Follow TV Tropes

Following

Person Of Mass Destruction / Video Games

Go To

People of Mass Destruction in Video Games.


  • ANNO: Mutationem: Amok is a supernatural entity that's sealed within the dimensional world called Hinterland. She possesses immense power that lets her control massive Mechanical Abominations that are armed with weapons and Combat Tentacles to devastate all in their path. When fully unleashed in the Fission Mailed and Bad Ending, she brings The End of the World as We Know It by turning the entire planet into a desolate burning wasteland and leaving no survivors.
  • The playable characters in Alter A.I.L.A. are treated like this. While their abilities (in most cases) are really more like One Man Armies, they're WMD analogues that both the Empire and Rebellion want to control or destroy, and victory in the war will go to whoever gets control of the most Super Soldiers. Black, meanwhile, is the real deal, capable of one-shotting Humongous Mecha. Jackals are the result of Imperial research into creating these, and the project led to the destruction of the city they were created in. And that's just the Alpha version; the Evil Genius has created a more powerful Jackal as his secret weapon. And finally, Aila is an Artificial Human created from Lost Technology, and is powerful beyond human comprehension. This is not a metaphor.
  • Arc the Lad gives us a few. Arc, chosen summoner of magical spirits; Gogen, the master of magic of the Precursor Heroes, Elc, the last Pyrenian, Choko, the ultimate monster turned to good, and The Big Bad: he was a normal human who willingly turned himself into an Eldritch Abomination. The former four can each wipe out a village with ease, while the fifth nearly destroyed the entire biosphere when he was released.
  • On average, the usual Guardian General Demi-God from Asura's Wrath is required to be one of these to be a member of them. Yasha is shown being able to use a Rider Kick strong enough to deflect the Brahmastra with enough force to make it fizzle out and push the Karma Fortress that holds enough so the laser scrapes off the earth. Augus can use a Massive 380,000 kilometer sized blade to literally extend through the Planet of Gaea itself. Wyzen can use his Mantra to make himself as big as Gaea and can poke things to death with a country sized finger, and Deus is here by being stronger then the aforementioned characters. And all of those people pale when compared to Asura once he enters his Berserker form. To give you an idea of how powerful he is in that form, try thinking of a walking, talking (well, screaming), nuclear missile silo. And don't even get started on his Destructor form.
  • Baldur's Gate:
    • The Bhaalspawn in Baldur's Gate II (both the original and even more so the expansion) are sometimes treated like this, but in this case the characters who do so are somewhat lacking justification for it. A Bhaalspawn can certainly be a One-Man Army like any high-level character, and getting to high enough levels they can approach this kind of power. But many are just ordinary, unpowered (and un-murderous) people. It is implied that all Bhaalspawn have some form of power, latent or not, but even then this isn't necessarily a destructive one, despite the ultimate source being the god known as the Lord of Murder — one Bhaalspawn has the power of being teleported away whenever he's in danger.
    • Gale, of Baldur's Gate III, has a Netherese Orb embedded in his body, essentially making him a living Fantastic Nuke. As a result, he needs to regularly absorb power from magical artefacts to keep it stable, or else risk having it go off and basically vaporize a large chunk of whichever Realm he is in at the time.
  • Borderlands 2:
    • All of the Vault Hunters are referred to as a "Walking Apocalypse" by Professor Nakayama in Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt DLC, as by this point they had mowed their way through probably tens of thousands of people.
    • While all Vault Hunters qualify to some extent, Gaige takes the cake. If specced in Ordered Chaos her damage output is high enough to kill Badass enemies in one hit, and Close Enough and To The Nth Degree skills means she can kill enemies behind her without even knowing it, outside of "gained XP" pop-up.
  • Breath of Fire:
    • In Breath of Fire III the dragon clan, known as the Brood, was considered this, and they were hunted down and exterminated as a result. Indeed, Ryu in whelp form, freshly awoken from his hibernation state and attacked, is more than capable of killing anything that stands in his way, which raises the question of how the Brood were exterminated in the first place. The answer is that the Brood refused to fight back against their exterminators, because they knew that their unleashed power would destroy the world. They instead chose to die (or gave up their power and went into hiding) rather than fight back. The goddess that ordered their extermination was afraid of the fact that the dragon clan could challenge her power, and ordered them all killed out of paranoid fear.
    • In Breath of Fire IV, Ryu's dragon forms are powerful but not overwhelmingly so. However, when he gets enraged and unleashes the Kaiser form for the first time, it's powerful enough to destroy a village (and also incinerates a villain who was previously shown to be almost impervious to all damage). Both friends and villains treat Ryu a little more carefully for the rest of the game when they understand the power he holds as a result.
