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  • For a murder game, Ace Attorney characters seem to be surprisingly resistant to bullets not taken to the head or heart.
    • Manfred von Karma was shot in the shoulder and left the bullet in there for 15 years just so nobody would find out about it.
    • Shi-Long Lang gets shot in the leg and just keeps walking around afterwards without so much as a limp. Probably because he's just that badass, since earlier he also caught Franziska's whip.
    • Wocky Kitaki does get shot in the heart, and survives for over six months!
    • Phoenix Wright himself seems to be borderline invincible:
      • He eats a poisoned glass necklace (and even mentions chewing it) without suffering any adverse effects or even visible pain.
      • He and Maya are tased with a stun gun, which their attacker says carries 600,000 volts, and he stands up again just a minute later, unharmed, whereas Maya still feels the aftereffects a day later.
      • He smashes through a massive heavy wood door meant to prevent possessed people from escaping the room, and doesn't even seem to carry away as much as a bruise.
      • He's clocked on the head with a fire extinguisher and only blacks out for a few moments before getting up, suffering temporary amnesia.
      • He falls 10 meters from a burning bridge, lands in a freezing cold river famous for its very fast and extremely lethal current, is carried along with said current of doom for a few miles, and comes away with only a cold.
      • And, finally, he's hit by a car, thrown 30 feet across the street, and slammed headfirst into a telephone pole. All he gets is a sprained ankle.
      • All of this has started to catch up to him in his 30's, though; Spirit of Justice sees him sustain a back injury so severe he is rendered unconscious for a whole day.
    • Apollo Justice gets caught in a courtroom bombing and sustains severe injuries, but somehow only spends a grand total of two days in the hospital. Then again, Trucy constantly uses him as a guinea pig for her magic tricks, so it's possible he's built up a tolerance to most forms of pyrotechnics.
    • Pearl Fey runs from Kurain Village to Japanifornia at the age of 8 without breaking a sweat. The trip takes two hours by train. Her Limited Wardrobe includes platform sandals, meaning she either wore those while running or took them off and ran barefoot. Also counts as Achievements in Ignorance, since she only did this because she had never heard of a train before, and assumed everybody made the trip on foot.
    • Dhurke takes three bullets to the chest at point blank range and stumbles for a moment only to simply stand up tall and ask Inga if he thought that that would be enough to kill him. Inga panics, asking Dhurke if he's "some kinda freak" before running off. Dhurke does succumb to his injuries, but not before asking Maya to channel him as soon as he dies so he can free her from the temple and go to America to see Apollo one last time. He even comforts her as she cries and assures her that everything's going to be okay.
  • In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, the ADFX-02 Morgan certainly doesn't look or perform like the properly armoured A-10 Warthog/Thunderbolt II, but can take at least six missile hits before it goes down when most enemy planes go down in two. Even then, it still manages to pull off a Single-Stroke Battle-like flypast on Cipher's plane before it finally explodes.
  • Assassin's Creed:
    • In Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, the Cardinal in the St. Peter's Basilica Lair of Romulus sidequest can take multiple crossbow bolts or blows from a heavy weapon, damage that would crumple a Brute, despite apparently wearing nothing more protective than cloth robes.
    • Ezio and possibly Altaïr could count for this as well. Best seen in the trailer for Assassin's Creed: Revelations, during which Ezio, while working his way through an army one by one, headbutts a guy wearing an actual iron helmet. Helmet-guy doesn't win this encounter. Compounded in the extended trailer (and the second opening cutscene) of the same game, when he freefalls from several stories high, only to make a Three-Point Landing with no negative physical effects and all of his acrobatic abilities intact. Desmond counts as well on the technicality that he doesn't have a health bar, meaning he can survive any fall or fight you can put him through.
  • In Bad Piggies, regardless of how crazy and painful the inventions are, the Pig, the King Pig, and the Egg can survive all of them without even the smallest injury. The Birds, they just die upon hitting the Pigs' inventions.
  • Enzo in Bayonetta takes a few bumps, like being thrown head-first into the driver's seat of his car.
  • In Black & White, there's a particular guy who taunts you, and no matter what do you to him (which being a deity, there's a lot of possibilities), he will remain unscratched.
  • Bushido Blade is an aversion. Unlike most weapon-based fighters, one clean hit kills you automatically.
  • City of Heroes:
    • The eleventh official expansion to the MMORPG added a new powerset, Willpower, specifically designed to let players create characters who are Made of Iron. The ability existed all along with Invulnerability, Stone Armor, etc., but Willpower gave another way to do it that seems more believable for the "Natural" Origin character. The powerset is a mix of defense, resistance, and regeneration, rather than offering only one or two of those three like the other powers in the game do.
    • To a lesser extent, every PC in City of Heroes qualifies for this — even a relatively fragile psychic with no defensive powers is capable of taking a few machine-gun clips to the face with no lasting ill effect. And this goes double for the enemies, triple for Archvillain/Hero-class foes. A game mechanic that frequently misses notice is that players are protected against dying from most one-hit kills when at full health. It prevents certain annoying situations and cheap deaths. The result is that although not every hero or villain can leap skyscrapers, they can all survive falling off of one, even at level 1 with no defensive abilities, merely dropping down to a single hit point. Of course, actual enemies don't stop after just one attack.
  • In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, after the mastermind (Junko Enoshima) is defeated, as per the rules of their own killing game, they are punished with execution. Or in their case, executions. They are subjected to all of the game's previous executions in succession, each of which was enough to kill a person on its own, and somehow manage to survive until the last one, which finally kills them. And they even enjoy it!
  • There are some ridiculous stage effects in the Dead or Alive series that can range from being thrown into explosive containers to literally dropping over 10 stories below. Worst that happens is a KO, and otherwise, everyone just gets up like nothing even happened.
  • Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening has one grievous example. Lady, who is fully human, gets the bayonet on her bazooka rammed through her thigh and twisted around. For a real person, that would render the leg useless for the rest of his or her life, assuming they didn't bleed out first. For Lady? One bandage around the leg later, she's climbing up the side of a building. When you fight her as a boss, she's just as durable as any of the demon bosses.
