After The End / Video Games

T'was a piece of work was man...

Video Games that take place After the End.

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• 2027 features this in the epilogue for the Omar ending, after they nuke most of the planet.
• 7 Days to Die takes place after a Third World War. Oddly enough, Navezgane seems to be perfectly intact, aside from it being surrounded by a nuclear wasteland and the entire population consisting of zombies.
• 8Bit Killer is set years after mankind nearly became extinct through a drawn-out war. Then Master Brain arrived and raised an army to finish it all under the pretense of promising a new dawn.
• After Armageddon Gaiden takes place after a nuclear war has completely destroyed human civilization and left the Earth a wasteland. The world was then taken over by demons who rose from underground and enslaved the surviving humans.
• After the End: A Post-Apocalyptic America takes place in North America, with society rebuilding itself centuries after an unspecified apocalypse.
• After the War is set, well, after a nuclear war in 2049 between China and the United States.
• After Us is set after an unknown cataclysm reduces the earth's surface into an uninhabited wasteland. You're a nature spirit named Gaia exploring what's left of the world.
• The Age of Decadence is a post-apocalyptic game set in the low-magic fantasy period where the imperial experiments in magic had backfired a long time ago. Thus, the future of earth is not at stake, but the cataclysm did turn the once-thriving Empire (based wholesale on Rome) into one struggling to hold itself together and where civil war is slowly brewing, thus justifying the title.
• Alien Legacy takes place after Earth has been most likely attacked and humanity there wiped out by the aggressive Centaurians. A number of Sleeper Starships have been launched before that in order to allow humanity to endure elsewhere. You are the captain of one such ship, the UNS Calypso, which has just arrived to its destination, where you find another such scenario. As it turns out, another ship, the UNS Tantalus, was sent after the Calypso to the same system. Since it had a slightly more efficient fusion engine, it ended up beating the Calypso and arriving there 21 years earlier. However, instead of a fledgling colony, all you find are ruins and vague Apocalyptic Logs. Furthermore, since every captain is instructed to assume that his or her ships is all that's left, this trope may very well be true for all the other ships.
• Anarchy Reigns takes place after world war has torn the world apart and rampant industrialization by the surviving powers has polluted everything else, leading to rampant illness and mutation.
• Anbennar, a mod for Europa Universalis IV, has the elven continent of Aelantir, once a shining beacon of civilization, that was destroyed by a massive explosion. As the game starts 1444 years after the cataclysm, new civilizations have been built in Aelantir by the survivors, who have mutated into "Ruinborn" elves. Other areas of the world was also affected by the Day of Ashen Skies, to a far more limited degree (for example, the Damerian Republic, one of the major powers on the continent on Cannor had its capital sink into the sea, but avoided complete collapse).
• While the first stages of ANNIE: Last Hope is set during a Zombie Apocalypse about to happen, the following cutscene one-third through is set after a two-month Time Skip, with Annie becoming a new leader to the survivors and investigating the outbreak.
• Anno Domini: All installments of the series that are set in the future (namely, Anno 2070 and Anno 2205 to date) have this as their backstory. Earth's polar caps have melted, mostly due to environmental warming and the occasional nuclear exchange, turning the planet's highest peaks into isolated islands and the only remaining stretches of habitable land. Various MegaCorps fight over these precious territories and their resources, although all of this does sound worse than it actually is in-game since the Anno example is a fairly mild one. Humanity still appears to be numerous, uses highly advanced technology and is a lot more concerned about attaining and maintaining a comfortable lifestyle than just scraping by. Anno 2205 takes it even further down the bright path as open conflict between the MegaCorps does not exist (they merely compete on the world market), the game world is vibrant, beautiful and full of life, and humanity has even taken to settling the moon in earnest, complete with busy trade routes to and fro.
• The Aquatic Adventure Of The Last Human takes place centuries after mankind went extinct and the Earth has become flooded.
• Archimedean Dynasty and the Aquanox games take place in a world where a global nuclear war and the rising sea levels have driven the survivors underwater. The surface is abandoned and remains uninhabitable. Humans settle the ocean depths and actually manage to thrive, to an extent. The arrival of the Bionts changes all that.
• Most Armored Core games have one or take place after one. Best examples are Last Raven which happens after the unmanned suicide weapons destroy the world in Nexus and V/Verdict Day which take place in the distant future of For Answer after the National Dismantlement War, LYNX War, the conflict with the League and ORCA and it's constant use of Kojima particles.
• Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. is set in the aftermath of a Bug War where humans lose the Earth against a legion of hostile insectoid aliens from space. The titular Armourines are a group of Space Marines tasked with reclaiming earth, and you play as one of their two elite members.
• Artery Gear: Fusion: The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting. Monsters called 'puppets' are destroying most of humanity, and only with the recent advent of Artery Gears has humanity begun to fight back.
• Atomicrops takes place on the world's weirdest (and only) farm. After the nuclear apocalypse drove the world itself insane, your posse of farmers must grow sapient crops to feed the town while scavenging seeds, farm animals, and supernatural trinkets from a horde of bandit bunnies, poop-flinging trees, hermit crab-gunners, teleporting cats, dirty snowmen, and what-have-you, smooshed around four hyper-exaggerated biomes smooshed together, all so you can save up enough Cash-ews to buy a better gun for the wacky final bosses. And the mayor is a walking raddish.
• Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden takes place in the Post-Cyberpocalypse, where the world was devastated by a Chaos Dunk performed by Charles Barkley and almost all the great basketball players were massacred in what is known as the Great B-Ball Purge.
• Battle for Wesnoth: Under the Burning Suns campaign takes place long after Wesnoth is gone and consequently long after all other mainline campaigns. Wesnoth's land has turned into a desert and the sky has two suns, because the mages of Wesnoth raised another sun sometime before the kingdom fall and when they tried to raise the third sun, they failed and the sun crashed into Wesnoth.
• Bastion takes place after the Calamity tore Caelondia and the surrounding area (and possibly the entire world) to pieces, leaving only four people and a small army of pissed off Ura ready to take revenge on what's left of the nation as the only known survivors.
• Bayonetta takes place an eternity after an event called Armageddon, in which whatever realm existed beforehand was obliterated and split into the Trinity of Realities; Paradiso, the World of Light, Inferno, the World of Darkness, and the Human Realm, the World of Chaos. Apparently this split re-balanced reality to a point where it is now stable, but if the balance between light and darkness skews too much it's said a second Armageddon could occur.
• Beyond Sunset uses this trope as a plot twist. Your character awakens in a laboratory of a MegaCorp called Geneme Corporation with no recollection of your memories of who you are, except you're a Cyber Ninja who spends the whole game fighting robots. Then a Mysterious Informant introducing herself as Raven informs you (via a vide screen halfway through) to come to the Geneme Corporation's rooftops. You managed to reach there after defeating a powerful robot boss, and when you eventually rendezvous with Raven she then reveals what's actually going on: the world outside is a post-apocalyptic wasteland after humans lost a Robot War, you're a captured human meant to be converted into one of the machines, and a second war is incoming to wipe out what's left of the humans.
• Breath of Death VII is set an unspecified time after mankind destroyed itself in a nuclear war, leaving behind lands that were eventually settled by the undead who have formed quasi-medieval communities. During your adventure you visit ruins of two modern-looking cities.
• BUCK: Saturday Morning Cartoon Apocalypse is set in a post-apocalyptic World of Funny Animals.
• Bug Fables: The Day of Awakening for bugs is heavily implied to also have been the day of reckoning for the "Giants" whose relics dot Bugaria.
• Caravaneer: A climate catastrophe and overpopulation triggered a total collapse of the environment that reduced much of the Earth into a desert wasteland, with what remains of humanity living in isolated towns connected by the titular caravaneers.
• C-12: Final Resistance is set many years after an Alien Invasion, where the aliens are on the brink of driving humanity to extinction and all of civilization has crumbled.
• Caves of Qud is set in a world of ruins, mutants, and remnant killer robots. The nature of the apocalypse isn't specified, but it appears to have involved hyper-advanced interstellar humans, left some advanced pockets admidst the wastelands, and fucked up the world something fierce; whatever mutagenic events it carried were so intense lush areas are even deadlier than the wastelands because the fauna is brutal, utter aberrations of nature walk around casually and even the flora is actively trying to eat you.
• Centipede: Infestation, a Centipede re-imagining for the 3DS and Wii, creates a plot for the game. It takes place in an post-apocalyptic world where only a few humans exist and there are many Big Creepy-Crawlies.
• Chrono Trigger:
  • In 1999 A.D., Lavos awakened and laid waste to the world. In 2300 A.D., you can see the world still suffering from it. There's very little food (though the survivors are kept alive via Autodocs), and mutants and killer robots roam the ruined cities and factories. It's your job to Set Right What Once Went Wrong by killing Lavos before this happens.
  • Happens again in 12,000 BC after the fall of Zeal. When Zeal crashed into the surface, it not only wiped out most of Zeal's own populace but also the vast majority of the "Earthbound Ones" as well. When the dust settles, all that's left of the world is about a dozen or so people and a couple of tiny little islands. Unlike the aforementioned End, there's nothing you can do to prevent this one, since it serves as a demonstration of the disastrous consequences of abusing the powers of an Eldritch Abomination.
