Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu / Video Games

"I refuse!"

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• Agarest Senki may trump the other examples in here because in this game, you punch out six of them. Although, only two deserved to be punched in the face, and the rest just got dragged along.
  • Agarest Senki 2 however plays with this one. While you see that Weiss kills Chaos in the opening, punching him out is a bad idea in this game since it caused a lot of problems to the other people. This get subverted when it turns out Weiss did not stab Chaos. He was still discussing stuff with Chaos when fellow Cthulhu Mobius (disguised as Fasti the archaeologist) stabs through Weiss to stab Chaos. If you go to the True End route, this trope then gets played straight again by punching out the 6 gods including Chaos and Mobius. Your head hurt yet?
• In Akai Ito, it takes a super-powered, 1700-years-old Mizuki person with a perfected Dangerous Forbidden Technique to literally punch the star-god Nushi to a permanent end. She's also your auntie and later your life partner.
  • In its sort-of sequel Aoi Shiro, you get to storm the titular castle with your girlfriend and put an end to Evil Sorceror Ba Rouryuu, who bathes in the power of primordial chaos. And both of you survives intact.
• Albion: The leader of the Kenget Kamulos turns into an avatar of Kamulos, the God of War, to fight the player characters. And, well, it's not a Hopeless Bossfight. Especially humiliating when the Kenget are always going on about their martial superiority, and their then god is beaten by a party including females, non-humans, and warriors using physical weapons (ie. non-spellcasters), all of which they disdain, plus one traitor of their own people.
• Cthulhu itself is the final boss of Alone in the Dark: Illumination. Turns out he can be taken down with several hundred assault rifle rounds.
• The final boss of the Another Century's Episode trilogy is Shin Dragon, from the Getter Robo series, which is capable of obliterating celestial bodies like Jupiter's moons with ease and can punch holes in reality. You can potentially beat it with anything in the game, from Shin Getter all the way down to the RX-78 Gundam or a VF-1 Valkyrie.
• Likewise, most of the bosses you fight in Aquaria are also gods of some sort.
• Arc the Lad is a rare case: while the Eldritch Abomination responsible for most of the trouble is eventually defeated, it takes four games, 4.000 years in story, no less than five team of semi-godly fighters powered by the local gods and three near or complete collapse of civilization before the Big Bad finally bite the dust. Before that, the game series will provide plenty of deaths, tragedies and increased difficulty: The Eldritch Abomination will eventually get defeated, but you're going to earn that triumph.
• The final battle of Asura's Wrath involves a hand-to-hand battle with the Vlitra Core, the malevolent Genius Loci controlling the Gohma, residing in the center of the planet. This being Asuras Wrath, you do literally punch it to death.
  • The true final battle, however, comes at the end of the DLC chapters, where Asura quite literally punches out Chakravartin, aka GOD.
• In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, the final battle pits the epic-level protagonist and his party against Amellisan, traitorous priestess of Bhaal, charged up with about 99% of Bhaal's power. Your protagonist has the remaining 1%. You win.
  • This is to say little of the Superboss. Demogorgon, the creature imprisoned at the bottom of Watcher's Keep, is the Prince of Demons himself and therefore the most powerful demon lord in the Dungeons and Dragons cosmology. Of course, given the way planar mechanics work, killing him just sends him back to the Abyss. Still seriously impressive though.
• Bayonetta hits her world's Cthulhu out so hard that she punches its soul out of its body. She punches God's soul out of its physical body and into the sun. More accurately, she summons the setting's version of Satan to do it.
• In Bayonetta 2 the titular character tops herself, this time, with the help the Big Bad from the last game, summons a half-demonic, half-godly entity that resembles a fusion of the previous game's God and Satan to drop kick the body out of the soul of God!
• The Binding of Isaac: Runs start out with a crying, naked child in a basement armed with only their tears, blood, or in the Forgotten's case a bone as weapons. Runs could potentially end with that same child killing Satan, a demonic skeletal entity known as "the Lamb," angels Uriel and Gabriel, or a Mega Satan. What the Lamb is supposed to be is not completely clear, but it's fought after Satan and implied to have some connection with Jesus Christ.
• Bloodborne:
  • As the game progresses, the Hunter's job slowly goes from simply taking out mutated werebeasts to slaughtering the various eldritch creatures that are running the whole show that is the Hunter's Dream. It's often mentioned that other Hunters out there have done their own share of cosmic horror population control as well. By the end of the game, you've punched out at least two Great Ones (Rom and Mergo's Wet Nurse), which increases to 3 if you fight the Superboss Ebrietas, 4 if you count the DLC Final Boss the Orphan of Kos, up to 5 if you unlock the Moon Presence's True Final Boss battle.
  • The DLC reveals that Byrgenwerth, a college of scholars obsessed with the Great Ones, managed to kill Kos - this turned out to be a very bad idea, as not only Kos was one of the most benevolent of the Great Ones, she and the Fishing Hamlet who revered her (whose inhabitants were also slaughtered by Byrgenwerth's Hunters) cursed the blood-crazed hunters and formed the Hunter's Nightmare.
• Happens for both the protagonist and antagonist in the first BloodRayne as both Rayne and Jurgen Wulf can do significant damage to Belial before time runs out and he gains convenient plot-armour with which to smush the both of you. If you find a place to hide so that Jurgen ignores you and focuses almost solely on Belial (he'll still come across you every now and then while gathering weapons), he'll nearly beat him before the time expires, at least 70% on the hardest difficulty IIRC. Since for some reason blades do more damage than guns, as usual, Jurgen will eventually fail in this battle without your help, despite the fact he moves too fast to take damage from the clumsy devil.
• You can quite literally do this in Borderlands by playing as Brick.
  • Brick aside, the final boss of Borderlands 1 was supposedly sealed away rather than killed, but the reason is never fully explained. If it was sealed due to being unkillable, then it only stands to reason that the solution to the Eridians problem were good ol' fashioned bullets and Vault Hunters who range from stubborn to downright insane.
• Bravely Default has this in Lord Ouroboros. All throughout the game, you've been having to restore the crystals as told by Airy. Every time you went through the Holy Pillar, you end up in a parallel world. Once you've restored the crystals in the final world, Airy reveals her true colors and you fight her. You follow her to the Dark Aurora where you fight her One-Winged Angel form until she's killed by Ouroboros who plans to use all the worlds that many other versions of the heroes have linked together so he can get to the Celestial Realm and cause havoc. Throughout the fight, he destroys at least 6 of those worlds, making you just about ready to surrender. It's when the many other worlds fight back and sever his connection that you're fully able to punch this Cthulhu out for good!
  • Then Bravely Second ups the ante with Providence, an embodiment of despair who has been shaping Ba'als to attack Luxendarc using the sorrow from Vega's memories and is even aware of the player's action and can act against them. Again, nothing stops you from punching it, even literally so if you brought Monks to the mix.
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth tries to maintain the bleak, hopeless atmosphere of the Mythos, and the player spends much of the game either unarmed or with insufficient ammo, forced to run away from the monsters trying to kill him. However, at the end, the main character ends up severely injuring (possibly outright killing) Dagon (the 100-foot tall Deep One god) with a USCGC's 5-inch naval gun. When examining a statue of Dagon later on, he even cockily remarks "It's a statue of Dagon, minus the missile I lodged in his face". He later goes on to kill a pair of Flying Polyps with an alien BFG and kill even Mother Hydra herself. And before that, he had single-handedly taken out a no less a creature than a Shoggoth (with a little help from some tons of explosive gas in enclosed space). So it's kind of jarring that, after such a string of incredible victories, and finding out he's half super-being he decides to kill himself because of his alien heritage, which he just can't come in terms with at the end of the game.
  • Also, it's more than unclear if the things you killed/wounded actually were Dagon and Hydra. It might just have been overly large deep ones. And the protagonist thinking he killed the Big Bad does not mean much, especially in a Cosmic Horror Story with a madman as the narrator.
• Castlevania lets you beat the crap out of Death on a regular basis, not to mention some of the more notable Bosses like the personification of chaos in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, and all sorts of high-level demons.
  • Speaking of Aria, prior to the game's events, a Belmont fought Dracula. That's usual business; what is not usual is that they killed him permanently. It was "J" aka Julius Belmont's doing, though it also resulted in decades-long amnesia and the temporary loss of the Vampire Killer whip.
  • Cthulhu is even an enemy. A minor, recurring enemy at that. It actually is present in multiple Castlevania games, but is generally named Malachi (mistranslation during production of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; the name stuck), and never a boss.
    • At one point in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, you walk in on Dmitri killing Cthulhu/Malachi, so Soma might very well ask the trope title.
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: Shield Rod + Alucard Shield = Did You Just Eat Cthulhu? Especially with Galamoth, a potential ruler of hell who's two screens tall, and you consume him like so much dim-sum.
    • Galamoth also has an odd quirk where blunt strikes to the face make him flinch. A savvy Alucard can reach an eye-level platform before he's ready to fight and defeat him easily with nothing but repeated punches to the nose.
  • In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, you get to air joust with Satan. And then you punch him out. And then you strangle him. You unfortunately become Dracula after this though.
• Choo-Choo Charles: Invoked. Charles is a massive, sentient, seemingly invincible carnivorous spider-train that relentlessly hunts down anyone he finds. You are a nameless protagnoist who is tasked with using your own gun-equipped train to kill him. In the end, you succeed in killing Charles by shooting him several times in the face while in his Hell form, luring him to a bridge, and blowing it up, sending him plummeting to his doom.
• Chrono Trigger, in which a teenage boy and his friends amass enough power and allies to be able to destroy, in direct combat, a being that renders planets nearly uninhabitable and shatters civilizations. And one of your party members fights with her fists.
  • And said alien does all on-screen mass destruction its weakest form.
    • Not to mention, a fully-leveled Ayla can kill its strongest form in two punches if both are critical hits.
  • As an extra bonus, the Ocean Palace scenario, which is the first time are forced into a confrontation with Lavos, contains several references to the Cthulhu mythos. (You can voluntarily face Lavos anytime after you reach the End of Time, but unless you're in a New Game Plus this only leads to a quick Game Over if you do so before the Ocean Palace event.)
• City of Heroes usually avoids this — big threats need big groups of superpowered individuals to take on — but there are a good few moments where really big threats can be taken out with rather questionable means. The comic strips, for example, have two instances of superpowered hordes being taken out by flashbangs on arrows; in the first case a bunch of ancient deathless ghost mages, in the second case a group of psychically enhanced and deranged lunatics about to tear apart a powerful hero. In-game, while not common, it's quite possible for a group of "natural" origin heroes with powers on a normal human's level to take down Lanaru or Ruladak, beings that make up major aspects of a sentient dimension's awareness. That's made worse by requiring that group to spend upward of six hours going through the lore behind those opponents, describing how they literally broke their planet. Even more fun is going home and getting your backside handed to you by a next-gen SWAT team.
  • Then there is Hequat, Goddess of the Mu, who can be taken on and defeated by a lone villain. (They do at least say that she is in a weakened state, which is why you have to go and attack her now.)
• Every Contra in general. Up to two shirtless men or clad dressed women are to take out a whole army of aliens which includes loads and loads of monsters that are at least 3 time bigger than them with inter-changeable rifles.
• Crusader Kings 2 introduces an event chain modeled roughly after "The Call of Cthulhu" in an expansion appropriately named "The Old Gods" (focusing on Viking and Pagan rulers). Yes, the player does have the ability to ram Cthulhu with a dragonboat.
• Cryostasis does this at the end: Over the course of the game, the main character has altered history so many times that by the end of the game, the Timey-Wimey Ball has finally had it and decides to do away with the player character. How, you may ask? By throwing Chronos, the goddamn God of Time at him.
• While King Dice is The Heavy of the game, the Greater-Scope Villain of Cuphead is the Devil himself. And yes, we do mean that literally: you're working for Satan in this game. If you choose to do the right thing and not hand over the soul contracts you've earned from the Devil's debtors, you can duke it out with Satan and fire super-blasts right into his huge smug face until you reduce him to uncontrollable sobbing and win.
• Dante's Inferno begins with Dante punching out The Grim Reaper. He then slaughters his way through Hell, killing several major demons and eventually beats down Lucifer himself.
• By the end of Dark Souls (including the DLC), you will have defeated the following (albeit usually not at full strength):
  • Three of the four Lord Soul Bearers,
    • The setting's Top God (Gwyn, Lord of Cinder)
    • The source of all demons (Bed of Chaos)
    • The Lord of the Dead (Gravelord Nito)
  • Two Archdragons (Kalameet, if you so choose, and Seath the Scaleless)
  • The God of Magic (Dark Sun Gwyndolin, if you so choose)
  • Two lesser gods (Ornstein and Smough)
  • An Eldritch Abomination responsible for the spread of the Abyss (Manus, Father of the Abyss)
  • Possibly a half-dragon locked away for her power (Crossbreed Priscilla)
  • And various demons, knights, and dagerous creatures.
• Dark Souls II continues the tradition, with enemies and bosses including:
  • The requisite Archdragon Superboss (Sinh, the Slumbering Dragon)
  • Two separate demons made of masses of animate iron (the Smelter Demons)
  • Multiple giants
  • A demonic lava creature (Old Iron King)
  • A creature made up of thousands of collected bodies (The Rotten)
  • A monstrous spider heavily implied to be the reincarnation of Seath the Scaleless (The Duke's Dear Freja)
  • Two fragments of Manus (Nashandra and Elana, the Sqalid Queen), plus a knight empowered by another (Raime, the Fume Knight).
  • Vendrick, the incredibly strong former king of Drangleic.
  • Vendrick's brother, who's turned himself into an Eldritch Abomination in a failed attempt to break the Curse of Fire (Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin).
• Dark Souls III has your poor Unkindled fight such foes as:
  • The Lords of Cinder, four entities powerful enough to Link the Fire.
    • A Badass Army who all Linked the Flame together (Abyss Watchers)
    • A corrupt cleric who turned into a sludge monster from eating people including the aforementioned Gwyndolin (Aldrich, Devourer of Gods).
    • A giant king (Yhorm the Giant)
    • Two godly princes who fight together (Lothric, Elder Prince and Lorian, Younger Prince).
