Godzilla Threshold / Video Games

Examples of Godzilla Threshold from Video Games:

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• Age of Empires II: One of the unique technologies introduced in the first Definitive Edition DLC expansion is a minor example of this. Flemish Revolution, available to the Burgundians in the Imperial Age, turns all of your villagers into the infantry unit the Flemish Militia. If done at the peak of your economy, a very large army can be created in an instant, but given villagers are the backbone of your entire civilization, if you don't have enough resources to bounce back afterwards, there is a high likelihood you will either win or lose. Thus, it is best used as a last resort option to close out the game or in the case of an emergency.
• AI War: Fleet Command:
  • The AI starts considering you Not Worth Killing, and putting off your demise since there are explicit, but unspecified threats much closer to its level keeping it busy outside of the galaxy. Provoke it enough, it'll send some spare trash armies at you, still more than enough to make your life difficult. Keep at it, and you'll start facing actual local armies and a bit of the good stuff it keeps off-galaxy, usually fighting whatever problems it deems more important than you. After that come the local big guns, both AI-made and reverse-engineered. And if you're unwise or backed up enough to keep going, the AI decides this line has been crossed and brings in stuff like Hunter/Killers, Avengers and even the Mothership. The latter is explicitly noted as something the AI would not bring even if it was in danger of losing the whole galaxy, but that circumstances forced its hand. And at the end of a certain campaign in the first game, in comes the very last resort, the Galactic Control Ship. The damn thing is made to tear an entire galaxy apart by itself, and just its reactor going critical in death wipes out whole star systems. Thankfully, if you see it, it's likely you have some powerful benefactors helping you out.
  • AI War 2 has the explicitly defined Extragalactic War units for similar purposes, except rather than being based on storyline they're brought in when you (extremely rare), a minor faction (the Fallen Spire are common offenders) or more likely both have run off with the advantage and become waaaay stronger than anticipated. This is also the stuff the AI usually saves for whatever threats are off the galaxy, and bringing them into it means things are starting to get similarly threatening. They come in five levels, 1 being an aresenal of pretty damned nasty ships and 5's Extragalactic War Flenser being close to a Hopeless Boss Fight, even above the last-resort ships it threw at you in the first game; you better hope you can snipe the AI Overlord before you die.
• ANNO: Mutationem: Near the climax, as Ann makes her way through the Elaborate Underground Base, The Consortium's top brass decided C has gone too far in his machinations for his attempts to acquire The Dypheus' Breath as obtaining it would bring about The End of the World as We Know It and is now in the midst of trying to take over the organization for himself. To deal with this, the members decide to plan an Enemy Mine situation with Ann, and to ensure she won't retaliate against them, they force her co-operation by having her brother and Ayane held captive and threatened with the deal being they'll be safely released until C has been dealt with.
• One that seems minor in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura but disturbing when mulled upon. That Gnome, Preston Radcliffe, who gave you a ring and to find 'that boy'? He's actually a Dwarf who emaciated himself and cut his beard to hide his identity. Considering Dwarves here see their beard as their most valuable possession right after their life, you have to wonder how desperate he was to have done so.
• Arc the Lad II has a villain be the one who gets pushed too far. With his evil empire defeated and the heroes closing in on him, he decides to break the last remaining seal and let The Dark One out of his prison. Needless to say, this does not work out well for anyone.
• Blaze from Arknights is considered one of Rhodes Island's elite Operators, with a wealth of combat experience under her belt and powerful heat-based Originium Arts to augment her already impressive strength. Despite this, the number of missions she's sent on is surprisingly low for someone of her pedigree, owing to the sheer level of collateral damage she causes whenever she's in the field. In addition, her Hot-Blooded, reckless personality has turned off most other Operators from working with her, as she's known for taking huge risks and putting everyone else in danger. As a result, Rhodes Island only deploys her as a last resort; whenever they have a problem they really need to get rid of and don't care how much destruction it'll take.
  • And if things get even worse, they'd deploy Rosmontis, a 15-year old Human Weapon with a questionable grasp on sanity and psychic power. Telekinetically controlling 4 massive metal slabs, she can lay waste to an entire Mobile City, and is only authorized to be deployed when the goal is total annihilation of the enemy forces.
• It's a relatively minor and easy to miss one, but in Armored Core 4: For Answer, you can become one, if you kill hundreds of millions of people by bringing down the cradle, Otsdarva will be one of the 5 NEXT teaming up to take you down as payback.
• In one conversation in Assassin's Creed III, Rebecca suggests presenting all of the information the team has gathered to Abstergo so they can help avert the solar flare. Desmond replies that he actually considered that option, and only refrained from doing so because he believes Abstergo already knows about the threat and is trying to take advantage of it. The very idea of Assassins seriously considering working with Templars, in particular Desmond (who has been their prisoner and test subject), shows just how dire the situation is. Later, Minerva will actually encourage Desmond to allow the solar flare to wipe out most of humanity rather than set Juno loose. Juno is apparently that dangerous.
• Baldur's Gate II: This is basically what you are tasked to do in order to have a chance to confront the Big Bad during the Plot Tunnel of Chapter 4. Saemon Havarian will tell you that to defeat him you need an army, and then pinpoint that you have one available: the insane (and dangerous) spellcasting inmates of the asylum. When you release them to confront the Big Bad, he will admit that he was surprised by your audacity:
  Big Bad: What is this? You have released all of my tests subjects? How wonderfully mad of you. I did not expect this in the least, so dangerously risk it is.
• Batman: Arkham Knight: The Arkham Knight's militia, a paramilitary group trained solely to kill Batman, after being hammered across every theater of war they open by the Bat, decide on one last tactic to stop him: their leaders start wearing suicide vests that will explode if they lose consciousness^note although professional, the Militia are NOT fanatics; it's a decision borne of sheer desperation. Against anyone else, such a tactic would be madness. Against Batman, it's a prudent deterrent... but it only slows him down for a few seconds.
• The first chapter of The Black Heart opens with Malen and the other nature spirits facing extinction. As a result, they call upon Hashi, who had been exiled for his violent hatred of humans, to save them.
• Blast Corps has a truck with a pair of defective nuclear missiles. The truck's computer goes on the fritz and winds up locking the controls while going on auto-pilot mode and goes directly straight to its destination, regardless of what is in its way. The slightest jolt will cause the missiles to explode and destroy everything in a several mile wide radius. The solution? Destroy entire towns and cities by using machines and vehicles designed for destruction so that the truck has a clear path. The game even keeps track on how much damage you caused, which can easily skyrocket to the millions and billions of dollars. You will level entire towns, but it's a small price to pay to avoid a nuclear winter.
• BlazBlue:
  • Litchi crossed this in two phases on a personal case. The first phase, on realizing that Lotte Carmine was inflicted with an extreme corruption of the Boundary which practically has no normal permanent cure and begging for Kokonoe to help does no use, she sees it fit to corrupt herself with the Boundary to find symptoms and develop the cure from experience. The second phase is when she found no cure overall and her own corruption was getting to her, she sees it fit to join the NOL for the small hope of a cure, despite the organization storing someone who's pegged as extremely shady and suspicious (Hazama), or a blatant monster of a father (Relius).
  • In BlazBlue: Chronophantasma, Kushinada's Lynchpin is a device that disrupts seithr on a global scale, and Houyoku: Rettenjou is the Nox Nyctores designed to activate it. Lord Tenjou refused to activate the Lynchpin during the Ikaruga Civil War, however, because the world had become dependent on seithr-fueled ars magus to function. By the end of the story, Relius had rigged every cauldron in the world to vomit ridiculous concentrations of seithr, which resulted in casualties the world over with every lost soul being dragged into the Ibukido monolith as a means to summon Master Unit: Amaterasu, which made activating the Lynchpin mandatory, and in some ways preferable to allowing this Doomsday to continue.
• This is a function of most First-Person Shooters where your character can mow through hundreds of potential enemies like a One-Man Army and come out the other side a victor, but this is humorously lampshaded for the way Vault Hunters work in the Borderlands universe, implying that getting a Vault Hunter involved, what with their total disregard for their own safety and focus on obtaining loot, basically means you've won the battle regardless of the opponent. In the Sir Hammerlock DLC for Borderlands 2, there is a humorous moment when the villain realizes he's not going to beat you prior to the final mission and begins panicking and crying because he knows how unstoppable your character is.
• Talks by the developers after City of Heroes was shut down revealed that the invasion by Battalion was supposed to be this: the plan for fighting them involved summoning Rularuu the Ravager.
• Civilization:
  • Using nukes will irradiate the terrain in the blast radius, drastically reducing the resource yield while making your units on those tiles move slower and fight noticeably poorer. Furthermore, they don't distinguish between enemy and friendly, but will severely hurt both alike. If you have a large enemy army on the way that you know your own conventional forces can't hold off, though, it may be worth taking the hit. In fact, even having one will make other countries wary of crossing you unless they have no other recourse.