• City of Heroes: Going Rogue: The Devouring Earth has destroyed most of the Earth, and mankind is slowly rebuilding. You play as a Praetorian, living under the watchful eye of Emperor Cole, whose island city of Praetoria is one of the few places where mankind can be safe. Praetoria is in Another Dimension. Primal Earth is still (relatively) intact. This leads to some interesting problems when Emperor Cole finds out there's an inhabitable universe run by a group of people he has deemed unfit to rule themselves...
• Code Vein: The game takes place a few decades after a cataclysm known as "The Great Collapse" wrecked Earth. This was immediately followed up by an invasion of nigh-indestructible beings known only as "the horrors", which forced what was left of humanity to create vampire supersoldiers known as Revenants just to survive the onslaught. The city the game takes place in is in an unending state of conflict between the Revenants and the Lost (Revenants that have gone insane and animalistic), both of which are unable to ever die, and the few remaining actual humans are in constant danger of being enslaved so that Revenants can feed on their blood. And it gets worse. Those "horrors" mentioned above? They're the Aragami from the God Eater franchise that are slowly annihilating humanity despite all efforts to resist them. Code Vein turns out to be a Stealth Prequel.
• Combat Of Giants: Mutant Insects takes place in a world 300 years after a meteor crashed the Earth and destroyed human civilization, making way for giant mutated insects to rule the world.
• Cookie Run: Kingdom takes place a long time after the Final Battle between The Five and Dark Enchantress Cookie, resulting in The Five disappearing, and the ancient Cookie kingdoms crumbling and falling to ruin.
• CP3D: The Dilapidated Dimension is an alternate version of the island that is completely abandoned and overgrown with plant life. Nobody seems to know what happened to it.
• Crystalis: The Protagonist Without a Past awakes from being a Human Popsicle 100 years after civilization was thrown back to the dark ages in a great war. "October 1997, The End Day" is a Shout-Out to Terminator.
• Danganronpa, unlike most examples, uses this as the earth-shattering reveal (rather than an openly-presented selling point) in the first game. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is set in an environment where students are trapped for a long period of time and forced to kill each other. Why don't the police ever show up? An event, known as the Tragedy, happened that caused a huge worldwide conflict, and there are no police or even people to control what is happening inside the school. Plenty of people tried to rescue them, but were killed by the heavy weaponry installed around the school. Courtesy of the Ultimate Despair and The Tragedy, the world has apparently been caught up in a state of social unrest, war, widespread terrorism, coup d'etats, mass suicides, and general anarchy- at least, for the areas that are not directly controlled by the Ultimate Despair- for at least two years. This is the real reason nobody could rescue the students trapped in Hope's Peak, despite their killing game being broadcast worldwide. Of course, this is all revealed by the Unreliable Expositor Big Bad. By the second game, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, we learn that Junko was telling the truth about the Tragedy, but that things are starting to look up thanks to the efforts of the Future Foundation in successfully overthrowing the Ultimate Despair and capturing the Remnants of Despair. Killer Killer even implies that society is recovering fairly quickly, with the idol industry, hospitals, and the manga industry back up and running. In Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, this seems to be averted as the world is a peaceful Alternate Universe that uses the killing games to relieve their violent urges, but this is, again, according to the Unreliable Expositor Big Bad.
• Dark Earth takes place a few centuries after a meteor strike leaves most of the planet in perpetual darkness from a large dust cloud. Only a few spots are relatively cloudless and allow light to shine through. It is in these spots that the survivors have built cities. Anyone who stayed behind is infected by a "dark sickness" and mutates into a monster.
• Dark Souls takes place after what was effectively a Zombie Apocalypse, leaving the setting a series of ruins.
  • Dark Souls II takes place an undisclosed but lengthy time after the first game. Entirely new civilisations have risen and fallen to the Undead Curse. Naturally, you get to wander through their ruins again hitting things with sharp objects.
  • Dark Souls III adds yet more time, and has had the cycle of the world go on often enough that even the cycle itself is wearing out. The "Ringed City" DLC includes a scene set in what is suggested to be the ultimate end of time, where you and the final boss are implied to be the last living (sort of) beings left in all of existence, alone amongst an endless plain of ash and the few remaining ruins of mankind's creations.
• Darksiders takes place after the Apocalypse, the Player Character being one of the four Horsemen.
• DC Universe Online plays with this trope. The game begins with Brainiac having invaded Earth just after Lex Luthor killed Superman with the rest of the Society and Justice League dead from their war. Luthor, then, goes back in time with the intent on creating numerous metahumans to fight Brainiac's invasion and stop this from happening. Or rather, so that the villains can win and he can savor the victory.
• Destiny takes place several centuries after humanity experienced a golden age when they made contact with a benevolent alien god-like being known as the Traveler which blessed earth with immensely-advanced technology and enhanced humans to have vastly greater intelligence and lifespans. Then the Traveler's enemy — a nebulous force known as the Darkness — arrived and utterly destroyed humanity despite all their advanced technology and weaponry, and was only stopped by the Traveler performing a Heroic Sacrifice to stop the Darkness. The game itself picks up in the "City Age": a time where humanity has managed to scrape together their survivors and scraps of old technology to rebuild a large city beneath the protective shadow of the Traveler's mute body, and now humanity is setting out to retake Earth and the rest of the solar system from their numerous alien enemies who have invaded after their fall.
• Death Road to Canada: A Zombie Apocalypse has come and Canada is the only nation left standing. Your mission is to traverse the ruins of the United States and get there.
• Deus Ex: Invisible War takes place 20 years after the Great Collapse triggered by JC Denton, yet in that time, civilization has returned to its pre-collapse level. See Apocalypse Not.
• Doom: Many of its games, and the majority of fan-made WADs, take place with nearly every other human on whichever chosen planet the game takes place on dead before you even start moving. Although in Doom II and Doom 64 you return the favor and totally trash Hell after killing nearly every demon still in it.
• Dragon Age contains several examples:
  • Elves in the setting were once immortal and had a magically advanced society before being largely destroyed and enslaved by the human Tevinter Emperium. The third game reveals that the end for the elves came about more due to civil war, with the humans more or less picking over the bones of their civilization.
  • It happened to the elves again when their new homeland, the Dales, was destroyed by the Chantry. Elven society has since fracture into two remnants: The city elves that are little more than slaves in most cities in Thedas and the nomadic Dalish elves.
  • The Blights have ravaged the landscape, rendering large swaths of the setting uninhabitable. The aforementioned human empire was devastated by the First Blight. Given that the Emperium was built on blood magic, few outside Tevinter lament this fact.
  • There's an offhand joke in Haven indicating that the setting may be an After the End scenario for our world. A tombstone in the cemetery reads "The L H C did it".
  • There are hints of this for the Dwarves. Solas calls them "a severed arm twitching in a pool of its own blood," possibly implying that the dwarves used to be connected to the fade and were suddenly and violently cut off from it.
• The second act of Dragon Quest XI follows the world after Yggdrasil The World Tree is destroyed by Big Bad Mordegon, plummeting the world into a hellscape. Joined by a reformed villain, the Hero travels the world gathering up his old friends to take on the Lord of Shadows. After beating him, you can time travel back to before Yggdrasil's destruction and defeat Moredegon there, reversing the apocalypse.
• Dragon Quest Builders takes place in Alefgard, after a What If? scenario regarding the events of the original game, after the original Hero took up the Dragonlord's offer to side with him. Since then, the realm has been brought to ruin as humans were cursed to forget how to craft and build and is ruled by monsters.
• Duke Nukem: Zero Hour: the Post-Apocalypse era after the aliens created a Temporal Paradox and brought about The End of the World as We Know It.
• ELEX takes place on the fictional world of Magalan, home to a Human civilization roughly equivalent to modern day Earth, after a meteor hit the planet causing the collapse of said civilization. The meteor brought with it the element Elex, a precious and limited resource which can power advanced machinery, give people magical powers and re-shape creatures into new and different life forms. Naturally, a major war has started for the control over this resource and in what direction civilization on Magalan will rebuild itself.
• Enchanted Arms has this. The fact Yokohama, Kyoto and London are all in the same general 100-km radius area should give you a rough idea of how badly the Golem Wars messed up the planet's surface and layout. Despite the chaotic rearranging of the surface, Mount Fuji somehow got through the mess in one piece.
• ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights: The game takes place in the kingdom of Land's End, which has been desolated by and endless rain spreading an ancient plague that has transformed its inhabitants into terrible zombie-like creatures known as the Blighted. The protagonist, a young girl and last surviving priestess, wakes up in the middle of the devastation, with only the spirit of an Umbral Knight to let her know what's going on.
• Enslaved: Odyssey to the West takes place 150 years into the future, after a Robot War that ended badly for mankind.
• Etrian Odyssey is established as being one of these in the intro... but the exact nature of the world Before The End is intentionally left vague at first.
• Ever Maiden implies that the world outside the Puellarium is decaying or in ruins, which is why there is a need to raise young girls as Maidens to fix it.
• In Everhood, the world the player sees is implied to only be the last remnant of something that was once much larger and grander. There were once millions of residents in Everhood, but after uncountable eons of eternity picking each other off, there are fewer than 30 people left at the start of the game.
• In Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, everyone in your village has disappeared. The bulk of the game centers around figuring out why.
• Exmortis 2 is all about this: after the war between the human race and the Exmortis, the Earth has been reduced to a barren desert, inhabited only by the few humans still surviving and the Exmortis horde. For added effect, the sky has turned blood red, and the aforementioned survivors are continuously preyed upon by roaming bands of Exmortis travelling upon dark red stormclouds.
