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alt title(s): Conservation Of Ninjitsu; Inverse Ninja Law 
"Anyway, fighting off a dozen ninjas is easy. It's when you run into one ninja that you know you're in trouble."
''"You wanna fight? There's only one ninja left, so that means I'm death incarnate."
In any martial arts fight, there is only a finite amount of ninjutsu available to each side in a given encounter. As a result, one Ninja is a deadly threat, but an army of them are cannon fodder.
This is also known as The Law of Inverse Ninja Strength : Threat = 1/N, where N = number of Ninjas or other "Elite Adversaries".
The reason for this is pretty simple: Twenty-plus Ninjas are ultimately Mooks, and narratively speaking will be treated as such. A single Ninja, more often than not, is a main character or The Dragon, and as such is much more important to the story. (Put another way, there's no Dramatic Tension in seeing a lot of guys beat up one hero or a much smaller number of them, so if there are many antagonists, they have to be weak, but a "fair" fight against equal numbers of opponents can seriously test the characters. It's much the same reason why boxing matches are one-on-one; saying you punched out Mike Tyson wouldn't be very impressive if you were one of eight other boxers beating on him.)
This can apply to Elite Mooks other than ninjas; vampires, for example, are particularly susceptible to Conservation Of Ninjutsu, as are werewolves, alien monsters, Special Forces commandos, and Super Powered Robot Meter Maids. Zombies seem to be exempt from this. This is because they are not considered elite fighters: without the element of surprise, they're mainly dangerous because they travel in packs, and with each victim they overtake, their ranks swell.
The effects of this trope are more severe on less individualized groups of ninjas, such that 3 of essentially the same guy has an adjusted ninjutsu of about 4.1.
Extra points if, when presented with their multiple adversaries, one character makes note that, "We barely were able to handle one, how on earth are we going to handle this many?", right before proceeding to successfully do just that.
A.K.A. Inverse Ninja Law. See also Strong As They Need To Be, The Worf Effect. Compare Conservation Of Competence and What Measure Is A Non Unique. A reason why the Zerg Rush fails. May lead to Lowered Monster Difficulty, but so may its inversion. See also Distribution Of Ninjutsu.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Naruto takes it to new heights. Not only do minions and other extras actively exhibit the trope, but the titular character himself possesses the ability to make a good 1000+ clones of himself. To that point, if he creates 1-5, they're usually the key to his victory, but almost any time he goes over 10 or so (which turns out to be his most common strategy), they turn into cannon fodder, as their main weakness is that they usually go poof with just one hit.
- The "Uzumaki Barrage" attack seems to avoid this trope since it relies more on the simple physical weight of the clones rather than their martial arts skill. It still fails more often than not, though.
- Naruto also has the textbook example of the individualism corollary: in one of the two small-group battles that don't eventually get whittled down to a one-on-one, the main Power Trio and The Mole manage to beat an outnumbered group of narratively identical, visualy near-identical opponents.
- Post-Time Skip, after his Character Development frees him from being an Idiot Hero, this blind multi-clone rush becomes a viable strategy, as Naruto realizes that he learns everything his clones learn. So, he charges an enemy with five or so clones, learns their strategies, and formulates his own plan.
- Ironically, the Shadow Clone jutsu itself seems to be a skill possessed by only a few, extremely badass ninja (everyone else uses non-physical clones or element based clones). Thus, the most effective way to personally apply the Law of Ninjitsu Conservation is itself conserved.
- The show makes note of this trope: The standard squad is made up of four ninja. Kakashi says that any more an the team starts getting slow, clunky, and disorganized. A bigger team is worse at completing missions than a smaller one. Plus, any ninja that stands alone is pretty much Bad Ass enough to beat an entire squad.
- Sasuke seems to be Genre Savvy to this: after his Face Heel Turn he almost always fights alone and thus would die if he failed. However, Plot Armor prevents his death, and thus he almost always wins, contrast before when he was starting to fall to The Worf Effect.
- Naruto's clones being weaker is justified to some extent because he has to split his chakra among his different bodies, making them all weaker than he is alone.
- Which still doesn't explain why he can make one hundred clones, get whittled down to just himself, and win anyway.
- His chakra doesn't disappear when the clone does, it reverts back to all the other clones as well as the original.
- Additionally, it's harder to coordinate a plan of attack with hundreds of clones, since when he has a few clones, each has a unique purpose, but when there are hundreds, he typically either surrounds the ending and attacks one or a few at a time, or just charges in, which makes having 100 clones not result in a hundred-fold increase in effectiveness. Additionally, some opponents (especially those who have seen him using Shadow Clones before, like Sasuke), know how to fight them effectively, or can use techniques to cover a wide area and strike many clones at once.
- Additionally, Naruto seems to have grown out of this. He hasn't used the mass clone technique for combat since the timeskip.
- I think the show actually mathematically explains this trope as a description of the shadow clone technique. Total chakra/1000 clones = ladder rungs and decoys. Total chakra/3 clones = Ball blender that cuts the opponents cells apart
- Recently in the second Shippuden movie, this Trope was slightly inverted where the large Konoha Ninja Forces were almost completely decimated by Enemy Sky Ninja, yet it only takes 4 Konoha Ninja to later in the film completely destroy the entire enemy fleet.
