Unskilled But Strong / Anime & Manga

Characters who are Unskilled, but Strong in Anime and Manga.

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• The Fleet of Fog from Arpeggio of Blue Steel have this opinion of themselves, reckoning that when humanity manages to close the tech gap on their Game-Breaker weapons, mankind's tactical and strategic skill will dominate them. They developed the Mental Models to try and emulate and better understand human thinking, which has indeed made them more flexible, but also introduced some quirks.
• Attack on Titan:
  • Connie has top marks for "Speed" but is only average in "Agility" according to the manual. The boy is fast but not as skilled as Jean or Mikasa at directing that speed to where he wants to go.
  • Almost all the normal Titans are this. They have very little intelligence but their massive size does a lot of damage.
  • Eren is like this at first when he discovers his Titan-Shifting powers. The other Titan-Shifters all have unique abilities and fight smart, while Eren tended to just smash everything in his path. When he fights Reiner and remembers his training with Annie, he gets better.
  • Porco isn't too bad, but he relies extremely heavily on being "an invincible titan" rather than the actual skill others developed. When he's faced with people who can actually fight him effectively, he goes down very quickly.
  • The original holder of the Titan Shifter powers, Ymir Fritz, is stated to have been unable to draw out their full individual powers, but considering she had all nine at her beck and call and there was no other being on the planet that came within a mile of taking her on, she didn't need to be skilled with them in order to establish the Eldians as the dominant empire in only thirteen years. She only died in her human form from an attack not even aimed at her, but instead Taking the Bullet for King Fritz.
• Baki the Grappler:
  • Oliva Biscuit by his own admission has almost no fighting skill compared to the regular cast, but his muscles are so dense that even bullets can't penetrate them, and can punch harder with raw power than a lot of the main cast, who've spent a lifetime practicing their technique.
  • Pickle the Caveman lived before fighting styles were a thing, being from the prehistoric age. He also hunted dinosaurs with his bare hands.
  • Doctor Kureha Shinogi is a subversion to this, to an extent. He has no fighting technique, and has an Olympian-level body in everything, having a scientifically-perfect body, but he also makes up for his lack of fight experience with his medical knowledge giving him a good grasp of the human body's weak points.
• Beelzebub:
  • There are loads of characters like this, up to and including the main character himself, Tatsumi Oga. He has faced a multitude of martial artists and beat them just because he had superior raw power.
  • Hideotora Toujou is an even better example, he beats up superpowered characters and demons and is even on par with a Super Milk Time powered Oga with just instincts and raw power.
• Due to unusual circumstances Beet the Vandel Buster can use five of the powerful magical weapons called Saiga, when most individuals can use only one. However, early parts of the series are spent with Beet learning how to fully utilize his five Saiga and Beet has zero ability in the more basic magical skills which are supposed to be the lead up to obtaining a Saiga in the first place. One character even comments that he learns everything backwards.
• Many of the Apostles from Berserk are this, since they're so strong and fast compared to a normal human. Compared to them, Guts is Weak, but Skilled.
• Noelle of Black Clover has a huge amount of magical power but no control whatsoever over it. Despite being noble-born, she has lived a life ostracized and disregarded because of it. Upon entering the Black Bulls, she finds a great deal of support to help her with this problem and makes improvements quickly.
  • Noelle's arrogant jerkass older siblings also have great magical power, without the control issues. But as a result, they all have come to see the idea of training to improve one's skill as a sign of weakness. Subverted with her eldest brother Nozel, who's spent his whole life training because he's well aware of the monstrous power of the devil who murdered their mother and has become very much Strong and Skilled in his pursuit of vengeance.
  • This is played straight with the Elves when compared to the humans. Even the weakest of the Elves have vastly more power than most humans. However this leads to them becoming complacent and their only method of fighting is simply to throw about big and powerful spells in an attempt to kill their opponents without thinking. This leaves most of them vulnerable to the tactics their Weak, but Skilled human counterparts use.
  • Devils suffer from the same problems as the elves. Not only they have immense reserves of mana, they are incredibly durable physically and thus can easily defeat and kill seasoned mages just by bashing at them. In the other hand, these beings are very complacent and their only method of fighting is to overwhelm foes using incredibly powerful magic and bash them around trying to kill them. It works if you're as strong as the king of devils Lucifero, but it doesn't prevent Weak, but Skilled humans from outsmarting and defeating them. Save for the devils themselves, devil hosts like Dante and Vanica, as well as Dark Disciples usually don't have any learnt tactics because of their immense power and pride, although there are exceptions.
• Bleach:
  • Ichigo has amazingly high spiritual power as a result of being a hybrid of human, hollow, Shinigami, and Quincy, but at the start of the series he's a high school student who's a brawler at best (and has very little time to train in between battles), while almost all other characters have had centuries to hone their skills. In fights, he tends to use his extreme power (and the fact that no one expects some random human to match Shinigami Captains) to break through whatever tricks his enemies come up with. Urahara theorizes that Ichigo's talent seems to be mostly instinctual, and generally trains him by tossing him into life-threatening situations under the theory that he learns best from experience.
  • The only captain in history without Bankai, Kenpachi fights on raw power alone. When Yamamoto tried to train him, he rejected the formal battle philosophy. Kenpachi actually didn't want to become more skilled, because his immense strength meant most fights were already too easy to satisfy his Blood Knight tendencies. It's eventually revealed that the Central 46 banned Yamamoto from continuing to teach him because they were afraid a skilled Kenpachi would be too powerful to defeat should he ever rebel.
  • It's made clear from the outset that Yammy lacks the skill and intellect for even rudimentary Arrancar skills so he relies heavily on being so unnaturally strong his brute strength wins the fight for him. He's eventually defeated when Kenpachi, one of the strongest captains, and Byakuya, one of the most skilled captains, join forces to fight him.
  • Aizen deliberately stripped Wonderweiss of all intellect, skill, rationality and even language capability to focus on maximising his power output. This turned Wonderweiss into a huge powerhouse that most of his Shinigami opponents couldn't handle, even the captains. Yamamoto criticized his attacks for being too predictable, however. Of course, Wonderweiss's fighting capability didn't matter to Aizen, who made him powerful so that he could fully absorb the power of Yamamoto's shikai.
  • Nnoitra's fighting technique mostly boils down to tanking hits with his abnormally-strong hierro (which he claims is the strongest of the Espada) and then shanking opponents when they get too close to him. His released form is very strong and durable, but aside from extra arms, he doesn't employ any flashy techniques like Ulquiorra, Grimmjow and Starrk do when they release their second forms.
• Blood+: In yet another of their parallels, Diva lacks the swordsmanship and combat skills of Saya, but her sheer strength and speed tend to make up for it.
• Rin, from Blue Exorcist episode three onwards, can sling around some pretty impressive pyrotechnics. However, later in the series, he is given a training exercise where he has to light two candles while missing a third and ends up repeatedly torching all three, to his growing frustration.
• Buso Renkin: Kazuki has great durability due to his Magitek artificial heart and Victor powers, while his lance, Sunlight Heart, has great speed and attack power. On the other hand, however, with the exception of some basic, self-taught, martial arts moves, Kazuki had received no formal battle training prior to the start of the series and even after Captain Bravo's intensive training, he has the least skill and experience of any Alchemist Warrior in the series.
• Cardcaptor Sakura: During the capture of the Fight, Sakura enhances herself with the Power. While Sakura has no martial arts training whatsoever, the Power makes her so strong that the one hit she manages to land knocks the Fight out cold.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Noted by Touma during his first fight with Accelerator. Accelerator's powers are among the most powerful in the series, but is at a bit of a loss when he can't just curb stomp Touma like he has all his previous opponents.
    Touma: The strongest esper in Academy City... really has no skills at all, huh? Then grit your teeth, weakling. Because a punch from the weakest is gonna hurt.
  • Fans have noted that, the way Accelerator's powers work, he could be a lot stronger than he already is if he were more creative with them. But when he can just kill people with a touch, he usually doesn't really have to do anything creative to win. In fact, Accelerator notices this himself in his fight with Touma: after getting pounded in hand-to-hand combat, he realizes that he can control the air, why does he need to fight hand-to-hand?
  • Accelerator could in a sense be considered both at once seeing as his powers rely on highly attuned mental calculations which could be seen as the "skill" but at the same time he is physically weak and his redirection isn't so much a wall as much as changed + to - as exploited by his former master.
  • Touma himself is tough as nails and an experienced street fighter, but he gets his ass handed to him when he faces trained martial artists like Kaori and Motoharu.
  • Another major villain, Fiamma of the Right is obscenely powerful but, like Accelerator, is at a loss when he can't simply win with a Curb-Stomp Battle. One of his comrades, however, Acqua of the Back, is very much strong and skilled.
  • Gunha Sogiita has incredible powers, but can't use them to their full potential because he doesn't understand how they work and he fights with almost no strategy besides charging and punching. This is his own choice. Due to being an Idiot Hero and living by Honor Before Reason and guts alone, he sees no reason to learn and improve himself.
• Chihayafuru: Chihaya starts this way, having a very good ear and extremely fast reflexes but basically no understanding of strategy or any other way to play the game. Once Dr. Harada tells her to stop relying on that to win, she goes through a Heroic BSoD for a while worrying that she's not a good player, but she then starts to pay close attention to other techniques her opponents use, and after a while her ability to take on new techniques ends up becoming one of her greatest strengths.
