Breath of Fire 6

~ the goodbye ~

Breath of Fire never came anywhere near me. The series ran on the Super Nintendo and the PlayStation through the nineties, and Japanese role-playing games on cartridge were about the last category a 33.6k line in Turkey was going to deliver. I know the name the way you know a band from reading about them.

The full title was Breath of Fire 6: Guardians of the White Dragon. It launched in Japan on 24 February 2016 for Windows and Android, with an iOS build following on 12 July, and it stayed inside Japan for its entire life. Kazunori Sugiura produced, Tamiya Terashima wrote the music. The structure was episodic: Capcom planned eight chapters and released them one at a time into a live service.

Underneath, it was a free-to-play action RPG with a hero you built yourself, AI party members the game called Fellows, cooperative missions for up to four players and a dragon transformation called D-Trance that stood in for the transformation mechanic the old games were known for. Saves carried across phone and PC, which in 2016 was still a thing worth advertising. The money came from microtransactions.

Reception was brutal in a way that numbered sequels rarely get. It settled at roughly 1.5 out of 5 on Google Play. Reviewers said the art looked borrowed from MapleStory and that the whole thing read as the cheapest available version of what a free-to-play conversion could be.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the reveal ~

August 2013, Capcom's Network Game Conference in Japan. The last mainline Breath of Fire had been Dragon Quarter in 2002, a strange and deliberately punishing game that ended the series on a console and left it quiet for eleven years. When Capcom put a 6 on the end of the name again, what it was announcing turned out to be a browser and smartphone title built for touch.

The reaction was immediate and it was negative, and the interesting part is that both halves of the potential audience had a reason to walk. People who had waited eleven years did not want a phone game paid for by the item. People who play free-to-play RPGs on phones had no particular attachment to a Capcom series that had last shipped when they were children. The announcement managed to reach an audience that was two groups wide and empty in the middle.

~ nineteen months ~

Capcom posted the closure notice on 27 July 2017 and gave two months of warning. Service ended on 27 September 2017. The stated reason was a change in the external environment, which is the formula Japanese publishers use when the real answer is revenue, and Capcom did not elaborate.

Six of the eight planned episodes had shipped. The story was left unfinished in a game that was never sold outside one country, which means the ending of Breath of Fire 6 does not exist anywhere and never will. There is no disc to fall back on and no offline mode, and an archived copy of the client does nothing at all without the servers behind it.

~ what it cost the series ~

Nine years on from the shutdown, the number 6 is still the last one attached to Breath of Fire. Capcom has reissued the older entries through collections and subscription services, but the series has no sixth installment anyone can reach and no seventh in sight.

A franchise can survive being dormant. Capcom left this one alone for eleven years and nobody buried it. What it did not survive was being revived badly on a platform that deletes its own products, because a dormant series can be brought back and a series whose last entry is nineteen months of unreachable server logs has to be brought back from further away than that.

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