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Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu
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"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). Through some combination of skill, brains, courage and occasionally raw world-shattering power, maybe some kind of incredibly circuitous strategy and/or trap, or hey, When All You Have Is A Hammer they go to work and... they beat the abomination.
In short, you just killed a God. Not a mook, not an Elite Mook, not The Dragon... a GOD!
This appears in quite a few videogames (especially RPG's), where the Final Boss is inevitibly some kind of Ultimate Evil unleashed upon the world, or the Big Bad has ascended to godhood and gone One Winged Angel... only to be defeated by the heroes by whittling down its health points. Particularly jarring if the Horror in question is allegedly so powerful that the Precursors were only able to seal it away, or if the heroes claim it was defeated via The Power Of Friendship (when it's obvious they won via the Power Of BFS, More Dakka and Nuke-Level Summon Magic).
A common Hand Wave in video games (RPG's in particular) is to have something happen that relates to the story and limits the Big Bad's power and/or brings the heroes up to its level... They then pummel it with BFSes and Nuke-level magic.
Maybe the heroes may have found some rules that the power in question has limits or a Necessary Drawback, and then proceed to exploit it ruthlessly. Maybe Cthulu Had The Flu. A Projected Avatar is often used if what they defeated was just part of the being in our reality at the time, in which case reducing its Hit Points to 0 just temporarily banishes it.
This is generally the result of whenever you put an Eldritch Abomination in the same room as a Super Hero, or anyone or anything else capable of hitting For Massive Damage. Do not expect this trope to appear in any Cosmic Horror Story worth its salt, except perhaps as a Hope Spot and a prelude to having Broken Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu.
Compare Power Creep Power Seep, Strong As They Need To Be, New Powers As The Plot Demands, Gods Hands Are Tied, Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?
Contrast Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu, Did We Just Have Tea With Cthulhu, Punch Punch Punch Uh Oh.
Also see Do Not Taunt Cthulhu.
Examples:
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- Many Doctor Strange and Fantastic Four comics.
- Ghost Rider has an ability called Penance Stare, which forces people to experience the suffering they have wrought on others. In one Fantastic Four cartoon, he uses this power against Galactus.
- 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 the Anti-Life Equation, which he's been searching for for at least 30 years of comic continuity. He was easily defeated time and again without this weapon, and takes over the world in a fingersnap once he has it. Guess that's why he wanted it so bad.
- Darkseid has a history of keeping enemies alive if they've put up a good fight. This isn't as stupid as it sounds, considering his "defeats" tend to be more that the opposition's just capable enough that the current plan's no longer worth the effort, and Darkseid has had no few occasions where he converts heroes into his footsoldiers. Of course, you also have the Wallbanger that Darkseid's ultimate defeat comes by Superman whistling. Seriously.
- 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, courtesy of the Legion's own Brainiac 5.
- Preacher: An old-west gunslinger kills God with a revolver. Okay, a magical revolver made from the Angel of Death's sword, but still...
- And this is after he literally causes hell to freeze over with only the iciness of his hatred which falls roughly into the same category. Scary guy. Between the two he kills Satan with that gun for mocking him.
- 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 Hand Cannon. This is Lampshaded in the Goon/Hellboy crossover issue found in the Heaps of Ruination trade paperback. When confronted with the Communist Airborne Mollusk Militia, and specifically their champion, a massive octopus with a hot-air balloon strapped to his head (no, I Am Not Making This Up), this bit of dialogue ensues:
Hellboy: Stand back! I do this for a living!"
Goon: Oh yeah? When I come across somethin' like this I just try ta punch it in the head — what do you do?"
Hellboy: Pretty much the same thing.
The two heavyset heroes go on to do just that.
- 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's special ability appears to be punching out Marvel Universe Big Bads.
- As long as they are off screen anyway.
- 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.
- Wein also gave us The Lurker in Tunnel 13, a Swamp Thing story featuring M'Nagalah the All-Consuming, the shoggoth-like father of life on Earth and and fountain of all human knowledge. Swamp Thing causes a cave in at the mineshaft where M'Nagalah is awaiting the proper alignment of the cosmos that will allow him to conquer the universe, destroying him in the process (at least temporarily, anyway.)
- Slainé (Mac Roth) from 2000AD 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 catatonic afterward, but still....
- 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.
- In Dojon, Herbert kills the Absolute Evil with just two fingers. Of course he can do it with anyone who's green.
- In the current Hulk Book, Red Hulk punched The Watcher and in a recent issue he Punched an Elder of the Universe to death.
