< Shoot the Shaggy Dog

Shoot the Shaggy Dog/Video Games

  • In The Darkness II, Jackie finally breaks through all of the lies and deceit of the Darkness to find Jenny's trapped soul in Hell. He manages to free Jenny, defying the Darkness's warnings, getting a touching moment with the woman he loves. After the credits, though, It Got Worse. The game makes the player let go of Jenny before she transforms into the Arch Enemy of the Darkness, the Angelus. The Angelus escapes from Hell, leaving Jackie trapped there with no way out, and having the woman he worked so hard to save not only fly away, but become his most powerful enemy, deadset on killing him and destroying everything he has left.
  • Both Left 4 Dead games can be considered this, depending on how you choose to interpret them. The first game was originally four unrelated campaigns, each meant to be a different "movie" that the characters were in, each of which ends in at least one of the characters surviving (assuming you beat the finale). However, later-released DLC filled in the time "between" two of the campaigns -- suggesting that the whole thing is pointless, because each time they're rescued, they only end up in the next campaign, no better off than they were before.
    • The Sacrifice has its share of Shoot The Shaggy Dog moments and aversions. The comics take place immediately after the crew is rescued by the military where they're kept in quarantine in a military camp slowly dissolving into anarchy, by guards who don't even know what Boomers and Smokers are. Also, it's revealed that Zoey had shot her father for no reason - he may not have zombified, but they took their cue from horror movies once he got bit. It ends with Bill sacrificing himself so that the other three can get to an island.
    • The sequel makes this explicit -- the five campaigns are in definite chronological order, rather than being distinct "movies" like the first game -- and even taken as a whole might still end up shooting the shaggy dog. In the ending to the last campaign, the characters are evacuated by the military, but various things about the city in the last campaign suggest that the military may be killing off "carriers" (people who do not themselves become zombies when infected, but can spread the infection to uninfected people who will become zombies from it), which may include the player characters. An alternate interpretation has them being kept in isolated quarantine and being subjected to medical experiments in an attempt to find a cure, instead of just being killed off, because that's so much better.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2: Arguably. Timey-wimey stuff cancels out the seemingly happy ending from Final Fantasy XIII. The plot of this game centers around Serah searching for her sister Lightning, who has vanished for no apparent reason. Various time paradoxes destroy progress made by the protagonists. In the end, Serah dies after beating the bad guy, Lightning is crystallized, and the bad guy gets better.
  • Terranigma. The main plot turns out to be one big Evil Plan on part of a dark god that made the hero revive a previously dead world, complete with human life... So that the dark god and its associates could conquer it. Once he finds out he's been the Unwitting Pawn the main character is reverted to a baby for trying to stop it, nearly killed by his own love interest and Exposition Fairy and just barely avoids death due to the sacrifice of his love interest. Then comes the part revealing that the new world and his own world exist in a cycle of death and rebirth where the rebirth of one world means the destruction of the old one: Foiling the plot and saving the new world from the dark god means he, and everyone he knows and loves from his own world, must die along with said god (and yes, thou must). This isn't the part that makes it an example of this trope, though. That would be the part where the hero turns out to be the Chosen One by the Powers That Be who run the worlds: He is reborn to do the exact same thing over and over again every time the cycle is repeated. And the cycle would only ever be broken if he failed. The game tops this off with the mother of all Mood Whiplash endings, where the protagonist is 'rewarded' with a final day in his pre-heroic existence together with all his friends and family, all blissfully ignorant of the fact that they will die at the end of it.
  • Possibly the biggest instance of a variation on this trope in a console RPG, however, can be found in the obscure Squaresoft game Live a Live (this is going to get a bit long). In the hidden Medieval chapter, the handsome knight Oersted gathers a crew of three other heroes to save the princess from the newly resurrected demon lord. They defeat the demon, only for one of the heroes to realize that that wasn't the actual demon, before dying of his illness. Then the dungeon collapses, and another member of the crew is caught by it. The two remaining heroes return home, and Oersted sees the demon in the night, and kills it... only to realize that it was an illusion. He killed the king instead. The entire kingdom declares him to be the true demon, and they capture and torture his remaining companion, almost to death. Said companion does die, after setting Oersted free and telling him to keep believing, because there is still one person who still believes in him; the princess. Oersted returns to the demon's lair, finds a secret passage in the strangely uncollapsed chambers, and finds... the companion that got caught in the collapse. Turns out he faked his death, and then proceeded to cause Oersted's life to go straight to hell, because he was jealous. Oersted duels him to the death, and then the princess, the last person who believed in him, shows up. She asks why he never came to rescue her (the traitorous friend having found her first), declares her love for the traitor and hatred for Oersted, and kills herself. Absolutely nothing good was accomplished, and now Oersted is completely alone and hopeless. Poor guy. Is there any wonder he then made himself into a demon lord using nothing but the raw power of his hatred?
  • Silent Hill 2: While escorting Maria in the hospital, if she gets killed (most easily during the Pyramid Head chase), it's a Nonstandard Game Over. However, all your hard work is apparently pointless, since she is scripted to die at the end of the chase sequence.
    • Subverted, since there's a lot more going on with Maria, who survives dying quite a few times. Nonetheless, Silent Hill absolutely LOVES this trope. Consider:
      • In Silent Hill 1, two endings revolve around the protagonist not being able to save his daughter at all from the great demon, and possibly only delaying the Eldritch Abomination from doing...whatever it was going to do.
      • In Silent Hill 2, all endings reveal the protagonist, originally sympathetic, murdered his wife and is being punished for it. In one ending, he commits suicide. In another, he takes the malevolent spirit who looks like his wife with him, with hints she will 'die' for the fourth time just as his wife did, and in one ending, he attempts a resurrection of his wife with spells from a world which would make Lovecraft wince. One ending, however, at least has him coming to terms with his inner demons and concludes with him moving on with his life.
      • In Silent Hill 3, there is a Nonstandard Game Over where the protagonist is consumed by an evil spirit in a horrific scene and an ending where she is possessed by a diabolic entity and kills the Only Sane Man.
      • In Silent Hill 4, one ending kills both protagonists horribly, one ending kills one protagonist and the other is lucky to survive, and a third leads to an evil genus loci taking over the protagonist's apartment, with who knows what horror to come.
      • In Silent Hill Origins, one ending leaves the protagonist trapped in asylum-like surroundings and given sinister injections by mysterious hooded individuals, as well as strongly hinting that the protagonist is in fact the serial murderer known as the Butcher.
      • And finally, in Silent Hill Homecoming, one ending sees the hero turned into a walking symbol of evil, one ending sees him drowned by his own father, one reveals it was all due to electroshock therapy at Bedlam House. Oh, sure, the series has a couple of happy endings, somewhere...
      • And then, the joke endings traditionally show the protagonists make it through all that only to be abducted by UFOs, rendering the whole nightmare they went through moot.
