Do Not Go Gentle moments in Video Games.
- Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag has the mission "Do Not Go Gently..." in which Blackbeard and company are ambushed by the British and he dies fighting them off.
- The last fight in The Black Heart is one for both sides: Janos had just been mobbed by a horde of Shar-Makai and got his heart ripped out and crushed in front of him by Ananzi, sincerely believing that he is tapping into the last ebbs of the Black Heart's power to give himself a few more minutes of life. However, he had already grievously wounded Ananzi to the point that she has to join forces with Final, who himself has already been weakened by having to fight everyone else who went after the Heart. Janos wins out.
- Azala of Chrono Trigger, being a supreme fatalist, acknowledges before her last stand that it is probably her and her species' fate to lose to the humans but refuses to go down without a fight.Azala: (SNES version) Though it may be our fate to perish, we will not simply hand this world over to you!
Azala: (DS version) Even should it prove our fate to die, we will not relinquish this world to the likes of you! - A villainous example in Cult of the Lamb: the Bishop Shamura, unlike their siblings, knows that their death at the Lamb's hands is inevitable, and they've made peace with that, but they're still not going down without a fight.
- In Cyberpunk 2077, this forms the basis of a secret endgame mission and ending: V is at the end of their physical endurance as the biochip ravages their brain, and they, along with Johnny, are faced with a choice of whether to enlist the aid of their friends to raid Arasaka in a last-ditch effort to save V, knowing they would be putting more lives on the line than their own; or to simply end it all, right then and there. Under the right conditions, Johnny can offer a third option: launch a one-man assault on Arasaka. Taking this option leads to the secret mission "(Don't Fear) The Reaper", which is one of the toughest quests in the game and treated as a Suicide Mission, but offers a way to at least go down in a blaze of glory instead of simply fading away.
- For those wondering why the multiplayer Starcraft example below is considered poor form, look no further than Dawn of War. An Eldar player who had clearly lost could stall out their official defeat almost indefinitely with a game of "Hunt the last Webway Gate", using an invisible Worker Unit alternate building and destroying two invisible Webway Gates over and over.
- The Excuse Plot of Dawn of War II: The Last Stand.
- The Blood Ravens after delivering the poison to the hive fleet, but getting their extraction ship shot down and leaving them stranded behind Tyranid lines, and again when (if) the Tyranids win the Retribution campaign.
- Divinity: Original Sin II: If the Player Character decides that Queen Justinia should die for her attempt to unleash a Fantastic Nuke on a major city, she'll denounce them for playing Judge, Jury, and Executioner, demand the right to defend herself as a matter of honour, and go down fighting.
- Dragon Age: Origins, depending on what you did, has Alistair wishing to do this by killing the Archdemon as his first and final act as King of Ferelden so he could be remembered as one of the good ones.
- Wardens have a name for this. 'The Calling'. When the Taint they take on to become a Warden (by drinking darkspawn blood) starts to kill them from the inside, they head to the Deep Roads to take as many of the darkspawn with them as they can.
- Fate/Grand Order:
- In the Seventh Singularity, Babylonia, it is revealed near the end that Gilgamesh knew all along that fighting the Goddesses was futile, that Tiamat would be awakened and Uruk would be destroyed. His future sight told him so, in no uncertain terms. But when he told this to the citizens of Uruk and asked whether they would just allow the inevitable to happen, or fight it with all their strength, they chose to fight. In the end, it turns out that Gilgamesh's vision did not account for the player's presence, and the player is able to tip the scales just enough for Tiamat to be defeated... though Gilgamesh and Uruk are still destroyed, and there are only 500 survivors of the once-prosperous kingdom left. Gilgamesh still counts that as a win: 500 survivors is much better than the ZERO survivors he had foreseen.
- The last Singularity is pretty much the swan song of humanity; every star that is the Heroic Spirits arrives to lend a hand for their earnest wish to fight for humanity's survival. The Big Bad Demon God King Goetia could not understand why humanity keeps on resisting his plot to remake them into immortals... until the real Solomon strips him his everything. His Hive Mind gain their separate will, several decide to make their stand with or against the Heroic Spirits until there's no one left. Now dubbed Human King Goetia, he got beaten within the inch of his remaining life, half of his body scattered to the wind, and in that moment he finally understands the meaning of human's mortality. Deciding that he would not just be lying there waiting for his death, he chases after his destined nemesis the protagonist to spend his remaining life fighting till the end. The protagonist accepts, and a fistfight ensues.
