Dominion Tank Police. Yes, you read that right. Tank. Police. They round up ordinary criminals, robbers, and thieves with tanks. And then coax confessions out of these same ordinary thugs with such methods as putting a grenade in their mouth, with a string tied to a ceiling beam, and balancing him on a chair with just 1cm of slack.
Appleseed has the Mobile Fortresses: Massive six-legged Spider Tanks the size of several building blocks. They have a BFG that is longer than it's own chasis length and dozens of multi-barreled auto cannons all over the places. Oh, and Olympus has 10 of them, protecting the city.
It's less prominent in Ghost in the Shell, but when the situation calls for it the Major is not above using automatic rifles with exploding bullets and Batou shots machine guns and even miniguns from the hip. When you want to kill cyborgs, your rule of thumb is the Chunky Salsa Rule. Their enemies frequently try to counter that with walking tanks.
Hentai Kamen, on occasion. Especially with any of the Shiki-s involved - although Shuto is slightly more balanced.
Eat-Man, what with all the BFGs. And in the Mira/Misha arc, Bolt is stabbed through the heart with a missile.
Blame! introduces the GravitationalBeam Emitter, a weapon that is incapable of anything less than overkill. The weapon is no larger than a pistol and the main character fires it off like farts after a bean casserole, despite it leaving a 40 kilometer long path of destruction along it's aim, no matter what happens to be in the way. And this being Blame!, it is not even most powerful among such weapons.
When Grimmjow kills Luppi. Grimmjow first punches him through the gut, which would probably have meant that Luppi would have just bleed to death if he let him, but then decides to go and blast off his upper body.
The Soukyouku used for the execution of serious criminals. Not only is it quite a spectacle - being a phoenix - it incinerates the target's soul, meaning they cannot be reincarnated into the living world.
After Mello kidnaps TakadaMatt, in his escape attempt, is shot approximately fifty thousand times by a hugely unnecessary number of Takada's bodyguards. Many fangirls mourned. Clearly an egregious case of more dakka.
In the last episode when Light reveals he is Kira, and Matsuda shoots him several times. Subverted in the fact that Light isn't even killed by it, and only dies when Ryuk writes his name down.
2nd Gig has one of the best examples of this. After spending the best part of 26 episodes thinking he's bulletproof, the scheming Kazunoto Goda gets machine-gunned to death at point-blank range until his head asplodes by the Major and Batou.
There's also the terrorists plan to buy plutonium from the russian mafia to threaten the government with atomic bombs. The corrupt government takes no risks and calls a favor from the Americans, to nuke the entire refugee colony where the terrorists are hiding.
Lina Inverse is the queen of overkill. Having already fireballed and freeze arrowed an enemy, Lina often proceeds to finish them off with a DRAGON SLAVE!, which takes out the entire village with the foe.
Lina's blowing up of villages or large buildings tends to be a running gag, but the climax of Slayers Next plays this absolutely straight, when the God of the Slayers universe shows up in person to disintegrate and completely obliterate the Big Bad.
Serial Experiments Lain has some guy trapped in an online game emptying an entire clip of virtual rounds on a very, very, very Creepy Child. It turns out the rounds were real, and so was the not-so-creepy child.
Black Scorpion in Samurai Deeper Kyo shoots out of his mouth a "beam" made of a thousand poisoned steel needles, each one being more than enough to kill a human in seconds.
Sousuke Sagara isn't usually given to overkill on actual battlefields, but - having been raised as a Child Soldier - when he's assigned as an undercover bodyguard to an Ordinary High School Student, he applies good battlefield tactics to his school life and goes massively overboard. Some people say it with flowers; Sousuke says it with land mines.
A prime example is found in Super Robot Wars W, when asked to help Kaname find a way to keep delinquents from rival schools from crashing the school festival, he wires the yard with so many high explosives that when two Mechanical Beasts, monsters that usually give Mazinger Z a hard time, come stomping into the school, they're destroyed outright by the blast.
Another example of his typical way of doing things: Blasting holes in the wall instead of using the door. 65% of all urban combat casualties occur in relation to a doorway, so for Sousuke this makes perfect sense.
The Lambda Driver functioning off of Sousuke's emotional state also leads to one instance of battlefield overkill: in The Second Raid, Sousuke blasts the Big Bad so hard that he and his Humongous Mecha completely disintegrate... along with a hundred-meter long trench cut into the street. Through Clouseau. Without harming him. Clouseau's response in the English dub is a deathly-scared "That was OVERKILL, sergeant!"
Its Giga Drill Breaker. Its various permutations only get stronger from there. Then there's the one-off Giga Drill Maximum, which involves attaching a Giga Drill to every point physically possible and shooting them out to wipe out enemies in all directions.
How do you hit an elusive target? You shoot every point in spacetime.
Super Tengen Toppa Giga Drill Breaker. There is nothing more. When the energy of the entire big bang, all that is and shall ever be is in Drill form, you know you may finally have enough daka.
Hellsing's Alucard will often use far more bullets and/or physical force than necessary to kill his opponents. Conversely, what seems like overkill from the other side is never enough to kill him.
Seras Victoria likes this trope as well. Lacking Alucard's capacity for physical force and regeneration, she dual-wields 30mm autocannons and uses them against human-sized targets. Splat.
In Samurai 7, some villagers get it in their heads to attack a thieving Humongous Mecha with farm tools. They get said mecha's BFS in response.
To make sure Frieza is finally dead after chopping him in half with his sword Trunks proceeds to chop off his limbs and tail, chop his two halves into smaller pieces, and finishes it by incinerating his remains with a ki-blast. Given he survived a beating from Goku, getting cut in half, and being on an exploding planet, it probably seemed like a sensible precaution.
From the same show, a subversion of the trope occurs during the Majin Buu arc. Gotenks has just blown Super Buu apart with several Kamikaze Ghosts. He and Piccolo then proceed to disintegrate the chunks of Buu's body (Piccolo saw Buu regenerate from getting blasted apart before, and wanted to take no chances). Why a subversion then? Because despite being disintegrated (i.e. his body was reduced to the atomic level), Majin Buu still manages to re-form his body. Specifically, Gotenks and Piccolo incinerate the leftover chunks of Buu. Buu then manages to reform himself from the SMOKE.
Then Goku goes on to violate the laws of physics when his Spirit Bomb kills Buu dead with no chance of regeneration by destroying every atom he is made of. It's a trend too; Gohan took care of Cell in much the same way, except with a Kamehameha.
In Gundam Wing a character, after he 'is no longer needed', is dropped out of a high flying plane... and the woman who dropped him (Lady Une in full-on buns-and-glasses mode) then shoots him in the head on the way down. This is made even more ludicrous by her stated reason: she didn't want to soil the plane with his blood.
The above statements need to be clarified. First, when Azrael needs to defeat a ZAFT invasion of the Alaska base at Josh-A he stations a whole bunch of unwanted forces to defend the base, orders his fanatical subordinates to escape, then uses a Cyclops bomb to irradiate and then vaporize the base, its defenders, and the majority of the ZAFT assault forces. Later, when he is staging his final assault on the space fortress at Jachin Due, he not deploys nukes at Boaz fortress, completely reducing it to ash, but he also deploys enough nukes against the Plant Colonies to wipe them out several times over.
ZAFT is little better. Before the series began, the Earth Alliance nuked one of the PLANT colonies, killing roughly 250,000 people. ZAFT's response was the deployment of N-Jammers on Earth, which triggered a catastrophic energy crisis in every nation on the planet. Late in the series when they completely disable the Alliance forces at Panama with EM Ps, they don't secure the helpless and surrendering soldiers, they massacre all of them. The one ironic non accomplice in this event is Yzak Joule who feels that butchering unarmed and stationary targets is a waste of time, which is ironic considering his previous actions at Heliopolis and the 8th Fleet battle. At the end of the war, Patrick Zala's victory strategy involves purging all moderate factions in the governments including his old friend Sigel Clyne and then using the massive gamma ray laser GENESIS to scorch the surface of Earth, wiping out all life.
The icing on the cake is when you find out that both Azrael and Zala were being used by Rau LeCreuset in an attempt perpetuate the extinction of mankind via Mutual Assured Destruction with both sides superweapons (the nukes and GENESIS). What do you expect when the entire series is a Crapsack World that runs on Humans Are Bastards and the brilliance stems from just how emotionally painful and morally challenging it is.
And then in SEED Destiny Djibril picks up the reins from the late Azrael and does things more or less the same way. He tries to nuke the Plants right at the start of the war, uses the Destroy Gundam to crush local revolts in Eurasia, and fires Requiem at ZAFT in a last bid to kill them all.
Also in Gundam Seed Destiny, in a duel between Kira and Athrun, during a blade-lock, Kira cut off Athrun's Savior's arms, disarming it, and then proceeded to chop it into pieces, making it rain scrap metal, making sure that Gundam wasn't going to come back.
Claire Stanfield has gone on record claiming that he can't be satisfied with killing someone unless he goes entirely over the top with it.
Nice Holystone is like this with bombs. She stabbed a guy in the face with a knife then left a bomb full of fireworks attached to it. Later, she went to rescue her boyfriend who was in a garage with the door open. She blew a hole in the wall a little to the left and went in that way instead.
Nick: Now Donny, what kind of bone-headed question is that? The boss likes to blow stuff up!
So how in the world was Ladd not get mentioned given he not only beats a man to death using good old fisticuffs, he wears a white suit in anticipation of the mess staining it a pretty shade of red.
Louise Halevy had an over-the-top kill towards Nena Trinity, first she tore the Throne Drei limbs to limbs, leaving the cockpit with a bloody Nena, then shoves the Mobile Armor's arm into the cockpit, which impales Nena and cuts her in half, then the cockpit explodes. And wait a minute, there is still a haro left from this attack. Still not enough...
In the dub, which is actually surprisingly good, Tieria talks about this in episode 10. "So, I see you got caught. This just goes to prove that you never deserved to be a Gundam Meister. You deserve ten thousand deaths!" Ironically, moments later it is turned against himself. "So, I actually got caught. This just goes to prove that I never deserved to be a Gundam Meister. I deserve ten thousand deaths!".
Virtue, Nadleeh, and Seravee all qualify. Virtue is your average heavy-assault mecha with an incredibly destructive particle bazooka (Shown in one of the first episodes to not destroy the enemy, but break them down into particles). Nadleeh is slightly less bulky, and more mobile, but can dual-wield Virtue's shoulder mounted cannons as were they handguns. Seravee, well, it can wield 6 particle bazookas, each more powerful than Virtue's single bazooka. And if it is forced into melee combat, it can just wield 6 beam sabers instead. The movie went further and gave us the Gundam Zabanya, an upgraded version of the Gundam Dynames, and is more focused on precision, rather than fire-power, and yet it still has 20 Bits and 78 missile launchers built into its frame. And then there's the Gundam Harute, which in its own right is pretty all-round... Until Hallelujah and Soma Peries awake, at which point it is controlled by the two most powerful Super Soldiers ever created.
Naruto's Rasenshuriken, a move that pretty much makes a giant dome of utter destruction even on the cellular level, and Sasuke's Kirin, which a temple-destroying bolt of lightning from the sky are indicative of this trope, but both come at a price.
In Naruto Shippuden Movie 3, Naruto uses a spirit bomb sized Rasenshuriken and tears the planet a new asshole as well as destroying the villain. The crater resulting is maybe larger than Konoha.
Deidara can be stealthy and use his explosives like a fine scalpel... and then there's his C4 attack which creates a massive golem of himself which scatters into a countless number of microscopic bombs that cause any living being within range to dissolve into dust. And his sole reason for creating it was because he didn't like Itachi.
Konan, the Patron Saint of this trope, has brought this trope Up to 11 and Beyond the Impossible Levels at the same time. For a battle she prepared six hundred billion explosive tags. Enough to fill a lake and explode continuously for ten minutes straight. And this was all to target a single man.
Chapter 561 presents resurrected Madara, who used his powers to drop two consecutive asteroids on the Fourth Division.
It is famous for ramping up the characters to untold proportions where everything they do is essentially another shot on overkill... At least until the other person comes up with something that is EVEN MORE overkill.
During Alita's fight with Sachumudo, Sachumudo has nanomachine dust that breaks EVERYTHING apart making him nearly completely invincible... Until Alita learns to use Plasma to burn it like gas only for Sachumudo to reveal that he can control magnetic fields and creates a giant ball of plasma that can incinerate Alita 100 times over... Only for Alita to turn THAT over again by using her Hertza Haeon to blast the entire sphere into Sachumudo. And proceeds to tear the living crap out of him UNTIL HE REVERTS INTO AN INFANT FORM.
One moment is when Sechs enters the first tournament round against the Stellar nursery school where their first opponent Getz uses attacks that were used to take down WARSHIPS.
Anything involving Zekka automatically falls into this category.
Somewhat averted in Black Lagoon during the Hansel and Gretel arc. A group of bounty hunters guns down a car they believe is carrying the twins by not only shooting it with an RPG but also by riddling it with so many bullets that there is literally no part for the car without a bullet hole in it. But given that the twins hired two orphans to act as a decoy you have the overkill part just not the kill part, unless you count the two children in the car.
In the Gungrave anime Bear Walken's team is called the "Overkills." Which is demonstrated after they riddle Blood War with hundreds of bullets. Granted this is done after he is shot up by Brandon, Bunji and Harry.
Pretty much every major character applies this trope at least once. For example, Kaiba. Why blast your opponent with one large and powerful dragon when you can use THREE JOINED TOGETHER?
Epically done by Yami, after Yugi's soul is taken by the Oricalchos. Inspector Haga taunts the guilt-wracked and now rather unstable Yami by tearing up a card in front of him after claiming Yugi's soul was in it and that tearing it up erased him, "as a joke". Yami... well, he goes totally and utterly apeshit. Using a spell card which allows him to attack as long as he continues to draw monster cards, Yami defeats Haga by drawing two monster cards, which are enough to drop Haga's lifepoints to zero. However, the enraged Yami then continues bashing at Haga by drawing at least six more monster cards in a row, each hitting for 1500 points each. He would've kept going too, if Anzu hadn't stopped him. Here's the scene... Not pretty.
From Season 4: "Mokuba, what did I teach you? If at first you don't succeed, BLAST IT AGAIN WITH YOUR BLUE-EYES WHITE DRAGON!".
An example that also doubles as a Crowning Momentof Awesome takes place in Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds when Jack Atlas summons Red-Nova Dragon for the first time. Both he and his opponent have 200 life points left, and Jack, after turning the Big Bad into a card purely with the power of his own hot-blooded awesomeness, proceeds to summon said card and steamroll his opponent for almost 2000 points of Battle Damage.
Jack (LP/700) and Scar-Red Nova (ATK/5500) later find themselves on the receiving end, courtesy of Jose's Machine Emperor, Grannel (ATK/12000). There's a reason its attack is called GRAND SLAUGHTER CANNON! There is also how Granel ruined Aporia's life 3 times; Childhood killing of his parents, killing his apparent lover, and being the cause of his death to Z-ONE.
In Yu Gi Oh Zexal, IV uses his jumbo-sized shredder puppet to grind two monsters into submission, then "holographically" blasts their owners off the ground with the laser cannon coming out of it. He then tells them their suffering is not over yet, and proceeds to repeat the process by reviving the shredded monsters and grinding them over. But of course, How could be be done without some whipping?
Neon Genesis Evangelion: You want to open up a giant round physics breaking disc-like Angel that has Shinji trapped inside? Simple! Drop 992 not-actually-nukes on it!
Well, luckily, they ended up not having to do that due to the excellent timing of Eva Unit-01 in going berserk again
There is very little left of Unit-02, and by extension Asuka by the time the Mass Production EVAS are through with them in End of Evangelion.
Essentially, Shinji does this in End of Evangelion and it's manga equivalent. At the end of it all, Shinji is left bitter, disillusioned and depressed. Problem: Your friends are gone. You're sure they left because you injured and killed your other friends, or let them die. There's nobody left who appreciates the sacrifices you've made or gives you thanks for what you've done, there's nobody to talk to and nobody understands what you've been through... because you failed them. Solution: Kill everyone.''Everyone''.
Rebuild 2.22; Asuka's introduction, the Dummy Plug activation against Bardiel, The fight against Zeruel and the last scene.
Yasuo Umetsu's Kite manages to top a lot. However, one sequence deserves special mention: After Sawa assassinates a particular target, one of the bodyguards she had dealt with earlier (by shooting him a bunch of times) tackles her out of the window of a multi-story skyscraper. She manages to turn it around so she's hiding next to his chest, making his wild retaliatory pistol shots useless, and the two of them fall and fall and land on a car on an elevated freeway...making the car fall through the freewayand land on a truck in the street, makingthatfall through the street and into a subway station. As Sawa clings to the edge of the pit leading up to the normal street level, a falling electrical sign shaped like an arrow falls and crushes the bodyguard and causes the two vehicles to f*** ing explode.
The Egrigori of Project ARMS are shown to have no problem offing large groups of witnesses and using their many government and police connections to hush it up. When two agents attempt to blow up a high school (simply because they themselves had been picked on in school), one points out that they could do whatever they liked and get it all passed off as a gas leak. One of the ARMS teens tells how, to get to him, the Egrigori blew up, burned down, and gunned his entire town (the same town was blown up, burned down, and gunned again when the protagonists return for answers). Later, the Red Caps basically cut off all possible escape routes from a town so the ARMS can't escape and holds the entire town hostage (thankfully it more or less turns out well). A flashback shows that Keith White had no problem having his soldiers machine gun a group of children. Oh, and the big climactic battle involved Black Alice seizing control of nuclear missiles and lobbing them at America while the Jabberwock goes on rampage, blowing everything up. Baked Apple indeed...
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has two of the titular characters, Jotaro and Giorno, beating up Steely Dan for three pages and Cioccolotta for four pages respectively, all the while shouting their beat-em-up phrases, and the cherry on top for Giorno is a WRYYYYY that continues off the page, reminding the readers who his father is.
Pretty much any super move is capable of obliterating an entire army of mooks. And yet they still keep coming.
Half-way through the first main story arc, Talpa orders his evil spirits to create a massive, organic bomb-like sphere of energy(called the matrix). Its purpose? To kill Rowan of Strata, who's asleep in space.
It started out with a cannon that levels a hundred houses in a row, had a bomb that could blow up a city, is now at island-destroying bombardments and according to Word Of God, it's only halfway through the story.
And this isn't even mentioning the two ancient super-weapons we haven't seen yet, either of which apparently make the aforementioned island-destroying bombardments look like pea shooters by comparison.
A recent chapter explained there are actually three ancient super-weapons, Uranus, Pluton and Poseidon, and explained what exactly Poseidon is: a mermaid princess with the power to summon from nowhere and control Kaiju, whose power has been passed down the Mermaids royal line and is currently held by Shirahoshi. Note that for the entire arc where Shirahoshi appeared before being identified as Poseidon, people who knew her power openly admitted she could have easily destroyed the world by accident.
The main gun as shown in the episode Booby Trap. When the gun fires, it takes out everything in front of it, including part of a mountain range, carves a tangent through the ocean and blasts into space...all to take out a couple of scout ships, and giving the Zentraedi plenty of warning that the ship was active.
The large Wave Motion Gun implanted at one of the Earth's poles towards the middle of the series...that takes out a big percentage of the Zentraedi fleet of millions of ships in one shot. Too bad the Zentraedi had already bombarded the planet's surface to glass before the cannon could shoot.
The revolutionary who tries to lead Takashi out of the city gets caught by the police he shoots at them and they return fire with machine guns mortally wounding him, when he tells Takashi to leave the police proceed to blast the hell out of him with another fusillade, with one of the last hits splitting his skull in two.
In the Akira manga, the General at one point calls in an orbital strike on a mugger.
People are rarely killed in Anime/Pokemon. Enter Pokémon Hunter J, who is one of the few characters portrayed as being purely evil. So how do we dispose of her when karma catches up to her? Why, having her airship blasted by Future Sight, falling into a giant whirlpool in the middle of a lake. As the airship gets submerged, have the windows break causing hundreds if not thousands of pounds of water rush in to crush her. If that didn't kill her, the airship exploding will. Pokémon may not kill often, but damned if they don't know how to make sure you die.
And even then, Giovanni survived having his headquarters explode and collapse on top of him (in itself an example of the trope. We're talking a military complex of several stories here, after all) and he managed to haul himself out of the rubble, dust himself off, and walk away. After all, Meowth's dubious Imagine Spot scenes aren't the only reason Giovanni has become a Memetic Badass.
In Maiden Rose, after forcing their way into the country via Taki's sacred family ground and killing*
nearly
the soldiers sent to stop them, including Taki's lover, Berkut and co. expect Taki will have to give in to the intrusion, considering he is completely obstructed from acting by his higher-ups and shouldn't have even sent the force he did. Instead Taki orders his men to get the tanks ready, goes out and shoots armour-piercing, high explosive rounds (aka anti-tank weapons) at the oncoming passenger train. "That's insane" indeed, and also awesome.
Nearly every fight boils down to this when it comes to fighting the homunculi. Mustang burns Lust well over a dozen times and later Envy. The trope is played with and subverted sometimes, such as when the main villain Father can withstand mortar fire, spears, explosions, and gunfire from all sides, all at once, and without even moving a muscle.
And then there is the battle at Briggs, where all of the Dracma army is destroyed in minutes!
Not to Mention the Ishbal Massacre where State Alchemists were deployed to the front lines with Philosopher Stones to be used as human weapons. After deployment, the entire war was over in ONE DAY. Mustang is seen using alchemy to reduce an entire city to rubble with a single snap of his fingers.
In the prologue of the sci-fi/hentai anime EL, it explains that in 2030 the world's major powers nearly wiped out all life on the planet via nuclear holocaust. Their reason? To put a stop to environmental pollution.
Myotismon has proven extremely hard to kill. They've destroyed him twice but he comes back in Digimon Adventure 02 for round three. So how do you finally kill this sadistic Complete Monster off for good? Blow up his soul with the combined light of every Digivice on Earth fired from a BFG that shoots dark matter. To put this in perspective, just the light of eight Digivices completely negated an explosion that could completely destroy two dimmensions. Myotismon's soul got hit with the light of millions of Digivices in one, concentrated blast fired out of a darkmatter cannon. And this is one of those cases were the victim in question was just that hard to kill considering how they'd already vaporized him twice already and he keeps coming back. Since this particular Myotismon never comes back, it worked.
