Disc One Nuke

A minor form of munchkining, wherein a player exploits the ability to gain a powerful item or weapon early in the game. This allows the player to rush through the first (presumably tedious) quarter or so of the game without major challenges. There are a few ways to do this, many involving patient use of the reset button and quick access to a save point:


 * Attack a relatively strong enemy near a restore/save point in the hopes it Randomly Drops a useful item to use or sell.
 * Steal equipment from a temporary party member (So Long and Thanks For All the Gear in reverse).
 * Abuse a game's Item Crafting mode.
 * Grind early mini-games as much as possible so that their (typically low) prize money adds up enough to swap for an item hiding behind a Cash Gate.
 * Having the creator "encourage" buying a previous game to automatically obtain that item from the previous game.
 * Level grind and combine for hours to get the best Mon.

More dishonestly, you can outright cheat with various popular "all items" codes, as many of these items can be (patiently) used to achieve the effects of other codes that may wreck your game by screwing with Event Flags.

Depending on the game, this may be a form of Sequence Breaking, since many adventure games rely on the logical order of obtainable equipment or abilities (to reach the boss you need the grappling hook, found across the lake for which you need the flippers, found behind the boulder for which you need the bombs, etc. all the way back to you at the very beginning with nothing but your wooden stick sword and good intentions) to maintain the game's geographical and plot linearity. The "Breaking" part of the term is a deliberate cautionary word choice, since doing this in some titles can cause the game to crash entirely and necessitate a complete restart, sometimes many hours of play after the sequence is initially broken.

Distinct from a Game Breaker in that it's usually not enough to carry you through the entire game.

Level Grinding can theoretically get you to this point, but in most games it would take so ludicrously long that it's way more tedious than just getting on with the game. There are plenty of Disc One Nukes that exploit some aspect of the game to make grinding way more lucrative than it should be, however.

New Game+ is a form of this that requires you to complete the game without it first.

Compare Magikarp Power. Last-Disc Magic is the inverse of this. See also Peninsula of Power Leveling, where you can gain experience early on rather than items or equipment.

Ultima

 * In Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, if one created a thief character and through racial and point allocations increased your Dexterity to a high level, one could obtain the two most powerful pieces of equipment in the game, the Reflect Suit and the Phazor, by attempting to steal from the armor and weapon shops of any store (Even if they weren't purchasable at the time), thus obtaining a sizable amount of money (By selling their own goods back to them) and end up with the most powerful gear before you even fight your first creature or enter your first dungeon.
 * In Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, if the player knows where to get the flying carpet, they can get 5 skull keys, that can be used open any magically locked door in the game, for 100 gold from a NPC. Normally this NPC only has the 5 skull keys to sell, but by exploiting a bug in the game, the player can keep on buying the skull keys indefinitely (assuming they have the money). The keys can be used to break into the storeroom in the basement of Castle British and stealing all kinds of good equipment. Since the chests "respawn" every time the Castle is reloaded, the player can somewhat easily get very good equipment and tons of money. This does play havoc on the party's Karma, though. But this is easily fixable by donating money to the shrines.
 * In Ultima VII: The Black Gate, if you start the game from the command line with "ultima ABCD[Alt]255" (hold down [Alt] and press 255) and you will get a cheat menu.
 * There is a house southwest of Trinsic, the starting town, you can line up crates to form a stair to the rooftop, if you go behind the chimney and them south, you will end up on The Cheat Room. It has 8 suits of Magic Armor, 2 Death Scythes, a Juggernaut Hammer, a Bird (it's a weapon), 2 Magic Axes, lots of Magic Rings, a Spell Book with all the Spells, 1000 Gold, 100 Lockpicks, 100 of each Reagent, a Purple Wand, three Prisms and a Hoe of Destruction. There are also teleporters to most all of the major locations in the game plot as well as nearly every item critical to finishing the game.
 * If you you know the way, you can get the Magic Carpet, which is not only free, but also allows you to travel almost anywhere in right after getting in Britain, the third city in the game.
 * You can also get the Hoe of Destruction, the second best weapon in the game, right after getting in Britain.
 * The expansion, Ultima VII: Forge of Virtue, containins a dungeon whose payoff is the Black Sword, a weapon far more powerful than any in the original game, as well as boosting the main character's stats to the maximum (twice the maximum in the case of the Strength stat). Although the main character doesn't discover how to find the new area until about halfway through the main game, if the player knows where it is they can access it almost immediately.
 * In the Test of Love, flip the switch next to the Stone of Castambre. Then go back into the caves to the north. A secret passage will have opened that leads to a room with a Death Scythe, 9 Glass Swords and a Firedoom Staff.

Final Fantasy

 * Final Fantasy II offered a Disc One Nuke in the form of the Captains, enemies which show up as mid-late-game mooks, stationed at Fynn throughout most of the game. Once Minwu was acquired, crafty players could down Captains with liberal application of offensive magic and receive the Flame Bow, which applies Fire effects to physical attacks, and the Toad Tome, which could effectively one-hit kill nearly anything in the rest of the game, including some bosses.
 * In Final Fantasy III (at least in the NES Version) it's possible to get the very best Gear after you arrive at the first village in the game. The glitch required to abuse is rather tedious, but even getting the best gear for just one of your four characters makes the whole game incredibly easy to finish.
 * Final Fantasy VI:
 * Gau is a character built around the concept of a Disc One Nuke. He mimics the attack of monsters, letting him use level two magic long before your other party members even begin to learn first level magic, and from there until the second half of the game can usually consistently stay one-step ahead of the abilities of the rest of the party. The only catch is the game doesn't tell you which monsters teach him which attacks, and finding a specific monster to teach him a specific attack can take hours.
 * Edgar joins the party with the Auto-Crossbow, which lets him attack all enemies at once, doing more damage than a normal attack and ignoring row. Once Edgar joins pretty much every random encounter up until Zozo can be ended in a single round.
 * Once you get to Zozo, you can do a sidequest to get him a friggin' CHAINSAW that's not only more powerful than his regular melee attack but has a 1/4 chance of scoring a One-Hit Kill. This is balanced by the fact that, later in the game, pretty much every enemy is immune to Instant Death, meaning the chainsaw is just a 3/4 chance of doing extra damage with a 1/4 chance of doing no damage.
 * In the very beginning, when the Moogles help Locke rescue Terra in the caves of Narshe, you can unequip Mog for some decent equipment that will last you through a fair bit of the early game. (He doesn't need the equipment for his boss battle since dancing has the potential to end it in one round.)
 * The Fixed Dice are something of a Disc Two nuke. Immediately after getting the airship in the ruined world, your 3-4 person party can sprint into Kefka's tower and get this incredibly powerful weapon, assuming they don't randomly encounter any enemies that can't be run away from. Doing so makes Setzer your most powerful fighter pretty much until you decide to do Kefka's tower (the final dungeon) for real.
 * You can also get Mog from Narshe first and do the raid without any random encounter risks since you get his Moogle Charm which has the "No Encounters" power. This is still practically in the beginning of World of Ruin.
 * In Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, Bio. In any party with a Black Magic spellcaster, this one spell is instant death for enemy parties. Why? Well, for one thing, it's literally instant—unlike every other spell in the game, it has no casting time. For another, it's stronger than the mid-level elemental spells, which are all most of your casters will have access to during their chapters (only Golbez and Fusoya have access to the best elemental spells initially). It's non-elemental, so nothing resists or absorbs it, and as an added bonus, it inflicts Sap, which most enemies and some bosses aren't immune to. (It's less this in the original Final Fantasy IV, where access to it is fairly limited before the -ga spells become available.)
 * In Final Fantasy V there are multiple such things. First is the blue magic Death Claw, which lowers an enemy's HP to a single digit and paralyzes it. Many bosses aren't immune to it, and that spell can be learned from two fairly early bosses.
 * Then there's the Barehanded ability. This Level 2 skill from the Monk class gives any class who equips it the power of a Monk when fighting unarmed. Give this to your mage, and suddenly the wizards aren't squishy no more.
 * In Final Fantasy VII, if you're patient, loaded with cash, and very lucky, you can grind through the Battle Arena and get the Omnislash item on Disc 1, just before the Temple of the Ancients. Bear in mind, you're attempting this without the Ribbon, which renders you vulnerable to many of the Arena's more sadistic reels. Level Grinding is PARADISE next to the hell this process entails, and the sheer irritation and maniacal HATE it engenders is enough to make it a Bragging Rights Reward as well. After getting the Omnislash, leveling Cloud's limit is easy by comparison. Hop off on the part of the Mideel area you can reach and battle your weaselly guts out, you masochistic champion.
 * Gaining limit breaks is a matter of both enemy kills and how often you use a limit break. Making sure a given character gets all the kills can get them their level 3 limit breaks very early on. Aeris's invulnerability limit break plus the Enemy Skill Materia can let you learn Beta from the Midgar Zolom early on, making most of the early game a joke.
 * Getting Beta from the Zolom is even easier than that, and can be done as soon as you reach the swamp. Elemental + Fire Materia on the armour, get everyone in the back row, put everyone on Sadness with Tranquilizers, Poison the Zolom to add damage and he'll be chucking Beta down in no time. Some luck involved in not having the Enemy Skill Materia guy get tail-whipped out of the fight. Once learned, throw it right back at the Zolom to finish it off and proceed to nuke that first disc.
 * As soon as you get the buggy, drive around in the desert until you encounter a Harpy, and learn Aqualung from them (You might have to get Mighty Guard to survive it, but that's no biggie - the Beach Plugs on the nearby beaches know it). Aqualung will kill practically every mob in a single shot from there to the end of disc one.
 * The Enemy Skill materia is a disc one nuke in itself. If you know what you're doing, you can get Beta, Trine, Aqualung, Big Guard, and White Winds on one before the end of the first disc.
 * The Chocobuckle skill from wild chocobos count if you're playing the original Japanese version. It's obtained when Beta is available and cost only 3 MP. The damage is equal to the number of times escaped multiplied by the caster's level. By escaping many times, you can easily do four-digit damage before you reach Junon. Being a Game Breaker, later releases nerfed it by making the damage equal to the number of times escaped.
 * Barret and Cloud's limit breaks can be obtained in the starting area. It is just a matter of patience. Soldiers will eventually drop potions to heal you.
 * Cloud's level 3 limit break Meteorain (which getting is just a matter of killing 300 or so enemies) fires 6 shots doing 1.5x normal damage at random targets. Powerful against groups of mooks, but catastrophic when you're only fighting one enemy, such as a boss. Even the "hard" disc 1 bosses like Lost Number and Demon's Gate can go down in one hit.
 * Get the Big Guard Enemy Skill from the enemies along the beach near Costa del Sol. It puts Haste, Barrier, and Magic Barrier on your entire team, much earlier than the Time and Barrier materias become available, and saves you the necessary level grinding to get those materia up to par as well.
 * Final Fantasy VIII, creative use of the card game and a card-to-item converting ability (along with various item-to-item converters and item-to-spell converters) could get you most of the powerful spells and even the ultimate weapons before the end of disk one. This, though, literally takes hours, almost as long as it would take to get them "honestly". Many players did it for the pure joy of defeating even the end-of-disk boss in one move.
 * You can quickly grind out Siren's L-Mag RF (which barely takes twenty minutes of random battles) and spend your first couple of SeeD paychecks on Tents and Cabins, which refine into Curagas. It's really easy to have 3000+ max HP on one of your characters after the second dungeon. Then, keep your characters with 3000+ max HP in the 500-900 HP range (at least during Disc 1). This will allow them to use their Limit Break attacks frequently while still leaving them with enough life to survive most enemy attacks.
 * On the topic of junctions, as soon as Attack-J becomes available and spells like Death or Break can become stockable, your characters can OHKO any non-boss enemy susceptible to those spells. Since the chance of the added effect is dependent on the number of spells you have stocked, stocking 100 of each (and never casting them) translates into a Death or Petrify chance of over 90% per attack. This is extremely useful for grinding and taking out enemies that are many levels above your party. The only danger is if your characters become confused, you have a very high chance to game over.
 * The PC port included a separately opened mini-game (actually a port of the Japanese Pocketstation mini-game) that would play itself (though you could also play actively). If you let it run for a few days, then you'd have a buttload of items. Then you could open the main game and transfer those items, which included stuff you couldn't even find in the main game (like the Ribbon ability, and the Mog summon). And if you'd copied the savefile before transferring, you could abuse this to the absolute extreme.
 * With enough patience and leveling, one can gain 300 Water Spells as early as Pre-Fire Cavern to junction to Strength in Disk 1. Before the higher-end spells come into play, Water is the absolute best Damage junction available during Disk 1 and you're more than capable of killing any standard enemies you face.
 * With about three hours work, you can get Squall's second best weapon before leaving Balamb. The cards needed are all held by the more difficult card players within Garden. The other characters cant get anywhere near as huge of a boost.
 * It is also possible in Final Fantasy IX to net nearly every character's best or second-best weapons by abusing the Chocobo Hot-and-Cold digging side-quest. If you abuse it enough to gain the flying chocobo you can even enter other continents prematurely which causes the game to bug out and skip a large chunk of the plot. This was fixed in the greatest hits version of the game.
 * And another Blue Magic spell does a guaranteed 9999 damage if your HP is 1. This is still a one-hit kill on bosses well into the second disk.
 * And if you grind patiently at the earliest opportunity you can gain enough magic points for Garnet to be able to use her monster summoning abilities, a few discs before the ordeal where she actually learns to summon according to the plot.
 * There's a Bonus Boss in Alexandria Castle's library, Tantarian. If you beat this Boss, you will be rewarded with the Running Shoes, an accessory that teaches Auto-Haste status on your party. It's possible to fight Tantarian as early as Disc 2, although he would certainly be a challenge then.
 * In Final Fantasy X, if you invest enough in O'aka's store, you can obtain several weapons with the "Stone Touch" ability as early as the Mi'ihen Highroad. It doesn't even matter whether the weapon in question is usable by a damage dealer (can be Lulu's doll or Yuna's staff). With a 30% chance to petrify virtually every non-boss enemy from that point onward, random encounters and grinding become absurdly easy.
 * If you're patient, by the time you leave Besaid you can abuse the sphere grid to the point where you can have Lulu and Yuna's Ga level spells which basically allows you to one shot or heal completely in every standard enemy encounter until at least half way through the game. You can also get hold of Tidus's Blitz Ace Overdrive by hitting the Besaid mooks 70 times with his regular limit breaks - something that's child's play once you replace his stoic default setting (which increases the Overdrive gauge every time he takes damage) with Warrior (which increases every time he inflicts damage.)
 * In Final Fantasy X-2, there is one point in the game where a merchant shows up on your home base for a while. Due to a mechanic with him alone, if you have a half-decent startup amount of cash, you can cause him to be the cheapest merchant in the game simply by buying as many Potions from him as possible and selling them back ad nauseum. This doesn't sound like much, but in his final state after doing this enough the items he sells are cheaper than he'll buy them back for. Result is instant infinite gil. The problem is that you can only do this at a specific point about halfway through the game.
 * Crossing over with Peninsula of Power Leveling, there's Shell Shockers in the dry plains, accessible as soon as you get control of your Global Airship (which in this game is as soon as you finish the prologue). While their 4,700 HP is intimidating, their only attack reduces HP by a fixed percent, meaning it can't kill you, yet it still gives a ton of experience. Taking out even one of these is enough to make the first chapters noticeably easier.
 * Final Fantasy XII allows many opportunities for this, through its minor aversions of the Sorting Algorithm of Evil which place certain high-level enemies in early areas of the game. By beating up on these enemies during the time at the start of the game when the player only has Vaan, one can take advantage of Leaked Experience to power up all the other characters before even getting them. This enables a determined player to raise their characters to the levels they'd normally be at game's end in just a few hours. A bit later in the game, provided one has a strategy guide, one can enter the Necrohol of Nabudis to obtain the game's most powerful weapon about a fourth of the way through the main storyline.
 * The License Point system in Final Fantasy XII is a bit of a Disc One Nuke, although its effects diminish the further you go in the game. It's a board, somewhat reminiscent of FFX's sphere grid, which is filled with "licenses" for all of the game's equipment, skills, and magic, as well as a section dedicated to power ups for the character that has the license. Increased attack power, extra HP, significantly less wait time between turns, etc. The important difference between this and the sphere grid is that it isn't a straight line; as long as an adjacent square is activated, you can activate any square on the board whenever you want, provided you have the license points necessary. The game keeps you from getting any of the more powerful spells and equipment too early on, since you have to BUY them in a store as well as acquire the license, but there's no such restriction on the so-called Augment licenses. Add that on to the fact that every enemy in the game gives at least one license point, regardless level, and it is possible to grind wolves and cockatrices in the beginning of the game, and before reaching level 10, have exactly 1000 more HP than you're supposed to, have three times your base MP, cast an 8-MP spell with an actual cost of 5, and fly through many of the game's first bosses.
 * The powerful Quickening attacks are available as soon as you buy them from the License Board. Without too much grinding you can have all 3 Quickenings for each character before Raithwall Tomb. You can then use Quickening chains to curb-stomp bosses well into the Act 2.
 * With three Quickenings each, even That One Boss opponents like the Elder Wyrm and Tiamat rapidly dissolve in an orgiastic CGI display that resembles an orbital strike more than a sword fight.
 * Along the same lines as the Zodiac Spear is the Arcturus, the second most powerful gun in the game and achieved only through selling things to the Bazaar. You get it by selling 2 Yensa Fins (poaches from Yensas and Bull Yensas in the Yensan Sandsea), 2 Wyvern Wings (rare steal from the Wyvern Lord hunt in the Yensan Sandsea, strange since respawning enemies equals respawning loot, you can, with plenty of patience, steal dozens of wings from this one-of-a-kind, 4-winged creature...and it can still fly...), and a Salamand Halycon (rare steal from Salamand Entite in the...I'm sure you can guess where). How soon can you get all these things? About 1/8 of the way through the game,.
 * XII is full of opportunities to sequence break and obtain weapons and equipment that are not typically available until much later in the game. Given the way the game calculates statistics like evasion, defense, and so on, a sufficiently powerful armor can allow characters whose levels are in the single digits take virtually no damage. If they are using powerful guns, they can deal thousands of damage as well. Equipment is central to a "122333" challenge game (where all the characters are left at their initial levels).
 * The wide-open, free-roaming Final Fantasy XIII-2 has quite a few notable nukes.
 * It's possible to get the Moogle Throw ability, which enables one to reach out-of-reach treasure chests, several hours before one is "supposed" to have it, which expedites sidequests significantly, gets you awesome loot, and opens up some otherwise inaccessible areas, which may be home to more nukes.
 * But the real nukes are the monsters in your third party member slot. With the assistance of a FAQ or guide, you can find monsters that can last you the entire game in the first area where monsters can be captured—such as the Pulsework Knight, a mighty Sentinel that allows you to survive high-level encounters at a relatively low level.
 * Archylte Steppe. In its entirety. It is a treasure trove. For example—the Red Chocobo and Blue Chocobo, absolutely ideal Commandos and Ravagers, can be fought and caught in Archylte. It'll take some doing, because at the first time you enter the Steppe they're Boss in Mook Clothing-level encounters, but it can be done (the aforementioned Pulsework Knight is very helpful in this). And once you've caught them, consider that due to what must have been a testing oversight, the process of getting Rare Candy to level them up with—getting the mid-tier candies is also going to net you 99 of the high-tier candies, which is more than enough to slingshot them to 99. Difficulty curve, what difficulty curve?
 * If you manage to max level the Dragoon from Augusta Tower 200AF, you will be able to use him through the rest of the game, short of Bonus Bosses. This is because it has ~600 Attack at a time you are at the 250s.
 * The introductory RPG Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest has a sort of Disc 2 Nuke in the form of the Dragon Claw weapon, which causes Petrification. The nuke powers of this weapon play on the weaknesses of two Recurring Bosses in the final dungeon - bosses that were never given protection against Petrification.
 * Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has the Cinquedea weapon which teaches Thieves Steal:Ability, enabling instant mastery of abilities by stealing them from enemy units (instead of careful job rearranging and sending them on about eight missions). It's a reward for reaching level 30 in the Negotiate skill, which normally will happen about 55-60% of the way through the game - however, grinding a series of repeatable dispatch missions can boost this stat without making significant game progress, meaning that you can reach level 30 and get the Cinquedea before the third storyline mission. One of the abilities which can be stolen from that mission's boss is Steal:Weapon (not normally available until around 80% progress) - and at that point, things just get psychotic.
 * In the original Final Fantasy Tactics, make a character into a White Mage early on, and then use up all the Job Points you acquire to get the Holy spell. You'll generally only be able to use it once per battle because of the high MP cost, but it's pretty much guaranteed to kill whatever it hits in the early part of the game. It's great for dealing with after his Face Heel Turn.
 * Experience points are rewarded for performing any action on friend or foe, not by defeating enemies of a certain level. For this reason, it's actually possible to reach level 99 in any single battle in the game, since each action rewards 10 experience points, and it takes 100 experience points to reach a new level. Job Points, which are used to master job classes, are gained in the same fashion, so it's also possible to master any class in a single battle.
 * In fact, that's exactly what's required for a solo character challenge. Hell, if you make it through the first few battles of the solo Ramza game properly, you can own the entire rest of the game with little problem.
 * Stealing Blood Sword the second time you fight him will make any close-quarters fight from then until Chapter IV (including the duel with ) a cruel joke, as it allows your strongest physical fighter (probably Ramza) to attack AND heal the same amount of damage simultaneously. With Counter or First Strike you can make someone invincible to any attack that isn't ranged or a One-Hit Kill. The problem with that is that  is That One Boss in his own right, and getting a thief close enough to steal the Blood Sword without being killed by said Blood Sword (or frozen in place by the two nearby Time Mages, or riddled with arrows by the Archers, etc.) requires a bit of work on its own.
 * Making a unit a Monk and giving him/her the Knight's Equip Armor ability helps well in the early game, as the considerable boost to HP (the armor) and attack (the Monk class' properties) increases their chance of survival.
 * Final Fantasy Tactics A2 nerfed many things that broke the game in Advance, but there are new nukes to abuse. Getting the ability to buy tokens in the auction houses early can let you take control of all the regions easily, and then bid on powerful items like 'Zeus Mace' or 'Excalibur'. These auction houses will actually give you even more broken rewards for sweeping the lots subsequent times.
 * It is also possible, by completing the right quests, to gather the trade goods needed to unlock top-end equipment for purchase, right from the get go even.
 * Several of the missions themselves, which were intended for mid-to-late game parties, reward powerful equips outright and can be beaten just a couple of hours into the game, by abusing skills like Mirror Items which are obtained very early with the (ab)use of the two mentioned tricks.
 * Among these are the 'Sequencer' sword and the 'Peytral' armor, strong items on their own right that become even more powerful each time you use a Opportunity Command in battles. With enough 'Opportunity Command' uses, the two items are effectively peerless stat-wise.
 * In fact, any combination of these three examples can be (ab)used almost immediately after you start a new game.

