Unbreakable Weapons

By definition, if video games don't have Breakable Weapons, they have the exact opposite: Unbreakable Weapons. No matter how many times you rapidly fire that gun in full-auto mode, it never malfunctions nor does it ever require any sort of maintenance. Swords never break no matter how many times you foolishly use it to strike armored enemies. Unless, of course, the plot calls for it.

Of course, there's a very good reason for this — most video game characters don't need to go to the toilet, either, but you don't get so many complaints about that. Expect First Person Shooters which do include mechanisms to reflect weapon degradation/malfunction to fall way down the "realistic" end of the Fackler Scale of FPS Realism.

Sometimes explained by being Made of Indestructium.

Examples:

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Action-Adventure Games

Assassin's Creed II: While armor can degrade, none of Ezio's weapons ever break. It is somewhat justified in the case of the iconic Hidden Blade, whose construction is far ahead of its time. The Hidden Blade does break... in a cutscene, two games later.
Legacy of Kain: Most games play this straight; in Blood Omen, none of the weapons can be broken. In the Soul Reaver games (I could be wrong on this one) none of the weapons you pick up—many of which are ceremonial or even decorative—will break, though you'll lose them. Defiance also features an unbreakble sword in the form of Kain's Reaver. Blood Omen 2 is the only game to feature breakable weapons, and even then, they're only breakable when you're using them; enemies can block your (superhumanly strong) attacks infinitely without them breaking. However, even this game features an unbreakable weapon in the form of the Soul Reaver itself, which is obtained in the last bossfight or by a cheat code. Being unbreakable is a plot point for the Soul Reaver, however; it's also the only weapon that is broken as part of the plot. Whenever it strikes itself (time travel), one version will break.
The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has the breakable Giant's Knife as an exception, and wooden shields can be incinerated in all of the 3D games, but this trope applies to almost all the standard items and equipment in the games. Like-likes throughout the series can often eat your shields, but that's not exactly breaking them. In fact, in later games they'll drop them intact if they're defeated quickly enough.
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has only one unbreakable shield (Hylian), available from Lanayru's challenge. All others have limited durability.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
  - The game tends to the other extreme, with only one unbreakable weapon: the Master Sword, which instead periodically runs out of energy and becomes unusable until it recharges. However, it will never break against any of the bosses, since they're aspects of Calamity Ganon, the sword's intended target.
  - Notably unlike Link, however, enemies do not consume the hardness of weapons when they use them, and can swing them indefinitely without damaging them in any way. The only way to break their weapons is for them to be set on fire, which steadily eat away at their hardness in the same way as it does when Link's holding a burning weapon.
The Matrix: Path of Neo: If you use a cheat, every weapon becomes indestructible, unlike in regular gameplay which has Breakable Weapons.
Rise of the Kasai: You can bash your sword against armor, other swords, and stone walls—you can block a heavy axe swung by a Mighty Glacier with a pair of knives, but your weapons will never break. Not even the wooden ones.

Beat 'em Ups

The Double Dragon series is notable for being one of the few beat-'em-up franchises to feature unbreakable weapons. Specifically, melee weapons such as the baseball bat and the whip or large objects like oildrums or boulders can be wielded by the player as much as possible, provided the player doesn't lose his weapon by having it fall off-screen out of his reach or into a pitfall. However, the player will drop any weapon his character is wielding after reaching a certain point (normally after completing a stage). In the NES games, weapons will vanish when their original wielders are killed.
River City Girls: Books that make certain weapons types unbreakable as long as they're in the inventory, can be bought:
- "Jock Journal" for Sports
- "Joy of Toys" for Toys
- "Thrillhouse" for Household
In River City Ransom, anything that can be used as a weapon can be picked up by the player and used indefinitely as long as it's in the player's possession.

