That One Attack

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A particular attack in an enemy's arsenal which is significantly more dangerous than most of its attacks.

If you have a party, it will almost always target all party members, and it often takes off the majority of your hit points, if not worse. It's a staple for That One Boss to have one of these, possibly more.

This attack showing up even once is always bad news; if the AI Roulette gives you two in a row, expect to see the Game Over screen. Whether or not you can beat That One Boss that uses this attack usually depends entirely on whether or not you can avoid/endure/recover from it.

Skill Gate Characters may also derive their harmful-to-newbies nature from having one of these, and thus falter when the opponent learns to counter it. If these are available to players without suffering Redemption Demotion, they usually become Game Breakers.

Examples of That One Attack are listed on these subpages:

• Real Life
• Tabletop Games
• Video Games
  • Action Game
  • Fighting Game
  • First-Person Shooter
  • Racing Game
  • Rhythm Game
  • Roguelike
  • Role-Playing Game
    • Final Fantasy
    • Shin Megami Tensei
  • Shoot'Em Up
    • Touhou
  • Simulation Game
  • Third-Person Shooter
  • Tower Defense
  • Turn-Based Strategy

Examples of That One Attack include:

Video Games

Third-Person Shooter

• Gradius III's lava stage boss explodes into pieces upon dying. Pieces that will kill you if they collide with you.
• In The Hunt's Final Boss has a phase where it only uses ONE attack. Unfortunately, said attack resembles something from a Bullet Hell: it generates a minefield of indestructible red mines that absorb your shots. Made worse is the fact that you have a large collision box.
• The House of the Dead III has The Fool's final attack pattern, in which he jumps from one side of the cage to your side, swiping you in the process. To prevent his swipe from hitting you, you must hit his remaining claw 6 times in what little time you have. Now, your gun has 6 shells. If you miss even ONE of those shots, you will fail because it takes too much time to reload. Oh, and did you bring a second player with you? Well, now you must hit him 12 times, or 6 shots from each player. Which means if the other player is not very good, or is some dumb kid who is fooling around, you are royally fucked. Even if all of your shots are spot-on.
  • The Magician from the first and second games switches from fireballs to hard to counter melee attacks in the second and fourth phases of the battle. It's hard enough to shoot his weak spots, but it's worse when he attacks so quickly.
• From Hellsinker we have Perpetual Calendars "Lunatic Phantom". It's a blue flame that fly around the stage in a semy random pattern at high speed. It also cannot be supressed meaning that if it catches up to you, you will either loose a life or burn an auto reject.
  • In the Shrine of Farewell we have Million Lives' "Innocent Clockwork". While it is perhaps the attack with the least amount of bullets in the game you'd be surprised at it's high bodycount despite it's simplicity.

