Follow TV Tropes


Story-Breaker Power

Go To

"It feels like kind of a cheat; you can't have your characters be too powerful."
Martin Lloyd, Stargate SG-1, "200"

A question writers should ask themselves when deciding which (if any) Super Powers to give any character is "Which and how strong a set of powers does a character need in order for this story to be entertaining?" This is because many times characters begin or end up having powers that in the hands of a competent and reasonably intelligent protagonist would allow them to handily solve a plot. Plot complications, the Sorting Algorithm of Evil and the Sliding Scale of Villain Threat would be incapable of dealing with this character... at least not without drastically changing the setting or the story's tone.


This is a common problem for sequels of works that end with the protagonist unlocking their full power. Once they get too much power they win the Superpower Lottery and become godlike, or worse, Suelike. On the other hand, a simple or limited power can lead to viewers asking "Why don't they just use his power of X to do Y and stop the bad guy/get the MacGuffin?". In order to challenge the protagonist the writers will have to ramp up the villain's power, find a way to otherwise remove or sideline them, Depower them or at least reduce it to more reasonable levels, take away their weapons, make the power come at a price, or give them a Drama-Preserving Handicap of some sort (see also Kryptonite Is Everywhere ). Otherwise, the character will be Too Powerful to Live. The easiest way to tell if this trope is in effect is when the writer resorts to handing the protagonist the Idiot Ball and Forgot About His Powers to keep the character from using their powers in a straightforward way.


Another good sign of this trope affecting the setting is if over time, it seems as though the character's abilities and competence can suddenly fluctuate in a non-intuitive way depending on the plot. If for instance a character, with all their Super Strength, is often shown being able to stop calamities like falling buildings but is suddenly shown to struggle dealing with the villain's Mooks, this trope is likely at work. Power Creep, Power Seep works similarly, but specifically kicks in when the character is an alternate setting/timeline or is being handled by a different author, and their usual capabilities would break the story intended for them.

On a bit of a tangent, there's a reason why this trope applies mostly to protagonists; we expect the Big Bad to have a nigh unbeatable edge and get beaten nonetheless, giving us a typical underdog story. Though this isn't to say it's good for a villain to have a Story Breaker Power, because they run the risk of becoming a Villain Sue. This is why most stories with such villains focus on stopping them from actually getting these powers.


The abilities most likely to be Story Breaker Powers without careful use are:

It's worth clarifying that yes, characters with these powers can and often do have engaging stories, great struggles, and otherwise captivate the audience. When that's the case, it generally is because the writer finds a way to properly integrate the power into the story rather than just shoehorning it into a stock plot probably originally intended for non-powered characters; ways to do this can for example involve complications that the hero legitimately CAN'T easily solve by just throwing their power at them, and giving the downsides of having said power some spotlight time as well. In short, whether or not a given power is a "story breaker" depends on the story in question just as much as it does on the power itself.

Compare Deus Exit Machina and Story-Breaker Team-Up, where this trope appears not because of a power itself but because of disparities between them. Just Eat Gilligan can become a result if this power can resolve all conflicts in the story. Game-Breaker is a similar but otherwise unrelated trope, when a player manages to inflict this on a game. When instead of personal powers it's a certain kind of Applied Phlebotinum that has this story-breaking ability, see Holding Back the Phlebotinum for ways writers deal with this kind of material. New Life in Another World Bonus when one gains these powers upon being Trapped in Another World. From a Doylist perspective, this is the main reason as to why Superman Stays Out of Gotham.


    open/close all folders 

    Comic Strips 
  • One of the things that contributed to Dick Tracy 1960s Dork Age was the introduction of the "Space Coupe" and all its accompanying crime tracking and weaponry. Once you give the heroes a device that can go anywhere and track any kind of crime, the villains don't really have a chance. This led to the plot "Villains Try To Steal The Space Coupe" repeated ad nauseum for a while. When the new creative team started to reintroduce past elements to the current story, one of the first things they did was have Diet Smith tell Tracy that he mothballed the Space Coupe basically because of the "Villains Try To Steal The Space Coupe" factor.

    Fan Works 
  • Hogyoku ex Machina has Ichigo. He spends most of the fic with most of his power sealed off yet still has 3 times the reiatsu of any captain. At full power however...
  • Imperfect Metamorphosis has Rin Satsuki, who can negate, absorb, and to a limited extent redirect all but the most powerful magical attacks. Then she was involuntarily transformed into a Blob Monster who gains the powers of anyone she absorbs. Then she absorbs EX-Rumia, who was already a powerful and indestructible Flying Brick and a horrifically deadly Walking Wasteland. When most of Touhou Project's Superpower Lottery winners (see below) attacked her at the same time they did little more than annoy her, and that was before she absorbed Kaguya and Mokou and gained Complete Immortality. Fortunately she doesn't want to hurt anyone, and has spent most of her time defending herself, running away, or hiding.
  • Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami:
    • The Royal Death Note lets the user bypass the rule that they must know their target's face and full name. The whole plot of Death Note - Light's hunt for L's name - becomes quite pointless, since Dark can simply write "L" and kill him. Except...
    • There is also a Life Note, which allows anyone, no matter how they died, to be brought back instantly. The Death Notes are essentially worthless. Except...
    • There is an Anti Life Note which is immune to the Life Note's powers (except it doesn't work on Near for some reason). (Un)fortunately, the author forgets about this before it has a chance to pay off.
    • The granddaddy of all of these is the Everything Note, which can do everything. It can be used for resurrection, time travel, superpowers, teleportation and sex. As soon as it is introduced, any pretense at being a Gambit Pile Up story is completely gone.
    • On a meta level, the Reset Note grants a metafictional Reset Button to Dark, which lets him Retcon Khaos' rise to power and making his defeat one of the greatest anticlimaxes ever. If he was smarter about using it, the Reset Note would be even stronger than the Everything Note.
  • In Death Note II: The Hidden Note, the main character KJ was born with Shinigami eyes. Which means that if he gets a Death Note, he can easily kill anyone he doesn't like with one just by looking at them without the cost of half his lifespan. The good news is that KJ is a lot less trigger happy than his father when it comes to killing people.
  • In RE-TAKE, Shinji for the first two chapters displays the power to kill Arael by swatting it out of the sky with his AT-field. Later when Asuka gets pregnant, the power he had is passed onto his child, but Ghost-Asuka apparently had the same power and when she managed to forgive him she allows him to easily defeat the MP-Evas.
  • Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness: In Act III and onwards, Luna and Falla's chrono magic easily makes them among the most powerful of Tsukune's gang, if not the most powerful, to the extent that they were instrumental in the gang's defeat of Alucard in Act IV. Naturally, the author keeps coming up with ways to keep them from going all out to prevent them from rendering everyone else useless, such as the Almighty's law forbidding them from actual Time Travel, the risk of chrono dementia, the risk of getting preyed upon by chrono wraiths, and Babylon keeping track of their chrono magic in order to capture them.
  • The Secret Return of Alex Mack has Pyre, who can read minds, has a Compelling Voice, limited precognition, minor telekinesis, and above all has epic-level pyrokinesis that makes her a Person of Mass Destruction. Word of God is that that's why she had to be killed off.
  • In With Strings Attached, Ringo is able to mentally see anything he's ever seen before, and can work his way into unfamiliar places from a familiar starting point, including people and unique objects. And he can do it effortlessly and indefinitely. And he can see perfectly in the dark. And he can see things as small as atoms. And he never holds the Idiot Ball. The concept of “information is power” really applies with him. He's also telekinetic, with an enormous range. Thus, unless you magically hide yourself from him, he will fuck you up—and the plot along with you. As Jeft discovered to his sorrow.
  • Yet again, with a little extra help:
    • The Oogakari, a family of OC God Mode Sues that jump into canon and mess with the plot and help the main characters sort of behind the scenes, but they are far more interested in seeing how messed up things will be once the new plot unfurls than actually bringing peace to the world. The supposed leader of the family, Ghost, is a walking Class Z apocalypse via his time space burning fire, which gives him the power of "denial of phenomena". In layman's terms, he can negate anyone, anything, any EVENT, any CAUSALITY, any MEMORY, any WORLD, any GOD, or any DIMENSION he wishes by burning the time space that makes them up. This includes the events that possess anytime he dies or gets hurt as well. He is confirmed to be the absolute end of his multiverse and can enact it anytime he wants, but doesn't because "he isn't that big of an asshole".
    • His Sister, Shadow, is right up there as she contains the supposed Goddess (Demon Dragon Goddess... Thing) Zuzushi, that created their multiverse. As a result she has obtained the ability to "create all from nothing". It's been stated but not shown that she is easily capable of manifesting universes on a whim, and even contemplated destroying and recreating the Narutoverse the current story was in after Ghost trapped her in it while a major event occurred in another universe.
  • The author of Child of the Storm is obviously very well aware of this trope, and since the Avengers are, with the addition of Loki and several years to gel as a team, nearly unstoppable, he makes sure that the bad guys spend their time striking from the shadows, arguing that you'd have to be a moron or legitimately insane to think you could take them in a straight fight. As a result, while Thor, Loki, or Wanda could crush Voldemort or almost any of those bad guys who aren't an Eldritch Abomination in a fight, the bad guys are very much aware of this and as such go out of their way to avoid head-on fights, attacking from their hidden base and keeping them away from Harry and his friends. When they finally get their chance to go all-out against the bad guys in the finale, it takes an army of Mooks to even slow them down. When the Red Room try the same trick in the sequel, they're found within hours, in normal time, and only escape because the Avengers were occupied with other matters.
    • Stephen Strange is The Archmage and both a seer and a time traveller, and as such could easily have told the Avengers and SHIELD where to strike, or done so himself. However, when called on this, he explains that had he done so, the protagonists would have been weaker for their lack of experiences, and the bad guys would have survived in hiding to cause more trouble down the line, rather than being drawn out and crushed.
  • The entire premise of Puella Magi Adfligo Systema, whose title literally translates to "system-breaking magical girl." The main character, Sabrina, possesses the ability to control Grief, the corruptive substance produced when magical girls use their magic. Because of this, she has functionally limitless power, and provides that same limitlessness to anyone else - in fact, using her abilities will only give her more material to work with. Since Grief is also the material Witches and their barriers are made from, it can be shaped into virtually any form or function, giving her what amounts to an Imagination-Based Superpower, and making her a Man of Kryptonite to the setting's primary threat. On top of that, she's also essentially a Fourth-Wall Observer, and possesses the knowledge of anyone regularly reading and posting in the thread - including the entire plot of the original story. Because of this, the focus of the story ends up shifting heavily, from a struggle for survival to attempting to untangle the Dysfunction Junction that is the show's primary cast and the Crapsack World that is the entire setting.
  • Showa & Vampire ran into this just with sheer size of its cast, almost all of whom have superpowers of one form or another, the most prominent among them being akin to gods after a couple arcs (To list off just one of them, he has the power to change into the form of any Kamen Rider from an entire era of the show's history a la Kamen Rider Decade complete with all of the original's combat experience and a Super Mode combining all of their strength and abilities, but what's more any form he can assume he can change any of his friends to as well with any powers they get stacking with any they already have, an X-Men-style mutant power to control the flow of time and in the godly Omega tier on top that, gains an unremovable jewel that instills him with the power and essence of a divine dragon creature, has five of the seven types of Dying Will Flames from Reborn! (2004), and Train Heartnet's gun). This requires a lot of Forgot About His Powers to make Kamen Rider-style Monsters of the Week a credible threat to them. The most dramatic example is probably the character who's a Technopath who can mentally hack computers, make battle robots form themselves out of junk, and instantly repurpose everyday machines into deadly weapons with his powers. And when all the villains's just as well he never thought of what he should've been able to do. The kicker is the villains are in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation: the reason they keep attacking the heroes is to capture them to exploit their powers. But even if you believe a Showa-type evil organization can make monsters capable of defeating such powerful heroes, wouldn't the fact that they can create monsters powerful enough to do the job mean they don't need to capture the heroes to exploit their powers?
  • Worm/Heroes crossover fanfic Skittering Thief shows how devastating a power like Arthur Petrelli's can really be when it's the protagonist who has them. Taylor's ability to permanently steal the powers of others makes every cape around utterly terrified of her regardless of whether they are a villain or not. She starts off with only a few powers taken from a few capes mostly by accident, but by the end has absorbed so many powers she's able to fight off Endbringers by herself and survive. The only one more feared than her is Sylar, but even then that only lasts up until she absorbs the power of an Endbringer. By the end, Taylor has gained so many one means or the other that she all but claims to have become God, and as she has taken powers from all twenty Endbringer, Eden's corpse and then Scion itself, along with the intent to absorb every other member of its kind she has a pretty good claim.
    • To a lesser extent the Heroes-verse powers in general are pretty devastating in the universe of Worm. They come off as far simpler in practice, but far more effective in use since they don't come without drawbacks. The power that really makes the difference in the final battle is Claire's regeneration. As it's a healing power far greater than anything either Scion or Eden ever had and can be used without expending energy....and the power that lets Taylor beat the entity without any effort.
  • Hellsister Trilogy features virtually every Pre-Crisis DCU hero and villain, but The Spectre being the omnipotent embodiment of Divine Wrath means he has to be used very sparingly. So, he sits out of two major cosmic conflicts, and his two brief appearances amount to save Supergirl's life after Mordru has been dealt with and destroy Trigon single-handedly and then vanishing as the heroes confront the true menace: Darkseid.
  • Dangerverse: The greater Slytherin bloodline gift of prophetic Sight. Literally everything that happens in the plot comes directly or indirectly from the use of this power, and Anne was forced to put all sorts of restrictions on it in order for there to be a plot at all.
    • For starters, the elder line of Slytherin (from which Voldemort descends) has lost this power entirely and the younger line has no living heirs for most of the story, rendering Alexander Slytherin the only one with this power.
    • And Alexander is limited in the amount of help he can give. He can only give prophecies at certain times, can never tell them something twice, and suffers from other restrictions.
    • After he bends the rules to warn Danger to retrieve Draco in time, he is banned from giving them any information for a considerable time.
    • Then again in fifth year, he is banned from helping due to his daughter interfering in the mortal world.
    • When Luna is made an Heir of Slytherin and gains this power, she immediately leaves to infiltrate the Death Eaters with Reynard, not returning until the very end of the story.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! Extra CCC: Path to the King: Hakuno's deck is filled with original cards based on the Heroic Spirits from Fate/EXTRA. This deck comes packed with support cards that give his monsters insane attack boosts and special abilities, and that's only if the Heroic Spirit monster in question doesn't already have an unbalanced effect or 2 of its own. His deck is so powerful that none of his duels last more than 5 turns, and keep in mind the duels in the fanfic have both players start with 8000 life points. And if that weren't enough, his Servants are very much still able to materialize in the real world and kill people.
  • Halloween Unspectacular: The main reason why the Fiddley Thing was Demoted to Extra following the second collection — even if its power is usually only used For the Lulz, it's still too powerful to use in any of the regular storylines, as it could solve the conflict way too easily. This is also the reason Cosmo and Wanda rarely appear, despite the fact that Timmy is a major character.
  • My Heroes Reborn: The villain Priestess's Quirk allows her to reawaken the most recent past life of a person, and said past life can be from alternate universes. While it does strengthen the victim's body to the prime of their life to handle whatever new skills they have, it cannot regrow new muscles systems or allow them to use forms of energy that don't already exist in the My Hero Academia-verse (i.e. no chakra or magic). This is normally why she's comfortable using it even if it's essentially a game of lucky dip — until she awoke Izuku's past life: "Black Leg" Sanji. A.K.A. a guy whose monstrous strength only comes from pure skill, including his haki, which is simply materializing his willpower/ambition, and thus does not have his strength nerfed. At all. Izuku quickly goes from being barely able to use his Quirk to defend himself to the absolute strongest member of Class 1-A in thirty seconds, and just about the only thing stopping him from destroying the plot completely is a combination of Plot Armor for everyone else and Sanji's personality flaws.
  • Taylor Varga has Taylor Hebert gain the powers of the Varga from the anime Luna Varga. These powers include Super Strength, Super Senses, Nigh-Invulnerability, Spontaneous Weapon Creation & Instant Armor, and Voluntary Shapeshifting. And that's just for starters.
    • To put it into perspective, this power is so great that the Endbringers just nope out if there's even a chance of getting within a stone's throw of Taylor.
  • It Gets Worse gives Taylor Hebert powers based on luck and probability. If someone plans to hurt Taylor in anyway, her powers start setting off a series of events that will invariably lead to their karmic and humiliating comeuppance. Oh, did I mention those powers are constantly active, and don't even require any sort of input from Taylor herself? It's actually quite fun to read how her enemies get defeated.
  • In Batman story Dance with the Demons, Catwoman gets shot with a poisoned dart. So that Hal Jordan -whose Power Ring is more than capable of drawing toxic substances out of a body quickly and efficiently- can't save the day before the end of the first chapter, it's stated that the poison killing Selina has some yellow components (which a Green Lantern Ring can't work around of).
  • In the There Was Once an Avenger from Krypton series, the Hulk, Thor, and Supergirl are this for the Avengers. All of them are major winners of the Superpower Lottery and are in the same weight class when it comes to raw overall power. Circumventing the issue with the former two, Banner rarely ever lets the Hulk out due to fear of the damage and destruction he would cause, while Thor is rarely on Earth. Supergirl, however, gets to show how effortlessly someone with this level of power would take care of most threats when put on a team comprised of mostly badass normals, Charles Atlas Superpower, or those in Power Armor. Chapter 23 of The Girl Who Could Knock Out the Hulk brutally deconstructs this trope when Doctor Doom makes his appearance. He casually dismantles the whole team and stabs Kara with a Kryptonite dagger, all while chastizing them for being too reliant on her to win things when they're not enough.
  • The Doom Slayer in Remnant Inferis: DOOM has many of his strongest weapons taken away by Atlas so that his fights don't become too one-sided in his favor. Even still, he's ludicrously powerful, having the strength to rip people and Grimm apart like tissue paper and the durability to tank blows that even the toughest users of Aura would be subdued by. To get around this, whenever Beacon is undergoing a demonic threat, he's busy somewhere else.
  • In Total Drama Infinite, Deadpool has Medium Awareness that allows him to read the fic's script and predict exactly what's going to happen at any given point. Since this would essentially allow him to circumvent the other competitors' strategies, topple the villain's alliance and prevent his own elimination at will, he promises not to use it again for the author's sake.

