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

* Magic spells [[Evolving Attack|level up]] if used in battle. While curative and damage spells grow more powerful, status-affecting spells grow more accurate. Since very few monsters resist the more oddball instant death spells like Toad or Exit, if you spend some time with them, they'll go from constantly-missing waste of space to instant-win commands. And almost every boss and enemy is vulnerable to Toad, so <ref>and some soldiers outside the castle drop it, even if they are moderately powerful for that part of the game</ref>... Exit can also be leveled up easily, by just walking into a town and casting it, then going back into the town...

** The ''Osmose'' spell can also be considered a game breaker. It's easy to level up, drains humongous amounts of MP from your foe, and never fails (not even on the final boss). One single ''Osmose'' spell and the final boss is completely drained of MP, leaving him only physical attacks. If you have one PC on the front row with 99% evasion, you are effectively completely invulnerable and you might as well just keep the X button pressed and wait for the boss to die.

* Use of the Blood Sword can take down the ''[[Final Boss|Emperor]]'' in two rounds. And in the NES version, there's two of them...

* Although the original [[Nintendo Hard|doesn't really have any]], the DS remake introduced a few:

** [[Guide Dang It|Assuming you can find it]], the Ultima Weapon is easily this. In addition to having one of the best attack stats in the whole game, it gives a whopping +15 bonus to all of its wielder's stats. Needless to say, having it makes the endgame ALOT easier.

== Final Fantasy IV ==

** 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.

** The Economizers (Celestriads), however, become less useful if you consider ''another'' game breaker, the Osmose spell, which drains MPs from enemies and works on virtually every enemy except the undead. It's essentially a free MP recharge. It does waste a turn, unlike the Economizer/Celestriad, but it doesn't take up a relic slot. With the Economiser/Celestriad, you can simply use Osmose to recharge your MP stock, should it somehow fall low.

* The Genji Glove (which allows dual wielding of any two weapons) can be paired with the Offering/Master's Scroll (four attacks for the price of one). Wield the strongest weapons with those relics and the final boss just becomes a challenge of getting the first attack off before he does his opening move. It's one of the few ways you can actually defeat Chupon/Typhon in the arena.

* 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.

** Not to mention the mechanics for actually acquiring limit breaks in the first place. Killing large groups of lower-powered enemies can unlock your characters' higher level limit breaks earlier than you would otherwise. When it comes to the limits that you can only unlock by using other limits, quipping characters with crappy armor and fighting enemies with high attack power causes them to suffer much higher damage than they normally would and allows you to learn the limits faster.

* 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.

** Trine, which has an absurdly low cost for the damage it does; for comparison, the summon Ramuh (which deals damage with exactly the same properties as Trine) does half the damage for double the cost. And Trine is powerful enough to wipe out entire swarms of mooks in a single shot until around the end of disc 2. You know, around the time it's possible to get W-Item and after the time it's possible to get Knights of the Round.

** Goblin Punch, which is incredibly easy to obtain if you know where to find it, and does an obscene amount of damage for 0 MP.

** Command Counter. When hit the character would Counter Attack with a mime of the last action your party performed. Naturally, this can lead you to miming a double summon of Knights of the Round and then on your actual turn repeating it. This was especially notable with enemies that dealt physical damage to all characters in the party because each one of them (if equipped with Command Counter+Mine), they would Mime the Mimed Knights of the Round. This reduced even the strongest enemy in the game to putty.

** Even worse: Barret with Ungarmax. After loading him up with a few Hero Drinks, let him do this, let the enemy attack him, and watch as Barret unleashes up to 144 attacks each worth about 5000+ damage apiece.

