The Enemy Weapons Are Better

You're in a war zone, you're given your standard gear from your outfit, and then you carry out your mission. However, about a few minutes in, you promptly drop whatever guns you were carrying and grab the enemy's. Now wait, your side just handed you a perfectly good weapon! Why would abandon the one you just had? Sometimes in video games (most commonly FPS games) you're more than likely to just stop using the weapons you were issued and begin using anything you can procure on sight. This is usually for two reasons:

• The enemy rightly does have a better weapon than yours, whether it was because they had a better assault rifle, or they just had an assault rifle and for some reason your side doesn't.
• The most common reason: you can't find ammo for your gun. The enemy carries the guns you can pick ammo up from, why not use that and not worry about your ammo?

For this trope to work however, the character must be able to be sent in fully loaded and then have the option of keeping their own weapons or exchanging them. Usually it's the latter because they find the enemy's weapons are, indeed, better. Related to Offscreen Villain Dark Matter, in which the bad guys get more and better stuff to preserve the Rule of Drama.

Examples of The Enemy Weapons Are Better include:

Video Games

• In the World War II Call of Duty series of games, German weapons can be irresistible (especially when you're carrying around the Sten). You might pick up a Kar98K, which frequently one-shot kills, or the accurate MP40. If you're lucky you can find yourself a Gewehr 41 rifle.
  • The original Call of Duty: German Sturmgewehr MP 44. Superior accuracy for an assault rifle, even over long range. Fairly common during the later stages of the game. Never accept anything less...
  • Or the FG 42, the only gun that has both automatic fire AND a sniper scope. There's a reason why it's considered a Game Breaker in multiplayer. Too bad it's so goddamn rare later on...
  • Somewhat averted in the Modern Warfare game, as ammunition tends to be shared. Swapping for an enemy weapon thus is reduced to preference (guns tend to do the same damage regardless).
  • That said, in multiplayer you are usually given only two to three full magazines for each weapon - meaning that you'll be forced to swap for enemy weapons when you run dry without appropriate perks. (One trick is to use the M9 as your sidearm if you're using an MP5 for the main weapon - the bullets that the M9 comes with makes a de facto extra magazine.)
    • Averted again when one considers that 9 (if not 10!) times out of 10 you're given the Perfect equipment to do a mission with at the start of it. And heaven help you if you switch out your lovely silenced weapons when doing a stealth mission.
• The Medal of Honor Allied Assault and expansions averts this, as ammo is universal. You can still exchange your weapons though.
• In Counter-Strike, it's not uncommon to see CT players drop whatever gun their using for an AK-47 or an SG-552. That or the Terrorists dropping whatever they were using for an M4A1 rifle.
  • You might see this in the World War II Half-Life mod, Day Of Defeat as well.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion may have you do this, why not kill that bandit for his silver sword that you'll find very useful later?
  • This is not by accident. The level at which certain items appear in shops is slightly higher than the level at which those same items would appear in chests and on enemies. Additionally, a player has to follow a sidequest thread up to a certain point before they are allowed to enchant their own equipment, as opposed to just looting a marauder's corpse and finding an enchanted sword or somesuch. Presumably, this is to keep players from building up gold and creating their own Disc One Nuke. (The point about enchanting is even mentioned directly by NPCs, for much the same reason.)
    • Which leads to the logical conclusion reached by the Concerned comic author Chris Livingston:

Chris Livingston: "One of the first times I played Oblivion, I was fighting alongside some NPC soldier inside the first Oblivion gate. This NPC died during a battle, so I stripped him of his armor and weapons, which were better than my current ones, and left him dead and naked on the blasted planes of the underworld. A little later I died, and hadn't saved my progress. So, when I reloaded, the NPC was there, alive. And, this time, he didn't die in the battle. He was pretty, you know, beat up, though, and since he had died the last time, I sort of thought it was okay to, you know... totally bludgeon him to death and take his cool stuff. Now that's being a dickweed."