• The Fall: Last Days of Gaia. Most of the world is reduced to desert, and in many places biosphere is dying off irreversibly. Unlike the majority of Spiritual Successors to Fallout, it's not the nukes that caused it, though, but the terraformers intended to make Mars habitable crashing over Earth instead as a result of a terrorist attack.
• Fallout: The series takes place in a world that's been ravaged by global thermo-nuclear war. Most of the world is a desolate wasteland, and of the few places that haven't been destroyed most are either highly toxic, radioactive, or inhabited by the worst scum of humanity.
  • However, unlike a lot of apocalyptic stories which end before civilization starts to get back up on its feet, the world in Fallout slowly gets better with each game. By the time of Fallout: New Vegas (204 years After the End), the West Coast of the former United States, primarily the former states of California and Oregon has been mostly rebuilt and united under a single nation that's as close to pre-war America as it gets, and the rest of the wasteland around it, primarily the former states of Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, and Utah are occupied by savage but surviving tribes, prosperous settlements, and ambitious nation-states.
  • By the time of Fallout 4 (6 years after New Vegas and 210 years After the End), the East Coast, on the other hand, is still largely fractured with small to moderate cases of powerful factions holding and losing control over territory. However, places like Washington D.C. (called the Capital Wasteland), Pittsburgh (called the Pitt) in Pennsylvania, Point Lookout State Park (called Point Lookout) in Maryland, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (called the Commonwealth), and Mount Desert Island (called The Island) in Maine have all seen a resurgence of human civilization, whether because humanity themselves have eked out a resilient new way of living there or the nuclear devastation wasn't as severe as other places so there's more room for populations, communities, and/or settlements to form and grow.
  • Of course, the player's actions can set things back to square one again (e.g. poisoning Project Purity with a mutated strain of FEV, nuking Dry Wells or the Long 15 or both, switching off Far Harbor's Fog condensers to let the Island's creatures destroy it).
  • Both New Vegas and Fallout 76 offer a case of after the end of After The End:
    • For the Mojave Wasteland, there is The Divide, a nigh-inhospitable region that survived the Great War and was previously a thriving community. At least until Courier Six delivered a package there that armed and detonated the inactive warheads underground, leaving the place as one of the most twisted and hellish places in the Wasteland wreathed in perpetual storms that kick up winds so strong it can tear flesh from a body in seconds.
    • In Appalachia, a mere 20+ years after the Great War devastated the area, humanity started to come back, started to rebuild. But then chaos erupted, as a race of mutated creatures called Scorchbeasts were unleashed and proceeded to wipe out the vast majority of human life in the area through a virulent affliction called the Scorched Plague. By the time Vault 76 opens on Reclamation Day, the Vault Dwellers there are the only shred of human civilization remaining. At least initially.
• Far Cry: New Dawn is the continuation of Far Cry 5 set 17 years after nuclear bombs drop down on the country, proving that Joseph Seed was right about the apocalypse. The game is now set in a Mad Max-esque future.
• Final Fantasy
  • Final Fantasy III: The whole game starts After the End. The entire world is flooded and in some sort of stasis except for the Floating Continent where the heroes live.
  • Final Fantasy V: The second world is thirty years out from Exdeath's first devastating rampage across the planet. It has exactly five major settlements. Three of them are fortified kingdoms ruled by the heroes who sealed Exdeath, while the other two are villages so remote they require either air or submarine travel to even reach them. Much of the landscape is also uninhabitable marshland or impassable mountains, and scholars in Surgate imply that the second world used to look a lot more like the first world, which is well-populated with several major kingdoms, trade routes, and numerous towns scattered around the globe.
  • Final Fantasy VI: The second half set after a one-year Time Skip shows a world altered by the Big Bad's actions... and having one of the most depressing 2D cinematics of all time. And technically, Final Fantasy VI goes through this twice: the War of the Magi, set long before the start of the game, ripped the world apart so badly it took mankind 1,000 years just to discover steam power... only for the game's Big Bad to do it again for a giggle.
  • Final Fantasy X: There's an argument for the entire setting being set "after the end" given Sin's historical decimation of Zanarkand and repeated decimation of any and all towns, plus the belief of the majority of Spirans that the only way to get rid of Sin is to forgo technological advancement.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time has a setting that consists of one town and one isolated village next to a vast wasteland left by the ancient civilization.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2: The Bad Future world of 700 AF is this after the second fall of Cocoon. The planet is nothing but a barren wasteland covered in crystal dust and the few remaining humans have slowly died one by one until only Noel remains as the last of humanity. The whole purpose of Serah and Noel's journey through time is to avert this outcome.
  • Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII takes place after the end of XIII-2, when Etro's death caused a Time Crash and Chaos flodded the entire planet. The events have caused humanity to end up in a stasis: they do not physically age and no new life is born, but nobody is invulnerable or immortal. It's Lightning's duty to collect as many souls as she can within 13 Days... before The End happens to this world.
  • Final Fantasy XIV plays with this trope a tad in the A Realm Reborn era. After the events of the final battle in 1.0, the story opens up five years later with many of the city-states trying to rebuild after the lesser moon Dalmund appeared over Eorzea and broke open, unleashing the dragon Bahamut. They find themselves besieged not only by the beast tribes who seek to take advantage of this by summoning their gods but also by the Garlean Empire, who seeks to continue their reign of conquest. Probably worst off in this are the Amalj'aa race, where a vast majority of their kind have been tempered by their god Ifrit, that the very very few who haven't are hiding in constant fear. The Shadowbringers expansion has another example in "The First", an alternate reality in The Multiverse where the balance between Light and Darkness was disrupted to the point that the power of Light destroyed most of the world. All that remains is the continent of Norvrandt, and its myriad peoples and remaining settlements are struggling to deal with the fallout from the Flood of Light. Beyond Norvrandt, there is only the Empty, a vast, lifeless desert.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening, there is a series of DLC chapters called "The Future Past", which take place in a world in which Grima is revived and has all but destroyed the world, leaving Chrom's army to help the few remaining survivors put a stop to all of the carnage. This world is shown to be nearly identical to the main game's future, in which Grima is also revived and from where Lucina and the future children came from; their goal being to prevent that future from happening again.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses is revealed to take place at least a thousand years after humans engaged in senseless wars that ravaged the continent of Fodlan, wiping out a considerable portion of its population and devastating its landscape, requiring the goddess Sothis to exhaust herself trying to heal it all. The "javelins of light", a term used to describe what we would consider an ICBM, are all-but stated to have been a major cause; one of the major locations is Ailell, the Valley of Torment, which became a Lethal Lava Land after being struck by one.
• The Flame in the Flood takes place in the ruins of post-societal America, long after climate change and massive floods have caused the collapse of civilization. The protagonist, Scout, must travel down a fierce river with her Canine Companion Aesop, scrounging for supplies in various decaying settlements.
• Flotsam: At some point in the past, the world was flooded in its totality. Most pre-flood skills indicate adulthood before the floods, while a few, like Wiz-Squid, mention a post-flood upbringing. There are only remnants left from what society was before and some of the sea life isn't looking like it used to either.
• Fuel takes place after environmental disasters have rendered large parts of Earth inhospitable. In addition to racing, the player character must also avoid various environmental hazards.
• Gaia Seed: Project Trap is set after a cataclysm which wipes out all vegetation on earth, with the titular "Gaia Seed" project aimed to salvage the earth. But while trying to return to our planet, you find out Earth is actively retaliating to prevent the return of humans.
• Gears of War 3: By the time the game's story rolls around, the Locusts have destroyed the last of humanity's refuges (as seen at the end of GOW 2), the COG has been disbanded, the Lambent is running rampant, and the few remaining inhabitants of Sera are fighting for survival.
• Ghostrunner is set after an event known as The Burst, causing the atmosphere to be full of radioactive dust that requires constant filtering. Humanity's population has dwindled to less than 1 million as they cower inside a massive skyscraper called Dharma Tower.
• Call of Duty: Ghosts is set ten years after a cataclysmic hostile attack destroys much of US society, turning the country from a powerful global force into a shell of its former self. The government unable to afford a proper military (likely having lost too much money on the recovery effort), the eponymous "Ghosts" are called together from all remaining branches of special forces to form a single spec-ops organization.
• This seems to be at least partially why the world in Gingiva is such a Mind Screw: the world has taken over and horribly twisted by some evil megacorporation for materialistic purposes, and almost everyone has been enslaved.
• A Girl Adrift: The world has been overtaken by a cataclysmic flood, with the endless expanse of ocean only broken up by tiny spits of land dotted with the ruins of the modern world. These islands are scattered hundreds of miles apart; survivors are similarly few and far between.
• Golden Sun has a variation, where the catalyst event has already happened, but the apocalypse has been happening (very slowly) for hundreds or possibly thousands of years since the initial event. The power of Alchemy was used to create the Great Age of Man, but was later sealed away by the ancients because it was being used for war which threatened to destroy the world. Hundreds or thousands of years later, the world is falling apart at the edges, as Alchemy is what holds the world together. The great civilizations and mighty cities have disappeared completely, leaving behind only legends and a few crumbling ruins, accompanied by Schizo Tech which nobody knows how to create anymore, and can only be operated by those with the power of Psynergy, which has become incredibly rare and Invisible to Normals.
• Grim Dawn: The titular Grim Dawn was the day of the apocalypse, in which the Aetherials descended upon Cairn and humanity en masse, possessing many and butchering the rest. The game takes place some time after that, with your character being someone who was released from possession and now helps out the few pockets of human resistance that remain (and aren't trying to make things worse).
