Playing every PS1 game - Breath of Fire III-IV, Brian Lara Cricket

With the recent success of a ‘JRPG formula’ game like Expedition 33, I’ve vaguely wondered recently whether they might be due a comeback after being basically dead for decades. The old format of turn-based combat, world map traversal and equipping your characters with something more ‘involved’ than a single sharp implement and piece of armour basically died a death after the PS2, and we were brainwashed into believing that modern role playing games needed to be hack-and-slash “action RPGs” where you simply choose between a ‘quick’ a quick/slow attack button until you won.

So it’s fun to revisit these old JRPGs for two reasons. One is that given the genre died its aforementioned death by the end of the 2000s, it feels like a bit of a novelty again (a bit like fixed-camera-tank-control horror games). The other is that for the same reason, it still feels ‘current’, as the format hasn’t been iterated over and over, as opposed to how it would be going back to an old FPS like Medal of Honor in this post-CoD world.

Breath of Fire III

On one level, it must have sucked trying to make RPGs in the 90s, given the utter market dominance of the Final Fantasy juggernaut, which set a very high standard for things. On another level it may have been the perfect time, as the jump to high fidelity 3D HD games and the subsequent long march to every game being exactly the same had yet to happen, and looking back, the period was probably the high watermark for the genre.

Plant 42? In a Capcom game?

I’ve never played any of the Breath of Fire games, aside from giving BoF4 a swing a few years ago and not getting anywhere with it. Apparently the games do share some sort of common narrative through the series while remaining more or less independent from each other? Impossible to know unless I play the preceding two, but going through BoF3 I never felt the impression that I was missing some sort of key lore knowledge or something because of my ignorance of its predecessors.

Honest to God full frontal nudity in 1997.

It’s a well made, interesting, extremely un-ambitious JRPG. In 1997 I can see the response being an indifferent shrug (which it seems to have been), because it was a time of rapid graphical progress, and consumers wouldn’t have been able to help comparing BoF3 - which is for all intents and purposes a SNES game with some 3D elements - with Final Fantasy VII, which had just changed the whole landscape entirely. Games that didn’t change much between fourth and fifth generation consoles were being almost universally dismissed out of hand.

So I would say that playing it now, with the context of its release forgotten about, one can appraise the game on its own merits. And I think it’s a decent enough game. It’s almost choking on the tried-and-true formula - strong and silent youngster player character stumbles into a journey of increasingly high stakes, assembling a crew of other misfits along the way - but it never gets so far as to venture into the realm of cliché and triteness.

The 2D spritework is actually pretty good. Nobody would have cared at the time, though.

At least not too much. It’s a game of very few surprises. Twists come when you expect them to (though you might not guess what they are) and are telegraphed ahead of time appropriately. Game mechanics which might be called gimmicks in any other game manage to get away with it by being rather neatly woven into the narrative; your character is a shape shifting human-dragon, so it makes sense that his special move in battles is to transform into a beefed-up lizard and tear the shit out of enemies.

Combine stones to transform into all flavours of instrument of draconic death.

Where the systems differ from Final Fantasy you find some actually pretty good ideas. The game is populated with a roster of ‘masters’ just going about their business in various locations, and under whom your characters can ‘apprentice’. Depending on your choice of teacher, different stats are favoured for an increase on levelling up, meaning you can boost a magic user’s INT stat for a while and then switch for a few levels to a different master who will jack up their DEF. I’m amazed I’ve never seen the idea copied by another game.

Aside from it happening automatically by levelling up, you learn skills by ‘examining’ an enemy and then waiting for them to hit you with it, and there are a lot of skills to learn. It’s a bit of an annoying lottery and doesn’t work half the time. Masters will also teach you skills as you level up in their understudy, but it’s quite easy to end up missing powerful spells because you screwed up your levelling plan, and inadvertently snooker yourself.

The volume of minigames meet JRPG standards. Fishing actually plays quite a significant part though is entirely optional and never talked about in-game.

