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alt title(s): Beloved Peasant Village 
Not wasting time, Sephiroth burns Cloud's village before the game starts.
No! My beloved peasant village!: The hero's home town, city, slum, or planet will usually be annihilated in a spectacular fashion before the end of the game, and often before the end of the opening scene. — The Grand List of Console RPG Clichés
The town the hero first appears in is often his hometown. There is a very high chance said town will be demolished by evil forces, prompting him to quest, although sometimes the town is inaccessible for other reasons (banishment, for example).
This is not strictly limited to hometowns. It's almost guaranteed that wherever the hero starts out — be it town, planet or even universe, depending on the scope of the story — is likely to be rudely destroyed by forces of fate as soon as his back is turned.
Frequently paired with Refusal Of The Call, since The Call Knows Where You Live, and often the reason You Can't Go Home Again after Easing Into The Adventure.
Note that this trope does not include stories in which survival (within the town) during disaster or war, and its aftermath, are the main focus. The key aspect of this trope is not that the town is destroyed, but that the destruction of (or banishment from) the hero's old home becomes an impetus to the later adventures.
See also Where I Was Born And Razed, when the character is the doom of their own hometown.
Not to be confused with Domed Hometown, although these are easier to doom.
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Examples
Anime & Manga
- Many of the princesses of Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch have run away from their destroyed kingdoms, or been caught in the attempt; curiously, the heroine is the only one whose home turf is safe.
- Sara from Soukou No Strain has a Doomed Space Academy that is attacked by her brother; she is the only survivor.
- In Mahou Sensei Negima, the hometown of Negi and Anya is attacked by demons that turn nearly all the townspeople to stone. Negi is saved by his father who gives Negi his staff before leaving.
- Given the historical destruction of most of Japan's major cities during World War II, this comes up frequently in anime set in this period:
- This is subverted in Full Metal Alchemist where Ed and Alphonse Elric set fire to their own house so they can't turn back. Their attempts to redeem themselves from this "original sin" drive the plot. They do, however, make relatively frequent visits to their home town to call on childhood friends.
- This is further subverted, and may be even Lamp Shaded, in the fact that during the Ishvalan civil war, Ed and Al's hometown is reported to have been run in and destroyed (which is used as an official excuse for Ed's limbs), but now it seems to be thriving again.
- Various points (at least in the manga) indicate that while it hardly seems devastated, it would have been more of a bustling city had the Ishvalan civil war not happened.
- In the manga, Hohenheim has an alternate interpretation of Ed and Al's motives, saying that they did it to forget trying to transmute their mother.
- In Chrono Crusade, Chrono and Rosette's motivation for joining the Order is to find Rosette's brother, Joshua, who was kidnapped by Aion. When he was kidnapped, he was given Chrono's horns—and the power overwhelmed him and he ended up "stopping" the time of the orphanage Rosette and Joshua lived in, freezing everyone inside in stone. Chrono, Joshua and Rosette are the only survivors from it.
- Once upon a time, there was a space colony called Side 7...
- Yu-Gi-Oh has a villainous example. Kul Elna, a village of former tomb builders turned tomb robbers, was burned to the ground and had its inhabitants slaughtered as components in the spell that forged the Millennium Items. Luckily for one small boy who managed to stay hidden, the sorcerers only needed the lives of the other 99 villagers, which left him as the sole survivor. Flash forward about ten to fifteen years, and Thief King Bakura is out for revenge...
Comics
- Krypton from the Superman mythos is the quintessential example of a Doomed Hometown, being a doomed home planet.
- In Rom: Spaceknight, Claireton, West Virginia, which served as the setting for much of the series and is home to Rom's girlfriend Brandy Clark, is completely overrun by Dire Wraiths during Rom's absence, its inhabitants slaughtered. Brandy, by then a Spaceknight herself, becomes obsessed with exacting vengeance against the Wraiths for this atrocity.
- What, nobody's mentioned ElfQuest yet? Humans burn down our heroes' forest holt
 , forcing them to go on... well, the entire rest of the story, basically, rather than just staying home.
