Improbable Aiming Skills/Video Games

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Examples of Improbable Aiming Skills in Video Games include:

Visual Novels

  • Umineko no Naku Koro ni gives us the four Chiester sisters. Their first apperance is for them to shoot down two people running away from them with a single arrow. After the people have turned at least one corner. And that's their most basic shot. They go on to do things like firing an arrow from the other side of a forest, through an open window and then through a keyhole into a locked room to kill two people.
  • Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai! has Miyako and Yoichi (one of the new characters in the sequel), who are both members of the "Five Bows Under Heaven". Less improbable but still impressive is the Prime Minister with a rifle.

Unsorted

  • In City of Heroes, all attacks are determined whether they hit as soon as the animation starts. Basically, the animation just determines how long the attack takes to carry out. But it can take a few seconds to get to the part where you appear to attack. Which can lead to a melee attack hitting an opponent 30 feet and around a corner by the time your character actually swings, and the same goes for the computer hitting you.
  • Red Dead Revolver and Red Dead Redemption. It ain't called "Dead Eye" for nothin'.
  • Dante from the Devil May Cry series is a pretty damn good shot even in the game proper, but only demonstrates truly ridiculous levels of skill in the cutscenes, such as as the intro of Devil May Cry 3, where he—among other things—kills several Mooks with a single bullet by sending a bunch of billiard-balls into the air, and then shooting one of them in such a way that it starts a chain-reaction, sending the balls flying in all directions like gigantic, colorful buckshot. This is due to the fact that he's a human/demon hybrid using magical, demonic handguns.
    • In Devil May Cry 4, Dante puts a round through the Mad Scientist Agnus' papers. When Agnus picks one up to examine the damage, Dante puts another round through the exact same hole to kill him.
      • In the same game, in the boss encounters with Dante, he rarely uses his guns, unless of course Nero tries to shoot him, at which point Dante will begin to shoot the bullets out of the air.
      • Also in the same game, Dante manages to pull off "stacking" five bullets on the end of the handle of his sword (a la Robin Hood, just with bullets), stuck inside the Big Bad, each landing perfectly behind the other, with the final one thrusting it into its core.
  • Final Fantasy XIII deserves some mention. While free-falling from a jet, Lightning manages to fire one bullet and perfectly hit Fang's Eidolith (which is also moving and is about the size of a large pebble).
    • Did we mention that Lightning's weapon of choice, the Gunblade, has no ironsights or aiming method to speak of?
    • Arguably done more for Rule of Cool than for any other reason. Having Lightning shoot the Eidolith wasn't necessary (bearing in mind that in-game, Fang's is one of only two that activates on its own when used), but it just looked awesome.
  • Partially subverted in Deus Ex. Weapons in which you are untrained or only slightly trained have very bad aim. Although the player can start off with very good aim in one type of weapon or decent aim in several, they'll still have a few really inaccurate crappy ones for most of the game until enough skill points are gathered to push them to Advanced or Master training level.
  • Enter the Matrix has numerous examples, but one instance in particular is quite noteworthy; in the airport level, Ghost is tasked with shooting out the nose wheel of a Gulfstream jet to prevent it from taking off; Ghost being in a control tower and the plane being about a hundred yards away or so and beginning its takeoff roll. Granted Ghost is armed with a Barrett sniper rifle, but even the best snipers would be hard-pressed to make that shot.
  • Revolver Ocelot from Metal Gear Solid is another rare villainous example. Though wielding a revolver (and never, ever using his other hand to steady it), he's got unerring accuracy, on-par with even Sniper Wolf. He can even richochet bullets off of walls. When Cyborg Ninja cuts off his right hand, he just starts shooting with his left instead, without any perceptible drop in accuracy.
    • This may be accounted for by the fact that Revolver Ocelot the son of a psychic. However, that doesn't explain how, in a New Game+ file, Snake can pull off the same stunts, shooting around walls and even aiming behind enemies and hitting them in the back.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3 subverts this; the future Big Boss, then known as Naked Snake, gave Ocelot the idea of using a revolver as his weapon of choice, after noticing that with his previous gun (a Makarov PM handgun), he twisted his elbow to absorb the recoil, which actually worsened his aim with it.
