Born of Bread is about a good-willed bread and his story of bringing back peace to his village. I am serious.
No matter how RPG games are laid out, there is always a serious tone to it. Especially in Japanese RPG games, excluding The Mother and other very niche titles from back in the day, I’ve always been in this mood of hopefulness, depressive episodes, and a story that takes 60 or hours to finish. There is also the other end of the spectrum, where developers tend to follow the more light-hearted way and fill their stories with jokes, fourth-wall breaking, and characters acting incredibly realistic instead of reading their lines from the script.
The latter rarely comes, but they make a big fuss in the RPG lists once they do. As I mentioned earlier, Mother- also known as Earthbound in the West- is a Japanese roleplaying game that doesn’t take itself that seriously, with characters being aware of what they are in and acting usually pretty relatable. Then came Paper Mario, a spinoff series for the Super Mario we all know; however, he gets to team up with his usual enemies, and somehow they are very vocal about their situations.
Born of Bread, as a standalone cute roleplaying game, also follows the same road of self-aware character trope and executes the formula well enough to be a worthy experience. Mind you; these titles are rare to come by on PC platforms as they were mainly console exclusives back in the day, though we could see an emergence of this type of genre being popular again with more and more developers jumping on the bandwagon.
Born of Bread starts with Queen’s chef suddenly creating a boy out of cooked dough. From the first instance you come across, you know Born of Bread will be a different experience than your regular RPG game that takes the unbeatable role of a hero. The emergence of the dough boy- we call him Loaf- is quite convenient as a few researchers working deep down in the forest find a lair filled with locked-away spirits of the past. These spirits have evil tendencies and bring back the days of their youth. However, it’s not going to be, as they require Sun Shards to be able to have the power.
Luckily, Sun Shards are spread across the nation, which gives both the heroes and villains a space where you can allegedly stop their evil intentions. Although the slow pacing can hurt the flow of the game, Born of Bread made it so that the story didn’t feel like it was a sludge to go through. In fact, developers had fun while employing certain events and plots to make it seem reasonable for our hero to take rather than going for the obvious choice.
The real gameplay starts once we “acquire” the Sun Shard in the castle while exploring around, and the 5-person villain group pops out of nowhere. Having no other choice than stay in the fight, we do engage in our first battle, but it lasts pretty short as the self-aware nature of Born of Bread hits us back with villains knowing we have no power whatsoever, they kick our butt out of the castle right away. Since the chef is working under the Queen’s commission, the Queen sees all the ruckus in the dining hall and charges him for all the quarrels that night.
Once defeated by our opposition and flung out of the castle, the Chef and Loaf navigate through the forest to find the bakery the chef runs in town. This is where we come across our first companion, and many more sidekicks will help us in our story. The first companion, both personality and move set-wise, allows players to become accustomed to having a friend by their side.
As you keep playing throughout the story, new companions unlock, and you can change between them during your gameplay. Each sidekick has different abilities to execute with a special button press, such as digging or magical powers to make enormous petals appear. These extra capabilities are only helpful for map exploring, though you won’t see that mechanic executed in the fighting.
The meat and potatoes- or should I say the flour and the yeast of the game- is the combat you set against your enemies. While there are enemies set free to roam on the map, sometimes you can come across bigger and tougher enemies with larger health pools or heavy-hitting attacks. They come by rare, but in the later levels, enemies become tougher than usual, so you need to compromise your character builds properly.
The combat is turn-based, so you have lots of time to think about your current or future move. Though in the first few hours, all you do is mash the A button to get attacks done, the first few are as effective as a sunburnt leaf laying on the concrete, easy to smash through. So, building up tactics or using your items is not very relevant until later in the game when it is necessary to use the moves you have learned earned through the skill tree.
The implementation of the skill tree is actually neat. While going through the overworld, talking to characters, and searching for secrets, you can eventually see a salamander-like silhouette etched on the walls or ground. By bashing those, you gain a skill point, which can be exchanged for a new move in the designated places. However, I must add that the skills can be only gained for the companion but not for the dough boy. Doughboy gets his extra moves and skills by getting weapons through his adventure. Weapons are stored in his backpack and can be upgraded, too.
Unlike other RPG games, Born of Bread has other tricks. Savers Guild, built in the center of the village, offers adventurers a well-known option, but in the game, it is masked as “something completely new”. Savers help save your game during your story, but our unique saver who came out of nowhere is a tech geek. Having a clashing timeline with medieval style and having a tech geek as a helper sounds odd, but the character itself is worth it. The purple dragon, who everyone confuses with other creatures, has a laptop with him all the time, and he appears to stream our fights to a certain audience on the internet.
I am not making this up; your saver Dub has a laptop and camera to stream your fights. It is not only for show, though. Viewers highly influence the team’s morale; add WillPower- the game’s mana system- and even give you bonus health or WP once they order you to do a specific action.
Like attacking, using an item, or defending an incoming attack, just like in real-life streaming, once you start botching everything up, your viewer count drops down, and you have to get it back by performing well. One tiny bit of detail is that there is a chat box with messages flowing through. The better you do, the more hype there is. But when you are doing poorly, bots start filling the chat, which is a lovely detail.
The visual style of Born of Bread is one of the most striking aspects as it draws inspiration from the popular Super Paper Mario, where a 2.5D playing field is mostly employed. While the background and paths are 3D, all the character sprites are 2D. Animations are well-made, and the facial expressions and emotions are human-like despite being 2D sprites. My only gist with the art style or the approach of 2.5D is that the camera is a bit shaky to get used to if you can get used to it.
I do not want to compare, but I do not have any other point of reference; Super Paper Mario has the same camera movement built into it, but the player never has to walk toward the camera in the game or make it available less than usual. Because you do not want players to walk into nothingness, in terms of Born of Bread, there were quite a lot of times where you had to walk towards the camera, and since it’s fixed, you might find yourself walking towards your death without knowing.
Music is another prominent front of Born of Bread, which adds quite a lot of story to it; there is no doubt about it. Depending on your place, the story of the mood, and even a slight bit of silliness, the tone of the music changes perfectly and supports the story even further. Accompanied by the cute cartoonish looks, the title is impressive visually. However, some people might find graphics and presentation glorious, so this point of mine is rather objective. But I am pretty sure if you like these sorts of games, you’d like the route Born of Bread took.
In overall bread-like shape, Born of Bread is clearly a game made with passion that includes many stories to unwrap and silly business along with it. The charm that the game gives is utterly important, and while trying to defeat the villains, you understand that characters aren’t just characters. They feel like important beings rather than just 2D images. Well, maybe, except for our protagonist, he’s just bread. Sorry for the lack of bread puns, but maybe playing Born of Bread will inspire you to come up with your own- and, yes, you will also have a great time experiencing it.
