Disney Death / Video Games

Disney Deaths in video games.

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• In Advanced Variable Geo 2, Tamao, Yuka, and all of the game's characters, including Chiho, who appears to be fatally wounded from Miranda's gunshot, all combine their attacks to destroy Miranda's getaway plane and kill Miranda herself, though at the cost of Chiho's life. The Stinger then shows Tamao and Yuka visiting Chiho's grave... Until a hand suddenly touches Tamao's shoulder and as she turns her back, she smiles and the game ends, implying that Chiho survived the plane crash.
• During the final main campaign mission in Borderlands 2, "The Talon of God", Mordecai and Brick are apparently killed during the attack on Heroes' Pass when their hijacked transport is shot down, but they appear in time to celebrate your victory after you defeat the final boss. Downplayed in that the game makes very little effort to convince you that they're really dead; it's mostly just to explain why they aren't present to help you against the final boss.
• In Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer, Gray Bear. They just turn up alive at the end. Although it could be possibly that since the Wendigo's curse was lifted, maybe that allowed them to come back to life?
• Gabriel Belmont from Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is killed by Satan right before the final battle. His wife, Marie, resurrects him.
• Princess Aurora of Child of Light dies in her sleep before the game even starts, whence she is spirited to Lemuria, then at the climax she is killed by Umbra but Comes Back Strong.
• A little over halfway through Chrono Trigger, Crono is killed off by an attack courtesy of the planet-destroying monster Lavos, leaving the game without its main character for an extended period of time. In the meantime, the remainder of the party sets to work on reviving him using judicious use of time travel and a clone won in a carnival game^note Technically, reviving Crono is an optional sidequest, but if you don't bring him back before beating the game, the ending has the rest of the party setting off to do so immediately afterwards.
  • A textbook Robot Disney Death occurs earlier in the game, when the other R-Series robots trash Robo for defending humans. Once the R-Series have been dispatched, your other party members retrieve Robo and drag him back to the Proto Dome, where Lucca fixes him up good as new.
• Curse Crackers: For Whom The Belle Toils: Just over halfway through World 5, Leer and Tedra fuse into Leadra and try to attack Belle, only for Chime to take the hit instead and be sent flying off into space. After fighting Leadra as the final boss, Chime turns out to be alive and eats the meteor that they were planning to destroy the moon, and by extension the world below, with.
• Subverted in Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, when the robot Thursday is saved by the ghost the main characters have put to rest... only to be immediately broken again by Flonne.
  • Later, just before the Final Boss, Flonne is turned into a flower by Seraph Lamington for what appears to be an incredibly stupid reason. In some of the Multiple Endings, this death is for real; in others, it turns out to be a Disney Death.
• The MassMouth 2 Game Mod for Doom gleefully parodies this trope, with nearly every major character returning to life at least once. Lampshaded in one boss fight:
  Linguica: You fag! I'll kill you for killing me!
  MassMouth: Why doesn't anybody stay dead around here?
• In the NES version of Double Dragon II, Marian is killed off in the game's opening sequence, only to wake up perfectly fine after the final boss battle, unlike the arcade version, where she is Killed Off for Real.
• This happens to almost everyone at the end of Dragalia Lost: In the end, Xenos actually succeeds in his ultimate goal in destroying the multiverse, thus wiping out all of its inhabitants save for the main gang. Once Xenos is defeated, though, the Auspexes create a new world that revived everyone who perished, with the same people from different realities being merged into one conscious. This includes some people who weren’t wiped out from the disaster, such as Mordecai. There is one exception though: Euden himself. Since he is a part of Xenos’s heart, if Xenos dies, then he dies as well. When the new world is created, nobody remembers who Euden is, so he is never revived. Zethia feels like something is missing from the new world, which only then does Euden appear. Since Zethia couldn’t fully remember him, this new Euden is a mere copy, and like with Anne Boonchuy, the Euden that we’ve been following for the entire adventure is well and truly gone.
• In Dragon Quest IV, Orin/Oojam performs a Heroic Sacrifice to help Mara/Maya and Nara/Meena escape. The game gives all indication that he is dead, with the standard "No response, seems to be a corpse" message. But later on, you find him wounded at the inn in Frenor/Vrenor.
• Drakensang 2: The River of Time essentially is a "retelling" of the events of the game by Forgrimm to Kladdis (who wanted to know about her parents). On a TPK, you get treated to either of a variety of scenes like "That cannot be right — I was just seeing whether you were listening" — "Just kidding" and similar exchanges, before the game offers to reload at an earlier point.
• Originally subverted in Fallout 3 (Either you or a NPC had to die to finish the main quest), but the Broken Steel DLC changed this sacrifice into a 2 weeks coma. However, Sarah still dies for real if you send her in to activate it.