- Ninja Scroll: Jubei eliminates ninja after ninja flunky with prototypical displays of gushing High Pressure Blood. Only the Eight Devils of Kimon can give him a challenge; all others die with pathetic ease.
- Played with in Ninin Ga Shinobuden, where Shinobu's fellow ninjas are faceless mooks who can't do anything right. Miyabi can defeat the whole clan easily, and she's like twelve.
- That may have at least as much to do with the fact that, in spite of being "trained" by Norio Wakamoto, they never actually do anything but look at or talk about porn, and are completely curb stomped by other nameless ninja mooks when they visit the kunoichi camp.
- Anyone in Dragonball who possessed the ability to duplicate themselves usually followed a similar rule.
- The creator of the Division technique actually gets criticized by his rival for creating a move with such a debilitating flaw.
- Hellsing does use this. The Hellsing Organisation's operatives mop the floor with masses of enemy ghouls but find more trouble in dealing with lone strong vampires. However, there is also a lot of subversion. Seras assisted Alucard against the lone Tubalcain Alhambra and helped her side win instead of making the odds worse, as the Inverse Ninja Law would have. Similarly, when Alexander makes his one-man charge towards Alucard and a newly-summoned army of familiars in a later part of the story, he finds that the numbers actually are to Alucard's advantage and it takes reinforcements to save him.
- Played straight before being subverted in Zone Of The Enders: Idolo. The titular Orbital Frame is highly effective against small groups of LEVs, but is eventually taken down by concentrated fire from an overwhelming number of the same.
- Bleach employs this trope constantly, but perhaps the most glaring example occurs in the Soul Society arc. Ichigo, after barely surviving a duel with Squad 6 lieutenant Renji Abarai, defeats three other lieutenants in a matter of seconds without using his sword just a few episodes later (granted, he has just been through some intense training and one of the lieutenants is from the medical 4th Squad). Subverted by Aizen, who is pretty much untouchable regardless of how few or many people he's up against.
- Somewhat justified in that case, however, as Renji is portrayed as far stronger than an average lieutenant, to the point of having a Bankai.
- Renji achieves Bankai after his duel with Ichigo.
- Thing is, though, he was still strong enough to be ready to achieve Bankai just after recovering from his fight with Ichigo, which puts him at pretty much the top of the Lieutenants.
- It was in fact 23 episodes later, which hardly qualifies as "just a few".
- Also, in a particularly boring episode, Ichigo barely scrapes by fighting his first gillian, but is later seen destroying dozens of them at a stroke.
- Subverted in End of Evangelion. Asuka fights nine mass-produced Eva units, each with weapons that can cleave straight through her nigh-impenetrable AT Field. Asuka's Eva, meanwhile, has only a Progressive Knife and three minutes of battery power. In that timespan, Asuka disables or destroys every last one. Only to find out that they were Only Mostly Dead, and promptly get her ass kicked. Whoops.
- Mahou Sensei Negima has two resident Obvious Ninjas, one plays this straight the other subverts it slightly. Inugami Kotaro can't create Shadow Clones of equal power to himself (and his cap was seven in the Tournament sub-arc). However Boobs Of Steel Kaede with her Sixteen Shadow Clones CAN... but not at full count. When she has four shadow clones they are all equal to her alone. Proving with Training at least in Negima you can bypass this trope.
- Later in the series the main lead's father Nagi and his team the Ala Rubra were fighting in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon against the absolute Big Bad. A single sneak attack from him was enough to wipe out the entire party. Then, after being healed, Nagi managed to single-handedly take out the Black Cloak wearing Ultimate Evil. Hammering the point home, each individual member of the Ala Rubra were more than capable on their own against their Eigen stylized PsycoRanger opponents they'd faced previous.
- A textbook example occurs in chapter 254. Negi takes down a small army of Governor Godel's elite "private bodyguards" in a matter of seconds, but when he fights Godel one-on-one, the Govenor takes his legs out before he can react, then nails him with a barrier peircing attack whilst he was unable to dodge. Negi was on the floor before he knew what hit him.
- In Berserk, Apostles were a major threat early in the series, with Guts needing to fight with everything he had to kill one, and Guts probably would have died fighting the Count if the Count's daughter hadn't conveniently burst into the room for Guts to use as a hostage. Now that all the Apostles in the world are serving Griffith, they've been demoted to Elite Mooks. Justified, since Guts has the Berserker's Armor, which makes him much stronger and brings out his Superpowered Evil Side.
- Further justified in the current ark, where Griffith's army fights an equally powerful army of equally messed up demons.
- Yu-Gi-Oh GX sometimes shows a character (usually Manjoume/Chazz) defeat several duelists at once offscreen. In Manjoume's case, apparently it's his coattails of doom that makes him elite enough to do this.
- Manjoume actually does defeat four opponents at once during a match, they all get two monsters each on their first turn, and using their effects render Manjoume unable to attack, he beats them with three cards.
- The Type-3 Gadget Drones in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, which slapped Elio around for most of the fight when there was only one of them during the first mission, but gets taken out by the Forwards in seconds when they come in groups in later missions. Justified since said Forwards were going through Nanoha's Training From Hell every single day.
- Used interestingly at the end of the Enies Lobby arc in One Piece. The Straw Hats are attacked by a horde of Captain-ranked Marines. Each one displays unique powers, fighting skills, or weapons. Each one a few chapters ago would have been a boss, or at least a major enemy. Now, they were dangerous only because of their sheer numbers.