    Films — Animation 
  • Aladdin has the Genie, who with phenomenal cosmic powers can do anything aside from killing someone, forcing someone to fall in love, or bringing people Back from the Dead (though Genie implies that he can perform resurrections, but simply doesn't like doing so). The catch is he is unable to use these powers for himself, having instead made to grant wishes to anyone who wields the lamp he is trapped in. This was key to Aladdin defeating Jafar, when the latter wished to become a Genie.
    • After he's freed in the first movie, Genie's powers are demoted to "semi-phenomenal, nearly cosmic" for the sequels and Aladdin: The Series, and gets to hold the Idiot Ball frequently.
  • Bolt, which is about a dog who thinks he's a superhero when in fact he's simply an actor. One of his powers in his show is a super powerful bark that can destroy... like 100 mooks, helicopters and cars all at once. Though it's only useful in large open spaces without innocent bystanders.
  • Zelda from the second sequel to The Swan Princess has the power to create Seekers - homing fireballs that can find any target anywhere and never stop seeking them. The only way to stop one is to break the caster's wand. Of course, Zelda's plan is to gain the Forbidden Arts and the power to destroy - she remembers at the eleventh hour about her Seekers and sends one after Odette. It works. temporarily..
  • Moana: The ocean itself, which is apparently sentient and intervenes numerous times to help Moana as well as carrying the Heart of Te Fiti to her at the beginning of the film. In fact, other than the need to teach Moana and Maui their respective lessons, there is no known reason as to why the ocean could not have simply returned Te Fiti's heart to her on its own.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In the DVD Commentary for The Lord of the Rings extended version, Peter Jackson points out and jokes about it that Gandalf could not use the magic he used to turn away the forces of Mordor a second time because he used up all the power in his staff "And all the shops in Minas Trith were sold out of batteries".
  • The Matrix sequels have this problem with Neo, as at the end of the first film he is essentially a god of The Matrix, with the power to do anything he damn well pleases while inside it. Because of this the writers had to considerably tone down his powers from Reloaded onwards (going from a Reality Warper to a Flying Brick), and up the villain threat. Of course at the end of the first film, the writers didn't know if the movie would be popular enough for a sequel, so this is Hand Waved in the sequel as the Agents got an upgrade.
  • In Return to Oz, the Ruby Slippers become a literal story breaker once the Nome King is defeated and Dorothy recovers them. Everything is repaired, and the story pretty much ends.
  • X-Men Film Series:
    • Professor Charles Xavier's Telepathy is such that most of the movies would be over very, very quickly if he did not frequently get incapacitated or rendered powerless in some way.
    • X-Men: Days of Future Past: Quicksilver gets Put on a Bus after the Pentagon raid because, as that raid shows, he is downright unstoppable. While moving at Super Speed, simply tapping a person is the equivalent of getting hit by a heavyweight boxer, and he can take out an entire room of armed guards so quickly that their bullets weren't even able to reach the people they had shot at when he started. In X-Men: Apocalypse he saves the entire class from a giant explosion and is the first character to put up a fight and hurt Apocalypse. His powers proved to be such a hassle that in X-Men: Dark Phoenix, he spends the majority of the film in a coma after getting injured by the Phoenix during the first act.
    • X-Men: Apocalypse: Nightcrawler's energy level drains rapidly if he teleports too many people at the same time, and he's inert for part of the Final Battle. John Ottman divulges in the "Unlimited Powers: VFX, Stunts and Set Pieces" featurette on the Blu-Ray the reason for the limitation on the character's endurance.
      Ottman: This is why we knocked Nightcrawler out. Because for the whole third act, if he's around, he can just bamf people endlessly.
  • Bruce Almighty: With the ability to do literally anything (except affect free will or tell people about his powers), Bruce's powers definitely count. The only reason there's a story at all after Bruce gets his powers is because he's too stupid to remember that he can, in his own words, clean everything up in 5 minutes if he wants to.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • As with the X-men Movie franchise version, Quicksilver's Super Speed rigs many fights in his favor. His speed is great enough that he can travel across vast distances is very short times, and everyone around him appears to be standing still while he's running in a fight. He smugly asks Hawkeye "You didn't see that coming?" on one occasion. He would have been problematic to write around for future films, such as the below-mentioned Civil War, so it's a silent blessing for the writers that he dies in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
    • Speaking of Age of Ultron, The Vision wields Mjolnir in the final battle against the titular villain...and that's the last time The Vision and Thor ever interact in the MCU, to prevent him from doing to everyone else what he does to Ultron and his army.
    • According to Word of God, this is a major reason both the Incredible Hulk and Thor were excluded from Captain America: Civil War. They're so much more powerful than most of the other heroes that they'd tilt the balance of power ridiculously in favor of whichever team they ended up on. Vision is also used very sparingly during the airport fight scene, not doing much until the end of the battle, while Spider-Man and Giant-Man, normally powerful but not ridiculously overpowered superheroes, quickly turn the tide of battle for their respective sides.
    • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: With his special arrow and a prototype controller, Yondu was able to single-handedly put down about 100 members of his mutinous crew with almost hilarious ease and no danger to himself, Kraglin, Rocket, or Groot. With him in the gang, a lot of potential enemies and threats would become far less threatening, so his Heroic Sacrifice for Peter, while saddening, did not come as a huge shock to savvy viewers.
    • Thor: Ragnarok has Hela, the Goddess Of Death. Hela is strong enough to crush Thor's Hammer and can take down most of Asgard all by herself with ease. The only reason why she lost was because of Surtur at full power; even Hulk and and a newly god-powered Thor couldn't do anything to her!
    • In Avengers: Infinity War, Vision is badly injured in a sneak attack early on, and is unable to use his Intangibility the rest of the film. This conveniently allows the bad guys to fight him on more equal footing and prevents him from serving as a Deus ex Machina at key points.
    • Infinity War makes it clear Doctor Strange is the strongest (non-Super Serum-charged, non-Infinity Stone-powered) regular human in the MCU bar none, being the only character other than Thor who's able to fight Thanos on roughly even footing with a dizzying array of superpowers - trapping Thanos in prison dimensions, restraining him with bands of energy, summoning an army of illusory clones to distract him, and in one particularly memorable instance catching a literal black hole that Thanos throws at him and turning it into butterflies. Moreover, he and his allies very nearly win against Thanos without the help of the other heavy-hitter Avengers like the Vision, Scarlet Witch, Hulk, or Thor. And all of this is without the use of the Time Stone except for looking into the future. Conveniently, he's one of the heroes killed by the Snap to keep him from teaming up with the stronger Avengers and making Endgame a walk in the park.
    • Scarlet Witch, by the time of Infinity War, is powerful enough to destroy the mind-stone empowered Vision at his own urging with one hand while simultaneously holding back an advancing Thanos with the other. (Admittedly, she did have the other Wakanda-based Avengers trying to halt Thanos in his approach, but the emphasis here is on "trying".) Like Doctor Strange, she's killed by the snap to level the playing field for the next movie, which then proceeds to justify that exclusion when she returns for the final battle and quite literally tosses Thanos around like a rag doll.
    • The biggest example is Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet. Thanos is already strong enough to solo and give a Curb-Stomp Battle to the Hulk without needing any stones, and ends up being the most powerful being in the universe with 2 stones, and at no point does it seem like Thanos will lose in ''Infinity War' except for the scene in Titan. By the time he has all six stones, only Thor can kill him with a Villain-Beating Artifact he spent the entire film constructing, but misses his head and instead goes for his heart which allowed Thanos to do the snap.
    • This actually becomes a plot point in Endgame, when the Avengers track Thanos down on his garden planet so they can use the Stones to reverse the Snap, only to find that Thanos destroyed them to prevent his actions from being undone.
    • Endgame also provides a very convenient (for the writers) explanation as to why the Infinity Stones can't just be used willy-nilly to wipe out every problem the Avengers face: when Tony Stark uses them, he dies from the strain of being subjected to so much energy. Even the Hulk and Thanos, who are much larger and stronger than regular humans by about a factor of ten or more, suffersevere burn scars and injuries from performing Snapture-level Reality Warping.
    • Thor, after the events of Infinity War became this, able to curb-stomp even Thanos wielding all six infinity stones while using Stormbreaker. He's scaled back in Endgame by having him gain a lot of weight due to depression over his failure to prevent the snap and wallow in a alcohol-induced haze over the next five years.
    • Word of God confirms that Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, is the most powerful superhero in MCU. In the climax of her own movie after she finally unlocks her powers, she completely wipes the floor with Ronan's Kree bombing fleet effortlessly and can travel through space at the speed of light. This is why she never appears in any of the previous movies beforehand as she alone can singlehandedly solve any conflict the Avengers got themselves into with ease, and only shows up to join the team when things are at their bleakest in Avengers: Endgame and promptly does more damage to the villains than every other hero in the MCU does in the same fight, starting with her completely destroying Thanos' ship by herself. She does still end up defeated by Thanos, but it's shot in a way that makes it clear she would've have been able to overpower him if not for some quick thinking on Thanos' part.
  • Galvatron (a.k.a. Megatron) from Transformers: Age of Extinction, owing to his origins as a KSI creation, transforms not by shifting his parts around like other Transformers, but by becoming a cloud of Transformium. This, combined with his lack of a Spark, effectively renders him nigh-invincible. Come Transformers: The Last Knight, and this ability of his is conspicuously and inexplicably absent.
  • Superman's power is a major issue in and behind the story of Justice League (2017). Basically, the story needs to be about assembling a Super Team that should include Superman because he's traditionally been a key member... but he's more powerful than the other members put together, so why do you need a team at all? The forces of evil in the film wait until Superman's death in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice make their move in the first place so they don't have to deal with him. Batman starts to assemble the team to resist the upcoming invasion, but they keep losing to the villain, and he thinks it's necessary to try to resurrect Superman in spite of the risks. They succeed, but he's not immediately available to help them, so they head to the Final Battle without him. The villain beats them again, but then Superman shows up and easily turns the tide of the battle single-handedly (although he has to go back to save some people in the middle of it to keep things interesting). This demonstrates the power difference, too: Steppenwolf is strong enough to fight Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash and Aquaman simultaneously by himself, but he's helpless against Superman. If Superman wasn't in the film at all, the story could have been basically the same but with the team winning via a Heroic Second Wind and teamwork.
  • Force Users in Star Wars have this trope in hand whenever a Non-Force User is the opponent. The telekinesis they all have alone should make any battles between a Force User and Non-Force User a Curbstomp Battle in the former's favor every time, not to mention their other powers. So with any stories that involve one a Drama-Preserving Handicap is made or the writers simply have a Force User not use much if any of their abilities just to give the Non-Force Users a reason to exist. This is largely thanks to Sequel Escalation; in the original trilogy telekinesis and similar powers were slow and required intense concentration, so it was genuinely a good tactic to take advantage of their precognitive reflexes and focus on swordfighting. In later entries their telekinesis and other powers have been boosted so much that if anything the lightsaber slows them down.

