At last, the low level challenge in Breath of Fire is finished!
In this playthrough, I tried to finish the game with all team members at more or less equally low levels. Only mandatory battles were fought, with the exception of the dragon shrine hero solo battles which are a must for the best ending (as well as a much harder final boss battle, which is what we’re looking for).
I didn’t use fusion forms during battles, and Agni was used only to cause the boss to appear. The final battle itself was done the hard way.
My levels are shown in the video. I wanted to complete the game without using fusions or dragons in battles, and I did it.
Now, let’s discuss the final boss.
Tyr, or Goddess, is easily the hardest boss we face in the challenge. Her physical attacks usually kill the target, unless they miss, and only Ryu and Ox have a decent chance of surviving a physical while standing in the front row. This wouldn’t be a problem with four party members if the boss was at least slower than Karn. But no, she’s fast.
In a normal playthrough, you’d counter this issue with the Idle spell but Nina learns it one level later. Even then, it’s questionable whether Karn would be quicker than the boss after a casting of that spell.
So that’s the problem, we’re playing blind here, selecting commands without having a clear idea what to expect. A character who was igned to revive another or attack may be killed the following turn, and we get really unlucky we may end up with two characters - or even one - standing at any given point of this long battle.
Are we completely obscured? Not so much. We know what the boss CAN do.
Every first three turns out of four, Tyr has a 75% chance of using her lethal physical attack. Technically, it might’ve been wise not to do any healing whatsoever and only revive the allies when they are dead. But what about the other 25%? The boss may also cast Comet / Big Bang, which will deal 70 damage to all four party members. Not really that devastating. Two Comet castings in a row, however, will kill Nina and Ryu and leave Bo at 1 HP, uming he was at max health in the first place. On every fourth turn, the percentage is 50/50, meaning a Comet casting is just as likely to be seen as a physical attack.
So what we do is dedicate one character, optimally (i.e. when all four are alive) Bo, to use a Meat on the party every single turn. Meat is an item that you can hunt for, which restores 70 HP to the whole party. You can store very many of them as, unlike Cure2 items, nine of them occupy one slot in your inventory.
When somebody dies, one of the remaining three uses a Life item. This is PREFERRED to casting Renew with Nina, as Renew will go BEFORE the boss. This means that the character we just revived will die again if the boss decides to cast a Comet spell. This doesn’t apply to Ox, who’s equipped with the Earth Robe (absorbs spell damage).
Now, the boss has 31,000 HP and our best attack does only 400 so this is one monster of a battle. Even we are lucky, there will often be times when half of the party (or more) is dead. What to do if that happens?
First of all, Life2 items. The normal Life, bought in shops, revives a fallen character with 1 HP. Life2 restores them to full HP, allowing even the weakest of them to withstand a Comet if it’s to come next. When two characters are standing, BOTH should use Life2 on their allies. Sure, attacking is important because if we stop that we’ll never win and just keep retreating and reviving but if the boss takes out the reviving character the other one will be left solo. We have 13 Life2 items by opening chests during the storyline and preserving them until this battle.
That’s also very likely actually. But it can be countered. Moon Drop items revive and restore everyone’s health to maximum. We have only four, having found them in chests during the game. The last resort is the Water Jar which can be used once per battle. It works exactly like Moon Drops do but restores AP as well.
As I’ve said, with the boss’s massive HP we should be ready for the worst as we will inevitably run out of those items and get into trouble.
The boss’s attacks also seem to get stronger as time passes, so the battle just gets more and more intense.
Duration : 0:10:51