• Most of the Awakened Beings in Claymore fight like that. Because they are so strong that people can not do anything against them, it is not necessary for them to know combat techniques.
• Suzaku Kururugi in Code Geass. He's had combat training his entire life, so on foot he doesn't apply. In a Knightmare, however, he's a complete newbie whose natural abilities and advanced Knightmare allow him to dominate most opponents. This is most obvious when he faces off against Kallen, who is both skilled and strong with plenty of piloting experience; Suzaku only ever wins against her when he has a distinct advantage (or when luck intervenes).
• At one point lampshaded in Darker than Black, when a powerful gravity controlling Contractor is easily dispatched within seconds of his appearance.
• Date A Live:
  • The Spirits all have incredible strength, speed, and other attributes, but most of them don't have any martial training (Tohka admits that they just sort of pop into existence and have no real memories). Thus, they tend to get curb-stomped if they fight someone with a similar power level but superior skills.
  • Shido Itsuka does not have much experience in using his powers and has no sword training, so in battle, he usually just swings his sword like a baseball bat and hope his enemies run into it. Since he has enormous reserves of energy, the abilities of multiple Spirits, and a sword with incredible cutting power, it mostly works out for him.
• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba:
  • Nezuko Kamado is an otherwise normal girl who, at the start of the story, is forcibly transformed into a demon. As a demon, Nezuko has numerous abilities such as near-limitless stamina, regeneration, super strength, and flammable blood. Unlike her brother Tanjiro, however, she has no formal training as a fighter. As a result, when Nezuko takes to the field, her fighting consists of charging in, overwhelming any opponents with kicks powerful enough to knock demons' heads right off and using her stamina and rapid regeneration to simply tank her way through injuries that would kill or incapacitate a human. The sheer onslaught of her attack has allowed her to defeat powerful enemies, even lower ranking members of the Big Bad's strongest fighters.
  • A large portion of Demons in general are this in fact, preferring to rely on their sheer strength or broken powers to do most of the heavy lifting. Among the Twelve Kizuki, the most powerful demons under Muzan, only Akaza and Kokushibo can truly back up their strength with honed skills from their lives as humans, and Muzan's basic strategy as shown in the Final Battle is basically to wail on his foes with his Combat Tentacles at full power while relying on his broken Healing Factor and various back-up brains and hearts to keep him alive. Yet were it not for him being poisoned and his incredible physical abilities suffering for it, he would have easily slain the exhausted Demon Slayer Corps or at least escaped once again.
• Digimon Adventure 02: Triceramon. The species is known for its high physical strength amongst Perfect-level Digimon. The Triceramon who appears in episode 39 is shown to overpower Paildramon with just its raw power, even before Mummymon ends up joining the fight against Paildramon. Prior to this episode, Paildramon has been shown to physically overwhelm much larger Digimon than itself and the bigger Triceramon, notably Okuwamon and Megadramon. Despite their pure physical strength, the Triceramon species doesn't really have fancy-looking attacks or special skills, as they simply don't need them.
• Leo and Neo have a discussion about this regarding VenomVamdemon Digimon V-Tamer 01 whose a big dumb brute who only threatening to Leo because he is higher up the Evolutionary Levels. To Neo, this trait makes him a perfect pawn.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Villains sometimes fall into this category. Pretty much all of them are experienced fighters, but often lack knowledge of certain techniques:
    • Vegeta, Nappa, and Raditz. All battle-tested Saiyan fighters, but they heavily rely on their brute strength and overall toughness to beat their opponent. Raditz failed to train in overcoming the Saiyan's weakness by grabbing the tail unlike Goku, Vegeta, and Nappa, and couldn't do anything when he was locked in a full-nelson by Goku. Nappa couldn't even respond when Goku proved to be his match and Goku outright called him sloppy. Vegeta is the least guilty of this, but he completely lost it when he was fighting a fighter equal to him and chose to overwhelm Goku by transforming into a Great Ape. Eventually, Vegeta outgrows this trope and like Goku proved very adept at learning new techniques.
    • Freeza's entire army are shown to be this; though they can use Ki Attacks, they all rely on scouters to detect and gauge ki levels, and can't alter their battle strength at will. As such, they are all caught flat-footed when fighting someone who can. Zarbon can transform to increase his strength, but this is useful for only so long. Of all of them, only Captain Ginyu can raise his Power Level. During his fight against Dodoria, Vegeta notes that this is due to relying on brute force, like he once did. If Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' is any indication, the very concept of training is alien to the Freeza Force.
    • Cell is an interesting example. While he has all of the skills of his DNA material, he prefers to build up his power by devouring others and extracting their hard-earned power for himself. All of his major power boosts come from the life forces he consumed, unlike the Saiyans who became stronger through Training from Hell. Filler shows him training for the first time during his wait for the Cell Games to start.
    • Fat Buu who is a near endless well of power, endurance, and is able to regenerate. He is also the least skilled of all the Buu forms. He can't even sense energy and gets his ass beaten when fighting someone near or above his power such as Evil Buu, Kid Buu, and Super Saiyan 3 Goku.
    • Super Buu is an interesting case. Although he can sense energy unlike Fat Buu, his fighting style is very crude and like Fat Buu he relies on his ability to regenerate to get ahead. He subverts this trope later after he absorbs Gotenks, Gohan, and Piccolo, not only gaining their powers, but also their skills and fighting experience. While Piccolo is the least dangerous of the group, he's a brilliant tactician and thus his absorption is what really turns the tide.
    • Kid Buu plays with this trope. While his overall power compared to Super Buu is a debate that rages on to this day, he's a mindless, savage brute and fights like one. However, he is considered the most dangerous because he is completely unpredictable and unhinged, meaning he is one of the few fighters who benefits from this. Furthermore, he does subvert the "unskilled" part in some degree in that he is the most skilled at utilizing the unique rubbery and stretchy properties of his body (makes sense, given he is in his pure natural form.)
    • The original version of Legendary Super Saiyan Broly is a subversion. He really is quite skilled, but he's so strong, he doesn't even bother showing it. Still, during his fights he often shows off complex wrestling moves. The rebooted version shown in Dragon Ball Super: Broly plays this a little straighter. While he has received some training from his (much, much weaker) father Paragus, most of his experience is against giant monsters and animals; he has almost no experience fighting other people, especially people who can approach his level of strength. When he faces foes who can match his raw power (Vegeta at first, Whis, Gogeta), he gets clobbered.
    • In Dragon Ball GT, out of all seven Shadow Dragons, only Eis, Nuova, and Syn/Omega possess fighting skills that pose a legitimate threat to Goku and the Z Fighters; the other four rely more on their Elemental Powers and trickery to fight them.
    • Freeza is one of the few villains who knows how to raise and lower his power level, but lacks knowledge on how to sense ki without a scouter. In addition, Freeza has spent so much time toying with opponents far weaker than him that he never learned how to stand up in a protracted battle against someone of roughly equal strength. Once raw power proves not to be enough, it is only a matter of time before the more highly trained (and now more powerful) Goku defeats him.
    • Deconstructed in Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F'. By his own admission, Freeza was such a prodigy that he never bothered to train because he figured no one could match his strength. But after getting killed and resurrected and then being told that Goku defeated Majin Buu (one of the two beings his father told him never to cross), he realizes that if a Saiyan monkey could achieve such power through hard work and skill, then so could he. So, he finally decides to train for the first time in his life and in just four months achieves a level of power bordering on Physical God. He loses again because of his overconfidence; his new Golden Super Mode is certainly powerful, but it burns through his stamina at an incredible rate. If he'd kept training to overcome that flaw rather than rushing to Earth the moment he unlocked it, he would have been far stronger than even Goku and would have been able to defeat them all easily.
    • It's downplayed in the Resurrection F arc of Dragon Ball Super, where Frieza can fully control his power in his true form, sense power levels, and even control his power in his Golden state. He still burns Ki at an accelerated rate, and after admittedly lasting a bit longer than in the film he loses power after going all out for only about a minute. However, as of the Universal Survival Saga, this trope has finally been averted. He tells Goku that after his last defeat, he spent his time in Hell meditating and concentrating on killing Goku in the most brutal ways possible and as a result, has managed to gain perfect control over his ki, allowing him to maintain his Golden form indefinitely.
    • Freeza plays with this trope so much he simultaneously created and inverted the Bishōnen Line: Freeza was born with so much raw power ^note his official Power Level is 120 Million, in an era when 5 Thousand was terrifyingly powerful but so little skill at controlling it that he was forced to create multiple different forms to serve as varying levels of Power Limiter. In contrast to your standard Bishōnen Line character, Freeza spends most of his time in his most transformed state, and each form after that is him dialing down the Willfully Weak button, until he returns to his true form.
    • While Future Zamasu does possess enough power to fight against Blue Goku, he heavily relies on his own Complete Immortality to either serve as a meat shield for Goku Black or take advantage of his immortality in conjunction with Black's attacks. However, due to being overconfident with his immortality, he is very easily caught off-guard such as either being backhanded or being sealed away with the Mafuba wave.
