Superpower Lottery

Far left: More Dakka and Determination. Center left: Badassery, Sanity and Most Common Superpower. Far right: Gadgets and Cool Airship. Center right: Training, Improbably High IQ, and Money. Center: Omnipotence.
"Your ability to summon a horde of celestial superbeings at will is making my... BMX skills look a bit redundant."
—The BMX Bandit, on his companion the Angel Summoner, That Mitchell and Webb Look.

In a setting or team with Stock Super Powers, everyone in the cast has some power which is inevitably useful at least some of the time. Much like the real world, some get luckier than others when it comes time to get a power. On one end, you get people with What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?. Then come the more powered individuals. And finally, there are those who won the Superpower Lottery.

Beyond Hard Work Hardly Works, past the inevitable Sidekick Glass Ceiling, someone who won the Superpower Lottery has a completely overwhelming ability compared to everyone else in the story. There is no Competitive Balance; thus a common Fan Nickname for such a power is "Haxxor", implying it's the kind of power someone who's rewriting "the game" would give themselves. Such characters will invariably end up on the higher levels of Super Weight. This often leads to weaker cast members becoming as irrelevant as mere bystanders, but can outright threaten to remove all conflict to the character, necessitating either Plot Induced Stupidity, Deus Exit Machina, Poor Communication Kills and other creative ways to keep the story going. And when a villain wins the lottery, it can be an intimidating challenge but can also lead to Only the Author Can Save Them Now and strain Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

Ways for this include, but may not be limited to:

These heroes and villains are prone to:

If some of the "superpowers" involved are downright harmful, it's Superpower Russian Roulette.

Examples of Superpower Lottery include:

