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  • The Chilean soldiers in Abyss Odyssey do a pretty good job of fighting the Warlock's magical, nightmarish creations in The Abyss. Chilean soldiers will occasionally help you in your fight as you descend into the Abyss, and you can often find lone soldiers attacking half a dozen monsters at once. On the other hand, they are very relieved when the player — be it the skeletal Ghost Monk or the beautiful, magical Katrien or Pincoya — shows up and are none too happy to let them lead.
  • In the Ace Attorney series:
    • Miles Edgeworth. Phoenix Wright becomes a Living Lie Detector with the help of his magatama. Apollo Justice has superhuman perception augmented by his bracelet. Athena Cykes has enhanced hearing coupled with a device that can read emotions based on voice. Miles Edgeworth has … logic enhanced by his brain. Demonstrated in this comic strip.
    • Dhurke Sahdmadhi. Leader of a rebel group that is working on overthrowing a corrupt kingdom, charismatic, a good father who goes to the extreme for his sons, able to withstand three bullets from a pistol enough to tell his last words to Maya...and then ask her to channel him so he could return to the U.S.A. to meet his adopted son Apollo. Has a badass theme, a badass catchphrase and his own voiced 'Objection' speech bubble. And no powers at all. A fucking legend.
  • Given the nature of the other two primary combatant species, the marine character from the Aliens vs. Predator PC games qualifies.
  • Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura: It's entirely possible, and surprisingly effective, to build your character as this. Completely turn your back on such silly things as magic and technological gadgets, in favour of being a face-wrecking Lightning Bruiser warrior, and a sneaky backstabbing thief.
    • The Bane of Kree. Now granted, the Bangellian Scourge was and is an immensely powerful magical sword, but the Bane was an otherwise completely normal human barbarian, who ended up being a threat to civilization on the same scale as an insatiable, omnivorous monster, a hyper-intelligent, near-invulnerable dragon-man, and an omnicidal elven wizard with approximately two millenia of experience.
  • Armored Core is a universe where giant robots are commonplace, but a notable thing about the gifted pilots known as Ravens is they are mostly cybernetically upgraded. Of all of the pilots, only you were not a Human Plus and in the end wind up as the Last Raven standing in the plot of Armored Core 3.
    • In Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, this distinction goes to V.I Freud. The leader of Arquebus Corporation's elite strike force is a contender for Rubicon's best AC pilot who reached the top of the arena without any Human Plus enhancements and he did it with an AC made of early-game, off-the-shelf parts.
  • Mark Meltzer from BioShock 2. He's the only person in the world to figure out Rapture exists. Upon doing so, he travels there, armed with only his wits and a pistol, to rescue his daughter. Did we mention that this is in BioShock 2 where the developers promised that Jack (who gets at least one canon offensive splicing) would have trouble making it through? He probably would have made his way completely through Rapture if he hadn't been distracted, captured, and turned into a Big Daddy
  • Kairu from Black Sigil was born without magic in a land where everyone has magic. The entire party are also all Magic Knights. Despite all that, he still manages to be the most useful and the most powerful member of his group.
  • BlazBlue:
    • Bang Shishigami, a refugee from the Ikaruga federation, is merely a ninja who relies on his hard work and training for... throwing kunai and nails to fire-based attacks to a good dose of toughness for a ninja to even Fu-Rin-Ka-Zan. Despite this and being saddled with the designation of 'Official Joke Character', he has managed to use his power massively and creatively to hold up on his own, including surviving a catastrophic explosion and living to tell the tale, eluding a Troll who's, safe to say, overpowered and delights on Mind Rape. He actually has the Nox Nyctores Phoenix Rettenjou, but he didn't know how to properly use it, relying solely on his wits.
      • Not to mention in his greatest Moment of Awesome so far: in Platinum's Story Mode, he pulls off an epic Big Damn Heroes moment against Relius Clover, canonically one of the few people comparable in power to Hazama/Terumi. Bang goes toe-to-toe with him long enough for Hakumen and Valkenhayn to come in and pull their own Big Damn Heroes moment by intimidating the mad scientist into retreating. Remember this is from the only normal, completely unaugmented human being in the series.
      • Topped by his latest one in Chronophantasma: He fights Azrael to a standstill. Repeat: Azrael. And Azrael walked away saying he was a great fight. Earlier on in the story, Azrael Curb Stomped Jin Kisaragi, one of the most powerful in the setting, and called him boring. Not bad, Mr. Shishigami, not bad at all.
    • Makoto Nanaya is also a questionable example. Yes, she is a beastkin and therefore capable of punching people across rooms, but keep in mind that she has no stated Ars, Nox Nyctores, or other magical/technological/supernatural power at all. All she has is her raw strength and her trusty tonfas. Of course, considering that the only other named beastkin are Six Heroes or descendants thereof, you could say she's normal by beastkin standards.
    • Kagura Mutsuki of Chronophantasma. Nobody is really sure where exactly he gets his power from — that huge zweihander he carries isn't a named Armagus or Nox, and seems to be purely human with no special heritage. However, he's still freakishly powerful, able to fight Mu-12 and Azrael to a standstill. Being one of Lord Tenjo's disciples, just like Bang, may have something to do with it.
  • Bloodline Champions has the Vanguard, Gunner, Engineer, Ranid Assassin, Alchemist, Astronomer, Spear Master, Nomad, and Ravener bloodlines seem to be this from their backgrounds, but the last three are a bit unclear considering their in-game capabilities and the naming of some of those abilities.
  • Borderlands series player characters:
    • Borderlands 1:
      • Roland, an ex-Crimson Lance soldier whose only special ability is to deploy a turret.
      • Mordecai, a master marksman with an alien attack bird.
      • Brick, a man built like a mountain whose special ability is simply punching things really hard.
    • Borderlands 2:
      • Axton, a former Dahl commando who also just has a deployable turret, though his is much more versatile than Roland's.
      • Salvador, a Pint-Size Powerhouse who can Dual Wield any combination of guns.
      • Gaige, a scrawny 18-year-old girl who can summon her own attack robot and massively boost her gun damage at the cost of an equally massive accuracy penalty.
    • Tales From The Borderlands:
      • Fiona, a travelling conwoman with a spring-loaded derringer hidden up her sleeve, a silver tongue, and quick thinking to improvise her way out of a sticky situation.
    • Borderlands The Pre-Sequel:
      • Athena, a highly-trained ex-Crimson Lance assassin with a shield that can absorb projectiles and be flung at enemies, ricocheting off multiple ones.
      • Aurelia Hammerlock, sister of other series Badass Normal, Sir Hammerlock. Her only special ability is a device around her neck that can create a small but powerful blizzard around her.
      • "Jack" (real name Timothy) is perhaps the most normal player character in the series, being a dorky, awkward actor who only became Jack's body double to pay off his student loans. He reacts the most like a normal person would to the craziness of the world around him. Despite this, he can still stand strong alongside other more combat-hardened characters. He also survives seven years trapped aboard a space casino that's full of people who want to kill him for having the face of the guy who caused the whole mess. And that's despite losing the ability to deploy combat-capable holographic clones.
      • Nisha, a crack-shot sociopathic gunslinger who can dual-wield any handgun and whose special ability is essentially a very strong aim assist.
    • Borderlands 3:
      • Zane, a freelance corporate assassin who signs up for the game's events as a holiday. He has various gadgets on him, and can deploy two at once at the cost of being able to throw grenades. These being an attack drone, a deployable barrier that protects him and boosts gun damage, a holographic clone that can potentially have a copy of the real Zane's weapon, and a shoulder cannon.
      • Moze, a former Vladof soldier with her own summonable mech she can ride in called Iron Bear. In Iron Bear, she can deal large amounts of damage with no danger of death. On foot, she can regenerate ammo, have shots that don't consume ammo, have incendiary bullets mixed in with normal shots, and get big boosts to splash damage.
  • The Adventurer in the Bravely Default series. He has no apparent powers or job class and is always found hanging out in every dungeon in the game. Which means he got there before your party. Oh, and he is also the resident "Hardest Superboss" to boot. Then Subverted in Bravely Second, where it is revealed that she is a Celestial and, as such, not normal at all.
  • Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter has three main party members. One of which is an extreme rarity in that he bonded with a dragon, another of which was a girl with wings modded by surgery to make her into a walking air purifier, with magic. The third...is the leader of a rebellion with only her guns. Badass Normal Award of this game goes to Lin.
  • Captain Novolin, the protagonist from the eponymous video game, is a superhero whose superpower is... Having diabetes. And that's it: he doesn't get special powers from his illness, he's just a diabetic man (albeit a quite muscular one who can pull off some impressive jumps) who believes he is the best-suited hero to fight aliens who happen to be made of junk food that will damage him by simply touching him.
  • The majority of protagonists from the Castlevania series fall into three categories: chosen heirs of the Belmont clan, magic users, and supernatural beings. Protagonists that fall outside of these categories certainly qualify, most notably Grant DaNasty the wall-climbing pirate and Henry Oldrey the armored gunslinger.
  • Vincent from Catherine. Yeah, OK, the guy's an absolute loser, but c'mon, taking on insane killer sheep, towering manifestations of nightmares and fears, demons, and gods while being a 30-something video-game designer armed with only a pillow and Goofy Print Underwear? That's pretty impressive.
    • Most apparent in the Chaos True Ending, where the credits slides and the final epilogue show that Vincent travels through Hell with Catherine and single-handedly conquers it, still dressed in his goofy underwear. He kicks lots of demon ass, brings them all to heel, and pretty much rules over the place, despite being a normal human.
  • Ayla from Chrono Trigger. Most of the party has powerful magic granted to them by the God of War. But since Ayla comes from an age before magic existed, she can't learn it. Therefore, she resorts to beating the crap out of her enemies with her bare fists. On higher levels, she is even able to surpass the magic-wielding characters in terms of damage dealing.
    • There's a point in the game where you have your weapons taken, and you are unable to fight until you retrieve them...Unless Ayla is in your party. Since she doesn't need weapons, she can fight back.
  • In City of Heroes, you begin your early career fighting demonically powered street gangs, work your way up through fighting psychic robots, hordes of demons, eight-feet-tall genetically altered supersoldiers, cyborg criminals, and lab-grown supervillains. The final and most difficult enemy faction of the game, however, is a group of normal humans armed with tasers and six-shooters.
    • And their allies, Ninjas to the max. Plus the "Natural" origin for heroes or villains was originally intended for and is still used by, player characters whose concept is a Badass Normal.
      • However, Natural simply means "nothing my species can't normally do" — if the player character is an alien, those "natural" abilities can go a long way. Like, say, if you're Kryptonian.
      • Arguably, Superman might instead be a Science hero since his powers come from the genetic reaction to Earth's yellow sun. The Martian Manhunter, on the other hand...
    • Within the lore of the game itself, there's one of the iconic heroes, Justice Leag- I mean, Freedom Phalanx member Manticore. Similarly to Batman, he is the only member on the aforementioned team who has no supernatural power granted to him by the gods, was not experimented on by evil scientists, and was not born with any great psychic ability. His real claim to fame? Really, really good aim with a bow and arrow. Although having more money than God probably helped. Also, the first arc of the Top Cow comic series gave him teleportation ability, which he can use with clever results such as shooting explosive arrows into a room half a mile away. Despite this new ability, however, he's still perceived as nothing special in terms of power compared to his teammates, and yet he's often the one they turn to when their leader is out of commission. Not bad.
      • Word of God reveals that Manticore can teleport because he has hacked into the city-wide Emergency Teleportation Network.
  • Clive Barker's Undying: He may have some magical powers, but Patrick is more-or-less a normal man fighting evil undead siblings, powerful archmages and all sorts of demonic beings.
  • In Croma Heroes, Celeste is the only main party member to have no innate magic powers or military training, instead pulling her weight through clever use of guns, drugged knives, and street smarts, though, she can stand up to most bosses.
    • The two protagonists of the prologue game also count, since at the time they are just children. Who best groups of adults with wooden swords, boxing gloves, and firecracker.
  • Cuphead is full of Inkblot Cartoon Style bosses who transform into giant monsters (some more than once!), have giant monsters at their beck and call, or were giant monsters to begin with, but there's a few who fight for their souls with just their wits and a few props.
