Beam Spam

Taste the rainbow, motherfucker!

"Your weapon absorbs attacks and then fires it back[...] Let's see if you can do it when I fire 1,000 shots at once."

— Coyote Starrk, Bleach

What's better than having a laser? How about 50 bazillion of them?

Beam spam embodies the idea that quantity has a quality all its own. Rather than impressing the audience with a demonstration of just how powerful the Wave-Motion Gun is, you instead break their brains with an insane number of energy rays spewing out of the same source. The key word here is beam SPAM. Roboteching with Homing Lasers is a frequent way of getting more lasers to fit on screen by allowing them to come out from more places than just the front of the vessel.

This is common in ship-to-ship space combat, but you'll also frequently find this trope in shows with Hermetic Magic or Humongous Mecha.

A subtrope of Spam Attack. Compare More Dakka (bullets), Bullet Hell (a genre of game based on avoiding bullets), Magic Missile Storm (magic), and Macross Missile Massacre (guided self-propelled explosives). Contrast Wave-Motion Gun, Kamehame Hadoken and Blasting Time.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Aldnoah.Zero: Several different Martian Kataphrakts have particularly powerful laser weaponry, but the king of this trope in this series is the Herschel, which, in addition to being armed with a powerful laser rifle, carries legions of attack drones with which to chase down and bombard its opponents with a storm of lasers.
• Bleach:
  • The bow Uryuu got after regaining his power can fire 1,200 shots simultaneously.
  • The Primera Espada Coyote Starrk's release gives him the ability to rapid-fire multiple Ceros at once, fitting with his release's gunslinger motif.
  • Also the kidou spell Hyapporankan or "Hundred-Step Rail Parch." Hisagi uses it against Findor Calius, as does Hitsugaya in a movie.
• The Grand Cross in Bodacious Space Pirates uses these to devastate enemy ships after zig-zagging to close range.
• Bokurano has some ridiculous beam-spam in the closing chapters, though it does help that the Humongous Mecha Zearth can fire beams from any point of its body (remember that thing that Buu from Dragon Ball Z did mentioned earlier in this article? It's kinda like that◊).
• Shizuri Mugino of A Certain Magical Index has the ability to convert electrons into a highly destructive form of matter that exists somewhere between particles and waves. On her own, she can only create three or four beams at once, but she carries around silicon cards that can disperse her individual laser shots into multiple ones.
• The main weapon of Lelouch's Shinkirō Knightmare in Code Geass produces an attack of this sort, via the power of refraction. Later on in the series Suzaku (who is now dangerously close to stealing Kira Yamato's coveted executive beam spammer club trophy) gets a spiffy new upgrade to the Lancelot. It's new energy wings double as a weapon allowing it to deluge targets in energy. You almost have to feel sorry for them...
  • Hell, Lelouch once launches the mirrors his Knightmare uses for the aformentioned refraction attack in order to Geass his father without having to look him in the eye and expose himself to being Geassed in retaliation. And it works.
  • Before the Gawain's Hadron Cannons were tweaked by Rakshata, they worked like this; afterwards, they became Wave Motion Guns.
• Satchii, the anti-hacker device in Den-noh Coil, uses this as its ultimate attack modus. It only works virtually, but since all of the protagonists spend most of their time in virtual reality it's still very terrifying to them.
• Dragon Ball Z. Uncountable times. It rarely works; a single huge beam is almost always depicted more effective. Resorting to it is usually a clear sign of desperation on the part of the user.
  • This is one of Vegeta's Signature Moves. In fact, when Majin Buu uses it on him during their first fight, Goku accuses him of copying it from Vegeta.
  Goku: That's Vegeta's Technique™.
  • Krillin used it on Nappa, having no effect.
  • Piccolo employs this against #17, though every shot he misses with actually stays afloat in the air, which then come together in one big attack.
  • Goku himself uses this technique against Perfect Cell. Surprisingly, the technique was effective as it hurt Cell enough to force him to guard and stunned him in place.
  • Buu spammed an entire planet with lasers, using his aptly-named Human Genocide Attack to wipe out the planet's entire supply of Muggles. Tien and Chiaotzu actually outlasted the rest of the Z team because they were down on Earth at the time rather than at Kami's lookout, and therefore only had to survive the beam spam rather than the "Chocolate Lasers" he used on the foes right in front of him.
  • Frieza can fire multiple Death Beams at once from a single finger. He uses this against Goku in their first confrontation but the Saiyan is able to block them all, much to Frieza's surprise.
  • Dragon Ball Z Abridged gleefully lampshades how useless this tactic tends to be when Vegeta tries it on Perfect Cell.
    [Perfect Cell emerges unscathed from Vegeta's barrage]
    Cell: Prince, has this ever worked?
• Seen in various forms on Eureka Seven. You have your ship-mounted type, seen in the aerial battle between the Gekko and the Izumo, as well as the Nirvash typeTheEND's personal homing laser array. The latter puts out nearly enough beams to turn the whole screen red and white.
• Fairy Tail Sting's Holy Ray, a barrage of homing lasers.
• In Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Fern has a particularly high casting speed which lets her rapidly fire off multiple blasts of basic offensive magic at her opponents. While each individual spell is easily blocked, the sheer quantity of attacks she puts out can prevent her opponent from retaliating because they need to focus on defense. The fact that offensive magic is significantly more mana efficient than defensive magic gives Fern an extra advantage as she can wear down her opponent faster than her casting will exhaust her.
• The original Gall Force used this a lot, with their bendy laser beams.
• Gainax's GunBuster: HOMING LASER!!!!
• Nearly every Gundam series has at least one example:
  • The Qubeley Mass-Production Type, Quin Mantha, and Geymalk of Gundam ZZ each have 30 funnels. The Quin Mantha also mounts 9 beam cannons on its body, while the Geymalk mounts 22 (though the gigantic Quin Mantha's cannons are bigger).
  • The inspiration for the pose when beam-spamming is the V2 Gundam from Mobile Suit Victory Gundam. While the basic machine only has the standard, modest armament of a single beam rifle, the Assault and Buster Mecha Expansion Pack sets (which can either be attached individually or at once) turn it into a Walking Armory of devastatingly powerful beam weapons.
    • The Khsatriya from Gundam Unicorn as well, but not to the same extreme. Using all 24 funnels simultaneously lets it deliver Death In All Directions quite easily, with another 12 mega particle cannons mounted across its body. In fact, its pilot's preferred method of dealing with anyone irritatingly difficult to fight is to just surround the annoying fly with funnels and blast away. It works quite well until the Unicorn Gundam deploys.
  • Gundam Wing had this in the form of entire walls of beam cannon-equipped armies firing all at once, and the entire space station Libra did this when it wasn't showing off its Wave-Motion Gun.
    • Wing Zero shoots its buster rifle a forwards... then it shoots downwards... then it shoots while spinning around... Needless to say, its two beam sabers don't get much screen-time.
  • In After War Gundam X the Harmonica Shield is this to the Gundam X Divider, the shield houses Thirteen beam cannons that when fired retains much of its destructive power even under water.
  • The Freedom Gundam in Gundam SEED and its upgrade, the Strike Freedom (this page image), in Gundam SEED Destiny, especially when equipped with the METEOR pack. Combine near-limitless energy with a state-of-the-art targeting system (two luxuries that most mobile suits in the SEED universe don't have) with a SEED Mode user who refuses to kill and you get someone who can show up in the middle of battle and proceed to completely disarm both sides in less than a minute. In addition, the Providence and Legend Gundams are capable of remotely-controlled Beam Spam thanks to their DRAGOONs, which the Strike Freedom is also equipped with.
    • The same universe gives us the very aptly named Destroy Gundam. It has six Wave Motion Guns (three in its chest and one in its face in Mobile Suit mode, plus two twin-barrelled high-energy beam cannons in Mobile Armor Mode), twenty thermal-plasma composite cannons, ten beam cannons on its fingers (which detach to become Attack Drones), 24 missile launchers, and four 75mm automatic chainguns.
  • Gundam Zabanya from Gundam 00: A Wakening of the Trailblazer has 14 Rifle Bits (two of which are hand-carried) and 14 Holster Bits. Combined with Guns Akimbo'd Gun Kata and a reactor core and targeting system that puts even the above-mentioned Freedom suits to shame, we get a display of beam spamming action that rapes everything on the screen.
    • A wakening of the Trailblazer loves doing this. Most of the Gadelaza's scenes involve it just flying through a mass of ELS, and letting its 154 GN Fangs skewer them via Death In All Directions. Every now and then it actually bothers attacking personally, using either its giant Wave-Motion Gun, Macross Missile Massacre, or the four massive beam guns it has as auxiliary weapons. There Is No Kill Like Overkill indeed.
  • Averted in Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, all mobile suits in-universe use physical ammunition rather than beam weapon. As it turns out, though, beam weaponry isn't nonexistent, but forgotten. It was used by the mobile armor Hashmal which fires a Wave-Motion Gun that while useless against the setting's Nanolaminate Armor still makes short work of anything ballistic weapon mounted on it as well as being capable of bouncing off the armor to hit other targets.
• In the .hack movie G.U. Trilogy, Ovan and Haseo face off against one another. After they gain their Avatar powers, Ovan unleashes a massive wave of red beams, countered by a massive blue beam from Haseo. They collide making a massive purple explosion.
• In Heavy Metal L-Gaim, many mecha models spam beams relentlessly.
• In Heroic Age, ships don't necessarily fire that many lasers, but with the sheer amount of ships, space battles turn into disco light shows.
• Kiddy Grade: The Deucalion gets to do this to a variety of targets.
• Entire battles in Legend of the Galactic Heroes consist of tactics-infused beam spam. Interestingly, Alliance ships are most prone to beam spam, and one of their most notable commanders is named Attenborough.
• Lyrical Nanoha has the combat cyborg Otto and her aptly named Inherent Skill, Ray Storm, which sends powerful beams flying in every direction. Nanoha herself also has a few examples of this, not least is her Blaster System, which functions much like the DRAGOONs mentioned above. And Fate has her Phalanx Shift attack that is a Beam Spam version of her basic beam attack. Exaggerated when Reinforce upgrades Fate's spell to Genocide Shift.
  • The episode that introduced Fate gave us Bardiche's first spoken words in the franchise. "Photon Lancer. Full Autofire." Beam Spam ensued.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Battle of Aces makes this the basic ranged attack of both Hayate and her Evil Twin Material-D. Sure, you could fire only one of the little energy balls, but where's the fun in that?
  • In the third season, Nanoha even Beam Spams her Wave-Motion Gun attack from five different directions against her daughter Vivio.
    • Hayate did something similar earlier in the season to wipe out an armada of Gadget Drones. The only difference was there were a lot more lasers and they were bigger.
• Macross uses this trope (in the forms of turret spam and ships-with-WMG-spam) almost as much as it does the Macross Missile Massacre - and when you have 100+ ships on each side each with 100+ turrets ...
  • In the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, most ship-to-ship combat consisted of laser spam when not using the Wave-Motion Gun — and in episode 27, approximately 4.8 million Zentradi warships use their Wave Motion Guns on Earth's surface, with predictable results.
  • In Macross Plus, you don't see pure Beam Spam, but you do see a bullet-hell scenario of turret fire for Isamu to weave through.
  • Macross Zero has a good lightshow near the finish.
  • The Grand Finale of Macross Frontier has a bullet-hell scenario of normal turrets between ships, followed up by epic Wave-Motion Gun Beam Spam on the part of the Vajra under Grace O'Connor. Too bad for her it didn't stop the quite-literal Megaton Punch ...
    • The Vajra Beam Spam fired at Frontier in the Grand Finale wasn't just just beam spam, it was Bullet Hell with beam weapons.
• The Nadesico's big sister, the Cosmos, beamspams Wave Motion Guns.
• Naruto:
  • In the anime adaptation of 6-tailed Naruto's fight against Pain (Ch. 438/Ep. 167), Naruto pelts Pain with a 20-second-long Bijuu-Dama Barrage and, later on, with chakra lasers. This is brought to canon in Chapter 610 when Bee and Naruto, both in their full Tailed Beast forms, fire a barrage of Bijuu-Damas at the Juubi, which then retaliates with a massive chakra beam attack.
  • There's also Darui's signature Jutsu, Storm Release: Laser Circus, which unleashes massive beams of light.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi: Aside from Roboteching, Magic Missiles also have the tendency to suddenly shoot in straight lines when locked on.
• Admiral Kizaru of One Piece has his Yasakani no Magatama technique, which can rain down a ridiculous amount of light beams over a wide area.
• Kuki's Dolem from RahXephon has this as it's power, making it a nigh unstoppable engine of destruction. In one memorable scene a Macross Missile Massacre was launched against it only to shot to pieces before the missiles could even get halfway.
• In the first Sailor Moon anime, Sailor Venus: not only she's prone to fire her Crescent Beam in quick succession, she also has a variation that consists in a barrage coming from above-on a single target. And whatever you do, don't get her mad.
• In Smile PreCure!, Cure Happy, the pink leader who possesses the power of holy light, is capable of firing pink light beams and can do so in rapid succession. She does this to Pierrot in her Ultra form and an army of Midens in HUGtto! PreCure ♥ Futari wa PreCure: Pretty Cure All Stars Memories.
• In Shakugan no Shana this is basically Hecate's primary form of attack... and her lasers bend and partially home in on the target! She can also spam smaller fireballs.
• The Neuroi in Strike Witches attack like this.
• In the Super Robot Wars: Original Generation Divine Wars (Yes, that's the title,) the Cosmo Nova special attack is depicted as a roboteched Beam Spam.
• Attenborough Cortitch of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the gunner of the many Cool Ships throughout the series, lives for this kind of stuff.
  • In the final battle, he emptied the Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann's supply of Probability Fluctuation Missiles in a single salvo. The Anti-Spiral counters by using beam-weapons that create explosions the size of fucking galaxies, and those beam-weapons have a faster rate-of-fire than a modern-day machinegun. And it has hundreds, if not thousands, of them. At that point, the show almost manages to achieve Too Much Dakka.
    • The second movie adaption of the series succeeded. When the Giga Drill Breaker attacks from both the Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Super Granzeboma collide, an ENTIRE UNIVERSE COLLAPSES. Now it's Too Much Dakka!
• Umineko: When They Cry:
  • "The ballista shots that numbered a little over a thousand were all fired at once, drawing a beautiful geometric curtain of death.
  • In the same fight, Beato also shot 18900 bolts of lightning at the predecessor Beatrice. Both this attempt and the one above miss.
• Spriggan. In "Berserker", Yu Ominae finds himself up against a Lost Technology Killer Robot that uses this trope. He eventually defeats it by luring it into a chamber where he punctures some steam pipes, diffusing the beams so they won't penetrate his Powered Armor.
• Two instances in the series Vandread. Once, in the first series and never used again, when Vandread Dita bounces a whole lotta energy beams off the other Dreads to wipe out a fast-moving enemy attack in one shot. And, in Vandread: The Second Stage, when Bart unlocks the Nirvana's Main Gun in his Moment of Awesome. This attack is used in the remainder of the series, and consists of the Nirvana firing hundreds of beams all at once, that not only seek using Roboteching, they seek their targets while dodging friendlies
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: This is how Raidraptors Satellite Cannon Falcon's special effect works for every Raidraptor monster in the user's graveyard. Kurosaki uses this effect to lower Dennis's Chaos Giant's attack to 500 before finishing him off with a Kill Sat-style Finishing Move.

