Game Breaker/Shoot'Em Up

See that boss on the right? That laser will fry him in less than four seconds.

Game Breakers in shoot-'em-ups.

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• Einhander has the Flash Weapon Pod, which shoots out a deadly pink laser that hurts A LOT but is very rare to find and has very little ammunition. Combine that with the Secret Character Astraea Mk II, who starts out each life with 9999 ammunition for each weapon, give it two Flash pods as its starting weapons, and you'll tear up pretty much everything in the game.
• Fire Shark has the flamethrower weapon. At maximum level, it fires out SIX streams of deadly fire in a spread (initially). The 4 side flames then proceed to sweep the sides AND back of the player, decimating most mooks they touch via massive damage. Not only that, it's the only weapon to hit behind the player character (there WILL be enemies coming from behind at times). Small wonder why the game is called FIRE Shark...
• The hidden Slave fighter in Raiden Fighters. It fires shots that spread out in front of it, which fire very fast and are capable of doing large amounts of damage, particularly at point blank. Moreover, it has a small hitbox, and if you choose the Judge Spear variation of the Slave, you not only can move absurdly fast, but you also have the Judge Spear's super-powerful bomb. On the Raiden Fighters Aces compilation, the Slave dominates every single online leaderboard, save for ship-specific leaderboards.
  • Some consider the Judge Spear itself to be a Game Breaker. Fully power it up and give it a Slave formation that makes up for its lack of defensive spread, and you can easily tear through large enemies (and earn QUICK SHOT! bonuses that most other ships would find impossible to earn) and bring down bosses in very little time.
• Justified Game Breaker of sorts: The Boundary Team in Touhou: Imperishable Night is by and far the easiest of the teams to beat the game with, with their homing attacks, smaller hitbox, and extremely long deathbomb timer (which was already quite long for a Touhou game to begin with). The characters that make up the team? The main character of the series, and the second Bonus Level of Hell's boss from the previous game that can control boundaries (Read: Able to manipulate damn near anything she pleases, be it Dream and Reality, Motion and Stillness, Life and Death, or pretty much anything that could be conceived of as having a boundary whether or not it makes sense in real life.), is older than Gensokyo itself, and has a very capable shikigami to help with her attacks. Yes, the plot power there is as great as implied.
  • Also from Imperishable Night is the "Malice Cannon" glitch. When using the Magic Team, pressing the Shift button on and off every half second or so has the effect of both Marisa and Alice's shots staying on screen at the same time, resulting in the "Malice Cannon," which inflicts the most amount of damage on the opposition in the entire game. Despite this, the Magic Team is still the weakest team (or at least the hardest to use) due to being completely unable to attack anything that isn't directly in front.
  • Perfect Cherry Blossom brings in Sakuya as a playable character, and she is, by and large, one of the easier characters to clear the game with; her normal shot covers the screen, while her focused shot locks in on enemies, and her bombs (depending on the shot type) have some of the longer invincibility times in the game. And she gets four per life, compared to Reimu's three and Marisa's paltry two.
    • There's an inversion because of the bombs, though; there are bosses on the extra stages who get invincibility frames during their Spell Cards as soon as you bomb. Declaring bombs actually stalls the card, making it harder than it should be, so it's actually better to reserve the bomb stock to activate your border of life and death counter. As game breaker as Sakuya can be in the normal game, it's harder to beat the extra stages with her than with Reimu, whose shots home at sharper angles, has a smaller hitbox and gets a longer time frame to activate her counter-death move.
  • Phantasmagoria of Flower View: Medicine Melancholy's "Sweet Poison" card is an immovable poison cloud that can slow down opponents; when pitted against the computer, the AI is programmed to duck around enemy shots, so throwing out several of these shots in their path will result in some... interesting situations.
    • Shikieiki Yamaxanadu's boss summon Spell Card also has some odd effects on the AI. The AI appears to not think ahead more than a split-second, while Shikieiki's summoned boss image regularly shoots a wide laser aimed directly at the opponent, leaving them about a second to get out of the way. Clearly, this is longer than the amount of time the AI tries to think ahead, since it will very often fail to move out of the way.