      • Later in the same game, Ocelot adds a stock to the revolver to steady his aim for a long-range shot. And misses.
      • In MGS3, the first time we see Ocelot, he displays Xanatos Roulette Aiming Skills, managing to fire a bullet that ricochets multiple times before killing a Mook. When Snake later gets one of the revolvers, the bullets still ricochet, so he could concievably do the same if the player was good enough.
    • Also subverted in The Twin Snakes, where, during the torture scene, Ocelot is spinning his gun on his left hand and drops it by accident—lending a bit of credibility that his left hand isn't quite as accurate as his right. He later goes on to shoot the PAL key out of Snake's hand near the end of the game.
    • Ironically, in Twin Snakes, the legendary sniper villain character Sniper Wolf also subverts this trope by submitting to certain real-world sniping necessities of behavior: her accuracy suffers unless she's lying down, she takes an elevated position and plans ahead to hold that superior position throughout her battles. The irony comes from nearly every other villain in the game embodying a trope in order to make themselves unique, while Wolf's more conventional sniping ability is soundly trumped by Solid Snake's employment of two tropes multiplied together. In the cutscene in which Wolf is defeated (following a player-controlled sniper-fight boss battle in an outdoor snowfield in Alaska, against an enemy wearing all white, in the midst of a blizzard), Snake is suddenly disarmed by Wolf shooting the PSG-1 sniper rifle from his grip and taking a bead on his forehead. She is undone, however, when Snake suddenly performs a perfect backflip, lands with his heel against the rifle's stock to propel it into the air, executes a full 360 turn to grab it, aims, and fires the killing shot straight into Wolf's lungs from more than a hundred yards distant. In Wolf's defense, she does recover from surprise in time to return fire simultaneously, but without the power of being the primary focus of the cutscene, her shot harmlessly misses. The combined power of Improbable Aiming Skills and Cutscene Power to the Max has a resonance, it seems, rendering the protagonist briefly perfect.
  • Altaïr, the main character of Assassin's Creed, also displays an unbelieveable level of accuracy with his throwing-knives. His knives always hit, even on a moving target that changes direction unexpectedly, and ALWAYS kills instantly, without even giving the victim a chance to cry out. Well, unless it's one of your 'Targets', in which case they just basically ignore the throwing-knives for no apparent reason.
    • Ezio is the same with throwing knives in Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. He also has a small pistol, which is extremely accurate for those days. In Brotherhood, Ezio gets a crossbow, which will hit (and instantly kill) anyone he aims at. In fact, Stealth-Based Missions become really easy once the crossbow is introduced.
  • Gordon Freeman in Half Life. He's not shown to be supernaturally accurate, at least compared to other First Person Shooter heroes. However, unlike almost all other FPS heroes (who at least have some form of military background), he's a theoretical physicist who's never picked up a gun in his life prior to the events of the game. This makes incredibly impressive his ability to rapidly learn to use an assault rifle well enough to fight off both an alien invasion and a battalion of highly trained special forces soldiers.
    • Well, except for the firing range in the hazard course which is apparently mandatory for all Security Officers and people using the H.E.V. Though, it's never clear how often they're required to run it.
    • Lampshaded in the sequel, in which Breen, through his "Breencast" system, berates his mook army for being completely unable to impede Gordon's progress: "This is not some agent provocateur or highly trained assassin we are discussing. Gordon Freeman is a theoretical physicist who hardly earned the distinction of his Ph.D at the time of the Black Mesa Incident... The man you have consistently failed to slow, let alone capture, is by all standards simply that, an ordinary man."
    • Maybe Averted, at least in Gordon's case. At the beginning of Half Life when you first acquire the HEV Suit, among the systems being activated, a targeting system is mentioned.
