Revive Kills Zombie - Television Tropes & Idioms

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!

—Noah 'The Spoony One' Antwiler, on Final Fantasy VIII's use of this trope.

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 with health items or by healing/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 one 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. Contrast Contractual Boss Immunity, when villains who should have a similar vulnerability to a hero's powers aren't due to game rule fiat.

For overlooked techiques that are genuinely useless except for one very specific situation, see Not Completely Worthless.

Examples:

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Folklore

Live Action TV

Tabletop Games

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 stated that one can only be revived if they want to be revived. (Thus, you can't resurrect someone over and over in order to torture whom.) 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.
  - Nilbog!? It's goblin spelt backwards!...which would explain why it's the inverse of a regular goblin.
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.

Video Games

Flood are quite dificult until you find their 3 weaknesses: Explosives, Swords, and droppin da hamma!
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.
- Seth is a sucker for M. Bison's crouching fierce kick as an opener. After that, you're on your own!
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.
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow has the 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 dropkick. 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.
The Eden Trial in City Of Heroes spawns two Giant Monsters (enemies that are hard to take down with a full team of eight players) when your team try 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.
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.
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.
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 Earthbound, only the first part 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.
- 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.
  - Sometimes they'll just go "screw it" and throw something like Fire Gamma at you anyway, so watch out.
The Final Fantasy series allows this a lot.
- Final Fantasy IV Bonus Boss Odin is mentioned in a book in the Land of Summoned Monsters as having lost only one battle, "when lightning struck his sword". Sure enough, Lightning spells will kill him in about three hits.
- Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI 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 Final Fantasy 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.
  - 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.
  - In fact a lot of Final Fantasy V bosses lacked a Contractual Boss Immunity. Go ahead, Mute, Berserk, or even Frog a wizard boss to make them useless. You can even petrify or cast L5 Death on some. It's one of the few F Fs you can beat while avoiding gaining levels.
- 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.
  - Another unorthodox 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!
  - 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 IX has a double subversion- the standard cure reversal works, and Life and Full Life both kill undead monsters instantly, but if you try using a Phoenix Down on the undead monsters, it will appear to do nothing, but on closer inspection, it turns out that Phoenix Down is 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 Lifa Tree level, where your characters keep getting zombified. Here's the thing, you can't revive a zombified party member unless you first remove the zombie status with an item- oh yeah, 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.
  - 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 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.
  - Another "boss becomes ridiculously easy" variety shows up with Natus. Cast Reflect on your party, he keeps damaging himself!
  - 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.
  - Yu Yevon is also a bit of a cop-out for a final boss, because while you can make him kill himself, the characters also have Auto-Life cast on them at all times, meaning it's impossible to lose the fight. The fight is more like interactive story than the final battle.
- 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 Final Boss of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest can be destroyed with two or three Cure spells from the Hero.
  - A slight subversion: The first boss in this game keels over from a single hit of your partner's Life spell, despite being a decidedly non-zombie Minotaur.
- 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 a absurdly short stint 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.
  - Not exactly "Damn Near Anything", granted, the accessory makes SOME enemies easier. But it still doesn't ignore immunities; which pretty much every damn boss in Final Fantasy XII has. See if you can use that accessory on the all-powerful Bonus Boss and still tell me the game is broken.
  - There's also an item that reverses the effects of status healing items and spells. Put it on, use a remedy on a monster, and any bad status effect it's vulnerable to is inflicted on it.
  - 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. Of course, this can be a bit tricky as the programmers have carefully calculated the duration of Reverse to last long enough for the computer to screw you over and wear off just in time for you to either kill yourself or fully heal the monster.
  - Reverse becomes much more useful when used on your own party, as long as you don't do it against an enemy who uses Revive Kills Zombie on you.
- 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!
  - 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—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.
- To counter the undead's 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).
- Gogo in FFV. You have to copy him to defeat him. Only way to do that is to just stand there...
In Fire Emblem 10, 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.