There are two glaring problems with the game, and depending on your temperament they can both be crippling. The first is that the encounter rate is utterly ludicrous. Don’t expect your step count to enter double digits too often without entering a random battle against the local mooks. The way that the battles take place on the same stage as the level itself - that is to say, without any swooshing transitions - speeds things up a bit, but it is nonetheless constant. It makes dungeons drag on, and given how they often have a puzzling element, breaks things up way too much.

Weirdly, the game frequently leaves off full stops at the end of sentences, breaking the flow of text.

The other is that the game itself is sloooooow. It’s not quite reaching the coma-like depths of sloth as Blood Omen, but I don’t know how much I’d get through things without an emulator with a frame skip function. Unlike Blood Omen, the game doesn’t run slowly; the pace is a design decision. Even on the fastest setting, dialogue boxes take far too long to slowly stream the text in, and everything seems to just labour itself into movement. It drives me mad.

Right as the game starts to run out of ideas, it throws an epic desert trek at you where you have to navigate using constellations.

That’s about it though really for the negatives, as big as they are. It’s a good old fashioned RPG that does a better job of believable worldbuilding than most of the stuff you get these days. There is a ton of genuinely ‘hidden’ content, too, from a time before collectathon tickbox quest menus where everything there was to do in the game is clearly explained to you ahead of time so that you don’t risk missing anything. In Breath of Fire III, if you don’t ever go fishing, or build the fairy village, or find the hidden skill teachers, the game remains indifferent. It just lets you carry on with the game, and when you do find the stuff a few playthroughs later, it feels far more rewarding than the ho-hum of checking off a side quest list before you let yourself finish it, then never play again.

Kept my attention for: A few weeks
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 7/10

Breath of Fire IV

An interesting thing I (re)discovered when playing Breath of Fire IV immediately after III was a long forgotten feeling of a genuine ‘leap forward’ in fidelity between editions of the same series of games. It’s definitely Breath of Fire, but looks much swankier, expands meaningfully on the mechanics of its predecessor, and just generally feels like a ‘new’, fresh experience. It’s hard to describe, but as technological improvements have long since entered the realm of diminishing returns, there aren’t really modern parallels. Every Assassin’s Creed game has been more or less the same thing for almost 20 years. Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be Grand Theft Auto V, which was itself a re-badge of Grand Theft Auto IV. Fight me if you disagree.

It’s the same, but evolved.

The characters and certain elements of worldbuilding carry over from BoF3, but in name and appearance only, so it’s more of a very conspicuous nod to the previous games rather than a direct continuation. The plot is also similar, but that’s because it’s the same sort of JRPG plod you would expect. I’ll lift it directly from what I wrote about BoF3, because even verbatim it works again - strong and silent youngster player character stumbles into a journey of increasingly high stakes, assembling a crew of other misfits along the way. It’s maaaybe a bit less procedural in terms of narrative than BoF3, but really not by much. There is the odd surprise.

It’s definitely more ‘cinematic’ and makes far more use of the 3D hardware.

The ‘master’ system stays, and is improved a bit by removing the requirement to schlep back and forth to assign and re-assign characters to their tutelage. The skill swapping system - which, I’ll be honest, I never really used in the previous game - also returns. The only thing I’d have changed with the old battle system would have been to make it a bit quicker; it hasn’t done that. A lot of the bosses are now rendered in 3D, which I’m sure was considered a much-needed 21st century graphical update at the time, but looking at it now it’s hard to think that the untextured, Final Fantasy VII style blocky enemies look any better than the really quite good pixel art they were replacing.

The camping tent is back, but the world map has been hobbled.

