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Rule Of Cool / Video Games

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Rule of Cool in Video Games.

  • ANNO: Mutationem: The story follows an Action Girl who's also a One-Woman Army that single-handedly takes down mooks from various organizations, Mini Mechas, and Animalistic Abominations with an Enhanced Punch. She also happens to have a Super Mode that's connected to a supernatural being sealed in Another Dimension, can dish out twice the amount of damage towards opponents.
  • This serves as the physics engine for the Devil May Cry universe, it seems. The core basis of the series' gameplay is beating shit up and making it look good. Several of the cutscenes, concepts and Impossibly Cool Weapons are impractically over-the-top purely for raw awesome factor. We have Dante rocking on with a literal electric guitar, and Lady's motorcycle having flamethrower attachments in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, Nero's sword revving like a motorcycle in Devil May Cry 4 and Devil May Cry 5, then Dante also comes back fighting demons by swinging a motorcycle around in the latter game. This also applies at a meta-level, as Hideki Kamiya was inspired to include the juggle mechanic in the original game due to a bug that caused enemies to float in the early versions of Onimusha: Warlords.
  • Metroid:
    • Most of the technology exists either to be unnecessarily cool or to be unnecessarily complicated, and often both.
    • There is not a single creature in the series that is not biologically inaccurate in one way or another.
    • In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, there's Luminoth Script. It's a three-dimensional array of lit and unlit nodes, linked by lines, with the shape and which nodes are lit or unlit conveying the message. This array is impossible to read or write in two dimensions, needlessly complicated, and likely can't convey the amount of information it's shown to... but it looks awesome.
  • Suda51: Many of their games runs off the Rule of Cool.
    • Killer7 has a paraplegic assassin whose manifested alternate personalities do his bidding while fighting evil spirits,
    • No More Heroes stars an otaku who won a lightsaber on an Internet auction and went on to become an assassin so he can get laid.
    • Lollipop Chainsaw shows a cheerleader using a chainsaw to survive a zombie apocalypse,
    • Killer is Dead: An assassin who fights cyborg mooks with a katana and a cybernetic arm while not hitting on ladies...
  • Fallout 3:
    • This trope and intentional Zeerust are the only things that can explain the giant scorpions, the radiation hanging around after 200 years and keeping things a wasteland, and the fact that that many buildings are still there after being nuked then left to rot for over 200 years, cars that explode in mushroom clouds and most of all... Liberty Prime. A giant, bipedal robot with Gort's laser eyes and a backpack of miniature nuclear missiles, which it throws like footballs and is voiced by Peter 'Optimus Prime' Cullen.
    • Is it possible to blow someone's head apart by launching a teddy bear at them? Probably not. When you get the Rock-it Launcher and manage to do just that, will you care about the previous question? No.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • The opening sequence of the first game counts. Yes, it's a tutorial level, but does it really matter when Sora is navigating a black void, walking on stained-glass floors of Disney characters, and it all culminates in a battle against a giant Heartless with a hole in its chest in the shape of a heart symbol?
    • The final battle in Kingdom Hearts II, where Sora and Riku fight Xemnas. They're floating in space and you can slice buildings flying at you in half and send them flying back without moving. This is so impossible the only explanation is that the laws of physics were breaking. Considering what was happening at the end of the game, it's not too far-fetched.
    • A lot of the combination attacks with world-specific partners fall into this area, as do the Drive Forms. Where did Donald and Goofy go? Why does Sora's roar with Beast kill everything? Why does Auron's sword do more damage when he's got Sora attached to his back? Where did Sora and Mulan get all those fireworks? Better question. Who cares!? It's freaking awesome!
    • Flowmotion from Kingdom Hearts 3D also runs off of this. Bouncing off walls, spinning around lampposts, dashing from building to building, and all of it can be used to fight enemies. It's given no explanation whatsoever, Sora just sees another character do it and suddenly he can too.
    • Really, the entire series runs on this trope. Its internal logic seems to be "look cool first, explain why later", which also heavily contributes to the series infamous Kudzu Plot.
  • Painkiller:
  • Serious Sam and The Second Encounter: Hordes of enemies rushing at you for no reason in locales so vast, grandeur and glorious that the only real explanation is to look cool and make you feel like the coolest player ever. Which you are. Sometimes.
  • Metal Wolf Chaos was probably created with this rule specifically in mind. It's the only logical explanation for why you're playing as the President of the United States battling a coup by the Vice President in a heavily-armed mech, the giant robotic spider the Vice President unleashes on Manhattan, the huge ray-gun on Alcatraz Island and much else.