- Morgan was also a captain, and Luffy defeated him without taking a single hit. T-Bone was an Elite Mook, and while he presented a threat to the Rocketman, Zoro defeated him in one hit, so the strength of Captain-ranked Marines is not that significant at this point in the story.
- Afro Samurai is made of this trope. Afro will triumph over any number of foes attacking in numbers, but have trouble one-on-one.
- Yakitate Japan ! inverts this by having Kageto Kinoshita's only endearing trait be his ability to clone himself. He is full of so much suck that his power alone is zero anyway, so making clones can't hurt.
- One of the manga of Ah, Megami-sama!, shows Urd demonstrating her copying ability, in an omake, and explaining, as she gets into the hundreds or so of copies, they start to become, well... jelly...
- Ronin Warriors is almost absurdly blatant about this. In the first episode, they face a single one of Talpa's samurai Mooks. It takes the entire episode and the Hero summoning his armor and using his Finishing Move to take him out. Any subsequent attacks by them can generally be handled without transforming, and in the second arc, two of the heroes can take on hundreds of them.
- Watch an episode of Sailor Moon and you'll have the basic formula: Sailor Scouts weaken monster, Sailor Moon finishes it off. Now watch one of the movies, where there can be dozens to hundreds of monsters at once, and EVERYONE will be able to pick them off with an attack or two.
- One Piece does this to the point of ridiculousness. During the Assault on Enies Lobby, Luffy single-handedly defeats an army of 2000 Marines without receiving even a scratch. Immediately afterwards, he fights one-on-one against Blueno, who gives him significantly more trouble. However, given that Blueno was an elite agent and the Marines were just foot soldiers, it's somewhat justified.
Comic Books
- Occurs whenever multiple villains team up to crush the hero. Despite how fearsome there are individually, especially during their debut, they are taken down by the hero in a fraction of the time and effort it originally took. Prime example being the Sinister Six of early Spider-Man.
- Justified when Spidey is baiting the Vulture in the Secret of the Sinister Six novel, claiming that's because he can't afford to hold back when he's facing all six of them.
- Also, it's demonstrated in every event that Spidey uses his enemies' abilities against each other. He tends to have much easier fights against the Six as a whole because their signature trait is a total lack of coordination, meaning Spidey can hop all over the place and watch them run into each other.
- Such as using Shocker's vibro-shock devices to keep Sandman from changing back to human form.
- The Hand, a group of elite ninja in Marvel comic books, is almost nothing but cannon fodder. The willingness to die seems to be more important in membership consideration than skill, considering how many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of these guys characters like Wolverine and Elektra have waded through. These were, at least in part, the inspiration for the Foot Clan, above.
- Justified by the Wolverine comic "...[the mooks] have to be careful they don't chop one of their own by mistake. While I can hit anyone I please."
- The Punisher - 'nuff said.
- One Flash storyline had a Speed Force enhanced bunch of Ninja going up against various Flashes and other speedsters. They realized almost too late that the more ninja they took out of the action, the faster the others were getting...
- Played with in a recent Runaways comic where Kingpin faces the heroes with an army of ninjas (more Nnnjas then usual, according to one kid). During the fight, Molly (a superstrong girl who was very upset about punching Punisher, who had no powers to protect him, and had sworn off fighting anyone without powers) asks if ninjas had powers so she could fight them. She is given the answer, that, because they were ninjas, they counted as double, the implication being that heroes in the Marvel universe cut loose when fighting ninjas.
- Watchmen subverts this, as Rorschach attempts to fight through an army of policemen and fails.
- Theres a Ghost Rider storyline that justifies this. Basically Lucifer splits himself into 666 different bodies when one body dies the remaining ones gain more power until only one remains with all of the devils hellish force.
- In The Negation #11, Obregon Kaine reminisces on a lesson from his training days as he watches hundreds of superpowered Australians thoroughly fail to defeat General Murquade: "It doesn't matter if you're fighting ten enemies or a hundred...just worry about the one you're killing now!"
Film
- In the new Star Trek movie, any time a group of ships appear, be it Klingon or Federation, count on them getting wrecked. A single ship, especially if it's named Enterprise, is going to kick ass. This is hilariously evident in the series even moreso (see TV examples).
- Batman Begins skirts the edge of this trope. Bruce Wayne only fights one member of the League of Shadows during his escape (all the others were too busy dodging explosions); still, one might wonder how Bruce was the only ninja to escape the exploding dojo. (The answer: he wasn't.) When he takes up the Batman mantle officially, he is able hold his own against four ninjas at once (and larger numbers of Falcone's gangsters, for that matter, but they're hardly "elite").
- It should be considered, though, that Batman does have the best body armor and equipment that money can buy, which should give him an extra edge.
- It should also be noted that he's the Goddamn Batman.
- In the Matrix trilogy, in the famous Burly Brawl scene from Matrix Reloaded, Neo is able to manhandle (though not without some difficulty) dozens, if not hundreds, of Smith copies, yet in Matrix Revolutions, which takes place chronologically perhaps a day or so later, he is completely beaten by just a single Smith. And this little segment of dialogue, taken in the context of this trope, shows Smith to be quite Genre Savvy when the need calls for it.
Neo: It ends tonight.
