The Brood, an ancient race of dragons, is all but extinct. Their power was so strong that they had to be killed. A, the last one of the Brood, is awaken after 400 years and he wants to know more about his people.
Well aware of his fearful power, A uses it until he becomes strong enough to rely on his physical power. After which he manipulates luck to an indecent extent, using frame-by-frame advance to pulverize his foes, and even the final boss. It may be a little anti-climactic, but it's much quicker this way

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: PSCX-RR v0.1.3
  • Aim for the best ending
  • Aim for the fastest completion
  • Manipulation of luck
  • Use of glitches
  • Take damage to save time

Comments

So, this is my first PSX submission. This was also the very first PSX RPG I ever played. Although not as interesting as BOF 2, BOF 3 is still a good game, with interesting plot twists, a good soundtrack and customizable characters through masters (although only onw, Bunyan, is shown).
The speedrun can be accelerated through many things :
  • Althought fights can't be totally avoided, they can be greatly delayed. For some reason, walking along the edge of the screen keeps the monsters away. Also, in very narrow corridors, using the defense stance keeps the party from engaging combat (is it a glitch?). Finally, starting to walk one frame before a combat would otherwise occur delays the combat. Sometimes, the party can start running again without fighting. This explains the sometimes weird walking patterns I sometimes take
  • Although A (Ryu) is a dragon, he never uses his power after getting his revenge on Balio and Sunder. Instead, he uses Super Combo, a technic taught by his master Bunyan (who makes A a killing machine with higher attack). Normally, the most skilled players would be able to press 7-10 buttons one after the other in order to attack foes. But thanks to frame-to-frame advance, the skill can be pushed to its limit (32 hits). When the button is pressed influences the amount of damage
  • As mention above, barely any dragon power is ever used. Only one optional gene, thorn, is picked up.
  • Only 3-4 weapons are ever bought. The others are found/stolen
  • Healing is used only once
  • It's minor, but since Peco doesn't speak much, he is used is some occasions (Steel Beach, Angel Tower) to diminish the amount of dialogue
  • Unuseful characters are killed as much as possible, so that Momo can get might and so that A can be as strong as possible. He is helped with ivory dice, which doubles the experience earned in a battle (hence the 60 k experience against dragon lord)

Highlights of the game

  • Nue 1 : for the first fight, I only needed to do about 120 damage. Critical hits from Rei do the trick
  •  Nue 2 : Although Rei dies, I was able to finish the fight in three rounds
  • Pooch : I hate that dog. I was able to finish it in 4 rounds, but with great misery since only Rei does decent damage
  • Rocky : The rooster was much easier. His jump attack can do very little damage, which helped Rei resist the attacks
  • Torast : Teepo is quite strong! Down in 3 rounds and 2 critical attacks
  • Kassen : Ghosts are weak against holy magic - including healing magic
  • Galtel : He only casts weakening spells, so he goes down easily
  • Dosken : I don't know if it's a glitch, but a holy attack against him make him cast heal on our party
  • Amalgam : He had to die before the 5th round, in which he always casts astral warp. A's death was convenient; one more level under Bunyan
Bunyan is the only necessary master in the game. He gives better attack, defense and HP. It's all that A needs.
  • Mutant : plants are weak against fire. Which is why Momo does so much damage (and A barely needs to do any!)
  • Dodai : Momo had to start the fight. Her ice chrysm makes a lot of damage. Also, she learns blind (for later) and double blow to speed up the fight. When the Dodai is almost done, A comes in, uses the Ivory dice from the Tower and doubles his level!
  • Emitai : It was quite a lucky fight. Dragonned A countered a few times against the golems which sped up the fight.
  • Bullies : counters are quite useful
  • Stallion : three dragon strikes and it's out! I was able to do it thanks to Garr's Titan belt (which he traded for the soul gem)
  • Zig : Since it's a speedrun, Beyd only needed HP to survive Zig's lucky strike. When he did, a lucky strike of my own took care of Zig
In the lighthouse, I took advantage of the defense formation. And for ALL after mentionned fight, monsters are down using Super Combo. Without exception
  • Gazer : blinding it doubled the experience yield
  • Dolphin : a lucky fight. In my previous tries, i wasn't able to kill it one the first round
  • Gisshan et al. : since Gisshan defended so much, I took care of the dragons first.
I took advantage of the (apparently) famous Angel Tower glitch. Using a normal formation, the whole party warps on a block leading to the bottom of the tower, saving at least 2-3 minutes
  • Garr : he's quickly history
  • Dragon zombie : undeads are weak against fire (flare sword, bought in Urkan Tapa)
  • Weretiger : unlike what my speedrun FAQ said, Rei can be down with as little as 450 hp
  • Mikba : Since he has some resistance to fire, I had to switch swords. But he's easy nonetheless
  • Huge slug : Another monster weak against fire
  • Shroom : neutral against fire, but still easy
The defense formation is most useful in the Tidal cave. I only fought once!! But for that, I had to walk alongside the walls
  • Gaist : Another sword switch against this fire demon. The torches are annoying, but killing them would have taken time
For the rope pulling mini-game, I think frame-by-frame advance helped
  • Angler : Although it's a fish, tis strong against electricity. And for those who followed the run, using super combo takes about as many frames as with Aura!
Riding the boat can be frustrating. Even when the boat isn't moving - but the screen show it - the engine still heats up. For the shisu, only one sprig of horseradish is necessary. And the length of the fish doesn't matter. In the Black Ship, for some reason, the Booster Counter took 2000 frames more than my tryouts
  • Ammonites : the barbarossa (bought is junk town) is lightning-based, which is useful against fish
  • Elder : he takes care of the other, I take care of him
For the crossing of the desert, I realized that it was a speedrun. So I didn't drink water of rested during the day (don't try this at home, kids).
  • Manmo : If I didn,t kill it on the first try, it would have countered my attack
  • Chimera : I miraculously killed it without using last resort
  • Arwan : To facilitate the next fight, I needed to avoid its attack
  • Dragon Lord : Dragons are weak against the dragon sword. I used my two last ivory dice, boosting me to level 37
  • Nues : I wished I could have countered every time...
  • Mikbas : 3 seconds shorter without the dragon sword (fire based)
  • Myria : I was thanfully lucky to withstand Myria's attack on last resort.
Possible improvement : Better luck during fights, try to get the gooking sword (which would be used for at most 4 fights), improve enemy encounter (try to get the holy mantle)
 
