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Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu
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Hastur. Half-brother of Cthulhu, spawn of Azathoth. About to be pwned.
"No matter how subtle the Jenoine, a Morganti Dagger between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp its style."
"He's a god; it'll take more than one shot."
So, along comes the Eldritch Abomination: incomprehensible, insanity-inducing gods; alien beings that don't even notice humanity, let alone care; technological beings whose thoughts encompass the universe. You know the type. Eternal, infinite, impossible to even understand, let alone oppose...
And then along come a couple of plucky heroes, who didn't get told that the Abomination is impossible to beat (and even if they were told, they wouldn't care). And so, they do beat the Abomination, through some combination of skill, brains, courage and occasionally raw world-shattering power. Maybe some kind of incredibly circuitous strategy and/or trap would have been more appropriate, but hey, When All You Have Is A Hammer...
This applies to just about every videogame RPG ever made, where the Final Boss is inevitibly some kind of eldritch, supernatural Ultimate Evil unleashed from a can, or the villain has ascended to godhood and gone One Winged Angel...only to be defeated by the heroes by simply pummelling the crap out of it with the same spells and weapons they've been using all game. Particularly jarring if the Horror in question is allegedly so powerful that the last set of heroes were only able to seal it away, or if the heroes deliver it a post-battle speech about having beaten it via The Power Of Friendship (when it's obvious they won via the Power Of BFSes and Nuke-Level Summon Magic).
A common Hand Wave in video games ( RP Gs in particular) is to have something happen during or before the fight that relates to the story and limits the Big Bad's power and/or brings the heroes up to its level... then pummel it with BFSes and Nuke-level magic.
See: Charles Atlas Superpower, particularly if this sudden Power Creep Power Seep doesn't make sense. Compare Gods Hands Are Tied. Compare Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu. Depending on the story, the heroes may have to find some rules that the power in question is bound by, and then exploit them ruthlessly.
This is generally the result of whenever you put an Eldritch Abomination in the same room as a Super Hero.
Do not expect this trope to appear in any Cosmic Horror setting worth its salt, except perhaps as a Hope Spot. Another counter example is Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu
Examples
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- Many Doctor Strange and Fantastic Four comics.
- The Authority, when they killed the Maker of the World.
- And more or less literally in the first four pages of The Authority Prime, a miniseries of, admittedly, debatable quality.
Hawksmoor: What the hell is that thing?
Doctor: Your basic elder god, returned from a dimension it was banished to millennia ago, here to turn Earth into its own personal slaughterhouse.
Hawksmoor: So we're talking...
Doctor: Two minutes.
- Pretty much every superhero in the DC Universe has punched out the Evil New God Darkseid, the ruler of Apokolips including nonpowered superheroes like Batman and Green Arrow.
- Darkseid isn't quite in the Cosmic Horror category though, and it is often hinted at that Darkseid isn't really trying or isn't at full power when he is fighting the Superheroes. When he consider the ease in which has taken over the world in Final Crisis, this gives those old theories some credence.
- Or just says something about his current writer
- The Legion of Super Heroes occasionally go beat up the Time Trapper, essentially an Anthropomorphic Personification of a force of entropy. Particularly notable is the time that Mon-El (a Captain Ersatz of Superboy) killed the Time Trapper and, as a result, rebooted reality.
- Fun fact — Time Trapper is, among other things, the Anthropomorphic Personification of the theory that the universe only goes 'round once. There's another villain, the Infinite Man, who is the embodiment of the theory that the universe runs on an infinite loop. Of course, they fought that one time.
- Preacher: An old-west gunslinger kills God with a revolver. Okay, a magical revolver made from the Angel of Death's sword, but still...
- Runaways: Technically, they only have to survive long enough for the Gibborim's time on this world to run out and wait for the baddies to fade away, but given that the fight involves Molly throwing Victor at one's face, it still qualifies.
- The Goon and Hellboy are both pretty much based on this trope. In the latter, while admittedly many of the supporting characters often use more traditional methods of dealing with monsters, the main character's usual approach is to punch them really hard with his giant stone hand and shooting them with his Really Big Gun.