  • Devil Survivor handwaves this trope: Various characters, including the protagonist and his allies, have "COMP" devices that summon demons and aid the user in combat. One of the COMP's functions is a "harmonizer" program that allows humans to fight and defend against demons with a fair chance; this is demonstrated when the protagonist and his friends activate their COMPs for the first time and are attacked by the demons that come out, but don't suffer the horribly debilitating injuries that one would normally expect, something that both the party and the demons point out. Furthermore, the harmonizer doesn't just affect the user, but all humans within range, thus allowing non-COMP users in the surrounding area (often mission escortees) to enjoy a lower mortality rate than those who aren't fortunate enough to be near a COMP user.
  • King K Rool in Donkey Kong Country. In the first game it's fairly standard punishment, but in the second, he suffers his gun exploding on him about ten times, gets punched out the window of an airship by a captured Donkey Kong, hits every single cliff face on the way down, is torn apart by sharks, sinks into the ocean, has his gun explode again in the True Final Boss battle, flies into the island core, is presumably there when it sinks like Atlantis, and sails away on his ship afterwards. Then, in the third game, he gets electrocuted like ten times from his mad science laboratory equipment and has a giant egg dropped on his head by the freed Banana Bird queen. Then he gets beaten up by all five Kongs in Donkey Kong 64, hit by a rocket-powered boot shot by Funky Kong, and thrown straight through the roof of the boxing roof and into K Lumsy Island, where said giant locked-up Kremling proceeds to beat K Rool senseless for locking him up. He's perfectly fine in later appearances.
  • Doofus Drop has Doofus himself. He falls down a very large mountain, hits all kinds of obstacles, and yet he ends up without even a scratch. Even if he gets impaled by a spike or fork, he can keep going after a fart.
  • Perhaps the best example of the superhumanly resistant First-Person Shooter player character is also the first example, the one and only Doomguy from Doom, who manages to survive everything hell can throw at him.
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout 3:
      • This is somewhat applicable to several high-end baddies added in the expansions, the probable reason being that by the end of the vanilla game, the Lone Wanderer can deal immense amounts of damage. Special mention goes to the swampfolk of Point Lookout, who, despite being dressed in overalls, can take much more damage than the Powered Armor-clad stormtroopers of the Enclave (such that sneak criticals on the bigger ones frequently only deal scratch damage), and also dish out more damage, despite the Enclave mooks wielding high-tech energy weapons, and the swampfolk wielding axes and breech-loading shotguns. In universe, this may be due to the heavy mutations caused by a combination of radiation exposure and inbreeding. Out of universe, the reason is the game being a cheating bastard. The Hillbillies' and Tribals' weapons (and most of the weapons in Point Lookout for that matter) deal an extra 30-50 points of damage when used against the Lone Wanderer. They also happen to have raised health (Word of God says this is because the developers wanted Point Lookout to be one of the hardest expansions).
      • Also applicable to some of your followers in Broken Steel, namely Dogmeat, Fawkes, and Seargent RL-3. When the ability to level up companions was added, there was a glitch that made these three gain hundreds of hitpoints per level. By level 30, they couldn't be killed by anything less than three shots from the Mysterious Stranger's .44 Magnum, a gun you can only get by cheating that does over 9,000 damage per shot.
    • Fallout: New Vegas:
      • Joshua Graham, Caesar's former Dragon. For starters, he was shot and confirmed dead by NCR snipers five times only to bounce right back. For his failure in the First Battle of Hoover Dam, Caesar had him set on fire and thrown into the Grand Canyon, and even sent a hit squad down after him just in case that didn't do the trick. It didn't, and neither did they. In-game, he has a Damage Threshold of 50, which is more than the best Power Armor, and certainly more than his own armor, which only has 15. If asked, Graham merely states that for him it was a mix of Heroic Resolve and faith. This also makes him Blessed with Suck, since his ridiculous toughness also makes him Immune to Drugs, meaning that he can't heal the burns that cover his entire body nor get any relief from the constant excruciating pain they cause him.
      • Graham's replacement as Caesar's Dragon, Legate Lanius, as well. He is an absolute beast with a minimum of 845 hit points, only a bit behind a Legendary Deathclaw, complete immunity to radiation and poison, and near-complete immunity to fire. While his Damage Threshold of 19 doesn't sound impressive, consider that this is coupled with his high fatigue levels, making him near-impossible to disable, not to mention that he can heal himself a lot and restore any crippled limbs. And he's fast. So fast that even if you cripple both his legs, he can still outrun you. And to top it off, he has a massive sword called the Blade of the East, which has a massive chance to knock you down.
      • The White Legs tribals are also surprisingly tough for their lack of armor, being able to sometimes survive a headshot from the Anti-Materiel Rifle. They also level scale, meaning that they are just as formidable to the player at Level 40 as at Level 15, if not more so.
      • The main game's Praetorian Guards have 10% Damage Resistance, the equivalent of the player's Toughness perk, in addition to a Damage Threshold of 12 granted by their armor. They are also 30% faster than normal NPCs. If you're Vilified by the Legion, prepare to face about a dozen of them when entering Caesar's tent, and be curbstomped if you're not leveled up enough.
      • Can't forget the Courier. They get shot twice in the head and just walk it off after a couple days at the doctor's.note  Ulysses from the Lonesome Road DLC sums it up best when giving you a Villain Respect speech.
        Ulysses: Thought carrying that Chip would end you, no... you got lives in you, hard to kill. Storms, bullets... sand and wind, yet still you walk. For now.
  • Fate/stay night: Shirou "My body is made of blades" Emiya. Both literally and figuratively.
  • In an attempt to stop a bar fight early on in fault - milestone one, Rune blocks a hit from an ale-filled cask with no visible injuries. This is used to foreshadow the reveal that Rune is an automaton.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Too numerous to mention. Not merely the bosses, but also the playable characters before their health reaches a certain point. A good example is whenever Final Fantasy IX's "Doomsday" attack (a planet-destroying meteor) misses its intended target, leaving no mark on either the enemy or the landscape. Generally, in video games, only the last hit point counts. And in fact, being beaten to near-death can even make you stronger: In Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VIII, characters who are near death have a chance of performing a special, powerful attack only available in that state.