    • The purest example is Sally Stageplay. She fights you on a theatre stage, using nothing but props and a parasol, and has the most mundane final form out of all the bosses, which is simply her in an angel outfit while a cord flies her around (her earlier One-Winged Angel form is a cardboard prop). She's not as difficult as the other bosses at that point of the game, either, but that's not saying much...
    • Werner Werman fights Cuphead and Mugman with a tank that he made himself out of a soup can. And a robotic cat that he also created and pilots for the final stage of the fight.
    • Captain Brineybeard has no supernatural powers himself, instead relying on calling up various sea creatures to attack.
  • Dark Chronicle has Max, an otherwise ordinary boy who fights monsters with a wrench and a gun. Contrasted with his partner, Monica, who is a shapeshifting Magic Knight.
  • Darkest Dungeon has the Brigand Cannon boss, which is just an ordinary cannon for all intents and purposes. It's not an eldritch horror, it is not an evil spellcaster, or is it an undead monstrosity. It is simply a cannon led by a group of sociopathic bandits, that dangers the town of Hamlet and is just as formidable as any other given occult horror within the game. The Vvulf, the leader of the aforementioned bandits, also counts, leading a brigand invasion that's just as difficult to face as the hardest dungeon in the game, and the man himself can easily take on your team with just some brigand support, a big shield and a barrel full of bombs. And finally, the DLC's Fanatic can take on heroes that have faced and stomped any of the other monstrosities of the Estate and crush them all by his lonesome, through plentiful armament, a stake to burn heretics with, and sheer, batshit insane zeal. Parties that would wipe the floor with a writhing mass of demon-infested flesh or an entire crew of undead pirates with an enchanted anchor can get a Total Party Kill against this single human.
  • There are countless hazards, many magical, in Lordran in Dark Souls. One of your most effective allies, among sorcerers and clerics, is Solaire of Astoria, who has no magic; he's just very good at fighting.
    • Another example is Black Iron Tarkus, who through sheer training has achieved enough strength to wield a One-Handed Zweihänder, a tower shield and one of the heaviest armor sets in the game, and still be able to walk at reasonable speed. He also can and will defeat a 20-foot-tall iron golem in an up-front melee battle by himself.
    • Sieglinde of Catarina is a sweet young knight on a quest to find her father armed only with a sweet set of armor and a regular claymore. She is also the only character that appears in the game that is explicitly stated not to be afflicted with the Undead curse, which means that if she is killed then she won't be resurrected at the last bonfire she passed. And she still gets through a huge chunk of the game with only minimal aid from the player character.
    • Hell, the player character is generally this. You start out in a world full of super-powered, giant demons as a hollow that hasn't gone insane yet, and by the end of the game, you've killed legions of the undead, dragons, demons, the personification of death, and several Gods, all while having limited stamina.
    • Slave Knight Gael, the Grand Finale boss of the series, is just a regular knight who was given physical power by the Dark Soul. He is using a greatsword that is rusted and broken. He barely holds control over the burning humanity spirits augmenting his abilities. Yet he is the ultimate boss of the entire series.
    • Keep in mind "normal" is a very relative term in the Dark Souls universe: while they're not born powerful and will pretty much always be weaker than stronger races like Gods (barring over-consumption of Darkness), humans, like just about everyone else in the universe, have the ability to consume defeated opponents' souls to increase their strength. Most of the best warriors are blatantly superhuman as a result, just not as much as other entities. The Ashen One, for instance, can swing around a hammer the size of a small car about halfway through the game, and is barely bothered by scripted hundred-foot falls onto hard rock or smacks to the chest from beings strong enough to shatter stone.
    • Bloodborne: You aren't exactly normal anymore, what with all the augmentations your blood gives you, but any powers you obtain are purely due to items and not spellcraft. The blood enhances your existing abilities, which are fighting and shooting and understanding, and that is exactly what you do to kill monstrous beasts and hordes of insane hunters.
  • B.B. Hood (Bulleta) in Darkstalkers is the only one who doesn't use supernatural abilities, but she still manages to take down monsters with nothing more than heavy weaponry despite being a young human girl.
    • She does the same thing as one of the Darkstalkers representatives on the Capcom side in the Marvel vs. Capcom series.
  • In DC Universe Online, characters with Gadgets and Munitions power sets, who by default are mentored by Batman and The Joker, use high-tech devices and conventional weaponry and explosives instead of genetic or magical powers, and these powers are typically paired with the Acrobatics movement type, which focuses on enhanced agility, ziplining, and gliding. Zig-zagged in that they still possess the Required Secondary Power of minor Super-Strength that enable all characters to lift objects and not take any damage from falling from a great height, and that the Iconic Powers system allows them to optionally access abilities such as Eye Beams and Super-Breath.
  • Dead Rising protagonists Frank West and Chuck Greene each wade through a Zombie Apocalypse with their eyes on a goal and no amount of flesh-eating monsters or stupid survivors can dissuade them.
  • Isaac Clarke is the personification of this trope. Despite being one of the only characters encountered to not have any military training across all three Dead Space games, he managed to survive three separate Necromorph outbreaks (one of which he was the sole survivor), created and destroyed a Marker, managed to escape from the Church of Unitology (an organization powerful enough to overthrow the Earth’s government) for months, managed to survive being hunted by an entire space station’s worth of military while fighting an outbreak, was chosen to lead an expedition into a Necromorph infested planet because he’s considered the most knowledgeable on Necromorphs, and at the end of the third game, destroyed an entire Necromorph moon, the most powerful Necromorph in the Universe. He’s an engineer. An ENGINEER.
  • Demonbane: Ruri's butler, Winfield, is the only combatant in the game with no magical abilities or superpowers whatsoever. Yet he's somehow able to keep up with the world's most deadly People of Mass Destruction in speed and power, simply because he is really, really good at boxing. No explanation is ever given for this.
  • In the Destiny universe, the Cabal and the Fallen have no access to the nigh-magical abilities of the Traveller or its arch-enemy, the Darkness, unlike the Guardians, the Hive, the Taken, and the Vex. Despite this, the Fallen are one of the most omnipresent and dangerous enemies in the system, and the Cabal are brutal rhino-men with access to all the military resources of a massive empire and, in the second game, manage to bring down the Tower.
  • Devil May Cry:
    • Lady, introduced in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, has no demonic powers to call her own but slaughters lower demons easily with her artillery, has sufficient agility to dodge, and survives brief clashes with the Sons of Sparda. She becomes playable in the Special Edition of Devil May Cry 4 and still retains her weaponry and explosives. Since she lacks the Devil Trigger of the other characters who have demonic blood, her DT Gauge is consumed to let her throw several grenades to deal massive damage instead.
    • Before Lady's debut, the Devil May Cry 2 novel had Beryl, a devil hunter who served as the Deuteragonist. Like Lady, Beryl had no demonic powers and relied on her gun to fight demons. She is also the first female character to participate in the climactic battle against the villain alongside Dante. For comparison, Trish only showed up after Mundus was sufficiently weakened, and Lady shot Arkham after he was crippled.
    • Nico Goldstein from Devil May Cry 5 similarly has no innate demon powers, and furthermore unlike Lady, she doesn't fight in the frontlines. However, she's a Badass Driver par excellence who manages to score a few demon roadkills.
  • Shirou Yusa from Dies Irae is perhaps the closest to being normal within this universe where Reality Warping powers are dime a dozen. Despite this, he constantly enters combat against far more powerful opponents and keeps on blindsiding them. In one route, he is also the sole normal human to have ever managed to kill a Die Ewigkeit user.
  • In the Disgaea series, pick a human, any human (game play). The strongest example is Sapphire (both in and out of game play). Subverted with Adell, who thinks he's human (he's not).
  • In Dishonored, Corvo starts the game as the Royal Protector, bodyguard to the Empress, and manages to fight off half a dozen super-powered mooks until their boss shows up. After that, the Outsider comes to him in a dream and gives him powers, making him an Empowered Badass Normal. However, the Self-Imposed Challenge "It was just a dream" involves players ignoring any and all magic in the game, proving that Corvo can carve through an entire city of magitek with nothing but his wits and his gear.
  • Doom: In a world where various fireball-throwing, flying, mook-spawning, mook-reincarnating, rocket launcher- or minigun-infused hellspawn are out to viciously murder you and all you hold dear while corrupting the land itself into malevolent and alien locales, it goes without saying that the hero is comparatively just a man with a lot of fairly mundane guns (disregarding that some of them are very large). But he doesn't just hold his own, he massacres the armies of hell so easily that they're completely terrified of him. At least, this is the case for the original games. Starting with Doom (2016), it's made clear that the Doomguy has become an Empowered Badass Normal with practically Hulk-level super strength and durability and various rune-based powers. His guns get a lot crazier too (the starting assault rifle fires .50 BMG rounds).
  • Dragon Age:
    • Leliana of Dragon Age: Origins is the resident Badass Normal. The rest of the party consists of two Grey Wardens, two mages, a warhound, a Proud Warrior Race Guy explicitly stated to be stronger and tougher than any human, a dwarf (same qualifications), an elf trained from childhood by the deadliest order of assassins in the land, and a war golem. Leliana is an ordinary young woman whose training was about seduction and espionage rather than combat, and she can hold her own against any of her fellow party members.
      • Shianni, one of the only elven alienage-dwellers aside from possibly the City Elf Warden who's completely unafraid of sticking up for her community. Her first Moment of Awesome is potentially bashing Bann Vaughan over the head with a bottle in one of the origins, and she gets another even bigger one if you let her fight alongside you when the darkspawn invade Denerim. She's definitely no Grey Warden, but man can she hold her own. She goes on to become the alienage elder, according to the game's epilogue.
      • The player character before undergoing the joining, is always an absolute badass, especially if their origin involves a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
      • The Dalish Elf Origin is probably the most badass in this regard. The Dalish Elf gets infected with the Darkspawn Taint and only survives due to the Keeper's magic keeping it at bay for now, meaning the only thing that is keeping them from succumbing to The Corruption is sheer force of will alone. They fight through a forest filled with Darkspawn to find Duncan, who admits he did not think they would actually survive. After travelling all the way to Ostagar, they proceed to fight through another forest of yet more Darkspawn... and only then do they finally get cured!
      • Nathanial Howe from the Awakening expansion. Even before the Joining, it took four Grey Wardens to subdue him.
    • Rogue or Warrior Hawke, Aveline, and Carver in Dragon Age II are survivors of Ferelden's Redshirt Army, with relatively little military training. Aveline becomes Captain of the Kirkwall Guard, Carver either dies, becomes a Grey Warden, or rises to high rank among the Templars, and Hawke is Hawke. There's also Isabella, whose fighting skills are built entirely from the duals she's engaged in over the years for the fun of it, and Sebastian who's just a talented archer.
    • In Dragon Age: Inquisition, Sera is simply a City Elf who is primarily self-taught as an archer whose Tempest abilities are simply using magic elixirs to imbue herself with certain effects. Similarly, Blackwall is revealed to not even be an actual Warden, having never gone through the Joining and perhaps the most bog-standard of the companions.
  • Dragon Quest:
    • Dragon Quest II: The Prince of Midenhall is the only one of the main three who can't use magic. And the only lead character of any Dragon Quest game who can't use magic, for that matter. He still gets the job done.
    • Dragon Quest IV:
      • Torneko, who is pretty Badass both gameplay-wise (he can fight off monsters by bashing them with an abacus) and plot-wise (It is thanks to his business exploits that the Chosen manage to cross over the continents and eventually find the Zenithian Sword)
      • Ragnar McRyan gains no magical abilities but is one of your better physical fighters.
      • Alevna is completely incapable of using magic but her physical damage output is unmatched.
    • In Dragon Quest V, your party members include the hero's wife and children, who are descendants of the Legendary Hero, his father's former Lancer, his long-date pet sabretooth tiger and the occasional Slime...and then there's Tuppence. A plain soldier from your castle that just wants his share of the glory. He knows no magic or special techniques at all, but he can equip most heavy armor and has quite a lot of HP. He gets some pretty heartwarming lines if you bring him along to the final boss fight.
    • Carver from Dragon Quest VI is the only mandatory party member to have no access to spells outside of the vocation system. He is a simple carpenter turned martial artist keeping pace with a chosen hero, a powerful mage, an extremely powerful sorceress, and the head priest of an entire town of priests.
    • From Dragon Quest VIII there's Yangus, who started out as a normal bandit. He's easily the most awesome character in the game, and he can barely even use magic.
