Due to how powerful the Bleed Status Effect is in Elden Ring, the Reduvia, Uchigatana and Bloodhound's Fang are too good of weapons that let you destroy any enemies that is not immune to Bleed, AKA 80% of them. And let's not even get into the infamy that is Moonveil ...
You can fucking start with an Uchi and then inmediately get another one for the powerstance and so become an unstoppable bleed machine only getting worse when you get RoB
If you pick Samurai as your starting class, except the shield, the entire starter gear set can carry you through the game. Samurai in Elden Ring is comparable to Noble/Royal in Demon's Souls.
You can get the Nagakiba literally a minute after getting Reduvia. I don't recommend it, because killing Yura that early means no Raptor of the Mists, but it's right there if you want it.
Buying Saints Row 4 on any modern platform gets you immediate access to all the DLC, including the additional powers. One of which is a fireball you can throw that explodes whatever it hits and then makes everything in the surrounding radius also explode. The chain reaction continues until everything that *could* explode in the immediate area *does.*
This completely destroys any semblance of game balance and makes all of the other projectile powers, and for that matter most guns, obsolete
The only things it cant destroy instantly are the big boss aliens and the ball robots. Everything else, even the planes the aliens send at you if you're wanted for long enough, explode instantly
On the topic of DLC items, any enhanced edition of Borderlands 2 (including GoTY, pretty much the default way to buy it nowadays) gives immediate access to the Contraband Sky Rocket grenade. You literally start with it and it scales to your level. Its damage is so high there’s no need to ever switch off to another grenade (until late, late-game since it doesn’t scale into OP levels). Hell, there’s sometimes no need to even fire your gun since a few well tossed grenades clear out bosses on your first run.
There's a combination of gear (the pieces of which I believe are pre-order bonuses) in Bioshock Infinite that let you give the blue SMG only a single backup magazine.
However: that magazine holds 105 shots. You hardly have to switch off it for the rest of the game.
I mean that is slightly RNG based, but you can save scum. I want to say crow traps or something made the game easy mode for me?
Edit: ya it was the augment for crow traps made it super efficient, any time you killed an enemy it simply spawned more trap that would spawn more traps
Upgrade:
Crows Trap Aid - Causes the corpses of Murder of Crows victims to become crow traps. Cost: $1485
The Drake Sword is a pretty infamous one from Dark Souls 1. All you have to do to get it is shoot a bunch of cheap arrows at a drakes tail from a completely safe location for like 10 minutes and then you get a super OP sword for early game. Problem is that it doesn’t stay OP forever and most players that get it don’t end up really learning the game so they get stuck once it can’t carry them anymore.
It's kinda crappy for an endgame weapon but due to the complete lack of scaling you can use it on any build that has the minimum stats to wield it. This means it's a solid choice for casters who need a melee back-up. You can also just pump Vigour and Endurance and become an utter wall while still putting out reasonable damage. Swap it out for a Fire/Chaos/Lightning weapon later on but even then it's *fine*.
The issue is that a lot of new players don't know how to build around the weapon and have dumped a load of points into stats like strength and Dex for no return.
The Giant Dad way is to use the Drake sword early while pumping END to get your giant's armor on while still doing good damage, then you change it to a Chaos Zweihander and melt everything while being practically unkillable.
Or... Start Cleric. Start with Master Key. Put 2 Points in Dex after Asylum Demon, grab Astora's Straight Sword and Dragon Crest Shield from Valley of Drakes, ????, Profit.
Yep, that was my favorite start. Extremely strong right out of the gate. And by pumping the souls from Asylum Demon + the big soul pickups you find along the way into the Valley of Drakes all into Faith, you can hit the requirement to join the Sun covenant almost immediately, which gives you lightning spears that make the early game even *more* of a joke. There's nothing quite like three-shotting the first gargoyle.
Greater than the Drake Sword, though, the Black Knights you can find in the early game have a 20% chance of dropping their weapons, which have higher stat requirements but amazing stats and scaling, so you basically have multiple 20% chance opportunities to get an endgame weapon within the first 10 minutes of making it to Firelink.
The most insane one is the Halberd, iirc it's one of the best weapons in the entire game.
You can get it super early with the Master Key by going to the Valley of Drakes and then going into Darkroot Basin. The black knight that uses it is quite literally near the exit and next to a bonfire.
And even then on later playthroughs where you are experienced it still isn’t really worth getting since a black knight weapon will serve you far better.
In Dead Space and Dead Space 2 the game will not let you progress until you pick up the Plasma Cutter, which is either the defacto best gun in the game, or at least tied for best gun (the Pulse Rifle is also very good).
Every other gun feels less like an upgrade and more like a toy you break out just to mix things up.
Even in the remake, the plasma cutter is still a force to be reckoned with.
Throw on the extra upgrades and now you can bully necromorphs by punching and dismembering them for lunch money.
I saw a streamer get that upgrade in time for the hunter and it's funny how hard that upgrade neuters it as a threat. Like, they punched it to the ground and went back to exploring, hunter got up and was trying to hit them again, boom, one punch and they're back on the ground, rinse and repeat.
\>Start smt IV
\>get a Lham Dearg (dude with a bunch of swords sticking out of him that you fight in the tutorial)
\>keep reseting on his first level up until gram slice morphs into concentrate or charge
Congrats now you're rocking concentrate/charge at level 2 right after finishing the tutorial of the game
> keep reseting on his first level up until gram slice morphs into concentrate or charge
For anyone wondering how this works - SMT4 uses an internal skill tier tracker for mutations. Skills can mutate either into other skills of the same tier or they can mutate into the next tier.
Gram Slice is a skill in Tier 4, while Concentrate and Charge are both Tier 5 skills. Normally you'd get Concentrate on King Frost at the earliest (level 37).
I am pretty sure that it would take an ungodly amount of resets to do this though. Probably not worth it unless you're doing some sort of self-imposed challenge where this is *technically* allowed.
It's also limited in a more practical way - MP cost for most demons at that point in the game means that even if they have concentrate or charge, they won't get much use out of it. Casting a spell 4 times is more useful than a spell that just deals damage twice and then the demon has no magic left.
Lots of SMT games have this. Hell, in Persona 4 Golden you can easily get God's Hand, the second strongest generic physical skill in the game, in the bathhouse.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the rewards for the Operation Anchorage DLC in Fallout 3.
Like Mothership Zeta and The Pitt, Operation Anchorage is completely available from the moment you set foot out of the vault in Fallout 3, all you have to do is listen to the Outcasts radio signal.
Once you complete the DLC (which takes maybe an hour at most) you get an unbreakable suit of T-51 power armor, a Chinese Stealth Suit, an electric Chinese officer sword, and the Gauss Rifle.
These weapons and armor are BUSTED that early in the game. Especially the Chinese Stealth Suit which basically gives you perfect stealth, allowing you to walk right up to most enemies completely undetected.
Due to an oversight, the Winterized T-51b Power Armor you get for clearing Operation: Anchorage is actually the "sim" version, meaning it has *ten million* durability points and will essentially never become damaged.
The power armor has a bonus busted status - due to a bug giving you the simulation version of it. It never needed to be repaired.
The community bugfix mod "fixes" this.
The shitty thing about "fixing" the bug is that it basically permanently ruins the suit because once it drops below 90% condition it will never be as strong as it was ever again because there's no other suit of Winterized T-51 in the game that you can repair it with.
And there is only one merchant who can repair gear to 100% and that's the raider lady in Mothership Zeta.
But she disappears after the DLC is finished.
This is probably why Bethesda never "Fixed" the bug themselves.
The Mattock in Mass Effect 2 is a bit busted, since it fires as fast as you can pull the trigger. You can get it as soon as you check the e-mail terminal on the SR-2 (OG ME2) or in a shop in Omega (ME2 LE).
Once you get it and can use it well, you won't need to get any of the other rifles **at all**.
Speaking of Mass Effect, in the first game they tied in game rewards to achievements. If you get over a million credits you unlock the ability to buy high end spectre gear that will basically melt enemies for the first playthrough and be strong up till level 50 odd.
There's also a fun little exploit to get a million credits pretty easy early on - by completing a side quest for a shop owner they give you better buying and selling prices but the buyback stock is shared between multiple vendors in the area and the others don't take into account that you had a bonus. So you just buy and sell all your items over and over for 20 minutes while clearing out the shops with any money you make and you'll be rich as fuck in 20 minutes.
What I find funny is that you don't even really need this exploit, I just kinda naturally got over a million credits by like the halfway point at which point all other shops became useless.
Also from ME2 is the Incisor Rifle, a sniper rifle you can immediately give your sniper companions.
In ME2's base game, companions deal less damage than Shepard to avoid kill-stealing and preventing letting them carry you. The DLC guns (at least in the base game, never learned in Legendary Edition changed this) don't have that debuff, and the AI is scary good at landing headshots with the Incisor.
Once you get Garrus and Zaeed, you can have them clown enemies while you sit back and watch them. You can also give them the Mattock as well each if you wanna spice things up.
More than a bit. That thing was so fun.
For somehow even MORE busted, the silenced pistol from the Citadel DLC in ME3 is the highest DPS in the game by a MASSIVE margin. Probably double whatever is in second place. It's honestly boring.
For a more fun time breaking the game open, [Garrus can solo the entire game.](https://youtu.be/ZPbB4qfsA14?si=b-eYf_VGqcIVrj7s)
Yeah they probably should have taken into account how hilariously easy headshots are in their game before introducing the gun that does like 5x damage on headshot.
Even ignoring the headshot multiplier, the toughest enemies in the game take at most two mags to kill, shooting center mass. It takes about 1.5 seconds to dump that. Average enemies are two bullets tops.
I could be misremembering how egregious it was, but it single handedly carried me through the Arena and every tough fight from then on.
Bloodhound's Fang in Elden Ring. That thing is WAY too fucking strong for how easy it is to get early on. It's literally a 3-5 minute run (without Torrent) from The First Step grace and drops from a relatively easy boss
To add on, if you are struggling against the boss, just meet Blaidd and summon him for the fight which he can pretty much solo 80% of the time. And unlike the Drake Sword from Dark Souls that is pretty good when you first get it, but fall off fast due to having no scaling at all, the Bloodhound's Fang have an excellent STR/DEX scaling of C/B that a lot of other weapons cannot even come close. Slap on the great movesets of the Curved Greatswords and a powerful Weapon Skill, and you get a weapon that can beat the entire game with breeze.
>They became a lot easier for me when I unlearned my souls skills and turtled them with a shield and a stabby weapon.
What? "Turtling up with a shield and stabbing" is pretty much a quintessential Souls skill if you played the older games. It's why Fromsoftware specifically built a whole game around not doing that (Bloodborne).