  • Knights mutated into giant monsters by cursed rings (Outrider Knights, Vordt of the Boreal Valley, Dancer of the Boreal Valley).
  • Yet more demons
  • A tree mutated from countless curses (Curse-Rotted Greatwood).
  • A former Lord of Cinder candidate corrupted by the Abyss, who's actually more deadly in his original state (Iudex Gundyr and Champion Gundyr)
  • A dragon-riding war god (Nameless King)
  • The Anthropomorphic Personification of the First Flame (Soul of Cinder)
  • A third dragon, this time with Abyssal corruption (Darkeater Midir)
  • The elite warriors of the Precursors (Ringed Knights)
  • And, to cap it all off, the embodiment of the Dark Soul (Slave Knight Gael).
• In Dead Space, the final boss is the Hive Mind that is controlling the Necromorphs; it has to be at least over 100 meters tall. Isaac Clarke is an engineer with a headful o' crazy and a cutting tool. Guess who gets owned?
  • Isaac outdoes himself in Dead Space 3, in which he takes on a freaking moon-sized Necromorph. Okay, technically "the Machine" did most of the actual work there, but this sequence still involves gouging out the Brother Moon's eyes with telekinetically-thrown Markers.
• The Elders from Deep Town: Mining Factory are Eldritch Abominations older than the stars who ended human civilization in the 23rd century. The mining platform AI you play as can destroy almost each and every one with nothing but lasers, explosives, electrical shocks and other technologies.
• Demonbane is based on utilizing half of the Cthulhu Mythos to beat the shit out of the other half, which includes Cthulhu.
• Destiny and its sequel, Destiny 2 see you taking down so many Cthulhus that you could probably add "kills the unkillable" as a skill in their resume.
  • From the first game:
    • The main Campaign see you kill the Black Heart, an entity that the mechanical Vex could not understand and thus felt the need to worship, and which the sequel eventually reveals to be their imitation of the Veil, the source of all Darkness in the universe.
    • The base game raid sees them slay Atheon, the Vex Mind tasked with making Vex dominion a new law of physics, and can retgone you out of existence.
    • The Dark Below adds Crota, Son of Oryx, one of the Hive Gods to your kill count - the same Crota who personally spew hundreds of Guardians alone in the Great Disaster.
    • The Taken King adds Orux, the Taken King, Crota's father.
    • Rise of Iron finishes off their achievements in the original with Aksis, a Fallen Splicer who has become the controlling mind for the SIVA Grey Goo plague.
  • From the sequel:
    • Initially it appears they add Dominus Ghaul, supreme military leader and de-facto Empror of the Cabal to this list when they slay him after he absorbs the Traveler's Light, but this is subverted when Ghaul is immediately resurrected, only for the Traveler to Awaken and obliterate him, proving that sometimes it takes Cthulhu to kill Cthulhu.
    • Curse of Osiris adds Panoptes, the Vex mind in charge of the Infinite Forest on Mercury, and Argos, the Vex Mind that is the core of Nessus.
    • Warmind sees them slay Nokris, another of Oryx's children, and Xol, one of the worm gods above Oryx and his sisters (yes, it turns out to be a fake Xol, but props for trying).
    • Forsaken would then add an Taken Ahamkara, best described as an undead wish granting space dragon Jackass Genie that feeds on the difference between reality and possibility.
    • Shadowkeep would continue their Cthulhu-punching with the Consecrated and Sanctified Minds, two of the most alien and distorted Vex Minds in existence.
    • The base story of The Witch Queen adds Savathun, Oryx's sister, the hive god of lies, and the first Hive Lightbearer, though since her ghost gets away, she isn't necessarily gone for good.
    • This is immediately followed by the Vow of the Disciple raid, which sees them add Rhulk, the First Disciple, the very first being to serve the Darkness (or rather The Witness) to their list of defeated Cthulhus.
    • Lightfall tops this with two additional disciples - Calus, the Emperor of the Cabal, and Nezarec, the Final God of Pain and the herald of the first collapse.
    • Season of the Deep adds the Leviathan Eater, the most powerful general of Xivu Arath, who personally killed a servant of the Traveler known as the Leviathan.
• According to Devil May Cry lore, The Legendary Dark Knight Sparda did this on at least two occasions—demon kings Mundus and Argosax the Chaos. In the first and second games, Dante follows in his dad's footsteps. While Dante needed some help from his dad (or more specifically, his father's sword) and Trish to defeat (and seal away) Mundus, the latter fight was a Curbstomp Battle from start to finish. He also takes down the Big Bad of the third game (who was drawing on Sparda's power) alongside his twin brother Vergil, and defeated a demon of similar caliber in the anime.
• Pretty much the point of Diablo.
  • There's quite a contrast between the end of the first game, where it doesn't really turn out that well in the end, and the second game, where you mow your way through all three of the Great Evils, along with over 9000 of their minions, and pretty much anything else that inconveniences you.
    • Lampshaded in the third game. According to backstory, humans actually have potential to be even more powerful than angels and demons. That's also a reason why the demons are messing with human world in a first place.
    • Also there is in-game achievement "Punch Diablo".
• Disciples II, particularly the final level of the Mountain Clans campaign, in which your Viking-expy dwarf hero parties must defeat "the wyrm Nhidogg," a physical manifestation of the corruption and imminent destruction of the world due in large part to the dwarves' negligence of their traditions, with weapons. Given the emphasis on martial bravery in those traditions, it makes at least some sense.
  • Also, the capital city of each side is protected by a "guardian" character who cannot be removed from the capitol, is clearly intended to be effectively unkillable, and attacks in a non-blockable fashion for the maximum possible base damage per hit, but can be defeated with the right cheesy tactics.
• Disgaea 2: Adell pulls a Get A Hold Of Yourself Man on Rozalin's Superpowered Evil Side, an Omnicidal Maniac that just finished thoroughly trouncing a level 1200 (in standard RPG levels, by the way) overlord without even breaking a sweat. Did He Just Bright Slap Cthulhu? Yes, and it worked.
  • Also in Disgaea 2 you can fight and defeat Laharl (the aforementioned level 1200 overlord). To put it into perspective, Laharl is the protagonist of the first game with enough power to blow up a planet out of hand. And in the PSP remake of the original you can fight Zetta, who is stated to be the most powerful being in existence. Then there's Baal or The Dark Sun...
  • In the third game, Raspberyl prevents Mao's unleashing of his REALLY evil side (a horror in his own right) by hugging him. TWICE.
  • Basically, in the Disgaeaverse, there are a number of characters who are fully capable of punching out Cthulhu.
    • Does it still count if the protagonists are ALSO horribly overpowered demons?
  • This is the major plot of Disgaea 6 as Zed dies repeatedly to the same opponent, but gaining power each time. The God of Destruction is his target, and he's slowly gaining his way to becoming as powerful as it.
• Can happen to Pretenders in Dominions, if they die particularly ignominiously. Some have even been lost to blood slaves... which are roughly the weakest unit in the game and really only exist to give Blood Mages something to sacrifice in combat.
• Doom is one of the legends in this department. The hero, an ordinary Space Marine, with an arsenal of powerful but in no way supernatural weapons, kills his way through hell, defeating archedemons and such.
  • It ends with Hell exploding and Satan's brain pumped full of rockets. The Marine does not go in for half measures.
  • In the hilarious Doom comic, the Marine literally tries to punch out Cthulhu (in this case, a Cyberdemon), but fails and spends the rest of the comic gathering weapons.
    • Not limited to the comic book. Doom power gamers prove their skill by performing the same feat in game. Silver medal for using the berserk punch, gold for regular punch.
• Dragalia Lost has had this happen quite a few times when the dragons are either godlike beings or named after gods.
  • Chapter 21 Part 1 has Euden, along with Nedrick, pull an Enemy Mine against Elysium and kill the Holywyrm.
  • "Drifting Sorrows" has Cleo facing off against Nyarlathotep and blasting him away after they used a grieving widow to raise an army of zombies, and also planning to open the Gate that contains the Ancient One.
  • "Faith Forsaken" the third anniversary event has Euden and co. literally face off against Satan himself in a multi-phase battle. Said battle also had a Nightmare version with 16 different players all trying to beat him up like an oversized piñata to see who could inflict the most damage to him in the limited time they had.
• In the Final Battle of Dragon Age: Origins you slay the Archdemon, an ancient dragon god of the Tevinter Imperium (in this case Urthemiel, the god of Beauty) corrupted by the darkspawn taint. Of course, finishing it off requires either a Heroic Sacrifice from a Grey Warden. Though, in this case, Morrigan provides a way out... one that gives her a chance to raise the dragon god as her own child.
  • Not to be outdone, Dragon Age: Inquisition not only lets you kill multiple dragons but pits you against a millenium-old darkspawn who used to be one of the magisters of legend who defiled the Golden City of the gods that can control an archdemon on the same level as the one in Origins.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Every final boss usually has the whole world scared shitless, generally proven themselves unbelievably evil, and are stupid powerful, and once their asses are kicked, the games in series go out of their way to make sure you know you just punched out Cthulhu, and usually every citizen on the planet is quite aware of just how damn badass you are at the same time.
  • Dragon Quest III: Zoma overpowered and defeated the goddess Rubiss, who created a literal entire world under her own power, petrified her, and chucked her statue into a dank tower on the mortal plane to rot.
• Dragon Ball fighting games like Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi and Dragon Ball FighterZ (similar to the Marvel vs. Capcom example below) invoke this by allowing you to beat the absolute shit out of Frieza, Cell, Kid Buu, Broly, Beerus, Whis, Ultra Instinct Goku and Jiren... while playing as the likes of Krillin, Yamcha, Tien, Videl, Yajirobe, Chi-Chi and even Mr. Hercule Satan himself. Lampshaded in FighterZ by Yamcha in one of his victory quotes against Ultra Instinct Goku.
  Yamcha: I have no idea how I won, but hey, it's a win, right?
  • Similarly invoked in Dragon Ball Xenoverse where you the player can beat up all kinds of immensely powerful opponents such as Beerus (a God of Destruction) and Whis (an Angel) and at end of the first game Demon God Demigra. It’s especially satisfying, if you do it while playing as an Earthling, as Demigra and other villains like Frieza bluster over the fact a being of such little lifespan and importance is not only defying them but royally kicking their asses as well. In the sequel Hit, the strongest fighter of Universe 6 (who’s able to fight Goku and Vegeta in their god forms) as your instructor actively looks down his nose at Earthlings as insignificant in power. When you clean his clock with your Earthling power, he is utterly amazed and quickly amends his opinion.
• The true final boss in Duel Savior Destiny is God himself and is absolutely unkillable by any means as well as essentially omnipotent. However with a little powerup or ten thousand Taiga is able to apparently curb stomp his opponent if the after battle commentary is anything to go by. He still has to do it over and over again due to the whole unkillable thing, though.
• In Dungeon Crawl you can go through the gateway to Hell, and individually beat all four lords of hell. Theoretically you could do this with your bare hands, though they have ludicrous hit points and AC, and, in the meantime, you would probably be killed by the hordes of demons they summon.
  • What about killing Jiyva???
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • It's quite possible to massacre titans, Forgotten Beasts, and demons from the bowels of the Earth, and in the last case you can even colonize hell and use it to grow mushrooms.
  • Exclusive to Adventure Mode, it's possible to wander in to a Vault and kill angels within. Angels in the game's world tend to be just as eldritch and nasty as the demons.
• Hastur from Earnest Evans is, indeed, taken down by a puny human whip.
• In the finale of Earth Defense Force 5, the EDF has been decimated and the Earth's population has dropped by 90%. The only people still willing to fight against the Primers are the Storm Team, especially Storm-1, who fights against the Mothership, which contains the Nameless. The fight against such an eldritch being gets so bad it makes Intelligence activate Plan Omega: every man, woman, and child is now an EDF soldier, all just to Hold the Line while Storm-1 fights a godlike being. Eventually you finally win by doing what you've done to every problem: shoot it till it dies.
• Elden Ring:
  • In the lore of the game, the Blind Swordsman fought against the ancient God of Rot with an enchanted blade and defeated it, sealing it into the underground and forming what would become the Lake of Rot in the present.
  • Your character's goal, and the one all Tarnished have, is to gather the Great Runes; unfortunately, the majority of Great Runes are in the possession of demigods who are very unwilling to give them away, so you're tasked with hunting them down to the last. Two demigods in particular stand out:
    • Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy, was once head inquisitor of the Golden Order before he betrayed it and began plotting against it, committing the ultimate heresy in the process. In his lust for power he fused with an ancient snake-god, becoming a gigantic, eldritch snake with arms and legs who feasts on mortal souls. This puts him at a significant advantage compared to even the other demigods, but that doesn't stop your character from picking a fight and (eventually) winning.
    • Malenia, Blade of Miquella is an unparalleeld Swordmaster and World's Strongest Woman by default, and would be an incredibly tough fight even withotu counting her nature as a demigod - however, she's also an Empyrean and the (unwilling) chosen vessel of the previously mentioned God of Rot. Altough she managed to contain it for most of her life, she's still a Person of Mass Destruction and the living equivalent of a biological bomb, as the region of Caelid unfortunately found out. In the fight against her, she eventually loses control of her powers and ascends as Malenia, Goddess of Rot, sprouting wings made of butterflies and her own hair and unleashing the power of the Scarlet Rot on you - however, she's still vulnerable to weapons like any other boss.
  • And at the end of the game you fight, back-to-back, Radagon of the Golden Order, second Elden Lord, and the Elden Beast. Radagon himself is powered by the titular Elden Ring within his body, enhancing him to divine levels even considering the Ring's shattered nature; after defeating him, the Elden Beast, the divine creature that represents the very concept of Order, emerges from within Radagon's body to fight the Tarnished in one final confrontation. After beating both, a unique victory screen appears: "GOD SLAIN".
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Played with concerning the Daedra throughout the series. The mortal forms they take when on Mundus, the mortal plane, can be killed and destroyed, but their essence always returns to Oblivion where it can be reformed. Instead of "death", physically ruining a Daedra's body is called "banishment". To date, while Daedra have been beaten, battered, and even fundamentally changed, nothing in the setting has ever been able to truly "kill" one. That said, even Daedric Princes are vulnerable to banishment, and it is considered a highly unpleasant experience by daedra nonetheless.
