Game Breaker / Action

Game Breakers in action games.

Games with their own pages

• Assassin's Creed
• Castlevania
• Dynasty Warriors
• Fire Emblem Warriors
• Hades
• Honkai Impact 3rd
• The Legend of Zelda
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild^note Also includes examples from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
• Metal Gear
• Warriors Orochi

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• In Another Century's Episode 2, the Buster Ark possesses an attack called "Riot Shot", essentially a Death Blossom-style "spinning Beam Spam attack, best used when surrounded by enemies. However, due to a programming bug, any enemy that is physically touching the Buster Ark when it activates the move suffers insane damage, potentially allowing the player to one-shot just about everything in the game, even the SNK Bosses they throw at you in Boss Rush mode.
• In Astalon: Tears of the Earth, hidden in the Tower of Serpents are three Money Multipliers that cumulatively double the orbs you receive, up to a maximum of eight times. Making full use of these will rapidly result in your characters becoming monstrously overpowered. The "drawback" is that you take damage activating them, but even setting aside the fact that you'll have more than enough orbs to regenerate the healing candles after every death, the damage you'll take doing this becomes a pittance once you've bought enough health and defense upgrades.
• From Battlestations Midway we have Torpedo Bombers and Torpedoes themselves. They can sink an enemy ship faster than Dive Bombers and even full on barrages of main guns from Destroyers, Cruisers, and even Battleships.
• Bayonetta has the Climax Bracers, so game breaking just equipping them disables the ability to set records in the game (which isn't a hindrance if you don't care about records). In the first game they put Bayonetta on permanent 'Serious Mode', in which all of her attacks summon massively damaging demonic limbs (normally a mode only reserved for intense boss fights). In the sequel, they grant Bayonetta infinite magic, which means unlimited Umbran Climax or Torture Attacks, or if used in conjunction with the Bracelet of Time, unlimited Witch Time.
• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, being a Spiritual Successor to the Castlevania series, is proving itself to be incredibly broken:
  • The Rhava Velar will utterly tear the game apart. Anyone who remembers the ludicrously overpowered Crissaegrim from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night will be pleased to know this weapon is literally identical, with such ridiculous attack speed that it tears enemies and bosses apart in seconds with impugnity. The best part is, rather than being forced to rely on the ridiculously low odds of an ultra-rare drop, the Rhava Velar is crafted with uncommon but easily acquired later game items. Even after a patch that nerfed its attack power from 16 to 14, it's still more than fast enough for that to not be a problem.
  • Adrasteia combined with Recycle Hat. Can you say a gun with decent base-level attacks and homing bullets combined with unlimited high-level ammunition?
    • For more fun, add the Scattershot bullets. Normally they fire five shots in sort-of-random forward directions. Adrasteia's homing overrides that.
  • Augment Gold can be transmuted from Augment Luck and a single lump of gold, and fully upgraded to rank 9 for a total of 8 ectoplasms and 3 holy waters (bought for a peasants wage) and three additional gold lumps. Setting this fully ranked as your passive shard (which will double-stack its effect) will make every torch in the game drop at least 500GP and very commonly drop 1000GP and 2000GP bags, in a game where torches normally drop between 1 and 10^note though they can drop 50 and eventually 100, depending on your Luck stat and 500 is considered rare from a chest. With this in effect you can run back and forth between Johannes' room and the hallway, smacking those same two torches over and over, and amass an absurd wealth of 100,000GP in about 10 minutes, or combine it with Accelerator and just look at Rockefeller go.
    • With that, you now have absurd access to resources. This ludicrous flow of funds means unlimited alkahests, meaning you can break down any item you find to add it to the shop, from weapons to items to foodstuffs, to be bought and cannibalized for components, allowing you to quickly upgrade shards and prepare new foods for stat bonuses.
    • Which segues nicely to the Gold Power Ring, which boosts your attack power based on your wealth. It only takes around 10,000GP to noticeably increase your damage output, so imagine what you could accomplish with ten or fifty times that.
