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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!
Situation where a tough enemy who can be beaten with a simple but sometimes overlooked strategy utilizing a single technique or item. The famous example is undead enemies being killed by healing or revival magic. Since the enemy is "dead", taking away their "deadness" kills them. Adding this to the " Non Lethal KO versus Only Mostly Dead" debate is sure to give a headache.
This sometimes applies to a boss whose only real danger is a "charged attack". You merely have to blast them to interrupt the countdown. Sometimes, doing so will even kill them from Phlebotinum Overload.
This can be the video game equivalent of an Eigen Plot for underused classes, abilities, items, etc.
For overlooked techiques that are genuinely useless except for one very specific situation, see Not Completely Worthless.
Examples:
- Originated in the Dungeons And Dragons tabletop roleplaying system, from which a great many of the mechanics of fantasy RPGs, and the tropes based on them, arose.
- This is explained within the rules by stating that undead creatures are powered by negative energy, while healing spells work by channelling positive energy- when the two types meet, they cancel each other out, harming the undead. Likewise Inflict Wound spells use negative energy to harm the living, and thus heal undead creatures.
- Most Necromancy spells, which use negative energy, only heal Undead foes. An exception is "Undeath to Death", one of the very few instant-kill spells that can affect them.
- The actual 'return from the dead' spells, however, require material components worth thousands of gp (that are consumed by the casting) take several minutes (a minute being ten combat rounds) to cast, and explicitly state they do not work on undead creatures, at least not if the undead creature hasn't been re-killed already (in which case it turns the undead creature back into who it was when it was alive). The original troper may have been thinking of a spell like Heal, which does indeed do enough damage to past most undead creatures in one shot, and on a normal creature is usually sufficient to bring them back to full health from unconsciousness (but not actual death).
- In second edition and before, however, it did work on undead creatures, either destroying them or turning them into living creatures depending on exactly what rule you looked at. The description of the mummy in first edition stated specifically that a resurrection spell turns it into a normal fighter.
- while Raise Dead acted as Slay Living for undead. (Yeah, it makes sense) but then, 2nd. ed. had the entire concept of "reversible" spells...
- According 3.5, undead are in fact turned back to normal by the spell true resurrection, which makes for some very interesting RP opportunities and new chars.
- Although, in some versions it is explicitly state that one can only be revived in they want to be revived. (Thus, you can't resurrect someone over and over in order to torture them.) Some modules point out that some intelligent undead are aware of this and very explicitly do not want to be revived, thus it does not work.
- When cast on an Eye of Gruumsh (a one-eyed, mad orc fighter), Remove Blindness/Deafness (to restore his other eye) disables his abilities.
- Averted in 4th Edition, wherein healing effects work the same on everybody, and the old "positive energy/negative energy" has been changed to "radiant damage/necrotic damage." Undead are resistant to necrotic damage and vulnerable to radiant damage, but enough necrotic damage will still destroy undead, and radiant damage hurts the living too.
- Positive energy was dangerous in 3rd Edition. Staying too long on the Positive Energy Plane eventually causes living creatures to explode.
- In the Endless Quest series published by TSR (a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure IN D&D! series), one ending for Lair of the Lich is to cast Raise Dead on said lich. This doesn't work in the game at all of course, but hey, it was funny.
- One of the odder monsters of the old-school D&D games was the Nilbog, a goblin that could not be killed with regular attacks and spells, as such attacks would heal him rather than hurt him. The only way to kill him was to use healing spells.
- The Final Fantasy series allows this a lot.
- The Phantom Train in Final Fantasy VI drops from one Phoenix Down.
- Final Fantasy VI had (or rather 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, there were several undead monsters that 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 are 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.
- Another unortodox use of spells was "Vanish". The trick here is that when physically attacking a vanished character, attacks would always miss - but when magically attacking a vanished character, attacks would always hit. Thus, a common tactic is to cast Vanish on enemies and then attack them with a One Hit Kill attack like Break, Death, or Banish - usually it wouldn't work, but when your targets are Vanished, success is assured!
- 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.
- However, this chapter also includes a double subversion. 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 advantadge, though: Occasionally he will aim for a party member he did not Zombiefy, 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.
- Another "boss becomes ridiculously easy" variety shows up with Natus. Cast Reflect on your party, he keeps damaging himself!
