It's almost an art for Star Ocean players to find the fastest and most efficient ways to remove any challenge from the games. For example, in Till the End of Time, doing so will almost certainly involve either Orichalcum or Boots of Prowess, depending on where you are in the game.
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Star Ocean / First Departure / First Departure R
Star Ocean
- In the SNES version, the powered-up version of Roddick (Ratix)'s Double Slash (Souhazan) is hideously overpowered: you could get the item needed to learn it relatively early in the game, and the main benefit over the normal version is that it shoots out 2 large energy crescents after the second slash. Combine this with the fact that you can link up to 4 attacks together into a combo, and you can effortlessly stunlock most enemies until they keel over, including the initial appearance of the recurring tri-Ace superboss, Gabriel Celeste.
- FD/FDR carry over the same broken item crafting system originally introduced in The Second Story and can completely shatter the game as early as reaching Ionis:
- Depending on your party setup at the time, one/all of Millie, Ronyx, and Mavelle will have joined. Unlocking Hidden Talents will most likely give one of them enough Skill Points to master Alchemy and reaching Oracle Level 10 with anyone gives more than enough Fol to purchase the Lezard Flask. Use Alchemy to create Philosopher's Stones to sell and the player will have more than enough money for the entire rest of the game.
- At this same time, the necessary skills for Music and Orchestra become available. Playing "The Devil's Aria" from the Silver Trumpet at Music Levels 9 and 4 allow the team to fight relatively easy enemies for 80,000 - 100,000 experience a pop to quickly gain enough SP to master all Skills. While Orchestra is active, it's much easier to unlock Hidden Talents, creation success rates skyrocket, and characters are able to succeed in creation tasks without required talents.
- Finally, a combination of Alchemy and Customization allows every character to upgrade their weapons to near-endgame levels and, after buying a Magical Rasp in Silvalant, all of the best armor can be forged using the Blacksmith Super Specialty.
- Roddick's Dragon Roar ability that he naturally learns at Level 28. It costs 15 MP per use, hits multiple times, and can stunlock most anything while keeping him out of range of melee attacks. After Roddick masters the Guard Break and Power Burst combat skills, it becomes far more reliable and does more damage than anything else he can attack with. The strategy guide written for the PSP version of First Departure acknowledges this as it sums up the best way to defeat Gabriel as, "Dodge its initial assault while closing in and spam Dragon Roar."
- Cure All all but rules out any reason to bother with most food. Anyone who knows it could just sit on the sidelines and then bust it out for a measly 25 MP, and if they run out, you could just give them an MP-restoring food to enable use of it again, or craft a Ring of Mental Power so you don't even have to bother with that. Doesn't help that food cannot be eaten in battle, making that even more pointless when it can't act as an alternative in case no one fighting knows it.
Star Ocean: The Second Story / Second Evolution
Star Ocean: The Second Story
- In the original, against flying bosses (especially the Phoenix in the Cave of Trials), Opera can pretty much break the game because her anti-air attack is an easily spammable shot from her rifle where she doesn't even have to jump. She can pretty much stunlock flying bosses to death that way. This got nerfed in the remake.
- The Customize skill can grant party members access to powerful weapons well before the enemies' strengths increase to balance. An noteworthy example is that Claude's ultimate weapon, Eternal Sphere / Aeterna, is customizable just over halfway through the first disc, a weapon that is only truly outclassed after completing the Bonus Dungeon.
- Eternal Sphere / Aeterna is itself a Game Breaker; beyond an impressive 1600 ATK stat, granting several elemental resistances, and other stat increases, the weapon also shoots out multiple stars with each successful hit. Each star can also damage an enemy, and it is very easy to stunlock any enemy sans the Final Boss and the last boss in the Bonus Dungeon by spamming normal attacks with it.
- Bloody Armor can be this; it grants invulnerability at the cost of rapidly draining the character's HP, which is easily solved by including Opera or Noel in the party to spam Healing Star or Fairy Light, ideally while equipped with a Fairy Ring and a Ring of Mental Power so they can't run out of MP.
