Attack Its Weak Point / Video Games

The intimidating four-armed behemoth's weakness is his tongue? That PDA really does come in handy.

Cases of enemies and other entities that have some specific section of them more susceptible to damage.

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• ANNO: Mutationem:
  • The Mother Grub occasionally opens it mouth to prepare for an aggressive attack, allowing a chance to Feed It a Bomb and deal piercing damage from within its body.
  • T.R's offensive battle mech will open up it control panels after firing a Macross Missile Massacre, providing an opening to fire the Tunguska launcher to heavily deplete its armor bar to momentarily stun it.
  • Against the MI Mecha, it will briefly stand immobile while activating aerial attack weapons, causing its head to momentarily loosen the armor around it, exposing the weak spot to let it receive double damage from attacks.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine: In Chapter 4, Henry needs to chop off the joints on Bertrum's mechanical arms with an axe.
• Contra likes the red, glowing orb variety, at least in earlier games.
• Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls:
  • Monokuma drones take extra damage if you shoot them in the eye, meaning most of them can be taken down with one well-placed shot.
  • Each of the Warriors of Hope has a Mini-Mecha with a weak point that becomes exposed under certain conditions, which you have to attack to defeat it. For example, Jataro's robot Doctor Von Geralt has a weak point on its head, so to access it you have to knock it over by using Knockback ammo to hit it with its own bombs.
• Genji: Days of the Blade: The Trope Namer is a demonstration at E3 2006, in which Bill Rich demonstrates one of the games's boss battles — namely, the battle against the "Giant Enemy Crab" boss. After he "flips over this crab on its back," he narrates, "And you attack its weak point for massive damage."
• Hi-Fi RUSH: In the first boss battle, after Chai has forcibly damage the facial armor of the Humongous Mecha to make it fall off, he lampshades how it practically says weak spot.
• The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon:
  • Normally nearly invulnerable and so tough he can shrug off attack from the Dragon Elders, the golem still has vulnerable eyes, as well as spots containing life crystals which can be destroyed to stop him.
  • The Destroyer is a monster the size of a city that can only be harmed by attacking its heart, which in turn can only be exposed by destroying crystal clusters scattered across its body.
• Marvel's Avengers: Large robotic enemies, such as the war robot and the robot airship, can only be damaged by attacking their cooling vents and their eyes.
• Virtual-ON:
  • Operation Moongate Final Boss Z-Gradt has one where he is grey with ultra-heavy armour most of the time, but turns gold at one point, while also deploying a truly MASSIVE cannon. During this period he is much more vulnerable, as long as you aren't hit by his cannon.
  • Oratorio Tangram's midboss Bradtos employs a similar method, although the shots it use when it exposes the weakness is far weaker than Z-Gradt's cannon.
  • Tangram herself is like this. Her shell is all but invulnerable to your attacks, until part of it breaks away to expose her eye-shaped emblem. But again, exposure of said weak point also means she's about to unleash her most powerful attacks.
• The colossi in Shadow of the Colossus all possess glowing sigils on their flesh that can only be revealed by sunlight reflected off the protagonist's magic sword. Hitting this spot is the only real way to inflict any injury to them; somewhere between half to ninety percent of the fight (depending on the boss) is exposing it/getting there.
• Sly Cooper:
  • In the final battle of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, Clockwerk needs to be hit in the areas where Carmelita has recently shot him with her shock pistol.
  • In a few boss battles in Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, particularly those fought in Sly's biplane or with Dimitri's speargun, the weak point is Dr. M, who is connected to the boss monster via the massive plug in his head.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil 4:
    • Happens with a variety of baddies, but the worst are the Regenerators and Iron Maidens. Scary as hell and nigh invincible, and you see the first one before you can even attack its weak point. They require a thermal scope on a sniper rifle,^note They can be killed without the scope, but they have a colossal pool of HP and you can run out of ammo very quickly if you try to fight them this way. but always attack from close range. That means while you're trying to snipe them, they're eating, impaling, flailing at you and freaking you the hell out.
    • After a certain point, using headshots on the regular mooks may just cause them to sprout Combat Tentacles.
  • Regenerators and Iron Maidens have nothing on the Resident Evil 5 Reapers, giant cockroaches who not only quickly regenerate lost limbs and heads, but can shield their weak point, a squishy white egg sac. A number of other enemies have weak points that may or may not require a partner to expose and exploit, such as Popokarimu's squishy under-abdomen, Ndesu's giant plaga growth, Uroboros' glowing red clusters, and Wesker's concealable weak spot / any rocket he catches in his hands. And of course, who could forget the ever-trusty bullet to the face?
• The bosses in the House of the Dead series take minimal damage if hit anywhere other than a designated weak point, though blasting at that weak point really will deal out huge damage to them, like Justice from 4 for example, whose weak point is his tongue (pictured above). However, the first boss in the first game — Chariot — subverts this just a tad by having its armor blown off when its health gets down to a third, allowing you to fire at the soft, pink body underneath anywhere you wish. This is also the in-game manual's Hand Wave for why agents in the spinoff/parody Typing of the Dead are running around wearing keyboard-guns — the typing feeds into an autotargeting mechanism which eliminates all risk of friendly fire and automatically discovers and isolates weak spots in targets.
• Metroid:
  • In general, the series uses this trope liberally. The only boss that isn't hit for massive damage is Ridley (Kraid in the original game also, but the remake has since gone with his Kaiju-sized form from Super), with whom the only strategy is "make him dead before he makes you dead". And even then it only applies sometimes — Meta-Ridley always has at least one form that can't be damaged unless you aim for his torso. Omega Pirate from Metroid Prime inverts this: He has no specific weak spots, but before you can harm him you have to first blast away his armour (which means you attack his strong points first).
  • Metroid II: Return of Samus: Blob throwers must be destroyed from the top down, unless Samus is using the ice or wave beams. It counters by throwing floating "blobs" to try and stop her from getting above it.
  • Hilariously in the first Metroid Prime game, there's a rock monster boss that looks almost exactly like the one in Galaxy Quest. You must use the thermal visor in order to find his weak spot (a random piece of rock that changes after he takes enough damage).
  • The various Metroid metamorphoses in Metroid: Samus Returns are only vulnerable from their exposed belly nuclei, a crucial change from Metroid II: Return of Samus where they could be shot anywhere.
• The bosses in the original R-Type used this system, and the third level took it to extremes by featuring just a single, giant enemy with a number of weak points; the player had to pilot his ship around the boss itself, blowing up each part in turn.
• Choo-Choo Charles: Downplayed. Charles can be damaged by shooting him anywhere, but it takes a very long time to drain his health. Shooting him in his face, however, will take away bigger chunks of his health and also stagger him briefly.
• Chrono Trigger
  • Late in the game there is a boss called the Son of the Sun, who is a giant eyeball surrounded by a ring of flames. You can only attack the surrounding flames, and all but one will take no damage and counterattack when hit. The one that you can hit to actually damage the boss looks exactly the same as the others, and is only identifiable through trial-and-error. To make this worse, it uses an attack called "Roulette Shuffle" that spins the flames around so the one you attack is in a completely different area.
  • Subverted by Chrono Trigger's final boss, Lavos, who appears to be a humanoid figure flanked by biological orbs. It turns out that the "Lavos Core" is actually one of the orbs, while the humanoid is just a drone that regenerates like the other orb. Many parties die before finally discovering this crucial fact.
• Star Fox:
  • The series is fond of this, often in the obviously-glowing-red variation. Of particular note is one boss in Star Fox Command whose weak point is essentially a giant glowing butt. The enemy forces are mainly apes and monkeys, you see, and this boss is a Humongous Mecha baboon.
  • Peppy usually tells where the weak points are. "Aim for his back!" "Aim for the open spot!" "Maybe it's an arm! Aim for the arm!" "Shoot the tentacles to open the core!"
  • Star Fox Adventures :
    • The first boss from can be attacked, but you can't truly harm him not matter how much you whack his tail with a stick. In fact, he's so tough, he can only be hurt from within. Do enough damage so he gets annoyed and eats you, so you can attack it from inside.
    • There's a normal, area-specific enemy that can only be hurt on a spot on its back. Circle-strafe all you want; it'll keep up. You have to hit it with a Ground Quake to make it turn around so you can hit it on its back.
  • The series also features some subversions, though. Andross is the eye type, but shooting his eyes only stuns him briefly. To defeat him, the player has to first shoot his hands off, then shoot the head anywhere BUT the eyes. On the right route, he then reveals his true form: a giant brain with detachable eyeballs that shoot lasers, whose sole weak spot is the cerebellum.
• Almost all of the large Grigori bosses in Star Ocean: The Last Hope have a glowing core that needs to be struck in order to cause anything more then Scratch Damage.
• Lost Planet takes this to the extreme. Every single Akrid—from the weakest cannon fodder all the way up to the Superboss—has orange weak points. It's worth noting that although Akrid make up a significant portion of the enemies in the single-player game, they're not the only ones; humans (the head) and Vital Suits (the engine or the kneecaps) also have them.