- In a "charged attack" sense, the easiest (and pretty much the only) way to defeat Bahamut in most of the games you fight him in is to bounce his Mega Flare attack back at him with Reflect spells.
- The DS remake of IV removed this option, thus making the battle a lot more difficult.
- In the same game, the boss Asura can heal more damage than you could ever do in a single action, but cast Reflect on her and all that healing will be redirected to your own party members.
- Any magic-based boss who targets your entire party with its attack can be defeated handily by casting Reflect on all members of your party (or simply summoning Carbuncle, who does that easily). In fact, Carbuncle followed by targeting your entire party with powerful black magic is a fairly common tactic, especially against bosses that cast Reflect on themselves, since that's the only way most spells will hit them anyway.
- The above "reflect override" effect was actually introduced in IV, but was absent from VII, in which using this trick results in a game of "magic ping-pong" until one of the reflects wears off.
- And in FFXII, certain bosses (especially Exodus and Zodiac) use this trick on you, casting Reflect on themselves before using their most powerful attack. Over and over.
- The secret to beating the Demon Wall is quite easy in Final Fantasy IV. Casting "Slow" on it not only decreases its attack rate, it also slows the rate at which it approaches the heroes.
- Likewise, the final boss of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest can be destroyed with two or three Cure spells from the Hero.
- VI and V had the unblockable spell Invisibility, which made any magic hit an enemy 100% of the time. This could then be combined with one of the three low-hit-rate instant-death spells, Stone, X-Zone, and Death. In VI this overrode status immunities. This meant that you could kill, in some cases, even the final boss with two attacks.
- It should be noted that if you used X-Zone to kill Doom Gaze with this trick, you wouldn't get the magicite.
- Soulcage in Final Fantasy IX dies to one Phoenix Down or Life spell (as do many of the other monsters in that area). On a related note, quite a few stone monsters in that game were a variation on this, dying when a Soft (item that cures petrification) was used on them.
- The "Soft" item trick also works on statue enemies in V. It even has a special animation.
- 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.
- Final Fantasy Tactics has a variant - the final boss is extremely vulnerable to an Oracle's Drain spell, the cheapest ability to buy for the class and not very useful in most circumstances. This actually turns Beowulf (an optional character that has more powerful versions of all Oracle abilities) into a one-battle Game Breaker.
- 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 an absurdly short period of time, and in turn raises all of your eventual allies levels through Leaked Experience.
- Speaking of Final Fantasy XII, if one is either a diligent sidequester or adventurous about venturing into Zertinan Caverns, shortly before the halfway point of the game there becomes available an accessory that turns Revive Kills Zombie into Revive Kills Damn Near Anything. Mmm, delicious broken game.
- The status ailment "Reverse", for all intents and purposes, turns any non-zombie into an undead as it reverses what something heals from and what it takes damage from. A common tactic in Mark Hunting is to cast Reverse and then "Renew", the most powerful healing spell, For Massive Damage.
- Ultima in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance can't move and has only one special attack, which inflicts the extremely annoying Charm status. However, the developers neglected to make Ultima immune to the game's law system, and if you fight the battle on the day Charm is banned, she will just stand there and let you kill her, because enemies (except those immune to laws) will never break the law (unless forced to, such as being berserked when attacking is illegal).
- And in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 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 himself 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 weilding).
- 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!
- To counter the undeads vulnerability to this trope, several games in the series also made it so that Death effects would cause the undead to revive instantly with full health, while the effect had a 100% chance to occur on them (thankfully, not on bosses).
- 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.
- Many otherwise-impossible fighting game bosses have a specific sequence of attacks that will bring them down without much trouble.
- Zero in King Of Fighters 2000, for example, can't seem to counter repeated sweeps.
- Jinpachi Mishima of Tekken 5 is surprisingly vulnerable to attacks using the controller sequence Forward-Forward+Punch.
- LEFT Punch, actually. Square. "1", if you're an arcade-goer. Trying that with 2 (Triangle, Right Punch) will get you massacred.
- Princess Sissy, the final boss of Power Instinct Matrimelee, has an attack wherein she summons Abobo to throw punches. If you roll during the attack and then hit her from behind, her AI causes her to repeat the attack. As a result, you can trick her into looping that attack (and thus hit her over and over from behind) until she's defeated.
- Inferno cannot see throws coming, and they take off three times as much HP from his three-times-as-large health. May be an oversight, but no one is complaining.
- 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.
