Game Breaker/Other Media

Game Breakers that don't fit into any of the other categories.

Anime and Manga
"Chisame: This guy is so broken it's not even funny!"
 * Yu-Gi-Oh!: Noah's deck master Shinato's Ark is this all the way. First, whenever an opponent attacks Noah directly, he gets to special summon a monster in the Graveyard to block the attack, and can do this once for each monster in the Graveyard. Second, he can outright remove all the monsters in both Graveyards from play to gain 500 Life Points for each one. And then when the Ark is destroyed, Shinato itself is summoned. Whenever Shinato destroys a monster, the opponent's Life Points are cut in half and Noah's points increase by the same amount. When the opponent takes battle damage, Noah gains the same amount of points they lost. Whenever Shinato would be destroyed it moves back off the field into the Deck Master position, so it effectively cannot be destroyed. Oh, and it has 3300 ATK points. No wonder Noah became the first duelist in the show to get over 10,000 Life Points.
 * Yugi is only able to defeat it by
 * JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
 * Mahou Sensei Negima does a Shout-Out to this concept with Jack Rakan, who's so absurdly powerful that the other characters start referring to him as broken.


 * In a similar instance to Jack Rakan, Priscilla from Claymore is broken enough that she can probably thrash an Eldritch Abomination among Eldritch Abominations. Against regular enemies, she even states she finds it difficult to go easy enough to avoid killing them.
 * Aizen Sousuke from Bleach is referred to as "Captain Broken" by fans thanks to his absolutely ridiculous ability to completely control the senses of anyone who sees him release his sword even once. And that's one of his low-level abilities. And, of course, he also managed to.
 * He also manages to damn near kill a fellow captain using a high-power hado (destructive art) without performing the full incantation, which means that the technique was 1/3 its normal strength.
 * Don't even mention
 * Shakugan no Shana: On the Comic Book Rumbles board, Shana's fuzetsu is considered a game breaker, as it allows her to essentially render any character not immune to it helpless.
 * There are debatedly many Devil Fruits in One Piece which can be considered this, but none more so than Blackbeard's Yami Yami no Mi (Dark Dark Fruit). In rough order, it gives the user control over gravity (i.e. letting the darkness suck in absolutely anything), allows them to cancel out other Devil Fruit abilities, and most recently,  Needless to say, someone lucked out in the Superpower Lottery.
 * And even that has it's weakness, being that it inverses the standard rule of Logia types - instead of being able to dodge all attacks (excluding maybe one polar-opposite element), he can't dodge anything.
 * In the Angelic Layer manga, Blanche's Hyper Mode is considered a Game Breaker. Oddly enough, she's allowed to compete in national Angelic Layer tournaments and use the ability, and the game's creator is not enraged, but rather, fascinated by it.
 * Future GPX Cyber Formula: Hayato's Lifting Turn, in which, with v-Asurada AKF-0's effect fans, elevates the car and floats around the turn. It can also float around its opponents, giving Hayato tremendous advantage.
 * The Mangekyo Sharingan and Rinnegan from Naruto can both be considered Game Breakers. Also recently shown
 * Naruto's Nine-Tailed Chakra Mode. Too many examples to list...
 * As for, special mention goes to  , who has both the sharingan and rinnegan, as well as
 * In A Certain Magical Index, Accelerator's esper ability is pretty much a total Game Breaker. He can control the vector values of anything he touches. He can increase/decrease the speed, change the direction and gravity of where it goes and control how much force feedback it can cause. Including his own body. He just has to touch you to cause severe harm to your innards. And woe betide anyone who is or gets wounded in a fight against him. In that case he will touch your wound, making contact with your blood. Then he'll just reverse the flow of the blood circulation, killing you in a very horrible way. And to top the whole thing: his powers are automatic so anything that tries to hit him hits back to where it came from. HARD. When a character can theoretically fly and survive a nuclear bomb dropped directly on him without breaking a sweat, you know you don't want to oppose him...
 * You think that's a Game Breaker? Later volumes in the Light Novel introduce even more powerful characters than Accelerator, such as Fiamma of the Right, whom Touma even describes as an RPG Character with an I WIN command! Touma himself skirts the line closely, since in a world full of magical powers and supernatural abilities, a right hand that essentially kills all other abilities is the Game Breaker.
 * How crazy is this series? Fiamma ... and he's still only the fourth-most powerful character in the thing.
 * Kazuya Aoi, the protagonist of the manga Freezing, has his Advance Freezing that can freeze fighters even in Pandora Mode to actually be able to let Satellizer hit her opponents. Unfortunately, this also means that other Pandora users gun for him first.
 * Kenshin's master Hiko Seijurou from Rurouni Kenshin was described by his creator as being this; he has an extremely powerful sword style and the physical capability to use it fully and could probably beat every villain in the series before lunch if he felt so inclined. He never does, though- he was also designed to be extremely anti-social so that he almost never gets involved, preventing the series from being really short.
 * In the Gundam franchise, the Turn A and Turn X completely overpower anything else in the series. Here's a partial list of their abilities: self-repair via nanomachines, teleportation, thrusters equal in strength to a battleship's, bending light to briefly turn invisible, I-fields that can even block kinetic weaponry, and, of course, the infamous "Moonlight Butterfly", which knocked Earth back into the stone age in one fell swoop. These mobile suits were designed for the explicit purpose of interstellar warfare, each expected to take on the military forces of an entire planet and win. All this from an ostensibly Real Robot series.

