Armor Is Useless / Video Games

Armor Is Useless in Video Games.

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• Played realistically straight in Seven Six Two High Calibre. Combat is extremely lethal and even the weakest pistol in the game can cause fatal damage with two or three shots to the chest. Armor, like in real life, only provides a token amount of damage resistance, enough for several assault rifle rounds at the most; ceramic and titanium plates can be inserted for improved protection in certain vests, but they can be broken completely by enough damage and have to be replaced. Even worse, helmets and bulletproof vests only protect the head and torso respectively, so any shots not to those areas get no damage resistance (unless you turn on an option on the difficulty settings). And armor piercing ammo (or powerful cartridges) tend to just slice through that armor anyway, so it'll usually only provide just enough protection to escape immediate death and run for cover. As in real life, the best defense is to not get shot.
• Parodied in Alex Kidd in High-Tech World, where putting on a suit of samurai armor would completely immobilize you, causing a Game Over.
• ANNO: Mutationem: The parade of mooks from both The Factio Pugni and The Consortium are equipped with Powered Armor. Despite wearing fully metallic high-tech armor, they are just as susceptible to damage as the anomalous unarmored opponents encountered. They take the same amount of damage from any of Ann's weapons, and their full-body shields offer no protection at all even from gunshots.
• Asheron's Call: While normally completely averted, (armor is very useful for players) It's played very straight with the tuskers, a race of killer gorillas with tusks who have mostly been enslaved by the virindi, and made to wear armor. While almost all of them have armor (ranging from leather to plate), they tend to have a very low armor rating, with the plate-wearing tusker guards have a lower armor rating than the leather wearing tusker slaves. It's subverted with the armored and plated tuskers, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • Assassinations, Hidden Blade Counter Attacks and Brotherhood's new Arrow Storm and Execution moves will one-shot anyone regardless of health. Also, the Captain from Brotherhood multiplayer is a One-Hit-Point Wonder despite wearing full plate. On the other hand, Ezio's damage-taking improves as he gets better armour and more heavily-armoured opponents are themselves harder to kill in a straight fight, with Borgia Captains (those that fight you anyway) and Papal Guards needing multiple Hidden Gun shots to kill. To add to this, the Armor of Altaïr saved Ezio from a nasty stabbing at the end of 2, while part of the Cesare fight is spent stripping off the boss's armour so he can be properly hurt. They seem to be improving on that with the enemies, as in Revelations the Janissaries cannot be one-hit killed by the hidden blade.
  • This is played slightly differently with the RPG turn in Origins and Odyssey, in a few ways. First, enemies can come in ranks such as Captain and Polemarch that denote their health and damage. Normally these ranks apply logically to what the enemy is wearing, but sometimes it's thrown out the window, resulting in lightly-armoured foes requiring a full-on brawl to kill, while a heavily-adorned normal enemy can be assassinated with a single blade through the head. Second is your own gear thanks to levels and rarities: a Common Conqueror's Helmet will protect you less than a Legendary-rank fabric Shroud, and visual customization can invoke it to be even worse. Third, many attacks finishing moves completely disregard armour just to look cool, so swords will cut and stab straight through armour and send blood flying.
• Back Stab have Spanish Conquistador and British Redcoat enemies, the former who wears armour over their torso. Despite that, their health meter isn't any different, and your Finishing Move - a stab through the stomach - works equally well on both of them.
• In Baldur's Gate II, there are classic AD&D rules and values of THAC0 ("to hit armor class 0") and AC ("armor class"). They work in a way that the lesser number is stronger, that is, a chain mail armor that gives an AC of 2 is better than a leather armor with an AC of 5. This can be sometimes confusing, i.e. when an enchanted full plate mail +1 gives a value of -1. A virtual die is rolled to check if the attack is successful and does damage or is absorbed/blocked, and it depends on the AC of the defender and the THAC0 of the attacker. Both are influenced by character weapons and skills, such as dexterity, or even by spells. In the first game, AC was very important and could make the difference, with negative AC making you almost invulnerable against weaker opponents. But in the sequel expansion Throne of Bhaal major enemies start to get THAC0s ridiculously low (to the point of -30) that they will hit you anyway (unless they roll a 1 which is a miss). Minor enemies are still suffering your armor, but by that time you are so much powerful that they wouldn't represent a menace at all. That being said, the powerful magic armors available in the game might not be useful for preventing you from being hit, but they do offer things like resistance or immunity to different damage types, the ability to cast various spells, and other useful properties. So there's still a reason to equip them.
• Zigzagged in the Batman: Arkham Series:
  • Batman's costumes in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City are made of an unspecified fabric armor that are torn up as the night progresses, yet they offer limited protection from firearms and melee attacks via in-game upgrades, with Batman even surviving a shot to the chest from Two-Face (as the chest is where the strongest armor layers reside) Though you will die if you take enough damage, which is justified in that real-life armor has its limits and being shot while wearing it will still cause bodily harm.
  • The prequel game Batman: Arkham Origins features Batman wearing clunky hardened armor that takes less damage over the course of the game (apart from the cape) merely being scratched up. You'll still be shot to pieces and take damage from melee strikes, but in a cutscene, Batman is able to take three point-blank gunshots from the Joker and remain unharmed.
  • Batman: Arkham Knight features a sleeker version of the armored suit from Origins with Titanium plates covering an MR fluid bodysuit. You still take damage from gunfire in-game, but Batman again survives a point-blank gunshot to the chest courtesy of Commissioner Gordon Before that Gordon punches Batman in the face without breaking his hand on the Titanium cowl, and Bats even seemed to be somewhat shaken by it. However, the titular Arkham Knight fires a contact bullet into Batman's unarmored side but Bats is able to inject himself with something that saves his life. So basically, the armor is near-useless in gameplay, but occasionally proves useful in cutscenes.
  • The latter three games feature mooks with body armor who are immune to regular strikes and must be taken out with Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs or takedowns. They also cannot be choked out silently in predator mode and have to be taken out in other ways.
• Averted in Battle Brothers. True to real life, helmets are a must-have since nearly any hit to the head will kill instantly. Even a simple padded gambeson is a huge improvement on a basic cloth tunic, and a mail byrnie or set of scale armour is an even greater improvement on a gambeson. Good armour saves you money in the long run, as it is cheaper and faster to repair damaged gear than to wait until a mercenaries' wounds heal.
• Played straight and averted in the Battlefield series, depending on the entry:
  • In Battlefield 2 the Assault, Support, and Anti Tank classes have body armor which slightly reduces the damage they take from torso shots in exchange for having lower sprint stamina. Battlefield 2142 allows any class to equip body armor with identical benefits and tradeoffs.
  • Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 4, and Battlefield Hardline allow players to equip armor as specializations (in 4 and BC2) or gadgets (in Hardline). As these games don't have sprint stamina, there are no downsides beyond taking up a specialization or gadget slot.
  • Battlefield 1 inverts this - all elite classes wear armor that is much, much more effective than actual World War I armor was. Of special note is the Sentry class, whose plate armor lets him negate 83% of bullet damage, negate the typical headshot multiplier, and No-Sell most melee attacks. Cavalry also took reduced damage to their chest and torso thanks to their chest armor.
• BioShock 2. Yes, you are wearing a suit that can withstand pressure at the bottom of the ocean. No, that won't help against a gun. Or a wrench. Or fire. Or anything else, for that matter.
  • It's weaker than human skin, but it does have two very important features — because the Big Daddy is a bunch of ADAM-infused organs surgically grafted to a diving suit, you get one whole second of undershirt to prevent fatal damage temporarily, at which point you have the option of using a single medkit, which heals ALL damage. This represents the Big Daddy's massive health pool, rather than their damage resistance.
  • However, in the first game you do get to equip a Big Daddy diving suit, which, unlike in BioShock 2, does reduce the damage you take. You still aren't invincible, though.
• In Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled, armor isn't entirely useless so much as Defense is. You appear to take the same damage from introductory-area enemies, even after abusing a specific shop's buy/sell mechanics to purchase hundreds of Defense Up potions and using them to max every character's Defense. It's for this very reason that it's best to equip armor based on any offense and status resistances they have, as opposed to Defense. At least technically the armor itself isn't what's useless.
• Boktai 2 had armor available to the main character, which offers a minuscule defense increase, but also decreases his movement speed based on its weight. Players very quickly learn they're better off playing as an armor-less Fragile Speedster that is quick enough to dodge and outrun enemies and with a curative item or two on standby, rather than a slow-as-molasses character that's still a Glass Cannon.