  • Thrilling Adventure Hour: The Force Galactic, which grants its wielder more or less omnipotence. The Barkeep has it much of the series, and the only reason why he does not use it to solve problems with the snap of his fingers is because his wife forbids him from using it in his place, leaving Sparks Nevada or the others usually fix the situation without his help. That said, he does sometimes bend the rules a bit, such as by using the powers outside his place and on other, far away planets.

    Tabletop Games 
  • What makes a given power a "story breaker" or not in a tabletop RPG context is often the involved group's (especially the GM's) ability and willingness to cope with it in their personal game...or lack thereof, of course. Player character power issues can also be aggravated by the not uncommon tacit assumption that the "PC halo" comes with a fair degree of Hero Insurance, cushioning the characters against what might otherwise be logical consequences of using their powers. For example, the effectiveness of the "scry-and-die" tactic below relies a lot on any prospective targets of potential teleporting assassins imitating Orcus and rarely if ever actually getting proactive about patching that hole in their security.
    • The joy of being a DM is that you have your own story-breaker power in the form of being able to change things before they resolve; it's fairly easy to roleplay a boss that's far better at Gambit Roulette than the actual DM playing him. A boss monster that thinks ahead when the DM also thought ahead puts up scrying protections to prevent the teleport trick — a boss that thinks ahead when the DM did not think ahead just had a permanent illusion of a throne room put in over a pit of poisoned spikes after the last group of adventurers tried the same thing. And a DM that didn't think ahead and feels that the players were CHEATING on them (perhaps because the players somehow obtained spells they weren't supposed to be able to afford at their level) will point out that since the players didn't see through the illusion (which they cannot do through a scrying spell), the fall surprises them, meaning they cannot roll a save to avoid hitting the spikes. Though it really needs to be handled carefully, since pulling this off too often just makes it look like the GM is punishing the players for thinking outside the box.
  • One Miraculous Arc in Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is dedicated to having these and festooning them with limitations so that the story can survive. It's known as Reality Syndrome. Generally, they are limited by a) time constraints on how often you can use them, and b) a diagram giving the HG progressively more elaborate opportunities to mess things up as the wish strays further from the character's core truths.
  • Player characters in Continuum start out with these by default, as a spanner's most basic ability is the power to travel through time and space at will. Later on they can develop a number of psychic abilities like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, hypnosis, telepathy, and more. The GM chapter of the book even starts the section on game balance by warning the GM that "The characters in Continuum are the most powerful ever designed for an RPG. They can teleport and travel time at will. And they will show off every chance they get."
  • Aberrant characters are able to break any possible story once they get powers in the level four or five range. At will, they can make massive hive-minds, destroy the entire ecosystem of Earth, or will humanity into extinction.
  • The rulebooks for The Dresden Files make suggestions on this front in two ways. In the section on building opposition, most of the guidelines are along the lines of taking your villain and giving them powers equal in cost to the Player Party's. It suggests you create a group of antagonists instead, since as the party gets more powerful, the villain's powers would make them damn near impossible to fight effectively if the model was followednote . It also suggests that Harry Dresden himself might be one, and gives suggestions for taking him out of the picture. Needless to say, Harry's margin comments are less than enthused about it.
    Harry: Billy, this whole section DISTURBS me. I'm making this face at you. Like, the one in the picture right here.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Spellcasters in earlier editions had spells to duplicate every power in the trope description, and spellcasters can learn large numbers of spells.
    • In fact, spells in general are considered to be this, but a few schools in particular take most of the blame: Divination (whose wide variety of information-gathering spells makes running any sort of mystery or puzzle extremely difficult), Conjuration (a big one, as teleportation invalidates most needs for traveling, and the ability to summon aid bogs down combat, when the summoner isn't just calling up godlike beings), and Transmutation (mostly for the Polymorph line: why be Pals with Jesus when you can just become Jesus?).
    • With high-level characters, one of the simplest and most dangerous strategies is commonly called "Scry and Die" — instead of traversing a dungeon or an elaborate plot to track down the Big Bad for an epic confrontation, the players scry out his location with magic, then buff up (and occasionally stop time) before teleporting in and killing the unfortunate enemy very, very quickly]] (or fetching whatever their goal is to fetch, and so forth.)
    • Repeatedly casting the "Love's Pain" spell (someone the target loves takes damage, cannot be stopped) on a Mook who you have given Fake Memories of loving your enemy...
    • Even low-level spells can be a pain in the DM's butt. Take "Knock", which undoes any mundane lock (and some magical locks too), instantly and 100% reliably.
    • The Wish spell, which is pretty much as it sounds. The player wishes for anything to happen and reality will reshape itself to make it come true. There are some limitations, and some downsides. The spell is difficult to obtain and cast, and drains the life force of the caster (read: XP loss) to empower the events. If the wish is something too insane, the caster may die without yielding enough power to make it happen. Second, and usually even more importantly, you should be very careful what you wish for. Just wishing for a lot of gold, for example, may result in all the gold in every king's treasury teleported to you. However, how you will explain that to their armies that are sure to follow is not in the scope of the spell. In fact, the GM is specifically instructed on what wishes to give them a chance, in Second Edition, and if the players ask for more, to make SURE they regret it.
    • Miracle, the divine flavor of Wish, is even more enhanced: The spell-replicating function of Miracle carries no XP burn and can duplicate the effects of ANY 7th level spell or lower and ANY 8th level Domain spell or lower. Only the massively broken reality-warping function of the spell incurs a possible XP burn. Also, Miracle is not a spell cast so much as a supplication made of a deity, removing the possibility of the spellcaster receiving any magical backlash — of course, if the deity in question (which is to say, the DM) doesn't feel like granting the request, Miracle may simply fail, or end up worse.
      • Miracle is particularly potent when used by an Ur-Priest, a 3.5 prestige class whose schtick is stealing magic from gods and priests. The god's choices are no longer relevant; since the fluff is that the character is stealing the power from the deity in the first place, the deity no longer needs to approve or disapprove; the caster simply uses the stolen power in whatever manner she chooses. And this would entail no greater or lesser retribution than stealing any other 9th level spell, so if an Ur-Priest is casting 9ths, they've been dealing with that for a while.
    • Craft Contingent Spell (cast a spell in advance, it triggers when a condition is met) and Celerity (take an extra action, even in the middle of another character's turnnote ) can be extremely powerful even when used separately, but Contingent Celerity makes the user impossible to catch by surprise. Throw Time Stop into the mix and well...
    • The infamous Glibness spell from 3.5 : a Bard-exclusive spell available at level 7 that gives a +30 bonus to Bluff checks for the purpose of telling lies, a bonus big enough to give you a chance to deceive a character 30 levels higher than you are and make this task almost impossible to fail against characters of your own level. At a time when rules were poorly worded and succeeding to lie with a Bluff check would force the second party to take your word as absolute truth, this spell had the potential to wreck a scenario entirely. Later, after changes in wording switching from "the NPC believes you" to "the NPC doesn't notice you are lying", a very far-fetched or implausible lie would result in the NPC to question your sanity instead of blindly believing you, depending on what your GM thinks is the most logical outcome.
    • This trope is the main reasoning behind the Character Tiers in most editions: not pure power, but the ability to just completely invalidate entire storylines planned by the DM without even trying. A barbarian might be able to kill the Big Bad in one hit, but he still has to get there. Meanwhile, journey across dangerous land? Teleport. Murder mystery? Raise Dead. Find the traitor? Detect Thoughts. Stop a plague? Remove Disease. Low on funds? Fabricate. Foil an assassination? Magnificent Mansion. Learn the Big Bad's weakness? Legend Lore. Interrogate someone? Charm Person. Hold off an invading army? More spells than can be named. These can be planned around by the DM - for instance, declaring that the place the party needs to go to has some kind of magic that makes teleporting unreliable - but that's still a deliberate effort being made just so the plot can work, and the DM has to take all the spells the character has learned and might learn into account. The definition of Tier 1 is a character who has the potential to learn or at least duplicate pretty much every spell and switch them out regularly, meaning the DM has to pay specific attention to the character's daily loadout just to make sure they don't accidentally skip a third of the adventure.
  • Warp is extremely powerful in GURPS, so much so that it is explicitly banned for players in the Dungeon Fantasy books. The authors did eventually cave and add it in with the requirement that the player take a small Unusual Background named "Ha-ha! I Can Teleport!" and isn't able to improve it.
  • The Hero System traditionally marks those powers that its designers consider to be this trope with warning icons. GM discretion is still required since the system also allows its "stock" building block powers to be modified N ways from Sunday and so the power level of the final result may end up being radically different (in either direction) from the assumed base, but the issue itself is explicitly acknowledged.
  • In Iron Kingdoms Lord Toruk the Dragon Father is a Physical God who created his own empire with himself as the God-Emperor. The only reason he doesn't just go and burn down the mainland himself is ironically the same reason he needs an army in the first place; he's always worried about the other dragons ganging up on him if he makes any moves, so he's trying to build an army to hunt them down individually, or at least soften them up.
