| abstract
| - Game Breakers in role-playing games.
* Lord of the Rings The Third Age is filled with gamebreakers in the combat system which make most attacks/abilities pointless to use.
* The elven warrior Idrial's entire loadout of magic has spells that can be combined to automatically win the fight. The best example of this is her power "Aura of the Valar" which is unlocked very early in the game(Although requiring hefty grinding to learn). It can be cast on any character (including herself) and its effects last until it's activated or the encounter ends. The effect of the aura will automatically revive the character instantly upon death (along with full HP and AP) and give the turn to that character. If cast on the elf herself you have automatically won the encounter since she can just cast it again when revived by its effect. This means that she cannot die, no matter what. This could have easily been balanced by giving enemy magicians the ability to remove the effect but sadly they don't have it-not that many 'magicians' even exist. When her Frenzy ability is unlocked she can also cast another spell after adding the effect to herself, which means that she gets a free attack aswell when revived. Balanced by the massive turn penalty Frenzy forces which could kill her...except if she drops, she just puts it up again.
* The ranger Elegost has two different attacks that will break the combat of the encounter instantly. The first attack has an effect which prevents the target from attacking in close combat for 4 rounds, if used on all enemies systematically you'll then get to attack all the time. The second attack has the same effect but with ranged attacks instead. Balanced later by characters immune to the effect...and cancelling the majority of his entire moveset besides.
* The dwarf Hadhod can use a spell that blocks a certain amount of incoming damage, based on your Spirit(Read Intelligence) score. You later (by later I mean "Very early in the game as well") unlock a stronger version of the spell which casts it upon the entire party. Whilst Hadhod isn't the best magician by default, there are items that can grant a hefty boost to Spirit and the shield is one of the moves affected. Combine this with the abilities previously mentioned and you'll have no threat that might stop you from winning the game. To be honest, unlocking "Aura of the Valar" alone guarantees that you'll beat the game. It's only a matter of time by that point.
* And how do you fuel all these abilities, which are generally very expensive and need to be used to earn more abilities in the first place? Simple. Quite apart from it borrowing FFX's save points=healing, Berethor, the main character, early on learns a party buff called 'Fellowship Grace' that restores MP to all the party, including himself. On it's own, it doesn't add much. Then you cast one of the first buffs he gets, 'Company Might'. All of a sudden, the restoration of Fellowship Grace is healing hundreds of MP-more than enough to pay off the costs and basically grant infinite MP for any encounter while both are up. If they expire, just refresh them.
* In Xenosaga, there is an unlockable ether spell called Erde Kaiser. It is so sickeningly powerful, it trivializes the rest of the game. Sadly, it's probably still not as powerful as Cutscene Power to the Max KOS-MOS.
* There's also a ring which reduces casting of all spells to 1 EP (even the normally expensive Erde Kaiser). Combining it with even more powerful Erde Kaisers trivialized all boss battles including the end boss. The final boss of Xenosaga III really was a joke if you used the most powerful Erde Kaiser Σ. Casting it for only 1 SP is just rubbing salt into the wounds.
* There's another ring that doubles the power of your Ethers (including Erde Kaiser series) but at double the EP cost. However, when all your Ethers only cost 1 EP, it doesn't even matter. They remain 1 EP at double the power. Imagine that.. a double powered Erde Kaiser for 1 EP! You will make the last boss your bitch.
* There is also an accessory called the Bravesoul, accessible through an easy optional minigame. This raises physical attack as HP gets lower. Combine this with Jr's Angelic Requiem tech which hits all enemies for physical damage you can have a nuke that can take out almost all random battles in one turn.
* Combine bravesoul with Shion's last resort ether and she can to nearly 20000 HP damage to an enemy.
* After a simple side-quest, but miss able, type deal on Miltia in the third game, the shop is updated with multiple stat upgrades (when you land on Michtam). With these upgrades, you could make any character as strong as desired. The catch, however, is that the upgrades are expensive.
* A complete round through Abel's Ark yields enough money to buy about 7 or 8, if memory serves. Do this a few times, and you're set (that and the place offers good leveling potential).
* In Xenoblade Chronicles, the Critical Combo skill can easily be a game breaker, as when coupled with Double Attack gems and Haste gems and/or auras, the sheer number of critical hits you'll be landing will fill up the party gauge extremely quickly, allowing you to spam chain attacks to deal huge amounts of damage, heal the party, and/or keep the enemy locked down until it's dead. It also pratically ensures that you'll have enough gauge to revive any party members who get KO'd.
* The topple and daze status effects can become game breakers later on, as the cooldowns on the arts that cause them can potentially become low enough after enough upgrades that an enemy can be kept on the ground and unable to act indefinitely if you're using a party consisting solely of characters who can inflict either or both of those ailments. Combined with the aforementioned tactic and gems that increase the duration of topple and daze effects, pretty much any enemy that isn't outright immune to the topple status becomes trivial to deal with.
* Heavy abuse of Item Crafting in Star Ocean the Second Story, with enough negatives every so often that it seems the programmers anticipated this.
* The same holds true for Star Ocean: Till the End of Time as well, where synthing a few Orichalcums onto Fayt's weapon, minimizing his Fury usage and spamming Side Kick --> Side Kick on your close range attacks will destroy most of the bosses in the game (Later in the game, replace this with your choice of Air Raid or Dimension Door)--and let's not even mention the Boots of Prowess, with which you can soup Fayt up until he takes 0 damage on every hit from the final boss. Granted, Boots of Prowess are incredibly expensive to refine, but with enough reloading and abuse of a couple of fol-making strategies, it's completely doable well before post-game. "Serious fans" will scoff at you for using either Orichalcum or Boots of Prowess in Galaxy difficulty (before post-game), as the items were most likely intended for playing on Universe and especially 4D, where such "cheats" become necessary not to die on every boss.
* The easiest way to level up early on in Star Ocean the Second Story happens right after Claude and Rena reunite early on in the game, before you go into Cross. You can go to the left towards the mountains, and head towards the Mt. Lasguss mountain trail. Granted, at this point most enemies here will defeat you in a single attack....except for one. There is an enemy called a Sound which looks like a purple balloon with a face. It sucks away your magic points, but has NO attacks whatsoever. If you were lucky and patient enough, you would find one of two fight with nothing but Sounds, which you literally couldn't lose due the fact that they can't hurt you. There was a fight with three Sounds, and another fight with seven Sounds which would take a long time to win at that point, but the experience and possible items gained made it worth it, especially since you only had two party members at the time. Just keep searching for the Sound fights early on near the entrance to the mountains, win the battle, leave, heal at an inn or with items, save, head to the mountains again, repeat the process and watch how quickly Claude and Rena level up. This level boost can help through the majority of the first disk, if not the rest of the game itself.
* There was an item that could be obtained by using the pickpocket ability on one of the people in Mars Village called the Treasure Chest. What it does, is when its used it gives three random items to your inventory. Normally, this might not seem like much, until you realize that if your lucky enough, you can get extremely high powered weapons and items normally only obtainable on the second disk. One of these weapons is Claude's Marvel Sword which makes the rest of disk one a joke, especially if used with the Lasguss Mountain trick mentioned above. You steal the Treasure Chest, leave the village and save, then use the Treasure Chest, and hope you get the Marvel Sword. If you don't, reload your file and try again until you do. It's that easy.
* The Eternal Sphere, arguably the best weapon in the game and by far the most broken. You get it early, really early if you abuse itemcrafting (probably not even 1/4 into the game). From the moment you get it, just about everything you fight afterwords becomes ridiculously easy.
* An accurate time table for getting the Eternal Sphere would be something like this: at about five and a half hours into the game, you'll complete the Lacour Tournament of Arms and receive the Sharp Edge from Grandpa Gamgee, then you need to buy all the skills from the local shop. Then it'll take about two more hours of solo grinding with Claude in the Sanctuary of Linga to accumulate enough SP to raise his Customize skill to 9. You'll also need to invest some points into the Radar skill to get some Mithril much earlier than you're suppose to. Then, with some luck, you'll eventually forge the Sharp Edge into the Minus Sword and then the Minus Sword into the Eternal Sphere. So, about seven and a half to eight hours into the game and you can have, arguably, Claude's best weapon. Alternatively, it can be done in about the same total playtime but with less grinding by waiting until shortly after reaching the second disc.
* Ironically The Second Story could have been said to suffer from reverse gamebreaking in certain areas. Once you unlocked the secret dungeon that would make leveling up to 255 and getting all the best equipment a piece of cake, the final boss was also improved. Improvement meaning double health, faster, and a spam attack, that was guaranteed to happen once, that killed 3 out of 4 of your team members. Also frequently seen is on the higher levels of the secret dungeon, bosses from one level would become random encounters the next and other enemies would use petrification attacks that hit multiple times. Not to mention you couldn't save in the secret dungeon, but could leave voluntarily, and many levels had hp and mp drain from standing under colored lights.
* Actually, the means of unlocking the secret dungeon and the means of engaging the final boss' Super Mode were completely different and separate, meaning it was just as possible to face the Big Bad in his normal form with such power that "Curb Stomp Battle" doesn't even describe it...as it was to face him in his ultimate form without any chance in hell of even hitting him, let alone winning.
* The first Star Ocean also had some fairly broken item crafting, as well as an unassuming "draw" skill which let you duplicate certain items. Most nice things can't be duplicated with "draw", but violins can, which sell for a * very* high price.
* In the original version of the first Star Ocean, Roddick/Ratix's Secret Skill/Ougi version of his Double Slash/Souhazan is hideously overpowered: you could get the item needed to learn it relatively early in the game, and the main benefit over the normal version is that it shoots out 2 large energy crescents after the second slash. Combine this with the fact that you can link up to 4 attacks together into a combo, and you can effortlessly stunlock most enemies until they keel over, including the initial appearance of the recurring tri-Ace Bonus Boss, Gabriel Celeste.
* In SaGa Frontier the combination of the skills Overdrive and Stasis Rune can break the game. Overdrive is an ability that allows the caster to take 5-7 actions instantaneously at the cost of them being made pretty much useless afterwards due to stat draining. However, if for the last action in Overdrive you use Stasis Rune which locks you and an opponent in stasis this stat draining can be avoided. Not only that, but after the stasis wears off your character will have 5-7 actions per turn for the rest of the fight with no penalty. Even though only two characters can get the spells to pull this off it still will completely break the game.
* Let us not forget the absurdly powerful DSC (Dream Super Combo), a barehanded-type attack that can be gained by equipping the Sliding, Suplex, BabelCrumble, and GiantSwing attacks all at once. It randomly delivers 3 to 5 attacks, dealing more damage the more hits get thrown out. 3 attacks alone will do more damage than pretty much any other attack in the game. 5 attacks will do enough damage to utterly destroy anything that isn't a final boss or Bonus Boss. Not to mention it works on almost EVERYTHING (only monsters that are immune to throw-type attacks are immune to it, since everything but Sliding are throw-attacks, but there's really not many of those beasts). This one attack is the biggest reasons most guides recommend recruiting the character Liza if you can, since she can learn all 4 attacks very quickly (others tend to have trouble learning at least one move in the combo). The only downside is that it's fairly expensive at 18 WP (most endgame moves cost 9-10 WP), but most enemies will fall LONG before a DSC user runs out of WP.
* Legend of Mana is filled with gamebreakers, and most of these are intentionally placed in the game. With a proper understanding of Golem crafting or weapon crafting, you can have an incredibly powerful ally or damage- and armor-capped characters fairly early in the game. Or you can make a Golem that constantly spits out full healing items, making anything but a one-hit kill ignorable.
* After the Jumi Arc, you can recruit Blackpearl, Pearl's Super-Powered Evil Side as an NPC assistant. That particular character's synchronization ability instantly refills your entire Charge Meter.
* Kingdom Hearts II has an area (namely, the Peak of the Pride Lands) in which many weak Heartless appear and respawn rapidly; with some experience boosters, Lv99 is a few hours away at most. The Final Mix removed this, however.
* Birth By Sleep has its own potentially game-breaking minigame. Basically, think Monopoly with four checkpoints you touch for points (don't have to touch them to win but they help a LOT). If you win a match, the abilities you used on the tiles that your enemies landed on will boost in the main-game and you may unlock more abilities. It is not quite game-breaking on its own but it can potentially make combat a bit too easy.
* There's also a few spells in Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep that could be considered Game Breakers, though none more so than the spell Mega Flare. It's an absolute nuke that hits the whole area for massive damage, and lasts for several seconds, meaning it's possible to damage multiple waves of spawning enemies with one spell. And, if you play the Command Board right, it can be obtained before you even get to the second world. Level up three Fires and two Aeros. Fuse the Fires into Firaga, then fuse the Aeros into Aerora. Now fuse Firaga and Aerora to make Fission Firaga. Make another Firaga (or buy one from a Moogle if you have enough money) and fuse it with Slow to get Crawling Fire. Now fuse Fission Firaga and Crawling Fire and proceed to own everything that stands in your way. Unfortunately, the spell was nerfed in the Final Mix version by doubling its recharge time.
* Terra's combo finisher Meteor is another good one. A wide area of effect attack that hits for massive damage and makes Terra invincible during casting. Ventus and Aqua have Time Splicer, which freezes all enemies in the area and allows the user to warp between enemies while attacking them. Dodge Roll for Ventus and Cartwheel for Aqua are excellent for dodging, since not only do they allow you to move quickly out of harm's way, they also grant invincibility frames, meaning attacks can be survived by spamming Dodge Roll or Cartwheel. Also for Ventus, Salvation, which is basically his version of MM Miracle Lv3 from Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories - a massively powerful Holy attack that hits everywhere.
* Perhaps the most simple of the gamebreakers in Birth By Sleep are the shotlock commands. Not only can do they do an utterly ridiculous amount of damage, they make you completely invincible for the duration of the move. With Focus Guard ability equipped, you can max out your focus gauge in no time at all against tough bosses, and bombard them with shotlocks almost constantly.
* Go on, set up a boss deck full of nothing but Sonic Blade + Multiple Hi-Potions in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. 90% of all boss battles can be won with this in under 2 minutes. Yes, all the way up to the 12th floor, at least. And there's only 13 floors. Needless, this is exploited like all hell for massive damage!
* Even better if the boss has an element. Trouble with Vexen (who is ice elemental)? Throw a bunch of Firagas around + Multiple Mega-Ethers. Each Firaga takes of 3/4 of one of his HP bars. It's super-effective!
* Actually, a Fire only deck is a game breaker for itself; a Fire only deck can make every boss but Axel (who is immune to it) a joke; even the final boss in all his forms perish before it.
* Omnislash (stack three Cloud cards in a sleight) for Sora and MM Miracle Lv3 (stack three The King cards in a sleight) for Riku. Omnislash is a powerful attack that hits everywhere and can only be blocked by a 0 card, which the AI can't seem to do as often as it would like. MM Miracle Lv3 is basically like a Holy version of the Phoenix summon from the Final Fantasy games - it does huge amounts of damage to everything in the area, heals Riku back to full HP and fully reloads his cards. And since The King is Riku's only summon card, it's not too hard to get plenty of them. As for Sora, people have beaten the game by building decks containing nothing but Cloud cards.
* Dark Mode is Riku's Game Breaker of choice. It powers him up considerably, while giving him access to three new moves: Dark Break (attacks from above), Dark Firaga (a powerful blast of energy that despite its name is actually dark-element, not fire-element) and Dark Aura, which is essentially the same attack he does when you fight him as a boss in the original Kingdom Hearts. All are achieved by stacking three Soul Eater cards in a sleight, the attack done corresponding to the total value of the three cards. The whole strategy for Riku basically involves getting him into Dark Mode as fast as possible.
* In the Play Station 2 remake, the safest and possibly quickest way to deal with many of the bosses is to simply abuse Riku's new Card Duel mechanic, which if successful, unleashes a very powerful attack that can't be canceled out by the opponent.
* Also in the remake, Sora gets the new Lethal Flame sleight, which has a very simple combination (Stop + two keyblade cards), is very powerful, and most importantly, freezes the target a moment after its activation (Even bypassing the immunity most bosses possess to the Stop status), which gives them only a very brief window of opportunity to cancel the sleight with a zero card; an opportunity that can be removed entirely if you break one of their cards with the sleight.