  • For a non-money example, the Invert shard has proven to be very broken as most bosses don't know what the hell to do against it. The difficult Demon Carpenter, the Kunekune who stuns and damages you just by looking at you, even the Big Bad himself? Just camp out above their head and swing a great sword while they helplessly hurl attacks left and right. The best part is Invert Shard is a mandatory ability guaranteed to be earned from a boss battle.
  • While it can't be done until very late in the game, defeating a certain Optional Boss and getting access to having all of O.D's books equipped at once basically turns Miriam's stroll through the castle into a fast-paced nuclear-powered Mook Horror Show. If you don't care about spoilers, complete 90% of the map, check out the new tome that O.D. lets you check out, head through the Glacial Tomb, and learn that O.D. was not kidding when he told you not to run off with that book...
• In Castle Crashers, the Red Knight (lightning) is this for much of the game. Here's why: his basic magical ability is a sustained lightning bolt. While the bolt is going, any enemy caught in it is paralyzed and continues to take damage. Each point of damage is considered a "hit" and exp is calculated by hit, not by kill. Therefore, using the red knight's magic paralyzes enemies and causes exp to rise faster than any other character in the game, and paralyzes any humanoid type enemy. It is also devastatingly effective against bosses. Until the final level, where the basic enemies are magic proof, this is THE most effective spell available, bar none. Until you reach insane mode, this power is nearly unstoppable.
• Several players of Cave Story claim that the Level 2 Blade is one of these. At first glance, this seems confusing; it has less range than both its previous form and its following form, the game's lack of diagonal aiming makes the slight widening of range from Level 1 to Level 2 a negligible benefit, and the Blade as a whole is a single-shot weapon. It's the definition of the third aspect, though, that adds credibility to the claims — "single-shot" translates here as "the last shot can't be onscreen before you can fire the next shot." The Level 2 Blade at point-blank range does the most damage per second of any weapon in the game. Therefore, by getting dangerously close to bosses and mashing the fire button, it's possible to spam the Blade repeatedly and kill almost any enemy in the game in a matter of seconds.
  • On the other hand, the Spur doesn't require leveling, only charging, and does the most damage outside the level 2 Blade at point blank, and does it at any range. And you get it midway through the game, if you're willing to put up with keeping the dinky Polar Star despite several offers of trading it for better weapons.
• Despite Cuphead's soul-crushing difficulty still shining through even by using these two weapons, no one would argue they give you an insane advantage:
  • The Charge Shot gives insane damage output for a relatively short charge time, so much so that the developers intend to Nerf it in a patch. It's still fully capable of rapid fire when it's needed, but simply focusing entirely on dodging attacks while taking a few charged pot shots at the enemy is worlds easier than trying to juggle gunning them down while dealing with the crap they're hurling at you. It infamously turns the otherwise difficult Grim Matchstick into a complete pushover.
  • The Smoke Bomb renders a ton of enemies attacks as utter non-threats, particularly against a handful of the King Dice battles and some of the more difficult Run and Gun stages.
• In the arcade version of Double Dragon, almost all of the enemies can be easily defeated by having the player turn his back and use the elbow attack (punch and jump simultaneously) on them. This is because enemy characters are normally hesitant to approach the player upfront, but are more than willing to attack from behind. The elbow attack has a wide range and knocks an enemy in one hit, the same effect as doing an uppercut or roundhouse kick, yet it's easier to perform and no matter how much the player abuses this technique, the enemy's A.I. doesn't bother to change its pattern. The elbow punch was considerably nerfed in most of the sequels and home versions, if not outright removed.
• Dust: An Elysian Tail has Dust's aerial spin combined with Fidget's projectiles. Very few enemies can attack him while he is doing this, the projectiles put enemies into hit stun and knock them into the air (allowing Dust to later attack them to regain magic), and in the endgame it is possible to boost your Fidget stat to ten times its base level, turning it from "killing enemies while not being able to be hurt" to "very quickly killing enemies while not being able to be hurt." Worse still, the few enemies who can knock you out of it are STILL best dealt with by projectile spam, to put them in hitstun so they can't attack you. The only enemy in the game who cannot be killed in this way is an enemy you must counter the attack of to damage, and they are rare and almost always encountered on their own, and easily bypassed anyway. Oh, and the aerial spin tracks enemies too, and can boost you very high into the air, allowing for Sequence Breaking at times as well.
