One-Man Army/Video Games

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Examples of One-Man Army in Video Games include:

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First-Person Shooters

"Hey pal, what are you gonna do? Save the world all by yourself?"

Hack and Slash

Other Examples, that need to be sorted by genre

  • If there's any person who should be fit to provide the picture for this trope, it would be Captain Titus of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Why? Well, not wanting to spoil too much, but he makes other OneManArmies look comparatively sissy compared to what he's dished out over the course of the game. Deconstructed at the end. The sheer ridiculousness of Titus' deeds make the Inquisition suspicious of him.
  • The Black Ops soldiers in PlanetSide. They have ten times the staying power of a regular soldier, and can use any vehicle and weapon in the game. However, regular soldiers avert this, hard.
  • In Lord of the Rings: The Battle For Middle Earth, it's possible to rack up thousands of vanquished enemies with Gandalf in a single battle using his Word of Power attack. Having tens of thousands of kills at the end of a campaign is not unheard of.
    • Your custom heroes from the sequel can be this trope, too, given that you've selected the right powers. Some players put all their skill points into armour, which makes the hero capable of surviving three times the damage a normal hero unit can take, and then give him powers that allow him to curbstomp a whole squad of enemy heroes or monsters.
      • Non-campaign maps will have a stealthed Gollum running around. Killing Gollum gets you the One Ring, and if you take that to your fortress you can recruit a Ring Hero. For Men, Elves and Dwarves it's a powered-up Galadriel... but if you're playing an Evil faction (Mordor, Isengard, Goblins or Angmar) you get Sauron, who can pretty much wipe out an entire army and an enemy base by himself.
  • In Sengoku Rance, it's possible to make any foot soldier unit in the game into this by giving it the Fellow Troops' Revenge ability, which allows a special attack that deals damage equal to the number of casualties the unit has suffered. Since troop counts can easily reach and exceed 1000-2000 men per unit in this game, a foot soldier unit that's been reduced to a handful of men (or just one, ideally) can slaughter hundreds of troops per turn, assuming you can cover them with other infantry units and keep an enemy counterattack from wiping them off the map.
    • Of course, the most literal example would have to be Ogawa Kentarou after becoming a demon.
  • Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior (of Warhammer 40,000 fame) played this trope to terrifying limits. Not only does La'Kais kill several battalions of the Imperial Guard, large numbers of Space Marines and several Dreadnaughts, a good deal of Chaos Marines and several Daemons including a God by himself - he does it all within the timespan of twenty four hours. This is even more amazing when one considers that La'Kais is a Tau Fire Warrior, making him the Tau equivalent of basic infantry, a common foot soldier. Furthermore, not just any day—La'Kais' first day of live combat action. (Hmmm...) It's worth noting that canonically, he was driven insane by his experiences and was never fit for duty again.
    • At least, up until around the Eye of Terror world campaign, at which point they brought him back (for the Tabletop Game) as O'Kais (Shas'o being the equivalent of "general", while shas'la is roughly "private". Yeah, Tau nomenclature includes lots of compounds, and an individual's rank and caste), and used him as the justification for introducing man-portable railguns as a sniper-rifle analogue. They still note that he was a basket case, but he gets roped back in for a completely undefined 'emergency'.
    • The Novel offers a few justifications: one, (Khorne was helping); also most of his kills were from blowing up a ship's engine (flushing hundreds out into space). He's still pretty messed up.
  • In the World War 2 game Blazing Angels, you play as a pilot known as 'Captain'. You manage to accomplish by the end of the game the feats of destroying half of the Blitz bomber force, stopping the Blitzkreig at Dunkirk, destroying the entire Midway invasion force, destroying virtually the entire Pearl Harbor attack force, raiding the Japanese base of Rebaul and devastating the airfield there, taking out the top secret Nazi nuclear project, destroying the entire D-Day bunker network,, stopping Operation Bodenplatte, destroying the Berlin radar network, surviving a three minute dogfight with the rest of Germany's airforce by yourself, and taking out an elite jet squadron. And the said jet squadron insults you by saying they have jets and you don't.
  • Epitomized in many of the Medal of Honor games, where one soldier practically defeats the entire Nazi army and wins World War II single-handedly. Call of Duty: Finest Hour is another World War II game that is a major offender (the main PC series less so, as it's more team-oriented).
    • Indeed, the PC Call of Duty games were intentionally intended to avert this by using a more team-based single-player game, and having a campaign that shows the war from multiple perspectives—given the improbably large body count the player still racks up at times, they were only partially successful.
      • The attempt in the first Call of Duty is largely useless, as allied NPCs and enemies will stand point-blank discharging their weapons at each other. Eventually the player will lose all of his allies unless he takes over the killing.
      • In Call of Duty 4, it will vary within the mission; in the first, "Crew Expendable," you can literally let the AI do all the work for at least the first quarter, just following from the rear, until the first skirmish where there's a realistic chance for the enemy to hit you. Conveniently, you are spared poor orders-following AI by not having control over your team at all.
      • In Call of Duty: World at War's multiplayer, if a Marine Raiders player gets a high enough killstreak, their character sometimes yells, "I'm a One-Man Army!" in what seems to be this trope combined with lampshading.
      • One of the multiplayer perks in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is named One Man Army. It lets you switch classes without dying, meaning you could very well fill in for all roles of an army.
      • And Modern Warfare 3 follows suit with the "Specialist" strike package, allowing a player to actually gain more perks as he makes kills - managing to get 8 within one life gives that player the advantages of nearly every perk and weapon proficiency in the game.
  • As of KOF XIII, "The One-Man Army" is the official nickname of Hot-Blooded super-soldier Ralf Jones. Not one bit of it is exaggeration.
  • In most fighter (or starfighter) simulations, the player character pilot typically accumulates a kill score in the hundreds over the course of a career, or even a single campaign. It's common to make "ace" (traditionally five kills) during the very first mission. If the game includes a kill board, the protagonist soon outpaces the other NPC pilots, sometimes by an order of magnitude.
    • In Elite, in order to reach the ultimate Elite ranking, you have to kill over 6,000 ships.
    • Ace Combat is the best example of this trope as allied pilots are nothing more than moving distractions but the player massacres an entire country's air force (and in some games, army and navy, too)/.
      • This isn't entirely true in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War or Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, where your wingmen will occasionally shoot down enemy planes and destroy ground targets. That said, a grand majority of the property damage in the game is caused by the player. Note as a contrast that while the notoriety of Wardog Squadron in 5 is for the whole flight group, there's only one Demon Lord of the Round Table in Zero...
      • Ace Combat 6 has allied units who are actually useful; and under the right circumstances, can jack up any target with a Macross Missile Massacre. This can be very essential to certain achievement runs (such as guns-only Campaigns or those where you have to fly only one of the three plane types) and especially when it comes to taking down Strigons.
      • Actually invoked in Unsung War in Operation Katina, which stars the protagonist, Mobius 1, from the previous game. The operation narrator states outright that Mobius 1 has a higher kill ratio than an entire squadron. The narrator continues that a sizeable force of Erusean veterans has risen up to start another war, and that Mobius 1's job is to take them out... by himself.
    • In TIE Fighter, it is in fact possible to destroy one of the big Rebel cruisers with a TIE Fighter. The warship has shields and many laser turrets; the fighter has no shields, no warheads, and only two laser cannons. Of course, it's nearly impossible to do this if other ships are around; even with just the one ship, it's a pretty big accomplishment that requires a lot of hard work and fancy flying. Similarly, in its predecessor Star Wars: X-Wing, the first 12-mission campaign centered around an elaborate plot to smuggle a bomb onto a specific Star Destroyer to blow it up; however, a sufficiently skilled pilot could shoot down that specific Star Destroyer (which acted as the base for the enemy in every mission) with a single X-Wing every single time, leading to promotion to general and every combat medal in the game bing awarded after the first mission.
      • In the final game of the series, X-Wing Alliance, it was laughably easy to become an instant ace in the very first official mission. In the training missions, LucasArts Totally Games even accounted for the very skilled players, by having recorded lines from your trainer if you manage to, for example, destroy the entire convoy.
    • Afterburner Climax has your Jaguar Flight sent to stop the enemy from using nuclear weapons. Your wingmen don't do much, really, and your plane has Bottomless Magazines along with the Macross Missile Massacre-enabling "Climax Mode" Limit Break. The enemy sends what feels like their entire air force at you. Hilarity Ensues.
  • In order to gain complete control of Los Santos, the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas must kill in total thousands of rival gang members armed with AK-47s and other heavy weaponry, usually 30-40 per "territory." Furthermore, because gang members are instantly replaced (or healed by paramedics), it's possible for the player character to wipe out the same gang several times over in the course of minutes.
    • In fact, all of the various Grand Theft Auto protagonists singlehandedly accrue impressive kill counts.
  • Contra.
    • Technically, it's an example of a two-man army since there are two main characters.
    • Actually, it's more like a 30 man army if you think about it.
  • Some Shoot Em Ups like Raptor: Call of the Shadows and Stargunner tend to do this, with one ship going against an entire enemy fleet and winning.
  • In Half-Life, Gordon Freeman starts off as an unassuming theoretical physicist whose job basically amounts to manual labor. But one resonance cascade and crowbar pickup later, Gordon is a virtually unstoppable badass who fends off not only an entire invasion of incredibly lethal aliens, but also whole platoons of crack soldiers. When he returns in Half-Life 2 he finds that he has become a legendary figure whose mere presence is enough to precipitate a worldwide revolt. (No doubt his nigh-unique "hazard suit" helped, but it amounts to a bit of a Hand Wave.)
    • This was also lampshaded in Half-Life 2 in Dr. Breen's message to the Combine forces:

"How could one man have slipped through your force's fingers time and time again? How is it possible? This is not some agent provocateur or highly trained assassin we are discussing. Gordon Freeman is a theoretical physicist who had hardly earned the distinction of his Ph.D. at the time of the Black Mesa Incident. I have good reason to believe that in the intervening years, he was in a state that precluded further development of covert skills. The man you have consistently failed to slow, let alone capture, is by all standards simply that--an ordinary man. How can you have failed to apprehend him? Well... I will leave the upbraiding for another time, to the extent it proves necessary. Now is the moment to redeem yourselves."

