Breath of Fire 3 - 0 Exp Run Part 10: Mikba
20A rather unexpectedly quick victory against one of the game's toughest bosses.
Challenge playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbSv8zSDR9c3B4PywC9BZi6DB276WM3gE
Having defeated the Dragon Zombie, Ryu and Garr made it out of the Dauna Mines, which signifies both a progression in the game's storyline and access to two new fishing spots and... more importantly... right, the Faerie Village.
There's a good reason why the Faerie Village was banned entirely from my previous BoF 3 challenge run done a couple years back. While the items it makes available can be accessed much later on in the game, sometimes even with better alternatives as rare drops and steals from enemies in the last dungeon, the sudden jump in equipment quality thanks to the FV is very abrupt and potentially gamebreaking. The gamebreaking features are, coincidentally, the very thing we are looking for on this playthrough, so that's all good! :)
Specifically, we're interested in exploiting everything the shop, exploration and casino (!!!) functions of the Faerie Village grant. The shops offer just an Angling Rod for easier fishing of Barandy/Whale/Spearfish for Life Armours (nobody cares about the Royal Sword lol), Spiked Gauntlets ("shield" that boosts attack) and Royal Dagger (Protect item magic for characters lacking the spell, which is just about all of them). The exploration part of it requires considerably more patience with resets and retrying, but we can get multiple Ivory Charms (having two on cancels all elemental damage and all side effect of enemy skills and apparently doubles healing spells' power too), Spirit Rings (halves AP cost), as well as Force Armours and Mind Shields (the former also give us a chance to cast Barrier as an item) for some very potent protection. Ryu can also acquire the Demonsbane weapon early via exploration, and it doubles his damage against several key enemy bosses.
And then there's the casino where we can exploit the RNG to score mind-bogglingly overpowered items. We can finally get enough Speed Boots to accommodate an entire party, there are Divine Helms for extra defence, and another chance to score Spirit Rings (not that useful in this challenge because of the poor availability of the better offensive skills like Shadowwalk, Aura and Super Combo). And finally, two abnormally rare weapons can be acquired early by playing the number guessing game in the casino, and these are Rei's Lifestealer and Ryu's GooKingSword.
Lifestealer is Rei's strongest dagger after Holy Avenger, and the strongest of the light weapons at his disposal. It can proc instakills, but since we're not really facing randoms we hardly care about that. GooKingSword is notorious for the simple fact that there is a meme in the BoF3 community claiming this weapon doesn't exist in the game's code at all and is completely unobtainable. There's a good reason to think so, considering the enemy dropping the weapon - the Goo King - is absurdly powerful, defeating him in a way that permits him to drop an item is too tricky and the drop rate is abysmally low on top of that.
The GooKingSword is actually not such a threatening toy in the hands of a lv. 1 Ryu, but it does give him some viability with the right setup (like the one shown here), though actually the Demonsbane is the weapon I use here because its demonslaying properties makes it about even with the GooKingSword in damage output after a series of buffs.
When the battle starts, Rei is in KO condition and needs to be revived. However, once Rei is revived, it's a bad idea to restore his HP (fearing a potential attack from Mikba), because just "touching" Rei triggers his Weretiger in this one boss battle, and we might not be ready to start attacking so early.
Why we'd rather set up buffs and wait is Mikba's innate ability to counterattack with Reprisal attacks and proc terrifying criticals with Lucky Strike. He can accomplish these two in one single counter too, so landing physical attacks on him isn't safe at all, unless the attack in question is Blitz (doesn't trigger Reprisals).
Mika is slow however, with only 17 speed. Even a 0 spd character equipped with two Speed Boots will be EX-turning Mikba after two Speed castings from Rei, and Rei can take 2 pairs of Speed Boots to EX-turn the boss naturally thanks to his godly base speed. We definitely want Ryu, fronting the attack formation, buffed up to EX-turn, but it's probably pointless to do the same for Garr - after all, he doesn't do much offensively, and casting Speed 4 times takes a bit too much time since Rei is the only source of the buff so far.
Fronting the attack formation, Ryu will cast Resist on himself every active turn, neutralising most hits targeting the party and keeping himself alive, getting ready to start attacking on the EX-turns he gets with Rei's help. After taking 2 Vodka Shots and using Last Resort, Ryu can start pummelling the boss with Blitz for impressive 700-800ish damage.
(out of space)
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