Critical Existence Failure - Television Tropes & Idioms

"It doesn't matter how much health you have. It's just... Are you dead yet? Are you dead or are you alive? If you are alive, continue fighting. If you are dead, retry."
— Kung-Fu Jesus; Lets Play God Hand

No matter how much you get hurt or what it is that's doing the damage, the worst you'll show for it is blood decals on your suit. You laugh as Universal Poison does 5 points of damage per step, you shrug off the flying chainsaw robots like nothing, and you're perfectly fine as long as you have one Hit Point left. However, if something removes that last point, even if it was the slightest of injuries, it can cause you to have a sudden Critical Existence Failure and explode in a spray of gore.

Those subject to this seem to be held together more by their own life force than anything tangible, as the act of dying instantly makes them as durable as wet tissue paper in a blender.

Most of this is a function of fair gameplay, especially fighting games, where making a character weaker over time would just make them progressively more vulnerable and susceptible to damage. (Of course, that doesn't make Cherry Tapping any less painful.)

Compare Strong Flesh Weak Steel. See also Wafer Thin Mint, which goes outside of games. The Chunky Salsa Rule and Subsystem Damage are this trope's opposites in some ways. If Critical Existence Failure is always a danger, the character is a One Hit Point Wonder.

Examples

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Board Games

Live Action TV

Tabletop Games

While most Tabletop RPGs have some kind of wound penalties, Dungeons And Dragons does not, thus ensuring that any character with at least one hit point remaining (and several without that) is capable of any kind of action and exertion. This is Handwaved in some editions by the claim that hit points don't actually represent health, but the "ability to avoid injury" (despite the fact that they are recovered through bandages and magical curing spells). This, of course, inspired on RPG.net Fauxtivational Posters of bloodied and beaten (but still standing) characters with a caption of "I've still got one HP left!"
- In 3rd Edition you aren't dead until you reach -10 hp. At 0 hp you are disabled, and will lose HP with any action except movement that doesn't heal you. At -1 to -9, you are dying, meaning you fall unconscious and begin bleeding out at a rate of 1 hp per turn (unless you have an ability like Die Hard) unless healed or you reach -10 hp. You recover completely if you are taken out of negative hp via magical or mundane healing—if you aren't dying but you are still in negative hp, you remain unconscious; any healing stabilizes you.
  - Even funnier when a character with the Delay Death spell and -1000 HP or so gets tossed into an Antimagic Field.
  - This originated in the Dungeon Master's Guide in 1st Edition. CPR or bandaging wounds would bring a dying character back to 0 HP, and the character would need to rest for many weeks after to be able to fight again.
  - Oddly enough, all other tomes in the 1st Edition stated that at 0 HP the character was dead.
  - Also, drowning immediately sets your HP to zero. There are at least three ways to exploit this. One of them involves transfinite numbers.
- The 4th edition finally bites the bullet and takes the handwave to its logical conclusion; healing spells and bandages still recover hit points, but so do stirring speeches, special fighting moves, and even just taking a moment to catch your breath.
GURPS is notable for completely averting this trope by including shock penalties for every landed attack, specific rules for dismemberment and allowing characters to survive down to -5xHP as long as they make HT rolls at -1, -2, -3 and -4xHP. In fact the rules note that it is only as -10xHP that there is nothing left of the character.
- In addition, it's possible to perform called shots (by taking penalties to the roll) so that you can shoot (or stab) someone in the vitals (for extra damage) or in a limb (where a given amount of damage will cripple that limb). Note that the above-mentioned dismemberment rules are basically an extension of crippling rules—usually for use with really sharp blades.
Averted in some d20-based Tabletop RPGs, most notably Star Wars d20 (the Revised Core Rulebook edition), as well as Spycraft and its derivee, the Stargate SG-1 RPG. Hit points are split into vitality points, which represent the type of damage a character can shrug off relatively easily, and wound points, which represent serious injury. After running out of vitality points, the character is fatigued, suffers ability penalties and cannot run, but is still alive, and further attacks will damage wound points. (Vitality points increase with level; wound points do not.) Only after running out of wound points does a Critical Existence Failure occur. Some types of damage, like fall damage, affect wound points directly and ignore vitality points, as do critical hits. So if you roll well, it's entirely possible for a first-level character to one-shot Darth Vader.
- The Saga Edition of the d20-based Star Wars RPG would use hit points (for characters, vehicles, structures and objects alike), but both a damage threshold and a condition track. (Do damage equal to or greater than the damage threshold, the recipient moves down one step on the condition track, with a corresponding penalty to certain rolls: -1, -2, -5, -10, and then unconscious or unwilling-to-fight/resist.) Your character becomes unconscious if the damage is below its damage threshold, and killed or destroyed if the damage is equal to or greater than its damage threshold. An explanation in one of the preview articles was essentially that every blow failed to be serious or connect... except the one that dropped you to zero hit points.
Very averted in Unknown Armies—instead of players keeping track of hitpoints, they are tallied by the GM, who then describes the players' injuries back to them. Each injury must heal at least one hit point naturally, regardless of first aid, and heavy damage leaves permanent skill penalties.
Averted in Inquisitor—unless armour totally stops damage to a body part there are repercussions, both immediate and long-lasting. For example, a minimum-damage wound to the head will still cause minor stunning, whereas a heavy shot to the groin will knock them prone, stun them, make them bleed heavily, slow them down and possibly send them into system shock. The only chance of not having a negative effect is taking a weak hit to a limb (you can shrug off the first few points of arm or leg damage), but anything more than a graze will cause bad things to happen. And that's before you factor in blacking out from accumulated pain, or simply having them go Totally Batshit Crazy due to post-traumatic stress. And due to having their scrotum turned into steak tartare.
