That One Attack/Video Games/Action Game

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Examples of That One Attack in Action Games include:

• Rank 2 in No More Heroes has an attack that instantly kills you. What does she do? She drops to the floor crying. If you hit her, or even get close to her, she instantly beats you to death. At no point is it hinted that this will kill you, and if you play the game without knowledge of this, YOU WILL DIE. To make matters worse, she can sometimes do this in mid combo. Even more aggravating is that sometimes she actually is crying (she only attacks if she left one hand on the bat), so you can get thrown off easily if you aren't watching.
  • Rank 4 of the first game, the boss has a near undodgeable spinning attack that takes a large chunk of health and can not be blocked.
  • Speaking of spinning, Mimmy in the second game. "YIPEE!"SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!SLAP!
  • Rank 7 in Desperate Struggle can summon a dragon made of energy. This dragon will follow you very closely, and Travis can't dodge fast enough to escape it. And Rank 7 will still attack freely as it's chasing you! The dragon can be blocked, though it eats your battery like candy; it also has a tell: If the sky is dark it's still chasing you, if the sky clears it's gone.
  • Rank 1's second form is even worse. About halfway through the battle, he'll start teleporting around, attacking three times in rapid succession. In a game where you dodge primarily by rolling, this attack comes faster than you can roll. If you manage to get him down to 1/4th HP, he'll start spamming that attack and a series of three whirlwind punches that are equally difficult (read: impossible) to dodge. The worst part? Both attacks knock you back a considerable distance, and can send you out of the arena, one-hit-killing you. That said, the teleport punch is avoidable provided you have hair-trigger reflexes and know that the second punch will almost always miss if you dodge the first, leaving you free to dodge the third. The tornado punch? Nnnnot so much.
• The suicide attack by the Egg Viper in Sonic Adventure, if only because of the horrid camera angle. Some of the Sonic Rush battles (and the Sky Canyon boss in Sonic Advance 2) have instant death attacks, or attacks which are nearly impossible to avoid consistently.
  • The Sonic Rush Series ones are very well-telegraphed, though. Probably the only hard one to see coming is the one where Eggman (or Nega) rams his giant robot's shoulder spikes into the stage at the end of said battle, mostly because you've never seen it before. The button-mashing on the Sonic vs. Blaze battle would be hard to see coming as well if it weren't for the mini-cutscene and the fact that one boss earlier used an easier version of the button-mashing gimmick.
• The charging tackle Meta Ridley in Metroid Prime does when he's on the ground. It's not too hard to avoid at first, but later on, especially in Hard mode, he seems to be able to guess where you'll be. Cue frustration. In fact, physical attacks in general are pretty annoying in Metroid Prime as you may get cornered.
• Jet Force Gemini's second fight with Mizar has the infamous "electric jump rope". It's probably 80% of the reason the Mizar rematch is hair-pullingly tough to fight.
• In Prototype, the Supreme Hunter can use the same tendril barrage you can, and it inflicts a terrifying amount of damage. Furthermore, depending on how chaotic the fight is, noticing the move being prepared can be extremely difficult, and there's no getting out of the way once it's been unleashed on you.
• Dracula in I Wanna Be the Guy is already a bone-crackingly difficult Luck-Based Mission, but he has one attack that (even by IWBTG standards) seems programmed to screw you over. He shoots a single, homing Delicious Fruit at you. It's too slow to accidentally fly offscreen, hangs around long enough that you're gonna have to dodge it, and if he follows up with his fireball attack (which floods the floor with, well, fire), or those purple things are flying around, you're screwed.
• In Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Dracula throws long streams of bats that bypass Mercy Invincibility and will shred your HP down to nothing in seconds if you get caught off guard. If you can avoid that, then it'll be the bloody soul steals out of nowhere, which do a lot to you and give him a bit more health back. Portrait of Ruin's bosses normally have a single attack that is much more difficult to work against than the others too.
