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"Who'd have thought being a vampire slayer was so fuckin' easy? Stakes and garlic, waste of time, chuck some feathers from the item store at it!"
A game mechanic where undead enemies can be quickly defeated with health items or by casting healing/revival magic. From a gameplay standpoint, this simply allows healing skills to do double duty as Turn Undead, and makes the party's dedicated healer not-so-useless when your party is asked to explore that ancient crypt at night. Logically, it's often explained or assumed that the source of healing magic (usually nature or the divine) is anathema to the undead. This particular example is one of the worst cases of Guide Dang It, since it's unintuitive to cast a healing spell on an enemy if players are unfamiliar with this trope.
For overlooked techniques that are genuinely useless except for one very specific situation, see Not Completely Worthless. Compare Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration for ways the undead can heal without, err, dying? Subtrope of Holy Hand Grenade, where Holy magic is explicitly used to kill and maim enemies, living or not.
Examples:
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Video Games
- Ancient Domains Of Mystery: Casting various healing spells, including Bless, on undead damages them. Throwing potions of cure corruption also dramatically weakens the chaos beings.
- In Baldur's Gate 2, a quest involves defeating a monster that is completely invulnerable, but will die when even the weakest healing spell is used on it. Thankfully, this isn't hard to find out, and the game helpfully puts a somewhat-hidden healing scroll in the same room.
- In Dragon Quest III, Zoma (the game's final boss) can be severely damaged by healing spells or Medical Herbs. In fact, this is the most effective way to attack him. He has to be weakened first with the Sphere of Light, though. There is absolutely nothing in the game that suggests this is possible. Even the complete walkthrough provided in the NES manual didn't say anything.
- You can learn a spell in Portrait of Ruin that cures vampirism. It also serves as one of the only two ways to keep red skeletons and axe knights from rising from their ashes.
- Legend's videogame adaptation of the Weis/Hickman original property Death Gate features a doppleganger of the player who precisely mirrors his motions (thus blocking his path). The solution is to use the game's rune-based magic system to cast the otherwise ill-advised "Self-Immolation" spell, but to construct it backwards.
- From Disgaea2 onward, there is the Reverse Damage geo effect, which can invoke this trope (and since there are several stages later on that use Reverse Damage, your healer turns into a death god/goddess.)
- Disgaea3 introduces an evility that makes healing spells cause damage at the expense of reducing the character's stats, allowing a healer to do this whenever they like, though not quite as effectively.
- In Earthbound, only the first and second parts of the final Boss Battle is much of a fight, and the rest are defeated with overuse of the "Pray" command.
- The other games in the series tend to lean towards this strategy during the final battles; in the original Mother (Earthbound Zero), the Big Bad was defeated by the party members singing a song. In Mother 3, the Final Boss cannot be defeated by standard means, and all you can do is defend and revive yourself while you're pummelled with 200-600 HP-draining hits per turn.
- The Final Fantasy series allows this a lot.
- This mechanic has been in the series since Final Fantasy II. Final Fantasy I instead had the more Turn Undead-style Dia line of spells.
- In Final Fantasy IV, Scarmiglione and his zombie minions are hurt and killed by using healing spells and items. Revive spell and items won't kill them outright, but will score huge amounts of damage. To be honest, because the counters to healing items are so deadly for your party, it's better to just use fire spells and items. At least then you'll stay in one piece.
- Final Fantasy V also has the Moogle Eater boss, which is That One Boss if you try to fight it legitimately, but jobs to a Phoenix Down or the Raise spell.
- You could also use a Gold Needle (which cures Petrification) to get an instant-kill on Stone enemies.
- The Phantom Train in Final Fantasy VI drops from one Phoenix Down.
- While using a Phoenix Down will kill any undead enemy in one hit, they can be expensive to stock up on. Holy Waters turn out to also kill undead enemies instantly, but they cost quite a bit less.
- Final Fantasy VI was supposed to have a counter to this system: while curative magic and items healed regular characters and hurt undead enemies, there were two status effects (Seizure and Phantasm, with the latter being a more powerful version of the former) that would hurt regular characters and heal undead (like a reversed version of the Regen status effect). As a result, several undead monsters bore the Seizure status effect, with the intended result of them being somewhat harder to kill because of this. Unfortunately, due to one of the numerous bugs in the game's battle system, the status effect didn't work like it was supposed to, and actually ended up hurting the monsters periodically instead of healing them. The resultant battles are rather humorous to watch.