Averted in Battle Tech, a sci-fi miniatures game. As your 'Mechs (huge bipedal war machines of death) take damage, they can lose weapons, take engine hits, their gyros can be disrupted, and quite realistically the pilot can be killed with a headshot. Ammunition can also explode, critical heat sinks destroyed...whenever a 'Mech runs out of armor in a location, bad things happen.
- Played straight with Powered Armor units, however. You can strip all the armor off a trooper, but until you take out that last damage box representing the trooper himself, he fights at full power.
Averted in Mutants And Masterminds, which doesn't even have Hit Points.

Close Tabletop Games

Video Games

The Battlefield series plays this straight while on foot. You can be done to literally one hp point, but you will be able to function perfectly until you fall two feet and die. The vehicles on the other hand play this mostly straight, although damaged vehicles will smoke as they take more damage. If they catch on fire, they will on function for about ten seconds before exploded.
- The Project Reality mod averts this, damaged vehicles won't function well, and infantry will start to bleed out after taking so much damage. Bleed out enough, or take a lot of damage, your character vision will blur, and you have about a minute or so before becoming incapacitated.
Half-Life: You can leap off cliffs, walk through corrosive agents, withstand nuclear fire, and take enough bullets that the lead alone should have rendered you immobile, but you can run around with 1hp left without penalty. Should you then walk through a puddle of too-hot coffee, you die a horrible death. Another example is that anybody who dies from crushing damage explodes spectacularly, even if the "crushing damage" is from a ceiling dropping to the point where even hunching slightly would have rendered it a non-issue.
- A clearer example might be that if a living entity and a dead entity are equally distant from an explosion, then the living one will be flung backwards injured but completely intact, while the dead one will be gibbed.
  - This is even more jarring with Half Life 2's ragdoll physics: For example, if a rebel is being fired at by a gunship's high-powered machine gun, they will simply absorb the bullets until their health hits 0, at which point they die and are suddenly sent flying several dozen feet.
  - This was fixed in Team Fortress 2, where turrets, explosives, and the heavy's minigun all have a great deal of force.
  - Subverted in the Sourcemod Dystopia where getting hurt does not affect you performance at all until you lose all your armor. At that point, any damage results in significant knockback.
Enemies in Parasite Eve melt into puddles of goo upon death. Nobody in game seems to realize the implications of this, as they're caught completely off-guard whenever a very non-melted boss gets back up. This could have been explained away by invoking Everything Fades for technical reasons, had it not been clearly visible in cutscenes. Oops, Plot Hole!
Averted and played straight in Resident Evil 4. Enemies can hit you with everything from explosives to 3' spiked claws without injury, unless the hit would kill you, in which case you get an "execution scene". However, you move slower, your aim is less focused, and clutch your abdomen when low on HP, and there is one enemy that will instantly decapitate you, no matter how healthy you are. Also, like Parasite Eve, enemies melt when they die, and everybody finds it strange when an enemy that didn't melt gets back up.
- There are at least two enemies that can instantly kill you. One of which is the infamous chainsaw users (which come in both male and female flavors) and the other being the later stages of the parasite.
  - Apparently, everyone forgot Blind Gladiator Man. He stabs you in the face, for god sake!
  - Many bosses can also kill with one attack, especially later in the game. Usually these attacks give you a chance to dodges.
- Likewise in Dead Space.
Crashing the player ship in Wipeout XL/Wipeout 2097 causes the message "Critical Shield Failure" to appear. Also, the ship explodes, even if it was only grazing the wall at the time.
Averted in Resident Evil 2 and the Dino Crisis series, which instead use Game Breaking Injury. When your health is about halfway depleted, your character will slow down slightly and start clutching his/her ribs or arm, when it gets a certain amount lower, they will be reduced to limping, and in Dino Crisis, Regina starts losing blood and can bleed to death.
- The aversion becomes even more obvious (though still not perfectly realistic) in Resident Evil Outbreak, where your characters can be so crippled that they can't do anything except crawl feebly on the ground, only able to move properly once picked up by a teammate and healed up; they can't defend themselves when grounded, and the virus gauge sees a big jump in accelerated effect. Left 4 Dead had similar incapacitation up its sleeve, since it's also a game reliant on teamwork.
Silent Hill series: your character can get sliced and diced by demon children or bludgeoned or shot by demon nurses many times without external injury or disability, but when you're low on health, they keel over and die from being bitten by a bug or flicked by a mannequin. Pyramid Head has his One Hit Kill overhand knife attack, which just has to miss James by a few inches to register(bad collision detection programming). And when James' health his low, PH just needs to administer a Touch Of Death(which is normally a stranglehold attack).
Mega Man: Mega Man is completely fine with only one hit point left, even though the next hit will cause him to explode violently.
- Note that in later series, the characters (who are robots, mind) actually show that they are injured while standing still if they are low on health, usually in the form of holding one arm as if it were injured and breathing heavily. This doesn't keep them from performing any worse, of course.
- In an in-game mix of this and being Stalked By The Bell, Grey/Ashe comes across a pair of capsules with associated timers - these are Prometheus and Pandora's capsules. The two are set to die if they aren't maintained at regular intervals, and Albert uses this as a sort of blackmail to keep them in line with his plot. The two are still standing despite the abuse Grey/Ashe give them after the fight against them, but Prometheus barely has enough time to voice how he'll resort to omnicide before his clock hits zero. Pandora, as expected, times out about the same moment.
  - Actually, that last bit wasn't caused by the timer, but rather, the release of pent-up anger in the presence of so many Model Ws. Hell, it's even implied that they're not dead, but Grey/Ashe can't save them from the collapsing base. Either way, it still more or less fufills Albert's Xanatos Gambit.
Metroid: Samus Aran can stand in molten lava without permanent harm as long as she has energy left (and with the proper suit upgrade, without temporary harm), and can suffer shocks that would kill an ordinary woman... but once she's down to one point, bumping into a little spiked bug is lethal. This is possibly justified, however, as her health seems to equate to the life of her suit — in Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion, it explodes when she runs out of health, and in every game it starts beeping an alarm when she's in critical condition. Given the environments she traverses in most of the games, losing her suit would be fatal (if not instantly so).