- In the sixth Lostbelt, Chaldea's horse faerie and one of their guides throughout the story, Redra Bit is on the brink of despair in its third act. The death of his friend Lostbelt Gareth, his former master Aurora's machinations, and knowing what Faerie Britain is truly like at its core have all greatly hurt him as the world around him goes to hell. So Redra gives his all in a final push to do good by running nonstop for one day and a half to save the people of Chaldea he has come to know from destruction even as his legs and muscles scream in agony all the way to the coast. He realizes he'll die from this last journey but puts on a brave face to the very end for his friends.
- The endgame of Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker has the Player Character and the Scions faced with a Sadistic Choice: Either evacuate the planet onto the moon to be ferried away into a safe place as the planet is destroyed by the Endsinger, guaranteeing they save people in the short term but not fixing the fundamental cause of the problem, while also condemning several alternate versions of the planet to be destroyed along with everyone in it, or have one last desperate attempt of taking the fight to the Endsinger herself, risking their own life and that of everyone on the planet for the chance of saving everyone and ending the threat for good. They ultimately choose the latter.
- In Verse 2 of the Episode Ignis DLC for Final Fantasy XV, Ignis faces off against Ardyn at Zegnautus Keep in an attempt to change the future and prevent Noctis' eventual Heroic Sacrifice. To do so, he decides to wear the Ring of the Lucii and offer his life for the power to fight Ardyn, guaranteeing his death at the end of the fight. Bear in mind that Ardyn was able to match and overpower Regis in combat, and he was easily able to defeat Ifrit, a Physical God. He not only succeeds in defeating Ardyn (albeit temporarily), his temporary Heroic Sacrifice alters the future enough to turn the game's Bittersweet Ending into an Earn Your Happy Ending where Ravus lives to undergo a Heel–Face Turn and allies with Noctis and friends, allowing the five of them to permanently kill Ardyn without requiring a Heroic Sacrifice and rebuild Insomnia.
- This is the premise behind Imageepoch's dungeon RPG Final Promise Story, where the main characters have 24 hours before their country is overrun and annihilated by ominous steel monsters.
- For Honor: Apollyon respects people who defy her to the bitter end rather than meekly submit to their fates. In fact, she lets those who take this attitude with her live, believing that they are the only warriors deserving of life.Apollyon(addressing a group of Iron Legion soldiers who had surrendered to her): Do you know what kind of creature waits for its own slaughter? Sheep. Sheep.(cuts off their heads with her sword)
- In Gears of War 2, an achievement included with the Dark Corners map pack is "Did Not Go Gentle". The rest of the quote is implied due to the map related to the achievement being set at night.
- The ending of the prequel game Halo: Reach was a forgone conclusion, given that the Fall of Reach was a major plot point in the Halo universe's storylinenote , and Master Chief is explicitly known as the Last Spartannote . Nonetheless, the final level of the game shows that the second-to-last Spartan definitely Did Not Go Gently.
- Lorewise, while Reach was a catastrophic loss for the UNSC, it was one of the battles with the highest amounts of Covenant casualties. The UNSC really gave their best and made the Covenant work hard to conquer Reach.
- In a meta sense, the Noble 14
. They were a group of 14 players who simply didn't log off the servers for Halo 2's multiplayer, which was scheduled for shutdown in April 15, 2010. They continued playing until internet issues (or their consoles simply breaking down from overheating) dropped them off, with the last player being booted on May 11, 2010 by the servers themselves being turned off.
- Goodbye Volcano High ultimately concludes with this. With the news of the impending asteroid at the beginning of the game, it takes a while before the situation becomes serious enough to trigger Apocalypse Anarchy. But at the end of Chapter 7, Fang and their friends resolve to put on a concert and invite the entire city on the day the asteroid hits. They figure if they really are doomed, they might as well go out with a bang and lift the spirits of everyone they know and love. The achievement for completing this performance with 90% score or better is even named "Out with a Bang".