Comic Books

 * The Flash or any other character with Super Speed can essentially render any character without super speed helpless.
 * Darkseid has Omega Beams that cannot be avoided or survived. If he can see you, he can kill you, and there is nothing you can do about it. Naturally most of his defeats involve their effectiveness being massively downplayed, or he just flat-out forgets that he has them.

Literature

 * In Mistborn the two primary magic systems are allomancy (where small pieces of particular metals are swallowed and then "burned" to grant particular superhuman powers) and feruchemy (where one can store up one's own attributes in pieces of metal and tap into them later- for example, becoming very weak and frail for a time lets you store the energy to gain Super Strength at a later time). For the most part, the two systems are Mutually Exclusive Magic- except for the Lord Ruler, who was both an allomancer and a feruchemist, meaning that he could swallow and burn metals in which he'd stored his own qualities, giving him access to insane amounts of power that no-one else in the series could match.

Live-Action TV

 * The spartan from Deadliest Warrior has a game breaker, in the form of his big ass shield. In both his fights, against a ninja, and a samurai respectively, he never has to do much besides let his enemy tire themselves out by fruitlessly whacking at his shield, then he'll move in for the kill.

New Media

 * In the parodic Let's Play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Special Edition, playing as Knuckles the Echidna makes any level a cakewalk. In addition to gliding and climbing walls, he can jump really high (as in, high enough skip entire levels in a single bound or to almost leave Mobius' atmosphere) and he can summon artillery support to take out Robotnik in a single shot.
 * Alluded to in the title of PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun.

Tabletop Games

 * Subverted in Magi-Nation. A power gem could be bought for 8 animite and sold for 12 animite. However, while animite is the currency of the realm, you never need to buy items, as you can recover health naturally, and you need infused animite anyways to forge rings. Basically, its a game breaker in the most technical sense that you need animite, but you don't need it that badly.

Video Games

 * The NES version of Monopoly allows the player to make offers on AI players' property, which the AI will accept a certain percent of the time depending on how high the offer is. However, since there's no limit to how many times an offer can be made per turn, the player can repeatedly offer an extremely low amount for a property and the AI will eventually agree. Effectively, this means the player can take over the entire board with ease.

