Game Breaker / Epic Battle Fantasy

• To a certain degree, the Mog spell in the first game. It basically amounts to a free item being used on one of the characters, in a game where you have two opportunities to buy items with limited funds. Being one of the cheapest spells, it's very likely that Matt will get an Ether before he runs out of MP, effectively making the spell easy to spam.
• The Tera Drill spell does ridiculous amounts of damage to enemies with defensive buffs. Buff attack on whoever has it and even Akron goes down relatively easily.
• In the second game, getting Matt to learn Mana Leech. Almost any attack in which his sword makes contact with an enemy will give him between 110 and 130 mana for free. Legend, his strongest physical attack, only costs 90 mana. Throw in a few Counter abilities, and enemies will be actively feeding Matt mana points.
• In the third game, a surprising amount of enemies can be afflicted with the Poison status, and since the game averts Useless Useful Spell, this includes bosses. It's very easy to get 9 stacks on a boss and have its health slowly get drained for free. Many of the enemies that are immune to poison tend to be inorganic in nature, making them weak to bombs instead — very few enemies can take both.
• The poison status condition from Epic Battle Fantasy 3 requires elaboration. Poison in this game can stack; a level 1 poison isn't particularly noteworthy, but the poison damage is vastly increased for each consecutive level. By the time you reach a level 9 poison, you would have to spam Limit Breaks just to deal more damage in one turn than the poison is doing. One of Matt's earliest learnable skills is Nettle, which causes this condition, and if you level Nettle up to level 3, you can get them to a level 3 poison with one use of Nettle. And one of the earliest weapons you can find is the Black Fang, which boosts the power of Nettle. Worse, later on you can teach Lance the Poison Gas move, which inflicts level 3 poison on all enemies, and can sometimes do it twice for a level 6, in one shot. Even the final boss is not immune — in fact, being a Barrier Change Boss, it has a state where it's weak to poison, and can sometimes start the battle this way. Stack him up to the gills with poison and tank and he'll lose tens of thousands of HP per turn. The only balance is that some of the enemies are immune to it, including most of the later bosses and the Monoliths. What really makes poison broken, though, is the way battles work in the game. Battles take place in waves, and once you kill all the enemies in one wave, the next one will spawn right away. If you use 2 characters' actions to KO one wave, you'll then have only one character to prepare for the next wave's attacks, forcing the player to be careful about eliminating waves too quickly. But if the wave is finished off with poison, which takes place between turns, you didn't have any characters use their actions — so you'll have all three characters ready for the next one, removing a large balancing factor normally inherent to the game. Poison was so broken that, when the game was released on Steam, its damage to enemies was nerfed by a full 30%.
• Lance's Airstrike special. It deals a large amount of damage to a single enemy, with a 50% chance of inflicting that damage to the entire enemy party. Note that the "run" command is much more effective than it is in most RPGs; you can run from any battle in the game at any time and come back to that same fight later, albeit with the enemies fully healed. So have Lance move first, if Airstrike targets a single enemy, run away, walk to restore MP, come back to the battle, try again, and repeat until the enemy party gets blasted to death or near-death. If this wasn't broken enough, consider that Airstrike uses the rare Bomb element, which is the weak point of almost every Demonic Spider in the game. Then consider that Airstrike, at higher levels, gains a chance to replace its bomb with a much bigger one that deals almost double damage… and those same "run and return" shenanigans become even more valuable. And if that's somehow not enough, you can have Natalie move first, use her Bless white magic to increase Lance's damage by 70%, and…
• Lance's hat and coat, along with the Army Jacket. Sure, they give some defense, but that's not why you want them. No, you want them because they have a chance to summon Lance's tank (a single powerful shot or eight inaccurate shots per enemy) and an Airstrike respectively between turns. For free. And they can stack. It is not unheard of for battles to end before you even had a chance to act because the enemy is buried under a barrage of tank shells, missiles and More Dakka. Oh, and they resist Dark, so if you fully upgrade them, Cosmic Monoliths can't touch a character who wears both (sadly, one of the guys is screwed).
• In Adventure Story, there is Mana Staff. Its basic attack is very weak; however, each of its attacks has a chance to drain MP from not only enemies, but also objects and projectiles. This essentially provides unlimited healing and powers up spells.
• If Matt equips the Rune Blade in the fourth game, and forges it to the max level, AND if you give Matt most/all of the ham items to buff his attack, you can regularly attack enemies with skills that cost MP and more often than not, your MP will be filled up basically automatically. Also, the max level of the Rune Blade basically guarantees that Matt will syphon his targets, and makes him completely immune to be dispelled and syphoned himself. The Rune Blade also boosts the damage of holy skills. Not only that, but he's just about guaranteed to counter, and he may casts a powerful skill called Glitter regularly, which is, again, boosted by the sword itself.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 4 drastically nerfed poison to the point where it's under-powered, and brought airstrikes to within balance, but it's not quite immune to having its own game breakers. By giving Lance the Solar Flare special (which reduces the enemy party's accuracy, with nothing in the whole game immune to it and almost nothing resisting it outside of chapter bosses) and combining it with Anna's Reflex ability (which boosts evasion for the whole party), it becomes practically impossible for the enemy to hit you at all. Both of these skills can be cast multiple times. Reflex carries over to the next wave, and while Solar Flare doesn't, it's fairly easy to let Lance hit the next wave with a Solar Flare before they can act.
