Game Breaker/Video Games/Role-Playing Game/Final Fantasy: Difference between revisions

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* The ATB system in general can be a game breaker if you know how to abuse it. If you put it on ''Wait'', input a few actions but keep one in some menu (items, magic, etc.), the action queue will empty out and then the next character will have its turn immediately. This is a great way to curve when the enemy gets its turn. Or you can simply pause the ATB while your characters are performing their attack animations, while leaving it running while the enemy performs theirs.

** Not to mention actions that ignore the action queue and take place immediately, such as Quick turns in V and VI and [[Limit Break|Limit Breaks]] in VII and VIII.

* Enemy skills (or Blue Magic) from any given game tend to be abused due to their potent effects at the earliest they can be obtained. A lot of these however, do require some [[Guide Dang It]].

** [[Death of a Thousand Cuts|1000 Needles]] does exactly 1000 HP of damage, no matter what. This is useful if you either come across this early on (and survive getting hit) or if you face an enemy that has [[Nigh Invulnerable|absurd defenses]].

 

== Final Fantasy IV ==

** If you master all the minigames, Rydia's whitkin becomes the gamebreaker by maxing all his stats. Then combining with augments and the right skills you can finish any enemy in the game trivially. An easy "any enemy" strategy is to equip Whitkin with Flare as his only attack option and give him the augments to allow him to cast through walls. If his stats are maxed, Rydia will summon him and he'll get off 3 maxed power flares, doing ''far'' more than 9999 damage collectively - easily beating out Bahamut's damage cap - and all for the low low price of 50 mp.

** In the GBA version, Abel's Lance. This weapon has a chance of casting [[HP to One|Tornado]] whenever Kain attacks with it equipped, which would normally be [[Awesome but Impractical]] since with most common enemies you'll save maybe one hit. The problem is that ''it bypasses immunity''. On '''anything'''. Can you say "[[Final Boss|Zeromus]] dies in 2 hits"? Add the ring that turns Kain's Jump into a [[Double Jump]], and that becomes "Zeromus dies in 1 action".

 

== Final Fantasy V ==

* The spell "Quick" allowed you to immediately have the caster take two additional turns. It had a high MP cost, which curbed its abuse potential a little, but you'd be surprised what you can do with two turns, particularly if you also used X-Magic (which allowed you to cast two spells in one turn) or X-Fight (which allowed you to do 4 attacks on random enemy targets in one turn, albeit with each having reduced power).

* The Blood Sword is a powerful sword that absorbs the enemy's HP when you attack with it, which alone would make it a very effective weapon to use, but it has an abysmal hit rate. However, if you use !Aim, !Jump, or of course !X-Fight, you can completely circumvent the low hit rate as every attack made with these skills is guaranteed to hit. !X-Fight gets a special mention as the Blood Sword also ignores the half-damage aspect the skill. This is because the Blood Sword is considered a magic attack (!X-Fight is only supposed to be used with physical attacks, after all). So, you're getting 4 full-powered Blood Sword attacks, plus 4 half-damage hits from your second weapon (if applicable). Basically, this bumps the damage of a single !X-Fight up to SIX times your normal damage instead of a "mere" 2x. This almost always restores your health to full as well as greatly damaging the enemies, which makes every mid-game fight (and most of the end-game ones) a complete and total joke unless you're facing undead.

* The Mimic command allows characters to copy the previous attacker's commands at no cost, including magic. Mimic can also be used to mimic Mimic commands, so by giving your entire team Mimic, have one character X-magic Golem, which completely negates at least one physical attack, followed by a powerful spell, have the next character mimic that, then have everyone mimic the previous mimic, every character will be both attacking and setting up a shield to block the next physical attack every single round at no cost, making it impossible for an opponent with nothing but physical attacks to do anything but sit there and take damage as all its attacks are blocked... and through use of the above-mentioned berserk bug, all monsters can be made to use nothing but physical attacks.

 

== Final Fantasy VI ==

** A lesser known, but arguably equally broken, abuse of Gau's rages does not involve exploiting any glitches, but is a legitimate use of a particular Rage. The Rafflesia Rage uses the special move "Entice" which basically causes the enemy to convert to the side of the caster, and will damage itself indefinitely. Normally, spells like this would be blocked by immunity but not one enemy in the game is immune to it. The spell may miss occasionally, but it cannot be blocked indefinitely. Use of this rage on the ultimate bosses of the game renders them as helpless pets, who will do nothing but damage themselves for the rest of battle unless the caster (either Gau or Gogo) dies.

