Worf Had The Flu / Video Games

Times where Worf Had the Flu in Video Games.

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• Ace Combat:
  • The first Yellow Squadron member shot down in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, Yellow Four, is revealed to have sortied with poorly-maintained engines. The rest of the squad retreats immediately because they're not in any better shape after their runway was bombed by a local resistance group.
  • In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, Gelb 2 mentions that his squad would often be sent from one mission to another without even any basic maintenance on their planes. This plus the fact that Gelb is one of only two story-ace squadrons in the game that doesn't outnumber you by at least two-to-one results is a slightly easier Ace fight than normal, despite them flying an end-game plane a while before the player has anything that should be comparable.
• Action Taimanin makes it extensively clear in its 19th chapter that the only reason the Task Force is able to stand against (and eventually defeat) Edwin Black without being instantly destroyed is that he has spent the twelve hours between the preceding chapter and that one in a Mêlée à Trois fight against The King of the Death Wraith and Astaroth, two archdemons on the same level of power as him, and the Task Force just distracted Black into taking a full-force attack from the other two.
• In Blazblue, this is pretty much the major reason for most of Ragna's losses. Hakumen's sword can nullify his Healing Factor, Hazama could use his Azure Grimoire to shut down Ragna's, effectively crippling him, and almost all his losses in Chronophantasma were a result of Celica's presence not only shutting down the Azure Grimoire, but also making him lose use of both his right arm and eye entirely.
  • A major reason for Terumi's humiliating defeat at Kokonoe's hands in Chronophantasma was due to her rewiring her brain so she felt no hatred towards him. With his power source cut off, the fight could only go downhill for him.
• In Borderlands 2, despite being built up as The Dreaded (as well as a playable character in a spinoff), Wilhelm goes down very easily when you finally fight him, because Handsome Jack poisoned him before the battle as part of a Batman Gambit requiring the Vault Hunters to defeat him.
• In Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Silas Greaves admits the only way he was able to survive a duel with John Wesley Hardin (one of the fastest gunfighters who ever lived) was because the latter was drunk after a wild birthday celebration and thus didn't count his shots.
• In Chrono Trigger there is a sequence where your party has all of their money and equipment taken from them. Unless you have Ayla in your party, this sequence becomes a stealth mission. Strangely, you are unable to fight even if you have magic.
• Sometimes occurs in Dark Souls, where a few fights could be considered a Mercy Kill. For more specific examples:
  • You only fight Gravelord Nito after his Lord Soul has been greatly diminished because he gave away most if it, and Pinwheel has been sapping his power for a while.
  • The Bed of Chaos's weak core is because it's the result of the Witch of Izalith destroying herself with a failed attempt at re-creating the First Flame.
  • Gwyn is only fought after a millennium of burning in the First Flame, leaving him a shadow of his former self.
  • Vendrick in the second game is fought naked and Hollowified, and still requires Giant Souls to give you a chance at beating him. If you try to attack him when you meet him in his prime (in a memory), you can't even get him to aggro. Your attacks are that unthreatening.
  • The Twin Princes in 3 have to fight together, because both of them are crippled and barely alive. If either Lothric or Lorian could move on their own, the Ashen One would be in for one nightmare of a fight.
  • The ancient race of Archdragons in particular rely on this trope to varying degrees to even give you a chance against them, and even then they're usually among the series' most brutal Superbosses. It took an alliance of all the ancient gods who found the Great Souls in the First Flame, as well as the aforementioned Seath's betrayal of his kin, to end their reign over the world.
    • In the Dark Souls 1 expansion, Artorias of the Abyss, Superboss Black Dragon Kalameet is (almost) completely impossible to even fight until you get Hawkeye Gough to snipe him out of the sky, nailing one of his wings to his side and causing him to crash, preventing him from flying for more than a few seconds at a time. The stone dragon you find in Ash Lake as the keeper of the Path of the Dragon covenant goes one further by being the only character in the entire game to be completely invincible- you can cut off its tail to use as a weapon, but it doesn't even notice and it's implied it will simply regenerate in time.
