Beyond The Impossible / Video Games

Events in Video Games that are not possible. Only list examples that fit this description.

• Ace Combat: Joint Assault: In the second phase of the final Sulejmani fight, he can suddenly do a bullshit roll maneuver to dodge all your missiles, something no one else can do. Not even you in the same plane.
• EXA_PICO has three examples and justified in all of them:
  • Melody of Elemia: It is technically possible for a Reyvateil to craft a song outside her cosmosphere and without the aid of a Hymn Crystal, but it's so difficult and happens so rarely that anyone who sees it happen will say it's impossible.
  • Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica. The game likes to mention how only one person at a time can dive into a single reyvateil with a two person dive being a big deal that only the most skilled therapist can perform. Jacqil says Frelia can handle four people at once. Everyone shouts how impossible this is, and normally they would be right, but Jacqil reminds them that Frelia is a goddess and so can handle it easily. Croix' response is essentially, "oh yeah....I forgot..."
  • Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel: When the Rinkernator is open, Reyvateils can't use Song Magic because the source of it is disabled. Coccona can cast anyways because she is registered to an entirely different server called Infel Phira instead of the Third Tower whose Rinkernator was open at the time. There's a cutscene showing the energy transfer through space.
• Asura's Wrath:
  • At one point Asura becomes so mad, he gains the level of power it took his fellow Deities nearly 12000 YEARS to accumulate. Yasha even states that this is impossible by the standards they were using.
  • Killing Chakravartin was said by Chakravartin himself to be an impossibility.
  • Deus even uses this trope as his motto:
    Deus: Power without a purpose is meaningless and worthless. A purpose that is firm can change the impossible to the possible.
• Battle Clash: Eddie and the ST Valius. This guy is so fast he can jump out of the corner of one side of the screen and reappear from the other less than a second later, landing in the same exact spot. In other words, he manages to cover the entire span of the stage you're on in a single jump. The stage in question (the Tower of Babel) is a giant space elevator.
• Azrael from BlazBlue was such a dangerous juggernaut that he had to be sealed in a pocket dimension that was kept at absolute zero. After being released from it in Chronophantasma, he basically reacts as if he's had a power nap, and is dominating the rest of the cast within hours. It goes even further in Central Fiction, where he creates a sealed arena for his fight with Kagura by shifting space through sheer strength, and punches his way through a dimensional barrier without breaking a sweat just so he can pick a fight with Izanami.
• In Borderlands, Some class abilities allow more ammo to be used than some guns can hold. In some cases this allows for five shotgun rounds to be used when only two are loaded as well as sub-machinegun and assault rifles being able to hold as much as THOUSANDS of rounds. With the right character skills, even revolvers with a clearly-visible number of chambers can hold more rounds than should be possible.
• Borderlands 2:
  • Gaige has an ability called Anarchy, which increases her damage but reduces her accuracy for every stack. Under normal circumstances, the max number of stacks is 400, which equals 700% bonus to damage and an equal penalty to accuracy. However, with a special class mod that drops from a raid boss, you can get up to 600 stacks, for 1,050%. Once you pass about 550 stacks, bullets stop making any sort of sense. They'll zig-zag in mid-air, land behind you, bounce up and down, and all sorts of crazy stuff. In the rare event you actually hit something, they'll take so much damage, Ludicrous Gibs is almost guaranteed.
  • Gaige's Close Enough ability causes fired bullets to ricochet off of surfaces toward a nearby enemy with slightly reduced damage. They always hit something, regardless of trajectory. Having both Close Enough and any number of Anarchy stacks will result it a hailstorm of bullets flying in every conceivable direction before turning around and turning every enemy into chowder. This is particularly effective with the powerful but inaccurate Torgue weapons.
  • Salvador's "5 Shots or 6" gives him a chance to gain 2 ammo upon shooting (1 is automatically consumed via said shooting, the other is added to his magazine), maxed out at 25%. Class mods (Most notably the Legendary Hoarder) can raise it to 50% or even 55%, meaning he's capable of spontaneously generating more ammo just by shooting. Vladof Rocket launchers don't consume ammo every 3rd shot and the Butcher shotgun randomly generates more ammo every few shots or so, meaning with these guns, Salvador can literally have his ammo gauge bounce from nearly empty to max, empty again, and keep going up and down. Once you reach this level of insanity, the best way to conserve ammo is to shoot as fast as possible and as much as possible.
• Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter: In order to finish off Chetyre, Ryu uses D-Breath to push his D-Ratio up to 169% and counting, when normally hitting 100% causes a Nonstandard Game Over due to his body being taken over by Odjn: the reason why he still manages to survive is because Odjn severs their bond afterward.
• Devil Survivor: It's a Running Gag that Midori's innocence a la The Power of Love is actually helping the demonic situation. Surprisingly, this is even able to convince a Black Frost to join the main cast.
• Digimon World Data Squad: Yuma managed to make the physical embodiment of Lust feel pure love.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins: While the Blights aren't impossible to defeat, the fact that the Warden defeats the fifth one so quickly is unbelievable, to the point that many people outside Ferelden even believe that the Fifth Blight never happened. ^note The previous shortest Blight lasted 12 years and involved half of the continent. Blights prior to that lasted decades. In contrast, the 5th Blight was defeated in one year with just three Wardens and a single nation (two, if you count Orzammar).
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition: The Cardinal Rules of Magic state that you can only send your mind into the Fade, while your body remains in the real world. Only once has this rule been defied, and that took a Human Sacrifice involving several hundred slaves, with the results being described as nothing less than utterly disastrous. So, when the Player Character of this game enters the Fade physically without any consequence, it is viewed by damn near everyone as nothing less than a miracle.
  • Another cardinal rule of magic is that time cannot be manipulated. People's perception of time perhaps, but not time itself. That's why no one saw it coming when Magister Alexius went back in time to convince the rebel mages that the Templars presented a much greater danger to them after the Breach than they actually did. It turns out that the Breach is actively rewriting the laws of reality.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • The "Deathgate" succession fort has a Battery that produces power from nothing. "The physics is weeping".
  • Several long-running succession forts (including Failcannon) have well-documented cases where the fortress's layout is so labyrinthine, so complex and bizarre, that it actually breaks the game's pathing engine. (In the case of Failcannon, this saved them from the wrath of at least one Forgotten Beast which wanted to ascend to the populated levels, and knew a path existed, but couldn't find it.) As if that weren't impossible enough Bizarrchitecture, rooms sometimes exist that none of the players can locate. They can scroll without impediment throughout the entire fortress, and yet the only way to find these rooms is consistently to wait for a dwarf to come in and then zoom to them. Somehow, looking for it any other way, it cannot be found...
• In the final battle of EarthBound (1994), Paula's Pray command breaks the fourth wall and gets the Player to attack and destroy Giygas, a being so powerful and alien that humans cannot grasp its true form.
• A character in Fallout: New Vegas claims to have done the impossible and shot a Brotherhood of Steel Paladin through the eye hole of their Power Armor. If you've met the Brotherhood and gotten in their good books you can challenge these Blatant Lies by pointing out that their eye protection is bullet proof.
  • Fallout 3's DLC Operation: Anchorage is mostly set in a VR simulation of the Battle of Anchorage. This does not stop the Mysterious Stranger from coming to your assistance if you have the perk. While it's implied that the Mysterious Stranger is in someway supernatural, it's still pretty crazy that he can appear out of nowhere in a computer simulation.
  • In New Vegas, you can elect to save Caesar by performing life-saving brain surgery. In order to succeed, you need high stats in medicine...Or a ludicrously high Luck stat. The game lampshades this by having a character ask how you managed to pull this off, one of your responses to which can be "I have no idea."
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • Mysterious Heroine X can make a spaceship go faster than light even if it doesn't have a warp engine.
  • King Hassan can kill anyone, or at the very least make them vulnerable to death, even beings with Complete Immortality.
  • When Ophelia Phamrsolone subconsciously wishes for someone to save her, Napoleon Bonaparte manages to summon himself without any assistance from the Counter Force.
