Improbable Aiming Skills/Anime and Manga

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Improbable Aiming Skills in Anime and Manga include:

  • In "Blade of the Immortal" Habaki has a pistol-wielding marksman who manages to save Habaki's daughter/subordinate from death by arrows, by shooting all 10-20 of them out of the air. Made even more improbable, by the fact that they were flintlock pistols.
  • With an odd example, Ataru Moroboshi of Urusei Yatsura usually uses a frying pan to block Jariten's fire breath and to hit him away, usually a few blocks. In one episode, Jariten's mother visits, and he tries to get a carnation for her, only to be delayed by many bizarre circumstances that you get used to when watching this show. In an act that might be considered kindness, Ataru hits Jariten with the frying pan, who goes flying...right into his mother's lap. Please note that Ten's mother was at least a mile away, which makes Ataru more or less as accurate as a sniper... with a frying pan.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has Hol Horse, whose Stand basically grants him Improbable Aiming Skills as he can control where the bullet goes after he's fired it.
    • Even further along the timeline is Guido Mista, whose Sex Pistols Stand kicks the bullets he fires out of a gun. If he doesn't feed them first they won't work and also will sometimes beat each other up.
  • In Jura Tripper, Tiger shoots a saddle latch, causing it to rip and release the saddle. From a flying dinosaur.
  • Mana Tatsumiya in Mahou Sensei Negima could ricochet her bullets and hit her targets with a sniper rifle, even when she couldn't see the target and was firing impact-fused bullets which should have detonated instead of bouncing. Similarly Gandolfini, one of the mage-teachers, was capable of intercepting an incoming bullet and hitting it head-on with one of his own.
  • Mazinger Z: One of the Dr. Hell's Mechanical Beasts (Jenova M9) could shoot down anything as far as one hundred kilometres away. Baron Ashura decided trying its aim by shooting down a passenger plane.
  • The king of Improbable Marksmanship, however, is probably Vash the Stampede from Trigun. Capable of putting a bullet down the barrel of a sniper's Big Freaking Gun from a kilometer or so away. Earlier in the series, he attends a quick-draw contest, and is able to ensure that every hit is non-lethal by flicking pebbles at the bullets in-flight and altering their course. In the same contest, he tries to get out of the qualifying round by intentionally missing the targets; he fails. Missing, that is.

Vash: Eh... oops. I hit them all...

    • Vash aims, mind you, with a gun that has its sights off. Luckily he left his gun with a master gunsmith in one episode, the same episode we discover that his gun's sights are off by two inches after five feet. Presumably a master gunsmith would fix that.
    • Nicholas D. Wolfwood from the same series was also quite good, but he naturally pales against Vash.
  • Vash lost the title to Rushuna Tendo, the main character of Grenadier. Also a peace-loving, gun toting blonde in a red jacket, she at one point stopped a massive barrage of bullets by firing a single bullet, that caused a chain reaction where each bullet deflected the next bullet down the line until the final bullet destroying the machine gun firing said bullets (To be fair, the gun in question was firing them in a very tight spiral (kind of like an inverted gatling gun), but it's impressive nonetheless).
    • In the final battle in the series, in which Rushuna faces off against her Evil Counterpart, 80% of the bullets they fired would hit each other exactly between them. In one case, rapid-fired while jumping away from each other.
    • The improbable aiming with these two starts well before a shot is even fired: to load their guns, they literally thrust their chests in the direction that allows the bullets stored in their cleavage to leap right into the loading chambers.
    • The very first time you see Rushuna use her gun, she picks off a sniper from about a mile away. With a revolver. Firing it across her body at waist height. And she makes sure it's not a lethal shot.
    • I think you mean she's the queen of this trope, not the king. Also note that Vash does not need a gun to deflect bullets.
    • Also, Rushuna is probably based off of Vash, if you know what I mean.