    • The Ancient Dragon in Dark Souls II is a massive Damage-Sponge Boss which has attacks that are almost all a One-Hit Kill, but you can still kill it in single combat; however it turns out to (apparently) not be a true Archdragon at all, but a facsimile created by Lord Aldia with a Giant Soul at its core. Sinh the Slumbering Dragon from the Crown of the Sunken King DLC is another incredibly dangerous opponent, but he was impaled completely through the body by a gigantic spear when Shulva fell, which is still lodged there where you fight him.
    • Darkeater Midir from Dark Souls III was an Archdragon raised by the gods themselves to fight the all-consuming Abyss, and has become corrupted by it over the centuries. While this has enhanced his power in some ways (such as giving him a laser beam breath and dark sorcerous attacks), it's also implied to be eating away at him. He still remains possibly the toughest boss in the entire series.
  • Actually inverted in the spiritual predecessor, Demon's Souls, where almost none of the bosses are weakened and quite a few are actually explicitly powered up by being turned into demons. The true forms of Ostrava, Alfred (Tower Knight), Oolan (Phalanx), Metas (Penetrator), and Allant (False King Allant) pale in comparison to their demon forms. However, it's played straight by exactly one foe: the Dragon God, who you encounter already chained up and in a death trap that you simply have to activate. He'd be completely invulnerable to you in any other situation.
• At the end of Devil May Cry 5, despite having reached levels of power that surpass nearly anything from previous games, Vergil is weakened and exhausted from his Duel to the Death with the similarly powered-up Dante, and despite his bravado is easy pickings for Nero despite having a massive advantage over the younger Devil Hunter in experience and power even with Nero unlocking his own proper Devil Trigger.
• Dragon Quest IV: The justification for why the party is able to defeat Estark if he is supposedly even stronger than the Final Boss is that he's still not at full strength due to just waking up.
• Elden Ring: It's downplayed compared to Dark Souls, as many enemies are explicitly being fought at full strength, but the sheer number of bosses means there's still a long list where the trope applies.
  • Starscourge Radahn was once the strongest of the demigods, but being infected by scarlet rot destroyed his body and mind. By the present day, he's hardly more than a feral beast whose legs have rotted away, he's riddled with the spears and arrows of past fights, and is far past his prime. Nevertheless, he's an absolute monster of a boss with multiple One-Hit Kill attacks and is more than capable of taking on a small army all by himself.
  • Malenia, Blade of Miquella, was already suffering from the Scarlet Rot back when she fought Radahn, and the strain of fighting such a powerful opponent to a draw forced her to unleash the Scarlet Rot to defeat him, which only further decays her body by the time you fight her, being blind and three of her limbs are prosthetics. While she's still back at near full-strength, by this point, she's forced to focus more on holding back the Rot rather than fighting you, leaving her unable to fight too aggressively. You may not notice this while she's turning you into paste. Though in her second phase, her disabilities are presumably compensated for by her going full Goddess of Rot, but even then, it's heavily indicated that the mentality of the Rot affected her skills, meaning she is still not quite at her best.
  • Elder Dragon Greyoll is completely immobile and defended by her children, but she'd be quite literally unfightable if she did take action, because she's so giant she crashes the game when she moves.
  • Many bosses fight you in projection form, and are invariably weaker as projections than they are in-person. Obviously, this is averted when you fight them in the flesh. Examples include Festering Fingerprint Vyke (his true self is trapped in the Lord Contender's Evergaol), Mohg's "Omen" form underneath Leyndell, Godfrey's golden shade near the Elden Throne, Loretta's spirit form in Raya Lucaria, and Margit (who's actually just a projection of Morgott, the Omen King).
  • Renalla was once a terrifyingly powerful mage, but as of the present has lost her mind due to the Trauma Conga Line she's suffered. She barely takes any action against you at all. The fight isn't so much about beating her as beating the flunkies keeping up her shield. And when you fight her in her prime in the second phase, it isn't really her but a projection made by her daughter Ranni. Though the strength and versatility of her spells, her having nearly the exact same health as the real deal, and the fact that you still get a "Legend Felled" message for destroying it all heavily suggest that the projection is on par with the real Rennala.
  • The Fire Giant boss is still suffering from wounds he took during Marika's war with the Giants, and hitting those wounds deals extra damage.
