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Simple strategies that completely break games

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Phediuk

Member
As in, strategies that any first-time player could do and succeed at the game. No end-game equipment or complicated tricks required.

Back in the day, I 1CCed the original Virtua Fighter several times in the arcade just by picking Akira, ducking, and punching repeatedly. The AI couldn't do anything; they'd just keep walking into the punches. I won most fights without even taking a hit.
 
Streets of Rage 2, pick Axel, uppercut everything (mash forward+punch). On any difficulty below Mania, you're pretty much guaranteed to 1CC the game, even if you're a total noob.
 
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In Streets of Rage 2 you can complete the whole game, and all bosses, just by spamming Axel's 'grand upper' special move. Really easy to perform too, just forward-forward-attack.
 
The noob combo nearly ruined Halo 2's multiplayer. It completely removed the challenge from single player as well.

EDIT: Suplexing in Resident Evil 4. Nearly ruined the game for me since it made combat so ridiculously easy.
 
Shadows of the Damned's dodgeroll.

You're completely invincible from almost everything when you do it for a whole second (only a few rare attacks can touch you as you're rolling and you still get hurt by being consumed by Darkness), but it can completely break many of the combat scenarios if you abuse it, especially since you can cancel any animation almost to do a dodgeroll (aiming, reloading, etc.), and will immediately pull your gun back out once the roll is finished if holding the trigger.

I played my first run of the game not realizing how broken the dodgeroll is, and the game is completely playable and beatable without it. Hell, it feels like the game is designed without it in mind 95% of the time. The exception to this is the boss battle against Flemming near the end, and debatable the final boss as well.
 
Doodle Jump for mobile - before the patch, you could just hold the phone sideways and have the character 'fall' across the screen at 62,000 times the speed of light. You'd hit every platform, pretty much. Wasn't perfect, but still...
 
Dragon Age: Origins:
AOE taunt plus the shield spell.
The enemies just keep attacking an invuerable party member.
 
Several Fire Emblem games have a trick to break it.

In FE9 by pouring BEXP into Marcia and maybe a support unit, she and Titania can clear the game easy even on Hard mode.

In FE8, Using Seth is basically an Auto win button.

FE11 - Caeda and the Forged Wing Spear might be the most broken weapon/unit in the series. It's more Caeda destroying the armies of Archanea single handedly.

FE13 - Water Trick - Stuff Robin and chrom into the water for the beginning and cheese the AI for grinding, get Robin to a high enough level and he steamrolls the game.

FE3 - The Starsphere shards in general are broken in Book 2. You can build Broken units so easily in this game, its hilarious.

FE4 - Sigurd for the first half, the lord you get is basically invincible and that's before he gets the Tyrfing. If you've got the right breeding, then Sety breaks the second half too.

The other games in the series aren't nearly as breakable as these ones.
 
Get the Multibottle Rockets on Earthbound and laugh all the way to the ending. Just don't forget that the dog boss can reflect it, so kill its shield first.
 
SomedayTheFire said:
Actually using the junction system in Final Fantasy VIII
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What does this mean? Junctioning as in looking for all the right stat boosters or as in that and as in drawing and using magics? I'd be kind of happy to hear the magic system was better than GFs. I kind of always wanted it to work but I never put the time into it.

Was way too damn lazy/didn't care enough to bother actually using that system. Hunting down, stocking, equipping, using, and then restocking the magic was too much of a hassle for a game that could barely hold my interest in the first place. I just sort of threw on what I had and used limited magic, which made the game all the more annoying as summons are so ridiculous in that game and the longer ones are even incentivized with boost.

Really, it is a mix of crappy execution of the junction system, badly designed system incentives, and my own apathy that made that by far the worst Final Fantasy I have ever played (I stopped after 10). Story and characters are god awful too; only ever finished it as a joke run many years later.
 
Jack Scofield said:
The noob combo nearly ruined Halo 2's multiplayer. It completely removed the challenge from single player as well.

EDIT: Suplexing in Resident Evil 4. Nearly ruined the game for me since it made combat so ridiculously easy.
Click to expand...



It was either a suplex or a pile driver that broke Hybrid Heaven on N64. It was a one or two hit kill for most of the game. I think you can learn the move from a zebra or a horse head or something. It was tricky to learn since it almost kills you. (You could only learn a move my it being performed on you.) I think I replayed the fight around 10 times to get him to perform the move early enough in the fight for me to survive and learn the move. I don't think you were really supposed to learn that move that early on.
 
I've said this in other threads, but Sonic Battle on the Gameboy Advance had a couple of strategies:

  1. Certain characters had mid-air kicks that essentially would yo-yo them down for the hit and then bounce them back up, which could be repeated indefinitely.
  2. The AI was also programmed with a degree of spam detection so that if you spammed the same move over and over, the AI would learn to read your inputs and block the move 100% of the time (and, eventually, even gain a free super meter just to take you down). But Sonic Battle's combat system was almost sort of like isometric Smash Bros. in its simplicity, but there was also sort of a class-based elemental loadout system you could pick before you spawned. So the way it worked is that if you triggered spam detection for one move type in one element, another move in a different element would get a 0% block rate. What this meant is that you could spam a move until it triggered the spam detection, switch elements and then spam another move freely. The sequence of elements was always the same, too, so you could rotate through the elements using the one move the CPU never blocked until it triggered spam detection and then switch to the next one in sequence over and over and over for the whole game.
 
Super Mario World: get the cape, start to fly and ascend until you're out of view. Stay out of view until you've reached the end of the level. Success!

You can't fly through all the levels, of course, but quite a lot of them.
 
dragonzdogma said:
Capcom vs Snk 2 I frame roll into special moves.
Loved playing with blanka :)
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm just bad at fighting games but I'm not sure a first time player can master a 3-frame cancel into a special movement.

I'd put tick throws from Hyper Fighting squarely in the 'even a caveman can do it' list for exploitable strategies in fighting games before I put roll canceling up there.
 
Diprosalic said:
that seems complicated, can you just spam it with no timing?
Click to expand...

More or less, yeah. The timing for the stunlock is quite generous.

I find it easier to pull off with the Gamecube's analog stick, but all you really need is a few moments of practice. It's just spinning the stick and pressing b.
 
Being able to crack Ziodyne (the most powerful lightning spell in the game that is normally not obtained until late game) really early on in Devil Survivor 2. A boss has the skill that you don't have to kill you pass the mission, but he uses a spell that costs so much of a spell that costs a high amount of MP. It's defensive, so you just engage him and defend until he runs himself out of MP and then you can kill him no problem.
 
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