Action Game

• Rank 2 in No More Heroes has an attack that instantly kills you. What does she do? She drops to the floor crying. If you hit her, or even get close to her, she instantly beats you to death. At no point is it hinted that this will kill you, and if you play the game without knowledge of this, YOU WILL DIE. To make matters worse, she can sometimes do this in mid combo. Even more aggravating is that sometimes she actually is crying (she only attacks if she left one hand on the bat), so you can get thrown off easily if you aren't watching.
  • Rank 4 of the first game, the boss has a near undodgeable spinning attack that takes a large chunk of health and can not be blocked.
  • Speaking of spinning, Mimmy in the second game. "YIPEE!"SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!
  • Rank 7 in Desperate Struggle can summon a dragon made of energy. This dragon will follow you very closely, and Travis can't dodge fast enough to escape it. And Rank 7 will still attack freely as it's chasing you! The dragon can be blocked, though it eats your battery like candy; it also has a tell: If the sky is dark it's still chasing you, if the sky clears it's gone.
  • Rank 1's second form is even worse. About halfway through the battle, he'll start teleporting around, attacking three times in rapid succession. In a game where you dodge primarily by rolling, this attack comes faster than you can roll. If you manage to get him down to 1/4th HP, he'll start spamming that attack and a series of three whirlwind punches that are equally difficult (read: impossible) to dodge. The worst part? Both attacks knock you back a considerable distance, and can send you out of the arena, one-hit-killing you. That said, the teleport punch is avoidable provided you have hair-trigger reflexes and know that the second punch will almost always miss if you dodge the first, leaving you free to dodge the third. The tornado punch? Nnnnot so much.
• The suicide attack by the Egg Viper in Sonic Adventure, if only because of the horrid camera angle. Some of the Sonic Rush battles (and the Sky Canyon boss in Sonic Advance 2) have instant death attacks, or attacks which are nearly impossible to avoid consistently.
  • The Sonic Rush Series ones are very well-telegraphed, though. Probably the only hard one to see coming is the one where Eggman (or Nega) rams his giant robot's shoulder spikes into the stage at the end of said battle, mostly because you've never seen it before. The button-mashing on the Sonic vs. Blaze battle would be hard to see coming as well if it weren't for the mini-cutscene and the fact that one boss earlier used an easier version of the button-mashing gimmick.
• The charging tackle Meta Ridley in Metroid Prime does when he's on the ground. It's not too hard to avoid at first, but later on, especially in Hard mode, he seems to be able to guess where you'll be. Cue frustration. In fact, physical attacks in general are pretty annoying in Metroid Prime as you may get cornered.
• Jet Force Gemini's second fight with Mizar has the infamous "electric jump rope". It's probably 80% of the reason the Mizar rematch is hair-pullingly tough to fight.
• In Prototype, the Supreme Hunter can use the same tendril barrage you can, and it inflicts a terrifying amount of damage. Furthermore, depending on how chaotic the fight is, noticing the move being prepared can be extremely difficult, and there's no getting out of the way once it's been unleashed on you.
• Dracula in I Wanna Be the Guy is already a bone-crackingly difficult Luck-Based Mission, but he has one attack that (even by IWBTG standards) seems programmed to screw you over. He shoots a single, homing Delicious Fruit at you. It's too slow to accidentally fly offscreen, hangs around long enough that you're gonna have to dodge it, and if he follows up with his fireball attack (which floods the floor with, well, fire), or those purple things are flying around, you're screwed.
• In Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Dracula throws long streams of bats that bypass Mercy Invincibility and will shred your HP down to nothing in seconds if you get caught off guard. If you can avoid that, then it'll be the bloody soul steals out of nowhere, which do a lot to you and give him a bit more health back. Portrait of Ruin's bosses normally have a single attack that is much more difficult to work against than the others too.
• In Mega Man X5, the fight with Zero has him throwing nearly-full-screen Sword Beams that you have to dodge in sequence. Capcom acknowledged this by making this attack Zero's Level 3 Hyper Combo in Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