    • Galuf from Final Fantasy V, especially during his one-on-one with the Big Bad. Bring his HP to zero? Eh, 'tis merely a flesh wound, he fights on undaunted. Until the adrenaline rush wears off, anyway, at which point the injuries catch up with him and he suffers a Critical Existence Failure.
    • Final Fantasy VII:
      • While the Turks are not supposed to be enhanced like their SOLDIER counterparts, they seem to live through everything while SOLDIER members drop like flies. In the original game, members of the Turks are seen surviving being beaten up by the heroes several times (once hard enough for the Turk to be hospitalized); being stabbed in the stomach in the middle of an abandoned temple (and you find that Turk at the entrance of the temple when the flashback shows him in the center of it, indicating that he possibly traveled through the booby-trapped and monster-infested temple with a stab wound); getting shot, then experimented on, then shoved in a coffin for 30 years; being shot down in a submarine to the bottom of the WEAPON-infested ocean; being on a plane that gets attacked by a WEAPON, which then crashes to the bottom of the ocean and gets infested by super strong monsters; and a Meteor nearly crashing on the city.

        The trend continues in the movie sequel Advent Children and its remake Advent Children Complete when Tseng and Elena get captured and tortured by the villains, but still survive and show up near the end no worse for wear. Meanwhile the two remaining Turks (Reno and Rude) get beaten by the Big Bad, hit in the face by a metal rod, pummeled by the henchmen, thrown from the top of a building, and fall a great distance from a crashing helicopter onto pavement, but appear perfectly fine in the next scene to attempt a near-kamikaze moment with dynamite (which they also survive and appear at the end of the movie unharmed). Rude even has a billboard fall and hit square him on the head, only for him to shrug it off a second later. The most injuries seen on the Turks are a few bandages, a small cut, and a bloody nose (the two latter of which are gone a few scenes later).

        It's once more continued in the Final Fantasy VII Remake. Reno gets absolutely wrecked by the BFS-wielding Cloud (twice), as well as Tifa and Barret on the second occasion, yet when we next see him, he's just got a couple of bandages and is sprawled on a couch, rather than hospitalised like any other man would be. Then there's Rude, who, while piloting a helicopter during the fight at the Sector 7 pillar, is shot out of the air by Barret. Despite his partner's initial concern, Rude casually walks out of the burning wreckage like the Terminator — no worse for wear and healthy enough to kick ass.
      • Cloud Strife, the main protagonist, can also be seen as Made of Iron, seeing how he can survive several deadly falls with nothing more than skinned knees. Not to mention being stabbed through the chest by Sephiroth. Then there's the Final Boss Safer Sephiroth, who hits Cloud and the rest of the party members with Supernova, which destroys planets and does massive damage but is something Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Cid, Cait Sith, Yuffie, and Vincent can all survive. Better yet, Gameplay and Story Segregation isn't in play here, as according to the Crisis Core manual, Supernova is indeed real, as Sephiroth teleports the victims to a Pocket Dimesion where they are promptly nuked by Supernova. Given Critical Existence Failure is at play for Cloud and company Made of Iron, is to be expected. It should be remarked, though, that numerous examples of falling damage that should have been unsurvivable are probably justified — there's a lot of grounds to imply that FFVII's world gravity is very different from our own (both from characters falling from great heights and jumping ridiculously high).
    • Basch fon Ronsenburg in Final Fantasy XII. He's betrayed and locked in a dungeon for two years, hanging from his scaffolding by his arms. After he's rescued by the other characters, Basch is visibly tortured — the bruises and red marks on his shoulders are absolutely horrifying to look at. He finds a corpse and loots its clothes, ties his hair back, finds his former friends, and gets to work.
    • Final Fantasy XIV:
      • The Warrior of Light takes an absolutely absurd amount of punishment over the course of their adventures. They have, in no particular order, deflected a sword the size of a small office building, survived divine judgment from a machine god, thunderbolts from various other gods, the Breath Weapon of one of the most powerful dragons in existence, and survived the "optimized" version of the "ultimate magic" that their Patron God Hydaelyn was gravely weakened defending the Warrior from earlier in their career.
        Warrior of Light: You name it, I've been punched by it.
      • Hildibrand Manderville, who thanks to Rule of Funny, has been launched skyward and across continents, buried alive and wandering a desert thinking he's a zombie, suplexed, piledrivered, smashed with a giant frying pan, the works. And the worst he gets is his fancy suit in ruins.
  • Ena from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. In a game where every mortal wound is either Permadeath or a mercenary career-ending injury, she can "die" three times and still be back for the end. The first is when the hero takes her out (reducing her to 0 HP). The second is when the Black Knight strikes her down (somewhat justified because he says he checked his swing). And after joining your party, she can die a third time... but she is plot-relevant and lives to see the end. She can then die two more times in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Note that the second example is part of a non-canonical Bad Ending. The kicker? Throughout all of this, she's in the early stages of pregnancy.
  • The pointman from the First Encounter Assault Recon series. Even taking into account a limited healing factor, he survives things that would turn other men to paste, like getting thrown several hundred meters onto the roof of a multi-story car park... by an explosion. By F.E.A.R 3, he has full Regenerating Health.
  • Ghost Trick has several characters who stretch the limits of survivability, even without the player character's death-reversing powers:
    • Yomiel, in the alternate timeline, gets hit with a supersonic sweet potato, is stabbed in the back with the pointy part of a statue, and then has his legs crushed by a free-falling megalith. It appears he sustained nothing permanent, according to the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
    • Inspector Cabanela jumps into an explosion (one that killed another person in the room) and survives. Granted, both of his legs get mangled, and he sustains several more debilitating injuries.
    • The poor rat living in Lynne and Emma's apartment complex. He gets flung around the room, gets dropped onto and dangles from a clock's pendulum, is smacked by an angry lady with a wine bottle, gets galvanized with an electric cable, and has his tail set on fire.
