Is there anything more enjoyable than casually strolling through a game without any challenge because you've over-levelled and over-equipped your character from an early stage?

Currently playing Final Fantasy 12 Zodiac Age and the Trial Mode is so broken for obtaining OP equipment really early. On top of that there's a high level undead that you can one-hit KO with Phoenix Downs and chain to easily level up to around level 30 really early on.

So by the time you're about 1 hour into the storyline you can be one-hit killing boss fights.

What games have you played where you can get completely OP super early?

 

Morrowind is always a good laugh. You can speedrun it in about 3 minutes through alchemy and spell exploits.

 

It's not super early, I guess, but in Skyrim I did the rest pot->enchant pot->alchemy enchantment loop and got to be pretty much untouchable. The main hurdle is actually getting the alchemy enchantment and the potion ingredients, but there's a quest for the enchantment and you can just duplicate the ingredients if you have a follower.

 

Breath of the Wild - with DLC Majora's Mask you can just run around without enemies taking an interest in you. Not quite the same as cheesing through fights with the infinity+1 sword, but given how exploration heavy the gameplay is, I'd call this the real endgame experience.

 

Speaking of 12, I remember when I first played it there was a thing I did where I set the commands in a certain way and just afk levelled top max, lol.

8 had a similarly breakable system where you could get the Lionheart and other insane weapons reeeeealy early with triple triad.

 

FF12 really is a good mention. You can use phoenix downs to chain Dustia to get some serious early game levels. You can steal some mid game weapons super early, like a wind dagger from an early mark, and farm katanas from werewolves right in Giza plains. You could go grab the Zodiac Spear like a third through the game. The remaster completely broke the game with trial mode, allowing you to infinitely steal endgame equipment an hour into the game, and letting you farm LP dozens of times faster than intended.

The latest TES games and BotW have already been mentioned, and for good reason. In BotW, you could effortlessly cook food that gave you max temporary hearts super early, and be practically immortal. Pretty much all the TES games had good equipment lying around that you could get to early, though it was mid/late game crafting that completely broke those games.

The first game I 'broke' was FF9. I farmed Grand Dragon and got level 60ish during disc 1. I also farmed those frogs and got Quina's frog drop to do massive damage during disc one, getting his ultimate weapon early disc 2 too.

I never got FF8's ultimate weapons through the card game, but I did get the second best weapons through the card game... probably on disc 1. Close enough.

I think you can craft endgame gear in most Star Oceans like 1/3 to 1/2 through the game. Any jrpg with a mystery crafting system has a 50% chance to be completely broken.

 

Pretty much any game that has uniquely powerful abilities or equipment technically available early, with stat requirements able to be met by hyper-specializing, but not otherwise normally obtained until much later with more balanced play.
Honorable mention to games that have powerful, but ludicrously expensive (relative to the point in the game), end-game equipment show up as a teaser in the shops of one of the early locations.

 

I keep thinking of the Serious Sam games as falling in this category. You were OP by default, and scything through enemies was what you did.

 

Dark Souls 1 has a bunch of different weapons you can get early to put the game into easy mode. Any black knight weapon, drake sword, astora straight sword, zweihander. On top of that there is a soul farm you can get to fairly early (need 20k for the key), and funnily enough theres a different soul farm you can do to farm the 20k. None of is really necessary but it can be fun just steamrolling everything

 

Cyberpunk gets pretty close, as you can get the legendary subdermal armor mod for 14k before you've even talked to Dex, and if you're brave enough you can find free legendary Mantis Blades near a cyberpsycho encounter in corpo plaza.

 

The obvious answer to this one is the game Prototype, where you start as an unkillable monstrosity of rage and violence and it only goes up from there.

 

I've been playing Yakuza 0 recently, a game where you spend money you get from fights to upgrade yourself. There is a 7 foot tall Japanese man called Mr. Shakedown who randomly shows up to mug you and take all your money. He is meant to be basically unbeatable until the midgame, but can be trounced with a rare weapon you can randomly find. Farming him with this weapon means you can be fully upgraded within the first chapter of the game. There is also a perk you can get that gives you 50% more money for beating him, meaning you can lose to him once, then beat him to rack up money even faster.

 

Life. Just take the Born Rich starting perk.

 

Most From Software games

For all the legendary difficulty of those games, you can break them within the first hour.

In the OG Dark Souls alone, you have the Zweihander sitting in the graveyard right next door to Firelink Shrine, the Gravelord Sword down in the Catacombs, and the Uchigatana in the Undead Burg. If you take the Master Key and visit some areas earlier than usual, you can get stuff like the Great Club and Falchion from Blighttown. Then there's the Grass Crest Shield and the Dark Knight Halberd from the Darkroot Garden. If you want to take a more magical route, you can get the Crown of Dusk and Oolacile Ivory Catalyst in the Garden or just dump all of your souls into the Pyro glove to power up your spells and gain access to top-tier pyromancy spells on top of that. Combustion/Great Combustion solves most of your problems. Regardless of which weapon or style you choose, you can pretty easily pick up enough soul items in the early going to beef up your stats.