  • Defied in Battlespire, where any attempt to attack Mehrunes Dagon results in your instant death. Although you do banish him by striking him (once) with a sword, that's only the last of a chain of actions resulting in him getting banished (not killed).
  • Morrowind:
    • Averted with Big Bad Physical God Dagoth Ur. He really is a god (How can you kill a god?), and cannot be outright killed. However, the plan isn't about killing him, but instead severing his ties to the source of his power, the still-beating Heart of Lorkhan ("dead" creator god of Mundus). Cut off from his power source, his once-again mortal form dies.
    • Justified with the Tribunal, who really are gods with the same power source as Dagoth Ur. However, he has cut them off from being able to recharge their divinity, leaving them in an extremely weakened state. If battled and killed before completing the main quest (which is no easy task even in their weakened states), this is the reason why it is possible. (After the main quest, they are cut off from their source of power and can be killed like any other mortal, though they are still extremely strong.)
    • Averted again in the Bloodmoon expansion with Hircine. Hircine is the Daedric Prince of the Hunt, and wants to give the "hunted" a sporting chance, so he fights you as an "aspect" of himself (that you choose: guile, strength, or speed) with significantly reduced (but still extremely strong) power.
  • Oblivion:
    • Averted when the player finally confronts the Big Bad, Mehrunes Dagon. As you're up against an evil god who just tore reality a new one, the actual fighting is left to your companion, the descendent of a god himself. The best your character can do is stagger Dagon for a few seconds to buy time for Martin to complete his transformation. (Using Wabbajack, some exploitative custom spell, a game-breakingly powerful custom weapon can "kill" him, but since he's not supposed to die from any means, he has no death animation and it breaks the ending of the game.)
    • To a lesser extent, the trope still applies, because many bosses such as the King of Worms and Mankar Camoran, and every enemy except Mehrunes Dagon can be easily killed by punching, since Hand to Hand is a legitimate combat skill in Oblivion.
    • Seemingly played straight in the Shivering Isles expansion. In fact, you are merely replacing the avatar of a Daedric Prince; the essence of Sheogorath, his madness and power, are eternal and simply moves to new avatars when he becomes bored.
  • Skyrim:
    • Plays with it at the end of the main quest. Yes, Alduin is the bringer of the end and he was powerful enough that a previous set of heroes could only send him through time. Yes, the player does manage to kill him (quite easily if Dragonrend is used). However, one of his contemporaries (his former Dragon, no less) snarks that he's not really all he claims to be. It is, however, implied that Alduin is truly undefeatable, and that the Dovahkiin merely strands him in time again, delaying the inevitable; this is mentioned as a reason you didn't absorb his soul. The Dovahkiin has the advantage of not being an ordinary mortal (he/she has the soul of a Dragon) and being somewhat Immune to Fate since he/she has no set-in-stone destiny. Even Alduin can't fight fate which is implied to be another reason he lost. It's not truly time for the world to end.
    • Killing any normal dragon also qualifies. They are all Aedric entities with immortal souls, and while extremely powerful, any mortal with enough skill can slay one. However, unless their soul is absorbed, they can be resurrected. That is where the Dragonborn comes in...
    • One of the first things you see in the main quest of Skyrim is a group of regular guards fighting a smaller dragon. They're often capable of killing it without your help.
    • Also, in order to be allowed into the Hall of Valor so you can fight Alduin, you first need to fight the god Tsun, who tests souls to see if they are worthy of being allowed into the Hall. Tsun is the Nord name for the Divine Zenithar. In other words, you have to fight ad best an avatar of one of the Nine Divines themselves to reach the Hall.
  • The Elder Scrolls Online:
    • The climax of the main plot has you go head-to-head against a fully-powered Molag Bal, god of schemes, as he wields his iconic mace. Granted, you're divinely powered at the time, but it still counts.
• Epic Battle Fantasy: The final bosses starting from the third game are some sort of powerful cosmic entities in one way or another, but this never stops the party from beating them. In the third game, Matt, Natalie, and Lance kill Akron, their world's Satanic Archetype that could make a black hole Pocket Dimension just by being unsealed. In the fourth game, not only do they and Anna defeat God(cat) herself(/selves), should the player chose they can destroy a glitch in reality. The fifth game tops the gang's achievements in the fourth with an extradimensional being that's even more powerful than Godcat acting as the true antagonist, who runs the entire universe and can delete Earth. The side content in 5 also sees a return of the team beating a glitch entity (which is a downplayed example of the trope; the Glitch is revealed to be sapient and tells the team that it will return even if "killed," and they're all clearly traumatized from the event) and has God himself serving as the ultimate superboss.
• Justified in Eternal Darkness — humanity defeats the Ancients, but they have not one, but two Eldritch Abominations backing them up — one's behind the scenes, and one is summoned to do the actual ass-kicking.
  • Actually, once you've played the game three times, you find that thanks to the nebulous reality-bending of the situation, you defeat all three simultaneously (despite it being a rock/paper/scissors relationship), and the only one left is dying anyway.
  • This also happens with the field reporter Peter Jacob against the Black Guardian. It's particularly notable in that Peter isn't physically fit by any stretch, his sanity had already taken a downturn due to the stress of covering World War I, his weapons are useless against the Guardian, and he knows he's completely out of his depth during the boss battle. Yet at the end of the day, Peter is the one who leaves with his life intact.
• EverQuest has a long-standing tradition of making the game universe's gods into major or final bosses. Of course, since they generally don't stay dead in the game's storyline, some have come back for more (and more, and more) as the game has had expansion packs added to it.
• Fate Series: Servants are Humanoid Abominations and are not only nigh impossible for modern humans to fight and defeat, but human weaponry will flat out not work on them unless magically crafted or enchanted.
  • Fate/stay night:
    • In Unlimited Blade Works, the visual novel's second route, Shirou takes on Gilgamesh, the strongest Servant to ever exist (with the possible exception of Karna from Fate/Apocrypha), in a one-on-one duel, and came out the victor. His ability to do so is sheer coincidence, and Shirou acknowledges that if he were up against any other Heroic Spirit, he would most likely lose, as they are masters of their weapons whereas he is merely an "owner" of weapons, but as Gilgamesh was himself more of an "owner," it leveled the playing field. Even so, he still managed to win a fight against a demigod and humanity's oldest recorded hero. There is a bit of Worf Had the Flu involved though, as not only did Shirou technically not defeat Gilgamesh (he ran out of energy shortly before landing the killing blow and was at Gil's mercy) but Gil was also holding back his greatest weapons the entire time, feeling a mongrel like Shirou isn't worthy of facing them. Even so Shirou still crippled Gilgamesh, but it still took the Holy Grail itself and Archer interfering to put down Gil for good.
    • Shirou manages to do it at least once (and up to three times) more in Heaven's Feel, the third and final route. First, when Berserker (whose true identity is none other than Heracles) — corrupted by Angra Mainyu, All the Evils of the World — is sent after the heroes, Shirou (with the help of Archer's arm, which was grafted to his body after he lost his own) manages to project Berserker's own Noble Phantasm back at him and kill him nine times in one blow. The second occurs in a Bad End, but is no less badass — using only the knowledge from Archer's arm and a technique using the short swords Kanshou and Bakuya, Shirou is able to win a one-on-one duel with Saber Alter. And lastly, in the Normal End, Shirou is able to project Excalibur to kill Angra Mainyu himself with one final attack.
    • Souichirou Kuzuki has no magical powers or knowledge of the supernatural, but thanks to his martial art skills and Caster giving him an enhancement, he kills Rider and beats the crap out of Saber in the Unlimited Blade Works route.
  • Fate/Grand Order:
    • When you learn that Francis Drake has a Holy Grail, she explains that she mugged some guy for it, and only kept the tacky thing because it never runs out of rum. Her crew promptly interject that by "some guy" she means the Greek god Poseidon himself, whom Drake insists wasn't all that impressive.
    • Miyamoto Musashi is first encountered as an ordinary human. Her swordsmanship skills allow her to defeat Servants. Since she was fighting Servants cursed with undeath, meaning they could pull themselves together if chopped up or even decapitated, she could not actually finish them off until Senji Muramasa loaned her a special sword that would keep them dead.
    • The elderly Li Shuwen fights Servants with his bare hands... and wins.
    • Ritsuka Fujimaru, who aside from his rather mediocre magical powers is an ordinary human, takes the Demon God Goetia on in hand to hand combat armed with only Mash's shield and a Command Spell to give him strength and kills Goetia.
    • Before Goetia came Tiamat, the Mesopotamian progenitor goddess. As the Mother of All Life, Tiamat could not die as long as life remained in the world, and was on track to wipe the surface of the planet clean of life and start again. The heroes figured out a way to circumvent her immortality by dropping her into the Underworld, where whether one counts as living or dead is determined by the goddess of the dead, Ereshkigal; a timely intervention by the first Hassan-i-Sabbah ensured that the concept of death was applied to her; and the heroes, blessed by Ereshkigal and buffed by Merlin, managed to take her down.
    • God Arjuna, the Big Bad of the fourth Lostbelt, was an alternate version of Arjuna who had absorbed the entire Hindu pantheon (except for Kama/Mara). He was a Reality Warper who would destroy and recreate the world every ten days. He's the most powerful antagonist the heroes have faced since the aforementioned Tiamat. And yet, even he proved fallible when faced with his old nemesis, Karna, who, while empowered by Shiva and Vishnu, struck him down once and for all.
• This is the case with most final bosses in the Final Fantasy series:
  • All the way back in Final Fantasy, you can literally punch out Chaos (who is at the very least sufficiently eldritch, if not the actual anthropomorphic personification of the concept of chaos) with the Monk/Black Belt class. Chaos is also not invulnerable to White Mage's "FEAR" spell (whose effect is that it causes enemies to run away), though of course the chances of it working without heavy luck manipulation is slim.
  • After Emperor Mateus of Palamecia (in the world of Final Fantasy II), died, the evil half of his soul went to Hell, where it proceeded to single-handedly slay the Devil and take over his demonic powers. The other half? It went to heaven to become God. The celestial chain has never suffered a worse punch-out.
  • Final Fantasy III: The Cloud of Darkness is an actual God which manifests as a roughly female avatar from a swirling, multicolored fog. It has no purpose, no reason, other than to consume all the reality of the World of Light itself. It's beaten back by four kids with a penchant for onions.
  • Final Fantasy IV: Zeromus is a grotesque, shapeless thing with a vaguely crustacean appearance, and the embodiment of the primal force of Hatred itself. Although Cecil and company defeat it, it claims to be eternal, or, at least, that it will exist as long as humanity does.
  • Final Fantasy V: Neo-Exdeath is a melange of Eldritch Abominations sealed or sent to sleep within the Dimensional Rift. Its appearance is as of dozens of corpses and demons blindly sewn together.
  • Kefka, having murdered and betrayed his way into position as the sole source of magic in the world of Final Fantasy VI and become a god, can be defeated by Good Old Fisticuffs, blasting him with magic, or abusing the Joker Doom trick.
  • Sephiroth, from Final Fantasy VII is said in a Word of God case to be "the strongest character in the Final Fantasy VII universe. There is nothing above him, and it would be impossible to make a character stronger than he is." He's defeated a couple of times by sword combos, albeit lengthy, very impressive sword combos that attack him from virtually every angle. The eldritch abomination part comes in when you consider Jenova. However, he never really dies, since he came back for Advent Children, and can probably come back again. He can be defeated, but he will come back, that makes him terribly dangerous. Oh, and if you're not sold on the God part, his leitmotif and final form are the Trope namers for One-Winged Angel.
    • Far stronger than him (in game terms) are the Weapons, in particular the Ruby Weapon, which can instantly kill two characters, has incredible defense, and looks like an eldritch abomination, complete with tentacles. He can be defeated with a single level 7 character. It's pretty easy, with the right material and heat resistance. Takes half an hour, but what can you do? It is an unstoppable force representing the life force of the earth.
    • Averted in Kingdom Hearts and its sequel where he is much harder to "beat", since you don't really kill him. Don't worry, the series has its own Eldritch Abominations to punch out.
    • At the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake, the heroes slay Whisper Harbinger, a massive, supernatural entity that is that physical manifestation of destiny itself that up to this point has been enforcing the plot to follow the original game to ensure the survival of the Planet. What’s more it’s heavily implied even this god-like entity is weaker than Sephiroth himself.
    • Speaking of Remake, Tifa can potentially have a Moment of Awesome invoking this during the climatic fight with Sephiroth who, as previously detailed above, is the most powerful being in the universe and nothing short of a Physical God. Yet, when Sephiroth has Cloud and Aerith at his mercy, mortal Kick Chick Tifa comes in and quite literally sends his one winged angel ass flying with a somersault kick, which he had to genuinely guard against! Instead of lazily parrying like most other attacks that came his way.
  • A rare example of the player being on the wrong end of this trope occurs in Final Fantasy VIII. If you acquire the allegiance of Odin then he will sometimes show up to instakill whole packs of enemies for you. On the last occasion when the player fights Seifer Odin's summoning animation will play, perhaps leading people to believe that their rival is going to get taken out in a single hit. Seifer proceeds to nonchalantly bisect Odin, forcing players to fight the battle in the normal manner.
  • Final Fantasy IX: Necron (JP: Darkness of Eternity), the very embodiment of death in its most absolute sense. It's not clear exactly what Necron is, since he appears a bit as a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, but in the English version he claims to be Death itself. A somewhat unusual example, Necron is fought by the party and essentially thwarted. But instead of being beaten until it's destroyed, the act of battling Necron causes it to rethink the ideas behind its destructive plans and it decides to back off completely. As it leaves, it warns that it's still out there and will always exist as long as there is a cycle of life and death in the universe.
