Web Original / Beath of Flams

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A lisping hero... a mysterious name... a classic parody.

Beath of Flams is a JRPG released on...well, nothing. In actuality, the game doesn't exist...but the strategy guide does!

Beath of Flams is a parody of the JRPG genre, more specifically those from the mid-90s, written in the form of a strategy guide. It was written in 1998 by Fritz Fraundorf, who was also a fanfic and FAQ writer for plenty of other games. Throughout the "game", our hero Dullard takes on the Nameless Empire in a bunch of random events that attempt to use, subvert, or otherwise play with The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés.

The guide can be found at https://serpent231.tripod.com/beath.txt or at https://dailyscribbling.com/non-fiction/beath-of-flams-faq/

Tropes found in Beath Of Flams include...

• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Three characters can be in the party at a time, even though most of the cutscenes suggest the party is travelling together.
• Affectionate Parody: Of JRPGs as a whole, or at least those released from the SNES and early PS1 era.
• All Just a Dream: The first time you finish the game, this is the ending.
• And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: A reward for defeating the Superboss is a T-shirt with this message. It's the best armor in the game, but if you could win that fight in the first place, you're beyond the help it would give you.
• Animal Disguise: One of these - more specifically, the "two people in one costume" variant - is used in order to catch Cid's lost horse, a tiny bronco.
• Big Damn Heroes: Double subverted. Zitti attempts this during the rescue mission to get Tim the Talking Warhead. She swoops in on a hang glider and presses what she thinks is an "abort" button, but is actually the "emergency launch" button. But once launched, Tim turns around mid-flight, declaring he's not interested in blowing up Formaldehyde and joins you.
• Brick Joke: Yassir Ferret attacks Dullard early on in the game, but calls off the attack quickly on realizing you're not Tim. You actually meet Tim several chapters later...and Yassir Ferret returns right afterwards intending to finish what he started.
  • When held captive on on the Nameless Empire ships, Johnny starts telling lame jokes to pass time. Near the end of the game, there's an optional fight if Johnny is in the party with a bunch of incensed Square (now known as Square Enix) fans, because one of those jokes made fun of Square.
• CamelCase: Everything in SoggyFrontier is written this way, among a few other places.
• Car Fu: Zitti's gear, the Hornet, is actually a car that stands on its back wheels and punches with the front.
• Cassandra Truth: The chancellor of Formaldehyde seems to be the only one who recognizes the king was replaced with an imposter, but no one believes him, thinking he's really just using it as a chance to claim a higher position for himself.
• Cast of Expies: Nearly every character is one of these, and most of the ones that aren't are just stolen from other games or media. A few clear examples:
  • Dullard is your standard legendary hero-type with a transformation ability, mostly modeled after Ryu of Breath of Fire fame.
  • Lucille Westborough, being a Black Magician Girl and Last Of Her Kind, is modeled after Aeris.
  • Johnny Jump-Up is pretty much Barret, being the leader of the Generic Resistance Group and is a gun-user. He even borrows Barret's "what about Marlene?" catch phrase in a scene, as if to imply the same "actor" is involved. He's also described as wearing a black cloak, similar to Clive.
  • Cid Breakwind, of course, is your foul-mouthed mechanic slated to be an astronaut and spear user, just like Final Fantasy 7's version of Cid.
  • Chartreuse XXVI is a well-spoken blue lion-like thing with a human grandfather. In other words, he's Red XIII with a different paint job.
  • Zitti, being a rebellious princess, archery expert, and user of support magic, is based on Marle. She's also mentioned to be a spoony bard.
  • Pokérman has an appearance similar to Pikachu with a pinstripe suit and cigar, but his interactions and abilities read closer to Cait Sith.
  • Kain is a hybrid case, borrowing Shadow's ninjutsu, canine companion, and switching sides based on who's paying him with references to Cloud's plot as an imperfect clone and Rei's thief skills and uncontrollable transformation.
  • On the villainous side, we've got Graph, who similar to Grahf, has an ancient past whose identity overlaps with another character entirely. His boss battle is more reminiscent of Sephiroth.