  • City of Heroes:
    • Positron used to be this way for much of the game's history. He suffered an accident during the Rikti Wars that left his massive radioactive powers unstable and forced him to live inside his sealed suit - because not doing so could level an entire city. During the first plot arc of the Top Cow run of the City of Heroes comic, Lord Recluse drained the powers of all the superheroes and Positron was forced to seal himself within the Phalanx's base because he'd already begun to leak anti-matter. A makeshift attempt to repair his suit in this arc let him function somewhat normally, but he was still a danger to his team until the heroes powers were restored at the end of the arc. He still remained stuck in the suit until the comic's final arc, when an attack by a mutated Hero 1 ruptured his suit and killed him and several of his team mates. The Dark Watcher was able to restore him to life, and resurrection finally cured him of his instability. This was reflected in the game as well, where Positron now appears without his helmet. Of course, if he were ever to get injured like that again...
    • In one in game arc, you are sent to a future where you have fully unlocked the powers of an Incarnate — Basically a mythic god incarnate. You're able to utterly defeat some of the strongest enemies in the game, including three separate incarnates... all of them at once if you so choose, with very little effort. Despite all this, you're powers came to little to late to stop the Coming Storm that caused the horror you're facing... so the mission giver comes up with an idea to jump start your incarnate path early (in game mechanics, you've unlocked the post-game content).
  • Yuriko Omega in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 is basically the Japanese schoolgirl version of Tetsuo. She also can be considered a weaponized version of Haruhi.
  • They don't have any superpowers as such, and if you have them dead to rights are as easy to kill as any other human being — but the deliberate unleashing of a Silencer from the Crusader games is viewed not unlike the use of a small tactical nuke. When one goes rogue, it doesn't take the bad guys long, once they figure out where he's gone, to imagine exactly how much trouble they're in.
  • In Disgaea, characters who have at least overlord-level strength can and will destroy the world if really ticked off. Though they can only do to when using Cutscene Power to the Max. Laharl does do it in a Bad End, as does Mao. And what if an Overlord was so powerful that she could wipe out 99 Overlords and a thousand demon lords and has gone omnicidal due to her troubled past, and you get the True Overlord Zenon in a nutshell. She even defeats Laharl with little to no effort, taking a signature Overlord's Wrath in the face and shrugging it off as if it was dust. Even better? She isn't even on her full power due to just waking up.
  • High level mages in Dominions can, with the research to go with their skill, annihilate or simply dominate the minds of armies consisting of hundreds of soldiers. With some preparation time (one turn/month) and the majority of magical gems in your nations treasury, make a second sun to screw up the races who aren't used to heat, plunge the world into eternal night, accelerate time to kill all living beings in a few years and call on armageddon.
  • Doom:
    • Doom (2016): The Doom Slayer himself likely qualifies. Presented as-is, without the backstory, he's already someone who can and will personally kill thousands of demons, one by one, even if he has to do it with his bare damn hands (and he can). He's someone that recovers and strengthens with every demon he has killed, has more than enough strength to kill a Humanoid Abomination of a zombie with one hand while naked, too agile for most demons to even touch and skilled enough with any weapon that he can outperform entire armies.
    • In Doom Eternal the Phobos Base even has a dedicated PA announcement for all personnel to clear the area if "The Slayer has entered the facility". With the story taken into account, he definitely qualifies; his killcount is in the tens of millions at least, he's been rampaging for millennia without stopping, and even without his armor he confronted a gigantic demon the size of a city and won, leaving its corpse there to revisit when he's back in Hell. Humanity simply doesn't have enough armament, both regular and Mass Destruction combined, to match the damage an unbound Doomguy can inflict.
    • The reason why he is a Person of Mass Destruction rather than just One-Man Army is that whenever he decides to do his job, he has tendency to destroy buildings and even terrain. In DOOM 2016, he destroyed multiple generators and facilitie and remember that one area with an enormous monster bone pile that is part of the landscape? That was the devil he killed all by himself. To put it into perspective, Hell has a record of the Doom Slayer: at first he was dismissed as just another person raging against the unstoppable forces of Hell, but by the end of the chronicle, he had conquered Hell so brutally that the demons fled from him and hid in the shadows in a desperate bid to survive, and finally resorted to collapsing a mountain on him to kill him. And that didn't work, it only stopped him for a time. In the end, they had no choice but to seal him in a box, hoping that no one with an ounce of sanity will ever open it. Guess what happens?
    • Capping it all off, he uses a giant laser cannon to SHOOT A HOLE IN MARS!!! Just to get to his next target.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
  • The player character in Escape Velocity: Nova by the end of The Polaris storyline. Universe-bending psychic powers sufficient to destroy planets... many of the NPCs are probably relieved when you transcend and merge with the universe at the end. Which is peanuts compared to the Vell-os storyline, where you are a walking demigod for most of the end. And then you wake up some real gods. Gameplay-wise, you aren't necessarily that much more powerful than you can be towards the end of some of the other storylines, but this is compensated by what that represents storywise: that you purely under your own power can match what others need powerful and well-equipped starships to do.