  • Bamboo Pandamonium's desperation attack in X8. It comes out with virtually no warning, takes up over half the screen, and deals an obscene amount of damage.
    • The attack is specifically designed to one-shot Ride Armour, which makes the fight much easier if you managed to manoever it to his arena, as it allows you to continuously pummel him while taking zero damage. God help you if you're not in Ride Armour when that attack connects. Oh, and there is no Ride Armour when you fight him again in the Boss Rush. Hope you've got full Life Tanks!
    • Lumine's first form uses the desperation attacks of the 8 Reploid bosses, including the one mentioned above. However, there are two attacks that he modified; Avalanche Yeti's attack, which causes gigantic snowflakes that freeze you on contact to rain down, lasts a lot longer, and Lumine can still blast you with other attacks while it's in effect. And then Burn Rooster's attack, which engulfs the walls in flames, never wears off. After it hits the field, you can no longer wall-jump.
• The final battle with Nelo Angelo (a.k.a. Vergil) from Devil May Cry has him throwing out his deadliest attack, summoning blue energy swords around you and using them on you like Reverse Shrapnel.
  • Hell Lusts from 3 have an uppercut attack. Admittedly it isn't too powerful, but it has ridiculous priority, the demons love to use it while you're busy fighting others and they sometimes feint it by just doing the starting dash without actually striking, meaning prediction is difficult. Behold the horror.
• Bunji Kugashira in the original Gungrave: "See Ya"/"Not So Fast!" Kicks Grave in the stomach --> shoots Grave while airborne = instant shield break and knocks off 25% of Grave's HP. This attack can KO you should the boss spam it (and he will). The fight even starts off with the boss using it, and it's very hard to avoid or see coming. It doesn't help that he's the only boss in the game that can heal.
• DadGame has Bonus Boss Mecha Death. It's a freakin' power struggle you have to win. Why is this power struggle on here? You have to tap with the animation of the key tapping, but more often than not, there is going to be slowdown, and your rhythm will be thrown off just enought that Mecha Death will win this fight by instantly killing you for a simple mistake. It doesn't help that you may win the first time, but you'll lose the next one, so it really feels like that you just gotta get lucky on all the power struggles. And sometimes, he does it A LOT.
• In the Monster Hunter franchise, the most agreed upon That One Attack is Plesioth's Hip-check. The hitbox for the attack is so broken that you could be standing close to it, on the opposite side of the attack's direction, not touching the Plesioth's body, and still get hit. It doesn't help that it's one of its only four viable melee attacks while on land.
• The third phase of that flying claw boss in Frogger Beyond has an attack which elevates its difficulty to near-Luck-Based Mission levels. Basically, it's a leaded cluster of fireballs, followed by a fast fireball. Only problem is, each fireball hits a random spot, and there's no guarantee that you'll survive it. It may have a pattern, but since poor Frogger is a One-Hit-Point Wonder, one hit sends him to the first phase. This means it's nearly impossible to learn the pattern when it kills you every time. May the gods of random number shine on you if it glitches up and fires the attack out of the arena.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Gyorg has the habit of slallowing you temporarily after you inflict it damage. This attack is also very difficult to dodge.
  • Phytops from The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks prolongs gradually its thorned tentacle slash combo as the battle progresses. The ultimate combo is: moving its resting tentacles (to make Link's capture of the thorns to hurt it more difficult) while it shoots three series of goo drops, attacking with its left upper tentacle, then with the right one, and finally with both.
• In Famous has the final boss Kessler. He can and will hit you with attacks that are almost impossible to dodge, and if he summons his giant copy images, well, best to take cover (but there isn't any!).
• Yammy in Soul Carnival 2 has four such attacks:
  • 1: His support attack, which sucks you in and deals continuous damage
  • 2: His soul-sucking attack, which does the same thing, drains SP and deals damage faster
  • 3: Shooting laser bullets from his fists, which can't be dodged unless you're behind him and can't be broken out of except with a support, unlike the other two attacks. He can shoot up to eight at a time, and it can take off over 50% of your health if you aren't buffed up with defense-boosting accessories and/or Soul Pieces.
