Broken Faceplate

For when you want the best view of your imminent death.

The betrayer is enraged

His mask is broke, his crimson hauberk cloven

His brains they are arrayed amongst the ruins of the lies he's spoken

— GWAR, Immortal Corruptor

In some media, particularly science fiction media, armored characters will often have large plates covering their face. This could be anything from a large bubble helmet used in a conventional space suit, to a thin strip-like visor running across their eyes. Sometimes writers and artists need to show combat damage on suited characters, and one of the most visible and effective means of communicating that to the audience is by means of smashing, cracking, or putting a hole through the faceplate on their armor, suit, or mask.

This can be a very powerful image, as humans instinctively look to the face to gauge the state of another person's emotions, and even when that face is completely concealed behind a visor, the fact that the visor is damaged tends to communicate horrible damage quite quickly. This can also be a form of Gory Discretion Shot, as any damage severe enough to put a hole through a faceplate is likely to make a mess of the head it conceals, but the actual blood and gore need not be directly shown. See also Pretty Little Headshots. On the other hand, if the damage caused uncovers the character's face but does not cause head injury, that can also be a way of communicating to the audience that though the character is not dead, they are in serious danger. Tearing away their protection and revealing their face in the process will "humanize" an armored character to the audience, with all attendant human vulnerabilities that implies.

Note that though this trope seems most common to armored characters, it can apply to any character who conceals their face behind a mask. For example, a masked Super Hero who gets their mask partially torn off in battle would count as this trope, though one who deliberately takes the mask off would not.

Often a type of Armor-Piercing Attack, this is a non-fanservice Sub-Trope of Clothing Damage, and Sister Trope to Hat Damage if non-fatal. Can overlap with a Dramatic Unmask if this is done to reveal a character's identity. May invoke Ominous Crack where it's not fatal for added drama.

As is often a Death Trope, Spoilers may be unmarked ahead. Beware.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Happens in the fourth season of Bakugan when Dan shatters Mag Mel's mask in their fight, revealing his true identity of Emperor Barodius, the previous season's Big Bad who'd been sealed away for his attempted destruction of his neighboring planet.
• Very dramatically in the Code Geass first Season Finale: Suzaku shoots a bullet straight at Zero's forehead; the mask slowly cracks, falling into two pieces on the floor and finally revealing Lelouch Lamperouge's identity to both him and Kallen.
• In Darker than Black, one of the most common and effective ways to show that a foe is to be feared is for them to break Hei's mask.
• In Death Note, when Matt is shot by Takada's bodyguards, his goggles are cracked.
• '"Doraemon''
  • The remake of Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan have Doraemon and gang battling the masked villain, Gigazombie, whose mask later gets split vertically into two by a flung spear, revealing Gigazombie's true face to the heroes for the first time. Turns out Gigazombie looks like an ordinary person under that sinister mask.
  • Doraemon: Nobita and the Robot Kingdom have the villainous Dester having his helm split into half (in both anime and manga), leading to the Unrobotic Reveal that Dester's a human.
• In GTO: The Early Years, Nakajo punches the masked biker's helmet hard enough to smash it. This doesn't even knock him out.
• Gundam:
  • In the metaseries, the sight of a shattering faceplate is usually, though not always, the signal that a pilot is now dead. At best, it's a sign of severe injury and possible major life change.
  • In Gundam Build Fighters Episode 20, in the after-credits scene, this involves The Reveal of Aila being the lady with the helmet to Reiji.
• In Made in Abyss, during his rematch against Bondrewd, Reg bites down on Bondrewd's helmet, tearing away the metal plating covering his Magical Eye.
• Ryuga in Mahoromatic gets his helmet smashed open in the last episode of the first season.
• Haku from Naruto. His mask cracks and falls off while he waits for Naruto to kill him.
  • Later on, Obito's orange mask gets destroyed during his fight with Konan, and Naruto shatters his white mask during the war, revealing that he wasn't Madara, but in fact, Obito.
• Pumpkin Scissors:
  • Alice is buying time for Randel by taking on an entire division of Claymores (masked, heavily-armoured shock troopers). The captain mocks her because she's getting tired; her response is to hack right through the metal faceplate of the captain with her double-bladed cavalry sword, then slash through his body armour.
  • The same episode has another example near the end. As the body of Hans of the 908th High-Temperature Troop is being carted away, we see the faceplate of his flame and bullet resistant armour cracked wide open. As he can no longer survive outside his suit, this example is even more appropriate than most.
• Happens in Space Runaway Ideon several times, but it is rarely if ever meant to be a Gory Discretion Shot, given how graphic deaths are in the series.
• In Trigun, a sign that Vash is genuinely pissed is that he aims to kill, hitting the eye portion of Monev's transparent faceplate and cracking it, though Monev survives the shot.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, Zone's mask cracks after receiving a direct attack and part of it soon breaks off, revealing that he has the same face as Yusei.