- Ghostbusters: The titular busters have to Cross the streams to do it, but they destroy Gozer the Gozarian, an ancient god worshipped by the Hittites, Mesopotamians, and the Sumerians around 6000BC that would take on a Destructor Form from the thoughts of humans in the area and wreak havoc once it was summoned into our world.
- The main man himself is (temporarily) thwarted in The Call of Cthulhu when he is run down by a steamship (he begins regenerating but becomes stuck in R'yeh).
- Not to mention The Call of Cthulhu RPG features an Expansion Pack known as Delta Green, which casts players as members of the eponymous secret government agency, tasked with fighting against the Abomination of the Cthulhu Mythos.
- In August Derleth's Trail of Cthulhu, the above sequence is one-upped when Cthulhu is thwarted (again temporarily) by having a nuclear bomb dropped on him.
- Of course, in the RPG, they deal with this by saying that Cthulhu will simply regenerate and then you'll have to face a radioactive Eldritch Abomination. So it's not recommended.
- 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.
- In the Dragaera series, Morrolan kills a Physical God with a Great Weapon. Vlad Taltos is able to kill a Jenoine using another Great Weapon. Tazendra manages to defeat a Jenoine in single combat without the aid of a Great Weapon.
- Justified in the Conan The Barbarian novels. It is explicitly stated that Eldritch Abominations and demons lose much of their power when they enter reality. They still tend to be the strongest opponents Conan faces.
- In CS 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."
- Philip 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 an eventually undone timeline in the third novel of the Dragonlance Legends trilogy, Raistlin, a mortal man, albeit the most powerful wizard in the history of Krynn, had killed Takhisis, the chief goddess of darkness, whose primary form was a five-headed dragon.
- In The Dresden Files, part of Harry Dresden's backstory is that, at the age of sixteen, he beat a kind of demonic bounty hunter sicced on him by his Evil Mentor. He later discovers to his shock that the demonic bounty hunter called He Who Walks Behind is an Outsider—in Dresdenverse terms, an Eldritch Abomination. Fully trained wizards spend centuries learning how to defeat Outsiders.
- To avoid accusations of Beginners Luck, Harry's mother specifically had Harry under the appropriate signs which give him the ability to affect Outsiders in ways that normal wizards can't. Any wizard born under similar circumstances would have the same abilities.
- Which raises the question why wizards don't go out of their way to ensure there's a crop of them every generation. Unless this was once in an eon signs or something.
- In a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for humanity in Armageddon: The Salvation War, the U.S. opens up a portal to Satan and fires two anti-ship missiles at him. One of them gets a headshot. Justified, since demons are just flesh and blood lifeforms, just like us.
- "I have always been fortunate in my enemies-" *shhhnk* "hurk -" "Happy Assumption Day, fucker." *stab*
- In Glen Cook's series The Instrumentalities of the Night, the main character, "too ignorant to know he can never prevail over such a thing," discovers that even the most powerful gods are vulnerable to a mix of iron and silver hurled — this is the key point — by the newly developed gunpowder weapons. After a while, he's got troops trained to do it almost routinely.
- In Skulduggery Pleasant, they manage to kill the Grotesquery, a creature partially constructed from the corpse of a Faceless One, albeit with great difficulty and several casualties. In the third book, Valkyrie kills two Faceless Ones using a weapon designed to do so. Skulduggery manages to force one back through the door to their prison using a stron gust of wind. In the process, the weapon is destroyed, and Skulduggery is dragged along with the Faceless One.
- In Paradise Lost, Abdiel hitting Satan. Although an Angel, in Paradise Lost Abdiel is far below in glory the illustrious figures of Lucifer, Michael, Raphael, etc. His only distinction is loyalty, being the one angel to hear and reject Satan's offer to revolt. In the opening salvo of the War in Heaven, mighty Satan appears bedecked in his warrior-king regalia, ready to smite on all sides. Instead, Abdiel pops out of the fray and clocks him on the head, knocking him cold before he can strike a blow.
- In a Night Watch series novel Face of the Dark Palmira by Vladimir Vasilyev, a powerful Other (i.e. wizard) is in a magical stand-off with the agents of the Odessa Day Watch. He is punched out by a half-dazed, naked Dark Other with a regular torchiere over the head. It is explained later that the baddie attempted to maximize his magical potential by entering the Gloom (the magical dimension) half-way, which, ironically, left him vulnerable to physical attacks.
- The Everworld series of novels has several instances of humans attacking gods, with varying amounts of success.
- In Leslie Fish's filk song Cthulhu Gone, the Great Old Ones pack up and leave Earth, frightened by the invention of the atom bomb.
Where, oh where are the Old Ones gone?
