Non-Elemental

It's non-elementary, my dear Watson.

With Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, that means everyone and thing has strengths and vulnerabilities to everything else. Except for those that are "outside" the system, that is.

A Non-Elemental spell, power or monster will be the elemental equivalent of the Jack of All Stats: no weaknesses, but no noteworthy strength. Despite this "averageness", the Non-Elemental's greatest strength is that they can bypass most elemental resistances and strengths, making them effective against elements or types that have no or rare weaknesses and especially effective against enemies that are immune or resistant to numerous elemental types. That it's so well balanced means it can work in just about any situation on top of that, too.

Thematically, a Non-Elemental character may be described as using raw Ki or Mana, or some fundamental cosmic force at the center of the elemental system. Alternately, it may have developed a power that somehow bypasses the element system or fuses them all together. For these reasons, Non-Elemental characters and powers are sometimes considered advanced magic that is hard to master or acquire, and may be valued as Game Breakers. They may cross over with Infinity +1 Element due to this. Note that Non-Elemental powers are usually, but not always, distinct from "physical" attacks. Compare Element No. 5, which also tends to fall outside of the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Sieg's alignment in Rave Master. It's implied that this is why he was able to master all 8 elements at such a young age (whereas others who seem near his age can control maybe two or three) but never confirmed.
• Dragon Slayers in Fairy Tail can consume specific elements for power while also being granted almost complete immunity to magic of the same element. Eating an incompatible elements normally gives them the Dragon Slayer equivalent of food poisoning, except for cases where the Dragon Slayer has completely expended their magic, allowing them to adapt and gain new elemental powers. Acnologia, on the other hand, has no elemental attribute, which gives him no restriction to the magic he can consume or resist, effectively making him a Dragon Slayer of magic itself.
• Dragon Ball GT: Unlike the other Shadow Dragons, Syn Shenron, the strongest of the group, has no Elemental Powers on his own; he relies on basic Ki Manipulation. Of course, that changes when he becomes Omega Shenron, gaining the combined powers of all seven Shadow Dragons.
• Naruto:
  • Sakura is the only one of the original Team 7 members who doesn't use any elemental justus.
  • The Three Sanin consist of Jiraiya, Orochimaru and Tsunade. Jiraya could use earth and fire, Orochimaru could use wind and earth, and Tsunade relies on Ki Manipulation and Super-Strength.
  • Tsunade also serves this role among the Five Kages; A is an electricity user, Gaara uses sand, Onoki uses earth and gravity and Mei uses lava, acid and water.

Fan Works

• The first four agents that Leviathan faces in Manehattan's Lone Guardian all fit Mega Man Zero's element setup. Of them, Glintlock is the one who doesn't incorporate ice, fire, or electricity into his power set, instead relying on a heavily enchanted repeating crossbow and his own Improbable Aiming Skills to fight on par with the others.

Literature

• Chaos Fighters has also numerous non-video game examples such as Pure Energy attacks and subatomic particle beams.