Comic Books

• Galactus's Cool Helmet is occasionally cracked during battles, though this can happen with opponents who are much weaker than he is, like Thor. On one occasion, Thanos was able to blow off most of his armor revealing a human-looking form beneath his armor, though this is just what the human mind perceives.
• During the conclusion of Throne of Atlantis, Aquaman shatters Ocean Master's crown in two. Afterwards, Ocean Master relinquishes the title of king of Atlantis to him.
• In The Transformers (Marvel), Optimus Prime's famous faceplate was melted away when he was consumed in the explosion of Unicron's destruction. In the Transformers Generation 2 continuation, his faceplate was punched clean off by the berserk Jhiaxus.
  • In the Grand Finale of the original IDW comics timeline, this was inverted: his faceplate was all that was left of him after his death. Coincidentally, on that occasion, he was also consumed by the destruction of Unicron. During his funeral, Windblade placed the faceplate on his (empty) coffin.
• In Ultimate Fantastic Four, the titular foursome have to wear helmets on their journey into the N-Zone due to the dimension's atmosphere being lethal to humans. When Reed and Ben encounter Nihil, he springs a trap that shatters their faceplates. Reed spreads his hand over his helmet to keep it sealed shut. Ben isn't so lucky, but fortunately, it turns out that he can breathe in the N-Zone's atmosphere. Though in Ben's words: "This air tastes like crap."
• Wonder Woman: The Contest Artemis breaks the faceplate on the helmet of one of Julianna Sazia's musclebound cyborg henchmen during her first outing as a hero.

Fan Works

• In the Dornian Heresy (an Alternate Continuity of the ''Horus Heresy''), Sanguinius came into the care of the Baalite mutants who called themselves the Changed. With Sanguinius's help, the Changed defeated the Faceless Ones and piled their smashed rad-suit helmets at the base of Angel Falls.
• In Fallout: Equestria, Littlepip deals with a troublesome Enclave soldier by putting a large crack in her Powered Armor faceplate and hurling her into a vat of mutagenic chemicals. The results are not pretty.
• During the Final Battle of Marionettes, Trixie manages to shatter half the visor of Masquerade's Puppeteer Armor's helmet at the same time Masquerade shatters one of Trixie's (who turned out to be an android) eye lenses to reveal the optic underneath. This is more of an issue for Masquerade, as with her helmet damaged she has to block more attacks than she otherwise would.

Films — Animated

• Invoked. In G.I. Joe: The Movie, Cobra Commander's plate falls off in front of Roadblock, after he was blinded.