• Final Fantasy VII:
  • Talking Animal Cait Sith agrees to remain inside the Temple of the Ancients, 'solving puzzles' to make it shrink so it can be picked up and taken by the characters — naturally, this means anyone inside will be crushed. But Cait Sith is actually a robot, with a backup copy lurking nearby in case of disaster, which was why he agreed so readily (although his pre-death speech suggests he is genuinely able to feel sad about dying, even knowing a duplicate will come along). The temple shrinks, Cait is crushed, and 'Cait Sith Number Two' approaches, identical to the first - and naturally arrives at the worst possible time. It's been theorized that the game does this to increase the shock of the death of another main character later on. This copy is not only at the same level as the one that just died, but also has all of his equipment, which is near-impossible.
  • Dirge of Cerberus implies that Weiss received this fate. Despite being defeated by Chaos Vincent, as well as Omega being destroyed, the 100% ending (the Genesis Ending) has Genesis arriving to pick up Weiss and states to him not to go yet, as they still have more to do before taking off with him.
• Final Fantasy IV is known for this. Rydia is given one when she is swallowed by Leviathan, only to rejoin the party later. Cid is given one when he leaps off of the airship and detonates a bomb in order to let the rest of the party escape from pursuers-you later find him, not just alive but in good enough shape to upgrade the airship. Yang also has one when the Tower of Babil explodes-he seems dead, but if you go down into one of the underworld dungeons, he's alive but comatose and being tended by Sylphs. You can wake him up from his coma by hitting him in the face with a frying pan.
  • Only two characters are ever dead for good. Many of the others don't rejoin the party, but even the pair that gets turned to stone makes an appearance by the end.
• Final Fantasy II is the exact opposite of FFIV, but still has an instance of this. When the party is swallowed up by Leviathan, Leila vanishes...only to turn up in Fynn, having washed ashore and recovered.
• Final Fantasy III, while also containing a few character deaths on your side, has Desch, who throws himself into the furnace to stop the Tower of Owen from collapsing and save the Floating Continent. Before the final dungeon he is revealed to still be alive and helps to defeat Xande.
• Final Fantasy VI also has one of these moments, depending on how you play the game. If the player decides to kill Cid in the World of Ruin then Celes will commit suicide by throwing herself off a cliff, an idea conceived after being told others had effectively ended their lives in this manner. However, we find her waking up on the beach after having been nursed back to health by a bird! ...who just happens to have Locke's bandanna bandaging it's wing, signifying there ARE others also alive after the apocalypse of their world.
  • Also, Shadow has one of these after Kefka kills Leo. Rather than being unconscious, though, he's gone missing (to the Disc-One Final Dungeon to take on the baddies, even though he is injured, because he is a badass ninja) and, since his dog Interceptor is injured, your party assumes he is dead. Serves as revenge fuel against the Empire, as if there wasn't already enough of that. He will die for real if you don't wait for him during the Apocalypse. And if you do wait for him and get him as a permanent party member in World of Ruin, his death comes after you beat the final boss.
• Final Fantasy XIII:
  • When Sazh is driven to the Despair Event Horizon after his son is turned to crystal and he finds out Vanille was responsible for him becoming a l'Cie, he apparently shoots himself in the head, and is soon after shown laying motionless inside a coffin. Early into the next chapter we find out he couldn't bring himself to shoot himself any more than Vanille, and the coffin appearance was because he was knocked out by Nabaat soon after and was therefore unconscious rather than dead. He remains playable for the remainder of the game.
  • At the end of the game, Vanille and Fang do a Heroic Sacrifice to save Cocoon from total destruction following the demise of Orphan. They are presumed dead by Lightning and the others, but in the final scene we see they did not die, but were turned to crystal, asleep and dreaming, confident they will reawaken one day.
• Final Fantasy XIV: At the end of the storyline for A Realm Reborn, Nanamo is assassinated when her wine is poisoned as part of a plot by the Monetarists to frame the heroes and consolidate their power. It is later revealed in Heavensward, however, that Lolorito, one of the Monetarists, had sabotaged the assassination attempt by stealthily having the poison swapped with a sleeping potion that put the Sultana in a death-like slumber, but kept her alive, because even he knew that the death of Ul'dah's leader would cause chaos that would hurt profits. As a show of goodwill, he provides the heroes with an antidote that awakens her.
• In Gamer 2, helpful NPC Kora is murdered by Load-Bearing Boss ACE in the factory level cutscene. She later shows up still alive, reminding the player that she's an NPC in the game world, and therefore unable to permanently die. However, since the player has killed ACE, she immediately points out the game is being destroyed and she will die along with it.