  • While Bozo the Clown is, of course, a character borrowed straight from another show, his characterization here more resembles Kefka, being a mad clown who is later revealed to be part of an imperial experiment intended to give him inhuman powers.
  • And on the non-playable ally side of things, look out for Emmomucca, the Gadgeteer Genius whose name is a portmanteau of three other Gadgeteer Geniuses; Emma, Momo, and Lucca.
  • There's also Volts the dwarf, a clear parody of Watts, the recurring character of the Mana Series.
• Chain of Deals: The town of NoName has a subplot involving trading a bunch of Beanie Babies until you get one that can be brought to life.
• Chekhov's Gun: Ye Olde Legenderry Sworde is broken at the beginning of the game, but repaired to dispel a barrier into Sherbet (though requires a second repair to be usable as a weapon).
• The Chosen One: Dullard. Somehow.
• Clone Angst: Bozo constantly antagonizes Kain by claiming Kain is a clone of Bozo. Only after exploring Villanova Labs does the truth about that come out - it's actually the other way around, part of an attempt to inject the genes of the Warren into one of the Empire's greatest generals.
• Cosmic Keystones: The Kidney Stones. Each of them are based on a sign of the zodiac (making them a reference to the Zodiac Stones of Final Fantasy Tactics), and the second half of the game revolves around trying to collect them, or at least make sure the Empire doesn't have them. They can be used for transformative purposes, but also used to raise the forbidden city of Sherbet.
• Crop Circles: One of these appears in Azul, a farming town. Your party is abducted by telemarketer aliens when a cutscene in one lingers just long enough for telemarketer aliens to abduct you (and a nearby sheep).
• Cutting the Knot: A puzzle in the Escher Temple appears to be about placing four stones in a specific order given a riddle. The actual solution is to just throw the stones at the door until it breaks.
• Demihuman: Dullard, being one of the last surviving members of the woodchuck clan, can transform into different types of woodchucks. It's meant as a parallel to Breath of Fire III and its protagonist transforming into dragons, and uses pretty much the same system of using different genes for different types of woodchucks. Kain turns out to be this too, but he doesn't get the choice of different genes - he always turns into a Chucktaur.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Johnny admits to having started the Generic Resistance Group because years before the events of the game, when the Empire used to be a textile company, Johnny bought a sweater from them he later wanted to return, but wasn't allowed to do so.
  • Subverted with the fall of the Warren. They had an alliance with the Flams, who built the equipment needed for their war against the Evil Omen Goat Monkeys, but charged a ton of money for it in the process, and when they never paid the bill, the Flams just hunted them to near-extinction. The party thinks this is the case, since they couldn't understand why an allied power would charge so much in the first place. In actuality, that was pretty much the point - extortion as an excuse to commit genocide, and it turned out to be a plot by Graph, a.k.a Russell the Demon King.
• Doomed Hometown: Subverted. While the Nameless Imperial Capital is eventually abandoned and moved elsewhere, it's not due to any particular calamity - just bad feng shui.
• Dreadful Musician: The aptly-named Town Of Bad Music is so full of them that simply being there will kill you if you can't get Earplugs first. The band of thieves blocking the way to Soggy Frontier are from here.
• The Empire: Serves as the primary antagonist and instigator of events through most of the game.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: The Pinto itself is one of the choices in a bumper car minigame. It blows up after taking one hit. Obviously, not a good choice.
• The Exile: Right at the start, Dullard is banished from the Nameless Imperial Capital after being blamed for releasing Russell the Demon King. Much later, the famed inventor Emmomucca introduces herself as in exile from the Empire.
• Expy Coexistence: Despite most characters being based on others, the original versions pop up sometimes in cameo roles. Cloud, for example, pops up using the Get Cloud! enemy skill, and Pikachu pops up during one of Pokérman's slot skills.
• Fairy Battle: In the Pastel Woods, it's possible to encounter Nathaniel the Gelatinous Pink Blob, who does not attack and just begs the party not to hurt him. Complying earns a new weapon for Lucille.
• Fartillery: Cid's abilities.