    • That explains how he can hit a tiny Magnusson Device from 100 feet away with a pistol without even looking down the sights!
      • Well actually not so much for the pistol simply because its not accurate enough but Gordon Freeman has PERFECT aim with a revolver firing from the HIP.
  • The Lone Wanderer in Fallout 3 takes this trope to ridiculous extremes, being able to shoot a switchblade out of someone's hand and follow it up with a perfect headhsot. From fifty metres away. With a sightless (I shit you not) hunting rifle. He can still miss with a shotgun at point-blank range, oddly enough.
    • And that headshot doesn't even appear to be a true headshot. Instead the target is decapitated with a Clean Cut, the seemingly undamaged head lying next to the corpse. This is particularly hilarious when considering that the ammo used by Sniper rifles and the 'Infinity plus one rifle', Lincoln's Repeater (.308 and .44 Magnum, respectively) would have caused a lot of Pink Mist to spurt from the headless body. Compare a point blank hit with a shotgun which blows the enemy into many bloody chunks.
      • The sniper rifles and repeater are nice, but they just don't provide the satisfaction that decapitating someone with a BB gun does.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance makes use of arc trajectory algorithms for Archers/Hunters/Snipers/Assasins with bows and line-of-sight algorithms for Gunners to see if a projectile would be obstructed by an obstacle or the terrain itself due to tiles with varying heights to make it seem more realistic... but this all goes out the window when you order your bowmen/gunslingers to use specials, which ignore those algorithms and just check to see if the target is within weapon range. This leads to cases where you can have an archer shoot at something that's pretty much 2 tiles away and 10 storeys above, or have a gunner SHOOT THROUGH A MOUNTAIN FACE AT POINT BLANK RANGE and hit the target on the other side, 7 panels away.
    • It's amusing to think that a bullet backed up by Ultima Charge would behave this way.
  • Compared to other AI allies throughout the series, Captain MacMillan from Call of Duty 4 is a deadshot. Within a second of killing your first mook (as Lieutenant Price), his partner is killed by MacMillan, regardless of who you choose. Despite his skills, he's only there to supervise your preemptive assassination attempt on The Man Behind the Man. During the hectic escape from the operation, you're hard pressed for cover and ammo while MacMillan patiently urges you on, and turns his side of the field into a graveyard.
    • Technically, you're both there to kill your target. Snipers rotate rifle duty and spotter duty regularly, in order to avoid eye strain and tunnel vision (among other things). Price just happens to be the man on the rifle when the target shows up. And lest we forget, that particular shot was a little over a mile distant. Granted, the M 82 A 1 used for the shot has a maximum range of two miles, and realistic problems, such as slight wind causing the bullet to miss by four or five feet and the Coriolis effect (needing to correct for the rotation of the Earth), are present and compensated for.
  • Sometimes a common occurence in FPSes, especially if The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, but played straight in Time Splitters, as the Phlebitonium for much of the game, and in fact the concept itself, is plain and simply Rule of Cool. Of special note is that the computer tends to be completely suck with normal shotguns at long ranges, but does quite a few headshots with the BLUNDERBUSS. Speculation has it that this is due to a couple of the set patterns of blunderbuss firing arcs, and the height at which the computer naturally aims. If you require evidence, use all zombie characters, while playing one yourself, and take note of the amount of headless people running around in some all blundie games.
    • Also see: any oldschool 2d sprite FPS, where so long as you can see the creature in the distance, if he has a bullet-type attack which deals instantaneous damage, he can hit you very easily, even if he's a few pixels high. Averted with the Spider Mastermind in Doom due to the chaingun's naturally random 'spray'.
  • The assault rifle in Left 4 Dead has laser-like accuracy that gives it essentially infinite range. This can be a bit annoying when playing as the infected on versus, as Survivors will be able to spray bullets at you from halfway across the map and still get a headshot.