- Justified when Captain Atom beats up Nekron, one of three anthropomorphic personifications of death itself, since the whole reason Nekron is fighting him in the first place is that Captain Atom's power comes from the life energy of the universe. So when Cap later beats up another personification of death, the Black Racer, it's a little anticlimactic, frankly.
- Think of this pretty much every time you see Galactus driven off or "defeated".
- Or the time Reed Richards (the world's top Galactus driver-offer) killed the dreaming Celestial, a SSPAAACE GOD, trying to destroy the universe, combining this with Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu.
- Squirrel Girl
 . Just... Squirrel Girl.
- Rex Libris has this sort of thing as part of his job. As a public librarian. He even calls Nyarlathotep a wuss.
- In the 1970s, veteran scribes Marv Wolfman and Len Wein wrote The Incredible Hulk: Stalker From the Stars, wherein the Hulk crosses paths with an Eldritch Abomination attempting to escape its prison beneath the Earth so it could conquer and enslave humanity. In this case, the Hulk doesn't punch Cthulhu out so much as rip him to pieces and burn him alive. Ouch.
- Slainé (Mac Roth) from 2000AD (basically a Celtic Conan with an appreciably larger vocabulary) does this more than once. Admittedly, the biggest Eldritch Abomination that he faced, the High Cythron Grimnismal, was just finishing off his regeneration when Slainé and his party arrived, and could be brought down by the cutting of a few feeding tubes.
- Circuit Breaker, in the classic Transformers comics, was able to cause the universe-ending god, Unicron, to scream in pain by attacking him with cybernetic implants she made herself. Granted, she was left a vegetable afterward, but still....
- not a vegetable, just catatonic. She did occasionally bable some in the last few issues
- The Wretch, a little-known superhero use Satan's Literal Genie status against him and, using a birthday card, turns Satan into a crayon. Which he puts into a packet, which contains Beelzebub, Bhaal and Lucifer crayons as well.
Literature
- The main man himself is (temporarily) thwarted in The Call of Cthulhu when he is run down by a steamship (it takes him only few seconds to regenerate any damage though).
- Eskarina Smith kicked her way through the Discworld Dungeon Dimension creatures in Equal Rites. Also, earlier, in The Colour of Magic, Rincewind accidentally beats Bel-Shamharoth with Twoflower's picturebox's flash.
- Mind you, Discworld Dungeon Dimension creatures are described as being very weak against purely physical threats — they do, however, eat magic that is used against them to become much stronger.
- The Witch King of Angmar in The Lord Of The Rings was thought to be unbeatable, because Glorfindel had prophesied "not by the hand of man will he fall." Funny what will happen when a woman gets her hand on a sword...
- Not to mention the Hobbit with the conveniently anti-Ringwraith-enchanted dagger...
- Michael Moorcock's The Elric Saga series (and the Eternal Champion, et al.) have great fighters slaying sons of gods, and then eventually the gods themselves, in an escalating arms race.
- Following in Moorcock's example, every single monster in the various Monster Manuals of Dungeons And Dragons, up to and including demons and horrors from the Far Realm, can be defeated by bashing it to
zero negative 10 negative half their maximum hit points (or whatever it is for 4th edition).
- Not all of them can be attacked with normal, everyday weapons, however. Some can only be defeated by spells and magic weapons.
- Both the first edition and third edition of D&D's Deities And Demigods assigned hit points and combat statistics to god-like beings. The d20 Call of Cthulhu, a sister product to D&D, allows players to specifically fight and to kill Elder Gods. Their stats are tough enough that only epic D&D characters — themselves nigh-unto gods — could stand a chance against them, though.
- Handily averted by just about every other Call of Cthulhu RPG. In the original rulebook by Chaosium, Cthulhu had no stats other than "devours 1D6 characters per round"; in the GURPS version Cthulhupunk (which mixes modern-day Call of Cthulhu, Cyber Punk and High Tech Sci-Fi genre), a note indicates that vaporizing the big guy with an A-bomb would only get rid of him for two days, after which he would return... radioactive.