Films — Live-Action

• In 300, the Persian Immortals wear chromed masks into battle. One gets unmasked by a blow to the face. What's underneath is even uglier, matching the rest of Xerxes' army of freaks and horrors.
• Ad Astra.
  • During the Moon buggy chase, the lieutenant commanding Roy's escort is Killed Mid-Sentence by a Boom, Headshot! smashing in his faceplate.
  • While investigating a space station laboratory, an astronaut is attacked by an escaped lab monkey who smashes in his helmet and chews off his nose. Another astronaut desperately tries to cover the massive hole with duct tape, but he's dead by the time they get him back to his own spacecraft.
• In the original Alien, the first thing the face-hugger form goes for is the helmet, secreting acid to melt through the faceplate to impregnate the host within...
• In Autómata the Automaton Pilgram 7000 series and up have built-in faceplate-like masks that are often graffitied, shot at, broken, or when fully sapient simply removed.
• Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Towards the end of the fight between Batman and Superman, the helmet of Batman's Powered Armor gets broken enough to partially expose Batman's face, and the white eyes and voice changer don't work well anymore. Along with the rest of the armor, the broken helmet is seen again in Zack Snyder's Justice League as a Continuity Nod.
• The Dark Knight Rises:
  • During their first fight, Bane beats Batman so brutally that his cowl cracks.
  • In their second fight, Batman invokes this against Bane, hitting him so hard that his mask breaks - which messes with the constant flow of painkilling gas Bane needs to ignore the pain from his injuries.
• Equilibrium: the foot soldiers of the evil emotion supressing regime of Libria all wear motorcycle helmets during fights, many times their deaths are signalled by the glass front of the helmet shattering either from gun fire or by pistol whipping.
• In Gravity, Shariff's death is confirmed not only by the large hole in the visor of his helmet but by the hole in the back of the helmet and straight through the head in between.
• In Interstellar, this happens to the hero after getting a headbutt from another astronaut.
• In Iron Man 3, Pepper finds and picks up an Iron Man helmet, which has been cracked in half and slightly burned.
• Several examples in The Last Days on Mars (2013). Patient Zero staggers back to the expedition base, somehow surviving a fall that should have killed him or punctured his spacesuit. As he's dragged out of the airlock, a crewman takes off his helmet and we're shown the hole in the faceplate just before the Facial Horror of his desiccated features is revealed, and he attacks the crewman as an enraged alien fungus-infected zombie. Later a Zombie Infectee pulls off her space helmet to stop a colleague from rescuing her. He tries to put the helmet back on but sees the faceplate has been smashed. Later he comes across a member of the relief team dead in his spacesuit, after hearing their Sound-Only Death. The final version is when the Sole Survivor has to headbutt another infected victim, raising the possibility that he also might become infected.
• During their clash in The Last Jedi, Finn damages Captain Phasma's helmet, enabling viewers to see one of her clear blue eyes for the first (and possibly last) time.
• As in Literature below, The Martian has this happen to Mark Watney, forcing him to carry out a hasty emergency repair. Fortunately he has a roll of duct tape on his belt.
• At the end of the Action Prologue in Pacific Rim, Reliegh stumbles out of a collapsed Gypsy Danger with the faceplate over his helmet reduced to a few broken pieces around the edges and the right shoulder of his suit torn off, showing what he just went through.
• Masked Avengers have the leaders of the Masked Gang constantly wearing their masks, much like their namesake. A Mauve Shirt hero managed to confront three of the leaders, and slice their masks into half revealing their identities, one at a time. But then the third of the leader whose mask he splits apart turns out to be one of his allies, the unexpected reveal stunning him long enough to be mortally wounded by an ambush. He survives long enough to reveal the truth behind the Mask Gang to his allies later on.
• In The Raid, one early non-essential character gets shot clean through the faceplate on his riot helmet. Doubles as Eye Scream, at that.
• Used in RoboCop (1987), where his visor gets smashed open by ED209, allowing the audience to see the fear and surprise on his face during a close-up.
• Happens in Spider-Man Trilogy at least twice. Spidey's mask gets ripped when he's on the receiving end of a beatdown.
• The movie poster for Sputnik shows the protagonist holding the bloodstained and shattered helmet of a cosmonaut. Turns out something got inside the man who was wearing it.
• In Star Trek: First Contact, Picard takes a blow to the head while wearing a Starfleet space suit, causing the visor to crack. Fortunately for him, it still holds.
• During the space jump in Star Trek Into Darkness, Kirk takes a winging glance to the face from a small piece of debris. It produces a hairline fracture on his faceplate which begins to expand into a spiderweb of cracks as the air pressure in his suit pushes the faceplate outward. It holds and does not shatter completely, but it does disable his Heads-Up Display which he needs to navigate the debris field.
• During the intense forest battle in Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, Megatron shatters Optimus Prime's iconic faceplate by kicking him in the face. Soon after, Prime has to spit damaged pieces of it out of his mouth. Later, when he is upgraded with Jetfire's parts, Optimus's faceplate is repaired.
• Underwater.
  • Rodrigo has a faulty diving helmet and doesn't tell anyone as there aren't any more helmets to replace it. Norah is the only one to notice the Ominous Cracks appearing in his visor before they open the hatch to the outside ocean and the water pressure causes Rodrigo's damaged suit to implode.
  • When Lucien and Norah are ascending too fast, their suits are making cracking sounds from the pressure, until Lucien's visor starts to visibly crack. Lucien forces Norah to break her hold, so she at least will survive.
  • The oxygen in Norah's suit has run out, so Emily drags her into an airlock and purges the water but can't remove her helmet, so she has to smash a hole in Norah's faceplate to let the air in before she suffocates.