Tabletop RPG

• Artifacts and artifact creatures are generally colorless in Magic: The Gathering. They usually use no colored mana, and so can be used in nearly any deck. Not all artifacts are colorless, though; Shards of Alara popularized colored artifacts, which were expanded on in Scars of Mirrodin and eventually became a common sight by 2020. There are also other colorless spells, like most of the Eldrazi.
  • Especially notable is Ghostfire from Future Sight, a burn spell specifically defined as colourless despite costing Red Mana to cast, thus allowing it to circumvent Protection From Red. The theme of inexplicably colourless spells seems to be a theme of the Spirit Dragon, Ugin, who was first mentioned on Ghostfire and later became an important figure in the backstories to the Zendikar and Tarkir blocks (the second of which had a weapon of solidified Ghostfire).
  • Additionally, Ghostfire was initially included in Future Sight as a call back to the enchantment Ghostly Flame from Ice Age, which rendered all Black and Red damage sources colourless. Ghostflame Sliver was another such reference.
  • Battle for Zendikar added Devoid spells, which require colored mana to cast but are considered colorless in all other respects.
• Dungeons & Dragons may be the Trope Codifier or the Trope Maker.
  • Force effects in AD&D2 and D&D3. Nothing was resistant to force, and force can even hit ghosts and other ethereal creatures as if they were solid. To compensate, force spells usually did less damage for their level. As a whole, too, Force magic isn't as focused as Abjuration or Elemental Fire, but has a good mix of attack, protection and utility spells; AD&D2.5 acknowledged Force as a school of effect, allowing specialists.
  • Sonic in D&D3 might be considered the poor man's substitute for Force in this respect. While it was an 'element' and thus could be resisted, enemies with natural reistances were very rare, and unless you had specific foreknowledge, no-one would prepare for a fight by bothering with putting up defenses against sonic. Like force, sonic damage also was generally smaller than the more traditional elements. It was also generally better for destroying objects than most other elements, due to how the hardness rules were written.
  • Magic Missile is notable as well. Pure Magic, hits the target automatically. Therefore, scales into higher levels surprisingly well.
    • In most editions (read: all except 1st and 4th), Magic Missile is a Force effect; see above.
  • The best example in third edition, although widely disallowed for a variety of reasons, is the Crystal Shard psionic power. Although the fluff describes it as a sharp crystal shard that deals piercing damage, and should thus be a part of the physical combat system that suffers from Damage Reduction (except for DR that is overcome solely by piercing damage, of course), technically all psionics are magic and thus bypass all DR entirely (in addition to bypassing all Spell Resistance by virtue of being an actual physical object). It scales very well and remains viable for as long as Hit Points matter in the game.
  • The true example for 3.x: Nameless damage. No type of damage is stated and it is considered to be of no type. However, it has to be noted that many nameless attacks merely behave as an obscure damage type: for instance, Searing Light and Holy Smite are nameless, but have their own rules as to what creatures are vulnerable/resistant to them and their types are referred to indirectly via description ("light-based attacks" and "Good aligned attacks"). Later on, Light and Holy became official damage types.
  • D&D 3.x and 4e also have a system of types for bonuses (like competency bonuses, sacred bonuses etc.) for determining whether they stack (you cannot add two enhancement bonuses to the same thing, only take the higher one, but you can add enhancement and insight for instance). Nameless bonuses exist and stack with everything except getting the same bonus twice (such as casting the same spell multiple times) thus every effect that can give you a bonus essentially has its own unique type.
  • Long before specific keywords and types, even 1st Edition D&D had unofficial elemental types and untyped damage. Magic Missile and Prismatic Sphere did damage with no qualifier. The game assumed players could figure out that Fireball did fire damage, so a creature immune to fire would be unharmed, without needing a system of keywords. This still left many edge cases; the aforementioned Prismatic Sphere forced creatures to save versus poison or die. Would poison immunity prevent this? ^note Rules as written, probably not.
  • Normally, physical attacks are not part of this trope, but in D&D they avert this trope. Almost all weapons have the "elements" of Bludgeoning, Slashing, or Piercing (with occasional variants) and enemies which resist or ignore those "elements." Likewise, the material which makes up a weapon may give it an "elemental-type" in all but name. In the case of silver weapons, this can literally be a (chemical) element type!
• Pathfinder has two variants.
  • The first is force damage, a type of energy damage that represents pure kinetic force, with next to no creatures that have a resistance to it and being capable of fully affecting intangible creatures.
  • The second is never explicitly named, but occurs in certain monster abilities that deal damage but don't list a damage type. This means it can't penetrate any resistances that can only be overcome by specific damage types, but also means that no resistances against specific damage types can protect against it.
• Princess: The Hopeful: The sourcebook mentions that the weapons conjured by a Princess's Fight charms are the incarnation of her desire to inflict harm on her enemies and protect her allies, and as such are pure magical damage regardless of their appearance. This works both for and against the Hopeful: The (apparent) sword of pure silver a Princess creates may not deal aggravated damage to werewolves, but it also won't be blocked by the anti-silver forcefield a werewolf bought off a mad scientist.
• In Fabula Ultima, a rare few spells and effects can inflict damage that explicitly has no type. Nothing can resist, absorb, or be immune to such damage, but nothing is vulnerable to it, either.

