Times where Karma Houdini Warranties ran out in Video Games.
- In Baldur's Gate, the player is forced to accept help from Neb, a Serial Killer who targets children in order to escape from prison, at which point Neb is never seen again for the rest of the game. In the sequel, Neb can be killed in an optional sidequest.
- After being the main antagonists in BlazBlue: Continuum Shift and causing a whole bunch of trouble for the cast and never suffering any sort of setback in their plans, karma comes and bites Hazama and Relius right in the ass in BlazBlue: Chronophantasma. Hazama is weakened significantly after being caught in a trap laid by Kokonoe and is ultimately killed by Hakumen in the True Ending. Relius gets his ass royally handed to him by Valkenhayn and while he comes out of it alive unlike Hazama, he's at Carl's and Litchi's mercy as the then former Imperator abandons him when he no longer proves useful.
- Although by Central Fiction, while it's unknown how, we might be seeing Hazama/Terumi gluing his warranty again because he's back. We'll just see how successful the gluing is once it's revealed HOW he survived. As it turns out, both Relius and Terumi managed to glue back their warranties, since Terumi turns out to be Susano'o, a Physical God and the original soul possessing the SUSANOO unit inhabited by Hakumen and goes to wreak more havoc... until Ragna himself tore it anew and burnt it to ash by obliterating him out of existence. Unfortunately, Relius managed to keep his warranty intact this time around.
- Bubsy: The Woolies from Bubsy 3D will always succeed in ruling the galaxy no matter what you do. In The Woolies Strike Back Bubsy destroys their fleet, ruining their plans.
- Darkest Dungeon has an interesting example in the prequel comics where the warranty was revoked before it was granted. The Houndmaster's comic has him tracking down a cult sacrificing people to dark gods... only to discover it's comprised of his higher-ups in the city guard. Before this comic came out, however, the Bounty Hunter's comic was released, showing him kicking in the door of a tavern and utterly slaughtering a group of criminals. Those criminals are the cult from the Houndmaster's comic. The Houndmaster may not have brought them to justice, but they didn't escape for long.
- At the end of the third act of Diablo III, Adria is revealed to be a traitor to the heroes, using her daughter as a vessel for bringing back Diablo himself, but leaves through a portal as all Hell is breaking loose and does not appear again for the rest of the game, leaving you to fight the Prime Evil and his horrors in the fourth act without any kind of comeuppance being brought upon her for her actions. But come the Reaper of Souls expansion (released two years after the base game), Act V comes along, which has you fighting a Fallen Angel and his horde of Reapers who want to exterminate humanity. Adria resurfaces in the middle of the act, resulting in you hunting her down in order to get some important information from her and to make her pay.
- In Dissidia Final Fantasy, Chaos is the main villain of the large-scale divine conflict that the heroes are participating in, but Shinryu is largely responsible for the conflict existing in the first place, and is feeding on the power born from it. Chaos gets a boss fight, but Shinryu is his summon, and gets away scot-free. Come Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, a new pair of gods are concocting a separate conflict with no input from Shinryu, and the dragon returns to the world with intentions to feed on the power again; when the gods and their champions realize this, everyone bands together to kick his ass for it.
- Doom³: At the end of the main campaign, Dr. Betruger's plans to help Hell invade Earth are foiled, but the man himself survives and is transformed into a powerful demon. In the expansion Resurrection of Evil, another marine finally kills him.
- In Fable, the Player Character and other members of the Heroes Guild were all Nominal Heroes who only cared about getting paid, glory, or other selfish motivations and would flip-flop between helping the commoners or slaughtering them at the drop of a hat. Fable II reveals that soon after firearms became widespread, the Guild was destroyed by commoners who'd gotten fed up with its disregard for their well-being.