  • Ragnell in the 10th Fire Emblem is said to be indestructible, but in the ending cutscreen it is shown heavily nicked for no other reason than to look cool. Granted, Ike did fight a goddess beforehand, so the sword might have been damaged by a power equal to it.
  • Super Smash Bros.: There is no other way to justify scenes such as a crossdressing ninja punching a hole through a fighter jet to fight its anthropomorphic fox pilot. Following this, both fighters are stopped by being offered tea by a princess. All of them are on top of a moving airship that is currently engaged in combat. The storymode in Brawl is built on "that would look cool".
    • The story mode for Ultimate is essentially Kirby fighting to save the other members of the playable cast and recruiting the spirits of other video game characters to fight against an Evil God and that Evil God's even eviler counterpart.
    • One of the settings for battle is a spacecraft that flies out of the atmosphere, climbs into space, goes into hyperdrive, weaves through asteroid debris, hyperdrives back to the planet.
  • The Red Alert series of Command & Conquer games runs on pure cool (ok, maybe some camp too). A lot of units are there mostly based on sheer cool factor:
  • BioShock:
    • BioShock: No, they didn't have automated turrets or flying unmanned machinegun robots in the 60s, and the technology to build an entire city on the bottom of the ocean wasn't even feasible in the late 1940s but that's terribly irrelevant when one considers that you also have a Magical Hand That Shoots Bees and can set people on fire by snapping your fingers.
    • BioShock Infinite: You get the magic to sic a murder of crows on people. Even so, how does the flying city of Columbia carry enough fuel to stay airborne, or to lift all those stone buildings, marble statues, cobbled streets and parks at all? Through awesomeness.
  • God Hand: A Meme about the game goes from "These levels look bland" to "HOLY SHIT THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME I'M THE MOTHERFUCKING Fist of the North Star JESUS CHRIST" in three panels. And it doesn't even mention the Luchadore Gorilla.
  • God of War: You play as a large Spartan wearing little but a tunic, wielding blades attached to chains that are sheared into his arms, and you kill monsters 10 times bigger than you in brutal over the top ways. Also, you get to kill a god. Several times. Hell, half the stuff Kratos does would seem appalling if they weren't so damn awesome.
  • Fighting games in general lean heavily on this one but Yoda and Darth Vader are in Soul Calibur 4. There is no other possible explanation and if the developers try to provide one, they are lying bastards.
  • Disgaea: There is an entirely logical explanation as to why your Pettanko brawler can punch her enemies into the sun: Because it's awesome looking.
  • Ninja Gaiden indulged in this from time to time, but Ninja Gaiden II (2008) revels in it. There are zombies with chainsaws and cannons for arms, six-limbed werewolves with giant scythes, flying battleships, ninja special ops forces with rocket launchers, and a boss fight on the Statue of Liberty. Then Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 makes you fight the goddamn Statue of Liberty itself.
  • Yakuza may be serious and straight-laced in its main story, but when it comes to battles and sidequests, Rule of Cool, along with Rule of Funny, go into effect. Applications of these rules include, but are not limited to: tossing a mook's head into a microwave and asking the confused store clerk to turn it on, using a baseball bat like nunchucks, defeating enemies with break-dancing moves, parrying sword blows with your fists, bodyslamming your enemies with a motorcycle, and fighting a freakin' tiger!
  • Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise blends the hyperviolence and martial arts of Fist of the North Star with the gameplay and hijinks of the Yakuza series. Using the art of Hokuto Shinken to mix drinks at a bar? Why not! Playing baseball with a steel beam and raiders on motorcycles? Go nuts! Bashing mooks to death with their own death cries? Hell yeah!
  • Supreme Commander features units that operate by this trope, such as the experimentals. The Fatboy, Czar, and Megalith are Military Mashup Machines par excellence, the Galactic Colossus is a textbook example of Awesome, but Impractical, the Monkeylord is just kind of the Monkeylord... the list goes on.
  • Rocket Knight Adventures: stars a heavily armored anthropomorphic opossum who flies around with a rocket pack and wields a sword that can generate Razor Wind. It's utterly saturated with Steampunk Humongous Mecha, Airborne Aircraft Carriers, and Military Mashup Machines, and your enemies do things like deliberately blowing a hole in the side of their own spaceship to try and kill you or following you down through re-entry into the planet's atmosphere.