Video Games

• AdventureQuest has two types of this: Harm is basic unaligned damage from things like poison, while Void is based around Pure Energy and is the Infinity +1 Element.
  • Void doesn't always work, though. There's always things like the Void Dragon healed by it.
  • Another No elemental would be the Death Element. Take a guess as to what it does.
• Bahamut Lagoon features Uni magic, the element of black dragons. It's typeless, and does approximately twice as much damage as normal attacks, but always has a 50% chance of failure. It also makes Mini-Devil random attacks (which already have a random chance of failure or negative effect) become 'extremely' random.
• The Borderlands series: The "Normal" weapons in Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, and Borderlands 3, refer to any weapon without an elemental accessory attached. Normal weapons feature higher base damage than their elemental counterparts, but lack any damage over time or ability to debuff targets. In Borderlands 1, non-elemental weapons were an un-resisted damage type and had the benefit of an extra accessory (by virtue of the element taking up the accessory slot) that could apply a unique effect, such as an additional bullet per shot or a attached blade for bonus melee damage. Downplayed in Borderlands 2 (and any game after that), where elemental weapons could spawn with an accessory, and normal weapons were less effective versus armoured targets. Interesting to note that any Normal weapon will deal Explosive splash damage (where applicable).
  • Explosive element counted in the first game, but not so much in 2, where they deal reduced damage to shields. Slag took that spot, since nothing resists it, not even itself, if you don't count the Damage-Increasing Debuff that only Slag enemies are immune to.
  • As far as gun manufacturers go, Jakobs weapons all tend to be non-elemental weapons (save for certain Unique weapons) in exchange for higher base damage. This makes them fairly Boring, but Practical as far as weapons go (at least until the higher difficulties).
• Most Castlevania games have Slashing, Bashing and Piercing damage. They're technically different elements, but mostly confined to weapons and subweapons. Some games include spells that work off of these, making Earth spells Bashing and Wind spells Slashing.
• Chrono Trigger: physical attacks deal non-elemental damage. Two party members also have non-elemental affinity, granting them slight resistance to all magic damage: Ayla (a cavewoman born before humans were infused with magic) and Robo (a robot). Interestingly, Robo is still capable of dealing elemental damage with his techs— Laser Spin does Shadow, Area Bomb does Fire and Shock does Lightning.
• Early on City of Heroes had a few sources of untyped damage, mostly this was later replaced by toxic damage, but as a legacy effect toxic has no associated typed defence stat. (you can still acquire resistance normally though)
• The Worms from Cultist Simulator, which the game's pantheon of Eldritch Abominations fear in the same way humans fear said abominations. All of the monsters and artifacts are aligned with one of the nine principles that make up the setting's magic system, save for the Worms. Since the Worms exist outside the system, they're difficult for magic to comprehend and act against. An unreliable source says they're closest to Moth and Winter^note associated to chaos and entropy, respectively, among other things), but relying on them is dangerous.
• Diablo 2 has non-elemental magic damage, which very few enemies have resistance to. All seven character classes except the Druid and Sorceress have at least one skill for dealing magic damage, and there are some unique items that add magic damage to your attacks.
• The Disgaea series uses the elements Fire, Ice, and Wind for spells, as well as Star. Star used to be purely non-elemental that wasn't associated with any resistance values (though some abilities, such as the White Dragons in Disgaea 2 resisted non-elemental special abilities, which Star spells would've fell under along with physical skills), but later entries made it its own element with its own resistance values.
• Divinity: Original Sin and Original Sin II: Most weapons (other than wands and staffs) and offensive Witchcraft/Necromancer spells deal Physical damage. Unlike the elemental damage types, resistances and vulnerabilities to Physical damage are extremely rare.
• Damage Health and Drain Health effects in The Elder Scrolls games are Destruction effects that directly reduce Hit Points. Damage is more expensive in Mana than its elemental equivalents, while Drain is much cheaper but only causes temporary harm (unless that harm happens to be deadly).
• The Epic Battle Fantasy series:
  • In all games, Natalie's Lucky Star spell does non-elemental damage, such as in Epic Battle Fantasy 2, where its element is stated as "None".
  • In some games, there are spells / abilities that deal the [equipped weapon's element] damage, so dealing non-elemental damage with those requires a non-elemental weapon.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 1: Player 2's Pulsar spell:
    Hits all enemies for heavy non-elemental damage.
• In Eternal Darkness, spells empowered with the Mantorok rune fall outside of the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors game of the other three ancients. Additionally, Mantorok's spells typically have special effects like Damage Over Time.
• Acid weapons in Event Horizon deal typeless damage which cannot be resisted in any way.
• Fate/Grand Order introduces the Shielder class. While Servants within the game do obey a certain elemental rock-paper-scissors on who they are and aren't effective against, Shielder is notable for being the only class that does neutral damage to ALL classes, no exceptions. Mash Kyrielight is the only playable Shielder-class Servant in the game, although Galahad, the Heroic Spirit she draws power from, also possesses the ability to become a Shielder. Also, note that Mash later gains the ability (through an append skill upgrade) to do increased damage to Extra-class Servants, such as Avenger or Foreigner, although this is distinctly a trait of hers, and NOT inherent to the Shielder class itself.
• Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark has “Magical” damage, which is outside the game’s normal Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system and cannot be absorbed or resisted. Spells that inflict this damage are often very powerful, or else do less damage while inflicting status ailments.
• Final Fantasy. Non Elemental is the default for physical attacks, which aren't going to have an element unless you're using a specific weapon or skill. Elemental is the default for early direct-damage magic however, though a good number of spells (such as Status Effects) aren't going to be elemental, either. Notably, most of the strongest direct-damage spells, like Ultima, Bahamut, Flare (unless a game makes it a fire element spell), and Meteor, are non-elemental.
  • In later Final Fantasy games, physical attacks could be considered elemental as some monsters are immune to them.
  • At least one Final Fantasy game also included hidden (or at least never mentioned in-game) physical elements related to the kind of weapon used (slashing, bashing, piercing, etc) that occasionally an enemy's defenses would be strong or weak against. The actual effect was trivial enough that many players wouldn't even notice, but it was there in the game data.
  • Final Fantasy VII has a Good Bad Bug example with Ultima Weapon's "Ultima Beam" attack, which seems non-elemental but is actually of the "Hidden" element (it's the only offensive move with said element, the others are just status moves of various sorts). It's possible to resist or even absorb it by attaching Elemental to any non-elemental materia, though Ultima Weapon is easy enough that you probably don't need to bother.
  • Final Fantasy X is a strange case of zig zagging the trope for the Holy spell. The main elements of the game are fire, ice, lightning, and water, but Holy is treated as non elemental. Usually. Yunalesca is weak to Holy and a few of the monster creations in the Monster Arena can absorb Holy.
  • Final Fantasy XII lacks Ultima, instead it introduces Shock and Scathe, the latter of which is the strongest spell in the game and essentially is Ultima gameplay-wise. Worth noting is that while Bio and Scourge look like poison magic, they do direct non-elemental damage as well.
  • Final Fantasy XIII introduced the Ruin spell and its upgraded form Ruinga, which deal non-elemental damage unless upgraded with the one of Synergist's En(element) spells. All of Bahamut's attacks, are also non-elemental despite many of them looking like elemental attacks.
  • Final Fantasy XIV had spells with no element attached that were labeled as unaspected, such as Holy. When the game was rebooted, the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors were gutted so every spell was treated as non elemental, even ones that have obvious elements to them like Fire and Blizzard.
  • Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light has the Leaf series of spells, a rare case of non-elemental spells with the same level of power as regular elemental spells.
  • Final Fantasy VII Remake has Bahamut and Leviathan as the resident duo of non-elemental summons.
• Final Fantasy Legend III classifies most regular attacks as 'Damage' type, which can still be resisted by some monsters (mostly bosses). However, some black magic spells, such as Virus and Nuke, can deal untyped damage that bypasses even Damage resistance.
• The three types of weapons (swords/blades, axes/hammers, and lances/polearms) and the three elements of magic (fire, wind, and lightning) used in Fire Emblem games, all adhere to an Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic. The exception is bows for the weapon triangle which have no inherent advantage or disadvantage over the other weapons. A few of the games will also place Light magic outside the Trinity of Magic, though just as frequently gives it a different spot in the Trinity (Anima -> Light -> Dark -> Anima).
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening threw this out of the system and instead, made the elemental tomes have different characteristics. Wind tomes have the highest hit rate but trades in damage. Fire tomes are the middle ground, having decent damage and hit rate. Thunder tomes trade in the hit rate for critical hit and the highest damage output of the three. Light tomes are thrown out while Dark tomes have the highest damage possible in the entire game but are balanced with the lowest hit rate. The only exception is the Naga Tome, which deals non-elemental damage and is exceptionally effective against dragons.
  • In Fire Emblem Heroes, melee weapons and tomes are put together in the same colour-based Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors, but all staves and most bows and daggers are colorless, giving them neutral matchups against everyone. (Except Raventome users, at least, whose specialty is gaining 'colour advantage' against colorless units.) There are also a small number of colorless tomes, dragons, and beasts. Being colorless is usually considered an advantage, especially for defenders, as it allows for consistently good matchups without any easily exploitable or inconvenient weaknesses.
• The Neutral-type Vivosaurus in Fossil Fighters. Same goes for the Legendary type.
• In the iOS (iPod, iPad, iPhone) game Geomon, the recently introduced Mech type has no alignment, but no pure-mech Mon has been introduced.
• Normal humans (non-adepts) in Golden Sun. Adepts are canonically weak to the element opposing the one they control (though it doesn't really show with the player characters, whose resistances to the elements they're not aligned to are mostly equal and fixable with Djinn) and monsters have weaknesses and resistances all over the place, but regular humans are equally affected by all elements. Golden Sun: Dark Dawn introduced "dark" monsters, which are also equally vulnerable to all four elements.
• Granblue Fantasy has its seventh damage type used via damage skills, represented in white text, which isn't affected by the element weaknesses and strengths and is usually at a fixed number of damage. It also ignores all types of damage reduction or defense, making it invaluable against slimes and other enemies with high defenses. A non-elemental enemy type was introduced in the "What Makes the Sky Blue" event, which attacks with random elemental types and has no defensive strengths or weaknesses (besides a slight resistance to light/dark).