- In both the Khaavren and Taltos entries in the Dragaera series, characters have been able to kill the Jeonine, a powerful group of Eldritch Abomination/alien invader types (As Vlad points out at the top of the page), and in the former, at least one Physical God has been killed, although this only prevents them from manifesting in a particular dimension. It should be noted, however that all these cases involved Great Weapons, which approach Artifact Of Doom territory.
- Justified in the Conan The Barbarian novels. It is explicitly stated that Cosmic Horrors and demons lose much of their power when they enter reality. They still tend to be the strongest opponents Conan faces.
- In C.S. Lewis' Perelandra, Dr Ransom acts as the Good Angel when the Queen of Venus is tempted by a literal demon towards falling from grace. With the salvation of the entire planet hanging in the balance, Ransom realizes the demon's possession of an astronaut (which enabled it to enter the planet in the first place) was its Achilles Heel — he could simply pummel the thing into submission.
- Subverted and played for a good laugh in John Dechancie's Red Limit Freeway. After traveling for lightyears along roads built by SufficientlyAdvancedAliens the heroes meet a kindly old man in white robes. One of the heroes, convinced the old man is responsible for his alien abduction, hits him with a sucker punch. Cue the protagonist: "I think you knocked out God." Other guy: "Nah, God has a beard."
- Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy sets up god, AKA the Authority, as the enemy of free will and human interest, but in the third book he proves to have been so weakened by old age that he gets turned to dust by a strong breeze. A more threatening villain is his Dragon, Metatron, who himself can only be defeated when he is hurled into the void between universes, and thus destroyed forever.
- John Taylor from the Nightside books does this approximately every five minutes. No sooner does he hype how much of a terrifying unbeatable badass so-and-so is, then half a page later he beats them.
- Admittedly, it's usually through the Inherent Gift inherited from his vanished mother who eventually turns out to be Lilith, who was the ancestor of 95% of the Eldritch Abominations in the series in the first place. Given that his Gift enables him to find and hit any beings Achilles Heel, it's interesting that the series managed to maintain the necessary Dramatic Tension to keep going.
- Done repeatedly in Robin Jarvis' DeptfordMice, Deptford Histories, and Whitby Witches series.
- In the Whateley Universe, Sara Waite fights The Kellith in dreamspace with a knife. And wins. Even if Sara Waite is The Kellith, or one is part of the other, or they're a duality, or something.
Live Action TV
- The Doctor Who 2-parter "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" sees the Doctor and Rose defeat The Beast, an ancient evil who served as the basis for the Devil in every mythology and religion in the universe.
- Granted, it took a whole Black Hole to do so.
- Also, this is The Doctor we're talking about here. He convinces an incorporeal, flesh-eating force to just leave him and his friends well enough alone just by getting it to look up information on him in a library. To give an idea of what that entails, the Daleks refer to him as "The Oncoming Storm".
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer: For one Big Bad (the Judge), all the mystical texts declare that "no weapon forged" can stop him. However, as Xander realizes, those texts predate modern weapons. And thus, Buffy takes the Judge out with a rocket launcher.
- Okay, they didn't exactly destroy it, but they also came out ahead against the root of all evil.
- Not to mention the fact that Giles kills a God. With his bare hands.
- To be fair, she was bound in the body of a human, and had just been viciously pummeled nearly to death by a mystical hammer
- And for creatures like the Turok-han, who had previously been shown to be almost impervious to harm, punching and staking eventually become surprisingly effective.
- Let's not forget Willow. She hurt the Egyptian God of Death when he refused to bring Tara back from the dead. She hurt a god!
- And that wasn't her first time. A season earlier she managed to actually injure then until-then untouchable Glory. Twice. (Although the first time was by teleporting her high into the atmosphere and letting her splat.)
- Literally occurs in Star Trek:Deep Space Nine, in which Sisko actually punched out Q. Q remarks, "You hit me. Picard never hit me!"