  • Prince of Persia went from possible though infeasible acrobatics in Jordan Mechner's original games, to Ubisoft's disregard for the laws of physics relative to human motion. Could a man jumping twelve feet out into space at a sheer stone wall grab an eight-inch, ninety-degree angle stone ledge with anything resembling enough grip to keep himself from falling? Try doing it ten times within a minute's span, with your life on the line each time, in addition to running along or up walls for anything more than three steps at most. Why does it all work? Because it's cool as hell.
  • Dante's Inferno: You start off by killing the grim reaper, stealing his scythe, descending into hell and eventually killing the lord of hell himself. Along the way you also fight a giant naked woman throwing babies out of her boobs. Everything this game does is examine sections of the original poem and make them as cool as possible.
  • Metal Gear:
  • Persona:
    • A Let's Play series for Persona 3 calls attention to this when it mentions who the main character's ultimate Persona is: "Messiah is... well, he's that guy. Yeah. THAT guy. We're going to battle against the incarnation of Death by summoning that guy. I don't think this game could possibly be any more metal."
    • Chie's ultimate Persona in Persona 4 looks like a samurai Darth Vader with Darth Maul's lightsaber. The game also gives you Kintoki-Douji. It carries a Tomahawk MISSILE. Alas, it is a magic-oriented Persona, so it doesn't throw it.
  • Elite Beat Agents. The game's plot revolves around an organization of The Men in Black and Cool Shades who appear to help people out with their problems while dancing to pop songs. Helping a white blood cell fight off a virus just in time for the Olympics to Ashlee Simpson's "La La"? No problem. Assisting a coffee-addicted taxi driver in driving a pregnant woman to the hospital to the song "Sk8er Boi"? That's nothing for the EBA. Helping a diver find treasure while "YMCA" is blaring in the background? That's not even trying! How do you save a down-on-his-luck baseball player? By helping him win his next game? No! Clearly, the solution is to help him save a small boy from a giant lava-spewing rock monster in an amusement park! With baseball!
  • EBA's predecessor, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, ran on this trope too - Japanese-style male cheerleading is used to encourage a buddy cop pair to fight back against an invading army of battery-like aliens. An overworked salaryman to protects his city and his daughter in Ultraman fashion and the entire planet to blast an oncoming meteor with concentrated willpower
    • In the sequel, Earth's population is called upon again, this time to turn the sun back on through The Power of Rock.
  • Contra:
    • Contra III: The Alien Wars for SNES had one level almost entirely composed of the player riding on in-flight missiles.
    • Contra Re Birth attempts to one-up this by having the character ride down the flaming remains of a space station during reentry, and jump from one to the other while fighting a boss.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Dissidia Final Fantasy: heroes and villains of the first ten Final Fantasy games all beat the crap out of each other.
    • Sabin of Final Fantasy VI's ability to Suplex the Train was actually due to a coding error, where the "Too large to Suplex" tag wasn't turned on. Why do you think this "bug" has been left alone in every subsequent release?
    • Final Fantasy VIII has one case where a giant interstellar entity hurtles your enemies into a galaxy going supernova. Bahamut's got a long history of destroying things from orbit.
    • Crisis Core: Bahumut's signature move, Exaflare, involves the giant dragon surrounding the MOON with crystals, blowing half of it up, and turning it into a GIANT LASER which is pointed towards the planet, thus taking out a good amount of HP.
    • Final Fantasy XII has an extreme case of Schizo Tech that runs heavily on the Rule of Cool. There are knights wielding magic swords, Diesel Punk gadgets, and airships that are basically Star Wars NOT IN SPACE!
  • In the original Gungrave, if a boss comes close to dying, then using a demolition shot as the killing blow causes Grave to activate the "Graveyard Special" (Finishing Move), where his coffin launches a super-charged attack (which usually combines two or more his normal demolition shots). While this is not required to kill any boss, the demolition shot is so over the top that it looks awesome. Your player character is the reanimated corpse of a hitman with Guns Akimbo and a large coffin on his back that shoots rockets and can semi-morph into a machine gun. In the sequel, the original character gains allies. One is a blind samurai with swords that are also guns, and a ghost who uses a guitar with a dynamo in it to shoot arc lightning at his enemies. The ghost who defeats his enemies with The Power of Rock is named Rockabilly Redcadillac.
  • The makers of Deadly Creatures said the game was built upon this. "In real life, tarantulas don't go web swinging from area to area but wouldn't it be cool?"
  • ALL of Ratchet & Clank's guns are powered by this except the most basic ones (sometimes not even them). Let's consider a few:
  • The Karmic Transformers in Ōkami. Sure, they don't serve any other purpose than making Amaterasu look different, but there's something awesome about seeing a Japanese◊ Spitz◊ beat up enemies and bosses.
