So I was having a conversation about Wreck-it Ralph today, and somehow, the conversation turned to Fix-it Felix's hammer. For those who don't know, his hammer can fix anything just by hitting it. At this point, I wondered what would happen if Felix hit a corpse with his hammer. Would it come back to life? Here, the other person interjected that his hammer can only fix physical objects. I responded with that point in the movie where Felix heals his wounds by beating himself senseless. We reached an impasse.

So I put it to you, honorable duders of Giant Bomb. Does Fix-it Felix's hammer essentially make him immortal? I must know the answer.

He can be killed if you destroy the nucleus in his head with a kamehameha wave. He can't regenerate without that.

Does Felix have to wield the hammer to make it work or can anybody use it?

@slag:

I don't remember if anybody else ever wields the hammer.

A weakness in Wreck-It Ralph was that although they embraced the idiosyncrasies of "video game logic" it is a bit esoteric and applied arbitrarily at the last moment.

In any event, this reminds me of items in Rogue-like that are weapons but hit for -N damage. You can heal yourself or your pet by beating them up. So using video game logic, as long as the corpse is targetable and you can equip the golden magic hammer then it should be allowed.

This is incorrect information. You must destroy every possible cell, not just the one in the head, otherwise he can regenerate. Final Flash is also an acceptable alternative. Shame on you for spreading misinformation.

My hope is that if Felix's hammer was used on a corpse, it would come back to life. But it would come back wrong...

SOMETIMES, DEAD IS BETTER

No

Treating the movie as 'canon', though I haven't bothered to rewatch it:

1: When the characters are in the hall, they're told (by Sonic no less!) that if they die outside their own game, they die for real. If the hammer could negate this, Felix (who has been there for decades, and is incredibly helpful and kind) would surely be far more important and well-known, and not need to introduce himself - although he would probably do so anyway to be polite. Note that the hammer does work in other games (for instance, when fixing the finish line in the Candy game).

2: Felix does die in the movie at one point - in the apartment, hit by debris. He does leave a corpse, but resurrects automatically shortly after with the excuse that he had another life. Furthermore, the warning in point 1 only makes sense if it's not possible to die "for real" in your own game. So the hammer isn't necessary in any case while he's in the Fix-It-Felix arcade machine (this does make it strange that the apartment-dwellers were shocked by the death before Felix reveals he's okay, but perhaps deaths when the game is not being played are extremely rare, and are even more rarely witnessed by them, or they just don't travel much and aren't as aware).

3: The game code is directly accessible to the characters within the game (and indeed within games they don't belong to). Setting up a 'godmode' cheat is probably easier than having to deal with a hammer if a character was determined not to die at all - they could always just re-use the code inside the hammer. Mods and hacks are probably frowned on for obvious reasons, and changing your own game's operation might not help you outside of it, depending on how the transfer between games is supposed to happen, so that method might be useless. If it did reliably work across games, you'd expect to see duplication of useful tools (like the hammer, or devices capable of controlled flight) distributed around for emergencies and maintenance.

4: Since dead sentient characters are irrelevant to the hammer (either they're in their own game and don't need it, or are outside and unrecoverable), what other corpses are there? Only programmed ones. Not everything animated in the games is sentient (e.g. the 'hologram' officers at the tower when Ralph gets the medal, who don't react to the eggs and bugs), and games could have corpses that start dead with no need to be animated. Presumably the hammer would simply restore these to their original programmed state, and potentially even 'heal' them (it's capable of enlarging the bars in the candy prison cell, which seems to be a change from the original state), but it couldn't reattach an intelligence that never existed.

Conclusion: Immortality is possible, with some limitations, but the hammer would be at best a stopgap measure, and only capable of bringing the dead back to life in situations where they would revive anyway.

P.S. I haven't put that much thought into it so there's probably some mistakes.

Why don't they use Phoenix Down on Aerith.

When playing that game as a 9 year old, I really couldn't get my head around this.

When I read Internet answers years after the fact (well, before the fact for me), it was because the Masamune super-kills people and Phoenix Down don't do shit against it. Besides, there was a very inappropriate boss fight immediately after Aeris' death. Priorities, man.

He's immortal or at least regenerative because of the nature of his code, within his own game. The hammer itself has its own regenerative qualities, since it appears to be able to rebuild practically anything. It's their environment that allows them to reset back to healthy (at the end of every game).

I see you picked an answer but this was fun to think about.

My answer is simple: Fix-it -Felix is an object. A game object, like all videogame characters are. It's right there in the drop down menu of any game engine. Create New < Game Object.

That's why his hammer fixes him. And like all game objects, he is immortal so long as the loop is running, basically the hammer is just switching object states without hitting the restart. Or, the hammer is basically pulling the character out of the game loop and respawning them without hitting restart on the game entirely.