Wrecking the Curve

[Karifean]

Ideally RPGs tend to have a rather balanced difficulty curve, but every now and then a new element is introduced that you might not even recognize that massively upsets the balance of the game. You can go through the game without even realizing it exists, but if you do, you can just lean back and watch yourself annihilate enemies like it was nothing, at least for a couple hours of game time.

Do share, what are some of these 'pro tips' you've come across that make a game section incredibly easy once you know about it?

[Lord Golbez]

GF mod abilities in FFVIII are certainly a strong contender. For example, the right ability will allow you to turn tents into curaga right at the beginning of the game. Junction that to HP and you won't even have to heal early in the game because no one will ever do enough damage to require it. You can also do limit breaks with HP that would be about equal to your max hp if you didn't use that "trick." I definitely count this because I didn't realize the power of these abilities on my first time through and generally relied on what magic was available to draw.

While there is some grind in getting these abilities, by exploiting them right FFVIII lets you become overpowered with one of the least amounts of effort in FF games. Makes it seem ironic to me that people always complain about how much time you have to spend drawing spells in FFVIII.

[Wolf Kanno]

Charm Ammo in Shin Megami Tensei 1. Basic ammo for your guns, and you would be surprised what is not immune to charm in this game including bosses.

Swap spell and Unarmed in FFII, you want to break this game at the beginning? Drop all weapons and just have the party use unarmed, their strength will sky rocket and the unarmed counts as dual-wielding so the unarmed proficiency will max out to the soft cap fairly quickly. Now level up some healing spells, head to Fynn and fight those Imperial Soldiers walking about. They have one of the highest enemy ranks in and with a high enough unarmed level, you can actually take these guys out and watch a lot of your stats skyrocket. These guys also drop mid-tier gear and weapons that can boost your team and sell for a lot of money. Once you have 24,000 gil, play long enough to get the canoe and head southwest to Mysidia. You will likely need to run from everything since this is an end game area but once there, buy three Swap spell scrolls and teach them to Firion, Marie, and Gus. Return to Altair and wander about until you fight a simple Goblin, use Swap with one character on the enemy to trade your HP/MP and finish the battle. The Goblin's stats are so low, you're guaranteed to see your HP and MP skyrocket as well. Keep doing this with each character until their health is in the thousands. Now go beat the game and be completely bored as nothing can touch your team. Also the Toad spell in this game works like an instant death spell, what most don't know is that several bosses don;t even have immunity towards it, so if you really need to level up one offensive spell...

FFVII, once you get out of Midgar, give a character with the highest HP (usually Cloud or Barret) a Fire Materia linked to the Element Support materia along with the Enemy Skill materia. Place everyone in the back row and have one other party member with the Poison Materia. Fight the Midgar Zolom instead of using the chocobo. Bio will Poison the sucker at which point you just need everyone to stay healing each other. Once it rises, continue to skip the turn of the character equipped with the first set-up so they'll be able to react immediately. Once the enemy reaches a quarter health, they'll cast Beta. The character with the Fire/Element combo should survive the attack and since their turn should still be available, have them cast Beta to end the fight and then save. Beta pretty much makes everything in the first disc a complete joke and no, you don't actually need high levels to do this strategy, maybe an extra restore materia but its actually pretty easy to pull off.

In Suikoden I, you can recruit a guy to play a game of dice, he is incredibly bad at it thanks to faulty RNG and so you can amass unlimited money to keep your whole army completely updated with the best gear and highest weapon upgrades available.

In Suikoden II, once Riou has access to the Matilda border, you can actually push on the gate despite it being locked and move the door open to get past it. This drops you in a high level area but if you can make it to the town, you can recruit Humphrey and Futch who will be scaled for this area and then power level your team to absurdness. making the first half of the game significantly easy.

In Suikoden V, Ernst is a character you can recruit who has been cursed by his beast rune to take the form of a cheetah. His actual rune in battle transforms him back to a human in order to gain access to the rest of the rune's abilities. One of those abilities is a move that stuns all enemies on the field and Ernst is one of the game's fastest characters so he almost always goes first. What makes this truly game-breaking is that even bosses are not immune to this rune spell including the final boss. You can even gain a formation eventually that has the same effect though it only works once, but you can then use that turn to transform Ernst to spam his ability every turn afterwards effectively meaning nothing in the game can ever touch you.

In Lufia 2, once you find the island the Ancient Cave is on, just keeping playing it and try to amass weapons from the Blue Treasure boxes. Not only will these treasures help you get further into the dungeon, they are often endgame level gear as well.

In BoFII, when you get the chance to make the town, one of the carpenter's you can choose will open up a kitchen with his wife, where they'll take a bunch of easy to acquire items like some of the fish and meat you can hunt for and turn them into permanent stat increasing items, and one item than can be sold for more money than the price of all the easy to obtain items to make it.

In BoFV, the SOL system allows you a few options including one that send you back to your last save but sacrificing the personal XP you got but letting you keep half the Party Experience you acquired. Beating battles quickly tends to net you higher Party XP and doing this restore option also rests the D-Counter meaning that if you reach certain bosses close to a save point, you can cheese this boss over and over to amass millions of XP to power level your party to end game levels. In fact the second to last boss nets you a whopping 40,000XP if you can kill him and his two clones in one turn, which is ridiculously easy with the Dragon Form in this game. If you amass around 2 million Party XP farming this fight, you can make NG+ into a perfect run game by leveling your whole party to level 60 once you recruit them.