  • Dragonlord Placidusax is clearly not in the best shape when you fight him; he's lost one set of wings, his tail, three of his five heads, and a good chunk of his scales. He still puts up all the fight you'd expect from a former Elden Lord, but it's clear he's nowhere near as terrifyingly powerful as he would have been during his reign.
  • When you fight Radagon of the Golden Order, despite the fact that Radagon has fused with Marika and become a vessel for the Elden Ring, he’s still far from the peak of his powers. The Elden Ring remains shattered, and Radagon is crumbling with it. In addition, the fact that he doesn’t use any of the magic he’s supposed to have mastered suggests he may be little more than an Empty Shell playing host to the Elden Beast.
    • On a similar wavelength, the Final Boss also suffers from this. As nothing less than the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Golden Order, the Elden Beast is the Top God of Elden Ring, but when the player finally manages to confront it, it’s far from its peak. Since the Elden Beast and Elden Ring are one and the same, it still bears a horrid wound from the Shattering and lacks the various Great Runes you’ve been collecting all game. Not to mention, by the time you’re finally able to confront the Elden Beast, you’ve already unleashed Destined Death and Giantsflame to ravage the Erdtree, and that connection cannot have been kind. The fact it's still arguably the most powerful entity in the game despite these factors speak more than enough about its power.
  • Black Knife Assassins are usually fairly strong field bosses, but the one in Limgrave begins the fight at half health, making her a reasonable early-game challenge. This BKA also has a unique model with several slashes across her torso, implying that she just won a fight with whatever the original dungeon boss was, but was left badly hurt before the Tarnished came along to finish her off.
• In The Elder Scrolls series, in the rare cases where a mortal directly contends with a Daedric Prince, said Prince is either weakened (such as manifesting on Mundus, the mortal plane, where metaphysical laws typically weaken their power), is Willfully Weak (Hircine especially likes this, because a Daedric-Prince-On-Mortal hunt wouldn't be sporting), or said mortal has been empowered by one of the Divines or another Prince.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • Beowulf points out the reason why he fought the dragon at the end of his story to a mutual kill was because he had been an elderly man at the time and obviously not as strong as he had once been. Eventually, Beowulf, summoned in his physical prime, gets a chance to take the dragon on in a rematch and demolishes it.
  • Gawain explains that during the fall of Camelot, Mordred killed him by attacking him after he was exhausted after having fought a duel with Lancelot.
  • By the time Achilles shows up in the Atlantis Lostbelt, he has already been shot in the heel and has lost his shield, making him lose his invulnerability and 70% of his speed. He doesn't let it stop him from fighting.
• In the Final Fantasy series:
  • In the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, whenever Cloud manages to beat Sephiroth, it can be chalked up to some problem on Sephiroth's end.
    • During Cloud's first victory over Sephiroth, despite the latter's overwhelming physical superiority and experience advantage, he was in the midst of a psychotic breakdown, he had already been worn down by a duel with Zack Fair, Cloud took him completely by surprise and dealt a devastating sword blow to his midsection to open the battle, and he fatally underestimated Cloud's resolve to defeat him.
    • In their second duel, Sephiroth had already been left weakened after his Safer form was beaten by Cloud and his party and Cloud's will has grown stronger
    • Anytime they fight afterwards, Sephiroth proves to be easily more than a match and the only reason Cloud wins some of those is because Sephiroth either lets him win or takes his sweet time humiliating him and leaves himself open.
  • Final Fantasy XIV likes this trope to explain how you're able to go against bosses that by all accounts should be out of your league.
    • In Heavensward, Estinien uses the Eye to weaken Nidhogg, so you don't fight him at full strength. Until Nidhogg possesses Estinien himself and regains both of his Eyes.