- Note that the Captain N comics hang a lampshade on this. Samus gets damaged, and explains that her suit's power core has been breached, and it is about to explode.
- Also note that in the final boss battles of both Super and Fusion, taking hits from the Big Bad in question causes Samus to drop to one knee for several seconds, panting painfully. That Power Armor can be quite heavy if the power is drained.
Despite the "vivisection point" in the appropriately named Vivisector: Beast Inside, none of the enemies seem to really notice small things like huge chunks of flesh flayed from their torso, their entire skull exposed, or missing limbs until that final, decisive shot, and will keep on fighting like new until then. In fact, the German version of the game (currently the easiest to find through file-share, and which, due to German standards, is Bowdlerised) extends this further by not allow you to blow off any part of a human enemy, only the non-human ones, even when you take a nuke to their head.
Averted in the Fallout series of RPGs. One can target various locations on the enemy's body (such as the eyes and the groin), and crippling one of these areas has a direct and notable impact on gameplay. NPCs are also capable of getting scared and running away. Their deaths are still incredibly violent, though.
- The Bloody Mess trait in those same games can be seen as a straight example of this trope, as it ensures everyone around you dies in the most gory way possible. (Technically speaking, every single death executes the animation for death by extreme overkill via that source). Just for fun. Its picture at the top of the page sums it up pretty well.
Averted in Dwarf Fortress, as every creature works off a surprisingly complex wound-handling system, in that every hit does a certain amount of damage to a certain part of the body. Many of the kills are done with blood loss, usually either from severed limbs or hacked out chunks. This means that even if the creature is comparatively high on HP, it could take a random gash and die rather slowly, or that a creature missing most of its limbs, eyes, and internal organs can still take a few hits if it hadn't bled out already. Not to mention (most) creatures feel pain, and thus a single wound in the right spot (like a broken leg) can effectively cripple a creature and make it almost completely defenseless in a fight.
Metal Gear Solid is legendary for a particular use of this—Solid Snake has cigarettes, which allow him to see hidden laser traps and keep his hands steady while sniping, at the cost of his HP bleeding down slowly. It's impossible for Snake to smoke himself to death—a small blip of health will always remain—but then, if he gets so much as touched, he dies (presumably of spontaneous lung cancer).
- In Snake Eater, one of the big promoted features was that Snake could be injured, and would have to patch himself up to continue, with such injuries including bleeding, and broken limbs. However, as far as gameplay went, the injuries only affected Snake's health bar, so theoretically Snake could still run and fight as normal even if all four of his limbs were broken, there were bullets lodged in his head, and he was poisoned.
- Metal Gear Solid 4 uses this for a plot point later in the game. Naomi Hunter uses nanomachines to keep her cancer from progressing, but it doesn't appear to impair her ability to function in the slightest. She 'kills' herself by repeatedly injecting herself with an agent that temporarily neutralizes the nanomachines... allowing her cancer to continue as normal. Considering that the injections only last for a few hours, the cancer would have to be explosively violent in order to kill her before it the agent wore off.
  - It wasn't just that the nanomachines were holding back the cancer, but that they were the only thing keeping her alive. She mentions she's essentially already dead, the nanomachines being the only reason she's still up and breathing at all.
- But wonderfully averted in the final battle of MGS4. Solid Snake and Liquid Ocelot face off in hand-to-hand combat atop Outer Haven. As the fight progresses, two of the greatest warriors the world has ever seen get slower and slower, until they're just two old men, barely able to stand. It's scripted rather than based on actual damage, but it's certainly an effective conclusion
Aversion: In the card-based Lost Kingdoms series for the Gamecube, the protagonist (in each case, a mage-princess) would noticeably start limping, slowing down, and otherwise losing efficiency as her HP went lower. So, then, when you happened to get down to that 1 HP, your character was visibly on the edge of death and could barely move. Death was not so much exploding as collapsing from the sheer wound trauma and blood loss.
Aversion: In the Advance Wars series, damaged units effectiveness would drop noticeably as they get whacked around. For units composed of groups, this was shown by having more of its members missing when called to fire or be fired at. For units composed of a single large vehicle, this was shown by having it fire less ordinance in a single volley (presumably because of the structural damage having disabled parts of it).
- Somewhat more subtly, injured units can't use terrain cover as healthy units-terrain reduces damage dealt to a unit by (Unit HP*Terrains Stars)-meaning that a 5 Hp unit with four terrain stars takes more damage than a 10 hp unit with three terrain stars.
Averted in Jagged Alliance 2. The more injured you are, the faster you tire and the worse you get at everything. Additionally, if you're not wearing enough body armour there's a good chance of bullets or explosives inflicting critical damage to a body part, causing a massive permanent reduction to the appropriate stats.
- Most deaths in the game consist of the unfortunate victim simply slumping over to lie in a pool of blood. However, if you shoot someone in the head at close range, there's a good chance of their skull exploding. This can be awkward if you're trying to retrieve their head for the local bounty hunter.
Averted in the Front Mission series (with the exception of Gun Hazard): damage can fall on one of four parts of the unit—left arm, right arm, legs, and body—each with its own hitpoints. Losing an arm will remove your ability to use weapons or items on that arm, losing your legs reduces you to one square movement per turn (Your legs aren't truly destroyed, but ripped to skeletal structure) and loss of the body itself kills the unit. However until a part is destroyed it works perfectly. Also, simpler units like tanks and attack choppers have only one "body part."
- Oddly enough, in the Super Nintendo game Metal Warriors (which has extremely similar gameplay to Front Mission: Gun Hazard), your mech and that of others will start deteriorating as it loses (invisible) hit points, first losing its luster and taking cosmetic damage before its ability to use accessories is lost (signified by sparking from the shoulders) and, soon before it explodes, loses its arms and/or the ability to use its built-in weapons anymore.