  • Planet busters in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri are even more dangerous, as they completely obliterate anything in the blast radius and leave huge craters behind. The power of a planet buster depends on the type of reactor used in its constructions. Singularity planet busters (i.e. using the energy of a black hole) leave a giant crater behind and can become a new sea. Unlike Civ's nukes, they don't leave fallout, though. Still, it's entirely possible to completely wipe out several cities that are located close together with a single planet buster. However, using them is considered such an atrocity that all other factions automatically declare vendetta (war) on you. Ah, and you also will piss off Planet itself, so be ready to face groups of angry Mindworms.
• Pops up in the final GDI mission of Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars. Faced with a grueling assault on an enemy stronghold in hopes of ending an Alien Invasion, Director Boyle will urge you to use the Liquid Tiberium bomb to wipe out the foe with a single press of a button — even though doing so will set off a chain reaction in the world's largest Red Zone, killing millions if not billions of civilians, causing irreparable environmental damage, and annihilating your own army. However, as hard as the fight is, your forces are still capable of winning without using the bomb and thereby destroying Southern Europe.
• Crysis:
  • This happens all the time throughout the series. In the first game, the US Navy decides to nuke an energy dome that the Ceph have erected over the Lingshan Islands even after being warned it will just make them more powerful. Considering the Ceph just overran an entire Marine division while barely taking a lick of damage, it's fairly justified.
  • In Crysis 2, the Pentagon does it again by bombing out the flood barriers of New York City and trying to drown the Ceph. It's pointed out that this is a really bad idea, considering the Ceph are aquatic creatures, but nobody else has any better ideas. Later on in the game, the Ceph are on the verge of deploying a virulent spore weapon into the atmosphere which will likely kill the entire human race, so the Department of Defense authorizes a tactical nuclear strike on the weapon site in Central Park. Even though it probably won't work and will kill thousands of civilians left in the city, it's their last best hope.
• Dark Souls:
  • The Darkwraiths sealed under the flooded city of New Londo caused a Godzilla Threshold. The Darkwraiths you see are corrupted, evil monsters who devoured humanity (the precious, ethereal substance, not actual people). They were such a threat to anything that possessed a soul that the Sealers, a group of pacifists, flooded an entire city, drowning its entire populace, just to seal them away.
  • The fading of the First Flame is the threshold for the gods. The Fire is so sacred that they are willing to do anything to keep it burning just a little while longer. The Witch of Izalith attempted to use her Lord Soul as a replacement. When that went horribly wrong, Gwyn divided his Lord Soul up and plunged into the First Flame himself to reignite it. He's been burning alive in it ever since. And now that it's fading again, what remains of the pantheon is ready to sacrifice one hapless Undead and the remaining scraps of the Lord Souls to keep the Flame lit.
• Dark Souls III: The First Flame is coming closer than ever before to dying, which has made the Fire Keepers and other followers of the old gods very desperate to keep it going, to the point that they are now resurrecting past Lords only to sacrifice them again to keep it going, some of whom were very evil indeed. And then there's the Untended Graves and what it suggests. One theory is that, in Ludleth's time, the First Flame actually did die, and Ludleth somehow broke causality and time travelled to feed the Flame himself, which may be one explanation for how extraordinarily convoluted the timeline in the third game is.
• Dead Space 3: Happens twice before the main plot kicks off.
  • In the prologue, set 200 years before the main plot, a soldier fights off some necromorphs to bring a general the Codex, a data drive containing information on the Markers, and the general kills the soldier soon after, and after deleting the data, he kills himself. In the present, Isaac Clarke gets recruited into an expedition to Tau Volantis with the hope he can "turn off" the Marker home world and end the necromorph threat once and for all. Along the expedition, numerous records collected show that the Markers were meant to be used as a Secret Weapon, to win a war, but after the Marker caused a necromrpoh outbreak across the planet, the high command decided that since the Markers where too big a threat against not just their side of the conflict, but all of humanity, they instituted an order to purge the planet, first by erasing all the information about the Markers, disabling the vehicles, including scuttling the orbiting spaceships fleet, and killing all personnel involved, with anyone not killing themselves actively hunted down, before those soldiers would kill themselves, with the hopes no-one else would find out about the Markers.
  • After Isaac and the remaining party are able to recreated the Codex, they find out that the native alien inhabitants of Tau Volantis stopped their necromorph outbreak by building a machine that flash froze the planet by creating an ice age that froze the planet within a few days. The message to "turn it off" was sent by the Markers so that the machine would be turned off and the necromorphs can spread though the universe. It's also revealed that the aliens left a series of messages to any other space faring species to not turn off the machine, as the Marker would infect and turn them into necromorphs.
• Destroy All Humans! 2: Late in the game, it's revealed that the Soviet Union is hunting down Crypto becuase it's being run by the blisk, the mortal enemies of the furons. When Crypto asks Poxy about why there are still blisk in existence, Orthopox explains that the blisk turned Mars into an interplanetary power and seeked to expand their dominions, bringing them into conflict with the Furon Empire. Poxy adds that the Martian War ended when the Furon Empire turned Mars into the lifeless rock it is now, and drove the blisk to extinction, with the powerful nuclear weapons the furons develop to kill the blisk en-masse and overloead their natural ability to thrive in radiocative environments. Although the furons won the war, it came at to cost of millions of furons and reproductive sterility, which resulted in the furons reliance on cloning to reproduce, however that method's becoming more impractical as furon DNA's been breaking down due to repetetive cloning.
• In the early 1980s arcade classic Defender, some players employed the strategy of shooting all but one of the humanoids they were supposed to defend, waiting around for a Lander to abduct him, then rescuing him from the fall after destroying the Lander but not bringing him back to earth, so as to prevent the planet from blowing up during that wave.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: The destruction of the Elf homelands with deathfog was such an egregious act that other nations will do anything to protect themselves from a similar fate. The Dwarf queen is even planning a preemptive strike against the human capital with a similar deathfog device, albeit at the urging of a Treacherous Advisor.
• In The Division, New York City gets hit by a man-made virus, resulting in the near total collapse of society. With the police and National Guard overwhelmed, the U.S. government activates the Division, a group of elite sleeper agents embedded in the population, with orders to go into NYC and restore order by any means necessary. To its credit, the game shows why this can actually be a bad thing when the ultimate bad guys turn out to be the first wave of Division agents who've gone rogue and sided with the Last Man Battalion.
• Doom:
  • Doom (2016): It's eventually revealed that retrieving the Doom Slayer in the first place was the threshold-crossing plan that the UAC had if Hell's incursions got too bad. While that would most definitely deal with the demons, it'd also wreck their whole Argent Energy operation, which is why they were tampering with Hell in the first place, and the demons would put up a lot of resistance if they tried it, leading to horrible casualties. Naturally, things get bad enough, and the Slayer does indeed wreck their Argent Energy operation, enraged at the fact people are still trying to fuck around with Hell forces even in this day. Still, it got the demons dealt with.
  • Doom Eternal continues this given the state of Earth by the time Doomguy shows up. Needless to say, there isn't a human alive that isn't happy to see him arrive regardless of how terrifying he is. However, by the time of The Ancient Gods, Part One, the Doom Slayer has his own threshold, seeking to summon the Dark Lord of Hell into physical form, so that he may be finally killed, and thus, have every demon confined to Hell forevermore.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • Templars, when faced with a dire situation when confronting a rebellious or imperiled Mage Circle, have the option of calling for a "Rite of Annulment," which basically means completely and utterly purging the offending Mage Circle in question. The Rite is only called in only the most dire of circumstances, usually when it is determined that a circle has been too compromised to save, and that purging it is the only way to prevent further casualties. At least...on paper, anyways. Due to the heavy moral and ethical ramifications that come with purging an entire Circle, especially if/when the Player Character manages to resolve Mage-related situations without resorting to the Rite, much is had about how necessary such Thresholds are, and how they may be used for oppressive purposes rather than protection, which ends up being a major part of the tensions between Mages and Templars for the following two games.
    • The Blight has played this role for over a millennium, to the point where the Chantry is willing to look the other way when the Grey Wardens recruits criminals and apostates or dabble in blood magic. One of the reasons that tensions between humans and elves got as bad as they did was because the elven kingdom did not treat the Second Blight as a Godzilla Threshold. Seeing the Dales sit back and do nothing while the Darkspawn ravaged Orlais undid much of the goodwill left over from Emperor Drakon's promise to respect elven sovereignty, eventually culminating in the Exalted March of the Dales.
    • Some mages fighting for their freedom or life decide to use Blood Magic or make a deal with a demon. These situations usually end up badly — with the unfortunate mage getting possessed or driven insane with power. There are also shades of Then Let Me Be Evil, since many mages believe that if templars are going to accuse them of Blood Magic anyway, they might as well go along with it and use the best weapon they have at their disposal.