- In Far Cry 5 Joseph Seed won no matter what ending you got, with the game's canonical ending having him outright win completely, as his prediction about the end of the world became true with nuclear war occurring, and the player character is now his to brainwash. But karma hits him big time in Far Cry: New Dawn where his son went insane and had to be put down, he finally sees what he's been doing is wrong, and he either gets killed by his chosen one or has to live with the guilt. Then in Far Cry 6 it's revealed that New Dawn was All Just a Dream and he was actually arrested in 5.
- In Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, the Mysterious Girl is one of the main instigators of the events of the game and she always. Gets away. With everything. Also because there's more than one girl. And she also looks down on every playable character of the game, treating them only as nuisances, and always uses a controlled Eidolon to destroy the characters. But finally, she gets what she rightfully deserves in the Final Tale, when Bahamut regains his senses and blasts her with two Megaflares, with her trying to cast Reflect with no avail. That. Was. ''Satisfying''. On another note, after that fight, you'll come across a couple of areas where those girls are found as random enemies. But you can defeat them. Time for some heavy payback!.
- In Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
- Myson is the boss of Yuri and Constance's shared paralogue, and gets away with turning some people into Demonic Beasts and attempting to murder Duke Gerth. He later reappears as a midboss in one of the final two story battles of all routes save Crimson Flower, where you can give him some long-overdue payback.
- On the Crimson Flower route, those who slither in the dark remain at large at the story's conclusion, but the ending makes it clear that they're next on the chopping block. Several character endings make mention of the battle against them.
- Freedom Force: The page quote relates to Tombstone's backstory. His wife was murdered by his jealous neighbor who pinned the crime on him. On the day of his execution, the neighbor was there among the view audience, likely for a final laugh. Before the execution could be put through, Energy X strikes Nathan Graves, turning him into the aforementioned Anti-Hero, and takes the opportunity to confront the neighbor who is quick to spill the beans. There is no mention of what happened to the neighbor afterward, but it's likely that was given the same punishment.
- In Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony, Rocco Pelosi never faces any comeuppance for all the trouble he caused Luis and Tony. When he resurfaces in Grand Theft Auto V as a talent agent, karma catches up with him hard. First, Michael whoops his ass in a fistfight after he tries to extort money from Solomon Richards. Then, he gets killed by Michael after physically assaulting Solomon.
- Guilty Gear: After spending multiple games screwing other characters over for shits and giggles, I-No is ultimately killed by Sol in the climax of Strive. Her send-off, however, is surprisingly tragic.
- Horizon Zero Dawn: At the very end of the game, all you get to find out is that Theodore "Ted" Faro, the man who ultimately kickstarted the apocalypse and ruined attempts to stop the apocalypse in the name of profit and saving face, ultimately got the people that tried the hardest to save humanity killed and their ultimate repository of human knowledge deleted completely so that no one would know it was his fault... and then proceeded to retire to his own personal fortress-resort, with plenty of food, water and entertainment and no threats that could reach him; even the possibility of dying of old age wasn't certain, depending on cryogenic advances and the scientists he did take with him. But in Horizon Forbidden West we find out in absence of a proper hell, he accidentally created one for himself. He forced one of his remaining scientists to subject him to genetic longevity treatments, all in order to greet the survivors of humanity himself and guide them as a sort of godly figure with his remnant knowledge. However, the treatments were imperfect, and while extending his life also caused mutations; the scientist ultimately committed suicide rather than perfect the technique and endure even one more day with Faro bossing him around. Faro himself decided he'd just huddle up to the geothermal generator to provide his body energy and wait the mutations out... and so, he survived to the game's time. As a gigantic pile of tumors and fleshy moss wrapped around the generator, incapable of moving, and in too much pain to vocalize coherently or even think properly, with the thought he was humanity's true murderer festering in his head the whole time, and completely alone with no one he could force to tell him otherwise. Even Ceo, his declared inheritor and a man ready to worship everything Faro created and was, got so utterly revulsed at the sight of everything Ted Faro had become he immediately ordered him burned.
