Breath of Fire: Battle Tunes

Was just doing some level grinding today when I had some time to spare. I just wanted to let those of you with the latest version of Quicktime to check this out.

Breath of Fire Battle Music 1

Breath of Fire Battle Music 2

  

So now you can jam while you read our blog :). Also, try and picture a couple nerds with big smiles on our faces, thats J03 and I every time we play these games. Half our enjoyment comes from the music alone.

Keep gaming, dragons.

Breath of Fire: a Knight, a Wizard, and Princess Nina

Jumped back into Breath of Fire today. Managed to get through two bosses. The first was the Knight and the second was the Wizard.

Let me start off by saying that I absolutely love this game so far. There are quite a few things that I complain about a lot, but first and foremost, the story is stellar even if the dialogue is somewhat stinted.

So after I killed that Frog dude, I was told that earthquakes were being caused by a Quake machine and that I should delve into the dungeons below Nanai to stop it. So I did just that. After a few minutes of crawling around the lava-covered dungeon I ran into this little problem...

Meo: "Arrrrrrrghhh"

Which made getting to the bottom of the dungeon difficult, so when I ran out of antidotes I died quite a few times. However, like I mentioned here, this is good for level grinding. The irritating part was sneaking past the guards from the save point all the way to the castle. It wasn't quite as convenient as level grinding outside a town, but the baddies in the dungeon were tougher and garnered more EP. So I did this for a while until I made it to the bottom relatively unscathed where I met a Knight tinkering with the Quake Machine. We fought and...

"that all you got?"

So I pressed on. And eventually I collected enough Herbs from fallen enemies and various (way out of the way) chests. I fought the Knight again, and it turned out that I could take him with about 4 Herbs and a lucky streak of Cntrs and Slams. It got pretty close, because once I wore him down to his danger zone, he'd use a magic ability called Recovery and heal. This persisted about 7 times and then he stopped and just did melee damage. Finally I killed him, but not before the damned "Seems Alright" happened. For those of you not familiar with the "Seems Alright" in the BOF games, it is what happens when you wear a boss down to zero and they miraculously regain the ability to stay alive a few turns more. Sometimes "Seems Alright" is replaced with "Grings Confidently" or something stupid like that. That is one of things that angers me about this game. But, it just has to be worked into my strategy when going into a boss situation.

Defeating the Knight brought me to level 10! So I took the E.Key from the machine and the whole town was reduced to rubble. It's ok though because the King said that it was a tough choice to make. A nearby NPC promptly told me that I should travel to Winlan, so I did.

The people here all have wings!

I mosied through their capitol and upgraded some weapon and armor at the weapon shop, then found out the king is ill. Went to the castle and they sent me to bed because I couldn't see the king yet. Then I got to play as Princess Nina.

I was able to sneak around the castle and gather a LOT of Herbs and upgrade her armor for free. Then I found Ryu asleep, and it turns out he sleep-talks...

Somebody apparently has a thing for Sara.

Then I left the city and went to the tunnel to the left and I was greeted by a couple winged soldiers who didn't want me wandering around unescorted. They came in handy, though.

Nina serves best as a healer while the soldiers did whopping amounts of damage. After leveling up a couple, Nina became super fast and would almost always go first, allowing for quick healing when necessary. So we made our way through a zombie town where apparently people were rising from the grave because of an evil Wizard. We trekked through the woods to the Wizard's castle and did some fancy dungeoneering until we came upon him. He overwhelmed us because winged people are apparently susceptible to his Xeon Gas. So  one of the soldiers got away and went to the roof where he TURNED INTO A BIRD.

Because apparently having wings isn't good enough...?

He flew back to the castle and they deduced that someone without wings had to go to the tower because they wouldn't be affected by the Xeon Gas. So they flew me back, and they fought some dragons to allow my bird guy to get through.

Once inside the tower, I was shown a VERY convenient room, where I could save AND heal. I wish saving and healing could always just be one thing. But yeah.

Went down into the depths and found my new nemesis. He seemed very displeased that they winged people so easily thwarted his Xeon Gas with...gasp...someone without wings! Oh no! So then we did battle.

He kept using a move called Petrify, where I'm assuming he solidified his skin to make it difficult to deal damage to him. His strongest attack was Freeze which did about 15 damage. So when I was lower than 15 I used a Herb and continued to pummel him. Since I had like 20 Herbs, this was a pretty easy fight.

At last I destroyed him and we received the Remedy that will help heal the King's sickness.

Oh Ryu, just foiling evil plans wherever you can.

So we all flew back to Winlan and it was a glorious celebration of flying birds everywhere as we landed. Nina hurried to heal the King and when I found them the King was barely hanging on, but then suddenly was jumping up and down on his bed. I couldn't help but laugh. This is when I discovered that Ryu actually has some dialogue...which is weird for some RPGs...I don't remember the Ryu in BOF 3 saying anything. It's kind of like a Link thing, isn't it?