    • Freeman's Mind mentions several times Freeman's increasing body count and the ramifications thereof. "Man, if I get indicted once I leave here this is getting harder and harder to explain. I don't think anyone's gonna buy a few dozen counts of self-defense with a submachine gun."
      • By Episode 31 he changed his mind again to a more Raoul Duke-like attitude: who would believe the prosecutor if told that he, Gordon Freeman, an untrained scientist, survived monsters, killed hundreds of marines and launched a missile?
    • You have to be a complete Badass for the enemy high command to name you Anticitizen One.
    • Gordon is so badass that he's hired by interdimensional aliens, ostensibly as a walking weapon of mass destruction.
    • However, Barney does the same thing, with only security guard gear, and no-one really noticed.
    • Adrian Shepherd from Opposing Force sort of qualifies. He leads a squad of fellow HECU marines a few times, but for the most part fights on his own.
    • Half-Life 2 actually gives you the achievement "One Man Army" once you take down 6 gunships.
  • Though all of the Spartans in Halo are referred to by the Scary Dogmatic Aliens of The Covenant as "Demons", the Master Chief is a standout even among his fellow bio-augmented and Power Armor-wearing comrades, with only Noble Six possibly equaling him in deadliness.
    • The lack of psychological damage is justified as he's been training for this since he was six, with the UNSC taking particular care to make sure that he and the other Spartan-IIs would be able to remain mentally stable no matter what. Note that in the expanded universe, the Spartan-IIIs are created with less attention to their psychological well-being; Lucy-B091 remained Dumb Struck for 7+ years after a mission which killed all but two people of her 300-strong company.
    • Halo Legends gives us one of the earliest known Arbiters, who manages to carve through an entire Covenant Army with naught but Energy Swords and sheer Tranquil Fury.
    • And the Halo graphic novel gave us Sergeant Johnson slaughtering through Flood after Flood all on his own... although it's justified since he's actually a Spartan-I and therefore somehow immune to the Flood virus. But the point still stands.
  • Taken to ridiculous extremes in Drakengard. How ridiculous you may ask?... Well, in around the 10% of the game, Verse XIX "Last War between the Union of Flippedfrance vs the Empire of Notspain", around the first third of the mission Caim has the enemy coundown at 1576... yeah. And this is not the biggest bloodbath in the game and you had probably killed more enemies if you unite the XVIII other chapters. There is a reason why the game is also known as Caim Kills the FUCK OUT of Everybody: the Game
  • The original one-woman army is probably Samus Aran from the Metroid series. Miss Aran has blown up at least four planets (including a Dark World version of a planet) and wiped out three entire species all on her lonesome. By the end of each and every game, Samus has become a walking instrument of destruction, plowing through enemies with the Screw Attack and able to freeze, incinerate or otherwise decimate every Metroid she comes across. As with the Master Chief, the Space Pirates (her secondary enemy after the titular species) are terrified of her and refer to her as "the Hunter" in the Space Pirate Logs found in Metroid Prime and sequels. In fact, in Metroid Prime 2, you can read the journal of a dead soldier who maintains that Samus' exploits must have been exaggerated.
    • Also in the second installment can be found some humorous logs from the Pirates, once they discover that Samus and Dark Samus are separate beings. "Horrifying as it may sound, there are two of them now. We are bracing for a new assault."
      • "Surely, we are cursed."
    • The first Metroid Prime also has Pirate logs that basically read, "We gotta find out how Samus's weapons work or otherwise we're screwed!". It gets especially hilarious when they describe certain prototypes, like their attempt to recreate her Morph Ball technology, which tended to horribly mutilate test subjects, crushing and twisting their skeletons. "Science Team wisely decided to end the project after this," indeed.
    • In short, Apocalyptic Logs where the apocalypse is you.
    • In the third installment, GFMC troopers will generally treat her as a larger-than-life hero, usually saying things to the tune of, "Samus Aran, it's an honor to meet you!", stopping just short of asking for autographs.
  • Another example of a One Woman Army is Tanya Adams. Though in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 1 she can only blow up buildings and kill infantry, and only if you specifically order her to kill that infantry, in Red Alert 2, she automatically fires on advancing infantry (with pistols, but long before she's in range of their assault rifles), she can swim even in nearly frozen rivers, and use C4 on ships, buildings, and tanks (in RA2, as with many games, tanks have no machine guns, making them weak against infantry). The only thing that can stop her besides air power and overwhelming force are base defenses like sentry guns and Tesla coils. There are several missions where she takes out entire bases with little backup.
    • The "commando" units in the Tiberium series (as long as the enemy doesn't have vehicles), and Havoc in particular in Renegade (even if the enemy has vehicles).
      • Havoc is part of Dead 6, a crack commando group with specialists for each group, Havoc is basically the jack of all trades, immagine what his teammates would do in their field.
      • The Nod Cyborg Commando from Tiberian Sun is probably the strongest candidate for this in the RTSes: it's one of the strongest units in the game, bar none. It inverts the usual Crippling Overspecialization of "commando" units by having a weapon that's good enough to destroy tanks and buildings in a couple hits (and it's a One-Hit Kill against infantry and light vehicles), is Made of Iron, can regenerate by standing in Tiberium, and can fit into subterranean APCs for surprise attacks. Ghost Stalker has many of the same abilities for the GDI, except without the Made of Iron part.
    • In the expansions to the first Red Alert, the Soviets prototype a cybernetic soldier called Volkov. His first mission consists of wiping out dozens of Allied troops, buildings, tanks, and a battleship, finally ramming the point home by killing Tanya . Understandably, this worries the Allies...
    • Colonel Burton from Command & Conquer: Generals is described as such. The man can mow down infantry with just a couple shots, and even vehicles and buildings don't hold out long against his souped-up OICW, he can plant both remote-detonated and timer-controlled C4 charges, silently off infantry with his combat knife, and then make his getaway by climbing sheer cliff. While stealthed.
  • Sarah Kerrigan from StarCraft, who as a human was only a mediocre Ghost (and being the first StarCraft game, you couldn't heal her, making it dangerous to use her in battle), as the Zerg Queen of Blades, she had great armor, huge hitpoints, a melee attack which killed most infantry in one swipe and larger units with 2 or 3, could Entangle from a distance, and could destroy groups with Psionic Storms. During her attack on the Amerigo, when she's ambushed by 20 Marines, she's able to kill every one of them without dying.
    • Let's not forget Zeratul, the unit with one of the strongest attacks, and also permanaent stealth. He also does that in cutscenes. In one mission with proper microing, you can use him to kill half a Zerg base alone.
    • In his Battlecruiser, Edmund Duke does 50 damage a shot and can kill a lot of units in two or three hits. In the lone mission where you get to use him, Duke can level the entire enemy base on his own as long as you use the Yamato Gun properly and bring a SCV or two to repair him as he gets damaged.
    • The sequel has Tychus Findlay piloting Odin, the Super Prototype to Thor. Like Duke, Tychus can lay siege to enemy bases as long as someone provides some healing.
  • Extreme in Roguelike games. In one example, T.O.M.E. (Tales of Middle-Earth), you track down and kill every single Tolkien villain, ever. Up to and including the local equivalent of Satan, Morgoth (Sauron's boss). And then you go To Hell and Back to kill him there. Some versions throw in a few gods and demons from other series, such as the Cthulhu Mythos, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and general mythology.
    • Crawl's monsters might not go up that far in quality, but they certainly don't lack quantity: 266922 creatures vanquished. Also note that this game keeps detailed statistics on how many individuals of each creature type you have killed.
  • Fire Emblem. At first, you're generally on par with the imperial scrubs. Near the end of the game, though, you'll probably have "that one guy" (or even better, multiple), who you can just throw into a pile of red guys, and laugh at they waltz up and basically get obliterated. It's almost tragic.
    • In fact, for some this is a Self-Imposed Challenge, to play through an entire game using only one character.
    • As a more specific (and Egregious) example, it is apparently not only entirely possible, but easy, to solo the entirety of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance with the main character, Ike. And he's just a seventeen-year-old mercenary kid with a Big Freaking Sword.
    • In Path of Radiance, there's also Nephenee. The only edge Ike has over her is Aether. Nephenee doesn't need it, because the enemies in most cases are lucky if they even manage damage her at all. If they manage to bring her health halfway down, her Wrath ability kicks in, which boosts her critical hit ration dramatically, so one hit kills will be served in bulk.
      • Also, Mia can do serious damage thanks to Vantage. Throw on a Brave Sword, and they all die.
      • Don't forget the enemy One Man Army: the Black Knight. Tibarn mentions that he wiped out an entire unit of super-powerful bird-people on his own.
    • In the fourth game, Genealogy of the Holy War, you get quite a few characters who can almost solo the very large enemy armies (with the help of terrain bonuses). You'll know them because they wield Holy Weapons.
      • Seriously, the only reason some of them don't solo the chapter is because legendary weapons only have 50 uses per repair, and there are more than 50 enemies in the game's huge chapters. Otherwise, it's not too hard to win when Levin or Sety wields a Holsety tome with 105% evasion and 60 might.
    • In Radiant Dawn, there are several. Haar is one of the biggest, along with Caineghis, Nailah, Tibarn, and of course, Ike. However. one man overshadows them all: The Black Knight. Not only is he capable of soloing every single map in which he is available in the game,, he is also the highest possible level from beginning to end. And did we mention that he has what is arguably the second-most powerful weapon in the game, Alondite? And he's also the greatest tactical mind in Begnion, and a major military commander in two countries.
      • Actually, the enemy has quite a few One Man Armies - the two most-known are easily Dheginsea and Ashera both of which are completely cpable of killing lvl fifteens in the third tier with ease on easy mode.