- Ikaruga ends with the Stone-Like, who successfully destroyed humanity and the protagonists at the end of Radiant Silvergun, finally destroyed itself by a Heroic Sacrifice from Shinra and Kagari.
- inFAMOUS: Sasha is the leader of The Reapers and responsible for infecting Empire City with a mind controlling black tar so that she could make new Reapers out of ordinary civilians. When Cole finally tracks her down and defeats her, she is saved by the First Son before Cole can do anything to her. She doesn't appear in the game again, meaning we don't see her suffer any actual punishment, but she most likely died offscreen along with all the other conduits in the canon ending of inFAMOUS 2.
- In LEGO City Undercover, the game’s true villain, billionaire Forrest Blackwell, had his scheme thwarted and his right-hand man Rex Fury arrested but remained on the loose with no presumable way to stop him from hatching a new scheme. Come the license’s reappearance in LEGO Dimensions, and Blackwell reappears as a boss, now fully beatable. In fact, once you beat him, police arrive and make certain he will be sent to jail.
- Lost Judgment:
- Hiro Mikoshiba bullied his high school classmate, Toshiro Ehara, into committing suicide back when the two of them were students, but managed to get away with his actions due to his reputation as a model student and his school not wanting to ruin his future. Four years later, Mikoshiba pays the price for his cruelty when he's abducted, tortured, and brutally murdered by way of having his throat slit by Akihiro Ehara, the father of Toshiro Ehara.
- Shinya Kawai brutally tormented and bullied his classmate, Mitsuru Kusumoto, which drove him to attempt suicide only to end up in a coma for thirteen years. While Kawai was expelled from his school, he still showed no remorse for his actions, even bragging about them to the locals of Kamurocho while working as a sleazy bar owner. Karma eventually catches him six years after his expulsion, when he's abducted by his former high school classmates and by Kuwana, his former teacher, then tortured and murdered by Reiko Kusumoto, Mitsuru's mother.
- There is an odd case with Luminous Avenger iX, in which the game takes place 100 years after the bad ending of Azure Striker Gunvolt where Asimov succeeded in killing Gunvolt and Joule and bending Sumeragi to his will with the power gap left by Nova's death. Copen gives him his just desserts and breaks his power over Sumeragi. In the main timeline, Gunvolt and Joule barely survive and chase him down before he can implement his plans.
- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: Despite spending the entire game doing many despicable acts, including selling MSF out to Skull Face and XOF, leaving Strangelove in the Mammal Pod to suffocate to death, trying to use the then-infant Otacon as a test subject for Sahelanthropus, and triggering a vocal cord parasite outbreak onboard Mother Base that forces Venom Snake to Mercy Kill several Diamond Dogs, Huey Emmerich is allowed to escape with his life, with Snake opting to simply exile him from Mother Base despite all of his men cheering for Huey's death; the worst punishment Huey receives is being forced to dump his precious robotic legs overboard or sink. Of course, as revealed in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, years later, Huey was Driven to Suicide after discovering his second wife cheating on him with his own son; not quite as remarkable at the time, but fans who wanted some payback after The Phantom Pain eagerly took to calling him "the man who was cucked to death".
- Mortal Kombat X, hoo boy was there a lot of warranty tearing. Mileena is reduced to a rebel with no truly loyal allies and gets killed by D'Vorah. Kano gets beat up by Sonya and then arrested by Special Forces, and Quan Chi is reduced to a Butt-Monkey from the moment Sonya stomped on his crotch and is offed by Scorpion near the end. Mortal Kombat 11 goes even further in one instance: After strikes one and two in the last two games, Sonya takes Present Kano threatening Johnny's life as strike three and shoots Past Kano in the head, mulching anything that resembles a warranty and killing him off for good... hopefully.
- No More Heroes, Sylvia Christel plays Travis like a fool and manipulates him into becoming the #1 ranked assassin under the false promise of sex. She gets away completely unpunished when the game ends. In No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, we learn that her husband divorced her and she is shown miserable working in a strip club.
