Breath of Fire 4 Playthrough #2 (No Commentary)
10Breath of Fire Series: • Breath of Fire Series
As usual, I include random encounters because they are part of the game and the experience one would have playing it.
Please note that this is segmented and edited.
Notes
When you first learn Shift from talking to the tutorial NPC, you have to revisit areas on the world map before you can actually teleport to them.
I rest twice at the Checkpoint due to a game breaking bug with the wagon jumping you have to do there. You do the jump, the party vanishes and the wagon bounce animation loops infinitely. This may be an issue with Beetle specifically.
In Pabpab, you can learn the meaning of the various words the creatures use by examining the book in the room with the sick one. After gathering the herbs necessary to progress the game, you’ll be told the location of the Divine Helm. I provide a rough translation of the hint.
For the three treasures you are asked to acquire in Chiqua in order to progress, you only have to give him one of them. If you give him the treasure from the ruins, you permanently lose the transformation option it provides.
The jar requires you to fight a number of encounters before it will be finished. I don’t know the exact number. The fish is the easiest and fastest option, especially if you’ve been fishing but I haven’t, so I opt for the jar. After the ruins, I go around the world learning some skills in order to meet various master requirements and finally give Ryu a spell that does some damage. The jar wasn’t ready yet, so I go back to the ruins and fight some random encounters.
I probably should have ran out of Tomb to rest after the first boss there but this dungeon was going to kick my ass regardless of running out of MP. It just takes a little longer.
In Mukto, you can encounter the Rider enemy, which is actually one of the toughest enemies in the game for some reason. Obviously, I run away from it. I also run away from the Cyclops encounter because it takes too long/cost too many resources to deal with for its low reward.
After visiting Astana, the first visit was actually unnecessary, I go through a mountain section but since I don’t meet the requirements for Bunyan and likely won’t ever in this playthrough, I bypass the optional exit to his hut. If you need help finding it, you probably have bigger problems than trying to beat this game. I did leave a Protein behind his hut but it takes 4-5 encounters just to get to him and another 4-5 to leave. Didn’t seem worth it to me. The encounter rate is excessive here in the late game.
The preparations for the final dungeon were as follows:
Due to actually being unable to defeat A-tur without doing so, I went to Sinchon and repeatedly fought the Bots there until I reached level 43-44. The method involves hitting them with burn + eddy to create firewind. This splits them apart and doubles the amount of XP they reward. If you heal them, you can repeat this to double their XP again. You can do this a maximum of 8 times and each bot will reward 65635 XP, which is the maximum amount you can earn from a single source. I moved burn to Ershin and Eddy to Cray given their low wisdom to avoid accidentally killing the bots. This meant I had to exit and rest after each encounter but that’s not a big deal. Each encounter takes about 10 minutes real time to do, making this undoubtedly the best method for level grinding. After level 43, it requires 2 encounters of 3 bots for the party to level up, so I didn’t push it any further than that.
I did use rewind to ‘reroll’ encounters until I got the 3 bot one to save time.
After I finished level grinding, I went to the Faerie Village and converted one of the houses into an item shop. With an Ordinary Faerie assigned to it, you can eventually buy Vitamins and Wisdom seeds. I wanted to buy 99 of each (super overkill) and so I went to the Tomb and fought the Gold Gang’s there for 10k zenny a pop for a while.
Once I was done, I go grab the final treasure at Sonne just to show it and then go to Chedo to walk over the final dungeon.
00:00 Sanctum
28:30 Mt. Ryft & Shyde
43:37 Side Quests
1:13:17 Mt. Giga & Checkpoint
1:30:23 Shikk & Fane
2:12:04 Boss #9 - Kahn Rematch, Again
2:15:55 Island of Fire
2:26:55 Boss #10 - Glebe
2:32:46 Lyp, Jungle & Pabpab
3:08:48 Tidal Flats
4:08:06 Shan River & Chiqua
4:23:18 En Jhou Ruins
4:36:10 Skill Hunting
5:00:32 River & Pauk
5:28:28 Tomb
5:33:41 Boss #11 - Won-qu
5:43:07 Tomb Continued
6:13:41 Boss #12 - I & II (Good Lord.)
6:27:15 Tomb Continued
6:35:47 Mukto (Optional)
6:48:25 Astana & Highway
7:06:21 Imperial Headquarters
7:49:51 Preparation (See Notes)
8:02:25 Chedo
8:11:05 Boss #13 - A-tur
8:16:04 Chedo Continued
8:23:54 Castle
8:42:52 Boss #14 - Dragonne
8:47:18 Chedo Continued
9:11:14 Throne Room
9:25:41 Final Boss, Phase 1
9:36:23 Final Boss, Phase 2
9:50:00 Good Ending/Credits
10:04:29 Bad Ending