  • 4: His Burning Attack, which freezes time and deals over 3,000 damage. If he does this after the laser bullets, you die.
  • Every Giant Mook in the game has at least one, whether it's the Doom Gigants' punching attack that can deal over 10,000 damage and send you flying a good distance back, the gigantic Shinigami with a nigh-unavoidable axe attack that hurts like hell, or the turtle Hollows with a splash attack that throws you up into the air.
• Koei has quite a few across its three signature series, most of them handed out by high level characters or officers possessed of a situational super-buff.
  • Lu Bu, at all. His moveset is insanely powerful in just about every game he's been in since 3, but it's the throw from Dynasty Warriors 4 that really takes the cake. An unblockable multi hit throw with several officer and infantry mulching swings to tack on damage, followed by an overhead blow that occasionally sends players rocketing across the map, and more often sends their lifeless corpse into the next county, yet when you use it, its Too slow or {{The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard The damage is too low]]. This move was taken out in 5...to be replaced with a faster, zero-telegraphing fire element dash that breaks block. Thanks, KOEI.
  • Pang Tong's Musou, in 4 and 5. This often involves him standing in one place and doing a lot of tornado air bursts around him, which often means he'll tack on at least three and often six good hits, and once again blow people off into the distance.
  • Gan Ning's Musou, 3 through 5. This attack is powerful, comes out fast, and sends Gan Ning racing across the battlefield at ludicrous speed. If he doesn't actually knock the player character down with the attack, the glancing blow that hits still takes off a good chunk of life, and leaves said character in a stunned state.
  • Zhang Jiao's...anything involving his fire element, but his fire based sweeping attack and Musou are fairly obnoxious due to increased damage and leaving players in a 'burned' state for a couple of annoying, vulnerable seconds.
  • Saika Magoichi's rifle blasts, especially his Musou in Samurai Warriors 1, which was unblockable for most characters (as 'bullet block' was a rather rare skill). Only his slow attack speed kept him from Game Breaker status.
  • Ishikawa Goemon's spinning attack with his mace goes on forever, and it's just fast enough that each hit juggles. Thankfully, he doesn't appear too often in normal gameplay.
  • The same can't be said for Maeda Keiji, who gets a block breaking area of effect ground pound and a brutal multi-hit Musou attack, and happens to turn up in quite a few story modes. He also shows up on his Cool Horse Matsukaze most of the time, so there's no running from him.
  • Orochi's moveset, notable his Jumping Fireball that breaks guard, Fire Elemental, and juggles, and anything with relation with Dark Explosion(Air Charge and Charge attack) which is just as broken when you use it yourself, justified as he is the end boss to a Massively Multiplayer Crossover.
• Mega Man Network Transmission:
  • FireMan has two; his regular attack which is only dodgeable with good slide timing, and takes off a good chunk of your health. And when his HP gets low, he periodically bursts into a pillar of flame. If you're near him, One-Hit Kill without the Heat Armor, and an absurd amount of damage with it. That's right, the first boss of the game has an instant-death move.
  • Zero has an attack where he lets loose an energy wave that takes up the whole screen and does 300 damage. God help you if you didn't pack an Invis.
• |Sonic the Hedgehog 2006: Silver's psychokinesis. He grabs Sonic/Shadow and slams them into a wall or tosses them into the sky. When the attack starts, it cannot be broken out of. Sometimes he'll use a follow-up attack that ignores Mercy Invincibility and is an instant kill. If you move forward and not to the sides at the beginning of the battle (with Sonic, at least), he runs up and uses it to one-shot you.
• Assassin's Creed: Enemy Counter Attacks are pretty much impossible to predict and a free hit for the one responsible. Best hope no one takes advantage of Altaïr getting laid out.
• Custom Robo has the Waning Arc and Waxing Arc guns. Each one fires four shots that can go around walls, and have slight homing. It really hurts if all four rounds connect. Very late in the game is a Dual Boss battle that utilizes both of these guns, in a stage with shifting terrain.