    • Ganos of Universe 4 in the Tournament of Power. When he transforms, all his abilities are greatly boosted, he gains lightning powers, and his body is noted as continually gaining strength, speed, and endurance the longer he fights. Master Roshi even claimed that, if he stayed in the ring long enough, he'd become powerful enough to threaten even Goku. However, as Roshi also points out, Ganos' fighting skills are hopelessly basic. This allows the weaker but vastly more experienced Roshi to defeat Ganos singlehandedly (albeit dying in the process and needing to be revived by Goku).
    • Universe 4 in general, during the Tournament of Power, falls under this, in a similar vein to the Shadow Dragons mentioned above. Apart from Ganos, Caway, and Majora, all the members simply rely on gimmicks and trickery to fight. Master Roshi, being a fighter who's already very experienced with trickery, manages to defeat 3 of them in one episode. The final 3 members are also defeated in one episode, with Universe 4 only managing to ring out one fighter (Piccolo) throughout the whole tournament.
    • Toppo of Universe 11, after his ascension to a God of Destruction. In this state, in addition to all his normal abilities becoming vastly stronger, Toppo is able to summon the Energy of Destruction, enabling him to perform the infamous Hakai technique that Beerus used to erase Present Zamasu from existence. If that weren't enough, he can also cover his own body in the Energy of Destruction, giving him an invulnerable defense as anything that even touches his body will be erased. However, being newly ascended, he still needs to actually charge his Hakai energy before he can release it. In battle, all his uses of Hakai basically amount to simply spamming it as much as he can. He's defeated by Vegeta when the Saiyan Prince manages to produce so much energy that Toppo can't erase it all with the Hakai.
    • Played With in the case of Dyspo, also from Universe 11. He's not "strong" in the sense he has great strength, as he's actually lacking in raw power. Rather, his strength is in his Super-Speed, as he's arguably the fastest contender in the Tournament of Power and the whole Multiverse. However, his actual fighting moves are noted as being basic and predictable. Goku, Frieza (at first), and Hit are all able to counter him, the latter nearly defeating him twice. Towards the end, however, when Dyspo's pushed to his limits, his speed turns out to be that much of a threat on its own; he's able to put Ultimate Gohan and Golden Frieza on the ropes simply because he's raised his speed so much that they're no longer able to keep up with his attacks. While Gohan and Frieza do beat him, it comes at the cost of the latter draining most of his energy and the former needing to pull Taking You with Me.
    • The worst of them all, however, is Spopovich, who, thanks to Babidi giving him a power-up, is far stronger than baseline humans, can manipulate ki well enough to fly and fire ki blasts, and quickly recovers from any damage normal humans and people with low ki power inflicts him... But aside for that his technique is far worse than any of Frieza's soldiers, and the weaker but much more skilled Videl knocks him down seven times before growing too tired to fight effectively while holding back enough to not kill him. In fact he's so bad that Goku and the others realize something's strange is happening, as someone that unskilled could have never gotten so strong. A flashback to his fight with Mr. Satan, which was before Babidi empowered him, showed that he was so unskilled that when Mr. Satan dodges his punch, it causes him to lose his balance and fall over.
    • In Dragon Ball Super, Moro became incredibly powerful through stealing power from others, but does not train. After Goku injures him and then fully heals him with a Senzu Bean, he tries to sucker punch Goku, only to break his hand on his chest. Goku criticizes him for not training and for his really sloppy punch.
    • Granolah uses the Cerealian Dragon Balls to wish to be the strongest warrior in the universe. He fights Vegeta and is superior in strength and speed, but Vegeta notes that while Granolah has some training, he lacks combat experience, allowing Vegeta to outmaneuver him and land several hits. Granolah is able to improve his skill on the fly, but is unable to respond when Goku and Vegeta manage to surpass his power. Then Gas uses the Dragon Balls to become the strongest warrior and his power surpasses the other three, but with the same lack of experience.
  • On the heroes' side:
    • This is also Piccolo's reasoning for training Gohan after witnessing Gohan's hidden power firsthand against Raditz. However, even as an adult, Gohan still fits this trope. He is very powerful and has the ability to become the strongest fighter in the universe. However, he rarely trains, at least not to the extent of the other characters, to unlock his power. He gets powered up twice by having said power unlocked for him. Because of this, Gohan does not use many techniques and is prone to bull charges, Beam Spam, or falling for tricks by crafty fighters. He beats his opponents by overwhelming them with pure power and tends to do poorly against opponents who are equal or more powerful than him. This is a particularly bad problem in the Buu Arc, as Gohan hasn't been in a real fight for a good seven years and is severely rusty when he has to fight Dabura, whom 11-year-old Gohan would likely have demolished. A big part of the problem is that unlike most of the strong characters in the series, Gohan dislikes fighting. For the most part he only gets serious when he's really angry, and his anger is not conducive to good tactics. He appers to have worked on reducing this by the time of the Tournament of Power. While his fighting style does still mainly revolve around overpowering his opponents through brute force, having learned from his mistakes in the Buu Saga and becoming a scholar in the intervining time has allowed him to become a much more effective tactician and strategist with a MUCH cooler head.
    • Goten in his early appearances. He has yet to learn how to fly (considered a very basic technique in DBZ) but is able to turn into a Super Saiyan. Gohan compares it to learning how to run before you can crawl.
    • In an unusual twist, Roshi deliberately trains Goku and Krillin to boost all their raw physical and mental abilities through Training from Hell without ever fighting anyone. Roshi isn't neglecting technique, rather it's something he wants his students to develop by fighting on their own. Before the preliminaries of the first Tournament Arc, Krillin is worried that doing nothing but menial tasks for months hasn't prepared them at all, only for Goku to figure out they have to hold back to avoid killing someone by accident. In fact, they were so beyond Roshi's expectation that he had to enter the tournament in disguise to make sure they didn't win through brute force and get complacent.
    • Mr. Popo accuses Goku of this in the original series. As he puts it, Goku has a lot of power but makes very poor use of it by doing wasteful movements, wasting energy, and using his eyes too much. This is actually given a call back in the manga version of the Tournament Of Power, when after seeing Master Roshi go toe-to-toe with Jiren, Goku realizes that his teachers were preparing for him to master Ultra Instinct.
    • Although Future Trunks is disciplined and a Combat Pragmatist, since he didn't have anybody to train him after Future Gohan died, he doesn't have a full grasp of fundamental fighting concepts. Cell mocks him for relying on brute force and for not noticing the flaw of the Ultra Super Saiyan form (it increases strength but decreases speed and stamina, making it almost useless against an equal or superior fighter). Goku notices the flaw as soon as he achieves the form and so declines to use it. To quote Goku, "What good is strength if I can't catch my opponent?" Vegeta also immediately notices the flaw, and, until mastering the basic Super Saiyan form, relies on the Ascended Super Saiyan one that only bulks him up enough to increase his speed too, if not increasing the strength to the same level of the Ultra form.
    • Gotenks is one of the most powerful fighters in the series, but his supreme arrogance and obsession with cool-looking but useless techniques means that his actual effectiveness in combat is rather limited.
  • Zeno-sama also seems to fall into this category. While it's stated that he never actually fights (and probably doesn't really know how to), he's still the strongest since he can wipe out anyone or anything he wants with a thought.
  • When selecting potential team members for the multi-universe Tournament of Power, Goku and Gohan immediately disqualify Goten and Trunks from being involved. The format of the tournament is an eighty-combatant battle royale with ring-outs as the only accepted way to remove an opponent. This situation better favors Weak, but Skilled combatants like Krillin and Master Roshi. For all their power, Goten and Trunks are too inexperienced and straightforward as fighters to do much good in that situation.
  • Kefla, the fusion of Caulifla and Kale possesses a tremendous amount of power owing to their combined powers along with a Potara Fusion, which easily makes her the strongest fighter of Universe 6, even more so than Hit. However, she is shown to demonstrate very little control over her powers, as she often wastes her powers using impractical huge energy blasts and she couldn't even learn how to control her speed. Super Saiyan Blue Goku is even capable of fighting evenly with her with the latter only able to gain the upper hand due to Goku being weakened over his previous confrontation earlier. This perhaps demonstrated when Goku reattains his Ultra Instinct where even though her blasts are said to be able to vaporize him if it hits, Goku is easily able to dodge each and every single one of them before ultimately eliminating her with a Kamehameha straight to her face.
• In Durarara!!, Shizuo Heiwajima's typical fighting style is described as the real-life equivalent of Button Mashing. Given that he can bench-press a van and deflect or occasionally break a blade on his skin in a series that otherwise has normal human-level power, this is just about all he needs. And he gets even stronger when he's angry, making him basically a non-transforming HULK MASH!-Up.
• Eyeshield 21:
  • Gao only started playing football that season, yet he's already one of the best linemen in Japan. Why? Because he can bench press 440+ pounds and flings opponents away like nothing. People even nickname him things like "caveman", "dinosaur", "monster", and "muscle brains." His lack of technique, however, is a conscious choice since he wants to find someone who equals him in strength. When he finally does meet someone who overpowers him, he quickly starts improving on technique.
  • The manga actually points this out, noting that Gaou refuses to break the rules and hit Kid even when he was close enough when Kid released to be justified in hitting him. They acknowledge that it's not like he can't control himself, it's that he doesn't feel like it. So, he's more like the football equivalent of Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?.
