Kill Em All - Television Tropes & Idioms

Devilman manages to kill off the entire main cast ~~except~~ including Akira in the span of five volumes. Violence Jack technically bring many of them back... only for them to go through hell again.
Vagabond has a heroic example in the form of Miyamoto Musashi versus all seventy remaining Yoshioka swordsmen at the drooping pine of Ichijouji. (Subverted in that their leader Ueda Ryouhei survives both being "cut down" at the beginning of the fight long enough to cripple him before finally succumbing.) What he didn't expect was that the cycle of death and killing didn't stop there...
Space Runaway Ideon is the all-time heavyweight champion of this. The entire cast (including children! poor Ashura) die bloody and gruesome deaths, culminating in the complete destruction of the entire universe and everyone in it. Between this series and its predecessor Zambot 3, creator Yoshiyuki Tomino actually earned the nickname "Kill 'Em All Tomino".
- The ending to Space Runaway Ideon was so despressing, that even Tomino himself wonders how he came up with it.
- Enough so that Soukou No Strain, whose directing team worked with Tomino, ended up being a subversion. It began as an Everybodys Dead Dave and ended that way, but just about everybody expected Sara and her cohorts to drop off.
- Saikano feels incredibly influenced by Ideon, particularly considering the two have essentially the same ending; the main difference is, Saikano has no Earth Shattering Kaboom, and Shuji stays alive as the last man on Earth as Chise accompanies him as an Energy Being.
- Also Aura Battler Dunbine sees one character survive, a sylph by the name of Cham Fao, who Tomino seemed to have a soft spot for. Everyone else went down in flames and explosions, taking most of Earth and Byston Well with them.
  - And even that they tried to push, as it was mentioned that she was never seen again.
- Many of the Gundam series directed by Tomino also have high death counts, Zeta Gundam and Victory Gundam in particular. The ironic thing about the Gundam series is that Tomino's stated reason for his Kill Em All tendencies was to discourage sequels.
- Though Tomino is not involved with Gundam 00, the latter half of the first season (especially episode 24) sees a massive die-off of both main and named characters.
  - Likewise, the finale of Gundam SEED, while leaving nearly all the main heroes safe, killed off the majority of the supporting cast, and the only survivor among the antagonists was via a last-minute defection to the good guys. Unfortunately, the most blatantly obvious death (and the most moving one at that) got eliminated via Retcon in the sequel, with no explanation ever given.
- MS IGLOO 2. Everybody dies, except for one lucky as hell Federation soldier and a Feddie higher-up. It's no small wonder some people have compared this to V Gundam in terms of bleakness.
The SDF-1 and its entire crew are wiped out at the end of the first third of Robotech. (In the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, however, everyone is fine...which makes this the rare Macekre that ups the death count.)
- Since the characters in question never show up again in the entire Macross franchise, though, they may as well be dead.
  - Exedol, Max and Miriya are all in Macross 7. It's only the core Love Triangle that have disappeared without trace (in universe, contact with Megaroad 01 was lost sometime after it set out).
The entire town of Hinamizawa is wiped out in one of the continuities in Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni (several, actually), and most of the main characters die - generally in horrible and bloody ways - in the other continuities as well.
- Subverted in Matsuribayashi-hen. It says a lot about the series that not killing everyone could be considered a subversion rather than just an aversion.
- The entire When They Cry series is like that. Umineko No Naku Koro Ni follows suit and even underlines it by giving you the body count at the end of each arc, which is most frequently read, "When the seagulls cry, nobody has been left alive."
Genesis Climber Mospeada pulls this in its first episode. The one character who survives becomes protagonist by default.
In Dragonball Z, the villain Super Buu has an attack dubbed "Human Extinction", that does exactly as the name implies. To add to that, anyone who isn't killed by this attack he kills personally (by turning them into candy, no less). Then he blows up the Earth. Then, he turns to the rest of the universe, and eventually makes his way to the afterlife, and starts destroying stuff there. This is one of the rare cases where the heroes have a Reset Button - which itself becomes a plot point, as the surviving secondary cast rushes to find it before it becomes too late for everyone.
- And in Future Trunks' timeline, Goku dies from The Virus, all of the Z-fighters are killed by the Androids, and eventually Gohan meets his maker as well. There is no Reset Button here, since Piccolo died, disabling the dragonballs, and altering the past only creates an alternate timeline(aversion of Temporal Paradox).
The end of the second season of Monster Rancher kills all of the mons off. There is a third season where they come Back From The Dead; it was never released in the US.
- However if you watch it careful enough, you can deduct that much from ending of season 2. In short, mon's discs come in two varieties: sleeping mons (discs on the ground), which can be brought to life in temples and "lost mons" (caught by a bush-like growth), which cannot, and represent killed mons. At the end of season 2 we see all lost mons transform into sleeping mons, implying they will be revived again.
Most of the cast of Fushigi Yuugi died through the course of the series. This was, however, undone in the OVAs.
Staying true to the original Shichinin no Samurai, by the end of Samurai 7, Gorobei, Kyuzo, Kikuchyo, and Heihachi have all died in battle, leaving only three of the original seven.
- Naturally, this is also true of its Western remake The Magnificent Seven.
In Sailor Moon, every secondary heroine sacrifices her own life to allow the title character to press on toward the Final Showdown. Twice.
- In the manga, they die EVERY ARC...some more pointlessly than others.
  - Yes and no. Although the Inner Senshi do get killed in the first and third arcs of the manga, and everybody dies in Stars, nobody on the good side dies in the fourth arc, and only Sailor Pluto dies in the second arc.
- Subverted in the final season of the anime, while 99.9% of the secondary heroines die the Starlights actually live to see Sailor Moon save the day.
Mangaka Mohiro Kitoh may be said to be a challenger to Tomino's Kill Em All Throne:
- Narutaru... Don't mess with the little girl who can use the whole world as a weapon. Oh, and while at the end, it resembles The End of Evangelion in that there are two people alive, it doesn't feel that way.
- Bokurano makes a valiant attempt to out-Tomino Tomino himself. Early on, the children discover that even if they win their battles, they're guaranteed to die. Only later is it revealed that for every battle they win, an entire Alternate Universe is destroyed. Which they are, on occasion, forced to watch by their Robot Buddy.
Basilisk is the fight between the Iga and Kouga clans. 10 members of each clan are pitted against each other, and they die one by one until all that is left are the Star Crossed Lovers, who are both Driven To Suicide.