  • The Power of Friendship between Yu Mei-ren and the Prince of Lan Ling is so great that she was able to summon him in the Chinese Lostbelt, where no one believes in or wishes for heroes, cutting off its connection to the Throne of Heroes and making Servants impossible to summon.
  • It's acknowledged that Daybit Sem Void's Lostbelt is an "exception among exceptions" compared to the other Lostbelts, including the British one, where Pan Human History didn't happen due to Sefar cleansing everything from the face of the Earth. When Chaldea arrives, this turns out to be because of two things: 1. It is inhabited by ORT, an Ultimate One, and 2. The Human Order was erased because humans never evolved in the first place - the dominant species of his Lostbelt are intelligent dinosaurs.
  • Daybit summoned Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec War God, as a Grand Servant, even though Grand Servants are normally not summonable and beings with divinity normally can't be Grand Servants.
  • ORT summons another version of itself as Grand Foreigner. It really can't be overstated how insane this feat is in-universe. It used the aspects of the Tree of Emptiness it absorbed to simulate 300,000,000 years of history with itself as the prime lifeform of Earth, thereby registering itself in the Throne of Heroes as a Heroic Spirit, then inserted itself into the Grand Foreigner class (which does not exist), and summoned itself into reality despite already being dead. The Grand Servants are supposed to be of the seven regular classes and be heroes meant to protect humanity, but ORT is meant to destroy the world, meaning it literally turned the world's ultimate defense against the world it was meant to protect.
  • Chaldea manages to kill ORT, an Ultimate One, which lacks the concept of death, and render it Deader than Dead. While this happens due to a spectacular number of factors going in the favor, it should still be impossible to kill an Ultimate One, because the only weapons capable of harming it literally don't exist yet.
• Final Fantasy V After seeing his granddaughter and teammates fall to Exdeath's magical traps, Galuf stands up to the Big Bad, shakes off his magical bindings, gets knocked down to 0 HP and still keeps fighting regardless of what high-level spells Exdeath keeps tossing at him, and through Heroic Sacrifice saves the rest of the party. When an enraged --but astonished-- Exdeath demands to know what kind of ''hate'' could drive Galuf to such an extreme, the latter replies that it isn't hate that powers him.
• Final Fantasy VI: Sabin and Cyan have a boss fight against The Phantom Train. Sabin can successfully use his Suplex move on it, leading to the hilarity of seeing him lift the locomotive offscreen and slam it back down on its back like any other enemy. Also while only the locomotive is shown it is implied that he flips the entire train upside down in the process.
  • This arose from the developers neglecting to set a specific flag on the Phantom Train, one which precludes certain enemies and bosses (but not all bosses!) from being affected by Sabin's Suplex/Meteor Strike. Since then, every re-release of FF6 has mysteriously neglected to include said flag on the Phantom Train.
• In Five Nights at Freddy's, you can use Custom Night to set all 4 of the animatronics' AI to 20 (the absolute highest it can go), but developer Scott Cawthon didn't program in a reward because he thought it was impossible to beat. A lets-player called BigBug proved him wrong, after 23 hours of trying. Markiplier soon followed, after 7 hours straight trying to beat it. There's currently a section of the Crowning Moment of Awesome page for people who've been able to beat 4/20 Mode. Now you get an extra star on the main screen for beating it.
• Iji: Assassin Asha is so impossibly fast that he is able to dodge shots that land in an instant, which no other Assassin enemies can do. This includes the Nuke, which blows up the entire screen as soon as you pull the trigger. The only reason he's vulnerable to it in his first fight was only because he did not expect you to have one, and the only reason he's beatable in his second fight is because his massive ego finds it beneath him to dodge something as weak as shotgun pellets.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts: Near the climax, Beast, in order to find Belle, tears through dimensions by sheer force of will. Maleficent comments on how this was impossible; everyone else (herself included) either needs aid from the Heartless or a gummi ship to cross dimensions. Beast doesn't know how he did it. He just wanted to see Belle that badly.
  • The Nobodies. Their entire existence is supposed to be impossible, and Namine is even more impossible.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep: After getting his body stolen by Xehanort, Terra refuses to submit, his mind and soul re-animating his suit of armor through hate and anger, the same thing that got his body stolen in the first place. Terra, as The Lingering Will, then proceeds to kick his own ass. Xehanort, now as Terranort, could only utter in shock how ridiculous it is.