Fan Works

• The first time Kyon is shown using Altair and Vega's Gungnir mode in Kyon: Big Damn Hero, it shot to one thousand three hundred and thirty-seven different targets.
• In Imaginary Seas, Zoe's lasers aren't as destructive as Artemis' Anti-Planet Noble Phantasm but come down far more numerously and far faster, crisscrossing the area in front of Percy's sword swings with much shorter delays between shots.
• In the Tamers Forever Series, Gallantmon's new "Takato's Star Storm" technique works by firing a barrage of plasma bolts from the small triangles rimming his shield.
• This is how Array approaches his fight with Discord in Chronicles of Harmony's End.
• The author of Bait and Switch (STO) stated in an author's note that he analyzed the armaments of the Galaxy-class starship from the perspective of what you could do with (according to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual) ten phaser banks if you weren't constrained by such things as a special effects budget. Combine that with forty years of technical advancements since the Enterprise-D was built, and the USS Bajor packs a wallop.
• In Fractured (SovereignGFC), a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands crossover and its sequel, Origins, the Trans-Galactic Republic's Star Dreadnaughts (and smaller Star Destroyers) unleash Beam Spam against Reapers. Whose shields are mostly kinetic-blockers and thus cannot withstand a few turbolasers, let alone hundreds. Leads to repeated Curb Stomp Battles. Any battle involving a fully-functional Star Dreadnaught is going to involve this, really.
• In Wilhuff Tarkin, Hero of the Rebellion, normal military blaster rifles and carbines are noted to have a high rate of fire... Leading to Imperial efficiency experts deleting their light repeating blasters (the squad automatic weapon equivalents) and later resisting their introduction after the increased casualty rate showed their importance

Films — Animation

• The LEGO Movie: The volume of fire that the bad guys can produce from their laser guns is a sight to behold. Thankfully for our heroes, their aim sucks.