  • Crazy Taxi: In real life, taxicabs wouldn't be allowed to break every traffic law in existence in an effort to get their customer to their destination as fast as possible. Thank goodness this isn't real life.
  • Diviner Maros in City of Villains. He's a seer who can see an entire section of time at once and spends his time forgetting what week it is and creating time paradoxes. At one point he starts to send you on a mission, only to realize you did that two missions ago and then pauses to remember when he is. He frequently sends you to places he only knows about because you told him where they were when you got back, or gives you advice based on stuff you told him in the future, because he gave you that advice. How can he do this? Because he's cool.
  • Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar: Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Mischief Makers:
    • Sequences in the game include outrunning a tidal wave on a tricycle, riding giant bees, and a stage literally called Missile Surf.
    • As for the boss fights, one of them has the main character riding on the back of a giant cat and fighting an anthropomorphic sentai wolf on a transforming motorcycle. The cat can also do the aforementioned missile surf while the main character grabs giant lasers out of the air and throws them back at the wolf.
  • [PROTOTYPE]: You can punch your enemies to death, but why do that when you can achieve the same result by shoryukening them, punching them thrice in midair, then slamming them into the ground like a rail spike? Then you can use his corpse to down a military helicopter, grab the now-plummeting helicopter in mid-air and chuck it down at a tank and finish off with a ground-pound, taking out any infantry stragglers.
  • Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ. Little Red Riding Hood may not be the definition of cool. We've seen zombies in media a million and a half times. BBQs are what middle age men do to show off their cooking skills while keeping their testicles intact. Put them all together and there is nothing uncool about a grown Little Red Riding Hood in skimpy clothing using a flamethrower on the undead.
  • Scribblenauts. Why make a game where you can make God fight Cthulu? Why make a game where you can travel back in time, ride a dinosaur through the time machine, and then kill robot zombies. Because you can.
  • Shinobi III, Return of the Ninja Master: Ninjas on surfboads? Check. Ninjas on kites? Check. Climbing your way to the top of a cliff on falling rocks while fighting flying ninjas? Hell yes, check.
  • Touhou Project has Marisa, who mentions that spellcards aren't made to be overwhelmingly powerful, but to have beautiful patterns and look cool in both Silent Sinner in Blue, and her own Grimoire of Marisa. That isn't to say there aren't spell cards that worry more about pure power rather than style, but as a whole, you could sell tickets to an audience to see a spellcard lightshow if you were so inclined. The fact that you can't use a card that can't be beat shows that power isn't the main focus, and the point of the system in the first place was so that youkai would ease up on the power and allow competition between themselves and humans.
    • The entire premise of the games run on this: it is stated that Reimu has the ability to "escape from reality" in order to effectively make herself invincible against the opposition, but then there wouldn't be much of a game to play.
  • Naruto: Ultimate Ninja: Using an Ougi (or Ultimate) triggers a cutscene of your character using his powers with all almighty coolness.
  • Crimson Skies. The PC version: received this line in a review.
    These things could never get off the ground in real life. But who cares? They. Look. Cool.
  • Ace Attorney: Court proceedings aren't anything like that in real life, but after you've played a bit, you'll wish they were.
  • Team Fortress 2: So it comes time to update the most overpowered and controversial class in the game with a new weapon, what do you give him? Valve gave him a claymore sword that decapitates on killing blows, a shield that resists fire and explosions, AND makes him run faster than any other class in the game. All of this for seemingly no reason other than the fact that the demoman is Scottish, and it makes a pretty cool Braveheart reference.
  • Star Wars: The Force Unleashed does things with the Force that were so cool it blew your mind away. Fighting a forty-story tall alien tentacle monster? Throwing Darth Freakin' Vader into the wall? Crashing a low-flying STAR DESTROYER into a major city!
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • There is a part on Shadow the Hedgehog's intro cutscene showing Shadow doing Chaos Control quickly, then punching an alien. Rinse and repeat for 10 to 20 seconds. That part of the cutscene does look pretty cool, and has no effect on any aspect of the game at all, so the use of chaos control here is justified by this rule (Normally, you need a Chaos Emerald and charge up the chaos control to do it, you cannot do it instantly).
    • On Shadow's intro on Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Shadow is shown running through snow while avoiding many robots shooting him. He then runs through the robots. The robots blow up, and then he bounces on a single robot to get past a big door. That's a full use of this rule. However, the Chaos Control he proceeds to use is unjustified because it doesn't look as cool as it should... especially after what he just did.
