When Keima enters "God of Conquest" mode, he's capable of playing twenty-four games simultaneously.
"A group of unknown players who win every single game they play, with scores no one has ever come close to. Their account names are always left empty, so they're only known as "Blank." These gamers are said to be unbeatable."
Many games will have That One Player who dedicates hours of practice to know the ins and outs, be at the top of the rankings, soloed the Superboss, acquired the Infinity +1 Sword, and found the Easter Egg no one even knew existed. Then there's this guy (or girl), who is the top of every game they try because of natural talent. The Godlike Gamer is essentially The Ace when it comes to video games. While That One Player tends to stick to one game and takes the fun out of it for other gamers due to their superior skill, the Godlike Gamer is a Master of All for games in general.
As amazing as they are online, in real life, expect them to be a loser Geek with No Social Skills and in the worst cases a NEET who dedicates their whole life to gaming.
This is a common choice for The Protagonist of an "Isekai" series, where a Genre Savvy gamer gets transported to a RPG Mechanics 'Verse. After all, who could have a better chance of surviving a game world than an expert gamer? While there, they are likely of becoming the World's Best Warrior.
If they are a villain, they're almost definitely a Internet Jerk and Smug Super who is a general jerkass to fellow players who loves to Kill Steal or player kill. Sometimes a cheating Game Master or a player using hax might pretend to be one before being revealed as a fraud.
Often overlaps with UltimateGamer386. However, while that person is defined by their reputation in MMORPGs, the Godlike Gamer is defined by their skill and can easily be an unknown newbie who is immensely talented.
May also end up as a King of Games if they try their hand outside digital games.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Accel World:
- Virtually all Burst Linkers are this to an extent, as to even qualify to play Brain Burst requires specific parameters to be met. But among the community, the seven Kings are regarded as the best of the best being the only level-nine players in the game. One of said Kings is female protagonist, Kuroyukihime/Black Lotus.
- Played with in regards to The Protagonist Haruyuki/Silver Crow, while he at first seemed like your run-of-the-mill newbie with Crippling Overspecialization that made him a Fragile Speedster, but then he's revealed to have natural talent and learns how to activate his wings (implied to be an Incarnate Skill which is very difficult to master), making him one of the few who can fly and as a result one of the most dangerous Burst Linkers alive.
- Himouto! Umaru-chan: Umaru displays this in her gamer alter-ego "UMR", where she's one of the top gamers in Japan. At the arcade she frequents, she's able to pull off impossible maneuvers on the arcade machines so that she can get hundreds of prizes in one turn. The arcade staff have come to resent her inhuman success and fear she'll risk bankrupting them.
- How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, Takuma Sakamoto fit this to a T. In the MMORPG "Cross Reverie", he played as the Demon Lord Diablo who was so ridiculously skilled and powerful that no one dared to challenge him. In fact he decided to hold back in order to keep things fun for himself. Then he's cast into said world where he's reincarnated as his character and finds everyone else is laughably underleveled.
- KonoSuba: Kazuma Satou is a deconstruction due to the series being an affectionate parody of the genre. While he seems like the typical example at first, being a Genre Savvy NEET who dedicated himself to gaming and got whisked away to a RPG Mechanics 'Verse, the new world is just different enough to his gaming experiences that his experience is mostly useless and he ends up being a Loser Protagonist with nothing ever going his way.
- Log Horizon: The titular Log Horizon guild, who are renowned as a legendary guild in the RPG Verse they are trapped in. This is especially the case for The Protagonist, Shiroe, who is a master strategist. The guild's strength lies in their ability to work together in perfect coordination in accordance with Shiroe's exceptional planning skill.
