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Fire-Breathing Weapon

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"We have flamethrowers. And what this indicates to me is that at some point someone said to himself, 'Gee, I'd sure like to set those people on fire over there, but I'm way too far away to get the job done. If only I had something to throw flame on them.' And it might have ended there, but he mentioned it to his friend—his friend who was good with tools. And about a month later he came back, 'Hey, quite a concept!'" FWOOOSH.
— George Carlin

Sometimes, you have an opponent, structure, device or other target which you have just got to kill with FIRE. If you have to do this multiple times, you would wish you have an actual weapon which can burn things for you instead of rigging something on the spot all the time.

You will need the Fire Breathing Weapon; a gun-like weapon which creates fire. Pull the trigger and a gout of fire will appear, covering your target in burny goodness. Most games use a form of directional Splash Damage to implement this.

Of course this is not limited to the flamethrowers alone: various (directional) bombs, traps, improvised weapons and even vehicle cannons can fall under this category. The common similarity between all the weapons here is they all use "Kill It with Fire" as their main form of causing damage, and they are all "point and burn" weapons.

Weapon of choice for the Pyromaniac. Sometimes used for lighting cigarettes.

PS: If you use this weapon on your target, and it stands up uninjured yet on fire and quite pissed off... well, it's nice knowing you.

See also Greek Fire, Flaming Sword, Aerosol Flamethrower, Booze Flamethrower, Molotov Cocktail, Homemade Flamethrower, Videogame Flamethrowers Suck, and Flamethrower Backfire. Compare Playing with Fire, for people who make fire themselves or Flame Spewer Obstacle where vents of flame acts as a hazard. If you were looking for literally breathing fire, that's Breath Weapon.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Black Lagoon: The character Claude "Torch" Weaver specializes in these.
  • One Piece: Early villain and weapon-maniac Don Krieg has, among his unnumerable arms, a powerful flamethrower hidden in the wristplates of his armor: it's compact but powerful enough to torch to ashes a huge piece of mast which Luffy threw at him like a javelin before it could hit him.
  • Pumpkin Scissors: Hans, the last surviving member of his 908th Flamethrower Troop, still wields his unit's weapon and is permanently stuck inside his flamer unit gear. He witnessed the rest of his unit die before his eyes when they removed their gear, and subsequently became quite deranged as a result.
  • In Rurouni Kenshin, minor villain Hyottoko has a primitive flamethrower built in his body: basically, he has a large bag of oil in his stomach, with the nozzle in his mouth and flint teeth, allowing him to breathe fire at will. Kenshin easily beats his fiery breath by spinning his sword fast enough to create a wind current and deflect the flames.
  • In Sailor Moon, Eudial of the Witches 5 uses flame-throwers made from household appliances called Fire Busters. They prove surprisingly powerful and can even overpower Sailor Moon's Finishing Move.
  • Yaiba: Burner the Fire Kishin carries a massive shield on his person that can generate a pillar of roaring flames at will.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: Panik sets up his duel arena with flamethrowers that he uses against Yugi — first to intimidate him, then to burn him to a crisp after Yugi beats him. It fails, and Panik gets mind-crushed.

    Comic Books 
  • The DCU:
    • Batman: Firefly, a villain with a jetpack and a flamethrower.
    • Batwoman (Rebirth): Kate Kane has flamethrower gloves that shoot fire from the palms.
    • Code Name: Gravedigger: In Men of War #4, Gravedigger grabs a flamethrower during a raid on a secret German weapons store. He fires it down the barrel of a tank's main gun just after the tank has fired, when he knows the breech will be open as they reload. This fills the cab with flame, cooking the crew and touching off the ammo.
    • The Flash: Heat Wave is a villain who carries two pistols that shoot fire.
    • Martian Manhunter: The Human Flame has a shirt that shoots fire.
    • Supergirl: Kara Zor-El has an enemy named Nightflame — who made her only appearance in Demon Spawn story — who has a sword that shoots fire like a flamethrower.
    • Wonder Woman: Black and Gold: The lady thief in "Golden Age" brings a torch to cut into the safe, and quickly turns to using it as a weapon when Wonder Woman intervenes.
  • In Missile Mouse, Blazing Bat uses a flamethrower as his preferred weapon.
  • In Silverblade, one member of the Carnival of Killers Vermillion hires to kill Milestone wields a flamethrower.
  • X-Men villain Pyro wears a suit that includes a pair of wrist-mounted flamethrowers because he can control fire but does not generate it.

    Comic Strips 
  • In Scary Gary, Leopold has a flamethrower. He occasionally uses it to "help" Gary do things like making toast when the toaster is busted, and claims it also does waffles. One of Leopold’s favorite phone apps is also a mini-flamethrower.

