Throughout the Dragon Quest series, there have always been ways to break the games without just searching for those pesky Metal Slimes.
- Dragon Quest III:
- Depending on when your Mage or Sage gets it, the Transform spell can qualify as one. Having two or more of your best ally? Yes, please! Not much gear though, until the remakes threw in quite a handful. (The best is the Rubiss Sword, which has a colossal + 160 attack bonus, casts Thordain for free when used as an item, and everyone can use and equip it with no penalties.)
- Somewhat oddly, the Golden Claw of all things, especially in the remakes. By itself it's powerful but not super game-breaking; in the original release, it can't even really be used as a weapon, practically. However, getting out of the pyramid with it puts you in a ton of fights... Which is the point, right? Except it puts you in a ton of fights, which means if you pull it off, you just came out of a hypercharged grind session and are swimming in money and experience even without selling the damn things. It's far worse in all remakes, where you have the "bag" and can bring dozens of cheap healing herbs along, and conceivably get the claws out very soon after reaching the Pyramid initially. Pull that off, and not only does your Fighter have a weapon better than anything store-buyable but you've just pulled off a speed-grinding session that gives you all the money you'll need for a large chunk of the game and probably gave your entire team several levels in the space of two dungeon floors.
- If you have the first three characters select "Parry" and then cancel all the way to the first when it is time to select the fourth character's command. This will allow you to attack normally, but your characters will take damage as if they had parried.
- Dragon Quest IV:
- The Prayer Ring. One of the cheapest items in the Casino is, well, one of the "cheapest" items in the game, giving you literally infinite MP (praying outside of battle recharges MP for free), and thus infinite grinding with only the occasional break to save the game.
- Psaro. The ability to equip cursed items without penalties is just the start of it. He is so powerful and his spells so useful there is no reason not to have him in the party at all times.
- In the NES version of the game, the Sword of Lethargy. On a successful attack, it has a chance to put enemies to sleep, and bosses are not immune to this effect.
- Chapter 3 can be this...depending on how much you take advantage of the valuable items the enemies tend to drop. The casino in question happens to open up near the end, where being a merchant would be most useful. The game tries to compensate by raising the price of the tokens but due to the high amounts of money you can make, it doesn't matter. Alternatively, just buy as many cautery swords as you're willing to grind out, since they sell for a massive 2625 gold each, you can easily get them with only a little work, and they carry over to chapter 5.
- Dragon Quest V: In the SNES version, it was possible to hit nothing but criticals and automatically recruit any suitable monster, by giving your hero very specific items (and nothing else, reducing his combat ability). Somewhat lessened by the fact that one of the items is only available very late-game.
- Dragon Quest VI:
- The Paladin skill (learned naturally by Carver) Forbearance. The user of the skill becomes the substitute of each and every attack—from basic strikes to status-inflicting breath to uber hit-all spells. While the user gets all of the combined effects of any attacks until forced unable to cover his/her allies and can easily be crippled or killed, the 3 allies can take care of other things. The user can simply be placed in the back to take the part of a hit-all attack meant for him/her last (nullifying it if he/she dies first), and the power is particularly glaring if the user is of the Liquid Metal Slime class, which gives off ridiculous defense.
- The physical classes (Warrior, Martial Artist, Paladin...) often have high-damage/multiple-target/both skills that require little to no MP. Given the rarity of MP-restoring items, they can save the day when your mage is reduced to dealing 1 damage at a time.
- The Staff of Ghent can be used in battle to cast Midheal for free, and is useful for keeping the party's HP topped up until the end of the game. The best part? It walks right into your party during the main plot, being Nevan's initially-equipped weapon.
- And later on, the Luminary vocation can learn Hustle Dance, dishing out Midheal-tier restoration to everyone in the party for no cost.
- Mastering the Sage Vocation with Healie/Curie. Healie and Curie are the only characters able to learn the spell Omniheal. Omniheal costs twice as much MP as Multiheal but fully heals each character instead of just restoring 100HP each. Sage gives large boosts to MP, getting larger with each rank gained, and the Mastery Bonus for the Vocation reduces the cost of spells by 50%, meaning Omniheal will cost the same as Multiheal would normally ais much more powerful.