• Geist does this twice with the same character. The first time, he is swallowed whole by a boss monster, then escapes from its stomach when you kill the boss monster, causing it to burst open. The second time, his helicopter is shot down, but he appears at the end of the game with no explanation of how he got there.
• After the fight against the final boss of Golden Sun: The Lost Age, it is revealed that this monster was in fact created from the parents of some playable characters (the father of Isaac, and the parents of Jenna and Felix), whom they thought already dead. By defeating the boss, they also killed their parents. However, they are alive and well during the last minutes of gameplay, with only a cheap explanation (the Psynergy of Mars Lighthouse is supposed to have revived them) as to why they are not dead.
• Granblue Fantasy has a Robot Disney Death with the Golem Adam. He breaks down at the end of the first arc, after having sustained too much damage defending the Grancypher, but by the time the crew visits Mephorash again, he's up and running again, having been repaired.
• In the best ending for Heavy Rain, it seems like Ethan is too late to save Shaun from drowning and collapses in tears. Then Shaun starts coughing...
• At the end of House of the Dead's first chapter, Sophie is apparently dealt a fatal blow by Chariot, but in the Golden Ending, which is also the canon ending, she emerges from the mansion none the worse for wear. In the Bad Ending, she comes back as a zombie.
• Ikenfell: The Coven Mage Bax appears to die after being impaled by blood magic from Headmistress Aeldra after her feelings of guilt and grief that she'd been removing ends up being returned to her, causing her to fall into madness and amplifying her belief that the Dark Fold has returned. This causes his fellow Coven Mage Ibn to lose control of his powers, open a portal to the dimension he gets his powers from, and threaten the already-endangered world further. Eventually, the party realises that Bax hasn't died yet and work together to heal him so he can help to bring Ibn out of this state.
• In King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, Alexander pulls this one off by feigning suicide via the heart-stopping powers of the "Drink Me" potion, making him appear dead to Shamir Shamazel and the Pawn Shop Owner. While Shamir runs off to report to Big Bad Alhazred, the potion's effects wear off, and Alex revives to the owner's surprise and explains the whole gambit for re-entry into the castle where Cassima is.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby Super Star Ultra not only manages to retcon Marx's death into this trope but also uses it as the explanation for his power boost in the True Arena (What's left of Nova merges with him.). And then he dies for good.
  • In Kirby's Return to Dream Land, the Final Boss, Magolor, is last seen vanishing away upon defeat and are not seen again. And aside from his Unexplained Recovery he has in Kirby's Dream Collection, Deluxe finally gives us the answer.
  • Kirby: Planet Robobot: At the end of Meta Knightmare Returns, Star Dream is slain by Galacta Knight before the final battle, and it is last seen slowly descending in the background, presumably being destroyed. But as we see in the True Arena, this wasn't fatal; a blow like that was so strong it managed to activate Star Dream's final program and enter its Soul form.
  • Following the Post-Final Boss of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Elfilin vanishes after his desperate bid to seal the rift that threatens to destroy both Planet Popstar and the Forgotten Land. For a few seconds, it looks like he's gone forever... and then there’s a bright flash of light...
• Parodied in the Infocom text adventure game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, in which your sidekick Tiffany (or Trent, depending on your character's gender) heroically sacrifices themselves about half a dozen times to help you out, complete with a silent moment of loss and mourning on your part, before they turn up again in the very next area, having survived through increasingly implausible coincidence.
• The Jumi arc in Legend of Mana. In spades. You don't find out until the very end, though, by which point they've invoked the sister trope Our Hero Is Dead. It's Player Punch-eriffic!
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Link's uncle gives a speech about his and Link's time together before he dies. During the end credits it shows that he's alive and well in the house. Justified in that Link used his wish to the Triforce to undo the damage Ganon had caused, so his casualties, Link's uncle included, were revived.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Ganon emerges from his duel with Midna holding and crushing her helmet. After Ganon is defeated, there's a light show, after which Link finds Midna not only alive and well but also restored to her true form.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,the leader of the Yiga clan, Master Kohga, is defeated by Link before he ends up getting crushed by a boulder that he summoned as a last resort and ends up falling into a seemingly bottomless pit in the area of the fight. Notably, Kohga was one of the few enemies besides the elemental blight that couldn't be revived by the blood moon. The sequel The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom revealed that this was because Kohga survived the fall and ended up in the Depths. When he is defeated for the final time in the Depths, he ends up the victim of his own attack yet again and is launched out of the Depths through a chasm by alarge amount of Zonai Rockets.
• Done in Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals. Dekar, the world's strongest man, has a temple dropped on him, with a miniboss holding him with magic so he can't get away. He eats it, and comes back in the end, clearing a path for your dirigible to reach Doom Island. In the remake, he gets thrown into a hellish otherworld. He fights his way out and blows up the entire dimension behind him.
