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There Is No Kill Like Overkill
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alt title(s): No Kill Like Overkill; There Is No Kill Like An Overkill 
Rule 37: There is no 'overkill'. There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload'.
Sometimes, the act of killing an opponent can be completely overdone. A prime example would be shooting an enemy until they're almost dead, then, to finish them off, completely blowing up their body and everything else in a five mile radius. All in all, it's waste of resources, tactics, and time.
...but it's always, always worth it. Always. Especially if the enemy is just hanging on up until the end. Actually, that's just cruel.
Often part of a Humiliation Conga, if said conga ends with the villain's death. If not then it will often happen to the nameless Mook or other poor minion who happens to be in the hero (generally the Anti Hero)'s way.
If done right, you'll probably have the pleasure of saying No One Could Survive That without having to doubt. Or... maybe not. Can sometimes result in a Cruel And Unusual Death. Every so often, it will actually worsen the situation by crossing the Godzilla Threshold.
Compare the Chunky Salsa Rule, and contrast with Cherry Tapping. Compare Rasputinian Death. See also Critical Existence Failure, Videogame Cruelty Potential, and Deader Than Dead. Ludicrous Gibs often results. The entire point of Death In All Directions, especially More Dakka. The more ludicrous can become Apocalypse Wow.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Appleseed has the Mobile Fortresses: Massive six-legged Spider Tanks the size of several building blocks, with a BFG that is longer than it's own chasis length and dozens of multi-barreled autocanons all over the places. Oh, and Olympus has 10 of them, protecting the city.
- Blame! introduces the Gravitational Beam Emitter, a weapon that is incapable of anything less than overkill. Did I mention that this weapon is no larger than a pistol and the main character fires it off like farts after a bean casserole?
- Of course, this being Blame!, it is not even most powerful among such weapons.
- In Death Note, after Mello kidnaps Takada Matt, 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.
- Oddly enough, this trope is almost played straight 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.
- Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex: 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. Now if ''that'' isn't giving the audience what they want, I don't know what is!
- Lina Inverse of The Slayers 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.
- 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 of Full Metal Panic! isn't given to overkill on actual battlefields, but - having been Raised By Wolves as a Child Soldier - when he's assigned as an undercover bodyguard to an Ordinary High School Student, he 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... well, you know, using the door?
- Ironic in that "blasting holes in the wall" is an actual (read: intentional) battlefield alternative to using the door, so from that mindset using the door would actually be more risky (two words: "fatal funnel").
- Completely justified in blasting holes instead of using a door. 65% of all urban combat casualties occur in relation to a doorway.
- The main character of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha follows the philosophy of doing everything with "Maximum Power". Exhausted Dark Magical Girl who had been rendered defenseless with binds? Bring out Starlight Breaker! Someone trying to run away and is in the middle of a teleport spell? Let's try out the shiny new Wave Motion Gun! A Smug Snake support mage who has little to no direct combat experience? Five Divine Busters combined into a huge beam that can blast through an entire Cool Ship should do the trick!
- It doesn't help that the Japanese for "maximum power!" (zenryoku zenkai) is phonetically the same as the Japanese for "Total Annihilation!"
- It should be kept in mind that the reason she never bothers holding back isn't because of any blood-thirstiness but rather because she's a master of nonlethal attack magic. You have to get her really pissed for her to hit you with a lethal spell.
- As much as we love flanderization and jokes, let's try to be fair here. Nanoha used that much power when attacking Quattro because Quattro was half a ship away on the other side of several walls. Not to mention that Nanoha was trying to make sure Quattro STAYED unconscious. There's also the fact that Quattro was being abusive to Nanoha's adopted daughter. As for using five Starlight Breakers on Vivio, it was the only way to free her from both the relic and the Cradle's systems. And back in season 1, when she blasted Fate, bear in mind that Fate's just as powerful. Meaning a blast like that would be the only way of inflicting ANY damage, let alone getting a knockout blow. Ditto with blasting Vita in season 2.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and its GIGA. DRILL. BREAKER!