  • Train of Black Cat pulls many stunts similar to Vash, including shooting down both barrels of a Dual-Wielding opponent and shooting other people's bullets out of the air (after a few seconds talking about how their shots would be ineffective anyway). Maybe most improbable is when he shoots a can off a stump, then shoots it five more times while in the air, aiming at the same spot where he shot it the first time. He only hits three, gets annoyed, and is later spotted next to a pile of similar cans having wasted a lot of bullets. One can only assume he got it right at some point.
    • Because he was transformed into a child at the time (and therefore couldn't handle the recoil of his gun), it's implied that he always gets it right in normal circumstances, and was frustrated by his inability to do so.
      • Actually, he hadn't yet been turned into a child. Still full-sized, he complains that he's "losing his touch" and that he needs to practice, something he apparently hadn't done in a while.
  • The vampire leads of Hellsing are extremely good (though not infallible) shots due to a sort of "third eye" superpower they have. Even more impressive is the manga's Rip van Winkle, whose magical rifle fires bullets that change course mid-flight to such a degree that they can hit multiple targets and blow up helicopters.
    • The fully human Integra Hellsing (in the first TV series at least). She is shown as capable of shooting the exact same spot on a target repeatedly (creating a single hole in it) and rapidly shooting the shape of a cross into the face of a vampire (take into account the gun's recoil and the fact that the vampire would stagger back after each shot).
  • Amazing shooting skills are a key characteristic of the female assassins in the anime Noir. Among other things, one of the characters—on two separate occasions—is capable of shooting the blade off a knife being swung at her partner. She does this with a handgun at up to fifty feet away.
    • Then again, Kirika was also raised from earliest childhood to be the perfect assassin, so it's reasonable to assume that her training included lots and lots and LOTS of firearms practice.
    • Are you seriously suggesting any use of this trope in anime is even remotely justified?
  • Gunsmith Cats revolves around high-octane gunning and driving around the streets of Chicago—and the main character's trademarked ability to shoot her opponents' trigger finger off at a generous distance. (Hence her nickname, "Thumb-Snap Rally".) She's also hit an oncoming RPG dead-center to detonate it before it reached her, put a hole clean through a target's hand from a neighbouring rooftop (although that wasn't with a handgun) and on more than one occasion has fired her gun in order to hit someone with the ejected bullet casings. Once when asked at gunpoint to disarm, she let her magazine fall on her foot, whereupon she kicked it back into place and shot her assailant (who was understandably dumbstruck at the maneuver).
  • Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh!!, who on more than one occasion knocks something out of someone's hand with a piece of cardboard.
    • Before him, there was the Agent S5, who used poker cards as projectiles.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX takes this further with Austin O'Brien, whose duel disk doubles a gun. He's more than capable of hitting a target several hundred feet away. For whatever reason, the cards tend to explode upon impact.
  • One Piece being a World of Badass, top snipers are commonly capable of pulling this off. Among the top contenders for main character Usopp's CMOA is when he hits the main antagonist of an arc with a rubber-band slingshot, while standing on the top of a tower several miles away while there is hurricane force wind, with perfect precision. Even the other characters point out that it should not be posssible.
    • Usopp also once shot a ball from his slingshot through a crown on a weathervane chicken that essentially across most of a city. He initially didn't see it because it was so far away.
    • There are two other characters connected to Usopp, who, at least at the time of their introduction, actually outclassed Usopp in Improbable Aiming Skills. These are Yasopp, Usopp's father, who has claimed to be able to hit an ant between its eyes. The other is Van Auger, Usopp's obvious Evil Counterpart, who has demonstrated lethal accuracy from so far away the main characters can't even see the island he's shooting from. It is unclear whether or not Usopp has surpassed either yet, though it seems almost inevitable that he ultimately will. Van Auger shouldn't be surprising, as his clothes, gun, and aiming ability all seem to be taken directly from Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
    • And now we have the Mato Mato fruit, who allows the user (the fishman pirate Vander Decken IX) to turn whoever he touches into a target, so that any item he toss will chase him down forever and hit him, unless there is an unavoidable or faster-moving object in the way.