* If a character's HP hits exactly 7777 on the dot, they will start automatically attacking enemies for 7777 damage. [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|62 times.]] The [[Incredible Shrinking Man|Mini spell]], normally a [[Useless Useful Spell]], reduces all physical damage caused by one enemy to 1, but there's nothing stopping you from using it on your own characters. By using enough HP Plus materia for 9999 HP, the Demi spell (deals 1/4 max HP in damage) will leave you at 7499 HP - attack with the Mini-ed character 22 times, then use 3 of the lowest level healing potion to heal 100 HP each, and we have instant overkill of any non-[[Bonus Boss]] enemy in the game. It helps that Emerald Weapon has an attack that deals 1111 damage for every materia on your characters - you can see where this is going.

* A comparitively lesser one, but the morph ability can be used like this. The morph ability dies less damage, but if it kills an opponent the opponent will be morphed into a specific item, with each monster type having a specific item it morphs into. The end game has a [[Peninsula of Power Leveling|sunken plane]] where every monster is absurdly powerful (for the level your originally find it) but morphs into a stat boosting item. This by itself isn't too much of a game breaker, the effort of cherry tapping the games hardest foes to death is so extream that you deserve the boost you get. That is until you explor the sunken plane a little and discover [[Secret Character|Yuffie's]] [[Infinity+1 Sword|ultimate weapon]] which can one do full damage attack when using morph, making it absordly easy to collect these stat boosting items, the game starts to get a bit more broken.

=== [[Crisis Core]] ===

* You can equip an accessory called Brutal that raises the maximum damage you can do to 99999. If you then use the Costly Punch materia, you will do 99999 damage with it. All for the low cost of a tiny bit of HP...

** Well, increasing stat bonus of your materia is the only way to max your stats, although even without it, Brutal and Costly Punch allows you to [[One-Hit Kill]] any boss in story mode. On the other hand, you can't even think about killing strongest boss in side missions if you don't have Costly Punch and Brutal and haven't maxed at least some of your stats. After all, she has ''only'' 10 000 000 HP (she can heal herself too), not to mention her deadly attacks.

== Final Fantasy VIII ==

* ''FFVIII'''s junction system, combined with the game's [[Dynamic Difficulty]], makes it phenomenally easy to put together game breakers once you know how to use it effectively. Quezacotl's Card and Card Mod and the various GF item-refining abilities can be used to stock the characters up with magic to junction to and boost their stats. Card also prevents the party from earning XP for enemies thus transformed, keeping everyone's levels low; if the player avoids [[Level Grinding]] and focuses on refining and junctioning high-end magic instead, the party's stats quickly outstrip those of their enemies.

* Keeping a character at low HP allows them to execute their [[Limit Break|Limit Breaks]] every turn:

** Selphie's [[Confusion Fu]] limit break includes two [[One-Hit Kill]] spells, "Rapture" and "The End," the latter of which works even on bosses. It doesn't come up often, but by exploiting some minor flaws in the game's programming it's possible to make it unable to perform the next character's action, allowing the player to keep rolling indefinitely until The End comes up.

*** 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.]]

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

** The risk of leaving characters at low HP is easily offset by another absurdly simple junction setup: set Squall with the Cover and Counter abilities and junction 100 Drain spells to Status-Attack-J. Leave the other two party members' HP as low as you like; Squall will take the hits for them and immediately counterattack, replenishing his own HP with every hit. [[Always Accurate Attack|And he always hits.]]

* Another way of abusing the [[Dynamic Difficulty]] involves [[Guest Star Party Member|Guest Star Party Members]] Seifer (in disc 1) and Edea (in disc 3). Letting the other party members get KOed and [[Level Grinding]] with the guest party member can, if you're willing to grind that much, leave a comparatively low-level party with level 99 GFs and high-end spells like Firaga with no effect on the party's average level once the guest character leaves.

* Any GF that eventually gains an ability that has the word "Bonus" in it, like Ifrit who gets "Strength Bonus", Leviathan who gets "Spirit Bonus", Carbunkle who gets "Vitality Bonus", or Brothers who get "Health Points Bonus", mainly because learning these abilities and keeping these GF's attached to your party members will give them significant boosts in their stats.

