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Impossibly Cool Weapon
The Glaive: Made of awesome.

One of X weapons and gadgets not fit for this world.
— Promos for Ratchet And Clank

The double-ended laser sword. Now that is a seriously good way to cause major injuries to yourself. So you know anyone who dares to attempt to wield one of these suckers in battle is either incredibly good, or incredibly stupid. And if they were that stupid, they wouldn't be standing in front of you with all four limbs still attached.
— Darths And Droids

Basically, this is about any weapon that is done just for Rule Of Cool, since it is either impossible, unlikely, or impractical in Real Life.

Usually made from two methods: the Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot method (take a bunch of cool weapons together), and the Up To Eleven method (crank up the weapon's abilities).

The difference with Improbable Weapon User is that these are based off of actual weapons, not non-weapon things used as weapons. A Flaming Sword would count as an impossibly cool weapon. A cardboard tube would count as an improbable weapon.

A Sub Trope of Rule Of Cool, and a Sister Trope of Abnormal Ammo, BFG, BFS, Cool Sword, and Improbable Weapon User.

Compare Cool Starship, Impossibly Cool Clothes, Scary Impractical Armor, and Weaponized Landmark.

Contrast Weapons Are Better tropes, which imply normal weapons are impossibly cool by themselves.
Specific Types:

Examples:

  • The lightsabers from Star Wars.
    • Mind you, most frequent users, such as the Jedi and Sith orders, are, in fact, superhuman. The fact that they're telepathic, telekinetic, precognitive and generally enhanced is meant to justify their usage of a weapon that'll kill you if you bump into someone.
    • "Note to self: Lightsaberchucks: BAD IDEA."
      • Asajj Ventress has been known to use paired lightsabers connected by a cable from time to time.
    • "Lightwhips" are introduced in the Star Wars Expanded Universe; despite the name, they're not lightsaber-whips, they're electrified whips that can withstand a lightsaber's blade.
    • As well, in The Force Unleashed game a boss uses lightsaber tonfa.
    • Also, the Death Star. Okay mass murder is not cool, but you know what I mean.
    • The X Wing Series introduces the blastsword, signature weapon of the Adumari. It's pretty much what it sounds like.
    Wes: "So it's like a blaster you have to hit someone with. I have to have one."
    Tycho: "Don't give him a new kind of weapon! It would be like giving a lightsaber to a two-year-old!"
  • Ray guns, especially before the invention of the laser.
  • Krull has the Glaive, a telekenetic ninja star with retractable blades (pictured above). The Real Life weapon of that name is a type of polearm.
    • Warcraft III has the same weapon (with the same name) but increased to the size of a human torso. Throwing it (or launching it out of a massive slingshot) is apparently not a problem.
  • Sword-chucks, yo!
  • Any variation of a shuriken that is larger than the user's own body, especially the "pinwheel" types with a cross-grip in the middle. I don't know how that can be practical since shuriken are traditionally single-use weapons unless you bother to go and retrieve them.
  • The chainsaw nunchucks of The Adventures Of Dr Mc Ninja.
  • Detritus's "Piecemaker" crossbow in Discworld. The Piecemaker is more or less a ballista held by a troll, which when it fired its regular bolts incinerated them due to friction with the air from the speed, creating a giant fireball of shrapnel that decimated buildings. Later, Detritus adopted tying a crap-ton of normal crossbow bolts tied together with some string, which snapped a few feet off the crossbow, blotting out the sun (The smaller bolts still caught fire.)
    • Whenever Detritus pulls this out, everybody stands behind him. Everybody. Those who don't are Not Very Lucky.
    • "When mister safety-catch is not on, mister cross-bow is not your friend."
    • When first firing it at the testing range, it took out the target, the earth behind the target, the ground, and a passing bird that was directly above Detritus when he pulled the trigger.
  • The Lancer, a Chainsaw - Machine Gun hybrid. For buyers of the Limited Edition of Gears Of War 2, it comes in a solid gold variety.
  • How about D'argo's Qualita Blade? A sword that works as a pulse rifle!
  • The chainsword. Oh lord, the chainsword. It has problems, but damn if it isn't cool.
    • And then there's the rest. What happens when you combine a chainsword with a PowerFist? Awesome happens.
    • Let's face it, most Warhammer 40 K weapons fit this trope. The weakest weapon in the setting is a laser gun which can blow the arm clean off an unarmoured normal, and they just get bigger, more impossible and more awesome from there. For instance, the Ork gun which fires Snotlings THROUGH HELL into the target's brain. Demon-powered swords. Razor Floss cannons. Weaponised cutting torches which can shoot through tank armour. Molecule-thick shuriken shooters. Guns which fire needles of frozen poison. And so forth. And let's not forget that virtually all of the setting's weapons have versions which can be mounted to Humongous Mecha. And then, there's the Tyranids...
  • Any and all Humongous Mecha. Tanks: acceptable, Walking Tanks: Possible, although with limited applications, Humanoid Tanks the size of skyscrapers: Rule Of Cool.
  • In the PS 3 game Heavenly Sword, one of the playable characters, Kai, had a HUGE crossbow that fired like a Gatling gun. It also had unlimited ammo.
    • The fact that the arrows can actually be guided directly into an enemies skull from a kilometer away doesn't make the list?
    • The titular Heavenly Sword was also fairly cool, a pair of curvy ornate swords that could also be attached together into one big powerful two handed sword or strung out on chains and whipped around for God Of War style long range attacks.
  • Monster Hunter is all about this trope. Serrated BFSs with teeth that fold into the blade when not being wielded, giant telescoping lances, and giant collapsible crossbows that worked more like BFGs were par for the course.
    • The most impossibly cool weapons by far, though, were the gunhammer and gunlance. They were similar to the Gunblades of Final Fantasy VIII, but even more impossible. The gunlance was essentially an eight foot long lance with a revolver cylinder built into the handguard and a barrel running alonside the underside of the blade. It shot whatever you stabbed. The gunhammer got rid of the blade altogether - it was nothing but a giant cylinder and hammer assembly on a stick. You hit things with it and they got shot (after being crushed of course). Both were awesome.
      • So cool that the gunlance actually became a main weapon type in the sequel. The gunhammer never panned out, however, and instead we got the hunting horn.
  • It's a gun, Frank. A gun that shoots swords.
  • The Devil May Cry 'verse has many:
    • In Devil May Cry 3 you get Nevan, a frickin' electric guitar scythe that shoots out purple lightning and bats. And which used to be a massively hot succubus. And before that, Cerberus, a three-sectioned nunchaku made of ice.