Films
- Possibly the most famous is the destruction of Luke's home in Star Wars, killing his aunt and uncle and freeing him to leave the planet. Notice that he never mentions them ever again, and instead obsesses over the father who didn't raise him.
- Also, Leia's home planet gets exploded.
- Eragon opens the exact same way. Exact.
- And proceeds in the same way. And ends in a very similar way. =)
- The movie, perhaps. It's similar, but not nearly exact, in the book.
- Nope, the book is... still pretty much an exact replica.
- Lampshaded in the Conan the Barbarian film, wherein the main villain Thulsa Doom destroys young Conan's village and mercilessly slays his mother before his eyes, leading him to be sold into slavery where he is hardened by forced labor and trained as a champion gladiator. When he eventually wins his freedom, embarks on a career as a warrior, and seeks out Thulsa Doom to take his revenge, the villain calmly points out to Conan that everything he became is because of Doom himself and Conan actually OWES him. Of course Conan is anything but grateful, but still the point stands.
- In Starship Troopers, Johhny Rico's native city, Buenos Aires, gets destroyed by the bugs just as he resigned from the armed forces. Of course, now it's personal.
- In the book, Rico is from the Philippines. His mother (not his father) died in the destruction of Buenos Aires (by a nuclear bomb, not a guided asteroid) just because she happened to be there visiting relatives.
- In the Street Fighter movie, Chun Li reveals she's pursuing M. Bison because he destroyed her village and killed her father. This leads to the single most awesome bit about the movie, in an echo of Thulsa Doom above:
- In the film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Allan Quatermain is living in self-imposed exile in a British colony in Africa, and has no interest in accepting the position of League leader. He accepts, however, when agents of the film's primary villain invade the colony, killing some of Quatermain's friends and blowing up a building.
- Not just "a building", but the pub...
- Titan AE , anyone?
- Mercilessly parodied in Mel Brooks' Men In Tights:
Robin Hood: Blinkin, listen to me. They've taken the castle!
Blinkin: I thought it felt a bit drafty. Cor, this never would have happened if your father was alive.
Robin Hood: He's dead?
Blinkin: Yes.
Robin Hood: And my mother?
Blinkin: She died of pneumonia while... oh, you were away...
Robin Hood: My brothers?
Blinkin: There were all killed by the plague.
Robin Hood: My dog, Pogo?
Blinkin: Run over by a carriage.
Robin Hood: My goldfish, Goldie?
Blinkin: Eaten by the cat.
Robin Hood: (on the verge of tears) My cat?
Blinkin: Choked on the goldfish.
(pause)
Blinkin: Oh, it's good to be home, ain't it, Master Robin?
- The rebooted Star Trek movie involved as a key plot point the destruction of Vulcan by a Romulan lunatic from the future, and its effect on Spock.
Gamebooks
- In the gamebook series Lone Wolf, the eponymous character's journey begins with the Darklords' destruction of his monastery, leaving him Last Of His Kind.
Literature
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opens on a Thursday morning as Arthur Dent looks outside his house at a bulldozer poised to demolish it to make way for a bypass. Coincidentally, the Vogon Constructor Fleet demolishes Earth later that day in order to build a hyperspace bypass. Before blowing up this Insignificant Little Blue Planet, the Vogons tell its inhabitants that they should have seen it coming: as with Arthur's house, the plans for the bypass were on file, even if some Obstructive Bureaucrat did store them in a slightly out-of-the-way location ("What do you mean, you've never been to Alpha Centauri?") "I could never get the hang of Thursdays." Arthur remarks as all this happens.
- Watership Down, Waif Prophet rabbit Fiver has a vision of their warren being destroyed. He, his brother and few others escape on this revelation and learn later that the vision was completely correct.
- In the Cambridge Latin Course, hero Quintus Caecilius Iucundus grew up in Pompeii. After the fiery destruction of his hometown and everything else in a ten mile radius, he leaves to destroy the forces of evil and corruption in Roman Britain.
