Assassin Outclassin / Video Games

• Ace Attorney Investigations 2 plays with this trope. The first case features an assassination attempt on a foreign president, which fails. But it turns out to have all been staged. The president was trying to invoke this trope in a desperate attempt to salvage his declining popularity.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • In Sequence 7 of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Ezio learns that Pietro, his key to the Borgias' safe house, is targeted by Micheletto Corella — Cesare Borgia's personal executioner who is considered the best assassin in Italy. Of course, Ezio, being an actual Assassin, takes this as a challenge and counters Micheletto's elaborate plan to Make It Look Like an Accident with an even more elaborate plan to save Pietro. He succeeds, despite Micheletto's last-ditch attempt to poison Pietro, and even spares his life in an act of Cruel Mercy.
  • Assassin's Creed: Revelations has Turkish Templar killers who ambush Ezio (the hero Assassin of the game). Press X to Not Die ensues, and if successful, Ezio can thwart the attempt. If not, his Life Meter gets dangerously close to zero.
    • A bunch of assassins (players) set loose on one another is the entire premise of the multiplayer element in Brotherhood and Revelations. Most of the game modes are set up so that your target is different from your pursuer, meaning you can't kill the person trying to kill you, but you can outclass them by stunning them before they get you, making them fail their contract. It's also common to get killed by your pursuer just before you manage to kill your own target. The new Assassinate mode allows you to kill any opponent, allowing you to outclass potential assassins directly, but only if they haven't yet locked onto you.
  • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: An early story mission has Edward Kenway, impersonating an Assassin who was a traitor (and whom Kenway killed in self-defense), meet with some Templars. During the meeting, they're attacked by Assassins who are after the Templars, but they don't expect Kenway's fighting skills.
  • In Assassin's Creed Rogue, the protagonist is an Assassin-turned Templar who has multiple opportunities to do this, either by killing Assassins hiding around and waiting for the right chance to strike at him or killing them while they're attempting to hunt down another target.
• Parodied in Bahamut Lagoon: when you recruit a pair of ninjas into your army, they also give you a free assassination as a bonus. You can choose the target to be either the Rebellious Princess, a Mighty Glacier, or a Red Shirt. No prizes for guessing which target is the only one they actually succeed in killing.
• A major chunk of the plot for Batman: Arkham Origins consists of Batman dealing with the eight assassins Black Mask (really the Joker) hired to kill him. There are actually achievements for getting past two of them — Shiva and Deathstroke — without taking damage or missing a counter, which would make them really outclassed, but just making it to the end of story mode means you've outfought six of the eight (the other two are only fought in optional sidequests).
• Borderlands:
  • Borderlands 2: The assassins after the new Vault Hunters in the Son of Crawmerax DLC are all assassinated by various allies.
    • Sergeant Jarter, Axton's old CO after him for desertion, is killed by Axton's ex-wife using a remote-detonated explosive.
      Axton: Oh, good, I hated that guy. Kinda weird that he just randomly exploded, though. Don't remember that happening in basic.
    • Grill Holloway, the uncle of Marcie Holloway looking to kill Gaige to avenge his niece, is killed by Gaige's dad, who sabotaged his transport.
      Gaige: Ha! SUCK IT, Holloway family! Even if your hitman hadn't fallen outta the sky for some weirdass reason, I woulda taken him out anyway. I killed Handsome friggin' JACK! You think one little assassin can take me down? BOOYAH. Also, sorry I killed your daughter.
    • Mordo Sophis, brother of the priest who was trying to use Maya as a weapon, is killed by an "anonymous admirer" who poisoned him. Implied to be Patricia Tannis, based on speech patterns.
      Maya: Consider yourself lucky. That poison must have worked quickly. I wouldn't have.
    • Blendo wants revenge on Salvador for killing his entire bandit clan ("That was a fun weekend") and is killed by the resort staff after Salvador's grandmother paid them. He's found hanging from a tree.
      Salvador: Aw, man. The last of the Chung clan and he got killed before I even showed up? Worst day ever.
    • Clements was one of the scientists who experimented on Krieg, who wants vengeance for his buddies that Krieg killed while escaping. He is killed by Doctor Samuels stabbing him with dozens of needles.
      Krieg: HE WAS THERE FOR THE BIRTHING! HE BROUGHT THEM INTO THE METAL FUN PALACE SO SHE COULD START THE PARTY!