    Fan Works 
  • Bait and Switch (STO): During the away mission in chapter seven, Eleya's tricorder picks up traces of fuel from a flamethrower, and she later inadvertently sets off said flamethrower's fuel tank with a grenade. Near the end of the chapter, a Bajoran Militia captain describes the Orion slave-raiders as having given up trying to break into a building that some Militiamen had barricaded themselves into. Instead, they used the flamethrower to set it on fire.
  • The Night Unfurls:
    • Kyril possesses the Flamesprayer as an offhand weapon for setting crowds of foes ablaze during his killing spree in the Mercenary Compound of Ansur. It is also used to burn prisoners alive during interrogation.
    • In Rad, Lily uses the Flamesprayer to hold back a horde of mutants and cook them alive.
  • The Space Marines in Rocketship Voyager have atomic burners, specifically described as nuclear-powered flamethrowers, in homage to Starship Troopers and Limbo.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The ABCs of Death: In "S", Roxanne pulls a flamethrower from the trunk of her car and tries to barbecue the hooded man. It doesn't work.
  • Alien: This is an effective weapon against Xenomorphs, since fire is one of the few things they don't like. It also has the advantage of not splashing acid everywhere when burning them.
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Anatoli Knyazev, a mercenary working for Lex Luthor, uses a flamethrower to burn several corpses in order to frame Superman (making him look like Superman did it with his Eye Beams). Later on in the movie, Luthor kidnaps Superman's mother and orders Anatoli to Burn the Witch! if Superman doesn't fight Batman. Batman however comes to the rescue of Martha Kent, and Anatoli suffers a Flamethrower Backfire after threatening to burn his hostage.
  • A Bridge Too Far: A humorous scene involves a flamethrower team sneaking up to destroy a bunker on the Arnhem bridge, only to dive for cover when they hit an ammunition dump instead.
  • The Burning: Cropsy whips out a makeshift flamethrower when he confronts Todd in his hideout.
  • Captain America: The First Avenger: Some of HYDRA's Elite Mooks wear battlesuits that have both plasma cannons and flamethrowers on the arms. The flamethrowers turn out to be the one weapon that Cap can't duck or dodge.
  • Deal of the Century: An Arms Dealer is hassled by a road rage jerkass, so he takes a flamethrower out of his trunk and adds to the flames painted on the side of the man's muscle car.
  • Don't Go in the House: The Pyromaniac Serial Killer builds his own flamethrower to kill people with.
  • In Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Dracula blasts Mike with fire shot out from his one-eyed demon-headed ring, burning him to ashes.
  • Dr. No deters the curious from going near his Island Base with a "dragon", actually a flamethrower-equipped armored car.
  • In Evidence, the killer uses a welding torch as their weapon of choice.