Smith: I know it does; I've seen it. I know how it ends. That's why the rest of me are gonna sit back and enjoy the show, because we already know that I'm the one that beats you.
- Let's not forget that it's said in the movie that Smith and Neo are linked in a way that they are always as powerful as the other. So all the Smiths involved in the fight are automatically as powerful as Neo combined, even if it's one. Making this a literal application of this rule in the canon.
- The fact that the Smith that is fighting Neo is The Smith that had been created from the Oracle is one possibility of why he is so much more powerful than the others, since When Neo flies away from the other Smiths in the Burly Brawl, none of them attempt to give chase, which they could have done if all of them could fly. It's possible that only "Oracle Smith" could do so.
- The list just wouldn't be complete without robots. In I, Robot, Will Smith's character Spooner is able to survive and utterly destroy two massive truckloads worth of corrupted robots during the highway sequence, but the scene gets really serious when he realizes that there is one (albeit handicapped) robot leftover.
- Though it should be noted, those two truckloads of robots were dispatched with a combination of gunplay and fancy vehicular maneuvers. For the last one, he was unarmed and his car flipped on its side.
- No ninjas or robots, but still. How can this trope not bring The Princess Bride to mind?
Fezzik: I just figured out why you would give me so much trouble.
Man in Black: Why is that, do you think?
Fezzik: Well, I haven't fought just one person for so long... I've been specializing in groups, fighting gangs for local charities... that kind of thing.
Man in Black: Why should that make such a difference?
Fezzik: You see, you use different moves when you're fighting half a dozen people than when you only have to worry about one.
- Probably the only time in Star Wars that the Imperial Stormtroopers were at all capable was when fighting a large number of rebel troops - both in the opening scene of "A New Hope", and in the invasion of Hoth in "The Empire Strikes Back". After that, when they were just fighting Luke, Han, Chewie, and Leia, they became the infamously poor marksmen they are remembered as. Ewoks count as heroes in this example.
- The one time the Jedi are killed by non-Sith and non-betrayal by own troops in the films is the Battle of Geonosis of Attack of the Clones, because there are 215 Jedi (179 die). Though the one shot by Jango Fett doesn't count.
- It is stated however, that the majority of these Jedi were users of a saber style that is, in fact, terrible against blasters. However, you'd think that that kind of style wouldn't be so widespread.
- Also, take the scene in Revenge of the Sith where Mace Windu and 3 other Jedi are attempting to arrest Palpatine. Palpatine instantly kills the first Jedi, then kills the second right after. The third Jedi survives for maybe 5 more seconds before also getting killed. Now that there is one more Jedi left, he manages to overpower Palpatine after a epic battle.
- Who was, after all, played by Samuel L Jackson.
- Possible subversion. A popular theory is that he could have taken them all out quickly with the element of surprise, but knew that together for an extended battle, they would be too much. So he took out the first three quickly then just battled with Mace Windu long enough to get Anakin upstairs, then put himself in a position where he appears to be overpowered. That way Anakin's sympathies would be with him and he could force Anakin to "save" him. This forced Anakin to strike against the Jedi so he was backed into a corner with no one but Palpatine. This leads to the final part of the mind games that turns Anakin to the Dark Side and makes him into Darth Vader. It's a Xanatos Roulette, but it's Palpatine, So Yeah.
- There's also TIE Fighters, though this is more easily justified. The Expanded Universe explicitly references one of the common justifications on this page—that a large number of starfighters have to be more careful when fighting a smaller number of starfighters—and then justifies it further by Rebel X-wings having shields and TIEs not (which itself tends to lead to higher survivability for the Rebel pilots, who thereby learn from their mistakes).
- Averted in the Alien quadrilogy; the xenomorphs are simple to kill from medium-long range, and with some weapons they can be defeated from close range. This does not vary based on number. It appears to be a straight application, however, as generally when there's only one in the area the characters nearby are totally unprepared to deal with it.
- In Kill Bill Volume 1, Black Mamba is able to slice through the numerous Crazy 88 members like butter with her superior katana, but displayed trouble whenever the General poked his bald head in at various points during the scuffle. Then again, he was easier to defeat than Gogo was.
- Authority Equals Asskicking. It also helped that he had an interesting weapon that he could dual-wield (with which he managed to take the Bride by surprise at one point).
- In Scarface, Tony Montana can gun down hordes of thugs, but a lone chainsaw-user proves a great threat and a single shotgun-toting assassin finally kills him.
- In Starship Troopers the bugs are incredibly strong when there's just one or two of them in the screen. When the troopers are defending the fortress, they can just spray down hordes of the same bugs with the same rifles that didn't work before.
- In The One, it is quite literally a law of the multiverse that "power" is spread between the different incarnations of a person across universes, and criminal abuse of this has naturally ensued. The Big Bad and sort-of Evil Twin to the hero partakes in killing off their "other selves", such that by the final fight both are superhumanly capable.
- Sounds a lot like Highlander when put that way. Which fits the trope, naturally.
- Very averted in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Raphael fights a horde of mooks alone... and is savagely beaten, thrown through a skylight (averting the soft glass trope), and spends the next quarter of the movie recovering. However, the aversion is fairly justified by the fact that TMNT has, is, and most likely will always be a show about the power of friendship and teamwork. His brothers weren't there, and he was emotionally unstable. Hence, the turtle with a cracked shell.
