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!

ME0: No, It's Not A New Cinnamon Chewing Gum

So after much thought I have decided to follow in JO3's footstopes and step outside of the sidescroller genre for my next game. I didn't want to start taking on obscure ones quite yet (as I have heard from many friends that this will likely be a problem later if we hit all of teh mainstream ones too early) because there is one game I started to play about three years ago and lost my copy of it. So now I'm bringing it back and I plan to see it through to the end. It's one of my favorite RPG series out there, as it is ripe with story, heart, and a unique gameplay.



Ladies and Gentlemen. I give you (if you actually read this instead of went from picture to picture :P) Breath of Fire!

Work on this game of dragon-filled awesomeness starts as soon as possible. Also, take a look at that cover art! I was blown away when I looked it up because it is far more epic than the cartoony style that the games are well known for. Nevertheless, I'm super stoked. This is gonna take a while, but I am dedicated to kicking its arse one way or another.

Keep on gaming gamers.



PS: We have added a few new features to our blog. We now have begun a list of defeated games so readers can keep track of what we've done already. We also have a page with tips and tricks for the games we've beaten, feel free to click and check them out.

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!

JO3; Need for F-Speed

Dear gamers, I apologize for my extended absence. I'm currently stage managing a fantastic theater production and have had no time to myself to settle down and start up a new game to talk about. I feel terrible about not posting though, so I decided I could at least announce my next game, which I will be posting about right away. I thought about what game I would play, trying to consider what I'll have time for, what kind of game I would even want to play, etc... And I came to a final decision!

Not just a racing game - a FUTURE racing game. With jet-cars and boosters and Captain Falcon. Everytime I see the cover I just think "Show me your moves!" And I intend to. Yes that's the wrong game. Yes that one is amazing too. Sadly that's not on the SNES so I can't blog about it... Not yet.

Catch ya later gamers.

P.S. Thank you for the continuous views, really makes me feel like I'm providing some entertainment - don't be so shy and comment! Let us know how we're doing.

Mega Man X: Grand Finale!

So here we are team. Last boss. Sigma. He's a big ol' jerk. And he has 3 different stages for the fight. I am thankful that the whole stage itself was essentially just the boss battle; because I did NOT want to have to deal with any mini-punks.

I beamed into this... Pit? A rather thin pipe that I had to wall jump up. There were these two holes that little robo-worms popped out of. Every one of them would either drop health, ammo for powers or an extra life. So I spam killed them until I was satisfactorilly stocked up.

Eventually I popped up into the room where Sigma appeared with his little robo-dog. He talked a little bit in regular bad guy fashion, then he call me a traitor!

What the hell!? Who did I betray? And when!?

Gawd, what I bastard. So he vanished and left his dog to do his dirty work. Well; this dog is annoying, I'll tell ya. He had a fair amount of moves at his disposal. He could leap at me, run at me, shoot glowing blues balls up and over at me, launch a large flame curve downwards and upwards at me. I could avoid his attacks easily enough, but his leaping was hard to gauge sometimes; and if I crept up the wall, he would jump up towards the wall, back and forth before dropping down.

Hitting him with a charged shot would knock him back a bit, but hitting him with an ice shot did a helluvalot of damage. So I switched between the two and took him down. Sigma re-appeared and threw off his cape and pulled out a ligthtsaber. And then we started the fight.

He began by lounging forward at me, and so I jumped up the wall. Then he jumped up the wall, back and forth. He hit me and knocked me down. I shot at him and (because he has a lightsaber) he deflected my shots. I started a charge shot and jumped on the wall again. He leapt up at my and I shot him. It hurt him, but but he kept coming and he killed me. So this began a series of unfortunate events... Or, I suppose of series of X dying. His leaping back and forth just seemed so erratic, it was so hard to predict where he would go and he kept hitting me, and dealing a top of damage! Gah.

Eventually I took a break and took a step away from the game.

I came back and thought of how I could hit him when he was in the air. The Ice-shot, the Boomerang all had means of striking out in angles I couldn't normally hit. Since I used much of the Ice-shot against his pup, I knew that power ran out pretty quick, so I didn't use it right away. I did find the Boomerang very useful though, because it would swing around up and hit him.

The boomerang was not strong enough, and I couldn't quite finish him off by the end of the power. So I switched to the Ice-Shot and shot him a few times. I really found the rhythm of his leaping, and could avoid him fairly easily now. And so I finished him off with a good amount of health left.

He exploded and I was very happy. But, of course, that was not the end. After the explosion cleared his head was floating in the center of the room with a stupid grin on his face. He floated up and the back of the screen lit up revealing a large... Robot-Dog-Headed-Floaty-SpikeHandy-Thing. His head joined with the canine head and the battle began.

He had two floating platform (hands) which opened up and shot lightning up and down, or flew down at me. I could jump on these in order to rise up on level with the head and shoot it (with a fully charged buster shot.) The platform would open and lightning blast me off often though, so I had to get used to leaping off of them. The head could also breathe fire down at me in a slow arc, or shoot large electric orbs which had a rather slim margin of error in dashing between. Through these combinations of attacks I found myself defeated a number of times.

Luckily I had those robo-worms to farm at the start of the level each time I died, so I stocked up on health, power and lives.

Eventually I found that I could wall jump up to the platforms (instead of waiting for them to float down) and I could continuously damage him with the Rolling Shield. As long as the platform wasn't directly touching the wall I could leap off of it when it shot lightning and back onto it to continue my onslaught. This strategy worked wonderfully, and I brought Sigma to another explosion. Again, in solid bad guy fashion he had a little bit to say before he died; but he did ask some very provocative questions.

I don't know! Haven't you been reading my progress!? No one tells me anything!

So I let the baddie explode, and I teleported away, conveniently on a cliff-face many miles away. From there I saw Sigma's fortress crumble into the ocean and then explode in brilliant light.

Now... If I can teleport so far away, so easily, why do I have to go through levels at all? Can't I just teleport into the bosses rooms?

Then some nice Bit music started to play, and some epilogue details started to crawl up the screen, again, questioning why we did this whole thing.

"Those who sacrificed themselves will never return." ... Doesn't Zero have his own series now? Also, you should say "never be forgotten" it puts more of a positive swing while keeping the weight of the words... But that might just be me.

The epilogue ends saying that the X-buster on his arm knows the answer. The GUN on his arm knows the answer to whether he will have to keep fighting... I wonder what the gun will say? NO, DON'T USE ME, I WANT TO BECOME POINTLESS. But, then again, ya never know.

So the credits rolled, and there were some names and stuff, and then they ended and I was greeted with this smiling face! (Accompanied by some rather creepy music.)

!!! A sequel!? No way!

And that concludes my trip through Mega Man X. I hope you all enjoyed the adventure as much as I did! I had a lot of fun with the game, I can see why it is held in high regard among those lists of "Best SNES games." The action is alot of fun, and the 16-Bit graphic style is quite lovely. My only gripe is story... But, I suppose that's what RPGs are for!... I don't think I'll do an RPG next though, judging by the amount of time I've been able to settle down and play last month, it'll be best to get a less time consuming game out of the way... But which one? If anyone has any ideas, throw them out in the comment section below, I'd be happy to see what you're all thinking.

Catch ya later gamers!