  • A lot of the drama in Nobilis comes from how everyone and their dog has these and is not shy about throwing them around. That said, due to a particular quirk of reality caused by it being written in a language of flowers, anyone, noble or otherwise, can add some changes of their own, and because this kind of reality tampering is, so to say, rewriting the rules rather than playing along with them, nobles could well see their own powers and domain yanked right from them without any say in the matter. Thus, the DM is outright told none of the players should be granted any related power. Third edition adds a wrinkle where you can do anything, but pushing your power too far - say, using power over snakes to create an Aaron's Serpent, who are snake-shaped gods - causes Actuals to come out of the substrate of reality and start absorbing things, and a few days later you end up with a ship eating Chicago or something similarly difficult to repair.
  • One of the theories for why the Ancients in Traveller went extinct is that they had reached such a high technology level, that their powers were near limitless, and they quickly got bored of everything, and decided to end their race.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade: Caine. Want to fight him? You lose. That's all his card says.
    • Similarly, all the level 10 disciplines belong exclusively to the antediluvians and are described solely as a "plot device" able to accomplish whatever the vampire in question needs it to accomplish. Some given examples include Absimiliard, the Nosferatu founder, unleashing a plague of pests to Diablerize the entire global population of vampires, and Tremere attempting to mind control the global population of humans.
  • Mage: The Awakening: Mages in general. Any Arcanum from two dots can do thing which would be considered broken in any other game (for example, absolute immunity to any mundane threats), and from three dots Storyteller needs to start thinking very carefully about how to challenge his players. Adepts and Masters are even more powerful, and bend reality in almost any way they like. And then you have Archmages, who can literally do anything, as long as their rivals and hostile gods don't mind.
  • Speaking of White Wolf material, the entire premise of Exalted is an effort to quantify, formalize and tame those... with at best mixed success. For the "out-of-combat" part, it is entirely possible, even common, for starting or at least very inexperienced characters to have infallible lie detector, similarly perfect True Sight against any sensory illusions/invisibility, capacity to create things out of thin air and, soon enough, reshape matter (that includes proverbial "punching someone into a frog"), form supernaturally binding contracts (itself a huge plot-breaker in competent hands), summoning and binding a HUGE array of demons with pretty much any special shtick one cares to think about, and, in the separate sub-system of "social combat" ability to persuade anyone of anything, "magically", e.g. defying subject's common sense, and possibly giving openly suicidal orders. In other words, even before we go to combat, it's extremely challenging to come up with a complicated plot with mysteries and twists that a competent "power-oriented" player group won't just barge through on the back of their abilities, often with no rolls or with rolls which are nigh-impossible to fail. Oh, and there's a reroll built in characters from the start for those fancy unlucky moments.
    • This is not to get started about 2e's combat system, which quickly ends up with perfect attacks being deflected by perfect defenses - there are ones for every case, against being shaped into a frog, against being mind-raped, and plainly against getting hit/damaged, with the latter explicitly being able to "defend" against acid rains, swimming in lava and other things not realistically dodgeable or blockable. Because almost any hit landed can and will be supplemented with either some kind of instant-incapacitation/death effect or just plain lethal amounts of damage dice.
    • This brought about so-called "Paranoia Combat": characters sitting behind layers of perfect defenses while trying to force opponents to spend more mana on theirs (by way of multiple attacks, mostly). Characters' mana pool (called Essence) is actually their "life points" and whoever runs out first, by virtue of less efficient build or plainly having less maximum to begin with, tends to splatter gruesomely. It doesn't help that officially "power tiers" of various kinds of supernaturals in the system differ by their maximum mana pools and costs of their defenses, weaker ones having both at a disadvantage. it also leads to rather ugh-oh "accounting" playstyle where high-class supernaturals barely ever roll dice on attacks, more often just comparing their mana pools and attrition rates.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • The Primarchs and the God-Emperor are obscenely powerful even for the setting (the first action of Leman Russ after birth was to climb out of a volcano, and later in life all of them casually crushed Greater Daemons), and if they were still around it would devastate the Status Quo Is God so beloved by the writers. Hence they have all, in one way or another, been out of action for ten thousand years, with the Emperor immobilised (possibly dead) and directing the Astronomicon, and the Primarchs either dead, incapacitated, lost, or in the case of the surviving Traitor Primarchs simply content to sit in the Eye of Terror. There is a very good reasons for this, as the one time a Primarch (Angron) decided to do something, he conquered approximately seventy sectors before the Imperium could direct a large enough force against him.
    • The Ultramarines Primarch was eventually brought out of stasis and allowed to speak with the Emperor and take a good hard look at the way the Imperium has been crumbling since his absence. He started working on getting the Imperium back in shape and actually started making progress... but now the galaxy is somehow even worse off, with massive Warp storms cutting off entire systems.
    • The C'tan had as much power in the material realm as Greater Daemons do in the warp (i.e. Reality Warper levels), fed on stars, and commanded vast armies of Necrons which they created in the first place. They caused so many problems with their mere presence that 5th Edition retconned them into having been shattered into pieces by the Necrons millions of years ago, and the C'tan that had been encountered were nothing but fairly mindless, much weaker fragments of the originals.
    • The Tyranids can strip a whole planet of biomass, oceans and atmosphere included, in a matter of months, are effectively limitless (the number of creatures in a swarm is reliant on how much biomass they've consumed, and they've already eaten several galaxies), their Hive Mind projects a shadow in the warp that disrupts psykers and daemons within dozens of light years of it, and most critically they have no Enemy Civil War, unlike every other major threat in the setting. Like the Borg mentioned above there has been no good reason given as to why they haven't already eaten everything in the galaxy and been on their merry way except that they don't travel between systems as fast as other species.
  • The Orks. Just as limitless as the 'nids (they reproduce by emitting spores when they die), they have an instinctive mastery of technology to the point where their teleporters work better than the humans', and the average ork is seven feet tall. They're believed to have been created in order to counter the aforementioned Necrons, and they currently have a Forever War going on with the Tyranids where both sides are evenly matched and getting stronger by the day. The only reason they haven't taken over the galaxy yet is that they have an Enemy Civil War whenever their top leader dies. The War of the Beast was an event where that last one didn't happen long enough for a warboss the size of a building to establish power, meaning they actually started getting smarter and disciplined with better weapons and even diplomats. It took most of the Imperium and one of the Primarchs (one who can't die, at that) to finally defeat him.

    • The Makuta species has 42 base powers, a strengthened version of the elemental power of shadow, highly dangerous mask powers, and Teridax even possessed secret knowledge about the workings of the universe, allowing him to manipulate matter at will. Plus, they're Energy Beings with no biological needs who can possess machines or soulless living bodies, their personal bodies can shapeshift, and they each have access to a personal Pocket Dimension to store excess mass. And they can absorb other beings to gain mass or simply kill them. How did the writer keep them from demolishing the heroes under a second? The answer is multi-layered: Teridax's master plan required the heroes to be alive; some Makuta were given drama preserving handicaps, many had a constant grip on the Villain Ball which clouded their judgment, some were treacherous and turned on their brethren in the middle of fighting the heroes, and the gaseous substance they're made out of could easily be burnt away. Notably, the one time one of them decided to ditch Teridax's plan and just kill the heroes to get his own started was a borderline Curb-Stomp Battle that would have killed them all had his fellow Makuta not stopped him.
    • The Skakdi race (the species to which the Piraka belong) has access to elemental powers (but only when working as a team, which they hate), each has a unique but highly powerful special ability (like Adaptive Ability, bringing objects to life, conjuring tailor made prisons, Power Copying, etc), and eye-based or mental powers. And one of them called Zaktan is a Worm That Walks who can fly, shapeshift to a limited extent, and become an insect swarm. Fans cried foul when six of them easily beat the Toa Nuva (the most powerful heroes of their universe)note , so at the end of the story, they got devolved into weaker sea serpents by Mutagenic Goo...but then they came back as the Golden-Skinned Being and...well, see below.
    • Time Travel is one power that the writer deliberately avoided, citing this trope as a reason. However, he practically abused dimension-hopping. Thus, to tone it down, Brutaka's Mask of Dimensional Gates was destroyed though he got something arguably just as broken with all the Makuta powers and the only other MODG in existence fused to Vezon, an incompetent lunatic who could barely control it.
    • The Golden-Skinned Being has almost unlimited control over matter and is able to make almost anything disappear into thin air. It has powerful telepathy, can easily brainwash others, and through sheer will, create entire new worlds reflecting the desires of others, where these others can be locked away for eternity, out of this universe. The story got Left Hanging not long after he appeared, so it's unknown how the writer would have handled him.
    • The Energized Protodermis Entity, an Eldritch Abomination who basically unwittingly set the entire BIONICLE story into motion, can destroy or transform anything with a slight touch. It's also a liquid, so pretty hard to avoid if you're in a room with it. However, it doesn't have control over whether the things it touches cease existing or get transformed. The being itself very rarely appears, its substance acting mostly as Phlebotinum. Its only known weakness is gravity — it flows down big holes. It's also an All-Powerful Bystander; it has no interest in anyone else's affairs.
    • The fully-collected Great and Noble Masks gave the Toa Mata a massive assortment of Stock Superpowers that really should have made a lot of conflicts far easier. They ended up losing all those powers with their Toa Nuva upgrades, having to gather them a second time, then losing them again permanently.
  • Transformers: The first iteration of the brand featured no less than four giant Transformers that could transform into entire cities and battle stations. Given how even one of them should reasonably completely destroy all but a few of the Autobots/Decepticons, it's probably no coincidence that they have relatively scant appearances in both G1 and later franchises, and when they do appear, they're often weakened in some way (Scorponok is often downscaled to a regular size, for example).