• Enter the Matrix has a grappling move using two of the attack buttons simultaneously at close range. It’s underwhelming generally. However when you grab an enemy while you have a gun drawn, it becomes a single-move instakill for nearly every enemy in the game, save Agents. “Dodge this” indeed.
• The Invisibility Potion in Fester's Quest, contrary to its name, is actually an 'Invincibility' Potion, allowing you to not take damage for a period of time. Saving these for bosses (since your items are refreshed after each boss anyway) allows you to make very quick work of the ones before boarding the alien ship, with the first one being extremely vulnerable to using the Invisibility Potion to just stand on him and drop TNT incessantly, since he never changes his vertical position. The second, third, and fifth can be obliterated by using Invisibility Potions, then just standing there and whipping them into submission with the strongest whip (though the third will require some aiming due to its shield). The fourth is less vulnerable, but once you run out of potions it is possible to walk to the bottom of the screen and pace left and right to avoid its shots while letting seeker missiles fly, which will generally finish the job.
  • Another extremely powerful item is the Noose, which summons Lurch (with a "You rang." screen and his portrait), then kills every enemy on screen. The thing is that you get fifteen of them between each boss, and since they do nothing on bosses there's no point to save them, allowing you to summon Lurch to clear your way on the way to the next boss. Unlike Invisibility Potions which you get before the first boss, however, you only get Nooses before the fifth.
• In Gotcha Force, the Barrier Girl functions like this against anything that doesn't have a Wave-Motion Gun or that can get a decent drilling attack off. Except for drilling attacks (most of which are melee) or really powerful blasters, she can dodge around most shots, only taking a couple of chips to her barrier - by the time it's finally breached, she's probably recharged and can restore the barrier. Even if you have the aforementioned attacks, she's generally fast enough that hitting with those attacks is a pain.
  • Of course, it gets worse with the Beam Gunner. Fast, possessing a powerful regular ranged attack that recharges quickly, and with a boat of hit points, he can quickly Beam Spam nearly anything to oblivion. If that wasn't enough, he also has a Wave-Motion Gun, giving it the ability to even solo against a Combining Mecha.
• In the Flash game Great Dungeon In The Sky (Link.), you can basically sweep the whole game with any character with the Summon Creature ability. Because enemies don't notice you unless you're on the same level as them, if you find a nice place to stand, you can just keep dropping monsters on them until they're dead. And one of the starting classes has it. For added amusement, unlock the Wind or Platinum Dragon: no need for a place to stand now, just hover in the air and summon baby dragons/skeletons until everything else in the room is dead. Said starting class, the Necromance, is also a Game-Breaker in its own right thanks to having a fast ranged attack and a fast healing spell.
• From Koei Tecmo:
  • Tiki in Fire Emblem Warriors works almost identically to Young Link, her attacks being weak and cumbersome with her Super Mode being her dragon form, gaining attacks that can sweep almost as far as she can see and take down named enemies in a single Critical Hit while her Awakening gauge can both be refilled on command from her Special gauge and stops draining during a Critical Hit animation. Yet the Ability system manages to make her even more broken if she equips Galeforce, which refills her Special AND Awakening gauges whenever she kills any enemy stronger than a common grunt, meaning refilling the gauge manually will only, if ever, be needed if she has killed everything in her immediate vicinity and doesn't have an enemy commander close enough to extend her rampage.
  • In the Samurai Warriors series, the Ice element. All other elements simply add some extra damage to your attacks. Ice element has a chance to freeze the enemy, which means your subsequent attacks deal more damage, can't be blocked, and can't even be blown away by your combos so you can just keep it going. Even a low level officer can trounce any enemy as long as they manage to freeze them.