    • Dragon Quest XI has Jade, who attacks with bare hands and feet, spears, and claws, and can hit pretty hard despite being the only party member unable to learn magic.
    • The Builder from Dragon Quest Builders stands out from other heroes in the series. One key difference is, as stated by the goddess Rubiss, that they are not a hero. How this manifests in-game is that the Builder does not get stronger by defeating monsters and gaining experience points. The only way they can stand a chance against the Dragonlord's army is by continuing to build better equipment to protect themself. They don't learn magic and can't improve their base physical strength: their only asset is their ability to build and craft, and that manages to be enough to beat the odds.
  • In Duel Savior Destiny most of the competent fighters are either Savior Candidates and wield magic, sentient weaponry, or are powerful mages. Selbium, on the other hand, is just a soldier, but apart from only having one or two super moves, he's otherwise actually entirely competent, though he can't quite match up to the actual Savior Candidates when they have their Aether Relics.
  • Dwarf Fortress features dragons, rocs, giants, minotaurs, undead animals (such as elephants), procedurally-generated Eldritch Abominations, and The Legions of Hell themselves. Yet even a single dwarf, if his skills are high enough, can kill one of those things with ease. Even an untrained dwarf can kill an opponent much more powerful than him by just being lucky. (or by being equipped with a pick)
  • Earth Defense Force: The EDF is full of those. From the Red Shirts to Storm 1 to 4, every single of the defenders of Earth are bona fide Homo Sapiens with access to great training and gear, who still mow down hordes of giant insects, super-powered aliens, robots and flying saucers by the dozen.
    • Rangers take it up a notch: Wing Divers have a jetpack and state-of-the-art laser and plasma weapons. Fencers have a powered exoskeleton and carry several vehicle-mounted guns. Air Raiders have access to every vehicle of the EDF ranging from combat bikes to a Mini-Mecha and the launch codes for a wide variety of artillery pieces and airstrikes. Rangers have regular infantry weaponry, the ability to sprint and nothing else.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • The Imperials of Cyrodiil combine this with Boring, but Practical and Humans Are Average. They aren't magical powerhouses like the Altmer or Bretons, they aren't great individual warriors like the Nords or the Orcs, and they're not great at stealth like the Khajiit or Argonians. All they really have going for them is that they make for cunning diplomats, competent statesmen and disciplined infantry. Yet the forces of Cyrodiil forged three empires conquering most or all of Tamriel.
    • Speaking of the Nords, while they are some of the greatest individual warriors in Tamriel, they are so while also being the least magically inclined race. Their modern culture even has an inherent dislike of magic and magic users, with the sole exception being for Restoration magic (as they can always use more healers). Despite their lack of magical skill, the Nords (and their Atmoran ancestors) are basically the reason why Mankind even exists on Tamriel. They drove Skyrim's native Falmer (Snow Elves) to near extinction and established a foothold for free Men in Tamriel (at a time when Tamriel's other races of men were subservient or outright slaves to Tamriel's Elves). They also established the first empire of Men in Tamriel, which spanned from High Rock in the West to Morrowind in the east, and was only torn apart due to a succession crisis.
    • The Chimer, golden-skinned ancestors of the Dunmer, were this. Despite lacking the magical might of the Altmer, the technological skill of the Dwemer, and pure brute force of the Nords, they managed to hold their own in conflicts against each thanks to their Jack of All Stats balance. They stopped qualifying after the Battle of Red Mountain, when they became the Dunmer and gained three Physical Gods who helped to defend Morrowind from outside threats for nearly 4000 years.
    • The player character from Oblivion comes over as this compared the player characters from Morrowind and Skyrim. The player character from Morrowind is the Nerevarine, the reincarnation of an ancient legendary general, and acquires a disease as part of the main quest which makes him/her The Ageless in addition to Ideal Illness Immunity. The player character from Skyrim is the Dragonborn, a mortal born with the soul of an immortal dragon, which grants innate access to the reality-warping language of the dragons. The only peculiarity this character has is that he happens to be at the right place at the right time to meet the emperor and set in motion the chain of events leading to the defeat of Mehrunes Dagon. Apart from this, there is nothing setting them apart from other people. However, this does not stop him from marching into Oblivion and killing hordes of Daedra. They avert this trope after becoming the new Daedric Prince of Madness, losing the "Normal" part in more ways than one.
    • A more specific example from Skyrim, is the Old Orc who can be found wandering the roads and wilderness looking for a Worthy Opponent to kill him because he wants to fight like a man rather than as a feeble and frail wretch in his bed. This Orc, clad in hides and leathers and wielding an ordinary, non-enchanted axe, will put up a challenging fight against your character who at this point is certainly a fabled dragonslayer and possibly also the chosen champion of the Orc god Malacath.
    • In the spin-off Action-Adventure game Redguard, the hero is Cyrus, a simple Redguard pirate/swordsman. Despite this, during the course of the game, he slays a dragon, defeats a Sload Necromancer, and matches wits with a Daedric Prince. Later games and stories indicate that Cyrus was an incarnation of the HoonDing, the Redguard "Make Way" god who manifests whenever the Redguard people need a place to live. If true, Cyrus is a divinely Empowered Badass Normal instead.
  • The End Times: Vermintide: Markus Kruber is an ordinary human sellsword fighting vile ratmen in a world gone to hell, alongside a badass old Witch Hunter, a fire wizard, an elven archer and a dwarf. As a sergeant of the Imperial State Army, being a Badass Normal comes with the territory. The sequel graduates him to an Empowered Badass Normal when he discovers some distant Bretonnian ancestry and becomes a powerful Grail Knight after impressing the Lady of the Lake. After this, Bardin probably becomes the closest the Ubersreik Five have to a Badass Normal, as Saltzpyre becomes a Warrior Priest and Kerillian becomes a Sister of the Thorn, leaving him as the sole remaining member who does not use magic; he's just a dwarf engineer with a steam-powered gatling gun and some other bits of clockwork Dawi gadgetry.
  • Gre fits this trope to a tee in Evolution Worlds. Every other character either has hidden powers like Linear or uses a Cyframe... But not Gre. Gre actually uses his own talent and a simple rifle. To top it off, he is also the oldest character. Nobody messes with Gre.
  • The majority of the hunters in Evolve qualify for this. They're normal humans who take on massive killing machines with only their wits and tech to keep them alive.
  • EXTRAPOWER:
    • Most of the heroes in the EXTRAPOWER series are aliens, magical, demonic beings, or otherwise superpowered. Then there's Toyama in EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce who is just a middle-aged wrestler with a shotgun, holding his own against demonic and extraterrestrial menaces.
    • Wolf in EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist can hold his own against Zophy and his Wolf Fist is explosively deadly, but he's otherwise a completely normal human who trained to this point.
  • Fate/stay night:
    • Souichirou Kuzuki is a normal man with no knowledge of the supernatural world and no magical abilities whatsoever, who still participates in the Holy Grail War. His position with his Servant is reversed, in that he fights while his Servant supports him with spells. With an enchantment on his fists and his own unconventional martial arts style, he manages to temporarily overwhelm Saber, the best close-range fighter, and rips out Rider's throat during his most prominent route.
    • Servant Assassin is a Badass Normal by the standards of the Servants. He has no famous name or legend and no Noble Phantasm. He never defeated armies or monsters (his 'legend' only consists of him losing to Miyamoto Musashi), knows no magic, and has no beasts, armies, or anything apart from his trusty no-dachi and his own finely-honed skill to call upon. Furthermore he turns out to be the result of a forbidden summon; he isn't a true heroic spirit at all, just the spirit of some nameless samurai called upon to fill the role of Sasaki Kojiro, who never existed here. He still manages to repel and almost defeat Saber twice and is sufficiently skilled to unnerve Lancer, and knows a sword technique on the level of an anti-personal Noble Phantasm.
    • Though she never gets to show it off, Word of God has it that Taiga Fujimura is as skilled with the sword as Shiki Ryougi.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Kain Highwind of Final Fantasy IV was a Badass Normal for much of his existence. He's a Memetic Badass at that despite having no magical powers and just being really, really good at abusing Jump Physics. The sequel The After Years upgraded him into a Holy Dragoon, so his status as a normal has been removed. However, that was more than a decade after his original game and his badassery was famous well before The After Years came out.
      • The game also gives us Cid, who's just an old engineer with a hammer that jumps out of an airship riding a bomb, falls into the underworld, and survives. Less than a week later he's tuning up your new ship.
      • Yang also has nothing but training.
    • Final Fantasy VI's General Leo is a highly accomplished swordsman, has the sweet "shock" ability, and he holds the same high position in the Empire that Kefka and Celes once did. And guess what, not only does he not have magical powers, but he refused the magitek infusion that would have given them to him!
      • Final Fantasy VI abolishes this trope with Leo, however. Leo is killed off, and after this everyone that's not a minor NPC can learn magic except sasquatches (and sasquatches are hardly normal!)
    • Final Fantasy VII: In a party with a genetically enhanced Super-Soldier (Cloud), a big black Mr. T-lookalike eco-terrorist with a chaingun strapped to his arm (Barret), a woman with magic practically coursing through her blood (Aerith), a red wolf-like creature (Red XIII), a cat puppet riding a giant robotic stuffed toy (Cait Sith), a man who can transform into different monsters (Vincent) and a cocky Ninja girl (Yuffie), Tifa and Cid chose to be different, chose to be badass normal... chose to be a barmaid with martial arts training and a gruff airship pilot with a home-made spear and some dynamite!
    • Although he spends half of Final Fantasy IX portrayed as the Butt-Monkey, Steiner is the only character in the game (if not the entire planet) who isn't either a Super Prototype creature, a Half-Human Hybrid that can call destruction from the heavens, a Beast Man with natural gifts, or some chi master who can jump 100 feet in the air and throw fireballs at people. He just hits people really hard with swords and is the only party member who can hit for max damage unaugmented.
      • This is also doubly true for his Trance abilities. Every party member that goes into Trance gains new abilities or have their current abilities enhanced for extra power or additional properties. What does Steiner have for his Trance skills? Not a damn thing. Instead, he just has tripled attack power.
      • Vivi, however, can turn him into an Empowered Badass Normal by enchanting his sword to summon magic attacks to hit enemies. When they are in the party together, Steiner can use his own MP to use Vivi's black magic against one target.
    • Final Fantasy X has exactly two badass normal protagonists, when you think about it. Tidus is a Fayth-based pro-sports player who can manipulate time itself, Lulu is a black mage capable of bending reality to her whim, Yuna summons demigods to do her bidding, Kimarhi Ronso is a giant cat-man who can steal enemies' moves, and Auron is an undead legendary badass who is so angry at Yevon for turning his best friend into Sin he won't rest until they're destroyed. Who's left? Rikku, who's just a girl who's good at stealing and building things, and Wakka, who hits things with what is basically a soccer ball.
    • Given the huge prevalence of Magitek in Final Fantasy XII, it's hard to tell who's fighting without some sort of magic/technology backing them up. Most of the Arcadian Judges, though, fight using only their swords and various physical attacks, while Mad Scientist Cid battles with assorted BFGs and all of them are bosses and are much more dangerous than the abyssal demons and behemoths you've seen on the way up to them. Vayne then shows them up in the final battle — after spending the game battling through armored soldiers wielding BFSes, Vayne takes the party on in his day-to-day wear and fights using nothing but his bare hands. Well, the cinematic attacks show him sending energy bursts at the party, but if the name of one such attack ("Force of Will") is an indicator, Vayne is such a Badass Normal he can bend the laws of physics through sheer willpower. Then as is par for the series, he goes One-Winged Angel and uses nothing but magic.
    • Early on, your characters are this in Final Fantasy XIII except for Vanille, but later on, you end up fighting enemies who are Badass Normals. Psicom is made up of people whose only real advantage to keeping up with the l'cie party members is their very good equipment. They make up for their lack of superhuman feats or magic by using things like machine guns, bazookas, and good old fashioned teamwork.
    • In Final Fantasy XIV, Thancred is Brought Down to Normal due to his time in the lifestream after A Realm Reborn going into Heavensward: he completely loses the ability to manipulate aether and use magic. Nonetheless, he proves himself an apt fighter even without magic, availing himself as a capable rogue and scout throughout Heavensward and Stormblood, and proving himself to be an expert Gunbreaker in Shadowbringers.
