BFG (weapon)

Well, at least it's not a concealed weapon.
"My cause is just... my will is strong... and my gun is very, very large."
—Doomguy, from the Doom comic

A BFG is a piece of personal artillery used by an individual and chiefly defined by its frickin' bigness. A BFG might have a mounting or bipod, but the main use in-story is for our warrior to sling it around as a personal weapon. With gritted teeth. While standing knee-deep in a pile of spent brass, shouting Come Get Some!

The BFG is a visual metaphor for power, and therefore has a lot of uses as a trope. If The Hero, particularly the Action Hero, gets hold of one, it's likely because the writers intend to escalate the action, most likely with a Storming the Castle scene where he takes on a whole army.

A Sub-Trope of Impossibly Cool Weapon. See also Big Bulky Bomb and Blade of Fearsome Size.

A BFG chiefly differs from a Hand Cannon in that the Hand Cannon is large for a pistol, while the BFG is large for ... well, it's just plain large. A BFG, possibly after Sucking-In Lines, may cause people to be Blown Across the Room from the mere recoil of firing it.

See also: Beam Spam, Splash Damage, a Macross Missile Massacre, Sphere of Destruction, Wave Motion Gun, Lightning Gun, Freeze Ray, Death Ray, Disintegrator Ray, Frickin' Laser Beams and Recursive Ammo. A BFG will almost certainly yield Stuff Blowing Up, and will likely possess additional dakka. A Swiss Army Gun tends to also be a BFG, as does a Bigger Stick. Might cause the user to be Trigger Happy.

Not to be confused with Roald Dahl's book and character The BFG (Big Friendly Giant), the 1989 film or the 2016 film versions thereof, TNA Wrestling's show Bound for Glory, or Big Friendly Dog. Or another type of gun.

Examples of BFG (weapon) include:

Anime and Manga

  • A number of weapons from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex qualify. Saito uses a sniper rifle, Batou uses a Minigun, Ishikawa uses a bazooka filled with Anti-Tank Adhesive Countermeasure ammo, Borma uses a bazooka, and Motoko herself uses a .50 caliber anti-tank rifle... with only one arm. Of course, considering that they are all enhanced with prosthetics to various extents, it makes some sense that they can wield these weapons. Togusa, the only non-cyborg, just uses a Mateba autorevolver. In the original movie Batou also uses a man-portable HEAT SPIW (High-Explosive Anti-Tank Special-Purpose Individual Weapon), which he affectionately calls "your standard-issue Big Gun".
  • In at least one occasion on the classic cyberpunk anime Bubblegum Crisis, (entirely human) police officer Leon McNichol makes use of a massive anti-mecha gun that appears to be some sort of miniaturized cannon. Again seen in the episode "Red Eyes" when Linna is equipped with a prototype motoslave connected to a huge cannon capable of not only reaching but vaporizing a Kill Sat in orbit. And somewhat humorously presented in Revenge Road where the ADP has to deal with a rampaging super-car that seems to have taken on a digital mind of its own. Their response is to drag out a decommissioned tank so as to have a gun capable of stopping it.
  • The weapon of choice for the Capital Police in Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is a hand-held version of the MG-42 heavy machine gun from WWII. In real life, this weapon weighed well over 11 kg and was only accurate with a tripod, and was normally used by a team of two to four men. However, in the movie, they take steps to make the use of a man-portable one seem more realistic, such as an added foregrip and a shoulder-mounted compartment that holds the ammo-belt. The weight-balance problem was more than likely evened out by the heavy armor they wore. Plus, they always seemed to use them at ranges of only 10–15 feet from the target, and at such a close range, accuracy problems for a heavy machine gun become essentially non-existent, since the spray fire is going to kill everything.
    • The foregrip is actually the standard bipod of that weapon and the firing stance used by the Capital Police officers (grabbing the weapon by the bipod and shooting from the hip) is actually trained by real soldiers as a firing method for certain combat situations. Only short and imprecise bursts of fire are possible though, whereas in the anime entire ammo belts are fired with great precision.
  • In Hellsing, Seras Victoria, a recently turned vampire, uses a 30mm cannon that weighs 120 pounds unloaded. Her strength enables her to wield it like a mundane personal rifle, much to the shock of the human troops. And this is one of the smaller guns in the series.
    • She later upgraded to an even bigger cannon. It had two 30mm auto cannons, could fire grenades, and had the ability to take down armored vehicles at four kilometers.
  • Natsuki Kruger in Mai-Otome is a proud wielder of a BFG from Hammerspace (literal, in-story Hammerspace, accessed via Applied Phlebotinum). It is at least 1.5 times as long as she is tall, if not longer.
  • There's also the experimental laser rifle Kaneda gets a hold of in Akira, when it's shown that Tetsuo can halt ordinary bullets in midair.
  • Trigun thrives on this trope. Wolfwood wields the Cross Punisher, which actually contains a machine gun, a missile launcher, and (in the anime) between six and eight normal-sized guns. Knowing that Wolfwood's Punisher is slightly taller than him and that Wolfwood is about 1.85m, the weapon must weigh at the very least 100 kilos, which makes it a more than honourable BFG (and Wolfie one honourable Badass). Millie Thompson carries a stungun that looks like a portable Gatling gun, can fire projectiles with enough force to knock over a truck, and fits neatly inside her overcoat without a bulge. Chapel the Evergreen (Wolfwood's mentor in the anime) carries a Punisher that can split down its length to form a pair of machine guns. Caine the Longshot, another Gung-Ho Gun in the anime, has a sniper rifle with a barrel that is several yards long. He shoots at Vash and Wolfwood from far outside of town until Vash uses his Improbable Aiming Skills to blow the rifle to pieces. And then, the most BFGing BFG of all BFGs: Vash and Knives' angel arms. When fired at low power, they blast away whole cities. When fired at full power, they carve giant craters in the moon.
  • Traditional Magical Girl shows usually have the heroine wielding a cute little magic wand. In Lyrical Nanoha, the heroine's weapon of choice is a long magical staff that turns into a BFG capable of firing Wave Motion Gun-class blasts of energy. Also, Numbers Cyborg Dieci, whose weapon is called Enormous Cannon, which is just what it sounds like.
  • Bolt Crank's affectation for comedically over-sized armaments of all shapes and sizes amounts to half the appeal of Eat Man.
  • Sakuya of Koi Koi 7 can call forth any gun at any time, and has a preference for BFGs.
  • Hitomi Landsknecht from ICE wields one, with a gorgeous Steampunk design.
  • Miyu from the Mai-Otome manga has a tri-barrelled triple gatling that is almost certainly a Xenosaga Shout-Out. Unfortunately, the enemies she attempts to use it on have Deflector Shields...
  • Mahou Sensei Negima:
    • Chachamaru at one point wields a gun as long as she is tall. It's powerful enough to temporarily contain an uber-powerful demon.
    • Mana LOVES the BFG: she does Guns Akimbo with Desert Eagles, and when she was hired to prevent love confessions in a determinated area she did it by shooting her targets with a tranquillizer-loaded, 14 kg anti-materiel rifle. At one point, she even uses an anti-tank machine gun to fight demons.
  • America's ultimate weapon in Getter Robo Hien is a BFG, made by transforming the Statue of Liberty into a laser cannon which is then wielded by one of their Humongous Mecha. This might be a shout-out to the Statue of Liberty Cannon from G Gundam.
  • Bleach - 2nd Division's Captain, Soifon, an expert in assassinations and melee combat, truly dislikes her Bankai. Why? Because it's a freakin' missile launcher. And it makes an insanely giant boom. Fans call it The Banzooka. Also, the Zanpakutou of Hanataro Yamada, Hisagomaru, can, in materialized form, release a Death Ray from the BFG concealed in his chest. This requires the absorbing of a certain amount of pain energy from some poor victim nearby. While in Zanpakutou form, this attack would likely be considered a Wave Motion Sword.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Yoko's enormous coilgun-sniper rifle. The gun is about as long as she is tall (mainly because of the barrel, which is fairly ridiculous on its own, the rest of the gun itself is actually fairly reasonably-sized considering its purpose, that, and it's a railgun that can accept any ammunition that can fit into the barrel, even arrows), and is capable of taking down Humongous Mecha, occasionally in one shot. Turned Up to Eleven in the final episode where Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the mecha that jumps on galaxies like stepping stones gets one of its own. Sized appropriately of course.
  • S-Cry-ed: George Tatsunami's Alter, Big Magnum, is, as its name would suggest, a Big Fucking Revolver that shoots Big Fucking Bullets.
  • The Law of Ueki: Any one-star or above Celestial being, most notably Robert and Ueki has a weapon called Kurogane, which turns their arm into a giant, 6-foot cannon that completely overshadows the user in size.
  • Though not actually that big, Lady Eboshi's gun in Princess Mononoke is the prototype of a BFG especially designed to be used by women. It's a shoulder-fired matchlock musket which fires shot well over an inch in diameter and has a really big muzzle flash. With it Eboshi mortally wounds two very powerful forest spirits and decapitates The Great Forest Spirit with a single shot.

Eboshi: "Now watch closely, everyone. I'm going to show you how to kill a god."

  • Many of GaoGaiGar's predecessors in the Brave Series had their ultimate forms come equipped with BFGs (while the former went down a different route). Two of the most famous (and most appropriately named) are Fire J-Decker's Max Cannon Mode and Great Might Gaine's Perfect Cannon.
  • In Transformers Victory, Deathsaurus has the Living-Metal-Destroying Cannon.
  • At one point, Lt. Surge has a bazooka. What makes it awesome is its ammo...which are Voltorb and Eletrode. Seriously.
  • Several people in One Piece are armed with oversized guns or even cannon. For example, Tilestone, Zanbei and Absalom. Also slightly parodied with one marine officer who wielded a really huge portable bazooka.
  • Death the Kid wields two of these when using Death Cannon, which are somehow merged with his arms. They're usually normal-looking pistols.
  • In FLCL, Kitsurubami once uses a bipod-mounted anti-tank rifle that she somehow fits into a car the size of a Ford Focus.
  • Hiromi in Patlabor has a tendency to end up packing an enormous anti-labor rifle in the movies; in the first, it's shown being fired at a police patrol car, throwing it about fifty feet into the air trailing debris. The one he uses in the second movie forces him backwards with every shot even though he's braced and using a bipod, and is powered enough to go straight through the head of a Extor.
  • Miltary Labors themselves typically have relatively small rotary guns or outsized rifles; Police Labors get massive revolvers or giant-sized versions of police shotguns.
  • In RahXephon, the Vermillion mecha that replace the planes Elvy's squadron use in the early part of the series are armed with a massive BFG which consists of a machine gun and a Wave Motion Gun that can blow up an entire island.
  • Bakugan Battle Brawlers has recently unveiled Battle Gear, which contains several things that qualify as BFG's, but the current granddaddy of them all is Zukanator(Yes, the little guy on the lower right is and in a figurative sense one was The Dragon). Practically big enough to be a Wave Motion Gun, it turns your Bakugan into a living Kill Sat. However, it fits the BFG category because it is carried by the hero and can't blow a spaceship in two. It can blow a pretty sizable hole clean through one, though.
  • Guts' Arm Cannon in Berserk.
  • D-Gray Man: Allen Walker's anti-Akuma weapon can go into this form, first seen at the "Ghost of Martel" arc.
  • Gray from Fairy Tail once made one of these
  • Final Fantasy Unlimited has Kaze wielding the Magun, which through the use of Soil Charges can summon giant monsters for just about any occasion, including a monster that is literally a God.
  • In the second season of Darker than Black , Suou can manifest a PTRD 14.5mm anti-tank rifle with her contractor ability. We see its effects on the human body in one episode. It was not pretty.
  • Mami Tomoe from Puella Magi Madoka Magica wields conjured matchlock rifles as her Weapon of Choice, and her Tiro Finale gun is huge.
  • The Wave Motion Gun from Uchuu Senkan Yamato.
  • The Carbon-Freeze cannon and Gekko's Moonclub, which doubles as a Bazooka, in Yaiba.
  • Quite a few characters in Black Lagoon carry BFGs...the head of the Church of Violence is a nun who carries a Desert Eagle .50 pistol, and one character is a young girl whose weapon of choice is a Browning Automatic Rifle. That she shoots from the hip. And a neo-Nazi carries a .454 Luger (which he never gets to use due to shooting his mouth off too much in front of one of the protagonists, who is notorious for shooting blowhards in the middle of their speeches).
    • The best one has to be Roberta during the "Baile de la Muerte" arc, who starts sniping at the Grey Wolf unit with a Barrett M82 anti-materiel rifle. When some FARC soldiers show up behind her, she swings it around and blasts them one-handed.
  • Takeo from Noblesse uses a gun that is as tall as him, and he's one of the tallest characters in the series!
  • Yozakura Quartet: Kotoha's Acht and Krupp K5(that railway gun).
  • Several Digimon embody this trope, most notably Beelzemon, in both his blast mode and Xros Wars incarnation.


