"This long, absorbing game offers plenty of story turns, intense battles, and intriguing characters." A reviewer for Next Generation said that the game "is larger and more involved than its predecessor, but unfortunately also much less interesting. While some parts are very clever (you are able to build your home town, populating it with stray homeless folks you run across), it suffers from too little direction, a purely mechanical storyline, and the clunkiest dialogue since Night Trap." Similar to the original Super Nintendo Entertainment System release, the Game Boy Advance version met with mostly positive reception from critics, with the Japanese version receiving a 29 out of 40 score from Weekly Famitsu magazine. GameSpot compared the game to the previous version, calling it a "faithful translation of the SNES game" and praised the title's new save feature allowing players to record their progress at any time, but found that its music "leans toward the bland side of things" and "lack[s] personality". IGN found the game to be a step up from the first game's Game Boy Advance port, stating that "The storyline and characters make Breath of Fire II a much better game than the first adventure in the series...even though the game hasn't changed a whole lot." The website additionally felt that the game's lack of spaces in text fields and shoddy translation hurt the overall presentation, and the graphics were not up to par with games designed initially for the handheld such as Camelot's Golden Sun. GamePro awarded the Game Boy version a perfect score as well as an Editor's Choice Award, stating that the only flaw was the game's low difficulty, declaring that "In the realm of today’s high-powered next-gen role-players, BOFII is an excellent time-killer". The game would later be nominated for "Best Port of a 16-bit Classic" and "Best Role-Playing Game on Game Boy Advance" in GameSpot's Best and Worst of 2002 Awards. The Game Boy Advance version holds a 75% review average on GameRankings, as well as an 81% average on Metacritic. Breath of Fire IIs Virtual Console release in 2007 met with mixed response. GameSpot called attention to the title's "pleasing visual presentation" and breadth of content, but found the game's localization to be "terrible" along with unpolished gameplay mechanics that made it appear to be a "hasty, careless effort". The game's pacing was also said to be poor, with too many "mundane