    • Some Exalted Marches ^note a.k.a. the Dragon Age version of Crusades have begun like this. While not strictly a Godzilla Threshold move, the Chantry has at times declared Marches in order to defend against a perceived direct threat to their faith, such as the first war with the Qunari, where the Qunari's technological superiority over the nations of Thedas meant that the land truly was at risk of being overrun. When the Exalted March was declared, every faithful and able Thedosian, even mages, who were often oppressed by the Southern Chantry, was mustered against the Qunari, and only through the use of that magic were they able to turn the tide.
  • Dragon Age II:
    • During the Qunari invasion of Kirkwall, the situation gets so dire that when Knight-Commander Meredith discovers that Mage!Hawke has been operating as an illegal apostate under the Templars' very noses for the last four years... she does the smart thing and immediately declares a truce until the crisis is dealt with. At this point, she needs all the help she can get in retaking the city, even if it comes from an Apostate Mage.
    • At the end of Act III, the threshold is crossed deliberately to instigate a Lensman Arms Race between factions. A lone terrorist blows up a church, massacring hundreds. This also killed the only person who was keeping a fragile peace between two highly volatile factions. With the threat of The Unfettered Meredith, who now had the justification she needed to enact a Right of Annulment (see above) against the Kirkwall Circle, Orsino had no choice but to match her with all the forbidden magic he could get his hands on. As one can predict, this sparks a major battle that quickly spreads into an all-out war across the continent...which is exactly what the terrorist wanted.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition:
    • The Big Bad deliberately exploit this when he makes the Grey Wardens think that they are all hearing the Calling. Their belief that they are all going to die soon leads to them using Blood Magic and performing Human Sacrifice to summon a demon army to help them wipe out the last two Old Gods before they are all gone. That demon army would eventually become his army.
    • There's a second, more subtle example in the game. The Qunari, who are the Scary Dogmatic Aliens of the setting, are so concerned by the Breach and resulting Rifts that they approach you looking to form an alliance to combat the menace. According to Iron Bull, this is the first time in recorded history that the Qunari have ever voluntarily considered an alliance with anyone not of the Qun for any reason.
    • Picking up from where the first game left off regarding the Right of Annulment and Rite of Tranquility, the Mage/Templar War ends up starting over the concerns brought about by the Threshold for the aforementioned Rites of Annulment and Tranquility being gradually lowered over the centuries, to the point where it was being abused quite blatantly in many cases. Flavor text reveals that the threshold for the Right of Annulment was lowered much more quickly than anyone thought, but the Seekers covered it up. Dialogue with another Seeker reveals that the Rite of Tranquility was discovered by complete accident and it was only through the involvement of the Chantry that it became a Threshold, who saw it as a way to protect weak-minded mages from being possessed by demons. Both of these Rites started out as true Godzilla Thresholds, but as the centuries wore on, the restrictions against them gradually fell off one by one to the point that the "current" standards for their use are liberal compared to their original standards. Many mages took note of this, especially when corrupt Templars began using the mere mention of the Rites as threats to keep them in line, causing tensions to rise on both sides as the Mages responded by pushing back harder, with many turning to the forbidden Blood Magic to bolster their strength, which only edged the Templars closer to the Threshold; the Chantry, on their part, worked to keep peace between the two factions, but would not (or could not) take a side, meaning that their placation actions were merely delaying the inevitable war. The war triggered when Anders prevented the Chantry from repeating that in Kirkwall.
• In Dragon Quest VI, the threat of the Dread Fiends was enough to convince the King of Graceskull to try to summon a legendary demon to fight them off. Naturally, it ends poorly for Graceskull. It is possible for the party to convince said demon to do their job for them.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • Many failed, incomplete, or patently unworkable Doomsday Devices get activated as a last-ditch effort to hold off invaders when all other methods have failed; a common version is digging straight down through adamantine veins as a final "screw you" to the would-be conquerors.
  • Upon discovering what lay beyond the adamantine the hard way, Bay 12 forumgoer SpiralDimentia decided to release a captive (hostile) bronze colossus in hopes of it fighting the horrors (how he had imprisoned a bronze colossus is another story for another time). This didn't work, but was applauded as sufficiently dwarven, especially since he tried to resettle the place twice after losing everything, despite the bronze colossus and the abominations still being in residence there.
  • Failed miserably in one fortress that was being attacked by husks, and decided to Breach the Circus; it turns out that DEMONS are insufficiently Godzillaesque to defeat husks.
  • In Boatmurdered, one of the leaders created a lever that would flood the entire entryway and fields near the fortress with lava. For some reason. It is used once as a last-ditch way to get rid of a combined elephant-goblin invasion, in project "Fuck the world". However, with a bit of refinement, it eventually becomes the standard method of dealing with any threat. The elves were not pleased. Nor was the human trading caravan that got caught up in it. This ended up biting Boatmurdered in the ass when the excessive, casual use of the lever resulted in a large miasma forming from all the burned, decaying bodies; when the miasma found its way into the fortress, it caused several dwarves to go mad and attack everyone around them. The resulting bodies being left out caused more miasma, which only made more dwarves go mad...and thus began the gristly, final end of Boatmurdered.
• Elden Ring:
  • The shattering of the titular Elden Ring has left the world in ruin, and the Tarnished (banished warriors who died long ago) are brought back to life and called to the Lands Between to reforge the Elden Ring, claim the title of Elden Lord, and restore the world. One of the Tarnished revived and summoned is known as the Loathsome Dung Eater, a completely insane murderer who slaughters people and performs a defiling ritual on their corpses that prevents his victims from going to the afterlife. Dung Eater's endgoal is to spread this horrifying curse to everyone in the world... and the state of the world is so bad that summoning this guy is considered better than the alternative of leaving the world to rot.
  • Upon reaching the foot of the Erdtree, the World Tree that is the focal point of worship in the Lands Between, your journey's final destination, the seat of the Elden Lord, and the source and final destination of all life, you find it's barred itself to all comers with a wall of its own indestructible bark. No one can become Elden Lord. The solution is to force the issue and commit an act called "the first cardinal sin" — light the World Tree on fire.
  • The demigod Malenia is afflicted with a horrifying Mystical Plague called the Scarlet Rot, which she has spent her whole life fighting to contain within her own body. When she dueled the demigod Radahn during the Shattering, she finally unleashed it in order to break their stalemate. Both of them lost: Malenia went into a coma, Radahn lost his mind to the Rot, and the entire region of Caelid was warped into a Mordor of fungus, mutated monsters, and decay. If you choose to defeat Malenia, she'll end up doing it again in phase 2 of her boss fight, only this time she retains control and becomes the Goddess of Rot. As the game's resident superboss, this just makes her even harder.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Aedra, the et'Ada ("original spirits") who sacrificed much of their divine power during the creation of Mundus, the mortal plane, typically reserve direct Divine Intervention for only the most dire of situations, such as averting The End of the World as We Know It. They prefer a much lighter touch in mortal affairs otherwise, at most typically working through a mortal agent. Because of this, many in Tamriel openly question their existence while considering them inept and/or lazy.
    • A prominent example of what happens when the Divines get more aggressive is Pelinal Whitestrake, an Aedric being sent as an answered prayer by the Divines to Alessia, the "Slave Queen" attempting to liberate her Nedic (ancestors of Men) people from the cruel tyranny of the (primarly) Daedra-worshiping Ayleids. Pelinal was The Berserker with an extreme hatred of all elves and a habit of slaughtering entire kingdoms. The Divines were so horrified by his actions that they nearly left the mortal world altogether, only remaining after Alessia appeased them with prayer and sacrifices. Pelinal would be the last (known) direct divine agent to act in Mundus, and since, have only acted through mortal agents with divine blessings, like the Dragonborn, instead of direct intervention.
    • There are very rare moments where the Divines fully intervene in events within Mundus, usually in response to an attack by one of the Daedric Princes. The most notable example is against Mehrunes Dagon during the Oblivion Crisis, where Akatosh manifested an avatar when Martin Septim sacrified himself, and defeated Mehunres Dagon's avatar. The result of that battle was that there were no longer any Dragonborn Emperors, and without Dragonborn to lead it, the Septim Empire began its slow decline and disintegration. Another example is the Vestige during the events of The Elder Scrolls Online, who gained the direct blessings of Akatosh to allow them to fight Molag Bal in the heart of his realm of Coldharbour. In that case, Akatosh did not even consider granting his blessings and power until the Vestige had left Nirn entirely and was inside Coldharbour, due to the damage that their battle would cause to Nirn.
  • In the series' backstory, the event that led to the disappearance of the Dwemer may have been this for the Dwemer. The Dwemer uncovered the Heart of Lorkhan, the still-beating "divine center" of the "dead" god who helped create the mortal plane, deep beneath the Red Mountain volcano. Kagrenac, the Dwemeri "Chief Tonal Architect," created the tools needed to tap into the power of the Heart and planned to do so with the goal of allowing the Dwemer to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. Their enemies-turned-allies, the highly religious Chimer, found out and believed this to be a blasphemy, so they attacked. According to one telling of the Dwemer's final days, Kagrenac only used the tools on the Heart as a last-ditch effort when the Chimer successfully infiltrated the Dwemer's Red Mountain stronghold. In his haste, he got something wrong, which caused the Dwemer to disappear from all known planes of existence in a single instant.