Scrambled back to their darkling lands
They have fled with a rare good sense
The lightnings held in human hands
- This Ear Worm about narwhals has a lyric that claims "they stop Cthulhu from eating ye", then it shows a a octopus-like creture (most-likely Cthulhu) attacking a boat then being impaled by a horn of a narwhal.
- In The Iliad, Diomedes goes on a god-stabbing rampage with the help of Athena. First he slashes Aphrodite when she tries to spirit away Aeneas. Feeling his oats, he attacks Apollo two times, but Apollo just tells him to cut it out. When Apollo and Aphrodite return to Olympus complaining about Diomedes, Ares descends on the battlefield on a mission. Athena leads Diomedes towards the god of war and guides his spear cast to take him directly in the gut. Ares screams and flees the field. Diomedes thus becomes the only mortal to wound two gods in a single day.
- 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 hitpoints (in every 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. (Monk classes fit this trope literally: Being unarmed classes, and epic-level Monk could REALLY punch out Cthulhu)
- Averted in the 3.5 book Elder Evils with at least some of the evils. They don't have stats and can't be fought directly, you can thwart efforts to rouse them or make them manifest. In some cases, this does involve battling their spawn which are statted but still usually require high level or epic level characters to beat. If one of the actual Elders does arise/manifest/wake up, the world is screwed.
- Averted by the Fourth Edition. Evil gods are given full stats, but they ignore attacks by characters who are not themselves also epic level and thus on a path towards immortality themselves. Even with damage from an epic-level threat, they cannot be killed by normal means, as they "discorporate" when they take enough damage to be considered bloodied. Each god's listing comes with a few idea seeds for ways the being might be slain, but that's left to the dungeonmaster's judgment. Lower-level "aspects" of the gods can still be punched out, 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.
- I believe that it actually stated he ate 1D6 players per round. So you get to kill off your gaming buddies if you fight him. Fun!
- Making certain entities statless for this reason shows up in a number of other RPGs, such as Unknown Armies and Planescape. In Vampire: The Masquerade there is only one rule for fighting Cain, the first vampire: "You lose".
- Note, however, the rules for killing the Tarrasque in Dungeons and Dragons. First you reduce its HP to 0. Then, to make it stay dead, you cast Wish. If, as is sometimes done, the spell is removed as a Game Breaker, the beastie is coming back no matter what.
- 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.
- The C'tan can actually be Cherry Tapped to death with sniper rifles, due to their crappy save and sniper weapons always wounding half the time.
- Hey, what happens if an "blank" (person with negative Warp presence) gets close to a Chaos god?
- Blanks or Pariahs can sap the footsoldier demons and possibly remove them for good but the more powerful demons have examples of overloading their blankness in the fluff. A Chaos God would simply rip the blank to shreds without even realising.
- Eisenhorn managed this one throughout his career, but the most notable is when he destroyed the daemonhost Prophaniti so thoroughly that even its warp presence was extinguished. With nothing more than a force staff and his own balls-out badassness.
- The Ultramarine Space Marine Chapter Master, Marneus Calgar literally punches out the Avatar of Khaine, the bloody handed war god of the Eldar.
- 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.
- Exalted is a game where you gain the ability to punch Cthulu in the Kidneys at chargen. You go up from there. Some of the only monsters this player is scared of facing are the neverborn, with over 100 Health levels (You start with 7. 25 is considered a lot), with every stat and ability of at least 15- Compared to your limit of 5; and the Kukla. He's a dragon with a tail the size of a mountain range. 'Nuff said.
- Well, no. You can easily destroy big dumb brute monsters, beating tyrannosauruses to death with your fists, etc, but local equivalents of Cthulhu generally possess enough magic powers to kill whole parties of starting-level characters with contemptous ease.
- 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).
- In the early Call of Cthulu by Chaosium the Headbutt skill allowed you to stop anyone acting for one turn. A starting character had a 95% chance of pulling this off.
- Every single character story (as distinct from character backstory) this troper has heard involves the player rolling an insane number of natural 20's so that his character ended up killing Cthulhu, or the Tarrasque, or some other unbeatable foe. And then he did it again next week.
- Munchkin has a Cthulhu version, as well as a variety of others. It has been stated in the Internet-based epic rules that with these rules in play, at high levels, you can have enough personal power to kill a radioactive Cthulhu and his clone. Presumably, by this point you have six hands, and they're all on fire.
- Monsterpocalypse features the Lords of Cthul, who have "We were inspired by HP Lovecraft" written on them in the maddening tongue of R'lyeh. Complete with tentacles. In the backstory, they're avatars of cosmic forces and are here simply because they like making people dead. These avatars can be taken out by tank fire, kamikaze cyborg alien birds, and 60-foot-tall Highly Visible Ninja bodyslamming them.