First-Person Shooter

• Doom's custom boss or miniboss monsters from the add-on pack in standalone mod scoredoom have at least one. Here are several egregious examples
  • The Annihilator's homing missiles deal heavy damage, and are really hard to dodge, even in wide-open spaces (especially painful if said areas lack cover).
  • The winged goat demon Azazel's "stunned" state will make him shoot out ground-hugging fireballs that can rip through you, dealing incredible damage in a short amount of time. The fireballs are really fast as well.
  • The Demolisher's bfg cannon can outright obliterate you on a direct hit; however, he sometimes fires two shots, with the second one likely to finish you off; on top of that, the twin super gattling guns can shred you twice as fast if you don't hide.
  • Hellsmith's three-way explosive fireballs may as well be a One-Hit Kill on a direct hit, since each of said fireballs split into multiple explosions as well.
  • Every single one of Moloch's attacks are brutal, especially the hell grenades (very tough to dodge in tight spaces and deal massive damge) and nail barrage (these blaze through the map and rip through you for pretty large damage, and they rebound too).
  • Scourge's homing missiles can instantly kill you on a direct hit, and they're pretty fast to avoid as well. What's worse? He launches them in three sets of two. There's also that flamethrower attack of his that has a decent range but can quickly empty your health in seconds. Ouch!
  • The Dark Cardinal's homing energy ball nova attack is really annoying considering the mini fireballs home in on you and the attack goes off every time he flinches.
  • The Terminator's plasma grenade attack will total your health and armor on a direct hit, and it does severe damage if you're in the blast radius. It's a nightmare to dodge in tight spaces.
  • The Pyro Demon's teleport explosion attack is not only extremely damaging (splash damage ahoy) and a huge pain in the ass to avoid, he tends to do it pretty frequently sometimes. Mitigated somewhat in that he sometimes does it anyway even if you're not on the same level he is and he can't get down or up from there.
  • Thamuz's hard-to-avoid homing plasma ball can take you out instantly as well if it hits (that's without armor in this case); the ring of fire attack makes him invincible until he finishes the attack by sending the ground-hugging flames out (which only go straight, thankfully)
• The Charger or The Jockey from Left 4 Dead when on a level with ledges that kill you. A well placed charge from a charger can kill an ENTIRE TEAM.
  • Also, Smokers on a level with holes you go down but can't go back up.
    • Hunters and Jockeys are also the bane of the slow ponderous player in these situations too. Second chances are rarely given among survivor players and most players who don't "get with the programme" the first time around and fail to jump down the right hole at the same time as the rest of the team are often summarily booted from the game if they get pinned/snared and become unsaveable.
    • Likewise for infected players, it is extremely difficult to pin/snare a survivor player and kill them before their buddies shoot you and rescue them (you are vulnerable to other players when pinning one and cannot move until your pinned target is dead). Therefore pinning/snaring a slow, clueless survivor player who didn't jump down the one-way hole at the same time as the rest of the survivor team is seen as a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the infected side and a benchmark by which to measure a player's skill as an infected.
  • Anything from the Tank. On Expert, both of his attacks will incapacitate you in one hit, and he's scarily accurate with the cement throw. On any other difficulty, one of his punches sends you flying, which can range from being a minor nuisance to sending you flying off a bridge/rooftop to your instant death, and the developers love putting instant death falls on finale levels, the only place where you're definitely running into a Tank. And you don't respawn during the finale event. Punching cars/debris counts too since it's another instant incap, regardless of difficulty.
  • Any attack in the game that damages also causes flinching, the Common Infected will reduce your speed to nothing if three or more are hitting you at the same time.
  • For anyone playing as the Special Infected, the Survivors' melee attack will stagger you long enough for them to move away and kill you, or they could kill you using just the melee attack if they're feeling sadistic, which most people are in Online Versus.
  • It gets even worse for the Tank: if your Tank dosn't have access to cars or cover to get to the survivors, the survivors will simply shoot the Tank player from a distance. Each shot causes flinching which will slow the Tank; with all four survivors wielding machineguns in a wide open area without any cars to throw, the Tank usually dies in seconds when survivor teams do this.
  • One attack from survivor players annoy the hell out of Tank players: Fire. If they hear a Tank appear, survivor players will use their molotovs as soon as the Tank player is in their sights or shoot nearby gas cans as a substitute. Once caught on fire, the Tank will keep taking damage until it dies, frustrating the infected team to no end. If there's any water nearby, then you're not as screwed.
• Borderlands has the Roid Raged Psycho's Grenades. The boss seems easy and it's child's play to snipe his overly large head. And then he throws a grenade that will completely destroy your health and shields if it hits, leaving you open for him to kill you. To make it worse, he has a spread mod, so every single grenade will spit up into 6.
  • The Destroyer's shockwave attack. It's not very damaging, oh no. There are two issues: First, it pushes you out of cover, so it can get you with it's other attacks (Plus it's a pain to keep running back to cover) and two, prepare to throw your controller against the screen if you happen to be even remotely close to the edge when he uses it.

