Armor Is Useless / Anime & Manga

• A (justified) version of this trope is why Aldnoah.Zero's protagonist Inaho refuses to upgrade from his KG-6 Sleipnir, a lightly-armored training Kataphrakt, to the military's standard-issue KG-7 Areion. Seeing as most Martian Kataphrakts have insanely powerful weaponry that can easily One-Hit Kill even an Areion, the extra armor would be useless, and the Sleipnir has the advantage of greater speed and maneuverability.
• Von Jobina in Bastard!! (1988), full stop. He's always clad in armor from head to toe but, as the series' resident Butt-Monkey, that doesn't stop him from getting his ass kicked around.
• Berserk:
  • The series gives us a Zig-Zagged version of this trope. In general, armor is a lot less protective against all weapons than it would be in reality, but it's still better than nothing and can sometimes save the life of the person wearing it, provided that their armor's good enough and they're somehow important to the plot. A plot-important character is more likely to have their armor deflect or at least reduce the damage of a blow than any Mook or Red Shirt soldiers, who tend to get shot or stabbed right through their armor even if they're wearing heavy full plate. In those cases projectiles such as arrows, bolts, and thrown weapons often deeply penetrate plate armor and helmets, even if they are fired from a relatively weak weapon or over a long range. On the other hand, characters are often shown making an effort to target the armor's weak points such as the eye slits and armpits. The characters who can reliably defeat armor outright tend to be unusually or even superhumanly strong, such as Guts and some of the Giant Mooks he faces. The fact that enemies always gawk at Guts' Dragon Slayer and ability to cut fully armored men in half shows that this is rare in-universe and beyond the abilities of most. Episode 330 of the manga shows that without being able to use his full strength or his giant sword, Guts has to use some unorthodox techniques to defeat a noble's son wearing top quality full plate armor, as he can't simply crack it open like usual. Apostles and other monsters are exempt from all of these rules, since they tend to be huge or strong enough to make treating armor like tissue paper justified.
  • Guts himself acknowledges his need for armor even though he's Made of Iron, crediting Godo's armor with protecting him against the goat-cult leader and remarking while fighting Grunbeld that without armor he doesn't have a chance against such a strong opponent. The Berserker armor that he acquires later not only unleashes his offensive power, but is also tough enough to protect him from the jaws of an Apostle.
• Possibly the only thing in all of Bleach to wear armor is the giant summoned by Sajin Komamura's Bankai. However, it seems to wear normal samurai armor in a world where other characters can, say, cut through all the buildings in a half-mile radius just by unsheathing their sword. The fact that Komamura takes any damage the giant does makes the worf notoriously strong with this one.
  • Hardly Worfed. The only person able to damage him through the Bankai was Tousen, another captain who had become a Hollow-Shinigami Hybrid, and that put a graze on his arm.
  • Exaggerated in the Vandenreich arc, where Komamura's Deadly Upgrade causes his Bankai to shed its armor... and makes it completely indestructible.
• In Claymore you can see it more often. Each of the warriors wears armor. And while the armor is still quite effective against simple yoma, the Awakened Beings can shred it easily.
• In Dawn of the Seeker, Cassandra is able to punch out foes who are wearing plate mail and helmets with her bare hands. There are a few points where armor is shown deflecting a blow, but for the most part the trope is played completely straight.
• Averted in DNA², at least in the manga version: Karin wears armor almost all the time, and while it gets destroyed a few times it explicitly saves her life against Ryuji, and the undersuit is resistant enough to cutting that, even tattered, it took a while for some would-be rapists to cut it (long enough for Junta to pull a Big Damn Heroes) and blunted the knife in the process. The only time it's useless is when Mori shows up, and that was because he came with a fluid made specifically to dissolve it.
• Dragon Ball: Everybody who wears armor either gets rid of it or dies. Or as often as not, both. However, this isn't due as much to the armor itself (which is used quite often by even the Main Characters) as the fact that they eventually get to the point that their superpowers outstrip their armor's ability to protect. It's also explained in the original series, as most characters wore armor or clothing that was weighted for training purposes, and after removing it they become much faster. One notable aversion is after Goku's first battle with Vegeta in the Saiyan Saga of Dragon Ball Z. When Vegeta recovers from his injuries, the doctor reveals that the only reason he's still alive is because his armor protected him from being crushed by Gohan.