- In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy fairly easily takes out half a dozen Nazis on the truck transporting the Ark. But he nearly gets killed when there's just one Nazi left.
- Yeah, but it's clear that that one tough guy left is the badass squad leader, who has sent his underlings forward and finally realizes that if you need something done you have to do it yourself.
- Averted in ''Big Trouble In Little China'. The three sorcerer-ninja henchmen of the sorcerer-ninja Big Bad are almost exactly as tough together as each is separately.
- Let's not forget this was pretty much the whole plot of the American Ninja series
- In V for Vendetta, the main character takes down half a dozen or more guys twice, but the most badass one occurs after he's been gunned down and is practically at death's door.
- Both played straight and averted in Ip Man, where both the titular hero and General Miura can throw down with multiple opponents with ease but Master Liu, who had been winning at the one-on-one Japanese-staged matches, tries to take on three at once and gets his ass handed to him.
- This troper feels proud to be the one to add, but sad at the same time for the fact of this not being here already, the very premise behind the movie 300. 3 hundreds of warriors against tens of thousands of warriors and Nightmare Fuel bloodthirsty beasts? Guess how the movie ends? You guessed wrong. In the ending, there's actually 10,000 Spartans and 30,000 Greeks, ready to face the Persians. If this trope applies to both sides, those 10,000 Spartans would actually turn out to be worthless against the now (lots) smaller number of Persians. Eh, it's still a Crowning Moment Of Awesome
- The formula is played straight and averted in Equilibrium. In the final fight scenes, Preston is surrounded by six elite mooks and takes them down in about five seconds flat. There follows a duel with The Dragon ... well, kind of, since, averting the trope, The Dragon is taken down with one swipe.
- The trope is played straight in any of The Karate Kid movies whenever Mr Miyagi gets involved in a fight. Three, four guys, one big Caucasian guy ... doesn't matter. Old guy always wins.
- American Ninja: The hero is a lone ninja in the US Army. The villain has an army of ninja, and you can guess how effective they are.
- Aragorn in Lord Of The Rings at Helm's Deep and at the river signify this trope. First, Aragorn faces down what looks like several platoons of orcs. Alone. And survives. Then, at Helm's Deep, with Gimli, he holds the gate into Helm's Deep against the entire uruk-hai army. "Gondor needs no king?" Needs no army, either. It's got Aragorn.
- Additionally, one of the supplementary guide books (which incoporates the main elements of both the films and books) upholds the other side of the trope and indicates that in a one-on-one fight, an Uruk-Hai's size and strength would always let it beat a Rohan soldier.
Literature
Live Action TV
- Star Trek is all over this trope. In fact this could be the very basis of their famous Redshirts. You see groups of red-shirts get vaporized, but Scotty survives into the 24th century! Even if the future, multiple Starfleet personnel get wasted during the course of TNG, but Worf makes it, inspite of The Worf Effect. Likewise, while whole armadas of ships get pummeled, single starships win the day. This even applies to the bad guys. A single Borg cube can cause so much havoc, yet every time we seen a bunch of Borg cubes, they're usually destroyed immediately after.
- Buffyverse vampires were particularly subject to this trope. Individual vampires could be fairly respectable opponents, though they still had a bad track record of getting one-stab killed after Season 1. Whenever vampires gathered in groups, they were cannon fodder. One just hopes they don't have problems with splinters.
- Particularly egregious in the final season, where one Turok-Han 'uber-vamp' was a nearly unstoppable force, very narrowly beaten by the Slayer after several victories. In the finale, however, the Scoobies went up against an army of them, and Xander, Anya, and the slayers-still-in-training were taking hundreds of them down easily, albeit with the One Girl in all the world who will be Chosen becoming the Many Girls thanks to a timely spell by Willow, and not without several casualties, including multiple Potential Slayers, and Anya.
- In the DVD commentary, Joss Whedon points out that this was a conscious decision, claiming that "they couldn't all be as hard to beat as the first one," since that would make the last fight unwinnable. No in-universe explanation is given, simply the remark that storytelling is more important than an internally-consistent canon. Nothing else left to do but recite the Mantra and shrug it off.
- Interesting, one may argue that an anti-climactic Grand Finale and Peril Rollover is a failure of storytelling.
- Your Mileage May Vary
- In Doctor Who, the amount of danger presented by the Daleks seems to always be inversely proportional to the number of Daleks present.
- In Super Sentai and Power Rangers there are many instances of a monster beating up an entire team of Rangers, only to be defeated by a single Ranger in a sufficiently climactic battle.
- The enemy grunts are an exception, though. They are pushovers in small or moderate numbers, but huge hordes of them occasionally manage to overpower the Rangers (happens especially in season finales).
- Also, early seasons would sometimes feature battles with multiple resurrected monsters, who would usually go down with just one or two hits. Eventually subverted in the third season premiere where a villain and four resurrected monsters, all giant sized, tear the Megazord to pieces.
- In Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, the Mooks suffer from an extreme case of this. A group of them are nothing but cannon fodder for an unmorphed Len to kick around. One, on the other hand, once required two Riders to use some of their strongest attacks.
- Babylon 5 presents a rare good-guy example of this: when there's only one White Star, it's unstoppable. Once there's a fleet, they start getting taken down by mid-level enemies, often with no Vorlon or Shadow support.
