Breath of Fire: Right in the Feels

 Progression is slow going in Breath of Fire, but the storytelling is pretty brilliant. It takes round-about routes to get to certain points, but there's quite a bit of payoff once it happens.

I piddled about Tantar and Tuntar until I finally thought to talk to the chief again, d'oye. And he was like "Ryu, we need a proper wedding ring thingy, so go get it while we prep for the interspecies wedding"

Ok.

So he opened up a trap door, as usual, and I got...yes...another key. So I go back north to the cave by my big robot friend and find on the inside that the water level has been lowered because of the damn being broken. So I traverse this dungeon like all the rest with little incident and receive the ring.

 The fact that this chest kinda resembles a Boss Key chest from Zelda became slightly foreboding to me.

Went back to town and found that they had arranged the wedding *gasp* just in time for me to bring the ring!

Don't mind me, ladies, errand boy coming through.

And we commenced with the inappropriate marriage of dog and woman. No offense, Bo.

So we were thanked and let go. I took a nap at the inn and proceeded to leave. We were supposedly gonna take the robot over the river...but...

That dickbag had better ideas I guess. And like a classic cartoon villain he had it perfectly timed. So while we were all in this town celebrating a wedding...

The neighboring town went 'splodey. But before the General could do the same to us, the Robot inexplicably shuts down...weird right? So we go in to stop the bad guy.

I thought this was gonna be an easy fight, but was I ever wrong, wow!

Ok, who fed the General after midnight?

He turned into a Gremlin and proceeded to pound me to a pulp. In order to win this fight I had to have Nina casting Atk Up on Ryu and Bo as well as Fort to keep Bo's shitty defenses up. After that, essentially, Nina was healing on every round while Bo and Ryu slowly chipped away at this dude's health. Once he was at a sliver of health, he did the boss thing and became tougher. Every turn he was blowing fire worth 15-20 damage at the whole team. Nina had to keep on her toes and heal the lowest health dude for like a millenia before Bo finally shot him down.

After this, the Robot moved:

We got to the southern part where the broken bridge was. Then the saddest thing in the world happened. I was too sad to take a screenshot, but essentially, GAR hopped into the volcano and died so that he wouldn't hurt anyone ever again.

This was me

With the GAR's noble sacrifice came the eruption of the volcano which filled the southern river and hardened into stone so we could cross.

 From here on I will fight for GAR and everything he stood for...

Keep on gaming, Gamers.

-ME0

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

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: 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!"

Super Metroid: Couldn't help but ace this game right away! Death to the Motherbrain!

 So I literally took a few minutes in between writing that last blog post and going back to finish the game. Unfortunately I've now published them together because I had the other one on draft for too long. But that's the life of technology. So anyways, I couldn't help myself and I went back into Super Metroid and completely destroyed this game.






Like I thought, things went down once I went to the golden statue. (I picked up more health and missile upgrades along the way, btw) The statue started blinking out, one boss at a time....

 And then sank into the water...

It was a nifty cutscene, and I was presented with an elevator to a new world. The final one. This one had no secret passages, just Metroids and stupid computer-controlled laser loops that fired at random, a LOT.

By the way, I now fully understand every webcomic joke about Metroids. They are the most irritating creatures. You cannot at ALL get rid of them once they latch on, aside from entering a different room and coming back in. The trick I soon discovered was to plasma freeze them and then super bomb them. I later discovered I should have used regular missiles instead....woulda made things easier.

I forgot to get a pic of it, but I did come across a metroid MUCH bigger than the one displayed above. It attacked me and sucked my health all the way down except for one health. Then it pulled away....was....was this the Metroid I was looking for? Motherly feelings swam through me as it sadly withdrew from me. I then found health, missiles, and a save point, then it was time for the mother of all bosses...the Mother Brain.

note: getting to the mother brain proved difficult, and many retries were had due to the fact that the laser loops would drastically lower health as I took apart the obstacles getting to it. THEN it took WAY too many missiles to destroy the case the brain was in, which in turn made the boss fight impossible after. SO, I eventuall discovered you could do a whole bunch of damage to the brain, then make your way back to the missile loader and energy recharge station, then come back and the brain had the same amount of damage taken. So this is what I did eventually and I exploded the brain.