• Jeanne d'Arc allows every single character to take on one of the three alignments Sol, Luna and Stella by equipping accessories of the respective elements. However, one can also allow these characters to have a neutral alignment by not equipping them with these accessories. In fact, most boss characters in the game have neutral alignment.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, most attacks are "physical" or fire/ice/thunder. But certain spells and most Keyblade sleights are considered to be "special", which mostly work like this. "Mostly", as a couple of bosses resist or are weak to it, and it pierces defenses that regular elements can't get past.
  • Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] has the Balloon line of spells and any wind spells. The former is commonly mistaken to be Water element, as it gives Water resistance in Dream Eater creation.
• The later King's Bounty games have a few abilities that deal astral damage. With the exception of Death Star, they are Rage-based and only hit enemies (Death Star hits all living beings instead). Holy may also count, considering that there is no dedicated form of protection against it, but it's not very effective against anything but the undead and demons.
• League of Legends has True Damage, which cannot be mitigated and will always do the number of HP listed in the tooltip. It tends to be either a chip-damage side effect to another move, or an Ultimate.
• In The Legend of Dragoon, the game's strongest enemies tend to be of a neutral element, such as a dragon encountered in chapter three.
• Card-based RPG Lost Kingdoms has the four typical elements, along with neutral type. Cards and monsters that dealt with pure magic, death, or darkness were categorized as neutral. In Lost Kingdoms 2, the player could even specialize in neutral, but neutral affinity increased much slower than other elements (besides the new steel element).
• Lost Odyssey had the Force spell line, which dealt Non Elemental physical damage as opposed to magic damage
• The majority of Battle Chips and enemies in Mega Man Battle Network are non-elemental (often called the Null element). Starting in 4, many additional elements are introduced for the purpose of activating the game's Double Soul transformations, leaving Null as the only one that doesn't, though some of the forms can power up Null-element Chips in addition to their own element. However, these elements still aren't involved in the elemental square, at least not until 6 put four of them into a second square of their own.
• The Mega Man Zero and Mega Man ZX series started a trend among their standard eight bosses of having two of them being outside the Fire, Ice, Lightning triangle of the other six, lacking any specific elemental weakness but also any resistance to them either.
  • Before Double Soul, Style Changes from 2 and 3 put normal MegaMan into this trope, as every Style was forced into having one of the four elements. Well, except for Hub Style.
  • Mega Man Star Force reverts to just the four-element system, with a few extra elements becoming attached to regular attacks due to granting certain properties outside of the cycle. In both versions of Star Force 3, Mega Man gains a non-elemental transformation alongside one of each element; unusually for this trope, they are still given a weakness, albeit to one of the property-like elements.
• Metroid Prime: The Power Beam has a non-elemental affinity compared to the Plasma, Ice, and Wave Beams, which follow a Fire, Ice, Lightning motif. As a result, it's the only weapon in Samus' arsenal that can harm Chozo Ghosts.
• This was one of two points of blaster weapons in Might and Magic VI and VII — the damage done was in itself not that impressive for when you could get your hands on them, at least given that there were no skill that improved it and blasters never had and could not be given enchantments, but no creature had any sort of resistance to the energy damage they did. Combine that with a high rate of fire and a low miss-chance, and they became valid end-game weapons given how common high resistances to other damage types were at that point. The bad news? At that point some of the creatures you were facing had attacks that did the same type of damage, and just as they you have no way to get energy damage resistance...
• In the Mother series (except the first game), the powerful non-elemental attack is the trademark of The Hero of each game, where it is named after their favorite thing. Ness's attack is called PSI/PK Rockin' while Lucas's is called PK Love.
  • PK Starstorm, learned by Poo and Kumatora, is also non-elemental and in terms of its damage to cost ratio, the best PSI/PK attack in the game.
• In Nexomon, the Normal type is neutral to the other six types. Nothing resists it or is weak to it, and Normal-type Nexomon aren't weak to or resistant to anything. This is not the case in Nexomon Extinction, where Normal is resisted by, and weak to, the Ghost and Psychic types.
• The original Nexus War had spells that did Untyped damage, which didn't do more damage than usual but (unlike other damage types) didn't have a slew of potions and powers that made anyone immune to them. In the sequel, mundane non-magical attacks fill this role and there are several powerups that "promote" a magical attack to one that deals a mundane damage type.
• In Octopath Traveler, almost all damaging moves available to the player have either an element or a "weapon type", as the game revolves around exploiting enemies' weaknesses. However the Loot-Making Attack Bilfegan's Bounty is explicitly non-elemental.^note But it's still a magic attack, meaning it uses the character's "Elemental attack" stat rather than "Physical attack".