BoF4 is widely viewed as superior to what was in turn viewed as a rather underbaked BoF3, and is talked about as one of the better RPGs on the PlayStation. So it felt strange to feel like I had more fun with BoF3. It could be an expectations thing - in that I went in to BoF3 with none, and into BoF4 with many. But I don’t know. Playing BoF4 is frequently…irritating. The game has evolved the rather rudimentary “isometric but hold down R1 to meekly shift the camera around a few degrees” method of movement from its predecessor into a fully 3D environment which can be rotated around four cardinal directions at will. All it means is you constantly - constantly - get lost behind a wall, or a tree, or some other object and have to spend a few moments faffing with the camera rotation to find which of the four viewpoints lets you see what you’re doing. Take two paces forward, and repeat the process as the cramped environments mean you lose your character again. Doing so also messes with your sense of direction, with the camera always swooping around, and you rely on trial and error until you are able to build up a half-decent mental map of the stage.

Not knowing where the hell you’re going happens ALL THE TIME.

Things are ever so slightly faster than the lethargic wait-a-thon that BoF3 frequently found itself manifesting, but for some reason it feels far less responsive. Accidentally hitting the wrong menu option happened quite a lot, and not being able to align my character to properly speak to someone, or fit through a gap, occurred with a frustrating regularity. I just got quite fed up with it in all honesty. I gave it a fair whack to see if the rather dull narrative started picking itself up after a while, but it never did. I got to the end of Chapter 1 (of 4), and decided I couldn’t be bothered any more.

This was the moment I finally tapped out. I’m there, somewhere behind all the geometry.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10

Brian Lara Cricket

Cricket games - particularly 3D cricket games - are hard to develop in a halfway realistic or meaningful way for a couple of reasons.

There are two types of leave…

The main one is that the game revolves around very sophisticated collision detection. To simulate the game properly, you need a 3D ball object - maybe a few pixels wide - to move quickly across the environment and identify accurately when it comes into contact with an object and react appropriately. This object could be a cricket bat, or it could be a batting pad, or an arm, or a helmet, or gloves.

Let’s say the ball has hit the bat - also a few pixels wide. At which angle is the bat facing at this point in time? When did it hit the bat? Each object’s position in space and its velocity/direction is only calculated once per frame - and this game runs at around 25 frames per second. If a cricket ball is bowled at 80mph, that’s about 36 metres per second, which means the ball moves a whopping 1.4 metres between each frame. Quite the conundrum for a programmer who wants to have objects bounce off each other realistically.

So really, on the PlayStation you would have to fudge it a bit by taking the first frame at which the ball is somewhere near the batsman, take the user input (ie. the direction in which you want to hit it), do a calculation based on how well timed the user input was, then run the animation for that particular shot, moving the batsman model into such a place where it will give the impression that the ball has hit the bat and bounced away naturally. That, more or less, is exactly what Brian Lara Cricket does. And in my opinion, it is the best cricket simulation of all time.

More or less every test ground in the world circa 1998 has been fully 3D modelled. This is Cape Town.

Saying that, such greatness is not as grand a feat is it might seem, given the thoroughly lacklustre calibre of most of the games old and new with which it competes. Cricket is a game played in three dimensions, so 2D cricket games that came before BLC can’t shake off the feeling of clunkiness and their lack of any true control for the player. On the original PlayStation, the only competition was EA’s truly dreadful Cricket 2000. The PS2 had a few passable cricketing offerings, but it’s worth bearing in mind that Ashes Cricket 2013 was so bad that it was removed from sale after a week. In the 25 years since BLC’s release, the only cricket sim that has offered a similar experience has been Don Bradman Cricket, which came out in 2014 and has failed to build on its promise in the years that followed (it actually morphed into the more recently licenced ‘Cricket [year]’ series, which I’ve played a bit and found it to be guff).

A central game mode is the ‘test season’, where you can play all the test fixtures of a given nation over the course of several years. I refuse to believe anyone has ever managed it.

Brian Lara Cricket gets almost everything right. The animations are smooth and segway into each other naturally. The controls are responsive. The commentary by Jonathan Agnew and Geoffrey Boycott was still being lifted and used in other games years later. Setting up your game is easy; you choose the teams, choose the number of days, number of overs, the location, and whether you want to play in whites or one-day coloured pyjamas. Living a 4-day West Indies v Sri Lanka coloured kit non-test match in Harare is achievable in a few moments.