  • If you don't get the antidote for the zombie virus, every character's ending in Resident Evil Outbreak ends with them dying. The best you can hope for is a glorious death, taking out loads of zombies as you go -- and that sort of thing only occurs if you're playing the final level with a combination of characters that can't be set up anywhere but online. And since Capcom took their servers down as far as this game is concerned...
    • Taking out a bunch of zombies becomes pretty pointless too, when you remember that they would have just been destroyed when Raccoon City is nuked anyway.
  • The entire first third of Summoner consisted of you going through great lengths to gather and destroy four magical rings on the advice of your Mentor (a renegade ex-Watcher) and the royal house of your homeland in order to become powerful enough to smash through Murod's Orenian army, free Orenia, and kill Murod. Unfortunately, it turns out that the king's brother and the queen were conspiring with Murod and broke the siege to let in the Orenian army, destroying the four rings actually releases the incredibly powerful demons imprisoned within them, one of your party members was a partially unknowing patsy for this scheme, and your mentor has actually been Possessed by the most powerful of the four demons from within one of the rings since the start of the game, meaning that your ENTIRE game up to this point has been nothing more than the fulfillment of the villains' Evil Plan. This is made more exasperating yet by a Sidequest earlier in the game which would have implicated the traitorous brother in an earlier crime if the NPC characters involved didn't screw up their part of the operation.
  • The ending to the original Doom had the Space Marine escaping from Hell and returning to Earth... only to find that the demons he had been fighting have already invaded. Cue the sequel.
    • The ending of the first episode wasn't a bad example as well. After killing the two bosses, the Barons of Hell, the only exit is through a teleporter and after taking it, you get killed by a bunch of monsters, and, no, god mode will not help you. And the debriefing text afterward is so meta:

"Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base, you're supposed to win, aren't you? Aren't you? Where's your fat reward and ticket home? What the hell is this? It's not supposed to end this way!"

  • The plot of Diablo revolves around a protagonist who seeks to stop the titular demon from destroying the town of Tristram, setting himself free from the cathedral, and leading his demonic hordes to destroy the world. In the end, he kills the demon (actually, his human host) and plunges the stone containing his soul into himself, with hopes that he will be able to contain the demon's power. All in all, a reasonable ending. Now, cut to the second game. It is revealed that he couldn't resist it. He became Diablo, destroyed Tristram, set himself free, and is now leading his demonic hordes to destroy the world. Well, crap. It was actually revealed that by the time you face Diablo in the first Diablo game, you're already under his control. The entire point of Diablo's plotting in the first game was for him to find a stronger host body. He reckoned, correctly, that any being strong enough to fight his/her way down to him, and then "slay" him was exactly what he needed. The manual to Diablo II: Lord of Destruction even points out how every time people thought it was over, the brothers just kept reemerging.
    • The expansion of the sequel isn't much better. You manage to smash Mephisto and Diablo's soulstones! Except that Baal is still left unchecked, and he's figured out the location of the source of the soulstones, the Worldstone. Oh, and he manages to convince one of the NPCs to give him a Plot Coupon, meaning free access to the Worldstone for him. By the time you catch up to and kill Baal, Tyrael comes down and notifies you that Baal's corruption of the Worldstone means that the only way to prevent the entire Realm from becoming an outpost of Hell is to destroy the Worldstone. Not even Tyrael himself knows what will happen afterwards. All you can do is enter the portal he opens for you and wait for Diablo III (announced in 2008) One effect of destroying the Worldstone has been made clear: The previous location of the Arreat Summit on the world map is now labelled as the Arreat Crater. Ouch.
  • The video game version of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream was built with this in mind. There is only one way to win in any satisfying, "good ending" kind of way. Either you get all the characters to face their personal demons and die with dignity, after which four of them sacrifice their lives to give the fifth one a chance to defeat AM once and for all but must continue to forever roam AM's deceased mind to make sure it stays that way, or the lone survivor is turned into an immortal, hideous, miserable monster. And apparently Harlan Ellison, the original story's author, had initially objected to the good ending. And the part where the characters can die with dignity at all. In this sense, it's entirely true to the original story.
  • Kya Dark Lineage ended on what seemed to be a happy note with the heroine defeating the Big Bad and restoring peace to the alternate world... until the artifact that was supposed to take the heroine and her brother home dumps them in a desolate world where it's implied they're eaten by a monster. OK...
  • Chakan the Forever Man ended like this: Chakan, a soldier cursed with immortality until he destroyed all supernatural evil because he bested Death in a duel, never gets his final rest in any of the two final endings you can get. After he has 'rid the elemental and terrestrial planes of evil', Chakan impales himself with his own swords, only to be brought back to life by Death and mocked that, since there are countless planets in the universe that still have evil in them and he can never visit them all, his task will remain unfinished forever. You then duel Death. Be defeated, and Chakan will lament that his final rest can wait as he is still bound by his deal with Death. Defeat Death, and the game ends by showing you an hourglass that never empties: Death can't release you if you kill him. Either way, the plot Shoots the Shaggy Dog by not allowing Chakan to die at the end.
  • In an old Bullfrog game called Flood, you guide your character Quiffy through 42 levels of platform trouble and reach an ending animation where Quiffy climbs up a manhole to freedom and is immediately squashed by a truck. He deserved better.
  • This is the first half of the 4th Fire Emblem game, Genealogy of the Holy War. Everything starts going south for the main character, Sigurd after he enters Augustria. He promised the King he would leave after a year and a half; the king sent troops to attack Sigurd before then. Sigurd's friend Eltoshan, a knight under the king, gets executed for questioning his actions. Sigurd's wife Diadora gets kidnapped. Sigurd's father is framed for the murder of Grandbell's prince and Sigurd's wanted by his own country for crimes he didn't commit. He is offered refuge in the country of Silesia but he leaves after Grandbell sends troops in. While making a slow march towards the capitol, he watches his father die and finds out his sister and best friend (his brother-in-law) were killed while bringing reinforcements. When he reaches Velthomer, he is tricked into leading his small, exhausted army before Alvis's troops by being told the King knows he's innocent and that he can now rest. Alvis shows off his new wife, a brainwashed Diadora, and orders his troops to slaughter 'em all. Alvis himself kills Sigurd. But don't worry, seventeen years later all their kids finish the job.
  • Along with the Replacement Scrappy and Mind Screw issues, this trope is perhaps another reason why Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty received such venomous reactions. Everything that occurs only served to further the plans of the villains, the main character nothing but a pawn who isn't even sure if what he's experiencing is real anymore; and neither is the player for that matter.