Films — Live-Action

• Godzilla's Arch-Enemy King Ghidorah often does this with his gravity beams, often firing blasts in random directions with his unoccupied heads while the third is busy grappling with an adjacent enemy.
  • MechaGodzilla in all of its incarnations is practically king of this trope. Each version is armed to the teeth (probably including the teeth themselves) and carries a massive of shitton of firepower that it can unleash from its entire body. This is particularly glaring with the Showa version, which had guns and lasers on practically every part of itself. Godzilla's battles with the Showa MechaGodzilla probably contained a higher explosion-per-second ratio than your average Michael Bay flick.
  • The Heisei Era was known for producing several monsters with a large array of colorful beam attacks, but Mothra Leo, monster protagonist of the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy, likely holds the crown for having the largest number of them. After graduating from his larval stage, he gains an arsenal of various beam-related abilities (and, even as a larva, he has a Chest Blaster attack). Furthermore, each successive Rebirth of Mothra movie winds up with him getting some kind of evolution, which, inevitably, results in him ending up with even more beam attacks and new forms that come with an absurd number of beam attacks of their own.
  • In Shin Godzilla, Godzilla himself is able to pull this off by firing atomic beams not only from his mouth, but from the tip of his tail and his back.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong sees Godzilla attempt this against Kong during their second fight, though it goes poorly as a result of Kong's acrobatic prowess — he never manages to do more than wing the speedy ape with a glancing shot against his back. Godzilla is far more successful when he gets pissed off enough to stop trying to be fancy and just uses his relative size advantage instead.
• The Death Blossom mode in The Last Starfighter. (Kira Yamato, eat your heart out.)
  • For extra fun, it combines this with a Macross Missile Massacre.
  • And takes a cue from Wave-Motion Gun, as it uses all the ship`s energy to fire it.
• In most Star Trek works, ships fire phasers one or two beams at a time (usually because they're only in combat with one other ship), but in the 2009 film they're capable of firing about a dozen at once while still maintaining precise accuracy as evident when the Enterprise gives cover fire to the futuristic Vulcan vessel Spock is using and destroys Nero's Macross Missile Massacre. Even earlier, at the beginning of the film, the crew of the USS Kelvin use this technique first in a failed attempt to defend themselves against the Narada, and then to provide cover fire for their own escaping shuttlecraft.
  • In Star Trek: Nemesis, when the Enterprise-E is trying to find the cloaked Scimitar, Picard orders Worf to fire a full spread from all phaser strips in the hope of hitting something, followed by a spread of torpedoes. This works for a while, until they run out of torpedoes and deplete the charge in the phaser banks, whereupon they try simply ramming Shinzon's warship.
  • USS Vengeance in Star Trek Into Darkness . Remarkably, averted for the Enterprise; she doesn't get to fire a shot before the weapons systems are taken out.
• While the Star Wars Death Stars are most famous for their Wave-Motion Gun, Rebellion pilots will tell you that the millions of turbolaser turrets and emplacements dotting their surface are the much greater challenge if you want to actually destroy one.

Literature

• In the Empire From the Ashes series by David Weber, there is a class of planetoid armed ONLY with heavy energy guns (essentially directed black holes). 4,000km diameter planetoid battleship with pretty much the entire surface covered with them? Just add targets. They have 16 of these things and STILL nearly get overrun. They have to resort to supernova-ing the system. Good thing it wasn't Earth, eh?
• In the Dale Brown novel Flight of the Old Dog the Ice Fortress anti-ballistic missile system is supposedly able to use X-ray laser spam to destroy dozens to hundreds of missiles or warheads per munition.
• The 'gigawatt lasers' of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War count as about one each, given that even the early models are capable of hitting at least 20 targets a second. 300 years later that was up to about 1000 targets a second.
• In David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series, one of the staple weapons is the vehicle-mounted tribarrel, a weapon with three rotating barrels that shoots energy blasts (called "bolts") so fast that the bolts leaving the weapon appear to be a solid line, not individual bolts. The weapons scale up, too - his tanks in the series have both a tribarrel and a 20cm "main gun" that can literally cook mountainsides with one shot. The tribarrel is based on a cross between the real-life MG42 machine gun and the Gatling gun, both of which have beam-spam-class rates of fire.
• The Honor Harrington universe has an interesting mix. Due to reasons^note Advances in active and passive defenses (i.e. point-defense weapons, counter-missiles, electronic warfare systems (decoys, jammers, etc.) and shields) have basically (all things being equal) made it flat out impossible to hit a target warship with a missile, or even get close enough that a multi-megaton nuclear warhead will so much as scratch the paintwork., all missiles are actually stand-off, nuclear bomb-pumped laser platforms. So when a Macross Missile Massacre reaches attack range and detonates, it has a tendency to turn into a colossal beam spam given that each missile throws between four and eight lasers, and later in the series, even a relatively small engagement will involve a hundred plus missiles per salvo. In one particularly notable battle, the total number of missiles in flight was almost seven hundred thousand.
  • And that's just the missiles. If one considers the point-defense laser clusters trying to shoot incoming missiles down, it get even worse.
  • And all of the above disregards the laser/graser^note lasers, but with gamma rays rather than visible light broadsides that all warships of the setting carry. Yeah, Weber likes this one.
• Mandatory in Voidskipper space combat; when all the ships involved are dodging around at the speed of light your only real way to guarantee hits is area saturation, which needs a lot of firepower.
• Lensman:
  • E.E. "Doc" Smith was a master at this game — by the fifth book in his epic series, the enemy is using hyperspatial tubes to suddenly pop up out of nowhere and descend upon a hapless target. The beam spam anticipated upon their emergence is so horrific that a significant proportion of the Galactic Patrol's fleet is composed of drone battleships so as to keep the casualties down - the first few minutes of the engagement cost the Patrol ONE EIGHTH of its entire fleet.
  • By the end of the series, the beams have been substituted by whole planets and antimatter bombs of planetary size.
  • In the prehistory of the Galactic Patrol, its ancestor the Triplanetary Patrol forms the entire fleet into a cone-shaped formation which is pointed at the enemy, at which point the beam spam basically fuses into a Wave-Motion Gun type discharge.
• Material from Star Wars Legends makes it quite clear that if they want to, the bigger Star Destroyers are quite capable of this even without using all their weaponry. The Executor-class (the ones like Vader's ship) is specifically noted as seem to throw up "sheets" or "walls" of energy. This is often used for melting the face off a planet.
  • The Star Dreadnought Wrath◊ is the objectification of this trope, an application of the "maximum battleship" idea, taken to its extreme
• In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 Gaunt's Ghosts novel Necropolis, at one point, the Chaos forces have so many lasguns firing at the same time, that nobody can hear the individual shots being fired. Instead, they think that weird sound in the background is the wind blowing.
  • In Blood Pact, when the Chaos witch bursts into the room to attack Mabbon, Maggs kills her by simply unloading his lasgun at her, firing over two hundred shots at her and overwhelming her warp-shields. It even freaks him out.
• The Wheel of Time. Arrows of fire. Book 11. (Or: How to fully kill a Fade before nightfall)
  • Rand showed the ability to beam spam in book 11. He essentially generates one thousand beams with his bare hands.
• The Culture in at least one instance won, or rather preëmpted, a battle for a particular object by deploying approximately 10^5 semi-independent ships around it.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5:
  • The space station itself is shown to be armed with a number of laser-autocannons stretched along the spine of the station, capable of putting out impressive volumes of fire. In Season 2, this weapons grid is upgraded and in the Season 2 finale is shown to now have several Gatling-laser positions and several massive energy turrets added to it, quite capable of destroying a flagship battlecruiser belonging to a substantially more advanced alien race in a few bursts of concerted fire (aided by fighters strafing it as well).
  • Similarly, the sturdy Starfury, with two powerful but slow-firing energy cannons, is superseded by the Thunderbolt, which sacrifices power in favor of just having a laser minigun strapped to the front of it.
  • In the Battle of the Line, humanity brings every ship capable of fighting into Earth orbit, which provides ample cannon fodder for the Minbari beams:
    Sinclair: ...and the sky was full of stars, and every star was an exploding ship — one of ours.
• This turns up in Power Rangers now and again. Usually, the basic finisher is a Diagonal Cut, but as more and more mecha are added, they have to get snazzier. The third or fourth finisher to be introduced in a series is usually many weapons from all over the components' bodies being fired at once, for some very pretty death rays. Also, many Rangers-weapons-combined finishers are this, including the first.
  • The first season of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers had the Ultrazord, whose only attack was, you guessed it, a beam spam. The third season had another good example in the Shogun MegaFalconzord.
• In Smallville, "Bizarro", Clark combines heat vision and Super-Speed to vaporize a flood of all the water from a reservoir instantaneously. Behold.
• Star Trek may do it in the movies more often, but the shows employ it on rare occasions, too:
  • In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise was able to fire multiple rounds when needed—most notably in "Conundrum" and "The Survivor".
    • "Best of Both Worlds" proves that it was a good idea to stick some phaser strips everywhere they could find room — even on the nacelles.
    • In the Interactive Technical Manual it's stated that (supposedly) the arrangement of the phaser strips ensures that every point around the ship can be hit by two independent banks.
  • In an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Tuvok quells a riot by firing his hand phaser in a spread that blankets the bridge. Though beam-spreading like that isn't a new concept, it was never portrayed quite so effectively before.
  • Notable Deep Space Nine occurrences include the Defiant itself in every appearance, and the refit Excelsior class they encounter near Earth in one episode (subverted in that it and the Defiant are both duking it out with beam spam trying not to destroy each other and resultingly barely even hitting each other at point blank range).
    • Regularly occurs when a battle involves the station itself. When the Klingons attack the station in one episode looking for members of the Cardassian government, Sisko warns them how many photon torpedoes he has waiting for them, then demonstrates with a few rounds of high-tech More Dakka. When that doesn't back them off, his next order is "fire at will". Insert several minutes of mutual beam-spamming before the Klingons deploy boarding parties and the fight moves inside.