* The original Kingdom Hearts can arguably be broken just by starting the game with "Shield Priority". With the ability to survive critical hits (that would have otherwise killed you) with 1 hp, the added HP, and perhaps some Level Grinding, even "Those Bosses" that are required to finish the game are no worry, due to the ability to tank the damage and just heal back up without a cooldown on the healing spell at all. Even "Magic Points" are not a limiter thanks to a skill that causes sufficient MP regeneration from damage taken. It is possible to rarely die, all the way to the end of the game, using this setup.
* Starting with Shield Priority also allows Sora to learn the "Lucky Strike" ability much MUCH earlier than any other set-up, which means you can start collecting all the rare materials needed for forging better items (including the Ultima weapon) much earlier in the game.
* In Kingdom Hearts II, Berserk Charge is a very powerful skill on its own, but the drawback is that you never get a finishing blow on bosses. But when you combine this with a Square-button skill that acts as a finisher, such as Horizontal Slash...
* Reflega deals multi-hit Non-Elemental Area of Effect damage proportional to the strength of the hit it blocked. Use it on a Mook for a counter that does decent damage. Use it on most anything stronger for a One-Hit Kill.
* Another good one for Kingdom Hearts II is the way MP works. With the right combination of abilities, you can basically make Sora near-invincible. To explain: Curaga heals Sora to full HP, at the cost of all his MP (and that's all his current MP, not maximum). This seems pretty balanced at first, but can become broken with the addition of two abilities: MP Rage and MP Haste. MP Rage makes your MP increase (or recharge faster) when you take damage. MP Haste makes your MP recharge faster when it runs out. These two abilities stack. Equip enough of them and you can basically get hit once and your MP shoots back to 100% again. Equip the Ultima Weapon (which is arguably much easier to get in the second game than in the first), which has the built-in unique ability MP Hastega, and add Leaf Bracer, which means Sora can't be hit out of casting Curaga, and as long as you can hit the shortcut fast enough you can basically never die.
* The infamous "infinite combo" trick. Equip the ability Berserk Charge, which allows Sora to perform an infinite combo during MP recharge. Use Trinity Limit, a powerful attack that consumes all of Sora's MP, then follow it up with an infinite combo. Once your MP recharges, use Trinity Limit again and repeat the process until the enemy is dead. If you're fast enough, you can trap them in an infinite combo that they can't break out of. The only one this won't work on is Sephiroth, since he can teleport.
* The Balloon spell in Kingdom Hearts 3D. Available in the very first world, it's a low cooldown, good damage command that surrounds you with a cluster of stationary explosive balloons that detonate on contact with enemies, and can also be smacked with your keyblade to turn them into homing projectiles. Multiple sets of balloons can be deployed simultaneously, and enemies and bosses are too stupid to avoid them, so it simply becomes a matter of waiting for them to go charging into their demise once you set them up.
* The Sega CD version of Lunar: The Silver Star had The Hero, Alex. Every single MacGuffin and special ability go to him, and by the end of the game, all of his attributes (HP, defense, attack, magical power, and speed, and he can cast one of the healing spells) overpower everyone else in the party. Given the nature that individual abilities are spread out throughout the party (Mia wielding Black Magic, Nash with only Thunder Magic, Kyle as a hard hitter, Jessica as the White Mage, and, in the remakes, Luna casting weak Standard Status Effects) while Alex has all of that rolled into one, in addition to superior skills such as a Holy Hand Grenade spell among others, this is pretty poorly spread. In the remakes, this is toned down somewhat.
* In the sequel, Lunar: Eternal Blue, this is thankfully averted. Hiro still has some edge, but everyone else's status and skills are much more spread out and on par with one another.
* Shadow Hearts: Covenant has Yuri's Dark Seraphim. Acquiring this form requires all the previous Fusions (an easy get if you just remember to check the earlier areas of the game, complete Tiffauges Castle, and complete the Dog Shrine) and the defeat of a Bonus Boss. Said boss was ludicrously hard in the first Shadow Hearts, but here he's a pushover. Once you have Dark Seraphim and max out its level (simple by this point), everything else in the game--even the ultimate Bonus Boss, Solomon--boils down to "Fuse Dark Seraphim, cast 'For Everyone...' (an across-the-board stat buff for the full party), attack, win".
* While Dark Seraphim was indeed appallingly powerful (and righteously so given what you have to do to acquire it), the real game breaker was Lucia and her Aromatherapy powers, which gave other characters bonuses. Among her ultimate powers were such lovely tricks as letting every other character attack as though they were using a Third Key (get 3 attacks in a row) and setting other characters' critical hit rate to 100%.
* Consider the following combo: Yuri, with a 5-hit attack ring and a 35% attack bonus, fuses fire monster and uses Energy Charge (next attack does 125% more damage), Lucia uses Moon Oil+ Night Oil combination (all hit are criticals), Yuri switches to Dark Seraphim and uses a Seventh Key (7 attacks in a row). Assuming you get all 7 sweeps from the Seventh Key off without missing, you've just dealt out 35 critical hit attacks magnified to inflict more than double the damage they'd normally do. Even the secret boss would be overkilled in a single blow!
* There exists an accessory, the Extreme, that triples your damage in exchange for turning the Judgement Ring (the timed-hit based attack system) invisible. You can also set the Judgement Ring to practice mode, which means that rather than ending your attack if you miss the hit range like normal, nothing happens, at the cost of losing your perfect slice. This means you can just mash X over and over and get five hits of heavy damage. Combine this with any of the other game breakers listed, and very little survives.
* There is a purchasable accessory called Spikes that puts any character equipped with one in a permanent Resist defense state, making them take significantly reduced damage, and immune to status effects and knock-back, at the cost of losing one Sanity Point per hit taken. Yuri's second earth fusion has a skill that negates the Sanity loss from Resist. Combine the two and you will be Nigh Invulnerable.
* It's rather easy to make a single character in Breath of Fire 3 into an invincible killing machine. Doing so is simply a matter of raising a character's Agility to a high enough level (either through leveling up under the faerie master Meryleep, who gives the highest Agility boost, or farming Swallow Eyes, which give a permanent + 1 to Agility). After that, stick the Resist skill (which makes the user completely immune to damage for the rest of the turn) on them. Thanks to BoF3's unique mechanics, any characters that are much faster than all the enemies get an extra turn. The "invincible" character simply Resists on their normal turn, and does all their attacking on their extra turns. You can also take further advantage of this by using the Chain Formation, which makes all three characters have the same Agility as the person in front.
* Also from BoF3, Peco. Under the right conditions, he becomes just as impossible to kill as the Resist-user above. First, he has the highest HP and Defense in the game, and also average Attack. He passively recovers 5% of his max HP every round. He starts at level 1, which means you can get the maximum gains out of whatever master you choose for him. Most people use Fahl, who gives the highest HP and Defense gains at a level up, as well as some extra Attack. So several levels later, Peco is now pretty much Nigh Invulnerable. Now stick him at the front of the Attack formation, which both increases his attack power (moving it up from average to high) and makes enemies focus their attacks on him, letting our little Stone Wall soak up damage while the other two characters do as they wish without fear of getting killed. Oh, and don't forget that Peco ALSO has the highest reprisal rate in the game (a whopping 50% chance of countering physical attacks), which makes for great fun when he's getting hit with more than half the enemies' attacks? Watching your tiny, mutant onion slaughter the strongest enemies in the game is both awesome and hilarious to watch.
* Don't forget - Aside from your main character being able to ascend into dragon form, which itself could be arguably a Game Breaker, Rei has the ability to transform into a Weretiger. Doing this greatly increases his physical power, but in return, you lose control of him and he has increasingly higher chances of attacking one of your allies each subsequent turn - Often resulting in a One-Hit Kill of that character. This is what normally balances it out. But add the Useless Useful Spell Influence which forces anyone who can be influenced to only attack whatever you targeted with the skill until either they or the target dies. This skill only affects a small number of weak monsters normally, yet it applies to Rei in this state, allowing you to designate a boss monster at the beginning of the fight and then leave him to continuously thrash it. Now combine that with the dragon form of your main character and commence the curb stomp of any enemy or boss, save for That One Boss in Mook Clothing.
* To screw things up even more, have Nina or Momo be your 3rd party member, then use the Fusion gene to transform Ryu into a tiger-dragon. On top of being faster than Rei, it also has access to the absurdly powerful Shadowwalk ability. Costs a scant 8 MP to use (making the form cost 16 AP per turn), and gives you a guaranteed critical hit. This, on top of Rei's spoileriffic abilities mentioned above, can even devastate the final boss with relative ease. Oh, and if you have the AP to spare, you can tack the Warrior gene on to ramp this hybrid form into Super Mode. At this point it will be more than half as powerful as True Kaiser form, and will get extra turns, making it insanely stronger and cheaper to use.
* Once you get the Trance gene, Mook battles become nothing to worry about. For a piddly 13 AP to cast and 7 AP/turn to maintain, the Shadow/Trance combination grants Ryu access to the Tiamat form, which, on top of being nicely powerful and ridiculously quick, is a "convert the whole party" dragon form, adding in the benefit of the rest of your party being untouchable. It also has status-effect immunity. Oh, and a secondary breath weapon that hits every enemy with instant death and costs no AP to use. The awesome serpentine look is just icing on the cake.
* BOF3 also had a rare item called Ivory Dice that doubled experience from any enemy it was used on. With the aid of magical copying fairies, you could get lots of them, and stack them in battle to multiply any enemy's experience exponentially: 2 for 1, 4 for 2, 8 for 3, 16 for 4 and so forth. This is however balanced out by the fact that you can still only gain 65535 exp per battle and you need close to twice that to level up once you reach the high 60s, not to mention the extensive time investment in getting that many Ivory Dice to begin with.
* In Breath of Fire 2, we have the secret character Bleu. You can have her join your party as soon as you have access to the whale, and you get her at level 35 (for comparison, being around level 20 at this point is overleveled, albeit slightly). She has access to all of the best offensive spells in the game from the moment you get her, except for four of them, and she learns these four at levels 36, 37, 38, and 39 respectively. And her special ability heals her to full health at no MP cost - the only downside is a Defense debuff that wears off after the battle ends. And as she levels up, it gets beyond ridiculous. Other characters can typically expect to gain 7 or 8 points in their best stats, 1 or 2 in their worst, and roughly 4 on average. This character, when going from level 37 to 38, gains +15 HP +15 MP +15 Strength +15 Stamina +15 Agility +12 Wisdom +14 Luck. This is not an extreme example. This is normal for her. She gets +15 everything at least twice, and maybe it would be more if the stats weren't already capped by the point it could be possible. The only downsides are that she is a Guide Dang It to acquire and that she cannot bond with shamans (generally the way to power up your characters) - but really, she doesn't need to.
* There's also the cook, who you can have access to as soon as you beat the Witch Tower (though he can be Lost Forever if you pick the wrong carpenter in Capitan). If you give him the right ingredients, he can cook extremely rare items that are massively gamebreaking when they're available in large quantities. The extremely rare item that lets you re-cast Ryu's uber-powerful Dragon summons which normally only work once per battle? Check. Items that boost your characters' stats? Check. Items that can be sold for more than the cost of their ingredients, essentially giving you infinite money? Check. An item that fully heals your whole party while simultaneously buffing them? Check. The only downsides are Guide Dang It and sheer tedium, but if you can cook enough of these items, you'll have a full party of uber-characters who when combined with shaman bonding can put the above-mentioned Bleu to shame.
* Romancing SaGa 2 had Coppelia: An android created by Mad Scientist Hiraga (Only usable once: but good with Every Weapon)
* Romancing SaGa 3 had Dragon God Descent (Wind Magic): Makes cost of WP and JP 0 at the cost of converting Hit Point Damage Received into Life Point Damage Received so you can use techs and magic infinitely, and giving it to a certain character Zo makes the real final boss a joke.
* Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song has the Synthesis Spells Overdrive and Hasten Time, which let you immediately end the turn and get a free round of attacks; Hasten Time let your whole party get an attack in, while Overdrive had the caster acting five times.
* Valkyrie Profile Lenneth has two (and usage of the first helps fuel the second):
* The Reverie skill adds up to three shadow duplicates to a melee fighter equipping it, which hit for reduced damage. No big deal? While they don't do much damage, they do add to the combo meter, and the various finishing strikes do more damage the higher it's pumped up. Now, with some weapons already hitting for 6-10 blows for some fighters, you could really inflate the combo meter. Finish off with a Great Magic spell that hits all enemies (for sheer number of combo hits, Celestial Star and Meteor Swarm are preferred), and only a couple of bosses could even last long enough to get their first turn. This also typically resulted in netting many bonus crystals (which gave a 5% boost to earned XP, up to a maximum of + 50%) and items, allowing you to power-level quickly.
* Combining the Guts Skill (up to an 80% chance of reviving from death), the Auto-Item Skill (which you can set to have a 100% chance of using the revival item on a character that died), and equipping multiple Angel Curios (which had a high chance to both revive the player and break if used) made it nearly impossible to die. However, the combination itself is very expensive, and generally not feasible to maintain until you reach the Bonus Dungeon.
* Of course, the two could be combined to devastating effect (and are pretty much the only way to beat the Iseria Queen).
* It's only part of the trope if used in the normal storyline part of the game. In the Bonus Dungeon it is essentially required because the attacks of many of the later enemies are either one hit kill one party member or one hit kill your entire party. Both attacks will be unavoidable, as well, so health and defense actually cease to matter. Even if you abuse the auto revive skills completely, the Iseria Queen fight does take long enough she might very well get lucky and wipe out your party anyways.
* In Escape Velocity Nova, you can exploit some trade routes to earn obscene amounts of money very quickly. For example, there's one system in Polaran space which has a planet and its moon sitting very close to one another - you can buy one commodity at a low price on the planet and then sell it for a much higher price on the moon. Performing a trade by travelling from the planet to the moon takes about 30 seconds. After half an hour of trading and progressively getting larger escorts to carry more weight you can go from a starting total of 150,000 credits to in excess of 100 million credits very easily. Considering the most expensive ships in the game usually top out at around 10 million credits, this exploit basically makes money a non-issue.
* Valkyrie Profile Silmeria has its own game-breaking example, if you happen to know when certain characters will be leaving the party completely and spend enough time leveling them up by fighting boss battles over and over. It takes some time to get them up to the required level, but once they leave, you'll gain some very powerful equipment as a compensation that will make most of the rest of the game a cakewalk, right up until the very last bosses. Very much a Guide Dang It situation, since the game doesn't give any hints about it before it happens other than the fact that any Player Mooks you boot out of your party also leave behind items that permanently boost the stats of another character relative in number to their strength when you released them, and even then you don't get any notification of the new items you get after the previously mentioned special characters leave, unlike you do with the Player Mooks.
* The original Mario & Luigi game (Superstar Saga) had a series of badges called Shroom Badges (Shroom Badge, Shroom Badge A, Shroom Badge AA) that increased your attack proportional to the number of mushrooms you were carrying. Ostensibly, this was supposed to have the penalty where healing yourself costs you attack, but it is both cheap and easy to carry almost 99 of all FOUR kinds of mushrooms and to heal only using Nuts. Since carrying around 30 of each kind of mushroom was enough of a Game Breaker, just imagine what 396 of them must be like.
* Funny thing is with the Shroom Badges is that the damage increase also affects First Strikes. With enough mushrooms, you can instantly kill a lot of enemies without even starting the battle.
* There's also the Bonus Ring, which doubles your experience if you manage to not get hurt in battle. It's available as soon as Starbeans Cafe opens (You need to blend two different drinks for it). Since it's possible to avoid every enemy attack in the game, you can level up high enough to defeat the final boss by the time you're in the Beanstar Fetch Quest if you're good enough.
* In the DS sequel, Partners in Time (aka Mario and Luigi 2x2 in Japan), there is the Practice Badge, which bless the bearer(s) with infinite use of attack items at the cost of attacking power. Maybe they're weaker, but with a little practice you'll be able to spam quite high damage using the clone flower, and not worry about buying any, saving all your money on healing and buff items. You probably won't even have to buy a single of these weapons if you grind enough, and as long as there at least one available in your inventory, you'll be able to sell them for quite a price (more if you max out your characters' moustaches).