Oh well, apparently I'm wrong.

After the King granted me access to the "tunnels" or whatever, Nina decided to join my party. Thank goodness, someone to heal me while I decimate legions of baddies, muahaha.

In any case, I have the RPG bug and I'm gonna keep plugging away here.

Keep on gaming, dragons.

Breath of Fire: It's Not Safe To Go Alone, Take 300 Gold...

 Alrighty RPG fans, the trek has begun on Breath of Fire, or BOF (reminds me of the Marry, Boff, Kill game, haha. I'd rather BOF people than Boff them. Rawr.). Those of you who have played large scale RPGs of previous generation consoles know that they are tough, irritating, but fun as hell.

The BOF games are nothing short of brilliant. I have played this one briefly when I was younger and shelved it for eons. I did, however get REALLY far in BOF 3 for the Playstation, which is a fantastic game. Things that separate the BOF games from any other RPGs are the extensive challenges that tie in MANY off-the-beaten-path sidequests with a very solid storyline. Turning into various types of dragons in battle is extremely fun and the games are completely filled with a crazy cast of unique playable and non-playable characters.

From my experience with BOF 3, I learned that there are SO many sidequests and strange segues that you easily lose track of the many through-line and often have a lot of thinking to do in order to decide what happens next. SO, I am pretty thankful for this blog, because if I forget, voila, I got it documented, yo!

As far as this blog goes, you'll see me talking more strategy and somewhat less story-explanation. I'm not a GameFAQ writer, so don't expect anything super detailed, after all, we have a goal at 16-Bit-Warriors, and that goal includes me seeing this game til the end.

For this first post, let me just do some explaining of the mechanics briefly so that future posts you'll be able to get what I mean in case I short-hand too many things.

Let's start off by me telling you I'm a traditional RPG'er. I stick to the canonical names.

Fun Fact: Ryu is Japanese for Dragon.

Battle Mechanics:

In BOF, the battle screen looks like this:

It's actually much better than some RPGs. The animation, personally is among my favorites because the sprites don't stand still, swing, and deal damage from a distance. The characters actually move up to the bad guys and attack. For 16 Bits, that's ballin. In the Battle area, you make a choice if you want to select your move, auto-battle, skip your turn, or flee. In the moves you can attack, defend, use magic, or use item. Auto-battle will just skip the move select and deal damage to your foe. It will persist until you cancel it by pushing B.

When your health gets below a certain point, the health bar turns red and Ryu takes a knee. From hence-forth I will be referring to this state as the Danger Zone. Queue 80's music:

"Riiiiiiide innnnn tooooo theeeee Danger Zone!"

(Sorry Kenny Loggins)

Things about BOF battling that you need to know:

1. It's easy to die, so stack up on Herbs or stay near a Save Point (more on that in a bit)

2. Counter Attacks (Cntr) - They are SO handy. Once in a while, depending on your Luck Level (more on that in a bit) you'll automatically counter attack after being hit, which you get to stack a normal-turn attack on top of.

3. Critical Hits (Slam) - Once in a while, also depending on you Luck and your Strength, you'll critical hit a monster with a Slam, which does double of more damage.

4. Sometimes you actually forget that you have to push A - Like in the above picture, the animation will continue, but there's nothing but cards on the screen as if you're waiting for something to happen. Get in the habit of pushing A a lot because this is just waiting for you to decide to do something. If you have a brain-fart problem like me, this will occur often.

Stats:

So as you level up you get stats. Your stats include poitns in HP (Health Points), AP (Ability Points), Vigor (Taking Damage), Agility (Turn Speed (Initiative to you DnD players)), Wisdom (Magic Damage), Strength (Melee Damage), and Luck (Chances of Slams and Cntrs occurring).

Also included in your stats are your ability stats that increase and decrease with your weapons and armor. These include ATK, ACT, INT, DEF, MAG, and FATE. Now, I think I get all the first five, but Fate? Why the hell would a pair of boots increase or decrease my fate? Yeah, I'm sure one day I'll figure it out.

Ok, SO, After gathering this knowledge off the get-go, I set off to take down BOF. I didn't get very far for this first post, but let me just start you off. The story opened up with a dragon waking me up from my dream...

 ...to find out that my town was burning down. When I found the refugees, I gathered info a little too quickly:

 Who the hell did you hear that from, NPC? And why is it breaking news NOW?

So a gal named Sara fought off the bad dudes after turning us to Stone and then we awoke to a destroyed town. So sad.

Darth Vader: "NOOOOOOO!" Audience "Ffffffuuuuuu..."