    • In Endwalker, you fight Zodiark and Hydaelyn, said to be the most powerful of primals. However, Zodiark is only 8/14 rejoined, while you are 9/14 rejoined thanks to merging with Ardbert, and summon seven champions of Light with the Crystal of Azem. Furthermore, the Ascian who used to be Zodiark's heart, Elidibus, is gone, and the primal is now piloted by Fandaniel, an Omnicidal Maniac and Death Seeker who wants to lose as part of his scheme. As for Hydaelyn, by the time you fight her, most of her strength has been spent on containing Zodiark, shielding you, and empowering Minfilia on the First to prevent its total annihilation; furthermore, she's not fighting you and the Scions to the death, but rather testing your strength.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, Hector, who in the prequel was established as being a major badass, is quickly and effortlessly wasted by Zephiel. However, he is 20 years past his prime and cannot fight as effectively as he once could.
  • In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, Greil's death at the Black Knight's hand is revealed to have been because of a number of factors. His weapon really was not a proper weapon to fight him, and Greil crippled his good arm because of a insanity-induced rampage he went on. When the Black Knight learns of this he realizes his victory was hollow.
  • In the original Japanese version of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, the Black Knight claims to Ike that he beat him at the end of Path of Radiance because some malfunctioning warp powder sent a shade of himself to fight him. The English translation changes this to a case of I Let You Win, as the Black Knight wanted to give Ike more time to surpass Greil's power and reach his full potential.
• God of War:
  • Zeus pulls this on Kratos in God of War II by tricking him into using a magic sword to defeat a giant statue at the start of the game. However Kratos had to deplete all his energy in doing so making him easy pickings for Zeus to kill him. As the end of the game shows though, Kratos at full power is more than a match for Zeus. The statue's outstretched hand slamming into Kratos while his back was turned didn't do him any favors either.
  • In the same game, despite being renowned as a powerful goddess and considered both in- and out-of-universe as the greatest tactician in all of Greek mythology, Athena somehow comes to the decision to throw herself in the path of Kratos attempting to slay Zeus with the Blade of Olympus and getting killed herself, not even given a proper boss battle like a deity of her caliber could have and should have gotten. She comes back as a specter haunting the new God of War, even into the Norse era but it still leaves a sour taste.
  • God of War (PS4): In contrast to the previous games, Kratos, the warrior who once flipped over Titans the literal size of mountains now visibly strains and struggles against Trolls no bigger than the Cyclopses he once casually knocked out, and most tellingly is visibly winded and exhausted after his bouts with The Stranger in spite of once not even breaking a sweat beating the life out of Hercules and Zeus himself. Word of God states this is because he's out of practice and he's also playing Willfully Weak as he is acting as if he is just a normal but great warrior to his son.
• Golden Sun:
  • Golden Sun: When the party faces Saturos on the roof of the Mercury Lighthouse, they are able to defeat him. However, it's revealed that because he's a Fire Adept, he's weakened by being on the Water-aligned lighthouse roof (strangely enough, although Water Adept Mia is able to recover her MP, Fire Adept Garet suffers no disadvantages). Saturos is stronger (and backed up by Menardi) when fought on the complementary Earth-aligned Venus Lighthouse.
  • Golden Sun: The Lost Age: When you fight Agatio and Karst at Jupiter Lighthouse, they're tired and worn down from their fight with Isaac's party, while Felix and co. are at full strength as they were healed by Alex shortly before the battle began. Karst even acknowledges this at one point, but later attempts to double-cross you and invoke You Have Outlived Your Usefulness anyway.
• Johnny Klebitz, during his single scene in Grand Theft Auto V, is crippled by his meth addiction, reducing him to a withered shell of the One-Man Army he once was. It gets him stomped to death by Trevor (who, in contrast, is a Functional Addict).
• Kingdom Hearts
  • In Kingdom Hearts, Sora's party manages to rescue Hercules from Cerberus. As the party leaves, Phil is utterly flabbergasted as to how they managed to do it. Hercules then says that he had managed to "soften up" Cerberus a bit before Sora appeared. Later in the game, you can fight Cerberus again and he has an extra health bar, proving he was indeed weaker.
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, Hercules has been fighting Hades' minions non-stop for days or weeks and suffering from a Heroic BSoD that saps at his confidence and willpower. When he fights Auron, he's so worn down physically and mentally that Auron is able to overpower him and would have killed him if Sora and friends hadn't saved him.