    • Similarly, Aya Shameimaru's meteors make the AI look like an idiot, since by the time the meteor enters the area the computer can "see", it's usually too late for it to dodge. See here for an example of this in action, and note that this is done on Lunatic difficulty, in which the AI can sometimes last over ten minutes against normal characters. Helping Aya's case even more is that this game's story mode lacks Mirror Matches, and Aya is That One Boss.
  • The 'Marisa Bugged/Broken' glitch from Mountain of Faith. Put simply, due to a mishap in the game programming Marisa B does absurd damage firing unfocused between 3 and 4 power. By absurd damage, I mean killing bosses before their bullets even approach Marisa. If you can get through the stages with a decent amount of power this makes clearing the game an absolute joke. The reason this is going here is that if it's an accidental glitch you would expect a patch - the game's been out for over a year three years now, and no fix.
    • Mountain of Faith in general is broken by its bomb system. Because your bombs are tied to your power level, and because there is an extra level of power (5.00 power is functionally the same thing as 4.00 power, except that power items stop appearing, making it basically a free bomb), as long as you never hit max there will be more than enough power items to make it through virtually anything. The bombs are very large, very powerful, and grant both autocollection and invincibility throughout without any real downsides besides the power drop. To prove the point, there is an infamous replay in which the player bombs every attack and still beats the game without continues.
• Touhou fangames aren't immune to this either. Marine Benefit gives us the MarisaB shottype, which fires piercing lasers, has high power, and has the Master Spark bomb. This has appeared in canon Touhou games while being considered a generally bad shottype, but in Marine Benefit the game is practically made for it, with a ton of fairies that are nigh-unkillable to most other shottypes because they stay behind other fairies - and killing them gives the player H items, which both lower the point of collection and give the player more bombs to use, and playing as any Marisa shottype increases the value of H items. Since Marine Benefit (unlike canon Touhou games) doesn't have a Cap on the number of bombs you can stock, it is quite possible to get enough bombs that they literally go off the screen...by the stage 3 boss, thus allowing the player to turn the bosses into a joke just by spamming Master Spark. It doesn't hurt that "high power" here is defined as "second highest in the game" (when the highest falls firmly under Awesome but Impractical and is the difference is barely noticeable). And just in case this wasn't broken enough, all of the final boss' spellcards revolve around summoning the same mooks that MarisaB is killing nigh-instantly.
  • Arguably even worse is ReimuA, who has the distinction of being the only shot type that both has a bomb that clears only a specific area of the screen, and can move away from where the bomb is centered. While this sounds like it'd be more of a hindrance than a help, one has to bear in mind that the game has a system where the player is rewarded with lives for grazing a certain number of bullets. This makes this bomb a godsend; every time the player bombs, rushing up to the boss and grazing everything they shoot during the invincibility period can give the player a ridiculous amount of resources. For some idea of just how bad this can get, see here, where a player ends an attack with double the resources they came in with...despite dying six times, and making multiple mistakes.
• Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War has a mild version of this in the Su-37 Terminator, which has a huge standard missile load, can equip the second-best missiles and best bomb in the game, and can turn on a freaking dime. There's little reason to fly anything else once you can afford it. The Eurofighter Typhoon is available even earlier in Mission 3 but only on the Mercenary Ace path (which is supposed to be harder than the Soldier or Knight paths), and it doesn't carry the Fuel Air Explosive (FAE) Bomb... which allows one to finish the Hresvelgr in three hits and Avalon (one of the infamous tunnel missions) in a single fly-through. Part of the issue is that the Terminator's available so early -- complete Mission 6 on any path, any difficulty -- whereas comparable or better planes can only be purchased after beating the game at least once, or have their requirements lowered if you have saves from the other two PS2 Ace Combat games on your memory card. Zero has a much less mild version of this in the ADFX-02 Morgan, which has a weapon that can finish some entire missions with a single shot. (Then again, it is the final boss' plane, and he's already demonstrated its nastiness on you...)
  • In Ace Combat games, the only actual restriction on the "superfighters" -- the X-02 Wyvern (4, 5, Zero), the ADF-01 Falken (5, Zero), the ADFX-02 Morgan (Zero), and the CFA-44 Nosferatu (6) -- is price to buy and unlock method; there are comparatively powerful late-game planes that are balanced in both ways, but the Su-37 is an exception.
