History GameBreaker / FinalFantasy

!!VideoGame/FinalFantasyX2

* Also, not too far into the game you get access to the accessory Bloodlust, which auto-berserks the wearer and greatly increases their strength, just about tripling their attack. This comes at the loss of a large amount of maximum health and being permanently poisoned, but the poison is no problem with Alchemist Mega Potion spam. Equip this on a Berserker class, which has naturally very high HP and access to automatic counterattacks and dodges, and use the other slot for an auto-Haste accessory; in nearly all battles you can just wait for your berserker to autoattack everyone to death in a matter of seconds. It only runs into slight problems against enemies completely immune to physical damage and enemies with attacks that will cut you to 1 HP, since the poison will often kill you shortly thereafter.
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The ''FinalFantasy'' series has more ways to shatter the difficulty curve that you can barely shake a sword at it. These are rarely fixed up in [[VideoGameRemake remakes]], so some consider bonus content an attempt to give the broken material some pressure. This makes games that ''do'' fix up broken content (e.g. ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'') somewhat controversial.

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* DualWielding + !X-Fight + !Magicsword. ''Eight'' attacks, each at half-damage, that were guaranteed to hit, ignored defense (which more than makes up for !X-Fight halving base damage), and could be imbued with most of the game's element types, including Holy, or several of the StandardStatusEffects. Or, if none of those were particularly necessary, Flare. And after the initial !Magicsword casting (itself cheapened relative to the original Black Magic cost), completely free. With the right class setup, the above could additionally be performed in response to any enemy's physical attack. Using Break as your element for "!Spellblade" is an OneHitKill on any enemy that doesn't have an explicit immunity to it, and higher levels of !Spellblade will also instantly kill non-boss enemies that are WEAK to an element(if it is immune to instant death, it takes QuadDamage instead). This particular combination proved so infamous for its sheer power that "Spellblade-Dual Wield-Rapid Fire!" is Bartz's ''LimitBreak'' in ''DissidiaFinalFantasy''.

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* Like most FinalFantasy games, the spells you learn from your enemies could be the most game-breaking of all:

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!! VideoGame/FinalFantasyX2

[[folder: FinalFantasyXI]]
* With ''FinalFantasyXI'' being a {{MMORPG}}, what counts as a GameBreaker is always a source of heated debate and often changed as the metagame evolved and new patches were brought in to {{Nerf}} the most obvious ones. Here are some of the more famous ones over the game's history:

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* The SAW weapon in ''FinalFantasy 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.

* Early on in ''FinalFantasyThe4HeroesOfLight'' you can find an item called a Hunting Horn, which forces a random battle when it is used and has infinite uses (similar to the musical instruments of the ''WildArms'' series.) Shortly afterwards, you unlock the Merchant crown, which increases the drop rate of gems after battles, and comes with an ability to find gems on the battlefield.

<<|GameBreaker|>>

* This game has one of the single greatest {{Game Breaker}}s for obtaining money in RPG history, considering the fact that all you have to do is master an "All" materia and sell it. A single star "All" materia sells for nothing, but a five star master "All" materia sells for [[spoiler: 1,400,000 gil]] at ''any'' store which should provide enough money for ''the rest of the game.'' The real kicker is the fact that "All" is an extremely early and easy materia to find, as well as levels up considerably quicker than most other materia, and can be bought for almost nothing in materia stores. It gets better considering the fact that when you master a materia, you get a fresh one star copy of the five star materia allowing you to master it all over again, which means you can repeat the cycle as many times as you want, and considering that "All" is one of the most essential and fundamental materia to master, it's a safe bet that you have a mastered "All" materia pretty soon in the game.

* The fact that Squall can get his [[InfinityPlusOneSword Lionheart]] weapon extremely early after the school becomes mobile, and pretty easily with a little bit of luck in item stealing. The majority of the item he needs can be made from cards, won in battles, or stolen from enemies pretty easily early on, but the one thing he needs is 5 Pulse Ammo (which is another GameBreaker for Irvine) that's usually found in the later half of the game, unless you take the school to one of the southern islands, and search in the barren terrain area until you find an [[ShockAndAwe electric creature called a Blitz]], and hope you can steal a Power Generator from it. The Power Generator is the Blitz's rare item hold, which means that you can only steal it instead of winning after the battle, and enemies only have ''one'' item at a time, which means you might have to mug a lot of Blitzes before you find a Power Generator. Once you find the Power Generator and have the right ability, you can convert it into 20 Pulse Ammo, which means that assuming you have the other necessary items, Squall can get his Lionheart weapon, and leave 15 Pulse Ammo for Irvine making this a complete win-win situation.