Screenshot suggestion : frame 694 530, the famous Angel Tower glitch frame 1027681, which would be dubbed "Naked women are very susceptible"

FractalFusion: Judging.
FractalFusion: Well done. Accepting for publication.

GabCM: I'll upload FerretFaucet's 512kb encode in a single part to YouTube, and then I'll use his stuff for publication.

Active player (278)
Joined: 9/1/2008
Posts: 900
don't worry, I'll get to that game after doing Beyond the Beyond, which should be shorter. Hell, I want my revenge on those ?$(?*&%( dice
Joined: 1/27/2011
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Location: Minnesota, USA
Ladies and gentlemen, Archive.org home with SD streaming SD Encode - 829,906 KB 512kb SD Encode - 1,538,032 KB Total length of encode: 07:51:48 HD is encoding. ETA for the HD is about 60 hours though, so don't expect that too soon.
Brandon
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Joined: 11/21/2010
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Location: Tennessee
The biggest round of applause I've ever given if FerretFaucet can get the HD online. I've tried to upload janus' BoF run at least 10 times and failed each time. While I'm here, much props, janus. I'm struggling to TAS a level less than 2 minutes long, and you made a 7 hour+ run...amazing.
All the best, Brandon Evans
honorableJay
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Joined: 8/18/2008
Posts: 104
Location: Albany, NY
Brandon wrote:
While I'm here, much props, janus. I'm struggling to TAS a level less than 2 minutes long, and you made a 7 hour+ run...amazing.
Not to mention that he did it about 4 times in a row.
Jungon
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I'm voting Yes here, but ... I'll be watching the video during, hm ... the next 2 years, slowly =P and I better be amused in the process >.>
*Jungon*/*Johnnyz* smilie weirdo =P ^^ o.o @__@ +D
Joined: 1/27/2011
Posts: 78
Location: Minnesota, USA
As a side note, this is one of the funniest parts of a game ever:
Joined: 5/4/2005
Posts: 502
Location: Onett, Eagleland
Just skimmed through the run, I love this game and wow, I've never seen a 30 hit combo with Super combo, just watching it go through the animation of 30 hits alone was pretty funny, definitely voting yes. Amazing to see a game that takes 30+ hours (rushing) on a normal play through to beat take only 7.
I think.....therefore I am not Barry Burton
Active player (278)
Joined: 9/1/2008
Posts: 900
As a side note, this is one of the funniest parts of a game ever:
si I reckon you chose this frame?
Active player (421)
Joined: 9/27/2004
Posts: 650
Location: Canada
I can't help but think you picked up some unneeded parts during the parts salvaging segment to fix up the boat. But other than that the whole run was a good watch, so I'm voting yes.
Skilled player (1633)
Joined: 11/15/2004
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janus, I've noticed you don't seem to talk much about how you do luck manipulation. Do you use lua scripts? Do everything by hand? How does the RNG in the BOF series work?
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
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Inzult wrote:
I can't help but think you picked up some unneeded parts during the parts salvaging segment to fix up the boat. But other than that the whole run was a good watch, so I'm voting yes.
actually, everything is useful. I can't miss any part, as the drawing shows.
janus, I've noticed you don't seem to talk much about how you do luck manipulation. Do you use lua scripts? Do everything by hand? How does the RNG in the BOF series work?
I do everything by hand. As far as the RNG works : from what I found, item drop in BOF 3 depends on the action taken during battle and the probability of dropping. The gooking sword is dropped at 1/256, which is why i didn't get it
Active player (275)
Joined: 4/30/2009
Posts: 791
Yeah I'm one of those crazy people who watched the entire thing from start to finish. And I like what I see - a long RPG reduced to a mere wisp of its intended length. Cracking job, yes vote from me.
Joined: 4/29/2006
Posts: 70
Awesome! Thanks for the encodes Ferret. Archive.org is always slow for me, maybe it's in the US and im in the EU I dunno. Anyhoo I decided to host your 512kb encode on my 100 Mbit host if anyone else dislikes archive.org http://undie.no-ip.org/encodes/breath_of_fire_iii-tas-janus_512kb.mp4 [1.5GB]
Joined: 5/24/2005
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Location: France
For bringing back memories of long hours of play and making this game this short, you got a yes vote ! Very nice job !
Not dead yet... still very busy... damn...
Active player (421)
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Location: Canada
janus wrote:
actually, everything is useful. I can't miss any part, as the drawing shows.
