Diabolus Ex Machina / Video Games

Diabolus ex Machina in video games.

---

• In any game where a chopper is called in to rescue your party halfway through the game, it will probably get shot down or otherwise destroyed, as in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Dino Crisis, Resident Evil 4, or Modern Warfare.
  • In general, some sort of Diabolus Ex Machina would happen in the beginning of each Left 4 Dead campaign, serving as the Machina of the preceding campaign. But all those escapes turn sour because the Immune carry and spread the disease.
  • In Serious Sam 3: BFE, after seeing at least two choppers get shot down, (one of which he was ON at the time), Sam decides he's not going to get on any more choppers.
  • The Conduit actually jokes about it, where Ford's way off an oil rig is supposedly a Leviathan. The Leviathan destroys a helicopter flying over the base:
    Ford: ...And you're SURE there's no other way out of here?
    Prometheus: Well, there was a helicopter...
• Apocalypse: Bruce Willis/Trey Kincaid has defeated the four horsemen, (i.e. the Dragons), and is about to take down the Big Bad Reverend. Unfortunately, he gets a Demonic Possession ex machina, ending the game on a Downer Ending.
• Aquaria pulls this in The Stinger: Mia — who hasn't done anything of significance since the Noob Cave — reveals herself to have been manipulating Naija in a Batman Gambit to destroy the Big Bad. She then wipes the Naija's memory and spirits her away from her new family, leaving her right back where she started — lonely, isolated, and amnesiac — while Mia is free to take over the surface. The creator admitted in this message board thread that there were never any fixed plans for a sequel, and that he wanted to avoid a happy ending.
• A lot of the moral choices in the second Army of Two game end this way. You either choose the "bad" option, or you choose the "good" option...except that the guy you gave up some advantage to save turns out to be corrupt AND selling weapons to terrorists. Or a guy you choose to save instead of killing in exchange for money is later killed in a plane crash accident.
• The Baldur's Gate series has a variety of endings, depending on your action in-game. One of them involves the Protagonist giving up their divine soul and turning their back on Godhood in order to be with their newly-found True Love — who, in her aftermath/autobiography is brutally murdered by her vengeful kin, leaving the Protagonist to raise their child alone, embittered, and hell-bent on committing genocide as return. This even applies if the Protagonist was, for the previous 100 hours of gameplay, a Lawful Good Priest of Peace and Healing... This is especially silly given that even if that attack somehow worked (and by the end of the expansion everyone in the party is so powerful that there's virtually zero chance of that), the player character either had the power to raise the dead themselves as a virtual afterthought or they were such a legendary hero that they were owed favors by multiple individuals (including a few gods) who could easily do it for them.
• The BlazBlue series makes it clear that its demands for anything resembling a happy ending will be paid with blood, in full with lots of overdue interest^note which does finally happen in Central Fiction, and yet even by those standards Chronophantasma is where this trope comes out in full force.
  • So Tsubaki is back with the good guys, Bang has been reunited with Lord Tenjou's son, Relius is a broken shell of a man, Terumi is dead, Take-Mikazuchi is defeated, Nu is unconscious, and all is right with the world, yea? Izanami pops right on in at the very end, has Phantom teleport Hakumen away (he was trying to kill Nu, something not even Celica could talk him out of), sics Phantom on Jubei (and reveals that she is Jubei's long-dead wife Nine of the Six Heroes), and reanimates Nu, who proceeds to hug.exe Ragna on the spot, fusing with him despite every effort he made to prevent it, wounding Noel and beating Jin to within an inch of his life in the process, with Ragna doing everything in his power just to keep from outright killing them. Bonus points for Izanami being the manifestation of death, as Rachel calls her, which implies a being of divine nature.
  • On the subject of Ragna, he never gets a good ending in Arcade Mode, but the endings for his Calamity Trigger and Continuum Shift Arcade runs can be seen coming. Ragna manages to stalemate with Nu-13 in CP Arcade (whereas all prior encounters ended with hug.exe), but when he attempts to activate his Azure Grimoire, Izanami intervenes and jams it. Terumi gloats about it, Nu stops Ragna from trying to wipe the smirk off Terumi's face, and that's how it ends. It ends this exact same way in Chapter 7 of the Chronophantasma story, too. Bonus points for evoking the Evil Plot Escape Clause, as losing Nu would compromise the villains' attempt to evoke the Master Unit.
