Role-Playing Games / Disc One Nuke

The Aethra Chronicles allows you to buy a Power Ring in your starting town. Due to a Good Bad Bug, this ring will give an archer ten extra attacks per round, allowing a level 1 character to One-Hit Kill even early bosses. (Then, when you later visit other towns, you can buy more Power Rings — and they stack.)
Albion
- This game has an instance of this. Careful exploration and talking to NPCs in the prologue will allow you to find a powerful gun, with ammo. However, you must also figure out how to smuggle it past the guards. Once you do, you have a limited but extremely powerful gun, perfect for the difficult early battles.
- Another example of this is the ultimate "freeze everyone" spell Frost Avalanche, which can be acquired for free on the first island if you reach level 9. This is possible if the player skips through most fights during the main quest of this island to acquire the spellcaster, and then wipes the island almost clean of monsters. If this is done successfully, the Frost Avalanche spell will enable player to freeze every group of monsters anywhere in the game (except some bosses); and because the spell also damages enemies significantly, the combat becomes reduced into a repetitive casting of F.A. If the player does not acquire the spell on first island, he or she can buy it some 20 hours (of gameplay) later on the third island.
The Saw Cleaver and Hunter Axe from Bloodborne are two of the three starter weapons, yet they are proven to be as deadly as late game weapons you can obtain since they both primarily scale with Strength. By the time you maximised the upgrade, attached Cursed Tempering Blood Gems and applied Fire/Bolt paper onto it, you probably wouldn't even need the rest of the weapons and stats.
In Bravely Default, leaving the game running in sleep mode allows you to rebuild various shops in the hero's Doomed Hometown, which may begin selling very high-level items after a while. The most notable example is the Angel Bow. If you can grind for the 3000 pg it costs (rather high, but not impossible to get with a bit of patience), you'll have one of the strongest weapons in the game rather early on.
Early on in Breath of Fire, you get the Earth Key (E. Key) as part of the story. What the game doesn't tell you, though, is that you can use it to generate a localized earthquake that does a flat 30 damage to all enemies on screen — enough to mop up early mobs with ease and even allow weaker characters (like Nina) to deal respectable damage to bosses for a good chunk of the early game. It gets taken away from you eventually, but it remains quite useful for as long as you have it.
Breath of Fire II:
- If you know where it is and have the cash to afford it, it's possible to access the secret "Manilo" shop just north of Coursair. This requires you to know that the store is located in a fishing spot (which never appears unless you're battling in a certain view just north of the town) and that you need at least one Gold piece (a rare drop from monsters and sparsely found in towns) and a lot of luck in order to catch him in the first place. If you do, though, you get access to armor and weapons that normally won't be found until the midpoint of the game, making you an absolute tank in combat. The only downside is that it takes a good 4,000-5,000 zenny per character to fully outfit them, but it's worth a bit of grinding for characters who can chainsaw through the next four dungeons.
- It's possible to recruit the optional character Bleu as soon as you have access to the Whale, roughly halfway through the game and before you've even recruited Spar. She comes in at level 35, at a point when the rest of your party is probably about level 20, with a great array of damaging, buffing and debuffing spells, and her stat growths remain extraordinarily high even after level 60. And as if that wasn't enough, her in-battle ability Shed allows her to regain all her health at no AP cost (albeit lowering her defence in doing so), making her nearly unkillable.
In Chrono Cross, the Profiteer's Purse, obtained by checking behind the stairs in Gogh's mansion in Another Termina, is this in two ways. You can either disassemble it to its base components for three pieces of Iron (letting you forge better equipment than would otherwise be possible that early in the game) or give it to Serge for a 1-15% bonus to all money gained from battles (which adds up very quickly - handy on later playthroughs, especially if you're trying to deck out every playable character with Prism gear). Either way, though, it's well worth making the small detour for it.
- The same game has the Plasma Pistol, the second-best gun which can be wielded by Norris or Starky. It can also be obtained far earlier than other weapons of its level; right after recruiting Starky, in fact. Just check the big sawfish in Home Arni village with Starky in your party and it's yours.
Chrono Trigger
- Right at the beginning of the game you can buy a Lodesword from Melchior for 4000 Gold. This is very expensive for this point in the game, but a patient player can spend about an hour repeatedly beat the crap out of Gato and exchanging all the silver points you'll get for enough money to afford it. Note that Gato is fought for free and won't actually kill you if you lose, so there's absolutely no risk involved. This weapon and the experience you'll earn from Gato will effectively neuter the entire 600 AD Save the Princess mission.
- You reach a town run by monsters (Medina) fairly early in the game. The weapons and armor shop has very good equipment, but the shopkeeper sells them at ridiculously high prices because he hates humans, preventing you from buying it (you can purchase the same equipment at reasonable prices in 12,000 BC, but you get there much later on). It is possible to raise enough money to buy it early, making combat a bit easier for a while. The best way is by buying weapons and armor in 65,000,000 BC (where they trade it for random items you get after beating enemies instead of gold), and then selling it.
- While not actually needed due to the difference in levels, a New Game Plus is greatly accelerated by putting Berserker Bands on each character, making battles go by much faster as each enemy up to the Heckran will die in a single hit. The only drawback is running into enemies immune to physical damage (like the Future's ghosts and sentient acids or Magus' Jugglers).
Contact features Blue Pillbugs, which show up in one room on the second island and are definitely something you'll want to avoid engaging normally until you're strong enough to kill them so that you can grab the Armor Breaker weapon, which increases the odds of triggering the Armor Break ability (if you have it) by twenty percent. However, thanks to a trick involving a nearby stairwell and some tricky maneuvering, it's possible to repeatedly kill one of them, allowing you to quick level offensive stats, and, if you grind for long enough or just get lucky, you can get it to drop the Armor Breaker. Said weapon has an offense of twenty-seven. The highest offense for a weapon that you could ostensibly get at that point in the game normally? Eight. The boss of that island gets turned into a joke, taking three hits for each hand and the head. It also tends to render enemies rather frightened, allowing you to progress relatively unmolested and smash anything stupid enough to attack you.
Dark Cloud brings us the famous Broken Dagger Glitch, which gives you a free item resembling a broken dagger (hence the name) that, when attached to a weapon, will instantly max out all of its stats. This basically completely trivializes the weapon crafting system in the game since you can turn any crap low level weapon into a top-tier one with just a few minutes of attaching broken daggers, gaining a single level and then upgrading them.
In Dark Chronicle, there's the famous Name Ticket Glitch, where renaming any crap low-level weapon to the EXACT name of an endgame weapon will give you said endgame weapon, letting you skip a lot of stat grinding (though you will still have to farm a pretty hefty number of dungeon medals for that). A less exploitative example is Jurak's Gun - once you've made some progress in Sindain, check a guide for the hidden requirements to get the Georama there to 100%; these are normally not revealed to you until several chapters later, but there's no safeguards in place to prevent you from unlocking them early. Your reward is Jurak's Gun, which packs quite a punch when you get it (it's a chunk of wood that fires lasers, somehow) and offers a direct upgrade path to the strongest gun in the game, the Supernova.
- Erik can be considered a more literal example of this. He's one of the first support characters you get (automatically recruited at the start of Chapter 2) and if you add him to your party, he can make you six Improved Bombs for free; these little numbers do a whopping 400 damage apiece, which will one-shot most enemies and deal hefty damage to bosses for the next two or three chapters. You have to boot him from the party and wait one in-game day for his energy to recharge to get more, but you can get as many as you want from him at absolutely no cost.
  - Improved Bombs remain useful later on too, as you can sell them for a pretty good chunk of change (500 apiece). So, that's an easy 3000 Gilda a day for about 20 seconds of work each time.
Dark Souls
- The Drake Sword is the perfect example of a Disc One Nuke in that it is easily obtainable immediately after the second boss of the game (provided you know how) and its base damage of 200 is miles above anything else you can get at that point. It can easily carry you through about the first half of the game. Problem is, it has no stat scaling, so that 200 damage isn't getting any higher without upgrading it, and its upgrade material is incredibly rare and only drops off a few non-respawning minibosses and a certain type of Demonic Spider. By the time you get to around the halfway point, a normal weapon will start to surpass it provided you've upgraded it a few times and levelled up the right stats to take advantage of its scaling. Sadly, new players who get the Drake Sword tend to become hypnotized by the insane damage it does in the early areas and catch a severe case of Complacent Gaming Syndrome, continuing to use it long after the point where they should have switched to something else and most likely not even realizing that all those levels they're putting into Strength aren't actually doing anything.
- The Zweihander in the graveyard is another borderline example; the skeletons are quite difficult to kill, but can be killed with even your starting weapon and magic with enough skill and patience (or you could just make a suicide run to grab it). While it has slow attacks, it can one-shot or stun many enemies and has very high base damage, making it rather rapidly superior to the Drake Sword once you get to the first blacksmith and start upgrading it. It can stun most of the enemies in the Darkroot Garden and Basin as well, which gives access to a fair bit of solid equipment. The weapon remains good through the end of the game, if using a heavy weapon is your thing.
- The Stone Armor set in the Darkroot Garden can be acquired either by buying a (pretty expensive) unlocking item or simply by legitimately beating the garden and basin fairly early in the game; the main issue is the enemies in the back end of Darkroot Garden being extremely dangerous. However, the Stone Armor set is one of the better heavy armor sets in the game, requires no upgrading, and can be acquired before going to Blighttown, meaning that someone who is willing to be slow moving but extremely tough can put on the armor and be extremely resilient to damage long before they are "supposed to" be.
- It is possible to run through the Catacombs early and get weapons comparable to the Drake Sword, but which scale better later in the game. You can join the Gravelord Servant covenant very early to get the Gravelord Sword. While it needs some stat investments, you'll likely have enough souls to 2-hand the Gravelord Sword after you defeat Pinwheel. Another alternative is to find Vamos and upgrade a weapon of choice to a Fire +1 weapon. Also, taking out Pinwheel early is fairly trivial with a good melee weapon, and gets you the Rite of Kindling, letting you get up to 20 Estus Flasks out of bonfires. However, it's easier said than done; this involves rushing through hordes of respawning skeletons and dashing through a big open room full of Skeleton Wheels.
- If you're lucky enough to get one to drop, Black Knight weapons have great physical damage, deal extra damage to demons, and are useful through the entire game and even New Game Plus. The Black Knight Sword is perhaps the most egregious; its stat requirements are fairly low (20 strength and 18 dexterity), and it drops off of a (fairly difficult to beat, but possible to kill cheesily with ranged weapons) enemy just beyond the first save point in Undead Burg. It is more powerful than the Drake Sword (or indeed, anything else you will be able to make or find until late in the game), scales with your stats, and upgrades with Twinkling Titanite (meaning you can upgrade it to the max level without having to hunt down an ember to give to a blacksmith). Additionally, many of the early bosses in the game are demons, which it gets a damage bonus against, making it even better. Only slightly later, the Black Knight Halberd is fairly easily obtained as well (if you get lucky enough to get the knight to drop it) by forcing a Black Knight off a cliff or simply killing it.
- Another extremely powerful weapon that a player can get from the very start is the Titanite Catch Pole, a rare drop from the non-respawning Titanite Demons in the Catacombs or Undead Parish. If you do get it, you have a lightweight halberd that has a very low stat requirement, deals both physical and magic damage, and upgrades with Twinkling Titanite. The fact that it deals magic damage allows you to hit enemies through their metal shields. At higher levels (40 Strength and 30 Dexterity), it becomes a tool primarily for dealing riposte damage (882 damage), surpassing the Black Knight Great Axe (862 damage).
- The regular Halberd can be found outside the front door of the Undead Parish (the actual building itself). Though not as powerful, it benefits from having lower stat requirements, meaning that most classes can use it almost immediately, as well as being much stronger and faster than most other normal weapons up to that point. And unlike the Black Knight and Dragon weapons, it can be upgraded with regular Titanite so you don't have to wait until later in the game. The standard attack has the speed and range of other spear weapons but with more damage, and the heavy attack compensates for its slower speed with a swing with both the range of a full thrust and an approximately 270 degree arc attack. Both of these can one-shot almost any low-level Mook with upgrades. There's a reason you'll find it one of the most commonly used weapons among early-mid game spectres.
- If you start the game with Master Key as your gift, after the tutorial you can immediately get Astora's Straight Sword. Heading down the elevator to the New Londo Ruins, taking a turn to a locked grate door that serves as a short cut to Blighttown. Instead of heading into the caves you walk along the cliffs towards an undead dragon with several shiny goodies sitting in front of it. You will almost certainly be killed the moment you take them, but among them is the sword. It is nearly on par for damage with the Drake Sword, but much easier to manage stat requirements (the only potentially problematic one being a 14 faith requirement). It's as strong as the Drake Sword, but with actual stat scaling, easier to upgrade, and blessed to boot.
- The Balder Side Sword can be dropped by the Balder Knights in the Undead Parish who wield it, has a long reach, great moveset, and high Dexterity scaling. It's a disgustingly rare drop, and at this point in the game you don't have many ways to boost your drop rate, but it's worth the grind.
- Any weapon that upgrades with Twinkling Titanite that is obtainable in the early game (most if not all of which are already listed above) can become even more of a nuke as soon as you unlock the shortcut elevator between Firelink Shrine and the Undead Parish. Because that lets you go back to the Undead Asylum, and if you trade every kind of moss to Snuggly the Crow there, you can come away with 4 Twinkling Titanite, enough to upgrade any compatible weapon straight to +3 (out of a maximum of +5). If you were lucky enough to get Twinkling Titanite from the two Crystal Lizards you can find this early in the game, you might even be able to go up to +4.
