From Bad To Worse / Video Games

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• The opening cutscene of Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation is a very good example of things going from bad to worse. You can watch it being MST'd here.
• Ai to Yuuki to Kashiwa Mochi seems like a simple, if difficult, puzzle game at first with a simple plot: A young girl named Ai is sick, and while she's sick, she dreams of a world full of sweets and her imaginary friend, a boy named Yuki. However, as the game progresses, the player gradually begins to realize that something is amiss, and sure enough there is. Ai isn't simply sick, she's dying of cancer. And Yuki? He's a Shinigami sent to guide her soul to the afterlife.
• Arcaea:
  • One side of the main story begins with our cute, naive protagonist doing nothing but relishing in watching and collecting delightful memories. Then it disintegrates into said protagonist collecting too much of those memories and overdosing on them until she became completely numb and catatonic. And if she doesn't end up there, she runs into another girl who tries to kill her and the story gets worse from there, with both protagonists becoming more and more insane as they try to kill each other. It eventually ended with our protagonist reaching a breaking point and killing off the girl she tried to befriend and turning herself into a broken wreck out of guilt and remorse. She does get better on the first ending as she atones for (sorta) resurrecting the girl she killed and befrinding her, but it is possible to reach another ending where she just leaves the other girl dead, traps everyone else inside Arcaea and letting all of them become catatonic after a millennium and becomes an insane and nihilistic wreck of a Mad God.
  • The other side of the main story is really no better. Another girl awakens in a tower, sees nothing but horrible memories of "pain, betrayal, envy and dark", becomes so desenetized that she loses all hope of expecting anything good will happen and goes out of the tower trying to find someone to hurt and kill. It reaches the point where when she ran into our main protagonist and saw a premonition that she would kill her, she didn't just try to aim for the kill, but evolved into something trying to sadistically toy with her bit by bit before aiming for the kill...only to get herself on the receiving end instead. The Downer Ending gives bonus information on how did she end up like that; she was a practictioner of some power from a destroyed world where she was shunned and hated by other people because of possessing said power. Then a god or angel arrived, obliterated her entire world, and made her the final victim as there's absolutely nothing she can do about it.
  • The side story, "Lasting Eden," has a girl who after her homeworld was destroyed by an unknown apocalyptic event, was transported to Arcaea with her memories intact (so she would remember all the horrible things that happened) and saw nothing but horrible memories. The torment reached a point where the girl wanted to die....until a voice encouraged her to run and get out all the way to the outside world. Things don't get better here, as a creepy stalker-yandere-like Outside-Context Problem with a god complex and reality-warping powers entered Arcaea on her own volition, ran into her and abducts her to places unknown.
• Arc the Lad II starts with its protagonist's flashback about the genocide of his people (done by the uncle of the first game's protagonist to boot). Yep: the game starts with a genocide, and things get downhill from here. Don't get fooled by the game's cutesy graphics: this game is brutal.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum. Joker takes over Arkham. Joker lets out the inmates. Joker unleashes big ass Titan monsters. Joker sends Scarecrow after you. Joker MUTATES HIMSELF INTO A TITAN MONSTER!
• BioShock's backstory has this in spades. It starts off well enough, a radical objectivist founds an isolated city of art, science and industry underwater to avoid the "taint of parasites". Things look even better when mutant sea slugs carrying a "miracle serum" are discovered and said serum gets mass-produced. Things start to go bad when a smuggler decides to monopolize the serum, making the objectivist who runs the city crack down on the smuggler and his supporters in increasingly severe ways. Things really go bad after the smuggler's faked death, as the majority of citizens go insane because they've grown to be entirely dependent on the highly addictive serum. And then there's a civil war that kills off most of the population, trashes the city into ruins and debris and starts the city's decline. By the time Jack arrives, the city has devolved into anarchy, with the population turned into violent, mutated "Splicers" and the radical objectivist desperately trying to keep his city together by becoming a totalitarian dictator, which was, ironically, the exact opposite of what he sought to become.
• It doesn't matter how bad the BlazBlue world has gotten, Hazama/Yuuki Terumi will attempt to, and most likely succeed, in making it even worse: He is behind everything bad that occured before in the series. His motives? Shits and giggles, mostly... and plunging the world into his own version of paradise of truth: despair. This trope is referenced and lampshaded prior to a fateful decision in Slight Hope. Makoto's memory of world history doesn't match up with what everyone else is telling her (due to her being in an alternate timeline, but she doesn't know that), she's apparently gone back in time, Hazama tried to kill her, Jin is seriously injured, Tager and Kokonoe don't recognize her or her "gnu" password, and then Jin goes missing.
  Bang: One of our men saw him in the company of a man in a half-mask... and they appeared to be heading for the upper levels.
  Makoto: Man in a half-mask? (Let me guess... Colonel Relius Clover! He's the one mentioned in the report about the 12th Prime Field Device... the one that looked like Noel... This is going from bad to worse — I can feel it! There's not a moment to waste!)
• Fou-lu's storyline in Breath of Fire IV. He gets summoned as a god—except the summoners manage to bugger it up, only bring half the god across with the other half ending up 600 years in future, on the other side of the planet. Then he reunites an empire only to end up as the King in the Mountain for the next six hundred years while the inheritors of the imperial throne become gradually more and more corrupt and decide not to keep that bargain with the God-Emperor they summoned. When he wakes up, he discovers his own empire has been telling the army he is the "Dragon of Doom" destined to destroy the empire, ends up having increasingly extreme attempts at assassination, discovers the army is also hunting down his other half, and eventually goes Laughing Mad and generally stabby towards humanity with the third assassination attempt, which involved kidnapping his Significant Other, torturing her to insanity, and using her as the warhead of a Nuclear Weapon Expy because her connection to him would literally make it hurt more. And this is still not the end of the attempts to Kill The God-Emperor (and literally Bullying a Dragon). When Fou-lu finally makes it to the capital, the acting emperor acts as if the whole thing about the Evil Empire setting him on fire, mauling him with Giant Owls of Doom, using his girlfriend as a Tactical Magickal Thermonuclear Warhead, and so on were a horrible mistake..right before stabbing him in the back with a soul-eating sword made from the results of another botched attempt at summoning a god. To say Fou-lu takes this poorly is an understatement, and it is perfectly reasonable in retrospect that he finds Humans Are Bastards as a result. And his other half ended up with a very supportive Nakama and had a chance to learn something about humanity other than the inherent bastardy of people. And in the standard Game Over, the aforementioned other half essentially has to beat Fou-lu sane before merging with him. There is also a Nonstandard Game Over where the protagonist can decide that Humans Are Bastards.
• In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the mission "Shock and Awe" goes from bad to worse very fast. You start off rescuing an advance unit of Marines trapped by Al-Asad's fanatical soldiers, and right after evacuating them, the Cobra helicopter that's been backing you up all mission long goes down. You swoop in to save her, and learn that there's a nuclear warhead found in the city. After you pull her out, and are bugging out of town, the nuke goes off. You survive the aftermath... for a few minutes. The world's apathetic response to this is what motivates the big bad of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
• In Chrono Trigger, after a Hopeless Boss Fight with the Big Bad, Crono gets apparently vaporized, Schala gets absorbed by Lavos, Janus and the Gurus get scattered throughout time and the floating Kingdom of Zeal comes crashing down, destroying 90% of the planet in a huge tidal wave. It got even worse when Dalton shows up, smacks the survivors around, takes your party hostage and steals your time machine in one fell swoop. To top it all off, your equipment, items, and money are all taken and you are literally helpless against the enemies in the area until you get some of it back (or unless you were prescient enough to bring Ayla with you). One of your party members even remarks, "This is depressing..."
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series: In Tiberian Dawn, GDI defeats Nod and kills Kane. In Tiberian Sun, Kane comes back and GDI defeats them again, killing him again. Meanwhile, tiberium has begun to mutate substantial portions of the human population, and tiberium growth is spreading across the surface of the planet. In Tiberium Wars, tiberium has now taken over more than half the Earth's surface, rendering entire continents uninhabitable. GDI has cleaned up some areas, Blue Zones; but other Yellow Zones remain contaminated, and Red Zones are so bad that humans can't even survive there. Then, Kane comes back AGAIN, now as a cyborg, more powerful than ever. GDI uses their ion cannon to root Kane out — this attracts the Scrin, who come to claim the tiberium they apparently seeded on the Earth before the events of Tiberian Dawn. The Scrin didn't know we were here, but they want their tiberium, and they decide to just go ahead and kill us off. If this weren't bad enough, Kane plan to use Scrin technology and refuses to fight them; thus GDI is forced to fight Kane and the Scrin at the same time. Finally, in a last-ditch effort GDI defeats the Scrin and the Scrin commander escapes, only to learn that now the Scrin are planning a full-scale invasion.
• One of the main draws of Cookie Clicker is seeing how much worse your cookie empire can make things. It really starts in earnest with minor chocolate-based environmental damage from your cookie farms, and ends with the destruction of all life on Earth in a Grandmapocalypse, all matter in the universe becoming cookies down to the subatomic level, demonic incursions, places being Ret-Gone'd, and time travel usage causing assorted historical figures to become sentient talking lumps of dough.
• The Darkness game of the comic is just one long string of these moments. First off, Jackie's "Uncle" tries to off him, then he gets taken over by a being of pure evil. Then after taking some small revenge on his backstabbing relative, he retaliates by capturing and then killing the love of Jackie's life in front of him whilst the Darkness stops him doing anything. This leads Jackie to kill himself, which only lands him in Hell. And then, to summarize: Jackie will be, before the game is over, tortured, blown up, sent to Hell again, forced to willingly accept the Darkness into himself and in the end have his soul eaten by it.
• Dead Space: Isaac's heading to a ship to repair a transmitter and meet up with an estranged girlfriend. Said ship turns out to be overrun with some of the freakiest monsters ever. And it turns out that the ship's engines stopped, so that they're going to crash into the planet they're orbiting. Then, once Isaac fixes that, the ship's going to run into asteroids unless Isaac manages to shoot them down. Then, it turns out that something's poisoning the air, a Mad Scientist created an Implacable Man, the cure for the air poisoning won't work until you deal with a Lovecraftian monster, then your attempts to get a call out for rescue are blocked by a space slug that inexplicably selected the antenna array to sit around, then it turns out the military opened a escape pod full of necromorphs and now their ship is full of superfast necromorphs, the regenerator returns, then The Mole is revealed, then when you finally seem to have stopped the monsters the mole returns steals the marker and reveals your girlfriend was dead the whole time, then the Big Bad Hive Mind shows up. Then there's an ending that implies that Isaac's either freakin' insane or killed by his zombie girlfriend. Dead Space: Extraction does this right off the bat.
• The Diablo series:
  • The first Diablo features the title demon lord driving King Leoric of Khanduras insane, bringing him back as a powerful skeletal demon, and then possessing his youngest son Albrecht. He then Mind Controls the hero of the first game, who it turns out is the King's older son Aidan, into sticking the piece of Diablo's soulstone into his own head.
  • By the time Diablo II rolls around, Tristram, the town where the first game was largely set, has been destroyed by the demons, with most of its inhabitants either dead or corrupted, and its only survivor, Deckard Cain, being tortured in every way by the demons. To make things worse, all three of the player characters from the first game didn't make it out of things in one piece — the Rogue was corrupted by Andariel and became Blood Raven, the Mage was driven insane by Diablo himself and became the Summoner, and the Warrior? As a result of sticking that soulstone into his own head at the end of the first game, he's become Diablo's new host. The heroes of the second game go Ax-Crazy at the end of the game with the exception of the Barbarian. When Diablo is defeated again, his older brother Baal corrupts the Worldstone, forcing the archangel Tyrael to destroy it to prevent it from being used to control humanity, obliterating Mount Arreat and a good portion of the surrounding barbarian homeland with it.