    • The most blatant example is probably taking Emma to the Shell A core to upload the virus to make GW bug out. You easily spend at least an hour on the entire ordeal, including killing Vamp for the second time, trudging your way through tedious underwater segments, sneaking Emma past several patrolling guards, and then doing a 5-minute long Sniping Mission to ensure Emma makes it to the end. If she dies through any of this, Game Over. If she makes it over to Shell A, Vamp jumps out of the water and grabs her. He can also kill her for a Game Over, but if you kill him... he ends up having stabbed her anyway, and there is nothing Raiden or Snake can do to save her. And on top of that? THE VIRUS DOESN'T EVEN FULLY UPLOAD.
  • The basic plot of Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant goes like this: "There's a MacGuffin hidden on this planet. The Dark Savant is looking for it. Find it before he does, and don't let him have it." During the game's ending, after you've killed the Dark Savant and finally found the MacGuffin, the real Dark Savant shows up, hostage in hand, and demands that you hand it over in exchange for the girl you met earlier. The game actually lets you choose whether or not to hand it over, but if you decide to keep the MacGuffin, he just kills your party and takes it from your corpse. If you agree to the exchange, he gives you the girl, you give him the MacGuffin, and he goes off into space, with your characters in pursuit. Either way, you completely failed in your mission. Cue the sequel.
  • In I Wanna Be the Guy, if you don't move out of the way out of a slowly falling apple at the end of the ending sequence, you will actually die, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to be The Guy in the first place. Also, you have to fight The Guy all over again!
    • During the fight with The Guy to become The Guy, it is revealed that, The Guy is your character's father. He killed his own father to become The Guy, and you are going to kill him to become The Guy, and in the future your son is going to kill you and become The Guy. Geez...talk about pointless.
  • One possible ending in Shadow of Destiny has the main character escape death and, in the process, realise how precious life is. It's all very heartwarming... and then he lies down to look at the sky and is promptly run over by a car. End of game.
  • Peasants Quest (a video game spin-off from Homestar Runner and parody of old Sierra games) -- The goal is to gather up everything needed to be allowed to go fight the dragon, Trogdor, and then get past the traps guarding the gate to his lair. If you fail, of course, you die. If you succeed... Trogdor tells you how impressed he is that you got this far, and then burnininates you because, of course, silly peasant, you can't defeat a DRAGON! Fortunately, you get a statue in your honor, so it's not completely pointless...
    • Another Homestar example: the whole point of episode three of Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People, "Baddest Of The Bands", is to get cash to fix Strong Bad's broken FunMachine. Once repairs are finally paid for, not only is the console still not working, it turns out that all you had to do to "fix" it was to remove a "crusty wad of jalapeno cheese spray" stuck to the game cartridge! To quote Strong Bad himself, "What the crippity-crap!?"
  • In the Konquest mode of Mortal Kombat Armageddon, Taven and his brother Daegon are forced into hibernation for millennia by their parents in order for them to participate in a quest to stop The End of the World as We Know It. The quest ends up destroying his entire family, with Daegon being resurrected early and killing their parents and enslaving his guardian dragon for his clan, Taven's own dragon being killed to prevent his progress on the quest, and finally the brothers facing each other in Mortal Kombat (Taven wins, though he doesn't like it). And when he finally does complete the quest, not only does it not depower or destroy the entire cast, as the quest was supposed to upon completion, but it actually supercharges them, essentially causing Armageddon to happen faster instead of stopping it dead in its tracks.
  • Persona 2: Innocent Sin. The heroes fail to prevent the Big Bad from having his way and all of the Earth is destroyed aside from the city they live in which now hovers above the destroyed Earth. Maya, the Cool Big Sis, also dies because she gets stabbed by some crazy woman and all is lost. In return, the heroes get to rewind time so the event that started it all 10 years ago never happened. Of course this means all they did during the game was for no reason at all and it's pretty much just a big Game Over, please load your latest save (which was 10 years ago).
  • Persona 3's Bad Ending can be considered as an example of this trope. The protagonist and the rest of SEES not only accidentally release the Sealed Evil in a Can ( Nyx ) but then are given the chance to kill him while he's still in human form. If the protagonist decides to do so, The memories of the entire SEES team are wiped and they lose their ability to summon persona (Which removes the only chance they have of defeating Nyx). Not only that, but they also lose all their memories and friendships garnered during the previous year. The game then fast forwards to the end of the school year, which has the protagonist, Junpei and Yukari singing karaoke, drinking, and partying their hearts out, unaware that the end of the world is nearly upon them...
  • Resistance 2. Your first act in the game is to watch the Big Bad make a shiny escape, and then lose your home base. Your second act is to lose your second base, but just narrowly manage to save the inhibitor serum, which keeps you from turning into something like the Big Bad. But that doesn't matter, because suddenly you're going from place to place without ever bothering to keep yourself safely injected. What follows is a series of battles that you ultimately fail to win each and every time. But that's okay. At the end, you've set us up the bomb, and killed the big bad of the game. You ride the nuclear wave out of the flagship, and land, albeit roughly. Too bad it doesn't mean a thing. Some big, scary floating rock now dots the atmosphere, Earth is still screwed, and to top it off, your hero has just turned. Then he is very shortly thereafter executed.
  • The original Alien vs. Predator game had a particularly scary campaign for the squishy human Marine. Having fought your way through the infested colony and escaped to the unsurprisingly infested space station above the planet, having beaten the inevitable alien queen, you just get abandoned. You've probably seen too much. In any event, it didn't really matter as you started the campaign having just been facehugged anyway, so you're basically screwed regardless of what you do. Yay.
    • In an old Aliens 3 arcade shooter, the players take role of two prisoners fighting for survival as the Xenomorphs invade the prison. Finally, at the end, they run into the Weyland Yutani team sent in to retrieve Ripley. However, rescue is not high on their priorities and the Weyland Yutani thugs opt to just shoot the players instead.
  • At the end of Grand Theft Auto III, our hero is implied to have flipped out and literally shot the shaggy dog, i.e. Maria, who he went through all that trouble to rescue. This is one of the few times this is played for laughs.
  • The diamond subplot in Grand Theft Auto IV. Practically every criminal organization (and there are a lot) in the city gets involved in one way or another trying to steal a bag of diamonds the size of your fist. At the end of a long shootout, one of Bulagarin's men throws the bag into a passing truck full of mulch. Newspapers later report that the diamonds are found by a homeless man.
    • The homeless man is later shown in the ending of The Ballad of Gay Tony expansion pack, right after Luis lands in the park. He is later seen partying, though he strangely is still seen in his ragged dirty clothes.
  • Infocom used this trope at least twice.
    • In Infidel, the Player Character solves an ancient pyramid's brutal riddles, defuses its Death Traps, and opens the treasure sarcophagus in the Burial Chamber... only for the room to collapse, burying him alive. This is arguably justified, as the Player Character is a greedy, lying fool, but is that really a consolation after solving so many Expert-level puzzles?