    • In the sequel to Dissidia Final Fantasy, Dissidia 012, Laguna Loire of Final Fantasy VIII definitely qualifies. Unlike every other character in the game who all at least minor magical skills, Laguna uses no magic or any other supernatural powers at all. Instead, he's a Multi-Ranged Master with a Hyperspace Arsenal of shotguns, machine guns, rocket launchers, and a BFG based on an airship. Even his Limit Break is nothing more than a Combination Attack of all his weapons at once.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • As a whole, virtually any unit that doesn't use magic, shapeshifting, legendary weapons or any other supernatural powers qualifies. Usually, getting lucky with a physical unit's level ups results in a Mook Horror Show at the hands of a sword/axe/lance/bow/knife-wielding badass who knows no fear or mercy.
    • Most protagonists are Blue Bloods with some sort of divine heritage (or something similar) that grants them all sorts of cool personal weaponry to toy with. However, there are two big exceptions.
    • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, those born with Crests are granted boons such as enhanced strength, high aptitude for magic, etc. While most of the playable cast are Crest-bearing nobles, Petra, Caspar, Dedue, Ashe, Raphael, Leonie, Cyril, Alois, Gilbert, and Shamir are all Magically Inept Fighters who lack Crests. This doesn't hinder their ability to kick ass in the slightest.
  • In Fire Warrior, the protagonist La'Kais qualifies. Sure he's an alien, but he's a Tau, which means he's shorter-lived and physically weaker than even the average human. And yet his first day of live fire combat he personally killed several battalions of the Imperial Guard, large numbers of Space Marines and several Dreadnaughts, a good deal of Chaos Marines and several Daemons, and he does it all within the time span of twenty-four hours. Alas, he breaks down after that.
  • In War Hammer 40000 Space Marine, this is 2nd Lieutenant Mira. A normal human, serving in the common army, in contrast with the protagonist, a genetically augmented Space Marine wearing power-armor. She's the leader of an Imperial Guard force, mainly because all of her leaders and commanding officers are dead. All her Commissars, 1st Lieutenants, so on and so on: massacred. And against all odds, she's the one person keeping the army of men on this world besieged by an alien force functioning and fighting. She's running an entire army against waves and waves of Orks (and later also Chaos forces), managing multiple fronts, keeping her men on the line shooting, keeping sentry turret defenses up, making sure air transports are taking things where they need to goddamn go. And the game protagonist, captain Titus of the Ultramarines, has to rely on Mira on multiple occasions to move the plot forward. And in certain sections she's fighting right alongside you in the frail - against the terrifying horrors of the War Hammer 40k universe, not being a damsel in distress or someone to be babied. She's shooting and shouting and being the complete hardass she goddamn righteously is.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: All the security guard protagonists are average guys who survive a whole week with killer animatronics. All they get to keep them at bay are door lights and blast doors running on limited power (Mike Schmidt against four animatronics), a flashlight and a Freddy head (Jeremy Fitzgerald/Fritz Smith against eleven) and audio cues (3's unnamed Fazbear's Fright guard against only one, but it's possessed by a Serial Killer and aided by six "phantoms"). On the Custom Nights, they can even set the animatronics to their highest settings and (if the player does well) still survive!
  • Despite setting out to skewer every Silver Age trope going, it took until the sequel for the Freedom Force series to roll out some Badass Normals with the Wartime Heroes, capable of standing toe-to-toe with the worst Energy-X powered monstrosities Blitzkreig can devise.
    • Though Sky King uses a jetpack, body armour, and chain guns, Blackjack gets by with a pistol and homemade bombs, and Tricolour has just a rapier. Not even body armour.
  • F-Zero's Dr. Stewart the surgeon, who competes with Bounty Hunter Captain Falcon, gang leader Samurai Goroh and assassin soldier Pico.
  • Games Workshop video games:
    • Mordheim: City of the Damned:
      • The game's playable factions include psychotic mutants and demon-worshipping cultists, murderous Rat Men, all-female holy warriors with supernatural powers, the slavering hordes of The Undead and their vampiric masters, and... a bunch of ordinary Reiklander sellswords with nothing but sharpened steel, crude firearms, and their wits and discipline. Sometimes they win.
      • The Legendary unit for the Witch Hunters faction, the Executioner, is just a giant of a man wielding a massive axe. The other factions' Legendary units include a hulking ogre mercenary for the Mercenaries, a bio-engineered rat monster for the Skaven, a walking magical avatar for the Sisters, and an insane mutant for the Cultists.
  • Briggs the pirate leader in the Golden Sun series comes from a family prone to Fire Adepts, but doesn't have any powers himself. He's still notorious for being a relatively difficult boss in the early parts of The Lost Age. It doesn't help that it's easy to accidentally get to his fight well before you should, but he's dangerous even to a properly leveled and equipped party because of his excellent enemy AI and just being that strong. He's also one of the few Muggles who actually understands how Adepts and Psynergy work, despite Psynergy being Invisible to Normals and subject to a Weirdness Censor.
    • In fact, most of the Muggles in the series who pick fights with the player character are boss fights, and all but the three thieves in Vault are pretty ferocious.
    • Kraden, a recurring fan favorite, has no combat capability or powers whatsoever, but will walk across monster-infested war zones and through trap-filled, monster-infested dungeons if there are some Adepts in need of plot exposition, and somehow he always makes it to his destination unscathed. In the fandom and to a lesser degree in-universe, he is a Memetic Badass for this.
  • Guilty Gear:
    • In a crazy universe filled with magic users and Half Human Hybrids, Baiken is just a badass samurai chick who demonstrates no ability with magic. But between her chain-arm (to replace the one that was chopped off; she's also down an eye, but that doesn't slow her down one bit) and her peerless skill with an ordinary katana, she can hold her own against some incredibly powerful people, and survives every encounter. Hell, in the very first entry on the Playstation she was the Superboss.
    • Johnny would also qualify, as he is just some Texan guy with iaido skills (though admittedly he does use a bit of fire magic for some of his moves). Slayer, an all-powerful Lightning Bruiser vampire who never goes all out against any of his opponents out of gentlemanly respect (and because he would devastate everything around for miles if he did), points out after defeating Johnny that he is holding back significantly as well. When he goes all out, he can defeat a near-perfect copy of Justice; and in Xrd he defeated Bedman as well (who had previously stomped Slayer).
    • The most normal fighter in the series, though, is Bridget. She's a transgender girl armed with a Killer Yo-Yo and a teddy bear that's armed to the teeth and has no special powers to speak of, yet holds her own against the rest of the cast of superpowered badasses, and makes friends with a gang of pirates and one of the most powerful Gear in the world. Even Potemkin, who literally weighs a ton in muscle, is impressed by her enough that he offers her a job to help with training his men. This is especially evident in her Guilty Gear -STRIVE- perfect arcade run; she takes on and beats Ky in his Dragon Install form.
  • Halo:
    • There's the ODSTs (Orbital Drop Shock Troopers), who are basically Marine Force Recon IN SPACE! The ones in Halo 3: ODST are almost as badass as Spartans; little wonder that the two groups have a rivalry, as described by Romeo in Halo: Helljumper:
      Romeo: Armored up on the outside, and pumped up with who-knows-what drugs or whatever on the inside... Guys like that don't develop real instincts. No need to. They're just tanks on legs.
    • The Rookie, the protagonist of Halo 3: ODST, is probably the best example in the franchise. He single-handedly wipes out hundreds of enemy troops, dozens of whom are power-armored superhuman aliens comparable to Spartans, without breaking a sweat, using little more than a submachine gun and whatever weapons he can scrounge off of dead allies and enemies. Even when separated from his squad in a hostile city occupied by the Covenant, he cuts a swath through them (including Brute SpecOps who can fly and turn invisible on top of being able to bench press a truck) and even occasionally a few groups of freakin' Hunters, eventually regrouping with his unit. Most Spartans couldn't do that.
    • Edward Buck, one of ODST's protagonists, was the quintessential example before becoming a Spartan-IV; it's outright said that he would have been a Spartan if he was any better, and his Crowning Moment in ODST involves him killing a Brute Chieftan by stabbing it in the throat. By the time of Halo 5, he HAS become a Spartan.
    • Also Sergeant John Forge from Halo Wars. He's just an ordinary marine sergeant, but he once took on a Spartan when the two argued and held his own to the point that said Spartan always ate with him in the mess hall afterwards. And in his crowning moment, he took on an Arbiter in a one-on-one fight and won.
    • Every member of the UNSCDF (United Nations Space Command Defense Force) count as this. They are outnumbered dozens-to-one at the least on the ground and outnumbered in space by ships that radically out-class the UNSC Navy. Yet, not only do the soldiers, Marines, and sailors keep fighting, they make the Covenant climb mountains of their own warriors' corpses and kill many times their own number in Covenant. Even in space, particularly clever UNSC commanders could sometimes achieve a good kill-death-ratio in battle, though in a straight fight they usually had to outnumber Covenant ships three-to-one in order to win. Badasses among Badasses!
  • The Knights in Heroes of Might and Magic I and II. Exactly two non-humans in their ranks (an elven hero and a goblin hero), starts with no magical power (and can only build up to a level 3 Mages' Guild) and the canonical victors of the First and Second Wars of Enrothian Succession (III added monks throwing fireballs, gryphons and angels to their ranks, so they weren't quite so normal anymore).
  • The cast of Jump Force is populated by superpowered characters, from heroes like Izuku Midoriya to the supernaturally gifted like Yugi Muto and Yusuke Urameshi, all the way up to Physical Gods like Goku and Vegeta. And then there are the characters from Rurouni Kenshin, who are merely exceptionally gifted swordsmen; and Ryo Saeba of City Hunter, an ordinary man whose prowess in combat comes from his preternatural marksmanship.
  • Magnus from Kid Icarus: Uprising is said to be the strongest human of all. Gaol would probably qualify as well.
  • T.J "Combo" Garrett from Killer Instinct is a championship boxer fighting in a martial arts tournament where his competitors are an ice alien, a cyborg killing machine, a genetically-engineered velociraptor, an ancient skeleton warrior, a native American shaman with real powers, a Tibetan warrior monk with a Laser Blade, a werewolf, a man who's constantly on fire, and even a woman who can turn into a flaming panther and inexplicably kill people with her boobs. Notable in that it's fully intentional on the Badass Normal's part: he used to improve his performance with cybernetic implants, but of course was disgraced when the news got out he was cheating. He has entered the tournament, no implants this time, to restore his honour and prove his strength and skill really are his own.
    "I took the easy route, once. It got me fame, fortune and glory. But it was all hollow. When I fell, I fell hard. I lost everything. But I'm back now, and this time, I'm doing it right. And don't think for a moment that I'll let anything get in my way. 'Cause if you give me that moment... I win!"
  • Captain Hook in the Kingdom Hearts series counts as this. Consider it this way. By the time you reach him in the first game, Sora has punched out very powerful heartless, a god-like genie, god-like entities in general, villains the size of small buildings, etc. You have an insane aerial advantage over Hook as well. Also, he's not overflowing with the power of darkness either (at least compared to other villains) and lacks real magic. Yet somehow, he still manages to put up a good, solid fight and doesn't die.
    • It's not an isolated incident either. Captain Hook is tough to beat in both Chain of Memories and Birth by Sleep as well.
    • Hook isn't the only one to get this either, as the good guys have Captain Goofy as their resident badass normal. Donald is the most powerful black mage in all of Final Fantasy, Sora, Mickey, and the other playable characters are all essentially Jedi... and Goofy is good with a shield, no magical power or supernatural abilities. He keeps up with them anyway.
    • Also, while not as tough in a fight as some other characters, the Twilight trio of Hayner, Pence, and Olette manage to distract Ansem, Seeker of Darkness — the villain of the first game — long enough to escape with Ansem the Wise. Pence's computer skills also come in handy several times throughout the series.
  • Goro Daimon from the recurring Hero Team in the The King of Fighters. The other two members have special fire and electricity powers, while Goro is just a really strong judo practitioner. There's also Chin Gentsai of the recurring Psycho Team, who lacks any of the Psycho Powers of the other members, and Antonov, the first boss in the series to lack any kind of supernatural ability.
  • In a franchise where the ability to fly, copying enemies' powers, magic swords are pretty much commonplace, Bandana Dee from Kirby definitely counts. He's just a Waddle Dee armed with a spear. He just knows how to really use it.