Pokémon

 * You can catch Caterpie in the Viridian Forest. A little bit of Level Grinding (and I mean a little bit- just a few levels), and it becomes a Butterfree with the Confusion ability. In fact, Yellow Version makes it even easier to obtain, since Butterfree learns Confusion as soon as it evolves in Yellow version (presumably to compensate for the fact that Pikachu cannot harm Brock's Pokemon, so you really almost NEED a Butterfree to beat Brock). Since Confusion is a psychic attack, it's strong on its own, exploits many opponent's weaknesses, and it inflicts confusion status.
 * You can also can catch either gender of Nidoran west of Viridian City, which is before you enter Viridian Forest, and when it evolves into Nidorino or Nidorina at Lv16, you can use the Moonstone you can find in Mt. Moon after beating the first Gym and immediate evolve it into the powerful Nidoking or Nidoqueen respectively. While the two monsters didn't learn many moves thru level ups besides Thrash in the 1st generation, they make up for it in stats and the powerful TM/HM moves both of them can learn such as Dig, Hyper Beam, DoubleTeam, Surf, and several others.
 * In the Pokémon games, one can trade for an extremely high-level Pokémon from another cartridge very early in the game. The game tries to prevent this practice by making the new Pokémon disobedient in the early areas, but the stat gap is so high that you'll crush your enemies anyway, despite your Pokémon only moving every fourth turn or so.
 * If you have access to another cartridge, you can also trade one Pokémon from the "weak" savegame to the 100% Completion cartridge, level it up there (obedience is no problem there, plus it even gets experience bonus for being traded) and then trade it back. It now will obey on the "weak" savegame but can be strong enough to plow down most of the game.
 * Alternatively, breed a powerful Pokémon (such as Dratini) on the "strong" save file, trade the egg to the weak one, hatch it there, trade it back to the strong one, train it there, return it to the weak game. Since it hatched there, it will obey you regardless of badges. If you breed some powerful egg moves or TMs onto it, it could easily enter Game Breaker status.
 * In Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, there is Starly, a Com Mons at the start of the game, on the very first route. While it does struggle a little at the first Gym, from that point on, it is almost unstoppable, especially once it reaches it's final form and learns Close Combat, a FIGHTING-type move (on a Flying type, and Fighting/Flying has excellent coverage) with 120 Base Power. Staraptor also has a very high Attack stat, and outspeeds most of the Pokémon in the game as well. Throw in Intimidate after it gets to its second stage, and you have a Disc 1 Nuke which keeps nuking even in the Endgame.
 * Various kinds of Pokémon also exhibit types of Magikarp Power that can be taken advantage of fairly early in the game:
 * By training the useless Magikarp, which can be acquired the moment you get an Old Rod (or even earlier in the first games, if you're willing to buy the Pokémon from a shady merchant), it will evolve into the incredibly powerful Gyarados at level 20. Even if you don't go out of your way to power-level your Magikarp, it's not hard to make this happen before you or most opponents have anything else that compares. You can also obtain one via the Pokéwalker in HG/SS, at a higher level than normal and with a decent offensive move to boot.
 * A similar example from Generation I (when Psychics were still the rocket launcher of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors) would be to catch an Abra as soon as you reached Cerulean, level it up until it evolved into the very-respectable Kadabra at level 16, then trade it to a friend and back to make it further evolve into Alakazam. Carnage ensues. Sending it to the Generation II games also allows it to learn the various elemental punches, making it even more powerful.
 * Since the Abra has Teleport, you can also use it to trigger the Mew Glitch.
 * The games played this straight during the second generation. The Game Corner was located early in the game at Goldenrod. If you had the patience and skill then you could earn the coins to buy incredibly powerful TMs and Pokémon. They started out at Level 5, but the Daycare (which will raise your Pokémon for you) was just a short walk away.
 * Similarly, if you have a spare Master Ball from any other game, you can trade it to HeartGold or SoulSilver and catch either Entei or Raikou (or both). If you catch them almost right after they flee from the tower, it gives a real big advantage.
 * Geodude may be considered this in G/S/C. You get it on a branching-off route from the first route at Lv5, and it is strong against every single Johto Gym Pokémon up to the 7th Gym. However, it slowly becomes less effective thanks to the moves learned by the later Gym Leaders, Pryce's Pokémon especially.
 * The second generation (and remakes) also gave out Surf after just the third Gym - with the highest possible power without some sort of drawback (lowered accuracy, recoil damage, or the like), it's considered a viable move for endgame and competition-built Pokémon. Gold/Silver/Crystal give it to you about a quarter through the game - giving you enough power to breeze through nearly anything that doesn't specifically resist it. Moves of that power become more standard about 75% of the way through the game, which keeps it from being a true Game Breaker.
 * There's also the Pickup ability in Ruby and Sapphire. It gives a 10% chance of acquiring an item after each battle. This item can include a Nugget (which can be sold and turned around into 50 Poké Balls or a bunch of healing items), a Rare Candy (a free level-up), or either a PP Up or a Protein (both stat-boosting items which can be sold for almost as much as a Nugget if you don't want the stat boost). Only slightly less useful is its ability to acquire healing items much more powerful than available until around the halfway point of the game or the best Poké Ball carried in stores (with a much higher catch rate for Pokémon). And it is available on Zigzagoon, one of the game's Com Mons and probably one of the first three Pokémon caught by every player. With a little luck or patience, a player can have an entire medicine cabinet at their disposal to go with a never-ending supply of Poké Balls before running into the first Gym Leader.
 * You can pull the same trick with Lillipup in Black and White. The swag is not as high-end, but you'll still be set for the rest of the game if you grind early on.
 * Even better, in Black and White, Pickup can now steal away a one time use item the opponent uses up or thrown at them with Fling, meaning you can snag several good berries in a short amount of time.
 * In HeartGold and SoulSilver, by using the Pokéwalker, it's possible to catch Pokémon more powerful than what you would normally have access to.
 * You can get a Kangaskhan at the very start of the game by doing so. Kangaskhan is normally an end game Pokémon, and as such has base stats comparable to fully evolved ones. Use it to breeze through the early Gyms, particularly Morty's.
 * You can get a Kangaskhan early on in the game in the Gen V versions as well, thanks to the Dream World. Likewise, you can get a Nidoqueen/Nidoking not long after the second gym through the same method.
 * You can also to get powerful Pokémon like Dratini, Staryu, and Gastly this way.
 * And even more Pokéwalker abuse is possible if you own two copies of the game. Supposing you have beaten the game on one copy, you have likely unlocked the National Dex, and with it, the later Pokéwalker routes that include decently high level Pokémon from Hoenn and Sinnoh. Now, supposing you start a new game on a new cartridge, you can use the gift option with the Pokéwalker from your original cartridge to gift your new game level 30+ rare Pokémon. And the kicker? They count the new game as their trainer. That's right. You can be running around the second town with level 30+ Pokémon that will always listen to you.
 * A Pokéwalker can also give you access both to a Pikachu and a Light Ball as early as the beginning of the game. Considering Light Ball doubles Pikachu's Attack and Special Attack, you might be able to train an absolutely unstoppable beast before you win your first Badge.
 * If you can get your hands on a Jirachi (a Disc One Nuke in and of itself) - which many players did before they even started the game, considering they were handed out for two weeks leading up to Heart Gold and Soul Silver's launch - you can unlock a Pokéwalker course called Night Sky's Edge as early as the second town.With a lot of walking and a little luck you can get your hands on a TM for Psychic, one of the strongest Psychic-type moves and the strongest one with no real drawbacks to using it.
 * Back in Generation I, you could get Dig before the second Gym, even though it had the stats of an endgame attack. Better yet, it was super-effective against several Gyms and most Mons could learn it, including two of the starters.
 * In Platinum, as soon as the player has their first Badge, they can do a little backtracking with Rock Smash and, if they're lucky, find a Golbat. At level 10, when under normal circumstances Zubat evolves at level 22. And it evolves to the insanely fast and strong Crobat at max happiness, meaning that the player could have the final form of a three-stage family by the time they reach the second Gym. Oh, and both of Crobat's types are super effective against said Gym. Yeeeaaaahhhhh...
 * It's also possible to get some of these in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, thanks to the Wonder Mail codes. Once you're able to recruit party members, you can enter codes to take up missions in even the second and fourth dungeons that allow you to get strong, fully-evolved (in a game where you can't even evolve until the end) mons such as Flygon and Metagross.
 * Generation I had the Mew Glitch, which could get you a Mew before you beat the second Gym. While it came slightly underleveled for the area and only had one move, Mew has equal (and good) stats in everything, and is capable of learning any TM or HM, putting those good stats to use.
 * It gets better! Abusing that glitch a specific way allows you to catch your Mew at level 1. An impossibility normally, and if you look at the EXP count in its stats, it's got way more EXP than you'll ever need to max out any Pokemon. If your Mew happens to gain an amount of EXP less than that necessary to reach level 2, then the game glitches and all that EXP comes into play at once, auto-leveling your Mew to level 100. Sure, you have to click the A button about two hundred times, but after that you can just breeze through the game.
 * Your starter Pokemon, preferably the Water or the Fire type, can be this is you use nothing else. One Man Party is a very viable way to play the games as you'll be so overlevelled with a single Pokemon early on that much of the game won't stand much of a chance against you. It's not as easy to do in Generation V though, due to higher levelled mons getting less exp than at low levels against foes, so you won't be as overlevelled.
 * Also harder to do in Generation IV due to more type diversity. On the other hand, in Gen III with Mudkip...
 * There's also "Muscle", the Machop you can get in exchange of a Drowzee in Gold/Silver and HG/SS at Goldenrod City. To elaborate: Pokemon obtained from trades grow up faster than normally caught ones but, as a trade-off, once they reach high levels they will rarely obey you - i.e. they will attack only once in a while. As early as the third gym, you can get a Fighting-type Pokemon that will grow faster than other Pokés you can catch normally and whose typing and moves will help you against at least three of the remaining gyms in the region. Not only that, you can train Muscle up to level 30 - by which point it'll have evolved into the stronger Machoke - and it'll still obey you; and, once you get the Fog Badge from the Ecruteak gym, Muscle can reach level 50 before it starts rebelling. Not even the Elite 4 have level 50 Pokemon during your first playthrough.
 * Then trade it to another game and back for Machamp, who's both extremely powerful (especially for the early game) and top non uber tier in competitive play.
 * Dream World adds a whole new arsenal of nukes to the fifth generation. To elaborate: right after defeating the first gym and retrieving a Plot Coupon (all of which can be done in less than two hours from the beginning of a new game) you have access to the DW. Through the website you're allowed to catch Pokemon not ordinarily available in the games themselves and who also carry very good abilities. This way you can obtain such things as Bidoof with the incredible ability Moody - making him a lethal threat even in the advanced metagame-, Nidoran male or female with Hustle - which, upon evolving into Nidoking, acquire the brutally abusable ability Sheer Force, especially now that TM's can be used multiple times -, Tangela with Regenerator, Taillow with Scrappy, among many others. All this after, again, a mere 1–2 hours or normal gameplay.
 * In fairness, the entire concept of Pokémon is that you can catch a weak one and it will eventually evolve into a strong one. Nidoran in itself being able to evolve into Nidoking over the course of normal gameplay isn't itself a disc one nuke in any shape or form. However! Most of the fifth gen natives don't evolve until much later levels than their siblings from bygone ages. Basic-form gameplay lasts a lot longer in Generation V, with Scraggy, for instance, not evolving until level 39. Being able to get a twice-evolved Pokémon as early as level sixteen - as in, before your starters have evolved - is absolutely astonishing. Nidoking, then, is very much a disc one nuke.
 * By exploiting the Event Mon Arceus in Heart Gold/Soul Silver, you can get one of the Sinnoh cover art legendaries at level 1. While Arceus won't likely obey you, the legendary you get will. Needless to say, this requires likely two games, one of Diamond, pearl or Platnium, the event Arceus (or the Arceus at Spear Pillar only accessible through hacking), and the ability to trade in Heart Gold/Soul Silver.
 * In Heart Gold/Soul Silver, there's the addition of the Voltorb Flip game as early as Goldenrod City. If you're good at the game, you can be pretty well off. They have some of the strongest technical machines, though they're more expensive, and a Dratini happens to be available for an amount pretty cheap to those who are good at the game. The Dratini has Dragon Rage, too, an attack that does 40 hp of damage no matter what, which can knock out both of Whitney's Pokémon in just two moves.

Fallout

 * Fallout 1 allows a determined player to gain very powerful armor and weapons early on, via the Brotherhood of Steel, after which the game becomes ridiculously easy.
 * In Fallout 2, there was a much-publicised, non-cheating method of obtaining one of the game's most powerful suits of armor before even reaching the second town of the game. It involved running nigh-naked through towards what amounted to the last town, and praying an Enclave patrol didn't show up as a random encounter and slaughter you messily.
 * And then you go to the NCR, where the first merchant you encounter is very easy to steal from. This allows you to get several pretty good weapons along with the Bozar, one of the game's most powerful weapons, and tons of ammo for everything.
 * Fallout 3 offers incredible chances at getting powerful equipment early, especially of you're willing to explore the world before embarking on the main quests.
 * For the melee player in Fallout 3, there's a readily available equivalent to the Disc One Nuke which will see you through the entire game. The Shishkebab, the game's most powerful melee weapon, is crafted from items laying in close proximity of each other in your warm up dungeon (Springvale School), and a schematic obtained from a merchant in easy reach of your first base town. The price may be high, but far from unobtainable at that level of the game. Although the final upgrade to the weapon's schematic comes late in the game, even at suboptimal power it's still the superior weapon.
 * Averted when it comes to powered armor, though. You can get it at any time—oops, you need training to use it.
 * If you have Operation Anchorage installed, you can complete it straight out of the Vault and are awarded Power Armor Training, as well as a suit of Power Armor that never degrades. Alternatively, if you don't like power armor, there is also Chinese Stealth Armor in there, and among the stashed weapons is a Gauss Rifle and Jingwei's Shocksword. Oh, and please put the armor on immediately as Defender Sibley and his mooks will turn on you shortly after.
 * Most minmaxers will leave Vault 101 with 9 INT and then beeline straight to Rivet City for the Bobblehead before reaching Level 3 in order to obtain the maximum amount of skill points possible. They also max out Big Guns without ever putting a point into it by abusing the respawning Flamethrower Recipies book in Bethesda Ruins.
 * Operation Anchorage itself is a Disk One Nuke—you get the game's best armor, the game's 2nd best ranged weapon, and one of the best melee weapons all from completing the same mission. Mothership Zeta on the other hand, awards you with insanely powerful weapons, ammo, and the ever-awesome Alien Epoxy, that you can use to fix any weapon, including rare ones like Tesla Cannons and Gauss Rifles. Also, the EX-B Drone Cannon is a freaking grenade launcher, the only one of its kind.
 * Lincoln's Repeater can be found in a museum, but can be easy to miss if you are not reading a guide.
 * The Xuanlong Assualt Rifle is a unique Chinese Assault Rifle with boosted damage and an increased clip size. It can destroy most low-level enemies and remains useful throughout the game. All it takes is completing a rather Guide Dang It unmarked quest to spawn it.
 * With the DLC Broken Steel installed the companion Dogmeat which without the DLC has health around 500, levels with you and starts at 2,500 hp at level 1. Later hits around 15,000 when you hit level 30. Since he's coded to be a higher priority target than the player's character, Dogmeat will draw attackers' attention away from the player character, meaning that enemies will attack a near invincible companion leaving you to attack freely without having them attack you. Dogmeat can be found as soon as the vault is left for the first time.
 * The "Alien Blaster". Although the gun is very powerful, its ammo is very limited and it's impossible to obtain more (since it's of extra-terrestrial origin).
 * There are more alien weapons if you download the "Mothership Zeta" expansion. And more power cells, too.
 * Fallout: New Vegas has, among others, the well-known Ratslayer, a unique Varmint Rifle with all the mods, found in a cave a little ways off the beaten path. The problem is you have to fight the bigger Giant Rats to get it, but it is well worth it if you can.
 * At the start of the game, if you go east from Goodsprings to the Yangtze Memorial, you can use a shovel to dig up a grave, which usually has some form of mid-level weapon in it, ranging from Plasma Rifles to Incinerators.
 * North of Nipton, you can find a dead Bright Brotherhood ghoul. If you're lucky, you can get a Plasma Defender, a small, light energy pistol that hits harder than a Plasma Rifle.
 * If you can evade the Cazadores north of Goodsprings, you can find a grave with Chance's Knife, an excellent melee weapon.
 * It's even easier to pick up Knock-Knock, arguably the best melee weapon in the unmodded game, and you can do it as early as Level 2 if you know what you're doing (and have both Stealth Boys and anti-radiation meds).
 * Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to my good buddy Boone. He's the last thing you'll never see, and the second companion you can hire.
 * Cross Boone with ED-E, the first companion you can hire, and nothing will touch you.
 * Obtaining 50 bottles of Sunset Sarsaparilla, Save Scumming after drinking one until you get a Blue Star Cap, and repeating until they are all star caps gets you Pew Pew, a laser pistol that hits like a shotgun and does about four times the regular laser pistol's damage. If you have high Energy Weapons, this gun will carry you until the end of the game.
 * Oh, and you can steal the various weapons in the Van Graff store by dragging it to the toilet and then pocket them there. Among them is a Plasma Caster, a Gattling Laser, and a Plasma Defender.
 * Smalltime. With judicious tailoring of your character, use of stuff given or found in the first town and the right perks, you can obtain the Gobi Campaign Rifle at level 4. 'Course, you'll be at least level 7 before you can fire it well.
 * Ditto Fallout Tactics, it is possible to get some weapons early. You just need some poisons or drugs. You can try to get the brotherhood bunker encounter and kill the 2 guards using poison or drug overdose and get their miniguns, or poison the merchant and his guards to get Pancor Jackhammers and the Browning machine gun (though good chance you are not strong enough to use it yet, and ammo is rather scarce early game). If you get one of the merchant encounter, you can get EMP shotgun shells as well which let you easily bust the turrets in Preoria mission, along with a FN FAL rifle. If you get the Radscorpions fighting civilians encounter early enough and let the civilians die (which is easy, because they're fighting the Radscorpions with their bare hands) and loot the corpses, you'll find out that at least one of the civilians was carrying a Combat Shotgun.
 * You can also use the gambling bug. Bet nothing for the merchant's entire inventory, click on gamble repeatedly, and after 1–2 minutes, you'll suddenly have his entire inventory...