    • The first level of Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic escapes wrongful capture from a G.U.N. (Military organisation similar to NATO) Helicopter, and surfs down the hilly city streets on a chunk of the wing. Then at the end of the level, G.U.N. chases him with a truck-truck-truck, a 4 story tall semi so wide it barley scraped along the sides of the buildings and sends everything in the street flying on impact. [1]
    • The truck came back for Sonic Generations. It now chases Modern Sonic for far longer, has buzzsaws at the front and even chases Sonic UP A BUILDING. Yes, that thing can now fly.
    • Question: How can a hedgehog outrun a black hole? Answer: Who gives a flying fox?
  • Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!. Why else would a four-foot-tall, 107 lb, 17-year-old kid from The Bronx be travelling around the world, fighting circus freaks, competing for the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship? Because it's cool. In the Wii version, why else is Mike Tyson replaced as the final challenger by Donkey Kong?
  • Speaking of the Wii version of Punch-Out!!, normally the game only gives you stars for doing specific actions like landing tricky shots or interrupting an opponent's attack. However, when fighting Mr. Sandman you get a free star when his health is very low and he's about to be knocked-out: it serves no practical purpose, but damn does it feel good to get to defeat the world champion with your Signature Attack.
  • Pick any Shoot 'Em Up. Firing Frickin' Laser Beams larger than your fighter could handle isn't cool enough...
  • This is why Grenade Launcher exists in Left 4 Dead 2. As Valve said, they and many people wanted to see more stuff blow up, so they threw in the weapon. Combine the weapon with fire bullets and you got a gun of awesome.
  • Need For Madness?: On the loading screen, the following is displayed: "The following game is really mad, because unlike other games it does not try to obey or emulate any rules of physics correctly. In fact it was programmed on the basis of if it looks cool and feels cool, then it's cool." .
  • Hybrid Heaven. It's your typical "aliens plotting to take over the world and only you can stop them" plot, but you beat the aliens by performing wrestling moves on them.
  • Just Cause 2 's programmers stated that they tried to set the game so that the laws of physics would seem to be drunk, to encourage the players to do more crazy things because it would be cool It worked.
  • Ultima I. Just Ultima I. After spending much of the game fighting in a standard RPG setting you must upgrade your weapon to a Phazor, buy a space shuttle and fight TIE Fighters to become a Space Ace so a princess will give you the location of a time machine that you can use to stop the Big Bad before he reaches One-Winged Angel form. The game seems to combine aspects from Dungeons & Dragons, Star Trek, Doctor Who and a wide range of other sources.
  • Alan Wake has a scene where you have to defend yourself on a rock stage (in the middle of a farm field) while a kickass metal song plays and pyrotechnics explode around you. Why? Because fuck yeah.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Epona gets an upgrade from the "X" in a boy and his horse into a bona fide war horse in this game, complete with a few Rearing Horse moments. Spectacular Spinning applies to the Spinner and the trusty spin attack. You can do some cool Spider-Man moves with the Double Clawshot, walk on walls because of the electromagnets in the Goron Mines and when fighting bosses there is almost always a moment of Theme Music Power-Up when you've exposed an enemy's vulnerabilities.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: What else could justify using a damn sword AS A FREAKING LIGHTNING ROD without getting cooked and fried to hell and back??
  • Viewtiful Joe involves this trope because it's based in the land of Action Hero movies . Upon entering Movie World, Joe becomes a martial arts expert, capable of taking tank shells to the face, and can kill enemies just by striking a pose. After you defeat Fire Leo by burning at temperatures over 1000000 degrees, you join a planet-dwarfing mech-battle.
  • Tomb Raider: Where else can you play as a daring female archaeologist that is packing heat as she fends off enemies from wolves, to henchmen, and even a freaking Tyrannosaurs rex while performing acrobatics to either evade enemy attacks or to get from one place to another. Things get even crazier once Lara Croft gets on a vehicle and can run enemies over or make insane jumps over a chasm. Even the traps are taken to the extreme, such as poison darts, rolling boulders, spikes, fire traps, and many more as the series progressed, yet they still remained awesome.
  • The trope is lampshaded by the developers in the remake Tomb Raider: Anniversary when they discuss the Uzi wielding teenager. In the original game, the kid was fought in what appeared to be an underground skateboard park and he fought Lara by shooting at her while he was skateboarding (the area had a ton of pits with lava in them in case you weren't in enough danger) and giving the line "You firin' at me? You firin' at me, huh? Ain't nobody else here; you must be firing at me!" The developers admitted that looking back on the level design for the boss fight now, it looked pretty damn silly, but at the same time, it was too cool.