      • With BEXP abuse and a bit of luck, every unit in the game can be one of these, even low-tier ones like Meg and Fiona.
    • Even the 13-year-old empress Sanaki can rock faces when her speed is upped by 2 or so. Add that to the fact that Flare recharges her health, and all those hits that take her down to 1-2 health are quickly negated.
  • The player's character in Neverwinter Nights 2 gains notoriety for this as the game progresses. In addition, a good character will express a feeling of being haunted by the hundreds of dead behind them to a party member in the final act.
    • Most likely not intended, but the first act involves the player killing, what according to the setting, is signicenent portion of the titular city, who have all decided to join thief's guilds.
      • If the player joins the theives' guild instead, you'll discover most of those are mooks from out of town. It's still a lot of mooks.
    • There's even a History Feat that points specifically to this, called "Orcslayer", or something similar. The description says that the "broken remains of the orcs clans curse the day you were born", making it unambigous that you have slain the majority of the orcs of the region.
  • Somewhat subverted in the Max Payne series. While Max kills hundreds of criminals in the course of three enraged nights, it causes him severe psychological damage. He also only narrowly avoids going to prison.
  • KOEI's Dynasty Warriors/Samurai Warriors games have the entire game based around butchering your average soldiers as well as enemy officers. This doesn't seem to be much of an achievement, however, as it seems a majority of soldiers in Ancient China were trained to stand there and stare dumbly at their opponents.
    • Anyone who's actually read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Chinese literary epic on which the Dynasty series is based, will probably take this trope as Justified, because the characters are exactly that way in the book. Certain characters (Zhang Fei, Lu Bu, among others) are so legendary that entire armies will balk or flee at the sight of them.
    • Zhang Fei's claim to fame was defending a bridge by himself against Cao Cao and a thousand or more of his troops. Cao Cao was worried of an ambush on the other side, but still.
      • Zhuge Liang one-ups him in the novel by defeating Sima Yi literally by himself, armed only with a fan and a teapot and accompanied by only an unarmed servant boy. Basically, Sima Yi of Wei is approaching with a huge and formidable army. Zhuge knows his own forces are tired and cannot beat this force, so he orders them all to retreat. He then sets up in a city which he has earlier cleared of people, sitting above the wide-open city gate calmly drinking tea and fanning himself. The Wei army soon arrives, and Sima Yi can scarcely believe his eyes—an unarmed Zhuge Liang right there for his taking?! Having previously suffered multiple times from Zhuge's perfidy, Sima thinks it's just another trap and orders a general retreat.
    • Considering that the way they trained the lower level soldiers at the time was to pick a random farmer, put a spear into his hand, and say, "Have fun". The trained officers exploits may not have been exaggerated much either.
    • Sengoku Basara is a worse offender. In Koei's series, at least your allies do something good when they're not in front of you. (Some of the time, anyway. Other times...) In here, they practically do nothing but stand there like an idiot, and you REALLY have to be a One-Man Army to survive. But with flashy moves given, well I don't think it's a problem.
    • Its sister serie Dynasty Warriors: Gundam is the same premise, IN SPACE!!! It even has a skill called "One Man Army" that powers you up tremendously against grunts.
  • Another idolized Player Character is Tact Mayers from the Galaxy Angel gameverse, who, although helped by another fleet, did most of the work defeating Eonia and breaking up the Val-Fasq conspiracy. There is a twist, however—he's a commander and his victories come from the battle plans he gives the Angels, which is a bit more realistic.
  • In Baldur's Gate 2, the protagonist is the spawn of a god, with the potential of ascending to godhood. Quite a few NPC and antagonists are aware of his status and his experience at killing high level monsters, but none are particularly impressed by it. However, in the Throne of Bhaal Expansion Pack, an entire nation builds a task force for the express purpose of stopping the PC, and one of the more interesting sequences shows the villain, a high level NPC with multiple monstrous Dragons, panicking at the thought of the PC invading her lair. Even Elminster doesn't want to fight you.
    • While nowhere near as epic as BG2, being a lower level game and all, the kill count can also get pretty high in the first game. There is one area that is basically a village of the extremely xenophobic xvarts, and if you decide to go through there you'll have to kill several dozens of them. The Big Bad even acknowledges how dangerous you are in his letters to his hired assassins as you kill more and more of them over the course of the game. Also in this game you can meet Drizzt do Urden who is a one-man army in his own right, slicing through hordes of gnolls (and your party, if you are so foolish as to challenge him) without any effort.
  • In a particularly memorable sequence of the PS2 game Kingdom Hearts 2, the main character, Sora--a 15 year old boy wielding a gigantic key as a weapon—fights off a literal thousand enemies—at once. It takes maybe 5–10 minutes, tops. Go ahead and calculate the kill-per-second rate if you want...
    • In fact, those enemies are actually fairly easy to defeat, so it is claimed. The original trailers made Sora come across as even more badass, with threateningly large Heartless amongst the enemies. Perhaps the thought of it was too much badass for Disney. Sora does, in fact, gain a kill count of at least two or three that over his entire "career".
      • The actual problem was the severe amount of slowdown caused by having thousands of heartless and then hundreds of Giant heartless on screen at once. This issue was solved during The 1000 Heartless Battle by only allowing the Heartless right up close to you, usually no more than several dozen, to move, and leaves the rest to stand stationary (even beyond the invisible barrier) until Sora gets close to them or there are very few left.
    • Bonus points go to the fact that, in the upper right-hand corner, you get a kill counter.
    • Also in Kingdom Hearts II, Sora is able to use his friends as components when he goes into a drive. He becomes this when he goes into Master and Final forms.
  • In Time Crisis, the protagonist, Richard Miller, is explicitly described as a "one-man army" in the opening scenes. Although his body count is somewhat less than the other examples, he does manage to completely clear out a castle being used as a crime base in about 15 minutes. The rest of the games feature two-man armies.
  • In Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox and its Updated Rereleases, Ryu Hayabusa slaughters his way through the army of a small empire, starting with their anti-terrorist paramilitaries, then graduating to the conventional army. The body-count is easily in the thousands, and that's not even counting the dozens of ninjas he kills during a training exercise in the first level. If you start counting the demons, then there's easily another coupl'a thousand. The really interesting part is, perhaps, that he takes on a fully-equipped modern-day army—sporting assault-rifles, grenade-launchers, and anti-tank weapons, as well as actual tanks and helicopter gunships—using nothing more technologically advanced than a composite bow. But then, he is a single Ninja.
  • Super Smash Bros.. Endless Melee/Brawl. You get one life to take out as many enemies as possible. Getting every achievement means you're going to have to take down hundreds.
  • Nethack's endgame involves trying to sacrifice the Amulet of Yendor to your god and ascend to demi-godhood, which was ostensibly the point of the entire venture. The altars for doing this are guarded by Death, Famine, and Pestilence; War is now the player, what with the massive amount of killing (if not outright genocide) that they've in the process of getting there. And quite goddamn deservedly, considering how difficult it is to pull it off.
    • This is actually lampshaded pretty brilliantly in-game. The Riders will eventually regenerate when killed, no matter what you do. One standard way to get rid of other regenerators such as trolls is through the use of a tinning kit on their remains. Trying this one one of the Horsemen leads to them springing back to life immediately with the quote "Yes... but War does not preserve its enemies."
      • You can also #chat to one of the riders, and they'll respond, "Who do you think you are, War?" If you sourcedive, you'll even find the comment "War" == player
    • Some Roguelikes actually have a feature, genocide, for wiping out entire species. Nethack belongs to this group; the most common way to do it there is using a scroll of genocide, which in it's blessed state can genocide multiple species with one use. As if this wasn't enough, it's also possible for the player to "extinct" enemies, which basically means to genocide manually—that is, kill enough of a particular type of enemy that the game stops spawning them.
    • On the other side of the coin, it's also perfectly possible of winning the game without killing a single being. This is, of course, a lot harder than the more violent version, but also a lot more satisfying.
  • Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid is described by other characters as being one on numerous occasions—but he isn't. It's a stealth game, meaning that if he decides to start Munchkining down the Redshirt Army he's just asking to be slaughtered.
    • In Solid Meryl mentions Snake's reputation as a "one man army." Snake insists that he isn't.
    • Although there's the occasional mandatory sequence in which Snake or Raiden are forced to do just that.
      • Though they both easily get the one-man army status due to the fact they often have to take down the titular Metal Gears (with an occasional Tank or Jet) on their own, regardless of how trigger-happy (or not) they are in the infiltration.
    • Of course, starting with MGS2, the player can take the option of a no-kill playthrough. Also technically possible in MGS1 with the exception of bosses (who must be killed). In fact, based on that information, Snake is either the most genocidal killer ever... or the most pacifistic hero ever.
    • Similar story with Splinter Cell, where the protagonist is unable to pick up weapons lying around (at least in earlier titles), and must use the limited pistol and silenced gun ammo from the start of the level. He still manages to kill or knock out at least a few hundred people by the end of the game.
  • In Doom, the nameless main character is "too tough for Hell to contain", having slaughtered the entire army of Hell, including an ultra-tough Cyberdemon and a Spider Mastermind. (Of course, the ending sequence reveals that part of his motivation in the fourth episode was vengeance for the death of his pet bunny, so perhaps the experience in the preceding three episodes had unhinged him somewhat...)
