GOG’s recreation preservation program has been busy since its November launch final 12 months. Over 100 video games are presently included within the firm’s noble effort to not simply get Good Outdated Video games engaged on fashionable {hardware} however actively preserve them and even provide tech help for anybody who buys them. This protecting promise covers every little thing from the revered historical texts of ’80s Ultima to the grotesque 3D pleasures of the 2000s System Shock 2 and Silent Hill 4.
Now Capcom’s previous and oft-forgotten PC port of beloved PlayStation RPG Breath of Fireplace 4 is becoming a member of this legendary lineup. The sport has all of it: an excellent story, lovely artwork, scary enemies, and a fishing minigame to take pleasure in (until you are PC Gamer’s Lauren Morton).
On paper it is the right decide for GOG’s group voting-based “Dreamlist” initiative; a comparatively well-known underdog that everybody warmed as much as just a bit too late with a preexisting PC launch begging for some fashionable fixes, now accessible digitally for the primary time.
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Sadly this newly polished-up port doesn’t make an excellent first impression: once I tried a preview construct forward of at present’s launch, the sport launched by default right into a smeary fullscreen mode with no in-game choices to repair it. This will not be an enormous downside for GOG’s different previous (and unique) Capcom PC video games—Resident Evil and Dino Disaster share a tough, reasonable model that places polygons entrance and centre—however it’s undoubtedly not an excellent match for a recreation constructed round clear, flat colors and copious quantities of best-in-class pixel artwork.
No one actually minds if a rusted metal pipe or a pile of zombie gore within the nook of a grimy alley is not completely crisp and clear (if anybody even notices within the first place), however it’s obviously apparent that one thing’s not fairly proper when the primary solid are a couple of cartoonish bundles of pixels standing in a sunny market.
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The one approach to type this out is to close the sport down and begin twiddling with the extra Direct X executable tucked away within the little menu subsequent to the large play button on the sport’s GOG Galaxy display that everyone would naturally hit first.
This handy launcher affords an entire host of sensible choices, together with the power to pressure windowed mode or disable many of the aggressive filtering. Breath of Fireplace 4 belongs to an period of RPGs that simply do not fairly look proper on something aside from a CRT working at 240p, with makes an attempt to sharpen the pixel artwork or render the 3D environments at greater resolutions upsetting the fragile stability between the 2.
Even when working on the decrease period-accurate resolutions—as proven beneath—the polygons are nonetheless too sharp and the pixels too blurry. Characters seem like out of focus cutouts standing on high of papercraft bins.
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Which, to be truthful, is precisely how they used to look the primary time this recreation turned up on PC in 2003. That is Breath of Fireplace 4’s inescapable downside: across the time this got here out, Capcom was so disinterested within the PC promote it managed to spectacularly bungle even the likes of Satan Might Cry 3 and Resident Evil 4. There has by no means been something particular, and even notably competent, about this particular port of the sport. It did not have distinctive costumes to placed on, secret bonus scenes to search out, excessive decision portraits to see, any enjoyable extras unlocked from the start, or a thriving mod group providing intensive tweaks and new challenges.
It was only a barely worse model of an excellent RPG everybody had already been in a position to purchase for years on what was the most well-liked console on the planet. It is nonetheless a barely worse model of an excellent RPG now, even after all of the exhausting work GOG have put into smoothing its current points out.
The listing of fixes and enhancements vary from full fashionable controller help to finding out varied snags, crashes, and audio points. That is nice, as a result of in 2025 I count on to have the ability to seize the closest controller after which use it to play a recreation that does not fall to items the moment I Alt+Tab away or instantly cling in the course of an unusual combat, however throughout my time with this new port I could not escape the sensation they’d spent a variety of time engaged on the improper factor.
Take a look at all that effort, solely to finish up with a recreation that, at greatest, manages to carry out about in addition to (and nonetheless seems to be worse than) the PlayStation recreation I emulated on my previous Vita years in the past. That is not nostalgia speaking—I pulled the Vita out of the cabinet to verify my reminiscence. Even imperfect, although, it’s nice to see Breath of Fireplace 4 accessible on a digital platform aside from the PS3/Vita retailer, which Sony already threatened to shut as soon as.
GOG’s preservation program could promise that “That is the perfect model of this recreation you should buy on any PC platform,” however on this particular occasion that is solely true on a technicality. They’re completely proper: there is not, and has by no means been, a greater PC port of Breath of Fireplace 4, and the sport beneath the smudge continues to be a superb one. It is simply not fairly as prestigious a badge of honor when it is the one model you should buy on PC in any respect.