Comic Books

"I think Cable should be holding a BIG gun on this cover."
"Well yeah, he usually is."
"Pffffft, no, I mean a REALLY big gun."

  • In the Transmetropolitan series, Yelena Rossini briefly picks up one of these at a gun shop. She is acutely disappointed when she is not allowed to take it home, and asks whether it's because of her sex, but it turns out that the weapon is "designed for people with two backup spines."
  • The GAU Avengers used by the trolls (and Shiro) in Samurai Cat in the Real World.
  • In the Superman Elseworlds comic At Earth's End, Superman uses a comically oversized gun (it's twice his size!) to kill twin clones of Hitler.
  • In the first arc of Wildstorm's Gen 13, the newly gen-active Fairchild picks up a massive laser/rifle type weapon she obtained from one of the fallen I/O ops to brandish in her fight to save her new comrades....though it seemed to be more of just a chance to see a hot spandex wearing redhead brandish a gun considering she was now about 6'5 and superhumanly strong regardless.
  • Gene in Kingdom gets his hands on one when he falls in with the Wild Bunch. In his own words:

Gene likes the new kill-toy.

"Don't worry, it's got a stun setting!
"A fifty millimeter gatling cannon with a STUN setting?!"
"Uh...Yeah.

  • In The Incredible Hulk, a soldier in a battle mans a high-tech cannon about ten feet long. When a blast knocks the weapon off its legs, pinning the soldier beneath, the Hulk (the really smart version) picks up the cannon, wields it in one hand, and to the enemy says "...let us reason together"
  • Sabretooth's shortlived partner Birdy was quite fond of guns which her tiny frame would normally find impossible to lift.
  • The main guns on the H.A.T.E. Aeromarine in Nextwave:

Monica Rambeau: Those are some big f%43ing guns!

  • Blue Beetle: The third Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes) has a scarab that specializes in these. We never get to see him use most of them, because they're all lethal and for Jaime, killing's a big no-no. But seriously. One has theological implications. Just think about that.
  • In Daredevil, drugged-up Super Soldier Nuke wields a freaking beast of a firearm affectionately called Betsy after his beloved childhood babysitter. Betsy is titanic in size and power, and even sports a kill counter so Nuke's handlers can monitor his results.
  • Transformers: Fortress Maximus, as the biggest Transformer in G1, carried an appropriately sized up gun, but some Transformers, notably Galvatron and Shockwave, actually transformed into Transformer-sized guns.
    • Megatron's Arm Cannon was the BFG from Generation 1, however in a strange twist he himself transformed from one of the largest core Transformers into a Transformer handgun (a Walther P-38) which wasn't a Hand Cannon. His BFG became the scope.
    • Probably the largest in-scale weapon ever sported by a Transformer (who wasn't Unicron or Primus, whose Armada and Energon-incarnations sported guns the size of continents) is Trypticon's main cannon, which he only uses in battle station mode; in city mode, it becomes a sky scraper.
  • |Gabriel sports one, and it looks remarkably similar to a Bolter.
  • Empowered has ThugBoy's 50-cal Sniper Rifle, although it gets destroyed during a fight. And the B.F.Gunnaz who are named after this trope.
  • Played for laughs in the Sturmtruppen: the Lieutenant's attempt to make a new, powerful rifle for the army ends up in the same rifle as before, but now howizer-sized, and gets him fired.


Fan Works

  • The Darned Nearly Recoilless Rifle from Under The Bridge is probably one of the smallest BFGs. It only uses comparatively tiny .22 rimfire cartridges of which it can only hold one. The reason why it does qualify as a BFG is that it's designed by a mouse for rodents. The sole cartridge is inserted into the barrel from behind; it's actually designed to be operated by multiple rodents, one of whom loads it. And although the recoil is dramatically reduced by ejecting the empty casing backwards, it is still strong enough to knock over a single gunmouse.


Film

  • The M134 Minigun carried by Jesse "The Body" Ventura's character in the movie Predator, lovingly nicknamed "Old Painless." Ventura commented the weapon was like trying to fire a chainsaw.
  • Nikolai from Predators also gets a minigun, which Stans actually calls a "big fucking gun" when he was ranting about how everyone else (except for Edwin) has guns while he only has a shiv.
  • The Terminator smiles over the same minigun in T2, with the grip arrangement the only thing altered; John Connor notes, "Oh, yeah. It's definitely you." On set, Schwarzenegger was the only person who could physically carry the minigun by himself.
  • First subverted, and later used straight, in Men in Black, when Agent J (Will Smith) asks for a really powerful gun, and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) gives him the Noisy Cricket—a tiny, fragile-looking gun which turns out to be incredibly powerful and has enough recoil to knock J across the room. Towards the end, however, they both get some really big guns.
    • In the Animated Series, J eventually acquires a suppressor for the Noisy Cricket that reduces the recoil to where he can fire it without bowling himself over each time.
  • The Hitman film of the game series has this when Udre Belicoff goes Guns Akimbo with two RPDs.
  • Played completely straight in The Matrix: Mouse, the wimpiest member of the team, similarly attempts to go Guns Akimbo with two drum-fed fully automatic shotguns. Sadly his attempt to provide More Dakka does not result in any deaths at all except his own. Although the film has "lots of guns", they're mostly the type that can be concealed under a Badass Longcoat. Except for when Neo fires on the Agents holding Morpheus with a helicopter-mounted Minigun. (How Neo avoided cutting Morpheus to shreds when one of the Agents was standing behind him was not mentioned.)
  • Nearly all the Prawn weapons in District 9 count as BFG's. One of their weapons is a Lightning Gun that kills people by making them explode. Another one can blow people through walls, yet another one is a machine gun which can blow your head off. The most impressive one, though, is neither really seen in action, but only in the intro. It seems to fire a grenade, which explodes in a big, black mushroom cloud that's surrounded by lightning bolts. All of these guns can be carried by a man.
  • One of the most plausible instances of this trope appears in the sci-fi film Aliens. In order to save colony survivor Newt, Ellen Ripley straps an automatic pulse rifle/grenade launcher combo to a flamethrower with duct tape, along with a belt of extra grenades, making her a one-woman army. In the extra material on the DVD, Sigourney Weaver actually carried the weapon around the set while shooting scenes, although it was ridiculously heavy, and had to be taken off at regular intervals.
  • Hellboy's latest weapon, "Big Baby" from Hellboy II: The Golden Army, is a modified shotgun with an insanely large six-shooter attachment. Deleted scenes reveal that the gun's gigantic cartridges have bottles drawn on the sides, with the message, "Suck on this" written on the shells.

Hellboy: You woke up "the baby!"

  • Rambo is big on this one. The fourth movie has a fifty-cal Browning M2 machine gun, typically used as an anti-aircraft weapon, used against infantry. Due to the movie's very Ludicrous Gibs nature, the results are pretty much what you'd expect - heads blow up like overripe melons, torsos are split in the middle, limbs are torn off, and blood rains everywhere. The big gun allows the good guys to win the fight - Rambo uses it to kill more baddies than the whole rebel army does with ordinary small arms.
  • General Jack D. Ripper in Doctor Strangelove kept an M1919A4 machine gun in his golf bag!
  • Guy Ritchie likes to turn BFGs against their owners:
    • In Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, one of Dog's bandits brings a Bren light machine gun to hold up the pot growers. The gun is so loud that Dog threatens to kill him if he fires it again. Ultimately a girl grabs the gun and unloads the thing on Dog's crew. In slow-motion, the shells hitting the ground sound like oil drums.
    • In Snatch, Vinnie brings a giant semi-auto shotgun to hold up a bookie. Sol remarks, "It's a fucking anti-aircraft gun!" Vinnie uses it to blow a hole in the wall and force the girl at the counter to lower the protective shield, but she ultimately snatches it and fires on the thieves before making her exit.
  • The Doom movie, where it's lampshaded by being called the "Bio-Force Gun." Of course, when The Rock's character gazes in awe at it before acquiring it, he says to himself, "Big... Fucking... Gun..."
    • The Rock, in a later interview, said that he was given a choice between a segment in first-person view and the BFG...... his choice ended up letting him keep the prop BFG.
  • While there is no specific BFG in the movie, Split Second might have been the first to refer to them as such. "We need to get bigger guns. BIG Fucking GUNS!" These were the "Combat Shotguns" they checked out from the police armory- in actuality a pair of miniguns that used shotgun shells instead of bullets.
  • There's at least one older example - Fritz the Cat picks up a cop's sidearm and yells "Whoa! This is a Big Fucking Gun!" He then fires it a couple of times at random around the apartment, but considering everyone in the room is either stoned or in the middle of an orgy, not much is made of this.
  • The Annihilator 2000 in Beverly Hills Cop III, which is not only a highly powerful rail gun, but includes such additional features as—and none of these are exaggerations—a cell phone, radio, CD player, and microwave oven.
  • In Tremors, the "Elephant Gun" used in the Rec Room. In reality, an 8 gauge side-by-side shotgun. Probably fired roughly a 2 ounce slug of hardened lead, if it was loaded for elephant. (Why wouldn't it be? You never know when you will face a war elephant.) In the sequel, there's the Grizzly Big Boar, a single shot .50 caliber rifle. Unfortunately, it was a bit too big.
  • Tremors 4 goes that extra mile, featuring an 8-foot 4-inch, 94-pound punt gun with a two-inch ("A" Gauge) barrel (see Real Life below). It was actually a prop built for the film using a triple-loaded 12-gauge inside to produce a muzzle flash; the barrel's inside was sprayed with WD40 prior to shooting to add more smoke. This is because apparently there are very few functional punt guns left in America today.
  • In the western Appaloosa, Viggo Mortensen's character carries a mammoth 8-gauge shotgun around with him at all times. The gun weighed 11 lbs and was 50 inches long. In the behind the scenes footage, the filmmakers described it as a punt gun, mounted to the sides of riverbarges and fired into large flocks of birds. In reality, 8-gauge shotguns would be considered too small to be a punt gun.
  • In Eraser, Arnold (who else?) wields two railguns which can see through walls and fire bullets at near-lightspeed; he mostly fires them from the hip like machine guns. An enemy Cold Sniper also uses one for most of the movie.
  • Any projectile carried by a Transformer automatically fits this trope due to being wielded by alien robots that on average are 20 feet in height. Although in particular, Ironhide and Optimus fit this quite well. According to the modelers, Ironhide's cannons have more pieces than some of the other Transformers in their entirety. Megatron takes it a step further with the enormous Fusion Cannon he forms by slamming his hands together in the first movie.
  • In RoboCop the bad guys get hold of some "Cobra assault cannons" in order to take down the otherwise bulletproof cyborg hero. One of them test-fires one of the guns, blows up a car with one shot, and declares "I like it!"
  • In Superman Returns, one of the early Mooks that Superman faces is a bank robber with a tripod-mounted minigun with which he holds off the cops most spectacularly. Needless to say, his attempts to use it on Superman result in hilarity.
  • In the 1997 film, The Jackal, Bruce Willis's character (The Jackal, who else?), has a custom-built BFG that he has to keep in the back of a car, controlling it remotely via a laptop. To test it, he blows off Jack Black's hand with a single shot.
  • Four Rooms: The Wrong Man segement... someone with a large caliber hand gun receives a phone call from another room in the hotel.
"No needles here, kid. Just a big fucking gun."
—Sigfrieg
  • In Die Hard, Gruber's Dragon shows he means business when the police pull up in an APC by repeatedly firing an enormous recoilless cannon at it.
  • Near the end of Black Hawk Down some militia show up with an SPG-9 recoilless rifle, which they menace some US soldiers with; a group duly take control of it, use it and then disable it.
  • "You've had your eight! Now for my EIGHTY!"
  • The Zorg ZF-1 in The Fifth Element is a rather large "pod weapon system" with a laundry list of handy functions including seeking bullets, a flamethrower and a rocket launcher. Just don't forget to ask about the little red button.
  • In Moonwalker, after Frankie Lideo's mooks fail to take down robo-Jackson, Lideo himself jumps into the seat of a Wave Motion Gun the size of a building which he somehow operates with hand cranks. This actually blasts Michael's Cool Plane form out of the sky, only for him to Deus Ex Machina his way back into play just in time to save some children from a random atomising. Precisely why a drug dealer would own such a piece of hardware in the first place is entirely unclear, but then this is hardly the weirdest thing that happens in the movie.
  • At the end of Scarface, Tony Montana famously pulls out an M16 fitted with an M203. A common misunderstanding is that this gun was his "little friend;" actually, he was talking about the 40mm grenade he was firing. There was nothing little about the weapon.
  • Nothing says "hello" quite like Blue Thunder's 20mm rotary cannon staring you in the face, as some cops find out in the Gunship Rescue scene in the film.
  • As the poster makes clear, the real star of The Dogs of War is a giant 18 round grenade launcher; the supporting cast includes some guy named Christopher Walken. It really exists, though it fires shotgun shells rather than grenades.
  • At the climax of The Spirit, both Mortgenstern and The Octopus wield huge guns.
  • In Treasure of Swamp Castle, there is a cannon at the beginning of the movie so big it takes dozens of men to put the cannonball in the barrel.
  • Judge Dredd. For part of the second half of the film, Dredd ends up using Fargo's really huge shotgun.
  • Pulp Fiction: "Did you forget that somebody was in there with a goddamn hand cannon?"
  • In Jumanji, Van Pelt emerges armed with a huge elephant gun powerful enough to decimate a police cruiser all by itself. When he finds he can't get any more ammo at the local gun store he is faced with a waiting period and forms to fill out for a replacement weapon. Undeterred, he offers a handful of gold coins to the owner and gets a super-advanced silent killer even bigger than the elephant gun seconds later.
  • In The Avengers, Coulson grabs a very large and untested gun made from the remains of the Destroyer. Then he shoots Loki with it.

