Breath of Fire 3 Mage Ryu Run Part 3: Mutant

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MoogleBoss

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Published on June 17, 2011 2:01:54 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuNfUG-zK00

Game:

Breath of Fire III (1997)

Duration: 2:57

1,956 views

12

After Ryu joins forced with Nina, his mage build seems to suffer a decline in usefulness. Sure, that Magic Ball sure hurts like nothing else and is death to almost any random enemy it targets, but Nina slowly gains level while proceeding through dungeons (and I also stopped to grind for a little while so that I could have 15 weapon types immediately for D'Lonzo) and gets higher physical attack, defence and speed than Ryu.

Even with level-up stats gained under magic-oriented master Mygas, Ryu's physical attack is high enough to OHKO the holy-weak spirits and undead in Wyndia with a Silver Knife equipped, and he could ambush large groups of dangerous enemies (mainly the ones that power themselves up and attack with Jolt - these can be dangerous) with a Typhoon spell, killing most of them.

Together Ryu and Nina make a nice duo at this point, having enough speed to outspeed most enemies (it should be noted that mage Ryu doesn't need heavy swords so he's not weighed down) and killing them with magic.

Nut Mage and Nut Trooper - yeah, these annoying little guys with ridiculous evasion - fear magic more than anything else; however, Ryu needs to waste Burn's 1 AP to dispose of one of them, which is way better than wasting turns trying to land a physical attack on one of them.

When Momo joins, she has the highest physical strength of all characters by far, as well as the best weapons. This gives the party a little variety in what can be done. I gave Momo Midas Stone because there aren't any occasions when I'd like her to be quick at this point. Extra money FTW.

I got 15 weapon types and apprenticed Momo under D'lonzo. This hurts her AP and makes her even more fragile (which is already a problem as she is the second most fragile character in the game after Nina), but allows her to quickly learn D'lonzo's great skills and boosts her accuracy during the time of levelling under this master. Which is nice, because I don't plan my endgame to contain Momo, so her use earlygame is what I value the most.

You can see that against Mutant, the next boss, magician Ryu is nothing more than a support character. We need to land 2 fire-element attacks on the boss to make it lose its 250 HP regeneration (which is half of its full HP), but even that wasn't necessary because we ended up killing the boss on the next turn anyway.

Mutant is weak to fire, so Momo with Flame Chrysm and Double Blow does ridiculous damage after Double Resort on the tip of the attack formation. There's the risk of having the boss attack Momo on the first turn, but that's where Nina could help if necessary. The boss can't possibly kill Momo as long as she is at around max health.

Around this time I got to thinking, do I want Ryu to just be "there" or base the whole playthrough on focusing on his unique abilities and opportunities (as opposed to the most popular physical build)? I decided that I'd intentionally make the other two characters inferior so that the battles are more reliant on Ryu's magic than on the natural strengths of his allies further augmented by Bunyan's or Fahl's stat boosts. Because let's face it, any combination of Peco, Momo and Rei mean they could deal with any threat in the game without requiring much of Ryu's help.

So yeah, in the end I settled for a party of magical Ryu, durable support Nina (lol) and tankish Garr (who is completely outclassed by Peco). I considered messing Garr up by apprenticing under Meryleep so that he doesn't succeed at anything just like Nina, but thought that was too stupid to even consider. This puts a greater burden on Ryu to get the poorly built party out of trouble with his magic in the more difficult parts of the game.

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