Multiple Life Bars

Green: Health.
Grey: Guard.
Blue: Barrier.

A character has multiple Life Meters. You might have to deplete all or just one of them to defeat them.

Variants that have their own trope page:

• A Mana Shield is a common Layered Hitpoints variant, allowing you to use your Mana Meter as an extra layer on top of your regular Hit Points.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health
• Subsystem Damage keeps track of the damage to each component of a character separately.
• Body Armor As Hitpoints, where the body armor takes all the damage, or mitigates damage to the core health bar as long as it exists.
• Stat Overflow, for systems with the actual ability to represent stat overloading.

Commonly seen on a Marathon Boss. Often, each bar's depletion triggers a change in the boss' behavior as well, which leads to Sequential Boss or Turns Red. Contrast Shared Life-Meter.

Sub-Trope of Status Line (a display element showing the current disposition of the player, e.g. score, health, ammo, etc).

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Examples:

Tabletop Games

• Alternity had four different types of damage, each of which had to be tracked separately: stun, wound, mortal and fatigue. Losing half of your stun or wound points inflicted negative penalties. You suffered the same penalties for each point of mortal or fatigue damage.
  • Armor only prevented the most severe damage, allowing half that value of lower damage to leak through. In theory, you could beat someone into unconsciousness even if they're wearing armor that entirely outmatched your regular damage value.
  • Spaceships were divided into sections, each of which could be independently knocked out.
• Arkham Horror: Investigators have separate Stamina and Sanity meters for physical and mental threats, with the same penalty for either meter falling to zero. In 2^nd Edition, the victim only loses some equipment and wakes up at the hospital or asylum; in 3^rd, they're dead.
• BattleTech has both multiple life bars and Subsystem Damage. BattleMechs are broken into Left/Center/Right Torso (each with front and rear armor facings), left/right legs and arms, and the head. Each section has Armor and Internal Structure. Once the armor is destroyed, the internal structure will be damaged on every hit and can have a very high probability of causing Critical Hits on components mounted in that section. High-value systems like the fusion reactor, stabilization gyroscope, and sensors can take multiple hits (though not with Critical Existence Failure, their function will be impaired with each hit before full disability) though most weapons will be disabled in one hit and ammunition magazines will go boom with one hit. The pilot has a semi-independent "health bar", as things that damage the 'mech may not necessarily injure the pilot. A 'mech may be rendered tactically inert (but possibly salvageable), but the pilot may survive having their 'mech shout out from under them (possibly by hasty vertical evacuation from the 'mech). A 'mech might be decapitated by death of the pilot (by whatever cause), but the 'mech can be salvaged. Like the heavy core components, the pilot doesn't have Critical Existence Failure either; each injury causes the chance of being rendered unconscious from the injury, with the odds of such happening (and the difficulty of coming to again) increasing with each hit.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • Temporary Hit Points is a common enough effect. In game this is the term for effects that give you hit points above and beyond your maximum, but depending on edition some spells also fit the trope description, such as Stoneskin. In 3.5 these spells were effectively a secondary life bar with bleedthrough for damage over a certain threshold - in Stoneskin's case, it blocked up to 10 points of damage per physical attack until it had blocked up to 150 points in total.
  • Module S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Police robots had a 20 hit point force shield that acted like the Gamma World Force Field Generation ability, except that it regenerated at 1 hit point per melee round.
  • In 3^rd Edition, some powers can deal damage to a target's ability scores. At high levels, a lot of monsters have hundreds or even thousands of HP and often a Healing Factor, but only 10 points of their lowest ability score, and most creatures don't have anything to heal ability damage. Since a creature is incapacitated for at least a day when any of its ability scores falls to zero, this is a Game-Breaker that was not carried over to 4^th Edition.