- In The Pilgrim's Progress the City of Destruction (the main character's hometown) will be destroyed in the end of days by fire and brimstone, prompting him to escape to Celestial City (heaven).
- In Eric Flint's 1632 and successor books, the 'hero' is in some sense Grantville, West Virginia, displaced in time and space to Thuringia in 1632 amidst the Wars of Religion. None of the characters in it can go home to Modern Earth, and they have no idea if Modern Earth has been destroyed by the event that moved them, or continues to exist in another 'branch' of time. In any case they can't go back and are forced into adventure, making this a case of a /town/ that has a Doomed Hometown.
- In Blish's Oki series, the flying cities are forced off Earth by the disaster of world conquest by a totalitarian state. So each of them is a town with a Doomed Hometown.
- The Shire in The Lord Of The Rings. Somewhat inverted in that it is only destroyed/enslaved at the very end of the story, and if anything, gives Frodo a reason to get back there.
- Subverted in the second book of The Sovereign Stone Trilogy. The Evil Overlord sends his henchman to the home village of one of the protagonists with orders to burn the village, massacre the inhabitants and torture the survivors to death for information. The villages however are part of a tribal culture whose main exports are fearless barbarian mercenary's, they massacre the henchman, torture the boss henchman to death and stake out his body as an example to those who will follow, before burning there OWN village to the ground so the enemy (who knows where they live) will get no use from it then go off to found a new village elsewhere.
- Mino, Takeo's village in Tales of the Otori, does not outlast the opening chapter of the first book.
- The Beastmaster. When Evil Rip Torn attacks Dar's villiage and kills his dog, Dar dresses in leather, burns the bodies and goes on a grand quest.
Live Action TV
- Star Trek The Next Generation's Data was created in a Colony on the planet of Omnicron Theta on which all life was mysteriously and utterly annihilated (right down to the level of soil bacteria) by a space entity that resembles a giant snowflake. After the disaster, Data was found by the crew of the USS Tripoli when they came to investigate. He was deactivated during the attack so the creature didn't count him as alive, and is effectively the sole survivor of the entire colony. Several later episodes see them either dealing with the return of this creature, or tracking it down.
- Similarly, Worf was rescued as a child from his homeworld, the Klingon colony of Khitomer, by a Federation starhip after the planet was nuked by Romulans.
- In the remade Battlestar Galactica, all twelve planets occupied by humans are razed by the enemy Cylons, using nuclear weapons. It is the catalyst that begins the events in the series.
- The same thing happened in the original, as well, though it was aerial bombardment / strafing from Cylon fightercraft that did the damage rather than nukes.
- Smallville, natch.
- Doctor Who: The Doctor's home planet is blown up. By himself! Cue double-angst.
- But wasn't he traveling the universe before that anyway?
- The whole before/after thing gets a bit confused when there's Time Travel involved.
- Yes he was traveling the universe but he returned home to help fight in the time war. Then he managed to win the war by simultaneously destroying the Time Lord planet and the Dalek planet along with both of their native inhabitants with the exceptions of the Master and several hundreds of Daleks who keep popping up and dying off whenever the plot demands it.
- In Robin of Sherwood the title character, a.k.a. Robin of Loxley, is a bit miffed when the Sheriff of Nottingham torches the village of Loxley.
- According to Firefly's background information, Malcolm Reynolds' homeworld of Shadow was rendered uninhabitable during the Unification War, and remains quarantined.
Toys
- The Bionicle character Tobduk's time in the Order of Mata Nui began after his home island became the first victims of the Visorak horde. The attack and his survival changed his personality a great deal.
Video Games
- In Doom II, the anonymous "Doomguy" is told in an intermission screen that "the alien base is in the heart of your own home city, not far from the starport."
- Final Fantasy:
- Rydia's hometown, the village of Mist, is burned to the ground early in Final Fantasy IV; this is a noticeable subversion in that the destruction was performed by the hero. (To be fair, he was tricked into it...depending on the translation, anyway.) Also, most of the inhabitants survived (though the rest of the summoners were wiped out).
