Breath of Fire 3 - 0 Exp Run Part 2: Team Patrio
15Challenge playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbSv8zSDR9c3B4PywC9BZi6DB276WM3gE
After beating Mutant, Peco joins the party so that there are now 4 units to choose from. Since this game, you always use only 3 characters in a battle at a time in the BoF series (I kinda miss the first two games having 4 characters in the party at once, though there are some things about them I don't miss that much).
Comparison of the party at this point of the challenge:
Ryu (lv. 1) - 20 HP, 11 AP, 12 Pwr, 10 Def, 8 Agl, 10 Int
Nina (lv. 5) - 27 HP, 33 AP, 13 Pwr, 13 Def, 14 Agl, 24 Int
Momo (lv. 10) - 52 HP, 40 AP, 30 Pwr, 25 Def, 15 Agl, 50 Int
Peco (lv. 1) - 40 HP, 8 AP, 18 Pwr, 14 Def, 3 Agl, 4 Int
Peco is clearly a winner, having double HP compared to Ryu, in spite of losing just about everywhere else (higher Pwr and Def aren't too important considering Peco gets much poorer equipment options). He's significantly healthier than Nina who is 4 levels higher too!
Sadly, for the arena sequence of the storyline, Nina is forced into the party, so that leaves just one optional slot in the roster, which can be filled by either Momo or Peco.
Momo is the healthier of the two, has superior equipment and speed, so there's no question that she should take the 3rd spot. Actually, it's hard to imagine Team Patrio being beatable without her presence - it's three solo battles in the row and she has the best combat in the party by far.
Since 0 Exp means Ryu doesn't have to take any experience here for Momo to avoid levelling up, Momo might as well take on all three of the opponents here.
The first one is Claw, capable of inflicting blindness and outspeeding Momo. There's one thing that's important about her, and that's Speed Boots being a rather rare drop. I can't overstate how much value this one item has in this challenge - 10 points of speed is a huge boost at this point of the game for any runthrough, and it's essential in this challenge run, period. Many interesting strategies and equipment setups become impossible thanks to the early pair of Speed Boots alone.
Later on you can get infinite amounts of these but so far we get just one. An interesting feature the boots have is that when you equip two on a character who has been weighed down to 0 speed (possibly having negative speed, but 0 is as low as it drops to), they'll have 20 speed, which actually means you can have a 40 speed character with the best defensive gear equipped, outspeeding and sometimes even EX-turning after two Speed buffs. Will be abused later.
Speaking of offensive options, Momo can go for Jump, which is unreliable, but the gamble usually gives higher attack multipliers while the lowest one tends to not appear nearly as often. Double Blow is more reliable however, especially considering how Momo's innately low accuracy makes it a good idea to strike twice - you're likely to connect at least one of the attacks this way.
So the Speed Boots have to drop at all costs.
Cawer is the first battle where we can equip this accessory and enjoy its benefits, and Momo can EX-turn this guy thanks to the item. He mostly uses magic anyway, so you can easily get away with having a low defence stat with the heavy armour taken off.
Patrio is the reason why I didn't just attack the Dodai to win quickly. Patrio isn't so hard himself, but if we want to learn Frost Strike from him, surviving becomes really hard, because his attacks crit about 50% of the time with Lucky Strike.
It's not possible for Momo to avoid the 2HKO for sure, so she should be ready to switch equipment to go first sometimes for emergency healing, and buffs don't help enough to lower Lucky Strike damage. If we have poor luck with learning the skill, we stick around for longer and risk more.
I had a 19 minute video recorded just because of Frost Strike here, but I edited the repetitive parts out. As you can see in the video, Momo died once when trying to learn the ability and I even had to use up my Black Porgies to recover Patrio's AP because he didn't have enough to keep using the ability.
It was sorta worthless in the end, because my Gisshan strategy didn't involve using any Frost Strikes whatsoever (I had a different means of offence there instead), and I'm not sure if Frost Strike will be used against future bosses like Gaist or Manmo later on in the challenge. It's far easier to learn it from Bolt enemies with a party of 3 in random encounters though.
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