Coulson: So that's what it does.

Literature

  • Duumvirate is loaded with BF Gs. Fusion-powered microwave lasers, atomic slugs, and there's a subplot involving "room eraser" spread weapons.
  • Discworld:
    • Largely free of firearms, as the Disc is, the trope still shows up in the form of the massive 900 kg ballista siege weapon carried by Sergeant Detritus (an enormous troll made of rock) as a crossbow, "The Piecemaker." It is called this because the iron stone-piercing spear it used to fire was replaced with a bundle of arrows, which was presumably supposed to allow it to operated as an area weapon but unintentionally results in the arrows disintegrating into an expanding cone of burning wood fragments when fired, making it more like a (very inaccurate) shotgun that can blow holes through walls, doors, and presumably people.

When the Piecemaker is first used, it uses a ballista bolt. The results were so horrifying (And probably expensive) that they just tied a bunch of bolts together instead. The results were even more horrifying. The scene in Night Watch where it is fired - as a warning shot! - at an assassin is perhaps the most hilarous (and most destructive) scene in all of Discworld. Yes, this even includes the exploding cabbages.

In fact, when Vimes mentions seeing it tested, apparently the target vanished so did the two targets on either side, and a flock of seaguls who happened to be in the wrong place. I.E. right above Detritus. It's the only weapon that can open both front and back doors simultaneously.

In The Fifth Elephant, its destructive power was so terrifying that Vimes actually threatened an inanimate secret trapdoor into opening just by pointing it in roughly the general direction he thought it was in. Later, when Detritus used it to open the front door of an enemy castle, Vimes labelled it as a national emergency rather than a weapon. Several paragraphs later:

Vimes: Detritus, you can't fire that off in here! This is an enclosed building!
Detritus: Only till I pull dis trigger, sir.

    • The Gonne in Men At Arms is one of the more powerful devices in the Discworld setting (it actually wounded the aforementioned Sergeant Detritus), and is usually depicted as huge-bore semi-automatic rifle using a horizontal rack of six chambers.
    • A Real Life BFG was briefly alluded to in Pyramids. The "puntbow" used by Pteppic's ibis-poacher tutor is a low-tech equivalent of the massive boat-mounted shotguns once used by commercial hunters to shoot entire flocks of waterfowl.
  • Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash features "Reason,", a gatling gun firing depleted-uranium slivers at incredibly high velocities. It's a little hard to move around because its nuclear power supply, utilizing radiothermal isotopes, uses an outboard heat-disperser that drops into the ocean. "See, I told you they'd listen to Reason."
  • Neal Stephenson also features a Vickers machine gun in the World War II timeline of Cryptonomicon, which is less futuristic than Reason because of the lower-tech setting, but noteworthy because of the (characteristic) pages-long description of its badassery.
  • Piling up plasma cannons and other big guns in Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons, Cheradinine Zakalwe says he'll need "FYT" weapons for a mission. His Culture handler says she doesn't recognise the term; it stands for "Fuck You Too".
  • Another Banks novel, Against a Dark Background has as a McGuffin the "lazy gun". Among other peculiarities is the fact that it weigh three times as much when it's upside down as when it's right side up. Its effect on its tend to be ... humorous ..., such as materialising a free-falling ship's anchor directly overhead, or a spear, piece of tsunami, small nuke, or asteroid. When researchers attempted to disassemble one its self-destruction took out a fifth of the city and killed half a million people.
  • One of The Executioner novels has Mack Bolan fighting the giant Igor Baibakov, a big and psychopathic ex-Spetsnaz terrorist who uses a Barrett Light Fifty as his weapon of choice. Not only does he use this .50 BMG monster in its primary role as a sniper weapon, but he's so big and powerful that he can use the thing at close range like an assault rifle, which is more justified by his impressive size and strength and the Rule of Scary than anything else.
  • Happens in the Star Wars novel Wraith Squadron, as part of a ludicrously complex plan to capture one of Zsinj's corvettes: Gamorrean (think the guys guarding Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi, but smarter) pilot Piggy uses an X-wing laser cannon as a personal weapon. It blows clean through a floor/ceiling (and the officer above it) with one shot. Wedge even points out how implausible the weapon ought to be.

Wedge: "A laser cannon is nine meters long, Five."
Kell: "Not the essential components and housing, sir. Strip out all the computerized aiming and synchronization equipment, the diagnostics, the flashback suppressor, I think we could chop it down to a meter and a half, two meters."

  • In Phule's Company, one of the sluglike Sinthians tries to shoot a full-auto shotgun... but since said trooper is half the body mass of a human and riding a Hover Board at the time, the resulting blast sends him into a rapid spin—fortunately Phule had the foresight to disable the "full auto" feature beforehand, so no further shots are fired and the surrounding soldiers remain unpunctured.
  • John Ringo is in love with this trope, with nearly every story of his involving infantry/marines.
    • The Prince Roger series, co-written with David Weber, features a lot of BFGs, but the giant four-armed Mardukans really take the cake. They can "off-hand" wield cannons meant to serve Humans as crewed support weapons and capable of blowing large concrete buildings and stone walls to dust. When some madman decides to equip a squad of them with a species-appropriate version of Powered Armor, the standard issue weapon that goes with it is more typically the main gun of a tank.

Taken to the extreme by Erkum Pol, The Big Guy even by the standard of the nine-feet-tall-on-average Mardukans. He likes BFG's, and can carry the aforementioned tank gun without Powered Armor. On the other hand (one of them, anyway), his aiming skills aren't even up to Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy standards. When he takes the tank gun along on a hostage rescue mission (supposedly just for intimidation purposes[1]), Hilarity Ensues (for "hilarity" read "an entire city block being set on fire").

    • The M-300 grav rifles from the Posleen War Series qualify. They use gravity drivers to fling antimatter-loaded pellets (or, later, when supplies are low, regular uranium pellets) around at just below the speed of light.
    • In the Into the Looking Glass series, the initial invasion by the aliens later called the Dreen were countered in part by a bunch of Florida rednecks with a rather diverse collection of weapons, including a rifle used for hunting big game that fires the .577 Tyrannosaur round. Later books in the series include Space Marines who regularly carry around some pretty serious armament, in their Powered Armor, including one who dual wields two cut-down .50 caliber sniper rifles.
  • In John Barnes' Timeline War series, The Alliance issues its soldiers the SHAKK. It's only rifle sized... But the ammo is self propelled over a six mile range, seeks its target so aggressively it can even be fired from behind full cover using a remote camera, delivers enough kinetic energy with each round to liquify a human being, and comes in a 6000 round magazine that can be emptied in a few seconds on full-auto. Exploits include shooting down barely-visible planes and ripping modern-era tanks to scrap. The weapon can also manufacture more rounds from random trash. At least in spirit, it is one very, very, very B.F.G.
  • The later Dale Brown books give users of the Tin Man Powered Armor - and later still the CIDs - the ability to wield railguns.
  • A more realistic depiction appears in Harry Turtledove's Hitler's War. A Czech expat fighting for the French scavenges an anti-tank rifle and spends the rest of the book wrecking light armor and blowing people in half.
  • "Starworld" by Harry Harrison. One of the Israeli commandoes is firing a handheld .50 calibre recoilless machine gun during the attack on Spaceconcert.
  • The Guide is not very specific about its size, but the Kill-O-Zap gun is definitely not a gun to be trifled with: "The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with."
  • Monster Hunter International features Abomination, a fully automatic shotgun with attached grenade launcher, which gets a more detailed description than most of the human (or otherwise) characters.
  • Desmond Bagley's thriller The Tightrope Men features a punt gun: an extremely large shotgun generally 4 gauge and bigger, which were mounted to the sides of riverbarges and used to fire into large flocks of water fowl to harvest many birds with a single discharge. One of the protagonists recognises it for what it is, and they actually use it in the appropriate way, blasting a mook with birdshot. One character remarks, "What weapon did you have on that punt? A bloody flamethrower?"
  • Ferik Jurgen, aide of Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM) normally carries a melta, a squad support anti-tank weapon, as his personal weapon.
  • Vilmain, from the novel Malevil, has a bazooka. Hardly the most massive weapon on this page, it is by the far the heaviest weapon in post-World War III rural France, were the only other weapons are shotguns. While not powerful enough to really damage the protagonist's castle, feet-thick stone being greater then a few inches of steel, it's more then enough to destroy the gates and kill the defenders behind their fortifications.
  • Adam Anders of Domina has a 6-gauge "Saint George" (as in the dragon slayer) shotgun as one of his main weapons. Although that's pretty small compared to everything else on this page, that's basically the biggest shotguns get in real life.
  • In Daemon, nothing less than a 50-cal rifle will damage the Immune to Bullets Razorbacks or first AutoM8.

Live Action TV

  • Sons of Guns: The Red Jacket crew converts a tripod-mounted Browning M1919 into a shoulder fired weapon. It's still quite hefty. They also mount a .50 cal. "ma deuce" to the top of the War Wagon.
  • Jaffa staff weapons in Stargate SG-1 are pretty big on their own, but at one point Teal'c wields a dismounted anti-ship version taken from a Death Glider. And one-shots an Al'kesh with it. In the windshield.
    • In Stargate: Continuum, Vala has to be dissuaded from bringing this (the X-699) to Ba'al's extraction ceremony.
    • How have human railguns not been mentioned? Not just a regular railgun, either, an automatic railgun. They even call attention to it in Stargate Universe.

Eli Wallace: Wow, that is a big gun.