    • In Devil May Cry 4 Pandora's Box from Devil May Cry 4, a demonic firearm manifesting as a briefcase capable of morphing into a variety of heavy weapons. A crapload of forms and they're all awesome. Lucifer. Bright pink exploding energy spears, anyone?
      • On the slightly more mundane (but still strange) front, we have the weapons of the Order: a sort of revved-up flame/vibro-sword, and the equally insane rocket-powered lance wielded by the Bianco Angelo armor suits for jet-propelled lunges.
  • Rave Master's Ten Commandments - a shape-shifing BFS with elemental powers.
  • In addition to chainswords, .hack//G.U. has Azure Kite's weird triple-bladed swords. They look like they'd be heard to handle with just two arms, but hey.
  • The Devices of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Some of them speak in Gratuitous English. Some of them speak in Gratuitous German. Most of them can switch from one kickass form to another. Most of them are Determinators in their own right, demanding Deadly Upgrades if they lose and even continuing to fight even after their owner loses consciousness. All of them are human-sized versions of Humongous Mecha weaponry that can, and do, take out Humongous Mecha.
  • An episode of SD Gundam Force features the Zakos showing off an "ultra space universe bazooka cannon gatling triple double wonderful drill super missile rocket machine gun gun gun". It ended up actually impossibly cool, because it completely fell apart upon trying to use it.
  • A sort of shovel-tipped longsword shows up in various places. It looks cool, but is totally useless as a real-world weapon: the broad point prevents stabbing attacks from doing much damage, and it throws off the balance, making slashing attacks difficult. Existed in real life, but as a very specific tool for execution, not a weapon of war or for fighting.
  • Literally almost every weapon in Painkiller is based around this trope. To wit:
    • Your main melee melee/ranged weapon, the eponymous Painkiller, is essentially a horizontally held weed whacker that can be sent flying through enemy ranks, blades spinning.
    • Your standard garden-variety shotgun, which can not only freeze your enemies, but packs enough of a punch to send them flying into the air.
    • A gun that shoots foot-long wooden stakes through the air at high speeds, pinning enemies to walls by their limbs.
    • A rocket launcher and minigun combined into the same weapon.
    • And lastly, a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. And shurikens which shoot lightning.
  • In the Kamen Rider Spirits manga, Skull Rider uses a bizarre weapon that's a combination of brass knuckles & a shotgun. It has shells in it that go off when you punch something. No explaination is given for how he manages to keep them from blowing his own hands off.
  • Fire Emblem 7 has what can probably be described as a "slingshot-spear".
    • You mean the ballistae? Those existed in real life too, and I don't know if they would qualify here...
  • Fallout Tactics: Fantasy Ball. Sole possible explanation for its existence: designed to weird the hell out of anyone in sight, thus compelling target to waive Agility bonus.
    • The same game has a weapon called the punch gun
  • Check out this Cracked.com article for their picks of the most impossibly cool fictional weapons that would be retarded in real life.
  • In Deadman Wonderland, Genkaku's double gatling-gun electric guitar. One of the creators even said in his blog that he isn't sure if it would even be possible in real life.
  • Just about every weapon in the Ratchet And Clank universe is impossibly cool. The first ads for the games even showed how they just wouldn't work in real life.
    • The upgraded forms of the RY3NO in the third game. These upgraded forms fire laser missiles that spiral around and disintegrate anything they pass through, before exploding in an unbelievably huge flash of light. So it's a combination of Macross Missile Massacre, Beam Spam, More Dakka, BFG, and Stuff Blowing Up. This is like every gun trope welded together and given a trigger.
    • The Rift Inducer from the third game. The gun creates temporary black holes, and when upgraded to the Rift Ripper, it shoots lightning streams
  • The Valaes Tairn elves in Eberron favour a double-bladed scimitar. Despite the inherent impracticality of this weapon, the Valaes Tairn pull it off, possibly because they're Bad Ass Elf Proud Warrior Race Guys who will kill you if you point this out.
  • And let's not forget the infamous Flying Guillotine. Drop the basket on someone's head, pull the chain, and it's Off With His Head!
  • The Evoker from Persona3. It's basically a pistol. Except instead of using it to shoot people, you point it at your head and use it to summon the physical manifestation of your psyche. Which is a lot more impressive than an ordinary bullet. (Though, since some party members use normal guns, you have to wonder what would happen if they accidentally drew the wrong one... On second thought no you don't.)
  • Bauhaus Jungle Kommandos from WarZone Tabletop Wargame use Big Freakin' Gatling Shotguns with two sets of barrels. Whoever gets hit by THAT, is in a world of hurt.
  • So many of the swords in World Of Warcraft. Either they're ridiculously huge, they look like they were designed by Kit Rae in collaboration with Fred Flintstone and a Taos jeweler, or both. The same goes for The Pirates Of Dark Water, although those mostly just look like they were designed by Kit Rae.
    • Truth In Television: It should be noted that Kit Rae's fantasy weapons are for display purposes only.
  • From Dungeons And Dragons the double axe, the two-bladed sword, and especially the dire flail.
  • The film Sorority Row has the villain using a lug wrench with innumerable blades jutting out of it.