• Killer7:
  • The majority of the Heaven's Smiles have a glowing yellow spot somewhere on their body. Shooting this kills them instantly and grants you far more blood (used to heal and for power-ups) than gunning them down the standard way. Heaven's Smiles without the yellow spot have similar vulnerabilities — the enlarged part of a Phantom Smile, the eye of a Giant Smile, the shirt on an Ulmeyda Smile, the cockpit on the part of it's body that looks like a jet that it uses to fly around...
  • Most comical is the Ceramic smile boss, a big hulking monster of a smile that runs fairly quickly. Just shoot his heart through the convenient hole in his chest once. At least he has the sense to turn tail and run when you have your gun pointed at him.
• Traditionally, the only way to harm Dracula's first form in the Castlevania games is to hit him in the head. In Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, there is the giant mecha-centaur demon knight (well, at least it's original) called Eligor. To kill him, you have to attack his eyeball, which is for some reason on the back of his head. The only way to actually be able to damage him is to get onto his back, and getting there requires destroying a number of glowing red orbs on his legs to make him drop to his knees first.
• Doom II: The Final Boss of the game, the Icon of Sin, has you firing rockets into the brain of the Icon. When using the idclip cheat, however, you can go into the brain and see... John Romero's severed head impaled on a stick. Also, if you reverse what the demon chants at the start of the battle, you'll hear the message "To win the game you must kill me, John Romero!"
• In Thief II: The Metal Age, both the larger and smaller versions of the "Children of Karras" have a glowing-red coal hatch on the rear of their boilers. Unless you have an implausibly large amount of fire arrows or explosive mines available, hitting that coal hatch with water arrows is the only way in the game to disable one. Humorously, this is Lampshaded in-game by an engineer's report asking what the hell the designer was thinking leaving the boiler so exposed like that, especially in a world where Water Arrows are well-known tools, and saying they really need to fix that ASAP.
• In Team Fortress 2:
  • Hitting an enemy in the back with the knife as a Spy.
  • Hitting an enemy in the back with fire from the Pyro's Backburner flamethower.
  • Shooting an enemy in the head with the Sniper's sniper rifle or the Spy's Ambassador.
• The "headshot=death" rule has become more-or-less universal, providing players with an intuitive, sensible advanced technique for dispatching foes. Famously, completing the Halo games on the punishing "Legendary" difficulty requires a mastery of it.
  • This was avoided, though, in Team Fortress 2 (for every class besides Sniper, anyway), which deliberately removed them (and replaced them with more-or-less random criticals) because the developers felt that headshots rewarded obsessive players at the expense of casual gamers and were unfriendly to team play.
  • Also avoided in PlanetSide. The in-universe justification is apparently that the Auraxian factions were smart enough to give their soldiers durable enough helmets to take your average rifle round without causing more damage than a body-shot. The sniper rifle takes off 75% of your average armored grunt's HP in one shot no matter where you hit, anyway. ^note The real reason? While the developers were working on the game, they played a lot of Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament as "research." Their boss apparently sucked at both of them, and after getting killed hundreds upon hundreds of times with headshots, he insisted that there be no headshots in their game.
  • On the flip side, Metal Gear Online (at least the version packaged with MGS4) has an in-game option in which players hosting a match can decide to enable a "Headshots Only" mode, in which you're penalized if you shoot an opposing player anywhere but their head. And considering just how headshot-unfriendly the game's controls are to begin with...
• Lampshaded in Conker's Bad Fur Day. One Terminator-like robot boss sports a huge flashing red button on his back reading "Do Not Push." The next boss combines this (hitting him in his vulnerable spot is literally the only way to hurt him) with a rather nasty form of Groin Attack (crushing his "vulnerables" between a pair of bricks). Nearly all the bosses have this — Mecha-Teddy has the gigantic yellow hole that opens up when you shoot his possessed dolly, the big caveman can only be dealt with by using your velociraptor to headbutt his groin, and then bite his ass.
• Mega Man:
  • Inverted in Mega Man ZX. The eight main bosses have a weak point, but hitting them there damages the biometal you are trying to take from them, resulting in costly repairs after the fight, or a rematch. The ideal outcome is to defeat them without ever hitting the weak spot. A few bosses actually have annoyingly easy-to-hit weaknesses.
  • Played straight in its predecessor, Mega Man Zero though, with Omega. In the aforementioned Boss' first form, he's only vulnerable on the black portion of his torso. For his One-Winged Angel, the target is raised, with the horn of the central head as the target. His Bishōnen Line form, however, lacks any such weakness. Similarly, the One-Winged Angel forms of Copy-X, Elpizo, and Dr. Weil are all found on their heads.
  • ZX Advent plays this straight enough, since Model A copies the bosses' DNA at the same quality no matter how hard you bang on weak points. Some bosses don't have any weak points, however, and just need to be hammered on the old-fashioned way.
  • In the pre-predecessor Mega Man X, expect the Giant Enemy Crab and all variants to have its head be the weakness. That also applies to the nearly omnipresent Big Bad Sigma, who most often has his head or the gem on his forehead being the weakness. It's averted with X8's Final Boss Lumine, who despite having an obvious crystal sticking out his chest, is vulnerable to hits on his actual body whenever his shield isn't up.
  • There's another example in Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X, particularly in The Day of ∑ prequel when a mechaniloid went berserk. Its generator is its weak point. Accordingly...
  Chill Penguin: Shoot the generator X! Shoot the generator!
  • Lampshaded in Mega Man Legends, where the villains complain whenever the mooks expose a weakpoint in their indestructable vehicle order to make a rear-facing attack.
  • Played straight in X7, where your mission control tells you "The head is his weak point, aim for the head!" on one of the Mavericks. EGM poked fun at this by that image being screen capped and the reviewer saying "really, I never would have tried that on my own".
  • Played with in Mega Man X4. One of Sigma's final form is a giant head that spits debris at you. There's a big, blinking red orb on his forehead, which has baited many gamers into shooting at it. But its real weak point is its mouth.
• Metal Gear:
  • Attempted justification in Metal Gear Solid. The Humongous Mecha's designer was an eccentric soul who felt that it needed a "personality flaw" to make it complete. Therefore the only part of the mecha which isn't practically invincible is the target-shaped box of sensors sticking off the side, without which the pilot is deaf and blind. This forces the pilot to open up the cockpit in order to see what he is doing, leaving the controls vulnerable to your missiles. Strangely, the weakest part of the cockpit is not the guy sitting in it.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater this is justified: the back of the Walking Behemoth Shagohod falls off when you attempt to destroy it by blowing up a bridge from underneath it and the only part left unarmored is the back of the cockpit, which was never to be exposed. Shooting the threads with the RPG-7 also helps considerably.
  • Beating Vamp is made a lot easier in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty if you shoot for the crotch.
• Half-Life:
  • In the original Half-Life, you kill the Nihilanth by destroying the crystals it's using to heal and then shooting everything you've got at its massive head.
  • Half-Life: Alyx has several, all of which can be discerned more easily using the Reflex Sight upgrade for the pistol or SMG:
    • Combine Grunts who have gas tanks on their back can be taken out by shooting the tank's valve, which causes the tank to explode and damage anything nearby. Grunts can also be one-tapped by shooting the grenades they carry, but this is considerably more difficult.
    • Armored headcrabs are covered in bulletproof growths and must be killed by shooting the glowing heart on their underside, which they usually only expose when they rear up and screech the second before they leap at you.
    • Some headcrab zombies have a green tumor on one of their limbs. Shooting the tumor causes it to explode and kill the zombie.
    • Whenever a Reviver headcrab takes control of a zombie corpse, it inflates a certain part of the zombie's body, which you then have to shoot to injure it; doing this enough times forces the Reviver to abandon the corpse it's currently controlling.
    • Antlions have armored shells and can only be killed by shooting off their front legs and then damaging their exposed abdomen. Spitter antlions are easier pickings for those with sufficiently good aim, as they'll expose their abdomen every time they perform their spit attack.
• Portal:
  • GLaDOS in Portal is a massive supercomputer taking up an entire room... but she also happens to have a massive Venus-like structure hanging out from the roof... with four glowing orbs on it (which are also massive). Hmmm... oh look, it's your old pal, the rocket turret!
  • In Portal 2, Wheatley tries to protect himself with shields. Too bad you have a portal gun.
• Lampshaded in Heavenly Sword, where Kai threatens a guard with a very painful Groin Attack if he doesn't cough up the password to the armory where the titular sword is.
• The enemy ships in Einhänder, aside from small-fighter type cannon fodder, were usually segmented. Shooting the main body of the ship would destroy it eventually, but simply destroying the cockpit and (in some ships) the engines would cause the ship to crash and explode.
• Gradius: "Shoot the Core!" The series has a number of iconic "Core" bosses, which have one of more cores hidden behind barriers. You have to avoid the boss' attacks long enough to expose the core(s) and destroy it/them.
• Punch-Out!!:
  • King Hippo has two weak points: his belly-button and the back of his throat. And you can't get to either right away. In the Wii game's Title Defense mode, he covers up said belly button with a manhole. This turns out to be a Double Subversion of this trope, as the way to beat him is to knock off said manhole and expose his weak point.