      • That might not be the best example: the gun in question is a crew-served light artillery piece.
  • In The Prisoner's spy spoof episode "The Girl Who Was Death", the title character Sonia, having failed to kill Number 6 with various elaborate death traps, finally decides on the direct approach, escalating from a machine gun to hand grenades and mortars before finally drawing a bazooka on him.
  • Chuck has an excellent example of this trope in action during the first episode of the third season, when Casey gets to use his minigun. Gunship battles, explosions and gunfights with terrorists ensue.
  • Kamen Rider Ryuki: Kamen Rider Zolda (Kitaoka Shuuichi) wields a gun twice as long as he is tall (picture), and two pretty big guns mounted on his shoulders, too. And that's nothing compared to his Macross Missile Massacre Finishing Move...
  • Kamen Rider 555's Faiz Blaster. That thing was HUGE. Sad its gun form was rarely used.
    • Faiz's Final Form Ride in Kamen Rider Decade is the Faiz Blaster. Of course, this time it's human sized due to being the transformation of a person. Dunno if this makes it bigger or smaller than the original, though.
    • Then there's Kamen Rider Kabuto's Perfect Zecter which was both a BFG and a BFS.
  • Super Sentai, and by extension Power Rangers, loves this trope. In some seasons, the Rangers combine their individual weapons into a BFG, while others use the "Team Bazooka", a separate weapon to which each Ranger contributes a power cell or ammunition.
  • Doctor Who:
    • BFGs are the weapon of choice against Daleks in "The Stolen Earth". The one Rose carries looks like it weighs half as much as she does, and Mickey and Jackie wield equally impressive versions. They were first used against the Cybermen in Series 2, though, by the Preachers.
    • Jack Harkness, of both Doctor Who and Torchwood, has always been fond of them. He used a modified defabricator the size of a minigun in Doctor Who's "Bad Wolf" and "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End". He also constructs an equally beefy weapon in the Torchwood episode "Something Borrowed".
    • The Special Weapons Dalek in the old-Who episode Remembrance of the Daleks was basically a self-propelled BFG that first blew down a large metal gate before taking out an entire rival Dalek squad. And they say its gun is fifty times more powerful than the normal Dalek gun. There's a reason the other Daleks called it "the Abomination".
    • Though he doesn't actually fire it, Adric uses a cannon that's not only taller than him but is meant to be mounted on a spaceship to scare slave traders away from the Doctor and Romana in Warriors' Gate. Yes. You read that right. Adric.
  • Harper in the Sharpe series of novels and television dramas carries a Nock Volley Gun.
  • Where would this article be without Jayne of Firefly, who never left Serenity without enough firepower to take out a ship? Hey! She has a name, you know.
  • In Star Trek: First Contact, Worf takes a REALLY BIG gun, shouts "Assimilate this!", and blasts a group of Borg into oblivion.
  • One episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is based around the crew's attempts to catch a murderer armed with a special sniper rifle that teleports its own bullets.
  • In one episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the crew is taken to the Q continuum where they fight in the Q Civil War. The weapons look like USA-Civil war era guns, but in normal space they cause supernovas.
  • In the Buffy episode "Innocence", the gang has to defeat an enemy called the Judge who "no weapon forged" could kill. However, that declaration was made before Christ, and humanity has much bigger weapons. Buffy decimates him with an AT-4 rocket launcher.
  • Although the Cylon Centurions in the new Battlestar Galactica have built-in automatic weapons, Cylon boarding parties can be seen hand-carrying heavy machine guns in "Razor" and "Daybreak".
  • "Vyvyan, where did you get that Howitzer?!" "Found it!"
  • Babylon 5 has the Nova-class, a human-built battleship armed with an obscene number of BFG. This is the first one appeared in the series.


Tabletop Games

  • Many of the heavy weapons in Warhammer 40,000 are BFGs. It is worth noting that normal humans have to mount them on mobile platforms and use them in teams of two—it's only the superhuman Space Marines who can use them like traditional BFGs, and even then most of them have to stay still and brace themselves before firing. Of course, there are some Badass Normal humans who can lift said weapons by themselves, and those are realistically seen as abnormal.
    • It is worth elaborating that the standard Space Marine weapon is a fully-automatic gun firing rocket-propelled explosive-tipped "bolt" rounds, each of which is capable of punching through most infantry armor to detonate within the target, or with sustained fire blast apart lightly-armored vehicles. "Normal human" version reduced to "mere" .75 caliber is somewhat less impressive, but expensive and of course is a status symbol.
    • Among the heaviest of what still counts as Basic ("rifle" sized) weapons are hot-shot lasguns (aka hellguns), used mostly by Storm Troopers. While normal lasguns are on par with carbines or assault rifles (or shotgun with slugs, if overloaded enough to lose all their advantages), hellguns are comparable to bolters in performance against armored targets - and are just as finicky and maintenance intensive, though cheaper. The weapon itself looks a lot bulkier than a common lasgun, is heavier by half, and instead of powerpack the size of a rifle magazine is fed from a 10 kg cable-linked backpack.
    • The common weapon for the Ogryn (basically an Ogre IN SPACE!) is Ripper Gun - full-auto shotgun of much bigger caliber than human shotguns and sturdy enough to withstand being used as a warhammer.
    • Special mention goes to the Tau Railgun, the main armament of the Hammerhead Tank and XV88 Heavy Crisis Suit.

Major Kane, Mordant 607th Heavy Armoured Regiment: One of the light walkers carried a weapon of lethal effect. It fired a form of ultra-high velocity projectile. I saw one of our tanks after having been hit by it. There was a small hole in either flank - one the projectile's entry point, one its exit. The tiny munition had passed through the vehicle with such speed that everything within the hull not welded down had been sucked out through the exit hole. Including the crew. We never identified their bodies, for all that remained of them was a red stain upon the ground, extending some twenty metres from the wreck.

    • Kaptin Badrukk has a particularly awesome example - it was taken from an Ogryn and is loaded with highly unstable plasma cylinders. Standing near it is a death sentence. Though this is less due to its firepower, and more because it's hotter than Chernobyl. (Badrukk himself wears lead under his kaptin's uniform, making him marginally less likely to die.)
    • The Orks also have Shokk Attack Guns, which teleport a small Goblin through hell into an enemy's insides. Yes, really.
    • One Ork Warboss loved his gun so much he went back in time to kill his past self so he could have another one. You heard me.
    • There are all sorts of detailed support for Heavies in RPG. For one, Bulging Bicep talent that allows to use Heavy weapons without bracing (deploying bipods, etc) - and gives a bonus to weight lifting. Humans as well as both Eldar factions also sometimes put heavy weapons on antigravity pallets, so one can shoot it and move on - and also halves the effective weight (even Eldar-made Heavy weapons are, well, heavy). There are also other solutions, such as Stabiliser Harness, which supports weight of a mounted Heavy weapon Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade style - the wielder cannot be disarmed and has the same advantages as from Bulging Bicep talent, but all movement related tests are hindered (it's bulky).
  • Paranoia has a couple of 'em:
    • Cone rifles, basically bazookas. Ammo ranges from solid slug to high explosive to hallucinogenic gas to tacnuke (information on the blast radius is not available at your security clearance), and is always clearly labeled.
    • Plasma generators, only slightly below tacnukes in sheer destructive capacity. They also malfunction relatively often, and some of those malfunctions would cause the entire thing to explode; naturally, it being Paranoia, you couldn't tell which malfunction was which, and neither could the rest of the party. And you had to strap the thing on to use it; taking it off suddenly (say, to get away from the now-it's-a-bomb strapped to your back) was not easy. Fixing it wasn't easy, either; you have to make one repair roll just to turn off the alarm, another to stop it from exploding, and a third to actually get it to fire again (good luck with that). Oh, and as usual, you have to pay a fine if you let it get damaged.
  • Rifts has a number of heavy weapons, from railguns to missile launchers, with a perennial favorite being Plasma Cannons. One of the most infamous is the "Boom Gun", the railgun used by the Glitter Boy Powered Armor, which is so powerful the armor has to anchor itself to the ground before firing. A different style of Glitter Boy has a gun that can only be used by it because, without its unique stabilization system, any other mecha or vehicle would eventually shake itself apart with the recoil. Another weapon of note is the ATL-1 laser cannon, which is so powerful it drains an entire energy charge for a single shot. In Russia, the troops of the warlords there are so enamored with BFGs that they actually designed and used a servo-harness to allow normal humans to carry them around.
  • The Proteus expansion set to the now mostly forgotten Netrunner trading card game paid homage to the concept with the 'Big Frackin' Gun' icebreaker card—a powerful 'gun' for the Runner player to use in cyberspace to blow away the Corps's virtual sentries, cheap to install but with a hefty activation cost per 'shot'.
  • Traveller has the PGMP (Plasma Gun, Man-Portable) and the even more OTT FGMP (Fusion Gun, Man-Portable) for when there's No Kill Like Overkill. Some models can only be used if you're wearing Powered Armour.
  • The Grav Railgun from GURPS: Ultra-Tech can be carried by people in a good suit of Powered Armor and fires with enough force to punch straight through a a tank from five miles away... with more accuracy than a sniper rifle... twenty times a second... completely without recoil.
  • As below in Real Life, Call of Cthulhu has the Elephant Gun. It's used a lot, I hear.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Battles has ogre leadbelchers that wield cannons in a blunderbuss like fashion. Dwarfs and Empire also has their fair ammount of big guns but none rivals the leadbelchers of the ogres. The Hellcannon too. When it was first released, it was able to obliterate not only enemy war engine crews, but also the war engine. A small template dealing as much damage as a cannonball to everything underneath, followed by a larger template of everyone screaming "OMG WE'RE GONNA FRAKKING DIE" and running away. The gun itself could also beat on entire squads without too much aggravation.
    • All of this pales in comparisson, of course, to the Hellhammer cannon. Only one of these ever appeared in the Fantasy game, and that was Queen Bess (which used the small blast marker of the Chaos Hellcannon mentioned above), and that was a stripped down version. The full version is a monster. One of them is mounted in a tower on Middenhiem Castle, requiring dozens of barrels of gunpowder to prime its shot, which has to be lifted into the gun by an enslaved giant. In Man O'War, a naval spin-off game of Warhammer Fantasy where the Hellhammer first appeared, it was mounted on a specially designed Wargalley. The recoil caused the firing ship to be flung backward two ship lengths. This thing makes the Jaivana cannon look like a children's toy!
  • Exalted has some of the larger First Age alchemical fire weapons, which were designed to level the field between humans and warstriders. The bigger one in Wonders of the Lost Age is basically a fire bazooka.
    • The pre-release spoilers for Shards of the Exalted Dream, which is slated to include firearms rules for use with parallel universes, have unveiled the three-dot Godcannon artifact, which is a handheld weapon with a four-foot barrel and a divinely powered firing chamber the size of a man's torso. What's most awesome is that despite being two-handed it only requires Strength 2 to use, so a character with a strength of 6 or higher (such as a Solar with Increasing Strength Exercise, an Alchemical with Fourth Strength Augmentation, or a Lunar in Deadly Beastman Transformation) can dual-wield them.
  • Shadowrun.
    • Drool at the Thunderstruck Gauss Rifle. Then weep at its prohibitive availability rating.
    • And then there's the rest of his family, the assault cannon class. All of them would be considered anti-materiel weapons in Real Life. It's just that there are so many tough targets in Shadowrun (like trolls, drones, cyborgs, dragons, etc.) that you need this kind of firepower at the higher levels.
    • Then again, some sniper rifles can do as much (or even more) damage if they are equipped with EX-explosive ammo (which is cheaper than assault cannon rounds), and have a higher rate of fire and a longer range, which puts them squarely in this class.