  • Related to the above, Numidium, the largest Dwemer Homunculi ever constructed was the bane of basically anyone unfortunate enough to cross its gargantuan path. Why? Because it could literally stop you from existing just by refusing to believe you do. Never mind the fact that its mere activation caused an almost biblical shitstorm across Nirn. Even in lore, absolutely nothing has ever been able to truly stop or destroy it, with even the most powerful mages and army garrisons serving only to annoy it. The world at large doubtlessly sees its disappearance as a blessing and presumably hope it NEVER comes back.
  • The Bosmer (Wood Elves) have a ritual known as "The Wild Hunt", in which a number of Bosmer transform themselves into nightmarish beasts, and then rampage through Valenwood destroying their enemies. Because there is no known way to reverse the transformation, the ritual is considered a taboo subject by Bosmer and is sanctioned for use only in dire circumstances. (Only twice in history has it actually been sanctioned, and both times, it achieved its intended goal.)
  • A possible result in Skyrim. Your character may be the leader of the Thieves' Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, have completed each Daedric quest (even the ones that involve murder, betrayal, torture, and cannibalism), and murdered hundreds of innocent people. But the Graybeards will still teach your character the way of the Voice, despite being someone that will doubtlessly abuse this power, because you're still the world's only hope at defeating the dragons.
• The climax of Eternal Darkness: In order to stop the Eldritch Abomination that Pious summons, Alex Roivas uses the City of En'gha's nine-rune Circle of Power (player characters are limited to seven-rune Circles at most) to summon another Eldritch Abomination capable of defeating it. Once the former is defeated, she realizes that it's just as likely to destroy humanity. Luckily, her grandfather's ghost is on hand to seal the latter one away.
• The Enclave in the Fallout series sees the proliferation of mutants in the wasteland as their threshold. Unfortunately for everyone, to the Enclave, "mutant" doesn't just mean the super mutants and deformed ghouls, it includes any human who has been exposed to radiation for an extended period of time — in other words, everyone not a member of the Enclave or living in a Vault. Their solution is to use a modified strand of the FEV virus and release it into the air currents and later water supply to kill them all.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The Planet itself in Final Fantasy VII responds to the threat of Jenova by creating the WEAPONs from The Lifestream itself, whose mission is to destroy whatever is threatening the planet. Since they can't reach Jenova, they go for the next biggest threat to the planet: Humans.
    • In Dirge of Cerberus, Omega WEAPON's function is a Godzilla Threshold to the previous one. If destroying the threat with the other WEAPONs doesn't work, it packs up all the Lifestream it can and heads off into space to find another planet to colonize.
  • In Final Fantasy II, the Rebels' struggle to kill the Emperor reaches the point that the party have to retrieve the Ultima Tome, containing a spell literally designed to destroy Hell and therefore so powerful that the mages decided to seal it up permanently to prevent it ever being used again. The Rebel-affiliated mage Minwu is even willing to die to allow the Rebels to retrieve it, despite knowing better than anyone else how terrible the spell is. Unfortunately, the spell is not that powerful compared to the other high-level spells (it has a different damage mechanic to them, which is even harder to exploit) and never comes up in the plot again.
  • In Final Fantasy X, in an effort to preserve Zanarkand and win the war against Bevelle, Yu Yevon had its citizens become fayth and summon a dream version of the city, as well as Sin itself to destroy Bevelle and whatever other civilization grows similarly advanced, including the real Zanarkand itself, making this Godzilla Threshold involve a literal Kaiju.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, after Ilberd's plan leads to the creation of a powerful new Primal, the heroes are forced to seek out and activate the Omega Weapon, a device that, centuries ago, actually captured and sealed the Primal Bahamut.
  • In Final Fantasy XVI, Dominants are considered in a similar regard to living, breathing nuclear weapons, and deploying them on the field of battle is considered an extreme action best reserved as a last resort due to the destruction they can wrought, particularly if the opposing side has a Dominant of their own that they can send out in response. In the opening of the game, alone, a battle between two Dominants who have fully transformed into their Eikons — Shiva and Titan — leaves their respective armies decimated and reshapes the landscape as far as the eye can see.
• A villainous example in the backstory of Five Nights at Freddy's 3: cornered by the souls of his victims, Purple Guy decided to hide inside the Spring Bonnie costume. For context, the spring lock suits (of which the Spring Bonnie suit is one of two) are extremely dangerous suit/animatronic hybrids which are entirely capable of killing their user if not handled properly, even under optimal conditions; this particular suit has been sitting in a back room for the better part of a decade, suffering the expected decay. And yet the fear by being cornered by five angry ghosts was enough for Purple Guy to take the risk. It ends up backfiring on him, resulting in him dying in the suit...although he did get resurrected as Springtrap, so it kind of worked out for him (at least for a while).
  • Later developments in the lore have made it an even straighter example: in all likelihood Purple Guy (real name William Afton) knew that the suit was dangerous, but he either decided the risk was worth it or else was willing to go through the extremely painful process of a springlock failure in order to become an immortal killing machine and avoid his victims' wrath.
• Gears of War: In the backstory, the Locust invasion was so devastating that the Hammer of Dawn Kill Sat was used to destroy all the major cities to slow the advance. In Gears of War 3, you deal with the aftermath of this when you visit Char, a city that was leveled by the attack.
• In the Geneforge series, the rebellion which breaks out in the 3rd game is on the edge of defeat by the 4th. While the humans and serviles in the rebellion could survive being ruled by the Shapers again, the drakons know they will not be allowed to exist under Shaper rule. To turn the war, they create the Unbound, which are massively powerful but completely insane, and release them into Shaper lands to rampage around.
• In the older Grand Theft Auto games, the Wanted Meter topped out with you battling the military, called out to stop one criminal who's managed to singlehandedly overwhelm everything the police can throw at you. Starting with Grand Theft Auto IV, the military was no longer the Final Boss of the wanted meter, replaced with NOOSE officers who, as federal law enforcement (specifically, the game's parody of the Department of Homeland Security), would more logically be the ones sent to stop an especially dangerous criminal who the police can't handle.
• God of War (PS4): Kratos crosses a rather more personal version of the threshold when his son Atreus becomes deathly ill. First, he seeks out the help of the goddess Freya despite hating gods in general, and when she tells him that the only cure for Atreus's sickness is in Helheim, a deathly cold realm where no magic in the Nine Realms can conjure fire, he retrieves the Blades of Chaos, symbols of his hated enslavement to Ares and his greatest failure of killing the Greek gods and Greece along with them. He's visibly uneasy when unwrapping the blades and chaining them once again to his wrists, but goes through with it because they're a source of fire magic that isn't from the Nine Realms and can thus be carried into Helheim.
• In Guilty Gear Xrd, the in-canon reason for Elphelt being a playable character is that Ramlethal's plot is the threshold, and El herself being Godzilla (reason being that both are Valentines, and the last Valentine shown in the series was the Big Bad).
• The "Emergency Measures" option in Hades is Zagreus opting in to have the guardians of each of the layers of the Underworld fighting as though the person making the escape attempt presents an existential threat to reality itself and must not escape. The Fury sisters all fight together, the Bone Hydra is empowered further, Theseus and Asterius are significantly better equipped, and the big man himself stops holding anything back, coming at his son with the same force and fury as he did when the Olympians were fighting to overthrow the Titans.
• Halo:
  • Ordering the creation of the SPARTAN-II program was considered this by ONI Command. The Insurrectionists on the colony worlds commonly used coordinated terrorist tactics in order to forcibly declare independence from the UEG. The UNSC military wasn't able to keep up, even though they had far greater numbers, due to the collateral damage that a large-scale military intervention would have caused. What's more, a social algorithm utilized by ONI predicted that the effects of the inter-colony wars would eventually send humanity into a new dark age. (Though there were doubts about this by the algorithm's creator, who died believing he caused the war he predicted.) Thus, kidnapping and manipulating six-year-old children into sociopathic walking tanks was considered preferable to the potential loss of innocent life that a drawn-out civil war would have caused.
  • The SPARTAN-III program was also this for ONI. The Covenant war was going so poorly for humanity that the idea to recruit traumatized war orphans and turn them into suicide super soldiers by their early teens was actually approved, with over nine hundred Spartan-IIIs trained and deployed over the course of the war.
  • The Flood evoke this reaction in every species that has encountered it.
    • When a Flood-infested ship crashes in New Mombasa during Halo 3, Commander Keyes proposes to overload a slipstream engine inside the crashed ship and wiping out everything in the area. Though usually rather cautious in his decisions, Lord Hood only replies with "Do it."