- Persona 5:
- It's implied the palace bosses have flaunted their warranties for years via connections, prestige, or just buying people's silence before being targeted by the Phantom Thieves. Before the end, every last one gets thoroughly shredded, and the targets themselves publicly beg for arrest.
- There are also some minor antagonists that get their comeuppance as well. Principal Kobayakawa, the head of Shujin Academy and a member of The Conspiracy, got away with keeping a physically and sexually abusive teacher out of trouble for what can be assumed to be months at least. After he fails to discover the identity of the Phantom Thieves, his higher-ups decide to make him have a psychotic mental breakdown and have him die in what would otherwise be an accident. Granted, it was done to maintain the secrecy of the conspiracy and to sow distrust in the Phantom Thieves, but there's no denying his fate was very much deserved.
- The protagonist can suffer this should he try to date multiple girls. Not only is his infidelity found out on Valentine's Day, he's also beaten up by the girl(s) he cheated on (outside of the one he spent the day with, who never finds out). However, this is ultimately played with, since, assuming you date one of the girls on Valentine's Day instead of hanging out with Ryuji, you'll still get to keep their chocolate (a powerful SP recovery item) you receive from the date, Sojiro will give you a pity chocolate after your subsequent beatdown (which, while a pitiful SP recovery item, is still one more chocolate than you would've received for being faithful), and Sojiro will successfully salvage your relationships with the rest of the girls. This is played more straight in Royal, where female characters with maxed out platonic Confidants with now give Giri-Choco to the protagonist, meaning he'll receive one less chocolate for every girl he romances past the first one.
- The ending of Police Quest 1: In Pursuit of the Death Angel has Donald Colby, one of the pushers that supplied Lytton High School with drugs (including those that killed Jack Cobb's daughter via overdose), get off nearly scot-free with only a suspended sentence in exchange for information that led to Jesse Bains's conviction. In the second game, Colby was found dead in Steelton, murdered by Bains in revenge.
- Red Dead Redemption uses this as a deconstruction with former outlaw John Marston who wanted to live a quiet life with his family. However, Edgar Ross refuses to see him as anything but a criminal, and has his wife and son kidnapped to force John to hunt down the old members of his gang. Once the deed is done, Edgar has him shot down by a firing squad and sees too it that history only remembers John as an outlaw who tried to escape from justice. Years later, John's grown-up son hunts down Edgar and kills him in revenge. The message of the story is clear: no matter how you see yourself doing the right thing, your past sins will find a way to come back to you.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil 2: Brian Irons had raped a fellow student during his university days and completely got away with it due to his "outstanding excellence in academics". After becoming Chief of Police, he took bribes from Umbrella on a routine basis and blocked all investigations and claims performed by S.T.A.R.S. after the Mansion Incident in the first game, which basically meant that no one could do anything against him. Once the T-Virus broke out in Raccoon City, Irons then took down the remaining survivors in the police precinct and killed the mayor's daughter just to drag everyone down with him. It isn't until the mutated William Birkin kills him that Irons finally reaps what he sows.
- Zigzagged in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis: Sociopathic Soldier Nikolai, who has been murdering his fellow Umbrella Supervisors to steal their findings for greater profit, canonically gets away with it. But, if the player makes a specific choice by pushing the Nemesis off of the bridge to the Dead Factory, Nikolai attempts to assassinate Jill for the bounty Umbrella has on her head — which provokes the Nemesis to attack him and brutally rip him apart for getting in its way. The remake also makes his fate more ambiguous when Jill and Carlos defeat him at the very end, leaving him injured while they take off in a helicopter.
