- Due to a bug, accessing the menu while charging up a spell will make the spell charge when you are in the menu and the game is paused, meaning you can technically rapid-fire all of your spells without worrying about being interrupted. The enemies charge their spells while you're in the menu, too, so this bug can also be used against you if you're not careful.
- Having Hawkeye and Kevin in the same team, since they have double-strike capability. Their Level One Techs (green bar) can be stronger than their Level Threes (red bar) with elemental/strength buffs. If you picked their Dark-Dark classes (Nightblade for Hawkeye and Death Hand for Kevin), they tear most bosses apart. Add some more pain by lowering the enemy's defenses.
- There are some who consider Beiser's black market a game breaker in itself, as the purchasable items potentially render many classes entirely redundant.
- Tossing a Dark-oriented Hawkeye and a Light-oriented Riesz (with Nightblade/Starlancer being probably the most broken of the bunch) into the same party renders most of the God-Beasts a joke. Riesz buffs the party while Hawkeye debuffs the bosses, effectively neutering their damage output. If a third character knows sabre magic, most boss fights will end in under a minute. The much-maligned Sage class shines as the third party member by providing the aforementioned sabers alongside healing and holy magic, providing everything that Riesz and Hawkeye lack.
- Deadly Weapon or Lunatic (used by Hawkeye as a Nightblade or Wanderer, respectively) both reduce the target's maximum HP by a set percentage. The developers were clearly only thinking of enemies using it against players (it only knocks off a couple hundred HP max), but when Hawkeye uses it on bosses, it can be the equivalent of doing several thousand HP in a single hit since the lost HP does not recover when the status wears off and most bosses do not heal.
- Hawkeye's Ninja Master class gains the ability to multi-target his Shuriken. This means you have a speed-casting ability that hits all enemies on the screen, does significant damage, knocks enemies backward, and lowers their evasion. All for only 1 MP. Fans have dubbed it the "1 MP Wonder".
The balance of the game was heavily skewed in the player's favor, which has garnered an "
It's Easy, So It Sucks!" reaction from the fandom, and these are the main culprits. Bear in mind that with 1.1.0, and the No Future difficulty that comes with it, you will likely be scrambling for these with all due haste.
- Hawkeye has quite a few nasty tricks up his sleeve:
- Hawkeye as a Nightblade has an inherent skill that causes any of his attacks to have a 10% chance to instantly kill any regular enemy with a power attack if it has a status effect on it. He learns a skill in his first class that makes his Power Attacks apply poison with a 30% chance. Combine those two together, and there's a chance that Hawkeye can kill a regular enemy with a single combo string. His Prestige Class on the Dark route gets a passive ability that's an even better version, since it gives a 10% chance to instantly kill any regular enemy, period. This makes late-game encounters in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon a complete joke, since Hawkeye can just spam power attacks over and over until he kills them instantly.
- The Ninja Master, once considered a a joke next to the Nightblade in the original, now has a major power boost thanks to several abilities. First, the Ninja Master gets skills that increase damage against an enemy's weakpoint, which all stack. The Ninja Master also gets several skills that increase damage of the same element on repeated casts, again which, stack. Finally, it gets several skills, that once again stack, that add to the CS gauge every time Hawkeye hits with a ninja technique. Not every time they're cast, every time they hit. Since the Ninja Master can target all enemies on the screen with his techniques, some of which hit three times per cast, this can refill his CS gauge absurdly fast. This means that the Ninja Master can spam his damaging techniques, applying debuffs all the while, annihilate anything left with a class strike, then rinse and repeat.
- Hawkeye as a Nomad is generally passed over by the community since his spells lack power compared to the Rogue or Ninja Master, and his utility spells generally aren't that useful. However, with the advent of No Future mode, where enemies can and will kill you in one hit, his Crystalline spell (which cancels out a single hit) becomes less a novelty and more a necessity.
- The skill "Eagle Talons", obtained during Hawkeye's Class 4 quest, replenishes 1 MP whenever a basic attack hits the enemy. This is already a handy skill for MP-centric characters such as Angela, but is absolutely broken when used by Hawkeye due to his fast, numerous hits. It's enough to handily replenish his MP reserves even as he uses his traps or ninja attacks on a regular basis.
- Duran as a Liege can learn Heal Light+, which restores HP to every party member as opposed to only one. This can be combined with a skill that reduces healing spell costs in battle, and a shared skill from Angela that recovers one MP with every strong attack. The result is a party-wide heal for only 4 MP, which Duran can easily recover in just a few normal combo strings on anything. And since Duran is already a Stone Wall with the most durability of any of the six heroes, this gives any party Liege Duran is in a ton of staying power.
- Winning the fight against this version's Black Rabite rewards you a skill rendering all MP costs to zero in battle. This is as broken as it sounds late-game, but is even better in that you can use it in New Game Plus. This skill gives a fresh Angela license to destroy everything with her strongest spells without worrying about MP costs, or gives Charlotte the ability to heal and buff all of your characters as many times as she wants. Either way, it turns your party into an absolute force to be reckoned with.
- Defeating Anise in under 2 minutes on Hard rewards the player with a Chain Skill that allows for unlimited item usage in battle, breaking the Beiser Market even more by being able to spam everything that it has to offer and cover holes in the party line-up infinitely. The only thing deflating it is that Anise is the second most powerful entity in the entire game, surpassed by the Black Rabite alone; anyone that can handle both of them can effectively break the game in two as it is.
- Finding Li'l Cactus 50 times rewards the party with a Chain Skill that grants 200 CP at the start of each battle. Apply that on a New Game Plus to a character with a good AOE Class Skill (Riesz's Whirlwind Spear or Gladiator Duran's Spin Slash) and most battles will begin with that character severely damaging, if not outright killing, most of the enemies.