* In general the [[Summon Magic|GFs]] are, as already demonstrated above, far more useful for their junction abilities than as actual summons, but there are exceptions:

** Eden's absurdly long summon sequence gives the player ample time to abuse the Boost option. Max your compatibility so you can summon it up within a couple of seconds and watch it completely ignore the damage cap by about 40,000+ points to all enemies.

* The Meltdown spell, which is available once you reach Trabia, will inflict Vit-0 on any and all enemies in the game, including the bosses, ''including'' Omega Weapon, 99.9% of the time. It hardly ever fails. Combine this with Aura (another potential gamebreaker that allows the use of Limit Breaks regardless of health), and you too can experience the fun of spamming Renzokuken on enemies who are literally defenseless.

== Final Fantasy IX ==

* Partially due to the fact that the battle system maxed out at doing one hit of 9999 damage and a maximum boss HP of [[Powers of Two Minus One|65535]], you can use skills and abilities like Soul Blade (with Masamune equipped, anything vulnerable to Death spells WILL die in 10 seconds 100% of the time), a time based Auto-Regen (Especially when combined with Boosted summon spells). Hell, the Ability system as a whole will let your characters do a bunch of boosts at the same time, including, but not limited to, Auto-Life, Auto-Regen, Auto-Haste, Auto-Reflect, Auto-Potion, Long Reach, Various magic/attack boosts, etc... Once you get to a high enough level, you'll be regening back to full power as fast as they can damage you, if they manage to hit you at all.

** Whether it's a [[Good Bad Bug]] or something else going on, but with at least Auto-Haste and Auto-Regen, characters will become invincible so as long as something doesn't hit for their max HP, as Regen will fire off every millisecond.

* There's Zidane's, Quina's and especially Freya's defense-ignoring 9999 hit spells. Low MP requirements, no available early in the game, though you're unlikely to fulfill the requirements of Quina's until near the end of the game, but that's alright because...

* Many of Quina's Blue Magic spells. Bad Breath, Level 5 Death, Night (combined with your party equipping the Insomniac ability), Magic Hammer, Mighty Guard, Limit Glove, Angel's Snack, White Wind... whether its attacking, defending or healing, at full or low HP, Quina is easily a top tier character, even without his maxed out Frog Drop.

* Steiner's Shock ability which does max damage to practically anything it hits regardless of their stats.

* Amarant in general counts for this due to his high attack strength, his solid stats, and his versatility in his move set. He can cause direct damage, cast status effects, restore party members' health and magic points, and can even revive them all by himself.

* ReflectX2 + Carbuncle + casting high level reflectable spell on your own party = the only real way to break 9999 damage in one attack in the entire game.

* The ability Auto-Regen gives you back health not based on turns but rather on an actual amount of time. Hence making sure summons were on full animation rather would give you more health than the quicker "part animation". The full Ark, for instance, could get you from 1hp to about 5,000hp, if not more.

* 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.

* According to [[Word of God]], [[Final Fantasy V|Exdeath]] is designed to be this. Yet, he's so hard to use that he's not a reguarly used character in tournaments. Regardless, he's still a formidable foe in the right hands, being able to block plenty of attacks and counter them with his normally hard-to-use attacks. He tends to be held back by the fact that he's either useless or deadly, depending entirely on whether you're a master or not.

* To break the battle mode of ''Dissidia'', well--there are a few options, but [[Final Fantasy IX|Zidane]] is perhaps most notable. The character is fast enough to just ''run away'' from most attacks without having to block or dodge, is small and thus on the hard side to hit, the majority of his bravery attacks combo easily ''and'' chain into either chase sequences (useful if the player is good at them) or the even-more-useful Meo Twister HP attacks. And his HP attacks--the homing, long-duration, guard-crushing charge Grand Lethal is well-loved, but Free Energy is just as useful for a different reason. Sure, the range is very short, but it tracks well, and the hitbox takes a little getting used to (it can miss if the opponent is too far or too close to Zidane), but it is pretty much ''the fastest'' HP attack in the game--the only one faster is Bartz' Goblin Punch, which he only has access to in [[Super Mode|Ex Mode]]. With all of these, Zidane can absolutely destroy the story mode of the game, thus granting the player access to the things necessary to break the game in the other, above-described ways.