• While lacking an Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system, Path of Exile's Chaos element pulls double duty as both this and Armor Piercing. It has none of the Status Effects that fire, ice and lightning possess, but it goes straight through energy shields and damages health directly. While only a handful of enemies can deal chaos damage, it's also the hardest element to defend against as chaos resistance in equipment is rare and comes at a weaker magnitude and only a few passive skills in the massive skill grid offers any. There's even a passive skill that grants immunity to said element, but turns the player into a One-Hit-Point Wonder in return, forcing them to rely purely on Energy Shield to survive blows.
• The Perfect Tower: Normal enemies don't have any immunities or specialties. You can turn elemental enemies normal by using purification skills.
• The Trope Codifier for Mons itself, Pokémon, has a few individual-game-exclusive or minor examples. "Normal" fits into the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors like everything else though.
  • A few non-standard attacks in the game, such as Struggle, Future Sight and Doom Desire, are considered by the game engine to be typeless (though the latter two aren't as of Gen V and on), such that they are never super-effective and even do damage that bypasses Shedinja's Wonder Guard. Secondary damage sources, like the Confusion status effect, also ignore type.
  • The move Burn Out will cause Fire-type Pokémon to loose their Fire-typing after being used. If the move is used by a pure Fire-type like Arcanine or Typhlosion, then they become typeless until they regain their type back.
  • Revelation Dance, a move that deals damage matching the user's primary type, will become typeless when used by a Pokémon with no type (see above), in which case it'll deal neutral damage against any type but not bypass Shedinja's Wonder Guard.
  • Pawmot's Secret Art, Double Shock, is an Electric-type variant of Burn Out which removes its Electric-typing after using it, turning it into a pure Fighting-type. If this move is somehow used by a pure Electric-type, it'll become typeless until it's switched out.
  • In Pokémon Colosseum, Shadow Rush (the sole "corrupt" Shadow move in the game) functioned as non-elemental as well. In the sequel, it became the Infinity +1 Element and was doubly effective against everything except other Shadow Pokémon.
  • ???-type exists in the main games as well, though it was taken out in Generation V. It's normally impossible to get an offensive move or Mon with this type (though there does exist a ???-type; Arceus, a mon who changes its type based on held items), but if it's hacked in, it serves as a true non-elemental type with no strengths or weaknesses.
  • Generation I has glitch types, present on glitch Pokémon and glitch moves, that are functionally identical to the ???-type.
  • In the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series, Pokémon have the ability to perform a weak basic attack, which isn't of any typing. There's also two TMs exclusive to the series, Wide Slash and Vacuum Cut, which are both non-elemental. Wide Slash is a physical move that hits three tiles directly in front of the user, and Vacuum Cut is a set-damage attack that hits everything in a room.
    • Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon does away with those TMs, but in their place introduces a few enemy-exclusive typeless moves for the Void Shadows. Additionally, the final boss starts off typeless before it changes type.
• Geppetto in Shadow Hearts: Covenant is the one character without an innate element. His elemental affliation depends on the dress his puppet, Cornelia, wears. In Shadow Hearts: From The New World, Johnny, the Supporting Protagonist, doesn't have his own element; Shania, the game's Fusion user, is Darkness (as was Yuri from the previous game, also a Fusion user).
• Shin Megami Tensei games have "Almighty" spells. At minumum you'll typically encounter (in order of power) Megido, Megidola, and Megidolaon. Nothing can block them, and things that resist them (mostly bosses) are rare, but nothing is weak against them either. Almighty Spells also tend to have inflated MP costs for their damage output, making them bad MP economy.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei II, one boss, one of the aspects of God, gets healed by almighty attacks.
  • Persona completely lacks the Almighty element. The closest thing to an non-elemental attack is Hieroglyphein, which is described as "???", and it only works on bosses - every other enemy in the game resists it.
  • In Persona 2, Almighty attacks and Non-Elemental attacks are two separate elements. Almighty is treated like every other element, with a few opponents immune to Almighty attacks, like Dark Alice and the Big Bad first form. Your teammates Maya is also immune to Almighty once she gets her Ultimate Persona. On the other hand, Non-Elemental attacks like Another Dimension or Death Roulette are typically One-Hit Kill moves, and there is absolutely nothing to resists them.
  • Played straight in Persona 3 and averted in Persona 4. Both games retain the Megido series of Almighty spells, and performing an all-out attack with your whole party is an Almighty attack too. Unfortunately, in the latter game, Almighty attacks become just another elemental type, and some common enemies are resistant to it, making it hard to sweep the board with a team attack.
  • Persona 5 notably cuts the cost of Almighty attacks compared to other games, putting on par with (or in the case of Megidolaon, actually being cheaper than) elemental skills of similar power. Like the elemental skills, Almighty skills also have "boost" and "amp" abilities to increase their strength, although getting them requires Network Fusion.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, two bosses are resistant to almighty damage: Noah and Lucifer. Hopefully, you'll have the Pierce ability to help you.
  • In the first Digital Devil Saga, four enemies have some kind of resistance against almighty attacks: Metal Slime Omoikane, who is only affected by the normally useless Gun element, Bat takes only a single point of damage from all non earth damage while he take a defensive stance, the optional boss Huang Long is immune to all attacks while he uses his defensive move and the Big Bad's final form and its orbs resist almighty damage, encouraging you to take down the orbs and be able to hurt the Big Bad with elemental or physical attacks.
