Archived Discussion Main / BeamSpam

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Adam850: What exactly is a Beam Spam? What does it look like?

Phartman: Remember when you'd get into arguements as a kid and one of you would eventually back up a retort with the word infinity, as in "No, you're a doodie-head, times infinity!"? I think a Beam Spam is the anime equivalent of that infinity qualifier.

Citizen: Relying on blasting your Energy Weapon over and over again until you kill the enemy dead. You know "Needs more cowbell"? Yeah.

Holland: The Eureka Seve N reference seemed quite unnecessary to me. The Macross-esque Itano Circuses and the strange weapons of Anemone's mecha are a bit over the top, but really not that uncommon in super robot anime. Not at the level that the entry implied. You get many more vividly colored beams in Gundam SEED....

Anonymous: This page seriously needs to be split. There's a difference between beam SPAM and just one big, signature beam attack. i.e. Lina Inverse's Dragon Slave spell and the SDF-1's Reflex Cannon are not beam spam but the attacks used by the robots from Bangai-O & Zone of Enders and many of the moves used by Avatars in .hack//GU ARE beam spam.

Beam spam embodies phrase, "Quantity has a quality all of its own."

Kendra Kirai: I'm sensing a melding between Beam Spam and Wave-Motion Gun here...If nobody objects, within a few hours, I'm going to go through and pull out the ones that are clearly Wave Motion Guns.

(Much Later) There we go, I've pulled them out. Placing here in case anybody really objects after all.

This Troper: Since the WMG examples have been removed, shouldn't the description be changed as well? (It currently sounds like what a WMG should be.)

• Anonymous: Done. Should we delete some of the chatter below about the WMG examples that used to be on the page?

• The Marble Screw in Futari Wa Pretty Cure. Later got outpaced by Rainbow Storm. But we can't have that, so Marble Screw became Marble Screw Max. Then Hikari showed up and we had Extreme Luminario. So Marble Screw Max got powered up again (in a manner not entirely unlike the Rainbow Storm) and became Marble Screw Max Spark.
  • Don't bother making dirty jokes about "Marble Screw." We've long since exhausted them all.
• Lina Inverse's signature spell from The Slayers, "Dragon Slave", is a classic example. The effect is roughly equivalent to a small atomic bomb, generating a massive Sphere of Destruction.

• Ori battlecruisers have as their primary weapon a giant yellow beam that destroys what used to be the toughest ships in the galaxy in two or less shots.
• The main battleship of Starship Operators relied on one of these. When it ran out they settled shooting other ships with a battleship-scale revolver.
• What, no Gundam Wing yet? Heero's beam cannon first takes out two mobile suits at a time... then three... then an entire space colony... and tops it off with a asteroid-sized chunk of reinforced, armored battle station. With one shot.
• X-Men leader Cyclops, best demonstrated in an issue of Astonishing, where he takes his visor off and flattens everything in his forward arc.
• Many of the Final Smashes in Super Smash Bros Brawl have elements of this, but Samus Aran's is a textbook example: a giant all-encompassing beam of energy that's so powerful it shorts out her own armor.
• The Global Defense Initiative's iconic Ion Cannon.
• Godzilla's heat ray slowly evolved from a simple Breath Weapon bonus to a serious spam option (circe Godzilla vs. Biollante). By the time of Final Wars, it's powerful (and sustainable) enough to knock two enemy monsters into a building, then shove the whole stack (monsters and building) along for several more bodylengths.
• Fudou's "Dragon Cannon" in Madan Senki Ryukendo releases a very large, very powerful dragon-like beam of energy. It's also available in Magna, Trinity and Ultimate versions.
• Dragonball, especially Dragonball Z and onwards.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha - First two seasons. The third season reveals that relying on this solely in combat is very unhealthy; so the Space-Time Administration encourages mages to diversify their attacks.
  • Nanoha still does it anyway when she's really pissed.

Servbot: Removed...

• For less-modern forms of Beam Spam, look no farther than Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. One team attack, appropriately called "1000 Blades", involves the magic girl providing the brawny main character with a magical supply of knives, which he throws at the rate of ohmygodhowmany for about ten seconds.

Non-beam versions of Beam Spam goes to one of the other tropes in the Death In All Directions index.

...which, surprisingly, lacks the small, throwing blades (knives, darts, needles, pointy feathers) version of spamming. Could have sworn we had a trope like that.

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Impacto: It'll need some resizing, but how about using this◊ epic spread from Bokurano as a page image?