  • The reason Vegeta isn't wearing armor through the Buu saga is because it's against the rules of the World's Martial Arts Tournament. He's back to wearing armor in the more recent works set between Kid Buu's defeat and DBZ's Distant Finale.
• The heavily kevlar-armoured soldiers in Elfen Lied die in scores when battling naked teenage girls — then again, said teenage girls have immense Psychic Powers that render them Immune to Bullets and lets them pull people's limbs off with their mind.
• Fairy Tail: Despite armor-equipping being her primary magic, Erza later in the series seems to do much better the less armor she equips, as her stronger opponents tend to break through them very easily. Erza has an... interesting relationship with this trope. While she tends to play it straight in the later parts of the series, it's also subverted in that while her armor tends to be pretty useless as armor, it's often tremendously useful as a stat buff or for the moves unique to a given armor set, some of which are very much not useless defensively (e.g. nullifying a several-story-building-sized magic cannon shot down to nothing with the Adamantine Armor).
• Fate/Zero: Berserker AKA Sir Lancelot supposedly wears armor of the highest quality, but his insanely high stats, and a Noble Phantasm that allows him to wield anything like he was born to do so (including an F15 jet fighter, a Gatling gun, and a steel pole), make it almost meaningless, as he is only hit once throughout the entire series (Excluding when Rider ran him over with his A+ Rank Noble Phantasm chariot, which he survived seemingly without any more damage than a few bruises). His armor is technically extremely powerful and very useful, but he doesn't even need it because he's so damned good.
  • During her initial battle with Lancer, Saber is cut by one of his spears clean through her armor. The spear has an Anti-Magic ability, and her armor is magical in nature, so it simply passed through the armor as if it wasn't even there. Believing this trope to be in effect, Saber discards the armor because it would otherwise only slow her down...which turns out to be a poor decision, as the armor would have blocked Lancer's second spear, which creates injuries that cannot be healed.
• In Fist of the North Star, armor means nothing against Kenshiro. To be fair, Kenshiro is strong enough to defeat a tank:
  • One enemy challenged him while wearing a suit of plate armor. Kenshiro disposed of him just like he would dispose of any unarmored enemy.
  • And then a group tried to challenge him while they were in a tank. Kenshiro just casually demolished the tank.
  • In Fist of the Blue Sky one of the villains actually came up with an armor that could resist Hokuto Shinken's Pressure Point strikes: it was thick, electrified, and just in case it didn't work he also had spring-heeled boots to jump around and impede the accuracy needed for a pressure point strike while he used knives to try and slice Kenshiro Kasumi's fingers. He had also failed to consider Kenshiro constantly wore rubber-soled boots and was strong enough to kick through him - or in the nearby water tank, electrocuting him.
• Gamaran: Armors (usually chainmails) are pretty effective against swords, but more often than not, the sword users (99% of the times, Ogame Ryu Members) will find a way to pierce the mail anyway. In Iori's case, is because he's so powerful that even his slashes can break a chainmail.
• Gate:
  • The Empire's Roman/Medieval style armor and shields do not provide any protection against the modern firearms used by the JSDF, which realistically punch right through.
  • Rory Mercury has Super-Strength so her halberd can slice through armor and shields like butter.
  • Averted in one scene where Lelei wears armor under her robes, which saves her life when an assassin tries to stab her.
• Continuously averted in Goblin Slayer. As a series that emphasises Boring, but Practical in brutal war against an insidious enemy, armour has proven indispensable time and time again.
  • The Greenhorn Team make the mistake of not using armour. The Wizard girl is pinned down to the floor and incapacitated with a poison dagger stab wound. The Warrior boy wears armour and fares better but a retaliatory stab in the leg makes him panic and seals his fate when he loses his grip on his sword.
  • A female adventurer wearing armour but not a helmet is incapacitated and dragged away to a Fate Worse than Death when a goblin hits her in the head with a rock. The Goblin Slayer, who wears a fully enclosed steel helm, takes several similar hits to the head and is only mildly dazed.
  • It even works against the heroes. At one point a senior goblin is wearing a looted steel breastplate under his cloak; without it the Goblin Slayer would have killed it then and there.
• Gundam: Played with in every possible way. Usually averted in the beginning, where the titular Super Prototype is usually invulnerable or at least highly resistant to enemy fire at the start of the war, the usually played straight as the enemy develops weapons capable of penetrating it. Played straight and justified in Universal Century series from Zeta Gundam onwards, as no armor except for exceptionally thick ones like on Scirocco's The O could stand up to sustained exposure to beam weaponry, so the main defense was not getting hit in the first place. Thus, most Mobile Suits built after the One Year War period usually had less armor than previous designs.