* There's also a badge that makes all attack items free, but you need 90 beans in order to get it, which means that it usually can't be obtained before Star Hill, late in the game.
* Although if you get to Thwomp Volcano you can get a potentially unlimited supply of beans through the mini-game. Despite the fact that each time you play costs 100 coins, combine that with some easy ways to get coins really quickly in that same area and, with enough grinding, you can get badges for everyone.
* For Bowser's Inside Story: The Broggy Bonker could count as this for Bowser. It's his ultimate attack which does ludicrous amounts of damage as well as being quite easy to pull off, which coupled with the Economy Ring (reduces SP usage by half) makes it incredibly spammable.
* Don't forget about what happens when Bowser reaches level 40, he receives the Intruder Fangs which allow him TWO actions per turn! Combine this with the King's Shell which is his best defensive armor, and raises his punch's power by 30 percent, then use moves like Broggy Bonker twice in a row to see how Game Breaking Bowser can be.
* There's the Magic Window ability which allows Mario and Luigi to summon endless clones of themselves as long as you pushed the correct buttons at the right time. If you were quick enough, most enemies and bosses could be defeated by this single ability alone.
* Then there is the Mighty Meteor special attack; by the time you get this, you can stock up on the best healing items in the game as after completing said move successfully, an item pops out based on how strong the enemy was. Use this move in the Airway section to get Star Candies
* There's Peach equipped with the Lazy Shell armor in Super Mario RPG. We're talking about a White Magician Girl who can heal the entire party at once, status effects and all for 4 MP, revive party members to (almost) full health (if you get a Timed Hit) for only TWO, and almost literally CAN'T DIE. Even Culex will have a tough time killing whoever equips the Lazy Shell armor, making it entirely possible, if somewhat boring, to simply stall until all the enemies run out of MP.
* Just give her the Quartz Charm you receive for beating Culex to significantly raise her stats, as well as making her immune to pretty much every status condition in the book for true Game Breaking ability.
* By the way, she tanks relatively well once she starts gaining levels, even without the Lazy Shell, and gets some pretty awesome weapons, so not only can she heal, she can bust out some massive damage herself. It's not as good as Bowser, Mario or Geno, but good enough to get her by without Psycho Bomb.
* By the same token, Mario equipped with the Super Suit was an unstoppable tank. It has virtually the same effects as the Lazy Shell Armor but with better stats (and no attack penalty). The Super Suit could be obtained as soon as you reached Monstro Town if you were skilled at timing your Super Jump attacks. You could practically take Mario into any battle alone (letting the other two party members die or otherwise make them block), and to further pile on the overkill, equip him with the Lazy Shell weapon and Attack Scarf. Once you have these three items no boss in the game can stand up to you.
* While indeed a game breaker, only a few people can actually pull off the 100 super jumps needed to earn the armor and the timing windows for each jump get smaller and smaller. The trouble of pulling off 100 jumps in a row without missing may not be worth the effort since the armor isn't available until 3/4 into the game.
* Geno, plain and simple. His Geno Whirl attack timed hit does 9999 damage each time for a small amount of flower points. No, seriously it does that much damage when timed correctly, making any enemy not immune to it (including one of the endgame bosses) a joke.
* The Safety Ring makes an individual into a Game Breaker in and of itself. It protects against all magic damage (though some abilities are considered physical), all status effects, and instant death. And it's relatively easy to find.
* In Paper Mario, equip Mario with the Power Bounce badge (which lets you jump on an enemy repeatedly, provided that you nail the Action Commands) and the Charge badge. The Charge ability ups Mario's attack power and can be stacked. Thus, all you have to do is keep charging Mario for about 4 turns, then unleash a Power Bounce. Get the timing right, and you can do 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then boom. You just did 55 damage, in a game where the most powerful boss has 100 HP. The fact that one of Mario's partners can pull off the same exact strategy helps.
* If you're particularly good at keeping your Power Bounces going you can take down any enemy, bosses included, just by bouncing forever. The sequel capped the amount of times you could bounce.
* The Thousand Year Door has a good number too, generally centered around turning Mario into a Glass Cannon. The craziest is the "Danger Mario" setup focused around the Power Rush badge. It adds two attack when Mario has 5 HP or less, it stacks, and you can buy as many as you want. Add in the stackable badges that make attacks sometimes miss, drop Mario's max HP to 5, and you're permanently superpowered AND nigh-untouchable.
* With the Spike Shield and Jumpman badges Mario can completely eliminate all need for the hammer and get a decent attack boost on the jump which can now be used on (almost) all enemies. Add in one of the two or three items that allows one to hit flaming enemies, two or three Power Plus badges, and a couple of P-Up D-Downs and Mario is a killing machine that can do damage above and beyond that possible in the original game's method with just a charge or two combined with Power Jump. Even better, so long as Mario has about 15 HP just in case it doesn't matter how bad his defense is -- The Thousand Year Door introduced a very easily exploitable ability to have one of your partners serve as an impenetrable Stone Wall. And one of those partners has this move called Rally Wink that will give your super killing machine Mario another turn each time it's used.
* Get a lot of Super Appeal badges (I think about 10 should do it) from the Pianta Arcade, equip them, then Appeal as Mario. Your star meter is completely filled.
* In The 7th Saga, Valsu's Elixir spell restores all HP and MP. You only get it late in the game, though.
* Conversely, this can make the game Unwinnable if you're not playing as Valsu (or allied with him) and he gets one of the Plot Coupons, because all of the protagonists level up alongside your chosen character.
* Baldur's Gate II and the Throne of Bhaal Expansion Pack had a couple...
* A mild one are the various "kill undead instantly unless they save" weapons, which allow you to instantly kill any undead boss in a single round, since there is no effective defense against it whatsoever and you could easily get up to 8-10 attacks per combat round even in medium levels. Essentially turns nasty Bonus Boss Kangaxx, considered the strongest opponent in Shadows of Amn, into an Anticlimax Boss.
* Then there are the traps of epic level Thieves, which are so nasty strong they can, among other things, instakill the Throne of Bhaal Bonus Boss Demogorgon AFTER you've installed a mod to specifically make him much tougher.
* THEN there is the combination of The Robe of Vecna and Amulet of Power (lower casting time) with the high-level spell "Improved Alacrity" (cast spells immediately one after the other instead of a one spell per round limit) which basically allows your mage to pull off the magical version of Beam Spam. And you could combine it with Time Stop (everything except the caster freezes in place for six rounds) to have your enormous Spell Spam assault hit the enemy with dozens of spells before he can do anything. And if your enemies are still alive after that, you can cast Wish to replenish your spells and do the entire thing over again.
* To increase effectiveness, you could turn on autopause and set it to "when casting ends". This way you will maximize number of castings during Improved Alacrity.
* Even more effective as a high level sorceror, when you can easily cast 9 of the most effective attack spells of every level, instead of only those of you memorised spells were atttack spells.
* And if that's not overkill enough for you, casting Simulacrum before hand means you can do all of that twice.
* And then you could cast Spell Trap and have your Simulacrum recharge your spells, including Spell Trap.
* Not to mention Projected Image a spell that created an illusory copy of the caster, including all of his spells. Meaning that the Image could do everything already mentioned above whilst leaving the actual wizard in complete safety. If, by some miracle, the Image was killed, then the wizard could just cast it again.
* Projected Image is capable of doing some things your regular mage can't. For example, there's an "epic level" spell that lets you summon a planetar, a powerful fighter/mage/cleric hybrid that can contend with most monsters in the game. Downside? You're limited to one, but the projected image can make as many as six.
* Another great thing about Simulacrum and Projected Image is that they copy the items in your quick slots as well. Buy some powerful scrolls, put those scrolls in your quickslots, create a copy of yourself, and let them use those spell scrolls without using up the original scrolls.
* Another one: the seller inside the Shadow Thieves' base accepted to buy stolen objects (unlike any other shop in the game). Which means that, with a Thief with a high pick-pocketing skill, you could sell-steal-sell again-steal again-and so on some expensive object and become ludicrously rich in a heartbeat.
* Mind flayers can drain the INT stat with every attack until it reaches zero, whereupon the target will die. Assumedly, this is meant to simulate the mind flayer devouring the character's brain. With the shapeshift spell the player can assume the form of a mind flayer at whim. Cast time stop, which not only gives you free turns but all but guarantees every melee attack will land, turn into a mind flayer, and start consuming those brains. It even works on monsters that don't have brains to speak of.
* There was the fact that Bards could get epic-level traps... and, since they had no "set traps" skill, they succeeded automatically. This for traps that could freeze time.
* Then there was the regular thief's traps... which had no restrictions as to how many you could place. So, place 5-6 traps, sleep, then place 5-6 more, for total damage enough to kill any and all bosses in the game, provided you could set them up beforehand: even if you could not, you could set them up elsewhere and send the boss careening there with a ring of the ram (or simply make it chase you there).
* If you play a bounty hunter, you get special traps that not only did more damage, but could be thrown. Since traps had a pretty big area of effect, this meant that the thief could throw a trap, hide, throw another, hide again, etc. Even more absurd, you only had to do this once at level 21+ because these traps mazed enemies, which meant you could now send in the rest of your party to slaughter them one by one as they popped out of the maze one at a time. Then there were spells like Death Fog, which did damage over time and had such ridiculous areas of effect that you could engulf enemies from outside their visual range.
* Killing Irenicus on that elven tree level takes approximately 2.5 seconds if you trap the area heavily beforehand.
* Similarly to how bards could automatically create epic-level traps, paladins at high levels could get at least one epic-level priest spell, castable once per day because they couldn't cast spells anywhere near that level. So if you got to a high enough level before completing Shadows of Amn, you could summon a deva to help you in the final battle that could by itself go toe-to-toe with the boss himself. (I'm not sure if it had some particular immunity that kept it from being killed in that situation, or if it was really that tough.)
* After that, there was a miniboss that made monsters spawn continuously until he was killed. Each monster dropped magical katana and full plate armour. Keeping the boss alive for a lot of time allowed for approximately a metric crapton (300k+ ) of gold, made by selling all this loot.
* The 20th level monk was immune to normal weapons. It so happened that a score of enemies in some chapter wielded normal swords and fought in bridges. Sending a monk to block the bridge kept the other team safe, as 3-4 knights desperately tried to touch you... and failed. Killing them was more than simple.
* Melee classes got an epic skill that allowed them to, for a certain time, kill any < 8th level enemy with a mere touch. The drows in a part of the game made for interesting metronome material... they got killed in regular time intervals.
* The epic feat "whirlwind attack" allowed for 10 attacks per round. No matter what the weapon. Even with a ranged one. Even a freaking heavy crossbow. To call the damage "massive" would understate.
* The entire Multiplayer system allows an incredible gamebreaker. So you've played the game once through, and are fighting Kangaxx. Import your epic fighter/mage armed with the aforementioned undead killing hammer, cast Time Stop, and beat him over the head with it until he fails a save. You now have the Ring of Gaxx, an incredibly potent item. Now, give it to someone, save the game, take it off them, then import them from that save. Congratulations, you now have two of the most powerful item in the game. Give them to it, save, take, import Repeat until you've got twelve. And this can be done with any item or character in the game, and the machine of Lum the Mad.
* And this isn't counting the fact that a nimble-fingered rogue can steal one if you click 'pick pocket' at the right time. The ring respawns when Kangaxx moves into his demilich form, letting you pilfer it and loot it from his corpse. The above-mentioned cyclical importation can now be really sped up.
* Should be noted that a lot of these (Whirlwind attack, Death blow, etc.) were not game-breaking: The enemies were simply tough enough that the game was still hard. That is, unless you played the game solo (which gave you 6 times the experience...) which meant you'd acquire them probably at some point in chapter 3.
* Before they nerfed Cloak of Reflection, it reflected all spell damage back onto the caster - which meant that if you protected yourself against nasty non-damage spells, you could get Irenicus to kill himself with Cone of Cold in the first part of the final battle (before you go down to hell). Even after the nerf, it made you immune to spell damage (it just didn't reflect it). You could, fairly easily, make yourself completely immune to damage or any negative effect whatsoever (especially as a fighter/mage).
* Several minibosses/dragons were vulnerable to the instant kill spell Finger of Death, such as the Shadow Dragon - A creature that the game assumes most lower level characters would want to quietly sneak past. Most bosses /minibosses in the game were immune to instant kill though.
* The Staff Of The Magi can be a gamebreaker. upon equipping it, it makes the character using it invisible. you can walk up to someone, hit them (thus breaking your invisibility), and then immediately go into your inventory and just by clicking on the staff, re-equip it, including reactivating the invisibility. Rinse and repeat, and very very few enemies can do a thing about it.
* Abusing the Steal skill in Fable I gets you some of the best equipment in the game, before even having fought the Wasp Queen.
* Probably the biggest gamebreaker in Fable I is your ability to carry infinite health and mana potions (which are also ridiculously cheap to buy). This makes you essentially immortal, even before you factor in the game-breaking spells.
* Another major gamebreaker was the 'slow time' spell, which when maxed out made the player practically invulnerable. Enemies would be unable to attack and the player can re-cast the spell WHILE IT WAS STILL ACTIVE, meaning the spell lasted as long as the player's willpower. If combined with the multi hit spells (the arrow and sword ones), any enemy (including bosses) could be killed before their first attack.
* There are two Area of Effect magic attacks, one Holy and one Evil. Functionally though, they are identical: for 10 seconds you will channel the spell, causing any enemy in the area to be frozen in place while taking damage. You can still receive damage for the duration and if your health reaches 0 the spell is gonna be interrupted. You can use the spell again immediately (with a 1 second delay). Once you get this spell, there is no reason to use anything else. Even against all bosses.
* That, and Physical Shield. It sends damage to your Will energy instead of your health. For some reason, this takes away the "getting hit = reduced combat multiplier" effect that the game is basically built around. So, you go and build up a massive combat multiplier (say, 108, just for kicks) by killing hordes of Mooks, and then you drink the "Ages of" potions which give 1000 experience in their respective category. Before factoring in combat multiplier. Yeah, at that point, you could pretty much bring every skill to max level.
* The sequel, Fable II, has a similar trick. About halfway through the story, you get access to an arena called "The Crucible". When fighting in the Crucible, you can use extended combos to multiply your experience point gain by up to four... including those from potions. With some spare cash and some healthy item hoarding, you can bring a boatload of potions into the Crucible with you (or even buy them during the actual tournament) and score 500,000+ EXP in all four categories, making it laughably easy to max out every skill.
* One can also buy real estate, forward the time on your console, and get the eventual gains from the real estate if you really waited that long in a near-instant by comparison.
* Although the ability to do this was taken out in Fable III, buying up all the properties early on gives you tremendous income. How much income? Enough to render the hard choices you have to make in the second half of the game are trivial, since you'll have more than enough gold to cover your losses.
* There is also the ability to abuse the dynamic economy. When a shopkeeper has lots of an item, the cost to buy and sell is lower than it is when the item is scarce. However, the only limit on how many items you can buy or sell at once is how much money you have, and the price will only change after you've finished your purchase. So you can buy a shops entire stock or an item at the low price, and immediately sell it back at the new higher price, giving you potentially infinite money.
* You need at least Level 3 Guile though for it to work, which is piss easy to get to with a little work anyway. This trick also has the added benefit of leaving you with a ton of health potions if that is the item you use for the trick after you are done. The trick has higher yields with higher Guile levels and more of the item you are selling.
* In Fable II it is also possible to max out your character in little under a half an hour once you reach adulthood. When you start co-op, your partner has the same amount of exp you do. You can release all the exp on your partners character, at which point it gets placed in your exp pool. You can then spend this exp to level up your character. Rinse and repeat, and you are at max level.
* The dodging mechanic in Fable is another easily available Game Breaker - while your character can't block everything, dodging makes him invulnerable during the roll animation. Also it can get you away from the mob and/or follow up attacks. And on top of that it's actually faster to roll than to run.
* And there is the ranged weapons mechanic - the longer you hold down the attack key, the stronger the attack is, which makes some sense, as your character is able to draw the arrow back more and hence release it with more force (for bows that is, but for some reason crossbows have it as well). That is, until you find you that there is no limit to how much you can hold down the attack button - it doesn't matter that the your character cannot physically draw the bow more, the longer you hold it the more damage it will do. Prepare a shot and don't release it for a few minutes and 'everything will die with one shot kill. Including bosses. Made ridiculously exploitable by the dodging mechanic which doesn't reset the damage counter.