    • A mysterious assassin after Zero (maybe?) is killed (probably) by ... someone. The corpse is found impaled on weird spikes. No one except Zero knows what's up with that.
      Zero: I understand it. / A message sent, and received. / Mercy is coming.
  • In the Commander Lilith DLC: Captain Flynt considers sending assassins after his brother Zane a fine way of staying in touch. Zane sends the heads back in a box.
    Captain Flynt: Classic Zane. [chuckles]
  • Borderlands 3: In Zane's personal ECHO Log on Sanctuary, he shoots an assassin hired to go after him by his countless enemies.
• In Cave Story, Balrog clumsily tries to ambush the hero about five times and always hilariously fails, until he finally realizes that fighting him has no use.
• In Clonk, a player-made scenario called Faffnir is an assassination mission. According to the guards, your character is nowhere near the first person they've had to deal with.
• Dishonored allows you to do this in the late-game level "The Flooded District". Having been captured by a group of Assassins working for Daud, the man who killed the Empress, Corvo is stripped of his gear and imprisoned so he can be turned over to the Lord Regent Farley Havelock. Corvo promptly escapes, recovers his gear, and then proceeds into Daud's base to confront him. If he gets there undetected, then Daud will be informed by one of his men that Corvo has escaped, but no one has seen anything or has any idea how he did it, to which Daud merely states that Corvo knows their work better than they do. While it's then possible to engage Daud in an epic swordfight, the nonlethal option involves sneaking up behind Daud and picking his pocket, letting him know that Corvo snuck into the heart of his base, past all of his men, and had Daud right in his sights and let him live with Daud being none the wiser. It's no surprise that Daud up and leaves Dunwall afterward.
  • An achievement named "Food Chain" requires you to assassinate one of Daud's assassins. However, due to their teleportation and tethering abilities, wristbows, and adeptness at melee combat, they can easily end up assassinating you.
• The Red Prince, in Divinity: Original Sin II has survived so many assassination attempts, and killed so many would-be assassins, that he's grown bored of the constant attempts on his life. Plus, it's not the fact that they're trying to kill him that bothers him, it's their terrible manners.
• Doom Eternal takes it to a logical extreme — The Doom Hunters were an entire species of demon bred to hunt down and kill The Doom Slayer. They're extinct now. Granted, they've been brought back as cyborgs to make another attempt, but you'll still be killing several over the course of the game.
• Dragon Age: Origins:
  • Zevran will try to assassinate the PC. Obviously, you have to survive the battle to continue the game. Afterward, you have the choice to recruit or kill him. If you recruit him, you'll face more assassins a little later in the game. If you get his approval high enough, he'll confess that he only went for a head-on assault because he wanted you to kill him. Otherwise, he would have tried a sneakier method.
  • Later in the game, after you fend off yet another assassination attempt, a Fereldan guard captain will remark, "And people actually voluntarily attack you?"
• Nearly the exact same thing happens in Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening. When the PC first arrives at Vigil's Keep after the darkspawn invasion, you're told that the guards subdued and captured a man sneaking around the fort attempting to kill him/her. You have the chance to speak to him in the Vigil's Keep dungeon, where you find out that he's Nathaniel Howe, Arl Howe's son, who was after you as revenge for killing his father... and one of your options when speaking to him is to suggest that he become a Grey Warden and join your party. When he asks why the PC isn't worried about him trying to "finish the job," one dialogue response is "Some of my best friends have attempted to kill me." (For extra hilarity, play Awakening with a Warden who romanced Zevran in the main game.)
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Morrowind:
    • Once you've advanced far enough in the main quest, Dagoth Ur will send Ash Zombie assassins to attack you if you sleep in cities under the influence of a nearby Sixth House base. If you want to stop the attacks (as well as free any Sleepers in the area), you'll need to locate the base and kill the Dagoth in charge.
    • In the Tribunal expansion, you are randomly assaulted by Dark Brotherhood assassins whenever you sleep, until you get to the heart of the problem (and the main premise for the expansion's storyline) and stop them. Naturally, if you aren't employing this trope, you die. Game Over.
  • Skyrim:
    • Various people will, at times, send Dark Brotherhood assassins after you for stealing from them, as will Ancano, near the end of the College of Winterhold questline. This doesn't work. This is a bad idea, considering just who the player character is.
    • Delphine is noted to have killed a Thalmor assassination team that was sent to kill her.