- In Witchcraft, humans can grow powerful enough to eventually take on Gods, Archdevils, Archangels, powerful monsters, and other horrible things from beyond. However, special mention goes to the non-magical dreamer guy that crushed a god. Turns out taking on a lucid dreamer in the dreamscape is a good way to get yourself killed, no matter what you are.
- This Troper's RPG group was playing a Rifts campaign where the players had ascended, literaly, via plot point, to (technicly minor) godhood. Final boss fight, the newborn Great Old One whose awakening would destroy Earth. The plan to use the Ark of the Covenant against it didn't go so well and the GM really wasn't expecting us to win, till one of the players realized they'd been holding onto a Knife of Child Sacrifice picked up along the way. Vs. a baby Eldritch Abomination? Took a few tries...
- 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.
- The final boss of the Another Centurys Episode trilogy is Shin Dragon, from the Getter Robo series, which is capable of obliterating celestial bodies like Jupiter's moons with ease and can punch holes in reality. You can potentially beat it with anything in the game, from Shin Getter all the way down to the RX-78 Gundam or a VF-1 Valkyrie.
- In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, the final battle pits the epic-level protagonist and his party against Amellisan, traitorous priestess of Bhaal, charged up with about 99% of Bhaal's power. Your protagonist has the reminaing 1%. You win.
- 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.
- 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?".
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- And one of your party members (the most awesome one) fights with her fists, so yeah.
- Though the sequel Chrono Cross takes on the issue.
- Lavos is very much a Cthulhu. He resides under the sea (technically below the earth under the sea, which is just land after the continents shift) from an ancient era, humankind was influenced by his presence, most notably when a group of mages discovered he outdid their old power source, the Sun. Bonus points for his symbol having power and being unwisely summoned by Magus.
- Mortal Kombat has Raiden, the God of Thunder. However, he is no stronger than every other fighter, human or not.
- 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.)
- Pretty much the point of Diablo.
- In Warriors Orochi, you get to punch out the Serpent King Orochi, of course he returns. He becomes even more badass in the sequel when you see just how many people he punched out, including an example where Orochi himself punches out a Cthulhu even bigger than himself-The Gods.
- An "Did You Just Make Out With Cthulhu" example (see also the Suzumiya Haruhi example) occurs in the good ending of Disgaea 2, when Adell stops the real Overlord Xenon, Rozalin, by Frenching her. One or two more examples of this, and Did You Just Make Out With Cthulhu will become a subtrope in its own right rather than just a variation of this Expectant Mother Trope.
- A straighter example would be when Adell pulls a Get Ahold Of Yourself Man on Rozalin's Superpowered Evil Side, an Omnicidal Maniac that just finished thoroughly trouncing a level 1200 (in standard RPG levels, by the way) overlord without even breaking a sweat. Did He Just Bright Slap Cthulhu? Yes, and it worked.
- In Disgaea 2 you can fight and defeat Laharl (the aforementioned level 1200 overlord). To put it into perspective, Laharl is the protagonist of the first game with enough power to blow up a planet out of hand. And in the PSP remake of the original you can fight Zetta, who is stated to be the most powerful being in existance. Then there's Baal...
- In the third game, Raspberyl prevents Mao's unleashing of his REALLY evil side (a borderline Cosmic Horror in his own right) by hugging him. TWICE.
- Basically, in the Disgaeaverse, there are a number of characters who are fully capable of punching out Cthulhu.
- Doom is one of the legends in this department. The hero, an ordinary Space Marine, with an arsenal of powerful but in no way supernatural weapons, kills his way through hell, defeating archedemons and such.
- It ends with Hell exploding. The Marine does not go in for half measures.
- In Dragon Warrior VII, after you've beaten the game, you could enter two bonus dungeons, the boss of the first of which is God. He will be at the end of the second dungeon, where you can ask him to be a resident of your immigrant town. You can fight him infinitely many times there.
- Hastur from Earnest Evans is, indeed, taken down by a puny human whip.
- 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.
- Averted in The Elder Scrolls III: 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.
- Averted nicely in The Elder Scrolls IV: 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. Unless, of course, you bring Wabbajack into battle with you, but whether or not it this counts after you lower Dagon to the health of a deer is debatable.
- 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.
- The protagonist of Battlespire ends up killing Mehrunes Dagon's avatar, sans divine help. Which means that Martin sucks.
- It's implied that defeating Jyggalag doesn't actually kill him, it just frees him from the curse that forces him to turn into Sheogorath, and that Sheogorath/Jyggalag planned this all along.