- Another "counter" to this system is the exact reverse of Revive Kills Zombie, kill revives zombie. Using Instant Death effects like the Death spell or the effect of an Assassin's Dagger will on an undead foe will cause them to die... and then instantly regenerate with full HP.
- Also interesting is that the zombie damage system can be applied to player characters. Anyone wearing a Lich Ring is turned undead without the side effects of the Zombie condition, and so will be healed by Death and Poison, and harmed by Cure. Also applies to Gau raging an undead enemy.
- And the item to heal the "Stone" condition instantly kills many monsters made of stone. Most notably, the tombstone-things that roam the room where you find Odin, whom also give more money than required to buy said item. Which makes that "dreadful place" actually a fair training spot.
- Final Fantasy VI also had the spells Rasp and Osmose, which depleted an enemy's magic points (the latter also restored yours by the same amount). Some enemies were noted (though only at one spot in the entire game) to be inherently magical, and unable to maintain their forms if their MP was depleted. You thus had the option of either depleting their hit points or magic points to defeat them; in the case of several that had last-ditch attacks when out of hit points (including That One Boss), removing their magic was the wiser (or sometimes faster) option.
- A ghost boss in Final Fantasy VII could be killed instantly by using an X-potion (restores a living party member to full HP) on it, since it had less than 9999 HP.
- Casting "Angel Whisper" (ultimate cure-everything-even-death spell) on an undead enemy will result in instant death (no HP loss) + many status ailments.
- Then there's the Zombie President in Final Fantasy VIII which transforms into a zombie after a few hits. After it transforms, it can be killed by a single Phoenix Down. (The success rate, however, is quite low, so it actually takes a relatively large number of Phoenix Downs to kill him.)
- Abadon from the same game, a Phoenix Down will miss but the Curaga spell will severely damage him. For some unknown reason, he has the spell himself so you don't even need to use up your own magic stock, just keep drawing and casting!
- You don't even need to risk a draw failure or worry about a low MAG stat on the drawing character. Equip the Recover command for guaranteed 9999HP healing. Or 9999HP hurting on Abadon and any other undead creature you may encounter. And you have infinite uses of it. You only need three, though.
- The Zombie status effect makes player characters subject to this trope, as well as turning their models a strange shade of green. This is its only effect, so you might wonder why the enemies bother. Right up until the point you get one-shotted with a Curaga.
- In Final Fantasy IX the standard cure reversal works, and Life and Full Life both kill undead monsters instantly, while Phoenix Down causes HP To One to zombies, allowing even Dagger, whose weapons are the weakest, to finish them off. Oddly enough, though, zombification doesn't wear off upon death, making the game hate you during the Iifa Tree level, where your characters keep getting zombified. You can't revive a zombified party member unless you first remove the zombie status with an item — and Remedy (the cure-all for status effects) doesn't cure zombification or viral infection.
- Evrae Altana in Final Fantasy X takes two or three. Final boss Yu Yevon, while not a zombie, is vulnerable to zombification (unlike most boss monsters); coupled with his habit of casting a very powerful cure spell during any turn in which his life is not at maximum, this makes it fairly easy to trick him into killing himself.
- One boss uses this exact tactic against your party, using a Zombie attack on one of your party members followed by Life (which kills Zombies). This can easily be used to your advantage, though: Occasionally he will aim for a party member he did not Zombify, causing nothing to happen. He might even hit a dead party member, reviving him with full HP. A later Sequential Boss also resorts to Zombie effects in her second form which you must "suffer" before defeating her, because the first action of her third form is a global death effect which only Zombied party members will survive.
- Almost the ONLY way for a reasonably leveled party to to take on the Dark Flans inside Mount Gagazet is to use a zombie weapon to inflict the status on the flan, then Phoenix Down or Life it to death.
- The Final Boss of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest can be destroyed with two or three Cure spells from the Hero.
- Aside from Cure, all of your White Magic takes an offensive bent when used on enemies. Life becomes an insta-kill spell, Heal hits the targeted enemy with every status affliction it would normally cure, and Exit boots them out of reality entirely.
- This trope is the basis for one of the main game-breakers of Final Fantasy XII where you can spawn and then repeatedly kill Dustia, an undead rare monster far beyond your combat level, right at the start of the game. This allows a player to level up Vaan to level 40+ in a absurdly short stint and in turn raises all of your eventual allies levels through Leaked Experience.