Manhua

• School Shock: The Queen Of Moths uses this as her take on the Dynamic Entry on the battle field of Beijing.

Music

• Trans-Siberian Orchestra's live shows embody this trope, save that TSO's lasers are of the non-damaging variety.

Roleplay

• In Touhou: a Glimmer of an Outside World, there are two spell-cards that qualify for this: the Ultimate Spark, through dint of being formed from four huge lasers, and the Twilight Spark, which is one massive laser ringed by lots and lots of curved ones.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech has several mechs built for laser spamming, however spamming lasers has the possibility to overload your reactor due to the heat from firing so many lasers at once. Many designs are still built to do so, since it's very, very viable.
  • The Medium Laser, a Boring, but Practical weapon in every sense of the word, is ideally suited for loading up heavily with them. Because of their small size and mass, an absurd number of them can be crammed onto a mech, and their modest damage, relatively (to other energy weapons) low heat/damage ratio, and passable range make firing a lot of them in one turn actually feasible if the mech's heat system is designed for it. Derivatives of the Medium Laser (Extended Range, Pulse, Heavy) don't pull it off quite as well as the original, though.
  • Taken to extremes with the Clan Black Hawk/Nova, a medium 'mech whose sole weaponry is 12 Clantech ER Medium Lasers (a quarter of the 'mech's weight is entirely made up of lasers). An Alpha Strike from the Black Hawk will deal 84 damage at a fairly decent range, but will also generate 60 heat, enough to take the Black Hawk just shy of 'instant shutdown from massive heat overload' territory. It is very much a 'mech made for Hit-and-Run Tactics.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • A Wizard or Sorcerer can learn the Magic Missile spell, which grants more and more magic missiles as they gain levels. In the 1st Edition, there's no limit on number of missiles, so it becomes the embodiment of this trope at the highest level. Sadly, later versions capped it at just five because it was just too much bang for a first level spell.
    • The Wizard's Compendium describes the Improved Magic Missile spell, which is a 3rd level spell that ups the limit to 10, but is otherwise identical. Considering that MM never misses and is effective against ghosts and other pesky incorporeal creatures, it has its uses.
    • Also, collecting splatbook cheese will allow you to fire a staggering 380 missiles in the span of 6 seconds of in-game time.
  • It's more effective with actual rays; D&D's third edition has a huge number of metamagic feats that can take basic ray spells and multiply the beams. Magic missiles are nothing compared to a Quickened Maximized Energy Admixtured Twinned Split Scorching Ray from an Artificer.
    • Use the right magic items and feats and it might be possible to fire off six of those at once. That's 72 shots for 48 points of damage each... at a minimum of 27,225 gold pieces cost just for the wand charges.
    • Then there's Empowered. That's a total of 5184 points of damage — 72x72. Also, the combination of Force Missile Mage (if the DM will allow it), Argent Savant, Incantatrix, and Spellwarp Sniper can be absolutely terrifying for a Magic Missile. Incantatrix to get free metamagics applied, Spellwarp Sniper to turn it into a ray so you can put stuff like Split and Twinned, Argent Savant for further damage, and Force Missile Mage for more damage and more missiles.
  • Though Magic Missile isn't that hot, its older brother Chain Missile moves the upper limit to ten missiles. Combine that with several castings of Delay Spell (which delays the activation of a spell until a later turn), and you can spend several rounds before firing off sixty or seventy never-miss missiles who then proceed to chase after secondary targets. It's a complete waste of time and higher level spell slots, but damn if it doesn't look cool.
  • One of the most famous monsters in the franchise is the Beholder, a floating mass of eyes and teeth that can fire Eye Beams from all of its many, many eyeballs, each with its own unique and powerful magical effect. A Beholder in battle is by definition a fountain of lethal, chaotic beam spam, requiring its enemies to pass a random string of difficult skill checks if they don't want to be slowed, paralysed, petrified, and/or simply disintegrated into a pile of dust, among many other exotic, unpleasant fates. To make matters worse, Beholders are canonically extremely smart, and will therefore carefully aim each and every one of those randomly-selected beams at the most vulnerable possible target.
• In Exalted, a 2E Solar can start with a combo containing Blazing Solar Bolt and Peony Blossom Attack. With sufficient creativity the end result resembles Kamehame Hadoken Beam Spam. Exalted 2.5 has errata'd this away because Blazing Solar Bolt and Peony Blossom Attack can no longer be used together.
• GURPS Ultra-Tech gives us the "Gatling Laser", a tripod-mounted weapon consisting of four "Dinosaur Lasers" (shoulder-fired BFGs "powerful enough to blow away a dinosaur"), each firing multiple times per second. Higher Tech Level versions include gamma-ray and x-ray models.
  • Star Fleet Battles offers the Gatling Phaser.
• This (along with More Dakka and Macross Missile Massacre) is why they let you link weapons in Mekton Zeta. If you don't mind the expense, you could set up a humanoid mecha, middleweight frame, which simply consists of a cockpit, primary sensors, and 44 individual light beam guns (assuming you haven't installed a pod, which at middleweight would add space for another dozen), all firing at once. If your GM is lenient and has given you a high CP allowance, you could crosslink all of these, so you fire 44 shots directly at your target's face. That's gotta hurt.
• The Imperial Guard in Warhammer 40,000. Each infantryman is armed with a lasgun, and they tend to field a lot of them. For kicks, their vehicles come with "multilasers". Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • In the words of 40k fans, "One lasgun does diddly. 50 lasguns, on the other hand, that's a shitload of diddly."
    • And let us not forget the "First line, Second line" Order from the 5th edition codex. Let us add one more shot to your Lasgun. Now imagine it at half range... With rapid fire... with a combined squad of 40 guardsmen.
  • The Tau fall along the same lines, though their numbers are fewer. Possibly the worst thing you can do against them (besides using transports) is to put a squad less than a foot away from a Fire Warrior group. The words "Rapid Fire" usually follow. The basic Fire Warrior weapon is a twin barreled plasma projecting Pulse Rifle that hits even harder than the standard Space Marine Bolter (despite the latter being a .75 caliber [19mm] rapid-fire mini-rocket launcher) and shoots further than every other race's basic weapon. Additionally, Tau Pathfinders and Gun Drones (as well as select Fire Warrior squads) carry Pulse Carbines which, while having less range than the Rifle, are Assault weapons (always able to fire at maximum fire rate, regardless if the unit moved or not) that also mount underslung photon grenade launchers which can cause hit units to become pinned down.
    • Meanwhile for their elite troops in Battlesuits, the smallest of the suits, the Stealth Suits, carry multi-barrelled Burst Cannons, which can be replaced with anti-armor/vehicle Fusion Blasters. Their Crisis and Broadside Battlesuits, in addition to the above, have access to the always popular Plasma Rifle^note which the Tau have solved the whole overheating problem the Imperium of Mankind suffers, by realizing that just being slightly across the line for a weapon being overkill is more than enough to deal with most of the galaxy's threats as it still retains the weapon armor melting capabilities. Crisis suits also have access to another Gatling Good weapon in the form of the Cyclic Ion Blasters^note essentially, the bastard child of a Burst Cannon combined with a Plasma Rifle. And then they went ahead and created the XV104 Riptide which by default, mounts a Heavy Burst Cannon that shred squads apart on its own (in addition to its Crisis suit sized sub-weapons). It can also mount an Ion Accelerator which can be overcharged for some Wave-Motion Gun goodness. Their vehicles which mount Ion Cannons of various flavors also join in on this.
    • Due to the Tau's utter ineptitude at melee (both in-game and in-universe), one would think that they'd be screwed if the enemy gets too close to them. However, 6th edition added the Overwatch rule, which means a unit being assaulted can fire off quick, if somewhat inaccurate, snapshots at their attackers, meaning Assault troops have to overcome this danger with some form of mobility, protection, sheer numbers, or some combination of all. This was compounded when the Tau codex got an update which allows nearby Tau units to use their Overwatch for a turn to assist another unit with their own, meaning that if you're playing against a skilled Tau Commander, he's probably quietly hoping you attempt to send a squad or two towards close-combat, while setting up a kill-box that gives him a bunch of free Beam Spam attacks each turn.
  • The Eldar, while mostly famous for their monomolecular shuriken launchers and other exotic toys, deserve at least a honorary mention for their laser weaponry, and can probably rival the Imperial Guard if they try. Their scatter lasers tend to have higher rate of fire than most Imperial weaponry (including the above multilasers), and their light walkers can come with two of them per piece at a reasonable point price. Oh, and there is also the Sunrifle, arguably the quickest-firing weapon carried by hand, and the Fire Prism, which, well, pretty much embodies this trope. It uses a refraction prism to create enough laser beams to either hit anything in a large radius, or project a "concentrated" beam with enough force to stand a chance of going through the thickest armors in the setting... over a somewhat smaller radius. Yep, Beam Spam indeed.
    • And now, Eldar Jetbikes, which are a Troops choice (the force organization slot with the highest cap), can take Scatter Lasers. On every single model in a squad. That's 40 shots from a full-sized squad. That's as many as four tens. And That's Terrible.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Apoqliphort Towers fires lasers from all of its spikes, as depicted in the artwork of Laser Qlip.

