Game Breaker / Final Fantasy Tactics

• The Special Units as a whole, but more specially:
  • Orlandeau aka "Thunder God Cid", who not only has ungodly stats, and knows just about all the sword abilities of several Special Units (Agrias, Gaffgarion and Meliadoul, to be precise) right off the bat, but also comes with with legendary equipment such as Excalibur free of charge. And you don't have to go to any extra effort to get him — he just gets dropped into your lap about 2/3 of the way through, so the only way to not break the game is to deliberately not use him.
    • Speaking of Orlandeau, his equipment can turn the normally powerful but not overly powerful Agrias and Meliadoul into game breakers. Auto-Haste from Excalibur, plus the best armor (by a LOT) in the game gives them the same attack, speed and defense power as Orlandeau himself, just with slightly less versatility in Sword Techs.
  • Beowulf Cadmus, whose status spells are better than those of the devoted debuff class.
  • Balthier, in the Updated Re Release, comes with superb equipment, all of Mustadio's skills and upgraded Thief abilities (no more will you have to worry about beating <15% success rate). His Barrage skill is akin to attacking twice with any weapon, it's unblockable, undodgeable and if he uses it with his default gun he can easily kill any unit within two rounds from across the stage.
• Any ability that doesn't require "casting-time" breaks the game due to bypassing Charge Times, to which about any class save for the most basic ones is limited. It's also the reason why a mastered Arithmetician is horribly broken.
• Fairly early on in the game, Ramza has access to Yell/Tailwind, which ups his speed by one per use. Reuse it enough, and you'll start getting extra turns, and he can use it on other characters. The thing is, the faster you get, quite literally the faster you can get. The ability snowballs once you get underway, to the point where Ramza will be getting up to eight turns in a row, which is eight turns he can be upping another character's speed.
  • Incidentally, the fact that Wiegraf practically requires you to abuse this Game-Breaker is part of why he's That One Boss. What makes it such a hard fight is evading him long enough to get your speed high enough.
• Perfumes can turn any female character into a killing machine. Moreso if you equip it on Special Units (like Agrias, Meliadoul or Reis), who are already powerful by their own right. One such accessory, Chantage, gives permanent Auto-Raise, making the wearer nearly invincible (the only way she can be defeated is by Petrify or Blood Suck). Conveniently, the series-standard Ribbon is also female-exclusive in this game, so even those weaknesses can be compensated for.
  • The War of the Lions takes this even further, with the ability to gain the Tynar Rouge accessory, which grants permanent Haste, Protect, Shell, boosts Holy and adds +3 to Strength and Magic. Give that to Agrias and watch as she basically rivals Orlandeau's feats.
• Cloud's Limit Break Finishing Touch. It is as fast as a level-one White/Black spell, costs no MP, and causes KO, Stone and Stop. Sure, you still have to build him up from level 1 and use the weak Materia Blade, but attack power is irrelevant when you're hitting with an insta-kill move. The only stats that matter for Cloud are Speed (simple, make him a Ninja) and HP. The Time Mage's Quickness ability also helps, making the low casting time for Finishing Touch even shorter.
• Meliadoul's Unyielding Blade can hit enemies without the specific equipment in the remakes (which means not even monsters are safe; they don't have any equipment to break but the attacks still do major damage) and while she isn't Orlandeau, Meliadoul still hits pretty damn hard with her skillset. By default she actually hits harder than Agrias, but lacks the (surprisingly useful) status effects and the AoE attacks. While redundant in the original, the remake changes the question of "Why bother using her when you have Cid?" to "Why not use both?"
• The Samurai ability Blade Grasp/Shirahadori. Grants a percentage chance equal to your Brave of blocking a physical attack, including arrows and bullets, despite its description. A high Brave/low Faith character with this skill is practically immortal - it can give a player a 97% base chance to block an attack.
• Orators, due to their ability to reset enemy CT. Give their skill set to someone like Mustadio, and suddenly, stealing Genji equipment from Elmdore becomes much easier.
• The Calculator/Arithmetician's skill set can make a spell caster nearly unstoppable, by allowing instant, free casting of most of the game's spells (including Flare and Holy) with unlimited range. Give the skill to a job with high magic power, and you've practically got a Person of Mass Destruction. If only this job was able to be scroll-glitched, it would easily become the most exploitable class in the game.
  • There's also armor that absorbs Holy elemental spells, so you could just nuke everybody on the field, hurting the enemy and healing yourself at the same time.
• The Updated Re-release adds "Dark Knight" as a job class. Make one with Darkness, Iaido, Shirahadori, Safeguard, and Move+3 as abilities, then equip him with Excalibur, Aegis Shield, Crystal Helm, Mirror Mail, and Featherweave Cloak. Especially deadly in the endgame, as Brave increases are permanent in a 4:1 or so ratio, give him 20 Brave in one encounter and he keeps five after the fight. You could easily have a character untouchable by magic with an 8% chance of being hit from behind. The only weaknesses are summons and non-reflectable magics, which can be avoided by virtue of the shield and cloak, and characters with holy blade abilities, like Weigraf and Loffrey — the latter of which is foiled by Safeguard. Ramza? With Shout? Hoo-lee-crap. Strategically position a Mime? Ow.