Anime and Manga

  • The various sword powers in Bleach vary hugely, according to their wielders' importance to the plot. Ikkaku's shikai takes the form of a spear, with the power to... bend at two points. Lame. At least Renji gets a Whip Sword. Meanwhile, Mayuri's causes complete paralysis, Ichigo's fires huge blasts of energy, Kira's doubles the weight of whatever it hits every time it hits, and Byakuya's turns into a cloud of razor blade petals. Then there's Aizen, who can perfectly manipulate all the senses of anyone who has ever seen him releasing his shikai. Permanently. He also happens to have enough sheer power to casually block Ichigo's bankai with one finger. Out of all the lotteries in Bleach (raw power, shikai abilities, bankai abilities if you can even achieve bankai, kido skill, shunpo skill) most of characters got pretty good results in some of them (and almost nothing in the rest). Aizen won them all. There's a reason two of his fan nicknames are 'Captain Superman', and perhaps more appropriately, Captain Broken.
    • Orihime's true power is to reshape reality at her whim by "rejecting" parts of it. Of course, her powers are limited by own willpower, and in the fight-happy environment she happens to be an Actual Pacifist.
    • Judging from the official databooks, Yamamoto is supposed to have won the lottery as well; almost all of his stats are rated 100 out of 100. The only blot on his record is a comparatively low physical endurance, presumably from extreme age.
    • Arrancar's release states also operate on this principle, although not necessarily in order of ranking; Grimmjow's release doesn't actually do very much besides boosting his speed and close-combat abilities, but his immediate inferior Zommari's has an ability to take command of anything he locks onto with any one his 50+ eyes, which would be completely broken if Zommari had used it right, and Barragan's quite literally makes him death incarnate by allowing him to age anything he pleases thousands of years in an instant.
    • Fullbrings are starting to be like this. Ginjou can use Sword Beams and Jakie gets stronger the dirtier her boots gets. Really something, right? However, Riruka can trap anyone in a dollhouse for as long as she wants, Giriko imposes time limits to complete tasks (which must be fulfilled; you die otherwise), Yukio can seal anyone in a video game like reality which he controls (to the point where he can manipulate the time inside it), and Tsukihima has a sword that allows him to literally insert himself into the past of anything it hits, including doing such things as inserting himself into the distant past of a piece of floor so that he has been there before and put a trap there. When said floor has only existed for a few minutes.
  • Phoenix Ikki from Saint Seiya. Not only is he physically stronger than his fellow saints, he has resurective powers...that double his power every time he comes back. And his armor does that too! Break into pieces and it will reform itself stronger. Which is why this character is often somewhere else and only comes by to beat up the toughest opponents.
    • Also, Virgo Shaka. He can fight 3 gold saints on equal terms..and win.
  • Captain Hiwatari of Busou Renkin. Tokiko gets four bladed arms. Kazuki gets a lance that enables a number of lance-related superattacks. Hiwatari gets a napalm bomb that allows him to generate flame attacks, regenerate from any wound, and fly. And did I mention the fact that it's a napalm bomb? That renews itself?
  • The Hyuuga and Uchiha clans from Naruto. The former can see through nearly everything in nearly every direction at once and disable their opponents completely by hitting special points on the body. The later is even more powerful, allowing easy copying of others' techniques and can potentially (at a price) upgrade their eyes to a level that allows completely unique techniques like burning anything, sucking something into another dimension, and powerful illusions that can compress days worth of torture into seconds. Other clans have genetic powers/kekkei genkai like unique element jutsu that grant special powers, all of which make normal ninja look in envy or fear, but even among the clans with such Kekkei Genkai powers the Uchiha stand among the top.
    • Of the Uchiha clan, there are those who can unlock the Mangekyou Sharingan, which allows access to greater genjustus and ninja techniques. The ones exhibited by Itachi and Sasuke in particular are: Amaterasu, the black flames which are (supposedly) hotter than the sun; Tsukuyomi, a powerful genjutsu which lets the user experience a form of time dilation (in Itachi's case 3 days in mere moments) as they can torture the victim in any way they please; And finally, Susanoo, which creates an etheral being with powerful weaponry and defenses capable of disposing a shinobi like Orochimaru in seconds. Along with Kakashi's very own Kamui, which teleports anything he focuses on sight into another dimension. Rockets, body parts, you name it, it's gone. The drawback is while the Sharingan consumes energy, the Mangekyou Sharingan not only consumes a lot of energy, but renders the user blind after repeated use. This drawback is presumably rectified with the Eternal Mangekyou Sharingan, which supposedly offers even greater power. To acheive this, one must take the eyes of another Uchiha with a Mangekyou Sharingan. Those known to have activated a Eternal Mangekoyu Sharingan are Madara and Sasuke.
    • We now know what that greater power is: Access to the entire section below. That's the power Madara commands.
    • Then there's the third eye technique, the Rinnegan, that is far more powerful than the Hyuuga and Uchiha's. It has similar sensory ability, makes you an Instant Expert, lets you master all five elemental forms of nature manipulation plus the non-elemental one (when few can do more than two and nobody else can do all six), and let's the user control six reanimated bodies each given a special power (one of which is bringing dead people/damaged bodies Back from the Dead) and a shared sense of sight between them. Only two people are known to have ever had it. One was the founder of modern ninjutsu, who was so powerful as to be thought of as a living god. The other instantly killed a chuunin when he was a kid without any previous training, and lead an assault Konoha by himself. He has enough raw power to destroy most of a town in one shot, and he does. Though the trade off for the greater abilities is massive, possibly deadly, chakra useage, and for a few even dipping into life-force; such as the aforementioned rasing of the recently dead.
      • Make that three with the edition of Madara, or four if you count Tobi stealing one of Nagato's.
    • The Fifth Mizukage Mei Terumi also scored pretty big, being able to use two unique types of Elemental Powers in addition to the three regular ones they were made from. Three normal elements already put her ahead of the curve, and the special elements tend to be flat-out more powerful than normal ones in what they do. To date she's the only character with a double Kekkai Genkai.
    • Also, being the host of a tailed beast, which gives you massive reserves of energy and some unique ability (which themselves vary in worth). Naturally, Naruto is host to the strongest of the beasts, with the mother of all Superpowered Evil Sides that when releasing larger amounts of it power tears up the landscape to a degree that would make any Dragonball Z character proud. This, too, comes at a great price.
    • Danzo BOUGHT the lottery. He grafted the First Hokage, Hashirama Senju's, DNA into himself in the form of his right arm, which he has had ten sharingan eyes implanted into. That means he possesses the powers of the Uchiha and Senju allowing him to use a forbidden technique that gives him minor reality warping powers in regards to his own person, as well as the power to control the Bijuu, entities of godlike power that give their own lottery to the person containing them. And he has a damaged sharingan with mind-controlling powers for a right eye. He's also smart enough to conceal this knowledge.
    • And we can't forget the Sage of the Six Paths, who is worshipped as the creator of modern ninjutsu and defeated the Ten-Tailed Beast. Then he sealed its chakra into himself, making him nothing less than a Physical God, and sealed the remaining body into a sphere of earth that became the moon. He also possesses the Rinnegan.
    • And finnaly we have the Tsuchikage, who's one of two people (the other being his mentor) that can do a 3 element technique in his dust release, as well as his basic earth skills. This allows him to fly, create large objects to smash things with, and carry an turtle the size of a small island with one hand.
  • In The Law of Ueki, each participant in the ever-present Tournament Arc has a special power given to them by their heavenly sponsor, usually of the form "turn X into Y"; our hero, for instance, can transform garbage (usually wrappers) into trees (with a degree of Green Thumb). The Big Bad of the first arc's power at first seems to be generating gravity-manipulating bubbles... but, no, that turns out to just be a side effect created by a previous use of his real power: to make anything ideal, which is bordering on (but not quite) Reality Warper territory.
    • Other people in later arcs display incredible powers as well, most notably Marilyn, who can change one second into ten (e.g. perfectly dodge everything) and only loses because of her own Heroic RROD.
  • In One Piece, while Devil Fruit powers that in other series would be mostly worthless are quite useful, the Logia fruits are still absurdly stronger, and appropriately rarer. They're able to become and reform from their element at will, which gives them extraordinary power, grants them Not Quite Flight (especially useful given that falling into the ocean is the most dangerous thing that can happen to anybody with Devil Fruit power) and very fast travel, and makes them Nigh Invulnerable Blobs anytime they're able to see a blow coming (some are even able to over-step this by changing reflexively).
    • Above even the standard Logia fruits are the powers granted to Admiral Kizaru: As a being made of pure light, he is nearly massless, can move at the speed of light, can kick with near-infinite force, and has no clear elemental weakness. It's no wonder he tends to treat combat as an absolute joke and makes small talk with his enemies.
    • This trope is played quite literally with the Devil's Fruits, as it's entirely possible to LOSE at the Superpower Lottery, since most of the time nobody knows what power is bestowed on the users before they eat it, leaving it up to fate as to whether you're Cursed with Awesome or Blessed with Suck. Blackbeard is a pure example of both, since though he can pretty much neutralise all opposing devil fruit user's abilities and can suck things into pure darkness, he does have one slight problem -- he can't dodge anything. Since his powers are partly gravity based, he pulls in all attacks, and is unable to avoid them like other logia users. Considering most people in the Grand Line have absurd fighting strength—devil fruit or not—this is not at all convenient.
      • But then, a very useful ability appears later: A complete Mega Manning of a second Devil's Fruit. To note, he chooses Whitebeard's power below.
    • Meanwhile, Marco is a Phoenix (Mythical Zoan), so he gets the rare flight ability, fire creation, and regeneration, in addition to the 3 zoan forms. Then there's the other reasons he's Whitebeard's First Division Commander.
    • Paramecia fruits are more of a "huge gamble", as that classification means "anything besides Logia or Zoan", and thus range from "useless" to "impossibly broken". While most of the stronger ones are Logia, many that are arguably the strongest are both Paramecia: Whitebeard's (creates shockwaves which can be strong enough to cause earthquake and tidal waves) and Kuma's (paw pads on his hands... which punt anything they touch flying away faster than the eye can see hundreds of miles away, including abstract concepts like strength and pain).
    • The lottery gets better for the Zoan-typer Devil powers. Zoan types were usually used for enhancing ones abilities by transforming ones body into full-animal or half animal, essentially having 3 forms (human, animal or hybrid of both). Those who got lucky got the Carnivorous Models, which were considered more dangerous than models previously shown. Now, if you really hit the lottery, you'll find yourself with an Extinct (dinosaur), Awakened (superhealing) or Mythical (again, Marco) Zoan power.
    • The real lottery winners are those with "Haoushoku Haki", or "King's Ambition"; only one in a million are born with it, and it's powerful enough to knock out scores of Elite Mooks, such as the Kuja warriors, who are already well-accustomed to the effects of the regular variety. And this was done by somebody who didn't even realize he had any sort of Haki (or even what Haki was). Currently, only seven characters in the series are confirmed to possess this type of Haki, all of whom are leaders in some way: Luffy, Shanks, Boa Hancock, Silvers Rayleigh, Gold Roger, Whitebeard, and Portgas D. Ace.
      • Arguable. At least 3 people have been shown with the aforementioned Haoushoku Haki. Devil Fruits only exist one at a time.
    • If you're looking for a true loser of the lottery it would be Pierre, Gan Fall's riding bird from Skypiea. He ate the Uma Uma no Mi, allowing him to become a horse. The problem: he is already perfectly ridable in his pure bird form. So all he got is a cosmetic change into a pegasus at the cost of being paralyzed in seawater
      • For the longest time, Brook seemed like an example of one of the lottery losers as well, with his Devil Fruit giving him the power to resurrect himself after being killed one time, meaning that until then, he's just a guy with Super Drowning Skills. The abilities he shows after then are really more just an offshoot of accidentally coming back as a living skeleton than anything having to do with the Devil Fruit itself. However, events after the Time Skip have proved that Heart Is an Awesome Power after all, just with a steeper learning curve than most.
  • Haruhi Suzumiya series: Mikuru has a Time Travel device that can only be used with permission from her superiors in the future. Plot-important, but lame. Itsuki can enter Closed Space and surround himself in a flying glowing shell to fight giant energy beings. Pretty neat, though he's completely powerless outside of Closed Space. Haruhi is a powerful Reality Warper... but she's Locked Out of the Loop and—limited by her common sense—only uses her power subconsciously. No, the real winner is the Sufficiently Advanced Alien Yuki, who can tie the fabric of reality in knots, manipulate probability at a whim, make herself an Instant Expert in anything she likes, and in the fourth novel steal Haruhi's power altogether, permanently depowering Haruhi in order to totally rewrite reality to her whim and make herself the female lead. Even without the Reality Warper or Techno Wizard part, she still has inhuman computational abilities just by merit of her creator—her hacking the game played against the Computer Club and micromanaging twenty different fleets in real time involved nothing but Rapid-Fire Typing. But the real kicker? Per Kyon's prior "no cheating" command, she deliberately constrained her typing speed within normal human limitations.
  • Contractors in Darker than Black acquire only a single power, and its usefulness varies wildly—and almost equally random remuneration, which may include things like narcolepsy, having to break your fingers or drink children's blood. The primary culprit would be Amber, who can control time. She can stop or even reverse it, with whoever she wants to remembering what happened prior to the reversal and being able to act on that information, and her remuneration is to grow younger, granting her potential immortality.
    • Also, Hei, who has a decent electric attack with no remuneration thanks to the means by which he "inherited" his powers. Nice, but not that broken... up until The Reveal that electrons will do for him anything up to substance alteration, so its true potential is unclear. This also leaves an equally open set of synergetic effects, including undesirable ones.
    • In terms of remunerations, the clear winner is probably April, a Hard-Drinking Party Girl with the remuneration of drinking alcohol. Of course, her power is to make it start raining, which is pretty useless on its own. But when your partner is An Ice Person...
    • Season 2 character August 7 comes pretty close to hitting the superpower-remuneration combo jackpot. His remuneration is giving away the secrets of magic tricks which, as a former Stage Magician, is annoying but harmless. His power? Being able to distort the space around him, which not only means attacks go right through him without causing any damage, he is able to pull anything he wants right out of his body.