    • Kizaru has shown himself to be a pretty accurate marksman too, shooting Luffy's seastone key in half from an incredibly long distance.
  • Riza Hawkeye from Fullmetal Alchemist. Her idea of disciplining a puppy is to empty a pistol's magazine around it, without even grazing the puppy. Not to mention that she can face even the most menacing monster calmly, only to lose it when she thought her beloved boss was dead.
    • The anime has one instance of her destroying a small tractor with one bullet, that is to say the vehicle fell apart.
    • Also, Izumi's pretty sharp with that knife, though she's more of a Kung Fu/Alchemy Badass than a Knife Nut.
  • Though normally she's Overshadowed by Awesome, sometimes to the point of being a Damsel in Distress (though, to be fair, her fiance Ranma Saotome gets the Damsel in Distress treatment too, sometimes actually being a damsel), Akane Tendo of Ranma ½ nevertheless is repeatedly shown to have amazing skill with thrown or projectile weapons. In one of the earliest stories, she manages to accurately shoot an arrow laden with a bag containing about a kilo of catnip, and repeatedly manages to nail just about anyone she pleases with thrown weapons, no matter what she's actually throwing. One notable example is when Hikaru Gosunkugi tries to ruin Ranma's reputation by dressing up in costume and harassing Furinkan Girls, only to pull this on Akane, who promptly attacks him and, when he outruns her, throws an apple at him. It bends around a corner, practically at a 90 degree angle, and hits him hard enough to knock him head over heels.
    • Ranma also exhibits some improbable aiming skills, as he was once able to flick a stub-sized pencil from across the classroom, while jumping, and stick it point-first into the hole of the fifty-yen coin in his teacher's hand. He was also able to jam a polearm weapon perfectly into the key-like slot on a statue, while falling from several hundred feet in the air.
  • In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai, Kasai manages to snipe out all four tires of a van (think of the angles!) in under 7 seconds from a great distance. This apparently requires no resighting, reloading, or any movement on the part of the shooter.
  • In Rose of Versailles, Oscar is a legend with a sword, so when someone challenges her to a pistol duel, everyone thinks that she's **** ed. However, one Retcon later, she's also been practicing with guns her whole life. Who knew?
  • Kurz Weber of Full Metal Panic!! is apparently one of the most naturally talented marksmen in the world, and generally handles sniping duties for his unit. This includes, at one point, making a shot from the back of a moving truck that goes straight into a Humongous Mecha's machinegun, disabling the weapon—using an ordinary sniper rifle. His personal best? A 1,620 yard kill-shot at heart, at night, during a storm, suffering from dying injuries. At the time the novel in which this happened was written, the world record was 2,500 yards, with a considerably more powerful rifle, in considerably more ideal conditions (Good lighting, no crosswind...).
    • Compared to Kurz, Sousuke's marksmanship is merely normal, but he still nails a watermelon from something like fifty paces, blindfolded, during a game of crack-the-watermelon in Full Metal Panic! Fumoffu.
    • And then there was Shinji, he hit several turrets while running so he could be able to look at the girls bathing. He lands on Sousuke's crotch.
  • The Major from Ghost in the Shell once shot a fleeing perp in the ankle, as he was landing from a jump, at what could have been no less than a hundred meters. Justified somewhat with the Major being a full cyborg capable of acting with literally mechanical precision and has targeting software capable of calculating all aspects of the shot.
    • More justified in season 2, where they establish that she actually uses a specialized program loaded into her cybernetics just for shooting at specific ranges.
    • Specifically, she has a program capable of shooting down sniper rifle bullets with a Walther WA2000 at close range.
  • In the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG episode "Poker Face", the Major and Saito face off. It becomes a game of I Know You Know I Know when Saito is viewing the skills of The Major and realizes she does not have the software for midrange sniping skills. He attempts to shoot her before she can download the software. The Major had been fooling Saito into thinking that she couldn't shoot down his bullets midflight the whole time and shoots him in the eye. Maybe.