    • Gracia's horseback moveset in Chronicles also is ridiculously overpowered. While on the ground she has slow and short-ranged attacks, with her only saving grace being an invincibility skill and an area attack, when mounted she can constantly spam VERY damaging fireballs with her regular combo. The kicker though is her third combo, which fires a wide energy blade in front of her which travels almost the entire rendering distance before disappearing. Combine it with the Ice element, and any boss will die in seconds.
  • One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 has many characters that are blatantly overpowered, as is the norm for any musou game. The one that trumps them all, however, is Admiral Fujitora. His attacks are fast, hit dozens of times in a single combo, and he can activate his Fuwa Fuwa No Mi to stun enemies and summon meteors from space. What makes him a Game Breaker, however, is his R1 move: a chargeable attack that summons a meteor to fall at a location near you. What makes THAT game-breaking is that fact that, when fully charged, the meteor will impact an area the size of a city block and do enough damage to instantly kill all Mooks and most, if not all strong enemies. He can do this with no cooldown, at no cost, and during a Kizuna rush, where attacks of that caliber are usually replaced. The only catch is that if he gets hit before the meteor falls (which, if fully charged, takes a total of 3 seconds), the meteor is cancelled. But then you can just try again.
  • Partially justified for being the Big Bad, but Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2 has Kaioh. All of his moves have huge range and power, and pretty fast recovery. On top of that, by having him use a 5 Aura Scroll Nexus he can use his final Signature Move for a measly two Aura stocks. Said signature move covers a huge area and it lasts for a while. Go to the middle of a crowd, press circle, and bam, instant 50 enemies killed and guaranteed A Rank base overtake.
    • Toki on a minor scale for his C4. He sends two waves that kill any mooks in their way and deal decent damage to bosses. In fact, while it is not the best strategy for speed runs, Toki can pretty much stay in the other side of the stage sending his waves agains the boss (wich will actually fill the player's Aura gauge) and occasionally steeping in to deliver a Signature Move.
• From the LEGO Adaptation Games as a whole:
  • The biggest gamebreakers are the multipliers. The first one is usually quite expensive (half a million or more) and merely doubles your income, but is typically unlockable early (often at the very start if you know precisely what to do). This alone however makes getting True Jedi/Pirate/Archeologist/Wizard/Whatever in any level a doddle. But then the next one costs double the price, but with a x2 multiplier it's just a case of collecting the same amount again. The thing is, with these multipliers, is that they stack. x2 and x4 becomes x8. You can get x2, x4, x6, x8 and x10, or a multiplier of 3,840, making the lowest possible stud worth 38,400. By the time you've got the first two, you'll earn enough for the third without even trying, even though it costs ridiculous money. Get them all, and maxing out the money count can happen in minutes, giving you enough money to buy anything else.
  • The other notably game breaking perks are Regenerate Hearts which is surprisingly cheap and makes death nearly impossible, Character Studs which makes defeated enemies spit out studs and essentially gives you unlimited money if you find any respawning character to beat up and are patient, and good old fashioned Invincibility.
  • LEGO Star Wars
    • In LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, Deflect Bolts causes all blaster shots that would hit you to ricochet off. Since pretty much every standard enemy in the game uses blasters (except Gamorrean Guards, which you only fight twice), this amounts to a cheaper version of invincibility for 80% of the game. If you want to be a total asshole, add on Perfect Deflect, which causes all deflected blaster shots to ricochet back into the person who fired them, making all enemies immediately kill themselves upon seeing you. And if you add on Exploding Blaster Bolts...
    • Droideka is hilariously broken. It's the fastest character when rolled up, it has the highest damage of any character due to firing two shots of two bolts each with every press of the button, and it has a defensive shield that gives it effectively a triple-size health bar that can be replenished simply by moving. Its only downside is being unable to perform a lot of standard actions (most notably jumping), but being only available in Free Play, this just means you have to switch to someone else whenever you need to do those things and then immediately switch back to Droideka.
  • In The LEGO Movie Videogame Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and Ghost Vitruvius break the game wide open since they can fly, which renders nearly all the puzzle solving and many other characters special abilities completely unnecessary. Why find pieces and build that unstable bridge for Vitruvius or extinguish that flame when you can just fly over it? Justified, however, as these characters aren't unlocked until the final mission has been completed and it would take a conscious effort to not have most of secrets found at this point.