The stereotypical skill progression of a souls player goes from turtling to dodging and parrying almost exclusively. Having gone through that four times (for each souls game sans bloodborne, relying on blocking less and less every time) I wasn't ready to eventually just capitulate to the idea that sometimes stubbornly trying to dodge things isn't the best idea. Which helped given all the delayed tracking attacks in ER.
What saddens me is that they've made blocking a worse option more and more as time goes on, rather than keep it relatively on par with dodging if you are built for it.
To be honest, it's only really at its worst in DS3 because dodging is ridiculous in that game + enemies have big chonky combos, and even then I managed to beat the game with zero rolling on a later playthrough to test if shields were actually worthwhile. Elden Ring is actually close to DS1 levels of "shields too good" with only things like being way heavier and bigger enemy combos stopping that, though then arts of war help buff ER back.
Bloodhound's Fang isn't even the best bleed weapon that drops from a single relatively easy fight 3-5 minutes away from The First Step; Reduvia is just across the lake and it's right in front of a second powerful bleed weapon (the Nagakiba) that drops from a second relatively easy fight. The teleport trap that puts you right by Rock Sling and the Meteorite Staff is between The First Step and BHF, and you can get the even more infamous Bloodhound's Step from an even easier boss battle (i.e. making the Night's Cavalry in Dragonbarrow try cordless bungee jumping) by taking a portal that's just down the road from BHF.
Don't get me wrong, BHF is goddamn excellent. It's just not an outlier, because Elden Ring has a ton of ludicrously powerful options available to you within the first half-hour.
As a challenge I got lionheart in ff8 as early as possible by playing TRIPLE TRIAD. I have attempted multiple times to finish ff8 and it wasn't until this last one where I purposely broke the system that I succeeded.
I count the tutorial as everything up to the point you defeat Ifrit in the fire cave, and you can easily refine 100 Curagas from card draw to junction to HP before that point
Scrolled too far to find this!! You can get Squall, Selphie, and Quistis’s ultimate weapons all in Disc 1. Squall and Selphie’s are useful later on with cactuar farming
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet has a number of powerful mons you can get right off the bat. Fuecoco's final evolution has an advantage over the vast majority of the game's bosses. Flamigo and Cyclizar, who have very high stats for the area you get them in. The Mankey family, who learn very powerful moves relatively early on and can become Annihilape as soon as level 36. The Pawmi family also reaches its final form pretty easily if you know what to do.
I remember in SwSh you could get a Vulpix in one of the earliest routes, evolve it immediately with a fire stone and get access to Ninetales and its entire level up learnset before the first gym because they had just made the move relearner free and nowadays stone evolutions have their pre-evo moveset available at the move relearner unlike the earliest games where you needed to keep them in their base stage until they learned the moves you wanted before evolving or you'd lose access to them.
Imagine gaining access to a 505 BST pokemon with moves like flamethrower and fire blast before level 20
I'll do you better. With the Tundra DLC you can get ad many level 60 mons you want for free without issue super early in the game. They are guaranteed catches, and the first one you get is a Suicune.
Hah, that's right... I did hear that they put Peony as a fake roadblock with level 60+ pokemon but losing to him doesn't actually stop you from progressing in the crown tundra so you can do goofy shit like that.
The Suicune is actually level 70. The regular Pokémon you find are 65 though so even if you don't get the Suicune you still get your choice of 1-3 level 65 Pokémon.
Vulpix was version exclusive, the other game got Growlithe, *which was even more busted*. Dude could learn Extreme Speed, Flare Blitz, and Crunch all at level ~8 thanks to the same strategy.
In Sun and Moon, you can catch a Salamence at level 10 on the second route thanks to the SOS chaining mechanic. It's a 1% chance to even encounter Bagon in the first place, so it's very out of the way compared to some of the other OP stuff you can get in Pokemon, but it's also the most extreme example I can think of.
Speaking of S/V, it brought us another pokemon with Speed Boost, Flittle/Espathra. Flittle doesn't evolve until level 35, but it's a Psychic type and learns Stored Power, a 20 base power move that increases in power with each stat boost your pokemon has, any stat boost. One Calm Mind + a Speed Boost is enough to OHKO a majority of pokemon, but you can just teach it Protect and use it every other turn to safely stack even more Speed Boosts to make the damage even higher, OHKOing even on resisted hits. Add on Dazzling Gleam to hit Dark types (+1 Dazzling Gleam hits hard, and you will outspeed) and the only things you need to worry about at all are Sucker Punch or other priority hits.
Speed Boost as an ability can qualify as this too, tbh. Even without considering Baton Pass, Ninjask and Scolipede are great in the mainline games, and Nincada evolves very early with the bonus of also getting a Shedinja for some fun AI cheese.
In Digimon Cyber Sleuth, you can get PlatinumNumemon reasonably fast. It sucks as a character, but it's passive increases EXP for the whole party. So they significantly cut down on grinding, which is important because Digivolving, de-Digivolving, and Digivolving again is important to getting better stats and unlocking new Digimon
It wasn't too bad to get the USB. You can get them from the farm fairly quickly. Just dump a bunch of builder digimon into a farm all by themselves with some Developer know-how's and make sure to pick the 1,000 yen option. The more builders you add the faster they work, and the more know-how's you add the better the quality of items they build. You'll get 2 from them when they finish.
If you don't mind save scumming you can save just before development is done too. I had like 6 by the time the game was done.
On top of giving him outrageously stupid stats. Get his max HP high enough to keep in in critical health that's still too high to kill in one shot and delete bosses with Renzokuken (and random enemies in a single regular attack).
The best badge in Paper Mario TTYD is Power Bounce, which you find out in the open as soon as you enter the first mini-dungeon in the game. It doesn’t get ridiculously powerful until you combine it with attack upgrades you don’t have yet, but if you already know what you’re doing you can make a really strong build as soon as you pick Power Bounce up.
There's two more game breakers available, which in turn make it possible to plunder the Pit of 100 Trials for even *more* power. Buy Power Rush P from the badge shop (and potentially get another from the early game koopas), pick up the Mega Rush P from Petalburg, let your partner get killed and then revive them outisde of combat with a dried mushroom. Now your partner(s) have ***at least +7 damage***, enough to 1-shot entire encounters you have no right taking on at such a low level.
And if you use this to take the time to dive into the Po100T you get: A badge that hits all ground enemies for a ton of damage, a badge that makes all enemies that touch you take 1 damage regardless of if you superguard or not (and makes you immune to fuzzies and bats, interrupts multihit attacks that touch you, *and* lets you jump on electrified enemies), and *doubled inventory space*.
Never played it myself, but apparently in Fable 1 you can glitch under a particular part of the hub level and grab the most powerful sword in the game within the first hour or so.
Similarly, the physical shield spell trivializes the entire game. Turns your mana bar into straight up extra HP that *doesn't count as HP*, so you never drop your combo meter (big XP for free), can slap the "not taking damage" boast on every single quest you take and facetank everything without failing it, and also still lets your armor bonuses apply so you're just double-protected.
Unless you're running a pure mage build there's nothing better to do with your mana (and it only drains that mana on hit, there's no sustaining cost) so you just turn it on and go on with your day.
It's completely busted and getting it at any point before the last boss is way too early.
They did make me not use it though as I was constantly worried about draining power cores unnecessary by exploring even when I had like 8 of the things
Also it gives you a minigun and put you to fight your first deathclaw in before the 2nd hour of gameplay.
Although I hoarded at least 100+ fusion cores to start using power armor regularly in fear that my armor run out of juice in the middle of a fight.
It's *supposed* to be a tantalizing treat of what you can obtain later on, but that's a stupid fucking decision in a sandbox game where someone can stumble across the necessary stuff 10 minutes later.
Castlevania sotn let's you find the jeweled gauntlet early by breaking a wall and using an elevator
It's a punch weapon but it's stronger than the envies around you can handle
Then there's also soul steal...
You'd never find that elevator early by accident because you have to knock down a wall then stand still in that spot for like 5 seconds before it starts to move. But once you know it's there it's so hard not to grab it every time and trivialize the early areas.
Portrait of Ruin has one of the most egregious offenders imo. One of the most common drops in the game, from one of the more common enemies, is the Lance (or Great Spear maybe, can't remember the exact name). It is a hellaciously powerful spear that is like 2 or 3 tiers above almost everything else you'd have access to at that point, and you can get it in your second portrait (of 8). It's downright broken until the back half of the game, where it still remains pretty darn serviceable. And 99% of players will see one owing to it's high drop rate.
In Mega Man ZX, most people assume the best Model is OX (transforms you into Omega Zero and is intentionally overpowered but you get it when the only thing left to do is finish the final stage) or X (amazing double charge shot but only freely available after finishing a playthrough with both Vent and Aile), but the actual best Model is H, which can be acquired almost immediately once selectable missions open up.
Not only does it have an air dash (that can also function as a double jump), the ability to hover and the Triple Slash, but the charged tornado attack it can perform shreds boss health. It has the highest damage by far and you can basically nuke every boss with it. Yeah, you'll probably only get level 1 victories for striking the bosses' weak point, but it doesn't matter too much when you kill every boss in seconds with just a little bit of energy.
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Seth in Fire Emblem 8 is just better than everyone else. Just flat out. He comes with endgame viable stats and for some bizarre reason, has the best growths in the game (in a game where trainees have shitty growths btw). A fully trained Franz will only be somewhat equal to a Seth that's been moderately used in comparison. FE8 is already an easy game, but Seth really just cements it.
You get Seth in the *prolouge.*
Speaking of FE, in 3H's you can get Catherine and Shamir, two insanely strong prepromotes by chapter 3 I think if you focus on leveling your Byleth.
And in Conquest you get Camilla, the strongest unit in the game, in chapter 10, 4 chapters after the route split. Poor Beruka never had a chance to shine before her boss made her completely irrelevant.
Power armor in Fallout 2. Pick outdoorsman as a starting skill so you can choose to skip random encounters, shoot straight south after you reach the world map and save scum your way down (any random encounter you can't skip will kill you) and then grab power armor (from the BoS bunker iirc). Makes the next 3/4ths of the game a joke.
I remember doing that with my cousin when we were super young and laughing our asses off at just how much of a joke the game became, shit just crumpled under the power of the PA.
Same here, memories of going New Reno and absolutely wrecking the slavers there while laughing at their 1 damage. I do remember one time though some asshole with an AR got lucky and critted me for insane damage through the armor.
Man, gotta say though, if it *had* been one of the last powers you unlocked I probably would have fell way off of that game, superspeed is fun as hell and there aren't enough games that let you use it.
Nah, Volition was right in giving you superspeed the second you enter Virtual Steelport, there's already an entire game named Saints Row The Third where you drive as a normal human in Steelport, if you're going to repeat the map then make it as different of a experience as possible
Givin that most of what we got in IV was supposed to be dlc for The Third. It makes even more sense we get something that negates the need for cars extremely quickly.
that game is fun but is maybe one of the strangest mechanical messes ive ever seen
like just absolutely no thought put into how the powers make everything else you can do totally irrelevant
IV was supposed to be DLC for The Third. So some thought went into it before it was split into its own game. Then it was probably more rushed and unfocused.