• Zig Zagged in Carmageddon II. Getting more armor makes it a lot harder for the opponents to raze your car from direct damage, to the point where getting hit by even the Big Dump won't bend your chassis a single centimeter. However, God help you if you run (or get knocked) too fast into any pointed edge of the world's geometry^note such as the corners of buildings or road barricades, as the armor value doesn't affect the chances of your car getting split in half, which usually gets you wasted. This, combined with the increase in the average vehicle's speed later in the game, means that even as your armor gets stronger, your chances of getting instantly wasted also become paradoxically higher.
• Averted in Carrion. Security Guards wear body armor that not just protects them from being torn in half, but eaten too. The only way to kill them is to 1) get them from behind, or 2) nail them with a thrown object to stun them. Then, the monster (i.e., the player) has to smash their shit all over the walls, floor, and ceiling to put them down. The monster can also grow a durable (i.e., bulletproof and bomb-resistant) keratin exoskeleton at its max size.
• In City of Heroes, your powers are completely divorced from your appearance, so armor really is useless. At least for protection, anyway. If you choose to wear armor, it's typically for conceptual reasons or looking cool. Not counting armor (or shields) provided by your powers, which work and do provide protection when in use. Although there aren't many powers that really produce material armor instead of auras of some sort, and you'll still get something like being temporarily covered in ice or granite instead of plate armor or a flak jacket out of them.
• Played straight in Dead or Alive, with the fully power-armored Space Marine Nicole being just as vulnerable to punches and kicks as the more Stripperiffically-dressed women.
• In Deep Rock Galactic, the Space Dwarf use armour ranging from the Driller's Powered Armor to the Scout's light flak jacket. Barring mods, all dwarfs have the same HP and shielding. You can purchase new iterations of each classes' armour, which is purely cosmetic and just makes each suit look more high-tech. The underlying armour rig however can be upgraded. And the Roughneck cosmetics simply forego all visible armor in favor of rough casual wear complete with arms on display, while sacrificing no actual protection.
  The veteran roughnecks of DRG are known to care less for protection, and more for utility. Years of hard work in the mines make you that way - why wear heavy armor when YOU are the most dangerous thing down here by far?
• Downplayed in Deepwoken. There exists various armors in the game, with Master Armors being considered the best of them all. This is played straight on a character slot that has the Crestfallen echo modifier active, as armor is permanently broken, making them only useful for their talents alone and nothing else.
• Demon's Souls and Dark Souls players typically end up falling into this mentality sooner or later, as well as Shields Are Useless. Players will typically only equip heavy armour and actually use a shield for blocking when they first start playing the series, as a form of Skill Gate Characters. Once they get used to the mechanics, players will typically come to value mobility over defense, and discard both their heavy armour and shield in favour of light (or sometimes no) armour to maintain full mobility and Stat Sticks that are glued to the player's back 100% of the time and never actually used, ending up with a Glass Cannon that never gets hit rather than a Mighty Glacier that can block or tank many hits. The "Fashion Souls" meme resulted from this: the idea being that if you're any good at the games, you don't care about your armour's stats and only care about putting together a cool-looking outfit.
  • That said, some of the most dangerous (and most reviled) PvP builds in Dark Souls are Lightning Bruisers who have min-maxed to the extent that they can wear some of the heaviest, tankiest armour in the game without suffering any loss in mobility, such as the infamously meme-tastic "Giant Dad".
  • Due to the way damage is calculated in Dark Souls III, armour is especially useless. Basically, there are two defensive stats for each damage type: "Defense", which decreases the damage by a flat amount, and "Absorption", which further decreases it by a percentage. Equipping heavy armor will only improve your Absorption. Your Defense is always the same regardless of what you have equipped (as long as you have something equipped, as leaving an armor slot empty decreases Defense by varying amounts depending on the slot). Even the lightest sets have Absorption in the 10s, while even the heaviest have it only in the 30s; you may have to put on armor that's more than four times as heavy to reduce damage by barely a quarter! And since Poise is practically nonexistent in Dark Souls III, the PvP meta pretty much entirely revolves around stunlocking the opponent with small, quick weapons like straight swords, which Defense is far more valuable against than Absorption (which is more valuable against big weapons that hit really hard). So you might as well just use the lightest armour you can find since it's all going to be pretty much the same in the end.
  • FromSoftware appears to have taken notice of the player base's preference for dodging over defense, since Bloodborne does away with equipment weight entirely and armour/clothing offers little protection, existing primarily to look cool. There's also exactly one shield in the game, which exists solely for its Flavor Text to tell you that shields suck and there are none in the game. The in-story justification is that beasts are much stronger than humans which renders traditional methods of combat ineffective against them, necessitating that Hunters adopt the fighting style pioneered by Gehrman, forgoing armour and defensiveness in favour of pure speed and aggression, killing beasts as quickly as possible before one is overwhelmed. In the Chalice Dungeons, you can sometimes find long-dead corpses of knights in plate armour with swords and shields, who clearly didn't stand a chance against the beasts.
• Detroit: Become Human plays it straight with the U.S. Army. Despite being suited up in high-tech armor they're no less impervious to damage than the deviant androids they're sent to neutralize towards the end of the story, and their full-face ballistic helmets do nothing whatsoever to protect them from headshots.
• Deus Ex: Armored soldiers from UNATCO and Majestic 12 have as many hit points as homeless bums. NSF terrorists are actually weaker.
• Devil May Cry: The playable characters' weapons cut and pierce armored enemies like butter. The only enemies that can defend against the player's attacks are those with magical barriers, shields or demonic weapons of their own.
• Diablo:
  • Armor was virtually mandatory for players but due to a bug, monsters with high armor rating were actually easier to hit. Diablo himself had a 95% chance to be hit by even a level 1 character swinging a broken dagger.
  • In early versions of Diablo II, enemy attack rating was actually four times bigger than displayed, making the "chance to hit" percentage meaningless. As a result, and because most advanced armor types didn't have unique versions and required more strength (which was a dump stat unless you were a barbarian) there was little point in going higher than the most basic armors. Furthermore, defensive skills that increased armor were useless. The attack rating change was made at the last moment before release because the game was considered to be too easy. The expansion reduced the multiplier from x4 to x2 and added unique versions of better armors. It still wasn't enough because for some reason you had a 95% chance to hit while moving and you're always moving. Using a shield was infinitely better.
• In Drakengard, there is no amount of armor you can be wearing, damaged or undamaged, that changes how much damage you take. And in cutscenes, we're shown it works the same way for The Evil Army, although that's possibly because the protagonist is a Badass Normal.
• Averted in Dwarf Fortress, up to a point; any stabbing or slashing attack that fails the armour check is re-rolled for bludgeoning damage, which plate armour or chainmail do very little to protect against. Broken ribs are definitely preferable to getting run through with a sword, however. One straight example is that the current version's armor is remarkably vulnerable to Annoying Arrows, with weak-material arrows reliably piercing anything up to adamantine. The only exceptions are that wood or bone arrows/bolts are still liable to deflect off any metal armor while adamantime arrows bounce off everything in spite of their hardness because of their extremely low density. There's also the problem of hits transferring some of the force to the wearer of the armor, the ratios of which are somewhat out of whack and can result in most of the hit making it through even the strongest armor.
• Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors have a number of characters who run around the battlefield in heavy armour. There is little or no evidence that they take any less damage than the characters who run around in robes or barechested (in earlier games in the franchise, there actually was actually was an armor stat that supposedly reduced damage, with characters who wore heavier armor having a higher rating, but the difference it made was too small to be relevant). They do tend to be pretty slow, though. These series seem to work off the principle of Glass Cannon instead. Those bigger guys or armored guys DO do more damage, or at the very least, have much larger range. Except for Xiahou Yuan. Because he just fails that much. Whoopee! Free arrows! Now, do you have anything else to offer? Worse, his attacks have a habit of juggling enemies, which means they can't attack, but they also take a third as much damage, making one on one fights take even longer.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Throughout the series, a character's protection depends more on his skill with the armor class rather than the armor itself (though despite this, NPCs are almost always armored appropriately). For example, a character with a high Heavy Armor skill will be better protected in a suit of low-quality Iron armor than a character with a low Heavy Armor skill will be in a set of elite Daedric armor. In Morrowind, NPCs will occasionally reference this trope if the player asks them for advice. You're warned not to judge how tough a fight will be based on the amount or quality of your opponent's armor or weapons, as the really powerful characters don't need these things to kill you.