Averted in most of the Battle Tech games, especially prior to the dissolution of FASA. This is at least partly because it reflects the original paper and pencil tactical sim they are all based on.
- Although the trope is used straight with battle armor infantry in the tabletop game, with the justification that the last point of armor represents the trooper inside, and at that point, even the weakest weapons in the game are powerful enough to invoke the Chunky Salsa Rule on a squishy human body.
A notable example of this trope can be seen in the Sonic The Hedgehog series of games, where Sonic's health is dictated not by a health meter, but by having rings on hand. When he is hit, all the rings go flying, disappearing after a few seconds if they're not picked up; another hit kills him. However—and this scenario comes up much more often than you might think—no matter how many times he is hit, as long as Sonic can keep recovering that one ring, he is safe.
- Various comics and even the early Genesis games tried to Hand Wave this as the rings having some sort of shield energy or otherwise being directly tied to Sonic's powers and life energy, but nobody really bought it. In addition, in the later games, rings aren't explained in the slightest, even their protective properties; the designers assume that everyone knows already.
Deus Ex averts the trope; you can be damaged in arm, head, legs, and chest. Enough head and chest damage kills you; arm damage affects accuracy and prevents you from using weapons or equipment that require both arms; and leg damage slows you. If both your legs are reduced to black, you have to crawl, although you are strangely in no danger of bleeding to death. (If you've taken enough damage to lose both legs, though, you're probably gonna be killed soon anyway.)
- The lack of risk of bleeding to death could easily be explained with a bit of handwavium to which the player is exposed early on; JC Denton, like his brother Paul, is one of about three people possessing nano-augmentations, which would logically be engineered to keep the user alive to the extent possible. Since one of the installable augmentations is one that replenishes health, (at the cost of gradual consumption of the player's finite bioelectrical energy) this theory gains more weight. It's not a huge stretch to assume that even the most basic level of augmentations is made to eject foreign bodies and seal wounds, even if bloodloss could only be catered for by a more specific augmentation.
- A slightly disturbing example of this being played straight is how post-incapacitation gibbing works. Hack up an unconscious person and they'll slowly darken, but still be considered alive, before suddenly hitting the threshold where they explode into dogfood. There is no way to go from "unconscious" to "dead but intact".
One interesting side-effect of this trope is games in which you get EVEN STRONGER when your health is critical, either due to a Limit Break or some equipped item, learned ability, or innate character trait which unleashes an automatic power-up to compensate for critical HP loss.
- In Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, the Rubicant (Lubicant in-game due to a silly translation error) soul increases your stats the fewer hit points you have. One of the best ways to speed through the Boss Rush mode is to deplete HP to 1 and equip the soul, thus doing silly amounts of damage.
  - In Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, the Arma Custos back glyph fuels your STR stat with Cerberus, increasing it as you lose HP (as long as the glyph is active, of course). At around 1 HP, you gain a STR boost equal to your maximum non-boosted STR plus one. Oh, and you can activate the Dominus Agony back glyph to drain your HP, or you can use some items.
- In Super Smash Bros Brawl, Lucario also gets stronger as it becomes more damaged, 200% at the limit. One of the Events focuses on this, as do some webcomics.
  - This 200% cap is sad, since he can easily go all the way up to 600% in a certain room aboard the Halberd...
  - Several Pokemon abilities and berries that activate when a Pokemon of a certain type is damaged to a certain point. The anime has shown Overgrow and Blaze.
  - Also in Pokemon, there are several attacks whose power increase at lower HP.
  - One popular strategy in the Paper Mario is called Danger Mario, which has the player lower his HP to 1 and equip many badges that increase attack and defense when your HP is critical.
- Often Hand Waved by the explanation of adrenaline, but I don't think anybody is buying that. (Although it was well done in Final Fantasy 9 where plot elements would cause people to enter Trance based on their personality regardless of where their meter was.)
- In Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics there is a Perk called Adrenaline Rush which increases your Strength by 1 when you drop below 50% of your max hit points.
- In Fallout 3 there is a Perk called Nerd Rage. When your health drops below 20%, your Strength is raised to 10, and your Damage Resistance increases by 50% (to a maximum of 85%).
  - The Fallout 3 health system implements this trope.
  - The stark realism of Fallout 3 was significantly ruined for this troper by the fact that you can shoot an enemy five times in the face at point-black range with no visible effect at all, until the sixth shot cleanly decapiates them sending their intact head spinning to the floor. Especially frustrating if it's at a key point in an otherwise extremely dramatic scene.
- In a way, Fallout more has Critical Carrying Capacity Failure, just a pound over your carrying limit and you go from a run to a crawl.
  - Increased weight does slow you down, but not that much. However, you could probably carry around three sets of Power Armor and a full arsenal of weapons around and run pretty effortlessly, but just one tin can more immediately slows you down to walking speed and blocks Fast Travel.
- Inordinately common in Super Robot Wars with the Prevail skill. In most games nearly all the pilots learn it at a certain level & in games that use the Pilot Points system it's possible to give it to anyone, which makes a bit of snese, considering most Humongous Mecha pilots are Hot Blooded Determinators. In practise it usually isn't all that useful for most characters aside from those who come equipped with it from the start, as by the time most pilots earn it their ability to evade is already high enough that they won't be taking much damage anyway.
In X-Wing and TIE Fighter, once you started taking hits to your hull, various systems would fail or short out, including targeting, sensors, power management, and even weapons, shields, and more rarely, flight control or engine power. Oddly, though, never life support.
- TIE fighter pilots wear fully sealed space suits. X-Wing pilots, on the other hand (and all Rebel pilots, really) wear something called a "Magcon" suit—a smaller version of the magnetic containment convenient energy shield that contains atmosphere and some body heat, which activates if the pilot encounters vacuum. It's the kind of shield you see on those big docking bays that are open to vacuum. The X-wings do have life support, because the suit can only shield them for so long, but life support is probably ignored in the game because given the game's repair time scales (about 5 minutes for your R2 to fully patch up your nonfunctioning engines), the magcon would invariably keep the pilot alive until the life support was repaired.