  • The player characters in the Fallout series may become this, singlehandedly slaughtering and even nuking entire towns, or wiping out what's left of civilization with a waterborne virus.
  • First Encounter Assault Recon: Alma Wade, an immensely powerful psychic child who twists and bends reality to her will and is outright said to be "the mother of the apocalypse." A nuclear explosion didn't do much to slow her down, either. In the third game, her birth pains are enough to knock over skyscrapers.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy VI starts with the Empire subjugating Terra, half-human and half-Esper, whose powers are so great she annihilated a battallion of Magitek troopers in seconds. Locke's rescue of her, and Kefka's attempts to recapture her, drive the first 10 hours or so of the plot. Afterwards, the Empire sets its sights on the Espers themselves.
      • Terra's also faster than the world's fastest airship, is treated by the resistance as the one hope of standing up to the Empire, able to open a magically sealed gate that no one, human or esper, could open, is described by the team's knowledgeable wizard guy as "more than magic" or rather, more powerful than it, and, oh yeah, participates in taking out several Gods at the game's ending.
    • In Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, anyone who ranks SOLDIER First Class or the equivalent, or higher.
      • Sephiroth, who (pre-madness) in Final Fantasy VII, was apparently capable of casually slicing up the giant Junon Cannon like a carrot stick... one-handed.
      • Zack (who decimated an entire division of the Shinra army), as well as Genesis and Angeal in Crisis Core.
      • Cloud Strife is one during the games story and Advent Children with him having the power of a SOLDIER first class.
      • Dirge of Cerberus shows Vincent (especially in his Chaos persona) and top level Tsviets like Wiess qualifying as this.
    • SeeD in Final Fantasy VIII are implied to be an entire Badass Army of these. The field exam that Squall goes through at the beginning involves nine SeeD troops and twelve SeeD candidates taking on an entire Galbadian army and winning. Ultimately they're ordered to withdraw, not because of their losses (they don't have any), but because their contract expired. Their exclusive access to Guardian Forces is what makes them so powerful: while other soldiers have access to magic, they cannot use that magic to empower themselves the way SeeD can.
    • Final Fantasy IX had Kuja who had a Taking You with Me so epic he managed to destroy a planet single-handedly. He then upped the ante and nearly destroyed the entire universe at its point of origin.
      • Also from FFIX anyone who can use summon magic. While Queen Brahne was wielding Dagger's summons she was able to conquer an entire continent. Given how it compares to when your characters use the same summons this is also an example of Cutscene Power to the Max
    • Final Fantasy X has a Person-cum-monster of Mass Destruction as the entire driving point of its world and history, as Sin is in actuality a summoned Horror surrounding its Summoner, Yu Yevon. Sin is doomed to return until that little sucker is ripped out and dealt with outside of Sin's core, in point of fact. Tidus may be considered a Smartbomb of Mass Destruction as his entire reason for existing is to break the cycle of sacrifice and renewal so Sin and that which opposes it can be put to an end, once and for all.
    • Final Fantasy XII gives us Ashe, who chooses at the end not to become one (being a one woman army helped by five one sidekick armies is reasonably sufficient to restore her throne), and of course Final Fantasy X: Yuna's pilgrimmage is basically a quest to become a nun of mass destruction.
    • In Final Fantasy XIII there is the L'cie. A group of six L'cie manage to be more than a match for the entire Cocoon military. In fact, a key portion of the plot revolves around the group becoming Persons of Mass Destruction.
      • The idea carries over into Final Fantasy Type-0, where sending a L'cie to invade another nation is considered a war crime.
    • Final Fantasy XIV has the primals: summoned beings that take the form of various deities. Most often summoned by the beast tribes in response to aggression by the races of Man, they commonly bear animosity towards their summoners' enemies and possess enough magical power to raze entire city-states if left unopposed. Furthermore, they require massive amounts of aether to not only be summoned in the first place, but to maintain their physical form: if not destroyed, they could potentially drain the planet of its life force. One particularly notable example is Tsukuyomi, the primal that Yotsuyu transforms into late in the story of Stormblood; and the "Warrior of Light", the primal form of Elidibus.
    • Final Fantasy XVI has Eikons, beings hosted in Dominants, humans who are able to take their forms and cause widespread destruction. Depending on where they are born, Dominants are either revered, tolerated due to their power, or they are used as weapons of war. There are eight known Eikons, with one representing each element; Ifrit's sudden appearance in the prologue throws that all out the window, as the Phoenix is already an Eikon of fire.
