Family Unfriendly Death / Video Games

• A Boy and His Blob: To defeat the frog-like enemies you must transform Blob into a coconut which will make the enemy eat him. Then call the Blob back, he'll burst out of the enemy, making him explode. Granted, it's a blob, but it's still kind of grisly.
• One of the games on the Genesis version of Action 52 was a Frogger clone. Instead of a frog, you played a dog. Get hit by a car, and the dog gets decapitated and his guts pour out.
• Little-known Japan-only PS1 platformer The Adventure of Little Ralph has this in spades, especially near the end. The main character is transformed into a little kid. For most of the game, the deaths are of the simple 'falling over' variety. Then, you get to the Temple stage, where you can get impaled on spikes (complete with blood splatter), crushed by a giant piston (complete with blood splatter), burnt to a crisp, or electrocuted. Even worse is where Ralph falls into a pit of giant maggots, sinking in slowly and disappearing, only to have his skull then pop out, stripped clean of all flesh.
• A beta version of the SNES platformer Ardy Lightfoot has Catry, the vulpine boss of the fourth level, sporting a ninja costume (and a slightly more pronounced bustline). On the flip side, her final fate in the bowels of the next level's giant worm is as a half-digested corpse (as opposed to a skeleton in the final Japanese version and just lying prone on the ground in the U.S. version).
• Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore: Duke Nodelki's death is remarkably rough for an otherwise goofy and light-hearted game, even in comparison to the other villains Arzette defeats: He turns to stone while begging for his life, whereupon Arzette smashes his head in with her sword.
• Awesome Possum... Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt is an Edutainment Game meant to deliver a Green Aesop. One of many things the developers added to follow in the footsteps of another wise-cracking, furry anthropomorphic character was add many different death animations. Most of them are relatively innocuous, but sometimes, when Awesome Possum gets knocked to the ground with none of his health left, all of his flesh and clothes will quickly rot off, leaving nothing but a malformed skeleton behind!
  • An even more grim version of this ocurs in the Beta versions of the game where instead of getting more and more tired in his Expressive Health Bar, his head would progressively rot away until only his skull is left.
• Amiga platformer Axel's Magic Hammer looks and plays like a typical kid-friendly Super Mario Bros. clone - until the title character dies. For reasons known only to developer Core Design, when Axel dies from losing all his health, he violently explodes, his bloody limbs and head flying through the screen, accompanied by a blood-curdling scream. Not that this doesn't apply when he falls into water; all that happens is that his Super Drowning Skills kick in as he dies out of the player's view.
• The death of Bottles in Banjo-Tooie. It turns out he was inside Banjo's house when Gruntilda zapped it with a very powerful energy blast. He exits the house totally incinerated and then falls down the floor, dying when his (visible) soul exits the body. The game is rated E.
• Admiral A-Qira's disturbingly realistic death in Battalion Wars II is a bit off-putting, given the game's ambiguously family friendly nature. He gets poisoned by Kaiser Vlad and falls to the ground coughing and retching!
  Admiral A-Qira: (Gasp!) POISON! (Cough Gasp) TREACHERY!!! (Sputter Retch)
  (A-Qira Slowly falls to the ground and dies)
  Kaiser Vlad: Quite correct... on both counts.
• In Battlezone II: Combat Commander, dying as an ISDF soldier will show a failure screen◊ with your character's limbs being ripped apart by plasma fire, their ribcage being exposed from heat, and their faceplate exploding outward in a shower of blood. The game is rated E by the ESRB for "animated violence". Dying as a Scion nets you the much less gruesome screen of your character melting into a pool of biometal. In the first game, completing the Europa mission for the Americans shows a dead, bloating Soviet CCA soldier half-buried in the frozen ground with his faceplate shattered. The Soviet failure screen shows your character's skeleton inside a heavily damaged spacesuit. Again, rated E.
• The US localization of Bionic Commando (1988) for the NES retained the graphic cutscene of Master D's head exploding, which lead to the Rearmed remake receiving an M rating.