The same is true of the Freespace series. While your Hull strength has no direct bearing on the capabilities of your ship, by the time it gets dangerously low chances are you're going to have lost a subsystem. And individual subsystems do gradually degrade as they're damaged (the more damage your Weapons system takes, for example, the greater the odds are of a weapon failing to fire when you pull the trigger). All systems can be repaired automatically from anything down to 1%, but once it hits 0 it's gone until the end of the mission. Assuming you can still finish the mission in that state.
The Wing Commander series averts this: Once your shields are gone, different ship systems can take damage, and will affect things such as navigation, gun recharge rate, and of course exploded/non-exploded state of said ship.
- This troper had literally every weapon shot off his ship in a Wing Commander 1 mission, to the point that his fighter was just a cockpit and engine. Somehow those systems functioned perfectly and he flew back to the carrier safely.
- Especially hilarious where your communications could become so damaged you could no longer transmit landing requests, essentially meaning you could never land, in the games that didn't just automatically land you (like Privateer). With patience (and not being in a timed retreat mission, like for example the last Loki IV mission in Wing Commander III) one can wait for the auto-repair to fix the comm system, so they can request landing clearance.
  - Of course, if the auto-repair system is also dead, you're kinda hosed.
Subverted slightly in the Splinter Cell series. Sam Fisher can only take four or five shots before dying. However this is more to encourage the player to be stealthy that to be realistic.
- Hardly a subversion, he can still take a bullet or two to the face and carry on regardless, only dying when he passes the zero-health mark. In the later games, playing co-op lets you carry on even after that, if your teammate can get to you and give you an adrenaline shot.
Super Smash Bros is a partial example, in that increasing the characters' damage "percentages" doesn't affect their speed, power, or any other abilities, but does make it easier for other characters to smack them off the screen. The trope is played completely straight in the Stamina mode from Melee and Brawl, as well as for Master Hand and some other bosses.
- Also, at low percentages, when your character is dangling from a ledge, their 'Climb back up' animation is quick and fluid. At higher percentages, they struggle as they try to climb back up (but always manage to), and it takes slightly longer.
Aversion: In Outlive nuclear power plants and uranium mines will begin to release radiation, damaging themselves and their surroundings until repaired or totally destroyed.
Command And Conquer generally plays this straight, but averts it with most buildings. For instance, damaged power plants will provide less energy.
- Tiberian Sun also has the Nod Cyborgs, who were able to lose their legs when taking enough damage. Oddly enough, they can regenerate back to full health in tiberium fields (since they are mutants) without regaining them.
  - There is nothing so perfectly humiliating as defeating your opponent with an army of legless cyborg troopers.
- Some Command & Conquer games heavily avert this. Most, if not all, damaged units move and fire slower, and are basically useless when nearly dead. This can be frustrating, so Critical Existence Failure is an Acceptable Break From Reality in the C&C series.
While all RP Gs with Hit Points feature this, Chrono Trigger has a particularly amusing example with a certain enemy who only has two moves: one which reduces a character's HP to 1, and one which does exactly 1 HP damage. Basically, the RPG equivalent of almost beating you to death and then killing you with a finger poke.
Subverted in Eternal Darkness as taking damage caused you to limp slowly around and aim ineffectively. Not only that, but that goes for enemies as well, which resulted in the reverse of the gradually-building final battle most games have. It was amusing to see that the climax of the game was... a guy with a stick limping away from a girl shakily aiming a shotgun.
Grand Theft Auto series: You can smash up your car and not suffer a decrease in performance, but one tiny bump too many, and it catches fire and explodes, taking you with it if you don't get away fast enough.
- In Grand Theft Auto IV, due to a better damage modeling system, it is possible for the body of the car to come into contact with the wheels (hampering performance) or for the axles to become bent (ditto).
- GTA IV is also the only game in the series where a car, any car, regardless of condition, won't explode just because it is flipped over. Apparently a collapsed roof meant self destruct in the older games.
- And you can die from tripping on the curb if your health is low enough.
Halo has a rather amusing exception for Combat-type Flood. They can get their arms shot off and occasionally rise again. With a bit of creative shooting, you can create a "pet Flood"—a Combat Form missing both its arms, which can't hurt you but just follows you incessantly.
- All the human vehicles use MC's own shields as their life meter, even though they appear to take physical damage in 2 and 3. So if your own health bar hits zero and you die, the vehicle explodes as well, no matter what shape it is in.
- In the latter two games, if an Infection form touches you with your shields down, you die instantly, unlike in the first game where they only drained your health and you could shake them off before they killed you.
In the Syphon Filter series, the character has both armor and health. Certain enemies can One Hit Kill with headshots regardless of the player's armor level, and although the health bar depletes much faster than the armor, it still suffers from the Critical Existence Failure syndrome, in that it doesn't affect the player's mobility.
In the Rainbow Six series, one well placed shot(eg head or chest) instantly kills your teammates(and in the first three games, they're gone for the rest of the campaign), but nonlethal hits, eg to arms or legs, don't seem to cripple or slow you down. In a partial aversion, teammates can sometimes be nonfatally incapacitated.
In the SNES version of U.N. Squadron, taking a hit causes your ship to go into Danger mode, at which point one more hit will kill you. After a little while, your ship would repair itself, albeit with some life lost, and be able to take another hit. But if your life meter gets too low, your ship will permanently remain in Danger mode until you either die or get a health refill.
There is a small aversion for Terran structures in Starcraft. After taking enough damage to turn their hit point counter red, Terran structures slowly lose health, even if they are no longer under attack. This health loss will continue until the structure either destroys itself or is repaired. This is explained in the manual that due to the relatively haphazard, ramshackle, and—this is both the strength and weakness of the faction—interconnected nature of Terran structures, they are susceptible to internal damage like fires and malfunctioning machinery.