    Video Games 
  • BioShock Infinite ended with Elizabeth becoming omnipotent and unlocking the full scope of her reality warping powers. While this worked for the main storyline, it caused major problems for the Burial at Sea DLC, the second episode of which has Elizabeth as the main character, as it meant the writers had to find a way to write a compelling story about a protagonist who is effectively unbeatable and who's opponents are, at best, Badass Normals. The DLC begins with Elizabeth being awkwardly Brought Down to Normal and eventually it's revealed that the whole thing was one long Thanatos Gambit planned out by the omnipotent Elizabeth before she lost her powers. Fans still argue over whether she had to be given the Idiot Ball to get the plot to work.
  • BlazBlue:
    • The legendary hero Hakumen is hands down the strongest character in the setting, with the possible exception of Azrael. However, he doesn't truly exist as we understand; he's stuck in another dimension called the Boundary, and the threads binding him to the physical world are tenuous at best, and getting weaker. Hence, he can only access a fraction of his true power. In one of the drama CDs, he absolutely thrashes the two Big Bads of the story with only 15% of his power, but he was transported away before he could finish them off. It's suggested that currently he can only use 40% of his power. If he could use all of it, there probably wouldn't be much of a plot. Central Fiction explains why: Hakumen's body is known to all as the Susanō'o Unit. The truth is it is Susanō'o, as in the Japanese god of storms. Hakumen is not the body's original user. Yūki Terumi is. And he gets it back, killing Hakumen in doing so. Terumi knows everything that the Susanō'o Unit can do and is at full power, and his first act upon regaining his true form is to one-shot five of the most powerful characters in the franchise, including the below mentioned Jubei, without breaking a metaphorical sweat. It only occurs for the finale. The only reason the game doesn't end right there in a bad ending is because Terumi hasn't yet fully bonded with his original body, allowing Ragna to rip his soul back out of it.
    • Jubei too — He's described as the strongest living creature on the planet, and as such has to be injured early on so that he can't just go and solve all the story's problems by himself.
    • Nine of the Six Heroes, who would eventually marry Jubei, also counts; she is probably the most powerful magic user in the series, even the goddess of death and one of the Co-Dragons think so. She can manipulate the elements (though fire is her favourite); control gravity; fly; enhance her physical abilities; control the mind of someone as powerful as Terumi; and, after becoming Phantom, look into alternate timelines, the last of which Terumi abuses like a cheat sheet to successfully play Xanatos Speed Chess with the entire cast. Her magical abilities, in fact, are the reason Jubei is sidelined for a large portion of the series' run. However, this is all mitigated by her nuclear temper and arrogance leading to poor decision making; the fact that she is on some level refusing to follow orders from the bad guys; her love for her sister holding her back; and that once your get past all the power, she has the endurance of wet tissue paperas soon as he gets an opening, Ragna takes her out in one hit.
  • The Elder Scrolls: Though, to date, they have only been hinted-at in-game or have been mentioned dripping in heavy metaphor, there exist several "ascended" metaphysical states in the ES universe. (Each has been further fleshed out by developer supplemental texts.) The first of these states is CHIM, where one becomes aware of the nature of Anu's Dream but exists as one with it and maintains a sense of individuality. (Dunmeri Physical God Vivec claims to have achieved this level, while Mankar Camoran in Oblivion claims that the Deity of Human Origin Talos has also achieved it.) Even these works don't make it clear exactly what CHIM is, though the ES lore community posits that it is the realization of being a fictional character in a fictional world, followed by breaking loose from the laws of said world using "powers" and abilities normally reserved for a Player Character (ex. Save Scumming, Pause Scumming, use of the Master Console, use of the Construction Set Level Editor, etc.) Naturally, these abilities make the user appear divine and otherworldly to the mortals of the settings. Included are Vivec flooding the island of Vvardenfell to kill Akaviri invaders, Talos performing a Cosmic Retcon to turn Cyrodiil from a tropical jungle to a temperate forest, as well as both rewriting their own pasts. Take, for example, Vivec's explanation of what happens when he "dies", which sounds suspiciously like reloading a saved game:
  • Not unlike its Spiritual Successor BlazBlue, Guilty Gear has its fair share of these.
    • Sol Badguy, the main protagonist, is a Gear Super Prototype who can easily curbstomp most of the cast while holding back massively. Fortunately, he practically never goes even halfway to going all out, partly because he's aware that doing so would probably destroy everything for miles around him, and partly because he's a lazy bastard. By the time of Overture, it's stated that his Dragon Install is "encroaching", meaning his Power Limiter is no longer able to fully restrain the entirety of Sol's power as he ages and evolves. For all his brilliance, however, Sol's being played a sucker by the series' enigmatic Big Bad and his power as a Gear does little to affect the political intrigue many of his allies and rivals are wrapped up in. Following the original game (but especially since XX), the series has also brought in several other Story-Breaker Powers who can counter or even surpass Sol's level of power, including the aforementioned Big Bad.
    • Justice is a Commander Gear capable of exerting her influence over nearly every other Gear in existence, turning them to her side; only Sol is immune to her commands on account being the prototype Gear. note  She additionally possesses physical and magical abilities superior to most other lifeforms (reflected by her serving as an unrelenting SNK Boss in the original game and being flat-out broken whenever she's playable note ) and, in the backstory, was responsible for nuking Japan with her Gamma Ray. (To wit, Xrd features the ruins of Japan as a stage, which can be accurately described as a hole in the Pacific Ocean.) In two of her three run-ins with Sol, she beat him clean, even when he had the Fireseal boosting his magic to cover for his Power Limiter. It's also implied in Overture and outright shown in Xrd that Justice was capable of becoming a Megadeth-type Gear (read: Kaiju), suggesting she might not even have been at the apex of her power when Sol did manage to kill her.
    • Justice's daughter, Dizzy, is introduced in Guilty Gear X and quickly became this trope for a different reason: In addition to having a level of strength comparable to her mother and Sol, she possesses the ability to reawaken Gears, most of which fell dormant after Justice's death. Considering that the Gears vastly outnumbered humans during the Crusades, just the rumor of Justice's child walking around unsupervised is enough to jump-start an international crisis. While believed to be capable of surpassing Justice, Dizzy is held back by her pacifistic nature and, early on, a complete inability to control her powers. Xrd shows Dizzy exhibiting much greater control, while also implicating she owes her frightening potential to the fact she's the daughter of Justice and Sol.
    • That Man is the creator of the Gears and main villain of the setting, with a brilliant mind, access to high-level magic, and several unexplained powers, including the ability to age backwards. Players are introduced to him effortlessly shrugging off Sol's attacks and exhibiting knowledge borderlining on prescience despite being an "ordinary" human, and when Sol finally gets the chance to fight him in Overture, complete with Sol assuming his Gear form for the first time on-screen, it's a largely indirect battle serving as a test to see if Sol is capable of taking care of a more immediate threat. Complicating matters is That Man's affable nature and questionable acts, to the point that he spends more time giving cryptic hints and reining in one of his subordinates (a Time Master witch with Stupid Evil tendencies) than he does doing anything even remotely evil. This is because, as revealed in Xrd, he's not a villain at allhe's the Big Good and the one person who truly knows what's going on, though he's really bad at being forthright with information. When he finally comes clean to Sol late in -REVELATOR- about everything he's been up to over the years, he spares no time in devising a plan that effectively derails the true villain's schemes.
    • Slayer is an immortal Vampire Monarch and the original founder of the Assassin's Guild. Like Sol, he's Willfully Weak in battle, emphasized by a few comically exaggerated attacks and his K.O. pose showing Slayer lying on the ground unharmed, merely bored at the outcome. Despite this, his encounters with Sol regularly have Sol (something of an Invincible Hero in direct combat in normal circumstances) on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle and Slayer's Instant Kill sees him casually punch his opponent out of the Milky Way. The Post-War Administration Bureau has a risk rating for all of the XX cast, with Slayer being awarded the second-highest threat level (behind Dizzy) at S+ because of his incredible combat ability and imperceptible motivations. Luckily for them, Slayer retired from actively mingling in human affairs and prefers to play the role of Mysterious Backer in the present, rarely getting involved beyond giving advice to other characters or sparring to sate his appetite for battle.
    • Xrd newcomer Bedman is, true to his name, a young man strapped to a bed. He also happens to possess various supernatural powers connected to a dreamlike world he resides within while asleep (which he can drag others into to subject Your Mind Makes It Real on them in a rather hellish fashion), and his first appearance in -SIGN- establishes him as a No-Nonsense Nemesis capable of streamrolling several heavy hitters, chief among them the aforementioned Slayer. Only two characters in -SIGN- (a Back from the Dead Zato-1 and Zepp's president Gabriel note ) are able to drive him off, and Bedman ends up catching That Man by surprise and whisking him away to parts unknown late in the story. It's only when Slayer returns for a grudge match in -REVELATOR- after tapping back into his full power (which allows him to demolish mountains with but a flick of his finger) that Bedman truly finds himself on the defensive... at which point he reveals he's only been using approximately 8% of his full power. Bedman's powers do have a critical drawback in that he cannot manifest in the real world while awake without his very existence eroding away due to an unspecified form of Power Incontinence, a double-edged sword exploited by the previously defeated Venom in order to forcibly awaken Bedman and kill him.
    • Bedman himself serves as The Dragon to Ariels aka the Universal Will, who proves to be nearly as dangerous in -REVELATOR-. From a physical standpoint, she's near the top of the list, as evidenced by the fact that she can fight against Sol, Ky (one of the heroes of the Crusades who also recently acquired Gear powers), and Sin (Ky's part-Gear son raised by Sol) at once and spank all of them without any visible effort (though Sol had a Drama-Preserving Handicap preventing him from using Dragon Install). She also has command of a potentially limitless Clone Army in the form of the Valentines, some of which have the potential to rival Sol and Commander Gears like Justice and Dizzy in terms of strength. If that wasn't enough, she's perhaps the ultimate example of a Villain with Good Publicity, serving as the Sanctus Maximus Populi, the leader of the world's most popular religion, and therefore having access to some of the strongest magic around, including a nigh-impregnable defensive spell (Absolute Defense: Felion) that can only be breached by Sol and That Man working together in a manner that, in the latter's words, could've ended up destroying the planet if they weren't careful. Basically, imagine The Pope as a top-tier Magic Knight and you're not too far off. This isn't getting into the fact that this is only describing the Universal Will in her "human" form. Before she became Ariels, the Universal Will merely coming into contact with Justice from within the Backyard inflicted Mind Rape upon Justice and caused a Reality Bleed that would've ran unchecked if That Man didn't take control of Justice and manually fire her Gamma Ray upon Japan. Fortunately, Ariels is something of an Almighty Idiot, especially once the mask slips, as her Irrational Hatred of humans prevents her from taking them seriously—which proves fatal when the coalition in opposition to her includes various unexpected parties including Ramlethal Valentine, one of her "daughters" that Ariels tried to pull a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on and, even more unexpectedly, a time-traveling Axl Low who comes through with a last-minute save on Sol's behalf.
  • In one of the many, many, many Walking Spoilers for Kid Icarus: Uprising, Dyntos has the power to copy anything and forge anything. This includes entire armies, and equip them all with ultimate weapons. And he can do it far faster than any of the other factions. The only thing that keeps him from actually breaking the story is his True Neutral tendencies; he doesn't actually want to take over the universe.
  • The Legend of Zelda has the Triforce. Similar to the Dragon Balls of the Dragon Ball franchise, the Triforce is an omnipotent Cosmic Keystone that can grant any wish. The only caveat to its use is that the user must have a balance of Power, Wisdom, and Courage in their heart to use it to its full power, but by the end of several games, Link and/or Zelda is able to use it, having achieved that balance already. Theoretically, its omnipotent power should be able to stop the cycle of Ganon returning to menace Hyrule as instigated by Demise's curse of hatred, but this would bring the series to a permanent close. Because of this, should they ever use it, the good guys only use the Triforce to resolve more immediate matters such as defeating just one instance of Ganon or restoring the damage done by said villain.
  • Mega Man:
    • The original Blue Bomber himself has the potential to be one. Even though his physical limits are fairly fixed, his retention of Special Weapons is not. The only reason he doesn't retain the ones from every game is because he freely chooses to discard them once they're no longer needed, being a peace-loving hero. With over a hundred weapons thus far, if he'd decided to hold onto them all, even most X-era characters would pale in comparison.
    • Duo, from the Classic series, is perhaps the most powerful character in the entire main continuity. He alone is powered by "Justice Energy", the only counterpoint to Evil Energy which has been all but stated as the base of the Maverick/Zero Virus and when the two clash, it causes destruction on an intergalactic scale. If he wasn't an officer for the universe at large and remained on Earth, or Rock had perhaps copied this off of him, there wouldn't be much of a franchise.
    • X has unlimited potential. The attempted reboot of his series, Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X, has Dr. Light state that X can evolve as he fights, explaining how he retains certain powers and upgrades between games. Notably, X5 shows X is capable of fighting Zero to a draw, regardless of whether Zero's empowered by The Virus. The only reason he has problems in battle is his kindness causing him to hold back, and his awful experiences with the robotic battlefield makes him suppress his full power even harder by the minute.
      • Speaking of X, in the later Mega Man Zero series we get several hints of how powerful he became by this point. In 2, we discover that X's lifeless corpse is being used to seal the Dark Elf. We also discover that his soul was split in five pieces: Cyber-Elf X (who possesses the original's personality) and the Four Guardians. In 3, Cyber-Elf X (who, again, has barely a fifth of X's original soul) protects the entire Resistance inside its base without any real effort, completely overriding the Dark Elf and Omega's mind control. If X managed to regain his full power, he would be practically unstoppable.
