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There Is No Kill Like Overkill / Anime & Manga

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  • AKIRA:
    • When the revolutionary who tries to lead Takashi out of the city gets caught by the police, he shoots at them, and they return fire with machine guns, mortally wounding him. When he tells Takashi to leave, the police proceed to blast the hell out of him with another fusillade, with one of the last hits splitting his skull in two.
    • The General at one point calls in an orbital strike on a mugger.
  • Baccano!:
    • Claire Stanfield has gone on record claiming that he can't be satisfied with killing someone unless he goes entirely over the top with it.
    • Nice Holystone is like this with bombs. She stabbed a guy in the face with a knife then left a bomb full of fireworks attached to it. Later, she went to rescue her boyfriend who was in a garage with the door open. She blew a hole in the wall a little to the left and went in that way instead.
      Donny: Boss, the place was open! Why'd you blow it up?
      Nick: Now Donny, what kind of bone-headed question is that? The boss likes to blow stuff up!
    • There's also Ladd, given that he not only beats a man to death using good old fisticuffs, he wears a white suit in anticipation of the mess staining it a pretty shade of red.
  • Battle Angel Alita:
    • The series is famous for ramping up the characters to untold proportions where everything they do is essentially another shot on overkill... at least until the other person comes up with something that is even more overkill.
    • During Alita's fight with Sachumudo, Sachumudo uses nanomachine dust that breaks everything apart, making him nearly completely invincible... until Alita learns to use plasma to burn it away, only for Sachumudo to reveal that he can control magnetic fields and create a giant ball of plasma that can incinerate Alita 100 times over... only for Alita to turn that over again by using her Hertza Haeon to blast the entire sphere into Sachumudo, and proceed to tear the living crap out of him until he reverts to an infant form.
    • When Sechs enters the first tournament round against the Stellar nursery school, the first opponent, Getz, uses attacks that are used to take down warships.
    • Anything involving Zekka automatically falls into this category.
  • Black Lagoon:
    • Somewhat averted during the Hansel and Gretel arc. A group of bounty hunters gun down a car they believe is carrying the twins by not only shooting it with an RPG but also by riddling it with so many bullets that there is literally no part for the car without a bullet hole in it — but given that the twins hired two orphans to act as a decoy, you have the overkill part, just not the kill part, unless you count the two children in the car.
    • When Fabiola starts a fight at the Yellow Flag, the Columbian cartel responds with a car-mounted machine gun hosing down the entire building — and they miss.
    • Hotel Moscow is known for using military-grade gear without hesitation. Hotel Moscow's idea of starting a gang war? Several explosions of antipersonnel mines in their main income sources. Then they go on a full-blown military search-and-destroy mission. Granted, they are mostly former military and do know how to use this stuff properly...
  • Blame! introduces the Gravitational Beam Emitter, a weapon that is incapable of anything less than overkill. The weapon is no larger than a pistol, and the main character fires it off like farts after a bean casserole, despite it leaving a 40-kilometer-long path of destruction along its aim, no matter what happens to be in the way — and this being Blame!, it is not even most powerful among such weapons.
  • Bleach:
    • When Grimmjow kills Luppi. Grimmjow first thrusts his arm through Luppi's chest, which would probably have meant that Luppi would have just bled to death if he let him, but then Grimmjow decides to go and blast off his upper body with a Cero.
    • The Sokyoku used for the execution of serious criminals. Not only is it quite a spectacle - being a large phoenix - but it incinerates the target's soul, meaning they cannot be reincarnated into the living world.
    • Driscoll Berci is actually codenamed "The Overkill", and this reflects in his incredibly brutal fighting style. Naturally, Yamamoto treats him to the same principle by blowing him to ashes with Ryujin Jakka.
    • Yhwach does this to Yamamoto. He slices him in half from shoulder to hip with a BFS. When Yamamoto's bisected torso falls to the ground, he cuts off his sword (and remaining), arm. Lastly, he completely nukes the corpse over and over until nothing is left.
    • Gremmy Thoumeaux attempted to kill Kenpachi Zaraki by summoning a meteor, which would have destroyed everything if Kenpachi hadn't stopped it.
    • Askin Nakk le Vaar's death. Grimmjow sticks his hand through his chest from behind, rips out his heart, and when Askin continues talking, starts ripping out more organs.
    • When Byakuya uses Senbonzakura Kageyoshi to run Gerard Valkyrie through a blender not once, but twice. First, up into the sky, and when Gerard lands, pummels him again with said blender blades. Shinji mentions this as overkill immediately afterwards.
  • While the immune cells' reaction to any germ invading the body in Cells at Work! seems to be this, it's a rare justified Truth in Television example, as extermination without mercy is what the body does to any foreign invader. This is also why organ transplant recipients need to take immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives.
  • A Certain Magical Index:
    • The organization GREMLIN wants to kill Touma Kamijou. They want to kill him so bad that they are willing to wipe out the human race just to be sure he's dead. They later cause a volcano to erupt, causing incredible destruction, just because they wanted to use the volcano's heat to forge a replica of Odin's spear Gungnir.
    • Make Accelerator angry and this is what he'll do to you. There wasn't even a drop of blood left of Amata Kihara when Accelerator was through with him.
    • There's Aleister Crowley being so obsessed with killing Shiage Hamazura that he calls in everybody from Academy City's Dark Side and then the military. The Girl in the Dress even thought Crowley was going overboard for spending so much to kill one guy. Despite what she thought, it actually wasn't enough because Shiage survived.
  • City Hunter:
    • Handguns chambered for magnum rounds are very much overkill against unarmored targets that aren't Umibozu, yet Ryo and co. use them almost exclusively. In a more typical example, Ryo once used a rifle chambered for .500 Nitro Express rounds (a hunting round created to take down big game such as buffalos, rhinoceros and elephants) as part of a complicated scheme to give a very humiliating death to a boxer who fixed his matches with threats and blackmail, and took care of explaining how powerful it was beforehand.
    • It happens when facing Union Teope. Justified as Union Teope is fond of dosing people with Angel Dust, with the victim becoming a mindless murderer with Super-Strength and effectively impossible to stop without a headshot or beheading (they can be killed by shooting them in other places, but they won't stay down and will kill you before bleeding out), and the best way to do so is to riddle the drone with bullets and shoot him in the head with a Hand Cannon while he's down.
      • This was dramatically shown by the first and second Angel Dust-dosed assassins shown on page: the first, set after Hideyuki Makimura, was hit by a car and shot five times at point blank with a .357 Magnum and still found the strength to mortally wound him before bleeding out, while the second, set after Ryo, was shot twice with a .357 Magnum and was already coming back for more when Ryo (who already had experience with the drug, having been the first test subject, so he knew what to do) beheaded him.
    • Then there's what Ryo did to the General: using his Colt Python .357 Magnum he first shot him in the right side of the chest, then in the arm to stop him from using his arm-mounted assault rifle and then right in the heart, then, seeing the General had taken Angel Dust, he hit him in the forehead and throat the knives the General had just thrown at him, and when the enemy revealed his leg-mounted grenade launcher he put a bullet down the grenade launcher's barrel, blowing him up. At that point the General finally died, what with his body having been disintegrated and all...
    • Note that Ryu apparently considers overkill as a basic combat skill: the first lesson he gave Kaori after gun safety was the Mozambique Drill, that is shoot the enemy in each shoulder and then the head, with a .357 Magnum. Or maybe it was due the circumstances, as the lesson happened right as Ryo and Kaori were facing Union Teope for the first time, and Kaori Makimura was Hideyuki's younger sister.