• In the conclusion of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Alex and Luna apparently sacrifice themselves to stop Lunar's corruption, only to turn up alive and well one cutscene later.
• Mario & Luigi:
  • Mario & Luigi: Dream Team: Britta appears to die after being saved from Torkscrew in Dozing Sands, but just as the screen begins to fade out, she wakes up and yells at her subordinates for thinking she was dying.
  • Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam: After defeating a Brainwashed and Crazy Wiggler, he comments on being "sleepy" and lies down, and Paragoomba-angels fly down to spirit him away... except he was just metamorphosing into a butterfly.
• Mass Effect:
  • Played straight in Mass Effect. The group, having just defeated Sovereign, is fleeing from an incoming chunk of Reaper. Cut to the two party members with you, as a C-Sec officer and Anderson pry open one of the chunks that was a near miss to reveal them. Anderson asks where Shepard is, they shake their heads, and all parties involved get a crushed expression - cut to the side, where you see a form moving toward the group through the wreckage. Swell of music, Shepard mounting the top of the biggest chunk, with a huge "I just punched out Cthulhu" grin on his/her face. Cut to final sequence.
  • Also seen in Mass Effect 2 with the same character. (Early game spoilers) Shepard's ship is attacked, despite being in the "undetectable" stealth mode. Shepard gets the majority of the crew out alive but is unable to get in an escape pod before the ship blows, and then goes through the ship exploding, the space suit failing, and the massive heat friction endured by entering a planet's atmosphere. Shepard actually does die from the experience, but a certain organization from the first game invests a lot of time, effort, and a lot of money in restoring body and brain to life. It takes two years, but they do it.
  • And again at the end of Mass Effect 3. If you choose Shepard to destroy synthetic life, he/she dies, like in the other endings. And stays dead. Unless you get 100% completion. Then there's a small scene where Shepard may have lived.
• The Matrix: Path of Neo has a Playing with a Trope example in that while the player knows that Neo didn't permanently die, a security guard who was BodySurfed by Smith believes Neo to be dead... until they meet again six months later.
• The Mega Man series has these:
  • The Robot Masters who are defeated come back following the game's events in the first game, 9, and 11.
  • Shadow Man is an exception in the spinoff game Super Adventure Rockman after he is defeated, as his body bursts from Mega Man attacking him at full power, presumably as a Karmic Death for his heinous Kick the Dog moment, although in that game's Archie Comics adaptation, he does manage to survive.
  • Sigma in the Mega Man X, seven times. Then he gets Killed Off for Real after the eighth game.
  • In Mega Man Star Force 3, a villain vaporizes two significant characters, including Luna Platz, which shakes the main cast so much that Geo has to try and convince the others she isn't dead. In the next portion of the game, Aaron Boreal, a friend of Geo's, indicates that the effects are reversible... but his demonstration of this is a blatant example of Came Back Wrong. Geo decides to proceed with the recovery process anyway, hunting down Luna's digitized fragments, but the recovery attempt is stymied at several points by Dark Phantom, who effectively takes the necessary equipment hostage in a gambit for Mega Man's newest power. Despite all this, Luna effectively recovers, but has no memory of the attack.
    • The credits indicate that Ace, who performed a Heroic Sacrifice against the same villain, was also restored or repaired to life and limb following the events of the game.
    • Actually both cases are justified, It is due to the brotherband between the characters and Luna that the power of the brotherband had helped save Luna. Ace became noise and he was sent to Meteor G by King. This lead to them getting his data and recreating him like Luna.
  • Any time Mega Man X's Zero gets blown to pieces. Don't expect it to last long. Then he actually does get killed off at the end of Mega Man Zero 4.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker has this with Paz. Even though she was ejected from an exploding Metal Gear Zeke that she hijacked into the Caribbean Sea, Paz can still be seen in the Personnel files. Big Boss even hints at the possibility that Paz survived, as he noted to Chico in a briefing file that she took scuba gear with her when she was ejected.
  • Subverted for drama in Metal Gear Solid V: Paz did indeed survive the events of Peace Walker, and is rescued in Ground Zeroes, but she ends up jumping out of a helicopter because of the bombs that Skull Face planted in her, which then explode, only for her to show up in The Phantom Pain nine years later with hard amnesia and an eternally young body... only for that to have been a hallucination. It's not absolutely confirmed if she did die, but given that Venom was five feet away from her before the explosion, and woke up to find that he had shards of bone and teeth lodged inside his body... yeah, she's almost certainly dead.
  • And Solid Snake at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2's first act, Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 4, as well as Big Boss himself, twice. Actually, Big Boss only does it once; his apparent Disney Death in Metal Gear was actually his Body Double being Killed Off for Real.