Digimon Xros Wars has Kiriha who lives by this trope, his tactics mostly involves his digimon unleashing a barrage of Beam Spam of ungodly proportions, if a single volley isn't enough, he keeps on firing some more, and he doesn't even care if Taiki's digimon get in his line of fire. In fact, he specifically invokes this when fighting regenerating undead opponents. How do you stop opponents that can recover from any attack you hit them with? You blast them until they can't.
How about the first time we see Skullgreymon. It slaps the other Greymon at a giant TV screen so it get's electrocuted and then just to be sure fires of a mini-nuke at it.
Akemi Homura lives and breathes this trope in every meaning of the word. At one point, she uses approximately $18 million in military hardware to kill one witch, because it HAD to be dead.
Hokuto no Ken is pretty much the martial arts equivalent of "overkill", considering just about every move ends with a part of your opponent violently exploding in a wave of gore, with what exactly explodes being dependent on the attack used.
In To Aru Majutsu no Index, the organization GREMLIN wants to kill Touma Kamijo. They want to kill him so bad that they are willing to wipe out the human race just to be sure he's dead.
The story "The Big Fat Kill" ends with just about every prostitute in town emptying guns into an alleyway to kill anyone who could possibly connect them to the death of a famous cop. It's one of the more... impressive images. Manute sums it up with his last words, delivered to the man who organized it: "McCarthy, you shit!"
Earlier in the story, Miho cuts off Jackie Boy's hand. And then plugs his gun so when he fires it, the slide goes into his own head. She is explicitly described as "toying" with him. And then, when Dwight instructs her to finish him already, Miho proceeds to "make a Pez dispenser out of him."
Miho actually does this a lot. She never kills someone when she can almost kill him and then destroy him. Family Matters has one particularly disturbing case where she repeatedly cuts a fat man until he's choking on his own blood, and then when McCarthy tells her to end it because they need to hurry up, she punts off his head.
Then there's John Hartigan finishing off Roark Jr. in That Yellow Bastard. As he puts it, he's eventually just pounding wet chunks of skull into the floorboards.
Marv pretty much embodies this trope. He basically made it his goal to kill every single person involved in the killing of his beloved Goldie, capped off with the twin slaughterings of the man who did the deed: he sawed one's arms and legs off, had a wolf partially eat him and for good measure sawed his head off.
In a possible Lampshade Hanging, HYDRA (from Nick Fury comics) calls its superweapon The Overkill Horn. Its function? Remotely activating every single nuclear weapon on the surface of the planet the whole world over.
The Joker is sometimes known to do this; most notably with Jason Todd (the second Robin), in which, after smacking him across the face with a gunbutt (causing him to cough up blood), then kicking him in the face, having him roughed up by two muscle bound henchmen, and beating him brutally with a crowbar to the point where the Joker was literally covered in Jason's blood, he finally finished him by blowing him up with a bomb. It should also be noted that he came back from the bomb, too...
Another example is when after Alexander Luthor lost a finger and got stripped of his powers. Joker comes out of nowhere and sprays him in the face with his acid spitting flower, fries his head with two electric buzzers repeatedly, then finishes him off by a point blank range shotgun blast to the head.
Joker just seems to be DC's go-to guy for being absolutely thorough in making sure a character is Killed Off for Real. Plus he was REALLY pissed that he didn't get in on the whole Infinite Crisis schtick.
Boy: Jesus, KM, how many times can you shoot two guys?
During the early years of the Cold War, atom bombs had a habit of showing up in fiction as the Finishing Move in situations where it'd seem like overkill, or even dangerously self-destructive, to use them. One example is the cover of the 1951 propaganda comic "Atomic War!◊", featuring two American bombers fighting a Soviet submarine, and the following quote from one of the pilots:
"His bomb missed! But even a near miss will get that red sub when I fire my atomic rockets!".
Punisher: Harry "Heck" Thornton. Hitman and all around Arkansas redneck. Heard a story about Harry that four state troopers managed to surround him once. He draws and kills three of them, the fourth one gets off a shot, Harry ducks it and shoots him dead. Dodged a bullet, so I use thirty.
Brianna Diggers LOVES this trope so much that she made smart bombs with their own AI in them to "go boom" on "baddies". To date, due to her love of this trope, she has scared demons which once terrorized the planet and her bombs, hundreds of them, were able to knock out a giant Dynasty War Gigas. Don't even get started on how over-equipped she comes for a camping trip in an area with lots of target practi... er, wild monsters.
Her sister Gina is also fond of this trope at times, if less so.
In the opening sequence of the first issue of Soft Desire, we meet a woman who is trying to steal a mysterious box. Because of this, a fight ensues with a guy who just won't die.
Alan Moore's Top 10: "Permission to use extreme force, sir?" "Kick her !@#$%ing ass, son."
War Machine's armor can add more weapons to his armor, his image is at the top for a reason.
Fanfiction
Mister Cynical's Lycanthrope series on fanfiction.net (loosely based on Neon Genesis Evangelion) is notorious for this, to the point where the characters in the series actually come to expect it. One notable example is where Shinji is supposed to kill a member of Seele in Paris. Instead of simply shooting him, he decides to blow up the building he's in, along with many others (including the Eiffel Tower). The end result is that Paris is filled with flaming debris which just happens to form a giant smiley face a mile and a half wide.
Shinji: Now those Frenchies have a smile they can be proud of!
Also, Finishing The Fight (found on the Halo Fanfic Recs page), in which much care is taken to describe the effects when "modern" UNSC weaponry is used on Dungeons & Dragons baddies..
Garrus. Need to question some criminals? Knock down the wall of their warehouse with a cargo hauler and shoot them all in the knees. Turns out they're not the ones who have what he needs to know? Knock down the next warehouse's wall with a cargo hauler and kneecap the men inside. Need to question a mercenary boss? Blow up his car with a tank.
Apparently, Admiral Nick "Havoc" Parker is known for this - according to Shepard, orbital bombardment is his first resort. The prospect of him and Garrus being in the same room is terrifying.
In a crossover RPG (Fanon or Canon), Ancient Equivalents have invaded a faction on the level of the Ori (Tech, not power), and they have A LOT of drones (SG Fans Look Them Up), the defending forces just fired 'Vortex Beams' (Derived From Vortex Generation off of B5 Jumpgates) from the their ships, there were to many vortexes (700) that went critical resulting in the loss of a planet, two moons, 125 Ancient ships and 700 defensive forces. The vortexes merged and created a anomaly about 3 LS across :( Let's just say the person controlling the Ancients is not happy that they lost 1/3 or their fleet in the blink of an eye. The defending faction has something called a Planetary Defensive Grid well, you figure it out...
Hinata's Singularity Rasengan atomizes every cell in Madara's body and has the same fundamental effect on his chakra.
Film
It's all the more chilling for it's quiet, guilt tinged delivery when Alfred in The Dark Knight reveals how his mercenary squad finally caught the Robin Hood-style bandit they were hunting after they couldn't find him and he realized didn't care about money:
As Hannibal so eloquently put it, "overkill is underrated."
The James Bond films are archetypal for their rather messy deaths, although most of them are not caused by Bond himself or are Karmic Deaths. Then License To Kill upped the ante with a Darker and Edgier Bond who had no qualms with dispatching enemies in the most violent way possible, culminating with sending the Big Bad to Hell via an exploding tanker truck.
The death of Santino "Sonny" Corleone. Ambushed at a toll booth by a dozen Tommy Gun-wielding gangsters, shot several dozen times inside his car, then shot some more outside the car, then shot on the ground after he died, then had his face kicked in for good measure. The commentary for the film confirms that they wanted to make sure Sonny stayed dead, given that his elderly father had been repeatedly shot earlier in the film and survived, and that Sonny was known to be a tough bastard.
At the end of the movie, the elimination of the heads of the Five Families during the Baptism scene, along with Moe Greene and Tattaglia's mistress who had the misfortune of sharing his bed at the wrong time... and Carlo Rizzi, Michael's brother-in-law, for his role in Sonny's death. The body count for the end of Part II is relatively minor compared to Part I but aside from Hyman Roth's death, there was no real need for Michael to have the other two killed... including his own brother Fredo. It would take the mob boss massacre orchestrated by Joey Zaza in Part III to top the whole trilogy.
In Training Day, Alonzo Harris is a lesser version of this as a deliberate Shout Out: first the Russians crash his car, then they shoot him in the car, and after Alonzo leaves the vehicle, battered, he is shot brutally on full-auto.
Predator might be a borderline case in that the protagonists are fighting an almost invisible opponent and just happen to have his approximate position known. But then, the six people are emptying two assault rifles, two sub-machine guns, a grenade launcher, and a minigun at a patch of jungle over the next 40 seconds, all the while reloading and continuing to fire. And they didn't even get a good hit.
Just about everything. Giving a security robot Gattling guns? Sure, why not? How about making a new police robot as tall as a auditorium? Sure...
In the original Robocop, the main character's brutal death at the hands of Boddicker and his men before he was rebuilt as the titular cyborg.
Crazy Survivalist Burt Gummer from the Tremors series is all about the overkill. In the second movie, his "Grizzly" anti-tank rifle prompts Earl to comment, "Man, Burt, you put a whole new shine on the word 'overkill'." And it's not even the biggest gun he uses in the series...
In the fourth movie we are introduced to an un-exploded Tallboy bomb as the Mercenaries trek through the jungle toward the massacred Karen village. Later John Rambo sets up a Claymore next to the bomb while Burmese soldiers chase him. The Tallboy was developed by the British in WW 2 (more specifically, by Barnes Wallis, he of the Dambusters' Bouncing Bomb) to destroy hardened bunkers and was at the time the single most concentrated repository of High-Explosive in a single weapon. The Claymore by itself is capable of invoking the Chunky Salsa Rule on everyone within a dozen yards, when it went off and caused the Tallboy to sympathetically detonate the results were... impressive.
Also at one point upon stealing a machine gun turret John Rambo empties several rounds into a single soldier in a jeep literally ripping him to pieces.
Team America: World Police: Team America uses machine guns, rocket launchers, and missiles to kill terrorists, even if they are in a crowded city. They wind up destroying all the monuments and destroying the town, but hey, the bad guys are dead!
In the Robert Rodriguez film adaptation of Frank Miller'sSin City the character Hartigan, after knifing one of the primary villains of the piece in the gut and proceeding to "take his weapons away from him...bothof them," graphically and with his bare hands, then begins to brutally beat the bad guy's face in until "After a while all I'm doing is punching wet chips of bone into the floorboards. So I stop."
He did take Junior's other 'weapon' away once already, ineffectively, some years ago. This time, he was just making sure.
In Sukiyaki Western Django, Hiyomuri shoots a boy's father dead in front of him, then shoots him 4 more times once he's hit the ground and his wife is crouching over the body, who he then attempts to rape because he likes the look of her bathed in her husband's blood.
In Pet Sematary 2, after Edward Furlong's father kills the revived corpse of the sheriff, he leaves the house to go to search for his son. But just as he's about to open the door to his pickup, he stops, goes back in the house, empties the clip, reloads, empties the clip again, then leaves in his pickup! Zombies: Always Make Sure.
In Outlander, Kainan's people do orbital bombardment on a planet just to kill its natural inhabitants. Of course, given the amount of damage a single Moorwen did to the colony, this is perhaps a Justified Trope in retrospect.
One of Jason's first victims is the Jerkass Trey, who he impales somewhere around a half-dozen times with his machete. Afterward, noticing Trey's death spasms, Jason sets down his machete, grabs both ends of the bed, and breaks it (and Trey) in half.
Let's just say it; Jason Voorhees is the patron saint of this trope. Especially when played by Kane Hodder.
The Curse of Michael Myers has Michael preparing to kill a bunch of sanitarium employees by overlooking a tray filled with medical tools. At first, it looks like he's going to grab a scalpel, but, having apparently gotten tips from Jason Voorhees, he decides to grab a huge machete (that was there for some reason) instead.
In Rob Zombie's Halloween II, Michael stabs a nurse in the back. And then does it again. And again, and again, until after about an entire minute filled with stabbings, he rams the knife into her skull and leaves it stuck there.
Portrayed in a video game within Inside Man. A young boy makes his alter ego shoot many times at what must be an already dead man's head, and then he puts a grenade in the man's mouth. The lead bank robber, who is chatting with him at the time, is appalled.
In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Logan brings down a helicopter and its mutant operator, who is then incapacitated and trapped. He could use his adamantium claws to stab his helpless victim, but decides instead to blow up the entire helicopter in a massive display of pyrotechnics.
In the first movie, the Big Bad falls to his death. Then is run over by a bus. And then a steamroller. And then a marching band playing "Louie Louie". And Drebin's boss starts to cry, saying "My father went the same way!"
At the beginning of the same movie, O.J. Simpson's character is shot six times, then hits his head on a pipe, burns his hand on a stove, leans against a freshly painted door, gets his other hand caught in a window, falls face first into a wedding cake and then steps in a bear trap before finally falling into the harbor. He survives.
The Narada, Nero's ship is capable of wiping out whole fleets of Klingon Warbirds and drilling down to a planet's core. (The drill is left over from when it used to be a mining ship.) As soon as he gets his hands on Red Matter, a substance that can create artificial black holes his raging overkill tendencies just get that much worse. He starts destroying planets with it. Just a bit of an Omnicidal Maniac.
At the end of the film, the destruction of the Narada is another example. After Spock crashes Spock Prime's ship into the Narada, its payload of Red Matter detonates into a colossal black hole that the Narada is conveniently at the center of. After Nero spits in the face of Kirk's offer to evacuate his ship, the Enterprise finishes the job by unloading upon the Narada with its entire arsenal.
In The Great Mouse Detective, Ratigan tries to dispose of Basil with an overkill-tastic Death Trap including a mousetrap, an axe, a gun, and a falling anvil, noting that he couldn't decide which method would be best . . . so he used them all. Of course, Basil is able to use the various parts of the trap against each other and escape.
Ernest goes to his con-artist friends for help and they sell him an enormous amount of fake anti-troll equipment. It turns out he only needed milk, but it's still impressively like overkill.
Ernest:(coming down the stairs with what looks like a whole lot of fishing gear, strapped with wires and making whirring sounds.) You see before you the state-of-the-art troll-fighter of tomorrow. This multi-directional unitized high-tech fighting machine is toll-free, mucus-free and comes equipped with fifteenmillion megabytes of double-density wayfer-thin alloy forming a virtual reality of modern troll extermination.(he heaves the large device he's carrying gun-like on his shoulder into his hands in a dramatic pose.) Need I say more? (He glances down at Lady Hackmoore who is decidedly unimpressed).
Really, for not knowing about the whole milk thing, Ernest had overkill coming out the whazzoo. He set up traps in dumpsters for that troll!
Tom: Fourteen cans of troll-away spray nineteen ninety-five apiece. Two bolivian army slingshots, nine ninety-five each... troll ninja ninchucks... slime-proof troll gloves... chopped troll bait... fifteen no-troll strips... one trolling motor... for a grand total of... Ernest: Does that include the giant album of every troll love song ever written?
Also, when they were building the treehouse. They had pizza tossers, dog-food gatling guns and a helicopter bomber.
The fate of Cyrus the Virus in Con Air. [[spoiler:He died from being beaten to within an inch of his life by the hero, smashed through a bridge on the extended ladder of a moving firetruck, gets electrocuted after he falls off the ladder, dumped on a conveyor belt and his head smashed by a piledriver (the machine, not the wrestling move). He doesn't get better.
District 9 features several varieties of alien weapons. Most result in Ludicrous Gibs, all work on this principle. And it is oh so satisfying.
In Inglourious Basterds, Hitler and Goebbels were riddled with bullets, blown up with dynamite, and the cinema they were in was burned to the ground. Other high-ranking Nazi officers suffered similar fate as well, although not as bad.
Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. Hamlet not only stabs Claudius with his fencing sword, he also drops a chandelier on him and, while Claudius is pinned down by said chandelier, force-feeds him poison.
Bert I. Gordon's 1955 debut monster pic King Dinosaur has a group of astronauts exploring a rogue planet that's drifted into the solar system, and discovering a giant iguana among its native animals. After being forced to flee from it, one of the astronauts calmy announces "I've brought the atom bomb", and they proceed to nuke the giant lizard. As stock footage of a mushroom cloud fills the screen, the heroes proudly announce, without a trace of irony, that "we've brought civilization to Nova."
Final Destination In the first movie after the cast cheats Death, they begin to die off one by one. Most of these deaths were simple death by bus, decapitation etc, except for one. For some reason Death seems to really hate Ms Lewton, the teacher. First her computer explodes which lodges a sharp piece of glass into her throat, then the spark from the explosion causes fire which spreads inside her house. As she staggers, she falls down and manages to get stabbed by her own kitchen knife, then the gas cooker door blows open, spewing out gas. Then to top it all off, thanks to the gas, the entire house explodes. Sure you don't want to divert a meteorite to crash into the wreckage just to be absolutely sure, Death?
How do you kill the remaining two villains: Bomb the two-engined cargo plane they're in with gold bars until it explodesin a huge fireball.
In the pilot of the series, they're shooting bazookas at people during one shootout.
In Ghostbusters II, we learn that Vigo the Carpathian was "poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disemboweled & drawn and quartered". After all that, he still managed to say a few words before his head died.
The Self-Destruct Mechanism for Resident Evil: Degeneration probably counts. In sequence, it consists of: drenching the contaminated areas, up to and including the whole facility, in flammable decontamination fluid, igniting said fluid, dropping the contaminated sections down a 3000ft deep shaft, blowing them up again, and then, if the whole place is contaminated, sealing everything under a steel cover thick and tough enough to withstand a nuclear blast. Admittedly, they are working with some of the most lethal infectious pathogens on the planet, but it's still a little overboard.
Considering what has happened in Resident Evil before when these lethal infectious pathogens get out, you can never be too careful.
Undercover Brother's Mr. Feather is dropped out of a helicopter over the ocean. Just before falling hundreds of feet (the impact alone of which would've killed him instantly) a great white shark leaps out of the water, and eats him.
In 300 and HeroLeonidas and Nameless are each killed with a Rain of Arrows plentiful enough to fell a whole regiment. Though in Leonidas' case, he was with a regiment. Most of them had died by that point, but still!
The captain of the salvage team in Event Horizon, after having found out that the titular ship was possessed by infernal forces, he was inclined to fire missiles at it until it's vaporised.
In Shooter, a gun nut recounts the story of a sniper who was infamous for his brutality on the battlefield. The opposing side despised him so much that when they corner the sniper in the building, instead of trying to flush him out, they just bombarded it with enough artillery to level an entire city block. This is standard tactics for dealing with snipers, just not usually while they're in urban areas.
Letters From Iwo Jima is a rare example of overkill being shown from the receiving end.
It has VERY pragmatic "terrorists" (there's always a twist on what they really are in each movie, usually thieves). Even when McClane was a nobody, and when the bad guys thought it was just a random guy, they took no chances and attempted to kill him several times, prompting John's Properly Paranoid moments on the walkie talkie.
Then there's a scene in the second movie where the bad guys shoot at an airplane cockpit with machine guns, filling it with bullet holes, and then throw all their grenades just for good measure. When they see him parachuting out of the explosion, they just call him (again pragmatically) "Lucky Bastard"
One character goes after a wasp with a double-barreled shotgun after it kills her boss, the mayor. It takes three tries, but she does eventually kill it... after destroying a chandelier, corkboard, and an office chair.
Later they graduate to flamethrowers, and end up blowing up the swarm with about six propane tanks. Soaked in lighter fluid.
In Bruges: Ray kills the priest with many, many gunshots, even though he was at close range. A few of those unnecessary shots had gone off-target and killed a little kid.
The death of a revived Doras in the Decadefinale movie isn't quite as over-the-top, but close. He gets taken out by no less than twelve Kamen Riders, ten of whom were in their Super Modes, hitting him with their respective finishing attacks.
A feat nearly equaled in the Chou Den-O Trilogy, where Diend's Complete Form summons copies of eight movie-exclusive Riders, with all nine of them performing their finishers en masse. The opponent in question wasn't even nearly as strong as Doras, making this an even bigger case of overkill.
ACME Chairman: You see, if the Train of Death doesn't kill him, those twenty boxes of TNT will. That, or the 100-pound anvil dangling above him, or- Oh, look. There's the Pendulum of Doom! What's the Pendulum of Doom doing here?! I did not order the Pendulum of Doom! It's overkill! Get rid of it!
In the climactic shootout of John Woo's A Better Tomorrow II, one mook gets shot more than 20 times.
In Beverly Hills Cop, drug dealer Victor Maitland gets shot about twenty times by Foley and Bogomil at the climax.
And the famous lobby scene. You really start to wonder whether the advantages of carrying a loaded and ready gun outweigh the rather more severe disadvantages of having far less ammunition to work with, as well as the sheer amount of weight and bulk that carrying over a dozen guns would impose on the wearer.
The amount of energy required to destroy a planet is some eight - nine orders of magnitude greater than what killed the dinosaurs, and seven - eight more than required to just kill everyone. And the Death Star gives five - six orders of magnitude more than that. Not to mention, that they could have cracked the surface, or burned away the atmosphere, using a lot less resources (A Hyperdrive with the safety's turned off, for instance ).
Revenge of the Sith: After Aalya Secura is shot by the Clone troopers, they continue to shoot at her dead body afterwards.
After Harley knocks out Brother Bob with his own monster truck in Monster Man, Adam takes the wheel and proceeds to drive over him again and again until he is nothing but bloody paste.
Burt Gummer of the Tremors franchise lives and breathes this trope.
In the first movie, he and his wife unload multiple machine guns, assault rifles, an elephant gun, and even a flare gun into a Graboid. Then, he makes home made bombs that're powerful enough to make their guts airborne when exploded underground.
In the second movie, he kills his first Graboid with 4 pounds of C-4. And then kills another with a cluster bomb. Then, he shoots one of the Shiekers with a .50 caliber ant-tank gun with a solid broze bullet. Then they detonate 4.5 tons of high-explosives and reduce an entire oil refinery to a large crater to kill the remaining Shreikers.
In the 3rd movie, he blows up his entire house to kill a single Ass Blaster.
In the prequel, his ancestor buys a 2-inch bore Punt Gun and uses that to kill a Graboid.