- Hellsing. Come on.
- Often Subverted, in that what appeared to be Overkill (Like Alucard being riddled with bullets from several machine guns in the first episode), Didn't actually work.
- Played straight when it's Alucard pulling the triggers. Or when Walter is using his 'death floss'. Or when Seras is firing her enormous gun. Alucard vs. Anderson fights are especially overkill.
- In Samurai Seven, some villagers get it in their heads to attack a thieving Humongous Mecha with farm tools. They get said mecha's BFS in response.
- In DragonBall Z 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.
- Possibly justified in that Frieza was notoriously hard to kill on Namek. Cut into three pieces was bad enough, having the planet explode on him was worse. He survived to be reassembled into a cyborg by his dad. Trunks may have just decided to be thorough.
- Arguably the most enjoyable 15 seconds of the entire anime; especially if you eagerly went home every night and ran to the TV to avoid missing Frieza's death on Namek. I spent almost a whole month doing so.
- 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.
- 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 then shoots him in the head on the way down.
- You could argue that she showed him mercy though.
- 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.
- In Gundam 00, 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 presumably impales and kills Nena, then the cockpit explodes, immolating her corpse into nothing.
- Oh come on, Uzumaki Naruto. Mass shadow clone technique anyone? Especially in the Shippuuden movie.
- It only counts if it works.
- The manga chapters numbering in the 430s has him using Nature chakra (which is implied to be far more powerful than regular chakra, which allows him to use variations of the Rasengan en masse whereas before he had to limit his usage of any one of the variants of said technique. Keep that in mind as you consider how any one variant of said technique is already insanely powerful in its own right. This allowed him to kill nearly all of the bodies of Pain in massive shows of force, which had been been nigh un-killable before. Then there's what happened after it seemed that Pain apparently killed Hinata right in front of him right after the latter admitted her long-secret love for him, causing Naruto to draw on the Kyuubi's power far more than he ever had before (twice!), causing far more destruction than Pain's techniques. And bear in mind that previously Pain had turned the entire village of Konoha into a crater.
- Then it's a good thing that this was explicitly stated to be outside of the village, and that no one was harmed.
- Then there's 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 is pretty much a temple-destroying bolt of lightning from Heaven.
- Kirin was still not enough to get through Itachi's shield, while Rasenshuriken
- A minor example is in the manga version of Shino's with with Zaku (thought not the anime), Zaku has one arm blown off completely with the other rendered completely inoperable, but Shino still finds it necessary to punch him in the face while he's distracted.
- Right now Sasuke has a dozen-odd elemental techniques including two S-ranked ones, super speed, top-tier genjutsu skills and a fully activated Mangekyo Sharingan that has all of Itachi's uber techniques and more. He is this manga's living embodiment of overkill. More so than any other protagonist, at least.
- Battle Angel Alita 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 fo 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 chracter in Yu-Gi-Oh 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?
- Arguably any time when Jagd Mirage takes it on the battefield in The Five Star Stories, it being the most heavily armed Mortar Headd in their universe. It's a good thing that just two were ever built, as the only time they were used to their full power, a planet was lost.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: You want to open up a giant round physics breaking disc-like Angel that has Shinji trapped inside? Simple! Drop 992 nukes on it!
- Not nukes. N^2 mines - the N^2 means 'non-nuclear'. And they never did actually end up doing that, due to some excellent timing by Eva Unit-01
- There is very little left of Unit-02, and by extension Asuka by the time the MP-EVAS are through with her in End of Evangelion.
- 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, I think) 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 freeway and land on a truck in the street, making that fall 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...
- Jagd Mirage, a heavy artillery Mortar Headd from The Five Star Stories, whose main armament is a Twin Towers buster launcher. That is, a double-barreled railgun friggin' 200 meter long, capable of hurling 3-meter-wide antimatter shells to orbit on full auto. Luckily, it was so Awesome But Impractical that only two of them were ever built, but when they were used on full power, it ended in an Earth Shattering Kaboom. And if THAT's not an overkill, then what is?
