How Capcom Became an RPG Maker

The producer of those experiments, Tokuro Fujiwara, general manager of Capcom's console games division, produced the first two Breath of Fire games; the designer was Yoshinori Kawano, and the credited creators of the series are Kawano, Fujiwara, and Makoto Ikehara. The Avocado's staff history describes the first game's designers as comparative rookies building systems from the RPGs they themselves enjoyed. Ikehara stayed for the whole run, directing from the third game onward, inside Capcom's third development studio.

The line was in-house in every layer: Capcom studios developed all five console games, and the music came from Capcom's own sound team, Alph Lyla and its successors, for four games, until Dragon Quarter hired an outsider for the first time. By the fifth game the series had sold 3.2 million copies, and Capcom called it, in its own sales literature, their "best known and most successful role-playing game."

In December 2008, Capcom's head of research and development Keiji Inafune told 1UP there were no plans for a new Breath of Fire, citing a lack of staff and a competitive RPG market: certain RPG titles sell, he said, and Capcom did not need to consider making the rest. In June 2009 Capcom USA's Chris Svensson gave the series its official status, a "resting IP." The room was never demolished. It was left furnished, and the Library's page on the sixth game documents the one time somebody briefly turned the lights back on.