- No Game No Life: This is 『 』's entire shtick. They're a prestigious Sibling Team made up of Sora and Shiro, who are so legendary as gamers that they become an urban legend in the gaming continuity, purportedly possessing the top score for every game to exist and in all regards unbeatable. Their gaming abilities are so phenomenal that they're brought over to an alternate RPG Verse world where gaming skills govern everything, where of course the two of them absolutely dominate and become the new King of Games. Sora excels at manipulating and reading people, while Shiro's specialty is analytical thinking of the core game mechanics. It's established that 『 』 never loses unless it's intentionally or against each other. If their opponents try to cheat, then they will use the cheating against the cheater. The first episode alone has the two of them beating 12,000 players using 4 avatars, even when the opposition was cheating, and then shortly afterwards Sora ends up controlling four individual controllers with his hands and feet and still manages to win! Shiro is also revealed to have won 20 times against a chess simulator designed to beat grandmasters.
- While King from One-Punch Man is a complete fraud, having been confused for being a hero and "the world's strongest human" due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time multiple times, he is a wiz at video games, having outclassed everyone, including Saitama and the best gamers among the Blizzard Group, at every game they have played.
- Overlord (2012): Satoru was one, being a hardcore MMORPG gamer with an unbelievably powerful lich avatar before he finds himself trapped in the game world he played in as his overpowered avatar Ainz. His character has been maxed out so virtually no one poses any challenge to him, even though he tries to keep the extent of his true power a secret.
- The Rising of the Shield Hero has at least three of the Four Heroes (of the Stock Light-Novel Hero variety,) who were adept at a certain MMORPG that resembles the RPG Mechanics 'Verse they've been pulled into (the specific one varies since they all come from alternate realities,) giving them a leg-up on understanding the mechanics of the world. It becomes a Deconstruction, however, when this knowledge gives them a very myopic view of the world and how their actions affect it (often causing them to do more harm than good) because they treat their adventures as a game. Naofumi, meanwhile, doesn't have the same MMORPG experience that the others do, and thus is more down-to-earth and has a better understanding of the wants and needs of the people around him, meaning he does more good with his exploits without even explicitly meaning to.
- Sailor Moon: In her debut episode, Ami Mizuno/Sailor Mercury got the top score on an arcade game she has never played before, simply by watching Usagi play it once.
- Sword Art Online:
- Kirito is the perfect example, being depicted as a virtual reality MMORPG prodigy, who spent a large portion of his life gaming as a form of escapism. Upon being trapped in Sword Art Online, he quickly ascended the ranks to become the World's Best Warrior and the destined hero to take on the Big Bad. This also applies to any game he tries, where even if he's a complete newbie, he'll be a top player within days and known by everyone there.
- Yuuki, who is Kirito's Distaff Counterpart. To date, she's the only player able to best him in a fair fight. Yuuki's VR talents are unparalleled as she practically lives and breathes the virtual world. She arrives in Alfheim Online and immediately wins 77 consecutive duels. She also created her own 11-hit Original Sword Skill which is stated to be a very difficult task.
- Asuna is deemed to have The Gift when it comes to VR gaming, possessing impossibly high speed even back when she was a complete newbie, with Kirito feeling she was a natural despite the fact she lacked the most fundamental knowledge about the game interface. When she actually set her mind to it, she easily became the second strongest player in all of SAO after Kirito.
- Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online follows suit from its parent series with LLENN, who becomes an elite gamer in Gun Gale Online. Despite only being a newbie, she finds out she's a gaming prodigy with natural talent, able to destroy entire squadrons of enemy players by herself. It's up for debate how much of her feats are actual skill and how much is due to her advantageous avatar that gives her Super-Speed and a short stature, but nonetheless she ends up Famed In-Story and comes out as the champion of a PvP tournament. Pitohui even describes LLENN as "God's gift to FullDive."