  • An Honorable mention goes out to Final Fantasy X wherein there are TWO Eldritch Abominations. The first and more easily recognizable as actually being an Eldritch Abomination is Anima, an Eidolon who the protagonists have to fight because she (yes that horrifying thing is a she) is simply doing the bidding of her insane son who has mad delusions of marrying the main heroine in order to temporarily save the world from the other more dangerous Eldritch Abomination. The other one is the gigantic Space Whale known as Sin who turns out to NOT be the final boss; that honor goes to a Space Gnat. What's worse is that Sin can't be killed, because whoever kills him BECOMES him.
    • The people of Spira worship a mysterious, almighty deity known as Yevon. Yevon is actually evil, and the main villain and final boss of the game (although he technically isn't a god, but rather a ridiculously powerful summoner from 1000 years in the past.)
  • Final Fantasy XI In the Chains of Promathia expansion/storyline, You eventually fight the Twilight God Promathia, who is attempting to eliminate all life. To make this slightly more reasonable, you do have two almost-gods helping you in the fight.
    • The avatar-related battles are also arguably an example of this. Although the "prime avatars" are not the real deal, you do actually fight Diabolos, Bahamut, Odin, and Alexander. However, of those, only Alexander is really defeated (even then, it seems you merely halted him). The second Diabolos fight was more of a test to prove your worth, and Bahamut and especially Odin seem more impressed than defeated.
  • While the final boss is totally a One-Winged Angel, a great deal of the side quests in Final Fantasy XII basically amount to this trope. Particularly Zodiark, who is of the Sealed Evil in a Can variety, and Yiazmat essentially a huge, ancient dragon with 50 million hit points.
  • Used heavily in Final Fantasy XIV, wherein the player character does this seven times throughout the course of the storyline, once to each primal (Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, Leviathan, Ramuh, and Shiva in that order) as well as to the megalomaniacal King Mogglemog XII (who might also be considered a primal, arguably). And that's not counting the extracanonical Extreme fights. Your reputation as a god-killer turns you into The Dreaded among the Garleans (During one late-game cutscene, a small cadre of troops run at the sight of you, cowering at the presence of the "Eikon-slayer")
    • In the Heavenward expansion for the game you do this another two times (to Ravana and Bismarck) Actually another fifteen times as in addition to those two you beat the thirteen knights of the Heavenward at the same time. It actually gets to the point where some people outright don't believe your character exists, since how could any one person kill that many gods?
    • While future expansions had the Warrior of Light end up killing more primals, the Endwalker expansion somehow pushes this trope further by bringing you face to face with Zodiark early in the expansion, before hitting you with a "Trial Now Accessible" notification. If this isn't enough, you end up fighting Hydaelyn Herself in a test of your will and strength, fighting the very deity that guided and protected you thus far. Still not enough? Try the personification of despair itself. That last one isn't even a summoned primal.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics has a cabal of six Eldritch Abominations (seven if you include Elidibus) that are either sealed in magical crystals or using said crystals as a gateway into the mortal realm, and each of them is defeated by a group of mere mortals. If you fight them with a Monk in your party or with the Monk's "Brawler" ability equipped, you can literally punch each of them out of existence.
  • In Crisis Core, you can literally beat up Minerva, if the player continuously uses Costly Punch.
  • In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning faces off against Bhunivelze, the sole-remaining God who created a brand new planet and who recruited Lightning to harvest souls to bring into the new world in the final battle, and manages not only to beat him single-handedly (mostly), but knocks him into the Void after he reverts back into crystal stasis.
• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn requires you to kill a god with a mercenary and his posse. Granted, one important member of said posse is a vessel for the equal and opposite half of that god.
  • You still have to land the killing blow with The Hero's Infinity +1 Sword, or else the aforementioned god will simply regenerate. Justified because Ragnell was one of two swords created by the goddesses back when they were one deity. It is also powered up by said equal and opposite god during Ike's finishing attack.
    • Even that doesn't kill Ashera. It does destroy her physical form for several hundred years and during that time Yune is able to recombine with her and they become Ashunera again.
  • Subverted in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. The previous group of heroes had to seal away the Eldritch Abomination within the titular Sacred Stones, which over the course of the game naturally get broken. However, in the closing moments of the game, the heroes seal it away again, leaving them to fight the mindless body but not the full evil. It is implied in the game that they could not defeat it, only seal it, just as the generation of heroes before them had to do.
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening gets in on this as well, done to Grima, who is essentially an evil dragon god. There are even two ways to do it: either you return him to slumber, or you kill him off for good (though the latter requires the sacrifice of your Avatar). Oh, and the reason Grima and his cult are after you is you're the vessel bred for him to possess.
  • In Fire Emblem Gaiden, this happens for the first time when Alm kills Duma in order to save Celica. It requires the use of the Falchion, which is just as much of a legendary weapon as as the Archanean version. Good Bad Bugs mean that Nosferatu can break past his defense, though.
  • In the backstory of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Nemesis killed Sothis, who was by all means a Physical God, then drank her blood and had her spine turned into the Sword of the Creator. This sounds impressive until you learn that Sothis had exhausted her power fighting the Agarthans and fallen into a deep slumber to recover, making it less of a human triumphing over a god and more like a bandit sneaking into someone's room and murdering them in their sleep.
• Averted in Fossil Fighters. When the leader of the Terrible Trio pulls out an Olympus Mons (out of nowhere, we might add), it's completely indestructible. The only way to stop it is to go find an Olympus Mons of your own, and pit them against one another. They annihilate each other with their godly powers, leaving the bad guy stuck (and you with the Aftertaste Of Power in your mouth).
  • But it's later played straight with Planet Eater Guhnash. It's justified by the fact that you're attacking his weak point, his brains, for massive damage, but it's still just one kid and a couple of dinosaurs taking out a being the size of a planet by scratching at it.
• At the end of Irrational Games' Freedom Force, the team must contend with Timemaster. Timemaster cannot be defeated until you've destroyed his four Energy Crystally Thingies, but once you have, the Lord of the Timelines is in for a good face-kicking.
• The biggest threat to humans and Vasudans in FreeSpace is a powerful Shivan dreadnought, the Lucifer, with nigh-impenetrable shields, which devastates Vasuda Prime and is looking for Earth. It is only defeated in the last level through the use of Lost Technology by chasing it in subspace with fighters/bombers and destroying its generators while its shields are down. The explosion does, however, cause Earth to be but off from the rest of the galaxy for many decades.
  • The sequel had the Shivans go up to eleven in terms of threat level: your biggest victory in the campaign comes when you destroy the Sathanas, a ship far more powerful than the Lucy ever was, at great cost (the one ship capable of tackling the Sathanas is drydocked for extensive repairs). Then the Shivans reveal that they have over 80 more such ships en route to Capella. The Alliance does not walk away with a victory.
• The final chapter of F-Zero GX's Story Mode is the driving equivalent of this trope. Not only does Captain Falcon lap The Creators in a race where his soul is on the line, he smack-talks them for even having the audacity to challenge him in the first place. Did You Just Outrace Cthulhu? Yeah, pretty much.
• In Ghostbusters: The Video Game, the boys take out several entities that their scans classify as "Deity [Supreme Being]", including the Imprisoned Juvenile Slor, several ascended humans such as Azetlor and Shandor the Architect and, of course, the returning Destructor Form of Gozer the Gozerian himself, aka the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (although they claim that Stay Puft is weaker than he was when they fought him before, in the movie).
  • If you win the final battle, you hear Egon lampshade the trope by saying, "We eat gods for breakfast!" Afterwards, Egon thinks it was too bombastic, but Ray thinks it's actually quite cool.
• In Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins, the True Final Boss is Hades whom Arthur destroys simply by tossing weapons at him until he explodes and takes all of Hell with him. This sort of thing happens all the time in the Makaimura series. Arthur's beaten the crap out of Astaroth, Lucifer, Loki, Beezlebub, Samael, and Satan.
• Gene in God Hand does this quite literally. You defeat Angra (who's basically Satan in the game's universe) by punching him. A lot. Hell, even before getting the requisite 11th-Hour Superpower, Gene had to beat down three ancient demons with his bare hands to reach the Final Boss in the first place!
• Basically the stated goal of God of War is to...punch out the God of War. Sure, Kratos needs to go on a very long quest to retrieve a MacGuffin to give himself temporary godlike powers, but ultimately those "godlike powers" turn out to be "make me really big so I can beat this guy up."
  • As the original Greek Gods didn't always defeat human heroes (Ares in particular got beat up by Diomedes in one book of the Illiad) this is not entirely unreasonable.
  • God of War II basically takes this to the extreme: Kratos punches out gods, the gods parents, and everyone that gets between him and the gods. All because he hates Zeus. And because Zeus is totally a jerk.
    • Also his father, who apparently sired him specifically to take out any other Olympian that rebelled. Zeus is fully capable of this level of Jerkass, especially in this game series.
    • Possibly more impressive than the above is that he KILLS THE FATES! And this is after they tell him they've seen the future, and in it he fails. This isn't even possible for Olympus.
  • Word of God has it that God of War III explains why the greek pantheon of gods no longer exists. It's no one's surprise that Kratos is the answer. The ending is basically Did You Just Punch Zeus til His Head Was Completely Obliterated?
• In one of the branching paths in Guardian Heroes, God appears as the final boss...and yes, can be killed.
• The third campaign of Guild Wars, Nightfall deals on how the human heroes manage to overthrow the fallen god Abaddon, even when in the penultimate mission the other gods themselves decline to directly intervene, arguing that the humans have all the strength they need.

  Given the fact that humanity's ability to fuck up the plans and creations of gods is why the gods basically went into retirement, this kind of makes sense. "Well, they shat all over everything we did before, just give one of them our blessing and they'll probably find a way to fuck things up for the Big Bad as well"

  • And Guild Wars 2 will involve defeating at least one of the ancient dragons (Eldritch Abominations at least as powerful as the gods). In fact, getting back to the other two continents (as we'll inevitably do in expansions) will require it: Zhaitan (set up as the Big Bad by the trailer) has pretty much blocked off sea travel by way of his zombie pirate Mooks, and another dragon (Kralkatorrik) is blocking the land route to Elona.
  • It's quite possible that Grenth did this when he overthrew Dhuum, as well.
    • They're both gods, so that's more of a "Did Hades Just Punch Out Thanatos?"
• Played With in Hades as the protagonist Zagreus does eventually face his eponymous Physical God Big Bad father and kills him to escape the underworld. But it’s subverted on two regards: 1) death is generally a minor inconvenience in the Underworld so Zagreus technically just momentarily defeated his father, who came back straight away to keep fulfilling his job and 2) it’s treated less like a epic victory over a literal deific foe and more like a rebellious son finally breaking free of his domineering father’s influence.
• The fight against the mighty Nihilanth at the end of Half-Life. A giant bio-mechanical psychic being of unimaginable power that controls an entire dimension's worth of aliens... taken out by a scientist wearing a fancy suit.
  • Not to mention that despite all the fancy guns at Freemans disposal, the final blow is best delivered with a good ol fashioned crowbar.
  • Also carries over to Opposing Force, in which a living biological resource factory that literally sucks matter from our world to make more Race X... is destroyed by one Marine with a sniper rifle.
  • Both of those are nothing compared to the beginning of Half-Life 2: Episode One, when the previously unstoppable G-Man, capable of casually manipulating time and space to his whims, is completely owned by a group of Vortigaunts (the face he makes is priceless, by the way).
    • The Vortigaunts are currently keeping the G-Man at bay, and are at least powerful enough to face him on equal terms. However, the G-Man is figuring out how to get past their defenses. The point still stands: up until now, the G-Man was unstoppable in his efforts to manipulate Freeman and the world for whatever it is he's planning. For the first time, he's on the defensive and is now forced to improvise.
• Inverted slightly in Heavenly Sword: in the end, Nariko temporarily becomes a god. To defeat her, Bohan becomes a deity himself. Of course, since he's the villain, it doesn't work out as neatly as he'd hoped.
• Homeworld Cataclysm is all about punching out Cthulhu. The crew of the mining ship Kuun-Laan accidentally unleashes The Beast, a biomechanical virus threatening to destroy all life in the galaxy. They spend the rest of the game trying to set things straight, and after both ship and crew take a few levels in badass, The Beast is finally defeated by a combination of EMP-blasts and a lot of firepower.
• In Justice League Heroes: The Flash, if The Flash runs out of health while using his Super-Speed Bullet Time mode, the Black Flash (the Grim Reaper to speedsters in the DCU) will appear to take you away. However, you can beat him up and keep fighting with low health. This is rather downplayed, though, as beating him up only stops him for the time being, and every time you do this without getting killed off, he will be much harder to beat.
• Kid Icarus:
  • Kid Icarus (1986): You start out in the series' equivalent of hell and end up killing the goddess of darkness and saving the goddess of light.
  • Kid Icarus: Uprising cranks this trope up to eleven. On top of the gods you fought returning in this game, you also butt heads with even more gods and eventually, aliens!
• Kingdom Hearts does this a few times. The Greek God of the Dead (or the wisecracking Disney version) is a recurring boss, and while you can't seem to put him down permanently you can inflict some serious hurt. The most powerful Heartless can easily be seen as Eldritch Abominations, as can some of the Nobodies, and, oh yeah, the main characters take on Disney's Chernabog (who is basically Satan) in the very first game. He's not even the final boss, just something the developers kept in for the cool factor. For Sora, Donald and Goofy, fighting the Devil is a speed-bump.
• In The King of Fighters '97, you take down the legendary Orochi, who is treated as the equivalent of a world destroying god in this series.
  • To be fair, the game also makes it clear that you only put it back to sleep for, hopefully, another couple thousand years. AND it also more or less states that Orochi was using only a minuscule fraction of its power, due to only three of its eight "heads" having been used in its revival, and due to having just woken up. Essentially, had it been at full power, it'd have ripped you apart. Even as weakened as it is, it dishes out a tremendous beating on the heroes.
• In Kingdom of Loathing, one of the monsters lurking in Fernswarthy's Basement is an nth dimensional horror. It starts a being four dimensional and goes from there. And while it gets stronger as you go down, the 4th Dimensional Horror can be beaten by someone who is having trouble with the Bonerdagon.
  • There are also some very tough bosses in The Sea: Shub-Jiggawat, Elder God of Violence, Yog-urt, Elder Goddess of Hatred, and Dad Sea-Monkee, who's been given terrifying eldritch powers by being hooked up to some kind of machine.