- Also, Sisko takes out Gul Dukat after he's imbued with eldritch power as the emissary of the P'ah Wraiths with an extremely crude bull rush.
- This is a recurring theme in DS 9, albeit mostly metaphorical. The Gods of the Dominion are the main antagonists for much of the show (although they are in fact changelings just like Odo, and the Prophets of the Bajorans have to be saved from chronaton radiation in a couple of episodes. You'd almost think they introduced religion into an entirely secular setting just to make this point.
- It is an accepted part of Klingon culture that ancient Klingons found the gods to be troublesome, so they slew them. Presumably with their big curvy swords. And then set the heavens ablaze.
- In the Red Dwarf finale, The Grim Reaper himself shows up to claim Rimmer. Rimmer kicks him in the nads and runs away.
- Happens damn near literally in Farscape — the invincible space vampire Maldis is defeated in his second appearance with a couple punches and gunshots.
Tabletop Games
- The Warhammer games have numerous examples of this. Of course, being Warhammer, there are also plenty of examples where Cthulhu punches back....
- This methodology is pretty much the standard way of dealing with daemons among the Imperial Guard and the Tau in 40k. Confronted with eldritch horrors dredged up from the very base emotions of the universe, coming to destroy, rape, and consume everything they can lay their eyes on? Shoot it. With very, very large guns. Handled a wee bit more realistically in that it takes a real lot of firepower to bring one of these down, and even then they just are banished to the Warp and can be re-summoned. Meanwhile, the C'tan Physical Gods just need new bodies built for them if the shells are destroyed, although it is said that neither of the two active ones are at full power yet.
- Exalted has a good number of ineffable, horrifying beings out there on the periphery, all designed so that your characters will inevitably beat the snot out of them. A lot of gods in Exalted are weak enough for starting characters to kill them without much trouble (granted, many gods are "Least Gods", whose dominion encompasses things like individual blades of grass). Scion, by the same company, follows the same design philosophy.
- The tabletop roleplaying game Cthulhu Tech, which is a mashup of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Call Of Cthulhu, both averts and works this way. The Old Ones themselves pretty much automatically win if they actually bother directly fighting any number of protagonists, and the awakening of Cthulhu would officially screw over not just the human race, but an alien race trying to invade as well. Even the avatar of Hastur, horribly crippled to work within our limited sets of dimensions and weakened by improper summoning, is set as outgunning every other army on the planet combined. Thankfully, he stays at home. On the other hand, you can easily beat up a few Humongous Mecha or even an Engel with luck and some simple soldiers, or survive exposure to the infinite dimensions without being fried instantly. Seeing an Old One directly can't even drive you irreparably and instantly insane on its own, and lucky individuals can stroll up to the body of Cthulhu, take a picture, and leave without taking a single point of insanity.
- The boardgame Arkham Horror, a spin-off of the Call Of Cthulhu RPG, involves the players trying to close interdimensional gates opening around the town of Arkham. If they fail, a Great Old One awakens and the players have to fight him. It's possible, but extremely difficult, to defeat the Great Old One (unless it's Azathoth, who automatically ends the game with a loss for the players if he awakens).
Video Games
- Chrono Trigger in which a teenaged boy and his friends amass enough power and allies to be able to destroy, in direct combat, a being that renders planets nearly uninhabitable and shatters civilizations.
- Subverted in Earthbound, in which Giygas's final form cannot be killed through sheer damage but instead only through Paula's 'Pray' ability, which calls upon even the player to help win the battle.
- In the SNES strategy game Der Langrisser, the party, which starts off as only a pair of friends from a small village, eventually grows powerful enough to challenge Lushiris, the Goddess of Light. More accurately, the main character can one-hit kill her if built right.
- Anybody in Marvel vs. Capcom can beat Onslaught. Even Badass Normals like Jin Saotome, or any Street Fighter. Keep in mind that in the comics, Onslaught is more or less the most powerful psionic being in existence, and killed a lot of people before being taken down, which in itself required the efforts of several incredibly powerful characters.
