This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Rentsy: Halo 3 has a tricky way to, in the campaign, break into a Wraith Anti-Air Tank. This allows it to be driven... a terrible, terrible mistake as its infinite-ammo, fast-as-you-can-pull-the-trigger fuel rod cannons render all resistance futile beneath its slow tide of green death.
- This Troper earnestly requests that you provide details on how. *g*
I really don't agree with Wavedashing being on the list. It does not give you great speed, it allowed you to slide over the ground a bit, and for most characters it's barely noticeable. The advantage of Wavedashing does not come from the speed itself, as most of the time it's quite slow, but because of the fact that it has no start-up lag, and you can do it backwards.
Amadeous: I agree completely. Wavedashing is more for mindgames anyway. You might make a case for SFF Ling, and wobbling should be on, but the only people that think wavedashing is broken are the people that don't know how to use it.
Guy Smiley: Should the Rock Candy trick in Earthbound be put on this page? It can buff stats into absurdity - HP totals going into the thousands as opposed to their usual area around 500, for instance.
- Yes, because it is easy to do, and makes the whole party godlike.
- Definitely, easy 1.5k damage average to bosses that have at most 4k is pretty absurd at that point in the game.
Spinning Robo: In my opinion, yes, they are both Game Breakers. The Rock Candy trick is easy to pull off if you know how and can put everybody's stats well beyond the range they could ever otherwise be. The Multi-Bottle Rocket does significantly more damage than anything else in the game (unless you count the damage displayed from praying against Giygas, but I wouldn't count that since it's unavailable anywhere else in the game).
Inyssius: Actually, Pun-Pun is a level 1 character now, and can destroy gods without blinking.
Laevatein: Would a "Kingmaker Scenario" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingmaker_scenario)
fall under Game-Breaker, or should it have its own entry?
Tanto: Nah, that's a whole different thing.
Nirual: Can anyone tell me why Dry Bones is on the list? I always though the snaking technique was the Game Breaker in Mario Kart DS, not a particular character.
Pro-Mole: Same complaint here, Dry Bones is actually not that good because he is extremely light, so it's not uncommon to be tackled away by bigger racers, specially in 150cc and 150cc Mirror. Anyone to defense or we take it out?
AoBman05: The breakage stems from using Karts with high handling (and maybe top speed), it is likely that he was mentioned because his karts happen to have the highest handling ratings of them all (Which is vital for successful snaking). The individual characters themselves offer near neglectable bonus stats to their vehicles, which means snaking with even Bowser in the Dry Bomber or the Banisher is enough to break the game, so go ahead and remove the entry.
I'm not sure that the Nethack entry is properly a game-breaker. Nethack is so incredibly hard that a wand of wishing and two blessed scrolls of genocide (liches, mind flayers) are considered standard equipment for beginning to mid-level players. Polypiling for spellbooks is a game-breaker for magic users, but for fighters, the odds of getting a useful item out of even a mountain of junk is quite small.
- There's pudding farming, however.
MrOnimusha: I have to protest about the entire WH 40 K section, partially on the grounds that the editor who wrote that really doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Just to use one example, his declaration that anything using an assault cannon - a 40K weapon that is the equivalent of Doom's chaingun, for instance - is a gamebreaker is hopelessly wrong; it mows down lightly armoured foes with frightening efficiency, true, but going up against enemies with heavier armour it becomes more akin to a pea-shooter. Hell, I played a game not a week ago that saw my squad of Terminators - armed to the teeth with four assault cannons, thanks to a loophole in the rules that my opponent allowed me to use - die unceremoniously in the second turn of play after being ambushed and murdered to death in close combat, while my opponent's Obliterators got in the way of three turns' worth of las-cannon firing and died without registering a single kill. Grey Knight Terminators, another choice, are exempt from being Game Breakers because they are fucking expensive to take. Really, the absurdity of trying to describe anything in a game ruled primarily by dice rolls as a Game Breaker is fairly obvious to anyone who's played it to any serious level.
Citizen: tl;dr. I thought it didn't belong because it was assigning every side a unit, in a multiplayer game. Also, removed the nethack example for reasons stated above by an anon. The latter half was Self-Imposed Challenge anyway.
Evil Tim: There's a legitimate argument for one older-edition gamebreaker in 40k, mind, which was that according to the letter of the rules it was legal for an entire squad of Wolf Guard Terminators to each be equipped with an Assault Cannon and Cyclone Missile Launcher, and the models could be assembled in this way from stock parts without any conversion work whatsoever. It was eventually declared illegal in White Dwarf, on the basis that if such a unit of Terminators actually existed they'd be so powerful as to warrant specific mention in the Codex.