2004 Punisher movie: Castle just doesn't kill Howard Saint, but also just about everything Saint cares about. He sabotages Saint's money-laundering operations and then gives the money away. He then causes a rift with Saint's Cuban partners. After following both Saint's wife Livia and his best friend Quentin Glass, he creates the illusion that the two of them are having an affair behind Howard's back (despite the fact that Quentin is gay). When Howard finds out thanks to Mickey (who is Castle's mole), he stabs Quentin to death and then throws Livia over a bridge, she survives the fall but can't get off the train tracks in time and gets run over by a train. After he kills all of Saint's men in the club, he rigs a trip-wire grenade and forces his son John to hold up the grenade, where he eventually tires out and is blown up. An injured Howard tries to run, but Castle ties him to a car and sends it towards a parking lot, where he has rigged several hidden bombs that blow up as the car dragging Howard passes by, which light Howard on fire before that car blows up and we get an overview shot of the flames in the shape of the Punisher's iconic skull. Saint's an asshole that had it coming to him, but damn, what an example of overkill.
Literature
The end of Mostly Harmless has the entire planet Earth destroyed, in all parallel universes to boot, with all the main characters on it because Douglas Adams was sick of being asked for more sequels. The radio drama has them escape, in the nick of time.
The craziness of Jonathan Teatime in the Hogfather is established with a recounting of him doing this during an assassination mission. He was supposed to kill an elderly noble, and rather than drugging the guy's dog as would be typical, he nails it to a wall, kills two servants who were witnesses, and kills his victim so violently that his head is several feet from his body.
It's a good thing he did the trick with the spoon where you hold it in front of a victim's mouth to check if he's still breathing. Can never be too sure. Hm hm.
Special mention needs to go to the Piecemaker, though. There is a reason people generally endeavor to be a good distance directly behind Detritus when he fires the thing.
To elaborate: The Piecemaker is a converted siege ballista, designed to send 5-foot iron poles through fortifications. Its wielder, Sergeant Detritus, felt that this was a waste of a shot, so instead uses sheaves of regular arrows — hundreds of regular arrows. This means that, fully wound, it's effectively a shotgun that fires at near escape-velocity.
The Piecemaker is described as "a siege cross-bow that three men couldn't lift, [Detritus] had converted it to fire a thick sheaf of arrows all at once. Mostly they shattered in the air because of the forces involved, and the target was hit by an expanding cloud of burning splinters. Vimes had banned him from using it on people, but it was a damn good way of getting into buildings. It could open the front door and the back door at the same time.
In The Traitor's Hand, a Chaos Space Marine is noted as having been killed "with satisfying thoroughness" by two krak missiles and a lascannon, each of which is an anti-tank weapon on its own.
It's hard to say if the refinery-cum-fuel-air bomb in Caves of Ice was "overkill" or "just enough kill", given that it was used on Necrons, but its blast wave was felt in orbit.
The Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Death Star describes its use as "overkill in the most horrifyingly literal way possible". And indeed, blowing up a pacifistic planet just to Kick the Dog is clearly overdoing it.
Another example of overkill in the Expanded Universe is Base Delta Zero, a naval protocol dedicated to eliminating all assets of production on a planet. This varies from rendering the planet uninhabitable and for all intents and purposes useless, to outright slagging the crust.
For that matter, the Expanded Universe seems to have a good amount of overkill—the Sun Crusher fires a pulse torpedo into a star to cause it to go supernova, killing the star system at large; the Centerpoint Station does this by firing a pulse blast through hyperspace to hit its target! Emperor Palpatine seems to have been particularly fond of these.
Palpatine didn't create Centerpoint, that was The Precursors. Palpatine did, however, create the Galaxy Gun which does pretty much the same thing. And the Galaxy Gun was destroyed by being rammed by a Star Destroyer, so it's a double example of this trope.
On a more personal scale, the New Jedi Order novel Star By Star features both the New Republic and Yuuzhan Vong revealing their newly-developed infantry. The Republic fields YVH "Yuuzhan Vong Hunter"battle droids capable of dueling starfighters and winning, and capable of incredible feats of precision, correctly identifying and gunning down infiltrators in a crowd of humans without harming the civilians; YVH droids commonly go ten-to-one against standard Vong warriors and win. On the other side, the Vong begin deploying voxyn, Jedi-hunting beasts designed and shaped to be the ultimate killing machines, featuring razor-sharp claws and teeth, acid spit, blood that is both acidic and a neurotoxin, a deadly selection of retroviruses that live on their skin and spines, disorienting sreeches, and neural-shock attacks. The voxyn ultimately lose, due to Crippling Overspecialization — they're weak against More Dakka.
In the Halo expanded universe human ships ended up carrying salvos of "archer" anti-ship missiles that could decimate a human fleet (one archer could severely damage a destroyer) just to take down the shields of a covenant frigate. Justified that Covenant frigates can withstand tactical nuclear weapons.
Perhaps the ultimate example of this trope in any form of media is found in The Ringworld Throne. Tunesmith, the Night Person Protector, uses the Ringworld's meteor defense to shoot down invading starships. Said defense is an X-Ray laser powered by magnetically-fluorescent solar flares (yes, you read that right), creating a beam with enough width and power to vaporize - not "cause to explode into tiny chunks," but convert from solid into gaseous state - a planet.
Actually, vaporizing a planet is easier than blowing it completely apart. If you achieve one but not the other, most of the vapour will stay in the planet-sized fireball, due to gravity. The Millennium Falcon should have encountered an uncharted emission nebula, not uncharted asteroids.
Lampshaded in Homeland by R.A. Salvatore. While he and Alton are being swarmed by spiders, Masoj looks down at his crossbow in contemplation and remarks, "Overkill?"
Alton then, of course, drops a fireball at his feet in an attempt to exterminate the spiders. Overkill andKill It With Fire. Two tropes that go hand-in-hand.
Robert A. Heinlein disapproves of this trope. As he has Sergeant Zim from Starship Troopers comment, war is controlled violence, not killing for its own sake, and there are times where it would as foolish to destroy an enemy city with H-bombs as it would be to punish a baby by decapitating it.
In 'Cardinal of the Kremlin' Tom Clancy remarks that the main problem with nukes is leaving enough enemy command structure intact that you can conduct post-conflict negotiations.
The Star Wars Expanded Universe has numerous cases of insane death machines like the Death Star, the Sun Crusher, and the World Devastators. There are also cases of species doing this, such as the Yevetha and Yuunzhan Vong, who are so fanatical they see winning a war as exterminating the enemy race.
The Bothans, with the death of Borsk Fey'la and the disintegration of the New Republic, declare Ak'Rai, a form of total war that they have only done twice in their history. It calls for every capable Bothan to lend their maximum effort towards defeating their opponent, killing every last male, female, and child of the species, slag their home planet to dust, and erase them from history.
It wouldn't be an overkill thread without the Lensmen. When you're dealing with a planet, sure, no weapon is too powerful - but a fleet? The enemy's surviving ships (a fairly large number is implied) are huddled into the ideal globular defensive formation, weapons pointed out, shields mutually reinforcing... and the good guys direct several planets into the centre of mass, in addition to multiple planet-sized antimatter bombs. Yes, you read that right. Subverted slightly in that even after all this butchery is done, there are still a few survivors to be finished off.
Not to mention the devices used to destroy Ploor - not satisfied with ONE planet moving at fifteen times the speed of LIGHT, aimed at the planet, they fix up a second, identical one to fire at Ploor's sun. They then have to finish off the war ASAP because they're aware that they've finally created the universe's only unstoppable weapon, and if they don't beat the Big Bad within DAYS TO WEEKS, he'll duplicate it and they'll be fucked.
Earlier on in the series, the good guys are faced with the problem of how to defeat the enemy fleet. The solution - build hundreds of specialised starships that are either all defence shields (and no weapons or even human crew) or sluggers with all weapons (and no shields) and assemble them into a gigantic cylinder held together by networks of tractor beams and pressors (the opposite of tractors). The cylinder then flies straight down the throat of the enemy fleet's fire, and when the enemy ships enter its mouth a network of pressors drives them into a single file down the axis of the tube, where each faces odds of between eighty and 200 to one when it gets to the sluggers. At the end, A FRACTION OF ONE PER CENT of the non-remote-controlled ships have been lost, while the enemy is too disorganised to continue fighting.
The best example of this is when, after a Duke of the Red Court of Vampires cheated in a duel against Harry, Ebenezar McCoy pulls an out of use Russian Satellite down out of space onto the villain's mansion. He's also implied to have caused Krakatoa, the Madrid Earthquake, and several other major disasters.
There is a collection of short stories set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe that's entitled "Planetkill".
In The Magician's Nephew, Jadis is described as having been Queen of a world that is ruined when the protagonists come upon it. The reason? Her sister wanted the throne. Instead of killing her and being done with it, Jadis finds and uses the Unspeakable Word, with the result that everyone but herself dies.
Granted, as described, the sister had overcome Jadis' armies and captured her (as a prelude to execution) when she used it.
Perry Rhodan: has Arkon Bombs. Thrown on a planet the planet itself transforms into a nuclear weapon.
They have a device called Transform Cannon [1] that teleports ignited Nukes, Fusion Bombs or even above mentioned Arkon Bombs inside other ships over a distance of million of miles. (Given they are not fitted with >= 5D-Shields. Then they detonate right on the shield perimeter.)
In the Dale Brown novel Act of War, Zakharov sends several squads of men with anti-tank weapons and a helicopter gunship to kill one man. Naturally, when he goes after bigger targets he scales up accordingly. In Executive Intent a Mjolnir/Thor's Hammer orbit-launched kinetic kill vehicle, capable of causing massive casualties on impact with the ground, is fired at a Russian fighter jet, destroying it so thoroughly that it is reduced to so much dust. The Chinese assault on Mogadishu is also brutally thorough: If even a shot of enemy fire is detected from a building, the Chinese do not try to storm the building - they just level the bloody thing. Any gathering of people that might be construed as regrouping enemy units is cut down to the last man even if it is ostensibly civilians trying to recover their dead.
In Ender's Game, the M.D. Device, known as the Little Doctor, causes one atom to explode, then spreads to every other atom around it, causing it to explode. Ender uses this to destroy a planet and two entire fleets.
More specifically, it's a field effect of limited range where the atoms within the field detonate and expand the field slightly. It doesn't work on photons though, so any planet-based chain reaction will cease after a short expansion into space, rather than running wild and destroying the entire galaxy.
Kelsier of the Mistborn series certainly has his moments. If you ask him, any member of the nobility, or any one working for a member of the nobility is little better than cannon fodder.
One of the first times the Royal Manticoran Navy effectively fields its new missile pod technology in a fleet action, combined with its new long-range missiles that allow the fleet to start firing missiles long before they get within "normal" combat range, results in the enemy fleet getting obliterated almost before they can get a shot off. The number of missiles number in the tens of thousands, so many that a significant percentage are killed by other missiles as warheads detonate and another large percentage don't hit anything at all as there's only an expanding cloud of vapour instead of a target. The Solarian Navy, who have not been paying attention to this advance, have a fleet similarly obliterated after a skirmish with the Manticorans, and the Haven fleet at the end of Misison of Honor, now allied with Manticore, are confident they will do the same to yet another Sollie fleet.
Rand Al'Thor in The Wheel of Time series has used this more than once. A scene in The Gathering Storm is particularly noteworthy: He has finally tracked down Graendal to her castle. She is a noted Chessmaster, and Rand doubts that he can outwit her. So instead, he sends in a pawn, a minor nobleman who's stupid, power-hungry and easily manipulated, as a messenger. She uses Mind Control on the nobleman and sends him back to Rand, treating it as the start of an intricate game of backup plans and countermoves. It turns out that Rand was prepared for that; he detects signs of the Mind Control, takes that as solid confirmation of Graendal's presence, pulls out his biggest Amplifier Artifact, and drops a Magical Nuke on her, erasing the entire castle and everyone in it from existence. It didn't work as well as he hoped, but he still managed to get one Forsaken, albeit not the one he wanted, and at least one Black Ajah, so it fits this trope.
In The Merchant Princes Series, a Cycle of Revenge quickly becomes this. When knowledge of the Clan, a dimension-traveling group of smugglers, comes to the attention of the government, President Evil tries to Nuke 'Em because of the potential security risk they represent. Well, that's the pretext, at least. And his bomb succeeds only in hitting one castle, occupied mostly by an enemy of theirs at the time. However, a conservative faction of the Clan decides to retaliate by setting off three nuclear weapons in Washington, DC. They succeed. In retaliation, President Evil's successor sends dimension-traveling ships to the Clan's home country, an area roughly the size of Massachusetts, and carpet-bombs them with nuclear weapons. It's called, appropriately, CARTHAGE, and probably would have caused nuclear winter on that world.
In the Bolo novels, the 'Final War' against the Melconian Empire ended like this. The Terran Concordiat declared that every single planet in the Empire be completely cleansed of life. The Melconians made a similar declaration against the Concordiat at about the same time. Both succeeded. The war ended with both nations reduced to a few scattered remnants desperately searching for a planet that could still support life. Since the fragments of the Concordiat were slightly larger, they can arguably claim victory.
Pretty much the basis for armament design of the Troy and it's sister Battle Globes, as well as the SAPL network and it's Ung lasers.
The trope title is nearly quoted word for word in The Hot Gate, in regards to 20,000 human missiles sent at a Rangoran AV that had its point defense systems almost completely destroyed.
Tigerstar's death in Warriors. Killed by having nine internal organs cut through.
One of the Man-Kzin Wars collections contains the story of a ship called Catskinner, which is a crewed ramscoop ship that has a largish number of 500-pound chunks of iron that it drops shortly before reaching its target system. It slows down by hitting the star. For those lacking a grasp of the scale, the effect is like a relativistic shotgun blast the size of an entire star system. This was the diversion for the real mission, which was to insert (two teams of) assassins to kill the recently arrived representative of the Kzinti central government before he could mount a successful invasion of Earth. This manages to be both overkill (for a diversion) and under-kill given what they could have done to the system...
Live Action TV
In the first season of Lost, a character is killed by six shots from a man he temporarily killed. On a recent episode, a character empties an entire clip from his pistol into someone who'd done something to him, then stands there and pulls the trigger a couple more times before being told to stop.
The MythBusters Mantra: "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing". So many a myth gets ramped up to somehow include a test done with explosives. Sometimes hundreds of pounds of it. Or if the myth is about firearms, they go straight to theminigun. Notable ones:
"Cement Removal," in which they packed a cement mixer they acidentaly overfilled with hardened cement with so much explosives that the entire truck essentially disappeared. It had pissed them off. They set up in an abandoned quarry and the FBI had to close a highway that was too close for comfort.
And yet, in their shopping special they went to a junkyard where the vehicles they use in the myths that are rendered inoperative are sent to, they showed some of the remains of that particular cement mixer's drum with the cement still in it.
"Shooting Fish in a Barrel," - having proven that the shockwave of a handgun shot was enough to kill the fish, bringing in the aforementioned minigun at that point was superfluous.
There's an episode where they tested the theory that one could decimate trees with guns. After trying two different guns, they used a combat vehicle mounted minigun. Not only did it topple the tree, it set it on fire. Awesome.
Technically that wasn't overkill as they had already proven that lesser firearms wouldn't be able to cut down a tree.
Let's also not forget the "Tree Cannon" myth: Six ounces of black powder and a loosely-fitting marble cannonball don't destroy the cannon? How about five pounds of black powder and a tightly-fitting aluminum plug?
The Rocket Sled used to pancake a subcompact car: A metal plate attached to a two-stage rocket sled going almost the speed of sound impacted with a car propped up against a 5 inch metal plate and a concrete wall, causing the car to vaporize*
As in, you can see the cast reduced to a fine powder billowing around the sled
.
The episode where they're testing "pouring water on grease fires" and the resulting fireballs. As a finale, and a measure of what amount of water can put out a grease fire, Adam surprises Jamie by introducing a firefighter helicopter flying over the ridge to dump hundreds of gallons of water.
As his American counterpart Kamen Rider Torque puts it, "A little collateral damage, but what the heck?"
Engine Sentai Go-onger's Humongous Mecha EngineOh G12 has way too much overkill for its finishers. First, it can shoot GoRoader GT at the opponent, then launch energy attacks of its four component robots, then steamroll the enemy which it usually far overshadows. The finale has nearly all of that, plus G12 turning into a phoenix for a flying attack.
It's a robot combined from twelve sentient cars/trains/aircraft. "Overkill" was about five mecha ago, and is pretty much the raison d'être for all of Power Rangers' Humongous Mecha finishing moves. Even moreso with the annual Ultrazord "all of them together" formation.
Surpassed in the final episode of Power Rangers RPM, in which the Gold and Silver Rangers take out Venjix by dropping the city's command center on him! And he wasn't even giant sized! Not bad for the last monster defeat of the Disney-owned era.
Random Translator Guy: Isn't that kind of... overkill?
Spike: No, I think it's just enough kill!
The episode Innocence gives us The Judge, a demon that prophesy said "no weapon forged may kill him." So Buffy's friends sneak into a military base and steal a rocket launcher. Which may not have actually killed him, but it definitely dismembered him again.
One episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation involved a guy shot so many times that you could see straight through him. It turned out to be an accident.
In one episode of Stargate Atlantis, Genii commander Ladon Radim stages a coup d'état against Commander Cowen, who has holed up in a virtual fortress, surrounded by a nigh unopposable force of loyalists. He gets rid of the lot of them by detonating a hidden nuke nearby. He IS the Genii's chief scientific officer, after all; he made it himself.
Also from SGA: the war against the Asurans. First, the Horizon. Six 280 'gigaton' nukes. It wasn't enough, given the Asurans' nature. Then they killed them over by turning their planet into an asteroid field.
During the destruction of Asuras, two drones blew an Asuran battlecruiser in half. During the battle of Antarctica in Stargate SG-1, Anubis took a drone to the sort-of face, courtesy of O'Neill.
Deadliest Warrior tends to avoid this, with the weapon demonstrating how much it would take to kill someone, and that's all (generally one or two hits from edged weapons and spears). A few times, the experts went all-out.
Yakuza vs. Mafia: To test the M1921 Thompson with a 50-round drum against a Sten Mk II with a 32-round magazine, they set up two scenarios: the Mafia shooter would empty the Tommy Gun at five dummies with blood packs and clothing in a mockup of an Italian restaurant, while the Yakuza shooter got a mockup of a Japanese marketplace with four dummies standing around fruit crates. Both targets were gunned down: one dummy took 10 rounds from the Sten, and the Thompson tore the restaurant to shreds. It was a very literal bloodbath. Earlier in the episode, he fired the drum at a standing dummy. The entire front of the dummy fell off.
Shaolin Monk vs. Maori Warrior: The monk's most powerful weapon, the hook swords, were used in a beautiful demonstration by one of the team's experts on a pig carcass, chopping the pig in half with quick but deadly cuts. When the other expert got his hands on Emei piercers, he took out a gel dummy head with several double stabs to the jaw and temples. He then pulled out the dummy's eyes. Was he done? Nope. He just flipped the piercers to the non-eyed ends and literally turned the head inside-out. The show staff was understandably slightly frightened and disturbed.
Navy SEAL vs. Israeli Commando: After a fairly vicious demonstration of the commando's knife which was pretty damn impressive in its own right, one of the SEAL experts turned his three-inch blade on the gel dummy and went berserk. In the space of about fifteen seconds, the dummy was disemboweled, disarmed (literally), decapitated, disemboweled some more, and finally stabbed through the heart via its neck-stump. He used a three-inch knife to do to the gel torso what most people would need a sword to do.
A common characteristic of the more disturbed unsubs.
Judging from what Morgan says when he bursts in at the climax of "100," Hotch seems to have done this to Foyet. With his bare hands.
There was one unsub whose MO was clubbing the victim to death with anything he could get his hands on (up to a half-dozen different things) then stabbing them a ridiculous number of times, increasing the stab count with each subsequent victim. He was a delusional schizophrenic with insomnia. The only way he could sleep and make the voices stop was exhausting himself through the sheer amount of effort it takes to stab someone thirty or forty times.
In Stargate SG-1, the Ancients have built a weapon that can not only wipe out life on an entire planet in a single shot, but do the same for the entire galaxy provided the Stargates are all connected. One of them also built a weapon designed to literally kill gods (or rather ascended beings). It works. Within the confines of a single galaxy, that is.
This is the everyday philosophy of Cowboy CopSledge Hammer!, who thinks nothing of stopping a sniper by blowing up the building with a rocket launcher.
In the first season of Lexx Mantrid takes a disliking to humanity and decides that it (and the protagonists in particular) have to go. To that end he uses small self-replicating spaceflight-capable robots called Mantrid Drones to convert over 60% of the entire universe's mass into drones and then has all of them converge on our heroes, dragging the rest of the universe's mass along via the drones' gravitational attraction and setting off a universe-ending Big Crunch. When Kai, in a radio conversation with Mantrid, asks "isn't this overkill?" Mantrid responds: "Overkill? It is my style. I think... big."
To a lesser extent (and only lesser with something like that for comparison), the Lexx itself often employs overkill. For example:
When Lexx was first constructed its purpose was to serve as a terror weapon to subdue a large group of Heretic worlds by blowing up a few examples and forcing the rest to fall into line ala the Death Star. When it came time for His Divine Shadow to select which Heretic worlds to target, however, He declared that the targets would be "all of them." Fortunately the Lexx was stolen before this could be carried out.
In the miniseries episode "Eating Patterns" the ship has a large alien creature clinging to its hull that it wants to get rid of, so it fired its planet-exploding weapon at a nearby planet (which exploded) simply to generate a convenient asteroid that Lexx could fly past to "scrape" it off.
The planet-exploding weapon has also been fired at full strength against small spacecraft with crews of less than a dozen. (Lexx was intended to be a specialized ship accompanied by a supporting warfleet and so has no smaller weapons of its own for such situations)
In an even more restrained example of extreme overkill, Stanley had Lexx dial down its weapon to its absolute minimum power level to assassinate a single person who was at a known location on a planet's surface. Lexx, unused to such finesse, misses its target by a wide margin and instead blows up an entire unrelated city. Lexx's response was something along the lines of "oops."
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in order to deal with the Founders, a joint Obsidian Order/Tal Shiar fleet planned to moved in to blow away their home planet's crust and mantle. According the The Other Wiki, on an Earth-like planet, that constitutes 84% of planet's volume, just to get to a bunch of people that would mostly be on the surface.