Video Games

• In Asura's Wrath, Berserk Asura combines this with Kamehame Hadoken to take out an entire fleet of ships.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Variant: Combine the Spell Timestop with Improved Alacrity (removes delay between spells) and the "Robe of Vecna (lower casting time). You can then cast ALL your magic missiles, Acid Arrows, Flame Arrows plus a host of other spells (all the way to tenth level Infinity Plus One spells like Dragon's Breath or Comet), and they will all be fired at the target at the same time once the Timestop ends. There Is No Kill Like Overkill.
  • In the first Baldur's Gate, when you see Gorion battling Sarevok, Gorion unleashes a huge barrage of magic missiles at a time that, due to experience caps, you are unable to in the game. However, in the sequel, you are limited to 5 no matter what level you are. But that still can't stop you from getting a party of 6 rested mages to cast alacrity, then time stop at the same time so that at the end, they simultaneously (one after another with a nanosecond in between) unleash a red wave of doom upon the target. Give each one a spell sequencer (carrying three magic missile spells each) and a spell contingency (also three magic missile spells and set to "attacked"), then during their time stop turn have them each take a corner of a hexagon around the desired enemy and unleash the sequencers and as many memorized magic missiles as possible. Even if you only fire off 10 spells per mage, the target will be obliterated by [(1sequencer+1contingency)(3spells)+(10memorized)](5missiles)(6mages) = 480 missiles!
• Bangai-O can switch between this and a Macross Missile Massacre for its special attack.
• In The Binding of Isaac, an overpowered combination of Brimstone and Chocolate Milk allows you to spam the Brimstone beam free of charge by tapping a fire button.
• In Bloons Tower Defense 4, the Sun God monkeys and the Mega-Sun-God-Temple-Thing ARE this trope, especially in later levels when the game starts lagging.
• Lavos' main attack in Chrono Trigger is a technique called "Destruction Rains from the Heavens". In the Day of Lavos he rises from the underground and use it to destroy the world and leave it in a nuclear winter so he can spawn new lavoid forms in the surface of the planet and dispatch them to repeat the process in new worlds.
• Crab Spider Soldiers villain archetype in City of Heroes have a power similar to Beam Spam, although the number of blasts might not reach the level of spam regularly seen elsewhere.
  • Masterminds in City of Heroes, if they choose the Robotics powerset, can have dozens of beams spraying all over the screen from their various minions- each of the three lowest-level drones has an attack that fills the screen with laser fire, and if all of them go off at once, well...
  • Similarly, equip enemies in the Mission Architect with Robots, and you get the same thing, except aimed at you instead.
• Similarly, Command & Conquer: Renegade has a laser minigun, which is just a teeny bit overkill when you consider the normal laser rifle already has a high rate of fire.
• Getting Quick and Plasma in Copy Kitty will result in this, called Luster Shooter. Getting a third powerup will add more properties to it.
• Command & Conquer: Generals add-on Zero Hour introduces the US Avenger - mobile rapid-discharge-laser anti-aircraft battery. Deploying a few of these creates spectacular laser shows whenever an aircraft gets in the range . . . and renders nearly all aerial assaults a complete waste of time and resources.
• In Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, the laser turrets of the Brotherhood of Nod can be arranged into a 3 cannon array (and with an upgrade, it can be 4). Make a bunch of them surrounding your base and you'll be blazing light tanks into oblivion from the sheer number of laser beams hitting them and that's not including any Beam Spam from laser-armed tanks and infantry you have for your Noddies.
• One of the Cosmic Break Japan clan tournaments was composed of nothing but robots with Lasers and Short Boost, an "upgrade" that lets your robots jump rather than dash.
• Crimzon Clover puts this at the player's disposal, in the form of rapid-fire homing lasers.
• Cursed Treasure. Got a whole line of regular, Burning, and/or Hellfire temples on each side of the pat? The enemies had better prepare to get PWNED!
• In the Ringed City Downloadable Content for Dark Souls III, you encounter Angels: winged, vaguely insectoid creatures capable of unleashing ridiculous hails of laser death on you. Naturally, they cannot be killed without finding specific vulnerable "pupae" hidden somewhere in the map, and of course the third one you meet is in the middle of a giant toxic swamp that makes dodging hard, offers little cover, and poisons you, this is a From Software game.
• The Multilock move from Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening has Dante fire multiple shots at a single target with the Artemis demonic energy weapon, if admittedly quite lacking compared to most of the other examples here.
• In the first two Doom games, the BFG9000 is implemented internally as a beam spam weapon. The visual effects do not reflect this.
  • Technically, when the BFG9000's shot detonates, the game fires forty 2D rays from the player's viewpoint spaced out horizontally across the screen. Anything that one of these hits takes 15d8 damage and has the visual effect show up on it. The BFG was supposed to act more like this in the beta, where instead of the massive green bolt of plasma it fires now, it fired out dozens of green and red balls that bounced off walls. This was Dummied Out because the tons of plasma orbs on the screen caused severe framerate drops, and because it "looked like Christmas."
  • Doom 64 features a weapon called the "Unmaker" (referred to in-game as, "What the $%#@$ is this?!") that, upon finding three artifacts scattered throughout the game, fires three beams in a single shot. Combined with its rapid firing rate, a fully powered Unmaker can quickly take down even the final boss.
• Dungeon Siege has a race of Not-Beholder monsters that spam laser/light beams out of their tentacles/eyestalks in every direction, giving the dark caves they are encountered in something of a 70s disco feel.
• In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, an item can be enchanted with a damaging "On Target" spell. Equip the newly enchanted item and select it from the magic menu. Congrats! You now have what some fans refer to as a "magic machine gun." Unlike casting a regular spell which costs magicka and requires time for a casting animation, you can launch your enchanted attack as fast as you can click the mouse/button until the item runs out of charge. Just be careful of using it on enemies with reflect...
• Elite Dangerous has this with Conflict Zones in certain systems. They look like giant Rave Parties with more lasers and death.
• Empire at War:
  • The Empire has an anti-fighter corvette ship called the Tartan. The Tartan has the special ability to fire pretty much every gun at once. Max space unit per side in battle is 20 for the Empire in Galactic Conquest mode. Tartan's are 2 population each. 10 Tartans + special = LASER CANNON DAKKA.
  • This counts for any massed unit that uses lasers. Tartan's are just the most beam spam/dakka-ish. Even ground units can count if one uses a mod to remove the in-battle population cap, if you can manage to land all of them before the AI rushes your reinforcement point.
• Design-wise, this is the hat of Polaris and Vell-os ships in Escape Velocity Nova.
• The Amarr in EVE Online are very fond of their infidel-purifying lasers, but the Abaddon-class battleship is in particular known for it's picturesque beam spam broadsides◊. Sansha loves beam spam even more.
• Fallout:
  • The Gatling Laser weapon probably qualifies (especially the weapon in the third game and its "Precision" variant and Vengence). It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • The Tri-Beam Laser Rifle of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas is a downplayed version of this as it fires 3 beams as fast as a person can fire it but it's hard to find and harder to repair as it's quite flimsy and carried by tough foes such as Super Mutant Overlords and the Mojave Brotherhood of Steel chapter.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • The Laser RCW^note Rapid Capacitor Weapon is a laser tommy gun that uses the same ammo as the Gatling Laser while simultaneously being cheaper, easier to find and repair, uses less ammo with it's Recycler mod, and requires less skill to use, making it a more viable weapon at the cost of less power.
    • Mr. Houses' Securitrons also have their own variant of the Gatling Laser to use on hostiles and undesirables trying to enter New Vegas.
  • With the Fallout 4 Automotron DLC, you can build yorself a Robot Buddy with a Gatling Laser in each arm. At that point you can safely take a coffee break while it melts everything in the area.
• Fate/stay night:
  • Caster is such a master of this trope that she beamspams beamspams. In essence, she takes spells that ought to take at least thirty seconds to cast for a very good magus speed casting and does them instantly. Over and over and over, effortlessly. This is only possible on her home turf though, so normally she fights in a much more subtle manner.
  • Also, according to outside sources, Berserker's Nine Lives noble phantasm is essentially "an anti-phantasm beast, dragon-type 9-shot simultaneous homing laser volley." That's right, he can shoot out nine homing dragon lasers with a bow. Too bad that being summoned as a Berserker prevents him from using it.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX versions of Alexander shoot off dozens (upon dozens, in the second case) of beams of Holy magic. Alexander VIII shoots them from deployable cannon batteries mounted on its shoulders, whereas Alexander IX releases them from its city-spanning wings. In the latter case, they're also of the homing variety.
  • Final Fantasy XIII:
    • Alexander makes a return, using similar Beam Spam tactics. It's also a favored form of attack for Barthandelus.
    • The boss named Proudclad, which is a giant two-form Humongous Mecha, has a habit of turning the tides in any battle against it... By first using "Limiters Removal", which heals itself to pretty much full HP, and then spamming its Attack Drone attack against the leader. As long as you have Snow a Sentinel in your active party, things should work out just fine, though.
  • In Final Fantasy X, the Aeon Valefor's second Overdrive, Energy Blast, is very much this.
    • Tidus's Energy Rain Overdrive also counts.
    • The Holy spell also manifests as this.
  • The Final Fantasy XIV version of Bahamut's Megaflare and Teraflare are also this, with the latter having laid waste to nearly all of Eorzea itself. The player also has access to Teraflare as their Limit Break as a Summoner.
    • The same game also features a number of Garlean magitek weapons for more traditional beam spam, usually coming in the form of bit adds that shoot lasers from numerous directions
    • Construct 7 from the Ridorana Lighthouse will sweep the entire arena with shotgun-burst style lasers and during its second phase, it'll move even faster when turning around.
    • NieR: Automata's Hobbes does this to the entire raid for unavoidable Area of Effect damage every so often, increasing his barrage the angrier he gets as his HP lowers.
• Glue a massive amount of Laser L parts onto any Fraxy boss and you're done!
• In FreeSpace 2 a large battle can have so many beams flying everywhere that it makes the picture at the top of this article look like nothing in comparison. This Battle starts with first showcasing a Macross Missile Massacre and then going full Beam Spam with a dozen capital ships.
• From the Depths: The point of laser weapon systems and anti-missile lasers. The more individual laser systems pummeling the target the faster it gets destroyed or disabled.
• FTL: Faster Than Light: Beam weapons never miss and deal damage to every room they hit. Coupled with beam drones, it means world of hurt for the ship... if you can keep their shields down. There is even an achievement called "Slice and Dice" that requires you to hit every room of the enemy ship with a beam within 5 seconds interval.
• In Galactic Civilizations 2, just try attacking a starbase with every available weapon upgrade. It'll unleash this, Macross Missile Massacre, and More Dakka at the same time with enough force to reduce unprepared^note and many prepared attackers to powder.