• The Fate system effectively combines all three, especially in its post-Spirit of the Century incarnations such as The Dresden Files. Characters have both at least one stress track (and usually multiples, such as e.g. physical, mental, and social) and a small number of "consequence" slots that can be filled in with additional negative aspects of increasing severity. Stress, regardless of type, is temporary and clears out after each conflict assuming the character has a suitable chance to catch his or her breath; consequences on the other hand can last quite a while and in the worst case even be permanent, but help "soak up" more damage than the stress track alone could handle. Any successful attack that the character cannot or for some reason will not absorb with a combination of stress and consequences will take him or her out of the conflict; what precisely that means depends on the context (most people won't spontaneously die after losing a heated public debate, for example), but is by and large up to the winning side and probably not good.
• 1E Gamma World
  • Mutants with the Force Field Generation ability could create a force field that absorbed up to 5 dice of damage. Once the force field went down, any further damage reduced the mutant's hit points, and the force field could not be generated again for 24 hours.
  • Some types of powered armor had force fields that worked similarly, except that they returned to full strength at the start of the next melee turn even if they took more damage than their limit.
• Iridium System has 10 areas (vital and non-vital) for a humanoid character, each with its own fortitude points; damage can be either normal or Concussion (non-lethal).
• Games of Magic: The Gathering are usually lost when a player runs out of life, but you can also lose by accumulating 10 poison counters or running out of cards. All of these have decks behind them, though the poison counter deck used to be weak.
• In Mutant: Year Zero, each of the four Attributes act not only as skill checks for certain rolls, but also as their own individual health bars for certain attacks. Any damage dealt to them results in Trauma to that Attribute and lowers the amount of dice that can be rolled on it, until it is recovered by the necessary need for recovery. If any of the Attributes reach zero, the player's PC or NPC becomes broken and they can be killed by the next attack against them.
• Numenera has three pools which serve as both HP and as fuel for the character's abilities: Might, Speed, and Intellect.
• Palladium Role Playing Game split a living creatures' health into Structural Damage Capacity (SDC) and Hit Points (HP). You lose SDC first, which is considered mostly minor wounds, but once you lose that, you start losing HP, which is your vital life force. SDC heals more quickly. Magical creatures tend to have Mega Damage Capacity instead of either.
• Rifts used the same system as the Palladium RPG, which is no surprise, as they share a creator.
• Roleplaying is Magic has both physical and psychological endurance, but some events may deplete both, and reaching zero in either one causes the character to be "sidetracked" (put aside for the rest of the scene, unable to act). Additionally, Magic users don't have Mana counter : they draw points directly from either of their endurance pools.
• Some Tabletop RPG systems (Shadowrun and Hero System being prominent examples) differentiate stun damage and physical injury and keep track of them separately. Running out of either will knock you out, but recovering from injury is long and hard, while stun damage clears after a short rest.
• Unfathomable by Fantasy Flight Games is a cooperative game about a ship on a dangerous ocean voyage. The players lose if any of the Fuel, Food, Sanity, or Souls meters ever falls to zero, or if all sections of the ship are disabled at the same time.

Video Games

• ActRaiser's Big Bad and Final Boss, Tanzra, has two phases with their own life bars, the second being twice the length of the first.
• Alpha Protocol uses the layered hit points system for both the protagonist and most powerful enemies, including bosses. The "regenerating shield" part is called "endurance," and it represents a combination of body armor and willpower, and notably does not block everything (explosions tend to "bleed" through, for example). It also featured a semi-layered health bar underneath. Health was split into sub bars which determined how much you could heal. During missions, health items could restore one's health up to the last bar that was full. For example, if you depleted a bar to half, it could be refilled. But if you depleted a bar fully, that bar would remain empty until the next mission.
• Bayonetta and its sequel has some of the tougher enemies and especially bosses who have multiple life bars (up to five layers) in different colors. For example, if you see an enemy with a green life bar, get ready for a long fight, but when you see a boss with a white life bar, get ready for a really long fight.
• Betrayal at Krondor: A variation: there is a single unified set of life points in this game, but it's divided into two categories: stamina and health. Enemy attacks and Cast from Hit Points spells (all spells cost hit points in this game) will deplete stamina points until stamina points run out, and then they'll start depleting health points. The difference between the two is that your other stats like accuracy, speed, and strength begin to suffer when your health goes down, but depleting stamina does not have this effect.
• Brigador has three different layers of health: Hull, which can't be restored in any way, Shields, which can be restored with Shield pickups, and Overshield, which is gained from excess Shield and slowly degenerates over time.