Makes sense in contest: the people they were trying to kill were a race of shapeless gelatin-like life-forms. Normal phasers are frequently ineffective on them, and the combined fleet did negligible damage to them; but that was because they weren't actually there. Then 100-200 Jem'Hadar fighters show up... Really they underkilled that one.
Monty Python's Flying Circus has a sketch spoofing hunting, involving an egomaniac who hunts "tiny, inoffensive insects" using military hardware.
Hank: Well, I follow the moth in the helicopter to lure it away from the flowers, and then Roy comes along in the Lockheed Starfighter and attacks it with air-to-air missiles. Roy: A lot of people have asked us why we don't use fly spray. Well, where's the sport in that?
The two of them had just been shown going "mosquito hunting", which involved firing a bazooka at the mosquito from a distance, then shooting at it using a machine gun, and finally firing several shots at point blank range using a rifle. They also "skin" it by using a knife to cut off its wings.
In "A Good Man Goes to War" the Doctor destroys an entire Cyber-fleet simply to make a point. In fact, not even to make a point; he was simply telling them to do what Rory said.
One of the major backstory points since the series was revived in 2005 is that in order to end the Last Great Time War, the Doctor destroyed not only the entire Dalek Empire, but his race the Time Lords, too.
Person witnessing Airwolf's firepower for the first time: "God in Heaven!!!"
Stringfellow Hawke: "Yeah..."
Most notably, in the pilot episode, where String completely empties Airwolf's missile reserves on Moffett.
Dom: "String. It's done."
The other majorly notable example is when he opens fire on the corrupt sheriff in the episode Sweet Britches.
Kate: "You can't leave! You just blew up half the cowboys in town!"
Walker, Texas Ranger pulls this on a few occasions, but one event takes the cake. Walker is fighting a Curbstomp Battle against a genetic superhuman who won't go down. He's survived a full round of bullets to the chest, several beatdowns, and has the might to snap a neck with one punch. How does he die? He's drenched with kerosene, set ablaze, and then falls through a window into an explosives storage bay.
The Grand Finale, "The Final Show/Down" has Hayes Cooper pitted against Milos Lavocat, an old enemy who survived a Native American scalping. He believes because of this, he can't die. He takes a hit from Cooper's service revolver, shakes it off, and boasts his claim straight to Cooper's face after kidnapping his wife and child. Cooper proceeds to unload the rest of his bullets on Lavocat, killing him on the spot. He asked for it, didn't he?
Recurs later in the finale, when Ross Dollarhide is closing in on Gage with a fireman's axe. Gage unloads his gun into Dollarhide, but he just won't go down. Out of bullets, Gage screams at the sight of the falling axe- then the criminal topples over, stone cold dead.
Professional Wrestling
In WWE, wrestlers who have been feuding long enough will pull off something that garners this trope. Most recent examples involve The Nexus beating the hell out of people, though their favorite punching bag John Cena pulled this off himself at Tables, Ladders & Chairs 2010 where after beating Nexus leaderWade Barrett, he pulled a table on top of him and then dropped a series of supposedly decorative steel chairs suspended by a cable on top of him.
Heels are more likely to pull this trope on regular episodes just because they can.
Tabletop Games
The board game NATO about a Soviet attack into Western Europe has rules for tactical nuclear weapons (5-15 kilotons). The rules for strategic nukes: Soak the map with lighter fluid and apply a flame.
This is a mechanic in Warhammer Fantasy Battles where someone who fully obliterates a foe in a challenge is rewarded with a higher combat resolution.
Invoked in Iron Claw which actually has a mechanic where dealing more damage to an enemy than it takes to kill them has an effect on game play.
In many card games, some players will wipe out the opponent’s entire defense, drain his lifepoints to bare minimal, and then summon a full fleet of powered up monsters to wipe out what little the opponent has left, despite the fact even one of them could wipe out the remaining life points 10x over. Many gamers refer to this strategy as an Onslaught.
Tabletop RPG
Virtually everything past level 20 in all editions of Dungeons & Dragons fall into this.
"The Book of Vile Darkness" has a particularly vicious spell: Apocalypse from the Sky. The damage per square foot isn't stunning by the standards of 9th-level spells, but the blast radius is ten miles per caster level. According to the description, the spell ''typically levels forests, sends mountains tumbling, and wipes out entire populations of living creatures."
The cost of casting that is maybe even more overkill - casting it takes an artifact (high grade Unobtainium and likely better used another way) and damaging your own constitution to the extent of killing an average person (severely weakening tougher casters), does even more damage to the casters wisdom (non-wisdom based casters without overly high wisdom scores are likely to make themselves helpless in an instant) and even damages your wisdom just by being prepared. And it takes an entire day to cast. Still, it has its use. There is a spell (Sadism) that grants you a bonus on your die roll based on how much damaged you inflicted last round. If you just wiped out an entire continent, you can basically succeed in any die roll. Actually, that roll is likely to be overkill too.
There was a homebrewed Ultima spell (from the Final Fantasy games) 3.5 D&D. It did about all of those things and it required all of your spell slots to memorize it for the duration, had a bit of a time limit before it started damaging even more wisdom, and made you pass full out for like maybe half a month after use. Granted you could probably kill anything with it, barring maybe that one virtually-unkillable monster
And to go one better, a combination of metamagic when applied to the Locate City spell can do the same as (or better than) Apocalypse from the Sky. Locate City has a radius of ten miles per caster level. Apply a Snowcasting feat to add the Cold subtype, Flash Frost to make it deal 2 damage to everybody within the radius when you cast it, Energy Substitution to switch the damage to electric, Born of Three Thunders to allow a reflex save, and then Explosive Spell to force a reflex save or be blasted out of the area and taking 1d6 damage per ten feet traveled (which is, let us not forget, ten miles per caster level). Depending on DM adjudication, if this also applies to buildings, trees and other things within the radius of the spell, then you might just have a world-ender on your hands by environmental extinction. You may also need a feat from another sourcebook that turns a circle effect into a sphere. At 18th level, you can add Arcane Thesis, Widen Spell and Enlarge Spell to the combination, which should increase the area to a 400-mile radius. For comparison, England is only about 390 miles long. Kaboom indeed, and all before 20th level. With no negative effects beyond the book that the DM will probably be throwing at your skull.
Warhammer 40,000 lives off this. A fairly average pistol (a handheld fully automatic, armor piercing recoilless rocket-launcher) is an invocation of the Chunky Salsa Rule by anyone else's standards, and that's not even counting the standard lasgun of the Imperial Guard, which cleanly blows off the heads and arms of unarmored humans, or the pistols that fire shuriken or bugs that eat their way through your body to your brain in the brief few seconds that make up their lives, Oh and did we mention the flamethrower pistols that nuns in jet packs can wield akimbo?
Tau pulse rifles don't just kill Guardsmen. They kill Guardsmen very, very thoroughly. (Without cover, five hits in six are instantly lethal.) Pulse rifles are also the only basic ranged weapon except the Necron gauss flayer capable of putting the fear of the Tau'va into Space Marine Rhino vehicles and Ork looted wagons from the front. Railguns are even more spectacular, capable of reducing the largest and toughest tank (outside of Apocalypse) into a rapidly-expanding cloud of smoke and shredded metal.
Dawn of War brings this to the extreme within the game's system - no Earth-Shattering Kaboom, though. Granted, it starts off small with highly gruesome finishing moves between individual units, but reaching the top tier of almost any race brings wholesale death and destruction. The Necron's fully-awakened Monolith, for example, is a slowly-moving, teleporting, troop-producing, death-beam spewing glacier of epic proportions, and usually signals game over for anyone who receives it teleporting into the back of their one remaining base. Meanwhile, the Imperial Guard Baneblade can take a Monolith down.
Apocalypse demonstrates what happens when both sides come to this conclusion at the same time. Piles of rusted metal coated with guns and chainsaws, black hole grenades, tanks large enough to qualify as small cities, and Tyranid horrors that look like bad-tempered hills with spiky legs, happen.
Apocalypse just takes it Up to Eleven (and then 40,000). A Strength value of 10 is considered the highest you can go in the normal game. Apocalypse one-ups this with the D rating, which automatically wounds regardless of any modifiers and inflicts Instant Death, as well as automatically penetrating any tank it hits. On top of that, there's also the Void Missile, which includes the D-Strength value as well as having the ability to just remove any models it hits (with only Invulnerable Saves being able to save you) regardless of any rules (Vehicles and Eternal Warriors usually don't suffer as bad if they're hit by a D-strength weapon, but the Void Missile outright negate their existence). On top of that, all of the templates got doubled in size (and many of these possess the D-strength).
Emperor-Class Titans. Their primary guns are overkill against anything smaller than another Titan and nothing in the game except another Emperor is worth shooting all of the thing's guns at. If you made a model to scale with a Space Marine the thing would be the size of a 10-year-old player. The aforementioned primary weapons are each similar in size to a Baneblade.
Planetstrike: possibly the only 40K expansion suited for less than 3000 points in which dropping fragments of a starship on your enemy, blasting a Frickin' Laser Beam from orbit into the heart of their base, and pummelling them with a meteor shower, are all standard tactics. (The ship fragments, in the inaugural Planetstrike battle report, were described as going through a Guard Valkyrie flyer "like a sledgehammer through a pane of glass". Ouch.)
Two races in particular employ this level of thoroughness as one of their hats: The Tyranids will devour animals, vegetables, and minerals, as well as the geothermal energy within a planet, leaving it a lifeless husk, while the Necrons will systematically destroy all life on a planet right down to the last bacterium, to destroy anything that could even theoretically be corrupted by the Warp.
The current Blood Angels are like this with dreadnoughts: With a certain weapon equipped, a Dreadnought is fully capable of an infinite number of attacks, so much so that the rules actually had to list "this stops when you've either had a bad roll or everyone else is dead". They also have a Spellcasting Dreadnought; a Cyborg/mecha/battlesuit that can cast spells.
The Space Marine Apocalypse-only tank Terminus Ultra Land Raider. It has 8 Anti-tank cannons. The Imperial Armor Helios Land Raider might be a better example, fully upgraded it mounts 4 of the same anti-tank cannons, a long-range artillery rocket launcher, an even longer ranged cruise missile, a tank-killing heat ray, and a recoilless grenade launcher machine gun for point-defense.
Chaos runs with this with their champions: they will "bless" you to the point of overkill, and if you can't take it you get turned into a mewling spawn of chaos. If you can take it, you become a Daemon Prince, an ungodly powerful creature of death. Tzeentch is even more in love with this trope, since he is the lord of change after all.
The Tau Manta gunship, the largest single model produced by Games Workshop/Forge World (the Emperor Titan is way too big), mounts a pair of immense railguns that can punch through Titan shields, six massive anti-infantry ion cannons, a missile launcher, sixteen plasma gatling guns, and ten remote-guided cruise missiles. Its transport bays are designed to carry fifty infantry, four main battle tanks, and eight guys in flying battlesuits; but a strict interpretation of the rules allows the gunship to carry a hundred and seventy nine infantrymen.
A fluff piece in the Imperial Guard Codex talks about how the Death Korps of Krieg stopped a rebellion by bombarding the rebellious Hive City in question nonstop for ten years... Five years after the leaders of the hive transmitted their unconditional surrender, and two years after all life sign readings within the hive had ceased.
Warhammer without the 40K is pretty big on the overkill factor, as well. The Orcs aren't quite as obsessed with dakka as the Orks, but only because they've been too busy beating the crap out of everything else to invent it themselves.
Noted in the DM's guide to Legend of the Five Rings is Ryoko Owari. The governess's guiding philosophy is that minor nuisances are to be ignored, but any major problem must be dealt with as much force as she can muster: "Don't resort to violence quickly, resort to violence thoroughly."
GURPS: Ultratech has a few wonderful toys. There's the ghost particle beam that makes a massive antimatter explosion inside of the target. Reality disintegrators erase people from existence. The best example might be handguns that fire nuclear weapons, which are so much overkill that they have literally no practical use.
For vehicles, there is a 100mm gatling that shoots strategic nukes - average damage for that one is 210 billion per second (the human body is vaporized around 100 damage) On the defensive side stasis fields, can take infinite amounts of damage. There are weapons that can send someone to some point in space far enough away that you can just forget about them. Other supplements have their moments too (a spell to make a volcano, a template of a very minor Eldritch Abomination). Also, in GURPS everything can be scaled up Beyond the Impossible if the GM lets you.
The Azrael from GURPS: It attacks the enemy with a bunch of 700 megaton missiles and then smashes into the planet with enough force to wipe out the dinosaurs all over again.
The massive Ogre cybertanks from GURPS Ogre, whose main guns fire SATNUC (SATuration NUclear Cluster) rounds — each round splits into multiple submunitions which detonate over the target into semi-aimed shaped nuclear plasma blasts. Ogres also carry hypersmart missiles (almost smart enough to have opinions) and use APFSDSDU (Armor-Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot Depleted Uranium) rounds for point defense and anti-personnel fire.
Any one of a hundred weapons or skills in Exalted would qualify, but of particular note is a supernatural martial art move called Illustrative Overkill Technique, which allows an Exalt to kill an opponent in such an excessive fashion that everyone else has to run away or start retching.
The Five-Metal Shrike. Ground zero damage for the Godspear: infinity.
Any of the three remaining Titan-class aerial citadels. Main weapon: the Godspear, only more so. Let's put this in perspective: the Shrike can fire the Godspear to deal infinite damage to an area in a 25 yard radius, once per day, with a secondary blast of 50 damage out for 500m. A Titan citadel can do the same, once per hour (during daylight), from an orichalcum lens a mile in diameter, to level an area TEN MILES ACROSS. And the hull is covered with smaller weapons to see off threats that don't mandate the reduction of an entire city to a smouldering crater. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you destroy Gem.
While this is all over the place, Malfeas (and any Infernal using his Charms) has a particularly impressive line in overkill, starting with being able to add lots of dice to ostentatiously brutal moves and moving up to things like turning into a walking Fantastic Nuke surrounded by a zone of horrific radioactive death or condemning enemies to ten thousand years of suffering.
Scions Sun Purview has a Boon called "Fusion" which has a base of 7 Aggravated damage, plus the successes of a Strength+ Science roll. Seeing as 10s count twice, and you could have a pool of 15 dice, and then additional Epic Strength bonuses... and possible Arete (if you're Dodek). It's basically Hiroshima and Nagasaki on your target.
Mekton has nuclear bullets. Nuclear bullets? It also has, among other things, MIRV remotes packing enough missiles to make Honor Harrington jealous (oh, and these can be nuclear too); the Core Cannon, which is a hundred times too large to fit on the average mecha and could vaporise one seven times over in one shot; energy beams that can hit every part of a target a potentially infinite number of times; power reservoirs that can absorb your enemy's blasts, then project them back in a bolt of horrible doom that outshines the sun; and Excessive Scale, which is more or less reserved for building Death Stars, planet-sized battle fortresses, and the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The sourcebook that introduced most of these systems introduced several harder-to-damage kinds of armour plating to make up for the increased quantities of damage.
Magic: The Gathering: every colour except blue (which goes for subtlety). Black and White tend to just vaporise things (Damnation and Wrath of God), while Red can do an appalling amount of damage in the right circumstances (Shivan Meteor can do enough damage to turn an Eldritch Abomination into coleslaw, and Obliterate will kill everything except enchantments that can even theoretically be destroyed). Green's overkill is in the form of huge, bad-tempered monsters, such as Omnath, Locus of Mana (whose maximum power is limited only by how much mana you can generate between summoning him and victory), and Rampaging Baloths, which can produce a swarm of monsters that eat bears for breakfast. Available to anyone are the recently-released Eldritch Abominations, such as Emrakul and Kozilek, each of whom is 2-4 times as powerful as the average dragon. And then we have Lux Cannon, which can be used to destroy anything that can be conceivably destroyed. The flavor text describes this trope perfectly: "There are few problems that can't be solved by putting a hole in the world."
RIFTS: you do start with pistols that do have More Dakka than a modern age tank.
Paranoia has plasma generators, nuclear cone rifle rounds, nuclear hand grenades, all of which not only kill the target but reduce it to a thick yellow spray of component atoms. In 2nd Edition, where the damage table went from 1 (may be stunned) to 20 (probably vaporized), nukes had a damage rating of 30.
And then there's the Warbot Mark IV◊, rivaled for size only by Alpha Complex itself (and maybe a Giant Radioactive Mutant Cockroach or two).
In Rune Factory 3 you can continue to hit a dead enemy if they are knocked up. You can do this for hours if you want. Additionally, while in wooly form you can grab a dead enemy to perform a fatality on them.
One of the oldest examples is Scorched Earth. Nukes, Plasma Blasts, Hot Napalm, the Funky Bomb, and the aptly-named Death's Head. Quite capable of destroying large sections of the map, especially with the explosive sizes on maximum in the game's configuration. The Death's Head is so devastating that if fired wrong it can kill everyone on the screen. Including the player who thought firing it was a good idea.
Before them all came Turok; a series of games that lived and breathed this trope. The original game had the QUAD-ROCKET LAUNCHER, which fired off fourhigh explosive missiles at once - and it was one of the weaker weapons in your inventory. The FUSION CANNON was basically a tactical nuke-cross-BFG that decimated everything within a square-kilometre in a bright red flash. The... You know what? Just watch this. Its sequel, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, actually managed to top it. Because hunting dinosaurs requires heavy firepower.
Moreover, Turok really doesn't do any hunting himself (though some dinosaurs do attack, and some are actually armed later on), but rather, he fights many humans clearly designated as hunters/poachers. That's right. Turok carries enough firepower to hunt people who have enough firepower to hunt dinosaurs.
Command & Conquer thrives on this trope. Whether its constructing an army half the size of the map, sending said army against one particular enemy or structure, to the units such as double barreled tanks (Mammoth and Overlord), nuclear canons and trucks, and an orbital laser. Generals ramps things up with faction generals that specialize in a particular aspect of their army, and that includes a nuclear general, a laser general, and an explosives general. Then theirs a secret general in the Challenge mode who has access to all superweapons she introduces herself by firing all superweapons simultaneously at a column of tanks.
Speaking of Command and Conquer, just wipe out the majority of your enemy and decide to leave his Construction Yard barely intact with a little HP left? The perfect solution is to move your troops away, then launch your superweapon at the opponent's Construction Yard. Nothing quite so satisfying like kicking someone to the curb like that.
The "Command & Conquer: Retarded" Game Mod makes everything overpowered. The nukes, for instance, now have three times the power and area of effect.
In Ar Tonelico 2, this happens when you use 100 I.P.D. Replekia Amplification with Phantasmagoria song magic.
Gears of War 2: Single enemy infantry who has been incapacitated? ORBITAL LASER. Overall there is a ridiculous number of methods to reduce enemies to chunky salsa, and even more to execute downed enemies.
In fighting games, it's a generally common practice to finish a near KO'd opponent with a Super move or a rapid combination attack, just to finish off the match with flair, at least casually.
Capcom Vs SNK 2 Mark Of The Millennium even gave some people special winposes for finishing with certain supers (Hibiki Takane with her "No Fear Feint" and Rock Howard with Raising/Raging Storm or Deadly Rave). Chun-li blushes (after her "Yatta" pose) whenever she finishes her opponent with a Finest KO, aka overkill.
In addition, Akuma players especially like to finish off opponents with his Shun Goku Satsu move (Translates to "Instant Hell Murder", also known as The Raging Demon) which is possibly one of the most satisfying, and most predictable, moves in fighting game history. Pulling this off results in a giant burning 'Ten' symbol covering the screen in addition to the standard 'Flash', mirroring the one on Akuma's back... some fans claim to be eagerly awaiting the upcoming HD Remix of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, specifically in order to be able to pull that move off in 1080p.
Mortal Kombat actually encourages this with Fatalities. The gorier and more ridiculous, the better.
In certain games you also have the Brutalities, which are pretty much Fatalities on steroids. You have to do an 11-button combo to get it. The reward? Your opponent explodes in a shower of gore and bones.
The 'fatality' move of Smoke: when the opponent is dazed and reeling from side to side, the robot's chest opens and a bunch of small bombs tumble out. Cut to a shot of the planet Earth from orbit - which then goes Kaboom, captioned with the rather helpful assessment that "Smoke Wins".
In Mortal Kombat 9, the first of Quan Chi's fatalities involves ripping off your opponent's right leg and then hitting him with it so that he falls to the ground. Once in the ground, Quan Chi hits him in the head twice with his own leg and then it explodes in little fragments. And after that he keeps beating him to a pulp while the fatality assessment shows up and until you exit the match. Who needs necromancy, eh Quan Chi?
The Fighting Game based on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure rewarded a Super KO with a Reaction Shot of your opponent (drawn in the style of the manga) gasping in pain, Blood from the Mouth, scrolling into place in the background before fading to white and cutting back to your character's Victory Pose. Really satisfying. Furthermore, depending on how hte opponent was finished off, the portraits would show it. If you used Dio's blood suck super or Hol Horse's J.Geil super for example, the portrait would be covered in blood and slowly turn green. If killed by any of Black Polnareff or Chaka or Kan's supers, the portrait would split in half/quarters, and if beaten by Hol Horse's super or one of Polnareff's supers, the portrait would be covered in holes.
In Vampire Savior you must finish all opponents with EX or Dark Force moves to unlock your character's Bonus Boss.
In Endless Frontier: Super Robot Wars OG Saga, you get a 1.3x multiplier on your battle experience for performing a Limit Break finish. A lesser multiplier is awarded for finishing off the battle with a support attack. Which can be summoning a Humongous Mecha.
Killer Instinct and its sequel introduces, as well as the standard fatalities and humiliations; Ultimate combos, which automatically end with a fatality, and Ultra combos, which can escalate the hit counter somewhere into the upper eighties. Of course, the only time you can pull off either of these is when your opponent has barely enough health to survive a standard combination...
Of note is one of Fulgore's finishers. The screen darkens, he pulls of his (normal-sized) head... and out pops a machine-gun turret worthy of sitting atop a literal tank, let alone a robot. I wonder how he fit it in the regular head?
Speaking of supers, Maxima's HSDM in The King Of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match defines this, brutalizing the opponent with a barrage of missiles, before making totally sure by blasting them to Kingdom Come with a laser cannon from his chest. Not that his old HSDM (demoted to SDM) was less brutal, since it had him throwing the enemy to the floor with a painful looking body slam, before Bunker Bustering into their spine, for repeated hits and huge damage. By then it should be a wonder if the opponent is still standing after having their spine essentially ground to dust.