• Halo. Plasma weapons kick unholy amounts of ass against shields, while bullets are best for squishing actual meaty bits.
  • The plasma pistol had the most amount of asskickery of all weapons in Halo 1 considering it did more damage than the plasma rifle, could fire as fast as you pull the trigger (faster than the rifle if you could pull fast enough), could overcharge to instantly take out the shields of anything, was easily found in large quantities, and had the fastest melee attack of all the weapons. The only drawbacks are the fast overheating and short range.
  • This is actually one of the main ideas of the Halo series: You need to know what weapon to use where, and since you can only hold two weapons at a time, you need to learn how to plan ahead and when to use your weapons or Covenant weapons. For example, one such arrangement is known as "The Noob Combo," where you shoot a shielded person with a covenant plasma weapon, disabling the shield, and then shifting back to a human weapon to headshot the enemy.
• In Crysis, you nearly have to take the Korean's FY 71 assault rifle instead of the US's SCAR assault rifle. You start with the SCAR, which beats the FY 71 in power, magazine size, and how much ammo you can carry, but there is nearly no ammo for it, until near the end of the game.
  • They mostly fixed this in the sequel.
• In World of Warcraft all enemy equipment is better. The players will end up using almost exclusively items looted off of enemy corpses, occasionally with a quest reward mixed in. Admittedly the faction leaders have some great stuff, but they're not particularly willing to part with it.
  • End-game equipment tends to reverse this trend lately, usually being offered as a reward by a faction for tokens gained from killing bosses. However, Legendary Weapons are exclusively Enemy Equipment.
• Moblin swords and flaming deku sticks made for more viable weapons than your starting equipment in The Wind Waker, since they were three times longer than your sword or stunned enemies, respectively. Of course, their advantages are rendered moot once you get the master sword.
• La Tale has a few enemies that rarely drop soul urns, materials which could be used to craft unique weapons which were almost always more powerful than an ordinary weapon, in addition to several unique special effects. Possibly subverted, in that they would be weaker than a well enchanted ordinary weapon, since the special weapons tend to be difficult to enchant due to their rarity.
• In Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty, you will never find ammo for American guns. In fact, you'll never find ammo for anything but the German MP-45. Enjoy playing the whole game having to use the one crappy SMG for everything.
  • No, you can actually find American made weapons. They aren't used by the Germans (The MP-50 is by far the most used weapon), but they are lying around all over the place. This troper played the mission in the White Tower of London solely with American weapons by picking up American weapons lying around. Why they're there is anyone's guess.
• Used in the Warhammer 40,000 First-Person Shooter Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior. Which is odd, considering that the Tau are supposed to have the strongest basic weapons in the universe on table, but there's not much ammo. This lasts basically up until you get the Burst Cannon, which competes through sheer rate of fire, and the Rail Rifle, which was so good it got adapted into the tabletop game.
• You can occasionally find a weapon in a box in Shadow the Hedgehog, but the most prevalent source (especially for some of the better guns) was enemy units. Therefore, it's usually better to use a GUN weapon if you're following the dark path and a Black Arms weapon if you're following the hero path. Neutral path? Just use the best weapon possible.
• Played with in Mass Effect. In the beginning, your starting equipment is the absolute worst possible in the game and will immediately be replaced by whatever you find in the first mission. Even after that, Random Drops will on average be superior to equipment you can buy yourself at the time. But after fulfilling the required conditions the best weapons can only be bought in stores.
• In all Metal Gear games, it isn't so much that the enemy's weapons are better as it is that your side sends you in with only a token amount of equipment, which includes one small pistol at best. If you want to use anything bigger (which you invariably need to do in order to have something capable of damaging certain bosses), you'll need to steal equipment from the enemy.
  • This is actually explained in the first game in the Solid series. Snake follows On-Site Procurement procedures. There's a variety of reasons for this, first and foremost that because his operations are never really sanctioned, there can be nothing that traces him back to his parent organization. Using the enemy's own equipment denies them at least one avenue for discovering who sent him. In later games, when he's working of his own accord, he still prefers to follow this particular procedure, most likely because as a wanted terrorist, it's difficult for him to acquire weaponry.
• In the Fallout series, it's a necessity to loot stuff from enemies. The reason is simple: most of the time there is not enough ammo to keep using a different weapon. As for guns and armor, the third game and New Vegas require equipment repairs that can either be paid for (at merchants who only do a mediocre job and NEVER fully repair it) or doing a field-repair by taking apart a similar item and using its components (depends on Repair skill and destroys the spare, obviously) which is a bad thing if no suitable spare is found because it's one-of-a-kind or your current enemies don't have it. Therefore, looting guns from enemies and using them is miles more cost-effective. Armors are a bit more flexible in this regard and they also play the trope straight in Fallout 2 and 3: Enclave gear is superior to what you can get otherwise, especially Tesla and Hellfire armors.
  • The Broken Steel DLC expansion for Fallout3 gives us the Tri-Beam Laser Rifle, essentially a laser shotgun, and is only carried by Super Mutant Overlords. This weapon is literally better when wielded by the enemy against you, but it's still an excellent weapon regardless of who uses it.
• Subverted then played straight in X-COM. While you can take weapons from dead aliens, your soldiers can't use them until you've researched them. Once you've done that, you'll be able to steal spare ammunition and other gear from the aliens.
• Similar to the X-Com example above, UFO: Aftershock your soldiers can steal weapons and other gear from dead enemies, but there are some kinds of equipment that require special training in order to use them.
• The Disgaea series. While you can pass bills to upgrade the items available in shops, the best equipment in the game is stolen from high level enemies. In fact the very best stuff must be acquired by stealing the second best stuff from an enemy, using the Item World to travel into that stuff, and then stealing the stuff of the enemies in that stuff.
• Mega Man starts off with a wimpy plasma pellet gun (though in some games he can use a Charged Attack), and by defeating the bosses in the game will acquire many new weapons, most of which are more powerful than his starting gun (which he may nonetheless need to fall back on, as it's the only weapon with infinite ammo).
• Almost every single level in Goldeneye 007 starts with James Bond equipped with the PP7, a decent but relatively weak pistol which you'll quickly trade for an assault rifle or SMG as soon as the first opportunity comes along.

