about
So Myria is your favourite JRPG villain of all times?