    • Trinity tops this. It's a 1986 Time Travel game that begins with your narrow escape from a nuclear holocaust, which surely implies that your goal is to prevent World War III. And you do eventually make it to the site of the first atom bomb test... but you can't change history, and history now includes nuclear extinction. You're in a Stable Time Loop, and all you can do is escape from the holocaust again ... though it's implied you'll end up back there over and over again. While you do prevent disaster from happening in 1945, the final line emphasizes that, ultimately, you are surrounded by children who will never grow up.
  • In Adam Cadre's Varicella, Player Character Primo Varicella's goal is to become Regent to the royal prince. Most players will need many, many playthroughs against a frustratingly tight time limit to eliminate Varicella's homicidal rivals. Your reward for pulling this feat off is victory! Except the prince grows up to be more Ax Crazy than all of the rivals put together, and sentences Varicella to torture and death. There are other endings, all grim, save for an Easter Egg. Given the dreary setting, in which everybody's some combination of "evil," "crazy," and "victim," the shaggy dog's death might have been inevitable.
  • Jinxter. You die pointlessly, after spending an entire game trying to avoid this. Computer Gaming World labeled this one of the top fifteen worst game endings of all time.
  • Tenchu 4. Gohda castle burns, Kiku and Sekiya are dead and Onikage has (possibly) infected Ayame
  • The ending of the Hierarchy Campaign in Universe At War. Orlok is betrayed and killed, his rebellion accomplishing absolutely nothing except getting the Masari prince captured -- even the major characters he apparently killed during his campaign turn up alive and well when it switches over to the Masari.
  • In part two of Chapter 9 in Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus, The GUARDIANS are looking for a young Beast boy infected with the SEED-virus to give him the vaccine before the AMF CASTs kill him. However once found he ends up turning into a SEED form, forcing him to be killed anyway.
  • In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, Larkeicus spent 2,000 years planning a way to restore the crystals to the world, building a tower miles high to reach the place the cataclysm would occur. It then occurs anyway, only BECAUSE of the methods he used in the process, and since he's there at the time it ends up killing him. To top that off, the only reason it happened so exhaustingly high in the sky was because he built the tower that high.
  • In the "Sisters" mode of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. Since it's a prequel to the storyline of the main game, the ending doesn't surprise anyone who's unlocked it, but it's still a kick in the teeth. You don't even get to fight Brauner or Dracula. As soon as you walk into Brauner's room, he takes Cutscene Power to the Max and vampirizes the protagonists in front of their dying father. You have no chance to avoid this in any fashion. Fortunately things get better in the main story.
  • Activision's Apocalypse. At the end, Trey has defeated the Four Horsemen, and confronts the Big Bad Reverend himself. But before Trey can take him down, the Rev blasts him with lightning and transforms Trey into one of the demons.
  • Chrono Cross retroactively does this to Chrono Trigger, by revealing that the kingdom of Guardia was destroyed, with most of the cast living in 1000 AD implied to be destroyed, between the events of the two games, the residents of the timeline canceled by the Trigger heroes were sent to the Darkness Beyond Time, and the first game's Big Bad took on a new, even more dangerous form. Whether these things render the entire plot of Trigger pointless or merely explore a darker side of it is up to interpretation.
    • Both ports of Trigger released since Cross also added extra cutscenes to further emphasize this fact: The Fall of Guardia did not exist in the SNES version, so the game never ended with "Unexplainable army kills everyone in Guardia including our heroes." The Dream Devourer fight in the DS version was also new and pretty much exists for you to fight, win, and then be told you can't win and get sent back to the past...thus Chrono and his friends cannot stop the horrible events in the future from happening let alone their own horrible demises.
    • Certainly not the case. The day of Lavos is contained and the "apocalypse" gets delayed from the Day of Lavos in 1999 AD to the Time Crash in 2400 AD. Civilization gets an extra 401 years directly because of Triggers character's actions.
  • Probably less shaggy then most, but the Dream Chronicles series of puzzle games have this sort of ending. You spend the whole game looking for your kidnapped husband and child, and at the end you're whisked away to an enchanted prison. After escaping from that, you get amnesia and forget you even have a husband and child. It's not the worst and these problems are quickly fixed in the next game, but it's annoying.
  • The game Cyber-Lip is a Contra-style action side-scroller developed by Neo Geo. The story appears to be fairly run-of-the-mill throughout: the President orders two Bad Dudes to find and destroy the titular Cyber-Lip, a military supercomputer that's gone mad and destroyed a good portion of the Earth with its deadly army of cyborgs. Throughout the game you receive briefings from the President after each level on where to progress next. Once you reach the final level and destroy the Cyber-Lip once and for all, you receive a message from the President congratulating you on a job well done. Seems obligatory enough, being an arcade shoot-'em-up and all... until the player is suddenly hit with a Cruel Twist Ending when it is revealed that the "President" was an evil alien leader bent on world domination the entire time. The aliens apparently were the ones that caused the Earth's military technology, including Cyber-Lip, to go haywire, probably via programmed viruses or some similar means, and you, being the naive pawns that you were, went right along and finished the aliens' job for them: destroy every last remaining bit of Earth's defenses, allowing the aliens ample room to take over your planet once and for all. "The Earth is ours," declares the faux-President, and with an evil grin and a pair of frightening, red glowing eyes to boot. The End! No sequel was ever made, nor announced, and it is highly unlikely that one will ever be made, so as far as anyone knows, this marks the end of the heroes' feckless, fruitless battle. Now, just imagine the reactions of the people who spent quarter after quarter to get to the end of this game and defeat the final boss, only for their efforts to be greeted with THAT.
  • Baten Kaitos Origins has the story of Seph and his Nakama. First they try to save the village of Rasalas from Wiseman, only to arrive too late to do anything. Then they try to negotiate with Wiseman, who uses the opportunity to wipe out their hometown while they're away and simultaneously prove to them that they were completely powerless against him. This is something that Seph takes to heart after he discovers the results of the aforementioned act, and he decides to make a Deal with the Devil for the power needed to defeat Wiseman. Once they return, they find that Wiseman has taken over the minds of everyone in the world's largest city. As they are fighting through the aforementioned group to get to Wiseman, the Children of the Earth see the "senseless slaughter" they are inflicting, and decide to fix the problem by killing them. Which they succeed in doing, thus allowing Wiseman to escape completely unharmed. And the best part? The Children of the Earth had viewed Wiseman as a threat and were about to do the same to him before Seph and his Nakama stepped in. Meaning that if they had simply done nothing, there would have been no need to lift the world up into the sky, Wiseman would have been killed, and they wouldn't have had to pay the price of their Deal with the Devil - because there would have been no deal. Every single one of the problems faced in both this game and the original Baten Kaitos could have been completely avoided. Sucks to be those guys, huh?