  • Kingdom Hearts III’s endgame involves Kairi getting captured by Xemnas with embarrassingly little resistance in spite of her previous training to be a Keyblade wielder, with the only seeming justification being that he’s painfully twisting her arm when he kidnaps her. The Re:Mind DLC adds a new scenario into the middle of the moment to recontextualize this, showing her actually fighting Xemnas and noticeably giving him more difficulty than any other guardian, such that he resorts to a Nothingness attack to drain her, as well as Sora. After both are rescued from this, while Sora benefits from his future self’s heart returning to reinvigorate him, Kairi has no such assistance and is too worn out to put up any resistance when her kidnapping from the original game happens.
• The Last of Us Part II: The first confrontation between Ellie and Abby has Abby beating Ellie and Dina to a pulp and would have killed them if not for Lev's intervention. When they meet again over a year later, Abby has been held captive by the Rattlers for several months. She has lost most of her muscle mass due to both starvation and lack of physical activity on top of being very weak overall. This allows Ellie to fight her on a more even footing and Ellie wins this time around (even though she was recently impaled and not 100% herself), but ultimately chooses to spare Abby's life.
• Like a Dragon
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Ichiban gets worried, when in the rematch with Sawashiro, he grabs a katana off the wall. Adachi wonders why when Ichiban already beat him once. Ichiban explains Sawashiro real strength lies in when he uses weapons. Ichiban in fact guesses the first fight he either A) just lucked out or B) Sawashiro for what ever reason was simply holding back.
  • Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth: The reason why Kiryu has gone from a One-Man Army capable of dispatching of goons by himself to a member of Ichiban's party is that not only is he pushing 60 but he's contracted cancer. As such he's significantly weakened and can only temporarily fight like he used to via Dragon's Resurgence, in which he outright ignores the turn-based combat system and fights using the beat'em up system.
• Luminous Plume: The Crystal and Ashen Calamities are in the process of recharging their aura, meaning Raven can kill them before they reach their peak performance. At their full power, they're supposed to be nigh-unstoppable beings that Raven and Victor fled from in the past.
• The trope is inverted in Mass Effect 3, as Kai Leng is introduced in the midst of his attempts to assassinate the Citadel Council. If earlier gameplay requirements have been met, Shepard is able to thwart him with the help of Thane Krios, who was also an assassin but is now in the terminal stages of a fatal disease. In fact, he should have died six months ago. As Thane puts it, "That assassin should be embarrassed. He let a terminally ill drell stop him from completing his mark." Thane does end up fatally wounded, but it is stated that his advanced illness is the reason why treatments for his injury are ineffective.
• Mental Omega: The Allied (Hamartia) and Epsilon (Babel) finale mission of Act 2 sees the Allies' Paradox Engine, the Mighty Glacier unit in a game with plenty of them and up to then a nigh-unstoppable Game Changer for the Allies, crippled and rendered inoperable by Libra unleashing her full power as it makes its final run on the Mental Omega Device. However, Epsilon Infiltrators had previously sabotaged the Engine's Paradox Conductors, disabling all of its Prism Cannons, allowing Libra to pummel it freely. The fight would have been far more in the Engine's favour had the Prism Cannons still been active, given that Babel shows it able to two-shot Libra with them the first time they confront one another.
• In Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe the effect that causes the two universes to merge also evens out the power levels of the characters. Or else Liu Kang fighting Superman hand-to-hand would just be silly.
• In Nioh2, Shuten Doji is one of the Three Great Yokai, supposedly on par with the Big Bad. However, his movements during his boss fight are slow and easy to read due to him being drunk (which is true to real-life folklore). Players get to fight him at his prime as a Superboss in the second DLC — even with the aid of a powerful NPC companion, he is one of the hardest fights in the game since his movement is sped up dramatically to make him a Lightning Bruiser.
• In Odin Sphere, it's explained later that the reason Oswald lost to Mercedes during the Ringford rebellion was that his power was weakening, and he lost his power entirely when trying to fight baby Levanthan.
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has Prelate Hulrun, who is weakened and level-drained by a nabasu when the low-level party meets him in Kenabres. If the party doesn't kill Hulrun, he ends up showing his true strength as an ally in the Crusade.
• Persona 5, interestingly, has a literal example of this. Superboss The Reaper can actually catch the flu if fought under specific weather conditions, making what's normally a very difficult fight very easy.
