There Is No Kill Like Overkill/Anime and Manga

"Donny: Boss, the place was open! Why'd you blow it up?
 * Manga by Masamune Shiro:
 * They 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 that is longer than it's own chasis length and dozens of multi-barreled auto cannons all over the places. Oh, and Olympus has 10 of them, protecting the city.
 * 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.
 * Hentai Kamen, on occasion. Especially with any of the Shiki-s involved - although Shuto is slightly more balanced.
 * Eat Man, what with all the BFGs. And in the Mira/Misha arc, Bolt is stabbed through the heart with a missile.
 * 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 it's aim, no matter what happens to be in the way. And this being Blame!, it is not even most powerful among such weapons.
 * Space Battleship Yamato manages this with its fleet-destroying Wave Motion Gun. The Andromeda class ships, for some reason, mount * two* of them!
 * 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.
 * In Death Note:
 * After Matt, in his escape attempt,  Many fangirls mourned. Clearly an Egregious case of more dakka.
 * In the last episode
 * 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 gets machine-gunned to death at point-blank range  by the Major and Batou.
 * There's also the terrorists plan to . The corrupt government takes no risks and
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Full Metal Panic:
 * Sousuke Sagara isn't usually given to overkill on actual battlefields, but - having been raised as a Child Soldiers - when he's assigned as an undercover bodyguard to an Ordinary High School Student, he applies good battlefield tactics to his school life and goes massively overboard. Some people say it with flowers; Sousuke says it with land mines.
 * A prime example is found in Super Robot Wars W, when asked to help Kaname find a way to keep Delinquents from rival schools from crashing the school festival, he wires the yard with so many high explosives that when two Mechanical Beasts, monsters that usually give Mazinger Z a hard time, come stomping into the school, they're destroyed outright by the blast.
 * Another example of his typical way of doing things: Blasting holes in the wall instead of using the door. 65% of all urban combat casualties occur in relation to a doorway, so for Sousuke this makes perfect sense.
 * The Lambda Driver functioning off of Sousuke's emotional state also leads to one instance of battlefield overkill: in The Second Raid, Sousuke blasts the Big Bad so hard that he and his Humongous Mecha completely disintegrate...along with a hundred-meter long trench cut into the street. Through Clouseau. Without harming him. Clouseau's response in the English dub is a deathly-scared "That was OVERKILL, sergeant!"
 * Then there's Coustwell Brachiums' Final attack in Super Robot Wars Judgment.
 * Lyrical Nanoha
 * In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha As, Reinforce uses a city-sized Starlight Breaker in an attempt to take out the heroes. (Due to its excessively long casting time, it fails to do the job.)
 * In fandom, Nanoha herself has an exaggerated reputation of this.
 * 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 daka.
 * Never! You can never have enough dakka. Not even when you have turned a weaponized Big Bang against the enemy.
 * Hellsing's 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.
 * In Samurai Seven, some villagers get it in their heads to attack a thieving Humongous Mecha with farm tools. They get said mecha's BFS in response.
 * 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 incinerating his remains with a ki-blast. Given he survived a beating from Goku, getting cut in half, and being on an exploding planet, it probably seemed like a sensible precaution.
 * 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.
 * Then Goku goes on to violate the laws of physics when his Spirit Bomb kills Kid Buu dead 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.
 * In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing a character, after he 'is no longer needed', is dropped out of a high flying plane...and the woman who dropped 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.
 * Mobile Suit Gundam SEED:
 * Muruta Azrael is more or less the living embodiment of this trope. First, when Azrael needs to defeat a ZAFT invasion of  he stations a whole bunch of unwanted forces to defend the base, orders his fanatical subordinates to escape, then  . Later, when he is staging his final assault on the space fortress at Jachin Due, he not only.
 * His successor, Djibril, picks up the reins and does things more or less the same way. He tries to Nuke'Em 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, they don't secure the helpless and surrendering soldiers, they massacre all of them. The one ironic non-accomplice in this event is  . At the end of the war, Patrick Zala's victory strategy involves.
 * The icing on the cake is when you find out that . What do you expect when the entire series is a Crapsack World that runs on Humans Are Bastards?
 * Also in Destiny, in a duel between Kira and Athrun, during a blade-lock, Kira cut off Athrun's Savior's arms, literally disarming it, and then proceeded to chop it into pieces in a rain of scrap metal, making sure that Gundam wasn't going to come back.
 * 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.

Nick: Now Donny, what kind of bone-headed question is that? The boss likes to blow stuff up!"