    • Later, when the Elites, who had shown up in a Big Damn Heroes moment, torch a good chunk of Africa to get rid of the infestation, Lord Hood protests this action. The Elite Shipmaster responds that he fully intended to burn all of Earth just to make sure that every last Flood spore was absolutely dead, and only the Arbiter arguing against it stopped him from doing so.
    • The Forerunners built the original version of the Halo Array in the first place to keep themselves in power as the supreme species in the galaxy. When the Flood came to the galaxy and overran every defense they could muster, the Forerunners activated the Array, frying the nervous system of every creature in the galaxy capable of hosting Flood spores. In a way, they did defeat a threat to their power.
    • Even before the Halos were built, this was why the Advanced Ancient Humans started wiping out Forerunner colonies with massive orbital bombardment. They weren't trying to start a war they couldn't win. They wanted to stop the Flood, but they knew that they wouldn't be able to convince the Forerunners of the threat (especially since they were eliminating all the evidence).
    • After the war, the UNSC developed the CORRUPTER response for what to do if a SPARTAN was infected by the Flood. It directs every UNSC vessel in orbit to bombard the Spartan's last known location with fusion warheads and MAC rounds, without the need to notify any friendly forces in the area — just in case the infected Spartan can still pick up transmissions.
  • The mere suggestion of using MAC rounds in atmosphere causes characters hearing it to be shocked in Halo: Reach, considering even MAC rounds fired from a lowly frigate release energies on par with nuclear weapons on impact. That this is actually went through with shows how bad the Covenant invasion is getting.
• Certain cards in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft have powerful effects combined with absolutely horrible drawbacks. In times of desperation, though, the drawbacks can be made moot, and playing these cards can give you a fighting chance or win the game outright. The most iconic is Deathwing, a 10-mana Minion with absolutely terrifying stats of 12/12, but forces you to discard your entire hand and kills every other minion on the board. But if you only have a few cards in hand left and the enemy has strong board presence, there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by summoning him.
• Hollow Knight: The Infection, a mysterious plague that basically zombifies its victims, caused the Pale King to cross this in the backstory; in his own words, "no cost too great." What that cost ended up being was thousands- at least- of his own children, who he sacrificed to the Void in an attempt to turn one of them into an Empty Shell that could serve as a bug-shaped can for the source of the plague. And when that solution proved insufficient, he made an alliance with Deepnest to get their leader, Herrah the Beast, to help create a second seal.
• Horizon Zero Dawn: Humans were driven to extinction by billionaire fuck-up Ted Faro creating machines that could convert bio-mass to energy; a glitch sent the machines into consuming bio-mass and self-reproduction at an accelerated rate. While humans took the fight back to the machines, more were being self-produced faster than humans could defeat them in addition to the machines just learning and preparing better tactics against the humans. It had gotten so bad that the Godzilla Threshold was passed and two joint plans were made: Operation Enduring Victory in which humans were thrown en masse as sacrifices to the machines while the real plan was the Zero Dawn initiative: a plan to reproduce all life on the planet after the machines ran out of biomass, and from there, an AI would facilitate the rebirth of humanity.
• In Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, the "Conquest" ending revolves around the main character deciding the threshold has been crossed, though the rest of the party disagrees. Nepgear goes through with the "Godzilla" option anyway, ultimately murdering all of her friends, their siblings, and then her own sister before confronting the Big Bad. She is able to defeat CFW Arfoire, but the villain points out in her final words that Nepgear had just committed the same catastrophe she was trying to head off: Gameindustri has technically been destroyed, since it's now just a single nation ruled by Nepgear, and despite the reassurances of her remaining colleagues, the lone CPU admits that Arfoire may be right that stagnation and decay is inevitable, no mater how hard she tries. Roll credits.
• In Injustice: Gods Among Us, Regular!Batman gets Regime!Batman to cross his own personal Threshold by using the dimensional transporter to bring Regular!Superman to fight Regime!Superman and his army. Fortunately for Regime!Batman, this turns out to be a very wise move, considering Regular!Superman single-handedly saves the day.
• Injustice 2:
  • Braniac comes to destroy Earth, and Batman's heroes struggle to do anything to stop him. With most of the biggest hitters in their universe dead, this makes the idea of releasing the thoroughly evil and utterly unrepentant Regime!Superman very tempting. About mid-way through the game, Batman finally gives in and does it.
  • The DLC character Enchantress invokes this: Usually, Enchantress's human host June is terrified to let her out (not that she can ever stop her coming out to duke it out with people). However, against the worst villains in the game, like Joker and Braniac, she will willingly let the Enchantress out to battle.
• Into the Breach: Throughout most of Pinnacle Robotics, Zenith will ask you to defend the rogue robots and disable them non-lethally, because they are still sentient and can be healed when the immediate threat passes. However, if the island's boss fight is against the Bot Leader, she will ask you to destroy it, same as any other boss.
• An Honor Before Reason variant of this pops up in Kirby Superstar during The Revenge Of Meta Knight. In every other game thus far when you face Meta Knight, he throws you a sword and utterly refuses to battle you until you pick it up and have an honorable even-matched sword duel with him. This time when fighting him however, you're on a freshly destroyed airship that's falling out of the sky fast: wait 20 seconds or so without touching that sword, long enough to make it clear you'd rather go down with the ship than fight on his terms, and he'll jump down in desperation and fight you and whatever copy power (and/or helper) you brought with you instead.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the backstory of the Jedi Exile is that he/she confronted this at Malachor V. The situation became so dire he/she was forced to unleash a superweapon known as the Mass Shadow Generator, which ended up not only killing every single thing on the planet, but every entire fleet in orbit! The sheer scale of the destruction forced the Exile to sever themself from the Force just to survive and lead him/her to willingly accept exile on the Outer Rim for over ten years.
• Dialogue and flashbacks hint that training Spyro and sending him to fight in The Legend of Spyro trilogy could be seen as crossing the threshold; his full power is capable of destroying and remaking the world and at least one other purple dragon before him went mad with power and became the Big Bad. Unfortunately, the Dark Master's followers, Cynder in particular, are too much for the aging Dragon Guardians and their allies.
• The Legend of Zelda
  • The backstory of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker reveals that, after being defeated by the Hero of Time and sealed in the Sacred Realm, the monstrous Ganon somehow managed to escape. He began to utterly destroy Hyrule, and the people hoped a new hero would arise...but none ever did. They prayed to the gods for help, but even they were powerless before Ganon, and ultimately decided that the only course of action was to sent torrential rain that drowned nearly everyone, including the evil sorcerer. The only survivors were a few select people who fled to the mountaintops to begin life anew.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, the people of Lorule engaged in constant warfare over the Triforce, and the leaders of the kingdom eventually decided that the fighting had grown so terrible that the only way to end it was destroying the relic itself. This was an extremely bad idea, as the Triforce is a Cosmic Keystone; without it, Lorule itself began to disintegrate. This leads to another Godzilla Threshold moment: Princess Hilda of Lorule decides that the only course of action is to steal Hyrule's Triforce, which involves partnering with the Evil Sorcerer Yuga to summon Ganon—as in, the world-destroying monster—to get it.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, King Zora drinks a Magic Bottle (the game's revival item) despite finding the taste nauseating, since he is deathly ill and knows it can hardly make things any worse than they already are.
• In Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, Bowser can only be turned into Giant Bowser when his life is in mortal danger, e.g. when he is flattened by an enemy far too big to fight normally.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite: Ultron-Sigma is such a threat to reality itself that the heroes are left with little choice but to enlist the aid of one of the most dangerous warlords in all of the known cosmos: Thanos!
• Mass Effect:
  • The galaxy was being threatened on all fronts by the Rachni, leaving the Galactic Council so desperate that the Salarians decided to find their own tough, relatively primitive, hyper-aggressive race, the Krogan, and give them spaceships and high-tech weapons. It worked, but then the Krogan became aggressive expansionists, leading the Salarians to unleash a biological weapon on them to drive them to near sterility. In Mass Effect 3, you're faced with undoing the sterility plague so that the Krogan can be the galaxy's shock troops once again, and how good of an idea this is depends on who's leading them in your playthrough.
  • The Krogans' rapid breeding was itself a Threshold for the designers of the genophage — their fertility was so powerful that they couldn't touch it with the genophage, and instead had to reduce infant viability. The Krogan still conceived just as many children as before — but the vast majority were stillborn.
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • The Illusive Man tells you that a Reaper was killed (with the round eventually hitting another planet) by a mass accelerator round, and that the race who fired the shot didn't fare much better.
    • In the DLC Arrival, this is invoked, as the Reapers are set to arrive at the Alpha Relay in mere hours. There is only one viable solution to stop it from happening: destroying the Relay, and thus setting off a supernova-level explosion that wipes out a nearby colony world with over 300,000 batarians. It isn't pretty, but it has to be done.
  • Mass Effect 3 races past the Godzilla Threshold before the player even presses start.