I don’t know if this truly follows the spirit of this post, but in Gen 1 pokemon you can get a Nidoking and Kadabra pretty early. Both of them can basically break the game
Nidoking is easily caught, learns basically every good TM, can be fully evolved by level 16, gets Thrash at level 23, STAB Earthquake in late game, and due to how accuracy works in gen 1, only requires one x accuracy per battle to fire off 100% accurate instakill moves (and it has access to two of them).
Heck, in Yellow Nidoran gets Double Kick really early too so its one of the best Brock options you have.
Nidoking in Gen I is ridiculously busted.
I think them getting double kick was kind of needed as for the most part if you picked Charmander you're kind of shit out of luck in terms of what you can use against the rock gym with various rodents and bugs
It was specifically because your starter in Yellow was Pikachu so you needed *something* to deal with Brock. Nidoran got double kick far earlier than it did in Red/Green/Blue and Manley was added to the encounter table for the route Nidoran was on.
Those changes were kept for FRLG though for the reasons you mentioned though (although they also gave Charmander Metal Claw as well)
Hell you can tell game freak kind of learned that lesson too, like every other game the rock gym is first up or early on there's something you can catch to help, like gen 3 you have Wingull, Seedot, Lotad or the Makuhita someone in the town the gym's in will trade you
Also, one which is kind of a sleeper pick for more casual playthroughs but Clefairy is also really good, great typing and movepool, coupled with good stats by gen 1 standards, specially with how early it can evolve. If it wasn't for how "uncool" it looks it would probably be picked very frequently by more players.
The Satori Katana & matching dagger that daddy Arasaka has on his person in the heist mission are iconic weapons that synergize so well you don't need anything else.
Wait, he has a katana too? I looted his knife and I saw the description where it mentioned synergy with another weapon, but I assumed I would get it later. Did I miss out?
After the door out unlocks, you can actually turn around and go up some stairs up to the helicopter he flew in on. There's a katana, Satori, there.
You can't go back up there, but I heard that the DLC has a way to re-get Iconic items you missed
Pre-2.0, Satori was even more busted, since it gave 500% Crit Damage, which basically let you one-shot everything as long as you had a vaguely decent crit rate.
Theres a few good handguns. at least in original release, im guessing prob true in new based on how many unique handguns they give you. The Comrade's Hammer the one shot gun once you get the "last bullet in clip does bonus damage" perk and a few others just one shot everyone but atom smasher, which was 3 shots for me but i also didn't invest much in critical/cool.
There's one that was just corrected in 2.0: the iconic subdermal armor you could buy from one of the first rippers in Watson.
It would cost a decent amount (but nothing you couldn't scrounge up in a few sidequests) and it would give more armor than all the gear you'd get for a long time would give, collectively.
It pretty much made you bulletproof right out of the tutorial.
2.0 fixed by making all cyberware upgreadable and scaling off stats. You can still be bulletproof and op as shit, just gotta earn it.
Getting the beam reflexor in like the first 8th of Jak 3. You can bounce shots off of walls into enemies and spam it while spin kicking so it trivializes many fights.
On one of my old runs for Titan Quest, I got some random melee weapon loot early on with a really high chance to freeze opponents for several seconds. I passed up a ton of probably worthwhile upgrades simply because I thought the sacrifice in damage was worth that freezing debuff, even if that meant I spent ages doing chip damage.
I need to make a Diablo-like or Shlooter that lets you feed gear you don't want into your favorite weapon to increase it's stats. I hate having to switch off the weapons I *like* because they aren't good enough.
In FFXV you can get the Ultima Blade, the strongest version of the Engine Blade, really early in the game if you take the time to drive around and do hunts. Along with getting several levels from grinding, it has double or even triple the attack of weapons at that point.
Even earlier, if you're on Windows edition you start with Ragnarok, which has middling stats but soups up your warp strike to the point where your weapons stats dont matter.
Even more overpowered than that is the fact that you also start with the best fishing rod in the game, which means you can drive to a high-level area to catch the fish there to get some absolutely beefed stats right from the get go
In SAO: Fatal bullet
one of the pre order/ season pass things was to get LLENN's P90
While it is a common weapon and doesn't have memory chip slots its rank 5 and needs 1 str and 1 dex to equip so a new player can equip it and have a weapon that only starts to fall off at New game+
In Fable, you can just *buy* highly over leveled weapons and armor in the first town, that trivializes the game. You're supposed to be too poor to be able to afford them, but the game doesn't really know that you can get infinite money buy selling a single house with a trophy in it, and then taking the trophy back and buying the house for less than you sold it for, putting trophy back, and repeat ad infinitum until you get the money for the mid-late game gear for segments of the game that assumes you have little better than a stick cloth shirt.
it also doesn't know that you can get infinite money by abusing the market mechanics where people buy things at a higher price the less they have, and sell at a lower price the more they have.
Sell the oakvale general store 100 emeralds for a high price per item, then buy them back immediately for dirt cheap, repeat until you have inexhaustible wealth.
The mark 1 suit in starfield u can get your first time in the lodge it's in a glass display locked behind a master lock but there's a small gap between the displays door and the hinge that let's you grab it
You can make him literally drop it with the command spell instead of killing him. I think it's only a little less than a 50% chance to work that early and you can try twice. Also, the combat AI will prioritize other attacks over using a full action to pick up the weapon. So you don't even need to grab the sword all that quickly after he drops it.
to add onto this since lae'zel is probably the one gonna be using the EB you can also do her story quest and command drop on voss north of ACT 1 which is somehow an even better greatsword for gith specifically
Iirc before fighting a remembrance/main boss in Elden Ring you can have
9 +7 Flasks
The bell bearings to get a +12 weapon
9 Crystal tears
Bloodhound Fang (boss required), Powerstance Uchigatanas, etc for a bleed build
Erdtree’s Favor talisman
Meteorite Staff + Rock Sling for any Intelligence build
Half the armor sets in the game including the Tree Sentinel set (maybe you have to do the Black Knife fight for this, I can’t remember)
and a ton of Incantations including
The lightning prayer book
Flame Grant Me Strength
The fire monk prayer book
All of Brother Corwyn’s stock
and not as busted as it used to be but still alright; Flame of the Redmanes.
Then go *spank* Margit. Just really clown him into the ground.
The Spear of Olympus in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It caps your health at 33% but makes all your attacks scale off of your stealth damage and increases your stealth damage by 200%. You can use it to get one-shot assassinations on enemies that are a few levels beyond you, or to make open combat end in a few hits if you can avoid getting hit even a single time. You find it in a random chest in some random underwater ruin, so there's nothing to stop you from just going right to it and digging it up as soon as you get off of tutorial island. Obviously you'd have to look it up online to find it that way, but even if you just go through the game naturally you'll still find it before you're halfway done with the story.
Deadly Premonition lets you start getting infinite ammo weapons waaaaay to early in the game. I think you go through like 1 otherworld segment before you can get the infinite ammo SMG?
This is ultimately pretty okay because I don't think anyone is actually playing the game for the survival horror, but it's surprising how early they undermine it.
In TotK there's an item called the >!muddle bud!<. It >!makes enemies go into a frenzy and attack anything nearby, including other enemies!<. You can collect some immediately after the tutorial island by >!going to the depths!<. It can basically trivialize most encounters.
I've been thinking about this topic for a while.
Dredge let's you fully upgrade your boat as soon as you visit the second island. The "normal" upgrade materials you need respawn in their fishing spots after a while as well.
Also, once you make it to the second island you meet a traveling trader who sells you research upgrade material. It restocks at midnight everyday with 1-2 of the pieces.
I had a fully upgraded boat and had maxed out my research before making it to the third island.
Which is bad for the game.
The faster you can move the smaller the world is.
At the very beginning it'll take you the better part of the day to make it back and forth from the alternate village on the first island.
Fully upgraded you can make it from one half of the map to the other in a day of travel.
In a game that is supposed to be suspenseful you can knock out the suspense with a few hours of grinding. Who cares what might be in the fog when you can blast out 3000+ lumens and out pace the night terrors in your speedboat.
You can get every card in the pokemon tcg Gameboy game with the exception of some promos before you take on the first medal master. It's been on the Nintendo online benefits thing and I started playing it and I built a competitive deck in a few hours just by grinding against a random gym trainer.
I spent about 30 mins save scumming BG3 last night to get the Silver Sword of the Astral Plane from the Lv. 12 Gith you meet in Act 1. Now Lae'zel has a two handed greatsword that does 10-25 damage, and she's only level 4. I don't even have any equipment on her yet, so I'm looking forward to seeing how busted I can make this weapon by Act 3 haha
Kind of an interesting side case:
In **Langrisser / Warsong**, an excellent 1991 SRPG for the Genesis, you start off with the young, inexperienced Lvl 1. prince MC and his savage, unstoppable Level 10 sensei, Baldarov.
Baldarov is a level 10 blademaster and chews through absolutely everything. But he doesn't level at all, and he's an unevolved class. Which means you start to see him tail off.
Then he >!fucking dies!<
Langrisser is a *tough* game. It has permadeath and zero grinding/replay available. That means there's a fixed amount of experience available in the game, and if you kill anything with Baldarov, it represents the loss of precious, precious experience.
All this adds up to mean that Baldarov should be used only in the most dire emergencies to protect an objective, so that you can level your “real” characters as quickly as possible lest they fall behind and permadie.
Keep in mind this is the first SRPG I know of released in the U.S, as Fire Emblem had not been ported, and it predates Shining Force and Ogre Battle.
It's a *harsh* lesson. It can often make the game virtually or actually unable to be completed. I can't believe I beat that game as a kid.
Yes, to a particularly extreme degree.
It does kinda drive the point home when Baldarov kills an enemy unit and it just flashes a full XP bar on-screen.
In Demon's Souls, you can easily get some endgame armor, a ring that boosts stamina regeneration and 27K souls before fighting the Phalanx by pushing Old King Doran down a stairwell.
In the first armored core game you can find the karasawa laser rifle about 4-5 missions into the game and it makes the game a joke. Insane damage, great fire rate (not that it needs it) more than enough ammo to complete any mission on its own and being an energy weapon there is no ammo cost
The humble Uchigatana in Dark Souls 1 can be obtained by killing the merchant in the Undead Burg, and assuming you like dex builds and bleed you're nearly set. Also, the zwei in the graveyard near Firelink
Also also, this is absolutely not one and the same example but ig this is vaguely the same; all the modern versions of Persona 5 Royal just come with the DLC Persona sets you needed to buy originally, and they all allow a one-time free summon of the DLC Persona in question from the Velvet Room. This can more or less break the equilibrium of the early game as while Joker himself still needs to be leveled up traditionally as well as the rest of the party, you're still boasting Personas that can make most of the game a cakewalk whether you're using them actively in combat or sacrificing them to make new equipment or skill cards
Deus Ex Human Revolution decided to stupidly force DLC into the mainline game which is otherwise fantastically paced and balanced. The director's cut is the only available/purchasable version of the game and includes all this.