  • Ace Combat 04 definitely had Quick-maneuver Air-to-Air Missiles (QAAMs), which were true "fire and forget" guaranteed air-to-air kills. While these are toned down in subsequent games, in 6 they're usually considered a "n00b" weapon that online can only be best countered by... yep, bringing your own.
  • The final mission of The Unsung War is against eight of the toughest enemies in the game. It is intended to last at least thirty seconds for even the best players. However, a trick allows one to use a plane such as the Raptor, or any plane that uses the XLAA, and one shot kill four of them, then preform a loop one shot the survivors. The game literally breaks if you do it right, as since you are not meant to beat them that fast the speech cannot keep up with the speed of the battle, so you are basically waiting for up to a minute after the battle is over.
    • On the plus side, after the battle your wingmen have quite a few thoughts to share before attacking the SOLG. Break the game and you can easily listen to all of it rather than be interrupted by the attack if you went the long\hard way before.
  • In Ace Combat's half brother HAWX the situation is arguably worse it's version of the QAAM the "All Aspect Missile" is rightly regarded as completely broken. It's actually even better then the AC4 QAAM as it can lock on anywhere once in range (even directly behind you!) and has a 100% hit rate baring the use of flares of which you have a set and very limited supply (Way fewer then he has missiles), but even this is normally useless since the missile is very fast and hits in a second at most. Who in god's name thought this was balanced for MP is beyond me, but preemptive usage of them in battle is cause for ridicule and shame and an honor code of "only use them if fired at you first" is very common.
• Ace Combat 02's Infinity+1 Sword, the XFA-27, could launch four missiles in one go. While mild compared to pretty much every other one of the AC 'Breakers, it did make ground attack much quicker.
• Tyrian has the Plasma Storm, a "sidekick" weapon that has limited ammo (although it regenerates slowly) but does massive damage and has a very fast fire rate - you can empty it's ten shots in about a second, which will easily wipe out anything that's not invulnerable. Oh, and it's available before the first level. You can only afford one of two, but that's enough. It was toned down slightly in Tyrian 2000, but still retains most of its original awesomeness.
  • Also, the Zica Flamethrower, a "sidekick" that fires a stream of flame that passes through enemies, allows one to "affect" an enemy that has a collision box, and then ram their ship into said enemy and One-Hit Kill them. This also includes almost any boss that is not invulnerable at the time. (This Game Breaker applies to any weapon with a penetration effect.)
  • Not a weapon-type Game Breaker, but something of note is that during Episode I, in Savara V, during the boss fight, you can stay in a spot away from the boss and intercept its shots for money. The best part? The bosses never have a time limit, so you can do this for as long as you like for bottomless amounts of money.
• The Spread Gun in Contra. Since it fires five shots at a time, you can destroy quite a few bosses with ease just by firing point-blank. And most other enemies only need one shot anyway. If you're a component platform player, the jig is up once you have this weapon.
  • The Fire Gun in Contra III constantly does high damage to anything in the fire. Most bosses die in seconds if you aim it at their weak spots.
  • The upgraded version of the Machine Gun in Super Contra (the arcade version, not the NES game Super C) has a ridiculously fast firing rate allows you to wipe out most bosses in a matter of seconds
  • Browny in Hard Corps. He is very small, is the only character with a double jump and his Super-Electromagnetic Yo-Yo weapon can destroy bosses very quickly. He has the worst slide but that's a very minor drawback compared to his other advantages.
    • Brad Fang is also very overpowered. His A-type weapon, the Beast Shot, has a wider range than the other characters' A-type weapons, and his Explosive Punch and Psycho Blaster can wipe out bosses in seconds. His only drawback is that his tall stature makes his an easier target than the other characters, and the latter two weapons can only be fired horizontally.
  • Weapon Set F in Neo Contra has the GV Laser (from Gradius V nonetheless, hence the name), which fires a constant laser beam with a ridiculously long range. Its the best weapon to use if you want an easy S-rank in no time.
    • The troper writing this would like to point out weapon set D. The main weapon is a Lightning Gun that can One-Hit Kill many enemies, the secondary is a hard hitting bazooka that does massive damage against bosses and stationary objects, and the lock-on weapon is the Heaven's Laser, which is absurdly strong, never misses, and reloads stupidly fast, making things that need a lock-on utter push-overs. Oh, and it's unlocked early on at Stage 5, compared to Weapon Set F's Stage 7 requirement.