In Wolf's Rain every character dies, one at a time. While the world dies. And then the world is born again. And everyone is apparently reincarnated a really long time later... possibly in the modern day.
Chrono Crusade fell victim to this. In fact, the only major character that wasn't either permanently killed off or otherwise rendered ineffective was the Big Bad. Downer Ending, indeed.
- And a Shoot The Shaggy Dog ending.
- Luckily, this is only true of the anime. The manga has most of the cast surviving in the end (some even into the 1990s!)
Dai Mahou Touge features "Kill Them All" as the invocation activating the lead Magical Girl's powers... Mayhem ensues, as you may imagine.
Berserk closes the "Band of the Hawk" arc by killing every major character but four: Guts, Casca, Griffith (who has turned evil anyway), and one other member of the Band who had the good luck not to be there when things went to pot. The entire world of the series seems to be heading that way, as well.
Hellsing, while not over yet, is definitely veering in this direction. As of the latest chapter, only Integra, Seras, possibly Heinkel, Islands, and the Major (who's a freaking robot)are still kicking out of the named cast, and there's a high probability of more killing. Millennium, Iscariot, and likely the Wild Geese have all been destroyed, the Hellsing organization is just barely hanging on, Islands is planning to bomb the area into oblivion to end the mess, and, oh yeah, the entire population of London has been completely decimated.
- It is over now, and, out of the entire original cast, only Seras, Integra, and a now immortal Heinkel are still alive after the 30-year timeskip. As for everyone's favourite psycopathic vampire, well...see below.
- Alucard got better after 30 years
Death Note: All but two of the main characters are killed off: Matsuda and Near, unless you count the SPK and the Taskforce.
- And Ryuk.
  - But he goes without saying.
Osamu Tezuka used this trope often, even in his early career. In his late '40s work Lost World, out of the dozen or so main characters, only three survive to the end & several nameless extras are killed when the rocketship crashes on top of them. Astro Boy storylines frequently ended with everybody who wasn't a main character or a Recurrer dead (and sometimes even them!). Most of the Phoenix stories end with everybody except the titular bird dead, including the entire populations of a couple of planets, which is understandable since the main theme of the series is that the quest for immortality is futile & we should be happy with the lives we have.
- One could also argue that Midnight's sudden accident leading to his brain transplanted in his ex-girlfriend's body, effectively killing the girl he wanted to revive all the time, was a rather unsubtle way to end the story abruptly.
In Ga Rei Zero, the entire named cast dies in the last 2 minutes of the FIRST episode. It's an effective cliffhanger, but...
- Then they kill half of the cast not presented in first episode. Body count keeps rising in the manga including some survivors of Ga Rei Zero.
Legend Of The Galactic Heroes has most of the main cast dead by the end of it. The author, Tanaka Yoshiki, was given the nickname "Mass Murder".
A slight subversion of this trope comes from the not-very-well-known anime Shin-Hakkenden in which, by the end of the series, only two of the named characters are alive. One is the narrator (who doesn't really even take part in the story until 3/4 of the way through the series) and the Mislead Villain Girl, who's pregnant. The reason this sort of counts as "subverted" is the two main characters die.
End of Evangelion: Subverted. Third Impact/Instrumentality/Tangification/whatever appears to be a Kill Em All at first, but it's later explicitly stated that nobody is really dead, and the process is completely reversible—making it a potential Everybody Lives instead.
Rah Xephon ends up with about half of the main cast dead by the end of the penultimate episode.
- It seems like that at first until Ayato "retunes" the world to get a happy ending.
The Venus Versus Virus anime ends with every major character dead. The only characters who survive are minor comic-relief characters. The anime Overtook The Manga.
- Actually,Sumire and Lucia survived. All Lucia did was hug her.
In the Downer Ending of Texhnolyze, everybody either dies gruesomely or becomes a permanently stationary automaton. Given the nature of the show, this is probably expected.
The X1999 movie starts killing off its cast literally from its first scene - in some cases not even bothering to pause to introduce the characters first - and doesn't stop until everyone but Kamui is dead. The TV series is a little gentler, but as far as the manga is concerned, all bets are off.
- Also by those Sadistic Lady Mangaka, RG Veda (which was also their debut longrunning manga). Some people were actually surprised that two major characters survived.
Characters in Gantz die once to get involved in the story (and can possibly die again). Being a Mauve Shirt or even a main character is no protection from death. Then came the Osaka arc, and after that came the Italy arc.
By the end of Akira the only survivors are Kaneda, Kei, Kai, and the Colonel everyone else is either killed by Tetsuo or killed when Akira sucks everyone else into a vortex, Tetsuo's fate is left ambiguous.
Uzumaki: in the end, everybody dies. Not only the main characters, but everybody who's in Kurôzu-cho.
At the end of MD Geist, the main character, who is a military developed human killing machine reactivates a cancelled countdown time that unleashes a self-replicating robot army designed to exterminate all human life on the planet, just so he can have a stronger opponent to fight.
- Then in the sequel to MD Geist, he foils a plan to nuke all of the robots in one stroke, and then leads them to humanity's last remaining stronghold so that they completely destroy it.
Though possibly expected, in the space of about three chapters, Gunslinger Girl has rapidly descended into this, with almost half of the named SWA cyborgs ( Beatrice being among them) and likely their handlers, in the case of the others, being killed in a bloody battle against a well-armed terrorist group in possesion of a missile.
By the end of the first volume of Urotsukidoji otherwise known as Legend of the Overfiend the only survivors are Jyaku, Megumi, Nagumo, and Akemi everyone else is killed by demons, Niki, or Nagumo in his transformed state.
Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom does this over the course of the series, and then finishes its spree very callously in the final episode. At the episode's end, after the series seemingly following the "Cerulean Blue Sky" route of the Phantom of Inferno visual novel, Reiji/Zwei, at the episode's end, is shot dead by either Elen/Ein or a completely random passerby on a cart, and depending on the interpretation of the final scenes, Elen/Ein herself possibly committed suicide by deadly nightshade. In conclusion, every major character, except Mac Guire, possibly Ein, Shiga and Mio is dead by the end of the series.
In Tetragrammaton Labyrinth, this is what happens to any character that shows up more than twice in the story. It's less of a Downer Ending rather than a bittersweet ending, though. It's kind of ambiguous what kind of ending it is, but it seemed like it was a Earn Your Happy Ending type.
Gall Force series manage to do that nearly all time. Each time lots of cast is introduced just for one purpose: to gradually kill everyone and finally wipe all life from entire galaxy.