    Literature 
  • Baccano!: When things start to look bad for the Lemures, their leader Goose arms himself with one.
  • In The Day of the Triffids, flamethrowers turn out to be the most effective weapon against the eponymous killer plants, though since the crash of civilization it's increasingly difficult to find fuel. In Simon Clark's sequel, The Night of the Triffids, the protagonist's group have mitigated the problem by developing flamethrowers that run on triffid oil.
  • Discworld:
    • Rather literal example in Guards! Guards! when Vimes tries using a small dragon as a weapon to defend himself and Sybil from an angry mob.
    • The Klatchian Fire Engine in Men at Arms, although to Nobby's disappointment he doesn't get to try it in the field, after singing Sergeant Colon's eyebrows while testing if it still works.
    • Some deep-down dwarfs in Thud! are armed with flamethrowers. One makes the mistake of leaving his weapon behind when fleeing down a tunnel from Wilkins. Wilkins decides to fire it down the tunnel in case they're thinking about coming back.
  • In Dream Park, WW2-vintage flamethrowers turn up in the South Seas Treasure Game, which is set in around 1950.
  • Fengshen Yanyi:
    • The Immortals of Kunlun are in possession of two different magic feather fans that can generate massive masses of scorching hot blazes when swung: the Five Flames Seven Birds Fan used by the Elder Immortal of the South Pole and the Five Flames Divine Fire Fan bestowed to Yang Ren.
    • Taiyi Zhenren possess the magical Nine Dragons Divine Fire Coverlet, a magical trap which can turn anyone caught inside to ashes with the Breath Weapon of nine dragons.
    • Among his arsenal of fire-themed weapons, Luo Xuan has the Five Dragons Wheels (a couple of bladed wheels made of fire dragons that can spit fire as they fly across the air) and the Heaven-Illuminating Seal (which however is easily countered by Princess Longji's magic sword).
  • Rapier in The Five Greatest Warriors uses a flamethrower at one point to incinerate several men who were ambushing his allies.
  • Older Than Feudalism: In The Iliad, the hero Diomedes (the one who stabbed Ares) is described as having a fire-breathing shield.
  • Incarceron has firelocks, best described as fire-spitting rifles. In a world kept in a kind of post-medieval stasis.
  • Limbo by Bernard Wolfe has nuclear-powered flamethrowers!
  • In LoLo Apollo: I'm Afraid of Americans, Beetle uses a small flamethrower to light the bonfire at a Saturday evening church service, impressing the attending crowd. He later uses it to murder Halloween Jack and torch the JTF camp, preventing Bob Dracula from radioing out for aid.
  • In Mark S. Geston's novel Lords of the Starship, the book's entire Twist Ending is that the gigantic Starship of the title, which takes over a century to build, is not meant to fly at all — its rockets are actually humongous flamethrowers designed to incinerate millions of people.
  • Most Secret by Nevil Shute is about a fishing boat during World War II that is fitted out with a large flamethrower in a plan to destroy the German escort vessels keeping an eye on the French fishing fleet. The Kill It with Fire trope is specifically lampshaded.
  • The blue boxes in Relic Master are flamethrowers of some ilk, although they resemble electrical weapons as much as incendiary ones.
  • The Sackers in the Star Trek novel The Three Minute Universe used these to burn a couple of redshirts to a crisp for getting too close to one of their structures. Their natural weapon is fire and they are seemingly immune to all but the most raging of infernos anyway, so this works well for them.
  • In John Marco's Tyrants And Kings series, the flame cannon is one of the pinnacles of technology from the steampunkish, Roman Empire expy Nar. These flame cannons are basically artillery-class flamethrowers that can be used at close range and they have so much range that they are also mounted on ironclad warships to battle wooden ships that use conventional black-powder cannons.
  • The War Against the Chtorr: the preferred weapon of the protagonist against the Chtorran invaders, despite the fact that he had to burn alive the man who first taught him how to use it.
  • The grandaddies of 'em all: the Martians in The War of the Worlds (1898) have tripods armed with a deadly heat beam which can set almost anything on fire, and if not, melt it.

    Live-Action TV 

    Music Videos 
  • At the end of the video for Quarterflash's "Harden My Heart", a flame-thrower is used on the small building the lead singer emerges from, as it gets razed down.

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech has the Flamer, which runs gas near the mech's fusion reactor to heat it up, then vents the gas at an enemy's face. The first version of the Mechwarrior RPG for the game has a personal flamer pistol, which, while having only a couple of "shots", is noted as being highly intimidating, especially to other mechwarriors who already live with the possibility of being baked to death by their own mechs.
  • d20 Modern: Flamethrowers can force victims to roll around to put out the fire... but it's illegal, and can explode while you're wearing it. Use it with care!
  • GURPS has a slew of these: flamers and fusion guns from Ultra-Tech, flamethrowers and aerosol flamethrowers in High-Tech, low-tech flamethrowers for clerics in Dungeon Fantasy, heat rays in Spaceships, the fire lance from Fantasy, and the cheirosiphon and eruptor style weapons from Low-Tech.
  • In Paranoia, flamethrowers and plasma generators are as unreliable as everything else in Alpha Complex. Do you risk trying to repair them, or just unstrap the power pack and try to Outrun the Fireball (and risk being fined for letting valuable Computer property be destroyed)?
  • In Rocket Age, the flamethrower is available to players and enemies alike. Although essentially just a conventional early 20th century weapon, more daring and suicidal individuals use Radium fuel, which burns hotter and faster, but is, well, radioactive and even more likely to leave a crater than a regular pack if shot.
  • Warhammer:
    • The Skaven have Warpfire throwers, basically Steampunk flamethrowers with mutagenic napalm, though like most Skaven technology they're rather unreliable and prone to backfiring.
    • The Dwarves have cannons designed to send flaming pitch arcing towards the enemy, while their Irondrake troops can choose a handheld version of this as their primary weapon.
  • Warhammer 40,000: The flamer is so ubiquitous that just about every race, even the super-advanced Eldar, use some variant of it. In game terms, flamethrower-type weapons are useful because they 1) use a long teardrop-shaped template to resolve hits, meaning a well-placed burst can hit over a dozen models, and 2) they ignore the effects of cover, making them useful for clearing foes from bunkers or ruins.

    Theme Parks 

    Toys 
  • G.I. Joe: The weapon of choice for Torch, one of the Dreadnoks, as well as Blowtorch and Charbroil on the Joes' side.