- Horizon Zero Dawn: Hundreds of years before the events of the game, mankind fought a Hopeless War against the Faro Plague, a rogue swarm of Killer Robots that fed on biomass to build more of themselves. Knowing life on Earth was doomed no matter what, the smartest, most resourceful people on the planet poured everything they had into Project Zero Dawn, the construction of a ridiculously powerful terraforming network that would restore life from the ashes of the Old World once the Plague ran its course. And the entire rest of mankind? They picked up a railgun and marched to the frontlines to buy Zero Dawn the time it needed to finish construction, dying by the billions for a slim hope of salvation from an enemy of their own making. It's slightly downplayed by the vast majority of humanity believing Zero Dawn to be a superweapon that would destroy the Faro Plague, but even misled as they were, they chose to die fighting instead of going gently.
- Legacy of Kain:
- In Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, both Moebius and Mortanius acknowledge that they are destined to die at Kain's hands and have accepted that, but they both still refuse to make it easy for Kain, with neither going down without a fight.
- In Legacy of Kain: Defiance, in an Offscreen Moment of Awesome, Vorador is captured by Moebius and his mercenary army, but not without "a considerable price in blood."
- Olaf the Berserker from League of Legends is a funny twist on the idea. An unstoppable viking warrior, Olaf isn't scared of death in general, but he does fear a peaceful death, which he sees as an undignified, anticlimactic way to go out. As a result, he spends his life chucking himself at giant monsters to earn a glorious death in battle, but he's so good at killing them that he always survives before they go down.
- In Marathon 2, Durandal is at one point cornered above a planet with his single corvette, and an entire Pfhor fleet bearing down on him. Even with the upgrades he's made to the ship, he knows he can't win. He fights regardless and takes half the Pfhor fleet down with him.Durandal: I've lost, and Boomer is going down in flames. However, the Pfhor will not soon forget the "Humbling of Battle Group 7", in which half their attacking force was taken down by a single corvette. I suspect this will be written into the list of great defeats that all Pfhor commanders must memorize in their training."
- This is a major motivation behind a key villain of Marvel's Spider-Man 2: Kraven has a terminal illness — suggested to be cancer — and wants to go out fighting. This is why he came to New York: the supervillains operating out of the city were his best bet of dying in combat, and the symbiote-empowered Spidey may give him exactly the ending he wants.
- In Mass Effect, when leaving Kaidan or Ashley behind one of dialog options is "Fight hard, die proud".
- Mass Effect 2 has an assassin named Thane Krios who, upon finding out that his days are numbered, goes on a personal quest to kill some of the more prominent crime lords in the galaxy before dying. He joins Shepard's team after his last job for the same reason.
- From the 'Arrival' Downloadable Content:
Shepard: Maybe you're right. Maybe we can't win this. But we'll fight you regardless... However insignificant we may be, we will fight, we will sacrifice, and we will find a way. That is what humans do. - Mass Effect 3 is about the entire galaxy pulling one of these against the Reapers. A lot of fan-favorite side characters and even a few not so favorites die this way off-screen.
- More than any other race in the galaxy, the turians breathe this trope. Despite obviously losing and with staggeringly one-sided casualties, they spend almost the entirety of the game (implied to be months), engaging and bogging down the Reapers in an extended slugging match over and on their homeworld on relative terms that forces the Reapers to commit more to a single front, and with a krogan alliance, score the single largest victory in the war. Absolutely no other race that has their homeworld heavily targeted even comes close to putting up the level of resistance that the turians do.
- Dialogue with Javik, the last Prothean (and with Vigil in the first game) notes that the Prothean Empire went out this way. Even completely out-matched by the Reapers, it still took them several hundred years to go down. For comparison, Liara estimates the current war would only take the Reapers about a hundred years to finish.
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is all about this.
- The game pretty much opens with explaining that Snake's body is failing and that he will most likely die within months. While often near the point of giving up, he gets a grip on himself and gives everything to stop Liquid Ocelot.
- "I only get off my bike when I fall in love. ...or fall dead." Big Mama's resistance is uncovered and she doesn't have much hope of any of her men living to see the next morning. But that doesn't mean she won't fight Ocelot until the very end.
- And then there's the entire final act of the game, and also the entire series. There's really not much the recruits on the Missouri can do against Outer Haven, but with only a few hours left before Ocelot's rule over the world becomes perfect and being the last military unit not under his complete control, Mei Ling leads them into a full out attack anyway.
- In a way Big Boss and Zero also count, as their entire lives works were based on their anger about soldiers being considered disposable and they would not have that.