* The Ghoul augment in Fable II pretty much obviates the need for any kind of healing items unless you're only playing as a caster.
* The Chance Hit skill in Lufia: The Ruins of Lore for the Fighter class can be acquired early in the game, consumes little MP, and deals random damage from 20 to 200 in intervals of 20 (ignoring defense) -- rendering normal attack spells obsolete and allowing many bosses to be handily defeated by otherwise puny characters for much of the game.
* Much later in the game, it is possible with a little effort and planning to recruit an Anti Core, which can be taught a wide variety of skills and has insane defense and speed -- allowing it to attack up to eight times per round. Teach it Pickpocket and steal Power Sources from a certain enemy to arbitrarily boost its attack power, then teach it Rapidfire or Octostrike (no MP cost, hits all enemies) and watch as Hilarity Ensues.
* The Paladin skill Guardian in Dragon Quest VI. The user of the skill becomes the substitute of each and every attack--from basic strikes to status-inflicting breath to uber hit-all spells. While the user gets all of the combined effects of any attacks until forced unable to cover his/her allies and can easily be crippled or killed, the 3 allies can take care of other things. The user can simply be placed in the back to take the part of a hit-all attack meant for him/her last (nullifying it if he/she dies first), and the power is particularly glaring if the user is of the Lost Medal class, which gives off ridiculous defense.
* Item Crafting can sometimes lead to game breakage. For example, Knights of the Old Republic 2. If you focus the main character's skills on Repair up to 20 ranks, then you can transform any item into component parts for maximum salvage. Once done, you can take your entire stockpile of items up to that point and convert them into components, except for any weapon or equipment that can be upgraded. This gives you a huge supply of components for crafting. Then, you just build whatever you like. With enough components, you can make armor that makes you virtually unkillable and craft upgrade repeating blasters that get 3 attacks per round, each with a + 5 to hit and averaging 30 damage. And that doesn't even get into the light sabers that deflect anything, average 45 damage per blow, can't possibly miss, and give you a buff to your Force powers.
* KoTOR 2 also gives us the Force Wave, which pushes back, stuns and damages and, if you use the right stance, can be used pretty much indefinitely. Once you get it, you don't have to worry about biological enemies.
* How about 'lightsabers in general' for both games? Max force speed + max level flurry means you can one-shot anything but Malak in the first game as a Dark Side Guardian. And you can take down about 2/3 of Malak's HP in one swing, so he only takes TWO rounds. You can do pretty much the same thing in much of the second game.
* Straddling Game Breaker and Disc One Nuke, T3-M4 starts with a shock arm that can be used infinitely, can deal up to 60 points of damage (based on his level), and doesn't require a roll to hit. Granted some of this is countered by the fact that only he can use it, but still. Considering the second or third time you get control of him you can easily have an item that gives him regeneration, the character himself might be a game breaker.
* Something of an Elite Tweak, a Male Jedi Conular/Jedi Master who wins a few matches against the Handmaiden effortlessly destroys any semblance of difficulty. When training with her, she can train the Exile in an Echani technique called 'Battle Precognition', which allows him to use his Wisdom modifier, the highest stat on a proper Consular, to his Armor Class. To expand on this, when a paragon of his chosen side, light or dark, the Consular and its coinciding bonus class get a +3 bonus to Wisdom. Even further still, using a few easily obtained items like the plot given Ossus Keeper Robes which give more Wisdom bonuses, and the characters also plot given special crystal when fully upgraded gives yet ANOTHER huge boost to Wisdom (among other stats). Further still, take all levels of Dueling to get more bonuses when using a single weapon, and suddenly you can have an overall bonus to your AC from armor and Dexterity in the +30's to +40's with buffs. Not only are you untouchable, but your Force Powers might as well ignore resistance from all but The Big Bad, and with the right crystals and fixtures, a saber that hurts like hell.
* One of Colette's level 2 techs in Tales of Symphonia, Para Ball, only uses 14 TP and is stronger than most level 3 techs.
* Don't forget its near-guaranteed hit stun (and ability to stop all spellcasting by itself). She's an absolute monster in the arena for that reason.
* Also, once you get the hang of spell canceling, you can perform an essentially infinite combo with Colette if you have an angel tech set to B. Attack twice (non-directional), then quickly press B, then X, then attack twice again, cast and cancel, repeat. This works with any enemy that can stagger, and since the spell doesn't activate, it consumes no TP. Needless to say, it makes the arena a piece of cake.
* Sheena can do this, too.
* As can any character with access to any sort of spell. That's all of them except Lloyd and Presea, though Genis won't be making much use of it because of his already slow attack speed and strength. However, it's very possible for White Mage Raine to solo the Bonus Boss Abyssion using this tactic, combined with the fact that for some characters, it's ridiculously easy to get immunity to the elements. See here.
* Colette's Toss Hammer is a Level 1 Tech that randomly activates instead of Pow Hammer (fairly often) after using the latter 200 times. Easier than it sounds; Pow Hammer is gotten at a very low level, and through the course of battle you'll end up using skills a lot. Alright, so what's so bad about Toss Hammer? The poison damage it does is fast and hits hard, being percentage based- to the point of being able to take out 240,000 hp within a minute and a half. Right here. You can see the HP tick down when he uses a Magic Lens at 01:31. Oh yes, this Colette's at level 6.
* It gets broken even further. Once Pow Hammer has been used 200 times, her Pow Pow Hammer and Hammer Rain skills will randomly include at least one Toss Hammer. If the tech glitch has been used to get Hammer Rain alongside Para Ball...
* Lloyd's Devil's Arm quickly becomes infinitely more powerful then any weapon in the game (doing more then 10 times his next most powerful), because the Devil's arm increases when the character makes a kill (even if they haven't found them yet), Lloyd, being the main character, is in the party for all but two short sections and gets the lion's share of kills over the game (and kill count can be carried over for New Game+).
* Tales of Vesperia features the exact same premise. Once the player unlocks the true form of the Fell Arms, granted that pretty much everyone will play as Yuri, the Blazor Edge Abyssion will have somewhere in the range of 2500-3000 more attack power than any other weapon in the game for Yuri.
* One of Genis's possible EX-Skills is Randomizer (combine Tough and Rhythm). This skill makes his spell-casting times random; every once in a while, the spell will cast instantly. If you control Genis, you can alternate between the B and X buttons (which will repeatedly start and cancel a spell) until the spell casts instantly; this oftentimes makes the spell cast very quickly, even for high level spells, and you don't have to worry about being interrupted in the middle of spellcasting, making the tactic a quick way to bring down even the toughest bosses with a near-constant onslaught of powerful magic.
* You can also do this with Raine's EX-Skill Quick Spell (Neutralizer, Spell Save, and Happiness), which causes a spell to cast instantly about 10% of the time.
* Sheena has the Hard Hit EX skill, which increases the hitstun caused by her attacks. She also has the Force Seal spell, which also increases hitstun (and stacks with Hard Hit). Finally, her Serpent Seal Pinion has extremely low recovery, to the point that if you have Hard Hit and either cast Force Seal or attack from behind, the enemy's hitstun lasts longer than the recovery from SSP, allowing you to repeat your melee combo > SSP over and over again to keep the enemy perpetually stunned. With this strategy, Sheena can easily solo some bosses like Seles without letting them get off a single attack.
* The sequel also has Marta, who has Speed Cast 1, 2, and 3. Stack all three with some Speed Cast equipment, and she can cast virtually any spell near instantly. Add in one piece of equipment she can get at the start of the final chapter which makes all Artes, spells included, consume only 1 TP (when you're likely to have hit the 999 cap on max TP by this point on a New Game+), and she can single-handedly create an infinite combo by spamming Photon until the enemy keels over.
* And don't forget Emil, also from the sequel. With the skills Accelerate (which he could only get from two weapons: his best and a weapon that can be forged as early as chapter three) Glacies, Ability Plus, and Ability Plus 2, he was capable of infinitely comboing anything by simply using Blade Fury (which, due to Glacies has an extra stunning hit at the end) twice, then using any ground based Arcane arte (Sword Rain Alpha and Light Spear Cannon are the most popular), then just repeating the process by using Blade Fury twice again.
* And if that seemed too complex, by simply equipping one of the Accelerate weapons, with no other skills, Emil can do an infinite combo with his physical attacks.
* Guy from Tales of the Abyss. The game uses a strange combo system for attacks, where using a level 2 or above elemental spell or arte produces a Field of Fonons that was about 25-50% complete. In order to use them, you kept using those attacks until it was 100% formed, and then anybody standing inside it could use an appropriate spell that would absorb the Fonons and make a newer, better spell. Character skills and spells and techniques were customizable with Chambers, one of which (Sunlight) allowed you to use a Field of Fonons before it was complete. Guy had an Arcane arte that created an incomplete Wind Field and also tossed the enemy in to the air. You could immediately combo it in to a Base technique (Void Tempest) which would immediately use the newly made Wind Field to become Dragon Tempest, hitting the enemy before they managed to hit the ground, stunning them AGAIN, which meant you could start the combo up again. This is Guy in action taking on the Bonus Boss starting at one health, never healing, and winning using this tactic.
* To elaborate on the combo system: normally it goes normal attack to either a Base arte or Arcane arte, but Base can chain to Arcane. Arcane can't chain to Base though; there's a noticeable delay in comboing, which will kill the combo- unless you get the the skill Super Chain. However, a Fo F skill such as Dragon Tempest can be chained FROM anything and can chain INTO anything... so yeah, there's an infinite combo for you. Let's also throw in the fact that Guy is usually the character to end up with the most speed, and all his techs are fairly rapid already.
* Also from Tales of the Abyss is Anise's Ant Lion Man doll. It restores her HP and TP by 8% every 2 seconds or so. On paper, this doesn't look like much, but in practice this is an insane amount of healing. Imagine a mage who never runs out of TP, and who is also a Mighty Glacier that can only die to a One-Hit Kill.
* Even more disgusting is the Jewel of Lorelei, which you get automatically through story events, and gives the same benefits to Luke. So you can have two effectively unkillable fighters on the team, one of whom is a combo fiend and frontline fighter.
* By using the map glitch, you can get Luke a fancy sword as soon as you can explore the world map. By why stop there? If you saved up enough Gald and carried it over to your new game, you can go to Keterberg and buy the party Mythril weapons and armor, and stock up on gels and bottles. Now you can go outside and fight all the high level monsters (the party will still die a lot, but you stand a better chance with the weapons and armor you just bought). You can get from level ten to level thirty in about an hour (it's even better if you started with an EX Px 2 or EX Px 10).
* Rita in Tales of Vesperia. Get the Spell End and OVL Boost 2 skills, equip the Risky Ring, shortcut Tidal Wave to the A button, set all of your other characters to taunt. Go into battle, launch the enemies into the air with a single level Overlimit, mash A. Have fun. And don't forget to use another overlimit when the overlimit ends. Alternatively, you can also use the Minimum Damage skill along with it to farm Grade off of enemies like no one's business.
* Wonder trinket allows you to fit in even more tidal waves. Violent Pain is used the same way on single foes, to maintain permanent overlimit.
* Estelle is the real game breaker. Due to an unintended oversight (which was fixed in the updated PlayStation 3 release), the spell Force Field makes the target invincible for a few seconds, but with the Eternal Support skill, there's a chance it'll last for the ENTIRE BATTLE. Put the skill on, spam Force Field until it sticks, and you can't lose.
* You have to work a bit to get Yuri's infinite combo going, it requires the enemy to be stunned (with the spinning stars) early on so they can't break out of it, and it only works against solo enemies, but once you get the hang of it and remember to reset the fallen enemy with his free-run slash, Yuri becomes impossible to stop, especially against human enemies. There are videos of Alexei, Flynn, Duke, and Kratos all being brought to their knees by an infinitely-comboing Yuri.
* The PlayStation 3 version makes Yuri even more broken with the addition of his Vesperia No. 2 weapon, which gives him a second Mystic Arte, Tenshou Kouyokuken. With the Combination skills, Yuri can build up a 100x multiplier to be applied to the next attack that hits the enemy. Tenshou Kouyokuken is one of the strongest single-hit attacks in the game, probably second only to Indignation. Throw in the Barbatos Ring, which gives an incredible stat boost at the cost of not being able to use items, and painful destruction ensues - imagine One Hit KOing every boss in the game.
* It's possible to infinitely time stop anything in the game without much effort, completely removing any difficulty whatsoever. All one needs to do is get Raven's Stop Flow spell(Stops time for 5 seconds with a long cast time and high TP cost), equip him with the Risky Ring(Makes all Artes cost 1 TP), activate Overlimit 1 for instant cast time, and beat anything on the screen to death. With minor use of limit bottles, it's possible to maintain this technique for essentially forever.
* While not exactly useful against bosses, assigning Sylph and Arche's weaker spells to your hotkeys basically ensures an instant win against the incredibly powerful monsters in Shadow's cave. Being able to cast high level spells much faster than your characters can is not as useful as you'd think when the other guy is constantly knocking you out of your casting with a puny little ice needle. Of course, everyone should thank Dhaos for showing it to us with his Tetra Assault spell, which basically fires all three of the weakest spells in the game at you at once, knocking you off balance for the truly epic ass-kicking he's following it up with.
* In Tales of Rebirth, it's possible for one with enough time and knowledge of the enhance/inherit system for equipment to make a weapon that makes the wielder cause 32 times more damage.
* In Jade Empire Mirabelle is the only weapon that can do ranged damage, and do ridiculous damage. Jade Golem transformation is immune to all forms except weapon and demon. Both of them do have some negative aspect, but both of them makes defeating enemies and bosses like eating cheesecake.
* And until you got them, the Toad Demon form was obscenely cheap in that it's attack was uninterruptable and could sweep entire crowds of enemies at a time.
* There is also the basic controls themselves: if you "double-hit" forward, you jump, making you difficult, if impossible to hit. You can still hit while doing this, so if you keep doing "up-up-[attack button] (for me it was the space bar), you basically romped through the game with ease...
* It doesn't work on everything, but if you have the Effect Duration for Ice Shard, Tempest or Stone Immortal maxed out, the immobilising effect of a power attack lasts longer than the time it takes to attack again. These attacks still do (quite a lot of) damage- and Death's Hand isn't immune to them...
* And don't forget the three stunning forms: Storm Dragon, Paralyzing Palm and Hidden Fist. Each one prevents the target from acting for a fair duration-- Storm Dragon acts like a tazer, Paralyzing Palm does Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and Hidden Palm uses dirty tricks to disorient the target (they can still move some, but they can't attack, block or dodge)-- but they don't do damage. On its own, that doesn't seem too bad-- except that using these forms costs you nothing and it takes less than a second to switch between one form and another (also free). So, you can rapidly switch between your stunner of choice and a damaging martial style, turning any conflict with a human enemy into less of a fight and more a strength exercise. This includes the final boss. Oh, and all these forms can trigger Harmonic Combos, which allow you to one two shot Mooks.
* Viola in Eternal Sonata can become a game breaker depending on how you use her. Basically, keep her as far away from the enemies as possible and the moment you get her, she'll be dishing out damage in the 10K region. That's enough to defeat most enemies at that point in one or two shots. As if that wasn't enough, she learns Heal Arrow, a fairly powerful, easily spammable entire-party healing move fairly early on.
* To clarify, Viola's ranged damage increases with distance to the target. This means that, not only is she far out of trouble, but the massive damage bonuses gained from doing this mean that she can easily deal ten-twenty times as much damage as any other character you have when you get her.
* Accuracy is another major factor in her damage, as a fair distance shot-to-the-head could deal around 36K per hit. Even in the PlayStation 3 version of the game.
* Viola's damage and healing powers were both nerfed in the PlayStation 3 version, however. Her bow damage is still obscene, but the slow rate of fire offsets the high damage (generating less Echoes, which are needed for the all-important Harmony Chain special attack combos). 24 Echoes are needed for a Harmony Chain , and Viola has trouble generating more than six a turn. Since a decent six-attack Harmony Chain is a guaranteed kill on most normal enemies (and causes incredible damage to most bosses), this makes characters like Falsetto the real gamebreakers. Falsetto, although doing low damage per hit, has the highest attack rate in the game, and with the right equipment can run over to an enemy, go from 0 to 32 Echoes (the maximum amount recorded), and launch the Harmony Chain... in less than four seconds. Or one turn, if you think of it like that.