Video Games

  • Note: While all videogame mounted guns probably should qualify as this trope, in truth many either do far less damage than they ought to or can't hit the broad side of a barn. Only mounted guns that are as powerful and useful as they look should be listed.
  • Doom is the Trope Namer, the BFG-9000 appearing in all the games. It stands for "Bio-Force Gun" in the Doom movie, and "Big, uh, freakin' gun" in the Quake II manual, but the Doom design document (known among fans as the Doom Bible) specifically names it as "Big Fucking Gun." For the record, the BFG-9000 is also sometimes called pseudo-formally "Blast Field Generator" or "Blast Field Gun".
  • The Eridian Canon in Borderlands qualifies, firing a huge energy blast. Its damage is hard to quantify given level scaling weapon drops, but suffice to say, when you're at a level where the most powerful sniper rifle deals 100 damage and most weapons deal in the 10 to 50 range, this thing does around 1200. If only the projectile didn't move at glacial speeds...
  • In Virtual On, Raiden has a warship laser cannon mounted in each shoulder. The lasers are powerful enough to completely destroy lesser Virtuaroids in one shot. As if that was not enough, some versions add a hand-held twin-barreled Flat Launcher that is about the size of the smaller mechs (It should be noted that Raiden's standard hand-held weapon is a bazooka). Jaguarandi uses shoulder cannons very similar to Raiden's, and has two large arm cannons (one long, one short). Then there's Z-Gradt. Z-Gradt has one HUGE deployable MEGA-LASER, with a barrel diameter that's about as large as Raiden. Raiden stands about 18 meters high. Now that's what you call a BFG.
  • The Quake series:
    • The BFG10K in Quake II
    • The BFG in Quake III Arena, a rapid fire rocket launcher.
    • In Quake IV it was named "Dark Matter Gun", but functioned almost identically to Q2's BFG.
  • The Unreal Tournament series features the Redeemer, literally a shoulder-mounted nuclear warhead launcher, which can be either dumb-fired or remote-controlled. Launching this puppy in a clearing full of enemies is one of the best ways to get a MONSTER KILL or HOLY SHIT.
    • The "ChaosUT" mod for UT featured the "BFG 20K", which fired two variations of energy balls - tiny red ones that would home in on other players, or a giant green one a la Doom's own BFG. Also on the mod scene, a mod for Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004 took the Q3 BFG to its logical extreme with the "OMFG Gun"—a 30-round rocket launcher with a fire rate of 30 rounds per second. Oh My Friggin'/Fuckin' God indeed.
  • Crysis has the TAC Launcher, a thermonuclear grenade launcher. Unfortunately it's an event item in the single player campaign which means you can't even use it until a certain scene (in the battle before that one, it would've been very useful). But in multiplayer (and you can cheat to get it in single player), it has devastating effects simiar to the above Redeemer.
    • There is also a hand-held minigun designed for Nanosuit soldiers, a giant portable machinegun based on an alien Freeze Ray, and frequent use of three-shot disposible guided missile launchers.
    • The expansion pack introduces the PAX Cannon which you can freely use (bonus points for infinite ammo), but you only acquire it some 2 minutes before the end of the game.
    • The anti-vehicle turret in Warhead is also a sight to behold, knocking vehicles around like toys and taking down helicopters with a handful of shots.
  • Tomb Raider 3 has the rocket launcher, an extremely powerful weapon collected about halfway through the game. There is a very small amount of ammo for it in the entire game (and that's if you explore almost everything), so the player must use it very, very wisely. Since most enemies are too weak for the gun to be used on them and only a couple of the bosses are vulnerable to weapons (although it is very effective in those instances), the rocket launcher is Too Awesome to Use.
  • Every game in the Grand Theft Auto up until 4 features at least one of these, which, against all the laws of physics, can be fired by the player while standing still. And yet the player characters are supposed to be average humans.
  • Vulcan Raven of Metal Gear Solid. His codename is based on the fact that he wields an M61 Vulcan gatling gun. A normal Vulcan gun is 188 cm in height and weighs 112 kg, and he not only hefts the gun but also its ammunition (but not a power supply): an ammo drum the size of a refrigerator. In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, we have Fortune, also known as Lady Luck, who carries a rather large railgun. Her motion actor said that the dummy gun she had to point around was so big and heavy she 'had bruises all over [her] body' from handling it. It was made of wood and cardboard—one can only imagine the weight of the real thing. To top it off, Colonel Volgin wields a Davy Crockett recoilless launcher in the third game, even though he only uses it once in a cutscene.
    • In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Snake finally gets his own hands on one after defeating Crying Wolf, which is the one Fortune has on MGS2 and was given to Wolf by Vamp, which can take down almost anything in one shot. Snake can also purchase a Barrett M82A2, a bullpup version of the famous M82A1 anti-material rifle that can take down just about anything. It can kill five to ten lined-up enemies in one shot, it can take down a helicopter in two, and kill Gekko in one, so long as you aim for the neck.
    • Johnny also uses one for his Big Damn Hero moment. For no apparent reason as they are in the middle of boarding a ship and a single bullet from a handgun appears to be completely sufficient to kill the enemies wearing heavy body armor. Hideo Kojima personally recommends the M82A1.
  • Parasite Eve 2 allows the small-framed heroine, Aya Brea, to pick up a shoulder-mounted railgun in New Game+—it's as long as she is tall, made from solid metal, takes several seconds to charge, and the recoil sends her skidding back several feet each time she fires it.
  • The OICW from Eternal Darkness is the best gun when it comes to tearing apart Eldritch Abomination monsters. Considering that your character in that level has a miniscule Mana Meter, you need it.
    • An earlier level has the Elephant Gun, which can be fired one barrel at a time or both at once. Firing from the hip, or before you take enough time to carefully brace yourself, will result in your character being knocked on his ass by the recoil.
  • A full-sized rocket launcher pops up repeatedly in the Resident Evil series, often used to defeat a particularly indestructible monster towards the end, and later obtained in an "infinite ammo" variant in the New Game+. Resident Evil 2 upped the ante by adding an infinite-ammo Gatling gun to the arsenal.
  • Resident Evil 4 was mostly about the Hand Cannons, but the bad guys got to have more fun; there was a special enemy type who carried a portable gatling gun in the final stage, while in the castle Leon would occasionally find himself faced with cultists manning totally inexplicable vintage mounted gatlings placed in the middle of rooms for no adequately defined reason. The Separate Ways campaign in the PS2 and Wii versions went the final step of having Ada shoot up a warship with a series of huge mounted guns.
  • Resident Evil 5 ups the ante even further by having four BFGs exclusive to boss fights: when fighting the El Gigante clone, Chris and Sheva are using a minigun and PK Machine Gun mounted on a Humvee; there's a flamethrower used to fight one particularly tough monster; when fighting Excella you use a laser satellite tracker similar to the Hammer of Dawn of Gears of War fame; and of course the traditional RPG finisher on Wesker in the final boss fight. And since this is a co-op based game, Wesker gets TWO rocket launchers to the face. With a quick-time event and everything.
  • The Ratchet and Clank series, where nearly every gun (and there are a lot of them) is at least half the size of the protagonist. As they upgrade, they soon match the name on the firepower scale, too. This didn't stop them from making a BFG so FB, that it actually warranted a new acronym: the Rip You a New One. What's more, the RYNO was only the first in a series of four guns (RYNO, RYNO II, RYN3O/RYNOCERATOR, and RYNO IV/RYNO 4-EVER). Mind you, the last one never past the blueprint stage because it was deemed too powerful. This coming from a company that created a portable black hole launcher and Colony Dropping handguns.
    • RYNOs actually got smaller between the first and third games - the RY3NO is physically smaller than Ratchet (although not by much), while the original...isn't quite so compact.
    • The Harbinger/Supernova from Ratchet: Deadlocked. Apparently Dreadzone, the evil game show the eponymous hero gets kidnapped by, felt that the RYNO guns were too sissy, and design a gun that calls Frickin' Laser Beams down from space like it's the damn wrath of god, and can be upgraded 99 TIMES.
    • And you have yet to see the RYNO V, best described as two interlocked gigantic gatling guns along with a huge ass missile launcher in the middle. This thing is the friggin Cosmic Horror of weaponry, three times bigger than the character that use it. The 1812 Overture plays whenever it's fired.
    • With enough skill points, you can unlock the gun size modifier cheat. Which makes the the guns even bigger.
    • To sum it up: Ratchet is the new god of Engineers. "Use more gun", indeed.
    • Also of note, one of the areas in Up Your Arsenal is called "Nefarious BFG", which fits given how a BFG is the focal point of that area. Also doubles as Getting Crap Past the Radar!
  • Subvein has several BFGs for every category of gun, for example, a BFG Machinegun is a Heavy Minigun.
  • KOS-MOS in Xenosaga wields a number of BFGs, notably a triple-barreled tri-gatling gun (that's three sets of three barrels each—and it's her weakest special weapon). And she dual wields them. Some would point out that KOS-MOS is, in and of herself, a BFG.
  • Chris Stone in Freedom Fighters can wield a Kalashnikov PK-74 machinegun like a normal assault rifle.
  • Final Fantasy X-2's Gippal has a Big Fucking Pink Gun. With a sawblade on the end.
  • Breath of Fire III's resident Gadgeteer Genius, Momo, uses this as her weapon.
  • Zone of the Enders 2 has the Vector Cannon, huge even by the standards of most of its Humongous Mecha and forcing the protagonist's Super Prototype mech Jehuty to actually land before it can be charged and fired.
  • Serious Sam has a minigun almost as long as Sam is tall and a man-portable cannon firing explosive DU cannonballs. The ability of Sam to use either while running and jumping has led to suggestions that he be "upgraded" from Badass Normal to Charles Atlas Superpower-user.
  • The Turok series is known for its big bad guns. Some of the more notable examples include the Quad Rocket Launcher, Fusion Cannon, and Chronoscepter from the first game, the Scorpion Launcher and Nuke from the second game, and the PSG (Personal Singularity Generator) from the third game.
  • Makai Kingdom allows you to equip your forces with Gatling Guns, Bazookas, or Flamethrowers.
  • Cosmic Break has several big guns that fit in this category. The most notable ones are Bazooka Gatlings, Stardust Cannons, Powered Lasers and the underused Vulcans.
  • Rozalin from Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories utilizes a Gatling gun in one of her special attacks.
  • Team Fortress 2:
    • Sasha, the Heavy Weapons Guy's primary gun in weighs 150 kg and fires up to 2,400 $200 rounds per minute. It has a sister, Natascha.
    • The Soldier also has a rocket launcher with multiple shots in a clip - not as big as Sasha, but capable of a lot of damage in a couple of seconds. The Direct Hit, its alternate, is a sniping rocket launcher. He also has the Cow Mangler 5000, a Zeerust monstrosity of a laser cannon.
    • The Engineer's philosophy is "Use a gun. And if that doesn't work, use more gun." He's a sissy by this page's standards, though, because he sets up his combination rocket-launcher/double minigun as a turret.
  • Gauntlet (1985 video game): Dark Legacy's Archer had a Turbo-attack that, while not strictly speaking a gun, was the biggest, most complicated automatic repeating quadruple crossbow ever seen. And that includes Van Helsing!
  • Gauntlet: Legends did the Archer one better by making her fully-charged special a huge cannon. The narrator's voice calling the attack actually named it B.F.G.
  • Maya Schrödinger in Wild ARMs 3 has a gatling gun hidden up her skirt. She wriggles her hips and it just falls out.
  • Super Smash Bros. Melee and Brawl:
    • The Super Scope item can be charged up for quite the shot given the opportunity.
    • The Cracker Launcher can be aimed for firecracker shooting fun.
    • The Dark Cannons used by the Subspace Emissary bad guys that automatically turns any Smash fighter into a trophy.
    • Samus's fully-charged Arm Cannon possibly counts, and if not her Final Smash definitely does. There's also a BFG on the Halberd stage, as well as one featured in Subspace Emissary that takes down said battleship in one shot.
    • The magical bow Zelda/Sheik uses for their Light Arrow Final Smash counts too, between the sheer size of the bow and its effect.
  • The agents of Syndicate Wars (and to a lesser degree Syndicate) have a whole arsenal of BFGs, including miniguns, pulse lasers, plasma lances, graviton guns and nuclear grenades. They need upgrades to their skeletons to wield them effectively. The Gauss Gun from the original Syndicate definitely counts. It's a rocket launcher that can fire a rocket, instantly, across half the map and will kill nearly anyone in one hit (or destroy cars, etc). Also tends to set things on fire a lot. Pity they didn't keep any of these around for the sequel...
  • Halo
    • The Spartan Laser in Halo 3 is a huge shoulder-mounted anti-tank beam weapon. One shot can burn straight through three Warthogs lined up back-to-back. Not to mention tanks, enemy dropships.
    • The Fuel Rod Gun fires green, highly explosive energy that can deal very severe damage, has a five round magazine, and can fire pretty freakin' fast for something that powerful.
    • Spartans (and Elites) can wield gigantic Tri barreled minigun from the hip. This is a weapon that is about as long as the average UNSC Marine is tall.
    • The "AIE-486H Heavy Machine Gun" (the minigun) only uses 7.62x51mm SLAP(Sabot Light Armor Piercing) ammunition.
    • There is also the massive Anti Aircraft Battery of Halo 3's campaign level, "The Storm"? The description of that very mission is "Scarab. BFG. End of World."
    • And the Mass Driver in the level "The Pillar of Autumn" in Halo Reach. It fires 15 cm rounds with a kinetic energy of up to 1.1 gigajoules.
    • The Plasma Launcher from Halo Reach. Each time you pull the trigger, it shoots 4 plasma grenades... that home in on your target.
    • Any MAC gun