  • Tager gets hit with it, too. His final battle is against Relius Clover, and when the fight ends, Kokonoe orders him to round the bastard up on the spot, but time gets scrambled at that point, with Tager back outside the Ibukido Ruins. Kokonoe notices something is amiss, and chalks it up to the Master Unit, with no further explanation.
  • And then there's Makoto, who the villains make damn sure nothing goes right for if they can do anything about it. In Continuum Shift Arcade, Makoto has just knocked Noel out when Hazama comes along and tosses the poor girl into the smelting phase, whereas in Chronophantasma Arcade Tsubaki only gets one line in before Izanami forcibly reinstates Mind Eater and pushes her into a deathmatch with Makoto — after a fight in the Izayoi's Zero-Type mode no less. Both times attempts are made on Makoto's life in Story Mode to prevent the incidents from repeating themselves. The latter also overlaps with Deus ex Machina as Master Unit: Amaterasu ejects Makoto from that fight before it gets underway.
• In Call of Duty: World at War, the fake-surrendering Japanese soldiers who kill Roebuck/Polonsky at the end of "Breaking Point" in World at War could qualify, too, seeing as the mission had been a success up to that point, and Roebuck even said in the opening narration that they would all go home at the end. Even worse, you have to choose which one to save. In about a split instant.
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night retroactively does this to the events of its predecessor, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. In Rondo, Richter manages to kill Shaft, a dark priest loyal to Dracula and the man responsible for kidnapping Annette and Maria, twice — as a human and as a ghost. In pretty much any other series would this render Shaft Deader than Dead, but he somehow survives and goes on to possess Richter as part of his plot to resurrect the Dark Lord once again, necessitating Alucard's involvement a few years down the road. Why Shaft's third death at the hands of Al sticks whereas the first two didn't is never addressed.
• Dalton in the Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross continuity. He is quite clearly used as a comedic (and a not really super-powerful) villain in Trigger, but he manages to exact his vengeance against the heroes as suggested in the backstory of Cross and in dialogue exclusive to the DS version of Trigger.
• Clock Tower (1995): Poor Jennifer. Between Scissorman, Mary and seeing Lotte die (no matter what the player does), she may get a lovely Hope Spot in the form of either Laura or Ann running to greet her at the climax — except said Hope Spot is promptly pushed straight off the ledge, into the Clock Tower's gears.
• In the original Contra, the Final Boss is a large alien heart, and defeating it is the only way to stop the alien invasion and save the world. In the Amstrad CPC port, however, for no reason at all, its destruction somehow triggers the Earth's self-destruct mechanism which then promptly wipes out humanity and all life along with it.
• You just wiped all the gangs out of Paragon City and finished Crackdown. Now it's a police state run by your employer, which is another gang.
• Dead Space 3 pulls this in the Awakened expansion pack. The destruction of the Weird Moon of Tau Volantis sends a signal to awaken the other Brethren Moons, which have discovered Earth and are feasting on the planet by the time Isaac and Carver return.
• The first two Descent games end like this. In the first one, after clearing out the hostile robots from the solar system, PTMC refuses to let you return to base as they fear your ship might be infected with the virus, and they force you to do more work for them. In the end of the second, your warp drive malfunctions when trying to jump home, leaving your ship disabled and stranded in an unknown star system. It later turns out that Dravis intentionally sabotaged your warp core.
• Devil May Cry 2: In the penultimate mission of Dante's campaign, Dante sabotages Arius' ritual by replacing one of his artifacts with an ordinary coin. However, in the final mission, Argosax is summoned anyways, as a portal to the Demon World inexplicably opens, forcing Dante to step inside to fight him.
• The first episode of the original Doom ends like this, as after you defeat the Barons of Hell, you step on a teleporter expecting to end the level, but it sends you to a dark room filled with monsters and a damaging floor that kills you. The following text screen even lampshades this. Fortunately, you can still continue with the second and third episodes.
