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!"
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