The Avatar gets all the advantages of every other class and none of the downsides. Powerful stats, all weapons and armor available more or less immediately, full spellcasting power, the works. Get used to it, you've earned it (well, I've earned it), now you're the Avatar and you're awesome.
Whoa! Check it out! That Infinity +1 Sword is a true Game-Breaker! Did the creators notice this?
Yes. It's Purposely Overpowered.
May be a part of A Taste of Power or a Story-Breaker Power. Can also be essential to beat the Superboss on the Harder Than Hard bonus difficulty. Crutch Characters are often (temporarily) Purposely Overpowered. Compare with Infinity +1 Sword and 11th-Hour Superpower. Bragging Rights Rewards often turn out this way. It's also common to find these in a New Game Plus.
Often these types of characters/weapons are banned from tournaments or other areas where they may prove unfair. If they are allowed, or there is a great number of such characters, then they may be included in their own tier all to themselves. If tourney rules are flexible, then there may even be alternate rules allowing for tournaments consisting only of said "overpowered" characters. See also Master of All, for a character who is good at everything.
Contrast with Joke Character and Joke Item, which are purposely underpowered.
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Action Adventure
- The legendary set items from Diablo II and Diablo III. With how rarely legendary items drop anyways, the chances that you'll find every piece of a set are quite low. If you do manage to find them all, they provide an extreme power boost. The second game gives individual pieces of the set more bonuses depending on how many you have, and the third game grants new powers and radically changes abilities, generally turning one attack/ability into a Game-Breaker, with the more pieces of a set that you find.
Adventure Games
Fighting Games
Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Music Games
Platformers
- The RYNO (Rip Ya a New One) weapon series of Ratchet & Clank fame. It is extremely powerful? Hell yeah! But they're far from conveniently cheap - and in the Future series, you have to find the actual blueprints first. Omega RYNO 4-Ever even comes with a warning label stating that usage might make the game no longer fun.The RYNO 4-Ever had been declared a myth by the Galactic Society of Implausible Weapon Designs. Rumors had persisted on the Holo-Web that this upgrade to the R.Y.N.O IV was theoretically possible, but the subject was so controversial that merely mentioning it made a person become grounded for six months in an intergalactic penitentiary. If you heard any information about the RYNO 4-Ever, let alone encounter the actual weapon itself, you were advised to cover your eyes and ears and loudly hum show tunes of your choice. This weapon, should it even exist, was far too dangerous, illegal and downright gameplay destabilizing to ever be used. Ever. We mean it.
- The RYNO V revels in the fact that it's basically More Dakka, Beam Spam, and Macross Missile Massacre all rolled into one and garnished with a light dusting of pure crack by playing the finale of the 1812 Overture
while you are firing it. It's exactly as awesome as it sounds. - Occasionally, there are weapons that are just as strong but don't belong to R.Y.N.O. line. In Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando you can get the Zodiac, which is a Smart Bomb that one-shots an entire screen of non-boss enemies, but it takes a moment to charge, holds only 4 shots, and 1 shot costs 10,000 bolts, though that hardly matters if you can buy the weapon, plus its ammo can be found in crates. In Ratchet: Deadlocked you have the Harbinger, a Kill Sat that is far stronger than anything in the game, but can hold at the start only 4 shots and its ammo must be bought.
- The RYNO V revels in the fact that it's basically More Dakka, Beam Spam, and Macross Missile Massacre all rolled into one and garnished with a light dusting of pure crack by playing the finale of the 1812 Overture
Racing Games
Role Playing Games
- A few Guest-Star Party Member characters in various Final Fantasy games. The others, not so much.
- Leo in Final Fantasy VI, the one time you get to use him.
- Final Fantasy VII:
- Sephiroth is deadly when he's in Cloud's party in a flashback. This is meant to show that Cloud is scared of him and doesn't truly expect to ever be able to beat him. Not to mention that Sephiroth is literally invincible for every battle.
- Aerith is noticeably more powerful than any other party member, especially early in the game. She's the best mage by far, at a part in the game where magic is the best way to do damage, she's the best healer as well, you can find a staff that gives her seven Materia slots to jack up her stats even further and enable even more versatility, and you can obtain her fourth Limit Break (which heals the whole party, restores their MP, and makes them temporarily invincible) long before anyone else's. The developers have implied that this was done on purpose: what better way to make you miss a character when they're gone?
- Beatrix from Final Fantasy IX also counts. Sort of a Nerf from when she was an unbeatable boss, though.
- Seymour from Final Fantasy X, when he briefly joins your party for a boss battle. Though he's not as overpowering as most of the other examples on this page.
- Larsa from Final Fantasy XII comes equipped with limitless options, a good attack, and even subverts the 3-man limit rule for parties in the game. You meet him in Lhusu Mines, where he makes the entire operation a near cakewalk for as long as he's with the party. You even get him a second time (this time equipped with hi-potions) and the strategy guide even straight up suggests going off and tackling some of the trickier hunts before Larsa is scheduled to leave your company. Unfortunately, the Zodiac Edition nerfed him a bit by removing his infinite hi-potions.