- The "Scientific Ability" and "Kitchen Knife" skills are this in the early game, granting +10 and +20 Strength bonuses per level of the skill; at low levels, they can easily triple Claude's damage output.
- Go to Linga and buy some Smith's Hammers, then head to the Lassguss Mountains (west of Cross Castle) and go right at the fork in the path. You'll find yourself on a large beach. The enemies are rather tough here, but some of them will drop Orichalcum and Damascus. If you've obtained the Blacksmithing super specialty, you can use those two metals to make some very strong armors, helmets, and shields. And once you equip the new items, you can keep making more to sell. One of the items you can make from Damascus is the Core Plate; even if you haven't leveled up Tool Knowledge (to increase sell prices), you can sell them for 35,000 FOL each. Selling a lot means you won't have to worry about money for pretty much the rest of the game.
- Using Pickpocket on Filia allows you to get Mischief, an acessory that when equipped to a party member gets you random items, including nice sums of money, and sometimes items you couldn't receive until much later in the game.
- Forged Medals reduces the experience points a character needs for the next level to 1. Combine it with the Reproduction skill and you can get everyone to become overleveled before the first half of the game. They cease working at level 100, but at that point only the Bonus Dungeon is an issue. A Forged Medal can be randomly provided from the aforementioned Mischief, removing the risk of damaging Relationship Values by making one with the Contraband superspecialty.
- The Bunny Shoes. It permanently puts 'Haste' in the wearer, and this alone is tremendously useful for fighters to chase the enemy and position themselves, or for mages to escape dangerous situations. Even moreso when late game enemies are also ridiculously fast. While the Bunny Shoes item becomes a staple to the franchise, its appearance in 2 is basically its most broken form. Late in the Cave of Trials, the player can find Valiant Boots (for men) and Valkyrie Boots (for women) which give the same speed boost as the Bunny Shoes but pack a lot more defense.
- The newly added Wiseman assists in the remake carry a number of extremely powerful effects fitting their status and considering what you need to do to unlock them, with the 4 strongest ones being the standout ones: Michael deals damage to all enemies and greatly lowers their Break gauge, Hanael shoots out a long-lasting beam that heals the entire party's HP and MP, Lucifer deals damage and stuns all enemies, which is a great way to interrupt annoying boss attacks such as Iseria Queen's Spin Attack and Gabriel deals massive amounts of damage to all enemies and casts Angel Feather on the party, buffing their attack, intelligence and defense. The main limiting factor to their use is the fact that they have ridiculously long cooldown timers in comparision to normal assists (134 seconds for Leon's Extinction vs 1250 seconds for Michael and Lucifer), although this can be greatly shortened by dealing damage to the enemy and triggering battle skills, both of which will happen in abundance against most endgame enemies.
Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
- Nel's Ice Daggers has the highest probability of freezing the target (1:3 at Lv.10) of any ice spell/attack in the game. A frozen enemy can be insta-killed, regardless of their remaining HP, provided the attack doesn't also freeze the target. Alternatively, you can synthesize a Shell Sapphire to any weapon you choose, allowing you to freeze most enemiesnote on contact.
- Cliff's Aerial Assault deals 5x dmg. + ¼ that amount as MP dmg to a single target. You can augment it with the HP/MP Dmg. combat tome to triple both amounts (at Lv.10). Now set Aerial Assault to the short/strong position, so it can't be blocked.
- If Fayt or Cliff has equipped the 'No Guard' support skill, it prevents them from flinching from attacks that inflict less than ¼ their total HP. Meaning, no more hit stun - allowing them to attack without fear of being interrupted. Give 'No Guard' to Cliff while he has Aerial Assault. Bye bye game difficulty.