• Fetch Quest: There's a ton of them. An infamous moment in Formaldehyde involves a guy asking for a thing, only to declare after you find it that what he really wanted was a second thing, then after finding that, asks for a third thing. That said, there are other moments where the party just outright refuses to participate in the quest unless there's a clear reason they need to.
• Fictional Zodiac: The Zodiac signs (or Kidney signs?) in the world of Filbert are Aeris, Ford Taurus, Gemini Probe, Herpes, Leo DiCaprio, Viagra, Liberal, Threepio, Rabbittarius, Candy Corn, Aquarium, and Puzzle Pisces.
• Funetik Aksent: Pokérman speaks with an Italian accent, one that presents itself in text as adding an "-a" at the end of certain words. Ooga Booga does this too, using an Irish accent, but he only has one line he says repeatedly.
• Fun with Acronyms: LEG, Lucille's gear, which stands for Laser Emitting Goat. Subverted with LANDSLIDE, the resistance group, which reads as an acronym but is never expanded on.
• Fun with Homophones: There's a band of thieves on the way to Soggy Frontier...who repels the team by way of playing awful music.
  • A room in the Eternal Plane of Jello contains a bunch of pots, some of which must be smashed and others must be smoked.
• Fusion Dance: The Fusion gene combines all three of your characters into one bigger character, each with their own separate moveset loosely based on its composite parts.
• Genre Savvy: The game has a very loose fourth wall, and characters seem aware of it primarily when it would be funny. A few examples:
  • Upon realizing you're the heroes of the game, the Rich Guy immediately surrenders and gives you an important item, figuring you'd otherwise just teach him a lesson about greed.
  • When learning more about the Warren's backstory, Dullard and an unnamed monk nearly get into a fight before realizing they're both Warren. Poppin Fresh predicts in advance that it's going to be a disagreement before they learn they have something in common, and gleefully calls them out on it when he turns out to be correct.
  • Sage Bubba is aware he's being killed off just so he can dramatically pass along a character's ultimate ability as his last words.
• Ghost Ship: One shows up as the last playable segment of Disc One.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: About a third of the bosses in the game. One in particular (Al Gore) even says he's only there because "you can't have a dungeon without a boss".
• Global Currency: It's called nudeln.
• Golden Ending: Parodied. A secret ending exists if, on a second playthrough, you also collected the Golden Parcheesi Set of Amon-Re. The ending itself, though, is a tomato spinning around in space and a snippet of the far future with Chartreuse XXVI and his kids. Even the FAQ writer doesn't get it.
• Great Escape: There's a few of these. The first involves Dullard, Lucille, and Johnny escaping from a UFO. A second involves Dullard and Johnny escaping from being held captive on an imperial aircraft carrier. And later on, there's a more involved one to rescue Lucille.
• Great Offscreen War: The forces of Jello and Spam are integrated heavily into Ye Olde Warr and the motivations of the Warren and Flams.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Wedge and Vicks join for the first dungeon before being killed off, and the Jolly Yet Annoying Sidekick assists at Smidlock.
• Guide Dang It!: The game seems deliberately full of them - after all, we're reading the guide and it doesn't seem to know perfect solutions! A few standout examples include a "pointless lever puzzle" in the spam plant outside Noodleheim that it recommends just "pull levers at random", and an escape sequence through an imperial ship that outright requires a GameShark.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Kain. His alliances are based on who's paying him, even going so far as to immediately attack Dullard after joining his group simply because once the job Kain was assisting Dullard with is finished, attacking Dullard was his next offer.
• Heel–Face Turn: Ginger Spice. Overlaps with Reality Subtext, as the game was written during her real life exit from the Spice Girls.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Dullard, the lead character, can use swords (and only swords).
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The first fight with Russell and the first fight with the Evil Omen Goat Monkey at Smidlock end this way. Subverted with the first fight against the Greeks - after the fight seems lost, Dullard's hidden transformation powers kick in, allowing the fight to be won.
• Humongous Mecha: Most characters has one - they're even called Gears! The ones that don't are Pokérman (who instead just grows to giant size) and Tim (who doesn't have an equivalent at all).