* Don't forget Allegretto can rack up huge combos as well. Placing him and Falsetto in a party together ends up with almost every combo launching into a Harmony Chain. Jazz, despite being slow, also has the ability to rack up a high echo score with the Werewolf Choker (at least 24 due to his weapon hitting 2-3 times with each swing). With his status as the big tank and high-damage character, this can be a pretty good strategy. Provided that the enemies are nearby, anyway.
* Salsa and March can both rack up mean Echoes. March however takes the cake with 7 echoes per combo loop on one enemy. Combined with her Supernova or Eclipse Gaze she has from the start, March is arguably a Badass Adorable.
* Anyone equipped with the Werewolf Choker accessory could be turned into a game breaker since they received double the amount of echoes for each attack. Combine this with Falsetto, March, or Salsa's speed and multiple hitting attacks and watch the Game Breaking begin.
* In the PlayStation 3 port of the game, Serenade is another highly-broken character. Able to stay far away like Viola and do massive high-combo magic skills that only take around 2 seconds to cast (giving the player the opportunity to cast it twice per round, if not three times). Saving her up for after you have a Harmony Chain results in magic attacks that deal around ~120K damage if you're lucky.
* In Sailor Moon: Another Story, Sailor Pluto has a move that costs 12 AP and stops enemies from doing anything for three turns. This works on all enemies, even bosses, even the FINAL boss, 100% of the time. Conveniently, there's a item in shops that recovers all (12) of a character's AP.
* Not to mention AP is automaticly restored between battles.
* And did we mention the "Defend" command? Evasion and defence are bumped up to near 99% for that character. Turtle and wait for the enemy to run out of AP.
* Earthbound has the rock candy glitch, which allows you to boost your party's stats infinitely. The vitality and IQ stats in particular were clearly meant to stay within a certain range, and boosting them enough with this glitch will allow your characters' HP and PP to be higher than the in-battle HP/PP meters can display correctly.
* There are also Multi-Bottle Rockets, which can deal 1000+ damage when the last few bosses have 3000-4000ish HP and very few non-boss enemies have more than 1000.
* Sira of Albion can freeze every enemy on the field (except bosses, which instead, can be binded by thorn snares), has beyond average speed, and is also a very decent fighter, who can land critical hits more ofthen than most characters in the beginning.
* Lionheart has a perk which gives 5% additional gold from loot. However, this is calculated after you pick up the gold, not when it drops. As thus, a character can drop 1000 gold and pick up 1050. With buddies who looted 10,000 gold, you could use this in-mass to get over a million gold... most of the rare, important loot for beginners costs less than 10,000 gold in shop.
* In Legends of Magic, it was possible to "Beg" for the smallest available amount of resources from any faction you encountered and have the offer accepted. It was therefore possible to legitimately strip all of your opponent's resources to nothing in short time merely by begging them to death.
* A related note, using this game break may have resulted in the scenario regarding Legends of Magic in The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard
* Skies of Arcadia has a few: Enrique's Justice Shield reduces all physical damage taken by half, making every single boss battle far easier than was intended. Items are inherently broken too, as they can replicate every magic effect in the game but require no Spirit Points, bypass Aika's Delta Shield (which neutralises any and all magical spells cast on your party) and are easy to acquire. In airship combat, magic spells, which are otherwise woefully underpowered after the fourth dungeon or so, become godly; unlike all other weapons save your Wave Motion Gun, the magic cannon is guaranteed to hit as long as your target isn't directly behind you and you aren't silenced. While the actual offensive spells are about as pathetic as they are in normal battles, the Silence and Drain shells work on every single airship opponent up to and including the Final Boss, who literally can not attack outside of spells and its Wave Motion Gun.
* But then, the Bonus Bosses, especially in the remake, assume you're going to cast Justice Shield and Delta Shield every single turn, and will very quickly wipe you out if you don't.
* On top of that the bonus bosses leveled with the party, leading to a very easy game break against the player if they got too high.
* Forget Justice Shield, Vyse's Skull Shield prevents all physical damage. Coupled with Delta Shield, your team is practically invincible.
* Skull Shield only blocks standard attacks, not special attacks. It's powerful, but even with both that and Delta Shield about one third of the game's attacks -- and the most powerful ones to boot -- will affect you.
* You can buy stat-boosting items in the item shop on Crescent Island. Paranta Seeds, which boost attack power by three points, cost 5000 gold. Give Vyse enough, and the already very powerful Pirates' Wrath becomes absolutely ridiculous. Of course, giving loads of them to any character will make them a powerhouse damage-wise if you have them use normal attacks and/or physical attacks based off of the attack power stat. Other Seed types are also useful for gamebreaking. Give a character enough of all of the types, and you'll have a complete Munchkin character.
* There's also Aika's Swirlmerang. Not only does it hit pretty much everything (even the Loopers) with its 200 Hit%, it causes Confuse/Panic in every enemy not immune to it. Which surprisingly few of them were. Even many bosses could be confused with the Swirlmerang. And the fact that confusion is cured by getting hit can actually become a good thing in this case, because when an enemy is cured of Confuse, they skip their action for that turn. You can simply throw out the Swirlmerang, hit them with another character, and never have to heal (unless you get very unlucky with counterattacks, and even then you barely have to heal at all). Meanwhile the other two party members are charging up Prophecy...
* And to really break this even further, combining the Swirlmerang with Vyse's Skull Shield will not only nullify the counter attack problem, it'll let you skip the second character's attack. This turns every encounter that's against a single large enemy into a complete joke, and works beautifully in Soltis, where almost every enemy encounter is of this type and the few that aren't get one-shotted by Omega Psyclone anyway.
* Fina's Lunar Light. Revives all allies, cures all status ailments, AND fully heals everyone. And it's not terribly expensive (not cheap enough to use every round, though). In a game where your basic resurrection spell has only a 50% chance of working on ONE ally. RPG's would be a lot easier in general if they all had something like this. It's like Aerith's Great Gospel (okay, technically Pulse of Life) if you could cast it every other round.
* In The World Ends With You, you can save yourself the trouble of grinding for rare, uber-powerful/useful pins and threads if you go into Mingle mode and happen to run into someone who has the items in question, then go into their shops under the Friends menu and buy them. As a result, you can buy these items well before you would get them normally in the game. It's even better than a Disc One Nuke because it's possible from almost the very beginning.
* An example of uber Gamebreaking comes with the Darklit Planet set (which itself is a Game Breaker by automatically giving a 3x boost in power to each pin if all six are in the deck) combined with the SOS threads. The SOS threads, in practice, increase stats when the equipped player has 0 HP on his screen. Note that the other member's HP is still at normal levels. Skillful use of the threads can make Neku Nigh Invulnerable (without the Nigh, even on Ultimate) as well as deal the most damage possible in the game using a single Darklit Planet pin.
* And there's the screenlock strategy. A certain Darklit Planet pin causes an icicle to jut up from the ground, knocking any hit by it into the air. The Over The Top set and Speed Factor pin (which both heavily decrease recharge time for any used pins) added to the deck made the pin recharge in almost the same amount of time that it takes launched enemies to actually fall down to the ground. That leaves the bottom screen immobile and constantly taking damage, leaving your partner to just do whatever you feel like on the top screen.
* There's also the Eden set, which (if you manage to get all five of them in a deck) mean that Neku is invincible as long as the light puck is on him. If you combine that with a healing pin, Neku won't have any attacks. Because of this, the light puck will always be on him, meaning that unless the person on the top screen needs healing, you can just ignore the bottom screen completely. And, unlike the Planet set, you don't have to mingle to get these pins. All you have to do is get five 'One Jump From Eden' pins and evolve them into the other ones in the series. Simple.
* There are some pins that, when used together, allow for infinite combo chains. This makes it possible to easily defeat most monsters without taking a single hit.
* And then there's the Purple Sneaks and Heart Pochette combo. While these equips are often overlooked because they have poor stat boosts, if you equip one to each of your characters, the "Faster Puck II" boost will make your light puck pass instantly. Combine this with any equips that give a "Puck Power" boost, and you'll soon be seeing that beautiful 5X damage sign on both screens at once. Who needs good stat boosts when you have the WTFHAX puck? The best part is that both of these equips are available very early on, and can be combined with any of the above setups (with the exception of SOS) to break the game even further.
* The Magic Banana item in Monster Rancher 2 has several random effects; one of these affects was increasing your monster's lifespan by a single week while dropping their Loyalty. With a bit of Save Scumming, it is possible to abuse this effect to create an immortal monster. This makes it extremely easy to max out a monster's stats.
* In Bahamut Lagoon, you can feed the dragons items to power them up and give them new forms. One of Salamander's forms is called Phoenix, and it is literally invulnerable. Just give it the command Go, and it will destroy every enemy on the map for you while you sit on the sidelines. (Technically, since dragons in Bahamut Lagoon are linked to a unit of soldiers, it's still possible for Salamander's final form to be beaten indirectly if his soldiers are all killed... but as a practical matter, you can just hide them in the corner of the map while your invincible dragon kills everything for you. And the AI isn't smart enough to take advantage of this.)
* In Lands of Lore 3 you could talk to the retired hero of Lands of Lore 2 about 20% into the game and get powerful sword that made all other weapons obsolete.
* Arguably even more of a game breaker is the training room in the Fighter's Guild, where the player can trivially rack up vast quantities of experience for tiny sums of cash.
* An older example: in the first Eye of the Beholder game, the spell stoneskin is pretty much a game breaker. Once a scroll with this spell is found and a magic-user is of high level enough to cast it, the whole party can be basically made invulnerable to physical attacks. Only monsters that can do magical attacks still stand a chance. This is because the spell has no set duration, but would only fade once a character has suffered a certain number of blows. Hence the magic-user can cast the spell, then the whole party can rest so the stoneskin is memorized again, and so on until every member is protected. The protection can be quickly soaked up in a fight for the front-rank Meat Shields, but it can just be cast again as soon as dispelled... and for the Squishy Wizard or The Medic behind their lines, one casting may last very long since they are rarely hit. Not surprisingly, the stoneskin disappeared altogether from the spellbooks in the game's sequel, The Legend of Darkmoon, even with a party saved from the first game.
* Note that this spell was largely considered a Game Breaker in the second edition of AD&D itself (of which Eye of the Beholder is based) for the same reasons. It even spawned a lengthy discussion in Dragon magazine about how to circumvent this problem. Of course, in RPG the Game Master can always arbitrate and decide to change the spell description or prevent its use altogether. Video games don't have this luxury.
* One might know a particular vindictive GM having goblins carry around bags of 12 stones, because of the way stoneskin was worded in AD&D: they would throw the 12 stones at the person affected by stoneskin before attacking, the 12 stones making the effect of the spell wear off.
* This was a common tactic in tournaments, especially in Living City. Players would often toss handfuls of coins or rocks to instantly trigger all the 'ticks' of Stoneskin. A few rare weapons given out during precious few modules had the limited ability to pierce through Stoneskin.
* In Metal Gear Acid, the Johnathon Ingram card allows you to reduce your COST (your accumulated time until your next turn) by 20 and you can carry four of them, meaning a canny player could spew out a lot of high COST cards and still be able to have the next turn (effectively freezing all the other characters on the board in place). Also, using COST attack cards together with the FAMAS (which inflicts COST on every successful hit) means you can freeze certain bosses in place and keep taking turns as Snake until they die. This was changed in MGA2 so the JI card reduced less COST and you could carry fewer of them. (More specifically, you could carry 2 very nerfed JIs and 2 slightly nerfed JIs)
* Oh ho, you want Metal Gear Acid game breakers? How about this one from MGA2: There exist cards which give you many more actions per turn. There exist cards which let you throw away your current hand and draw a full one. There exists a card that lets you take another turn after the current one, ignoring but retaining your current COST. There exists a card which deals damage to an opponent which is based on your current COST. So, fill your deck with these cards, rip through it quickly enough that you can play an extra turn card every turn, racking up ridiculously high COST but never having to wait for it to dissipate, and then one-hit-kill every enemy.
* Phantom Brave has the "Failure" title, which reduced an item or character's stats to worthlessness and causes enemies with it to give no EXP. You'd think this title would be useless, but it's actually one of the most useful titles in the game. You can assign the "Failure" title to a high-level random dungeon, turning the enemies into pushovers (who give no EXP), but this title does no effect on items spawned in the dungeon. This creates a easy source of high-level weapons, and the game's dispatch EXP system awards you bonus exp based on item levels, which will be massive thanks to the items' high levels. Then you can temporarily attach the "Failure" title to a weapon, making powering that weapon up dirt cheap.
* The PSP remake of Disgaea 2 has seven bonus characters available as downloadable content, two of which are free downloads. Both of these characters join your party at level 100, one of the two (Pleinair) joins your party without a fight (and the other can be beaten once you have Pleinair), and both are available at any point in the game, including the very beginning. How gamebreaking is this? The final boss of the main storyline is only level 90.
* This only gets more game breaking if you download other DLC characters as well, as every one of them is at level 100 and uses no equipment until you recruit them. Why is this game breaking? Because now that you have two DLC characters, you can use them to gang up on new character, who's only real threat to you is through their spells. If you rinse and repeat this with every character, then you can have 6 level 100 characters, one of which is purposfully super strong (Demon Lord/Maijin Hanako). Consider your first cycle with these characters broken in half.
* In the original Play Station 2 version it was possible to capture a level 9999 monster once you reach the fourth chapter by exploiting Enemy Level Up Geo Panels. This was sadly removed in the PSP version.
* Cream the Rabbit from Sonic Chronicles. Seeing as you barely have to go out of your way to get her on your team, she definitely applies here. She has a move called "Refresh" that, when used, restores PP for everyone on the team. She can also heal everyone at once, rid everyone of status effects at once, etc. Her inputs kind of tricky? No problem. Equip her with Ferox, a Chao that makes all POW moves never fail, and watch the game suddenly become piss-easy.
* Also, that move Refresh? It also affects Cream, and at rank two (which you can get the minute you recruit her thanks to Leaked Experience) the move costs 8PP and restores 10. That's right, It pays for itself, meaning everyone else can perpetually use POW moves for absolutely no cost.
* In Arcanum, any Throwing character can immediately break the game halfway through by acquiring the Aerial Decapitator, a ranged, returning throwing weapon with massive damage and high attack speed. Grenades? Turn 'em to loot. Other party members? They'll never get a hit in. One shot kills: if it's not a lethal insta-crit, the damage will do 'em in. And as a ranged weapon, it never gets damaged so never needs repairs.
* In the unpatched version, the Molotov Coctails do not cost a turn when used in turn combat. Oh, and they can be made using cheap components with basic technology skills. Infinite damage is go.
* Another cheesy method is to ramp up your stats for speed and damage, then get the dagger of speed (or something named like that) and set combat to turn based. You can get in 25 hits before you opponent can even move.
* Not to mention that the starting "backgrounds" (themes for character that generally give various benefits and drawbacks) can be edited with a basic text editor with no negative effect on gameplay.
* Archery is arguably a Game Breaker for Nethack, if anything can be said to be a Game Breaker in NetHack. A properly prepared ranger will do just as much damage, if not more, than the most powerful melee characters, and will have an instant-kill chance as well. As few powerful enemies have anything but melee attacks, the player can kill many enemies (notably the end-game riders) before they can even land a blow.
* At maximum level with all of her potentials unlocked, Alicia in Valkyria Chronicles basically becomes unstoppable and is the perfect soldier for a Dungeon Bypass. Resist Crossfire signficantly reduces the damage she takes from enemy gunfire, Double Movement gives her a chance to completely refill her action bar when it depletes, and Mysterious Body gives her a chance to completely heal herself when she ends her turn. Combine this with the Awake Potential order that Welkin can give her (which massively increases the chance that her potentials activate), and there is no way the Imperials can stop Alicia from bypassing their lines and capturing their base camp.
* For fun, try it with the defense boost and tank killer orders active on her. She becomes a basically unstoppable juggernaut ready to poke a bunch of fatal holes into anything that moves.
* The weapon unlocked after completing a series of downloadable missions is basically the angel of death compressed into gun form.