** The [[Boss in Mook Clothing|Intangir]] rage seems useful...then Gau casts Pep Up, which gives his HP and MP to another party member and removes him from battle. However, if you cast Mute on Gau, he can't use Pep Up. Using Intangir on a Muted Gau will make him absorb all elemental attacks and almost every status ailment. Unless you're up against something with Stop, an instant death attack, or non-elemental magic, Gau will be untouchable for the rest of the fight.

* Another infamous trick is the Psycho Cyan glitch. By having Cyan use his "Retort" tech, killing him, and then [[Baleful Polymorph|turning him into an Imp]], you activate two glitches, the combination of which causes Cyan to respond to any attack, ''including his own'', with a standard attack on the enemy side. This would cause him to attack, respond to his own attack with an attack, and respond to that attack with another attack, and so on, until the entire enemy side is dead.

* And by killing dinosaurs in a particular forest you could get Economizers (Celestriad if you're playing the GBA rerelease), relics which reduce the cost of all spells to 1 MP. Even the ridiculously expensive spell Ultima that can take out the [[Final Boss]] in a few hits.

** Add in Quick and the Soul of Thamasa (which allows you to doublecast). You can cast five Ultima spells for the cost 6MP total.

* In the SNES version, the stat MBlock, which should only determine the rate at which a character dodges magic attacks, thanks to a glitch also determines this for physical attacks. Therefore raising your MBlock to 255 allows you to dodge virtually anything. This is fixed in the Game Boy Advance version, but it's still possible (albeit much harder, and only on a few characters) to get '''both''' evasion stats to 255, causing the same result.

** You don't need 255. 128 is enough for most characters, though due to an oddity, some characters need about 131.

** This can be done with an Auto controller even more easily. If left on for five days, your characters will be around Level 88. It takes much longer to gain additional levels, due to the large increases in XP needed.

* The desert near of Maranda allows you to learn the game's best spells in an hour; this can work with the above Ultima/Quick combinations to easily massacre your opponents.

 

== Final Fantasy VII ==

* First of, this game offers the all-powerful Knights of the Round summon. Combine it with (almost) any of the game's support materia for massive fun. W-Summon makes it do a quarter of a million damage. MP Absorb makes it practically free to cast. HP Absorb plus Counter makes you completely invincible. With enough work you can build a whole character around it. The only balance? It's [[Infinity+1 Sword|not available until the end of the last sidequest in the game]] and it takes ''a full minute'' to watch every time it's cast. However, the Quadra Magic materia works with every other summon and magic to make it be cast four times over, albeit at reduced power each time.

* There's also the mechanics for learning limit breaks. Once you figure out how they work, it's really easy to find a good spot and just crank everyone's limit breaks up to the highest trainable level and watch the carnage.

* Vincent's ultimate weapon deals damage based on the number of enemies he's killed with it. Kill [[Powers of Two Minus One|65535]] enemies and it's an instant kill on anything due to its damage formula overflowing so that it ends up doing negative damage, which triggers a failsafe script that instantly kills anything he hits with it. Due to this, it can even one-shot [[Sequential Boss|Sequential Bosses]] at their first stage.

** to a lesser extent every ultimate weapon does this. They each have the ability to do 9999 damage, when most melee attacks will only do ~1000 damage when the gamer first gets hold of the easier weapons. These weapons all have methods that power them up, such as having high MP or HP, and are weaker when unpowered; but it's usually absurdly easy to satisfy these conditions so that you always hit for 9999 damage, invalidating all spells that don't do multi hits. Special note goes to Barret, Tifa, and the aformentioned vincent, who's ultimate weapons stay at full power once powered up and can never grow weaker.

** Beta is available ''very'' early on in the game. If you're good or lucky, this nuclear chainsaw will cut through the rest of the first disc without any effort. It's three times more powerful than the second-strongest attack you'll have at that point.

** White Wind, which can also be obtained really early in the game, is basically all of the healing materia in the game mashed together for ''less MP'' than any one of its weaker cousins. It recovered your teammates by how ever many health points the caster has, so if the caster has 9999 HP when they use this move, their allies both recover 9999 HP also. Just keep the caster's health high, and your team was in good shape.