• In [PROTOTYPE], halfway through the game, Alex is given a "cure" that zaps him of all of his powers besides his strength, speed, and shape-shifting. He gets better.
• Played with in Punch-Out!! for Wii with Von-Kaiser. Prior to his first match, he's KO'd by what appears to be a kindergarten student and mocked by all the kid's friends, making him suffer from a nasty inadequacy complex when facing you for the first time, resulting in weakened attacks and a tendency to cower with fear and beg for his mother. Unlike the other characters who Take a Level in Badass, change tactics, or cheat to up their game for the Title Defense match, Von Kaiser merely gets so angry that you have the championship belt that he gets over his complex and shows up at full strength to challenge you. It's played with because, while he's about as difficult as the Major Circuit opponents from before, the "full strength" Von Kaiser is still laughably easy to beat.
• Radiant Arc:
  • Terra the Earth Spirit had to have her magic power weakened in order for the Morians to control her, meaning the party didn't defeat her at her full strength. At the same time, Lexie, Terence, and Aria were bedridden during that fight, meaning the party wasn't at its full strength either.
  • Linky's mother is actually the human avatar of Irin and is still powerful enough to be the guardian of one of the Grand Crystal shards, but she can't access her full divine powers, meaning she doesn't stand a chance against Seperus.
• Red Dead Redemption II: In this case, Arthur Morgan has tuberculosis, and he still gives Micah Bell some trouble. In his prime, Arthur would've probably flattened the guy easily.
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice: Isshin Ashina is easily the greatest swordsman in the world, but when you fight him on the Shura route, he's ninety years old, terminally ill, and literally hours away from death. He's still strong enough to easily kick the crap out of you. Isshin the Sword Saint, the version of him you fight on any other route, is him in the prime of his life, and makes any other boss in the game look like a warm-up.
• Despite being the strongest non-Xel'naga in the universe, in StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void Kerrigan gets tossed around by a hybrid with ease. Shortly afterwards, she comments that she's been fighting hybrid for days and was exhausted.
• In Street Fighter, Birdie uses this as the actual explanation for his original loss against Ryu when they meet again in Street Fighter Alpha; it also explains why he was white in the first game, and why he's overweight in the fifth.
• In Sunrider 4: The Captain's Return, Crow Harbor and his forces are nowhere near full strength by the time the crew of the Maray encounters them. His ancient Ryuvian ships may be more advanced and more powerful than anything else in the setting, but they're also heavily damaged from the battle that flung them all into the present day, and the infrastructure needed to repair and refuel them simply doesn't exist in the modern galaxy. Also, most of his men are either dead or juiced up on Psycho Serum, leaving him with only a handful of crazed Ryder pilots for backup. He still gives Kayto Shields's crew the fight of their lives despite this, but it's a fight they can potentially win instead of a curb stomp in Crow's favor.
• In Super Robot Wars: Original Generation Gaiden, many people seems to come to term that Lamia Loveless was hit with this trope that she accidentally got hit by so many Distress Balls. She only got caught by the Bartolls on the first place because she was not in her mecha (the same goes to Kusuha, Arado, Seolla and Latooni), and later on, Juergen managed to 'kill' her because for the same reason, added by the fact that she was just recently and forcefully been plugged out from her cockpit that binds her. She doesn't really have much impact after being rescued, but should you bring her to battle against the Bartolls in Chapter 34, she will express disgust on the Bartolls and show them that in the right conditions, they are no match for her. Unfortunately, however, she could never do it on Juergen (nor that she has any special lines against him when they face off in Free Battle).
• In one of Team Fortress 2's Meet the Team videos, a Scout kills a Heavy with his baseball bat. He then can be seen munching on the Heavy's Satiating Sandwich. Do note, however, that the Heavy in question was trying to eat his Sandvich before the Scout interrupted him — and the whole point of eating a Sandvich is to regain health.
• Tekken: The original Armor King dies between 3 and 4, killed in a Bar Brawl by Craig Marduk. It's later established that Armor King was forced to retire from professional wrestling due to a chronic illness, which by the time he fought Marduk had progressed to the point he was too weak to survive the beating he suffered.