Close Anime and Manga

Pride of Baghdad ends with all four protagonists being gunned down by American soldiers without even achieving the freedom that they'd been dreaming of. It should probably be mentioned that the protagonists are lions.
Coheed and Cambria: The Amory Wars - The Second Stage Turbine Blade. Not only do Coheed and Cambria get tricked into brutally murdering their own children, they also die mostly because Cambria destroys a spaceship's engine in a fit of rage. Secondary characters also die in a failed coup, by the truckload. And that's just one of the chapters in the story!
- It Gets Worse: Claudio (the protagonist for much of the storyline followed SSTB) is supposed to destroy the entire solar system, and release the souls of the Keywork!!! (The Keywork is the fictitious Solar System thing). Because Destiny Says So.
The Alternate Continuity story "The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe" is Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- Not to mention The Punisher: The End, where after a nuclear apocalypse, the Punisher and his sidekick venture out of a bomb shelter when the radiation has gone down enough for him to make it to the people responsible. He kills them, then his sidekick(who was actually a murderer), and then dies.
The Elseworlds graphic novel Batman: Crimson Mist ends up with every named character in the Batman world, except Dr. Jeremiah Arkham and, apparently, a female expert in the supernatural, killed off.
X-Force/X-Statix kills off team members intermittently throughout the series, before slaughtering the survivors en masse in the final issue. Still managed to have a sequel series, by showing us some of the characters' fates in the afterlife.
Marvel Zombies killed off a good 90% of its characters.
The original Transformers Marvel comics run featured vast numbers of deaths. In fact, something like one-fifth of all the characters introduced in the comic series had died by the end (in the case of Optimus Prime, twice over, but pretty much everyone else was for real). In fact, sometimes characters who had been the focus for multiple storylines with them evading death multiple times would suddenly be killed with no warning in a very off-hand manner several years later most notably Blaster, who had something like two year's worth of storylines based around him during which time he was repeatedly shot, infected with a horrific robotic illness, at one point completely disassembled and then tortured non-stop for months on end by Grimlock before finally getting some semblence of a normal life, only to be killed a year later by Starscream without a second's thought. This trope then went insane in the Generation 2 sequel series in which the corpses mounted up at an alarming rate.
- The later Universe comic introduced a gigantic number of characters in the first issues. This was way more than could be properly handled, so they massacred most of them until it was at a better size.
- Furman would be brought in to write the series finale for Beast Wars. His first question to the staff? "Who can I kill?" The answer? Tigerhawk, Depth Charge, and every Predacon except Megatron and Waspinator.
- It's probably not much of a stretch to say that Simon Furman is basically the white Yoshiyuki Tomino.
  - Notably, every character that he kills off that gets a death scene of their own concludes it with the line "Oh well. Never did want to live forever!"
Rising Stars is about 113 people with superpowers, called the Specials. At the end, they're all dead. The two most important non-Special characters also die.
Usagi Yojimbo author Stan Sakai wrote a Kill 'Em All Final Battle as an experiment, but decided it was "too depressing".
X-Men featured at least one story arc which took place in an alternate future in which Sentinels had killed most of Earth's heroes and enslaved the rest. By the end of it, the adult Shadowcat is the only X-Man alive.
The Great Lakes Avengers have a nasty habit of losing members, including Mr. Immortal's love interest in issue 1.
Ultimatum, Ultimate Marvel's big Crisis Crossover before the title reboot, cut a wide swath through the heroes and villains of the canon. By the time it's over, around 70% of the named characters and millions-strong chunks of international populations are dead.

Close Comic Books

The Harry Potter fanfic Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness has what can be described as a Kill Em All ending, with some very nasty curses involved and some major TearJerkers.
- The sequel, "Sluagh", is worse. That is one...erm...INVENTIVE young man. Depending on how you look at it, NONE of Our Heroes are left standing after the Battle of Druim Cett, and if half of those creatures aren't out of the author's imagination, there's some funky stuff in water of those Irish springs.