Which brought me down to a little square room to face off the evil brain with its new body. Suddenly Ninja Turtles comes to mind...hmm. So the fight was hard, namely because he/she/it had a mega move that couldn't be avoided and you had to ensure you had about 4 tanks of health left. Then it hurt me for a bit and THEN tried the move again...but I was saved by this!

 My Metroid baby came back and defended me. Then it gave me all of my health back, but the Mother Brain killed it. It was very tragic. Samus got furious and I gained an even more powerful laser attack...somehow.

 But hey, who am I to complain. DIE MOTHER BRAIN!

And I showed it who the real boss was. Then she proceeded to activate the self destruct (of course) so I had to boogy my way out of the planet, shooting MANY space pirates along the way *hallelujah!* and got back to my ship.

I took off into space and then the entire planet blew up. Take that you dirty Metroid-Thieving Pirates!

Another surprise was the actual number of hours I logged on the game was not nearly as much as I have been exaggerating about, haha. I had a good laugh at that.

Thus brings an end to the fun of Super Metroid. I hope you had fun journeying to the depths of Planet Zebes and defeating the Mother Brain. It was a difficult mission, but I think we all came out the better for it. Thank you all for your patience on my posting lateness.

Stay tuned for my next game announcement. Also, we still encourage game suggestions in our comments field. Don't be shy. We like comments at 16 Bit Warriors. Keep gaming gamers.

Super Metroid: Bye Bye Draygon and Ridley

Why hello there gamers! I sat down to take down this game once and for all. And wouldn't you know it, I took down two bosses in one sitting. This game has gotten a whole lot more interesting and I feel the end of it is near. Not to spoil any secrets, but I've already picked out my next game. *big evil grin*

So, without further ado, here are the tasks and challenges I faced today.

Well we left off having been brought back to Brinstar and me not knowing particularly where to go next.

 I took that door to the right there and soon discovered that my new suit had the ability to withstand most forms of lava. SO this made for plenty new discoveries and a lot of missile and health tank upgrades. Some new passages brought me to this interesting thing I wanted to show you guys.

 It's a giant turtle. Although I couldn't do any damage to it, once I shot at its babies, it would go into his shell and start flying around trying to knock me on my armored ass! I jumped on top of it and discovered it then would go straight up and show me secrets. Then I made my way through the other new areas....

 I thought this was a pretty cool pose. Using the grappling hook on walls.

I mosied along and it wasn't very long before I made my way through the weird underwater/sand levels and found myself in a new boss room. This guy is Draygon, and he was easy once I figured him out. I shot at his stomach, and he took lots of damage, but wouldn't die. Then I had the bright idea of shooting out the cannons on the wall, letting him catch me, then electrocuting him! He flew pretty close to the electric buzzing stuff where the cannons were and I used the grapple beam to kill him. I took a lot of damage in doing so, but he was instantly dead.

 He/She sank beneath the sand and its babies followed.

My reward? Space Jump!

The trick with Space Jump powerup is that I had to jump JUST after descending from a previous jump and I could theoretically jump infinitely . I say theoretically because the timing was really rough unless I was in shallow-roofed tunnels, then it was easy. Soon I also got another upgrade to my weapon. A Plasma Cannon!

This just simply dealt more damage, so I could take on the space pirates when they became more powerful. So, with my Space Jump and Gravity Suit, I was able to dance my way through a lake of lava and get to the entrance to Ridley's lair. The iconic bad guy awaited my arrival.

But first, an upgrade! I fought a Golden Chozo for this sucka.

 The idea of this attack was I could do damage when jumping into things and baddies. it also opened up cave-away rooves. So I dropped into a dark room and something sinister was...

 ...waiting.

Then BOOM! Attack of Ridley. I emptied every missile I had at him and when I ran out of those I gave him nothin but charged shots, all the while trying to discern his dip and lunge patterns. He was hard, but easy to hit. Lots of damage was done on both side, but in the end...

Ridley was nothing more than a health and ammo dump. *spits on Pterodactyl corpse*

So now that I've defeated the bosses of all the worlds, I'ma head back to that creepy golden statue thing and see what happens now. Keep on gamin, gamers!