  • A Certain Magical Index: On one end, you have people like Mikoto who worked hard to raise their rank and have intimidating powers. And then you have Accelerator. He can change the velocity vectors of anything he comes into contact with, including physical objects, energy blasts, and even UV radiation. This activates automatically as well, to protect him from any possible threat. When a character can theoretically fly, replicate the effects of a variety of other offensive powers, (theoretically) shrug off a nuclear bomb without even trying, and still have time for an Evil Laugh, you have to wonder if something went wrong somewhere...
    • Kuroko, the Plucky Comic Relief, can teleport anything under 300 pounds roughly a football field straight down just by touching it. Though Accelerator is immune even to this.
    • Then there is Awaki, who is basically Kuroko Up to Eleven. Her only disadvantage is she can't instantly teleport herself; she has a three-second delay. However, her weight limit is in the tonnes, her distance limit is similarly overblown, and the biggest difference is she doesn't have to touch you like Kuroko. She can send you anywhere she wants just by looking at you.
    • And then there's Touma and his Anti-Magic right hand, which can negate the abilities of everyone above. Later novels imply that his power is of divine origin. Furthermore, Volume 22 reveals that the Imagine Breaker is actually a Power Limiter. If it's removed, Touma's shoulder will manifest a terrible power that makes Fiamma's pale in comparison.
    • There are also people like Izzard, Fiamma, Hyouka, Gabriel, Aqua, Kaori... This entire series is filled with people that, anywhere else, would be considered story breaking.
    • How big are the "jackpots" in this series's lottery? In one of the later volumes, the Big Bad becomes more powerful than God... and there are still three characters stronger than him!
  • In Code Geass, there are many Geass powers, and most are rather limited, such as temporary paralysis or reading minds. Lelouch's Geass, the ability to force anyone to obey his commands, can be applied in so many different ways that it's arguably much more useful than any other power. Beyond just issuing commands, it can erase memories, create latent suggestions that activate on certain triggers, make people commit suicide (either immediately or after carrying out a primary command), force people to perceive him as someone else, make willing slaves out of anyone, or even work as a Super Mode when being ordered to 'live', like Suzaku. All of these are just creative applications of the basic power of: "Obey my command." The only real drawbacks to his power are that it requires direct eye contact with the target and that It Only Works Once on a particular individual.
    • Arguably his father's power of altering people's memories can be just as big a case: being able to use it lets him read minds (which is Mao's entire power, except Charles can turn his off), could let him have just as much control over people's as Lelouch's power, and can be used multiple times.
    • The main character of the spinoff video game Lost Colors has basically the same power as Lelouch, except that it's based on sound instead of sight. Since Lelouch's commands have to be heard anyway after he catches somebody in his Geass, this make's Rai's version clearly superior. Unlike Lelouch, he doesn't need to look his victim in the eye; he just needs them to hear his voice.
  • Lampshaded in Yu Yu Hakusho's anime when Kuwabara complains about Yusuke being able to use a Spirit Gun, while he gets a Spirit Sword. Toguro initially pretends that he had a bad draw in the apparitions' Superpower Lottery, gaining a demonic body and control as a percentage of how much power he puts out. He's being self deprecating- there's a reason he's the Big Bad of that arc.
  • The artifacts in Mahou Sensei Negima seem to be like this. Chisame's Magical Girl staff and attendants give her super hacking powers and limited detection abilities; mostly useless to begin with, and totally so after it runs out of battery power because the Magic World doesn't have any electronics. Nodoka gets a mind reading book, but she has to know her targets' names (not a problem later on) and be recklessly close to them to use it. Yue's book functions as a magic encyclopedia and comes with a handy flying broom. Asuna gets a nice BFS, even if its power is rather redundant. Konoka can heal anything short of death within a 30 second time limit. Chachamaru gets a Kill Sat which is so devastating that even Cosmo Entelechia's uber summon-demon dies with a single shot.
    • The artifact lottery appears to have a winner: Negi's artifact allows him to utilize the artifacts of any of his partners -- especially broken considering the still-increasing size of his harem. Perhaps it's for the best that this is only a temporary artifact. To be fair, its insinuated that Negi's artifact literally borrows his partners' artifacts, meaning that while its great for one-on-one fights, in the massive team battles that keep cropping up, it would be less than useless. Which is exactly what Negi wants, actually.
    • Pactios may not be as random as they seem, as Chamo hints in a recent chapter that the usefulness of an artifact is directly proportional to the partners' compatibility. Nodoka is Negi's first and primary Love Interest,[1] and her artifact gives her Telepathy, making her mind-reading of the bad guys' unspoken plans more of a headache than Negi himself. Natsume is Kotarou's Love Interest and has an artifact that grants her perfect stealth. Chachamaru is a Robot Girl who has a crush on Negi, and when he gave her a big, long, wet one in the process of negotiating with the rules of magic themselves in order to give her a pactio, she got a Kill Sat.
    • The Thousand Master, Jack Rakan, and Evangeline won the Lottery hard, as their power is basically being completely invincible. They have each been defeated a grand total of once, the former by the Lifemaker, the latter in a flashback that is incredibly improbable to be true, and Rakan when he was essentially removed from existence (and even that wasn't immediate or permanent).
  • A DVD Commentary for GetBackers had a joke about how Ban kept sneaking ahead of people in the line for super powers. Most of the characters have a basic power and its benefits (Ginji's electricity, Shido's control of animals and ability to mimic them), but Ban has his one-minute illusions, his "Snakebite" grip, and the ability to call on Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine (yeah) who can beat pretty much anyone he comes across. Plus his knowledge of just about anything. He's specifically referred to as a genius when it comes to fighting, but he's very well-read in other subjects that come up, as well.
    • Also, in the manga, he can do magic. Kinda-sorta. We only actually see him do this once though and it involves snogging another bloke.
  • Villains in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure frequently have overwhelmingly powerful abilities that are extremely difficult for the heroes to counter. Dio, for instance, has the power to stop time, which makes him pretty much immune to any attack he sees coming and lets him kill people before they know it.
    • His minion Vanilla Ice got an even greater power, though. His Stand, Cream, has the power to annihilate anything it touches, swallow its user for protection (without harming him), turn invisible, and fly at great speed.
    • And King Crimson from Part 5 has some sort of time-skipping ability, which enables him to "skip" any attack used against him. The only way Giorno managed to beat him was by manifesting an even more overpowered ability: the power to nullify the consequences of anything.
    • Subverted in the finale of part 6: Pucci is defeated thanks to one of his own abilities, which allows him to remove the powers or souls of others and store them as CDs. He accidentally causes Emporio to gain the ability to control weather because Pucci had removed the ability from Weather Report, leading to Pucci's final defeat.
  • Turn a Gundam. In the anime, it exhibits super-strong energy shields, teleportation, regeneration, and myriad other powers. And all this is ignoring the version from the novelization by Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino, where the Turn A at full power can destroy everything from Earth out to Jupiter, is nigh on invincible, can teleport itself, weapons, and even attacks (such as teleporting a beam into an enemy's cockpit), and can regenerate itself AND its pilot. The novel even remarks that the TV version used perhaps 5% of its full power; this, taken with the stark power contrast between the Turn A and everything except its Evil Counterpart Turn X, pretty much makes it undeniably the most powerful Gundam, and certainly high up the rankings for all Humongous Mecha.
  • NEEDLESS has people called Needless, who control powers such as fire, water, gravity, magnetism and whatnot. It is explicitly stated in the anime multiple times, that each user can only have one "fragment", which is the series' fancy term for "ability". Both the protagonist Adam Blade, and the Big Bad Adam Arclight have the memorization ability—which allows them to memorize and use any skill they have encountered. Of course, Adam Blade conveniently forgets his superpower thanks to Plot Induced Stupidity during his fight with the Bishojo Squad and gets his ass handed to him.
    • Big Bad's power is even more broken - unlike Blade's it gives him not an exact copy, but a more powerful version. In their fight, when using exact same copied skills, Adam was completely stomping Blade.
    • Anime's Gecko Ending also gave same Mega Manning to Saten.
  • Psi abilities in Psyren tend to have this happen. While training plays an important role, you have some game-breakers like Shiner's teleportation, and Nemesis Q's everything. The biggest winner though would have to be Shao, who is a combination mind-reader, power-nullifier, tracker, a Rise user capable of keeping up with Kyle, and capable of controlling and redirecting other people's PSI.
  • Most of the lead roles in the Nanoha series. Nanoha is a normal girl who just happens to have enough power to level pretty much anything. (Which she does.) Subaru is a cyborg designed to kick ass, Caro was exiled as a child for simply being too powerful; able to summon a dragon, and another ancient dragon at the same time. Hayate found a book (or, rather, the book found her) that gave her not only ridiculous magic power, but four unquestioningly loyal and incredibly powerful ancient knights. Touma found a similar book, a gunblade that gives him a beam cannon, and a hot love interest who seems to work as a magical reactor. On the other hand, Teana Lanstar got a non-lethal gun and Erio got a spear. ... Thanks for playing, you two!
  • Sieg, from Rave Master gets a toned down version of this. While he's not so powerful that he can easily defeat any of the villains, his being unaligned to any sort of element means he has no real weakness, and can easily use any sort of magic.
  • From the same author, Midnight from Fairy Tail is a more straight example. His "reflector" magic is basically a carbon copy of Accelerator's esper power with the added twist of letting him bend the light entering a person's eyes to create inescapable illusions just like Aizen. No doubt about it, he's 100% broken. Though, to be fair, it does have two loopholes that make it even remotely possible for someone to defeat him. The first one get's around Accelerator's power set: he can't "reflect" living things (i.e. people's bodies). The other one is that he can't reflect attacks if he's using his powers on something else.
    • Ultear has the ability to control Time allowing her to age and decay anything except people.
    • Rustyrose is a Reality Warper who's limit apparently is his imagination.
    • Freed can write runes that can trap people in forcefields that will only let victims out if they can fulfill a specific condition, and will severely punish them if they "break the rules".
  • Kakeru, the main character from Psycho Busters won the lottery by a mile. Some of the most powerful abilities in his world include seeing the future and telekinesis powerful enough to collapse a building or turn pens into deadly weapons. His ability is to edit time around himself. Essentially giving him reality warping in a ten meter radius, as well as the ability to rewind, slow or accelerate time as he desires as long as he activated his Perfect World beforehand. What's more, the power instinctively kicks in and turns back time should Kakeru be killed, meaning that even a surprise attack will be ineffective.
  • In Freezing, the Pandoras have the ability to summon weapons, all of them being different but usually being some sort of close range combat type. There is nothing to show that the girls get to pick out the weapons for themselves. For some reason, Elizabeth Mayberry lucked out and ended up with Frickin' Laser Beams.
    • Also Charles Bonaparte's Vibrato Hell has the ability to fire Long distance Omnidirectional Shockwaves.
    • Julia Munberk's Division Wave allows her to fire shockwaves at Mach 3 speeds.
  • Demonbane... or at least later on in the visual novels when shit starts to hit the fan. Elder God Demonbane is so powerful there's only one other robot that comes anywhere near its level of strength, that being Getter Emperor, which at that point is more a Cosmic Horror than anything else.
    • Getter Emperor is still growing, and is capable of absorbing everything around it and destroying a planet by casually moving to it. War God Demonbane (second form) is so big that the universe collapses thanks to its appearance, and is capable of manipulating time. It's so powerful that Nyarlathotep has to go back in time and kill the pilot. Elder God Demonbane (third and final form) is smaller, but is capable of casually beating Nyarlathotep. During the final battle, it's so powerful that it doesn't need to fight; it calls infinite numbers of War God Demobane from reality that exist, will exist, ever existed, and never existed. It's as ridiculous as it sounds.
  • Umineko no Naku Koro ni has Lambdadelta's wish granting, which is either this or Awesome but Impractical. Her ability is to guarantee the fulfillment of any wish that a person desires for as long as the required amount of effort to reach it is fulfilled.
  • Soul Eater has one. Maka won this for having a special 'grigori-shaped soul' and demonslayer wavelength which allow her to naturally resist magic and insanity. Her soul wavelength control is associated with the former, and all seem to have been a matter of luck. However, the way they're employed would indicate her being a Badass Bookworm to Soul's Musical Assassin comes in handy. Black Star and Tsubaki's skills are based on her family's unique inheritance, and Kid is an oddity for rather different reasons.
  • In Basilisk Gennosuke and Oboro both have completely broken abilities relative to everyone else. Gennosuke can invert hostile intention, causing anyone trying to hurt him to kill themselves while Oboro can shut down anyone's superpowers. Oboro ends up sealing her own powers specifically because she doesn't want to be responsible for effecting the story.
  • In Dreamland, dreamers become Travellers by overcoming their phobia during a nightmare: the power they have in Dreamland is directly linked to that phobia. Some overcome their fear of fire, cold, thunder, blood or Darkness. Others overcome their fear of fish, imperfection, or swings.
  • Arguably one of the most ridiculous versions of this in anime and manga history is from Tenchi Muyo!. Tenchi Masaki in his 13-dimensional form is so powerful, his mere presence causes dimensional quakes that are so powerful it makes the god of each dimension terrified of him.
  • In Mai-Otome, otome special powers are like this, but the fact that they're all Flying Bricks tends to normalize them. The exception appears to be Lena Sayers who can bypass all of the normal limitations that otome face. It wasn't enough that she already had a Flash Step and was one of the physically strongest otome. Stack all that on top of her non-otome powers, and she quickly trivializes everyone else in the meta-series. Her only limitation appeared to be her strong distaste for using those powers, but she overcame that.
  • Alucard of Hellsing. Vampires in this series are already pretty tough: they can heal themselves, have superhuman strength and senses, and can create ghouls out of non-virgin humans that obey their every command. Alucard, however, is in a class of his own. Instantaneous regeneration, walking through walls, practically invincible because he just doesn't die, even to stuff that kills other vampires outright... and that's when he's sealed. If his powers are unsealed... then we get fun stuff like shapeshifting and summoning hellhounds. And at his full strength? He can summon an undead army made up of everyone and everything he has ever killed. All completely under his command and all with the full powers they possessed in life at their disposal. Good luck fighting that.
  • Ajimu from Medaka Box is probably the most over-the-top example ever. While the series' other characters have one ability each (or two abilities at best), she has twelve billions abilities.