* 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.

* The remake gives us Balthier who has the powers of the Mustadio and the thief class plus another ability that allows him to attack four times with half damage each hit, so he really deals damage equivalent to attacking twice but he can do this with any weapon he is equiped with and to top it off the attack costs no mp with the gun he comes equiped with can deal enough damage to kill virually anyone within two rounds at an eight panel distance. He also has an absurd equipment list and VERY high speed. In short Balthier is an armored ninja with a gun who can rapid fire.

* Agrias and Meliadoul both are [[Game Breaker|Game Breakers]] in their own right. It is a testament to just how overpowered Cid is that most people don't realize just how good Holy Sword and Unyielding Blade actually are in their own right. There is slight [[Fan Dumb]] involved with Meliadoul because she can't spam the same ability on every single enemy in the game and a few are immune to it.

* Any unit equiped with a Feather Cape and Reflexes also deserves mention. The Feather cape gives a unit 40% chance to dodge physical attacks and a 30% chance to dodge magic attacks, Reflexes doubles both chances and since it's a cape the evade bonus works on back and side attacks so a unit by default gets hit from physicals 20% at most and gets hit from magic 40% of the time. The advantage it has on Shirahadori is that it stops most magic attacks and it allows you to evade counter.

* A simple, yet effective trick is the high Brave, low Faith, Item, Shirahadori combo. For every four points you modify someone's bravery or faith, one point is permanent. This means it's possible to get a character's Bravery to 97 and his Faith down to 3. This character has a 97% chance to block any physical attack (and you can pump that up to 100% by having Ramza use Yell at the start of combat) and shrug off anything magical. Only a few monster techniques, such as Choco Meteor, have any chance of dealing damage to him, as well as counter attacks. Even if he does get low on hit points, he can spend a turn to use a healing item on himself.

* Make a pair of Illusionists - which hit every enemy on screen with a magic spell, with Magic Frenzy - which pairs any magic used with a physical attack, and have them [[Dual Wield]] Heretic/Lilith Rods or Bomb Arms - the strongest rods the class can equip. It takes some preparation, but get those two set up and you essentially win forever.

* Another fun one is a crew of Nu Mou Scholars. Build your party right and they can damage the entire enemy party while constantly refilling your party's HP or MP. Stagger this properly and you become stupidly unkillable.

** You can then take this even farther by having one ability be Summoning and the other Red Magic, which includes Doublecast. So you can then do all of that ''twice a turn''.

** For even more fun, add a Chocobo Knight with the Critical: Quicken and Smile Toss abilities, equipped with a Venus Blade. Have your doublecasting summoner hit the Chocobo Knight with Ramuh (since Chocobo Knights are weak to lightning, this should activate the Critical: Quicken ability and make the Chocobo Knight move immediately afterward) followed by Ifrit (which it absorbs thanks to Venus Blade). Then have your Chocobo Knight hit the summoner with Smile Toss, which allows them to move instantly. You now have an infinite loop, in which your enemies will never get a turn. By constantly moving your Chocobo Knight to where the enemies are, you can keep hitting them with the splash damage until they all die, with nothing they can do about it.

* 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.

* The Dragon Claw in ''[[Final Fantasy Mystic Quest]]''. It has a chance of causing every status effect in the game, and not a low chance; it ''failing'' to cause status effects was the exception, not the rule. This includes petrification, which is implemented identically to instant death. Which pretty much means that any normal enemy dies in one hit. And for the maybe 10% of enemies immune to petrification? You've just put them to sleep, or paralyzed them, or confused them.

** 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.