  • The effectiveness of armor skill is discussed in-universe in various instruction manuals and books. One of the keys to fighting in armor is to not just wear the armor but learn how to move around in the various suits, recognize the resistance in the joints, and understanding how to turn and move so a blow that might hit a weak spot will instead strike unyielding plate.
  • Played straight throughout the series when it comes to magical attacks, as standard armor is completely useless against them. In order to defend against them, you either need to use specific Anti-Magic spells or enchant them onto your armor as a constant effect.
  • Skyrim:
    • In addition to the above, armor will never block more than 80% of the damage dealt. If you max out your heavy armor skill tree, it's possible to reach this cap wearing nothing more advanced than Steel armor (the second-lowest standard quality).
    • Armor also depends on the level of smithing and which skill tree you invested in. If you are a master smith, alchemist, and trained in the use of the Light Armor skill, it's very well that a set of simple reinforced leather is actually stronger for you than even something made from dragon bones, or Daedric (which is crystallised gods' blood forged with demon hearts).
    • The Vigil of Stendarr, a Church Militant order dedicated to hunting down supernatural threats to mortal life, apparently believe this to be the case. The only armor they wear are boots and gauntlets, forgoing body armor to wear enchanted robes.
  • Heavy metal armor can feel this way in The Elder Scrolls Online, where it is only 25% stronger than leather medium armor, and the stamina and crit-damage bonuses of medium tend to outweigh the slight tanking bonuses granted by heavy.
• Played straight at higher levels in Elona, as elemental resistance followed by speed become the most important defense. After all, if an enemy only does 1-3 HP damage, but gets 5-8 TURNS compared to your one, (say a quickling or alien kid, who does additional acid damage on top of that) then you may as well be taking 30HP damage a turn anyway. However, with light enough armor you can cut this down to as low as two or three, and with a pair of rings of speed, even out, as well as get chances to dodge the attacks. However, it is inverted again when you face down Frisia, the cat queen, as you'll never be able to match her speed unless you play a Catgod as well, or a quickling or bell, so it's best to reduce the damage you take as much as possible and let her kill herself by spamming Firewall/Acidground or throwing things which cause damage over time along with wearing the artifact mentioned. She takes so many turns compared to your character that you'll do much more damage in the same amount of time as trying to hit her with your main weapon, even if she only takes roughly 5-8 HP damage per turn. The other two bonus bosses are chumps compared to Frisia.
• How important armor is depends on which Etrian Odyssey game you're playing. It's at its peak in Etrian Odyssey III, where stacking accessories is generally more productive than wearing armor - Etrian Odyssey IV gets around this by letting you only equip one accessory at a time, but defense still factors in little enough that you'd rather equip armor that doesn't impact (or even increases) your speed and that gives you good stat bonuses. This changes in Etrian Odyssey V, where having a defense score that can keep up with your enemy's attack stats are far more important.
• In EverQuest, damage mitigation is primarily determined by your character class, with your armor class (AC) being more effective on some classes (like warriors) than others. This means that a warrior wearing a full suit of simple clothing is still going to resist considerably more damage than a wizard wearing the same armor because the former gains more AC from the cloth. Even at the same AC rating, warriors resist more damage than less melee-oriented classes. Furthermore, the actual "type" of armor in EverQuest is irrelevant, as the game makes no inherent distinction between plate armor, chain, leather, or cloth other than how its texture is displayed. Because of this, there are leather breastplates that provide several times as much protection as steel, and some cloth robes that are considerably more protective than earlier metal varieties. Ultimately, all that matters for protection when it comes to worn items is what level encounter they were obtained from and what classes can wear them.
• In Fable, different armors have different strengths and weaknesses, but these are negligible. Defeating the final boss wearing nothing but underpants is not only possible but hardly more difficult than doing so in full plate. Lionhead Studios realized that armor was useless in Fable, and as a result, in Fable II, you get the same armor bonus for wearing a harlot dress as you do for wearing a heavily layered assassin outfit: zero.
• Fallout:
  • Double Subversion in Fallout 3. Normally armor does a pretty good job reducing damage. Then you go to Point Lookout, where the enemies automatically get a certain amount of free damage in. This means that a player who easily mows through Enclave soldiers and Super Mutants can get pwned by mutated rednecks with shotguns. It can also be double subverted because of the equipment degradation reducing effectiveness over time and the low-quality (as in broken, not poorly made) equipment most NPCs have, which can result in a pair of Brotherhood of Steel knights in Powered Armor getting killed by a trio of raiders in Mad Max-style armor.
  • Fallout: New Vegas changes the armor calculations from being percentile to being additive, and if you don't exceed something's armor rating you only do Scratch Damage. It's played straight or averted depending on where you are in the game: higher enemy damage makes armor progressively less helpful, and all energy weapons ignore some by default anyway (although one Perk is supposed to make metal armor more potent against energy weapons, but the Perk is set up incorrectly unless you use a player-created mod to fix the issue). Any of the various infinity plus one armors, however, do greatly increase your survivability, and the wearables with stat boosts but poor defense are highly situational.
    • The Piercing Palm perk allows your unarmed attacks to ignore 15 points of DT. For reference, the only things that have more defense than that are NPCs in metal armor, powered armor, and some unique characters.
    • It does get double subverted on the highest difficulty, and against the most powerful enemies. Basically, they're going to kill you in either 1 or 2 hits, and no armor you wear will help with that. Worse, if they make you slower than lighter equipment. Most of the DLC enemies and some of the main game enemies also scale to the player's Experience level. Of course, your damage skyrockets just as much as the enemies', so everyone is a Glass Cannon on this difficulty.
    • Ironically, a DLC perk actually makes light armor better than even power armor. The Light Touch perk reduces enemy critical hit chance by 25%...which equates to a 0% critical chance for almost every enemy. 10 DT stands up to 80 damage a lot better than 30 DT stands up to 160 damage.
    • As with the later-released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, armor will stop no more than 80% of incoming damage.
  • Played straight and averted in Fallout 4. While its possible to upgrade any normal armour you find, as well as upgrading regular clothing with a ballistic weave which gives it a defense value which stacks with other types of armour after completing a specific quest, on higher difficulties (specifically Survival Mode, where you take 200% damage from all attacks) even a fully upgrade set of gear will give you maybe one or two extra seconds to find some cover and heal. Averted though with Powered Armor, which in this game acts more like a vehicle you pilot rather than worn gear like it was in the previous games. A fully upgraded set of X-01 armour will let you tank a mini-nuke to the face and limp out the other side, even on the aforementioned Survival mode.
• The original Far Cry averted this trope for both the player and enemies, except in the case of headshots, but the Classic Updated Re-release for consoles removed the damage reduction properties of enemies' armor, making it purely cosmetic.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In the original Final Fantasy, the Black Belt could wear some equipment, but when unarmored he gains one absorb for each level which will outstrip the absorb he can get from armors at very high levels. It's not something that people who tries to beat the game on a timely pace should worry about, though.
  • Final Fantasy II flirts with this. Armor is certainly useful, but heavy armor takes a considerable toll on your Evasion percentage, which is easily the One Stat to Rule Them All—especially when late-game enemies can inflict nasty status effects on hit. The game does provide light armor that gives respectable Defense without too heavy an Evasion penalty, and improving your Agility and shield skill (yes, strapping a piece of metal to your arm makes you ''faster'') will let you wear the super-heavy Armor of Invincibility and dodge everything thrown at you like a ninja.
  • Final Fantasy VII: The only "armor" you can buy for any character is "bangles," which are essentially large, heavy bracelets. You can see the characters wearing them, and occasionally even making motions as if they are trying to block or deflect attacks with them. As for how well this works... the way the game calculates damage means that defence stats in general aren't really worth the effort to improve (the most effective armor work by halving damage from physical elements), a glitch means that mdef ignores what armor is supposed to contribute to it, and you can cause your defence to roll over if you raised your stats high enough.
  • Final Fantasy VIII: While most Final Fantasy characters equip armor, even if only in inventory, here characters do not wear armor, visually or no. In-universe they're covert operatives who often go undercover, and wearing heavy armor would blow said cover pretty quickly. Besides, with Guardian Forces and junctioned magic, they don't need it.
  • Final Fantasy X has this rule too, to a certain extent. Nobody wears armor, aside from the crusaders, who are practically the Red Shirt Army of Spira. Any playable character in the entire game, however, can only equip a weapon and an arm-guard.