• Exit Fate. Daniel does it only once^note The assassin comments "You are... stronger than I", but in fact, Daniel just had healing spells, but afterwards, he manages to convince the assassin (who wanted to avenge his dead sister) that he is innocent in the case of aforementioned sister's death, which makes the assassin join him.
• Fallout 3: Players with "Good Karma" will find themselves occasionally ambushed by a Talon Company hit squad while players with "Evil Karma" will be attacked by the Regulators. Too bad they're dealing with the Lone Wanderer.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, if you piss off the NCR or Caesar's Legion enough, they'll start sending hit squads after you. Given that the fastest way to piss them off is to kill a bunch of their guys, there's no points for guessing how much of a chance the guys in the hit squads have. It doesn't take long before they start becoming little more than self-delivering loot.
• Sissel's first few jobs in Ghost Trick are to protect Lynne and her associates from blue-skinned assassins. In some instances, the assassins actually succeed, but Sissel goes back and changes events to thwart them.
• Hitman:
  • Hitman: Absolution features the appropriately named "Attack of the Saints" mission, in which an Amazon Brigade of assassins known as the Saints attempt to kill Agent 47. He picks them off one by one.
  • Hitman: Blood Money features a mission in which the player character 47 must locate three other assassins before they can kill their target and another where he has to take out two rival assassins trying to kill him.
  • A similar scenario occurs in a few missions in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. Some of the later missions include one where you have to kill a number of rival assassins who have been tasked with eliminating both you and your contact. The second-to-last mission involved 47 out-gambitting another assassin, Mr. 17, who is also one of his "brothers" (all of whom he thought were dead at that point).
  • In Hitman 2, the first Elusive Target is Mark Faba, a former MI5 agent turned freelance hitman who's survived so many attempts on his life that he even earned the alias "The Undying". Your mission is to succeed where others have failed.
  • Hitman 3's "Apex Predator" pits 47 against a squad of ten rival assassins, ICA agents sent to carry out a contract on Olivia Hall and 47 himself. Some of them adopt 47's tactics and disguise themselves, forcing 47 to identify them in a crowd. Part of the mission involves taking an earpiece from one of the slain assassins and listening in on their communications, and you can hear the others grow increasingly frustrated as you pick off their teammates one by one until you've eliminated half of them, at which point the surviving agents call off their mission and flee the scene.
• Iji is a major target for assassins once the Komato arrive. She survives repeated attempts by Asha, before finally killing him. If Iji avoids the fight, then he kills himself from shame.
  • You can also avert this by letting the assassin kill you, but coming back with a one-time checkpoint service. With a little creativity, you can use this twice, allowing you to die to the same assassin three times. The second time you come fight him Asha is joyful to have the chance to kill you twice, but the third time, he's just incensed that you won't stay dead.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: The Jedi Exile spends much of the early part of the game fending off bounty hunters, starting with HK-50 assassin droids. Unusually the bounty hunters don't want you dead: the Exchange (Space Mafia) is paying for Jedi to be captured and brought to them alive. The Exile and her teammates have no such compunctions:
  Atton: Anybody here catch that? All I understood was "very".
  Bao-Dur: I think he wanted us to give up the General to his poorly-trained collection of bounty hunters.
  Atton: Ah. Well, that would explain it. Which one do you want?
  Bao-Dur: I'll take the stupid one who decided to threaten us rather than shoot us when he had the chance. (Battle Discretion Shot)
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild lets Link do this with the Yiga Clan, servants of Ganon who are constantly disguising themselves so they can ambush him. Except perhaps the earliest of such encounters when players are still trying to build up their arsenals, these fights are generally one-sided in Link's favor.
• Love of Magic: The various assassins that attempt to take out Owyn and/or Emily, only to find that Owyn has Excalibur and an awful lot of power. Of particular note is the Cambion who comes to the attention of a Blessed by the Voices; he falls off the roof on top of Bella, who promptly splatters him.
• In Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, you actually play as the assassin sent after the rival mob boss' brother, who proves to be so cautious / lucky / tough to kill that the mission where you go after him, mission 15 (appropriately titled "You Lucky Bastard!"), is the single longest mission in the entire game. First, you try to call the bar he is in, and then just shoot him when he answers the phone. He wasn't there, and you kill a random stranger. Next, you use a car bomb, but he let his girlfriend borrow it, and so once again you kill a stranger. Then, you try to just ambush him with a machine gun, but it jams and you have to run away. Then, you hire some professionals. They take over a train junction; when the target is stopped at some train tracks, one professional will make sure the safety bars don't go down, while the other professionals are in a car behind the target. The idea was to ram the car into the trains. He figures this out and drives off, so the professionals drive into the train by accident. You immediately chase him to the docks, but he's surrounded by armed men. After killing them all, he hides behind a reinforced door. After blowing it up by ramming a tanker wagon into it, you finally get to kill him. When you do, your character says "You lucky bastard!"
