Breath Of Fire III

• This game wants you to have a guide ready. There are stuff that happens only if you know about it and do some thing you wouldn't ever do, particularly about Masters.

• At the start of the game when you're a dragon, check the first few bodies and you'll find a melted blade (gone forever) on one of them and buy every new weapon you can to apprentice to a Master later. The game only checks your item inventory and you can't unequip a weapon to have it count toward the 15 different weapons the Master wants. Buy a redundant starter weapon just in case.

• Ryu excels at almost everything in his human form, so you might not want to make him a dragon during every boss fight.

• Your buff spells can be cast five times for full effect.

• Transformations have their own stat sheet and won't share the buffs they got as humans. They won't keep their buffs if they revert and transform later.

• Don't try to min/max Masters based on point gain/losses. You eventually get a place where you can create stat items by the dozen.

• Agility may give you a second turn per character, but defense is the god stat.

• Don't sell any jewels you find from trees. It is used to recruit a Master.

• Don't use up your stat items if you want to use the Faerie Village to grind. They are very hard to get and available in random encounter maps at the very end of the game.

• Most Masters exist to teach you a couple skills in which most won't be useful. Some end game Masters can teach you some AoE that costs too much and poorly scales. Magic attacks fall behind. One spell on an IRL timer is bugged to not work if an enemy uses it before you.

• Fishing is either a day job or something to skip. Breaking a line destroys your lure and some are hard to replace. Unless you want to get an end-game Master related to catching all the biggest fish, you can get a weapon that is slightly better than available before you invade a huge mansion early in the game and fish for whales/barandy at the end of the game.

• Fishing for Silver Knives when the mini game finally unlocks, fetch a ton of money at that point. If you do want to make use of fishing and not have it be a second job, then get a bunch of knives and sell them later. You can buy super expensive stuff sooner as well.

• The choice of rods are a skill issue and the ultimate rod is not clearly superior. Technique is what attracts the fish to you.

• Fahl is an excellent Master for all characters.

• Many enemies have gimmicks like growing stronger or give more xp when hit with certain attacks. Use a guide.

• Abuse pilfer, especially on bosses which usually will have stat boosting items on them or gear.

• Willpower is a useless stat. You have to die to make use of it (RNG) or just get good and never die.

• Speaking of gear, you can change your loadout mid battle, no problem under the item command without wasting a turn. Just be careful about the item duping glitch and losing out on something important.

• All of your party members can be quite good, so don't feel like you're gimping yourself by picking your favorites.

• Near the end of the game you will be told to pray. The game wants you to not do anything for a few seconds here. No there are no real indicators that it wanted you to do this.

• Peco looks awful but actually can become hilariously broken if built a certain way (apprentice under Fahl. Laugh.) due to how his skills scale and incredibly high hp and def growths.

• Alternatively, if you hate Peco for any reason, you can always be a little cheesy and not ever level him until you find a master with skills you want right now.

• Skill ink might seem limited, but you can effectively get an unlimited amount through fishing and some vendors.

• There are no vendors that sell Coin lures, so be sure to save before you use it to try to catch a Manillo and not lose it.

• A random pond houses a Master that grows agility and you kick a rock into it to find her. There is also a hide and seek mini game that you play twice that unlocks masters who only teach different battle formations. One of them teaches the chain formation, which gives all party members speed equal to the leading party member. Apprenticing under her and using the Chain Formation, you'll eventually get an extra round in combat for everyone.

• Skills are a mix of being useful and useless depending on what you learn. That being said, try to learn Burn, Influence and Frost by the time you leave the first region and head to a mountain (It happens after a significant boss fight). You can learn frost from the mage Master in the first region, Burn and Influence from examination. The elemental spells make mountain battles much easier while influence is needed to control berserker party members when they transform, which includes one of Ryu's dragon forms and Rei's.

• You can beat a certain boss fight that takes place in the Wyndia dungeons before you get Nina, but you need the best equipment up to that point, have the influence skill, and need to be at least level 15. Even then, all you get is a bit of experience, and the incredibly rare chance of drops of a broadsword and fire resistant armor you can get later in the game. It's not worth it.

• There is a completely awful desert section much later on that houses some great items, but requires multiple trips through it. Do it after you cross the desert. You can somewhat cheese it by walking between two certain stars the whole time. The game will spitefully misdirect you after each encounter, so pay attention.

• Want to make the beginning second half of the game easier? After getting past a certain volcano (you'll know when you get there), go north. There's a town there that sells weapons that will hold their own for a while.

• When you get to the second half of the game as an adult, the first boss fight is an undead dragon that loves to use status effects. You can cheese this fight with the Kyrie spell. You can learn it one of two ways: Garr learns it naturally at level 26 or you learn it from the priest Master in Urkan Tapa, who will teach you the skill only if you know the Backhand skill. You can learn this skill from a hidden master located in the walls of Wyndia castle on the world map.

• Manly Clothes are the only revive that lets you keep your buffs. Be sure to replace this.

• You unlock the Faerie Village in the second half and it counts the number of battles for progression in opening up.

• There are a certain number of Faeries with fixed names and stats. You can safely kill off the few with terrible stats so better ones become available.

• All items have a certain number of battles to fight before it gets a chance at being copied. You can save scum.

• If you are copying items with the same battle count like the stat items, have one Faerie do it, fight one battle, have another Faerie copy another item, repeat. You don't want to have multiple successes and destroyed items in the same visit.