In the Knights Of The Old Republic RPG game, Darth Malak orders the orbital bombardment of Taris, killing 6 billion people in a failed attempt to kill one woman! All because the search for her was taking "too long."
In an odd twist of fate, he was right that it was taking too long; unfortunately he realised this too late to actually stop her.
In the Xbox remake of Ninja Gaiden, it's easy as pie to keep comboing a dead and decapitated foe with the Vigoorian Flail until the poor sucker finally disintegrates into a cloud of red dust. It's harder but more satisfying to do it with other weapons.
The Obliteration Techniques themselves are a rather ridiculous example of this trope, seeing as how you can do them on an enemy who's been decapitated just so long as the body hasn't fallen down yet.
In Samurai Shodown, defeating the foe with the right move (usually the strongest slash a character has, but there are some exceptions) will cause them to be bisected and golden charms to fall out, leaving only their weapon in the ground.
Samurai Shodown gets worse than that. In IV, at least, if you defeat your opponent by a lot and finish with a strong attack, you can perform a "final" attack that will cut them into pieces with blood graphically spurting out.
It gets even worse: In the original version of Samurai Shodown V Special, you could, under certain conditions, perform a (very violent and graphic) move called the "Zetsumei Ougi" which would actually kill your opponent (thus ending the match); the relevant part is that, for a number of characters it went beyond just cutting the opponent up: some of them would literally destroy the opponent's body leaving nothing behind, save perhaps a head, a skull, or a rain of blood.
In the Battlefield series, using the tank's main gun or anti-tank weaponry on a soldier qualifies.
Or on sea maps, where you can actually use a cruiser's 12in main guns to shoot infantry.
Star Wars Battlefront has a few examples, especially using an AT-AT to step on people and using AT weapons against infantry. The command classes in Battlefront 2 are good examples; the Imperial Officer and the MagnaGuard have grenade launchers, the MagnaGuard also has a rapid-fire rocket pistol, the Clone Commander has a man-portable heavy machine gun, and the Bothan Spy can turn invisible and has an incinerator.
The Special classes also count; the Destroyer Droid has machine guns and an energy shield. The Wookie has twice the health of normal infantry and has the bowcaster, which can shoot a shotgun-like burst that can easily kill at close range but can also charge up to fire a powerful shot that will take out nearly any enemy trooper. It also has a two-level zoom scope for sniping with the charged up shot, as well as a grenade launcher for a secondary weapon. The Dark Trooper has a lightning gun that can kill four soldiers at once. The Jet Trooper has an EMP rifle that can one-hit-kill anything but main battle tanks and Jedi, and the last two have jet packs.
The award upgraded rocket launcher allows a Vanguard to stand back and snipe infantry with short-range anti-tank cruise missiles.
The fan-made maps "Capital Ship Down" 1 and 2 are very good examples of why the second game left out the infantry maps with starfighters on them. A Y-wing can take down an AT-AT in two hits if they are carefully placed, and the bombs have an insane blast radius when used against infantry.
The Disgaea series in general is filled with this. It's not uncommon to be hitting enemies for billions of points of damage at higher levels, when the most HP you'll generally ever see anything with is in the low 10 millions. The third game is particularly guilty, due to the damage formula making the effect of the defense stat completely negligible against higher amounts of damage.
Then there's the attacks used to cause said damage, which include things like punching the moon into the target and explosions big enough to destroy the world and neighboring celestial bodies.
The fighting game Eternal Champions had overkill moves that were specific to each stage: if you can defeat your opponent and get their body to fall on just the right spot, they'll be chopped up by a fan, or fall into a vat of acid, or get impaled on the Washington monument, to name a few. The Sega CD remake also added a second form of Overkill, and featured more standard Vendettas, which were always overly bloody. One of the simplest, but most brutal one was where the character would pull out a knife, and stab his opponent until the screen faded out.
Also in the Sega CD version were the "Cinekills", in which the defeated fighter is teleported to the Dark Champion's realm, where the Dark Champion personally executes the defeated fighter, in cutscene form. However, it is difficult to pull off a Cinekill.
At the end of a game in Team Fortress 2 the opposing team are rendered unable to use their weapons with their speed decreased by 10% and the winning team have their critical hit ratio increased to maximum. Also the losing team's spawn area (normally the only safe area for them on the map) becomes accessible by the opposing team. If the server settings are particularly mean, the losing team can still respawn in that phase, only to be killed again by the winners.
The Spy's Backstab is meant to be a One-Hit Kill. To make sure it always is a one hit kill, Valve gave the Backstab the ability to always deal damage equaling twice the target's maximum health. And since it's a guaranteed Critical Hit, which triples the already high damage, you're doing damage equal to 6 times the enemy's max health. Getting a backstab on a Heavy does an absolutely ridiculous 1800 damage on an enemy that has 300 health (sometimes 450 health).
Final Fantasy X actually rewarded players for doing exactly what the word "overkill" implies. Finishing off enemies with a hugely damaging attack would increase the XP/gold gain and raise the odds of better item drops. Anima is the ultimate overkill machine, capable of inflicting 3199968 damage in two turns.
A similar system is used in Bookworm Adventures (only it grants gems that bestow status effects and damage bonuses).
Cactuars can use 10,000 needles to kill someone instantly unless their HP is above 9999 via Break HP Limit. Bonus Boss (one of many in the Monster Arena) Cactuar King uses 99,999 Needles, which does that amount of damage. Even though you can obtain the Break HP Limit to break your HP cap to go beyond 10K worth of HP, you will never survive this attack (unless you have Auto-Life), even if you use a Game Shark to make your HP go that high.
Also an element in Final Fantasy IV - since magic spells are cast faster if used more often, it's quite reasonable to return to early parts of the game to cast Holy and Meteor on goblins to take advantage of this. Of course, nobody ever tells you about this.
While it's referred to as "Overwhelm", wiping out the entire enemy party in a single turn nets you more of a Macca Bonus in Devil Survivor.
FFVIII's summon Eden. Nothing says 'overkill' like shooting your enemy with a beam that blows up the next galaxy.
Final Fantasy XII's Quickenings. One can easily enough get the first Quickening for everyone in the party within the first hour or so of gameplay.
Note that a long enough chain also does a massive AOE on top of the damage the Quickenings themselves do. You can one-shot most of the bosses AND their minions without ever getting touched.
In Drakengard, the weapon levelling system encouraged the player to continue slashing enemies long after their health ran out. Consecutive hits would increase the experience one obtained from defeating enemies.
Many networked FPS games (like Unreal Tournament) allow you to get Ludicrous Gibs from shooting fallen foes enough or blasting them. This behavior is encouraged in some by the ability of enemy medics to revive them.
"Jailbreak" for Unreal Tournament: When the enemy team is captured, the execution is, most of the times, real Overkill. In one map in space, each team's jail had 5 vertical tubes, and when the entire team was captured, the 5 tubes opened and 5 Redeemer warheads fell on the room, exploding simultaneously and turning the unfortunates into molecules and some flesh bits. The other one had big fans in each jail, ready to slice the losers to death.
Also, The Nail Weapons II X weapon pack for UT99, and the Redeemer, which tends not to even leave chunks, let alone a corpse.
In Final Fantasy Tactics, Take Your Time + Level Grinding = massive amounts of overkill for story battles, since they always have a default level. The downside to being able to drop a Meteor on, say, Algus is that quite a few of the random encounters afterward (why hello, Mr. Red Chocobo!) have the potential to unleash similar amounts of overkill on your party.
Metroid Fusion: In order to truly ensure the extinction of the X parasites, Samus can't rely on the Biologic Space Labs station's self-destruct systems alone; the only way to make sure they're absolutely wiped out is to deorbit the station with the self-destruct on a timer, and thus Colony Drop the station far enough into SR388's atmosphere to set up a planet-nuking chain reaction. Partially justified in that a station dedicated to biological (biological weapons?) research would have to guarantee that the station's remains were sterilized as well as destroyed, hence the absurdly powerful SD system.
A more personal example occurs in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. During the fight on Norion, Samus free-falls down a sixteen-kilometer-deep generator shaft in pursuit of Space Dragon and series Recurring Boss Ridley. After administering a long-distance thrashing with beam and missile weapons, she lands on his head, pries his jaws open and jams her cannon arm down his throat before firing several more rounds "down the hatch."
Granted, Ridley did kill Samus' parents in front of her; and he's also been revived countless times. She might just have been making sure he wouldn't return. (He usually does anyway.)
Indeed, he comes back later in that very game as the imposingly named Omega Ridley, and again in Super Metroid (which the Prime games are set before).
Fellow Big BadMother Brain ends up on the wrong end of another such smackdown in Super Metroid, when she murders the infant metroid from Metroid II and earns herself a Hyper Beam-fueled Roaring Rampage of Revenge from the creature's human adoptive "mother." The final shot decapitates Mother Brain, exploding her cybernetic combat body; her severed head turns to gray powder as it hits the floor.
In a straighter example of this trope, killing any regular mook with your most potent weapons (such as the missile combos in the Prime series - which include a flamethrower, an ice bomb, and a black hole, among others).
Enemies and characters killed in Enchanted Arms stick around for three turns, during which time they can be resurrected. If, however, they are killed by inflicting more than double their total health in one attack, they disappear instantly and can't be resurrected until the end of the combat.
In the shooter Call of Juarez, Reverend Ray can initiate a Bullet Time mode at will, causing to draw your six-shooters and have your crosshairs go towards the center from left and right... allowing you practically kill an enemy, use the Bullet Time, and then unload 12 bullets in them.
The expansion pack for Age Of Mythology allows the player to create a Titan (i.e. a god). They cost almost as much as a Wonder and take almost as long to construct (i.e. a shit-load of time and money), but watching an unstoppable hundred-metre-plus-tall engine of destruction effortlessly carve through enemy armies and bases is extremely satisfying.
Unless you actually target the enemy base, the titan will just fall to attrition, as it will constantly attack units if they attack them, meaning if you continuously make and send just one unit at the titan at a time, it will eventually die with you little closer to defeat. It'll still cost a lot of resources though...
Titans have no anti-air defense. Air units with an attack are hard to come by - the Atlanteans have Stymphalian Birds, the Egyptians have Phoenixes - but game-breaking if you plan to get them.
Super Robot Wars games can sometimes encourage this by giving "Dynamic Kills" to certain attacks; if they deal enough damage to kill, the animation will change to integrate the enemy's destruction, for instance having a super-powered punch drill straight through the target, or an energy blast's explosion keep burning until there's nothing left.
One of the first instances of this was Daitarn 3's Sun Attack. If the attack will just harm but not destroy, the attack is simply an big blast of energy. If it will, it's actually the blast carving a hole out of the enemy, and Daitarn drop-kicking the "plug" out. His team attack with Zambot 3 elevates it to the point both machines do the drop kick.
All child's play compared to the destructive power of the Valzacard from Super Robot Wars W. Its weakest attack is a huge and extraordinarily powerful blast of energy. Its trademark sword attack has a dynamic kill that breaks through the fabric of space, blasts the enemy into another dimension, and breaks through the other side. Its strongest attack, EX Nova Shoot Over, I couldn't even begin to describe. It starts out as turning the Armstra into a giant bow and arrow, then it just goes crazy from there. Really, you'd have to see it to believe it.
Then there's Regret Buster, pretty much Valzacard on steroids minus 4 pilots.
Darkbrain's ultimate attack is just ridiculous. One part of it involves slamming in the enemy into a few planets, the second part is a laser-punch through nine planets and assorted meteors, and the last part involves dropping them through a hole in the universe.
The combat system of The Force Unleashed is practically built around this entire concept, although special mention must go to the ability to hold a stormtrooper in the firing path of the DEATH STAR.
The Star WarsRTS game Empire At War allows you to build the Death Star and use it in space combat. Destroying the planet means that there is no ground conflict, allowing you to control the planet just by winning the space battle.
The Forces of Corruption expansion takes it one step further by allowing you to build the Death Star II, which not only can destroy the planet, but also fire on enemy capital ships and space stations during battle! It also allows the empire to get the Executor, a Super Star Destroyer bigger than the screen at normal zoom, that carries more weapons than a space station and can deploy eighteen fighter squadrons; it can often take any but the biggest rebel or Consortium fleets on its own. And to add insult to total destruction, it only costs 3 pop cap, the same as a frigate. In other words, its a Gamebreaker extraordinaire.
Recurring Optional Boss Iseria Queen from Tri-Ace's games is almost inevitably based around this - of course, since she's a boss, YOU are at the receiving end. Perhaps the best example is her appearance in Valkyrie Profile... her standard attack is a 25-hit combo, each strike dealing damage above your characters' Max Possible HP. Don't ask about her Special Attacks.
Not that Valkyrie Profile expects the player himself to raise this trope to a philosophy for the duration of gameplay. "Soul Crush" indeed.
And if you don't regularly indulge in massive overkill, Hel herself gets enraged and sends in horribly powerful monsters as punishment. Attacking efficiently is a very bad idea, so much did the designers love overkill.
Pretty much the logic behind the Bloody Mess perk in the Fallout series (Only in 3 does it actually provide any benefits). Normally, when an enemy dies, they fall down, possibly losing the last body part you shot at. With Bloody Mess, other body parts will fall off for absolutely no reason. There's nothing quite like detonating a super mutant by punching it.
Fallout incorporates many weapons designed for overkill fanatics. The original Fallout sported a rocket launcher, a minigun (and a laser variant), and a turbo plasma rifle (which is the most powerful weapon in the game overall); Fallout 2 had new fun toys such as the H&K G11E (the best submachine gun for Small Guns users), the Vindicator minigun (an even stronger minigun), a pulse rifle (which is even stronger than the turbo plasma rifle and causes electric death), and a secret Holy Hand Grenade (deals area damage of 300-500, enough to kill many enemies 3 times over); Fallout 3 has the infamous Experimental MIRV, an improved Fat Man that fires 8 nukes simultaneously in a wide spread.
Even without the Bloody Mess perk it was possible in Fallout 1 and 2 to finish off someone with a burst from even a modest submachine gun from point-blank range, which would literally rip his upper torso apart.
Gauss weapons are great for dealing with armored targets like robots. The Gauss rifle is the logical step up, and both the pistol and rifle are from Fallout 2. But Fallout Tactics takes things towards the logical extreme with the gauss minigun, which has fairly long range for a minigun, tears through huge groups of (high-powered) enemies like they were nothing, and is more powerful than the Browning M2. It also eats ammo like popcorn so you'll be saving it for the endgame.
If you fight Ulysses in the Fallout: New Vegas "Lonesome Road" DLC, he will pull this on you, being Dangerously Genre Savvy enough to know that the Courier won't go down in a one-on-one fight. He brings regenerating Eyebots and convinces the Marked Men into the fray to make sure you don't get out and have revenge.
In Supreme Commander, there's nothing like inundating your opponent's base with Tier 3 stationary cannons situated on the other side of the map, watching as their shields collapse and their buildings explode...unless it's queuing up a bunch of nuclear warheads that overwhelm their anti-missile defenses and reduces their base to a lifeless smoking crater.
In some cases this isn't really There Is No Kill Like Overkill so much as you must have twice as many nukes simultaneously striking the target as the enemy has strategic missile defense silos plus one in order to hit, because each defense can shoot down two incoming missiles before impact... though that doesn't stop you from building many more silos "just to be sure".
And the true overkill comes with the aptly named game-ender experimentals. They cost about as much as 20 'regular' experimentals. Even a single experimental is a threat to most bases, and if your opponent has the same amount of resources as you have but used them to build the cheaper experimentals, he'll have overrun your base long before your game-ender is done. But oh, what fun if you can get one of them deployed. To wit: An even more powerful artillery cannon than the tier 3, which can hit anywhere on the map with perfect accuracy, a mobile artillery installation that fires one round across the map per second, an artillery cannon that shoots one shot per 3 seconds which splits up into 6 projectiles, who each split up in 6 more projectiles, and a nuklear missile launcher that builds nukes very fast, for free, which take 2 countermeasure missiles to kill, and do 10 times more damage than the strongest unit can take in a huge radius. Oh, and there is one experimental building that produces nigh-unlimited resources.
You don't even need this. You can just set up a manufacturing plant that just makes tons and tons of gunships. Add in the above stationary guns, and you will obliterate everything.
World of Warcraft has the Warrior class, whose Execute ability is typically the strongest single attack, and burns all of their Rage to make it more powerful - but can only be used on opponents under 20% HP. It's, well...
Sadly, with the latest patch, Warriors can only burn 30 rage at a time (probably to "balance" PVP). Good news is you can take talents to get a chance to use it outside the 20% HP mark.
The Paladins have their own version, Hammer of Wrath. And fire-spec Mages passively deal more damage, all to targets under a fifth already.
Drain Soul: Normally, it does some low damage and restores soul shards if it's up when a target dies. Use it when the target is under 25%, and whatever you're aiming at is going to drop fast.
Soul Fire: Nothing says "die!" like a huge ball of fire that crits for 10k.
Shadow Bolt: Except maybe the screaming skull made of darkness that crits for 20k.
However, despite the overkillness of those abilities - against bosses, who will still have a ton of health despite being at 20%... these can really win it for you in PvE fights.
Even Priests get one of these, with a twist. Shadow Word: Death is a finishing move that causes a huge amount of damage... but if you don't kill the enemy with it, you take the damage as well. Since Priests are so squishy, the spell often ends up doing what it says on the tin either way. (Mostly, this is due to its instant cast and faster cooldown.)
C'thun Green Beams. imagine the standard chain lighting spell, except it doubles in damage each time it hits. If you screw up on starting the fight, the last person will be hit for several tens of millions, at the time the boss was released, that's many times your maximum health.
Mimiron will launch some rockets from time to time. They are not hard to dodge, and will do no damage outside a rather small area. Fail to dodge them, however, and you get hit for 5 MILLION damage. If, at that stage of the game, you have 1% of that, you can consider yourself a damn though Tank.
Final Fantasy VII's Knights of the Round is the strongest summoning in the game, using multiple attacks in one animation to circumvent the 9999 damage cap. Its animation takes about 1:15 minutes. W-Summon means you can use a Summoning twice in one round. Mimic lets a character... well, mimic the action of another. Putting this together, we get 6 KotR summonings in one round by letting one character do the W-Summon with the other two mimicking him. Of course, this has a drawback - you can easily get up, make yourself a sandwich and eat it before continuing with the game without missing anything apart from animations of monsters being hacked to very fine bits.
Additionally, we have the Infinite Omnislash, where equipping Cloud with 8 pairs of linked Counter (Which counter-attacks with the linked materia when hit) and Mimic (Which repeats the last action) Materia allows you to unleash a 16-hit Omnislash on an enemy, which will then be repeated 8 times every time he is hit. This is a great way of taking down some of the toughest bosses in the game solo.
Cid's Highwind and Barret's Ungermax can do if properly set up (both do 18 hits). A few Hero Drinks and either one can basically decimate Emerald Weapon in the same setup.
Overkilling in both effect and length of cutscene is Sephiroth's Supernova. He summons a fiery ball of destruction which destroys Pluto, Saturn and Jupiter before slamming into the Sun, causing it to erupt and swallow Mercury and Venus and tear apart the Earth! The animation takes two minutes, he can summon it multiple times in the same fight (destroying the Solar System each time) and you cannot skip the animation. Due to the games' mechanics, it won't actually kill the heroes.
In Dissidia, Super Nova returns, although not as long (or explosive). However, one of his HP damaging attacks does include dropping a meteor upon his opponent. The blast is so bright that your screen will flash white, and it leaves lighting, flames, and black clouds in its wake.
Kingdom of Loathing has a mechanic whereby dealing large amounts of extra damage to enemies in a certain area will cause parts of their bodies to fly off, which you then acquire in place of the enemy's normal item drops.
This is actually a very useful strategy for speedruns in that area (and pretty much mandatory if you want the best item to drop at the end). It also has elements (pun not intended...) of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, since the type of damage dealt sets the bodypart dropped- for example, Spooky damage "Scared the [enemy] so much he left his skull behind!"
Excessive Sleaze damage causes the hobo to leave his crotch behind.
Ike's Final Smash in Super Smash Bros. Brawl involves striking the enemy once, then catapulting them into the sky, where they are then slashed repeatedly with his sword before being hurtled back down to earth (and usually, back off into the sky).
Brütal Legend has a move which summons a giant, flaming zepplin that crashes into your enemies like a Hindenburg from Hell.
Modern combat RTS Act of War: Direct Action has each faction equipped with a superweapon and counter-superweapon. International terrorist ring The Consortium's superweapon houses 3 shots per structure (and you can build multiple structures), making it alarmingly easy to simply inundate a base with superweapon attacks faster than the enemy can counter them. In addition, the Consortium superweapon is a satellite nudged out of orbit onto the target...but first, coated in e. bola. Needless to say, the strategy of "launching more satellites than you have Patriot missiles" tends to warrant some overcommitment of resources, just to be on the safe side.
Pokémon: While not entirely the fault of the game itself, moreso that of the player, but there's nothing quite as satisfying as roasting a Lv. 2 Caterpie with a Lv. 100 Charizard with max Special Attack, using the strongest Fire-type attack in the game... and scoring a critical hit. It's even worse when you use Psychic with a Lv. 100, max-Special-Attack Mewtwo against a Lv. 2 Weedle... and still get a critical hit. At that point, it's not out of the question for a player to experience a momentary A God Am I feeling.
Given the structure of its evolution line, it's possible to produce a Level 1 Scizor (4x damage from Fire) specifically for link battles. You also get the same effect from breeding out a Level 1 Paras - which also has much lower defensive stats and has an ability which can increase its vulnerability to fire. Toasty!
Take a Lv. 100 Heatran (highest Special Attack of all Fire-types), give it Choice Specs (boosts Special moves), boost its natural Special Attack all the way up, change the weather to sunny, activate Heatran's Flash Fire, and attack the above Paras with Overheat, the strongest Fire-type attack Heatran can learn. Put that through a damage calculator, and the damage reaches the millions. That would essentially erase that Paras from existence. A Level 100 Heatran at max Sp ATK with its ability active, in a sunny field, wearing Choice Specs, using Overheat and getting a Critical Hit with Helping Hand added in against the weakest Level 1 Paras, has the potential for...wait for it...6,255,207.
It gets better. As of Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs, Heatran can use the more powerful Eruption. Meaning that at full health under sun, with +6 Sp Atk and boosts from Flash Fire, Helping Hand, a Cherrim's Flower Gift and a critical hit, with the target Paras at -6 Sp Def, Heatran can deal over 10 million points of damage.
