Breath of Fire 3: Skills and Masters

One of the characteristics shared by the Breath of Fire games is “neat gameplay systems that are never adequately explained”. All five games have some pretty cool ideas you can play around with, but because of translation issues or outright laziness the rules are nearly impossible to understand without reading a FAQ. I suppose the argument could be made that this was a design choice, and that Capcom figured players would have more fun learning all the rules on their own. I’m more inclined to believe it’s outright laziness, though, considering this problem permeates through a lot of Capcom games on pretty much every system known to man.

The Master and Skills systems in Breath of Fire III are particularly noteworthy here, because you can play the entire game without actually sussing out the rules, and therefore never using them properly. The game is playable like that, but you miss out on a lot of fun skills and a lot of strategy ideas. Through a combination of experimentation and FAQing I have learned the arcane mysteries of this game’s chewy caramel center. The systems are actually pretty simple, once you know the rules, and it’s easy and fun to take full advantage of them.

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What are skills?

Each hero has four pages on his or her Ability menu: Heal, Attack, Assist and Skill. The first three pages are magic spells, which the heroes learn by leveling up. Each hero is hard-coded to learn a specific set of spells, and this goes a long way in defining what your heroes can do.

The last page is Skills. These are special auxilary abilities that can be used to augment a hero’s existing moveset. Some Skills are duplicate magic spells, such as Frost and Shield. Some are special attacks that cost zero AP, such as Charge. And some are really weird, situational abilities like Influence and Super Combo. You can go the entire game without ever properly using a Skill, but that’s boring and stupid, so let’s learn how to get them!

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Learning Skills

You can get Skills from two places: monsters and masters.

Learning a Skill from a monster is pretty similar to learning Blue Magic in Final Fantasy. In combat, have a hero use the Examine command on a monster. If that monster uses a Skill, the hero has a chance of learning it. Examine is the eyball icon to the left of Attack.

One of three things will happen when you use Examine on a monster that uses a Skill:

1. Nothing. This means the Skill is learnable, but you failed to nab it. Either your Examine didn’t succeed, and you should try again next round, or you already have that particular Skill, which means you can’t learn it again.
2. Blue question mark. This means the monster isn’t using a learnable Skill. The game will flat out say “You can’t learn this ability”, which is your cue to give up on it.
3. Yellow exclamation point. You got it! The game will tell you what Skill you learned and who learned it.

You can also learn Skills from masters, which I’ll detail below.

Once you learn a Skill, you have it forever, but you can never have more than one copy of a Skill at a time. If you see a Skill you like, go ahead and have all three of your heroes Examine the monster to increase your chances of learning it. Don’t worry about making sure a particular hero learns it; you can move it to someone else later. (And you can move it back, too, if you change your mind.)

I don’t know what, exactly, governs whether or not Examine succeeds. As a rule, I’ve never had to spend more than a couple rounds with a creature before succeeding.

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Skill Notes

One of the options in your book at camp is “Skill Notes”. This lets you check and manage your heroes’ Skill lists. Think of this as a holding area for Skills that no heroes are currently using.

You can look all you like for free, but in order to move Skills you’ll have to use Skill Ink. This is a semi-rare treasure you’ll find in the game world, and it can be pretty intimidating to manage your Skills because it feels like you’ll make a mistake an waste an Ink. There are three reasons not to worry about this:

1. You can save first. Whatever else happens, the book at which you manage your Skills also acts as a save point. If you’re skittish, save first, make your changes, then reload if you don’t like them. You’ll get your Skill Ink back.
2. You can make as many transactions as you like with a single Skill Ink. It may seem like Skill Ink moves one Skill, but what it really does is gives you access the menu where all the magic happens. Once you use it and get to the point where you can move Skills around, you can stay there as long as you want as long as you don’t back out of the menu. You can re-allocate every Skill you’ve ever learned, all at once, if your little heart desires.
3. Skill Ink doesn’t run out.

It’s limited, but it is by no means finite. You can buy Skill Ink from Manillo shops at various fishing ponts in the world. Fishing it outside of the scope of this FAQ, but it’s really fun and you should be doing it anyway.

What it boils down to is: once you learn a Skill you have it forever, and you can move it around as much as you like between heroes.

Worth noting: any Skills Teepo knows when he leaves the group early in the game get dumped into your Skill Notes. So go ahead and use him to learn all those early game Skills. There are a few good ones!

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Masters

Throughout the game world you will meet characters who offer to train your heroes. This is very daunting because while the game alludes to certain things happening as part of being an apprentice it never out-and-out states what the benefits are in clear terms. There is some sense that a hero’s stats will change, and they’ll be offered new Skills now and then, but there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to it.

Simply put, masters affect the way your hero levels up. A few of them have passive effects, but their primary function is to alter a hero’s stat gains and, periodically, teach them new Skills.

No hero may have more than one master at a time, though you can change a hero’s master whenever you like simply by visiting a new one with that hero in the party. You may have as many heroes training under a single master as you like.

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Master Stat Gains

When talking to a master, they will say something like “your Attack will go up, but your AP will not go up so fast”. You’ll even see very clearly what stats a master affects, and to what degree they are affected, by checking the Master List at your camp book. Items in blue are bonuses granted by the master; items in red are penalties you’ll just have to live with.