Comic Books

  • Doctor Manhattan of Watchmen (pictured above, in center), who is basically a nascent Energy Being who is just discovering that A God Am I. This in a setting completely devoid of superpowers above Badass Normal. He is however also hamstrung by being omniscient along his own personal timeline, meaning he always knows the events of his past and future with perfect clarity and thus has no free will. Every action he takes is utterly deterministic because he views his future actions as having already happened. Furthermore, his mere existence has significantly altered the course of history - and not for the better.
  • Jenny Quantum and the Doctor in The Authority, as their powers seem to be defined as "anything they can think of". They've occasionally been shown defeating the other members of the team at their own specialties. Suspense usually comes along because the Doctor's powers rely heavily on 'thinking'. Scare the bejeebers out of him (or attack when he's snookered on heroin) and you can slide past his defenses.
    • The Military Industrial Complex put a psychotic pedophile hillbilly through a 6 billion dollar cybernetics program to give him over 1,000 super powers to kill the Authority. These included X-Ray strength and Psychic Defacation.
  • Franklin Richards, son of Fantastic Four heroes Susan and Reed Richards, suffers from intermittent omnipotence. In the many times Franklin has been given a temporary Plot-Relevant Age-Up, he for whatever reason always gets weaker after growing up. Supposedly, he's more powerful as a child because he doesn't know that half the things he does are supposed to be impossible. Or that they're probably bad ideas.
  • Galactus, Silver Surfer, and any of G-diddy's other Heralds. The Power Cosmic lets them accomplish basically anything he wants, up to and including massive scale reality manipulation. Since Galactus is the primary holder he can bestow or revoke the PC as he pleases.
  • DC's 90s hero Resurrection Man has a literal super power lottery as his power. Whenever he dies and comes back he has a different power. Played with in a crossover with Hitman.
    • "Butterflies?" BLAM "Visible Skeleton?" BLAM "Ability to generate fire? There we go."
    • By DC One Million he wears an armband containing a creature with the most powerful toxin known. To change powers he just kills himself with it for a split second.
    • Multi-Man, an off-and-on again villain, has similar powers. The Joker kills him many times until he comes up with a power to escape the high security prison (not Arkham) they are in.
  • The Flash has a tendency to fall into this, Depending on the Writer. While Super Speed sounds simple enough on paper, it's more like a Green Lantern Ring in the hands of an author who knows how to use his Techno Babble. He's used his superspeed to time travel, travel between dimensions, become intangible (and make other people or things intangible), become invisible, cure himself of detrimental conditions, increase or decrease the speed of other people and objects (including turning someone into, effectively, a living statue), create whirlwinds strong enough to lift others aloft (sometimes just by spinning his arms), extinguish fires, melt large amounts of snow and ice, fly, and power large machinery, among other things. At one point he started fabricating items from pure speed, whatever the heck that means. One of his famous tricks? Infinite Mass Punch. It's exactly what it sounds like. And it should be able to oneshot anybody that has a physical form, even Superman.
  • Justice League villain Amazo, by virtue of his All Your Powers Combined. The DCAU version became something similar through a variant of Mega Manning, and eventually becomes a virtual god.
  • Superman: so many powers that an entire title worth of X-Men could be fielded with them. They also tend to be at the highest end of the power spectrum for each, rendering him immensely powerful even among other equally strong and widely powered individuals. While quite a few writers have managed to sort it out and write engaging stories with him in defiance of his closeness to being a Deus Ex Machina, even other characters in the setting comment on (or become envious of) his many powers. The short form: With Superman around, what are all the other guys in the Justice League supposed to do? (The best JLA writers have a good answer for this question.)
    • Based on the evidence, it seems that the other superheroes make themselves useful by filling the pretty-glaring-once-you-think-about-it gap in Superman's powers — his inability to be in multiple places at once. If shit is going down all over the city/world/solar system simultaneously, Superman may be able to deal with a huge, devastating catastrophe that would crush other superheroes, but can still only deal with one of them at a time.
    • Silver Age Superman was far worse. Writers gave him basically anything you could stick the word "super" in front of as a power, including super-hypnotism and super-ventriloquism. And in addition to the array of powers he had during the Silver Age, their power level was also through the roof. Post-Crisis Superman can juggle battleships; pre-Crisis Superman could juggle planets.
    • Power Girl seemingly gets Superman's full combo platter, except her Kryptonite Factor only exists in an alternate universe. She routinely ends up on the wrong end of The Worf Effect. Maybe she traded the Popularity Power for something else?
    • Superboy-Prime isn't the only Superboy to win the lottery. Time travel and an Overnight Age-Up have revealed Kon-El will develop all of Superman's Kryptonian abilities, plus his tactile telekinesis will develop into full-blown telekinesis with which he can affect entire city blocks—and block magical attacks, one of Superman's few weaknesses. If he only had telepathy, he'd be a hybrid of Superman and Phoenix, but without Phoenix's issues.
  • Wonder Woman isn't much better. Not only does she have strength, speed, and impact resistance within a hair of Superman, but she has a huge array of gear and minor abilities. Most people know about the block-anything bracers and the lasso that's unbreakable and made of truth (which is a "downgrade" from its old 'compel the target to do anything' powers, though recent writers have revealed it works by reaching down and grabbing someone's soul, which is fun), but did you know her tiara can cut anything? That she can speak with animals, and heals at an accelerated rate due to her connection to Gaia? That she's immune to fire? That thanks to the goddess Athena sharing her visions that she can see through illusions? That's not a complete list.
  • X-Men has a few of these, just from the nature of the shared origin story.
    • Scarlet Witch is pretty much all-powerful at this point, thanks to her initial Power Of Probability being redefined into a Reality Warper by writers apparently haunted by Laplace's demon.
    • Phoenix gets this, but she went mad with power. Now Jean didn't actually have that much power after she fused with the Phoenix Force, but then she suddenly is more powerful than ever before, and more dangerous: Jean Grey alone can lift upwards of twenty tons with her brain. With limited Phoenix power, she can use external objects as a sense of touch and recompose matter at a molecular level. Unhinged, she can teleport anywhere in the universe at will and devour stars. Then it turns out she has one more level beyond that where she can exist outside of reality proper and has total control over space and time itself. On top of all that, if you kill her she comes back basically whenever she feels like it. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
    • Wolverine, through the effects of power inflation, has reached this point. In older stories, an injured Wolverine actually required medical treatment when his healing factor could not regenerate fast enough. Modern stories feature him being burned down to a skeleton and healing, or regenerating an entire body from a drop of blood. One storyline brought his regenerative abilities back to a more believable level, hand-waving all its previous exaggerated exploits with magic.
    • Iceman at his full potential is not just An Ice Person, but has full control over moisture itself. This includes absorbing bodies of water to increase his size, teleportation (not quite, but close enough) by traveling through water vapor, and he's physically immortal, since he can reconstitute his body from any source of moisture, and even killed a villain by drawing the water from her body.
    • A more recent addition is Darwin, whose power is to grow new abilities based on the situation at hand. His powers were initially supposed to be purely defensive, but apparently the situation then grew out of hand, and writers started adding offensive to overpowered. For instance, when fighting the Hulk, his powers merely teleported him into the next state for his protection... but that same fight saw one of the first offensive uses of his powers, when Darwin sucks the Gamma radiations out of the Hulk.
  • Speaking of the Hulk, he has Unlimited strength, accelerated healing, the ability to breathe underwater, dynamic durability, and the ability to leap as high as Superman, and unlike Supe's he has a high resistance to Mind Control. Also, as a bonus, Bruce Banner is one of the smartest men in the Marvel Universe, to the point where Norman Osborn decided he preffered fighting the Hulk.
    • Sage started as just a secretary with photographic memory, but experienced Power Creep, Power Seep until now she's telepathic, super-intelligent, more Badass than Wolverine, able to control minds, and even able to enhance other mutants' powers.
    • Occasional Big Bad Apocalypse's mutant powers have never been quite clearly defined. He's generally portrayed with immortality, super-strength, laser beams, shape-changing, regeneration (when he doesn't have Nigh Invulnerability), telekinesis, technopathy, and super-intelligence[2] and he once demonstrated minor intangibility. Essentially he has every single physical superpower, most of which ultimately could be derived just from his high-level shape-shifting. Most of his higher-end powers though come from taking advantage of Celestial technology that he discovered long ago. As a result he owes the Celestials a favor, and they actually rescued Apocalypse from certain death once just to make sure he couldn't escape the deal. His default powers are immortality, super-intelligence and his bizarre skin colour; he also still had superhuman strength, speed, durability, endurance and healing, not to mention he was something like 12 feet tall, but they were no-where near as nerfed as he is nowadays.
    • Depending on the Writer, Magneto really lucked out where superpowers are concerned. He went from menacing the X-Men with girders to controlling the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which should make him pretty much unbeatable. And at times he was virtually unbeatable.
    • In general, any Omega-level mutant falls to this, with the possible exception of Mr. Immortal (depending on whether being absolutely incapable of dying by any means is winning or losing). Essentially, an Omega-level mutant has no upper limit to whatever specific thing their powers control. Note that many famously ultra-powerful mutants like Magneto and Apocalypse are not classified as Omega-level (though Magneto probably should be). Let's not think about Squirrel Girl.
    • Then of course, there's Mimic, who is basically All Your Powers Combined personified. He can copy up to five other mutants at a time, but only gets half their power. Sounds kind of weak, until you realize that the different powers interact. In his first appearance, he'd mimicked Wolverine, Beast, and Colossus, among others. Yes, his claws were bone, and only half as long as Wolvie's. Yes, he was only half as strong as Beast. But when he turned himself into living metal, those claws became much deadlier, and his animalistic strength got taken Up to Eleven. This is a guy who can rig the Superpower Lottery.
    • The "normal" Marvel Universe version of Mimic also gets this to some degree. He has permanently taken on the abilities of the original five X-Men, and can take also on the powers of anyone else he's around. He returned after a long absence by proving to be comatose... until Wolverine stands too close. It hasn't happened yet, but he could easily hit god level if he has their full potential instead of being stuck at the level the powers were when he got them. Unfortunately, unlike Exiles Mimic, he is not entirely stable.[3]
  • Doctor Strange, Depending on the Writer, can go from "merely" one of the stronger Earth bound heroes to perhaps the most powerful superhero in mainstream comics. His powers enable him to do almost anything- at his best/ worst, he is the Wizard who does it-, as he has learnt to command the most primal eldritch energies permeating the universe and is backed up by a host of otherdimensional magical patrons, which is good because his Rogues Gallery is also one of the most powerful in mainstream superhero comics, consisting of multiple Evil Sorcerors, The Legions of Hell, at least one nigh-omnipotent Omnicidal Maniac, and demonic Dimension Lords whose mere presence in our reality constitutes a doomsday event, amongst other diabolical horrors and cosmic menaces. Strange has collected and inherited artifacts that amplify his powers even further or protect him from numerous mystical dangers, and on top of all that he is one of the best martial artists in the Marvel universe, and a retired world-class surgeon. Put simply, there's a reason he's called the Sorceror Supreme.
  • The original Legion of Super-Heroes had a character in the Heroes of Lallor named Duplicate Boy. His power? To have any power he wanted. Fortunately, he was only a supporting character and rarely appeared.
    • In a similar boat: Nemesis Kid, who had the power to give himself whatever power was needed to defeat a single opponent. (Didn't stop him from getting his neck snapped by Projectra, proving that all the power in the world can't beat awesome.)
      • Then there is Earth-Man (formerly Absorbancy Boy), who has the ability to temporarily absorb as many powers as he wants, turning him, in his words, into a "one-man Legion". Unfortunatly for the Legion, he's a socipathic xenophobe who wants to wipe out all species except humans.
  • The Martian Manhunter. His full list of Post-Crisis demonstrated powers covers half the Stock Super Powers page, and his Silver Age version was even more arbitrarily powerful. And yet he is still always a victim of The Worf Effect. "Oh my gosh if he defeated Martian Manhunter how can Superman defeat him?" Apparently the answer to this question is always "Easily".
    • The big downgrade, both post-Crisis and in the DCAU, was dropping an aspect of his shapeshifting—namely, the ability to gain the powers of whatever form he changed into! He would lose his standard set (except for the ability to shapeshift), but who cares? Used sensibly (which it generally wasn't), this gives J'Onn the winning ticket in the Superpower Lottery all by itself. Facing a fire creature? Shift into Superman and blow it out. And so on for just about anything.
  • The Spectre, whose powers are whatever the authors feel he should have. Sort of justified in that the Spectre is more or less an extension of God (as in, the actual God, not some Sufficiently Advanced Alien pretending to be God).
  • Shade the Changing Man, Peter Milligan's version. He could create hallucinations, he could create physical objects, he could change himself, he could change others, he could bring himself back from the dead, teleport, make and grow interdimensional spaces, and even travel through time itself! A few reasons why this worked:
    • Non-heroic comic book. That means all other characters get no gimmicks, so their character development have to be focused on character. And so you had purely normal, believable personalities who were at least as interesting as the guy with the powers, or moreso.
    • Shade's powers were just as often the plaything of his own issue-riddled subconscious. And the more adept Shade got at using his powers, the more colossally his fucked up mind could fashion a Mind Screw.
  • The Fantastic Four villain, the Super-Skrull, has all the powers of the F4, the Skrulls' natural ability to shapeshift and his own hypnosis based powers.
  • On Runaways, Nico's Staff of One lets her do anything (with the apparent limit of resurrection being off-limits)...but only once per effect. Lately, she's gained some measure of magic ability on her own, at least enough to fly around on her own power.
    • She also found out that, in a cross over with the Young Avengers, that she can recast a spell if she says it in a different language. Go count how many languages there are out there, and then look at that "weakness"
    • Though at times the staff is surprisingly literal, and if she casts a spell from a word with multiple meanings, there's no guarantee which one will take effect.
  • Green Lanterns have variously been shown to use their rings to control time, teleport, create sentient life, duplicate, become intangible, turn themselves into Kryptonians, temporarily recreate the entire rest of the GLC and pretty much anything you can imagine. Hal Jordan once survived being killed by pulling his own soul back into his body. In order to write workable stories they've slowly been depowered to "making any object they can imagine" which is still pretty awesome.
    • Sodam Yat. Take Superman, give him a Green Lantern ring, then merge him with the Ion symbiote which makes its host practically nigh-omnipotent and you've got Sodam.
    • As Kyle Rayner pointed out during the Nero arc, a GL ring can split atoms. Now imagine that power in the hands of a lunatic...
    • The Blue Lanterns are explicitly more powerful then the Green Lanterns, and can bring other bring users up to their level temporarily. It helps that they have a crippling Weaksauce Weakness, though.
    • And then there's the Orange Lanterns. They have all the powers of a Green Lantern, are a Hive Mind Virus, and can absorb other energy constructs with ease, something even Sodam Yat has trouble with.
    • The Black Lantern rings offer their reanimated hosts the benefits of the standard power aura and energy constructs that most of the other rings can generate, a Healing Factor that makes Wolverine's seem reasonable by comparison, and immunity to magic. This is on top of any superpowers the host might have had in life. Then again, since the ring also turns its host into a flesh-eating murderous zombie that has to (and worse, wants to) rip out hearts filled with emotion and considering the host's soul isn't brought back either and that you have to be dead in the first place, getting one of these rings isn't really a case of "winning" the lottery.
    • The wielders of the Indigo Light (compassion) can absorb and redirect the powers of other Lanterns of the rest of the emotion spectrum. What really sets them apart: by redirecting the power of a Green Lantern they can remove Black Lantern rings, destroying the zombie Lanterns.
    • And then there's the White Light, which was the original source of the other seven colors, and can not only override any and all of them, but can bring people back to life. Not that that means much.
  • Vartox, an alien superhero and rival of Superman in the Pre Crisis days, who once admitted to Superman that he periodically discovered powers he didn't even realize he had.
    • And sported the best character design in superhero history.
  • The final Big Bad of the DC Comics series H.E.R.O. was a serial killer who found the power dial and used it to gain any super-power he could think of. This trope is even lampshaded in the dialog:

Robby Reed: Most of the time, the dial gives you one power, or maybe a couple of related powers. This guy's going to hit the superpower lottery. We're talking Superman levels of power. Nightmare levels.