• Guns of Icarus is set in a post-apocalyptic world where Sky Pirates rule the air in Zeppelins from Another World.
• Gyossait takes place after worldwide natural cataclysms caused by the titular goddess of Earth. What's left of humanity lives in small tribes in ruined buildings, trying to survive the progressively harsher climate, mutant attacks, and the defeated goddess's eldritch powers.
• .hack:
  • The in-game setting for The World R:2 is set after a huge war where humanity kills most of the gods from R:1's backstory.
  • The entire franchise is based on a computer virus called Pluto's Kiss destroying the Internet years before. The incident is sometimes referred to as the Twilight of the Gods.
• Haiku, the Robot takes place in a world that was ravaged by an apocalypse 200 years ago and is now inhabited by machines. In addition, at the time the game takes place, most of these machines have become corrupted by a virus and are now hostile.
• Half-Life 2 takes place twenty years after an alien invasion of Earth and revolves about a human resistance fighting the against the occupation.
  • When the G-Man takes Freeman out of stasis and releases him out into the world again, the words he sends him off with are: "So wake up, Mister Freeman. Wake up and... smell the ashes."
  • One of the more obvious signs that things aren't as they should be is whenever you find a dock - the water line is clearly quite a few meters lower than it should be.
• Halo:
  • Over the course of the Human-Covenant War, humanity suffers well over 23 billion casualties, a major blow considering that their estimated pre-war population was about 39 billion. Additionally, hundreds of colonies were lost, having been glassed by the Covenant. Nevertheless, humanity has managed to survive the collapse of the Covenant intact enough to begin reterraforming and resettling many of their lost worlds (especially since Covenant glassing was not quite as destructive as initially believed).
  • Brute history is marked by the First Immolation, a major nuclear war that sent their space age species all the way back to the stone age; when the Covenant first encountered them in 2492, they were just rediscovering radio and rocketry.
  • In fact, the entire franchise can be considered this to some degree; 100,000 years ago, the Forerunners effectively wiped out all sentient life left in the Milky Way in order to starve out the Flood, with the various specimens they handpicked to resettle the galaxy afterwards all having to start off at a pre-industrial level, regardless of their previous technological capabilities. Even now, none of the surviving species in the Milky Way have managed to fully reattain the technological prowess of the Forerunners.
  • The Forerunner Saga reveals that humanity suffered this twice in the backstory; once when the Forerunners wiped out their highly advanced interstellar civilization and devolved the survivors, and again when the Halos were fired, which reduced their nascent industrial civilizations back into hunter-gatherer societies.
• Would you believe Hatoful Boyfriend has this for its backstory? To wit: Plagued by a superstrain of bird flu, humanity attempted to eradicate the plague-carrying birds with an engineered virus of their own. The birds that survived the latter developed sapience, realized humans were trying to kill them, and fought back, killing even more humans. And now you know why all the love interests are pigeons, and the human heroine lives in a cave in the middle of the wilderness.
• Hellgate: London is set in a world where Hell has taken over. Humanity has retreated underground due to the surface being overrun by demons, who have begun to bring "The Burn" upon Earth, an effort to "terraform" Earth to make it like Hell.
• HellMOO and its derivatives. HATE (HELL: AFTER THE END) is even an explicit reference.
• Hellbound, another game with a Hell on Earth setting. You're a demon revived by humans to help reclaim earth from the supernatural.
• Might & Magic:
  • One of the worlds visited. Enroth/Colony was a thriving, high-technological and magically developed planet before, within a hundred years, the robots of the most important control center for technology went crazy and overran it, a love drama lead to nukes being used in what was before one of the nicer areas on the planet, a massive rebellion occured against the increasingly tyrannical Governor, and a general alien invasion of the entire civilization led to the entire arm of the Galaxy being cut off from the rest of the worlds, with intrastellar infrastructure and communication being destroyed. The last is specifically cited as having caused 'a fall into barbarism and witchcraft' not only on this world, but on many others...
  • Heroes of Might and Magic IV starts with Enroth being destroyed by two swords of immense power clashing in battle (we even see a giant mushroom cloud). The survivors flee through mysterious portals leading to a virginal world called Axeoth, as Enroth is literally breaking apart around them. The Barbarians suffer the most, as they naturally fear anything magical, and most refuse to go through the portals. Most of the campaigns deal with the survivors building new kingdoms roughly based on the old ones. For example, the Haven campaign focuses on the new kingdom of Palaendra, populated by the survivors of the Kingdom of Erathia. They are desperately looking for any members of the royal Gryphonheart family to take the throne. That is, Lord Lysander is the one looking, while the people of Palaendra have given up and are perfectly willing to crown Lysander, who keeps refusing (naturally, he turns out to be a lost Gryphonheart heir and is forced to accept the crown).
• Hollow Knight has you explore the ruins of a bug kingdom called Hallownest that was apparently destroyed by a mysterious infection that reduced the bug-citizens to mindless, homicidal husks. You gradually meet some of the few surviving inhabitants and piece together clues about what happened.
• Most of Homeworld takes place after the Burning of Kharak.
• Horizon Zero Dawn takes place in a future where ruined cities have been reclaimed by nature and robots roam the Earth. It's later revealed that the game takes place in 3040 AD in what was once Colorado and Utah after a Robot War ended all life on Earth in 2066 and humanity created an AI to terraform and repopulate the Earth.
• House of the Dead:
  • The House of the Dead III takes place after the "world collapse", a Zombie Apocalypse brought about by The Virus thought to be unleashed by EFI.
  • The House of the Dead 4, is set during said collapse; the town you're in is completely abandoned save for a Zombie Apocalypse, and it's implied that the rest of the world has fallen into this condition as well.
• Hyper Light Drifter takes place in one of these. While the exact nature of the apocolypse is unclear due to the surreal nature of the cutscenes, the world is littered with dead bodies, broken war machines and ruined buildings. There are also the corpses of massive Kaiju-like monsters throughout the world (who are briefly seen alive during the opening). Most areas outside of the main city are dangerous to travel through due to bandits and murderous creatures, and in some underground areas there are large numbers of corpses, who look like they took shelter and died when the food and water ran out. The world, however, is very pretty, with the end having been long enough ago that many areas are overgrown.
• I Was a Teenage Exocolonist takes place in the far future, 20 years after the Stratospheric left Earth for Vertumna because the former became uninhabitable due to many factors such as climate change, pollution, and nuclear war.
• _iCEY._ takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, where the world has been destroyed and nothing remains, except various combat mechs and the apparent bringer of said apocalypse.
• Iji takes place six months after aliens came over Earth and obliterated nearly all life on the surface in a single Alpha Strike.
• The main setting of InfernoMOO. A few bastions of civilization have managed to rebuild yet, and have even developed some advanced technology.
• While at first glance the setting of Inherit the Earth may look like a Low Fantasy World of Funny Animals, the intro reveals that they became that way thanks to genetic tampering by humans, who may have been wiped out by a plague.
• In the Hunt takes place after most of the world is submerged underwater via an evil organization's Doomsday Device.
• In Into the Breach, the world has already been largely destroyed by rising sea levels. However, an invasion of building-sized alien insects threatens to destroy everything else that's left. At the beginning of a new profile, the latter has also already happened which prompts the only survivor to go back in time to try again. The entire game is about hopping between various timelines to try and defeat the Vek invasion.
• Jiu Xiao takes place after a cataclysm wiped out the surface world, courtesy of the Heaven's Wheel being prematurely activated.
• The world of Journey (2012) contains the ruins of a civilization you discover throughout. Guess what happened to it.
• Ixion, post-prologue, takes place in the wake of the Earth's devastation and the near-extinction of humanity, with you and the crew of your mobile Space Station, the Tiqqun, seeking out survivors and a new planet to call home.
• Kenshi is post-post-apocalyptic. The first apocalypse was a major collapse of the First Empire, which was either run by Skeletons or Humans. It was significantly more advanced than any following faction, having gene modding, the ability to create more Skeletons, killsats, giant Skeleton war machines and possibly interstellar travel. The second apocalypse was the collapse of the Skeleton-run Second Empire about 1000 years before the game starts, which wasn't as severe but still caused major societal upheaval and technological regression, as well as paving the way for the current factions to rise into the power vacuum that was left. Evidence of both empires can be found scattered throughout the world of Kenshi, though only the Second Empire was recent enough to have salvageable technologies.
• Every playthrough of Kingdoms Reborn begins with a text blurb saying that a big freeze wiped out most of civilisation, so everyone has to start again from the dark ages.
• Shiver Star, the fifth planet visited Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, is a snow-covered planet heavily implied to be post-apocalyptic Earth. Outlines of Earth's continents can be seen on its world map model, and its levels include a shopping mall, an abandoned factory, and a fight against a robot in a giant cityscape. According to Word of God, the inhabitants of Shiver Star left long ago for unknown reasons.
• Kileak 2 is set 27 years after a viral outbreak wiped out most of humanity, and the player's home reduced to a City in a Bottle.
• Last Armageddon takes place after an apocalyptic event has wiped out all of humanity and left the Earth a barren wasteland. The main characters are a group of monsters from the underworld, and finding out the truth of what exactly destroyed humanity becomes one of their goals.
• The Last of Us has the player character and his companion Ellie traveling in the Green Ruins of the Modern Age across the Fallen States of America after a fungus has infected much of humanity and destroyed civilization.
