Game Breaking

[Dagger Dias]

Most of us gamers are familiar with the word "broken" and all of the complaints that come along with it. For those who do not know yet, game breakers are controversial elements/strategies/glitches that suddenly trump everything else. Some dislike anything that's considered broken, while others exploit such things to their advantage.

One of the more popular examples is the legendary Pokemon such as Mewtwo, Rayquaza, Celebi, Lugia, etc. People often put rules into their battling to prevent others from using these characters since they are too powerful for most of the regular characters to defeat, thus complaining about how broken they are.

Another example comes from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Check the spoiler tag, since it deals with the last boss:

Spoiler

The Dark King had a massive weakness. The Cure spell would do 12,000+ damage to him, while everything else capped at around 2,000.

Whether that was a glitch or intentional remains unknown. Then there's Final Fantasy 6, the infamous Vanish + X-Zone double cast glitch that could instantly defeat just about any boss in the game. They did tone down that strategy significantly in other versions and remakes, but it remains a game breaker in the original SNES version.

So what are your thoughts on game breaking? Is it a chance to exploit things to your advantage, or is it merely a way out for gamers who know they are not hardcore at that/those particular game(s)? Why?

Are there any stories of epic game breaking you'd like to share?

Before I open the discussion I'll share a game breaking story of my own. There's an old SNES game called Paladin's Quest that I have mentioned a couple of times on here before. The most powerful spell in that game is called Spirit and the game tries to give you the impression that the final boss is impossible to defeat without it due to other attacks doing 1 or 2 points of damage to him. I was able to find a strategy to where I defeated him without even attacking at all. Here's some video footage, taken straight from my walkthrough series on youtube. Spoiler tagged since it IS the last boss.

Spoiler

[YOUTUBE]mOcA7-Zphmk&feature=related[/YOUTUBE]

Anyways, let's the somewhat controversial topic of game breaking now.

 

[Darkshot77]

Lets propperly define broken, In my opinion it is where you trhe player are doing something the programmers and designed you not to do, the following are examples of not broken:

In MVC3 Phoenix is broken because as dark phoenix she can teleport and throw her undodgeable fireballs.

Holy Paladins in world of warcraft are broken because they have very hight mana regeneration and powerful heals making them unkillable

These things are overpowered but not broken, they can be beat. Broken is something that cannot be beat, or doing things that were not possible. Dagger's example is key of a broken technique Killing a boss in one way that the developers had not planned for, and failed to error check.

The reason the Vanish/Doom/X-zone bug was so broken was:

Since the effects of the Vanish status were to make characters open to any magic attack, it overrides certain important checks, such as Instant Death immunity, which is usually dealt with differently from other status immunities. As a result, casting Doom on targets with the Clear status always defeats them, including powerful bosses...Banish, etc. prevents an enemy from using final attack scripts when defeated.

This became apparent when you could kill Doomgaze and it would not drop the Bauhamut magicite, or when you could kill Phunbaba with just Terra.

Besides this Final fantasy 6 had one more bug worth noting the Psycho Cyan bug:

The first bug allows Cyan to counter any physical attack dealt by any target if he is KOed and revived while in "Sky" status. The second bug occurs when Cyan is Imped while in "Sky" status. He counterattacks with a simple physical attack instead of Sky itself while Imped, and as such, "Sky" status never comes off. When these two bugs are combined, Cyan enters an infinite loop of attacking his opponents. Because he is imped, "Sky" status never comes off, and because he was revived after being KOed, he effectively attacks, and counter-attacks his own attack with another attack. The loop ends when all enemies on the screen are dead.

(Note: in the advance remake Cyan's scond sword tech Retort was changed to Sky)

Cyan would rampage and kill everything on the screen and could not be stopped, here is an example:

[YOUTUBE]vt9YmtT5PC0[/YOUTUBE]

All quotes were from the Final fantasy wiki.

 

[Harthan]

There was a good deal of voluntary game breaking in some of the more recent Fire Emblem games. In 7, you could abuse the arena (or even RNG abuse if you felt like it, though that was too much for me) to level up your characters very highly before they should have ever reached that point. I liked to use it as a way to catch up people who I wanted to use but were lagging behind, but one could easily abuse it to make all their characters max level, before promotion, at a time when most enemies were like half that level.

FE8 made it even easier to do this with the tower, where you could take your whole party in and endlessly clear a tower of monsters to keep leveling your characters, endlessly. I did a couple playthroughs where I maxed out every character, because I was that big of a junkie.

These things could break the game if you let them but they were wholly voluntary, and had some legitimate use. Not only were the arena and tower useful for catching up lagging characters, but they could be used to earn gold (the arena, anyway), which is a legitimate enough strategy. Although, of course, the great deal of gold you'd get might be called a game breaker. The point remains, however, that there were some legitimate tactics and they were all voluntary. Game breaking capable, shall we say.