Or, take a Shuckle, maximize its physical Defense, make it use Power Swap, give it the item Metronome, a + 6 Attack boost, Skill Swap Huge Power/Pure Power on it, partner it with a Cherrim and sunny weather, and have it use the Defense Curl/Rollout combo. On the last hit of Rollout (and 10th consecutive use of Rollout or more), have Cherrim use Helping Hand and direct Shuckle's wrath at a Level 1 Ledyba with minimum and -6 Defense and assume a Critical Hit... Of course, this is for thought experiment only.
Done. Assuming that everything is in Shuckle's favor, damage after 10 Rollouts would be 142,597,368 points of damage. The minimum HP for a Level 1 Ledyba is 11, meaning that the Shuckle could KO the Ledyba 12,963,397.1 times over. The hit would be 99.9999923% overkill. Don't mess with Shuckle.
Screw that. According to Bulbapedia, it's possible to deal about 50% MORE. "Although the circumstances would be nearly impossible, using Rollout, a level 100 Shuckle can potentially deal the most damage in one single attack through the use of numerous stat boosters, by using Helping Hand, Metronome held item, Power Trick, a Skill Swap to Pure Power or Huge Power, and the Defense Curl/Rollout combo. Also, Shuckle's partner must have the ability Flower Gift and the weather must be sunny. On the 5th impact of Rollout, if used against a level 1 Ledyba that has been hit with negative Defense modifiers (such as Screech), it can deal 213,896,052 damage with a critical hit.". 19 445 095.6K Os. Also, when this tropes went to copy this, he saw something new... "Actually the above isn't the most damage. Via calculations if the Shuckle is at level 100 and it has a defense enhancing nature with 31 I Vs and 252 E Vs in Defense and the Ledyba has a Defense hindering nature, after using all those powerup moves, without using Screech at all, and the Ledbya would still have a defense of 5, with a critical hit Rollout on the 5th turn, it can deal up to 821,360,590,800. But by sending Ledyba's defense to 1, almost 0 landing a critical hit on a level 1 Ledyba with any nature since 6 or 5/4 is approximately 1 as fractions don't exist in stats, on the 5th turn of Rollout, it can lash out 4,106,802,954,000 damage. 4 trillion 106 billion 802 million 954 thousand damage or 4 trillion 1 hundred 6 billion 8 hundred 2 million 9 hundred 54 thousand damage to make it easier to read this way. Almost an infinite amount of damage. This can be calculated by taking 2 of 100 and then using the forumla 5/2 * 614 which is Shuckle's highest defense stat at a Relaxed, Lax, Bold, or Impish nature with 31 Ivs and 252 Evs in the stat, +614/2 which gives 50% of 614, 307 *2*960*480^2/50) since /1 is pointless +2) *1.5 for STAB *4*2 for critical hit. The problem is then worked out from there until all the stuff that needs to be added and multiplied is completed. "... 4,106,802,954,000*
(Levels use 8-bit unsigned integer, which ranges from 0 to 255, this is why when you Rare Candy Lv. 255 Mon in Gen I or Gen II, it drops to Lv. 0 - it overflows. Until Gen III, the Pokémon were also stored in this, so there was only 4 glitch Pokémon in Gen II. However, it was upgraded to 16-bit unsigned integer, allowing for 65536 Pokémon, which is squared 256. To be able to get to such (ie. the damage Shuckle did) number, you would need a 64-bit unsigned integer which ranges from 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616 numbers, which is, of course, square of 4,294,967,295, which itself is square of 65,536). That number is so freaking big that it's 4 491 752.9 times higher than the damage Shuckle can do, which itself is incredibly high)
damage. That's almost 19 200 times more than the previous thing. This damage is enough to KO Ledyba about 373345723000 times. If humans were Ledyba... Our population is about 7 000 000 000. With the damage above... god, Rollout would kill our entire population about '''53''' times
On the other hand, with the help of stat-increasing attacks and an accessory that doubles Attack, it's possible in some versions to get the Attack of a Marowak so high that it actually wraps around and becomes extremely low, thanks to a bug. That the bug is fixed in later versions only causes Marowak to become the EPITOME of overkill (1000+ Attack)...if it can survive long enough.
The Worms series. Your enemy is down to the last worm, and standing on a ledge just begging to be poked? Nah... still got that Holy Hand Grenade!
Especially when you make a custom settings with explosions turned all the way up, and even more so with a third party program like Worms Armageddon's Fiddler which lets you monkey with just about every setting in the game. Letting loose with a high-explosive minigun is very satisfying.
By exploiting a bug related to the quick switching of weapons, it was possible to fire a minigun but use bazooka rockets as ammo. The typical result was, of course, blasting a tunnel through the whole map and killing everything in the way.
The Dinosaur King game features many attacks which very much appear to be overkill. One such attack involves knocking the opponent over and then literally stomping them into the ground. As that attack only gets that effect at a certain level of HP, it can be very satisfying if you've been beaten a lot over the course of the match. Others involve the opponent being set on fire, stomped flat, falling head-first from great heights, drowned, crushed by giant falling rocks, and being impaled on lightning.
The Final Strike from Mega Man X: Command Mission is designed for this. If you do enough damage to an enemy to reduce their current HP down to 25% or less of what they had previously with a non-subweapon attack without killing them, you can use the Final Strike which allows the player's party to initiate a barrage of shots and blows supposed to deal total damage way in excess of what is necessary, rewarding players for doing so with bonuses afterward. You can also do this to more than 1 enemy at the same time if you manage to hit several weakened enemies with a multitarget attack at the same time, and doing so increases the amount of time you can keep pounding away at them: this is also necessary to unlock some of the better FMEs for the FME Generator. Of course, against some bosses, 25% health is still a few % too many.
When Mega Man finalizes and performs the Red Gaia Eraser (in Megaman Starforce 3 Red Joker), he first fires off a laser of noise, which is more than enough to kill a weak boss, then the plates on his shoulders detach to perform a sweep beam, and it ends with a gigantic, field covering explosion. Nothing that isn't a major boss at full health should be left standing after this. In Black Ace, the Black End Galaxy involves throwing a black hole at the enemy, and then slicing them in half.
Heck, the third game's main combat gimmick is all about overkill. Overkilling an enemy raises your "noise" level by the amount you overkilled them with.
In Painkiller, a great many of the weapons not only kill the enemies, but sends their limbs flying off in every direction in a shower of blood. Bonus points when done to a whole pack of enemies at once and double bonus points when done in slow-motion, and extra gold for juggling a enemies' dead body.
In No More Heroes, after hitting a mook enough times, Travis can perform a special move that decapitaes the mook, showering Travis in blood and coins. This becomes practical later in the game - said special move can also decapitate/split in half other mooks nearby, resulting in multiple showers of blood and coins. It's Crazy Awesome.
Once he's been knocked down to half health, Bonus Boss Henry gains an unbelievably awesome One-Hit KO move. Describing it would fail to capture the ludicrousness, so here's a link instead.
In Desperate Struggle, Shinobu likes to cut off heads and then cut the heads into pieces. Given what Destroyman came back from, it might not actually be that unreasonable.
Surprisingly, Armored Core offers you a Sadistic Choice (at least in the early games) in terms of overkilling. If you shoot an enemy enough, it will burst into flames. Rest assured, it will die soon. However, until it actually explodes into nothingness, it can, and will, keep firing. Do you overkill it (which does speed up its death), wasting your ammo in the process (extremely important in some long missions without ammo boosts), or do you leave yourself vulnerable to its last attacks? Most players Take a Third Option, either by using a laserblade (which costs no ammo), or running away real fast.
The Novalith Cannon in Sins of a Solar Empire. Smaller worlds die from one shot, and the only way to survive two is to use the TEC-only Planetary Shield. The kicker? There's no possible way to stop a Novalith shell once fired even if you manage to conquer the target world and colonize it before your shells hit.
4X games in general seem to lend themselves well to practical demonstrations of this trope. Master Of Orion II, for example, has a device that blows planets apart, a la the Death Star. For when you absolutely, positively have to kill every last living thing bigger than a microbe.
The Mercenaries series offers the choice of overkill, especially once more powerful airstrikes become unlocked. Sure, you could just run up to the target, shoot him, and then verify him, but it's much more fun to watch the entire city block he's hiding in get blasted to hell by a carpet bombing run.
In Mercenaries 2, you get the option to purchase a tactical nuke and use it against anything and everything.
Overkill abounds in the RTS Rise of Legends. The secondary combat unit of the Vinci faction is a 15-foot clockwork robot that is equipped with a lightning gun, while their most powerful unit is something akin to a weapons factory with legs the size of tower cranes. The magic-wielding Alin have access to 50-foot golems built entirely out of glass, as well as crystalline spiders the size of tanks. Both smush enemies with little discrimination. The spacefaring Couatl frequently utilize some very large laser beams in combination with giant stone mechs.
In Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3, battles in the story mode and arena mode net you more experience points for finishing a fight dramatically. A signature energy blast move is good. A 30+ hit rush (possibly capped with a signature energy blast) is even better. A signature super move visible from space - which the game will never neglect to show you - is best of all. But being a Dragon Ball game, if you're not finishing fights like this anyway, you're not playing it right. For added effect, using an energy blast to finish things off will crack your opponent's HUD, while the super move will cause the thing to explode.
In Quake II, a downed enemy can be gibbed with enough firepower unloaded into his body, which may be advisable as sometimes a seemingly dead enemy will fire off some last shots at you.
Quake Live has an achievement for finishing off someone with 1 HP left with the Rail Gun, the most damaging weapon in the game.
The final boss of Lunar 2: Eternal Blue has a beam attack that hits for over 7000 damage, when your characters can have a maximum of 999 hit points, and most likely have 500-600. This gives him a guaranteed One-Hit KO attack even against characters with protection against the Useless Useful Spell versions.
In Metal Gear Solid, in your fight with Vulcan Raven, he uses a gatling gun that he took from a F-16 to shoot you with, while the most effective weapon to use against him is a Stinger missile launcher.
In one of the joke scenes from Metal Gear Solid 3, The Boss uses the Davy Crockett nuclear missile launcher against Snake. From point. Blank. Range.
Jak and Daxter didn't qualify until the second game, in which Jak got a Superpowered Evil Side possessing two kill-everything-on-the-screen attacks, as well as flickers of cool purple lightning that followed his attacks. Then he got a gun capable of firing a lightning orb that blows up every hovercar on the screen. Then the third game handed him an upgrade to this gun which burns through at least half of your ammo in one shot...a shot which is so large it gets its own mushroom cloud. As well as a variant form of his yellow gun which fires an Attack Drone that spams out ammo so fast it resembles a small but deadly rainstorm. Someone's really got to explain the concept of 'less than total destruction' to him. Ditto with Baron Praxis, who intends to stop the Metal Heads with a bomb that can blow up the universe! All of it! That's less like "overkill" and more like "omnikill"!
Ratchet & Clank often have guns which veer encouragingly close to being overkill. Starting with the RYNO and moving up to its Deadlocked equivalent, which rains laser beams from orbit. And then there's Clank's Humongous Mecha form, which, in the second game, is entirely capable of razing every building on a small but heavily urbanised moon... You get a Skill Point for that, too.
Arguably, it started with the Visibomb gun, a weapon that shoots a remote-controlled missile. On the right stages, you can stand at the beginning of a stage and shoot enemies clear on the other side of it.
Incidentally, just to give you an idea of what the RYNO can do: "RYNO" stands for "Rip Ya a New One." The third game has the RY3NO. Fully upgrading this give you the RYNOCIRATOR, which burns every on-screen enemy into ash.
The RYNO IV (from Tools of Destruction) was banned in 59 galaxies, including the one that you're currently in, and the mere act of talking about it is grounds for being thrown into Zordoom Prison indefinitely. The original holoplan was torn into 12 pieces and thrown across the galaxy, so nothing like it could be built ever again (as Gadgetron thought it was too dangerous, and we're talking about a company that sells portable black hole launchers (point away from face)). Obviously they didn't do a good enough job of discouraging the inventor, since A Crack In Time brought us the RYNO V. This was unanimously voted the weapon "Most Likely To End All Life As We Know It", outlawed everywhere, and, again, the plans were torn apart and scattered to the winds.
The RYNO V is notable for having an inbuilt speaker system that plays the 1812 Overture whenever you fire it. Because, you know, when you've got that much firepower, why the hell not?
In Postal 2 after killing or crippling people, you can choose to do some of the most sadistic things to them such as chopping them to pieces with a machete, setting them on fire, smashing their heads with a sledgehammer, blow them to pieces with a rocket launcher, break every bone in their body with a blunt object,etc.
In Neverwinter Nights, it's common for casters to open locked and trapped boxes with Fireball spells. This is an incantation designed to clear rooms.
Incredibly annoying because of a Scrappy Mechanic that forces you to wail on a chest with your weapon coupled with chests that resist damage that would drop an ogre. Apparently, either locks must be picked or the chest utterly destroyed, because no one can carefully use a hatchet and prybar to open something.
This is also the game that, with the gore settings all the way up, things explode in a shower of blood and bones when you kill them with a critical hit. This also works when killed by Instant Death spells - Implosion and Destruction actually look like they are ripping people inside out when they go off. Implosion is Area of Effect, so if it hits few creatures, the result is usually a fountain of blood and bones.
In Tron 2.0, there is a subroutine (weapon) called the Prankster Bit. Not only is it a 1-hit KO (sometimes killing the player if they stand too close to the blast), but it can even get you a Non-Standard Game Over if an NPC is sucked in (it acts like the TRON equivalent of a black hole gun). Overkill in a situation versus one or two enemies (especially if they are Intrusion Countermeasure Programs, where a Disc Primitive will work, and can even block the opponents' Discs), but great when trying to kill multiple enemies at once. Also the best weapon in the final boss battle, against the corrupted fCon Team, where you have to derez them one part at a time. The Prankster Bit can take about 10% off their life bar per hit (again, watch that blast radius), but it drains a heck of a lot of your energy. A high Weapon Efficiency rating is recommended. The Cluster Disc works almost as well, at a fraction of the energy.
In the Hopeless Boss Fight at the beginning of Paper Mario, Bowser whittles Mario down to almost no HP... then hits him with an attack that does 10 damage, which is pretty high-powered for this game.
That's your entire health meter at that point in the game. At the end of the game your health bar maxes out at 65, using every badge you can find to do it.
In Super Mario RPG, a properly-used Geno Whirl will always do 9999 damage. The enemy with the highest health in the game has roughly 2000 hit points less than this (however, with the exception of Exor it can't be used on bosses).
The hip-hop-themed fighting game Def Jam: Fight For NY actually required you use stronger means than a normal punch to finish your opponent and end the match, usually in the form of high-powered combos, smashing your opponent into an element of the stage, hitting them with a weapon, or the oft over-the-top special moves. And that's not counting the stage where you can push them in front of an passing subway train...
In MadWorld, Jack can slam an empty garbage can over a mook's head. Then shove a road sign through his neck. Then grab him and impale him on a nearby spike. Five times. Then he FINALLY dies. Or, you could just kill him in one hit with a chainsaw. It's your call, really.
In Baldur's Gate, a party member being reduced to enough hit points below zero prevents them from being resurrected, presumably because they've been pulverized. It's also possible to turn someone to stone or freeze them into an ice statue, then shatter it. For extra fun, petrify someone, then turn them back to flesh, then One-Hit Kill them Oh, and if the Gore setting is on, when enemies take enough damage they explode into chunks of meat.
The Matrix: Path of Neo allows you to pummel an enemy, lift him up into the air to continue the beating, leap up and smash him into the ceiling, fling him to the floor, and stomp on his throat with both feet.
Eternal Darkness features a double-barreled elephant gun. Firing it without bracing yourself first will knock you on your ass. And yet it is not the most damaging weapon available even in that level, nor is one shot from it sufficient to kill most foes.
Resident Evil 5's Hydra: The game's ultimate unlockable shotgun has four barrels side-by-side. Sheva has to wield it two-handed, but Chris and Wesker are so ridiculously ripped that they simply widen their stance and fire it with one hand at arm length. It has enough knockback potential to put any standard foe on its ass and does damage on par with a standard rifle at long-range, despite being...y'know...a shotgun.
Max Payne has a rather different concept of this. Rather than you keep shooting mooks that are already dead (which you can), Max shoots a boss after he is clearly dead. Over and over again. He had to have emptied at least one magazine (which given his weapon, a Beretta 92-FS, means at least fifteen rounds) into him.
Given that the boss in question (Jack Lupino) is really, really strung out on a drug that's known for rendering people oblivious to even the most crippling injuries, it wasn't an entirely unreasonable precaution.
Max Payne: When Lupino finally went down, I wanted to make real sure he'd stay that way. V was a bad monster, turned them into freaking zombie demons from outer space.
The Killer Suits in the stage "The Deep Six" empty their mags into a guy at the beginning in an effort to erase all evidence of Project Valhalla. One of them reloads and puts a final round into him before the other guy tells him "I think he's dead already."
A mod to the game let you wield a handheld minigun.
Ace Combat 6 requires you to fly your plane down the barrel of the Chandelier cruise missile launcher. Yes, a launcher with missiles so big you can fly a plane down its barrel. If a missile is launched with the plane still inside, well, "One-Hit Kill" is putting it... lightly. On the player's side, it's easy to single out a single target for all four or six special missiles, pop off the heaters and loose a few gun rounds as well. Or feed a single, isolated ground target a FAEB/LSWM/MPBM, all weapons meant for wide-area devastation.
Ace Combat 5 also has this with the Falken's Tactical Laser System and Zero has the one on the Morgan.
Air Force Delta Strike pits the player against the Leupold battery of gigantic rail-guns, so large you have to fly down the barrel. The barrel is actually five separate railgun barrels built as one. You have to maneuver your plane between shells, depending on which barrel is about to fire next. The enemy has three such railguns that you have to take on in that mission.
Soul Calibur 4's Critical Finish Also the fact that in Arcade Mode, you get extra points for hitting the downed corpse of your enemy when you win a round.
The Touhou fangame Touhou Soccer is basically Soccer played with additional rules that permits the use of spellcards or youkai powers on the ball. This results in excessively spectacular, SRW-style danmaku barrages on the unfortunate ball. For example:
The Scarlet Sisters use their weapons, Laevatinn and Gungnir, in addition to their danmaku techniques, for their combination attack.
Yuuka, Marisa and Mima all nuke the ball with several permutations of the MasterSpark.
Marisa in particular has a combination technique, where Alice and Patchouli cast buffs on her before she does a very good impression of Thrugelmir's Blade that Cleaves Continents that even shreds the spectator stands. Thankfully for the audience, spellcards only inflict all non-lethal damage...
Inverted in Cirno and Letty's combination strike. Cirno moves to blast the ball with her Icicle Fall (Easy) spellcard, apparently forgetting that it can't hit anything directly in front of her... like, say, an oncoming soccer ball. The ball proceeds to hit her in the face - not once, but fifty bajillion times, making it a rare case of overkill from the target to the attacker. Though, to be fair, it's still a good hit and the ball can rebound and score a goal.
Also, Rinnosuke's (MANnosuke! NICE COMBINATION with Tokiko. He kicks the ball hard, into the poor youkai's face, then it rebounds into the goal. It's one of the strongest moves in the game.
And then there is this from Mima just a little bit stronger than the above move enough that is the most powerful single shot in the game. Yes, it is entirely necessary to orbitally bombard a hemisphere to hit a soccer ball.
Hilariously inverted with this one by Chi... er... Hong Meiling.
Cross Edge allows you to beat enemies beyond death with high-damage combination attacks in order to get hard-to-find items useful for Item Crafting.
Record Of Agarest War is based on a variation of Cross Edge's system, and also allows overkills. Normal item drops are random in Aragest, but an overkill guarantees an item.
Both games also feature a break system (Cross Edge has three!) which allows you to destroy an enemy's defenses, increasing damage for all remaining attacks in the chain.
On the PS3/360 versions of Sonic Unleashed, the Nightmares (the regular, almost lizard-like enemies) have a dying animation which takes a few seconds. It begins with the Nightmare standing, then it slowly collapses until it dies. However, if the enemy gets hit at any time in this animation, it resets. You can make Sonic the Werehog do quite the overkill, especially when all your stats are fully levelled up, and you just whale on an enemy long after it's dead, working up a huge combo, then giving it an uppercut and smashing the enemy into the ground full force. It's up to you whether this example combines with Video Game Cruelty Potential.
The bottomless pits; just smash the hapless enemies off the edges and watch them fall and die.
Smooshing enemies into pancakes with your hands. It's especially fun when you get into the higher-level comboes. One-two punch, followed by smashing it between your two giant fists, followed by a powerful spinning backhand, followed by grabbing their ankles and slamming them into walls and the ground repeatedly....
In Prototype, it's possible, as shown even in the early trailers, to grab someone, jump on a high building (the Empire State Building, for instance), then jump, grab the person you were holding, crash it to the ground, grab it again, jump, crash into another floor, grab, crash, grab, and all the way to the street-level.
Not to mention other horrible things you can do. Punching through 5 people at once? No problem. Grabbing a helicopter with a whip, hijack it and use it as a landmower (where grass = people on the sidewalk) or simple jump in the air, land on someone, use his body as a skateboard and kick his corpse into a wall or a car, splatting it into tiny pieces. Or just jumping at the center of a crowded street and kill everyone with a burst of tentacles or spikes coming from beneath the ground.
Lets just say this entire game is based around overkill. Even the military needs to use overkill just to put a dent in Alex.
If you keep on attacking your opponent even after they are long gone, BlazBlue will actually award you a trophy for it: "It's The Only Way To Be Sure."
If you turn "show damage" on and perform an Astral Heat in training mode, you'll see that an Astral Finish can do up to 17,000 damage. The highest HP character in the game*
except Unlimited Ragna
. has 13,000 health(Tager), and will likely have only 2,000 left before you can initiate an Astral Heat.
Ragna, with his Astral Heat, slices the opponent with his Sinister Scythe, then transforms into... something... and then erases the target from reality. Really.
With Haku-men's Astral Heat, Akumetsu, the screen is so filled with blood that it turns black for a second.
God of War, specifically Theseus' death in the 2nd installment.
Ragnarok Online has a job build for Monk, which uses all of your SP for a single attack, also preventing SP regen for a few minutes afterwards. These builds usually result in someone dying, as monks are rather squishy.