  • In Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light and Mystery of the Emblem, Tiki, the daughter of Naga, is stated as having the potential to lay waste to the entire continent if she ever lost her mind; a fate many of her fellow dragons avoided by taking on human forms and becoming the Manakete race. She also became human, though her sheer power still posed a risk to her sanity despite this, and was thus put into a deep sleep by her mother before she passed away. She's eventually awakened some 1000 years later, but frequently forced to sleep until the Shield of Seals is repaired, after which she's finally able to live a normal life thanks to it properly containing her power.
  • Freedom Force has Man-Bot, an Iron Man Expy who was a carefree playboy until struck by an unstable canister of Energy X, causing it to periodically build up inside him and release in an explosive manner. His smart brother tries to get him to put on a powered containment suit until he can find a way to cure him, but the playboy refuses. He then "explodes" and accidentally kills his brother. Now he's The Atoner and wears the armor in order to avoid hurting more people. The armor allows him to channel the energy to power the suit and focus it into a beam of energy. He can still occasionally explode if attacked, but to a much lesser extent than without the suit. Man-Bot is also the key to the Time Master's plan to destroy the Celestial Clock and allow him to remain ageless.
  • Anyone and everyone in the Geneforge games who uses the augmentation canisters or the eponymous Artifact of Doom. Combine this with the tendency of such people to turn into Ax-Crazy psychopaths, and you've got a recipe for disaster on your hands. Not just canister junkies. In Geneforge 5, one Shaper offhandedly mentions that, with the proper equipment and training, she can control 40+ creations at once, at a distance of several miles, the average of which are 12-foot tall humanoids that can punch through walls.
  • Genshin Impact:
    • Archons are capable of wide-spread devastation.
      • Barbatos leveled a mountain range with his winds. Pieces of those mountains can further be found all the way out in the Golden Apple Archipelago far off Mondstadt's shores.
      • Morax dropped so many massive stone spears to seal another god they're now the mountainous islands known as the Guyun Stone Forest.
      • The Raiden Shogun killed a massive snake god with a single slash that also cut the entirety of Yashiori Island in half, forming the Musoujin Gorge. Centuries later, the gorge is still brimming with Electro energy, with the water at the bottom of the gorge making short work of the playable characters' health should they come into contact with it.
    • Alice: Oh boy, where do we even begin? How about the time when she tried to turn Baron Bunny into a Weapon of Mass Destruction? Or the time when she almost destroyed Starsnatch Cliff and had to be banned from that area? The reason why Stormterror's lair is in ruins: that was her doing. All this leads us to her daughter...
    • Klee, who is just like her mother Alice. Her destructive behavior can be attributed entirely to Alice. Klee's the reason the Stormbearer Mountains look more like cliffs nowadays. Of all the playable characters whose lore includes drastically changing the geography of Teyvat, Klee's the only one who isn't an archon.
  • God of War has Kratos. Unstoppable Rage given form. He gave One-Man Army a new meaning by becoming a one-man armageddon. If anything from Greek myth was left alive by the end of God of War III, it's because he hadn't killed it yet.
  • Guilty Gear:
    • Justice is certainly this. Converted into a magic-infused superbeing known as a Gear and intended as a weapon by "a certain major country," she grows to resent and hate humankind (despite having been one herself before becoming a Gear), turning on them in a fit of spite and malice. As she also possessed the ability to mentally control every other Gear in the world, it was a very impressive fit. She begins in grand fashion by disintegrating the islands of Japan.
    • Sol Badguy, who Gears were based off of. Gets fed up with his side and kills their Gears. It's worth noting that Sol holds back A LOT in all of his fights. Plus he wears a power limiting headband because if he didn't he'd be rampaging country to country, destroying the world.
    • Dizzy, the daughter of Justice and Sol Badguy, takes up the mantle in Guilty Gear X, though is notably much more benevolent, and in fact fearful of her own powers. Xrd finally gives her an Instant Kill, though despite the name she doesn't actually kill or even incapacitate her opponent because a near-miss from Necro (one of the entities that makes up Dizzy's wings) causing a nuke-sized mushroom cloud behind them is enough to get them to flat-out surrender.
    • The Valentines are implied to be this. Just one of them (i.e. Ramlethal) publically declaring war on the entire world is enough to cause mass panic.
  • Agent 47 of the Hitman series prefers leaving as little evidence of his assassinations as possible, but he is perfectly capable of clearing out an entire building of armed, trained soldiers if he chooses or is forced to.
  • The Herrschers from Honkai Impact 3rd. Humans that were corrupted by the titular Honkai, they gain god-like powers over a specific "authority" and serve as an escalating threat meant to completely wipe out human civilization. In the Previous Era, the Herrscher of Flames was responsible for completely destroying Australia over the course of a single week and the Herrscher of Corruption released all the world's nuclear weapons to wipe out the majority of humanity in mere hours. While the Herrschers of the current era are allegedly less powerful, the Herrscher of the Void destroyed a good portion of Eastern Europe and the Herrscher of Thunder's partial emergence destroyed a major city in Japan. Even after a Herrscher is defeated, the lingering Honkai energy can render an entire region uninhabitable for years to come. As such, the most powerful soldiers fighting for humanity are likewise People of Mass Destruction out of necessity....and ironically, the most vulnerable to becoming a Herrscher.
