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