Close Fan Fiction

Serenity acts like it's going to do this, only to stop after Wash.
- but that's unforgivable.
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Order 66
The movie Children Of Men leaves only one main character standing at its conclusion, unless you count her baby.
The last few scenes of The Departed ends up with every main character but one getting shot by each other - then the very last scene has that final main character getting shot by the other main character's boss.
Sidehackers was a brutal, gritty biker film in which almost every character (including the hero's extremely likable love interest, whose death Mystery Science Theater 3000 had to cut out of the aired version and have Crow explain) was gang raped and killed. The hero himself was gunned down by the fatally wounded villain whilst walking away from a Mexican Standoff. The three that lived (the black guy, the guy who told bad jokes, and the hero's friend) all ran off when the battle was in progress. Sidehackers incidentally, was the movie which prompted Best Brains to institute their policy of watching a movie all the way through before selecting it for their show.
Rocketship X-M features a bunch of people going to the moon, but ending up on Mars. They are able to find about people that are horribly mutated from a war and on the way back, and only have enough time tell the people of Earth about this, before a leak makes them run out of gas on the way home and they are unable to land. As Crow put it on Mystery Science Theater 3000, "There's nothing more depressing then being stuck in a spaceship, watching people die in a spaceship."
Beneath the Planet Of The Apes ends with pretty much the entire cast getting shot. And then Charlton Heston's dying act is to trigger a gigantic nuke that destroys the entire planet. They still managed three more films, though.
- Oh the irony... Heston actually re-wrote the ending to the script (in which Taylor destroys the entire planet) because he didn't want it to become a Franchise Zombie, and would rather just end it then.
Transformers: The Movie killed off most of the first generation of Transformers, Autobot and Decepticon alike, in order to facilitate the introduction of the new toy line.
- The later season of the cartoon series casts doubt on this, as many of the Transformers killed in the movie are seen up and walking around again, although some of these occasions are believed to have been animation gaffes.
  - And of course the impact of this is lessened since the highest-profile fatality, Optimus Prime, returned in the cartoon series. In the comics set after the movie, impressively, he stayed dead permanently.
At the end of Saving Private Ryan, out of the original squad sent to find Ryan as well as the entire paratrooper force defending the town of Ramelle, only two members of the original squad and Ryan himself survive when Allied reinforcements finally arrive.
In the Village Of The Damned remake with Christopher Reeve, only the teacher girl and her kid (the only alien child who had more or less normal emotions) survive. Everyone else in town is dead.
- A subversion of the original story (The Midwich Cuckoos and the original Village of the Damned movie) in which none of the kids had human emotions. They all died along with the teacher responsible for their deaths, but almost everybody else survived.)
Scarface ends with Tony and crew dead and the drug lord who ordered the film-ending attack still alive. Fortunately or not, we don't get to see his presumable satisfaction with this.
- The recent video game based on the film picks up after Tony's 'death' and has the player control him as he attempts to rebuild his drug empire. This can be viewed as an alternate continuity.
Those who do not die onscreen in the cult French Resistance movie Army of Shadows are killed off in the epilogue screen titles.
The Wild Bunch. Good guys. Bad guys. Worse Guys. Bystanders. Livestock. Only two named characters are still breathing as the closing credits roll.
In The Fall, Roy almost ends his story this way, much to Alexandria's horror. Only her confession of love convinces him to allow their avatars to live.
In the Saw franchise, there isn't a single character who survived all five movies, up to and including the titular serial killer himself.
The Quentin Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs ends with just about the entire crew dead except for Mr. Pink, who gets caught by the cops as the credits roll. And some would argue that even he is not captured, but instead shot to death by the police.
- And he returns to this with a vengeance in Inglourious Basterds. All but two of the basterds die, along with a Nazi officer who presumably doesn't die but does get a swastika carved into his forehead. Every other major character, including Hitler? Yeah, dead. (Marcel's fate is also left unclear, although given how fast that film went up...)
John Woo's The Killer ends with just about every major character dead except for Jenny and Inspector Li.
Let's see... Night of the Living Dead ( the only survivor is mistaken for a zombie and shot in the head), Cabin Fever (ditto, in an obvious homage), Resident Evil (Alice is the only survivor IN THE ENTIRE CITY).
- Ben isn't mistaken for a zombie. They were just a bunch of rednecks who felt like killing a black ma.
The Scottish film Outpost has an entire squad of mercenaries and their scientist/corporate employer wiped out by undead Nazi super-soldiers. The end of the movie leads the view to believe that a second team was wiped out the same way.
Dead Man. Interestingly, the only death we don't really see is that of William, presumably the titular "dead man."
The entire crew of Icarus II dies in the sci-fi movie Sunshine (2007), but they do manage to save the world in the process.
- Though it is hinted that Kappa does not die, but is frozen in time right before his death, stuck admiring a wall of fire. This is either a happy ending or a Fate Worse Than Death, depending on your point of view.
[REC] Nobody survives. Leading lady, camera man, hero firefighter, mother and daughter, Chinese family, young cop... they ALL bought it and/or came back.
- Except probably an old couple.
Quarantine. There's a few Hope Spots, in particular one close to the end when the landlord says there's a way to get out through the basement, but really. What really sells it is that most characters who die pop back up as (let's just say) zombies, and near the end there's a sequence where the two leads have to fight through what's left of the rest of the cast.
Cloverfield, although the ending is left intentionally ambiguous.
The Blair Witch Project. Of course, considering that the whole conceit of the movie is "Hey, we found this video camera out in the woods..." why would you expect anything else?
Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning ends with pretty much everybody dying in the massive P-Fleet vs Babel 13 space battle. A few survive, though, and Earth is freed from Emperor Pirk's tyranny.
All eight characters who got a speaking part in The Descent died. At least in the original version. The US got a different ending, and now a different team is filming a sequel featuring the two main characters.
The Final Destination series. The survivor of the first movie gets killed in the second and the survivors of the second one are told to be dead at the beginning of the third one. Said third movie decides to not waste time and kill everyone in a not very ambiguous ending.
- It Got Worse in the newest.
Very common in European war movies, especially WWII movies from Germany:
- In Das Boot, just as the titular submarine returns home and the crew is greeted by the cheering people the air raid siren sounds and allied aircraft attack the harbour, sinking the sub and killing everyone.
- This is actually an anti-war subversion, the U96 and all her crew returned safely home (U96 was considered a lucky boat in that none of her crew was killed)Her captain Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock went on to captain Germany`s first and only nuclear powered freighter. So although the book/film (based on the real crew) had a downer ending real life did not.
- And in Stalingrad, only 3 characters are alive near the end, and then a Russian sniper kills one of them, and the last two take cover and slowly freeze to death in the snow in the most beautiful scene ever.
  - Did we mention that as the two stop moving and are slowly covered by the falling snow, the credits roll? Yes, it's that kind of war movie.
Valkyrie ends with the deaths of virtually all of the major conspirators who organized the botched July 20th assassination attempt on Hitler.
- It's not like the screenwriter had a choice.
By the end of Miracle at St. Anna, with the exception of Hector and Angelo, every single villager and Allied soldier in St. Anna is killed during a battle with German soldiers.
By the end of the first Scary Movie everyone except for Cindy's father, Gale, and Doofy are killed. Of course, many of said characters inexplicably come Back From The Dead in the sequels.
In Dead Snow, the cast is slaughtered one by one during an exceptionally bloody standoff against the Nazi Colonel Herzog and his stiff soldiers. The toughest one survives after figuring out that the Nazis are after a box of stolen gold and presenting it to them. Though when he finally gets back to the car, he discovers he has accidentally brought a gold coin with him. The Colonel appears and offs him shortly afterwards.]]
The credits of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance start rolling when all characters are dead except one, who is fatally wounded. As the screen fades to black, we continue to hear his mumbling and moaning as he slowly bleeds out due to having his gut sliced to ribbons. At the end of the credits, he is still not dead.
In Stranger Than Fiction, this is stated to be author Karen Eiffel's Signature Style. It becomes an issue when the main character Harold Crick becomes her new protagonist and when confronted with this she is plagued by guilt at how many actual lives she might have ended.
The Akira Kurosawa film Ran — not surprising since the plot closely resembles that of King Lear, with a bonus cycle of vengeance element thrown in for good measure.
The Dirty Dozen. 11 of the titular group die, and the last is badly injured. The two officers with them both survive, though.
{{9}}. First, humanity is, apparently, completely wiped out. Then, the only two explicitley named human characters die, one before the movie even begins. Then, all of the stitchpunks, except 3, 4, 7 and 9, die along the course of the film. Granted, the ending itself isn't all that bleak, but that doesn't mitigate the loss of life.