• Dragon Age II: The Hawke family farm is gone, one of your new allies is dying of darkspawn taint, and just when you think it's safe to stop for a breather, an ogre comes out of nowhere to brutally smash one of your siblings into the dirt, reducing your party to you, your other sibling, and Aveline against the ogre and its hurlock buddies. And it's only the prologue.
• Dragon Quest V: The "Harry's been kidnapped" plotline. It turns out the kidnappers are on the Order of Zugzwang's payroll. The main character's father dies, and the hero and Harry are turned into slaves.
• The path towards the fourth ending in Drakengard is shaping up to be a Bittersweet Ending, which, given the only other "good" ending is also bittersweet, doesn't seem too bad. After all, after finding out that the Creepy Child Big Bad is irredeemably evil even after the protests of her twin brother, the heroes have finally succeeded in killing her once and for all. Now the world is saved. Except, wait, something's falling out of the sky... Justified in that said Creepy Child was essentially the avatar or representative of said things falling out of the sky. We probably should mention that said things are pissed off as hell after she dies and with no seal holding them back, it's The End of the World as We Know It.^note A Retcon from the second game. The first game more implies that killing her while she was the avatar of other evil entities kept them from holding said things falling from the sky back. Since this ending isn't canon to the sequel and both fit the general theme of the game's setting, take your pick. The real kicker is the fifth ending. The heroes cross over into another dimension to kill the mother of all the aforementioned elderitch abominations. She and the heroes are transported to modern day Tokyo and, after a climatic boss battle, get shot down by missiles from an aircraft. And as Nier reveals, this leads to the extinction of the human race.
• Because Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages's story had to be Cut Short due to the restrictions of the 90's, the final world you have to explore, Chokmah, had to be basically unfinished, and the game ends abruptly. In the Chokmah diner, a man-pig hybrid cowboy randomly teleports inside to give you a warning, and then as soon as he leaves the Man In Black who's been stalking you throughout the entire game knocks you out, sending you out of the realm and resulting in your failure to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant that you've been searching for. A sequel that was supposed to wrap up the story never came about.
• Fable:
  • Near the end of Fable II Lucien tells you he killed your family. There's no reason for him to do this, other than to set up the neutral choice for the ending.
  • Private Jammy is a soldier stationed at Fort Mourningwood in Fable III, named such for his good luck (he's been wounded a whopping total of 724 times). However, once the Hollowmen arrive, he invariably meets his demise no matter what the player does. His ghost then comes back to continue serving as the Hero's loader in the mortar mini-game. What a trooper.
• Fallout 3: The finale of the main quest is especially guilty of this, capping off with the protagonist sacrificing his/her own life by entering a radiation-flooded room to save the world... even though your radiation-proof mutant friend is standing right beside you. The Broken Steel expansion pack changes this ending, allowing you to send in a highly resistant super mutant, a ghoul who is actually healed by radiation, or a Robot!
  • Additionally, between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, the Capital Wasteland was ravaged by a giant super mutant army that appeared out of nowhere despite the fact that Vault 87, where the super mutants had been created, was out of the Forced Evolutionary Virus that allowed them to make more of themselves in the first place.
• Fatal Frame:
  • Fatal Frame: Miku has managed to collect all pieces of the Holy Mirror and managed to save her brother, as well as Kirie from her continued possession of the Malice. Kirie fulfills her duty as the Rope Shrine Maiden, keeping the Hellgate closed. Out of nowhere, Mafuyu decides to not leave with Miku, but remain behind with Kirie, so that she'll never have to suffer alone anymore.
  • Fatal Frame II: Mio finally finds her sister and is ready to leave the village. Suddenly, Mio gets possessed and strangles Mayu, completing the ritual they were trying to prevent from having to go through the entire time, and leaving Mio with huge guilt when she realizes what she has done.