• Speaking of cartoony, Brain Dead 13's got a whole mess of death scenes (all followed by resurrection scenes that may not have helped children), and almost all of them that happen to Lance (e.g., getting his limbs, like his hand or his head, cut off; getting drained of blood by a vampiress; getting his spine ripped apart by an atomic wedgie from the Frankenstein's Monster Jerk Jock; getting ripped apart vertically by the eyes; having his soul get sucked out and causing Rapid Aging by ghosts; getting pureed in a blender and then drunk like beer, etc.) are graphic and family-unfriendly. Neither bloody nor gory, but family-unfriendly nonetheless. And just like Super Metroid, this game got a Kids to Adults rating.
• In Brave Fencer Musashi, while two of the members of the Goldfish Poop Gang got pretty standard deaths, Topo, arguably the least harmless of the bunch (and of the antagonists period), is the one with the most brutal demise. After a fairly lighthearted game of "Simon Says", she gets brutally shocked by her own stage, screaming in pure agony, and finally spends her last moments painfully writhing and bleeding out. Yeah, the endgame is much darker then the rest of the game.
• Crash Bandicoot:
  • The series has always been well known for its wide variety of hilarious death animations, most of which are not even lethal! Which makes it all the more harrowing when one of the more lengthy death animations feature the poor underwater Bandicoot desperately struggling for air and kicking and convulsing frantically, before his lifeless corpse floats to the surface of shallow water. Sleep well, Kiddo!
  • Getting blown up by a TNT crate leads to Crash's shoes, eyeballs and nose raining from the sky. Definitely somewhere in the gray area between hilarious and horrifying.
  • And a "squashed flat" death in the second game, though humorous on its own, was cut from the Japanese version for too closely resembling a then-active serial killer's modus operandi.
• Death by electrocution or burning in the Dark Castle games, which is accompanied by a bloodcurdling scream.
• Dig Dug: Driller inflates his enemies 'til they explode. Said enemies are living creatures.
• In Dinosaur Planet, the Kamerian Heart bleeds from it's face before melting away when defeated.
• Miss Peaches in Dog's Life invents a massive machine to turn dogs into cat food. However, the main character is able to turn the tables on her and causes her to fall in the machine by farting in her face. She comes out as an oversized can with her legs sticking out the bottom in a childish Slapstick gag, but then the machine realizes its mistake and pulls her back in! The machine exclaims that she has been "sliced, diced and mashed" and a row of cat food cans are seen exiting the machine.
• Donkey Kong:
  • In the arcade version of Donkey Kong 3, when Stanley dies, all the bugs on screen immediately swarm and eat him, leaving only his bug sprayer behind.
  • Some of the boss 'deaths' in the Donkey Kong Country series, but especially in Donkey Kong 64. The most over the top and probably traumatising one has to be after the second Dogadon battle where the dragon flies into the wall with a loud splat, flies up and explodes into light, falls back down in the lava and resurfaces while flailing around on fire and screeching, before sinking back in with smoke rising from it. See at the end of this video
• Dragon Quest V: After defeating two of the Big Bad's henchmen, Pankraz is then forced to stop because Ladja uses his son as a shield. After taking a lot of blows from the henchmen in an uneven rematch (even though he just stands there without defending himself, it takes them a while to kill him because he's just that strong), he is then Kafrizzled to ashes, all in front of his son.
• Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp has a pretty revolting ending: After Dirk removes the Death Ring from Princess Daphne, he throws it with a rope at the evil wizard Mordroc, causing him to become a bubbling, fat creature. Seizing upon the opportunity, Dirk slashes the immobilized wizard with his sword, causing him to explode.
• Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds has a Dummied Out Indulgent Fantasy Segue where Luther gets violently attacked by a Psycho Electric Eel.
• Deaths in the C64 Friday the 13th: The Computer Game game are accompanied by a bloodcurdling scream and a disturbing image such as a knife in someone's head.