  • Final Fantasy XII: Subverted in the opening sequence. Some poor sap had a gaping hole in his armor, right in front of his throat. Three guesses where he was shot, and the first two don't count.
  • In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning can obtain several armor garbs. Most do provide minor damage reduction, but the two best defensive garbs are in fact robes.
• Fire Emblem doesn't usually include armor as a mechanic (except for the shields in Gaiden/Echoes and Three Houses). Defense is based entirely on character growths and class-based caps, rather than what armor a character is physically wearing. For example, in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Meg's defenses tend to be lower than Aran's, despite her being clad in full plate armor compared to his lighter breastplate (Meg's Defense cap is higher than Aran's, but even then, she's not likely to surpass him). Still, characters and classes featured with heavy armor tend to have a higher Defense base, growth, and cap. The exception to the rule is Jagen from the first game, who has a 0% Defense growth despite wearing his famous purple armor.
• In For Honor, the Viking Raider hero does not wear any armor at all beyond some furry leather shoulder pads. Indeed, a lack of armor is a common theme among the Viking factions as a whole, with the Berserker wearing little more than furs and the Valkyrie wearing a leather gambeson, a light helmet, and a shield. Only the Warlord wears real armor, consisting of chainmail underneath a leather gambeson. True to the trope, the Raider is the second-toughest of the Viking heroes, surpassed only by the Warlord. On the other hand, for the Knights and the Samurai factions, the more heavily-armored heroes are tougher than their more lightly-armored compatriots, though the trope is played straight in the sense that weapons that realistically couldn't hope to hurt a knight in full plate will still damage and kill even the most heavily-armored of warriors.
• Partly true in Galactic Civilizations II, given that armor is one of the three types of defenses you can install on ships, the other two being Deflector Shields and anti-missile systems. Basically, each type of defense is a good counter only for a specific type of weapon. Armor is good against kinetic projectiles, shields are good against energy weapons, and anti-missile systems are (obviously) good against missiles. Against any other type of weapon, their effect is reduced to the square root of the value. So, armor with a defense rating of 9 will only provide 3 defense points against lasers or missiles. Even without this approach, late-game weapons completely outstrip equivalent defensive technologies to the point of making them pointless even if they match.
• Played straight in Gears of War, where one of the FEW people wearing an honest helmet, Anthony Carmine, gets sniped in the head early on, killing him. Though the helmet made him one of The Faceless, despite being an actual character, his death was an in-joke to the developers, based on a study that showed people who wore helmets like that get shot more due to the lack of peripheral vision.
  • Lampshaded in Gears of War 2 though. During one level the group is complaining about the amount of dust in the underground caverns. The one member wearing a helmet points out that they wouldn't have this problem if they'd wear one, as they have built-in dust filters. Also, the character with the helmet is the Benjamin Carmine, little brother of Anthony Carmine.
    B. Carmine: If you wore a helmet, you wouldn't have to breathe in the dust.
    Dom: Yeah. [coughs] But then I wouldn't be able to see snipers so well, would I?
    Marcus: Cool it, Dom...
  • In Gears of War 3, Clayton Carmine, also wearing a helmet, is walking with the squad towards a COG base when a friendly sniper mistakes them for the Lambent, and shoots Clay in the head only for the bullet to ricochet off Clay's helmet, prompting a shocked, "Jeez louise, what the fuck?!"
  • While all the gears tromp around half a car's worth of armor, they seem to be about as tough as the Locust, most of whom aren't even wearing shirts. Sera also seems to have a surprising number of indigenous species that are completely immune to gunfire on some or most of their carapace (including rockworms, serapedes, Berserkers, and Corpsers), which begs the questions of why no one's making armor out of them.
  • Averted by Maulers and Armored Kantus. Maulers carry a shield that can absorb (or in the case of Elites, reflect) bullets and even rockets. Kantus armor slows the wearer down (and denies it the use of Ink Grenades in Beast Mode) but is nearly immune to bullets. Unlike the Mauler's shield, a Kantus' armor doesn't help it against fire or explosives.
  • Exaggerated in 3, which has unarmored versions of Anya, Dizzy, Marcus, and a version of Cole in football pads. All can take just as much damage as their heavily armored counterparts.
• The Ghosts 'n Goblins/Ghouls 'n Ghosts series has Arthur, who starts in full plate armour: however it just takes one hit and your armor goes flying off, leaving you to fight beasties in his pretty underpants. Another hit in that state, and he's dead. Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins has a variety of armors, most of which can take more than one hit. The trouble happens when you need a certain armor that can take only one hit to get past a certain point (especially the Angel Armor), meaning that once you lose the armor, you're hosed. Dorkly even made a video deconstructing this.
  • Played with for his appearance in Project × Zone. Arthur's armor is directly stated to be good against only one hit, but it will protect him from that hit, no matter how powerful it is. This allows him to be able to tank a massive explosion from ground zero.
• In the Golden Axe series, almost every hero character is either bare-chested or otherwise exposing large parts of the body. They can still take multiple slashes/bashes from weapons.
• God Eater: An Aragami can and will eat anything not infused with Bias Factor, meaning that God Eaters don't bother with armor as a rule. In-game, this manifests as clothing being purely cosmetic.
• Granblue Fantasy tends to play this trope regarding the characters, since the game's inventory system does not include armors and is limited only to weapons, rings, and summons:
  • Some characters who wear a full set of armor and a helmet are designated as Defense types (i.e. Baotorda, Deliford, Naoise, Vira's Grand version), fully averting this trope.
  • Yet, there are other armor-clad characters who are not Defense-oriented (Black Knight, Lancelot, Percival, Rackam), applying this trope.
  • A large number of the playable characters are wearing some types of armor, including those stated above, yet they can still receive the same amounts of damage as any other character without Defensive buffs.
  • It is possible for the player to directly play around this trope with the ability to change a character's appearance and outfit, such as Grand Vira still capable to tanking a huge amount of damage while wearing a swimsuit.
  • Vaseraga is probably one of the worst offenders. He wears an armor and a helmet in his Dark version, but his kit is focused on attack (though his passive allows him to stack defense). He loses all that protection in his Earth version, but he has a skill that provides him 50% damage reduction and an immunity to debuffs.
• Body armor in Grand Theft Auto V works fine in single-player, but is absolutely garbage when playing online. A few bullets is all it takes to take out the heaviest armor and it's not uncommon to see players forego armor entirely. Online lets you have a stock of armor in your inventory so you can equip one in a pinch, which is probably why the body armor is so flimsy.
• While Halo's story and Expanded Universe mostly avert this, its gameplay is all over the place with the trope:
  • In all lore, from novels to live-action films to in-game cutscenes, Covenant armor is consistently useless against any kind of bullets. Elites decked out in hundreds of pounds of the stuff fail to single shotgun shells or bursts of submachine gun fire that would be no-sold by any standard body armor today, once their shields are down. Grunts and Jackals are in the same boat. The exceptions are the Brutes, who actually have been seen tanking some fire when stripped of shielding.
  • Zig-zagged by anyone with personal energy shields. While a fully-shielded Elite Zealot can take half a mag of assault rifle fire without even flinching, one with its shields drained is only slightly more durable than a common Grunt, despite the fact that the former wears a lot more armor than the latter (and the lore stating that Elites are in general a lot tougher than Grunts). It's possible that the "armor" is actually just an exosuit jammed with electronics for supporting things like the shield and strength-enhancement, leaving little armor for actual bullet-resistant plating, which is supported by many sources showing that their "armor" won't even stop shotgun pellets. This discrepancy is particularly apparent (and less justified, considering their armor is explicitly supposed to be titanium) with Player Character Spartans; despite their supposedly incredibly advanced tailored-specifically-for-Spartan painstakingly-manufactured cutting-edge armor, no Spartan with its shields down can survive one single shot to the head from a basic pistol in any game, or more than just a few shots to the body from almost any other weapon in any game (an unshielded Player Character in fact has the same health as a UNSC marine on normal difficulty).
  • In the later games, Covenant mooks both wear more armor and have greater health the higher-ranked they are. What keeps this from being an aversion is that, with the exception of headshots, they take the same amount of damage from any given weapon regardless of whether you hit them in an armored or unarmored spot. The one exception are Hunters, who have such thick armor that you have to shoot the unarmored parts if you want to do any damage.