- In Final Fantasy V, Bartz's hometown is disintegrated late in the game. Strangely, nothing plot-relevant happens here, and you can play the game through without ever visiting it, and thus never learning it's his hometown (this happened in this troper's first playthrough).
- Final Fantasy VI contains an interesting aversion. Early in the game, Kefka starts to burn down Figaro Castle as a punishment to Edgar for refusing to give Terra up to him. For a moment, it seems like Edgar may lose his kingdom. But instead, he gets away and then the entire castle sinks Beneath The Earth. While not immediately accessible right after this event, Figaro remains available for the player's use all the way through the game, ever after The End Of The World As We Know It.
- Though Kefka does bring an end to Cyan's kingdom. Killing everyone in the Kingdom by poisoned well.
- Cloud from Final Fantasy VII is originally from Nibelheim, which was razed by Sephiroth. (It later got rebuilt and repopulated in an attempt to conceal that it ever was destroyed, which briefly confused the heroes). Later (chronologically speaking), he and the party are forced to leave Midgar to avoid the authorities. This shortly after Shinra destroys the Sector 7 slums, where AVALANCHE is based. And then the entire city is mostly destroyed later on!
- And let's not forget the razing of Corel by Shinra troops...
- Or that pre-game hero Zack's hometown of Gongaga is destroyed by Going Critical. What's worse is that Crisis Core reveals that however the reactor exploded, it occurred during the four years he was a test subject. When he arrives, the whole fact that the town is mostly a crater and there's gravestones all around the huts of whoever survived doesn't seem to really phase him.
- Tidus from Final Fantasy X is from the city of Zanarkand, which is attacked at the beginning of the game; when he comes to, the people of Spira insist that it was destroyed a thousand years ago. (Though there's more to it than this.)
- Final Fantasy IX has so very many contenders for this trope. Practically every major city is seriously razed by the end of the game, including Alexandria, the home of Dagger and the first place we meet Zidane and Vivi, and Burmecia, Freya's hometown. Terra / Bran Bal also counts, since it's really where Zidane came from.
- The unnamed-and-never-seen hometown of the hero from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Its destruction is only mentioned in the hero's first line of dialogue, and never alluded to after that.
- In Final Fantasy II, Fynn is taken over by the empire, and all of the protagonists' parents are killed, prompting them to want to join the rebellion, in addition to wanting to find Maria's brother Leon. The rebellion eventually retakes Fynn, though.
- Sadly, every town except Fynn is smashed into dust by the Empire.
- In Kingdom Hearts, Sora, Riku and Kairi are all from the Destiny Islands, which are vaguely snuffed out by the Heartless and later restored.
- The Chosen One's hometown of Arroyo in Fallout 2 - ironically, the village is destroyed just as the hero finds the item that was supposed to save it.
- In the ending, the village is rebuilt after freeing the survivors from the enclave, and the Chosen One leads the village.
- And Fallout 3's story really begins when the player is forced to leave the Vault to search for their father. Later on, as part of a Sidequest, the PC is able to return and see what has happened in their absence - but however they choose to resolve (or completely ignore!) matters, they don't get to stay. One of these "resolutions" results in our "Hero" dooming the hometown himself!
- At the end of the first chapter of Jade Empire, the little town of Two Rivers is destroyed, and almost all of its populace wiped out by Imperial forces.
- And that was just his adopted hometown. His real hometown was destroyed 20 years earlier. The main character seems to have pretty bad luck with hometowns.
- And played with in that your mentor was responsible for both, knowing that it would give you the motivation to kill his brother, the Emperor, and let him take the throne.
- Inverted in Dead Rising: the US Government destroys the village that Carlito lived in after zombie-virus infected wasps escape from a secret lab. They send in special forces units to kill anyone still left and keep the bioengineering operation a secret. You finish up the story by confronting The commander of the special forces unit, who was sent in to do the same thing to Willamette.