  • All fighters are obviously vulnerable to a hard right hook, but Glass Joe is especially weak, getting knocked out by one punch.
• Far Cry:
  • It's hard to notice, but this is actually subverted in the PC version. The large, glowing green orbs in the chests of the rocket launcher-wielding Giant Mooks are actually part of their armor, and they actually take less damage when shot there. Their real weak point is, common-sensibly enough, their head.
  • Played straight, but in a fairly tongue-in-cheek manner, for the final boss. He's a super-mutant with loads of health, but he can be killed in less than a second by shooting him in the crotch (something of an Easter egg, as there is no in-game indication that shooting him there would have that effect).
• Devil May Cry:
  • In the first game, Phantom can only be hurt by strikes to the face (high damage, but that's where he shoots fireballs from), and back (less damage, but less risk). Nightmare has a weakpoint that you have to expose by first solidifying it, then smashing the glowy circle.
  • Beowulf from Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening can be struck in his eye for greater damage than attacking the rest of his body. If Dante or Vergil lowers his health to the points where he Turns Red by hitting the eye, Beowulf will stumble and give a few more vital seconds for dealing damage. Cerberus from the same takes more damage from getting hit on either of his three heads. The Leviathan Heartcore, also from the same, needs to have its two accompanying "organs" destroyed before it opens up and makes itself vulnerable.
• The final boss in Descent 2 is covered by a force field in the front, and thus can only be hit from the rear. Worse, unless you happen to be cloaked, he will always turn to face you. You're meant to detonate a multi-warhead missile on a wall behind him, causing the secondary warheads to hit his weak spot. Didn't stockpile enough Earthshaker missiles ahead of time? You're screwed.
  • Unless you're really skilled with Smart Mines and Guided Missiles, or have a lot of spare cloaking devices.
• Halo has plenty of examples that aren't just the usual "shoot head for max damage" ones:
  • Hunters have strong armor covering most of their bodies. The weak points are the back, which is bigger and generally easier to go after, especially on co-op, and under the chin, which is much harder to hit but has the advantage of being accessible while they're facing you.
  • If you shoot the infection form inside the Flood combat forms (they're located in the part of the chest where the sensory tentacles are sticking out), they take more damage, or die in one hit if you have the right weapon.
  • The Scarab's weak point is a reactor core hidden in the center of its platform. Common strategies include using a aerial vehicle (or in the case of the Scarab in New Mombasa in Halo 2, a ledge above it) to land on its platform to get to the reactor core, or in Halo 3, firing at its legs until it lowers itself so it can be climbed.
  • Some vehicles have weak spots that you can hit for extra damage, with examples including the Ghost's left-side fuel cell and the Wraith's rear-end exhaust port.
  • In Halo 5: Guardians, the Promethean Knights and Soldiers, as well as the Warden Eternal, will expose big glowing weak spots (or in the Warden's case, a big dark one) once you knock off enough of their armor.
  • Also from Halo 5, the Grunt Goblin has weak spots on its front and back that can be exposed if you knock off the armor covering them.
• Although nearly all bosses in Rocket Knight Adventures (with the exception of Axel Gear) follow this trope, the third boss in the first game displays an interesting variant. The boss is a fish-shaped submarine-like vehicle partially submerged in lava, and the vehicle itself is completely invulnerable. The only way to deal damage is to wait until the rare occasions when the pilot is exposed and attack him.
• The Bosses in Jet Island have a Power Crystal that must be attacked to destroy them.
• Pokémon:
  • The anime's issues with New Powers as the Plot Demands aside, Parasect doesn't have just a double weakness to Flying and Fire, but in Generation IV, potentially a triple weakness to Fire if it has the Dry Skin ability.
  • Shedinja takes it even further, with its special ability. Only super-effective attacks or indirect damage (poison, weather) will work at all, but it's a guaranteed KO.
• Battlefield:
  • Tanks take realistic damage; shooting rockets to the front of the tank does minimal damage, more damage to the sides, and the most damage to the back. Smart players with this knowledge will always try to flank around to the back of the tank rather than take it head on.
  • The battlewalkers in Battlefield 2142 can shrug off most everything short of a suicidal transport pilot. However, there is a flimsy vent underneath that potentially allows someone with a pistol to inflict massive damage. The Titan supercarriers present a similar situation: they can only be damaged from outside by BLOC-3 missiles, but can be infiltrated to get to its creamy nuclear core.
• Almost every enemy you encounter in Dead Space, although how you are supposed to hit them is a bit different. Headshots are a joke in this game, instead you must shoot their limbs (hands, legs, tails, tentacles). The big ones even have their joints explicitly shown to the players. Exploders even have two weak points: their explosive pustule and its joint with the shoulder. Bosses and mini-bosses have big yellowish pustules that you should obviously know what to do with them. The "almost" part in this case are the Swarmers, which die in one hit no matter where you hit them, and Dividers, which do not have a weak point. New enemies in Dead Space: Extraction still follow this trend. Some of them are untransformed humans, and they too have a weak spot: the head, obviously.
• Justified in Valkyria Chronicles.
  • The Applied Phlebotinum powered tanks generate huge amounts of waste heat, and need radiators to avert a catastrophic heat explosion. Aim for the radiators, and anti-tank Lances will likely take them down in a single blow — two if it's a heavy tank. Even otherwise useless anti-infantry firearms will deal Scratch Damage to the radiator. Only two tanks in the entire game are capable of hiding their radiators — one of which only needs to expose them after firing the main cannon, one of which needs constant supporting repairs from nearby allied bases. It's also possible to headshot infantry units for greater damage at the cost of lower accuracy versus hitting center mass. While both of these apply toward both ally and enemy forces, enemies will never intentionally target the head (while they'll constantly attempt to exploit the tank radiator for all it's worth).
  • The final battle against the Marmota, a massive land battleship, is mostly hitting a series of different weakpoints in order to get at the ancient BFS it's outfitted with. First the player shoots at a huge gaping hole in the hull left when Alicia used her Valkyria powers to hurl a Valkyria lance through it, which creates a convenient ramp of scrap metal for infantry units to climb up and disable a pair of hidden radiators powering a shield surrounding the mounted superweapon, allowing it to be attacked directly.
• Taken to its logical extreme in Monster Hunter. Although no boss in the game has a specific weak point, all of them have parts that are weaker or stronger against player attack. Further, depending on the method of attack used, the weak points may be different (some parts are weak against blunt force but resistant to damage from edged weapons, for instance). Each part of their body also takes a varying amount of damage from the different elements. Properly exploiting these weaknesses can easily make the difference between a hunt taking close to the usual time limit of 50 minutes or less than half that.
• Zone of the Enders: the Second Runner does this at the Battleship Raid. Jehuty has to destroy them, and can go about this in a few ways: find and destroy every destructible piece of paneling and weapon on the ships, use the Vector Cannon to hit their generators, or (related to the last one) line up the Vector Cannon and fire at them to blow them up with just sheer damage. To be fair, the generators are protected by a shield of compressed space, and normal weapons do no damage to them; if you can hit the generators, you've got enough firepower to take down the ship through pure damage anyway.
• In the Onimusha games, scoring a counter-hit on an enemy during a narrow window of opportunity will have the screen flash bright yellow as your current character (usually) delivers a lunging slash. This will instantly destroy Mooks and inflict Massive Damage against Boss characters, and in the case of characters equipped with an Ogre Gauntlet result in a much higher Soul payoff than normal.
• Tank crews in the World War II MMOFPS Battleground Europe (a.k.a. World War II Online) have to know the weaknesses of every tank type they might possibly come up against, because the game tries to realistically model armor penetration. Trying to pound away at the front armor of a Panzer MIGHT work, but it's far less dangerous to aim for exhaust vents, the cupola, or anything else with thin armor. If you are driving a vehicle (or pushing an anti-tank gun) with small caliber shells, this might be the only way you will ever damage them at all. Then, of course, your gunner could very well get shot in the neck by an infantryman because you forgot to close the hatch. The same occurs in World of Tanks.
• In War Thunder Ground Forces, aiming for specific parts of the tanks is essential. This includes the view slits for the crew, ammo or fuel storage for a quick kill, but also the engine, transmission (getting stuck in reverse) tracks, or the turret to keep the enemy tank from firing or escaping.
  • This is a vital aspect of all modes of gameplay, actually. In aviation games, bombers are bullet sponges apart from several key weak points: attacking the engines will cause the bomber to lose power and fall out of the sky, and is necessary if you have no cannons or rockets and you're just down to machine guns; if you can get a good hit in the cockpit then you might kill the pilot and that would bring the plane down; hitting the base of the wing enough times might cause it to separate from the plane, which is of course lethal; and finally though they are not vital to the function of the plane, the turret gunners are also good targets of opportunity as killing them makes your job easier.
  • In naval games, the weak point of a large warship is the engine compartment. Destroying the engine room not only brings the behemoth to a halt (making it a sitting duck for artillery), but shots placed below the waterline cause the ship to gradually begin flooding.