- Same goes for some Final Fantasy weapons:
- The ultimate weapon in Final Fantasy VIII for Squall, Lionheart, gives him an ability to perform the Limit Break of the same name, which is a murder on anything but a Damage-Sponge Boss. And with a bit of know-how, you can get it before the Disc 1 ends. Selphie's Strange Vision, on the other hand, is the only weapon besides Squall's that comes with perfect accuracy of 255, making dealing with those pesky cactuars easier.
- The fully upgraded Celestial Weapons in Final Fantasy X. Each comes with 4 extremely rare and valuable abilities: Triple Overdrive (charges overdrive three times as fast), Break Damage Limit (allows to surpass a Damage Cap of 9,999, up to 99,999) and two other abilities that vary between the weapons (for example, the casters get One MP cost, ie. each spell costs 1 MP, be it Fire or Ultima). However, while you could make your own weapons with same abilities after a ton of Item Farming, these weapons have two properties that make them superior to anything you can craft: their direct attacks ignore enemy's defense, and their damage scales up based on hidden parameters (for example if Auron is beaten with an inch of his life, him striking with Masamune, his celestial weapon, would deal twice as much damage). Of course, you cannot get them until you kill Yunalesca, and even then each of them is subject to Guide Dang It!, requires a lot of time and many of them need That One Sidequest to be completed.
- Final Fantasy XII has plenty of these. Zodiac Spear is the strongest weapon in the game, and can be obtained relatively easily and quite fast if you did not open four specific, unmarked chests. The latter is not true for Updated Re-release, where the weapon must be found in the bowels of hardest dungeon in a chest that appears 1% of the time. Tournesol is slightly weaker double-handed sword that makes up for it with other bonuses, but that one requires a grinding Rare Random Drops to create the ingredients for the weapon. Wyrmhero Blade has the best overall bonuses and does not need a license to be used, but requires you to kill two bosses that appear at the end of game-spanning sidequest and completing a lengthy minigame to get it, though in Updated Re-release you can steal it (or multiple copies) in Trial Mode and actually put it to good use in the game itself.
- Once you get the Mascot Dressphere in Final Fantasy X-2, you'll never need to use a different one again. Good luck getting it, though.
- There's also the Special Dresspheres. One could play the game and avoid every single enemy encounter and still have an easy time of the bosses just by using them.
- Final Fantasy XV has the Ring of the Lucii, which you earn near the end of the game, but can bring with you into a New Game Plus. It can kill many enemies and bosses fairly quickly (even the Marlboro, who is oft regarded as That One Boss), and can even one-shot the Adamantoise, a Level 99 Super Boss that takes many players hours to slay when fighting normally.
- Pokémon's version mascots and event-only Pokémon tend to be designed this way and are consequentially forbidden to use in the Battle Institutes. Whether they actually succeed at this varies, though.
- Starting with the 5th generation, the third version legendary has been introduced with a weakened form (600 base Stat total compared to 680 for the others) that's good, but not really better than the best regular mons. Still banned, though.
- Mythicals (event-only Pokémon) almost always have a BST of 600, but usually have some gimmick intended to put them ahead of the curve.
- The event-exclusive Arceus is worth a mention, as it is fearsome, even when compared to other terrific Pokémon — one of the only mons that can reasonably expect to come even close to matching it is Mewtwo. (Especially if Mewtwo has Mega Evolved.) It not only has 120 in every base stat, but can use Plate items to change its type to anything it wants. On top of the normal reason, the reason for Arceus' sheer power is because it is heavily implied to be the creator-deity of the Pokémon universe — its signature move is even called Judgment.
- Mega Rayquaza, introduced in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire deserves a special mention for its unusual effectiveness even in relation to other Olympus Mons, including Arceus. It has a 780 base stat total* with sky-high Attack and Special Attack, respectable defenses, the second best Speed of all Dragon-types, an ability that shuts down weather and removes all Flying-type weaknesses, and a 120BP Flying-type STAB attack with perfect accuracy (though this does lower its defenses). Oh, and this all comes without a Mega Stone, so it's able to hold any item. It wouldn't be hyperbolic to suggest that Mega Rayquaza is the most powerful Pokémon in the history of the series. In fact, Mega Rayquaza is so insanely overpowered that in the Smogon competitive scene it was too strong even for the prestigious Ubers tier and they were forced to make a tier above that to accommodate Mega Rayquaza. Fittingly, Rayquaza plays up the Physical God aspect even heavier than Arceus, in that the populace of Hoenn literally worship it — the player character actually prays to Rayquaza to Mega Evolve it.
- Taken to a level of downright absurdity with Eternamax Eternatus. Thought Mega Rayquaza's 780 BST was absurd? Eternamax Eternatus has an absurd 1125 BST. The catch is that, for the first time in the series, its the only form of a Pokémon that is completely unplayable, possibly because of this reason alone.
Stealth Games
Sandbox Games
Survival Horror
Turn-Based Strategy
- The final boss characters in Advance Wars 2 and Days of Ruin, Sturm and Caulder/Stolos, are very challenging (The latter is in fact outright BANNED from Wi-Fi play, while peopled agree to use the former only in 2 vs 1 matches.) Sturm in the first game and Von Bolt from Dual Strike, meanwhile, are not.
Non-Video Game Examples