Action Adventure

 * The classic The Legend of Zelda a Link To T He Past has a minor Sequence Break that allows the player to easily get the Magic Cape, which makes Link invisible (and by extension invincible...as well as somehow being able to walk through large bumpers found in some caves and dungeons) at a cost of draining magic when in use. To get it, the player just needs to go to the cemetery in the Dark World, get inside the fence surrounding the solitary grave in the upper right corner of the cemetery (which only requires the player to destroy one of the bushes surrounding it in the Dark World, while the Light World version of the location is surrounded by an indestructible stone fence with heavy black stones blocking the way which can be only lifted with the Power Glove upgrade), warp to Light World and dash against the headstone to reveal a secret passage.
 * The player could also get the second-strongest sword as soon as he had the item to the first Dark World dungeon, the hammer. It, along with the mirror, could be used to rush into the fourth Dark world dungeon, grab the upgraded glove, save the blacksmith south of the town early, and get your sword upgraded. This upgraded sword lets you kill the second Dark world dungeon boss in two hits.
 * In the original game you could, with luck and perseverance, go into the first level with six hearts, the white sword, the blue ring, and the big shield.
 * One glitch from The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening would allow the player to grab the final dungeon's weapon, the Fire Rod, at the very beginning of the game.
 * Using the select-button warp trick in one room of the cave to the mushroom allows Link to enter a glitched part of Level 7 Eagle's Tower to get Level 3's power bracelet, then move over - then back, one can grab Level 7's upgraded Power Bracelet - which allows Link to go through several areas much sooner then he's supposed to and thus gain enough heart pieces/usable items/etc. to make many early boss fights much easier then they should be.
 * Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. With one of three possible soul combinations, it is possible to acquire by far two of the most powerful equips in the game as early as the midpoint: the giant sword Claimh Solais, which has both incredible reach and speed, a high attack rating and is holy attribute, making it effective against most enemies, and 2) the Eversing Armor.
 * Not exactly a Disc One Nuke, however; Claimh Solais is more like the Infinity+1 Sword.
 * Additionally, grinding for one of those monsters' souls (Curly) can be done in the same room as the Valkyrie soul, which is expensive on MP but disgustingly powerful and one of the few forms of holy damage aside from the Claimh Solais itself.
 * The Mystelain is one of the other holy swords, and while it's nowhere near as good as the Solais, it can be found in a secret room in the Clock Tower, which is a fair bit before that weapon. Again, it's the holy damage that's key, and it's very useful against Death, the boss of the tower.
 * In the sequel Dawn Of Sorrow, the Mandragora soul throws a shrieking mandragora into the middle of the screen, which explodes like the enemy does. It can be obtained pretty early if you're willing to grind for it, costs little MP, has very good range, and does quite a lot of damage and remains useful for most, if not all of the game.
 * Wouldn't the little trick in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night count? You know, where you use a little glitch while playing a file using the luck code, and bypass Death's ambush- thus keeping your original equipment. This equipment is useful until well into the Inverted Castle, and makes the entire first half of the game a cake walk.
 * More likely is the Jewel Knuckles. You're supposed to not get them until you've got the mist form, but there's a secret lift that appears if you wait a while in the room above it, allowing you to get them earlier. They have little range, but are quite strong. Mastering the Holy Water early on also counts as this - the sooner you figure out how you can own bosses in seconds with it, the better. Figuring out the button combinations of certain spells too - these spells are good throughout the entire game, if you can get used to the control scheme and have some MP left.

Action Game

 * In God of War, an exploit involving the tutorial for using the Medusa's Head magic, the XP bonuses given by the combo system, and the Poseidon's Rage magic you get on the first level allows you to potentially stockpile enough experience to instantly max out the levels of every new spell you acquire the instant you get it, along with the gear you have at that point.
 * In the next-gen version of Spider-Man 3, the player can unlock all the webswing speed upgrades by completing races even before completing the the second story mission.

Beat Em Up

 * If you keep going through the first level of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, you'll eventually have enough money to buy tonnes of upgrades from the shops in the first level. In particular though, if you stockpile the money to a ridiculous amount (just over $500, a lot in a game where most enemies have at most $1.50 on them), you can go to the video store, pay off Scott's late fees, and unlock some fantastic stat boosts for just $4.95 each. Once you've done this, you can easily unlock all the combat moves that make the game easier, not to mention enhance your stats to be able to one-hit kill most enemies, and even the first boss.
 * There's also a hidden shop on level one that has some items that give ungodly boosts to your stats without having to pay 500 bucks first. There's also a secret passage that you can reach that is filled with flying piggy banks that you can break for cash. Combined, you can attain high levels with ease. Of course, the shop's location is revealed in one of the trailers that promoted the game, so anyone who was watching the game before it came out would know exactly where it was. Need a hint?
 * The bookstore is actually a more efficient use of your hard-earned money than the secret shop; you'll generally spend about the same amount of money for the stats, but you'll also get something around a thousand experience points at the same time.
 * In the NES version of Double Dragon, the player can level-grind his way through the first few fight scenes alone by simply spamming the same basic punches and kicks on enemies. This is due the fact that the player gains experience points, not by defeating enemies, but by landing attacks. Since enemies aren't killed until they're knocked down to the ground, it's possible to attack an enemy as long as possible while they're still standing up.
 * In Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King from EA, a smart player will focus their skill points towards the purchase of the counter-kill "Bane" abilities, which is ridiculously easy to pull off and puts the character into Perfect Mode on a successful execution, making all resulting kills in that brief period "Perfect" kills, earning the player far more experience points.
 * The Enchanted Falchion +1 in Demon's Souls can be obtained with some tricky jumping long before you would normally be able to get a solid weapon, particularlly for a magic based character as it scales based on intelligence. Certain builds can kill the Red Dragon early on and gain large rewards for doing so.
 * The Drake Sword in Dark Souls. You can obtain the sword very early in the game if you have a bow and a lot of arrows to shoot the Hellkite Dragon's tail off. The sword boasts 200 attack power, which is way stronger than anything else you're likely to have at that point. It will eventually become obsolete since it doesn't scale with your stats.
 * While it isn't a weapon, being able to nab Havel's Ring (which boosts your equip load by a staggering 50%) before you fight any of the first bosses is a solid way to keep yourself in good equipment, and remain agile enough to dodge attacks, throughout the game. All it takes is either a lot of rolling and backstabbing, or a lot of arrows, to bring Havel the Rock down. And, unlike most of the game's dragon weapons, it never becomes useless.
 * The Black Knight Sword, especially post Patch 1.5 where the drop rate was significantly increased, meaning players will most likely get the weapon from one of the three early nonrespawning Black Knights. Though the stat requirements are comparatively high (20 Strength, 18 Dexterity), but easily attainable. The weapon has extremely high damage throughout the entirety of the first playthrough and New Game Plus, scales very well with stats and is extremely easy to fully upgrade (Easily possible to do so before ringing the Second Bell of Awakening). It also has a very good, versatile move set with both wide sweeping attacks for attacking multiple enemies and a nice vertical combo when fighting a single opponent/tight areas.
 * Evading enemies and lotting New Londo early can net an early Fire Keeper's soul (boosting your main source of healing) and some other stuff as soon as you leave the tutorial area.
 * The massive skips the Master Key makes possible allow for several items to be obtained early
 * In Dark Souls III a giant crystal lizard can be found in the starting area. Normally impossible for a low level and under equipped character to defeat, its favorite method of attack in a leaping attack that, with effort, can get it jump off a ledge a short ways away. This nets 4800 souls, enough for several early levels.

Driving Game

 * In Gran Turismo 4, you can import cash from your GT 3 save, up to 100,000 credits. With that sort of cash, you can buy a car that will storm all of the opening races without breaking a sweat. Or, you could get a decent car, work the licenses to an A grade, win the first rally and with a Cien, which will storm most races it can enter. Or, you could win the second rally and sell the car you win for a cool 250,000. Winning either of these rallies is easier than it sounds, as they are on tarmac and thus do not require dirt tires, an expensive option which shuts out most starters.
 * Gran Turismo 3 allowed you to do the Rally license tests without needing to complete the other license tests. This means that, provided you got the gold on all of the tests, you had access to the Subaru Impreza Rally Car Prototype, allowing you to plow through most of the early game races, as well as some mid-game and rally races, too.
 * The 1989 Dynamix PC game Death Track allowed you to choose between three cars: Crusher (high firepower), Pitbull (heavy armor) and Hellcat (high speed). If you chose the high speed car, and in the shop sold a couple of the default weapons that came with the car, you could afford the fastest engine available, making you able to win all the first races by lapping everyone else. The frequent wins allowed you to fully upgrade your car early on, allowing you to beat the whole championship quite easily.

Fighting Game

 * In DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 2 for both Wii and PlayStation 2, you can get ALL the Dragon Balls as early as in Chapter 4 of the Saiyan Saga, provided you know where they respawn. You can wish again and again for very powerful Potaras, thus having absurd stats to plow through Story Mode (and others as well) with little effort.
 * Unfortunately (or not?) averted in Tenkaichi 3. Dragon Balls are now randomly found among the rubble in the Story Mode fights, as there is no world map anymore. Then again, they won't be of much use as Story Mode characters have preescripted equipment, all the Potara system was reworked so that you couldn't max more than 2 stats out of four total, health not included, the high-level Tournaments are difficult for the wrong reasons (damage carries over to the next fight) and your skills matter way more than stats when playing online.

First Person Shooter

 * The GEP Gun in Deus Ex. You can get it within a minute of starting the game, and assuming you explore a bit, rockets are very easy to come by. With it, you can breach locked doors and chests, and  The Dragon Tooth Sword takes over for the breaching potential halfway through, but it is still useful afterwards.
 * The player can also obtain the Assault Rifle (which normally isn't obtained until the end of the third mission) in the first mission by killing the (only non-invincible) UNATCO trooper walking up the stairs right after you interrogate the NSF leader. Combined with the mods you find on the first two missions, none of which are difficult to find, you can make the Assault Rifle a fearsome weapon (very accurate, with extended mags and a targeting laser) that can easily take down a crowd of targets by the time you get to the second mission of the game.
 * In S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, you can acquire the "Stalker suit" (later patched into a slightly weaker Mercenary suit) in the first town in the game, by climbing on top of roofs and searching for a hole in a roof with the suit inside.
 * This is pretty much only a helpful nudge, considering the small portion of combat damage even the best armors in the game reduce and how annoyingly fast the same armors turn into Swiss cheese with zero protection.
 * A better example would be the fast firing AK. It can be found with a bit of exploring in the third area and boasts a rate of fire that won't be matched until the final third of the game. At that point in the game, the most advanced weapon you can find is the standard AKM, which the fast firing variant hopelessly out-classes. Even after more advanced weapons start turning up, it's still better to stick with the fast firing AK until weapons using NATO rounds start dropping.
 * Speaking of NATO weapons... As soon as you reach Bar, you can head for Wild Territory and grab a T Rs 301 from the enemies there; the only area it lacks much compared to the fast-firing AK is the fire rate, beyond that its stats are either near-identical or superior and it uses better ammo. After sticking a scope on it, and with a few trips to the Bar shop and a little luck (or/and exploration of Wild Territory) it's possible to get more than enough ammo (which isn't too expensive) for it to curb-stomp about half the game, even in areas that don't hand out ammo for it. Even better, as it's a Mook weapon it's essentially disposable and you can grab another as soon as your current one breaks down, unlike the Fast-fire AK that is gone as soon as it breaks down (even if that takes a while).
 * Both of you are overlooking the greatest Disk One Nuke of all time: At the very start of the game you have about a 5% chance of being able to buy a unique, extremely powerful assault rifle that uses the same ammo as the patrols outside. And there's usually a silencer available within 5 minutes of leaving the shop. Only problem is that you have to search most of the map for supplies and pistols to get the funds you need.
 * You're referring to the OC-14 Groza (called "Thunder" in an unmodded game) chambered for 5.45x39 ammo. The problem is that it's behind a nontrivial Cash Gate, and no longer has a chance of appearing after you complete the intro mission, so you pretty much have to ignore the plot and spend a few hours lugging crap back to the trader to sell. Plus, the same weapon is carried by one of the Duty soldiers at the Bar, and he often wanders out and gets eaten by dogs.
 * The subsequent games are even worse about this. In Clear Sky you can find your character's old Vintorez near the top of the first map where he dropped it, and while ammo is scarce for a while you can repair it for 9000 rubles—easy to make. You can exploit a clipping bug to steal an AK and scope from the CS mechanic, and the game practically throws high-end weapons at you constantly. The way they did stashes in Call of Pripyat, though, takes the cake—they're more realistically hidden in cubby holes and other out-of-the-way places rather than randomly appearing in containers, but that means that once you know where they are you can go fetch game-breaking weapons and supplies pretty much the moment you start the game.
 * From the exact beginning of Call of Pripyat, a player can find; the second-best shotgun in the game, a nice mid-tier assault rifle, the best scoped rifle in the game, the second-best pistol and an upgraded version of the beginner armour set for free, without even talking to anybody. Or firing a single bullet. Through Nimble, however, a perspective player with some extensive artifact moneymaking can outfit himself with some of the best equipment in the game before he even begins the plot.
 * System Shock 2 has a somewhat mild form of this. By abusing an exploit in the training rooms in the tutorial level, you can start the game proper with- among other things- a Laser Pistol in perfect condition, maintenance tools, an assortment of healing items, a Standard Pistol, and a Psi Amp. The weapons in perfect condition are the biggest boon, since it takes a while to fully upgrade the maintenance stat.
 * Additionally, you can unlock an armory very early on if you already know the code (which normally is given to you three levels later), gaining access to the game's best weapon before you could possibly have the skill to use it- but ensuring that you'll already have it whenever you do acquire the skill.
 * Further abuse of memorization provides early access to other keypad locks. You can skip the entire first level this way, not to mention large sections of other levels.
 * To an extent Borderlands, because of a promise to play with and give loot to anyone who proved they preordered the game. This resulted in many low level people getting guns they couldn't even use yet, though they could sell them for plenty of money.
 * Metroid Prime, at least the original, non-Players' Choice version, allows you to cheat the system and get the Space Jump Boots right as you land on Tallon IV. As a result, you can skip every single boss in the initial run of the Chozo Ruins except for the Incinerator Drone. It also allows skilled players to skip right through the Magmoor Caverns without the Varia Suit, a feat considered impossible otherwise. Basically, once you land on Tallon IV, you can snag the SJBs, speedily grab the weapons and Energy Tanks, and be in the Magmoor Caverns faster than you can say "Metroid".
 * In Doom II: Hell on Earth if the player went backwards from where they started in the first level, they would find a Chainsaw, which is superior to both the fist and the pistol the player starts with. It is also possible to get the super shotgun in roughly the second level, lasting well throughout the game. It is even possible to find the Big Freaking Gun-9000 relatively early in the game.

Four X

 * Master of Orion 2. There are a number of "special" systems which generally have some kind of reward for reaching them and a top quality planet to colonise. The catch is, they have a big space monster who will kill any interlopers. It seems expected that you need to build up a strongly armed ship or two in order to kill the monster. However, generally a fleet of about 10 scout sized ships armed with MIRV nuclear missiles can take them out - even if you lose most of your fleet in the process. This trick works because most of the monsters have only 1 or 2 extremely powerful attacks - each will easily kill a ship, but only one at a time. Doesn't work on hydras, the Guardian, or Antarans though, they have too many attacks.
 * Civilization4: Emphasize science and tech straight to Feudalism to get Longbowmen, a vicious defensive unit that can protect your cities well up until you unlock riflemen. This is doubly true of any cities you founded on hill tiles.
 * Ascendancy: Find a planet with xenoarcheological ruins? Drop a colony module right down next to the ruins, start digging them out, and on the day before the dig is complete, save. Advance a day, and if you discovered tech you don't like, reload and let the RNG give you something else. Doing this can net you the various nano-level technologies, maxing out your civilization's propulsion, weapons, energy generation and shielding systems, potentially before leaving your home star system.

Hack And Slash

 * The Diablo-like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series allows you to import character from other save files - even the character that you are currently playing. Abuse of this can enable a player to max out their character's levels and equipment as soon as they reach the town.
 * Diablo II:
 * The game allows you to trade between your characters online. One neat trick is to make Khalim's Will, which is usable by characters of any level (because it's a quest item) and provides obscene amounts of damage for most if not all characters below level 25 (when you acquire it, you're generally around level 21-24).
 * Enchant Skill, while normally a relatively useless sorceress skill that adds fire damage to a target's weapon, with incredible amounts of + skills, can get fire damage added up to somewhere between 3000 and 9000. It's still somewhat useless by the time you can get it there barring a very specific build. However, joining a normal game and giving that much damage to a character in normal mode essentially means anyone can go through the whole of normal one or two-shotting every monster with a regular short bow. To put it in perspective, Diablo only has 14,000 HP on Normal (though fire resistance does factor in) and Baal, the boss of the expansion only about twice that. The most a regular enemy has is about 3000. Makes early level grinding in Hardcore a breeze.