  • The Sturmtiger (added in the game's 10th Anniversary update) is a German siege engine armed with a massive 380mm rocket launcher. One rocket can destroy your tank if it lands in roughly the same postcode, or even two tanks together if they are clustered close. However the cannon has an enormous muzzle so wide that any shot well-placed down the gun will cause the rocket to explode, destroying the vehicle from the inside-out.
• Jak and Daxter: Dark Maker Humongous Mecha have multiple weakspots on their limbs, each of which can take a moderate amount of damage, then becomes invulnerable. If you don't notice the targeting reticules around the hips and knees, you can spend half an hour shooting them in the head.
• Ace Combat: "Its only weak point is in the front air intake. You'll have to attack it head on to take down Morgan."
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates: Every boss has a glowing red crystal that does more damage than hitting the rest of the boss.
  • These glowing red weak spots are also present in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time on most bosses.
  • Final Fantasy V Advance makes fun of the Trope Naming quote in its description of the Gladiator's Finisher command. Then again, they made fun of a lot of things.
  • Final Fantasy IX features normal Mooks that work like this. For example, Random Encounters in Cleyra include sand-elementals where you actively need to target a little, pink heart-like part of it. Not realizing this fast enough can result in throwing away lots of HP and mana in battle against the main body of the Mook.
• Every Fraxy boss has a weakpoint — it just depends on how big it is and how many there are!
• The Caterpillar in American McGee's Alice can only be damaged by attacking a glowy soft spot on its underbelly.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ever since the first boss of the first game (which was only vulnerable on its horn), its been making use of this. It especially likes the Go for the Eye variant, and making you figure out how to expose said weak point.
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link:
    • Geldarms can only be harmed by striking them in the head. This is complicated by the fact that, when active, they stand with their head well above Link's melee range. To take them out, the player must first strike them on their body, which will make them retreat into their burrows, and attack when the head is about to sink back underground.
    • The bosses include "Horsehead" and "Helmethead". Guess where you need to strike? Inverted with Gooma, a boss added to the international releases in place of a second battle with Helmethead, whose weak point is his body and, in contrast to the boss he replaced, whose head is invulnerable.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past:
    • The Moldorm's tail is the only part Link can hit in order to cause it damage. And due to the boss's erratic movement, it's hard to land the sword's slashes properly.
    • Helmasaur King, the Boss of the Dark Palace. Link has to aim for the green crystal on its forehead, which it protects with a mask.
    • Trinexx, the Boss of Turtle Rock. In the second phase of the battle, Link has to attack its glowing midsection.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Many bosses have each a specifc weak point: Gohma has her eye, King Dodongo has its mouth when it's open (in preparation of a wide fire breath), Barinade has its soft skin under its jellyfish armor, Morpha has its nucleus, Bongo Bongo has its eye (which is exposed once you attack both of its other weak points), and Ganon has his bright blue tail.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The only weak points in Twinmold are the heads and tails (the boss is a duo of large centipedes). The catch is that, due to their massive size, Link has to either grow in size with the Giant's Mask to hit the points easily, or have a very good aiming with his arrows.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: Octogon can only be damaged on its front. During the first half of the battle, it keeps its face pressed against the wall to counteract this, only becoming vulnerable when it turns around to fire at Link.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Played with when fighting Gohma. It has a massive fluorescent green and magenta eye, but if you throw your grappling hook at it the beast just casually closes his eye and deflects it. You actually have to aim for Valoo's unassuming and nondescript tail to drop the ceiling on it a few times to break its shell. Once the shell is gone, then you can target the eye with your grappling hook to stun Gohma. If you don't figure this out for yourself (the game gives only vague Foreshadowing), eventually The King of Red Lions will tell you to look around the room for something else to target.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The eyes of Diababa, Morpheel and Armogohma, the jewel on Fyrus's head, the Twilight Sword in Stallord's head, and the open point in Argorok's armor (on its back); the third battle with Zant has his shoes, and Beast Ganon has his underbelly during the second phase.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: There's a particularly fun (if easy) variant involving whacking a seesaw with the hammer in order to reach the giant golem Eox's weak point.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Various bosses and enemies use this, often with the added twist of only being vulnerable from a certain angle, requiring the player to time and angle their attack just right in order to actually hit it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild uses this trope the least of any game in the series, though it is still present. The individual dungeon bosses, Guardians and Hinox all have weak points that can be exploited (as do the Lynels, though they aren't technically boss enemies themselves), but the open-ended nature of the combat means they will still take damage and can be fought without utilizing the weak spots if the player goes in with the right equipment. Only the Talus minibosses and the final boss require hitting weak points to deal damage at all.
  • Hyrule Warriors: Enemy officers have attacks that will leave them vulnerable, indicated by a Weak Point Gauge over their heads. Attack them while the gauge is up to deplete it, and when it's empty the player character will perform a unique attack for a lot of damage.
• The Factory boss in Beyond Good & Evil is only vulnerable at its "core," which it protects with a metal grate. Luckily, its legs aren't so well-protected, and if you Use Your Head, figuring out how to knock him over isn't so tough.
• The third boss in Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy has a rather obvious "heart lid" on its chest to attack, but it keeps it closed most of the time. (And anyway, it's out of the reach of your sword anyway.) However, you are capable of throwing things that high... and indeed, you have to throw rocks at him to make him expose his weak point. Harder than it sounds—he's reeeeaally fast, and you when burdened by a rock? Not so much.
• Psychonauts:
  • Numerous bosses in the first game are only truly vulnerable at one point on their body. The most notable is probably The Butcher — the only part of his massive body that's vulnerable is his head, and even then, it's too high to reach normally or hit with ranged attacks. In round one, you can climb up his arms when he does a certain attack, but in round two, you have to throw telekinetic projectiles at him when he does the same attack. And he's much faster now.
  • Psychonauts 2: The Lady Luctopus' weak point is her heart... which is located in her head. Octopuses' hearts are located in their mantles, which makes sense.
• The MechWarrior games have this all over the place.
  • All mechs (including your own) have much weaker armor in the rear than they do in front; this doesn't really matter much when you're in an assault mech picking off light ones, since they die like flies either way. However, when you are in a small/medium mech, or a big one that's taken a lot of damage, and the radar cheerfully bleeps and tells you an enemy 100-ton behemoth is heading your way, the rear weak spot suddenly becomes a lot more important, because targeting it is the only way (barring sheer luck with critical strikes or a particularly incompetent enemy) to survive the encounter. Since they usually always face you, the leg are also always weak points on a mech, destroying them also permit to salvage the mech, very useful to capture the heavy armed 100-ton battlemech. Putting together enough precision weapons like lasers, autocannons, Gauss guns, or missiles with targeting computers to quickly destroy their leg is a damn good tactic.
  • The "weaker rear armor" bit is taken straight from the board game; the torso locations can each only have so much armor altogether and attacks coming in through will strike the front, so that's the side that gets the lion's share of the armor and the rear is left comparatively vulnerable to a determined attacker who can get there. Beyond that, actual aimed shots tend to be fairly rare because even with an advanced targeting computer success at hitting the chosen spot isn't guaranteed and the overall chance to hit in the first place goes down, and without try are limited to immobile targets and/or the occasional melee attack.
  • The weakest part of any 'Mech is the head (aka the cockpit), which has such low armor that one good hit will probably destroy it instantly. The issue here is that the head is really small and damned near impossible to deliberately hit on a moving 'Mech, so headshots tend to be the result of pure luck or an extremely stupid pilot sitting completely still and giving you the chance to line up such a shot. Striking the cockpit is also an excellent way to get relatively-intact mechs for salvage, as any hit there that gets through is liable to reduce the pilot to little more than Ludicrous Gibs given the firepower of most battlemech weaponry. Even if they survive (either by luck, or due to a weak weapon like an MG Array) they might panic and eject; and if they don't, injuries will still reduce pilot performance/mech effectiveness.
• Sonic the Hedgehog's arch-nemesis Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik is arguably the patron saint of using this trope, as most of his Mini-Mecha creations have an obvious weak spot on them (usually the cockpit) for Sonic to exploit. As for specific Eggman or non-Eggman examples across the series:
  • Sonic Adventure:
    • All forms of Chaos (except 6 which requires that you get him into a specific state... of matter) require that you attack his brain. This is fairly easy the first two times with Chaos 0, and then he starts jumping around on lampposts and punching at you, and you have to wait until he comes down, at which point he's easy again. 2 makes you wait until he misses a punch and freezes in place a couple of seconds, while 4 has to surface and float in place before you can attack him there. Perfect makes you have a minimum speed so that when you get to him, you spiral up the inside and hit his brain. If you're not going fast enough, you're just ejected and have to find him again. Actually, you could almost make a case for 6's weak spot being Froggy, at least in Big's version: once Big lands him, he wins.
    • The Egg vehicles have the cockpit as the weak point. The Hornet stays at bay and shoots small missiles at you, then tries to drill you into the ground. If he misses, there's your chance. The Walker makes you play Simon Says (sort of) with its ankle joints; one, two, or three of the feet stomp, sending out a shockwave which you want to avoid, but also making that joint vulnerable to brief malfunction if you jump near it. If all the glowing joints malfunction, that brings the cockpit down for semi-easy pickings. (You can hit its underside this time.) The Viper, the first three times, from time to time shows its belly, trying to lure Sonic in with a path to the cockpit while it's charging its (other) laser, which it will fire if you don't hit the cockpit in time. Then you have to wait until it yo-yos spinning spiked discs at you so you can jump on one and use it to reach Eggman.