• Improbable Weapon User: Kain can use fly swatters, Zitti can use harps, Pokérman equips yo-yos as a weapon but has abilities based on tarot cards, and the Jolly Yet Annoying Sidekick uses wax lips.
• Intentional Engrish for Funny: The Aeris Kidney stone mistranslates a character's name, changing it to something silly (Poppin Fresh becomes Popov) or a Shout-Out to another game (Kain becomes Wiegraf). It does have some potential use though, as Dullard can only equip the Durald Armor using this.
  • There's a few magic spells doing this too, with Rava Brraire (Lava Barrier) and Rava Lawl (Lava Wall).
• Interface Screw: While fallen into the Lispstream, all instances of the letter S are replaced by TH. Yes, even item names, menu commands, and the FAQ text itself.
• I Own This Town: NoName is initially run by the Rich Guy, who's obscenely rich from Beanie Baby speculating. But once he realizes Dullard's group are the good guys, he also expects you'll just teach him a lesson about greed and surrenders just to save both of you the hassle.
• Joke Character: Pokérman is described in the FAQ as the game's "cute but useless" character.
• Jumped at the Call: Dullard is told early on that the timeless battle between forces of the Jello (the good guys) and the Spam (the bad guys) is starting again, and only Dullard, the legendary hero, can stop them. Dullard thinks this is cool because he always wanted to be a legendary hero.
• Knights and Knaves: A puzzle just before Boss Buffalo involves telling which of five water buffalo are truth-tellers or liars.
• Last of His Kind: Subverted on two different occasions. Lucille is believed to be the last of the Flams, sometimes known as the Ancient Ones and the ones who have historically been responsible for repelling the forces of Spam, but Graph claims to be half Flam too. Dullard initially seems this way about the Warren, but it's eventually revealed Kain and a few one-off characters like Pavarotti and Storeman Norman are these too, just with more restricted abilities around them.
• Lethal Lava Land: A volcano near Formaldehyde.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: A few segments require you to run two separate parties:
  • When rescuing Lucille, Dullard, Kain, and later Chartreuse XXVI performs the actual rescue, while Johnny and Cid create a diversion.
  • At ChateauGeneric, Dullard, Lucille, and Johnny split from Zitti and Chartreuse XXVI to lead a multi-pronged attack on the chateau.
  • Fort Nicotina has involves going through two different towers with two different parties to unlock a gate for a third party.
  • When New Formaldehyde is under attack by the Armors, there's another split party. Dullard, Zitti, and Poppin Fresh are forced into one party, while the player can freely choose the other two parties.
  • And finally, Sherbet is taken on using three freely selected parties.
• Lost Woods: Lost Woods #203, explored in between meeting Cid and him joining the party. Similar to how it appeared in the original The Legend of Zelda I, progress here is based on progressing in a specific sequence of directions, ranging from the obvious ("Go three screens up and two left, you fool!") to the absurd ("When the arch rises in the water and the little people attack, and you start wondering 'am I normal?', remember who your real friends are.").
• MacGuffin Guardian: A heroic version. Pokérman is the guardian of the Yellow Chair, and his failure to protect it from the influence of the Empire is what causes Sherbet to rise from This Is NOT An Ominous Ring of Land.
• Mad Mathematician: Graph is introduced as an evil mathematician.
• Magic Mirror: The Mirror of Truth(TM), found in the volcano, is used to expose that the King of Formaldehyde has been replaced.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Tim the Talking Warhead only has one ability, blowing himself up. He does massive damage to an enemy, but it kills himself too, requiring you to revive him afterwards.
• Minigame Zone: The Tin Saucer. That said, very few of the minigames here are actually good.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Tower of Invertebrate Amphibians, which has nothing to do with invertebrates or amphibians (but is as weird as its name would suggest).
• One-Word Vocabulary: Ooga Booga, who only exists to pop up at random intervals to say "Stop ackin' like a bluh'y Irushmen!". Towards the beginning of Disc Two, there's also Neon Man, who just keeps saying "Smelly stuff" even after you've given him smelly stuff.
• Only in It for the Money: Kain admits he doesn't take side and just works for whoever's paying for him at the time.