    Video Games 
  • Army Men: The series as a whole is about toys, mainly plastic soldiers. Oddly enough, these guys aren't afraid to use fire to kill one another. Just look at Scorch from the RTS game, and the uses of one in Sarge's Heroes.
  • Ashes 2063: Flamethrowers are a somewhat common sight. Cannibal Master mutants have a version that jets out balls of flaming napalm, and Warlords have a version that spews short-range but highly damaging clouds of fire. Scav has the Master Blaster, a human-sized model that can fire in both modes but requires periodic reloading; in Afterglow, Mutant Destroyers carry the exact same model and are deadly with them.
  • Batman Doom: Batman can obtain an arm-fitted flamethrower that functions like the Plasma Rifle in Doom. Meanwhile, the Flamethrower Dude enemies are armed with traditional flamethrowers. Both of these weapons have a quite limited range.
  • Bayonetta 2 has the Undine, demonic weapons with both both Kill It with Fire and Kill It with Ice settings that are fueled by the rage and jealously from the soul of a jilted lover.
  • Bloodborne has the Flamesprayer, a steampunk-ish device the size of a particularly large watering can that runs on your ammunition to produce large gouts of flame. It lacks the stopping power of a proper firearm, but compensates through sheer amounts of damage in a decent area. What's more, many of the more bestial enemies fear and are Weak to Fire.
  • Flamethrowers in Bloodhound are an enemy-exclusive weapon (sadly), used by some human cultists to incinerate you. There's also one of the bosses, Punk the demon whose left arm is grafted with a flamethrower which he'll repeatedly use to turn his boss arena into a blazing inferno.
  • Blow Out grants you a flamethrower early in the game, for incinerating large numbers of mutant bugs closely packed together. Be warned that for larger bugs who can absorb more damage than the regular ones, they'll continue attacking when set alight to invoke Infernal Retaliation.
  • In Broken Helix, there's a flamethrower Reese gives you to clear out the laboratory's vents. It uses energy cells instead of gas canisters.
  • Brood Star: The Flamethrower primary weapon replaces the player ship's normal energy bullets with a continuous stream of blue-white fire. These flames do a lot of damage but fizzle out before traveling even half the length of the screen, forcing the player to get a bit closer to the onrushing Horde of Alien Locusts than usual.
  • Brutal Doom has the Mancubus Flame Launcher and the Revenant's hellish shoulder missile launchers, the same used by Revenants and Mancubi after they've been blown to pieces. The Mancubus flame cannon and Revenant missile launcher shoots globs of fire to burn any demon and zombie it hits. Project Brutality allows the Mancubus flame launcher to act as a flamethrower. The M2 Heavy Plasma has a plasmathower Secondary Fire that Doomguy swings in a wide swath in front of him.
  • Call of Duty: World at War has a flamethrower with short range but unlimited ammo if it doesn't overheat. It's potent at short-range like a real one but piss-poor anywhere else. While it is powerful in Call of Duty: Zombies, it quickly loses potency as the rounds go on.
  • In Cold Fear, you can get your hands on a flamethrower later in the game. It works pretty well against most enemies, thought the invisible specimens and the Brutes won't be staggered by it. Furthermore, it's pretty much useless outside, as the rain and the strong winds will render it useless.
  • Command & Conquer:
    • In the Tiberium series, the Brotherhood of Nod often has infantry armed with these, among other weapons included in their arsenals. It should be noted that the realism of fire-based weaponry in the series tends to vary from game to game. Nod's love affair with flamethrowers has, several times, extended to flamethrower tanks. In Tiberian Sun, this extended to the bizarrely improbable Subterranean Flame Tank.
    • Over in Red Alert, the Soviets have been known to use flamethrower turrets for base defense.
    • Generals gives us the Chinese, who love (nuclear) fire just as much. "Dragon" Flamethrower Tanks, fire-shelling artillery, fire-bombing MiGs and various nuclear weapons are all present in the game.
  • Contra:
    • The F weapon in Contra III: The Alien Wars and its Game Boy port, Contra: The Alien Wars.
    • A flame-thrower is one of Iron's special weapons in Contra Force.
    • The one in Contra 4 fires spinning fireballs (by twos in the back-view stages), and then upgrades to a gigantic one.
  • Crash Bandicoot: Dingodile uses one of these to great effect.
    Dingodile: Break out the butter. I'm gonna make toast!
  • Cyberpunk 2077: Johnny Silverhand's signature weapon is the Malorian Arms 3516 pistol, which comes with a short-range flamethrower to deal with enemies that got a bit too close. Though it's worth noting that this is its secondary function and the Malorian is primarily used for shooting.
  • In Dead Rising 2, Chuck Greene (and later Frank West) can combine a plastic gasoline canister with a suspiciously familiar Brand X water gun to get a carbine-style flamethrower (no backpack tank), great for turning large groups of zombies into large piles of charred corpses.
  • Dead Space has a chemical one. It's the size of a fire extinguisher and for some reason can't work in a vacuum in the first game.