  • League of Legends: A handful of Champions don't run off of Mana, Fury, their own health pool, or anything else. Examples include: Katarina, Garen, Riven, and Yasuo. In general, the Demacian military is a troop of this, since they represent the Anti-Magical Faction. Other characters that use mana but don't do anything supernatural with it include Caitlyn (a pro sniper), Sivir (very good at trick shots, although she does also have a brief spell shield), and Miss Fortune (whose chief skill is firing dual Hand Cannons very quickly).
  • Leather Goddesses of Phobos parodied this with plucky sidekick Trent/Tiffany, who wrestles alien threats on a hostile planet. Though his/her tragic demise is a Running Gag, he/she keeps returning due to toughness, persistence, and bizarre luck.
  • Gaza from Legend of Legaia is this. He is by far the strongest being that doesn't either wear a Seru, or is one — he is a normal human, yet a swordsman world-class caliber able to strike fear in the hearts of Seru-wearing soldiers and effortlessly strike down a half-dozen Warrior Monks from Biron.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • Unlike most movers and shakers of the Zelda universe, Groose from Skyward Sword has absolutely no magic, special training, or divine destiny — he's just the Skyloftian equivalent of a high school's Jerk Jock. Nonetheless, he manages to help Link subdue a sealed abomination twice with a self-made rail-catapult system he dubs the Groosenator.
    • Skyward Sword implies that every Link and Zelda to ever exist are descendants of the Skyward Sword Link and Zelda, and thus are destined to fight the reincarnation of Demise, a.k.a. every Ganon/Ganondorf to ever exist, as the original Demise cursed their entire bloodline. Therefore, they don't count, Because Destiny Says So. The Link from Wind Waker, however, is just some random kid named Link, in an era where pretty much every second boy is named Link because everyone wants to name their kid after the legendary Hero of Time. He isn't connected to the "real" Link in any way and has no destiny whatsoever to speak of, but still managed to kick so much ass that they had to call him the Hero of Winds just to give him some recognition.
  • Lie of Caelum: Hitoshi Ichiro has no flow ability, but can keep up with his peers using his swordsmanship. He manages to hold his own against Kyou when the latter uses the full power of the 6th Eye, even while suffering from a type disadvantage.
  • The short-lived series Loom implies Rusty being the most badass normal out of all the characters who were intended to be playable. (Bobbin is a weaver and thus able to use magic, Fleece is a shepherd who can sing magic like Bobbin's.) But since They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, we'll never know if he could have found a way to use magic or was just able to compensate by being a smith or able to make things to fight off the Dead and Chaos.
  • The party in Lufia & The Fortress of Doom consists of the descendant of a legendary hero, a mysterious girl with powerful magic who's the reincarnation of the Sinistral of Death, a half-elf archer and magician...and Aguro, a soldier with no magical potential but the highest physical power and resilience in the game, who can surpass Lufia's damage potential with the right weapon.
  • Kyle from Lunar: The Silver Star. He can't use the legendary Dragon Magic like The Hero Alex, use healing powers like his girlfriend Jessica, or rain down destructive magic like Mia or Nash, but give the man a sword, and he could singlehandedly cut down a thousand bandits/monsters/whoever forgot to pay their "protection fee" that day.
  • In MapleStory, Angelic Buster fits the bill. She's the only Nova (A race of dragon/human hybrids from a different planet) who can't use mana at all (And subsequently the only class in the game who can't use mana, sans demon slayer/avenger). Instead, she gains her powers from an ancient dragon who gives her immense power. It allows her to use very powerful skills but instead uses a recharge system. The system gives the better skills a chance (usually 40-60%) to recharge and reuse skills to "balance" her. At the time of her initial release, she was the only class to be able to consistently break the damage cap (Next major patch allowed anyone to do so, and increase the cap to 50 million so it became moot). She was a blatantly broken, being able to solo many bosses within a few seconds, and the hardest boss at the time in about an hour. She was nerfed in all subsequent releases (All releases outside of KMS got a version WORSE than the nerfed version. This was because the class was STILL in the top five DPS in the game.)
  • Marvel: Avengers Alliance:
    • The Player Character is a normal SHIELD agent leading a team full of superheroes with all kinds of powers and Charles Atlas training. But with the arsenal of weaponry and gadgets in SHIELD's arsenal, the Agent can still either kick ass or make the heroes even better at kicking ass themselves.
    • There's also a Team-Up Bonus called "Average Joes" for bringing along any two of the small number of hero characters who also don't have superpowers or supersuits.
  • In Paper Mario: The Origami King, Professor Toad is a simple researcher with a shovel. His attack is digging up coins and throwing them at enemies...defeating them in one shot. He also uses his knowledge to translate the otherwise incomprehensible texts in the desert and dig up pretty much anything that's buried under the sand.
  • Chris Redfield counts as one in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, He's able to hold his own against super mutants, robots, demons, and gods with nothing more than military training, a bunch of time in the gym, and his own personal arsenal of weapons.
  • Mass Effect is full of beings who are augmented beyond normal capabilities, plus entire species of natural superhumans (e.g. krogan and geth are individually strong enough to bench press cars), but there are a fair few people who count.
    • Garrus Vakarian is an alien, true, but turians aren't too different from humans and Garrus shows little sign of any abnormal augmentation. He is, however, undeniably a badass.
    • Zaeed and Kasumi from the second game are both completely ordinary humans in a party comprised of aliens, super soldiers, and biotics.
    • Kal'reegar, the Migrant Fleet Marine you meet in Tali's loyalty mission, is just an unassuming Quarian trooper who manages to hold his own against an entire geth squad and a Spider Tank. Although he won't hold them for long without your intervention, and in the third game, he pulls a You Shall Not Pass! to defend a Turian comms relay at the cost of his own life.
    • Tali herself manages to cut a swath through all manner of superhuman foes (particularly geth) and hold her own alongside the super soldiers that make up most of the rest of the Normandy team. Like Garrus, she shows little sign of any superhuman augmentation or abilities; she just has her military training, gadgets, guns, and a very good understanding of the technology in The 'Verse. She and Garrus like to hold competitions to see who can kill more; apparently she wins when they're fighting geth.
    • Ashley Williams, as well as James Vega in Mass Effect 3, are ordinary human soldiers who aren't even N7 when they join your merry band Ash joins the Spectres by the time 3 starts, and Vega gets an invitation to join the N7 program later in the game. Compared to your other companions, who consist of asari, krogan, biotic experts, quarian hackers, master assassins, scientist salarians, robots, and Garrus, the fact that they can hold their own just as well as their alien and enhanced human contemporaries merits praise. Ashley discusses this in the first game, where she wonders how much she actually brings to the table compared to the tech experts, the biotics, and the only other human being able to do both.
  • Master of Darkness has Dr. Ferdinand Social, a psychologist and amateur paranormal investigator with no special abilities and with only basic weaponry and tools like fencing sabers and pistols, able to battle zombies and vampires, eventually taking on a vampiric noble channeling the power of Dracula.
  • Officer Denise Marmalade from The Misadventures Of Tron Bonne is an interesting case. On one hand, she has such little self-confidence that Tron actually takes pity on her and doesn't put up much of a boss fight. On the other hand, she's strong enough to throw and suplex Tron's Humongous Mecha... with her bare hands.
  • Zero essentially becomes this by Megaman Zero. The tech of the world has progressed massively in the 100 years he was asleep, and even back in the X series, he was rather outdated, being born as a 'robot' from the Classic series Wily rather than a proper 'reploid'. By now he's basically just a slightly stronger human, just with some obscenely terrifying sword skills polished to perfection over years of combat that allow him to solo tear through the newest tech reploids the world's brought on, cause he's just that badass.
  • Even though it's primarily a spy series taking in the late Cold War and modern eras, Metal Gear is full of superhuman characters who possess incredible psionic powers, genetic modifications, and technical gadgets. However, some of the most badass characters don't have any of those:
    • The prime example is series Big Bad Revolver Ocelot. Starting with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty he also leaves the normal territory, but in Metal Gear Solid and prequel Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater he's just an extraordinary normal and has many of his greatest moments.
    • Likewise, Sniper Wolf from Metal Gear Solid. Unlike The End or Quiet, Sniper Wolf just had a German H&K PSG1 rifle and a lot of diazepam, but still managed to be a Worthy Opponent to Snake.
    • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater there's the Boss, the leader of the Cobras and the only member of the team without any supernatural powers. Yet, she's by far the most powerful fighter in the whole series. Though she has an incredibly powerful gun with infinite ammo, she barely uses it and instead beats up many of the world's deadliest soldiers with her bare hands. Even the brutal and towering Psycho Electro psychopath she's fake working for, backs off when she advances on him, after he accuses her of disloyalty.
    • The same goes for the Boss's apprentice Naked Snake, the only man who ever managed to defeat her though it's possible the Boss let him, who ends up becoming renowned as the greatest soldier in history after taking on the title of Big Boss. In fact, he was so badass that his natural DNA was used in several programs to create genetically modified super soldiers. His old Soviet partner EVA also puts most people to shame without any powers or gadgets, and continues to do so at the age of 78.
    • And a very unexpected and unusual case appears at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots with Johnny. For most of the games that he appeared in as a Joke Character; he seems to be a huge failure of a Genome Super Soldier who later got enhanced by The Systems' cybernetic augmentations and with quite a collection of gadgets of his own. However, he admits that he successfully chickened out of having any sort of augmentations done to him simply because he hated needles, making him about the only normal human in any combat unit anywhere. His performance still is lacking way behind, but the fact that he was able to almost keep up with an elite team of super soldiers and saved the others single-handedly on several occasions that The System had acted up and incapacitated everyone else is treated as being damn impressive.
    • MGS4 also has ''Missouri'''s marines. Unlike FROGS, they didn't even have the luxury of SOP, not to mention their lack of any special gadgets. However, even with this limitation, they still manages to fight those aforementioned FROGS to a standstill.
    • In Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance the ongoing Lensman Arms Race means that every enemy, down to the most basic Mooks, is either a Killer Robot or a full-body combat Cyborg. The only exception is Jetstream Sam who fills the role of Raiden's rival and the penultimate boss despite having no enhancements beyond a prosthetic arm. Although, he does wear a suit of body armor that enhances his physical capabilities.
    • The man himself, Solid Snake. While he might have been cloned with desirable traits in mind, at the end of the day he has no special powers (kinda), yet consistently goes up against many of the examples on this list, including Big Boss, a tank with nothing but grenades, Ocelot, Venom Snake, aka Big Boss in essence, self-proclaimed world's most powerful psychic Psycho Mantis, the monstrous B&B Corps, and of course, Metal Gears, and wins. He's not invincible of course, but it's still there. Fitting, as a long-running theme in the series is averting Hard Work Hardly Works: Good old fashioned training and experience ultimately makes for a much better soldier than just pumping a rookie full of augmentations, VR Training, or SOP and leaving him to rely on it instead of developing real skills. Though with that said in MGS4 Snake can wield the BFS Railgun which has the same firepower as a tank and then crawled through a microwave hallway, so apart from well above average strength and insane durability Solid Snake is a normal man.
    • Venom Snake in Metal Gear Solid V. Perhaps best shown in the cutscene on Mother Base where Quiet (a female Super-Soldier sniper with beyond-human strength, speed, and perception) tries to knife a soldier (it's later revealed he had the vocal parasites and she was trying to silence him to save the rest of the base). She Neck Lifts and tosses two men with each arm when they try to stop her and goes to continue her attack when Venom steps in, causing her to attack him. Snake subdues her in seconds. There's also the Diamond Dogs, a defining Badass Army because they can be sent on the same missions as Snake and achieve many of his incredible moments including wiping out Skulls units, clearing out entire outposts without being detected, and destroying Metal Gear Sahelanthropus.
  • Minecraft has the Player, who is essentially this, with exception to the ability to punch chunks out of trees and compressing minerals with one's bare hands, all the player has in their arsenal against the undead and monstrosities from a realm equivalent to hell (among others) consists of what the player can craft at the time, he/she fits comfortably into the Badass Normal category.
  • Everyone in Monster Hunter.
    • Gigantic monsters who are ridiculously tough and possess Elemental Powers, against normal human hunters armed with traps, tools and some really big weapons. Although, occasionally, you really have to wonder just how "normal" the hunters are.