- Similiarly, 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 realizes 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).
- In Earthbound, only the first part of the final Boss Battle is actually 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.
- Much of the HP draining can be avoided however, via use of the Franklin Badge, which reflects all lighting based attacks. Since the final bosses two main attacks are using his lightning sword, and PK Love (Which Flint protects you from for the duration of this battle) the final boss actually ends up killing himself. Though, to be fair, he was your apparently dead brother Claus, who was revived by Porky and brainwashed to be his general, which explains why he can use PK Love. He finally makes peace with his family before his defeat, making this a case of Redemption Equals Death.
- Also in MOTHER 3, you can trick the Barrier Trio by spamming Defense Down alpha so that they waste every move raising their defense.
- 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 them. Thankfully, this isn't hard to find out, and the game helpfully puts a somewhat-hidden healing scroll in the same room.
- Exor in Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars can be defeated with one well-timed Geno Whirl, a strategy that works on exactly zero other bosses in the game. This is probably an oversight rather than an intentional weakness.
- This is an oversight. Due to the way the game is coded, when Exor's invulnerability disappears, so does his instant death protection.
- The final battle in Deathmatch mode of Worms: Armageddon pits two worms of yours against fifteen computer-controlled worms. If you dig your worms into the ground and hide them, the computer will turn on itself and really only pay attention to you after they have nearly evened the odds. This does not happen at any other time in single-player mode.
- Valkyrie Profile, as well as Star Ocean: The Second Story, have a number of otherwise fairly weak weapons with "Slayer" in the name, which can kill certain otherwise very difficult enemies in a single hit (including bosses), if they match the name of the weapon. Of course, for balance reasons, they're Breakable Weapons.
- Not quite breakable enough, considering that if you finish the battle in the turn you use the weapon, it has no chance of breaking. As most of the enemies affected hunt alone, they last a suprisingly long time. Long enough for this editor to forget that they were breakable, and lose one when two dragon zombies teamed up.
- Non-RPG example: In Mega Man 2, it is much easier to defeat Metal Man the second time around than the first. After all, the second time you can use his weapon against him; it's a one-shot kill. This is only in the wussy American 'Normal' mode, equivalent to the non-existent Japanese 'Easy' mode. It would actually take two shots in 'Hard' mode.
- He's not the only one to fall quickly. It is possible to kill Crashman in one shot, as well as burning Woodman with one charged fireball, again, only in American 'Normal' mode. These are both considerably more difficult though, given the nature of the weapons.
- Using Top Spin can also create one-hit finishes on Shadowman, and Wily's last form in Mega Man 3, although this is very random.
- 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. (See Dungeons and Dragons entry above)
- 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.
- During WOW's original beta spells on Undead PCs did indeed work the way the 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 re-classified as humanoid.
- In Romancing Sa Ga 3, there's a difficult boss fight against three plant monsters that can be made a lot easier—at most, only one of the three is immune to instant death, and one of the spell combos is a high-probability vs. all instant death attack.
- The original Prince of Persia had a doppelganger boss whose death would also kill your main character. It could only be defeated by sheathing your sword and running into him, absorbing the copy into the original.
- Similarly, 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.
- The Super Metroid boss Draygon can give you a hard time unless you know the trick. Around the room are cannons which, when blasted, leave arcs of electricity behind. Let Draygon grab you, then fire your Grappling Beam into the electricity — and watch the boss fry.
- In Super Metroid, you can also kill Ridley with 20 charged plasma beam hits (as opposed to about 100 missiles or 35 super missiles). However it's not easy as the charging takes time and leaves you quite open to his attacks, not to mention he's very difficult to hit.
- Super Metroid also contains something of a reverse version of this. When fighting the miniboss Crocomire, shooting at him will push him back until he falls into a pit of lava and dies (but not before giving a nice Nightmare Fuel moment). However, use a power bomb against him and he goes berserk and rams you against a spiky wall till you die.
- In Metroid Prime, you can instantly remove Ridley's wings and half his health by boosting through his feet. Once he's grounded, you can kill him with two shots from the wavebuster. The former is a glitch, the latter isn't.
- The Wavebuster doesn't work on him in the European release, and quite likely not in the Player's Choice version either. He takes some damage but when he hides his weak spot, the attack stops harming him.