MMORPGs

 * Heirloom items in World of Warcraft can make leveling alts ridiculously easy, as they scale with character level and have stats appropriate to rare items. This is intentional, as you have to already have a level 80 character and spend a fair number of emblems to acquire them.
 * In the Good Bad Bugs camp, there have been a few instances where Blizzard forgot to make quest reward gear Bind on Pickup, meaning that, since they have no level restriction, players could equip them on their low level alts. These bugs were quickly squashed, however.
 * Another of those bugs involved Entei's Quenched Sword, a grey (lowest level quality) sword, basicly intended as vendor trash for high level players, but it had no minimum level to equip and so could be sent to a low level alt. While it's base damage was ridiculously low even compared to the weapons you started with, it still counted as a high Item level item, and could therefore have the high end weapon enchants applied to it, which when sent to a low level alt, gave him a VERY powerful weapon. Sadly the lack of a minimum level to equip was fixed in the next patch.
 * In the original Guild Wars campaign, there was a lively economy of high level players who would party up, for a price, with low level players and run their party from the first non-tutorial town (or, more commonly from the last outpost before the high level enemies show up) to the last large town where they could get the best armor in the game. Both the running service and the armor would cost much more money than a beginning character has, but since you can freely transfer money from all other characters on your account this was not much of a problem.
 * In RuneScape, grinding your mining and smithing levels while selling off the goods gets you not only a good amount of cash, but also some very powerful weapons and armor—and since the enemies around the first couple of towns generally don't aggro on sight, it's easy for your fighting levels to be too low to use said weapons and armor. Likewise, grinding your fishing and cooking stats can give you lots of powerful food items for health recovery, enabling you to tank around monsters with a significantly higher danger rating.
 * Formerly possible in zOMG!—experience is tied to the rings, so at the time the game debuted it was possible to simply buy high-level rings off the Marketplace. Gaia Online staff quickly realized the many problems with this and locked the rings.

Platform Game

 * Intrepid Metroid players often abuse the open-endedness of the game's levels to get new weapons or items.much earlier than intended.
 * In Super Metroid, this was practically encouraged by the inclusion of the obvious but difficult-to-master Wall Jump technique, which lets Samus climb walls and jump way higher than intended very early on in the game.
 * And in Metroid: Zero Mission this actually was encouraged, as there are pictures obtainable only by completing the game with a minimum percentage.
 * By the time Metroid Fusion came out, Nintendo was well aware of the sequence breaking that had occurred in earlier games—so much so that there is a certain cutscene in Fusion that can only be obtained by sequence breaking.
 * Lego Harry Potter contains a nice little gem. After the second level in the whole game (the first one at Hogwarts) you have the ability to get to the "Collect Ghost Studs" Red Brick powerup, before the plot would normally allow you to. It only costs 50,000 studs, which can easily be obtained by this point, but it allows you to collect the "Ghost Studs" dropped by Nearly Headless Nick as he leads you to the next level/lesson/cutscene, which are worth 1,000 studs each. You can easily get the 4 million needed to get Accio (which makes a lot of the puzzles moot by just giving you potion items) as well as other spells in just an hour or so of grinding. Makes One Hundred Percent Completion extremely easy. Add to this a glitch that sometimes allows you to collect ghost studs after you finish year 4 (when you shouldn't be able to) and this really edges into the territory of Game Breaker.
 * Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had a way for determined players to get hold of all seven Chaos Emeralds - and therefore, gain the Super Sonic ability - in the very first Act of the very first Zone through judicious use of the reset button.
 * And even without the reset button, it's possible, with skill and patience, to get all 7 before the end of Act 2 of the first zone.
 * Sonic 3 had a continually spawning enemy whenever you stood between two alarm points. It suicide dived at said alarm. Put yourself into a Spin dash, but don't release and it'll rack up the points to eventually give you loads of lives. Not really a Disc One Nuke as it occours in the last zone of Sonic 3, but if you're playing Sonic & Knuckles connected you can breeze through Sonic & Knuckles with tonnes of lives.
 * In Sonic 3, a skilled player can get all of the Chaos emeralds within the first two levels of the game. Angel Island contains two giant rings per act, so before finishing the first level a player could have four of the seven, then another four, two in each act in Hydrocity. Alternatively, one can wait and not get ANY of the giant rings the first two levels, and just use the ELEVEN chances available in the third level, 8 rings in the first act and 3 in the second. Needless to say that getting it on the first two levels means the rest of the game can be blown through.
 * This occurs in Mega Man 2, where its possible to nab the Metal Blades early in the game, possibly as the first weapon. They're EXTREMELY useful, allowing you to attack diagonally, and the blades themselves are much stronger than your standard weapon. And they don't require much energy to use, either. Some even go as far as referring to them as game breaking, especially in a series where most special weapons are mostly useless beyond a couple of boss battles.

Puzzle Game

 * Puzzle Quest:Challenge Of The Warlords has the Knight class. Abusing the Divine Right spell (which collects every Purple Star on the board for + 1 EXP each) and putting all the upgrade points into Battle (Attack power) and Morale (HP and spell resistance) allows you to easily create a Level 50 death dealer, before even reaching the Dragon Realms, the game's halfway point. And that's even if you don't get lucky with which Runes are being offered in the shops (in the PC version, at least).
 * The game's crafting and spell research and skill buying systems also allow for severe Game Breakers. The above mentioned Divine Right spell can be learned by any class after capturing a knight and building a mage tower, which can be done before reaching the first boss. Similarly, the chill tough spell, which causes your opponent to miss 3 turns, can be learned at about the same time. Similarly, the components for the absolute best gear in the game can be acquired at about the game's halfway point, allowing for every boss from then onward to be a cakewalk. Normally, leveling up only helps with certain enemy, as the game scales Random Encounters. However, you can buy skill points without leveling up, allowing for a level 1 character to have more attack power than any enemy in the game.
 * Another skill combo that can be a Game Breaker is the Warrior skill Berserker Rage combined with Conflagration. The former converts all red gems into skulls, and the latter changes all gems of a particular colour into red gems. With proper items it's possible to achieve turn one kills from level 20 onward, making for very disappointing boss and multiplayer battles.

Real Time Strategy

 * Unusual for a strategy game, completing the second mission of James in Sacrifice in the 'good' (and most obvious) way gets you the support of Siroco, a hero-version of Persephone's strongest unit, in further missions. The fact that the player's avatar is needed to permanently beat enemy wizards is pretty much the only reason why you can't point Siroco in the general direction of the enemy and win the next 3 missions while you go and get a drink.
 * In Mech Commander 1, the game allows you to salvage fallen enemy mechs, provided they aren't written off (i.e.: power core explodes) It's possible to salvage a Mad Cat mech in the 3rd mission of the game. The Mad Cat is one of the best mechs available - in the Heavy class, but with a speed of 24 m/s it can outpace most medium mechs. Having it makes the game a lot easier (although it's kinda pot luck in terms of getting it - at the time of the level, your mechs are unlikely to beat it normally - you have to detonate some explosive gas silos that the Mad Cat runs by).
 * The developers did release a patch that gave you a Mad Cat at the start to reflect the opening cinematic (though that looked like a power core breach). Getting the second Mad Cat through sheer persistence (20th time lucky...no, 21st time lucky...no...) was still important though to split the enemy fire between two targets.
 * In the sixth mission of Homeworld: Cataclysm, it was possible to capture a Taidani Battlecruiser when the most advanced vessel you could build yourself was a frigate. This ship would then be able to carry you through the next 8 or so missions, only becoming vulnerable to destruction when you gain the ability to build your own big ships. Really takes the fear out of those Escort Missions.
 * In Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising your Space Marines start at level 20 of 30. After the first mission you can reset and reassign their skill points and thus, through min-maxing, aquire the high-level abilities, such as infinite, stamina-based mines and frag grenades in bundles and artillery strikes. All of them are easy and safe to use and ridiculously powerfull. Except for some particularly nasty bosess, the game will become a walk in the park.
 * For that matter, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade's Space Marines have a disc one nuke of sorts in multiplayer gameplay. By going straight for T2 and immediately purchasing Grey Knights and a Chaplain, you'll cripple your economy but gain a small squad that deals substantial damage and is extremely difficult to kill, plus possessing a snare (thanks to the Chaplain) and a high-damage, morale-breaking Ao E spell (thanks to the Grey Knights. The Chaplain's cost was intended to discourage players from purchasing him so early in a match, but it can be done and is very effective, often requiring the entire enemy team to coordinate to take out the squad.
 * In Earth2150, the UCS plasma cannons are available much earlier than similarly powerful weapons from other factions. Add to this the weapon's Game Breaker status (high damage, high rate of fire, infinite ammo) and you can utterly annihilate the other factions with an early rush.
 * The First Shogun Total War has Warrior Monks, provided you didn't start the 1580 Scenario, or the Mongol Scenario. The Warrior monks are amongst the strongest melee units in the game, and to top it off, they also give a morale penalty to any non-christian unit they encounter. They can be got simply by building a garden (which trains emissaries) and then a temple. On top of this, most early factions deploy large numbers of ashigaru, which have terrible morale; the result is that one unit of these monks can potentially scatter armies if judiciously deployed. They can also unlock the No-Dachis, which gives the single strongest offensive infantry unit in the game. The Warrior monks main listed weakness is that if the opposition is christian, they lose their morale debuff. However, the main balance against warrior monks is in fact the humble Samurai Archer, which can bring them down by the dozens and potentially scatter them if combined by a judicious flank assault.

Roguelike

 * Sacrificing for Artifact Weapons in Nethack is an example of this. Certain roles get powerful weapons as guaranteed first-sacrifice-gifts, and Wizards get arguably their best weapon as a guaranteed first. An early co-aligned altar virtually guarantees ascension for a well-played Wizard.
 * The spell of Charm Monster for a Tourist (their special spell) or Wizard. No one ever does it because it requires spell-friendly armor to cast during combat, getting the spellbook is not guaranteed, and it takes even more patience than normal Nethack play. (Which requires a lot of patience.)
 * Ancient Domains of Mystery has these en masse. There's a waterproof blanket guaranteed to spawn in a cave near the beginning, greatly helping the player against rusting from water. The cave does contain tougher-than-usual monsters though. Some chaos mutations may give a lot of advantage. Some characters may start with magical boots that make them outrun almost any monster. And finally, in early-midgame the player may find "Si", an artifact that duplicates itself and provides infinite amount of money for the player who wishes to take advantage this power.
 * Even in the original Rogue, it was occasionally possible to obtain both a wand of polymorph and a wand of lightning/fire/cold on the first level of the dungeon. If you polymorphed the creature you were facing into a high-level monster (say, a Griffin or a Jabberwock), and then killed it with the damage-dealing wand, you'd instantly earn enough experience points to jump to level 10 or 11. The next ten or fifteen dungeon levels are trivially easy to survive with that many hit points.