    • Doom 2 takes this further, with the main character out-and-out destroying Hell on his second tour. (Granted, via the death throes of the Final Boss).
    • Doom 3 downplays the "anything special about him", though; furthermore as a Heroic Mime, his psychological state remains unclear, although in the Expansion Pack you play a different character. Who, er, doesn't even blink when the entire rest of his squad gets annihilated by an artifact which he then carries for the rest of the game...
  • In Dead Rising, the protagonist Frank ends up responsible for killing thousands of zombies and a handful of psychopathic killers, despite having no combat training. The actual military presence does next to nothing.
    • He's covered wars, you know.
      • True, but he outright states he's never fired at a person.
    • The most noteworthy achievement in the game requires the player to kill 53,594 zombies... In six hours of gameplay.
      • For those of you who dont know the significance of that number: It's the population of the Town he's in.
  • Torque in The Suffering kills hundreds of hideous monsters while fighting his way off Carnate Island, and all by himself outside of the occasional Escort Mission.
  • In Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefront II, your character is one of dozens of ordinary mooks in large-scale battles. Despite this, the player is expected to rack up enormous kill counts, because the rest of his army is made up of complete idiots. You can personally slaughter over two-thirds of the enemy forces but still have your army lose the fight!
    • Or it can go completely the other way, and you can be the sole survivor of your army and bring down hundreds of the enemy. And good god, does that feel good.
      • Even more so when you forgot to buy defense for a planet on the PSP. 90 soldiers losing to ten, of which I was responsible for eighty. Huge fail on their part.
    • It's actually a bit of an aversion; yes, the player must take care of everything in the campaign, but every time you die, you respawn as a different soldier.
      • Sometimes even switching between soldiers in mid-rampage.
  • Inspector Tequila was pretty Badass in the John Woo movie Hard Boiled, but in the video game Stranglehold, he truly turns into a One Man Army, gunning his way through... oh, somewhere in the vicinity of 1000 enemies. Ranging from Mooks, to Hitmen, to Russian mercenaries, and everything in between. He also racks up at least 70 million dollars worth of property damage. He basically eliminates three major crime syndicates singlehandedly.
  • Dante of Devil May Cry has probably accumulated a very impressive demon body count. Lack of clear details makes it difficult to say if he has outdone his father Sparda, who singlehandedly rebelled against The Legions of Hell and saved humanity (or so the backstory claims), or whether the fact that a demon as powerful as Sparda is his father justifies Dante's capabilities, which would make it in his blood.
  • Caim of Drakengard, due to his endless rage, wants to kill every single Imperial soldier in the world. And he can; getting a dragon at the beginning really just quickens the rate at which he kills everyone, he didn't actually need it for that purpose.
    • In certain levels the death toll is in the thousands. Yes, there is a counter dedicated for kills.
  • Whichever of the three mercs you play as in Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction automatically qualifies, but plot-wise Mattias meets the description best.
  • Bladestorm has this complex, where, at high levels, the main character, even without aid, can destroy a whole army. However, at similar levels, it counters this again, where the protagonist is incredibly weak without men.
  • The main character in F.E.A.R. kills nearly a thousand genetically modified enemy supersoldiers in less than 24 hours. This feat is made much more impressive by the fact that all of these soldiers are being psychically controlled by one man, so that if one sees you, all the rest know where you are too. Additionally, some of the soldiers wear so much armor that it takes nearly 8 shot gun rounds to the head to kill them; other soldiers are in extremely durable mech-suits. Did I mention that even the basic infantry can take take three 12-inch steel spikes through the head without flinching? The only thing that hero really has going for him is that he has super-reflexes, or from the player's point of view, the ability to slow down time, due to the fact that is his mother, Alma, has psychic/super-natural powers...
    • The first game also nicely averts the "No one finds this unusual" aspect of this trope with a post-credits phone dialog revealing that the incident was being monitored as an impromptu field test for two experiments: The army of supersoldiers and the player character. Guess which party passed with flying colors?
    • Even more so in the sequel, Project Origin. The main character is a soldier in Delta Force, a faction that was getting slaughtered in the first game. Yet in the first mission (with no Bullet Time) he kills thirty trained corporate soldiers in as many minutes, gets surgery done to give him slow-mo abilities, and then proceeds to not only kill as many clone Replica soldiers as the Point Man in the first game did (about 500) in the same amount of time, but also to defeat a 500-strong corporate army that could invade a moderately-sized country. Theoretically, he should also have been able to destroy Alma, but this was sabotaged by Corrupt Corporate Executive Genevieve Aristide. The quote from the leader of said corporate army pretty much sums it up.
  • Mario. Also Luigi in the rare cases where he gets to be the protagonist rather than just a secondary character.
    • Let's not forget about his evil counterpart Wario, who manages to one-up him by effortlessly beating up mobs of enemy Mooks and a giant one-eyed, tentacled, civilization-destroying black gem in Wario World. He also takes down sealed evils in a can on a regular basis throughout his Wario Land series.
    • And just think, Mario isn't half the badass that Super Communist Mario is...
    • Mario's only a one man army when Luigi isn't with him. Then it becomes a two man army. Moreover, he has been a part of at least 3 four-person armies (all of whom have also included Luigi).
    • However, the only time more than one member of each small numbered army was in New Super Mario Brother Wii. Regardless, he manages to destroy entire fleets of tanks and airships which have cannons, bombs, flamethrowers on a regular day. He manages to do it while being a One-Hit-Point Wonder as well, which makes it all the more impressive and the only reason he should ever falter, but then he'll come back with another life and then plow through the hordes of walking shrooms and turtles again. The only reason why they're never afraid of him is probably because Bowser is the only one able to match his badassery.
    • And all they ever need to use? Their jumping ability. The Super Speed and Super Strength come in handy, but they don't really need them to win.
  • By the end of Resident Evil 4, Leon has singlehandedly killed hundreds of Ganados. When the Big Bad confronts you at the end, it's no wonder he's alone: you've probably wiped out most, if not all, of his army.
    • There's a note you can find about a third of the way through the first disk, which basically just reads "We gotta do something or he'll kill them all!"
  • Rayman has often fought entire armies more or less by himself, whether they consist of robo pirates or black lums.
  • Pretty much any SOLDIER 1st Class from the world of Final Fantasy VII counts. For example, in Crisis Core, one of Zack's first missions is essentially summed up as "Storm the enemy base alone. Have fun." By the end of the game, it literally takes the strength of the entire Shinra standing army to take Zack down.
      • Genesis is literally a one man army, due to his clones.
  • The Hero of Fable usually ends up killing hundreds of people and monsters through the course of the game. Since they rapidly respawn and the player can continue the game after the ending credits, the Hero can literally have an INFINITE kill count. Not only that, but every type of being he has killed, and how many, are listed on his character sheet.
  • Link from The Legend of Zelda hacks up monsters with his sword, shoots them with arrows, blows them up with bombs, tramples them with his horse, kills them in many inventive ways with magic, and in Twilight Princess, uses an iron ball and chain to massacre them four at a time. In the last dungeon you go through 20 at a time, not to mention cavalry, and in the Hidden Village you have to snipe an entire town of Bublins. In his various incarnations, Link must have killed at least fifteen armies of Mooks, plus their leaders.
    • That's not even counting the hundreds of bodies one must walk over to complete the Savage Labyrinth/Cave of Ordeals. This editor doesn't know how many Miniblins occupy That One Room, but he suspects it its upwards of fifty.
    • In the handheld versions Oracle of Ages/Seasons, you receive a ring for killing 1000 monsters.
    • However, Link takes this trope literally in Skyward Sword. After spending the whole game kicking asses, he fights entire armies of bokoblins, on his own, before defeating Big Bad Ghirahim in a duel to save Zelda. And he did it in a row.
  • In No One Lives Forever, Kate Archer kills hundreds of enemy soldiers in her various missions, and far from not finding this at all unusual, her superiors find it so unbelievable they assume she's lying in her mission reports.
  • The Silencers from Crusader are described as an entire unit of one-man armies. Given how a skilled player can practically dance through levels and has probably killed thousands of enemy troops by the end of each game, it's not that much of a stretch.
  • By late-game, Altaïr of Assassin's Creed is literally hacking and slashing his way through entire armies of Saracen and Crusader troops.
    • He may be a mortal man, but he surpasses Determinator status at the speed of light and lands squarely into Implacable Man territory.
  • In Assassin's Creed II there's Altaïr's descendant Ezio Auditore da Firenze, who starts his Roaring Rampage of Revenge at age seventeen. It lasts for twenty-three years, during which he decimates an entire faction of Templar conspiracists, becomes the most feared man in all of Italia to the point of being made into the kind of story people tell each other when they don't want to sleep at night while he's still alive, and murders his way through at least a thousand of their guards/allies. Oh, and he hunts down and administers a Curb Stomp Battle to the Pope.
  • In Assassin's Creed Brotherhood this actually becomes moreso the case, even before he cuts or sneaks his way through one more army to confront Cesare Borgia for the last time. It's possible that the first potential recruits were actually inspired by him openly fighting off Borgia troops across the bridge/river from the papal apartments.
    • Even his recruits get into the act once promoted to the highest rank, Assassino, at level 10—Smoke Bombs + Pistol + as many Health squares as the final boss = the Call Assassins button becomes an "I WIN" button against most Mook groups.
    • Ezio, without his brotherhood, is back to his old ways in Revelations.
    • The trope is called attention to at the start of Brotherhood.