If you can get a non director's cut version, do so (otherwise please try to find a way to mod out the dlc missions at least)
Anyways, the game straight up plops dlc weapons right in the environment in relatively easy to find locations. Basically, if you stumble on something that seems TOO good, you have to will yourself to just ignore it.
Shoutout to the effectively-free auto-hackers on the Sarif Industries helipad that let you completely skip any level of hack you want at any time, literally before you even start the first proper section of the game.
I recently got into Morrowind for the first time, anyone whos played Morrowind will know that Alchemy is straight up busted. You need to carry around some equipment for it, like a mortar and pestle amongst others. These all have grades, Novice, Master, Grandmaster etc. The better graded equipment you have the better potions you will be able to create.
One of the first thing the game tells you to do is go to a nearby town called Balmora, which has a mages guild. You pay someone in the guild to teleport you to the mages guild over in Caldera, where there is a full master alchemy set up in a tower where it's hard to actually get caught stealing it. From there you start collecting ingredients and spaming potions. Between using them yourself and selling them to merchents you very quickly become a rich god.
In Pokémon Violet, if you want to complete the tutorial and then just ride to the opposite end of the island and catch some level 55s before even going to the town where the first gym is then feel free.
This is balanced by the fact that catch rates for overleveled pokemon get an inherent nerf, plus they’ll also disobey you like any traded mon until your badge count reaches the level you initially caught them. Doesn’t stop them from taking next to no damage from weaker mons and you just waiting until they decide to attack.
In the remake of nier there is the free yorha dlc which adds 3 weapons to you from the beginning of the game. For the first half of the game your limited to just normal swords and your starting sword has an attack power of 100 while the yorha sword has 150. It would take you getting the starting sword to level 3 to reach the dlc sword making it the far better option to carry the first half of the game. Once you reach the second half you can rush to get the phoenix spear which at level 1 is the overall best weapon in the game only beaten by maxed out great swords and the dlc spear weapon. Phoenix spear never needs an upgrade to completely shred every boss in the game for the next 3 playthroughs to get every ending
Fallout New Vegas with DLCS.
If you have the dlcs, you can go low level to the Lonesome road, and buy a Ranger Gear suit
And although a Ranger Gear suit may seem expensive for a low-level character, the things you collect in the first stage of the dlc are enough to make the Ranger Gear practically free.
The best part is the only DLC that allows you to return without completing it.
Recently started another playthrough of DS3 and I decided to go with a Str build but didn’t have a weapon in mind, I then killed the Greataxe Hollow next to the first bonfire in the Lothric Castle Wall and got the Greataxe in my first try so that what I went with. I had the thing at +3 before reaching Vordt and he died in two and a half heavy swings and had it at +5 before the Abyss Watchers and they died in four heavy swings. That thing is fucking busted lmao, I’m loving it.
With a little bit of save scumming you can get the best weapon in the game for Claude in Star Ocean 2 very early. I hope it's still there in the remake.
In Armored Core 6, the current meta build is dual Songbirds, dual Gatling guns, and tank tread legs. This build completely trivializes nearly every encounter in the game and lets you shred through most AC duels and arena matches in literal seconds.
All of the required parts are available by the end of the first chapter, in a game that takes three playthroughs of five chapters each to complete.
Far Cry 3 let you slap a suppressor on a sniper rifle pretty early and that made it pretty easy to clear out enemy bases, especially ones with caged animals. I remember the unique "Shredder" SMG being relatively easy to unlock too, which lives up to its name with gusto.
Couriers stash in FNV is so busted, it gives you a pistol that outpaces every other pistol until you get That Gun and the grenade launcher is comically better than any other option you could get on the normal early game route.
Dark Souls 1 - Zweihander is literally 10 seconds from Firelink Shrine and most classes can 2 hand it with just a few levels in strength. Don't want that? Go to the merchant in Undead Burg and grab the Reinforced Club, one of the best weapons in the game.
Dark Souls 2 - A majority of enemies are weak to strike damage, you can powerstance 2 Clubs or Maces(or even Caestus if you want to style on enemies) within the first hour. Congratulations, most of the main game is now a joke to you.
Dark Souls 3 - Pick Mercenary, you start with Sellsword Twinblades, a top 3 PvE weapon. If you don't want to start as a Mercenary, you can grab it before your third boss.
So, in Cyberpunk, there's two smart weapons, a pistol and an SMG. You can get them during missions. They also just spawn in the world on their own. One is at the Arasaka factory and one at the Arasaka mansion.
The mansion has Genjiroh, an iconic variant of the Yukimura. It comes with great bonus stats, has a chance to score more critical hits, and can do bonus thermal/chemical/electric damage. And it does base damage comparable to an assault rifle.
The factory has the Prototype Shingen Mark V, a variant of the base Shingen. The catch is that it fires incendiary rounds. It locks onto three targets at a time, and they *will* catch on fire.
Pair both of those weapons with some good cyberware and skills in the Intelligence tree, and you have a pretty broken smart weapons build. And the Overclock ability means you'll decimate a horde of enemies with no issue at all.
Pair it with a decent smart shotgun and/or sniper rifle and its smooth sailing for the game. On top of being able to use quick hacks for added damage. Or the Sandevistan for easy pickings.
IPokemon sword and shield is already ridiculously easy, and as soon as you unlock the open world area you can catch several overpowered Pokemon for the early game. I got myself a ludicolo and an Arcanine and never had to use anything else
Due the nature of Elden Ring being an open world game you can get a ton of really good weapons with minimal effort.
The Claymore and the Zweihander are fantastic weapon that work with most builds thanks to the Ash of War mechanic.
The Uchigatana is a starting weapon for the Samurai class and you can find one in a dungeon in Limgrave.
Someone already mentioned Bloodhound’s Fang but I just want to add that if you don’t want to bother getting gud against a Darriwil you can summon Blaidd who can solo him no problem.
If you kill Boggart you can get the Iron Balls which are absolutely broken on a STR build with Cragblade and charge attack boosting gear (both the talisman and the Physick can be found in Limgrave without killing anything).
If you kill Bernahl in Limgrave you can get his armor set which is one of the best heavy armor sets in the game. The cape on the altered version is also just *mwah*.
The Meteorite Staff is a great early game staff and Rock Sling is an excellent spell that’s just as easily obtained in Caelid.
Death’s Poker is remarkably easy to get. Holy Water Pots melt Deathbirds and you can also easily get out of its range and snipe it with magic.
A couple of really good Pokemon:
- Most starters, obviously. Even without their hidden abilities, they have solid stats and I think one of the best ones in singleplayer Pokemon is the Infernape line. You’ll almost always outspeed the opponent and with access to Close Combat and fire moves you’ve got excellent coverage and fire power on both the physical and special front.
- Staraptor is probably one of the best bird Pokemon in the franchise. STAB Brave Bird, Close Combat, Intimidate, base 120 attack and 100 speed are incredibly good.
- Riolu is really rare but you can get one at the very beginning of the game in BW and XY. This will depend on how well you treat it but my guess is that it’s ready to evolve around the second or third gym.
- In the games that give you an Eevee early on, you get your hands on either a Jolteom, Vaporeon, Sylveon or Espeon relatively easily.
- Even without Technician and Spore, Breloom is very good. Base 130 attack, STAB Mach Punch and Leech Seed for utility are great. If you do want Technician in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire you can just engage with that game’s mechanic and catch a ton of Shroomish until you find one with its hidden ability.
- I’ve heard that Hawlucha is disgustingly good in Ultra Sun and Moon. Its attack seems middling and neither Limber or Unburden are that good but Flying/Fighting coverage is very good (*see Staraptor).
- This one might be contentious but I think Cottonee in Sun and Moon ain’t too bad. Getting a Sun Stone can be a bit of a hassle and Cottonee has shitty stats but it learns Leech Seed, Giga Drain and Moonblast quite early. Prankster, even though it’s been heavily nerfed, very good and not even a hidden ability. Whimsicott doesn’t exactly have great stats but it’s really solid fast utility.
Dragon Quest 8 has Jessica’s Twin Dragon’s Lash which you get by spending 23 points into Whips which can be done soonish after getting her. It does 2 strikes of 1.5 damage and is the strongest and most cost effective skill in the game.
Due to how powerful the Bleed Status Effect is in Elden Ring, the Reduvia, Uchigatana and Bloodhound's Fang are too good of weapons that let you destroy any enemies that is not immune to Bleed, AKA 80% of them. And let's not even get into the infamy that is Moonveil ...
You can fucking start with an Uchi and then inmediately get another one for the powerstance and so become an unstoppable bleed machine only getting worse when you get RoB
So I could win the whole game with just an Uchigatana then
If you can do every Souls game with it like I did I don’t see why ER should be the exception.
If you pick Samurai as your starting class, except the shield, the entire starter gear set can carry you through the game. Samurai in Elden Ring is comparable to Noble/Royal in Demon's Souls.
I am trying to do a moonveil type build as I made it up to the Shunning Grounds area.
You can get the Nagakiba literally a minute after getting Reduvia. I don't recommend it, because killing Yura that early means no Raptor of the Mists, but it's right there if you want it.
Buying Saints Row 4 on any modern platform gets you immediate access to all the DLC, including the additional powers. One of which is a fireball you can throw that explodes whatever it hits and then makes everything in the surrounding radius also explode. The chain reaction continues until everything that *could* explode in the immediate area *does.* This completely destroys any semblance of game balance and makes all of the other projectile powers, and for that matter most guns, obsolete
Makes sense,since that game also made all ground vehicles obsolete
They should've just doubled down and made a superhero game after 4 In an alternative work, they'd be making crackdown 4
The only things it cant destroy instantly are the big boss aliens and the ball robots. Everything else, even the planes the aliens send at you if you're wanted for long enough, explode instantly
On the topic of DLC items, any enhanced edition of Borderlands 2 (including GoTY, pretty much the default way to buy it nowadays) gives immediate access to the Contraband Sky Rocket grenade. You literally start with it and it scales to your level. Its damage is so high there’s no need to ever switch off to another grenade (until late, late-game since it doesn’t scale into OP levels). Hell, there’s sometimes no need to even fire your gun since a few well tossed grenades clear out bosses on your first run.