First-Person Shooters

In Halo, human weapons don't jam or break, but alien plasma weapons normally overheat from uninterrupted continuous fire (requiring a brief cooldown period), and eventually run out of energy and must be discarded. Functionally, this serves as a balance for the fact that such weapons don't need to be reloaded.
Guns in Gears of War can jam if you mistime the "quick reload" action. Guns can be reloaded normally without any risk of jamming them, it just takes a bit longer.
Special honors ought to go to Gordon Freeman's guns in Half-Life. Any weapon that can still happily fire at full auto despite being immersed in water, toxic waste, massively radioactive liquid that damages the HEV suit, fire, and cold intense enough to cause death in less than a minute deserves the unbreakable title.
All weapons in BioShock are unbreakable, even the ones that are made out of spare parts.
Metro 2033's weapons are completely invincible during gameplay, despite half of the guns being made from random bits of industrial pipes and pumps. However, the Idle Animations frequently show the protagonist breaking his guns, like causing the selector switch on his Bastard carbine to fall off, or accidentally ripping the adjustable stock off of the Duplet shotgun. The trend continues in Metro: Last Light, though the guns at least look a little more refined and not about to fall apart.
E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy features completely invulnerable weapons. Interestingly enough, you can actually use the weapons as body shields by holding them up to your chest, which works especially well with the BFGs like the Sulfatum. The guns will happily take several hundred bullets straight to their receiver and barrel(s), then work perfectly fine. The HS010 submachine gun will work perfectly fine after firing a dozen magazines in its triple-fire rate mode, though it sounds like it is ripping itself apart when fired. The swords (including the high-explosive BFS) will all work perfectly fine after slashing through thousands of mooks, and work perfectly fine after the player jumps three stories into the air to slash at an attack helicopter.
The Borderlands series: All the guns on the planet work no matter what: even getting swallowed by animals with bile capable of dissolving bank vault doors won't cause the weapon to so much as misfire even once. In Borderlands 2, Marcus Kincaid, Pandora's resident gun runner, is introduced in a cutscene where a resident of Sanctuary asks for a refund for a malfunctioning gun. Marcus analyzes it a little, then shoots the customer's leg.
The Moonraker/Military Laser in GoldenEye for the Nintendo 64. This can prompt people running around holding Z, making a particularly annoying noise.

Hack and Slash

Drakengard's weapons are unbreakable. Kind of funny in that some of the weapons themselves are broken until you sufficiently upgrade them, but won't break further.
Devil May Cry deserves special mention, considering some of the downright ridiculous things that Dante does with his sword, such as jamming it into the ground and using it to spin around repeatedly, continuously twisting the sword through a foot of solid concrete. However, since it was said before that Dante fires bullets from guns using his demon energy, and pretty much all of his weapons are demonic in nature, this may not be too much of a stretch for some.
The original Diablo had a durability exploit in which, through the use of Hidden Shrines, the player can raise the durability of an item to 255, which the game recognizes as indestructible.
- The sequel provides intentional examples, such as mods and socketables making an item indestructible.
Path of Exile has all weapons be indestructible. This is particularly notable when your weapons include daggers made of broken glass and clubs that are just chunks of driftwood, all fully capable of withstanding being set on fire and used to kill enemies made out of rock.

MMORPGs

Runescape weaponry is unusually resilient, for example an axe will continue to fell trees after breaking a thousand steel platebodies to bits. Barrows Armor, however, is extremely old (thousands of years) and will break and decay after fifteen hours of solid use, until it needs to be repaired for hundreds of thousands of coins.
- Certain item sets which have been PVP Balanced, including the aforementioned Barrows equipment, have usage limits. After hours of use, the Ancient Warriors armor, from the same period as the Barrows set, will actually crumble to dust, making their use in PVP even more risky since they're lost forever once they're done. Ancient equipment is inconsistent in this regard, as the ludicrously rare Third Age equipment, obtainable only through the most difficult treasure trails, are from the same time period as the other sets, and indestructable.
Nexus Clash balances this with Breakable Weapons. Actual weapons such as guns and swords break down with use and need to be repaired. Improvised weapons such as crowbars and shovels can be used indefinitely, but are naturally inferior to weapons that were actually meant to be weapons.

