History GameBreaker / Castlevania

** Of course, having to defeating the brutally difficult [[BonusBoss Galamoth]] to get it would render the Poison Cloud a BraggingRightsReward, if not for the elemental absorbing circlets. Pop on the easily obtained Beryl Circlet that absorbs his lightning to restore your HP, and Galamoth becomes an absolute non-threat. The other circlets can be situationally useful as well, but the Ruby Circlet you also get for defeating Galamoth absorbs ''fire''. So many enemies in the game use fire, notably the [[DemonicSpiders Guardians]] that defend the Clock Room, that it gets you pretty close to outright invincibility.

** For mages (unlocked after beating the game), Uranus + everything (except Unicorn, as it heals instead of doing damage). All summons give you invincibility until they end, but the game makes up for it by having huge-to-insane MP costs. But the mage playthrough gives you insane MP and MP recovery, so partway through the game you gain enough MP to chain-spam the cheapest summon until the cows come home, and by the end [[LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards you can chain-spam even the strongest summons with zero risk]].

* The 1,000 Blades Dual Crash is probably the worst example, though, because you get it so early in the game. It's not ''actually'' one thousand blades, just 48 (or 51 if your partner is on-screen), but even that will kill pretty much anything in a few strikes, and since each stuns separately, the enemy is quite screwed. The high hit count also makes it perfect against Final Guard, a BossInMookClothing who has 50 HP... but with a DEF so high that it takes only 1 HP of damage per hit from ''everything''.

** There's also an easy trick to getting a powerful fist weapon, the Jewel Knuckles, much earlier than you're supposed to, which dovetails into ''another'' trick that uses them to get yourself to a preposterously high level for that part of the game by repeatedly beating up a defenseless Spike Ball. It would take ages, except the knuckles have a very good critical rate, so instead of 2 damage per punch, you will often deal 5 to 10 times that.

** For extra fun, use the 99 LCK code, and keep Death from taking your stuff. While the Alucard Shield is available fairly late in the game normally, the Shield Rod is available very early if you make a point of going for it. If your shield doesn't get stolen, you get to abuse it on most of the bosses instead of just the last few.

** Actually, the Holy Water can kill Dracula's second form; however, you need to make it through the clocktower and to Dracula in one attempt, have the triple shot, and have between 25-30 hearts to do it while throwing the Holy Water at his head.

[[folder:Chronicles of Sorrow]]
!!''[[VideoGame/CastlevaniaChroniclesOfSorrow Aria of Sorrow]]''

!!''[[VideoGame/CastlevaniaChroniclesOfSorrow Dawn of Sorrow]]''
* The Mandragora Soul. It simply sends a screaming mandragora out for 30 MP. The range is insane, the damage is very good for such a cheap-costing soul, and while a little grinding may be needed for it, you can get it as soon as you get into the Garden of Madness. The somewhat rarer and later Great Axe Armour Soul costs more and is only a little more powerful, but the range is massive, similar to the Red Minotaur Soul but less broken.
** There's also the Devil Soul, which gives you a huge Strength stat boost in exchange for doing 10 HP of damage each second. The Devil Soul is also very easy to get, appearing fairly early in the game. Using it in combination with the Valmanway (see "Crissaegrim" under ''Symphony'', because being broken in just one game apparently wasn't enough), it can beat the game's Boss Rush mode in just over 4 minutes (taking into account the long waiting times to gather the healing orb after every battle).
** The Medusa Soul + [[DivingKick jumpkick]] combo: basically, in ''Dawn of Sorrow'', your jumpkicks do more damage the longer you fall before connecting with an enemy, which is normally only useful against Gergoth, since his boss arena is the only one with a long vertical drop. But since the game only counts airtime and not the distance you cover before connecting with an enemy, you can easily use the Medusa Soul to freeze yourself in midair mid-kick and do ridiculous amounts of damage to anything below you when you let go. There were several bosses who ate an extremely, extremely damaging boot to the top of the skull.

* Hector can be pretty break-y too if you're prone to experimenting with weapons. Using the replica of Isaac's spear against him in the second battle is almost unfair because your combo is faster than his recovery, and if you keep hitting him from behind (FoeYay abounds with those two), you can get him stuck in perpetual recovery stagger until he switches modes, or until one of the [=IDs=] lambasts you.

* This game has a Quick Save feature, likely intended to be a SuspendSave. What it actually does is perform a full save of the game, minus your location. This allows players to avoid losing valuable items they just acquired, as well as easily backtrack to their last save point (after such a situation, or if they make a long trek only to run into a dead-end or an AbilityRequiredToProceed area where they don't have the ability required yet, for eample) by performing a Quick Save and then just reset the game and load their file. Later games would avoid this exploit by making quick saves actual suspend saves instead.

* [=SotN=] was not meant to be a challenge. Specifically, Iga decided that earlier games were too difficult, so the level up feature and the extra items were put in so everyone could enjoy the game regardless of skill. Challenge gamers can avoid grinding for levels and rare drops, and deliberately not use the stuff below. For everyone else, the players who love the idea of mass carnage and annihilating the forces of darkness while they can't even touch you, Konami provided more ways to do so than you can shake a stick at:

* The Holy Water, which damages enemies as it falls to the ground, and when it does, it explodes into a flame that freezes whatever enemies are caught in it and inflicts continuous damage. Pick up a Double or Triple Shot and watch every boss in [[VideoGame/CastlevaniaI the original game]] except ''Dracula'' will go down in mere seconds, including [[ThatOneBoss Death]]. Not even Dracula's final form gets off unscathed, as while the Holy Water won't deal any damage to him, it ''will'' freeze him, allowing you to whip away for free. It retains this game-breaking property minus the freezing in ''VideoGame/{{Castlevania III|DraculasCurse}}'', which runs on the same engine, but by ''VideoGame/SuperCastlevaniaIV'', it was nerfed to make it a more balanced subweapon. Definitely a GameBreaker of that time.