- And in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 the Ranger class gains the "Mirror Item" skill, which changes it from Revive Kills Zombie to Revive Kills Everything Except Zombie, as well as the more obvious inversions such as making Potions deal damage. And Remedies (normally a cure-all) now inflict everything.
- Also played straight in the same game on one Side Quest where a requester wants a Potion and Hi-Potion to heal up, but winds up hurting herself drinking the Potion because she is a zombie. Luso stops her from drinking the Hi-Potion, which would have been extremely fatal. Keep taking care of her, she gets better (and dual wielding).
- In Moria and some versions of Angband, the spell "Turn Stone to Mud", normally used for digging new passages, can also be used to devastating effect against stone-based monsters such as golems.
- In Bungie's Myth series, healing any undead unit will kill it.
- A glitch/feature allows you to use this against the final boss of the first game, breaking the otherwise awesomely challenging ending with a one-hit-kill. The second game averts the trope with all undead boss and mini-boss units—healing them will actually heal them.
- In NetHack, the Finger of Death spell, one of the most powerful spells in the game, resulting in an instant kill if the target is not an undead or any monster that can resist the spell, only serves to heal Death, who is one the Riders (three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appeared; specifically, Famine, Pestilence, and Death; it is assumed that the player is War), while Pestilence, another Rider, can be healed by potions of sickness and damaged by potions of healing, because The Dev Team Thinks of Everything.
- Played straight in the MMORPG Ragnarok Online, where the Resurrection spell and items that give the same effect have a chance to instantly kill any non-boss creature with the undead element, even other players (assuming they wear armour that gives them the undead element). Healing spells of every sort also damage also damage undead enemies (and allies), the exception being the Alchemist's Potion pitcher skill.
- Interestingly played with in Warcraft III: A Paladin healing spell kills undead and heals the living, but a Death Knight spell kills the living and heals the undead.
- Strangely, its MMORPG successor World of Warcraft ignores this so that undead PCs can be revived by living teammates. This caused some philosophical problems for the boys at Penny Arcade.
- Most infuriatingly, Death Knights are not themselves Undead; they're just as alive as the Paladins they face (and, by implication, used to be). Why couldn't they just have allowed living PCs to learn the damn spell?
- In the Warcraft tabletop RPG, it is stated in the rules that using resurrection spells on undead creatures won't work, or if the undead has been "killed", return it back to unlife. This is apparently because resurrection spells return the being's soul to their body, and the undead still have their soul, it's just bound to the undead body (making undeath their "natural" state). Light-based healing should still damage the undead since they're powered by the antithesis of the Light.
- Word Of God says that undead who keep their own will can use and be healed by the light, it just hurts like hell.
"Wielding the Light is a matter of having willpower or faith in one's own ability to do it. That's why there are evil paladins. For the undead, this requires such a great deal of willpower that it is exceedingly rare, especially since it is self-destructive. When undead channel the Light, it feels (to them) as if their entire bodies are being consumed in righteous fire. Forsaken healed by the Light (whether the healer is Forsaken or not) are effectively cauterized by the effect: sure, the wound is healed, but the healing effect is cripplingly painful."
- Also in World of Warcraft: one of the Paladin's spells, Holy Shock, has an effect along these lines. If targeted on a friendly, it'll heal them; if targeted on an enemy (including but by no means limited to undead), it'll do damage. Priests have Penance (single target) and Holy Nova (area of effect), which do the same. Some veteran priests use a targeting macro on their Smite and Flash Heal spells so that the same key press will cast the correct spell depending on the target. This makes the same button press kill enemies and heal allies.
- During WOW's original beta spells on Undead PCs did indeed work the way they do in WC3, but it was found to be too broken (A paladin could kill swarms of undead players in PVP with little effort.) so they were reclassified as humanoid.
- In effect in MapleStory, where Undead monsters will immediately become Clerics' favourite monsters to grind on, as the Heal skill heals yourself, any party members in the area, and any undead monsters in the area. They can just spam heal spells on mobs of undead monsters and the only thing they'll ever have to worry about is MP. Not a bad deal.
- In a variation, the easy way to beat the boss fight against Cyanis in The Bards Tale III is to cast cure on him. He's not a zombie, though, just a good man gone mad from grief.
- In the 3rd Breath of Fire game, you will occasionally run into a large group of Zombie enemies lead by a "ZombieDr". Wail on his team for a bit, and the good Doctor will use the game's most powerful full-party healing spell....at which point this trope turns it into one of the most hilarious things to ever happen in a random encounter in RPG history.