• Gunstar Heroes has one of two game-breakers depending on your movement choice at the beginning of the game. If you chose "free shot" (i.e., move while firing), your best option is the Lightning/Chaser combo, which fires a large homing laser that stays onscreen and seeks out any targets as long as you hold the fire button. It makes many situations much easier, in that you can focus entirely on dodging enemy attacks while letting it do its thing. It's kinda stupid, though, in that it's nigh-impossible to force the weapon to attack a particular target, and it may just end up trying to destroy something that's indestructible; its damage output is also rather lacking. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you chose "fixed shot" controls (i.e., holding the fire button makes your character unable to run, which has the side-effect of aiming diagonally much easier), use Lightning/Fire instead. It's essentially a short-range beam of energy that's extremely powerful and can even destroy most enemy bullets. Which one ends up breaking your game largely depends on your playing style, but most vets will conclude that Lightning/Fire is superior despite its terrible range that often puts the player right in the face of danger (contending, of course, that the high damage and bullet-killing properties made close-range encounters end in a snap).
• In Thunder Force VI, every ship is broken in some way. The starting ship, the Phoenix, starts with all of its weapons and both Craws, and never loses them on dying like ships from past games. The Rynex-R, unlocked upon completing the game once, doesn't have this luxury, but more than makes up for it with the incredibly broken Twin Shot Over Weapon, pictured above. The caption is not hyperbole; a boss that takes 30-60 seconds to defeat can easily go down in under 10 seconds. It also has the Free Way weapon, which will target and slam an enemy that comes within proximity of your ship, making it idea for crowded parts of the game. Finally, the Syrinx, the last unlockable ship, is similar to the Phoenix, but with a new Wave Shot that, instead of firing a three-way spread of crescent wave bursts, fires a microwave-style laser that incinerates everything in its path and makes waves of "popcorn" enemies all but trivial.
  • Thunder Force III / Thunder Force AC / Thunder Spirits: Grab a Saber powerup. Use it on a boss. Instant win.
  • Thunder Force V: Grab a Free Range powerup. Get up close to a boss and spam its Over Weapon. Instant win and x16 point multiplier.
    • In the case of Thunder Force V, for owners of the Playstation version, they had access to the RVR-01HiS via a secret method. This version of the RVR-01 was significantly faster and boasted slightly improved firepower. The only downside is reduced CRAW regeneration, but when they appear as random item drops, who needs to worry about CRAW recharge rate?
• R-Type Final has the Needle Force, which comes with the otherwise unspectacular Pod ships. It's not especially powerful when docked, but once it's loose a fully-powered Needle Force will fire a spray of bullets in all 32 directions possible for bullets to travel in a spinning pattern, one bullet per game tick. No other Force fires even close to this fast and no other force is capable of filling the screen so effectively with bullets. Park it next to a boss's Weak Point and said boss will go down in very little time. The space armada in level 5? No problem - just launch the Force into each ship as it arrives and wait for it to do its magic. They will hardly be able to get a single shot off before they are destroyed, one after the other.
  • Also the Mega Wave Cannon, the little brother of the intentionally broke Giga Wave Cannon. Why? Due to the way things work, the Mega is just as good at killing everything as the Giga regardless of how many loops. Note: this is a Wave Cannon that basically one shots anything that's not explicitly invincible AND goes through walls and obstacles.
• The Lock-on Laser in Raiden II. They removed it in Raiden III, but restored it by popular demand in Raiden IV.
  • The Lock-on Laser is actually the weakest weapon in the game, most players go with the Spread Shot or the laser.
• Falchion Beta in Gradius Gaiden, compared to the other three ships Lord British, Vic Viper, and Jade Knight. For its Double, Falchion Beta has Auto-Aim - Which auto-tracks and destroys any enemies above it. Auto-Aim renders any stage a cakewalk, even in higher loops. Its Laser, Gravity Bullet, causes such a high amount of concentrated damage that bosses die in mere seconds. Its missile weapon, Rolling Missile, will also pierce targets forward and back from where it drops.