- Also in Prime games, many of the beam combo weapons (like Wavebuster, Ice Spreader, and Sonic Boom), while unable to kill bosses with one hit, can remove a sizable chunk of the bosses healthbar and end one phase of the fight in a single shot. They tend to use a very large amount of missiles and are often quite inaccurate.
- The Screw Attack in Prime 2 and 3 takes a while to activate and has to land at a specific distance to be effective. However it deals a ton of damage against bosses.
- During the Timed Mission in Prime 2 you have to fight Dark Samus. If you hit her with a screw attack right before she reaches half health, you will skip most of her (slow) Turns Red phase.
- Gandraya in Prime 3 is acrobatic, hops all over the arena and fires homing projectiles. But when she grabs you, the spot she disengages in is the perfect Screw Attack distance. And it takes 1/6 of her health to boot.
- Omega Ridley isn't vulnerable to the Screw Attack, but it will interrupt his attack. Speedrunners and low-life runners will spam Screw Attack to force Ridley to choose a faster, easier to dodge attack instead.
- Once you get the X-Ray Visor in Metroid Prime 3, you can use it to kill the Metroid Hatcher in one shot.
- Super Smash Bros Melee has several challenges in what are called 'Events'. The final Event, #51, the Showdown, pits you against three aggressive enemies on a cramped stage, with little room to run or hide. While the world record time is still achieved by aggressive in-your-face attacking, ludicrously fast times have been achieved by luring the AI into jumping to its doom by leaping off first.
- In the same event, you can easily defeat Giga Bowser by using Jigglypuff's rest on him, making Jigglypuff a Lethal Joke Character
- The Cruel Man Melee in Brawl challenges are easily accomplished by choosing a floaty character and hovering under the platform until they go after you. Then you fly up onto the platform and watch them fall to their doom.
- In the 10th Fire Emblem game, by not using the Infinity Plus One Sword and instead using a hammer (a weapon that deals triple damage to heavily armoured foes) on the Black Knight (who is of course a heavily armored unit), the otherwise long boss fight can be shortened to 2 turns.
- Speaking of Fire Emblem, FE7's Luna is a far better option then the legendary weapons for the final level, but that is also partly due to the fact that the legendary weapons more or less suck.
- There's two that were easy to miss in Painkiller: Battle Out Of Hell, both of which involve the otherwise difficult Panzer Spider enemy — a cyborg demon spider. Just before the end of the "Secret Lab" level, you face your first one... slightly earlier in the same sewer tunnel, you face a pack of Gremlins — powerful, nigh-invulnerable angler-fish creatures. If, instead of killing the Gremlins, you just run from them until you reach the Panzer Spider, they'll attack each other on sight and die instantly. Similarly, at the end of "Dead City", you face a Panzer Spider that's exceptionally powerful, even by the standards of the powered-up versions from that level... but there's a tanker truck stuck in the top of the tunnel it's in. Shoot it with the right timing, and it will explode and fall on the Panzer Spider, killing it instantly.
- The Eden Trial in City Of Heroes spawns two Giant Monsters (enemies that hard to take down with a full team of eight players) when your team tries to attack a gigantic rock wall. A solid strategy for when you don't have eight players is to lure the Giant Monsters, one at a time, into one of the many deep pits that dot the landscape, through which the players access different "levels" of the event. Players can go through them, but NPCs get stuck.
- This was fixed in later versions, but something similar hasn't been: Luring the Clockwork Paladin to the police drones in King's Row. With a good sniper power, you never have to be in range as you kite him away, and you can just rely on the drone's one-hit KO to save you and reset the mission.
- After adding the Ragdoll Physics engine, enemies who get stuck in knockback animation will not stand up or defend themselves, so you can take your time to kill him.
- In the otherwise-abysmal Genesis game Warlock, you have a crystal ball you can use as a weapon. Said crystal ball will orbit you for a brief time when you use an item from your inventory. During that time, you are completely invincible. Imagine how simplistic the Final Boss becomes when you exploit that trick on him, especially if said item is a healing potion, crystal shield, or full-screen nuke...
- In the free MMORPG Urban Dead, there is no such thing as "permanent" death; any zombie can be reverted to human form using a device called a Revivification Syringe. The closest a zombie can come to being unreviveable is with the skill "Brain Rot," which renders one immune to the effects of syringes in most situations. However, even zombies with the skill can still be revived in a powered Necro Tech facility. Although such tactics are less common than they were before due to the increase Action Point cost of using a syringe, it is still more AP-efficient to clear out a builidng with syringes than with weapons.