- Heck, one minor example is the Estoc, the largest thrusting sword with the longest reach in the game and is also the earliest you can acquire. Being a thrusting sword you can use it to stab while keeping your shield up, but it also has a swing attack for its heavy one-handed attack rather than another stab, making it easier to use. Its stat requirements are extremely reasonable even for a low-level character (only 10 strength and 12 dexterity) and it upgrades with basic titanite. And best of all? All you need to do to get it is walk down the stairs at Firelink Shrine, take the elevator down the the New Londo Ruins and find it sitting out practically in the open — once you're out of the Undead Asylum, you don't have to kill a single enemy for it!
Dark Souls II
- Soul Spear, the Last Disc Magic from Dark Souls can be obtained early on in Huntsman's Copse. You can even farm duplicates by burning Bonfire Ascetic at the first Bonfire of the area.
- The Lizard Staff, a high speed sorcery staff with a decent Intelligence scaling can also be obtained early on in the Undead Purgatory during the Executioner Chariot battle. So long as the boss is alive, the Black Hollow Mages (Necromancers) would respawn whenever you quit the fight and they can be farmed for their attire and staff. A high Intelligence build can make a good use of it by infusing the staff with Faintstone to increase the scaling even further.
- The Moon Butterfly Set, an armor supposed to be unlocked in New Game Plus, can actually be obtained by merely burning Bonfire Ascetic at Majula Bonfire and be bought in the armorer's shop once you've got the souls. It reduces falling speed, falling damage and even inflicts poison by merely standing to anyone.
- The game has a few powerful weapons you can get early in the game that could serve the player throughout the rest of the game, if the weapons are upgraded properly. The most prominent are the Fire Longsword and Heide Knight Sword. Both weapons can be found in The Forest of the Fallen Giants, which is one of the first major areas the player explores in the game. The Heide Knight Sword you get by killing a hollow Heide Knight, who you encounter early in the area. The sword has a built in lighting effect, which can later get improved upon with a lighting stone after you find the Dull Ember. Or you can add another effect and have two of them on the same sword for added benefits. For example: a poisoned Heide Knight Sword. The Fire Sword is in a chest you find by exploring the area. Both weapons are very helpful in dealing with most enemies and bosses, since a lot of them are either weak against fire or lighting damage. Another benefit of both swords is that it doesn't take much strength or dexterity to use them. So you can build a long ranged character and use both swords as a secondary weapon for close encounters.
  - The Heide Knight was removed from the Forest of Fallen Giants in the 'Scholar of the First Sin' edition of the game, but in exchange an even more egregious example of this trope was added — the Grand Lance (a weapon you could previously only acquire right near the very end of the game) was inexplicably moved to be available right after beating the Last Giant (normally the first boss a normal player will face)! While it requires a moderate investment of stats (22 STR and 18 DEX) and is very heavy at 12 units, it's a shockingly powerful weapon that can easily carry you through the entire game.
- The Merchant's Hat, obtainable from one of the first merchants, increases item drop rates. Take it to Heide's Tower of Flame, which has hugely powerful but very slow knights (the aforementioned Heide Knight Sword or Fire Longsword helps here). They drop the Old Knight equipment, which has excellent stats but extremely low durability. Of particular note is the Old Knight's Shield, which has massive stability and fantastic damage reduction. While the required stats are rather high, the sizable amounts of souls dropped by the knights can help you quickly reach them, and if you practice some dodging, the low durability won't trouble you too much.
- The Idol Chime is a very powerful weapon you can get early in the game as a magic user. From Majula, go to Heide's Tower of Flame and fight the Dragonrider, the easier of the two bosses of that area. After defeating him, go up the stairs where there is a bonfire. You'll also see an NPC named Licia who sells miracle magic. Buy the items you need from her, then kill her. She is actually one of the toughest NPCs to kill, but there are ways of making the fight easy, such as physically hitting her before she can cast a spell. After killing her she drops the Idol Chime and a key item needed to reach another area. She'll charge you souls to use the item if you let her live. She also isn't worth keeping alive, because she secretly tries to kill the player a couple of times as the Nameless Usurper. Her clothes will also become available when the player buys from Melentia the old hag. Buying and wearing Licia's hat will give the player a boost in magic usages.
- The humble rapier. Yes, really. The one you can buy for a mere 1,000 souls after you get a quarter of the way through the first area. Not only does it attack really fast, it consumes very little stamina for each attack, allowing for 5-6 hit combos with enough stamina left to dodge one more attack. Combine that with damage buffs from spells or pine resins, and it can easily beat any boss you can reach before the Looking Glass Knight.
Dark Souls III:
- You can easily turn any starting weapon into a Disc One Nuke by picking the Fire Gem as your starting gift. Andre is able to do Fire infusion from the very start of the game. Fire infusion works like Fire ascencion in the first game, improving the base damage and adding fire damage, but completely eliminating the stat scaling. Except you literally just started the game and your stats are absolute garbage right now, so that scaling wasn't doing much. Many enemies and bosses in the early game are extremely weak to fire as well.
- As soon as you reach Firelink Shrine, you can find a hostile NPC named Sword Master. If you defeat him (usually by kicking him off the nearby cliff or having him roll off on his own, then quitting and reloading to spawn his drops), he will drop the Uchigatana. The Uchigatana has great attack stats and naturally inflicts Bleed. Unupgraded it will tear through the first few areas of the game with ease (especially if you infuse it with that Fire Gem mentioned above), and fully upgraded it can easily take you through the entire game.
- Didn't pick the Fire Gem and don't want to raise Dex? In the first real area of the game, the High Wall of Lothric, there's a Mimic that holds a Deep Battle Axe. Deep is the dark equivalent to Fire, with high base damage and elemental damage but no scaling, and will serve you almost as well as a Fire weapon for the early game. The boss of the High Wall, Vordt, is weak to dark damage as well.
- At the beginning of the second area, the Undead Settlement, you can recruit Yoel of Londor, who will go back to Firelink Shrine. He will give you a level up for free, and then another one after every 2 deaths (which you can quite easily inflict upon yourself if you so choose). The only downside to this is that you start Hollowing, which does absolutely nothing but make you look like a corpse (which you probably won't even see anyway) and will even offer some benefits later in the game if you go for a specific build. After five free levels, he will die, and be replaced by Yuria. She sells the Dark Hand for a prohibitively expensive (for this point in the game) 12,000 souls, but should you scrounge up that much, you won't need another weapon for a long time. As in, "when you start finding Titantite Chunks, it might be time to switch weapons" long.
Not quite a nuke but useful early game. In The Dark Spire, from the tower entrance go north 6, east 9, south 4. You should be in front of a locked door. Save, open it, follow very short path to basement. Once there go north 1, west 2, south 1 and face the east wall. Behind a secret door you find a very good weapon you normally can't obtain for another 25% of the game or so. Careful though, as the enemies in the basement can easily annihilate you, especially if you're heading here at game start. Save anywhere comes in handy here.
- There's also the sleep spell, which is notably a first tier spell for a mage. Unlike other games where sleep is worthless, it's absolutely busted in this game. Barring ghosts, the spell will put anything and everything it's cast on to sleep with a near 100% success rate until around the fourth floor, which makes their defensive stats drop to zero for effortless kills. Anything on floors 1 and 2 that you put to sleep will also stay asleep, and floor 3 enemies usually won't wake up until you've practically finished the battle. By the time the spell starts losing its usefulness, your mage will be so deadly that it doesn't matter anymore.
In Dash Quest, Prior to a recent update, the starter spells Magic Missile, Fireball, Recover and Haste are these, thanks to their low Mana cost, relatively high damage, and quick recharging, by merely investing on equipments and skills which reduces you Mana cost, spell recharge speed (which can reach 110% at max), item & spell duplication, intelligence, critical damage and fire damage, you can deliver One-Hit Kill to early bosses and clear half of the entire game effortlessly. By the time when you purchased the Ivory Staff, prior to a recent update, thanks to a Good Bad Bug, you could nullify your recharging speed into merely 1 second and your spells merely costed 1-2 Mana, which meant you can bump across all stages within 30 seconds in sonic speed while turning your game into a Macross Missile Massacre by spamming Haste, Fireball, Magic Missile and Lightning over and over again. Now, it is patched and you have to resort to both melee and late game spells.
The very first choice in Deus Ex allows you to obtain the GEP Gun, essentially the game's rocket launcher. It kills most enemies in just one shot, even if you haven't raised its relevant skills, and it's even a good way to handle noncombat situations by letting you blow up doors. Though it's limited by ammunition, you'd be surprised how many rockets you can find with even a little exploration.
In Digimon World, it is actually possible to raise the very first Digimon you get into an Ultimate; you'll need to look up a guide to find out how the exact mechanics behind digivolution work and the requirements for the Ultimate Digimon (because the game doesn't tell you anything), but if you do you can go to high level areas with strong Digimon much earlier than normal, get a lot of the game's recruits rather quickly and maybe even beat the game before your first Digimon dies of old age if you know what you're doing.
The first act of Divinity: Original Sin 2 is quite difficult, but you get a few things that can alleviate it:
- A pair of gloves that give you access to the spell "Teleportation". Teleportation is easily one of the best spells in the game, and being able to warp enemies away from you (while inflicting a little bit of damage) is manna from heaven. Bonus points is that you can give this to anyone - so if you have the regular Teleportation Spell? You can give it to someone else and they will have access to this. You can even use this to trap enemies on ledges they can't get off, a more effective form of crowd control than the actual forms of Crowd Control.
- Beast is able to have his Source Collar removed way before the others if he talks with a few NPCs who know him. This means that he will have access to his Source skill - Blinding Gale. While it's arguably the weakest Source Skill due to it relying off of Beast being in melee (bad news if you made him a ranged fighter or a Squishy Wizard), and Source points are very very rare early-game, but for the point in the game it's pretty good.
Dislyte: The Esper Dhalia. She's an exclusive Esper obtained from Ripple Dimension, which means you only need to stalk chats and act fast to get into her Ripples to get 40 pieces to summon her immediately. She has high speed, her Sonic Camo skill grants party-wide C. RATE Up (and ATK Up when enhanced, which is easy at Phase 4) AND increases AP by 25%, basically turning all your slowpokes into speed demons. And even then, on one target, she can inflict SPD Down and perhaps Frozen right after with Umbra Attack, and her basic attack can inflict Stun. Coupled with the fact that it's easy to obtain Epic Abilimon, it's pretty easy to max out her skills so she's always doing something useful at the speed of sound. More likely than not, she'll remain useful forever in your many team setups.
Dragon Age: Origins:
- The Feastday Gifts and Pranks DLC breaks the entire companion approval concept, despite it being a massive part of the base game. With this DLC, you can manipulate your companions' approval by giving them "Thoughtful Gifts", which are bought from Bodahn in the Party Camp for next-to-nothing. These can be used to max out the approval gauges immediately, which give all your companions greater stats and make things easier in the long run. Additionally, Qunari Prayers for the Dead (a book that can be given to Sten) can make your party functionally immortal during most fights — if you're low on health, simply have Sten activate it and wait for the cutscene to finish.
- With the Warden's Keep DLC installed, you can come across a random encounter on the world map that allows you to pick up a rare mineral from inside a meteorite that crashed. Completing Soldier's Peak (which is a fairly short mission) and taking this mineral to the blacksmith that appears outside the Keep gives you access to one of the Starfang swords (either a one-handed or greatsword version, depending on your choice), which are nearly the most powerful in their class. The only restriction is that you need 31 strength for the longsword (and 38 for the two-handed version), but it's well worth upping your strength stat early if you get access to it near the beginning of the game.
- If the player goes for the Circle Tower quest first on the World Map, there's an exploit that can be performed in the Fade. Aside from the fact that you can potentially gain 21 different +1 increases to your attributes, hitting the use button on these locations fast enough (especially if you have a slower computer) tricks the game into activating it multiple times, which can sometimes give you a permanent +4 or +5 bonus (if not more) to one stat. If done early enough, this can make the early game much easier for you.
- The two new Talents you can gain by drinking the diablery potion in Warden's Keep. The Mage's are particularly potent — a very powerful nuke and a mana regenerator that costs about a papercut's worth of HP to activate.
- One exploit allows the player to sell an item for twice it's sell value by putting it in the junk tab and then quickly pressing the Sell and Sell All Junk buttons, then buy it back for the original sell cost. This can be repeated ad nauseam, giving the player an infinite source of money as soon as they reach the first shop and allowing them to buy anything they want as soon as they come across it. Since most of the (non-DLC) best gear in Origins is on vendors rather than in dungeons or as quest rewards, this allows you to potentially get some of the best items in the game right off the bat. Sure, some of it has level or stat requirements to use, but most players will reach those long before they'd had the money to get around the Cash Gate, and even settling for any Infinity -1 Sword will make you broken at the beginning of the game. And this glitch also works in the second game.
- Completing the DLC stories The Darkspawn Chronicles, The Golems of Amgarrak, and Witch Hunt reward you with powerful weapons, armor, mage robes, rings, and necklaces that automatically start in your inventory in a new game. While the armor and weapons have minimum strength scores needed to equip them, they still function as a massive boost in power right off the bat. Also, the mace you get for completing Golems on Hard or Nightmare difficulty (The Reaper's Cudgel) can be sold for a staggering amount of money.