In Wild Arms, if you really just don;t want to bother with challenge, there is a ridiculously easy item duplication trick in this game, and unlike say... FFVII's version, you can actually use it on stat improving items. So you can basically have three characters with max health, Rudy will have infinite ammo basically for his ARMS, Jack can have all his Quick Draw abilities cost 1MP, Cecilia can have every spell in the game, and you can have 99 Escape Goats which auto-revive a character in battle when killed. All it requires is two basic Heal Berries (think the lowly potion from FF) and one of each of those special items special items.

[Karifean]

Re:Beta, you still need to attack the Zolom yourself as him standing up, him kicking a character out of battle, and finally him using Beta, are all counterattacks he uses after crossing certain HP thresholds, and will be used in that order. Also if you're still having trouble surviving, buy some Tranquilizers and put everyone in Sadness for an extra 30% damage reduction.

In Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age, Lamont/Larsa has the Shades of Black technique, which uses a random Black Magic spell for no MP cost. Set him up to spam this instead of his regular attack. It will completely destroy everything in the Lhusu Mines and allow you to easily level up quite a bit if you want since the area has one of the best early grinding spots as well, but it still remains very useful when you get him again in Jahara (though by this point you can have the technique yourself).

In Persona 3, this is pretty late in the game, but you can fuse a Helel/Satan combo with Victory Cry on one of them, allowing you to use infinite Armageddons, instantly killing any encounter in the game except for the final boss (only kills one of its phases) and Elizabeth. Even at that point in the game this is still a rather crazy powerup since the enemies in Monad as well as the Reaper are seriously threatening pretty much regardless of level, but Armageddon kills them all instantly, which makes the final parts of leveling up real easy.

Trails of Cold Steel 2, maximizing evasion on Fie, enough said.

[Lord Golbez]

Suikoden II also has a save trick where you can keep Jowy in your party throughout the game. I guess that's more of a cheat, but since the unite attack with Riou and Jowy us ine of the best in the game, it does make things easier.

[Wolf Kanno]

Almost forgot this.

Star Ocean 2 - There is an ability you can teach your party leader called pickpocket, which does exactly what it says on the tin while wandering towns. In the fourth village you get to in the game. You can pickpocket an old man who has a magic box/treasure chest item. This item will randomly give you three items. Save the game and then open it. for some reason, the game gives you a high chance of getting a Marvel Sword, a overpowered weapon that increases most of your stats by hundred of points because it's a Disc 2 weapon. Claude will now be practically invincible for the rest of the disc. To make matters worse, thanks to SO2's crafting mechanics, you can actually make Claude's best weapon the Eternal Sphere before leaving the first disc if you improve the right skills and luck out a bit with RNG to get the right items. Honestly, SO2's crafting mechanics seriously break the game, but then again, all of the crafting systems in the series do this.

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance - The Balloon series of spells. I know it sound ridiculous, but if you want to breeze through this game with little effort, just fill up your command queue with Balloon series spells to watch as they wreck most enemy types.

Persona 2 Eternal Punishment - Not absolutely game breaking, but certainly a huge help. In one of the locations in the game, you'll meet a crazy fortuneteller lady. If you talk to her, she tells you your fortune after you give her your birthday. Now... if instead of putting in your birthday you instead write HASTURCOMEFORTH then you get an odd piece of dialogue. Return to Maya's office and you;ll discover a package on her desk giving you the Hastur material card The King in Yellow. Hastur is a Lovecraftian monster of the Tower Arcana that you can create at level 68 and can only be used by Baofu. He is weak to all types of melee damage but will reflect all magical attacks including status magic and almighty. His skill set is a nasty collection of instant death spells and dark magic, and this Persona allows a special conversation with the Biyarky enemy found in the final dungeon and later parts of the Bomb Shelter. These enemies are brutal as they resist or nullify everything and all of their move sets are group hitting non-elemental spells that can wreck even a high level party. When it talks to them, they hand over Seeds of Escape. Golden Nectar, which is an item that drastically reduces encounters and unlike normal spells like Estoma, this one effects powerful enemies as well as weak ones. Pretty awesome Persona you can get for free. The only real catch is that apparently there is no way to find him without consulting a guide as no one has been able to find the hint that explains the method to gain him. I don't believe even official guides told people, so it may have only been discovered through people looking at the code.

Xenosaga Episode 1: The minigames in this title are ridiculous in that they are fun, and pretty easy. Once you gain access to the casino about midway into the game, you can finally access one of the most broken minigames in the series. Unlike almost every other game I've played that has Poker in it, this one seems to be rigged in your favor. It's ridiculously easy to max out your coins from playing it. Doing so will allow you to purchase the Bravesoul, which is easily the most broken accessory in the game. It works similar to the Power Crisis from Xenogears, or Valiant Knife in FFVI. Xenosaga allows you to actually learn this ability permanently, and equip it to your whole party, making your actual on foot team more powerful than anything else in the game. The casino can also be used as a slow but infinite source of money as you can max out basic items and then sell them at shops for a small profit.

Dragon Warrior III (GBC version only) - If you have the original Gamboy Color version of this game, there is a strange glitch kept in there that involves the Pashishi Tracks. There is some specific criteria, but most of it involves on landing on a square that forces a battle. When you win said battle, you get a strange piece of dialogue that says a great power has come over your hero, and then they will proceed to max out their level. If you're playing a female hero with the Sexy personality, you'll have an absolutely awesome stat growth across the board. The Pashishi tracks become available really early in the game and it doesn't matter which one you're on.

[WarZidane]

Trails in the Sky games, three arts (spells) called Earth Guard, Earth Wall and Gaia Shield. They give physical immunity against one attack to the targeted party members (Guard is single-target, Wall is an area, Gaia Shield is the entire battlefield).

99% of enemy attacks in Trails in the Sky are physical and the spells are cheap and fast to cast, they make the game easy on lower difficulties and the highest difficulty practically demands you use them.

They were also never in Trails again after Sky the 3rd