*** This gets even worse when you use this on really strong enemies like T-Rexaur, Snow Lion, or Ruby Dragon, which almost guarantees enough experience for an automatic level up with each victory.

** If you make sure that the only offensive magic in Rinoa's list is Meteor, her Angel Wing limit break becomes ridiculous, especially when combined with speed exploits. In short, it spams Meteor. [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|Incessantly.]]

** With a good strength junction and decent finger speed, Zell can pretty much destroy ''anything'' simply by alternating the two most basic moves of his limit break over and over again, a trick [[Awesome Yet Practical]] enough to earn the [[Fan Nickname]] "Armageddon Fist."

** Squall + [[Infinity+1 Sword|Lionheart]] + 100 Hastes junctioned to Speed + Aura + Haste = absolute carnage.

 

== Final Fantasy X ==

* Rikku's [[Limit Break]] lets her combine two items to create a spell. Game breaking spells include Trio of 9999, Quartet of 9, Chaos Grenade, Calamity Bomb, Final Elixir, Hyper Mighty Guard... "No Sphere Grid" runs rely on Trio of 9999.

** To clarify: Trio of 9999 makes every single effect you use do 9999 damage or healing. Use it with Tidus' and Wakka's best Overdrives to get 6 and 12 hits of 9999 respectively. Conveniently, the 2nd to last boss (much more difficult than the [[Anticlimax Boss]] that you fight after him) has 180,000 hp, letting the combination of these three Overdrives kill him with no trouble.

 

== Final Fantasy XI ==

** Up until mid-2005, the game had an unnatural, objective bias towards ranged weapons. Damage was fixed and not subject to the random number generator, only being reduced at a near-insignificant rate by the enemy's VIT. What this meant was a shot that did 180 damage to leveling fodder did 175 to a top-tier monster. This is before one even looks at the Ranger class, which was painfully unfair. Ranged Accuracy and Attack gear was both really cheap and plentiful, with even the cheap stuff giving way better results than hard-to-get endgame gear for the other jobs. The flat curve of power and total lack of diminishing returns made it ridiculous overpowered in practically every situation. Rangers also got a couple tiers of a Ranged Accuracy-enhancing passive trait (which, as if to mock the other jobs, also affected melee), Barrage (fires five successive shots while giving full TP for each hit), and could lay down constant 1800+ damage Sidewinders when the most other jobs could hope for with their weapon skills was ~1100. The sheer number of other unintended benefits to the job were staggering and endgame consisted pretty much of "throw more Rangers at it".

** Colibri. No one will ''ever'' fight a monster that parrots spells cast on it back at the party, steals the tank's food, and has a single-target [[Limit Break|TP]]-killing move, right? Why, you can't even debuff it! Let's make its whole region grant an XP bonus to make up for it. (Never mind that if you don't cast on it, a colibri is essentially a mage-type mob with no spells -- all of the [[Squishy Wizard|Squishy]] with none of the [[Squishy Wizard|Wizard]]. Did I mention that the region not only has an XP bonus, but very short respawn times? Needless to say, colibri [[Broken Base|are a rich source of flame wars]].)

 

== Dissidia: Final Fantasy ==

* With the right combination of equipment, one can stunt one's character to a piddling 400HP. With 9999 initial Bravery and a full EX Gauge. There is a summon that can lock your Bravery at 9999, and EX Mode can block HP attacks, so you just need to use a single attack on the opponent; but as almost all set-ups give more than four-hundred Brave, the term "rocket tag" is quite suitable. Oh, and you could add a Phoenix Pinion to the combo, ensuring that if you got killed, you'd be healed back to 9999 HP.

** Duodecim, it's prequel sequel sort of fixes this by making the character more...accessible. Turn guard turns and faces an enemy, blocking the brave attacks easily, and the other spells got powered up as well.