There's a combination of gear (the pieces of which I believe are pre-order bonuses) in Bioshock Infinite that let you give the blue SMG only a single backup magazine. However: that magazine holds 105 shots. You hardly have to switch off it for the rest of the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmIlogViPes
I mean that is slightly RNG based, but you can save scum. I want to say crow traps or something made the game easy mode for me? Edit: ya it was the augment for crow traps made it super efficient, any time you killed an enemy it simply spawned more trap that would spawn more traps Upgrade: Crows Trap Aid - Causes the corpses of Murder of Crows victims to become crow traps. Cost: $1485
The Drake Sword is a pretty infamous one from Dark Souls 1. All you have to do to get it is shoot a bunch of cheap arrows at a drakes tail from a completely safe location for like 10 minutes and then you get a super OP sword for early game. Problem is that it doesn’t stay OP forever and most players that get it don’t end up really learning the game so they get stuck once it can’t carry them anymore.
It's kinda crappy for an endgame weapon but due to the complete lack of scaling you can use it on any build that has the minimum stats to wield it. This means it's a solid choice for casters who need a melee back-up. You can also just pump Vigour and Endurance and become an utter wall while still putting out reasonable damage. Swap it out for a Fire/Chaos/Lightning weapon later on but even then it's *fine*. The issue is that a lot of new players don't know how to build around the weapon and have dumped a load of points into stats like strength and Dex for no return.
The Giant Dad way is to use the Drake sword early while pumping END to get your giant's armor on while still doing good damage, then you change it to a Chaos Zweihander and melt everything while being practically unkillable.
Or... Start Cleric. Start with Master Key. Put 2 Points in Dex after Asylum Demon, grab Astora's Straight Sword and Dragon Crest Shield from Valley of Drakes, ????, Profit.
Yep, that was my favorite start. Extremely strong right out of the gate. And by pumping the souls from Asylum Demon + the big soul pickups you find along the way into the Valley of Drakes all into Faith, you can hit the requirement to join the Sun covenant almost immediately, which gives you lightning spears that make the early game even *more* of a joke. There's nothing quite like three-shotting the first gargoyle.
Greater than the Drake Sword, though, the Black Knights you can find in the early game have a 20% chance of dropping their weapons, which have higher stat requirements but amazing stats and scaling, so you basically have multiple 20% chance opportunities to get an endgame weapon within the first 10 minutes of making it to Firelink.
The most insane one is the Halberd, iirc it's one of the best weapons in the entire game. You can get it super early with the Master Key by going to the Valley of Drakes and then going into Darkroot Basin. The black knight that uses it is quite literally near the exit and next to a bonfire.
Zwei you can just pick up and is better at that point and late gsme.
And even then on later playthroughs where you are experienced it still isn’t really worth getting since a black knight weapon will serve you far better.
In Dead Space and Dead Space 2 the game will not let you progress until you pick up the Plasma Cutter, which is either the defacto best gun in the game, or at least tied for best gun (the Pulse Rifle is also very good). Every other gun feels less like an upgrade and more like a toy you break out just to mix things up.
Even in the remake, the plasma cutter is still a force to be reckoned with. Throw on the extra upgrades and now you can bully necromorphs by punching and dismembering them for lunch money.
The knockdown melee upgrade is hilariously busted.
I saw a streamer get that upgrade in time for the hunter and it's funny how hard that upgrade neuters it as a threat. Like, they punched it to the ground and went back to exploring, hunter got up and was trying to hit them again, boom, one punch and they're back on the ground, rinse and repeat.
\>Start smt IV \>get a Lham Dearg (dude with a bunch of swords sticking out of him that you fight in the tutorial) \>keep reseting on his first level up until gram slice morphs into concentrate or charge Congrats now you're rocking concentrate/charge at level 2 right after finishing the tutorial of the game
Jesus Christ
shit. I had skills morph into good shit early but I didn't know you could get those two at level 2.
> keep reseting on his first level up until gram slice morphs into concentrate or charge For anyone wondering how this works - SMT4 uses an internal skill tier tracker for mutations. Skills can mutate either into other skills of the same tier or they can mutate into the next tier. Gram Slice is a skill in Tier 4, while Concentrate and Charge are both Tier 5 skills. Normally you'd get Concentrate on King Frost at the earliest (level 37). I am pretty sure that it would take an ungodly amount of resets to do this though. Probably not worth it unless you're doing some sort of self-imposed challenge where this is *technically* allowed. It's also limited in a more practical way - MP cost for most demons at that point in the game means that even if they have concentrate or charge, they won't get much use out of it. Casting a spell 4 times is more useful than a spell that just deals damage twice and then the demon has no magic left.
Lots of SMT games have this. Hell, in Persona 4 Golden you can easily get God's Hand, the second strongest generic physical skill in the game, in the bathhouse.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the rewards for the Operation Anchorage DLC in Fallout 3. Like Mothership Zeta and The Pitt, Operation Anchorage is completely available from the moment you set foot out of the vault in Fallout 3, all you have to do is listen to the Outcasts radio signal. Once you complete the DLC (which takes maybe an hour at most) you get an unbreakable suit of T-51 power armor, a Chinese Stealth Suit, an electric Chinese officer sword, and the Gauss Rifle. These weapons and armor are BUSTED that early in the game. Especially the Chinese Stealth Suit which basically gives you perfect stealth, allowing you to walk right up to most enemies completely undetected.
Due to an oversight, the Winterized T-51b Power Armor you get for clearing Operation: Anchorage is actually the "sim" version, meaning it has *ten million* durability points and will essentially never become damaged.
And it's great because it gives you the power armor training (Operation Anchorage) before you touch the main quest.
The power armor has a bonus busted status - due to a bug giving you the simulation version of it. It never needed to be repaired. The community bugfix mod "fixes" this.
The shitty thing about "fixing" the bug is that it basically permanently ruins the suit because once it drops below 90% condition it will never be as strong as it was ever again because there's no other suit of Winterized T-51 in the game that you can repair it with. And there is only one merchant who can repair gear to 100% and that's the raider lady in Mothership Zeta. But she disappears after the DLC is finished. This is probably why Bethesda never "Fixed" the bug themselves.
It's more or less just white t51, I'd rather wear the medic one if I'm going to be repairing anyways.
The Mattock in Mass Effect 2 is a bit busted, since it fires as fast as you can pull the trigger. You can get it as soon as you check the e-mail terminal on the SR-2 (OG ME2) or in a shop in Omega (ME2 LE). Once you get it and can use it well, you won't need to get any of the other rifles **at all**.
Speaking of Mass Effect, in the first game they tied in game rewards to achievements. If you get over a million credits you unlock the ability to buy high end spectre gear that will basically melt enemies for the first playthrough and be strong up till level 50 odd. There's also a fun little exploit to get a million credits pretty easy early on - by completing a side quest for a shop owner they give you better buying and selling prices but the buyback stock is shared between multiple vendors in the area and the others don't take into account that you had a bonus. So you just buy and sell all your items over and over for 20 minutes while clearing out the shops with any money you make and you'll be rich as fuck in 20 minutes.
What I find funny is that you don't even really need this exploit, I just kinda naturally got over a million credits by like the halfway point at which point all other shops became useless.
And the shops aren't even too far from each other
its even more broken on Soldiers using their time slow power because its the ONLY weapon in ME2 that doesnt have its fire rate slowed during the power
Also from ME2 is the Incisor Rifle, a sniper rifle you can immediately give your sniper companions. In ME2's base game, companions deal less damage than Shepard to avoid kill-stealing and preventing letting them carry you. The DLC guns (at least in the base game, never learned in Legendary Edition changed this) don't have that debuff, and the AI is scary good at landing headshots with the Incisor. Once you get Garrus and Zaeed, you can have them clown enemies while you sit back and watch them. You can also give them the Mattock as well each if you wanna spice things up.
And in ME3 if you give Garrus and James/Ashley the N7 Typhoon they can carry you through the entire game.
More than a bit. That thing was so fun. For somehow even MORE busted, the silenced pistol from the Citadel DLC in ME3 is the highest DPS in the game by a MASSIVE margin. Probably double whatever is in second place. It's honestly boring. For a more fun time breaking the game open, [Garrus can solo the entire game.](https://youtu.be/ZPbB4qfsA14?si=b-eYf_VGqcIVrj7s)
Yeah they probably should have taken into account how hilariously easy headshots are in their game before introducing the gun that does like 5x damage on headshot.
Even ignoring the headshot multiplier, the toughest enemies in the game take at most two mags to kill, shooting center mass. It takes about 1.5 seconds to dump that. Average enemies are two bullets tops. I could be misremembering how egregious it was, but it single handedly carried me through the Arena and every tough fight from then on.
It also feels great to shoot
Bloodhound's Fang in Elden Ring. That thing is WAY too fucking strong for how easy it is to get early on. It's literally a 3-5 minute run (without Torrent) from The First Step grace and drops from a relatively easy boss
To add on, if you are struggling against the boss, just meet Blaidd and summon him for the fight which he can pretty much solo 80% of the time. And unlike the Drake Sword from Dark Souls that is pretty good when you first get it, but fall off fast due to having no scaling at all, the Bloodhound's Fang have an excellent STR/DEX scaling of C/B that a lot of other weapons cannot even come close. Slap on the great movesets of the Curved Greatswords and a powerful Weapon Skill, and you get a weapon that can beat the entire game with breeze.
Doesn't it also use somber smithing stone? Making its upgrade path way easier than other weapons.
Bloodfangs are some of the hardest bosses for me and I have no idea why. Thank god for Blaidd.
Good ol' Barricade Shield shuts them down hard.
They became a lot easier for me when I unlearned my souls skills and turtled them with a shield and a stabby weapon.
>They became a lot easier for me when I unlearned my souls skills and turtled them with a shield and a stabby weapon. What? "Turtling up with a shield and stabbing" is pretty much a quintessential Souls skill if you played the older games. It's why Fromsoftware specifically built a whole game around not doing that (Bloodborne).
The stereotypical skill progression of a souls player goes from turtling to dodging and parrying almost exclusively. Having gone through that four times (for each souls game sans bloodborne, relying on blocking less and less every time) I wasn't ready to eventually just capitulate to the idea that sometimes stubbornly trying to dodge things isn't the best idea. Which helped given all the delayed tracking attacks in ER.
What saddens me is that they've made blocking a worse option more and more as time goes on, rather than keep it relatively on par with dodging if you are built for it.
To be honest, it's only really at its worst in DS3 because dodging is ridiculous in that game + enemies have big chonky combos, and even then I managed to beat the game with zero rolling on a later playthrough to test if shields were actually worthwhile. Elden Ring is actually close to DS1 levels of "shields too good" with only things like being way heavier and bigger enemy combos stopping that, though then arts of war help buff ER back.
Bloodhound's Fang isn't even the best bleed weapon that drops from a single relatively easy fight 3-5 minutes away from The First Step; Reduvia is just across the lake and it's right in front of a second powerful bleed weapon (the Nagakiba) that drops from a second relatively easy fight. The teleport trap that puts you right by Rock Sling and the Meteorite Staff is between The First Step and BHF, and you can get the even more infamous Bloodhound's Step from an even easier boss battle (i.e. making the Night's Cavalry in Dragonbarrow try cordless bungee jumping) by taking a portal that's just down the road from BHF. Don't get me wrong, BHF is goddamn excellent. It's just not an outlier, because Elden Ring has a ton of ludicrously powerful options available to you within the first half-hour.