- The World God Only Knows: Keima Katsuragi (pictured above) is one of the most impressive examples in the entirety of fiction. He spends almost all of his free time playing video games. He gets away with playing games in class because he still aces all his tests in school and holds perfect attention to the lecture. He also runs a gaming blog as the "God of Conquest", where he tackles on any game suggested to him, including mapping out every last possible route in an Obvious Beta Dating Sim game that the developers released without ever properly finishing. When he builds up a backlog of dozens of games due to the events of the story, he decides to lock himself in his room and play all of his backlog, including numerous Role-Playing Games and Dating Sims. He enters into "God of Conquest" mode, and plays twenty-four games all at once. He completes 3 months worth of backlogs by the end of the day. His skill at dating sims even translates to skill at wooing flesh-and-blood girls in real life, though not flawlessly, as he still learns frequently that real girls are more complex than virtual ones.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- Yugi Muto, or rather his Superpowered Evil Side Dark Yugi, is possibly the Trope Codifier for the anime community who also overlaps with King of Games which he is the Trope Namer for. Yugi has a reputation for being an expert in all forms of games. It's played far more straight in the manga continuity and the first anime series where he would play in all types of games from board games to card games to video games. However, all subsequent anime-only series have him only focusing on the Duel Monsters card game. Though he still qualifies for this, where to date he has only lost twice, with one of them due to timeout and the other time being against himself. His amazing success combines both exceptional strategic thinking along with luck manipulation.
- Seto Kaiba is a Child Prodigy and already a genius at everything. So it's no surprise that when he invested his talents into gaming he became one of the greatest duelists in history, second only to Yugi. The two of them end up as rivals and Worthy Opponents. A battle between him and Yugi will be long and drawn out and can go either way as the two duelists run rings around each other. In the manga, Kaiba is also known as the famous gamer "Kai" who got the highest score in every game.
Films — Live-Action
- Jimmy of The Wizard is basically a Nintendo playing savant whose incredible game skills wins him and his friends the Nintendo World Championship, beating out Memetic Badass Lucas.
- It's worth mentioning that Jimmy's skill with a game is so extreme that during the final confrontation where both players are playing the (at the time) un-released Super Mario Bros 3, Jimmy instantly discovers the secret to getting the warp whistle in the first world, teleports multiple worlds ahead, and then proceeds to dominates the match so spectacularly that Lucas has literally no chance of winning.
- In Tommy, the Pinball Wizard is, as his name implies, one of the best pinball players in England, though he ends up being usurped by Tommy Walker.
Live-Action TV
- Conor from Gamer's Guide to Pretty Much Everything is famous as a professional gamer, going by the handle Kid Fury. Unfortunately, he was forced to retire because of... a thumb injury. He can still game, though, and he does so with his Five-Man Band of gamer friends.
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid protagonist Emu Hojo was also known as the Genius Gamer "M" before he abandoned professional gaming to become a doctor, which turns out to be an extremely useful skill set when video game villains start possessing his patients. Fairly early in the show we also meet Nico Saiba, Genius Gamer "N", who is also this trope but was second-best to M.
- Daryl Musashi in The X-Files episode "First-Person Shooter" is presented as one of the (if not the) best FPS players in the world, invited to test the newest VR environment. Nevertheless, the Monster of the Week infesting said VR offs him with little ceremony within minutes. (The episode also makes it quite clear, however, that the writers have a very vague idea of gaming and its culture.)
Literature
- Animorphs has a literal example in the Ellimist, who enjoyed playing his species' equivalent of video games before becoming a Sufficiently Advanced Alien and Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence. Ironically, the one time we see him playing a video game, he loses. Once he becomes a functional god, he and his Evil Counterpart Crayak play a Cosmic Chess Game over the fate of the galaxy.
- Ready Player One: Wade Owen Watts/Parzival becomes one of the greatest players of the OASIS after a series of events starting with him finding the Copper Key and eventually leading him to become a Physical God.
- Ye Xiu of The King's Avatar, a Living Legend in the Professional Gaming scene with the accolades to back it up and the epitaph "Battle God", who's been playing the In-Universe Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game "Glory" since its beta. The breadth of in-game knowledge he has also earned him the In-Series Nickname "Glory Encyclopedia". Even when he becomes a Reluctant Retiree from the professional scene, Ye Xiu re-dedicates himself to casual play again, this time using a Character Class no professional gamer would dare use, "Unspecialized", and still trounces amateur and veteran players alike.