- In the first dungeon right after the time skip, you encounter a Zombie Dragon boss who loves mass status effects and is incredibly annoying. Level-grind Garr to 26 beforehand and cast Kyrie, hilarity ensues.
- As Neverwinter Nights uses the D&D ruleset, this works as expected. Players mystified by Vampire Priests who unexpectedly die in a flash of white energy might be amused to learn that, when seriously injured, any NPC with standard cleric AI might attempt to use healing magic on themselves, thus committing suicide as undead. (Irritatingly, the XP goes away, too.)
- In the premium module Pirates of the Sword Coast, your character becomes undead. After that point healing spells and potions hurt you, and you must instead chug potions of harm to restore your HP. (Mercifully, if you decide to export your undead character into a different module, they'll retain all the undead immunities but can be healed with normal curative magic.)
- Pokémon Diamond & Pearl introduced Black Sludge, an item that harms its holder. That is, unless held by a Poison type, which is healed instead.
- In the game Magicka, most spells cast using the Life element heal the living and deal damage to zombies. Which explains the ability to place healing mines. Not a good spell to use for standard healing, though
- In Xenogears, a particularly notorious enemy not only gets healed by offensive spells, but also by basic physical attacks. The ensuing rage and confusion is usually enough to stop most players from discovering that using even the weaker heals on it drops it pretty quickly—though it seems obvious now, imagine you're experimenting with all the different elements, deathblows, lethal items, trying to find SOMETHING that can stop this thing...experimentation usually stops short of trying to heal your foes, especially when the monster's appearance and name don't exactly give away this trait. They also have an HP To One ability. This monster alone takes its place among the game's other puzzles that collectively make the average gamer feel like a dunce.
- Minecraft has several kinds of potions with beneficial or harmful effects. For every type, you can use it on yourself, or turn it into a splash potion to throw at friends or enemies. Zombies and skeletons are healed by potions of Poison or Instant Harm, but can be damaged with potions of Regeneration and Instant Health.
- Surprisingly (and somewhat frustratingly) averted in multipart browser RPG Mardek, which has a Zombie status effect (which turns your party members into zombies who attack you) and an item, Holy Water, that cures it. Using Holy Water on a pre-existing zombie does nothing.
- Healing spells, however, do decent damage to undead.
Tabletop Games
Non-game Examples
Anime & Manga
- In the cat arc in InuYasha, Sesshomaru defeats a monster that had sucked up the souls of four other demons using his Tenseiga, which cannot harm a living being, and revives the dead. The trapped souls return to their bodies.
- Tenseiga revives the dead by slaying the spirits that come to gather the dead person's soul. As it happens, this little quirk means that Tenseiga can cut ghosts and other Made Of Air entities, and is in fact the only weapon that can do so.
Comic Books
- In X-Men, Sebastian Shaw absorbs any kinetic energy directed at him, even a bullet, so Storm covers him in snow, which actually saps his energy, due to cold being a lack of said energy. *
Ironically, 15ish years later the X-Man Bishop—whose powers are similar to Shaw's—would charge himself up by using snowfall.
- In Invincible the main character faces a villain with powers similar to the X-Men character mentioned above; the way the main character wins is continues punching the badguy until he's been overloaded with so much energy it travels through the floor vaporizing his family and emotionally crippling him
Folklore
- Many household items and materials that have a known healing effect are often associated to be used against evil spirits or creatures. For example, silver is a known germicide (it's toxic to germs like many heavy metals but not toxic enough to kill humans, at least not accidentally) and has been used instead of antibiotics throughout history. Werewolves are hurt by silver, as well as vampires and possibly other evil creatures.
- According to some accounts, the nuckelavee (a skinless, plague-bearing centaur...or, "a very large head on two small arms") was hurt by contact with fresh water.
- Vampires and evil spirits were believed to be incapable of crossing running water. It's probably based on the ancients noticing that drinking from stagnant water, which was often loaded with dangerous microbes, caused illness, while running water was considered safe for drinking.
Literature
- Night on Mispec Moor by Larry Niven. An alien plant reproduces by infecting newly killed corpses and rallying their bodies for one last lurch. On a battlefield an off-worlder is cornered by these plausible zombies. He's in deep trouble until, in desperation, he tries spritzing one with his pan-spectrum cure spray. Better Than It Sounds.