• Fabricant 100: While No 100 is physically the strongest, she doesn't have any unique abilities, which puts her at disavantage against weaker Fabricants who utilize tactics and superpowers.
• Fist of the North Star has two examples with Raoh and Jagi (though that is relative due being highly skilled martial artists and practitioners of the Crazy-Prepared Hokuto Shinken style):
  • Raoh may not be as skilled as his younger brothers Kenshiro or Toki, but he makes up for it with his imposing physique, immense strength, potent fighting spirit, and monstrous willpower. The best example is Raoh's showing against Souther in "Legends of the Dark King" and comparing it with Kenshiro's first fight with Souther: Kenshiro, after an early moment of trouble, completely outclassed Souther and only lost because Souther's body is immune to the pressure point strikes that make Hokuto Shinken so formidable, while Raoh's less refined strikes still harmed Souther, making him realize they should have a truce or they'd likely kill each other, simply by being just that powerful.
  • Jagi is the less skilled of the Hokuto Brothers... And can still shatter a pillar with a fist, and may actually have more raw strength than Kenshiro. He only loses because Kenshiro's technique is much, much better.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • With the exception of master swordsman Wrath,^SpoilerWhich makes sense, as he doesn't share the others' regenerative abilities, and his special power is the one eye that can see his opponent's attacks and openings, meaning he still has to be able to defend the attacks and exploit the weaknesses to get anywhere most of the Homunculi seem to rely on their regenerative abilities and special powers far more than their fighting skills:
    • Envy gets a lot of mileage out of its shapeshifting abilities and its One-Winged Angel Form, but it possesses poor hand-to-hand fighting skills. This is taken advantage of very liberally by the Xingese fighters, who are not only skilled at hand-to-hand but also have the ability to detect homunculi, rendering Envy's shape-shifting moot. And ultimately that One-Winged Angel form proves to be a liability against the highly-skilled Roy Mustang because it just gives him a much bigger target to set on fire.
    • Gluttony possesses decent physical strength and an ability to fire a giant beam which sucks up everything it touches, but spends most of his time getting pounded on by the heroes due to being very much Dumb Muscle.
    • Greed, admittedly not a poor fighter, can harden his body to make himself impervious to attack, but he tends to fare poorly against opponents who can counter his ability, such as Ed, who uses alchemy to convert his armor into charcoal. This is later used by Greed himself against Father in a Chekhov's Gun moment. His resurrected form is much more skilled, though, presumably because he can at least partially draw from the combat skills of his host body Ling.
    • Sloth may be the most extreme of the lot, being faster than Wrath and even stronger than Pride, but he's the least skilled fighter. His physical toughness (enough to shrug off a tank shell) and Super-Speed are enough to nearly kill BOTH of the Armstrong siblings. Being Sloth, he's too damn lazy to put any effort into further training his physical abilities or practicing fighting skills (or anything else) that would make him mind-bogglingly powerful. Case in point: he has so little control over his incredible speed that he spends a good portion of his last fight crashing into things. If Sloth had any control over his abilities, he'd be nearly invincible; his fighting style basically amounts to flailing around at his targets.
    • Pride relies pretty much on his endless mass of shadow tentacles, but they're all he really needs to be one of the most dangerous villains.
  • On the heroic side, Van Hohenheim, despite being one of the strongest characters in terms of raw power, admits to not being much of a fighter, a description which also applies to the Big Bad himself.
  • Halfway-averted in Fullmetal Alchemist (2003). While Sloth, Lust and Gluttony are not particularly skilled in a fight, Wrath is in the very least competent in hand-to-hand, Pride is the master swordsman in this version, and Envy uses a form of capoiera to humble Ed during their final encounter.
• In Full Metal Panic!, Leonard Testarossa isn't a very good pilot, but his Belial is equipped with the Lambda Driver, a device driven by the user's willpower that lets them perform feats that defy the laws of physics; since Leonard has tons of willpower, the Belial is practically invincible. However, during the final battle Sosuke uses the Lambda Driver-cancelling "Angel Feather" system to make it a contest of skill — needless to say, after that it isn't even a fight anymore.
• Hayato Kazami from Future GPX Cyber Formula is initially this, since he has no experience in motorsport and has to rely on his motorcycle racing background to drive a race car while his rivals clearly had more years of experience than he does. However, once he slowly learns more of his racing skills, he performs extremely well in races and wins races at times mostly out of determination.
• Gamaran:
  • Ryuho Kibe, the "Silver Demon", is the commander of the 47th Division of the Muhou Ryuu and, by Word of God, the physically strongest character in the series. However, his actual martial skills are subpar, the Ryu he came from was considered nothing special within the land of Unabara and his only natural talent is his ability to withstand the deadly side effects of the battle drug Jugan which gives him unearthly strength and high pain tolerance. His weapon is a huge steel club which he uses with little finesse, even his only named technique is rather primitive (he just thrusts his club at the enemy and, if they dodge, use the hooks on the side of the club to tear them open as he pulls back the club). Thanks to his superior use of martial arts, Gama is able to win against him.
  • Shura has Bihoumaru, an incredibly strong and powerful vassal of Tadaie Hiramatsu. He's incredibly strong and though, being able to take several sword wounds without even flinching and fights by overwhelming his opponent with pure instict, but seems to lack proper strategy or technique in combat. When faced by an opponent who's actually more knowledgeable of bare-handed fight than him, he gets his ass kicked. This extends to his weapon being a simple "tessui" (a type of chinese steel hammer with a round head), which he merely uses to raise some dust to hide in before attacking.
• The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated!'s titular character, Jahy, used to be this. She was by a wide margin the most powerful demon around after the Demon King themselves, and effectively ruled the demons with an iron fist as a result. When she's in the human world, though, it becomes apparent what skills she cultivated besides crushing people with magical might: that is to say, none. She starts the series out in a crappy run-down apartment working as waitstaff in a small bar, which is the only job she seems able to qualify for (and it seems to be more down to her looks than anything).
• Gundam:
  • Many young heroes in the Gundam series are notably less skilled than their more experienced Ace Pilot adversaries, but manage to survive due to Falling into the Cockpit of a Super Prototype. Generally, though, they survive enough battles through the series to become experienced and an ace in their own right. In the original series, Mobile Suit Gundam, Amuro Ray at his second sortie gets his ass handed to him by Char, whose Zaku II is extremely inferior but has earned his fame as Zeon's most formidable pilot by being just that good and has only improved since. After Char is pulled away from the frontlines, Amuro, who by this point has been piloting the Gundam for roughly a month and a half, manages to defeat Ramba Ral, a veteran soldier who's been piloting a mobile suit before they were first introduced to the battlefield four years ago (he was one of the test pilots through their whole development) thanks to his machine's superiority over Ral's Gouf. Ral praises Amuro, but tells him not to get cocky, since it was the Gundam's power and not his own skill that won the day; Amuro just calls him a Sore Loser.
  • Oftentimes the main characters are psychic as well, which of course is a huge boon in combat. There's still a matter of Skill vs Power there, though: some rely so heavily on their psychic abilities that they have little conventional skill. And it has been shown that sufficiently skilled non-psychics can beat a psychic in combat in this franchise.
  • There's also Tieria Erde of Gundam 00. While his other fellow Meisters are or grow into skilled pilots, Tieria himself never really gets much better. However all of his Gundam's have 3 or more massive particle beam weapons and a energy shield to protect him, AND a secret hidden mode to surprise his opponents with. He doesn't need skill when he can simply blow his enemies away from long range, while safe inside his barrier, and if for some reason they do get to him and his shield fails he surprises them by switching modes. The main character Setsuna is also like this at first, relying on his powerful Gundam to offset his rather poor piloting skills, but as the tech gap decreases he comes into his own as an extremely skilled pilot. The Trinity Siblings meanwhile never improve because they were designed that way, so when their job was complete they'd be easy prey for the skilled pilots with equally good weapons sent after them.
  • The protagonists of Iron Blooded Orphans manage to be both skilled and unskilled at the same time via their Ajana-Vijana implant systems that allow them to directly interface with their mobile suits. Without it they can't even get the mobile suit to move as they are mostly illiterate and incapable of understanding the controls without the brain link (although some of their pilots gradually are able to learn to get by without the system). With it however they're capable of a level of precise and fine control that's impossible for any pilot no matter how skilled to replicate with just a standard control set up. As a result they're dancing around veteran Gjallarhorn pilots and making them look like chumps via the system despite the fact that they should have a massive advantage in skill. Notably when some Gjallarhorn pilots gets the system themselves, they become a nigh unstoppable force of nature due to a combination of skill AND direct precise control.
• Hajime no Ippo:
  • Takeshi Sendo's raw power and fighting instincts are top-notch. His biggest weakness is lack of technical skill.
  • Subverted and played straight with Brian Hawk. It is the very lack of skillful boxing that makes him so incredibly dangerous. He doesn't have the limits of the textbook boxing techniques and, combined with naturally insane power, speed and reflexes, become completely unpredictable. His fighting style is even described by his trainer as not being boxing but "simply violence." Takamura spends the first half of their fight trying to prove that boxing skill is of use. It is eventually played straight when Hawk's trainer learns how very superior Takamura is through having learned the proper technique and how much of a backbone Brian Hawk lacks because of his lack of proper training.