Roleplaying Games

 * Telefang is a strange example: to get a monster on your side, you phone them up. If you know a powerful monster's phone number, then you can get it early.
 * The Red Eagle in Treasure of the Rudras. You can get this badass weapon for Surlent at the start of his scenario in the Sakkara Desert by killing a certain enemy, not only is it powerful but you can immensely level grind by killing that enemy and the Red Eagle sells for around 2000 Ragu. Only problem is that you need an very powerful Lightning Mantra to toast that enemy.
 * Of course, some experimenting with random Mantra entry can result in this sort of nuke as well, assuming you have the MP for it. And most players are likely to be willing to play with that system anyway...which can result in hideously powerful spells of every element that cost only 1 MP to cast.
 * Also from the same game are the Axis Shields which sell for 200 Ragu a pop and Beze wings which sell for 480 Ragu each also the Bezeweigns that drop those wings give a solid amount of Experience, but are very quick and can escape without speed/power/critical buffs on your characters.
 * Metal Saga has the Abrams tank, costs a bundle (20K+ Gold), but it does pay off as being one of the best tanks in the game up until you get the Red Wolf or Whitemuu and even then it still is useful.
 * One of the most ridiculous examples was also patently deliberate- in the obscure PS 1 RPG The Granstream Saga the most powerful weapon in the game, the Onimaru, could only be acquired right at the very beginning, even before your first battle. You have 1 chance to get it by using a secret-revealing item on a seemingly random piece of wall to find it. Once you have it, you can basically trash the entire game without raising a sweat- it has almost twice the power of any other weapon in the game and is easy to use too (compared to the next strongest weapon which is unwieldy and tough to use).
 * In Lufia: The Legend Returns for the Game Boy Color, the game's strongest weapon, the Alumina sword, is sometimes dropped by normal enemies very early in the game.
 * In Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals. About halfway through the game, the party is able to go visit the Ancient Cave. The Ancient Cave has 99 floors with randomly generated layouts, your party stripped of all equipment and items and reduced to Level 1, and you have to find items and equipment in randomly placed chests while dealing with increasingly strong monsters. In addition, there are blue-colored treasure chests, many of which bear some of the most powerful weapons and equipment in the game. Did we mention that when you leave, you lose everything gathered in the cave except what you find in blue chests? Should one spend enough time in the Ancient Cave, their party becomes Nigh Invulnerable until the end of the game.
 * Albion has a very interesting form of this. Careful exploration and talking to NPCs in the prologue will allow you to find a powerful gun, with ammo. However, you must also figure out how to smuggle it past the guards. Once you do, you have a limited but extremely powerful gun, perfect for the difficult early battles.
 * The NES game Faxanadu had a magic store early on, which sold one of the most powerful spells in the game - Death. Unfortunately it was set at such a high price that affording it would require several hours of Level Grinding (which, again, would take as long as it'd be to get it "honestly") or a cheat code (in which case, why don't you just cheat up the Death spell itself?).
 * Not to mention it's far cheaper later on as well. Though it's only two hours, not several, if you know the correct spots.
 * Said store also sold the Magic Shield, the best shield in the game.
 * The Playstation RPG Star Ocean the Second Story is a perfect example of this. Using a bit of Level Grinding to gain skill points, you can acquire an item early on called the Mischief. This item drops a random item into your inventory every 15 seconds, one of which is called the Forged Medal. The Forged Medal reduces the EXP needed for a character to reach the next level to 1. With a bit more grinding, you can get the ability to replicate the Forged Medal, allowing you to level your characters insanely high in little time at all. Of course, if you spend just a tiny bit more time grinding, you won't need to copy Forged Medals until the game's second disk...it's entirely possible to gain the most powerful sword in the game before you're even halfway finished with the game's first disc!
 * Getting as far as you can in the tournament in Disc 1 nets you a sword which can only be obtained this way. All you need after that is two Mithrils, which you can get randomly by using particular items made via item creation. Customizing using the two Mithrils yields the Eternal Sphere, possibly the best weapon in the entire game, which renders Disc 1 a joke and everything up to the final boss (not including the Bonus Dungeon) at least easily doable.
 * It is also possible to obtain at least 2 copies of the most powerful armor during the first disc. Get Ernest to join your group and you can pickpocket one from him in a certain town. You can also pickpocket one from Claude's dad (assuming you chose Claude as the main character). Any character equipped with this armor will be invincible throughout the first disc and probably throughout the entire second disc except the Final Dungeon and the Bonus Dungeon.
 * If you get your pickpocketing skill high enough in Disc One, you can pickpocket an item called the Treasure Chest from a guy in Mars Village. The Treasure Chest produces three items at random when used. It can potentially give you the Marvel Sword, which Claude won't have to replace for a stronger sword until halfway through Disc Two. It raises your offense and defense to extreme levels, effectively turning one character into a super tank.
 * And on the subject of skills, a lot of other ones can fall under this trope on their own, even before they combine into abilities. Some of the best examples would be Biology (A boost of (skill level squared times 10) to your HP, meaning a 1000 HP boost at maxed level), Herbal Medicine (+ 3% to the effect of Blue/Blackberries per level, which start off restoring 22% of your max HP and MP respectively, but at max level will recover a much more useful 52%), Danger Sense (+ 3 Stamina per level, Stamina will recover HP and MP after battles, which is INSANELY helpful), and Playfulness (gives some cash upon gaining a level in the skill, giving HUGE amounts at the higher levels; maxing out this skill for ONE character will take care of your money problems for the entire first disc). The better ones are balanced out by extremely high SP costs, but by leveling the Perseverance skill and doing a bit of grinding, they can be easily be bought before leaving the first continent.
 * The tradition continues in the Playstation 2 RPG Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. It might be considered a Guide Dang It, but some stumble upon it on their own. In Star Ocean 3, you get bonuses for "completing" a map (walking every single portion of it), which is a rather tedious process. The rewards range from ostensibly lame to quite good. Early on, the rewards err on the side of lame. However, even the ones that suck sell for quite a bit of currency. If you complete all of the areas which can be completed up until a certain town not particularly far into the game, and fight the encounters that result from wandering around the map to complete it, you will have enough money to purchase one or two items that would otherwise be teaser gear in an improbably powerful shop. Normally, you would have to wait until later in the game to come back and buy the high-powered items. Needless to say, the difficulty takes a rather sharp dive at that point, and it could even be considered a sequence error due to sloppy programming under a liberal definition.
 * In the middle of the first disk, after obtaining the second best alchemist in the game, you can obtain some Orichalcum. It looks useless, until you forge it into a weapon. It adds 500+ attack and gives you a 50% chance of surviving a fatal blow if you have Fury. They're also not that expensive to make (10,000 Fol)... Well you can probably afford four-five at most, but still, 2000+ attack to go around in that point is pretty darn impressive. They were likely put in for the sake of playing on Universe and 4D difficulty, where things like abusing selling the model bunnies and Orichalcum become rather necessary. Though one has to wonder if that is the case, why didn't they just lock them out in Galaxy mode...?
 * Said Orichalcum is available behind a hill you can access incredibly early. The theory is that you'll die a horrible death if you go there before the game expects you to. In reality, one of the random encounters there is a ball type enemy that does nothing but damage your MP. By rushing in and killing that enemy, you can gain dozens of levels in no time at all, then move on to beating up the enemies for the Orichalcum and other rare ores in the area behind the hill. And all of this is absolutely required on the Nintendo Hard higher difficulty levels.
 * In Tales of the Abyss, near endgame weapons are sold early on at shops for ridiculously high amounts of Gald, but become cheaper and affordable as the plot progresses and your characters actually build up to that level. However, the ability to transfer Gald to a new record once you complete the game allows you to afford the weapons at that point, which is very useful if one chooses to play the game using a Nintendo Hard difficulty level.
 * In the first Xenosaga game, the player can finish the tutorial for the game's Humongous Mecha system without actually using the AGWS mecha to gain the rare points used to level up Limit Breaks. Grinding the tutorial while it's available lets the player have access to very potent attacks much earlier than what would be possible by playing "fair".
 * Also present in its spiritual predecessor Xenogears. If you grind up enough cash early in the game, you can purchase an Ether Doubler from Nisan, which powers up your magic attacks in exchange for increased Mana cost. Once Elly joins your party with her Gear, she can use Aerods, which are basically a multi-target magic attack that costs fuel instead of ether but still counts as an ether attack. With an Ether Doubler, Elly goes from mediocre Squishy Wizard to Goddess of MT Death, and can tear through most enemies in the early-mid game (including bosses) with only one or two rounds of aerod abuse.
 * Valkyrie Profile gives the player a number of staves that allow mages to use Great Magic early in the game, though they have a high chance of breaking after each use.
 * Except, they only break if you do regular attacks with them. If you keep your mages only using magic attacks, they can use ludicrously overpowered weaponry way before you should get it, and you keep getting better overpowered ones til the end of the game.
 * Also except if you do some roundabout moves, you can acquire the Unicorn's Horn, which is an unbreakable Great Magic staff, in Chapter 4. And it's more powerful than all but one of the breakable ones. Expect to hear the invocation to Celestial Star (by far the spell with the most hits and the fewest enemies that resist it) and Meteor Swarm (second-most hits and hits everything that resists Celestial Star) repeatedly after acquiring it. Quite a Guide Dang It, though.
 * In Kingdom Hearts, it is possible to be as advanced as Level 20 without leaving Destiny Island, after a few hours of level grinding against Wakka or Selphie (block the jumprope for 1 xp, watch it hit her head for another, and it won't ever kill her). Blocking his attacks gives you quick Technical XP. By doing this it becomes easy to win all battles for at least the next 2 worlds, including the ones you're not even supposed to win.
 * A little grinding on the tutorial of Kingdom Hearts II will increase your stats enough to make the initial gameplay ridiculously easy - even though you don't have stats during the tutorial.
 * Additionally, stepping on to a save point and going to the world map while in a Drive Form will reset you to normal with a maxed out Drive Gauge(even if it was nearly empty), making it possible to stay in Drive Form nearly continuously and level up much more quickly than is intended.
 * Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days gives us its hysterical joke weapons, which can be obtained after the tutorial missions by going back via Holo-Missions and earning their respective Challenge Sigils. Joke Weapon or not, they're more powerful than the basic Kingdom Key you start with, and make some of the earlier missions much easier.
 * The first special attack you have access to in Super Mario RPG can potentially be a Disc One Nuke. Mario's standard Jump attack actually makes a slight gain in power every time it is used. This can be done up to 255 times, and by that time, Jump will be the most powerful skill in the game by far (with the possible exception of 100 Super Jumps, and this is much easier). Of course the very first dungeon contains Spinies, which are immune to Jump attacks, which make them the perfect candidates to practice the move on. Unsurprisingly, this strategy is one of the major keys to a Low Level challenge in SMRPG.
 * The very first level of Super Paper Mario contains a creature that spits out infinite numbers of projectiles that the player can jump on to gain points. Because the points earned increase with each successive jump, with the only limit being the end of the screen (at which point you have to start all over, but you can easily make several thousand jumps before then), it's possible to level the character up far past what it would take to beat the game's toughest Bonus Boss... in less than an hour. Did I mention you can do this on the very first level?
 * The classic "infinite 1-Up trick" is also performable. However, the experience starts going negative after a certain amount of jumps.
 * In the third chapter of Dragon Quest IV, it is possible (though very time-consuming and even more boring) to obtain a sword that is by far the strongest weapon available in the chapter before fighting even a single battle, if you're willing to sit through hours upon hours of running a weapon shop until somebody sells you the sword and you earn enough money to buy it (the player character doesn't own the store, he's just hired help). Saving up the money is by far the more time-consuming part of the process. An added complication is that customers may try to buy the sword before you have enough money for it, and sometimes they stubbornly refuse to take no for an answer. By the time the chapter 3 character returns in chapter 5, his once-overpowered sword has become mediocre in the face of much tougher enemies. All in all, it's far more trouble than it's worth; conventional Level Grinding would be more efficient and less boring.
 * You can get the money in other ways, though; in fact, you're required to earn several times the cost of the sword in order to beat that section of the game, and many fast-money tricks are specifically provided to this end. So if you happen to have the weapon appear, you can just call it a lucky break, leave your job, and come back halfway through the chapter to buy it... when it's nice to have, but not that overpowered. In later chapters you can just buy it from stores anyway.
 * But then again, the main reason to get the sword to appear isn't so that you can use it yourself, it's because it's also the most expensive weapon in the chapter and thus makes it a prime subject for the most effective of these in-game money tricks. So in other words, ultimately you'd want to buy as many of these swords from the original weapon shop as possible, sell them at your own weapon shop for 50% profit and repeat until your Bag of Sharing is filled with 99 copies of every item you can possibly acquire in the chapter. And after that's done, give yourself a huge amount of cash and use that to buy all the casino tokens you could ever need. If you're wondering why just not amass a huge fortune and not screw around with buying excessive amount of equipment to sell, that's simply because while money doesn't carry over between chapters, equipment will.
 * A much better example from DQ4 would be Save Scumming at the casino to win 4 Metal Babble Shields, 8 Meteorite Armbands, and a couple dozen Wizard Rings in Chapter 2.
 * You might also consider the fact that you can leave behind one of the Broad Swords in the Silver Statuette cave for the hero to pick up in early Chapter 5.
 * Dragon Quest V, by contrast, allows you to obtain the Metal King Sword from the casino, reachable not long after getting clear of the game's prologue. If you have the patience to win the tokens for it at the casino, it really is the best sword in the game.
 * In the Mons spinoff games, there are often several examples of powerful early or mid game monsters that are available if you understand the breeding system.
 * For example, in Dragon Quest Monsters Joker, capturing the first enemy you see, the humble Rank F Slime, opens up the option to breed 4 of them together across two generations. (not that it mentions this in game, mind you.) 2 Slimes bred together that both have 2 Slime parents results in a Rank C King Slime, a reference to how they appear in Dragon Quest IV (8 slimes all jump together and merge into a King Slime). The King Slime will dominate the early game due to it's "Cleric" skillset (which is a mistranslation of "Hero", aka the Dragon Quest hero's skillset of Cure spells, Lightning spells, and outrageous sword techniques).
 * Even better, if you do the same thing with 4 King Slimes, you get a Rank B King Cureslime, which will inherit the Cleric skillset, as well as the most powerful healing skillset in the game. Taking a Rank B King Cureslime and breeding it with a Rank F Bubble Slime (easily available early in the game, or breed-able using a slime and a platypunk, which is available right next to the slimes) will lead a Rank A King Bubble Slime, which gets Bad Breath, one of the best debuff skillsets in the game—as well as Cleric and Heal-All. In addition, these powerful Rank C/B/A monsters also play hell with the game's monster recruitment system, allowing you to catapult past the Rank F/E/D part of the early game. Of course, going all the way to Rank A would take an incredibly huge amount of work to do, but you could still do it literally within hours of the game starting.
 * Not to mention that it's pretty easy as it is to synthesize a Rank A monster by the third island if you've scouted a good amount and already synthesized a couple times. I managed to get a King Bubble Slime early on without even needing four King Slimes. Once you really dig into the mechanics of the game it's possible to have a team of Rank A/B monsters by the time you hit Infern Isle, which is mostly comprised of C/D monsters.
 * In Sword of Mana on the Gameboy Advance, playing as the girl gives you Light magic at the start of the game, bats are weak against Light magic and are found in the first cave area you come across. Grinding until you kill 1000 bats transforms them into Doomy Bats of Doom which can be hit with Light magic, which in turn grinds up your Light skill until it's powerful enough to kill them, thereby allowing you to level up really easily and quickly, making the rest of the game a breeze.
 * In Crisis Core you can do optional side missions (300 in total!). You can access the missions from any save point but some are locked until you progress in the story. If you do a lot of missions, you will gain a lot of levels and some pretty good equipment. The problem is that the main story does not scale with your level.
 * Not even to mention how the game's Materia Fusion system acts, in a particularly creative player's hands, as a massive Game Breaker factory. With shrewd materia fusing (there are guides to teach you how) you can have your six equipped materia provide you the + 999% HP bonus twice (combined with the HP Break ability, you have 99,999 health instead of the standard maximum of 9,999) as well as + 100 on your attack, agility, vitality and luck stats, making you a living god when combined with the game's best armor. In fact, this is pretty much the ONLY way to face the game's ultimate optional boss and not being killed by her first attack (never mind the hundreds of attacks she'll use as you try and whittle away her TEN MILLION HP)
 * There's also a hidden shop you can get fairly early in the game through the side missions. It sells materia that let you attack with and defend against any statuses attached to the other materia you have equipped. The same shop sells the Hell elemental materia, which are essentially the top Ice/Fire/Lightning spells, with Death/Stop/Poison/etc. slapped on. With enough cash, you'll be simultaneously immune to and dishing out half of the most debilitating status effects in the game.
 * A general Mega Ten example: Petrify and Charm. No, seriously. Charm can be obtained very early in pretty much every game, and doubles as one of the best ways to deal with bad Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors matchups you're bound to have, a way to deal with Goddamned Bats and a way to keep your party healed with low cost and, though rare, can also works on minor bosses. Petrify, on the other hand, kills pretty much everything non-boss, barring some rare occasions, with surprisingly high accuracy, even though it takes longer to get.
 * In the Updated Rerelease Persona 3: FES, you can now indulge in Item Crafting at the Shinshoudo Antique Shop. The process is simple: you must forge a persona you have in your inventory to a "blank" weapon. With a bit of Money Grinding, and use of the Old Save Bonus feature to bring back one's persona compendium from the original game, one can buy back a high-level persona and fuse it to any blank weapon resulting in a weapon you probably wouldn't get for at least 70% into the game. For more fun and potential game breakage, forging certain personae results in an Infinity+1 Sword.
 * Fusing the right 3 Persona (Pixie and Nekomata then the result with an angel) early on can give you a Lilim with the 4 main elements by level 8. This lasts more than long enough for the next quad elemental persona (Pale Raider) which lasts till the right skills are accessible for specialists.
 * A similar recipe exists to create a 4-element Yomotsu Shikome a Lv. 9 Hermit persona. It's slightly better than Lilim because Shikome has no weakness and is resistant to Darkness/Mudo.
 * You can do a similar trick in Persona 4. New Game+ lets you carry over your money and any registered personas. As soon as the compendium is available, you can just buy a high-powered persona such as Ardha, Lucifer, Satan, Metatron, Yoshitsune, etc. and bulldoze through dungeons in at least one day.
 * There's also the "Victory Cry Kaiwan" trick. Kaiwan is a Lv. 24 Star arcana persona who starts with Tetrakarn. While it is a useful spell because it will reflect any Phys-based attack (except almighty) once, the true beauty of it comes when you fuse the persona on a day where the Fusion Forecast gives the "skill change" bonus. When it is fused with the least amount of passed-on skills, there's a random chance of Tetrakarn morphing into Victory Cry (full HP/SP restore after winning a battle). If Kaiwan gets Victory Cry, he makes great fusion fodder for passing the skill to other personas.
 * Raidou Kuzunoha VS King Abaddon features Fiend battles. They are quite tough as per usual for the series as they start hounding you as early as Episode Three. However, with a little patience and demon setup, you can kill the White Rider (and Red Rider if you're lucky) and unlock it for fusion. What makes this so great is that Fiends do not have the level restriction as most other demons—all you need is to have defeated the Fiend just once, have the proper gems (which can be acquired by bribing demons) and the moon phase to be New Moon. If you create the Rider, he'll be about 40+ levels higher than Raidou, have a boatload of resistances and can be augmented with Full Moon Mitama fusion. With this demon(s) on Raidou's side, they can pretty much curbstomp the next two Episodes or so. This can also be done when fusing Magatsu/Evil-type demons (any moonphase except new moon), and for those you don't even have to kill them to unlock. The system can be further exploited by the fact that you cannot have the same demon twice, Fiend and Magatsu/Evil fusions are no exception, if you have the demon that you would get from the gems, you simply get the one lower, unless there isn't any in which case you get one HIGHER, with enough time and saving you could easily get a level 31 and a level 33 evil demon from the moment you are able to fuse.
 * In later Mega Man Battle Network games, you gained fairly early access to a thing called the Number Trader, which you input a set code into to gain items, including ridiculously powerful chips and Navi Customizer parts you shouldn't have yet. Mega Man Star Force does this too, with Cipher Codes. The Chip Traders in Battle Network can be used for this too, although those are fairly random and luck-based.
 * In Battle Network 1, simply acquiring the Pop Up chip can make you nigh unbeatable to most enemies and bosses because you remain invisible for the duration fo the turn. As long as you just use a charged buster attack (which deals a fair amount of damage), you can attack without being hit back unless you get careless. This tactic works best on the final boss when your effort is not timed.
 * By the same token, in Battle Network 3, Mega Man has to fight FlashMan, the very first boss in the game. With a little trial and error, one can create a folder based around the chip and effectively destroy every boss in the game.
 * Also in 3, a Life Sword folder is pretty easy to make early in the game if you know where to look (SciLab GMD and Swordies), and lasts though most of it.
 * BN 5 had Dark Invisible, a Dark Chip obtained through the Number Trader using a code you can easily find on GameFAQs. The chip itself is pretty powerful since it provides an 8-second invincible berserker mode, but if you're playing Team Colonel you can use it to activate ShadowMan's Chaos Unison after the 4th Liberation Mission (where you regain control of Mega Man and he gains ShadowMan and TomahawkMan's Double Souls). Combine with proper timing and abuse of pausing and you've got yourself a recipe for easy victories.
 * The most ridiculous example though is in the DS version of BN 5. In it, you can import your folder from the GBA version. If you have beat the cartridge version and import it to the DS version, You now have a folder that can beat the end boss and you may use it on the first area.
 * In Star Force 2 (both versions) one can go overboard with this if you know what you're doing:
 * You can register Brothers VERY early in the game. The trick comes up when you know you can register the other version on the same card as a Brother; if you've completed that version, you can get a good number of pickups when you first reach them earlier than you're supposed to, and you can send end-game cards via mail from your completed game.
 * There are in-game, legitimate codes that can be entered to grant you various cards, abilities, etc, which can be entered as soon as the opening cutscenes finish. One category of these is known as the 'leveling' codes, which give MegaMan more HP, a stronger buster, etc. The strongest of these gives you an HP count around what you might have endgame without it (+ 990, you start with 100), a standard buster that renders a fifth of your starting folder obsolete, and as many Giga Card slots as you can EVER (reasonably) have without it, among other things. At the START OF THE GAME. The kicker is that those loosened card restrictions and extra ~1000 HP are just as useful against the strongest version of the final boss, making this a bit of a Game Breaker.
 * In the most literal example, there are cards called Blank Cards in the game that can be overwritten with essentially any card in the game. You get the first one fairly early on. There are cards in the game that, unmodified, can nuke the entire enemy area of the battlefield for about 400-500 damage. Most end-game bosses have less than six times that, so...
 * The World Ends With You features the ability to evolve existing pins into more powerful forms. Pins require one of three types of experience points to do so. While the selection of pins is rather limited, it is nonetheless possible to get the Yoshimitsu pin (the most powerful Shockwave pin), as well as the most powerful versions of the Natural Puppy energy blast pins... during the first week (chapter) of the game. It's not even that hard-Shutdown and Mingle PP aren't affected by what point of the game you are at, so a game-end player with 100% Completion will get those points in the same amounts that a newbie just starting his game will. If only pin evolutions weren't such a Guide Dang It...
 * Speaking of Mingling, using it around other players allows you to buy powerful pins and threads sooner than you'd normally obtain them. The catches? If you buy the entire Darklit Planet set, you can't fully utilize its power until you have six pin slots (you need all six pins equipped at once for them to inflict lots of damage), and in the case of threads, many powerful threads have a high Bravery requirement.
 * Savvy players of Mega Man X 5 can get X's Ultimate Armor and/or Zero's Black Armor early; they simply need to  before striking out on any of the eight Maverick levels, then.
 * Of course, doing this is pretty much a one-way ticket to the bad ending, and usually makes it impossible to get Zero's upgrade unless you're insanely lucky.
 * I'll just input the Video Game Cheats at the character select screen, thanks.
 * A better, more "legal" example would be Zero's C-Sword skill, obtained from Grizzly Slash. It has good range, and can strike multiple hits. To top it all off, defeating Slash also rewards you with the Double Jump ability, which, as many fans would know, is very useful. What makes it a Disc One Nuke is that Grizzly Slash is the easiest boss (and level) in the game, and a good choice to start on the 8 bosses.
 * In Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X, Storm Tornado is the most powerful weapon in the game, able to destroy nearly every enemy that gets hit with it. You can easily obtain this if you destroy Storm Eagle first.
 * Contact features Blue Pillbugs, which show up in one room on the second island and are definitely something you'll want to avoid engaging normally until you're strong enough to kill them so that you can grab the Armor Breaker weapon, which increases the odds of triggering the Armor Break ability (if you have it) by twenty percent. However, thanks to a trick involvinga nearby stairwell and some tricky maneuvering, it's possible to repeatedly kill one of them, allowing you to quick level offensive stats, and, if you grind for long enough or just get lucky, you can get it to drop the Armor Breaker. Said weapon has an offense of twenty-seven. The highest offense for a weapon that you could ostensibly get at that point in the game normally? Eight. The boss of that island gets turned into a joke, taking three hits for each hand and the head. It also tends to render enemies rather frightened, allowing you to progress relatively unmolested and smash anything stupid enough to attack you.
 * Infinite Undiscovery released a few DLC (downloadable content, from Xbox Live's Marketplace) "vouchers" that allow you to purchase exceptionally rare materials from merchants anywhere in the world. Coupled with several profitable alchemy recipes to choose from, a player could raise the money for expensive components and craft themselves some of the best armors and weapons in the game before even finishing Castle Prevant (the third dungeon).
 * Understatement. With Edward in your party, buy as many Sheep Hides as you possibly can, and turn them into Smiley Charms. Sheep Hides cost 120 fol apiece, and Smiley Charms sell for 1500, do the math. It gets even more ridiculous if you can download the free vouchers that let you buy practically every single material needed for item creation, from every merchant in the game, hrmm... Well, if you are stocking up on materials and feel as if the Smiley Charms aren't going fast enough, never fear, most likely during the process Edward will have become a level 6(max)smith, while you only have to be level 3 to make Horseshoes. They sell for 2600 fol, while you need one granite and 2 iron metal to make(which you can buy ANYWHERE after you download the vouchers)which collectively costs 750 fol. So, with the vouchers, you can legitametaly get pretty damn near getting the last equipment for all of your characters, in the first or second town. So while the vouchers help, you don't even need them if you want ridiculous amounts of money, all you need is a TV and some extra batteries.
 * Obscure Game Boy Color RPG Li'l Monster has a Disc One Nuke from the first boss, Gyro. You don't have to beat him to advance the game, but if you do, he drops the one-of-a-kind Dowser gem. Dowser's power isn't that impressive, but it can be used to summon a different monster, who, while difficult to beat at an early stage, is still defeatable with Save Scumming... and the gem he drops doubles your damage delt. Plus, the Dowser gem itself can be used to make Gyro your Mon, and his power is decent for that early game stage.
 * Paladin's Quest has the Gomutai, a sword which can be found in the middle of the game and which has an attack power of 300 when the next best sword (found much later) has 100. It seems to be a Disc One Nuke, but ends up not imbalancing the game despite performing exactly as advertised, since you have a four character party and doubling the power of one character doesn't double the power of the party.
 * In Legend of Dragoon, it is possible to level up Dart's additions to max early on. This gives a huge heads up. Early disc 2 you have a chance to fight 00Parts, a high level minion that can insta kill, but also gives absurd cash on defeat, which can be used to buy the best armor and helmet in the game, and an accesory which makes the Additions automatic.
 * Oracle of Tao has a way two ways to level to 20 in the first town. The first is beating a certain type of ghost near the graveyards, and the second is a random room which has a priestess that gives levelups to the party (up to level 20).
 * Stealing from the second boss in the game yields a Dark Sword which is much more powerful than any of the current weapons before this point. Also, multiple copies can be stolen, giving a great deal of money for other items.
 * SaGa Frontier allows you fast access to several very powerful weapons very early in the game. The most spectacular of these? At the beginning of Asellus' quest, she starts out in the village of the craftsman of the Infinity+1 Sword which means, for a small sacrifice of life points, you can have the second strongest sword in the game available to you roughly thirty minutes in. To balance this, however, there is an essentially optional boss battle near the end of this quest that is extremely difficult to beat, even with this sword.
 * SaGa II (known in the states as Final Fantasy Legend II) randomly awared new mutant powers at the end of battles based on the level of the monsters fought. One particular boss encountered relatively early in the was a class "9", more or less meaning that a little bit of Save Scumming would net you a power far more advanced than you were meant to have at that point in the game.
 * The second and third parts of the Lufia series have those, in the second you need a bit of grinding to beat Gades, but his blade onehits every critter for some time, and it's special ability is among the very best in the entire game. The third game needs a bit more grinding, and a certain strategy, but you can get a few very nice items by beating a few Bonus Bosses early. And then there is Alumina Sword, which you can get early just by a lot of luck (or grinding again, of course).
 * In Suikoden I, if you enter the forest beside Seika early you will meet Kobolds, monsters FAR stronger then what you should be facing. However you can wipe them out in one fire spell. Because you get more experience the bigger the difference in levels between you and the enemy, ten minutes of fighting can set you FAR ahead of the curve before you even have your fortress, which just happens to be where one of the hardest fights in the game is.