      Sissel: Now I REALLY owe that rat an apology.
  • The player goat in Goat Simulator. You simply cannot die. Got hit by a truck? Set yourself on fire with a barbeque grill? Blew up the gas station and got caught in the blast? No problem! The worst that'll happen is that you get flung backwards high into the air, exhibiting Ragdoll Physics along the way, and a simple press of the "Ragdoll" key while lying down will get you back up and running! Even better, NPC goats and humans also have the same degree of invulnerability, no matter how much the latter scream in pain!
  • The Incredible Machine's Cosmic Plaything mini-human Mel Schlemming can withstand anything outside of getting eaten, though falling from a great height will knock him out.
  • Jurassic Park: The Game:
    • Nima takes a fall during the prologue that would probably cripple her in real life, at the very least.
    • Gerry is on the other end of two Barrier-Busting Blow barriers in the first episode alone.
  • Killer7 has its Final Boss and Post-Final Boss:
    • Greg Nightmare starts off as a standard boss by this game's standards. Then you blow off his lower body, at which point he won't die no matter how many times you shoot him. In addition, he spawns seven Black Smiles, each of which kills a personality permanently and cannot be killed at all. What you're supposed to do is watch all six main personalities die until you get to Garcian, at which point he can pick up the Golden Gun, which will one-shot any remaining Smiles and Nightmare himself.
    • The Last Shot Smile is an utterly pathetic boss, but the aforementioned Golden Gun takes five shots to kill it, meaning that from a plot perspective, it's likely immune to all other weapons, as well.
  • Nugget from Kindergarten. It's especially noticeable in Kindergarten 2, in which he chews off his own arm and spends the entire day trailing blood everywhere he goes, yet survives the day with no ill effect beyond feeling rather woozy by lunchtime. In the same game, he can take being struck by a ball thrown hard enough to lob the protagonist's head off. He even lampshades it in the former case:
    Nugget: Nugget is quite durable. Nugget will survive.
  • Joel from The Last of Us. Depending on how one plays the game, he'll get shot, beaten up, knocked out, get into fist fights with infected and hostile survivors, and get knocked down or otherwise fall a good distance, all on a regular basis, but it never stops or even slows him down. Until he falls from a walkway at the university and gets impaled by a piece of rebar. That knocks him out for a few weeks, but when he awakens to discover that Ellie's been taken by a group of cannibals, he drags himself and his not-fully-healed impalement wound outside and goes full Papa Wolf on said cannibals anyway.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • Link seems to be this. He gets battered about with swords as big as he is and just shrugs it off. If he takes enough damage, he acts tired when he stands still. That's the extent of the damage. In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, he slams facefirst into a stone wall after being launched several hundred feet by a catapult, and then falls hundreds of feet into the water below. He shrugs it off after only a brief moment of looking a little tired.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: The thieves and chickens are the only enemies in the game that you simply cannot kill.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: King Bulblin is no slouch, either. For a humanoid mini-boss with no magical protection, he handles being repeatedly sliced, diced, and thrown off bridges pretty damn well.
  • Like a Dragon:
    • Kazuma Kiryu's defining trait; the man takes knife wounds, gunshots, and massive explosions and walks away with only a few minor scratches. In one substory in Yakuza 2, a big thug who has been impersonating Kiryu punches him square in the jaw, and Kiryu doesn't even react.
    • This even extends to the mooks as well, who take extremely vicious (bordering on sadistic) beatdowns, stabbings, and falls off buildings that should at best hospitalize them and at worst kill them or render them comatose. Despite this, the mooks look no worse for wear save for some small bruises and a wounded pride. It's not until the Dragon Engine era-games that they stay down for good.
  • The RPG episodes of LISA feature multiple instances of this, particularly the Joy Mutants. There are two particularly egregious instances:
    • In LISA the Painful, Brad ends up taking a lot of punishment during the finale, where he takes on his own companions, the entire Rando Army, and Rando himself. By the end of it, he's literally littered with arrows. It helps that he's overdosing on Joy and turning into a mutant.
    • In LISA the Joyful, we've got one of the warlords: Sindy Gallows. By the time Buddy meets him, he has been struck by multiple arrows (including some in the head) and hanged. Then he wakes up and fights you while still hanging from the gallows.
  • In Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, there's an optional Title for Guy that reduces explosion damage he takes... which means he takes zero damage from getting shot by a tank.
  • Lugaru averts this. A few well-aimed blows to the head can deal with most enemies (or you), and the staff can kill with one swing (again, you too).
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda: Major Saelen Varn, STG (retired). The guy survives getting shot with a poisonous dart and left in out in the harsh desert of Elaaden to die, and lasts for what's implied to be some days before Ryder finds him. Then, rather than going to see a doctor about these life-threatening injuries, hunts down the man who tried to kill him. Did we mention Varn is a salarian, who are usually considered the most fragile species in the ME universe?
  • Throughout Medal of Honor: Vanguard, Keegan survives: jumping out of an exploding plane, a glider crash, being buttstroked by a Karabiner 98K, having an explosive charge detonate directly next to him, followed by a bridge then collapsing on top of him, and that is only what happens during cutscenes. The game even lampshades this, with Private Slauson saying: "Geez, Keegan, you've got a hard head, you took a good hit."
  • Mega Man:
    • Dr. Wily has this quality in the classic Mega Man series, being perfectly fine despite having his inventions blown up with him inside on numerous occasions, and even taking direct hits from Mega Man in some of them.
    • Mega Man Battle Network:
      • Dr. Wily's incarnation in this series deserves a mention all on his own, as he defies imminent death at the end of each game in which he appears. He's at the center of a large explosion in the first game. In the third, he has his mind drained by a machine that promptly self-destructs with an explosion large enough to sink the entire island on which Wily's base is stationed. He somehow regains his mind and reappears in the fifth game, in which he walks into an exploding computer room based in the crater of a currently-erupting volcano and actually uses the computer while it is in the process of exploding. In the sixth and final game of the franchise, Wily stands in the center of an explosion that levels a large portion of town, yet is said in the epilogue to have survived with only a few scratches.