- Jojos 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.
Comic Books
- The Sin City 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.
- 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.
- 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 from Batman 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, being roughed up by two muscle bound henchmen, being beaten brutally with a crowbar to the point where he is literally covered in his blood, and finishing him by blowing him up with a bomb.
- To be fair Jason survived everything short of that bomb. Batfolks are hard to kill so the Joker was just playing it safe. You may now think of every death trap Batman survived.
- 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 finishing 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.
- Lampshaded in The Invisibles
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!"
- On occasion, Frank Castle will do this, when an enemy is just too dangerous to leave solid.
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.
Film
- James Bond was the king of this in movies, often killing enemies in the most sadistic, unnecessary way possible. Honestly, if it wasn't for that licence to kill, he'd probably be in Arkham.
- Though Bond's victims really do deserve it. Or worse.
- Bonus points have to be given to the violence of Licence To Kill. A man's heart is torn out, two characters end up in a Shark Pool (one dies, the other barely survives), a Mook gets thrown into a tank containing an electric eel, another gets dumped into shelf full of of mealworms, one henchman's head explodes thanks to a depressurization chamber and an axe, one of the Dragons gets minced by a grinder at the end of a Conveyor Belt O Doom, another is impaled by a forklift, and last but not least, Bond torches the gasoline-soaked Big Bad, blowing up several oil tanker trucks in the process. So Darker And Edgier that was originally rated R, and had some scenes cut to reach a PG-13.
- The death of Santino Corleone in The Godfather definitely qualifies. 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.
- Alonzo Harris in Training Day is a lesser version of this: first the Russians crash his car, then they shoot him in the car, and after Alonzo leaves the vehicle, slightly battered, he is shot brutally.
- Just about everything in Robocop. 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 movie, 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...
- Ending of the movie Bonnie and Clyde.
- Also the end of the real Bonnie and Clyde. With no warning, the posse that killed them emptied their automatic rifles at the car, then their shotguns, then their pistols. Upwards of 130 rounds fired, with each of them hit more than 25 times. One of the lawmen later said of the unloading of ammunition, "We weren't taking any chances."
- Well given that officers had been killed trying to arrest these two in the past, it wasn't surprising.
- Justified in that both of them had a tendency to carry Automatic weapons such as the famous "Tommy Gun." Clyde was also supposedly famous for being an accurate hip shot with B.A.R. — that he stole from a National Guard armory and sawed down for concealment.
- In the fourth Rambo 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 booby-trap 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.
- To be nitpicky, the Tallboy is not the biggest - this 12,000lb bomb has a bigger brother, Grand Slam, which weighs in at ten tons. Other, bigger bombs were built (the Germans were playing with a 17.7 ton version in WW 2 but never got a chance to use it), but apart from the nukes on Japan, these are the most powerful bombs ever used in war. Unfortunately for the plot of Rambo 4, Tallboy's only use was against the Germans in Europe.
- To nitpick this nitpickiness: the Grand Slam was developed after the Tallboy, so "at the time" is quite correct.
- 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.
- The tallboy was designed to penetrate up to 16 feet of concrete and had no external detonators, there is no way a mere claymore mine could have set it off (hells, even three independent triggers weren't enough on occasion).
- Team America World Police : Team America uses automatic 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's Sin City the character Hartigan, after knifing one of the primary villains of the piece in the gut and proceeding to "take away his weapon...both of them," graphically and with his bare hands, then begins to brutally beat the bad guy's face until "After a while all I'm doing is punching wet chips of bone into the floorboards. So I stop."
- He did take the '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 The Gamers, the protagonists backstab an old rival with a ballista.
- Mr. Grocer's favorite method of assassination in Grosse Pointe Blank.
- In Outlander, Kainan's people does orbital bombardment on a planet just to kill its natural inhabitants. Of course, given what happened after the sole-surviving not Moorwen does to the colony, this is totally justified.