Literature

• Frequently appears in the BattleTech Expanded Universe:
  • In the Legend of the Jade Phoenix trilogy, Aidan only won his Bloodname when a lucky shot from his autocannon cracked the canopy on his gloating enemy's Humongous Mecha, which shattered and burst outwards on the airless moon.
  • In the finale to the second Saga Of The Gray Death Legion novel, Grayson Carlyle is forced to jettison his mech's armored canopy and fight off a lance of enemy mechs. By the end of the fight, he's suffering from second-degree burns and corneal damage from the searing light of his mech's twin Lightning Guns.
• In the Ray Bradbury story Kaleidoscope, several astronauts are thrown into space with no hope of rescue. One of them starts screaming hysterically, and rather than listen to this over the suit radio for the rest of his short life, the protagonist smashes the man's faceplate.
• In The Martian, after the seal around one of the Hab airlocks rips and the pressure blasts the airlock out, with Mark inside it, Mark has the faceplate of his helmet shattered. He is trapped in a pressured environment with a slow leak and needs to MacGyver a way to seal it before he can go anywhere. He ends up cutting the left arm off his suit, tucking that arm against his chest, sealing the hole where the arm was, then using part of the suit's arm as an emergency patch, using the camera on the other arm to see.
• Shown on the cover for the space horror novel Paradise-1, by David Wellington.
• Spaced Out (2016): When Dash sees Lily Sjoberg's space helmet on the floor of the old Moon Base Alpha operations pod, he notes a crack zig-zagging across the visor.
  • Dash's mom also notes a hairline fracture on her space helmet's visor while out on the lunar surface. This was because Cesar Marquez and the Sjoberg twins were using them as football helmets one night, and damaged them.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who. After the Action Prologue of "The Power of the Doctor", Dan gets back on the TARDIS, takes off his space helmet and sees a hole smashed in the faceplate. Realising how close he came to dying, he decides to return to his ordinary life on Earth rather than continue adventuring with the Doctor and Yaz.
• Farscape
  • A Catapult Nightmare has Crichton dying this way in "Dream a Little Dream".
  • In "The Flax", Crichton and Aeryn are trapped in a damaged transport pod and the only way to fix it is to depressurize briefly. They have suits but the visor on Crichton's helmet is cracked so he won't be able to fix the environmental controls. Instead he tells Aeryn how to make the repairs and how to perform CPR to revive him once she's sealed the pod.
• Kamen Rider:
  • In Kamen Rider Blade, Tachibana (Garren)'s helmet is broken when he faces off against the Peacock Undead.
  • In Kamen Rider Decade, Yuusuke, wearing the G3-X armor, is attacked by one of the Lords and part of the faceplate is damaged in the process.
  • In Kamen Rider Gaim, Mitsuzane blows off half of Takatora's faceplate at the end of their duel.
  • Chihiro's Amazon Neo helmet is broken by gunfire in the finale of Kamen Rider Amazons, revealing his true monstrous Amazon form underneath.
  • In the penultimate episode of Kamen Rider Build, Gentoku Himuro/Kamen Rider Rogue's helmet is broken while fighting the Big Bad Evolt. He doesn't survive much longer afterwards.
  • In the last episode of Kamen Rider Zi-O, Geiz's helmet is broken after receiving the final blow that would kill Sougo to save his life, then untransforms and tells him to turn into Oma Zi-O and dies in the process.
• Played for laughs in Loki Season Two, when Mobius finds the suit he's about to wear to go outside to a temporal loom that will spaghettify him at the smallest leak, has a crack in the helmet.