• In Mega Man X5, the fight with Zero has him throwing nearly-full-screen Sword Beams that you have to dodge in sequence. Capcom acknowledged this by making this attack Zero's Level 3 Hyper Combo in Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
  • Bamboo Pandamonium's desperation attack in X8. It comes out with virtually no warning, takes up over half the screen, and deals an obscene amount of damage.
    • The attack is specifically designed to one-shot Ride Armour, which makes the fight much easier if you managed to manoever it to his arena, as it allows you to continuously pummel him while taking zero damage. God help you if you're not in Ride Armour when that attack connects. Oh, and there is no Ride Armour when you fight him again in the Boss Rush. Hope you've got full Life Tanks!
    • Lumine's first form uses the desperation attacks of the 8 Reploid bosses, including the one mentioned above. However, there are two attacks that he modified; Avalanche Yeti's attack, which causes gigantic snowflakes that freeze you on contact to rain down, lasts a lot longer, and Lumine can still blast you with other attacks while it's in effect. And then Burn Rooster's attack, which engulfs the walls in flames, never wears off. After it hits the field, you can no longer wall-jump.
• The final battle with Nelo Angelo (a.k.a. Vergil) from Devil May Cry has him throwing out his deadliest attack, summoning blue energy swords around you and using them on you like Reverse Shrapnel.
  • Hell Lusts from 3 have an uppercut attack. Admittedly it isn't too powerful, but it has ridiculous priority, the demons love to use it while you're busy fighting others and they sometimes feint it by just doing the starting dash without actually striking, meaning prediction is difficult. Behold the horror.
• Bunji Kugashira in the original Gungrave: "See Ya"/"Not So Fast!" Kicks Grave in the stomach --> shoots Grave while airborne = instant shield break and knocks off 25% of Grave's HP. This attack can KO you should the boss spam it (and he will). The fight even starts off with the boss using it, and it's very hard to avoid or see coming. It doesn't help that he's the only boss in the game that can heal.
• DadGame has Bonus Boss Mecha Death. It's a freakin' power struggle you have to win. Why is this power struggle on here? You have to tap with the animation of the key tapping, but more often than not, there is going to be slowdown, and your rhythm will be thrown off just enought that Mecha Death will win this fight by instantly killing you for a simple mistake. It doesn't help that you may win the first time, but you'll lose the next one, so it really feels like that you just gotta get lucky on all the power struggles. And sometimes, he does it A LOT.
• In the Monster Hunter franchise, the most agreed upon That One Attack is Plesioth's Hip-check. The hitbox for the attack is so broken that you could be standing close to it, on the opposite side of the attack's direction, not touching the Plesioth's body, and still get hit. It doesn't help that it's one of its only four viable melee attacks while on land.
• The third phase of that flying claw boss in Frogger Beyond has an attack which elevates its difficulty to near-Luck-Based Mission levels. Basically, it's a leaded cluster of fireballs, followed by a fast fireball. Only problem is, each fireball hits a random spot, and there's no guarantee that you'll survive it. It may have a pattern, but since poor Frogger is a One-Hit-Point Wonder, one hit sends him to the first phase. This means it's nearly impossible to learn the pattern when it kills you every time. May the gods of random number shine on you if it glitches up and fires the attack out of the arena.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Gyorg has the habit of slallowing you temporarily after you inflict it damage. This attack is also very difficult to dodge.
  • Phytops from The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks prolongs gradually its thorned tentacle slash combo as the battle progresses. The ultimate combo is: moving its resting tentacles (to make Link's capture of the thorns to hurt it more difficult) while it shoots three series of goo drops, attacking with its left upper tentacle, then with the right one, and finally with both.
• In Famous has the final boss Kessler. He can and will hit you with attacks that are almost impossible to dodge, and if he summons his giant copy images, well, best to take cover (but there isn't any!).
• Yammy in Soul Carnival 2 has four such attacks:
  • 1: His support attack, which sucks you in and deals continuous damage
  • 2: His soul-sucking attack, which does the same thing, drains SP and deals damage faster
  • 3: Shooting laser bullets from his fists, which can't be dodged unless you're behind him and can't be broken out of except with a support, unlike the other two attacks. He can shoot up to eight at a time, and it can take off over 50% of your health if you aren't buffed up with defense-boosting accessories and/or Soul Pieces.