* The game Yggdra Union has a skill called Crusade that instantly defeats all enemies AND gives a 50% damage boost AND has an ace type of all AND has a move of 12, which ties Steal as the highest move in the game.
* Crusade has a couple of drawbacks though. Only one unit can use it, and then when only the head is alive. The movement stat of 12 means the skill has a massive charge time, and even a unit with maxed-out TEC can only half-fill it, meaning at least one clash will have to happen normally, or Yggdra has the spend time in the dangerous Passive stance. Skills are only good for one turn, and units who take part in multiple consecutive clashes are typically weaker at the start of the next, so any attempts at repeated use have a steadily increasing chace of Yggdra getting defeated during the charge time. To cap it all off, since the rest of the unit has to be dead for Crusade to activate, the 50% morale damage boost is only equal to beating an enemy with a full unit using a more workable skill. Yggdra herself, on the other hand, has ridiculously powerful base stats post-Awesome Moment of Crowning and the incredibly useful Always Ace attribute, making her a game breaking unit in and of herself.
* And Crusade's drawbacks are easily fixable if the player just charges it right at the beginning of every battle, making it easy for Yggdra to attack full Unions by herself and wipe them out completely.
* Angelic Thunder also instantly kills all enemies, but it has a low POW and doesn't get the 50% damage boost that Crusade does, so it can easily be survived.
* Genocide is also game breaking. Even if it takes your unit down to 1 member (from 3 or 4, depending on the version), it still greatly increases your attack AND prevents your enemies from using skills AND gives you a 50% damage boost.
* The enemy that can use this having the best weapon type doesn't help much either.
* Sanctuary is also game breaking. Early on, it doesn't do much, but in the later battlefields, it can easily be spammed to grant invincibility and kill enemies that should've wiped the floor with you.
* Reincarnation is even worse, as it even changes your class so you get weapon affinity advantage.
* Unless you are using a bow or scythe type unit. When fighting against Bow, the game seems to disregard that it has potentially 3 unit types that are strong against it and just go neutral. On Scythe, there is NO VIABLE WEAKNESS TO EXPLOIT and thus you can charge him with Mistel or Durant (as a Dragon) and come out on top.
* Enough about skills, let's talk about items.
* Gauge Fills items fill your gauge at insanely fast rates, which makes any skill easily spammable.
* 1 on 1 = win items (namely, Zolfy and Snipe Glass) aren't too powerful on their own, but become free wins when paired with a well-timed Revolution or Chariot.
* Critical 50% items. Between the head dying, the loss of counter, the state of panic, and the damage boost, this becomes killer.
* In SSI's Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday RPG there was an exploit that could get you more armor, weapons, and credits than you had carrying space for. In space comba´$2C provided th!u you survived to get close enough to a victim ship to board it, you could capture the ship in 2 combats instead of doing a dungeon crawl through the ship to take the bridge and engineering. The way you would set this up is after boarding the ship, fight the initial boarding fight. After you win that fight, retreat to your ship through the airlock. You will then have a battle of opportunity as the entire enemy ship's crew will follow you and attack. Provided that you have equipped your party with grenade launchers, plasma throwers, and aerosol/chaff grenades, you will have an incredibly easy time wiping out the crew as their area effect weapons impact on the blocking walls put up by your chaff/aerosol grenades and annihilate each other. This tactic will allow your party of 6 to wipe out crews hundreds of times larger than yourself in one battle, up to and including that Dreadnought that sits in orbit over Mars the entire game.
* In the original SNES version, Shiren the Wanderer provided a Dividing pot (a pot that duplicates any item put into it) as one of the new loot in Fei's Final Problem. The gamebreaker is that there also exists a Scroll of Withdraw (or you can inscribe a Blank Scroll to get the same effect) that lets you retrieve items from any pot without having to break it (normally you have to toss non-Holding pots at walls to break them and get back their contents). So, if you have a Dividing Pot or better and two Withdraw scrolls, you can put one scroll in the pot (making two Withdraw scrolls) and the item that you wish to copy, then use the remaining Withdraw scroll to get back two Withdraw scrolls and two of the other item! You could do this over and over again with just about any non-pot item for infinite supplies.
* They fixed the exploit in the DS version, though.
* Another game-breaker in the SNES version comes with a huge amount of time, resources, and devotion (or just three Blank Scrolls and a Dividing Pot[6]): if you can somehow power up a shield to a very high level, eventually, you'll find that all normal damage will be negated. Normal damage meaning damage from melee attacks (which is what almost all monsters have), arrows, and non-explosive traps. This means that unless the enemy uses attacks that do fire and explosion damage or have status-draining moves, you're virtually invincible.
* In the obscure 90s PC game Don't Go Alone, the final boss is behind 5 doors which each require a special key to open. Late in the game, you receive acid which lets you burn through walls. This acid is mandatory; there's a part in the game where you absolutely need to go through walls to progess. The thing is, the acid can burn through any wall, so you can easily use it to go around the special doors.
* Neverwinter Nights 2 has Hide in Plain sight. While a powerful (but nothing compared to the quadriatric wizards) in PnP D&D, the games Real Time with Pause system breaks it clean in half (could say the combat is broken anyways, but that is another story). A character with the ability can break off from combat and hide (how it works in PnP), this however is compounded by issues of the real time with pause system. 1.The checks to see if you can see the hiding character don't happen untill the next round, where he is unhiding to attack you anyways. 2.You lose any actions that target the hiding character from your queue 3. Movement and hide are full real time, attacking is turn based. 4. After unhiding to attack, you must wait till the round "finishes" to attack him (see the past 3) 4. A round (how long you must wait to attack) is 6 seconds, hide in plain sight has a cool down of 5 seconds (so you can't attack before he hides again), so decent rhythm means no attacks for the enemy (or you in PvP). You can "target" the hider with area of effect attacks, but the build also gives abilities that make him essentially immune to them.
* Phantasy Star IV: Early game, Hahn, Alys, and Chaz can use the Triblaster Combo using the base Techs: Foi, Tsu, and Wat
* When you get Rune in the party, he comes with the ability Gra. Create a Macro with him just using Gra first and the rest defend and fight in the last passage to Tonoe.
* When you get to Dezoris, Fire Storm makes quick work of the enemies. It's a combination of Hewn + Zan or Flaeli + any Foi.
* In Lashiec's Castle, after killing the Xe-La-Thouls if your level is high enough you can use the Grandcross tech: Efess + Crosscut, and since there is a healing point near them, you can fight to your heart's content.
* Post Dezoris, if you open the Silver Soldier quest, you can access the Vahal Fort where, you can fight Life Deleters which give you 2,500 Exp each. Use Hyperjammer + Tandle to make quick work of them. Hell, even use Negatis, and it will kill them. Tandle alone will even kill the weaker enemies.
* Even Better, Have Wren just use Spark if you are only fighting one Life Deleter. Spark often destroys all mechanical enemies
* In Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, you can unlock Green Goblin just in time for the last level. On-foot, his melee attacks and powers are nothing special. Hop on his glider, however, and his standard attack is a rapid-fire laser that deals roughly double the damage of another character's melee strikes. It's long-range and piercing, making it ridiculously easy to cut mobs of enemies down in seconds. The only drawback is that he'll be knocked off with a single attack and he has the defense of a wet paper sack, so proper maneuvering is a requirement against enemies with large-area attacks (if you do it right, nobody will survive long enough to actually punch you). It also consumes a small amount of stamina (the game's version of MP), but equipping a Boost item that restores stamina upon attacking an enemy solves that problem quickly. Having him in your party and using his glider against the bosses of the game's final stage makes it about as challenging as fighting off a knife-wielding mugger with a machete.
* Also falling under this category is Deadpool's Best One Ever! ability, which he gets as soon as he joins. Initially it's a relatively expensive skill that gives a mild boost in all of Deadpool's attributes...until you reach the maximum level for it, at which point it jumps to a 30 POINT BONUS TO ALL STATS. Making it, as the name suggests, the best ability in the game by a considerable margin.
* Chrono Trigger has a fun way to make a party full of Game Breakers, even without the New Game+. Using Crono/Frog/Ayla, you can execute 3D Attack, which arguably is the best physical attack in the game. Mix Lucca/Robo/Magus and the Blue Rock, you get the most powerful magic spell in the game. You can obtain pretty much the best equipment for almost everyone if you go through the Black Omen three times. Marle's haste spell can be cast on any character, including herself, multiple times, eventually allowing each party member to attack the enemy several times for each time the enemy attacks. Maybe Square decided to make this game a bit easier than most RPGs?
* Rubbles are creatures only found in one place in the game, Mt. Woe. They disable items and techs when fighting them, and they run away after a short while, but they're worth 1000 EXP and 100 TP (which level up Techs) if they're defeated. Once fought, Rubbles don't ever respawn...except one, which happens to be located close to a save point mid-level. Fighting just that one Rubble over and over, it's incredibly easy to obtain all characters' Techs within an hour or two, with some added EXP leveling to boot.
* Golden Studs, full stop. They slash the cost for Tech casting by 75%. That über-powerful spell/Tech that cost 20 points that you could only use four times in a row, max, before needing to refill your MP? Now it costs 5. Get three, give them to your party, and have fun spamming those aforementioned Game Breaker attacks. Throw on a Haste Helm for fun, and suddenly even bosses are made out of papier-mâché.
* Wild Arms the first game on the Playstation One had a nice little glitch that let you have 255 of any item you wanted, as long as you only had one copy of it to begin with. The trick was to have a Heal Berry (heals 200 HP) in your first slot and your first two characters (Generally Jack and Cecilia) to use it. Your third character (Rudy) would take the Heal Berry and swap it with the one item you wanted to duplicate. Made things really easy when you wanted to have the extremely rare Bullet Clips (full reload to any of Rudy's weapons), Crest Graphs (you need these to make spells for Cecilia), Secret Signs (an item that allows Jack to learn his techniques quicker and cuts down on the MP cost of each one) or Goat Dolls (the last item can be bought from the Black Market). Goat Dolls especially were insane with this trick as they allowed your character to take shots that would kill them normally and get back up with no problem. Add in the fact that you can re-equip yourself each turn and your party could laugh at every boss battle ever.
* In Wild Arms 4, the resident Mighty Glacier Raquel is just so broken, it's not even funny. Give her the right setup, and she can solo Ragu O' Ragla. Take note, she's dying in this game.
* Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica has this in the form of an 'I Win' button called Replakia. The game's battle magic is based on a percentage system which builds up for more power the longer the 'song' goes on. Replakia is explained by the game as collectible extras combing their song power with yours. When activated Replakia gives a huge instant boost to your song percentage and gives increasing acceleration of the natural increase through the character's outfits, depending on how many extras you've managed to obtain (which are game breakers in themselves - see below), all for the same MP constant cost the spell normally has and a turn or two of making sure Cloche's Vanguard gets the up bonus (which is the requirement to use Replakia). Replakia is only usable for one offensive cast per combat, but nothing short of chapter ending bosses could possibly survive it.
* Once you get to the point where you can reliably splice a Synchronity Chain (multi-mage combo attack) on a turn 1 - 3 (1/2 with a dedicated item) Replakia, your greatest challenge is trying to keep the boss alive long enough through nothing but fighter basic attacks to see how much damage your combo can actually inflict.
* It should be noted that Replakia is essentially NEEDED to finish the game properly, as there's a Game Breaking Bug on the second to last boss where if she's not defeated quickly, she will perform an attack that glitches and freezes the game. The problem is that she has a crapton of health - enough that lower-leveled Reyvateils might not have enough oomph in their spell to drop her far enough for her to switch patterns.
* Additionally, the extras used for Replakia, the I.P.D.s, can be equipped onto the Vanguards for additional bonuses. Any I.P.D.s you find with any type of Guard bonus should be equipped, since that skill increases the timing window for better defense options. Since the only way to prevent damage totally is to get a Perfect guard, and Perfect guards massively increase the song percentage, having both the Vanguards with an I.P.D. with Guard++ or higher basically guarantees protection, even against the endgame boss and level 10 I.P.D.s.
* Quest 64 has two spells that just break the game. The first is Avalanche, which can be obtained early on if you dedicate yourself to Earth Element. The spell will do massive amounts of damage in a large area, and it doesn't cost much to use. The second, although obtained much later, is Magic Barrier, which renders the main character invincible. Since the game is almost Nintendo Hard, these two spells make the game laughable once obtained.
* The biggest reason for this isn't the combo itself; it is that both spells are earth element. If they were different elements, it would still be gamebreaking, but nowhere near so much. Also in this list in the Heal spell (first one is level 7 in water), which can be incredibly abused, due to the MP regen system and gained easily before even the first boss, probably making it a real Disk One Nuke.
* Finally, there's your staff. Its power increases more as your elements increase. This actually means that by the end of the game, it'll deal well over 100 damage with ease, which is more than most single spells.
* Secret of Evermore has one spell in the game that breaks the game: Barrier. It basically makes both characters invincible for a period of time. Another game breaker is the Bazooka, thanks to a bug in the original release that gave infinite ammo.
* Geneforge 2 introduced a bunch of new spells more than the original, including some very broken stuff in Mental Magic. Playing as an Agent (which pays fewer skill points for magic skills), it's possible to boost Mental Magic and Spellcraft to the point that no enemy can resist your spells. Coupled with spells like Strong Daze (paralyzes all nearby enemies until they take damage or the duration expires), Terror (target cannot fight back and tries to hide in a corner), or Charm (guess what it does), you really don't even need creations.
* Dark Cloud 2 (aka Dark Chronicle) has an interesting and oft-overlooked Game Breaker involving the medal collection sidequest. The sole reason most people bother with collecting medals is One Hundred Percent Completion and/or getting Monica's sexiest outfits, as clothing is all you can get by exchanging medals...except for one seemingly-useless item, the Name Change Ticket. The purpose of the Ticket is deliberately downplayed, and most people don't bother wasting hard-earned medals on it. However, investing medals in one or two Tickets can result in extremely early acquisition of the game's strongest weapons. Once you have a Ticket, buy the cheapest, weakest weapon in the game, then use the Ticket to rename it. Changing its name to the exact name of another existing weapon transforms the renamed weapon into that weapon at its weakest stats. Thus, by the third chapter of the game, you can have the Grade Zero, Supernova, LOVE, Chronicle 2, Island King, or whichever terminal weapon tickles your fancy.
* The Name Change Ticket's game-breaking status is challenged only slightly by its ability to create only the base level of the weapon, with the lowest possible stats, whereas a terminal weapon synthesized all the way through the weapon crafting tree would inherit a plethora of stats and elemental affinities. However, even the basic stats of a terminal weapon are more than enough to deal with anything for many, many chapters to come, and by the time it starts showing its age it will have accrued enough levels and Synth Points that you can graft whatever Synth Spheres (stat boosters) you want anyway.
* In Divine Divinity the Scorpion trap skill was way overpowered. Sure, the actual scorpion traps themselves weighed a ton and took up most of your inventory space, but if you had your traps skill high enough, they dealt a ton of damage and were next to impossible to kill. All you needed to do was get near a boss, drop 10 - 20 scorpion traps, sit back, watch as they completely overwhelmed the boss, and wait for it to end.
* In Dragon Age the Arcane Warrior is pretty much totally invincible once you have Shimmering Shield. You barely need a party on the hardest difficulty with this spec, even the hardest bosses can be easily worn down by yourself.
* The bug with Shimmering Shield not draining mana like it was supposed to was patched, making Arcane Warrior tanks a little less ridiculous. A far more blatant example of this trope at work is the Mage spell Mana Clash, which drains enemy spellcasters' mana pools and does Spirit elemental damage (which few enemies have a resistance to) in proportion to the mana it drains. It is entirely possible to one shot even the strongest of enemy mages with this spell. The game itself seems to agree about how grossly unfair this spell is, seeing as enemy mages will never cast it on your party. There's a reason fandom refers to Mage Wardens as Easy Mode.
* Wanna talk about bitch-making Mage spells? Let's see...Crushing Prison which stuns enemies while dealing damage (and you're free to deal plenty more from your next attack), the room-clearing Storm of the Century (a combination of AOE's Tempest and Blizzard), and last but certainly not least, the Blood Magic spell Blood Wound, which boils the blood of all nearby enemies. Yup, another room-clearer, and one that makes all other damage spells parlor tricks in comparison. Some strategy guides actually advise against these spells, since they turn pretty much every battle into walks in the park.