  • Jak, in Jak II: Renegade, was injected with Dark Eco in order to be used against the Metal Heads. Since he proceeded to rack up a hecatomb of Metal Head and Krimzon Guard kills, one can only assume the Baron was too successful for his own good.
  • In Kingdom Hearts, most villains, as well as the heroes, are this. Essentially most of them had enough to destroy planets.
    • Most members of both the original Organization XIII and Real Organization XIII, all when armed with weapons, could take out huge armies with ease. They all had incredible powers, bordering on the impractical.
      • For example, Axel could set a whole battlefield on fire, just by thinking about it.
    • Roxas had two keyblades with infinite sharpness, could move at the speed of light, and had tremendous magical powers.
    • Most of the trained Keyblade Wielders and Masters are this, being able to take out the Heartless with ease.
  • Kirby: Practically any of the franchise's main protagonists or antagonists, but most notably:
  • Mass Effect:
    • Jack in Mass Effect 2 is basically the setting's equivalent of Starkiller as the product of Biotics experimentation from Cerberus. In her recruitment mission, after releasing her from her cryo-chamber she proceeds to rampage unarmed through the prison station that held her.
    • Shepard itself. There's nearly a 100% of chance that something explodes in every place the commander lands. By Mass Effect 2, Shepard is well-known for this.
  • Omega in Mega Man Zero 3, used by Dr. Weil as the instrument for enacting the Elf Wars, all but singlehandedly wiped out 60% of humanity, and 90% of all reploids.
  • Metal Gear:
    • As well as being an all around badass, Solid Snake, now Old Snake as of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, has to deal with some very heavy complications. Most pressing of which is that the FoxDie virus implanted in him in Metal Gear Solid has, after nine years since its creation, mutated to the point where instead of affecting specific targets, it will soon start affecting anyone and everyone, and Snake must face the prospect of becoming one of the most dangerous biological weapons on Earth. By the end of the game Snake makes the decision to kill himself before this happens, but thankfully however this is averted by the end with the timely arrival of Big Boss, who relays the information that a new FoxDie virus injected into him at the start of the game has eliminated the mutant strain, so Snake can at least spend what's left of his life in peace - it is mentioned that the new strain could eventually mutate to the same horrific degree, but that depends on Snake living that long, when he'd already been given a prognosis of, at most, one year left.
    • On that subject, Big Boss/Naked Snake was considered such an incredible soldier that his post mortem (or so they thought) DNA became a highly prized commodity. So much so that the antagonist of Metal Gear Solid, Liquid Snake, makes it one of his ransom demands, in the hopes of correcting mutations the Genome soldiers suffered from after being injected with Big Boss's "soldier genes". Big Boss may not have caused things to explode by winking at them, but if your genetic material becomes that valuable after you die you might as well be on par with weapons of mass destruction.
    • To top this off, Naked Snake's mentor, The Boss, was so feared as a one-woman N.G.O. Superpower by the KGB and CIA due to her high charisma and major assets in all major countries, that both operations agreed to a truce and sabotaged billions of dollars in projects and risked millions of lives just to kill the Boss without turning her into a martyr. Assassination attempts include the KGB sabotaging its own spy network (sent one of their only psychic agents on an Uriah Gambit so he could get killed by The Boss, since he was practically her husband), the CIA sabotaging their one chance at being the first nation to get a human in space (they had the technology but when they heard that The Boss was going to be the test pilot, they started demanding ridiculous requests that would get the pilot killed), the assassination of an innocent and brilliant mind who eventually revolutionized rocket science (ironically, the Boss regrets failing to unjustly murder him because his actions inadvertently screwed up her plans), and other marvels of human advancement aborted just to kill one woman. And she survived all of this. Eventually, the KGB sacrifices its own piece of eden (and their secret Tank Mecha testing center) and the CIA sabotage their heist of billions (in 1960s) of untraceable funds, just to ensure that the Boss is marked as a traitor to both countries and executed by her student, Naked Snake. When Snake realizes just how far countries were willing to go to prevent one woman from institutionalizing world peace, he snaps and becomes the next person of mass destruction. His mentor in warfare being revealed to be a pacifist is the final straw.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has another example in the form of Quiet, Venom Snake's sharpshooting ally and love interest. She is revealed in the game's second act as being infected with vocal chord parasites, a deadly biological weapon that can spread like wildfire and kill anyone speaking in the language the parasites are attuned to. Specifically, she is infected with a strain that is activated by speaking English; a strain that had been engineered by Skull Face as part of his plan to Take Over the World by destroying the English language (as well as holding the world at ransom with nukes only he could control). Since English is the dominant language of most of the world, if she were to speak a word of English, she could cause a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions. In the end, when Snake is gravely wounded in the desert and an evac chopper has trouble finding them in a sandstorm, she is forced to give instructions to the pilot over a walkie-talkie in English and, with her parasites activated, wandered out into the desert to die, taking the parasites with her and averting a global disaster.