- In Freddy vs. Jason 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.
- 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. An onlooking bank robber/hostage taker 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 Naked Gun 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!"
- Two Words: The Narada. Nero's ship in Star Trek 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.
- 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.
- In Ernest Scared Stupid, 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 equiped 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. He's the bad guy in a Bruckheimer movie, so I don't need to spoiler that he dies. His fate is impressive nonetheless, being beaten to within an inch of his life by the hero, smashed through a bridge on the extended ladder of a moving firetruck, 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 dynamites, 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.
- In Aliens, Ripley recommends nuking the site from orbit to make absolutely sure that no xenomorphs escape.
- except that even though they effectivly do that...
- Steven Seagal is made of this trope.
- To clarify, see the climax of Marked For Death. Seagal grabs the Big Bad, stabs him in the eyes (using his thumbs, mind you) breaks his back over his knee, throws him through a wall, chucks him down an elevator shaft, where he lands on a spike.
- 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 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 absolutley sure Death?
- Der Clown – Payday: How do you kill the remaining two villains: Bomb the two-engined cargo plane they're in with gold bars until it explodes in a huge fireball.
- In Ghostbusters II, we learn that Vigo the Carpathian was "poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disembowled, drawn and quartered". After all that, he still managed to say a few words before his head died.
- Eerily, this was based off of the real life murder of Rasputin, who was poisoned, shot four times, beaten, castrated, tied up, wrapped in a carpet and thrown into a freezing river. And he still managed to untie the ropes. Cause of death: drowning.
Literature
- 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 Mari Magot, overkill is inherently meaningless.
- 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.
- Also, the Death Star's main gun is over five orders of magnitude more powerful than the minimum amount of energy actually required to destroy an Earth-mass planet. Talk about overkill. You could destroy a planet 27,000 times the mass of Earth with that kind of firepower. It'd be like using an H-bomb to destroy an outhouse.
- This level of overkill is actually required since the hard part isn't destroying planets, it's punching through the planetary shields which are much stronger than the planets are.
- 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.
- Also that is a serious over-estimation of the Death Star's power, because if the wikia is anything to go by a 1/3 power shot isn't even enough to destroy a planet smaller than earth (Despayre has less than .75 eaerth gravity), so a planet the size of earth is going to take somewhat more power than that. Also, I shouldn't think Alderaan's shields were 'that' powerful, I mean we're talking something running on city generators here, not some sort of tectonic plant.
- 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 and Kill 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.
- 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.
- This shows up a bit in the The Dresden Files.
- The best example of this is when, after a Duke of the Red Court of Vampires cheated in a duel against Harry, Ebenezar Mc Coy 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.
- What does Morgan do when confronted with an Eldritch Abomination? He blows that mother up.
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 And Dragons baddies..
Live Action TV
Tabletop RPG
- Virtually everything past level 20 in all editions of D&D 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. It's pretty much Awesome But Impractical - though one might consider it one of the easier ways to destroy artifacts ....
- I'm not sure if this is about the same or worse.... but there was a homebrewed Ultima( from the FF games) spell for use in I think 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 monster that is just about unkillable.
- Warhammer 40000 lives off this. Chance of heresy on a planet? Kill the planet. WITH FIRE. 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?
- Lasguns are great, when you need light in the trenches. To even injure the varied eldritch abominations that inhabit Warhammer 40K, far more... prejudice is required.
- And then there are the Orks.
- 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 rhinos 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.
- This troper remembers reading some fluff that the railguns don't really out right destroy vehicles, but rather pierce through both sides of the armor and suck out everything inside through a tiny hole. Or So I Heard.
- That's if you get a 'Destroyed' result and it hits the crew compartment. Now imagine what happens if it nails a Leman Russ through the battle cannon shell magazines with a 'Vehicle Explodes' result.
- Dawn Of War brings this to the extreme within the game's system - no Earth Shattering Kaboom, sorry. 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.
- "Shatter their skies!"