- Riesz has some very busted potential no matter which path she takes.
- The Fenrir Knight can gain skills that debuff the entire enemy party, reducing their damage, defense, and magic (depending on the spell). In the remake, the Fenrir Knight also gains a passive skill that makes these debuffs last forever, so there's no need to cast it in a fight more than once. Finally, Riesz can gain a skill from her training to restore fifteen percent of her Critical Strike gauge every time she casts a successful debuff. That is, fifteen percent per debuff per enemy. At the start of battle, that's an easy sixty percent to her CS gauge right there from one quick cast of Defenseless, Weaken, or Enfeeble on most encounters. Couple that with skills that reduce the MP cost of debuff skills (which stack), and she can recover tons of her CS gauge for only 1 MP per cast. This makes Fenrir Knight Riesz a formidable powerhouse of debuffing, and allows her to use her CS skills basically at will.
- The Dragon Master can't debuff the entire enemy party per cast, but that doesn't matter as much since she can save the MP in a boss battle for Jormungandr spam; the "Random Debuff II" ability lets her inflict debuffs with power attacks, which also gives back some CS points due to how the system works, to say nothing of the aforementioned "Stat Down CS Boost" and "Summon CS Boost" which recharges CS points with every cast of Jormungandr. Can we say "Class Strikes for days"?
- For those who want to go Light, the Valkyrie can exploit the combo system to get 1% extra CS point per normal attack, which in any boss fight will keep you handily topped off. Going Vanadis means that Riesz only needs to cast buffs twice with "Extra Potent", which gives the buff effect to her on cast on top of the intended target; going Starlancer instead gives her eternal buffs much like the Fenrir Knight's eternal debuffs, along with passives that buff stats further; and pushing into Meteorite territory allows Riesz to heal 10% of her party's HP with each Class Strike, for a whopping half max HP from five Whirlwind Lances. The end result is a near-literal goddess of war that pops the bird at anything that looks at her funny before paving it over in an endless meteor shower of pain, which can easily be coupled with Liege Duran for good times, and of course adding Dark Hawkeye or Dark-Dark Kevin with a full set of debuff-on-crit skills can recreate the stat shenanigans of the original.
- Kevin is just as, if not more, broken in the remake as he is in the original, especially if he goes Dark-Dark as Moon Energy works properly, a critical hit can lower an enemy's defense, and he learns skills that restore upwards of 30% of the CS gauge per enemy kill. Pair him with a Light-based Duran or Charlotte for Holy Saber, and a well-aimed Class 4 Class Skill can one-shot Anise's second form. Using him with Duran and Riesz, or just using New Game Plus, adds the option of debuffing the enemy's attack and magic alongside their defense.
- Charlotte as a Warlock has one ability that increases effective damage. Combine this with Angela or Edelfrei Duran's sabers, and you'll wreck bosses.
- Angela has Magikarp Power in the remake:
- The original game was infamous for the spell glitch that made Angela the greatest character in the game, but by the time the party starts facing the Benevodons she'll occupy that spot again. A random encounter comes over? Please, almost any combination Angela has will allow her to two-shot or even one-shot the entire enemy party, on Hard. There's a boss fight? The list of skills Angela can equip that passively raise her magical power seems to go on forever, and if you know what you're doing you can double her damage.
- This especially becomes apparent in boss fights, where many of the bosses have multiple hurt boxes, including her final boss. Why is this important? Because you can hit multiple hurt boxes on a boss at once, and each individual hurtbox will take the damage. This will turn the final boss into an utter joke and allow Angela to steamroll her final dungeons.
- It gets better, though; Angela has access to multiple abilities in the remake that make MP management incredibly easy, including two she's required to get to get fire magic. She can get MP by whacking enemies with a Power attack, she can cut the cost of her spells, she can passively regain 5 MP every 5 seconds, the MP no longer caps at 99 so Angela can easily have around 150 by the Benevodons, and so on.
- And of course there's the Black Rabite chain ability, which reduces MP costs to all her spells to 0, and allows her to throw away all means of MP conservation and focus entirely on nuking everything — and if that doesn't sound broken to you yet, just remember: Unlimited Ancient Curse.
- Her one balancing factor of being squishy isn't even that much of a problem in the remake anymore because the player can actually dodge the enemy Class Strikes meant to ruin Angela in the original game, and in fact, those enemy Class Strikes often leave the enemy open during and after the fact. One of her Luck-based skills, Elusive, also makes it harder for enemies to target her in the first place, especially when paired off with Duran using Provoke, making it entirely possible for Angela to simply hang out at the edge of the fight and hammer mobs with magic, while never even needing to worry about defense.
- While it only comes up under New Game Plus, any character that you completed a previous run with and you reuse under the new game will be at whatever level they were on when you finished the previous game. This includes up to the level cap. The only thing they don't have is any spells, class changes, or class-specific gear, as these are locked by the story. So depending on how much grinding you did in the previous play through, and how you build your New Game Plus party, you could have one or more Level 99 characters at the start of the game. (While there's a Cap on stat bonuses based on class changes, that's not a terrible hardship.)
- The Love of Mana ability available in New Game Plus grants you a 300% bonus to XP for each fight. Meaning it's very easy to become ridiculously over-leveled for the encounters in your area even without relying on high-level characters from previous games. It's entirely possible for the party to be ready for their second class change by the time you reach the Wind Stone if you happen to have enough ??? Seeds left over from a previous game.note The one balancing factor here appears to be that you only generate the class items for the Light Path if you grow ??? Seeds before your first class change. But there's still nothing stopping you from getting your first class change, going back to Palo Port to grow your ??? Seeds, then heading back to the Wind Stone. And while boss fights normally provide enough XP to level up once, now it's not impossible for a boss to level you three or more times depending on other XP bonuses.