* There's some even more devious spells that the game knows go together in a Game Breaking fashion, and even mention it in the spell descriptions. There's Sleep, Horror and Waking Nightmare, Horror causing damage to enemies if they fail a resistance check, and Waking Nightmare causing, among other things, enemies to stop attacking you at least (whether through a fear effect or a temporary alignment change), and turning on each other at worst, also requiring a resistance check. However, if you successfully cast the Sleep on them first, they automatically fail the resistance check. At this point, your choices are, kill them immediately, or sit back and watch them turn on each other. Pass the Popcorn, please.
* Death Hex and Death Cloud, when combined, change from "Critical Hits For Others" or "Damage Over Time" to "Die Bitch".
* Long Story Short, There's a reason why, In-Universe, Magic Users ruled the world and tried to take on the Maker.
* Sword and shield is also extremely powerful when stacked with dexterity, dodge + % and defense+ items. Making the tank nearly impossible to hit, add spell resistance from templar, enchanments, auto-health regen as well as awakening's broken carapace skill (First 15 sec of skill makes you immune to damage, the second half absorbs a percentage of damage that actually manages to land).
* A more general Game Breaker is the Traps Are A Girl's Best Friend glitch, which lets you sell sets of spring traps (which require one extremely cheap item that is sold in infinite amounts at a nearby merchant) for a huge markup and gives you a hundred XP per sale. If you have the patience, you can easily fill out all your skills and abilities, as well as amping up your stats to ridiculous levels. Granted, the enemies level up with you, but the skills you gain more than make up the difference.
* In a similar vein, once you have acquired the Dalish Elves' assistance, they ask for you to donate basic crafting ingredients. Like all donations to your forces, you get 10 xp for every item you donate. One of the items you can donate is elfroot, which you should already have plenty of and can get lots of for cheap at many merchannts...but what makes this not only useful but ridiculous is the fact that there is a single merchant in the base game that can sell you unlimited amounts of elfroot, in stacks of 99 (990 xp), for a pittance. It's Valathorn, the merchant...in the Dalish Elf camp. "You do not talk about Grey Warden Camp", anyone?
*
* In Awakening, Accuracy coupled with Aim, high dexterity and some rapid aim gear turns archery from the inferior rogue build (and rogues aren't that great to begin with) into having a crit rate of over 100% and tripling the damage you did before. What does this mean? You're oneshotting mooks at max attack speed with autoattack and are essentially untouchable. This allows you to even solo the hardest encounter in the game (The Harvester on Nightmare) with minimal difficulty. Which is good considering your allies for that mission are terrible and built wrong.
* From the Feastday Gifts DLC we have the Qunari Prayers for the Dead: an item that can be used over and over so as Sten in your party and conscious. It's effect? Bringing any fallen party members back to life. Very handy in some of the tougher boss fights. The real game breaking element is that you're invincible during the cutscene, and if you watch it all, the party is restored to max health and mana, so as long as Sten is alive, your party is essentially immortal. This can be cheesed to astonishing effect.
* The ingredients for making Potent Lyrium Potions are much cheaper than what you can sell them for, making this an extremely easy way to make money. Even better is that you can buy infinite amounts of three of the four ingredients from a single vendor.
* Essentially, the best party in Origins was three Arcane Warriors and a Rogue. Why? Because three mages is the most you can get and Rogues have a couple minor non-combat abilities that Mages do not have spells to emulate. Otherwise, Arcane Warriors do more damage than Rogues and take less damage than Warriors.
* It's quite easy, with the right build, for a Rogue to obtain a 95% chance to dodge. This is just as overpowered as it sounds, and makes most non-Mage enemies a joke.
* Getting back to Mage abilities, Mana Clash is an absolute beast when dealing with mage, demon, or abomination opponents, especially when empowered by its prerequisite Spell Might. It can usually take out entire rooms full of opponents in a single shot, which basically allows you to walk through the Circle Tower quest (where about 90% of your opponents will be vulnerable to it). It also does more damage to the victim if they have larger mana reserves, which means it allows you to make mincemeat of magic-wielding bosses like Caladrius, the Lower Ruins Arcane Horror, and Gaxkang (sometimes you can even kill them with a single shot if you use the aforementioned Spell Might). A lot of missions in the game become much, much easier if you bring along a Mage who can cast Mana Clash.
* Dragon Age 2: mages are now much more fragile than before, and since enemies have a tendency to spawn right next to you at the worst moments, they don't last long. Meanwhile, two-handed swordsmen are murder masters: in a game where enemies tend to cluster, a weapon with a nice wide swing is devastating, and the majority of the moves for a two handed sword user can be upgraded to do critical hits every time they connect, and strike a wide area. And with the skill Second Wind, you can speed up the cool down of your skills, and completely restore your stamina. And you can use it once a minute, or every 45 seconds once it's upgraded. With the proper build, the only reason you need a party with you is to heal you while you reduce every enemy in sight to red ruin.
* A dual wielding rogue with the dual weapon and Assassin specialization trees maxed out can easily dispatch boss-rank characters in two or three hits.
* A properly-specced archer Rogue gets critical hits for 250% damage close to 70% of the time, knocks back enemies on hits, and will one-shot any non-boss enemies.
* That's nothing. A properly built dual weapon rogue can score critical hits one hundred percent of the time. This is exactly as broken as it sounds.
* Blue Dragon has the Barrier Magic skill "Field Barrier". When this gets leveled up to its maximum(Field Barrier 3), you can cast it on the world map and literally kill all the low-level enemies by running into them. The tradeoff for this is that while killing the enemies this way gets you half of the SP(points you need to level up your Shadows) that fighting them normally would have, you don't get any EXP for your characters, making it mostly useful for leveling up your Shadows or making it through areas without having to try and navigate around the enemies you don't want to battle.
* The weapons received after successfully defeating the Doppelganger in one volume of the .hack//G.U. games will let you breeze through the next volume.
* By completing Sanjuro's sidequest in the second volume of the original .hack, you can receive the Blades of Bond. Despite being only a level 19 weapon, it has stats that are utterly absurd. It gives boosts to elemental attack and defense in every element, and these boosts are second only to the fourth volume's Infinity+1 Sword - and even then, there's barely a difference. It increases evasion - both physical and magical - by 10%, and that's before you factor in the boosts from your armor. It gives +25 to physical accuracy, which is just obscene - the only weapons that give higher boosts carry attack penalties, whereas the Blades of Bond have an attack stat among the best of all the weapons of its type in the second volume. Granted, it starts to fall behind in this area in the third and fourth volume - or would, if not for one of its skills being Ap Corv, which boosts attack power (read: the ONLY thing it starts to fall behind in). And another one of its skills is Thunder Dance, which makes very short work of the Specters. And to cap it all, it has a decent chance of healing you with every attack. To find weapons that compare favorably to the Blades of Bond, you have to look to level 90+ weapons generally found only after beating the final boss two games later.
* In a meta-example, the unique abilities the main characters gain in "The World" can be considered game breakers. I'd like to see someone beat Kite or Haseo in player-versus-players when they have access to weapons like the Twilight Bracelet and Skeith.
* Ash's secret Vandalier class upgrade in Vandal Hearts. Took some side-questing to obtain, but if you did the game became a walkover. Ridiculous stats aside, the Vandalier also had access to every spell and unlimited use of every item in the game. So you could nuke the entire map repeatedly, and when you ran out of MP just use the item which restores your entire party to full health and MP. The rest of your team is irrelevant at this point.
* Baten Kaitos Origins has an EX attack combo called The Apotheosis, which is so overwhelmingly powerful that it One Hit Kills every single enemy in the game from full health. Yes, even the Final Boss. Yes, even the Bonus Boss. All it requires to pull off is a powerful weapon of your choice, an MP Burst, and seven specific attack cards. Four of which you start the game with, and the other three of which are dropped into your lap as you progress.
* Think that's bad? Try Guillo's ultimate, Frigid Queen's Festival. Although not quite as powerful as The Apotheosis, it targets the entire enemy party. It's not impossible for an enemy to survive, but it typically deals so much damage that it might as well be. After one use of Frigid Queen's Festival, a couple weak attacks can easily pick off that Bonus Boss who just barely survived the hit.
* Heck, Aphelion Dustwake (the last piece of Frigid Queen's Festival) is a Game Breaker in and of itself. Nearly every enemy encounter can be ended instantly with that card, a weapon, and 4 MP. One of the game's mechanics involves a heartwing dash, which allows you to start battles above the normal 0 MP; the problem is that if it overflows, the enemy gets free hits on you. By manipulating the heartwing dash, you can start battles with 4 or 5 MP fairly easily with a little practice. Didn't draw that card? Just keep using Sagi and Milly's turns to keep discarding until you get it. Having problems working the heartwing dash? Get the hidden Quest Magnus Gena's Pinion, which prevents overflow (thus keeping you at 5 MP for essentially forever), and the game becomes an utter joke. Frigid Queen's Festival is only really needed for Flunky Bosses, or else just utter annihilation.
* There's plenty more in Origins, one notorious example being Mountain Apple abuse. Quest magnus are used to slightly adjust your characters' stats, and they affect the whole party. None of these are gamebreaking alone, especially as these are temporary boosts that only last as long as you're holding the items in your limited quest magnus space, and more powerful ones are significantly harder to get. Mountain Apples, however, raise your HP by five percent; this doesn't seem like much, but the problem is that you can get an infinite amount of Mountain Apples with next to no effort. Even taking the Cap on quest magnus into account, your HP becomes absurdly high, which allows you to completely neglect your armor rating, which in turn allows you to power up your weapons at a much faster rate than you would normally be able to - all of the Cannon, with none of the Glass. Combine this with the Book of Mana, a Game Breaker in its own right which completely heals your entire party for 1 MP, and things just get absurd.
* Deluxe Sushi from the original deserves a mention. It heals 3000 HP per use and has a 50% chance of reviving a fallen character. Through the game's Item Crafting system, it was possible to go to a low level area like Nunki Valley, load one character's deck up with the ingredients, and farm Deluxe Sushi for a while. If you give each character five or six Deluxe Sushi cards, you're unstoppable, since nothing in the game comes even close to doing that much damage. Just to top it off, the process for creating Deluxe Sushi involves the Deluxe Wasabi Root, which in and of itself is a powerful revival item.
* Beanlings in Mother 3 give absurd amounts of experience if you manage to defeat them. Note that Beanlings appear in areas randomly and always try to run from you, leaving a well-timed dash the perfect method for not only catching them, but getting them facing backwards. A good way to exploit this is in the Sunshine Forest after Tazmily jumps ahead three years with Lucas. As long as you get Boney to follow you, which not only gets you back any items left on him when he was travelling with Flint, as well as equipping yourself with the best equipment from Thomas' shop. Avoiding the immobile Grated Yammonsters, the Really Flying Mice and the Slitherhens are not too big of a problem. Eventually a Black Beanling will can be found, caught and fought. The Beanling isn't all too powerful and, if beaten, gives enough experience to raise Lucas to more than twice the level he started the chapter at. Add that there is a stash of stronger enemies further north, and you can have ass-kicking stats before even getting on the train.
* Also, Fresh Eggs. They can be bought for 40 DP. Left in your inventory for a while, they hatch into Chicks and then mature into Chickens, both of which do nothing but make room in your inventory when used. However, Chickens can be sold for 200 DP, making it your best method of making money early after the system works it's way into the game. Alternatively, the Fresh Eggs themselves heal 80 HP, compared to Bread Rolls that do only 60 HP. Problem is, they turn into the aforementioned farm fowl if not used. Fresh Milk heals 80 HP, but spoils into Rotten Milk if not used, which heals 10 HP. There's a special trick to Fresh Eggs that need only be discovered once to be abused. If you soak in a Hot Spring before the egg hatches, it "boils" into a Hot Spring Egg, which not only heals 100 HP, but DOESN'T SPOIL OR CHANGE. The coup de grace? The Tazmily Food Store sells Fresh Eggs, and the Kokori Hot Spring is only a quick dash from town. As a bonus, Slitherhens in the Sunshine Forest can drop Fresh Eggs for free, and aren't hard to kill from the start.
* If you are quick enough to avoid the enemies in chapter 4, you can just do the Hot spring egg trick at the Chimera Lab, a chicken that is nearby a hot spring gives you an egg, and after boiling it, you can get another one from it.
* In Legend of Dragoon, there are two super expensive armor pieces that knock down damage by around 90%, one for normal damage and one for magic. They are chest armor and helm, respectively, allowing for player characters to be virtually untouchable, as even high powered boss attacks do less than 200 damage on characters with ~4000 HP. Add on the rings that increase speed, cut all damage in half again, or regen 10% HP per turn, and you can beat the final boss without healing or blocking. Buying them either takes serious grinding or waiting until near the end of the game.
* In Suikoden II, it is possible to access the Knightdom of Matilda very early in the game through a glitch and recruit two strong characters. What makes it a game breaker is that completing the subquest to recruit them is going to eventually bump you up to the mid 30's. Keep in mind that at this point of the game, your level should be in the mid teen which makes the game much easier.
* Suikoden Tactics. One name stands above all. His name is Lazlo, the protagonist of Suikoden IV. Simply put, when you start a new game in Suikoden Tactics and load a data with Suikoden IV with Lazlo surviving, recruit him and send him out to the battlefield. You won't be disappointed that you even played Suikoden IV.
* This troper would argue that Yuber in Suikoden III fits under this, although you can only use him for a very small portion of the game after beating the regular story mode. Despite this, he is admittedly overpowered - he could destroy many groups of enemies just by himself, even though Luc and Sarah were dead..
* Millenia's Spellbinding Eye in Grandia II is easily the most broken move in the game. 100% chance of paralyzing ANYTHING in the entire game, including the final boss? Yeesh.
* Set up one character with the taunt ability so he/she is always attacked, then loading them up with defensive boosts, counter attack, and auto-regen effects. Then have the characte defend every turn. he/she will take so little damage that the regen effect heals it all. This ability is so effective that with this effect alone combined with a few heal rings it's possible to beat the final boss while underleveled without casting a single spell or using a special ability. just beat on him.
* In Po Po Lo Crois, focused attacks are an utter game breaker. When Pietro is hitting for maybe 40-80 damage with a melee in the first part of the game; a focused attack will hit for around 200. And that's within the first hour of gameplay! Naturally, a Let's Play of this shows how broken they are; with several bosses later in the game going down within a few rounds of Focused Attacks.
* Not to mention, if you have a multi hit move that's focused, you'll easily do more than any single-hitting move. Jilva Special, Axle Spin, Wind Cutter, and Ballistic are definite examples. (And part of why this troper highly recommends you to bring Jilva with you to the final bosses! Other than the fact that she's pretty flexible in the first place) Where White Knight's Aerial Slash will hit for maybe 500 damage and Jilva's Olden Dance will hit for around the same focused, Jilva Special and Ballistic will get for well over a thousand. Pretty good considering that bosses were pretty much made with this in mind, especially the final boss.
* In the first Golden Sun two of the Djinn (Granite and Flash) reduce damage dealt to the entire party by a certain percentage. Granite's isn't much (around 40% or so), but Flash reduces damage by a whopping 90% (of course, you get him near the end of the game). Once you have both, you can trivalize the remainder of the bosses (even the Bonus Boss) by simply having two characters repeatedly take turns using and setting the Djinn, severely reducing damage received, while having another character (usually Mia since she gets Wish naturally) blanket healing the party, with the last character (usally Ivan since Jupiter deals good damage against most of the endgame bosses) setting up for Summons.
* The second game adds Shade, another shield Djinn that reduces damage by around 60%.
* And again in Dark Dawn, with Bark (50%), Shell (60%) and Chasm (90%). That said, the number of Djinn screws has gone up as well, as if they expected you to utilize this against the various Bonus Bosses and planned around it.
* A more oblique version comes in the "jammer" Djinn (like Ground, Doldrum, and Ivy). Not much in themselves, but if you plan your turns around them, you can deny any attack that might royally screw the party over, like the aforementioned Djinn screws. Reducing That One Boss from three commands to two in a given round is always welcome.
