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Let's Play Epic Battle Fantasy 3!
Update 1
Hey there, everyone, and welcome to my contribution to Mega64's Let's Play Flash Games! thread!
The EBF series started off a bit differently, a pair of games that were pretty much just a string of battles, where you played as a couple of characters who start off at 'max level', the idea being that it's like a JRPG endgame with no grinding to get there.
The third series changed the format up a bit - there's levelling up, now, skills to learn, and... well, grinding, if you want to. Also a story (sort of), NPC interaction... they changed up the formula, and I think it worked really well.
Unfortunately, this IS a flash game, so it's full of 4chan-esque humour, sexism and boob jokes. It's still a lot of fun, though, and I'd like to show it off!
Also, I apologise in advance for the slightly odd resolution of the images, the game just plays at a bit of a weird resolution, and complains at you if you try to fiddle with it.
So, without further ado, let's take a look at Epic Battle Fantasy 3!
Or, to be more precise, at its preloader.
There's a little sort-of game here, where you can click the slimes and they go splat. Then more form. There's no real challenge, it's just a way to kill time while the game loads.
That's... quite enough of that, I think. Too much Cookie Clicker has left me itchy to click on things to make numbers go up.
EBF 3 - Intro Video (youtube)
Matt, seen here trying to escape from the screen is pretty much the archetypical dumb hero. Fond of direct combat and swords, not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Natalie is a girl, in a flashgame. Naturally that means there needs to be comments on her breasts and such, or this wouldn't be the internet.
Let me just say, despite that, there is no nudity in this game that I'm aware of, and at worst, some of the stuff basically boils down to "Lol boobs" level humour.
Anyway. She's the party mage! She's not immune to the occasional bout of idiocy, but she's nominally the smartest of the group.
Lance was (earlier EBF game spoiler) the final boss of the previous game, but is now their friend. Has a lot of... ethically questionable attacks, such as poison gas bombs and whatnot, and is pretty great on the whole.
Also has the incredibly useful Scan ability.
Anyway, here's the game's main menu! There's a fair bit of stuff here, and most of it's pretty obvious. Art is concept art and such, which I'll show off if anyone is interested, I've never clicked on Music but I can take a wild guess at what's in there, and Medals are basically achievements, gotten for a variety of tasks throughout the game.
There's actually a reason to get them, and I'll be aiming to get all of them. I've done so in the past!
For splatting 100 slimes in the intro, we already have our first medal!
Taking a look at the credits earns us our second, too. Off to a pretty good start!
Ah, now. There are a variety of difficulties, and I'll be playing on Normal for now. The game has a new game plus system, where you can keep... some things, I forget specifically what, but some bonuses when you start a NG+. I know medals are one such thing, which is helpful.
Either way, Epic is really quite hard, especially at certain points, Easy is... Easy, Hard would be putting more pressure on me for little gain in terms of interesting changes, so we're sticking with Normal for now.
Case in point, our heroes are idiots.
For some reason, Natalie actually blinks in this inverted colour scene. It's quite difficult to capture in screenshots, though, as it turns out.
So, here are our heroes! They're a doofy-looking bunch on the overworld.
And here's our menu! I'll go over things in more detail later, but for now, you can probably hazard a guess at what most of it does - Forge is for improving items, Skills is for learning skills, etc.
Not sure about you guys, but I'd be wary of kiwi fruits I found in a chest that had been exposed to the sun and air for goodness knows how long.
Hell, any fruit that had.
"It looked dead. Smelled dead too. Never expected anything like this to happen. It's probably still out there, doing who knows what."
"Well, I guess we've landed pretty far away, this landscape is unfamiliar. Looks like a farm on some village? Guess we better have a look around."
This game has multiple mugshots for characters. I love how utterly doofy Matt looks in this one. 
"That's not an immediate concern, but I guess we'll need to recover our skills and weapons at some point if we're to fight that guy again."
"Er, we're not sure... where are we?"
Ow, right in the 4th wall.
"Thanks...?"
Clearly, this man is a disguised chocobo, going by his name.
Anyway, that was exciting, let's see who else we can find in town to talk to!
Never mind.
Instead, let's show off some combat! We can explore the rest of town later.
"Doesn't look very interesting though. Maybe we'll at least find some decent creatures to eat."
The dumb hero character is obsessed with food? Clearly, we're breaking new ground.
Not that I mind, honestly. There have been much worse protagonists than a violent idiot in a pirate hat.
"We're not here to hunt innocent animals... Though I guess it's alright to euthanise some if they get in the way."
"We should get through this place in five minutes, I don't want you two messing around! Let's hurry and visit the tougher levels so we can hunt real monsters and not feeble forest vermin."
"I concur, let's slaughter everything that moves and get outta here."
This bush looks friendly!
Unfortunately, I'm a terrible judge of character. Welcome to the battle screen!
Your characters will attack in the order they're in - I don't think you can permanently change it around, so it defaults to Matt->Natalie->Lance, then the enemies get a turn. Repeat until one team is dead.
Hoo boy, lots of options. Attack is exactly what you think it is, you attack one guy. Order lets you select another character to take their turn immediately, but doesn't permanently swap characters around.
This game has quite a lot of skills, and everyone has their own skillsets. Matt has Bushido, which are generally sword techniques of some kind, and Special, which ranges from buffing his attack, to attacking enemies with amplifiers (if I remember correctly, anyway. It's been a while.)
I really like a lot of the attack animations and such that this game has, so I'll probably be trying to make .gifs out of a lot of them, and video the more major fights.
Or I could just video every fight, if people would prefer that!
Natalie is a girl with a staff, so she is, of course, the mage. Black magic contains some fairly decent spells, and White Magic contains a lot of life-saving spells. Lucky Star is... not really inspiring.
Case in point.
Lance can shoot people with various different bullets, or use his military connections to do a variety of fun things.
Scan here is one of the most handy abilities in the game, and one I tend to use a LOT.
It gives us all kinds of helpful data on an enemy! A bit of flavour text, strengths, weaknesses, health - and, to make things even better, once you've scanned a monster once, it gets added to the bestiary, and you can easily check all this in combat.
Needless to say, this is super handy!
Natalie got hit, and debuffed! The little grey shield icon means that her defense is being debuffed, and currently by 15%. Most buffs and debuffs in this game decay at a rate of 5% per turn, so this was probably 20% initially, but faded a bit.
Here's how a Scanned enemy's stats look, once you look them up - when targetting an enemy you've scanned, there'll be a small ? next to them, if you mouseover that, it displays this.
Anyway, debuff or no debuff, we were facing down a shrubbery. Even weakened, our heroes are still capable of dealing with that!
And with that, we gain various things! Exp is for levelling up and improving stats, AP is for learning skills, gold is for buying stuff, and items are for... all kinds of shit, honestly. Mostly forging things and sidequests.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this so far - this game's actually pretty long, and there's a fair bit to it, so I wanted to make the first post give a bit of a gist of what it's about, to see if anyone finds it interesting.