• The original Frogger was limited to drowning or being flattened by a car/truck, and maybe the occasional alligator. Other games in the series got a little more creative — Frogger 3D (the PS1 and PC game, not the 3DS game) alone had: being mauled by a dog, falling into lava, crushed between spiked walls, getting run over by a lawnmower, and so forth. Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge also had deaths such as being inflated and popped like a balloon, and getting cut in half, with visible blood. Makes you wonder what the hell the ESRB was thinking when they gave that game an E rating. Then, later 3D games like Frogger's Adventures: The Rescue go back to more cartoonish deaths.
• Eric Chahi seems to have a thing for horribly violent death. While this is merely somewhat shocking in games that might plausibly have been for older players, being ripped limb-from-limb by living shadows in the very Disney-esque Heart of Darkness is quite jarring. And that is just the beginning of the list of horrific deaths the player character can suffer.
  • Out of This World: Getting bitten by deadly switchblade slugs, being crisped by the enemy's Frickin' Laser Beams, scalded to death by steam pipes, drowning, and mauling by the Shadow Beast are all potential deaths here.
• Illusion of Gaia:
  • The Jackal's death is quite gruesome, particularly for an SNES game. He has captured the hero's love interest, but the hero plays his flute, activating the booby trap of the room to spew a stream of fire at the Jackal, setting his body completely alight. He slowly burns to death as he tries to crawl his way along the floor to the protagonists before finally collapsing, still in flames. If you exit and re-enter the room afterwards, his bones remain.
  • Don't forget when Hamlet the Pig jumps into the fire in order to feed the villagers. To eat or not to eat...
• Final Fantasy VI has Odin bisecting six people with Atom Edge onscreen, and summoning him in battle allows him to do the same to enemies.
• One cutscene late in the 2.X storyline of Final Fantasy XIV features a very violent death. Clever camera angles make for a Gory Discretion Shot, but it's quite clear that someone got cleaved in twain.
• In Kingdom Hearts, several villains suffer horrifying deaths including being burnt to nonexistence whilst having a weapon shoved through the character's chest.
• Five Nights at Freddy's contains the extremely violent and unpleasant way to die, known as the Springlock Failure. What happens to you is best explained by the games antagonist, William Afton.
  Dave/William: And if you trigger those spring locks, two things will happen: first the locks themselves will snap right into you, making deep cuts all over your body, and a split second later, all the animatronic parts, all that sharp steel and hard plastic will instantly be driven into your body. You will die, but it will be slow. You’ll feel your organs punctured, the suit will grow wet with your blood, and you will know you’re dying for long, long minutes. You’ll try to scream, but you will be unable to: your vocal cords will be severed, and your lungs will fill with your own blood until you drown in it.
  • He himself ultimately becomes a firsthand demonstration of all of that, courtesy of a self-defensive and vengeful Charlie. Yes, he deserves it all, being the Purple Guy and all, but still...
• Kirby:
  • Marx Soul in Kirby Super Star Ultra. After you beat the snot outta him, he blows up... then reappears briefly only to split in half while screaming with an equally horrific facial expression. And then both halves explode and so does the boss arena afterwards. And this is immediately followed by Kirby reigning cheerfully triumphant as the champion of The True Arena...
  • In Kirby Super Star, if your Partner gets KO'd, it starts to slowly explode, and if there are no enemies to emergency Copy or no health to pick up, they're forced to jump around, flailing as they slowly die. However, this can be prevented by using the Normal Beam, turning them into an item, copying it, and turning your copy back into a partner. But if you've got a Copy of your own, no less a special like Crash, well...
  • In Kirby's Dream Land 3 there's Zero who, in a final attempt to kill you, rips off its own iris, which constantly bleeds whenever it gets hit, and after taking enough damage, begins violently hemorrhaging while spinning out and eventually explodes in a shower of blood.
    • Zero's return in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards as Zero Two is almost worse when you give it some thought. To push it into the state where you can damage it, you need to repeatedly impale its eye with the Crystal Shards, releasing clouds of blood. This stuns it in pain long enough for you to open fire on its bandaged wound from Dreamland 3, which makes it writhe in agony.
  • In Kirby's Pinball Land, if Kirby falls off the board and you can't launch him back up, he explodes into bits.