  • Crest of the Stars: The Abh do not generally involve themselves in the affairs of surface worlds under their dominion. However, if an armed uprising does happen and is big enough to catch their attention, their response to it is apparently... severe, and often involves either Orbital Bombardment or burning away the planet's atmosphere.
  • In Death Note:
    • After Mello kidnaps Takada Matt, in his escape attempt, is shot approximately fifty thousand times by a hugely unnecessary number of Takada's bodyguards. Many fangirls mourned. Clearly an egregious case of more dakka.
    • In the last episode when Light reveals he is Kira, and Matsuda unloads five rounds from his revolver into him to stop him from writing Near's name in the torn scrap of Death Note he had on him using his own blood, and has to be stopped before he puts his final bullet in Light's head. Subverted in the fact that Light isn't even killed by it, and only dies when Ryuk writes his name down. Note that this might have been the best course of action to take in that situation: Light is known to be a Determinator by everyone who knows him, Matsuda included. As Matsuda shoots Light's dominant hand, Light can be seen continuing to attempt to kill Near no matter how many bullets wind up inside that hand, and Matsuda understandably believes the only way to stop Light from trying to kill Near is to kill Light.
  • In D.Gray-Man, Yu Kanda kills Skinn Bolic by cutting him multiple times, stabbing him with his sword in the left side of the chest (where the heart is), slicing him from the shoulder down to the lower belly (which causes the Innocence to melt in his body as well) and finally bisecting him to eventually make him stop moving.
  • Digimon:
    • Myotismon from Digimon Adventurehas proven extremely hard to kill. He's been destroyed twice, but he comes back in Digimon Adventure 02 for round three. So how do you finally kill this sadist off for good? Blow up his soul with the combined light of every Digivice on Earth fired from a BFG that shoots dark matter. To put this in perspective, just the light of eight Digivices completely negate an explosion that could completely destroy two dimensions. Myotismon's soul is hit with the light of millions of Digivices in one, in a concentrated blast fired out of a darkmatter cannon. And this is one of those cases where the victim in question is just that hard to kill, considering that he'd been vaporized him already and kept coming back. Since this particular Myotismon never comes back, it works.
    • Digimon Fusion has Kiriha, who lives by this trope. His tactics mostly involve his Digimon unleashing a barrage of Beam Spam of ungodly proportions; if a single volley isn't enough, he keeps on firing some more, and he doesn't even care if Taiki's Digimon get in his line of fire. In fact, he specifically invokes this when fighting regenerating undead opponents. How do you stop opponents that can recover from any attack you hit them with? You blast them until they can't.
    • Then there's the first time we see Skullgreymon. It slaps the other Greymon at a giant TV screen so it gets electrocuted, and then, just to be sure, fires of a mini-nuke at it.
  • Dragon Ball Z:
    • To make sure Frieza is finally dead after slicing him in half with his sword, Trunks proceeds to cut off his limbs and tail, chop his two halves into smaller pieces, and finishes it by disintegrating his remains with a ki-blast. Given he survived a beating from Goku, getting cut in half, and being on an exploding planet, and given that Frieza was one of the most powerful villains of the series, it probably seemed like a sensible precaution. Also notable is the amount of effort Frieza's minions went through in order to resurrect him years later: Even after bringing him back to life, his body was still chopped up.
    • Two examples during the Android/Cell Saga:
      • When Dr. Gero last monitored Goku on Earth, the highest power level on record was Vegeta's Great Ape form which had a power level around 180,000. He didn't see any of the fights on Namek, so he calculated how powerful to make the androids. Even the weakest of his androids was at least comparable to Frieza, who was the undisputed most powerful mortal in the universe. If the Z-Fighters had never gone to Namek or met Frieza, they would have been killed with little trouble.
      • Androids 16, 17 and 18 were Gero's strongest androids and it showed when they demonstrated enough power to easily best a normal Super Saiyan - something Gero didn't even account for.note  On top of that, at least 16 and 18 (and perhaps even 17) have self-detonators - 16 in particular, felt his was powerful enough to insta-kill even Goku despite his power being close to Perfect Cell. And as for Cell, he is a Mix-and-Match Man created from the DNA of the strongest known beings on Earth, he is designed to able to absorb organic life to increase his power and ultimately absorb 17 and 18 to reach his Perfect state, his self-destruct ability has enough power to blow up the Earth even in his weaker Semi-Perfect state, and by the end of his life as Super Perfect Cell had grown in power to the point he could wipe out a solar system with one Kamehameha. Gero really wanted Goku dead.
    • A subversion of the trope occurs during the Majin Buu arc. Gotenks has just blown Super Buu apart with several Kamikaze Ghosts. He and Piccolo then proceed to disintegrate the chunks of Buu's body (Piccolo saw Buu regenerate from getting blasted apart before, and wanted to take no chances). Why a subversion then? Because despite being disintegrated (i.e. his body was reduced to the atomic level), Majin Buu still manages to re-form his body. Buu then manages to reform himself from the SMOKE.
    • Right after Kid Buu is formed, his first act is to fire a deceptively-small ki blast with enough power packed in it to blow up Earth. When Goku and Vegeta knock it away into space, Kid Buu responds by laughing and then forming a massive energy ball strong enough to destroy the planet 10 times over. And this time, there's no stopping it.
    • Then Goku goes on to violate the laws of physics; conservation of matter when his Spirit Bomb kills Kid Buu with no chance of regeneration by destroying every atom he is made of. It's a trend too; Gohan took care of Cell in much the same way, except with a Kamehameha.
  • Eat-Man, what with all the BFGs. Plus, in the Mira/Misha arc, Bolt is stabbed through the heart with a missile.
  • The prologue of the sci-fi/hentai anime EL explains that in 2030, the world's major powers nearly wiped out all life on the planet via nuclear holocaust. Their reason? To put a stop to environmental pollution.
  • Fairy Tail
    • Jose is not happy with just firing a Wave-Motion Gun at the ruins of Fairy Tail's base and its wounded members. He then turns his own base into a Humongous Mecha Wizard, which proceeds to draw a magic seal that will wipe out an entire town.
    • Likewise with Laxus attempting Fairy Law during his arc to wipe out everyone in the town, despite having shown he could easily pulverize Natsu and Gajeel into the dirt. This ends up biting him in the ass, because not only does he waste a large amount of magical energy, the spell fails to hurt anyone because deep down he doesn't really want to kill any of them and the realization of the implication sends him into a Villainous Breakdown, all of which culminates in his defeat.
    • Zeref does this to Larcade in the Alvarez Empire arc for interfering with his fight against Natsu, ultimately reducing him to a stain on the floor.
  • This is Gilgamesh's main MO in Fate/Zero, attacking any and all enemies with a Storm of Infinity+1 Swords triggered by a Badass Fingersnap. When that fails, he pulls out his personal sword Ea to perform Enuma Elish, a technique so powerful it creates a Reality-Breaking Paradox every time it's used.
  • Fist of the North Star applies this to most battles Kenshiro participates in: by the time the fight's over, someone's gonna end up exploding into a pile of chunky salsa.
  • Jagd Mirage, a heavy artillery Mortar Headd from The Five Star Stories, whose main armament is a Twin Towers buster launcher. That is, a double-barreled railgun friggin' 200 meter long, capable of hurling 3-meter-wide antimatter shells to orbit on full auto. Luckily, it was so Awesome, but Impractical that only two of them were ever built, but when they were used on full power, it ended in an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. And if THAT's not an overkill, then what is?
  • Fullmetal Alchemist:
    • Nearly every fight boils down to this when it comes to fighting the homunculi. In the manga, Mustang burns Lust well over a dozen times.
    • And then there is the battle at Briggs in the manga, where all of the Dracma army is destroyed in minutes.