    • The Tigrex and its Brute subspecies don't have any elemental powers. Despite having wings, the Tigrex doesn't fly when it fights. It doesn't have any digging powers, spitting powers, or anything particularly special at all. The Tigrex is just simply one angry wyvern with a T. rex head that has one mighty roar.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • The series with its roster of empowered martial artists and inter-dimensional creatures, introduced Kurtis Stryker in the third installment: a rather unliked cop with some police gadgets in lieu of powers which he used to kick just as much ass as the god of thunder. Armageddon dug him out of the scrappy heap and had him take a level in badass still without giving him any powers.
    • Sonya Blade is the most prominent example of this among the Main Characters. While her partner Jax is a cyborg and her ex-husband and daughter Johnny and Cassie are supernaturally empowered the same as the Shaolin monks Liu Kang and Kung Lao, Sonya herself merely has a Super Wrist-Gadget that shoots pink energy and pure athleticism (she can also kill people with a Projectile Kiss somehow). Despite this, Sonya is still able to beat up superpowered ninjas like Sub-Zero and Scorpion as well as overpower monsters and sorcerers like Quan Chi with her enhanced strength and skill. Though granted Strong as They Need to Be Plot Armour does help Sonya out here. In MKX and MK11, Sonya also has a Attack Drone and other robots as part of her gameplay to make up for her lack of superpowers.
    • X introduces the incredibly awesome Erron Black, a wandering mercenary gunslinger born on Earthrealm and somehow ended up in Outworld. True he has some familiarity with magic but he's never shown using it himself, he just uses old-fashioned firearms and other makeshift weapons to defeat sorcerers, demon spawn and monsters. Hell, when faced with the Xenomorph, what's his intro quote? "Haven't seen one of your kind in a while."
    • Rambo in particular stands out among the Guest Fighters in Mortal Kombat 11 and the series in general. He's a completely ordinary human from an ordinary Earth with no magic of sci-fi elements to speak of. Only Leatherface comes close in how normal and unempowered he is and a lot of his opening quotes remark on just how confused he is. This doesn't stop him from kicking the asses of ninjas, cyborgs, ninja cyborgs, lethal humanoids, magicians and gods.
  • Mother:
    • In EarthBound (1994), all of your party has access to powerful psychic attacks except for Jeff. However, he is the only party member who knows how to assemble and use a bazooka, as well as other weapons, out of junk.
    • Likewise, most of the cast in the sequel, Mother 3. Both Flint and Duster posses no PSI like Lucas and Kumatora, but are still able to take on the same powerful enemies as them. If it counts, even two of the oldest men on Nowhere Island — Alec and Old Man Wess — are able to provide plenty of backup for fighting against mechanized dinosaurs, giant water snakes, and fortified army tanks; at least until the new society deems them useless and throws them in a retirement home.
    • The first game in the series had the prototype for Jeff, Roid/Lloyd, who similar could not use PSI but could use a flamethrower. Then there's Teddy, who is the leader of a gang and has a katana as his ultimate weapon.
    • Also from the first game, Pippi. Yes, she's a little girl, but she boasts insane stat boosts with each level up that are about on par with Teddy's. It's pretty funny to watch her do near double the damage Ninten can do... until, tragically, you have to return her home to advance the plot.
  • M.U.G.E.N:
    • Fighting game Shades of Manhattan 2 has a roster full of superheroes and villains with various superpowers. Then there's Detective Garrett Laurel, a policeman whose superpower is carrying a gun and riot baton.
    • There's also the original character that comes with M.U.G.E.N itself, Kung Fu Man. No ki, magic, psionic or technological powers, just a man with some training in Kung Fu. The only thing not normal is his capability to Double Jump.
  • In Nexus War the Eternal Soldier's power come from being a badass; he compares favorably with angels, demons, and powerful wizards.
  • No More Heroes: Who is Travis Touchdown? Just some loser Otaku from Cali who's into masked wrestling and sword fighting who doesn't get the Infinity +1 Sword or Chosen One status: he just buys a Beam Katana off the internet. Not only that, he's broke and jobless. What's the first thing this stain on society's panties does? Kills the 11th highest-ranking assassin for walking-around-money. What follows is a legendary slaughter of thousands of Mooks, along with such merits as; out-maneuvering Desert Eagles; fighting Superheroes; fighting up-hill against Special Ops; charging an earthquake generator; charging a Wave-Motion Gun; fighting a couple Eldritch Abomination; piloting a Giant Mecha; charging another earthquake generator; flanking giant energy dragons; dodging .50 caliber sniper shots; taking down a Kill Sat; and jumping on top of a so-called "Travesty". All this and more from an Otaku who lives in a shoddy motel with nothing but a sword. He's also amazingly, insanely durable, to the point of walking off things in cutscenes like getting electrocuted, impaled through the chest, slammed into a wall hard enough to leave a huge dent and stepping on two land mines.
  • Kyle, the protagonist of the SNES game Nosferatu, takes down werewolves, golems, and vampires all by relying on his fists and his wits.
  • Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: James Patterson himself. He fights off a whole army of zombies, vampires, ghosts, and demons all by himself. And he's just a normal guy, armed with a sword and some ordinary guns.
  • In Octopath Traveler, most of the playable characters are either mages (Ophilia and Cyrus), Magic Knights (Tressa and Primrose), or have a little affinity with magic (Alfyn, Therion, and H'aanit). Olberic, on the other hand, relies exclusively on his skill with conventional weapons.
  • Paladins takes place in a Dungeon Punk world where most champions either use magic or Magitek. On top of that, half of the champions aren't even human. This makes the champions Viktor and Tyra stand out by being humans who rely on ordinary firearms and their skills as an Old Soldier and a Scarily Competent Tracker, respectively.
  • In Phoenix Point, the Earth is overrun by Eldritch Abominations and Cronenberged sea creatures straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos, thanks to an alien virus that emerged from the melted permafrost of the polar ice caps. The last surviving humans are all hardened fighters. Particularly New Jericho, who eschew Synedrion's advanced technology and the Disciples' playing around with mutations and get by with elite soldiers armed with Magnetic Weapons and sheer human grit.
  • Piers, the Dark-type Gym Leader of Pokémon Sword and Shield, doesn't use Dynamax to power-up his Pokemon. The reason for this is twofold: firstly, Spikemuth is not built on a Power Spot, so Pokemon can't Dynamax at his Gym. Secondly, even if presented with an opportunity to Dynamax, he will refuse to do so as a point of pride. Even without Dynamaxing, he is more than capable of holding his own in a Pokemon battle. Raihan, the Dragon-type Gym Leader, even mentions that he barely managed to defeat Piers while Gigantamaxing. Piers is just that damn good.
    • Looker is an Interpol agent first seen in Pokémon Platinum who, after his Croagunk was killed in Pokémon X and Y, no longer uses any Pokémon or weapons. Bear in mind that, due to the nature of his job, he winds up in many dangerous situations, yet he manages to get by using his wits and knowledge alone.
    • Guzma, from Pokémon Sun and Moon is one of the few Pokémon trainers known to have begun without a starter. That means he had to have caught his first Pokémon without any Pokémon of his own to weaken them first. As that first Pokémon was Wimpod, who can only deal minimal damage until it evolves at Level 30, he either had incredible patience and perseverence or literally fought other Pokémon with his bare hands alongside Wimpod. He later became an Empowered Badass Normal as Alola's strongest Bug-type trainer and the leader of Team Skull, and by Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, has completed the Island Challenge.
  • Amagi Saeko in the H-Game Pretty Soldier Wars A.D. 2048, whose Charles Atlas Superpower brings her into the ranks of Extraordinarily Empowered Robot Girls.
  • Two characters from Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army. First, the obvious: Satake, leader of the local Yakuza gang. He beat up one of the game's heavily-armored Super Soldiers with his bare hands, only suffering some broken ribs. Second, the not-so-obvious: Raidou's perfectly normal employer, Shouhei Narumi. He somehow got to the end of a dungeon crawling with demons he can't see, and Super Soldiers that, while he could see them to fight, are heavily armored. And by the end, he was injured, but still standing and able to walk.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Most of the heroes of the games are normal humans who take on zombies and horrifying mutants with nothing but their skills, tenacity and a whole lot of bullets. Special mention goes to Chris Redfield, Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield, Jill Valentine and Ada Wong. A lot of the stunts they pull off are pretty much Charles Atlas Superpower.
    • Ethan Winters of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Unlike the other RE protagonists, Ethan doesn't have any special training or gym time or anything that would help him survive the ordeal. He's just a regular guy with a missing wife and a stubborn refusal to die. This is however subverted in Resident Evil Village, in which it is revealed that he did die quite early on in 7, and was revived and enhanced by the Mold.
    • The End of Zoe DLC has Joe Baker, who does have experience in the U.S. military but unlike every other RE protagonist is well past his prime, being older than his brother Jack who's in his late 50s. Yet Joe is still strong enough to deal with the Molded and mutant gators with little more than his fists, makeshift throwing spears, and a shotgun.
    • Played fully straight with the Action Survivor cast of Resident Evil: Outbreak as barring RPD Officer Kevin and security guard Mark, the rest of the cast consists of: Cindy (a waitress), George (a surgeon), Alyssa (an investigative reporter), Yoko (a university student), Jim (a Railway employee) and David (a plumber). All capable of kicking as much zombie and monster ass as the veteran heroes of the mainline games.
    • Similarly the cast of Resident Evil: Resistance the pack-in Asymmetric Multiplayer Gaiden Game of Resident Evil 3 (Remake) has: Samuel (a boxer), Harmon (an intern), Tyrone (a firefighter), January (a hacker), Martin (an engineer) and Becca (a parker ranger). All of whom are on par with Jill who can kill The Dreaded Nemesis.
  • Many NPCs in Rift, especially Defiant-side. Dacia Ultan especially stands out
  • In SaGa Frontier 2, one of the two main characters, Gustav XIII, is an exiled prince who is incapable of channeling and using magic. This is significant because, in a world where people are so dependent on magic that they have to use wooden swords and armor to channel their energy for combative use, he conquers the known world by simply using iron equipment (which negate magic powers).
  • The Boss in the Saints Row series pulls of many feats that would be considered outrageous by normal human standards. For example, In Saints Row IV, they are able to go hand-to-hand with Zinyak, an alien twice their size. They appear evenly matched until Zinyak invokes their psychic powers.
  • Septerra Core has Maya and Corgan as these, oh so very much.
  • The original Shadow Hearts has a party that includes a Harmonixer, a vampire, an esper, and two practitioners of magic. And then there's Margarete, who is nothing more than a spy with a pistol. Her "special skills" consist of her calling to her backup team to ask for grenade, sniper rifle, or some more bizarre, but still obviously technological gadget.
  • The Trader Emergency Coalition of Sins of a Solar Empire. They didn't even have a proper military before the war, yet they can go toe to toe with The Advent and The Vasari with nothing more than converted civilian spacecraft, amongst which are a bulk Freighter and a cruise ship, by virtue of excessive armor plating, More Dakka, Macross Missile Massacres and sheer numbers.
    • Their battleship, the Kol, which is explicitly the first true military ship in over 700 years. It is probably the best battleship amongst the three factions by virtue of sheer durability.
  • Skullgirls: Most fighters have some sort of superpower; some have Parasite partners (like Filia, Squigly, and Eliza), some like Parasoul and Cerebella wield living weapons, some like Big Band and Painwheel are cybernetically enhanced, some have other magic powers picked up on their journeys (like Ms. Fortune's Detachment Combat and Annie's Star Power), and some have multiple factors (like Umbrella, who wields a living weapon and is part-Skullgirl), but a few have none at all and still kick ass.
    • Valentine fights only with medical implements, some homebrew poison, and her skills as an elite anti-Skullgirl agent.
    • Beowulf is probably the crowning example of this, as even Valentine is implied to have used a Super Serum in the past, but Beowulf is just a really good wrestler armed with a chair he calls "The Hurting", and in his backstory he managed to defeat the Gigan warrior Grendel in single combat. Okay, that fight was fake, but his skills aren't; when given a rematch with Grendel at full strength, he still wins. In his story, he goes on to beat up Cerebella (in an exhibition match; she's a huge fan), Painwheel, Valentine, Big Band, himself (Double impersonating him), Double, and the Skullgirl herself.
    • Many of the unimplemented potential DLC characters would also have fit this trope; Hubrecht, Regina, Minette, and the Black Egrets have no special powers.