  • In Dreamfall, none of the game's three protagonists manages to achieve their objectives. Although main character Zoé Castillo manages to prevent a societal and technological collapse in Stark, she fails at her mission to stop WATICorp from releasing the Dreamer and proves unable to rescue her ex-boyfriend--worse still, she is placed in a permanent coma. Over in Arcadia, April Ryan is unable to prevent the Azadi Empire from completing their Evil Tower of Ominousness, or even figure out what it's for, and is left for dead. The third protagonist, Azadi apostle Kian Alvane, is arrested for treason by the empire just after he decides to try to convince its leaders of the error of their ways. While some or most of these may end up being reversed if or when the game receives a sequel, calling the game's ending a downer would be a gross understatement.
  • Obs Cure II: Mei spends the first half of the game trying to track down her twin sister Jun and save her. When she finally tracks her down, the game lets you control Jun's escape attempts, only to have her brutally killed literally seconds after yanking that control away. Things go downhill from there. One by one, the heroes suffer increasingly Cruel And Unusual Deaths until only two of the original students remain, all their attempts to stop the infection from spreading fail, and the ending leaves the two survivors facing down a cloud of black spores implied to be surrounding an even more horrific monster than the Final Boss.
  • In many video games, a Nonstandard Game Over, as well as Have a Nice Death and The Many Deaths of You can be considered a Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending, especially if they put considerable effort into it. Then again, so can an ordinary, generic game over, if you think about the consequences before retrying.
  • At least the "Path of Darkness" ending to Alone in the Dark. If you shoot Sarah, Lucifer's Evil Plan fully succeeds, and the possessed Carnby opens the gates of hell, heralding The End of the World as We Know It. Earlier, it is said "Lucifer's failure is also his reincarnation".
  • In Super Robot Wars Original Generations (read: NOT Gaiden yet), we have a mechanical dog who eventually develops and feels like an actual dog. After spending through hardships that affirms that it has emotions and is like a real person, er, dog, it is captured and was about to turned back into a mindless machine again. Thankfully, the dog gained an iron will and it was able to escape that predicatement and was on the verge of being rescued... only to be shot down dead. What's the point of having an iron will and all those hardships if in the end, it just dies like that? It seriously makes her whole development, and the buildup that leads to its iron will escape completely pointless. Thankfully, OG Gaiden deals with the continuation and is now trying to resuscitate the dead shaggy dog. That dog's name? Lamia Loveless.
  • The ending of Yume Nikki likely qualifies....
  • Played straight in Batman: Arkham Asylum. At two points in the game you're required to save Dr. Young, getting a Nonstandard Game Over if you fail. After you save her the second time she dies literally about a minute later anyway falling for a trap left by the Joker.
  • Poor, poor Charlie... His death was a Foregone Conclusion (in Street Fighter II, Guile's motivation was that Bison killed Charlie. Charlie's debut game was a Prequel with no Guile in sight). Charlie can never win. In Street Fighter Alpha, he thinks he's defeated M. Bison, but Bison comes from behind and kills him. In Street Fighter Alpha 2, a Remaquel of the original Alpha, he gets knocked off a waterfall in Venezuela, but only after getting shot by a Shadaloo helicopter. In the non-canon Marvel Super Heroes VS Street Fighter, he's been given a Face Heel Turn and works for Shadaloo. Somehow, in Street Fighter Alpha 3, he's alive and well. This time, he actually manages to beat M. Bison...but Capcom fixed that by adding Guile to the home ports of the game and declaring his ending canon canon. In his ending, Charlie infiltrates M. Bison's base with Guile and Chun-Li, and while Guile and Chun-Li escape, the base self-destructs, killing Charlie and Bison both. What's worse is that Bison came back, while Charlie has been Killed Off for Real (or not, since Capcom loves Retconning this series).
    • At this point it seems likely, but definitely don't bet the dojo on it. Don't forget that Gouken, who was killed before the first game, and whose death was a huge turning point and defining moment for no fewer than three major characters, was brought back. And Rose. And shouldn't Gen have gently shuffled off long before now?
  • In the Twisted Metal series, competitors fight in a massive demolition derby with missiles, blowing up opposing cars, monuments, and cities with abandon. The prize? A wish granted by competition organizer Calypso, who wavers between Literal Genie and Jackass Genie. It rarely ends well, though occasionally someone will wise up and turn down the wish.
  • The Futurama video game ends like this, as the playable characters' reviving device is destroyed, and they, who have traveled back in time to prevent the beginning of the game, are crushed shortly afterward by the final boss. And then, just when it looks like their actions had prevented the professor from selling the company, Mom offers him the sombrero he was wearing at the start of the game. Return to the first scene.
  • Dead Rising ends this way as well. The protagonist, Frank West, enters a shopping mall that later becomes overrun with zombies. Frank can go around the mall, gathering information on the outbreak and/or save the remaining survivors. Of course, it ultimately doesn't matter, considering Carlito has infected a bunch of orphans, given them all a serum that delays the growth of the larva that turns them into zombies, and had them sent to various orphanages throughout North America, resulting in the infection's nation-wide spread. The rest of the world is left alone, but it can only be assumed that some infected people will cross into other countries. But then again, there is the sequel.
    • Some of the first game's other endings didn't use this trope (many people who die from plot live). Said sequel make all of Chuck's efforts for nothing if you fail to get the conditions for Ending S. Endings F-B all end with Chuck and Katey dying with no chance of escape despite everything you've done. Ending A leads into Dead Rising Case West, so you survive there, at least.
  • Driver 3: Tanner shoots Jericho, but spares his life. Then Jericho gets back up and shoots Tanner, who is last seen flatlining, the doctors attempting CPR. The game wasn't received so well, then there was the In Name Only Parallel Lines, which was the final nail in the coffin. RIP Driver.
    • Or maybe not. Driver 5 is in the works which will carry on this plot line: Tanner is in a coma and a great part of the game, if not all of it will take place in his head while he tries to wake up.
  • Pirated copies of EarthBound give us a meta-example. You play through the game, which ends up being almost exactly the same (more enemies, though) and, once you get to the final boss, The game freezes. And then deletes all of your save files.
  • Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. Admittedly it's the Bad End, but still- the hero devotes his entire life to taking revenge on the Valkyrie for killing his father, making a Deal with the Devil and crossing the Moral Event Horizon to do so. Ignore for a second the fact that the Valkyrie only escorts the souls of those already dead to Valhalla, the Norse warrior's heaven. He finally achieves his goal, but then Freya shows up and reveals that the Valkyrie will reincarnate eventually, rendering Wylfried's victory pointless and his revenge impossible. He then gets sent to hell per the terms of his contract, having accomplished nothing but bringing the kingdom he was trying to protect to ruin. To add insult to injury, the epilogue reveals that the Valkyrie took a dive in the fight as an act of repentance, as she felt that Wylfried's Face Heel Turn was her fault.