- And then, of course, you have the essence of the Nightbringer. It can only be summoned for 60 seconds, but it has some of the deadliest attacks in the game, and it is invulnerable. Emperor help you if a Necron Lord uses that on anything.
- Untrue. Swarm the Nightbringer with weak mob units or shut it down with things like Assault Terminators, and it becomes quite useless.
- Which is why good players use it with flayed ones or a destroyer swarm. Or the monolith itself.
- Being invulnerable, it can be a real pain if your Waaagh-banner-encrusted Ork base has to endure it for a minute while all yer boyz iz off krumpin' da Kronz.
- 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.
- 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. Did we mention that if you made a model to scale with a Space Marine the thing would be the size of a 10-year-old? The aforementioned primary weapons are each similar in size to a Baneblade.
- Planetstrike too. It's 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.)
- 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 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.
- Not even close. 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.
- How about the Azrael from GURPS: Spaceships? 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.
- 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.
- Scion's Sun Purview has a Boon called "Fusion" 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.
Video Games
- 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 four high 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. It's sequel, Turok 2: Seeds Of Evil, actually managed to top it.
- Command and 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.
- Gears Of War 2 is the ruler of this trope. 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.
- Famously inverted in a Crowning Moment Of Awesome by Daigo Umehara.
- The Street Fighter, Capcom crossovers and Guilty Gear games punctuate this kind of KO with a flash on the background.
- Capcom vs. SNK 2 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).
- In addition, Akuma players especially like to finish off opponents with his Shun Goku Satsu move (Trnaslates 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".
- The Fighting Game based off Jojos 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 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 hte 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 opponetn is still standing after having their spine essentially ground to dust.
- In the First Person Shooter Adaptation Decay of Shadowrun, after you kill an opponent, you have to continue to shoot their body until it vanishes to keep them from being resurrected by a teammate.
- When winning one online match of Command And Conquer, this troper felt the need to kill his opponent's final unit, a minigunner, with a nuclear warhead.
- 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.
- And in the sequel, Ninja Gaiden II, the evil spider clan ninjas and evil fiends that you fight will keep attacking you even after they've lost a limb. Therefore, Ryu has a new obliteration technique, which in most cases will take off a few more limbs and usually a head (just to make absolutely sure they're dead).
- The Obliteration Techinques themselves are a rather ridicoulous 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 litterally 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.
- 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 FMV 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.
- 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.
- A similar system is used in Bookworm Adventures (only it grants gems that bestow status effects and damage bonuses).
- 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.
- 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.
- Can anyone say 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. And tother one had big fans in each jail, ready to slice the losers to death.
- Nali Weapons II X weapon pack for UT 99.
- 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 Bad Mother 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 lot 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...
- 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, however, toss in Daitarn 3 drop-kicking the enemy to oblivion (If This Troper recalls correctly, 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, 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.
- Dwarf Fortress features several levels of overkill, especially in Fortress Mode, ranging from champion macedwarves playing Goblin Golf to weapon traps equipped with ten steel large serrated discs to flooding the world with lava to kill one elephant.
- As for the last one? Boatmurdered did it. It was Made Of Win.
- This is Dwarf Fortress. It was made of
lose fun. AWESOME lose fun.
- Recently a dwarf fortress player carved out the bottom of an entire mountain causing it to drop on level (crushing two or three dwarves and a cat) just to see what would happen. The result was a tantrum spiral and the mountain splitting in half.
- 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 entire Falcon Punch meme was based around this.
- 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.
- Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume allows you to drop an opponent's HP to zero, continue to unleash the rest of your attacks, and then hammer them with four finishing strikes. And this is a core game mechanic.
- 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 G 11 E (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.
- To restate that, it is a [[ nuclear shotgun]] that does enough damage with each nuke to instantly kill anything in the game.
- 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.
- 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 queueing 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".
- 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). This troper already misses the ridiculous crits obtained from dropping a full rage bar on Execute. 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.
- Soul Fire: Nothing says "die!" like a huge ball of fire that crits for 10k.