- Not for Broadcast: In Day 296, if the Disrupt tape is not played during the Hostage Situation, security will bust in and order Jeremy Donaldson to drop the gun. If you don't cut to the ads, he decides to go out in a blaze of glory by attempting to shoot one of the officers, only to be cut down by bullets.
- StarCraft II:
- In single-player, the last mission of the Protoss mini-campaign is all about this trope. Achievements are awarded based on how many enemies you take down before you are wiped out.
- In multiplayer matches continuing to fight once it's hopeless is generally considered very poor etiquette and angers opponents.
- This choice actually determines what ending you get in Persona 3. Go quietly into The End of the World as We Know It, and you will die, unaware of what happened to you. Choose to fight against all hope, and you will die, albeit by a Heroic Sacrifice in order to Seal Evil in a Can so everyone else will live.
- In Pokémon, there are certain abilities or moves which allow the Pokemon to give one final act of defiance to a would-be victor.
- Self-Destruct, its more powerful version Explosion, Misty Explosion, cause direct damage to the opposing Pokemon while causing the user to faint.
- Final Gambit reduces the enemy's health equal to the current health of the user, with the user fainting from the use.
- Memento causes the user to faint while weakening the opposing Pokemon's attack and special attack stats by two stages each.
- Healing Wish and Lunar Dance combine this with Take Up My Sword as they cause the user to faint but will heal the incoming Pokemon its health and remove status conditions.
- If a Pokemon with ability Aftermath faints from a physical contact move, the attacker will lose 25% of their maximum HP.
- If a Pokemon uses Destiny Bond, then if they faint the attacking one will faint irregardless of their condition.
- If a Pokemon uses Grudge, then if they faint from an enemy move, that move will have all of its PP be reduced to 0.
- In Portal 2, one of the pre-recorded messages of Cave Johnson, deathly ill and bankrupt at that point in his life, is a rant about what you do When Life Gives You Lemons.... You don't go making lemonade. You make life take lemons back. You get mad. You burn life's house down. With the lemons.
- In the ending of Red Dead Redemption, after John Marston is betrayed by Director Ross, who sent a platoon of US soldiers to storm The Marston's ranch, John, knowing that they'll never stop hunting him, fights off a wave of soldiers to give his family a window to escape and ducks into the barn as the soldiers surround him, before walking out to meet more rifles pointing at him than he has bullets, ready to go out guns blazing.
- The Multiplayer game Zombie Overrun is "Do Not Go Gentle: The Game!" You are told that you are going to die and instructed to take as many Zombies as you can with you.
- Each of the endings of Red Dead Redemption II deals with Arthur Morgan in the terminal stage of a tuberculosis infection forced to make a decision: go after the lost score from the Blackwater heist, or help John Marston and his family escape to safety. Either way, he is resolute to fight until he has no strength left in him.
- In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Commander Gore begs you to please follow this, resist the temptation of power, and save the world, combined with Dare to Be Badass. Should you accept, he thanks you, tells you It Has Been an Honor, and finally leaves to the greater beyond...
- In the final boss battle of Sonic Adventure 2, dialogue during the battle suggests that Shadow's overuse of his Super Mode would cause him to die, but he continues to fight on anyway and help Sonic execute a powerful Chaos Control that prevents the ARK's Colony Drop, in doing so falling into the planet's atmosphere. Later averted, when he appears alive and well in Sonic Heroes.
- Central to Trillion: God of Destruction. Challenging the eponymous Big Bad is a suicide mission in the truest sense; victory is impossible, all each Overlord can do is hope to do enough damage that one of her successors might succeed. A big part of Zeabolos' character arc is trying not to crack under the strain of deciding which of his nearest and dearest to send to their death next, with no time to mourn in between.
- Wolfenstein: The New Order: When the Nazis invade the Resistance's base, one of BJ's timeline-dependent teammates will give the Nazis hell before dying. Tekla will shoot several Nazis before she is gunned down, while J cranks his guitar's amp up and rocks Berlin with "Star-Spangled Banner" in his final moments.
- In World of Warcraft Kilrogg Deadeye foresaw that he would be killed by the players in Hellfire Citadel but fought them to the bitter end anyway, seeming happy to meet his destined fate. In the same fate, he grants players a vision of their death in a futile Last Stand where Khadgar invokes this trope.