  • Deus Ex Universe: In the first game, short puffs work frighteningly well against common mooks and panics the ones that can last the burns but eats its rare ammo if put on full blast, takes up 4x2 spaces in your inventory, and requires more skill in Heavy Weapons to be effective. Invisible War's flamethrower has a napalm ball launcher as its Secondary Fire and acts much like its predecessor.
  • Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth, Doom³, and Doom (2016) have the Mancubi with their arm-mounted flame launchers that spit fireballs with deadly accuracy.
  • Dynasty Warriors: Zhang Jiao, leader of the Yellow Turbans, can shoot streams of fire and globes of flame out of his staff, often to deadly effect. Starting from the seventh game, the Shaman Rod weapon type (which includes Zhang Jiao's weapon of choice) can emit bursts of flame as part of its heavy attacks.
  • Everything or Nothing: Jaws uses a flamethrower during his final battle with Bond.
  • EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance: The FireBoo who appear in Stage 4 have these for arms.
  • In Factorio, the player can research and build Flamethrower Turrets and a personal, portable Flamethrower, while the Tank has one built in. It's even possible to set forests on fire, but as this generates tremendous amounts of pollution, it will generally trigger heavy biter attacks. The player is also NOT Friendly Fire Proof.
  • Fallout: Flamethrowers are a series staple. The Broken Steel add-on to Fallout 3 adds the Heavy Incinerator, which rapid-fires gobs of napalm over long distances, more like a real-life flamethrower. Fallout 4 adds the "Shishkebab", a Chinese officer's sword with a flamethrower mounted onto it. In terms of skills, they were categorized as Big Guns until Fallout: New Vegas, which changed them to use the same Energy Weapons skill as the Slow Lasers.
  • Far Cry 5 has Flamethrowers, of course, but also Incendiary rounds for shotguns, Incendiary arrows for bows, and Incendiary rockets for rocket launchers. And a blowtorch that can be used as a melee weapon if you don't mind the guaranteed Infernal Retaliation.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, the Machinist class's level 70 ability lets them whip out a flamethrower and torch their enemies for up to 10 seconds.
  • Fire Shark has an extremely powerful one that burns everything in front of your plane at max level. Being so powerful it's the rarest weapon you can pick up.
  • Gears of War has these, mostly used by the Locust. Like other games you can shoot the fuel tank to kill the poor bastard holding it but the tank is fairly small and fits well on the back of a standard Locust, let alone a Boomer. The flames however are extremely potent against the Sires in the second game and Maulers as the flames go around their Boomshield.
  • Grand Theft Auto had this until the HD Universe, save for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. The flamethrower doesn't have tons of ammo but when it starts a fire it isn't easy to put out. In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas it is also one of the two weapons that can take out a Rhino, the other being Molotov Cocktails.
  • Grim Dawn: Inquisitors have access to one in the form of the Stone of Ignaffar, which will let them channel its Flames forward into a highly-damaging cone; essentially a magical flamethrower packed into a little stone.
  • Gunstar Heroes has Fire as one of its four basic shot types. Fire combinations boast high damage but have a rather limited range. Combinations include:
    • Basic Fire — by itself, Fire creates a short-range flamethrower.
    • Fire + Fire — a longer-range version of basic flamethrower.
    • Fire + Force — large fireballs that explode on contact with enemies (or by letting go of the fire button).
    • Fire + Chaser — Creates a rather slow homing fireball that will target one enemy at a time, but is also controllable using the d-pad.
    • Fire + Lightning — a Laser Blade, the highest damage combination in the game, but with the shortest range of all the weapons.
  • Halo's version is great against Flood or in enclosed spaces. It slows you down, though.
  • Interstate '76 has flamethrowers that theoretically bypass enemy armor to damage components directly, but they're really glitchy and have pathetic range.
  • Just Breed has one that's also a Flaming Sword; every time you attack with it, it hits nearly half the battlefield with an absurdly massive area-effect cone of fire.
  • Kero Blaster: Fire/Burner/Melter, the final weapon obtained in a normal playthrough, shoots a continuous stream of fire as long as you hold down the trigger button. It's got the worst range of all the weapons even at max level, and is also useless underwater, but it can destroy certain projectiles, deals damage pretty quickly, and gains an Orbiting Particle Shield as the Melter. It's also the only weapon that can destroy ice obstacles.
  • Killing Floor:
    • There's an entire class based around these: The Firebug. In addition to the usual Flamethrower, other weapons for the perk include the Caulk 'n' Burn, a makeshift flamethrower made from a caulk gun; the Spitfire Flare Revolver, a revolver that shoots flares; and the Microwave Gun, which fires a beam of microwaves that not only set enemies on fire, but also make them plump up and explode. While extremely good at mowing down hordes of weaker specimens, larger ones are unfazed by the flames.