Close Film

In Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy, any character with a name had a fifty-fifty chance of making it out of book 3 alive. There were more deaths than in the previous two books combined - and the second book took place during a war.
Mostly Harmless. At the end, most of the main characters and all possible Earths are completely obliterated from all possible timelines. Permanently. (The only possible survivor is a character who stepped into a teleporter in a previous book and wasn't seen again.) And then, to make it even worse, the author died.
- The author had, before his death, adapted the novel for a radio version; he had stated some dissatisfaction with the downbeat ending and, in the radio version, it is revealed that the Babelfish can teleport its host if they're about to die. Since all the main characters are using a babelfish for translation, they survive (landing at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe).
- The cop-out nature of that ending is somewhat redeemed by the fact that Adams himself had intended to subvert this trope in a later novel. His death complicated things.
  - Not as much as you might think. Eoin Colfer (Author of Artemis Fowl et al) was contracted to deliver a 6th book, And Another Thing.
A Song Of Ice And Fire has been going this way at full speed since A Storm of Swords, and it's not like the first two books lacked corpses either.
- From Martin himself: "No one will be alive by the last book. In fact, they all die in the fifth. The sixth book will be just a thousand-page description of snow blowing across the graves..."
  - To some extent this is overstated. Although the death of the presumed main character in Book 1 was shocking, most of the deaths since then have been of secondary characters at best. The only other truly central character to die came back. Most notably, the 'big three' core characters, usually held to be Tyrion, Dany and Jon, are still alive and kicking.
Shakespeare's tragedies, anyone?
- Hamlet has 10 major deaths (if you count Claudius's as 2 because he got stabbed and drank the poisoned wine). The only major character still alive is Horatio.
- By the end of the fifth act of King Lear, only two or three people are left alive, one of which wants to join his king in death (though his death was never really shown by the end). Depending on the version, the ending is different (where either Edgar or Albany is crowned).
Noticeably averted in House Of Leaves. I say "noticeably" because in the photograph insert after the cover, there is a typed note in the middle of the mess, detailing the author's desire to kill off Will Navidson's children in brutal ways. "Drown them in blood" was the particular phrase.
Todd McCaffrey's Dragonriders Of Pern books have, thus far, featured exploding mine holds, three continent threatening plagues (two of which infected dragons) and almost an entire Weyr taken out in one swoop by a bad jump between.
Battle Royale. Of course, everyone dying is pretty much the premise of the book. In fact, in the end, one more survives than was supposed to...
HP Lovecraft never pulled this off, probably because he always presented his stories in a semi-realistic manner, so ending it with "then everybody died" when the world is, very clearly, not dead, would kinda ruin the setting. Instead he had lots of "everybody WILL die. And there's nothing we can do about it".
- Well, he did write things like Nyarlathotep and The Doom That Came To Sarnath, which basically describe the sudden and mysterious fall of entire cities. Might avert the trope mainly by virtue of not having a lot of explicitly named characters, mind.
Somewhat subverted in the final Narnia book, in which all nearly the characters from our world appear, having died there in a train accident. They get a Happy Ending, while much fan consternation is caused by the fate of Susan, who is "no longer a friend of Narnia", does not appear in the book, and survives. I.e. the sole survivor is the one who, in typical plot terms, gets casually killed off.
- Apocryphally, Neil Gaiman deals with this lost end in his 2004 short story The Problem of Susan (the title of the story is a spoiler itself in this context).
In ''And Then There Were None'' by Agatha Christie, everyone on the island is killed off and the culprit leaves a confession in a bottle, sends it out to sea, and commits suicide.
By the end of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, every character in the posse, including the protagonist The Kid, is dead. The only exception is Judge Holden.
Approximately half of the characters introduced in the first book of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book Of The Fallen series are dead by (and mostly during) book three. 75% are gone by the end of book six (including most of the Big Damn Heroes from earlier on).
- Almost all of those characters are either reincarnated, resurrected or continue to play an active role as ghosts.
  - Tell that to Coltaine and the Chain of Dogs. Or Whiskeyjack. Or Dujek Onearm. Or T'Amber. Or the Sengars. Or...
  - Coltaine is clearly going to reincarnate, according to the end of Chain of Dogs. And Whiskeyjack is very much present in the most recent book, Toll the Hounds, which also mentions Dujek Onearm as one of the commanders in the army of the dead that Iskar Jarak commands ...
Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar cycle of novels have spanned something like 200 years to date, so with a few magical exceptions every major character from the first book is mow dead. However, the end of the ''Serpentwar' sub-series was notable for not only wiping out most of the then-supporting cast and a couple of leading characters in a devastating war, but also destroying the city of Krondor, where a significant amount of the action in the books had taken place. Later books took this to an insane extreme by blowing up the entire planet of Kelewan, which had seen a lot of the action take place there as well.
Paul Kearney's splendid five-book Monarchies of God series ends with the death of every single character of note. Seriously, I think the only character who isn't expressly shown to be dead is a second-tier character who ceased being of any importance and vanished after the third volume.
- Except for the King of Torunna, who rode of into the sunset, and somehow ended up meeting the Prophet Ramusio who had founded both the worlds great religions. A long time ago.
This was originally supposed to be the fate of most of the main characters in the Honor Harrington novel At All Costs in which even the protagonist herself was supposed to die so that her son could take up the mantle a few decades down the road. The Author decided to change that however.
In Stephen King's novel The Tommyknockers, except for two kids, pretty much every character is dead by the end.
- In The Stand, 99.4% of humanity is killed off in the first quarter of the book, and then most of the many, many main characters die over the course of the book, leaving two or three alive.
Iain M. Banks is a big fan of this. Both Consider Phlebas and Against A Dark Background end with just one main character alive (barely).
- And now Matter as well.
- Consider Phelbas goes further than the main characters: virtually everybody picked out of the crowd, even just as "the security guard", is killed off.
All Quiet On The Western Front. Almost every character dies, even including the narrator.
It's not everybody in Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, but after the battle of Chi Bi, the fan favorites start dying off one by one. By the end of the series none of them are left and nobody cares that Sima Yi's grandson has taken over all three kingdoms.
A few of the One Hundred And Eight heroes of Heroes of the Water Margin (or Suikoden, for those of you more familiar with the Japanese title) had already died before the end, but a huge list of them get killed off fighting another rebel group, just as the government had hoped because they feared the heroes' power. Whichever survivors that didn't scatter to the winds after that were poisoned by order of the emperor.
The Arthur legend. At the end, a whopping five characters are left living: Lancelot and Guinevere (who join the Church and die anyway), Bedivere, Morgan, and Arthur, who was carried off to Avalon with a mortal wound, to wait and sleep there until England needs him again.
- Wait, Morgan died. She turned into a snake and got cut in half. But there was one minor knight besides Bedivere who came out alive.
In Ben Counter's Warhammer 40000 Horus Heresy novel Battle for the Abyss, every single character, named and unnamed, ends up dead. By Horus Heresy standards, this is a Bittersweet Ending: at least the loyalist Space Marines' Heroic Sacrifices are not in vain.
In David Weber and John Ringo's Prince Roger series, they start with a full company of body guards. Throughout the four books, only 14 or so of the group are left. The planet was a great example of Everything Trying to Kill You
Has a lampshade hung on it by Mark Twain in the afterword to Pudd'nhead Wilson, where he explains that the solution to the convoluted original plot was to drop the original characters down a well in the back yard, which only ceased when it seemed likely the well would fill up.
In Ben Counter's Warhammer 40000 novel Daemon World, the epilogue states that there is a legend that one of the book's characters lived. Other than that slight possibility, all the characters (named and unnamed) and the entire population of the world died — plus the world itself. An Eldar maiden world, it commited suicide because of all the horrors that had been committed on it.
In Gav Thorpe's Warhammer 40000 novel Angels of Darkness, the Dark Angels realize that they can remain in a hermetically sealed fortress, and so keep the virus released it from destroying the world, and die themselves because their suits won't last that long. Fearing what they might do when dying of hunger and aspixation, they all commited suicide together.
In Ben Counter's Warhammer 40000 Grey Knights novel Hammer of Daemons, Alaric himself survives. Also some low-level unnamed Mooks, and two Grey Knights who weren't captured in the opening chapter. Other than that, every named character and large chunks of the unnamed masses die.
Moby Dick. Everyone and everything except the narrator dies. There's a reason he starts the book by saying "Call me Ishmael."
This is exactly the point of the Hunger Games, the novel's titular reality TV-show. Suberted when Katniss and Peeta attempt a double suicide with poison; to avoid this, the Capitol makes them both winners. The Capitol is not very happy about it, either.
The Hero of Ages, the final book in the Mistborn trilogy. By the end, the series' body count includes, Kelsier, Dockson, Clubs, Ore'Seur, The Lord Ruler, Tindwyl, Zane, Preservation, Elend Venture, and Vin, the main character herself. Note that doesn't include outright villains, such as Straff Venture or Ruin.