This build is the main reason Monks have their reputation as boss killers.
Doom was probably the first game ever to make overkill somewhat worthwhile, by introducing us to Ludicrous Gibs.
Rise of the Triad, an Apogee game that was released around the same time Doo M was, included several weapons with ridiculous amounts of explosive firepower such as the napalm-laden Firebomb, the six-missile-overkill Drunk Missile, and the Dark Staff. Any one of these weapons could be found on the first level. Not only would the enemy be gibbed upon contact, but any surrounding enemies caught in the blast would also be wiped out, and in extreme cases, gibs would stream down the screen, with an accompanying message "Ludicrous Gibs!" displayed at the top-left corner. Needless to say, these were long-distance weapons, and any player too close would be thrown into the air and most likely be killed in the blast.
Singularity Planet Busters from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. For when you really need to turn the heartland of an opposing faction into a vast water filled crater.
The killstreak rewards in Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer include everything from AGM missiles to airstrikes to carpet bombing runs to a Tactical Nuke that instantly kills everyone on the map, cannot be stopped or avoided (except via EMP, the second highest reward), and ends the game in victory for your team.
Empire Earth includes an epic version of the age progression present in the Age of Empires series. Once you get your first level of rifle infantry they are utterly devastating compared to the previous tiers of footmen, but of course, military superiority altogether can be taken to absurd levels depending on how fast you can rise through the eras relative to your opponent. Are you nuking individual cavemen?
With the ability to summon anything, Scribblenauts is rife with opportunities for this. Park full of trash? Use a black hole. Bee attacking you? Time for a minigun. Defeat a barracuda with Cthulhu! Summon God as your personal bodyguard! And so on...
EVE Online: Records show that the top usage of Titan Doomsday Devices for December 09 was the destruction of Battleships. A Titan Doomsday Device does up to 3 MILLION HP of damage and never misses. The theoretical maximum HP of battleship (factoring resistance to damage) remains under 600 thousand HP.
Homeworld's capital ships were heavily armored. The concentrated fire used to kill them off quickly commonly involved 10-50 capital ships, each firing 1-4 enormous ion cannons at the same target. The last few missions of the original game could involve hundreds of ships concentrating fire on a single target.
In the last mission of FreeSpace 2 the genocidal Shivans invade and destroy an entire star system in what can only come across as a literally astronomical dick move, given their enigmatic motives.
In Sacrifice, nearly all of the most powerful spells fall under this trope. In particular the spell that summons a volcano, or the one that causes a giant circle of ground to fall away. The spell that vaporizes a target unit's intestines for a one-hit-kill & gib may also qualify. A similar spell achieves the gib by dropping a giant cow on the target from several hundred feet in the air.
In The World Ends with You, the power of a Fusion is determined by three multipliers: Attack score, the Difficulty setting, and a power score unique to each fusion. Shiki's strongest fusion has a multiplier of 20 (10 more than her 2nd level). Beat's third level fusion has a multiplier of 30. And Joshua's third level fusion has a multiplier of 99.99. Fitting, since it does "drop the freakin' moon".
The M-920 Cain heavy weapon in Mass Effect 2. Its nickname is the "Nuke Launcher," though technically, it's only firing a small piece of metal at relativistic speeds. Either way, it causes a big boom. Using it against the toughest bosses practically kills them outright. Using it against weaker enemies is the very definition of overkill. There's also the downloadable M-490 Blackstorm Projector, which basically creates a miniature black hole that draws in nearby enemies until it collapses explosively.
The sheer amount of resources that the Reapers have poured into neutralizing Commander Shepard is simply awe-inspiring. Given that s/he's killed a few of them,it's a bit justified.
The Widow Sniper Rifle, which is designed to pierce tank armor. If you use it in Mass Effect 2, you'll primarily be using it against infantry.
With a sadistic Random Number God controlling everything from behind the scenes, you'll see a lot of Overkill in Fire Emblem. So you hacked away at that boss's HP, leaving them with exactly 1 HP left? Well, the next unit to attack, which if it would crit (despite having a mere 1% chance to do so) would kill the boss from full HP... promptly will crit. Of course, if your plan is to leave the Boss with a minor bit of HP, so a weaker unit could kill it, the second attack of whatever unit you had sent into the fight to weaken said boss, also will be a crit, killing the boss immediately. Or when your unit did their first attack, leaving the enemy with a minor bit of HP, then they take the enemy's counterattack... that's when the Crit will come. Of course it all works in reverse. The enemy won't kill your unit practically. They'll crit and overkill you.
The sacred weapons from Sacred Stones get x3 bonus when fighting a monster. Crit with that, and that can do damage upwards of 150 damage, easily. When your characters' health all max out at 60, it's not uncommon to one-hit-kill an enemy 3-4 times over. And of course, the above rule applies as well.
Along the same vein are the mastery skills from Path of Radiance and especially Radiant Dawn. In the former, you have to use up a lot of skill capacity points just to learn them and you only get 4 opportunites per game, but the masteries that inflict damage cut through enemies swiftly whenever they kick in. But lordy, Radiant Dawn is a whole other beast: all units that promote to tier 3 (and Laguz that use a Satori Sign) get a free mastery skill, and they are ALL made of Overkill. Only one or two of them don't inflict 3-5x more damage, and some have a side effect (put enemy to sleep, ect.) that you're not liable to take advantage of because your hapless victims will usually become Deader than Dead first.
Luna (in Dawn) triples the user's Strength, then negates the foe's Defense, then usually crushes its' victim in one stroke. More or less, there's not a unit in the game that can survive that. But! If that's just not Overkill enough for you, consider the Black Knight's obscene mastery, Eclipse. Same effect, but 5x Strength instead. Based on the Knight's stats, he has a fixed 40% chance to inflict 208 damage. The final boss is 88 HP short of that. Ye gods. Fortunately, when it comes time to duel the Knight in the final chapter, equipping Nihil shuts down Eclipse (and any other enemy mastery) altogether.
Most of Ar tonelico's Song Magic isn't quite so powerful. But then we come across Tower Connection, Silver Horn, Ar tonelico, and Phantasmagoria. The latter two in the second game fire a concentrated laser at the Floating Continent you're on, which causes an explosion larger than the continent itself. About 100 times larger. Combined with Replakia, which is itself another huge freakin' laser much closer to the continent than the titular tower, and it's a surprise the same thing that would happen to Lyner if he used Ar tonelico?? doesn't happen here.
In Spider-Man 2, you could climb the highest building in the city while holding a thug, then jump off and piledrive the thug to the ground. In fact, this is the only way to jump from the top of the Empire State Building to the ground without dying.
Transcendence actively promotes this in dealing with the massive capital ship enemies encountered near the end of the game. Of particular note is the alien weapon - the Iocrym Fracture Cannon - a deadly plasma cannon that launches and unending stream of excessively damaging plasma, which at this stage of the game is essentially one of the two most damaging types of damage, which can then be upgraded to + 250% damage, for a total for 350% the original damage, giving over a thousand DPS of plasma damage, which is more than enough to slice through anything in the game.
Of all things, this can also be accomplished with jettisoned crates of fuel; putting enough fuel, or ammo, into an unlimited number of crates and then shooting them will create a massive chain reaction of thermonuclear explosions, killing anything viewable in screen with absolute certainty, and beyond, depending how widely spread the crates are. In theory, one could do this to an entire star system, frying everything instantly and completely.
In Urban Rivals, Darth of the GHEIST Clan is noted of being too good of a killer, as he is known for using hundreds of bullets, when three would have done, or also using a bazooka at the drop of a hat.
Wesker in Resident Evil 5. Hit by two rockets, which explode him into a lake of molten lava. Justified, because his mutations make him immune to most conventional weapons at this point.
Barbatos from Tales Of Destiny. "Item nazo tsukatten Ja NEEEEEE!!!" He can overkill every hit in a combo even with max stats, just because you used an item. Then, there's nothing like taking a hit from world destroyer on the whole screen for 669,515,520 damage. Even if you stat grinded all the way to 9,999 Hit Points, it would be enough to kill you 67,000 times.
In Persona 3 and Persona 4, if one of your characters uses a normal attack and lands a critical, they usually strike the enemy so hard or so many times, he not only gets massive damage but also is knocked down, in Persona 4 for more than one round. Kanji is probably one of the best examples - his critical attack consists of throwing his chair/board/shield at the enemy, kicking him and punching down to the ground. Mitsuru is also similar, she strikes an enemy vertically, launches a barrage of swift strikes and curb-stomps him with boots on high heels. No wonder everyone is afraid of those two characters.
The bonus bosses from both of those games like to indulge in overkill, too. If you attempt to, in any way, null any of their attacks, and also after a certain number of turns regardless, they will cast a powered-up Medigolaon which does 9,999 to the whole party. Now consider the fact that your HP is capped at 999...
The final boss of Descent II features a colossal green robot that is completely invulnerable to all frontal attacks and sports dual rapid fire homing earthshaker missile launchers that he uses quite liberally. The earthshaker missile is a fusion of the smart missile and the mega missile turned Up to Eleven. In mere seconds of him spotting you, you can expect to have anywhere from 2 to 10 shaker missiles quickly closing in on your position. God help you if they miss.
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood isn't quite as over-the-top as many examples on this page, but one move has to stand out - stabbing a guard through the underside of the head, then firing the Hidden Gun at point-blank. The former would be a fatal wound in Real Life, and remember that the latter can punch through Brute plate for a One-Hit Kill even at maximum effective range. At point-blank, one wonders why the head doesn't explode or get sent flying.
In The Godfather, after choking someone to death, Aldo seals the deal with a Neck Snap. You can never be too sure, right?
Sin in Final Fantasy X. Eventually, your team pisses it off so much it is provoked into using Tera Gravitation to kill you. The attack in question pulls debris in from the Moon, and gouges enormous fiery rifts in the planet's surface that can be seen from outer space. All this, to kill a piddly ship with some two-legged gnats on (read: you). It's a testament to how resilient your party is that they do not get turned into vapor by that. Or maybe they are simply that lucky...
Actually, it uses Giga-Graviton to finish off your party if your piss it off enough. And Tera-Graviton was actually mis-aimed by the one controlling it so it doesn't actually hurt you. One of the Bonus Bosses actually uses Tera-Graviton as an attack, and...it can never kill you. Weird.
The Kingdom Hearts games are known for absurdly difficult bonus bosses, but the Unknown in Birth by Sleep takes the fucking cake. Virtually every attack he's got will reduce you to 1 HP regardless of level, which includes each individual hit from his overly long combos. Get hit with a full combo, and you'll be stunned, aka, deader than dead. Many of his own attacks consist of the most powerful deck commands in the game cranked up to eleven, and to make matters worse, if you do manage to land a good combo on him...he'll just reverse time and proceed to school you. There's Overkill, and then there's the Unknown.
In Call of Duty 4's Death from Above there is nothing more satisfying than using the 105mm to kill a single enemy soldier just because you have the time.
In Halo: Reach, there is a Wave Motion Gun usable in the climax. It can One-Hit Kill a Covenant Supercarrier in one hit if timed right. It can also be used to kill the incoming Phantoms, which can usually only be killed by orbital nukes or dozens of rockets. There are also Banshees there, which are Glass Cannons. Lulz ensue.
On the topic of tactical bombings, there is a Target Locator. It rarely ever appears, but when it does, it fires bombs the size of enemy units. Firing this upon large crowds of Grunts can prove very pleasing.
In the Penny Arcade Adventures games, killing someone with an overkill causes you to kill them in slow motion, and then get a +5% damage bonus. This goes all the way up to +75% in each game, per character.
The Last Remnant has a special combat effect just for that called, guess what, Overkill. It requires someone to be hit by an enemy with about twice as much damage as the defender's HP. While hard to perform on bosses and players, normal creeps often succumb to this. Overkills usually are so powerful, not only the entire Union dies (Unions share HP - if one person gets hit for 3k damage, entire group is as well), they are blown away like a rag-doll or disintegrated if it was a spell.
In the Sly Spy arcade game, the player fights a shark as a boss. After killing it, it's possible to keep shooting at it before the level ends, turning it's corpse into a bloody mess.
In 3DDotGameHeroes, fully upgrading the Giga sword causes the blade, when on full life, to blanket the screen, destroying pretty much everything in its path, even making boss fights on the hardest difficulty mode a cakewalk.
In the Morrowind The player can become this using the easily trainable alchemy skill, which allows you to brew a potion to increase your intelligence. Intelligence being the governing attribute of the alchemy skill. Thus this allows you brew another, more powerful potion to increase your intelligence. Do this for a while and then brew for example "Fortify Attack" and "Fortify Strength". This allows you to kill the second form of Dagoth-Ur in one hit, even though he is scripted to be invincible.
"Fortify Speed" is an option as well, but it would require one to install a third party program that allows you to slow time in-game otherwise the character becomes too fast to control. It actually becomes too fast to calculate for the collision detection resulting in things like being able to run trough mountains.
Trigger Knight has the purchasable consumable Divine Edge. It multiplies the damage that your next attack does a thousand times, ensuring that whatever you hit is dead. Even the dragons, which are nigh impossible to otherwise kill.
I'll explain. The Skirnir missile frigate has eight launchers for Shadow missiles. Shadow missiles have eight warheads. Each warhead does 755 MJ of damage. The two toughest ships in the game have a maximum of 12 GJ of shielding. Do the math.
Oh, and did I mention the damn Shadows will seek new targets if the old one is destroyed before they hit???? The Skirnir is a Trope Codifier for Game Breaker.
Some Tower Defense games sum overkill damage for achievements. Gemcraft Labyrinth rewards you with EXP multipliers for large sums each battle.
Web Comics and New Media
Nosfera's husband Brahm, a vampire, is killed by being stabbed in the heart with a cross. This is lampshaded.
Schlock Mercenary takes this to heart, especially Kevyn, who wears antimatter grenades on his shoulders. One of those antimatter grenades is capable of slagging a tank, and the other has the yield of a good-sized nuke.
Schlock Mercenary himself runs around with two sawed off anti-tank multicannons and an oversized plasgun. The multicannons are especially ridiculous because he can hook up feeders and, quote, "fire breacher rounds on full auto."
One of the most popular books with mercenaries in the Schlockverse, The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Pirates, contains several appropriate quotes on the subject, as shown in the quotes section for this trope. The one that quotes this trope practically verbatim can be found in poster form.
Actually subverted on one occasion, in which Schlock mocks two enemies for aiming anti-tank weapons at him. They tell him that they're not worried about a little overkill, to which Schlock responds, "OK, but you might want to use your anti-tank weapons on those tanks behind you."
Schlock's immune system is itself a form of overkill, it allows him to survive practically anything, even including foreign nanites.
Once, the PD Fleetmind launched an all-out assault on an entire star system as a diversion, to extract Tagon's Toughs with minimum collateral damage. To quote the UNS Marine prize crew guarding the Toughs: "'Minimal collateral damage' and 'entire star system' do not belong in the same sentence"
Riff is, in general, a very enthusiastic supporter of this trope. Regard "party favors".
The Order of the Stick: Familicide. Nothing says "overkill" like making Black Dragons the newest member of the Endangered Species list.
The Last Days of Foxhound: Vulcan Raven's take on the matter: "Subtlety is a thing for philosophy, not combat. If you're going to kill someone, you might as well kill them a whole lot."
Billy MaysYoutube PoopSuicide Putty: "Call right now and I'll triple the offer! And send you six sticks of Suicide Putty so you can kill yourself six times!"
In Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger, the Empire of the Seven Systems responded to the (admittedly rather brutal) slaughter of one of their colony ships by incinerating an entire solar system.
Black Mage's preferred form of attack - he has been known to vaporize forests, and at one point destroyed a city by accident when demonstrating to its mayor how he would destroy the city if he didn't get what he wanted. He has refrained from using spells in battles where his life was at stake because he viewed anything that wasn't complete overkill a waste of his time.
Jeff manages this with a single bullet in Chicanery:
From this episode of Genocide Man "The old government policy of proportionate response failed in the 21st century. Now the official policy is overwhelming response. Overkill. First and always."
In reality, the Warcraft series was...partially inspired by Warhammer.
;
"Don't say another goddamn word. Up until now, I've been polite. If you say anything else—word one—I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds it's destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one. When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though coming from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth."
Web Original
Corus From the Multiverses FCP completely and utterly obliterates Perfect Darkness, calling upon his other personality's inter-dimensional horde of boltzmann brains to destroy him.
Survival of the Fittest, to the point where some wryly observe it's almost a competition to see who can fabricate the most over-the-top, graphic death possible.
Jin Li-Jen being practically ripped to shreds by Walter Smith (eviscerated, castrated and decapitated).
Kara Holmes. Villain Blood Boy slices off her foot, shoves it into her mouth, breaking her jaw and blows the aforementioned jaw off with firecrackers before leaving her to suffocate.
Rick Holeman, who gets shot, stabbed, then stabbed again, and again, and again, basically mutilated by the time the fight is over. It's rather justified, however, seeing how incredibly hard he was to kill.
Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction: after he's already killed Agent South, Agent Washington goes on to dispose of the body by shooting at it, incinerating it, and detonating a bunch of exploding crates next to it. This is apparently standard procedure.
In Linkara'sLet's Play of Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force, he gets freaked out by small rodent-like enemies and chases them around with a handheld Photon Torpedo launcher. After blasting them (and getting hit with a little splash damage), he muses "Maybe that was a little too much", followed by a caption that reads "But totally worth it."
In the second RP of Darwin's Soldiers, Shelton empties an entire pistol magazine killing Delta Leader. Justified, since he doesn't know how to use a weapon, and an unspecified majority of the bullets missed.
The displacement cannon from Orion's Arm is absurdly powerful. It fires a "bubble" of compressed space-time that is the size of an atom, infinitely maneuverable and travels at the speed of light. When it reaches the target it travels between the molecules in its armor and then collapses to release an swarm of monopoles that convert the mass of the target directly into energy, virtually assuring its destruction. How much overkill is this? A single displacement cannon destroyed a fleet of 10000 ships in four seconds.
In A Robo Western, This is how the Sheriff Bot deals with One Eye.
Anything done to SCP-682 tends to end up like this. Seeing as it adapts to whatever is thrown at it and wants to kill us all, this makes a bit of sense.
A good example would have to be using SCP-272 on it. SCP-272 is a iron nail that, in the proper conditions, pins someone's shadow to the ground and will not let it go. If the shadow's length is forcefully changed due to the environment, it will pull the person closer to it to keep the shadow embedded under the nail. Thus, if the shadow is changed quickly enough, you can expect the subject to be thrown a large distance. The SCP Foundation decided to use (quoted from the linked page) "a circular array of thirty (30) two-thousand-watt (2,000W) stadium lights" to enact such damage on a large scale. "All thirty stadium lights are then switched on and off in random stroboscopic 'disco' pattern, at 4 Hz. SCP-682 is forcibly hurled around the enclosure in random directions, in accordance with the stroboscopic pattern, and sustains heavy damage." After 55 minutes of this, SCP-682 had sustained damage including 63 broken teeth, severance of its back-left limb, and "its skull has been fractured to the point that both its eyeballs have been dislodged from their sockets." It then evolved luminescence brighter than the stadium lights to nullify its own shadow.
Another good example is having SCP-682 fight against SCP-096. SCP-096 is a small humanoid figure that utterly annihilates anything that sees its face. They battled for twenty-seven hours before the screaming stopped, and both were heavily damaged. SCP-682 lost 85% of its mass. Neither entity would even look at each other after that.
Ben10: The Omnitrix has a self-destruct device that destroys the universe. Could be because its creator is a misanthrope, or whatever you call someone who dislikes everyone, regardless of species (An ''Omni''cidal Maniac, perhaps?) Or just wanted to be absolutely sure sure it stayed out of the wrong hands.
Megas XLR: The entire idea of the series was based around overkill. So much so that Jersey City was destroyed in just about every episode. One of the most notorious examples involved Coop sending the planet into a nuclear winter just to defeat the Monster of the Week.
Several times throughout the series, while fighting another Humongous Mecha, Coop would look down at the dashboard of the Megas, which seemed to change from week-to-week, and find hilariously appropriate buttons to push, such as: three buttons in a row, labeled "Missiles" "Lotsa Missiles" and "ALL DA MISSILES"... guess which one he chose? All three
Going for his 'save the world' button, he found it was out of order, but "Destroy the world", "Smite the world" and "Destroy the world WORSE" were perfectly fine.
The absurdity of the overkills, however, sometimes went beyond physics, as, on two separate occasions, the Megas opened up its chest, and out came the main gun of an iconic anime spaceship - the first, in the pilot episode, was the main cannon and front hull of the Battlestar Yamato from the series of the same name; and the second, in an episode close to the series finale, was the main guns of the SDF-1 Macross from Super Dimension Fortress Macross.
By and away the greatest moment of overkill in the series is Coop's imagined destruction of the DMV. He stomps the building to pieces, then punches the pieces to bits, then blasts the bits to smithereens, pauses, and then blasts the smithereens into whatever is smaller than smithereens. All while laughing maniacally.
In the episode Breakout, the bad guy is invisible. How do you hit an invisible foe? Simple. Fire off every single weapon you've got.
In "Universal Remote", Coop manages to give the Bad Guy of the Week a shield that will reflect anything he shoots at it. His solution? Hit it with something bigger. Cue Jersey City getting utterly nuked.
Brock Samson of The Venture Bros. goes through Mooks like there's no tomorrow, often killing them in inventive and ultimately unnecessary ways. Like Bond, he has a license to kill so he can get away with it usually.
In Mulan, the villain Shan Yu charges his entire army against what is about 15 soldiers. Naturally, the Conservation of Ninjutsu wasn't on his side.
The second half of the series premiere for Superman: The Animated Series subverts this. The giant mecha slams Superman into a police car, crushes the car into a wad of steel around him, tosses it through the side of a building... then collapses the building on top of him by firing a missile into it... then sets the rubble on fire... then strides through the fire to stomp on top of the rubble pile. Problem is, he's fighting Superman - when Supes breaks out underneath the mecha, his hair isn't even mussed.
Non-fatal example: one episode of Invader Zim had a water balloon fight between the title character and his rival, Dib. While Dib builds a backpack that creates and launches water balloons, Zim created an orbital space station that sucks out all the water from the city, collects it into a balloon that dwarfs satellites, and launches it right onto Dib. The resulting collision causes a tidal wave that devastates the city.
