Breath of Death VII: The Beginning (BoD) is a little gem I found on the Xbox Live Arcade’s “Indie games” section among such wonderful titles such as ‘Avatar Boogie’, ‘Curling 2010’, ‘Who did I date last night?’ and a multitude of zombie titles (seriously guys the novelty has worn off) (in case you can’t tell those titles in that sequence are NOT wonderful). BoD is what the indie section was made for; I would say you get more than your dollars worth out of it (OH YEAH IT’S ONLY ONE DOLLAR. BUY IT), but saying that you get your dollars worth attaches a certain deflated value to that dollar. You don’t want BoD to be some exception to the rule; you want BoD to be the standard by which the games in the indie section are measured. Seriously, why are there so many zombie games and who is buying this crap?
Games have been around for a good 30+(ish) years, they’ve established their own culture consisting of tropes and terms; I believe games are art – not every game, not the majority of games, but I believe art can be made with the medium. But none of that right now, I’m more concerned with the culture: BoD is a satirical Role Playing Game loaded with Zelda, Phantasy Star, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Dragon Warrior/Quest, and well, references to gaming and pop-culture in general. It is hyper aware of the problems the genre is plagued with and so it actively avoids and makes fun of such models – the game’s story is humorous and will have you laughing, at the same time it avoids falling into most of the models it mocks ceaselessly. The story and humor will get you invested, but the actual mechanics are well thought out – this is more than just laughing at the pitfalls of the genre; the systems it utilizes is oddly familiar yet so slightly tweaked that you can’t help but wonder why any RPG post-SNES remained so stubbornly archaic.
Fight. Item. Magic. First Person view of your enemies on a black background. More bare than the original Dragon Warrior on the NES. Yet it works, it communicates what is going on. Combat is about as complicated as choosing attack; you don’t need summons or draws or eidolons or what have you, just attack already. Here’s where it gets attractive – 1)Full Heal after every battle (Yeah FFXIII finally did it and people bitched but look – refilling your party after each fight allows every fight to be designed to be challenging rather than tedious; you aren’t losing because the party is slowly being whittled away in a dungeon crawl but because your strategy sucks), this healing creates an atmosphere where you don’t have to micromanage every encounter based on health, rather you just plow forward; good momentum, game never becomes a brick wall. 2) You can choose when to fight, just pick the option off the menu. You command battles on your own terms – there are also random encounters on the map, but get this: they’re limited in number. A dungeon has, let’s say, an encounter count of twenty, after you fight twenty encounters random battles cease in that area. If you absolutely need to fight more battles than that just pick Fight off the menu. If you’ve exhausted the battles then you are probably over the level needed to clear the area. So uh, once again, no brick wall; you’re free to explore.
Exploring is simple and straightforward. The world map and dungeons can be analyzed better once all that random battle clutter is out of the way (think about the spatial relations of a lot of RPG’s and how bad they are if you aren’t constantly distracted with monster fights and fetch quests) and you can see there is a very basic visual language at play. Mountains and rivers guide you to the next town or dungeon without disorientation, dungeons are playfully designed to tease and mess with your expectations, and my god does the music in the game kick ass. Everything is just honest and straightforward; a solid, hilarious five or six hours. What? RPG’s don’t need to be over fifty hours long.
So yeah, best dollar I ever spent. On a videogame at least.
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