  • Pyribbit's defeat in Kirby: Triple Deluxe is quite scary; after getting beaten by the pink puffball, he falls into the lava pool in the background, flails around in a desperate attempt to get out, but is then promptly crushed by the four floating rocks in the background and sinks into the bottom. It's even kept for his return in the Kirby Clash games!
  • President Haltmann's death in Kirby: Planet Robobot, good lord. After his mind control helmet is stolen by Susie and causes Star Dream to become an Omnicidal Maniac hellbent on eradicating all life, Haltmann's mind is promptly deleted from the mother computer's programming. And then comes The True Arena: Star Dream Soul OS deliberately deletes any lingering trace of his soul left to ensure victory over Kirby, and in its final phase, you can outright hear Haltmann's screams as Kirby manages to take down Star Dream's core.
• The player character's death in Last Alert is especially gory.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, despite its Lighter and Softer graphics, features Ganondorf's death: being impaled with the Master Sword through the jewel on his forehead by a 9-year-old kid, which is even more brutal than his chest-impalement in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
  • Link's drowning animation is almost as horrifying as Mario's drowning animation in Super Mario 64. When Link drowns, he struggles in the water, sinks, then floats with his back up, dead.
  • Even though The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is Rated E, the death of the third boss, Barinade, is particularly gruesome. Huge boils begin to form all over its body and it explodes in a burst of green blood and flesh. And none of it disappears after you kill it. Before leaving you can run around the room and see all of the gore splattered on the floor.
  • Ocarina of Time really established this as a series tradition for baddies in general and Ganon in particular. The last controllable action in the whole game involves Link slashing at Ganon several times — with the necessary blood flying around — before jamming the Master Sword into his face. However, this goes as far back as The Legend of Zelda, where shooting Ganon with a silver arrow causes him to explode into Ludicrous Gibs. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past toned Ganon's death down to more generic explosions, but the Nintendo Power comic brought the gore back, with gallons of blood spilling out of him and very prominent Onamatopoeia detailing it.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Ghirahim's death is perhaps the most disturbing one in the entire series. He starts out by inverting the Crucified Hero Shot, being lifted up by the Demon King Demise. Then the hilt of a sword starts to appear from the core in his chest. Demise then pulls it out, while Ghirahim laughs maniacally, almost as if he wanted it to happen. Ghirahim then begins to fade away and is absorbed into Demise's sword. Even if he still seemed to be alive inside the sword, that's only up until the end of the battle, when it dissolves in Demise's hand, completely and instantly.
  • Wand Of Gamelon: Hectan gruesomely melts away, leaving his still beating heart behind.
• There's a Chinese bootleg NES game based on The Lion King called The Lion King V: Timon & Pumbaa. Its game-over screens have Simba hanging from a noose, Timon burying himself alive and Pumbaa leaping into a boiling pot, which is pretty violent stuff for a "kiddie game".
• Mega Man:
  • The transformed Double literally slicing apart various reploids in Mega Man X4 complete with blood gushing from their wounds for some reason.
  • The same game has Zero getting Flashback Nightmares of him surrounded by bloodied corpses (his victims when he first awoke as a Maverick), with blood on his hands as well.
• Minecraft: Story Mode: While it revives afterwards, the Wither Storm being blown to bits by the Formidi-Bomb, complete with blood and visible bones.
• Mother 3:
  • All creatures/enemies are defeated, broken into pieces, returned to their senses, etc when they are beaten. At least until the last boss. Suicide by electrocution, anybody?
  • Also, early in the game we have Hinawa's death, who was attacked by a Mecha-Drago, a kind of modified dinosaur. The episode seems to have been so violent that one of the reptile's fangs was found embedded in her chest. Probably the coffin was closed during the funeral.
• Sakura Wars 2: Thou Shalt Not Die:
  • At the end of chapter 1, Demon King runs his sword through Shinnosuke Yamazaki, with the latter coughing up blood.