Come to think of it, while there was still the generic 'Imperial Assassin' before the Calledus changed the Polymorphine Wargear Card, there was another; Polymorphine lacked any text saying that common sense had to be used when deciding what the Assassin was disguised as, so some people would try to convince their opponent that what appeared to be a Gretchin was actually an Imperial Assassin wearing Terminator Armour and riding a bike!
And of course there was the Strategy Card Virus Outbreak which Games Workshop went so far as to tell players to physically destroy due to its ability to kill some entire armies before the battle had even started.
SAMAS: The Assault Cannon thing came from 4th Ed, where it got 4 shots and the full Rending rule. This made it good against just about everything but maybe a Necron Monolith. From a statistical standpoint, it was a better tank killer than the lascannon, and ate infantry up better than the Heavy Bolter. It's only disadvantage was range, and that was mitigated by the fact that nearly everything in a Space Marine army that may carry an Assault Cannon can drop right next to any given unit one way or the other, and shoot in the same turn. This was nerfed in 5th Ed by reducing the Rending rule, so while it can still shred any type of infantry or chew through a Land Raider, it's not quite as good at the latter anymore.
- So could someone explain the whole Ork thing to me?
The Jerf sez: No, a built-in editor does not count as a game breaker for Civilization. If nothing else, it's an editor when you use it that way, designed for crafting scenarios, not a game.
GG Crono: I still maintain that FF 8's Bonus Boss is nigh-impossible WITHOUT the invincibility items. Which is the main reason why one should never even bother, since all you get is a Bragging Rights Reward anyway.
Citizen: Dumped here for my own amusement.
- Since it does not involve outright hacking, such as a hex edit, nor exploiting an outright bug which clearly shouldn't occur, Game Breaking utilizes some organic feature of the game in an unintentional way.
Ninjacrat: Sounds like what Good Bad Bugs was born for.
Citizen: That should have been linked to in the page. Added with emphasis, and I guess we should start moving over some of those bugs to that, then?
- With the release of the construction set however, you can just make a single ring that makes you invisible, invincible, makes you strong enough to carry all the loot in the world, makes you popular, all permantly, and that it is given to you at the start of the game. Now THAT is game-breaking.
- To be fair, the construction set is how you make mods. Mods don't count as Game Breakers, game breaking mods are cheats.
gs68: Removing my own edit. What's wrong with using continues?!
- Unlimited continues in Shoot Em Ups, rail shooters, and other arcade-like games. Some players use continues like it's life support just to see the whole game, others (like this troper) don't count a game as "beaten" until it's completed without continues; otherwise, why use skill to beat the game when you can just come into the arcade with lots of money? Or, for those playing at home, just keep hitting Start or the coin button, only actually playing the game to advance it?
Fallingwater: removing the flak cannon from the Unreal example. It is by no means a game breaker. It would be if it maintained its one-shot-kill power past spitting distance, but since it's essentially a shotgun on steroids it doesn't, and the grenades are slow and parabolic, so hard to place in the path of a moving enemy. Very powerful the flak cannon is, a Game-Breaker it is not.
Redkun: Removed a lot of examples. It seems to me like a lot of these aren't examples of "[utilizing] some organic feature of the game in an unintentional way." but rather "ZOMG this character is like, so uber powerful!" Wavedashing in Super Smash Bros. Melee is a Game-Breaker because it uses the game engine in an unconventional way to gain a significant advantage against which there is no counter. Using one single move over and over again to make yourself invincible is a Game-Breaker. Rikku's Mix Overdrive in FinalFantasyX counts as a Game-Breaker because you have to grind like crazy- far more than the game expects from a casual player- before you get the results.
The character of Solid Snake in Super Smash Bros' Brawl is not a Game-Breaker. He may be top-tier (from the sounds of things) but simply being powerful should not count as a Game-Breaker. I really think this article needs a clean-up- removing any examples that are simply, "This character is a Game-Breaker." and tightening up what is considered one.
I'm of the opinion that for it to count as a Game-Breaker, it should:
- Practically guarantee victory when you use it.
- Be easily reusable, even if it takes a lot of effort to attain in the first place.
- Be some kind of specific strategy or ability, not just a character in general. (e.g. Kilik in Soul Calibur on his own is not a Game-Breaker, but his ability to keep enemies "down" permanently is.) We have another trope for you to complain about overly-powerful characters now.