- It's repeatedly been mentioned in game that it is not possible to kill a Daedric prince, you can only destroy their physical form.
- Justified in Eternal Darkness — humanity defeats the Ancients, but they have not one, but two Eldritch Abominations backing them up — one's behind the scenes, and one is summoned to do the actual ass-kicking.
- Actually, once you've played the game three times, you find that thanks to the nebulous reality-bending of the situation, you defeat all three simultaneously (despite it being a rock/paper/scissors relationship), and the only one left is dying anyway.
- 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.
- Bit of a clarification. The Warring Triad projected a field which absorbed all magic while they were in perfect alignment. It was the precise combination of their powers that negated magic, not an innate quality of the powers themselves. Kefka upset that and drained off the raw power of magic from them, but was still vulnerable to magical attack.
- 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:
- Final Fantasy III: The Cloud of Darkness is an actual God which manifests as a roughly female avatar from a swirling, multicolored fog. It has no purpose, no reason, other than to consume all the reality of the World of Light itself. It's beaten back by four kids with a penchant for onions.
- Final Fantasy IV: Zeromus is a grotesque, shapeless thing with a vaguely crustacean appearance, and the embodiment of the primal force of Hatred itself. Although Cecil and company defeat it, it claims to be eternal, or, at least, that it will exist as long as humanity does.
- Final Fantasy V: Neo-Exdeath is a melange of Eldritch Abominations sealed or sent to sleep within the Dimensional Rift. Its appearance is as of dozens of corpses and demons blindly sewn together.
- Sephiroth, from Final Fantasy VII is said in a Word of God case to be "the strongest character in the Final Fantasy VII universe. There is nothing above him, and it would be impossible to make a character stronger than he is." He's defeated a couple of times by sword combos. Albeit lengthy, very impressive sword combos that attack him from virtually every angle. The eldritch abomination part comes in when you consider Jenova.
- 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 eldritch abomination with all the tentacles. He can be defeated 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.
- Averted in Kingdom Hearts and its sequel where he is much harder to 'beat', since you don't really kill him.
- This ended up happening in Final Fantasy Legend when the heroes got pissed at The Creator for daring to toy with his own creations.
- Not to mention that that series had a tendency to base bosses on various mythical deities, and not just the final ones. In the second game you beat the crap out of Venus and Odin (who had been resurrecting you for most of the game. On the final world a reanimated statue of Isis joins your party, and you take on a security system built by the ancient gods
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 defeat human heroes (Ares in particular got beat up by Hector in one book of the Illiad) this is not entirely unreasonable.
- God Of War 2 basically takes this to the extreme: Kratos punches out gods, the gods parents, and everyone that gets between him and the gods. All because he hates Zeus. And because Zeus is totally a jerk.
- Most of the big bosses in Kirby games can only be described as an Eldritch Abomination, but of course Kirby thrashes these folks on a regular basis.
- The anime actually implies that he's a good Eldritch Abomination, so perhaps it's not so surprising.
- In King Of Fighters 97, you take down the legendary Orochi, who is treated as the equivalent of a world destroying god in this series.
- 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.
- Occurs in the endgame of Legacy Of Kain: Defiance, where Kain uses the newly aquired power of the Soul Reaver blade to take down the Elder God.
- 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 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.
- 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 and Heroic Sacrifice of several incredibly powerful characters.
- The best fighter against Onslaught is the robot girl—not woman, girl—whose day job is maid. That's right, Mega Man's sister Roll. It's fun to take her in against Onslaught and wipe the floor with him.
- 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.
- Before that, in Marvel Super Heroes versus Street Fighter, one of the playable characters is Shuma-Gorath, who in the comics is an incredibly powerful Eldritch Abomination but of course had to be severely toned down to maintain balance. Same for Blackheart, son of Mephisto himself.
- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance has the same issue. Your little super team fights nearly every supervillain in the Marvel Universe over the course of the game. As a result, a skilled player can defeat Mephisto, Galactus, Gladiator, Ymir, Loki, and Dr. Doom coupled with the stolen god powers of Odin all with Badass Normal Nick Fury.
- Then again, one of Fury's alternate costumes IS Samuel L. Jackson.
- This does reflect comic book "reality", in which Badass Normal heroes regularly trounce super-powered foes that in a realistic fight would leave them as a stain on the floor.
- Somewhat justified in that the fight with Galactus consists entirely of the team running for their lives, and then distracting him while the Silver Surfer turns Big G's own powers against him. And the fight with Mephisto is impossible to win until the X-Man you didn't save forces him into the void with him/her.