** The best part about Amarant is his first move "Chakra" restores a little bit of health and magic for a small amount of his own magic which means that when he uses the move on himself, the move pays for itself. The best part is the fact that later on, he can learn an ability to strengthen "Chakra".

** Special mention goes to Wakka's "World Champion" weapon since it's one of the most powerful (if not THE most powerful) and the easiest weapons to get both the Jupiter Crest and the Jupiter Sigil for, considering that all you have to do to get the sigil is play a lot of blitzball and it will eventually be a prize for winning. This leads to another GameBreaker in blitzball with Tidus' Jecht Shot to easily overwhelm your opponents, and once you got of Tidus' key moves, you had a chance of winning the [[BeyondTheImpossible Jecht Shot 2]] which takes the original Jecht Shot UpToEleven and pretty much guarantees victory over any team.

** 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.

* On Disk 3, fly to the Island Closest to Heaven and the Island Closest to Hell, equip the "Encounter None" ability on someone in your party, and keep drawing magic from the hidden draw points. It takes a while to recharge after each draw, but after a while you'll be able to give each member of your party 100 of the best magic spells in the game like Meteor, Flare, and Ultima to junction however you want to raise your stats to ''godly'' levels.
* The fun doesn't stop there. Junction 100 Ultima spells to your magic defense, and you will be immune to ''all'' elemental magic, which means that only high level magic like Meteor, Flare, and Ultima can hurt you. This makes the final dungeon considerably easier, especially since 7 out of the 8 bosses use regular elemental magic, and are weakened substantially because of it. The other boss has non-elemental magic, but has low enough HP to defeat it before it can really damage you if you maxed out everyone's high level magic with the trick described above and junctioned those spells to your stats to make everything go quicker.

* The Celestial Weapons. When fully upgraded, Nirvana and Onion Knight ignores Magic Resistance. Similarly, Caladbolg, World Champion, Spirit Lance, Godhand and Masamune will all ignore Physical Defense. The weapons also increase or decrease the damage output of any character using it, depending on they remaining percentage of MP or HP respectively (the MR-ignoring ones depend on MP, while the PD-ignoring ones rely on HP). This allows [[spoiler:Yu Yevon]] to be one-hit killed by Tidus, as Tidus is always the first character to act during the final battle, even if you have others equipped with First Strike.
** You don't even ''need'' the Celestial Weapons (which is good, because trying to get the crests or sigils for some of them will make you want to hurt people). In the Macalania Woods entrance, Wantz sell weapons and armor with four empty slots. Just by grinding for money, you can easily create weapons that will [[LudicrousGibs liquify]] any enemy you come across, and armor that will turn you into [[ImplacableMan walking super-tanks]].
** Nirvana and Onion Knight don't ignore magic defense, that's a common-seen mistake. All Celestial Weapons ignore 100% of Physical Defense, however.

* What does or doesn't count as a GameBreaker in is a source of heated debate, but there is one example few will refute. Up until mid-2005, the game had an unnatural, objective bias towards ranged weapons. Damage was fixed and not subject to the random number generator, only being reduced at a near-insignificant rate by the enemy's VIT. What this meant was a shot that did 180 damage to leveling fodder did 175 to a top-tier monster. This is before one even looks at the Ranger class, which was painfully unfair. Ranged Accuracy and Attack gear was both really cheap and plentiful, with even the cheap stuff giving way better results than hard-to-get endgame gear for the other jobs. The flat curve of power and total lack of diminishing returns made it ridiculous overpowered in practically every situation. Rangers also got a couple tiers of a Ranged Accuracy-enhancing passive trait (which, as if to mock the other jobs, also affected melee), Barrage (fires five successive shots while giving full TP for each hit), and could lay down constant 1800+ damage Sidewinders when the most other jobs could hope for with their weapon skills was ~1100. The sheer number of other unintended benefits to the job were staggering and endgame consisted pretty much of "throw more Rangers at it". Up until the {{nerf}}hammer was dropped on that aspect of the game, Ranger's influence wrecked the social structure of the game as well. Basically, anything damage-related that wasn't Ranger just wasn't worthy of either experience parties or endgame, with their acceptance into either being more out of pity or variety than real appreciation. The stereotype of Rangers being elitist powergaming pricks wasn't too far off and a constant fixture of search comments was "Ranger PT Only". When Square changed the system, the outcry of people angry that they were "BroughtDownToNormal" was almost as great as the cheers for the game not just being Ranger Fantasy any more.