- 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 Pv E 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.
- Shadow Word: Death isn't even that powerful. All it has over Mind Blast is the 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 million, at the time the boss was released, that's Over Nine Thousand times your maximum health...
- Any raid boss mechanic that is intended to be merely avoided by a basic motor skill check is pretty much going to obliterate your character/group if you get hit by its full brunt (in a regular scenario; bugs like the above are fairly merciless in that regard).
- Four words: Knights of the Round.
- A few more words: W-Summon Knights of the Round & Mimic. To explain this: 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 Kot R 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.
- Inidentally, that is how this troper killed Emerald WEAPON without taking so much as a single hit. Glorious, glorious Overkill.
- 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.
- 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!"
- And excessive Sleaze damage causes the hobo to leave his crotch behind.
- This troper, in Super Smash Bros Brawl obtained a Final Smash with Marth, which can OHKO anything already, then Chain-Grabbed Lucas until he was at 999%... Then unleashed the Critical Hit upon the poor boy.
- Worth noting that Super Smash Bros actively encourages this - you'd be surprised at how often a skilled player can recover from being knocked back with over 200% damage if you don't use big attacks.
- This troper can attest to that, as his friend only plays as Ike, meaning I've gotten VERY proficient at recovering, as I favor lighter characters.
- Ike's Final Smash 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). And now someone found a way to increase the overkill quotient of that move...
- Pokémon : While not entirely the fault of the game itself, more-so that of the the player, but there's nothing quite as satisfying as roasting a lv2 Caterpie with a lv100 Charizard with max Special Attack, using the strongest fire-element attack in the game... and scoring a critical hit. This caused this troper's friend to shout the command, "Charizard! Eat!" Mmm... burnt Bug-type. It's even worse when you use Psychic with a lv100, max-special-attack Mewtwo against a lv2 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 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 attacks), 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- Even more so when you make a custom settings with explosions turned all the way up.
- 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.
- Which may in fact be an Ascended Glitch. Anybody remember the minigun-of-annihilation bug from the first game?
- For those that does not, it was being able to fire bazooka shots like minigun shots. Yes, it was as broken as it sounds like.
- 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. With all enemies in the encounter down to 25% health, the Final Strike 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. Of course, against some bosses, 25% health is still a few % too many.
- 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-mo.
- 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.
- 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.
- This troper's preferred - highly inefficient, but fun - strategy in Sins Of A Solar Empire is to play a massive map, build up a TEC empire with a Novalith Cannon on each world, get World Vision from another empire, arrange a minor falling-out, and fire twice at every one of that player's worlds. Smaller worlds die from one shot, and the only way to survive two is to use the TEC-only Planetary Shield. Then, while waiting the 10+ minutes the Novalith shell will take to hit, get back into the victim's good graces... just in time to see the shells crash, reducing an entire galactic empire at the height of its power to cinders within the span of time it takes from ordering your first gun to fire to ordering your last gun to fire. 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, postively 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.
- 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.
- 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. As far as I can tell, this is simply so he has some sort of instant-death attack, as you can obtain rings that protect against 'normal' instant-death effects.
- 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 And Clank often have guns which veer encouragingly close to being overkill. Starting with the RYNO and moving up to its
Gladiator 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.
- 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 troper found it amusing to hear the death scream AFTER the opponent was blown into a bloody mess.
- In Tron 2.0, there is a subroutine (weapon) called the Prankster Bit. Not only is it a 1-kit KO (sometimes killing the player if they stand too close to the blast), but it can even get you a Nonstandard 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.
- 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 Mad World, 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 Baldurs 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.
- While we're on the subject of shotguns, let's not forget 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'S 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 alredy dead (which you can), Max shoots a boss after he is clearly dead. OVER AND OVER AGAIN. This troper lost count of how many rounds Max pumped into him, but he had to have emptied at least one mag (which given his weapon, a Beretta 92-FS, means at least fifteen rounds) into him.
- 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
- 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.