* Dark Dawn also introduces two particular abilities that help destroy the main game. One of them is useless outside of it, but the other may just save your hide against the Bonus Bosses if used judiciously.
* Amiti learns the "Insight" Psynergy as part of the story, and its ability is to show you what field Psynergy works with what terrain feature. Needless to say, this ability breaks every puzzle in half, so only use it when you absolutely must (like the Capricorn room).
* Alternately, Sveta comes with the Beastform Psynergy, which grants a unique class for the duration of the effect. The downside is that she loses access to her Djinn while transformed, and one is locked into Recovery mode after each round until the end of combat or she runs out, at which point she returns to normal (Djinn Blast/Storm will expedite this, much to your chagrin). The upside is that she gets some physical attack Psynergy (which is always welcome compared to "spell" Psynergy), an on-demand hit-all, on-demand defense for the entire party, and some very absurd stat hikes. Unless the enemy is the final boss or one of the aforementioned bonus bosses, consider the entire enemy party raped.
* In Betrayal at Krondor, one could rest during the turn-based fights to gain 2 life points each turn. Resting outside of fights recharges the health much slower (and costs food). It is entirely possible to walk into a fight half-dead, "freeze" the enemy using a spell, then re-charge all characters and come out perfectly healthy of a fight one went into almost dead. Also makes life-potions seem redundant.
* Ogre Battle 64 had the Princess class. Princesses are lawful characters who use spellbooks. More importantly, when a princess is a leader, everyone gets an extra attack, so paladins get four attacks and priests get three chances to heal. You can see where this is going. * sigh* Too bad you only get one. Another game breaker is a strong air force, primarily hawkmen and their upgrades, but also flying monsters and angels. Then there are other lawful gamebreakers: Two priests, two paladins, and a lawful character or third paladin. Leia (not that Leia) and four freyas. Chaotic units have a few game breakers of their own: Black knights and liches.
* Tactics Ogre: Knights of Lodis has a few: Princesses here will increase a human's effectiveness. Beyond princesses, there are also ghosts, who can teleport. And use any equipment in the game. And liches, who are practically invulnerable. Finally, if you make a fire-elemental female, name her Deneb, and make her into a witch, you get Deneb, the witch<3, who can use summon magic. Angels, fairies, and gremlins are also overpowered. Really, it's a matter of choosing which overpowered character you want.
* The original Ogre Battle. Princess and Lich can work together in the same unit, and their combined might is enough to burn everything to the ground. On the other hand, due to how the Karma Meter works, you do not want to use a unit built like this to liberate towns unless you're angling for a bad ending.
* In The Witcher, the Igni Sign starts off as relatively subpar (very high endurance cost, very low damage). However, if leveled properly, it can become so ludicrously powerful that even bosses become piss easy to it. Combined with the Tiny Owl potion's ridiculous speed of endurance regeneration, near the end of the game you can simply use just that.
* In the sequel, the cake is taken by the Quen sign. It throws back enemies that hit you, combined with the right equipment it can absorb all damage at level TWO and even earlier it makes most of the game a cakewalk. Even the final boss is not immune.
* Quen got nerfed quite a bit in the 1.3 update.
* Also in the sequel, the ability to riposte during swordfights. Can be acquired as soon as the three main skill trees open, with the cost of a measly skill point. Before getting it, you're likely to spend more time dodging blows than dealing them. After you take this one, the combat dynamics change so drastically that almost every standard armed encounter turns into a cakewalk. It's actually quite ironic that it becomes available not long after the player has likely learnt how not to suck in combat without it.
* In Live a Live's final chapter, the Sundown Kid becomes insanely broken if you get his ultimate attack at level 16. It's a long-range, area-effect attack that more often than not hits everything for 999 damage. And that's even if you don't have his ultimate weapon. The only thing stopping from snapping the entire game's challenge cleanly in two is that he's a Glass Cannon with very low HP. Of course, that only means that he's best used as artillery.
* After stupenduous amounts of Level Grinding, beating seven kinds of snot out of various Bonus Bosses and resurfacing Like a Badass Out of Hell, all whilst enduring an already ATLUS Hard game, this LPer can finally declare: "Team Broken as fuck is assembled." Any encounter after gaining Masakados as well as two certain bonus demons will be reduced to a Curb Stomp Battle. Ask the Digital Devil Saga Protagonists.
* The Sword Expertise gem in Children of Mana. All you need to do to get it is buy or find a Sonic Wave gem (3000L, but you find loads of it) and a Mighty Defense gem (only 1000L). If you fuse those together (12000L which is a bit expensive) and you'll get Sword Expertise which gives you +8 Sword ATK, unleashes a shock wave on the third sword strike, doubles sword damage and is only a 2x1 gem. Sonic Wave is 2x1, Mighty Defense is 1x2 and Sword Expertise is infinitely more useful than both of those together. Even Poppen who's the mage character is unstoppable with Sword Expertise.
* Chrono Cross has two main ones. First off, there's a Bonus Boss, Dario, who, if fought normally, is incredibly difficult, and beating him nets you the Mastermune, arguably Serge's best weapon. However, due to a bit of Artificial Stupidity in his programming, it's possible to prevent him from ever attacking just by spamming the right kind of element every turn. This allows him to be beaten very early by sneaky players. Second, completing that fight allows an optional character, Glenn, to claim the legendary sword Einlanzer. From both worlds. The capacity to dual wield the Infinity+1 Sword makes him one of, if not the, most powerful characters in the game.
* Task Maker:
* Use "Other spell to invoke" and type in "Restart place" to do Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and you can break the game eight ways to Sunday.
* For instance, there's a Poison Potion (which greatly increases all your stats) hidden in the SE corner of Enitsirhc. Grab it, use it, use Restart Place, lather rinse repeat. This also works in the sequel Tomb of the TaskMaker, but the game asks you if you're sure first.
* Got a monster that's on your heels, about to kill you? Restart Place!
* Near a pile of treasure? Restart Place and you'll have more treasure!
* Just about any dungeon can be broken by using Ethereal Potion, which allows walking through walls. The creators even invoked this in Poet's Nightmare, placing a special stairway behind a wall that's only accessible by Ethereal Potion and leads straight to the goal. Also possible with Falling Wall scrolls in the sequel.
* Castle Hall (the first place you enter in the game after the Forced Tutorial) has catacombs that are normally hidden away until the final task, but a simple Ethereal Potion can allow early access to them. Since you get an Ethereal Potion in the tutorial level, you should be able to get at least the Vorpal Blade (second most-powerful sword) before the very strong monsters in the catacombs notice.
* Fierce Fold is composed almost entirely of force fields that have to be turned off to progress. If you can't figure out the pattern to switch them off, "headoff" will turn off any force field you face.
* Vision Cloak and X-Ray Ring both let you see through all walls. Combine one of these with a Grasp Distant Object spell, and vast piles of treasure (not to mention task objects) are now easily accessed.
* One version of the game accidentally shipped with a spell allowing the player to wish for any object at any time. Cue wishes for two Excaliburs, a bunch of Poison Potions (which boost all stats), an X-Ray Ring, a Food Ring, Boots o' Speed and a sack full of wands.
* The flash game Book of Mages: The Dark Times has the Dark Wood clan. While the other clans have some powerful abilities to their credit, the Dark Wood clan stands out for the fact that four out of its five exclusive abilities break the game almost single-handedly, never mind when actually combined with each other. To list them: 1.
* 2. 1.
* The Curse status condition. Every hit with this condition reduces the strength of your opponent by one. There are two reasons this is broken: first, in this game damage is done by multiple fairly weak attacks, and the damage reduction applies to each hit. Second, Curse can stack, to the point where even the endgame bosses can be reduced to the same strength as the trainees fought in the beginning of the game. And Curse never wears off. While spells to remove status conditions exist, they are extremely rare (and, until endgame, impractically costly), so the number of opponents who will do so can be counted on one hand. 3. 2.
* Increase Special. By paying a mere 20 hp, you can increase your much more important Special bar by 20 points, and this counts as a free action, meaning your opponent cannot do anything during this turn. The Special bar dictates how many of your spells you can cast. Thus, battles typically go thusly: Turn 1, increase Special. Turn 2, nail opponent with five more bolts than it is physically possible for them to have, all of which have the Curse status on them. Yes, five Curses that early on. Your opponent may now start weeping. 4. 3.
* Silence. Bear in mind that everyone in this game is a mage, and while Silence does allow them basic attacks and wears off after one turn, you'd be surprised what you can do in that amount of time, especially when you add more Curses into the mix. Or, if their strength is already at minimum, you can cast a Combined bolt. This is a basic attack usable by anyone that turns all of your multiple attacks into a single shot, weakened by each of your opponent's attacks that hit it; not broken by itself, but when combined with their minimized strength, they will take an absurd amount of damage, with nothing they can do about it. What's the cost of the Silence spell? 20 special points. 5. 4.
* Trade Life. Exactly What It Says on the Tin, exactly as broken as it sounds. The only limitation on this spell is that you need an almost full Special bar to cast it, but once again, Increase Special. Running low on health thanks to one Increase Special too many? Now they are. Fighting Witchthorn, or the Bonus Boss, with their absurd amount of HP? Well, wish them luck getting your new HP bar down.
*
* While not quite as bad as Curse + Silence, the Chaos Desert clan's Burning Bolts is capable of dealing absolutely insane damage due to the way it works. As mentioned above, damage is usually done by multiple fairly weak attacks in this game, but Burning Bolts throws that right out of the window by allowing these attacks to double the effects of the last attack that hit during that turn. What this means is that if each attack normally deals 10 damage (which is pretty easily attainable with boosting items), the first attack that hits deals the normal 10 damage...then the next one deals 20...then the next one deals 30, and so on. When you add in the fact that Chaos Desert gets 10 more hits than any other clan with the exception of Great Sea (and even then, only Watervine actually uses this defensive ability), and the fact that the Chaos Desert clan enchantment reduces the opponent's Special bar to make blocking these attacks even harder...well, consider the fact that a full-power Burning Bolts deals enough damage to kill That One Boss five times over, and the reason that enemy is That One Boss in the first place is because of their insane HP stat.
* Ice Land. 1.
* 2. 1.
* Freeze. The Ice Land mages absolutely cripple any mage who focuses on defense (except for Burning Hill, the quintessential anti-gamebreaker), because this enchantment reduces the number of defensive bolts the enemy can shoot; an ability that tends to make Great Sea and Poison Water mages cry. 3. 2.
* Freeze Attack, an admittedly-expensive ability that allows them to cancel their opponent's attack at will. 4. 3.
* For twenty special points, they can use Freeze Defend: a spell that allows them to attack their opponent without the possibility of any kind of defense. Though they're limited to a basic attack plus Freeze effect, this gives them ten shots of unopposed Freeze on an opponent. Which is very nasty combined with... 5. 4.
* Freeze Death. If their opponent has 20 freezes on him, they can lay down a One Hit KO effect. No resistance, no defense, nothing.
* As in its obvious inspiration, alchemy in Two Worlds is completely broken by the ability to make potions that boost your primary stats. The problem is compounded, however, in that these stat boosts are permanent, and in that the ingredients to make the potions have a 100% drop rate from common foes in certain areas. If you train alchemy to maximum and then make all the strength-boosting potions you get the ingredients for over the course of normal gameplay, it's possible to kill the final boss in two hits.
* The poison status condition from Epic Battle Fantasy 3. Poison in this game can stack; a level 1 poison isn't particularly noteworthy, but the poison damage is vastly increased for each consecutive level. By the time you reach a level 9 poison, you would have to spam Limit Breaks just to deal more damage in one turn than the poison is doing. One of Matt's earliest learnable skills is Nettle, which causes this condition, and if you level Nettle up to level 3, you can get them to a level 3 poison with one use of Nettle. And one of the earliest weapons you can find is the Black Fang, which boosts the power of Nettle. It Gets Worse; later on, you can teach Lance the Poison Gas move, which inflicts level 3 poison on all enemies, and can sometimes do it twice for a level 6, in one shot. The only balance is that some of the enemies are immune to it, including most of the later bosses and the Monoliths (and most of the smaller enemies can be killed quickly enough that the poison is not very useful against them).
* On the other hand, the final boss spends most of its time with poison absorb activated, so if you accidentally poison it, it will then usually be healing an equivalent amount of damage, making it virtually impossible to kill. Making matters worse, one item occasionally retaliates with poison against incoming attacks, and therefore must be removed for the final battle.
* Lance's Airstrike special. It deals a large amount of damage to a single enemy, with a 50% chance of inflicting that damage to the entire enemy party. Note that the "run" command is much more effective than it is in most RPGs; you can run from any battle in the game at any time and come back to that same fight later, albeit with the enemies fully healed. So have Lance move first, if Airstrike targets a single enemy, run away, walk to restore MP, come back to the battle, try again, and repeat until the enemy party gets blasted to death or near-death. If this wasn't broken enough, consider that Airstrike uses the rare Bomb element, which is the weak point of almost every Demonic Spider in the game. Then consider that Airstrike, at higher levels, gains a chance to replace its bomb with a much bigger one that deals almost double damage...and those same "run and return" shenanigans become even more valuable. And if that's somehow not enough, you can have Natalie move first, use her Bless white magic to increase Lance's damage by 70%, and...
* Tons in The Reconstruction:
* Qualstio's "Stifling Heat" passive skill, which raises the chance of Flame Burst inflicting Disable to 100%. Makes bosses laughably easy due to the game's aversion of Contractual Boss Immunity. Unless you do a ridiculous amount of skill point grinding, though, you won't be able to get it until very late in the game.
* Santes, Santes, Santes. She has both potent healing spells and one of the, if not the, most powerful direct damage spell in the entire game. One of her early passive abilities grants her a significant Agility boost, too, so she can attack and heal pretty quickly. It's unlikely you'll ever want to remove her from your party throughout the game's entire duration.
* The full-party buff spells (Rising Morale, Blessing of Wit, and Refreshment) are extremely useful as well, due to the fact that they effectively regenerate both Mana and Hit Points. They are balanced out somewhat by the fact that the party members who have said skills tend to be weaker or less useful than other party members, however.
* Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk 2 has the combination of Neptune with Nepgear as her support. Nepgear as a support can give the front line party member the ability to be able to break the damage cap. Neptune also has a Combination Attack with Nepgear and with some status buffs to increase Neptune's strength, you can easily own any boss with just two to three hits. For bonus points, have a lot of shares to Planeptune for a lot of damage. Just don't do this if you're going on the Ruling End.
* Rune Factory 3 has...oil. Plain old oil that can be thrown at monsters to make them receive triple damage from fire attacks. Couple it with a fire-element weapon or the already nigh-game breaking Explosion spell and pretty much any boss can be steamrolled Also, both the oil and fire spells can be accessed pretty much at the start of the game.
* In Alpha Protocol, pistols have the Chain Shot ability. It slows time to a crawl and let's you select up to six targets after which up to six shots will be fired instantly, with perfect precision and there is nothing stopping the player from aiming all six of those shots at a boss's head, killing most of them with just one use of the skill.
* Sonny 2 has the multi-buff Withdrawal strategy. By maxing out the move Withdrawal, using all three of the Biological class' Super Modes at once, and hitting the enemy with Agile Exposure to increase the damage they take, Withdrawal will do absolutely ludicrous damage. See here for this in action; that boss that was taken out in one hit of Withdrawal? That's the game's Bonus Boss.
* Silva Saga has a 3 party system (with 4 members each); Heroes, Mercenaries and Idols. Idols are strictly magic only, Mercenaries rely only on brute strength and Heroes--being the most balanced--are able to use both. What really separates the Mercenaries and Idols from the Heroes is that after every battle they heal FULL HP and MP (where-as Heroes do not).
* During battle, you can switch between any of the 3 parties at any time. You have complete control of the Heroes (items, magic, defend, etc) while Mercenaries and Idols just spam their only attacks without any control other than to switch to a different party. This is where breaking the game comes in; you can send out the Mercenaries/Idols to fight, wait until the 3rd member of the party has attacked then quickly cancel out the rest of your turn. Your turn will now be reset, and you'll be brought back to choosing which party you want to fight with BUT all damage dealt to the enemy just before-hand will NOT be reset. You can repeat this for as long as you want and the enemy won't be able to have a single turn against you (but only if your agility is higher than the enemy, otherwise the enemy will be the first to attack).
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