* The "avatarburn" party style. Get a bunch of [[SummonMagic Summoners]], a couple of maximum-level characters, a low-level sync target, and a [[TheGambler Corsair]]. Have the high-level characters get half a zone's worth of low-level mobs angry at them. Sync the actual party down to the sync target's level. Have the Corsair put up Corsair's Roll to increase the XP returns. Have the Summoners summon nearly anything, then hit [[EleventhHourSuperpower Astral Flow]] targetting the swarm of monsters on the high-level characters. ''Gain '''tens of thousands of XP''' in seconds.'' Have the Corsair use [[EleventhHourSuperpower Wild Card]] to attempt to reset the party's [[EleventhHourSuperpower two-hours]], ''potentially allowing you to repeat the process'' once things respawn. Note that the Corsair, while useful, is technically optional; you can do this really well with just the summoners, allowing more people to leech off of the instant XP at a time.

** 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 FinalBoss 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 [[MoneyForNothing nothing else to spend money on]]. The humble ''Cure'' spell [[ReviveKillsZombie deals over 10,000 damage]] to the final boss ''per casting'' - but only if your hero (and not Phoebe) casts it.
** 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 ReviveKillsZombie. 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.

** Bards, which were a supreme example of JokeCharacter in the original, recieved a massive buff in the remake. Their songs' effects last for two rounds and can be stacked, [[GuideDangIt, though the game never bothers to tell you this]]. It is possible, for instance, to stack their defence-increasing song with a song that reduces all incoming damage by a fixed percentage. Both of these songs can stack with Protect, making your party borderline-invincible in all but a select few situations.

** Bards, which were a supreme example of JokeCharacter in the original, recieved a massive buff in the remake. Their songs' effects last for two rounds and can be stacked, [[GuideDangIt, though the game never bothers to tell you this.' It is possible, for instance, to stack their defence-increasing song with a song that reduces all incoming damage by a fixed percentage. Both of these songs can stack with Protect, making your party borderline-invincible in all but a select few situations.

* Although the original [[NintendoHard doesn't really have any]], the DS remake introduced a few.

* Notice how there are currently no examples for this game. [[NintendoHard Yeah.]]

* Several set-ups can last in a nigh-eternal EX Mode. Combine with Gabranth (who's power sky-rockets while in EX Mode) for similar results to Jecht.
** Not quite. Gabranth is pitifully weak unless he's in EX Mode and his only HP attack outside EX Mode is charging his EX gauge. The only was Gabranth is even close to GameBreaker stats are the facts that this also means any abilities and/or accessories that only work in EX Mode will be in effect a lot and he can use his EX Burst pretty easily and multiple times per fight but in Dissidia012, EX Bursts were nerfed anyways so it's not as powerful as it was in the original. God help you if you use Gabranth in a small stage though...

* First of, this game offers the all-powerful Knights of the Round summon. Combine it with (almost) any of the game's support materia for massive fun. W-Summon makes it do a quarter of a million damage. MP Absorb makes it practically free to cast. HP Absorb plus Counter makes you completely invincible. With enough work you can build a whole character around it. The only balance? It's [[InfinityPlusOneSword not available until the end of the last sidequest in the game]] and it takes ''a full minute'' to watch every time it's cast. However, the Quadra Magic materia works with every other summon and magic to make it be cast four times over, albeit at reduced power each time. But if you try to use it with Knights of the Round, you'll find that the MP cost is higher than the {{cap}} by a mere ''one'' point... giving you a use for the [=HP=] <--> [=MP=] Switch materia.