  • Vice of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, who managed to snipe the head of a Combat Cyborg who was attacking an ally, with said ally being in the way of his line of sight, through a building window, from a moving helicopter that couldn't be seen from said building. And he did this while said cyborg had previously been playing possum, so he only had a split second to react and perform the shot.
    • Subverted in a flashback by the same character. A gunman is holding a little girl hostage. He takes the shot and hits her in the EYE!!! The guilt from this caused him to quit his job as a sniper and become a helicopter pilot. The girl visits him later in the series while he is hospitalized and she appears to have a glass eye.
    • Near the beginning of A's, Nanoha, while training, uses a guided magical bullet to hit a juice can 100 times in midair, and is slightly disappointed when the can doesn't fall into the trash bin after the final strike.
  • Golgo 13 beats all of the above. In the movie The Professional, he killed a man by aiming through the skyscraper between them. Not enough for you? The pinnacle of improbable aim comes from the chapter "Hollywood Cinderella", where he aimed at a target by watching them on TV. He could probably shoot you from another continent given the right gun.
    • In the second episode of the recent anime, the cops manage to get all the evidence they needed to incriminate him: they found him in the only hotel room the shot could be taken from, they found the rifle he used in the dust chute, they found the shell from the bullet fired, etc. For all purposes, he was caught. Then they did the math on the shot: 500 meters away, through a two-foot gap between buildings, through tempered bullet-proof glass, at sundown with the sun shining on the window he was to fire through, with the wind blowing across the shot requiring it to be off-center. The cops determined the shot to be ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE. They had to let him go. The head inspector even commented "To prove that he's guilty, you'd have to prove there's a monster amongst us with the skills of a god." YEAH.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam 00's Lockon Stratos is recruited for the PMC Celestial Being because of his ability to, with the aid of his Dynames Gundam, shoot a satellite out of orbit from the ground, not to mention during the siege on the Ptolemaios, the Gundam was not calibrated and he ignored Haro's request to tune the gun and instead programmed it to manually target or else he would have been inactive for a good 10 minutes. That and he also has skill with a real life sniper rifle.
    • A less noticed example would be Gundam Wing's Lady Une. She managed a headshot with a standard hand gun, while the target was in free-fall and she was in the airplane she had trown the target out of 8 seconds prior.
    • Gundam Seed: Kira Yamato once he gets the Freedom Gundam. Granted, he is using a targeting computer for aid, but nonetheless, he frequently fires five beams at once, which disable (not destroy) five different mobile suits per volley. He's even better in Gundam Seed Destiny, where he's got even more beams and often fires from strange angles (such as being upside down). You could maybe chalk this up to his being a Coordinator... except that no other Coordinator in the series even comes close to that level of marksmanship. It gets to the point that some fans declare him a God Mode Sue due to his skill.
  • In Samurai Deeper Kyo, Basara, who is a member of the Junishinsho, is able to fire countless arrows at incredible speed, and almost never miss, even when he is aiming at such tiny points like eyes or in peoples' mouths. And as if that weren't badass enough, his specialty is firing his arrows in the air so that they will come down around him at the exact moment his enemies close in for the attack. It's implied that Basara is such a strategic genius that he can predict when his enemy will close in, but it seems more like a supernatural ability than anything else.
  • In the manga Gun Blaze West, "Target" Kevin is a sharpshooter... with a double-barrelled sawed-off shotgun. Yeah. He's also got a twelve barrelled number for special occasions, but still seems to think of himself as an ace marksman even though it would take more effort not to hit something with that monster.
  • Parodied in Ninin ga Shinobuden, where a squad of Ninja pin all of Miyabi's rogue summoning scrolls to the wall with shuriken. Then they all start expressing their surprise, as none of them had ever used a shuriken before.