  • Reaches a head in Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam, where it turns out that while regular armor (that is, built onto a Mobile Suit as a standard feature) won't do jack against beam weaponry, ablative armor works just fine, and the Anti-Beam Coating mantles the Crossbone Gundams use means they can charge in as they please. (The Crossbones were designed on the principle that Mobile Suits of this time focused on evading and defending against long-range beam attacks, with beam shields in common use, and were thus rather inept at close-in or melee beam attacks.)
  • As a rule, putting heavy armor on your mobile suit is next to useless against Char, as he's savvy enough to: 1.) pack weapons that can pierce said armor (the heat hawk can cut through it, and a mecha-scale bazooka capable of penetrating battleship armor can pass through the armor of the usually Nigh Invulnerable Gundam like a hot bullet through butter. This is what he went around with before getting the beam weapons that made armor useless in general); 2.) If for some reason he doesn't have weapons powerful enough, he knows how to work around said armor (on his first fight with the Gundam, for example, his reaction to finding his current loadout useless was to kick the Gundam on the cockpit to throw the pilot around like a ragdoll, nearly killing Amuro before being forced to retreat).
  • Series that include Mobile Armors generally follow this principle: Whenever a Mobile Armor is introduced, it is very likely to be destroyed in that episode. One notable exception is the first Destroy Gundam, which took an entire story arc to take down, while a later battle against 7 of them takes about 2 minutes. Another exception is the Psyco Gundam, introduced around episode 20, and didn't leave the show until Episode 40. An improved version returned in Gundam ZZ only to get destroyed. Probably the only one that survives the series it appears in is the Regnant — and even then, its main reason for survival was its Roboteching Wave-Motion Gun and The Paralyzer, not armor. Neither its Flawed Prototype Empruss nor its Ace Custom successor Gadelaza achieves this feat, however.
  • Of course, this trope has been proven to be subverted numerous times. In Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, the NT-1 "Alex" is wrapped up in the Kampher's Chain Mine and is detonated. When the dust settles, the "Alex"'s Chobham Armor falls away and the only damage the "Alex" has is just a broken V-Fin. In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED the Duel Gundam tanks a hit by the Raider Gundam, sacrificing its Assault Shroud armor to race in and destroy the Gundam.
• The Hellsing anime. Anyone with body armor is really dead by the end of the arc they show up in, if not the very episode. Given the super-powered supernatural freaks one is likely to deal with in the series, mobility (or, in Alucard's case, a truly impressive Healing Factor) is a better defense than Kevlar.
• Averted in Holyland: Yuu's makeshift armor gives him a decisive advantage against his targets during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge (it helps he was facing high-school delinquents whose most powerful weapons were bats and sticks), and even the simple boxing handwraps he wears for duels are quite useful.
• Inuyasha: In the earliest episodes, Inuyasha's robe (made from the fur of the fire rat, making it fireproof) provides protection from a villain's attack whether he or Kagome is wearing it. However, after a few episodes this protection apparently vanishes and it seems to grant less protection than Kagome's school uniform.
• Downplayed in Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple: armor is useful and protective, but certain threats are just too much:
  • Fortuna's troop wear high-end bulletproof armor, and are seen shrugging off 5.56mm rounds. Jennifer Gray's high-powered revolvers, however, can knock the wearers' out, and against the Ryozanpaku masters they're worse than useless as the Masters, all strong enough to crush tanks, have trouble holding back enough to not kill Fortuna's soldiers.
  • Kenichi is given chainmail and arm guards that save him more than once against weapon users and even help him survive being attacked by Master level fighters (the chainmal was made by Shigure, so it's far more durable than any bulletproof armor made with modern methods).
  • Many Master level weapon users, including Shigure and most of the Eight Executioner's Blades, wear armor to defend against each other. While Shigure favors chainmail that doesn't impair her agile fighting style but can be destroyed by a concentrated attack from a Master, others use plate that can stand up to 20mm autocannon shells.
  • Played completely straight for women fighting against Kensei Ma, as the first thing the pervert will do is to strip them.
• In animated short Kigeki, the Black Swordsman cuts through an army of heavily armoured cavalry knights like butter. One of them he even slices in half down the middle.