• Invoked in Fate/Grand Order's 2016 Valentines' Day event. When the protagonist and Shakespeare learn that they'll be able to resolve all the chaos going on simply by having a short tea party with Nursery Rhyme, Shakespeare decides that this is too easy and boring. So he "accidentally" rewrites the encounter so that Nursery Rhyme decides to trap the protagonist in the tea party using her Nameless Forest Reality Marble.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Not quite the ending, but the climax of World 1 in Final Fantasy V is rather like this. Against all odds, you finally managed to get to the last elemental crystal in time, unlike all the other ones that ended up breaking. The bad guy's possessed puppet gets beaten back, there's a lovely reunion with one of the characters and his granddaughter, where he gets his memory of her back, and a reunion of two of the characters and their long-lost father... and then Bartz realizes that throughout the long reunion, they'd forgotten to turn off the Crystal-draining machinery and the crystal shatters.
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • Ultros is a Diabolus Ex Machina personified. Four times in the World of Balance, he comes out of nowhere to cause trouble for the heroes, including trying to drop a weight on Celes's head at the opera.
    • Kefka's rending of the world is a huge example of a famous Diabolus Ex Machina that was actually very well received.
  • Final Fantasy VII:
    • The game is a Diabolus Ex Machina strewn throughout an entire disc. Aside from Aerith dying at the end of Disc 1, the party chases Sephiroth to the Northern Crater, where they prepare to battle him once and for all, until Sephiroth decides to break poor Cloud's mind and force him to learn that he's a failed experiment. This ends in Cloud handing over the Black Materia, and all hell breaking loose. So now, not only is Meteor looming about to kill the world in one week, but the Planet has released its failsafe, a group of massive biomechanical creatures called the WEAPONs that are capable of wreaking serious destruction. The next time we see Cloud, he's alive, but totally catatonic.
    • It was revealed 20 years after the game came out that there was originally a really extreme one. Nojima had the idea that the entire party should be killed off except for the two characters the player brought with them, and planned to use the part where the party parachute into Midgar to kill off everyone. Mercifully, Tetsuya Nomura talked them out of it, saying it was important to keep Aerith's death special by not just killing off characters at random.
• F.E.A.R. ends with the protagonist being extracted aboard a helicopter with a couple of NPC teammates. The helicopter suddenly lurches and Alma is seen climbing aboard an instant before the game cuts to the credits.
  • The Expansion Pack Extraction Point, takes this trope one step further by killing off those NPC teammates and foreshadowing a devastating war.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
  • Chapter 9 ends with your father Jeralt getting shanked in the back. Your player character naturally takes offense to this and pulls out their Divine Pulse ability to turn back time in order to stop this. Too bad a new villain you've never seen before teleports in out of nowhere and blocks your counterstrike, resulting in Jeralt getting shanked again, this time for good.
  • The final bosses of the Verdant Wind, Azure Moon, and Silver Snow routes are all Diabolus Ex Machinas. To wit:
    • In Verdant Wind, you've finally defeated both the opposing nations and the evil death cult and are ready to wrap things up when suddenly Nemesis, an ancient threat from thousands of years ago, comes back from the dead with zero explanation as to how and the closest thing to foreshadowing being showing up in a flashback dream in the opening cutscene and occasionally being namedropped in Exposition Dumps.
    • In Azure Moon you're gearing up to have a fairly standard Storming the Castle fight against Edelgard and the remainder of the Adrestian Army when it turns out she secretly had a super powered One-Winged Angel mode this whole time that is never foreshadowed.
    • In Silver Snow, you've defeated all of the bad guys when suddenly it turns out that Rhea has secretly been going through Dragon Degeneration and goes berserk, despite being perfectly fine on every other route and seeming perfectly fine throughout the entire game (at least, the parts of the game she's actually present in), so now you have to fight her.
• The Force Unleashed II uses this in regards to the outcomes of its moral choices. At the end, Starkiller has beaten Darth Vader after he seemingly killed Juno, and the player is given the choice whether or not to kill him. If you do try to kill him, another Starkiller clone comes out of nowhere, kills you and all your friends, and infiltrates the Rebellion in your place, leading to The Bad Guy Wins.
• FreeSpace 2 does this with a flourish: at the end of an arduous, complicated and desperate campaign to destroy the Shivan dreadnought Sathanas which threatens the (known) galaxy, you learn that the Shivans have about a bazillion more such ships.