- But still played straight with all units and structures, which once complete function at perfect efficiency until they lose their very last real hit point, at which point they explode spectacularly whether they were killed by a Hydralisk's spines or a Probe's cutting laser or a Battlecruiser's laser batteries.
Particularly humorous in later 2D Castlevania games, which generally have a 0 HP character reduced to a spray of blood, even if they just lost their last 2 HP to a flying femur to the forehead.
- Although such an attack will cause Shanoa to simply drop dead.
Early Legend Of Zelda games suffered from this. Link's could be down to half a heart and be walking along fine. Accidentally bump into an Octorok, and he twirls around and blinks out of existence.
The Earthworm Jim games justified this by establishing that Jim himself never takes any damage, but his suit does, and his health is represented by how much energy his suit has (which goes all the way up to 200%). If the suit runs out of energy, it suddenly malfunctions and fries Jim as he sits inside it, even though the suit itself is virtually indestructible. The second game's "life lost" screen has the suit short out and violently eject Jim from it, leaving him laying helpless on the ground. (He is a worm.)
Soul Calibur IV averted it. You don't function any worse with damage, but the damage is actually taken by your armour which you can lose making the areas it protected more vulnerable.
In the NES Adaptation Decay of Predator, Arnold explodes into smithereens when his life meter runs out.
Gears Of War plays this incredibly straight with its health system, in which you accumulate detail to a center red skull-and-gear icon, and at critical you will sometimes explode in showers of abrupt gore. You can also regenerate damage over time. Before you get to critical, however, you can take ten thousand rifle bullets, so long as you space it out so you have time to regenerate.
- However, after reaching that critical state, you will frequently go into a 'downed' state if not gibbed or headshotted, similar to the Dungeons And Dragons' 3rd edition '0 hp' state, as your character is not yet dead at that point, but essentially incapacitated and will bleed to death without aid.
- In Gears of War 2, some will drop dead instantly, others will drop to the dirt and start crawling away or toward friendlies—who can and will revive them back to full HP.
Used to an absurd degree in Valkyrie Profile. As the dead spirits accompanying Lenneth are actually animated in the real world by her divine power (she only has enough to summon three, explaining the Arbitrary Headcount Limit), not only did each character reach Critical Existence Failure at 0 hit points, but neglecting to revive Lenneth in three turns upon her death caused Critical Existence Failure for the entire party.
- Averted but not for you in Valkyrie Profile Silmeria. The PCs can keep fighting without penalty as long as they have that one hitpoint, but enemies are composed of different parts, and on some enemies breaking a piece off will render them immobile for the rest of the battle (for example, slicing the wing off a bird leaves it laying on the ground, still alive, but unable to move or attack). Some enemies, if you remove their main attacking limb, will even retreat.
Drakengard. Sometimes the life meter serves other purposes under specific circumstances. Whenever a party member is summoned to take your place, it instead becomes a time meter. When fighting the final boss it seems to just be insane.
Classic shoot-em-up Blue Max also avoids this; it is (to my knowledge) the only game from its era where a direct hit wouldn't simply blow you up, but would instead damage your gun, or your controls, or cause fuel to leak.
- Star Raiders had ships damaged by multiple hits (until your shield went).
Averted in Bushido Blade. Only a deep wound to the head or torso will kill you. A deep wound to a limb will disable it; shallow wounds anywhere will only slow you down no matter how many you take (although it gets wonky after a while, because you start looking overcranked rather than staggered with pain and bloodloss).
Averted in Kartia, where attack strength is directly tied to HP.
Averted and played straight in Metal Arms: Glitch in the System: most enemies in the game can take body part damage, such as: arms that hang limply unless firing (where recoil takes over), limping and blowing off their head or even their whole upper body, leaving a pair of legs to run around wildly until they are destroyed. Glitch, however, remains fine until all of his energy is gone, causing him to explode spectacularly.
Averted in Betrayal at Krondor. All creatures have stamina and health points which were reduced both by enemy attacks and some of your own actions. Stamina was lost first, reducing this has no effect on abilities. Once stamina is exhausted any reductions in health cause a proportional reduction in all a creature's abilities. If you're reduced to 50% health, your attack and defence skill are also reduced by 50% making it easier to further damage you and less likely your counterattacks would succeed.
Arcanum Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura plays this straight but has a small subversion: certain wounds can leave nasty scars, which can reduce your stats (usually Beauty). The scar can be removed magically and this restores the lost Beauty points.
Averted in X-Com: UFO Defense. There is not only limb damage that affects stats, but any hit can inflict Fatal Wounds that drain the hit points of units hit every turn (which doesn't affect aliens), and a stun meter that causes the target to faint should it ever exceed that unit's HP (which does affect aliens, and is in fact required to beat the game). Early-game, if a shot doesn't kill a soldier, they'll probably fall unconscious within a few turns and then just bleed to death. Played straight with Cyberdisks. When they die, they promptly blow up real good, taking out anything in roughly a 10-square radius... potentially even other Cyberdisks!
Handwaved in the Total Annihilation manual by the introduction of "Heavy Armor" that makes the unit behave like one giant molecule.
- A giant robot tank "behaving like a single molecule"? Now that's a handwave!
World In Conflict's infantry squads subvert this: As the squad loses health, its members die one by one and the squad loses firepower accordingly. Since each member of a squad has a specific role to play, loss of certain members can lessen or eliminate the squad's ability to attack certain types of units(eg. a regular infantry squad cannot attack helicopters if it loses its AA soldier). The trope is still played straight for all other types of units and buildings.
- Company Of Heroes also averts this with their infantry squads like World In Conflict above, but also can have certain areas of vehicles get damaged, such as the main gun being disabled, the gunner getting killed, etc., disabling that specific area on account of the damage to that area. However, a vehicle with a engine explicitly stated to be destroyed can still move, though a very slow pace, and it is still possible for the vehicle to be damaged in a way in which it has had no functions disabled, meaning Critical Existence Failure is in full effect when it goes down. It's rather impossible to fully avoid such a thing happening though, and it doesn't happen very often on its own, especially since the game encourages flanking the back of armoured vehicles.