* All the above is indeed well and good for breaking tournament play or optional [[Bonus Dungeon|Inward Chaos]], but [[Square Peg, Round Trope|aren't quite gamebreakers]] due to requiring [[Difficult but Awesome|a great deal of skill and practice to begin to be effective]], [[Bragging Rights Reward|equipment and accessories so painstaking to get that almost anyone who has them can demonstrate that they don't need them]], and anyways, villains like Exdeath, Gabranth, and Jecht aren't playable in the plot of ''Dissidia''. Dodge-cancel combos are a different story, however. Some attack chains involve large hitstun to keep the opponent within range of the next part of the chain, but any chain requiring multiple button presses can be interrupted with a dodge before the next attack button is pushed; the attacker can then begin a new attack chain, and some characters can do this repeatedly to maintain these extended combos indefinitely. Furthermore, as the [[All There in the Manual|in-game help files]] state, some HP attacks can be canceled by entering EX Mode, which is another way to abuse hitstun. When you start playing online with human opponents, expect those who use Warrior of Light, Golbez, Sephiroth, and Zidane to spam their aptly-named "infinite combos" to entirely destroy the playability of the game.

* In ''Dissidia 012'' it's legitimately possible to boost your accessory multiplier to 99.9. Let's add Smiting Soul, Safety Bit and Side by Side and enable EXP to HP. Now you only have a 0.1% chance to not to instantly break your opponent and unless your opponent has the [[Achilles Heel|Destroyer]] accessory, you'll always [[Last Chance Hit Point|endure a killing blow with one HP]], and any HP Attack that connects your opponent will heal you, and even if you were about to be killed, you can probably Assist Change out of the attack, effectively making you [[Nigh Invulnerability|Nigh Invulnerable]].

 

== Final Fantasy Tactics series ==

* Thundergod Cid, who not only has ungodly stats, and knows just about all the sword abilities of several special characters right off the bat, but also comes with ''freaking Excalibur'' free of charge. You don't even have to go to any extra effort to ''get'' him--he just gets dropped into your lap about 2/3 of the way through, so the only way to ''not'' break the game is to deliberately not use him.

* Beowulf, whose status spells are ''better'' than those of the devoted debuff class.

* Two Dancers, paired with three Mimes. Set the Dancers to Wizzinabus. Set the controller down. Even without exploiting the way the game engine calculates damage, they can usually murder their way through just about anything before the enemy can even reach them.

* In a similar vein to Orlandu, give Agrias Dual Wield, [[Infinity+1 Sword|Chaos Blade and Excalibur]], a Lordly Robe (optional, but its +2 attack and Wall status helps), and a Chantage. She'll be ridiculously fast, powerful, and most importantly, '''immortal'''. Alternatively, if you're playing the [[Updated Rerelease]], you can replace the Excalibur with a more powerful weapon if you have one, and replace the Chantage with the Tynar Rouge, which will take away your immortality but make you overall more powerful. You ''could'' do the same with Meliadoul, but as her attacks can only hit one target, it's not as effective.

** Which is why, of course, Ramza will wear the Secret Clothes (which make him invisible to enemies right from the beginning of the battle) while Agrias rampages across the map. Give him Sunken State and even if Agrias gets hit with a debilitating status effect, the enemy has ONE SHOT and ONE SHOT ONLY to kill Ramza. Especially if he has Move HP Up.

* Fairly early on in the game, Ramza has access to an ability that ups his speed by one per use. Spam it enough, and you'll start getting extra turns, and he can use it on other characters. The thing is, the faster you get, quite literally the faster you ''can'' get. The ability snowballs once you get underway, to the point where Ramza will be getting up to eight turns in a row, which is eight turns he can be upping another character's speed.

* Calculators. With a little trial and error and simple math, you have the ability to get any spell, free of cost, with no charge time, and hitting potentially every enemy in the screen at once. This method was used to solo a speed run in under five hours.

* Hell, ANYTHING from War of the Lions multiplayer rewards list. While some of it is limited to either Melee([[PvP]]) or rendezvous(co-op missions) most of it breaks the game. the brigands glove for example, it's a glove accessory that gives +3 to speed and auto-haste, yep no need of Excalibur as a weapon now you can equip a Chaos Blade and still get haste. The next item is the Grand Armor which gives permanent Reraise, like the Chantage does but now it frees up that accessory slot for female units or now males get reraise automatically. Perhaps the most game breaking of all is the Brave Suit, which is pretty much the Grand Armor but as clothing, you might ask why is it more of a game breaker?, its actually easier, to get, relatively speaking albeit time consuming.