There happens to be a fellow running a shop in a secret underground passage in the Docks district of Kirkwall in Dragon Age II who sells a ridiculously powerful bow for a reasonable price in the second chapter. Makes the game a lot easier, actually. Also, all you have to do to receive Hanlon's Razor, easily the best greatsword until Act II, is to beat the demo. Most of the DLC equipment and unlockable Extra equipment is this as well. Items such as the Staff of Parlathan, which can be obtained by registering for the newsletter, are powerful in Act I but are eventually outclassed in Act II. One exception is Hindsight — its "Enemies drop better equipment" property makes it useful for the entire game.
- In terms of abilities, the rogue's "Pinpoint Strikes" functions as this. It guarantees critical hits for a time, which dramatically increases the character's damage output. With the right build, you can have both the base ability and the duration upgrade (meaning that you can auto-crit for 20 seconds of every 40, boosting overall damage output by about half) by late act 1. It qualifies as a Disc-One Nuke rather than a proper Game-Breaker because high level rogues have high critical hit chances naturally: 100% crit chance is a much bigger improvement over 20-35% than 50-75%.
Dragon Age: Inquisition has the Golden Nug, which was added in one of the last patches. Using the Nug, which is a statue found in Haven and Skyhold, synchronizes all your saved games to make every weapon and armor schematic, potion, seed, and Skyhold accessory that you've found in each game available to you. This means that you can start a new game and use the Nug to instantly gain access to Tier 3 and Tier 4 weapons and equipment, allowing you to craft items that have roughly triple the power of what you'll be finding even when you're forced to use weak Tier 1 components to build them.
DragonFable has the Doom weapons, available from the Mysterious Stranger outside of Falconreach. While prohibitively expensive at 28000 gold, if the player grinds a lot of gold, they can have one of these as soon as level 8, and can upgrade them to higher level versions by grinding materials from various quests. Regardless of how far they are upgraded, these weapons are MUCH stronger than anything remotely close to their level, and if the player stays on top of their upgrade path, they're a viable option until shortly before the level cap. They also have a light-based variation, the Destiny weapons, which are obtained by taking a Doom weapon to Artix in Doomwood and purifying them, takes this even further, as they reach their maximum level much quicker than the Doom weapons (and, in fact, are stronger than a Doom weapon of a similar level), but aren't as viable towards the level cap as a result.
Dragon Quest:
- Dragon Quest III: It was possible in the original NES version to get a modest pile of money at the beginning of the game by registering warrior class characters, taking their expensive weapons / armor, selling it, then returning the character to the eatery and deleting their registration. This would let you easily amass enough gold to buy the best equipment at the first two towns for all your characters, which made the beginning of the game a bit easier^note. Re-releases fixed this by having every registered character join the party with no equipment, but the King 'gives' you four full sets of equipment…
- Dragon Quest IV:
  - In the third chapter, it is possible (though very time-consuming and even more boring) to obtain a sword that is by far the strongest weapon available in the chapter before fighting even a single battle, if you're willing to sit through hours upon hours of running a weapon shop until somebody sells you the sword and you earn enough money to buy it (the player character doesn't own the store, he's just hired help). Saving up the money is by far the more time-consuming part of the process. An added complication is that customers may try to buy the sword before you have enough money for it, and sometimes they stubbornly refuse to take no for an answer. By the time the chapter 3 character returns in chapter 5, his once-overpowered sword has become mediocre in the face of much tougher enemies. All in all, it's far more trouble than it's worth; conventional Level Grinding would be more efficient and less boring.
  - You can get the money in other ways, though; in fact, you're required to earn several times the cost of the sword in order to beat that section of the game, and many fast-money tricks are specifically provided to this end. So if you happen to have the weapon appear, you can just call it a lucky break, leave your job, and come back halfway through the chapter to buy it... when it's nice to have, but not that overpowered. In later chapters you can just buy it from stores anyway.
  - But then again, the main reason to get the sword to appear isn't so that you can use it yourself, it's because it's also the most expensive weapon in the chapter and thus makes it a prime subject for the most effective of these in-game money tricks. So in other words, ultimately you'd want to buy as many of these swords from the original weapon shop as possible, sell them at your own weapon shop for 50% profit and repeat until your Bag of Sharing is filled with 99 copies of every item you can possibly acquire in the chapter. And after that's done, give yourself a huge amount of cash and use that to buy all the casino tokens you could ever need. If you're wondering why just not amass a huge fortune and not screw around with buying excessive amount of equipment to sell, that's simply because while money doesn't carry over between chapters, equipment will.
  - Save Scumming at the casino to win 4 Metal Babble Shields, 8 Meteorite Armbands, and a couple dozen Wizard Rings in Chapter 2.
  - You might also consider the fact that you can leave behind one of the Broad Swords in the Silver Statuette cave for the hero to pick up in early Chapter 5.
- Dragon Quest V:
  - The Metal King Sword you can get at the Casino in Fortuna really IS the most powerful sword in the game. And you can get as many of them as you want if you don't mind a bit of slot machine grinding. Plus, a lot of people can equip the sword, even the Slime! It's stronger than the Zenithian Blade and every casino carries a unlimited number of them. With some Save Scumming, you can get the 50K tokens needed to buy one.
  - The Slime can become one. It can equip the Metal King equipment, and learns the Kabuff and Kasap spells early on.
  - A few other monsters can become this if you luck into recruiting one, particularly the Metal Slime (of course) and the Dancing Jewel/Goodybag, the latter of which actually had decent recruitment odds. The Metal Slime doesn't really need explanation; the Goodybag, meanwhile, can be a bit hampered by the low Wisdom random AI at times, but when you have 180 Defense with gear at recruitment time, near-blanket immunity to all elements, and get Kaswoosh at your (low) level cap, who even cares?
- In the Dragon Quest Monsters spinoff games, there are often several examples of powerful early or mid game monsters that are available if you understand the breeding system.
  - For example, in Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, capturing the first enemy you see, the humble Rank F Slime, opens up the option to breed 4 of them together across two generations. (not that it mentions this in game, mind you.) 2 Slimes bred together that both have 2 Slime parents results in a Rank C King Slime, a reference to how they appear in Dragon Quest IV (8 slimes all jump together and merge into a King Slime). The King Slime will dominate the early game due to its "Cleric" skillset (which is a mistranslation of "Hero", aka the Dragon Quest hero's skillset of Cure spells, Lightning spells, and outrageous sword techniques).
  - Even better, if you do the same thing with 4 King Slimes, you get a Rank B King Cureslime, which will inherit the Cleric skillset, as well as the most powerful healing skillset in the game. Taking a Rank B King Cureslime and breeding it with a Rank F Bubble Slime (easily available early in the game, or breed-able using a slime and a platypunk, which is available right next to the slimes) will lead a Rank A King Bubble Slime, which gets Bad Breath, one of the best debuff skillsets in the game — as well as Cleric and Heal-All. In addition, these powerful Rank C/B/A monsters also play hell with the game's monster recruitment system, allowing you to catapult past the Rank F/E/D part of the early game. Of course, going all the way to Rank A would take an incredibly huge amount of work to do, but you could still do it literally within hours of the game starting.
  - Not to mention that it's pretty easy as it is to synthesize a Rank A monster by the third island if you've scouted a good amount and already synthesized a couple times. It's possible to get a King Bubble Slime early on without even needing four King Slimes. Once you really dig into the mechanics of the game it's possible to have a team of Rank A/B monsters by the time you hit Infern Isle, which is mostly comprised of C/D monsters.
- The Vocation system in Dragon Quest VI is determined by the number of successful battles fought as that vocation, but most areas prevent these areas from counting after the character reaches a certain level. If you have the patience for it, the first area with a cap of 99 is the Spiegelspire, where you can Whistle for monster battles just outside the door (this also prevents the much tougher second-floor enemies from appearing). you will then be able to face monsters and bosses with ease, having a massive arsenal of extremely powerful spells even if your level isn't that high.
  - The Boomerang is a lifesaver in the early game, as it allows you to attack every enemy at once. It's worth keeping even when single-target weapons would do more damage (and since changing equipment is a free action...).
  - The game hands you several Disc One Nukes just in time for the Disc-One Final Dungeon. The Staff of Ghent is an unlimited-use free cast of Midheal in battle, which will see usage until the end of the game. Carver gets Knuckle Sandwich, an extremely-powerful single-target attack; and the Fire Claw, a weapon that can last Carver halfway through the rest of the game thanks to its high damage (with an added fire effect for standard attacks) and the ability to cast Frizzle when used as an item, perfect for when enemies are resistant against Knuckle Sandwich.
- For Dragon Quest VII, Sword Dance was this in the original version. The 3DS remake changes this so that you no longer maintain all your abilities (Just the ones from the base classes) regardless of class to avoid Complacent Gaming Syndrome, but in the Playstation version it was easily one of the best abilities in the game.
  - Bang is a more literal example. Maribel learns this spell fairly early in the game (At level 9) and at that point, is an "I Win" button for most regular enemy encounters. By the time you reach Dharma Temple/Alltrades Abbey (unlocking the vocations), it will have tapered off - but by then you will have whips and boomerangs.
  - The 3DS version on the other hand allows you to exploit traveler's tablets for near infinite job growth. And some of the abilities that come from base classes are very good for the point when you can get them. "Muscle Dance", the final ability of the Dancer will give you a free group attack that is certainly good for random encounters that often have groups of enemies. So for characters who can't equip whips, or if Maribel doesn't have any? Just do the Muscle Dance. Thin Air is a powerful all-targeting spell of the wind element learned by Paladins and Pirates, which very few enemies resist early on. The final ability of the Sailor on the other hand is "Lightning", which hits all enemies - essentially a free slightly weaker "Bang" spell. The only downside of Muscle Dance, Thin Air and Lightning is that around mid-game (When you unlock the mid-advanced tier classes) they start to taper off.
  - Not just that, but the first casino you meet (Prior to Alltrades Abbey) now has a matching minigame that can give you some very useful equipment - the Zombiesbane sword for example will carry you all the way to a much much later scenario.
- Dragon Quest VIII gives us the casino, which has a roulette wheel that's incredibly broken. By betting the maximum number of tokens on every spot, you'll almost always walk away with literally tens of thousands more tokens than what you bet. With a little Save Scumming, it's possible to obtain some very nice armor, as well as one of Jessica's best whips, that makes monster encounters for the next five to ten hours a complete joke.
  - As soon as you arrive on the second continent the alchemy system becomes available, which offers some fun possibilities. Combining two Farmer's Scythes will make an Iron Axe for Yangus, which is the best weapon he'll get for quite a while. You can also make and sell 49 Strong Medicines and Special Medicines and 10 Lesser Panaceas, Rose-Roots, Strong Antidotes and Special Antidotes for a bit over 6,000 gold in profits for future ventures. Going down a ramp behind the small house across the bridge near Riverside Chapel also puts you on a beach with frequent Metal Slime encounters, which are relatively easy to kill with Eight's Thunder/Lightning Thrust and Yangus's Hatchet Man/Axecutioner; though you may want to wait until after you get Angelo for that so he can share the experience (and help out with Metal Slash).
- In Dragon Quest XI, it's possible to get Hustle Dance on Sylvando as early as level 18 by using Rectification on his Litheness tree. You now have access to a strong full-party heal, when Rab won't learn Multiheal until level 30 or Serena until level 35, and if Sylvando gets some Charm-boosting gear, it can quite easily out-heal them for far less MP cost. It's incredibly useful against bosses whose attacks hit the entire party, and you will run into enemies that can do that. Hustle Dance will even scale into the postgame depending on how Sylvando is built.
  - While not as busted as it was in some earlier Dragon Quest games, the Puerto Valor casino still has some twinky possibilities. Farming enough tokens can get you two Lightning Lances for Jade and Serena and a Platinum Power Sword for the hero, which are the best weapons you can get for those three until well into Act 2.
In Dragon's Dogma, if you don't buy anything else early on, you can buy 999 throwblasts in your hometown before you've done much at all. These will kill nearly any early enemy in one or two hits so you can just sell your weapons, use throwblasts on anything mildly threatening, & punch everything else. It's a great way to save money because you can skip buying early equipment & use the money you save to buy better equipment later.
- The Dark Arisen expansion also gives players the Set of Voldoan Armor and Set of Queen's Clothing for free once you reach Gran Soren, which are among the most powerful armor sets in the game. Expect to see every other pawn in the Rift wearing them, potentially even your own for a while once you see their stats.
In EarthBound, when guiding Jeff out of Winters to join Ness's party, you'll notice that the store outside of the Snow Wood Boarding School sells the T-Rex's Bat, Non-Stick Frying Pan, and Coin of Silence at insanely high prices, yet you don't have access to the ATM (since Jeff doesn't own an ATM card). Meanwhile, the various enemies appearing throughout Winters during this portion sometimes drop food items that can be sold at varying low prices. If you have enough patience, you can earn and sell enough items to raise enough money to obtain any of these items, so that when Jeff actually JOINS the main party, he can equip these items to Ness and/or Paula to make them insanely overpowered for this early in the game. Most people go for just the T-Rex's Bat, since at $698, it's the cheapest of these overpowered items. However, some people are patient enough to raise an additional $1490 for the Non-Stick Frying Pan and $2500 for the Coin of Silence. Regardless, if you're up to the challenge, you can potentially overpower at one or more party members.
Etrian Odyssey:
- If you know the conditional drop for a boss, or manage to save up a Formaldehyde (an item that, if deployed on a turn and the enemy dies within the same turn, guarantees that the enemy drops everything it can drop, even if you don't meet the proper conditions otherwise) in later games, you can unlock some pretty powerful equipment early in the game. The only obstacle from that point is the hundreds of thousands of En it costs to purchase it.
- Poison in the early game is a very handy way of clearing random encounters, especially if you have skills that can inflict it to multiple targets. It often does more damage than your party can do regularly until you start accessing stronger equipment and better skills in the midgame.
- Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth: It's possible but difficult to kill the Owl Beasts in 3F, even in the demo version where you're limited to the first 10 levels and first three floors, but they drop materials needed for the Feather Staff, which from +1 to +4 comes with a reasonably-powerful fire-elemental attack that costs only a single TP.
In the Fable series:
- Fable:
  - One Betting Mini-Game in the first city lets the player double their money by winning a childishly simple card-pairs style game. It's repeatable, so after a few rounds, you can win enough to buy all the Teaser Equipment in town, as well as a full stock of health and mana potions.
  - Merchants adjust their purchase and sale prices according to how many of an item they have in their inventory at the moment. Gather a few dozen of any item a merchant lacks; sell them at a high price; buy them back at the newly reduced price; and repeat until sufficiently wealthy.
  - The Hero Save feature saves the player character's inventory and stats, but resets the environment of an active quest, including all item spawns. A player can abuse this to obtain tons of money and enough Silver Keys to open every chest in the game, including ones containing legendary weapons.
  - The Combat Multiplier is an Experience Booster that scales with how long you fight without taking Hit Point damage. The Physical Shield spell redirects any damage taken into your Mana Points, allowing the player to raise the Combat Multiplier indefinitely and rack up huge amounts of XP early in the game. The multiplier also applies when you drink an experience-granting potion.
  - Skorm's Bow, the most powerful ranged weapon in the game, can be obtained with a bit of careful Human Sacrifice before your first mission.
  - Wellow's Pickhammer and the Cutlass Bluetane can both be obtained before the first mission of the game if you plan ahead for an If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten! challenge and a tricky bit of combat, respectively. They have about four times the damage of any weapon you can afford at that point and remain the best weapon available until the Arena Quest, which is about two-thirds of the way through the main game.
- Fable II:
  - It is possible to make obscene amounts of money early in the game by renting out your character's house, winding the computer's clock forward, collecting the back rent, buying more houses with the proceeds, and repeating.
  - You can create a guest account, sell all of its stats, and quit; all the experience will go back to your main character. you can then use that exp to buy more stats, create a guest, sell those stats, quit, and repeat over and over again. before to long all your stats can be maxed out before you even meet the first boss.
- In Fable III, you can have somebody join your game as a friend. You can send that friend money and items, and they can send it back. After disconnecting from the game, that gold is returned, along with the money already returned. 100 Gold turns into 200, then 4, 8, 16...
Faxanadu had a magic store early on, which sold one of the most powerful spells in the game — Death. Unfortunately it was set at such a high price that affording it would require several hours of Level Grinding (which, again, would take as long as it'd be to get it "honestly") or a cheat code (in which case, why don't you just cheat up the Death spell itself?).
- Not to mention it's far cheaper later on as well. Though it's only two hours, not several, if you know the correct spots.
- Said store also sold the Magic Shield, the best shield in the game (which is actually the second-best item in its category)
- If you know how to force item drops to appear, there's a place where you can get Wing Boots, which sell for roughly 1/5 the cost of the magic shield, to show up over and over not long after this shop. You can easily grab 5-6 extra pairs, then sell them in a nearby town. Using this method makes getting the Death spell and Magic Shield viable as you could scrounge up the cash for them in roughly 20 minutes.
In the first Geneforge game the Shaper class has an easy way to level grind, Guardians and Agents less so because of higher skill costs. The Shaper Player can create Fire-type minions called Fyoras and them have them kill each other for XP, then use the skill points earned to boost the levels of Fire-type creations, thus keeping the XP received from waning at higher level. The second stage even has an infinite healing fountain for refueling Essentia in between minion slaughter fests. It is not recommended to max out one's level just on Fyoras, but still, the high level army of Fyoras makes the early game stages a cake walk.
In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, if you held on to those Lucky Medals, you can win the powerful Water/Wind summon Eclipse from Lemuria's Lucky Fountain as soon as you arrive. Most of the significant boss enemies in The Lost Age are Fire/Earth-aligned, including two of the Superbosses and nearly all the significant dragons. If your play style involves using the summons at all, Eclipse is a game-breaker.
- In the first game, by using glitches to skip recruiting Mia and her Djinni and acquiring the rest of the Djinn normally, you can end up with twenty-seven Djinn and three characters to divide them between, instead of twenty-eight Djinn and four characters. This will give you nine Djinn per character instead of seven, and understanding how the Djinn are used in Golden Sun's Class and Level System will allow your remaining characters to access some of the most powerful class tiers that would normally be inaccessible until The Lost Age's endgame.
- Prevented with Lunpa, a high-level Bonus Dungeon with a Dungeon Town out front selling equally high-level equipment. While the town can be accessed as soon as you have Mia, the shopkeepers won't sell you anything until the dungeon is beaten (and the item needed to get in the dungeon can't be obtained until the last part of the game).
- In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, there's an item acquired about a third of the way through the game called the Ice Queen Gem, which enables all stages of the Cold Snap Psynergy, including its pricey-but-powerful final form, Frostbite. Rief, otherwise despised for his Crippling Overspecialization, has very high Psynergy Points and Mercury affinity, and can comfortably spam Frostbite to great effect, from the moment you get the Gem until weapons outclass Psynergy altogether.
In Gothic 3, after you gain control of the unnamed hero, you had the opportunity to buy a flaming sword for a ridiculously low price. This could be accomplished after rescuing a blacksmith (he's the one selling it). This was unfortunately fixed in a patch.
In Grandia using healing magic in the field generates water magic experience points. Since the game features both MP restore at save points and damage-dealing traps in the field, all it takes is one near the other to level water magic as high as you want (and since levelling magic improves stats, this is nothing to shake a stick at). This can also be done with earth magic and a poison trap, though this is so slow as to be useless to any but the most persistent munchkin.
Grandia III features Magic Eggs, which can be equipped to boost magic of certain elements or consumed to gain access to certain magic spells...and you soon gain the ability to combine them together to make better eggs. The game gives you quite a few eggs from the get-go, which can be combined into the best eggs in the game. Equipping them is gated by level, but the spells are only gated by mana cost, with the very most powerful/expensive ones using 99 MP...and your mages start with at least 200, and there are plenty of mana-restoring items. Also, while the eggs that give stats such as +3 in multiple elements are too high to equip early, you can easily get a +3 (which is the max) in one element that anyone can equip early. While this can't be spammed all over the place on random encounters due to mana costs, the random encounters are easy anyway...its real value is in making boss fights complete jokes by spamming enormous nukes that do ~3000 damage on bosses that have about 6000 HP. Also, your character can equip skills to reduce the mana costs and regen their own mana, and the most damaging spell learnable isn't even 99 MP, it's 84, with the caveat that it's only single-target.
One of the most ridiculous examples was also patently deliberate — in the obscure PS1 RPG The Granstream Saga the most powerful weapon in the game, the Onimaru, could only be acquired right at the very beginning, even before your first battle. You have 1 chance to get it by using a secret-revealing item on a seemingly random piece of wall to find it. Once you have it, you can basically trash the entire game without raising a sweat — it has almost twice the power of any other weapon in the game and is easy to use too (compared to the next strongest weapon which is unwieldy and tough to use).
Hyperdimension Neptunia has dungeons ranging from level 1 to up to level 1000. There's nothing stopping you from going into a high level dungeon with a lot of care and grabbing a powerful weapon very early. There's also no level system with equipment so there's no reason not to equip it.
- Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory has an accessory available at the start of chapter 2 that gives +2500 HP, more than doubling a character's health at that stage of the game. It's not even hidden, being up for sale at the shop for a substantial, but not unrealistic price. This may well have been deliberate to ease the grinding required to pass the Beef Gate the game suddenly throws at you.
Infinite Undiscovery released a few DLC (downloadable content, from Xbox Live's Marketplace) "vouchers" that allow you to purchase exceptionally rare materials from merchants anywhere in the world. Coupled with several profitable alchemy recipes to choose from, a player could raise the money for expensive components and craft themselves some of the best armors and weapons in the game before even finishing Castle Prevant (the third dungeon).
- Understatement. With Edward in your party, buy as many Sheep Hides as you possibly can, and turn them into Smiley Charms. Sheep Hides cost 120 fol apiece, and Smiley Charms sell for 1500, do the math. It gets even more ridiculous if you can download the free vouchers that let you buy practically every single material needed for item creation, from every merchant in the game, hrmm... Well, if you are stocking up on materials and feel as if the Smiley Charms aren't going fast enough, never fear, most likely during the process Edward will have become a level 6(max)smith, while you only have to be level 3 to make Horseshoes. They sell for 2600 fol, while you need one granite and 2 iron metal to make(which you can buy ANYWHERE after you download the vouchers)which collectively costs 750 fol. So, with the vouchers, you can legitimately get pretty damn near getting the last equipment for all of your characters, in the first or second town. So while the vouchers help, you don't even need them if you want ridiculous amounts of money, all you need is a TV and some extra batteries.
Jade Cocoon has four; two minions, one weapon, and one friendly bird-man:
- Arpatron, the minion that can only be captured once from Korus (unless you exploit a glitch) and is permanently missable, has spectacular stat growth and the hidden trait that enhances special attacks which is carried over through merging as long as you use Arpatron as the base. Merged carefully, this thing will carry you most of the way through the game and never stop being useful.
- You can catch a Nushab in the very first forest, who happens to be the only minion who naturally knows Poison Fang. Since poison is a crippling status ailment in the game^note and is very easy to inflict on both enemies and bosses, and with careful merging you can carry the Poison Fang ability into newer minions, these guys will never stop being worth farming or raising, at least until you find...
- The nightglow sword, which is found by fighting Ashas in the Moth Forest. It's guaranteed to inflict poison to any minion that isn't immune to it (which includes all but one of the bosses), and you'll use it throughout the entire game despite it's sub-par attack level.
- Kikinak the Bird Man, the guardian spirit of the Dragonfly Forest, can be fought as many times as you like until you beat the Spider Forest. He goes down easy to fire-based attacks and has a 64% chance of dropping a Great Walnut on defeat. Great Walnuts permanently increase Levant's max HP, so if you have a fire-type minion you'd like to Level Grind Kikinak is the place to do it: you can double Levant's HP within about 2 hours or so.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance: There is a quest relatively early in the game involving a German Knight, whom is wearing high-end armor. If the player stalks said character until they sleep, and murders him, they can basically gain Nigh-Invulnerability to early-game enemies.
In Kingdom Hearts, it's possible to level grind by sparring with your friends before the Heartless attack. Tidus is ridiculously easy to parry. You get EXP for parrying attacks and grinding enough this way makes the early game much easier.
A little grinding on the tutorial of Kingdom Hearts II will increase your stats enough to make the initial gameplay ridiculously easy — even though you don't have stats during the tutorial.
- Additionally, stepping on to a save point and going to the world map while in a Drive Form will reset you to normal with a maxed out Drive Gauge(even if it was nearly empty), making it possible to stay in Drive Form nearly continuously and level up much more quickly than is intended.
Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days gives us its hysterical joke weapons, which can be obtained after the tutorial missions by going back via Holo-Missions and earning their respective Challenge Sigils. Joke Weapon or not, they're more powerful than the basic Kingdom Key you start with, and make some of the earlier missions much easier.
Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has the Megaflare command, a massive and massively powerful fire-based attack that pretty much wipes the field, plus, using it is practically a guarantee of entering a Command Style, in case anything survived that blast. When can you get it? At the latest, after beating two of the first bosses. The Megaflare command is only available via the game's "command melding" system, but even if the longest, most round-about way is chosen (for the benefits of passive abilities, which can also be used to increase the damage your fire attacks do), it still boils down to only needing three individual commands (3 Aero commands, 6 Fire, and 3 Stop/Slow) all of which can be bought in any shop after beating the second boss. Sure, the commands have to be "leveled up" before being melded, but if you're not fond of fighting monsters, there's a minigame that can be played that will level them up FOR you. And the self-same minigame is home to yet another nuke, if you're decent with the Shotlock system. Sufficiently determined players can have Megaflare before the third world, and if you're playing as Terra, it's even easier: In the early Snow White world, Fission Firaga, the final ingredient, falls into your lap and from that point can be bought in stores. The only semblance of balance is the time involved leveling the commands and the fact that some enemies resist fire.
- Through a series of tricky jumps in Disney Town, it's possible to get Ven Superglide before he even learns regular Glide. Not only does this help greatly in combat and general exploration, it lets you access many more chests you weren't supposed to get until late-game.
In Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], repeatedly allowing the easily reobtained AR card dream eaters to die off and harvesting their dream pieces can allow to you make some dream eaters normally available only in the endgame at the very start of the game and take advantage of the powerful commands they provide. The Ryu Dragon is probably the most notable in this regard, providing both the highly destructive Meteor Crash and the screen clearing Mega Flare, on top of being a very competent fighter in its own right.
- Abusing the Flick Rush can result in a similar case. Simply spent your hard earned medals on Slot Edge, each can be bought for 150 Medal, and sold for 600 Munny each, rendering the majority of the prize being worthless in comparison. With enough munny, you can make a Star Rank Spirit with +20 level with almost every one of their abilities unlocked that can last you through the entire game right after finishing the first world.
- Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories features two, one in Sora's mode and one in Riku's mode:
  - Simba for Sora. He is a summon who you get early, and in the Game Boy Advance version, can hit everything on the screen at once if positioned correctly and knock about smaller enemies. It is very good for clearing out enemies early-game, but it will taper off (unless you sleight it) later on.