  • Truth In Television: AR-15-mounted crossbows, which are probably best used for stealthy sentry kills. The fact that there's still space for an underslung grenade launcher makes it even cooler.
  • Most energy weapons in Virtual On. Homing beams, beam swords, homing beam swords, anti-ship cannons, heart shaped beams, circle beams, scythes, anything is possible.
  • Three words: Triple. Barreled. Shotgun. Thank you, Resident Evil 5.
  • Many weapons in Team Fortress Two. The Soldier has a semiauto rocket launcher, the Heavy has a pair of 200-pound miniguns that can kill in a second, the Medic has a chaingun that shoots blood-sapping syringes and a bizarre mix of a saw, a short sword, and a hypodermic needle, the Spy has a Hand Cannon with the Scout's mom on it, the Scout has a shotgun with enough kick to send his target and him flying ten feet, the Engineer has his turrets, the Pyro has an axe covered in barbed wire that instakills people on fire and a flamethrower shaped like a dragon, the Demoman has a sticky bomb launcher with so much firepower, the programmers referred to them as "winbombs", and the Sniper has a jar of piss that causes people to lose the will to live.
  • Xena Warrior Princess has the chakram, a precision guided frisbee of death that can defeat freaking armies.
  • This◊
  • Giga-Drill-Breaker!!!! A drill at least 3 metres across that causes giant fucking mecha to blow up. Activated by screaming the name of the attack extremely loudly while in a mecha, and being awesome.
  • The goddamn rocket powered sledgehammer from Gunnm.
  • The ZF-1 from The Fifth Element definitely qualifies, and doubles as a Swiss Army Gun.
  • In "Tokyo Delta Jetlag D," the in-universe anime/manga series from Unwinder's Tall Comics, main character Jaded Lament uses the Katagun, a katana that shoots bullets in the shape of the blade. Check it out (and some entertaining Lamp Shading of anime/manga tropes) here.
  • The villain of Phantasm, the Tall Man, uses flying killer spheres to take out his enemies. They fly at you, stick into your head with twin blades that pop out, then they kill you by drilling into your brain, with the blood exiting through a hole in the back.
    • On that note, the Cerebral Bore, plus nearly half of the Turok series' other weapons. Remember the minimum of three barrels per rocket launcher? The landmines specifically designed to amputate at the shin? The electrified shotgun that can put the same bullets through a single target six times over? The rocket-propelled sledgehammer? The precision-guided boomerang chainsaw? That gun that dessicates enemies and leaves behind jerky? The sticky, radioactive flares that slowly microwave people?
  • Whatever the hell The Octopus was using at the end of Frank goddamn Miller's film version of The Spirit.
  • Bionicle has a ton of these. Some of the most notable ones are:
    • Tahu's magma swords. He had a Flaming Sword, but that got replaced by a pair of broadswords that double as a surfboard
    • Onua Nuva's quake breakers. They are effectively a pair of chainsaws that can cut through rock and double as rollerblades.
    • Nuju Metru's crystal spikes. Just look at 'em! [1]◊
  • Anything from James Bond, from his wristwatch/high-powered laser, to one of the villains' sharpened bowler hat which can be thrown like a disc and cut of heads.
  • The Master's laser screwdriver from Doctor Who. The laser screwdriver is a deadlier form of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and a weapon that shoots out a laser beam that kills instantly and can rapidly age victims whose DNA it possesses.
    • Prior to this, he always used a shrink ray called a Tissue Compression Eliminator. It didn't shrink you neatly, it compressed (that is, crushed) your tissues down to the size of a doll, so it was quite lethal, and left a teeny tiny corpse. Regrettably, the show never addressed the fact that the doll-corpses should have been very heavy... But, eh, so what? Rule Of Cool.
  • A villain from Samurai Champloo had a delightful kusarigama variant that seemed to violate several laws of physics. The scythe head shot off of the haft, propelled by springs, gunpowder or black magic and then retracted so quickly that the scythe somehow beheaded or bisected anyone in between it and the haft.
  • Most of the built-in weapons used during the Casa Cristo Classic in the film version of Speed Racer.
  • The artifact sword named Demonhealer from GURPS: Dungeon Fantasy doesn't have a blade so much as it has a hole in reality that happens to be in the shape of a blade.
  • Parodied in No More Heroes. Rank 1, Dark Star, wields a LIGHTSABER DRAGON. He does not get a chance to use it before he gets punched through the chest shortly after revealing it.
  • Voltron's Blazing Sword, an indestructible blade the size of a good-size building, wielded by a giant tobot for hacking apart other giant robots. A solid object, but re-created out of Pure Energy every time it's needed. Despite the name, it is not a Flaming Sword.
  • The Arborians' ice arrows in Filmation's Flash Gordon (which turned out to be very handy for putting out a forest fire in one episode). Meanwhile, Ming himself was fond of using a Flaming Sword in combat.
  • The title weapon from Galtar And The Golden Lance, an enchanted weapon of prophecy that can only be weilded by a Chosen One, it can split into two smaller blades and shoots powerful energy zaps.
  • The Star Sword and the Power Sword from Blackstar, which would join to form the even more awesome Power Star if they weren't weilded by the hero and the villain respectively. Used for shooting energy beams more often than as actual swords.
  • Chewbacca's "bowcaster," a cross between a laser gun and a crossbow. Or something like that. Looks really cool, and requires a bandolier for some reason.

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