Today's comic is based on Breath of Fire 3, which introduced Fairy Villages. The town is populated only by fairies that present special functions and allows the player to grow the population and culture as well as assign its inhabitants' jobs. Fairies in the village eventually die from old age or from being sent off to hunt, but new fairies are always born assuming you have enough food. One of the jobs players can give fairies is copying an item you have in your inventory. You give up the one of your valuable items in hopes of getting two in return and if the fairies fail you get a rice ball instead. XD

The Breath of Fire series is one of my favorite franchises of all time. There are five games in the series; the first was released in Japan in early 1993 for the SNES and the fifth in late 2002 for the PS2. Some are and aren't continuations along the same timeline, but all of them have the constant theme of the main character being a blue-haired re-namable boy named Ryu who can turn into a dragon and one of your party members being a winged girl named Nina.

I have so much to say about this series that I don't really know where to start. >.< I guess first off, I can say that a large part of my love for the franchise probably stems from playing the first few games as a child and growing up as the series progressed in sequel releases. I still remember when the first Breath of Fire just came out and Nintendo Power Magazine had it featured with pages filled with screenshots and illustrations. I was really taken in by the art, visual style, and the character designs; it seemed so different than every other game I've played and seen.

One of the things I always loved about the series aside from their engrossing stories was how the worlds were always made up of a variety of different races, that there was never two of any race in your party, and how the number of races in the world always seemed to grow for each sequel up till the fifth game. Every member of your party played differently in your party too; they had their own abilities and spells and noticeable stat strengths and weaknesses, giving the player a diverse variety of party styles and strategies to play around with.

Breath of Fire has a huge loyal fan base and like many others, for the longest time I've hoped that Capcom would one day make a sixth game to the series. I don't think that day will ever come though, especially since they don't seem so keen on doing much more than their already super successful selling franchises like Street Fighter and since it seems like they're afraid of competing in the RPG market. =/ Maybe it's better this way though; that Breath of Fire ends as an awesome memorable series.