Web Comics

 * The cast of Adventurers!, which is set in an RPG Mechanics Verse, have found and exploited a few of these.
 * Drowtales - The fae, especially the drowolath/drowussu/vanir (light elves). Drowtales is not a setting that is aimed to be balanced in terms of power between factions and species. Period. The humanoid fae are not only dominant in terms of power compared to other species who can't use mana, they are also unbalanced (in terms of gaming) within their own species. It is mentioned in the immortality podcast that very old dokkalfar or drow can reach a point where they are so powerful that they could literally wipe out a small army (drow size army, granted) of 'normal'/young (60-200 y.o.) fae. Waes'oloth, the Beldrobbaen Ill'haress is the example used. Of course, by that time their aura has grown so huge/dense that they literally need a whole clan or even city to sustain their bodies in a prime condition. This is why Diva's 'ordinary' mana blast blew an entire mutlistory building down. Within the city of Chel she had sufficient mana to fuel her attacks to nearly godlike power levels. This disparity in power, both in relation to other species and within their own species, is what makes the fae dominant. Only their comparative absence from the surface for a millennium has allowed the goblin races (halmes, kotorcs, ferals, naga) to become dominant there. A dominance that can be wiped away if the fae (drow or vanir in this case) makes a concentrated effort to do so. (Luckily for the goblins, so far they seem to prefer trade and limited raids.) It is not balanced, it is not fair and it might rub people the wrong way but it is the fait accompli in the Drowtales setting.

Western Animation

 * When Phineas and Ferb create a virtual reality game, Candace gets sucked in, with a Modesty Towel and more important to the trope a hairdryer reducing the use of "jumping and ducking."
 * In ReBoot Bob's Glitch lets him be a cheating bastard in every game he's in. Then there was the one time he (mistakenly) brings a bomb into a racing game, and the explosion crashes the game. And the one time Matrix pulled out his Gun, in a Golf Game.

Real Life

 * Sports are not immune from their own game breakers.
 * In baseball, the bunt used to be a game breaker as it allowed a hitter to take as many pitches as he wanted, able to stand there and bunt off every pitch until he saw one that he wanted to hit. As a result, the rules were changed so that a bunt foul with two strikes would count as a strike out, preventing the bunt from being abused.
 * Another famous baseball game breaker: since a batter's strike zone is dependent on his height, you might have wondered "so why don't they just send midgets to hit?" In 1951, the St. Louis Browns (now Baltimore Orioles) did just that; they signed a midget to a contract and sent him to hit, and when he was (naturally) walked, removed him for a pinch runner. When the commissioner's office found out, they promptly invalidated the contract and mandated that all contracts in the future be approved by the league. No word on whether or not the Browns (one of the worst teams in baseball in this era) planned to play a team of nine midgets and therefore score a theoretically infinite number of runs.
 * Basketball used to have a game breaker of its own. It used to be possible to get a lead in the game, then literally sit on the ball, forcing the other team to foul, hoping that the player would miss the free throws in order to get the ball back and have a chance of scoring. To solve this problem, Danny Biasone created the shot clock, requiring a team to take a shot within 24 seconds or lose possession of the ball. This addition radically changed the way that game was played, making old versions of the game almost unrecognizable today.
 * In (American) Football, the "Flying Wedge" is a very effective formation that tends to result in a lot of injuries, which is why it's been banned.
 * The Porsche 917 was such a good race car that the Le Mans organizers rewrote the rules after the 1970 season to ban it.
 * Pog has 2. One, Unoffical slammers were often larger and thicker than official Slammers, making it much easier to score if you were using then, for no real drawback. A much better one was to simply throw the slammer at the SIDE of the pile, which could often knock over more than half of the Pogs on turn 1, rendering the game unwinnable for anyone else.

UNKNOWN

 * In Mythic Quest, the main character's Shadow Sword is so powerful it is often accused of being a hack in that video game by other characters. All the Shadow Spells fall under this, usually ending up in one hit KO territory.
 * MOD: The only work named "Mythic Quest" that I can find in a web search is a 2020 streaming TV series, but this example was in the copy of the page forked from TV Tropes in 2012. What medium is this work from?