- Not fall under Bragging Rights Reward.
Evil_Tim: Certain characters could be counted as game breakers still [Maxi from Soul Calibur 1 is designed in such a way that you can often win a match against a human opponent, regardless of their skill, without so much as looking at the screen] but yes, without any explaination as to what's specifically broken about them [in Maxi's case, that button bashing results in fluid, completely unpredictable high / low combos] it's just whining about The Powerful Character Being Too Powerful. There's a lot of awful examples in here, as with the Ace Combat ones of being able to earn planes that are good [?]; sure, AC Zero's extremely early Su-37 is a game breaker [as is Gran Turismo 4's F1 car, since there's an easy way to earn it involving the Pike's Peak Escudo and the circular Indycar track], but games that become easier as you go through them shouldn't automatically be classified as such.
Heyleto: I've noticed that the term Game-Breaker has been used by tropers all over this wiki to describe extremely unbalanced weapons/ships/characters/powers/etc, in all forms of media. Maybe we should have multiple tropes to cover it:
- Game Breaker, for overpowered things, which is what the term is used for most of the time;
- Game Breaking Trick, for tricks that exploit rules creatively for the player's benefit, and use lateral, outside-the-box thinking to 'break' the game, this trope; like the 100% chameleon one from Oblivion;
- Game Breaking Strategy, for tactics that removes challenge from the game, possibly including lengthy grinding, farming and/or Poop Socking, like using a Fragile Speedster's ranged attack against a much more powerful Mighty Glacier with no ranged attacks; and
- Writers Have No Sense Of Balance, for when one player option supposedly equal in power to the others very much isn't, for better or for worse, like the 3rd edition Monk class.
PC game designers frequently come out with patches to fix game breakers. How should we handle that in this wiki. Specifically, there is a very long discussion about stacking magical vulnerabilities for the game The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. This particular abuse as been patched for quite some time.
Evil_Tim: Just make it clear it's been patched, I think. The M60 / LAW kit in Battlefield Vietnam was quickly patched out because it broke the game. If anything, being patched or nerfed makes it a confirmed example because it shows even the developers recognised something was wrong.
- Next time you see someone playing into level 30 without infinite spinning, poor water on them. Guarantee you you'll see sparks.
Ack Sed: Think the entries should be titled according to genre - the clue's in the name. Permission to reorganise freely sirs?
SenatorJ: I think the Ace Online example is too techincal. I don't play the game and I really don't understand a lot of the jargon it uses. Can someone who does play that game help out?
Ace Of Scarabs: All right, I simplified it for the knowlessmen. tl;dr, the Bigsmash's massive DPS is made even more ridiculous by its Deadly Upgrade to a legendary weapon, thanks to the range and accuracy boosting which is more extreme thn the boosts enjoyed by other weapons.
Master Knight: Removing the following:
- Brawl now officially has a Game Breaker character: Meta Knight. Not only is his Mach Tornado incredibly annoying, he has powerful attacks that come out instantly, and have unusually high priority. Shuttle Loop, his recovery move, happens instantly, has considerable knockback, and brings Meta Knight into a glide, setting up the enemy for his equally fast and powerful glide attack. Oh, and he will recover from anything that doesn't KO him outright. His only disadvantage is that he's light, but that doesn't help much if you can't hit him in the first place. He has an advantage against nearly everyone but himself.
- Brawl. Wolf. Side A. That is all.
First off, both are multiplayer examples, and Easy Mode Character was subjective, especially about multiplayer. Secondly, both of those are debatable anyway. Meta Knight has weaknesses besides the low weight, which I'll grant isn't THAT much of a weakness, not even considering the way Brawl handles weight in the first place. Anyway, he has no projectiles, and his B moves make him helpless. The latter isn't major, but the former means he has to be close to you to slap you around. As for Wolf's Side A, I eat that like it was a single bacon piece of the Lumberjack Slam for breakfast. Simply put, putting either of those two back in makes putting Pit in fair game.
Game Guru GG: To be fair, the holders of the Super Smash Bros tournaments have contemplated banning Meta Knight, so he'd technically would count almost as much as posterboy Akuma does.
Master Knight: I'd still rather put up with Meta Knight the close range fighter than Pit the arrow abuser who rapes mid to long range combat and thereby forces his opponents to be stuck fighting him close range constantly, which on top of being just plain dumb from having to rely purely on having a dexterity edge anyway (never mind the fact that any decent player should expect this strategy right away), gets particularly bad when he can frickin' fly. Without those arrows being such a pain, Pit would have no glaring strengths, even if he still wouldn't have any glaring weaknesses either.