  • Almost everyone in Angel Heart and City Hunter is crack shooter, but the most egregorious example is Umibozu, who retain his aiming skill even after got blinded. Really.
  • Let's not forget Jigen from Lupin III.
  • While training, Itachi of Naruto leaps into the air and, while upside-down, hits eight targets with his kunai, and strikes two of them in midair in such a way to divert their course to hit two targets behind a rock, while still getting those two to their targets. In an early episode, Zabuza throws some shuriken at Naruto, but Haku, who is standing between the two and off to the side, out of the way of the shuriken's flight path, throws needles at them and knocks them out of the air.
    • Apparently Tenten has this ability, however, this never stops anyone from just blocking or deflecting her ninja tools.
  • Madlax, who can kill anyone not protected by Plot Armor with a single shot regardless or whether or not she's running, jumping, or hanging upside down. Half the time she doesn't even aim.
    • Half the time she doesn't even have her eyes open.
  • Taken up to major proportions in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which has Yoko in the Final Episode when she snipes the Anti-Spiral's Homeworld. Note that although it seemed like an easy hit, take into account that the fight had the Grand Zamboa and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann moving faster than the speed of light. And Yoko STILL manages to hit her target even through a hail of laser fire while her target was moving at the speed of light. It's a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Yoko cause is just shows that she has some SERIOUS Sniper skills.
  • Although his excess of guns is usually just for intimidation (and laughs), Hiruma in Eyeshield 21 has insanely good aim when it counts with his guns or a football. The Kid, too, although he's descended from Olympic champion marksmen.
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    • Pretty much all the quarterbacks, as expected of them, have great aiming skills, with the biggest exception being (probably) Homer from the NASA Aliens/Shuttles, who has a super long, super huge pass, but has little control on where it lands and so he relies heavily on his receiver, Watt.
  • Throwing a fifty-meter long lance into low Earth orbit in order to hit an Angel barely a few hundred meters across dead on? It doesn't matter if the thrower was a semi-organic Humongous Mecha with a trio of supercomputers doing ballistic calculations, that sort of thing is a bit much for your average person. Apparently, Rei can do it.
  • Ookami-san's Ryoshi can shoot marble-sized balls with a slingshot with remarkable accuracy. He shot a moving baseball out of the way, for crying out loud!
  • Revy from Black Lagoon not only hits practically every time, but she does it wielding TWO GUNS AT ONCE! And it seems like every Mook she shoots dies instantly or is at least incapacitated.
  • In Hidan no Aria, Reki, who's signature quote is "I am a single bullet. It has no heart. Therefore, it does not think. It just flies straight towards its target", shoots the unilluminated clamp holding a bomb to the shadowed underside of a speeding bus off... from a distance of at least 200 meters... from inside a pace matching helicopter (think of the down draft on the bullet), through the siderails of the bridge that are flashing past several times a second... thus forcing the bomb to not only detach from the bus but bounce off the bridge to detonate harmless in the water. She is said to be able to shoot anything within a 2 km radius without missing.
  • In Digimon Tamers, Henry combines this with his usual What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome? posing. One card, three targets, and the card game wasn't even his forte in the first place.
  • Natsuki from My-HiME shoots several Flechette Storm magical darts out of the air with dual pistols.
  • In Canaan In the first episode, Canaan takes out several enemies at long-range with a pistol.
  • In Death Note, when in the last episode Matsuda manages to accurately shoot a pen out of Light's hand as he tries to write down Near's name on a hidden piece of Death Note.
  • Genjyo Sanzo from Saiyuki for sure. He has not only shot a single playing piece off a floating table when both of them were whirling around in a torrential maelstrom, he once shot a poison seed out of Gojyo's heart with such pinpoint aim that it destroyed the seed without killing Gojyo.
  • Mirai Nikki: Yuno is scarily good with a handgun as well as any bladed Psycho Weapons she gets her hands on. Best exemplified when she took down a police SWAT team by shooting them all in the neck, thereby avoiding their bulletproof vests and helmets.
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