  • The Janitor from Soda Dungeon 2. He shows up every hundred floors where a dimension boss used to be. While he does start off as kind of a joke, he gradually gains a massive HP well, a diverse skillset, and a terrifyingly lethal broom the further into the dungeon you go.
  • Soul Series:
    • Mitsurugi has no supernatural powers and no connection to either spirit sword, and the katana he uses is made of perfectly normal metal and has no otherwise remarkable features. However, he's so skilled that whole armies of normal men can't beat him even with firearms, and he's considered a worthy adversary to blatantly supernatural fighters like Nightmare, Olcadan (who killed a god's messenger) and Algol. In the time gap between IV and V, Mitsurugi has hung up his trusty katana and become a farmer because absolutely nothing short of immortal god-kings challenges the guy any more. There's more than a few other characters who would count as well - Hilde, Hwang, Setsuka, Rock note  — but when it comes to sheer badassery, nobody else even comes close.
    • In Soul Calibur VI where he finds himself a Worthy Opponent in a certain Witcher. To wit, a type of Super-Soldier created through magic and alchemy to fight monsters because they are far too dangerous for regular humans to handle; a Witcher is strong enough to cleave a fully-armoured man in half with a steel sword, has eyesight and reflexes to put a cat to shame, and even some limited magical power in the form of Signs. And a completely ordinary samurai from 16th Century Japan fights him to a draw.
    • VI in general highlights this more, mainly because unlike before, the characters that have explicit supernatural power now use them in combat. The majority of characters have some kind of special ability, with the exceptions being the aforementioned Mitsurugi, Seong Mi-na, Maxi, Voldo, Raphael, and Tira.
    • Seong Mi-na, inverse of Mitsurugi's case, deconstructs this. She gets utterly curb-stomped by Ivy, a woman with quasi-magical/alchemical abilities and a living whip-sword that moves according to her will, and she was completely unprepared for it because she didn't even know magic exists. It could be Mi-na is just Overshadowed by Awesome: she would be a very awesome fighter if she were a real person, and she cuts through monster Mooks over the story with little trouble, but there's only so much an ordinary Korean girl with a spear can do against named characters who are just as good as she is, and have supernatural powers to boot.
    • Hwang also deconstructs this with his appearance in VI. He is an immensely skilled swordsman and a national hero in Korea, but he has no training to fight the supernatural threats thrown at him by Soul Edge and its minions. He's actually killed when he tries to investigate the Society of Salvation because he cannot defend himself against Won Gabok's magic (Gabok turns him into a Malfested and tells him he will use his body as an assassin, starting with Mi-na; hearing this, Hwang commits Seppuku to prevent himself being Reforged into a Minion). His body is recovered by a Taoist sage and she resurrects him and tutors him in Taoist magic because there is no way he can contend with Gabok using only normal techniques.
  • The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series has the eponymous stalkers, all of whom survive (and thrive) in a radioactive wasteland covered in patches of land where the laws of physics have gone bananas, all of which is ruled by psychotics with various levels of firearms. All of whom will kill you just as soon as they will trade with you. Anyone who can thrive in that environment is a badass normal.
    • Probably the best example besides the protagonist is Lesnik, the old forester who lives in the Red Forest in a disused radio tower alone, and has done since before the Chernobyl plant exploded back in 1986. The Red Forest is not only highly radioactive but also exceedingly dangerous and mutant-infested by the standards of the Zone, and Stalkers refuse to venture there unless in heavily-armed groups. Lesnik managed to bag a Bloodsucker (a lightning-quick vampire-like creature with razor-sharp claws, optic camouflage skin and a mug only a mother could love) and mount its head on his wall, presumably with nothing but an old hunting shotgun (he leaves it hanging next to the grisly trophy).
  • In StarCraft, being Badass Normal is the hat of the Terran faction, who are simply spacefaring humans. The other factions are the highly advanced psychically gifted Protoss and the Zerg, a Horde of Alien Locusts.
  • In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic:
    • Carth Onasi is simply a damn good soldier if chosen instead of Canderous or HK-47. Give him a double-sided sword and the appropriate feats, and he kicks Dark Jedi ass!
      • While it may or may not be accidental, there are several hints in-game (being able to see/understand Ajunta Pall, incredibly strange luck, uncanny intuition) that Carth might be a closet-case Force Sensitive. Plus, his son joined the Sith Academy on Korriban—as a Sith. And the lore is pretty clear that the Force is typically hereditary.
    • Canderous is arguably the best example of this. He appears in both games and is a non-force sensitive Mandalorian that can take on anything, be they troops, creatures, droids, and even dark Jedi, whether he's gunning them down with a BFG or hacking with a BFS. Exaggerated in the sequel when Canderous turns out to be the best of the three options (the others being two Jedi, one of them who has absorbed much power from others) to tank a literal Force-Eldritch Abomination.
    • Jolee lampshades the usefulness of the soldiers in his banter with Bastila.
      Jolee: I want to stop Malak as much as anyone. But I don't have to join the Order to do it. Look at Carth or Canderous. They're with us in this quest, but they aren't Jedi.
  • A must in Star Wars: The Old Republic, because precisely half the player classes are Jedi or Sith, and the others can't just be inferior to them. There is the Bounty Hunter class, sure (who ends up kills more force-Users than any other non-Force user class in the game through sheer firepower and crazy preparation), but the Republic Trooper can go toe-to-toe with a Sith with melee weapons, and sometimes just his bare fists and a single grenade. Meanwhile, the Smuggler has even less firepower, and resorts to such things as kicking his opponent in the nuts. The Imperial Agent in particular was designed around the idea of how someone like Grand Moff Tarkin is capable of standing up against Force-users.
    • Even the Jedi and Sith classes will lean heavily on their Muggle companions.
    • The Hope cinematic trailer shows this in action with commander Jace Malcolm. After tanking the lightning of one of that era's most powerful sith for a solid few seconds, he uses Darth Malgus' moment of distraction to get in close, get him in a Brawler Lock, THEN DETONATE A THERMAL DETONATOR IN HIS FACE!
  • In Star Wars: Battlefront and sequels, the Player Character is this, especially if they're the basic soldier class. Just a regular soldier, gunning down enemy troops by the dozen and even shooting the crap out of Sith or Jedi.
  • The Street Fighter series has Balrog. He's a completely normal boxer who can hold his own against opponents who can throw fireballs, defy gravity, sheath their bodies in electricity, or kick you in the face from 30 feet away.
    • Even with characters with Ki Manipulations and other bizarre powers, there's still plenty of fighters who rely on good old traditional ass-kicking. Other examples include Balrog's Blue Oni counterpart Dudley, the entire Final Fight roster, Zangief, Makoto, and Vega. Cody in particular not only has no special powers (aside from a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane tornado uppercut) or even a formalized fighting style but handicaps himself with a pair of handcuffs and can still go toe-to-toe with the likes of M. Bison in his prime. If that weren’t enough when he takes the handcuffs off in the Udon Comics Cody knocks out Ryu The Hero with a single punch.
  • All the player characters in the Streets of Rage series know some form of fighting, whether it's wrestling or martial arts, and one of the characters is a cyborg who attacks can electrocute people. The enemies the crew faces aren't much different than they are, but they can swarm in by the dozens and can all be easily taken down by you single-handedly. By the 2nd game onward, you fight robots and you beat them down with your bare hands! The player characters can also use a variety of mundane items for extra damage like glass bottles, knives, baseball bats, and pipes.
  • Ryley Robinson, the silent protagonist of Subnautica, winds up the sole survivor of the starship Aurora crashlanding on an alien ocean planet. He quickly copes with the initial shock and steels himself for the long haul and perseveres against the odds. By the time the credits roll, Ryley has survived countless close encounters with alien predators, braved the irradiated wreck of the Aurora to plug the holes in the ship's drive core, cured a terrible alien plague, saved an ancient species of gentle, intelligent telepathic leviathans (and through them, the entire planet) from extinction, and been the first human to discover signs of a star-faring alien civilisation. Not bad for the "Non-Essential Systems Maintenance Chief".
  • Luca Blight from Suikoden II fights with only a single sword and heavy armor in a world where magic is pretty commonplace. He ends up tearing through the protagonist's army when they try to target him in a battle. He is nearly undefeatable, only dying when he is ambushed by the 18 strongest members of the opposing army (protagonist included) plus some archers. He's riddled with cutscene arrows, fights six party members, riddled with some more cutscene arrows, fights six more party members, fights six MORE party members, gets riddled with more cutscene arrows, then finally dies in a duel against the protagonist. This is generally considered his best CMOA, although there are several more.
    • The Beast Rune potentially disqualifies him from this, however.
    • Georg Prime may also qualify, being hailed as the greatest swordsman in the whole Suikoden world. Then again, he has an Eyepatch of Power.
  • While almost every character in the Super Mario Bros. series has some superhuman abilities, it is worth noting that a lot of these are acknowledged to be species traits. Toad is no different from any other Toad in terms of abilities, but he is MUCH more badass.
  • Kai Kitamura (and arguably Katina Tarask and Russel Bagman) in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation, who are implied to fight through several major battles against rebels and alien invaders in grunt-level mecha, as opposed to the many Super Prototypes and Super Robots used by the other heroes (though the player can assign them to some of said Super Prototypes). When Kai can get a badass Humongous Mecha of his own in the second game, even that drives the point home, as it looks exactly like his old grunt unit (in OG Gaiden, he officially gets another mecha, which is just a customized version of his grunt mech). One of his battle quotes handily sums up the role of a badass normal: "One fist may not be able to destroy the world… but it can certainly destroy you!"
    • In a way, Elzam von Branstein (also known as Ratsel Feinschmecker) also applies. Most of the more skilled Real Robot pilots generally have some variety of psychic powers, and characters who don't generally balance this out by piloting the more powerful but generally less maneuverable Super Robots. Elzam, however, pilots the Huckebein Mk-II and Mk-III — both Real Robots designed for use by psychics — far better than any of the psychic characters ever could. He's just that good. When he finally does receive a Super Robot, he loses some of what makes him "normal" but gains the equivalent in pure badass. And he still dodges better than the psychics.
      • He introduced himself to America as this in typical mind-blowing fashion: In the very first mission of Original Generation 1 for the Gameboy Advance, he takes out a squad of alien beings humanity has never seen before A) all by himself, B) with the weakest mech available in the game, the basic Gespenst, and C) while that Gespenst has absolutely NO weapons on it whatsoever. He solidifies himself as a Badass Normal from the start.
      • He survived one of Kusuha's health drinks with zero ill effects.
    • Kyosuke Nanbu also fits here. Unlike his colleagues, he doesn't have any psychic powers and he isn't chosen by any guardians or anything like that. He manages to fight and win his battles by pure skill and a little luck. Want proof of this? How about the fact that his mech, the Alteisen Riese is considered to be an impractical mech, is so top-heavy that it requires a tesla drive (which normally enables flight on a mech) just to stand without falling over and has no special weapons (just guns and pellets). Yet he still manages to kick plenty of ass with it.
      • The only thing that's really abnormal about him is unusual luck that has allowed him to survive (with minor injuries) attacks/accidents that should have killed him. In the past, he was the only survivor of a shuttle crash full of cadets; In Original Generation he walks away from a utterly destroyed prototype after a traitor sabotaged it and caused it to crash; and in Original Generation 2 he survives having his mech ripped apart by Axel, though that was the only point he was closest to dying.
    • There's also Super Robot Wars Judgment's Calvina Coulange. While most of the originals here (friends or enemies) are of the Fury race in general (including Touya, who is Half Fury), she just happens to be a normal human, who used to be a genius Ace Pilot. And when presented with a mecha designed to be ridden by Furies, all she needs is just a little adjustment and then she resumes her old days of metal ass-kicking, piloting something she's supposedly not be able to drive.
    • Discussed between Raidiese F. Branstein and Gyunei Guss in Shin Super Robot Wars. Gyunei asks Rai if he's a "Fortified Human", which Rai knows nothing about. He then demands to know how Rai can be so calm when his life is on the line in this battle, and Rai answers that calmness is only natural for a skilled pilot, the implication that Gyunei is afraid of fighting.
  • Super Smash Bros. features a wide array of fighters with magic powers and/or futuristic weaponry. Two characters who break from this mold most strongly are the Villager, who attacks entirely with the mundane tools he uses in his home franchise, and the Wii Fit Trainer, who is able to hold her own against the likes of Bowser and Samus Aran with nothing but yoga poses.