• In Hades, this is invoked for any runs after completing the game's story while also being played for laughs. When reaching the end, the narrator gives a Hand Wave of an excuse for how exactly Zagreus ends up dying after escaping. These include, but are not limited to: tripping on a rock, stepping on a rake, trying to talk to a bear, being run over by a chariot, discovering it was all a dream, and assuming that the Narrator has run out of ways to kill him off and being proven wrong.
• Half-Life:
  • At the end of the first Half-Life, if you decide not to side with the ostensibly evil G-Man, you're immediately dumped into the middle of a bunch of angry Xen aliens with no weapons or hope of victory.
  • Half-Life 2: Episode Two: After Gordon fends off a horde of Striders at White Forest, a Combine Advisor shows up, immobilizes Gordon, Alyx and Alyx's father Eli, and kills Eli by jamming a nozzle up his spine to suck his brains out, but is then stopped by Dog before it can do the same thing to Alyx or Gordon, leaving the game on a Kick the Dog moment.
• Haunting Starring Polterguy: After poltergeist Polterguy defeats the final boss, he returns into his human form again, but an anvil appears out of nowhere, lands on his head and turns him into a ghost again.
• The ending to Infocom's text adventure Infidel has always been somewhat controversial with fans because it's a good example of this trope being used to Shoot the Shaggy Dog. The protagonist (despite being selfish, greedy, and foolish) makes it to the pyramid's burial chamber to claim the riches ... only for the walls to collapse and trap him there to die.
• Parodied in I Wanna Be the Guy. At the end of it, you defeat The Guy, take his gun, and return home triumphantly as the credits roll. You also walk under a tree with one of the game's deadly apples giant cherries on it, which falls. If you're not expecting it and don't move, it lands on you, killing you and giving you the standard Game Over screen even though it's after the credits. Fortunately, the game still counts you as having beaten it.
• Jak X: Combat Racing. Non-fatal example, but after you've won the game, Rayn is suddenly revealed to have been manipulating you all along, wasn't poisoned, and now she's the biggest crimelord.
• In Killzone 2, the ISA has busted their asses to get to and defeat Visari, only to find out that the Helghast have a huge reserve fleet coming.
• Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] is especially infamous for this. Everything since the original Kingdom Hearts endures a big Happy Ending Override as part of the Greater-Scope Villain's new Stable Time Loop to set up the Grand Finale in Kingdom Hearts III. This is especially significant because the secret ending of Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (which showed how things became so messy to begin with) had a much more hopeful implication.
• L.A. Noire has Cole Phelps about to break the case against Courtney Sheldon involving illegal morphine when the Chief of Police interrupts the interrogation and drags Cole away to his office. The interrogation is suspended and is never resolved. Cole is outed for having an affair with Elsa and is demoted to the arson desk. The demotion also keeps Cole away from the big case he was working on since he would have gotten to close to the plans that were laid within the Suburban Redevelopment Fund.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: When Link pulls out the Master Sword, it (or possibly Rauru) puts him in a coma until he is an adult, which allows Ganondorf to take the Triforce unopposed. While Rauru claims afterwards that the Sword demands an adult wielder, this is not foreshadowed beforehand, and it is contradicted in both earlier and later games within the same timeline.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: One in the backstory. Ganondorf is exposed for his crimes and executed. When the Sages stab him in the chest with a giant sword, they are very surprised when he suddenly manifests the Triforce of Power, survives, and starts killing them. They have to exile him to the Twilight Realm instead. This is because of timeline trickery. After Ocarina of Time, Link came back and warned Hyrule about Ganondorf's ambitions and they were able to stop him. But in the original timeline, his plan went unopposed, and when he touched the Triforce it broke, with the Triforce of Power going to him. Since the Triforce transcends time and space, he received it again in the altered timeline at the same moment.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has one at the very end: At the conclusion of the Final Boss, Demise suddenly curses the incarnations of Link and the descendants of Zelda to forever fight the incarnation of his hatred. Hence, he causes the events of every game for the rest of the series.
• At the end of Marathon 2, the defeated Pfhor use their sun-shattering Trih Xeem on L'howon's sun, unintentionally releasing the omnicidal Eldritch Abomination known as the W'rkncacnter.