- Fayt is completely invincible during his strong button's long distance run animation. So with proper space and timing, he can charge straight through attacks such as Nebelung Valasti and Ether Strike with impunity and score two free hits.note
- There's also Fayt's ultimate attack, Dimension Door, once you figure out that to activate it, you have to hold the attack button down (Something that the writers of the strategy guide completely missed and called the attack useless). It creates a vast damaging zone around Fayt for a few seconds before he teleports behind the targeted enemy and unleashes an incredibly wide and damaging slash that can hit multiple targets. Paired with a weapon that has high enough attack power, it can wipe entire enemy encounters with a single hit, with just the damaging zone being enough to wipe out entire mobs of enemies.
- Maria. Don't let her initial impression fool you - she does start with a crappy weapon so it gives the illusion that she has crappy damage output. Change it and watch how she makes succeeding boss battles trivial. Her starting skills alone are quite deadly - Aiming Device is an accurate, strong attack that deals good MP damage to boot, and Scatter Beam is utterly devastating at close range. Scatter Beam combos will carry you towards post game until you can get her all-powerful Energy Burst attack, which is just a massive Wave-Motion Gun that lets Maria tear pretty much anything it's aimed at a new one. Also, she gains a huge amount of MP, so putting Convert Damage on her turns her into an MP tank.
- Item creation, as might be expected, is ripe for abuse with the right inventors:
- The Celestial Homonculous in Alchemy, which can be sold for twice the amount of money it took to create, which means easy money in early to mid game.
- Also in Alchemy is the Orichalcum, which gives a 500 point boost to the attack power of any weapon it's synthesized onto. As most items have eight slots available for placement, this means a humongous boost in attack power that will last you well throughout the story even when placed on weaker weapons, such as Fayt's starting weapon, Metal Pipe, which is required for several Battle Trophies.
- In Crafting, the Boots of Prowess are quite probably the best item in the game. When first created, they'll give a 5% boost to strength and defense. Further refinement allows for a total of 30% boost. Eight of these on a weapon, plus two in the accessory equipment slots = 300% boost to your character's attack and defense. On Galaxy, with the right armor, this can make Fayt totally immune to damage from most attacks, even from the game's ultimate bonus bosses. On Universe and 4D, the enemies are a bit stronger, so it doesn't work on them, but it would still trivialize everything else.
- In the Airyglyph Aquaducts, the game's second dungeon, there is an enemy that drops Regeneration Symbols. Combined with every character having the means of learning the Healing spell, and Nel starting with said spell, this one accessory coming in so early completely destroys the main game's intended balance by effectively removing all restrictions on special abilities and greatly reducing the risk of dying by being reduced to zero MP. Add the skill that converts all HP damage to MP damage and it gets even more ridiculous. The risk doesn't pick up again until the Bonus Dungeons, by which point the player can craft the stronger Ring of Mental Power.
Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Star Ocean: The Last Hope
- Meracle. Her X Claw and Comet Impact are extremely powerful, she has the best Blindside in the game, and she can stunlock like nobody's business.
- Bacchus, who has the ability to fire his Arm Cannon while dodging. This may seem like a pretty mundane ability, but it lets him safely strafe enemies, and kill almost every enemy without them even being able to touch him.
- Reimi isn't as mobile, but she can pretty much do the same thing. She's perfect for the strat until Bacchus joins.
- Thanks to a massive damage output and a love of sweeping attacks, Arumat can tear through random encounters like a hot knife through butter.
Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness
Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness
- Anne's Hammer of Might is fast, strong, does AOE and knockdown, can hit downed enemies, and when paired with attack-enhancing Roles, makes Anne a One-Woman Army the likes of which would make Arumat proud.
- Some roles portray this, the likes of:
- Dead Man Walking: This defensive role causes the character to become invincible at the expense of steady damage of 1% every 3 to 10 ticks of damage per second. Not too bad. However, pairing this with the Instigator role allows the character to become a walking tank with a sufficiently advanced healer.
- Holy Mother: A Healing role unlocked with Level 3 in Elementalist, Paladin and Crusader. Gives a steady stream of MP (to a max of 3%) every 5 seconds while enemies do less actions. Pretty much an infinite MP pool for the character with this role, especially handy for Miki when put together with Sage and Shrewd Overseer.