Close Literature

Blakes Seven. They even threw in a line of dialogue which revealed that the only previous regular character to make it out of the series alive had died off-screen at some point since.
- It is worth pointing out that this was unintended. The writers had a fifth season planned in which it would be revealed that only one character was definitely dead. The rest had merely been stunned and taken prisoner. However, the BBC decided to cancel the series at that point, so it was just assumed that almost everyone was dead. It should be pointed out that Avon and Tarrant weren't gunned down on screen and in theory survived, although the latter was severely injured in the crash-landing of Scorpio.
The Black Adder ended with all but two of the main characters dying from drinking poison as a result of a convoluted power struggle. Later seasons of the Blackadder also tended to end with the wiping out of all or most of the cast. This was played for morbid laughs in Blackadder II and Blackadder the Third, and anything but in Blackadder Goes Forth.
The Dinosaurs finale, "Changing Nature," had the dinosaurs in the process of going extinct due to environmental catastrophe brought about by the actions of the WESAYSO Corporation. A very bleak ending to a generally light-hearted show.
Mortal Kombat: Konquest. Reportedly, there was supposed to be a second season, which either undid some of the deaths, or continued with a new crew, but the series was canceled, and thus finished with a Downer Ending.
Cold Case dealt with a mall shooting where the perps killed and maimed more than 15 people before offing themselves. After further investigation, it's learned that one of the survivors helped motivate them into the shooting, thinking they'd just take out the jerks who tried to rape her earlier that day, only to have this revenge plan backfire when she realized they were unstable enough to go after people at random. The survivor eventually tried to off herself, as well, thus fulfilling the trope in spades.
The Young Ones ends with the four main characters dying in a bus crash. Granted, they died just about every episode, but we're to assume this one sticks.
- Also, Vyvyan's hampster and their landlord both died in the same episode, under different circumstances. (Although the landlord was eaten by lions in the previous season, oddly enough.)
British soap opera Dream Team took this to insane lengths: 37 deaths of (mostly) main characters over its run, which considering the show is set at a relatively normal soccer (football) team is quite some achievement.
- These deaths range from freak coach explosions to chewing gum.
Six Feet Under features a doozy of an finale, as the audience finds out how every main character died: Ruth, David and Federico die of natural causes, Keith is shot to death as he exits a security van, Brenda is literally 'talked' to death by her brother, and Claire dies at the age of 102.
V: The Series had numerous secondary characters being killed off during the series, including resistance fighters who had been present since the original miniseries (not to mention other long-term characters simply leaving, never to be seen again). At the end, the viewer is left to infer that resistance member Robin's child, Elizabeth (a.k.a. "The Star Child") and her boyfriend were killed when they boarded a transport with a hidden bomb on it.
Doctor Who: The Caves of Androzani where all but two characters die - Peri and the villain's secretary. Even the Doctor dies, well, kind of.
- In Horror at Fang Rock, the entire guest cast dies. The Doctor and Leela sail off, leaving a lighthouse full of corpses behind them.
- Killing ridiculous numbers of people is standard fare for Doctor Who, but it is almost guaranteed every time the Daleks make an appearance, with Genesis of the Daleks, Resurrection of the Daleks, and The Dalek's Master Plan (among others) all ending with obscenely high body counts of both major and secondary characters. They aren't Space Nazis for nothing.
- Not to mention Logopolis in which approximately a tenth of the universe gets destroyed. By accident.
- And then there's the Fifth Doctor adventure Warriors of the Deep, where almost everyone and their dog (except the Doctor and his two companions) bite it in particularly painful ways. Or Castrovalva, where seemingly everyone (except, again, the Doctor and his three compansions) die. Hell, the Fifth Doctor had a lot of these, didn't he?
  - This was actually pointed out in Resurrection of the Daleks and given as the reason for one of his companions leaving him.
  - Of course in Castrovalva the characters who die are sentient illusions created by the Master. It still is kind of poignant.
The short-lived NBC show The Others ended with all but one character (Albert) biting it.
The final episodes of the Canadian TV series Butch Patterson: Private Dick ended with five of the seven main characters being killed off one by one, the sixth going to jail for their murders, with only the title character being the last man standing.
Forever Knight. Oh, Forever Knight. Virtually everyone on the show was killed off over the course of the third season, culminating in the hero killing his beloved and then asking his sire to stake him.
In the five-episode zombie series Dead Set, absolutely every character, and, indeed, most - if not all - of Britain, is either dead or undead by the final episode.
Angel. In the final episode, Wesley and Lindsey are both killed in the final battle, and Eve refuses to leave the collapsing building, and may or might die. Doyle, Cordelia and Fred have all died previously. Connor escapes, as does Lorne. The last thing we see is Angel, Spike, Ilyria and a mortally wounded Gunn facing off impossible odds. Although Joss Whedon later wrote comics in which most characters survive (sort of), this was the end for a lot of the TV audience.

Close Live Action TV

See Rocks Fall Everyone Dies.
Warhammer 40000. Kill Em All doesn't begin to describe it.
- Rape and torture them all to death, and then capture all their souls and rape and torture them for all eternity might go a little ways towards describing it.
Most games of Nuclear War end this way.

