History GameBreaker / BravelyDefault

In games that try their damnedest to give you a grueling struggle, it doesn't take a whole lot of [[ArcWords courage to disobey]]. ''VideoGame/BravelyDefault'' and ''VideoGame/BravelySecond'' are no exception.

* As mentioned above, Time Mage's Hasten World can really break the game in half to a degree that even the strongest BonusBoss can be defeated by setting the game on autobattle: it increases the amount of BP gained per turn to 2 for both allies and enemies, which can allow you do things like spam Valkyrie's High Jump on an enemy that's completely unable to do anything about it since the party collectively blasts off at every chance they get before the enemy can get a turn in, or making sure that the Spiritmaster can spam Stillness right when it wears off.

* There are several potent combinations, but Stillness (neither the player or the enemy takes any damage for 2 turns) from the Spiritmaster class is probably the worst offender. Coupled with the right setup (e.g. Hasten World ability, or My Hero from a performer) it can make the party impervious from any kind of damage; the only real thing to watch out for are status effects, and those can be countered with the right accessory/armor, or just have the Spiritmaster cast Fairy Ward. The way it works is all you need is for the Spiritmaster to go before the enemy, and for at least one party member to go before they do. That means that your faster party member attacks, then Stillness stops damage output entirely for 2 turns, meaning the enemy NEVER gets to deal damage.

* Although there's a random element to it you can get guests via the on-line functionality who are orders of magnitude stronger than your party. Using summon ally to get them to help you can make defeating [[DiscOneNuke early bosses]] absolutely trivial as they'll one shot them.

* Arguably the most game breaking combo for the final bosses is Two Monks with the Dark Knight skills, a White Mage with the Spiritmaster's skills and Hasten World, and a Pirate. The set up is rather easy: Have the each character use enough brave to have -4 and employ Stillness to go two whole turns of not being damaged while you whittle away their HP using a combination of the Monk's [[HPToOne Phoenix]] [[HeroicSacrifice Flight]] then spam [[HealthDamageAsymmetry Minus Strike]] to deal a full 9999 damage through the entire fight. Thanks to Stillness and the Pirate's Shin Smash, which lowers speed, they party won't be damaged since their attacks will be faster than the enemy.

* Pirate itself is a pretty powerful job, and with the right setup (such as a Natural Talent monk), can do 9999 damage early on multiple times in a single turn. It's fairly useful as well, with the various debuffs weakening your enemies.

** Even better? Adaptation lets you absorb all elemental attacks. Yes, ''all''. Couple that with the Performer/Freelancer My Hero trick, Fairy Ward and the Templar's Rampart and ''nothing'' can touch you, save the meteor and comet spells. Only problem you may have is MP, but Aspir can take care of that.

* DARK. NEBULA. Dark Nebula is a Dark Knight skill that, for 30% of your health, hits for a ridiculous 4x regular damage to ALL foes... with the disadvantage that it hits your units, too. Sounds not worth the payoff. Until you realise that you can combine it with Spiritmaster's Enigma (or equipment that grants immunity to dark, like the Dark Shield) to make it more efficient than even special moves... or just give them the Red Mage's "Revenge" and let them take the hit for free BP. If your entire party is spamming Dark Nebula, you can triple-Brave every turn and ''still'' come out with positive BP. And you can use it with Sword Magic Drain or Freelancer's Mimic to make the health cost essentially moot. Have fun killing endgame bosses in two turns!

* Conjurer: Although it's the last class in the game you can get, Obliterate means you can grind with zero effort as it automatically kills the enemies (save bosses) 20 levels weaker than you and thus consistently triggers every PG, EXP and JP bonus, meaning you'll be getting 50% more of each after 10 battles in a row. Conviniently enough, it also comes with an ability that increases the EXP you get from enemies, although by that point you've probably saved enough cash for a Growth Egg that does it better and doesn't stack with the ability, not to mention EXP is probably the one thing you'll need the least of as described on the main page.

* Low Leverage, another one of the Merchant's abilities halves the cost, damage, and recovery of both your and your opponent's abilities. While it may not sound like much, it means that you are much less likely to get [[TotalPartyKill TPKed]]. Once you start hitting the damage cap it becomes even more useful: say you've designed a very formidable party that hits for 15000 damage per attack (a conservative amount) the extra 5000 damage is lost, however with low leverage in effect your damage output is reduced by one quarter (to 7500) and your cost is halved. Furthermore it allows you to spam the aforementioned My Hero/Mimic every turn.

