More than two decades after its original launch, cult-classic JRPG Breath of Fire IV has returned to PCs as part of the GOG Preservation Program. The game first released on PC in 2000 (2003 for Europe and Japan), but time has not been kind to what many considered a somewhat sub-par port in the first place.
For starters, Breath of Fire IV was designed with 240p displays in mind. Even advanced upscaling techniques don’t come out looking just right, and early players say that even GOG’s fixed version requires a bit of fiddling to clear up blurriness. That said, the new version includes a host of bug fixes and corrections that make it far easier to play on modern machines (including removing DRM.)
GOG says Breath of Fire IV is fully compatible with both Windows 10 and 11, includes the English and Japanese localizations, and has numerous rendering options to choose from. It also restored missing environmental sounds and buffed keyboard and mouse support, as well as the crashes that could occur during battle. Perhaps most notably, this new version has full controller support.
As part of the GOG Preservation Program, Breath of Fire IV is “the best version of this game you can buy on any PC platform,” according to GOG. The game was chosen after more than 23,000 people voted to add it to the GOG Dreamlist, a collection of games players have voted to modernize and maintain.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing the Breath of Fire series before, this is a fantastic opportunity. The games absolutely show their age, but there’s a classic charm in the cartoony, sprite-style graphics and pixellated fruit. You’ll get quite a bit of playtime out of it, too; just the story alone will take more than 30 hours to finish, and if you’re a completionist you can basically double that number. And if you don’t want to buy it on PC, you can also play it as part of the Nintendo Switch Online library.