  • In the second Digital Devil Saga, an Old Save Bonus can allow you to recieve a ring that resists Almighty damage. However, this requires you to have defeated Huang Long, considered to be the second-hardest Optional Boss in the game after the Demi-Fiend, and who requires you to defeat four other bonus bosses just to get to.
  • In the DS spinoff Devil Survivor they are joined by Holy Dance and Drain, with Holy Dance being one of the best boss killing spells in the game. A grand total of one enemy resists Almighty damage, namely Beldr, who is immune to everything but mistletoe. The game also brings us the no longer hypothetical Megidoladyne attack, used by the Optional Boss Lucifer. Instead of being used in battle, it's used on the map to inflict extreme Almighty damage to everyone in your party, and gets more powerful each time it is cast, until it is powerful enough to inflict four-digit damage, in a game where the max HP of any controllable character or demon is 999.
  • Devil Survivor 2 has the extremely rare Anti-Almighty skill, and a certain demon (Lucifer) and one of your possible allies (Yamato) both have built-in Almighty immunities. Also, the second Arc Villain of the Triangulum Arc in Record Breaker, Spica, becomes immune to any attack used to kill its buds. This includes Almighty.
• Etrian Odyssey has a small number of skills that deal "untyped" damage. One such skill is named Megido, and the effect of upgrading it is listed as "Almighty Damage Up".
• Spiral Knights has the Normal damage type, which damages all enemy types equally.
• The Spirit Engine 2 has Absolute damage, which is as impossible to resist as the name implies.
• Tales Series games often feature one or two non-elemental summon spells, usually Maxwell or Origin, as well as a few non-elemental attack spells like Tractor Beam and Meteor Storm. In Tales of Eternia, though, Maxwell was actually "Elemental elemental", that is, embodying all elements.
• The Neutral type in Temtem is essentially the closest thing to "no type" and holder of the majority of generic physical actions like biting and licking. However, in-universe this is actually a wastebasket for all temtem not within other types, and indeed some moves seem elemental enough of their own.
• No type cards in Tokyo 7th Sisters are neither weak nor strong against cards with types.
• Torment: Tides of Numenera has Relativistic damage, which bypasses the target’s Armor and Resistance stats to always deal full damage.
• In the Ultima series of games (at least later on), Lightning damage fills this role, because no monster has an innate resistance to it. This is how Glass Swords are able to always deal maximum damage; they deal 255 points of Lightning damage.
• Chaos type damage in Warcraft III does full damage to every armor type, including the heavily-armored Fortified and the otherwise Nigh-Invulnerable Divine armor type. Conversely, the "medium" armor type, before a game update, received the same amount of damage from all weapons.
• Warframe:
  • The 'Damage 2.0' system has "True" damage, a completely unresisted damage type (that also doesn't cause a debuff) applied by melee finishing moves, some abilities and the bleed damage applied by Slash procs; as compared to the base damage types Impact, Puncture and Slash which subvert the trope as they will act as any other element (i.e being more or less effective against certain damage types, capable of applying a unique debuff etc.) despite being physical-based damage.
  • "Tau" damage (a unique damage type used exclusively by the Sentient faction) used to play the trope straight until the introduction of the Umbral mods, which improve Tau damage resistance.
  • "Void" damage (a unique damage type used by operators and one warframe) used to be a damage type that had normal resistances in place (Cloned Flesh and Fossilized health had 50% resistance, making it fairly ineffective) with its main niche being that Sentients were not resistant to it to it but a more recent update brought it in line to a true neutral damage type that could be utilized in normal gameplay, and does normal damage against everything while having special interactions against sentient units to screw with their adaptive resistances.
• The Blast spell in the Wild ARMs series of games. At least in the ones where Ley Points aren't a part of the battle system. In the games where they are, Blast takes the element of the hex the caster is standing and is only non-elemental if the hex has no such elemental traits.
• World of Warcraft:
  • There are six elemental schools of damage (holy, shadow, frost, fire, nature, arcane) plus a seventh category called physical. Of these, in earlier iterations of WoW only Holy damage had no form of resistance stat (armor was resistance against physical damage, shadow resistance reduced shadow damage, fire resistance reduced fire, etc.)
  • In later updates of the game, spell class resistance stats on item have mostly been eliminated except in special cases, but there are various other forms of resistances through various game mechanics.
  • Furthermore, many spells are categorized by two or more spell types (shadowfrost, shadowflame, frostfire, etc.) and always do damage based on the lower of the target's resistances; there is one category called 'Magic Damage' which is classed as all six spell types, and another category called 'Chaos Damage' which is all six spell types plus physical damage, which always in all cases benefits the lowest target's lowest resistance.
  • A lot of boss abilities, and some abilities used by GMs for testing purposes, don't fall into categories at all so that they can't be dodged, parried, blocked, absorbed, deflected, reflected, resisted, interrupted or dispelled.
• The page image displays the five elements of Wynncraft: Earth, Thunder, Water, Fire, and Air. Many creatures throughout the world are strong or weak against one or more elements, but none of them have any resistance against Neutral damage, which almost all weapons deal in some measure. Thus, even if a creature is shielded well against all five types of elemental damage, it can still be fought and defeated with Neutral damage.