  • Spinner of Avengers: The Initiative takes this to its literal extreme; she gets a new power every day (losing whatever powers she had the previous day, of course), and her name refers to the luck-of-the-draw element inherent in this (as in the Wheel of Fortune or the spinner in the Game of Life).
  • Black Bolt, the King of The Inhumans, is probably the ultimate example of this in the Marvel Universe. If he hadn't been created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, he'd probably get called a God Mode Sue a lot more often. A basic listing of his powers include a supersonic voice that, at max power, can destroy a planet (and, amplified by technology, has split open reality itself twice); telekinesis; superhuman strength; matter and energy manipulation; transmutation; and flight. In nearly 50 years of existence, he's never lost a real fight, at worst being stalemated (or limited by circumstances). The only significant class of superpower he doesn't possess is telepathy, and that's because he's The Voiceless.
  • The Plutonian, star of Mark Waid's Irredeemable, used to be Earth's most prominent superhero. When he goes rogue, he makes it very clear who won the lottery - it's all his former allies can do to stop him from slaughtering them all in moments. Hell, they can't even protect themselves from his wrath; he lets them get away several times for his own sadistic pleasure.
    • Then when Charybdis/Survivor got a power boost, it seemed like he and Tony were on equal terms, except Survivor had the edge in actual combat technique. Then it's revealed that Tony is really a godlike Reality Warper and all of his powers stem from him subconsciously altering the laws of physics around him.
  • Jackie Estacado in The Darkness. The full extent of his power has yet to be explored, but the ones we've seen are impressive indeed. He has enhanced strength, agility, speed, stamina, and what-have-you. Second, he can make just about anything out of darkness. Things like BFGs, Combat Tentacles, and the infamous Darklings. The only limitation on this power seems to be that these creations crumble in direct sunlight. Finally, he has an in-universe form of Contractual Immortality: the Darkness refuses to let him stay dead until he has produced a male heir. After being blown to atoms by a bomb he merely had to wait in Hell while the Darkness built him a new body.
    • An example of Jackie's "enhanced strength" would be that he made Superman's lip bleed by punching him.
  • Black Alice from DC Comics has the ability to instantly steal anybody's magical powers. And we do mean anybody. From Felix Faust to the freaking Spectre.
  • The Eternals, created by Jack Kirby, are an entire race of people who each won the Superpower Lottery at birth. Each and every one of them is born with their own innate Green Lantern Ring, in the form of cosmic energy that suffuses them. Basic Eternal powers include: Complete Immortality, invulnerability to most forms of harm (including disease, poison, and extremes of heat and cold), a Healing Factor (for anything they're not invulnerable to), the ability to breathe underwater, Super Strength, flight, Telepathy, casting illusions, Mind Control, teleportation, and, last but not least, transmutation. And that's just the base power set. Some Eternals have trained themselves to use cosmic energy in different ways.
  • The Mighty Thor, whose list of powers is pretty long even without including Mjolnir. Also, the majority of other name Asgardians; even the weaker name ones tend to have a wide variety of physical powers, a magical weapon or two, and at least one schtick power.
  • Aquaman. That's right, Aquaman. The Butt Monkey of The DCU for decades, the Trope Namer for This Looks Like a Job For Aquaman and requiring one Plot Tailored to the Party after another to be at all relevant, he is absolutely not as weak as common opinion believes. A combination of Required Secondary Powers (he can swim like a fish and punch people while under 500+ atmospheres of pressure, which is Superman level asskickery) and Fridge Horror (he commands everything that lives in the ocean; guess where Godzilla, Cthulhu, and the Leviathan live?) have had many writers portray him as horrifically powerful and outright feared by heroes and villains alike, and for very good reasons. And that is before considering that he is also the king of a lost civilization with its own military force full of super-technological weaponry.

"He could control every creature that lives in the sea. But I don't think either of you know what that really means. Do you know, do you understand, do you have any idea how much life there is in just one single square mile of sea? I don't think you do... and if you multiply that by lots of miles in every direction... I'd never seen anything like it in my whole life... and God as my witness, I hope to never see it again."

  • In All Fall Down, as Siphon, Sophie Mitchell has this in spades—but at a terrible cost.


Fan Works

  • In Luminosity, some people have absolutely no notable powers at all—or are like Esme, who (maybe) has compassion. Then there are people like Edward, who can read anyone's mind for a radius measured in miles. Then there are people like Bella, who can block out mental attacks and also almost anything else, with warning. The Volturi tends to (intentionally) have a concentration of these people, like Addy, who can copy any power.
  • Averted in With Strings Attached; the C'hovite gods (actually Jeft) deliberately make sure the four have a good mix of powers with minimal overlap and maximum utility so that none of them are left in the dust by the others.
    • Though their idea of “utility” isn't Paul's by any means....
    • Although no one had anything to do with Ringo's magic, the others were deliberately maneuvered into specific artifacts, or (in Paul's case) built up, to make sure they could all do different things and be useful in different situations.


Film

  • Jack Jack in The Incredibles. Considering how like the Fantastic Four their family is, it's not surprising he has Goo-Goo Godlike level Shapeshifting abilities that mimic not just forms but spontaneously generates superpowers. In the DVD Commentary the authors explicitly said that Jack Jack's superpower lottery represents the fact that being a baby he can potentially develop in many different way and, in their minds, his powers will probably stabilise and become more defined as a he grew.
    • In the DVD special features, this is parodied with Meta-Man, who had basically every superpower imaginable and yet died by getting his neck snapped when his cape snagged in an elevator shaft.
  • Bolt is about a dog who thinks he's a superhero when in fact he's simply an actor surrounded by special effects designed to trick him. One of his powers in his show is a super powerful bark that can destroy... like 100 mooks, helicopters and cars all at once. To be fair, they seem to work largely in city settings, meaning that the Super Bark isn't an applicable ability unless they want to cause massive scale destruction... Though the laser vision, superstrength, and intelligence are more than enough.
  • Our Man Flint is a parody of James Bond with way too much Power Creep, Power Seep. Marty Stu doesn't even begin to describe it. Flint doesn't just seduce a beautiful woman or two. He starts the film with a harem that would make Hugh Hefner jealous. Flint is able to go through a battalion of Green Berets with karate chops. He waltzes through the plot with so much ease there isn't even any tension. He has everything James Bond has, but he has it at superhuman levels. In gamer terms, he's a 20th level character taking on 2nd level challenges.
    • And he knows—not just something, but a lot—about everything. Flint glances at a soldier in passing and recognizes that the man wears a ribbon for the Battle of the Bulge—but there is no ribbon for that battle, so the guy's an impostor. Don't ask how he could tell which battle the fake ribbon was for...