  • And now Diablo III. As a result of a star falling from the heavens (which turns out to be Tyrael, who after twenty years of reforming in Pandemonium following the Worldstone's destruction returned to the High Heavens only to be put on trial by his jerkass peers who don't give a shit about humanity and decided to renounce his angelic status to aid humanity directly), a Zombie Apocalypse is going down in New Tristram. Several beloved characters from Diablo II, including Deckard Cain, end up dying either before or during the game. The demon cult that killed Cain ends up wreaking havoc across the deserts of Kehjistan, including the village of Alcarnus, before being taken down along with their master Belial. But then Azmodan learns about the Black Soulstone, which Belial and every major Evil you've killed during Diablo II were drawn into courtesy of Adria, the Witch of Tristram from the very first game, and decides to invade the mortal realm in order to retrieve it. All of this, however, doesn't hold a candle to Adria's betrayal at the very end of Act III, which sees her using the Black Soulstone with all seven Evils inside to bring about Diablo's rebirth as the Prime Evil, the embodiment of all seven of the Great Evils in one being, by turning poor Leah, the daughter that she had with Aidan when he was Diablo's host, into Diablo's new host. Diablo then proceeds to bring down the Diamond Gates, which have never fallen in the entire history of the Eternal Conflict, and unleash Hell upon the High Heavens themselves, running roughshod all over the angels who don't stand a chance against the Prime Evil and spreading his evil supernatural corruption everywhere — and not even angels are immune to it! In the expansion, Reaper of Souls, the angel of death, Malthael, shows up to take the Black Soulstone containing Diablo sometime later. He plans on using it to destroy all demons and their descendants, which in the Diabloverse includes humanity (humans are the descendants of the Nephalem who are spawn of Demons and Angels). When you do make it to him, he shatters the Black Soulstone and absorbs Diablo's power in a last-ditch attempt to stop you, and when you finally kill him, Tyrael tells you that because the Black Soulstone was destroyed, Diablo has been released.
• Dragon Age:
  • Every Origin story in Dragon Age: Origins eventually follows this trope. It's why your character is always left with no choice but to join the Wardens; the other options are imprisonment or death. The main plot follows it too. The supposed "final battle" against the Darkspawn ends with every Grey Warden but you and Alistair dead, the king dead, and the forces he brought with him slaughtered, leaving Ferelden's forces severely depleted. Worse, Loghain twists this to his advantage by assuming regency, branding any surviving Grey Wardens in Ferelden (all two of them) traitors responsible for the king's death, and starting a civil war with Ferelden's nobility. After that, when you try to raise your own army to battle the Blight, it becomes painfully clear that all of your potential allies have their own problems — and guess who has to solve them? Finally, after you save everyone's asses, deal with Loghain, and get Ferelden's nobility behind you...then the Darkspawn launch a full-scale invasion. You then learn that the only way to end the Blight is to kill the Archdemon, and the only way to do that is for a Grey Warden to sacrifice himself/herself. Morrigan gives you another option, but that option will impregnate her with a Humanoid Abomination.
  • And then Dragon Age II hits. Broke your back as the Warden trying to make Thedas just a little brighter for everyone? Took the altruistic route and gave up rewards out of the goodness of your pure, wholesome heart? Too bad. Denerim is (still) in ruins, the Blightlands have consumed everything south of Lothering, and millions have either died or fled Ferelden to locales already taxed from dealing with their own problems, much less a large influx of refugees. Then, in the city of Kirkwall, shit gets real: thousands die in the qunari rampage, and tensions between the mages and the Templars finally reach their extreme and disastrous conclusion, with the ramifications felt in every corner of Thedas.
  • And then there's Dragon Age: Inquisition. You thought Kirkwall looked bad? It turns out, the events in Kirkwall caused mages all over Thedas to rebel, resulting in the Right of Annulment being imposed on Rivain's Circle. There's now a full-scale war between mages and templars waging all over the continent. To make matters worse, the red lyrium Hawke found in the deep roads is being used by an ancient, sentient darkspawn to corrupt either the mages or the Templars, creating his own, private army with powers cranked up to eleven. He's also gotten his hands on the Grey Wardens, used them to open the Breach, releasing an endless stream of demons into the world, and convinced them to use blood magic to bind their mages to demons, essentially creating a demon army. This is all a bid to force his way into the Black City and make himself a god, never mind that this would destroy the world. No wonder the Warden took off while the organization suffers from massive bad rep.
• Dragon Quest V: The hero's life goes down the drain the moment his father is killed by Ladja. He becomes a slave for ten years, his wife gets kidnapped, he gets turned into a stone statue for eight years... all because Ladja is trying to wipe the ancient hero's lineage out.
• Drakengard has five endings, each of which sees the world in even worse shape than the last. In order:
  • Ending A: To protect the world from the Watchers, Caim's pact-partner, the Red Dragon, offers herself to become the new goddess seal. This ending is canon and leads into the events of Drakengard 2.
  • Ending B: Inuart places Furiae's deceased body into one of the Seeds of Destruction, transforming her into a horrific monster that kills him on the spot. Caim is forced to put down his sister, but is afterwards powerless to do anything but watch as the other Seeds hatch into clones of his transformed sister, their shrieks heralding the end of the world.
  • Ending C: The Red Dragon breaks her pact with Caim to join her dragon brethren in conquering the world, forcing Caim to put her down. While this destroys one of the Seeds of Destruction, Caim now finds himself alone against a seemingly endless army of dragons...
  • Ending D: Arioch is devoured by the Watchers, and Leonard sacrifices himself to buy his comrades time. The only way to stop the Watchers now is for Seere to break his pact with Golem, releasing his sealed time and trapping the Grotesquerie Queen in eternal stasis, along with the surrounding city and a large swath of the world.
  • Ending E: Rather than sacrifice Seere, Caim and the Red Dragon pursue the Grotesqurie Queen to destroy it themselves. The battle takes them across time and space to "the land of the gods" — in truth, Tokyo in the year 2003. Caim and the Red Dragon manage to destroy the Queen-beast, only to die shortly thereafter when JSDF fighter jets shoot them out of the sky, the Dragon's body becoming impaled on Tokyo Tower. This ending is also canon and leads into the events of NieR while also zig-zagging the trope: with the Grotesqurie Queen gone from the world of Drakengard, this may be the best outcome for that world, but Earth's human population is doomed to extinction.
• Dragon's Dogma starts off with a dragon ripping out your heart and daring you to retake it, and the dragon's appearance making everyone anxious. And after you reclaim your heart and slay the dragon? The sky permanently darkens, the monsters become stronger and more bloodthirsty, and a large swath of the local Hub Town gets swallowed up in a massive sinkhole — all of which, the duke and his men blame you for.
• In Dwarf Fortress, when several of your dwarves die to a siege, megabeast or accident, the carnage may not end there. The death of a dwarf upsets his friends and relatives, who may get angry enough to tantrum, start fistfights or, in extreme cases, become suicidal or Ax-Crazy. This results in more deaths, which make even more dwarves unhappy... The resulting tantrum spiral can destroy your entire fortress. It does not help that the fortress guard responds to dwarven tantrums with beatings and incarceration, which makes them even more unhappy. A guard skilled enough in wrestling may even end up beating a dwarf to death for a minor offence. Or, if the guard has a weapon, the criminal will be stabbed/hacked/lashed/etc.
• Earth Defense Force 5 has humanity's war against the alien invaders continuing to leave the Earth in an increasingly worse state. While the invaders are initially content to send large insects after humans, as humanity fights back, they swing back hard with war machines of increasing lethality and footsoldiers the size of buildings. By the end of the game, the human population of Earth has been reduced by 90%, and civilization as we know it has been essentially blown back to the stone age. Humanity may have driven the invaders back into space, but the cost makes it an ultimately hollow victory.
• In The Elder Scrolls series, this is the case for The Empire following Oblivion Crisis. The Oblivion Crisis was an utter disaster for Tamriel, no question. Cities were leveled, thousands of people killed, and, following a Heroic Sacrifice to end it, the Third Empire of Tamriel was left without a Septim heir to the throne for the first time in nearly 500 years. Then, the Thalmor, an Aldmeri radical and militarized political party of religious extremists, use the chaos following the Crisis to claim credit for ending it. This brings them massive populist support in their homeland and allows them to rise to the highest levels of the Aldmeri government. Ten years later, they assassinate Potentate Ocato, who was doing well at holding the fractured Empire together. Petty infighting erupts among the Elder Council, and the Summerset Isles, the Aldmeri homeland, use the ensuing chaos to secede from the Empire under the leadership of the Thalmor. They annex neighboring Valenwood (homeland of the Bosmer) and announce the reformation of the Aldmeri Dominion of old, an ancient Arch-Enemy to the various Cyrodiilic Empires. Through further manipulation, they convince the Khajiit of Elsweyr to join the Dominion as a vassal nation and then convince the Argonians to secede and then invade the Red Year weakened Morrowind in retaliation for thousands of years of their race's slavery at the hands of the Dunmer. Their actions essentially rob the Vestigial Third Empire of five former provinces. Titus Mede, a Colovian warlord, manages to capture the vacant Ruby Throne and declares himself to be the new Emperor, bringing some stability to the Empire for a time. However, the Dominion isn't satisfied. After building their nation back up, they attack the Empire in what becomes known as the "Great War". Dominion forces capture the Imperial City, but Emperor Titus Mede II (grandson of Titus Mede I) pulls his legions out and regroups with his forces from Skyrim. Together, they re-capture the Imperial City and push the Dominion out of Cyrodiil. The remaining strength of the Empire is greater than the Dominion anticipated, but they have a fallback: the White-Gold Concordat. With Mede II sensing that his forces are too weak to further pursue the Dominion, he reluctantly agrees. The Concordat, among other things, cedes large tracts of Hammerfell to the Dominion, bans the worship of Talos, and allows Dominion agents to patrol the Empire to enforce these terms. Mede II's acceptance of the Concordat essentially wins the war but loses the peace. Hammerfell secedes and continues the war with the Dominion on their own. Civil War erupts in Skyrim as the Nords attempt to do the same... This all leads up to the events of Skyrim, which, depending on the choices you make, can end with Titus Mede II being assassinated by the Dark Brotherhood and the Dragonborn leading the Stormcloak rebels to victory over the forces of the Empire.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  • After the sacrifice of Martin Septim, the Empire was deprived of both a political leader and the bearer of the Dragon Blood, and many immediately saw an opening for independence. Enter The Thalmor, Nazi-like High Elves who think only their kin should dominate the world and prove so by going at war with the Empire after reforming Alinor, annexing Valenwood and invading Elsweyr. The Empire manages to barely avoid defeat but has to sign a treaty with the Thalmor known as the White-Gold Concordact, with humiliating terms like allowing the Thalmor to ban Talos worship (as they hate the idea of a human becoming a god when the elves are the descendants of the gods themselves) and ceding Hammerfell to the Dominion. This causes both Hammerfell and Black Marsh to secede from the Empire and go their own ways (Hammerfell fights back and Black Marsh invades the remains of Morrowind both to make the dark elves pay for centuries of Argonian slavery and because Morrowind has become a wasteland after Red Mountain erupted). Reduced to Cyrodiil, Skyrim, High Rock and some of the parts of Morrowind which aren't annexed by the Argonians or uninhabitable, the Empire finally can breathe, lick its wounds and re-organize to get back at the Dominion. But wait, there's more! Enter Skyrim's civil war between the supporters of the Empire and the Stormcloaks, Nord separatists who want to secede from the Empire (which they perceive as being weak, corrupted and toyed with by the Thalmor). With both Skyrim and the Empire at war, how could things possibly get worse?? Cue the dragons and Alduin the World-Eater. Not ending the Skyrim crisis decisively either way, killing Emperor Titus Mede II for the Dark Brotherhood, and killing Paathurnax for the Blades is guaranteed to make things even worse for everybody without pointy ears.
• Eversion: It starts off as a cheery and cute little freeware platformer with a flowerlike protagonist that does the Goomba Stomp on cute little Goomba-like enemies. But as you use your eversion powers to get the gems you have to collect, things gradually get darker and darker. Soon, you're dodging evil hands that shoot up from the pits, the Goomba-like enemies have turned into evil one-red-eyed monsters with More Teeth than the Osmond Family, the gems you collect become skulls, the plants become lethal thorns, blood goes flying when you stomp an enemy or when you die, and the whole world in general becomes a scene out of Hell itself. And, if that wasn't enough, there's an evil Cruel Twist Ending in store...