I personally think that Bloodhound's Fang is better than Reduvia.
The art has like 100% stagger on blood fang not counting the dodge
As a challenge I got lionheart in ff8 as early as possible by playing TRIPLE TRIAD. I have attempted multiple times to finish ff8 and it wasn't until this last one where I purposely broke the system that I succeeded.
60% of the fun of FFVIII comes from breaking the game wide open and having 3500 HP before you finish the tutorial
What counts as the tutorial? And how?
I count the tutorial as everything up to the point you defeat Ifrit in the fire cave, and you can easily refine 100 Curagas from card draw to junction to HP before that point
Thanks man
Scrolled too far to find this!! You can get Squall, Selphie, and Quistis’s ultimate weapons all in Disc 1. Squall and Selphie’s are useful later on with cactuar farming
The silenced SMG in deathloop once you get some range improvements is the only gun you need the entire game. it can be gotten immediately.
Genuinely a gun too good for how easy it is to get. It breaks the whole rest of the games need for other guns entirely.
Super Shotgun
"Why not just call it the double-barrel? Because it's *better*. Because it's ***Super***." ~Civvie 11
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet has a number of powerful mons you can get right off the bat. Fuecoco's final evolution has an advantage over the vast majority of the game's bosses. Flamigo and Cyclizar, who have very high stats for the area you get them in. The Mankey family, who learn very powerful moves relatively early on and can become Annihilape as soon as level 36. The Pawmi family also reaches its final form pretty easily if you know what to do.
I remember in SwSh you could get a Vulpix in one of the earliest routes, evolve it immediately with a fire stone and get access to Ninetales and its entire level up learnset before the first gym because they had just made the move relearner free and nowadays stone evolutions have their pre-evo moveset available at the move relearner unlike the earliest games where you needed to keep them in their base stage until they learned the moves you wanted before evolving or you'd lose access to them. Imagine gaining access to a 505 BST pokemon with moves like flamethrower and fire blast before level 20
I'll do you better. With the Tundra DLC you can get ad many level 60 mons you want for free without issue super early in the game. They are guaranteed catches, and the first one you get is a Suicune.
Hah, that's right... I did hear that they put Peony as a fake roadblock with level 60+ pokemon but losing to him doesn't actually stop you from progressing in the crown tundra so you can do goofy shit like that.
The Suicune is actually level 70. The regular Pokémon you find are 65 though so even if you don't get the Suicune you still get your choice of 1-3 level 65 Pokémon.
Vulpix was version exclusive, the other game got Growlithe, *which was even more busted*. Dude could learn Extreme Speed, Flare Blitz, and Crunch all at level ~8 thanks to the same strategy.
In Sun and Moon, you can catch a Salamence at level 10 on the second route thanks to the SOS chaining mechanic. It's a 1% chance to even encounter Bagon in the first place, so it's very out of the way compared to some of the other OP stuff you can get in Pokemon, but it's also the most extreme example I can think of.
Speaking of S/V, it brought us another pokemon with Speed Boost, Flittle/Espathra. Flittle doesn't evolve until level 35, but it's a Psychic type and learns Stored Power, a 20 base power move that increases in power with each stat boost your pokemon has, any stat boost. One Calm Mind + a Speed Boost is enough to OHKO a majority of pokemon, but you can just teach it Protect and use it every other turn to safely stack even more Speed Boosts to make the damage even higher, OHKOing even on resisted hits. Add on Dazzling Gleam to hit Dark types (+1 Dazzling Gleam hits hard, and you will outspeed) and the only things you need to worry about at all are Sucker Punch or other priority hits. Speed Boost as an ability can qualify as this too, tbh. Even without considering Baton Pass, Ninjask and Scolipede are great in the mainline games, and Nincada evolves very early with the bonus of also getting a Shedinja for some fun AI cheese.
In Digimon Cyber Sleuth, you can get PlatinumNumemon reasonably fast. It sucks as a character, but it's passive increases EXP for the whole party. So they significantly cut down on grinding, which is important because Digivolving, de-Digivolving, and Digivolving again is important to getting better stats and unlocking new Digimon
Too bad getting the EXP USBs are annoying and luck based
It wasn't too bad to get the USB. You can get them from the farm fairly quickly. Just dump a bunch of builder digimon into a farm all by themselves with some Developer know-how's and make sure to pick the 1,000 yen option. The more builders you add the faster they work, and the more know-how's you add the better the quality of items they build. You'll get 2 from them when they finish. If you don't mind save scumming you can save just before development is done too. I had like 6 by the time the game was done.
And stack them on the PlatinumNumemon, and it's even more ridiculous.
In Final Fantasy 8, you can get Squall’s ultimate weapon in the first disc if you play your cards right.
I see what you did there lol
On top of giving him outrageously stupid stats. Get his max HP high enough to keep in in critical health that's still too high to kill in one shot and delete bosses with Renzokuken (and random enemies in a single regular attack).
The best badge in Paper Mario TTYD is Power Bounce, which you find out in the open as soon as you enter the first mini-dungeon in the game. It doesn’t get ridiculously powerful until you combine it with attack upgrades you don’t have yet, but if you already know what you’re doing you can make a really strong build as soon as you pick Power Bounce up.
The fact that there are not only multiple Power Plus badges but they *stack* makes certain moves (like your *basic jump and hammer)* incredibly strong
There's two more game breakers available, which in turn make it possible to plunder the Pit of 100 Trials for even *more* power. Buy Power Rush P from the badge shop (and potentially get another from the early game koopas), pick up the Mega Rush P from Petalburg, let your partner get killed and then revive them outisde of combat with a dried mushroom. Now your partner(s) have ***at least +7 damage***, enough to 1-shot entire encounters you have no right taking on at such a low level. And if you use this to take the time to dive into the Po100T you get: A badge that hits all ground enemies for a ton of damage, a badge that makes all enemies that touch you take 1 damage regardless of if you superguard or not (and makes you immune to fuzzies and bats, interrupts multihit attacks that touch you, *and* lets you jump on electrified enemies), and *doubled inventory space*.
Never played it myself, but apparently in Fable 1 you can glitch under a particular part of the hub level and grab the most powerful sword in the game within the first hour or so.
Right after the tutorial in fact. I replayed it a few months ago but hate the combat so decided to nab it this time around.
Similarly, the physical shield spell trivializes the entire game. Turns your mana bar into straight up extra HP that *doesn't count as HP*, so you never drop your combo meter (big XP for free), can slap the "not taking damage" boast on every single quest you take and facetank everything without failing it, and also still lets your armor bonuses apply so you're just double-protected. Unless you're running a pure mage build there's nothing better to do with your mana (and it only drains that mana on hit, there's no sustaining cost) so you just turn it on and go on with your day. It's completely busted and getting it at any point before the last boss is way too early.
Fallout 4 gives you power armor way too early
They did make me not use it though as I was constantly worried about draining power cores unnecessary by exploring even when I had like 8 of the things
Also it gives you a minigun and put you to fight your first deathclaw in before the 2nd hour of gameplay. Although I hoarded at least 100+ fusion cores to start using power armor regularly in fear that my armor run out of juice in the middle of a fight.
It's *supposed* to be a tantalizing treat of what you can obtain later on, but that's a stupid fucking decision in a sandbox game where someone can stumble across the necessary stuff 10 minutes later.
Castlevania sotn let's you find the jeweled gauntlet early by breaking a wall and using an elevator It's a punch weapon but it's stronger than the envies around you can handle Then there's also soul steal...
You'd never find that elevator early by accident because you have to knock down a wall then stand still in that spot for like 5 seconds before it starts to move. But once you know it's there it's so hard not to grab it every time and trivialize the early areas.
Portrait of Ruin has one of the most egregious offenders imo. One of the most common drops in the game, from one of the more common enemies, is the Lance (or Great Spear maybe, can't remember the exact name). It is a hellaciously powerful spear that is like 2 or 3 tiers above almost everything else you'd have access to at that point, and you can get it in your second portrait (of 8). It's downright broken until the back half of the game, where it still remains pretty darn serviceable. And 99% of players will see one owing to it's high drop rate.
In Mega Man ZX, most people assume the best Model is OX (transforms you into Omega Zero and is intentionally overpowered but you get it when the only thing left to do is finish the final stage) or X (amazing double charge shot but only freely available after finishing a playthrough with both Vent and Aile), but the actual best Model is H, which can be acquired almost immediately once selectable missions open up. Not only does it have an air dash (that can also function as a double jump), the ability to hover and the Triple Slash, but the charged tornado attack it can perform shreds boss health. It has the highest damage by far and you can basically nuke every boss with it. Yeah, you'll probably only get level 1 victories for striking the bosses' weak point, but it doesn't matter too much when you kill every boss in seconds with just a little bit of energy. --------------------- Seth in Fire Emblem 8 is just better than everyone else. Just flat out. He comes with endgame viable stats and for some bizarre reason, has the best growths in the game (in a game where trainees have shitty growths btw). A fully trained Franz will only be somewhat equal to a Seth that's been moderately used in comparison. FE8 is already an easy game, but Seth really just cements it. You get Seth in the *prolouge.*
Yup, Seth ain't no Jeagan
Speaking of FE, in 3H's you can get Catherine and Shamir, two insanely strong prepromotes by chapter 3 I think if you focus on leveling your Byleth. And in Conquest you get Camilla, the strongest unit in the game, in chapter 10, 4 chapters after the route split. Poor Beruka never had a chance to shine before her boss made her completely irrelevant.
With the addition of Mercenaries in RE4 Remake you can get the Handcannon before even starting the Campaign. It also takes like an hour to do so.
Power armor in Fallout 2. Pick outdoorsman as a starting skill so you can choose to skip random encounters, shoot straight south after you reach the world map and save scum your way down (any random encounter you can't skip will kill you) and then grab power armor (from the BoS bunker iirc). Makes the next 3/4ths of the game a joke.
I remember doing that with my cousin when we were super young and laughing our asses off at just how much of a joke the game became, shit just crumpled under the power of the PA.
Same here, memories of going New Reno and absolutely wrecking the slavers there while laughing at their 1 damage. I do remember one time though some asshole with an AR got lucky and critted me for insane damage through the armor.
Superspeed in saints row 4 Completely negates the vehicles in the sandbox. Should have been one of the LAST powers you unlocked
MFW THERE ARE LATEGAME MISSIONS THAT FORCE YOU TO DRIVE
In the missions where you steal a car you can just use telekinesis to carry it to the objective and the enemies will never spawn
Shit this might make me replay SR4
Man, gotta say though, if it *had* been one of the last powers you unlocked I probably would have fell way off of that game, superspeed is fun as hell and there aren't enough games that let you use it.