• Billy vs. SNAKEMAN Delivery Missions have Drivetrain (the HP of your bike/car), Durability (the HP of the pizza box you're delivering), and Deliciousness (the temperature/HP of the contents of the box, also a time limiter for your run). All of these are needed to continue, so at higher difficulties the game's about anticipating the most likely threats and balancing speed, risk and high-stress maneuvers.
• Bosses in Breath of Fire I had 2 life bars. A normal life bar, and a hidden one that activated once the normal life bar was depleted. The boss typically changed tactics once the hidden life bar activated.
• In Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia you can use your hearts count as this if you equip a certain item.
• Champions has at least 3: Stun (go to 0 and you fall unconscious), body (go to 0 and you may die) and endurance (go to 0 and you are too exhausted to take most actions).
• Chaos Legion bosses often have multiple life bars (up to four) in different colors (yellow, green, blue, purple). Subverted with the mooks in the game, who may have different-colored life bars, but those life bars are merely indicators of how tough they are (mooks with yellow bars die quickly, while those with white bars will take a while to take down).
• In Civilization VI, cities with walls gain two health bars, one for the city and one for the fortification. By contrast, earlier games have fortification buildings simply add to the health of the city. Certain units can bypass the walls to attack the city directly, and the replenishment of each has different qualifications: life regenerates automatically at a rate determined by population, whereas walls can only be repaired as a construction project which depends on the city's production rate and prevents the city building anything else, like new units.
• The Final Boss of Clock Tower 3. This is quite jarring because no other boss had these, so seeing his death count translate to three full-sized health bars may have caused quite an Oh, Crap!.
• Crackdown has an armor meter that regenerates fairly quickly, which gives way to a health meter that regens more slowly.
• In Crying Suns, most battleships start with at least two "hull" bars, and you can get more by spending Scrap on additional hull structures. If a hull bar runs out of hit points, you’ll need to repair it by spending Scrap at a shipyard.
• Dead In Vinland, like its predecessor Dead in Bermuda, has five health bars measured as a percentage (where lower is better): Fatigue, Hunger, Sickness, Injury, and Depression. The higher the percentage, the worse penalties that character gets to skills tied to that meter (with Fatigue penalizing all skills). Reaching 100% on any one of them kills a character.
• The final boss of Dead Rising 2 Case West and the final boss of Off the Record both have a total of three life bars, which is three times the life of a normal psychopath.
• Deep Rock Galactic:
  • Dwarves have a bar for their health, and a bar for their personal shield. The amount of shield is much smaller than their maximum health, but regenerates after a while, and health doesn't regenerate until reduced to the last 15%.
  • Dreadnoughts have an extra life bar in addition to their normal one, representing the hardened shell over their thorax. Once this bar is depleted, the shell breaks off, leaving the vulnerable flesh underneath exposed. Put enough rounds in that, and the Dreadnought finally dies.
  • Rival Caretakers, much like Dreadnoughts, have health bars for their four intake vents, and a health bar for the Caretaker itself.
• The Final Boss of Defender's Quest has five health bars that must be depleted in sequence. They also become invincible after each one is knocked off until you expend some psi.
• Several bosses in Distorted Travesty have multiple life bars, and usually change their behaviour after one of them is depleted.
• In Divinity: Original Sin II, every combat-capable character has both physical and magic armor from their gear in addition to a life bar; monsters generally have physical armor from their natural defenses but little to no magic armor. Each type of armor absorbs damage from attacks of that type until it's depleted, at which point that damage type will start draining the person's HP. Most status effects from abilities can only take effect if one of the armor types is depleted. A few attacks ignore both types of armor altogether, but they generally have long cooldowns to prevent them from being used several times in one battle.
• The blood meter in Donna: Avenger of Blood isn't hit points per se, but rather your allowance for using superpowers (described below.) There is also a calmness meter, which fluctuates depending on various events — looking at the Countrysons poster and some of the letters reduces calmness, but smoking a cigarette increases calmness 'and' acts as the Hint System.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition has health meters as usual, along with two possible extension on health. Barriers can be cast on party members by Mages, though they erode over time and don't benefit from armor damage reduction. Guard is generated by certain Warrior abilities, and while it has a far lower cap than Barrier, Guard does benefit from armor and doesn't deplete over time. Barriers are also vulnerable to magic-dispelling effects, while Guard is not.
• Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure uses the method of layered lifebars to indicate that much more health while conserving screen space. Even though there's health power-ups that give you more layers on your lifebar, the first fights against General Tao and King Piccolo start you with one layer when the opponent has several, the telltale sign that the plot's calling for Goku to get clobbered.
• In the Dynasty Warriors franchise, several games feature boss characters with multiple health bars. Arslan: The Warriors of Legend incorporates an "overshield" mechanic, in which an active shield protects the boss. The shield must be attacked and depleted before the boss characters starts to receive normal damage. In One Piece: Pirate Warriors and Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage, boss characters have a single health bar, split into multiple sections, which signify the different "phases" of the fight.
• Earthsiege utilize multiple lifebars to distinguish between energy shields (which may regenerate) and armor/HP for various components, usually resulting in Subsystem Damage as your armor/HP reaches low levels.
• Ecco the Dolphin has both a health meter and a breath meter. Ecco is a mammal so he has to breathe air. Eating fish restores the health meter and surfacing or finding underwater air pockets fill the air meter.
• Bosses can have lots of health bars in Elsword, especially the later ones. The Field Bonus Boss has 99 bars!
• EndWar: Units have two life bars, one for Health (representing direct damage) and the other for Shields (representing evasion and defensive measures).
• EVE Online ships have shield, armor, and hull HP bars. Layered, but once one bar is sufficiently lowered, damage can start bleeding through to the layer underneath.
  • If shield and armor are gone, the ship's weapons and modules are exposed to attacks. Any damage to hull may bleed through modules, damaging or disabling them. Even if the ship survives the ordeal, it has to dock up and get repairs to be spaceworthy again.
• Fate/Grand Order: Known as "break bars", these were introduced to the game in the "1.5th" story arc, usually given to bosses. When one life bar is depleted, no damage can be done to the next bar until the end of the turn, where it "breaks", and usually triggers a variety of powerful buffs for the boss. Several later story bosses have as many as four or five life bars. Taken to the extreme by ORT in the seventh Lostbelt, which has ten life bars.
• Final Fantasy V gives us the debut of Golem, who once summoned absorbs damage for your party.
  • Final Fantasy X has a Giant Flyer enemy that basically has an extra lifebar: it starts out every battle flying but lands when heavily damaged. Thing is, you can't one-shot it even with 99999s, it always goes to the landed stage with HP to 1.
  • Two superbosses in Final Fantasy XII, the Hell Wyrm and Yiazmat specifically, each had a variant of the game's normal boss health bar. What makes theirs different is the fact that they have 50 health bars apiece. Not too bad with the Hell Wyrm, which had only 8,930,711 HP. This sounds like a lot, and it is, but the game's battle system means you can hit hard and rapidly if you've got your Gambits set up right. That's nothing compared to what Yiazmat has. You really wanna know, huh? Well... 50,112,254 HP. Strangely, the other superboss of the game, Omega Mark XII, does NOT have a health bar like this, considering how it has 10,370,699 HP in the Japanese version (even there it doesn't have it!) Possibly justified for the western releases, which took 9,000,000 health off its original counterpart.
  • In Dissidia Final Fantasy, you have crystals representing every 1000 hit points (up to 9 crystals). The sequel, on the other hand, has a straight-forward bar reflecting your percentage of remaining HP.
• Final Fight, as one of the earliest beat'em ups, used this system for the enemies and bosses: if an enemy or boss has more health than can be displayed on a single bar, it is represented by different layered colors. As the damage dealt to them increases, the color of the bar changes until it matches the standard bar of the player until the enemy/boss are finally defeated. This would be copied by later Beat'em ups, such as Streets of Rage.
• The Fire Emblem series occasionally uses this trope.
  • Monsters in Fire Emblem: Three Houses have anywhere from 2-4 bars of health, the reserves represented by red crystal icons next to their HP. They also have Latent Abilities that activate as you take away bars.