Web Comics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja has this page; not the first time a video game has steered the comic.

Real Life

• A Real Life example: In the Vietnam War, U.S. soldiers actually preferred the Vietcong AK-47s to their own M16s. While the AK-47 wasn't "technologically advanced", it offered both a higher lethality and the robustness in the mostly jungle environment that the M16 lacked, which frequently jammed (thanks to poor ammo and the boast that the M16 was maintenance-free).
  • Another reason was that the stock on the early M-16 had a tendency to break when used to strike something. This was because of the polymer materials used in it. The AK, on the other hand, had a solid piece of wood for a stock. And even if you managed to break that, all you needed to fix it was an appropriate piece of wood.
    • The stock for the M-16 actually had the buffer tube running through it, which is a critical part of the mechanism. You break the tube, or bend it, and your gun won't fire. Offset by the fact that the AK-47 sounded different from the M-16, and had a tendency to draw friendly mortar fire as a result.
• German soldiers tended to prefer the Mosin Nagant over the Karabiner 98K if they had the option. Mostly because the Soviet lube didn't freeze in the cold of the eastern front.
  • German doctrine, unlike most forces, actually accepted use of captured arms. In general grabbing an SMG or semi-auto was preferable to the bolt action you had.
  • Conversely the MP-40 was a popular prize for British soldiers, aided by the fact that their issued Sten Guns used the same ammo and magazines but were otherwise cheaply made pieces of junk.
  • In addition, German soldiers in WWII preferred US grenades because they were less bulky, while US soldiers preferred German stick grenades because they could be thrown farther, helping to keep the US soldiers out of harm's way.
• Invoked by the Liberator pistol. A single shot pistol that would take longer to reload than manufacture and breaks before firing 50 rounds, but small enough to easily conceal and ambush a guy to shoot him in the back and steal his not shit gun. By making it a horrible weapon it ensured that the enemy would not be able to use them for anything when they captured a few from random airdrops^[1] before rebels got them.
• In Real Life this practice carries an increased risk of friendly fire, particularly if the guns have distinctly different sounds. This was a problem in the Vietnam conflict.

1. ↑ though liberators were ultimately never airdropped as intended as any bomber time would be better spent dropping real bombs, they were given away by US operatives in Greece and presumably used as intended