  • Inspired by Takamura, Brian Hawk's trainer eventually finds another similar prospect in a 17 year old kid by the name of Woli, who as a result of grown up on a tropical island and spending his days climbing and jumping through trees with monkeys, is an unbelievable athlete. At the time of his match with Ippo, Woli was the Indonesian national champion, despite having only fought 3 matches total in his life. Despite being obviously green to the point that he wasn't used to holding a "proper" boxing stance, Woli gives Ippo fits and nearly beats him on sheer natural talent alone.Ippo only wins on a miracle comeback because Ippo used tactics Woli had never fought against. After the fight, Kamogawa tells Woli's trainer that Ippo only won due to his experience, and that he'll never offer a rematch.
• Lampshaded in Heaven's Lost Property. Astraea is physically the strongest of the Angeloids, but she's a complete idiot. While this prevents her from using her strength to its full potential, Daedalus points out that "The reason I didn't give her any processing power...is because she doesn't need any." Astraea has acknowledged that she can't beat Ikaros in a straight fight because Ikaros' power approaches hers and she's a well-rounded fighter.
• Hellsing's earlier vampires, like the transformed couple and the Valentine brothers, rely primarily on their newfound enhanced strength and enhanced speed, with the more powerful abilities like enhanced regeneration, familiars, and becoming smoke unavailable. This comes back to bite them when they go up against Alucard, who aside from being clearly stronger, faster, and capable of taking more hits than anything else, has over five centuries of fighting experience.
• High School D×D:
  • Once he gets over his teething problems with Boosted Gear, Issei runs headlong into this trope. He's capable of overpowering anyone once he gets rolling, but the applications of his power trend towards brute force. And when he does get some utility skills, they're fueled by his perversion and situationally practical at best. Becomes a Discussed Trope, as Issei notes this power is no good if he can't hit anything, and he trains with Kiba to overcome this very weakness.
  • Xenovia is nearly as bad, being the original bearer of the nickname "Power Idiot" for her habit of handling every situation by plunging in sword first. Long-time comrade Irina commiserates that she's always been like this.
  • The heroes in general have a problem with this: Rias' powers are great for erasing things from existence, but she has very few defensive options. Akeno focuses on magic nukes and has poor defense for her tier. Koneko has only Super-Strength and Full-Contact Magic to her name and struggles with enemies she can't punch. This is underscored during the Gremory-Sitri Ratings Game, where Team Sitri realized during the planning stages that they'd be hosed in a straight fight, and base their entire strategy on avoiding one.
• Holyland:
  • Yuu starts out with only a one-two straight combo and no footwork or other technique. He gets better. The Strong part comes from how various more experienced fighters note that his raw power and speed are very high, while also being able to keep going after beatings that do in lesser men.
  • Katou also applies. Despite his lack of real training, he wins through brute strength, fighting dirty and drug-taking that makes him Feel No Pain. He gets utterly destroyed later on when a MMA exponent decides to get serious.
• How Not to Summon a Demon Lord: The Demon Lord Krebskulm is reverted to a child and has a childlike mentality, so she doesn't remember how to fight. This means it is easy for trained fighters to avoid her attacks. She retains all of her awesome power, so if she ever manages to land a hit, her opponent is finished.
• How to Treat a Lady Knight Right: Leo is a Strong and Skilled swordswoman who also possesses an insane amount of magical power. In contrast to her sword skills, however, her magic is so unstable that when she tries to use it she simply casts explosive magic on herself. Houli tries to help her control it by holding her hand and manually adjusting her magic with his, and is largely successful, but the act of holding hands eventually makes Leo so embarrassed she blasts Houli with power rivaling that of the greatest sorcerer.
• Ikki Tousen's Hakufu Sonsaku is considered to be the worst fighter of Kanto. Despite that, she's also the strongest of the fighters and has rarely ever been defeated. She's even the leader of Nanyo Academy.
• InuYasha:
  • The title character is a prime example. Word of God explains that instead of using techniques and tactics, Inuyasha wins simply with raw power and instinct: Despite the Tessaiga's many abilities, Inuyasha's typical approach to battle is charging head-on with his sword raised high, screaming like a maniac, and either hammering his opponents with the blade or spamming his Sword Beam. His actual sword strikes are either overhead swings or horizontal slashes that often miss their mark, making him an easily predictable opponent and allowing his opponents to exploit holes in his attacks. If he ever gets his ass kicked, this is usually why; in fact, his recklessness is why Goshinki was able to break Tessaiga in the first place.
  • The two half-demons Jinenji and Gyu-oh are also strong fighters. However, they do not master the least martial arts. Half-demons do not have to do that either, because they are usually very strong.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure likes to feature Stand users who have phenomenal abilities but aren't too clever with them, with the biggest in the franchise being Ungalo of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean. His Stand, Bohemian Rhapsody, has the power to make fictional characters come to life. This is an ability that would be incredibly broken even before you factor in that its range extends over the entire world, and these characters are indestructible, seek out people who identify with them, and then inexorably force those people to re-enact the events of the story, usually to their deaths. However, Ungalo is a foolish and unambitious drug addict, and therefore has basically no idea how to control or exploit his power other than to just turn it on while miles away and let it run wild until the protagonists are hopefully dead. He has so little control over his Stand that the protagonists end up using it to defeat him, by "inventing" a character with the power to negate Bohemian Rhapsody.
  • For a non-Stand example, there's Tarukus from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood. He's a muscle-bound reanimated knight who wields a BFS. Despite being a Genius Bruiser, he boasts that he doesn't need strategy besides hitting his opponents until they fall.
• Yoshimori is this way in Kekkaishi, although he's improving, in contrast to his Weak, but Skilled counterpart, Tokine.
• Many competitors in Kengan Ashura lack real combat training and rely purely on raw strength. Murobichi Gozo is an Olympian athlete and a decathlon champion, but lacks any real training with actual martial arts. Adam Dudley is a hockey player who is little more than a brawler in combat. Karo Yoshinari is a fisherman by trade, and most of his "moves" are fishing and whaling techniques. Bando Yohei relies on his Abnormal Limb Rotation Range and durability. Kono Haruo is completely out of practice and gets by on Stout Strength. And Julius Reinhold is the World's Strongest Man, stated to have taken enough steroids to kill most people, and openly states that he believes technique is a weakness. Several of them shape up by the time of the sequel.
• Berserker in Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple is The Dragon to Odin in Ragnarok, despite not having any formal martial arts training like everyone else. He has his rank purely due to his natural talent as a fighter. Much, much later, Berserker returns after receiving training. However, the one who trained him emphasized improving his random style rather than fixing it with the intent of making Berserker turn his way of fighting into his own "self-taught style."
• Kill la Kill:
  • Nui Harime. Unlike Ryuko, who has Power Copying from Senketsu and can think on the fly, and Satsuki, whose fighting skills are virtually unmatched, Nui prefers to overwhelm her opponents with her strength, speed, and powers, with little innovation every time she battles. When Ryuko embraces her Life Fiber powers and regains both Scissor Blades, Nui gets knocked a peg down and suffers a Villainous Breakdown.
  • Ryuko also started out as this. There are few better ways to describe someone wearing a 100% Life Fiber uniform that some subs translate as a "Godrobe," (which, by the way, is probably not an exaggeration) but struggles against people wearing 20% Life Fiber. This also extends to the fact that she's a Fragile Speedster/Glass Cannon: In spite of her high offense and speed as a result of being a Life Fibers-enhanced human on top of wearing a 100% Life Fiber uniform, she takes hits from three-star Goku Uniforms users (which are considerably weaker than a Kamui, which is equivalent to a 10-star Goku Uniform) because the latter are far better skilled with their uniforms. She and Senketsu get better, though. Lord, do they get better. Especially after consuming all that Life Fiber.
• Kinnikuman:
  • Buffaloman was not a great fighter at all until he made a Deal with the Devil and gained his ten million Choujin Power. With it he can overpower any opponent he faces and even put out enough power to reverse the Kinniku Buster.
  • Kinnikuman himself is this, to an extent. Part of the reason why he started out as such an awful superhero, besides his cowardice and stupidity, was that he was so goddamn clumsy; one time, while going giant, he tripped over a car like a roller skate and landed face first in a subway entrance. Even after he learns how to wrestle, he starts to prefer power moves over techniques, spending most of his fights setting up opponents to be put into one of his heavy finishers. This is eventually called out during his fight against Kinnikuman Super Phoenix during the Scramble For The Throne arc.
  • The Perfect Choujin Peek-A-Boo is a Manchild with the mentality of an infant. However, precisely because of this, Peek-A-Boo can learn frighteningly fast and dominates his fight with Kinnikuman by learning and assimilating all the power moves Kinnikuman favors. Kinnikuman learns the secret to defeating him lies in the use of basic, foundational moves like body slams and kicks. This works because Peek-A-Boo grew too fast, and has none of those basics himself. Kinnikuman wins the fight by breaking out the Fuurinkazan, a combo of multiple basic techniques he hasn't used in a fight since the early days of the series.
• Shurato Hidaka from Legend of Heavenly Sphere Shurato has lots of raw power but lacks the proper training, as he was trained in martial arts on Earth but that doesn't exactly help him to control his Sohma.