      • Being Made of Iron seems to be hereditary, as Wily's son, Dr. Regal, manages to survive high-voltage electrocution and his subsequent fall off of a very high roof. He goes on to survive the same explosion and eruption that Wily survives after having his mind and memories completely drained.
  • The Metal Gear series:
    • All the playable characters are Made of Iron. For example, despite electroshock torture, repeated head trauma, poison gas exposure, and a scene where he's clearly shot through the chest prior to the second Sniper Wolf battle, Snake manages to get through Metal Gear Solid. ​In Guns of the Patriots, it's even mentioned that given all the abuse the now old Snake has endured, he shouldn't be able to stand, let alone save the world. The part where he gets shot through the chest was removed in The Twin Snakes and replaced with a more realistic cutscene where Wolf's bullet narrowly misses him and he quickly dives behind cover. The other stuff, though, still applies.
    • Even before he becomes a playable character, Big Boss survives a couple of rockets to the face and a nuclear explosion in Metal Gear and it takes several blasts of an Aerosol Flamethrower to put him down in Solid Snake, which, as is revealed in Guns of the Patriots, only puts him in a coma. This is partially subverted in The Phantom Pain, where it's revealed at the end that the Big Boss you defeat at the end of Metal Gear was actually Venom Snake, Big Boss's body double. Still pretty impressive with the latter though, who's still Big Boss.
    • Liquid Snake from Metal Gear Solid. While not nigh invulnerable, he survives things which should kill your average tank. First he survives having his Hind-D shot out from under him. (It's implied that he parachuted out, but still...) Snake then blows up his giant mecha by throwing missiles directly into Liquid's lap in the open cockpit. He then survives the giant mecha exploding, which knocks Snake out, despite being inside it at the time, and in fact wakes up early enough to strip Snake down to his pants and drag him and his love interest up to the top of the five-story-tall now-derelict mecha for a personal fist fight between brothers. Then, when Snake knocks him off the giant mecha, he survives the five-story fall and comes at him as Snake escapes in a Jeep, driving his own and firing its machine gun. He is still hardy enough, even after all this, to drive with one hand and shoot with the other. Snake shoots him with his own machine gun. The bare-chested bastard shrugs it off. Then, after all that, he survives the crash of both Jeeps and comes at you with a machine gun in one hand, in all his bare-chested glory. You only survive because he then dies of a bloody virus of all things. Damn FOXDIE. That doesn't stop him coming back in the sequel after The Dragon, who replaced his lost arm with Liquid's, gets possessed by Liquid from beyond the grave. And he still thinks Snake, who dies remarkably easily, got their clone-parent's dominant traits.

      The Gamecube remake, The Twin Snakes, steps this up. After Liquid seemingly drops dead from FOXDIE, he picks himself up and tries to fight the virus off whilst attempting to grab Snake twice, then gets up on his feet to have a staredown with him. Then he succumbs to the FOXDIE.
  • The Metroid series:
    • Ridley seems to be nigh-unkillable across the entire franchise. In his initial raid of K-2L in the Metroid manga, his own ship crashes on top of him, and he only survives via eating the corpses of the innocent lives he and his pirates took. In the actual game series, he: is shot to near-death by Samus, and manages to survive the process of himself becoming a Cyborg; is defeated again by Samus and then blasted off the Artifact Temple by its concentrated lasers for defiling said temple, surviving even after he explodes on the way down; fights Samus in freefall down a gigantic shaft and gets immolated by the generator at the bottom, still surviving via huge amounts of Phazon and then also surviving another battle with Samus; gets shot down by Samus three times and gets his life force drained by the Baby Metroid, and still manages to discard his cyber-implants; and then finally dies, not from the two encounters he has with Samus, but from a goddamn planetary nuke. And there's still enough left of Ridley to make first and second generation clones of him.
    • Despite initial impressions, the weaker Rippers from the first Metroid can be killed by your normal beam weapon — 100 beam shots, to be precise. You're better off just freezing them with the Ice Beam or blowing them up with a single missile. Their hardier counterparts are immune to everything, even your Screw Attack.
  • Faith of Mirror's Edge can be shot countless times and walk away from it just fine, as long as she gets some time to rest in between injuries.
  • An interesting example in Modern Warfare. Most of the time in game, especially on Veteran and online, this trope is averted; while you can take one to three shots standing without much issue, any more than that and you'll have just as much a chance of standing as the card tower you're trying to build before the hurricane hits, metaphorically. However, in the Campaign, this trope is played straight when your character, Soap, survives, in order, falling off of a waterfall, having his head bashed into the roof of a car, being stabbed in the chest, crawling to a gun with said knife in chest, being stomped on the face with a boot, and finally pulling the knife out of his chest and throwing it into the eye of General Shepherd, finishing him off for good.
  • Every character in the Monster Hunter series. Every character. Players included. Jumped off a cliff? No problem, you stumble a little, but take no damage. Hit by an exploding fireball that's bigger than you? Stop drop and roll, but otherwise, good to go! Stabbed, impaled, bitten, stomped, crushed, burned, eaten? Pff. Get back up and go. Nothing can stop a Monster Hunter! The absolute worst that ever happens is that you faint, then get escorted back to camp with full health and stamina bars, or back to town ready for another hunt if it was the party's third time.
  • Mortal Kombat is in love with this trope:
    • In the klassic games, the cast, which includes normal humans, survive things like Scorpion impaling them through the chest with his spear, being uppercutted so hard they're sent flying several feet into the air (which requires enough force to break the neck, if not sever the head completely), or getting shot and blown up by Stryker's guns and grenades.
    • Starting with the 2011 reboot, this trope gets taken up to eleven with the X-Ray Attacks, which explicitly show x-ray shots of the fighters' bones cracking and organs rupturing. Fighters can get up after having suffering a Neck Snap, broken spine, shattered skull, and other injuries that should leave them paralyzed for life if they didn't kill them instantly.