• You know the deathclaws from Fallout? The Demonic Spiders that are really hard to kill and extremely dangerous? Yeah, in the newest game, Fallout: New Vegas, there are varieties. There's a blind one and... a deathclaw alpha. Then there's also a mother Deathclaw surrounded by babies, and the LEGENDARY Deathclaw, who has more health and is more heavily guarded than the FINAL BOSS!
• Fallen Legion Revenants: The Miasma starts as a global pandemic of a respiratory disease that slowly but eventually kills the infected. Then something happened to make it start zombifying people and turning animals into monsters. That something was Ivor using unspecified Dark Magic on a patient in attempt to discover a cure. The supervirus carrying Patient Zero then went about trying to infect the whole world until you stop it in Lucien's Epilogue. Conditions in Welkin also decline as your actions deliberately ruin the quarentine to provoke rebellion against Ivor.
• Fate/stay night: All three routes have quite a bit of it in that things will suddenly get a lot worse, in the order of Fate (most idealistic route; town remains mostly unmolested, only bad people (And the Love Interest,damnit!) die and Shirou wins all battles through Heroic Spirit and Deus ex Machina), Unlimited Blade Works (middle route; Caster drains and castrates a lot of townspeople (though without killing), Shirou loses Saber, Ayako is abducted, Ilya is killed and Shirou has to depend a lot more on external factors like I Let You Win and exploiting his opponent's Fatal Flaw) and finally Heaven's Feel (most cynical route; massive human casualties across town, all the Servants except Rider are killed or corrupted, Shirou loses all his ideals and his Reality Marble and becomes an Anti-Hero that must depend upon a Dangerous Forbidden Technique to win that gives him brain damage and eventually kills him). But hey, at least the final endings are all happy... Well, mostly... Screw you, Fate Route.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy II: The heroes are either ineffectual, too late, or both combined at the beginning...then, after the Dreadnaught's completion (which they failed to stop), people start dying in large numbers. Shit proceeds to get worse and the heroes continue to be only marginally effective (with a few hope spots for flavor) until the heroes finally infiltrate one of the Empire's fortresses and kill the Emperor...except that he predicted they would do that, and proceeded to use the opportunity to go to Hell, take over, and return to Earth. It manages a not-entirely-unhappy ending, but man.
  • Final Fantasy III's endgame seems to be constantly trying to one-up itself in how brutally unfair it can be. First, there's the ever-present fact that you can only save on the world map, which can make dungeon crawling a huge pain in the ass. Then, there's the fact that before you can start the dungeon, first you have to clear a dungeon before it (with boss fights a-plenty.) And then there's the optional dungeon inside the final dungeon that you have to clear if you want the most powerful jobs in the game (and you probably do.) Oh, and during all this, you don't get a single chance to save unless you feel like backtracking all the way back out to the world map. And once you beat the final boss, you're pitted against the real final boss, who proceeds to effortlessly slaughter you. And before you can start cussing at the screen, you're whisked away to the real final dungeon, and from this point on you don't even get the luxury of backtracking to the world map to save anymore. And before you can beat the real final boss, there's still four more boss fights, one of which qualifies for That One Boss status and can easily destroy you if you don't know to fight him properly.
  • Final Fantasy V: First, the Wind Crystal breaks, and Lenna's father mysteriously vanishes after giving the four heroes the quest to protect the rest of them. They fail. Completely. Although you do get shiny new jobs out of the crystal shards. So much for "the nick of time." Also, most of the royalty who aren't in the party end up if not dead, then in a very bad way as the result of Exdeath. Lenna, Faris, and King Tycoon are reunited after King Tycoon's possession by Exdeath is broken... only for Tycoon to die moments later . Then in the second half, Galuf's old friend Xezat dies. Then Galuf dies. Then the last of the four original heroes, Kelger, dies. And then Exdeath gets the power of the Void and uses it to trash the recombined world. And then he becomes an eldritch abomination of immense power and nihilism. Fortunately, being more of a lighthearted game, all of this only ends up making the heroes more determined.
  • Throughout most of Final Fantasy VI, villains are constantly one-upping the heroes and making things worse. To wit: the party is separated, Kefka murders an entire castle's population through poisoning their water, Terra is morphed into a monster and flies away, the party goes on a mission to restore the character to normal, only to reveal important secrets to the Empire that only makes them more powerful, Kefka turns the party against Celes, and as a last-ditch effort, the party unleashes a horde of pissed-off monsters into the world who promptly start a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Things finally start to look up when this causes enough damage that The Empire surrenders and ends the war. Only they don't. Then, Kefka kills General Leo and the Emperor and assumes ultimate magical power as a god, destroying the world in the process. And that's only the half-way point of the game. Fortunately, as the world has hit rock bottom, the only way for the story to go is up.
  • Final Fantasy VII tends to use things going downhill to advance much of the plot. Starts out with the MegaCorp with the massive private army sucking the planet dry. Then the crazy, presumably dead Big Bad periodically manifests to cause chaos and drop Jenova boss fights on you. Eventually, you learn he's after the Black Materia, which contains the world-destroying black magic, Meteor. Your party manages to reach it first and circumvents the deadly booby trap with no casualties aside from a rapidly-replaced robot. Guess what? Turns out The Hero is Brainwashed and Crazy, he attacks his own friends and hands the Black Materia over to the nutter. Your White Magician Girl figures out how to stop Meteor, but of course, she dies. Things only go further south from there in rapid succession. Sephiroth is fully revived, the planet itself spawns giant monsters to Kill All Humans, Cloud is rendered catatonic and Tifa leaves the party entirely to care for him, and the whole time, Meteor is hanging in the sky. Obviously, some of it gets better before the game ends. At least a couple of the weapons will always be killed as the plot advances (two of them being optional Superbosses). Cloud and Tifa rejoin the party, with Cloud fully sane again. Then in the sequel Advent Children, people start dropping dead left and right from a mysterious plague that's incurable, excruciatingly painful, always fatal, and drowns its victims in despair and depression. And Cloud finds out that he has the disease.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2 plays like this. First, Lightning is erased from history which totally screws up the timeline. Then after spending the whole game piecing the real timeline back together, it's revealed that Serah has the Eyes of Etro. Immediately after defeating the final boss, she and Mog die. Then, as a result of killing the final boss, the goddess Etro is killed and time itself is completely destroyed. And then, in the full completion stinger, the final boss is revealed to still be alive.
• In FreeSpace, once the Shivans appear, the story gradually follows this direction, culminating in the Shivan Superdestroyer Lucifer glassing Vasuda Prime. The sequel takes this direction again when the Sathanas Fleet appears.
• Gears of War — particularly the PC port with additional chapters — is basically a series of things getting worse moments. The planet's overrun with Mooks and their giant insect-dinosaur pets, the Phlebotinum the team spent the entire first two-thirds of the game finding and deploying didn't do its job, the last-ditch nuke got hijacked by the Big Bad and oh, yes, Mission Control can't contact you with important information half the time due to enemy signal jamming.
• Grand Theft Auto V in the mission Caida Libre, Michael De Santa tries to make amends with cartel don Martin Madraza. Trevor Phillips joins in the mission and separates with Michael temporarily to personally talk with Martin. According to Trevor, they both got angry at each other, resulting in Trevor assaulting Martin. Michael is shocked to see Trevor arrive while driving Martin's now stolen car. Michael assumes the worst and asks if Trevor murdered Martin. Trevor replies, "No, I didn't kill him. But I did kidnap his wife!"
• The plot of Half-Life is another long string of these. The major plot points, in order: Gordon Freeman, player character and MIT-educated scientist, draws the short straw and has to do hazardous materials handling for an experiment at the super-secret government lab where he works. Naturally, the experiment goes awry and Gordon gets knocked out and experiences a nightmarish vision/cross-dimensional trip. After this he must make his way through the crumbling wreckage of the lab, dealing with malfunctioning machinery. Then, he must fight off monstrous creatures armed with only a crowbar and 9mm pistol. Then, he makes contact with a rescue squad, only to discover that said squad is really a paramilitary force that's wiping out monsters and witnesses alike. Then, after evading them, he winds up having to deal with TWO different varieties of huge frickin' beast in an attempt to find his way to someplace that might be reasonably safe, while STILL dealing with both aliens and soldiers- the latter of which, by the way, are tracking him through devices in the HEV suit he's been wearing all this time. Then, he survives a shootout with a trio of government-employed Glock Ninjas, only to grab a Distress Ball and get mugged for his gear, captured, and left for dead in a trash compactor. Then, he must crawl through a hazardous waste management facility armed with little more than his trusty crowbar. Then, he has to flee across the mountainside chased by a frickin' helicopter gunship, then shoot said gunship down, then go mano y mano with a tank. Then, after navigating a warehouse trapped to the gills with explosives, he gets caught in the middle of a big battle between the soldiers and the aliens, with both sides quite willing to take time out to shoot at him. then, as if that wasn't enough the soldiers bug out leaving Freeman to deal with the aliens all by himself. Finally, he's roped into teleporting into the aliens' home dimension navigating some terrifying landscapes, annoying jumping puzzles, and seemingly endless aliens, en route to a final confrontation with a giant wooden idol shaped like an infant with a head that's on fire. And his reward for all this? he gets abducted by a mysterious individual who's been lurking about all game, who can apparently warp spacetime more or less at will, who is quite obviously evil, and who offers Gordon the choice of being sent into a massive swarm of aliens without any weapons- or going to work for him doing unspecified but certainly hazardous work.
• Half-Life 2:
  • The game plays this straight for the first half — Gordon goes from being chased through sewers by the police force of an Orwellian dystopia to being pursued by a helicopter during a speedboat chase through an irradiated marsh, then he arrives at a safe haven only to have it attacked by the enemy ten minutes later, leaving him separated from his allies and forced to crawl through a zombie-infested ruin while throwing junk at said zombies for lack of ammo. This is followed by a road-trip down a deserted highway, still chased by the bad guys and also forced to deal with ravenous Antlions and hazards. However, after that the game starts a mild deconstruction of the trope. While the situations continue to get more threatening over the course of the game, they don't feel like it because Gordon has allies and is actually working proactively against the antagonists. Whereas up until this point he has been struggling to simply stay alive.
  • It's back to business as usual in the Half-Life 2 expansions. Episode One was actually hopeful, what with Gordon and Alyx surviving, stealing some good info from the Combine, blowing up the Citadel, stranding the Combine on Earth, and escaping City 17 as it exploded. But then Episode Two comes along and Eli Vance gets killed by The Combine who also steal all of the rebels' secrets.
  • And you know that's just Gordon's week. Barney Calhoun and Adrian Sheppard have their own problems that gets worse by the minute.
• Halo:
  • The original trilogy has a general progression of this:
    • Halo: Combat Evolved starts off with a single human ship fleeing an entire Covenant fleet after humanity's second most important planet after Earth was just destroyed; in fact, the Covenant have already destroyed most of humanity's planets and military. Not only that, but your character, the Master Chief, is one of the last Spartan Super Soldiers left, with most of the rest having been killed during Reach's fall. Then the human ship gets shot down on a mysterious ringworld called Halo, which turns out to be A) filled with ravenous space parasites that infect others to become grotesque zombies called the Flood, and B) a superweapon which kills all life in the galaxy. The Chief and his trusty AI buddy Cortana destroy the ringworld, but end up being among the few survivors; they manage to pick up a few survivors on their way to Earth, but most of them die too.
    • A more contained example would be the discovery of the Flood. First Master Chief comes across an abandoned base with signs something brutal happened, to the point where the game starts looking more like a horror game. Then, he finds helmet footage from one of the casualties that shows him what caused it, immediately after which entire swarms of that same enemy show up. Then the zombies show up. And then the zombies start using guns...
    • Halo 2 starts off with the Covenant finally finding Earth. Then the Covenant find another Halo array. Then the Covenant come seconds away from successfully firing said Halo, and are only stopped because the humans and Elite-led Covenant defectors team up at the last second to stop them. All the while, the Flood on this Halo end up escaping and taking over the Covenant capital of High Charity, which is also a giant spaceship. Not only that, but Cortana is trapped on High Charity with the Flood. Then Chief comes back to Earth to find out that it's still getting wrecked by the Covenant.