• The Legend of Zelda (Akira Himekawa): In the adaptation of Majora's Mask, Odolwa is still a giant with a massive machete, but Link manages to outmaneuver him and slash him through the stomach. It helps that Odolwa doesn't have the tricks used by his game counterpart, such as summoning flunkies or setting up fires.
• Kouichi in Linebarrels of Iron is this at first; most of his early victories are entirely due to Linebarrel being a Lightning Bruiser, and he causes extreme amounts of collateral damage from inexperience. Reiji points all of this out when he hands Kouichi his ass in the fourth episode of the anime.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Nanoha Takamachi has a lot of raw power, but her technique isn't quite up to the task at the very beginning. Later on though, she trains and refines her technique so immensely that it almost becomes an inversion. She learns fast and she does it good.
  • Applies to Fate to some degree, too, as Precia had Linith skip over certain aspects of her training while teaching her how to fight in order to get her ready to search for the Jewel Seeds soon enough. While observing Fate and Nanoha's battle in Episode 7, Chrono notes that both of them are mainly throwing around powerful attacks with less regard to using the best one for the situation.
  • Precia herself has an incredible amount of raw magical power (she was able to cripple a spaceship in another dimension, and is one of only 2 identified SS-rank mages in the franchise) but lacks actual combat experience, which is probably why she mostly stays hidden and makes Fate do the work.
  • Hayate is this down to the core. Her magical power is by far the highest in the entire TSAB (she's the other known SS-rank mage) and her attacks are equal to nukes. And yet she's — at least in the main continuity, as opposed to the Battle of Aces one — helplessly unskilled and needs support to even aim her attacks properly. As she says herself, this is why she would lose to almost everyone else in the main cast, despite being theoretically the strongest mage alive.
  • The Hückebein Family from Force would seem to be this by design. Their powers allow them to kill mages with barely any effort on their part, and without any harm to boot, but none of them apart from Curren initially show any tactics beyond simple brute force. This makes sense, since they have no real interest in learning how to fight when the virus that will kill them if they don't kill other people doesn't differentiate between a talented fighter and a civilian. Then enemies show up who they can't simply overpower, making them have to work for their victories.
  • As Chrono states in the first season, raw magical power doesn't equate to being a top tier mage. This point is made clear in a supplementary manga, where Nanoha and Fate, both AAA class mages, both badly lose a training battle against an admiral whose power level is two levels below them.
  • Vivio shows the other end of the spectrum in that enough raw power can overcome any amount of skill. When she was first introduced, she was a six year old girl who hasn't had a day of combat training, formal or otherwise. With nothing more than brute strength, she managed to take on the best aerial combat mage in the entire TSAB utilizing the latest in military hardware. And she probably would have won if she had actually wanted to.^note Vivio's mage rank has never been specified, but fans generally presume that her Sankt Kaiser form was SSS, the highest possible rank.
  • Rinne in ViVid Strike! is another example. She was born with an extraordinary amount of talent but her fighting style is Attack! Attack! Attack!. Normally, this enough to let her steamroll through any opponent, but she ended up losing to Vivio (who had become Weak, but Skilled due to injuries sustained at the end of StrikerS).
• Magi: Labyrinth of Magic has this apply to both Alibaba and Aladdin, at least at first. As a Magi, Aladdin has a massive supply of Magoi, but next to no idea how to use it other than instinctively shielding himself. Alibaba had a incredibly powerful Djinn Metal Vessel but ran into problems with focusing and truly utilizing that power like most Metal Vessel users could. They both grow out of it.
• After receiving an upgrade, Magical Circle Guru-Guru's Kukuri has even more trouble controlling her magic than normal. Attempting to use it sends her flying off randomly. After her visit to the Migu Migu Ruins and getting the idea to incorporate dancing into her drawing, her next summon is a flying beast that takes them right where they need to go and away from their current foe.
• In The Anime of the Game for Medabots, the medabot called Cyandog is actually a pretty decent-tier battling unit... but because his chassis is a shooting-oriented DOG-type, and his medal is a Monkey type, which is a close-combat specialist, there's a fundamental lack of synchronization; his shots are powerful, but his accuracy is absolutely awful. This is then doubled down on when his owner, Spyke, chooses to give him a more powerful DOG-type chassis instead of a close combat chassis for his Mid-Season Upgrade; as Krosserdog, his stats are all boosted high enough that his accuracy is much improved... but anybody familiar with a normal Krosserdog can still see his shooting is far less effective than normal.
• Munakata Kei from Medaka Box possesses a Hyperspace Arsenal of a whole variety of weapons (katana, grenades, guns, hammers). However, he lacks any actual skill at handling his weapons, and tosses aside any that don't finish the job. Zenkichi manages to counter almost all his weapons because of this, though is severely tired out by the process. The purpose of all those weapons is actually to make Munakata weaker, since in hand-to-hand combat just one hit from him would be fatal and he doesn't want to kill anybody.
• My Hero Academia:
  • Shoto Todoroki plays with this. He is the most naturally powerful quirk user enrolled in UA, disregarding Izuku who is less likely to match Shoto at a recent time due to having a quirk that grows over time or needs to adapt to the user through practice. Shoto is a born genetic freak engrained with his father and mother's potential for surpassing the best of the best, and he's received plenty of Training from Hell to master controlling these powers. But that same Training from Hell and his own parental issues have led to him to intentionally hold back via only using his ice while neglecting his fire to spite his father, which is dangerous since the two elements are meant to balance each other and overusing one screws with his body, and he's prone to letting his emotions make his power unleash far bigger and more dangerous attacks than he likes, thus sadly becomes more prone to be outperformed and overcome in pure skill from highly skilled students of his tier.
  • Izuku Midoriya plays with this trope. One aspect of Izuku Midoriya's quirk is a simple Super-Strength power, however he can use it to blow away his opponent just by flicking his finger. Unfortunately, the strain of the power causes his bones to shatter, and before he became more used to it (and thus able to set it to levels other than 0% and 100%), every fight ended with him in much worse shape than his opponent, even when he won. Even after he learns to use less of the power to keep his bones from breaking, he can still only overpower his opponents with superior strength and speed. A large aspect is because Izuku still has trouble accepting the Quirk One-For-All as a part of himself. On the other hand, Izuku knows quite well how to fight without using his quirk, since he went most of his life without having it. He does gradually grow out of this, however, starting with learning to use Full Cowl so he can use his Quirk in managable percentages.
  • All Might averts this trope. While his appearance and quirk gives the impression of only Super-Strength, Super-Speed and Super-Toughness, he combines the raw power with his keen tactical sense and refined punch techniques. Later chapters however reveal that One For All also contains the Quirks of the previous holders, but All Might never figured out how to access them, only using the physical abilities to their full potential.
  • The show also gives us All For One. His eponymous Quirk allows him to steal the Quirks of others which he can then combine to form devastating attacks that can lay waste to several city blocks as well as take out several Pro Heroes in a single instant and is physically strong enough to hold All Might at bay with his bare hands despite needing a mobile life support system. Unlike All Might, who trained for years to master his One For All Quirk, All For One isn't a refined fighter and his "fighting style" basically boils down to "mash together a bunch of powerful Quirks, blast the enemy and hope they're dead". He even cites this trope as the reason why he doesn't want Best Jeanist's Fiber Master Quirk as such a powerful Quirk would require years of practice to master.
  • Dabi's Cremation Quirk is extremely powerful — he can incinerate opponents, knock heavy vehicles off the road and start a raging forest fire with a flick of his fingers, but his technique pretty much boils down to "spam everything with really hot fire until it's ashes" (though granted, he hasn't been in many situations where this hasn't worked in his favour) and he can't use his flames continuously or he starts to cook from the inside out.
  • In a similar manner to Dabi, Overhaul's fighting style is pretty much to keep using his quirk until whatever is in his way is nothing but a bloody pulp and once you manage to get close enough to him he has virtually no hand-to-hand combat skills, though good luck actually doing that if you're not a main character, because his Overhaul Quirk is insanely powerful and he can use it on both organic and inorganic matter and use it constantly without suffering much in the way of physical drawbacks.
  • Muscular is perhaps the series' biggest example. He is absurdly strong, tough, and fast thanks to his Quirk allowing his muscle fibers to increase in mass to an absurd degree... but his "fighting style" consists of "punch or crush what's in front of him until it stops moving". This generally works well for him, because he's just that strong, but his rematch with Midoriya shows that against an opponent his power edge isn't enough to overwhelm, like the now Strong and Skilled Midoriya, he doesn't stand a chance.
• Naruto:
  • The title character is described as this before the Time Skip by Jiraiya. As he explains when he becomes Naruto's mentor, Naruto possesses such a large reserve of chakra (thanks to being the Nine-Tailed Fox's container) that he can more readily rely on raw-power ninjutsu instead of the more fine-control techniques his peers have learned.
    • It's worth noting that although his fighting skills start off as unrefined (though he improves tremendously throughout the series), he was already quite clever in how he used his abilities, with his victories as much a result of good tactics as sheer determination.