• The secondary effects of the Ring of Lightning in Little Big Adventure II can easily turn it into a Game-Breaker. The item in question is, essentially, a spell that requires a full bar of Magic Points to be used. Its only plot-forced usage involves getting another item that can't be accessed without the spell. When cast in a random place, the Ring of Lightning still empties the Magic Points bar... effectively working as a "kill all enemies on screen" item, regardless of how many normal attacks you need to kill them. This extends to the tough huge enemies that normally require a lot of time and efforts to defeat them. If you get killed and lose an extra life (represented by a clover leaf), your magic is restored to full, allowing you to use the spell again. You can have up to ten clover leaves by the time of the final showdown (with extra leaves scattered all around the Big Bad's place), which provides a "cast spell - run - get killed - cast spell..." tactic instead of "run - avoid enemies - blow up teleporters to stop enemies from appearing - run...". The first tactic saves a lot of time, but this is just the beginning. The Big Bad is immune to your weapons except the Emperor's Sword, suggesting that you should have a sword fight with him, just like in the first game. He isn't immune to the Ring of Lightning. It kills him instantly. Way too easy for the final battle...
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor:
  • Get the upgrade to allow the use of two combo finishers in a row. During the story, you get the combo finisher that stuns all enemies. Get the combo finisher that kills all stunned enemies. Yeah. If you feel like not even trying, get the upgrades to build combo points faster. Three hits, two buttons, battlefield clear.
  • Also, Shadow Strike Chain teleports you to a target and kills it for the cost of 2 elf-shot, a limited resource, then lets you choose another target and repeat until you run out of elf-shot. Add two runes to your bow that refund 1 elf-shot on a Shadow Strike kill. Whoopsie.
• The game Psychic World for the Sega Master System and Game Gear gives you an Invincibility skill that costs a moderate amount of energy to use. It also gives you a move that turns HP into energy at a very favorable exchange rate. By using them together, you can be invulnerable to damage for the entire duration of the game.
• River City Ransom has the books "Stone Hands", "Dragon Feet", and "Grand Slam". Once you accumulate enough money to buy at least one, the game becomes stupidly easy, as these books make your fist, kick, or weapon attacks three times faster. This allows you to easily beat any enemy with no chance of them retaliating. Especially with the "Grand Slam" (affects weapon attacks), since some weapons have a quite long range, so you can beat anyone without them even getting close to you.
• Saint Seiya: Sanctuary Battle has Phoenix Ikki, who is available right off the bat. While he's already very powerful for a Bronze Saint, he really shines once the player spend some Cosmo Points to upgrade his Phoenix Wing to Lv. 10. Once that's done, he's able to kill waves of enemies and even bosses without ever needing to get close to them, much less using a single punch - Phoenix Wing is the best projectile in the entire game, it comes out instantly, doesn't fade by hitting walls or ground (and its range is IMMENSE), juggles the enemies dealing multiple hits (more than enough to kill mooks and deal huge damage to bosses), and at Lv. 10, it is extremely powerful and cost a measly 400 Cosmo a pop (wich it often recovers by itself due to hitting many enemies each one a lot of times). Watch as he kills 20 mooks by pressing circle once and laugh as Gold Saints fall before even finishing their introductory quotes.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours. The Bodog jeep with the machine gun on top? Makes the required 'Tony versus a crowd of mooks' fights terrifically easy. Especially if one is in an out of the way spot; the cops have trouble finding those.