    • Halo 3: The Covenant have effectively taken over Earth, and now you must prevent them from activating the portal that leads to the Ark (another place where you can fire the remaining Halo arrays from). You fail. Then a Flood-infected ship crash-lands on Earth, and is only stopped when Elite reinforcements finally show up. When the good guys go through the Ark to stop the Covenant from firing the Halos, Flood-infected High Charity follows them there. The good guys finally manage to beat both (and rescue Cortana), but at heavy cost, with Chief and Cortana themselves left to drift in space by themselves. Also, the Expanded Universe goes on to show that even though this war is over, there's still plenty of battles left to be fought, with a lot of broken pieces that need to be picked up and glued back together, and lots of demolished fences that need mending.
    • One of the chapters in Combat Evolved is actually called "Wait, It Gets Worse."
  • The Prequel game Halo: Reach gets worse every ten minutes. There are only two tiny Hope Spots that get immediately crushed just seconds later by something much worse than the threat that had just been stopped. After all, the whole planet and all the characters are Doomed by Canon.
  • In Halo 4, most of the game is Chief and Cortana trying, and failing, to stop the Didact from accomplishing the next step of his Evil Plan. It's only at the very end where the Didact finally suffers a defeat, and it comes at the cost of Cortana sacrificing herself.
• In the Harvest December series this happens to main protagonist Masaki Konno as he's been dealing with the stress of his Unwanted Harem and — come April — it doubles in size, causing him to develop gastritis.
• Irisu Syndrome!. It seems like a tale of some university students having fun, but the titular bunnygirl's role is never explained. Then spoilers happened. Starting with [[spoiler:Edogawa going missing, and the picture of him in your game folder getting scribbled out. Then if you're not doing well enough, everyone gets scribbled out. If you do get a decent score, Irisu is shown killing Ageha, but then it's revealed to be a Scary Surprise Party for her. Then there's the Metsu Episode. [[spoiler:That dopey kid carrying his notebook everywhere? Turns out he's a deranged psychopath who draws suicidal cats for fun and gets off to the thought of being murdered by Irisu. And accordingly switches to drawing dead bunnies to manipulate her into doing so.
• Everything in a Jak and Daxter game goes wrong eventually. Even in the Lighter and Softer first game. Bombs able to blow up the universe, near-infinite supplies of Dark Eco kept in underground silos that are quite easy to open with the right robot, villainous aristocrats, Always Chaotic Evil aliens coming to ally with a cyborg Omnicidal Maniac and, of course, whenever it looks like the world's been saved, it goes straight back to hell within the week. And Jak spends about half his life breaking it.
• Kane & Lynch. No matter how bad things get, things get worse. And worse. And worse, culminating in a Sadistic Choice, a Catch-22 Dilemma where no matter what, you lose.
• Killzone 2. Oooh, boy, Killzone 2. So, Visari's dead! The war has finally concluded. Pshaw, "The madness begins", right? It turns out only a few fleeting moments later that those words are hardly a lie. An stupidly huge Helghast fleet enters out of nowhere, obliterates whatever aerial support the ISA ground forces still had in the blink of an eye, and, to top it off, the player character quite possibly resigns himself to death. And then Killzone 3 reveals you can follow the script of an action movie and manage to fuck things up even more. Rico manages to bungle saving the galaxy by accidentally destroying Helghan. In a standard action movie, completely eradicating the fascists would be a good ending. In this series, Helghan only grew to become an authoritarian superpower because they were supplying most of humanity's energy. So, the galaxy is now in an energy crisis, the surviving Helghans are forced to go back to work on their now-irradiated hellhole of a planet to barely meet energy quotas, and the only way to placate them into not going on a suicide run was to (literally) give half of Vekta to Helghan, and everyone involved is miserable.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has this in spades. Terra especially was a victim of this. First he fails his Mark of Mastery exam, which was his greatest ambition, then he makes messes in other worlds for Ventus and Aqua to clean up due to being overly-trusting, then he has a spat with said friends upon realizing their master sent Aqua to watch him, then he causes some more trouble in other worlds due to his overly-trusting nature, THEN in a desperate attempt to protect Ven from being killed by their master, he beats their master to the point were it took only one more blow from Master Xehanort to finish him off. It gets even more worse when Terra uses his anger and the darkness that had been built up over the course of the game to defeat Master Xehanort. It was enough to allow him to pull a Grand Theft Me on Terra and take possession of his body, leaving behind his Keyblade and his hollow armor that is brought to life by his lingering will. Sure, the armor defeats Terranort but in the end, his will has to wait for more than a whole DECADE before he can finally get his heart and body back.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, this can be a potential development for the Onderon civil war arc. The Queen's forces are being decimated by the corrupt General Vaklu, who is knocking on the palace gates. Then Mastar Kavar informs the Queen that things have just gotten even worse - an insanely powerful former Jedi general has arrived and has a score to settle with him, and has just joined the battle on Vaklu's side.
• Left 4 Dead:
  • The game has a typical zombie outbreak in the northeast, but by the sequel, not only there are more special infected types, but the infection has spread all the way down south of the United States, making the entire east coast a hot zone for zombies. Any given bad situation in the game can be compounded by one simple thing: the Tank. Imagine this: a hunter is on Coach, a jockey is chasing around Nick, Ellis and Rochelle are boomed on... and then a tank shows up. And the AI Director is always more than happy to send one your way.
  • The survivors from the first game get into a huge string of bad luck as they fight their way to survival according to the comic. Every rescue attempt had failed them, and just when they think the military saving them would end their nightmare, it turns out they're considered carriers of the virus, who have been turning people into zombies and unwittingly spreading it around. The military imprisons them, intending only to use the survivors to research a cure for the virus, and won't hesitate to kill them if they can't produce one. The survivors manage to get away, and find a boat to sail out to sea, but a bridge is in the way and they wind up alerting not just all the zombies in the area, but four Tanks. This claims the life of Bill, who was voted the most popular original Left 4 Dead character of the original survivors, and the 2nd most popular overall character in the Xbox 360 20-week poll. Way to kick 'em when they're down!
  • Think the special infected was bad enough in Left 4 Dead? It goes downhill in the sequel; the Smoker now has more boils that are eating away at its face, the Boomer has more boils on its body, and the Witch gained the ability to wander about in the daylight. Then we have the Spitter, a female infected that can spit acid on survivors to block their path, the Charger who has the ability to plow into survivors to make them go flying (hope you are not near a ledge!) and grab one survivor to smash them to death, and the Jockey that force survivors to move into hazards or away from the team. Even the common infected gotten an upgrade by becoming the Elite Mook of the game depending on the map; hazmat infected can't be set on fire, clown infected attracts all nearby infected to him, mudmen blinds survivors with mud and crouch when moving, construction infected wear earmuffs that doesn't let them hear pipe bombs, and riot infected are zombies with body armor that makes them immune to damage except on its back.
• The Legacy of Kain series plays with this trope throughout all the games.
  • In Blood Omen, the Balance Guardian is murdered by one of her fellow Guardians who is possessed by an Eldritch Abomination. This causes her lover to go mad with grief and drives his fellow Guardians insane through their telepathic link... and that's all BEFORE the game actually starts.
  • In Soul Reaver, we see the result of Kain refusing his sacrifice. Nosgoth isn't really a pretty place right now...
  • Soul Reaver 2, at the end, Kain realizes that everything he's done up to that point has played right into the hands of his enemies. Cue brief, but visible, Heroic BSoD.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is an entire game of things going downhill. Even within the context of the story, the conclusion is a bit bittersweet at worst, but considering all the horrific fallout that occurs years later due to Ganondorf's rise to power (in what is now three timelines, according to Word of God), the ending can hardly be called happy. For one, in the Downfall Timeline Ganon couldn't even be defeated, and for a time he imposed reign of terror like no other, only being reverted in A Link to the Past. In the Child Timeline, preventing his initial ambush within Hyrule Castle only delayed the inevitable as he and Zant came into full force to invade both Hyrule and the Twilight Realm in Twilight Princess. And in the Adult Timeline, Ganon managed to return while Link couldn't as he had returned to his original era, meaning Ganon was left unopposed which forced the gods to sacrifice the entirety of Hyrule via the Great Flood to seal it with Ganon inside, setting the events of The Wind Waker into motion.
• Live A Live takes a turn for the tear-jerkingly dramatic after all of the basic chapters have been completed. The ensuing Wham Episode is a things getting worse plot at its most concise, and depending on the character you choose for the final chapter, it can go downhill from there.
• Lunar: Eternal Blue starts off with a world being controlled by a Corrupt Church that claims to worship the goddess Althena but seems more focused on maintaining its own power; meanwhile, the dark god Zophar is slowly reawakening. So you have to journey to the church's headquarters to ask Althena for help. The "Althena" that the church follows is a fake who works for Zophar, as do all of its higher-ups, and the real Althena is imprisoned by a mystical seal. So you go on a quest to unlock the seal, but by the time you finish, Zophar has almost returned. Then you find out that Althena has been dead for 1000 years, and has left nothing but an inspirational message behind. And Zophar picks that exact moment to descend from the world, vaporize the ocean, and start destroying everything. So Lucia decides to absorb Althena's power and all the magic in the world to fight him. But Zophar catches her off-guard and eats her, stealing all the power she absorbed for himself. So now the world is rapidly turning into a barren wasteland, you have no magic, and you have to fight the God of Destruction who also has the power of the Goddess of Creation.
• In Marathon, first off one of your ship's three resident AI becomes rampant and contacts some evil alien slavers who attack the ship, capture most of the crew and one of the other A.I.s. You spend a large chunk of the game working for the remaining AI against the rampant AI, who is working with some of the slave aliens for an unknown purpose. The rampant AI's new friends then kill the sane AI, forcing you to work for the rampant AI, since he's the only chance the humans have to escape. (Remember, he's the one that brought them here.) Things get better after a bit, but then they get worse in the second game again. I'll let someone else tell the tale of Marathon 2, but suffice to say, we find out at the beginning of Marathon Infinity that the last-ditch effort to defeat the slaver aliens accidentally releases a reality warping Eldritch Abomination. This forces you to jump around the timeline, trying to fix things, but you usually make things worse until you finally make them better.
• The three games of the Mass Effect series go for this. In the first game, you're figuring out what happened to an ancient race, and when you find out, you have to stop an invasion that would cause the death of galactic society. The second game STARTS OUT with your character dying (you get better), and ends with you just barely (again) forestalling the invasion... at the expense of destroying an entire solar system in the process. And then in the third game, all your efforts to prevent the invasion are for naught. The invasion happens, and Earth is the first planet to fall... Whether or not the series has a final happy ending or ends with the cycle of destruction starting over in the future is up to the choices your character made throughout the series.
• Max Payne. His entire life is one big downward slide from the first level of the first game onto the last. He loses his family, the closest thing he gets to a girlfriend and almost all of his friends die in front of him, assuming of course they don't betray him. Usually as victims to ever-escalating criminal plots that just get more twisted the more you learn about them.
  "OBITUARIES: Everybody Max Payne ever loved."
• Mega Man:
  • Megaman Battle Network 2 has Lan's trip to Netopia. In order:
    • Lan's trouble starts at the airport itself, where he is forced to surrender his PET, MegaMan in tow, to airport security. (Immediately after this, Yai sends you an e-mail asking for a souvenir).
    • Then, once Lan enters the terminal, a foreigner with a thick French accent bumps into him and steals all his money. It can be retrieved if you confront the man at the Netopian airport after arriving, but if you don't it becomes Permanently Missable Content.
    • After this, Lan finds Chaud in the terminal, who returns Lan's PET to him, but not without flaunting his Official authority and first taunting Lan for being a loser.
    • After arriving in Netopia, Lan's attempt to exit the airport is interrupted by another man, who all but kidnaps him into a "taxi", only to refuse to let Lan leave without first surrendering all of his battle-chips.
    • Once the boys reach their hotel, they blame each other for the catastrophic taxi ride and Lan ditches MegaMan on the floor of his hotel room. After a surprise encounter with Higsby, Lan returns and reconciles with MegaMan, only to learn his passport has been stolen.
    • The boys newly reconciled, they have to go on a quest to retrieve their stolen property. After getting everything back, they attend the ONBA conference in Netopia castle, when suddenly the castle's traps activate and everyone is dumped into the dungeon filled with even more traps.