- In Dragon Quest VIII, the kingdom of Trodain is engulfed by vines before the game starts due to a curse laid on it by the villain. Only the hero, the king, and the princess escape, and the latter two were cursed into other forms before the kingdom was hit.
- In Xenogears, the main character, Fei, unintentionally destroys his hometown, Lahan. Fei's attempt to pilot a giant, top secret, crash landed, military robot ("gear") in the middle of a firefight leads to the town's destruction. Also a prime example of devastating Lost Technology.
- And speaking of all things Xeno, at the beginning of Xenosaga Ep. 1, the Woglinde (the starting area of the game, though certainly not Shion's home, which has already been destroyed) is blown up.
- The game actually plays with this in a rather interesting way, as this damnation of the hometown had apparently been planned by one of the villains in order to get the hero going.
- The Xeno series just loves this trope: not only is Lahan toasted, but later Fei as id destroy the capital of Solaris, aka Elly and Citan, his lover and mentor hometown and yes: he is commiting a genocide on purpose, and, in Xeno III, we learn that Kevin's homeworld was also destroyed (while earth as been lost for centuries already). Oh, and the Kukai fondation is ALSO attacked: it would actually be faster to keep an account of cities who are not doomed
- In Homeworld, the planet and most of its fleet are decimated by an invasion force moments after the first interstellar excursion is made, leaving only a rag-tag fleet of survivors led by you (a la Battlestar Galactica) to fend for themselves. Somewhat ironically, the titular homeworld is in fact not the planet destroyed at the beginning.
- After a fashion, this happens twice in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The very first section of the game takes place on a spaceship which gets shot down, and the next section takes place on a planet which gets bombarded to oblivion just as the protagonists are leaving. It actually happens three times as the Jedi Academy on Dantooine (the planet visited after the aforementioned "planet bombarded to oblivion") is attacked and destroyed by Darth Malak after a certain number of Plot Coupons has been collected. You meet some survivors though.
- Also, the home planets of two party members were destroyed in events prior to the game.
- Star Ocean: The Second Story has a version of this where the planet your character starts on is destroyed after they leave it. And also the destruction of Future Dude Claude's starship, late in the game, for no other reason than to allow the bad guys to show off their uber-powerful weapons. Jerks.
- Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has the resort planet of Hyda IV, which is attacked when the main character is chillin' out on it.
- In Neverwinter Nights 2, the (playable) prologue is a fair in the protagonist's home village, West Harbor, which is invaded and burned in the beginning of the main game. There is a subversion, however, as West Harbor is not quite destroyed and can actually be visited later at almost any point in the game, although the player can't do much there — and a double subversion as it is much later invaded again and destroyed during the player's absence.
- An is rebuilt in the add on pack Storm of Zehir.
- Similarly, in Fable, the main character's hometown of Oakvale is ransacked by bandits, and he's the only survivor. Later in the game, however, he gets to return to the rebuilt and repopulated town.
- In Secret of Mana the main character is banished from his adoptive hometown. He's let back in at the end.
- Pirate Isle in Skies of Arcadia, though it's rebuilt halfway through the game.
- Much later in the game, your new base gets destroyed just like Pirate Isle, but rebuilt after one quest. The only Doomed Hometown that stays doomed is Valua, Enrique's home country, which gets completely bombarded and only rebuilt after the end of the game.
- Very common in the Tales Series:
- In Tales of Phantasia, Cless' and Chester's initial motivations are revenge for the evil knight Mars burning down their hometown and killing their families.
- In Tales of Eternia, the main pair is banished for the heinous crime of finding an alien girl, whose presence gets the elder's house attacked.
- Better example from the same game: said alien girl's hometown gets destroyed somewhere during the middle of the game. Arguably the first thing that made Reid realize not caring is not the answer to life.
- Tales of Innocence has the main character able to enter his hometown, but unable to enter his house, since it's under surveillance because he has special powers.