- In the Mega Man Zero series' Grand Finale, Dr. Weil fuses to the Ragnarok satellite while it was plummeting to the ground, to fight Zero as the Final Boss. If Weil wasn't killed by Zero, then the satellite burning up in the atmosphere's re-entry should, right? RIGHT? Until Mega Man ZX rolled around, that is...
- 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:
- Youmu carves her sword technique's name on the moon before cleaving it with her swords and uses the momentum to launch the balll at extreme speeds.
- 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 Master Spark.
- 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...
- Mokou and Flandre have techniques where they kick the ball thousands of times before it can escape.
- 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.
- 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.
- On the PS 3/360 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.
- And then there's the bottomless pits... Just smash the hapless enemies off the edges and watch them fall and die.
- Smooshing enemies into pancakes with your hands.
- In Prototype, it's possible to perform, as shown even in the early trailers, to grab someone, jump on a high building (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.
- 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."
- Two words: ASTRAL FINISH!
- 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 10,500 health, and will likely have only 2,000 left before you can initiate an Astral Heat.
- 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.
Webcomics and New Media
- Schlock Mercenary takes this to heart, especially Kevyn, who wears antimatter grenades on his shoulders. It should be pointed out that one of those antimatter grenades is capable of slagging a tank, and the other has the yield of a good-sized nuke.
- Don't forget the titular character, Schlock, who 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."
- Make that TWO plasguns, as shown in recent strips.
- 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.
- Penny Arcade: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness not only features a gory death if you finish off an enemy with a special move, it also awards the character with an Overkill bonus that permanently raises the damage (with a cap tied to the current weapon upgrade).
- Richard of Looking For Group doesn't understand the concept of overkill.
- Riff's anti-vampire, wooden stake gatling gun from Sluggy Freelance. "Now THAT is one staked vampire."
- Riff is, in general, a very enthusiastic supporter of this trope. Need proof? "party favors"
- Order Of The Stick: Familicide
- 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."
- Anti Heroes duplicates the Mythbusters quote here.
- Billy Mays Youtube Poop Suicide 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!"
- Some of Agatha's death rays in Girl Genius.
Close Webcomics and New Media
Web Original
- 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's Lets 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."
Western Animation
- 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.
- 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
- This is of course, nothing compared to win he went for his 'save the world' button, which 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 Dimensional Fortress Macross.
- By and away the most greatest moment of overkill in the series is Coop's imagined destruction of the DMV.
- 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 an episode of Stroker And Hoop, Santa Claus (yes, Santa and no, he was not Bad Santa) shoots the guys who tried to kill him and Stroker And Hoop have to tell him to stop shooting, as they are dead.
- Korgoth Of Barbaria. Just... Korgoth.
- Every episode of Super Jail has this.
- The second half of the series premiere for Superman The Animated Series subverts this. The giant mecha slams Superman through the side of a building...then collapses the building on top of him...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 build 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.
- Bambi Meets Godzilla
- The Perilsof Penelope Pitstop did this with each and every trap the Hooded Claw used to kill Penelope.
- 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!!"
- Did we mention that said armada, if this troper recalls correctly, is also a Combining Mecha? Or was that later...
- One The Simpsons episode 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.
- 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.
Real Life
- 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.
- "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."
- The final fate of the German battleship Bismarck in WW2. During its final battle basically 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. The British Home Fleet were so determined to destroy it that they even fired on aircraft from their own Mediterranean fleet to keep the kill for the themselves. 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.
- Another bunch of battleship examples: Almost every Japanese battleship in World War II (especially the Yamato and Musashi)
- The "fired on their own aircraft" part is untrue. What actually happened was Swordfish torpedo-bombers from a (Med Fleet) carrier accidentally started to attack one of their own cruisers in the murk.
- Subverted (can a real life example subvert a trope?) in the WWII Battle off Samar. 4 Japanese battleships (including the Yamato), 8 cruisers, and 11 destroyers attacked an American screening force that put together weighed less than the Yamato alone... and lost!