  • In Fire Emblem Engage, bosses have Revival Crystals, which refill their health each time it's depleted. Unlike Three Houses, though, the health bars are the same amount, whereas in Three Houses, monsters had more health in their last life bars than they did in their first ones.
• For the King: Both the Kraken and Sea King have a body and two tentacles, each with its own life meter. The Kraken will retreat upon losing a tentacle and is killed forever when the body is destroyed; the Sea King's tentacles will fight on after the body is destroyed, so all three parts need to be destroyed to kill it.
• Frostpunk has two bars equivalent to a Morale Mechanic: Hope and Discontent. You need to keep Hope high and Discontent low. If Hope gets too low or Discontent gets too high, your citizens will threaten to overthrow you. Many actions and events will affect one or the other, and occasionally both. Eventually, you can choose to pass a law that crosses the Moral Event Horizon and eliminate the need to maintain Hope.
• The Zoltan Shield in FTL: Faster Than Light functions much like one of these. It blocks all incoming attacks and prevents your ship from hacking, boarding and mind controlling. The standard shield cannot block missiles, but slowly recharges.
• In Gravity Circuit, standard bosses have two layers (orange and green) on their life bars, and the Final Boss has three (and can shield himself for good measure). Kai can start building up a second health layer for himself by collecting health upgrades, each one adding four extra pips to the green layer.
• Guild Wars 2 has the Necromancer's Death Shroud that radically modifies their abilities and adds a second layer of health that slowly decays over time when activated but prevents healing except for a few specific Necromancer traits that give gradual healing. The Path of Fire expansion adds the Barrier mechanic, used mainly by the Scourge and Weaver elite specializations, that adds temporary health that decays very rapidly and cannot exceed half the recipient's maximum health.
• In the Gundam Battle Assault games, instead of duels utilizing a best-two-out-of-three format, each fighter had three life meters. When one is depleted, the mech is "overheated" and flinches for a moment, but the fight otherwise continues without interruption.
  * In Halfway, you first have the blue body armour bar taking all the damage, and then it starts hitting the red health bar.
• Many Harvest Moon games have both Stamina (your primary bar) and Fatigue (your secondary bar). Fatigue is harder to recover, and if you expend too much of it, it won't fully recover even by going to sleep. You'll need items. You burn Fatigue by working during bad weather or by working when your Stamina is empty.
• Iji has both "Armor" and "HP" stats, for the Player Character and enemies. Small arms fire only damages armor, with each HP equating one full armor bar. However, powerful attacks (melee attacks, explosives) directly damage HP, bypassing the armor entirely. Later bosses have HP high enough to be displayed with multiple colored layers on their life meter. The Final Boss can have anywhere from six to eight life bars, depending on difficulty.
• All of the bosses in Ikaruga have layered life meters, with the Final Boss, Tageri, having at least twelve layers.
• For critters with more than 500 HP in Impressive Title, each extra bar represents an extra 500 HP and they disappear as the critter's health is lowered.
• Jet Force Gemini: Each of the green-colored corners of the X-shaped shield in the center of a character's Life Meter has its own HP, in turn represented by the fragments of the surrounding ring (which, at the start of the game, is halved, but collectiong a Heart Container will add a new fragment to encourage the player to find enough to complete the ring.
• Kaiju Wars: The titular kaiju typically begin most missions with two-to-three health bars, and can gain more as they heal themselves. Fully depleting one of a kaiju's health bars will reduce its movement speed by one, making it more difficult for the kaiju to reach whatever building it's currently trying to destroy. In Pterus Ignis's case, bringing the creature down to its last health bar will also ground it, leaving it vulnerable to the player's non-anti-air units.
• Kingdom Hearts bosses use layered health bars (which are only visible with the Scan ability). In Kingdom Hearts, there is a single bar that cycles through colors for each additional bar's worth of health (green > yellow > orange > pink > purple, with green being the "base"). Some bosses (such as Sephiroth) had health beyond the maximum the bar could display, causing them to appear to be taking no damage from any attacks until they were brought in range. Every game since then has stuck with a green bar and squares underneath, showing how many they had in all. In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, however, the colors are mixed up (green > blue > yellow > red, with green being the "base"). From Kingdom Hearts II onward, the colored bar system was ditched in favor of a HP gauge counter, with one full HP bar representing 200 HP.