    • Zero, whom Amy is fleeing throughout her stages, is only vulnerable once Amy knocks him into the electric fencing surrounding the boss stage. This causes him to flip his top, exposing a button which you then attack.
  • Sonic Adventure 2:
    • Boss GUN vehicles, much like Egg vehicles, are only vulnerable in the cockpit. How easy they are to get to varies.
    • The Egg Golem has different weakpoints depending on who's fighting it. As Sonic, the weakpoint is a device on top of its head. In the Dark Story, it's revealed that the device is a "restraining mechanism": Sonic's damaging it causes it to turn on Eggman, who must shut it down by exposing and destroying the three generators in its torso.
    • The Biolizard has a tank on its back which you have to attack. To reach it, however, you have to wait until it's tired from chomping at you and shooting balls of dark energy at you. Then you can grind up the rail that begins at its mouth, and then you can attack.
    • The Finalhazard. "Aim for the red swelling area to damage him!"
  • Sonic Heroes has a notable Egg boss where it's weak point ISN'T the cockpit (it has none) — the Egg Emperor. It's weak point is the glowing orb in the middle of it's body with the slightly-hard-to-see-during-gameplay picture of Eggman on it. However, it's smart enough to protect itself with a giant shield. You have to either destroy the shield with a Power character, or temporarily paralyze the shield-arm with Thunder Shoot in order to do any damage.
  • Eggman's love for this trope ends up getting lampshaded in a Fourth-Wall Mail Slot event on the franchise's official Twitter account. According to him, it's a backup plan for if a robot ever goes rogue on him.
• Bosses in the Parodius series almost always have a weak point, which the game helpfully points out to you. One boss in Sexy Parodius is a huge tanuki, complete with arrows telling you what his weak point isn't.
• Star Wars:
  • Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Atari 2600): While the Imperial Walkers normally require forty-eight hits (thirty in the Intellivision) to take down, a flashing spot will occasionally appear on the Walker, which if the player strikes it will take down the Walker with one shot.
  • Lampshaded in Star Wars: Republic Commando regarding spider droids:
  CT-01/425: Its durasteel plating is rated for starship hulls and is nearly invulnerable to small arms fire. Only its optical cluster, the red orb on its abdomen, is unshielded and vulnerable.
  Scorch: In other words, shoot the big red spot.
  • In Star Wars: Squadrons, destroying a capital ship's Power System creates ruptures on the ship's hull. Attacking these ruptures inflicts massive damage on the cap ship.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The game features a quest in which you must defeat undead that are unkillable unless you destroy the crystals that keep them moving. These crystals become vulnerable only when the undead in question has taken enough damage that it would otherwise be defeated. (If you don't destroy the crystal then the undead, merely stunned instead of defeated, snaps out of it and resumes attacking even though it has 0 health. This resulted in some hilarious griefing potential early in the game's run where the designers forgot to put a "leash" on the crystal-bound undead like most enemies have, forcing them to return to their normal area when lured too far away. Since they didn't have this, some players would pull the invincible undead all the way to a town or a major city, where they would slowly but inexorably murder any opponent, no matter how statistically outclassed they should have been. And the only way to stop it would either be a server reset or luring the undead all the way back to their crystal.
  • Raigonn, the final boss of the Gate of the Setting Sun dungeon, is a slightly more traditional example, where players need to attack and destroy its weak spot — specifically named that, no less! — in order to break its armour before they can kill it.
  • The Ulduar boss XT-002 Deconstructinator both plays the trope straight and subverts it. After damaging the boss enough, its mechanical heart will be exposed. The heart takes double damage and any damage done to the heart is mirrored to the boss. However, the heart has its own life meter, and if killed, it will actually make the boss STRONGER, causing him to heal, gain a damage boost, and gain new attacks. Ergo, unless the players were attempting to trigger this purposely (it was the Boss' hard mode trigger), it was best to only attack the weak point for a short amount of time.^note Fortunately, the heart healed itself to full after every exposed/returned/exposed cycle.
• FreeSpace
  • FreeSpace 2 features alien communication nodes with a giant crystal in the center. Blowing up the crystal causes the thing to self destruct in a massive explosion. Somewhat subverted in that these devices are far behind enemy lines, and were not expected to be attacked.
  • In the original, the Lucifer had a reactor be destroyed, which would then blow up the ship. Like with the above example however, these reactors were never expected to be vulnerable — they powered off the massive energy shielding that normally renders the Lucifer completely impervious.
• Lost Kingdoms II:
  • The God of Harmony. It's hard to defeat unless you know what cards can cripple and/or kill it outright:
  • Your first fight can be ended with Wraith (which can be missed since the Ghoul card can be missed if you progress too much), Sandworm's Sandstorm or the Lizardman combo since it doesn't flinch from an attack, just like a Petrified target.
  • The second fight which is the final boss can end with Vampire's Death Spell or a properly placed Catapult.
• Lampshaded in The Simpsons Game, where a cutscene shows an alien saucer attacking the Simpsons house. It starts moving around, firing then stops, prompting Bart:
  Bart: Guys, look! The hatch opens after every four laser bursts! That's the weak spot when we need to fire!
  Kang: Hey Kodos, that ugly kid's right. Why are we exposing our weak spot every four laser bursts?
  Kodos: You're right! Why do we even need to expose our weak spot at all!?
  Kang: Thanks for the heads-up, Earth dumbass!
• The basis of Blood of Bahamut. The giant monsters that are the game's entire basis can only be damaged at their Cores (if you hit anywhere else, damage is along single-digit lines). Indeed, some missions are entirely to remove armor over a Gargantuan's core before you can actually fight it.
• Army of Two has heavily armored enemies that can only be hurt from behind. The general strategy is to use the game's aggro mechanic to get them to focus on one while the other sneaks around behind them.
• All bosses in Legend of Kay have a glowing red amulet that must be hit. The in-game justification is that those amulets enable the bad guys to enslave dangerous animals and force them to do their bidding.
• Mass Effect has, alongside the usual 'shoot them in the head' approach (which even works on the geth for unclear reasons), several other examples;
  • The final boss in Mass Effect 2 is a giant terminator with a multitude of orange 'Shoot me here!' lights in place of its eyes and a big hummer on its chest. They're not the only place that will take damage, but they do take damage at a higher rate than elsewhere. In case that wasn't obvious enough, they're actually labelled as "Weak Point" on your HUD.
  • The Reaper on Rannoch is so heavily armored that it's only weak spot is the lense of it's giant laser beam, which it keeps covered until right before it fires. Since it completely jams normal targeting sensors, you have to line up a handheld targeting laser to aim for the entire Quarian fleet that sits in orbit.
  • Brutes take more damage than usual against lightly armoured areas such as their backsides, and Husks in 2 die the second their legs are destroyed.
  • The Atlas mechs and Scions both have weakpoints. For the Atlas, the shoulders, knees, and crotch all have plating that can be shot off to stagger it and interrupt an attack in progress, as well as the giant vent on the back (although this is harder to get a bead on). Shooting the lumps on a Scion's back can have the same stagger effect on top of dealing a pretty decent chunk of damage to the Scion. On higher levels in multiplayer, knowing this is essential.
  • Surprisingly enough, a Phantom's sword is the weakpoint. Hitting it with a surprisingly small number of rounds will shatter the weapon, forcing them to back off and use their hand blaster and depriving them of their one-hit-kill weapon. Good luck hitting it, though.
• In Aliens vs. Predator (2010), to have a real chance of beating combat synths as the marine, you need to hit them in their weakpoint — their legs. No, really. Knocking off their head just blinds them and makes it harder for them to hit you, their torso can take absurd amounts of punishment, and although their arms would theoretically work too, they're too hard to hit in practice as they're holding guns. Aim for the legs.
• The Borderlands series:
  • Almost every enemy in the first game, Borderlands has some body part that will take bonus damage when hit. Soft parts like head and eyes are common targets, as are underbellies.
  • Borderlands 2: Multiple:
    • features Loaders, a robotic enemy class with an uncommon yet logical weak point—their joints. Just as in real life, mechanical and electronic joints are more complex and often more delicate than the limb or body structures that they join and are more easily damaged by, say, a shotgun blast. More advanced Loaders, such as SGT's, armour their joints and are vulnerable only to eye shots.
    • Assassin Zer0 has a ranged combat style entirely defined by these. The B0re upgrade, among other things, highlights weak points, and most of the Sniper tree buffs critical hit damage in one way or another. This can get particularly nasty with a Jakobs sniper rifle, which has a much higher damage multiplier against weak points than any other brand of gun.
    • Actual invulnerability when not hit in a critical spot is pretty rare, however — the final boss of the "Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt" DLC exhibits it, and Crystalisk enemies are almost invincible when not hit on their giant shiny crystals (explosive rounds can damage their bodies, but unless you've already done a lot with critical hits it's going to take a very long time), but that's about it.