    • Not to mention the Ishbal Massacre, where state alchemists were deployed to the front lines with Philosopher Stones to be used as human weapons. After deployment, the entire war was over in one day. Mustang is seen using alchemy to reduce an entire city to rubble with a single snap of his fingers.
  • Full Metal Panic!:
  • The various types of Aquarions from Genesis of Aquarion, Aquarion Evol, and Aquarion Logos all display overkill powers including infinite reaches, infinite ammunition, infinite strength, infinite speed, and the Aquarion Logos Genesis from the third series can even kill entire concepts (and by default everything including opponents associated with them). This is not even counting the time it punched a beam spamming black hole monster that threatened all of reality to death.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex:
    • 2nd Gig has one of the best examples of this. After spending the best part of 26 episodes thinking he's bulletproof, the scheming Kazunoto Goda gets machine-gunned to death at point-blank range until his head asplodes by the Major and Batou.
    • There's also the terrorists' plan to buy plutonium from the Russian mafia to threaten the government with atomic bombs. The corrupt government takes no risks and calls a favor from the Americans to nuke the entire refugee colony where the terrorists are hiding.
  • Girls und Panzer gives us a few examples:
  • Gundam:
    • Mobile Suit Gundam:
      • Gihren Zabi backs various superweapon projects, kills a billion people in the first week of the war with chemical weapons, drops a colony on Earth Federation headquarters, and uses nuclear weapons at the first real battle between Zeon and the Federation. That's without taking into account his use of the Solar Ray to assassinate one man; namely, his own father.
      • To say nothing of Char's slaying of Kycillia: shooting her in the face with a rocket launcher. The missile flies so fast that it smashes through the bridge of her ship and tears her head off before it even explodes.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket: The Kampfer has just used its chain mine to destroy the Gundam NT-1 "Alex"'s Chobham Armor and has pulled out its beam saber for what its pilot hopes is the final blow. The Alex responds by raising up its arm and firing its Gatling gun mounted on its forearm, and just keeps firing until the stupid thing falls down and stays down. The poor pilot is so much hamburger.
    • From Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, we have the Dendrobium "Orchis", a massive mobile armor which docks with the "Stamen", a regular-sized Gundam. It features self-guided Macross Missile Massacre-launching projectiles, chain mines, folded-up weapons for the Stamen to use, its own I-field generator, two massive claws outfitted with beam sabers, and a Wave-Motion Gun, which can also be used to stab enemy mechs with, as seen in the climax. It's so powerful that in order to reconcile it with Zeta, they had to have the entire incident covered up.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn: The Full Armor Unicorn. Basically, they slapped a large backpack and extra boosters on the Unicorn and crammed in as many weapons as they possibly could. In addition to its standard armament of a Beam Magnum, head vulcans, and four beam sabers, it now has two double-barreled beam gatlings, another double gatlings on the shoulders, multiple missile pods on its legs and more on the backpack, two shoulder-mounted bazookas, two anti-ship missile launchers, two grenade launchers, 24 (MS-scale) hand grenades, and two beam javelins/halberds. This thing is seemingly designed to take on an entire army on its own.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam Wing:
      • One character, after he 'is no longer needed', is dropped out of a high-flying plane... and the woman who drops him (Lady Une in full-on buns-and-glasses mode) then shoots him in the head on the way down. This is made even more ludicrous by her stated reason: she didn't want to soil the plane with his blood.
      • Wing Gundam's Buster Rifle. So powerful that it can blow up a colony or planetoid in one shot, and mobile suits often explode just from being near the beam. Heero usually uses it against small numbers of mobile suits. In The Movie, Tallgeese III has a similar weapon. The Wing Zero meanwhile has a Twin Buster Rifle, which is just as overpowered as it sounds.
      • The Mercurius and Vayeate mobile suits are deliberate overkill in the defense and offense departments, respectively. Mercurius was a test bed for the Defensor drones, three of which can form an energy shield that blocks most anything. Mercurius has eight of them. The Vayeate is basically a mobile suit-shaped engine for a gigantic beam cannon that might just outdo the Buster Rifle in terms of sheer firepower, and has a built-in generator so that it won't run out of power after three shots like the Buster Rifle does. This would veer into Crippling Overspecialization if it weren't for the fact that the Mercurious and Vayeate were planned to work together like Bash Brothers.
    • After War Gundam X: The X Gundam's and Double X Gundam's Satellite Cannons. Think of Wing Zero's overpowered Buster Rifle times about ten, and you might have one of these. Explicitly stated to be anti-army weapons or Space Colony destroyers.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED:
      • Muruta Azrael. First, when Azrael needs to defeat a ZAFT invasion of the Alaska base at Josh-A, he stations a whole bunch of unwanted forces to defend the base, orders his fanatical subordinates to escape, then uses a Cyclops bomb to irradiate and then vaporize the base, its defenders, and the majority of the ZAFT assault forces. Later, when he is staging his final assault on the space fortress at Jachin Due, he not only deploys nukes at Boaz fortress, completely reducing it to ash, but he also deploys enough nukes against the Plant Colonies to wipe them out several times over.
      • His successor, Djibril, picks up the reins and does things more or less the same way. He tries to nuke the Plants right at the start of the war, uses the Destroy Gundam to crush local revolts in Eurasia, and fires Requiem at ZAFT in a last bid to kill them all.
      • ZAFT is little better. Before the series began, the Earth Alliance nuked one of the PLANT colonies, killing roughly 250,000 people. ZAFT's response was the deployment of N-Jammers on Earth, which triggered a catastrophic energy crisis in every nation on the planet. Late in the series, when they completely disable the Alliance forces at Panama with EMPs, they don't secure the helpless and surrendering soldiers, they massacre all of them. The one ironic non-accomplice in this event is Yzak Joule, who feels that butchering unarmed and stationary targets is a waste of time, which is ironic considering his previous actions at Heliopolis and the 8th Fleet battle. At the end of the war, Patrick Zala's victory strategy involves purging all moderate factions in the governments, including his old friend Siegel Clyne, and then using the massive gamma ray laser GENESIS to scorch the surface of Earth, wiping out all life.
      • The icing on the cake is when you find out that both Azrael and Zala were being used by Rau Le Creuset in an attempt to bring about the extinction of mankind via Mutually Assured Destruction with both sides' superweapons (the nukes and GENESIS). What do you expect when the entire series is a Crapsack World that runs on Humans Kill Wantonly?
      • Oh, and Rau Le Creuset himself? His Gundam, Providence, gets impaled in the final battle by the Beam Saber of Kira's Freedom, and despite the Laser Blade missing him by inches, he is exposed to the vacuum of space as a result, sucking his mask off and taking his air away. But that isn't enough... Rau is in front of the massive laser cannon of the GENESIS as it fires its last shot before exploding, completely obliterating and disintegrating the Providence with Rau inside, as if to remove any doubt that Rau could live through that. Kira wisely gets out of dodge before it fires.
      • Also in Destiny, in a duel between Kira and Athrun, during a blade-lock, Kira cuts off Athrun's Savior's arms, literally disarming it, and then proceeds to chop it into pieces in a rain of scrap metal, making sure that Gundam isn't going to come back. It's a non-lethal example, though, since Kira is a Badass Pacifist and... that's kinda his best friend he's fighting against.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam 00:
      • Louise Halevy has a particularly well-deserved punishment for the loathsome Nena Trinity (the girl responsible for killing Louise's parents, as well as the loss of Louise's hand) when she finally gets to face her with her Regnant Mobile Armor. First, she blasts Nena's Gundam Throne Drei with the homing Beam Cannon of her Regnant twice, blowing off its arm and legs. Then she tears the Throne Drei limb from limb with her Regnant's Fang claws, bloodying Nena inside her cockpit as she reduces the Drei to just a battered, sparking torso. Then, with Nena completely helpless and trying to refuse her impending fate, Louise violently shoves the Regnant's arm into the cockpit, impaling Nena and severing her in two. Somehow, Nena briefly survives that and screams a Dying Curse at Louise before the rest of Throne Drei explodes, incinerating what's left of her. It is completely deserved. Surprisingly, Nena's Haro survives the explosion.