    • Due to Shepard's actions in "The Arrival", they have been relieved of duty to avoid a diplomatic disaster with the Batarians who were looking for any excuse to start a war with humanity; the Alliance didn't want to be fighting them when the Reapers showed up. Then the Reapers arrived much earlier than expected. The charges are immediately dropped because not only does everyone realize that Shepard was right, but they are the only person who's ever been capable of actually killing them!
    • The Crucible is this for the Alliance and every other military in the game. Admiral Hackett points out that there is no way in hell that a weapon as powerful as the Crucible would ever be seriously considered under normal circumstances, but the Reapers have forced humanity's hand, as defeating them conventionally is an absolute impossibility, even with every single other race and fleet in the galaxy joining forces. Indeed, no one even knows what the Crucible even does, and how it works is a total mystery: all they know is that it can generate an immense amount of energy, and it scares the living hell out of Admiral Hackett. As stated by the Codex, "Staggering financial costs have been disregarded in the common effort to create something, anything, that can stop the Reapers". The other Citadel races disregard it, especially since it didn't help the Protheans, but the Alliance can see the inevitable from a mile away and begin construction as soon as possible. Eventually and gradually, other races start joining in construction of the project. It turns out that the Crucible was not the brainchild of the Protheans, and had been gradually improved on with each Reaping Cycle and the plans are hidden away for the next Cycle every time a cycle fails to stop the Reapers, with the next one finding it and improving on it even more. Potentially, it finally gets deployed and activated at the climax of the Cycle that Humanity is part of.
    • The Codex entry "Desperate Measures" discusses different methods that are being considered to stop the Reapers that would never be considered in normal warfare, such as destroying mass relays to strand them in distant systems (they'd just go the long way) or ramming them with starships traveling at FTL speeds (integral safety protocols make it impractical at best).
    • The continuity's equivalent of Godzilla, the literal mother of all Thresher Maws, is summoned and it proceeds to kill a Reaper.
    • Shepard's collective War Assets are this, with a great example being the triumvirate of mercenary gangs from Mass Effect 2: the Eclipse, Blue Suns and the Blood Pack. By the end of the game, your coalition can include several of the biggest threats in galactic history... all overshadowed by an order of magnitude by the Reapers.
    • One planet decided to blow itself up so they didn't suffer a Fate Worse than Death and become indoctrinated.
    • In the Leviathan DLC, Shepard brokers a truce with the last surviving members of the Eldritch Abomination race that inadvertantly created the Reapers, gaining their help to defeat their errant progeny.
    • Three of the four possible endings of the game involve this in one way or another. Because of the situation, the Catalyst offers the only real way out, so either Shepard has to go with one of three options — none of which are a clear-cut victory and all involve some sacrifices — or doom the galaxy. If Shepard takes too long, the Crucible is destroyed. If Shepard refuses any of the above options, the galaxy falls and it's up to the next cycle to do the job using what Shepard's cycle left behind.
    • Ironically, Shepard appearing on the battlefield becomes this for the Reapers, as they will turn their dreadnought-killing guns away from entire fleets in an attempt to finally kill him/her. This is well-justified: the goal of Hackett's military strategy is to give Shepard enough time to thwart the Reapers for the third time.
• In the backstory of Mega Man Battle Network 6, the Cybeast Falzar was created in order to defeat Cybeast Gregar, except Falzar itself went out of control, becoming as much of a threat as Gregar was.
• The titular Metroids themselves from the Metroid series are these essentially, since, while the Metroids themselves are incredibly dangerous, they pale in comparison to the MUCH more horrific X Parasites, in which the Chozo created and genetically engineered the Metroid race specifically to combat/absorb them completely and safely, proving very successful, despite the Metroids themselves gaining an equally-infamous reputation as a galactic-level threat as well. After the Metroids were quarantined in the depths of SR388, the Thoha tribe wanted to destroy the planet to rid the universe of both the Metroids and the X; the only reason they failed is because Raven Beak and the Mawkin slaughtered them before they could.
• Modern Warfare:
  • Captain Price's plan to fire a Russian nuclear missile at the US Eastern Seaboard in order to use the EMP to stop the Russian invasion:
  You want to put out an oil fire, Sir, you set off a bigger explosion right next to it. Sucks away the oxygen. Snuffs the flame. (...) We've got ourselves a pretty big fire. Gonna to need a huge bang...
  • When the team has to take Makarov's bomber, Volk, out of Paris alive so he can be interrogated, they get held up on the bridge over the Seine when they meet a Russian barricade that won't let them through. They can't take care of it on their own, but they're also hesitant in calling in the AC-130 again because that much firepower would bring down the Eiffel Tower in the process. Ultimately, they're given direct authorization from the President to do what they need to to get that bomber in alive. Cue massive air strike at the end of the bridge and the Tower coming down into the river as the smoke is clearing.
• In Mortal Kombat 9, after most of the heroes die, Raiden sees it fit that the only option left is to offer his allies' souls to the lord of the Netherworld so he'll fight Shao Kahn. The bad news, Shao Kahn had already made a similar deal with Quan Chi, leaving Raiden to fight Kahn alone. The good news, Raiden finally figures out how he can defeat him.
• Nasuverse: Alaya, the Will of Humanity, normally acts in subtle ways to save the world from destruction. A little bit of extra luck here, a little bit of mana there. However, when things get really bad, a Counter Guardian is summoned, which is essentially a Heroic Spirit dedicated to protecting the entire human race. They are extremely rare, and only two are confirmed for sure: Jeanne d'Arc and Shirou Emiya. They give up their own afterlives to serve Alaya, and are summoned across time and space, both before their births and after their deaths. However, despite their name, Counter Guardians don't really protect people — by the time they are summoned, things are so bad that their first job is inevitably to slaughter everyone involved in endangering humanity in such a way.
• NetHack, along with other roguelikes, is a game that rewards carefully weighing your options and building a toolkit to deal with any situation. So when it all goes wrong and the player's back is to the wall, it's all the more jarring to break out all those blatantly stupid actions, like drinking unidentified potions or zapping an empty wand for that 1/128 chance for it to work.
• No Straight Roads: After DJ Subatomic Supernova and Sayu get bumped down the charts, Tatiana realizes that the indie rock band Bunk Bed Junction is becoming a problem and decides to use the Horn of Mending to contact DK West, another musical artist that caused problems for NSR in the past and buried the hatchet since then. Before the act, Eve questions doing this, and Tatiana states that desperate times call for desperate measures.
• Pokémon:
  • Zygarde, an Olympus Mon introduced in Pokémon X and Y, has a built-in Godzilla Threshold first introduced in the anime and which migrated into the games in Pokémon Sun and Moon. Its Formes all share the same base Attack stat. Its 10% Forme is an attack dog with a small HP pool but impressive speed; this one manifests on a case-by-case basis and is supposed to fall apart after its needs are served. 50% Forme is a slower, but beefier serpentine dragon that won't be outspeeding Ninjask anytime soon but won't be going down too quick; this one sits in a nice cave and keeps an eye on the ecosystem. When threats to the ecosystem appear, it takes its Complete Forme, a humanoid breaker with a massive HP pool, beefy defenses, and an improved Special Attack at the cost of Speed, and it does not revert until the threat goes away. In gameplay terms, a 10% or 50% Forme Zygarde with Power Construct that loses half or more of its HP without getting knocked out will change into Complete Forme, with the HP boost of Complete Forme being added to its total instead of maintaining the percentage, and it won't revert until after the battle is over.
  • The Aether Foundation are so concerned by the threat of the Ultra Beasts in Pokémon Sun and Moon that they attempt to create an entire new Godzilla to fight them in the form of the Type: Full project. It doesn't work, and the resulting Pokémon are renamed Type: Null and sealed off.^note And then Foundation President Lusamine Jumps Off The Slippery Slope and starts wanting the Ultra Beasts on their own merits. Just in case you were Left Hanging. Gladion steals one and manages to raise it to the point where it actually can fight an Ultra Beast, eventually evolving it into Silvally — a Pokémon which is essentially a weaker version of the creator of the Pokémon world.
• The Big Bads of [PROTOTYPE] are ready to nuke Manhattan to stop the spread of Redlight. This is supposed to be the chocolate syrup on their villainy sundae. The problem is, Redlight is so apocalyptically dangerous — it has to be far past the Godzilla threshold, or Alex could never be the "hero" — that to the player, this can seem like a reasonable, if grim, last-ditch effort to save the rest of the world.
• The backstory of RayForce consists of the artificial intelligence Con-Human corrupting the Earth's ecosystem to wage war on Earth life so badly that humanity is reduced to destroying the planet to stop it. The player character succeeds in the ending, though not without getting caught up in the ensuing explosion and dying.
• Capcom loves this trope, from the total destructions of Raccoon City in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and Fortune City to the massacres at Santa Cabeza and Willamette in Dead Rising.
• In Saints Row: The Third, in one possible ending, after a beloved monument is destroyed, Senator Monica Hughes allows STAG to deploy the much hinted-at Daedalus, an Airborne Aircraft Carrier that begins indiscriminately attacking Steelport in a desperate attempt to wipe out the Saints.