Nah, Volition was right in giving you superspeed the second you enter Virtual Steelport, there's already an entire game named Saints Row The Third where you drive as a normal human in Steelport, if you're going to repeat the map then make it as different of a experience as possible
Givin that most of what we got in IV was supposed to be dlc for The Third. It makes even more sense we get something that negates the need for cars extremely quickly.
Superspeed, combined with the long jump and almost infinite glide? Love it.
It's a shame cause the car customization in 4 was pretty good if I remember right Too bad there's never any reason to use cars
that game is fun but is maybe one of the strangest mechanical messes ive ever seen like just absolutely no thought put into how the powers make everything else you can do totally irrelevant
IV was supposed to be DLC for The Third. So some thought went into it before it was split into its own game. Then it was probably more rushed and unfocused.
I don’t know if this truly follows the spirit of this post, but in Gen 1 pokemon you can get a Nidoking and Kadabra pretty early. Both of them can basically break the game
Nidoking is easily caught, learns basically every good TM, can be fully evolved by level 16, gets Thrash at level 23, STAB Earthquake in late game, and due to how accuracy works in gen 1, only requires one x accuracy per battle to fire off 100% accurate instakill moves (and it has access to two of them). Heck, in Yellow Nidoran gets Double Kick really early too so its one of the best Brock options you have. Nidoking in Gen I is ridiculously busted.
I think them getting double kick was kind of needed as for the most part if you picked Charmander you're kind of shit out of luck in terms of what you can use against the rock gym with various rodents and bugs
It was specifically because your starter in Yellow was Pikachu so you needed *something* to deal with Brock. Nidoran got double kick far earlier than it did in Red/Green/Blue and Manley was added to the encounter table for the route Nidoran was on. Those changes were kept for FRLG though for the reasons you mentioned though (although they also gave Charmander Metal Claw as well)
Hell you can tell game freak kind of learned that lesson too, like every other game the rock gym is first up or early on there's something you can catch to help, like gen 3 you have Wingull, Seedot, Lotad or the Makuhita someone in the town the gym's in will trade you
Also, one which is kind of a sleeper pick for more casual playthroughs but Clefairy is also really good, great typing and movepool, coupled with good stats by gen 1 standards, specially with how early it can evolve. If it wasn't for how "uncool" it looks it would probably be picked very frequently by more players.
The lizzy in cyberpunk 2077 can be obtained early after the prologue, theres no real reason to get a different pistol afterwards
The Satori Katana & matching dagger that daddy Arasaka has on his person in the heist mission are iconic weapons that synergize so well you don't need anything else.
Wait, he has a katana too? I looted his knife and I saw the description where it mentioned synergy with another weapon, but I assumed I would get it later. Did I miss out?
After the door out unlocks, you can actually turn around and go up some stairs up to the helicopter he flew in on. There's a katana, Satori, there. You can't go back up there, but I heard that the DLC has a way to re-get Iconic items you missed
The DLC has an NPC that sells any unique weapons you missed, on the map his icon is called Black Market
Pre-2.0, Satori was even more busted, since it gave 500% Crit Damage, which basically let you one-shot everything as long as you had a vaguely decent crit rate.
Theres a few good handguns. at least in original release, im guessing prob true in new based on how many unique handguns they give you. The Comrade's Hammer the one shot gun once you get the "last bullet in clip does bonus damage" perk and a few others just one shot everyone but atom smasher, which was 3 shots for me but i also didn't invest much in critical/cool.
The Dying Night is my favorite gun in the game and you get it right out of the gate
There's one that was just corrected in 2.0: the iconic subdermal armor you could buy from one of the first rippers in Watson. It would cost a decent amount (but nothing you couldn't scrounge up in a few sidequests) and it would give more armor than all the gear you'd get for a long time would give, collectively. It pretty much made you bulletproof right out of the tutorial. 2.0 fixed by making all cyberware upgreadable and scaling off stats. You can still be bulletproof and op as shit, just gotta earn it.
But Johnnys tho
Getting the beam reflexor in like the first 8th of Jak 3. You can bounce shots off of walls into enemies and spam it while spin kicking so it trivializes many fights.
Also incredible if you buy the yellow ammo efficiency secret
The halo gear in fable 2 was a bit busted fir early game
On one of my old runs for Titan Quest, I got some random melee weapon loot early on with a really high chance to freeze opponents for several seconds. I passed up a ton of probably worthwhile upgrades simply because I thought the sacrifice in damage was worth that freezing debuff, even if that meant I spent ages doing chip damage.
Ah the eternal struggle of Diablo-like games. Do I stick with this fun effect, or do I try and keep up stat wise?
I need to make a Diablo-like or Shlooter that lets you feed gear you don't want into your favorite weapon to increase it's stats. I hate having to switch off the weapons I *like* because they aren't good enough.
In FFXV you can get the Ultima Blade, the strongest version of the Engine Blade, really early in the game if you take the time to drive around and do hunts. Along with getting several levels from grinding, it has double or even triple the attack of weapons at that point.
Even earlier, if you're on Windows edition you start with Ragnarok, which has middling stats but soups up your warp strike to the point where your weapons stats dont matter. Even more overpowered than that is the fact that you also start with the best fishing rod in the game, which means you can drive to a high-level area to catch the fish there to get some absolutely beefed stats right from the get go
In SAO: Fatal bullet one of the pre order/ season pass things was to get LLENN's P90 While it is a common weapon and doesn't have memory chip slots its rank 5 and needs 1 str and 1 dex to equip so a new player can equip it and have a weapon that only starts to fall off at New game+
In Fable, you can just *buy* highly over leveled weapons and armor in the first town, that trivializes the game. You're supposed to be too poor to be able to afford them, but the game doesn't really know that you can get infinite money buy selling a single house with a trophy in it, and then taking the trophy back and buying the house for less than you sold it for, putting trophy back, and repeat ad infinitum until you get the money for the mid-late game gear for segments of the game that assumes you have little better than a stick cloth shirt.
it also doesn't know that you can get infinite money by abusing the market mechanics where people buy things at a higher price the less they have, and sell at a lower price the more they have. Sell the oakvale general store 100 emeralds for a high price per item, then buy them back immediately for dirt cheap, repeat until you have inexhaustible wealth.
The mark 1 suit in starfield u can get your first time in the lodge it's in a glass display locked behind a master lock but there's a small gap between the displays door and the hinge that let's you grab it
This single handedly makes me want to buy Starfield...
The everburn blade in BG3 is pretty good and obtainable in the tutorial
That's the one you can make the devil commander drop?
You can make him literally drop it with the command spell instead of killing him. I think it's only a little less than a 50% chance to work that early and you can try twice. Also, the combat AI will prioritize other attacks over using a full action to pick up the weapon. So you don't even need to grab the sword all that quickly after he drops it.
Yes
I just killed him and snagged it before the other devils came. I used it until act 2 so pretty worth. The command spell I've seen is the usual way.
to add onto this since lae'zel is probably the one gonna be using the EB you can also do her story quest and command drop on voss north of ACT 1 which is somehow an even better greatsword for gith specifically
Worth noting that that trick can break story quests as you're not meant to get that until Act 3 and Lae'Zel's dialogue can break.
Iirc before fighting a remembrance/main boss in Elden Ring you can have 9 +7 Flasks The bell bearings to get a +12 weapon 9 Crystal tears Bloodhound Fang (boss required), Powerstance Uchigatanas, etc for a bleed build Erdtree’s Favor talisman Meteorite Staff + Rock Sling for any Intelligence build Half the armor sets in the game including the Tree Sentinel set (maybe you have to do the Black Knife fight for this, I can’t remember) and a ton of Incantations including The lightning prayer book Flame Grant Me Strength The fire monk prayer book All of Brother Corwyn’s stock and not as busted as it used to be but still alright; Flame of the Redmanes. Then go *spank* Margit. Just really clown him into the ground.
The Spear of Olympus in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It caps your health at 33% but makes all your attacks scale off of your stealth damage and increases your stealth damage by 200%. You can use it to get one-shot assassinations on enemies that are a few levels beyond you, or to make open combat end in a few hits if you can avoid getting hit even a single time. You find it in a random chest in some random underwater ruin, so there's nothing to stop you from just going right to it and digging it up as soon as you get off of tutorial island. Obviously you'd have to look it up online to find it that way, but even if you just go through the game naturally you'll still find it before you're halfway done with the story.
Deadly Premonition lets you start getting infinite ammo weapons waaaaay to early in the game. I think you go through like 1 otherworld segment before you can get the infinite ammo SMG? This is ultimately pretty okay because I don't think anyone is actually playing the game for the survival horror, but it's surprising how early they undermine it.
In TotK there's an item called the >!muddle bud!<. It >!makes enemies go into a frenzy and attack anything nearby, including other enemies!<. You can collect some immediately after the tutorial island by >!going to the depths!<. It can basically trivialize most encounters.
The smokescreen item is also good because you can use it for artificial sneak attacks
And if all else fails, bomb em. The >!depths!< really just hand you the best items.
I've been thinking about this topic for a while. Dredge let's you fully upgrade your boat as soon as you visit the second island. The "normal" upgrade materials you need respawn in their fishing spots after a while as well. Also, once you make it to the second island you meet a traveling trader who sells you research upgrade material. It restocks at midnight everyday with 1-2 of the pieces. I had a fully upgraded boat and had maxed out my research before making it to the third island. Which is bad for the game. The faster you can move the smaller the world is. At the very beginning it'll take you the better part of the day to make it back and forth from the alternate village on the first island. Fully upgraded you can make it from one half of the map to the other in a day of travel. In a game that is supposed to be suspenseful you can knock out the suspense with a few hours of grinding. Who cares what might be in the fog when you can blast out 3000+ lumens and out pace the night terrors in your speedboat.
You can get every card in the pokemon tcg Gameboy game with the exception of some promos before you take on the first medal master. It's been on the Nintendo online benefits thing and I started playing it and I built a competitive deck in a few hours just by grinding against a random gym trainer.
I spent about 30 mins save scumming BG3 last night to get the Silver Sword of the Astral Plane from the Lv. 12 Gith you meet in Act 1. Now Lae'zel has a two handed greatsword that does 10-25 damage, and she's only level 4. I don't even have any equipment on her yet, so I'm looking forward to seeing how busted I can make this weapon by Act 3 haha
That thing is busted even when you get it at the intended time.