      • In the dub, Tieria talks about this in episode 10. "So, I see you got caught. This just goes to prove that you never deserved to be a Gundam Meister. You deserve ten thousand deaths!" Ironically, it is turned against himself moments later. "So, I actually got caught. This just goes to prove that I never deserved to be a Gundam Meister. I deserve ten thousand deaths!"
      • Virtue, Nadleeh, and Seravee all qualify. Virtue is your average heavy-assault mecha with an incredibly destructive particle bazooka (shown in one of the first episodes to not destroy the enemy, but break them down into particles). Nadleeh is slightly less bulky, and more mobile, but can dual-wield Virtue's shoulder-mounted cannons as were they handguns. Seravee... well, it can wield 6 particle bazookas, each more powerful than Virtue's single bazooka, and if it is forced into melee combat, it can just wield 6 beam sabers instead. The movie goes further and gives us the Gundam Zabanya, an upgraded version of the Gundam Dynames which is more focused on precision rather than firepower, and yet it still has 20 Bits and 78 missile launchers built into its frame. Then there's the Gundam Harute, which in its own right is pretty all-round... until Hallelujah and Soma Peries awake, at which point it is controlled by the two most powerful Super Soldiers ever created.
      • Also from The Movie: the Gadelaza. Here is all you need to know about its overkill weaponry: 154 bits... and a Wave-Motion Gun for good measure.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam AGE:
      • Episode 26. Asemu versus Desil. After Woolf dies from taking Desil's beam saber thrust for Asemu, he goes full out against Desil, first by taking off the Khronos's legs, then its arms and its remaining shoulder cannon. Then he bisects the mobile suit, and finishes it off by firing his Hyper DODS cannons at the two halves, leaving the Khronos and its pilot as space dust. Considering the type of guy he was, it was a long time coming — and redeemed Asemu in the eyes of Western fans.
      • In Episode 31, the AGE-3 Fortress' most powerful attack involves combining the energy of all 4 of its BFGs into one huge blast, glassing a large part of the desert in its wake.
    • Mikazuki Augus from Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans is already notorious for frequently delivering No Holds Barred Beatdowns to his enemies, but the fight against Carta Issue takes the cake. In his Roaring Rampage of Revenge for his fallen allies, he slams her bodyguards and stomps them when the later wants to negotiate for a duel, pursues Carta without bothering to acknowledge her chatter and her name, dismembers her mecha, flings said dismembered mecha across a snowy field, breaks her sword and snaps her hand apart. Even when Mika's final blow is interrupted by Gaelio and Orga, getting her mecha tossed around like a rag doll has already mortally wounded Carta.
  • In the Gungrave anime, Bear Walken's team is called the "Overkills", which is demonstrated after they riddle Blood War with hundreds of bullets. Granted, this is done after he is shot up by Brandon, Bunji and Harry.
  • In Heavy Object, this is what happens when Objects are assigned to attack anything other than an Object. They have enough firepower to level entire cities and reduce people to a paste.
  • Hellsing:
    • Alucard will often use far more bullets and/or physical force than necessary to kill his opponents. Conversely, what seems like overkill from the other side is never enough to kill him.
    • Seras Victoria likes this trope as well. Lacking Alucard's capacity for physical force and regeneration, she dual-wields 30mm autocannons and uses them against human-sized targets.
  • Hentai Kamen, on occasion. Especially with any of the Shiki-s involved - although Shuto is slightly more balanced.
  • Hunter × Hunter: After sacrificing ''everything'' to gain enough power to beat Pitou, a raging Gon beats Neferpitou in the stomach and sends it flying into the air and to the mountainside before finally pummeling it so hard that its head turned to mush. When Pitou's corpse revives itself via Terpsichora and severs his arm, he beats it once more then uses his own severed arm to pin down the corpse to fire off one last rage-filled induced Jajanken that blows out the surrounding area.
  • Ixion Saga DT, Kon decides to interrupt Erec with a Groin Attack, his weapon a spiked toe boot. He then goes up to eleven in the next episode, with a ROCKET HAMMER!
    • He actually shatters Erec's balls... quite literally.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has two of the titular characters, Jotaro and Giorno, beating up Steely Dan and Cioccolata for three and seven pages respectively (becoming 20/30 seconds in the anime adaptation), all the while shouting their beat-em-up phrases, and the cherry on top for Giorno is a WRYYYYY that continues off the page, reminding the readers who his father is.
    • DIO attempts to use this in the climax of his fight with Jotaro. Jotaro, frozen in place by The World, has precious few seconds to plan a defense against DIO, as most of his bones are broken, and he'll have a very short window of opportunity to defend himself. Expecting a flurry of knives or a physical rush, DIO instead throws a steamroller at him, before jumping on top of it and pummeling it into the ground onto Jotaro. Not to be outdone by himself, DIO in the OVA uses an oil truck, which explodes in the ensuing Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs.
      • DIO himself suffers this, as he is physically beaten to his breaking point, has his Stand destroyed, which reflects damage to his soul, drained of all his blood, and finally exposed to the sun's rays.
    • Cioccolata's death is one of most brutal in the series, even if compared to the main villain's. Before the barrage, Cioccolata's been shot with a bullet to the head. Such bullet is transformed by Gold Experience into a stag beetle which proceeds to destroy his brain from inside out. Every single punch Gold Experience delivers afterward has expanding and delaying effects, putting him in lasting pain and suffering before he's thrown down a tall building and crashes full-speed into a garbage truck for combustible wastes. In the anime, Gold Experience's beatdown of Cioccolata goes on for a full 30 seconds with it screaming "MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA!" the entire time.
    • Rohan also gets a major one in the anime from Josuke after insulting his hair. He gets punched multiple times for a couple of seconds and then he falls and hits a bookcase which falls on him and then when he tries to get back up he gets punched multiple times again.
    • After pretty infuriating fight with Devo the Cursed, who managed to tie him up under the bed and attemted to exploit his inability to move or see majority of the room to kill him, Polnareff was understandably pissed off. So, remembering how Devo said that he will bite his balls off, he decides to finish him off by cutting up everything but his balls. Results wasn't pretty.
    • Naturally, when Polnareff defeated J.Geil, guy, who killed his sister, he went extra mile to make his death as painful as possible, using his stand's rapier to riddle his body with more holes, than a fine swiss cheese - just his face was stabbed at least sixteen times. Fact that over the course of the fight Geil already get large slash wound from shoulder to the hip and another one in the middle his face makes it even more over the top.
  • In Jormungand, one of Koko's team members is killed by a CIA hit squad, three of whom make it out alive. She tracks them to a cave in Iraq, then calls in a B-52 airstrike on them strong enough to change the landscape.
  • Quite a few of the signature moves in Kinnikuman could apply, but the most obvious is Omegaman's Catastrophe Drop. It levels a whole city block.
  • Yasuo Umetsu's Kite (1998) manages to top a lot. However, one sequence deserves special mention: After Sawa assassinates a particular target, one of the bodyguards she had dealt with earlier (by shooting him a bunch of times) tackles her out of the window of a multi-story skyscraper. She manages to turn it around so she's hiding next to his chest, making his wild retaliatory pistol shots useless, and the two of them fall and fall and land on a car on an elevated freeway...making the car fall through the freeway and land on a truck in the street, making that all through the street and into a subway station. As Sawa clings to the edge of the pit leading up to the normal street level, a falling electrical sign shaped like an arrow falls and crushes the bodyguard and causes the two vehicles to explode.