The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess has this in the third and final phase of the last boss, although it very well may be a glitch. While normally some movement, parries, and technique are required to get an attack in and not blocked, simply swinging the fishing rod, which has almost no use after the first time it is required early in the game (except for obviously, the optional fishing minigame), will distract the boss and give you enough time to launch a sequence of hits with your sword.
- It can hardly be called a glitch when there is an accompanying animation of him ACTUALLY LOOKING AT AND WATCHING IT. It kind of becomes something intentionally hidden at that point.
- Actually a reference to some of the earlier Lo Z games, where one could do much the same things including reflecting the absurdly powerful final boss magic attacks with butterfly nets and empty bottles. (In the same vein, an empty bottle is a legitimate (if risky) tactic to use in the first phase of TP's final boss fight.)
- As another example of a widely overlooked weakness, the Iron Knuckles in Ocarina Of Time are often regarded as being among the tougher enemies, as they have heavy armour and a very powerful attack that can't be blocked—but they're easily beaten with Bombchus.
Mario And Luigi Superstar Saga features That One Boss Trunkle, who can be defeated easily by applying Chopper Bros. directly to the forehead.
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.
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.
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 swifter, 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.
- During the second fight against Dark Samus in Metroid Prime 2, Dark Samus is actually very vulnerable to the Dark Beam, so much so that a single charged shot at the start of the fight will automatically advance the fight to the second phase. This flies completely against what the game builds its premise upon—the Dark Beam is very effective against light world enemies and the Light Beam is very effective against dark foes. There's actually reasoning behind this, as, despite her name, Dark Samus does not originate or even have anything to do with the Dark World.
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.
In NetHack, the Finger of Death spell, one of the most powerful spells in the game, resulting in an instant kill if the target fails whose save, only serves to heal the "Riders" (three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; specifically, Famine, Pestilence, and Death; it is assumed that the player is War), whereas healing spells damage them. Similar effects occur with potions of sickness and healing, respectively, because The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything.
There were 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 a tanker truck is 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 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.
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.
The Tyrant boss at the end of Resident Evil Outbreak can be killed with normal weaponry...if you have lots 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.
- Ganados in Resident Evil 4 become very difficult to deal with if the Las Plagas parasite bursts out of their body, since some forms of it can easily decapitate Leon if he gets too close and absorb a lot of damage from conventional weapons. However, a flash-bang grenade will kill them instantly.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 Nightmare Fuel moment). However, use a power bomb against him and he goes berserk and rams you against a spiky wall till you die.
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 short 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 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, manier 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.
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 tough 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 surprisingly long time. Long enough for this editor to forget that they were breakable, and lose one when two dragon zombies teamed up.
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.
  - Undead Npcs can use it too. The Forsaken Argent Healer even talk about the light. wierd.
- 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 reclassified as humanoid.
  - Also makes sense because Forsaken are not quite your regular undead...
  - The Hand Wave used is that Forsaken are being kept sentient by their own willpower, and you drain it by attacking them. Of course this doesn't explain why they don't get back up as mindless zombies upon death, but there you go...
In the So Bad Its Horrible movie-based game Warlock, the crystal ball seems to be 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.
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.
In effect in Maple Story, 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.
Not sure how effective it would be for others, but for this troper, in the Ferris Wheel level of Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the nigh impossible stand against countless Russian troops was survived on Veteran mode by... hiding in the little one-person booth down below Captain Mac Millan! Just be ready to run like hell when the rescue helicopter arrives.
In Metal Gear Solid, the battle against Gray Fox is normally pretty tough. However, as he is a cyborg, you can use Chaff Grenades (which are normally used to temporarily disable security cameras) to confuse him and make the fight much easier. The item has similar effect on Metal Gear REX as well.
Thanks to the Elemental Rock Paper Scissors battle system, normal enemies in Shin Megami Tensei games usually have a weakness that will allow you to take them out with relative ease. ([For a MegaTen game anyway...) Since both Death spells (The Hama series, and the Mudo series) are associated with Light or Dark elements, being weak to those elements results in an automatic death.
- But the best example comes from Persona 3, with the Strength and Fortune Full Moon Boss. The Ghastly Wail skill automatically kills anyone currently Afraid. One of Fortune's roulette results can inflict Fear on the enemy party. Hilarity Ensues.

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