One thing I quickly deduced was that the walking in this game is tooooo slow. But the dialogue boxes are good and quick, so my irritation level was pretty low when I moved on to the first town. This town had a save point in it like my home down. They are easy to spot with a stone dragon head over the doorway.

Note on Save Points: You can die at any point after saving and be revived at the save point, you will NOT lose levels or have any penalties. SO, if you are a level-grinder like me, just find a town with one of these guys in it and keep battling outside until you die. You can save money on Herbs this way and spend less time looking for healing pools (found in dungeons and castles:

Which I didn't find out about until level-grinding to level 5.

I had stepped one foot into this neighboring town's castle and got insta-killed by a Gloom. So I decided to grind until I could one-hit a Bulla and attack faster than a Flea, believing that to be sufficient enough to explore the castle. 

"So get your muk blobbin and your arms flip flobbin, Do the Creep! Ahhhhh! Do the Creep!"

Found a few pieces of armor and a better sword along the way and quickly encountered my first boss:

Tough as nails this guy. I used all my Herbs to beat him because his jump attack could take 12 HP at a time. 

Luckily he didn't poison me (which, you'll find, is my biggest RPG pet-peeve. Lord, do I hate Poison.)

I wasted this dude and the castle was restored to normal. I got so many EP (experience points) that I leveled up to level 8. Win!

That was about as far as I got, an NPC mentioned some trouble in Nanai, so I'm off to do some hero-ing over there.

Keep on gaming, dragons!

PS: I shall name him Bill.

"Bill, you stay away from the cliff edge. Bad Golden Stag! Bad!"

F-Zero: Brakes are for Suckers

Alright, so my first go at this F-Zero game was a... Partial success. To be honest, I was actually feeling pretty confident about my abilities after the first lap of Mute City. I thought the controls were simple, and that I knew exactly how to power through this whole game. Oh ho ho, boy, was I wrong. This game is vicious. It is fast, and relentless, and it is near impossible to stop to think about anything else when you're blasting along in your hover-car. By the end of my sit-down I was cursing left, right and center. I slammed my fists down on the table and walked away to get some chocolate ice cream. Let's see how I started off so well.

The game starts off simple enough. Two options: Grand Prix or Practice. I'm like "Practice? Hah, who needs it." So I jump in. There's only four different cars, which seems ludicrously small considering the roster of cars in modern racing games (over 1,000 in some cases.) I don't really take time to look at stats or acceleration because the Blue Falcon looks perfect and I love me Smash Bros.

Logic = flawless.

So here go, Mute City. Pretty basic starting racing level. More or less an oval-ish shape.

^See that oval? It's a bit distorted

So the cars blast off and I gun it. I pass two of them easily enough but the yellow car is just ahead of me. We tango for a bit, weaving side to side, he's trying to keep me from passing him, I'm trying to pass him... Classic. Then we turn.

Let me tell you something about F-Zero corners. They are tight. These are not very forgiving corners of the stage. And when you bump the wall you will know. It electrifies you. I'd say it's like the bottom of your car is fingernails, and the edges of the stage are like a chalkboard. You grind down on it and it hurts you and makes a horrible sound that you never want to experience again. But if you're going too fast, it'll shuck you all the way into the opposite wall, which will shoot you back and electrify you too. So brings in the power meter at the top right of the screen. This is your health bar. It goes down when you hit something - be it a wall or another car. There is one strip of healing track per level (so far anyway) and when you go onto it a little robot appears above you and lasers down some glowing energy that heals you.

So anyway, back to the race at hand. This yellow guy was not letting up, and even when I passed him, he was ALWAYS right on my tail. It was like no matter how fast, or how well I thought I was doing, he was literally always right behind me. I did manage to keep calm though, it was all about focus, that's one of the main things I took away; this game demands your attention or you will be passed. You can't idle. Idle and Die.

So I'm in first place right now, great place to be. There are only 3 other cars and they're behind me (right behind me infact), when I see a car coming up infront of me. And I'm thinking, "Sweet, I'm lapping one of them!" But, no, it was a car I didn't recognize. So I pass it, and there are a couple more. Then it just becomes normal that there are all these other cars in the race. Some of them are flashing, and if you bump them, they explode. I guess their extra enemies to deal with, because just racing would be boring, right?

So that's the gist of Mute City. I won though.

Wooo! First place!

Next we came to Big Blue, which is a really fun stage; and has an AMAZING soundtrack to it. It's very recognizable, but that may be because I played a lot of Smash Bros. (When will I stop referencing that game? Who knows.)

Anyhoo, pretty well the same deal here. Kept ahead, couldn't look back, smashed into some walls, tight corners, flashing enemy-bombs. Came out on top.

So I really felt good about those two first levels, and I imagined I would continue this winning streak and demolish anything in my way. You'll see how wrong I was in my next post, catch ya later gamers!