  • Lyrical Nanoha
  • This is the preferred method of officer John Estes aka Sleepy from Mad Bull 34 for dealing with criminals, he either shoots them with a pistol until he blows their heads off or shoots them in the head with a shotgun until their heads are blown apart.
  • In Maiden Rose, after forcing their way into the country via Taki's sacred family ground and killingnote  the soldiers sent to stop them, including Taki's lover, Berkut and co. expect Taki will have to give in to the intrusion, considering he is completely obstructed from acting by his higher-ups and shouldn't have even sent the force he did. Instead Taki orders his men to get the tanks ready, goes out and shoots armour-piercing, high explosive rounds (aka anti-tank weapons) at the oncoming passenger train. "That's insane" indeed, and also awesome.
  • Martian Successor Nadesico has not just one, but TWO Wave-Motion Gun's that qualify: The standard Gravity Blast Cannon that is already capable of decimating fleets of ships and the Y-Unit upgrade known as the Phase Transition Cannon, which folds space around an entire area, destroying everything including space itself. It was so destructive that it was never used again, with Yurika stating bluntly (unlike her) that no person or organization should ever have access to such power.
  • Naruto:
    • In the Hidan and Kakuzu arc, Shikamaru uses this tactic to defeat the semi-immortal Hidan; first by blowing him up, then burying him in a deep hole.
    • Sasuke's Kirin, a temple-destroying bolt of lightning that can only be used once in a blue moon, but makes up for it in destructive power, which is used to kill one man named Itachi Uchiha. It even manages to obliterate Itachi's Susano'o and its so called invincible shield, the Yata Mirror, in the process.
    • When pushed to the wall, Deidara can summon all of his clay and use his "C4" attack, creating a massive clay golem in his image that scatters into countless microscopic bombs that, he claims, will dissolve any living being in range to dust. He created this technique in the desire to defeat Itachi, ironically the same person that Sasuke wants dead and the same person who inspired Sasuke to make Kirin, mentioned above.
    • Konan, the Patron Saint of this trope. For a battle she prepared six hundred billion explosive tags. Enough to fill a lake and explode continuously for ten minutes straight. And this was all to target a single man.
    • In Naruto Shippuden Movie 3, Naruto uses a massive (cough) Spirit Bomb (cough) Rasenshuriken to spike the movie's antagonist into the earth, and coincidentally, forms this attack in a manner very similar to the Spirit Bomb - gathering the energy of hundreds of smaller Rasengans.
    • The Tailed Beast Ball is a chakra blast that can destroy an entire mountain, but in the first few showings of the attack, the attack was used against a single (powerful) person. Later in the series, there have been massive Tailed Beast Balls; the most notable example is when Bee and Naruto both put all of their power into a Tailed Beast Ball large enough to engulf both of their beasts, in order to stop the transforming Gedo Mazou statue. The attack plowed through multiple mountain ranges, as well as the statue, and the resulting explosion engulfed an area 20+ times larger than one of the prominent battlefields.
      • The Juubi's attacks are on an even more massive scale. In fact, it formed a supermassive Tailed Beast Bomb, presumably large enough to destroy a small country, and fired at a weakened Naruto when it discovered that he had chakra from most of the tailed beasts.
    • Madara Uchiha loves this trope. When facing an army he summons a meteor and drops it on them, and when Onoki barely stops that he just drops another meteor on top of it. Then he battles five Kage-level ninja to their combined points of exhaustion, then summons 25 Wood Clones of himself who are near equal in power to the original and has them each summon a Nigh-Invulnerable shield on top of that. However, he then averts this by upholding his vow not to use one of his most powerful jutsus twice in the same battle, feeling that it would be demeaning to the attack.
    • In the Sasuke retrival arc, Temari and Gaara revealing their new technique. Temari's Quick Beheading Dance is capable of leveling a forest. Gaara's Quicksand Waterfall Flow is a giant tsunami of sand that can change the landscape and it's usually followed by the Desert Imperial Funeral which crushes the victim.
    • Naruto and Sasuke's combined attack, Korin ShippÅ« Shikkoku no Ya Zeroshiki translation which combines a Futon: Cho Odama Rasenshuriken translation with Enton: Susano'o Kagutsuchi translation to form a gigantic firestorm of black flames. Even the Ten-Tails felt that attack!
    • A flashback reveals Uchiha Obito did this to a group of about 20 ninja from the Hidden Mist village. Enraged by seeing Rin's death, he proceeds to massacre them so brutally that the moon appears red from all the blood that flew into the sky.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion: You want to open up a giant round physics breaking disc-like Angel that has Shinji trapped inside? Simple! Drop 992 not-actually-nukes on it!
    • Well, luckily, they ended up not having to do that due to the excellent timing of Eva Unit-01 in going berserk again.
    • There is very little left of Unit-02, and by extension Asuka by the time the Mass Production EVAS are through with them in End of Evangelion.
    • Essentially, Shinji does this in End of Evangelion and it's manga equivalent. At the end of it all, Shinji is left bitter, disillusioned and depressed. Problem: Your friends are gone. You're sure they left because you injured and killed your other friends, or let them die. There's nobody left who appreciates the sacrifices you've made or gives you thanks for what you've done, there's nobody to talk to and nobody understands what you've been through...because you failed them. Solution: Kill everyone. ''Everyone''.
    • Rebuild 2.22; Asuka's introduction, the Dummy Plug activation against Bardiel, the fight against Zeruel and the last scene.
  • One Piece
    • It started out with a cannon that levels a hundred houses in a row, had a bomb that could blow up a city, is now at island-destroying bombardments and according to Word of God, it's only halfway through the story.
    • Buggy planned to use abovementioned city-leveling cannon to kill Luffy. He was planning to use that amount of firepower to kill one man, who, at that moment was tied up and locked in the cage, which was standing several feet away from the cannon.
    • And this isn't even mentioning the two ancient super-weapons we haven't seen yet, either of which apparently make the aforementioned island-destroying bombardments look like pea shooters by comparison.
    • A recent chapter explained there are actually three ancient super-weapons, Uranus, Pluton and Poseidon, and explained what exactly Poseidon is: a mermaid princess with the power to summon from nowhere and control Kaiju, whose power has been passed down the Mermaids royal line and is currently held by Shirahoshi. Note that for the entire arc where Shirahoshi appeared before being identified as Poseidon, people who knew her power openly admitted she could have easily destroyed the world by accident.
    • And then there's the Buster Call: a fleet of ten warships called in to destroy a single target, usually an island or a group of criminals. Each of these ships are HUGE, and carry about a thousand Marine soldiers each. The attack includes five Vice Admirals, the third highest marine rank. These ships will bomb their targets until there is nothing left, and can and will eradicate the population of entire islands. As this is the strongest attack the marines normally utilize against a target, the order for it can only be issued by ten people in the entire world (or persons given authority to do so by one of those people): the three Admirals (second highest Marine rank), the Fleet Admiral (highest Marine rank), the Commander-in-Chief (having authority over both the Marines and the several goverment agencies) and the five Gorosei (the leaders of the World Goverment). The readers are only aware of two times one has been ordered: the first to eradicate some archeologists who knew too much, and the second by accident of the incompetent CP9 leader Spandam pressing the wrong button (it is implied that the only reason he had this button at all because he stole it from Admiral Aokiji, who, knowing him, would've never given out something like that just to eradicate a small pirate crew).
