Basic Trope: A Boss Battle that takes very little or no input from the player to defeat and is harder to lose than win.
- Straight: Garry Coolguy confronts the Big Bad, Commander Glassjaw. But all Glassjaw ever does is sit in his chair and taunt Garry, who easily takes him down just by punching him once.
- Exaggerated:
- Glassjaw turns into a fine red powder when Garry (barely) touches him.
- The fight with Glassjaw requires no controller input whatsoever, a literal zero-effort boss.
- The player literally cannot die against Glassjaw, even if they deliberately try to injure Garry through Collision Damage.
- Downplayed:
- Anticlimax Boss
- Glassjaw is theoretically capable of finishing off Garry, but Garry has a companion who will finish off Glassjaw before that can happen.
- Fighting Glassjaw is much the same as fighting a real boss, except that when you lose all your Hit Points, instead of getting a Game Over, the fight keeps going as though nothing had happened.
- Glassjaw does try to fight, but he has rather low health and his attacks are weak and telegraphed, so as long as you actually bother to attack him, he's no challenge.
- Justified:
- Glassjaw is not strong enough to hurt Garry at all.
- The Glassjaw Garry punches out in one go is fought at the end of a multi-stage boss battle. By the time he's gotten to that point, he's exhausted his power and all his weapons have been destroyed. No wonder he goes down like a chump.
- The fight is basically an assassination mission, attacking Glassjaw when he's asleep, drunk, unguarded, or otherwise not at all prepared for a fight.
- Glassjaw is committing Suicide by Cop and is actively refusing to fight back.
- The fight is Garry's Moral Event Horizon, where the "boss" is an innocent bystander who saw too much.
- Inverted: Hopeless Boss Fight
- Subverted:
- After getting one-shotted, Glassjaw gets back up and unleashes a second, more intimidating form.
- It turns out that the challenge in the fight is actually to lose to Glassjaw, which is meant to be far more difficult.
- Glassjaw is Throwing the Fight.
- Double Subverted:
- Glassjaw's second form gets one-shotted again.
- There's a convenient Bottomless Pit right next to the fighting area, so losing deliberately is actually just as easy as winning deliberately.
- Parodied:
- Glassjaw trips on the steps leading down to his arena and his health bar empties when he hits the bottom. The game counts this as a win for Garry.
- All of the bosses in the game provide achievements for losing to them. Most of the achievements for the easier bosses mock the player, but the one given for losing to Glassjaw is recorded as That One Achievement.
- Zig Zagged:
- A Recurring Boss or Sequential Boss is sometimes this and sometimes very difficult.
- Rush Boss
- Averted: Glassjaw fights like a regular boss.
- Enforced: The section before Glassjaw was That One Level and the developer felt that was hard enough.
- Lampshaded: "What a wimp. Didn't even try to attack me."
- Invoked: Glassjaw was a Death Seeker looking to go out by taunting the hero.
- Exploited: The Big Bad deliberately put Glassjaw where he was to trick Garry into thinking the section after him was going to be as easy as Glassjaw.
- Defied: Glassjaw is shown getting into a suit of Powered Armor before the fight, ensuring that he'll be a match for Garry.
- Discussed:Garry: "Wow, that fight was easier than I expected. What a useless commander."
- Conversed:The player "Wait, that was it? That was such an easy fight! What a ripoff!"
- Implied: The player in a Let's Play video is shown breezing past Glassjaw in about five seconds, compared to the several minutes for most other bosses.
- Deconstructed: After the "fight", Garry must live with the emotional torment of killing somebody who was powerless before him.
- Reconstructed: Garry manages to get over this by convincing himself that killing Glassjaw was a good thing.
- Played For Laughs: Glassjaw leaps into the arena with an enormous gun and a suit of Powered Armor, ready to gun down Garry... and dies of a heart attack five seconds into the battle. His corpse is dragged away via Vaudeville Hook.
- Played For Drama:
- Glassjaw has a dead man's switch that will destroy the entire base along with Garry if he dies. Garry is forced to choose between letting Glassjaw live or sacrificing himself to stop Glassjaw once and for all.
- The "fight" exists only to show Garry Jumping Off the Slippery Slope; by this point, Glassjaw literally cannot fight back, but Garry still chooses to beat him until he stops responding entirely.
This link to Zero-Effort Boss is the easiest one to click on the page.