- The final confrontation of Mass Effect pretty much consists of exposing the resident Eldritch Abomination, the Reaper Sovereign, and letting the Human Systems Alliance shoot the bajeesus out of it. However, given that it was only ONE of a race of Eldritch Horrors, and it was being attacked by the combined forces of half the 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 is the whole point of every game in the Megami Tensei series. In SMT2 you can even make Cthulhu one of your mons.
- Persona 2 In which the last boss literally IS Nyarlathotep himself, and while he wins in Tsumi/Innocent Sin, in Batsu/Eternal Punishment he loses and you literally Slice, Shoot, and of course PUNCH the ever loving crap out of him before he is forced to retreat.
- Persona 3 sets this up for the latter half of the game... And then subverts it after the presumed final battle with a Hope Spot, as it turns out the Eldritch Abomination was impossible to kill after all. Only the The Power Of Friendship and a Heroic Sacrifice manages to ultimately drive it off, and even then it's implied to only be temporarily.
- Persona 4 takes this trope more literally than Persona 3 does - the protagonist literally kills Izanami, one of the Japanese gods of creation, single-handedly (Izanami herself says before dying "Power enough to erase my existence...").
- Nocturne averts this with its bonus ending. The final boss is Lucifer — yeah, that Lucifer. But he isn't going all out on you, he is just testing if you are good enough. Because once you've 'defeated' him and showed your potential, you become his Dragon and lead the Armies Of Hell in a battle against God. That means he probably had to set the bar pretty high...
- 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.
- 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.
- Subverted in Peasant's Quest (from Homestar Runner): "beating" the game consists of the protagonist getting closer than any hero ever has to killing Trogdor - deflecting one gout of flame, stabbing your sword an inch or two into Trogdor's nigh-impenetrable hide, hearing The Burninator speak, and finally being almost effortlessly devoured. A really cool monument is built to honor this feat.
- In episode 5 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, Strong Bad actually does defeat Trogdor by hitting his weak spots, which Rather Dashing failed to notice. Sure, Strong Bad transforms into a big, muscular version of himself with a gigantic knife (displayed in ridiculously awesome next-gen graphics) to accomplish this, but he's still just hitting him... And then it turns out that it was all a dream and Trogdor is still destroying the countryside.
- Played for laughs in the first episode of Penny Arcade Adventures On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Inciting Gabe to tackle a very Cthulian being, Tycho asks "Do you want to punch a god?" Gabe: "..." Tycho "..." Gabe: "..." Tycho: "..." Gabe: "Yes!"
- Then again in the second episode. PC: "Gods? Again?" Gabe: "Yeah, it's like... I don't mind fighting gods? It's just I'd like a little warning first."
- Just to put things in perspective here? The first God is defeated through a combination of a radio tube, absolutely pure urine, and the soul of a mime. The second is defeated with a giant robot doll piloted by a thirteen-year old girl.
- In Perfect Dark Zero, Joanna Dark defeats Zhang Li with early-21st-century weapons though the knife/machete comes in handiest despite the fact that he uses the Graal to gain superhuman powers and "become a god".
- 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.
- This makes it more Did You Just Stuff Cthulhu Into A Little Tiny Ball, unless we want to start with the sealing in a can stuff.
- Don't forget that to capture Mons you have to attack them, lower their health, and give them status effects. So it still Punching out Cthulhu, more or less.
- The anime, or at least the movies, handles this more realistically, with only the "weakest" legendary Pokemon (e.g. Celebi, Jirachi, Manaphy) capable of being harmed by humans. The more powerful legendaries (e.g. Mewtwo, Kyogre, Darkrai) are more-or-less invulnerable to anything less than other legendaries, and the truly powerful ones (e.g. Dialga, Giratina) are essentially indestructible.
- The second movie also gives us world-ending consequences for capturing the three Legendary Birds.
- The So Bad Its Horrible 2D fighting game Pray For Death had Cthulhu himself as a normally playable character. So Yeah.
- 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.)
- In the first Shadow Hearts game there are two different villains who try to summon a God, the first to destroy the Japanese army and the second to cleanse the Earth of sin by destroying the wicked. By the start of the second game the new villains refer to the hero Yuri as "Godslayer".
- 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.
- At the end of Silent Hill 3, Heather takes down God. With a lead pipe.
- It should be noted, however, that the games are hardly clear on what exactly is the "God" of the town's religion, and indeed it's entirely likely to be yet another hallucination (which is one of the more reasonable Epilectic Trees concerning the game).
- The local Eldritch Abomination gets punched pretty much once per game, but what the result is depends on which of the endings you get.