- However, more zombie players have been getting the Brain Rot skill, if only because it allows them to get the skill Flesh Rot which increases hit points by 10 and lowers damage inflicted by guns.
- Handled interestingly in Metal Gear Solid 3: The only way to "win" the boss battle against The Sorrow is to get killed, then use the "revival pill" you had from the beginning. The purpose of the revival pill was to awaken from a state of false death (which could be brought on by taking the "fake death pill"). Afterwards, it turns out that the battle was All Just A Dream, so it makes sense (almost).
- Surprisingly enough, the fake death pill will fool most bosses... except for the final boss and The End, as she will literally kick you out of the Game Over screen. (Oh, and be careful when fighting The Fury- Fire hurts whether you're dead or not.)
- In MGS 4, anti-seizure medication is used to defeat Vamp, since it's actually a nanomachine suppressant that can shut down his Healing Factor. So Syringe Kills Vampire.
- 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.
- In Seiken Densetsu 3, the boss battle against Koren, the Wizard of the Red Lotus, can be pretty tough, as pretty much all he does is spam high-damage attack magic non-stop against your party. However, if you have Hawkeye as a Wanderer with the Counter Magic spell, or amassed some Matango Oils from enemy drops, you can create magic shields around your characters to reflect Koren's spells back at him. Since Koren has no other attacks besides his magic, this makes your characters effectively immune to almost every attack he's got. Watch out for Ancient, though; that can still kill you.
- The Tyrant boss at the end of Resident Evil Outbreak can be killed with normal weaponry...if you have a lot of it. Or you could take the T-Virus cure that you generated, load it into a pill launcher, and drop him with one shot. The same holds true of the tyrant in the end of Resident Evil Outbreak File #2. You can find a remote control with a destruct button that "kills" the tyrant once for free.
- In Wii Sports boxing weaveing back and forth repeatedly, then countering when you foe misses results in such easy wins, the player can literally reach a rank that is off the scoring chart, and if they go at it long enough, off the screen.
- The literal meaning of the trope is averted in Disgaea, where healing spells heal zombies. Presumably, demons have worked out healing spells that will not kill the undead.
- Laharl makes it pretty clear that in the Disgaea-verse, humans suck, so it's not that bizarre.
- In Bungie's Myth series, healing any undead unit will kill it.
- Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow has the innocent enough Medusa Head soul. All it makes you do is hang in the air without falling for a pittance in mana. It also happens to make some bosses so easy it borders on Game Breaker.
- Made even stranger in Dawn of Sorrow due to the double jump drop kick. The kick increases damage based on the duration of time you remain in the air rather than the distance it takes to fall. This means that you can simply use the Medusa head to supercharge a kick that can do over a thousand damage.
- 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.
- Mona and Lisa of Streets Of Rage 3 are notoriously hard. However, if you get them behind you and hit them with your character's Back Attack, their AI won't realize what you just did, and they'll keep coming. Nothing like beating the snot out of two of the hardest bosses in the game with an Offhand Backhand.
- In addition to the more obvious uses of the characters' human forms in Digital Devil Saga, they're completely immune to Holy-type attacks while in this form. There's one boss battle that can be made much easier by exploiting this, nearly eliminating the otherwise high risk of a total party kill.
- Mario And Luigi Superstar Saga features That One Boss Trunkle, who can be defeated easily by applying Chopper Bros. directly to the forehead.
- Tabletop Game example: Exalted has a Charm (Order-Affirming Blow) that undoes Shaping effects. Guess what? The Fair Folk use shaping effects to create their bodies. One Hit Kill.
- Real Life: In 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 (its toxic to germs like many heavy metals but not toxic enough to kill humans, at least no accidentally) and has been used instead of antibiotics throughout history. Werewolves are hurt by silver, as well as vampires and possibly other evil creatures. This makes the troop Older Than Dirt.
- Most people feel that the crystal ball you have in the godawful movie-based game Warlock is a horrible weapon, as it does little damage, has an awkward control scheme, and leaves you stuck in place for a free hit from enemies while you manipulate it. However, whenever you cast a spell, the ball orbits around you quickly for a few seconds, not only leaving you invulnerable to attack during the duration of the spellcasting, but also retaining its weaponlike abilities in the process, meaning any enemy within range will be hit multiple times in quick succession.
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