• Metroid: Zero Mission is a remake of the original Metroid that continues after the original ended. It accomplishes this by having Samus shot down by Space Pirates while leaving Zebes, destroying her ship and suit. This is followed up by an inversion in the form of an ancient Chozo temple giving Samus an older yet far more advanced Power Suit (the one she's pictured with in most incarnations). It even is capable of recognizing the incompatible Upgrades she received earlier in the game.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Raiden's ending in the original Mortal Kombat (1992).
    "Raiden's victory comes as no surprise to him. He was never impressed by Shang Tsung's inferior sorcery, Goro's brute force, or the challenge of the other contestants. He quickly becomes bored with his mortal competition and soon invites other gods to participate on the contest. The ensuing battles rage on for years. And the wars result in our world's final destruction. Have a nice day."
  • This trope has been the common theme of Reptile's endings since Mortal Kombat 4. It is very rare for him to ever catch a break, with his ultimate fate usually being death at the hands of untrustworthy employers. In one instance, his body gets taken over to become the vessel of rebirth for the Big Bad of the next game.
  • Mortal Kombat 9 takes it even further. After destroying Quan Chi's Soulnado, thus saving the souls of Earthrealm, Nightwolf regroups with Raiden's chosen right as Raiden and Liu Kang go to have a chat with the Elder Gods. At that moment, the Cyber Lin Kuei and a Brainwashed and Crazy Sindel show up. Everything goes to hell after that, ending with a majority of Earthrealm's protectors dying and subsequently being reanimated as revenants in service to the Netherrealm.
  • The entirety of Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath. After the main story resolves everything in the heroes' favor, Sindel and Shao Kahn come into play to ruin everything. Cassie Cage and the Special Forces are captured by Shao Kahn's armies and sent to Outworld, Past!Kitana is dethroned, Past!Liu Kang is crippled by Shao Kahn, Raiden and Fujin are brought to death's door by Shang Tsung, who now wears Kronika's crown, and overall the bad guys win. Granted, there's still a chance for Fire God Liu Kang to stop Shang Tsung from forging an evil timeline in his image, but even then the player could always choose Shang Tsung if they were feeling mean.
• Neverwinter Nights 2:
  • In one of the most appalling Diabolus Ex Machina endings ever, Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies is taken quite literally.
  • Remedied in the Expansion Pack that follows with you waking up afterward, albeit on the opposite side of Faerun, and you spend much of the game trying to figure out how the hell you got there. Also you wake up with an entirely new Diabolus in the form of the Spirit Eater curse.
  • The rocks falling is lampshaded later in Mask of the Betrayer by Ammon Jerro, in a rather hypocritical bit of humor.
    Player Character: I remember being disappointed that the fortress's structure wasn't more architecturally sound.
    Ammon Jerro: Yes. That powerful and evil beings insist on causing destruction even as they die is an unfortunate habit.
• Persona 2 pulls this infamously at the end of the first installment of the duology, Innocent Sin. Despite having lost his bet with Philemon over whether humans can overcome the supernatural adversity he was stirring up, Nyarlathotep teleports a minion of his behind Maya Amano, who stabs her with the mythical Spear of Longinus, fulfilling the Oracle of Maia and triggering the end of the world. Distraught at the death of their friend, and with the earth destroyed, the remaining party members agree to give up their memories of each other in exchange for Philemon reviving Maya and resetting the timeline.
• In Pikmin 2, after collecting enough treasure to repay the debt of Hocotate Freight, Olimar immediately takes off to return home, only to realize he forgot to make sure sure his coworker, Louie, got on the ship with him. This results in him needing to return to the planet again, this time to retrieve Louie, who has somehow taken control of a massive mutant spider, who serves as the game’s final boss.
• The updated ending to Portal — The first independently mobile entity apart from Chell turns up just to drag her back right after you thought she was free.
• In [PROTOTYPE] after defeating the game’s big bads and getting yourself in a position to stop the military from nuking Manhattan, it’s revealed that your contact in the military is actually a shapeshifted Supreme Hunter, a boss enemy from half a game ago. Cue final boss fight. Up until that point it’s never so much as hinted at that anybody but the player character has that ability.