  • The Elder Dragons of Monster Hunter are essentially regarded as living, breathing forces of nature moreso than simply animals like other species of monster. Each Elder Dragon is capable of devastation on a massive scale if not dealt with. Fatalis, an Elder Dragon introduced in the first generation of games, is said to have been powerful enough to destroy an entire kingdom overnight. In Monster Hunter: World: Iceborne, Safi'jiiva, the mature form of the possibly-extraterrestrial Elder Dragon Xeno'jiiva, is capable of absorbing and manipulating the bioenergy of the surrounding area, causing radical and possibly destructive changes to the ecosystem.
  • In the evil ending of Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer, you become one of the most extreme examples of this in fiction. You gain full control of the Spirit-Eater Curse and wage a one-man crusade against the entire plane, devouring anyone and anything that stands in your way or ever wronged you. Eventually the gods of the realm banded together to stop you. No one exactly sure how that ended up, but what's sure is that there are less gods than before and you are nowhere to be seen, although it's implied that the gods only manage to drive you away rather than kill you.
  • Alex Mercer in [PROTOTYPE] is another one of the "possibly an accident" variants, as resulting from a virus. In a Crapsack World filled with murderous military fanatics, zombies, and other twisted unholy abominations, he is considered by far the most dangerous thing out there. And for very good reason. Thanks to the powers granted by the Backlight Virus, Alex is essentially the perfect killing machine. He's incredibly fast and immensely strong, can transform his body parts into deadly weapons, and has incredible healing powers that make him virtually unstoppable. His most dangerous ability, however, is that he can consume anyone he comes across, taking on their appearance, voice, and memories, allowing him to flawlessly impersonate them. He can be the person right next to you and you'd never know until it was too late. There's a reason why Blackwatch gave him the codename "Zeus".
    • Just to give an idea of how powerful he is, Mercer can generate a shockwave powerful enough to gib everybody within twenty feet of him by slamming his fists together. James Heller can launch you halfway across New York by jumping in your general vicinity. These people are literally walking WMDs.
  • The Boss in the Saints Row series. In the first two games, the Boss of the Third Street Saints crushes rival gangs almost single-handedly. In Saints Row: The Third, the Boss takes on a paramilitary organization, blowing up aircraft carriers (airborne and otherwise) and even potentially taking over a city-state. In Saints Row IV, the Boss' badassery sees them elected President of the United States, they gain superpowers, and take on an entire alien empire. And in the Gat out of Hell expansion, it's revealed that Satan has chosen the Boss to wed his daughter Jezebel because they have caused more death, destruction and chaos than any being in human history.
  • Kyrie of Sands of Destruction is really called the Destruct. Appropriate, because he can literally turn everything in the world into sand (not that he wants to). And he almost does, before the Power of Love says otherwise. Morte is far more keen on destroying the world, and given the number of bombs she carries and how much she loves to use them, she almost counts in her own right; if she ever figures out how to activate Kyrie's destructive powers on command, she will. Luckily for the world, by the time she does learn the phrase that controls Kyrie's powers, he's managed to change her mind on that whole "destroy the world" thing.
  • Carter of The Secret World. A magical prodigy of unprecedented power, she's ended up destroying most of the previous houses she lived in without even meaning to, and even now that she's safely note  quartered at Innsmouth Academy, the place had to be warded from the inside just to stop her from accidentally blowing the place to bits by mistake. When she finally gets to fight in "Carter Unleashed," she can casually obliterate entire roomfuls of familiars with a single spell... and Montag speculates that if misapplied, her powers could lead to thaumonuclear devastation.
  • Toyotomi Hideyoshi from Sengoku Basara certainly counts as one. From the anime alone, he can send a wave of arrows flying back to their archers at the wave of a hand, can part the clouds with a fist pump, can block the Fugaku's cannon with one hand before raising a massive amount of earth by punching the air above it and stopping the ship (which is the size of an island), breaking said ship by punching Motochika into it, and finally destroys Odawara Castle with a punch, the castle that Hideyoshi was actually wishing to seize. Oh yeah, and he cleared the Setouchi Sea with a punch...and the water only came back half a day later. In the games, he can generate enough energy to make an incredible amount of earth erupt into the sky. There's a reason he's called the Supreme King.