• In the Mazinger saga:
  • Mazinger Z tries to avert this trope. Mazinger's cockpit offers little protection, and in the first chapters, Kouji repeatedly gets hurt and even knocked out because he fights in civilian clothes (and in the manga, the villains are aware of that and try to exploit it). In an early story, Baron Ashura commands a Mechanical Beast to grab Mazinger, fly high and drop it, knowing — as Kouji does — that the freefall's impact would kill the pilot, even if Mazinger endured it). In order to avoid that, he begins wearing a Latex Space Suit to protect his body during the fights. It is more protective than plain clothes, but he still gets injured while wearing it.
  • Another series of the franchise plays this trope in a more straight fashion. Tetsuya Tsurugi, Duke Fleed and their allies wear sturdy Latex Space Suits to protect their bodies from harm during the battles. They often get injured nonetheless, especially Tetsuya, who is too rash and reckless. On the other hand, New Mazinger averts this trope. Kabuto wears Powered Armor that protects him efficiently during the whole story.
• Naruto: Various characters wear plate armor (samurai, Choza, Choji, the first three Hokages), some wear what appears to be chainmail underarmor (Naruto, Jiraiya, Anko), the vests/jackets most ninja wear is ostensibly supposed to be a form of armor (looking a lot like the type of flak vests used by soldiers before bullet-resistant vests were invented). They have only ever been shown to be useful on three occasions:
  • A sand jounin survived a neck shot with a sword because his flack jacket's high collar absorbed the strike and trapped the blade. He then counter-attacked with a wind blade that sliced through armor.
  • Hinata's chainmail underarmor saved her life when Pain tried to stab her in the heart with a spike, though she did require some healing.
  • A samurai being consumed in Amaterasu fire was saved by having his armor taken off.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion plays with this trope:
  • The armor on the Evangelion units protects the pilot but the list of damages is incredible. Broken skull-piece (Sachiel, #3), broken arm (ditto), pierced (Shamshel, #4; Armisael, #16), cut (Zeruel, #14), not to mention nearly turning its pilot into Kentucky Fried Shinji (Ramiel, #5; also aversion to Convection, Schmonvection against Sandalphon, #11). Also, it can't do anything against psychic attacks at all. Poor Asuka... The armor's true purpose is to weaken and keep the Evas under control.
  • The multiple layers of armor covering the Geofront become increasingly less effective as the series progress. Ramiel (#5) takes 24 hours to drill through, while Zeruel (#14) penetrates it with just a few energy blasts. The first encountered angel — Salchiel (#3) — manages to blast through it in two shots — much faster than Zeruel — though he doesn't use this hole to his advantage.
  • Played more conventionally in The End of Evangelion. When Misato takes out several of the invading commandos, a close examination will reveal that the soldiers' vests were penetrated despite Misato only using a pistol.
• In One Piece, armor is usually either not present or is dismantled fairly quickly (ignoring, of course, characters who are literally Made of Iron). One notable exception is in the Baratie Arc, where a major part of the battle involves Luffy's attempts to get through Don Krieg's armor.
• In the same vein as Sailor Moon, the characters from the Pretty Cure series wear different varieties of clothing, but still withstand the same kinds of forces the Senshi dealt with, including space. Unlike the Senshi, their uniforms get scuffed in major battles, but never torn or ripped.
• Rurouni Kenshin:
  • Kenshin's sensei tells an armored giant opponent to remove his armor because it restricts his movements, weakening his offense and that the false sense of protection from armor weakens his dodging/parrying skills. Taken to the extreme with Bright King Anji, whose special technique delivers two strikes so quickly in succession that an object's hardness is negated, meaning it can literally destroy anything, no matter how hard.
  • In a bonus chapter, Kenshin faces an opponent who wears a suit of European armor. The man boasts that his armor can stop katanas, but Kenshin nonchalantly hits him in the side with the blunt side of his sword. The impact cracks the armor apart and instantly KO's him.
• In Samurai 7, most of the titular samurai wear no armor, and the armored one is a cyborg. They are shot at frequently, by everything from soldiers to giant mecha.
• Sailor Moon: The Sailor Senshi wear nothing but moderately skimpy clothing made of what appears to be cotton, yet appears to be perfectly capable of keeping the wearer — exposed skin and all — protected from everything from flying debris to flames to the vacuum of space. Further, while they are often smacked around, their clothing only shows it when they are fighting the Big Bad or somebody directly under them. In the live-action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Senshi wears some armor — a sports-bra-style Breast Plate made of what looks like fiberglass or plastic.