  • Mega Man X4: The game begins with Sky Lagoon (a city of some sort) crashing into another city. The casualties are enormous, and even worse the prime suspect is Repliforce, a massive Reploid army. But, thankfully, your character finds a high ranking Repliforce member in the ruins. Whew, good, we can get their side of the story and find out what really happened. Only you can't, because the member you meet is so freaking stupid that instead of coming in for questioning, he refuses to disarm, gives a self-serving and questionable reason for it, rebels, and gets Repliforce to declare war on humanity, making this disaster worse, despite being told straight to his face the likely consequences of his refusal. And as it turns out, Repliforce isn't even to blame for the Sky Lagoon incident! But Mega Man X5 is the worst. It looks like you stop Sigma at the beginning, but it was all part of his Evil Plan to infect the world with the Maverick Virus. Most of the machines in the world are going berserk, and the giant space colony Eurasia is on a collision course with Earth. And it cannot be stopped. It's random how well you'll do, but at best you'll stop most of the damage (which isn't saying much), but if you fail, then the impact wipes out most of the life on Earth, and Zero turns evil. Also, no matter what happens, in the game's ending, Zero dies. Thankfully, in Mega Man X6, it turns out you got the best possible result. Which really isn't saying much.
  • Mega Man Zero: First game, you find a failed copy of X is oppressing Reploids and has led to another war between humans and reploids. Next game, war is still going even though Zero killed Copy X, and a nut from the reploid side named Elpizo tries to use a sentient program called the Dark Elf to destroy humanity. Zero stops him, but the war still isn't over. Next game, despite the reploid's side having developed a new energy source that supposedly negates the need for a war, Dr. Weil (not be confused with Dr. Wily from the original series, they aren't the same, guy, in fact in the Japanese version Weil is called Dr. Vile) has revived Copy X as a puppet. A puppet that continues the war for no good reason. Zero kills Copy X for good, but Weil wanted you to do that because it puts him in control of the human city Neo Arcadia. Even though Zero puts an end to his plans to control all the world's reploids and turn the Dark Elf good, Weil survives the game. Next game, most humans are fleeing Neo Arcadia because of how oppressive Weil's rule is, and there's only one other place they can live, called Area Zero (which, amusingly enough, is the crash site of Eurasia) which Weil is trying to destroy. Zero finds that the humans also hate him because it's partially his fault that Weil rules Neo Arcadia. Most of the game, Weil is trying to get control of this super orbital weapon called Ragnarok, which he attends to use to destroy Area Zero. Ultimately, The Dragon, Craft, takes control of it and uses to destroy Neo Arcadia just to kill Weil. Zero stops Ragnorak's main gun before it can fire again, but it starts falling to Earth. Zero makes his way to the power core, and it turns out Weil survived, merges with the core, and becomes the final boss. Zero finally manages to kill him, and the explosion of the core destroys Ragnarok, and Zero with it.
  • Mega Man ZX: Several years after Ragnarok was demolished, a Resistance expeditionary force investigated some of the wreckage that descended to earth. They delivered some of what they found to the new coalition government for further research. It fell into the hands of the chief robotics and biotechnology expert, Albert, with predictable results — "predictable" in that he started having delusions of godhood. Before the first century was up, a second expeditionary force was commissioned. One amongst them, Serpent, was susceptible to the influence of the hardware, which was dubbed Biometal due to its organic qualities, and went bugfuck insane. Ciel used her last hours as the leader of this group to develop six more Biometals as a countermeasure before quarantining them and delivering an emergency message to pass the torch on to Alouette. During this time, Albert had designed his own Biometal and was engineering world politics in accordance to his own madness. Before the second century of this alleged peace was up, a new wave of Mavericks emerge and engage in mass slaughters, harvesting the Cyber-Elves left behind in preparation for Serpent's attempt at ascension to godhood and leaving scores of orphans in its wake. Two of the survivors, Vent and Aile, spend the next ten years with Giro, another survivor, before he is disposed of by Serpent, entrusting the two with the power to protect the world from Serpent's madness. They fulfill this obligation and completely demolish Serpent and his headquarters, along with the Biometal he had been gathering for his own plot. The parts Serpent had been using, dubbed Model W, had been discovered worldwide, and the hunt was on — both by varying parties, including Albert's, to gather it all up, and by the Model Z Xs and the Guardians to demolish it all. Two youths, Grey and Ashe, got tangled up in the Biometal rush, and find themselves assailed on all sides before they joined up with the Guardians to thwart Albert's machinations, dangerously close to completion as they were. But it turns out that during the whole craze, Albert wasn't the only Sage corrupted by Model W, and yet, beneath it all, one can't help but get the feeling a demon was festering inside, waiting for the chance to become exultant and exact its revenge on the life that continues to taunt him.
  • And then humanity goes extinct, leaving behind an artificial clone species to make a living scrounging in the wreckage of ages past- and several failsafe systems that assume the clone species has gone rogue and thus must be exterminated, despite said clone species not even knowing that they're clones, much less having the tech to defend themselves.
• The climax to Chapter 4 in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker certainly qualifies. Let's see, right when Snake enters the Communications Tower of the American base in Nicaragua, Hot Coldman reveals that he had already inputted the false data into Peace Walker, which is data that detailed an imaginary Soviet nuclear strike against the United States homeland, which is supposed to trick Peace Walker into launching a nuke at an innocent party (The Mother Base) for the final test, with the intention of having the trade winds spread it to Costa Rica to poison the fish and crop supply and thus get enough "free hands" to participate in the mass production of Peace Walker, which meant that he only had one more step: Inputting the code in his football, before he launches Peace Walker. After being betrayed by Vladimir Zadornov, who himself also ends up being betrayed by the FSLN group, Coldman, dying from his gunshot wound, activates Peace Walker (which was now targeting Cuba thanks to Zadornov), which not only created a reverse situation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and nearly endangered America's chances of winning the Cold War, but he also reveals that he also had secretly programmed Peace Walker to transmit the exact same false data that tricked it to NORAD via a multilength frequency signal, which caused NORAD to think that the Soviets really were launching a Nuclear Strike on the US Homeland, and also couldn't be blocked out by even an electromagnetic pulse due to it being a multilength frequency signal, meaning that there would soon be an all-out nuclear war as a result of his actions. Coldman also did it at that point because he knew full well that he was going to die as a result, and planned to die before giving the Abort Code, forcing Snake and Strangelove to destroy Peace Walker itself. Even after Snake managed to destroy Peace Walker and stop it from launching the Nuke, the signal still persisted as the Mammal Pod wasn't destroyed. They also couldn't just shoot the lock off of Mammal Pod like they did with the Reptile pod since it had reinforced armor to withstand a nuclear blast. They also couldn't simply lift Peace Walker into Lake Nicaragua due to it being vastly over the chopper's carrying capacity. Snake then resorted to calling the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and after verifying his identity as well as telling him that the missile trajectory data that NORAD received was fake, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs called off the retaliatory strike. Unfortunately, the ECR did not agree to this decision and mutinied against him. Despite Snake removing the AI data uplinks from the Mammal Pod due to the Mammal Pod allowing him to do so, the data was still transmitting to NORAD. It wasn't until The Boss possessed Peace Walker and sacrificed herself/itself that the disaster was averted.
• This trope was invoked in the Secret Theatre film Metal Gear Raiden: Snake Eraser, in which Raiden attempts to kill Naked Snake Terminator-style so he'd usurp Solid Snake's status as star of the series, only for it to go wrong. One particular example was his attempting to kill Naked Snake in the Groznyj Grad prison, but he ends up just missing him, and being locked up in Snake's place. It gets worse when Volgin pays a visit and ends up mistaking Raiden for his boyfriend Raikov, wonders why he's in the cell, and proceeds to either assault him or commit Prison Rape on him.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: Aether's history. The Luminoth are forced to fight against an entire alternate dimension of dark creatures who corrupt most of the light world, and can possess almost any living creature at will. They can't call for help because of the huge storm covering the planet, and the fact that all their spacefaring allies have been wiped out by this point. Their attempts to destroy the Ing Hive result in their robots turning against them. When they try to retrieve their planetary energy and kill the Emperor Ing, they get slaughtered. They're reduced to about five rooms out of the entire planet, and have to enter stasis pods in hopes of some miracle occurring. And while they're in there, Space Pirates arrive, and they bring Metroids along, both of which pose a threat on their own and are even worse under Ing possession. And then Dark Samus arrives. You can't take five steps in Prime 2 without seeing a Luminoth corpse. As their logs point out, the Space Pirates don't have it much better, between Ing attacks, GFMC attacks, Samus, Dark Samus, their insane science experiments, and their Metroid containment tanks constantly breaking.
  • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: Bryyo and Elysia are picturesque examples of how Phazon makes everything worse.
    • Bryyo: The Reptilicus were enlightened minds, sharing their knowledge of Bryyo and their people with other enlightened minds, including the motherfucking Chozo, and heralded the rise of Science, even as the Primals mourn the loss of the old ways. One of the Lords of Science essentially tells the Primals to bugger off, and the reaction is such that "it was as flame to a dry forest" ceases to adequately describe the backlash. The planet was literally torn apart (you think those chains are just Scenery Porn?), with only 4% remaining inhabitable, and the Lords of Science were forced into hiding from the frothing Primals. After they get their cleaning gear up and running to try to save what is left, all but one Lord of Science wind up being discovered and slaughtered with extreme prejudice. The last one lives in hiding with his custom Mogenar up until he finds a Primal prophetess seeking him to decipher the visions she had been having. A Fuel Gel explosion reveals them to the hopelessly bloodlusted savages, and the prophetess manages to flee and stave off death for a while longer while the last Lord of Science bites it. Long after the day that Reptilicus society as it was once known died off for good, the Space Pirates ravage a GFMC outpost and drop a Leviathan onto the planet.
    • Elysia: The Elysians — mechanoid beings who avoid A.I. Is a Crapshoot — were created by the Chozo themselves and gifted with self-awareness. They selflessly aided their creators until they left, and governed the facility diligently even from sleep mode despite the horrible dreams they had. When the GFMC signed a treaty with them, they yielded their vast wealth of knowledge and gained the fuel, parts, and equipment to keep themselves going. It starts going downhill once the Space Pirates infect 313 with a virus, knocking 217 offline due to universal AU shutdown to stem the damage. Four months later, the Space Pirates show up and hang the forces long enough for another Leviathan to drop, and likely worsen 217's Phazon corruption as one last fuck you. Two weeks after that disaster, Ghor shows up and starts fixing things... and then, to utterly dash the Elysians' remaining hopes, he gets completely corrupted himself and takes absolute control over SkyTown. Somewhere in space, the Chozo are crying...
  • First law of Metroid Fusion: Something has to break every five minutes. Whether it's breaking power conduits in an aqueous environment, shutting the reactor down, or possessing a biomechanical weapon to tear the station apart, the X Parasites don't like things working right.
  • Metroid Dread lives up to the name. From the moment Samus arrives, she's had a megalomaniacal Chozo and seven hacked E.M.M.I. units hunting for her, but then the one living being on the planet not out for her literal blood is killed by a robot loyal to the aforementioned Chozo. It is revealed by that one living being that the X came to ZDR after his people were wiped out, and that Chozo confined them to a single location... before letting Samus in to fight them and ultimately letting them out. The end result of all of this would justify blowing up the whole planet, which is exactly what happens by the end of the game.
• The backstory for the Enroth-located Might and Magic games have this: first either a major control centre for advanced technology got a case of robots going murderously buggy, or one of the nicer areas of the planet got nuked over a love drama (both happened, it just isn't clear which happened first). Then the planet loses contact with the mother civilization (and they are not self-sufficient). Then the Governor of the planet gets increasingly tyrannical, culminating in a rebellion. That succeeded, but the civilization still crashed to a medieval at best level of technology. Things get overall better after that, but then HOMMIV and MMIX makes all the improvements just an extended Hope Spot. The planet blows up.
• The entire storyline of Mortal Kombat 9. In an attempt to avert Armageddon, Raiden sends a message to his past self, but Raiden doesn't understand what the message is supposed to mean until after Sub-Zero gets captured and cyberized, Kung Lao is killed by Shao Kahn, and an even stronger Sindel kills nearly every Earthrealm warrior except for Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade. Then Shinnok rears his ugly head...