- Was anyone else just a tiny bit peeved that they had the nerve to give Thanos the Infinity Gauntlet; effectively making him omnipotent, and then make him suck? Tier rankings place him at 5th to last, only out-sucked by a nerfed Zangief and 3 Joke Characters.
- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance has the same issue. Your little super team fights nearly every supervillain in the Marvel Universe over the course of the game. As a result, a skilled player can defeat Mephisto, Galactus, Gladiator, Ymir, Loki, and Dr. Doom coupled with the stolen god powers of Odin all with Badass Normal Nick Fury.
- What's interesting? The best fighter against Onslaught is the robot girl—not woman, girl—whose day job is maid. That's right, Mega Man's sister Roll. It's fun to take her in against Onslaught and wipe the floor with him while my partner (a not-so-nerfed Zangief) likely just drinks.
- Tohno Shiki from Tsukihime has a power that is very conducive to this. He arguably does this by making Roa Deader Than Dead, which is one hell of an achievement considering the man regenerates from just his ankles at one point; to add insult to injury, Shiki destroyed Roa's concept of existence, which prevents him from reincarnating as usual.
- This is the whole point of every game in the Megami Tensei series. In SMT2 you can even make Cthulhu one of your mons.
- Dark Brain from Super Robot Wars and the related series Great Battle IV can travel multiple dimensions using his own powers, grows larger based on the despair of the people fighting it (which, in retrospect, may not be a good thing when fighting mecha pilots), and can destroy planets easily. He seeks the 12 keys of the Super Robot Wars Multiverse, and he created Dynamis the Big Bad of Super Robot Wars R to search and destroy Fighter Roar. You have an assload of giant robots. Guess who's not walking away from this fight?
- Same with Irui Ganeden, the spirit of the earth, in Super Robot Wars Alpha 2, and Keiser Ephes in Alpha 3.
- Well, one might say a lot of Super Robot Taisen games feed off this trope. Personally, I'd say even defeating SEELE's Mass-Produced Evangelions, Baron Maximillian's Baronz from Brain Powerd or the Emperor of the Dark from the MazinKaiser saga counts as Punching Out Cthulhu.
- In fact, just about any game that includes some sort of metaphysical or otherwise supernatural force as an antagonist will have the heroes beating it into submission like they would the random encounters right outside the first town.
- City Of Heroes usually avoids this — big threats need big groups of superpowered individuals to take on — but there are a good few moments where really big threats can be taken out with rather questionable means. The comic strips, for example, have two instances of superpowered hordes being taken out by flashbangs on arrows, in the first case a bunch of ancient deathless ghost mages, in the second case a group of psychically enhanced and deranged lunatics about to tear apart a powerful hero. In-game, while not common, it's quite possible for a group of "natural" origin heroes with powers on a normal human's level to take down Lanaru or Ruladak, beings that make up major aspects of a sentient dimension's awareness. That's made worse by requiring that group to spend upward of six hours going through the lore behind those opponents, describing how they literally broke their planet. Even more fun is going home and getting your backside handed to you by a next-gen SWAT team.
- Then there is Hequat, Goddess of the Mu, who can be taken on and defeated by a lone villain. (They do at least say that she is in a weakened state, which is why you have to go and attack her now.)
- In the Pokemon games, you are able to capture legendary one-of-a-kind (per game) Mons that are often forces of nature. The last game contains Arceus, who apparently created the universe.
- Happens more than once in the Warcraft universe:
- The videogame Shining Force subverts this in the final fight with the Dark Dragon. Even after depleting its hit points, it's still not technically dead, and the best that can be done is for the main character to stab his sword into the back of its head, and hold it there while the rest of the party escaped the collapsing castle.
- The final boss of Shining Force 2 is a demon who is effectively the equivalent of Satan. More humorously, there's an exploit involving the master's monks where you cast their buff skill, earning 48 exp, than leave the battlefield. You can keep doing this till the monks are lv99, at which point, they will be stronger than said demon, leading to a literal Did You Just Punch Out Satan.