- This also applies to Dawn Of War; not surprising given they're both Relic creations. As your squads get hit, the individual troopers die, and they can take their heavy weapons with them, meaning you need to retrain them and requisition more heavy weapons. On the other hand, up until they die, they will still fight at full power, and neither buildings nor vehicles lose power as they get hit.
- Also averted in End War, where units are generally groups of four (four squads in the case of engineers and riflemen). After shields are lost, individual vehicles/squads begin to take damage and explode/die, causing the unit to decline in effectiveness. When the unit has lost 3/4 of its vehicles/squads, it will send up a flare, recharge its shields, stop fighting and call for evacuation. As keeping your men alive for the next mission is a very, very important part of the game, it's generally a good idea to try to cover their evacuation.
Played straight in the Crusader games by Origin, where it states right in the manual under the description of your health bar, "As a Silencer he can continue at peak efficiency up to the point of collapse and death." You're just that Bad Ass.
Averted in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Specific injury to body parts needs specific treatment, and does have effect on your character.
Crysis potentially averts this with vehicles; a number of vehicles can have their windows shot out and through, and may have means of movement which can be specifically damaged and hampered.
In the PSX version of Doom, the Doomguy's head explodes when he is killed with explosives or his health goes a certain amount below zero.
Averted in the space sim Freespace 2. Fighters hit in the relevant spots can take damage to a subsystem (communication, targeting, etc.) or lose one without exploding. Capital ships having many such spots, they can have all their subsystems disabled, their engines stopped and all their turrets stripped away by weak lasers fired by a single fighter also armed with patience.
- Doubly averted in that capital ships, even on their last HP, will not fall to anything short of an asteroid impact or an anti-capital beam or torpedo. This also means that while a torpedo-less lone fighter can entirely disable a capital ship, it can never finish it off.
And averted even more in the Independence War space sim, where the ship has dozens of onboard systems. Each and any of them can (and will) be damaged by enemy fire, with corresponding effect on the ship's handling and fighting abilities. There's an entire control screen dedicated solely to prioritization of inflight repairs.
Virtually every Beat Em Up game suffers from this trope. Get a character to the bottom of their health bar, and the slightest touch will knock them out or kill them (depending on game), including (in some cases) a perfectly blocked attack, or a kick in the ankle.
San Francisco Rush series: Normal shunts and bumps only cause cosmetic damage, but with high-speed crashes or rollovers, Every Car Is A Pinto.
In Die By The Sword, you wouldn't lose efficiency from damage, but could lose your limbs before going. Losing a shield arm could be bad, losing a weapon arm was worse. Still, the legs didn't seem to affect you till you lost both of them.
Both MMORPGs Dark Age Of Camelot and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (both from Mythic) have you start to limp once your health gets to critical, hampering any chance of fleeing...
If you don't fall into water when you die in Worms, worms reduced to zero health blow themselves up. The death explosion can even harm other worms to the point of death too, or otherwise set off a hilarious chain of Stuff Blowing Up.
Averted in most of the World Of Darkness RP Gs by White Wolf: the more damaged you are, the more dice you lose from your actions, to the point where sufficient injury denies you the use of your skills entirely. It even varies from supernatural to supernatural, where vampires are able to ignore more wound penalties than humans, and so on.
- Also, if you are damaged enough in combat, you can have permanent scars appear, or have limbs disappear. This troper has had the misfortune of attempting to remove an arrow from a packmate's eye, failing horribly (as he always did in that game), and blinding his friend for the rest of the campaign.
- Promethean: The Created is the exception, playing the trope straight: Prometheans are literally held together by their own life force. In fact, they don't even suffer wound or injury penalties until they have taken so much damage that they are only a few hitpoints away from permanent death, and even then, if they get healed, there's no real lasting damage. And even if they don't get healed, they can still rise from death.
  - Every Promethean gets one "Get Out Of Death Free" card. Everything else being equal, a second death will be permanent. However, members of the Osirian "Lineage" can learn how to not only do it again, but raise other characters (including otherwise ordinary mortals) from the dead. It's possible but somewhat difficult for other Prometheans to learn this trick.
Averted in Egosoft's X-Universe games. Once a ship loses its shields and starts taking hull damage, it becomes slower and various weapons and modules get randomly destroyed.
Left 4 Dead averts this quite thoroughly. As you lose health your character is noticeably clumsier and slower, with their remaining health beginning to bleed out at a certain point. If you run out of health you go into an incapacitated state where you can do nothing but fire your sidearm and must be helped by another player, though some enemies will keep pounding on your incapacitated form in order to finish you off. One oddity, however, is where your incapacitated "health" bar is three times bigger than your regular one!
Zombies and Demon Marines in Doom 3 explode into gory chunks when killed with certain weapons such as the shotgun, and if they leave a corpse, it quickly disintegrates and disappears.
In Descent, once your shields are down, one tiny ding causes your ship to explode.
- Partly subverted in that while a flare(always does 1 damage) will kill a 1-shield ship, there are a few curcumstances where you can be dropped to 0 shields and still fuction(speaking from experience). And while hitting things while moving too fast will drop your shields, running into a wall will never get rid of that last shield point.
The Lord Of The Rings Online has at least one ability where shouting at your enemies damages them very slightly, debuffs them and buffs you. It's fun shouting wounded wargs to death...
Averted in The Getaway. Cars that take enough damage will have handling and performance problems, and taking too much damage will cause your character to start limping.
Averted in the TOCA Race Driver games, where cars will take damage realistically, suffering performance hits with increased damage.