    • There's also the Husk specimen, who has one of these in place of an arm. In the first game, it's only capable of launching exploding fireball projectiles, but the sequel adds the ability to spray a stream of flame. Both games avert Unusable Enemy Equipment by allowing the player to buy the Husk Cannon.
  • The Last of Us:
  • Last Rites grants you a flamethrower early on, and it's one of the best weapon for wiping out entire walls of zombies. The downside is that it tends to run dry rather quickly.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Fire Rod, a recurring item found in several games since The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, sends pillars of flame rolling towards enemies.
  • Marathon: The TOZT-7 Backpack Napalm Unit is a flamethrower that deals high dmage at close range. It is effective against organic enemies but fully armoured ones are immune to it.
  • Mass Effect 2 has one for Shepard in Zaeed's DLC. While it's got excellent DPS, it doesn't cause enemies to flinch and is very short-ranged. The Blood Pack mercenaries also sometimes deploy vorcha troopers with flamethrowers. Like most Blood Pack weapons, it's exceptionally deadly up close and exceptionally vulnerable from far away. In the multiplayer of Mass Effect 3, arm-mounted flamethrowers are the special weapons of Vorcha.
  • MechWarrior: The Flamer appears in all versions. While it does minimal damage, it heats up the enemy and can cause their battlemech to shut down. They are especially dangerous in Mechwarrior Living Legends, where overheating can cause your vehicle to literally melt to death. Other incendiary weapons occasionally appear, such as Short Range Missile launchers in freeware re-release of Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries firing Inferno missiles, which temporarily lights enemies on fire with napalm.
  • Mega Man: Fire Wave and Wave Burner. Both are short-range fire weapons that breathe fire that drains weapon energy when the fire button is held. It can also melt ice in both of the games they are in. However, the Wave Burner can be used underwater with it shooting waves instead of water.
  • Men of Valor has one of these. Mounted on an M48 Patton tank, no less.
  • Metal Slug flamethrowers belch a fairly short-ranged blast of flame that can torch multiple enemies. Especially handy against mummies, which require a lot of pistol rounds to take down. There's also the Big Flamethrower, which shoots a large fireball all the way across the screen.
  • Metroid:
    • One of Samus' common weapons for her Arm Cannon is the Plasma Beam.
    • In Metroid Prime and the Super Smash Bros.. series, she also has an actual flamethrower.
    • Metroid II: Return of Samus: Automs have flame throwers of the sucky variety. They can't do much damage to Samus, especially not with the Varia suit, but are still best avoided.
  • Mortal Kombat:
  • The Naval Ops allows you to mount flamethrowers on your ship, and they are quite effective against the Habbakkuk boss, an aircraft carrier made of ice.
  • Postal has the Flamer flamethrower and Napalm Launcher. Postal 2 has the Naplam Launcher, a can of gas and matches, and a Can of Stynx aerosol deodorant spray.
  • Ratchet & Clank has a few of these:
    • The Pyrocitor from the first game is best for large groups in close range or tight clusters for the first few levels and little elsewhere.
    • Lava Gun from the second and third games shoots lava until the upgrade makes it shoot meteors. While the version is good for crowds the upgrade with a Lock-On mod lets it tear apart single foes. The third game's upgrade turns it into a liquid nitrogen thrower so it doesn't count.
    • Size Matters has a terrible with poor range and no damage to compensate.
    • The fifth game's Pyro Blaster has a lot of damage, decent range that can be upgraded, and modest ammo consumption. The upgrade, the Incinerator, turns it into a twin-barrel plasmathrower.
  • Samurai Warriors: Tokugawa Ieyasu is armed with a special spear which hides a cannon: aside from cannonballs, it can also serves as a wide-ranged flamethrower to stun foes and make them collapse in flames. Of course, it's one of the only situations where the attack is always fire-elemental regardless of the weapon's attribute.
  • Seven Samurai 20XX:
    • Optional Boss Karakuri Hanzo will fight you with a mechanical mecha made up of junk, with his most dangerous attack being a Koma-Inu statue that releases a burst of flames.
    • Klein, one of Zwei's minions/slaves, fights with a gigantic gauntlet shaped like a dragon's head: aside from randomly shooting gouts of flames, one of his most dangerous attacks has him grab Natoe within the maws and unleash a stream of fire on him.
  • Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall - Director's Cut allows you to unlock Dragon's Breath rounds for Eiger that damage enemy armour.
  • Skylight has flamethrowers, which can deal a lot of damage against anyone afflicted with the Douse status effect.
  • Songs of Conquest: The Artificers, the upgraded version of the Tinkerer, replaces their wrenches for flamethrowers, which lets them deal damage to the target and any unit behind them.