  • Super Robot Wars has so many BFGs it's almost impossible to list them all. Some of the most notable are the SRX's HTB cannon, R-Gun ITSELF, Wing Gundam Zero's twin buster rifle, the Huckabein's black hole gun, DX Gundam's Twin satellite cannon, and F-type Evangelon unit 1's N2 launcher, to name a few. The most nefarious of them is the Ideon gun in SRW Alpha 3, which is probably the most powerful gun on this list, as it fries a huge part of the galaxy in front of it. It has huge damage, and the map attack version can annihilate the whole map, AND kill the final boss and his army IN THREE SHOTS. It has infinite energy too.
  • Done with a twist in the System Shock games. In the first game, the strongest energy weapon is the LG-XX Plasma Rifle, which fires refracting orbs of plasma that leave glowing marks where they ricochet. In the second game, the Fusion Cannon takes the title, taking up 1/3 of your view and firing huge green balls of death. The problem with both weapons? You're more likely to kill yourself than your enemies, especially in cramped quarters, and more conventional weapons prove to be more useful in later stages of the games.
  • The Fallout series:
    • Features a slew of BFGs, even getting their own skill set for use. They range from the mundane Bazooka to laser Gatling guns and plasma rifles. The third instalment has the "Fat Man", described as a tactical (read handheld) nuclear catapult. Since There Is No Kill Like Overkill, there is a unique Fat Man (the Experimental MIRV) that fires eight mini nukes at once. Can kill anything with one shot, but the 8 mini nukes have a combined cost of over 2000 caps.
    • Scratch that. The Broken Steel DLC has the shoulder-mounted Tesla Cannon that can one-shot Vertibirds. And unlike the Fat Man, it uses microfusion cells as ammo, which are laughably common. Ambushing an Enclave patrol with a sniper rifle can net you a few dozen shots with the Tesla Cannon. Also, the Operation Anchorage DLC rewards you with a Gauss Rifle fitted with a sniper scope. And a knockdown effect for critical hits.
    • If you are not above using glitches, enter "player.additem 5DEEE 1" into the console. You'll get what looks like an ordinary missile launcher but it's boom instantly puts the Fat Man to shame. This is the weapon that gets used in one of the game locations where you can call a nuke strike from orbit.
    • Aaand, someone was crazy enough to mod a FULL-SCALE NUKE into a shoulder-mounted launcher, using the Megaton nuke explosion effect. Search around the 'net for "Fat Man Extreme" and brace yourself. You Have Been Warned.
    • To make it more crazy people have made machine gun MIRV versions that fire megaton nukes they murder everything.
  • The indie game Shadowgrounds has a few. For one, the minigun can be upgraded to have a shorter spinup time and can be placed on the ground as a sentry. For two, the rocket launcher's alt-fire is a dirty bomb. For three, the lightning gun can fry even the biggest mooks in a second.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog has a few of these, obviously. Most notable is the chain gun, probably the most broken weapon in the game. It gets more ammunition than any other, has the best firing rate and is one of the more powerful weapons as well. Oh, and he wields it in one hand.
  • Seraphim characters in Sacred 2: Fallen Angel can learn an ability called BeeEffGee which summons, well, a BeeEffGee. Its strength scales with both the character's level and the BeeEffGee ability level and is usually more powerful than other weapons you can acquire at the time, but the ability takes up one of your very limited "buff" slots. It's also available in the original.
  • Devil May Cry started out by giving Dante a revolver grenade launcher to play with, along with an energy shooting...thing, which covered his entire forearm. This was only a taste of the silliness that would come along later.
    • Devil May Cry 2 had him tool around with a distinctly more excessive Stinger missile launcher instead of the grenade launcher.
    • 3 really got into the swing of things, throwing Dante a colossal Lahti L-39 anti-tank rifle called Spiral. There's also Lady's BFG, Kalina Ann: a rocket launcher with a rather large bayonet attached. It's about as big as she is, and yet she can not only lift it, but somehow whip it out in time to stick the bayonet in a wall after being dropped off a tower.
    • In Devil May Cry 4, Dante sports the Pandora, a suitcase which can transform, among other things, into a bazooka, a stationary laser turret and a flying craft equipped with roughly twenty rocket launchers, all of which fire at once. Nero, meanwhile, has a carbine-sized Hand Cannon which can be powered up to fire timed-delayed high explosive bullets.
  • General RAAM from Gears of War carries a fucking troika/shotgun combo for his weapon of choice in the first game!
  • Iji has several BFGs.
    • The MPFB Devastator
    • The Velocithor,
    • The Plasma Cannon
    • The insane Phantom Hammer, which is capable of shooting through several kilometers of rock. While they are usually mounted on space ships, the final boss carries one of these.
    • The Massacre is the grand king of BFGs. How powerful is the Massacre? This powerful.
  • The first Max Payne game, near the end, gives you a Pancor Jackhammer, which is an fully-automatic shotgun that the Player Character still fires semi-auto. This is because it can kill any Mook you can see in one shot. The second game replaced it with the actually semi-auto Striker-12, and also had Mona cart around a rather big Romak PSL sniper rifle.
  • Planescape: Torment features a level 8 spell, Mechanus Cannon'. Casting it fires a giant energy cannon on the plane of Mechanus, with the blast passing through a portal to strike your target.
  • Jak II Renegade. Near the end, you power up A GUN THE SIZE OF A SKYSCRAPER to punch a hole in the Metal Head nest.
  • In Jak 3, there's a gun that actually had to be shrunk so Tess could hold it.
  • StarCraft has a gauss rifle designed to be fired while wearing Power Armor. Ghosts are armed with C-10 Canister Rifles, which are basically sniper shotguns almost as long as they are tall. And no, they don't wear Power Armor at all.
    • And then there's Marauders, assuming you count "dual integral grenade launchers" as "gun".
    • On the mechanized side of things, look no further than the Odin, which lugs around four 330mm artillery cannon. Lots of guns throw out piles of spent brass—few guns have spent brass the size of zerglings.
  • Marvel vs. Capcom. Say it with me...PROTON CANNON!!!
  • Monster Hunter has a couple of different classes of BFG-like weaponry. Heavy Bowguns are technically supposed to be crossbows, except that they're about as long as the wielder is tall, magazine-fed, and capable of launching cluster bombs. In a similar vein, Gunlances are essentially a one-handed gauntlet with a cannon - yes, a human-sized cannon - mounted on it, and a bayonet mounted on that. The Gunlance is actually more of a melee weapon, although it does have some ranged attack capability, but come on - it is what it is. Some of these "Crossbows" get so big they actually fold up into a (still huge) carrying mode when not in use.
  • Harman Smith of Killer7 wields a Barrett M82 anti-material rifle, which he holds aloft from his wheelchair. Keep in mind that such guns weigh about 13 kg and are used to destroy lightly armoured targets, but have recoil mechanism that allow it to be fired from the shoulder.
  • The Coffin in Gungrave, which the main character carries strapped to his back, can transform into either a heavy machine gun/gatling gun, a bazooka, or a quad missile launcher. Grave can also smack the bad guys with it as a melee attack.
  • Ciel in Tsukihime wields the Seventh Scripture, a harpoon gun that fires holy scriptures designed to prevent reincarnation and also kill things. She weighs around 90 pounds, the Scripture weighs around 130. And that's without all the optional bits added on, which can double the weight. Yea, a gun that weighs 250+ pounds carried by a 90 pound girl. It doesn't seem to slow her down much except in Melty Blood during a sub boss fight so she's actually still possible to beat.
  • The Conduit has two. The SMAW rocket launcher technically qualifies as a BFG due to its size, while the Carbonizer Mk16 is a big, flashy, high-tech Energy Weapon that cooks enemies in seconds.
  • In Lost Planet, most VS weapons can be used on foot. Gatling gun? Check. Massive shotgun? Insanely large rocket launcher? A four barreled gun that shoots homing lasers? Check, check, and check.
  • Return to Castle Wolfenstein started out with fairly ordinary weapons, with the strongest being a one-shot Panzerfaust rocket launcher and a Flammenwerfer; however, the illusion of sanity is tossed out the window around the time the mutants and zombies start showing up, with the player being given a portable "Venom" minigun and a Tesla Gun in fairly short order.
  • The 2009 Wolfenstein game has the Leichenfaust 44, a Nazi superweapon powered by extradimensional energies. It fires large globules of said energy that cancel out gravity within their area of effect and reduce enemies to piles of scorched bones. There's also a Particle Cannon, a Panzerschreck rocket launcher which can be modded to be multi-shot and fire guided missiles, a Flammenwerfer and an newer Tesla Gun; about half of the player's inventory is made of huge, silly and highly satisfying weapons. At one point the game you encounter a version of the aforementioned Leichenfaust 44 scaled up to the main armament of a giant supertank. They let you play with it.
  • In possibly the first ever example of a man-portable firearm in the series, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess introduces us to Auru and his weapon of choice - a shoulder-fired mini-cannon.
    • Despite what many players believe, such a weapon actually did exist, they were called hand cannons (no not that kind).
  • Uncharted 2 lets Nathan Drake walk around with a GAU-19 .50 calibre rotary gun. It's the most powerful weapon short of explosives, but suffers from accuracy issues and weight (Drake is reduced to hobbling when carrying it, and also cannot jump, roll or duck). Still a lot of fun to use - especially since it takes a moment or two to wind up before the bullets come roaring forth, so you can imagine the look of horror on the faces of your foes.
  • The John Woo game Stranglehold has two of thse—the M-249 machine gun for those who prefer More Dakka, and the Rocket Launcher for those who prefer to BLOW THINGS UP. Both of them can be used to devastating effect with the Tequila Bomb Barrage attack, and using the latter weapon with Barrage is the best way to take out the helicopter miniboss in the final stage.
  • The Contact Beam in Dead Space is powerful enough to vaporize any non-boss Necromorph with one hit. It's meant to blast through dense rock strata. It's also probably meant to vaporize pirates too.
  • Speed Buster's Buster Launcher from No More Heroes, just look at the thing.
  • If the Discworld ballista mentioned below qualifies as a BFG, so does the crossbow wielded by Regulus in the game Demigod. When loaded it's as long as he is tall.
  • Numerous areas in .hack GU show an absolutely massive cannon in the background, which the Game Within A Game's backstory says killed the gods of The World. In .hack//Quantum, Shamrock aka Pi, uses it to fire a Data Drain.
  • Mass Effect 2 gives the player access to an entire range of BFG-tier guns, known appropriately enough as "Heavy Weapons."
    • The Blackstorm Projector, which is quite simply a portable black hole cannon.
    • Then there is the M-98 Widow Anti-Materiel Rifle. An anti-vehicle rifle, designed to never be used without being braced or for use by heavily reinforced synthetics. Shepard in the second game can use it on the move (thanks to cybernetic enhancements) and primarily against infantry. Also worth mentioning is the M-300 Claymore, an insanely high-powered shotgun designed for Krogan use. The designation is arranged to look like BOOM.
    • The M-26 Revenant LMG. A light machine gun that can rip apart pretty much anything. With accuracy upgrades, it becomes ludicrously powerful - stick any of the ammo upgrades on it and it becomes freakishly good. And the Shadow Broker wields it one handed.
    • The Arc Projector. First, it ionizes its target with a high-powered laser. Then, it releases an enormous burst of arcing electricity, which travels between targets. The results are impressive. Best of all, the thing has next to no recoil and can be fired by moving.
    • The Collector Particle Beam. A directed energy weapon that causes targets to burn white hot and then decompose rapidly on screen. Did we mention the insane accuracy and the enormous ammo capacity too?
    • The M-622 Avalanche. There is nothing quite like causing an enemy to freeze, then shattering them with normal gunfire. Also allows the player to revel in Video Game Cruelty Potential by shouting things like: "Iced that guy," "cool off," and "my, you look shattered."
    • The Cain. It has more concentrated kaboom than anything else in the game- boss attacks included. After using this beastie it takes several more missions to scrape together enough ammo to use it again- you can only fire it about once a mission unless you unlock all of the heavy weapon ammo upgrades, plus the hidden bonus ammo upgrade, plus the extra ammo leg armor piece. The little 'ptoonk!' noise it makes after warming up to fire is as hilarious as the following gigantic explosion is awesome. How powefull is it? On normal difficulty, the only thing that can survive the first hit is the final boss. Everything else is vapor.
    • Mass Effect 3 turns Heavy Weapons into disposable, in-mission pickups, and even adds a few heavy weapons to boot. The Reaper Blackstar is essentially a single-shot, very rare, scaled-up version of the Blackstorm Projector from Mass Effect 2. The Cain also makes a reappearance, where it kills a Hades Cannon (i.e., a Reaper with a mounted gun on top) in one shot. One wonders why these aren't mass produced and deployed everywhere, especially because doing so would actually allow the galaxy to win the war conventionally.
    • Lastly, Mass Effect 3 features a mounted turret that you can use on occasion, and it is exactly as powerful as its size suggests: it rips apart Brutes in 2–3 seconds, and its good rate of fire is only marred by a fast reload.
  • Star Trek Elite Force. Photon Torpedo Rocket Launchers, anyone? The sequel went a little further with the final gun being some kind of Romulan personal nuclear weapon.
  • The Painkiller series has a handful of awesome guns. There is a gun that fires entire tree trunks and grenades as the secondary fire, and one that shoots shurikens like a machine gun. One of the games STARTS with you using the decapitated head of a wizard that shoots lasers.
  • In Syphon Filter, evil French Pyromaniac Anton Girdeux wields an enormous flamethrower; the flame tanks are the only weakness of his otherwise invincible armoured suit. He even yells "You need a bigger gun!" if Logan fires at his armour.
  • In Dark Sector, the space-suited Lasrian Elite Troopers are armed with a "Trooper Gun," a combination of a pneumatic-powered gatling gun and rocket launcher that Hayden needs special armour to even pick up.
  • The Call of Duty series has a tendency towards letting the player mess around with weapons they'd have trouble carrying alone; bazooka and Panzerschreck rocket launchers, medium machine guns, and the like. The original gets bonus silly points for allowing the player to control an entire 88mm FlaK 37 anti-tank / anti-aircraft gun solo, the weapon typically requiring a crew of ten; using the FlaK 30 (normal crew: 8) was only slightly more sensible.