Close Tabletop Games

An anonymous quote summarizes the work of Shakespeare as "Shakespeare's tragedies: They all die. Shakespeare's comedies: Half of them die, and the other half crossdress." It's a fairly accurate summation.
- Not that accurate; this troper checked, and the only two Comedies involving death are Love's Labour's Lost (where the dead character never appeared to begin with) and Troilus and Cressida (which is just as likely to be described as a Tragedy, Romance, or Problem Play as a Comedy).
  - Well. there's also A Winters Tale, which features the deaths of Mamillius and Antigonus (as a result of the hero's actions, no less). Though again, it's more a problem play than a true comedy. And there's those people who presumably died in the shipwreck at the beginning of Twelfth Night, though that's offstage and before the play begins.
- Case in point: Titus Andronicus, where the only two major characters left alive when the play ends are Lucius, Marcus and Card Carrying Villain Aaron. And Aaron's being taken off to his execution.
- Another one: Hamlet. Everyone dies except Horatio and Fortinbras.
- Not so much with the cross-dressing, but Macbeth serves as another strong example of the trope.
- "Romeo And Juliet", anyone? It's almost a trope in itself for a character not to realize this and say something like: "Oh, what a beautiful, heartwarming love story, just like Romeo and Juliet!"
- King Lear. Only Kent, Edgar, and Albany are left at the play's end, and of the two, only Kent and Edgar really count as main characters. Oh, and it's implied Kent will die shortly anyway.
Götterdämmerung, the final play in Richard Wagner's operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, culminates with Siegfried's death prompting Brünnhilde to make a Heroic Sacrifice that burns down Valhalla with all the gods inside.
Wagner started on the path of Everyone Dies early. His boyhood tragedy Leubald featured 24 deaths and by the last act he was having to bring characters back as ghosts.
In Sweeney Todd, All but Toby, Anthony, and Johanna wind up dead. The original Broadway musical and Stephen Sondheim himself indicate that Anthony and Johanna do, in fact, survive, having burst onto the scene with the constable in tow (Sondheim has said that they are the only two characters to have a "happy" ending, relatively speaking). Toby, however, has gone completely and incurably insane.
Explicitly referred to in the Toxic Avenger musical, in which the titular monster considers doing this in the appropriately named song, "Everybody Dies." Averted when he changes his mind after one murder.
'Tis Pity She's a Whore ends with most of the main characters dead. It wasn't just Shakespeare who loved to kill off characters during that era.
Greek tragedies often killed off all or nearly all the main characters, leaving only one or two minor characters to carry on. Example: Antigone. Other times it was Everybodys Dead Dave.