• In the PS1 version at least, any unit participating in battle with other unit types would gain a quarter of any JP those units gained, meaning a Level 2 Ramza could leech enough JP from others' actions to actually progress to other jobs and eventually master them all, without taking an Action. This way, random encounters' levels are still low, but Ramza still has ludicrous skill sets and the option to level up in whatever job the player wants (or spams the stat growth, as mentioned later herein with the Degenerator).
• Give units the Dance/Sing ability with Sunken State as a reaction ability, making a barricade of invisible dancers/singers, and choosing Wait whenever a turn comes up. Also, bring a book; doing this took as much time to read a Tom Clancy novel or two.
• One of the most practical reaction skills in the game is Auto-Potion. It causes the character to consume the cheapest healing potion in your inventory, as a counter-attack, saving you the trouble of wasting a precious turn to heal them yourself. It does come with the downside of consuming said potion, which can get expensive if the skill is used en masse, but by the time you can employ it en masse you probably aren't hurting for Gil. Its other downside is that, to learn it, you have to spend time as a Chemist. ...A healing class that is also a true Combat Medic due to being one of the only classes in the game that can use guns. Yeah, they're really awful to have on your team.
• Set Chivalry on Archers and watch them break enemy equipment from a distance. Doubles as a Disc-One Nuke.
• The Ninja job has awesome stats in almost every category, and handing them the support ability "Martial Arts" makes a devastatingly fast, double-fisted death machine.
  • Give a Ninja the "Equip Spear" ability, the "Jump" ability, and optimize them with all of your speed-boosting equipment and the Ultimate Javelin. For added effectiveness, learn the Lancer/Dragoon's best Jump skills. You'll have a warrior able to inflict 999 damage from eight panels away with the speed of a Short Charged, level 1 Black Magic spell.
• Or the broken combo of the reaction ability "MP Switch/Mana Shield" and "Move MP UP/Manafont" which makes you completely invulnerable to damage as long as you move.
• One can also raise a monk's level and allow them to deal more damage than any weaponed character. The Accumulate ability provides 10 experience and many job points (or something like that) per usage, meaning with enough time, you can level up an entire party (and their jobs) in one battle as many times as you want, without doing any damage or casting any magic. Combined with haste spells (which boosts a character's speed for that battle) characters could have many, many turns while enemies have one. And then you can have dual-wielding on a specific character, use "best fit" in a shop, and TWO excaliburs would be equipped, only costing 10 money a piece. Extra game breaker: only random encounters had level-matched enemies. Formal matches could have your level 99 characters facing off against level 20 enemies.
• Two Dancers, paired with three Mimes. Have every dance use Wiznaibus/Mincing Minuet. Set the controller down. Even without exploiting the way the game engine calculates damage, they can usually murder their way through just about anything before the enemy can even reach them.
• Any unit equipped with a Feather Cape and Reflexes also deserves mention. The Feather cape gives a unita 40% chance to dodge physical attacks and a 30% chance to dodge magic attacks, Reflexes doubles both chances and since it's a cape the evade bonus works on back and side attacks so a unit by default gets hit from physicals 20% at most and gets hit from magic 40% of the time. The advantage it has on Shirahadori is that it stops most magic attacks and it allows you to evade counter.
• A simple, yet effective trick is the high Brave, low Faith, Item, Shirahadori combo. For every four points you modify someone's bravery or faith, one point is permanent. This means it's possible to get a character's Bravery to 97 and his Faith down to 3. This character has a 97% chance to block any physical attack (and you can pump that up to 100% by having Ramza use Cheer Up at the start of combat) and shrug off anything magical. Only a few monster techniques, such as Choco Meteor, have any chance of dealing damage to him, as well as counter attacks and dual-wielders. Even if he does get low on hit points, he can spend a turn to use a healing item on himself.
• Hell, ANYTHING from War of the Lions' multiplayer rewards list. While some of it is limited to either Melee (PvP) or Rendezvous (co-op missions) most of it breaks the game. The Brigand's Glove, for example, is a glove accessory that gives +3 to speed and Auto-Haste. No need for Excalibur as a weapon now, you can equip a Chaos Blade and still get Haste. The next item is the Grand Armor which gives permanent Reraise, like the Chantage does, but now it frees up that accessory slot for female units or now males get Reraise automatically.
• Not quite as broken as the above examples, but setting Ramza as a Monk with Guts, Dual Wield, Counter/Hamedo, and whatever move ability fits the situation is insanely powerful. Spend the first few rounds raising his speed and attack power and he pretty much kills anything in one round.
• The Golem summon puts up a wall on all allies that blocks up to N points of damage before it breaks, where N is the caster's max HP. Powerful enough as is, but thanks to a quirk in the game's AI, casting Golem makes the enemies drop everything they're doing and try to break all of your shields instead of, say, casting any obscenely powerful spells they might be packing.
• Summons are this when used as a secondary ability for wizards and time mages with high faith and magic attack up. Most notably Ramuh and Odin, which are a quick way to get through the majority of the game without having to spend too much time grinding for JP. Ramuh has even more longevity when equipped with a thunder rod.