In the first two Soldier Of Fortune games, most irritatingly in the second, where The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard, explosives instantly gibbed the player if he was in the blast radius. Oddly, in Pay Back, even on Hard difficulty getting hit directly by a rocket is not always lethal. Poor damage randomization programming, I guess? This game was thrown together in only three or so months, shovelware style. So unless it causes your life bar to go below zero and therefore Critical Existence Failure, you'll be mostly unfazed (other than the obligatory Interface Screw which tints the screen redder as your Walk It Off health gets lower).
- BTW, Mullins does seem to suffer true Ludicrous Gibs critical existence failure in the first game if so much as being bitten by a dog causes his life to hit zero.
- Mullins suffers more than that. If he shoots a civilian in 2, even accidentally, he'll respond to his act of evil by spontaneously yelling 'WLAAAAAARGH' and falling over backwards, dead. Now that's a guilt trip.
Rad Gravity explodes when he is killed in space, perhaps due to the Hollywood physics of explosive decompression caused by rupture of his suit.
Trilby's Notes, part of the Chzo Mythos by Yahtzee Croshaw, gives a nod to this at the end when the Big Bad tells a mortally wounded Trilby that he won't die from a mere stab wound because "Men like [Trilby] live by pure will."
- Double spoiler: The Big Bad's goading is a hint to the now incapacitated player, who will invariably try every command he can think of to foil the plot. Turns out, all you can do (and all you have to do) is make the decision to "die".
Only partially subverted in Air Rivals, a flight combat MMORPG. There is no penalty for simply having damage, so the trope applies normally. However, while receiving damage, the player's craft loses speed.
Played straight in The Simpsons: Hit and Run, where all vehicles explode violently when destroyed, but function normally until that happens. Oddly enough, you can then get back in the exploded car and drive it (albit slowly).
In the Disgaea series, there is a species of monster known as the Prinny — one of the most famous of Nippon Ichi's design. It happens to earn this honor through a combination of being cute, stitched-up penguins that violently detonate when thrown, unless in the Prinny World, or unless they happen to be the main character of the new Prinny PSP game.
- Of course, the main character of the new Prinny game happens to have a scarf that saves him from exploding like a Prinny normally would (for about 3 hits)... except on Hard Mode, where he's a One Hit Point Wonder all over again. And every time you die, no matter what mode you're on, he still explodes. However, Bonus Boss Asagi tries to steal the show again, this time in a Prinny suit... and when you beat her, her suit overloads and explodes furiously with her still in it — but don't worry, she's still (relatively) alive, it seems.
Averted in Age Of Mythology, as damaged buildings produce units slower.
Subverted in Vagrant Story. The different areas of your body all have different health bars (in addition to your overall HP), and when, for example, your arms take too much damage, your strength begins to drop.
- For example, if too much damage is done to your weapon arm, you do less damage or are less likely to hit (this troper can't remember which). With your shield arm, you're less likely to block. The torso, you take more damage. The head, you're magic abilities and defense decrease. The legs, you move at 1/2 speed.
Partially avoided in Metal Warriors. Your mech has no hit bar, and you have to judge your health by its visible condition. When it is fully health, it's paint will be bright and shiny, and will become darker, duller, and more bullet-ridden. You know you're in trouble when your arm falls off. Despite all this clever avoidance, your own character out-of-suit looks perfectly fine until he takes that tenth little zap.
Marathon is an interesting case. For both the player and enemies, certain types of damage, such as explosive or crushing, would always trigger a hard (read: messy) death (unless the enemy was set so that they only had a soft/hard death sequence available to them). Most of the other types would cause a soft death, with some exceptions: 1. If the player took enough fatal damage (such as a charged fusion bolt) they would undergo a hard death. 2. If a creature died from a damage type that they were marked as vulnerable to (e.g. a hunter being killed by fusion energy). 3. If the creature had the "die in flames" setting enabled and was killed by lava, fire, or the alien weapon.
Averted in Exalted, which has wound penalties... but considering that you're playing a superpowered demigod with access to perfect defences, you'll probably never experience all of them. Played semi-straight with the ~~Mooks~~ extras you fight, who only have 3 levels of health, and usually the BFS an Exalt is holding just cleaves them in half; while they do have wound penalties, usually they just disappear in a spray of gore before anyone remembers they do.
In VALVe's Day of Defeat: Source, you can fall exactly 19 feet 11 inches with no penalties whatsoever. If you fall 1 extra inch,you suffer an abrupt death.
Mass Effect tends to avert this for the player character, but not for the NP Cs. When Shepard gets down to critical health, he/she can't aim, can't sprint, and the screen turns pulsating red with an ominous heartbeat sound effect. Your other party members, however, can keep fighting at 100% efficiency with only the barest sliver of health. Go figure.
Mercenaries 2 has Mooks which are easy to kill and that have very enthusiastic death animations. Sometimes, if shooting at them with a weak machine gun, they will flinch slightly after the first 9 shots and then scream, throw their arms in the air and leap backwards.
Max Payne suffers this like nobody else. See, Max doesn't ever actually heal himself in any way whatsoever, he just keeps taking painkillers. By the end of the game he could easily have taken enough damage to empty his life bar a hundred times over and be full of so many bullets you'd have trouble finding something to shoot at that was still him, but as long as he can't feel it, he's fine and dandy. But should he suddenly be in a position where he feels actual pain, he falls over in slow motion.
Star Wars: Empire at War slightly averts this. Infantry platoons and fighter/bomber squadrons lose men and fighters/bombers as the overall health deteriorates, vehicles and buildings will slowly take external damage (and catch fire) as health lowers, and in space combat anything larger than a corvette or missile cruiser must have hardpoints destroyed first before the entire thing dies. However, until something dies/is destroyed, it still functions at 100% and buildings that are destroyed will spit out infantry.
Any installment of the Wizardry series partially averts this trope. The damage dealt by the breath attacks of certain enemies is based on their current HP, so there is a reason to wound them without killing them. However when dealing with anything else it's played straight as an enemy is just as deadly with 1 HP left as fully healthy.