- The vocation system in general, which lets you keep all previously learned spells and abilities from any class. You can thus have an entire team made entirely of Stone Walls, each with the firepower of a Glass Cannon.
- Dragon Quest VII: The monster recruitment feature of the previous two games is replaced with the ability to collect Monster Hearts, which allow one of the main characters to assume a vocation based on that monster. While many of these monster vocations have partial elemental and status resistances and some useful skills* , most of them don't have the raw power of the endgame human vocations. The most notable exception is the Platinum King Jewel, which not only has access to the most powerful healing spells and and ludicrously strong Big Banga skill, but upon mastery obtain a whopping +255 resilience, making them virtually untouchable by most physical attacks. As if that weren't enough, they also become the only class in the game to obtain complete immunity to all elements and status effects, making enemy spells virtually useless as well. The only downside is that becoming a Platinum King Jewel takes such an absurdly high effort and time investment that it may as well be a Bragging Rights Reward.
- Dragon Quest VIII:
- Jessica's unique Sex Appeal stat gets very broken by its last ability, Hustle Dance. This ability restores a mild amount of HP to all party members without costing any MP. Build up her tension enough, and you can restore your party to full health for no cost.
- Yangus gets an ability in his Axe stat that either gets a critical hit, or does nothing. What makes this ability broken is that critical hits ignore defense, which means doing a ton of damage to anything, including the Lord of Dragovians as the Metal Dragon, or a Metal Slime. A good way to level late in the game is going to the Slime Hill, finding King Metal Slimes, and swinging away with Yangus.
- If you know how to abuse the roulette wheel in the casino, you can get several of the Disc-One Nuke weapons and armor from the casino's store very early. Betting the maximum amount of tokens on every spot that you can almost always ends up earning you more tokens than you spent. With a little Save Scumming, you can walk out of the casino with items that could last you until the battle with Sir Leopold or longer.
- Dragon Quest IX:
- Tension makes a comeback from VIII, but is optional. A fully tensioned up character, with buff spells, using a powerful attack can do 70-140 TIMES the damage of a standard swing — 7000+ instead of 80. Endgame bosses have an attack that specifically prevents this tactic, but bosses before the end of the main story do not. (The legacy and grotto bosses require you to do most of this stuff to have a fighting chance. And most of them have an attack, Disruptive Wave, specifically designed to counteract the first one.)
- In addition to that, you keep skill points between switching jobs, meaning that if you level to 15 then switch jobs a few times, you can take one of the class's 5th, passive skill trees to 100, which then affects all jobs that character uses. Taking Courage to 100, for example, will make the character strong and tough even if they are a Mage. Taking a weapon's skill to 100 will make them vastly stronger when using that weapon (+ 60 attack power when most weapons at the time are giving around 27) than they "should" be. Later, doing this up to level 38 (which is when jobs give the first 100th skill point) will allow you to do this with *multiple* skill trees.
- Forbearance, the ultimate Paladin skill, makes your Paladin take all incoming damage for the team. So in effect, what you can then do is outfit your paladin with the best gear, dedicate one character to healing, and have the paladin cast Forbearance every turn. While this means your paladin will take 4 hits every time the enemy casts a group-targeting spell, it also means that your healer only has to heal one target. In addition, it means that damage reflection skills (such as the Fan's Reverse Flourish or Shield's Magic Mirror) will reflect breath and magic four times.
- Against metal monsters, Have A Ball is right alongside four Falcon Blades for efficiency, as it fires six or seven low damage attacks, randomly distributed among the enemies. Gets even better if you start the battle with someone's tension at fifty, in which case they're dealing four damage per hit against monsters that have less than twenty HP.
- Dragon Quest XI:
- Divide. Erik's next move will be multiplied by 3 when used. That means more chances to hit, more chances to crit, and with Critical Claim, three guaranteed critical hits. Using Divide followed by Double Down while dual-wielding boomerangs is lethal in boss fights that have multiple targets. Divide followed by either Persecutter or Victimizer (which deal 6x the damage on targets with applicable status conditions) can deal so much damage as to kill the True Final Boss in ONE GO.