For example, it might say “HP +2, Int -1”. These alterations are not immediate, however; you can have a hero change masters without ever seeing a change in their stats. What masters actually do is alter how much a hero’s stats go up when they gain a level. This particular master grants a +2 bonus to HP every level, at the cost of -1 Int.

It’s important to note that this does not cause your hero’s Int to actually go down! It will just increase by one fewer point at level-up than it would have if that hero had no master at all.

A few masters list passive effects underneath their stat changes on the Master Notes screen. Yggdrasil, for example, has a passive “weak vs. fire” penalty. D’lonzo, on the other hand, has a passive “Accuracy” bonus, which causes her apprentices to miss less. These passives are mostly just little perks and it probably is not worth parking a character on a particular master forever just to enjoy one.

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Learning Skills From Masters

Each master has a set of Skills they can teach. Heroes learn these Skills the same way they learn their other Abilities: by leveling up. When you first take on a master, imagine an invisible counter starting at zero. Each time that hero levels up, the counter goes up one. When the counter reaches the correct level, the master will teach that hero a new Skill.

The game doesn’t tell you when you’ve gained enough levels; there’s no way to know except to just visit your master and see what’s up. Make sure you talk to him with the correct hero leading the party!

The rules here are pretty simple:

1. Masters will only teach a Skill once. Multiple heroes can’t get the same Skill from a single master. Once you have a Skill, though, you can swap it around on your Skill Notes screen just like normal.
2. You get a star once you have all of a master’s Skills. You’ll notice each master’s name on the Master List at your camp has a dot next to it. If you already know all the Skills that master teaches, that dot will turn into a star.
3. If you leave, you have to start over. That invisible counter I mention starts over if you leave a master and try to come back. Once you’ve plugged a hero into a master, make sure you leave him there until you get your star!

The strategy here is pretty simple, if you’re just in it for the skills: make sure each master you meet gets a student long enough to pass along all his Skills. After that, only use that master if you want to continue gaining stats from him.

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Good Skills You Shouldn’t Miss

Compiling and experimenting with the huge amount of Skills can be pretty daunting, so here are a few early ones that will be helpful to you throughout the game:

1. Influence. This is used by the Boss Goblins in the very first forest. They use it constantly and it is super easy to get. This skill places a “target” on one enemy, and any berserked characters on your team will mindlessly attack that target. This is great because two of your heroes eventually get sick-broken berserker attacks, which are too dangerous to use normally because they’ll attack and kill your other heroes. With Influence on, you can just point them at the boss and let them go crazy.
2. Double Blow. NutTroops use this all the time. You’ll see this monster pretty much everywhere early in Wyndia, right after Ryu sets out on his own. For 2 AP, a character will attack twice. Excellent for Ryu, whose offensive options are pretty limited at that point in the game!
3. Rest. This is used by one of the plant creatures in the Dump, shortly after you recruit Momo. Using this restores a small amount of HP and AP to the character who used it. It’s a great option for Nina in combat rounds where she doesn’t have to cast spells, as it helps stretch that AP bar just a bit further.

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Tricky Early Game Masters

You’ll reach a point where it’s trivial to visit any master you want whenever you want, but very early in the game it can be difficult since you’re always so restricted in where you can go. Here’s a list of masters you want to make sure you get in line early on, and how to do it.

Masters don’t become available until just before Rei and Teepo leave the party. This would be after Bunyan has his little conversation with “the cows” about what a bad idea it was to raid McNeil’s manor.

1. Bunyan. He’s at his shack in the woods. You can’t get back here for a very long time, and it would be a shame for Ryu to miss all those boosts to his attack power, considering how much time he’ll spend carrying the party.
2. Mygas. He’s the wizard at a ?-spot in some woods in the Yraall Region. I mention him because he will take all of your zenny the first time you talk to him. Go to town first and stock up on tons of healing items and equipment so he doesn’t get your whole stash. There isn’t actually anything you can do with him yet, although you’ll want to come back once you have Nina.
3. Durandal. He’s in the little shack inside the inner walls of Wyndia. He’s completely useless, but there’s a much better master later on that won’t train you until you’ve gotten all his Skills. He’s the only master Nina can access for much of the early game, so make sure to put her there before moving on with the plot.
4. D’lonzo. She’s at the Coffee Shop, just after you recruit Momo. D’lonzo is great for two reasons: she gives a passive Accuracy boost, which dramatically improves her regular attack. Second, she teaches Steal, which you want to get as early as possible. She won’t train you unless you have fifteen unique weapons in your inventory. It is just barely possible to do this with some careful pre-planning. You have to make sure to buy every single unique weapon up to this point, including the ones you see in Manillo shops. You have to make sure Rei Pilfered everything he possibly could in the early game. You have to make sure to get the Melted Blade during the game’s prologue. And you probably will have to do some grinding to afford the stuff on sale in Wyndia an Genmel. Even if you miss the mark, though, you still want to get Momo on staff with D’lonzo as early as you can. Without mastering D’lonzo’s Skills there is no way to steal items until you get Rei back much later in the game.

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I hope this document helps someone enjoy Breath of Fire III a little more. Next I’ll probably have to compile what I know about the SOL system in Dragon Quarter.