  Terranort: Your body submits, your heart succumbs - so why does your mind resist?!
• Mass Effect 3:
  • Almost all of Cerberus is semi-huskified and heavily indoctrinated. Check out their reaction to Shepard showing up on Mars:
    Cerberus Trooper: HOLY SHIT! IT'S SHEPARD!
  • Now realize that Shepard is actually scaring the hell out of people who can no longer think or feel anything for themselves. They merely duplicate the thoughts and feelings of those who control them. So Shepard "merely" strikes fear in the hearts of the Reapers.
    Rannoch Reaper: Shepard.
    Shepard: You know who I am?
    Rannoch Reaper: Harbinger speaks of you.
  • At one point in Mass Effect 3, Garrus and Legion are debating weapon calibration. Legion insists that the maximum possible improvement is .32% percent. Garrus tinkers with the weapon, and manages to pull .43% improvement, baffling Legion. To drive the point further, Legion is an extremely sophisticated AI that is able to link directly to the machine. Garrus is 'just' a skilled technician.
  • In the Citadel DLC, a humorous example, but no less awesome: "The Vakarian Tango", in which a romanced Garrus manages to get Shepard to dance good.
• Mega Man Battle Network:
  • Explicit in the fifth chapter of Takamisaki's manga, regarding how quickly Lan and Mega Man achieve Full-Synchro.
    I'll be... You've just redefined what's possible!!!
  • There's an implicit example in the epilogue, where MegaMan and ProtoMan's fight is dubbed "Tera-class". Those familiar with the series should recognize the fact that the series Battle Chip Tiers don't go beyond Giga.
• Snake's infamous achievement of destroying an M1 Tank with hand grenades in Metal Gear Solid gets pointed out as this in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots if you radio Otacon in the same snowfield where it happened. Otacon explains that he once asked an army commander how an Infantryman could take down a tank one-on-one and was told in no uncertain terms not to try as it would be impossible, only for Snake to matter-of-factly point out that's how he did it because that's all he had. Cue fan-boying from Otacon!
• Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker: Big Boss and his mercenaries are supposedly normal humans, but they're somehow strong enough to prevent getting stomped on by a giant mech by catching its foot in mid-stomp.
  Paz: It's a miracle!
• The many Realms of Mortal Kombat are in a state of perpetual conflict with each other, mostly due to the scheming of Shang Tsung and Shao Kahn's unchained ambitions of conquest. Even when those two are out of the picture or overshadowed by greater threats, Outworld and Earthrealm oft resort to Teeth-Clenched Teamwork at best, and the Netherrealm abhors the living. Thus Sheeva's intro in 11 should tell you everything you need to know about their view of the Joker.
  Sheeva: You have done the impossible.
  Joker: Oh? Do tell, my dear!
  Sheeva: You have united the realms against your evil.
• M.U.G.E.N has original characters that are so game-breaking that they can defeat their opponent before the match even starts!!!
• Myst: Yessha's mother, Catherine, was good at this. In the novels, she's mentioned as having written "Torus", a stable doughnut-shaped Age, which features a huge waterfall that falls through the planet's core, turns into rain and gets carried back by clouds to refill the Ocean, that in turn, feeds the Waterfall. Atrus' reaction to first seeing this was that until then, he had thought it impossible to do such things with the Art.
• Nintendo Wars:
  • The Advance Wars series makes it possible, such as with a well-timed CO Power like Colin's Power of Money, to occasionally do things that shouldn't actually be possible like blowing up a medium tank with small-arms fire from an infantry unit. Dual Strike even has unique battle victory flavor text for when you manage to do it, where instead of "good!" or "excellent!!" you'll get "INCREDIBLE!!!" in shimmering rainbow text.
  • Any fixed-damage environmental attack like Hawke, Drake, or Olaf's specials or Black Hole cannons and lasers, can not destroy units and are limited to dropping that unit to 1HP instead. However, internally, units have 100 HP and they're not at 10/100 but 1/100. This means a 1HP infantry (which can't normally hurt anything) is capable of swagging up to a megatank drained to the brink by one of these attacks, opening fire, and destroying it.