  - Maleficent's card in Riku's story. It gives an attack power boost at the cost of increasing your deck's reload speed, but Riku's reload speed is instantaneous and doesn't increase like Sora's does, so Maleficent basically has no drawback at all in his hands, besides the opportunity cost of not having another enemy card (like Jafar) in effect. And while Sora doesn't get the card until the game's midpoint at the earliest, Riku gets it right after his first floor.
Knights of the Old Republic: Cash is hard to come by at first, and that Yavin vendor sells awesome stuff that is definitely pricey. A vendor on Dantooine also has the best set of armor in the game and by the time you have the cash to get it, you probably can't go back to the planet. Unless, of course, you have the patience and the Save Scumming to shake down to two inexhaustible Pazaak sharks — the first in the Lower Taris Cantina, the second on Tatooine in the hunting lodge. Say hello to having some of the finest gear in the game before hitting the third planet.
In The Legend of Dragoon, it is possible to level up Dart's Additions to max early on. This gives a huge heads up. Early Disc 2 you have a chance to fight 00Parts, a high level minion that can insta-kill, but also gives absurd cash on defeat, which can be used to buy the best armor and helmet in the game, and an accessory which makes the Additions automatic.
- Because Rose only has three Additions, she can unlock her final Addition by the start of Disc 3 with minimal grinding. Likewise, Lavitz unlocks his penultimate Addition roughly halfway through Disc 1, making it possible to unlock his final Addition before even returning to Hellena, though it takes a lot of grinding to do so.
- Still early in the game, when you don't have your full roster of characters (and Lavitz is still alive) there's a shop in the Commercial Town of Lohan that sells some of the most powerful items in the game at 10000G. Kill enough 00Parts that live near Lohan and you can eventually get some of these for your characters (good luck outfitting your entire team).
- Legend of Dragoon has Metal Slime type monsters in Yellow Bird, Cursed Jar, Blue Bird, 00Parts, Treasure Jar, Red Bird, Lucky Jar, Rainbow Bird and Triceratops. These creatures alternately drop either a ton of experience or gold in a game that's awfully stingy with both. Some of them also have useful item drops. You can encounter some of these early in the game and farming these can make you an early powerhouse.
Gaius in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV is generally this as soon as he joins the party. As soon as he joins, there's a chest at the third dungeon of Elin that contains a Chrono Burst R that players can equip towards Gaius, long before Chrono Burst is even available. There's also a trial treasure chest in said dungeon that contains Musse's Brave Order that reduces the cost of all arts by 80%. Combine that with a character whose link can restore EP and link that character with Gaius and it's possible for Gaius to solo most of the game by himself by using his Wild Rage craft that refills his CP and just S-Craft bosses to death as long as players watch out for Gaius' HP and have sufficient item restorations for HP, EP, and BP. And just for added insult to injury, there's a cryptid outside Elin that drops a Lost Arts quartz when defeated. All of this can be done just before Juna's party reaches Crossbell for the first time.
Lie of Caelum:
- If the player chooses to farm for casino coins, they can obtain the Aloeguard, which surpasses most armor units in the early game. Equipping one on each party member can trivialize even True mode, at least until the enemies catch up.
- If the player clears the Star Warrior game, they receive the Terra Gear (SW), which has good stats and three mod slots.
- There's nothing stopping the player from farming enough money to max out all the PomPomYu donation rewards and expanding their shop inventory, which includes powerful equipment. However, the December 20 2022 patch increased the prices of the more powerful items above the wallet cap to prevent players from getting too overpowered too early.
Light Crusader has two examples. First, you can get the best armour in the game from the Lily pad enemies, which are all over the place in the first two levels of the dungeon. Second, you can fill up your magic completely if you find the hidden green potion in the second level.
Lil' Monster has a Disc One Nuke from the first boss, Gyro. You don't have to beat him to advance the game, but if you do, he drops the one-of-a-kind Dowser gem. Dowser's power isn't that impressive, but it can be used to summon a different monster, who, while difficult to beat at an early stage, is still defeatable with Save Scumming... and the gem he drops doubles your damage dealt. Plus, the Dowser gem itself can be used to make Gyro your mon, and his power is decent for that early game stage.
The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age makes it possible, if insanely tedious, to grind ability points in single battles, purely by focusing on defensive abilities throughout combat, and healing whenever necessary — or not, since Berethor's awesome Leadership party buffs can regenerate health and power points. What follows is Berethor using a speed buff for more turns before enemy turns, followed by an action point regeneration buff, followed by a hit point regeneration buff — rinse and repeat until you have everything you need.
Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals has three good examples:
- The first time you face Gades it's supposed to be a Hopeless Boss Fight, but a properly equipped party with enough curative items and a ground up level can in fact take him down. You earn his sword from the battle which not only has obscene attack for a good portion of the game but can also use Octo-Strike, which hits an opponent eight times in a row. This weapon will be useful for most of the game. Mind you, with the amount of Level Grinding required to make Gades even physically possible to defeat during this encounter, it's going to be a long time before you have any further trouble with the game anyway...
- About halfway through the game, the party is able to go visit the Ancient Cave. The Ancient Cave is basically a self-contained Roguelike mini-game; it has 99 Randomly Generated Levels, your party stripped of all equipment and items and reduced to Level 1, and you have to find items and equipment in randomly placed chests while dealing with increasingly strong monsters. In addition, there are blue-colored treasure chests, many of which bear some of the most powerful weapons and equipment in the game. And when you leave, you lose everything gathered in the cave except what you find in blue chests. Should one spend enough time in the Ancient Cave, their party becomes Nigh Invulnerable until the end of the game.
- An early game boss, the Catfish, will occasionally drop the Catfish Jewel, which comes with the Mega Quake IP ability. It hits all enemies, is insanely cheap, and outdamages everything for the first quarter of the game.
In Lufia: The Legend Returns, the game's Infinity -1 Sword, the Alumina Sword, is sometimes dropped by normal enemies very early in the game.
- Much like the prior game, winning the two early Hopeless Boss Fights against Gades rewards you with unique gear. Beating him requires Item Farming in the Randomly Generated Levels for Hi-Bombs and Revives, but nets you a powerful shield with a hefty damage boost and a powerful sword that'll carry you for half the game.
One of the earliest abilities you can learn in Lufia: The Ruins of Lore is Chance Hit, which does random fixed damage between 20 and 200 for a very low AP cost. Eldin and Torma's standard attacks will likely be doing about 30 at this point, making the ability ridiculously powerful. Only towards the end of the game does the Fury skill best it in consistent damage output.
- Early in the game, you can catch bird monsters called Puccis. Puccis are absolutely worthless as Mons...but they do learn Rapidfire, an attack that hits every enemy and raises the user's speed for completely free. Teach Rapidfire to a worthwhile Mon, and they'll tear most encounters to shreds.
Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, once again, has the Gades Sword. Though its stats aren't as spectacular this time around, it's one of the few weapons to have the Fire 3 spell, an utterly-Game-Breaking attack.
- While you don't get bonus experience in New Game Plus this time around, there's a few bonuses for subsequent playthroughs:
  - The best Ancient Cave drops are restricted to New Game Plus...and you can visit the Ancient Cave right from the start of a New Game Plus. You'll only have Maxim, but once you find weapons like the Red Wing Sword or the Lightning, you won't need anyone else.
  - The Mystic Stone Board is also immediately available, and any "blue" items and Mystic Stones you have are retained. This can start you off with solid gear and massively-boosted stats.
In the Gameboy Color RPG Magi-Nation, a basic healing item could be sold for considerably more (taking into account the low max-money cap) than it cost to buy it. It doesn't take half a brain to figure out the consequences of this.
Magna Carta 2 allows you to buy a complete collection of gag weapons for the small price of 400MS. Not only are these weapons given to you (almost) straight away, but they're the most powerful weapons in the game and will destroy any semblance of challenge right up until the final boss.
In the Mass Effect series:
- Mass Effect:
  - On Eden Prime, a crate near where you encounter Ashley is guaranteed to have the Scorpion Light Armor. While Scorpion armor can be bought at any time from the Normandy requisition officer, you will not have the thousands of credits to buy it until a few missions after leaving the Citadel. Over here, you get one for free, and it is easily the best early game armor, outclassing even some heavy armors you might get as random drops.
  - As soon as you get Tali, max out her 'Quarian Machinist' skill and give her a shield boosting armor mod. Doing so will give her enough shielding to turn her into a shotgun-wielding Stone Wall for the next few hours.
  - The Level VII "Spectre - Master Gear" Weapons, which are unlocked after the player hits one million credits and are second only to the Level X Spectre Weapons. Considering the game loves to throw the player tons of loot, they have lots of things to sell and not much incentive to spend money buying weapons from stores because they probably picked it up half an hour ago. If they explore UNC worlds before doing any story Missions, they'll be able to afford a full set of these weapons and make every future encounter in the game a damn-near cakewalk with no cooldown concerns for all but the sniper rifle. The only reason why the Level X Master Gear aren't listed here is because you additionally need to hit Level 50 to get them.
  - You can actually get the Master Gear weapons on your first visit to the Citadel. After you save Dr. Michel and complete her questline, she will buy items for more than other nearby merchants sell them. So it's a matter of about half an hour devoted to running back and forth to amass that first million credits.
  - Completing the Pinnacle Station DLC's quest line unlocks an apartment on Intai'sei where you can spend credits to salvage convoys over and over, one of which allows players to get most of the best equipment in the game at the maximum level for less money than it legitimately costs to buy them (and it's absolutely vulnerable to Save Scumming) This allows a low level player to get equipment that isn't possible to get under normal circumstances without beating the game once to change the level cap from 50 to 60 (such as the coveted Colossus Armor or the aforementioned Level X Spectre - Master Gear).
- Mass Effect 2:
  - The Locust SMG, obtained during Kasumi's loyalty mission, which is a fast-firing weapon that is accurate enough to be used at long range, and is great for stripping shields or barriers. It can also be obtained just before Horizon, where (on Insanity, at least) every single enemy you fight has barriers. Oh, and Squad Mates have perfect aim and recoil when using it.
  - Downloadable Content brought us the M-96 Mattock, an Assault Rifle that fires sniper-rifle ammunition. If you start the game as a Soldier, you have access to Assault Rifles immediately and can use this gun to mow down just about every enemy in seconds.
  - The DLC also gives us the Geth Plasma Shotgun, which is both incredibly powerful and has no real spread, unlike all the other shotguns. It's incredibly useful in the hands of the player, but since the AI Squad Mates have perfect aim and no ammo concerns, they can absolutely *melt* through most enemies with the thing.
- Mass Effect 3:
  - The Cerberus Ajax Armor (and, to a certain extent, the N7 Defender Armor) straddles the line between this and Bribing Your Way to Victory. The former is a piece of Downloadable Content, the latter a Pre-Order Bonus — and both of them have more cumulative benefits than any other suit in the basegame, cost nothing in-game, can be acquired as soon as the player steps foot on the Normandy and makes Shepard an absolute tank that's far sturdier and resistant to damage than they're expected to be at the beginning of the game. For reference, the only other suit that offers the same level of cumulative benefit (the Cerberus Nightmare, Shade or Spirit Armor) is a Bragging Rights Reward offered during the Citadel DLC, which can't even be accessed until (at the earliest) after the Cerberus Coup.
  - Despite attempts by the developers to marginalize their impact, nearly all of the Downloadable Content weapon packs are broken in one fashion or another, having far more damage output than Shepard is expected to have at the beginning of the game (with some comparable to New Game Plus weapon levels, without even beating a single mission). These include the fully automatic Piranha shotgun, which shreds even the toughest enemies in close quarters; the Cerberus Harrier assault rifle, which has a combination of high damage, rate of fire, accuracy, and low recoil that make it extremely effective in just about any situation; and perhaps most of all, the Typhoon machine gun. The Typhoon has an extremely high sustained damage potential, only mitigated by extreme recoil and ammo consumption. Your squadmates, however, do not have to worry about either of those problems, and equipping both squadmates with Typhoons and appropriate ammo powers can change the toughest fights on the highest difficulty from a brutal slog to a cakewalk.
- Mass Effect: Andromeda gets in on the paid DLC weapons act with the Pathfinder weapon set, Deep Space Explorer armor and the Andromeda Elite helmet. But if paying for extra weapons doesn’t float your boat, favorites from the trilogy such as the Widow, Black Widow and the Carnifex already have their blueprints unlocked when you leave the Nexus for the first time. You can therefore go right ahead, collect the minerals they need and craft them before getting to Eos.
Mega Man X: Command Mission has Massimo and his second-best weapon, the Interceptor. After the second (technically third) chapter, you can send Mechaniloids to cleared areas to find hidden money and items. Send some to the first chapter's location, Lagrano Ruins, and then proceed to the current chapter's location, Gaudile's Laboratory. Grind levels and Zenny for a while, then return to base and check your Mechaniloids. They should have found the key to a secret room in Lagrano along with Zenny. Return to the Laboratory and keep grinding Zenny, then head to Lagrano and use the key to find a secret weapon shop that has the Interceptor. You now possess Massimo's best weapon until Chapter 10, and it also has a chance to cancel an enemy's turn, which even works on bosses.
Mega Man Battle Network:
- For every game in the series, the difficulty is mainly determined by how quickly the player can condense their folder down to a single chip code, as no individual chip is powerful enough to compare to being able to use five chips every turn. Each game has at least one code that can be used to build a folder extremely early on if the player knows what to look for, usually the one that matches the game's first boss such as FlashMan in 3 or BlastMan in 6.
- Mega Man Battle Network 1 has the Guts Shoot Program Advance. All three of its components are readily available from almost the beginning of the game, you can put five copies of each into your thirty-chip folder to make it almost guaranteed that you'll draw it on the first turn, and it does an unavoidable 500 damage in a game where even the strongest boss only has 1000 HP.