- This is especially bad since the White Stars are meant to be able to learn from each hit it takes, so that the armour gets stronger after every battle. Even as late as the fourth series, the White Stars continued to get weaker: in Series 3, it takes 3 White Stars to destroy a Shadow warship( after a telepath has jammed it), but by the battle of Proxima 3, 4 White Stars are needed to deal with a single Earth destroyer, an incredibly simpler ship with far less firepower (albeit with the ability to manoeuvre ), which Sheridan stated was weaker than The White Star.
- Quite possibly, at Proxima 3, the White Star fleet was not all-out after the EA destroyer, instead trying to cripple it and force a surrender. Thus seemingly less powerful.
- This also seems to apply to the Shadows and Vorlons - Shadow battlecrabs were notoriously difficult to kill and Vorlons were pretty much invincible. Until the Battle of Coriana, when they started blowing up left and right. (Though in fairness, the coalition force arrayed against them was pretty huge too.)
- The casualties were massively slanted against the allied fleet.
- Don't forget the time Marcus Cole explained to a group of thugs why they should tell him what he wanted to know: "Because if you don't, then in five minutes I'll be the only person at this table still standing. Five minutes after that, I'll be the only person in this room still standing. So, who's in?" After he makes good on this threat, he laments that, "Now I have to wait for someone to wake up."
- Kamen Rider Den-O: The hordes of ninja in the movie Ore Tanjou suffer so badly from this that even the ridiculously inept protagonist Ryoutarou can hold his own against one.
- Stargate SG 1 and Stargate Atlantis played it quite straight with the Jaffa and the Wraith respectively.
- Hilariously lampshaded in an Adam Sandler-era SNL skit, where the group of ninjas sit and lick their wounds after another failed attack. "How did we agree to attack the good guy?" "All at once!" "And how did we end up attacking?" "One at a time, one at a time." Sandler's hooded ninja speaks up about the use of throwing stars, noting that they are not a good idea in a large group, then pulling back his hood to reveal one stuck in his forehead. The gang ends up deciding to get their confidence back by beating up the next person they meet in the lobby - who of course turns out to be Bruce Lee.
Tabletop Games
- Brickwars invokes this trope for its Ninja Scum◊ card invokes the trope hilariously, resulting in a unit that gets lower rolls the more there are (and you must have at least three).The flavor text says it all.
- {{Don'tRestYourHead}} has a Ninja madness power that lets you summon endless numbers of ninja mooks from every impossible hiding place. Their only ability is a reckless Zerg Rush. OR you call an elite Ninja, Colour Coded For Your Convenience. Don't mess with him. He's badass.
- Dungeons And Dragons uses "minion" class enemies to invoke this trope in 4th Edition. They each have one hit point and are designed to fall in droves. Then there are elite and solo enemies, equal to two and five normal monsters respectively. If you see a group of 20 orcs, they are probably mostly minions, and one fireball will leave you with a target or two left; if you see two orcs, they are probably elite brutes, each of which has 194 hit points, a much nastier fight.
- The 3rd edition of D&D shows a different form of this trope, in that the Encounter Level (difficulty) of a fight is calculated not by counting the enemies, but by adding 2 to the Encounter Level for each doubling of the number of enemies. Thusly, one gnoll is EL 1, but sixteen gnolls are only EL 9. By the time you get up to 32, it's not even worth raising the EL, as characters above 9th level have enough mass-effect spells to easily handle that many weak enemies.
- The Ninja Burger Employee's Handbook specifically recommends against this trope.
- A particularly nasty version of this occurs in Runequest; due to the Critical Fumble rules, armies take the most damage from their own side. Thus, a larger army is actually less of a threat.
Video Games
- Bad Dudes Versus Dragon Ninja. Armies of brightly dressed Highly Visible Ninja rush at the one (or two) good guys in broad daylight then each one falls down (and vanishes) after being struck a single blow (in fact in the case of the chi punch several ninja can be killed by the same blow).
- A noted problem with Metal Gear Solid 2: fighting thirty Metal Gears is significantly less dramatic than the usual finale of fighting one, because of the greatly reduced significance of each foe; in fact, Metal Gear RAY's require only a handful of missiles to destroy, while their REX predecessor (Which they were designed specifically to be able to defeat) required some 20-30 of those missiles and a lone ninja (himself taking full advantage of this very trope) to perform a Heroic Sacrifice. This may be justified, as was well established that the Metal Gears involved in that fight were designed to be cheap, mass-produced, and be piloted by an AI.
- No ninjas or robots either and applying to main characters, but still: In Devil May Cry 3, Dante or Vergil alone can use their full powers in the first phase of the fight against Arkham. When the second phase rolls in, bringing Vergil or Dante (respectively according to character used) with it, the player loses his Style-based moves and Devil Trigger transformation, while the interloper also cannot fight at full power.
- In the not yet released 2009 Terminator video game the player kills tons of terminator robots with grenades, M16, shotguns, pistols and even by punching them. This is in contrast to the movies where bullets/RP Gs/exploding gas tankers/ firetrucks did nothing.
- In Spider-Man: The Game of The Movie, one level relies heavily on stealth, and if you are spotted or trip an alarm it brings out a couple Super Soldiers, giant robots that are extremely formidable opponents. Even one is a handful, and if you run into more than one, your only hope is to run and hide. A couple levels later you have to fight your way through dozens of Super Soldiers, which are notably easier to get past.
