Breath Of Fire III

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.

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.

Fishing is either a day job or something to skip. 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 at the end of the game.

Many enemies have gimmicks like growing stronger or level you up when hit with certain attacks. A guide will help.

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.

At the start of the game when you're a dragon, check the first few bodies and you'll find a melted blade on one of them (hold onto it until you get to the master that requires you to have 15 unique weapons in your inventory)

Give the fishing minigame a real chance; some love it, some hate it. It's one of the very few ways to get a reliable source of items to restore AP (MP) and it can lead to you getting certain equipment quite a bit earlier than you would normally.

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.

Don't feel bad looking up a guide on masters, some of their requirements are a little obscure or seem pointless. For the first half of the game there aren't any that are really hard to miss except two (if you get a fairy jewel or whatever it's called from hitting a tree with crows in it DO NOT SELL IT OR ELSE YOU WILL MISS OUT ON AN AWESOME MASTER).

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

Speaking of gear, you can change your loadout mid battle, no problem under the item command without wasting a turn.

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

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.

I don't think there's many, if any, vendors that sell Coin lures for zenny, so be sure to save before you use it to try to catch a manilo just in case something goes horribly wrong.

There is a fairie village later in the game which contains a Master that provides the best agility stat increases per level ups in the game. 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. By combing these two masters, you'll regularly gain extra turns in combat, even for slow characters like Garr, if you use a fast character under the Fairy Master!

After you gain the other lady party member, stop using Ryu as your healer. By the time that happens, you should have dragon form unlocked, which uses a significant amount of mana each turn.

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 party members when they transform, which includes one of Ryu's dragon forms.

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.

You can kill two birds with one stone by taking care of Fahl's requirement of winning 30 battles without resting by taking peco along. Go to Cedar woods and, by that time, you should be incredibly over leveled for the area. Peco gains some levels and he will turn into a tank under Fahl.

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.