- BN1 also features the WoodTower chips, which you can grind for as soon as you beat WoodMan. Not only do they do an obscene amount of damage for the point in the game when you get them, but they're super-effective against the Elec-element enemies in the Power Plant.
- Mega Man Battle Network 3: White and Blue introduces the Number Trader, which allows you to input an eight-digit code to receive various items. While the codes are meant to be found throughout the game from NPCs or in various external media, they're readily available online and can be used at any time. In many of the games, the Number Trader rewards will snap the early difficulty of the game in half with chips and parts meant to be acquired much later.
- Mega Man Battle Network 5 Double Team DS has the most extreme example in the series: it lets you import your folder from the GBA version to the DS version using the dual-slot feature, enabling access to an endgame folder from the very start of the game, and it gives you access to a Super Mode with a plethora of unique abilities. Inserting any of the Boktai games instead won't let you carry over the folder, but results in an even more broken Super Mode.
Mega Man Star Force:
- All three games see the Number Trader return in the form of Cipher Codes, with all the same access to a plethora of high-level cards and parts from the beginning of the game with the aid of a walkthrough.
- Also in all three games, you can register Brothers from other players, including yourself if you have multiple versions of the game. The second game takes this even further by including two out of three versions of the game on each cart, thus allowing you to register the cart as a Brother with itself. If you've completed the other version, you can get a good number of pickups when you first reach them earlier than you're supposed to, and you can send end-game cards via mail from your completed game.
- In Star Force 1, defeating a boss by performing a suitably powerful combo of cards will let you register it as a Best Combo, which can be turned into a card, letting you use that combo whenever you want.
- In Star Force 2, the Wave Command Code menu can be accessed shortly after booting up the game; although accessing it is undocumented in the English release, it still works. The interface is meant to use an overlay you were supposed to purchase in order to know where on the touchscreen to press to input each code, but this is trivially bypassed with a walkthrough, and these codes have effects like giving you ten times your starting HP, extra Giga Card slots, enhancing your standard buster to the point where it renders a fifth of your starting folder obsolete, and the ability to start every single battle as Tribe King, skipping the normally long and complicated in-battle process to activate it.
- Star Force 2 also has ten Blank Cards available throughout the game, some of which can be gotten extremely early. Using more Wave Command Codes, these can be turned into essentially any card in the game.
- Star Force 3 features the Noise Modification Gear system in the Japanese release, which is essentially the same as the Wave Command Code system. This one actually is locked out of the international release, but nothing stops you from undoing the lock with a bit of hacking to use it as you wish. It also features the Secret Satellite Server, which by following a somewhat unintuitive system of unlocking higher ranks, allows you free access to the same massively overpowered folder normally only accessible in your Super Mode.
Metal Max sequel Metal Max Returns has the Abrams tank, costs a bundle (20K+ Gold), but it does pay off as being one of the best tanks in the game up until you get the Red Wolf or Whitemuu and even then it still is useful.
- For the PS2 Metal Saga game, to quickly become nearly invincible. Just get the Buggy, then avoid battles and dungeons until you get on the train. The train has a gambling den where you can easily become super-rich. Follow the train to the Hell's Keep where you can buy some of the best equipment like Rail Cannons for your tanks. C Units determine the tank's likelihood of getting hurt by an attack, so buy those Sigma 80s and then return to the early levels you skipped out on.
Might and Magic:
- Owing to the random nature of the third, fourth and fifth games' loot system, you can potentially get weapons and gear with exceptionally powerful prefixes very early in the game; Ruby, Sapphire, Diamond and especially Obsidian carry heavy enchantments, with Obsidian in particular granting +10 to hit and a whopping +50 damage; even on a crappy dagger or staff, that's league's beyond any weapon' s base damage. That said, the odds of finding these in low level dungeons are extremely low and still aren't great even in high leveled ones, so it's more of a "nice if you get it, but you probably won't without copious savescumming" thing.
- VI actually has one as an intended feature. In the starting town of the game, you can find a hidden fly spell scroll, in the wall of one of the town's buildings, which you can use to fly atop another building, which, in turn, features a hidden portal to another map (Dragonsand), which is filled with the toughest foes of the entire game: dragons. This portal drops you near the Shrine of Gods which greatly ups your stats (you can access the area normally, with extensive traveling through dangerous territories). In addition to that, there's an Easter Egg dungeon there, one of booths in which gives the party an extremely powerful temporary buff. Finally, upon exiting the dungeon, which again drops you near the Shrine of Gods, you can use another hidden portal to get back to the starting map. Now, until the temporary buff expires, you have enough time to wipe the accessible area of the first map without effort. It's not game breaking but still a major boost at the very beginning of the game.
- Might and Magic I has a fountain near the beginning that temporarily sets a single stat of one member of your party to max. However, there is a bug that allows you to use it repeatedly until your entire party is max everything. This lets you cakewalk through some high-level random encounters, and lets you level up your party very quickly.
- Might and Magic VII gives you the opportunity to kill a dragon, in the first map of the game. You can either do it with a spell staff, which you can conveniently accept from one of the peasants (although this has implications, later on) or you can go by the process of exploiting the AI and employ the tactic of shoot and hide. This is a freakishly time-consuming process but dragons give of the best loot. Given the fact that you can multiloot the dragon, you can outfit your entire party with the best gear in the land!
- In Might and Magic VIII if you head straight to Garrote Gorge and into the Dragon Cave, you can recruit Ithilgore, a level 5 Dragon. You only need to increase his Dragon skill to buff up armor class, hit rate and damage, and give him access to Fly. His standard dragon breath attack is far stronger than normal arrows and never misses. If you have him in your party, you're nearly invincible.
- World of Xeen, the combination of IV and V, has one due to how the combination works: with both installed, one of the several connections between the two games' sides^note is between the two starting towns if you only have one game (the combined game always starts on IV's side). Characters created on V's side — something you can freely do after starting the game by going to the tavern there — start at level 5 as that side is more dangerous, and once you've done that, nothing keeps you from going back to IV's side and sweep through the early content.
In Neverwinter Nights you had the option of using a created character in a character battles optional side-game. However one of these arena's required level 10 characters or higher, and if you were less than that, it would automatically increase your level to level 10. So create a 1st level character, import, export and then load him into the game and you'd begin the game with 10 levels ready to go.
- In Hordes of the Underdark, the player was immediately given enough XP to hit level 15. Which could be used in the same fashion. Almost as egregious as making a module consisting entirely of user-created ubergear and weak monsters with a massive challenge rating, giving XP through the nose. Not that anyone would ever do this.
- You could easily make a custom module that did nothing but shot you up to an arbitrary level and gave you great gear. The developers were canny enough to prevent you from linking a script to any of these items to do whatever you wanted, although those of us who wanted this power for good, not evil, were bummed. By far the worst, though, was the Appraise skill. It decreased the amount you paid for items from vendors and increased how much they'd give you for 'em. If you had enough Appraise skill (which was by no means easy, but quite possible) you could make money by buying and selling an item ad nauseum.
Octopath Traveler:
- Therion's item-stealing mechanic and Tressa's item-purchasing mechanic allow them to take or buy items and equipment from nearly every NPC in the game. While the chance of a successful steal rises with Therion's level, even at low levels it's possible to get most of the equipment with a bit of Save Scumming.
- The Soul Knife can be stolen from multiple characters in Noblecourt, which can be reached with a short risky run from the town that Cyrus is recruited in. It offers an excellent +98 Physical Attack and a monstrous +188 Elemental Attack, far more than most staffs.
- The player can steal a Golden Axe in the same town where Alfyn is recruited. You will need someone to knock out the person blocking the door to reach him. However as H'aanit, Therion, and Alfyn's starting areas are neighboring towns, you can feasibly get this weapon within the first hours of gameplay and it continues to be one of the best equips for H'aanit and Alfyn up to the late game.
- H'aanit's monster capturing mechanic can be highly abused if you know where certain easy to capture 'higher tier' monsters are. With enough careful planning, it's possible for her to be doing quad digit damage while everyone else is still doing triple digit damage even when boosted to max.
- Tressa's parents have a Warrior's Scarf and Dragon's Scarf available to be Purchased by their daughter. While they cost 16,500 leaves each, it's relatively easy to have 33,000 leaves if Tressa isn't chosen as the protagonist. The scarves restore 100 HP and 6 SP every turn, respectively. Early on in the game, these make survival almost trivially easy.
Oracle of Tao has two ways to level to 20 in the first town. The first is beating a certain type of ghost near the graveyards, and the second is a random room which has a priestess that gives levelups to the party (up to level 20).
- Stealing from the second boss in the game yields a Dark Sword which is much more powerful than any of the current weapons before this point.
- Since few enemies drop actual money in the more recent updates, money is usually made selling stuff. It is possibly to make money very fast though, by selling Blackmail pictures of one of the party members crossdressing.
Paladin's Quest has the Gomutai, a sword which can be found in the middle of the game and which has an attack power of 300 when the next best sword (found much later) has 100. It seems to be a Disc One Nuke, but ends up not imbalancing the game despite performing exactly as advertised, since you have a four character party and doubling the power of one character doesn't double the power of the party.
Both of the first two Paper Mario games have a badge called Power Plus, which provides a free +1 boost to all of your attacks without any drawbacks. Typically, you find one Power Plus fairly late in each game, but there's also a vendor that sells a second one in exchange for Star Pieces. While the one in the first game is expensive, the one in the sequel only costs 15 Star Pieces... a price that you can afford before the second chapter with enough searching.
- Making matters better, by preemptively gaming the clock on your console and setting it back about a year, you can buy a Happy Lucky Lottery ticket^note, set it forward around 11 months, and then check the ticket daily (resetting and forwarding the clock a day each time) and within 30 resets you'll win first prize: another Power Plus badge. Lucky can't tell you're cheating when you do it this way and you can play the lottery as soon as you complete the first chapter. Combined with the aforementioned badge bought with Star Pieces and you'll be doing end-game levels of damage with basic attacks.
- Keep in mind that each Power Plus increases the damage each time Mario hits an enemy by 1, meaning with both his base hammer attack will deal 4 damage while his jump attack (which hits twice) will deal a total of 6. If you get lucky/are patient enough, you can also buy the Jumpman badge from Charlieton as soon as the end of the Prologue, which will increase the damage done by each jump attack again by 1. Add to that the Super Boots you get in the middle of Chapter 2, and you're doing a devastating 10 damage in a single turn. Magnus Von Grapple is FUCKED.
- The "Danger Mario" setup, while normally a late-game tactic (As reducing your max HP to 5 can't be done until after Chapter 5) can still be taken advantage of early in the game. Two "Power Rush" badges can be obtained as soon as Chapter 1 is beaten, giving Mario's hammer an attack of six and his jump an attack of five each (totaling ten) if both are equipped. Keeping Mario below 5 health is easy enough to do, as is protecting him by putting his partner up front, and at this point you'll be one-punching all enemies and killing bosses before they get much of a chance to attack. While it won't become the Game-Breaker it can be until you can set it up properly (Max HP of 5 and farming as many Power Rush badges as possible from Shady Koopas), being able to wipe out an entire enemy party with one Multibounce will be useful for much of the game.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star also has this in the form of Paperization blocks, which are hidden, but once uncovered can be used to upgrade your weaker stickers into their more powerful forms. These blocks are available as early as the first world.
Phantasy Star IV has this in the form of its combo system. Set up a macro to use the techniques FOI, WAT and TSU. TRIBLASTER can carry you through most of Motavia, although it's inefficient against later bosses.
- When Rune joins your party, he basically is a Disc-One Nuke in and of himself due to his being significantly higher level than everyone else and his mastery of multi-target spells. Using him to waste screens full of enemies is a very efficient way to level grind and earn meseta sufficient to carry everyone else through the entire first third of the game. You can also strip him for his equipment before he leaves, which nets you the Wood-Cane, an extremely rare item (you won't find another one until much later on, if you ever do, as it's a very rare enemy drop in only one particular dungeon) that serves as an unlimited-use combat healing item.
In Planescape: Torment, for Fighters proficient in hammers, it is fairly easy to get Mazed quite early in the game and find a Brimstone Hammer, which will last you until mid-game or later.
In Planet Alcatraz, as soon as you get to the Cannibal Village, you can exploit the AI and kill the guards carrying Kain Machineguns. They make subsequent fights significantly easier, provided that your party has at least 2 characters strong enough to hold them. The Achtung Machineguns are even more powerful and can be acquired at the same location, but ammo for them are so rare that they are only good for selling.
In the first Gold Box game, Pool of Radiance you can easily get your Level 1 characters a practically infinite supply of Plate Mail +2 and Two-handed Swords +2 (this game is so low-level that these are among the best magic items you can get). How? Hire the Level 4 Fighter NPC and murder him (preferably with a Sleep spell and attack follow-up) during one of your many random encounters. Rinse and repeat.
In Record of Agarest War, there's a means of getting this without DLC. Simply save up 250 TP, and buy 10 Vessels of Life from the Adventurer's Guild. Grab the title...and then sell them all. You now have 250,000 gold as early as Generation 1, and can easily get a few other titles with ease...and 3 pieces of Mithral. And the smithing guide for Mithral gear, which in turn means that you can create a few Mithral items as soon as Platinum gear is available. A bit of a late example, but it helps with trashing late Generation 2/Early Generation 3. Some of the actual items from the Adventurer's Guild can be this as well, provided you save up for them in lieu of manuals.