  • There's a partial aversion by some higher-ranking Brute variants and Halo: Reach's Grunt Ultras; you'll have to shoot off their helmets first before you can headshot them. Depending on the game, the same thing also applies to any allied human NPC wearing a helmet. In general though, even helmet-wearing enemies will go down in one headshot if they don't have energy shields.
  • Inverted with the Brutes; Halo 2's and Reach's unarmored versions are noticeably more durable than Halo 3's armored ones (in fact, 2's Brutes were infamous for being insanely bullet-spongy). Within each individual game, however, they do still follow the general rule of "armored variants have more health". In lore, Brute armor is also consistently the only armor that provides any protection against bullets: in one ODST cutscene, for example, Buck fruitlessly empties an entire assault rifle magazine into an unshielded Brute Chieftan, while in a Reach cutscene, Noble Six kills an unshielded Elite Ultra with four shots to the chest from the same rifle.
• Horizon Zero Dawn is all over the place with this. First of all, what Aloy's outfits look like has nothing to do with what they protect against, nor how effective they are at it. The Carja Blazon outfit for instance has escalating amounts of metal belts strapped across its chest while leaving Aloy's midriff exposed, making it seem like a it's meant to defend against physical attacks at most, but it's actually the game's anti-fire damage outfit. Speaking of which, almost all outfits only protect against a single one of six damage types, and with most enemies attacking with multiple damage types, even the top-tier outfits always leave Aloy partially vulnerable. Said top-tier outfits only become available quite far into the story, and the initial ones are so worthless (providing a mighty 10% damage reduction on average) that the choice is essentially cosmetic. They also have only one weave slot, but that's okay because basic weave bonuses don't make much of a difference, anyway. It isn't until you get your hands on medium and heavy outfit versions, combined with some decent weaves, that outfits stop being completely useless and turn into situational life savers instead, especially on Ultra Hard difficulty where enemies deal several times their normal damage and quickly donning an outfit that protects against the current enemy's main attacks can mean the difference between life and death. The only outfit that averts this whole discussion is the unique Shield Weaver due to its Deflector Shields always providing some decent protection against all damage types. Still, Aloy's main defense regardless of difficulty is always dodging, never relying on armor to soak up hits - if you got hit, you did something wrong, and on Ultra Hard you'll probably be dead.
• None of the possible PCs, or your companions for that matter, wear armor in Jade Empire, and it doesn't affect their defense at all, although amusingly several incorrect descriptions of you by enemies describe you wearing head-to-toe suits of armor.
• In KanColle, the stronger enemy types and bosses are so powerful that they can one-shot even the player's toughest battleships. In such cases, it can be better to just avoid the defensive formations in favour of offence-oriented ones and hope your girls can sink or cripple them before they do it to you.
• Averted in Kingdom Come: Deliverance where even a simple gambeson can spell the difference between life and death and wearing quality plate armor can turn you from a squishy meat person into a nearly unstoppable tank. Just watch out for enemies with maces and warhammers.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • The only reason why Sora wears armor in Space Paranoids is to blend in. Of course, the armor happens to be his magical clothes in a different shape, and he can still use his Drive Forms; his circuits change color to match each form, from red to blue to yellow.
  • Completely played straight with his and Riku's armor for The Grid. Their armor's only purpose here is to hold their Identity Discs and, in Sora's case, his Recusant's Sigil; in Riku's case, his Spirit Dream Eater symbol.
  • The keyblade armors worn by Terra, Aqua, and Ventus in Birth By Sleep also count. In-universe, they're meant to protect their users from the darkness as they travel the Lanes Between, but in gameplay, the armor doesn't affect your defense stat or give any extra resistance to Dark attacks.
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, Mulan becomes much more powerful once she ditches all the armor she was wearing while pretending to be a man.
• Played with in League of Legends. Armor is a stat, which can be more or less useful depending on your opponent's team comp and the current meta. It's also zig-zagged with champion models; most tank characters are heavily armored (if often lacking helmets) while squishier characters are often in normal clothes, but there's always exceptions, like the skimpily-dressed Morgana being tougher than her fully-armored sister, Kayle, and the breastplate-wearing Lux being squishier than the shirtless Sylas. Sometimes it's justified by the unarmored characters being demigods or similar beings who don't really require armor in the first place.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The corrupted guard enemies debuting in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past wear so much plate armor that their face can't even be seen. Yet in all of their appearances, they are among the weakest enemies in the game unlike other armored enemies.
  • The improved graphics of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess reveal that Link wears chainmail under his trademark green tunic. But he takes exactly the same amount of damage from Blin attacks with the armor as he does without it in the prologue.
• Mass Effect both averts and plays this straight:
  • The first game included armor customization for both Shepard and his/her squadmates, with armor bonuses and protection factored in through multiple armor classes.
  • The sequel both played this straight and averted it. The player could now acquire armor pieces that improved various aspects of their health, shields, shield recharge time, ammo capacity, and so forth. Meanwhile, all of the squadmates' armors became merely cosmetic, with instances like Garrus' damaged armor, Miranda's catsuit, and Jack's "strips of clothing" having the exact same armor rating as their fully-armored versions from the Alternate Appearance Pack DLC's.
    • The two healthiest teammates are Grunt, a Krogan in full armor, and Thane, who wears a trenchcoat and bares the skin over his vital organs for medical reasons. However, this doesn't extend to the Suicide Mission, where characters who are heavily armored can fall just as easily as the one's who aren't during the rendezvous with the secondary fire team.
  • In the third game, squadmates received a 25% bonus to certain stats (shields, power damage, weapon damage, etc.) based on what costume they are wearing. However, the game also played it straight in certain situations (having Ashley/Kaidan potentially die from a single shot to their torso during the Cerberus Coup) and averted in others (Shepard's armor saving his/her life, but being burned off, when s/he's hit with Harbinger's beam).
    • Likewise, Tali is notably covered with what appears to be blood in the Extended Cut's evacuation scene, even if she's wearing her From Ashes DLC costume (which includes an armored facemask).
• Averted in Max Payne 3, where armoured paramilitaries and Dirty Cops are noticeably harder to kill than unprotected favela gangbangers or mobsters. The extreme of this are the thankfully rare Heavily Armored Mooks that are Immune to Bullets centre mass and can only be killed with headshots. It's especially obvious when Max goes to the UFE HQ and fights both the armoured frontliners and the unarmoured desk jockeys; the latter are much easier to kill.
• Metal Gear Online lets you customize your player characters, where you have the option of giving him/her combat armor or helmets, but these are merely aesthetic accessories, and have no effect on how much damage you take. You still take as much damage as shirtless male characters or bikini-clad female characters.
• Armor in Might and Magic 6 — 8 is only as good as three things: Your skill with the armor in question, The abilities of the enemy you're fighting, and how good your Repair Skill is. Given how many late-game enemies had abilities that (a) ignore armor class and (b) break armor, you may as well rely entirely on magic resistance once you reach the Lost Technology section of the games. Leather armor is slightly more useful than the other armors - every class that can use armor can upgrade the leather skill to a level where this is no disadvantage to having one on, which meshes well with that it, as all armors, can carry useful bonuses that have nothing to do with armor class (there are no non-armor options for the torso slot), and in 7 and 8 the Grandmaster bonus applies even if the armor class does not.
• Minecraft: Story Mode: Averted in Episode 3. Either Ellegard or Magnus can die depending on whose armor Jesse takes. Also inverted in regular Minecraft, as armor significantly reduces damage taken from enemies.
• Mission Impossible (1990): The instruction manual claims that Max Harte was ordered to wear heavy body armour to justify his slow speed in game. However, he takes the same amount of damage from attacks as the other two agents who wear normal clothing.
• Exists but to a lesser degree in the Monster Hunter series.
  • While armor is both useful and effective, the trope comes into play in terms of how you'll commonly use them. The good armor is made from killing the monster the armor set comes from many times to get loot used to make it. The problem is that the armor tends to be most resistant to the element said monster uses. Say you kill a monster with electric powers over and over again, you've now made armor most effective in defending against the very monster you now never need to see again. While the armor can still help if there's ANOTHER monster of that element you have trouble with, this still heavily contrasts with crafting weapons which do the opposite (are less effective against the monster you were grinding with and more effective on some other monster).
  • When it comes to offering damage protection from monster attacks, most armors in Monster Hunter games are horrible when faced with monsters of the same rank. You got armor with high elemental resistance and high raw defense? Yeah that's great, instead of being killed in 1-2 hits now you can take about 3 (maybe 4!) hits before dying.