• Every player of Thelast.io can find and drink shield potions that'll give them 50 shield points on top of their life bar, with a maximum of 100.
• Killer Instinct (2013): ARIA is a Mechanically Unusual Fighter with three separate lifebars for each of her drones instead of one lifebar with two stocks like everyone else. She's essentially a 3-man team fighter packaged to one.
• League of Legends has a weird example in the form of Kled. He has two health bars: his own and his mount's, Skaarl. While he's mounted on Skaarl, the latter takes all the incoming damage, and any additional health from items, masteries, runes and abilities goes to Skaarl, while Kled's own health grows only by leveling up. When Skaarl's health is depleted, she runs and leaves Kled on his own, and only comes back when he charges up his courage again, regaining Skaarl's health bar on top of his own (whatever is left of it). This can happen several times on a single fight as long as Kled keeps on gaining courage by recklessly attacking the enemy, which makes Skaarl's health bar function more like a regenerating shield for Kled than a proper health bar.
• In Legend of Mana, both you and the enemies you fight can have layered health bars. The colors in order were blue, green, yellow, orange, then red, though characters with sufficiently high HP would have the colors alternate between blue and green numerous times before progressing to the others.
• MADNESS: Project Nexus 2 features Corpus and TAC-Bar. Corpus represents the player's health, divided into blocks that regenerate as long as they're not fully depleted. TAC-Bar serves as a "shield" that reduces/nullifies ranged attacks as long as you're facing the attack and regenerates when killing enemies.
• In MapleStory, higher-leveled bosses will have multiple health bars, layered on top of each other. The different layers of the health bar are color-coded, allowing players to keep constant track of the battle.
• The Shields in Marathon come in Red (x1), Yellow (x2) and Purple (x3).
• The Mass Effect series uses kinetic barriers (referred to as "shields" by you and your squadmates) followed by your actual health. Enemies in Mass Effect 2 can have up to three layers of HP, the first being their Barrier or Shield, the second being their Armor and the last one being their Health. Mass Effect 3 makes Armor an alternative to Health rather than a layer of protection.
• Master of Orion 2 has damage applied to sectored regenerating shields, then armor, then hull structure and systems — drive, computer and shield generator has separate points, other systems are either broken or not. A ship is killed only when its structure or drive is reduced to 0 HP. Drives are low on HP, but rarely get hit and stations haven't any. Some weapons can penetrate normal shields or armor, emission-guided missile variant always hits drives and one gun ignores armor and structure, dealing only shield and system damage, which can immobilize or kill ships really quick. All bypassing measures can be countered, though.
• The MechWarrior series often mixes Subsystem Damage with multiple life bars like its source material. Mechs are split between multiple distinct zones (such as legs) which have their armor healthbar and internal structure healthbar. Stripping the armor of a section exposes the internal structure, allowing successive hits to damage the internals and individual components such as weapons. Blast through the internal structure and the entire limb or section is destroyed. A mech is only destroyed if it loses the center torso, cockpit, or in some games both legs.
• MediEvil has a potion system for undead hero Sir Fortesque; any time he recieves fatal damage, he automatically uses a full health potion if available, which represents each extra life bar. This had the good side-effect of preventing strong attacks from dealing extra damage once an extra health bar was depleted.
• Mega Man Zero introduced layered life bars to the series, and Mega Man ZX continued this tradition. In fact, you can even get your own layered life bar.
  • Before that, most of the final bosses relied on having at least 2 phases as extra health, while Wily Wars featured Hyperstorm H, the only boss that had more than one health bar in the series, not counting layers or phases.
• Metal Gear games starting with Sons of Liberty (for enemies; the player doesn't get a separate stamina bar until Snake Eater) have separate stamina/psyche and health bars. The former is only drained by non-lethal weapons which are usually more difficult to use than their lethal counterparts (and games where the player has one, the bar slowly empties to represent starvation and/or exertion), but knocking enemies out has advantages (the most obvious one being that most bosses in the series give you some sort of bonus for knocking them out instead of killing them).