• In Metal Slug 3D, Oguma pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to stop Lieu as Marco and his soldiers escape in a helicopter, despite Marco's protests. The Stinger, however, reveals that Oguma survived, and he is last seen talking to Rumi Aikawa as the game ends.
• In Metroid: Other M, Anthony Higgs is slapped into a pit lava by Ridley's tail. At the first ending of the game, Anthony comes out of nowhere to escort Samus back to her starship, accompanied by a flashback showing how he escaped certain death.
  • The creators of Other M took into account how Phantoon's death sequence could be taken as him fleeing... after the main game, Phantoon takes over the Bottle Ship and is fought as the True Final Boss.
• Played with in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, when one puzzle with a time limit will cause Guybrush to die if he runs out of time... until the player is reminded that the entire game is told in flashback to Elaine, who doubts Guybrush's claim that he died and gives the player another chance at the puzzle.
• In the rare Multipath Adventures of Superman, the finale to the story arc, "Scream of the Banshee" contains this trope, depending on your final decision. In one outcome, the Silver Banshee and Boggane are banished, and Lois and Jimmy go to the side of an unconscious Superman as he slowly regains said consciousness. In the bad ending, Superman will get hit with a charge of the Banshee's haywire magic before the same cutscene of Banshee and Boggane being sealed within their stone, followed by Lois and Jimmy examining Superman. The trope is averted in this ending, as Superman doesn't wake up, and Lois begins sobbing, realizing he is lifeless, as Jimmy tearfully utters, "At least...we saved the world." as the camera pans out and gradually fades to black.
• Happens to Ryu himself at the end of Chapter 2 in Ninja Gaiden Black, where he is cut in half by Doku, but revived by the falcon spirit.
• In Nostalgia (Red Entertainment), Gilbert Brown pulls it off so often that his Heroic Sacrifice loses a lot of impact, if not all of it.
• In Ori and the Blind Forest, this happens to the title character a total of three times; first at the beginning of the game, then after completing the first dungeon, then lastly at the end.
  • In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, shortly after Ori and Ku reunite, the latter suffers this while defending the former from the Big Bad, only recovering once Ori Ascends to a Higher Plane of Existence at the end.
• Played for Laughs in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. On Keelhaul Key, Admiral Bobbery is assaulted by some of the local spirits and appears to be on his last, stubby little legs. Barely clinging to consciousness, he begs you to fetch the Chuckola Cola he brought along with him, to drink in honor of his late wife. After Bobbery chugs to Scarlett's memory, he promptly... starts snoring. Your partner, realizing he was confused and overdramatic at worst, encourages you to give him a sound whack on the head to rouse him. He goes from asleep to fighting stance in .7 seconds flat.
  • This also pops up in the post-game in a more serious fashion, where it turns out that TEC survives having his hard drive deleted and then blowing up, and Grodus survives having his head and body destroyed separately. No clue how on either one of those.
    • When talking to TEC after beating the final boss, he mentions that he saw a bright light and heard Princess Peach's voice before being resurrected. It is possible that Peach, while breaking temporarily free from the Shadow Queen's grasp to send Mario her power, also uses a portion of her power to save TEC. This is actually what many fans believe. No clue about the other one, though. Another Disney Death case is Lord Crump who is blown into space. Although to be fair, Goombella did say both survived based on a rumor she heard; though she clearly believes it, she never saw them herself, and while a scene of them in Poshley Heights is shown, its canonocity can be debated, as they never appear in this area or any other post-game, unlike TEC.
  • Super Paper Mario does this a lot, namely with Peach, Bowser, Luigi, Luvbi, and Nastasia.
• Unless you screw up and get locked into the Bad Ending, Nanako flatlines from her mysterious Incurable Cough of Death in Persona 4, only to recover a few minutes later; unusually for the trope, she really did die for those couple minutes, she just experienced a Lazarus syndrome.
• Persona 5: Ryuji Sakamoto seemingly gets caught in a explosion while helping the rest of your party escape the sinking Cruise Ship dungeon, only to walk up completely fine a few minutes later and reveal that said explosion ended up blasting him into the real world. Soon afterward, the protagonist and Futaba return to Le Blanc cafe, but Sojiro's missing and the news of someone's kidnapping and murder is playing on TV. However, Sojiro returns soon afterwards, and Futaba says he's just as bad as Ryuji. There's also, at the end of the game, Morgana. After Yaldabaoth is defeated, Morgana seemingly fades away into nothingness. A few months later, he shows up completely fine. Turns out he didn't disappear after all due to being deeply ingrained in the Phantom Thieves' cognition. The only reason it took him a few months to return is because he was too embarassed to show up right after that Tear Jerker goodbye, so he decided to lay low for a while. This fact greatly annoys the rest of the party.