The trend holds true with the Mace and/or Rapier trivializing Dark Souls II as soon as you talk to the blacksmith or the Hunter's Axe letting you spin to win as soon as you reach the Hunter's Dream. Dark Souls III is notorious for how you can break the game by killing the Dancer of the Boreal Valley as early as possible and getting access to awesome weapons like the Sunlight Straight Sword and endgame upgrade materials. The Royalty starting class in Demon's Souls is legendary for how overpowered it is.

Granted, about half of these shortcuts rely on the person having played through the game at least once to know the tricks or looking up tutorials online (the Dancer in particular being a bridge too far for most newbies), but stuff like the Hunter's Axe and Royalty can turn you into a wrecking ball almost instantly.

Once you know the tricks, though, you can't ever look back. I do the tree jump every time I start up a new character in Dark Souls III, and I always go with the Master Key as my gift in the OG Dark Souls even if it's only to pick up the Grass Crest Shield and some Fire Keeper Souls to power up my Estus Flasks.

 

I found Prototype to be an interesting one because you start out pretty damn powerful but your enemies learn from your skills and develop countermeasures that make things more difficult despite the new abilities you gain. Until you get the whip hand and can launch yourself at helicopters.

 

Pokemon Yellow.

Go west of Viridian City and catch a Nidoran. Double Kick will be super-effective and shatter Brock's brittle rock-types, you'll probably hit level 16 and evolve into Nidorino in Mt Moon where you'll find a Moon Stone, then Nidoking's here to make the world your bitch.

 

I don't know whether it's been changed in the Legendary version, but in Mass Effect 3, you can in theory play the From Ashes DLC as the third mission, maybe an hour, an hour and a half into the game, which will automatically give you the particle rifle weapon - a rifle that does more damage the longer you fire it, and also has infinite ammo. Useful in and of itself, but because the game lowers your power cooldown the fewer weapons you're carrying, it also means you can ditch all your other weapons and spam out biotic and tech powers much more often. Not quite god mode, but still powerful.

 

Re: the particle rifle, it doesn't ramp up dmg infinitely (there's an initial wind-up and in a few seconds the rifle gets to its maximum dps) and it only has infinite ammo lore-wise, because you can overheat it (think the system from ME1) and cooling down takes longer than any reload animation.

In ME1, soldiers investing in Fitness can get Immunity, which at the master level has a 20s duration and 30s cooldown, so you can keep it up most of the time and just laugh at most dmg enemies can throw at you. It makes for boring play, but you can roll through Insanity on muscle memory alone.

Hugely nerfed in the Legendary Edition, though.

 

The Cerberus Harrier is a great weapon as well. It‘s based on the Mattock and expensive to procure (150000 Credits), but easily upgradeable through a modest financial investment and rips through anything that moves. With the right mods you can mow down multiple shielded enemies in one clip.

 

Related, but less 'break the game' and more 'use your resources fully' is geodude in the Johto games. Catch it on Route 46, get it Rock Throw for the first two Gyms (both catastrophically weak to Rock), Rock-type diminishes the impact of that fucking miltank, and in the originals (GSC) you even have a decent advantage on Morty because all his Pokémon are weak to Magnitude and you should get it to evolve by then. That's the first four Gyms made trivial and a lot of the trainers as well.

Also in the same category: Lysithea with the item from Lorenz's Paralogue in Fire Emblem Three Houses. The item gives +1 range on all magic spells, which makes her immune from any retaliation. Lysithea herself is an archetypical glass cannon who gets a spell that is 'Effective' (triple damage) against Cavalry units. This allows her to outright oneshot an antagonist who shows up on multiple occasions in many of the storylines and who will, in fact, gleefully murder anyone else. (Especially in the earlier chapters you encounter them.)

Alternately for FE:3H - Play Blue Lions and put some effort into Dimitri. It'll pay off in the latter half of the game. Not really OP-very-fast, though.

Lastly, the old Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor game (RPG) gives you the option to get a Wand of Fireballs (30 use cast Fireball) in the starting zone. This will murder any group of enemies for the next zone as long as you use it sparingly and wisely. (Fireball has friendly fire.) There is a theoretical downside in that you're supposed to get it in exchange for a favour way down the line, buuuut.... You can kite enemies into town to kill the NPC that has it, and it'll show up as loot.

Alternately, you can try and kill a Red Dragon in said starting zone. Takes a lot of kiting, but it will drop a high level item, which can be a regular high level weapon (which will still allow you do be very efficient on the murdering) to outright stuff that's wearable until endgame.