- Critical Claim is also very powerful on its own - all variants of metal slimes take normal damage from critical hits, and since their whole gimmick is taking less damage and trying to run away but having almost no hitpoints, Critical Claim is a guaranteed One-Hit KO against them. Combine this with it being possible for Erik to eventually attack before a metal slime has the chance to even attempt to run away, and metal slimes suddenly go from the occasional neat bonus to something you can actively hunt to get the best EXP rates in the entire game.
- MP Regeneration:
- The Belle's Bow. An accessory for Jade that can be acquired nearly immediately after getting her, in its best form it increases her charm drastically and gives her 6MP Recovery per turn. This eliminates most of her MP concerns and remains useful even in the post game. Broken even more if she is equipped with it when you arrive in Arboria, where it will be duplicated in the post game.
- In the Switch version, switching between 2D and 3D modes resets all treasure chests with a very small number of exceptions. Once the player has reached Arboria, this can be used to obtain enough copies of the Supplicant accessory to outfit the entire party. With two fully-upgraded Supplicants on every party member, the entire party will be regenerating 6 MP (9 if Jade uses one alongside the Belle's Bow) per turn from the end of Act 1 onward.
- Mode switching will also allow the player to stock up on mini medals much sooner, allowing them to obtain Erdwin's shield at the very beginning of Act 3. For the entirety of the final act, the Luminary can recover at least 10 MP every round.
- Though it takes a bit of work to get and you get it in the middle of the second act, the Sage's Stone is as broken in this game as it is in every other game. It is a literal, infinite use free Multi-heal, and it suits both Hendrik and the Luminary as a means to heal the party cheaply. Particularly good for Hendrik, due to his less than stellar MP pool. Even better is that during the postgame, you can find a second one, in case just one wasn't enough.
- It is stupidly easy to break the game using the 200-token roulette tables in the Octagonia Casino: simply walk in with a few thousand tokens to start (although the minimum required is 800, this removes Save Scumming) and bet 200 on all three rows and the treasure square (so that you're guaranteed a win). While this seems like a good way to lose money, it isn't - At worst, you'll only lose 200 coins each time, and eventually, the wheel will absolutely land on the Jackpot, netting you a million tokens. And this is repeatable. All of a sudden, you have the best whip in the main game, amazing armour, easy access to rare materials, and, most importantly, the means for infinite gold: Sage's Elixirs are very cheap in tokens, sell for a decent amount at market, and are damned useful to boot. By winning the jackpot, buying a ludicrous amount of Elixirs, and selling them, you can kiss any worries about gold goodbye.
- Fans have also discovered that, for unknown reasons, 12 and 14 are significantly more likely to land on the jackpot. Get a few wins (or just grind for the gold), bet max on 12 and 14, save scum for a few minutes, and that jackpot will come. (As a bonus, this also makes the sidequest where you have to hit the jackpot much easier)
- While it's not usable until Act 3, Veronica's Magic Burst spellnote is by far the most powerful attack available in the postgame. Enhanced by Channel Anger's 50% damage bonus, it can deal upwards of 4000 damage to all enemies, enough to kill some bosses outright and severely weaken those that can survive it. After it's used, the exhausted Veronica can be swapped out for another party member to finish the job... or you could combine it with the Octagonia casino trick above to stock up on Elfin Elixers, which fully restore all MP, and let her spam it repeatedly.
- The Definitive Edition adds Tickington, a series of Nostalgia Levels where you encounter characters and locations from previous Dragon Quest games. By doing sidequests there, you can earn a number of powerful pieces of equipment based on items from past games.
- The Golden Pickaxe adds gives you a bonus random ore whenever you collect from a stone material spot.
- The Benevolessence is a free, infinite use Magic Barrier. It can be given to anyone to add utility to their arsenal. Jade and Erik especially benefit from it as they have great speed and next to no supporting moves, while Serena can be made to have both defensive buffs to free up Veronica's turns.
