Breath of Fire III

There's no hero school in real life. If you want to be lauded and loved, you'll need to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills, the right attitude, and the right reaction. Heroism, at least the sort that's in the papers, is a complex, unpredictable mixture of their split second circumstances combined with your split second reaction.

Would you save the baby from the burning house? Who can tell.

In video game roleplaying adventure games, things are a lot more straightforward. You'll need to be a diminutive orphan from a remote village: you'll have a little sword, a disapproving girlfriend, a silly fringe and a peculiar and oft-called upon ability to incapacitate all manner of monsters with a deft flick of your skinny, pubescent wrist. And, of course, there will be that epic storyline dangling carrot-like, calling you towards an inevitable showdown with an arch-demon as the fate of humanity seesaws on your slight shoulders.

Breath of Fire III has all these, but mixes things up a little bit by giving your little orphan character a dark secret: you are half dragon.

The game opens with you being discovered at the bottom of a deep, dark cave by hapless miners. They break you out of your crystal womb tomb with dynamite, and you duly incinerate them for the inconvenience, your nostrils curling out funeral wake smoke signals with dark delight. But, despite these first impressions, this is not a game that has you raping and pillaging your way across medieval pastoral horizons. Instead, you'll mainly wander the earth looking for answers and two missing friends, and not as a dragon, but dressed as a little boy (and for the second half, a man), called Ryu.

During battles, which occur randomly and rather too frequently outside of the safe confines of local villages, you'll be able to switch over to your dragon form at the expense of you Action Point gauge, which must be refilled if you want to repeat this transformation of terror. The rest of the time your three in-battle characters will have to hack and slash their way through a winding, generally exciting storyline using little more than the standard offensive procedures of a-punching and a-stabbing. Helpfully, more options are opened by an 'examine' command on your battle menu, whereby you can watch the enemies you're attacking and, if lucky, learn a new technique from them to turn against your opponents.

You and your band of companions can also learn special abilities from various skill masters found around the furthest reaches of the game world. You can opt to become their apprentices and – once you've completed any tasks they give you – you can start learning new skills. As you traverse from area to area, shunting the story along, you'll inch your characters' development forward too, better equipping them for the final showdown.

If you it gets a bit much and you fancy a break from the pressures of the quest, however, you can find fun beside any of the game's various lakes. With a rod and lure, you can go fishing! Fish you catch can be used as items to cure poison or replenish stats, so this mode is more than just a tack-on. Eventually you'll unlock a fishing mode accessible from the start-up screen, at which point you can fish with a friend over the game-sharing mode.

Breath of Fire III looks lovely on the PSP. The mixture of well-designed 2D sprites with 3D fire effects dancing and tearing across your handheld's widescreen are exciting and inviting. Not so acceptable are the painful loading times that bookend each battle and cutscene of dialogue. These really hurt the flow of play, and this is something you'll have to come to terms with if you want to persevere to (and past) the end credits.

Nevertheless, there are very few RPG games available on PSP. And at its best, Breath of Fire III fills the gap admirably. Breath of Fire III is on sale now.