  • The Espgaluda series features characters can slow down bullets and power up their attack by using Kakusei ("Awakening"). Not only does activation instantly change their gender, but they also inexplicably change into a different set of clothes. The character designer said that it was just to look cool.
  • Sengoku Basara: Samurai Dual Wielding spears, scythes, chainsaws or six swords at once. Riding horses like circus freaks. Shit blowing up. Gratuitous English. Ninjas. Pirates. Zombies. Gundams. A Norio Wakamoto -voiced villain. All historically accurate, of course.
  • The Nintendo GameCube Wrestling Game WWE WrestleMania XIX has a story mode of sorts called "Revenge Mode" where you wrestle to complete various objectives in different locations, such as a Harbour and Shopping Mall. What does this feature? Chokeslamming security guards down a storey or two? Check. Throwing people down several feet into the sea? Check. Wanton destruction for the sake of sabotaging WrestleMania after you've been fired by Vince McMahon? Check. A Create A Superstar which lets you add gear that would never be seen in a real life wrestling match? Check. A finishing move that involves people getting knocked out from a getting a good look at your wrestler's ass? Check. Yep.
  • The Powered Armor in Vanquish's main function is the ability to get on your knees and jet around the battlefield at 50 miles per hour. Plus you can slow down everything around you and mark targets in Bullet Time. It makes no sense and would be extremely unwieldy and impractical in real life but in the game it's as cool as they come.
  • Bulletstorm tasks the player with trying to cook up the most outrageous kills they possibly can to score points. To facilitate this, you have a leash you can use to toss hapless enemies around and your kicks can send foes flying great distances. It's nonsensical but it's all in good fun. Having to willfully suspend your disbelief will be a non-issue once you drag that enemy in front of a big Venus flytrap to get eaten alive and your score goes up.
  • Saints Row:
    • Saints Row: The Third: Bail out of a plane amidst lampshaded implausible quantities of stuff which also fell out. Kill enemies in free-fall. Catch a girl and deploy a parachute. See the plane coming back to ram you, drop the girl, shoot out the plane's windscreen, fly through it shooting everything in sight, fall out the back, more midair combat, catch Shaundi again.
    • Saints Row IV starts you as a special operative trying to stop a nuclear missile, which you do by dismantling the missile in flight, then you cut to being the President of the United States, then aliens invade, then you get put in the Matrix where you have superpowers.
  • The Rule of Cool rules supreme in any game developed by PlatinumGames:
    • MadWorld deals with a guy mauling his opponent with a giant chainsaw attached to his arm in the most over-the-top and goriest manners possible. Just that is enough already.
    • The Bayonetta series as a whole, with a Stripperific witch wielding a double Guns Akimbo (two in hands, two on feet) brutalizing Angels and demons alike, killing two supreme gods and delivering some of the most stylish over-the-top battle in video game history.
    • The Wonderful 101 has the player control 101 superheroes on their way to protect the Earth from gigantic aliens, occasionnally piloting Humongous Mechas and culminating with an Astral Finale during which they fight a Mechanical Abomination almost as big as the Earth itself.
    • NieR: Automata features a Robot Girl with a fashion sense that would make Bayonetta proud fighting robots with badass weapons. Why is said Robot Girl wearing a blindfold? Partly because it's actually a high-tech visor, but mostly because it looks frickin' cool. The game also has a crossover questline in Final Fantasy XIV. Why? Why the hell not!
    • Astral Chain: police officers fighting monsters with a monster of their own? Nice!
    • It is finally worth noting that Platinum devs were behind several games that warranted entries on this page before Platinum games was created, namely Viewtiful Joe and Ōkami.
  • Borderlands and Borderlands 2: Sure, having a shotgun that shoots missiles or a machine gun that can electrocute people doesn't make much sense, but damn if it isn't awesome. The DLC goes even further with it; Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep has a gun that shoots swords. Which then explode into more swords.
  • No Man's Sky: could any of the planets you can visit in the game be as close together as they are in Real Life and be anywhere as viable or possible as they are in-game? Of course not; though you're not likely going to care when they make for some truly breathtaking alien skies and scenery.
  • Guilty Gear is the single coolest fighting game ever. The playable cast includes a Pirate Girl wielding an anchor as big as she is, a blind assassin who kills people with the demonic entity living in his shadow, a drug dealer turned ninja turned politician, a trash-talking half-dragon bounty hunter who likes Queen, and a British time-traveller ala Doctor Who plus a kusarigama and fire magic. That last guy is possibly the most normal character in this game.