• Most of the big bosses in Kirby games can only be described as an Eldritch Abomination, but of course Kirby thrashes these folks on a regular basis.
  • The anime and later Kirby Star Allies actually imply that he's a good Eldritch Abomination, so perhaps it's not so surprising.
    • While Kirby's implied status would mean most instances in the series are subversions, it would also mean that him being beaten by Drawcia (a living painting) in the intro to Kirby: Canvas Curse is a straight example.
  • Notable examples of this are the Soul forms of final bosses. They're like the final bosses, but much harder, and you can only face them by completing the True Arena.
    • In Kirby Star Allies, Void Termina has a form beyond his Soul form, known simply as Void... who is revealed in his flavor text (in the Japanese version, anyway) to essentially be God. And on top of the main heroes, Void can be beaten by the likes of a Parasol Waddle Dee.
  • For an example that doesn't involve Kirby, there's the backstory of Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Long ago, a being known as Fecto Elfilis attempted to destroy the civilization that once inhabited the planet. They proceeded to capture him and lock him in a science lab so they could research his portal creating abilities. And just to add insult to injury, they turned his prison into a tourist trap.
• In the SNES strategy game Der Langrisser, the party, which starts off as only a pair of friends from a small village, eventually grows powerful enough to challenge Lushiris, the Goddess of Light. More accurately, the main character can one-hit kill her if built right. Rohga puts it quite bluntly, in fact: "Holy shit... Incredible! You've even killed a deity!"
• Occurs in the endgame of Legacy of Kain: Defiance, where Kain uses the newly acquired power of the Soul Reaver blade to take down the Elder God.
• This happens repeatedly in The Legend of Zelda series. Usually, the Sword of Plot Advancement (eg. Master Sword, Light Arrows, etc...) is required to beat the final boss, who is a being so evil that only Link can stop it.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the final boss is referred to as the Demon King who fought against the gods. Or in other words, the Zeldaverse's equivalent of Satan. He's also heavily implied to be the source of Ganondorf, who is a mere remnant of this being.
• At the end of the prehistoric chapter of Live A Live, the shaman is eaten by a gigantic dinosaur that the villagers worship as a god. It spits out the shaman's skull helmet and then the gorilla sidekick throws it at him, proving that it can be hurt. The caveboy proceeds to kill it. It's also possible to kill the dinosaur with two attacks from the White Magician Girl.
  • The final chapter of the game has the heroes of the first seven chapters (which includes the caveboy of the above-mentioned chapter) banding together to defeat Odio, a demon who's manifested as their story's respective villains and is about to destroy the world at large. Even better, in the remake the heroes not only end up fighting altogether but manage to save Oersted, the knight who became Odio in the first pace, and have him be the one to lay the final blow.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, which is set during the events of the movies but tells a distinct story, hasthe party instantly transported to the top of Barad-dûr, where they fight spotlight-eye Sauron (who is a lesser god), and beat him into submission using swords, spears, and arrows. This is preceded by the party killing over a dozen ringwraiths as well.
• The Lufia series revolves around the hero Maxim and his descendants repeatedly killing the four Sinistrals every time they reincarnate.
• In Lunar: Eternal Blue, the party of heroes defeat Zophar, the God of Darkness, by whacking at him with weapons and magic — and the Power of Humanity, of course.
• Magicka has the player(s) take on an otherworldly being posessing a powerful mage, and winning. For even more adherance to this trope, the DLC pack The Stars are Left has the final boss being Cthulhu itself.
• Several cases in MARDEK. The Security Demon seems like it is supposed to be an unwinnable battle that you are supposed to avoid but it can be beaten. So far two of the GDM not counting Rohoph, although they are probably the weakest two in a straight up fight, and both the body and soul of something called the annihilator which is stated to have destroyed an ancient civilization.
• Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has Bowser go up against a being of pure darkness using his form that has more than enough power to destroy the world, and repeatedly overpowers it with brute strength alone. The only part the Bros. play in the battle is helping to make sure it doesn't get back up again after Bowser has knocked the core out of its gut (he wins at inhaling the thing, too). Did you just prove yourself better than Cthulhu at everything he tries?
  • And then Bowser LITERALLY punches it out with a series of superpowerful punches.
    • And then, in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, The final boss is Bowser as a Reality Warper, possibly more badass than ever. Then the Mario Bros. come along and fight him. For the first time, there's no 11th-Hour Superpower for Mario when the final boss shows up. The Mario Bros. fight him head on, with the only help they get being a bit of healing at the start of the battle. Being Mario and Luigi, they win, but it's still one of the most powerful foes they've ever faced.
    • Dream Team also has Giant Luigi square off against The Zeekeeper, a being that is able to open dimensional rifts, and is the guardian of the p'illo kingdom.
• Anybody in Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes can beat Onslaught. Even Badass Normals like Jin Saotome, or any Street Fighter. Keep in mind that in the comics, Onslaught is more or less the most powerful psionic being in existence, and killed a lot of people before being taken down, which in itself required the efforts and Heroic Sacrifice of several incredibly powerful characters.
  • The best fighter against Onslaught is the robot girl—not woman, girl—whose day job is maid. That's right, Mega Man's sister Roll. It's fun to take her in against Onslaught and wipe the floor with him.
  • Before that, in Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, one of the playable characters is Shuma-Gorath, who in the comics is an incredibly powerful Eldritch Abomination but of course had to be severely toned down to maintain balance. Same for Blackheart, son of Mephisto himself.
  • Pretty much the whole series can be consider an example when you look the powers of the different characters, and realize that if many of them actually fought the fight would be a big Curbstomp Battle, assuming of course character shields were removed (for example, Captain America going up against the Hulk).
  • In Marvel vs. Capcom 3, you can have guys such as Haggar, Chris Redfield and in Ultimate even Phoenix Wright go up against Physical Gods like the aforementioned Shuma-Gorath, Dormammu, and Phoenix and win. Even better; the Final Boss is Galactus.
  • Akuma (who is far, far from normal) acknowledges this trope when defeating Thor, Ammy or for maximum application, Shuma-Gorath
    Akuma: I have killed a god with my fists!
  • Before that (but after Marvel vs. Capcom 2), Tatsunoko vs. Capcom allows you to punch out Yami. Nice.
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance has the same issue. Your little super team fights nearly every supervillain in the Marvel Universe over the course of the game. As a result, a skilled player can defeat Mephisto, Galactus, Gladiator, Ymir, Loki, and Dr. Doom coupled with the stolen god powers of Odin all with Badass Normal Nick Fury.
  • Then again, one of Fury's alternate costumes IS Samuel L. Jackson.
  • This does reflect comic book "reality", in which Badass Normal heroes regularly trounce super-powered foes that in a realistic fight would leave them as a stain on the floor.
  • Somewhat justified in that the fight with Galactus consists entirely of the team running for their lives, and then distracting him while the Silver Surfer turns Big G's own powers against him. And the fight with Mephisto is impossible to win until the X-Man you didn't save forces him into the void with him/her.
  • With Galactus it's more of a case of Breaking Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu because at the end of the game he's seen swearing revenge while enveloping the entire Earth with his hand.
• Mass Effect features many examples of this. Beings that would be considered incomprehensible gods in lesser settings are QUITE comprehensible and killable to the ludicrously advanced civilizations of the 22nd century (the kind that would make the Elder Things look like cavemen).
  • Commander Shepard has punched out a few Cthulhui. The final confrontation of Mass Effect pretty much consists of exposing the resident Eldritch Abomination, the Reaper Sovereign, and letting the Human Systems Alliance shoot the bajeesus out of it. However, given that it was only ONE of a race of Eldritch Horrors, and it was being attacked by the combined forces of half the space-faring species in the galaxy, and even then it only barely worked, it's relatively justified. It's said by Vigil that the thing didn't just reveal itself from the beginning precisely because it was afraid that something like this would happen.
  • While a much lesser threat than the above, Shepard and co also personally kill the Thorian, a million-year-old, planet-wide, mind controlling planet-like creature worshiped as a god by the planet's inhabitants. No ships are needed for this, just some man-portable BFGs and an exploitation of weak points.
  • Thresher Maws are 90-meter long sand worms^note For comparison: the original Gojira was 50 meters tall. with bulletproof armored bodies and tentacle-like faces that can smash futuristic tanks like tin cans (or melt them with acid spit) and are worshiped as gods by more primitive peoples (case in point: Kalros). Shepard and co can kill nearly a dozen of them in the first game with the aid of the Mako and its 155mm railgun. They then top that by killing one on-foot in the second game.
  • Mass Effect 2 on the other hand, ends with your three-man team killing a Reaper. It's a "larval" Reaper that's nothing compared to a fully grown one, but it's still a ~100 meter long (not including the tail) Mechanical Abomination.
  • You can melee Harbinger as many times as he shows up. ASSUMING DIRECT CON-- *punch*
  • Mass Effect 3 has several Reapers being killed throughout the course of the game. While the civilizations of the galaxy as a whole stand absolutely no chance against the Reaper Armada (partly because there are hundreds of thousands of them),^note It's stated in the codex that the Reapers harvest civilizations every fifty thousand years, yielding at least one "Sovereign-class" Reaper and dozens more destroyers. The Leviathan of Dis, a single Reaper not implied to be particularly notable, is over a billion years old. So, bare minimum, there are 20,000 Sovereign-class Reapers and 240,000 destroyers. single Reapers are susceptible to enough conventional firepower, just like anything else.
    • Shepard calling down the firepower of the entire Migrant Fleet against a Reaper destroyer on Rannoch.
    • Shepard siccing Shai-Hulud Kalros, the mother of all thresher maws on a Reaper on Tuchanka.
  • It's actually possible to beat the nigh-unstoppable Brutes to death without fighting a single shot. In fact, Vanguards even get a special award if when a Brute tries to charge at them... they biotically charge right back.
• In Megadimension Neptunia VII, because you're playing as the CPUs, you're on the receiving end of this trope when the Gold Third decides to crash the party at the start of the Gold Third arc. In reality, they didn't really mean to do that. They were just testing their powers out to see if they're strong enough to defeat a prophecy. They didn't expect to actually win.
• Messiah sees Bob, a tiny cherub angel, managing to kill Satan, or at least thoroughly kick his ass. Granted, it's because of a very contrived plot device where Bob's possession powers happen to somehow create projectiles that can kill this enemy.
• The Metroid Prime Trilogy is rather fond of this one. First up was Gorea in Metroid Prime: Hunters, an Eldritch Abomination that wiped out some precursors and ended up sealed. Samus unsealed it and kicked its ass. Second was the Emperor Ing in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, a demonic Dimension Lord that Samus shot to death. Finally, there was the sentient planet of Phaaze in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, whose Toxic Phlebotinum was corrupting the universe itself. Samus blew it up.
• The entire point of Monster Hunter. It doesn't matter if they face titanic ice wolves, flying and tunnelling Triceratops or mountain-sized Elder Dragons which wipe out whole ecosystems when they're hungry. The Hunters will find them, kill them, carve them up and make some damn awesome outfits out of them.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Liu Kang, the series' original main hero, has made a career out of doing this. He has defeated the shapeshifting, soul-stealing sorcerer Shang Tsung, Shang Tsung's master Shao Kahn and the fallen Elder God Shinnok. In Mortal Kombat 11, he tops the previous feats by killing Kronika, the Titan of Time and mother of Shinnok.
  • Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero: Sub-Zero fights his way past four elemental gods guarding Shinnok's amulet. In the climax, he defeats Shinnok himself.
  • Mortal Kombat: Deception: The canon ending has Shinnok, the protagonist of this game, absorbing the powers of all the other fighters and defeating the Dragon King Onaga, a being that Raiden, Shang Tsung and Quan Chi combined couldn't stop.
  • Mortal Kombat X: Johnny Cage's chapter concludes with him defeating the Elder God Shinnok. His daughter Cassie replicates this feat in the climax.
• Myth: The Fallen Lords is about a world where the forces of good and evil each own the world for a thousand years, and then it flips. Unfortunately for the player in the first game, it's the other side's turn to win. The game ends bleakly as the last remains of the good army sacrifices themselves to beat the prophecy and Screw Destiny. This involves killing the equivalent of three gods, and an actual god. The sequel is about the surviving forces of light coming up against the surviving forces of darkness, while destiny and fate have gone Off the Rails, and it also involves fighting godlike creatures.
• The final boss of Neverwinter Nights: Hordes Of The Underdark is Mephistopheles, the second strongest devil in the universe.
  • And if you found his True Name earlier, you can bind him to be a powerless barmaid for all eternity.
  • If anything, the sequel's Epic level expansion Mask of the Betrayer gets one even better, especially if you were already familiar with the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. DID I JUST EAT MYRKUL?!?
    • NWN2's first campaign ends with killing an ancient Pure Magic Being. The second expansion Storm of Zehir ends with killing an avatar of the yuan-ti god of poison.
• The final boss of the Xbox remake of Ninja Gaiden wields the Dark Dragon Blade, which is supposed to give him the power of the "Devil incarnate". While he is a rather tough fight, our Charles Atlas Superpowered Highly Visible Ninja badass protagonist still defeats him anyway. Admittedly, Ryu was using the True Dragon Sword, which was meant specifically to counter the DDB, but still. Ryu also takes down multiple Greater Fiends, each of which is worth quite a number of regular fiends in power, as well as the released Archfiend.
• Octopath Traveler has the last quest, "At Journey's End." The dark god Galdera is revived thanks to Lyblac's interventions, but the eight party members take him on, defeat him, and send him right back into the darkness from whence he came.
• In Odin Sphere, Gwendolyn kills death. Let that sink in for a moment. She also kills a Kaiju dragon at the end of the game.
• Notably inverted in Ōkami; you're playing as an eccentric Physical God, but a large number of the bosses you face are Badass Normals who can still give you one hell of a fight. Played straight when you defeat Yami.
• Invoked in One Piece: Pirate Warriors when you beat a powerful opponents such as Whitebeard, Admirals and other Logia and Haki users all while playing as Nami, who while strong in her own right, is physically very weak compared to the rest of her crew, especially the Monster Trio (Luffy, Zoro and Sanji).