• MORDHAU: Utterly averted. While blunt weaponry will still do its share of nasty damage, even that is dampened by some amount of armor. And full heavy armor will let you survive whole barrages of blows, especially swords and axes. It does slow you down significantly, but the other option risks instant death from just about every weapon. And trying to be clever by armoring only certain parts will not help; a lack of helmet will directly lead to a lack of head from a stray blow from anything, and skimping on leg armor will get you swept off your feet with very large and sharp/heavy implements, or most likely killed because a Bear Trap just claimed everything below the knee.
• In Mordheim: City of the Damned, you'll only rarely see players kit up their fighters in heavy armour. You'd be amazed just how many weapons can bypass armour - many of them are the kind of hefty, two-handed weapons that nimble and lightly-armoured fighters with good dodging skills would laugh at. Plus more obviously it limits the wearer's mobility, meaning they can't move very far per turn and are also more prone to falling and hurting themselves when trying to traverse ledges and gaps. Heavy armour does become fairly useful on fighters who expect to wade into heated melees with multiple opponents due to the limit on how many attacks the fighter can possibly dodge, but for one-on-one scraps and general exploration and looting, the extra mobility is way more useful.
• In Mount & Blade, most weapons do cutting damage, which is significantly hampered by armor. Piercing and blunt attacks get through more often, but generally have less power once they pass the armor.
• Neverwinter Nights was based on the D&D ruleset, so armor was completely useless for around half of all possible characters at higher levels and only moderately useful for the other half. Ditto Neverwinter Nights 2. At a certain level, you're wearing armor less for protection and more for the bonus effects from the enchantment on it.
• Nibblers: Bamboo Lizards' armor can block a match just fine, but when a Nibbler strikes, the armor is ignored.
• Operation Body Count. While most attacks will hit armor first, two enemies that start appearing in the first 10 levels will also damage your health directly regardless of armor: Giant rats and shock drones. The former has health damage reduced by the presence of armor, the latter completely bypasses it.
• Overwatch subverts it.
  • Armor reduces the damage of every projectile/attack by up to 5 points (a percentage until that point, so something that does less than 10 damage is only reduced by a percentage). Which means that characters who deal damage with rapid-fire, shotgun-style, or damage-over-time weapons (ex: Tracer, Reaper, Roadhog, Soldier: 76, Winston, Symmetra) have their damage noticeably reduced. However, since the damage reduction caps at 5 points, Armor does little to nothing against single attacks that do a lot of damage (ex: Pharah's rockets, Junkrat's grenades, Widowmaker's scoped rifle).
  • Played with in terms of character designs. Most of the higher HP characters tend to have models showing them wearing armor (such as Reinhardt, Winston, DVA, and Wrecking Ball) are covered in metal plating. Then there is Roadhog, who has the most raw health of the case, whose only armor is his Shoulders of Doom and his own oversized gut.
• Averted in Pacific Fleet and Atlantic Fleet. Heavily-armored ships won't take much damage from small-caliber guns, especially if they fire HE ammo instead of AP. However, like Real Life warships, ships in the game don't have the same armor stat everywhere, typically differentiating between belt and deck armor (the latter tends to be far weaker, favoring plunging shots and bomb airstrikes). Atlantic Fleet also adds Subsystem Damage, with heavier ships having their large-caliber turrets armored. This, of course, doesn't stop a tiny destroyer from sinking a battleship by getting close enough to launch a broadside of torpedoes.
• Averted in Paladins. Fernando, Ash, and Khan wear immense suits of armour that give them their huge tank health pools. The other frontlines have similar character design justifications for their health, such as being a stone-skinned giantess, an enormous tortoise, or a mech. Barik has the least health of the frontlines due to his much smaller stature but his body armour gives him more than any non-frontline.
• PAYDAY 2:
  • The game has various types of armor; the smaller and lighter armors offer little protection but don't really hamper your movement speed. Bulkier and heavier armors give more protection in exchange for slower speed and less stamina. Due to rebalancing for enemies and players in some updates and the introduction to the SWAT Van Turret, armor is torn up so fast (especially on Death Wish) that wearing bulky armor slows you down enough to get shot up and make your extra protection become gone in a matter of seconds. Most players prefer to wear a two-piece suit, which has no armor value but offers the highest stamina and speed values, plus it's the only "armor" that has a base value for dodge (random chance on whether a shot that hits you deals no damage). There's also several perk decks that can boost dodge even further, making you almost immune to being shot at if lady luck's at your side. Because armor is too cumbersome and is a liability for most, the majority of skilled players will never use armor. This also has a side-effect where most players attempting to stealth a heist will restart whenever stealth is broken instead of attempting to salvage things and leave guns blazing - "stealth" in this game is often more a matter of being able to move within a security guard's line of sight without arousing suspicion rather than actively staying out of sight. This is obviously much easier to do with a two-piece suit and an easily-concealable but likely weak weapon than it is coming in with full torso-, arm- and thigh-covering body armor and a heavy weapon that drops similarly-armored cops in one shot, which means that players gearing up for stealth aren't geared for surviving protracted firefights.
  • For the enemies, most of them are heavily armored on higher difficulties. Their heads have minimal protection, which makes having armor entirely pointless and explosive weapons can tear through armor anyway. The Bulldozer is covered from head to toe in armor, but the faceplate can be shot off, exposing the Bulldozer's face to further gunfire.
• In Pillars of Eternity there's nothing stopping a caster class from wearing heavy armor, but it does come at the cost of an increased recovery when it comes to performing actions.
• Armor in Postal 2 doesn't last very long. They're actually very effective at stopping damage from bullets, absorbing something like 80% of the damage you take. The issue is that your armor, even the silicon-carbide stuff with doubled durability, only survives a handful of bullets before getting destroyed, and the Postal Dude is your average everyman who nevertheless finds himself getting shot at about as often as any other FPS protagonist, so it's rare for you to keep armor for more than a couple minutes.
• [PROTOTYPE 2] has a DLC Pack which includes an Armored form for Protagonist James Heller, as well as another that was used by Alex Mercer in the first one; both of them are merely skins, so you won't take any less damage using either one. Averted for the first one, though; Armor Power does a number on your speed and mobility, but decreases the overall damage you'll take.
• Ragnarok Online — upper end armors like full plate armor are comparatively little more powerful than lesser armors. While a character in full plate in most RPGs can get beat on all day (especially by 'trash' and low level monsters) and not feel it, RO characters in full plate take much more damage than the idea of full plate armor seems to indicate. It is true that armor is upgradeable and you can add 'cards' to the slots, it is ridiculous how little protection the best armors give warriors and tanks.
• Played straight in the Rainbow Six games, though this is more of a case of Helmets Are Useless. Heavy armor will completely shrug off shotguns loaded with buckshot at point blank range as well as submachineguns with JHPs at long range, as long as it doesn't hit your head, which doesn't happen very often since enemies almost always aim for your head and are often equipped with assault rifles. In the first game, in particular, the AI was known to score headshots from beyond the real-life effective range of their weapons while looking completely the other way. Lampshaded in the original novel, where it is noted that 7.62 rounds will still go through their armour. It takes about three missions before anyone they go up against can even get a shot off, but once those odds are surmounted, a good chunk of Rainbow's Team One is dead or hospitalized despite the armor difference.
• Resident Evil 4: Completely averted by the suit of armor Ashley can wear as an unlockable costume in the game's rereleases. It makes her completely invincible from any kind of hazard in the game; bullets won't make her flinch, explosions will merely make her tumble, and enemies who try to kidnap her will fall and fail due to the armor's weight. This makes the segments with her much easier, as you don't need to worry about her safety anymore.
• Averted in Rimworld: like in the Dwarf Fortress example above, armor (or tough enough clothing) can reduce sharp damage and convert it to blunt damage which doesn't induce bleeding (unless it destroys a body part). Further clothing layers can reduce or negate this damage too, and they can also provide protection from fire. A lucky shot that hits an unarmored body part can still be lethal though.
• Averted in Sabres of Infinity with Banehardened armor, which, while incredibly expensive, renders the wearer extremely effective protection against conventional weapons.
• In Scribblenauts it is possible to create armor, helmets, shields, etc. but they don't make it any harder to die.