 * So how in the world was Ladd not get mentioned given 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.
 * Mobile Suit Gundam 00:
 * And wait a minute, there is still a haro left from this attack. Still not enough...
 * In the dub, which is actually surprisingly good, 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, moments later it is turned against himself. "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 went further and gave us the Gundam Zabanya, an upgraded version of the Gundam Dynames, and is more focused on precision, rather than fire-power, and yet it still has 20 Bits and 78 missile launchers built into its frame. And 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.
 * In Episode 31, the AGE-3 Fortress' most powerful attack involves combining the energy of all 4 of its BFGs into one huge blast, leveling a large part of the desert in its wake.
 * 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.
 * In Naruto:
 * In the Hidan and Kakuzu arc, Shikamaru 1. possesses Hidan, 2. tricks Hidan into killing 1/5 of his own partner, 3. almost chops his head off, 4. blows him up, 5. drops him into a pit, and 6. buries him under several tons of rock. Probably justified because Hidan is functionally immortal.
 * Naruto's Rasenshuriken, a move that pretty much makes a giant dome of utter destruction even on the cellular level, and Sasuke's Kirin, which a temple-destroying bolt of lightning from the sky are indicative of this trope, but both come at a price.
 * In Naruto Shippuden Movie 3, Naruto uses a  and
 * Deidara can be stealthy and use his explosives like a fine scalpel...and then there's his C4 attack which creates a massive golem of himself which scatters into a countless number of microscopic bombs that cause any living being within range to dissolve into dust. And his sole reason for creating it was because he didn't like Itachi.
 * Konan, the Patron Saint of this trope, has brought this trope Up to 11 and Beyond the Impossible Levels at the same time. . And this was all to target a single man.
 * Not to mention in the previous chapter,
 * On a smaller scale we've been treated to some of EMS Sasuke's powers.
 * Chapter 588:
 * Gunnm:
 * It 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 has nanomachine dust that breaks EVERYTHING apart making him nearly completely invincible...until Alita learns to use Plasma to burn it like gas only for Sachumudo to reveal that he can control magnetic fields and creates 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 proceeds to tear the living crap out of him UNTIL HE REVERTS INTO AN INFANT FORM.
 * One moment is when Sechs enters the first tournament round against the Stellar nursery school where their first opponent Getz uses attacks that were used to take down WARSHIPS.
 * Anything involving Zekka automatically falls into this category.
 * Somewhat averted in Black Lagoon during the Hansel and Gretel arc. A group of bounty hunters guns 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.
 * In the Gungrave anime Bear Walken's team is called the "Overkills." Which is demonstrated after they
 * Yu-Gi-Oh:
 * Pretty much every major character applies this trope at least once. For example, Kaiba. Why blast your opponent with one large and powerful dragon when you can use THREE JOINED TOGETHER?
 * Epically done by Yami, after Yugi's soul is taken by the Oricalchos. Inspector 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...well, he goes totally and utterly apeshit. Using a spell card which allows him to attack as long as he continues to draw monster cards, Yami defeats Haga by drawing two monster cards, which are enough to drop Haga's lifepoints to zero. However, the enraged Yami then continues bashing at Haga by drawing at least six more monster cards in a row, each hitting for 1500 points each. He would've kept going too, if Anzu hadn't stopped him. Here's the scene...Not pretty.
 * From Season 4: "Mokuba, what did I teach you? If at first you don't succeed, BLAST IT AGAIN WITH YOUR BLUE-EYES WHITE DRAGON!".
 * 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!")
 * An example that also doubles as a Crowning Moment of Awesome takes place in Yu-Gi-Oh 5 Ds when Jack Atlas
 * There's a reason its attack is called  There is also how
 * In Yu-Gi-Oh Ze Xal,  He then tells them their suffering is not over yet, and   But of course,
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion: You want to open up a giant round disc-like Angel ? Simple! Drop 992 not-actually-nukes on it!
 * Well, luckily, they ended up not having to do that
 * There is very little left of by the time   are through with them in End of Evangelion.
 * Essentially,  in End of Evangelion and it's manga equivalent. At the end of it all,   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.
 * Rebuild 2.22; Asuka's introduction, the Dummy Plug activation against Bardiel, The fight against Zeruel and the last scene.
 * Yasuo Umetsu's Kite manages to top a lot.
 * 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 . 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 . Baked Apple indeed...
 * 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 Earthshattering Kaboom. And if THAT's not an overkill, then what is?
 * Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure has two of the titular characters, Jotaro and Giorno, beating up Steely Dan for three pages and Cioccolotta for four pages respectively, 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.
 * 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 Its purpose?
 * 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.
 * 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: . Note that for the entire arc where   appeared before being identified as Poseidon, people who knew   power openly admitted   could have easily destroyed the world by accident.
 * 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...
 * Jack Rakan of Mahou Sensei Negima has absolutely no sense of restraint. Just look. And this is him holding back.
 * Evangeline freeze lava.
 * 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.
 *  Umineko no Naku Koro Ni. Happy Halloween for Maria
 * Akira
 * 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.
 * In the Akira manga, the General at one point calls in an orbital strike on a mugger.
 * Pokémon
 * People are rarely killed in Pokémon., 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? . 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.
 * In Maiden Rose, after forcing their way into the country via Taki's sacred family ground and killing 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.
 * Fullmetal Alchemist:
 * Nearly every fight boils down to this when it comes to fighting the homunculi. In the manga, Mustang.
 * And then there is the battle at Briggs in the manga, where.
 * 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.
 * In the prologue of the sci-hentai anime EL, it 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.
 * Digimon Adventure: Myotismon has proven extremely hard to kill. They've destroyed him twice but he comes back in Digimon Adventure 02 for round three. So how do you finally kill this sadistic Complete Monster off for good?
 * Digimon Xros Wars has Kiriha who lives by this trope, his tactics mostly involves his digimon unleashing a barrage of Beam Spam of ungodly proportions, if a single volley isn't enough, he keeps on firing some More Dakka, 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.
 * How about the first time we see Skullgreymon. It slaps the other Greymon at a giant TV screen so it get's electrocuted and then just to be sure fires of a mini-nuke at it.
 * Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Akemi Homura lives and breathes this trope in every meaning of the word.
 * Fist of the North Star: Hokuto no Ken is pretty much the martial arts equivalent of "overkill", considering just about every move ends with a part of your opponent violently exploding in a wave of gore, with what exactly explodes being dependent on the attack used.
 * In To Aru Majutsu no Index, the organization GREMLIN wants to kill Touma Kamijo. They want to kill him so bad that they are willing to wipe out the human race just to be sure he's dead.
 * Fist of the North Star: Hokuto no Ken is pretty much the martial arts equivalent of "overkill", considering just about every move ends with a part of your opponent violently exploding in a wave of gore, with what exactly explodes being dependent on the attack used.
 * In To Aru Majutsu no Index, the organization GREMLIN wants to kill Touma Kamijo. They want to kill him so bad that they are willing to wipe out the human race just to be sure he's dead.