  • 4: His Burning Attack, which freezes time and deals over 3,000 damage. If he does this after the laser bullets, you die.
  • Every Giant Mook in the game has at least one, whether it's the Doom Gigants' punching attack that can deal over 10,000 damage and send you flying a good distance back, the gigantic Shinigami with a nigh-unavoidable axe attack that hurts like hell, or the turtle Hollows with a splash attack that throws you up into the air.
• Koei has quite a few across its three signature series, most of them handed out by high level characters or officers possessed of a situational super-buff.
  • Lu Bu, at all. His moveset is insanely powerful in just about every game he's been in since 3, but it's the throw from Dynasty Warriors 4 that really takes the cake. An unblockable multi hit throw with several officer and infantry mulching swings to tack on damage, followed by an overhead blow that occasionally sends players rocketing across the map, and more often sends their lifeless corpse into the next county, yet when you use it, its Too slow or {{The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard The damage is too low]]. This move was taken out in 5...to be replaced with a faster, zero-telegraphing fire element dash that breaks block. Thanks, KOEI.
  • Pang Tong's Musou, in 4 and 5. This often involves him standing in one place and doing a lot of tornado air bursts around him, which often means he'll tack on at least three and often six good hits, and once again blow people off into the distance.
  • Gan Ning's Musou, 3 through 5. This attack is powerful, comes out fast, and sends Gan Ning racing across the battlefield at ludicrous speed. If he doesn't actually knock the player character down with the attack, the glancing blow that hits still takes off a good chunk of life, and leaves said character in a stunned state.
  • Zhang Jiao's...anything involving his fire element, but his fire based sweeping attack and Musou are fairly obnoxious due to increased damage and leaving players in a 'burned' state for a couple of annoying, vulnerable seconds.
  • Saika Magoichi's rifle blasts, especially his Musou in Samurai Warriors 1, which was unblockable for most characters (as 'bullet block' was a rather rare skill). Only his slow attack speed kept him from Game Breaker status.
  • Ishikawa Goemon's spinning attack with his mace goes on forever, and it's just fast enough that each hit juggles. Thankfully, he doesn't appear too often in normal gameplay.
  • The same can't be said for Maeda Keiji, who gets a block breaking area of effect ground pound and a brutal multi-hit Musou attack, and happens to turn up in quite a few story modes. He also shows up on his Cool Horse Matsukaze most of the time, so there's no running from him.
  • Orochi's moveset, notable his Jumping Fireball that breaks guard, Fire Elemental, and juggles, and anything with relation with Dark Explosion(Air Charge and Charge attack) which is just as broken when you use it yourself, justified as he is the end boss to a Massively Multiplayer Crossover.
• Mega Man Network Transmission:
  • FireMan has two; his regular attack which is only dodgeable with good slide timing, and takes off a good chunk of your health. And when his HP gets low, he periodically bursts into a pillar of flame. If you're near him, One-Hit Kill without the Heat Armor, and an absurd amount of damage with it. That's right, the first boss of the game has an instant-death move.
  • Zero has an attack where he lets loose an energy wave that takes up the whole screen and does 300 damage. God help you if you didn't pack an Invis.
• |Sonic the Hedgehog 2006: Silver's psychokinesis. He grabs Sonic/Shadow and slams them into a wall or tosses them into the sky. When the attack starts, it cannot be broken out of. Sometimes he'll use a follow-up attack that ignores Mercy Invincibility and is an instant kill. If you move forward and not to the sides at the beginning of the battle (with Sonic, at least), he runs up and uses it to one-shot you.
• Assassin's Creed: Enemy Counter Attacks are pretty much impossible to predict and a free hit for the one responsible. Best hope no one takes advantage of Altaïr getting laid out.
• Custom Robo has the Waning Arc and Waxing Arc guns. Each one fires four shots that can go around walls, and have slight homing. It really hurts if all four rounds connect. Very late in the game is a Dual Boss battle that utilizes both of these guns, in a stage with shifting terrain.

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