Literature

  • Xanth comes to mind—where every human has a special, unique talent, and people with particularly powerful magical talents are Magicians and are able to serve as king (or Sorceress, the female equivalent). There are weak but useful abilities, for example determining the direction of anything (including 'Source of Magic'), or speak any language. The relatively few useless talents are called 'Spot on the Wall' powers (named after some poor schlump whose talent was Exactly What It Says on the Tin). Magician levels are Illusion (at a range, that you can see through, that encompass all five senses), the ability to turn anyone but yourself into any other living creature, the ability to turn yourself into any other living creature, making things true by agreeing with them (only barely avoiding Story-Breaker Power status by the fact that the thing agreed with has to come from someone unaware of her talent), knowing damn near everything, enhancement (of anything, without apparent limit, and including "enhancement" of negative traits), nullification of magic (no matter how powerful), and being immune to magical harm. That last talent hides itself as well, so that people don't wise up and try to hurt him by mundane means either. Not there are very many entirely mundane means available; Xanth is so thoroughly infused with magic that even the simplest objects are probably at least a little bit magical. The talent also indirect magical harm in its protections, so something like magically hiding the edge of a cliff from him and trying to get him to fall off wouldn't work either. It's even theorized in-universe that when the omnipotent demon that's the source of all magic in Xanth left, shutting all the magic down, it came back very shortly afterward solely because of this talent, as putting him in danger by removing magic could be considered indirect magical harm. That's right, it's so powerful that it can even affect its own omnipotent source.
    • One of them even (without trying to) makes winning the Superpower Lottery a hereditary trait; he impressed the above-mentioned omnipotent demon, who decided that all of the character's descendants would also be Magicians/Sorceresses. The demon never told him about this reward, though.
    • Another one, perhaps the ultimate winner of the Superpower Lottery, is a character who has the talent of having whatever talent she wants. Each talent can only be used once but eventually regenerates. However, using minor variations can easily overcome that flaw, and a little creativity can produce an almost infinite number of variations on any given talent. Unaddressed is what would happen if she simply picked "omnipotence" as her current talent and never switched to a different one.
  • In an obscure children's book called Samantha Stone and the Mermaid's Quest, Samantha spends much of the book trying to learn how to teleport—both herself and objects. She gradually becomes better at it, able to teleport herself and others, but often not exactly where she intends. But by the end, Samantha is teleporting behind enemies to knock them out, teleporting out of ropes when tied up, and teleporting captured prisoners out of a cell. The villain only undoes this power by binding and gagging her, thus preventing her from casting the spell. However, the story ends shortly after a big rescue and fight scene which involves use of the teleportation power, but on a cliffhanger implying a sequel. So basically, if Samantha keeps her teleportation powers for the sequel (should it get made), then she could easily "break" the whole story by warping out of danger at all times, unless the villains are prepared to bind and gag her over and over—unless something appears to Deus Ex Machina her ability down to uselessness.
  • The Twilight vampires: In addition to super strength, super speed, durability, beauty, and immortality, each one gets a special power based on what kind of latent abilities they had in their previous "human" life. It's pretty clear who's won though. Losers get even more strength, or stubbornness. Winners are mind readers, can see the future, can cause you unbelievable pain at will, control ALL FOUR classical elements, or in Bella's case, immunity to other powers, which can be shared. The only way to kill them? Burn them after tearing them to pieces (to keep them, obviously, from just running around while on fire).
  • Circle of Magic has Tris. Even living among other powerful mages, Tris comes off as a lottery winner. A powerful storm mage, she has enough power to level a city if necessary. By exercising tight control she can also achieve feats such as using winds to fly, create solid structures out of the rocks in the ground, divert the paths of storms, and scry on the wind, an incredibly rare achievement. Her power makes many of the other mages frightened and jealous, which bothers Tris to no end, and was directly responsible for her lousy childhood. In The Will of the Empress, she actually has to be taken out of action temporarily near the end so the others can get some of the spotlight.
  • In Those Who Walk In Darkness by John Ridley, this applies to telepaths. Not just because of the mindreading, but because they can use an apparently unlimited number of People Puppets and have an effective range of miles. They do have a handicap: they're not necessarily all that bright ...
  • Vanyel Ashkevron, the hero of the Last Herald-Mage trilogy of the Heralds of Valdemar series, wins the lottery and then some. In an accident involving the creation of a Gate, he receives just about every one of the Heralds' Psychic Powers plus enough magical power to level a city. Too bad it's his fate to die in a Heroic Sacrifice after losing nearly everything he cares about.
  • Somewhat subverted in the Mistborn books—in allomancy (the basic magic system), most people have one of the basic powers (superstrength, super-senses, limited telekinetic control of metal, etc.) while the eponymous Mistborn have all of them. This may seem like (and in many circumstances is) a complete advantage over the lesser "Mistings", but as Vin discovers, having only one power means you get a whole lot more practice with it—in other words, in some ways you're better than any Mistborn, and can be just as useful. Of course, Vin herself in some ways wins the lottery over other Mistborn, as she has some powers they don't have thanks to a nasty bit of Hemalurgy performed by her mother, and being a proto-god.
    • The Inquisitors from the same series win the Lottery by cheating. They practice the art of Hemalurgy, which lets them steal powers from others and apply them to themselves (by having someone pound giant metal spikes through the still-living victim's body and into their own!). As a result, your basic Inquisitor is basically a Mistborn with even stronger abilities. Later on they even find out that it's possible to steal Feruchemical powers with Hemalurgy, as well, which is even more powerful; by itself, Feruchemy is pretty dangerous, but when you combine it with Allomantic power in a single body, the interaction between the two lets you break several of the basic rules of both types of power.
    • The real winner of the lottery is the Lord Ruler, who Was born a feruchemist, and then found a metal called Lerasium that gives whoever burns it the powers of a Mistborn. This combination makes him essentially a Physical God - By storing attributes using Feruchemy, and then burning the Metalminds, you can get back more of an attribute than you stored. You can then store this, and so on. Combine that with the regular powers of Allomancy, and you have someone who you need to channel a Shard to stop. That is why the Lord Ruler, although we don't see much of his powers, can slaughter armies without difficulty
    • In the Alloy of Law, we find that there are no Mistborn or Feruchemists any more - instead, you have Mistings (who have one Allomantic power) and Ferings (who have one Feruchemical power) and the rare Twinborn, who have one of each. Most Twinborn win the lottery (at least withing the setting), doubly so for someone who has the same metal for both powers (allowing them to store the power in a Metalmind, then burn it for a greater return, which they can then store and so on) but their are varying levels of Twinborn.
    • Some Twinborn combinations are useful, but nothing special - the ability to store warmth (Brass) combined with the power to conceal Allomantic power use (Copper). Others have combinations of powers that are very useful in certain areas - someone who can store wakefulness (Bronze) and has super-senses (Tin) makes a great sentry, while one of the characters, Wayne, can create a bubble of sped up time around them (Bendalloy), while also storing health (Gold) - this makes him a brilliant one on one combatant.
    • And then you have the protagonist, Wax, and the antagonist, Miles, who have some of the best combinations available. Wax can store his weight (Iron) and telekinetically push metals (Steel). Since when you push on something, the overall motion is determined by your relative weights, then Wax can level city blocks and chuck train carriages at people, not to mention he can push on things to leap great distances, while storing his weight to travel further and survive the huge falls. Miles is a double Gold Twinborn - while the allomantic Gold power (which allows an Allomancer to see what they might have been if they had made different choices in the past) is not particularly useful, by compounding Gold he can give himself a healing factor that puts Wolverine to shame, and he has suffered so many injuries in the past he doesn't feel pain any more - both of which he illustrates when he blasts himself in the face with a shotgun to prove his power to his men.
  • Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords gives each of the twelve eponymous swords a superpower. One provides uncanny luck, another instills loyalty, and a third creates illusions. Several tend to kill their wielders. And then there is Shieldbreaker, which instantly detonates any weapon used against it (spells and demons count as weapons), including other Swords, and makes the wielder immune to other Swords' effects like the aforementioned luck and illusions. Its weaknesses are small enough to be the surprise conclusion to both Swords series.
  • In the Gaea Trilogy, the eponymous Physical God subjects some characters to a weak sort that tends to involve Translator Microbes.
  • In a more technological vein, the Lazy Guns from Iain Banks' Against a Dark Background novel. Lost Technology from a previous iteration of the book's civilization (which wiped itself out, probably using Lazy Guns), a Lazy Gun kills its target. For small, soft things (like you) this is done in a darkly humorous manner, such as materialising a set of great white shark jaws around your throat. For big targets, like cities, it simply materialises a nuclear blast. It may be assumed that sufficient energy is applied to kill any target regardless of its protection.
  • Used twice in the Wild Cards series. The premise is that an alien virus, known as "Wild Card", is released over New York City. It kills 90% of the affected population out right (known as "drawing the Black Queen"), turns 9% into deformed "jokers," and turns the remaining 1% into superheroes ("Aces"). Among said Aces, the usefulness and potency of powers are varied (some with particularly useless powers are known derisively as "Deuces." So you have to win one Superpower Lottery just to get the powers, and a second to get something useful.
    • And then there's the Sleeper, who wins the Superpower Lottery fairly frequently - and lives in fear of the day that he'll lose, because given the math, if he loses, it'll be death in an instant.


Live Action TV

  • Sylar and Peter Petrelli from Heroes, and Eden to a lesser extent. Sylar and Peter both have power absorbing powers, while Eden can control anyone's mind. The former two had power loss and Laser-Guided Amnesia, respectively, for most of Season Two as a Deus Exit Machina, while Eden was killed early on (by the Lottery winner Sylar, of course).
    • Also, Hiro Nakamura. With time travel, teleportation, and the ability to slow or stop time, it would be up for grabs whether he or Peter displayed more Plot Induced Stupidity were it not for the fact, of course, that Peter now also has these abilities (and almost everyone else's). Somewhat balanced by the fact Hiro's powers are abnormally difficult to master, which would explain why Peter doesn't take full advantage of them outside of his Future Badass version, but when that balance was removed and Hiro gained at least near-complete control over his power, it's shown to be just as powerful as it should be. Even to the point that he could take down Sylar and Elle within seconds, with no visible effort.
    • All the four characters mentioned above have had at some point in the series their powers neutralized and blocked by the Haitian. The Haitian is able to directly manipulate the neurons of the brain to remove specific memories, and can block the powers of most supers (though possibly not passive powers like regeneration) just by standing near them. The Haitian might not have won the Superpower Lottery, but he's the guy with the hand on the lottery machine.
    • And Matt Parkman. He started off with the power to read minds, but then he could control someone's mind simply by planting thoughts into their head, an even more powerful form of Eden's power that doesn't require voice activation, and can trap people in a nightmare world that he controls, with them being unable to escape unless they posses the same power. And, if that's not enough, he may gain more abilities, as another character has told him that, "Anything the brain controls, you control."
    • Subverted in the online graphic novels with another character who can gain other people's powers, Linda. The other two characters with that ability, Peter and Sylar, are essentially the two most important and powerful main characters in the series—but Linda is viewed as Blessed with Suck because anything she touches dies (leading to her parents locking her in her room and pushing food through the bottom of the door), she only ever gets one ability, and it's pretty lame (she can "see" "ghosts"), and when she tries to take Linderman's power, he kills her rather anticlimactically. (Oh, and her story is told Back to Front for some reason, so you know that even though she's potentially at least as much as a threat as Sylar, she's already taken out).
    • Hiro and Peter were later adjusted, Peter only capable of absorbing powers by touching someone and only has one power at a time, and Hiro lost his power thanks to Arthur Petrelli but regained the power to stop time thanks to Baby Touch and Go Parkman, but still couldn't teleport.
  • Castiel from Supernatural. Being an angel, his abilities seem to have no limit: so far, we've seen him display super strength, invulnerability, the ability to travel through time, telepathy, telekinesis, dream-walking, teleportation, element control, a gigantic, winged, eye-searing true form, and immortality (he can only be killed by another angel's sword, but Castiel ramps this up by having what seems like a God-sanctioned get-out-of-death-free card). This was all well and good when he was supposed to be last only the first half of Season 4, but his promotion to regular character forced writers to write in that angel-banishing sigil to make an episode fight last the entire hour. In Season 6 he exhibited the ability to literally change the past (he prevented the sinking of the Titanic and thus "created" 50,000 souls - the descendants of the people that were originally killed, twice ( then he went back to re-sink it after one of the Sisters of Fate convinced him what he did was wrong), and managed to imprint the events as dreams in the main characters' minds (he wanted them to remember). And even later on he absorbed every soul in Purgatory and became a god for a while, becoming nigh-omnipotent.
  • Angel Summoner and the BMX Bandit. Click here.
  • Delvin a.k.a. Excelsor, the world's most famous superhero in the British live-action series No Heroics (starts September 18, 2008). His card lists his powers as "Basically Everything". Excelsor's the bane of the B-list protagonists' lives (especially of Alex, a.k.a. The Hotness, a shy 30-year-old office worker with heat-based powers, who desperately but unsuccessfully tries to become famous). Excelsor is also an arrogant Jerkass. Go figure.
  • Kamen Rider Ryuki features up to 13 of these warriors, whose powers depend entirely on what cards were in their decks when they got them—so we've got one who can call up a Macross Missile Massacre, one who gets up to 3 monsters under his thumb, and a few who don't even have serviceable hand weapons to start with.
  • Lyta Alexander of Babylon 5 describes herself as the telepathic equivalent of a doomsday weapon. She's pretty much right.
  • In the Doctor Who episode "The End of Time", the Master, of all people, wins the Superpower Lottery, due to coming back wrong and Lucy throwing a Spanner in the Works. He can fly, shoot lightning, has Super Strength, and oh yeah, gains energy by eating people.
    • Ofcourse this is alleviated by the fact that he Casts From Hit Points, and must constantly feed to just stay alive, and is driven even further to insanity by his insatiable hunger.
  • Dr. Shinkuro Isaka from Kamen Rider Double wasn't content with just the base powers granted by his Gaia Memory...so he did a few "upgrades". The Weather Memory gives Isaka effectively every Elemental Power; at times he's demonstrated intense sunlight, rain, lightning, tornadoes, and Snow. And that's still not enough, as he keeps giving people overclocked Gaia Memories that eventually kill him and allows him to add that Memory's powers to his own. This also results in his Karmic Death when the Gaia Memory connector ports all over his body consume him after the Weather Memory is finally destroyed.
  • While this does not apply to the main cast of Sanctuary, it works for the Five, who all took the same Super Serum made from vampire blood. Of all of them, Nikola Tesla is the only one who became an actual vampire. Plus, he also got electrical powers. John Druitt gained the power of space-time teleportation. James Watson became a super-genius. Nigel Griffin gained the power of Invisibility. Helen Magnus got... longevity, something Tesla got as part of the whole package. These powers, though, are inherited by their children. Notably, Griffin's granddaughter had his power. Also, Ashley Magnus, being the daughter of Helen and Druitt, did not originally manifest any powers. Those had to be activated by the Cabal and were, basically, a combination of Tesla's vampirism and Druitt's teleportation.
  • In Misfits most powers are fairly unhelpful or useless, but some are just pathetic, while others are incredibly powerful. One girl had the power to turn people bald, and one man could caffeinate drinks. Other characters could travel through time, control the future by drawing it or move objects with their minds.