* The Dragon Claw in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyMysticQuest''. 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. Feel free to pick them off while they are powerless to fight back.
** 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 FinalBoss 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 [[MoneyForNothing nothing else to spend money on]]. Have fun overkilling every single enemy you come across without any sense of restraint whatsoever. The humble ''Cure'' spell [[ReviveKillsZombie deals over 10,000 damage]] to the final boss ''per casting'' - but only if your hero (and not Phoebe) casts it. Saves on those rare Wizard spells.
* Early on in ''FinalFantasyThe4HeroesOfLight'' you can find an item called a Hunting Horn, which forces a random battle when it is used and has infinite uses (similar to the musical instruments of the ''WildArms'' series.) Shortly afterwards, you unlock the Merchant crown, which increases the drop rate of gems after battles, and comes with an ability to find gems on the battlefield. Think this one out carefully, kids.

** The [[BossInMookClothing 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 or non-elemental magic, Gau will be untouchable for the rest of the fight.

** Big Guard, which is insultingly easy to obtain if you know how, which puts the most important beneficial status in the game on your whole party.

* The [[ManaDrain Osmose]] spell. Once you teach someone that spell, they can basically refill their MP anytime they want to, as long as you're not fighting undead enemies. Get the [=ZoneSeek=] esper and you can give everyone in your party infinite MP.

* The Ultima Weapon/Atma Weapon, Valiant Knife, and Fixed Dice also deserve mention. The Ultima Weapon and Valiant Knife both have the incredible property of completely ignoring the enemy's defense rating. The damage they do is only dependent on the wielder's HP (Ultima Weapon does more damage with more HP, inverse with the Valiant Knife) and Strength rating. This means it is possible to do 9999 damage on a low level enemy, or the final ultimate boss, with equal ease. The Fixed Dice has it's own damage calculation, so the damage done is determined only by luck. Combined with a Master's Scroll relic to attack four times, Setzer can deal massive damage to any enemy in the game, regardless of defense. Oh, and all three of these weapons has 100% ACCURACY so they will NEVER miss.

* 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 defenceless.

* Rikku's LimitBreak lets her combine two items to create a spell. Game breaking spells include Trio of 9999, Quartet of 9, Chaos Grenade, Calamity Bomb, Final Elixer, Hyper Mighty Guard... "No Sphere Grid" runs rely on Trio of 9999.

* Much worse than Cat Nip, the Lady Luck class is completely insane if you are good with those wheels... Black Sky and Cry in the Night are some rather strong nukes, dark matter is a cap-damage vs all enemies damage item, Megaelixir completely heals the entire party, Megaelixir+ does the same, but also revives, Mighty Guard+ is pretty much the ultimate defensive skill and just to make it extra broken it has a spell called “CONGRATS!” which grants you instant victory against 99% of the game’s enemies while giving you outrageous amounts of money and insanely powerful rare items for free. Finally Lady Luck gives you automatic double experience, money and items after battle just in case you had any doubt as to what the best job is.

* Once you beat the boss at Oerba, you are allowed the ability to learn {{Limit Break}}s, of which each character gets a single one. [[StaffChick Vanille's]] is a variation of the spell Death, in which it deals big damage to everything on screen and had a 1% chance to kill opponents including the FinalBoss, increasing by 1% for each debuff on the enemy and increasing even further on staggered enemies. Players quickly discovered a method of powerleveling that does not involve running across the world map for hours: Find an [[GiantMook Adamantoise]], make everyone a [[StandardStatusEffect Saboteur]], summon Vani's Eidolon (which puts the mook into a paralysis state for about six turns), and then spam the LimitBreak until the 1% kicks in and it dies. 40000 CP to use for leveling in about two minutes of work, and double that if you got some special equipment from a BonusBoss. And the easiest way to kill said BonusBoss? You guessed it.

* There was good reason Final Fantasy II's experience model was never used again: You could increase your stats simply by having your party members strike each other. Who needs monsters? (And in its original, Japan-only NES incarnation, you could stat grind simply by ''selecting commands'' off the menu, cancel and repeat without taking any actual turns!)