* The Utsusemi combo also completely breaks several bosses that only have physical attacks and never Brave, such as the keystone dragons. Combine Utsusemi with Ringabel (best agility) and Hermes Sandals (+10 agility), use Utsusemi once, hit Y to auto-battle, and walk away and get a snack. While it does rob your other party members of EXP/JP, you can always grind later.
* Also in the demo, a Valkyrie with Crescent Moon, 2-Handed and a Mythril Spear on your fastest character can make gaining PG, EXP and JP ridiculously fast and easy. With this setup, go to the southern part of the map, past the dungeon to a little shore. There you will always encounter 6 Chompers which are pretty strong, can poison you, but usually run away. Use Brave to have your fastest character cast two Crescent Moons and watch them all go down before they can even blink. Keep at it for a while and soon you'll be gaining 120 Job Points a fight. (Also recommended to have your 2nd fastest character do the same thing in case the first fails to KO them all. As long as they attack before the enemy gets a chance to act, you win.)

* The Vampire's Battle Thirst can be pretty debilitating to normal enemies if done right. With Drain Attack Up, it will steal 2 BP instead of 1, and if you can get all enemies in the battle down to -4 BP before they can act...they will never get to do so, because you can just keep draining their BP when they start getting close to 0. You usually won't even run out of MP, thanks to Magic Thirst.

* Blessed Shields and Sage's Staff until you need better healing later on, are very good equipment for a good majority of the game. Blessed Shield, if used as an item, casts Cura. Note, it isn't used up. You can keep on using them. Sage's Staff is the same, except with Raise. Free revives. For a good while you can go without a dedicated healing class, or at least have one but not be required to equip red or white magic. They even go well together as using the items counts towards the requirements for the staff's special moves, which are very useful as well.

* Wanna know how to get unlimited money and experience/job points?
** Step 1. Obtain the Conjurer job and grind until you gain the Obliterate ability and equip it (Obliterate instakills enemies at the beginning of the battle whom you have 20 or more levels up on)
** Step 2: Go to an area with powerful monsters in it (like say, the northern forest)
** Step 3: Turn the encounter rate up to max
** Step 4: Because of the way bonuses work, Obliterate will give you bonuses in experience, job points and money for merely entering battle that keep stacking up after each successful battle (until you hit the limit of course).
** Step 5: Enjoy obtaining absurd amounts of money, level ups and as much mastered jobs as you want. Bosses from this point onwards may as well surrender in advance to avoid humiliation.

* Do you remember the FinalBoss from Default? Do you remember how his first phase consisted of completely healing himself at the end of every turn? Go into battle with full HP, and the Exorcist's level 11 ability [[HolyShitQuotient does just that]]. Auto Undo activates at the end of every turn, and if your HP or MP are lower than they were at the the start of the turn, well, now they're not. It doesn't activate when KO'd, but as long as the enemy can't empty your HP in one turn, this amounts to effective invulnerability ''and'' endless magic spamming regardless of MP costs. And although it doesn't trigger after a battle ends, it can be combined with the Kaiser's Cerberus to top you back up after a battle, making dungeon trekking a breeze.

* The Wizard's Ventriloquism skill. Spellcrafting in itself is extremely strong, but it costs 1 BP per modified spell. Ventriloquism makes it so that a single Spellcraft affects all spells cast by the party that turn, more or less doubling the potential magic output a magic-oriented team can do. Combine this with the Rain Spellcraft which makes a spell hit 4 times and you can dish out [[MagicMissileStorm 60 spells in a single turn]]. This is a level 10 ability (thus available from the start unlike other potential Gamebreakers that have to be unlocked through [[spoiler: level 11]]) on the first job you get. [[spoiler:Once you unlock level 11 you can double all of your spells with the Red Mage's Consecutive Magic, so that makes 120. A Meteor Rain easily hits the damage cap of 9999, so you potentially deal 120*9999 dmg = 1199880 Damage, [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill that's five times the endboss's HP on hard!]]]]

* As mentioned under MetalSlime on the main page, there is an enemy that you can steal Megalixirs from that you can repeatedly encounter. This is game-breaking enough on its own, considering that it's not that hard to maximize your stock of them, but the Salve-Maker has an ability—Turn Toxic—that lets you make a healing item do damage instead. So you could have four people with the relevant skillset and have them each Brave 4 times and spam a total of 16 toxic Megalixirs, [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill dealing 159,984 damage to every enemy in the battle]][[labelnote:note]] To put that into perspective, the final boss only has 202,500 health.[[/labelnote]], or potentially even more if you use Bravely Second with Attack Item Amp active (which makes attack items do 1.5x damage, thereby making each Megalixir used during Bravely Second do 14,998 damage to every enemy instead of 9999). In fact, if you can manage to manipulate the turn order precisely enough, that could theoretically be done with ''one'' Megalixir and 15 uses of Mimic.
* Blessed Shields and Sage's staff until you need better healing later on, are very good equipment for a good majority of the game. Blessed Shield, if used as an item, casts Cura. Note, it isn't used up. You can keep on using them. Sage's staff is the same, except with Raise. Free revives. For a good while you can go without a dedicated healing class, or at least have one but not be required to equip red or white magic. They even go well together as using the items counts towards the requirements for the staff's special moves, which are very useful as well.