- Albert Wesker in Resident Evil is revealed to be The Mole in the S.T.A.R.S. unit by working with Umbrella and killing off his teammates as test subjects against Umbrella's monsters. Wesker gets gored to death by the Tyrant, but Resident Evil – Code: Veronica reveals that Wesker is alive due to a virus in his body that revived him while also granting him Super-Strength and Super-Speed. Wesker orchestrates most of the events in Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5 where many people get kidnapped, murdered, and experimented on. This also includes Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield's partner. By the end of the fifth game, Wesker finally gets his karma warranty revoked when Chris and Sheva destroy him with rocket launchers.
- Resident Evil 7: Biohazard has Lucas Baker; after Ethan escapes from his death traps and acquires the serum ingredients, he doesn't bother pursuing Lucas and instead focuses on escaping, letting him get away. This doesn't last long; the Not a Hero DLC, set shortly after the main game, has Chris Redfield sent in after Lucas. Lucas doesn't get out of the DLC alive.
- In Shadowrun Returns, a repeating motif of the series is that the true masterminds behind its Crapsack World, the megas, the CEOs and the Great Dragons will usually always come out smelling of roses even if you can defeat the monsters they were usually guilty of releasing in the first place. This trope comes into play in Hong Kong, where Josephine Tsang gets away with subverting the Fortune Engine, having drained over a decade of good luck from Kowloon Walled City, caused untold misery, and almost caused a Yama king manifestation. The warranty comes into play in the postgame, where bereft of the Fortune Engine and her heir her company collapses, she gets investigated for financial fraud and ends up hanging herself in a Wuxing debtor's prison less than a year later.
- Dr. Eggman has gotten away for the crimes he did in Sonic Adventures 1 and 2, but in Sonic Heroes he gets imprisoned by Metal Sonic and gets a one-sided beating from Team Chaotix for trying to bail out of paying them. Things haven't gone right for him ever since.
- In South Park: The Fractured but Whole, Stephen Stotch (Butter's dad) is featured as one of the bosses. Do you know what that means? It means that now you get to lay the smackdown on him for all the times he unjustly punished and abused Butters. It'll be even better if Professor Chaos is the one to finish him off, especially if it's with his Ultimate Power Move, the "Hammer of Chaos"! It goes without saying that fans felt very good about this.
- In Starbound, Asra Nox, the leader of the Occasus cult bent on unleashing the Ruin upon the universe, escapes from the player as the Ruin is destroyed. As of the 1.4 update, she reappears at the end of the Bounty Hunter questline and, after an intense battle against her and her Swansong mech, is finally captured and brought to justice.
- In the Street Fighter universe, M. Bison steadily built his empire after every entry in the series, with him getting setbacks at most, but never truly defeated. Nash, Guile's best friend and mentor failed and paid with his life, Chun Li's attempts to avenge her father's death have failed, and Cammy overcoming her brainwashing and rebelling against Bison didn't stop him from making a group of cloned assassins based on her DNA called "Dolls". Even villain rivals, like Seth from Street Fighter IV have failed to defeat him. And by the time of Street Fighter V, Bison, now middle-aged, is at the height of his power. His Shadaloo empire has spanned worldwide, and he seems unstoppable. Until the ancient power, the Illuminati, decides to step in and stop Bison once and for all. They bring Nash back to life, and this combined with other circumstances, including an unlikely hero in Rashid who was just looking for his friend, defeats Bison for good, with the Illuminati replacing him as the main villain threat in Street Fighter III, which takes place directly after V lore-wise.
- If there is a mecha anime villain that got away with their crimes in their home series and then said anime gets included in Super Robot Wars... it's time for the group of heroes that believe in justice and hope to come down to these villains and burn away their warranties to a crisp with a great dose of hot blood and sheer over-the-top badassery.
- Byakuren Hijiri from Touhou Project. She once posed as a Youkai exterminator for the humans while secretly colluding with the Youkai; this was solely done just so to assure her power from Youkai wouldn't "disappear." She eventually came to genuinely care for Youkai and realized this wasn't the way to go about things, thus changed her ways, relocating youkai to places where they couldn't harm humans while trying to make peace between the two species from behind the scenes. This got found out, and the humans who trusted her to be an exterminator before called her a traitor, and sealed her down in the demon world, Makai.