- Averted in the Xanth series, where water from a healing spring can patch up damage dealt to undead creatures - fairly useful to the (good guy) Zombie Master, since his zombies don't heal naturally. It can't return them to true life, though, only return them to an intact corpse state.
- The Hunter from the Coldfire Trilogy is a strange example. As a consequence of the Deal with the Devil that made him immortal, his very being is so twisted that healing magic would have no effect on him. Worse, if he tried to use it himself it would kill him. A rare case of the zombie being killed if he tried to cast Revive. When Damian learns this he muses on the irony of being punished for an act of compassion.
- Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the older examples of this. The daughter of a botanist, Beatrice Rappaccini grows up in a poisonous garden and, as a result, becomes poisonous herself. A man falls in love with her from afar and, in desperation, gives her an antidote so they can try to live together. Guess what happens...
- In The Black Mountains by Fred Saberhagen, Som the Dead, a local viceroy of a vicious empire, has made himself immortal and invulnerable by becoming a living dead. Any attacks against him wound the attacker. He is finally destroyed when, mistaking him for someone horribly wounded and gangrenous, Draffut throws a measure of concentrated liquid life force at him.
Live Action TV
- In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where an unstoppable weapon is being used by the villainess to rip the souls out of everyone's body, Picard realizes that it feeds off anger and calms down, causing the weapon to stop working.
- In the Star Trek New Frontier novel "Gods Above", the crew eventually realize the way to stop The Beings (the kin of Apollo from "Who Mourns for Adonais?") is to not only show no fear, but actually have no fear, as fear and worship are the two things The Beings feed on (and they've already Technobabbled up a solution for the worship thing).
- The original series episode Day of the Dove had a similar plot.
Webcomics
- In Dominic Deegan, white magic (which usually has restorative and invigorating effects) is not only very effective against undead and necromancers, but potentially lethal to infernomancers. This is apparently not an inherent feature of the magic itself, but rather because demons (and, by extension, their mortal servants) are vulnerable to faith, and white magic has a strong association with holiness among Callanians. For the orcs, who assign little spiritual significance to light or darkness but hold ice to be sacred, ice-based magic is just as effective against demonic foes as white magic is for Callanians.
- Penny Arcade made a World Of Warcraft related comic about a group of Horde characters gathered around their fallen Undead friend, who was asking politely to be rezzed; the others ponder whether or not casting revival on a zombie would be a good thing or if it would finish him off.
- In 8-Bit Theater Chaos had just about torn his way into the dimension in order to turn it into his own hellish playground. The depowered protagonists were helpless and as Chaos went One-Winged Angel it appeared all was doomed... until four healing characters showed up and purified Chaos with White Magic.
White Mage: And then we zapped enough white magic to bring down a vile god of chaotic energy.
Priest: Which he was.
Healer: So, that worked out.
- Referenced in a combination of this Ctrl+Alt+Del strip and the one straight after it. Although in this case it may be that Ethan did not intend the tropes meaning. The fact that the arc so far has a heavy tabletop games theme running through it though seems to indicate that he would know about it.
- Full Frontal Nerdity played this with regards to a Left 4 Dead-inspired campaign. Cure Disease would kill the zombies by eliminating the virus animating them while a resurrection would return them to life... at which point the zombies would tear the newly-revived character apart.
Western Animation
- In the Anvilicious Justice League Unlimited episode, "Hawk and Dove," the good guys find themselves fighting an unstoppable automaton called the Annihilator that gains strength from aggression and violence. Eventually, Dove, the pacifist superhero, insists on trying the passive approach. He stands up to the machine without attacking or acting in his own defense. Without any aggressive action to feed on, the machine shuts down.
- In the same vein, the android AMAZO mimics both the principal characters' superpowers and weaknesses, as is revealed when after he obtains Superman's strength he also obtains his weakness to kryptonite.
- And it takes him about three seconds to evolve past that weakness to Kryptonite, too.
- Hilariously enough, in AMAZO's original appearance in the comic books, his power was to duplicate all of the powers of the current members of the Justice League. How did they beat him? Simple; They disbanded the Justice League mid-fight, rendering AMAZO a helpless robot, as he had no powers to copy.
- The Samurai Jack episode "Jack vs. Mad Jack" has Jack fighting a clone spawned from his irrational anger. At the conclusion, he catches on, steps back and meditates. With his anger calmed, the clone's power cuts off and it dissipates.
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