Multiple Media

  • In LEGO's Bionicle line, powers are so common and plentiful, only the most egregious cases can be mentioned here:
    • First and foremost, the Makuta. They all have 42 standard powers from the get-go, plus the Elemental Power of shadow. By banishing their inner light, they gained an even bigger control over these shadow powers. Being Energy Beings, they can possess soulless bodies and robots, which was a major plot point. Lets throw in that they're also shapeshifters, provided they're in their own bodies.
    • Skakdi are a violent race of savages that have access to Elemental Powers, vision-powers (laser vision, telescopic vision, etc), and have yet another, random power unique to the specimen—like Adaptive Ability or being able to conjure cages made out of literally anything at will. One Skakdi, Zaktan, became a mass of microscopic insects due to an accident, and could thus fly, shape-shift, seep through holes, and attack in the form of an angry swarm. Their toys also came with multi-functional weapons and the BIONICLE equivalent of guns! Fans complained so much that the following year's villains had to be vastly de-powered.


Video Games

  • Advent Rising's Gideon Wyeth, has, once he unlocks all his powers, Super Strength, a Healing Factor, Bullet Time when using his improbable dodging skills, telekinesis, various forcefiedls (which are impenetrable and harm any enemy that touches them), electromagnetic bolts, massive, devastating radial energy explosions, gravimetric teleportation, inertial damping, dozens of exploding ice-missiles, and cryokinesis. He's also skilled at piloting, marksmanship, and hand-to-hand combat. And, for his last trick, he can create controlled singularity that can kill a Physical God.
  • In Touhou, there are humans that can stop time, ghosts that can kill you with a thought, and onis that can create black holes. And then we have Yukari Yakumo. Her ability is to manipulate boundaries. Any boundary. Including abstract ones like life and death, day and night, reality and illusion, and fictional and actual. In other words, her ability is practically whatever the hell she wants; she once opened a portal to the moon by looking at its reflection in a lake and manipulating the boundary between Truth and Lies. Word of God mentions that she has no weaknesses, is as powerful as the gods, and can annihilate Gensoukyou, the setting of Touhou, at a whim.
    • The aforementioned oni, Suika Ibuki isn't a pushover either. Thanks to her heritage, she has enough physical strength to tear apart and rebuild mountains. Her power over density also lets her do all sorts of weird stuff, like turn into a mist, grow giant, form an army of mini-clones, or force people to group together or disperse, which she uses to make them have lots and lots of feasts.
    • The description of main heroine Reimu Hakurei's "last word" ultimate spellcard in Imperishable Night, "Fantasy Heaven," is literally "With Reimu's ability to float, she floats away from physical reality and becomes invincible. If it wasn't just for play (with a time limit), no one could beat her with any method." The attack is modified in the fighting Gaiden Games, which don't have countdowns (kinda); there it's just a One Hit KO, which lasts five seconds, only one of which is actually needed. There's a reason fans joke that she has a spellcard of "Hax Sign 「You Just Plain Fucking Lose」."
    • Before she moved to Gensoukyou, Sanae Kochiya pretty much won this in the Outside World. Her profile even comments on how she had gone from being a living god to a normal person, because now she lives in a world where Everyone Is a Super.
    • Utsuho Reiuji was originally just a dumb bird with no special abilities. Then she was offered the corpse of a sun god for snack, gained the power to control nuclear fusion, and became a living, breathing star and quite possibly the most powerful individual in Gensoukyou (with the exception of aforementioned Yukari and Reimu, however). If she weren't still a dumb bird (albeit one capable of operating a fusion reactor) she could easily obliterate the planet with a thought and rampage across entire galaxies with ease.
    • A note on that ghost that can kill with a thought: Because Yuyuko's body is sealing the Saigyou Ayakashi she can't be exorcised, and because she's already dead she can't really be hurt. Her manipulation of death lets her kill anything that isn't already dead or immortal. Except that she can control dead spirits and she's stronger than all of the known immortals. Actually getting rid of her would entail unsealing the most dangerous being in the setting. Fortunately, she fights using the same formalised rules as everyone else and is a genuinely good person, because probably no one could stop her otherwise.
    • Koishi Komeji won the super power lottery by sealing one power away first - Mind Reading. This somewhat backfired in an unintended way, now she is immunie to it and can make herself invisible by hiding her presence from the minds of others. This together with her natural magical power and understading of how her enemies tick could end in active Mind Control used on literally everyone if she felt like it. What is she doing all the time? Enjoying the scenery.
  • In Wild ARMs 3, Maya Schroedinger, The Rival to the heroine, has the power to adopt any power depicted by a character in the book she last touched. She is never a party member, though. She uses this to be a martial artist, a mage, and The Gunslinger, among other things.
  • The main character of Final Fantasy IX gets this. He's spent sixteen years becoming a master thief and then founds out that he is actually the Angel of Death for his adopted world, complete with Badass powers. Unfortunately, presumably due to his lack of training in use of these powers he can only use them in Trance
  • The Main Characters of Persona 3 and Persona 4. Whereas the other party members gain the ability to summon a Persona that grants them special powers, the Main Characters can potentially summon any Persona (and can switch between them freely). However, the Persona 3 lead paid one hell of a price for it (specifically, one 'die at age 16 and your soul used as a padlock on the jail for the life-eradicating Eldritch Abomination for all eternity' price), and the reason why the Persona 4 protagonist didn't have the Persona 3 protagonist's problems is due to being literally touched by a Japanese goddess.
    • It's worth noting that in Persona and Persona 2, every party member could do this. However, they couldn't hold as many at the same time as the characters mentioned above, and were less effective with Persona that had less affinity with their arcana, to the point where complete incompatibility meant they couldn't use that Persona, period (the P3 and P4 protagonists avoid the latter issue presumably because their arcana is The Fool).
    • Minato may actually take it a step further, since not only can he potentially summon any Persona ever and freely switch between them, but he also can summon two Personas at once for a Combination Attack, with effects ranging from 50% healing and evasion increase... to throwing the freaking Apocalypse at his enemies.
  • Digital Devil Saga had the Ground Zero Incident. In a barren wasteland populated only by thousands of warring military units, a mysterious egg hatched, releasing streams of light that transformed anyone they touched into demons. Any kind of demons, mind you - from small, pathetic amorphous blobs to the highest seraph of Heaven. The big drawback? They're all Cannibalism Superpowers. Horror Hunger and I'm a Humanitarian become two realities you cannot avoid, ever. And then there's the case of having your mind overwritten by the demon's...
  • In Fate/stay night, each legendary hero has a Noble Phantasm which reflects some part of their legend, and is unique to their character... Except for Gilgamesh. His Noble Phantasm, "Gate of Babylon", is a portal to his treasury that allows him to summon pretty much every Noble Phantasm except Excalibur, to pull out individually or launch in missile barrages as he wishes (since he's the original King of Heroes, he used to own all of the world's treasures, and thus all the original Noble Phantasms). He also turns out to have another Noble Phantasm atop of this which is classified as "anti-world" in power (the other Noble Phantasms topping out at "anti-castle").
    • Archer's ultimate technique is pretty similar (specifically his Reality Marble, Unlimited Blade Works), though story-wise he never gets to show its full potential. He can create an imitation of any weapon (specifically swords), that he has ever seen, giving him an endless supply of disposable legendary weapons. A "Broken Phantasm" is supposed to be an unthinkable technique, destroying the hero's proof of heroism (and well, their weapon) for one-time Massive Damage. Archer can do this... Whenever he wants.
    • Finally, Saber herself has a wee touch of this. She starts out by 'merely' having an invisible sword for a Noble Phantasm, freakishly powerful regeneration and the best close combat skill of all the Servants. She then turns out to be Arthur, the strongest example of this class, and her 'true' Noble Phantasm, Excalibur (which also has a neato wind-based attack as part of being revealed), is a grade A++ anti-castle noble phantasm and the second strongest of all the weapons. She then turns out to have a third Noble Phantasm on top of this, Avalon, whose stated ability is basically to make her invincible -- she uses it to block Gilgamesh's abovementioned "anti-world" attack, without it taking a dent. And on top of this she used to possess a fourth weapon, the Sword in the Stone, which is strong enough to kill the toughest servant seven times over with a single blow... And it's weaker than the one she already has.
      • Just to hammer the point home, the sword she used to take down Berserker was a fake, implying that the original sword is even stronger. And even that is still weaker than her actual Noble Phantasm!
    • The Nasuverse has a variety of "Mystic Eyes," ranging from simple stuff like "charm" to rare and powerful ones like petrification ('sup, Medusa). And then there's the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception owned by Ryougi and Tohno Shiki, which allow them to kill the existence of anyone or anything that could conceivably be destroyed and bypass any number of explicit Cannot-Be-Killed-No-Matter-What powers. Combined with convenient anti-demon assassin training, this allows them—mere humans—to take on beings of overwhelming power.
      • Ryougi much more so than Tohno. For Tohno, using his eyes risks insanity and brain damage. He has to wear a pair of magical glasses that block the effects of his eyes to keep his brain from melting, and eventually his eyes grow too strong for the glasses to contain them, which means he only has a few years left to live. Ryougi doesn't have any of these limitations. And she has an alternate personality that is absolutely omnipotent.
    • Ciel of Tsukihime was born to an entirely ordinary family, yet she also possessed enough magic circuits of high enough quality that her magic power is considered to be on the same level as Servants. Unfortunately this verges into Blessed with Suck territory for her since her incredibly potent magical power made her a prime target as Roa's next host.
  • League of Legends features a very diverse cast. Although competitive balance equalises their relative power level, the characters range from a dude with a sword to an ice elemental phoenix, from a pirate with a regular flintlock pistol to a desert god from outer space, and from a fat drunkard with a beer keg and no other powers to an armoured angel of war.
  • Conduits from In Famous, especially the second game, Cole and his partners Nix and Kuo got off with easily controlled and amazing powers, the second game's big bad, Bertrand, wasn't so lucky, his power involves turning into a fifty foot beserk monster and transforming other people into smaller monsters. An NPC pointed this out in a dead drop.
  • Mass Effect: Commander Shepard can potentially obtain a ton of totally-not-super biotic powers, in addition to impressive weaponry. Other biotics, many of whom qualify as Super Soldiers in their own right, only have a few abilities. Among the abilities a high level biotic Shepard can have: Super Speed, Telekinesis, Energy Balls, psychokinetic explosions, Life Drain, force fields,, and the ability to spawn a miniature black hole. And while most non-biotic classes rely more on skill and external weaponry, all classes, including the biotic ones, get Super Strength (though only Captain America (comics) level), regeneration, and immunity to poisons.
  • Asura from Asura's Wrath', who is basically The Hulk on steroids, and post Karma Fortress Mantra Reactor surgery no longer has the bad side effect of destroying himself with his anger. He can also Become the size of the planet and travel across the cosmos at extreme speeds, destroy volleys of planets being thrown at with casualy with energy blasts, and punch straight through a planet several hundreds of times bigger than his planet sized self with ease. It's noted that even after shrinking back to human size, he keeps all the above powers, and just gets more and more powerful as the finale goes on, even after reverting to his base form.
  • In Prototype and Prototype 2 you get the ability to run faster than cars, jump 10 stories high and a block across, glide, transform, create blades, take on an entire army without breaking a sweat. Let's just say in this game you hit the Jackpot!.