  • Spider: The Video Game has flamethrowers that your character — a sentient spider — can obtain. The flames deal severe damage and kills most enemies on one hit, but the flamethrowers lack range compared to other weapons and have limited ammunition.
  • StarCraft:
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Bounty Hunter sports a wrist-mounted flamethrower among their other weapons. Their Powertech advanced class features a number of other flame-based weapons both single-target and area-effect. This culminates in the Pyrotech specialization, which... well, it's right there in the name.
  • Strife has a flamethrower but due to the Doom Engine it acts as a napalm squirt gun.
  • Super Smash Bros.: The Fire Flower can be used to project flames in front of the player using it. Its very short range is offset by it doing a lot of little hits really fast.
  • Team Fortress Classic: Long story short, the flamethrower sucks, with piss-poor damage and short range. Its only use is as a gimmicky weapon that blocks your target's vision, and that's about it.
  • Team Fortress 2: The Pyro has a short-ranged flamethrower as their primary weapon, along with some alternate flamethrowers with different stats. They are much more effective than in Team Fortress Classic, but are generally still considered one of the game's weaker weapons due to somewhat poor damage and the prevalence of options to extinguish afterburn. They're especially poor in competitive due to their low skill ceiling, leaving pyro with little chance against other classes of sufficient skill. They did however gain a major new use in the form of an alternate fire airblast, which can be used to reflect projectiles, knock back enemies, and extinguish teammates; and are also very effective at checking for cloaked or disguised spies. The Pyro can also use a few flare guns, each with different effects and drawbacks.
  • Terraria has the Flamethrower, a Hardmode weapon that spews a cone of flame with enemy-piercing and defense-piercing capabilities, that inflicts the Hellfire debuff and uses slime gel as ammunition. In the Frost Moon event, you can get the Elf Melter, a more powerful version with Cold Flames that inflict Frostbite instead.
  • ThunderJaws have a flamethrower as a power-up which deals better damage than your default Harpoon Gun, firing a continuous stream of flames capable of damaging multiple enemies in a row. And owing to Gameplay and Story Segregation, somehow the flamethrower can be used in underwater levels (the game's designers probably coded it as a functioning weapon without checking the environment) and against Living Lava enemies (which are already made of fire by default).
  • Toy Soldiers: The Chemical Thrower of the first game could be upgraded into a flamethrower, and in Toy Soldiers: Cold War, it returned in the form of a Aerosol Flamethrower.
  • One of the later weapons available in Turbo Overkill is a double-barreled flamethrower, which blasts two parallel line of flames at enemies. Mooks turns into Man on Fire instantly, though larger enemies may attempt an Infernal Retaliation.
  • The first Ubersoldier has a lone flamethrower-wielding Nazi attacking you in the final stage. The sequel throws in maybe a dozen more of these.
  • The Valkyria Chronicles series has both man-portable and vehicle-mounted flamethrowers. They're very good for taking out turrets, bunkers, and soldiers behind cover.
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, you can order a flamethrower from your Friend in the Black Market, Mercurio, in the final plot arc. Discussed when he comments that he keeps getting requests from people who've been watching too many action movies, but Justified in that it's devastatingly effective against late-game everything, especially undead.
  • A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: There's the Flamethrower.
  • Warframe has a couple weapons that shoot fire. The Ignis is a standard flamethrower that can burn enemies up to 20 meters away. Its upgraded counterpart, the Ignis Wraith, has improved stats in nearly every area, including a range of 27 meters. And the Javlok is a gun-staff that shoots fireballs and can be thrown to create a fiery explosion at the point of impact.
  • Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader: Flamers in all shapes and sizes are available to you and your party (and, of course, your enemies). There are also Melta weapons, like the Meltagun used by Arch-Militant Mort in the prologue - this gun works by projecting a beam of intense heat, defeating all but the very heaviest of armour and reducing most targets to ash and molten slag with the pull of a trigger.
  • Wildcat Gun Machine grants you a futuristic flamethrower in the later parts, when enemies starts relying on a Zerg Rush, for you to incinerate them by the dozens.
  • The Dragon hat in the Game Boy and Virtual Boy Wario Land.
  • In WarWind, flamethrower is one of the most powerful weapons in the game, used by a Tha'Roon infantry unit (Executioner) and mounted on the APCs used by the Marines.
  • X3: Terran Conflict introduces the Plasma Burst Generator, which is a flamethrower powered by a nuclear fusion reactor. A favored weapon of the Space Pirates faction, the weapon is a thorough gamebreaker in the hands of the player due to Splash Damage Abuse against large targets.