• Paradiegetic Gameplay: In order to reset the rocket path to get to Space Station Mir, you have to hit the reset button on the console. This might be a reference to a similar puzzle in X-Men (1993).
• Parody Episode: Multiple scenes are intended to resemble and subvert specific scenes from other games. A few standout examples include...
  • Cid's introduction strongly resembles that of Cid from Final Fantasy VII, including being known as "the captain", a past history involving a failed space launch, and an association with a tiny bronco (in this case, an actual bronco rather than a plane).
  • About halfway through the game, just after learning she's an Ancient One just like her source material Aeris, she appears to be run through with a sword by a major villain...only to reveal that it was an inflatable decoy.
  • The dungeon segment right before this involves collecting pieces of Carl, working nearly identically to a side quest in Final Fantasy VI involving collecting pieces of Coral to proceed.
  • The trek through the Desert of Life resembles a scene in Breath of Fire III in which the party uses stars to hike across a desert.
  • A post-credits scene involves Chartreuse XXVI and his kids finding the ruins of the Nameless Imperial Capital, with his cubs asking how he's still alive given what he claimed as his human-to-monster age ratio would leave him well past his natural lifespan. You know, just like the post-credits scene of Final Fantasy 7 and the question most people already had about Red XIII.
• Power Copying: Johnny's Enemy Skillz work this way - as long as Johnny's a target of the effect and doesn't die from it, he learns it permanently.
• Quick Draw: Inverted. Johnny and Bozo engage in a slow draw contest, aiming to be the last to fire. It's only made tense because it's happening while a self-destruct countdown is active and an escape vehicle is freely available.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: The Empire's council, consisting of Archmage Soho, General Leer, Bozo the Clown, Graph (later in the game), and Elmer Fudd, the leader of a Quirky Miniboss Squad within the Quirky Miniboss Squad: The Greeks, also known as the Spice Girls.
• Rare Random Drop: Subverted. Poppin Fresh's best weapon, the Kickaxe, is claimed by a random townsfolk to be one (a 1 in 32767 chance of being dropped by Mauve Puffs), but none of the hints he gives actually work, nor is there even an enemy named Mauve Puff. He's actually got it himself and drops it after a single hit.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Attacking Carl with the Carl Sword causes him to take, instead of a numerical value, "A Lot" of damage, instantly winning the fight.
• Rebellious Princess: Zitti is perceived as this. She claims not to be rebellious, admitting that she got lost in the city one day, but felt claiming to be rebellious was less embarrassing than admitting she was lost, but nonetheless seems to hit most of the usual checklist - young, female, a magic-based skill set (around buffs and debuffs), and up until this is revealed, seeming to do everything she can to avoid going back to Formaldehyde.
• Rule of Funny: Most of the plot seems to exist more to get to the next joke rather than to tell a story.
• Save Point: More specifically, a Save Dog that saves your game when talking to it.
• Schmuck Bait: Multiple at the Tin Saucer, which range from obviously tilted against you but harmless (the 2x2 tic-tac-toe game) to fatal (the broken gondola ride).
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Russell, the Demon King.
• Secret A.I. Moves: The first fight with Kain sees him using abilities he never had access to when he was in your party a minute ago. Granted, they are abilities Kain can use, just at a much more advanced level than where anyone would realistically be at that point in the game.
• Secret Character: Kain can be permanently recruited into your party at the end of the game as long as you only attacked him when he was in his Gear in the last fight against him.
• Sequel Hook: Two of them - one listed in the update history of the FAQ (Tactics Beath), and another at the end of the FAQ proper (Beath 64: The Bagpipes of Time).
• Ship Level: The Imperial Shipyard, followed shortly after by a segment escaping from one of the ships.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Dullard constantly changes in and out of clothes that either do or don't make him look like a bum. It inadvertantly helps in a few cases, most notably on the way to Soggy Frontier (where the band of thieves assume he has no money and therefore won't buy their CD) and the Tin Saucer (where the tournament is run by The Guy Who Always Cuts Off Your Limbs, who up to that point only saw him in one wardrobe and didn't recognize him in the other).
