Monday, February 7, 2011

Text Play: Breath of Fire (SNES): Issue # 10: Little Yellow Fish

I actually died while trying to get to Prima so I could save and stop at the end of last issue. That's how wimpy Gobi is.



Fortunately, though, the Dragon Lord was nice enough to revive Gobi in Prima instead of making me replay the entire last part. What a great guy, huh?

Anyway, this is probably going to be a short issue, not only because there are a few major things that happen here that I don't want to sort of just pass over, but because this brief little bit here sucks hard as a result of having to use Gobi exclusively to advance the plot.

Gobi, as I might have mentioned before, is a fish person. He's also a merchant, but because he's got a rep as a greedy bastard, his guild took away his license so that he wouldn't make the rest of them look bad by association.

This bit can be a real cake walk, provided you don't get into any fights underwater while you're just Gobi. It took me awhile to do it because, one, I wanted to equip Gobi with better stuff than what he had, and two, I'm getting a little forgetful now that I'm a little “older” and had to do a little trial and error to get things done.

So, as I said at the end of the last issue, Gobi goes to his home town of Prima, which is under the sea, to get a key item called Gills for the party. The natural person to talk to is the Guild Owner, Prima's town elder. The Guild Owner asks Gobi if he's learned a lesson by losing his business license and tells him that they don't have any Gills on hand because they need a shipment of some vauge “Goods” from a place called Gant to get them. So, this means that it's Gobi's job to go there and make it happen.

The way I finally remembered I was on the right track was when I found the beach that had monsters that didn't pretty much murder Gobi right away. The bad news is that even with all the new and better equipment I bought him, our floundering flounder can still get his ass kicked by anything that isn't the monsters from the start of the game. The worse news is that he can pretty much one-hit-kill those ones just like everyone else in the party by this point.

But fortunately, once you've found the right place, by heading straight south of Prima, it's a breeze to finish off, so long as there are no sea monsters to fight, as the elder in Gant pretty much just hands over the Goods once Gobi says that's what he's there for.

Once you get back to Prima with the Goods, the Guild Owner gives you the gills and reads a letter about how Gant was attacked by the Dark Dragons. Just then, those same dudes sink a little boat with a metal worker from Gant who was going to Prima to tell the same story and add something about a secret weapon.

This dude is called Ox, who is literally just that: an ox. He's strong, so his special ability is to punch things. He can break weak walls and other obstacles by pounding on them, and can shake things out of trees the same way. It's a useful thing, but it's not a good idea to have him on point unless there's an immediate need to have him hit things, because he's as slow as he is strong, and the encounter rate really does go up while on the map or in dungeons. There's another reaper, perhaps a sibling of the ones from Karma, waiting to steal Ox's soul. So long as you keep Gobi out of the party until the last couple rounds of the fight, it's not really a problem. The only person you'll want to have in the party that really needs to rely on pure physical attacks is Karn. The hero can use his fire dragon morph, Bo has decent fire magic, and Nina should have an undead-killing spell called Zom1 by now, that's actually the second best thing to use on the reaper. Kill the reaper and Ox joins you, saying that he needs help rescuing Gant.

But that's for Issue #11. Normally, I'd have a cute title for it by now, but I really don't, so I'll just give a clue about my location by referencing local kids' show host Captain Eleven instead.

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