  Haru: Give us back our tears!
• In the Infocom text adventure game Planetfall, the cleaning robot Floyd 'dies' heroically sacrificing his life to obtain an essential keycard, complete with an eulogy given by the PC. At the end of the game he reappears, repaired. In the next game, he becomes Brainwashed and Crazy and you have to kill him for real.
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon:
  • Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky ends with the hero character being knocked out of the time line when s/he changes the future (yep, the main character is from The Future). However, after your partner cries his or her heart out to Bidoof before the end credits, Dialga decides to grant you partner his or her greatest desire - which is the revival of your character. It's not like you could reach the postgame content if you were dead, huh?
  • Hydreigon in Gates To Infinity comes back to life in the ending, despite being frozen solid and then shattered.
• In Portal 2 co-op whenever one of the robots "dies" they just come back through a vent.
• In Project × Zone, Arthur apparently sacrifices himself in the climax of Chapter 17. In the next chapter, as some of the group begin to mourn his "death", he promptly comes back, revealing that he can survive anything as long as he has his armor on, subverting Armor Is Useless.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • In Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Ratchet, Clank, and Captain Qwark are on a ship set to self-destruct. Qwark goes back for something, and doesn't get off in time... until the duo investigates the wreckage on planet Zeldrin and finds an escape pod and a recording of Qwark Disguised in Drag calling a cab to take him somewhere. Later, upon completing the final Vid-Comic, Ratchet and Clank discover that Qwark has a hideout in the Thran Asteroid Belt. Sure enough, he's found Faking the Dead because he doesn't want to actually die.
  • In Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, Alistair Azimuth shoots Ratchet in the chest. You can actually hear his heartbeat slowing to a stop before he plummets off the edge of the platform. However, it's reversed when Clank uses the Great Clock to turn time back six minutes.
• Red Dead Redemption II: Those who have played the original Red Dead Redemption will know that John Marston was shot and fell off the train during the last robbery, left for dead by Dutch van der Linde, who claimed that John didn't make it. He later returns to the camp near the end, proving how far Dutch has fallen from the man who looked after his own.
• Resident Evil:
  • Albert Wesker gets impaled and apparently dies on-screen in the original Resident Evil, yet continues to operate from the shadows in later games. The on-screen death is sort-of retconned in the Nintendo GameCube version, but only after Resident Evil – Code: Veronica was released.
  • Ada Wong "dies" in both of her scenarios of Resident Evil 2, only to return to throw the player a rocket launcher during the penultimate battle. She lives on to be one of the driving forces behind Resident Evil 4.
• In Saints Row: The Third during the prologue when The Boss and Shaundi are escaping Philippe Loren's plane, Johnny tells them over the intercom from behind the flight deck door that he'll see them back in Stilwater, when gunshots and the sound of a body dropping are heard and he suddenly goes silent. In Saints Row IV it's revealed that the body getting shot was a random Morningstar goon that Johnny was using as a Human Shield against Loren; Johnny was actually abducted by Zinyak, who believed that Johnny was powerful enough to destroy his whole empire, and Loren threatening The Boss that Johnny's corpse was the beginning was just him taking the piss to get the Saints to back off.
• In the first episode of Sam & Max: Season 1, Max throws Jimmy Two-Teeth out the window to his (presumed) death. He later re-appears in their office unharmed.
  • In season 3, a subversion. In the final episode, Max becomes a giant monster and eventually has to be destroyed. Sam wanders around the city aimlessly mourning the loss of his best friend all the way through the end credits. Then suddenly, a Max from an alternate timeline (from the previous season) appears, and reveals that in his universe the same events happened although in his world Sam was the one that became a monster and died. This Max then takes the previous one's place. So the Max of this world actually is dead, but we technically still have him since the alternative universe is the same character with just a few slightly different experiences.
  • In the final episode of Season 3, Sal the Cockroach dies inside monster Max's body, but during the post-credits scene as the camera pans upward to the sky, you can see a giant cockroach crawling up a building if you look closely. Could this mean that Sal somehow survived?
• In Shadow of the Colossus, the protagonist's faithful steed apparently falls to his death when a bridge gives out, only to return during the ending alive, but with a broken leg... which is usually a death sentence for a horse anyway.
• This happened to Sonic in Sonic Adventure 2. Eggman finds out from Tails that he had been given the fake Chaos Emerald, and proceeds to jettison Sonic into space. However, thanks to Chaos Control, he manages to escape the blast just in the nick of time.
  • Happens to him again in Sonic The Hedgehog. He is actually killed by Mephiles in order to make Elise cry as part of his big plan, but he is revived just before the final boss battle with the power of the chaos emeralds and a kiss from Elise.