Ezio: Checking up on me, Uncle?
Mario: What can I say? We sent one man against an entire army. I was worried!

  • Assassin's Creed III continues the tradition with Connor, who is depicted in the E3 trailer taking on an entire British regiment by himself in order to assassinate their commander. In so doing, he rallies the Continental troops who had up until that point been suffering a crushing defeat. To this end, Connor has developed skills specifically designed to help him deal with massed musket fire, including taking cover during volleys and using the bodies of his enemies as a Bulletproof Human Shield.
  • Army of Two has, well, a Two Man Army, but still.
  • Averted in Snatcher, where Random Hajile is considered highly skilled because he's managed to hunt down four Snatchers in a month.
  • In the Metal Slug series, the Mooks will often run screaming from the player character, and for good reason—they currently have three wars with the Rebellion Army, two alien invasion attempts, a demonic attack, and an invasion from the center of the earth on their list of things defeated. Notice that the game plays trope literally: The player doesn't simply blast away Mooks and other infantry, but indeed, takes out dozens of tanks, combat helicopters, bombers, fighters, battle armors, ships, stationary guns, and, of course, the bosses. Of course, the game being on the far side of silly side, it is all depicted in a most comical manner.
  • Ratchet from the Ratchet and Clank games. There's not much to say about him, he's a one Lombax army. Literally destroying billions of aliens all by his lonesome self. Then again, if everyone dropped money when they died, you'd do it too. Having a massive collection of increasingly powerful high-caliber weaponry also helps.
    • Lampshaded in Up Your Arsenal: Once Ratchet shows up on the battlefield in Veldin, all the front-line soldiers take the Genre Savvy approach by tossing him their guns and getting the hell out of there.
    • Probably the most literal demonstration of this trope occurs in A Crack in Time, in which there's a level where Ratchet goes back in time to single-handedly win a war just so he can get a ride off the planet when he returns to the present.
  • Kratos from God of War, but, you know, he's a god. At least after the first game and his Punching Out of Ares.
    • Which then gets drained from his body in the second game. Of course, he then goes from One Man Army to One Man Apocalypse.
    • By God of War III it's been stated that if anything was left alive, it's because Kratos hasn't killed it yet.
  • Ashley Riot from Vagrant Story doesn't need reinforcements... he is the reinforcements.
    • Almost hits the trope by name: "Gods... is he even human? He fights with the strength of a brigade..."
  • In the original Star FOX and its N64 remake, the Big Bad controls a massive war machine aimed at conquering the Lylat System. The freedom-loving Cornerians are hopelessly outmatched and outnumbered....until they call upon the help of the Star Fox team. Flying in a small squad of ultra-advanced Arwing starfighters, Fox McCloud and his 3 teammates lead a daring counterattack against Andross, obliterating hundreds upon hundreds of enemy craft, destroying entire fleets of battleships, and defeating numerous boss enemies. Turns out the teammates don't even contribute much, it's all the player-controlled character carving a swath of destruction through the Mook army.
    • In Video Game/Starfox 64, the Star Fox team presents their "fee" (kill count) to the Cornerian army for their services. Depending on how high the number is, General Pepper has reactions ranging from "It was worth it," to "WHAT!?!"
  • Guilty Gear's background material indicates that Potemkin, resident Mighty Glacier, is estimated to have such incredible physical strength and stamina that he is as dangerous as an entire armored division. Considering his One-Hit Kill attack involves him punching someone once without his strength inhibitors, that seems justified.
  • The game Asterix & Obelix XXL, despite having two characters, pretty much embodies this trope, as Asterix is the one you play as most, and thus he is the One-Man Army, while the significantly stronger Obelix is AI-controlled and isn't exactly that useful. In the very last section, you also have to take down 1000 Romans.
    • By that point in the game, you should be able to purchase a special attack that enforces this trope even more: it transforms Asterix into a powerful tornado, sending literally hundreds of Mooks flying. Just one or two of them can wipe these armies.
  • Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice has Princess Sapphire Rhodonite, who effectively serves as her kingdom's entire military force.
    • In a cutscene in the first game, Laharl personally takes on the EDF invasion fleet, numbered in the millions, and wins.
  • Possibly first played straightest in the original Dragon Quest I. An entire nation's military force is overrun by enemy mooks, and one man, with no weapon or armor, no equipment of any kind, and no magic (well, at least he starts that way) steps up and singlehandedly slaughters thousands of monsters and the big bad himself.
  • In Crysis your suit makes you a One-Man Army. A slightly more realistic one than usual, because you can't carry more than three weapons and you do die with surprising ease if you fail to notice the grenade that has rolled near your feet or if an enemy scores a lucky headshot, but in the end you still manage to defeat untold numbers of baddies all by yo'self.
    • You don't even have to use weapons to be a one man army. You can just use your Good Old Fisticuffs to literally kill a hundred KVA troops. theoretically, this also works on aliens, but their strong close combat capabilities make it really hard to do.
  • Sam "Serious" Stone from Serious Sam. As the Gamespy reviewer put it back in 2001, "Never before, in all my days of gaming, can I recall a game leaving a bigger body count -- and since I was alive when Pong first debuted as a home television game, its safe to say I've seen it all, or at least most of it."
    • "I eat resistance for breakfast!"
  • In Saint's Row, you played as a custom made character who had to take down three rival gangs, mostly by yourself. Somewhat subverted in the fact that you can take along members of your gang with you on missions, and they could wield the same weapons that you do, but doubly subverted in the fact that they were exponentially weaker than you and could not take as much fire as you. In the end, it takes a planted bomb to off you. Saint's Row 2, however, confirms that your character is still alive.
  • Nariko of Heavenly Sword becomes a One Woman Army, especially toward the end when she's singlehandedly taking down literal scores of King Bohan's men in a truly epic War Sequence before the final showdown.
  • In Painkiller Daniel literally plows through thousands of demons occupying Purgatory, kills the generals of hell (who all range from 3 to 5 stories tall) and battle your way into hell and kill Lucifer. Yeah it's part of the story and thus a spoiler, but really how could you not see it coming?
  • Tony Montana from Scarface the World Is Yours can easily get over a thousand kills to his name by the end of the game, and that is without actively farming kills from respawning enemies.
  • Ninety-Nine Nights. Every level is The War Sequence, and you're the one who kills just about everything in sight. Oh! With a modicum of help from the two regiments that accompany you into battle, but really, they don't do a whole lot.
  • Terra of Final Fantasy VI is introduced in the opening segment as a one-woman army who "Fried 50 of [the Empire's] Magitek-armored soldiers in three minutes".
  • Immortal Defense had your ascended character slaughter thousand of ships and everyone on board in the eons long defense of your dead homeworld.
  • No One Messes With The Duke.
  • Amaterasu in Okami. Oh dear kittens, Amaterasu. Granted, she is a goddess, but still, she ploughs through monsters as if there's no tomorrow.
  • Deconstructed in Iji. If you decide to kill everything in sight like is expected in other games, you end up fighting off TWO CONSECUTIVE ALIEN INVASIONS IN ONE DAY. You actually get awarded the rank "One Woman Army" if you rack up 300 kills by the end of the game. The alien's chatlogs grow noticeably more afraid, and there is a You Bastard moment if you go this route. On the other hand, it is also possible to go through teh game without killing a single enemy, which leads to a somewhat happier ending.
    • The game doesn't ignore the psychological impact that the war has on poor Iji. She isn't a soldier, she'd never killed before the start of the game, and she's reluctant to start fighting in the opening cutscene. During gameplay, she apologizes to the first few aliens she kills, then grows silent as she gets numb to it, then when her kill count gets high enough, she starts screaming "Die!" at her enemies, in a voice that sounds like she's coming unhinged.
  • Mitsurugi in the Soul Series is a mercenary who explicitly sides with the outnumbered sides to fight more people. Even explicitly mentioned in his good ending in Soul Calibur III: "If you want to kill me, you had better bring a whole army."
    • Yet even he is outdone by Nightmare, who completely annihalates a huge army of Knights in the opening of Soul Calibur III. In his weakest state.
  • The protagonists of the two Knights of the Old Republic games have a decent go at this—the Jedi Exile, in the second game, massacres her (canonically, the player can choose the character's gender) way through an enormous battleship (with a little help from the boss Mandalorian and the battleship's owner's (reformed?) Sith apprentice) before single-handedly carving through the entire population of a Sith academy, wheras Revan storms through much of a giant Sith-powered army factory to confront his traitorous ex-apprentice.
    • Darth Malak rather Lampshades this in a flash of Genre Savvy. He tells to send all his troops to confront the PC, not because they'd be able to stop him/her (of course they can't), but in order to give him time to prepare his defenses.
  • On that Star Wars note, Kyle Katarn from the Dark Forces Saga, who has killed quite a large number of the Empire's servants and other miscreants in his journeys.
    • There's a reason the EU establishes him as the new Jedi Battlemaster by the time he gets into the books.
    • His apprentice Jaden Korr almost singlehandedly destroyed a conspiracy to revive a dead ancient Sith Lord, then (re)killed the Sith Lord Marka Ragnos.
  • Dead Space (series): Isaac Clarke, a single engineer armed with six power tools (plus one real gun) who takes down dozens and dozens of the creatures that wiped out and recruited an entire ship of over a thousand people, along with four separate gigantic monsters, one of which was technically invincible. In fact, he not only fails to die, he performs way better than the actual soldiers who turn up later in the game!
  • Castlevania: The Belmont clan's members, as well as the other playable enemies of Dracula.
  • From Zone of the Enders, we have Leo Steinbuck and Dingo Egret, who between themselves and Jehuty destroy large numbers of BAHRAM's Mecha-Mooks. Justified in that Jehuty is a Super Prototype mech.
  • Conqueror: 1086 AD asks the player to do a lot of castle storming. You can assemble an army and storm with a healthy collection of nights and bowmen. Or you can do it your damn self. The latter option is more efficient.
  • In Shogun: Total War you could build kensai units. Whereas other units represented groups of soldiers, this unit was a powerful single swordsman. So powerful that if you placed him at a choke point (so he couldn't be flanked or surrounded) he could take out whole units on his own.
  • The Marathon series is another example, and perhaps one of the first games to try to justify this trope. The character goes from being listed as just another security officer, to being a military super cyborg, to being the hero with a thousand faces, until the game decides the only possible justification is you being the physical embodiment of destiny.
    • Don't forget Durandal himself. The Pfhor sent the best fleet (14 ships, 10% of the active navy) commanded by their best admiral. He destroyed half of them with a single stolen Corvette before going down, and then finishes the job when he hijacks the flagship.
  • The nameless pilot protagonist of Einhander is explicitly described as being feared in the opening cutscene, and if his backstory exploits even approach those made while beating the game, why he has that reputation is aptly demonstrated.