• The Game Boy Advance Shaman King Master of Spirits has Black Raven, Michael, and Golem. To put it simply, Black Raven increases Spirit regeneration, which allowed you to use more Spirit attacks, which is essential on the game to deal higher damage. Michael and Golem are, in a simple term, a splitted version of Amidamaru's Antiquity upgrade, which unleashes a BFS that cuts 235 degrees and can hit walls. Instead, Michael is a fast middle range projectile that can go through walls. Golem fires a full screen fast Laser beam that hits 180 degrees of the screen, but did not go past the wall. Both of these attacks consume way less energy than Amidamaru's Antiquity upgrade, and deal respectable damage on its own right that match the likes of said upgrade and Matamune. The use of Golem and Michael renders the final level a total joke (that is if you can beat Golem) and made both the Big Bad and the Final Boss of the first game a joke. While still devastating in the second game, the Final Boss restricts you to only use Amidamaru as your spirit in the final battle.
  • There are three Spirits(one of them being combinations) that made the whole game easier to manage :
    • The first you can obtain is a Combination Attack of 5 passive Status Buff spirits. If you equipped all of them, when you dies, you are taken back to the World Map and gain all of your health unless you're fighting a Boss. This allows you to save your money to buy healing items, which you can dedicate to Boss fights and Mid Way of the levels by purposefully killing yourself after each level and started in a Top condition which makes a lot of difference(note that you dont get a health recovery unless you finished a level in this game, and you dont even recover all of your health).
    • Jen is acquired mid game, and it has an awesome passive effect. For every 50 kills you got, you get a chance to acquire a little bit of money, or an item. The trick is to kill 50 enemy, which you can do by switching screens or going to easy level, and get an item, which you can sell for appropriate item or use them for getting through the level. In other words, by the time you acquired Jen, you would be stocked with money and items that made it easier to win the game.
    • Last but not least, is the Grand Tao Dragon. Simply put, the Grand Tao Dragon allowed you to use it on a finished level, and skip it. While it sounds simple, the ability to skip troublesome levels is ridiculously useful for travelling around for several purposes.
• Splinter Cell: Conviction has the Five-Seven, a silenced pistol made available to you very early on in the game. It has the biggest magazine size of any of the pistols, improved accuracy and (once you add only one upgrade) gives you the ability to execute four enemies at once with the "mark and execute" system (the highest you can perform at once). If you're a decent stealth player, there's little reason to use any other weapon besides it, as you can effectively take down a squad of enemies in seconds.
  • Once unlocked, you can also use it in any mission except the first, but if you somehow need a higher-capacity magazine, the pretty-much-best Alternate Weapon is the MP7A1 machine pistol — suppressed by default, able to be upgraded to have three marks (and hence to commit three executions), about 33% more damage (if you even have to fire normally), and have its magazine size doubled from 20 to 40 rounds. Moreover, since it's a machine pistol the user can wield it while holding a human shield or onto a pipe or ledge. Finally, due to alternate weapons' "three magazines' worth of spare ammo" accounting for Extended Magazine upgrades, that means that the MP7A1 with Extended Magazine goes from 20/60 (80 rounds total) to 40/120 (160 rounds total) — most of the assault rifles and submachine guns have only 30/90 (120 rounds total).
• Wolf in the multiplayer mode of Star Fox: Assault has the highest health and speed stats in the game, and the only balance on him is that he has a smaller targeting reticule when riding an Arwing or Landmaster. He is the only character who can survive a Demon Sniper shot, just to give an idea of his durability,
  • Also, Slippy, of all people, is incredibly effective in every situation outside the Arwing. On the ground, because of his high jumping ability, you can basically just keep jumping around in front of your opponent and completely dodge whatever they're doing while taking potshots at them. Combined with his above average health and his dominance in the Land Master, he's easily dominant on maps where ground combat is an option. His only downfall is in the Arwing, where he's rather weak compared to most other characters. And he doesn't need to be unlocked, unlike Wolf. Peppy is arguably even better than Slippy using the same tactics.
  • In the unreleased Star Fox 2, there were three different ships in the game—Fox and Falco were the fastest, Peppy and Slippy were the toughest, and Miyu and Fay were the strongest. The problem lies in the definition of "strongest." Miyu and Fay start out with level 2 weapons and have half the charge time of the other ships. This makes boss battles much quicker. They only downside is that their ships are made of cardboard, but the shortened battle time more than makes up for it.