  • World at War features some of the silliest examples the player could actually carry; an M1919 Browning .30 cal machine gun that can be fired from the hip, and a six-foot PTRS-41 anti-tank rifle that a normal soldier would have trouble even carrying assembled, which can also be fired from the hip. And then there's the 68-pound M2 flamethrower, which the player can carry as well as the aforementioned M1919. Like the earlier games, it also had the player firing a fixed, crew-served AA gun solo, this time a Japanese Type 96 triple 25mm gun (with a normal crew of 9).
  • Call of Duty 4 features a sniping mission using a huge mounted Barrett .50 cal anti-tank rifle to take down a target almost a mile away; the gun itself appears in multiplayer useable without the fixed bipod it has in the mission. There's also a shoulder-mounted Javelin anti-tank missile launcher, an M60 light machine gun, and a mounted minigun. All but the M60 return in the sequel, which was replaced with an M240 and MG4 instead, along with an AT4 anti-tank missile.
  • Far Cry featured the terminally huge OICW as a standard rifle, also letting the player mess around with mounted miniguns and carry an M249 SAW and giant repeating rocket launcher; in addition, the "Fat Boy" Trigens got themselves a rocket-launching Arm Cannon out of this trope. The sequel kept the SAW and threw in a PK Machine Gun, AS50 anti-material rifle, MGL-140 grenade launcher, LPO-50 flamethrower, Carl Gustav recoilless launcher and a Chinese Type 63 mortar.
  • Helghast Heavy Troopers in Killzone 2 are armed with a giant rotary gun or a Lightning Gun; either way, the power pack turns out to be their undoing.
  • Mega Man Zero 4:
  • Speaking of Mega Man X, Sigma, in a departure from his usual battle style (as a close-range melee fighter in normal form) wields one in X7.
  • BioShock (series) 2 lets the player character access a series of heavy weapons, including a four-barrelled .50 calibre gatling gun, a high-powered rivet gun, and a really big grenade launcher. This is especially impressive considering Subject Delta holds even the largest guns single handed.
  • In Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus, Vincent can arm himself with a Cerberus variant sniper rifle or machine gun with a three-foot barrel. Goes further with The Brute, an ogre called Azul, who's first seen armed with a portable tank cannon, then with a giant dual gatling gun.
  • Aliens Versus Predator 2 featured several BFGs, including the Predator's Speargun and Plasmacaster, and for the Marine a laundry list of awesome including a huge three-barrel gatling gun, a giant sniper rifle, a Smartgun, and, oh yeah, a military power loader with a gatling gun, laser, missile launcher and flamethrower.
  • In Resistance Fall of Man, the Titan Chimera are armed with a gunpod taken from a Stalker mecha, though for some reason it fires huge discharges of fire rather than the usual machine gun. Given it's from the creators of Ratchet and Clank, it's no surprise the player gets to mess around with a stack of outlandish weaponry, including a rocket launcher that shoots missiles that can hover while re-aiming themselves and fire off smaller missiles.
  • These are Rudolf "Rudo" Steiner's Weapon of Choice in Phantasy Star II. His ultimate weapon, the Neishot, causes Stuff Blowing Up after Sucking-In Lines.
  • The Awesome but Impractical Microwave Pulse Gun in Soldier of Fortune, whose secondary Charged Attack causes enemies to inflate and explode like microwaved hot dogs.
  • The Evaporating Particle Beam in F.E.A.R., which skeletonizes its victims.
  • Black actually calls the M249 SAW "BFG" in supplementary material.
  • The Battlefield series tend to let the player go nuts with these; the original games featured controllable coastal defence guns, while later incarnations allowed the player to carry various massive weapons around.
    • Battlefield Heroes has exaggeratedly huge rocket launchers and machine guns. The Uber Tank Buster, Panzerfist, and Super Cheeser are the most notable examples.
    • Vietnam featured the infamous M60 / LAW kit before it was patched out, turning American troops into Rambo clones armed with a sniper-accurate machine gun and a portable anti-tank missile.
    • 2 let the player carry light machine guns, missile launchers, the Pancor Jackhammer or an anti-material rifle, among numerous others.
    • 2142 went to town, letting engineers carry either a missile launcher or giant anti-tank rifle, support troopers an explosive shotgun or heavy machine gun, snipers a 3-round heavy sniper rifle, and allowed assault troops to tool around with a heavy assault rifle based on the BAR that could be fitted with an underbarrel shotgun and underbarrel semi-automatic grenade launcher. And there was the expansion pack's Goliath, a slow-moving APC which packed a giant shotgun.
  • Deus Ex had a whole class of heavy weapons; there's a single-shot anti-tank missile, multi-shot guided missile launcher, plasma cannon, and a flamethrower.
    • Third game in the series has Kaiga M404 Minigun, fitted with four 5-kg counterweights on the rear end. The rest must weigh at least as much.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 has the M60 for the The Passing campaign. It's a huge machine gun that is almost as tall as the survivors and they mention how heavy it is to carry it. It has enough power to instantly kill common infected with just one bullet and it can quickly tear up special infected in a hurry. It only has 150 bullets and you can't refill the gun's ammo so once it's used up, you automatically discard it. The mutation Gib Fest gives every survivor one of these with infinite ammo.
  • In Scarface the World Is Yours, not only can you use the film-ending M16+ M203, Tony can also fire a SAW while walking and use a four-barrelled missile launcher.
  • The Blaster Launcher from the original X-COM is essentially a small cannon, firing bombs about the size and shape of a rugby ball. It's the only hand-held weapon capable of punching through the hulls of UFOs and it's very rare that anything survives the explosion (let alone a direct impact). To top it off, the missiles are capable of following up to nine waypoints, making even 180 degree turns with minimal error.
  • Red Faction has the Rocket Launcher. Then there's the FUSION rocket launcher. The blast from this thing is so big that you have no choice but to run like hell immediately after firing it. This game also has geo-mod technology which allows this gun to literally make giant craters in the environment.
    • The third game, Guerrilla, has the Thermobaric Rocket Launcher, the most powerful weapon in the game. It produces an explosion large enough to take down the largest structure in the game, a massive bridge spanning an entire canyon, in a couple shots, and can destroy EDF missile pod tanks in one shot as well. It can take down almost any building in one shot if it is detonated inside the building, and its alternate fire just happens to be a detonator. It only has four shots (8 when fully uprgraded), but is so powerful that those few shots are all you'll need.
  • Half Life: Opposing Force has the Displacer, a gun which looks and functions a lot like the Trope Namer, except it teleports on a direct hit. Its alt-fire teleports the player back and forth between Xen and Earth.
  • There is a BFG actually called the BFG in Adventure Quest. However, it is not extraordinarily powerful, but rather, just an ordinary middle-level weapon.
  • Every installment in the Counter-Strike series has the AWP, a sniper rifle that killed anything in one hit, regardless of how much HP or Armor they had. Combined with the Desert Eagle handgun, anybody wielding one was a force to be reckoned with. The weapon was so overpowered that some servers ban the AWP from use altogether, along with the automatic sniper rifles.
  • Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, being a game where you pilot a Humongous Mecha has this in spades, most notably with the Bullgut, a hand held quad-rocket launcher, the juggernaut, which can be best described as an artillery piece on steroids converted into a conventional gun, the shredder which is effectively a rapid fire version of the juggernaut, and on one particular route at the end game (or, if you're into getting yelled at, hidden away in many multi-player maps), the Red Riot (which has a music track named after it), bearing a massive blast radius, and the same firepower as a small nuke (To the point where a careless wielder can be instantly vaporized by just being at the edge of the blast). Then, there the special juggernaut wielded by one particular boss mech, which is roughly the size of the unit holding it, and is used to bring down an underground tunnel in one blast when first encountered.
  • In Free Allegiance's RPS (Rock Paper Scissors) mod, the player teams can get the BFG weapon - a big badass machinegun with uber firing speed, damage and range (outrange almost everything else). Did i mention it does splash damage and the bullets goes at several kilometer per second too ? 2 or 3 basic fighters equipped with those can torn appart a big capital ship in seconds --- even though they're cheated too.
  • One Marathon Game Mod, RED, has a BFG called the Omega Cannon, which can also be used to Rocket Jump without damage. Another mod, EVIL, has the Railgun and the Nuclear Mortar Unit.
  • The water gun equivalent of this would be the Water Bazooka in Water Warfare. Of course, it's just a water gun, so all it does is just... soak people badly.
  • War Rock is notable for actually having a realistic .50 machine gun. In addition to being fully automatic with unlimited ammunition, it has sniper rifle accuracy and range, kills players in at most 2 hits and can quickly destroy light vehicles. Luckily they're mostly found on lightly armoured vehicles, which keeps them from being too game breaking.
  • The Heavy Barrel, from the 1987 arcade game of the same name. You collected the pieces and, at an appropriate time, e.g., just before you meet a tough-to-kill bad guy on screen, you find the last piece and the machine yells "HEAVY BARREL". Think handheld Wave Motion Gun.
  • The guns on the gunboat in the Mission: Impossible N64 game. Able to take down hardened bunkers in a few shots and devastating against soldiers in the open. On the other hand, this trope was completely inverted on land, where even the soldiers guarding the naval submarines were only armed with handguns and the most powerful gun on land in any level is an uzi. Apparently Kalashnikovs (or any rifles for that matter) have not yet reached that part of the former Soviet Union.
  • In Metroid: Other M, Anthony's plasma gun. Nuff' said.
  • Imca from Valkyria Chronicles III may be the queen of this trope. Not only does she get a huge missile launcher from the beginning, but it also has the capability to fire at all enemies on the screen in rapid succession. The thing is as big as she is, and overlaps a bit with BFS in that it has a huge blade down its length. It must weigh a ton, but she still manages to swing it around in combat like it's nothing.
  • Shadows of the Empire has the Disruptor, which is similar to Doom's BFG 9000, but has a bigger blast radius, which can kill you if you're too close.
  • Strife features the Mauler, a combination energy super-shotgun and radial plasma bomb launcher. That disintegrates.
  • Will Rock features the Fireball Thrower (a bazooka), the Minigun and the Atomic Gun.
  • Patapon 3 has Cannogabang uberhero who carries a lasergun, or a cannon many times bigger than himself.
  • In UFO: Afterlight the final product of plasma weapon research tree is called the Annihilator and shoots remote controlled ultra-fast ball lightnings which down all but the toughest enemies with one explosion. This weapon breaks the game by making it easy to the point of boring - there is absolutely nothing the enemies can put against it, most of them are vaporised before they can say "Wh-", and remote control feature means a single operative can clear the map from the embark point, unless a really crafty alien somehow sneaks up on him unnoticed (so just bring a second operative on the mission for that case).
  • Rage by Id Software shows at the end of the most recent demo some gatling looking gun that screams and shoots what looks like dark matter. The demo cuts out just as the gun fires.
  • Jagged Alliance 2 has its share of anti-materiel rifles, usually from Real Life. v1.13 adds in even more; special mention goes to the VSSK Vychlop, a silenced .50-cal anti-materiel rifle.
  • X-COM UFO Defense has the Blaster Launcher as this. This gun will let you set up to 9 waypoints before you press a button that says "Launch Missile". The missile will follow an accurate path defined by the waypoints and at the final waypoint will unleash a massive explosion that has a diameter of 20 squares! If there is a group of people close together, they will more than likely be killed in the explosion (Captain Obvious). Oh, and the Aliens can use it just like you eventually can, and this gun must be treated with extreme caution!
  • Vandal Hearts has four characters who can upgrade into the Sniper class. The character art for them as Snipers portrays them as having Big Frakking Bows, including a metal bow as big as the wielder, and a crossbow that looks like a cricket bat with a slingshot attached, the most amusing is the metal pavise with a mechanical launcher strapped to it, fed by a belt of arrows. When firing, it makes various engine sounds, then shoots... a single arrow. It can be seen here, on the bottom left corner.
  • The 1993 Amiga classic Hired Guns has the Disruptor Cannon, little more than a monstrous drum-shaped gun with a small display that just reads "OK". When fired, it actually throws the character back a few spaces (or deals huge damage when the backblast hits the wall behind him or her).
  • Canderous Ordo (a.k.a. Mandalore) of the Knights of the Old Republic series has a taste for these. The first time you meet him he's carrying what amounts to the blaster equivalent of a .50 caliber machine gun ... as if it was a carbine. Later he mentions his disdain for Echani weapons, calling them "delicate with too little firepower".
  • Yes, even World of Warcraft has one of these, though what counts as this trope changes as new expansions are released. Here's a by-no-means-exhaustive list. Oh, and by the way...hunter weapon.
  • In Vector Vendetta, one of the enemies is called BFG. Indeed, while everything else shoots little bullets over the screen, this one uses a Hit Scan Frickin Laser Beam that bypasses your shield (if you have any). Of course the endgame boss also fires these.
  • Final Strike, the last functioning component of the Great Sacred Treasure, used to finish Hades once and for all in Kid Icarus: Uprising.
  • Warframe has archguns, a category of massive firearms (nearly as big as the human-sized warframes themselves) designed to be used in Archwing space combat where gravity isn't an issue. It's possible to upgrade them using Gravimags, devices that compensate their daunting weight, to deploy and use them in ground combat as well.