  • Defense is coded to reduce the percentage of damage taken, rather than raising their defensive power, if that makes any sense. If you can get a unit to 100% defense, a difficult but possible act that basically requires a Kanbei unit on an HQ with his super power popped and the defense skill, it will take 0% damage from any attack. Yes, a frigging bomber could swing by and drop a full salvo of bombs on a 100% infantry unit... and not so much as scratch it.
• No Man's Sky: Among the possible resources a planetary settlement can produce is the Kelp Sac, which is stated to be unfarmable according to its description.
• Pirate101: El Toro uses a whip for attacking and swinging over obstacles. He can even latch onto thin air with it.
• The Nameless One of Planescape: Torment, if eloquent enough, can argue a person into nonexistence by logically proving to him he cannot exist.
  • In the endgame, with sufficient willpower, you can do this to yourself.
• Pokémon:
  • Rayquaza, like many other Pokemon from the sixth Generation, it gains Mega Evolution (a temporary Super Mode only available in Battle). Unlike other Pokemon who can mega evolve, Rayquaza does not need a Mega Stone to do so. Justified due to it having a unique organ that has properties similar to that of a Mega Stone.
  • Mega Rayquaza is so overpowered, it broke the metagame. It was deemed too strong for even the highest tier, Ubers, where many of the Purposefully Overpowered Legendary (and pseudo-Legendary) Pokemon go. Smogon was forced to create a new tier, Anything Goes, just so Mega Rayquaza could be used without being banned. This makes Rayquaza more powerful than Arceus, the god of the Pokémon world.
    • This also counts from a meta perspective. Up until Mega Rayquaza entered the scene, Ubers was really just a banlist for the "main" tier, OU^note Overused; this changed upon its release, with (as above) Anything Goes being created as a banlist for Ubers. Mega Rayquaza is so strong that not only was it banned from the banlist, it was banned so hard that it outright turned the banlist into a full-fledged normal tier just so it could have its own banlist. Broke the metagame, indeed.
• Pokémon Colosseum: Duking finds Wild Pokemon in Orre, the desert land where no Pokemon can exist except imported ones. Normally this would not be impossible (strictly speaking) but the fact that no wild Pokemon exist in Orre is the defining aspect of both the story and gameplay. This has been expanded upon in the game's sequel Pokémon XD where he invented the means to lure wild Pokémon out of their hiding using bait he specifically made for this purpose. You can use said bait (which he sells through Pokémarts) to find and capture wild Pokémon in a region that's otherwise barren of wild Pokémon.
• Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones: The Vizier turns himself into a god... so the Prince and Farah kill him even though he's supposed to be unkillable.
• In SaGa Frontier, Gen has the ability to cut rope with a lead pipe with Implausible Fencing Powers. T260G momentarily comments on the impossibility of this.
• Saints Row IV. It's made pretty clear from the start that the computer virus-like Dominatrix in the Enter the Dominatrix DLC is a very powerful opponent within the simulation, but it doesn't become fully clear just how powerful until near the end of the DLC when she resets the DLC. Remember: not only are parts of Enter the Dominatrix not even set in the simulation, i.e. the only place her powers should logically be usable, the Framing Device for the entire DLC is that it's a flashback about the Dominatrix. Try not to think too hard about this one.
• In Shogun: Total War, In the Mongol Invasion campaign, you cannot perform a ceasefire from both sides- The Mongols neither have a Leader active and cannot make Emissaries. You can, however can stop the "At war" status on accident, by utilizing a Rebel revolt and not having any other borders touching the Opposing side. An example from the Mongol side.◊
• The mechanics of the world of Splatoon 2 make it so that ink of a given color cannot splat Inklings, Octarians or Salmonids of the same color; despite this, Pearl is implied to have splatted herself with her own Dualies during a dodge roll. This, of course, is Played for Laughs.
• Split/Second (2010): The reality TV premise would be impossible in Real Life; it's more or less just an excuse to blow as much stuff up during a race as possible.