  Nami: (after beating a strong enemy such as Teach or Akainu) "No way... I won?"
• In Parasite Eve (another Square Enix JRPG) the Fair Cop heroine Aya Brea pulls this off twice during the Final Battle. First is against Mitochondrial Eve, formerly a opera singer taken over by a mutated Mitochondria and now a Humanoid Abomination who is like a biological science-based Ultimecia, having god-like powers that grow over the course of the game to the point where she can destroy attacking F-16s and their pilots with her mind. Yet by the end Aya is still able to kill Eve, even just purely using her guns and not her Final Fantasy JRPG abilities and Liberation Super Mode. After that Aya fights the child Eve gave birth to, which is explicitly referred to as the Ultimate Life Form and grows into a Eldritch Abomination throughout the battle though Aya manages to kill it too — although it took a Moment of Awesome from Daniels skydiving out of the helicopter and catching alight to deliver Aya the Villain-Beating Artifact (bullets containing Aya’s cells) to weaken the Ultimate Being and then Aya blowing up the ship they were fighting on to destroy it for good.
  • Worth noting Aya, considering her aforementioned superhuman abilities having a mutated Mitochondria herself is far from the typical Survival Horror protagonist (even if she mainly fights like one), so her being able to kill other biological superbeings is ultimately justified within the story.
• This is the entire point of the old Bungie game Pathways into Darkness — you play as a special forces operative sent to nuke a gradually awakening Sleeping God unconscious before it can awake fully and unleash unimaginable havoc.
  • The last game in Bungie's Marathon trilogy averts this by having the protagonist travel through dimensions and/or back through time to prevent the Eldritch Abomination from ever being released in the first place.
• Your player character in Path of Exile starts off banished to a forsaken continent for relatively meager crimes. By Act 3, you kill the leader of the Corrupt Church government that exiled you in his One-Winged Angel form. In Act 4, you kill another Big Bad who's been using the Beast, which may be the source of all magic in the world, and inadvertantly kill it along with him. For the next six acts, you're slaying the gods that have been freed from the Beast's death, which earns you the title of "Godslayer" from many of the NPCs. After that, you'll be going off slaying an otherworldly Humanoid Abomination or two.
• Subverted in Peasant's Quest: "beating" the game consists of the protagonist getting closer than any hero ever has to killing Trogdor — deflecting one gout of flame, stabbing your sword an inch or two into Trogdor's nigh-impenetrable hide, hearing The Burninator speak, and finally being almost effortlessly burninated. A really cool monument is built to honor this feat.
  • In episode 5 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, Strong Bad actually does defeat Trogdor by hitting his weak spots, which Rather Dashing failed to notice. Sure, Strong Bad transforms into a big, muscular version of himself with a gigantic knife (displayed in ridiculously awesome next-gen graphics) to accomplish this, but he's still just hitting him... And then it turns out that it was all a dream and Trogdor is still destroying the countryside.
• Played for laughs in the first episode of Penny Arcade Adventures On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Inciting Gabe to tackle a very Cthulian being, Tycho asks "Do you want to punch a god?" Gabe: "..." Tycho "..." Gabe: "..." Tycho: "..." Gabe: "Yes!"
  • Then again in the second episode. PC: "Gods? Again?" Gabe: "Yeah, it's like... I don't mind fighting gods? It's just I'd like a little warning first."
    • Just to put things in perspective here? The first God is defeated through a combination of a radio tube, absolutely pure urine, and the soul of a mime. The second is defeated with a giant robot doll piloted by a thirteen-year old girl.
• In Perfect Dark Zero, Joanna Dark defeats Zhang Li with early-21st-century weapons though the knife/machete comes in handiest despite the fact that he uses the Graal to gain superhuman powers and "become a god".
• Phantasy Star's chief antagonist is the Eldritch Abomination Dark Force/Dark Falz. In the original tetrology, Dark Force is the manifestation of evil that attempts to invade the Algol system every millennium. Its backstory is different in the games that followed, but in any game, it is an enormous monster and intergalactic threat, each time by a team of comparatively teeny tiny heroes.
• Pharaoh Rebirth has the player character going around Egypt defeating several gods (up to and including Anubis in the Steam version) in his quest to defeat a revived pharaoh who put a deadly curse on him.
• Played for Laughs as an Easter Egg in Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, where a Chomper can be seen eating Slender Man.
• One of the possible final bosses of Poacher is the leader of a civilization of what are essentially embodiments of pure evil. The other is the god on which all religious deities that judge the dead (e.g. Anubis, Minos) were based, and — though how directly is up for debate — the source of that civilization's magic and life force. Both of them can be killed with nothing but a 12-gauge shotgun, and only one of them is as tough as it sounds.
• In the Pokémon games, you are able to capture legendary one-of-a-kind (per game) Mons that are often forces of nature. Pokémon Diamond and Pearl of games contains Arceus, who apparently created the universe. In order to capture Pokémon, you have to attack them, lower their health, and give them status effects before you can do so, which is what makes it this trope.
  • Shown here, a literal example how to beat an entire team of Legendaries... with a Magikarp.
  • There are a couple of more straightforward examples, where for whatever reason you can't capture the Legendary (yet), so the battle consists of attacking the Legendary until it faints. The most noteworthy example is the fight against Ultra Necrozma, as not only is Ultra Necrozma a being on the level of the aforementioned Arceus, but it's generally seen as the hardest wild Pokémon battle in the entire series.
• It's standard practice in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series to have your puny unevolved starter Pokemon take down at least one of the aforementioned god-like legendary Pokemon in each game's story.
  • Gates To Infinity ups the ante by having your hero defeat the Bittercold, which is an embodiment of all of the negative emotions in the world. By themselves, no less.
• The 2D fighting game Pray for Death had Cthulhu himself as a normally playable character.
• Princess Maker 2: Lizzie Shinkicker killing the God of War in the LP anyone? In the actual game its more just knocking him out long enough to nick his sword and run past him.
• Your final opponent in Puzzle Quest is Lord Bane, the god of Death (who responds to his defeat by basically saying he'll just regenerate in a century or so and wipe out your descendants... just like he did last time.)
  • If you happen to have a certain companion with you, he eats Bane.
• Quake actually had you telefrag Shub-Niggurath. You destroy a giant worm-like lava thing named Chthon in the first episode, too.
• In Quest for Glory V, the Dragon of Doom is not a true dragon, but a fire elemental. One so powerful that it's a perfectly viable option to is to nuke the entire damn island of Silmaria to get rid of it, and it's said in legend that the Dragon can't actually be slain, only imprisoned. So naturally, the Hero goes in and kicks its ass outright. In fact, while one of your allies is supposed to sacrifice themselves to even make it possible to defeat and imprison it, it's entirely possible to destroy the Dragon without it. And if you rescue Katrina from Hades, they outright refuse to allow anyone to die.^note Performing the Sacrifice significantly reduces the Dragon's health, which does help quite significantly due to the limited amount of time you have to defeat the Dragon. Fortunately, Katrina is that powerful. Screw Destiny indeed.
• The Resident Evil franchise while not supernatural based still invokes this regularly. As the Badass Normal Main Characters Chris, Leon, Jill, Claire etc fight horrifying super monsters many of whom are deadringers for Eldritch Nightmares and bring them down with RPGs and Magnum Revolvers or even more awesomely with knives, punches and kicks.
  • The climax of the remake of RE2 has Leon or Claire (who are respectively a rookie cop and a civilian college student) take down a G-Creature who looks like a mobile Sarlacc Pit by running it through the eye with a broken pipe. Granted, the train exploding did the rest of the job.
  • Jill at one point in RE3 has the option to shove Nemesis (The Dreaded modified Super Tyrant) off a bridge with her bare hands like a sack of potatoes. The remake has Jill wield a BFG the size of a motorcycle to annihilate Nemesis in his final form when he’s the size of building and resembles a shoggoth.
  • Played straight in RE4 as Leon kills the Las Plaga an Ancient Evil parasite which is worshipped by The Illuminati and un-fossilised in the twenty first century. Leon easily kills hundreds of them, some with his trusty knife and others with a German Suplex.
  • In RE5 Chris and Sheva fight and eventually overpower the superpowered Wesker, using a combination of RPGs, knives, More Dakka and even fisticuffs. Although they explicitly needed to weaken him with a De-power injection and “fortunately” landed in a active volcano and they were still getting mostly pounded by Wesker (who absorbed Uroboros to power up) right until the last minute.
  • In RE6 in the finale of Sherry and Jake’s campaign, Jake goes hand to hand against the Ustanak (a Nemesis/Mr X expy) and wins, punching him into molten steel. Although, Ustanak does quickly come back from that and Sherry and Jake have to Attack Its Weak Point to finish Ustanak for good.
    • In the same game Chris and Piers fight and kill HAOS a Kaiju sized B.O.W housed in a Underwater Base.
  • Ethan (who’s an untrained civilian) at the end of RE7 destroys the Walking Wasteland Big Bad Eveline with a special handgun loaded with Kryptonite Factor bullets. On a more physical level in the DLC End of Zoe has the protagonist Zoe fight his massively mutated brother Jack with his bare hands and kills Jack off for real in his final messy form with a Power Fist.
  • Ethan ups the ante in Resident Evil Village not only slaying the RE equivalent to The Addams Family buffed up on Psycho Serum but also kills Mother Miranda a god-like Voluntary Shape Shifter who is also a Walking Wasteland like Eveline. While Ethan does ultimately die in the effort, that’s mega badass for a mere system engineer who wasn’t even specially trained like Chris, Leon or Jill.
• Heinrich I in Return to Castle Wolfenstein is an ancient Sealed Evil in a Can. Supposedly indestructible, the only way to defeat him was for a wizard to seal him in the ground. Of course, that was way back around the year 1000, so when the hero shows up in 1944 it quickly becomes evident that being invulnerable to swords and spears is not the same as being invulnerable to nazi superweapons
  • Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny has you shoot down the angel of death, requiring a non-stop chaingun firing at pointblank range for a WHOLE 10 seconds.
• In RosenkreuzStilette, Iris was born with Rosenkreuz's magical prowess and the abundance of knowledge he acquired over the course of his life, which more than qualified her to take her place at the pinnacle of the world. For that, she claims to have transcended humanity and become a god. And guess what? She got punched out by Spiritia. Because everyone was cheering on Tia, and because Iris couldn't believe in others nor love her fellow man.
  • Grolla also punches out Iris in Rosenkreuzstilette Grollschwert despite her absolute power, unparalelled brains, and claims to be a child of God himself. And, all she needed was the Demon Sword Grollschwert, which basically told her to spill her blood. And she didn't even care if Iris was a god, a human, or even an insect - she was willing to rip her apart just the same. Whoa.
  • It gets better in Freudenstachel. After Iris hijacks Tia and forces her to fight her friend Freudia, the latter gets extremely pissed and decides to take Iris's defeat up to eleven by freezing her in an ice crystal with the intent to put her down for good.
• In Rune Factory 2, the final boss, who causes earthquakes and can destroy the world is beaten by an 8-year-old kid. If you level your character up fully, and use the best equipment, this Big Bad will fall without much effort.
• The Fyros of Ryzom want to invoke this by killing a beast known as The Dragon, a sleeping Eldritch Abomination said to reside in the Prime Roots. This is a noble goal, but it irritates the Karavan to no end since they believe that waking it up will bring about The End of the World as We Know It. Setting out to kill it also proved to be a bad idea as well because doing that woke up the Kitins, which is what caused them to swarm the surface world in the backstory.
• Common in the SaGa series, which has a tendency to base bosses on various mythical deities, not just the final ones.
  • This ends up happening in The Final Fantasy Legend when the heroes get pissed at The Creator for daring to toy with his own creations. Did You Just Saw Cthulhu's Head Off?
  • Bosses from the second game are also gods and named from various mythologies (Odin, Venus, Apollo). You beat the crap out of Venus and Odin (who had been resurrecting you for most of the game. On the final world a reanimated statue of Isis joins your party, and you take on a security system built by the ancient gods. However, most of the Gods in the second game are just people with MAGI, aka parts of an ancient statue (yeah, the one in the spoiler above). That you're carrying most of the MAGI most of the game and don't declare yourself a God probably has some meaning to it, but the game just skims over that point.
  • The bosses of the third game have declared themselves Gods of their world, but they're really stretching the definition at that point. The God of your world would fit the definition if he was trying to be an enemy, considering he used to be one of them. But in the end you only fight him in an attempt to assist his suicide before the final boss takes him over, turning him into some sort of wormy brain thing. Guess how that goes?
• Several of the final bosses in SaGa Frontier can probably qualify as gods or Eldritch Abominations. If punching's not your cup of tea, grappling moves work just as well on a region destroying giant mech, Satan, and what is more or less the god of sex.
• In Salt and Sanctuary, the shipwrecked survivor will slay countless horrors on the island, culminating in killing the Nameless God, who did this in his backstory by killing and usurping The Three, and potentially taking his place. The survivor can also potentially destroy the undead Three. Several of the bosses are explicitly Cthulhu-inspired horrors called Kraeken that have taken on different forms, with the strongest one you face being the one responsible for your plight and also somewhat of a cross between the original Cthulhu and Poseidon.
• Sands of Destruction: The main arty is forced to defeat the Creator, Kyrie's mother, in order to Take a Third Option and create a new world, rather than annihilating the one they live in.
• Nintendo DS platformer Scribblenauts allows you to summon not only Cthulhu himself, but several hundred other entities to fight him. That's right, you can set up your own "Did ___ Just Punch Out Cthulhu" scenarios. For the most fun, pit Cthulhu against God. With a shotgun. On a skateboard.
  • And of punching him out doesn't float your boat, how about riding on his back and using him to kill a Leviathan?
  • The addition of adjectives in the sequel serves to increase the number of ways with which Cthulhu can be dealt. For example, this video, in which the appropriate response is, "Did you just milk Cthulhu?"
• The True Final Boss of Sea of Stars, is driven off by Garl when he beats The God-like Fleshmancer to the ground with his pot lid.