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 
  • Girl Genius: While sparks seem to have a strong preference for creating death rays there are flamethrowers in the setting as well, for instance those in the Library's arsenal which are used in their fight against the Other in the Paris underground.
  • Scarlet & Emerald: Fire in a Can. Technically, it more closely resembles a Molotov Cocktail, but is used like a flamethrower: Scarlet dumps the fire out, as if it were some kind of liquid.
  • Stand Still, Stay Silent: Having worked in a Demolitions Expert unit specializing in burning down buildings before joining the expedition, Emil knows how to use a flamethrower and zig-zags between using that and a rifle for fighting trolls. When Onni summons a fire-based creature onto the battlefield in Chapter 13, Emil's flamethrower is used as an entry point.

    Web Videos 

    Western Animation 
  • Beast Wars: Inferno, a pyromaniac fire antnote  loves using his weapon to scorch enemies.
  • Biker Mice from Mars: The 2006 revival features a villain named Flare in "Biker Mice Down Under", who uses flamethrowers built into his gloves.

    Real Life 
  • Flamethrowers were used in several wars as well as for commercial clearing of land. Plus, they're pretty much the first example of gunpowder being used for, well, guns instead of rockets. And they're unregulated in 40 US states. Though not really used against other humans so much nowadays for the most part, it still has its uses, such as against wasps and killer bees.
  • Probably one of the common examples when Homemade Flamethrower and Improvised Fire Breathing Weapon, the SuperSoaker flamethrower
  • The Dragon's Breath shotgun shell.
  • The earliest use of a flamethrower in war could be seen as far back as the Byzantine "Greek Fire" (with simple pumps full of a flammable liquid), and it could be found even earlier in myth and legend.
  • FPSRussia demonstrates.
  • The inherent hazard of a military flamethrower and the reason why only insane men would volunteer to carry one is demonstrated by several incidents from WW2.
    • Anthony Beevor relates, in his account of the battle of Stalingrad, that German assault engineers captured by the Russians could expect no mercy if they were operating flamethrowers, a weapon feared and loathed in urban combat. Red Army informal practice was to crucify them in view of German positions and to leave them to die horribly, as a visible deterrent.
    • Japanese defenders confronted by American engineers using the flamethrower would make them a priority target, seeking to penetrate and ignite the napalm fuel carried in tanks on the operator's back. However, the weapon was tactically worth the risk for the psychological power it held, since even the most fanatical Japanese defenders were prone to falling back at a blast on their position.
    • During the Rhine crossing in March 1945, a British self-propelled flamethrower had its tanks ruptured in a loading accident while getting it into an amphibious carrier: the resultant fireball was one of the British army's biggest losses on the day. In a related accident, several men were soaked in the fuel mixture used by British flamethrower tanks. While this did not ignite, they had to be rushed to the rear — very carefully — for extensive chemical decontamination and medical treatment. One man got it in the eyes and was blinded for life.
  • To be noted: the usual image conveyed by a Fire-Breathing Weapon, as a large, cumbersome and very-short range Zippo lighter, is based on film prop flamethrowers, which, for the sake of safety, are fueled by propane gas. Military flamethrowers were always fed with liquid, sticky and oily fuels and gushed gigantic◊ jets◊ of flame,◊ to obliterate everything combustible in their range (30-50 yards). In small spaces, they were the most frightening weapon imaginable. For reference, a military flamethrower like the US-made M2 looks like this, while a propane torch flamethrower looks more like this,

 
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Professor Okita

When Professor Okita's creation, Sojimaru, goes out of control and he tries to bring her around with a good, hard kicking, she responds by labelling him "trash" and blasting him with a flamethrower. It even causes Ichiban to make reference to the series' title (in the English dub anyway).

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Ash Face

Blaze Brewers

Alternative Title(s): Flamethrower

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Professor Okita

When Professor Okita's creation, Sojimaru, goes out of control and he tries to bring her around with a good, hard kicking, she responds by labelling him "trash" and blasting him with a flamethrower. It even causes Ichiban to make reference to the series' title (in the English dub anyway).

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Professor Okita

Blaze Brewers