 * In Suikoden II, you have the opportunity to get through a gate into one of the later areas, Matilda, and pick up two characters that import from the first game. Your levels will jump significantly, making much of the rest of the game, at least until well beyond that area, nearly trivial.
 * The first Persona has a level 18 Persona that nullifies magic and has a powerful attack spell and Mediarama (the first Persona to have it; the rest are at level 29 and up). Not only is it absurdly easy to obtain, you can fuse it at a point where it can literally one-hit just about anything, and it remains useful even in the endgame due to its low SP cost.
 * In the Gameboy Color RPG Magi Nation, a basic healing item could be sold for considerably more (taking into account the low max-money cap) than it cost to buy it. It doesn't take half a brain to figure out the consequences of this.
 * In Chrono Trigger, you reach a town run by monsters (Medina) fairly early in the game. The weapons and armor shop has very good equipment, but the shopkeeper sells them at ridiculously high prices because he hates humans, preventing you from buying it (you can purchase the same equipment at reasonable prices in 12,000 BC, but you get there much later on). It is possible to raise enough money to buy it early, making combat a bit easier for a while. The best way is by buying weapons and armor in 65,000,000 BC (where they trade it for random items you get after beating enemies instead of gold), and then selling it.
 * The Mega Drive/Genesis game Light Crusader has two examples. First, you can get the best armour in the game from the Lily pad enemies, which are all over the place in the first two levels of the dungeon. Second, you can fill up your magic completely if you find the hidden green potion in the second level.
 * In Tales of Innocence Guild Dungeons' chests give randomly generated loot. However, some of the items in the tables are very, very good. Therefore, it is possible, in a rank 2 dungeon, to obtain a "Mythril" Sword with 110 attack and a casting speed bonus at a time where the normal swords you can buy in shops and/or loot in dungeons have maybe 18 attack.
 * Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep has the Megaflare command, a massive and massively powerful fire-based attack that pretty much wipes the field, plus, using it is practically a guarantee of entering a Command Style, in case anything survived that blast. When can you get it? At the latest, after beating two of the first bosses. The Megaflare command is only available via the game's "command melding" system, but even if the longest, most round-about way is chosen (for the benefits of passive abilities, which can also be used to increase the damage your fire attacks do), it still boils down to only needing three individual commands (3 Aero commands, 6 Fire, and 3 Stop/Slow) all of which can be bought in any shop after beating the second boss. Sure, the commands have to be "leveled up" before being melded, but did we mention that, if you're not fond of fighting monsters, there's a minigame that can be played that will level them up FOR you? (And the self-same minigame is home to yet another nuke, if you're decent with the Shotlock system)? Sufficiently determined players can have Megaflare before the third world, and if you're playing as Terra, it's even easier: In the early Snow White world, Fission Firaga, the final ingredient, falls into your lap and from that point can be bought in stores. The only semblance of balance is the time involved leveling the commands and the fact that some enemies resist fire.
 * Magna Carta 2 allows you to buy a complete collection of gag weapons for the small price of 400MS. Not only are these weapons given to you (almost) straight away, but they're the most powerful weapons in the game and will destroy any semblance of challenge right up until the final boss.
 * In Grandia using healing magic in the field generates water magic experience points. Since the game features both MP restore at save points and damage-dealing traps in the field, all it takes is one near the other to level water magic as high as you want (and since levelling magic improves stats, this is nothing to shake a stick at). This can also be done with earth magic and a poison trap, though this is so slow as to be useless to any but the most persistent munchkin.
 * In the SNES version of Wanderers from Ys, the outdoor areas of Ilvern Ruins have flocks of birds that respawn at a high rate, allowing you to grind up to 65535 EXP when you're barely a third of the way through the game.
 * In Record of Agarest War, there's a means of getting this without DLC. Simply save up 250 TP, and buy 10 Vessels of Life from the Adventurer's Guild. Grab the title...and then sell them all. You now have 250,000 gold as early as Generation 1, and can easily get a few other titles with ease...and 3 pieces of Mithral. And the smithing guide for Mithral gear, which in turn means that you can create a few Mithral items as soon as Platinum gear is available. A bit of a late example, but it helps with trashing late Generation 2/Early Generation 3. Some of the actual items from the Adventurer's Guild can be this as well, provided you save up for them in lieu of manuals.
 * In terms of characters, there's the first generation protagonist Leonhardt Raglen. Once you get him to level 10, he gets his first Willpower: Unleash All. What this does is that by having him at 25% HP or less, he gets a massive boost to his attack, defense, magic, and magic defense. Needless to say, any boss battle consists of having Leo killed (or at 25% HP), have an EX Skill handy and watch the fireworks. After his generation though, you lose him and you get his replacement, his son Ladius until you can find a Forbidden Tome to revive Leo.
 * This is a later example, but Strange Journey has Black Frost and Frost Ace, both of which have no weakness and spells that demons of their level shouldn't have; namely, third-tier ice attacks and a Total Party Kill. You can get them both as early as Delphinus if your level's high enough; having both of them only requires you to be at level 34 and having 5 specific demons in your party, which the game is generous enough to tell you.
 * Unlocking the fusion for Frost Ace, which can be done a little earlier, gives you an extra Disc One Nuke in the form of the Frost Cannon, a gun that comes with three spells; Bufudyne, Mazionga and Garudyne, all three of which are notably stronger than what other guns available to you at this point come with.
 * In The Genius Of Sappheiros, it is possible to recruit Byakuren and Mokou, normally the last two characters unlocked, before starting Chapter One. Head to the Myouren Shrine and wait for an hour (of real time) to get Byakuren, and go to the Bamboo Forest Of The Lost and enter the Konami Code to trigger Mokou's arrival. Having five characters plus a commander makes the first handful of chapters much easier.
 * Phantasy Star IV has this in the form of its combo system. Set up a macro to use the techniques FOI, WAT and TSU. TRIBLASTER can carry you through most of Motavia although it's inefficient against later bosses.
 * Hyperdimension Neptunia has dungeons ranging from level 1 to up to level 1000. There's nothing stopping you from going into a high level dungeon with a lot of care and grabbing a powerful weapon very early. There's also no level system with equipment so there's no reason not to equip it.
 * In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, if you held on to those Lucky Medals, you can win the powerful Water/Wind summon Eclipse from Lemuria's Lucky Fountain as soon as you arrive. Most of the significant boss enemies in The Lost Age are Fire/Earth-aligned, including two of the Bonus Bosses and nearly all the significant dragons. If your play style involves using the summons at all, Eclipse is a game-breaker.
 * By using glitches to skip recruiting Mia and her Djinni and acquire the rest of the Djinn normally, you can use nine-Djinn classes (normally unattainable until TLA's endgame) in the first game. Fusion Dragon didn't know what hit it/them.
 * In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, there's an item acquired about a third of the way through the game called the Ice Queen Gem, which enables all stages of the Cold Snap Psynergy, including its pricy-but-powerful final form, Frostbite. Rief, otherwise despised for his Crippling Overspecialization, has a large enough Psy pool even at low levels to just spam Frostbite on everything, up until darned near the end of the game when weapons outclass Psynergy altogether.
 * Might and Magic VI actually has one as an intended feature. In the starting town of the game, you can find a hidden fly spell scroll, in the wall of one of the town's buildings, which you can use to fly atop another building, which, in turn, features a hidden portal to another map (Dragonsand), which is filled with the toughest foes of the entire game: dragons. This portal places you near the shrine of the gods, which greatly ups your stats (you can normally access the area, with extensive travelling through dangerous territories). It's not gamebreaking but it gives you a fair advantage to make things much easier, at least at the very beginning.
 * Might and Magic VII gives you the opportunity to kill a dragon, in the first map of the game. You can either do it with a spell staff, which you can conveniently accept from one of the peasants (although this has implications, later on) or you can go by the process of exploiting the AI and employ the tactic of shoot and hide. This is a freakishly time-consuming process but dragons give of the best loot. Given the fact that you can multiloot the dragon, you can outfit your entire party with the best gear in the land!
 * The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall allows you to generate your character with an ebony dagger (second-best material in the game). It is very difficult to find, requiring the player to generate their character via questionnaire and hinges upon one of the twenty or so questions.
 * In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind it is possible to get one of the most powerful swords in the game with a little swimming, a little gold and a lot of waiting.
 * In the town Balmora, you can easily steal a magical ebony broadsword by jumping * just* out of line of sight of a nearby guard. So, you can have a very powerful weapon only minutes after character creation!
 * Two other of the most powerful items in the game are easily available by starting characters: The Amulet of Shadows gives you 80% Chameleon (effectively invisible) for a decent amount of time and is found in the custody of an easy to kill archer in the middle of the wilderness. The Masque of Clavicus Vile is a very strong helmet that boosts your personality by 30 points (making everybody like you) and is owned by a relatively low-level wizard.
 * In the first version of the game, one could obtain a game-breaking item very early on. There is a cave near the starting town where you'll find a robe with constant effect of health regeneration, making you almost invincible for the rest of the game. The cave contains some relatively powerful enemies, but you don't have to fight them. As long as you have a couple lock-pick scrolls and buy some levitation potions, even a Level 1 character could potentially get it. Bethesda seems to have noticed this, as the robe was heavily nerfed in a later patch.
 * Thorough players may notice that the three houses in Vivec (Hlaalu, Redoran and Telvani) each have their own vaults. The lower Redoran vault is easily openable when you have the key, which is located in dresser on the top floor of the manor across the street. Stealing it doesn't get you a bounty, even if you're seen, and the items you can get there are made of Ebony and Glass, making it highly profitable if one repairs them and takes them to the mudcrab merchant (alternatively, one could use them, but glass and ebony are inferior to a number of also easily obtainable weapons).
 * Morrowind, featured a very easily stolen Grand Soul Gem with the soul of a daedra in it in the Mages Guild of the second town. It could be used to either create a perma-enchanted item (provided you also had piles of cash), or alternatively was worth 50.000 gold by itself. Two catches however : no merchant in the world had that much cash on him (but that could be circumvented through outside-the-box bartering) and, more importantly, because of the way the "stolen" flag worked in that game, stealing that gem flagged ALL Grand Soul Gems as stolen, meaning you could later lose all of those you earned honestly just by talking to a guard.
 * In Morrowind the amount of easily obtainable magic rings you can pick up just after the start of the game can also help make early levels a breeze. Denstagmer's Ring gives you 30% resistance to Fire, Ice and Shock. Mentor's Ring boosts your Intellegence and Willpower by 10 and the Ring of Phynaster grants 20% resistance to Poison, Magicka and Shock. All of them can be found in caves just outside of towns and are not too badly guarded.
 * And of course, there are wonders of Alchemy, being able to cyclically boost your ability to make better and better potions right at the start of the game, culminating in utter unstoppability. Disc One Nuke comes in form of a second-best alchemy set available for free in a town not far from the start of the game.
 * Spellcrafting and object-enchanting abilities in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion can be exploited by low-level characters to craft One-Hit Kill weapons and highly unbalancing spells.
 * In Oblivion it's possible to get one of the strongest swords (if not the strongest) in the game very early. It's held by a very strong NPC and it would normally require an intense battle with her to get it, but all one really has to do is attack her, and then hop on a horse and lure her to the nearest city and let the guards kill her for you.
 * There's also an area of the battleground you're supposed to fight her in that, if reached, makes you impossible to hit. You can then spam arrows at her at your leisure, as long as you've got enough to kill her with.
 * In the Shivering Isles expansion, one of the early quests gives you an enchanted sword which self-repairs its damage and its enchantment, along with having a fire or ice power (depending on whether it's day or night), and can become more powerful as long as you've killed a good amount of enemies. AFAIK, you can access the expansion world anytime you want, meaning those with a GOTY edition can easily get the sword quickly.
 * Although, the sword is leveled, and it will become useless if you get it too early.
 * Weapons aside, in Oblivion you can create enchanted armor that renders you invisible at all times, thus making you almost unbeatable.
 * Or, the very first time you encounter a enchantment pedestal you can create multiple items enchanted with continuous heal making you very nearly unbeatable. If there was an enchanting thingy sitting outside the prison you could pretty-much do it then and there.
 * The Weak Fireball spell (5 damage in 5 feet for 3 seconds) in Oblivion is very easily obtainable (start the Skingrad recommendation quest for the Mages' Guild and you get it for free), is reasonably powerful, and has an extremely low magicka cost compared to other comparable spells, making it extremely useful for the first 10 levels or so.
 * Of note: One does not need to level up in either. Doing so allows you to raise your stats. But it's possible to max out your skills while remaining at a very low level. Since skill level and not stat progression is what makes the adventurer, and all enemies "level" according to your level and not skills, this can mean your "weak fireball spells" and "simple on-hit nuke daggers" remain useful indefinitely.
 * In Skyrim, joining the Companions, likely the first guild you'll encounter in the game, and going through their quests nets you a Skyforge Steel weapon, which is as powerful as an equivalent Elven weapon but weighs less and is easier to upgrade via smithing. The Companions also give you the opportunity to, and their final quest gives you access to a powerful shield and a unique two-handed axe with Daedric stats (though it can't be upgraded).
 * Even earlier in the game, Bound Weapons. Three are available, the first two being on sale in the second town visited for the storyline, Whiterun. All three are on par with Daedric weapons, and the Sword is a Novice Conjuration spell, allowing any player to use it. They also cannot be confiscated by NPCs due to being generated by spells, allowing a character in prison to use them against guards, and preventing disarmament.
 * Not to mention Soul Trap, which, whilst only effective against living enemies still gives you XP when used on dead ones. The fact that its a high level spell that's obtained very early on lets you grind an easy 50 conjuration skill levels in about 30 minutes, meaning that it gives you a minimum of 10-20 player-levels if you use the exploit early on. Given that your health is replenished to max whenever you level up, this makes it very hard to die even in the harder dungeons, so long as you're paying attention. The fact that it gives you access to a LOT of perks and high-level summons helps a fair bit as well.
 * A bit of Fridge Brilliance with the stats similar to Daedric weapons, considering they are shaped like the Daedric weapons you can smith yourself later in the game.
 * Also, by completing an early Main Storyline quest, you are made Thane of Whiterun and given Lydia as a Housecarl. She serves rather impressively as a melee tank and can be relied on to deal with troublesome foes.
 * The Mace Of Molag Baal is the only Daedric item who's quest you can literally initiate at level one and have an expectation of completing before level 5. It's enchantments aren't very notable, barring the ever useful soul trap, but that's not what makes it a nuke. It's raw physical attack with no upgrades is on par with a base Ebony weapon, and while you won't be able to improve it's base attack until you have smithing at level 60, it's still plenty powerful, and armor enchants to boost attack damage will still work to boost it. Plus, with the perks that allow maces to ignore enemy defenses, this makes it an incredibly useful weapon until you can make your own ebony and daedric weapons.
 * The Oghma Infinitum can be exploited into an unintentional Disc One Nuke. While only obtainable after level 15, it doesn't take long to reach the level, especially if you're of the Thief class. Once awarded to you, the tome can effectively be used to empower your character to absurd levels so early in the game, future quests will seem trivial from a story perspective.
 * Baldur's Gate has a tutorial section in which you learn how to control party members. Many players found they could loot the inventory of party members of valuable items (such as a + 1 shield, a wand of heavens, and healing potions, and nonmagical plate mail), and then export their characters, and simply start a new game with said character—who now starts off with enough armor and money to breeze through until the first major dungeon.
 * Also, in the section just outside Candlekeep, to the north, you usually will "randomly" meet Drizzt and a party of his friends. By saving the game here and having Imoen attempt to pickpocket him successfully before he exits the screen you could end up with BOTH of Drizzt's +5 named artifact scimitars!
 * Baldur's Gate also featured Ankheg-infested farmland in the map just north of the first real haven of the game. Ankhegs being worth quite a chunk of XP, but being correspondingly deadly, a patient and/or lucky player could gain a few levels in short order. You can also sell the ankheg shells for gobs of cash and have good armor crafted from them. though you would need gobs of cash for the latter. All you have to do is avoid the ankheg attacks, which are slow but virtually One Hit Kills at low level—and they have a vicious ranged attack.
 * A better way to get a ton of XP early was to buy a Scroll of Protection From Petrification and then go kill the basilisks near one of the early towns. They gave about 7000 XP each and were fairly trivial as long as you couldn't be turned to stone. If you wanted to solo the game, you could gain a number of levels very quickly this way.
 * Algernon's Cape grants the use of an at-will, instant-cast, virtually-unlimited-ammo Charm spell to a first or second level PC five minutes into the game through a ridiculously easy pickpocket or NPC kill (approximately 4 HP) - yeah, that's a game nuker. An easter egg, to be sure, and serious players who wanted to enjoy the game wouldn't use it, but still. There's nothing quite like turning an enemy party against itself. You could win the whole game with one character, never having to raise a fist. Of course, no kill XP, but then that's what quest completion XP is for.
 * A bit less extreme, but there are a few really well hidden secret containers in early maps. The first map after out from Candlekeep has a diamond, worth a good 500 gold; the Lion's Road map has a + 1 ring of protection; the Friendly Arm inn has a ring which doubles the wearer's first-level spell slots if they're a wizard; and though not precisely early, Nashkel still takes place in the first act and has half-weight + 2 plate mail.
 * In Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, after importing a character from the first game, if you quickly paused after hearing the character gasp at the start of the game, you could drop their inventory, and thus prevent it from being swiped by a script—allowing you to keep some decently powerful end-game items from the first game, easily good enough to see you through the early game. However, they disallowed the 'take items from tutorial' exploit of the first game by rendering such items unusable.
 * With a little luck you can get the lich in the Dancing Crane to waste its spells. Send a single character with a Cloak of Non-Detection and some invisibility item in first. Wait until the lich cast Time Stop and Meteor Swarm then go invisible and exit the room. Wait around for awhile and the lich's protective spells will expire making him killable even for an unleveled party.
 * Aside from the nice XP (no lich in the game gives less than 22,000) ,the lich's loot includes Daystar a sword with that lets you cast Sunbeam, a high level spell which nukes Undead en masse...and Undead are among the most common enemies in the game.
 * There is also an incredibly easy exploit one can use to get more or less infinite money using nothing but a potion and a gem. First, go into your inventory and drink a potion that isn't in a quickslot. Then, without leaving the inventory screen, swap the potion with a single gemstone. Leave the inventory and unpause. Your character will appear to use an item, but nothing will happen. If you go back into your inventory, you'll notice the "1" in the gem's icon has disappeared. Do the process again and the game's math engine will have an aneurysm. You can now sell your sixty five thousand (!!!) gems for more money than you could ever possibly spend. Enjoy.
 * The easiest way to level is located within the city that is under siege by giants. Go up the ramparts where soldiers are shooting arrows and getting killed, though your own characters are safe from harm there. Equip any infinite arrows/bolts items you have at your disposal and go into your character scripts menu. Set any character that has a bow/crossbow with unlimited ammunition to aggressive/ranged attack, and anyone else to doing nothing. Those characters will be able to kill giants unopposed, and there is no limit to how many you can kill. Go watch a movie while your characters earn enough XP to reach max level.
 * In Fable I, the player is given the opportunity to gamble in certain areas, with a 2-1 return on their wager should they be victorious. This doesn't seem like a big deal at first, given that the games are largely luck-based and you're just as likely to end up broke as you are to strike it rich... except in one case, where you are required to win a childishly simple card-pairs style game. There is no element of chance involved whatsoever here, making the game a sure win once one gets the hang of it. A patient player can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of gold in very short order, allowing them to purchase the strongest equipment that money can buy and enough health and mana potions to last for the entire game. This is presented to you in the very first city you come across, to boot.
 * An even faster way to gain money is by exploiting the game's economy, specifically the "Buy/Sell Maximum" buttons. Merchants in Fable adjust the price of an item based on how many of them they have in their inventory at the moment, without taking into account how many you're buying or selling. Gather a few dozen of any item, then sell them to a merchant all at once. The merchant now has many of them, so he sells them low. Buy them for a song. Now he has none, so he buys them high. Sell them for huge profit. Repeat until sufficiently wealthy.
 * Compounding the ridiculous simplicity of getting gold here is the fact that the Slow Time spell affects the timer in the game, meaning that you would have to be in a coma to fail at the game.
 * A word of caution though, this doesn't work in the expanded Fable: The Lost Chapters
 * Also, it is possible to abuse the Hero Save feature, which resets the player to the beginning of a quest, up to and including resetting all item spawns, conversations and Hero doors opened during the quest, every time they save, to attain both a ridiculous amount of money and enough silver keys to open every chest in the game. Including the one in the Hero's Guild, which contains a legendary weapon.
 * Also of note is the Magic Shield spell. Playing the game normally, delivering large combos without being hit raises the Combat Multiplier, which multiplies any experience gained. This means that players who fight well and avoid getting hit will level faster, right? The catch is that in Fable, "being hit" is defined as "taking HP damage". Magic Shield redirects any damage taken into MP, thereby preventing the Combat Multiplier from being cancelled and allowing the character to level up much faster than he could without it. Turn it on, wade into a crowd, and take out the trash with no skill involved. Then once the CM gets high enough, use those super-experience potions you've been saving up and Kill'Em All.
 * It also has Skorm's Bow, the most powerful ranged weapon in the game and if you play your cards right (and are not too squeamish) it can be yours before your first mission.
 * There's also Wellow's Pickhammer, which you can get literally in the first 30 minutes of the game if you know what you're doing. It has about four times the damage of anything you can afford when you start the game, and remains the best weapon up to and including the Arena quest, which is about two-thirds of the way through the game. All you have to do to get it is murder one or two people in front of the Demon Door guarding it...or just eat 15 or so crunchy chicks.
 * If one feels like it, it is entirely possible to get a character fully decked out in the best purchasable arms and armor before even completing the first quest. With a little more time, you can even go into this quest with a fully maximized character.
 * In Fable II it is possible to make obscene amounts of money early in the game. Your character starts out with a cheap house as an adult, which you can set to rent out. Save, exit the game and wind your system clock forwards. Your character still makes money from real estate even when you're not playing (though it's a fraction of the amount you would while playing you're just winding a clock forwards anyways). Repeat this process by buying more houses with the money you've made. With a bit of patience your character can be making more money every five minutes than you can possibly spend.
 * In Fable II, you can create a guest account, sell all of its stats and quit; all the experience will go back to your main character. you can then use that exp to buy more stats, create a guest, sell those stats, quit, and repeat over and over again. before to long all your stats can be maxed out before you even meet the first boss
 * In Gothic 3, after you gain control of the unnamed hero, you had the opportunity to buy a flaming sword for a ridiculously low price. This could be accomplished after rescuing a blacksmith (he's the one selling it). This was unfortunately fixed in a patch.
 * In Neverwinter Nights you had the option of using a created character in a character battles optional side-game. However one of these arena's required level 10 characters or higher, and if you were less than that, it would automatically increase your level to level 10. So create a 1st level character, import, export and then load him into the game and you'd begin the game with 10 levels ready to go.
 * In Hordes of the Underdark, the player was immediately given enough XP to hit level 15. Which could be used in the same fashion. Almost as egregious as making a module consisting entirely of user-created ubergear and weak monsters with a massive challenge rating, giving XP through the nose. Not that anyone would ever do this.
 * You could easily make a custom module that did nothing but shot you up to an arbitrary level and gave you great gear. The developers were canny enough to prevent you from linking a script to any of these items to do whatever you wanted, although those of us who wanted this power for good, not evil, were bummed. By far the worst, though, was the Appraise skill. It decreased the amount you paid for items from vendors and increased how much they'd give you for 'em. If you had enough Appraise skill (which was by no means easy, but quite possible) you could make money by buying and selling an item ad nauseum.
 * Baldur's Gate had a funnier infinite money maker, using a couple of cheap potions, a few valuable items, and maybe some Save Scumming. One could sell an item to a fence, steal it back, and then sell it again (most Merchants won't buy stolen goods...although how they know a non-unique item is stolen is a bad case of Fridge Logic ... but fences, of course, did, even when they should recognize it as being from their own shop...oooh, more Fridge Logic). And with a couple of potions of master theivery, you would almost never be caught.
 * Not quite a nuke but useful early game. In The Dark Spire, from the tower entrance go north 6, east 9, south 4. You should be in front of a locked door. Save, open it, follow very short path to basement. Once there go north 1, west 2, south 1 and face the east wall. Behind a secret door you find a very good weapon you normally can't obtain for another 25% of the game or so. Careful though, as the enemies in the basement can easily annihilate you, especially if you're heading here at game start. Save anywhere comes in handy here.
 * In Sudeki, a sufficiently savvy or even just sufficiently nosy player can find all four characters' ultimate weapons well before the halfway point of the game. (They also tend to end up overleveled, thanks to one weapon requiring completion of That One Sidequest which requires 21 of a rare randomly dropped piece of loot.)
 * Secret of Evermore features a glitch which can be exploited for Disc One Nukedom-if you save the game while a character is buffed and quit, when you start the game again you'll still be buffed, but your actual stats will be at their unbuffed level. Since the game still thinks you're buffed, when the buff wears off it'll reduce your stat...and if it's low enough, it'll wrap around to be super high, and you'll be able to one-shot almost anything. Balancing this is the fact that if you level up your stats will increase as normal, meaning if you're not careful you could wind up with stats even lower than your starting baseline.
 * There happens to be a fellow running a shop in a secret underground passage in the Docks district of Kirkwall in Dragon Age II who sells a ridiculously powerful bow for a reasonable price in the second chapter. Makes the game a lot easier, actually. Also, all you have to do to receive Hanlon's Razor, easily the best greatsword until Act II, is to beat the demo. Most of the DLC equipment and unlockable Extra equipment is this as well. Items such as the Staff of Parlathan, which can be obtained by registering for the newsletter, are powerful in Act I but are eventually outclassed in Act II. One exception is Hindsight—its "Enemies drop better equipment" property makes it useful for the entire game.
 * Dragon Age Origins has similar items. Completing (or simply having, in some cases) the various DLC packs gives you one of the better two-handed weapons, a pretty-good massive chestpiece, the best longbow, the best mace, a decent longsword, the second-best amulet, the best light armor, the best mage robes, and two great belts. The best mace can also be sold for 339 gold (or even more, if you're a Dwarf Noble) - enough to buy any two Cash Gated items. You get these items in your inventory right at the start of the game.
 * Not to mention the two new Talents you can gain by drinking the diablery potion in the Warden's Keep DLC. The Mage's are particularly potent—a very powerful nuke and a mana regenerator that cost about a papercut's worth of HP to activate.
 * Lord of the Rings: The Third Age makes it possible, if insanely tedious, to grind ability points in single battles, purely by focusing on defensive abilities throughout combat, and healing whenever necessary- or not, since Berethor's awesome Leadership party buffs can regenerate health and power points. What follows is Berethor using a speed buff for more turns before enemy turns, followed by an action point regeneration buff, followed by a hit point regeneration buff- rinse and repeat until you have everything you need.
 * In Mass Effect 1, on Eden Prime, you can encounter some colonists hiding from the geth. If you talk to them, they reveal they have some smuggled weapons. You can confiscate a pistol from them, which turns out to be powerful enough to last you for quite a while.
 * As soon as you get Tali, max out her 'Quarian Machinist' skill and give her a shield boosting armor mod. Doing so will give her enough shielding to turn her into a shotgun-wielding Stone Wall for the next few hours.
 * This is the entire point of Pinnacle Station.
 * Mass Effect 2 gives us the Locust SMG, obtained during Kasumi's loyalty mission. Said weapon is arguably the best SMG available, and it can be obtained before Horizon.
 * In Mass Effect 3, the N7 Crusader shotgun is a perfectly accurate semi-automatic slug shotgun. It's essentially an unscoped sniper rifle, and while it's eventually surpassed by other weapons, it's an excellent weapon for quite a while.
 * Similarly, the N7 Eagle combines the high fire rate and light weight of a burst fire SMG with the accuracy of a pistol.
 * In Task Maker for the Mac, you're given an Ethereal Potion in the (optional) Tutorial level. It can either be sold for a high price to a shop, or used to phase through a wall and access a passageway with three of the most powerful weapons in the game — and while one of the three is in the same chamber as some highly powerful monsters, they will spawn far enough away for you to grab it without being hit.
 * Lust Grimm:
 * The Paralyze skill, which normally has a medium probability of paralyzing an enemy for a few turns. The enemies in Hades Coast are ten to twenty levels higher than you when you first get access to the area, but they are all weak to paralysis and will be hit 100% of the time. This allows you to defeat them at no risk, gaining levels at an incredible rate.
 * The Embrace skill is less powerful but obtained earlier than Paralyze. When used, it has a 100% chance of debuffing the opponent's stats and a low chance of inflicting other status effects (including ecstasy, which is functionally equivalent to paralysis). However, if you use it on an enemy twice the debuffs stack. This similarly allows you to fight powerful enemies early on, though it requires more strategy since you can't completely shut them down like you can do with Paralyze.
 * The Spiffing Brit has demonstrated on his YouTube channel how a player can vastly overpower a starting character in games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Elden Ring simply by knowing the right places in the game to visit early on.