  • The power of the God Hand allows its wielder to pimp-slap the entire legions of Hell all by his lonesome.
  • Legendary Champions in Dwarf Fortress, especially ones with particularly well-made hammers, unless crossbows are involved. They tend to have godlike statistics, move like thunderbolts, and can hit goblins so hard they crash into trees and disintegrate in a spectacular spray of limbs. Legendary champion marksdwarves are in many ways even scarier, because DF crossbows in the hands of sufficiently experienced troops tend to function like a fusion of sniper rifle and heavy machine gun. Incidentally, the history of the randomized worlds will sometimes cause entire armies to start fights with solitary "historical figures". The odds are disturbingly stacked against the army.
    • This is taken to the extreme with Morul, who is currently legendary in 68 out of 73 skills. Even crossbow-wielding orks are no match for him.
    • Mention must also go to Tarn Adams for being a One Man Army of Developers. Seriously, Dwarf Fortress has far more content than almost any two or three games you can think of put together, and one guy made the whole damn thing.
  • In a very rare RTS example, World in Conflict can have this. An ordinary unit of 5 soldiers can take cover and fight ridiculously well against more enemies, with bad cover. One time while this player was playing Cascade Falls, a unit took cover in the ruins of a house and held off most of the Soviet army until a hydrogen bomb was dropped on the nearby town.
  • The main quest of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind involves becoming Hortator, or "War Leader" of the three Great Houses, suggesting that you'll be leading armies into battle... not really. You'll breach the main fortress of the Big Bad on your lonesome (if you follow Vivec's advice, after sacking the enemy's other fortresses first, equally on your lonesome).
  • The vast majority of arcade games made by Capcom in the 1980s and 1990s fit this trope. For instance: In 1942 a single P-38 tries to shoot down the entire Japanese air force (in later sequels gameplay was also expanded to include sinking the Japanese navy). In Gunsmoke a lone gunman goes pistol-to-pistol with hundreds of outlaws, pistol-to-arrow with an entire Indian village, and even pistol-to-shuriken with a ninja squad. In Final Fight, one brawler (two if you play with a friend) picks a fight with a huge criminal gang who have kidnapped the mayor's daughter and have an entire city completely terrorized. In Ghosts N Goblins, a solitary knight confronts an army of demons, undead creatures, and eventually Lucifer himself to save his princess. And in Commando, a soldier (named "Super Joe" even though he doesn't technically fit the Super Soldier trope) becomes quite literally a One-Man Army; armed with nothing but a machine gun and a handful of grenades, he has to fight his way through a jungle swarming with an endless number of enemy soldiers. There are lots more of these types of games in Capcom's library, many of them sequels or Spiritual Successors of the originals.
  • Speaking of Final Fight, this is a commonality amongst most Beat'Em Up games. See also Streets of Rage, Double Dragon, River City Ransom, etc.
  • Given the average wingman NPCs, this is often how Wing Commander missions get finished.
  • Adol Christin from the Ys series storms impossibly well defended enemy fortresses at least once per game, not to mention killing ancient evil forces, alone and generally with little more than a sword and armor.
  • Alex Mercer, from Prototype. You even regularly get updates on how many military, civilian, and infected you've killed during the course of the game, and it very, very rapidly goes up into the thousands.
  • BioShock (series)'s Jack Ryan--who fights his way through Rapture directly after surviving a plane crash, destroying at the very least four heavily armored and powerful Big Daddies at the ripe old age of two! That said, he was designed that way...
  • The Lone Wanderer of Fallout 3 can become quite the killing machine, capable of wiping out squads of raiders, mercenaries, and government soldiers with little more than a beat-up hunting rifle. This is especially intriguing given the character was raised for nineteen years in a totally sterile, controlled environment. Of course, your dad did give you a gun at age ten...
    • For added cool points, there's nothing like slaughtering your way through Raven Rock with a Flaming Sword.
      • Or barehanded, without equipping anything until the whole compound is smoking behind you. It's doable even on max difficulty.
    • Of course, the Vault Dweller and Chosen One of the previous games can do much the same thing and one was also raised in a sterile controlled environment.
    • In Fallout: New Vegas there are three in game challenges that net you a few extra experience points and a small bonus to damage. "Lord Death," "Lord Death of Murder Mountain" and "Apocalypse Ain't Got Nothing On Me." The first requires 200 kills. The second requires 700 more kills (for a total of 900 kills). The third requires another 1000 kills (for a total of 1900 kills). They seem appropriately named.
  • The Engineer in Team Fortress 2 hits this in his Meet the Team video, where he scores more kills than any other Meet The Team (grand total of 224, 15 onscreen).
    • Also, the Soldier went on a Nazi killing spree on his own during World War 2 and didn't stop until he learned the war was over in 1949.
    • In the "Meet the Medic" video, the Medic and Heavy are a two-man army (close enough, right?) when the Heavy is ubercharged. They kill so many Soldiers as a team that they can pose on a pile of them at the end of the video.
  • Whoever you play as in Diablo or Diablo 2. In the first game, you venture into the depths of hell killing every demon, critter, and monster in your path including Diablo himself. In the second game, not only do you plow through Hell and kill Diablo, you also kill his brothers Mephisto, Baal, and legions upon legions of their evil minions, all by yourself. Its a virtual one man demonic genocide.
    • And in Diablo III? You and your companion get to save both Sanctuary and the High Heavens from Belial, Asmodean, and eventually Diablo himself!
  • The original Mega Man was upgraded from a humble assistant into a one man army to fight against all of Wily's robots.
    • Mega Man X has fought multiple robot wars all by himself. Zero and Axl eventually join him as partners, but they're all one man armies themselves. After Zero and Axl are sealed/disappear, he's a one man army again for so long that he eventually gets sick of it and retires.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog could count as a one hedgehog army, of sorts. As particularly depicted in Sonic Unleashed, he regularly annihilates entire armies of robots, leaving them smoking piles of metal in his wake.
    • The power trios that make their first appearance in Sonic Heroes count as three-man armies of sorts; especally prominent in 'Egg Fleet' and 'Final Fortress' in which they're more or less pitting themselves up against a large, heavily-armed fleet and winning. Considering that at least one of the teams is composed of an ornery killer robot, a government agent, and a guy calling himself the ultimate life form, and several of the other teams go toe-to-toe with them throughout the game...
    • Tails in Tails Adventure is a one fox-kit army.
  • Galen Marek is trained for years by Darth Vader to hunt and kill surviving Jedi while leaving no witnesses, and boy does he deliver. By the end of the game, his kill list includes two Jedi (plus two who "merely" soundly defeated, and possibly the phantoms of three more (and it should be reiterated that each Jedi is a One-Man Army in his/her own right)), hundreds of soldiers, stormtroopers, aliens, and assorted scum, several AT-STs, a friggin' star destroyer--plus several more, indirectly--and (in the bad ending) Vader himself! (Even in the good ending, he soundly defeats Vader and has him at his mercy!)
  • This happens a lot in EVE Online. Various missions involve destroying wave after wave of ships. Depending on the level of the mission this can vary from dozens of frigates to dozens of battleships. It is implied in the lore that aforementioned battleships have several thousand crew members, so one mission could have a kill count in crew members that runs into the multi-millions fairly quickly. It's also worth knowing that EVE players are Capsuleers, they use capsule technology which seriously reduces the need for crew numbers. NPC's don't have the advantages that come with capsules.
  • Rubi Malone from Wet is another one woman army, taking out a couple of criminal gangs, and about two thousand mooks over the course of the game.
  • Plenty of such characters appear in Arc the Lad, including the Token Loli.
  • In Cave Story, the protagonist destroys the Demon Crown (an Artifact of Doom granting its wearer insane power) and the island's Core (apparently a powerful conduit of magic); both of which had destroyed armies of combat robots in the past. And as an encore, in the good ending he's joined by Action Girl Curly Brace and the two of them kill the sorcerer who created the Demon Crown.
  • In The Godfather: The Game, you can expect to run up at least 250-300 kills taking over Little Italy for the Corleones. If you have less than 1000 kills by the time you become Don by toppling the other four families, you're doing it wrong. In the sequel you have assistance from a Badass Crew of Personal Mooks but nothing's stopping you from keeping them all in reserve and going to town on NYC, Florida and Cuba by yourself.
  • Occasionally and hilariously lampshaded by a few NPCs in Dragon Age. "... And people actually attack you? On purpose?"
    • And then there's the simpleminded Dwarf lad who is good at enchantment. Near the end of the game, while you're Storming the Castle, you come across him standing in the middle of about two dozen dead demonspawn. What does he say when you ask him what happened? "Enchantment!"
    • In Dragon Age: Origins the Grey Warden and his/her allies can accrue a very impressive kill count by the end of the game. Since the Grey Warden is required to be in the party for most of it, chances are good that he or she will rack up the lion's share of the kills. It's even lampshaded in one sidequest after you help beleaguered guardsmen kill an entire band of mercenaries and their leader notes that only an idiot would willingly attack you. One poor dwarf who tries to attack you at one point even says that you fight like an Archdemon. There is an achievement for killing 1000 darkspawn over multiple playthroughs. It is entirely possible to earn it in one playthrough. That does not cover everything else you kill. By the end of the game you and your small band of companions will have killed legions of enemies.
    • Every Grey Warden is chosen specifically because they are Badass. A dwarf in Orzammar will tell you that only Grey Wardens go into the Deep Roads without a squad of soliders at their back. In the Dalish Elf origin, you find Duncan by following the trail of darkspawn corpses left in his wake.
  • Jak. Let's see, Big Freaking Gun? Check. Super-Powered Evil Side? Check. The blessings and occasional help of the Precursors themselves? Check. Countless Faceless Goons and Exclusively Evil monsters who just don't know when to quit and inevitably die in amazingly high numbers? Ay-yup. That's Jak.
  • Jack, from MadWorld, is able to kill hundreds (maybe thosands) of people including bosses that have better weapons, some that are monstrously enormous, a giant robot and even some that can regenerate using only the environment, his strength and a freaking CHAINSAW on his arm. It's later justified as Jack is actually the former Grand Champion of Deathwatch.
  • The USS Cheyenne from Tom Clancy's SSN is a One Sub Navy. Of course, it does have a serious technological advantage. This is acknowledged in the novel, where the captain is promoted to rear admiral and receives both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Order of Mao Tze-Dong.
  • Lampshaded in Starlancer. While the player himself doesn't receive any special recognition beyond a few medals, his squadron are described in one news broadcast as "seemingly hell-bent on winning the war all by themselves".
  • Commander Shepard & co. in Mass Effect. One of the dialogue options before the final battle against Saren is:

Saren: Commander Shepard, what took you so long?
Shepard: I had to wipe out a few hundred of your followers.

    • Just about any powerful biotic qualifies (take Jack, for instance, who immediately after being brought out of cold storage proceeds to tear a space station apart with her brain).
    • Garrus is another noteworthy one - he spent a long time killing hundreds of mercenaries all by himself. Granted, he had a severe advantage in terms of environment, but still.
    • Lampshaded in Mass Effect 2. On the Korlus mission, as you are going through mercenaries like a hot knife through butter, their leader chastises them on the intercom:

Jedore: There are three of them! Three! Anything can be killed if you do your job!

Project Guard: Shepard is tearing us apart!

    • The SSV Normandy is a one-ship armada by the end of Mass Effect 2. This is even quantified in Mass Effect 3, where the military contributions of military forces are expressed in terms of numerical "War Assets." Entire fleets of hundreds of frigates and cruisers and multiple dreadnoughts and carriers contribute about one hundred to one hundred and fifty points to the total each. The Normandy, by itself, contributes one hundred and fifteen points.
      • For comparison, the Destiny Ascension, the massive dreadnought that served as the Citadel flagship in the first game, provides 70.
    • Similarly, squadmates from Mass Effect 2 and some of the ones from Mass Effect 1 can be added to the War Assets pool. Potentially, adding squadmates to the war assets pool can net you an additional two to three hundred points, which can exceed the value of the entire ground force components supplied by some species. Only the krogan, all of the Alliance ground units you can recruit, and possibly the entire geth corps can supply more effective combat strength than ten of your squadmates.
    • Every asari commando is a one-woman army. They are considered to be the deadliest fighters in the entire galaxy (with the exception of Shepard), and even the codex says that going up against one alone is practically suicide. This is perfectly summed up by the War Assets entry for the Serrice Guard, a unit of asari commandos. After a space battle with a Blood Pack ship, they and the Blood Pack were forced to crash land on a planet. Over the course of nine days, the Blood Pack suffered over a hundred casualties from traps, ambushes, and night assaults. When the Blood Pack gave up and finally surrendered, they found out that they had only been fighting FIVE asari commandos.
  • Despite being a Glass Cannon in actual gameplay, this is the reputation bestowed upon Ragna the Bloodedge in BlazBlue, who has singlehandedly managed to wipe out several Library institutions and kill every single man and woman inside.
  • Borderlands if you're playing solo: You'll easily rack up the ten thousand corpses required to get the "I am become death" achievement.
  • In Alpha Prime, your Mission Control speculates that you might be The Mole when he points out how unlikely it is that you could have defeated so many enemy soldiers unless it was all staged.
    • "And don't say they want to kill you. Those boys keep plugging away, but somehow they still can't seem to finish the job. They can't seem to shoot you properly. It's a pure miracle you're still alive. And miracles are always suspicious."
  • Though not canonical examples, Parker and Mason, from Red Faction and Red Faction: Guerrilla respectively, end up appearing as one-man armies, considering how hideously incompetent the rest of the Red Faction seems to be. The Red Faction wouldn't have got anything done if it weren't for those two.
  • Your character from Def Jam: Fight For New York. Think about it for a second: he so dominates the underground Fight Clubbing circuit that he takes over a bunch of the bad guy's fight club locations on his own. This continues until the bad guy suggests a winner take all match to settle everything. After you win that fight, the bad guy goes back on his word and takes most of those club locations back by force, but that's ok because you can kick his goons out of all those clubs and reclaim them. Then after all that, when the Big Bad declares that He Has Your Girlfriend, you turn back around an retake all those clubs from the "good guy" gang by kicking their butts for the Manipulative Bastard Big Bad. So, basically your character will singlehandedly destroy two huge criminal gangs by himself, with his bare hands, in the course of maybe a couple of months. Oh, and for fun during his offtime, he can get into and win various independent tournaments and battle royals too.
  • In Supreme Commander the player is literally a one man army. Gate technology only allows small amounts of mass to be teleported, so commanders are teleported to the battlefield where they build and command the actual, robotic fighting force.
  • Jack Carver of Far Cry deserves a mention. Enemy mooks speculate about how one person could not possibly pull off the stunts he does. However, his Genre Savvy allies Val and Doyle both expect and demand that he be a One-Man Army on a regular basis.
  • In Pokémon it is possible to play throughout the whole game with a single Pokémon. Simply use one Pokémon for battles, and others for useless HMs.
    • Made impossible in Black and White, where Pokemon gain less experience the higher level they are compared to their opponent.
  • In Perfect Dark, Joanna appears to be way more durable than the typical guard and quite capable of slaughtering an entire building's worth of people all alone. It gets to the point where any allies you have are more of a liability than an actual help.
  • Suikoden II: Luca friggin' Blight. In one army battle, your team sets up an ambush to try and take him down with their entire goddamn army. They manage to pin him down even wound him. Then he gets angry. The battle ends after that with your characters expressing relief that there weren't as many deaths as they expected.
    • In game, to defeat him, you have to make 3 groups of characters to attack him, and ever after the three fights, you have to defeat him in a character duel. All of this after he is struck with an arrow.
      • 'An arrow?' AN ARROW? By his death, Luca has taken five barrages of arrows (each arrow apparently being strong enough to one-shot his elite guards which take multiple character's attacks in-battle to kill). He ends up dueling The Hero with at least SEVEN arrows still stuck in him. And he can STILL kick your ass.
  • While something you'd generally want to avoid in Mount & Blade, when you pull it off you feel like the biggest badass on the planet. Nothing like single handidly slaughtering a two-hundred man army by yourself.
    • For those who are unfamiliar with the game, becoming an actual One-Man Army (against actual enemy parties which number around 50-150 on average) is a VERY difficult feat. You start off far weaker than every other soldier out in the world. And even by end game, you will only be as best as the elite soldiers that other vassals can easily recruit in the hundreds. Even on the easiest difficulty, charging down a group of 5-10 elite troops is no easy feat. On 100% difficulty, attempting to take on any more than 3 enemies at a time is just inviting trouble, and taking on 10 toe-to-toe would be plain suicidal. The closest a player can get to being a One-Man Army is by focusing on archery and defending castles from above during sieges.
      • Or horseback archery, which, with patience, a good aim, a very fast horse, and a bit of luck to dodge the enemy projectiles, allow you to take down armies.
      • This troper was able to hold off entire armies alone by standing slightly to the right of a ladder during a siege and then swinging at head level for an hour or so.
  • Your allies are pretty useless in Gundam Climax UC, forcing you to kill everything yourself.
  • Kirby. Same as Mario but instead of having blood on his shoes, he simply ate millions of people. How that makes anyone not nauseous I don't know.
  • In Myth 2 Alric the Emperor of the Cath Buric can take on an entire army with the help of a magic sword that shoots fricking lighting out to strike down his enemies, in fact it's suggested that you let him be a one man army considering that the lighting can kill your troops to. when he's not wielding that sword he has a magic spell that jumps from enemy to enemy blowing up each one. Once you run out of spells you still is unbeatable in single combat. His evil counterparts are even more badass emphasis on bad. By using the level editor with Myth 2 you control soulblighter who is invincible to all but alric's attack's. Balor soulblighter's predecessor is once again invincible with the added bonus of calling lighting down out of the sky. shiver has a range of spells well suited for taking out an army but not invincible. And the the deceiver can brainwash an entire army and does in one level.
  • Valkyria Chronicles introduces Selvaria, a Valkyria soldier who can crush an entire squad of soldiers without backup. The only thing that's safe from her is a tank, and said tank most certainly cannot damage her, as she can deflect anything it fires at her. Later, Alicia, one of your units, becomes one of these too.
  • Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. It's even Lampshaded ingame: her exclusive skill is aptly named "Army of One".
    • Taken to extreme levels when you consider that she wipped out several battalions of Cocoon's finest soldiers, the Calvery, without any visible effort or breaking a sweat... and this is after dealing with an entire security fleet back on the race track without any visible effort either. Hell, even as a mere human she managed to wipe out an entire train of soldiers effortlessly. Final Fantasy XIII-2 seems to have taken this even further as she is not only stated to be far beyond that of a L'cie by the director... she now COMMANDS her own Eidolon army, commands an army of feral beasts, regularly defys the laws of physics, shatters entire buildings with a single spell, slams enemies through entire buildings, is immune to time manipulation, and now channels her magic to use as bullets.