• Sunless Sea: The Avid Horizon is a gate. It's also not a physical location but a Law, which prevents it from being opened, least of all by anything low on the Great Chain of Being. The Merchant Venturer, a human, a being on the very lowest part of the Great Chain, successfully distracts the guardians and passes through the gate in full defiance of the Law while managing to maintain both his body and his sanity. Sunless Skies implies that in one possible future he managed it so well that it allowed all of London to follow him through.
• The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: Post stage 1 of the boss fight, Scratch and Sniff manage to somehow pick Skabb off the ground and carry him out the window despite him being gigantic compared to them. Spyro and Sparx lampshade this.
• In The Force Unleashed, carbonite is known for its ability to sever a Jedi's Force connection. However, Starkiller can still use the Force to break out of carbonite with ease.
• Double Subverted in Sonic Colors, Sonic (who can run at least faster than the speed of sound), is able to outrun a black hole (remember, this is something that's gravity prevents anything, if close enough, -which even includes light- from escaping from it). He resisted it for a good 30 seconds, and was almost sucked back in. Even Tails is amazed that he made it back to their world in one piece.
• Street Fighter: Gouki/Akuma hits Gen with the Shun Goku Satsu, an attack which attacks the very soul of the opponent, invariably killing them. Gen, despite having never experienced it AND being an old, sick man, managed to empty his soul in time to withstand it.
• Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2, during the Dygenguard's debut, the machine fails to use the default TC-OS operating system. Filio Presty reboots and reprograms the actual JINKI-1 OS...in a matter of seconds, just before Vigagi can get a bead on Sanger Zonvolt. Jonathan Kazahara lampshades this trope and how it shouldn't be possible to do what Filio just did.
• There Is No Game walks the line of this one for the most part, but it really comes into effect during the Squirrel OS segment, where the narrator puts up a fake operating system to fool you into thinking the game has crashed and you need to reset. You get around it by finding a copy of This Is Not A Game, a fake version of the game, inside the fake, not-working operating system and launching it.
  '''Narrator: You've just launched a fake program from within a fake operating system! That's impossible! What's going to happen?! I don't like this at all...
• Tomb Raider I: Jacqueline Natla certainly gets her money's worth out of her immortality which explains how she survived things like a pillar crashing on her or plunging into lava, but at one point she had an artifact that was capable of killing gods thrown at her. It didn't work.
• Touhou Project features Yuugi Hoshiguma, a famous oni encountered having a rowdy drunken party in Hell's former capital. Now most oni already have some form of Super-Strength, but even among her kin, Yuugi is known as "the Strong." What takes her Beyond the Impossible is the extent of this strength - Yuugi's special power is stated to be "the ability to wield unexplainable phenomena," an abbreviation of a saying about how Confucius never discussed the supernatural. One way of interpreting this is that Yuugi is so strong, her physical feats defy reason, so she could theoretically pull stunts like dispersing a typhoon by punching it.
• Unchained Blades: You find a Plant Person in a dungeon filled with magma, and she was all alone!
• Undertale:
  • Done as a sight-gag when you face the Dummy at the request of Toriel. If you check, spare it, or miss 8 times in a row, the dummy gets bored and floats away while Toriel stares agape in sheer disbelief. Later subverted when you learn the dummy was, in fact, "alive" as it was possessed by a rather shy ghost.
  • Played for Laughs if you're fighting Undyne on a non-Genocide run; she'll suplex a boulder just because she can, then she suplexes ten boulders for the same reason, then finally suplexes herself "just to prove nothing is impossible".
  • Undyne, perhaps taking cues from Viral from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, manages to produce her own Determination, which monsters are stated to be unable to do. She adamantly refuses to die when the player kills her - until she melts. In the No Mercy route, the player character has to kill her twice - she determines herself into a more powerful form just to stop you.
  • There's Dr. W. D. Gaster, who at some point in development was the royal scientist but wound up getting cut from the final product (the in-game justification is that he fell into the CORE.) while still remaining in the game's code, fully aware of his situation. One of the few remaining things in the game pertaining to him is a lab entry written in Wingdings (implied to be what Gaster would've spoken in) that is entirely unused. It mentions negative photon readings, which are physically impossible.

---