    • Mortal Kombat 11 removes the x-ray effects from its Fatal Blow mechanic, but as the name suggests, it makes up for it by having the attacks be even less plausible to survive. Many of these moves involve getting large, sharp objects jammed into your skull, sometimes to the point of coming out the other end. And the x-rays are still in the game, but just relocated to the new Krushing Blow mechanic, where under certain conditions, regular attacks will take on enhanced properties and show the brutal damage up close in slow motion. Broken bones and brutal wounds don't cause any effects worse than slightly increased damage, a brief Damage Over Time effect, or an extended combo opportunity for your opponent.
    • However, Mortal Kombat, amazingly (and quite infamously), is one of the few mediums where the characters are Made of Iron and Made of Plasticine at the same time. Over the course of the match, they can be beaten to a bloody pulp by blows from other superhumans and not show a hint of discomfort or fatigue, but the second the match is over and they enter the iconic "groggy" state, they can easily be torn apart by the very same types of attacks they were taking not two minutes ago.
  • Robots in Mutant Football League, being the Mighty Glaciers of the player species, are the most durable on the field. Not only do they take less damage from hits, they're immune to electrical damage, heavily resistant to fire, and are the only species that can reliably survive explosions or lightning.
  • Travis Touchdown in No More Heroes is an interesting case of conditional Made of Iron. During boss introductions, he regularly takes blows that would normally leave his opponents dismembered, disemboweled, decapitated or simply blown to smithereens (at one point he has three hand grenades literally dropped in his lap, and later we see that only one of them is enough to blow a person's head off) with nary a scratch. Of course, in combat he can still have the crap beaten out of him, but a deathblow will still simply cause him to spit up blood and collapse. Not to mention he gets a hole punched in his heart with blood spurting everywhere and doesn't bat an eye, and comes out perfectly fine right after. Apparently it is mentioned somewhere that Travis wears a magical vest that protects him from even fatal blows to the chest. The sequel adds Determinator to this as well, as the player is given a finite number of times per fight to recover from a fatal blow and keep going with a tiny amount of health.
  • Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: Most monsters go down in a few shots from your weakest gun, but Demodus, Lesser Vampires, Demons, and Greater Vampires take quite a bit more punishment without stopping. And bosses take even more; in most fights they'll end up with at least four or five Wooden Stakes buried in their chest before they even flinch.
  • Portal 2: Chell can take far more punishment than one would expect, and so can her Long Fall Boots, apparently. She can be shot or otherwise injured an unlimited number of times with no permanent effects, as long as she has a few seconds to rest after each hit. This is handwaved by an offhand comment that the turrets fire the entire bullet. As real life tells us, the result is that instead of piercing through the skin (and occasionally the entire body), the bullets just plain whack against Chell. A few seconds of rest and the bruises stop hurting.
  • While it takes a bit of Fridge Logic to see it, since he isn't the toughest fellow around combat-wise, the Prince of Persia in the Sands of Time trilogy probably counts. No "normal" person should be able to keep pulling off his brand of Babylonian Ninja Le Parkour without at least getting bruises.
  • Captain Cross from [PROTOTYPE], supposedly an unpowered Badass Normal with only weapons and skills to call his own, soaks up damage that would otherwise do a number on tanks and the explicitly superpowered Super Soldiers.
  • Punch-Out!!:
    • Bald Bull is tough enough, but when you face him a second time in the World Circuit, suddenly he's immune to knock-downs by normal punches, and has to be knocked down either by Star Punches or exploiting his Bull Charge One-Hit Knockdown. Title Defense Bald Bull in the Wii remake is even tougher, as not even the Bull Charge trick will knock him down (though he ends up with just enough health that you can knock him down with a Star Punch afterwards).
    • At the other extreme, Glass Joe has a record of one win, and 99 loses. By all medical logic, he should be a brain-dead vegetable by now after taking beating after beating, but for some reason, he just keeps at it.
  • In Resident Evil, many characters are Made of Iron:
    • Chris Redfield will not be put down. He's survived getting smacked around by Tyrants and taken multiple No Holds Barred Beatdowns from the superhuman Big Bad Albert Wesker. In Resident Evil 6, Chris recovers from getting his skull bludgeoned by several B.O.Ws, with only mild amnesia.
    • Leon S. Kennedy may be just human, but it's hard to tell at times. Especially when he walks off getting punched and thrown into a stone pillar by a Super Tyrant, turned into a pin cushion by a Iron Maiden, falling several stories onto his back and even as a rookie cop getting shot in the shoulder and just shrugging it off for the rest of the Zombie Apocalypse.
    • Albert Wesker, by the time of Resident Evil 5, isn't bothered by getting a combat knife stabbed into his forearm, getting shot in the face, having an RPG missile going off in his hands, or falling out of a plane. Hell, even a dip in molten lava isn't enough to kill him, and Chris and co. need to top it off with two more RPG rockets to actually defeat him. Considering he isn't "human" following the first game, it isn't too surprising. Possibly justified too, given that he's implied to have a Healing Factor.
    • Jill Valentine has been brutalized by the Nemesis, directly infected, and once fell several stories out of a window and Came Back Strong. The remake of the third game really dials this up to eleven, as she gets absolutely clobbered to ludicrous extremes throughout the game, to the point where she shouldn't able to stand, let alone run around or wield firearms.
    • Claire Redfield gets knocked around by both Mr X and the G-Creature, gets hit with an gasoline truck explosion from point blank range and blown into a car, gets a beatdown from Wesker, has shrapnel embedded in her leg, and even falls three stories into the ocean and survives.
    • Can't forget Ada Wong either. She gets ravaged by Mr X and is up and healthy (albeit bandaged) later on. In the RE2make, she gets shot in the torso and falls into a seemingly bottomless pit, and yet appears (completely fine) later to help Leon escape.
    • HUNK gets brutalized by Birkin (aka the G-Creature) and left for dead. He gets up later and fights through armies of zombies to reach the extraction point.
    • Ethan Winters, despite not being professionally trained or having any lengthy combat experience, might just put the aforementioned examples to shame with how much crap he shrugs off in RE7 and Resident Evil Village. In the latter game, Ethan even manages to keep fighting and defeat Big Bad Mother Miranda with his freaking heart ripped out of his chest, prompting a Why Won't You Die? from Miranda. Ethan does eventually succumb to his wounds, but the amount it takes to kill him easily cements Ethan as the toughest son of a bitch in the whole RE universe.
