Breath of Fire 3 Mage Ryu Run Part 1 - Amalgam

Channel:

MoogleBoss

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6,660

Published on June 4, 2011 3:56:55 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH2FFgXiph4

Game:

Breath of Fire III (1997)

Duration: 3:18

3,102 views

23

I started a regular run of the game with a mage Ryu build and decided to record footage of it. I'll show boss battles, and the video description will elaborate on how effective (or not) a magic-oriented protagonist is against the random encounters and whatnot (I'm not recording those because that would be kinda long and boring, or at least boring for me to record).

Most people opt to make their Ryu physically strong, apprenticing him under a master like Bunyan. There is some sense in that, seeing how most dragon forms Ryu has permit him to deal remarkable physical damage to bosses and levels gained under Bunyan amplify that further. However, Kaiser, Ryu's ultimate dragon form, can go either way since it can use whatever skills you put on the hero - be it physical techniques like Shadowwalk or magical ones like Mjollnir.

The obvious difference is that Ryu can no longer tank as he would if trained under master Bunyan, now becoming more fragile than unapprenticed Nina and hitting enemies with normal physicals worse than her, but using a mage build for any other purpose than using magic in all battles is a bad idea in the first place.

It makes for a slow start, but it's a good idea to keep Ryu dead until the master Mygas becomes available, leaving all the fighting to Rei and Teepo. At lv. 1, Ryu very quickly learns all of Mygas's magic up to Magic Ball before going to McNeil's mission and can learn Typhoon after returning from there, allowing him to gain levels very quickly when travelling solo and keeping Nina away from harm when she joins at lv. 5.

In McNeil's mansion, a mage Ryu is not quite as good as unapprenticed Teepo wielding a Silver Knife. Many enemies here are holy-weak and gaining levels under Mygas hurts Ryu's physical strength. It's worth mentioning, however, that even with the Mygas levels hurting Ryu's physical prowess, he can still one-hit KO the earlygame holy-weak foes which is crucial.

Magic Ball only costs 2 AP and Ryu has sufficient AP to use it on every random encounter battle inside the mansion without running out (there are two rest points; first the bed when you enter, then another one before the rooftops).

Against the boss, Ryu is inferior to Rei and Teepo attacking with Silver Knives, especially Rei who can throw some heavy equipment away to get EX turns. However, I put Teepo at the point of my attack formation because Rei needs to Pilfer the Magic Shard first, before he gets to attacking, so he's more of a support character here.

This is a casual playthrough without any attempt at "super efficiency" or, on the contrary, "completeness". At times I stop to fish for good equipment and just for fun because I really like the fishing minigame in this BoF, and I don't really grind unless there's some requirement I need to meet (like having 15 weapons the earliest time you meet D'lonzo).

I'm going to avoid using tank Peco in this run and use him to quickly learn skills from undesirable masters instead. Fahl!Peco is ridiculously overpowered with his nonsensical bulk, death resistance and 100% Reprisal rate. If I were to train a Peco for power, it wouldn't matter much how I went about training Ryu - with Peco at the peak of the attack formation, it could be physical or magical Ryu, or it could be a lv. 1 Ryu in a wheelchair - Peco would take care of nearly everything.

I'll probably go for the standard Ryu/Rei/Momo party (which the game kinda forces you to use by putting all those obstacles that require character-specific skills, namely in the final dungeon). Or I might actually use Garr again, who's otherwise pretty unwanted since Peco outclasses him in just about every way. At this point I think I'd prefer having two quick characters instead though.

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