• The final battle of Serious Sam: The First Encounter. Sam Stone, an average human, has just fought his way through THOUSANDS of supernatural or alien monsters only to find something horrible teleport in behind him: Ugh-Zan III, a 350 foot-tall, lightning-shooting, Made of Iron, fireball-throwing alien warlock of near godlike power. It's actually somewhat justified, since for the first part of the fight you just run away, the second part you injure him heavily with some semi automatic rocket launchers and uranium cannonballs, but still not kill him, whereas the final part has you trying to hit with a beam from the sky that's implied to be supernatural in origin (since it's coming from a Sirian spaceship and the Sirians use "technomagical" weaponry). If you don't do that, he'll just regenerate his health, making him effectively invincible. To add insult to injury, NETRICSA describes Ugh-Zan III as an ancient deity and one of the most powerful beings in the universe.
• In the first Shadow Hearts game there are two different villains who try to summon a God, the first to destroy the Japanese army and the second to cleanse the Earth of sin by destroying the wicked. By the start of the second game the new villains refer to the hero Yuri as "Godslayer".
  • Not only Yuri, but Koudelka (in the manga) also manages to control a monster by hypnotizing herself, before she possessed by that monster. She then used the monster's power to beat up the Smug Snake that tried to destroy the world using that monster's power.
• The videogame Shining Force subverts this in the final fight with the Dark Dragon. Even after depleting its hit points, it's still not technically dead, and the best that can be done is for the main character to stab his sword into the back of its head, and hold it there while the rest of the party escaped the collapsing castle.
  • The final boss of Shining Force 2 is a demon who is effectively the equivalent of Satan. More humorously, there's an exploit involving the master's monks where you cast their buff skill, earning 48 exp, than leave the battlefield. You can keep doing this till the monks are lv99, at which point, they will be stronger than said demon, leading to a literal Did You Just Punch Out Satan.
• Shin Megami Tensei and its various spinoffs has you continuously kicking the crap out of major deities. Beings like Izanami, Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, the Fates of Greek mythology, Thor, the Four Archangels, Lucifer, and company are often encountered throughout the franchise, and at least two games make you challenge GOD. And there is much, much more. Even Cthulhu himself is a random encounter in some games, so you can literally punch out Cthulhu in the face, repeatedly. All in all, there is a very sizable stable of spirits out baying for your blood. And guess whose job it is to demonstrate why the power of Humanity is so coveted in these games? Some games do make subversions, however.
  • One of the franchise's most extreme example comes from the Demi-Fiend of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. You start as an Ordinary High-School Student, and then progressively evolve to become a demon that can beat the shit out of both an avatar of God and Lucifer. In one ending, you not only defeat them both, you go on to fight God himself. Depending on how one interprets this ending, the Demi-Fiend might as well be the strongest entity in the entire franchise, at least until later games introduce even stronger beings such as Stephen.
  • Digital Devil Saga: The Demi-Fiend is a Super Boss in this game, found near the end of the game. This is considered one of the hardest boss fights in gaming, as befits a character who can defeat both God and The Devil. Defeating him truly feels like you have beaten an Eldritch Abomination.
  • SMT spin-off Persona has plenty of examples, but there's a literal one at the end of Persona 2: Innocent Sin: When conversing with Philemon, whose bet with Nyarlathotep is responsible for not just the Earth getting torn a new one, but all of you and your friend's angst, one of your options is to just punch the callous bastard in the face. Philemon isn't particularly phased by it, though.
  • Persona 5 has a rather epic one at the end of the final boss. Even for all their strength, the Phantom Thieves are helpless against Yaldabaoth. It's with the prayers of humanity reaching them, allowing the party to get a Heroic Second Wind and for Joker to summon his ultimate Persona: Satanael. Joker and Satanael don't just punch this Cthulhu, they shoot him in the face!
• At the end of Silent Hill 3, Heather takes down God. With a lead pipe.
  • It should be noted, however, that the games are hardly clear on what exactly is the "God" of the town's religion, and indeed it's entirely likely to be yet another hallucination (which is one of the more reasonable Epileptic Trees concerning the game).
  • The local Eldritch Abomination gets punched pretty much once per game, but what the result is depends on which of the endings you get.
  • In the UFO ending, aliens laser-carpet-bomb Silent Hill itself (i.e., the entire town) from orbit.
  • It should be noted that the God was born incomplete, and from the wrong body. Claudia wasn't capable of birthing the God at its full potential, as Alessa was; or how Heather is now. Had the God been born as it should have, whether it's a delusion or an actual demon, it's doubtful Heather would have been able to beat it. That's what happened in the first game as well, with the God being forcibly ripped from its incubating vessel by aglaophotis. Also, even though the fans love to use the steel pipe, realistically the uses of that weapon would be limited once you got to some of the tougher/bigger monsters like the Scrapers, which are armed and deadly close-up. A weapon like that against a big creature that shoots fire and hits hard at close range doesn't sound like a really good idea. Heather would be better off using a handgun or shotgun, which would work to kill a prematurely born god in keeping with the first game ( assuming we ignore Harry's diary of the creature "falling dead" without one move). He did get punched out, but there was a reason in the story and it probably wasn't with a simple lead pipe.
• Silent Hill 4: Walter is considered to be a god within the rules of the world he's created for himself. His spirit form completely controls the world and is able to warp things to his liking with his powers. Yet Henry manages to hold him back with simple weapons and somehow plant the eight spears necessary to 'humanize' him without Walter getting in any good resistance, and he's limited to just guns and a chainsaw. (You don't even have to attack him; just go right for the spears and Walter goes down as easy as a Borg shot with a modulating phaser). Even without his immortality though, Walter should still have enough power to easily slap Henry away and end his threat, with him still being tougher than an ordinary human. Yet Henry still manages to kill him rather lamely, even in the Really Bad ending where it's only temporary and Walter comes back to kill everyone in the building. Either Walter doesn't know how to fight, or else the developers didn't know how to have a very average protagonist (Henry) engage such a powerful being and win without giving him some huge advantages and keeping Walter's powers at a minimum.
  • Walter wasn't the god of his world, but it was the Room itself. Walter just wanted to be with his "mother" (the Room itself) and his whole quest was for giving the Room itself a consciousness. Reason why Walter, even though he's the creator of the nightmare itself, is not that powerful: he never focused of making himself "stronger". As an added moment of Bad Assery on Henry's sakes, he was never really took into account in the whole process and even so managed to stop it by sheer will: no cult text ever took that into account, reason why characters like Henry and Harry were able to destroy the self-conscious inner worlds with relative ease. Jason, on the other hand...
• In NetHack variant Slash'EM, it's possible to summon Cthulhu in debug mode. But in Slash'EM Extended, the player actually has to beat him for the Amulet of Yendor. He's ungodly strong and revives after a while, but he can be overwhelmed by a decisive offensive action.
• Smite: It's a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena where Gods fight against Gods, but amongst them, there are also super powerful humans or demigods like Hercules, Achilles or even King Arthur and Mulan. They can punch out these godly creatures multiple times in one go within the rules of a MOBA. Even better, eventually Cthulhu himself joins the roster, meaning that he's just as punchable as every other Gods there are (But good luck, he's one of the tankiest Gods to take down, hope you don't run out of resources just to punch out Cthulhu). The most recent trailer has Cthulhu himself get punched out with laughable ease by Tiamat, one of the oldest deities on Earth.
• Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends have gotten really good about this in recent games.
  • The first non-Robotnik final boss Sonic fought was the watery god of destruction, Chaos, in the first Sonic Adventure. Granted, he didn't actually destroy Chaos, but he did use himself as a projectile and shot through his brain a couple of times.
    • Kinda justified, since at that point Sonic and Chaos were using the exact same power source, just a different attitude to activate them.
    • In Sonic Generations, as Modern Sonic, you defeat Perfect Chaos again, without transforming into Super Sonic. Looks like Sonic Took a Level in Badass.
  • Metal Sonic becomes nearly as powerful in Sonic Heroes, absorbing Chaos's and all the heroes's lifeform data. Super Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles take him out with ease because they're SONIC HEROES!
  • Black Doom wasn't quite a god, but he was the leader of an alien race and distinctly Cthulhu-like in voice and appearance. Shadow whips his ass in super form by himself.
  • It never actually happened, but Sonic, Shadow, and Silver teamed up to "stop the consciousness" (whatever that means) of Solaris, the god of the time-space continuum. Which meant smacking him in the core for massive damage.
  • In Sonic and the Secret Rings this trope is also shown (quite literally), where The genie and evil villain the Erazor Djinn uses all the rings to turn into a Horrific monstrosity called "Alf Layla wa-Layla" (Basically, one thousand and one nights in Arabian.), and begins to recreate the world in his own image, only to be stopped by Darkspine Sonic. Meaning, you knock his own attack back at him, fly up, and start punching the holy hell out of him.
  • Sonic Unleashed (the 360/PS3 version, at least) is notable in that someone — namely, the Gaia Colossus — literally does punch out the game's local Cthulhu; at the end of the fight, it rears back, zooms forward, and delivers the left haymaker of justice to Dark Gaia's face, stunning him long enough for Super Sonic to deliver the final blow.
    • In the Wii/PS2 version, you have to make him punch out Dark Gaia manually. Emphasis on the words "Punch Out".
• The Soulblazer trilogy has a trilogy of this trope - In Soulblazer, you kill the powerful demon/god(?) Deathtoll with the Soul Blade (admittedly the most powerful sword in the whole world. In Terranigma, you defeat the evil god Dark Gaia with what is essentially a SPEAR, and most heinously of all in Illusion of Gaia you also defeat the evil god Dark Gaia with nothing but your own ectoplasmic arm (as Shadow)!
• Even if you use the gothic lolita in Soul Calibur IV, you can defeat a Physical God who not only tamed Soul Edge, but actually created its counterpart.
• In South Park: The Fractured but Whole, the protagonists are a couple of fourth graders playing at superheroes who eventually end up facing off against Shub-Niggurath, The Black Goat of the Woods and Mother of a Thousand Young. And that's not even the final boss.
• Splatterhouse sees Rick doing battle with living embodiments of evil and all that serve them... with his fists. And on occasion baseball bats and two-by-fours. Thing is, this is presented in a much more serious manner than usual — the only way Rick can do all this is that the Terror Mask is backing him up, and the Mask is using him as a tool.
• Spyro and Cynder manage to kill the Destroyer, a mythological monster whose meant to destroy the world when it awakens, by destroying every dark crystal in its entire body, including flying into its body and destroying its heart. Malefor restores it to life himself, but doesn't count as Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu since the 'Cthulhu' in question would've been dead for real had Malefor not been there to revive it.
• This is the backstory for the world of Stella Glow where in a human boy traveled to the moon and killed god to stop him from killing all humans.
• Street Fighter does this with Ibuki, the high school teenage ninja girl. While she does have her own Ki attacks and weapons, she is generally considered to be a weaker character in the lore and most of the other characters generally criticize her fighting skill. However, in her own story mode and in the UFS card set, she is shown attacking and defeating GILL, someone who controls fire and ice, can summon meteors, and outpowers M. Bison and the shotos in canon. He can also self revive.
• In Strife, your struggle against the Evil Empire Cult called the Order eventually ends with you killing their god, the Entity. Justified by using the Sigil, an Artifact of Doom connected to The Entity, which is the only thing that can even deal damage to The Entity and the lesser specters enountered earlier in the game.
• Dark Brain from Super Robot Wars and the related series Great Battle IV can travel multiple dimensions using his own powers, grows larger based on the despair of the people fighting it (which, in retrospect, may not be a good thing when fighting mecha pilots), and can destroy planets easily. He seeks the 12 keys of the Super Robot Wars Multiverse, and he created Dynamis the Big Bad of Super Robot Wars R to search and destroy Fighter Roar. You have an assload of giant robots. Guess who's not walking away from this fight?
  • Same with Irui Ganeden, the spirit of the earth, in Alpha 2, and Keiser Ephes in Alpha 3.
  • Well, one might say a lot of Super Robot Taisen games feed off this trope. Other games have the Super Robot team go up against villains who, in their respective series, proved to be impossible to defeat... and win all the same:
    • In the Alpha series and in MX, during the Neon Genesis Evangelion storyline events, the heroes manage to defeat the Seele's Mass Produced Evangelions. Yes, exactly the monsters who, after having been defeated by Asuka, simply regenerated and tore her to pieces as if nothing happened. The Super Robots managed to kill them all. Not only that, but, in Alpha 3, they follow it up by fighting -and defeating- the fusion of the nine white Evangelions with a berserk Unit 01 and the Tree of Life... also known as God! And it's not even the final stage!
    • Super Robot Wars Alpha also gives a few villains from other series their own moments against the Angels. When the Third Angel appears over Tokyo-3, out steps a man in a suit smoking a cigar. This man proceeds to pound the Angel flat with his bare hands. The man in question? Alberto the Shockwave.
    • In Alpha 2 and J, during the final assault on Orphan, the Super Robots defeat Baron Maximillian's Hyper Baronz from Brain Powerd. In the series proper, the Hyper Baronz was so powerful that all Hime managed to do was damage it somewhat, and she and Yuu had to wait it out and survive until Baron exhausted all of her energy.
    • In the last two episodes of Alpha, the heroes also go up against The Emperor of Darkness, from the Mazinkaiser saga. And manage to destroy him, when all the Mazinkaiser team could do in the series was to seal it away.
  • Super Robot Wars UX takes the concept to new heights, where the protagonists have to destroy the physical embodiment of the Hindu apocalypse.
  • Sometimes, the Cthulhu you gotta punch out is part of your own team including, but not limited to, rampaging EVA-01, Mazinger Z transformed into Mazinger ZERO, possesed Genesic GaoGaiGar...
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • According to the running backstory, Master Hand and Crazy Hand represent the twin gods of creation and destruction, yet it is still possible for players to beat them. In classic mode, it can be seen as a friendly sparing match, but in Brawl's story mode, Master Hand is visibly subdued and enslaved by Tabuu, who can be seen as a devil entity, and whom the player can also beat. In Wii U/3DS, Master Hand can turn into Master Core, a Shapeshifting straight-up Eldritch Abomination which, again, can be beaten by any fighter.