    • His initial improvement after the Time Skip may to some seem like an Informed Ability, but he was already using his jutsus more intelligently, largely outgrowing the use of rushing enemies with dozens of clones (aside from when using a clone rush as a distraction from his real attack) in favor of more creative uses, such as creating one to redirect himself in the air. As he improves even more over the second half of the series (particularly with regards to techniques requiring fine control), he grows able to use powerful jutsus to their full potentials, instead of simply throwing in enough power to compensate for lack of skill, becoming one of the most powerful ninja in the world (though still a Genin in rank). The reason his improvement may seem informed is that he keeps losing his temper and charging at the enemy in Bijuu-mode.
  • Besides ninja, there's the tailed beasts themselves: they have immense power, but being monsters they can't do much with it besides thrash around and shoot out giant balls of chakra. It's for this reason that beasts with a host are stated to be potentially more dangerous.
  • A heavily downplayed variant occurs with Hashirama Senju, the first Hokage. Hashirama was actually a very skilled, trained shinobi, but strictly in comparison to his succeeding Hokage, he was this: His raw Chakra reserves surpassed all of them, even his own brother, and he mainly used his extremely powerful Wood-style Kekkei Genkai (a bloodline mutation rather than a taught shinobi art) in combat, whereas all the others had to develop/refine a wide variety of unique, powerful techniques to compare to him. Minato, the fourth Hokage, neatly contrasts him as being Weak, but Skilled compared to the other Hokage; while Minato was powerful to even an elite Ninja's standard, in contrast to Hashirama, he mainly relied on finesse, speed, and teleportation jutsus to compensate for a lack of humongous chakra power.
  • The 4th Raikage is this; He's a Lightning Bruiser with some wrestling moves, but basically uses a combination of speed and strength to overpower his opponents. While he was able to toss Uchiha Sasuke around like a rag doll, his headlong assault strategy costs him his arm, and had Gaara not interfered, possibly worse. When up against opponents who can match or surpass his speed and strength, such as the 4th Hokage or Madara Uchiha, he comes off as lacking.
  • The Greater-Scope Villain of the series, Kaguya Ōtsutsuki, is this in spades. Despite having more chakra than even the Ten-Tails and has fought before (she has fought her sons in the past before being sealed away), she barely has any fighting skills, and she doesn't know how to strategize, coming off as a child when dealing with weaker opponents. Naruto gets the better of her several times over and even slices her arm off due to her inability to recognize feints and basic tricks.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • In an unusual example, Negi's father Nagi Springfield, known as the 'Thousand Master' for supposedly mastering a thousand spells, is revealed to be a heroic, magical version of this. In truth, he only knows something like 5-6 spells by heart, and has to perform anything more complicated than the bare-bone basics from a tome — but he backs those spells up with a ludicrous amount of raw magical power (and a bit of mundane trickery).
  • Jack Rakan is thought to be this by many people, and at first glance he doesn't appear to do anything more than just hit things really hard. However, he's Obfuscating Stupidity: he's very skilled on top of all his raw power, he just doesn't see much need to use his skills unless his opponent is strong enough to warrant it.
• One Piece:
  • Luffy doesn't really have any "training" in his fighting style, he is just extremely creative with his rubber powers and makes up techniques on the spot.
    • Luffy's victory over Boa Sandersonia and Boa Marigold falls into this. The sisters' mastery of Haki allows them to predict Luffy's movements and deflect his attacks. Once Luffy goes into his Gear Second power-up, he's able to move so fast that, even though the sisters can still predict his movements, Luffy's moving so fast that it doesn't matter. Also, his attacks are powerful enough to overwhelm any attempt to block.
    • At that same time, he has the same level of Haki that Hancock does, but can't control it and can't do anything more than render people without sufficient force of will unconscious. Luffy's shown occasional flashes of other types of Haki use (against Mihawk, he avoided losing a hand because he saw a flash of what Mihawk's next attack would be), but they too were uncontrolled and he didn't even seem to realize what had happened. After training with Silvers Rayleigh, this has now changed as he's become both skilled and strong.
  • Zoro was also this to an extent in the earlier parts of the storyline, his idea of sword fighting being "Swing your swords at your opponent really, really hard until they stop moving". With his absurd Charles Atlas Superpower, this worked pretty well... until he faced off against Dracule Mihawk, the greatest swordsman in the world. He kept Zoro at bay with a blade smaller than a pocketknife, and the only reason Zoro survived the fight was that he had enough willpower and spirit to earn Mihawk's respect. Zoro started to focus more on technique from then onwards, and began in earnest when he fought a guy with steel-hard skin who was basically immune to brute force.
  • Of the Post-Time Skip villains, Hody Jones gets accused of this by Jimbei, who effortlessly blocks a powerful attack from him. He's also proven to be absolutely no match for Luffy whatsoever when they finally begin to throw down. Rather than making any effort to improve his technique, Hody instead artificially boosts his strength with Energy Steroids, which still isn't enough.
  • This apparently tends to apply to Logia users. In the Grand Line and weaker seas, very few people can use Haki so most Logia users easily No-Sell every attack. In the New World however, Haki is apparently fairly common so "Logia users convinced of their invincibility are the first to go."
  • Caesar Clown is an interesting combination of this and Glass Cannon; His Gas Gas powers give him a plethora of mean abilities, such as sucking away oxygen, poisoning people, and causing explosions. However, he's a scientist, not a fighter, so in battle his first and only responses are to use any one of those skills to overwhelm his opponent. When up against a Lightning Bruiser like Luffy, he goes down pretty quickly.
  • The Donquixote Pirates have two officers that are this: Machvise likes to crush people with his weight, while Dellinger blitzes his opponents with his speed. Machvise ends up being punched into the atmosphere when the giant warrior Hajrudin summons enough strength to match his force, and Dellinger goes down in one hit when up against the impossible speed of Hakuba.
  • Kyros has no background in combat training, having grown up as a Street Urchin around Dressrosa, yet was able to curb-stomp the soldiers and guards sent in to arrest him. This display of talent attracted the attention of the king of Dressrosa, who offered him a job as a fighter in the Colosseum. Kyros then proceeded to have an undefeated career in the Colosseum, with increasingly strong opponents due to his ever-growing reputation and celebrity status. He only ever suffered one injury, which was outside the Colosseum, an ambush set by Donquixote Doflamingo, some invisible Razor Floss that sliced off one of his feet and was subsequently turned into a toy during his quick moment of surprise. Kyros did not let this stop him though — even as a toy soldier, he rebuilt his image as a fearsome fighter, and until Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates arrived on Dressrosa, was the single biggest source of problems for Doflamingo and his criminal network.
  • Big Mom, one of the Four Emperors, was born Charlotte Linlin, a natural force of destruction who was taking down full-grown giant warriors at the age of 6 by complete accident. She never had to train for any amount of her freakish might, and only got even more dangerous after gaining a Devil Fruit power that gave her the ability to snatch somebody's soul right out of their body. As a result, in the present day she has no need for much technique or skill at all, as her raw power is more than enough; even after all these years she still swings swords like baseball bats and doesn't really punch so much as she swats things like flies, but that's more than enough.
  • Fleet Admiral Sakazuki. Most of his techniques boil down to either 'spam magma fists' or 'turn fist into magma and punch until target is dead', but his raw strength and the fact he's made of magma are enough for him to obliterate all but the strongest of foes in a few hits.
• One-Punch Man's Saitama is in running contention for being the pinnacle of this trope. His strikes have no real form to speak of and his skill in martial arts is nonexistent, but when the wind from your punches can carve out valleys from mountains, who really needs technique?
• Oyaji doesn’t know a single martial art, he simply is pure brawn, unfiltered rage when needs to be fully capable of massacring anyone who dares to mess with him, and more importantly doubled so when his family is put at risk.
• Pokémon:
  • Lt. Surge's Raichu in the anime falls into this. Surge's belief that only fully evolved Pokémon were worthwhile caused him to turn his Pikachu into a Raichu immediately. This Raichu lacks the techniques he would've learned only as a Pikachu and thus relies on his immense power to win; the minute Ash and co. realize this, they adapt their strategy to exploit Pikachu's natural speed and agility, allowing Pikachu to win the rematch.
  • Many fully evolved Pokemon have this problem. Being larger and stronger makes it harder for them to use their old skills and less incentive to learn new ones. Among the teams of the heroes, the ones hit the hardest by this are Ash's Charizard and Iris's Dragonite. When the two battle, Charizard has the upper hand because he's expanded his moveset, increased in strength since evolving and Iris misread Charizard's type.
  • When Ash's Pikachu first Gigantamaxes in the 2019 series, he's clearly not used to his sheer bulk and can't use his speed due to it. However, his Max Moves still pack a punch.
  • Pokémon Horizons: The Series: Roy always loses battles because all he does is train his Pokemon to increase the power of their moves. In battle, all he does is tell his Pokemon to attack head on, never using the environment or using any strategy at all.
• The Prince of Tennis:
  • Takashi Kawamura considers himself the burden of the Seigaku team, yet can fight Genius Bruiser Kabaji to a standstill. He then does it again, but against Gin Ishida from Shitenhouji. In fact, Kawamura has been this from the beginning of his tennis career, and may count as a deconstruction. As a first year, he was physically stronger than all of the juniors, but also had a chronic lack of control over his borderline Super-Strength that led the sempais to either bully him or tell him that he'd be better in the baseball team. Hence why he considers himself The Load.