  • Arcade Light-Gun shooters take this to a ridiculous extreme, for both you and your opponents. Not while using their guns, though, oh no. This trope is only invoked when your enemies throw something at you. Whenever anything is thrown at you, from a knife to a 55-gallon drum, it will hit you with 100% accuracy. Yes, for some reason a thrown baseball is more likely to kill you than an assault rifle in these sorts of games. For your part, however, you're quick enough on the draw to shoot whatever's coming at you out of the air with a single shot. Here are a few highlights of the genre:
    • Area 51: You can shoot grenades, oil drums, and RPGs out of the air with one shot from a pistol.
    • Target: Terror: You can shoot groups of dynamite (complete with timer) out of the air with a single pistol shot. Apparently they must have set said timers for 4 seconds, as they will explode the instant they hit you. Not only that, but one of the bonus levels involves you doing this while terrorists throw a non-stop string of dynamite bombs attached to frozen turkeys at you!
      • To neutralize the hijacker, you must shoot out his rather small Dead-Man Switch remote, otherwise he blows up the plane.
    • House of the Dead: Zombies will throw axes at you. This in itself is amazing, but they will always hit unless you shoot them out of the air with a single shot. Always. Even when the zombie throwing it is fifty feet away, TEN FEET BELOW YOU, AND DECAPITATED!
    • Silent Scope: Sniping from a moving vehicle? Check. Shooting out the rotor of a helicopter from said vehicle? Check. Sniping a boss with a Meat Shield in another erratically-moving vehicle? Check. Sniping searchlights while parachuting? Check. Shooting knives and grenades in midair? Check. Destroying a tank by sniping down its barrel? Check. Shooting the handcuffs (or bomb detonators) off a hostage? Check. Sniping underwater? Check. The player himself needs to have extraordinary sniping skills and dexterity to beat the game.
  • Batman in Batman: Arkham Asylum. In melee combat Batman always hits—often with multiple batarangs—his targets if he's facing towards them. But then, hey, he's Batman.
    • Batman: Arkham City has a side-quest featuring Deadshot, who manages to kill one of his targets by ricocheting the bullet of a metal shutter first
  • The archer units in Stella Deus The Gate Of Eternity can shoot anywhere as long as the target is in weapon range. This includes around corners, up hills, and through obstacles.
  • Borderlands in Playtrough 2 and 2.5, Bad Muthas and Superbads gain HUGE advance in terms of accuracy. For example: You're 40–50 meters away from Bad Mutha enemy, that said enemy haves shotgun with 20 accuracy. However... It still manages to get most of the projectiles to hit you, when you couldn't hit them with same shotgun from that range.
    • Surprisingly for enemies that are Demonic Kamikaze Spiders in close combat, Psychos have perfect accuracy whether they're twenty or two hundred yards away. It wouldn't be nearly as absurd if not for the fact that they're throwing axes at you.
    • Also used in Mordecai's back story. He apparently won a sharp shooting contest while he was 17 against several professional snipers with much more experience. The kicker? They all used sniper rifles; he used a revolver. The snipers then chased him off and called him a cheater.
  • Enemies in Rainbow Six can headshot you with almost any weapon from beyond visual range while aiming the wrong way, and can shoot at impossible angles that you can't.
  • The Mark & Execute ability from Splinter Cell Conviction allows Sam to One-Hit Kill, depending on the equipped weapon, up to four enemies in rapid succession even when they're in rather different locations. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Real Life marksman who can do so with his speed and accuracy, nevermind as consistently.
  • Prototype allows you to pick up any shouldered weapon and start leaping tens of meters into the air while always maintaining an accurate aim on any target, moving or still, that you've locked on to.
    • Locking on to a specific target isn't actually required to demonstrate this trope in its full glory. Pick up a gun with high-velocity projectiles(in this case, either the rifle or machinegun). With significant upgrades to the jump ability, leap across the street with plenty of human class targets with substantial threat ratings like normal soldiers near a hive or base. While still in air, tap the fire button rapidly. Voila, dead soldiers lying flat, all taken one bullet each in the span of about what, 2 to 3 seconds?