Shoot Em Up

 * A rare Shoot'Em Up example: The Plasma Storm in Tyrian. Although it has very limited ammo, it can destroy most bosses in a matter of seconds. And it's obtainable even before the first stage of the first chapter of the game!
 * An early Wave in old-school PC shoot-em-up Raptor: Call of the Shadows has a Air-Ground Missile pickup from a destroyed building about 30 seconds into the Wave. You can then quit out to the hangar menu, keeping the weapon, and sell that weapon for half price on the Black Market (in this case, 70K). Repeat this process until you have enough money. Alternatively, if you're more patient (or have access to the level warp cheat), there's a later Wave that drops a Dumbfire Missile worth even more credits.
 * The Tektite Blaster (T-Braster) in Gaiares, which has a bit of a Guide Dang It on how to get it (Fire the TOZ 6 times, missing all of them, and then capture an enemy weapon with the 7th TOZ shot).

Simulation Game

 * Harvest Moon, surprisingly. In Harvest Moon 64, you can get Karen up to a pink heart in a matter of minutes, just by showing her your dog a couple hundred times. Also, this might be debatable as "early" depending on your priorities in the game, but by getting a seed maker in A Wonderful Life and a fruit tree you could sell fruit tree seeds and be easily set with money for the rest of the game. Another Wonderful Life tried to tone it down by making fruit tree seeds sell for less, but it was still a huge cash cow compared to... well, raising cows.
 * Rune Factory does it one better by making it possible to mine high-quality sapphires in the second dungeon. The sapphires reset once you come out and go back in, leading to a lot of players becoming millionaires in no time at all. House and farm upgrades became an instant piece of cake.
 * No Harvest Moon embodies the Disc One Nuke better than Harvest Moon DS. With clever Save Scumming while mining, the right guides, and a fair bit of patience, it's possible to become a multi-millionaire who can work past exhaustion without penalty, have access to the ultimate crop-growing area, AND have all of the legendary tools within the first two days of the game.
 * Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception has the XFA-27. It can be unlocked as early as five missions in, yet its stats are comparable to lategame fighters even before tuning. Plus it comes with QAAMs out of the box. At 26k it's only slightly more than half the cost of the much later-appearing F-22 and can be bought one, maybe two missions after unlock if you're stocking up the cash from doing well. Given that it was the Game Breaker superplane of Ace Combat 2, though, this is perhaps unsurprising.
 * In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, the F-5E starting plane can carry a few QAAM missiles, which are essentially guaranteed kills against aircraft. The Su-37 Terminator is also unlocked after mission six and has very good special weapon options (and 82 standard missiles).
 * Mechwarrior 3 had a salvage system which allowed you to get just about any enemy mech, provided you shot one of it's leg off (and anything could be equipped on any mech). As a result, you could end up with a 75 ton mech after mission 4 (that one is canonic, according to the novelization), and 2 100 ton mechs after mission 8.
 * Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries features a gladiator arena, where you can play 24 missions very early on. When you get out, you have enough money to buy a few of the best mechs on the market, and the in-game time has advanced enough for them to be available.
 * SimCity 2000 allowed an easy solution to power problems for very cheap. By starting the game via map editor, the player could begin in a territory with a "pyramid" of waterfalls - free of charge. Filling this pyramid with hydro plants would provide power for the entire city, making early game a breeze as unlike most other plants, the hydro plants don't need to be rebuilt after a set period.
 * In the original SimCity, a player could completely ignore roads and build only rail lines. While they cost twice as much to build per tile, the citizens don't seem to care about the inconvenience and it eliminates an enormous chunk of your pollution and all of your traffic.
 * In the first two Naval Ops games, blueprints for advanced ships (as in guided missile destroyers when the enemies are still using WWII tech) can be obtained fairly early on with the right research and come with weapons and auxiliary systems that would not be normally obtained until much later. Advanced anti-sub missiles for your battleship are especially welcome.

Sports Games

 * EA Sports is notorious for this
 * In the NHL series, EA frequently inserts a Make-a-Wish kid as a free agent with extremely good stats and little to no salary demands. In 09 it was Sabrina Ladha, a 95 Overall goalie who wanted only $500k a year, a pittance. Virtually any team could become a Stanley Cup contender by picking her up and using their existing goalie and salary cap room as trade bait. And since she was a pre-teen, she'd be kicking ass for decades.
 * Madden NFL had a similar situation happen with Steve Young and Barry Sanders, who both retired early. EA placed them in the free agent pool the following year with 90+ ratings, allowing owners to scoop them up and instantly have an elite offense.
 * Madden games also have "money plays" — plays which will always work against even an All-Madden level computer-controlled team for a guaranteed five yards, at least. Here's an example play from Madden 10.

Stealth Based Game

 * Assassin's Creed games have the Hidden Blade and its Counter Attack. It's Difficult but Awesome, but if you master it early enough you can One-Hit Kill everyone.
 * In Brotherhood, while the parts of the game where they are received vary by player, the crossbow and poison darts make most of the guard encounters a breeze, even in stealthier missions. The ability to instakill most enemies silently is extremely boring, yet practical!
 * Revelations is full of these, largely due to the fact that basically everything opens up to you fairly early on in the story. The Master Assassin Armor set is attainable as early as Sequence 3, giving you massive amounts of health compared to the two pieces of basic leather armor available at blacksmiths at that point.
 * The Cardboard Box in the NES port of Metal Gear, due to the fact that you could shoot from it and guards ignore it even when it's in front of them, murdering them. You pick it up very early in the game.

Tabletop Games

 * In White Wolf's Exalted RPG, it is entirely possible to create a character capable of hitting anyone, aywhere, with the spell "Total Annihilation". Or how about being able to create a curse that kills off everyone who falls within a broad category - say, humans? Or any number of combinations of spells, charms, artefacts and/or backgrounds that will make your character able to do one thing, and one thing only - but that thing will most likely involve a LOT of pain for whoever gets hit. In fact, most of the effort when creating a character goes into resisting the urge to crank up your favourite attack before you even begin playing.
 * Dungeons & Dragons has the infamous Pun-Pun, a kobold (or other reptilian creature, but kobolds are traditional) "Squishy Wizard" who is able to have any special ability, and has "arbitrarily high" stats. Strict mechanics allow this as early as 11th-level, but technically it could be done as early as 1st with the right magic item, or demonic knowledge. The key to this is one random (but official) splatbook for the Forgotten Realms setting.
 * The game has plenty of more mundane examples and in fact a number of mechanics have been used at various times with low level survivability in mind. But third edition had some doozies, not the least of which was Haste, which was a result of the dev team not understanding the change in action economy from 2nd edition to 3rd, allowing wizards to cast two spells per round without suffering the second edition drawback of aging more rapidly (which itself could be mitigated somewhat by playing an elf but 3rd edition made that part unnecessary.) Of course the trade off is you blow through your spells that much faster but you can usually talk your party into letting you recoup after an intense battle.

Third Person Shooter

 * In SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3 on PSP, the OC-14 or RA-14 mentioned above is also a relatively easy to get and useful gun. Although to get it you have to score 750 kills, but you can just bang away in the first mission or custom missions with the lowest difficulty. It uses 7.62x39 rounds which is abundant in the 3rd and last mission, kills with 3 body shots at most, and had better overall stats than the AK103 used by Elite Mooks. Plus, it also can be fitted with a silencer which the AK103 can't.
 * An intrepid player can get a distressing amount of equipment within the first missions of the Crusader games; notably, can usually acquire the shotgun and rocket launcher in the first mission of each with relative ease, while finding secret areas later in the game can result in the character being fully-armed and armored by halfway through the game.
 * Gotcha Force has the Barrier Girl. She has a fairly quickly charging normal attack, a melee attack that drills opponents (so it does several rapid hits, good for juggling), and a fairly quick charged shot that she can use if the situation warrants. All of that would make her decent if not spectacular, except for the "barrier" part of her name. Said barrier is a shield that will simply absorb a decent amount of damage, and can be redeployed. Granted, it takes a while (unless Power Burst is active) for said barrier to recharge, but Barrier Girl is one of the more agile combatants - she's quick enough that she can strafe opponents without taking damage even without the shield. Even the wonky AI can abuse her ability to tank unless the player abuses the only early attacks that can chip the shield quickly (drilling attacks... like the one a Barrier Girl does in melee), and the computer can't handle them without breaking out the very powerful opponents using a Wave Motion Gun or a Big Freaking Sword.