• Mass Effect 3:
  • There are two possible versions of this when the Salarian Councillor is attacked by Cerberus assassin Kai Leng. If Kirrahe intervenes, he suffers a fatal wound but the target escapes. If Thane (no slouch in the assassin department himself) intervenes, the target escapes and Thane (though he suffers a fatal wound himself) gets a fantastic line.
    Thane: That assassin should be embarrassed. A terminally ill drell managed to stop him from reaching his target.
  • Shepard him/herself is the target of so many attempts to kill him/her that it leads to a hilarious moment in the "Citadel" DLC when an Alliance officer runs up to Shepard and Joker out having lunch and announcing dramatically that someone is trying to kill Shepard. Shepard and Joker look at her, look at each other, and Joker makes a sarcastic remark that Shepard is aware that people want him/her dead. Made even funnier in hindsight for the fact said Alliance officer turns out to be a former Cerberus member who tries to kill Shepard... with predictable results.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours begins in the famous mansion shootout from the end of the film, where Tony fails to notice Skull sneaking up behind him and putting a buckshot load in his back, killing him. Here, Tony turns around and blows the assassin away, and then fights his way out of the mansion to survive. Then the rest of the game begins.
• The Ship: Murder Party, what with the objective of the game being to assassinate other players. Killing innocent NPCs or players whom are not your current target penalizes your score, but (if you can figure out who it is) you are free to kill your own assassin. And take his wallet.
• One of the sidequests in Star Wars: The Old Republic for Imperial players in Nar Shaddaa is to take out Republic assassins sent after them (the Bounty Hunter can complain about how they're a target despite not actually being Imperial). Lampshaded by all the classes.
  Imperial PC: I like assassinating assassins. They always look so surprised.
• When you first meet Sheena in Tales of Symphonia, she's trying to assassinate the Chosen. Luckily, she's terrible at it, and eventually she joins the party.
• A handful of achievements for most classes in Team Fortress 2 revolve around getting the upper hand against enemy Spies, such as killing one when he's fully cloaked, or disguised as yourself.
  • In the Meet the Soldier and Meet the Sniper videos, the respective protagonists effortlessly kill a Spy that's about to backstab them.
• Garrett from the Thief games does this a few times. Starting in the first game (with a mission appropriately titled Assassins), he narrowly avoids a couple of hitmen sent to kill him. They don't realise what happened and think they're done, so he tails them back to their employer and humiliates everyone involved. In the second game, the mission Ambush! has Garrett traversing the streets of the City which are stuffed with the City Watch, who were tipped off to his location by a treacherous fence, making his way back to his old home and getting his stuff so that he can go disappear elsewhere.
• Failing to assassinate someone in the Total War games will often lead to the target developing paranoia and becoming even harder to assassinate. Due to Artificial Stupidity, the AI may sometimes try to serially assassinate your most valuable general, who only becomes better and better at outclassing them the more they try. Which can be funny moments on their own, like 18 seconds into this clip from Total War: Shogun 2.
• Kaguya from Touhou Project is always doing this to Mokou and vice-versa. Both are immortals.
• In Tropico 3 and 4, one possible random event is an assassin being sent after El Presidente; the player can choose to hide in their mansion for several months until the assassin gets bored and leaves, bribe the assassin to leave, attempt to arrest the assassin with the Secret Police or hire an even better assassin to assassinate the assassin before he can assassinate you.
• Saints Row: The Third features assassination side missions. In some of them, a rival assassin will appear and attempt to take out your target.
• During the Thames Wharf level in Tomb Raider III, Lara is occasionally attacked by assassins and she easily kills them. The ending cutscene has another one attacking her, but Lara gets the upper hand and disarms and interrogates him. It turns out that Sofia Leigh was the one who put out a hit on Lara (likely because she knew Lara was going after her artifact and wanted to stop her) and the assassin notes that he would effectively be able to retire if he succeeds in killing her. Not even a few seconds later, the nearby swinging church bell hits the assassin and sends him flying off the roof for an early retirement.