    • Saying that, its Spiritual Successor Blazblue comes close. It has a man with a massive sword and a replacement arm that allows him to go Super Saiyen, a girl who can pull gatling guns out of thin air who is also a robot that can rewrite the universe, a smooth talking intelligence agent with an infinite chain who screwed up the entire world and is actually God, a squirrel girl who can punch you into outer space, a suit of armour possessed by one of the character from another timeline, and a cat person with duel katanas.
  • Reservoir Dogs: Striking a real cool pose/doing something neat with your business suit allows you to slay your enemies in bullet time. Why? Why not.
  • Fleuret Blanc has an in-universe example. The bouts run on this; even if you're the first to tap out, you can still win if you have enough style points. As such, many of the techniques are very flashy and impressive while being impractical in terms of actual combat — such as allowing your opponent to hit you so you have time to play a song for the judges.
  • Basically what Heroes of the Storm is built on. A murlock and Zeartul driving a mech made by Volskya Industries and using it to beat up the Lord of Terror? Yes plase.
  • A number of the assassins in No More Heroes.
    • Travis Touchdown: A socially oblivious otaku and complete loser that happens to be surprisingly skilled at killing people with a beam katana, knows pro wrestling moves, is quite thoroughly Made of Iron, and can stop time by faking opponents out.
    • Destroyman: A dirtbag mailman who stars as a superhero in his independent films that convinces Travis to turn his back on him, get zapped by his joy buzzer to the brink of death, has machine guns in his nipples, and a laser codpiece. And he likes announcing his attacks, which activates his SFX converter, the device that launches his attacks.
    • Letz Shake: Singaporean punk rocker with a Brain in a Jar-earthquake maker (whose brain just so happens to belong to his father) and has the honor of the most spectacular if not enraging death in the game. Said Brain in a Jar-earthquake maker (Dr. Shake) returns in the sequel with the express purpose of enacting his revenge on Travis and Henry.
    • Harvey Moseiwitsch Volodarskii: He's a stage magician, for starters. A stage magician that you fight in the middle of a live performance, while he summons pigeons to attack you, flips the screen upside-down (not that it helps him much) and getting out of his instant-death attack involves a Houdini-esque escape trick.
    • Speed Buster: A deaf little old lady with a shopping cart... that turns into a (roughly) fifty-foot long Wave-Motion Gun. And her BGM is called "Mach 13 Elephant Explosion".
    • Bad Girl: In her spare time she chugs beer and beats gimps in S&M get-up with a baseball bat...in a lolita getup. She'll also spit booze on to the bat to light it on fire halfway through the fight. Be careful when she goes down.
    • Dark Star: Giant Dragon Beam Katana, for starters. Story-wise and metafictionally speaking, the only reason he exists is to set the player up for a Mind Screw as he, by revealing his face, convinces Travis that he's his killed-in-front-of-Travis'-eyes-dead father... only he's not, which ought to qualify for something—if not crazy-awesomeness then a defining moment in Suda51-ism.
    • From No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: Skelter Helter: Has a fairly bizarre gun, but other than that, is fairly unremarkable... until a few minutes after his decapitation, he tells Travis he's not done with him, then raves on about how killing someone isn't the same as ending their life.
    • Charlie MacDonald: Not only is he an assassin, but so's his harem of twenty-four cheerleaders, and apparently their collective modus operandi is summoning a Humongous Mecha from space (or they transform into said mecha, either way is awesome). At which point Travis promptly qualifies himself for this trope again by revealing that he's had his own Humongous Mecha commissioned (its design based on one of Travis' favorite animes, no less), just in case something like this ever happened.
  • Albert Wesker, from the Resident Evil series, has a master plan that involved getting stabbed through the chest (by a Tyrant's large, clawed hand, no less) so that an experimental virus he injected into himself would reanimate him, with glowing red, cat-like eyes, superhuman strength and speed. It sure as all living hell worked.
  • Drei from Phantom of Inferno starts off as a sweet, somewhat bratty little girl but the Not as You Know Them after the timeskip is made of this. Stepping out in front of big gangsters and daring them to shoot her, sniping items off the belts of her targets from atop a motorcycle, walking down the streets of Tokyo in a rage and trying to pick fights with random youths despite not knowing a word of Japanese, having sex with the main character in the middle of a gunfight...
  • Dwarf Fortress: Adventure Mode. Even the rules are crazy, such as armour-piercing throwing sand and the use of entire skeletons as melee weapons.