- In Tales of Symphonia, the hometown of Lloyd, Colette, Genis and Raine is partially burned down by Desians. Lloyd and Genis are banished for being partially to blame and forbidden from returning until Disc 2. But even after that, Genis decides to travel the world with Raine to help half-elves fit in, and Lloyd decides to set out with a companion of his choosing to destroy the Exspheres.
- Dawn of the New World, on the other hand, has two: Palmacosta and (nearly) Luin (which, if you recall, both got wrecked in the first game already). They both get better, though.
- Tales of Destiny averts the trope by having the player see the main character's hometown (which is notably NOT doomed) for the first time in the middle of the game, and when you arrive, he is welcomed home by his two living parents.
- Downright inverted in Tales of the Abyss — it happened to the villain during the backstory and is his main motivation for his Well Intentioned Extremist ways.
- Ditto in Tales of Hearts. The villain is attempting to restore his dead planet. Unfortunately, not only does he plan to do this by stealing the life energy from the main characters' planet, but his plan isn't even going to work.
- Tales of Vesperia continues the tradition, but this happens near the end of the game. And instead of running away, the party charges right in and attempts to stop it.
- In the Ultima-clone Questron, your character's home town of Geraldtown is abandoned and assumed sacked whenever one of several conditions occurs (you increase your health to a certain level, step a certain distance from the town, etc.)
- The main motivating factor of the character from Panzer Dragoon 2 was that his home was snuffed out by the empire for him raising a mutated beast of burden with the potential to grow into a dragon.
- The Big Bad torches your hometown in Castle of the Winds once you progress far enough in the local dungeon. The trigger is reading a letter the first boss is carrying (or deciding to spontaneously read it if you exit the local dungeon with it in your possession). Which leads to the ludicrous situation where you can drop it just before the exit and go visit your hometown then go back to the dungeon, pick up the letter and exit in 3 moves to find a smoking wasteland.
- In Devil May Cry 3, Dante's shop gets attacked by demons, and he later wrecks it with a sneeze, making it impossible to go back inside for the rest of the game. Played for laughs, though, given its ridiculousness.
- Occurs repeatedly in Summoner: First, you accidentally destroy your beloved peasant village of Ciran in an attempt to defend it with your fledgeling powers, killing your friends and family; after disowning your powers, you settle down in Masad, which years later gets burned to the ground by the Big Bad's invading army in their search for you; you then resolve to confront your past and defend the nation of Medeva, which you accidentally end up destroying as well after a suitable Big No.
- Thanks to its use of multiple view points, Suikoden III both plays this trope straight for one character, then inverts it as another main character is responsible for destroying the home town in question during her own story's first chapter.
- This occurs in Legend of Dragoon to the main character Dart's hometown in an almost stereotypical fashion. Not only is his adopted hometown destroyed in the intro, we later find out that his actual birthplace was also desolated years before the game.
- The real question is how the hell did they even find the village in the intro? It's not like there's all that many people in it, there's like 10 people tops. I'd say this is a somewhat averted variation on The Call Knows Where You Live given the unliklihood of the Serdian army stumbling across the village or even knowing of it's existence.
- In Sa Ga Frontier, Riki's entire quest focuses on saving his doomed hometown that turns out to be a Xanatos Gambit on the part of the Big Bad.
- Star Control II starts out with Earth under an Ur-Quan slave shield, which only the Ur-Quan (and also the Chmmr after you get them out, which happens at the end of the game) can penetrate.
- As if that wasn't bad enough, returning to the protagonist's actual home (a distant colony in the Vela system) reveals that it was also placed under a slave shield.
- Vela somewhat subverts this though, as under the Earthling's surrender agreement the Ur-Quan were within their rights to simply destroy the colony rather than slave shield it. It is in a sense a twisted act of mercy.
