I've just finished this game a little earlier today. It took me about a week to finish and man am I ever glad that I finally got around to trying it myself! Just Breed is indeed a rare gem! What a nice game it was! This is definitely one of those games that I can see myself replaying over and over again. The secret of how to get the Boss Mark was quite awesome, heh!
The battle system was also quite unique. It was similar to Der Langrisser, but not really the same. In DL, you hire expandable units which don't contribute to the story in anyway. They're just there for the bloodshed. Where as in Just Breed, the units are actual characters with names and dialogue. One annoying thing in DL is if you let a general reach 0 HP, they'll withdraw, but you'll lose his or her troopers too, also like in JB. Which doesn't sound bad except for the fact that if they retreat from battle even once, they'll have terrible fates at the end of the game such as them dying. So if you wanted a good ending like I did, you had to make sure that they never fell in combat. By the way, I went Imperial and managed to save Sonya. It's better to defeat Jessica before Bozer for a couple of reasons, but I won't really get into that since this is a thread about Just Breed.
It was also relaxing to know in Just Breed that the characters who reach 0 HP in battle don't actually die. They withdraw and can be brought back either by a doctor in a town or by using an item or spell. The Fire Emblem games were a bit stressing since you had to keep everyone safe at all times. If a character was defeated in combat, you could not use them for the rest of the game which really sucked. FEDA had a similar problem. If you lose a character, you had to go on those darn rescue missions which are Chaos based. This was annoying for players who wanted a Law Emblem such as myself. Shining Force was a little more lax like JB. You could revive fallen allies at a priest in town. As for Bahamut Lagoon, you only lost chararcters for good if you let a whole party get defeated. A party has four characters and they get revived automatically at the end of the battle only if at least one of them is still alive. The computer controled dragons also die for good if they fall in combat which is bad to say the least...
Overall, this was an excellant game and thee best NES RPG in my opinion. For the best emulator, I would recommend Nestopia. What a great ending it had! Everyone made it out alright and everything went back to how it was before the monsters attacked. I wish that all games had such nice endings. I hate having that bitter taste in my mouth at the end of most RPGs when someone gets killed in a stupid and unbelievable way. Lucky, that wasen't the case with Just Breed, woo! Another thing that I found really cool about this game is that the main charatcer rocks! He's the guard captain and the town priestess, Firis, is his girlfriend. And he's also the most popular guy in town! At the start of the game they're both eighteen and nineteen at the end (since the whole adventure took a year).
Also, if anyone wants to know what all the spells do, are looking for how to find the all the secrets, are in need of a walkthrough or just want to see what the characters look like, just look here:
http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/nes/justbreed/Whew, sorry for the long post, I guess I just had a lot to say about how awesome this game was. I'm sure glad that it got translated!