- And in the UFO ending, aliens laser-carpet-bomb Silent Hill itself (i.e., the entire town) from orbit.
- Sonic The Hedgehog and his friends have gotten really good about this in recent games.
- The first non-Robotnik final boss Sonic fought was the watery god of destruction, Chaos, in the first Sonic Adventure. Granted, he didn't actually destroy Chaos, but he did use himself as a projectile and shot through his brain a couple of times.
- Metal Sonic becomes nearly as powerful in Sonic Heroes, absorbing Chaos's and all the heroes's lifeform data. Super Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles take him out with ease because they're SONIC HEROES!
- Black Doom wasn't quite a god, but he was the leader of an alien race and distinctly Cthulhu-like in voice and appearance. Shadow whips his ass in super form by himself.
- It never actually happened, but Sonic, Shadow, and Silver teamed up to "stop the consciousness" (whatever that means) of Solaris, the god of the time-space continuum. Which meant smacking him in the core For Massive Damage.
- InSonic and the Secret Rings this trope is also shown, where The genie and evil villain the Erazor Djinn uses all the rings to turn into a Horrific monstrosity called "Alf Layla wa-Layla", and begins to recreate the world in his own image, only to be stopped by darkspine sonic.
- Sonic Unleashed (the 360/PS3 version, at least) is notable in that someone - namely, the Gaia Colossus/Chip - literally does punch out the game's local Cthulhu; at the end of the fight, it rears back, zooms forward, and delivers the left haymaker of justice to Dark Gaia's face, stunning him long enough for Super Sonic to deliver the final blow.
- In the Wii/PS2 version, you have to make him punch out Dark Gaia manually. Emphasis on the words "Punch Out".
- The Soulblazer trilogy has a trilogy of this trope - In Soulblazer, you kill the powerful demon/god(?) Deathtoll with the Soul Blade (admiteddly the most powerful sword in the whole world. In Terranigma, you defeat the evil god Dark Gaia with what is essentially a SPEAR, and most heinously of all in Illusion Of Gaia you also defeat the evil god Dark Gaia with nothing but your own ectoplasmic arm (as Shadow)!
- Even if you use the gothic lolita in Soul Calibur IV, you can defeat a Physical God who not only tamed Soul Edge, but actually created its counterpart.
- 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.
- 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. Other games have the Super Robot team go up against villains who, in their respective series, proved to be impossible to defeat... and win all the same:
- In the Alpha series and in MX, during the Neon Genesis Evangelion storyline events, the heroes manage to defeat the Seele's Mass Produced Evangelions. Yes, exactly the monsters who, after having been defeated by Asuka, simply regenerated and tore her to pieces as if nothing happened. The Super Robots managed to kill them all. Not only that, but, in Alpha 3, they follow it up by fighting -and defeating- the fusion of the nine white Evangelions with a berserk Unit 01 and the Tree of Life... also known as God! And it's not even the final stage!
- In Alpha 2 and J, during the final assault on Orphan, the Super Robots defeat Baron Maximillian's Hyper Baronz from Brain Powerd. In the series proper, the Hyper Baronz was so powerful that all Hime managed to do was damage it somewhat, and she and Yuu had to wait it out and survive until Baron exhausted all of her energy.
- In the last two episodes of Alpha, the heroes also go up against Yami No Teiou, from the Mazinkaiser saga. And manage to destroy him, when all the Mazinkaiser team could do in the series was to seal it away.
- 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.
- Thief: The Dark Project. Garrett not only kills The Trickster, but steals from him, too.
- 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...
- It didn't affect her because, as a compromise with Kanako, faith that goes to one of them also goes to the other. Basically, the people of Suwako's nation refused to accept Kanako as their god even after she defeated Suwako, so they set up a sort of joint shrine that gathers faith for both of them at once.
- Tohno Shiki from Tsukihime has a power that is very conducive to this. He arguably does this by making Roa Deader Than Dead, which is one hell of an achievement considering the man regenerates from just his ankles at one point; to add insult to injury, Shiki destroyed Roa's concept of existence, which prevents him from reincarnating as usual.
- In 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.
- Happens more than once in the Warcraft universe:
- World Of Warcraft raids let players duke it out with all kinds of eldritch horrors and the mightiest beings in the game lore (only short of Sargeras), only with larger numbers than usual. Granted, some of them are said to be in a weakened state or to be merely banished when defeated, and many of them put up a hell of a fight, but still...
- In The Witcher Dagon getting killed by Geralt at the end of chapter 4 is pretty inevitable, as you can get him in the bestiary by chapter 2. Interestingly, the god isn't defeated directly, but by killing his worshipers, depriving him of prayer.