Here, watch this from a let's play to see what I mean: needed parts It takes him 12 minutes or something to do it since he's screwing around a lot but the principle stands. There may be some reason to pick up all parts that I don't know about though. If so, pardon me.
Joined: 2/20/2010
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Location: I'm in space
Thanks for the encodes ferretfaucet!! I'm amazed at how quickly you were able to render them. Anyway, as one who has zero familiarity with the game and could not possibly identify unoptimized segments, I'm left with the facts that (1) watching a play-through of this game is entertaining, and (2) it was completed considerably quicker than the current unassisted record. Thus, I vote yes. A screenshot suggestion (@ 0:42:00) :
Oh, play it cool. Play it cool. Here come the space cops.
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nah, not representative of the game. I suggested the Angel Tower glitch and Deis fighting Garr naked (the exact frame is listed in the submission)
Joined: 5/8/2010
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Location: Entropy
This game is SO LONG, but I like breath of Fire and this TSA looks good. Still have to finish watching the video tho. Edit: After finally watching through the 7 hours long gameplay, I give it my yes! Tho I do feel like I just wasted 7 hours of my life for a game (but don't we always waste our life for no reasons?)
Joined: 12/27/2006
Posts: 49
As someone who stopped playing this game for various reasons (didn't like the encounter rate, graphics, and music) I must admit it was nice that you could read the text w/o slowing things down. On the other hand I did find the battles to be rather repetitive due to using very similar tactics. Still, I suppose I'll give this a weak yes due to the ease of reading text.
Joined: 1/10/2010
Posts: 59
I'm not going to lie, this run is most entertaining at 3x speed. Scary enough, the text is still mostly readable. On the one hand, this game has almost Valkyrie Profile amounts of "boring" stuff (escaped encounters, random running around, story) between actually interesting stuff (boss fights), and then even boss fights were pretty formulaic. That being said, I enjoyed this run for some reason I can't explain. While I'm not convinced that I might have voted differently if I didn't love this game, I'm going to have to vote yes.
Joined: 5/4/2005
Posts: 502
Location: Onett, Eagleland
One suggestion. Not sure if is was tested, but after Ryu is grown old and you go to the field with the pit trap before sin city, you can fight goo titans there in groups of 3 I believe. Wouldn't it have been faster to gain some levels from fighting a single group of 3 there to build Ryu's str on levelup so Last resort and Focus weren't necessary during some fights? This would save a few turns if the str gain was enough.
I think.....therefore I am not Barry Burton
Joined: 1/26/2009
Posts: 558
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Here an attempt to encode this with the SPU plugin and some encoding tool. The sound should be better, but at several place the audio is still laggy, because of a reload savestate bug, as far as I can see. To fix that, it's possible to manually edit my script to skip some unnecessary savestate checkpoint. Rather than trying to re-encode, I thought the result was good enough : Youtube : Part1, Part2 Also, at the end I saved the game to see how long was the in-game time :)
Joined: 1/27/2011
Posts: 78
Location: Minnesota, USA
BadPotato wrote:
Here an attempt to encode this with the SPU plugin and some encoding tool. The sound should be better, but at several place the audio is still laggy, because of a reload savestate bug, as far as I can see. To fix that, it's possible to manually edit my script to skip some unnecessary savestate checkpoint. Rather than trying to re-encode, I thought the result was good enough : Youtube : Part1, Part2 Also, at the end I saved the game to see how long was the in-game time :)
You're awesome. Abandoning my HD encode.
Joined: 1/26/2009
Posts: 558
Location: Canada - Québec
Please don't, those HD encode have experimental sound issue, they aren't following the all encoder guideline and futhermore those aren't even 1080p (the standard I guess...) Also, I already post earlier about my plan to keep up the encode in the BoF3 thread.
Joined: 1/27/2011
Posts: 78
Location: Minnesota, USA
BadPotato wrote:
Please don't, those HD encode have experimental sound issue, they aren't following the all encoder guideline and futhermore those aren't even 1080p (the standard I guess...) Also, I already post earlier about my plan to keep up the encode in the BoF3 thread.
Lordy lord. Ok then. I'll have it up within the next five or six days. Edit: Awesome job though, I love it.