    • Face McShooty can only be killed by shooting him in the face, and he will complain if you hit him anywhere else.
• Spoony's review of Microcosm describes the boss's weak points as "huge fuck-me lights".
• In another Mook example, the Drones in The Conduit have huge red glowing orbs on their chest... but these are part of their armor and don't take more damage than anywhere else. Their weakpoint is, sensibly enough, their head — although they can still take more punishment there than a human.
• Enemies in Resonance of Fate tend to have Cognizant Limbs that absorb damage from a certain angle. Strong enemies and bosses can have heavily-armored parts covering most angles, but one or two lightly-armored angles that leave the main body open to attack. And if you jump, your bullets hit random body parts. Shoot enough times with a submachine gun, and you will eventually almost completely fill up with scratch damage. Then, all you have to do is jump and attack with a direct damage weapon. No need to worry about pesky body parts after all.
• Rise of the Kasai has a few bosses like this. Three take the form of dragons that fly around the platform and will breathe fire at you that will instantly kill you if it hits. They're far out of reach for most of the fight and can only be sniped by arrows right before breathing fire, and then will only take damage if the arrow hits a weak point on their chest. The final boss can be stunned, but not killed, by attacking it over and over again, however, its Soul Jar is floating right above it. Once again, arrow to that equals dead boss.
• In all of the Silent Scope games, the boss's weak point is always the head. Certain vehicles also have weak points, like the rotor for a helicopter and the tires of a car. This is later subverted for laughs in the third game Sogeki, where the boss of Stage 3 has two. The first is obvious, his head. The second is not so obvious, his teddy bear. Shoot the teddy bear and he goes down. Though this is actually harder than it sounds, you have less than a second to shoot it when the chance presents itself.
• From the Wing Commander series:
  • In Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV, shots aimed at the bridge or engines of a capship do an additional 50% damage, once the shields are penetrated.
  • While the Kilrathi dreadnought in Wing Commander III isn't totally invulnerable, it's much more vulnerable when shooting at it inside the hangar, where there the fast-recharging shields don't protect, even compared to the extra damage given to targeting a capship's engines or bridge.
  • In Wing Commander IV, the only way to kill the Vesuvius is to drop the Flashpak in the hangar, where they don't use the quite effective armor found on the outer hull.
  • Played realistically in Prophecy with killing capital ships. The majority of the ship is too heavily armored and shielded for fighters to destroy them with massed fire. Instead, you have to take down their shield generators and hit the critical subsystems: Bridge and Engines. Even with those destroyed, the ship doesn't explode as in most games... it's left dead in space, with occasional secondary explosions across the hull.
• Bulletstorm has the usual weak spots — groin shots and headshots — but some fully mutated enemies have several glowing sacs of stuff on their body. Shoot any of the sacs and the whole body will go up in a blast of orange bodily liquids. Also, the plant boss has several weak spots to hit before it recharges its hitpoints.
• Pikmin:
  • Hermit Crawmads are covered in tough armor on their fronts that protect them from attack. To defeat them, the player must wait until they come out of their burrows to attack and then turn around to return to cover, in so doing exposing their soft, unprotected bottoms to attack.
  • Pikmin: The Armored Cannon Beetle can only be harmed by attacking its abdomen. This is normally kept covered by its hard elytra, meaning that the player must first clog its air intake with a Pikmin when the beetle sucks in air for an attack, causing it to overheat and forcing it open its elytra in order to cool itself down.
  • Pikmin 2:
    • The Segmented Crawbster boss is covered in impenetrable armor and has to be tricked into rolling into a wall and stunning itself to reveal the vulnerable bulge on its belly, which bursts when it's killed.
    • Anode beetles are protected by their tough shells, but can be flipped over and opened to attack by simply by throwing a pikmin directly onto their backs.
    • The backs and sides of cloaking burrow-nits are protected by heavy shells. The only part of their body vulnerable to damage is their face — which, however, means that attacking Pikmin are placed in the way of its stabbing, extensible proboscis.
  • Pikmin 3:
    • Joustmites work in reverse to how the burrow-nits do — their faces are invulnerably armored, but their backsides are soft and exposed. To mitigate this, joustmites constantly rotate in order to keep themselves facing the player.
    • A bugeyed crawmad's tough armor is impervious to attack, and defeating requires attacking its two weak spots in sequence. Firstly, Pikmin need to be thrown onto its large eyes; when enough harm is done to them, the crawmad will flip over and expose its soft belly, which is the only part where harm can truly be dealt to the beast.
    • Only two parts of the Quaggled Mireclops body can be attacked — its feet and its fruit-like head — and only attacking the latter will actually result in damage being dealt to the beast. Since the head is normally too far up for Pikmin to reach, the player must first target the feet in order to make the beast collapse and expose its head to being attacked.
• Pico's School: The only way to do damage to Casandra's monster form in the final battle is by targeting the dangling genitalia between her (or is that his?) legs.
• Heavy Weapon has a few bosses like this. The Battleship is weak in the control tower, Eyebot was vulnerable in the eye when it is open, and the Segmented Serpent Mechworm was weak in the head.
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Shadyas are a type of smoke-like enemies with large, curved blades. The only way to kill them is to attack the large, red, glowing orb in their chests.
• BattleTanx has the Rhino Tank, which is described as "A trainload of armor on front." You have to either use grenades or hit the tank from behind.
• Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 treats Mobile Armors like this: you have to strike them when and where they are vulnerable to do any damage at all. Thankfully the third game does away with this: in that Mobile Armors can be harmed at any time, but you do a lot more damage if you strike the weak points.
• Tachyon: The Fringe: Capital ships have destroyable subsystems. Take out the powerplant, it can't move. Destroy the weapons generator, it can't shoot. Blow up the shield generator, and its Deflector Shields won't regenerate. There are occasions where time constraints make this mode of attack inadvisable, but they're rare.
• Super Mario Bros. games have this all the time.
  • Oftentimes, the boss has a giant target painted on them, like the bandage on the Whomp King in Super Mario 64, the target on Topmaniac's head in Super Mario Galaxy, or the glowing/coloured lights/symbols on Megahammer in Super Mario Galaxy 2. In the Gobblegut fight in Galaxy 2, Bowser Jr warns Gobblegut to protect his "bellyache bulges". Just in case the player hadn't seen them...
  • Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island:
    • Naval Piranha's only weak spot is a bandaged lump on its stem (presumably the "navel", although it looks more like an adam's apple).
    • Eggs thrown at Sluggy the Unshaven just deform its outer shell without hurting it, but once its clearly-visible heart is exposed, it can be destroyed with a single strike. In both cases, Kamek draws your attention to this, in the first case by, bizarrely, calling Yoshi a "cutie without a navel", and in the second case by announcing "This slug has no weak points!"
    • Hookbill the Koopa is defeated by knocking him down then ground pounding his stomach.
  • Mario & Luigi:
    • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga:
    • Cackletta is the final boss, in smokey ghostly spirit form. You have to take down her hands and her head for her to expose her heart, which is her weak point.
    • Against Queen Bean, you have to attack her arms to deflate them (She's HUGELY muscular) and to make her lose her crown on her head, cause you know, spikes hurt when jumping on it.
    • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time: Even more drawn out in the final battle, the second in the series. You have to attack her tentacle legs, which enables you to attack the crown which enables you to attack the boss herself. And the crown regenerates after a while, rendering any attack to her useless. And if that wasn't enough, the legs also regenerate, sometimes forcing you to do the whole thing again.
    • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: The final boss. You begin the fight as Bowser. After you've dealt a certain amount of damage the boss fully heals and grows big. Then you must punch his stomach to make him spit out the Dark Star core. Then you must suck it into Bowser's stomach where Mario and Luigi take over. Now you have to fight an Eldritch Abomination version of Fawful. His weak points are his legs and glasses, if you don't destroy the glasses first he will retract some of his legs while you are attacking. After killing his legs he will fall to the ground, revealing the Dark Star core, the boss' REAL weak point. You have approximately two turns to damage it before it escapes, and you have to repeat the entire process until he finally dies.
    • Mario & Luigi: Dream Team: The final battle is against a 12 foot tall monster with the full power of the Dreamstone. Its weak point is the crystal shard in its forehead, which it'll guard with its right arm if it's not taken out first.
  • Wario: Master of Disguise: All bosses except Ka-Bloom! and Stuffy the 64th. Cannoli and Carpaccio use machines that can be weakened by hitting or pressing certain buttons in them, Barfatonic Lavachomper's weakness is in the uvula, Poobah the Pharaoh has it in the crotch, and Terrormisu has a different one per phase.
  • Paper Mario: The Origami King: The Earth Vellumental — a giant tortoise — can only be harmed by striking its exposed extremities, but is particularly vulnerable to blows against its weak, tender tail.
• For the final fight against Omega Supreme in Transformers: War for Cybertron, you first have to attack his exposed turrets, which are explicitly stated to be outside of his shields. Destroy enough of them and his shields go down and his chest becomes the vulnerable spot.
• In Scaler, the Rattlecrab (an Unexpected Shmup Boss) has four blue weak spots that glow red when it's going to attack. The first two are on its pincers, the third one is on its tail, and the fourth one is its mouth.