- In the World Of Mana, high-tier supernatural beings are common boss battles:
- X-Com: Terror from the Deep has a partially [[Justified]] version of this. The "Ultimate Alien" cannot be defeated once he wakes up, but you can kill him by blowing up the power generators to his cryogenics system first. The explosive result, however, makes the earth uninhabitable.
- The biggest threat to humans and Vasudans in Freespace is a powerful Shivan dreadnought, the Lucifer, with nigh-impenetrable shields, which devastates Vasuda Prime and is looking for Earth. It is only defeated in the last level through the use of LostTechnology by chasing it in subspace with fighters/bombers and destroying its generators while its shields are down. The explosion does, however, cause Earth to be but off from the rest of the galaxy for many decades.
- The Super Smash Bros series has actually inspired intense forum debates for its bizarre use of this. According to the running backstory, Master Hand and Crazy Hand represent the twin gods of creation and destruction, yet it is still possible for players to beat them. Until Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it could have been explained away as a friendly sparring match where the hands could win if they wanted to, but would rather train and play with fighters, but in Brawl, Master Hand is visibly subdued and enslaved by Tabuu, whom the player can also beat.
- A possible explanation is that the two hands are essentially the gods of Subspace, while Tabuu is more of a devil figure. The hands' behaviors towards the fighters in prior games could be deliberately training them in anticipation of when they'd need their help stopping Tabuu.
- Brawl is made by Mashahiro Sakurai, who also did Kirby, so it makes sense.
- Heinrich I in Return to Castle Wolfenstein is an ancient sealed evil in a can. Supposedly indestructible, the only way to defeat him was for a wizard to seal him in the ground. Of course, that was way back around the year 1000, so when the hero shows up in 1944 it quickly becomes evident that being invulnerable to swords and spears is not the same as being invulnerable to nazi superweapons
- The third campaign of Guild Wars, Nightfall deals on how the human heroes manage to overthrow the fallen god Abaddon, even when in the penultimate mission the other gods themselves decline to directly intervene, arguing that the humans have all the strength they need.
- Given the fact that humanity's ability to fuck up the plans and creations of gods is why the gods basically went into retirement, this kind of makes sense. "Well, they shat all over everything we did before, just give one of them our blessing and they'll probably find a way to fuck things up for the Big Bad as well"
- The otherwise excellent Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, which is set during the events of the movies but tells a distinct story, jumps the shark at the last minute when the party is instantly transported to the top of Barad-dur, where they fight spotlight-eye Sauron (who is a lesser god, remember), and beat him into submission using swords, spears, and arrows. Why?
- In Thief: The Dark Project, the titular character Garrett kills the Trickster, a forest god who resembles Pan. With a magical bomb. At least it was an inventive way to defeat the end boss, which fit well with the style of gameplay.
- Garrett even lampshades it in the stage intro to "The Maw of Chaos", saying "I've never robbed a god before".
- In Dead Space, the final boss is the Hive Mind Cosmic Horror that is controlling the Necromorphs; it has to be at least over 100 meters tall. Isaac Clarke is an engineer with a headful o' crazy and a cutting tool. Guess who gets owned?
- Upcoming Nintendo DS platformer Scribblenauts will allow you to summon not only Cthulhu himself, but several hundred other entities to fight him. That's right, you can set up your own "Did ___ Just Punch Out Cthulhu" scenarios. For the most fun, pit Cthulhu against God. With a shotgun. On a skateboard.
- 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 lose once. He also wrestled the Death of Being Wrestled to Death by Steve to death. Twice. Try not to think about that one.
- Don't forget the time a salt-water croc ate Cthulhu.
- Dr Mcninja PUNCHED OUT DEATH.
- The Seven Deadly Sins did so as well. Considering that the Sins arn't as powerful as you might think, this makes it more epic. Or would, if a certain Virtue didn't come in and make the finishing blow.
- Gunnerkrigg Court: Kat punched the psychopomp Muut in the
gut beautifully sculpted abs after finding out what Muut and the psychopomps had done to tick off her best friend Annie. It didn't do anything to Muut, but more importantly nothing happened to Kat, who basically attacked (a) Death with her bare hands. As the author said, "Do you have a friend that would do the same for you?"
- 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.
- It actually makes sense in context: the 'Kellith' in the dream represents the magical brainwashing her supposed high priest was trying to inflict on her. Of course, that technically makes it not quite an example of this trope — but then the Whateleyverse also has Tennyo, who apparently eats Eldritch Abominations, demons, and the like. (The jury's still out on whether she counts as one herself.)
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