- Subverted, then partially inverted in Golden Sun. The game opens with a (mostly sucessful) attempt to keep it from happening, then The hometown is destroyed in the ending to the 2nd game
- And the fact that the 2 antagonist-couples where motivated by the fact that their hometown (and by extension, the entire world) was hanging on the verge of destruction, effectively making them Anti Villains
- Fire Emblem cannot help itself. Since every game focuses on a royal brat (literally, the average age for the lead character is 16) reclaiming their home and throne. However only one game really fits this trope to a T. Fire Emblem 7 is slightly less grand on the usual cataclysm scale of Main lord hero losing home kingdom in Fire Emblem games. Lyn has only lost her tribe and her whole family at the start of the game due to bandits. When the Player incarnate arrives she's alone fending off bandits.
- Hell, Super Smash Bros Brawl has fun with it - the Fire Emblem stage is called "Castle Siege".
- And of course, Marth's castle eating a Subspace Bomb in Adventure mode.
- Done from the outside in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. One of the Hero's first quests is to rescue the Emperor's last surviving heir from the burning remains of his hometown.
- At the beginning of Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles Richter's girlfriend's hometown is attacked by Dracula's forces and several maidens kidnapped. Interestingly enough, one of the later towns encountered is from Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest.
- The opening chapter of Drakengard is a War Sequence in which the protagonist is trying to hold off The Evil Army from capturing his sister's castle. He fails, but he does rescue her before the castle falls completely. Later flashbacks and exposition show that the kingdom the protagonist grew up in was also a Doomed Hometown for similar reasons.
- Somewhat played on in Mother 3, in which the player character's quaint little hometown is NOT destroyed, but rather totally transformed into a modern city.
- Though some houses (including the main characters) were partially or completely burnt from being struck by lightning (controlled by the bad guys) multiple times.
- And by the end of the game, it's been completely abandoned.
- Ray's entire home island is destroyed in horrendous game Secret of the Stars. Of course you never see the destruction as Ray is spirited away to a new area. This editor assumes it will come back as a final dungeon if he can bring himself to finish the game.
- Having read spoilers, it appears I was correct except for one thing: IT GETS RE-DOOMED!!!
- The tutorial area of Guild Wars begins in the player character's Doomed Home Kingdom, before switching to a ruined version (in the main game world) once the tutorial finishes.
- Terranigma: Banishment and eventual destruction near the end of the game.
- In Banjo-Tooie, not only Banjo's House gets destroyed by Gruntilda, his whole homeworld is trashed after Grunty's sisters decide to leave their troops to raid the place.
- The Homestar Runner graphical text-based adventure Peasant's Quest starts with Rather Dashing's thatched-roof cottage being burninated by TROGDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR!
- South Town, the home of many original Fatal Fury characters, gets nuked from orbit in The King of Fighters 2001.
- Resident Evil series, especially The Umbrella Chronicles which shows from start Jill Valentine's city (where she works as part of SWAT-like police outfit STARS) being infected with a virus made by an Evil Corporation (turning everyone into zombies and worse) before being obliterated with a tactical nuclear strike by the US government as a safety measure for the rest of the country and her fighting the corporation from then on (going to an Antarctic base among other things).
- Ecco the Dolphin's features a Doomed Home Bay; everything and everybody in it is taken away by a storm, starting Ecco's quest to reunite with his family.
- Alicia, Welkin and Isara from Valkyria Chronicles are forced to abandon their hometown, Bruhl, because of The Empire's invasion. You get to take it back later though.
- This trope started the Halo wars. As human planets were "glassed" by genocidal aliens.
- And of course, the doomed planet of Reach was the "hometown" of the Master Chief.
- Drakan: Order of the Flame: Rynn crawls out of her burninating village filled with marauding orcs. No survivors except her and her abducted little brother, so she has to go rescue him.
- Zero Wing: What happen? Immediately after main screen turn-on, somebody set up us the bomb prompting you to take off every "zig" for the remainder of the game. You have no chance to survive make your time.
- In Baldurs Gate you are forced to leave your hometown, and cannot get back until much later in the game. As it's a fortified monastery defended by a startling number of priests, mages, and soldiers considering its size, it's perfectly fine. Later in the game however, just about everyone you know there is killed and replaced with evil doppelgangers.
- Ciel in Wild ARMs 4, which could also double as a Floating Continent.