  • Keigo Kyogoku, the game's Big Bad, gets killed by Ogami's sword, causing him to disintegrate into dust.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • New Super Mario Bros.: The first boss is a fight against Bowser, which you win by dropping him into lava, just like in the classic Super Mario Bros....except that back in the NES days, he didn't frantically struggle to escape, fall down into the lava, and briefly resurface as a skeleton after having his flesh burned away.
  • In Super Mario Sunshine, there are a certain type of enemy known as 'Electro-Koopas', who have electric shells, and attack by flinging their shells like a boomerang at you. How does Mario defeat them? By spraying them with water, so that when their shells come back they get electrocuted. And in a later episode at Pinna Park, Mario defeats a giant one by flipping the grate it was sleeping on, so that it plunges into the water, getting electrocuted also.
  • Mario's scarily realistic drowning in Super Mario 64. In the DS remake it's changed to a more cartoony drowning. There's also his death by toxic gas, where he grasps his throat and falls to the floor still twitching and possibly alive.
  • A few of Mario's death sequences in Super Mario Galaxy, namely electrocuted into a skeleton (and by that, we mean that only his skeleton is left behind), spaghettification and disintegrating!
  • That one scene in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in which Hooktail eats all the Toads in the audience, and starts chewing them with her mouth open. Sure, there's no blood or gore, but still, seeing numerous Toads getting chewed up while still alive is pretty disturbing. Luckily, you can jump on Hooktail's snout and free a few Toads that she gobbled up, but the moment is still freaky. Later on in the fight with Cortez, he eats the audience's souls to heal himself, and you actually get to see the audience members' lifeless husks fall to the floor of the theater and vanish.
  • This trope has been played with as early as Super Mario World in which four Koopaling battles take place over lava. While Iggy and Larry are just Killed Offscreen when pushed into the lava, Lemmy and Wendy sink into the lava in plain sight. It's even worse in the Game Boy Advance remake where it sounds as if they are shrieking in agony.
  • Super Mario Odyssey has Cookatiel, who dies by falling into a giant pot of stupendous stew and boiling alive, complete with sizzling sounds and bubbles coming up from where she fell in before she finally explodes in it.
  • Paper Mario: The Origami King has an attempted one when the titular Big Bad mercilessly crushes his own sister with a boulder and leaving Olivia for dead. To save her barely alive state, Bobby plays the trope straight — up to now, allied Bob-ombs would quickly come back after self-destructing. Not this time.
• The EUR/JPN versions of Um Jammer Lammy have a cutscene where Lammy avoids being run over by traffic, but then slips on a Banana Peel left on the sidewalk by P.J. Berri, lands on the hard concrete, dies, and then finds herself in Hell, which is where Stage 6 begins. Despite this, the game got a 3+ rating in Europe. However, in the American version, the cutscene was completely re-animated and the level takes place on an exotic island instead, because Sony did not approve of having Hell or the lead character's on-screen death in an E-rated game.
• In Ori and the Blind Forest, the cutscene where Kuro's owlets are accidentally burned alive by the Spirit Tree is horrifyingly graphic for an E rating. Like the Mario and Zelda examples above, Ori himself has a realistic drowning animation.
• Pikmin 2: The series is fairly violent already, but the electrocution deaths of some of the Pikmin stand out, being vaporized with visible skeletons (in the third game, electricity only stuns them). There's also the death of the Burrowing Snagret. It simply explodes the first time you defeat it, and then allows you to carry its decapitated head back, eyes open and frozen (in the third game, you can carry its whole body). The game, like its predecessor, is rated E for Everyone.
• In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, Kyurem kills Hydreigon after it freezes it in a huge chunk of ice, and then shatters it to pieces. It's fairly tame from a wide viewpoint, but for a series where Never Say "Die" is rarely averted, it's really jarring to see a Pokemon seemingly rendered Deader than Dead. Even more so when it doesn't stick anyways...
• Psychonauts:
  • One of the reasons why the game got a Teen rating is because in Lungfishopolis you can stomp on the lungfish, with tons of blood spread all around their corpses.
  • Milla's backstory depicts a group or orphans burning to death in a fire.