- The final confrontation of Mass Effect pretty much consists of exposing the resident Eldritch Abomination, the Reaper Sovereign, and letting the Human Systems Alliance shoot the bajeesus out of it. However, given that it was only ONE of a race of Cosmic Horrors, and it was being attacked by the combined forces of half the sentient species in the galaxy, and even then it only barely worked, it's relatively justified.
- It's also assumed, in the game, that the thing didn't just reveal itself from the beginning precisely because it was afraid that something like this would happen.
- This ended up happening in Final Fantasy Legend when the heroes got pissed at The Creator for daring to toy with his own creations.
- The final boss of the Xbox remake of Ninja Gaiden wields the Dark Dragon Blade, which is supposed to give him the power of the "Devil incarnate". While he is a rather tough fight, our Charles Atlas Superpowered Highly Visible Ninja Badass protagonist still defeats him anyway. Admittedly, Ryu was using the True Dragon Sword, which was meant specifically to counter the DDB, but still. Ryu also takes down multiple Greater Fiends, each of which is worth quite a number of regular fiends in power, as well as the released Archfiend.
- Don't forget Breath of Fire III, where the final boss is Myria, the resident creator goddess.
- She isn't a real goddess, since at the end she says "If there is a god, answer me! What should I have done with the Brood?".
- Kefka, having usurped position as the sole source of magic in the world of Final Fantasy VI and become a god, is defeated largely by blasting him with magic. Particularly jarring, as the Warring Triad, the gods who had this position before he took their powers, were largely immune to magic. Well, before he demoted them.
- This is the case with most final bosses in the Final Fantasy series. Notable examples are II, where the heroes basically off Satan, and IX, which concludes with killing Necron, the god of death (or something like that, the game is not particularly clear as to what he is exactly).
- Although more than a few Big Bads are merely ascended villains, several of the games also adhere more closely to the Eldritch Abomination motif:
- Zeromus is a grotesque, shapeless thing with a vaguely crustacean appearance, and the embodiment of the primal force of Hatred itself. Although Cecil and company defeat it, it claims to be eternal, or, at least, that it will exist as long as humanity does.
- The Cloud of Darkness is an actual God which manifests as a roughly female avatar from a swirling, multicolored fog. It has no purpose, no reason, other than to consume all the reality of the World of Light itself. It's beaten back by four kids with a penchant for onions.
- Neo-Exdeath is a melange of Eldritch Abominations sealed or sent to sleep within the Dimensional Rift. Its appearance is as of dozens of corpses and demons blindly sewn together.
- Fire Emblem 10 requires you to kill a god with a mercenary and his posse. Granted, one important member of said posse is a vessel for the equal and opposite half of that god.
- You still have to land the killing blow, with The Hero's Infinity Plus One Sword, or else the aforementioned god will simply regenerate. Justified because Ragnell was one of two swords created by the goddesses back when they were one deity. It is also powered up by said equal and opposite god during Ike's finishing attack.
- In Perfect Dark Zero, Joanna Dark defeats Zhang Li with early-21st-century weapons though the knife/machete comes in handiest despite the fact that he uses the Graal to gain superhuman powers and "become a god".
- Played for laughs in the first episode of Penny Arcade Adventures On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Inciting Gabe to tackle a very Cthulian being, Tycho asks "Do you want to punch a god?"
- Gabe: "..." Tycho "..." Gabe: "..." Tycho: "..." Gabe: "Yes!"
- Then again in the second episode. PC: "Gods? Again?" Gabe: "Yeah, it's like... I don't mind fighting gods? It's just I'd like a little warning first."
- Just to put things in perspective here? The first God is defeated through a combination of a radio tube, absolutely pure urine, and the soul of a mime. The second is defeated with a giant robot doll piloted by a thirteen-year old girl.
- Your final opponent in Puzzle Quest is Lord Bane, the god of Death (who responds to his defeat by basically saying he'll just regenerate in a century or so and wipe out your descendants... just like he did last time.)
- This is the entire point of the old Bungie game Pathways Into Darkness — you play as a special forces operative sent to nuke a gradually awakening Sleeping God unconscious before it can awake fully and unleash unimaginable havoc.