• In the anime-themed PC game Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, the enemies come in many varieties, some sporting basic uniforms, others power armor, and still others ten-foot-tall mini-mechas. The difference that makes in their durability is negligible: 100, 125, and 150 health points. All forms die to a single shotgun blast or a short burst from an assault rifle.
• In the video game based on Shrek 2, the armored knights you face in later levels are no tougher than the unarmoured peasants from the early game. Better yet, the knights are fully aware of this and complain about it in foppish Upper-Class Twit voices as Shrek and the gang pummel them.
  "Why is armor so useless?" "Ouch! Stupid cheap armor!"
• In the Siege of Avalon Anthology, the action takes place in a castle under siege, which had run out of good quality steel months earlier. Consequently, the armor and weapons coming out of the armory are pretty much worthless—one soldier calls them "tin swords and paper armor," and one of your earlier optional quests is to locate a cache of steel in the ruins of the town outside (though you only get a sword, not armor, for completing it). The real determining factors of whether you survive are how many hit points you have, how quickly you heal, whether you heal yourself using magic (and how good you are at it), and how many hits you actually take. Even the enchanted armor you can pick up toward the end of the game is more useful for the enchantments than the armor they're attached to.
• In The Sims Medieval, armor helps those who wear it (especially good-quality armors) but Sim level and Focus count for even more. The Spy is the only playable class who swordfights with no armor and an unarmored but high-level and focused Spy will usually beat an armored Sim with a lower level or focus.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) the first Iblis boss battle with Silver requires you to throw rocks at Iblis's ARMORED HEAD!
  • In Sonic Chronicles, only one playable character wears armour (discounting Omega, on account of being a robot). She has one of the lowest defences of the non-Squishy Wizard characters.
• SoulCalibur: The female warrior Hilde and male hero Siegfried both wear heavy plate armor, and yet they still take damage at the same rate as the rest of the cast, who wear ordinary clothes, fabric bodysuits, or in Voldo's case, a simple codpiece. Nightmare too; when he's not Siegfried, he is a set of heavy plate armor and still takes the same amount of damage as all the bondage-clad nudists running around. Plus, Darth Vader is in the fourth game and is subject to the same convention too (contradicting the Star Wars example above in "Film").
• Space Empires: Mostly averted in the series. It can have special effects, like damage regeneration, and armor-piercing weapons aren't very common.
• In Splatoon, unless it has an attached defense ability, a bulkier piece of gear doesn't protect any more than less bulky ones. Averted in single-player modes, where you can pick up to two (or three in the first game) pieces of armor, each serving as an extra life of sorts.
• Much like in 7.62 High Caliber, armor matters some but not much in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. There is a sensible difference between how many shots you can take while wearing a sunrise suit or an exoskeleton, but the latter definitely does not warrant carelessness: if you "run full-pelt into enemy strongholds gleefully spraying bullets, then your corpse will be strung up in their garden being used as a bird feeder before you can say 'reload, Doctor Freeman!'". Bullets hurt, you know.
• In StarCraft each point of armor translates to one point less damage taken from each attack. Given how little armor units have and the rate most units attack or do damage, this really doesn't make an appreciable difference.
  • Not entirely invoked because while armor typically does very little to reduce the damage of a Siege Tank which typically does a whopping 70 damage it matters little if you reduce the damage by a few points. But take a Terran Marine which typically does 6 points of damage and send him up against a fully upgraded Battlecruiser which will have 6 points of armor and the marine will do little to no damage.
  • Also, the "armor" stat isn't the full effect of armor. An unarmored human civilian has far fewer hitpoints than a generic marine.
• Star Trek Online has this problem due to the fact that the game really relies on DPS - even if you have a high resistance rating and powerful shields, escorts can melt that and your hull in an instant.
• Star Wars:
  • At first it was subverted in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Tanking classes, the ones who could take the most damage, typically wore heavy armor that would cover them head to toe, even the Jedi (though rarely with face-concealing gear). The Squishy Wizard classes were restricted to light armor, and the rest were an intermediate between the two.
    
    Then with later game updates, adaptive armor was added, which are really just Impossibly Cool Clothes. Since armor rating is based on the mods added to them, and adaptive armor sets could accept any mods, this allows players to disassemble hyper-advanced Powered Armor, put the components in a flashy robe or jacket, and get the exact same ratings. Now, the servers are filled with Jedi running around in Leia's stripper outfit and Troopers relying only on their well-toned abs for chest protection, with equal chances of winning against better-armed (and outfitted) opponents.
  • Played straight (at least after you become a Jedi) in Knights of the Old Republic, where the main character wearing armor actually makes Force powers unusable, making it necessary to downgrade from heavy combat vests to the simple robes of a Jedi. The sequel introduces a few types of armor designed for Force-users that lack this restriction, although they're only available as random loot.
  • Humorously lampshaded in Star Wars Battlefront 2. After gunning down Stormtroopers, Rebel soldiers can be heard to mockingly say "Yeah, that armor worked real well, didn't it?".
• In the Syphon Filter series starting with the second game, certain enemies deliver headshots that One-Hit Kill regardless of armor condition. Explosions fire and certain high-power guns also ignore armor. In the fourth game, there are thugs that wear both flak jackets and helmets but still die from a single headshot.
• Averted in Team Fortress 2 with the Heavy and Demoman, who wear black ballistic vests and have the highest amount of health of all the classes (300 and 175 HP respectively) (aside from the Soldier, who has 200).
• In the Total War series, whether armored troops are useful depends on both how you use them and what they're up against. Heavy knights on foot or on horseback can tear into light infantry with minimal losses and wade through heavy arrow barrages with limited casualties, but horse-mounted knights are still very vulnerable to pikemen and spears even with all their armor and barding. Dismounted heavily-armored troops are also vulnerable to cavalry charges unless they have their own spears since all that armor won't help when a lance-wielding knight in full plate charges you on the back of a furious destrier. Heavy armor can also be a drawback when fighting certain heavy infantry types like Venetian Hammers, who deal massive bonus damage to heavily-armored units. Also averted in "The Fall of the Samurai" DLC for Total War: Shogun 2 with ironclads, which are extremely tough compared to the wooden, or even armored, warships. For instance, the best way to kill a wooden ship is to fire incendiary ammo at it, causing it to be set on fire. Can't do that with an ironclad, and most non-AP shots bounce off without doing any serious damage. Armor-piercing ammo, though, can do enough damage to hurt even an ironclad.
• Tyrian: Once your ship loses its shields, its own armor is what separates you from a very explosive death. On higher difficulties, even ships with the highest armor ratings will fall apart after about a dozen hits.
• Undertale has some boss monsters covered in armor and checking their stats shows they got the defense to back it up. However, depending on what weapon you use and how high your LV is, you can take down those heavily armored monsters in just a few hits. It's explained in-universe that someone with a ton of malice and hatred can easily destroy a monster's body and soul (sometimes in a single strike), even if said monster is supposed to be way stronger than the human that is attacking them. It is also explained that a monster is extremely sensitive to the emotions and feelings of those around them and they get weak if they face against someone who has a lot of negative energy. LV stands for Level of Violence (i.e. a stat for It Gets Easier), which explains why you can easily one shot almost anyone if it gets really high.
• Warcraft III: Armor reduces damage taken from standard attacks, but the effects aren't very visible at low levels. The type of armor also matters: Fortified armor takes a lot less damage from most attacks, but takes more damage from siege weapons.
  • The human Footman is covered in metal, yet has one less point of armor than the half-naked orc Grunt.
• Inverted in Warframe.
  • High-level Grineer enemies and numerous mechanized Corpus proxies wear alloy or ferrite armor, which sharply cuts incoming damage from most damage sources. Corrosive damage is one of the most popular damage types in the game because of its ability to permanently reduce the armor of those hit, rendering the target vulnerable. This is especially noticeable with the colossal Eidolons, who enjoy Contractual Boss Immunity on top of insane amounts of armor that renders anything other than a radiation-specced weapon or an anti-Sentient weapon useless. Before you even get to that, you have to penetrate its nigh-invulnerable Deflector Shields, which can only be breached by the Void energy produced by the Operators.
  • At the same time though, Grineer heavy armour means that even basic Lancers and Troopers are Incredibly Durable Enemies that can take a few bursts of fire if you don't shoot them in the face, and their Elite Mooks are even tougher. In contrast, Corpus only wear future spacesuits and have to rely on their Deflector Shields, turning into Glass Cannon once those are down.