- Game example with robots: in Mega Man, the mass-produced Joes are basically Arm Cannon fodder. Only the unique Robot Masters are a challenge.
- Gemini Man (Mega Man 3) himself follows this trope. He starts the battle by doubling himself, and only attacks with a weak blaster (in response to your fire) and by Collision Damage. Only when you destroy the clone does he break out the Gemini Laser.
- Played very straight in Super Smash Bros. and sequels. Any level with "Team <character>" or the Fighting Alloys lets you fling them off the screen with one solid hit. Even heavy characters like Bowser blast off when part of a team. Meanwhile, some stages can give you hell with just 1-3 opponents and even with the very occasional ally.
- But brutally, BRUTALLY subverted in the well-named Cruel Melee/Cruel Brawl.
- A mission in the single player Star Wars Battlefront 2 has you as a single clone trooper among many going up against a horde of Jedi. This troper wonders if this was meant to be some kind of cosmic and cruel irony.
- Of course, that was Operation: Knightfall, those clone troopers were members of the 501st Legion, one of the most famous in the Clone Wars, and they were under the direct command of Darth Vader, who could probably have single-handedly annihilated those Jedi anyway.
- Another Star Wars example, in Republic Commando, when Delta Squad (essentially the ninjas of the Clone Wars) splits up to take down the Core Ship on Geonosis, Delta-38 (the player's character) lampshades this trope,
almost making it into a Crowning Moment Of Awesome:
Delta 38: Alone against all these droids? Heh, they don't stand a chance.
- Lampshaded with dark hilarity at the end of Max Payne. As he continues to gun down the Big Bad's Killer Suits in her penthouse suite, the PA system crackles to life:
Big Bad: What do you mean 'he's unstoppable'? You are superior to him in every way that counts. You are better trained, better equipped, and you outnumber him at least twenty-to-one. Do. Your. Job.
- Ninja Gaiden: Ryu, a lone ninja, can take on a seemingly endless horde of ninjas, demons, and fiends of all sizes and colors - and the endless hordes of ninja that come after him can barely touch him. Granted, higher difficulties on the Xbox game require that the player EARN every iota of their ninjutsu.
- Mass Effect actually averts this in the backstory. The neural network of the robotic Geth is made in such a way that they are actually more powerful when fighting in groups. In game, this is shown by having the Elite Mooks boost the stats of their nearby allies.
- City Of Heroes actually has this as a player's power. The more enemies that are nearby (Capped at 10 to balance things a little), the stronger a character possessing such a power will be in battle against all of the enemies. Also carries over to a few of the optional powers accessible to anyone, which can improve offense, defense or other stats across a whole team.
- To be specific, the powers that do this come in two types. Toggle powers that can be kept on for entire battles like "Invincibility" (increases your defense and accuracy for each foe within melee range), "Rise to the Challenge" (increases your health regeneration rate for each foe within melee range and decreases their accuracy). Then there are click powers that give a temporary buff with it's strength based on how many enemies it hits at the time it is fired like "Eclipse" (Resistance), "Energy Absorption" (Defense), "Power Sink"/"Energy Drain"/"Consume"/"Dark Consumption" (Endurance Refill), "Dark Regeneration" (Health Refill), and "Soul Drain"/"Sunless Mire" (Accuracy and Damage buff). This all comes together for the "Fulcrum Shift" power, which (take a breath) reduces an enemy's damage, then reduces the damage of every enemy around that enemy, then increases the damage of every ally around every one of those enemies, repeating that buff for each enemy debuffed, and throws another damage boost around the caster just for fun.
- The second PSP installment of the Ratchet And Clank series, Secret Agent Clank, has a skill point challenge that references this trope. Titled "Inverse Ninja Law", it requires you to defeat 99 ninja mooks during a boss fight where they spawn endlessly, far, far more than you need to defeat to beat the level.
- Somewhat averted in PSP's FF Tactics-esque Jeanne d'Arc, where game mechanic called chain-defence would mean, the more people in your direct vicinity, or in chain, there would be, the better your defence would be.
- Every shooter follows this rule, as you need only get one kill per death to tie and one extra to win. So, naturally, this troper applies it to Halo. A team of 1 or 2 players will easily defeat a significantly larger team if they play the situation right. This troper has won several 4 on 1 games, and he and his friend won a 6 on 2 game by a significant amount.
- In Kingdom Hearts II small groups of Heartless or Nobodies can usually pose a significant threat to Sora and his party, but during the aptly-named Battle of the 1000 Heartless, Sora is able to steamroll right over a group of 1000 Armored Knights and Surveillance Robots without any support from Donald and Goofy. Helped along by the reaction commands for said enemies, both of which are wide-area attacks capable of hitting large numbers of targets at once.
- Their unique abilities aided their enemy in combat! No wonder they could be brought in bulk...
- An early mission in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII boiled down to "Storm the enemy base alone. Have fun." Of course, it should be noted that your character is explicitly a Super Soldier.
- One of the stages in Disgaea has you fighting a giant enemy who divides himself into ten seprate enemies. Love Freak Flonne lampshades this by saying its love is divided by ten. However, noted by the Prinny commentary on the DS version after you lose, love is not a battle stat.