• Metroid games have Samus with multiple energy tanks, each one increasing her maximum health. Super Metroid also adds the Reserve Tank system, a secondary health storage method that could be triggered manually or when Samus runs out of energy in her main tanks.
• Mischief Makers has three layered health bars. This was also affected by the game's continue system; if you went down during a level, you could pay in extra Red Gems to continue with more than just the basic first layer of health.
• In Naruto Ninja Council, both the player and bosses have three life bars.
• Most of the enemies in Nekketsu Oyako have them, especially on higher difficulties, while the Final Boss has all three. Your character can have a second life bar by picking up healing items after your first bar is full, this was removed on the Saturn version.
• Bosses in Ninja Baseball Batman have two life bars.
• The Outfoxies uses the layered variant with three bars for each character, going from green to yellow to red.
• Parameters: For the Final Boss, the only enemy that does this. It goes from yellow, to dark blue, to light blue, to green, back to yellow, with the background as red, instead of the usual black.
• There are three layers in Pardus, from first to last to take damage:
  • Shields: Only available if you purchase a shield generator, which takes up some of your ship's cargo space. As such, they're rarely seen on trading ships. They are the only layer that does not have a value specific to each ship; rather, each shield generator has a different maximum health capacity. They cannot be repaired normally, but they regenerate a bit every 6 minutes and can be recharged at an Energy Well building. The Union has access to better ones with higher capacity and faster recharge rate, but even these don't count for much.
  • Armour: Only available if you purchase armour, which doesn't take up any cargo space. It makes up the bulk of a ship's hit points, and is subject to Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors. Its value is based on the innate armour value of each ship, subject to a multipiler (x1 through x5, with x6 in the weakest and strongest elements available to the Union) based on the grade of the armour item. Higher-grade armour still shows up with the same armour value, but divides incoming damage by the correct ratio (e.g. a shot that deals 60 damage would remove 12 points from x5 armour).
  • Hull: Without either of the above items, this is your ship's only life bar. Like the shield, it doesn't count for much, but traders and capital ships tend to have higher values for it than fighter ships. Wormhole damage, including explosives detonated due to wormhole damage, will always damage hull directly, regardless of armour or shields, which matters because this is the bar that causes Critical Existence Failure when it hits 0.
• In Path of Exile, damage can be taken from a multitude of resources, including life, energy shield, mana (when using Mind Over Matter), aegis (similar to energy shield, but rare and specific to a certain damage type), and guard skill.
• Each character in Pillars of Eternity has the Endurance bar and the Health bar. Endurance is depleted and recovered rapidly in combat and results in a Non-Lethal K.O. when depleted. Health is lost more slowly but having it hit 0 leads to either a permanent injury or the Final Death (on harder difficulties). Health can only be regained when camping, and with a few very rare and weak spells that serve as an emergency patch-up in a pinch at best. Otherwise, healing spells only restore endurance.
• PlanetSide has 2 life bars (or 3, with an implant) for its soldiers. Armor varies by the suit worn by the player, and absorbs some of the damage of incoming fire. Health is self-explanatory. With the Personal Shield implant, you could fuel a shield using your stamina, effectively giving you a third life bar. Vehicles had only one health bar by default, but certain facilities would charge up a "Shield" health bar on the vehicle when inside the facility's sphere of influence.
  • PlanetSide 2 follows the Regenerating Shields, Static Health model for its foot soldiers, and only has one life bar for vehicles and Power Armor.
• Pokémon's Substitute ability does this; the user pays 25% of their max health to hide behind a plush Pokémon-esque doll (likely in a Shout-Out to EarthBound, that had inventory-carried teddy bears that served a similar purpose) that has the exact same HP as the user lost, and absorbs any attack barring sound-based moves or the Infiltrator ability - and while it seems like a Useless Useful Spell, and often is in the main story; it has a plethora of secondary effects, including status immunity, and can also assist with stalling tactics or even be Baton Passed onto another team member to protect them on switch-in.