- The last game in Bungie's Marathon trilogy averts this by having the protagonist travel through dimensions and/or back through time to prevent the Eldritch Abomination from ever being released in the first place.
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth tries to maintain the bleak, hopeless atmosphere of the Mythos, and the player spends much of the game either unarmed or with insufficient ammo, forced to run away from the monsters trying to kill him. However, at the end, the main character ends up fighting and killing Dagon (the 100-foot tall Deep One god) with a battleship's main cannon. When examining a statue of Dagon later on, he even cockily remarks "It's a statue of Dagon, minus the missile I lodged in his face". He later goes on to kill a pair of Flying Polyps, and Mother Hydra herself. So it's kind of jarring that, after such a string of incredible victories, and finding out he's half super-being he decides to kill himself because of his alien heritage, which he just can't come in terms with at the end of the game.
- Even if you use the gothic lolita in Soul Calibur IV, you can defeat a Physical God who not only tamed Soul Edge, but actually created its counterpart.
- XCOM: Terror from the Deep does this also, Either done just by utter brute force and blowing the crap out of Chuthulu's city or sending in a Psionic in and turning a alien to destroy his chamber, thus ending the alien threatHowever, the result was devastating, Earth was clogged up chemicals and turned to a subsquent hellhole with few livable cities..
- As evidenced by the screenshot at the top of the page, Hastur from Earnest Evans is, indeed, taken down by a puny human whip.
- Castlevania lets you beat the crap out of Death on a regular basis, not to mention some of the more notable Bosses like the personification of chaos in Aria of Sorrow, and all sorts of high-level demons.
- Averted nicely in Oblivion when the player finally confronts the Big Bad, Mehrunes Dagon. As you're up against an evil god the actual fighting is left to your companion, the descendent of a god himself. The best your character can do is stagger Dagon for a few seconds to buy time for Martin to complete his transformation.
- Played straight in the expansion however. You take down an equivalent deity the old-fashioned way in his own domain, and then take his place.
- Also nicely averted in the third The Elder Scrolls game, Morrowind. The plan ends up not being about killing Dagoth Ur, which would never work according to others, but severing him from the source of his power - the divine center of the Daedric Prince Lorkhan.
- Happens in the Bloodmoon expansion to Morrowind too, but probably justified since the Daedric Prince Hircine is patron of the hunt and is probably giving the protagonist a really fair fight.
- Not to mention that the protagonist only fights an aspect of Hircine. Hircine is even kind enough to let you choose which one, believing that facing all of them at once would be 'less than sporting'.
- Happens for both the protagonist and antagonist in the first Blood Rayne as both Rayne and Jurgen Wulf can do significant damage to Belial before time runs out and he gains convenient plot-armour with which to smush the both of you. If you find a place to hide so that Jurgen ignores you and focuses almost solely on Belial (he'll still come across you every now and then while gathering weapons), he'll nearly beat him before the time expires, at least 70% on the hardest difficulty IIRC. Since for some reason blades do more damage than guns, as usual, Jurgen will eventually fail in this battle without your help, despite the fact he moves too fast to take damage from the clumsy devil.
- Basically the stated goal of God Of War is to... punch out the God of War. Sure, Kratos needs to go on a very long quest to retrieve a Mac Guffin to give himself temporary godlike powers, but ultimately those "godlike powers" turn out to be "make me really big so I can beat this guy up."
- As the original Greek Gods didn't always come out on top in combat with human Heros in some of the myths (Ares in particular got beat up by Hector in one book of the Illiad) this is not entirely unreasonable.
- Most of the big bosses in Kirby games can only be described as an Eldritch Abomination, but of course Kirby thrashes these folks on a regular basis.
- Doom is one of the legends in this department. The hero, an ordinary Space Marine, with an arsenal of powerful but in no way supernatural weapons, kills his way through hell, defeating archedemons and such.
