Breath of Fire IV

During the PS1 era Square was so far ahead in JRPG design that they started making everyone else in the genre look amateurish - and this posed problems for all of the smaller and less popular JRPG franchises, who tried to mimic what Square was doing (usually with smaller budgets) in hopes they could ride the wave to profits.

The problem is that decades on, when removing nostalgia from the equation, the most tedious, forgettable and poorly-aged JRPGs from the PS1/PS2 era tend to be the ones that were clearly trying to follow the Square formula as closely as their budgets and skills allowed.

Here and there, you will encounter examples from another category - JRPGs that did their own thing, had their own artistic and narrative vision. JRPGs that were not terribly interested in being a B-tier FF7 - games which tried to push the genre into new spaces. These are treasures, and generally have aged much better than their copycat peers.

Breath of Fire IV is one of these, and it has stood the test of time better than any other BoF game (there are BoF 3 defenders but that game is...solid and very by-the-numbers stylistically and narratively, and not in the same league really, it owes more to BoF 2 than anything else), and better than most PS1 JRPGs - it's visually gorgeous, not overlong, tells a simple story exceptionally well, avoids overdramatizing and overexplaining, does a marvelous (for this genre, anyway) job of humanizing nearly everyone in the game - even the antagonists, who might have more character development than the protagonists.

It's highly traditional at first - but it plays with core genre tropes in more subtle and creative ways than many of its peers that try to appear innovative by relying on faux-edginess and "plot twists" and end up being trope collections all over again.

BoF IV tried something different - it took a simple story and simple systems, thought very carefully about what it wanted to do, and what it wanted to say, and what aspects of the genre and its own series traditions it wanted to subvert - and did that remarkably well, with unusual narrative and design polish. In much the same way that small, inexpensive films can sometimes do more with little than big expensive films can, BoF IV hits far above its weight, and is unfairly forgotten - it outclasses so many better-known JRPGs that sustain their popularity on the fumes of nostalgia alone.

Can you believe it, it's a simple story told subtly and effectively, instead of the JRPG norm of a tiresome, amateurish, overlong and convoluted story told badly!

This is one of the very, very few PS1 JRPGs that have aged well enough for me to enjoy them from beginning to end without preexisting nostalgia, and that's enough for me to heartily and confidently recommend this to people in 2021.