"All or Nothing" strats in games

It's equipment , but the Pluto + Black Dog card combination in Circle of the Moon to turn into the most overpowered but fragile skeleton ever.
Also, the Death Ring in Ecclesia. Ridiculous stat buffs, but you get hit once and you're toast.

Let It Die. Just put on multiple Bull decals and let your health get low, and go wild.

Sadly, LID doesn't. The closest you get is fighting CPUs of other players' characters, and vice versa.

Glass cannon builds in Tales of MejEyal. Its not exactly one hit point, but You can definetly set it up where you one shot everything and get one shot by any real burst or stun combo.

MAH NIGGAH. Been playing Tales of Maj'Eyal for about a week straight now. Not sure if i like the Wyrmic or the Cursed more.

Play poker, go all in like all the other niggers.

In breath of fire 3 if you purposely Kill the main Character & keep him dead for the first third of the game you can dump him on a master at Level 1. Needless to say this completely breaks the game because when you're under certain masters that characters gets say, +4 MP at every level up, or plus +4 attack/hp at every level up in exchange for lowering another stat you weren't going to use.

Completely possible to steamroll the entire game doing this. If I recall you could keep Nina at Level 1 for a majority of the game too & then dump her on a broken master that maxed out her magic pool from level 1.

Sora (the shmup by Orange Juice devs) has a HEAT mechanic where dashing builds up the % which serves as a multiplier to damage you take if you get hit. Using dash, shot-cancelling, dashing through energy projectiles to dodge them all raise the % faster and faster. At 300% heat you basically die in one hit, but as long as you don't take that hit it doesn't matter. So instead of playing passively or carefully, you can just go insane and dash around like a bee on crack constantly weapon-cancelling to dump a barrage of attacks on the enemies as long as you're good enough to not get hit.

Acceleration of Sugiri X is that concept applied to a 1v1 fighting game. AoS2 release never fucking ever, release it already you fucks

FF6 did this with their eidolons
FF8 made the system not retarded

Tony Hawk games? If you spend your entire 2 mins doing a single combo you'll get massive points, but you'll lose everything if you screw up.

its not quite the same as paper mario
you don't get to have 5 hp and stack a ton of damage reduction and other stuff

More games need items like that, provided it's the type of game where you have the mobility to conceivably avoid all damage. Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty life bar. Or, you know, one hit.

I feel like SMT games do a really good job of this. In p5 a lot of the tougher boss fights I'd just build around getting one or two people to shit out huge damage every so often.

Ys Oath in Felghana and Origin have a boost mechanic that charges in seconds when you have 1 HP left. Whenever you trigger the boost you have brief invincible frames.

7th Dragon has a "corpse princess" party, where a dead princess buffs up 3 knights.

RefleX has a special ship that forces you to play the game with only one single hit point, but has crazy defensive and offensive skills.

Also seconding this. It has a weapon that deals triple damage when the player is above 200% heat, too.

Jagged Alliance 2 with the 1.13 mod lets you do some World War 2 LARPing right up until the endgame.

Thanks to all the added weapons you can kit out your team with 1930s-40s weapons and still be a force to be reckoned with the right tactics. Scoped bolt-actions and LMGs can keep some range advantage, while Tommy and PPSh guns can fuck up modern armors with sheer firepower.

Gets pretty intense once the enemy begins packing assault rifles, especially when shots start hitting extra hard since your mercs will only have steel helmets on for protection. However the low weight means they can dash around pretty fast…

This strat is completely viable until you hit the final city of Meduna where all the tanks are. I caved in a bit and pretended that my mortars were vintage models while the RPG-7 was a US bazooka. Theoretically though you could sneak through all the sectors to get to the final palace map, but I didn't have enough autism for that.

I know that KH 358/2 has the extreme ring that caps your HP to 1, but in turn offers a really high XP boost. By the time you get it, you likely wont need the XP boost, but the ability to constantly spam limit beaks can be fun, though I don't remeber trying the ring out on bosses.

Original Otogi had a sword that made it so that a single hit would kill you, but swinging the sword gave you i-frames your character would fade out of existence and the sequel changed that item to an accessory. Unfortunately, the games also had the Moonlight Sword which had a ranged one hit kill attack which was fairly hard for enemies to punish you if you knew what you were doing. It also was harder to get the risky sword/accessory than it was to get the moonlight sword, but less tedious.

Terrorblade in Dota 2

Get a shadow blade, sneak up on enemies while at low health, then Sunder them (swaps health percentages with target) and dagon them afterwards

Shotgun morphling to

Final Fantasy 4. The best armors are obtained mid game, dedicated to the Monk of the team. But keep these around on Cecil and see the berserked / hasted fury of 7k damage thrice in the time of a Bahamut casting before your team fills out their spell lists. Of course, your physical defense will plummet, but who care? End game is all about magic anyway

Dynasty Warriors 5 also had low max HP, red HP so you generate Musou naturally, mounting an elephant. A single press of O will make you invulnerable and attack everyone in front of you, but the last stomp's animation is long enough that your Musou refilled fully, allowing you to go be in constant Musou! But be a little slow on the O press and jumping soldiers will make mince meat of you in Chaos mode. Still can beat Lu Bu level 1 that way

Good old Infantry spam in Advance Wars

Ared you thinking of Paladin Reckoning bombing? Where you would stack the bonus hits to like 30+ and one shot someone? I don't remember warrior one shotting people outside of Enraged MS/White crits with sword mastery.