  • Wii U/3DS adds two Physical Goddesses as playable characters: Rosalina, Mother of the Cosmos, and Palutena, the Goddess of Light. Due to their playable status, they can naturally be beaten by anyone else.
  • In the intro to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's World of Light (which is the game's story mode), the Big Bad, Galeem, kills all of the playable characters save for Kirby (who manages to escape on his Warp Star), including the aforementioned Physical Goddesses, and uses their souls to make evil clones of them.
    • You eventually kick the snot out of Galeem, then his dark counterpart, Dharkon, and finally, one of the following: Galeem again, Dharkon again, or both at the same time.
  • For his trailer as Downloadable Content in Ultimate, Sephiroth makes his Smash debut by cutting Galeem in half with a single attack.
    • Then in a later Ultimate trailer, Sora himself kicks Sephiroth’s ass so hard he K.Os off the stage.
• Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan: Sydney is a normal human being who takes on the Mayan Pantheon to recover the calendar Haab, and comes out on top.
• Tales Series
  • In Tales of Legendia, the heroes beat Schwartz, supposedly a destroyer of universes. To be fair, she needed the negative energies of people to power up, and was weakened by positive energy, ala Earthbound. So her status might have been * very* exaggerated. Or she was just an avatar of the real one.
  • She wasn't actually stated to have that much power on her own. She was go to destroy the universe by destroying this one point, which if destroyed, destroys everything else.
  • Again in Tales of Symphonia, the heroes defeated Mithos Yggdrasiil. This person SPLIT A WORLD IN HALF, and in the first battle you fight against him, he punches you out with a healthy serving of Beam Spam. The second, third and fourth times you fight him, however, it is essentially a Curb-Stomp Battle in your favor, making the Big Bad look like a Squishy Wizard.
  • Tales of the Abyss has the end goal of both villains and heroes to take down the Score which is the memory of the planet and will come true no matter what. The Big Bad wants to go a step further and also take down the Pure Magic Being behind the Score. The Hero, Luke, ends up being the one freeing Auldrant from the Score...which might not be too impressive; not hard to punch out a god when you yourself are a God in Human Form. That said, not even Lorelei could believe Luke managed it.
  • Tales of Eternia goes one further and gives you a final battle against Satan. Well, his fantasy counterpart, but it's still impressive.
  • Jude Mathis literally punches the REAL Maxwell, Lord of Spirits, right off his throne in Tales of Xillia. He got a bit of help from Milla, who smashed the barrier protecting Maxwell but the actual punching was all him.
  • Tales of Destiny 2 one-ups all these. The entire endgame is about the heroes deciding whether or not they should kill the goddess of time to reset the timeline. They do, after a long grinding boss fight. In short, gods tend to not have very good life security in the Tales Series.
• Tekken 2. Final boss fight. Did you just punch out the Devil?
  • According to canon, Heihachi did. And then, when half of Devil came back (after Heihachi ripped Kazuya a new one) to try to possess the then-unborn Jin, Jun Kazama took up the reins. Word of advice: you don't mess with Jun's child. Did we mention that she was pregnant at the time of said ass-kicking?
  • The battles against Ogre (3, TTT2), Unknown (Tekken Tag Tournament, TTT2), Jinpachi (5), and Azazel (6) can also qualify.
• Terraria has bosses that are based and named after godlike entities and Cthulhu. "Eye of Cthulhu", "Brain of Cthulhu" after the introduction of the Crimson, and the "Eater of Worlds" all can be punched out. And then there's the Hard-Mode AND Expert Mode versions. Special mention goes to the Moon Lord, who is heavily implied to be Cthulhu himself.
  • The trope can be enacted in the most literal sense by using fist-shaped weapons (such as the KO Cannon or Golem Punch) to defeat them.
• 10tons's Tesla versus Lovecraft will have Nikolai Tesla foiling the Lovecraft deities and their servitors with revolvers, shotguns, tommy guns, a Mini-Mecha named War Pigeon and plenty of Weird Science Tesla Tech Timeline gadgets.
  • It gets worse for the Great Old Ones in the sequel Tesla Force, Nikolai is joined by Lovecraft, Marie Currie and Mary Shelley - so the team is a mix of Weird Science and Black Magic for killing Lovecraftian beings.
• In Thief: The Dark Project, Garrett kills the Trickster, a forest god who resembles Pan. With a magical bomb. At least it was an inventive way to defeat the end boss, which fit well with the style of gameplay.
  • Garrett even lampshades it in the stage intro to "The Maw of Chaos", saying "I've never robbed a god before. It'll be a challenge".
  • Thief: Deadly Shadows has a hidden Eldritch Abomination as the Big Bad, who emerges from hiding as you enter the endgame. This being CANNOT be harmed by ANYTHING...until you literally erase her magical glyphs.
• The major Big Bads in Titan Quest are Typhon, supposedly the mightiest titan to fight against the gods, and Hades, god of the dead. Zeus Lampshades this after the player defeats Typhon, noting that if mortal heroes are capable of such feats, the gods can no longer be of any relevance in the world.
• In Touhou Project, Plot Armor has allowed Reimu and/or Marisa to defeat and subsequently befriend beings that while not eldritch or abominations are certainly comparable to them, including but not limited to an Enfante Terrible with the power to destroy anything just by thinking about it and clenching her fist, one of the four Oni Devas that hurls black holes and is capable of tearing apart mountains, the millenia-old ruler of the netherworld, a Reality Warper with likely limitless power, one of the Judges of the Dead, and a nuclear-powered hell raven that uses miniature suns as a weapon.
  • They also defeated five literal gods in Touhou 10 (though two were just harvest gods). The next game's final boss (who already made the above list) had eaten a god to gain its power. Then again, in Touhou-verse "god" doesn't really mean all that much.
  • Of note is one of the sub-plots, in which cute little ice fairy Cirno was only looking for a ghost-free place to happily frolic around and have some fun... defeating in the process an insanity-inducing rabbit, the two aforementioned superpowerful girls, a faster-than-wind raven girl, the ferryman of the Netherworld's river, and the Judge of the Dead herself.
• Trails Series
  • The final battle of Trails in the Sky SC has Estelle and group defeating Angel Weissmann, a Weissmann who fused with the power of the Aureole, a Sept-Terrion with power over space itself that was gifted to humanity by the Goddess.
  • The final boss of Trails to Azure is the Azure Demiourgos, an artificial Sept-Terrion that's actually stated to be MORE powerful than the original Sept-Terrion of Mirage it's based on, and it shows: take too long in fighting it, and it will distort space itself, automatically killing your entire party without fail.
  • Trails of Cold Steel III has Rean Schwarzer killing the corrupted Holy Beast sent by Aidios to guard one of her seven Sept-terrions. This ends up being a bad thing as it ends up spreading the curse of Erebonia all over the continent.
  • Trails of Cold Steel IV Rean, Class VII and allies manage to defeat and ultimately destroy Ishmelga, the embodiment of the curse of Erebonia and the fusion of two Sept-Terrions.
• Tohno Shiki from Tsukihime has a power that is very conducive to this. He arguably does this by making Roa Deader than Dead, which is one hell of an achievement considering the man regenerates from just his ankles at one point; to add insult to injury, Shiki destroyed Roa's concept of existence, which prevents him from reincarnating as usual.
  • In the backstory, the mage Zelretch is famous for being a True Sorceror, known for travelling between realities at a whim... and for killing Brunestud of the Crimson Moon, also known as Type Moon, the Moon's Ultimate Being, the greatest life form created by the Moon with the total power of that celestial body behind him. The details aren't explained, but apparently it involved dropping the Moon on Brunestud's head. He might have gotten turned into a vampire for his trouble, but he still defeated one of the most powerful beings in the universe, by himself, using only raw power. For contrast, Type Mercury, known as ORT, is a giant crystal spider, powerful enough to override reality with its own internal Mental World and obliterate vampire kings in an instant. It is also explicitly the most powerful being in the present Nasuverse timeline. Types are also alien enough that even Shiki, that Cthulhu-puncher extraordinaire, would be unable to kill them, because their concepts of death are so unrelatable to Gaia; the only way to kill ORT is by pure force, which nobody in the Nasuverse can currently bring forward.
  • Actually, to clarify this a bit, Type Mercury/Ort technically has the "highest raw attack power". Take that how you will.
  • And technically, judging by Notes, the Black Barrel could theoretically take out ORT. Or make it so that Shiki can see their lines of death, since the Black Barrel apparently "forcibly injects a concept of death" into the target, making it basically super effective against all the Types and pretty much everybody else come Notes. It's called the "God killer gun" for a reason.
    • In Notes the Black Barrel could indeed do that but it's pretty much useless with the death of the last human on the planet.
• Umineko: When They Cry, Battler punches out Bernkastel in the face, despite her perfect manipulation of probability and The Multiverse, and her ability to throw and tank universe-shattering explosions.
• In Utawarerumono, this trope is given a unique twist: The deity the people in universe worship is both God and Cthulhu, and he asks his own followers to beat the crap out of him, who happens to resemble the Eva Unit-01 crossed with Godzilla. They succeed in beating their own God to the point the Cthulhu half is destroyed forever, just like said God asked for.
• In Valkyria Chronicles, with Squad 7's defeat of Maximillian. He had equipment that mimicked the powers of the Valkyria and unlike the fight with Selvaria, Squad 7 decided not to rely on Alicia's Valkyria powers.
• Viking: Battle for Asgard: Skarin manages to punch out the goddess Hel, Queen of the Underworld.
• Happens more than once in the Warcraft universe:
  • World of Warcraft raids let players duke it out with all kinds of eldritch horrors and the mightiest beings in the game lore (only short of Sargeras), only with larger numbers than usual. Some of them are said to be in a weakened state or to be merely banished when defeated but many of them put up a hell of a fight.
  • Many of the Old Gods of Azeroth have been turned into raid encounters. The first and most notable was C'thun who, even with the massive power increase for players since his release, remains a dangerous opponent. He is still killed on a fairly regular basis, however.
    • Another Old God, Yogg-Saron, was added in a patch. In this case only the hardiest can defeat him without help from super-powered guardians left by the Titans.
  • One of the raids in the Caverns of Time has you go back and fight Archimonde the Defiler. The demonlord in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos that could not be stopped by ENTIRE ARMIES at the end of the Night Elf campaign. However, the encounter ends the same way as in the original game once the players weakened him enough. He's also one of those bosses that can easily kill an entire raid in seconds if you don't know what to do.
  • The last two raid bosses of Legion are corrupted Titans. Titans are living humanoid planets — even if these ones appear in smaller form — and their power level is such that one of them killed an Old God by reaching down and pulling it off the planet it was infecting. Another one brought Draenor's largest a mountain to life to fight to cleanse that planet in his stead because he didn't want to break anything by getting involved, and all the orcs, ogres and Breakers on the planet descend from this giant. Pretty much nothing in the universe can compare to Titans in power.
  • It's not just the player characters, either; the Drakkari trolls in Zul'Drak have been practically eating their own gods to gain the power to fight the Scourge. The degree of success they have is varied; one god just dies and they take his power, another is saved by the player, a third one takes her traitorous servants with her to a personal hell. One god is actually seen being taken down in a single magical "hit".
• The Black Jewel from Wario World, for being a Reality Warper that feeds on people's negative energy and turns treasure into monsters, is pretty easily punched out by a fat guy and a bunch of elves.
• In Warriors Orochi, you get to punch out the Serpent King Orochi and, of course he returns. He becomes even more badass in the sequel when you see just how many people he punched out, including an example where Orochi himself punches out a Cthulhu even bigger than himself-The Gods.
• In Wild ARMs 2, your party has to kill a parallel universe that's encroaching on their reality. Logic dictates that you cannot punch out a universe, but the heroes find a way that almost manages to make sense. Then, after kicking its ass, the main character takes a moment to duel a completely unrelated and comparatively mundane Eldritch Abomination.
• In The Witcher, Dagon getting killed by Geralt at the end of chapter 4 is pretty inevitable, as you can get him in the bestiary by Chapter 2. Interestingly, the god isn't defeated directly, but by killing his worshipers, depriving him of prayer.
  • Not to mention you're also able to fight the King of the Wild Hunt, a supposedly immortal personification of death itself, after beating the Big Bad if you completed a certain quest during the fourth act.
    • In the books the Wild Hunt pestered Zireael and had run-ins with unicorns.
• In the World of Mana, high-tier supernatural beings are common boss battles:
  • In Trials of Mana, you get to fight eight Benevodons, destructive beasts that spend the earlier parts of the game as Sealed Evil in a Can. Not to mention that the final boss has the combined powers of the Benevodons and the Sword of Mana.
  • In Legend of Mana, you fight the Dragon Lord, a Demon, and the Mana Goddess' Superpowered Evil Side.
• XCOM Terror From The Deep has a partially justified version of this. The "Ultimate Alien" cannot be defeated once he wakes up, but you can kill him by blowing up the power generators to his cryogenics system first. The explosive result, however, makes the earth uninhabitable.
• Xenoblade Chronicles:
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 ends with the protagonists slaying the incarnation of one of the two titans they had lived on since the beginning of their race, and who had wiped out said race countless times to prevent them from becoming too advanced. Said incarnation also happened to be the originator of that world after first existing in our universe.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed has a near-literal example of this, with six of the seven protagonists interlinking to form the first Ouroboros fusion, with said fusion then punching out the Big Bad, who is otherwise the God of the first Myth Arc for Xenoblade Chronicles.
• Ys This is what the hero of the series, Adol Christin, does as a day job. He literally goes on adventures and most of the time ends up beating local dieties and Eldritch Abominations armed with just a sword.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction, you're able to beat Reshef the Dark Being in a duel, though he still tries one last attack to avoid being sealed away.
• Zigfrak:
  • There is a creature called L.G.O.D., the Lord God of Death. It is a violent sentient wormhole that is worshipped by space cultists. It is one of the game bosses you can fight.
  • Combat with the Lost Guardian is essentially a stand against an entity that has successfully destroyed human civilization on at least three occasions. It isn't possible to actually begin taking out its shields effectively until you also craft a Lost Superweapon in the form of the Echelon Engine.

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