• Gratuitous Space Battles loves this trope, although it's best used with some support.
• The Type-5 Weapon in Gun Nac, which when fully upgraded, fires six beams with each attack.
• In Higurashi Daybreak, when Rika is using a mop as her weapon, she can Beam Spam cannons of water.
• The Homeworld series loves this trope. The first game has the Kadeshi Multibeam frigates, tiny little ships that have four titanic ion cannons squeezed in. When firing, they "sweep" space in front of them, making them almost more of a danger to fighter squadrons than capital ships. The sequel has its own version of the Multibeam Frigate, which takes eight beam emitters and plants them all over the ship's hull, making it an unholy terror when diving into fighter swarms (it's named the 'Dervish' for a reason). And Homeworld 2 has Pulsar Gunship squadrons, which are capable of outright swarming enemy ships with tiny little ion beams.
  • And this isn't even getting into Ion Cannon Frigates or the Progenitor Dreadnought, which edge closer to Wave Motion Guns (though the Dreadnought also has anti-fighter beam turrets all over its hull) except for the fact that you can have dozens of the frigates all firing at a single target. And then there is Sajuuk, with a Phased Cannon Array even bigger than the dreadnoughts' and guaranteed-hit nanite beam cannons for point defense.
  • Best option: 1) Go into "versus" match. 2) Put unit limit to "maximum". Build pulsar gunships, ion frigates and battlecruisers until your unit cap is full. 3) Enjoy your beam spam. Or even better, make a versus match with 5 friends, and tell them all to do the same thing.
• Ikaruga's charge attack.
• Iji:
  • The final boss makes extensive use of this as well a couple other types of projectile spam. There's also the Alpha Strike, which is basically a bunch of alien ships getting together and beamspamming an entire planet to death.
  • And Asha. Specifically, his supermoves Plasma Rage and Plasma Vortex.
• Jak and Daxter:
  • The Beam Reflexor. "It's an upgrade to the sniper weapon", you say. "It doesn't have that high a rate of fire", you say. Then you see what happens when a) you're mashing the trigger and b) the blasts are rebounding in all directions. Combine this with the jump — spin — shoot combo (which fires five shots at a faster rate than normal) and you get a LOT of bouncing lasers.
  • Let's not forget the upgrade that comes after, the Gyro Burster. It fires an Attack Drone that fires fifty shots in all directions. Sadly, they don't rebound.
  • The Needle Lazer has the same high fire rate as the Vulcan Fury, but each shot consists of three lasers that home in on enemies.
• Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds has the Martians indulging in this whenever they get the Tempest or any large amount of units.
• In Kero Blaster, the third form of the starter weapon is the Lazer, which fires a powerful Death Ray which on a clean hit is the deadliest single projectile in the game, but has a slow rate of fire. The fourth and final form is the Lazer Uzi, whose shots are very slightly weaker individually but can fire more than twice as fast.
• Most powerful characters and Organization XIII members in Kingdom Hearts can use this.
  • Xemnas can not only summon handheld laser blades, but regularly uses them as projectiles. For his last-ditch attack in Kingdom Hearts II, he surrounds Sora and Riku with a giant dome of laser beams and then unleashes them all at once.
  • Xigbar also uses this in his Desperation Attack, the final part of it assailing you with dozens of lasers from multiple angles.
  • Marluxia also does this is the PS2 remake of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. His "ultimate" sleight during the final battle, Omni Laser, causes one of the rings rotating around the battlefield to fire an array of continuous beams inward at Sora. Marluxia will attempt the sleight up to three times as he does with his other attacks during this battle. Appropriately for a villain's ultimate attack, the cards he uses for this are all fours.
  • The version of Ragnarok used in Kingdom Hearts 3D has Sora and his dream eaters combine into a sphere of light that proceeds to bombard every enemy in the vicinity with countless lasers from every angle.
• A laser monsoon was seen in the game Knights of the Old Republic when the Sith fleet bombarded Taris.
• In Lost Planet, there's a weapon called the Homing Laser. It can shoot out up to four homing beams at once. Typical VS' can mount two of these. Do the math.
• The super move of Sarara from Magical Battle Arena, where she attacks a target by firing thirteen beams at the same time from her Attack Drones and mechanical bow.
• The second and third Master of Orion games allowed you to make rapid-fire versions of some beam weapons, with further research after developing the weapons. Load up the larger ships with such weapons, and it's pretty much "game over" for the other guy if you're anywhere near at parity with their tech levels.
• MechWarrior:
  • The games have the alpha strike, a special emergency action that fires all the guns, regardless of type, guidance or intended range. This can mean More Dakka, Macross Missile Massacre, Beam Spam or any combination of the three according to what weapons the given Mech is mounting.
  • Due to the series' general appreciation for Death of a Thousand Cuts, a perfectly viable weapon loadout is to fill every beam slot available on a Mech (this can get into the double digits for dedicated energy-based models) with small lasers. Alpha-striking with such a configuration can turn light mechs into frighteningly effective short-range armor destroyers, as they're fast enough to avoid most of the damage from the big guys while concentrating laser fire into one specific body area.
• Mega Man X: Command Mission:
  • X's Charged Attack certainly qualifies. His Hyper Mode charge shot qualifies even more especially since you can now unload everything on one target or simply pick who you want to blow up.
  • If that is all you have then forget it, you haven't seen Ultimate X armor. The minute that comes on, you can not only unload all your ammunition's worth on your opponent but you can also change targets when you are certain you killed your opponent Deader than Dead.
  • In X4 through X6, Zero has Giga Attacks that do this: the Rakukouha from X4 which launches projectiles in a half-circle, stoppable by walls, the Messenkou from X5 which is almost the same except from looking different and going through walls, and the Rekkouha from X6 which is Beam Spam in its truest sense, launching straight beams from above and below the screen.
• Metroid:
  • Although it's supposedly not her preferred M.O., Samus Aran's Arm Cannon can certainly qualify as Beam Spam, considering the unlimited ammo (the Power Beam in the Prime games can literally fire as fast as you can press A).
  • Super Metroid has the Spazer Beam, which isn't short for "Spam Laser", but should be. It triples the output of the other beams (except the Plasma Beam, which it can't be combined with) resulting in a wider field of fire.
  • The Hyper Mode's charge beam in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is literally a Beam Spam, firing so fast the blast forms a near-constant stream.
  • Metroid (Manga) also had an example in the form of Kreatz.
  • Metroid: Samus Returns introduces the "Beam Burst" Aeion ability lets Samus shoot a volley of lasers at a machine gun rate of fire.
• In Naval Ops, the pulse laser is a small weapon system that you can litter all your ships especially those of the battleship class. As the ultimate point-defence gun, you can easily gun down entire barrages of missiles and fleets of aircraft trying to divebomb you. In Warship Gunner 2, if you have Enigmatech H every weapon you have will be fired automatically making an all energy weapon ship a massive light show.
• Nexus: The Jupiter Incident has a race known only as the Ghosts. Their ships are armed with only lasers, which are weapons designed for precision targetting of subsystems in order to disable the enemy and escape. However, the Ghost lasers also do some hull and shield damage, and they have many of those. Several Ghost ships beam-spamming a single target can take it out in short order. The laser flak grids automatically fires at enemy fighters and missiles. It looks like multiple pulsing beams criss-crossing at the target.
• Most weapons in Outpost 2 are relatively slow firing (about one shot per second if you're lucky) and don't get any substantial upgrades to their rate of fire, so the Tiger heavy tank compensates this by mounting two of whatever weapon it's given. Then however you have the Laser and Microwave, which can get a very noticeable speed increase on top of the fastest rate of fire in the game. So if you put either one of them on a Tiger... Yeah.
• The Panzer Dragoon series' playable dragons' Berserk attacks, along with Atolm Dragon's "Ne-rai" move in Saga.
• The Vanu Sovereignty in PlanetSide use lasers and Plasma Cannons as often as possible, turning their infantry into walking laser raves. Elevated in Planetside 2 with its day-night cycles, where VS weapons put out an amazing lightshow at night that simultaneously blinds both the target and the user.
• P.N.03's Falcon Energy Drive combines this with a Spin Attack, firing four rotating lasers. Some bosses, especially the Final Boss after it Turns Red for the second time, have One-Hit Kill beam spam attacks.
• In the Spin-Off series Pokémon Ranger, Metagross, Kangaskhan, and Past Arceus love to spam beam attacks like there's no tomorrow.
• Quake II:
  • The Blaster and Hyperblaster normally fired little solid blocks of energy. A very simple mod could change this into a hitscan laser. Even without the mod, the Hyperblaster was basically a gatling energy weapon. If two people were dueling with them...
  • Also, the Quake II version of the BFG (BFG10k) fulfills the trope: It fires a green ball that fires lasers on all targets in the vicinity of its trajectory. When it hits a solid object, it explodes in a similar way to the original Doom BFG: The game checks if a line-of-sight can be drawn from the target to the ball's location of detonation and from the detonation site to the player who fired the weapon in the first place. If both lines of sight are met, the target is going to take a heap of damage and this is applied to all possible targets. Reportedly, it is a good tactic to fire the BFG into the ceiling in a room with a bunch of other players in a deathmatch game.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • RY3NO in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal becomes this after upgraded to V2 instead of just Macross Missile Massacre. At V5 those beams converge and obliterate everything on screen.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal brings us Harbinger, albeit this is more Kill Sat-y variety. Quasar-Turret Launcher and its turrets shooting enemies with lasers is straighter example. Then there is Landstalker and 70mm Stalker Turrets and their plasma mortars.
  • Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction has the RYNO IV again. Beam Spam with HOMING LASERS!
• The Light Gun arcade shooter Razing Storm has ALL of its Mecha-Mooks use this on the player, be they Mini-Mecha, Humongous Mecha or the Cool Airship Final Boss.
• In Red Shift by Diseased Productions^note creator of the Thing-Thing series it is possible to obtain several lasers for your fighter spacecraft. Some of them have truly nasty rate of fire.
• Anything with 'Diffusion' in the name in an R-Type game. Also the intro movie for Final. A Beam Spam of Wave Motion Guns fired from regular fighters.
• The Advent in Sins of a Solar Empire have a serious love of beam weapons. The Halcyon Carrier capital ship carries up to 7 squadrons of bombers (which are armed with beam weapons) in addition to the 8 heavier beam cannons mounted on the ship itself. And of course you can mass bombers with the Advent. With the researches and the new pacts system in Diplomacy it's not unreasonable to arrive at an advent planet which has no ships defending it and be set upon by no less than 30 bomber squadrons...each of which has 7-10 bombers beam spamming your ships. Can make for a rather quick death for smaller ships when focused.
• Solatorobo: Red the Hunter has Titano-Machina Lares and Lemures do this to fend off airships (not that one of them ever actually manages to hit Chocolat) and open a rift for Tartaros, then once they are taken over by Elh and Béluga, turn that same attack against Tartaros to open a hole in its shields for Red.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In the shooting battle mode of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, 20 rings will give you one of these to unleash on your opponent.
