I have missed out on the Breath of Fire series as a child so I was really excited when gog added Bof 4. I started playing it about a week ago, am now about 10 hours in looking for the wind dragon and... I just don't really enjoy the game.
I like some of the superficial stuff, e.g. the sprite work, animations, artistic design and music, but the general gameplay, story, characters and battle system didn't grab me at all.
Like, I am a bit annoyed by the "episodic" areas where you go through and basically forget everything about what you did there, the minigames a a bit too frequent. The battle mechanics are JRPG basic for that time which normally would not annoy me but here... it just bores me out. The characters haven't been interesting to me at all and I have a hard time engaging with the plot. I often feel like I am just doing something to continue my journey but that there is almost no impact to the overall story... The dialoges are also not interesting (I am playing it in Japanese by the way so there are no issues with translation errors happening in the game I was reading about the other day).
I often heard that Bof 4 had a great story and that was the main reason why I wanted to catch up to this game specifically but it's hard for me to cling to this hearsay alone. ._." Is it THAT special? I love more tragic, depresing and dark stories in general so if it goes in such a direction I might consider not dropping it.
By the way, it's not that I don't enjoy games from the PS1/PS2 era anymore or can't like them if I had never played them. I recently finished Mother 3 for the first time and loved it from beginning to end, or loved the Trails in the Sky remake which aside from it's gameplay should be counted as a "game from back then" in terms of characters & gameplay.