Two guesses where the weak point is.
That robot needs a less glaring weak spot.
That is, certain Boss Fights look very threatening, but all you need to do is hit the incredibly obvious glass chamber — which can either hold the pilot, an exposable core system, or whatever they decided to put behind it — for massive damage.
These are incredibly common around machinery bosses, such as against a Humongous Mecha, Walking Tank, or a Battleship Raid; the latter being less commonly used.
This trope can also be combined with Colossus Climb if the weak point is high up on a structure.
Subtrope of Attack Its Weak Point and usually falls under Shows Damage as well. Compare with Go for the Eye and Sniping the Cockpit. See Vehicular Assault.
Examples:
- Not a playable example, but an actual cutscene. In Bionic Commando 2009, Radd Spencer is gripped by Joe's mecha and nearly crushed to death. He regains consciousness in time to headbutt through Joe's windshield, through the heavy-reinforced glass, and through Joe's face. This causes the robot's hands to free him.
- Poison Ivy in Batman: Arkham Asylum. This one is odd, considering she's inside a plant. Presumably its actually a transparent membrane.
- Played with in the sequel, Batman: Arkham City for Mr. Freeze. The actual fight is a very complex Puzzle Boss, once you win it becomes a cutscene of Batman punching Mr. Freeze in the visor and then face.
- MechWarrior has this trope in the form of the cockpit hitbox location. However despite the fact that it has minimal armor and a powerful shot can in fact instakill any mech if you hit it the small size and difficulty of hitting it even under the best of conditions makes it almost universally a lucky shot if you pull it off.
- Crosses over directly with Go for the Eye against an Atlas; the cockpit is in its right eye!
- The first fight with Agnus in Devil May Cry 4 is this. He sits behind an electrified glass wall and you must break through it by chucking flying swords at it.
- Abductors in Freedom Wars have giant "pods" on their bodies, the destruction of which will deal heavy damage to the Abductor (as well as liberating whoever is trapped inside). Be careful, though: once the pod is broken, the Abductor Turns Red.
- Averted in the old Punisher beat'em up game - The robot boss has some glass panels in its head but those go first and breaking them is no impediment - you have to literally punch the thing into scrap to win (It somewhat resembles the car-wrecking bonus stage in Street Fighter II - the thing keeps losing more and more parts as you beat it up.)
- In The Ninja Warriors Again, the Final Boss, the evil dictator you're supposed to kill, is in a laser-spamming machine with a glass window. And there are loads of minions attacking you! You have to throw the minions into the glass to damage it until it breaks.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time for the SNES gives you this in your first boss fight against Shredder, who's in a mechanical construct firing all sorts of weapons at you while his Foot Soldiers are distracting you (and the battle is shown from Shredder's point of view). While you can beat up the ninjas endlessly, the only way to beat Shredder is to throw said ninjas into the screen.
- Various bosses in both Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2. In fact almost every robotic boss in each game is subject to this.
- In Pac-Man World 2, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde are all defeated this way. Pinky's mech is an odd example. The glass cockpit is coded to be a weak point, but you can't actually attack said cockpit without hacking (you're supposed to attack a different weak point), yet the glass dome continues to depress and crack anyway.
- The final boss of the original Mario vs. Donkey Kong.
- The brain-powered psychic tank in Psychonauts is defeated by flinging chunks of concrete at the glass dome shielding the boss's brain.
- The Sonic the Hedgehog series has many bosses defeated in this manner:
- The Egg Viper from Sonic Adventure.
- Every GUN mech from Sonic Adventure 2.
- All of the day bosses from Sonic Unleashed. And the Egg Dragoon too.
- The final bosses in Sonic Spinball and Sonic Colors.
- Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island had this for all of the end of level battles with Robotnik.
- The revamped fight with Metal Sonic in Sonic Mania Plus.
- Pretty much every boss fight where you fight Eggman directly. You'd think he'd learn by now.
- Mother Brain from Metroid, Super Metroid and Metroid: Zero Mission. Missiles or Super Missiles are needed to break the glass, which still fails to kill her. Same goes for Mecha Ridley in Zero Mission.
- In The Flintstones: The Rescue Of Dino & Hoppy, you have to defeat the final boss by breaking its cockpit cover made of glass.
- In Super Methane Bros, the three intermediate bosses can only be destroyed by repeated hits to their glass cockpits.
- Inverted in Earthworm Jim, which has a level where you have to carefully guide an underwater vehicle around. More cracks appear in the glass every time you hit a wall. Oh, and there's a time limit.
- Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril: The Final Boss battle with the Supermech.
- Captain Syrup's flying saucer, which serves as the Factory Final Boss in Wario Land II, has a crystal cockpit which you need to break with body slams so you can throw the bombs she launches back directly at her.
- In Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure, in the haunted pirate shipwreck, Buster beats Montana Max to the titular "hidden treasure" by seconds. During the battle against him, a-scuba helmeted Monty bursts out of the floor, leaving gaping holes into the One-Hit Kill water below. To defeat Monty, Buster must destroy his scuba helmet.
- In many of the Mega Man (Classic) games, the various Wily Machines that Dr. Wily pilots are generally weak at the cockpit. In a few cases, such as Mega Man 3, Mega Man has to break a different part of the Wily Machine to reveal the cockpit, but eventually, this trope will apply.
- Dr. Weil's final form in Mega Man Zero 4 has an orange pane of glass protecting his head. Break it and he blows up, though it's justified given that his head is really the only "human" part left on that cybernetic monstrosity he becomes.
- In the Darkwing Duck Licensed Game for the NES, during the final battle with Steelbeak, the first phase involves Darkwing destroying the glass window he is sitting behind. Doing so rewards Darkwing with a first aid kit, which he may need for the second phase.
Roleplay
- The first hostile entity in Destroy the Godmodder had a cracked glass cockpit. Despite being pretty big, it got curbstomped after the weakness was revealed.
- In Knights of the Old Republic, the key to defeating the final boss is shattering containers with prisoners, from which he keeps leeching life to heal himself.
- More Elite Mook than boss fight (although they are treated as boss enemies the first few times they appear), Atlas mechs in Mass Effect 3 are a variation of this trope: they have glass cockpits which you can break and then kill the engineer piloting it so you can hijack the mech and pilot it yourself, using it to kill the rest of the Cerberus troops. While cool, this turns out to be Awesome, but Impractical, since, by the time you manage to break the glass, the mech will probably be on the brink of death anyway (and if the Atlas mech is destroyed while you're in it, you get a Game Over); it's simpler to just destroy it outright.