  • In Sonic Lost World, Amy and Knuckles are killed by the Deadly Six's Life Drain machine late into the game, but Tails is able to reverse its effects in the ending.
  • Happens to Sage in Sonic Frontiers. It took an Heroic Sacrifice from her to destroy The End, and it seems like her father Eggman is lost in despair. But in The Stinger of the Golden Ending, he brings her back via a backup program on his computer.
• Before confronting Mr. Grizz in Splatoon 3, Agent 3 and the Squid Sisters find a dehydrated and unconscious Cuttlefish lying motionlessly on the ground, seemingly dead. He's revealed to be alive when Captain's Single Tear manages to bring him back to life in his dried squid form, and he remains in this form later.
• Near the end of Star Fox: Assault, quite a few Disney Deaths ensue in the build-up to the final battle. Most notably, Peppy crashes the Great Fox into the Aparoid barrier so that Star Fox can get through, and Wolf, Leon, and Panther distract some extremely powerful aparoids so Star Fox can reach the aparoid queen. Though all four are presumed dead by most of Star Fox (except Fox himself, who knew the truth all along), Peppy and R.O.B. turn up alive via escape shuttle, and Fox is sure that Wolf's team most likely survived as well. General Pepper is mentioned among them, though he was already established to survive the last time we saw him.
  • Every death in Assault other than the Aparoid Queen ends up being this. Even Pigma and Oikonny, who were seemingly dead, came back in Star Fox Command.
    • Pigma didn't exactly come back as a person, but more of some kind of mechanical, borderline Eldritch Abomination thing, and he seems to have died at the end of Command. Furthemore, Command has been stated by Nintendo themselves to be non-canon.
• In the one Sega Genesis Star Trek game, Data was the most useful of the command staff for this reason — it was very hard, if not impossible for him to get severely injured and taken off active duty. He would just get repaired, as opposed to others who have a good chance of getting that injured. All of the other command had a We Cannot Go On Without You as either Picard is injured (he always seems to be severely injured) or he resigns in guilt over causing them to get hurt. Thus the player could send only Data and his death wouldn't matter.
• Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast has Kyle Katarn choked and at Dessann's mercy before ordering his apprentice, Tavion, to murder Kyle's partner, Jan. This was part of their Xanatos Gambit to get Kyle to return to the Valley of the Jedi on Ruusan to quickly reconnect with the full power of the Force and leading Dessann and his Reborn warriors straight to a nexus to empower themselves and Jan was spared for interrogation as she was the only other person they knew with the location of Ruusan. Once they meet up again, Jan casually snarks at him taking his time to rescue her while Kyle is just happy that she's still alive, just in pain from Dessann and Galak Fyarr "burning out half a dozen interrogation droids" torturing her for the location of the Valley then the layout of the Jedi Praxeum on Yavin IV.
• Star Wars Legends: Played straight and averted in The Force Unleashed. Played straight when the apprentice gets thrown out the window of a star destroyer and when something similar happens to Rahm Kota (sic) and averted with PROXY and the actual death of The Apprentice.
  • Played for Laughs in the sequel when PROXY and Starkiller are reunited, each saying "I thought you were dead!" to the other at the same time.
• At the end of Sunset Overdrive, the player character is apparently fatally crushed under rubble after Riding the Bomb into the MegaCorp's headquarters, but then after the fake credits, they walk out of the ruins to chew out the developers for the depressing end, then the game rewinds for the real Final Boss battle.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • In Super Mario Sunshine, the robot pump FLUDD is seemingly destroyed in the final battle, and guess what? It comes back.
  • The Lumas, and to a much lesser extent, Mario/Luigi, Peach, and Bowser at the end of Super Mario Galaxy, as a result of the universe being destroyed and recreated due to Bowser's galaxy collapsing.
• Surprisingly averted in Super Robot Wars. A character rarely dies without much fanfare and usually gives a protracted speech before death, or at least everyone else remarks about said death. Otherwise, the character simply retreated. In some cases, doomed characters can be saved from their fate (and sometimes brought over to the player's side) by a set of specific actions, some quite byzantine.
  • The bit where they tend to avert character deaths of popular or important characters, especially Gai Daigouji from Martian Successor Nadesico... though then there's poor Schwartz Bruder from Mobile Fighter G Gundam, who rarely gets to live.
• In the Taiko no Tatsujin game Taiko no Tatsujin Wii: Dodon~! to Nidaime!, there is a Robot Disney Death shortly before the final boss. It is revealed that the Big Bad of the game was the one who invented Alumi, the mysterious robot seen at the beginning of the game and the ally of the main characters throughout it. He takes control of Alumi and fights the protagonists through her, and when Alumi is defeated, she is too damaged by the fight, and ends up dying. Everyone despairs before a sudden Mood Whiplash occurs, as the characters realize that they can use the power of the taiko drum to revive her, and they all end up fighting the Big Bad.