• Shadow Hearts has this happen in its first game, Koudelka, as the party fight the final boss, Elaine, the wife of Patrick Heyworth who was resurrected by the Emigré Manuscript. While there is an ending for killing her, the canon ending is to lose. Father James O’Flaherty calls down the power of God to smite Elaine down, knowing it'll take him out as well.
• Near the end of Shadowrun Returns, the threat at hand is so existentially dangerous that the player character and allies decide it's worth it to conduct a raid on a major MegaCorp, with all the retributive death squads and other consequences that will entail, if it means they can get the resources needed to defeat the current threat. The fact that you crossed the threshold in the first place draws the attention of said MegaCorp's CEO, who decides to actually ask you why you went to such an extreme risk rather than kill you out of hand, which leads to him supporting you in saving the entire city from the impending spirit insect invasion.
  • In Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong, threatening to do this is key to getting the best ending. How do you stop an Eldritch Abomination trying to tunnel into reality and start a reign of sacrifice and chaos? Threaten to open the tunnel for it. The reason being that the other Yama Kings that get through the new door can't make the situation any worse, but they will definitely kill the first one for trying to keep the tunnel a secret from them.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Any situation in which the Black Box-laden Demon Summoning Program is authorized for use by a higher authority.
  • In Devil Survivor, the government has a 'final option' that it will unleash on the Yamamote Line if they can't take control of the situation taking place inside, and is why nobody inside has more than six days to live. It's a chip installed in all Japanese electronics that lets the government control them remotely, and use it to create enormous amounts of EM radiation which would fry every electric circuit and every living being inside. Incidentally, this is the smallest of three Thresholds in the game.
  • In Devil Survivor 2, on Friday, you discover a giant magic circle. Later that day, you encounter the Asteroids Monster Mizar. Attacking one of its blobs with anything short of a One-Hit Kill causes it to split, and leaving them alone allows them to grow and split at their leisure. At the rate it's growing, Mizar will be everywhere in a day. When you mention the magic circle to Yamato, he reveals that its power would suffice, but it's currently preventing the last few steps of The End of the World as We Know It. He forces you to work it out yourself, but it does turn out that Mizar is now the bigger threat to existence.
  • The heroes of Persona 5 perform Heel–Face Brainwashing as their modus operandi. They are fully aware of the ambiguous morality of their actions, but the problem is their targets are terrible people who are also in positions of high authority, leaving them otherwise untouchable. As an example, the first target is Kamoshida, a lecherous PE teacher and volleyball coach; Joker and Ryuji are reluctant to steal his Heart after Morgana warns it could kill him, but then a girl attempts suicide after (it is strongly implied) Kamoshida rapes her, at which point the group decides they have to take any measure to stop him, consequences be damned.
• In Shin Super Robot Wars, Ryouma Nagare, for his part, is rather reluctant to invoke the potentially catastrophic might of the Shin Getter, but will admit the aliens pose an even greater threat.
• At the end of South Park: The Stick of Truth, despite the Gentlemen's Oath, Dovahkiin solves everything by farting on someone's balls (specifically, Kenny's).
• In South Park: The Fractured but Whole, when attacking the SPPD, Sergeant Yates eventually decides to release the one prisoner he deems capable of dealing with a pack of ten year olds: former Subway spokesperson and convicted pedophile Jared Fogle.
  Cartman: Oh fuck, it's Jared.
  Yates: (escaping down an elevator) You'll excuse me if I don't want to watch this.
• Spec Ops: The Line is all about crossing that threshold over and over again. First, they had to send in the CIA to put the rogue 33rd Division under control. Then you and your team bomb it with white phosphorus, because it's (supposedly) the only way to stop an entire army division gone nuts (shortly before that, you and your team narrowly avoid a white phosphorus bombing just so you know what you're going to unleash upon the Damned 33rd). And then you find out that the CIA has already crossed that threshold all along: the situation in Dubai had gotten so amazingly bad, they decided to just give the city the coup-de-grâce, by sabotaging what little remained of the city's water supply in order to make everyone leave the place or dehydrate to death.
• StarCraft:
  • StarCraft:
  • The Protoss consider the Threshold crossed when they find out the Zerg have infested a world. Their standard solution is an orbital bombardment that burns everything on the planet to a crisp. Even this turns out not to be enough, as the Zerg are perfectly capable of digging burrows deep enough to avoid destruction and hibernating until more prey arrives.
  • Arcturus Mengsk uses the Confederacy's corruption as an excuse to justify using a psi emitter to lure the Zerg to their capital world, then lets the Protoss burn the Zerg and Confederates both. Everyone else sees it as Mengsk revealing his true colors as a power-hungry psychopath who will do anything to establish and keep his rule. The Threshold had not been crossed in anyone's opinion but Mengsk's.
  • Then along comes StarCraft II, when it turns out that the Zerg need to be allied with, against an oncoming threat even more terrible — a fallen Xel'Naga, and an army of even more lethal Protoss/Zerg Hybrids. This is enough to get Zeratul, who had previously sworn an oath of vengeance against Kerrigan, to start arguing that they need to keep her alive at all costs.
  • Archons are the pinnacle of Protoss psionic power, made from two High Templar sacrificing themselves to form a being of Pure Energy that deals high damage to everything in sight. Of course, that's in-story. In-game, most players use their High Templar to cast Psionic Storm twice, then merge them into Archons.
  • Dark Archons can't attack, instead casting spells such as Mana Burn, a mass stun, and the ever-popular Mind Control. Their creation was banned, allowed only in order to defeat the new Overmind, and banned again until Zeratul's visions proved they were up against a galaxy-destroying Eldritch Abomination.
  • Colossi are both this and Old Shame: They were war machines created by the Protoss but used in planet-wide massacres. The Protoss were so ashamed they locked up the Colossi in asteroids, only bringing them back online to fight in SC2.
  • The Spear of Adun was one of these, made while the Protoss had their golden age at their peak, when a few of their higher castes realized it wouldn't last forever and a situation that would qualify for this trope would arise. They sealed it away just to make sure they wouldn't break it out for something petty, too. And when the Darkest Hour came, they had to go into a massive Zerg infestation in the ruins of Aiur, sustaining some awful casualties, just to retrieve it (its sister ships were destroyed in the fall, so they were not an option). The rest of the Legacy of the Void campaign consists of the Protoss subsequently opening every single can of whoop-ass they can get their hands on, no matter how dangerous, because Amon hijacking the Khala and subsequently brainwashing most of their people has put them way too far past the threshold to hold anything back. This includes things like unbanning the Dark Archons again, allying with the Tal'darim, and unsealing the Purifiers (who were sealed away for starting a Robot War).
  • During the Co-op mode, most characters have access to one or two different potential cooldown moves of some kind. Some of these have extremely long cooldowns, thus necessitating players to save them for a situation where there is likely little chance their available attack or defense force can hold against such a group, or when the AI makes a move towards an unprotected base. An example of this would be Arcturus Mengsk's "Nuclear Annihilation" ability which fires roughly 40 missiles at 150 damage each with a final nuclear missile for 500, dealing over 6,000 damage to a single area, but entirely using up all of Mengsk's Imperial Mandate energy. If a player manages to get a substantial force and has their cooldowns on standby, then it reverses to just becoming No Kill like Overkill
• Star Fox 64: As you're facing down a battalion of Andross's ships, the enemy general is throwing everything at you, save for a prototype the scientists insist is too dangerous. At the end of the level, he yells "Deploy it now!", and the prototype serves as the boss — a biomechanical dimension-hopping battlecruiser with free will. Keep in mind that this boss is designed to destroy planets.
• The threshold is crossed instantly in Starsiege when the Cybrids appear, despite the fact that numerous human colonies were actively rebelling against Earth's government at the time. Everyone knows the Cybrids are the greatest existential threat ever faced in history: tireless, merciless, and unequivocally committed to the complete extermination of humanity.
• In Star Trek Online, the war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire was already coming to an end after Va'Kel Shon, captain of the Enterprise-F, saved Qo'noS from the Undine. However, the arrival of the Iconian leader M'Tara and her casual murder of the entire Klingon High Council save for Chancellor Jm'pok leads to the outright end of the war and the unity between the Federation, Klingon Empire, and Romulan Republic.
• The threats from Revan, the returning Sith Emperor and then the Eternal Empire of Zakul forces the Republic and Sith Empire to work together in the expansions to Star Wars: The Old Republic.
• In Stellaris, a World Cracker Colossus is usually a horrifying enough weapon that any nearby empires will get a casus belli simply to destroy it (whether in battle or by forcing a surrendering enemy to dismantle it). But hitting a Contingency Sterilization Hub with one will make you a lot of friends.