  • Halo: Combat Evolved has several moments like this. At the end of the first chapter, John dramatically rescues a marine who trips and nearly misses the last lifeboat; unfortunately, all the marines on board die in the crash anyway. At the end of what is arguably the third mission with the objective of finding/rescuing Captain Keyes, it turns out that he was already part of the proto-Gravemind. The goal of the second chapter, and side-objectives several times throughout the rest of the game, is to rescue groups of marines so that they can be evacuated to a safer part of the ring, which is destroyed at the end of the game leaving no survivors (later retconned to a single dropship of survivors).
    • In Reach, Jorge sacrifices himself to destroy the Covenant carrier... only for an entire fleet to emerge from slipspace.
  • Kingdom Hearts 358 Days Over 2. Roxas's best friend, who has spent the entire game trying to figure out her purpose and later defy the purpose Organization XIII have engineered for her ends up getting brainwashed/reprogrammed, doing their dirty work for them, including trying to kill Roxas. He is forced to kill her, and when he gets ready for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, he gets beat down by The Rival from the first game, gets his memory wiped so that he doesn't even remember his friend, and the stage is set for Kingdom Hearts II... where he is absorbed by Sora in the prologue. At least you knew (most) of it was coming, if you played the games in the order they were released.
  • Divinity 2. In the end, it turns out you have been manipulated by the villain's girlfriend the entire game. You end up resurrecting her, making the villain invincible, and then find yourself imprisoned in some sort of crystal, alive and conscious to watch the world you tried to save burn. That's not even to mention what this does to the already trashed reputation of the dragon knights from their last accidental betrayal of mankind. It's probably a good thing you are the last one.
  • BioShock (series) had an ARG for the sequel called 'Something in the Sea' who's main character became well-liked enough to be placed in the game. Many a fan cheered when they saw Mark Meltzer's first audio diary in the game recording his heroic efforts to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Not so much cheering at hearing his last...since you take it off his corpse...after YOU kill him personally...with his daughter a few feet away from his body. Because he had been turned into a Big Daddy by Sofia Lamb.
    • However, if you have a soul and rescue Cindy and you eventually get the good ending, then his sacrifice is not in vain. If you are a Complete Monster and harvest the girl...well...then it invokes this trope.
    • Undermining this somewhat is a bug - if you return to the area where Meltzer is patrolling after killing him, another Big Daddy has taken his place. Killing this Big Daddy will yield another copy of Meltzer's final audio diary.
  • Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, DS version. All that trouble you had to go through, and the whole thing was All Just a Dream?! And almost all of the characters you worked your ass of to save get destroyed anyway?!?! Cue Anger Montage
    • Plus that means that the Creator isn't real, and you're NOT the Creator, which was the main gimmick of the series!!!
  • The American campaign in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Everything that Sergeant Paul Jackson does, from taking part in the invasion of Qu'rac, trying to capture Al-Asad (and failing), protecting a tank as it moves through a hostile area and rescuing a downed Cobra pilot from group of terrorists is all rendered moot as you evacuate Qu'rac. A nuclear missile goes off in the city, killing your commanding officer, your fellow teammates, the pilot you just saved, and, eventually, you. This is done to drive home the point that war is (if you consider the actions that you just took in the campaign) pointless. General Shepard comments on this in the sequel: "50,000 of my men died in the blink of an eye, and the world just fuckin' watched."
    • Somewhat disputable. It's fairly heavily implied that Al-Asad had the resources to dominate the Middle East with Russian Ultranationalist aid and (given the implications of that) heavily devastate all opponents. If nothing else, Jackson and his allies managed to dismantle Al-Asad's army to the point where nuking his own capital became the only way for him to salvage even a flipping of the bird from the defeat. Still an utterly tragic Pyrrhic Victory, but still vastly preferable to the alternative.
    • In the sequel, this trope returns in spades. Private Allen goes deep undercover with a terrorist cell killing hundreds of civilians in a Moscow airport - and then gets shot by the cell leader Makarov. When Russian authorities discover his body, they declare war on the U.S. Later, Ghost and Roach are dispatched to gather proof that Private Allen was innocent and that there was no reason for the Russia and the U.S. to be at war. Roach then delivers the evidence to General Shepard - who then shoots him and Ghost dead, douse them with gasoline, and set them on fire amid Captain Price frantically radioing in that Shepard is not to be trusted. If only this had actually worked...
  • Suikoden Tierkreis doesn't require the death of this particular Dog, but it certainly tries to bait the player into it. All but two Dialogue Trees in the game end with you taking the same path you would anyway, one repeats endlessly until you make the right choices . . . and one lets you determine whether or not to Combined Energy Attack the Big Bad, risking the lives of those who participate in the attack, with a "yes" answer being the default option, and a "no" answer being a declaration that there must be some other way to defeat him, with no indication you're doing anything more than denying what's necessary. Choose "no," and you'll later discover that he made the same choice against a similar foe, and every single one of the participants except him died. He was warped and twisted into becoming the villain he is now, and if you choose "yes," you'll follow in his footsteps, over the bodies of a hundred and seven of your allies (all of whom have previously been given names and personalities, and many of whom have had side quests centering on them!)
  • Knights of the Old Republic starts on the planet Taris, which has several side quests such as helping innocent people escape from bounty hunters (or killing them) and finding a cure for the rakghoul disease. As soon as you leave Taris, Malak fires on the planet from orbit and kills everyone. Even the Hope Spot you ear playing light side is turned into a twisted joke by the MMO. The Outcasts found their Promised land, and survived for a few generations, only to be picked off by rakghouls, disease, starvation, and finished off by toxic waste. Then again, the MMO is BioWare post-Dragon Age, so No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
    • Oh, and the Shaggy Dog is used for target practice well after that. The second planet you visit, with its nice peaceful farms is nuked by Malak. In the Crapsack World of the sequel, Exile goes back to find everyone lays the blame for it squarely on the Jedi...even Exile, who wasn't even there.
    • The MMO's backstory ultimately turns the dog into a bloody pulp: Revan and Exile leave everyone and everything they loved behind to wait and wonder (Bastila is left knocked up, starting a line that eventually results in Satele Shan) with no answers or closure. Meanwhile, they go charging in to fight an entire kriffing empire alone. Exile is at least killed outright, but Revan isn't so "fortunate". Oh, and the Sith come back and burn the Republic anyway, meaning it was pretty much all for nothing.
      • Well, it is possible that Revan and Exile delayed the True Sith from invading for about a few hundred years. So there efforts may have amounted to something.
        • Associated media actual implies this is the case. Revan and the Exile's attack on the Empire convinces the Sith Emperor to postpone his plans significantly and Revan's exploiting of the mental link between himself and the Emperor is largely responsible for the Treaty of Coruscant. It eventually allows a new generation of heroes to rise and face the Empire.