• Red Dead Redemption II can be chalked up to poor decisions or the simple fact that they're up against the whole United States, and the gang gets a mole a some point, but the beginning of Chapter V is a clear case. They've just robbed a big city bank, giving them enough money to fulfill their dream of buying land somewhere, and the gang's combatants have made their escape on a regular ship bound for Cuba. Sure, John was captured, but they can effectively spring him and send for the non-combatants at their leisure. Then a storm hits the boat, causing it to not only sink, but do so too fast for the gang to stick together or hold onto the loot. The loot is lost, and the gang washes up on a slave-based sugar plantation in the middle of a civil war they must now fight just to get home.
• Saints Row:
  • In the first game, under gang leader Julius, you destroy the three rival gangs in Stillwater and "unify" the city under the Third Street Saints. Then, with the help of the undercover cop in the Saints, Julius is captured by the police. They use him to blackmail the Saints into helping an anti-gang mayor get elected. Afterwards, when you confront said mayor to negotiate Julius's release, the two of you are blown up in an assassination attempt.
  • In the sequel, it's revealed that Julius set all of it up to dissolve the Saints and gang violence altogether: without his or the player's leadership, he knew the gang would fall apart and things would become more peaceful. Obviously, it didn't work, if only because the man didn't understand the concept of a power vacuum.
  • It's also revealed in the sequel that Dex, an ambitious ex-Saint, orchestrated a similar gambit during the finale, aiming to kill the player and destroy the gang, but for less noble reasons.
• The last episode of Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse has Max transformed into a giant hell-beast due to his new psychic powers mixing with an Elder God. Sam, Papierwaite, Dr. Norrington, and a pregnant Sybil are inside him. If they don't fix things, Max will explode and take out most of the northeastern United States. To stop this, the government is ready to kill Max. Things start to look up near the end when the Big Bad takes a Heel–Face Turn and lets the gang get out before fixing Max himself. It turns out that they all took too long: Max is hit by the weapon just as his normal mind is restored. His psychic brain has already caught fire, signalling that he'll explode. He manages to teleport into space to avoid killing everyone, but Sam is left defeated and broken-hearted. Sure, a Max from an alternate universe shows up to hang out... But that's because he just had the same thing happen to his Sam.
• Oichi in Sengoku Basara 2 Heroes dies this way in her own story. On the other hand, The Anime of the Game Sengoku Basara... well, puts this on many many characters. Oichi included.
• At the end of Soldier of Fortune: Payback, the Shop informant Alena Petrova turns out to be The Mole for an unidentified Greater-Scope Villain, and knocks out Mason with a fire extinguisher, taking the mysterious MacGuffin he just retrieved. There follows a cliffhanger ending with a conversation between her, said villain, and the still-alive Moor, that is Lost in Transmission.
• Ameena's subplot in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time ends on a big one. Ameena, a sick girl and blatant Expy of another flower girl, is finally reunited with her long-lost childhood friend. Then he dies (he was injured in battle a few scenes prior to this) and she succumbs to her illness seconds later. It's even more of a nightmare for the protagonist, since the girl was also virtually identical to his own best friend. Then Fayt's dad dies, then Earth is destroyed...
• In the ending of Star Wars: Republic Commando, your squad has taken out a massive separatist gunship and are ready for evac. Then, out of nowhere (and off-screen), Sev reports he's under attack and you lose contact with him. Despite the protests of you and your squad, your commander refuses to let you rescue him, and you all get on your evac shuttle, leaving him to die.
• In Street Fighter Alpha 2, Charlie, who always dies in his endings due to Foregone Conclusion, manages to corner Bison, only to be shot on the back by his intended back-up chopper.
• In The Stinger of Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow, Logan and Xing return to their hideout only to find Mujari dead and Teresa wounded by Trinidad, who then shoots Logan in a moment of Cutscene Incompetence, although he gets off a Last Breath Bullet. Xing starts CPR on Logan, and the story is left on a cliffhanger.
• Tales Series:
  • Tales of Vesperia has Zagi. He pops up at random moments to fight the party, all due to his obsession with Yuri. He also has various upgrades throughout that make him more dangerous each time he's encountered - and how he gets said upgrades are completely unknown. This is exactly why Yuri is so frustrated with him.