• In Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Raziel is thrown into the abyss at the height of Kain's empire's power and comes back 500 years (or more) later to find it a crumbling, decaying wasteland. Although in this case, there was no cataclysm, just a gradual downward spiral.
• Legend of Legaia: The entire concept of the first game is that the bad guys have already won when the game begins, the Mist has enveloped much of the world, the few humans who have managed to escape it live in walled or underground cities, and humanity is on the verge of extinction. Even the ending is bittersweet and symbolizes the End of an Age since Dr. Usha says that all Seru will die off within the next year, effectively throwing Legaia and its Seru-based technology back into the Stone Age.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Hyrule has been flooded for hundreds of years, and only the people chosen by the goddesses survived; the rest were killed off. The graphics are so light-hearted that it may never fully dawn on the player that over 90% of the population of Hyrule was drowned. Though this is downplayed in that said flooding happened long enough ago that people have adjusted to it, with several races now thriving on the countless islands that make up the region.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, New Hyrule is built upon the ruins of an ancient civilization. The titular "Spirit Tracks" are the main indication that the continent had inhabitants long before the characters from The Wind Waker encountered it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has the Lanayru Desert, filled with dilapidated, abandoned factories and burnt out, deactivated robot husks. Activate a timeshift stone, and you'll see them in all their mechanical, electrical, advanced glory. At the end of the game, the Hylians come down to earth from Skyloft and begin a medieval level society that lasts for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. Considering that Skyward Sword takes place at the start of the timeline, this means the entire Zelda franchise is a conga line of After the End settings.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild takes place 100 years after the Calamity Ganon went on a cataclysmic rampage through Hyrule. By the present day, all that's left are a few scattered villages in a world long reclaimed by the wilderness and littered with the broken shells of towns and fortresses and with entire fields filled with the rusted remnants of robotic war machines — and, besides them, with some still very active war machines still fighting the war that ended Hyrule. The only reason things aren't much worse is that Zelda has had Ganon trapped as a Sealed Evil in a Duel for the last century.
• The Little Tail Bronx games start off innocently enough, with Tail Concerto not really focusing much on the origin of the world... but then Solatorobo: Red the Hunter reveals that the series all takes place after the World War that ended with the humans wiping themselves out from existence, with all of the floating islands being the salvagable remains of what used to be part of Earth... and then Fuga: Melodies of Steel reveals that every thing that happened in Solatorobo took place on what used to be one giant landmass known as Gasco, which got fractured into pieces after the Bermans unleashed an ancient, planet-destroying Titano-Machina.
• Live A Live has the final chapter, "The Dominion of Hate". Following the shocking twist at the end of the Middle Ages chapter, the kingdom of Lucrece has been completely ravaged by Odio, who killed everyone after his Start of Darkness. The towns now sit silent and abandoned, and save for the monsters and the heroes who were pulled into this dark age, there is no life at all in the kingdom.
• Lost Ember has the player exploring the ruins of an Inrahsi city called Machu Kila. It's been so long since anyone's lived there that much of it has been reclaimed by the forest.
• Mars: War Logs features an initially successful attempt to colonize Mars torn asunder when the planet's axis tilts, leaving the surface vulnerable to devastating solar radiation. Decades later, surviving colonists eke out an uncertain existence in underground cities, which are fighting each other for water, fuel, and the few remaining relics from the colony's golden age.
• Mass Effect:
  • The krogan homeworld is basically a post-apocalyptic wasteland. First nuking themselves back to the stone age and later being infected with a disease that "controls" krogan birth rate did not really make life on Tunchanka easy (not like it was before: before "death by gunshot" was the most common cause of death for krogan it was being eaten by predators).
  • Given the devastation brought down on civilization by the Reapers once they arrive, it's a safe bet the homeworlds of every space-faring race have become this by the time they're gone, though some were hit harder than others. One point made clear by the expanded ending is that enough is left over for everyone to eventually rebuild. Oh, and the Reapers have perpetuated this cycle at least several hundred times.
  • From Javik's perspective everything that happens once you bring him out of stasis is this seeing as his entire race and culture was wiped out some 50 thousand years ago by the Reapers.
  • This is also true of the rachni, whose species was pretty much wiped out during the Rachni Wars, the quarians, who lost the war against the geth for their homeworld and have spent the last few hundred years trying in vain to reclaim it, and the Leviathans, who are responsible for the Reapers, their species reduced to a handful of individuals descended from the generation harvested to create Harbinger.
• The backstory of Mecha Ritz Steel Rondo is that Veloce, an aspiring 12-year-old scientist, destroyed all of humanity with her mass-produced mechas. A single mecha imbued with human spirit sets out to defy its programming and kill her.
• The Mega Man timeline is complicated. Every series but the original has a point either in-series or in-backstory could be considered "the end", sort of, from Mega Man X and Mega Man Zero's Colony Drops, to the war that took place between them that killed the vast majority of humans and Reploids, to the End of Humanity in Mega Man Legends, a series where the MacGuffin is the last remaining sample of intact human DNA. Mega Man Star Force takes the cake for least ambiguous End in an alternate timeline found in the postgame of the second game, which is the darkest point in the metaseries.
• Mercs of Boom: A meteor shower brings with it a strange organic blue crystal with properties similar to Tiberium and just as nasty side effects. While the crystals are a valuable source of resources, they also emit dangerous radiation that accelerates mutation in plant and animal life. According to the intro, the governments decided that the Godzilla Threshold has been reached and decide to Nuke 'em the sites of the greatest infestation. Naturally, it turns out to only make the situation worse, accelerating the spread of the crystal and further mutating lifeforms. Billions of humans are dead, the rest live in cities protected by special shields that block the radiation, which suffer constant animal attacks. Earth itself looks like an alien planet with Ruins of the Modern Age. There are also implications that this state of affairs was deliberately engineered by aliens (similar to the Scrin seeding Earth with Tiberium in C&C).
• Metal Walker has this, as a huge explosion turned the landscape into an unforgiving desert populated by killer robots.
• Metro 2033 (and the book that it was based on) have the remnants of humanity inhabiting the Moscow metro system after a devastating nuclear war. And that's just the situation of the living, as apparently, even the afterlife was blown up. Metro 2033 also has a bunch of paranormal events that can only really be explained by ghosts haunting the metro such as The Great Door or The River of Fate. Metro: Last Light shows that ghosts relive their terrifying last moments and can even pull living creatures into their afterlife.
  "It appears that the devastation we brought upon ourselves was complete. Heaven, hell, and purgatory were atomised as well. So when a soul leaves the body, it has nowhere to go, and must remain here, in the metro. A harsh, but... not undeserved atonement for our sins, wouldn't you agree?"
• In the Metroid series, you frequently explore the remains of fallen alien civilisations, often finding an Apocalyptic Log of how they fell. Particularly in the Metroid Prime Trilogy.
• Miscreated is set in a world where civilization was destroyed by the Final War.
• Mortal Kombat 3 has Shao Kahn destroying much of the Earthrealm, with the main characters being among the survivors of the initial harvest of souls, hunted by extermination squads who are tasked with eliminating threats to Kahn's rule.
• Mother:
  • Mother: Cognitive Dissonance has this at the beginning of Chapter 7. What makes it more horrible is it's actually Onett, as it is if Giygas succeeds.
  • Mother 3, though you wouldn't think so until the end, when it's revealed the two small neighboring islands the game takes place on are the last inhabitable areas on earth.
• In Mutant Football League, Sportscasters Grim Blitzro and Brickhead Mulligan will sometimes mention the world that existed before a nuclear apocalypse overtook the planet. The resulting radiation ended up creating the werewolves, demons, mutants, zombies, Deadheads, and orcs that now occupy the world. Players themselves also mention rules, strategies, and game plays that were not allowed in "the old league."
• Mutant Rampage: Bodyslam takes place after many wars and ecologic disasters ruined the world's cities.
• My Time at Portia takes place in a fairly optimistic post-apocalyptic setting. It's left ambiguous what actually happened, but the "Age of Darkness," a name which is entirely literal, was either the cause or a symptom of the collapse of society. The game is set some time after the darkness ended, well into the process of rebuilding. Gameplay consists of scavenging from the ruins of the old world and build things that help the titular town of Portia.
• The Neverwinter Nights 2 module-building community has given us the White Rose series, set in an ice-age-type post-apocalyptic world.
• Nexus Clash is set During The End. What's more, since it's about an Eternal Recurrence, player characters are trapped in a cycle, fighting in one apocalypse after another and unable to experience the worlds whose fates they're fighting over. Characters' attitudes toward this truth range from noble sacrifice to utter horror.
• A New Beginning has a brief section that takes place in one of these, after the world has been devastated by climate change. The Time Travelers who arrive there are from further in the Bad Future, where the last remnants of humanity live in sealed bunkers because the surface is completely uninhabitable. The whole point is to try to prevent the bad future from occurring by getting modern civilization to focus on greener sources of power.
• Nihilumbra doesn't show you much of the world (since you're too busy trying to dodge The Void), but the City you do get to see is completely empty, implying that the Void has killed everyone else a long time ago. Judging by the City being completely empty, it doesn't seem like this particular world has anyone left alive.
• NieR opens in 2049, years after a cataclysm befell the Earth beginning with the events of Ending E from Drakengard. Afterwards, the game jumps forward over a thousand years, by which point civilization has collapsed into small villages built from the ruins of the old world.
• NieR: Automata is set about ten thousand years into the future, by which point humanity has been driven from Earth by invading alien lifeforms who are now locked in war amidst the planet's ruins against the android army of YoRHa. It is later revealed that, as a result of events from the previous game, there actually aren't any humans left alive.