Mobius: Is this thing cracked?!

OB: slaps duct tape on it You'll be fine.

• In the finale of the Star Wars series Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan manages to cut Vader's helmet open with his lightsaber during their duel, revealing half of his ravaged face. It also causes Vader's voice modulator to malfunction, which allows Obi-Wan to hear the voice of Anakin Skywalker once again.
• Power Rangers:
  • Psycho Pink of Power Rangers in Space gets her helmet cracked, but you don't get to see through it. The same cracked helmet prop is reused a season later, when she (barely) survives the combined finishing moves of the Space and Galaxy Rangers, and seeks payback.
  • Lost Galaxy - During the final battle with Trakeena, Leo uses his Super Mode armor to grab her and fires at point-blank range. At first, his teammates aren't sure he survived, but he staggers out of the rubble with half his visor blown off and gives an epic thumbs up.
  • Lightspeed Rescue - This is how Captain Mitchell finds out who the new Titanium Ranger really is. It's his son.
    • Happens to Carter in the finale, to an extent — his helmet gets knocked off and we see the visor shattered when the helmet landed.
  • Time Force - This is how Wes's father finds out that his son is a Ranger.
    • This was a shot-for-shot remake of a scene from Mirai Sentai Timeranger. Including the fact that you could only a small part of his face, and the dad was a good ten yards away or more.
  • Ninja Steel - In the extended version of "Dimensions In Danger", Tommy and his robot Evil Knockoff have a brief Mirror Match in their Dino Thunder suits. When Tommy's visor gets broken, he starts using his other powersets.
  • Beast Morphers - Devon gets his visor shattered by Tubatron's sound wave after said robot is upgraded with a Fury Cell; This incident leads to Grid Battleforce developing their own Fury Cell tech.
• In Breakaway, the pilot episode of Space: 1999, astronaut Nordstrom flips out on the Moon's surface, is zapped by a laser barrier, and is thrown to the ground, cracking the faceplate of his helmet on an inconvenient rock. He survives it, but it doesn't really get any better for him.
• Super Sentai - Here's a montage.
  • Happens to Black Condor in Choujin Sentai Jetman.
  • In Mirai Sentai Timeranger: Tatsuya's visor breaks after he blocks a shot aimed at the City Guardians, revealing his identity to his father.
  • Happens at least once in Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger (to Blue).
  • In the Mahou Sentai Magiranger movie, Hikaru / Sungel gets shot point-blank, shattering his faceplate. Instead of his face, we see pure light underneath before he changes into his Heavenly Saint form.
    • A curious variation takes place in the final battle against N Ma; Kai manifests his helmet without the faceplate.
  • Gekiranger: Jan gets a hole punched in his visor during his final fight with Rio.
  • Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters: In Mission 14, Hiromu and Ryuuji both get smashed visors. This shows how strong the Metaroids are getting... the episode happens to be the debut of the 4th and 5th rangers. It also happens to Ryuuji in mission 46. It happens to all three main Rangers in the finale.
• In a rather strange inversion, Ultraman Z has Destrudos, transformed from Ultroid Zero, whose head breaks in half after the robot absorbs seven kaiju DNA to complete its mutation into the said monstrosity. The right part of Ultroid Zero's head half hangs onto several spikes on its right shoulder, where as the left one hangs on the head.