• Given the power levels of many Touhou Project characters this trope is used by many fans to explain the defeat of certain characters, since everyone in Gensokyo is battling under the Spellcard system, and if they weren't Holding Back the Phlebotinum, the fighting between magicians, time-stopper, ancient vampires, embodiments of death and afterlife, immortals, wielder of NUCLEAR POWER, and assortments of gods would have wiped Gensokyo off the map.
• In Warriors Orochi, this is how the Orochi beats the Tokugawa. They arrive and launch their attack on Edo castle just in time when Honda Tadakatsu is away scouting the area. Considering Tadakatsu is often considered Samurai Warriors' Lu Bu, the battle might have a different outcome if he is ever present.
  • In Warriors Orochi 3, several warriors end up dying in the normal timeline due to being weakened in a previous fight. Thanks to Kaguya's time traveling abilities, the heroes can go back in time and provide needed help for said warrior so that they end up surviving in an alternate timeline and join the heroes.
• Used pretty often in World of Warcraft to justify how small groups of unnamed adventurers can kill one of the most powerful beings on the planet with no help whatsoever from the Big Goods.
  • Each of the Old Gods are considerably weakened when players encounter them. C'Thun and Yogg-Saron were heavily weakened by their imprisonment by the Titans, while Y'Shaarj had already been killed in the backstory with players only facing remnants of his power. The only Old God to avert the trope and be fought at his full power is N'Zoth, who is explicitly stated to be the weakest of the four, having only survived as long as he did due to being a patient behind-the-scenes Chessmaster—and he still gives the adventurers who fight him the fight of their lives.
  • When first fought in the Molten Core in Classic World of Warcraft, Ragnaros the Firelord had just come out of hibernation and was considerably weakened due to being cut off from the energies of his realm, the Firelands. However, a few expansions later, in Cataclysm, players got to fight Ragnaros at full power in the Firelands, subverting this trope.
    Ragnaros yells: TOO SOON! YOU HAVE AWAKENED ME TOO SOON, EXECUTUS!
  • Burning Crusade gives us Kil'jaeden, the de facto leader of the Burning Legion, who was in the middle of a summoning and at about half his power — and players still needed help from a Big Good or two to beat him (and all that really means is just pushing him back through a portal). Like Ragnaros, though, players eventually got to fight Kil'jaeden at full power during the Legion expansion.
  • During the Duel to the Death between Cairne Bloodhoof and Garrosh Hellscream in the World of Warcraft novel The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm, Cairne gets some good hits in on Garrosh, but after taking a hit from his opponent's weapon, which unbeknownst to either of them, was poisoned, slows down long enough to take a fatal hit to the neck.
  • Thrall's fights with Garrosh tend to be this. The first time, Thrall held back to avoid humiliating Garrosh. The second time, Garrosh's dark shaman had twisted the elements around Orgimmar so Thrall couldn't use most of his powers. Finally the third time they fight, Thrall tries to match Garrosh in pure melee combat. Once Thrall calls upon the elements, he easily overpowers and kills Garrosh.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 uses this tropes extensively to actually explain why each Recurring Boss is more powerful each time they're fought instead of just leaving it as a gameplay contrivance:
  • Zeke was toying with the party and intentionally holding back to various degrees.
  • Brighid and Morag are never fought with both parties fighting at full strength. In the first fight, Brighid is separated from her Driver; in the second, Morag is attempting to non-lethally arrest Rex; in the third, Rex's party are holding back as they just try to talk through a misunderstanding.
  • Malos was crippled in the backstory, he gets his power back during the plot, and pilots Aion as the Final Boss.
  • Akhos, Patroka, and Mikhail all use Blades like the party and use more powerful ones later more specifically, their own weapons as Flesh Eaters. They're also fought alone or in pairs to start; their toughest battle comes when they team up and mirror the player party's Damager, Healer, Tank dynamic.
  • Most notably, any fight with Jin on his terms in nothing but a Curb-Stomp Battle in his favor. The only times the party win come from outside influence, in order: Fan la Norne suppressing his powers, Pneuma awakening her ability to rewrite reality to level the playing field, and being on the cusp of death by ether stagnation.

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