  • Killzone 2. All the ISA's sacrifices have apparently been for naught, as they are about to be annihilated by the Helghast's reserve fleet. Well, there is the threequel.
  • The old Amiga game onEscapee has a doozy. The main character has been sucked onto an alien world, survived untold dangers, and has met up with some fellow humans. All he has to do is deal with an alien blocking the hangar controls, and they can fly on out of there. After dispatching the alien, he returns to the ship...and it's gone. The crew mistook a brief lapse in his life signs as him dying, and blasted off without him. Not only is he stranded, but the hangar was rigged with explosives to cover the escape. He has enough time to let out some Manly Tears before everything explodes...
  • At least one of the endings in Gunstar Super Heroes has the entire Gunstar team dying pointlessly.
  • This happens twice in Dragon Quest V. While your character is a child traveling with your father Pankraz, you get the assignment to rescue the incredibly bratty Prince Harry. After going through the tunnel complex where he's held, you find and release him... but some minions of the Big Bad get the drop on you! Luckily, Pankraz beats them both handily. The Big Bad then takes you hostage and says that he'll kill you if Pankraz interferes - and revives his minions. Pankraz then gets beaten to death by the minions, and you and Prince Harry are forced into slavery. Ten years pass before the next phase of the game. Later on, you get married and have children - but the day after your wife gives birth, she is kidnapped! It turns out that the former castle chancellor is in league with the monsters. You eventually find him right before he dies from monster-delivered injuries. Later on, you find your wife - when the Big Bad turns both you and your wife into living statues. You are then stolen by tomb robbers and sold to a rich man - where you watch him having fun raising his child for the next eight years. However, you are eventually found and restored by your children!
  • Robotron: 2084 is an Endless Game that can't technically be won, then the sequel, Blaster retroactively shoots the shaggy dog, since it is revealed that the last human family has in fact been killed.
  • The fifth ending of Drakengard, which is only unlocked after One Hundred Percent Completion (keep that in mind). After spending the entire game trying -- and failing -- to protect the seals that will prevent The End of the World as We Know It (all of whom are destroyed off-screen no matter what you do), Caim and Angelus manage to face down Manah. Before anyone can do anything, Manah is crushed and killed by her own brother, causing the destruction of the fortress you were all in that kills Caim's sister, Furiae (again off-screen). Manah's death and the destruction of the seals and Barrier Maiden angers The Watchers, who decide to enter the world and destroy it. After losing the rest of the party against The Watchers in a series of Senseless Sacrifices, Caim and Angelus engage the leader of the Watchers and both of them are transported into another dimension for a climactic final showdown... The 'other dimension' turns out to be modern-day Tokyo. After a grueling Bonus Boss fight, the Watcher leader finally gives up the ghost. At which point Caim and Angelus are instantly and anticlimactically shot down and killed by a JSDF jet fighter in the closing cutscene. DRAKENGARD!
    • It Gets Worse. These events cause the magical plague that nearly destroys humanity in Nie R. That game ends with the title character destroying humanity's only hope of recovering from the disease.
    • And in the sequel to the first ending of Drakengard, Drakengard 2, also does this in its Ending A. The entire game is spent destroying the districts that essentially form the seals that bind Angelus, Caim's dragon from the first game. After destroying the dragon and launching the world into an apocalypse extremely similar to that of the first game (following Furiae's death), they realize that they have to make another goddess seal... so they place Eris as the goddess seal and the districts are remade. That basically means that the seals you've worked so hard throughout the game and killed a ton of people for the sake of destroying? They all have to be rebuilt to make Eris' burden more tolerable.
  • The ending to Red Dead Redemption. Despite all the hardships John Marston had to go through to kill his partners in his old gang for the US government in order to get his family back, he's still gunned down by the government official that got him into the whole mess in the first place. Worst of all, John's son, Jack, dedicates the rest of his life to be a wandering gunslinger like his father in order to avenge his death, something John explicitly never wanted his son to be.
  • The Adult Swim flash game Corporate Climber goes somewhere between this, Karmic Death, and Eternal Recurrence. Promoted from "peon" steadily on upwards, you're often given dubiously ethical tasks (for instance, as a CFO you're ordered to "Cook the books" by throwing them into a fire.) As a board member your only assignment is to "Live it up," but once you're promoted to president you "Pay the piper," thrown out the window by all the people you've wronged. If you want, you can go to hell from here, but you can also return to Earth as a peon and start all over.
  • Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors: Ending 5, "Knife". After finding door 9, Junpei and the others backtrack to find Clover. While searching, Junpei finds Lotus stabbed to death and is himself stabbed moments later. Though Junpei sees his killer, the player doesn't, leaving the player with no real understanding of the plot and no idea as to who the killer is.
    • Not just that ending. Ending 6, "Submarine", You walk into the main hall, and see Ace, Santa, and Clover on the staircase, covered in blood. Along with Seven and Lotus, you flee through a series of rooms, which had been unlocked, util you reach the Sun Room. Akane lay dead, and you find the dead bodies Seven and Clover. With all of the others presumably dead, you run over and examine a strange submarine bobbing on the water. Then... you are stabbed and die, with all of your questions unanswered, and much more mysteries apparent.
    • If the "Safe" ending hasn't been cleared beforehand, then the "True" ending (which is otherwise the Golden Ending) ends with several of the group, including the main character, forced to hopelessly try and work out a passcode for which they lack the necessary clue.
  • One Chance: Possibly the most depressing game ever. The best ending you can hope for is only your wife, coworkers, and most of the world dying. And you can't play again until you empty your cookies folder.
  • Mondo Medicals. You wander through the corridors (of the eponymous facility?), solving your way past mind-boggling obstacles and generally being confused and creeped out, and at the end - instead of any answers at all - you get a sudden bullet in the head.
  • In Radiant Silvergun, our heroes are powerless to stop the Stone-Like from wiping out human kind. The Creator robot creates clones of Buster and Reanna, but dies before he can warn them of the future. Thus, humanity is doomed to repeat the cycle, and will never learn the error of their ways.
  • The PlayStation FPS Codename: Tenka: The main character is an honest citizen who has worked many years to get off a ravaged Earth, only to find that the colony he has chosen is run by a Mega Corp that use its inhabitants to manufacturate mindless war cyborgs. He narrowly escapes being turned into one and wages war with the guidance of a rogue AI in order to escape the colony. After destroying countless assets of the Mega Corp, his "reward" is being killed by the AI, who no longer needs him.
  • The ending of Uşas (for the MSX) involves the two protagonists placing the four jewels they painstakingly fought to obtain on the forehead of the statue of the titular goddess only for it to obliterate our protagonists with a nuclear explosion. In the Japanese version, it was explained as an artifact of an ancient civilisation and that it's switch was the jewels. There is no such explaination in the PAL version.