- While you only get it after completing the main quest, the War Drum is a multi-target Oomph spell that costs no MP and can be used an infinite number of times. Two turns is all it takes to double the entire party's attack power, very useful for the difficult postgame battles.
- Dragon Quest Monsters:
- Metal Slime class monsters. Immune to magic. Immune to most status effects (with the exception of "waste a turn" effects). Utterly disgusting amounts of defense and agility. Great magic casting and mana scores. The only downside is they have jack and squat for hit points, the higher end ones having a single or double digit cap. Oh, and they level up on a level approaching the glacial. Still, make one your healer and not only will your other monsters never die, the enemy AI will constantly cause them to attack your Metal Slime, who will shrug it off.
- Taken even higher in Terry's Wonderland, where you not only can get a King Metal Slime by midgame, but can also make a Goldslime if you play your cards right. It requires plenty of planning and foregoing a Blizzardy earlier on, but the rest of the game just crumbles in front of one of the strongest monsters in the game.
- Rainhawks, made by breeding a Blizzardy and Phoenix, are immune to all fire and ice attacks and can use such moves themselves, have excellent attack, defense, and magic, and if leveled properly can defeat Gem Slimes and the like with basic attacks. They also have sizable HP.
- Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2: The Plus and Minus Sceptres take literally all the trial-and-error elements out of synthesizing, and are pretty easy to get past a certain point, too.
- Dragon Quest Builders 2:
- An update to the game prior to the English release allowed you to ride friendly golems (ala riding Goldirox during the Khrumbul-Dun story chapter), and it's every bit as awesome as it sounds. Their punches are basically an infinite-use wrecking ball, making material gathering and terraforming a piece of cake, and turning combat into a bit of a joke (although you can't take a recruited golem into the third or fourth story chapters). Just be careful that you don't go swinging that fist around your own structures...
- Completing the scavenger hunts on the Explorer's Shores grants an infinite amount of several common materials when using them at a workbench. Such usage isn't limited to the Isle of Awakening and makes gathering those same materials on islands in the main story unnecessary despite the Builder being unable to bring acquired items to the story islands at first. This gets a bit silly during Skelketraz, where you're supposed to be cut off from any outside help whatsoever.
- The gold brick and floor blocks can easily skyrocket the fanciness of a room. Same with the silver blocks, to a lesser extent.
- Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and The Blight Below:
- Terry's Falcon Slash skill can be used to infinitely stun lock the largest enemies, especially if they have more than one hitbox that can be hit with a single attack. All of his clones allow him to build max tension very quickly, unleash a Coup de Grace to topple the enemy, and rebuild his tension before it can get back up. It makes the rematch fight against the Gigantes and the fight against Atlas almost trivial.
- Nera has probably the highest DPS potential of any character of the entire game. Endless Crescent Moon + Endless Maelstrom + spamming bubbles = massive damage. The trade-off is her MP will drain real quick. Now consider that high tension mode gives infinite MP, and abilities that allow her to regain up to 10 MP per critical hit (meaning Raging Rubies can help her keep her MP going, but only from criticals from bubbles, as Miracle Moon's crits don't seem to restore MP, probably because it would've otherwise been truly game breaking).
- The same combination of abilities has been compared to outright cheating in defense missions if she has a good MP based build, allowing her to set up incredibly effective chokepoints for hordes of smaller to medium sized enemies (although larger boss-level enemies can eventually start to break free from the pull of Maelstrom), also putting them at the mercy of onslaughts of Hubble Bubbles, which will drift towards the center of the Maelstrom attack when active.
- Bianca is also incredibly effective at sniping smaller groups of enemies over even longer distances than either Terry or Nera once she has maxed out "Rain of Pain" and has the "10 MP restored per crit" perk, though people tend to use her more to grind mini medals after certain accessories with medal drop rate alterations become available. This allows the player to quickly rack up Mini Medals which can end up all but replacing the need to farm ingredients since they can also be bought for Mini Medals.