* DARK. NEBULA. Dark Nebula is a Dark Knight skill that, for 30% of your health, hits for a ridiculous 4x regular damage to ALL foes. . . with the disadvantage that it hits your units, too. Sounds not worth the payoff. Until you realise that you can combine it with Spiritmaster's Enigma (or equipment that grants immunity to dark, like the Dark Shield) to make it more efficient than even special moves... or just give them the Red Mage's "Revenge" and let them take the hit for free BP. If your entire party is spamming Dark Nebula, you can triple-Brave every turn and ''still'' come out with positive BP. And you can use it with Sword Magic Drain or Freelancer's Mimic to make the health cost essentially moot. Have fun killing endgame bosses in two turns!

* What's more, the game practically ''expects'' you to do this once you get to the TrueFinalBoss. Otherwise? [[MarathonLevel you'll be swinging at him for hours]], since he has a ''million'' health spread across five forms. And that's not including the bosses ''before'' it.

* Some bosses, like the Templar, are only able to attack one party member at a time. The Ninja learns an ability to force an enemy to target a particular teammate that they can cast every turn for no cost. The Swordmaster learns an ability that allows them to nominate one enemy against whom they will perform a hugely powerful counter attack against a selected enemy if attacked that by them that turn, which also has no cost. With another party member on healing duty, you can shut them down entirely. Or if you really want to break some bosses, giver that Swordmaster the Spell Fencer's Drain ability or a blood sword, now every counter attack will likely fully heal them which means both that you don't need to waste a turn healing them and that any attack that doesn't either one shot the samurai or bypass counter will be utterly negated no matter how many are used in a row. Slap a ribbon on them and there is very little that can stop them (with the added benefit of single target status spells like Death being focused onto the one party member who's now immune).

* Also in the demo, a Valkyrie with Crescent Moon, 2-Handed and a Mythril Spear on your fastest character can make gaining PQ, EXP and JP ridiculously fast and easy. With this setup, go to the southern part of the map, past the dungeon to a little shore. There you will always encounter 6 Chompers which are pretty strong, can poison you, but usually run away. Use Brave to have your fastest character cast two Crescent Moons and watch them all go down before they can even blink. Keep at it for a while and soon you'll be gaining 120 Job Points a fight. (Also recommended to have your 2nd fastest character do the same thing in case the first fails to KO them all. As long as they attack before the enemy gets a chance to act, you win.)

* Arcanist + anything that can cause Poison (either Black Mage, Red Mage, Spellfencer, Salve-Maker, or Vampire) cheeses anything that isn't immune to Poison (which is actually a lot, including the majority of the bosses): Hit them with Poison, then Exterminate for over 7000 damage. (9000 if Gloom is equipped, and it doesn't have resistances and/or high magic defenses... though it will usually still do more than anything could heal.) It may actually be one of the greatest things overall, due to how bosses work - the 'High-Jump Hasten World' combo isn't ALWAYS infallible, and a lot of the other strategies rely on the foe using either single target attacks or doing something very specific that CAN mess up. Arcanist isn't like this- the key to the Arcanist's entire strategy is Poison. Normally, people would just forget about Arcanist at that point because most RPGS have taught us status affects are useless for the player to use. After all, what boss can be poisoned? [[DefiedTrope Most, actually.]] The great thing about Bravely Default is a majority of the bosses are human. Almost every human, save some specific humans such as Qada who revolve their strategies around being partially healers, are susceptible to poison. Give it a couple of turns, and eventually poison WILL work. And when it does, Exterminate rips bosses apart. This is what makes Arcanist so formidable: it isn't about reacting to bosses or relying on specific markers, it's just about having someone shield the Arcanist, having a healer ready, and the Arcanist itself.

** Step 1. Obtain the Conjurer job and grind until you gain the Obliterate ability and equip it (obliterate instakills enemies at the beginning of the battle that are more than or equal to 20 levels lower than you)

* Equipping the Blood Blade lets you cast Sword Magic Drain for free. You'll probably only get one, but unequipping it is a free action, and doesn't cancel a queued Drain spell. Scroll back up and count how many other game-breakers are reliant on or enhanced by Drain.

** Even better? Adaptation lets you absorb all elemental attacks. Yes, ''all''. Couple that with the Performer/Freelancer My Hero trick, Fairy Ward and the Templar's Rampart and ''nothing'' can touch you. Only problem you may have is MP, but Aspir can take care of that.

** Gets even worse when you take the time to set it up with support abilities such as the Monk's Natural talent and buffs such as Lux before hitting Bravely Second. You can reach Bravely Second hitcap with this (a whopping 999,999 damage!) without too much effort. To EVERYTHING. For bonus points, tag the entire party with the Spiritmaster's Adaptation first and watch as your entire party is healed for obscene amounts.

** Templar: Rampart can make several tedious bosses, such as the dragons to open Vampire Castle, into little more than setting the game on autobattle and waiting for them to die, since when combined with the aforementioned Hasten World, it can be cast every turn for no mana. It turns pretty much any boss reliant on physical attacks into a pushover.