Web Original

• The Ballad of Edgardo: Raw Spirit can't be resisted by anything. While you could theoretically beef up your elemental resistances to the point of near or total immunity, the only way to stop Raw Spirit from damaging you was to not be hit, period. The tradeoff for this, of course, was that it was so weak that elemental attacks typically still did more damage even against resistant targets, so nobody bothered with it. Except for the titular Edgardo, who was stuck using it since he took a perk that removed the cap on the amount of Spirit he could hold before reading the whole description, realizing too late that it prevented him from using elements. This made him pathetically weak... until he reached a city with a field effect that constantly and instantly regenerates all of your Spirit as long as you were inside the city walls. Since Edgardo had no cap on his Spirit, he now had infinite Spirit, meaning he could empower his attacks with infinite amounts of irresistible damage and one-shot anything.
• In the Neopets Battledome, there are three types of non-elemental damage: Ice, Darkness, and Drain. The first two are typos - the damage types for the items that use them were meant to be Air and Dark (note the lack of "ness") respectively. The latter is used for Fixed Damage Attacks. All of them function as Unblockable Attacks — Drain by design, and Ice/Darkness merely because there's no items made to defend against those damage types.

Western Animation

• An example appears in the Grand Finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender: Spirit/Energy Bending, which Aang uses to completely depower the Big Bad. Despite looking like a heaping helping of Deus ex Machina at first, it makes sense when you remember that the Avatar is both a spirit and a vital part of the Universe, so souls and cosmic energy are well within his power to command and manipulate. Sure, it's done rarely and uses a ton of power, but it can be done. Lion Turtles, ancient beings that predate the Avatar Cycle itself, were masters of Energybending. One of them taught Aang how to do it.
  • In The Legend of Korra, Amon claims that he has the same power but it's really a mix of Bloodbending and chi blocking. True energybending can undo it.

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