Close Theater

Drakengard's fourth ending does this to all the main characters. Hell, even all the supporting characters are gone.
Odin Sphere has a bad ending in which the Ragnarok is carried out (okay, to be fair, it's carried out in the good ending, too, but what makes it different is that, in the bad ending, everyone dies. As in the world ends).
Call Of Duty 4 has one of the main characters as well as his entire squad, a pilot he just rescued, and countless other Marines, dying in a nuclear explosion. On the SAS side, the player is forced to watch as his entire squad is slowly killed off before being able to kill the Big Bad once and for all.
- And even then, depending on your interpretation of the final scene, Soap may have died of his injuries as the Russians were airlifting him to safety.
- Apparently, according to the upcoming sequel he lived
- The American campaign is a complete Shoot The Shaggy Dog.
Planescape: Torment ends with the entire party dead and one's character sent to eternal punishment in the lower planes or erased from existence entirely. It's possible to save everyone but the main character, who goes to his eternal punishment if you do so. And that's the good ending. Though it is implied that he kicks ass in the afterlife, as well.
Unreal II: The Awakening ends with a massive Bridge Drop on the whole squad except the main characters. While there was a vibe of The War Has Just Begun, the sequel hook was surprisingly vague and no actual sequel materialized. Downer Ending all around.
The Base Defense missions in the middle-late portions of Marathon II: Durandal have the player scouring a friendly base from evil clones of the friendlies. How to tell them apart (except that clones explode when approached)? Well, the first such mission is called God Will Sort the Dead. Yes, it's a very viable strategy, and on the Xbox 360 port, it's actually necessary for One Hundred Percent Completion.
- The levels in the Marathon games frequently included interesting messages if you viewed them using a map editor. The text for God Will Sort The Dead? "Q: How do you tell the difference between the good Bobs and the bad ones? A: Good Bobs?" The first game had it's own share, namely Bob-B-Q's "BOB-JAM? APPLY GRENADES LIBERALLY!!", and yes, you were supposed to save the Bobs on that level, too...
Neverwinter Nights 2: Rocks Fall Everyone Dies.
- Not quite, according to the Expansion Pack Mask Of The Betrayer. Apart from the player character, Amon Jerro survives, chasing the gargoyles who kidnapped the PC into the shadow plane only to somehow ends up in the Soulless Ward of the Academy of Binders. Retrieving his soul and talking to him reveals that Kelgar, Sand, and Neeshka may have also escaped the collapse. Khelgar survived by being badass, Neeshka dodged most of the debris and outran everyone, while Sand transformed into an iron golem. One ending comfirms the first two survivors, another confirms Neeshka and Kelgar (they both attend your wedding). Another expansion pack (Storm Of Zehir) implies that Casavir made it out alive (contrairy to what Amon Jerro saw), though grievously injured. He was captured an imprisoned by Luskans. Qara, Bishop, Elanee & Grobnar are the only four confirmed to be dead.
  - Still, not quite. Other than the confirmed survive: Ammon, Khelgar, and Casavir, and the confirmed dead: Bishop, Qara, the Construct, and Grobnar, ~~other characters are probably~~ Elanee is determined by the actions of your character in the OC, so it might be different for each player, but, even if Qara remains loyal at the end Ammon confirms her head was split open by a falling piece of debris.
The bad ending of Persona 3 has this happen to SEES, as well as about six billion-plus extras.
The appropriately named Armageddon Ending in Live A Live. The worst part is that You're playing as the bosses, it's you who gives out the command and to gain access to the ending, you must let the heroes beat you within an inch of your life, so you must deliberately search for the ending. You sick filthy bastard.
In Soul Nomad And The World Eaters, the 'bad ending of the Demon Path leads to the killing of most of the cast on-screen, followed by Revya destroying both worlds and killing everybody else, him/herself included.
- Also the Asagi Route; in a divergence from her normal characterization, Asagi spitefully destroys the world, forcing you to start a New Game Plus with her on the team.
In Far Cry 2, every named character (except for one) is dead, including all of your buddies and the player character. In fact, you kill them all yourself, other than the Jackal - who was the one you were sent to Africa to kill in the first place...
Same thing happens in the original Far Cry.
The final mission of Freespace 2 unexpectedly ends with the local star going supernova, and both the player's character and his entire squadron are incinerated. If you replay the final mission forewarned and position yourself near the jump point and can escape before the star explodes, you survive but your team-mates' heroic sacrifice is mentioned in the final cut-scene, implying that it's a bit disappointing you didn't join them.
Most of the lead and supporting cast of the Max Payne games is dead by the end of the second game, with only Max himself and one of the minor secondary characters surviving, unless you beat the game on the hardest difficulty, in which case Mona Sax also survives.
A humongous number of named characters are dead by the end of Star Craft: Brood War, with only four characters of note from the first game surviving (Kerrigan, Jim Raynor, Zeratul and Arcturus Mengsk).
FEAR: Extraction Point", the non-canon Mission Pack Sequel to FEAR'', ends with all the protagonist's teammates dead, the protagonist himself on the verge of death, having failed to defeat the Big Bad, and The End Of The World As We Know It looming.
- The actual canon continuation, FEAR 2, isn't much better... Every ally that protagonist Michael Beckett comes into contact with except one dies throughout the course of the game, and Beckett himself is raped by the Big Bad at the very end, his fate after that left hanging.
Dead Space has you see everyone die, and depending on how you see the ending, Isaac as well.
- Word Of God confirms that Isaac is still alive. For now...
Shin Megami Tensei I. Starts off an ordinary day in a modern Japanese town setting. By the end, it's just you, the Heroine and the Old Man left alive in the entire world, more or less.
Phantom Dust. Turns out it's the year 12010, and the human race has completely died due to an unspecified event. One man, Edgar, survived as he was in space at the time. (An accident involving a black hole caused him to skip ten thousand years.) On his return, he realised he was alone. In his loneliness, he found he had the ability to forge 'creations' from the dust that covered the surface of the Earth, and created a whole city of ordinary people to talk with. Edgar's final act before dying was to create a copy of himself, and charged it with the task restoring the world by removing the dust. The Edgar duplicate was a demented psychopath and decided to destroy the world instead. In the endgame, the protagonist lets the duplicate of Edgar's girlfriend talk herself into disappearing, defeats Edgar's duplicate (who then turns to dust), and ultimately dispels the Phantom Dust. This fixes the world, but causes every single person in the entire game to cease to exist (as they were 'dust creations'). The game's final shot is of a trail of footprints in sand leading away from Edgar's ship, where it's implied that the protagonist, being a 'dust creation' and fulfilling his friend's dying request, had ceased to exist. Everybody is dead.
- This troper thinks the ending is more open to interpretation than that. There's no real evidence that the protagonist really dispelled the dust, or even has the power to do so, and an alternate explanation is that he fulfilled the role the falesly Edgar was supposed to by restoring the world. While the above explanation is certainly feasible, there's no concrete evidence of it occurring. All we know is that the main character sent Edgar's ship into orbit, that the world has regained its original beauty, and that he took a stroll in the desert. Moreover, it is directly stated in game that the protagonist is specially made, and could continue existing even when finding out the truth of his origins. Even if the Dust were dispelled, it isn't a stretch to assume that he and one or two of the other characters who gained true autonomy could exist without its presence. Not to mention that the underground city the characters live in is clean of the dust, so it's not like being away from it is hazardous to their existence.
In the bad ending of Breath Of Fire IV, the final boss fight is against your former party members, ending with them all dead, as it's impossible to lose. It's then implied that your character goes on to end humanity as the credits roll over a black background.
In Final Fantasy X-2, losing, or taking too long, against the final boss Vegnagun will result in it firing, obliterating not only your party, but all of Spira.
DEFCON's motto is "Everybody Dies". Appropriate as everybody DOES die as a result of a nuclear war.
Mortal Kombat: Deception drops a bridge on most of the older characters at the beginning of the game, including Cage, Sonya, Kitana, Jax, Liu Kang, and Raiden.
- Liu Kang was actually killed in the previous game. And as for Raiden, it's not like death keeps him down for long - he's unlockable anyway.
Some advanced Net Hack players choose to accept the "extinctionist" challenge, a special form of play where you have to drive every single monster to extinction. This can be accomplished by casting an appropriate spell on the monster you want to wipe out, or killing 160 of it. Net Hack being how it is, most of those players' characters end up dying anyhow.
Fall Out 3. At least the way I did it.
Word Of God confirms that Mass Effect 2 will have at least one ending where the entire cast dies, including Shepard.
- Bioware was stopped from doing this for KOTOR. A female-only ending had Carth making a last-ditch effort to plead with the PC if she chose the Dark Side. The player could accept his offer to turn on Bastila and allow the Republic to destroy the Starforge, dying with him to save the Republic.
In Fate Stay Night's Heaven's Feel route, almost the entire supporting cast, and Saber, the Love Interest from the other routes die, and in one ending even Shiro, the protagonist, dies.
- The prequel Fate Zero is even worse. The protaganist Kiritsugu is diseased, and everyone else except for Kotomine and another main character dies.
A traditional end to your fort in Dwarf Fortress is when goblins/orcs/megabeasts/kobolds/zombie-carp massacre pretty much everyone in the fortress.

Close Video Games

In Nobody Scores, the main characters have a low chance of surviving any single comic. As the author puts it, each scenario is a "more or less intricate machin[e], the end result of which is always failure".
College Roomies From Hell seems to be heading in this direction - with Mike murdered by April and Marsha gunned down by Mike's mother to keep her from killing April... before she could.
- They all got better. For a given value of "better", of course; this being CRFH!!!.
Word Of God is that Ugly Hill was originally going to end with one of these, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.
Not the end of the world, but Last Days Of Foxhound has its reasons to kill of most of the main cast.

Close Webcomics

Pretty much the entire premise of Survival Of The Fittest (although it's something of a given, considering it is based off Battle Royale) By the end of the game, only one student it going to be left alive, something which entails the death of over 100 named characters to get to that point.
The Pokegirls were created by Sukebe and given one simple task: Kill Em All. They eventually fail, narrowly, but humanity is so depopulated that even three hundred years later, which is where the 'modern era' is set at, a wide-scale relapse of Pokegirls into madness would finish the job.
This is pretty much the premise of Happy Tree Friends usually only one character survives an episode.
Madness Combat. They usually get better, though.
Played for laughs in one of the alternate endings of the original Red Vs Blue series. "Son of a bitch!"
In The Demented Cartoon Movie, the ending credits point out that only one character survived the movie. Everyone else died in explosions, head explosions, car accidents, explosions, crushing, and explosions.
- Then again, technically even that character died off-screen when the Earth blew up. Multiple times.
  - It's speculated to be one of the Blah Guys on Mars...but Mars fell into the sun a couple of times anyway.

Close Web Original

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