    • This is Admiral Akainu's modus operandi. In fact, it's highly doubtful that the man knows the concept of overkill exists.
    • From One Piece Film Z, we have the titular Z, an ex-admiral who plans to turn the entire Grand Line into a fiery wasteland to eradicate all pirates. Even the aforementioned Fleet Admiral Akainu decided this was too extreme.
    • How does the immense Yonkou Big Mom react to a fly buzzing around her room at night? First, she smashes it with her brute strength (which already leaves a giant crater in the room). Then, she (unconsciously, she was trying to sleep at the time) has a storm cloud she controls blast it with lightning, a miniature sun breath fire on it, and finally a living BFS stab it. At the same time. By the time it's all done, the floor is devastated.
  • Saitama from One-Punch Man can defeat any opponent with a single punch, but he has the habit of unleashing a flurry of "normal punches" that usually leave the victim as an unrecognizable puddle of meat. It should be noted that "A single punch" doesn't so much as 'defeat' as it 'totally and utterly pulverizes'.
  • Plastic Memories: The Giftia who turned into a Wanderer as seen in a Flash Back during Episode 5 suffers a hail of bullets after it attacks Kazuki and one of the R-Security officers. Said Giftia was Michiru's adoptive father, and she watches helplessly as he's gunned down due to the threat he posed.
  • Pokémon: The Series
    • People are rarely killed in Pokémon. Enter Pokémon Hunter J, who is one of the few characters portrayed as being purely evil. So how do we dispose of her when karma catches up to her? Why, having her airship blasted by Future Sight, falling into a giant whirlpool in the middle of a lake. As the airship gets submerged, have the windows break causing hundreds if not thousands of pounds of water rush in to crush and/or drown her. If that didn't kill her, the airship exploding will. Pokémon may not kill often, but damned if they don't know how to make sure you die.
    • And even then, Giovanni survived having his headquarters explode and collapse on top of him (in itself an example of the trope. We're talking a military complex of several stories here, after all) and he managed to haul himself out of the rubble, dust himself off, and walk away. After all, Meowth's dubious Imagine Spot scenes aren't the only reason Giovanni has become a Memetic Badass.
    • Mewtwo. As soon as he found out he was a clone, he killed all of his creators and blew up their lab. Notably, this is so far the only human death in the dubbed version to be acknowledged as such, since J's fate is left implied, but never stated.
  • The Egrigori of Project ARMS are shown to have no problem offing large groups of witnesses and using their many government and police connections to hush it up. When two agents attempt to blow up a high school (simply because they themselves had been picked on in school), one points out that they could do whatever they liked and get it all passed off as a gas leak. One of the ARMS teens tells how, to get to him, the Egrigori blew up, burned down, and gunned his entire town (the same town was blown up, burned down, and gunned again when the protagonists return for answers). Later, the Red Caps basically cut off all possible escape routes from a town so the ARMS can't escape and holds the entire town hostage (thankfully it more or less turns out well). A flashback shows that Keith White had no problem having his soldiers machine gun a group of children. Oh, and the big climactic battle involved Black Alice seizing control of nuclear missiles and lobbing them at America while the Jabberwock goes on rampage, blowing everything up. Baked Apple indeed...
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Akemi Homura lives and breathes this trope in every meaning of the word. At one point, she uses approximately $18 million in military hardware (including cruise missiles) to kill one witch, because it HAD to be dead. The kicker? She's supposed to be a 14 years old Magical Girl. Rambo, eat your heart out.
    • Although it should be noted that this was not overkill. The witch, rumored to be the most powerful one in existence in the series, actually survived.
    • Another overkill incident occurs to show just how close poor Sayaka is to crossing the Despair Event Horizon: after taking the head of the witch Elsa Maria, whose outline looks very much like Hitomi, her rival for Kyousuke's affections, she proceeds to chop into her with her sword again and again, laughing all the way. "It doesn't hurt at all!"
  • Rebuild World:
    • Downplayed when early in the story, it's mentioned multiple times that Akira is using anti-monster bullets, which are this against unarmored human flesh he's hitting.
    • There are Lost Technology old world knives repeatedly used that can have the limiter shot off for Explosive Overclocking, to make a Laser Blade that will Clean Cut through an entire room when swung at their targets, lasting only a few seconds and destroying the knife.
    • Akira using CWH anti-tank rounds on The Swarm of Scary Scorpion monsters in an undercity tunnel with many a One Hit Poly Kill, leaving the tunnel filled with Ludicrous Gibs and making it hard for his employers to count the kills.
    • Discussed and subverted with Kain using the heavy weapons equipped on his Mini-Mecha to launch a Macross Missile Massacre at an unsuspecting Akira on his motorbike, which makes Nelia chide Kain for making it hard to find the body. And then Akira starts fighting back, having used his Cool Bike as a shield.
    • Discussed with Akira using two assault rifles with more standard Armor Piercing rounds in an ambush, unloading almost their entire clips on four robbers stacked up to breach a door in Sheryl's base, leaving two as Ludicrous Gibs, and a third Blown Across the Room. The survivor Zelmo tries to guilt Akira for this, to which Akira replies that Zelmo used his own men as a Human Shield.
    • Subversion. A monstrous humanoid enemy at one point gets driven over repeatedly by a unit of hunters until crushed into small pieces, only to grow a mouth out of his arm and regenerate From a Single Cell by eating a monster that came to eat his remains. This being due to a Nanomachine Super Serum.
    • In parts of a Mook Horror Show, Akira uses a barrage of expensive mini-missile and CWH rounds against an Amazon Brigade of hunters with insufficient Powered Armor, turning one element of them to Ludicrous Gibs, and soon after, Akira turning another element who tried to ambush him through a wall into Half the Woman She Used to Be with his sword.
  • In The Rising of the Shield Hero the goddess Medea has a special attack capable of one-shotting even the Legendary Heroes. As she explains it works by hitting them at every point of time in every parallel and divergent world.
  • Ronin Warriors/Yoroiden Samurai Troopers:
    • Pretty much any super move is capable of obliterating an entire army of mooks. And yet they still keep coming.
    • Half-way through the first main story arc, Talpa orders his evil spirits to create a massive, organic bomb-like sphere of energy (called the matrix). Its purpose? To kill Rowan of Strata, who's asleep in space.
  • In The Rose of Versailles, Oscar dies when she is shot by over a dozen muskets. Justified, since that the inaccuracy of smoothbore muskets, that, unless you have very high aiming skills of a professional hunter, you had to resort to do this when you shoot a single person at that distance.
  • In Sailor Moon Crystal, Season 3's Big Bad, Pharaoh 90, is mortally wounded by Sailor Saturn swinging the Silence Glaive, which has the power to destroy an entire planet (though Earth is spared his fate when Sailor Saturn returns him to the Tau Star System). And then, Sailor Moon releases the power of the Holy Grail and the Silver Crystal inside him, mortally wounding him while he's already dying.
  • In Samurai 7, some villagers get it in their heads to attack a thieving Humongous Mecha with farm tools. They get said mecha's BFS in response.
  • Black Scorpion in Samurai Deeper Kyo shoots out of his mouth a "beam" made of a thousand poisoned steel needles, each one being more than enough to kill a human in seconds.
  • Serial Experiments Lain has some guy trapped in an online game emptying an entire clip of virtual rounds on a very, very, very Creepy Child. It turns out the rounds were real, and so was the not-so-creepy child.
  • Manga by Shirow Masamune are mostly known for two things. 1.) Highly realistic portrayals of existing and theoretical technologies and 2) taking them to ridiculous extremes.