  • FEAR 2: Project Origin ends with three of Michael Beckett's teammates dead, one missing and presumed dead, one mortally wounded, and Beckett himself trapped with the Big Bad Alma in the very machine meant to destroy her-which has been turned off by Corrupt Corporate Executive Genevieve Aristide in an attempt to curry favor from her superiors by capturing Alma. To add insult to injury, Alma then rapes Beckett and conceives a child who is implied to be just as powerful as its mother, possibly setting the stage for The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Canabalt: No matter how far or fast you run, the only thing waiting for you is failure and death. There's no escape, and nothing to run to.
  • In stark contrast to the rest of the Suikoden series' normal endings, the normal ending for Suikoden 2 ends with Riou losing everything he ever cared for (his hometown, his sister and his best friend, the latter by his own hand), all his victories rendered hollow, and forced into a position he never asked for nor wanted as a figurehead ruler. The game ends with the not so subtle implication that Riou becomes a broken, bitter man whose status will likely be taken advantage of by ambitious advisers and generals...after all, what point was there to stop Luca and the Beast Rune, if in the end you become far worse off than you were before?
  • The ending of Do Don Pachi DaiFukkatsu. Next EXY went back in time in order to destroy the DonPachi Corps and prevent the events of DoDonPachi dai ou jou from happening. But in doing so, she ends up causing the events of DOJ--Colonel Longhena is appointed the commander of DonPachi, and the Blissful Death Wars happen anyway. Simply put, the entire plot of DFK was absolutely pointless.

"How long would this endless series of conflicts continue..."

  • Dead Island pulls this twice in the final few minutes. First, the voice (a Marine Colonel) guiding you to find a cure for the disease gasses you, leaves you for dead, steals the cure, and calls in an order to bomb the island - making all the work you did getting survivors to shelters and gathering medical supplies for them completely irrelevant. Second, when the Colonel gets bitten by his zombified wife, he uses the only vial of the cure (which you spent a good chunk of the game buying time for the scientists to develop) on himself - which doesn't work and turns him into the final boss.
  • The "Relinquish" Bad End in Vacant Sky, which requires completing the final dungeon without your other party members and minus a few skill upgrades you'd normally get right before entering, a task far harder than obtaining either of the "good" endings. Auria kills the villain in a cutscene, but not before he uses his power to make her perceive that she dies immediately afterward, despite being immortal. Nothing is done to stop Halo Locks from being restored and killing countless people; not only is this the only ending where that happens but it would in fact fail to happen had you lost the game anywhere except the final boss, as the villain's plan hinged on getting Auria to the bottom of the final dungeon. But wait, there's more! This is also the only one of the three main endings in which Vastale does not die and nothing at all is done to even slow down the Virad menace, and it's likely that Vel never wakes from her coma. That's what you get for intentionally violating the story's Aesop.
  • An In-Universe example happens in The World Ends With You - Neku wins his first Game, Shiki is picked to come back to life, and everything is happy.... but, really, you didn't expect the game to be that easy to win, did you? Not only can Neku not come back to life because only one person may be reborn each Game, The Conductor explains that because Shiki became the most important thing in the world to Neku, she's been taken as his Entry Fee. Everything Neku worked for during the first Week is negated. It gets even worse when, at the end of the second Week, The Conductor uses an equally trumped-up excuse to not only take away Neku's victory, but make it as if the second Week never even happened. When Neku learns, at the end, that these were all created because Kitaniji literally could not bring him back, and everything he thought he was playing for is a lie, he is, understandably, upset. Neku even lampshades this at one point during the third Week, where he's given up on the Game entirely - he tells Beat that even if he won, Kitaniji would just come up with a stupid excuse to disqualify him. When, after the last events of the game, The Reveal (and a doozy it was), and his apparent loss and (second) death at the hands of Joshua, he believes everything to have been in vain, he wakes up in the exact manner he does at the beginning of each Game, in the Scramble, leading to believe he has to play again. His literal "What the HELL!?" is big enough to have almost become a meme in itself. Of course, the game itself isn't an example, and in fact, is the complete opposite - if it weren't for Neku, his growth as a character, and all of his and his partners' actions, Shibuya would either be destroyed, under the complete control of Kitaniji, or ruled by Minamimoto, and he does get to come back to life at the end and reunite with all of his friends...except one.
  • In Shadow of the Colossus while you bring Mono back to life, she gets trapped in the forbidden world to presumedly starve to death; Wander dies and is reborn as a baby (to starve to death as well); the Dormin have been resealed and the people who killed Mono in the first place get away without a problem. And Agro has a limp. It would have been best had Wander never set of on his quest at all.
    • To be fair, Wander was able to survive on fruit throughout the game and the deer in the final sequence shows that some life has returned to the valley, making Wander, Argo and Mono's situation not completely hopeless.
  • This is part of James Vega's backstory in Mass Effect 3. On a mission against the Collectors (the big threat from the previous game) gone FUBAR, he had to choose between keeping his team alive or getting out with intel the Alliance could use to stop the Collectors once and for all. He chose the intel, only for Shepard's team to take out the Collectors themselves before any good could come of it.
    • The biggest complaint about the third game's controversial ending is that it's perceived as this. After the story of one human's choices shaping a galaxy, interactions between diverse sentient races, the development of relationships between people, etc. Then the last fifteen minutes of the third game in the series becomes narratively disjointed, limiting player options, and give a generally unexplained ending, the most optimistic interpretation of which leaves the galaxy in a new dark age.
    • That said, in interpretations of the ending that don't come to the conclusion that all life in the galaxy has been wiped out, Shepard's actions have, at the very least, saved galactic civilization from extinction at the tendrils of the Reapers. However, the means through which this is achieved might seem generally unappealing to some players. According to the Catalyst, picking "Destroy" will kill all synthetic life-EDI and the geth included-in the galaxy, "Control" generally vindicates the Illusive Man's ideals and contains a great deal of Fridge Horror, and the "Synthesis" makes a rather broad and unilateral decision for all galactic life with absolutely no hint at what the outcome will be. Hanging over all of this is the fact that Shepard was only able to win because the Catalyst let him do so.
  • Fragile Dreams has the protagonist searching for the first survivor he's seen since setting out, find out there's others elsewhere in the world, stop a second apocalypse, and then go off to look for the survivors with the girl he spent most of the game chasing after. The last part is ruined because a narration from the older protagonist reveals that said girl died before him and he is alone when he dies.
  • Conker's Bad Fur Day. All the titular character wanted to do was go home. He ends up going through hell, and, at one point, his girlfriend is kidnapped. Then, when he finally finds her again, she's brutally killed right in front of him. Then, just to add insult to injury, he was actually presented with a chance to bring her back to life. But, by the time he realized that it was even an option, it was already too late. Even after becoming the king and basically ruling over the entire land, it's easy to see why he's so bitter over the whole thing.
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