  • Tales of Xillia 2 has the party finally collect all 5 Waymarkers needed to make the Land of Canaan appear. Then, out of the blue, it's revealed that one needs a soulbridge to get there. A person with the ability to use Chromatus needs to die, so that their soul can act as a bridge. Meaning the party needs to kill either Julius or Ludger.
• Throne of Darkness: Your team has finally defeated the Dark Warlord and restored peace to Yamato for it. And suddenly, your daimyo takes the power of the Dark Warlord for himself, as it was his plan all along, becoming the next Dark Warlord, effortlessly stomps your party and turn them into his mindless slaves.
• TimeShift. You've killed the Big Bad, retrieved the only remaining temporal jump drive in your particular dimension, taken down a planet-wide fascist government, and even saved the girl. Then you cause a paradox.
• As retconned in the intro to Turok 3, the destruction of Primagen in Turok 2 caused a explosion that destroyed the entire universe, which is what Joshua was trying to prevent in the first place, making that game somewhat of a Shoot the Shaggy Dog. Fortunately, the universe is recreated, and Joshua somehow survives and has offspring, only to be killed at the beginning.
• Undertale does this in both the Pacifist and Neutral endings, Flowey appears out of nowhere to ruin your day. In the Pacifist ending you actually get your happy ending after all, but in a neutral ending he succeeds. If you make it to the Pacifist ending after getting the Genocide ending, the normally happy ending reveals the Fallen Human is still possessing Frisk's body and is hunting down and murdering the other characters.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale):
  • Episode 5 combines this with Morton's Fork. Kenny will sacrifice himself to save someone else regardless on whether or not you saved Ben or let him die in episode 4. If Ben lived, then the balcony the group jumps off to get into the rooftops will collapse when they try to jump it, causing Kenny to go down and sacrifice himself to ensure Ben gets a Mercy Kill out of guilt. If Ben died, then Kenny will live past the balcony, but will instead knock Lee's radio down an opening in one of the roofs later, one that just happens to be filled with walkers. Christa will go down and get it, but can't get back up. Kenny will then jump down and hoist her up, before running off and leaving his fate ambiguous.
  • Omid's death at the start of Season 2 Episode 1. If it wasn't for a random bandit showing up at just the right time, a series of seemingly inconsequential if slightly silly choices by Clementine (one — leaving her gun on the sink while she went to find her water bottle — which the player could have actually avoided if it weren't for it being preventable by the game), and the bathroom door closing just before Omid could successfully disarm the bandit, then it wouldn't have lead to the rest of the events of the first episode. Whats worse is that the Bandit likely had no intention of causing any of them any harm. She shoots Omid out of panic and drops the gun immediately but gets shot by Christa nonetheless.
• The Witcher and its sequels are infamous for pulling this frequently in its sidequests, as a means to enforce the Grey-and-Gray Morality Crapsack World theme.
• The World Ends with You:
  • After surviving the Reaper's Game, Neku and Shiki discover that only Shiki can come back to life. Neku is fine with this, until the Conductor hits him with the whammy that in order to play the next game, the entry fee he has to pay is Shiki herself—and he only tells Neku this after he agrees to play the game, and the Conductor has "collected" Shiki. It's later revealed that the Composer, the Conductor's boss and the guy responsible for reviving people, was absent. In fact, the whole game was invalid because of that; only the Conductor knew the Composer was gone and would have been shafted if anybody, including his subordinates, knew. Thus, it was just a cheat to keep the two in limbo and prevent from being found out.
  • Final Remix adds another one. After Neku and Beat fight their way out of the illusionary Shibuya, Coco simply shoots Neku dead, and prepares to revive Sho Minamimoto to be his partner for the next Reaper's Game. Oh, also? Shinjuku has been erased, and it looks like more bad stuff is on the way.
• In Zenonia 4, Regret spends most of the game trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong with Time Travel. Every time he changes the past, something else happens to ensure that the world is still doomed. Regret eventually decides to face the threat head on rather than running back to the past in a futile attempt to avoid it.

---