- World Of Warcraft includes one zone, Lake Wintergrasp, dedicated to world (i.e. not instanced) Pv P. In an effort to make it more fun on servers where one faction or the other is underpopulated, it features a mechanic called Tenacity that buffs whichever side has fewer people - the greater the disparity, the stronger the buff.
- In The Witcher, witchers have multiple swordplay styles for one-on-one and facing groups. Given equal skill developed in all styles it's still easier to wipe out a horde of creatures that would be hard-fought singly. Having trouble fighting that cemetaur with Strong Style? Dive into a crowd of them and let loose with Group style!
- And by hard fought singly it doesn't mean a separate encounter, it means that if you lure one away form the group and use a single style, you do less damage than fighting all of them with a group style.
- Extremely brutally subverted in the Dynamis type zones in Final Fantasy XI, awakening too many of the Vanguard will annihilate you. God help you if you're over run with Hydra Corps. (Elite Mooks +1?) There is no conservation, you will simply die if you don't have movement enhancement.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- While Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would make use of this trope when it needed to, it was also averted a fair number of times as well in the most recent series—while the turtles could defeat almost any individual ninja, their most definitive defeats came at times when they were overpowered by sheer numbers. Conversely, the Shredder, proved considerably easier to defeat when he was alone, and did not have his mooks to cover his flanks.
- Justice League made active use of the trope in its early seasons. The first instance was against eh robotic Manhunters and goes as follows: Three Manhunters vs. Justice League. Ends in a tie, but the Manhunters were winning. One of them was not damaged a bit after being hit directly with Hawkgirl's mace Second encounter: One Thousand Manhunters vs. Justice League. The Justice League tear them apart. Hawkgirl's mace tore throuh them, as did a green lantern ring. Third Encounter: One Manhunter vs. Green Lantern. The Manhunter overpowered the lantern ring and won
- This was solved to a point when the series switched over to Unlimited and the League was given its own personal army. The new team then proceeded to take on fearsome tasks that required multiple individuals, such as when they faced the Dark Heart, a nanotechnology being that could multiply itself exponentially.
- However, it was quickly flipped over once more when the team took on Amazo, an android that took down every Leaguer in existence without breaking an artificial sweat. Though this isn't that unbelievable when you consider that AMAZO is always getting stronger and had already left earth a while ago (hell, in that same story he teleported an entire planet just to get it out of his way and brought it back as soon as someone asked).
- Teen Titans is possibly the crowned king of this trope, providing an on point illustration of it about every other episode using a wide variety of monsters and Mecha Mooks. Standard example: the villain of the week summons a monster or robot or something. With much struggle and an elongated fight sequence, the Titans are either just barly able to deat the adversary or make their retreat. Later on in the episode, the villain tries the same trick again, but decides to spice it up a bit by either making the goon 20 times larger or replicating it to form a small army. Despite the blatantly increased odds, the Titans are still able to defeat the both the goons and the Villain Of The Week with half the sweat.
- Averted by Billy Numerous and Trigon's fire demons. Billy's a formidable opponent (for a Villain Of The Week anyway) because of his ability to make hundreds of copies that also have surprisingly good coordination. When Slade leads an army of fire demons to retrieve Raven from Titans Tower, her teammates, despite holding nothing back (Cyborg going so far as to hook himself up to the Tower defense systems to fire dual Sonic BF Gs), are overwhelmed by their foes' sheer numbers and Slade's own formidable powers.
- In an episode of Lilo And Stitch The Series, the Monster Of The Week was able to duplicate anything. However, the qualities of anything it duplicated were divided accordingly (i.e. it could duplicate a 100-watt lightbulb to produce 2 50-watt bulbs). Near the end of the episode, Lilo tricks Gantu into making 100 of each of his combat experiments, making them so weak they're easily defeated.
- In Xiaolin Showdown, one of the Shen Gong Wu, the Ring of Nine Dragons, can make duplicates of the user, but the duplicates get less competent the more are made.
- Also subverted to great amusement in that Jack Spicer, universal Butt Monkey and self proclaimed 'boy genius,' is actually able to use the ring to great effect, not because he is strong enough that even when divided into nine pieces he is still a formidable opponent, but rather because he's so bad already that the clones couldn't possibly get any worse.
- On Jackie Chan Adventures, whether Jackie had to fight five of the Shadowkhan or five hundred, they would always take exactly the same amount of effort to dispatch.
- In the CGI cartoon Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, after establishing a base on the jungle world of Tesca Nemerosa, the Roughnecks encounter a 'prototype' Spider Bug that proceeds to kidnap the entire squad one by one with consummate ease, until eventually only two remain uncaptured. When they finally confront it in a suitably epic battle, it takes a barrage of automatic rifle fire and a plummet onto stalagmites to defeat it. Next episode, they're fighting Spider Bugs by the dozens, in combination with the more conventional Bugs, and having little trouble holding their own.
- Subverted in The Spectacular Spider-Man episode "Group Therapy". The Sinister Six beat the crap out of Spiderman at first and the only reason he beat them was because he had the Symbiode suit on.
- It be more accurate to say the Symbiote suit had Spidy on.
- Parodied somewhat in the Fairly Odd Parents movie Wishology, in which baby fairy Poof dresses as a ninja and takes out a gang of Eliminators.
Truth In Television
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