- The instant you hear the name "Eden Prime," humanity's most successful colony in Mass Effect, you know that place is going up in flames within the next five minutes.
- Although his hometown of Ordon Village is left intact, Link gets pulled into the action of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess when some of the Big Bad's goons invade the village and abduct him and all of the resident children.
- Geneforge does this with the Wizarding School you start out in — swarms of monsters slaughter all but six of the people there while a creepy glowing woman rants about "fires of justice." You, a mere untrained apprentice, are the only one available to inform the nearby fort about the attack.
- Romancing Sa Ga has this happen to one of the heroes: Poor unlucky Albert. The others generally manage to avoid this, although it's possible for Barbara to lose the closest thing she has to a hometown, the Frontier, to the Jewel Beast. Also, part of the endgame involves racing to defeat Saruin before his forces destroy Estamir, meaning that Jamil (and Farah and Dowd) nearly face this.
- In Breath of Fire, the Dark Dragons attack and burn down much of the hero's home town. This is partly used to explain the poor selection of items in the town, and the abduction of the hero's sister in the course of this leads to him searching for her and fighting against the Dark Dragons.
- If you pick the colonist background in Mass Effect, Shepard's homeworld was Mindoir, a tiny farming colony that is located in the Attican Traverse where the batarians fought against the humans for territory rights. Ironically when Shepard was 16, the batarians razed the planet, killed almost everyone in the colony except a couple of leftovers who are being dragged in chains for slavery while Shepard was lucky enough to escape from their clutches. An Alliance patrol found him/her but all of Shepard's relatives and friends died from the raid. As the result of that, it motivated Shepard to join the military two years later.
- In the opening scenes of Blue Dragon, Shu's hometown Talta Village is destroyed by Nene's Landshark.
- In Stonekeep, the titular castle that is the childhood home of the protaganist is consumed by a devouring darkness. Drake is saved by a mysterious cloaked figure who teleports them both to safety and returns years later to reclaim the fortress.
- Shirou from Fate Stay Night had to live through a large portion of his hometown burning down around him at the age of eight — he was one of only a few people who survived the inferno, and the trauma of having lived through it while everyone else he saw died is one of the base pillars of his current mindset.
- The Azuma village gets torched in Tenchu 2.
Web Comics
- Parodied in this F@NBOYS strip.
- The Order of the Stick: Start of Darkness shows that Redcloak's village and all of its inhabitants (except for him and his brother) were destroyed by the Sapphire Guard shortly after his initiation as a cleric.
Western Animation
- Cybertron, the homeworld of the Transformers, has been destroyed in at least two continuities, rendered uninhabitable or slowly dying in a couple others, and ravaged by war pretty much across the board. To those who remember its golden age of peace and prosperity, "tragic" is an understatement. Not quite the doomed homeworld Krypton is, but on the flip side that makes it hit closer to home in a lot of ways, everyone dying one by one in a millon-year-long war that could very well tear the world apart.
- What makes it worse is that their home planet is also their God. It talks to them.
- And in the 2007 movie, the Allspark, which the Autobots are searching for to bring life back to their world, is destroyed in order to kill Megatron, leaving Cybertron doomed to be barren forever. Optimus Prime, upon Bumblebee's suggestion, sends out a signal suggesting Earth as a new home for any Autobots scattered amongst the stars.
- Avatar the Last Airbender: Not one, not two, but all four cardinal point Air Nomad temples were destroyed by Fire Lord Sozin in his campaign to wipe out the airbenders and prevent the Avatar from stopping him.
- Pointedly subverted with Katara and Sokka's village to establish Zuko as an Anti Villain. Aang agreed to turn himself in if Zuko left the village alone, and even though he breaks out and two villagers helped him, he doesn't do anything for revenge and just leaves.
- To be fair, Zuko really didn't care what happened as long as he captured the Avatar.
- The village in An American Tail, which is sacked in a cat-Cossack pogrom at the very beginning, in a Fiddler On The Roof parody. Surprisingly, this is intended to be a real town, which has in fact survived.
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