    • Even Villager and Wii Fit Trainer use some pretty abnormal things (like summoning things out of nowhere and firing orb-shaped solar rays from their stomachs). For the truest normals, there's Solid Snake in Brawl, who is mostly just a guy with a lot of impressive gadgets and weapons. There are also the Fire Emblem characters; while Ike does employ quite a bit of fire in his attacks and Robin is a straight-up mage for the most part, Marth and Lucina are pretty much just people who are really good with swords.
    • Little Mac is just a really good boxer, who normally fights other human boxers. Watching him beat the crap out of many of the giant monsters in Smash Run is interesting.
  • In System Shock 2, the player has military-grade cybernetic augmentations (and is actually in the military), but Dr. Marie Delacroix, whose logs show her one step ahead of the player with similar objectives, can be found in various locations, lacks such implants or even military training, but seems to do rather well from said logs at least until SHODAN feels she is no longer needed and leaves her to die.
  • While in most Tales Games, magic is hinted at being quite normal and can be matched by the physical arte users, the only game in which this trope can exist is Tales of Phantasia, and it counts for Cless, Chester, and to some extent Suzu. Magic is needed to defeat Dhaos, and Mint's magic is only healing so obviously, they have to get Arche and Klarth, who are rarities outside of elves in that they are able to use magic. (Klarth is one of the few humans who can use magic because he makes pacts with spirits, Arche is half-elf.) Cless, Chester, and Suzu are left to their own weapons and their own strengths, not being blessed with such power, but they do compensate for their powerful techniques, some of which border on magic. (As for Suzu, she learns her techniques through ninja scrolls which may be counted as magic).
    • Chester, in the original game, takes things out simply with his bow and arrow. He needs no technique.
    • In the game's prequel where magic is limited to those with elven blood, angels, or the chosen, Sheena has hinted that she, Regal (And maybe Zelos despite being a chosen) have elven blood distantly because they use magic. But meanwhile, Presea (despite being modded with expheres) is able to pull extremely heavy stuff with one hand despite being smaller than Genis and she and Lloyd are the only ones with no magic skills whatsoever.
    • Also worth noting is Tales of Rebirth's Milhaust Selkirk. He is the only Huma who doesn't have a Force, but he is still the highest-ranking character amongst the Karegia Kingdom and makes other Force users bend to his will and order. That being said, he is also powerful enough to beat the crap out of Veigue (although he was mentally distraught that time). And when both duke it out in full force, Milhaust was beaten... but even Veigue admitted Milhaust held back and there's no telling what the outcome will be if Milhaust was serious.
    • Alvin from Tales of Xillia qualifies, being the only member of the party who's completely incapable of using spirit artes due being a native of Elympios. Doesn't stop him from spontaneously generating fire and other elements to augment his sword slashes like other swordsmen throughout the series, though.
  • Invoked in the endings to Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars. Several of the Tatsunoko heroes are downright inspired by the Street Fighter characters and Batsu, for being able to hang with them in a fight through nothing but their training and resolve to grow stronger themselves.
    • Frank West, a freelance journalist who is able to kick thousands of zombies' asses with only a camera (which is not even a weapon) in his hand from the start in Dead Rising, and is able to swing things around crazy from the mart. Now that he is put into Tatsunoko vs. Capcom which is full of heroes with special martial arts or superpowers, big credit for Frankie!!
  • Tomb Raider has Lara Croft, gaming's quintessential English Badass Bookworm Action Girl. She has over the course of many long years faced dangerous (and often oversized) animals, dinosaurs, Irish ghosts, badly mutated humans, horribly mutated humans, mummies, evil statues, undead samurai warriors and outright gods with nothing but a pair of pistols. She has beaten them all.
  • Tekken has a lot of fighters capable of performing superhuman feats without much explanation other than Rule of Cool, but Heihachi Mishima has to take the cake. He is able to defeat both his wife and son, who have supernatural "Devil" powers granted to their bloodline by an ancient demon. He survives a fall off a cliff, walks away from an explosion that destroys an entire shrine with no visible injuries, and has the strength, reflexes, and precise control to catch a bullet fired at him from point blank range between his teeth. And he's in his 70s.
  • Touhou Project contains some of the most horrifically powerful beings imaginable, including-but-not-limited-to the creator and ruler of a demon world, a Cute Ghost Girl that can kill anyone with a thought, a vampire that can annihilate any- and everything, an oni that can create black holes and tear apart mountains with her bare hands, an ancient Reality Warper, a Judge of the Dead, two absolute immortals, a crow that wields nuclear fusion, and a character with literal, actual, impervious Plot Armor. Then there is Marisa Kirisame, a young girl without any inherent skills or abilities and only managed to use magic after studying really hard (and stealing various magical books and artifacts), who has not only fought all of the above but commonly wins.
    • And in the PC-98 exclusive Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream, we have Yumemi Okazaki, who doesn't even have that going for her; she comes from a world without magic and relies on a scientific imitation. She's also the only human endboss of any main game, as of 14.
    • Rika, both the first and extra boss of the second game, is a subversion. Though she's rather violent when behind one of the tanks cooked up with her engineering skills and able to go toe to toe with the Plot Armor-imbued main character, once she's out of her iron box she's little more than a sniveling little girl. Still, being able to build this... thing without magical powers has got to earn her points on the badass scale. In fact, she's the only human extra boss in the whole series so far. Not to mention being perhaps the hardest Extra stage boss in Touhou history.
    • Hong Meiling chooses to be a melee fighter (specializing in Tai Chi Chuan) in a world full of long-distance danmaku battles. While this did lead to her being defeated by at least one protagonist, she continues practicing each day, either through her Tai-Chi regimen or through developing some powerful short-range techniques while guarding at her post. She still believes that relying on projectiles is a waste.
    • Similarly is Youmu Konpaku, whose only special characteristic is being a Half-phantom. Much like Meiling, she makes up for her lack of special powers through sheer martial prowess, though in this case, it's her skill with swords that lets her contend with many of Gensokyo's finest. This is in spite of the fact that she's bringing a sword to danmaku fights.
  • Almost the entire Nanaya clan of demon hunting assassins in Tsukihime. They're supposed to have some psychic abilities, but otherwise fight demons and half-demons with pure physical talent. Shown very well in a Kagetsu Tohya side story with Nanaya Kiri (Shiki's real father) and his hit on a certain demon-blooded family, kicking much ass, up to and including disassembling his primary target when backed into a corner... wielding nothing but a pointed stick (metal, granted, but still).
  • Crossovers usually have this, with the whole comparing of characters from different universes deal. Notable examples include Nathan Drake in Playstation All Stars Battle Royale, Solid Snake in Super Smash Bros., Ezio Auditore in Soul Calibur V and the aforementioned Frank West in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom.
  • Teagan in Uncommon Time. Unlike the rest of the party, she can't do flashy magic — she just hits stuff really hard. She does have some affinity for earth magic, but can only use it to improve her physical strikes.
  • While most of the cast of Valkyria Chronicles can qualify by the fact they make a contribution in battles with massive tanks and superpowered Valkyrur, Imca of Valkyria Chronicles III is probably the most notable. She manages to actually knock out a fresh Valkyrur who had just fought an army, and impresses Selvaria, pretty much the strongest soldier with Valkyria powers or not.
  • Viking: Battle for Asgard has the main character leading one of these. Against whom you ask? The Queen of the Underworld and her Undead army, and they win.
  • Orgrim Doomhammer and Anduin Lothar, the leaders of the Horde and Alliance respectively in Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (and later retellings of the Second War). In a world war with dragons, undead sorcerer knights, paladins, ogres, magi, ogre-magi, submarines and countless other magical and technological weapons and persons of mass destruction, the Warchief and Grand Marshal still stand out as the two most dangerous beings present. Doomhammer gets additional props for being one of the few orc leaders who did not drink demon blood to gain super strength and Lothar gains extra props for being sixty.
    • In World of Warcraft, there's also Varian Wrynn, king of Stormwind, as well as both Saurfangs (and Brox, a relative, from the novels), Muradin Bronzebeard, and every notable Nightelf character that neither used magic nor druidic/divine powers.
    • Among the playable classes in World of Warcraft, the warrior, hunter, and rogue classes certainly qualify as they fight exclusively with physical weapons and animal companions and have no notable magical abilities.
      • Noteworthy is that in Legion every class gets their own class hall that only they can access. Most use some form of portal to get to and from their class hall. Warriors? They jump off the floating Valhalla style city that is their class hall and hit the ground like a meteor.
  • Wild ARMs series:
    • Wild ARMs 2 has Brad. He's got no magic, he's not a cyborg, a vampire, nor does he have an ancient spirit of evil sealed inside of him, all he has is his training as a mercenary and his heavy weapons. Despite this, he's capable of out-damaging damn near everyone in the party, not to mention being able to tank anything thrown his way.
    • Wild ARMs 4:
  • In The Witcher, Leo is an experiment by Vesimir in creating a kind of pseudo-witcher who has undergone the Grasses (herbal steroids) as well as witcher swordsmanship and magic training, but not had the mutations to make them truly superhuman, as the means to impart the mutations into witcher candidates has been lost. While the youth can defeat a large gang of bandits with ease, he is unable to deflect a crossbow bolt shot by the Professor and he tragically loses his life.
  • Wolfenstein's B.J Blazkowicz, probably the Trope Codifier Badass Normal Action Hero for the video game medium. Built like a brick outhouse, strong enough to wield an MG46 as a personal weapon, delivering one-liners in a gravelly Texan voice and waging a one-man war against Those Wacky Nazis... and winning. Blazkowicz has prevailed against hordes of Nazi soldiers, Nazi cyborg Super Soldiers, the undead, the occult, giant robotic dogs that breathe fire, not one but two Nazi Humongous Mecha and as many Eldritch Abominations, and even the Devil himself twice. As Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus demonstrates, not even decapitating him is a sure bet that you can permanently be rid of him, and the new Ubersoldat body he gets his head grafted onto is actually little different from his old one. If there is such a thing as a "master race," it begins and ends with B.J.
  • A rival of MapleStory called WonderKing has the Gunner/Gunslinger class. In a game where even warriors and ninjas call upon magical powers, a Gunner's skills consist of acrobatic maneuvers and using a variety of different weapons. Examples include a Gatling gun, a bazooka, and a missile launcher.
  • Tora of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is completely unable to resonate with Core Crystals, and thus cannot be a Driver by normal means. However, he fights just fine with his artificial Blade.
  • Xenonauts: Armed civilians and local law enforcement. A U-FO has just crash-landed, there's plasma flying everywhere, the mysterious human forces are utterly incompetent, but they will still one-shot that Reaper. With a pistol.
  • The playable characters in Xenosaga include a cyborg, a robot, a Realian, a URTV, the handmaiden of Mary, the universe's fail-safe, and Jin. Though he is a thoroughly ordinary human, Jin manages to slice Humongous Mecha in two, stop a blade with his bare hands, hold off waves of gnosis before his Heroic Sacrifice, finish off one of these gnosis after being impaled with a BFS, and be an all-around badass.
    • Allen of all people gains elements of this in the third episode. When confronting Kevin Winnicot, he takes several lightning blasts that would kill any normal person, then gets back up, all while telling Kevin—who is a supernaturally powerful Testament—how pathetic he really is. Also, in a scene after that, he pounces on an end-game level Gnosis, bludgeons it with his gun, and shoots it point-blank in the face. It's safe to say he would have made a full transition into a Badass Normal if there had been a fourth episode.
  • Adol from the Ys series. There's nothing obviously supernatural about him; he's just a dude who decided to wander a bit, and yet he pretty much eats gods for breakfast as a living. And even though he can use magic in some games, it's always for plot-related reasons (such as the bracelets in Ys: The Oath in Felghana) and not innate ability (as we said, there's nothing obviously supernatural about him), and he loses it after the journey's over. His best friend, Dogi, is pretty much a Badass Normal as well.
  • In Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner, Leo Stenbuck pilots Vic Viper, a heavily modified LEV. In comparison to Orbital Frames like Jehuty, LEVs are vastly inferior; yet Leo is able to hold his own against Jehuty in single combat.
  • Shadowrun Returns: Duncan is a completely ordinary person (well, he's an ork, but that's nothing unusual for the setting), but has no magic, no qi powers, no spirit guardians and no cyberware. All his abilities come from determined training and a shitload of guns, but he still manages to keep pace with the rest of the team.


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