Breath of Fire: Actually Agua This Time, We Swear

I'm beginning to see that Capcom's early RPGs are lacking a little tiny thing called "subtlety".

As often as I like to complain that its hard to remember what you're doing while playing long-stretch games like Breath of Fire or the Final Fantasy's, its clear to me now that the minigame I told you all about in my last post called "Ask the NPCs" is not a joke. It's a real thing and sometimes...sometimes its painful. But it goes much further. Allow me to show you.


Upon fixing the village I needed to know just WHERE Agua was. Well one dude told me Agua was to the North. And then THIS chick told me:

Oh. Ok.

So I head out of town and find an incomplete bridge with a floating tower that I've passed by dozens of times. Keeping Bo at the lead let me go through the forest, and led me to the end of a walkway on the lake.

Using the Tablet, the castle lowered itself down. And thus began many many generations of fantasy nerds obsessed with floating castles and floating rocks. (I know it didn't BEGIN here...but close).

In its day, this cutscene was top notch

Once inside I was introduced to something a little different...

Dungeon Designers Tip 2:

     Another way to have heroes take longer exploring small spaces is to have them do map puzzles. Not knowing where something takes you can be challenging and sometimes frustrating as hell if that something takes you back to the beginning where you gotta walk around again and fight seventeen more battles to start the puzzle again. As an example, try floating disks:

This dungeon took me a little while, but it was kinda worth it for the half decent treasure I found along the way. Then at the end of the line I came to this fella, who proves ultimately this game's lack of subtlety:

 I woulda shat my drawers if instead they had this:

See what I did there?

So anyways. This Boss wasn't much of a boss at all. I only had Nina cast Cura only a couple times before I wore him right down. Then:

*facepalm*

So I finally dealt with this entire area of the map. After some quick hover disk maneuvers and walking ALLLLLLLLLL the way back down to Tantar and Tuntar I kind of discovered something.

For real? A hop, skip, and a jump and there's a fully functioning river over there? Ditch these towns, re-settle people! The pioneers did! GHAD!

Keep on gaming, Gamers.

-ME0