Just like the original, the story goes on about a race of dragons called "The Brood". You take on the role of a boy called Ryu, the sole survivor of his kind.
When a couple of miners find Ryu in some sort of crystal, they liberate him after which he runs away.After some fleeing you get caught and shipped away by train. However, again you manage to escape and then the story starts with Ryu in human form. The game will take about 40 hours and that's extremely much considering that the first 20 hours is running around without a goal due to the lack of depth in the storyline. This clearly results in you becoming irritated and the gameplay going down the drain.

The combat system itself is beautifully worked out. The base consists out of a simple turn-based system but gets expanded by a Master system and the Dragon Gene system. In Master you learn new fighting techniques from other characters while the Dragon Gene system allows you to transform into all kinds of different dragons. These you can create by putting together the Genes you have. A good idea!

However, Breath of Fire 3 contains too many random encounters which are not well-balances making you often to be in a situation that's almost impossible to overcome. On the other side there are fights that are completely useless and then the camera tracks you from the completely wrong direction! This is especially irritating when you're indoors as the walls tend to block the camera and you won't see which enemy you've selected to attack. Guess why you often loose a battle...

Graphically, this Breath of Fire 3 isn't all too shabby. The 2D characters and 3D world are nicely done but the surroundings do disappoint a bit. These vary from uninteresting to abandoned and without any atmosphere. But where the surroundings fail, the beautiful special effects luckily make up.