• In Saint Seiya it varies wildly. Sometimes armor plays a vital role in a fight, sometimes a Saint gets his armor destroyed yet it doesn't seem to make him more vulnerable to attacks. The fact that some armors leave a lot of the wearer's body completely exposed remains consistently unimportant.
  • The first time Seiya wears his armor it turns to be a hindrance, as nobody had explained him he needed to channel his Cosmo through it and it weighed him down so much he was nearly beaten to death by Shaina's Mooks. He quickly figured out the trick however, allowing him to casually fling away his attackers and overpower the otherwise superior Shaina, who wasn't wearing hers because she was attacking Seiya on personal business and thus was forbidden to do so (when they fight again she's on patrol and thus allowed to wear her armor. Seiya gets trounced and gains a new terror for his opponent).
  • Shiryu is an isolated case, as he always seems to end up naked (and blind too), but still wins most of his fights. In the fandom, it is common to joke that a battle starring Shiryu is to take a while while he's still armored (and seeing.) It is a common theme that Shiryu needs to outgrow the need for his armor to win a battle, not in small part because the armor gets in the way of his special technique of the week. On the other hand, he usually ends up the most battered of the team (Seiya gets battered a lot too, but since it is usually in his Hard Head, he's fine.)
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Multiple ways. The giant Zentradi soldiers wear suits of armor that really should have armor thickness comparable to tanks, yet it offers them no survivability. Similarly, Destroids are much more heavily built than the slender Variable fighters in Mech mode, so logically should be more armored, yet they're routinely finished off in one shot.
• Tears to Tiara: The enemy soldiers in the first arc may as well have been wearing Saran Wrap, for all the good their armor did them against the heroes' attacks.
• In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the only one to ever wear armor is actually Thymilph, the first General of the Capitol. He's also the second named character to die (Kamina being the first, despite the fact that he only truly faded away after performing a Giga Drill Breaker, thus avenging his own death).
• While main character Thorfinn (being a Fragile Speedster), says that he never really found armor useful and thinks that it just makes you slow, and mooks mail armor might as well be cloth, Vinland Saga has averted this on multiple occasions.
  • In the anime's Action Prologue, Thors takes an arrow to the shoulder, but it seems to be caught in his chainmail without penetrating it, and later it falls out unnoticed.
  • When Thors fights Askeladd, his sword snaps on Askeladd's armor.
  • Askeladd takes an ax to the back of his armor. It's obviously painful for him and causes him to furiously lash out at the the attacker, but there's no question that he would have been killed without his breastplate.
  • Thorkell's chainmail presents a problem for Thorfinn in both of their fights, as Thorfinn can score light wounds on Thorkell's limbs but can't land a blow to the torso that would actually kill or seriously wound Thorkell due to the armor.
  • In his last battle, Bjorn's Gambeson resists multiple blows off screen, and at least two weapons (a spearhead and a large knife), are seen sticking out of it, having failed to penetrate deep enough to kill or incapacitate. There are also a few slashes in the fabric, again indicating that it resisted attacks or at least turned potentially serious wounds into minor ones. Unfortunately for Bjorn his luck runs out there; one last opponent gets a running start and manages to land a blow that gets through and causes a mortal gut wound.
  • During the Battle for Ketil's Farm, Ketil takes a nasty ax blow to the head and is knocked out for quite awhile, likely suffering one hell of a concussion afterwards. If not for his helmet, he would have died instead.
• Wolf's Rain: The Nobles' elite guard have heavy full-body armor and shields with built-in disruptor rays. Yet even all that doesn't prevent several of them from being bitten to death by wolves. The wolves go straight for their necks, which have no plate armor to allow their heads to move easily. Justified, in that the armor was intended to protect against the attacks of other human beings instead of an ostensibly extinct animal.
• Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead:
  • Thoroughly averted. Akira and Kencho manage to procure a shark suit from the abandoned aquarium, allowing Akira to act out his childhood superhero dreams by rescuing people from the zombies. While it doesn't stop him from feeling the pain of the bites, the chainmail links do an excellent job of preventing any of the zombies from breaking his skin and infecting him.
  • Beatrix also has a historically accurate suit of Japanese samurai armor as part of her Occidental Otaku hobby. Old-fashioned it may be, it prevents her from getting bitten, allowing her and Akira to temporarily hold off the zombie horde when push comes to shove.

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