Simulation Game

• In Crush Crumble and Chomp, a single shot from the Mad Scientist will cause the monster to gradually slow down (simulated by giving the player fewer opportunities to enter commands). This eventually proves fatal as the humans' attacks gradually overwhelm the monster.
  • Similarly, moving into a space with a power plant results in an immediate game over.

Roguelike

• In Angband, Ancient Multi-Hued Dragons and Drolems are notorious for killing players who descend to 2500' without poison resistance. Players without it will take 800 HP of damage from a single breath.
• Agility in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, especially in Monster Houses. Doubles the speed of every enemy in the room, giving them more than enough time to wreck your party without you being able to counterattack. If it's used twice? Quadruple speed.
  • Moves that hit all opposing pokemon, like Discharge. Wonderful when you're using it, ungodly painful when fighting against it, and an enemy manages to hit you with 3 or 4 of them before coming into range. The worst variation is easily Silver Wind (used by Venomoth/Dustox/etc), which not only hits you from all the way across the room, but also has a chance of raising all the opponent's stats, INCLUDING SPEED. Getting through dungeons filled with Silver Wind users turns into a Luck-Based Mission.
  • The Grudge Trap is That One Trap. Trip it, and every Pokemon on the floor is warped to where you are and given the Grudge status. In other words, when they go down, it drains the PP of the move you used to finish them to 0. Unless you have Warp Orbs/Seeds or Max Elixirs, you will die very quickly.

4X, Real Time Strategy, and Turn-Based Strategy

MOD: Need to be sorted before being moved to subpages

• Bleach: The 3rd Phantom: Sennen Hyourou. It deals a medium amount of damage, stops you from moving or attacking, AND lowers your accuracy and evasion. Did I mention it can hit the 4 squares around its target, too? That means MORE characters that get affected by it! It doesn't help that Hitsugaya has to be in Bankai when he uses it, so you'll take even more damage that isn't connected to that attack (In Bankai, anyone within a two-space radius of Hitsugaya takes damage and can be potentially frozen, lowering accuracy and evasion.)
  • It's not an attack, but Absolute Defense is too horrible of a move to not mention it. A character with this will randomly (much more often than not) take single-digit damage from ANY attack. Yes, even Co-Op attacks. A lot of bosses in Kisuke's Tower have it, and it is extremely frustrating.
• Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones has the Silencer skill. It is the reason why Assassins are almost never seen as enemies; half the chance they have of landing a critical hit becomes a chance to instantly kill the other unit. And there is no defending against it; when the Assassin sprite flickers, you're losing someone.
  • Fortunately, no Assassins appear as enemies in Sacred Stones. From this troper's knowledge, the only assassin you fight in the series is a boss in Blazing Sword, and even then only on a particular path.
  • Another example would be the Hel spell in Seisen no Keifu. Basically, it's an HP to One attack. In a game with Final Death. And unlike Eclipse in the GBA games, this one can actually hit you. And if your HP already is 1, it kills you. Did I mention the enemies with this spell come in groups??
  • Some ROM hacks bring their own horrible weapons to the table, such as GhebSaga with the Demi Lance. It hits for 1/2 of your maximum health, but has the Brave effect, meaning it ALWAYS attacks twice. It also can be thrown for a ranged attack. The only thing that doesn't make it completely rage-inducing is the fact that its accuracy isn't the greatest, but it's still able to kill you instantly.
  • Eclipse, the skill used by the Black Knight in Radiant Dawn. It multiplies his Strength by FIVE, and also negates the opponent's defense. During the duel between him and Ike, if you don't have Nihil equipped on Ike, then you're looking at a 40% chance of him activating it, and Ike will almost certainly die.

Racing Game

• Though several items and weapons in the Mario Kart series can be jarring and chaotic, both the Spiny Shell and the Thunder have gained notoriety for toughening the races for the players, especially the former for the first-place rider. Same reason why they're considered a Scrappy Mechanic.
• The Quake in the Wipeout series, a super-fast wave that can travel the length of any given circuit. And getting hit with it makes you lose control and slow to a crawl.