- In terms of characters, there's the first generation protagonist Leonhardt Raglen. Once you get him to level 10, he gets his first Willpower: Unleash All. What this does is that by having him at 25% HP or less, he gets a massive boost to his attack, defense, magic, and magic defense. Needless to say, any boss battle consists of having Leo killed (or at 25% HP), have an EX Skill handy and watch the fireworks. After his generation though, you lose him and you get his replacement, his son Ladius until you can find a Forbidden Tome to revive Leo.
Robopon has quite a few of these.
- In the first game, you can find a LostCode in the first town, which acts as a free evolution. Depending on what TV remote you have or what button you press, you can also find a hidden treasure chest with a Shortcut in it, which acts as a free level up.
- Pegs in the first game; it is practically one robot that most players will have in their party due to its reliability. It became even better in the sequel with an evolution, PegSS... but sadly wasn't available til near the end of the game due to its rare sparking combination.
- Replacing Pegs in the sequel is Hexbot (Cross), which you can immediately spark after getting all of the batteries from the Cave, including the hidden one. It can use instant death software and has decent growth compared to other Robopon you can spark early on in the game.
- Gigapon and its evolutions fill this role in Ring, and is useful even in the endgame.
Sacred Earth - Promise: The Transcendence Master Core can be obtained in a hidden room in the first dungeon. Its balanced stat multipliers are all very high for the early game and can rival early specialized MCs in their strongest stats.
SaGa Frontier allows you fast access to several very powerful weapons very early in the game. The most spectacular of these? At the beginning of Asellus' quest, she starts out in the village of the craftsman of the Infinity +1 Sword which means, for a small sacrifice of life points, you can have the second strongest sword in the game available to you roughly thirty minutes in. To balance this, however, there is an essentially optional boss battle near the end of this quest that is extremely difficult to beat, even with this sword.
- Scrap is the first stop in almost every player's quest in Saga Frontier, whether required or not, and for good reason. Every protagonist can pick up at least two or three decent characters at the pub there, and the junk shop is where one of the game's best-known exploits can be abused. Normally you pay a small admission fee and then get to pick out three items; sometimes you'll get a weapon or armor, though more often than not you'll get a Repair Kit or a useless Junk or Broken Bumper accessory instead. However, you can enter the shopkeeper's sell menu and click on the seventh option on the list (Hyperion Bazooka) and then go back in to get seven more items, and you can repeat this process any number of times. Better still, selling Repair Kits back to him will gradually upgrade his stock, letting you eventually get some decent mid-game gear before you've done much of anything story-wise.
- If you want to take this even further, you can also sell back your extra swords from the shop at Nakajima Robotics in Shrike; Osc-Swords in particular net you 110 credits apiece. You can then invest this in another well-known exploit known as Takonomics — buying and selling gold in Koorong and Nelson. A guy in Nelson's bar sells ingots for a flat 500 apiece, while the currency exchange counter in Koorong's price fluctuates as you buy and sell (to a maximum of 2040 and a minimum of 0). Thing is, though, you can roll the price down to zero in the menu and keep offering more gold to sell, but as soon as you roll back up, the prices go up too; so roll all the way down, all the way back up, and then start selling until the price drops just under 500. Doing this, you can very quickly turn a modest amount of gold into a pile of 55,000 or so credits and go on a shopping spree for really powerful gear, with enough ingots left over to repeat the trick if you ever need more. And if you're wondering, yes, both of these tricks still work in the 2021 remaster of Saga Frontier.
In Sands of Salzaar from Han Squirrel Studio, when making a new character the player is given a number of legacy points to modify their characters by either increasing their starting wealth or given special abilities and etc. Among these legacies are the abilities to summon a Fire Elemental and another that summons an Arctic Wolf. These summons greatly help a starting player avoid getting surrounded in combat and can help greatly in duels or other solo fights.
- The tavern keeper Fadia of Redstone Keep (one of the earliest locations encountered) is a Ms. Fanservice who shows up often during the loading screen, but being shown prominently also lampshades how useful she is. If you win her favor through gift-giving and buying everyone a round of drinks, she will eventually give you an artifact. It's an indestructible Book of Phoenix Summoning, which conjures up a powerful Phoenix into combat for 25 seconds before waiting a short cooldown. Other tavern keepers also have gifts but none of these come close in power.
Secret of Evermore features a glitch which can be exploited for Disc One Nukedom-if you save the game while a character is buffed and quit, when you start the game again you'll still be buffed, but your actual stats will be at their unbuffed level. Since the game still thinks you're buffed, when the buff wears off it'll reduce your stat...and if it's low enough, it'll wrap around to be super high, and you'll be able to one-shot almost anything. Balancing this is the fact that if you level up your stats will increase as normal, meaning if you're not careful you could wind up with stats even lower than your starting baseline.
- You also get the Crush spell fairly early in the game, which is fairly weak but is cast with 1 limestone and 1 wax, two of the cheapest most common elements in the game. Since it's so cheap to grind, you can level it up to 99 in about an hour of acquiring it, making it strong enough to one-shot all the enemies on the screen in one cast and most bosses until you reach Omnipota.
In Simplest RPG, you have a chance to find +85 items in the Ruins if you bought King mode (+60 normally) that can also be above your level. They are extremely powerful, potentially giving you 10x higher stats than expected by the time you can wear them.
In Skies of Arcadia, the four soldiers at the very beginning of the game have a very low chance of dropping an Electri Box. If you get it, you can utterly destroy the first four bosses of the game with it.
- Veteran players of the Legends update for Gamecube always save up their first three Moonberries to unlock Aika's Delta Shield - a wonderful skill that blocks ALL spells that target the party for one round and costs only 2 SP. (The downside is it blocks your own spells too, but healing/buffer items are dirt cheap and bypass this effect, so it's a negligible disadvantage.) This skill single-handedly makes any spellcasting enemies far less of a threat, letting you defeat some of the Wanted battles much earlier than intended and get a ton of cash and some sweet items for your trouble. Rupee of the Larso clan is a perfect example; if you fight him right after clearing the Temple of Pyrynn, he grants enough experience to give your entire team at least one full experience level (probably two) and drops the Captain's Hat accessory, which bolster's Vyse's attack by a whopping 80 points - a pretty ridiculous amount for the early game and still substantial by the end. Needless to say, this makes the rest of the game considerably easier to complete.
The Sweet Katana in South Park: The Stick of Truth is the highest powered weapon in the game, it can purchased at Jimbo's shop only if you're at level 15 and have a large amount of cash. The weapon can easily be obtained once you're free to explore the town at the very start by heading over to City Wong where there are a few enemies outside the entrance, they give a fair amount of EXP and cash once beaten, then continue re-entering and leaving the restaurant where the enemies will keep respawning, allowing a good amount of grinding and money to earn the katana.
Starfield:
- The UC Vanguard quest line is available early in the game, and soon leads to a boss battle at the New Atlantis starport. Two security guards will offer to help you. If you accept their help they will probably die, but one of them will drop a minigun worth about 80,000 credits. Give the gun and at least one round of the appropriate ammo to your companion, and don't forget to equip it on them. Congratulations! Your companion now has a minigun that will never run out of ammunition.
- The Cutter combines this trope with Magikarp Power. It is the first weapon you get, but it quickly becomes obsolete in combat because its high rate of fire cannot make up for its low base damage, However, it counts as a laser, and the fourth rank of the laser skill gives a 5% chance of setting your enemies on fire. 5% x a high rate of fire = a good chance of setting multiple fires on your enemy. Fire deals percentage damage over time, and multiple fires stack. Stitch that, Terrormorphs.
The Playstation RPG Star Ocean: The Second Story is a perfect example of this. Using a bit of Level Grinding to gain skill points, you can acquire an item early on called the Mischief. This item drops a random item into your inventory every 15 seconds, one of which is called the Forged Medal. The Forged Medal reduces the EXP needed for a character to reach the next level to 1. With a bit more grinding, you can get the ability to replicate the Forged Medal, allowing you to level your characters insanely high in little time at all. Of course, if you spend just a tiny bit more time grinding, you won't need to copy Forged Medals until the game's second disk...it's entirely possible to gain the most powerful sword in the game before you're even halfway finished with the game's first disc!
- Getting as far as you can in the tournament in Disc 1 nets you a sword which can only be obtained this way. All you need after that is two Mithrils, which you can get randomly by using particular items made via item creation. Customizing using the two Mithrils yields the Eternal Sphere, possibly the best weapon in the entire game, which renders Disc 1 a joke and everything up to the final boss (not including the Bonus Dungeon) at least easily doable.
- It is also possible to obtain at least 2 copies, possibly 3 of the second most powerful armor during the first disc. Get Ernest to join your group and you can pickpocket one from him in two specific towns. You can also pickpocket one from one of the soldiers on Claude's dad's ship (assuming you chose Claude as the main character). Any character equipped with this armor will be invincible throughout the first disc and probably throughout the entire second disc except the Final Dungeon and the Bonus Dungeon. The Bonus Dungeon is the only place you can find even better armor.
- If you get your pickpocketing skill high enough in Disc One, you can pickpocket an item called the Treasure Chest from a guy in Mars Village. The Treasure Chest produces three items at random when used. It can potentially give you the Marvel Sword, which Claude won't have to replace for a stronger sword until halfway through Disc Two. It raises your offense and defense to extreme levels, effectively turning one character into a super tank.
- And on the subject of skills, a lot of other ones can fall under this trope on their own, even before they combine into abilities. Some of the best examples would be Biology (A boost of (skill level squared times 10) to your HP, meaning a 1000 HP boost at maxed level), Herbal Medicine (+ 3% to the effect of Blue/Blackberries per level, which start off restoring 22% of your max HP and MP respectively, but at max level will recover a much more useful 52%), Danger Sense (+ 3 Stamina per level, Stamina will recover HP and MP after battles, which is INSANELY helpful), and Playfulness (gives some cash upon gaining a level in the skill, giving HUGE amounts at the higher levels; maxing out this skill for ONE character will take care of your money problems for the entire first disc). The better ones are balanced out by extremely high SP costs, but by leveling the Perseverance skill and doing a bit of grinding, they can be easily be bought before leaving the first continent.
The tradition continues in the Playstation 2 RPG Star Ocean: Till the End of Time:
- It might be considered a Guide Dang It!, but some stumble upon it on their own. In Star Ocean 3, you get bonuses for "completing" a map (walking every single portion of it), which is a rather tedious process. The rewards range from ostensibly lame to quite good. Early on, the rewards err on the side of lame. However, even the ones that suck sell for quite a bit of currency. If you complete all of the areas which can be completed up until a certain town not particularly far into the game, and fight the encounters that result from wandering around the map to complete it, you will have enough money to purchase one or two items that would otherwise be teaser gear in an improbably powerful shop. Normally, you would have to wait until later in the game to come back and buy the high-powered items. Needless to say, the difficulty takes a rather sharp dive at that point, and it could even be considered a sequence error due to sloppy programming under a liberal definition.
- There's a starting enemy (the nobleman) who has no damaging attacks. Seriously, he can't hurt you at all. This means that you can grind an unlimited victory chain off him as long as you're careful to avoid fighting any other enemies, so you can max out your bonus meter and earn some serious XP to easily overlevel yourself. And what's more, the only real "attack" he has is where he gives you money to leave the battle. So you'll get way more cash than you're supposed to have at that point in the game, allowing you to stock up on whatever you might want in the stores.
- In the middle of the first disk, after obtaining the second best alchemist in the game, you can obtain some Orichalcum. It looks useless, until you forge it into a weapon. It adds 500+ attack and gives you a 50% chance of surviving a fatal blow if you have Fury. They're also not that expensive to make (10,000 Fol)... Well you can probably afford four-five at most, but still, 2000+ attack to go around in that point is pretty darn impressive. They were likely put in for the sake of playing on Universe and 4D difficulty, where things like abusing selling the model bunnies and Orichalcum become rather necessary.
  - Said Orichalcum is available behind a hill you can access incredibly early. The theory is that you'll die a horrible death if you go there before the game expects you to. In reality, one of the random encounters there is a ball type enemy that does nothing but damage your MP. By rushing in and killing that enemy, you can gain dozens of levels in no time at all, then move on to beating up the enemies for the Orichalcum and other rare ores in the area behind the hill. And all of this is absolutely required on the Nintendo Hard higher difficulty levels.
- Another one in Till the End of Time that is more powerful than it appears is the Regeneration Symbol. They restore 3% of the wearer's MP at regular intervals. This has two benefits. The first is that it significantly reduces the risk of an MP-kill. The second is that one of the three characters that will be used throughout the first disk automatically comes with a Healing spell, and others can be given that spell with a certain item that was obtained in the first real dungeon. In the second dungeon, there is a room where the player can find an enemy that has a small chance of dropping Regeneration Symbols. If the player spends a little time collecting three of them, it becomes possible to spam battle skills endlessly because at least one character will always have unlimited MP to heal the cost of using them. Some skill is still required on the part of the player, but these items will last until the end of the main game when the player gains the ability to craft something even stronger.
Stonekeep has a Dagger of Penetration hidden on the very first introductory floor, revealed by playing around with the lever that opens the exit, then examining several walls for hidden switches. This weapon outright trivializes the next few levels.
In Sudeki, a sufficiently savvy or even just sufficiently nosy player can find all four characters' ultimate weapons well before the halfway point of the game. (They also tend to end up overleveled, thanks to one weapon requiring completion of That One Sidequest which requires 21 of a rare randomly dropped piece of loot.)
Suikoden:
- In Suikoden, if you enter the forest beside Seika early you will meet Kobolds, monsters FAR stronger than what you should be facing. However, you can wipe them out in one fire spell. Because you get more experience the bigger the difference in levels between you and the enemy, ten minutes of fighting can set you FAR ahead of the curve before you even have your fortress, which just happens to be where one of the hardest fights in the game is.