Role-Playing Games

Every Final Fantasy game. Hell, just about every electronic RPG ever made. Swords never break, and guns never jam. The maintenance portion can be handwaved in most games and RPGs by saying they sharpen blades and maintain and oil guns during down time between battles off screen.
- Early games had archery consume arrows, which is a partial aversion.
- Weapons (and armour) in Final Fantasy Tactics can be broken with Knight or Divine Knight skills, Samurai abilities in the same game could break the katana it used, and there was the Ogre Nix in Final Fantasy VI which would randomly break after use, but this can be prevented with the right Support ability.
- Irvine from Final Fantasy VIII actually had limited ammo for his guns... though only in his Limit Break.
  - Of course, Final Fantasy VIII actually said that weapons were completely indestructible as part of the SeeD ranking exam.
- One common exception is items that can be used to invoke some kind of magical property, generally casting a spell for no MP cost. Even when the item could be used to strike enemies forever without a dent, one use of its mystic power is likely to shatter it forever.
  - Even this isn't consistently the case, as in the first Final Fantasy, III and IV, spell casting weapons never break after use. As a tradeoff, they are generally limited to casting lower level spells.
In the original Baldur's Gate any non-magical weapon can break after a random period of use. This is attributed to weakness happening because Mulahey and his kobold mooks poison the ore in the Nashkel mine and not due to a natural property of iron, though. It also stops happening after Mulahey is killed.
Every World of Mana game. Unlike the previous two examples, there are no exceptions to this. The Mana Sword does seem to rust easily, but it never breaks.
Valkyrie Profile has both Breakable and Unbreakable Weapons. The breakable variety are said to have been made by humans or are barely able to contain the vast amount of power they hold, while the unbreakable ones are made by the gods and have an "ether coating" rendering them indestructible.
- Silmeria does this unless a specific Sealstone is used, and Covenant is like this regardless... which is confusing, since both are prequels.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Most physical melee weapons are alloyed with a supposedly-rare Unobtainium to keep enemy lightsabers from cutting through them like butter. Firearms of all sorts have infinite amounts of the appropriate ammo. Lightsabers... are about as indestructible as you'd expect. They're still Game Breakers.
- Lampshaded in KOTOR 2, when you meet a Mandalorian who had his spare ammo eaten, his gun's ammo depleted, then broke the gun by using it as a club. He points out that he was careless because, hey, when was the last time YOU ran out of ammo?
Most of the Ultima games feature this. Exceptions are usually magic weapons that can run out of charges. Ultima Underworld subverts the trope, with only the Infinity +1 Sword being this.
Golden Sun averts this. Items/weapons that can be used as items, if used in battle, can and frequently do break. You can get them fixed, but not mid-battle. However, broken weapons and items just mean you can no longer use their special effects and they have a lower resale value when broken; you can still equip them for stat changes as normal.
The Diviner weapons in Riviera: The Promised Land are unbreakable weapon for the Grim Angels. The protagonist Ein wields a holy sword named Einherjar while the antagonists use magical lances.
The Elder Scrolls series averted this trope through its first four installments, all having Breakable Weapons and armor. Skyrim made the switch to unbreakable weapons and armor, along with refactoring the Armorer skill (which in previous games allowed you to repair your equipment) into the Smithing skill, which allows you to create your own weapons/armor from raw materials as well as improve the quality of bought/found equipment.
The Fallout series likewise averts it through New Vegas, where equipment degrades with use. The Repair skill allows you to "break down" similar items to repair them, with your skill level (and related perks) determining the percentage of restored condition. Like its Elder Scrolls sister series, Fallout 4 switches to unbreakable equipment with the repair skill replaced by various others (Gun Nut, Science!, Armorer, etc.) which allow you to upgrade your equipment.
While previous games in the series played the trope completely straight, King's Field: The Ancient City does a variation. All weapons have a durability rating that degrades with use, but this rating will never go below 50%. Weapons can be repaired at a smithy to restore their durability but even a weapon at its lowest durability may still be used indefinitely, albeit with less attack power.
While System Shock 2 in general is notorious for its rapidly degrading weapons, there's a psychic power that makes them indestructible as long as it's active.

Third-Person Shooters

The Crusader games' weapons are Unbreakable. This is odd, because the RP-22 and RP-32 are explicitly described as "indestructible" due to their construction, but no other weapons are.
Dead Space and Dead Space 2 had weapons you could beat enemies to death with and they would still be in perfect mechanical condition. It's quite justified by all but one of those weapons not actually being weapons; they're repurposed industrial/mining tools with the safeties removed. Gear like that would probably be designed to be pretty much indestructible.
- The trend continues in Dead Space 3, although a change in gameplay meant that weapons now really are weapons, though jury-rigged from 200-years old parts salvaged from decaying shipwrecks and outposts on a hostile planet. Apparently, humans in this 'verse are really good at Ragnarök Proofing^note.

Turn-Based Strategy

Fire Emblem usually has one or two unbreakable artifact weapons per game, as an exception to otherwise being a superlative example of Breakable Weapons. Also, weapons exclusive to the Climax Bosses and Final Bosses tend to be unbreakable as a rule of thumb.
- Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, Mystery of the Emblem, and Shadow Dragon (all remakes of each other for the most part) have the Starsphere, which makes any weapon held by the character wielding it unbreakable. (It also appears in New Mystery, but with a different effect.)
- Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn have Ike's Ragnell, Elincia's Amiti, and the Black Knight's Alondite. In addition, near the end of Radiant Dawn, you get to make up to 13 weapons of your choice unbreakable for the final three chapters, so long as a character sent into the final campaign can use that weapon. This includes long-range tomes that normally have only five uses and the game's Infinity +1 Swords.
- Awakening introduces the skill "Armsthrift", allowing any character that can become a Mercenary to possibly keep a use of their weapon. By messing with the Inheritance system a bit, it becomes possible to have this go off every single time.
- All weapons in the game qualify for this trope in Fire Emblem Gaiden, Fire Emblem Fates, and Fire Emblem Engage.
- The legendary blade Falchion has infinite uses in the games where it appears. Justified, as it was forged from one of Naga's fangs.

Unbreakable Weapons

Examples:

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Unbreakable Weapons

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