- In Tales Of Legendia, the heroes beat Schwartz, supposedly a destroyer of universes. To be fair, she needed the negative energies of people to power up, and was weakened by positive energy, ala Earthbound. So her status might have been *very* exaggerated. Or she was just an avatar of the real one.
- Justified in Eternal Darkness — humanity defeats the Ancients, but they have not one, but two Eldritch Abominations backing them up — one's behind the scenes, and one is summoned to do the actual ass-kicking.
- Sephiroth, from Final Fantasy VII is said in a Word of God case to be "the strongest character in the Final Fantasy VII universe. There is nothing above him, and it would be impossible to make a character stronger than he is." He's defeated a couple of times by sword combos. Albeit lengthy, very impressive sword combos that attack him from virtually every angle. The cosmic horror part comes in when you consider Jenova.
- Far stronger than him are the weapons, in particular the ruby weapon, which can instant kill two characters, has incredible defense, and looks kinda like a cosmic horror with all the tentacles. I, and others, have defeated him with a single level 7 character. It's pretty easy, with the right materia and heat resistance. Takes half an hour, but what can you do? It is an unstoppable force representing the life force of the earth.
- At the end of Irrational Games' brilliant Freedom Force, the team must contend with Timemaster. Timemaster cannot be defeated until you've destroyed his four Energy Crystally Thingies, but once you have, the Lord of the Timelines is in for a good face-kicking.
- The final boss of Painkiller is Satan. Partially averted in this case: Daniel cannot even see Satan until he activates his Demon Morph Super Mode, and even then the normally One Hit Kill attacks in this mode do not damage the prince of darkness. To kill Satan, the player must shoot meteors out of the sky until Satan throws his sword, then deflect the sword back at Satan by shooting it.
- In the Lunar game Lunar 2 Eternal Blue Complete, the party of heroes defeats Zophar, the God of Darkness, by whacking at him with weapons and magic — and the power of Humanity, of course.
- At the end of Silent Hill 3, Heather takes down the God with her normal weapons.
- Well, it isn't THE God actually. It's just a manifestation, like the other enemies.
- At the end of the prehistoric chapter of Live A Live The shaman is eaten by a gigantic dinosaurish thing that the villagers worship as a god. It spits out the shaman's skull and then Gori throws it at him. It's also possible to kill the dino-god with two attacks from the Staff Chick
- In the Touhou game Mountain of Faith, the first three named enemies you encounter — Shizuha, Minoriko, and Hina — are gods. In other words, via Sorting Alorithm Of, um, Difficulty, they are the weakest characters in the game. Justified by the fact that they presumably lacked sufficient Faith, though it's not quite clear why this didn't apply to Suwako, whom nearly nobody knew about at the time, including her shrine's own priestess ...
- In Valkyria Chronicles, with Squad 7's defeat of Maximillian. He had equipment that mimicked the powers of the Valkyria and unlike the fight with Selvaria, Squad 7 decided not to rely on Alicia's Valkyria powers.
- Splatterhouse sees Rick doing battle with living embodiments of evil and all that serve them... with his fists. And on occasion baseball bats and two-by-fours. Thing is, this is presented in a much more serious manner than usual - the only way Rick can do all this is that the Terror Mask is backing him up, and the Mask is using him as a tool.
- Even with Iji's assortment of BFGs, her best weapon against a flying killer robot and the alien soldier that survived an Earth Shattering Kaboom... is a boot to the head.
Web Comics
- xkcd #521: "Where did you get this Christmas tree?" "Nowhere." "Did you cut down the Yggdrasil?" "...Maybe."
- Irregular Webcomic features a crocodile hunter named Steve who has wrestled with Cthulhu on more than one occasion. And has yet to loose once.
Western Animation
- The Real Ghostbusters had "The Collect Call of Cathulhu" episode, where the Busters managed to electrocute Cthulhu himself. In a follow up episode, the 'Busters take care of another Old One by sucking it into an artificially created black hole (probably not a bad way to take care of a powerful being).
- A Billy and Mandy episode, "The Prank Call of Cthulhu", ended with Cthulhu trapped in interdimensional phone lines, sucking off his shoes in the process (an episode
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