• Hela's Staff, one of Natalie's weapons, enormously increases her Magic Attack — higher than any other weapon in the game — at the cost of also reducing her HP and MP, and having a chance of cursing Natalie every round. Covering Natalie with the evasion strategy mentioned above makes her Glass Cannon status a non-issue, and since the curse condition only affects defense and leaves offense untouched, and MP is restored between battles, none of these supposed balancing factors actually matter all that much. Natalie has a Dark-elemental multi-target attack called Pulsar, which is the strongest multi-target attack in the game that isn't a Limit Break. The Hela's Staff is a Dark weapon, and in this game, that means it boosts Dark-elemental attacks by 1.5x on top of the boost to Magic Attack that Natalie is already getting. Natalie can also equip dark armors on top of this, both of which give the highest boosts any armor gives to the Magic Attack stat. And she can cast Charm in battle to temporarily increase her own Magic Attack by 70%, which applies to all of the above boosts, while having an ally cast Screamer, which lowers the enemy party's Magic Defense. Combining all of this, it's quite possible for Natalie to wipe out an entire enemy wave in Epic mode with a single cast of Pulsar after only one turn of set-up, and then do exactly the same thing to the next wave, and so on until all the enemies are dead.
• As far as the DLC goes, most of the extra skills and weapons you get are generally useful, but not so useful that they obsolete the other options in your inventory. There is, however, one DLC skill that breaks the game wide open: Plasma Cage. Its in-game description: "High-accuracy magic that stuns the target." Note that unlike almost every other skill you have, it doesn't say that it "may" cause this status effect, but that it will — as long as the enemy isn't immune to Stun, Plasma Cage will prevent any actions from them for two rounds. And it stacks with itself. By having one character spam Plasma Cage, and spending the other two characters' turns buffing, you can guarantee a ridiculously buffed party for the next round, while you can casually pick off the current round at your leisure once your party is buffed to the cap in practically everything. The high accuracy preventing evasive enemies from stopping this tactic is just the icing on the cake.
• In Bullet Heaven 2, NoLegs has the Shooting Star sub-weapon. It fires continuously in place, lasts much longer than any non-toggleable weapon, and you can have several of them active at once (unlike the toggled weapons, where you can only have one at a time). By picking up a diamond or heart to recharge your weapon at the right time, you can end up firing nine streams of bullets at once counting your primary weapon. You can either scatter the Shooting Stars around to hit everything onscreen or concentrate them in one spot to deal obscene damage — bosses can lose half their health within a second to the latter.
• EBF5 introduced The Virus status. It is basically the same thing as poison, being under the same immunity and dealing poison damage, except it multiplies by itself and spreads on all enemies should you infect someone with it. The damage from both the Virus and the Poison stack. This becomes a very efficient way to deal with all enemies which have high health and do not outright nullify or absorb poison, something that applies even to Superbosses (for example the entirety of the Miniboss Rush can be defeated on Epic difficulty using only this strategy). The only disadvantage is the Virus spreads on your characters as well, but most weapons supplying Virus also supply some Poison resistance, so with the right build, you can turn it into Regen.
• In 5, the Invisible and Enchant statuses will make the target immune to one type of damage, but twice as vulnerable to another. If you know a boss's HP threshold for their ultimate attacks or know what their Limit Break is, getting these one of these statuses on the whole party can allow them to No-Sell the attack. If you inflict one of these statuses on an enemy and stack other damage increasing ailments on them, you can do far more damage than usual with a Limit Break.
• In 5, the Viking Monolith summon can cast haste on the entire party, and one piece of equipment can randomly summon it.
• 5 has Anna's triple status build. With the fully upgraded Alchemist's Bow, Blue Elephant, and Red Dress, she has astonishing reliability with status effects. Her fully upgraded Spark Shower and Frost Flurry attacks can stun or freeze the enemy on impact at 120% success rate against a single target for both attacks, 50% against the entire enemy party for Spark Shower, and 40% against the entire enemy party for Frost Flurry; she routinely breaks through 80% resistance against single targets and 50% against enemy parties, and can easily stunlock nearly the entire enemy team and render most trash mobs helpless. She can also make use of Shredder to just straight-up instakill anything that isn't resistant to instant death.
• The v2.0 of EBF5 introduces Equip Remix, which significantly changes properties of equipment. Consequently, some pieces of it became this:
  • Green Goliath was an uninspiring gun which, while powerful, had serious drawbacks — it reduced accuracy and evasion and inflicted Tired status on Lance that reduced them further, while accuracy was one of Lance's highest stats. In Equip Remix, instead it boosts the strength and magic by much less, but its drawbacks get removed and most importantly — it grants charge to Lance each turn. This essentially means he can spam Hyperbeam each turn without charging, which is an AoE attack with 300 base damage when fully maxed. The weapon also has no element, meaning you don't need to worry about enemies absorbing the attack, and with flairs, Hyperbeam can be used to inflict status effects such as curse to all enemies. The only drawback is you have to defeat Neon Valhalla to acquire it.
  • Devil's Fork is located in the first bonus dungeon and fully maxed — which you probably can do right after getting it, since it requires Lava and Big Lava slime as materials, which you can capture in the same dungeon — summons Mouse Slime, Slime Bunny, or big Lava Slime randomly. The first is a weak electric attack that stuns anything not completely immune to stun. Slime Bunny grants Regen to everyone for 5 turns. Big Lava Slime does massive fire damage to one target. Even more, it completely shields Matt from ice, fire, and poison damage, essentially negating all DoT damage as well.
  • Star Hammer is even more of an Infinity +1 Sword than it was, since instead of boosting NoLegs' defenses, it raises his evasion (his best stat), it stuns on hit instead of dispelling, and it has a chance to randomly summon God. Yes, that God.

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