• Muv-Luv. Suuure, Extra was the light-hearted harem series... cue Takeru waking up in Unlimited's timeline, the world locked in a fight with the Horde of Alien Locusts and whatnots. It goes further downhill from there.
• While many attempt to make the claim, NieR is essentially "It Got Worse: The Game". Subsequent playthroughs are altered and reveal secrets from previous playthroughs that horrify you not only in terms of the plot but game elements and actions you performed which you previously took for granted. They are then upstaged by the NEXT playthrough where things then get much much worse. A running gag of sorts for the entire franchise, its predecessor Drakengard and follow up NieR: Automata are more of the same in their own horrifyingly depressing manner. All this before even going into the extra material or considering any horrifying implications which can be derived or are suggested by these games.
• Nintendo Wars: Most of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin could basically be summed up as this, but the first time it really hits you like a stone is the aptly named mission "Fear Experiment" where you're trying to secure an automated food factory and you encounter a new enemy faction. They're not like Beast's raiders who are a ragtag bunch of criminals and mercenaries running around with the scraps left behind by the military who sadistically kill people to steal weapons and supplies — this army is well organized, well-funded, very well armed with well-maintained cutting edge equipment, with the ability to call for reinforcements, who explicitly had no goal outside of destroying the factory so your group will starve to death. If that's not enough, you meet the Creeper at the end of the episode, flowers that nicely combine Body Horror and The Plague all in one "wonderful" package.
• Around the midpoint of Otter Island, Connor insists that the other two need to lock themselves in the cottage while he goes to check on some things after realizing the monster has arrived early on Otter Island this year. Half an hour later Connor hasn't returned and left his cellphone behind, so not only is one of the group missing, he's also the only one who really knows what's going on. Then when Zach goes out to look for Connor, he discovers that the rowboat oars are gone, essentially leaving them stranded on the island.
• Outlast's plot gets this: after entering the asylum to investigate, you're immediately locked inside, your means of escape gone. Then you start getting chased by lunatics. Then you actually get caught by one of them who cuts off two of your fingers. Then you start piecing out the twisted experiments that are run in there, and in stopping one of them get so crippled you barely have enough strength left to escape. except you don't. And all along the camera, your only means of navigating the dark rooms and being able to see enemies, gets damaged and starts glitching out. The expansion Whistleblower has the same progression. And given that the protagonist starts out as a traitor who is being hunted down by his former colleagues for tipping off the journalist, that's saying a lot.
• In Parasite Eve, it begins with a terrible fire that kills just about everyone attending an opera in Carnage Hall when a girl suddenly mutates into "Eve". It gets progressively worse as Eve's attacks begin to get more brazen. She converts the entire audience of another concert into a biomass that she can control and use to mutate more of the city's animal population, openly attacks an NYPD Precinct, picks a fight with the U.S Military and is largely winning before Aya kills her. Well, the day is saved right? Wrong. Turns out that "Ultimate Being" you hear so much about did get born. It's got enough power to decimate a U.S Carrier fleet and nearly kills Aya. Good, yeah? Turns out, killing Eve did not kill all of her monsters, which are now running around the country causing havoc. Good news; the government is getting a handle on it and has killed most of them by Parasite Eve 2. Bad news? New, artificial monsters are now showing up, created by Evilutionary Biologist whack-jobs who want to turn people into bestial monsters. Said Evilutionary Biologist whack-jobs apparently include The President of the United States. By 3rd Birthday? Reality itself has broken down and Eldritch Abominations — more so than even the freaks Eve churned out — destroy most of the United States within months. Aya spends the game trying to fix that.
• For the most part, Persona 4 is a very happy game. But then, November and December happen, which are just one long downhill slide. First, Nanako gets kidnapped, Dojima gets seriously injured, and one of the people struck off the suspect list at the start turns out to be the killer. Then, you save Nanako, but she's really sick. During this time, the fog from the TV — which is very toxic to non-Persona users — starts leaking into Inaba. Then, NANAKO DIES. She gets better, but she's still critically ill. You then work out who the real killer is, and it's freaking Adachi, who it's very unlikely that you suspected at that point. He gets into the TV... and reveals that he's trying to turn humans into Shadows! That all gets fixed, but then March happens... all of this will happen again in fifty years' time unless you destroy Izanami, a goddess of death who very nearly manages to kill you.
• Persona 3:
  • The game starts going from bad to worse on 10/4. First, Shinjiro dies. Then Ikutsuki is revealed to be evil and that he tricked SEES into not ending the Dark Hour, but instead bringing about The Fall, AKA The End of the World as We Know It, and manages to kill Mitsuru's father before dying himself. Then a New Transfer Student comes and turns out to be the one who will bring about The Fall. And as he regretfully informs everyone, The Fall involves Nyx, the invincible embodiment of death, inflicting Apathy Syndrome on everyone, effectively killing humanity, and that she will arrive before spring comes (it's late Fall at this point). And to make things worse, Takaya learns about this and starts up a doomsday cult which rapidly engulfs the entire town. And then when SEES goes and fights Nyx anyways, she turns out to actually be invincible and the only way to seal Nyx and stop the Fall is for the player character to make a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • In "The Answer", the protagonist's death causes the main party to be overcome with despair which causes them to be trapped in their dorm in a Groundhog Day loop and opens a new labyrinth known as the Abyss of Time under their dorm. In the Abyss they discover a way to bring back the protagonist and some party members are all for it while others think the last shouldn't be messed with. This causes a schism in the group and Aigis is forced to fight ALL of her friends in order to obtain pieces of a key that will unlock a door that allows the party to travel back to the moment of the protagonist's heroic sacrifice. After doing so, they discover that the protagonist used his soul to create a seal to prevent Erebus, the manifestation of humanity's despair and negative emotions, from reaching Nyx, which is what would bring about The Fall. The party defeats Erebus, but it will keep coming back every year until humanity no longer feels despair, which will NEVER happen, meaning that it will reappear over and over, likely until the end of time. Persona 4: Arena confirms that it is still reappearing years later and Elizabeth has taken it upon herself to destroy it every time it returns. She laments that in a year's time she will have to defeat it once more.
• Persona 5:
  • The game is interesting because it starts partway through the shift to worse, and then goes six months back in time to explain how that happened. First the Phantom Thieves of Hearts get framed for murder, making most of Japan fear and hate them. In their efforts to clear their name, they get backstabbed by the Guest-Star Party Member and their leader gets arrested and shot in the head. In the good ending path, he cheats his way out of being shot, but now faces the danger of the Conspiracy finding out that he's alive and finishing the job. The Phantom Thieves then manage to steal the heart of the man responsible for their predicament... and nothing changes, because he still gets elected as Prime Minister and the people still believe he's the best option for the country, despite him being a manipulative, mass-murdering, child abusing rapist. Our heroes then try to steal the heart of the collective unconsciousness in order to force the people of Japan to wake up and realize that they're being sheep, only to get wiped out of existence by the villain who turns out to been disguised as the Big Good for the entire game. Needless to say, headshotting the bastard who was responsible for all of this feels very, very good.
  • Chronologically speaking, the game starts off with you being framed for assault, expelled from your old school, and sent out to Tokyo to try to put your life back together. The situation rapidly deteriorates from there; you are accidentally drawn into a Mental World where you learn that your new gym teacher is a violent sexual predator, you discover that your unjust criminal record has been leaked to the school and you are swiftly turned into a social pariah, one of your new classmates who is being sexually abused by the gym teacher throws herself off the school rooftop, and the ensuing confrontation with the gym teacher results in you being sentenced to expulsion and a one-way ticket to juvenile hall before you've even been in Tokyo a week.
• Portal 2 reveals much of the backstory of Aperture Science through a combination of visual storytelling and recorded messages from its founder, Cave Johnson. These combine to chronicle a descent from being voted Best New Science Company in the 1950's and recruiting "astronauts, Olympians, and war heroes", to bankruptcy and recruiting street bums in the 70's, to testing products on the company's own employees in the 80's. As if this couldn't get any worse, earlier in the game there is a Call-Back to the "Bring Your Daughter to Work Day" originally mentioned in Portal, very strongly implying that the employees' children were the penultimate subjects. Most of whom died horribly, either through testing or when the facility's life support systems ran out of power.
• [PROTOTYPE]:
  • The first Hunter fight. So you've got this beastie that actually poses a threat by itself, as opposed to the Marines who need numbers. After much effort, even with Marines shooting it alongside you, you succeed in defeating and consuming it, gaining back health and a new power in the process. And there's two more dropping in; Alex takes one down (or runs down an invisible timer, it's not too clear), but then three Hunters drop in, and despite Alex's bravado one can't help feeling at least a bit worried, especially if they struggled with the previous ones. Drop two more, or run down another timer, and five more will follow. Fortunately after a while your task switches to destroying fuel tanks instead of killing them all, and that's the last wave... but for what it's worth you'll probably be real tense as the situation just seems to get keeping worse.
  • And the entire game is a long chain of events that could be summed up as things getting worse for every human in the game. Dana? Comatose. Cross? Munched on by the Supreme Hunter. Karen Parker? ...We assume it's bad, all right?. The military as a whole? The Marines lose hundreds if not thousands of troops of all ranks, and Blackwatch loses fewer men (by virtue of having fewer men), their leader (General Randall) and their best soldier (Cross).
• Radiant Silvergun. Want to know what happens when a Treasure game does NOT have an Excuse Plot? Why don't we start with everyone and everything on Earth being wiped out in a flash by the just-unearthed Stone-Like, with the only survivors of humanity being on an orbiting spacecraft? Then those human survivors have to come down to the desolate Earth in about a year to replenish supplies and find out more about the Stone-Like, only to find that the planet's full of robots and other constructs trying to finish the job of human genocide, and some of those survivors start dying off. Still not bad enough? At the very end of the game, the Stone-Like sends the remaining survivors back 100,000 years in time for Stage 1, and at the end, finish them off-but not before Creator uses hair strands collected from Buster and Reana to make clones and start humanity anew in its final moments. It's so bad that humanity is apparently doomed to repeat this fate again and again and AGAIN.
• Red Dead Redemption II starts with the protagonist and the gang he runs with on the run to the mountains after a botched robbery, detectives and bounty hunters hunting for them, two dead during their travels, a third (the eventual protagonist of the first game) mauled by wolves, and supplies running short. It eventually ends in the gang fractured and said protagonist dead from tuberculosis.
• In Resident Evil:
  • Sherry Birkin's life story should be titled It Got Worse. First, she gets dumped at the Police Station with the crazy rapist police chief that her parents are paying off because her mother can't be bothered to protect her because she's too busy tramping around the sewers of Raccoon City with a gun for basically no reason. Then, she gets word that her dad's being attacked by the monsters that have started popping up out of nowhere. Then one of them comes after her because Birkin came up with a craaaazy scheme to stick his virus in his daughter's locket to hide it from the company he made the virus for. Then of course, turns out another monster is after her: Her own father, who needs to find a host to implant his embryos in. And that someone needs to be very closely related to him. Guess what that means for poor Sherry? Don't worry, though, Annette's finally going to step it up and cure her daugh- Nevermind, Birkin just killed her. Claire, once again, picks up the slack for the Birkins, and gives Sherry an abortion shot. But it's not over. Not even close. Now Birkin's eating the train which is about to blow up because Umbrella is fucking terrible at making labs that don't blow up. Sherry comes to the rescue and is finally not completely useless by stopping the train, thus killing her own father. Then, Claire, Sherry's new mommy, runs off into the sunset to find Chris. But it's not all bad. Leon can take care of her just fine. Until the government decides to take her into custody. But, whoopsie. Someone found Will's will and Sherry is put under Wesker's care. And then, he goes and gets himself killed by going all Clipped-Wing Angel on us. If Sherry isn't in a padded room rocking back and forth by now, she's about to go Ax-Crazy on someone.
  • Leon Kennedy's first day on the police force in Raccoon City turned into this. Then his mission to save Ashley Graham, the president's daughter.
  • Jill tried to warn everyone about Umbrella's shenanigans, but of course no one listened. Not half a year later the city is overrun with monsters, the very people she tried to warn are now dead or killing everyone else, and her only choice left is to escape. Then she meets a wounded and panicked comrade who tells her "he" is coming for them. Not five minutes later, she finds out who he is. He wants her and only her dead, and he isn't going to stop until he succeeds.