Video Games

• The mask of Yasha, which symbolizes his allegiance to the Seven Deities in Asura's Wrath, takes more and more damage throughout the game, at one point being removed when he joins Asura in opposing his bosses, before finally shattering completely when Yasha finally dies in Episode 21.
• Two instances in Batman: Arkham Origins:
  • During the Deathstroke boss battle, Batman punches Deathstroke's face plate so hard that it flies off his face completely.
  • After beating Firefly, Batman punches out one of the eyepieces in Firefly's helmet, revealing part of his burnt-up face.
• In Battle Zone 1998, the first NSDF Europa mission ends with a shot of a Cosmo Colonist Army trooper with his helmet shattered, his face bloating out and freezing simultaneously in the vacuum. In Battlezone II: Combat Commander, mission failure with the ISDF results in a shot of your character's head exploding out through the Latex Space Suit's faceplate while the rest of their body melts.
• In Bayonetta 2, Bayonetta's recurring adversary, the Masked Lumen, gets his mask partially broken by Loki via a surprise attack, revealing his right eye which Bayonetta recognizes as the Right Eye of The World, which previously belonged to Father Balder, the Big Bad of the first game. In their climatic fight, he removes his mask entirely, and reveals himself to be young Balder.
• In the Macintosh FMV shooting gallery game Blood Bath, the screen cracks when you get hit, and displays a blood splatter when you are killed.
• This happens to Alternis Dim after his defeat in Bravely Default.
• In Call of Duty: Black Ops, one mission requires you to wear an NBC suit during a chemical attack. You're still fighting, though, and as you take damage, your faceshield will crack. While your health will regenerate normally, your faceshield won't, meaning that if you take too much damage in the entire sequence, you'll die from exposure to the chemical agent.
  • Also briefly appears Modern Warfare 3, in first person, when Price's Juggernaut suit is damaged by helicopter rockets in the final mission.
  • Black Ops II also briefly uses this in the final level, where the player and his team are dropping into the area by way of some form of jetpack with helmets/rebreathers as missiles explode in the air along your path; flying through the explosions damages you and causes minor cracks to appear at the edges of your vision, though not enough to actually break it if you get killed on the way down.
• In Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun the Nod campaign starts with a pan shot to a fallen Nod trooper, whose helmet is blown open. Unlike most other instances of this trope, if you look closely you can see the remains of the guy's face (it ain't pretty). This is intentionally juxtaposed with Nod Propaganda being broadcast over the trooper's transmitter, which leads into the actual intro.
• In Deus Ex: Human Revolution while infiltrating the TYM headquarters in Hengsha, Jensen comes across a TYM employee who just got caught in an industrial accident. He is trapped in a room full of toxic gas, and something smacked him across the head and broke the clear visor of his Hazmat Suit. He has a secondary rebreather beneath that, but it is clearly not as effective without the suit's seal, and the man is running out of time.
• The bad ending of Einhänder if you run out of time on the sixth stage.
• In FEAR 2: Project Origin, the screen cracks when Becket dies, representing his Cool Shades that give him his HUD being broken.
• Friday Night Funkin': Tankman's defeat icon has his visor shattered.
• Happens to Cpt. Mitchell in one of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2's later missions, also wrecking your HUD.
• In the finale of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, Yda's faceplate is cracked, showing one of her eyes, as she and Papalymo cover the other Scions' escape.
• Halo:
  • A few examples in Halo: Reach:
    • Noble Six's helmet is shown as a Dead Hat Shot In Medias Res during the opening cutscene, half buried in the dirt, lying alone and abandoned on a charred battlefield.
    • Seen from first person when Noble Six is making a Last Stand against the Covenant, and we learn why the helmet was discarded as shown in the opening.
  • In the teaser for Halo 5: Guardians, Master Chief's visor is cracked. He sports the look in-game after Locke kicks him in the face.