    • Both Omega and Dr. Weil in the Zero series repeatedly come into this. When wearing his special armor and harnessing the power of the Dark Elf, Omega has the ability to control every Reploid on Earth. Only X and Zero (due to them technically not being Reploids) are safe from its effects. And even when his armor is destroyed, his true form is that of Zero's original body, itself an incredibly powerful war machine and one of two contenders for World's Strongest Man in the setting (the other being X). Meanwhile, Dr. Weil, for his role in causing the Elf Wars (wherein he harnessed Omega's power to kill off the majority of the population of the entire planet in a few years' time), was "punished" with an immortal cyborg body with a Healing Factor so strong that he can recover from a direct hit by the Ragnarok, and has an unintended side effect of allowing him to fuse with machinery. Even when he's seemingly Killed Off for Real after fusing with Ragnarok and destroyed by Zero, the Mega Man ZX series very heavily implies that Model W — the multiple Artifacts Of Doom that can grant massive power boosts to their users in exchange for feeding on their negative emotions and eventually devouring them, and at full power possesses world-ending capabilities — is Weil's consciousness still fused with the fragments of Ragnarok.
    • The title character of Mega Man Battle Network, MegaMan.EXE. Due to his nature, it is implied that if he were to have access to his full potential, he'd be the most powerful entity on the planet. Demonstrated very clearly in the fifth game where he briefly ascends to this level and destroys the final boss—the manifestation of humanity's evil—with a wave of his hand. However, the data size of a human soul and all of its potential is so massive that Lan's PET, despise being custom-made and constantly upgraded to deal with such a strain, can barely execute it for more than a few seconds, supposedly to avoid Explosive Overclocking and taking MegaMan with it.
  • The main plot of Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon revolves around the powerful Legendary Pokemon being petrified by an unknown force; unsurprisingly, said force has it all and then some with its list of broken powers. Dark Matter can not only mind control Pokemon under loosely defined requirements, but can also bestow them its power of turning Pokemon into stone and feeding off of its victims' life energy. This makes it so any Pokemon under Dark Matter's control, no matter their lack of combat prowess, such as Nuzleaf can effortlessly beat Legendaries such as Entei that the heroes up to that point couldn't even touch without their evolution-granting scarves. Should Dark Matter's targets try to run away or manage to corner its minions, it would just send Yveltal, a Legendary Pokemon with dominion over death, to pull the plug, as the Eon Dragons and the other two Legendary Beasts found out. Dark Matter's nature as The Heartless also means that if it's destroyed, it will just be revived eventually and will attempt again to hurl the world into the sun after it absorbed enough life force. How the heck did Dark Matter not succeed in destroying the world in either of its attempts? It has a weakness in the Tree of Life, and the evolution scarfs turn out to be made from the tree, which renders Dark Matter's powers moot when the heroes are nearby the tree. At the end of the game, Dark Matter becomes a rarity in the franchise by being a villain Killed Off For Real, to the relief of the game's denizens and most likely the franchise's writing staff.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Chaos Control from allows its user to stop time entirely and/or teleport across various distances. What prevents it from being too convenient is that it requires a Chaos Emerald to use, of which there are only seven in existence, and only three recurring characters (including Sonic himself) are capable of the ability.
    • Taken to a whole new level with Mephiles, the Big Bad of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), as he can use Chaos Control to willingly travel to any point in time and manipulate events accordingly and even forcibly throw his enemies through time. Eventually, Shadow, Sonic, and Silver learn to do the same by using Chaos Control against each other.
    • In Sonic Forces, Infinite gets outfitted with the Phantom Ruby from Sonic Mania, giving him the ability to warp reality. It's later revealed that he can create illusions that warp his victims' perception of reality, but the effects are the same. He repeatedly routs the Resistance armies, and the limits by which he's able to warp reality are ill-defined. Consequently, he never seems to use the Phantom Ruby to its fullest potential in his actual boss fights, preferring to create harmful obstacles and do charging attacks.
  • In Super Robot Wars W, the Game-Breaker Valzacard is a mecha built with technology far beyond the whole universe, a Reality Warper, has survived the end of the world, and can play with space-time easily. Conventionally, it can erase its opponent from existence and its weakest attack has enough power to obliterate several of the Database Battleships (built with similar technology), making it the most powerful Original Generation in the franchise. The only canonical reason it doesn't beat everything without even trying is because some components are broken and there's no time for repairs, causing its output to be far lower than what it should be.
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • Tabuu's Off Wave in Super Smash Bros. Brawl has the power to revert all the characters back into trophies, which allowed it to completely curb stomp nearly the entire cast in seconds, with only a Chekhov's Gun allowing one to get free and revive the others. After that, they were only saved from another Off Wave by a Deus ex Machina Big Damn Heroes moment from Sonic, which depowered the Off Wave enough to only be a One-Hit Kill that covers the entire screen and can only be avoided through rolling and air dodging.
    • Galeem in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate can completely bathe an entire galaxy in light, enough to destroy the bodies of all the characters who become the game's spirits and turn most of the playable roster in to vessels used to make puppet fighters. The only thing preventing him from immediately taking over the entire Smash universe is Kirby pushing his Warp Star to its absolute limit, leaving him as the Sole Survivor.
  • Tartessos the City in Tears to Tiara 2 has stored in its temples a warship that is effectively a Galleass in an age of Quinqueremes, capable of taking on Krakens without trouble. It can also teleport dragons in for its own defense. That it is a city and effectively neutral for most of the work prevent the powers from being abused.
  • Touhou Project fans love to joke that the cast is the most dominant in fiction, with a long list of characters with unique abilities that have staggering applications, or just phenomenal levels of raw power. In canon the Spell Card rules were invented precisely because there were so many of these beings floating around, implemented to prevent the powerful denizens from going all out in combat and allowing weaker beings to stand a chance of winning.
    • Reimu Hakurei possesses literal Plot Armor, her status as Gensokyo's Barrier Maiden ensuring that she can never be killed as it would cause Gensokyo to experience Critical Existence Failure, and can channel Shinto gods to use any of their powers. Furthermore, her Fantasy Heaven ability temporarily causes her to "fly away from reality" and become completely invincible; Word of God is that this ability is only allowed in Spell Card duels because she added a time limit — without it she would be unstoppable.
    • Sakuya Izayoi is one big Shout-Out to Dio Brando above, and as such has the mandatory Time Stands Still ability. On top of that she can also slow time, speed it up, deflate it, compress it, erase it and invoke Temporal Paradoxes, and because of Required Secondary Powers her Time manipulation also allows her to manipulate space, doing things like making the Scarlet Devil Mansion Bigger on the Inside and making a Hammerspace pocket filled with infinite knives. In canon she doesn't kill people (anymore), but the third Fantasy Kaleidoscope episode gives a terrifying glimpse of what she's capable of.
    • Remilia Scarlet's ability to manipulate fate is only ever loosely defined and its use is implied to be unconscious, but the fate of people changes just from being around her (for better or worse) and she can apparently see into the future. No-one can be certain whether or not she's using her ability in any particular situation however, making judging its strength that much more difficult.
    • Flandre Scarlet has the power to destroy anything by visualising its "eye" and crushing it in her hand, no matter the object (or person) or the distance between her and the target. Her sister Remilia was so concerned about the damage Flandre's powers could cause that she confined her to the mansion's basement for all of her (500 years long) life. Which backfired to an extent, as now she doesn't know her own strength.
    • Yuyuko Saigyouji has the power to kill with a thought (aside from the two unkillable characters Mokou and Kaguya mentioned below), can control dead spirits, and is smart enough to see through even Yukari's schemes at a glance. She's immune to exorcism as long as she's bound to the Saigyou Ayakashi, and unsealing her would release one of the only evil creatures in the setting. However, she spends most of her time running her portion of the Netherworld, and rarely takes things seriously when she does get involved in the plot.
    • Yukari Yakumo is a powerful Youkai, a master of Onmyōdō, The Chessmaster with Super Intelligence and a legion of spies, and a nine-tailed kitsune as her shikigami, but much of her Shrouded in Myth status comes from her power to manipulate boundaries. While in-story this ability has mostly manifested as creating portals, and once as manipulating the border of night and day so that it could be both night and day at the same time, Akyuu writes that it is far more powerful... at least, according to Yukari:
      The ability to manipulate boundaries is a terrifying ability capable of fundamentally undermining reality. As far as we know, everything is built upon the existence of boundaries. If there was no water surface, there could be no lake. If there was no sky line, neither mountain nor sky could exist. Were it not for the Great Barrier, even Gensokyo itself wouldn't exist. If there were no boundaries, everything would probably exist as a single enormous object. Thus, the ability to manipulate boundaries is by logic an ability of creation and destruction. It essentially creates a new being, or rejects the existence of a being. [...] It's said that this ability is not limited to physical space, but also applies to pictures, others' dreams, and even stories.
    • Suika Ibuki can manipulate density, allowing her to do things like hurl miniature black holes as weapons, and because of Touhou logic can also grow big, split into multiple smaller copies, turn into mist, or even gather or disperse people (population density). And that's on top of being a oni with enough strength to tear apart and rebuild mountains (and the moon, because thankfully she realized that not having a moon would be bad, so she made a new one the same night she destroyed the old one during a drunken frenzy). Fortunately she's a Boisterous Bruiser more interested in fighting than in actually winning.
    • Eirin Yagokoro, as a super genius once known as "The Brain of the Moon", basically has the superpower of making Artifacts Of Doom. Aside from creating the aforementioned Hourai Elixir (which she may or may not have drunk as well) and much of Lunarian civilisation, her plot in Imperishable Night was to hide Earth from the Moon. She did this by hiding Earth in a pot. In a pot she kept on the Earth. She made a fake moon and sky to stick to the inside of the pot, too, so people wouldn't notice they were suddenly in a world that could fit into the hand of a person standing on the world that was in the pot they were holding in their hand. And it's been implied that she is also Omoikane), giving her the raw power of a high-ranking Physical God.
    • Eirin's sidekick, Reisen Udongein Inaba, has the ability to manipulate waves. Any kind of waves, including mind and electromagnetic waves. She can use it to manipulate light and radio, induce insanity in her line of sight, generate a thousand different beams and who knows what else. However, her crippling cowardice, greed and inexperience conspire to keep her at a Butt-Monkey level.
    • Fujiwara no Mokou and Kaguya Houraisan drank the Hourai Elixir, giving them Complete Immortality and allowing them to regenerate From a Single Cell from any damage, even if their bodies are completely destroyed. The very concept of death has been erased from their beings (meaning if you went back in time to before they drank the Elixir they still couldn't be killed), and the only limiting factor is how much pain they are willing to endure before they just give up. And they can endure a lot, because they spent several centuries repeatedly killing each other to pass the time.
    • Satori Komeiji's mind-reading is already convenient, before even considering that she can use it to copy an enemy's Spell Card and throw them right back. But her sister Koishi sealed away her mind-reading abilities due to Fantastic Racism, and in return got the even more powerful ability of manipulating the subconscious. She's immune to mind-reading of any kind (her sister's included), and is completely unnoticeable even if you're looking right at her, her existence wiped from people's memories afterwards (though not for children). While this means she's an Empty Shell with no desires or thoughts, Byakuren speculates in Symposium of Post-Mysticism that she managed to artificially achieve enlightenment.
    • Utsuho Reiuji controls nuclear fusion, the thing that powers stars. In her debut she created a miniature sun and was preparing to cover the surface with nuclear fire, and afterwards she spends her spare time powering a makeshift fusion reactor. It's a good thing all she wants to do is make her master Satori happy.
    • Watatsuki no Yorihime is basically Reimu if she trained, summoning any god from the (extensive) Shinto pantheon to do her bidding and delivering Curb Stomp Battles to some of Gensokyo's heavy hitters.
    • Hata no Kokoro's ability is manipulating emotions, which she used in Hopeless Masquerade to almost start a civil war in Gensokyo. Fortunately this wasn't intentional and she stopped immediately after she got what she was looking for, but if she started using that power deliberately...
    • The Miracle Mallet can grant any wish the user desires. While there's also a cost proportional to the size of the wish, it isn't to Jackass Genie levels; the only known large scale wish caused tsukumogami to instantly spout up everywhere as a side-effect, some of them becoming Evil Weapons, which didn't interfere with the user's plans at all. Fortunately only inchlings can use it, and the only inchling around is in no hurry to use it again for any big wishes, as she's more interested in using it to make herself larger.
    • Sagume Kishin's power means that when she says anything, the world changes so that whatever she says becomes a lie, which even she recognises as absurdly dangerous so she rarely ever speaks. However, the changes are usually within regular plausibility instead of an instantaneous magical change; for example she tells the protagonists that she's invading Gensokyo in the hopes that it will cause them to stop the reason for her invading (Junko's invasion of the moon).
  • Cassius Bright, the father of Estelle, in The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky can be considered as one. In fact, the reason why he was sent to a different country was because the villains, Ouroboros, believed that if he was there, he'd easily thwart their plans.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2:
    • Jin, can move and attack faster than most characters can blink, making him unbeatable in combat. Even Foresight is useless when he can hit faster than an opponent can get out of the way, and it gets worse, since this is born from the power to control elementary particles. Even weapons like particle beams are useless as he can manipulate them to not hit him, and he can chill and area to absolute zero to rob Blades of their powers (since Ether particles lose the energy to do work under those conditions).. The only thing keeping him in check is the fact he's following Malos a bit passively since his loyalty comes from Malos being his Only Friend, and Jin being near the end of his lifespan and at risk of dying from ether stagnation when he exerts himself. He only loses three fights in the whole game, and all of them come from outside influence: a Power Nullifier, Pneuma awakening to cheat right back, and a wound from that fight he never completely recovers from.
    • Once Rex gets Mythra he never really loses any fights except for the battle against Jin in Tantal due to the ability of Foresight, although he does need help sometimes. At best, he draws with Morag, Zeke and Power Nullified Jin.
    • Pneuma is likely the biggest out of all of them considering it was made to counter Jin. She can rewrite the laws of the physical surroundings, allowing her to be as fast as Jin and she also possesses the data of all Blade Cores, meaning she effectively has every non-flesh eater Blade's powers. The only challenge she and Rex are faced with is Aion, which they still win against.