  • Kintarou Tooyama happens to be both this trope and Skilled, but Naive. He's got raw talent and physical strength by the wazoo, but is also a Wild Child and the poster child for Idiot Hero.
  • Kaidoh Kaoru fits to a lesser extent. While he is a strong tennis player, most of his techniques merely revolve around variations of his signature technique "Snake" (until the nationals arc, he possessed only two; the rest were developed through Inui's guidance). However, he is extremely tenacious, able to hold his own against the much more skilled and violent Kirihara.
• The eponymous girls in Psychic Squad are theoretically some of the most powerful people in existence, but as otherwise ordinary 10-year-old girls their lack of training and experience means they sometimes struggle against Weak, but Skilled opponents.
• The main character of Psyren Yoshina Ageha starts out this way, being less skilled than fellow newbie Hiryu. This is justified by his incredibly powerful yet unstable PSI Melchese Door relying more on emotion. Though he quickly has to overcome it due to the toll it takes on his mind.
• While most of the gods in Record of Ragnarok are Strong and Skilled, Poseidon ends up being this. Because of his pride as a god, he believes himself to be naturally perfect and therefore has no need to hone his skills, instead relying on his natural strength in battle. This belief ultimately ends up biting him in the ass when he ends up losing his battle to the Weak, but Skilled Sasaki Kojiro.
• Rurouni Kenshin:
  • Sanosuke definitely fits this trope. Unlike many of the characters in the series, his fighting abilities were derived from being a fighter-for-hire. He lacks any formal fighting style other than Good Old Fisticuffs, making up for it in raw power and being Made of Iron. This is deconstructed in a fight with Saito; He proves to be just as powerful as Sanosuke if not more so, but has learned basic skills like defense. This allows him to pummel Sano with ease while avoiding damage. Further to note, Sanosuke had a badly injured shoulder at the time of the fight. Saito won without ever laying a punch near that shoulder just to show how powerful a skilled and strong fighter can be in fisticuffs. And in his first appearance, Sano fought Kenshin using a Zanbatou, which he had no particular skill in using and nothing to make up for the unwieldy bulk of the giant sword. He was relying entirely on the fact that his immense strength would allow him to swing such a massive sword in the first place, which had worked out fine in the past against swordsmen who lacked Kenshin's skill and speed. But he couldn't even come close to landing a hit on Kenshin, and afterward Sano relied on his fists instead.
  • To a degree, Shishio's Dragon Soujirou is this. He's stated to have talent that at the very least, equals Kenshin. However, his strategy basically boils down to relying on his superior speed to overwhelm Kenshin. When they fought for the second time, though, Kenshin had completed his Hiten Mitsurugi training, giving him a technique fast enough to match Soujirou, which meant it went down to power; Kenshin won because his stroke had more force, breaking Soujirou's blade.
• Makoto Kino of Sailor Moon: even when untransformed she's easily the physically strongest of the Sailor Senshi, and she does have some skill, it's just that the physically weaker Minako and Haruka are far more skilled and capable of handing her her ass on a silver platter.
• Jin of Samurai Champloo considers Mugen to be this. But Jin does have that kind of relationship with Mugen. It does bite him in the ass against Hand of God Kiriya though.
• Slam Dunk:
  • Hanamichi Sakuragi is incredibly tall for his early age and has huge physical strength as well as almost animalistic reflexes and jump abilities, but his raw power is paired with a complete lack of experience and skill. Therefore he gets stuck by the sidelines in the first part of the series, and has to go through Training from Hell to compensate.
  • Hitoshi Morishige is a similar, yet less extreme case. He has already gone through the training and it shows when we see him play, but is still very rough around the edges. I.e: he's seen performing an excellent slam dunk, but then gets scolded by the referee for knocking two opponents down while at it.
• ST☆R: Strike it Rich:
  • Hina has enough strength to knock out her opponents in a single hit. However, since she never fought someone on her level, she lacks skills and goes for big swings that leave her wide open. This isn't a problem against weaker fighters, but Nozomi has enough experience to capitalize on it during their second fight.
  • When they were in junior high, Riko got her judo team to national top four while Riku broke her prefecture women's throwing javelot. Neither of them had any experience in those sports, so they relied solely on their physical abilities. Riku even tells Hina that fighting isn't about technique, but nerve.
• Yoshika from Strike Witches starts out as one of these, selected by Mio for her immense raw power. Her inability to focus her power causes problems early on.
• Sword Art Online:
  • Played with in the case of Kirito. He becomes one of the most powerful and skilled players in Sword Art Online in the series first arc. Once that's done, Kirito moves on to another game, ALFheim Online, he discovers nearly all the compatible stats and abilities he had in SAO have carried over to ALO. As a result, he starts out with a high amount of fighting power, but needs instruction on the game's more basic elements such as flying and (especially) landing.
  • Sugou Nobuyuki/Oberon is pathetic combat-wise, but gets by throughout most of the Fairy Dance arc purely by abusing his admin privileges to give himself overpowered stats, equipment, and magic to fight Kirito with. Once he's stripped of his Game Master status, Kirito literally tears him apart, even when Sugou has access to the strongest weapon in the game.
    • Sugou also fits the bill as Alberich in the video game continuity. Kirito notes his avatar has ridiculously high stats and equipment, but his combat skill is very poor and lacking in any sort of technique or experience. Kirito compares it to a novice player controlling a powerful avatar, with no skill in handling his powers. In the end, Kirito resolves that he would only hinder the Clearing groups. This is actually what tips Kirito and the gang off that there's something wrong, since they can't fathom how someone can have such high stats and powerful equipment and yet be such a lousy fighter.
  • Eiji of Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale turns out to be this. He became the No. 2 player in the ARMMORPG of Ordinal Scale, but only because he wears Powered Armor that grants him Combat Clairvoyance to give him an unfair advantage. Once Kirito damages his armor and pulls out the power source, Eiji goes down in one hit.
• Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online:
  • LLENN is a variation, since she's incredibly fast and skilled at dodging bullets, but debuts as a newbie, so many of her early victories are due to her speed or getting lucky.
  • Team T-S is rather inexperienced in the first two Squad Jams, and only win the second by hanging back and finishing off LLENN and Fuka after Pito's defeat, but get by thanks to Powered Armor that can even deflect a headshot.
  • Team DOOM consists of players who converted from other VRMMOs, which means that they start with characters that have already been leveled up, and have much higher base stats than those who start from scratch, hence the "strong" part. The "unskilled" part refers to how they have no experience with GGO, and mainly fight through suicide bombing their opponents.
• Bunshichi Tawara in Tenjho Tenge is reported to be entirely self-taught, but was able to defeat a powered up Shin Natsume in a fight.
• The Testament of Sister New Devil: Mio inherited a tremendous amount of demonic power from her father, but she's been aware of it for less than a year and isn't particularly adept at using it.
• The belief that he is this nags at Kubota Junichiro from Tomo-chan Is a Girl!, and compratively speaking he is not wrong. As a young boy he begn studying under particularly hardcore martial arts master Aizawa Goro for the express purpose of becoming a powerful fighter like his child Tomo (*heh* "Tall order, kid's a beast."). Now a high-school freshman, Jun is a fearsome fighter by any remotely sane standard and when he goes all-out he can beat Tomo in a fight. The issue is that puberty hit him and Tomo rather differently and she not only has the speed and precision to completely dominate Jun in anything resembling point-based tournament sparring despite his superior reach, but enough strength in her own right that hammering on her like she is a man is the only chance Jun has to keep her from dismantling him whenever she sets her mind to it... and they both know it.
• In World Trigger, Chika is the least skilled sniper that Border has as official agent, where she didn't even complete her training yet. However, she is more threatening than other snipers because her massive trion turns her rifle into a Wave-Motion Gun.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Bonds Beyond Time, Paradox has an incredibly broken deck, but he has the dueling skills of an amateur, making several mistakes. Still, he would have easily beaten the heroes if they hadn't been dueling as a team.
  • While Dark Marik is by no means a bad duelist, his main dueling strategy relies on two things: The magic of his Shadow Games and the Winged Dragon of Ra. In all of his duels, Marik is on the cusp of defeat only for him to summon the Winged Dragon of Ra and win (not helped by it pulling out a new ability each time). In the four-way duel between him, Yugi, Kaiba, and Joey, he is the first one eliminated due to him not having access to Ra or his Shadow Games. And in his later duel with Joey, he only won because the latter passed out from the life-draining effects of the Shadow Game before he could deal the finishing blow. He would have been defeated in his first match, if Mai didn't try to use Ra to finish him (not knowing it required to recite a summoning phrase written in a dead language to unlock it).
  • Pegasus, the prior main antagonist, is a more extreme example: his Toon Deck is made up of cards so broken that they never saw release, and he can read thoughts on top of that. But though he's fairly clever and good at manipulating people, his actual strategies are decidedly lackluster; whenever he can't read an opponent and instantly set up countermeasures, his tactics amount to "attack the opponent with my best monster and see how it works out for me." By the time of GX, his skills have notably improved, after having lost the original Toon World and his mind-reading.
• The Toguro Brothers from YuYu Hakusho. They aren't unskilled, being well-versed in martial arts before a turn to evil, but by the present story's time the older has gotten lazy and relies on his broken shapeshifting and regeneration powers, while the younger has decided to rely only on his enormous strength.

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