    • Several monsters in the series take a ludicrous amount of firepower to be put down. It's especially noteworthy with the ones who canonically have no Healing Factor, e.g. the common zombies in RE2make, who will happily soak up the hundreds of bullets Leon and Claire fire at them. It often takes their entire head getting blown off for the RE2make zombies to stay down for good. The Ganados introduced in Resident Evil 4 are similarly durable, with a bullet to the face prompting the same reaction from them as getting beaned with a softball, and ten or more unupgraded pistol rounds to kill one being the norm. The remake of 4 thankfully downplays this, as they're a good deal smarter and more aggressive than before, but also no longer take a whole armory's worth of ammunition to kill.
  • Greasy Steve from Ride to Hell: Retribution can take several bullets to the face while driving a motorcycle through the forest without stopping. Of course, this may be more crappy programming than actual iron abilities, given which game it is.
  • The Boss of Saints Row can take fairly big amounts of damage even before you get upgrades. Magazines full of bullets, grenades, fire, getting run over, getting smacked by Giant Mooks who toss cars around, surviving a boat explosion with so few scares people think they changed their haircut... It takes a lot to faze them.
  • In Samurai Shodown, you can shrug off a sword aimed through the chest.
  • Everyone in Scribblenauts. Especially Maxwell himself. With the dizzying array of weapons in the game, you'd think something would cause a lasting injury. But nope. Critical Existence Failure only here.
  • Scorn deconstructs this. After being the host for a giant parasite that gradually has been killing him and transforming his body, Scorn Guy successfully ends up tearing the Parasite from his body. However, he has suffered so much damage that he can barely walk and his intestines are hanging out of his body. Even when he finally reaches his goal, Scorn Guy has to transfer his subsciousness into two nearby drones just so they can carry his mutilated body to salvation. And when the Parasite attacks again, Scorn Guy is far too weak to resist any longer, resulting in the Parasite turning him into a meaty cocoon.
  • Just like in Samurai Shodown, the fighters of the Soul Series, can take a sword strike to the chest to little ill effect.
  • The snowboarders in SSX can take plenty of punishment. From hitting each other at the speed of a car to crashing after a massive jump, they always seem to be able to get back up uninjured. Crashing in such a fashion as to totally wipe out is incredibly rare.
  • All the Heroes in Star Wars Battlefront (2015), even if their health varies, can take absurd amounts of punishment ranging from flurries of lightsaber swings to direct fire from AT-ATs. The only Heroes with excuses are Chewbacca, who's a Wookiee, and Vader, who's more machine than man. Everyone else is physically a normal member of their species, so they should die as easily as human, Rodian or Sullustautes foot soldiers do.
  • In the Hope cinematic trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, Jace Malcolm manages to tank force lightning for a few seconds, before getting in close and locking a powerful Sith Lord in a Brawler Lock. He then detonates a grenade in the Sith Lord's face. Both he and the Sith Lord get up afterward. The Sith, Darth Malgus, takes it even further, as Grand Master Satele Shan proceeds to smash a mountainside in his face with the force, and he still gets back up!
  • In Stray (2022), the titular Cat suffers two major falls, being gnawed on by Zurks, and is shot at least once by a Sentinel taser gun. The Cat shows no sign of injury aside from briefly limping after the falls, and even that is cured with a short bout of licking.
  • Street Fighter: Just as one example, the piledriver is capable of breaking necks in the real world when done in the somewhat controlled environment of Professional Wrestling; Zangief can perform one from effectively 20' in the air, and the victim can get up.
  • Suikoden II: Luca Blight ends up fighting eighteen heroes working in tandem, defeating at least twelve of them, and has to have half an army shoot him in order to weaken him enough to make a duel against him even remotely fair.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Bowser, definitely. From being thrown into lava and crushed by two castles and a train to getting knocked into a sun followed by a black hole, among much more, the sheer amount of things he's survived with barely a scratch on him is amazing. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door lampshades this in his playable sections. He has literally infinite lives. It's worth pointing out the one time he actually died. In New Super Mario Bros., the first boss is Bowser, who falls into lava after you cut the bridge. You've done this many times before, no big deal. But then he struggles in the lava as his skin and eyeballs melt out and only a skeleton is left as Mario just stares. Why is this worth pointing out? Because that's not when he dies. You meet him again in World 8, completely fine. He's just missing his flesh and eyes. Being a skeleton is no big deal for him. However, this time the bridge doesn't have any lava under it, and when you cut the bridge, he simply falls a great distance. It's a confirmed death in the very last fight, where Bowser Jr. is seen with Bowser's remains (his skeleton broken into pieces from the fall) and promptly throws it all into a black magic pot to resurrect him.
    • If Bowser is made of iron, Mario is made of freaking orichalcum. For those who do not understand, let us note that Mario has survived a fall from the stratosphere after being struck by magical lightning and shot out a glass window. But even that is not what is being referred to. Super Mario Galaxy, folks. At the end of the game, the universe is sucked into a supermassive black hole and renewed in a big bang — but Mario and Rosalina are exempt from this. Rosalina can cast barriers, but Mario has no such power. Mario took a black hole to the face followed by a big bang to the everything and came out okay.
    • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has a literal example in Chapter 3 with the Iron Clefts/Armored Harriers/Iron Adonis Twins, who cannot be beaten until Mario gets his Yoshi partner.
    • Wario in the Wario Land games will be put through every condition possible (to name a few, zombification, lit on fire, spun up into a ball of string, trapped in a snowball, and more) and he just shakes it off. All of them are also required to solve many of the puzzles.