- Suikoden 1 also has a trick one can perform at the start of the game — by leaving Gregminster at the first opportunity, heading south to Lenenkamp, and then west to the mountain pass leading to Sarady (Mt. Tigerwolf), one can talk to a villager in the upper-rightmost house there and receive either a Prosperity Rune (which doubles gained experience) or a Fortune Rune (which doubles the amount of money the party earns - easily the better choice as you will need a lot of cash to upgrade weapons). This is not the easiest trip to make — you'll probably have to farm levels, equipment and weapon upgrades for a bit at Lenenkamp to make the journey survivable, and even then you'll have to run from most fights in Tigerwolf. It will make the rest of the game considerably easier, however, so it's worth the risk.
- In Suikoden II, you have the opportunity to get through a gate into one of the later areas, Matilda, and pick up two characters that import from the first game. Your levels will jump significantly, making much of the rest of the game, at least until well beyond that area, nearly trivial.
Super Mario RPG:
- The first special attack you have access to can potentially be a Disc One Nuke. Mario's standard Jump attack actually makes a slight gain in power every time it is used. This can be done up to 255 times, and by that time, Jump will be the most powerful skill in the game by far (with the possible exception of 100 Super Jumps, and this is much easier). Of course the very first dungeon contains Spinies, which are immune to Jump attacks, which make them the perfect candidates to practice the move on. Unsurprisingly, this strategy is one of the major keys to a Low Level challenge in SMRPG.
- Rose Way is a goldmine for players. Firstly there's a Lakitu with an enemy on a fishing rod. These enemies come in groups of two or three, after three battles Lakitu will throw you a full HP/FP restoring mushroom, and leaving the screen and returning resets him. Since you'll never run out of FP you can easily cook the enemies with your most powerful attacks to gather experience points or farm your Jump move as mentioned earlier. Later you find a group of treasure chests with Shy Guys on them. Collecting the chests sends the Shy Guy after you, but so long as you leave the screen without battling him the chest will be restored when you return, allowing you to collect unlimited coins 15 at a time.
- While it's closer to a Disk Two Nuke, you can buy Work Pants from Moleville that boost physical and magical attack by 10, and speed by 5, and these can be equipped to any character. This boost to offensive stats is about 3 levels worth, giving you a definite edge for quite a while. When exactly their ever-lowering comparative defense becomes too glass cannony to handle will depend on your playstyle, but generally by the time you fight Yaridovich is when their defense becomes too low and you're forced to switch over to the Sailor class of items.
Super Paper Mario:
- The very first level contains a creature that spits out infinite numbers of projectiles that the player can jump on to gain points. Because the points earned increase with each successive jump, with the only limit being the end of the screen (at which point you have to start all over, but you can easily make several thousand jumps before then), it's possible to level the character up far past what it would take to beat the game's toughest Superboss... in less than an hour.
- The classic "infinite 1-Up trick" is also performable. However, the experience starts going negative after a certain amount of jumps.
In Sword of Mana on the Gameboy Advance, playing as the girl gives you Light magic at the start of the game, bats are weak against Light magic and are found in the first cave area you come across. Grinding until you kill 1000 bats transforms them into Doomy Bats of Doom which can be hit with Light magic, which in turn grinds up your Light skill until it's powerful enough to kill them, thereby allowing you to level up really easily and quickly, making the rest of the game a breeze.
Sword of Paladin: It's possible for the player to get lucky and find the Light Attack gem while traveling on a carriage. This gives them access to an AOE that's effective against the majority of enemies. Spamming this alongside Lena's AOE skills is enough to trivialize most early-game random encounters.
In Tales of Innocence Guild Dungeons' chests give randomly generated loot. However, some of the items in the tables are very, very good. Therefore, it is possible, in a rank 2 dungeon, to obtain a "Mythril" Sword with 110 attack and a casting speed bonus at a time where the normal swords you can buy in shops and/or loot in dungeons have maybe 18 attack.
In Tales of the Abyss, near endgame weapons are sold early on at shops for ridiculously high amounts of Gald, but become cheaper and affordable as the plot progresses and your characters actually build up to that level. However, the ability to transfer Gald to a new record once you complete the game allows you to afford the weapons at that point, which is very useful if one chooses to play the game using a Nintendo Hard difficulty level.
In Tales of Xillia, the player can abuse the game's shop building mechanic. Using monster drops or resources found in the fields' sparkly points to increase each shop's levels can be a grind and slow. But if the player has collected a lot of resources, chucking them into either the equipment or weapons shop can immediately unlock several new weapons that you might not have gotten until much later, leaving you to equip the party with mid-to-late game weapons, while still being in the first arc. Even better if the shop got the rather unpredictable triple experience bonus, leaving you to jump even more levels.
In TaskMaker for the Mac, you're given an Ethereal Potion in the (optional) Tutorial level. It can either be sold for a high price to a shop, or used to phase through a wall and access a passageway with three of the most powerful weapons in the game — and while one of the three is in the same chamber as some highly powerful monsters, they will spawn far enough away for you to grab it without being hit.
Telefang is a strange example: to get a monster on your side, you phone them up. If you know a powerful monster's phone number, then you can get it early.
Threads of Fate has some very unique means of raising your character's stats, two of which can be abused mercilessly to become a Physical God very early in the game:
- Losing to Rod is a very good way to go up 3 or 4 HP because of the game's "take damage to increase max health" mechanic. It only costs 100g to fight him, losing doesn't trigger a Game Over, using the inn is free, you only have to win one out of every ten matches to break even since he pays 1000g if you win, you can fight him anytime you want once you've finished Carona Forest, and losing to this guy takes about 10 seconds. Basically, a patient player can make their HP skyrocket by letting themselves get their ass kicked by this guy.
- Raising your MP to 110 allows you to get through a row of ice blocks in the Underground Ruins (the second level) and find some Rare Wine. Give it to Hobbes for free and he will drop his prices from 30,000g to $5,000g. Keep in mind this includes the permanent stat increasing items. Combined with the previous trick, you'll get to a point where your defense is high enough to tank Rod, take enough damage to raise your HP, still win, and then use the winnings to buy more stat increasing items...
The Tiamat Sacrament: If Az'uar gets his second evolution, he'll be able to use powerful single-target breaths that require runes of three different elements. If the player is willing to farm a lot of Runes, these single-target breaths can trivialize a lot of early and mid game bosses. By the endgame, bosses are balanced with a lot of HP with the expectation that the player is using triple runes.
Torchlight allows the player with the Alchemist character to focus on conjuration very early on. If you don't invest in anything else you can start summoning imps as soon as you gain a level (which is basically immediately), and by the time you reach level 5 you can have a small permanent army of a transformed spellcasting pet, 3 imps and a chemical golem following you around, the last of which is not much of a damage-dealer at low levels but excellent at taking blows, focusing everything else's attention on it rather than you. Learn the right spells (sold by an NPC in the starting map) and you can, should the need arise, reinforce this with temporary summons of flaming swords, skeletons, zombies and archers. The best part is that summoning magic doesn't cost a lot of mana, so you can treat your summons as consumables and just re-conjure them as needed, wearing down even large bosses. Wear something to ward off the few blows coming your way and you needn't even deal any damage yourself, making the whole game a breeze.
- Wanna turn it up to eleven? Download a pet mod and transform your pet into a gravedigger, which will raise from the dead about a dozen independent skeletons. They mostly follow you around, but they roam much more freely than your own summons, often resulting in entire rooms being cleared before you even reach them.
The Red Eagle in Treasure of the Rudra. You can get this badass weapon for Surlent at the start of his scenario in the Sakkara Desert by killing a certain enemy, not only is it powerful but you can immensely level grind by killing that enemy and the Red Eagle sells for around 2000 Ragu. Only problem is that you need a very powerful Lightning Mantra to toast that enemy.
- Of course, some experimenting with random Mantra entry can result in this sort of nuke as well, assuming you have the MP for it. And most players are likely to be willing to play with that system anyway... which can result in hideously powerful spells of every element that cost only 1 MP to cast.
- Also from the same game are the Axis Shields which sell for 200 Ragu a pop and Beze wings which sell for 480 Ragu each also the Bezeweigns that drop those wings give a solid amount of Experience, but are very quick and can escape without speed/power/critical buffs on your characters.
It's possible in Vagrant Story to get the ultimate dagger early on. As soon as you reach the section of the Undercity entered via Shandras Park, all the doll enemies carry knives (the Khukuri, Hatchet, and Baselard). If you have the patience, you can win these items, and combine them at the nearest workshop into the Jamadhar, the best dagger.
Valkyrie Profile gives the player a number of staves that allow mages to use Great Magic early in the game, though they have a high chance of breaking after each use.
- Except, they only break if you do regular attacks with them. If you keep your mages only using magic attacks, they can use ludicrously overpowered weaponry way before you should get it, and you keep getting better overpowered ones til the end of the game.
- The Character Arngrim easily falls under this category, considering he has the highest stats out of any Heavy Blade, and is quite literally the first party member you acquire.
- Also except if you do some roundabout moves, you can acquire the Unicorn's Horn, which is an unbreakable Great Magic staff, in Chapter 4. And it's more powerful than all but one of the breakable ones. Expect to hear the invocation to Celestial Star (by far the spell with the most hits and the fewest enemies that resist it) and Meteor Swarm (second-most hits and hits everything that resists Celestial Star) repeatedly after acquiring it. Quite a Guide Dang It!, though.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader: The final boss of act one drops a unique heavy bolter that can only be equipped by Heretical characters. A Rogue Trader of that alignment and of the soldier class, preparing to pick up the Arch-Militant class, can basically keep using this gun for the rest of the game. Its insane rate of fire, along with the way damage buffs from the arch-militant archetype interact with burst fire weapons means this gun will output insane damage that scales through the whole game and outstrips many later game weapons. It takes well into Act 2 to find your next Heavy Bolter (with no alignment restriction) and some non-negligeable investment in gaining favor from one of the merchants, meaning it's a while before anyone else in the party can get access to a similar weapon.
Wild ARMs Alter Code F has a fairly simple way to completely break the game early on if you know how. One of the weakest enemies in the game has a stealable item that sells for a million Gella, balanced by the fact that the only character with the ability to steal joins right before the final dungeon. However, there's a short sequence where she joins your party temporarily in the first quarter of the game. If you know to go back steal a few of those items before she leaves the party, you end up with enough cash to buy almost anything the game has to offer. One of the main character's weapons is upgradable with said money. You can dump all of your easy money into minmaxing the stats on his weapon, particularly the two expensive stats that calculate into the Gattling Raid attack (Attack and Bullet Capacity). The result is that Gattling Raid becomes powerful enough to knock out nearly every boss in the game with 1-2 attacks.
The World Ends with You features the ability to evolve existing pins into more powerful forms. Pins require one of three types of experience points to do so. While the selection of pins is rather limited, it is nonetheless possible to get the Yoshimitsu pin (the most powerful Shockwave pin), as well as the most powerful versions of the Natural Puppy energy blast pins... during the first week (chapter) of the game. It's not even that hard-Shutdown and Mingle PP aren't affected by what point of the game you are at, so a game-end player with 100% Completion will get those points in the same amounts that a newbie just starting his game will. If only pin evolutions weren't such a Guide Dang It!...
- Speaking of Mingling, using it around other players allows you to buy powerful pins and threads sooner than you'd normally obtain them. The catches? If you buy the entire Darklit Planet set, you can't fully utilize its power until you have six pin slots (you need all six pins equipped at once for them to inflict lots of damage), and in the case of threads, many powerful threads have a high Bravery requirement.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
- Depending on your luck with core crystals, you can get almost any rare Blade early in the game — though not all of them are good enough to fit this trope. Boreas in particular stands out, as you can max out his affinity chart with very little grinding as early as Chapter 2.
- Depending on how patient you are with salvaging, you can unlock Sheba anywhere from chapter 2 (with excessive patience) to Chapter 4 (reasonable patience), who is clearly meant to be for the later game with her 500,000 gold Cash Gate.
- With the DLC, you can get Crossette and Corvin as early as Chapter 2, both of which will make many parts of the early game quite easy.
Also present in its spiritual predecessor Xenogears. If you grind up enough cash early in the game, you can purchase an Ether Doubler from Nisan, which powers up your magic attacks in exchange for increased Mana cost. Once Elly joins your party with her Gear, she can use Aerods, which are basically a multi-target magic attack that costs fuel instead of ether but still counts as an ether attack. With an Ether Doubler, Elly goes from mediocre Squishy Wizard to Goddess of MT Death, and can tear through most enemies in the early-mid game (including bosses) with only one or two rounds of aerod abuse. And when she eventually leaves your party, a savvy player can take them off of her and stick them onto Emeralda for pretty good effect too.
In the first Xenosaga game, the player can finish the tutorial for the game's Humongous Mecha system without actually using the AGWS mecha to gain the rare points used to level up Limit Breaks. Grinding the tutorial while it's available lets the player have access to very potent attacks much earlier than what would be possible by playing "fair".
In the SNES version of Wanderers from Ys, the outdoor areas of Ilvern Ruins have flocks of birds that respawn at a high rate, while all you have to do is hold down Up + Attack, and they'll never hit you. You can grind up to 65535 EXP to reach the maximum level when you're barely a third of the way through the game.

Disc One Nuke / Role-Playing Games

Previous

Index

Next

Disc One Nuke / Role-Playing Games

Edit Locked

Previous

Index

Next