  • The Egg Wyvern and Solaris both do this in the 2006 game. And in Sonic Colors, the Egg Nega Wisp fires laser beams one at a time, but eventually going so fast you barely have time to react inbetween!
• Beam weapons are cheap and small in the Space Empires games, and are suitable for deploying en masse.
• In Star Control, the Earthling Cruiser's secondary weapon -a Star Wars-surplus Point-defense laser — while weak and of slow-fire can fire at any number of targets, but just one beam per target in theory In practice, however, thanks to a bug the point-defense can be nastier to an enemy.
• StarCraft II:
  • The Battlecruiser outputs a constant stream of laser bolts. Attacking with a dozen takes the beam spam to a whole new level.
  • A late-game Protoss "death-ball" will consist of zealots, stalkers, sentries, colossi and void rays. Of these, the zealot is the only one that doesn't shoot lasers.
  • Zealots dual-wield laser arm blades and rush their enemy instead.
• In Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, Maria (the game's only gunslinger) has an ability that's basically More Dakka with lasers. Souping up this ability is a common tactic with Freya. You can see it in action in this video, where it probably hits 20 times for 20,000HP each.
• Star Ruler lets you put twenty or more laser cannons on a ship. It also lets you put hundreds of those ships (or more!) in a single fleet.
• Star Trek Online:
  • You can achieve an effect like this with the right ship and weapons equipped (and you can use the space bar to fire all available weapons at once). And since each kind of attack (Phaser, disruptor, plasma, tetryon, etc) all come in different colors, it can resemble a Care Bear Stare as well....
  • The ability Beam Fire at Will embodies this trope by firing all of your ship's beam weapons at anything and everything in range... at once.
• Star Wars video games tend to have capital ships do this. The X-Wing series and the Jump to Lightspeed expansion of Star Wars: Galaxies are the most notorious examples (the latter featuring a Star Destroyer with 100 turrets — taking one down was as much a competition against the lag that they produced as anything else).
• In Star Wars: The Old Republic, Commandos do this with their assault cannons (most of which have multiple barrels and some of which are bigger than they are). The skill Full Auto is the primary damage-dealer for Commandos and gets lots of buffs as you gain levels, too.
• Star Wars: Battlefront brings us the Chaingun and the Repeating Blasters. DAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKA
• A legitimate option for capital ships in late-game Stellaris is to fill every weapon slot with powerful beam weapons and just incinerate everything. Of particular note are Fallen Empires, who do this not with ordinary beam weapons, but tachyon lances.
• In a rare Puzzle Game example, the level "Trigger Happy" in SubTerra (plus its "extra snappy" variant in an expansion pack, which is worse).
• In regular Super Robot Wars, The Rein Weissritter can use Flash Step to Beam Spam all by itself with only one gun.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • In Super Smash Bros. Melee, the Master and Crazy Hands can fire lasers from all five fingers at once. It's only dangerous if you get caught in the center of the stage, though, which is unlikely due to the long charge-up time — unless you're fighting both at once and don't notice one of them.
  • All over the place in Super Smash Bros. Brawl's story mode, "Subspace Emissary", but the most notable one is during the attack on the ship carrying the Subspace Cannon. The heroes have to dodge ridiculous amounts of beam-spam — with lasers bigger than the ships they're flying in, no less — while Kirby closes in on his Dragoon.
  • In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's story mode, "World of Light", Galeem does this in the opening cutscene, wiping out not just all of the fighters, but every character who appears as a Spirit (minus Kirby).
• Sword of the Stars:
  • A viable tactic, as beam weapons are far more accurate than projectile weapons. Fill up a Freighter Q with phasers, wait for the next pirate raid, and hilarity ensues.
  • Not to mention the titular class of dreadnought for humans whose primary weapons are a dozen heavy laser cannons, all forward-facing. Makes short work of most enemies. The drawback is it can only fire those at a single enemy. The awesomeness of this ship was unrivaled until the addition of railcannons, which are not only more powerful but also have a much longer range, as well as causing the target to fly away and spin uncontrollably.
• In Syndicate Wars, almost every weapon is a self-charging energy weapon (including the uzi and mini-gun). You have 4 agents who can around and mind-control the local population (who will help themselves to guns lying around) and enemy agents. So you can have a small army blazing away at your enemies with a storm of energy pulses and laser beams.
• Tachyon: The Fringe had one particular ship/weapon combo which embodied this — the GalSpan Phoenix heavy bomber, fitted with as many Deimos Heavy Lasers as it could muster. Five of those firing in unison, especially in linked fire, could fry any shield in one shot and breach the hull in three. And you still had your pick of missiles, chatter cannon, railgun etc for the other hardpoints.
• Sekundes from Tales of Eternia was designed as a throwback to Dhaos, hence retaining Dhaos Laser (Or Sekundes Laser if you will) as well as having a new arte named Million Assault, a beatdown that ends with a Sekundes Blast, and then three Sekundes Lasers in a row.
• Tales of Symphonia has the Judgment and Ray spells, which function like this.
• In Tales of the Abyss Guy has Mystic arte of the Slash variant: Brilliant Overlord
• In Tales of Vesperia, Dhaos has this as his Limit Break.
• The Talos Principle: Advanced beam puzzles in the later game stages can end up looking pretty spectacular, especially in open areas with good sight lines.
• Terraria:
  • The Wall of Flesh spams lasers when he gets to low health.
  • And some of the later bosses repeat this. If you are still affected by knockback while fighting The Destroyer, prepare to get stuck in the air due to the amount of lasers he shoots.
• In TerraTech, the player can equip their tech with as many laser guns as they fancy. Twenty or so is enough to unleash a storm of damage that can overwhelm most enemies. Late-game weapons such as the Better Future gatling laser can beam spam single-handedly.
• The entire cast of the Touhou Project series has some form of Beam Spam at their disposal, with a notable example being Shou Toramaru. Curving lasers. That briefly pause. She also loves lasers that turn into bullets, as does Nue's Danmaku Chimera attack.
  • Sariel's opening attack from the first game certainly qualifies.
  • THIS. Just... watch it. Shame such artillery gets used on a frigging soccer ball.
  • What's better than spamming lots of bullets? Spamming your Kamehame Hadouken, which Marisa does in her last word, "Blazing Star".
  • Special mention goes to Hinanawi Tenshi, who has about half of her attacks based off of either ridiculously huge or a ridiculous amount of lasers.
• Aozaki Aoko of Tsukihime uses both martial arts and Beam Spams when fighting, as seen in Melty Blood. This ranges from needle-thin shots to beams launched off her fists and her leg when in midair (which sweeps the entire screen with blue fire).
• Similar to the D&D Time Stop combination mentioned above under Tabletop gaming, Ultima Underworld for the PC had a Time Stop spell as well. At the upper levels, this allowed you to fling vast quantities of items, fire arrows, and blast spells at the opponent, limited only by the fact that if they collided with one another before the opponent, most of them would be harmlessly destroyed. More amusingly, running into your own arrows in mid-flight could kill you even before the spell expired.
• Approached in Unreal Tournament 2003, where the prequel's Plasma Gun is retooled as the Link Gun, with plenty of Beam Spam potential. Using alt-fire, the entire team can link-fire their guns at each other, granting the end user with ridiculous power. Unreal Tournament 2004 adds Link Turrets to the mix. Though they cannot target each other, they play nicely with Link Gun users.
  • Even with all the possibilities that the Link Gun adds, it just isn't quite like having two full teams of 16 players armed with the Instagib on a small map. It adds a whole new meaning to "Beam Spam" in video games.
  • Super Berserk mutator + Shock Rifle = exaggeration of this trope.
• The Lock-On Laser in Vanquish is of the Roboteching type. The Bogey boss at the end of the first act has an even more spammy laser attack.
• In Veck SE, the player's ship maxes out at firing 1,575 bullets per second.
• Vega Strike provides fireworks even in usual fights, but some stations got lots of turrets, and capships have a handful of these plus their own mounts, so... if someone shoots at your ship when you're landing at a Starfortress and misses, frantic zapping may ensue — by the way, all these beams are dual-mounted. And that's how a close battle involving half a dozen or so capships (which sometimes happens at jump points) looks like.
• In Viewtiful Joe, the Omnipotent King Blue uses a Beam Spam as one of his various and obnoxious attacks: he throws out his staff, which lines up with Joe's Humongous Mecha, and then fires off a beam to each side... while even MORE beams rain down from the heavens. You actually have the Hunt The Pixel between the beams to avoid the attack, and the staff can only be avoided by tricking it into attacking during a jump, so that you land lower than it.
• However strange it may seem, the final form of the final boss from Wario Land The Shake Dimension, aka the Shake King has multiple attacks involving an absolutely gigantic laser beam being fired at Wario, as well as multiple fireballs being sent everywhere at the same time. And another attack involving about five columns of lightning bolts being fired down from the top of the screen.
• Both the player and (eventually) the enemy in Warning Forever. The montrous foe can combine this with Macross Missile Massacre.
• The World Ends with You:
  • After a certain plot event, Joshua can use Beam Spam attacks; a certain combo finisher has more in common with a Wave-Motion Gun instead.
  • The final boss beamspams fireballs. Thank God for Neku's dodge ability.
• Does moonfire spam count? Moonfire does look like a Kill Sat...
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown
  • Heavy Lasers don't fire only one beam like other laser weapons, but eight separate ones in rapid sequence. The Laser mini-cannon upgrade for S.H.I.V.s fires even more lasers and even faster. The Laser Cannon aircraft weapon is one of the fastest firing in the game, spamming the target UFO with laser beams.
  • Plasma weapons usually fire single projectiles semi-automatic mode, or very short bursts. Two notable exceptions are the Outsider firing his Light Plasma Rifle in a six-projectile burst, and the Heavy Plasma when wielded by XCOM's Heavies: contrasting with the usual "three semi-automatic shots" when they're carried by Muton Elites, Heavies fire them in a fast continuous eight-shot salvo.
• In Xenosaga, KOS-MOS's most popular weapon, the X-Buster, is a spread-beam laser cannon fired from her stomach. A perfect example of this Trope.
• The Kha'ak of the X-Universe games are fond of Beam Spam, as the only weapon they can mount are lasers. Kha'ak capital ships mount dozens of laser cannons pointing in every direction, leading to Kha'ak sector invasions being a giant laser rave of death. This is a small example of their beam spam.
• In Zero K the units Archangel, Detriment, and Scorpion never stop shooting lasers when a target is near.
• Zone of the Enders.
  • The Homing Laser is Jehuty's main method of clearing swarms of Mecha-Mooks. Many other Orbital Frames in the series can pull it off as well.
  • It seems that pretty much any orbital frame designed to actually carry a pilot has one of these, and all of them have that homing principle. Those that the game's main antagonist, Anubis, fires though, take the "homing" part to a whole new level of silly — they move by zigzagging here and there gradually in an angular pattern.