  • Played with when it comes to player Warframes. Most have pitiful to moderate armor values and don't need any higher, as the primary defenses of most Warframes are shields. Not so for Rhino, Atlas, and Valkyr. Rhino's Iron Skin multiplies his existing armor value which is already high and adds it as a layer of extra health, Atlas's power strength increases proportionally to his armor level, and Valkyr's armor without mods or powers is a flat 600. Compare that to Excalibur, the poster-boy, at 225.
  • The frames Inaros and Nidus deserve special mention, as both frames completely lack Deflector Shields and must rely on both armor and health-restoring abilities to survive. Inaros in particular compensates with an immense health pool, multiple health-restoring skills and an armor-boosting skill that can leech health, whereas Nidus has Regenerating Health, a health-restoring skill and gains up to 50% more armor when fully leveled.
• Zigzagged in War Thunder when it comes to ground vehicles. While thick and/or well-angled armor can shrug off rounds, some lightly armored vehicles are deceptively survivable since their thin armor allows armor-piercing rounds to simply pass through without fragmenting. At the same though, the introduction of the hull break mechanic means that rounds with sufficient explosive charge like HE, HESH and HEAT rounds can knock out any lightly-armored vehicle. When it comes to early Cold War tanks, heavy tanks often struggle for relevancy since their steel armor weighs them down significantly yet can be easily penetrated by shaped-charge warheads used by more lightly armored vehicles. However, later Cold War/modern tanks have reactive and composite armor that can protect them from anything short of armor-piercing dart rounds or top-attack missiles. Overall, while armor can be a life-saver, mobility and stealth often take a higher priority in the current meta.
• In Wasteland 2, armor is not only useless, it's actually a hindrance more often than not. The effect it has against conventional attacks is minimal. Heavier suits slow the wearer down, when those that would benefit the most from heavy armor (characters that need to get up close and personal to the enemies) also require good speed to function. Furthermore, enemies tend to use Energy Weapons toward the end of the game, which do significantly more damage against targets in heavy armor. At that point, it's better to just strip down. Director's Cut reworked energy weapon damage so there's no downside to wearing light armor and some of the perks let you stack up enough armor points for decent protection, but heavy armor remains incredibly impractical.
• Increasingly played straight in World of Tanks. Highly armored vehicles take little or no damage when shot by much weak guns, but the game has increasingly been pushed toward weapon penetration beating armor as new tanks with high-penetration guns have been introduced and the decision was made to allow premium ammo (which usually has superior armor-penetration ability to standard ammo) to be purchased with in-game currency instead of real money. This means that even the fearsome T95, which boasts the thickest frontal armor of any tank in the game, is still vulnerable to shots penetrating its front glacis.
• While armor is quite important and tends to provide benefits other than sheer protection in World of Warcraft, these values don't necessarily correlate with the amount of armor. Females get away with much less armor in general, and an Eyepatch provides just as much protection as a full plate helmet, as long as it's given the same armor class. Another weird instance is the druid's bear form, which, despite not showing any armor whatsoever, magically quintuples the armor rating of his equipment, enabling the usually rather fragile, leather-wearing class to be a very capable tank which outranks full plate warriors and paladins in terms of sheer physical damage reduction (however, they can't use shields to block or weapons to parry, and have a rather limited array of abilities). Of course, given their magical nature, it's possible that this is representing the druid's bear form incorporating the magic from his or her armor into a magically reinforced thick hide. In addition, this trope applies when fighting elemental enemies whose elemental damage ignores armor, as do spells. Which kinda makes sense to some extent; getting hit by a fireball will probably melt you the same regardless of the thickness of what you're wearing — it may even be worse with metal armor if it's hot enough — but considering how the fire came from a flaming boulder, and therefore part of the damage is blunt force trauma, there's many types of magic for which you must scour your brain for the reasoning of how it damages someone, in that you'll survive a fireball from someone around the same level around you, despite how it's hot enough to set a boulder on fire, which makes it kind of like a meteor.
• X-COM:
  • X-COM: UFO Defense is a peculiar case that caused a fair bit of Natter. A soldier wearing the most powerful armor in the game, hit where it's thickest, has roughly a 2/3 chance of surviving one hit from the most common alien weapon. There's no guarantee against multiple shots. What would be rejected in most games is here a crucial improvement from losing half the squad on nearly every mission. The first armor available occasionally saves from getting their faces imploded, and instead leaves them in dire need of a medic on the field and time in the infirmary when they return.^note Thus doing exactly what reasonable armor can be expected to do in real life; making what would have been fatalities into living casualties. It's another major development.^note The reasoning behind the armor in the game is somewhat complicated and involves random numbers. Basically, when a unit is hit by an attack, the attack can do between 50 and 200 percent of its base damage. That damage value is then compared to the armor value of the unit (which varies depending on where it is hit), and an additional random value is either added or subtracted to the armor value. If the modified armor value is greater than the modified damage value, the armor holds and nothing happens: no armor reduction, no damage to the unit, nothing. If the armor value is less than the damage value, then the armor is damaged and some of the damage "bleeds" through to the unit. With plasma weapons and rookie soldiers, ANY damage bleed is likely going to kill them, but the damage roulette means that it's entirely possible (though extremely unlikely) for a human rookie with no armor to survive a Heavy Plasma shot to the chest. Better armor obviously means higher armor values but they don't guarantee survival odds, just improve them.
  • Tricky players note that advanced armor makes automatic high-explosive and incendiary rounds into amusing close combat weapons and that its flying version reduces Chryssalids from nigh-invincible instant death machines to mostly harmless. (While it also makes Silacoids completely harmless, that's not really a downgrade for them.) The sequel Apocalypse has much stronger armor.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the 2012 reboot of X-Com, plays Body Armor As Hitpoints, and it does improve your operatives's survivability in battle as long as you take care to avoid getting exposed to flanking attacks, as critical hits will still hurt like crazy. In some cases, the armor can even help your operatives avoid being hospitalized in the medical bay for days or even weeks if the damage they suffered is less than the bonus health provided by the armor. Furthermore, the advanced suits of armor all possess unique abilities that give your operatives other benefits besides protection from weapons fire. The Enemy Within expansion pack adds MEC troopers wearing Powered Armor (although they have to literally lose An Arm and a Leg to be able to do that, replacing them with robotic substitutes). MEC troopers are very tough to kill, especially since going into Overwatch without moving during the turn adds more protection. This is to compensate for the fact that MEC troopers are too large to be able to hide behind objects and are thus always exposed.
  • XCOM 2 has armor pulling double duty: in addition increasing hit points, heavy armor (and a specific Grenadier skill) provides armor plating, which is a straight damage reduction: 1 point of armor plating reduces the damage from an attack by 1 point. However, armor plating, while nice to have, is rarely worth stacking: there's a number of attacks, including common grenades and increasingly common acid attacks, that can shred armor plating for the remainder of the mission, rendering it useless, and it's difficult to get 3 points of armor plating on one character^*requiring a W.A.R. Suit on a Grenadier that took the Blast Padding skill, which is not very useful when enemies start doing 10+ points of damage per attack, most of which shred or even ignore armor. The inverse, however, is not true: the alien enemies you can fight against get plenty of armor, from the lowly Shieldbearer with 1 point, to the Andromedon with 4 points, and all the way up to the Gatekeeper with 7 points, and usually with excessive health pools as well.
• Justified in Xenonauts. Not only are the enemy soldiers using plasma weapons, which wouldn't even be impeded by Kevlar, but the game takes place at the dawn of The '80s when mass-produced bulletproof vests as standard issue infantry was still in the future anyway. One of the first research projects that opens up after capturing some samples of alien weapons is some armour that is not useless, although the best you can say for the cumbersome and only marginally protective "Jackal" armour you unlock first is that it's better than nothing. However, no armour will be of any use against Reapers. One blow from a Reaper will immediately convert any soldier it hits into a zombified horror, which spawns another Reaper when killed.
• In zOMG, your character's appearance is fully independent of your stats, to allow for total character customization. However, this also means that no matter how cool that Mythrill Armor(sic) looks on you, or how badass you look with your giant axe, you can still get killed by a flamingo if you don't have rings. The opposite is true as well. This is illustrated in the zOMG Manga, where a guard named Baldur is equipped with rare and expensive Mythrill Armor and an Ancient Katana, but is still taken out in one hit by a Buzz Saw. Conversely, Dani (Who is wearing Armor, but forgoes the chest plate) and Blaze (who isn't wearing armor at all, save for a small leather jacket) are much more effective fighters.

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