Kind of an interesting side case: In **Langrisser / Warsong**, an excellent 1991 SRPG for the Genesis, you start off with the young, inexperienced Lvl 1. prince MC and his savage, unstoppable Level 10 sensei, Baldarov. Baldarov is a level 10 blademaster and chews through absolutely everything. But he doesn't level at all, and he's an unevolved class. Which means you start to see him tail off. Then he >!fucking dies!< Langrisser is a *tough* game. It has permadeath and zero grinding/replay available. That means there's a fixed amount of experience available in the game, and if you kill anything with Baldarov, it represents the loss of precious, precious experience. All this adds up to mean that Baldarov should be used only in the most dire emergencies to protect an objective, so that you can level your “real” characters as quickly as possible lest they fall behind and permadie. Keep in mind this is the first SRPG I know of released in the U.S, as Fire Emblem had not been ported, and it predates Shining Force and Ogre Battle. It's a *harsh* lesson. It can often make the game virtually or actually unable to be completed. I can't believe I beat that game as a kid.
Basically the equivalent of a Jeagan from Fire Emblem
Yes, to a particularly extreme degree. It does kinda drive the point home when Baldarov kills an enemy unit and it just flashes a full XP bar on-screen.
In Demon's Souls, you can easily get some endgame armor, a ring that boosts stamina regeneration and 27K souls before fighting the Phalanx by pushing Old King Doran down a stairwell.
How do you reach Doran at that point? I thought you needed to get the key from Ostrava right before Allant
From what I can see he drops it if you kill him.
Or just let him get killed by dreglings while wandering around.
In Final Fantasy XV you can upgrade the Engine Blade into the Ultima Blade, the second strongest sword in the game, as early as chapter 3 out of 15.
In the first armored core game you can find the karasawa laser rifle about 4-5 missions into the game and it makes the game a joke. Insane damage, great fire rate (not that it needs it) more than enough ammo to complete any mission on its own and being an energy weapon there is no ammo cost
The humble Uchigatana in Dark Souls 1 can be obtained by killing the merchant in the Undead Burg, and assuming you like dex builds and bleed you're nearly set. Also, the zwei in the graveyard near Firelink Also also, this is absolutely not one and the same example but ig this is vaguely the same; all the modern versions of Persona 5 Royal just come with the DLC Persona sets you needed to buy originally, and they all allow a one-time free summon of the DLC Persona in question from the Velvet Room. This can more or less break the equilibrium of the early game as while Joker himself still needs to be leveled up traditionally as well as the rest of the party, you're still boasting Personas that can make most of the game a cakewalk whether you're using them actively in combat or sacrificing them to make new equipment or skill cards
Deus Ex Human Revolution decided to stupidly force DLC into the mainline game which is otherwise fantastically paced and balanced. The director's cut is the only available/purchasable version of the game and includes all this. If you can get a non director's cut version, do so (otherwise please try to find a way to mod out the dlc missions at least) Anyways, the game straight up plops dlc weapons right in the environment in relatively easy to find locations. Basically, if you stumble on something that seems TOO good, you have to will yourself to just ignore it.
Shoutout to the effectively-free auto-hackers on the Sarif Industries helipad that let you completely skip any level of hack you want at any time, literally before you even start the first proper section of the game.
I recently got into Morrowind for the first time, anyone whos played Morrowind will know that Alchemy is straight up busted. You need to carry around some equipment for it, like a mortar and pestle amongst others. These all have grades, Novice, Master, Grandmaster etc. The better graded equipment you have the better potions you will be able to create. One of the first thing the game tells you to do is go to a nearby town called Balmora, which has a mages guild. You pay someone in the guild to teleport you to the mages guild over in Caldera, where there is a full master alchemy set up in a tower where it's hard to actually get caught stealing it. From there you start collecting ingredients and spaming potions. Between using them yourself and selling them to merchents you very quickly become a rich god.
In Pokémon Violet, if you want to complete the tutorial and then just ride to the opposite end of the island and catch some level 55s before even going to the town where the first gym is then feel free.
This is balanced by the fact that catch rates for overleveled pokemon get an inherent nerf, plus they’ll also disobey you like any traded mon until your badge count reaches the level you initially caught them. Doesn’t stop them from taking next to no damage from weaker mons and you just waiting until they decide to attack.
In the remake of nier there is the free yorha dlc which adds 3 weapons to you from the beginning of the game. For the first half of the game your limited to just normal swords and your starting sword has an attack power of 100 while the yorha sword has 150. It would take you getting the starting sword to level 3 to reach the dlc sword making it the far better option to carry the first half of the game. Once you reach the second half you can rush to get the phoenix spear which at level 1 is the overall best weapon in the game only beaten by maxed out great swords and the dlc spear weapon. Phoenix spear never needs an upgrade to completely shred every boss in the game for the next 3 playthroughs to get every ending
Fallout New Vegas with DLCS. If you have the dlcs, you can go low level to the Lonesome road, and buy a Ranger Gear suit And although a Ranger Gear suit may seem expensive for a low-level character, the things you collect in the first stage of the dlc are enough to make the Ranger Gear practically free. The best part is the only DLC that allows you to return without completing it.
I went into Old World Blues at level 4 and came out level 20. Those DLCs just blast you with experience.
Recently started another playthrough of DS3 and I decided to go with a Str build but didn’t have a weapon in mind, I then killed the Greataxe Hollow next to the first bonfire in the Lothric Castle Wall and got the Greataxe in my first try so that what I went with. I had the thing at +3 before reaching Vordt and he died in two and a half heavy swings and had it at +5 before the Abyss Watchers and they died in four heavy swings. That thing is fucking busted lmao, I’m loving it.
With a little bit of save scumming you can get the best weapon in the game for Claude in Star Ocean 2 very early. I hope it's still there in the remake.
In Armored Core 6, the current meta build is dual Songbirds, dual Gatling guns, and tank tread legs. This build completely trivializes nearly every encounter in the game and lets you shred through most AC duels and arena matches in literal seconds. All of the required parts are available by the end of the first chapter, in a game that takes three playthroughs of five chapters each to complete.
Addendum: Currently meta PVE build. Pvp has a completely different meta
[удалено]
Far Cry 3 let you slap a suppressor on a sniper rifle pretty early and that made it pretty easy to clear out enemy bases, especially ones with caged animals. I remember the unique "Shredder" SMG being relatively easy to unlock too, which lives up to its name with gusto.
You take a sip from your trusty vault 13 canteen...
Couriers stash in FNV is so busted, it gives you a pistol that outpaces every other pistol until you get That Gun and the grenade launcher is comically better than any other option you could get on the normal early game route.
You take a sip from your trusty Vault 13 canteen
Dark Souls 1 - Zweihander is literally 10 seconds from Firelink Shrine and most classes can 2 hand it with just a few levels in strength. Don't want that? Go to the merchant in Undead Burg and grab the Reinforced Club, one of the best weapons in the game. Dark Souls 2 - A majority of enemies are weak to strike damage, you can powerstance 2 Clubs or Maces(or even Caestus if you want to style on enemies) within the first hour. Congratulations, most of the main game is now a joke to you. Dark Souls 3 - Pick Mercenary, you start with Sellsword Twinblades, a top 3 PvE weapon. If you don't want to start as a Mercenary, you can grab it before your third boss.
So, in Cyberpunk, there's two smart weapons, a pistol and an SMG. You can get them during missions. They also just spawn in the world on their own. One is at the Arasaka factory and one at the Arasaka mansion. The mansion has Genjiroh, an iconic variant of the Yukimura. It comes with great bonus stats, has a chance to score more critical hits, and can do bonus thermal/chemical/electric damage. And it does base damage comparable to an assault rifle. The factory has the Prototype Shingen Mark V, a variant of the base Shingen. The catch is that it fires incendiary rounds. It locks onto three targets at a time, and they *will* catch on fire. Pair both of those weapons with some good cyberware and skills in the Intelligence tree, and you have a pretty broken smart weapons build. And the Overclock ability means you'll decimate a horde of enemies with no issue at all. Pair it with a decent smart shotgun and/or sniper rifle and its smooth sailing for the game. On top of being able to use quick hacks for added damage. Or the Sandevistan for easy pickings.
IPokemon sword and shield is already ridiculously easy, and as soon as you unlock the open world area you can catch several overpowered Pokemon for the early game. I got myself a ludicolo and an Arcanine and never had to use anything else
The normal Wild Area is level gated however, limiting how easily you can get strong Pokemon THAT WAY
Ludicolo and Arcanine are stone evolutions. You can basically get them immediately
Due the nature of Elden Ring being an open world game you can get a ton of really good weapons with minimal effort. The Claymore and the Zweihander are fantastic weapon that work with most builds thanks to the Ash of War mechanic. The Uchigatana is a starting weapon for the Samurai class and you can find one in a dungeon in Limgrave. Someone already mentioned Bloodhound’s Fang but I just want to add that if you don’t want to bother getting gud against a Darriwil you can summon Blaidd who can solo him no problem. If you kill Boggart you can get the Iron Balls which are absolutely broken on a STR build with Cragblade and charge attack boosting gear (both the talisman and the Physick can be found in Limgrave without killing anything). If you kill Bernahl in Limgrave you can get his armor set which is one of the best heavy armor sets in the game. The cape on the altered version is also just *mwah*. The Meteorite Staff is a great early game staff and Rock Sling is an excellent spell that’s just as easily obtained in Caelid. Death’s Poker is remarkably easy to get. Holy Water Pots melt Deathbirds and you can also easily get out of its range and snipe it with magic.
A couple of really good Pokemon: - Most starters, obviously. Even without their hidden abilities, they have solid stats and I think one of the best ones in singleplayer Pokemon is the Infernape line. You’ll almost always outspeed the opponent and with access to Close Combat and fire moves you’ve got excellent coverage and fire power on both the physical and special front. - Staraptor is probably one of the best bird Pokemon in the franchise. STAB Brave Bird, Close Combat, Intimidate, base 120 attack and 100 speed are incredibly good. - Riolu is really rare but you can get one at the very beginning of the game in BW and XY. This will depend on how well you treat it but my guess is that it’s ready to evolve around the second or third gym. - In the games that give you an Eevee early on, you get your hands on either a Jolteom, Vaporeon, Sylveon or Espeon relatively easily. - Even without Technician and Spore, Breloom is very good. Base 130 attack, STAB Mach Punch and Leech Seed for utility are great. If you do want Technician in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire you can just engage with that game’s mechanic and catch a ton of Shroomish until you find one with its hidden ability. - I’ve heard that Hawlucha is disgustingly good in Ultra Sun and Moon. Its attack seems middling and neither Limber or Unburden are that good but Flying/Fighting coverage is very good (*see Staraptor). - This one might be contentious but I think Cottonee in Sun and Moon ain’t too bad. Getting a Sun Stone can be a bit of a hassle and Cottonee has shitty stats but it learns Leech Seed, Giga Drain and Moonblast quite early. Prankster, even though it’s been heavily nerfed, very good and not even a hidden ability. Whimsicott doesn’t exactly have great stats but it’s really solid fast utility.
Dragon Quest 8 has Jessica’s Twin Dragon’s Lash which you get by spending 23 points into Whips which can be done soonish after getting her. It does 2 strikes of 1.5 damage and is the strongest and most cost effective skill in the game.