• Skippable Boss: The final encounter with Bozo can be avoided if Kain joined your party, after the reveal about who's a clone of who.
• Significant Name Overlap: Used for humor. One of the common summons through the Final Fantasy series is Alexander. There's a summon here with that name too, except here, it's the kid having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
• Smoking Is Not Cool: In a game full of parody and silliness, this one has a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome. When Pokérman ends up wounded after Sherbet rises, his insurance company refuses to cover him because he smokes, and the next mission for the group involves him finding ways to kick the habit.
• Somebody Named "Nobody": The Nameless Emperor, who rules over the Nameless Empire from the Nameless Imperial Capital. Also, presumably unrelated to that, there's a town called NoName.
• Something Else Also Rises: When Ye Olde Legenderrye Sworde is repaired, it's bent and can't be used as a weapon...until going on a side quest to Viagra Falls.
• Speech Impediment: Dullard talks with a lisp. It becomes plot-relevant later, as one section of the later in the game involves getting him to stop doing that, just so a spoken password is recognized.
• Spiky Hair: Surprisingly averted by the main cast (as far as we know), but a trading sequence in NoName involves giving a bald guy a Sonic the Hedgehog doll in order to put on his head just so he can look like an RPG hero.
• The Starscream: Zigzagged. Bozo kills off the Nameless Emperor, adding that you should never trust an emperor's right hand man. But then Bozo makes the mistake of himself appointing a right hand man...who of course kills him during a pivotal moment.
• Superboss: Tin Armor, accessible only on Disc 3 and requiring an absurd amount of time to defeat due to its high HP and limited vulnerability.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: This Is NOT An Ominous Ring Of Land, the island in the center of the map from which Sherbet rises from.
• Terminal Transformation: This is how the Nameless Emperor is killed off. He uses what he thinks is the Viagra Kidney Stone expecting to transform into something useful, but instead was using Aquarium, in turn transforming into a fish out of water.
• There Was a Door: Once the party helps Mr. Squirrel buy a chocolate car, he drives it through the wall to leave the shop.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Wedge and Vicks die in the first dungeon, then inexplicably show up elsewhere in the game, usually only lasting a few minutes before dying again.
• Tom the Dark Lord: Russell, the Demon King.
• Toilet Humor: Diarrhea is one of the game's standard status ailments, working as a Time-Delayed Death unless cured first.
  • Cid Breakwind runs on this. His abilities involve farting.
• Token Non-Human: Chartreuse XXVI (a blue lion), Tim (a talking warhead), Poppin Fresh (a doughboy), and Pokérman (species never identified but passes as related to Pikachu). Partial example with Dullard and Kain (who are Warren, humans able to transform into woodchucks) and Lucille (a Flam, who present as human but have hidden magical abilities).
  • One boss, Shapeshifter, actually exploits this. While in his Pat Buchanan form, the Minority Death Ray attack results in an instant death to any non-human character. Yes, even the partial examples above.
• Tournament Arc: Dullard is accused of causing a disturbance at the Tin Saucer, but can get his sentence nullified by winning a tournament.
• Troperiffic: Many of the situations here seem contrived just to cover as many RPG clichés (or at least the ones best known by the late 1990s) as they can.
• Two Aliases, One Character: At the last second, Russell and Graph are revealed to be the same person.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: The stairs along the exterior of the Escher Temple, presented as a neverending staircase. To progress, you instead have to walk sideways, off the staircase entirely.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Shere Khan, the tower within Sherbet, the floating city. Though you can leave at a certain point to complete side quests.
• We Can Rule Together: Graph offers this right before the final battle with him. If you accept, he says your answer is incorrect and asks again.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The FAQ within the FAQ brings special attention to the fact that Peco Bill disappears with no explanation after Disc One. The question about what happened to him is never answered.
• Word-Salad Humor: One of Dullard's most powerful attacks is called Wheat First Butcher Singer, and a handful of enemy-only abilities have similarly nonsensical names.
• World Tree: Iggy Drasil, who for some reason thinks he's actually a dragon and not a tree. Iggy explains a good deal of the backstory between the Warren and Flams, who worked on opposite sides of Ye Olde Warr.