- This troper recently read an article about a British tourist vacationing in Greece who had a violent reaction to a mixed drink that put her in a hospital. The drink? A mixture of Baileys, chilli, tequila, absinthe, ouzo, vodka, cider and gin.
- Let's face it - Nothing says Final Smash! like the A-Bomb.
- Except the Tsar Bomba H-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.
- Only it was of little practical use, as it was too big for ICBM use and required bomber delivery. At full yield it would have also had an incredible amount of fallout. Besides, bombing with smaller nukes is more effective with a broader area more precisely covered, not to mention redundant warheads.
- Really, any H-Bomb is going to say Final Smash much better than an A-Bomb, although most of the Mnogo Nukes were H-Bombs anyway (they are so much better in terms of power/weight).
- 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. This troper once created a car that was an unarmored rail buggy with an electric motor, the driver sitting on a Fat Man type nuke with a pistol in one hand and a deadman switch in the other. He won the duel...
- That just screams"If the Russians do launch their nukes, can Jon really stop them?" "Even if Jon stops 99% of them, the 1% that get through will still kill every living thing on Earth."
- Don't forget Atomic Atomic Annie.
- 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 large enough for the missile to lock onto left floating.
- 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 helicopers, 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 possiblility would've demanded some military readiness. That said, the whole thing was definitely an overreaction as well as overkill, not to mention a classic case of "I am not making this up" for anyone trying to tell stories about it afterward.
- 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 IN BOTH ATOMS!
- 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.
- Relativistic weapons are even more powerful. At 99% light speed they're three times as powerful as an explosion using an equivalent mass of antimatter. However they're horrendously inefficient.
- What about an antimatter relativistic weapon?
- Also, antimatter might not be as impressive as you expect (only the stuff touching normal matter actually detonates).
- 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 mosquitos with lasers. They had a Schlock Mercenary poster up on the door- "There is no overkill. Only "Open fire!" and "I need to reload."
- 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."
- This xm1028 tank round is the pure embodiment of this trope given the fact that it's practical a shotgun shell for tanks (120mm) loaded with approx. 1000 tungsten ball 1cm across. 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 this troper finds a shotgun shell for tanks slightly more ludicrous.
- Nothing ludicrous about it. Infantry is one of the biggest threats to armor. Even molotov cocktails racked up a large number of vehicle kills in WWII, not to mention Carl Gustav recoilles rifles, LAWS and TOW missiles, and satchel caharges. A tank needs to be able to deal with infantry, and two machine guns doesn't always cut it. A tank may go through an entire war without needing cannister, but if it needs it, it really needs it. It's not meant for use on single people, but groups of them.
- 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.
- When the SAS shot dead three IRA terrorists in Gibraltar, one was asked at the subsequent inquest, "Why did you shoot him sixteen times?" His response? "The magazine ony holds 16 rounds sir." (Still, if you suspect he might have a remote detonator to a car bomb, you need to make certain the bastard's dead.)
- 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.
- This Troper's father, a fairly high-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, once described the "Parking Meter" rule of thumb for attacking cites, so named because after the attack, you should be able to look in any direction and see a parking meter. To clarify, there should be nothing left of the city taller than a parking meter.
- 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 is what magnums were designed for: stopping power. If someone or something is charging you, you can't afford to let blood loss do the job.
- This is why hollow points exist. They spread the force over a larger area, increasing the chance of hitting something vital.
- The shooting of Amadou Diallo. 41 bulllets fired, 19 hitting. The kicker, the shooting started, when Diallo reached for his wallet.
- This Troper isn't certain as to whether it was true or not, but at one point heard of an american plan to drop telegraph pole sized rods of Thalium from orbit, which would have an explosive yield roughly 100 times larger than a modern nuclear missile.
- The Cobalt Bomb. Roughly 510 tonnes of Cobalt would be needed, and due to wind etc 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.
- On November 12, 1970, they blowed a whale up. Blowed it up real good. Hint: Half a ton of dynamite makes a really big mess.
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