  • In Skullgirls, there's the eponymous Skullgirls. Queen Nancy caused a three-way war to stop simply so the powers in question could unite to stop her, while Marie devastates an entire city, killing thousands — and it's only incredible self-control that keeps the death toll from reaching millions.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Shadow the Hedgehog is the Ultimate Life Form, so he's capable of dealing a lot of damage and surviving falling back to Earth through the atmosphere. The best example of his destructive side comes when he removes his inhibitor rings, which he wears all the time to limit his power. With them off, he stops being able to control collateral damage. In one instance he was faced with an army of enemies and removed his rings in order to simply run through them all.
    • Emerl from Sonic Battle is a Gizoid with the destructive Power to annihilate the whole world. Of course, being raised by Sonic, he dislikes being this.
  • Ghost operatives in StarCraft, an otherwise fairly gritty and realistic sci-fi universe except for the part where human psychics can cloak and commit genocide with their minds. Especially Kerrigan, who had been captured by the Zerg to serve them, instead managed to overpower them and at one point was queen of the entire Zerg swarm. Which also provided her with some biological upgrades, allowing her to survive nukes.
    • To really drive home Kerrigan's power, before she was made the Queen of Blades, the scale used to measure psyonic power was rewritten because of her. Before she was the Queen of Blades, Kerrigan was a 10 (out of 10) on the scale. After, she was a 12!
      • After becoming the Primal Queen of Blades the scanners simply give up and declare Kerrigan to be "Unclassifiable".
    • Then there's Nova from the cancelled StarCraft: Nova, whose telepathic and telekinetic powers, as revealed in the prequel book, are of the up to eleven variety. When she witnesses the deaths of her parents, she unintentionally emits a telekinetic wave that kill everyone around her and shatters the transparent dome atop their house, which is said to have been designed to stop nukes. She can also Mind Control anyone to do her bidding and even capable of limited levitation (by telekinetically lifting herself).
    • Tassadar becomes one for a short while when he combines the powers of the High Templar with those of the Dark Templar to destroy the Overmind, although it costs him his life. This was previously done by Adun, although he used the power as a distraction.
    • Like Ghosts, other sufficiently powerful Protoss can qualify. In the backstory, the result of several Protoss practicing their powers in secret and screwing up killed thousands, and in-game specially trained Templars can rain down plenty of pain through psionic storms that can slaughter entire squadrons in one shot and severely damage structures. It's a little more difficult to know if the more unique units you get to field qualify, as while they do bring plenty of destruction they tend to do it by cutting armies up personally rather than by massive psionic attacks.
  • Fayt, the hero of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time turned out to literally be able to just plain delete things out of existence. As can the secondary female lead, Maria. Although she requires a physical catalyst.
  • Star Wars Legends:
    • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
      • The player character is constantly accused of being one, having destroyed worlds both accidentally and on purpose.
      • Darth Nihilus is a frighteningly literal example. He's more like an Eldritch Abomination than a man at this point and when he sees the Force, he goes and devours the entire planet to sate his hunger. An entire planet, Katarr, had all life on it wiped out, except for one person who became his apprentice.
    • Galen "Starkiller" Marek, the main character of The Force Unleashed is trained to use the Force to its maximum potential, uncaring of supposed limits and truly embodying "size matters not". He can bring down a Star Destroyer by himself, as well as create what are practically Force Shockwaves. He can also super-charge a ship's blaster cannon to cut a Star Destroyer in half. And then there's Luke. If he went Sith, he would've been a definite Person of Mass Destruction. As it is, he's just the Jedi's personal assassin.
  • Potentially the player character in Streets of Rogue, depending upon their traits, items and whatever mutators are active. Infinite ammo or melee durability and either an upgraded Wall Walloper trait or a rocket launcher with Blaster Master will allow anyone to completely destroy every single floor in the city down to the last brick. Even at a lower power level it quickly becomes trivially easy to kill everyone occupying those floors in a relatively short period of time, leading to several hundred casualties per hour being a reasonable benchmark to achieve.
    • Out of the vanilla classes the Werewolf and Zombie best embody this trope, since neither requires gaining any items or levels to wreck the city. The former has the worst base stats of any character but can transform into a howling maelstrom of fury in an instant to shred through absolutely any opponents in mere seconds, this transformation is actually powerful enough that it can realistically solo the Giant Robot with nothing but its claws and some careful dodging. The Zombie is nowhere even close to as powerful in a direct confrontation but infects anyone damaged by it, causing them to revive as another zombie when they die. These other zombies can in turn spread the infection themselves and as you might imagine this makes it very easy to snowball. You can start a floor alone, attack the first few people you see wandering the street or in any nearby buildings and just a few minutes later over a third of the floor can be an undead army that will do all of the heavy lifting for you.