- Turtle Head: In the original game and the main mode of Unmasked, the titular Serial Killer is able to flee the police and get away with his crimes- even in the true endings, where Detective Mason has set up police everywhere, we never find out if he is ever captured. Not so much in the true end of Emma's Story, where thanks to Emma, Mason is finally able to nab him.
- Wolfenstein:
- Near the end of Wolfenstein: The New Order, Deathshead's warranty finally expires. After seventeen years in-universe and thirteen years in real life, B.J. finally gets to kill Deathshead, though not without Deathshead nearly killing B.J. by blowing himself up with a grenade.
- Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus sees the warranty of Frau Engel expire: In The New Order, she is last seen reeling in horror at B.J. killing her beloved Bubi, and even then, only over teleconference. She becomes the Dragon Ascendant in The New Colossus and hounds B.J. over the game, making his life hell until he finally buries a hatchet in her skull on international television.
- World of Warcraft:
- After getting away with his crimes in the main games, Arthas finally faces justice in Wrath of the Lich King when Tirion Fording shatters Frostmourne and hacks him to pieces with the rest of the heroes.
- The Burning Legion is an army of demons who are able to invade worlds without fear of retribution because they are very hard to kill. When they die, they are reborn in the Twisting Nether; however, if a demon is confronted and slain there it is Deader than Dead. In addition, there are some weapons that can do it, such as the sword ''Ashbringer''. As of the Legionfall update, confronting them there is exactly what the armies of Azeroth plan to do, and it happens to the de facto leader, Kil'jaeden. The following patch even hints the Burning Legion's method of regenerating in the Twisting Nether is about to be discovered and done away with, meaning the Burning Legion across all dimensions would lose their ability to come back. Ultimately, Sargeras himself is sealed away, causing the army to fall apart.
- After her many atrocities that include making two Deals with the Devil, Queen Azshara is finally fought as a boss in Battle for Azeroth, but instead of dying then and there is taken by N'Zoth upon her defeat and is later shown being tortured in Ny'alotha. It doesn't stick, but it's a start.
- Trade Prince Gallywix gets away with being a Jerkass for several years, but goblin players get a chance to finally enact some revenge in the storyline for their heritage armor, ending with him being supplanted by Gazlowe as the leader of the Bilgewater Cartel.
- Shadowlands sees Sylvanas Windrunner get her comeuppance for her many crimes, as the Jailer leaves her to be captured by the Alliance and Horde after her final defeat. After the Jailer is defeated, she's left in the custody of Tyrande, who sentences her to gather every last soul sent to the Maw and have them sent off to the afterlives they deserve- an Impossible Task that she will never complete.
- Just before that, Kel'Thuzad, having escaped death many times, is finally killed when his Soul Jar is smashed during a battle and he dies for real.
- Mal'Ganis, who played a large part in Arthas becoming the Lich King, is killed for good in the Sepulcher of the First Ones after having lost his Resurrective Immortality.
- In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, throughout the first half of the game, Metal Face gets away with killing countless residents of Bionis, including some of the protagonists' closest friends and family. As a Faced Mechon, he's impervious to most weapons, including the Monado (and even when the Monado can damage him, he retreats before taking any serious punishment). Once Zanza upgrades the Monado to the Monado II, which can damage Faced Mechon, Metal Face is just as vulnerable as any other Mechon, and he finally gets defeated with the Monado II at Sword Valley.
- Nohman only appeared at the end of Zone of the Enders to hand Leo his ass in a Hopeless Boss Fight, forcing Leo to retreat. Nohman would later take center stage as the main antagonist of the sequel, The 2nd Runner, where he finally meets his end at the hands of Dingo.