  • The Player Character from Sunset Overdrive has a few moments of this, especially in the "Awesomesmithing" mission: the player wants to make a sword to impress Las Catrinas. How does he/she do it? By taking some trophies made of titanium, throwing them into a nuclear power plant's cooling tower, destroying the control devices to heat it up, then jumping into the tower to strike the metal. The result is a sword that shoots fire and lightning in addition to stealing enemies' souls. Awesome, but a sane person probably would never have gotten the idea to do this.
  • Lufia:
    • Dekar proclaims himself as the world's strongest man, and he just might be right about that, being a Mighty Glacier or Multi-Melee Master depending on the game. He can take on hordes of enemies and dispatch tough adversaries all on his own. He's also a very, very stupid man, to the point where he fails to grasp simple taunts and even walks right into an enemy's trap at one point. And even then, he's great at giving advice.
    • In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, Dekar stays behind in an exploding temple to hold off a horde of monsters. He comes back near the end, on the back of a whale, to hold off another horde of monsters for the heroes.
    • In Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, Dekar allows Idura to pull him into a hellish otherworld in Tia's place. He comes back near the end, and tells Alex that he blew up the entire dimension behind him during his escape.
  • Darkstalkers presents Lilith, Morrigan's incomplete clone. Her super consists of using the same bats that make up her clothes and sending all of them out in a whirlwind attack with the usual consequence. Her other unique super is her turning into a Playboy Bunny and tossing out a top hat which on contact, sets up a stage with the hapless enemy as the star, and playing a dancing mini-game that deals more damage to them the better you do. You also inflict them with more elemental attacks, and a perfect super can even be a One-Hit Kill Finishing Move.
  • PN03. Starring Vanessa Z. Schneider, a stripperific dance-battling cyberpunk mercernary who inexplicably twerks and jiggles her booty while she blasts robots while wearing her skin-tight "Aegis Suit" connected to her spine and powered by her (hotness) energy, with a thong-bottomed OneHitPointWonder raver/clubwear suit as the ultimate unlock. As the spiritual predecessor to Bayonetta, Vanessa is a "crazysexycool" heroine and P.N.03 is the ultimate fanservice shooter, providing endless hours of grinding combos, points, and ass.
  • Tales Series:
    • Tales of Rebirth has Tytree Crowe. Imagine Kamina with amplified happiness, optimism and Hot-Blooded-ness, meaning that he never gets depressed and is the only character who has the balls required to give Veigue a much-needed What the Hell, Hero? speech. And if that still doesn't convince you, then bare his fighting style in mind: martial arts in conjunction with an arm-mounted crossbow. And one of his Mystic Artes involves him turning his crossbow into a big Wave-Motion Gun of lightning.
    • Tales of Hearts took this one step further and gave Hisui two arm-mounted crossbows.
  • Durandal of Marathon has some elements of this: he loves composing songs and poems, waxing philosophical, and is very, very snarky. Some of his antics include "The Humbling of Battle Group Seven", in which he took on an entire Pfhor fleet with a single upgraded medium-sized ship and almost won, carving an epitaph (in Latin) into a moon visible from space using a Wave-Motion Gun, and scaring the crap out of humanity by buzzing Earth in a Precursor warship for the lulz.
  • Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice features a battle system heavily based around parrying and blocking attacks... and is set in feudal Japan. Historically, katanas were extremely brittle due to the low quality of iron in Japan, so parrying was usually avoided. But this battle system is really cool, so the historical inaccuracies are easily ignored.
  • In the Crash Bandicoot series, this is the only reason every game has the "run toward the camera from a boulder Indiana Jones style" levels. According to Word of God, they wanted to avoid making a "Sonic's ass" game, that is a game where you spent the entire time staring at the protagonist's ass from behind. They spent a ton of time and effort, and pushed the Playstation 1 to its absolute limit, giving Crash a very expressive face and wanted to show it off to the camera by having him come toward you sometimes.
  • Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: The Pokemon World Tournament is a post-game battle facility that lets you battle every gym leader and champion from the series up to that point, note  all packing teams consisting of Pokemon with competitive stats and movesets. Even the detractors of post-game battle facilities for their gratuitous use of The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard tend to like the Pokemon World Tournament for the sheer nostalgia overload it provides.
  • Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: Why can detectives use supernatural dispositions to investigate cases? Why can the protagonist be possessed by a Shinigami in the first place? Why add a city of eternal rain as the setting for all of it? Why make the CEO of a corporation a clone of the protagonist, who turns out to actually be the top detective of the organization he's a part of, of whom his clone is based off? Because you can write all of that into your story if you want to and it's also cool.

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