    • Snow also counts, considering he curbstomps and entire army battalion midway into the game.
  • Featured in the classic Star Raiders: the only person who can stop the Zylon fleet and protect the galaxy's scattered starbases is you.
  • Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the N64 has the player character essentially doing all the killing while your wingmen are useless. The sequel on the Game Cube at least has your wingmen look slightly more useful rather than flying around in scripted paths, but One Man Army comes back big time in one of the final missions where you must take on two Star Destroyers by yourself. Instead of a combined assault with friendly fighters, bombers and capital ships (which would, you know, make more sense) it's all up to the player to knock out these massive warships by himself while his allies fly around doing whatever. See also the "TIE Fighter" example above.
  • In Heroes of Might and Magic IV, one of the many gameplay changes from the three first ones was that your heroes could walk around on the map without an army. The skill system was revised, and made your heroes able to actually fight on the battlefield instead of their earlier, supporting role. The result of this? Any level 20 hero with Grandmaster Combat, Melee and Magic Resistance combined with Expert skills in Life Magic could defeat small armies without the help of creatures. Ten levels and some additional skills (Archery, another Magic skill or more Life Magic) later, they wipe out entire endgame armies singlehandedly.
  • Michael Ford in The Conduit and Conduit 2.
  • Alan Wake in, well, Alan Wake. For a novelist who never fired a gun outside of a shooting range, he is impressively adept at gunning down the Taken. It turns out, however, that he gained this ability by literally giving it to himself. Thanks to the supernatural effects of Cauldron Lake, everything he wrote as part of his novel "Departure" came true - and he wrote himself as the novel's protagonist who faced hordes of Taken and barely survived.
  • Geneforge heavily features minion magic and summoning. The Agent and Servile classes can both become capable of surviving without them.
  • The Witcher has Geralt of Rivia]]. If you stick with his True Neutrality at the end of the game, by necessity he becomes one-man-two-armies.
  • Asura takes this to higher levels, taking down enemy after enemy like no tommorow, from massive buddha mooks, to PLANET SIZED DEMIGODS.
  • Artix in Dragon Fable. In a war with 100 million undead, he killed 50 million alone and felt he was ripped off when the thousands of other heroes killed the other 50 million.
  • This occurs in the "Conflict" games, "Desert Storm" and "Desert Storm II: Back to Baghdad". In these two games, despite having a team of four highly-trained and specialised soldiers - a rifleman, sniper, heavy weapons specialist and demolitions expert/engineer - players were capable of completing each mission of the games with just the heavy weapons specialist, Mick Connors. His skill with a light machine gun and anti-tank weaponry, coupled with the game's auto-aim system, bottomless backpacks, and more than enough ammo to supply an army in each level, made Connors capable of carrying out every mission he appears in solo. Though he would need to be given mission-dependent equipment from his comrades such as C4 and designators at the start of each level.
    • This is lampshaded in Conflict: Global Storm (aka Global Terror in the US), where in the training level Control comments that "With the possible exception of Connors, no soldier is a one-man army".
      • Still, the very first level in the Campaign of Global Storm begins with the player assuming control of just Connors, who, despite being captured, beaten, and tortured, manages to overpower one of his captors and single handedly secure the small prison his team-mates are being held in - optionally with just a combat knife!
  • In Makai Kingdom, the titles for the second to highest tier infantry units is "One man army" and "One woman army" respectively. (The highest is "Lethal Weapon".) Since you cannot have more than eight units on the map at any given time, and since some areas (dungeons) require you to go through up to a hundred maps before you can return home and rest/resurrect/save, having a team of unstoppable and untouchable battle monkeys is essential if you want to go forth and bust a cap.
  • The Admiral Proudmoore from Warcraft III, even without his bodyguards is capable of killing thousand of orcs, trolls, ogres and taurens.
    • Broxigar in the Warcraft: War of the Ancients trilogy of books, specifically the last one. He goes out in a blaze of glory against Sargeras after having killed dozens, maybe hundreds, of demons.
  • Rico of the Just Cause series is about as close to a literal example as you can get, since he routinely waltzes into military compounds and casually slaughters dozens of solders in between blowing up various important structures, until he gets bored and steals a passenger plane so he can crash it into a police squad. Not for the sake of a mission, either; the game encourages you to wander around randomly blowing things up and mowing down the countless mooks that try to stop you.
  • The Kid from Bastion hacks his way through multiple small armies over the course of the game.
  • Deconstructed in Don Pachi.
  • Stranger the Bounty Hunter in Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath. Although it’s optional as to whether enemies are dead or not, Stranger still bounties a heck of a lot of Outlaws. It’s taken even further when Stranger is outed as a Steef, meaning that greater amounts of enemies are now being thrown at him due to his bounty, and suddenly there isn’t as much pressure to keep enemies alive anymore...
  • Player characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic are frequently given missions that they're told, point blank, they're being asked to do because it's too dangerous to send the army to handle it. Literally: "That factory is too well defended for our troops to take - go kill the garrison and signal us when it's safe to come in and occupy it." It's especially common on Balmorra.
  • The backstory of Chaos in Dissidia Final Fantasy is that he was supposed to be Lufenians' answer to another country's One-Man Army, Omega. Then he was driven insane by power and devastated the world, or something. By the time the game starts, it takes several Army of One from another worlds to take him down.
  • In Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, entire bandit gangs, cults, and squads of Tuatha soldiers fall to the Fateless One. The Fateless One occasionally has some assistance but still does most of the work. Of course, the Fateless One isn't just a Badass, he/she is a Badass who can wield the fabric of Fate itself as a weapon. The "House of Valor" questline pits the Fateless One against increasingly ridiculous and unfair odds, with the audience expressing amazement every time he/she wins.
  • In Xenogears Id is able to take on Gears by himself. When he's in his own Gear, he destroys entire armys.
  • In Star Ruler, military strength is tied to more things than numbers alone. Therefore, a lone mega-battleship can be worth fleets of lesser craft.
  • Agents from Syndicate, both the originals and the remake. In the original, one to four Agents under your control can mow down any number of police and enemy Agents similarly equipped as themselves. In the remake, Miles Kilo and the Wulf Western Agents can also scythe through entire units of Faceless Goons, as well as Agents equal or superior to themselves.
  • Pit in Kid Icarus: Uprising, a hordes of monsters and even a God cant defeat one Pit with a Weapon of Choice.
  • Monster Girl Quest:
    • Luka. Just halfway through the game, he singlehandedly defeats an army of Alraune Mooks, and that's after he's already defeated their leaders and most-powerful troops. And that's before he's anywhere near his full power.
    • Heinrich, to an even greater extent than Luka. He had the same power as Luka but was much more skilled with it. And even after losing this power, he slaughtered countless angels on his own.
    • Since monster society runs on Asskicking Equals Authority, plenty of high-ranking monsters fall under this trope. Alice tears through a hundred chimera beasts without suffering a single scratch, and Granberia defeats armies of human soldiers (on multiple occasions) without killing any of them.
  • Monster Girl Quest Paradox
    • Neris, one of the three contenders for the position of Monster Lord. While the other two contenders have armies of supporters, Neris is on her own, yet is seen as the strongest of them all. In one day, she defeats the inhabitants of three monster villages (each renowned for their power) and fights Granberia (who's just as powerful here as she is in the original game) to a draw. And this is without using her full power!
    • The Grangold King. Due to his protohuman blood being awakened, he's now capable of casting spells that devastate entire armies and is seemingly invulnerable.
  • MapleStory lampshades this in Act 4 of the Black Heaven scenario. After the player's Paper-Thin Disguise is exposed and he has to handle the Blackwings the old-fashioned way:

Black Wing: Uhh... Wait, our forces are unlimited, Keep pushing forward!
(Pause in dialogue, the player decimates about 50 Blackwing troops)
Black Wing: How many are there? Why can't we stop them?!
Android: One target, identified.
Black Wing]]: What? One?
(Another pause in dialogue, the player decimates far more of the army plus a sub-boss.)
Black Wing: You stupid... It's just one person!

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