• In Warning Forever, the enemy ship's weapon "Smash" is one of these. The turrets have a huge fire arc, are usually located in banks on the front and rear, and eject an enormous, slow-moving shotgun blast of large purple projectiles that don't all move at the same rate, shutting down large areas of the screen every time they fire.
• The Thunder Claw and Binchou Laser in Twin Cobra II. The red and blue weapons needs ungodly Button Mashing to make them not piss-weak, whereas the Thunder Claw has an huge spread and doesn't need rapid fire to be powerful. The Binchou Laser doesn't need Button Mashing either and it kill things really fast.
• The auto-bomb feature, which substitutes a life lost for a bomb fired (if any are left) if you get hit. Games that implement this become much easier, as your bombs are essentially extra lives and you don't need to concern yourself with deciding in a sticky situation whether to use up a bomb. Take Mushihime-sama Futari's Novice mode, which has auto-bomb, for instance. You start with 3 lives and 3 bombs, and every time you die you reset to 3 bombs. 3 lives * 3 automatically-fired bombs = what is essentially 9 lives, which you can get 1 more of by getting a bomb and 3 more of by getting a 1-Up. Do Don Pachi Dai-Fukkatsu Ver. 1.5 also has (non-disableable) auto-bomb, which contributes to Dai-Fukkatsu being regarded as the easiest DonPachi game to complete one loop of.
  • Some games, however, are smart about this. Ketsui Death Label has auto-bomb, but when it is activated, you lose all of your bombs.
• The X-Wing series is fond of these:
  • X-Wing gave us the B-wing.
  • TIE Fighter gave us the TIE Defender and Missile Boat.
  • X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter gave us the rule that you could use any Rebel craft on any Rebel mission and any Imperial craft on any Imperial mission. And you could use the TIE Defender, B-wing, TIE Avenger (called TIE Advanced for some reason), and Assault Gunboat. Yeah.
    • Freighters like the YT-1300 have turrets, completely negating the maneuverability advantage of unshielded Imperial craft. A pair of these can wipe out dozens of Tie Fighters in a single battle.
• Death Smiles Mega Black Label has Sakura. All the other characters in the game have a single familiar, which fires alongside them and absorbs suicide bullets. Sakura has two familiars, grouped together closely enough that the space between them registers as the hitbox for absorbing suicide bullets. This makes dealing with suicide bullets much easier as Sakura effectively has a single giant familiar.
• Do Don Pachi DaiFukkatsu has Strong Style, which is essentially a beefed up version of Bomb Style. Compared to Strong Style, Bomb Style is utterly useless. Hence why in DaiFukkatsu BLACK LABEL, selecting Strong Style will sharply increase enemy difficulty, essentially turning Strong Style into the rough equivalent of Mushihime-sama's Ultra Mode.
• Strikers 1945 II brings the world the F5-U Flying Pancake and the Hayate. The F5-U isn't strong but the main gun spreads a little, has homing lasers, and it's quick enough to evade many attacks in the game. Also, its charge shot consists of a laser that can kill many enemies in little to no time. The Hayate isn't as fast, but compensates for its lethality via attack drones that home in and whittle enemies down to nothing.
  • Then there's the P-55 Ascender, unlocked via cheat code. Again, not the fastest, but compensats for it with its decent strength and ludicrous special attack. It homes in on enemies, charges quickly and can hold the maximum nine specials--when other planes have at the most five specials.
• Time Crisis: Crisis Zone has the Laser Rifle. While exclusive to the console port, it is the most broken weapon in the game. Instantaneous hit rate, obscene rate of fire, very damaging, and it takes no effort to kill anything. The only issue is that it has to be unlocked, but it is well worth it. The weapon in question can be seen here.
• In the mobile game Gun Bros. by Glu, there is the obscenely powerful heavy gun called the Kraken. When shot, it shoots loads of homing missiles. As you shoot, the gun appears to quickly overheat. All is lost until... wait... it shoots a gigantic laser beam that vaporizes anything it touches. The gun does not stop firing missiles even WHILE firing the laser. However, there is a price to pay. Quite literally. Originally when the gun was released it was 1400 War Bucks (currency you spend real cash on). The maximum package currently offered is 710 War Bucks for $99.99. Which means this thing was initially a little over $200. If you thought that was bad, they've updated it to cost a staggering 3499 War Bucks. Do the math... yeah. Holy shit indeed.