Alternatively, there is a cheat code to play at, er, the beach.

No other game has been able to nail the atmosphere of a long and meandering test match scenario. The crowd will be biased toward the home team, but if a wicket hasn’t fallen in a while and the batsmen are slowly accumulating runs, things revert to a permanent low murmur, before exploding again as a ball is edged to second slip. Before each day’s play you’re given a weather forecast and an assessment of the pitch conditions, and said conditions make a genuine difference. Trying to plunder runs under muggy cloud, in England, on a soft surface will result in you collapsing briskly into an embarrassed heap, as the ball hoops around corners and nips laterally after bouncing. Better to wait until tomorrow.

A dry final day at The Oval means the ball will turn.

Batting rewards patience and picking the gaps in the field - though it can be a bit too easy to outfox the CPU’s sometimes puzzlingly dim field placements - and there is genuine risk/reward in choosing to use the circle button to try and thump the ball over the top for six, as actually hitting it all the way requires a combination of timing, picking the right ball to hit, and taking into account fielding positions, as if you don’t quite get hold of it (which will happen more often than not), you don’t want to look like an idiot having slapped it straight to a fielder.

A mock-90s cricket broadcast wouldn’t be complete without the novelty waddling duck.

Bowling lacks a bit of depth. You control a small ring which swoops around the pitch as if it were on ice, and press X when it passes over your desired spot to lock in where your ball is going to pitch. Alternatively, press circle for a slower delivery. You also have the option to press triangle for a ‘quicker ball’, but I don’t think this actually does anything. Interestingly, the manual will warn you about trying too many quicker balls, as you run the risk of overstepping the line and bowling a no ball - this is actually impossible in the game. That’s about it really. Bowling can be pretty dull, particularly when you’re bowling on a deck that’s as flat as a pancake and the opposition are 200-0. But that’s cricket for you. I don’t know really how you could make it that much more interesting, but a few later cricket games tried and mostly failed too.

Fielding is the game’s weakest aspect and is totally hopeless. The fact that it’s handled by the CPU by default indicates the developers recognised this.

Brian Lara Cricket is rather famously full of glitches - but the good kind. The most well known is the commentary bug where the ball is hit skyward, and Jonathan Agnew shouts “In the air…” like an frustrated spectator pre-empting an inevitable catch. The ball lands in the fielder’s hands, and the celebration animation begins, but Aggers declares “..and safe”, before the audio suddenly switches and the game instead plays the line he was supposed to say, which is “…and out”. I am sure this is because of the frame rate physics problem I discussed in the first few paragraphs, but it happens very frequently. Other bugs include wicketkeepers randomly wandering off (leaving the ball run through for four byes and Aggers dryly murmuring “That won’t please the wicketkeeper”), the classic 90s red-light-green-light third umpire getting things terribly wrong, and stumps being thrown down and fielding sides making loud appeals, while the batsmen stand safely within their crease, idly leaning on their bats. To me, I actually think the random weirdness gives it all a certain character.

This sort of stuff is a bit too common. Save after every over.

I’ve played BLC every so often ever since I first got it back in 1999. During the Covid lockdowns, when there was no sport to be watched anywhere for months on end, I set up a fake Ashes series on BLC for the (loose) entertainment of myself and some cricket buddies, where I set up a 5-test series of CPU vs CPU England vs Australia, and every morning I would load the game, start the day’s play, and let it run in the background while I worked from home, occasionally turning as Aggers reported on a wicket falling or Boycott gushed “you could pay money just to watch that”. In a tight series which saw the unexpected domination of Kent all rounder and 8-times-capped Mark Ealham (I guess you can’t simulate anything perfectly), Australia won 2-1.

I wouldn’t take guard there.

Kept my attention for: Forever
Did I finish it?: N/A
Overall: 8/10