  • In the infamous Meat Circus level, both the Butcher and Raz's false view of his father seemingly die by falling into a meat grinder. Understandably, there was a Gory Discretion Shot, but you can still hear it clear as crystal.
• The 3DO version of Rise of the Robots features a gruesome death scene against the Supervisor, where she decapitates the Cyborg and then impales his severed head, causing his eye to pop out. And it got a Kids to Adults rating in spite of this.
• Silent Debuggers: The mutated Charles Smith gets shot with machinegun fire before his head gets shot off. When the game was available on the Virtual Console, it was rated E by the ERSB.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Shadow the Hedgehog was censored pre-release in order to avoid a higher rating. Despite this, it still got away with Maria being shot (including keeping a still image of the censored moment of impact) and several endings implying that Shadow snapped Robotnik's neck.
  • Sonic Adventure 2 has a little girl shot to death, the genocide of everyone else on ARK, and Gerald Robotnik's execution scene. Sonic X made the latter scene even worse by adding gun shots when the camera cut away. Stuff like this saw the game upgraded to an "Everyone 10+" rating when it was remastered for HD consoles (originally it had launched as an "E" due to the E-10+ rating not existing in 2001^note The E-10+ rating wasn't established until early 2005 and the first game of the franchise to receive the rating was the aforementioned Shadow the Hedgehog).
  • In Sonic Unleashed, Super Sonic flies straight through Dark Gaia's central eye and bursts out of the back of its head. Though you don't see much of that, you DO see Dark Gaia toppling over, crumbling apart with gallons of green blood pouring everywhere.
• Space Quest:
  • Space Quest III did this too, with enemies carrying gel guns that would trap you in a solid block of a Jell-O-like substance. Very cartoony! Then Sierra's trademark Have a Nice Death screen pops up, and mentions that there are no air holes.
  • Not to mention most of the SQ series' deaths were particularly graphic for Sierra standards. SQ 3 alone has Roger suffer a fatal cut to an artery leading him to slowly and painfully bleed to death, not to mention Explosive Decompression or getting half his face blown off.
  • Or get shredded by a garbage shredder. Or falling to death.
  • Really, Space Quest was really "nice" about these. The first game opens with Roger being the only crew member still alive aboard the Arcada. Just LOOK at the corpses around the deck. Most were gut-shot and/or bled to death from multiple blaster wounds. There's also the grell, where you're chewed up and swallowed by the creature. Dehydration, Explosive Decompression, having your head dissolve from an acid pool, run over by motorcycles, Body Horror at the hands of the Pukoids...the list goes on.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate:
  • Despite the game being rated E10+, the fates of the Big Bad Ensemble in the bad endings are rather brutal, even if they are spheres. Dharkon's body is shot and ripped apart before Galeem fully disintegrates him while Galeem's wings are pulled apart before Dharkon's tentacles impale him.
  • Some of the fighter reveal trailers have other fighters suffer grisly ends. For Ridley's reveal trailer, he crushes Mario's skull and impales Mega Man with his tail. In the Simon and Richter Belmont reveal trailer, Luigi comes face-to-face with Death, who, with a slash of his scythe, rips Luigi's soul out of his body. Of course, no one dies permanently in Smash, with Nintendo UK reassuring fans that "Luigi is okay."
• In Tsioque when the Wizard is annoyed by the noise caused by the titular Princess, he takes it out on the guard outside her cage by zapping him into ashes. This was originally a gift for the game developer's little girl.
• Metroid:
  • The original Metroid got this. While someone playing the game for the first time might have gotten the impression of a robot exploding to bits during their first playthrough, knowing that there's a human being in that suit turns Samus' death animation into a gory, gravity-obeying splatter.
  • In Super Metroid, there is one particular boss fight which still seems almost saddening. There is a boss creature known as Crocomire who, when beaten, falls into the acid below. He repeatedly tries to claw his way out, each time his flesh animated to be melting off of his skeleton, all of the while yelping helplessly in a manner that you might think a dog would as it was dying. Soon, an earthquake occurs, and the bleached walking skeleton of Crocomire appears through a wall, making a last-ditch effort to survive before dropping dead, leaving only the skull behind. Words do it no justice.