• The Nintendo Wars game Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (Dark Conflict in Europe) takes place months after a devastating meteor shower strikes the planet and kills off nearly 90% of the human population. Roaming bandits, deserting soldiers, low food supplies, and selfish civilians are just some of the hazards of the new world.
• The setting of Nuclear Throne has been ravaged by some unknown nuclear holocaust. Humans are basically extinct, with the world's inhabitants having been transformed into Mutants. Most of the world is now a desert wasteland and where once were cities is now a frozen tundra. Radiation is scattered everywhere. The only hope for the survivors is to find the titular Nuclear Throne. No one knows exactly what it is or what it does, but the playable characters will fight tooth and nail to reach it.
• OFF: Assuming that The Room isn't symbolic (which it likely is), the game takes place after the world was destroyed by some disaster; it was rebuilt by the Queen and the Guardians, who all hoped to create a new, peaceful world. Continue/Stop/Rise, a Fan Sequel, plays with this. It takes place after the world was destroyed, but in this game's interpretation of events, that world was fake to begin with. The real world hasn't ended at all.
• OneShot: The Solstice route reveals that the current World is actually a rough simulation of an Old World that was lost a long time ago. Proto, Cedric, Rue, and the Author are the only surviving residents of the previous world.
• Outriders:
  • The initial codex unlocks summarize the Apocalypse How that forced humans to escape Earth and colonize Enoch: tectonic activity destroyed the Earth civilization, and 500000 settlers were put on the colony ship "Flores" and sent to Enoch.
  • The storm that happens in the prologue is the beginning of another End: after Maxwell authorizes the landings, colonists are dropped right in the middle of storm-related hell that destroys all the advanced tech and forces people to take cover underground with little resources, leading to the war between ECA and the Exiles.
• Overland takes place in the post-apocalyptic United States, where a mysterious alien species of Big Creepy-Crawlies has infested the planet, transforming and warping the landscape into a dangerous wasteland.
• Panzer Dragoon pulls this off twice, as well. The series starts a thousand years after a great civilization "perished into dust". By the time Saga has rolled around, the last remnants of civilization have been pushed back a bit further thanks to the destruction of the terraforming Towers, an event known as "The Great Fall".
• Phantasy Star:
  • Phantasy Star IV is set a thousand years after the destruction of Mother Brain and the planet Parma led to civilization failing across the Algol system in an event known as the "Great Collapse." Motavia is reverting to desert as the remnants of the Climatrol system break down, its society has broken down into a patchwork of towns under constant siege by biomonsters and held together mostly by the Hunter's Guild, and space travel has become Lost Technology.
  • Phantasy Star Online did it twice. First with their homeworld starts to wither and second being the civilization that sealed Dark Falz away.
  • Phantasy Star Zero did it too, set on an Earth that's been thoroughly blasted by a Dark Falz-possessed supercomputer called Mother Trinity. It happened so quickly and thoroughly that the period of destruction is known simply as the Great Blank, because nobody actually knows what happened.
• Phoenotopia and its remake Phoenotopia: Awakening subvert this; the ancient humans who went to space expected Earth to be stuck as one after the war, but it got better and is rather nice now. Played straight in the Dread/Scorched Lands, which are still as war-torn as ever.
• Pikmin: The planet the games are set on, called PNF-404 in the third entry of the series, is confirmed by Word of God to be Earth 250 million years from now, long after humanity has gone extinct. The Earth is now inhabited by bizarre creatures barely resembling anything from the real world, and the only remnants of humanity are small fragments of buildings, broken pottery, some pieces of still functioning machinery, and the various "treasures" — assorted bits, bobs and detritus of civilization — that the main characters collect in some installments.
• Pillars of Eternity is set many thousands of years after a mysterious apocalypse wiped out the Precursors, and the ruins of their civilization are scattered across the land. However, it’s been long enough that civilization has largely rebuilt itself. Unbeknownst to all, the apocalypse was deliberately self-inflicted; the Precursors destroyed themselves in a mass human sacrifice to create giant Magitek A.I.s that guide mortalkind... thus creating the Eoran Pantheon Of Gods. The Big Bad is the last of their kind, and has spent the past several millennia working to conceal the secret behind their disappearance.
• Piratez, a mod for Openxcom, takes place centuries after a lost game of the vanilla X-Com, when Earth was incorporated into the alien empire and most humans have been turned into mutants. In fact, all of your pirates are mutants too, and terror missions are replaced by pogroms against mutants.
• Planetarian takes place in a future world that is slowly dying after a devastating war that killed off most of humanity.
• Pokémon:
  • PokéPark Wii has what is possibly the most lighthearted take possible on this trope as a background element, at least as far as the park itself goes. It's unclear if humans are still around elsewhere or not.
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: There are broken-down human structures and most Pokemon know what a human is, but they regard them as fairy tales and everyone is extremely surprised when they learn the player character is a human. Special mention goes to the Explorers games' Bad Future for being after the end of the last end.
• Portal 2: Implied to be the case, although it's unclear if the world has actually ended or if the computers running the place merely think it has, on account of the fact that the whole facility has fallen apart in the time since the events of the first game. Although given that it shares a universe with Half-Life, the implication is the Combine invaded while Chell slept. Then we learn that Aperture apparently saw things coming and managed to take some steps. For the longest time, players thought Chell was the only human in Aperture, but the end of Portal 2's co-op campaign reveals a giant vault full of inhabited cryo-pods: enough "test subjects" to keep GLaDOS busy for a long time. Then GLaDOS proceeds to burn through all of them in about a week.
• Primal Rage shows in its Attract Mode that the world was hit by a giant asteroid, laying waste to all civilization... and awakening a number of powerful, ancient lifeforms. They now face each other in one-on-one deathmatches in order to determine which of them will be the god of "New Urth".
• Puzzles & Survival is set after a zombie apocalypse caused by a virus left the world a wasteland. Survivors fight each other for resources and dominance over the wasteland.
• Rage (2011) takes place a hundred and six years after Earth was decimated by real life asteroid 99942 Apophis. The protagonist, a survivor who was put in a cryogenic time-capsule refered to as an "Ark" as part of a massive international project known as "Eden Project", awakens to find Earth turned into a wasteland ruled by gangs with a few scattered settlements in between. To make matters worse, another group of survivors have awakened and are taking advantage of the chaos to set up a totalitarian empire.
• RAY Series: In Rayforce, Earth has been overtaken and transformed by the supercomputer-turned-Eldritch Abomination "Con Human". The game ends with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
• Rebuild takes place after a Zombie Apocalypse. Unlike most examples of this trope, the whole point is your trying to rebuild society, secure the city and possibly even cure zombieism.
• The Reckoning is set in the USA in 2019, a few years after a Zombie Apocalypse. The area is full of abandoned buildings, improvised settlements, wandering infected and raiders. This being a Mount & Blade: Warband mod, the core of the mod is to take part in the war between US Army remnants, Confederacy nostalgists, Neo-Nazis, Rednecks, and Raiders, either by choosing one faction to join or by creating your own independant empire.
• RAD is set in a world with not one, but two, global changing distasters.After a nuclear apocalypse a group of people called "The Menders" try to, well, mend the world using a series of machines. They promptly malfunctioned and disappeared; leaving the world in a worse state than when they started.
• The Reconstruction: While the game doesn't start out like this, an apocalypse happens towards the end that turns the final chapter into an After the End scenario.
• Resonance of Fate takes place long after humans polluted the Earth so badly that they couldn't live on it anymore due to extremely high cancer rates. The last enclave of humanity live in and around a giant air purifier built by their ancestors and have no idea the outside world exists.
• RFCK Endless War:The setting takes place in a post-apocalyptic society. The actual event is unknown, but it caused the Grand Canyon to fill up with radioactive slime and left most of the Southwest side of the U.S. a radioactive wasteland.
• Rimworld: Most generated planets show signs of a past civilisation, a road network crisscrosses the planetary surface and many maps are dotted with ruined buildings which can be reclaimed and used by your colonists. The original populace of the world might only live on as tribal descendants or the occasional Human Popsicle locked away in a bunker buried deep under a mountain.
• Sacred Earth - Alternative: The world has apparently been reduced to a husk by some kind of "despair." Unfortunately, True Konoe destroys whatever is left despite the replica's efforts to stop her, since doing so is necessary for her to summon a Celestial Tree to bring back her family. As a twist, it turns out this is one of many worlds in a multiverse setting, and True Konoe's activation of the Celestial Tree is endangering the other worlds too, though the world Promise and New Theory takes place in has yet to fall.
• Scrapland is set on the planet Earth, which has been polluted to the point that it's no longer capable of sustaining life, so humanity was forced to leave. Meanwhile, the robots stayed behind, and decided to build their own society out of the junk and scrap that humanity left behind, hence the planet was renamed "Scrapland".
• Seedship: The game is set after a world destroying event that is never elaborated on, forcing humanity to built the titular ship.
• Second Extinction is set after a new apocalypse wipes out most of mankind. The surviving humans have escaped to space, and as you return to earth once more it turns out dormant, mutated dinosaurs have been revived in the absence of humans, and are evolved to kill every human in sight.
• Secret of Mana: The world turns out to be this, with a past technologically advanced world civilization having long since been wiped out by harnessing the Mana Fortress. Considering this was caused by abusing Mana to power the Fortress, this is also a Green Aesop for our world's abuse of natural resources.