Clicking randomly in Deminer, it was hardcore but worth it at a certain point

Level 1 Critical Mode in Kingdom Hearts
The way the game mechanics work, you will deal obscene amounts of damage to most enemies but you will also die in no more than two weak hits or one medium hit.
Perfect for speedrunning and challenge runs.

Sengoku Basara 3 had an item that permanently kept your health in red in exchange for some boost, there was also another that boosted your attack and defense by a pretty significant amount when in red, and you could stack up to 5 of them at once.
I've never seen it mentioned but Oichi had long, chainable i-frames in that game, and with an i-frame boosting item she was completely invincible. And capable of attacking while evading.
Unfortunately you needed to lose a couple of the attack boosters for it to work since you also needed to add a guard break increasing item though, additionally it isn't 'all or nothing' anymore, it's just cheating.

Persian Douche in Age of Empires 2 is one of the most fucking cheeky cunt moves one can come up with.

Most of the times it fails miserably cause its all-on bet and even if they succeed at sniping down TC it doesn't guarantee win but at least ensures hilarious fights.

TWEWY has the Lapin Angelique Suicidal Special
twewy.wikia.com/wiki/SOS

I never even knew that was possible. Which armors are those?

This weapon from Ninja Gaiden Black can be tedious to obtain but it is a fucking monster when your health is low

That reminds me of pic related. In 100% OJ, Kae (the character whose this hyper belongs to) gets +1 ATK for each -1 DEF she has. This is already a high risk character, but you can get some survivavility out of a -1 DEF/+1 EVD card along with another implicit +1 ATK. Since Blazing stacks with itself and resets its duration, with the right cards and luck you could theorically reach any arbitrary ATK value while having effectively 0 DEF, making your character a walking instagib.
In practice what almost always happens is the following. You spend the entire game waiting for the planets to align, the perfect hand and the other players to bunch up. You activate your first blazing and maybe destroy one player. By the time you activate your second Blazing, everyone has skeddadled across the board so you might as well use your temporary sky high ATK against the boss.
The boss gets lucky, survives your attack, and oneshots you in return. Or a second player teleports behind u and attacks you first. Congrats, you have given half of your loot to this game's prospective winner, burnt the other half paying for the hypers, have no good cards and rolling for revive.
Kae is a hard waifu to have.

Enrage 25% damage increase + the deathwish (cooldown) another 20% damage increase.

Everyone here might hate me for it, but honestly ghosting in stealth games is this.
If you fuck up you're basically done for.

Any kind of minimalist run is the same, like knife only Resident Evil/Biohazard.

Any light armor crit build in action RPG's is this.

Jokers from Dungeon Travelers 2 are like Berserkers on crack. A regular Berserker just gets a curable defense debuff and a large attack boost, whereas a Joker's defense stat gets added to their attack stat, then set to zero for the duration of their berserk mode, so if they don't have a tank to cover them they'll die pretty much immediately before you can stack a few more buffs on them. Their primary damage dealing move can hit anywhere from zero to five times. They are so goddamn fun to play but they can die so fucking easily.

Yang's Green beret and the Black belt. They give Strength and Vitality increase both, which goes well on Cecil to reach a x15-16 multiplier in damage way sooner than supposed. Bonus point for getting a Giant gauntlet too. And by starting with Edge's Masamune for Haste, Power staff from Rosa for Berserk, Kain using a spider silk (in non FF4 Easy type) and Rydia doing whatever (I suggest Bio for the instant cast and continual damage piling), you can watch the show going until Black Hole is cast to remove your buffs. Or the end boss dying before he could even be starting to be dangerous, works too.

Soul Edge. It drains your hp and heals if you hit your enemy.

I always found it weird that Neku needs a high bravery stat to wear the female clothes.

I forgot about this game. I loved it, too, it just never generated much buzz except for when everyone's uteri exploded because of Squeenix's terrible announcement and when they made Shiki's 3D model.

DMC3 and 4.
Though they're also pretty strongly build around being risky and cool, you can still push it to the absolute limit if you want to be flashy, and it's even more rewarding.

IK's have extremely limited uses most times and if you whiff an IK you're basically out of the round without access to meter. The startup animation on them is also huge unless you meet three different conditions which will shorten the startup and make them comboable (opponent's hp bar is shining [20% hp], you have minimum 50% tension, this is the last round, etc.)

...

Cryptark lets you customize your ship at the beginning of every level, up to and including making your maximum health 1.

There's actually incentives to do this in-game: occasionally missions have secondary objectives, like "have a ship under this budget" or "have no more than three health", so the game actually encourages you to play this way sometimes.
Trying to defend yourself with only your budget forcefield (which only covers the front half of your ship) and fighting off hordes of enemies with with only one HP is as exhilarating as it is frustrating.