  • The Super Mario Bros. series has many villains capable of large-scale damage. Firstly, the main Big Bad (and occasional Anti-Hero) Bowser is pretty much a walking, fire-breathing tank capable of being a One-Man Army with enough incentive (though he's pragmatic enough to prefer having his countless minions around whenever possible) — and that's without any of the MacGuffins that have enabled him to become things like a Galactic Conqueror, a Reality Warper, etc.! And besides him, we have King Boo, the Shadow Queen, Count Bleck, Dimentio, the Dark Star, etc., all of whom are capable of various Apocalypse Hows.
  • Tales Series:
    • In Tales of the Abyss, it's stated that anyone who can use hyperresonance would be able to use the ability to destroy everything, right down to the atmosphere itself. It's because of this reason that Asch, the only character who can actually control it, never uses it: it's just too powerful.
    • Tales of Vesperia gives us Estelle, whose powers consume so much aer that they could indirectly lead to the destruction of the world. They're also lethal to the Entelexeia.
  • In Tera, a storyline reveals that during the Divine war the high elves managed to capture a snippet of power from one of the Titans. Such a snippet being essentially infinite power, it required something special; Or rather, someone special. Said person became "The Core", also known as the power source of the entire high elven civilization and more importantly of their capital city. While it also becomes immortal, it also loses its soul. Later in the game many things happen and the Core becomes wounded. They note the last time they lost control of the Core, an entire continent was devastated.
  • Touhou Project:
    • Yuuka kicked off the Touhou tradition of horribly destructive and overpowered Touhou bosses when she, in her boss fight, unleashed the first Master Spark in the series' history. Despite the fact that Yuuka has calmed down since those days, she is still regarded as The Dreaded in canon and is consistently portrayed as a solid contender for the position of World's Strongest Woman in fanon. And this is despite the fact that Yuuka's actual special ability is making wilting flowers bloom again and making sunflowers turn towards the sun. The below characters are typically portrayed as needing their spoils from the Super Power Lottery just to match Yuuka's sheer destructive and overwhelming raw power.
    • Shinki is the demonic God Empress who created the entirety of Makai, the Demon Realm, as well as all beings living within it. Over the course of your fight with her she also ends up unleashing so much unholy hell upon you that she burns her own realm down to the ground, reducing Pandemonium, the capital of Makai, to a hellscape of burning ruins.
    • Cheerful Child Flandre Scarlet possesses the ability to annihilate absolutely anything simply by bringing its "eye" into her hand and then crushing it. She has been confined to the basement of the Scarlet Devil Mansion for almost five-hundred years due to fears of the damage she could cause if she ever went on a rampage and, aside from her sister Remilia, no-one wants to be anywhere near her.
    • Yukari Yakumo's ability is the "manipulation of boundaries", which, as stated in Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, is basically a Semantic Superpower granting her virtual omnipotence limited only by her own imagination, will, and ability to define what she wants to do in terms of boundaries, effectively allowing her to do whatever she damn well pleases however she damn well likes. It's fortunate that she's far too invested in preserving Gensoukyou — and also way too lazy — to be too dangerous.
    • Utsuho Reiuji devoured the corpse of a Sun God and, as a consequence, gained the power to manipulate nuclear fusion, making her a living, breathing star and, if she were to ever fully harness her power, she would be almost completely unstoppable. Initially she somehow got the idea to take over Gensoukyou/burn it to the ground, but now she brings free electricity to its denizens instead.
  • In addition to their horrendously powerful fighting abilities, such as deflecting tank shells, the Valkyria in Valkyria Chronicles are capable of using the Valkyria's Flame, a devastating suicide attack that causes an explosion powerful enough to rival most nuclear bombs.
  • Warcraft:
    • In the backstory of the series, the Guardians of Tirisfal were an order of these. Each Guardian was a powerful mage who, upon growing old, transferred all their magic to their successor. Things go downhill when Medivh, the last one, gets possessed by the demon they were supposed to fight.
    • Warcraft III: The Demon Lord-esque Eredar general Archimonde singlehandedly destroys the city of Dalaran in seconds by raising a Reality-Changing Miniature out of dust, then scattering it. Overlaps with Cutscene Power to the Max; when he shows up in-game, he sticks to smaller-scale attacks.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The Aegis, Pyra. When last she fought at full power, she destroyed three continents. That was actually Mythra; she was so horrified at what she did that she sealed away most of her power and created a weaker, gentler personality named Pyra. Malos claims that the Aegises were created by the Architect to destroy the world, but Mythra disagrees. She's not able to come up with very good arguments, though, and the fact that the Aegises have access to multiple world-ending superweapons is strong evidence in Malos' favor. It turns out that Mythra was right. The Aegises were originally AIs in charge of the Space Elevator and all its technology, repurposed to manage the Blades that were being used to restore life to the world. Unfortunately, much of the technology they have access to consists of the very weapons that destroyed the world in the first place.
  • Id from Xenogears. Destroying a village by a momentary outbreak, wiping out an entire army, fighting Gears bare handed... In the game's backstory, he wiped an entire continent off the map.

Top