• Humanoid enemies in Alone in the Dark (2008) can only be killed by igniting the fissures on their bodies.
• In Duke Nukem, Atomic Edition, the Pig Cop riot tanks can take quite a lot of punishment and have an assortment of long and short-range weaponry. However, if you're quick enough to get behind them to press the nuclear trefold on the back, they self-destruct, leaving you with only the annoyed driver to deal with.
• The Brawlamari and Queen Buzzerfly in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] both have extremely conspicuous glowing orbs on their bodies that serve as the only points that can be struck to cause damage. It takes a little effort in order to get close enough to hit them, though.
• The naval portion of Assassin's Creed III introduces ship-to-ship battles. Your ship, the Aquila, can fire broadsides or use its smaller swivel cannons for precision targeting. The swivel cannons are usually only good against gunboats and are almost completely useless against bigger ships. However, if you damage a frigate enough with broadsides, this has a chance of exposing its powder magazine, which can be targeted with your swivel cannons for One-Hit Kill.
• In After the War, the Worm bosses can only be damaged by hitting the head. First you have to stun them, then use your sword to remove the shell and finally kill it by shooting at the thing.
• The Nevi from Gravity Rush have large glowing cores that shatter when hit with a well-placed Gravity Kick. In the case of many of the larger Nevi, this is the only way to damage them.
• The final boss's first form in Dynamite Dux is composed of several spheres; its weak point is the ball Achacha is riding.
• Hellbugs in the TV tie-in game Defiance are in general heavily armored, but the different versions all have some weak spot. The smallest skitterlings die pretty easily, but the Warrior, the next size up has only the inside of its mouth and it only opens that when it's about to attack. Matriarchs have three; the mouth, their chest when they rear up to do a smash attack, and once they've done a roll-charge attack and are recovering, vanes open and temporarily expose a weak spot at the rear. The sound your gun makes when you're hitting one of these changes from the usual pings of ricocheting bullets to a sawtoothed grinding noise to let you know you've got the right place.
• All of the different types of Darkers in Phantasy Star Online 2 have a conspicuous red core located somewhere on their bodies that serves as a weak point.
• Tales Series:
  • In Tales of Graces, striking an enemy with a move it's weak against provides you with a temporary damage bonus that fades with time or once your combo ends. It's possible to exploit multiple weaknesses on the same enemy to increase strength and duration of the bonus.
  • This system returns in Tales of Xillia 2, where it's even more crucial to combat, as bosses are unable to perform a Combo Breaker as long as the bonus is active (Something they'll do with annoyingly great frequency otherwise).
• The FM Towns Shoot 'Em Up Rayxanber helpfully describes the boss's weak point at the start of each stage.
• Possibly some of the hardest enemies to defeat solo, Trojans from Spiral Knights have a massive crystal in their back. They also have a shield, which unlike the player's shield can't be broken. Said shield is always up. Also, they hit like trucks.
• In Sky Serpents, the titular serpents have weak spots helpfully colored purple. Sometimes they're inaccessible due to cover by scales, which like everything else but those purple spots are invulnerable to attack.
• In Red Orchestra, especially with the AT handguns, aiming for the ammo storage and the engine or fuel tanks is essential. Chances of penetrating front armor, even from short range is very low. In the sequel, it is possible to knock out the crew, so aiming for the armored glass also works.
• In Copy Kitty, attacking Yolomacho's head deals more damage as opposed to hitting its body. This is important to know because in hard mode, you'll be hard pressed to hit its back if you don't know its weak point.
• Gigant: Take-Mikazuchi from BlazBlue: Chronophantasma has two weak points to hammer on, but neither are consistently vulnerable, and exposing one means hammering on the other. First is the tongue, which serves as the main weapon; during one Distortion Drive, it will stick the cannon out and prepare to fire; attacking Take-Mikazuchi's head during this time causes damage to the tongue, and when enough damage has been issued, the Distortion will abort and cause it to fall over. Second is the core, exposed in precisely the aforementioned fashion; when the core falls into arm's reach is when the player dumps everything they've got into it, as it is much more sensitive to pain than anywhere else on its body.
• Battleships in the SD Gundam G Generation series take up multiple squares on the map (for example, 3x4 or 4x5) and can be attacked anywhere in that area. Attacking a flashing square that corresponds to the bridge or some other vital system causes a "Pinpoint Attack" that does twice as much damage as usual.
• Warframe has a few examples:
  • Banshee's "Sonar" ability creates critical weak points on enemies, which have a 5x damage multiplier^note By default; upgrades can make it as high as 14.2x or as low as 2x when hit. The power also doubles as an Enemy-Detecting Radar.
  • Certain bosses have invincible armor except for certain weak spots, such as Sargas Ruk's glowing blue heat sinks (to his credit, he tries to keep them shut) and Vay Hek's big, ugly, hammy face.
• In the game The Cat in the Hat, boss fights with Mr. Quinn require you to attack his weak point — in this case, the exhaust pipe of his massive crab-vehicle.
• Lampshaded by the final boss of Sunset Overdrive, who complains about the presence of his own big, blinking weak spot with "Everybody knows the only reason you have a power core is so someone can destroy the power core!"
• Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: The only way to hurt Malachi is to shoot him in the glowing golden orb in his ribcage.
• The fight system in Undertale is turn-based, with a stop-the-needle Quick Time Event to attack opponents, but the fight against Mettaton EX is a Shmup in which you have to fire on the projectiles coming at you; during select rounds, you can also shoot Mettaton's "heart shaped core", which the CHECK command explicitly says is his weak spot. But all shooting it does is make his arms and then his legs fall off, reducing the maximum rating you have to reach to end the battle because reasons. If your goal is to kill him, you can still attack during your turn, and he's just as susceptible to physical attacks as any other boss because his ghost soul fused with his not-actually-invulnerable body when he unveiled his human form.
• In Fallout 4, a shot to the Fusion Core of a Sentry Bot or Powered Armor-wearing enemy will cause it to go critical and explode, also taking out adjacent enemies. And in the older games, the best way to take out a Deathclaw was to aim for the eyes. Hell of a shot to make against a charging 12-foot-tall reptilian mutant that is Shrouded in Myth and described invariably by the handful of lucky people to have met one and lived as a walking tank.
• Hit Creature Brains to destroy minor enemies in LittleBigPlanet, and attack the core of bosses to defeat them. And remember to shoot the Brightly Coloured Weak Spots on the Metal Gear REX to defeat it.
• The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings: The Kayran conveniently has glowing "tumors" to indicate where you should start hackin' with your silver.
• Each character in Oh...Sir!! The Insult Simulator has a weak point in the form of an insult topic that when attacked with the right insult will deal much heavier than normal damage. For example, Sir Arthur Knight is vulnerable to insults involving modern culture and technology ("[Your mother] [still uses Windows Vista] [and] [you] [never watched Star Wars]!"), while Nigel Hogg is vulnerable to insults about weight and appearance ("[Your sister] [looks like] [a grunting sow] [and] [can't exercise because of] [your pimply arse], [and everyone knows it]!")
  • This also applies to characters in the sequel Oh... Sir!! The Hollywood Roast. Jane Blunt is vulnerable to insults about Britain and the monarchy ("[The royal family] [had an embarrassing cameo in] [your last movie] [and] [your favorite director] [ruins the British accent]!"), while Wisecrack is vulnerable to insults about his originality, or lack thereof ("[Your therapist] [is a worse version of] [your mother] [and] [reminds me of] [a desperate cash grab]!")
• Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: The start of most Boss Battles. "Stop that Tinkerslug!"
• The monsters of Evolve each have a weak point that takes double damage from precision weapons. For most of them it's the head, but for the Behemoth it's its soft underbelly.
• In the early games in the Hiryū no Ken series (Flying Dragon, Flying Warriors, etc.), this makes up the bulk of the one-on-one fight scenes. Flashing red marks will appear on your fighter and your opponent. You have to inflict damage by attacking the red marks, while defending when the marks appear on your fighter's body. Occasionally, blue marks will appear when their is an opportunity for a Critical Hit, and star marks indicate an opportunity for a One-Hit KO. When no hit markers appear, it's usually a sign that your opponent is about to use a super-strong attack.
• Almost every enemy in the flash game series Stormwinds has a weak spot. If you see anything on the enemy vehicles that resembles parachutes, flotation devices (balloons) or exposed Steampunk machinery, attacking them in those spots will make them hurt, often causing extra damage. Usually, around halfway through the first level of each game, a Heavily Armored Giant Mook hanging from a very obvious bunch of balloons is introduced, quickly teaching the player that they need to strike said balloons to end it effectively.
• Starship Titanic: Prod the Maitre d'Bot in the "Achilles' Buttock" to defeat him.
• Every boss in Sundered has three Elder Shard fragments sticking out of its body, and attacking these fragments is the only way to harm them.
• In The Division, certain enemy types have specific "weak points" that can be shot at in order to deal massive damage to that enemy. Grenadiers, for example, have grenade satchels; shoot them enough, and they'll explode. This instantly kills the grenadier and can deal significant damage to other nearby enemies or cause secondary effects (e.g. Cleaner grenadiers go up in an incendiary blast that sets fire to other nearby enemies).