Thanks for at least not putting Meta Knight back on though. By the way, I came this way just now via A.I. Breaker.
Game Guru GG: Don't mention it. I don't tend to agree with Super Smash Bros Tourney Players, although I am a fan of Super Smash Bros. Besides, for Fighting Games, only a character outright banned could be considered a Game-Breaker, and Meta Knight was not.
Master Knight: I can believe you. And I set up a new YKTTW called Skill Gate Character to help stop the people who call Meta Knight broken from putting him back up.
Ephraim225: Removed this:
- Soul Calibur II's Kilik was BAD. He can hit you while you're on the ground, which resets your "fallen down" state, meaning once you were down it was impossible to get up again.
It is in fact possible to avoid that by, say, rolling backwards. Unless someone has a video to show... So Yeah .
Filby: Moved the Bible quote to the quotes page because, well, it's kind of incongruous on a page about video games.
Master Knight: *shrug* I swear, you people border on Too Dumb to Live.
Attack strings can be broken apart at individual moves. Who are you, Light Yagami with his convulted [1]s? Oh right, Light and Mikami also had What An Idiot moments at the end. And if Meta Knight even gets close to me, I'd be ready for him anyway. Why leave close-range combat with a guy like him to chance?
Oh, but I forgot, he has disjointed hitboxes. Oh wait. No I didn't. There is no doubt to disjointed hitboxes, but stop blowing them out of proportion. The Down Smash's front hitboxes don't even cover the whole diamond at the center of Final Destination, as shown at 5:59 thereabouts of this. The back hitboxes cover even less. And Meta Knight has to get up close to use the bloody thing to begin with. So is everything else he has, in fact, and he has like two approaches that even have reasonable speed. You're just asking to be killed in the first place.
Go after him? Yeah, I'll do that. Because I'm so stupid that I would try to out-attrition a specialist in their own freaking field.
What the? Tornado is a projectile? Okay, that is wrong on so many levels. I mean, it's just...No. Just....NO!
The only thing I'm granting is his surprising priority. Who made him able to pierce Bowser's Down B? But that does not make a broken character. All it means is that you can't directly out-attrition them, but that's more simply overpowered than flat out broken.
Honestly, Olimar would be more deserving of being on the page in terms of close-range people. Olimar's on-balance game is insane with or without Pikmin Throw spam or the Pikmin organization skills that should be needed for being that absurd, and I know because I main the guy, and am not too happy with his being OP, especially when it could have easily been covered by the Pikmin maturity stages coming into play, but I bet that would have made too much sense. Regardless, he has only one weakness besides being about as light as Meta Knight: his recovery, the Pikmin Chain, is a tether. But wait. That isn't much of a weakness at all. For starters, he has to have been knocked off balance already. And even without that, consider this: the tether recovery being a weakness is because the opponent can grab the edge to prevent it from working. Pikmin Chain is virtually instantaneous, making gimping Olimar itself risky, because you could be bounced right off the stage's edge and you die while Olimar survives. If you don't believe me, ask YoshSSB about my battle with him as Olimar, and YoshSSB has proven himself to have intelligence that lets him actually take on ally.
And not to mention these are multiplayer examples. They'll just be up for debate at most anyway.
Master Knight (again): *sigh* Sorry about that. It makes me really annoyed when people think a close range fighter is more broken than a long range fighter. Turns out both sides of the coin ran into a new YKTTW I set up called Skill Gate Character. Check it out, okay? And for the record, Meta Knight hasn't been banned in Italy. That's just a rumor.
I won't put Pit up. That's what the new YKTTW is for. But I will remove Meta Knight if he's put back up regardless.
Master Knight (yet again): Just removed this:
- Erm...why hasn't anyone mentioned God-Knight yet? You know, the only character that's been banned from some tournaments for being so cheap? And one of the two characters to, at one point, have their own tier?
yarrunmace, you must think you're pretty clever by now to change Meta Knight's name to make a CTRL+F job not show your edit. But I have very good eyesight as opposed to the %$#&% sisters of mine. (Long story.) Do not re-add Meta Knight without valid enough reason.
No points for guessing who: Removed this:
- Come on. Meta Knight is banned from some tournaments and he wasn't here?