• Used on the cover of Haze. Not that it ever actually happens in the game.
• Meta Knight from the Kirby series normally falls victim to this after you defeat him in his boss fight. It also reveals that his real face is a lot like Kirby's. He normally flees after you see it.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure, during the Final Chapter of Azure, the Special Support Section has to fight against Arianrhod, the Seventh Anguis of Ouroboros. Doing enough damage to her destroys her helmet to the point her stats increase and she'll likely wipe the party with her S-Craft soon after. She considers it an honor that the SSS survived long enough to break her helmet. If you defeat her, she considers them to be Worthy Opponents who can survive everything else to come after her.
• In Luminous Avenger iX, the end of final fight with Blade has him shattering his own helmet after seeing the picture in Kohaku's pendant that Copen dropped during the fight, revealing his face and showing he's a she. This is due to Blade finally overcoming her brainwashing from Sumeragi after seeing her little sister and her helmet apparently containing whatever tech they were using to keep her under control.
• During the "Bring Down the Sky" mission in Mass Effect, a survivor of the attack mentions that the Batarian terrorists killed engineers working vacuum by smashing their faceplates.
• Mass Effect: Andromeda uses the broken face plate during the very first mission. It happens almost immediately to the Player Character, though they quickly repair the damage with their omnitool. Later...the effects of a completely shattered face plate are a little harder to overcome.
• In Mega Man ZX Advent, the final boss Master Albert wears a full helmet with the front covered in opaque dark-blue glass that only shows his Glowing Eyes of Doom. Defeating him shows in the following cutscene Grey/Ashe manages to shatter the glass, revealing the fatally wounded Albert's face as he spitefully condemns them before he explodes.
• In Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, this is a gameplay mechanic similar to the Black Ops example above when you go above ground: your gas mask will start to crack and break as you take damage while wearing it. As it gets closer to breaking, it becomes less effective, and when it has a hole punched in it, it's done for and you have to find another in less than thirty seconds.
• The Game Over screen in Metroid Prime.
  • In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Samus comes across the leader of a group of Federation Marines on planet Aether. His faceplate is broken, so you know he's dead.
• In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, the Big Bad Shriek's horned skull headgear gets broken when Seir fends her off near the end of the story.
• The Bulldozer units in PAYDAY: The Heist can have its faceplate broken when shot at enough times, allowing you to do massive damage afterwards. in PAYDAY 2 and PAYDAY 3, Bulldozers have two layers of faceplates, with the unit's face being exposed upon both being broken.
• Spider-Man (PS4) - the mask of Peter's new, armored suit gets cracked about halfway through the final boss battle. Peter briefly tries to hide his face, only for Octavius to reveal he already knows it's him.
• In StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, a scene near the end of the game shows the aftermath of a battle, with many broken and imobile suits of Terran power armor strewn across the ground. One prominent shot shows a large hole shot through the characteristic domed visor.
  • A news report in Heart of the Swarm symbolizes a report on Jim Raynor's faked execution with a shot of his suit with a bullet through the faceplate.
• Used in first person in Star Wars: Republic Commando. The leader of Delta Squad will get cracks and chips on his visor when taking damage, which will be quickly repaired as the helmet's systems re-surface the visor.
• Twisted Metal: Head On has Miranda Watts, whose driver's helmet is broken enough to reveal one of the her eyes. By the time of her ending, it's gone through enough damage to reveal her entire face. It serves to give her an Identical Twin ID Tag from her sister from the second game, who wore a pristine helmet, and whose gameplay role she takes in this one.