Webcomics

• Dragon Ball Multiverse: Comes with the territory. The Saiyans use this to overkill Frieza and Zarbon in Universe 3.
• In Outsider, Loroi cruisers have several beam weapon turrets, large ones used for ship-to-ship combat and smaller ones used for point defense against enemy torpedoes (the preferred tactic of their main enemy, the Umiak). Combat against the Umiak means hundreds of beams going in every direction.
• xkcd uses it to light up the Moon. If billions of laser pointers don't do the job, then billions of superlasers will.

Web Originals

• In the first book of Dimension Heroes, Rob is infamous for using this trope to try to defeat his enemies, and oftentimes failing.
• Legend, of Worm, is capable of projecting lasers from any point on his body. He can also make them turn corners.

Western Animation

• Exo Squad features this all the time — it was the Western counterpart to Gundam, after all.
• The Justice League Unlimited episode "The Return" has a rather funky one. Most of the space-capable Leaguers are hovering in low orbit, along with most of their Javelins. Amazo approaches, Green Lantern yells "Light 'im up!", and black space abruptly turns all kinds of pretty colours. Naturally, it doesn't work, Amazo being a Physical God at this point. Sure looks cool, though. Link.
• Although we never actually see the effect, in an episode of ReBoot, Matrix enters an unfriendly bar. When threatened by a lot of bad guys, he simply says "Gun, Death Blossom Mode". Gun immediately starts spinning in a stationary globe and every single resident of the bar soon finds a red dot on their chest or head. Presumably the prelude to an epically devastating Beam Spam attack; shame we never get to see it.
• In Steven Universe, Blue Diamond has the ability to manipulate energy, which includes making it rain energy beams. She reveals this in "Reunited" against the Crystal Gems, just to show how powerful she is as a Diamond compared to them.

Real Life

• Sunbeam spam◊. Or a reverse beam spam. The tower is actually the target of hundreds of mirrors directing reflected beams of sunlight at a single point.
• The bomb-pumped laser, a multi-directional bloom of extremely high-powered x-ray lasers powered by a nuclear bomb that never left the design boards and ended up inspiring several science fiction weapons (including the one mentioned in the Honor Harrington entry, above). Obviously a single-shot weapon, it was intended as a defense against a massive Soviet weapons launch as part of the Star Wars system. Conceived of by Edward Teller, who is also known for the H-bomb and proposals to dig a deep-water harbour with multi-megaton nuclear bombs.
  • The multi-beam version was meant to be based on specialized Excalibur satellites. The actual test of the basic concept showed that it probably didn't work even as a single beam.^note To be more accurate, in the one test the US Government ran, the entire rig, bottom to top (including the x-ray sensor that was supposed to catch the laser beam) was destroyed in the shot, unavoidably. Teller's crew reported a success (and thereby apparently sank the Reykjavik nuclear accords singlehandedly), but it was later discovered that the result was too inconclusive and may have just been a sensor artifact. The test was never repeated.
  • Fusion ignition by laser is, however, an ongoing subject of research.
• Lasers as a means of destroying Improvised Explosive Devices is currently under research by the United States Department of Defense. Judging from the video, that version can switch on and off with little downtime.
• Even better: Directed Energy weaponry for the U.S. Navy is being undertaken for ship weaponry. Such as this and this.
• Behold the Dazzler, essentially a mounted flashbang that shoots non-lethal laser beams into a target's face leaving them temporarily disabled for a few minutes. Really useful if not outright scary.
• Fantasy & Science Fiction once ran an article which, as a thought experiment, calculated how many supermarket pen lasers it would take to build a working anti-missile defense system (and thus explain the technical difficulties behind such a system). The answer was, "Several million." In a What If? blog post, Randall Munroe takes this idea to the max, beginning with "What if everyone on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon?" and upgrading to more powerful light sources (law enforcement spotlights, IMAX projector arrays, megawatt military lasers) until the Moon just isn't there anymore.

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Vegeta: "How dare these bastards stole my technique™!"