Numbuh214, Smashboards has made its vote. Meta Knight will not be banned. And he's not freaking broken to begin with. Let me list what happened here:
- I lost in less than 3 minutes. You don't do that with a broken character against a person who you can consistently enough beat even without a main you certainly feel is cheap.
- I lost in less than 3 minutes with Damage Gauge OFF. You don't do that with a broken character EVER. Certainly not in Brawl.
- I lost in less than 3 minutes when I was clearly playing defense. You don't do that with a broken character EVER.
- I lost when I did not spam Tornado, Shuttle Loop, and Down Smash like some n00b. You don't lose with a broken character while display any decent amount of competence ever.
- I died all 3 times from being knocked right into the blast line, preventing any chance of recovery. Both of Ephraim's deaths resulted from messed up recovery, even if I had a hand in trying to gimp on the first one.
- I lost against a less skilled player who, instead of using his character's main strength actively, mainly fought my Meta Knight in HIS OWN FREAKING SPECIALTY! Tell me now Meta Knight is broken.
superfroggy: Um, I know having any hand in this issue is like donning a sandwich board labeled "Flame Me", but I want to at least try to clear this up. The main reasons some people (I'm going to attempt to remain as neutral as possible here) seem to feel that he is "broken" (in this case meaning heads and tails above other characters) are:
- His near-lagless attacks
- Awe-inspiring recovery, and
- Disjointed hitboxes
- Note: I agree with Master Knight on how said disjointed hitboxes aren't nearly as all-powerful as some disgruntled players make it out to be, but the fact remains that just about every character has at least one attack that they can't use on Meta Knight because it doesn't have enough range or speed to reach through his fast sword attacks, thus causing them to get filet'd whenever they attempt to use it.
- It also doesn't help that, for just about any flaw you can find in Meta Knight, one could likely argue that one of his strengths renders said flaw a moot point.
- His ledge game is insane as well. ...Or So I Heard.
- While it's easy to measure something like speed or weight and assign a number to it, the overall power of a character isn't so polite. It's hard to put a measuring tape to MK and declare, "Thou art quite Godly". Power isn't something that can be easily quantified.
- Meat Knight, while having many strengths, does have some weaknesses, as Numbuh214 was unfortunate enough to learn. These weaknesses mean that it is entirely possible for an inexperienced/less skilled MK player to lose 3-0 without any saving grace at all.
- Meta Knight supporters have an unfortunate tendancy to main Meta Knight, throwing their lack of bias into serious question. Conversely, Anti-MK's tend to be at least some shade of Scrub, which, again, puts their crediblity into question.
- And the biggest reason of all: the dividing line between "upper tier" and "OMFGZ BR 0 K 3 N!" is very, very unclear. Meta Knight is an excellent character, I'll give him that much; whether he's unfair is another matter.
Master Knight (yet again): another removal, oh my God:
- Meta Knight. Among the fastest characters in the game, several jumps, multiple good recovery moves, ridiculous priority and attack speed, a few powerful KO moves, and can easily prevent an off-stage opponent from recovering. And because of this all, he has no bad match-ups. The best anyone can hope for is to go even with him.
1)He has good speed, but it's overrated for chase games. This is the same game that has Sonic the Hedgehog, after all. 2)Several jumps, I'll grant, but Kirby was poster boy for that before several characters decided to join in on having that trait. 3)How does recovery help you if you, oh I don't know, maybe freaking hit the blast line and die first. And even if you don't, if you recover, I'll just kick your butt again. 4)Even without considering how overrated this is sometimes, if Meta Knight forced me to move close to him, then I might feel threatened. As it is, he has to move close to me himself, even if I don't use projectiles, and he's not even close to the best (or certainly not undisputed) at doing that, just versatile. 5)I think I could name all of the characters this does not apply to on one hand. 6)Gimping requires you to get me off the stage first. I'm kicking your butt on the stage.
Now do not re-add him without disputing my points altogether.
superfroggy: Um, Master Knight? I think you need to take a few deep breaths and a healthy dose of MST3K Mantra. I'm not arguing Meta Knight's status either way, but I think you're getting way too worked up over this and should probably try to calm down. I'm not trying to dispute your skills as a player, and you are making some valid points, but the manner in which you are wording them is pretty inflammatory IMHO and point #6 is blatant Flame Bait. Just try to calm down, okay?
- PS: Ugh, that sounded a lot less condescending in my head. Sorry.
Shrikesnest: I did some cleanup on the Final Fantasy section. I tried to keep as much in as possible, but some of it got thrown out and most all of it got compressed to be less of a game mechanics walkthrough.