  • Star Fox Command has the Black Rose, a ship exclusive to Panther Caroso. At first glance, it seems to be a horrible ship - it's made of cardboard, has no lock-on, and its bomb capacity maxes out at 1. However, its basic laser attack is overpowered to an absurd degree. It can one-shot many of the endgame-level enemies, and those it can't are nearly always two-shotted. It can kill boss-level enemies in ten shots, and the final boss in around twenty. It also has a hitbox that is so much larger than its sprite, you would think it was a Wave-Motion Gun; this means that aiming in something's general vicinity pretty much means you will hit it. Oh, and to make up for the aforementioned made-of-cardboardness of the Black Rose, it is tied with the Arwing II and Wolfen for the second best barrel roll in the game - in a game where the barrel roll nullifies ALL damage.
  • Star Fox Adventures gives us the Bafomdads, which revive you back to full health whenever you die. They are plentiful, but you can only carry one at a time...at least until you buy the Bafomdad Holder, which allows you to carry ten. You will never need to worry about dying ever again once you have this, and it is actually cheap enough to buy as soon as you get your first Scarab Bag (and you'll find more than enough scarabs within the store itself!)
• Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the Nintendo 64 had the V-Wing airspeeder. It was fast and agile, possessed a unique rapid-fire feature for its blasters, and a speed booster as standard equipment. Its only initial downside is the secondary cluster missiles, which are dummy rockets that fire in a hexagonal pattern. However, these become a Game-Breaker when you find the hidden power-up that makes each cluster rocket an individual seeker missile that can kill just about any TIE in a single hit. Armored targets fell quickly to these missiles as well, considering if all clusters hit a target the resulting damage made a proton torpedo look like a water balloon. Combine this powerful secondary weapon with the agility, speed, and firepower of the V-Wing and you have a very formidable fighter.
• Streets of Rage 2 has Axel's Grand Upper special. A brief introduction; all four player characters have three main special moves; standing-A, a power attack that slightly reduces your health if it hits, forward-A, a strong attack that decreases your health regardless of whether it hits or not, and forward-forward-B, a special that doesn't harm you. The problem? Axel's Grand Upper is his forward-forward-B, and is more powerful than his or anyone else's forward-A move. Axel is invincible for the entire animation (it can be used to slide straight through projectiles and attack bikers without jumping over their bikes), it scores a hit on every single frame, hits anyone who touches Axel's sprite from any direction at any time, and slides forward until Axel hits something if he does it away from someone. About the only enemies who can deal with it are those with long counter-moves that can wait it out (so that'd be the bosses Abadede, R. Bear, and absolutely nobody else), Shiva (who had roughly the same attack with the slide run out to most of the screen) and Mr. X.
• Twisted Metal 3 has Outlaw's special, if you know how to use it. It's programmed to only be fired one at a time, and with a considerable delay before it can be fired again, but the programmers forgot to take rear attacks into account: save up four or five of Outlaw's specials and fire them off as fast as you can mash left-right-down and they'll overlap, stacking their damage, and inflicting a downright ludicrous amount of unavoidable damage to any car in range. It's enough to One-Hit KO weaker-armor vehicles, does severe damage to the rest, and will drain a little under half the health of the Final Boss.
• Wizards & Warriors has the Boots of Force. No, really. It's short-range and slow but inflicts ludicrous damage making it rather useful against bosses, and it allows you to kick open chests without the key which allows you to bypass entire swaths of stages. This item is so good it turns every other sub-weapon into at best Power Up Letdowns and at worst Poison Mushrooms for taking this one away from you.
• Zombies Ate My Neighbors:
  • The fire extingushier, which can freeze enemies in place. On paper, it stinks, but if you keep squirting an enemy with it, it can freeze them in place for long enough for you to cycle to the watergun and kill them.
  • There's also the rocket launcher. No, not for shooting enemies, but for blasting open doors and walls. Why look for keys, detour to doors, and battle most enemies when you can just blast your way straight to the powerup or neighbor in need of rescue? The fact that ammo for them is surprisingly plentiful (much more so than keys, the intended way to open doors) only makes things better.

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