  • Most of the characters stories could be seen as this. Claire's brother goes missing, and she tracks him down to Raccoon City, only to find it overrun by Zombies. She ends up taking care of a child that is being stalked by multiple monsters, and leaves her and the one other person she escaped the Zombie apocalypse with to go find her brother. In Paris, she is kidnapped by the company responsible for the viral outbreak and sent to a prison camp. She escapes just in time for another zombie apocalypse. This time, though, she ends up in Antarctica, her love interest/sidekick is killed, but she reunites with her brother and manages to escape from another self destruct system.
• The RuneScape quest Hunt For Red Raktuber goes like this. The player hears from Larry that the penguins have built a submarine. The player infiltrates the penguin base and finds a group of dwarves who teach the player to disarm the submarine. The player infiltrates the submarine and finds the captain has been overtaken by the sea slugs. Then, after supposedly disarming the sub, the player lands on a tiny island south of Ape Atoll and finds the king of the penguins and some KPG agents. The dwarves are from a splinter group of the Red Axe who didn't want to wait for the Red Axe to bring down the humans, and all the player did was send the sub to the island so the King Penguin could take control. Oh, and they take Larry with them to be interrogated and leave the player to die on the island. Yep. That is, until you find the polar bear ally who is disguised as a tree and get him to give you a ride home.
• Sakura Wars:
  • In the second half of Sakura Wars 2: Thou Shalt Not Die, Keigo Kyogoku has the IJA launch a coup d'etat on Tokyo. The Flower Division's efforts to stop the coup fail when Kyogoku has a body double commit suicide so that he can revive the Musashi. Then he brings down the Musashi on Tokyo to cause utter chaos just before the Final Battle.
  • In Sakura Wars (2019), Yaksha turns up and attacks the Imperial Theater, destroying Sakura Amamiya's Kobu in the process. Then Yaksha finds the Imperial Sword in the form of the Amamiya Kunisada. Then Anastasia Palma steals the sword for President G, only for Yaksha to turn on her shortly afterward. Then President G reveals himself as Sotetsu Genan and begins his plans to summon the Archdemon. Then the government asks Sakura to exchange her life to create a new Imperial Sword. Then Anastasia, Clarissa "Claris" Snowflake, Azami Mochizuki and Hatsuho Shinonome are all killed in the Final Battle with Yaksha. And all of this happens a few hours before the Final Battle with Genan.
• In Sheep Happens, this happens with the backgrounds. Every time Perseus catches Hermes, the backgrounds get more and more apocalyptic. At first, Zeus appears and makes a dormant volcano erupt, then Charon crashes through a mountain and unleashes zombies from Hades on Earth, then the Titans appear and try to destroy everything. All the while, the Olympics are still going on and Perseus is still focused on chasing Hermes.
• Kuchiki Toko getting hit by a truck in The Shell is bad enough. How can that worsen? Her friend is killed off, then it's revealed she has a really rare blood type and can't get a transfusion. Then all her limbs are cut in a surgery to reduce the amount of blood she needs and then have her get kidnapped. And finally, her get gets killed off in every ending except one, where she's still horribly off.
• Shin Megami Tensei core games are chock full of these:
  • Shin Megami Tensei I has you first accused of an extremely vicious murder, and having to confront armed forces to escape the trumped charges. Later on, a demon kills your mother and disguises itself as her, and tries to kill you as well. You are eventually offered a bit of a respite, but then Ambassador Thorman calls Thor's Hammer upon Japan, effectively nuking most of the country into oblivion (not that the rest of the world is much better). Ultimately, it is all for nothing: the demons and the old gods are free once again, humanity's broken under the Messian and Gaian banners, and your character is fated to die alone.
  • Shin Megami Tensei II has you first awakening in a decayed, nearly destroyed slum and being coached for participation in a gladiatorial arena (which is your only chance to be moved to a better place). You will soon start being manipulated by forces of both Law and Chaos, and no matter what path you take you are forced to ultimately confront YHVH himself. Your reward? An eternal, unending "Groundhog Day" Loop in which you live for a bit, witness a tiny fraction of the war of Law and Chaos, die, are reborn into another world, witness another tiny part, die and are reborn again in another world. Ad infinitum.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne,you start as an Ordinary High-School Student who one day goes to visit your Psychologist Teacher to the hospital with your two friends. Then you find out she's part of a cult who believes Humanity's hopelessly corrupt and that it's time to clean the slate by killing everyone and triggering an "End of the World" Special scenario. By the end, both of your friends will be dead, either by your hand or by theirs, your teacher will have been vaporized, you will have been transformed into a god-killing Humanoid Abomination, and there is a fair chance you will be tagged as a potential new general for The Legions of Hell.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV first starts with you as a peasant in a bucolic countryside kingdom. Literally moments later, during a trip to the capital for a special rite, you witness the severe classism and difference between social strata. The rite ends up elevating you to the military caste, with your best friend, having just failed the same test, watching from away. It turns out the kingdom needs a strong military for good reasons... the capital is built upon a giant nest of demons. Then, after a grueling first day of combat training, said best friend makes a horrible decision out of envy, which costs him his humanity and life. After that, revelation after revelation comes crashing down, shattering the once-peaceful kingdom as their origins come to light. And ultimately, you again have the last of Humanity's votes: any and all decisions you could take to solve the final conflict will create a measure of unavoidable suffering. Cheerful games, eh?
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, an alternate take on the Neutral route, makes things worse. Due to certain events happening in this game that didn't happen in the original, not only is Flynn (the protagonist of IV) interrupted in the middle of the endgame, allowing the war between Law and Chaos to escalate further, an alliance of polytheistic gods forms and enters the fray, escalating the war into a three-way battle, and this new faction actually has a good chance of winning and remaking the world into their own image. And even after that, you still have to fight YHVH in order to put an end to the Forever War once and for all.
• One of the central themes to Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was how quickly the symbiote infection seemed to spread. Made apparent when, after unwillingly giving Spider-Man back the symbiote in the beginning of the story, without losing his, Venom soon realised he could reproduce the symbiote and do the same to others. After that, it literally takes one night before things get out of control.
• This is the entire plotline for Spec Ops: The Line.
  • Prior to the events of the game, the city of Dubai is besieged by sand storms. The U.S 33rd Infantry Battalion (later known as The Damned 33rd), led by Colonel John Konrad, defy orders to withdraw and volunteer to evacuate the citizens before a massive storm buried the city. Six months later, a Distress Call is picked up from the city, and a three-man team led by the protagonist Captain Martin Walker are sent to find Konrad and find out if there are any survivors. The situation is, of course, not what it appears to be, and by the time Team Delta realize there's far more going on (namely, that the 33rd voluntarily stayed in Dubai and employed martial law to stop the city from sliding into further chaos, evidenced by the dead bodies hanging from lamp posts), they're already embroiled in a war with their fellow American soldiers. As the team press on, further atrocities are committed (including the use of white phosphorus, and the game lets you see the aftermath of it, not just on the soldiers you condemned to a painful death but the 47 civilians they were trying to rescue), the CIA uses the team to destroy the water supply of Dubai to stop word getting out of what Konrad did (thereby dooming the survivors to a slow death by dehydration), and you end up losing your comrades. Even better, throughout the game, it's hinted that Walker — the protagonist you're playing — is mentally unstable, becoming increasingly violent, brutal and irrational as the game wears on, especially after the white phosphorus incident. And to finally cap it off? The Big Bad you've been hunting and has been taunting you throughout the game, Colonel Konrad? He's the personification of Walker's guilt, self-loathing and insanity. The real John Konrad killed himself because he couldn't live with the things he'd done in Dubai. Walker sacrificed what was left of his sanity, his teammates, and doomed an entire city for nothing.
  • You can also choose to make the game end on an even more depressing note in three ways. The first is by either letting 'Konrad' shoot Walker, or letting Walker put his gun against his head and kill himself. The second is by attacking the search team sent to find Walker in the epilogue and letting them kill him in a Suicide by Cop bid. The third way is to slaughter the search team in the epilogue, at which point Walker — broken, insane and beyond all hope — picks up the radio and more or less tells the remaining U.S troops to come and get him before he grabs a gun and heads back into the city, resigned in the knowledge that he's not leaving Dubai alive.
• StarCraft:
  • The original StarCraft ends with the destruction of the Zerg Overmind, and it looks like more or less all is well — the Protoss, honorable and advanced, are mostly in charge, and the corrupt and tyrannical Terran Confederacy has been overthrown in favor of a new human world order. But as it turns out, destroying the Overmind was useless, and by the end of Brood War not only has Protoss society been scattered to the winds, the United Earth Directorate been thoroughly beaten, and a new, just as corrupt and tyrannical Terran Dominion formed, Kerrigan is now in charge of the Zerg, after defeating the combined might of the rest of the sector is poised to take over the entire galaxy. It doesn't even stop there, as her Dragon is apparently using her for his own schemes, which she doesn't seem to be aware of.
  • StarCraft II ends up upping the ante even further. After the first few missions of La Résistance fighting against the Dominion, the Zerg suddenly launch a massive all-out attack on human space for no apparent reason, killing billions and razing entire star systems. Also, remember Raynor swearing in Brood War that he's going to kill Kerrigan someday? Zeratul turns up and reveals that if Kerrigan dies, it will cause The End of the World as We Know It. Why would that happen, you ask? Because Duran was actually working for a rogue Xel'Naga that, in a Bad Future, will corrupt the Zerg and use them alongside his Physical God Protoss/Zerg hybrids to annihilate all life in the galaxy. The Tal'Darim Protoss who are impeding Raynor throughout the game are already corrupted and the first Protoss/Zerg hybrids have already been set loose. Shit just got real.
• The story of Star Fox: Assault starts off with the remnants of Andross's army gathering under Andrew's flag, and with Star Fox on the case, looks like that chapter of Lylat's history will finally be over. Then, after 17 years of absence, the Aparoids make their return to Lylat by presumably killing Andrew with ease before attacking the team. An intact Core Memory is located, but then Pigma steals it, necessitating a chase. During said chase, it's discovered that Aparoids can infect machines. Almost immediately afterwards, it's known that they can infect organics, which gets Pigma assimilated and killed. The team quickly heads to Sauria to aid its population from an Aparoid swarm, only to find out that during the Sauria mission, the Aparoids sacked Corneria and took over General Pepper. The Aparoids' vulnerability to Apoptosis is discovered and made into a biological weapon to eliminate them all, but the Aparoids then send in missiles to try and kill the scientists making the weapon. The team makes it to the Aparoid homeworld, only for the Great Fox to be assimilated alongside Rob and Peppy, both of whom ram the Great Fox into the Homeworld's shield so the team can confront the Queen. Star Wolf makes one last appearance to aid the team and draws away a massive swarm of Aparoids. The Queen, using all information she absorbed, tries to psychologically break the team by using the voices and memories of all those that had been assimilated. The program is shot into the Queen after a quick battle, only for the Queen to begin suppressing it and fleeing, forcing one final battle to ensure the program goes off before the Queen can make an antibody and be rendered immune to it!
• The reveal trailer of the eighth DLC fighter for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has something to this effect. The trailer begins with a bad situation similar to World of Light's beginning with Galeem about to use his laser attack to obliterate everybody. Right before the attack fires, though, Galeem is attacked from behind and cut in two. The culprit makes himself known moments later as his Leitmotif, 'Advent: One Winged Angel' (Yes, that one) starts to play, with the way Cloud utters the name of the man who has caused him so much pain and trouble merely sealing just how much worse things got for the rest of the cast...
  Cloud: Sephiroth...