  • Super Robot Wars:
    • While her other "siblings" are probably of the same quality, Lamia Loveless have displayed these features several times (considering she is a Robot Girl, of course she is made of steel). In Super Robot Wars Advance, she stands up in between the two feuding expert martial artists Domon Kasshu and Kazuya Ryuuzaki, about to punch each other. She takes full brunt of both punches from different sides. She just comes back with mere bruises. Domon even mentions that she got hit on the vitals. In the OG saga, this is shown in OG Gaiden, where she goes through all the plugging in the ODE System, gets plugged out of her mecha forcefully by Kyosuke, shot down in open air, later gets plugged out again by Axel... all while butt naked. No One Could Survive That!... well except her, that is. It's more fatal than the above example, but she always survives enough for further repairs to get her back to normal state. Oh, and there's also her surviving Code: ATA, which is said to be able to take out two battleships at once, and still can get repaired, not utterly destroyed.
    • Kyosuke Nanbu has survived two explosions while being human. In the second one, he is in a mech that burns down, falls over, and sinks into water, and he only comes out with a few broken ribs.
  • In Super Smash Bros., everyone gets burned, frozen, electrocuted, bludgeoned, bruised, stabbed, slashed, drilled, bitten, stomped, crushed, pelted, blasted, and shot at with all sorts of physical and elemental attacks... and they'll still have absolutely nothing to show for it. The games' vague Living Toys angle was created partly to justify this, even more so in that the characters are imaginary constructs based on toys in the "real world" and therefore don't have to obey said "real world"'s laws of physics.
  • Tekken, being a fighting game, runs on this, but in the story every member of the Mishima family is borderline indestructible.
    • Jin and Kazuya are both in possession of the Devil Gene which boosts their prowess to considerable heights. Even without the Devil powers, they both survived atmospheric re-entry.
    • Jinpachi (Kazuya's grandfather and Jin's great-grandfather) was not only tough to begin with, but is similarly possessed by an evil spirit.
    • Lars is able to fight Devil Kazuya to a standstill repeatedly.
    • Reina, Heihachi's daughter, hits Devil Kazuya with a flying headbutt. She's not the one that's hurt from it. Shortly after, she willingly took the full force of a massive beam from Devil Kazuya and got away with only scratches, bruising, and an active Devil Gene.
    Kazuya: Hmph... still you remain unbroken.
    Reina: I'm nothing if not tough.
    • And yet, all of them pale in toughness to the patriarch himself Heihachi Mishima, who has no special Devil Gene or demonic possession to boost his power, and has been thrown from a ravine, ragdolled by Devil Jin twice, tanked a swarm of exploding Jack-4s with his face, had the stuffing beaten out of him by Kazuya, but it took being dropped directly in lava to confirm he'd been Killed Off for Real.
  • Everything that has ever lived in any Tomb Raider game:
    • In the first games, you have to shoot any human being for minutes for it to die, not because they are hard to hit. Every. Single. Shot. Is a hit. Count the amounts of bullets you have to put through each enemy (taking into account that the player uses two pistols at the same time). You'll be surprised how much stronger than 50 Cent each little monkey in the jungle is.
    • Of special note is Lara Croft in the 2013 reboot. She manages to keep going despite being impaled by rebar, crashing through trees and wooden barricades, routinely falling from over 20 feet onto dirt, rocks, concrete, and metal surfaces, being thrown around by explosions, being forced to breathe toxic gases, being pummeled by angry Russians, being slashed by bladed weapons, and soaking up potentially hundreds of bullets. While Lara often suffered a lot of injury in the other games, that game in particular does a really good job of illustrating just how brutal the things she walks away from really are.
  • Nathan Drake of Uncharted is either this, Born Lucky, or some combination of the two. He takes some mean bumps, only to come away relatively unharmed (enough to keep fighting). He's also gone as far as surviving days in the desert with absolutely nothing except the clothes on his back and still gets into a firefight (and wins) upon coming across a destroyed settlement. Notable since earlier in that game, a companion character ends up with a broken leg simply by falling off a ledge.
  • A startlingly common trait in Wolfenstein: The New Order:
    • B.J. Blazkowicz himself, to the point of almost hilarious absurdity. Above all, he demonstrates a bizarre immunity to being stabbed. In a scene near the end of the game, he is ambushed and injected with a paralytic, impaled and dragged around with a meat hook, and stabbed deep in the chest with a knife, before turning the tables on the Nazi and walking to the final boss battle like it was nothing.
    • At the end of the game, Deathshead realises that he's lost and tries to take Blazko out with a grenade. At point blank. Blazko survives it, although he's badly hurt and nearing death's door, while that creepy bastard gets liquified.
    • Turns out Max Hass is this. During the attack on the Kreisau Circle HQ, he gets riddled with several bursts of assault rifle fire and takes a burst of heavy machine-gun fire to the chest, yet is still shown during the evacuation no worse for wear. This has lead to theories that he's some sort of rejected Ubersoldat candidate.
    • Caroline Becker manages to survive being shot and crippled from the waist down and the explosion of an otherworldly machine that hurls her out of another dimension and into a nearby ditch, lingers in said ditch for three days before being found and rescued, and spends the rest of the war fighting a life-threatening illness.
    • Frau Engel survives getting her jaw crushed by a giant robot, getting slammed into a tree, and being thrown off a steep cliff... and still turns up at the end of the level, an assault rifle in each hand. She also leads the assault on the Kreisau Circle HQ, her gruesome jaw injury still not fully healed.
    • In the standalone expansion The Old Blood, a Nazi soldier surprises B.J. and the two basically just stand there repeatedly stabbing each other in the chest before the Nazi inevitably succumbs to his wounds, and in another scene, Rudi impales a section of lead pipe clean through his thigh during an Electric Torture session, and Blazko is no worse for wear, not even a limp.
  • Several examples in World of Warcraft:
    • Any racial leader (ex: Thrall for the Orcs) can take several (usually 15>) people whaling on him/her simultaneously with lighting bolts, flesh-eating zombie summons, fireballs, gunshots, etc.
    • Even your own character could be used as an example of this trope, as you're pretty much invulnerable to low-level mobs or characters after you hit level 80. Though it's ironically subverted in the same game; if you are not a tanking class in your tanking spec with your tanking gear? You should probably step back. Bonus points: Tanks visibly animate lifting their shield and dodging!

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