The premise of the '90s cartoon The Bots Master is that an evil, near-future corporation is gradually upgrading all the millions of service robots in the world in preparation for an eventual robotic coup. In one episode, the hero's Bratty Half-Pint sister discovers that they're scheduled to upgrade two lowly lifeguard bots at a nearby beach. Determined to prove herself while her brother's away, she uses their automated base to construct a massive, Normandy-sized armada of mechas and fighter ships to storm the beach, while the shell-shocked villains are left frantically screaming "it's just two lifeguard bots!!"
One episode of The Simpsons has Homer grabbing a cigarette, stomping on it until it's flat, and then unloading a whole mag into it.
"These are the Yakuza. They kill you 16 times before you hit the ground."
"Welcome to Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge. I am Carvallo. Now, choose a club. (beat) You have chosen a 3-wood. May I suggest a putter? (beat) 3-wood. Now enter the force of your swing. I suggest: feather touch. (beat) You have entered: power drive!"
Metalocalypse. When Dethklok is given the privilege to choose how a group of criminals would be executed, what is their idea? Strap the criminals to missiles, fire said missiles into the sky, then shoot them down with lasers. Naturally, they wrote a song about it.
When Ofdensen and Melmord were fighting over the position of Dethklok's manager by a fencing match. Ofdensen won, stabbing Melmord in the gut and throwing him off a tower. And to really make sure he was dead, Melmord got run over by a train. It was yet another Crowning Moment of Awesome for CharlesFosterOfdensen.
In one episode of Inhumanoids, the over-the-top fanatical Soviet soldier accompanying the bad guys is asked whether using a particular weapon wouldn't be overkill. He responds, "There is no overkill! There is only kill and no kill!"
In TaleSpin, the official method of execution for the country of Thembria is by firing squad. In this case, the firing squad either uses cannons, or tanks. They also hang you after they shoot you, as Becky finds out in "The Time Bandit". At least you get to choose the type of noose they use.
A truly hilarious example in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy: Billy's bike is run over by a car, mangling it. Billy says "Well, it still kinda works..." The bike is then crushed by a falling tree, zapped by a UFO's laser cannon, and hit by a meteor... which then grinds itself (and the bike) down into the center of the earth.
The Powerpuff Girls episode "Him Diddle Riddle" has HIM presenting riddles of various levels of danger or else the professor will PAY. Some could result in death, others could result in a missed phone call. One, however, could result in Ms. Keane being dumped into "this vat of boiling sharks".
In the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode "Green Isn't Your Color", Pinkie Pie's method of keeping a secret seems to be as follows: zipping her mouth shut, locking the zipper shut with a key, digging a hole in which she buries the key, building a house on top of the hole, and moving into the house. (in a frog in a log in a hole at the bottom of the sea)
Later, in Lesson Zero, Rainbow Dash demolishes a barn so hard it creates a rainbow mushroom cloud.
In the episode "Feeling Pinkie Keen," a flowerpot, an anvil, a cart, and a piano fall on Twilight Sparkle's head in quick succession.
Malcolm X was murdered in 1965 in New York by a sawed off shotgun blast to the chest, and then was shot 16 times by handguns. Someone wanted to get the job done...
This is reputedly how the murder of the Russian monk Grigori Rasputin took place in 1916. It's said that he was given four poisoned cup cakes and a bottle of poisoned wine (which had no effect), then shot in the chest six times, castrated, wrapped up in a blanket and thrown into the deathly cold Neva river, and pushed under the ice, which he tried to claw himself out of. His cause of death was then reported as asphyxiation by drowning and hypothermia. As noted on Rasputinian Death however, these are myths instigated by his political enemies to make him seem like a semi-invincible force of evil. In reality, he was shot in the head and died instantly.
As noted above, the real life Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow were both shot 25 times by a posse of Texas Rangers, Dallas PD, and Louisiana lawmen. With nine police offers around the country dead, one can't be too careful.
They didn't even try to arrest them. Instead they hid at the side of a road they knew the pair would be driving down in their car and just opened fire from their automatic rifles and shotguns, and then kept firing with their handguns when the other weapons were out of ammo. After the shooting ended, the officer suffered from temporary deafness. Barrow seems to have been a believer of the rule himself, as reportedly the car was filled with weapons and ammunition that would equip a small army.
Drug lord Pablo Escobar was taken down by an alliance of US Delta Force, US Navy SEAL Team 6, and the Colombian Police, none of whom have a reputation for ending things peacefully. They shot him many, many times.
In Okinawan kama (sickle) fighting, one form involves you decapitating your foe and removing both arms before kicking him away, another form has you make multiple, disemboweling, bisections on the imagined foe. All in all, this is tame compared to Filipino knife fighting where it is part of the fighting style itself to keep slashing a foe until even if they are alive they won't be able to move.
The reason for this is because humans are actually capable of functioning for about three seconds after things as extreme as decapitation or disembowelment alone and those few seconds are just long enough for them to have the last laugh at your expense.
Skeletal muscle (as opposed to heart and smooth muscle) are completely dependent on signals from the central nervous system for every movement except basic reflexes. This means anything done with purpose requires real time updates and commands from your brain. As soon as the brain's signal is lost, the muscle relaxes. This occurs virtually instantly. Decapitation results in immediate, irreversible loss of controlling signals to all skeletal muscle. The body drops like a puppet whose strings were cut. Any further contractions of skeletal muscle are spasms. Given how quickly the limited loss of blood flow from a rear naked choke can cause a person to pass out, the loss of all blood flow would likely mean the brain in the severed head would lose consciousness very quickly. A beheaded individual will not take a single step; humans don't behave like beheaded chickens. Being disemboweled is survivable and as long as the deep abdominal aorta and renal arteries aren't destroyed, the blood loss may be much less than one would expect. Before surgery, the survivability would be zero, but the kill wouldn't be instant. With surgery, survival is possible but certainly not easy and likely to include severe residual problems. Continuing to fight while disemboweled would be extremely unlikely but perhaps possible. Claims of human beings taking even a step after being beheaded are pure Bullshido.
All that said, involuntary muscle spasms from a guy holding sickles or knives is still probably something you wanna avoid...
"Even if a man were to have his head cut off, he should be able to do one more action with certainty." In the passage from the Hagakure from which this quote comes, Yamamoto Tsunetomo lists several examples of warriors who did just that before closing with the incredibly badass quote of: "With martial valor, if one becomes like a revengeful ghost and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he should not die."
This is poetry meant to explain an ideal, not meant to be taken as literal truth.
The final fate of the German battleship Bismarck in WW2. During its final battle nearly every single piece of the vessel's superstructure was destroyed and at least one torpedo slammed into it. This was in revenge for the sinking of the British battlecruiser HMS Hood. Of course, if the Royal Navy had been a little more rational about it, she probably would have been sunk a lot sooner: closing to point-blank range meant that virtually none of their fire hit the Bismarck's hull. There is still some debate over whether or not the British actually sank the Bismarck, or if it sank due to German efforts to scuttle the ship.
It was between three and five torpedoes. And approximately 3,000 shells ranging from 4 inch to 16 inch guns. And arguably they only caught her because one torpedo hit jammed her rudder. That torpedo came from a Fairey Swordfish that had tracked the Bismark via the oil trail it was leaving. The trail itself being the result of a hit by the newly commissioned battleship 'Prince Of Wales'. Also, those numbers are excessive in that fewer than 3,000 shells of all calibres were fired, and only 300-400 actually hit, with just about 80 being of a calibre capable of inflicting real damage.
Another bunch of battleship examples: Almost every Japanese battleship in World War II (especially the Yamato and Musashi)
It was also a big threat to the convoys supplying Britain with essential materials, so revenge wasn't the only motive.
In the same vein: German Battleship Scharnhorst, actually a battlecruiser, was a much larger threat to British shipping than the Bismark ever was. After an extensive and bloody career alongside her sister ship Gneisenau, Scharnhorst was eventually singled out and sunk. It took the Duke of York (a main line battleship), four cruisers, and something like 18 destroyers 12 hours of constant shelling before Scharnhorst finally went down by the bow - all serviceable guns still firing and screws still turning.
A total of 55 torpedoes and 2,195 shells had been fired since first contact with Duke of York and her battlegroup. Fewer shells, but many more torpedoes than Bismark soaked - And in less time.
It must also be noted though, that Scharnhorst, Like Bismark, was seriously hurt in the opening phases of the battle when a lucky shot from a cruiser took out her radar, leaving her virtually blind.
The Tsar BombaH-bomb, designed to level cities from 10 kilometres away, with a design payload of 100 megatonnes. Tested at half yield (50 Mt) 4 kilometres over Novaya Zemlya island, it registered as roughly a Richter 5 on seismographs, broke windows in Finland, and could have caused third degree burns from 100 kilometres distance.
They removed the third fission stage (after the initial fission and the secondary fusion stage) by replacing the uranium 238 tamper with a lead tamper was that they wanted to minimize the fallout, which would have been just as massive as the bomb itself, and on their own territory. If they had let it off at full yield, the Tu-95 that dropped it (on a parachute, from 6.5 km above its detonation altitude) wouldn't have survived...
In Car Wars, nuclear weapons were described as something along the lines of 'set even a small one off and the game is over'. The maps were poster-sized, two feet by three feet or so, and usually represented about eight city blocks or so. The smallest available nuke would utterly destroy at least six of those maps in every direction.
As conventionals go, the Grand Slam is pretty impressive. Oh, sure, it's got nothing on the power of nukes, but then, it was never meant to compete with nukes.
During Operation Praying Mantis in the 1980's, an Iranian frigate decided to challenge an American surface action group. Three American ships opened fire with guns and missiles. After multiple gun rounds and six Standard Missiles from the first two ships had impacted, the captain of the third ship decided that he would make sure and fired a Harpoon anti-ship missile. By the time it arrived at the frigate's location, there was not a part of the frigate left floating large enough for the missile to lock onto.
Operation Paul Bunyan: the US military (in cooperation with the South Korean military) used 813 men, armed with everything from ax stocks to M-16s and grenade launchers, seven Cobra attack helicopters, multiple F-4s and F-5s, a B-52 (along with F-111s and an aircraft carrier on standby)...to chop down a tree.
The above is a case of It Makes Sense in Context since said tree's unique geographic position could've sparked a border conflict with North Korea. So, the possibility would've demanded some military readiness. That said, the whole thing was definitely an overreaction as well as overkill.
It's also worth pointing out the first attempt at tree chopping ended with two American officers being hacked to death by North Korean troops. The operation was both an intentional show of force and a deterrent against any other such incident.
Antimatter is often used in theoretical bombs. The moment antimatter touches matter it reacts with it. To give you an idea of the power this would give, an Atomic bomb gives a little under 1% of every atom's potential power. The Antimatter/Matter reaction releases one hundred percent of the energy! (Granted, it's under 50% if you ignore the part that comes out as harmless neutrinos, but it's still one hell of a boom.) More evocatively, a single gram of antimatter annihilating with a single gram of matter will release twice as much energy as the 4,360 kg Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Also, there's no theoretical limit on the size of an antimatter bomb. A regular nuke can only get so big before it will partly scatter its core and prematurely halt the chain reaction. This doesn't happen with antimatter, because even when the particles get blown apart, they will react just as explosively when they touch the surrounding air.
Relativistic weapons, full stop. Traveling at 85% light speed, any object will hit a target and explode with the power of an equivalent amount of antimatter, with none of that neutrino waste either. However, they're horrendously inefficient due to the energy needed to accelerate to such a speed. At even greater velocities, 99.999% light speed, the explosive force that would be added by any payload (even antimatter or a hypothetic "total conversion bomb") is meaningless.
In 2006, after killing a police officer, a Jamaican criminal named Angilo Freeland was shot sixty-eight times (out of a hundred ten rounds). When asked why he was shot so many times, an officer responded, "That's all the bullets we had."
Hackmaster is basically built on this concept.
A group of scientists recently performed some research involving shooting mosquitoes with lasers. They had a Schlock Mercenary poster up on the door: "There is no overkill. Only 'Open fire!' and 'I need to reload'." Appropriately, said poster has a huge musclebound soldier pointing a prodigious quantity of firepower at an insect.
The book Great Mambo Chicken & the Transhuman Condition describes some explosives enthusiasts designing a mock A-bomb to win a contest:
"They came back the next week with a device that would not only look like an A-bomb explosion, it would actually work like one... he took a two-hundred-pound lard can and put three pieces of primacord inside, looping them around so they completely covered the bottom. Then he poured the ammonium nitrate into the can, inserted sticks of dynamite all around the perimeter, and ran the primacord fuse up to a blasting cap on top of it all. The cap would fire the primacord, which in turn would set off the dynamite, which would crush the mass of ammonium nitrate until the necessary pressure was reached — a true implosion device, just like the atom bomb."
It's the pure embodiment of this trope given the fact that it's practically a shotgun shell for tanks (120mm) loaded with approximately 1,150 tungsten balls each 10mm in diameter. Of course the video shows the result most clearly at the end. Admittedly it could be argued that the Bofors 40mm 3P round is good contender given the fact that each round explodes into 2500 fragments and pellets and that a standard burst consists of 5 rounds but a shotgun shell for tanks is still slightly more ludicrous.
Cross into fiction: in World War Z, infantryman Todd Wainio recounts the disastrous Battle of Yonkers and opines that against a horde of zombies (which are effectively mindless, shambling, but completely fearless infantry), these would have been far more appropriate than the armor-piercing rounds the officers had supplied the tanks.
3rd ACR had to dip into the strategic reserve of M1028 canister rounds during their recent deployment to Mosul. The M1028 canister round; awesome? Yes. Overkill? Not quite.
Canister shot very definite useful applications. Artillery crews can use it to prevent enemy infantry from overrunning them should they get so close, tank crews even have a strategy where if enemy infantry is swarming one tank, attempting to attach an anti-tank charge perhaps, then the other tank can use its main gun with canister to give the other tank a "back scratch". The tungsten shot can't harm the armor of the tank, but it WILL harm the not-armor of the bad guys all around it.
Not even a new concept - this was used in muzzleloader warfare back in the days of Tall Ships. Look up "grapeshot" (small iron balls about the size of a golf or tennis ball packed into a muzzleloader cannon as anti-ship's crew), "case-shot" (leather canisters filled with pistol balls, good against crew on-deck) and "chain shot" (two cannonballs connected by a chain, designed to topple masts).
When the SAS shot dead three IRA members in Gibraltar, one was asked at the subsequent inquest, "Why did you shoot him sixteen times?" His response? "The magazine only holds 16 rounds sir."
Some probably saw the preparations for the first Desert Storm campaign this way, but Colin Powell's philosophy is basically this trope: either go in thoroughly prepared to win, or don't go.
Often more justifiable in real life than you might imagine. A gunshot wound, unless it strikes the central nervous system, won't guarantee an instant stop. A shot through a major artery or even the heart will take several seconds to physically incapacitate somebody. Police are generally trained to shoot until the threat ceases, not to fire some small number of rounds and wait for blood loss to take over. This, for example, is what magnums were designed for: stopping power, and also why hollow points exist. They spread the force over a larger area, increasing the chance of hitting something vital. Also they tear a more ragged wound channel (including cutting with the sharp edges produced by the deforming bullet), increasing your chances of ripping up a major blood vessel and thus speeding shock and blood loss along. It also increases the chances of the bullet staying within the target body instead of penetrating out the other side, as jacketed bullets are known to do.
The shooting of Amadou Diallo. 41 bullets fired, 19 hitting. The shooting started when Diallo reached for his wallet (he didn't speak English, and the officers reportedly believed he was reaching for a gun). The shooting continued because the force of the bullets propped Diallo up against the door, so he didn't fall until they stopped.
It would have an explosive yield roughly 100 times larger than a modern nuclear missile.
The plot of the final Global Frequency episode centres around devices like these, which have been left unattended in space until their countdown is inadvertently started. Because they were America's last resort in case the nuclear deterrent failed, their control centre is fanatically defended, and capture of the centre destroys the ability to switch the rods off. Salvation of humanity depends on launching a man with a bomb at short notice to destroy the launch platform. Cue the ultimate choice - me or everyone else when the remote detonator fails.
There are smaller, conventional versions. In the 1960s and somewhat thereafter, when the British were looking into hypersonic combat aircraft, it was realised that kinetic heating makes it almost impossible to build a missile whose warhead and guidance electronics won't be cooked off by the heat. Fortunately, at those speeds the kinetic and thermal energy communicated to the target mean you don't need a warhead. By the 1980s it was realised that a GPS type system in the tail, where it's cooler, can be used to steer the weapon in a mach 5+ glide to its target.
This was used in the RPG Shadowrun, where they were called 'Thor Shots'. Essentially massive rods of metal fitted with engines and pointed downward from orbit to create explosions roughly equivalent to nuclear weapons but without the EMP effects.
This was quite real in the 1960s, and was called Project Thor. Nowadays these are called "kinetic kill" weapons, and include railguns.
It was also used in End War as the JSF superweapon, and we get to see it fired in the trailer. Now imagine if all those rods were fired all at once.
The Cobalt Bomb. Roughly 510 tonnes of cobalt would be needed, and due to wind and other factors, it probably wouldn't succeed in wiping out all life on Earth, but it'd come damn close. The only problem is how much it would cost... and possibly others not being entirely willing to just die.
The use of the M1 Abrams for urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan is seen as this, since the tank was designed to take on Soviet tanks en masse on open terrain, which they did easily on the beginning of both wars. Never mind a tank is much more vulnerable in a city than on open terrain.
Speaking of Rasputin, how about the family who took him in? After the Bolsheviks herded them all in a room, they read something to the Tsar about his crimes against the Russian people and what not, then opened fire. While the Tsar and Tsarina died near instantly, his children weren't exactly as lucky. Due to the fact that the children had hidden a huge amount of jewels in their clothing, which acted as armor. Cue the 20 minute long repeated stabbings and shootings of the children. Alexei was particularly hard to kill, despite his hemophilia; he was stabbed numerous times in the chest before being shot in the few times in the head. The girls suffered a similar fate, though it wasn't nearly as prolonged. One of the girls did have the wonderful pleasure of having Olga's brain matter splatter in her face before being knifed to death herself. Unfortunately, when they were hauling all 11 bodies (this includes a maid, their doctor, and such along with the family), one of the girls (either Anastasia or Maria) were still alive. She proceeded to sit up, cover her ears and scream wildly until several Bolshevik henchmen came over to finally shoot her dead. Then they drove the bodies to a mine shaft, stripped them, and then threw them all into the mine shaft. Unfortunately, the next day, word had gotten out that something had happened near the mine shaft, so later that night the Bolsheviks went back, got the bodies, and drove them to a more remote area where they proceeded to bash the Romanov corpse's skulls in so their faces wouldn't be recognizeable, then tossed the bodies onto a burning pyre and doused them with acid.
To go along with Romanovs, Alexandra's sister Elizabeth was killed the next day. How so? Well, first they gathered her along with several prisoners and took them to another abandoned mineshaft, then proceeded to beat her and the prisoners. Then, they took everyone and pushed them down the mineshaft, throwing a grenade down there for good measure. Unfortunately, the grenade blast only killed one person. The reason they found out this only killed one person was because Elizabeth and the others began to sing a Russian Orthodox Hymn. Another grenade was thrown down, but the singing continued. Finally, the Bolsheviks decided to throw a bunch of brushwood into the shaft and set it alight. One guard was to stand by and watch this to make sure they were all dead. In early October, White Soldiers discovered the Bodies, and found that Elizabeth had managed to bandage one of those injured during the fall prior to her death. These were the bodies that were found (NSFW)◊. The Bolsheviks seem rather fond of overkill, now don't they?
The local police killed Charles Whitman, after he put up a fight with them.
Headshot. With a .50 caliber sniper rifle. (google image it but, needless to say, not for the squeamish and somewhat NSFW).
Quoted from a report on urban warfare, discussing the Battle of Aachen. The situation: American forces are under sniper fire from a fortified church steeple. "This position proved to be impervious to both small arms and 75mm tank destroyer fire, whereupon Daniel again called upon his 155mm artillery piece. One shot from the 155 brought the entire structure crashing to the ground. This use of a 155mm gun as an anti-sniper weapon is perhaps the epitome of 'Knock 'em all down.'"
Sport example, Australia vs American Samoa in FIFA World Cup 2002 Qualification stage Oceania Zone in April 2001. Australia 'killed' American Samoa 31 - 0.
In rugby: By most points scored, New Zealand vs Japan at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, by 145 points to 17. Or by total shutout, Australia vs Namibia in 2003, 142-0.
Another sports example, the 1940 NFL Championship game featuring the Chicago Bears and Washington Redskins. The teams had met earlier in the season, with the Redskins winning 7 - 3. After the game the Redskins owner called the Bears players "crybabies" and "quitters." So how did the rematch go? Chicago wins 73 - 0.
Several of the weapons on this list seem to have been designed with this concept in mind. Some notable entries: Tyrannosaurus Rounds (the name should say it all), Varmint Grenades (note: using these against humans has been declared a war crime), and the punt gun (a 6 ft to 10 ft long shotgun firing one pound of shot that would likely give Wrex or Gruntwet dreams)
After the Sepoy rebellion, the British executed some of the captured rebels with cannons[2]. For another execution method that is really overdoing it see [3]
One of the plans for eliminating Osama Bin Laden very likely came close to defining this: The airstrike would have involved 32 bunker-busting bombs to take out a single building (just in case there were any underground bunkers in the neighborhood). According to military estimates, the effect of the raid would have been similar to an earthquake on the surrounding city...something that made the US government a bit squeamish. (Source: The New Yorker)
The standard reaction of an untrained person armed with a gun is to completely empty a clip/magazine into an attacker and keep pulling the trigger. Similarly, the reaction with any other weapon is to keep hitting/stabbing/whatevering the other person. We're hardwired to want to make sure that that which is on the business end of our weapons is thourougly dead. Our ancestors who didn't have that habit were killed by the big cat or bear or whatever it was that they figured was dead enough.
During World War II, the British came up with the idea that to destroy hardened targets, they needed a really REALLY big bomb. What they got was the Tallboy, a bomb so big that during its design phase no existing bomber at the time could carry it. Even when the Tallboy was scaled down for production, bombers needed special modifications to carry them. However, the Tallboy was hideously successful since it destroyed its targets by creating man-made earthquakes. The Tallboy was so successful that once they had the capability to carry it, the British designed an even biggerbomb. Even better, the Tallboy was officially known as the Bomb, Medium Capacity, 12,000 lb.
