GOG's game preservation program has been busy since its November launch last year. Over 100 games are currently included in the company's noble effort to not just get Good Old Games working on modern hardware but actively maintain them and even offer tech support for anyone who buys them. This protective promise covers everything from the revered ancient texts of '80s Ultima to the gruesome 3D pleasures of the 2000s System Shock 2 and Silent Hill 4.
Now Capcom's old and oft-forgotten PC port of beloved PlayStation RPG Breath of Fire 4 is joining this legendary lineup. The game has it all: a great story, beautiful art, frightening enemies, and a fishing minigame to enjoy (unless you're PC Gamer's Lauren Morton).
On paper it's the perfect pick for GOG's community voting-based "Dreamlist" initiative; a relatively well-known underdog that everyone warmed up to just a little too late with a preexisting PC release begging for some modern fixes, now available digitally for the first time.
Sadly this newly polished-up port does not make a great first impression: when I tried a preview build ahead of today's release, the game launched by default into a smeary fullscreen mode with no in-game options to fix it. This may not be a huge problem for GOG's other old (and exclusive) Capcom PC games—Resident Evil and Dino Crisis share a rough, realistic style that puts polygons front and centre—but it's definitely not a great fit for a game built around clean, flat colours and copious amounts of best-in-class pixel art.
Nobody really minds if a rusted steel pipe or a pile of zombie gore in the corner of a dirty alley isn't perfectly crisp and clean (if anyone even notices in the first place), but it's glaringly obvious that something's not quite right when the main cast are a few cartoonish bundles of pixels standing in a sunny marketplace.
The only way to sort this out is to shut the game down and start fiddling with the additional Direct X executable tucked away in the little menu next to the big play button on the game's GOG Galaxy screen that everybody would naturally hit first.
This convenient launcher offers a whole host of practical options, including the ability to force windowed mode or disable most of the aggressive filtering. Breath of Fire 4 belongs to an era of RPGs that just don't quite look right on anything other than a CRT running at 240p, with attempts to sharpen the pixel art or render the 3D environments at higher resolutions upsetting the delicate balance between the two.
Even when running at the lower period-accurate resolutions—as shown below—the polygons are still too sharp and the pixels too blurry. Characters look like out of focus cutouts standing on top of papercraft boxes.
Which, to be fair, is exactly how they used to look the first time this game turned up on PC in 2003. This is Breath of Fire 4's inescapable problem: around the time this came out, Capcom was so disinterested in the PC market it managed to spectacularly bungle even the likes of Devil May Cry 3 and Resident Evil 4. There has never been anything special, or even particularly competent, about this specific port of the game. It didn't have unique costumes to put on, secret bonus scenes to hunt down, high resolution portraits to see, any fun extras unlocked from the beginning, or a thriving mod community offering extensive tweaks and new challenges.
It was just a slightly worse version of a great RPG everyone had already been able to buy for years on what was the most popular console on the planet. It's still a slightly worse version of a great RPG now, even after all the hard work GOG have put into smoothing its existing issues out.
The list of fixes and improvements range from full modern controller support to sorting out various snags, crashes, and audio issues. That's great, because in 2025 I expect to be able to grab the nearest controller and then use it to play a game that doesn't fall to pieces the instant I Alt+Tab away or suddenly hang in the middle of an ordinary fight, but during my time with this new port I couldn't escape the feeling they'd spent a lot of time working on the wrong thing.
Look at all that effort, only to end up with a game that, at best, manages to perform about as well as (and still looks worse than) the PlayStation game I emulated on my old Vita years ago. That's not nostalgia talking—I pulled the Vita out of the cupboard to check my memory. Even imperfect, though, it is great to see Breath of Fire 4 available on a digital platform other than the PS3/Vita store, which Sony already threatened to close once.
GOG's preservation program may promise that "This is the best version of this game you can buy on any PC platform," but in this specific instance that's only true on a technicality. They are absolutely right: there isn't, and has never been, a better PC port of Breath of Fire 4, and the game underneath the smudge is still a brilliant one. It's just not quite as prestigious a badge of honor when it's the only version you can buy on PC at all.
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