• Episode 5 of Tales from the Borderlands has Sasha make a Heroic Sacrifice so the rest of the gang can bring down the Traveller once and for all. She is badly injured and on the brink of death, and at one point closes her eyes and goes still. Her sister and friends break down in tears - only for her to quickly say “Uh, I'm not dead yet”, and for Felix's healing device to start working and heal her wounds.
• In Tales of Symphonia, this happens to your entire party at one point. They all supposedly sacrifice themselves to allow Lloyd to get to Colette, but either Zelos or Kratos shows up to save each and every one of them.
• Namco uses this trope a lot in their Tekken series. The Mishimas have all been thrown off cliffs in some morbid test of strength, presumed dead but not. Even Jin's mother, Jun Kazama has "died" and returned with little explanation. Tekken 5 tried to sell the death of Heihachi only he didn't die. Even the Soulcalibur series has had examples of this, such as Li Long.
• In Time Crisis 5, Cathy apparently sacrifices herself to destroy the missile that Robert was going to use on New York. After you kill Robert, Cathy is revealed to have survived the crash.
• The Walking Dead:
  • At the end of Season One, Kenny dives into a horde of Walkers to distract them so that Lee can progress. In the decisions screen, he's stated to have been "lost to the horde" rather than outright dead. Unsurprisingly, he shows up in Season Two, with the handwave of having gotten lucky. However, depending on your decisions he's given a far more conclusive demise in the Season Two finale or an unceremonious death in a flashback sequence in Season Three.
  • Clementine is bit by a walker in Episode 4 of The Final Season, grows progressively weaker afterwards and finally asks AJ to leave or kill her, just like Lee did with her. AJ raises the ax he has and brings it down on her, before it cuts to black. The game then continues for about 20 minutes before the reveal that Clementine survived after all as AJ cut off her infected leg.
• In Wild ARMs 2, Brad was presumed dead by everyone half way through the game when he offered to sacrifice himself. Later on he was revealed to be alive and rescued his friends from danger by firing a railgun weapon at his enemy ship. He rejoins the party after that.
• In The Witch and the Hundred Knight, Metallia spends the last portion of the game trying to revive Visco after her brutal murder and, despite her best efforts, fails to do so. However, upon defeating the final boss, Metallia finds an incredibly heavy concentration of mana and decides to use that and her own soul to bring Visco back to life. Luckily, the Hundred Knight coughs up the seed Metallia was born from and, after having her seed planted, is brought back to life when it sprouts.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 1 Fiora "dies" at the claws of Metal Face near the beginning of the game. However, during the Wham Episode at Prison Island it is revealed that she survived and was turned into a Face Mechon, piloting Nemesis Face, and afterward Shulk makes it his goal to get her back
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Robot Girl Lila uses the last of her energy to jump-start Poppi's ether furnace and ceases functioning by her creator's side. Tatazo seems to have a case of Angst? What Angst? until the end of the chapter, when he reminds everyone the robot he built just suffered a fairly mundane power core burnout. Lila's right as rain a few chapters of repairs later.
  • After the final battle with Malos, Pyra/Mythra reassembles her Core Crystal and gives it to Rex before sacrificing herself to stop the collapsing Orbit Station from destroying Alrest. In The Stinger, her Core Crystal regenerates, bringing both Pyra and Mythra back to life, as separate people no less.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: When the party finally meets the Queen of Agnus Nia, she's immediately shot through the heart by Moebius D, seemingly killing her and destroying any hope of taking back the world from Moebius. However, Nia isn't a human but rather a Flesh-Eater Blade, meaning that destroying her heart is pointless so long as her core crystal is intact, made even more pointless when combined with the fact that she's the most powerful healing blade in Alrest. Of course, no one in Aionios knows what a Blade is or their biology, so there's no reason that D would have known to hit the crystal instead, or for the party to realise that her wound wasn't fatal. If D's aim had been off and he had struck her crystal, things could have been much worse.
  Nia: Owowowow! That bastard... stuck me good, he did! Two cetris to the side and things'd've been a sight worse...
• Maria Messa in Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter, when she is "sacrificed" by Dalles. Ys IV: Mask of the Sun does this to Leeza, Lilia, and Adol himself. Also, Adol's near-drowning at the beginning of The Ark of Napishtim.
• Zniw Adventure: Chief Ezfrazius is assumed to be dead after fighting the Big Bad one-on-one to let Zniw and Agu escape. Ezfrazius turns up again in the last cutscene, wearing a cast, but still very much alive.

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