• Shadow of the Colossus may apply, in a sense. Wander travels around the Forbidden Lands, which is devoid of human life, save for Wander himself. However, if one looks carefully (and does a lot of riding), traces of a prior civilization can be found, namely at the altar area in the desert that triggers the 13th colossus, and the "closed off city" that the 14th colossus resides in. Certainly not an end of all humanity or life, but an end to a civilization (maybe?), nonetheless.
• Shardlight takes the standard nuclear post-apocalypse setting and sets it up against an Alternate History/Days of Future Past background.
• Shin Megami Tensei loves this trope. In fact, almost all of the mainline games all take place after the end of the world, for the most part. To wit:
  • Megami Tensei II starts around 35 years After the End after a nuclear war combined with a demonic invasion sent humanity fleeing to the bomb shelters in 199X.
  • Shin Megami Tensei I has this happen twice over the course of the game, with the first fourth of the game being relatively nice until the Expanse breaks out, turning it into a case of an Urban Fantasy Just Before the End as Tokyo gets sent into chaos, only "resolving" when the United States Ambassador Thorman, aka Thor is on orders from YHVH himself to purge the entire world before demons overtake the Expanse and drops his "hammer" on Tokyo, and by proxy the rest of the world. And from whatever the nuke and demons haven't obliterated, YHVH finishes the job with a second Great Flood promptly killing anyone who wasn't in the Basilica at the time of it happening. By the end of it, a hell of a lot of dead bodies pile up and set it en course for Shin Megami Tensei II, after the Hero canonically wipes the floor with the angels and demons, only to be usurped at the last moment, and have a theocratic Cyberpunk dystopia installed in his place. Yeah, this universe isn't fun.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne starts the game by ending the world. You spend the rest of the game rebuilding it in your image.
  • Digital Devil Saga also takes place After the End. Though not in the way it appears at first.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV gives you three different flavors of apocalypse to choose from, each of them horrible. The Tokyo depicted in the game has a giant dome over it's head that's dwelled by the return party of God's Coccoons sent into the sky 25 years ago, only for a human hunter to side with the angels and against their backs install a feudal monarchy in its place, devoid of common tech. So on the surface you have clean water and air, but a theocratic nightmare where public executions are considered a holiday. Tokyo below it isn't much better, with the angels wanting them dead for good and the entire plane being a hellhole of demons and no sunlight, with one half ruled by the same Ring of Gaea from the first game and, in the Order of Messiah's place, a Yakuza group that engages in human trafficking and organ harvesting to keep the demons at bay with Red Pills, harvested neurotransmitters from the human brain. And this is the least horrible future!
  • Then there's Blasted Tokyo and Infernal Tokyo. Blasted Tokyo emerged in a timeline where the Forces of Law won or the Firmament couldn't be lifted up in time, turning the Earth into a scorched wasteland with the angels abandoning the landscape proper while leaving Pluto to clean up the remaining humans with a 100% lethal toxic gas. Infernal Tokyo is just as bad, as God's Plan was stopped in time, but due to it being the Chaos-aligned timeline, from it emerged an even worse Fantastic Caste System than Mikado, with the Half-Human Hybrid Demonoids being able to do whatever they want to the Neurishers that they feast Magnetite from.
• Sheltered is set in a world destroyed by a nuclear holocaust.
• Sidewinder F is an Ocean Punk flight sim taking place after runaway Global Warming.
• The Silent Age: Half of the story takes place After the End with abundance of skeletons and general decay of previously flourishing human civilization. The player switches between stable reality and this kind of Bad Future by means of time travelling.
• Skies of Arcadia: Although the world is set during an age of exploration, similar to the era of when Spain had numerous colonies, it is technically set way after the end — that is, after the Rains of Destruction fell and destroyed what the characters refer to in-game as the Old World, which was said a technological utopia until the events leading to the rains. Society has long evolved again since then, and it's found later that the only remains of the Old World that are left, along with the Gigas, is Fina's home, the Great Silver Shrine. Said shrine hosts the very elders that called down the rains in the first place...
• Skyhill: Is set in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war. Your character survives by virtue of being in a radiation-proof penthouse at the top of the building.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): Crisis City is essentially Soleanna's capital city after Iblis wrecks up the place. It ain't pretty.
• Spec Ops: The Line is set in what’s left of Dubai after the city is totaled by a massive sandstorm.
• In Speed Kills, the first race venue is a planet which was turned into a wasteland by nuclear war. It may have something of an Apunkalyptic atmosphere, judging by some of the racers there.
• The Splatoon series takes place approximately 12,000 years after humans and much of Earth's surface-dwelling fauna were driven to extinction by climate change and (according to the art book) nuclear warfare during World War V that managed to exacerbate it, after which various marine animals evolved to live on land and became the Inklings, Octarians, and other creatures seen in the game. The character Judd is introduced as being the only mammal left on the planet in the first game, having been placed in a specially-designed pod that released him after 10,000 years; the sequel would introduce another cat in the form of Li'l Judd (who's a literal clone of the original) and hint that your character's Mysterious Employer at their part-time job may actually be a bear (which is confirmed in the third game, with him being the only survivor of the Ark Polaris space shuttle). It's kept ambiguous as to whether or not the humans that make up the "Squid Research Lab" used to present the franchise's marketing actually exist in-universe, though Word of God states human influence does remain in the form of Splatfest themes, with most being the result of Inklings receiving radio waves from our time that have gone into space and been reflected back to Earth, and then interpreting our banal arguments as messages from a divine power to determine the superiority of bread vs. rice, cats vs. dogs, etc. This additionally explains why Inklings would have little understanding of what humans were as a species (they believe that our game consoles were altars of worship, which considering internet Console Wars, is a fair assumption), but have great knowledge of things like Transformers and SpongeBob SquarePants.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. partially subverts and even inverts it. Yes, the place you're living in is a giant completely irradiated version of the northern parts of Ukraine, but everywhere else is not only going on as usual, but completely thriving at the expense of Chernobyl by using the area as scientific research.
• Starsector takes place in an isolated sector 206 years after The Collapse, where the gate network suddenly and mysteriously stopped working. While the technology left allows a 21st-century lifestyle (With some higher tech industries, such as interstellar ship and antimatter fuel production), compared to the heights of Domain technology it's like modern humanity dropping down to an agrarian stone age lifestyle.
• If you ever meet a species with Tomb World climate preference in Stellaris, it is a safe bet that this happened at one point. Some reach for the stars anyways (and it is even a possible origin for your Empire). Sometimes, they are animals that survived (Usually Roachoids) that one empire decided to uplift because anything hardcore enough to have a Tomb World climate preference is hardcore enough to survive everywhere else.
• Steel Assault occurs after a nuclear meltdown turns most of the cities in North America into deserted ruins. And in the aftermath, a power-hungry billionaire and industrialist took over as a dictator and rules over the survivors with his private army.
• Steel Harbinger takes place a few decades after alien pods dropped on cities all over Earth, and began assimilating humans into half-mechanical hybrids. After the initial California outbreak, most of the world has been converted into monsters, and a small pocket of resistance is all that's left.
• Submerged takes place in a half-drowned city after climate change has flooded the world.
• Super Mario Galaxy 2 actually takes place inside a new universe created from the same black hole that destroyed the old one at the end of the first Super Mario Galaxy game. This makes every Mario game after Galaxy qualify as After the End.
• In Super Paper Mario, Count Bleck's goal is to destroy all dimensions (Including Heaven (the "Overthere") and Hell (the "Underwhere")) by sucking them into an interdimensional black hole called The Void, and successfully does so to one. When revisited, the remnants are very different from most examples of this trope: the dimension is completely blank, save for a straight line indicating the ground and the occasional black outline of a pile of rubble; there are no survivors. Dark stuff, for a Mario game.
• Super Mario Odyssey:
  • Crumbleden, aka the Ruined Kingdom, was once a civilization that used its large buildings to harness lightning, according to the brochure on it. Some theorized that it was the lightning that destroyed them, others think that something else destroyed the kingdom. It's implied that it was the Ruined Dragon that did so. Notably, it's one of the smallest kingdoms Mario can go to.
  • The brochure for Culmina Crater, the Darker Side of the Moon implies that the Moon Kingdom is also set after the end, destroyed by the cataclysm that created the crater in the first place. Notably, there are only two buildings on the entire moon (the Crazy Cap shop doesn't count as it's set up after the game's beaten) and it's sparsely populated, mostly with frogs and rabbits.
• Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden: Starting with chapter 10, it's a future that had, as part of it's backstory, the backstories of Xabungle, Gundam X, and ∀ Gundam, fused togther in typical SRW fashion. Alpha Gaiden is set after three ends: The gravitational shockwave the heroes were trying to prevent before the time travel, a massive attack by the underground forces (aka the Dinosaur Empire and the Mycenae civilisation), and the aforementioned fusion of Gundam X's massive Colony Drop and ∀ Gundam's Black History. "Apocalyptic clusterfuck" is about the only way to truly describe it.
• Tales Series
  • Tales of Phantasia takes place several hundred years after an end caused by a great war weakening a hyperadvanced magiteknological society too much for it to fend off a large meteor, which wiped out everything. By the time the game starts, mankind is in the dark ages both mystically and technologically (you go back a few hundred years to a point still after the impact and things are even more primitive). You also go to the future, where Magitek is just being rediscovered, and one of the first devices they're making is the very device which during the great war weakened mankind too much for it to defend itself.