    • Subverted somewhat in that automatic firing will cause a decrease in accuracy the longer the trigger is pulled no matter the player's stance.
    • Even more spectacular, is the throwing of objects(even while moving in the air). Should the moving target change velocity or direction slightly, the thrown object can mildly compensate mid-flight, making it look like the ambulance you've just hurled is homing onto the Apache chopper trying to dodge your attack. Improbable aiming taken to the absurd degree.
  • The AI in Worms is an incredible shot. Infact they seem to feel the need to rub it in, ignoring targets directly next to them to shoot at things a long distance away that they wouldn't be able to physically see or know exist if it wasn't for the side view.
    • Let's see - using a bazooka to shoot an enemy on the other side of the map. If that's not badass enough, the AI always relies on wind, so even if a straightforward shot at maximum power will still hit, they'll settle for firing in the opposite direction with somewhere between 10 and 50% of power and the shot will still do max damage. That's to say that the AI frequently does shots that could be classified as improbable at best, then there are the shots that go through a gap that by all accounts should not fit a bazooka and that's while the said bazooka is doing a turn under the influence of a very strong wind. Not badass enough? The AI using a bazooka is the preferred option for you; if the enemy pulls out a grenade, you can only pray it doesn't target the worm that will actually die by taking maximum grenade damage. Their favourite tactic is to make the grenade ricochet a bit (say, at least 3-5 times) and land on the head of your worm at the same time the fuse time runs out.
    • And this is on all difficulty levels; the only real difference is that lower AI levels will either sometimes miss (on purpose) or just be really bad at picking targets.
    • The "Cocky" AI in Worms Reloaded does this on purpose. It chooses to do the most difficult (but still viable) shots possible in order to show off.
  • Kevin Ryman and Alyssa Ashcroft in Resident Evil Outbreak can both take a little longer to aim a handgun to receive a much higher chance of a critical hit.
  • In Valkyria Chronicles, all the guns used by the player's squad start off mediocre and are gradually improved, and all start off with low accuracy, indicated by a huge possible hitbox, even sniper rifles. Later in the game, the hitbox of a sniper rifle is small enough to target soldiers on the other side of the map, specially if using Marina Wulfstan, whose hitbox becomes a single dot, this means she will hit dead-center any target at any distance ten times out of ten.
  • Displayed by your enemies in Will Rock: They can hit you from every possible distance with: Fireball shots, arrows, javelins, axes, knives, morning stars, acid, tridents, fiery stones/pebbles, fiery bullets and lightning bolts.
  • In the Medal of Honor series, Nazis have near-perfect accuracy when blind-firing behind cover (ie what is supposed to be suppressing fire).
  • Enemies with automatic weapons in Soldier Of Fortune II are implausibly accurate at long range, while the player suffers from A-Team Firing with the same guns.
  • A nameless, fameless Mook proves his serious chops in Final Fantasy XII's opening movie. The Imperial Trooper who kills Rassler does so by shooting him with an arrow. Through the one unarmored spot on his body (a one-inch gap between his breastplate and his neck/shoulderguard armor right over his collarbone.) While Rassler is mounted on a chocobo and jostling about erratically. In the din and chaos of a pitched battle. Across the span of a bridge. At night. If it wasn't for the fast Basch kills him with an equally improbable shot (albeit with an armor-piercing arrowhead, so he didn't need to aim at a weak spot,) the man would probably be deserving of a promotion.
  • The Zelda games—and any games that have auto-targeting—use this when you can lock onto an enemy and let loose with arrows or whatever weapon you have. It only gets really absurd when, in The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, a mini-game requires you to shoot an arrow at a post on a guard tower a hundred yards away, but the arrows don't drop at all and there is a targeting sight. The mini-game wins you the Hawkeye, an item that functions like binoculars, or a sniper scope when combined with the bow, giving you even more improbable aiming powers!
  • Falmer archers in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are neither better nor worse at archery than the other races, which is damned impressive, considering that they're all completely blind.
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