Turn Based Strategy

 * In the first Disgaea, it's possible to exploit the hospital prizes and the Dark Assembly's promotion exams to get very powerful equipment, a huge amount of money, and all your units above level 20 before so much as setting foot on the first non-tutorial map.
 * That's still lots of grinding, and still somewhat ineffectual as it only carries you to about episode 5 or 6 depending upon the amount of people you did get to 20. It's much easier to abuse the random dungeons in Phantom Brave, mostly due to the entire fusion system. Getting to level 100 takes only a couple hours if you know what you're doing with your weapons, and in fact in that time you can also create a weapon that will demolish everyone up to and including the final boss, as once you have about level 70 or 80 and a good beefed-up weapon, you can pop a 'bad' title on a level 400-500 dungeon, stealing high mana items with your bottlemail, and supercharge that weapon to be totally invincible. Just remember to stay away from those fraggin' weapon-stealing mushrooms! (Or select a weapon whose final abilities have insanely large areas of effect to kill them all at once, like a bomb, egg, or vase. RES weapons work the best as they can complement Marona's own gigantic RES stat which renders her nigh-invulnerable to damage.) Also you gain much more experience for tilted-level kills, the only grinding necessary in the game is for facing down the final three EX bosses and building up the amount of attacks you can do. (Instead of SP your amount of attacks is tied to weapon experience level.) But with a + 28000ATK weapon in the first few hours of the game, who needs that! (At least to complete the initial game)
 * The level 20 thing is a relatively small bonus, though, in comparision to having the funds to buy end-game quality equipment before the first map. Not to mention the the Muscle Star, Chaos Orb, and Testament, which will send the Attack, Magic, HP, and SP of whoever equips all three that early on through the roof, which makes all grinding until level 50 or so ridiculously easy. And it takes only about six promotion exams per chartacter to get that grinding over with, so it doesn't take that much time.
 * Pleinair, in the DS version, is a Double Subversion, as she can only be persuaded to join you upon starting up a New Game+, but since losing to the boss in chapter one counts as finishing the game, you can still get her within about half an hour.
 * In the PSP version of Disgaea 2, the game just gives you a level 100 Pleinair at the start of a new game if you've downloaded the free DLC pack she comes in. You can then use Pleinair to easily beat level 100 Sapphire (also a free DLC download) and have her join as well. Presumably this could be done with paid DLC characters as well.
 * The PC version nerfs Pleinar, but still game breaks in a different way, because you get her and all the other DLC characters from the PSP version at level 1 for free without needing to fight them, as well as some extra characters. Many still have obscenely powerful special skills even at Level 1, and with some clever grinding early on you can still turn them into this trope, it just takes longer since they start at Level 1.
 * Disgaea has yet another easily abuseable method of game breaking. Go to the item world until you find one with an invincible geo panel. Level up Laharl's spear mastery to 25—takes about an hour if you're lucky. You can then get the second best spear in the game, Longinus. Using the aforementioned lose-to-Mid-Boss trick, you can get it AGAIN, and sell it to make a TON of money.
 * The second one has a more blatant example. One of the levels about a third of the way through pits you against a squad of enemies sitting on effect panels that level them up by 10% of their current level every turn. It takes a little mindless, repetitive turn ending, but after a while they get all the way up to the max level of 9999, starting at about 10. Because you can capture any monster that's at most 2-3x the level of your highest level character, this allows you to quickly build up to having a team of these 9999 level monsters within five hours of starting the game. By comparison, the final boss of the main story is level 90. The PSP version patched out this exploit in 2 ways. The first by not allowing you capture any monsters that you can't create, the second by not allowing you to capture anything whose level is higher than your highest leveled party member.
 * But wait, there's more. At the end of the third chapter, you are thrown into a Hopeless Boss Fight against an enemy who is on average one hundred times your current level, with the gear to show for it. Typically, you would now be resigning yourself to getting mercilessly ground into pixellated paste or trying to line up the odd Fastball Special maneuver to nab a few treasure chests. However, due to the way the item stealing probabilities are calculated, even the most basic stealing item used by the most recently-generated thief will always, always, always have a 1% chance to steal one (and only one) item from said opponent. Now, the item to go for here is something called a Testament. It gives any character equipped with it a whopping 200 points in every single stat, apart from health, which gets twice that bonus. At a time when your average attack stat is roughly 100. Add to that the fact that character equip multipliers add another ten percent at least on top of that, and you have yourself a character whose current level is 12, but whose effective level (i.e. the level at which he would possess stats of this kind without equipment) is pushing 50. Just keep reloading, and sweet sweet overpoweredness is all yours.
 * And then, coming off that honking stat jack, we have the Item World. Summarizing briefly, it is a completely randomly generated dungeon created entirely off an item, and is crucial to postgame powerlevelling. Early on, it is mostly where you go to build up Felonies. But there's a twist: infrequently, you might be attacked by enemies called pirates - retitled versions of normal enemies. These are usually well above your current level, but your main character is now not only more than a match for them (thanks to having endgame gear at the start of your adventure), but also has an ability which does a percentage damage boost as long as his level is below that of his opponent. Proceed to demolish pirate booty with extreme prejudice, and appropriately massive experience points are all yours. Do it all right, and we have ourselves a level 25 character with nearing a thousand HP, easily 600 attack, and one metric shedload of Mana to pour into creating better Player Mooks... while the rest of your team is woefully underpowered in comparison. Mind you, considering that this is Disgaea we're talking about, this'll save you about 0.0003% of your actual levelgrinding time.
 * Speaking of Phantom Brave, it's possible to get a Bottle Mail (a phantom that easily "steals" items it is confined into) as soon as you start a new game and create enough characters to make a human pyramid so that Ash can reach the highest point on the map (this also earns his first Changebook that allows for Phantom Brave's spin on the Reincarnation ability that resets a character level to 1 with stat bonuses equal to the number of levels he gained before). It takes only a little bit of grinding after that to start exploiting random dungeons to farm items, mana, money, and titles.
 * Then there's the trolley—an improbable weapon that boosts Speed and uses Speed to determine the strength of its attacks. Since Speed also determines how often you get to go, grabbing a high-level trolley through "failure dungeon" grinding breaks the game in half and lets you clear all the main story stages without the enemies getting a single turn.
 * In Fire Emblem 8 there is a colosseum in the fifth stage. If you have Seth with you when you enter the stage have him go there. Its risky, as the opponents range from weak to insanely powerful, but played right you can grind the Crutch Character up to a ridiculous degree and reap a whole lot of cash in one go.
 * Joshua can also be leveled up in the arena fairly easily. However, the usefulness of this is tempered by the fact that you have no class-changing items at this time and won't be getting a Hero Crest until Chapter 9. Of course, you're about to get a Guiding Ring, and sending Seth and Joshua into the arena so many times is bound to provide plenty of healing opportunities...and you can certainly afford to continually restock your healers with more staves...yeah, that's right, you can have a Bishop by the start of Chapter 6. As in, the class that absolutely pwns all of the monster enemies. This is totally broken.
 * You can pull the exact same stunt in Fire Emblem 7, but thanks to a good bad bug involving Ninian, you can also have your character possess a godly defense boost virtually assuring they will never actually die in the arena.
 * This hardly covers how absurdly broken this is; by only taking bets in the 700-730 gold area (Anything less is practically a waste of a turn, and anything more is pretty dangerous) you can easily level every single character to 20 (Even healers) if you care enough to spend all your time on it (Not only that, but you'll end up with far more money than you put in, especially considering that using the arenas doesn't use up weaponry and equips you with their weaponry.) The only exception being axe users, which are vastly unreliable against swords (The arenas almost always pit you against the type you're good at and it's essentially elementalrockpaperscissors with swords and lances, and quite literally with magic, with the loser not being as likely to hit.) in that they won't have a good enough hit to do damage and will often get double attacked due to high speed sword users. Not only that but it's a recurring situation; there's arenas in levels 16x and 23 in FE7, 5 and 12 in FE8, etc.
 * Why bother paying attention to the price? If you pay the gatekeeper, and don't like your chances against the opponent they put you with, hard reset the game. When you turn it back on, you're taken to the last thing that happened before you went into the arena. Enter the aren and you'll receive the same offer; turn it down and enter the arena again. You'll be presented with a new enemy to fight, probably one preferable to the one you just turned down (though not always). Repeat as many times as necessary to get a favorable opponent (but remember, if you didn't like the enemy you got after turning down the first offer, you'll have to turn down two offers next time, and so on). The gamble of the arena almost completely disappears.
 * The "split story" nature of Fire Emblem 4 makes for an interesting one. The second half of the game begins at Chapter 6 featuring the children of the characters from the first half, and their equipment will be determined by what their same-gender parent had in their inventory at the end of Chapter 5 (except for Briggid's kids, who inherit from their opposite-gender parent instead). If Levn's son is a magic-user like his father, he'll inherit the ultimate wind magic, Holsety, as long as Levn received it near the end of Chapter 4. Tiltyu's son Arthur is a mage who arrives in Chapter 6, so if she was paired with Levn... On another note, Shanan gets the Balmung almost as soon as he joins up at the start of Chapter 7 and will be able to dodge pretty much everything due to the massive speed boost it grants, making him your premiere boss-killer until other legendary weapons are obtained.
 * Aless's Mistletain is somewhat of a Double Subversion. He arrives midway through Chapter 7, and he already has his legendary weapon, so it'll be one of your first and should kill just about anything. However, when he first arrives, it's almost a liability as it provides no bonuses to dodging or physical defense, it can't attack at range, and the AI seems to love to target Aless, not to mention the fact that since it will kill almost any enemy on the counterattack and enemies tend to come in large groups in this game, he's going to get mobbed and can easily be attacked 10-15 times in a single enemy phase. However, the final two chapters are filled to the brim with enemies that wield long-distance magic and/or Sleep staves (which in this game automatically hit if the target's magic resistance is lower than the wielder's magic), and many of the bosses are also magic-wielders, making Aless one of the most useful units in the game—Mistletain gives a healthy boost to magic resistance.
 * In Super Robot Wars Z save your money until stage 10. Full upgrade Kei's Bronco II weapons after this stage.(upgradeing his Bronco is cheaper) When you get him back in his Orguss a few stages later, congratulations! You now have the most powerful character in the entire game.
 * Rand is debatably one too, and HE'S YOUR MAIN CHARACTER!
 * Setsuko's route lets you get the Mega Bazooka Launcher and Great Booster attacks MUCH earler, as well as most her early stages giving you Ace Pilot Kamille Bidan.
 * In Super Robot Wars J, the Original Generation are insanely powerful, especially Granteed; you get them on the first (Toya's route) or second (Calvina's route) stage and never lose them.
 * In Sengoku Rance two early characters stand out as Disc One Nukes. Leila which can one shot kill most units larger than hers (in a game where you are typically outnumbered) and Natori who can decimate 30% of the enemy army after a round of preparation. Both are found rather early in the game.
 * Rance himself can be one in the lower difficulty levels once you get the Satisfication bonuses.
 * Age of Wonders II, courtesy of the Design-It-Yourself Equipment system. The system itself prevents most Game Breaker items from being made. However, in a campaign game you can bring equipment and heroes across scenarios. Lingering on the first level to build superior equipment for later scenarios shatters any difficulty, as your heroes can handle any enemy troops, allowing you to leave the entire rest of your army on defense. Nothing like giving your hero a sword with Double Strike, Extra Strike, and Life Stealing. And if you're worried about dying, there's always equipment to make your hero take only 50% damage from any element type, or heal all your HP at the end of a battle, or...
 * The Crescent Hawk's Inception starts you off in a Chameleon training Battlemech. If you play out the story as intended, you're jumped by four Jenners and lose the 'mech, but escape with your life to begin seeking your revenge. Except that it's possible to simply run away as soon as the Jenners appear, letting you begin the game in a 50 ton Chameleon. Considering that the largest enemy 'mech you'll ever face in this game is only 35 tons, it makes you the biggest badass on the planet from the very start of the game!
 * Completing the "Kurt Irving's First Mission" sidequest in Valkyria Chronicles 3 nets the SMG "Hilde". This mission uses its own units and is a prequel, rendering it trivial to clear regardless of game completion, but the Hidle it nets has stats appropriate for mid-game and exceptionally high range allowing the player to turn one Shocktrooper into a total powerhouse that also has the longest range of anyone that isn't a sniper. This mission was originally a pre-order bonus but is included in all copies of Valkyria Chronicles 3 Extra Edition (the version the Fan Translation patch is for) by default and, unlike the other DLC missions in that re-release, is actually playable from the start.

Turn Based Tactics

 * In Jagged Alliance 2 right from the get-go you can hire the best mercs in the rooster armed with hig-end weapons. Sure, with your starting funds you can only afford a couple of days of their service, but that's enough. They'll curb stomp through the first several missions, and then you can strip them of all their fancy gear, hire some more available mercs and carry on with a substantial edge.
 * In 7.62: High Caliber mod Hard Life the government soldiers who attack you in the first two opening missions carry FAL rifles in poor condition with their selector switch removed and shoot underpowered ammo that can't cycle the action reliably or do the harm a battle rifle should. Nine "shitFAL" (the first two quests give more than enough) can be merged into a good version of the FAL by obtaining a FAL manual (the base quartermaster will give one for free if you ask what the hell is with the rifle you found) and cleaning kit (one of your first allies comes with one) while the ammo can be restored to good condition by cannibalizing cartridges at a 3 to 1 rate. A GudFAL will be a very solid weapon for the first leg of the game when everyone carries rusty lowest bidder AKs, hunting shotguns and broken WW2 submachineguns.

Wide Open Sandbox

 * With the right strategy in Minecraft, it's possible to obtain a few diamonds within minutes of spawning. That'ssss a nice diamond sword you got there...
 * Thanks to the incredibly open-ended gameplay structure of the Grand Theft Auto games, you can complete many sidequests, and in doing so, acquire extremely high-powered weapons and accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars ? all before even accessing the game's opening tutorial missions.
 * Out of all the deliciously abusable sub-missions in San Andreas, one of the easiest ways to gather funds early-on is (un)surprisingly the the oldest profession in the book. Provided you can find the right type of car for the Pimping submissions and have lots of time to burn, you can gather completely ridiculous amounts of money early on.
 * Or, if you have something else to do, in San Andreas you can go to a strip club near your starting location, and stand on the stage, where patrons will throw money. As long as you don't touch the stripper, you can stand there, collecting money (albeit at the slow rate of like 5-20 dollars a minute). This adds up after a day or so of leaving the game on, however...
 * You can also simply save the game, go to the horse track, bet everything on the long odds, reload if you loose, save if you win, and rinse and repeat until you're filthy stinking rich.
 * Same can be done at the Casino, but that doesn't come until later in the game.
 * Hands down the best one is the Hunter helicopter (basically an Apache). It flies, it has a machinegun, it has missiles, it's insanely hard to kill, and you can do Vigilante missions in it. Take the Vigilante Missions to Level 150 or so and you'll have in excess of $40,000,000 in about an hour. Oh, and you can do this in Vice City as well.
 * The off-track betting place can serve a similar purpose if you bet on the horse with the longest odds and abuse the save/reload system. Similarly, the drug-trading mini-game in Chinatown Wars can effectively render the in-game economy meaningless after a good hour or so of savvy trading.
 * If you are pretty good at losing wanted ratings you can go to the UN building in GTA4 and kill the guards to aquire their M4s long before they are made available in the game. Also works with getting the last available weapon, the Combat Pistol - attack a gun dealer and take it. Or if you'd rather play it safe, the Combat Pistol and M4 (as well as all other weapons with the exception of the Rocket Launcher) can be picked up at various locations even on the first open islands.
 * Scarface the World Is Yours let you play as your henchmen for quick cash once you got the ability to unlock them. What made them easily abused was taking their preset weapons and stuffing them in Tony's car, adding it to his collection. One of the henchmen starts out with a grenade launcher! Do this enough times and Tony will pretty much have all the ammo he needs with very little effort.
 * Crackdown has two major Disc...erm...Island One Nukes. First off, buying the DLC gives your character some ridiclously powerful weapons accessible at any time - including your first loadout screen. However, you can also get the most powerful weapons in the game by driving to the third island first and killing basic street thugs that have them - once you reach a Supply Point with them in hand, they're yours for the rest of the now significantly easier game.
 * Blind luck can favor you as well. I got the best assault rifle(The Harlington HMG-90) in the game off one of the beginning enemies in the first island. Made the entire game a lot easier.
 * In The Godfather game, the aversion of Broken Bridge means you can, if you so desire, grind your way to high levels and the cash needed to upgrade your weapons through various means as soon as you can start free-roaming.
 * The sequel has Broken Bridge preventing you from getting the best henchmen and weapons early on, but you can still earn the cash needed to fully upgrade yourself not far from the start.
 * Saints Row 2 has 2 possible disc one nukes. As soon as you get your first crib it's possible to store any ground vehicle at it and be able to retrieve it whenever you want even if it's destroyed. It's easy to get a high wanted level and steal an APC with a machine gun mounted on it then use it for the rest of the game. The second Disk One Nuke can be gotten as soon as you have your hideout. The hideout has a helipad on it and through a combination of skill, luck, and persistence it's possible to jump out of your own helicopter and parachute onto a SWAT attack helicopter that comes for you when you're at the highest wanted level. If done properly you can enter the SWAT attack helicopter and store it at your helipad where it can be retrieved later. The attack helicopter's secondary fire is laser guided/homing missiles that make any combat where it's usable ridiculously easy.
 * Or, for the more feeble among you, simply head to the top of the Police Station and nick one. They don't always spawn though.
 * Side quests that gives you infinite ammo perks. Doesn't really matter which one. Pick one that's the easiest.
 * Saints Row 3 follows similar suit. Once you gain a garage, and access back to the National Guard Depot, you can enter the depot, and hang around until you gain enough wanted stars to spawn tanks, you can then steal the tank and take it to a garage. In Saints Row 3, you also have the option of using your own vehicle on some of the side-missions, which means you can do Drug Runs in tanks, operating the mounted machine gun (or laser gun, at later tanks) while the dealer drives around the city in the tank.
 * Likewise, once you gain access to a HQ with a helipad, you can raid the National Guard depot again for armed helicopters.
 * Because of random enemy equipment generation and a complete aversion of Unusable Enemy Equipment, Mount & Blade will sometimes do this. It's not impossible to run across bandits or deserters wearing surprisingly good armor (including strength modifiers like Reinforced or Thick) or wielding weapons bearing the Tempered/Balanced/Heavy/Strong/Masterwork modifiers, all of which improve the weapon in some form or fashion. This can lead to low-level, just-starting characters riding around Calradia on an old nag of a horse dressed in shabby commoner's clothing, but carrying a powerful high-quality sword plucked from the corpse of some bandit.
 * Terraria has loads of them. Depending on world size, you could find iron, silver, maybe even gold as soon as you spawn. There's also a small amount of demonite that can be found throughout the world. Another way to nuke is to join any multiplayer server. Someone in the server WILL be either fighting a boss (who usually drop loads of items used in the making of the third best metal armor, or some better weapons/tools) or just giving out random things. One other way to nuke is to head to the dungeon. You usually have to drop down a few feet before you're really in trouble, so stay up in the lobby. You might find anything between a water candle (which are common), a water bolt (a pretty cool spell), or even a chest with dungeon loot.