• This is how you defeat your enemies in Horizon Zero Dawn. Your various arrows and tools will mostly just plink off the massive machines populating the world, but shooting the assorted weak points in their chassis will do much more damage. Depending on what you hit, you can also rupture an especially volatile component on the machine which could set it on fire, freeze it, overload it with electricity, or trigger an explosion. This trope applies to human enemies to a lesser degree; arrows by and large don't do much damage unless they hit them in the head.
• In Akane the Kunoichi, some of the bosses have to be hit in the face. One of them shields his face when not attacking, so you have to time it right.
• In Touch The Dead, each boss has a weak point you need to shoot at in order to deal damage.
• Two of the bosses in Demon's Souls required you to attack their weakpoints in order to defeat them. The Tower Knight forced you to run around his titanic greatshield to hit his heels until stumbled and fell over, exposing his vulnerable head to your attacks, while the Adjudicator's blubbery body was almost impervious to your attacks except for a gaping wound in its belly with a snapped blade protruding from it (apparently one of its own cleavers), which when struck would cause the boss to slump forward, letting you reach the golden bird sitting on its head that controlled it.
• The Dark Souls trilogy also featured a number of bosses utilizing these mechanics:
  • In Dark Souls, the much-reviled Bed of Chaos was a Puzzle Boss which could only be defeated by striking the two orbs on either side of it, then making your way through its body to reach its heart... where you found a single Chaos Bug that would perish in one blow. Several other bosses in the game have vulnerable points where hitting them can cut off their body parts (such as the tails of dragons or the Bell Gargoyles) but attacking these are optional, although doing so will not only give you a special weapon but prevent them from using their tail lash attacks.
  • Dark Souls II features the Demon of Song, whose froglike body is completely invulnerable to your attacks until it opens up the skin covering its front to reveal its skull-like face and long arms, with which it attempts to grab and eat you. The Duke's Dear Freja can only be damaged by attacking either of the two heads at either end of its gigantic spider body. Finally, while you can hit Sinh the Slumbering Dragon anywhere to damage it, hitting it anywhere other than its head causes its corrosive poison to degrade your weapon extremely quickly, while striking its head also does more damage.
  • In Dark Souls III the Curse-Rotted Greatwood can only be effectively damaged by attacking the pallid white pustules sprouting from various points of its bulbous body, or the long white arm it sprouts in the later stage of the battle. High Lord Wolnir is also almost completely immune your attacks, but by attacking and shattering the magical bracelets he wears on his arms you can send him careening into the depths of the Abyss. You can theoretically defeat him with pure damage, but it's not recommended. Finally, as with Sinh from the previous game, Darkeater Midir takes additional damage when struck on the head rather than going for the more accessible limbs.
• Bonanza Bros.: The riot shield guards can only be shot in the back and side, or slammed with doors.
• Razing Storm: Players can disable the Krakken bosses by shooting it's joints. The difficult part is getting past it's defenses and turrets first.
• Splatoon:
  • Every Octarian boss in the series has the same weak point (save for DJ Octavio) - a giant tentacle. Very few of the bosses will leave this tentacle exposed on their own, so you’ll have to reveal it first, whether by waiting for an attack that leaves it vulnerable, Feeding It a Bomb, or destroying a series of smaller weak points. It’s explained via one Sunken Scroll in Splatoon 2 that these tentacles are cut from a host Octarian (implied to be Octavio himself) and are what give the mechanical bosses some degree of sentience.
  • In the Salmon Run PvE mode introduced in the second game, every single Boss Salmonid, save for the Goldie, has a weak point that's the key to defeating them:
    • Drizzlers normally hide under their impermeable umbrella-like armor, but when they pop out to shoot an Ink Storm-like missile, they're completely vulnerable for several seconds.
    • The Flyfish must have a Splat Bomb tossed into both of its missile pods to defeat them.
    • Grillers have a fish tail poking out of their back. If it's shot enough, three more appear. When enough damage is dealt to these weak points, the machine is destroyed.
    • While Maws can be taken down with normal firepower, it's much faster to toss a Splat Bomb at their warning marker before they lunge up to the surface, so they swallow the bomb and not a player.
    • If a Scrapper soaks up enough damage with its frontal shields, it will be immobilized for several seconds, at which point players can head to the back of the machine and kill its exposed driver.
    • The only vulnerable point on a Steel Eel is its driver, and if they are killed, the rest of the contraption will be demolished.
    • Steelheads attack by forming a bomb on their head and throwing it at a player. If enough damage is dealt to the bomb while it's still swelling up, the Steelhead will explode.
    • Stingers sit atop a tower of 7 pots, all of which must be destroyed to defeat them.
• Most enemies in Bullet Girls Phantasia have an exposed blue crystal core that, when shot, can instantly kill them or cause massive damage.
• Chicken Police: To get a good score in the interrogation mini-game, you have to pick questions that match the subjects' emotional weaknesses.
• Octopath Traveler: One of the core aspects of the combat system. Hitting an enemy with its weakness to causes it lose shield points in addition to dealing extra damage. When an enemy's shield points hit zero, the shield temporarily breaks and they lose a turn, during which an even greater amount of damage can be dealt. Also played with, because a key strategy the game expects you to pick up on by the third set of chapters is when to attack a weak point in such a way where your team has the longest amount of time to punish the boss while they only sit there and take it...and have time afterwards to buff and heal back up, since after recovering from being broken, bosses will generally get to move multiple times and hit back harder.
• Octopath Traveler II retains the previous game's shield system, and also invokes this with Ochette's animal companion. They will always hit an enemy with one of their weaknesses—physical for Akala, or magical for Mahina, unless they're up against one of the very few enemies that have purely magical/physical weaknesses (respectively).
• Genshin Impact: The Cyber Cyclops Ruin Guards and their variants all follow this.
  • The vanilla Ruin Guard is vulnerable to being shot in its eye by bow-wielding characters. The only time the eye is not vulnerable to its current target is when it turns around to perform its Macross Missile Massacre attack... which lets you hit its other weak point on its back if you react fast enough. Hitting either enough will temporarily take it offline, allowing you to get some free hits in before it boots back up, and hitting it once will allow you to hit its eye again to stun it immediately.
  • The flying Ruin Hunters only have the eye to hit, and it's only vulnerable if you can stray far enough away from it to force it into its artillery mode, but unlike the Ruin Guards, it only takes one hit to knock it down.
  • Ruin Graders also have two weak points: there's its eye, which is vulnerable when it fires its Eye Beam, and its legs, which open up when it charges at you and if hit enough will leave it immobilized, but it will still fire the beam at you if its eye is intact.
• Shark! Shark!: The titular shark is only vulnerable to attack on its tail. So the yellow fish needs to hit it there a few times to beat the shark.
• Going Under: When Jacqueline is asking Ray about the boss of Winkydink's weaknesses, and he thinks she means mental weaknesses:
  Jacqueline: Yeah, or like... physical ones.
  Maybe like, glowing weak spots or something like that.
  You know what, never mind.
• Some of the bosses in JumpJet Rex have this:
  • Seedmour's weak point is on top of his head. To expose it, you need to knock him onto the ground by using Rex's spin attack to deflect his leaf projectiles onto his propellers. It is possible to hurt him without attacking his weak point, but this takes much longer to deal proper damage and won't allow you to get the star for defeating him in under one minute.
  • The Big Globowski's weak point is its heart, and is exposed by taking out all three of its heads at once. Unlike Seedmour, it can only be defeated this way.
• In Dancing Monster, you have to remove a monster's body parts one by one. Only the part indicated in the top-left corner of the screen can be shot.
• Minecraft: Story Mode: The giant three-headed ghast has a glowing hole on top of its head.
• In Giants: Citizen Kabuto:
  • The titular kaiju and its Offspring can most effectively be harmed by shooting a glowing stone implanted around their groinal area... the Offspring version is even designed to visually resemble a set of glowing testicles!
  • A miniboss called a Charger is only vulnerable when shot in its open mouth.
• Primal Carnage: The dinosaurs have certain regions of their body which take more damage than other parts; in most cases the head, unsurprisingly enough, is the most vulnerable region. However, Bruiser class dinosaurs have armoured skulls which are resistant or even outright immune to headshots, making it more advisable to aim at their flanks and hindquarters. Certain weapons, like the flamethrower and PX Assault Cannon, will ignore armour values, however.
• Singular Stone: the Dragon bosses can shrug off any attack at their body, but their head and tail is vulnerable. The tail has weaker defense and has lower HP than the head, but yields lower XP.
• Shadow of the Ninja:
  • The Eyestalker mini-boss requires you to hit the eyes on the end of its body in order to defeat it.
  • The Killer Tank can only be damaged by attacking the turret on the top. There's a laser blaster on the underside that can be attacked and destroyed, but doing so has no effect on the tank's main health bar.
• Nobody Saves the World: This is how you fight the Calamity - stall its forces long enough for Randy to charge and fire a shot, wail on it when the weak point is subsequently exposed, rinse and repeat.

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