    • Dominion Tank Police. Yes, you read that right. Tank. Police. They round up ordinary criminals, robbers, and thieves with tanks. And then coax confessions out of these same ordinary thugs with such methods as putting a grenade in their mouth, with a string tied to a ceiling beam, and balancing him on a chair with just 1cm of slack.
    • Appleseed has the Mobile Fortresses: Massive six-legged Spider Tanks the size of several building blocks. They have a BFG longer than their own chassis length and dozens of multi-barreled auto cannons all over the places. Oh, and Olympus has 10 of them, protecting the city.
      • The impracticality is lampshaded in one scene, where Deunan berates a police robot for putting down a criminal with a leaping double axehandle strike, saying the resulting smear on the floor was not going to go over well with reporters.
    • It's less prominent in Ghost in the Shell, but when the situation calls for it the Major is not above using automatic rifles with exploding bullets, and Batou shoots machine guns and even miniguns from the hip. When you want to kill cyborgs, your rule of thumb is the Chunky Salsa Rule. Their enemies frequently try to counter that with walking tanks.
      • Becomes a plot point when Togusa arrests a cyborg in the second season, after shooting him in all limbs to immobilize him. At the trial, the defense tries to say this was overkill on Togusa's part due to a prejudice against cyborgs, while Togusa counters that the cyborg in question had deactivated his pain receptors, so disabling all his limbs was just pragmatism.
      • For similar reasons in the Appleseed manga, the ESWAT team doesn't bother disabling cyborg guards or taking them captive and instead kill them outright. Not so much because of the lack of pain, but because they may have an internal radio and could silently call for help, compromising the entire operation.
  • Slayers:
    • Lina Inverse is the queen of overkill. Having already fireballed and freeze arrowed an enemy, Lina often proceeds to finish them off with a DRAGON SLAVE!, which takes out the entire village with the foe.
    • Lina's blowing up of villages or large buildings tends to be a running gag, but the climax of Slayers Next plays this absolutely straight, when the God of the Slayers universe shows up in person to disintegrate and completely obliterate the Big Bad.
      • A sidenote to the spoiler; if cast wrongly, the spell summoning the above God could easily destroy the world they're in. Using that much destructive force against a single foe, even if said foe is a high ranking demon is indeed overkill.
  • Space Battleship Yamato manages this with its fleet-destroying Wave-Motion Gun. The Andromeda class ships, for some reason, mount *two* of them!
    • When the crew test fires the Wave-Motion Gun for the first time on a floating continent orbiting Jupiter, destroying the Gamilon base there, they accidentally ended up destroying the entire continent. It should be noted that said continent was roughly the size of Australia.
    • The crew prefers to fire the Wave-Motion Gun when it's charged at 120%.
    • However unlike a great many shows on this list, the Wave Motion Gun was not a cure-all solution that worked 100% of the time. Desslok plugged the barrel of the weapon several times, so if Yamato fired, they would destroy themselves. Or that the enemy fleet placed the friendly planet directly behind them, so if Yamato fired - sure they would kill the enemy, but they'd get the friendly behind them.
    • Also in 2199, Starsha was aghast that Yamato had taken the gift of FTL and weaponized it (the Wave Energy is essentially propellant. Out the back, ship go. Out the front, enemy die), so much so that she almost didn't give them the MacGuffin that would save the Earth. They had to swear never to use the weapon again. . . . and then the Comet Empire arrived.

    • Above and beyond the iconic BFG, the Yamato has torpedos bow and stern, missiles in the smokestack, AA guns all over the bridge tower, an squadron of starfighters (plus some support ships), and 6 of those big "Yeah, those come from a battleship" guns and can easily destroy entire enemy fleets singlehandedly.
  • Super Dimension Fortress Macross:
    • The main gun as shown in the episode Booby Trap. When the gun fires, it takes out everything in front of it, including part of a mountain range, carves a tangent through the ocean and blasts into space...all to take out a couple of scout ships, and giving the Zentraedi plenty of warning that the ship was active.
    • The large Wave Motion Gun implanted at one of the Earth's poles towards the middle of the series...that takes out a big percentage of the Zentraedi fleet of millions of ships in one shot. Too bad the Zentraedi had already bombarded the planet's surface to glass before the cannon could shoot.
  • In the 5th episode of Sword Art Online, a man named Caynz is killed by being run-through with a sword and hung from a window with a noose around his neck. Subverted it was a ruse.
    • Kirito does this to Sugou in ALO. First, he cuts his cheek then he cuts his arm off, chops him in half, finishing up by impaling his BFS in the eye.
      • Only made worse when you realize that Sugou had set the in-game pain absorber to zero. Meaning that when Kirito tore Sugou apart, Sugou had felt the exact same pain as if that had been done to him IN REAL LIFE.
  • In the anime version of Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online, after M blows up the hovercraft on the lake and its driver falls onto shore, LLENN runs up to finish him off. Being that her gun is a bit weak, she hits him with about a dozen rounds... then another burst of fire... and then another burst of fire until the P90's 50-round magazine is empty.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann:
    • Giga Drill Breaker. Its various permutations only get stronger from there. Then there's the one-off Giga Drill Maximum, which involves attaching a Giga Drill to every point physically possible and shooting them out to wipe out enemies in all directions.
    • How do you hit an elusive target? You shoot every point in spacetime.
    • Super Tengen Toppa Giga Drill Breaker. There is nothing more. When the energy of the entire big bang, all that is and shall ever be is in Drill form, you know you may finally have enough dakka.
  • Umineko: When They Cry. Happy Halloween for Maria
  • Variable Geo: Have you ever seen Kyo Kusanagi's "Ama no Murakumo" NeoMax before? If not, Satomi will gladly show you what it looks like and let you experience it firsthand, if make the mistake of pissing her off, like Yuuki did. Simply image giant waves of flame racing along the ground at high speed, engulfing everything in their wake. For comparison, here's his version of it, and here's hers (seen at 22:37-23:03).
  • In Transformers: Cybertron's episode "City", Optimus uses Metroplex's Cyber Key enhanced —and massive— axe Sparkdrinker to send Ransack and Crumplezone flying after they tried to pull the "Save the hostage or catch us" routine with Jolt. This was naturally lampshaded in the dub:
    Optimus: There we go! Now, I hope you two don't think this is a tad excessive!
    Ransack and Crumplezone: N-n-no sir!
    Optimus: That's good. After all, I'm just trying to be fair! Now, this is going to hurt me a lot more than it does you! *WHAM!*
  • Voltes V: Katherine really pulls out all the stops in her plan to kill Kenichi. First she tries to have his head bashed in with a revolving blunt object attached to the cieling. Then, she tries to blow up the church. Then, she tries to attack him with a dagger. Then, she tries to eliminate him by entering her spaceship and shooting at him repeatedly. And you know Kenichi really won the luck lottery when none of them manage to even touch him. Even funnier, Kenichi is oblivious to all her attempts, and even saves her while she's trying to kill him off.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • Yu-Gi-Oh!: Pretty much every major character applies this trope at least once. (Of course, for the times where the duel was done in front of an audience, it may have been a case of "giving the viewers what they want".) For example, Kaiba. Why blast your opponent with one large and powerful dragon when you can use THREE JOINED TOGETHER?
    • The end of the Yugi vs Kaiba duel in the Battle City Finals. Yugi could've simply used his Dark Paladin to kill one of Kaiba's three Blue-Eyes White Dragons, and would've won the match. Instead he paid a thousand Life Points to allow the Paladin to attack and destroy all three dragons at once, and totally blowing Kaiba's ego to smithereens.