Web Comics

Pip: Quit looking at me like that! I just grabbed the biggest, most-lethal looking guns I saw! Admit it! They don't look like short, short range weapons, do they?!

  • In MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck, there is a BFG called Ahab's Crosshairs wielded by the pirate Orphaner Dualscar, and later his descendant/ancestor (it's complicated) Eridan Ampora.
    • Jade Harley gains Iron Man's Proton Cannon from Marvel vs. Capcom by combining a rifle, her Iron Lass suit, and a proton accelerator.
    • Grandpa Harley has the Blunderbuss, which makes a dramatic entry of sorts before releasing fire along with a big BLAM on its target.

Web Original

  • Tech Infantry features a wide variety of plasma and other weaponry designed to be carried by heavy-weapons troopers in Powered Armor. It greatly helps that many of those soldiers inside the armor are Werewolves.
  • Big Fucking Steam Punk Guns!
  • Linkara shows off his third favorite weapon in the Silent Hill Dying Inside review: a minigun he wears on his hand. It shows up in his Doom review and 90's Kid picks it up in the Might Morphin Power Rangers review. HE also has another BFG he got off Cable that was used in the above mentioned Power Rangers review.
  • This video is titled 'Huge Guns'. Frankly, it's a bit of an understatement.
  • Used by a multitude of characters in Marvels RPG, availability never being an issue given the Death Ray weapon available from the shop. Rocket Raccoon got an Item of Power simply named BFG.
  • Darwin's Soldiers features two notable ones. Gustave Chiumbo, a massive Nile crocodile, wields a double barreled 4-gauge shotgun. Clyco's prototype weapon from the second RP counts too.
  • The XM78 in Noka. An anti-materiel rifle designed to annihilate armor plated targets such as tanks, most likely stolen by the heroes, and for what purpose? Noka has no skills with firearms so they let him use it on a panda. Yeah. It's that kind of story.
  • Lenny and Shinko's Disney-See as shown in the I,SHINKO short, Mickey's Christmas Carol review, and in the Questions and Answers video, Lenny has a large steampunk blunderbuss, that seems to have quite a kickback when being fired.
  • In the Salvation War, the demons are given modified 30mm RARDEN autocannons as assault rifles, since they are about 20 feet tall.


Western Animation

  • Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons have a duel where they come up with bigger and bigger guns; eventually Itchy has the good sense to actually shoot instead of getting yet another larger gun from hammerspace(his gun is already the size of planet Earth), and sends scratchy flying into the sun - improbable targeting skills at work, too!
  • Roadblock (and his Suspiciously Similar Substitute, Heavy Duty) from G.I. Joe. Roadblock's gun is identified in the original comics as carrying a M2 Browning machine gun, a gun that is usually operated by a squad or vehicle mounted, and weighs up to 120 lbs.
    • Sometimes it's depicted as more like the smaller (but still large and normally crew-served) M1919 Browning machine gun. Especially the action figure of him, since it wouldn't be able to stand up while carrying a properly-scaled M2.
  • While not completely fitting with this trope (it's more of a Wave Motion Gun), the Justice League watchtower has a large laser that is quite literally called the Binary Fusion Generator. This was not unintended by the writers.
  • A lot of Transformers have these.
    • The Requiem Blaster from Armada, which changes hands a couple times over the course of the series.
    • In Robots In Disguise, Optimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, Hightower, Mega-Octane, and Rollbar had weapons which would qualify as BFGs. Optimus' was shoulder-mounted, though, and Mega-Octane had both a hand held one and a back-mounted pair of cannons.
    • Bumblebee was seen with a gun (more like a Big Fucking Cannon) that was twice as long as he was tall in Dreamwave's "War Within" issue 5, while one of IDW's "Infiltration" issue 4 cover homages that with a really large caliber gun.
    • Both Generation 1 and Animated Swindle have a giant gun that can mount on top of their vehicle mode.
    • Megatron's fusion cannon from Generation One (and Megatron himself in at least one scene). Once he was upgraded to Galvatron, it became even more powerful - in a couple of the post-Movie episodes, it was used to destroy planets.
    • Cliffjumper is famous for pulling guns larger than he is.
    • This may be Megatron's B'est FG moment he's ever had. It's also just plain awesone.
    • The Animated Megatron also has a fusion cannon which is almost identical (if not a little bit bigger!) than the original and even uses the same sound effect (Although slightly modified to sound like a weapon firing). Most impressively, he uses it while Dual-Wielding. Is it any wonder that this guy is considered to be a Badass?
    • Meanwhile the Armada version of Megatron had a waist-mounted cannon which is so powerful it blows him backwards along the ground. Of course, most of the other Armada characters have similarly ludicrously powered weapons when they power up with Mini-Cons—Starscream's first test of his Null-Laser cannons leaves a huge crater.
    • Rampage's Hellbelcher from Beast Wars.
    • Another one is Rhinox's "Chaingun(s) of Doom,".
    • And the ones on the base in this exchange:

Megatron: (walking up to the Maximal Base, when half a dozen turrets come from out of nowhere) Ah! I come in peace!!
Rhinox, through megaphone: (turrets fold away. twice as many turrets, three times as big unfold and point at Megatron) You'll leave in pieces.

  • Remember the quad-guns the Millenium Falcon had? The ones that Han and Luke used to shoot down TIE Fighters in the first Star Wars film? In StarWars: Clone Wars, a ARC Trooper carries one of those guns mounted on his chest.
  • Almost subverted, but not quite, in the CGI-animated Action Man, when Coach gives Alex Mann a device called the BSU 10000. Alex thinks that this stands for something more sophisticated than the bazooka-like gun that it looks like at first glance, but Coach fires the gun at a pile of scrap metal (blowing it sky-high) and reveals that it really stands for "Blow Stuff Up". (Possibly a G-rated version of "Blow Shit Up", considering the show's audience.)
  • C.O.P.S. featured Mace, who carried a laser bazooka, and uses it in the opening to slice a hole in a reinforced concrete walkway. Also featured Buttons McBoomBoom who, along with having THE GREATEST NAME IN ALL OF FICTION, kept a pair of BFGs in his chest.
  • Dot's gun in ReBoot's season 2 finale "Web World Wars." It's bigger than she is.

Dot: What do you think? Does it make me look too butch'?
Mouse: Hmm, nah.... listen, while I'm working on the codes with Megabyte, well, you'll watch my back won't'cha?
Dot: What do you think this is for? <Cocks gun>

  • The unofficial ReBoot Episode Zero (a compilation of every cutscene from the PlayStation videogame) plays this a bit more straight. After Hexadecimal reveals that Dot is trapped inside one of her mirrors, Bob goes berserk. He brutally kicks Megabyte's ascii, then stares right at the mirror-slash-vidwindow above the Tor looking into Hex's lair. His next line, with progressive camera zoon-in on each letter: "Glitch: B.F.G.!". His already big gun turns into the poster child of More Dakka, then he points it straight up at the mirror, says his Catch Phrase ("Stay Frosty."), and blasts the crap out of it. (Watch the epic scene here, starting at 3:14.)
  • The King in Sym-Bionic Titan, while fighting with the army on the front lines and already shooting a BFG, runs out of bullets and pulls out an even bigger one.
  • On My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Pinkie Pie shows off her Party Cannon, which can blast decorations all over a room in one shot to instantly set up a party. She even hauls it all the way from Ponyville to Canterlot.
  • In ThunderCats (2011)
    • The Dragon Grune has a huge kanabo Morph Weapon that transforms into an equally huge Lightning Gun.
    • Mercenary slaver the Conquedor has a huge machine gun that fires adhesive goo and an absurdly long laser rifle he likes to use when tormenting Cute Machines villagers the Ro-Bear Berbils.
    • Played for Laughs in "Between Brothers" when young Wilykat invokes it by appropriating an enemy's BFG. He staggers under its weight, attempting to aim it at a Walking Tank while enemy troops sneak up behind him. Its recoil is so tremendous he sails backward into them, knocking them out, while his errant shot manages to hit the tank's feet.
  • Generator Rex: one of Rex's forms produces a ridiculously large gun, known as the Slam Cannon. It's about three times as large as its teenage wielder, and on one occasion used bowling balls for bullets - and they were small compared to its usual mass-of-rubble rounds.


  1. ↑ hey, firing a BFG is bound to be intimidating
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