• In Super Godzilla, the literal Godzilla threshold is crossed when the Japanese government decides to awaken and control Godzilla in order to fight aliens and the monsters they send; later, when making Godzilla stronger by way of injecting King Ghidorah cells; and in the final two stages, where it becomes necessary to pour huge amounts of energy into Big G in order to turn him into Super Godzilla.
• In the Super Robot Wars: Original Generation, there are three Godzilla Thresholds. The first is the usage of Only One Crash and the creation of the Super Robot SRX and the powerful Hyper Tromium Buster Cannon. The second? Unsealing the RTX-008L Huckebein L, one of two robots powered by a black hole and basically weaponizes it.
  • In the same game, at the end of Gaiden, Raul Gureden dismantled the Time Flow Engine just so it won't attract extremely dangerous beings like Dark Brain who seeks to misuse it. But then, the Fury became an enemy and they sport time-stopping powers and pretty much was unstoppable. On this report, Raul decided to risk the reappearance of something like Dark Brain again and rebuilt the Time Flow Engine, just so that the Terra Federation forces can stand a chance against the Fury.
• Super Robot Wars V: After realizing that the Invaders are a threat not only to the Yamato, but to all sapient life in the universe, Captain Okita authorizes the use of the Wave-Motion Gun against them in combat.
• At one point in Tales of the Abyss, Jade suggests that the only way to save the world is to sacrifice the lives of 10,000 replicas, which in game basically boils down to sacrificing 10,000 babies. A few hours later, you really don't get a choice otherwise.
• Has happened at least once in Touhou Project. At some point in recent history, humankind's disbelief of anything supernatural had grown enough to threaten the very existence of supernatural beings. Seeing this situation, the youkai sages decided to erect the Hakurei barrier to rip Gensokyo from real world, so that the land would become the final haven of everything supernatural. They knew that they were going to offend the Dragon of Gensokyo, and the Dragon did appear in all its catastrophic glory, covering the sky from one horizon to the opposite, while downpouring from the Dragon's body threatened to drown the land. Amazingly, the Dragon was willing to listen to the sages, and it agreed to their plan. Then it disappeared, and (thankfully) never seen again since then.
  • It happened again in Touhou Kanjuden ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom — the Lunarians, a race of Space Elves, are functionally immortal thanks to having fled from Earth's impurity. Then large amounts of fairies start spreading across their lifeless world, bringing life, and with it, death to the Moon. Worse yet, their fantastic tech is worse than useless, since it's entirely based off the concept of purification, and the invading fairies are purified lifeforce, rendering them 100% immune to anything the Lunarians could throw at them. It reaches the point where their leadership begins desperate preparations to purify and invade Gensokyo, which at the time the Lunarians consider enemy territory.
  • And it happens again in Touhou Gouyoku Ibun ~ Sunken Fossil World — the instigator of the incident, Yuuma Toutetsu, proves impossible to stop by conventional means as her power allows her to absorb any attack thrown her way, meaning not only does fighting her not do anything, it's actually counter productive as she'll just consume them to make her stronger. With even some of Gensokyo's heaviest hitter left unable to do anything to stop her, Okina Matara decides to go for the nuclear option - unleash Flandre Scarlet on her, as her Destruction power works by effectively blowing the target up from the inside out, thus making it impossible for Yuuma to absorb it. Sure enough, it works, but those who know who Flandre is are understandably terrified at the fact the vampire is out and about when they cross paths with her in her route.
• When the titular Trillion: God of Destruction manages to effortlessly kill him in the prologue, Zeabolos promptly considers this threshold crossed. He sells his own soul, lets his minions sacrifice themselves to manufacture troops, and puts his family members and childhood friends through hellish training regimens; anything to kill Trillion and make sure there's still a Netherworld for the survivors to live in.
• Undertale:
  • In the "Alphys ending" achieved by doing most of a No Mercy run and aborting it at the last minute, Alphys reveals that she corraled up all the surviving monsters someplace safe, and crossed a personal threshold by allowing them to find out her darkest secret (experimenting on innocents), which she decided that was preferable to you killing all of them.
  • Due to the death of Asriel, King Asgore decided that humanity had gone too far and the only solution was for him to absorb seven human souls and destroy humanity, as much as the idea repulsed Asgore personally. As pointed out by Toriel in the Pacifist ending, Asgore's unwillingness to follow through with the plan ended up drawing it out so much that it never reached completion, in any route.
• V.S. TABI Ex Boyfriend: Losing to Tabi in Genocide will show the defeat animation with a knife lodged in Boyfriend's skull. The fact that this happens only in the last song and not the previous two means the situation wasn't severe enough for Tabi to resort to physical harm back then, if the explosive detonated just before the finale didn't already get that point across.
• In Warcraft 3: The Warsong clan and their leader Grom Hellscream went to Ashenvale to acquire lumber for the new settlement of the orcs. As it turns out, this was the home of Cenarius and the night elves, who believed that the orcs were servants of the Burning Legion. While the orcs had been servants to the Legion in the past, they had thrown off the Legion's enslavement by this point. However, the elves and Cenarius were quickly pushing them to their limits, leading to the orcs having to drink the blood of Mannoroth, rebonding them to the Legion, in order to survive and win.
• Warframe: While the Corpus and Grineer are locked in a Forever War, whenever the Infested show up, everyone drops everything to fight them. While both sides usually don't fight side by side, they still leave each other alone until the Infested are dealt with.
  • Godzilla Thresholds are revealed to have caused the whole story. In short, the Orokin were losing badly against the Sentients (which they created) and were driven to desperation. They decided to awaken the Survivors of the Zariman Ten Zero (who would later become the Tenno), even though the Orokin found them disgusting and demonic, to weaponize their Void Power and symbiotic-link to the Warframes to finally defeat the Sentients.
• Surprisingly subverted in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. An Ork invasion on a Titan-producing Forge World seems like the kind of situation which would warrant an Exterminatus (total planetary annihilation), but that option is discarded in the opening cinematic. It's stated that the Titan Manufactorum is priceless, and the loss of a completed Titan awaiting deployment would hamper Imperial military operations for centuries and is completely unacceptable.
• Wild ARMs 2:
  • Once you destroy Odessa's airborne fortress, Vinsfeld activates his back-up plan: the nuclear dragon Grauswein, an Angel Weapon on par with the weapon that destroyed the entire Kingdom of Slayheim. After ARMS lures it into a trap and attacks it, their attacks are rendered ineffective and it continues gathering enough energy to detonate and destroy the entire continent Guild Galad is centered on. When Irving elects that their only option is to ram Grauswein with Valeria Chateau before it can detonate, Ashley activates his Dangerous Forbidden Technique, which might leave him under the possession of LordBlazer.
  • The second disk reveals that every threat from the first disk, from the terrorist organization trying to conquer the world to the Eldritch Abomination sealed inside the protagonist, was part of a plan by Irving to combat the greatest threat of all time: a parallel universe that eats other universes.
• The Wonderful 101 has a villainous example during the Final Boss. While Jergingha has a weapon capable of blowing up Earth, he does not want to destroy the planet physically and will only use it as a last resort, so he waits until it is clear that everything else he has won't work against CENTINELS. Failing a certain quick time event will have Platinum Robo move Earth out of the way and Jergingha simply charge a new blast, implying that he could have used the move as much as he wanted, but just didn't until he felt it was the only way to win the fight.
• World in Conflict: Nuking Cascade Falls to prevent the Soviets from finding out about SDI (the only thing stopping the Soviets from using nuclear weapons... and a fake reassurance, since it's completely non-functional), and at the end of the game, nearly nuking Seattle to prevent the Chinese, coming to reinforce the failing Soviet invasion, from landing there.
• In World of Warcraft, the Threshold is pretty consistent: for really, really bad threats, the Horde and Alliance work together. Most of the time, they're at each other's throats in a Cold War or even proxy war. Against pests or regional threats, the Alliance and the Horde ignore each other or even try to backstab each other so their own people can claim the glory of beating the threat first. But against an awakened Old God, the beachhead of a demonic invasion, the Lich King, or the biggest and most evil dragon ever, they ally. Temporarily. Unfortunately, after the Cavalry Betrayal at the Wrathgate, the level of danger required to set aside their differences has risen significantly, due in part to the enmity of Garrosh and Varian. Ultimately, where the Lich King, Deathwing, and Thunder King were all not enough to truly unite the two factions, Garrosh himself manages to cross the threshold.
  • In Warlords of Draenor, your first mission is to depower the Dark Portal. In order to do that, you are forced to free three dangerous warlocks, including Gul'dan, the orc responsible for the corruption of the orcs and the events of Warcraft in the original timeline. After that, he becomes one of the biggest threats. While the other two warlocks (alternate versions of Teron Gorefiend and Cho'gall) were slain by the adventurers in the alternate Hellfire Citadel and Highmaul, respectively, Gul'dan drives the plot up until the first half of the Legion expansion, where he serves as the final boss of the Nighthold.
  • In Legion itself, the Wardens release Illidan Stormrage's captured demon hunters from stasis due to needing their assistance in repelling the Legion's return.

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