    • Epically done by Yami Yugi, after Yugi's soul is taken by the Oricalchos. Insector Haga taunts the guilt-wracked and now rather unstable Yami by tearing up a card in front of him after claiming Yugi's soul was in it and that tearing it up erased him, "as a joke". Yami Yugi... well, he goes totally and utterly apeshit. Using the Spell Card Berserker Soul which allows him to attack as long as he continues to draw Monster Cards, Yami Yugi defeats Haga by drawing two Monster Cards, which are enough to drop his Life Points to 0. However, the enraged Yami Yugi then continues bashing at him, by drawing at least six more monster cards in a row, each hitting for 1500 damage each. He would've kept going too, if Anzu hadn't stopped him. This moment was cut shorter in the dub.
      • Just to drive home how far into overkill this is: by the time Anzu halted the onslaught, Haga was down to -8300... dead three times over. Even at the card game's 8000 Life Points start rather than the anime's 4000, this whole onslaught would have been a One-Hit Kill.
      • If one were to take into account how many life points he inflicted in one turn including the ones Haga already had, it would amount to 12000 damage in one turn.
      • The aforementioned Spell Card, Berserker Soul, exists in the real life card game. And just like Yami Yugi did to Haga, the game mechanics meant that you were absolutely allowed to keep overkilling your opponent with it after dropping their Life Points to 0 (up until a rule change stating that a Duel could end before a card effect resolves fully).
    • From Season 4: "Mokuba, what do I always tell you? If at first you don't succeed, BLAST 'EM WITH YOUR BLUE-EYES AGAIN!"
    • Rebecca is defenseless with 100 life points left while Leon has two monsters, one with 400 ATK and the other with 3400 ATK. He chooses to attack her directly with the stronger one.
    • In Yugi's duel with Noah, Noah has a hundred times as many life points as him. Yugi still defeats him in one turn.
    • And from an early episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Judai and Kaibaman face off, and the latter has Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon on his side, breathing down the former's powerful but much weaker Bladedge. Judai looks ready to turn things, as well as this trope, around by springing a trap that would destroy Kaibaman's ultimate monster at the cost of his own, with the added effect of taking out the latter's life points equivalent to the just destroyed monster... only for Kaibaman to chain De-Fusion and split the ultimate dragon back into its 3 only somewhat weaker counterparts. Judai, left with nothing on his side of his field, can only watch as Kaibaman launches his attack with ALL 3 of his Blue-Eyes, shouting, to maximum effect: "Kyojin! Muteki! Saikyou! Funsai! Gyakusai! Daikasai!" ("Giant! Invincible! Strongest! Pulverize! Honorable Defeat! Big Applause!" ) (Though, he only says this in the Japanese version. In the dub, Kaibaman just says "White Lightning!" and doesn't say anything else.)
    • In the Season Finale of that season, Kaiser duels Judai. In Kaiser's final turn, he uses Power Bond to summon Cyber End Dragon, which doubles its Attack Points to 8,000, and then plays Limiter Removal to double it again, to 16,000. Kaiser declares an attack against Judai's Shining Flare Wingman, which currently has 4,900 ATK, but Judai uses Battle Fusion, increasing his monster's ATK by that of Kaiser's monster. (Meaning Shining Flare Wingman now has 20,900 ATK.) But wait! Kaiser has a Battle Fusion too! Now Cyber End Dragon has 36,900 ATK! But Judai has one trick left: He uses a Trap called Final Fusion, which does damage to both players equal to the ATK of both monsters battling, meaning he and Kaiser take 57,800 damage simultaneously and the duel ends in a draw. (By the way, at the start of the round, Judai had 100 Life Points remaining and Kaiser had 550, and in this round alone, they both took more damage than fourteen times the Life Points they started with.)
    • Yusuke has 800 life points left but controls the 2300 ATK Clear Vicious Knight, which gains the strongest opposing monster's base ATK. Judai has the 2500 ATK Elemental Hero Neos, meaning Clear Vicious Knight would have 4800 ATK. Fortunately, Judai has Honest, which increases his monster's ATK by the opponent's total ATK. He could simply attack with Neos and use Honest to pump it up to 7300 ATK, which would inflict 2500 Battle Damage and give him the win. However, wanting to prove a point after Yusuke mocked his friendship with Johan, Judai copies Johan's Rainbow Dragon and fuses it with Neos to form the 4500 ATK Rainbow Neos. Clear Vicious Knight goes up to 6800 ATK, then Judai attacks with Rainbow Neos and uses Honest to pump it up to 11300 ATK, dealing Yusuke 4500 Battle Damage.
    • During Prince Ojin's duel with Sartorius, Prince Ojin uses Cost Down to summon Satellite Cannon, uses Charge to give it 2000 ATK, uses Mischief of the Time Goddess to skip to the Battle Phase of his next turn and then activates Limiter Removal to double Satellite Cannon's ATK to 4000 and then attacks Sartorius directly. Sartorius responds by discarding Arcana Force XIV - Temperance to reduce the Battle Damage he would have taken to 0.
    • An example that also doubles as a Moment of Awesome takes place in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds when Jack Atlas summons Red Nova Dragon for the first time. Both he and his opponent have 200 life points left, and Jack, after turning the Big Bad into a card purely with the power of his own hot-blooded awesomeness, proceeds to summon said card and steamroll his opponent for almost 2000 Battle Damage. (Of course, Jack is a pro, meaning he does this in front of an audience and is used to being exuberant on purpose.)
    • Jack (LP/700) and Scar-Red Nova (ATK/5500) later find themselves on the receiving end, courtesy of Jose's Meklord Emperor Grannel (ATK/12000). There's a reason its attack is called GRAND SLAUGHTER CANNON! There is also how Granel ruined Aporia's life three times; Childhood killing of his parents, killing his apparent lover, and being the cause of his death to Z-ONE.
    • In Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, IV uses his jumbo-sized shredder puppet to grind two monsters into submission, then "holographically" blasts their owners off the ground with the laser cannon coming out of it. He then tells them their suffering is not over yet, and proceeds to repeat the process by reviving the shredded monsters and grinding them over. But of course, how could he be done without some whipping?
      • Heck, ZEXAL pretty much indulges in overkill towards the end of the series. By that point, duels were routinely being decided by monsters buffed to five-digit ATK. The absolute crowner, however, has to be the 100000 ATK monstrosity that is the Big Bad's ace card.
    • In Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, Yuya is wide open with 500 life points left while Michio has five monsters with 300 ATK each. He could simply attack with them all, but he chooses to pump one of them up to 4800 ATK at the cost of it being the only one allowed to attack. Ironically, this backfires because Yuya had a card that could stop one monster's attack, so had Michio chosen not to go for overkill, he would have won. Yuya then beats him in his next turn.
    • Shun Kurosaki pumps his Raid Raptors - Rise Falcon up to 16400 ATK and then has it attack all of Masumi, Yaiba, and Hokuto's monsters at once.
    • Kurosaki later outdoes himself by having his Raid Raptors - Revolution Falcon bomb the entire field to the ground and make a building fall on Sora.
    • Kurosaki outdoes himself again by having his Raid Raptors - Satellite Cannon Falcon blast Dennis from orbit, leaving the opponent in a huge crater. It wasn't just a light show, either - much of the arena was utterly destroyed by the attack, to the point that the remaining duels in the tournament have to be held on the roadways outside the arena, and the MC begs him not to do it again. Do not piss off Shun Kurosaki.
    • In Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS, Lightning does this to Spectre when the later managed to overcome his strategy and lock both of the Extra Monster Zones, while not an high amount of damage at 6000LP damage, the strategy he employed destroyed Spectre's field entirely, leaving him with only his ace card negated on his field and everyone can only look in shock as Spectre is left unable to stop Lightning's following attack.

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