• The Trails Series is well-known for having these events happen during the final hour of the game and set up a Sequel Hook.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky First Chapter: Joshua regains his memories and turns out to be part of an Ancient Conspiracy who is out to obtain the goddess' treasure called the Sept-Terrion. Professor Alba is revealed to be the mastermind behind the events of the game and is known as Weissman the Faceless, the Third Anguis of Ouroboros. And it ends with Joshua kissing Estelle, drugging her, and saying his goodbyes as he feels that he can no longer stay with her.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel I: The Evil Chancellor, Osborne, who was about to declare war on Crossbell, is suddenly assassinated by Crow, a senior classmate of Class VII, robots called Soldats start dropping down on the capital from a gigantic ship called the Pantagruel curb stomping the defending tanks. Crow then goes to Trista where he confronts the heroes, and utterly defeats Rean with ease, forcing Celine to order Valimar to retreat.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II: The party manages to save Crown Prince Cedric but at the cost of Crow pulling off a Heroic Sacrifice to open up a path for Rean, Osborne turns out to be alive, hijacks the Phantasmal Blaze Plan away from Ouroboros, and forcefully makes Rean a national hero making sure that he participates in conquering Crossbell or else casualties will ensue. And just for a gut puncher, Osborne reveals that he is Rean's father.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III: Practically the entire final chapter. Ash shoots the Emperor with a Verne Company gun under the influence of the Erebonian Curse, resulting in a Day of the Jackboot and anti-Calvard rhetoric that eventually culminates in a declaration of war against Calvard. As this is going on, Altina is called to an Intelligence Division meeting that turns out to be a trap, and Millium isn't able to warn her in time. Then the combined forces of the Ironbloods (including Millium), the Gnomes, Ouroboros, Zephyr, and Thors Main Campus turn Karel Imperial Villa into the Gral of Erebos, and Alisa discovers that her father is the Chief of the Gnomes and that Sharon has returned to Ouroboros. As a force primarily consisting of the Branch Campus keeps the enemy occupied and the combined Class VII descends into the depths of the Gral, Old Class VII members staying behind to fight various Towa discovers that George was a Black Workshop sleeper agent and he claims to have murdered Angelica. Then Rean and the three free members of New Class VII are forced to fight a corrupted Holy Beast, and eventually, Rean is sent over the edge by Black Alberich blowing up the Courageous—apparently murdering Viscount Arseid, Toval, and Prince Olivert in the process—Altina nearly being killed by the Nameless One, and Millium taking her little sister's place and dying in Valimar's arms. The result is Rean losing control of his Superpowered Evil Side inside Valimar and slaughtering the Nameless One despite his best efforts to keep the Holy Beast alive, unleashing the Erebonian Curse and triggering the Great Twilight. And then Osborne summons his own Divine Knight, Ishmelga, to subdue and capture the unhinged Rean alongside the other four current Awakeners.
• Every arc of Umineko: When They Cry is like this since Beatrice's "game" has the people on the island killed one by one. However Episode 5 really takes the cake. First, it turns out Beatrice was a Death Seeker the whole time, but Lambdadelta makes it so she can't die, making her an Empty Shell. As she is no condition to pursue the game, Lambda takes her place, and since Battler only wants to fight Beato, he lets Bernkastel take his place. That wasn't a good idea. Bern brings her own piece on the game board: Furudo Erika, a sadistic super-detective who helps Battler to solve the epitaph. Once it's done, she gleefully watches the family jump at each other's throats over the inheritance. That's only the beginning. Then, five people die, Krauss is abducted, and Natsuhi starts to receive threatening calls from a man who pretends to be her "son" from 19 years ago. In the end Natsuhi is declared the culprit of the game, and Battler is killed after failing to prove her innocence. Then in the Tea Party Bern and Erika celebrate, and announce their intention to completely destroy Beatrice's world. Finished? Nope. After that Beatrice, who regained consciousness, walks in the chapel, only to discover Battler's body impaled on a giant sword. She cries, apologises, and disappears. As Battler finally reaches the truth of Beato's game and wakes up, all that remains of her is a pile of dust. And then, finally the tide turns, but that Episode is still pretty damn depressing.
• In Vandal Hearts the game opens with a heavily corrupted democracy that's in two minds about everything, with an ambitious right-winger Hel Spites making a bid for leadership. Fast forward three years and he's now the leader of a military dictatorship that employs the thugs you used to fight to 'keep the peace' and crush the rebellion. On top of that The Dragon turns out to be the Man Behind the Man, who's gone and recruited his own Dragon, planted a Mole in your party and has manipulated the Empire to place its top military leaders & fighters in your path. Also, he's trying to find a magical MacGuffin in order to destroy the majority of mankind and start over cause of his daddy issues.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale) has everything slowly get worse. In Episode 1 it's not too rough, yes there's an apocalypse but you're surviving it fine, and only a couple of Characters die. Then comes Episode 2, 3 months later. Your group is starving, still has just as many arguments as there were before, and the only people who offer a trade involving food end up trapping you in a meat locker to turn you into food. And a member of your group dies right in front of his daughter before you can escape. Episode 3 begins with scavenging and detective work, shortly followed by an attack by bandits, your home being destroyed, and a paranoid member of your group killing an innocent group member believing this was there fault. After which you find out a kid in your group was bit by a zombie, and you'll have to Mercy Kill him, and his mother is Driven to Suicide, and the whole thing ends with a creepy sounding stranger contacting Clementine, the child you're caring for, on her radio. Episode 4 revolves around your group trying to find a boat. You find nothing. Any boats are either long gone or scavenged to the hull. Then you find a boat in a place where no one would look, and get supplies to fix it with some help from a local group of invalids. Shortly before you get to get on it, Clementine goes missing, and you get bit by a zombie. Next Episode, your boat gets stolen while you were looking for her, you're either dying or dying slowly and missing an arm, the rest of your group either dies or disappears as you look for Clem... and even when you do get her back, you die shortly afterwards.
• Warcraft.
  • The first game was about a massive, nearly endless war between two mighty armies that was tearing apart the known world. Three games and five expansions down the road have seen the ball continue a massive roll downhill interrupted only by the occasional Hope Spot that bounces the ball into the air... whereupon it crashes right back down and picks up more speed.
  • This gets carried onto World of Warcraft:
    • It starts with a cold war between two massive military powers and a world still messed up from the previous games. A Zombie Apocalypse, a powerful demi-god like beings, an Eldritch Abomination, and the remaining demonic forces from the last few invasions are the things that are threatening the world. Then the next expansion introduces a demonic invasion and a world for the two major factions of Azeroth to fight over. The second expansion pushed the zombie apocalypse even further than it was now that they are actually trying, while almost simultaneously, one of the protectors of the world decides to try and get rid of all the magic in the world, likely destroying it in the process, another Eldritch Abomination, even stronger than the last one, breaks out of his jail and tries to raise an army, a civil war breaks out that leads to open war being declared once again between the two major forces, and they were only in a cold war when they had several places where they would use military force for land, resources, and flags, along with a kill on site policy many held. The next expansion is basically the apocalypse caused by a giant dragon that messes up the world. There are also some of the things that happened in the novels. It's a wonder that the fourth expansion can make things worse from there, but it will if the first three shows anything.
    • Cataclysm takes the concept and goes hog-wild. Almost all the races are evicted from Orgrimmar to force a fascistic government. Elwynn Forest is invaded by the Blackrock Orcs and set fire. Thrall is enslaved early in the game. Continents are either sunk or flooded. Mass Hysteria. And the developers are hinting that it'll get even worse by the time World of Warcraft II rolls around.
    • In fall 2011 Blizzard announced Mists of Pandaria, the next expansion which is about... pandas. And a new continent they live on. And what's basically the Fourth War. ^note It's actually counted. The last one was the Third War. And that your negative emotions are coming to kill you. they're the remains of one of those Eldrich Abominations
    • Next was Warlords of Dreanor. Remember the orc leader got arrested at the end of the last expansion? He escaped. Into an alternate past. And convinced all the clan leaders to wage a war on the main timeline. It works until that Gul'dan shows up and takes over, enslaving the orcs of the alternate Dreanor to the Burning Legion.
    • And lest we forget that the entire end of Warlords of Dreanor basically kick starts the next expansion, Legion, and the LARGEST DEMONIC INVASION IN AZEROTH'S HISTORY.
    • A lore and bad guy example in the War of the Shifting Sands — at first, it looks as if the servants of C'Thun are going to win, but then they foolishly attack the Caverns of Time, leading to the Bronze Dragonflights getting involved. Then when they start beating those back, the other Dragonflights show up. In the end, they are forcefully sealed into their main base and are killed along with C'Thun in the present day.
• World of Horror has "Old God Stirs" events that trigger after each mystery, making the playthrough harder with each victory achieved and further imperiling the world. The Herald of the Shattered Court makes this even worse by triggering two events instead of one. These include:
  • "Store Closed": The dog shopkeeper has closed up shop and left, leaving you with one less place to buy supplies.
  • "Arcane Storm": The appearance of bizarre aurora lights causes all Reason costs for spells to increase by 1.
  • "Blood Moon": The moon turns an ominous red, causing monsters to gain a whopping 20 power, making them harder to hit and dodge.
  • "Contaminated Water": The town's water has turned black and oily, so no more Stamina- or Reason-restoring baths between mysteries.
  • "Fetid Fumes": The air feels heavy and hard to breathe, thus reducing the benefits of resting at home.
  • "Freaky Flood": The tides are rising (or is the town sinking?). Exploring the coast now poses a risk of becoming drenched, lowering your combat speed.
  • "Heart of Darkness": As the town's lighthouse casts an ominous shadow, the number of floors needed to reach the top is increased by 1.
  • "Riots": Chaos is erupting downtown, and you're more likely to encounter hostile rioters.
  • "Roads Closed": The police have closed all the roads out of town, forcing you to seek alternate routes, and increasing the Doom cost of exploring the Village, Mansion, and Forest.
  • "Winds of Plague": The hospital is being overwhelmed by sick patients, increasing the costs for medical services.
  • "School Burned Down": A unique event that can only be triggered in a specific mystery. The school burns down, so you can no longer recruit allies from the schoolyard.
• World of Mana:
  • Secret of Mana was, as a whole, a long series of Bad Things Happening. It starts off with a world-spanning evil empire. Then the evil empire wants to blow up the world, and each step they progress ruins the entire world's essence. Then, just as things look their darkest and the Heroes have found their last hope... the bad guys vaporise it in a column of light. The world-destroying weapon just finished its boot-up cycle. Now it and its organic opposite will blow humanity back to the stone age if they aren't stopped. You think stopping just the weapon would work? Now its organic counterpart will make sure that no living thing but itself can survive. Oh, and it's also the last source of magic in the world, so blowing it up will deprive a dependent humanity of magic and eventually cause the world to fall apart at its seams.
  • Trials of Mana was this incarnate and it starts with each character's beginning story:
    • Riesz of Laurent loses her father and her castle is taken over... and her little brother was responsible for accidentally letting the invading force in.
    • Angela of Altena's mother tries to kill her... and it gets worse from there.
    • Hawkeye of Nevarl finds out that his newly self-appointed king's girlfriend is an evil witch who makes him kill his best friend and threatens to kill the girl he most likely loves if he says anything.
    • Duran of Valsena gets his ego-filled ass handed to him by a jerk-wizard (the same one responsible for Angela's mother trying to sacrifice her).
    • Kevin of Ferolia loses his only friend...because he accidentally killed him while he transformed into an unstoppable monster.
    • Charlotte of Wendel finds the priest she likes get kidnapped...and later finds out she's half-human, half-elf and doesn't fit in with either society.
    • While the heroes do go and defeat most of the evil in their homes, they fail to keep the Mana Stones from being destroyed, which means that some Sealed Evil in a Can called the Benevodons will be released. They go through most of the game trying to The Sword of Mana to save the world, then they lose, and the Benevodons are released. They kill the Benevodons, but find out afterwards that killing them sends their power to the Sword of Mana in the Big Bad's possession, so they basically make their archenemy a GOD, though they managed to kill him in spite of that. And even with that archenemy of theirs gone, the Mana Tree ends up being destroyed by him beforehand, and from there, it'll take, like, a thousand years before the mana that's disappeared from the world as a result can return to the world.
  • The Jumi and Dragoon arc of Legend of Mana drops the game into this trope, although there are alternatives. The former has the character watch as an entire race of people are annihilated by a single individual who is constantly powered up by the murders, before your character is finally turned into a rock. The latter starts with your character being imprisoned in Hell. It gets worse from there.
• X-COM: The first game ends on a happy note. The second has the aliens appear again, and destroying their headquarters also ruins Earth's biosphere. The third and fourth have more aliens striking the decayed Earth.