- The Witch of Knightcharm: One of the incoming students at an evil Wizarding School, Chosovi Naha, claims to be an expert gamer who won so much that she now wants to move on to fighting and dueling people in real life. Since her new school allows and encourages students to duel each other, she's very happy with her choice of educational institutions.
Music
Video Games
- Honkai Impact 3rd:
- Bronya's profile mentions that she's skilled at all sorts of games, from MMOs to dating sims. The Man Hua typically shows her playing against the other characters and easily winning even while she's expertly preparing dessert with her other hand. The Final HOMU Fantasy Raid has her practically taking over a MMORPG that she became obsessed over, with her godlike avatar serving as the Final Boss. One of the dates in the anniversary event shows that this even extends to things like basketball arcade games, where she handily beats the Captain if the player picks that option, thinking it would be an easy win due to her height.
- Fu Hua treats playing video games as serious as she treats martial arts, leading to situations such as in the anniversary event where she plays a two player arcade game where her left hand battles her right hand. In gaming ranking boards, she's only second to Bronya.
- D.Va from Overwatch is Blizzard's love letter to the professional StarCraft community. As such she's a pro-gamer whose skills at a mech combat game have been transferred to piloting a Mini-Mecha to fight an Omnic Kaiju which attacks South Korea every few years. Notably, she holds all the high scores in every map set in an Arcade (beating out Genji's old scores, and discounting Sombra's questionable ones).
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa:
- Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has Chiaki Nanami, the Ultimate Gamer. The only games she's bad at are Dating Sims. It helps that she's actually an Artificial Intelligence, although the real Chiaki was a Godlike Gamer herself while she was still alive.
- Izuru Kamukura was gifted with every known talent, including Chiaki's. They even play some games together in a Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony bonus mode.
Web Comics
- Latula Pyrope, a minor character in Homestuck, is known mainly for her exceptional prowess at games. Her theme song is one continuous Badass Boast about her skill at video games. Somewhat of an Informed Attribute, as she's never seen playing any games.
- Shadow and Chug from Powerup Comics are said to be the absolute best
at their preferred games, mainly FPSes, but we rarely see them actually playing. On top of that, Shadow and Chug are really the Author Avatars of Chad Wilson and Jason Krydenski, two minor characters from Unwinder's Tall Comics with bad cases of Small Name, Big Ego.
Western Animation
- Arthur: "Sue Ellen Gets Her Goose Cooked" has the gang obsessed with a game titled Virtual Goose. However, they keep coming across a gamer named "Fourhand451", who seems unbeatable at the game. Even all of Arthur's friends playing on one keyboard simultaneously aren't able to beat this mysterious user. Sue Ellen, the previous champion of the game, becomes determined to beat her rival. However, try as she might, she can never succeed. Eventually, DW tries out the game and thrashes the mysterious user on her first try, where the previously unbeaten player finally loses and is revealed to be none other than DW's friend Emily.
- Chop Socky Chooks: "Game Over Chooks!" has Chuckie Chan's student Ume being revealed as one, possessing unbeatable scores on arcade games. Her skill is so great that she gains the attention of Wasabi, who wishes to steal her gaming skills so he can use them in real life against the Chooks.
- As the name suggests, Captain N: The Game Master is about the NES gamer Kevin Keene, who's warped into a NES-fantasy world where he becomes The Chosen One as told by prophecies. Knowing about these games, Kevin soon known as Captain N, uses his knowledge and gaming skills to become The Ace and The Hero who'll free Videoland from Mother Brain. He's armed with a NES controller that can hack the world and a Zapper as his main weapon against pixel creatures.
- Grojband: The episode "Duelling Buttons" features Savage Fred, who is a legendary gamer with an unbeatable high score and became the face of a Guitar Hero knockoff game. Corey spends most of the episode obsessively trying to find a way to beat his score and before his sister, Trina does.