  • Tales of Symphonia, takes place some 4000 years after a great war very much like the above one but even more damaging in its effects (at any given time 50% of the world is suffering massive resource depletion), with mankind being prevented from advancing beyond the medieval stage by a powerful theocracy (to keep them from overtaxing the limited remaining resources). The heroes fix that, even restoring the magic tree which provides the resources and destroying the theocracy - setting mankind up for the disastrous great war mentioned in Phantasia.
• Heavily implied in The Talos Principle, with the audio and text logs you can read. It's suggested that humanity destroyed itself with its technology, likely through climate change.
• Thera: Legacy of the Great Torment is a full conversion mod for Medieval II: Total War that is set in a world that was once very much like our own, until a great calamity devastated the planet. Storms and blizzards ravaged entire kingdoms for months, even years at a time, and those who didn't freeze were killed in the famines and the fighting afterwards. To survive some kingdoms turned to faith, some turned to technology, and many turned to war. Now the storms have calmed and the fields are green again, and the greatly atrophied surviving kingdoms are separated by vast tracts of wilderness, hostile brigands and rival petty nations. Take the reins of one of them and lead it to glory.
• Timberborn is set after humanity's extinction, with the beavers now gaining sapience and forming societies and civilizations. The flavour text for the irrigation tower says that water only covers one-third of the Earth's surface now.
• They Are Billions is a Real-Time Strategy game set in the 22nd century after a Zombie Apocalypse has caused the nations of Earth to collapse.
• Tokyo Jungle is set in in a world where the human race has disappeared and the world has been left to the animals (everything from domestic pets, escaped zoo animals and even dinosaurs).
• Although the state of the rest of the world is hidden in Tokyo Tattoo Girls, Tokyo itself is under lockdown after a catastrophe involving major destruction and wildfire, and now gangs rule the city with the magic tattoos they've suddenly obtained.
• This is the case with the UFO: After Blank. The first one, UFO Aftermath, begins about a year after an alien attack that has killed 70-80% of humanity. The sequel, UFO Aftershock, is set after the bad ending of the first game, with humanity reduced to whatever population will fit in the sky-city Laputas. UFO Afterlight shows that the aliens also relocated some humans to Mars to terraform and colonize it.
• Unending Dusk is set some unspecified time after society's collapse, with the player fighting their way past hordes and hordes of cannibalistic raiders throughout the game.
• Undercover Cops, a Beat 'em Up which takes place in the same universe as In the Hunt.
• Underrail is set in a future when life on the surface has long since been made impossible and humanity dwells in a system of underground rail stations that have become self-contained states.
• Undertow (Chair Entertainment): Vast areas of the world are submerged beneath the waves after an alien race melted the icecaps, but humanity lives on in Underwater Cities, and they aren't alone.
• Violent Storm, which takes place after World War III ruined the world. Despite the setting, the game is very light-hearted.
• The Wager takes place after an event known only as "the Shattering," which was powerful enough to permanently alter the world's geography but left humanity seemingly intact.
• Warframe: The game takes place centuries after the Old War, where the Orokin Empire fought the Sentients. Both sides were wiped out, leaving the Origin System littered with Orokin relics, and the Tenno warriors in hibernation. While the Corpus tell of a golden age of technology when the Orokin were in charge, it becomes clear as the story wears on that it wasn't as pleasant as they pretend. The Orokin created the Sentients to terraform the Tau system. When the Sentients decided they didn't want the Orokin to ruin Tau like they ruined the Origin System, they rebelled. The Orokin tried to use their Grineer slaves to fight the Sentients, but they rebelled. The Orokin created the warframes to fight the Sentients, but they were mad and uncontrollable. The Tenno were able to control the warframes and defeated the Sentients, but then they killed the Orokin for their many crimes. And above all this, it's implied that there was another apocalypse before the Orokin Empire; absolutely no mention is ever made of anything we would recognize, and it's so far in the future that people don't even remember that Mars had to be terraformed before it was livable.
• In Wizard101 the player arrives at the worlds of Dragonspyre and Celestia after they had been destroyed by the Dragon Titan and the Storm Titan respectively. Dragonspyre looks like hell arrived in a large medieval East European city, with rivers of lava and bones littering the ground. Celestia is the equivalent of Atlantis except the Piceans and Crustateans have since found it and are beginning to build their own empire in the ruins.
• Whispers of a Machine takes place an unspecified number of years after an event only known as "the Collapse". Very few details are revealed, only that it involved A.I.s and a fight against them. It's implied that it was a religious anti-AI group that started it, though. In the post-Collapse world, most advanced tech is banned, which includes even basic computers. Based on some of the items in the museum of Nordsund, the town which the story takes place in, it can be concluded that the pre-Collapse world had Flying Cars and Robot Soldiers, as well as many kinds of household robots. Even the remote town of Nordsund is located atop a giant stone or metal disc-shaped pedestal that requires an elevator to access.
• World of Warcraft's expansion pack Cataclysm sunders the land of Azeroth, leaving players to experience a world full of floods, volcanoes and earthquakes with many major settlements and areas destroyed.
  • The Alliance has it rough as the Horde invades Northshire and Elwynn Forest while Orgrimmar is subjected to Fantastic Racism as most of the non-Orc residents are forced to live in slums or leave entirely.
  • This is actually the second time that Azeroth had an After the End scenario. Ten-thousand years ago, the Well of Eternity imploded, causing the sole continent to split into what there is today. It's noted in one of the Expanded Universe novels that the event happened so quickly that the heroes barely made it to safety. While it wasn't seen, we can pretty easily conclude that hundreds of thousands died - certainly, most of the night elf empire was completely obliterated.
  • Third time when you include the civilizations ruled by the Old Gods. Azeroth was originally ruled by the Old Gods and populated by their various servant races, such as the elementals, Mantid, and Qiraji. The Titans destroyed this world order, killing or imprisoning the Old Gods and reducing their servant races to shadows of what they were. While the new world is friendlier for mortal races, it was definitely an apocalypse for the world's original inhabitants.
  • Azeroth actually had it relatively easy. After the Orcs were corrupted by the Burning Legion, Draenor began slowly dying due to demonic corruption and Gul'dan shattering the links between the elements and the Orcs. Ner'zhul created a massive number of portals for the Horde to escape through, with the resulting release of magic tearing the entire world apart. Outland is all that remains of Draenor, a shattered continent floating in the Nether.
• Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land starts in the outskirts of Duhan just after the mysterious flash which destroyed most of the city and left its remaining inhabitants to scavenge and explore the ruins looking for answers.
• Vector Thrust takes place after the events of WWIII, starting when Kaesel and Poltavia absolutely destroyed each others' militaries in limited nuclear attacks, with several allies on each side taking a few warheads to the face as well. If that wasn't bad enough, due to the absence of the two superpowers' military presence, multiple nations across the world declare war on their neighbors to expand their influence. One nation, called the Kingdom, also got in the action, initiating a Curb-Stomp Battle with their next-generation weapons arsenal and causing so much destruction across the world that the event that eventually ended the Kingdom in a nuclear civil war was named after them. To this day, the superpowers are still recovering, most of the world except for a single continent remains irradiated, the land once known as the Kingdom is now an Exclusion Zone with enough radiation to kill you in hours if not minutes, and to top it all off proxy wars occur on a daily basis and nukes are thrown around like conventional weapons. You definitely would find it hard to rest with the fact that a nuke could hit your city at any time if it wasn't for the Legion peacekeeping force breathing down every aggressor's neck.
• In X: Rebirth, the jumpgate network has been down for thirty years following the Argons' attempt at creating artificial general intelligence to beat the Terrans in the Second Terraformer War. The Community of Planets and its member governments are long dead and everyone is at each others' throats over resources. Meanwhile the Xenon are experiencing a resurgence. The Darkness affected each system, but by far the worst off was the Terran colony of DeVries, which was dependent on food shipments; mass famine caused cannibalism. They've gotten better, but their technology is failing faster than they can repair it; most of the population lives on the rusting hulks of old Terran space stations.
• Xeno Series
  • Xenogears can count, after all, Miang decided to start a nuclear holocaust so grand that thousands of years later, there are only three big cities left on the surface of the world without most modern technology.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles X: Lin's narration, during the opening cutscene, recounts how the people of Earth were forced to flee their planet's destruction. But one of the alien factions, Ghost, that caused the destruction of Earth caught up to them and damaged their ship, causing them to crash-land on planet Mira.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Beneath the Cloud Sea of Alrest is the Land of Morytha, the ruins of Earth's previous human civilization before Klaus tried to create a new universe. Now all that's left of that civilization are wreckage, haywire robots, and feral mutants that used to be human. And the World Tree that is said to house the paradise of Elysium? It's just a space elevator overgrown with foliage and Elysium is a long since abandoned space colony.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The fractured continent of Aionios (which is ironically named after the concept of 'eternity') is the result of an intergalactic apocalypse that destroyed and imperfectly recreated the world, leading to an endless war between the two surviving factions and their clone soldiers as large portions of spacetime spontaneously implode in the background. It didn't help that the Ark meant to restore the worlds after their total destruction was hacked by a tulpa created from human desires.
• Yggdra Union has 2 examples. Lost Aries is a wasteland which is all that remains of a civilization destroyed by the Dragon of Purgatory. Near the end of the game, the setting's equivalent of Atlantis rises from the sea.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! BAM, the isle of Alba Litora was devastated by a great and deadly battle, leaving little but memories of previous duels in its wake.

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