    Visual Novels 
  • Danganronpa: Between a variety of talents, characters and a Magnificent Bastard of a Big Bad, no power seems to be able to outdo Luck in the Dangan Ronpa universe. This is even lampshaded in the third case of the game, when the killer says that one of the reasons for their murder was that they wanted to test their talent against Makoto's luck, and naturally, they lose. In the second game, Nagito, who is even luckier than Makoto ends up orchestrating his own death, through an insanely complicated method, so the person he wanted would be blamed for it and allowed to escape.
    • Miu Iruma's talent is Inventor, which basically ends up enabling her to create anything she wants with the resources she has on hand. This really comes into play in the last two chapter, which reveals she built a set of hammers capable of disabling all electronics they hit (at the cost of limited power for each), a jar that essentially circumnavigates the cameras used by the Mastermind and reinstalling Keebo's weaponry, turning him into a One-Man Army capable of ending the killing game on his lonesome. Literally the only thing preventing her from breaking the plot wide open is that her stupidity and bizarre sense of priorities means she never takes initiative to end the killing game, and her extremely vulgar and arrogant personality means no one wants to work with except when required.
  • Demonbane... or at least later on in the visual novels when shit starts to hit the fan. The War God Demonbane is often considered the largest mecha in all of fiction, as it is so big that the universe collapses when it and its opponent start super-sizing themselves. It can also manipulate time. Elder God Demonbane, on the other hand, is much smaller but possesses even greater abilities, such as time travel, multiverse-hopping, and summoning versions of itself from all the infinite universes; an infinite army of backup. What keeps Demonbane from being an Invincible Hero is the fact that its opponents are the Outer Gods of Lovecraft's works... anything less than an infinite amount of power would never compete with them. Nyarlathotep, for instance, removes the aforementioned War God Demonbane from existence with a thought, and even Elder God Demonbane has never been able to put it down for good, even after literally billions of battles across the multiverse.
  • Momoyo from Majikoi! Love Me Seriously! is one of the strongest people in the entire world to the point where she can defeat genetically engineered super soldiers designed to be One Man Armies in seconds. Due to the usually comedic Slice of Life tone, this allows the main group to enjoy themselves with little fear of being in danger due to the absolutely massive gap between her and almost everybody else. When things get serious, the plot always finds a way of suppressing her power to create actual drama.
  • The Nasuverse:
    • Fate/stay night:
    • Tsukihime has a few:
    • The Garden of Sinners: the original Ryougi Shiki's version of Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, where she can "kill" pretty much anything - magic, emotions, ghosts, living people, etc. - and her powers work through projectiles, which just screams for a sniper rifle. And she has an alternate personality that has a deep connection to the Root of Creation itself, to the point it was thought to be omnipotent until Word of God states it is just ranked below Archetype Earth in power level. Luckily for the sake of the plot too, it doesn't bother to do anything for the most part.
    • Angel Notes:
      • The "TYPES"... to make a long story short, the being who created Arcueid is one of those (TYPE-Moon), and it can do everything Arcueid can do, if not more. Another, TYPE-Mercury, is stated to be one of two beings tied for the position of "being able to kill all of humanity faster than anything else in existence" (though in the present time, ORT is currently asleep, and it isn't expected to wake up for a few thousand years). ORT has been noted to be more powerful than anything else on Earth before the time of Angel Notes... where a whole bunch of TYPES from other planets come to Earth to wipe out humanity, something which it is believed even one of them on their own could accomplish.
      • The World's Strongest Man during the time of Angel Notes, Ado Edem. He possesses an ability called "Slash Emperor" where he creates a titanic sword capable of cutting through realities like a hot knife through a butter. It can one-shot even the TYPES, and in the story Ado Edem defeated TYPE-Jupiter and TYPE-Saturn without breaking a sweat. The trade-off is that Slash Emperor consumes raw material to transform into power: when Ado Edem used it against TYPE-Jupiter, he also created an immense gash in the Earth's crust crossing the entirety of North America.
    • Fate/EXTRA introduces the Servant Saver, aka Siddhartha Gautama, who is said to have attained such power after his enlightenment that he could dominate the entire Solar System if he desired to. Being, well, the Buddha, he has no desire for power or to dominate anything. He did summon himself as a Servant and was easily one of the most powerful Servants ever seen, with even his most minor Noble Phantasm being a spell capable of reality-altering power. The only reason he's defeatable is that he's not trying to win: he's just fighting on behalf of a wretched soul to show that soul some compassion and kindness.
  • The Number 9 Bracelet in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. The Nonary Game is based on using digital roots to unlock doors using a certain combination of numbers on the other bracelets to do so, but the number 9 is able to open every door with every combination since it can't alter the digital root. So what happens to the man with the number 9 bracelet? He falls for another character's trap and is killed by the bomb in his stomach, leaving his bracelet for said character to claim in secret.
  • The witches in Umineko: When They Cry. Bernkastel can make any event happen so long as the probability of it happening isn't zero. Lambdadelta can also make any event happen provided that whoever or whatever is trying to cause that event doesn't give up. Featherine Augustus Aurora beats them all by being able to Rewrite Reality.
  • The spiritually-charged Magatama from the Phoenix Wright series has the ability to "sense secrets" in the form of binding chains called Psyche-Locks; in essence, it makes the holder a Living Lie Detector that allows them to perceive when people are hiding a game where, as a lawyer, the player's job is to find out if they're hiding something. However, there are limits to the Magatama's ability: it doesn't reveal specifically what the secret is, requiring Phoenix to present numerous pieces of evidences to "break" each lock. Furthermore, it can't be used in court itself, when it would be the most useful. There are also ways around it, as Matt Engarde proves in the second game: he is able to truthfully state "I didn't kill anyone" after arranging for an assassin to murder somebody.
    • There's also the famed Kurain Spirit Channeling Technique, which allows certain individuals to contact the souls of the dead and let them possess their bodies to communicate with the living world again. This might sound like the perfect way to expose murderers—after all, why not just ask the victim who killed them? To prevent the Technique from making murder an easily solved crime, it's made clear that only a select few individuals (mostly the Fey family) can perform it, and only after rigorous training (or by simply having immense psychic power inherently). An in-story justification also exists in the form of the DL-6 Incident, a murder case where the police, completely out of leads, asked Misty Fey to try to summon the victim; while the channeling worked, it didn't solve the crime (although that complication wasn't the medium's fault), which turned the public against psychic ability and thus made the Fey clan reluctant to advertise their abilities.
  • The Shinza Bansho Series has become quite infamous for this trope, featuring reality altering characters around every corner with fights that can range from anywhere between super powered fistfights to reality ending free-for-all's. When creating life draining fake moons and literal Plot Armor are considered the low end of the power scale, you know this trope is in effect. In fact, the only reason there often is a narrative at all is due to the fact that there are just so many individuals with such broken powers that it practically becomes a contest for who is the most broken.
    • The whole plot Dies Irae almost entirely centers around the main villain trying to create an opponent worthy of fighting him as he is so ungodly powerful that nothing can excite him. He is able to effortlessly beat pretty much anyone else that comes his way, including, but not limited to, Elemental Shapeshifter's, ancient magicians, a cyborg with an all ending strike, someone able to invoke a hellish inferno of perfect accuracy, those who are always faster than their opponent and even literal Gods.
    • Even within his own series, Hajun the Sixth Heaven from Kajiri Kamui Kagura, is considered to be in a league of his own. His power is counted in infinities, and due to a bizarre feedback loop, it is constantly rising. He was only ever beaten due to The Tumor that existed within him, and that was the cause of the feedback loop, was leeching power off him and feeding it to Habaki and his allies. Even his faulty reincarnation in Dies Irae Pantheon is still gaining strength, albeit not to such extremes, while all the other gods have to deal with being De Powered.