* The Concentrate ability. This Passive ability raises your accuracy by an absurd degree, despite the fact that the accuracy rate is practically the only device the game uses to balance abilities. That instant kill move that only had a 30% hit rate? Well now it's 80%!

* Moogles can learn Ultima Charge, go level up enough to meet its absurd MP requirements, become a Gunner, and dish out death every time they get a turn. Humans can do similar with archers or hunter, Viera can use assassins and snipers, etc.

* [[Video Game Stealing|Steal: Ability]], which was originally intended as a late-game accelerator pedal. By abusing certain really simple game mechanics, you can gain access to the ability [[Disc One Nuke|at a ridiculously early stage]]. As if the dev team anticipated this, you can steal ludicrously powerful abilities in some early missions, and after that the entire power curve of the game just falls apart.

* It should be noted that the "Damage To MP" game breaker from Final Fantasy tactics is even ''easier'' to pull off in this game, since units automatically regenerate MP without moving each round. This makes one of the hardest boss battles in the game trivial.

* The sequel to FFTA seriously toned-down, worked over and generally fixed its game breakers, but it introduced a couple new ones including Mirror Items, which reverses the effect of items. Antidotes inflict Poison, Eyedrops inflict Blind... and [[Healing Potion|X-Potions]] do 200 points of damage. Guaranteed. With the accuracy of a standard attack. Your newly-recruited Seeq Ranger can now do more damage than your most seasoned units and can inflict nearly all the [[Standard Status Effects]] in the game. For real lulz, team up with a Green Mage that knows Tranq (which raises accuracy. Oh yes), then go to town with 70% accuracy instant-death Phoenix Downs, Toad-inflicting Maiden's Kisses, etc. Combine with the ability that doubles the effects of items for laughs.

* The Paladin/Parivir/Geomancy combo. You get access to the best weapons and armors in the game, and Geomancy makes your [[Elemental Powers]] do x1.5 damage against ''everything'' that isn't strong against all of them. You can also inflict status effects on top of it all.

== Other ==

* The SAW weapon in ''Final Fantasy Legend'' (actually a ''[[SaGa]]'' game renamed for the American market) was supposed to have a chance of automatically killing the target if the user's strength was higher than the defender's defense, which is how it works in the sequel. Unfortunately, there was a programming mix-up between ">" and "<", making it so the SAW only worked if the attacker was ''weaker''. This lead to an unfortunate end to the final boss.

** Sadly, a bug stopped this from actually working as advertised: if an enemy was immune to any single status effect the Dragon Claw would cause, the game would not apply any of them. If it was immune to, say, poison, sleep/confuse/paralyze/petrify parts wouldn't work either. But anything that wasn't immune just straight up ''died'' from the Petrify effect.

** Magic in general is very, very powerful in Mystic Quest, especially the all-hitting Wizard spells White, Meteor, and Flare. These can end a good deal of non-boss battles with a single cast, and if not, they will certainly end it with two. However, casting of them is limited, to the point where it is not unheard of to confront the [[Final Boss]] while still having a maximum number of Wizard spell casts in the single digits. Sounds balanced, right? Until you factor in the Seed item, which completely replenishes your spell capacity to maximum. And which can be bought in increments of a ''hundred'', in a game where there is basically [[Money for Nothing|nothing else to spend money on]].

** Even more powerful than the highly damaging Wizard spells was the White magic. For strange reasons, most white magic would have the opposite effect if cast on the enemy, and we're not talking [[Revive Kills Zombie]]. We're talking ''Revive Kills Everything''; Life was an instant-death spell when used on enemies, the dungeon-warping Exit spell ejected enemies from combat, the status-cure caused random status effect on the enemy. Only Cure was limited to only hurting undead, otherwise White magic was full of death-dealing terror. And thanks to a [[Good Bad Bug]], even Cure has an offensive use; it more than makes up for its general lack of offensive power throughout the game by dealing obscene amounts of damage to the final boss, overkilling him in a few casts.

** Better yet -- if you walk into a wall, you get into a fight. You can set up the game to auto-finder (Merchant crown) and auto-escape (Wanderer crown). Escape does not cause an end of battle screen, so you're instantly on the world map again. In other words, if you really wanted to, you can point at the wall in auto mode, with 3 Merchants and 1 Wanderer, each with Hermes Boots equipped (always act first), steal 3 gems, escape, repeatedly, until you come back to the DS.