Web Comics

  • The outsiders in Project 0 are definitely winners. Especially as there's no handicap to Modding.
  • Man-Man is about non-powered fool Man-Man, but parodies this with Powers Guy, who has all kinds of awesome powers and does the actually useful stuff.
  • In Zodiac Libra can have every power he can think of, but he is limited by energy & effort, and the fact he's a bit of a ditz.
  • Errant Story:
    • The time monks, in a subversion. In a fantasy setting with fairly normal levels of magic and with firearms tech up to revolvers, they have bullet time. Despite that, they seem prone to the Worf effect. And the Elves can handily counter the super-speed, once they know to expect it; they taught them the trick hundreds of years ago, after all, and haven't used it themselves since, because it's too easy to counter.
    • Ian, on the other hand, basically gets phenomenal cosmic power, that seems to keep growing and growing. Unfortunately, With Great Power Comes Great Insanity.
  • In The Last Days of Foxhound, the take on the team is: Raven, who has precognition (we're told) and a big gun; Liquid, whose Charles Atlas Superpower lets him survive anything and beat people up pretty well; Wolf, the world's greatest sniper; Ocelot, the world's greatest pistoleer and liar (enough that it counts as a power, damnit); and Octopus, who can shapeshift into someone if he drinks their blood. And then there's Mantis, who can read and control minds, light anything on fire, zap people into unconsciousness and use telekinesis.
  • Chris of Sonichu has this in spades. He doesn't go through an episode without showing off some spiffy new ability. Of course, seeing as he's an Author Avatar God Mode Sue...
  • As of the end of Act 5 of Homestuck, Jade has won all the Superpower Lotteries. All of them. Among her friends who have achieved mastery of the wind, control of time and dominance over the arcane, she has gained the power to control space itself (as in miniaturizing entire planets), the ability to fire massive, planet-busting energy beams, and whatever else comes with the power of a First Guardian. All of this, and the cutest costume ever worn by someone with the title of "The Witch of Space".


Web Original

  • In the League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions there was The Queue (omnipotent power when they stand in a straight line), Soyburger Patricia (sorceress nicknamed Dues Ex Patricia after one such incident), q (a junior member of Star Trek's Q continuum), although Adon & the Observer tended toward the overpowered side as well.
  • In The RPG Fanatic the Student Sword claims to be the sword used in all computer roleplaying games until the protagonist becomes a true hero. So far the Student Sword has demonstrated the ability to summon zombies, perform Kingdom Hearts Keyblade-style "unlocking", perform the Soul Shooter attack from Azure Dreams, transform books into dvds and switch the Fanatic's "job" using magic.
  • In the Whateley Universe, there is Tennyo. She is one of the main characters at the Whateley Academy, and is so massively powered that in several stories, she essentially couldn't find a way to use her powers without damage so massive it would have been life-threatening to people nearby, or without other dire consequences. Also, it seems that serious use of her powers gives off lethal doses of radiation and may cause mind-shattering rips in our reality. And there's the whole "antimatter within her cells" thing that nobody understands. Deconstructed in that she has severe difficulties with using normal techniques. (She can't beat your average 'brick', because the only strength-boost she could use kills people's souls...)
    • Here's a list of her known powers: Superhuman strength and speed. Flight, both fast and agile. Energy blasts. Energy sword like a light saber that can breach most shields. Insane regeneration (highest known regen rating). IR and UV vision. Total life support (space, etc.). Power over gravity. Produces antimatter. Has survived a nuclear blast. Death Blow, which can rip apart souls. Can warp reality around her, causing massive destruction and insanity. Various other warper powers she is still discovering and has poor control over. Eats demons. Partial immunity to power nullification.
    • Basically the entirety of Team Kimba is this, with even the less powerful members having some aspect that can blow away most competition.
  • On this forum thread, this is the whole idea. By trying your luck you may get powers like a Chuck Norris Kick to the face,[4] or omnipotence. Then again others get the short end of the stick and get the power to know when you're asleep, or God forbid, the power that turns you into a vodoo doll


Western Animation

  • In Avatar: The Last Airbender, there are regular people. Then there are people who can control the element associated with where they grew up (Earth, Air, Fire, Water). And then there's the Avatar, who controls all four of them. And then some.
    • And then there's Ty Lee, who can run circles around you, jump circles above you, take you down with a few pokes or even seal off your bending. Not as lottery-ish as the Avatar, but that's some Badass Normalness there...
    • This also seems to affect the different Elemental Powers. "Earthbenders" can control earth but cannot control metal directly and "waterbenders" must use already available water or pull moisture out of somewhere. In contrast, instead of only being able to make fire by rapidly consuming fuel, "firebenders" can create fire out of their hands, not to mention lightning for really skilled "firebenders".
  • South Park parodies this with its Affectionate Parody of Anime, "Good Times With Weapons." Cartman gives himself New Powers as the Plot Demands until Kyle calls him out on it & makes him choose only one. He chooses the power to have any power he wants. Stan takes all his powers away. When the others need him to have powers again, he chooses the power to turn Kyle into a chicken.
  • In Static Shock, Edwin Alva's son, Edwin Alva Jr., learned to control the Big Bang gas that gave every other metahuman in Dakota their powers, essentially rigging the Superpower Lottery. He was doing pretty well with it, too, up until he took on too many powers at once and Power Incontinence turned him into stone.
  • The Venture Brothers has the occasional lottery winner. As Phantom Limb put it while convincing some un-powered senior villains to do his bidding:

"I can kill a man by simply touching him. Now what were your special powers again?"

    • Doctor Orpheus also counts: He can teleport, astral project, shoot energy from his hand, remove souls, set things on fire with his mind, mind wipe people, raise the dead (as long as he has a body and the soul is willing to come back), fly, detect ghosts, create a force of purple lightning that shut down a large robot and liquefied a group of Nazis, remove someone's arms (and not by cutting them off: they actually disappear), telekinesis, and predict when someone will die. And that's probably not all of it.
    • Professor Impossible, while still defeatable, got stretch powers while the rest of his family got invisible skin, skin that burns when oxygen hits it, and turned into basically one giant callous, so he got off pretty good.
    • Captain Sunshine can do anything Superman can and shoot beams of intense sunlight out of his chest. It's made up for by his Weaksauce Weakness though: He needs sunlight to use his powers and unlike superman does not get constant power from it.
  • Of the Teen Titans, Raven basically has a lot of powers. New Powers as the Plot Demands and Deus Ex Machina, for example. The Teen Titans Wiki lists her as having the following: Considerable arcane and mystic lore of both Azarath and Earth, telekinesis, astral projection ("Soul-Self"), levitation, empathy, telepathy, umbrakinetic dark energy manipulation (into energy blasts, a variety of constructs ranging from walls to claws to shields to flying platforms and effective telekinesis), biological manipulation (generally of herself), teleportation (across relatively short distances on the same planet or into other adjacent dimensions), time manipulation (uncontrolled and rare), physical healing (limited) of both herself and others, limited precognition, able to summon all her emotional forms and merge with them as White Raven in the multi-dimensional realm of her mind, ability to transfer power to others and cause them to lose consciousness, control over Trigon's lesser demons and ability to banish them (at least after acceptance of personal destiny), ability to rapidly age self back to normal age (in "white" form). She's by far the most frequent target for depowering or The Worf Effect, but when she's not either, the result is epic.
  • In Wakfu, followers of the god Xelor (who are also called Xelors) have the ability to manipulate time. The Hero, as well, can bend space by creating portals.
  • Justice League has the android AMAZO. His ability, to copy those of others, gave him the full set of the Original Seven's powers by his first appearance. Then he went into space for a while, and when he came back, he had enough power to teleport an entire planet. Because it was in his way. The entire extended League and Green Lantern Corps failed to even scratch him. At the end of it all, the person to defeat him was Lex Luthor.
  • Generator Rex has this to an extreme extent. The main cast is as follows: A Badass, but still entirely human MIB, a brilliant scientist, a talking monkey who is the Butt Monkey of the Worf Effect, an Unfazed Everyman Action Survivor...And Person of Mass Destruction whose current power set includes Depowering, Super Strength, Made of Iron, flight, technopathy, mid level mechanical shapeshifiting which gives him a wide array of weapons, and more.
  • In My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, a unicorn's magical powers are typically restricted to one specialty, usually associated with their Cutie Mark. Since Twilight Sparkle's magical specialty is magic, she doesn't have this restriction.
  • In Young Justice, Miss Martian's abilities were changed from the comics so as not to have too many heroes with super strength. So in place of her strength is telekinesis. All her other powers are the same, but they include being 'the most powerful untrained telepath' (according to J'onn), shape shifting (which can be used to become near invisible), flight as a result of the previously mentioned telekinesis, also the telekinesis mentioned before is strong enough to collide two helicopters without a breaking a sweat.


Real Life

  • Octopodes and other cephalopods. They're the closest thing to a shapeshifter we get in nature, able to change shape, skin texture, and color almost instantly to hide anywhere. They're insanely flexible, unusually intelligent for invertebrates, multi-limbed with Combat Tentacles, have underwater jet propulsion, can disappear in a cloud of ink, and have psychic powers. If land octopodes weren't impossible (their soft bodies can't be supported out of water and they'd dry up pretty quickly) and didn't only live to be about two years old, we'd be screwed.
  • The geographic territory of Europe, as Guns Germs And Steel points out. Access to domesticable crops and animals, and their attendant population boost and disease immunity? Check. Broken terrain encouraging a wide pool of highly competitive nation-states? Check. Favorable wind currents allowing for the conquest of two entire continents? Check. Places like Egypt and China may have had a great starting advantage, but regardless of who settled there, Europe was always going to own the late game. Later however, due to the heavily divided nature of Europe, which caused two World Wars that devastated them and let everyone else catch up in terms of technology, which was the only real advantage the Europeans had anyway, unless counting Europe as a group (which Europeans themselves don't) they are no longer the primary superpower and no individual European nation can hope to conquer an entire continent anymore.
    • Great Britain is the true winner of the lottery, having all the advantages of being in Europe, whilst being an island nation. This means naval dominance from a very early date, which to this date only the US can match, and thats only down to sheer numbers. If only it wasn't divided into 3 (or 4 counting Northern Ireland within the UK) very competitive individual nations, the whole world may have been very different...
  • Humans. What we got is Weak but Skilled taken Up to Eleven: we can utilize anything around us in limitless ways and can pretty much do anything. Still it's a Power At a Price, as big head and erect posture don't work together well, and we have to be born way before we are self-sufficient, and even then it's painfull for the mother. Opposable thumbs are still awesome.
    • Being born before we are self-sufficient is actually a blessing in disguise. The young of any species takes in information and learns better than the adults. (that's why many experts suggest that teachings in second languages should begin before the child is 10) While it does leave babies vulnerable, they have much more time to learn new things, which is better in the long run not just for the individual but for the species as a whole.
  1. ↑ she was the first to confess to Negi
  2. ↑ He once used technology to capture Loki, a rare instance of that character facing Science > Magic (though he eventually broke out...with difficulty); also, that thing about Hulk resisting Mind Control? Well guess who managed to make the Hulk his bitch?
  3. ↑ No, really, think of what each X-Man's greatest feat has been, and imagine him or her being able to operate at that level all the time easily. If Mimic's powers are as expandable for them as they proved to be for the original wielders, even Jean's full non-Phoenix potential could move mountains and control matter at a molecular level, as well as giving him influence over every mind within (an ever bigger) range. Scott's eyebeams can amp up to "stagger the Juggernaut or disintegrate a Sentinel" class. The full physical ability of the Beast could make him Spidey-class agile and nigh-Colossus class strong, Iceman's full ability, as an Omega, would be unlimited control of both water and temperature as well as turning to ice rendering him Made of Air (think a colder Hydro-Man), and even Angel's maneuverability at its maximum could make him all of the above... and impossible to hit. Death from above. If this happened when he was on the 'evil' side of the Heel Face Revolving Door, he could become worse than all the Big Bads combined if the writers didn't have this unfortunate tendency to forget he exists for decades at a time.
  4. ↑ Yes that's a power
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