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue: Revelation
  • Near the end of the season, the Meta manages to drive a spiked A.I. containment unit into Tex's visor, smashing a large round hole into the front of it and absorbing her into the unit. ^note Rooster Teeth supposedly intended for this iconic image to be used on the DVD cover until they discovered the trope was also being used in Halo: Reach, which was being released at nearly the same time. They decided to change it to avoid seeming like they were ripping off the idea.
  • It shows up again after York's injury in the sparring match in season 9, where he loses vision in one eye and gains some serious scars.

Webcomics

• Mistress Butterfly of Collar 6 cements her status as a Big Bad by shattering the cyclops-like faceplate of a supposedly powerful member of the association called a Judicatrix.
• May from Supernormal Step.
• This happens to Noisemaster in Cucumber Quest after his attack on Nautilus is unexpectedly blocked. It also marks the end of his silly DJ persona as his Kill Sat is fully charged and counts down to fire on the Melody Kingdom.
• In Narbonic, the state of Dave's eyeglasses symbolizes the state of his sanity. For most of the comic's run, his glasses are intact but represented as opaque. Towards the end when Dave finally realizes the great secret responsible for much of his life's path, his glasses are suddenly represented as clear, showing that he can see clearly now. And then one of the lenses cracks, as a not-so-subtle way to show that Dave is half-cracked.
• Spinnerette has a situation where a North Korean superhero raids a research faculty in the USA intending to steal a superweapon. The American general tells him, smugly and unwisely, that his platoon of Super Soldiers are wearing power armour and protection that makes them invulnerable to superpowers. The supervillain Colonel Glass then smiles wickedly and points out that his name is Colonel Glass. What do you think my superpower is? He then notes the soldiers are wearing vision-enhancing lenses in their faceplates. which from the point of view of a supervillain who can manipulate glass and turn it into, say, razor-sharp shards propelled with some force, is rather convenient. He then proceeds to blind each soldier in one eye. Because he's feeling merciful.
• Moontear in Star Mares usually wears polarized lenses that completely cover her eyes while in space. They get conveniently blown away when she has to have her eyes visible for a reaction shot.
• An early page of Terra has resident Friendly Sniper Grey O'Shea save one of his unit by putting a round through the faceplate of an Azatoth soldier.
• I'm the Grim Reaper: This happens to Brook twice. First is when Scarlet shoots him in the head in order to break his mask. The second is during their second fight when she manages to punch him and actually hurt him a little.

Western Animation

• When T'Chaka (the previous Black Panther) is killed by Man-Ape in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, his mask falls to the ground and symbolically shatters.
• In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, Jaller's mask is damaged during the Great Rescue. Vakama promptly gives Jaller Lhikan's mask.
• On Episode 7 of The Legend of Korra, police chief Lin Beifong beats an Equalist Mini-Mecha by metalbending her cables into punching daggers and smashing through the faceplate, attacking the operator.
• A scene of Star Wars: Clone Wars sees General Grievous grasping a clone trooper's head with his clawed foot and smashing him against a wall so hard that his helmet shatters and his jaw is visible. There's no blood, but it's reasonable to assume that the trooper is down for good.
• Star Wars Rebels: In "Twilight of the Apprentice", Ahsoka manages to take Darth Vader by surprise and damage his mask, revealing his right eye, and the deformed face of Anakin Skywalker to her.
• Transformers:
  • During Optimus's death sequence in Transformers: Armada, his faceplate cracks apart up close before he crumbles into dust.
  • Later, in Transformers: Cybertron, Optimus Prime's mouthplate is shattered again during the final battle, although he remains alive, victorious. Galvatron is the one who dies this time.
  • In Transformers: Prime, Soundwave gets slashed across his faceplate by Wheeljack, shortly before Wheeljack headbutts him hard enough to badly crack it. However, Soundwave shows pretty much no reaction to the damage and manages to narrowly win their battle.
• In the first season finale of The Owl House, Luz takes on Emperor Belos, the most powerful witch on the isles. At first, it's all she can do just to stay alive, while he's not even trying - until he lets his guard down and she chips off part of his mask with a surprise attack. This convinces him to get to the point of their meeting, with an added warning that he'll stop being so friendly if she does that again.

---