  • Even though the Metroid Prime Trilogy is rated Teen, dying in the first is greatly disturbing, and it only gets more so in the "death by Corruption" scene in the third.
  • Gandrayda's death in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Since Gandrayda is a shapeshifter, as she dies, she goes through a bunch of random forms, and then turns into Samus. And Samus watches herself die.
    • Rundas as well. Most enemies in these sort of games tend to explode or something after they're defeated, but he was impaled by icicles.
• The PSN game Super Stardust HD has some enemies that heavily bleed red blood upon being killed. And this is in an E-rated game by the way.
• Considering almost nobody ever really died in the previous games in the series, the death of Marquis de Singe in Tales of Monkey Island is kind of shocking. After his immortality elixir fails him, his wounds open up and he gets pushed into his own machine that breaks matter into its particles and spreads them around the seas. The way his scream suddenly cuts off is unsettling. Almost immediately after this, and without warning, Guybrush is murdered by LeChuck. Thankfully he gets better.
• Tales of Vesperia, despite its plot generally being lighter than most of the Tales Series, pulls no punches when it comes to Captain Cumore's death at the hands of its protagonist Yuri Lowell. After the Captain evades punishment for selling citizens into slavery... again, Yuri forgoes simply killing him in his sleep and instead chases him outside and drowns the man in quicksand. What really helps sell it is how calmly Yuri watches Cumore beg for mercy as he dies.
• Gillan's death by Diagonal Cut in Valis II, and the mage boss's death (complete with Blood from the Mouth) in the PC Engine remake of the first game.
• In World of Warcraft, the cutscene showing the events at the Wrathgate was far more graphic than just about anything else in the game.
• Despite being clearly aimed at a very young audience, the classic Spyro the Dragon trilogy had some pretty unsettling deaths; for starters, keep in mind that Spyro roasts his ennemies alive (some of them, such as Zephyr's chicks in Ripto's Rage being children). The first game is very tame, but comes the second one, one boss is crushed under large boulders and Ripto himself meets his end by taking a head dive in a pool of lava. In Year Of The Dragon, the Sorceress suffers a similar fate, with a pool of acid. Ripto and his goons unexplicably survived, but the Sorceress stayed dead.
• In line with its encouragement of sparing enemies instead of killing them, Undertale has some surprisingly gruesome death animations.
  • Killing Papyrus results in his head coming off and landing in his hand, then falling to the floor as his body turns to dust. He gets in a few more words of encouragment before his head turns to dust too.
  • Undyne:
    • Killing her on a Neutral run causes her to enter a Heroic Second Wind, all the while her attacks get weaker and weaker. Then, her body starts to melt, before finally turning to dust as well.
    • On a Genocide run, you deal the fatal blow right away, as she jumps inbetween you and Monster Kid. Turns out you hit her so hard, her entire torso has split in half! She doesn't die from this, instead holding onto her Determination and becoming Undyne the Undying. Killing her after her transformation causes her to melt, then turn to dust.
  • Sans, when killed, gains a giant gash over his chest, which appears to bleed, as well as Blood from the Mouth. When he stands up and walks off-screen, he's clearly barely capable of staying on his feet.
  • On a Genocide Run, Flowey pops up at the very end, telling you he can be useful to you, and that he proved that by killing the King. He then starts to stammer, before he gains Asriel's Voice Grunting and face and begs you not to kill him. You then hit him with the knife, over and over and over, until there's nothing left of him.
  • Most generic enemies have pretty unremarkable death animations. However, Tsunderplane — being an airplane — falls out of the sky and explodes as she hits the dialogue box.
    Tsunderplane: B-but I never got to- [KA-BOOM]
• X Com UFO Defense has an intro video depicting the beginning of the alien invasion, with civilians and Mutons alike getting gunned down violently. The PSX version also features a Game Over cutscene consisting of a leader of human civilization surrendering to the alien invaders, shortly before a Muton blows his head open. The PSX version has a K-A Rating (the modern equivalent of an E Rating).

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