    Web Animation 
  • Red vs. Blue
    • Tex initially has invisibility, super strength, and a voice filter. When her original body is destroyed, she can only recover the invisibility once in her second body. In her third body, she regains only her super strength, but at that point she's matched by the Meta.
    • Wyoming's Time Distortion Unit powers are nebulously defined anyway, but we know at the very least it can be used to loop small segments of time (used specifically by Wyoming to "replay" a situation in which he loses) and slow/stop time around the user. Yet in the prequel bits, Wyoming never once makes use of it, assuming he actually has it at all, even after we know he has an AI. This is because time manipulation should make it impossible for Wyoming to ever lose— and he very specifically has to at a few points.
    • Later seasons add a limit to the Time Distortion Unit: a charge limit. The Meta is already overpowered, but it's first attempt at using Wyoming's upgrade renders its suit unable to power any of its equipment, forcing it to retreat. This is justified in that Meta's armor can't power all of its equipment properly without AI support, compounded in that Meta runs multiple AI fragments at once. In season eight, the TDU is shorted out by Doc, rendering it useless.

  • Dragon Ball Multiverse:
    • Universe 16 Vegito Briefs is exactly as powerful as he was in Dragonball's canon, and can even become a Super Saiyan 3. His power is so great as a Super Saiyan 3 that everyone in the tournament arena begins floating off the ground just from Vegito powering up. Finally, there are less than a handful of people that can take Vegito on and make him work for a win. He's beaten in his second match by ring-out, both to preserve the surprise of the unnamed opponent that beat him and to give the remaining contestants a real chance to win.
    • Universe 20 Broly is one hell of an Adaptational Badass. His Legendary Super Saiyan form was reworked to constantly increase his power the longer a fight went on, meaning he'd eventually become stronger than whomever he fought if he survives that long. It took Vegito becoming a Super Saiyan 3 in their match for Broly to lose.
    • Universe 4 Majin Buu (named Zen Buu here) absorbed Goku, Vegeta, Trunks, Gohan, Goten, Piccolo, and Bulma in his universe, then went across his galaxy absorbing more people for their knowledge and power. The result makes him one of the most powerful beings participating in this tournament, and one of the few that's strong enough to fight Vegito.
    • Universe 2's Neko Majin and Arale are treated as Parody Sue versions of this trope. Their Rule of Funny powers are used in a serious context during the tournament, making them both extremely powerful Reality Warpers that equal even Zen Buu's magic in potency. Arale hands Universe Android 18 her ass the entire fight, only losing because of a Deus ex Machina. Neko Majin is able to copy everything Universe 18 Gotenks can do, including using the Fusion Dance with only himself to fuse with, the Super Saiyan form, and the Ghost Kamikaze Attack. He isn't harmed by anything Gotenks can do, so Gotenks had to bribe him into giving up the fight.
  • Han Jee-Han, the main character of The Gamer, on virtue of the limited yet exploitable Reality Warper nature of his powers which allow him to gain new abilities and grow stronger like a RPG character would. As of the end of the first season, his powers include:
    • Boring, but Practical utility skills, such as his Hammerspace, Enemy Scan and long-range audio chat.
    • Being Immune to Bullets as well as most forms of non-magical physical assault, as he regenerates faster than he can get harmed.
    • The ability to create and improve on his own spells, his signature one being a magical Flechette Storm.
    • A Healing Hands technique which works on pretty much anything from wounds to chronic diseases.
    • Summoning several copies (or one very strong version) of his Gnome elemental, who has several devastating abilities of her own.
    • Creating money and precious items from nothing, as all he has to do is create an Instance Dungeon with tough enemies and blast away at them, which helpfully also feeds his...
    • Level Grinding, which means that although most of his allies and enemies surpass him in raw power, he only needs to train up for long enough to catch up.
    • The kicker? One of the first thing he does when experimenting with his powers is to get such a large Mana pool that he can spam most of his attacks indefinitely.
  • One character in Casey and Andy is Satan. And she has Reality Warper powers. The author has remarked that it's hard to come up with reasons why she isn't using them to help her boyfriend out of whatever jam he finds himself in.
  • Grace's shapeshifting powers in El Goonish Shive, with her Omega form being the strongest to the point that she was able to effortlessly defeat Damien, the Big Bad of the Painted Black arc and the most powerful character in the comic at the time. Fortunately, she's usually a pacifist who prefers not to fight unless she has to, and many fights either find a way to take her out of it or put her in a situation where she can't fight at full power.
  • Homestuck:
    • The timing of Tavros's death comes suspiciously soon after the revelation that his animal affinity extends to First Guardians, and immediately after he asks about using it to get god-dog Becquerel to help directly.
    • The Serkets' ability to control/"Manipul8" other trolls is incredibly powerful. While there are some restrictions (Vriska could not use it on at least Terezi, only on Sollux half the time, and it simply puts humans to sleep), it can be used on multiple targets at once, and if the target has powers, the manipulator can use their powers as well. It can even be used through Trollian, after it had been hooked up to see the complete timeline of the human session, which is how Vriska discovers that she can only force humans in to sleep in the first place. Late in Act 6, Aranea manages to manipulate several offshoot Damaras to use their telekinesis in order to move an entire mini-planet. Vriska being given such an ability fits in with how she was intentionally written to be polarizing, as the sheer ease that she could control others is one of the many factors that throws her into being controversial.
    • The trolls themselves- being parodies of Mary Sues nearly all have wondrous, impressive powers that are rare even for their species. Unfortunately, their personalities are so dysfunctional and the Gambit Pileup they get stuck in is so massively huge (spanning dozens of characters, at least two apocalypses, and time travel in both directions) that any attempt they make to fix the situation either fails completely or only ends up making things worse. A recurring theme throughout Hivebent is that if the trolls could actually get past their various issues and work together as a team, they could be heroes.
    • Jade Harley gets several of these in a row. First, she imprints her dead dream-self into her sprite, creating a version of Jade with godlike power of both a sprite and the First Guardian that was already there... who is too depressed to use it. Then, she fuses with Jadesprite as part of going god-tier, giving her godlike power and the will to use it...but then the plot proceeds in such a way that she spends three years with her boundless teleport mojo not working for her. Finally, upon arriving in the alpha session, she is hit with mind control by a major villain, caught in a difficult confrontation with a fully-powered Page, knocked unconscious by a surprise hit and finally crushed under a building. In the post-retcon timeline, she's still hit with mind control by the same villain, but quickly gets put to sleep by another character's mind control powers, and spends the climax of Act 6 fighting one villain who shares her First Guardian abilities.
    • John and his retcon powers not only allow him to move through different universes (something not even Jade can do), but it also gives him the ability to make changes to the alpha timeline. Meaning that when things go wrong or get too hot to handle, he can just go back and change it, with absolutely no one able to stop him. It was through this ability that John managed to revive most of the dead main characters, as well as transport the entirety of the Land of Wind and Shade to his newly-created alpha timeline.
  • Richard from Looking for Group is a nigh-invulnerable dark mage with vast, vast powers: half the time he is sidelined in one way or another to let the other characters achieve something, the other half he is jarringly abrupt in his resolving of fights/problems. An entertaining character, but problematic.
  • The Order of the Stick:
    • Vaarsuvius becomes ridiculously powerful through a Deal with the Devil. The resulting arrogance results in a serious backfire/subversion later on when Xykon turns out to be much too well-prepared for a simple brute force attack to work. The above-described Scry and Die tactic is explicitly mentioned.
    • According to Rich Burlew, even with Vaarsuvius having the two most useful spell schools on their banned list (Conjuration, which governs summoning, teleportation, and creation, and Necromancy, which governs instant death, creation of undead, and many debuffs), it is very hard to write scenarios that they can't trivialize with the other six spell schools. V's spent multiple important battles out of the way because of this.
    • He's also stated that he considers true resurrection (the most powerful resurrection spell, capable of reviving a person even without a body) a story-breaker, and it will never show up in the comic. He also mentioned that the few monsters capable of casting it naturally would demand at least one life in exchange, which, in most cases, is too high a price for the characters to reasonably pay.
    • He's also not a fan of teleportation magic, since his story, like many, is about journeys. "Characters who blip right to their end destination do not for an engaging journey make."
    • Durkon, being a cleric, is just as powerful as V, if not more so. His displayed spells include healing to the point of resurrection, paralyzing at range, turning into a giant, tossing around lightning, changing the weather, flying, sending messages across long ranges, and making people immune to Mind Control or Level Drain, and that's on top of being a decent warrior in his own right. As such, it's practically a Running Gag that he doesn't use his skills to their full potential. Even then, he usually ends up either sitting fights out (the bandit forest, both Miko fights), being far away from people who need him (most of the battle of Azure City, most of Don't Split The Party), or, being turned into a vampire.
    • Xykon, the Big Bad, has similar issues; he's an epic-level lich sorcerer, and therefore one of the most powerful people alive. If he wanted to, he could pop in on the main characters, bombard them with meteors, and kill them in under thirty seconds, and he happens to be basically unkillable on top of that. He's kept from doing so by a mixture of Contractual Genre Blindness, laziness, and genuinely not giving a damn about the Order as a group.
  • This is why Petey only rarely gets screen time on Schlock Mercenary. His personal power level is at least an order of magnitude above any of the civilizations in the story, and he is fighting a war against the Andromeda Galaxy. He came back into focus in the last few books when the main characters' power level was up to the point where the company is a major player in galactic politics in their own right and the war Petey's losing is right on their doorstep.
  • Phantaminum from Tower of God. As an Exis, he is a being that cannot be interfered with. That's all he needs, but he is also ungodly powerful in conventional ways. Fortunately, he is a background character.
  • In White Dark Life, the story breaking power is NOT Mimicry, but rather Altair's combined soul-stealing and erasure powers. The more he kills, the stronger he gets and with no one even capable of remembering his victims. Well, photos excluded.
  • Scoob and Shag has the power of Commander One (Mickey Mouse), named "Power". It allows him to "turn off" and "turn back on" anything just by thinking about it. Absolutely anything. One use involved Commander "turn off" someone, causing the victim to collapse on itself and disappear; and then "turn back on" that same person, alive and well, to use them as a Human Shield.
  • The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: In a villainous example, Mongo the Überninja is a technologically engineered giant who's much better than a normal ninja, meaning The Hero is no match for him. The first time he appears, he's dealt with indirectly, but in "Army of One", his master makes an elaborate plot to lure the Doctor into a trap and have Mongo capture him. This leaves open two questions: Since Mongo is unstoppable, why didn't he just capture him from his office, and why did he have to capture him rather than kill him outright? Both are given contrived Hand Wave answers — even though the second question actually has a better, plot-relevant answer coming up next.
  • JoJopolis is a Fan Webcomic of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, so of course it gives these kind of abilities to its main villains.
    • "God Only Knows" allows the user to read the past and the future (essentially making them The Omniscient) and allowing them to pull off tricks like knowing how to throw a ball at a helicopter to make it crash in a precise spot. The user does have a few weakness related to close blood relatives (for example, the user cannot foresee events that happen to or next to their own daughter); but the user can also make someone else omniscient and make them look into the relative's future.
    • "Goodspeed You Black Emperor" can combine existing waves together... including light. Therefore, it can use light to create illusions, laser beams, or enough gamma radiation to replicate the effects of a low-power nuclear bomb.
    • "Cosmic Wheels", the hidden ability of Hurdy Gurdy Man, essentially allows the user to charge its own attacks to extend their range, speed and power infinitely. On top of that, since no human being can truly comprehend infinity, any user of "God Only Knows" cannot predict it.
    • "Everywhere At The End Of Time" allows the user to "access higher dimensional planes", essentially making them intangible at will and allowing them to teleport around. On top of that, their attacks will warp the victim's body, resulting in an almost certain One-Hit Kill. The main drawback is that staying too long in the other dimension will kill the user.

    Web Original 
  • Played for Laughs in one Liar Town USA post, describing a fictional TV show called Futuresight: "A wildly successful clairvoyant gambler is persuaded to solve crimes by the FBI. Since he's psychic, he solves hundreds each day. It's no big deal. Then a crime syndicate decides to target him. But they end up in jail, because he can see the future. After that, it's back to gambling."


Video Example(s):


Why she up there all this time

Okoye asks the question about Scarlet Witch, and this trope is the answer.

How well does it match the trope?

4.92 (12 votes)

Example of:

Main / StoryBreakerPower

Media sources:

Main / StoryBreakerPower