• Primal Rage uses both a traditional health meter, as well as a "brain meter." When it was depleted, the character would become temporarily stunned, allowing the opponent to get in some free hits.
• In Version 3 of Rakenzarn Tales, major bosses had shields which function as such. Hack off their first set of HP and they'll get a second set, usually changing up their tactics, moves and weaknesses. This was dropped in Version 4.
• In Rapid Reload for the PlayStation, Area Bosses have several overlapping life bars, going from blue to green (which is the color of the player's only life bar) to yellow and finally to red. There is also a digital counter, which helps show the damage you're dealing on tougher bosses whose blue bars won't start going down until they're more than halfway to destruction.
• Raptor: Call of the Shadows has this for the player. Each set of purchasable shields effectively gives the player an extra health bar. A maximum of five extra layers could be purchased from the store, but an unlimited amount could be stacked if you found them in the levels. Of course, considering how rarely they were found, if you were good enough to build up a significant stock over the normal maximum you didn't need those extra shields in the first place.
• In The Reconstruction, every character has Body, Mind and Soul points, all of which serve as Hit Points and mana at the same time. Any of these reaching zero KO's the character.
  • The prequel I Miss the Sunrise does the same with spacecrafts' hull, systems and pilot.
  • Body, Mind and Soul system returns in The Drop.
• In Returnal, every boss has three health bars, which are represented by small pips. They change up their tactics and become more aggressive each time a health bar is emptied.
• The final bosses of Rockman 4 Minus ∞.
  • The Wily Machine's first phase has what can only be described as a health bar made of health bars. That is, one full health bar, where each hit point represents its own separate health bar. That adds up to 29 times 28, or 812 hit points. However, it takes above average damage from every weapon and lacks Mercy Invincibility, so it's not as durable as it sounds.
  • The Wily Capsule later on has two health bars, giving it 56 hit points.
  • And then the Petit Robot Masters, who each has his own lifebar, with the one last hit's currently shown. That adds up to 8 times 28, or 224 hit points.
    • The Petit Robot Masters are defused somewhat by the Wily Buster, which takes them out in a few shots.
• Players in SCP: Secret Laboratory have a regular health bar and one of two secondary health bars, depending on if they're human or SCP:
  • Human players have Artificial HP (AHP for short), which absorbs 70% of damage taken. Humans spawn with no AHP by default, but can acquire it by eating Blue/Rainbow candy from SCP-330, or by using Adrenaline.
  • SCPs get Hume Shields, which fully absorb damage taken and regenerate after not taking damage for long enough.
• Most bosses in Scurge: Hive have layered life bars.
• The Japanese version of The Simpsons arcade game allows for players’ health to extend past 100% (represented by different colors) This was left out of the international versions, but is in the XBLA/PSN release when playing the unlockable Japanese ROM.
• This was parodied in the Spider-Man 2 tie-in game. After having dealt with Mysterio a couple of times, running his obstacle courses and fighting through his fun house of illusion, all that's left is to defeat and capture him. Spidey gets word that Mysterio is...robbing a convenience store. Spidey shows up at the store, and when he approaches, a boss icon for Mysterio appears onscreen, which is then encircled by three health meters.^note This is impressive looking, since the player has already fought Rhino, who had only one health meter. Spidey's first punch knocks him down and depletes all three meters. It turns out that without all his smoke and mirrors, Mysterio isn't all that impressive.
• Starcraft: The Protoss have Regenerating Shields, Static Health, and have a building that allows them to rapidly replenish their shields. However, the Zerg's Plague ability allows to bypass the shields and reduce their HP to 1, while the Terrans' EMP reduces shields to 0.
• Characters in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time get knocked out if they run out of mana, and many attacks exploit it by targeting magic points instead of or in addition to Hit Points, resulting in this trope.
• Star Wars:
  • The X Wing series and Dark Forces series feature shields and health. In X Wing, shields regenerate. In Dark Forces, they take energy damage, but not punches. 0% on your health points kills you.
  • The earlier builds of Star Wars: Galaxies gave all characters a health, action, and mind bar. Depleting any of these three would result in the character becoming incapacitated and susceptible to a deathblow, and most attacks would hit one of the three at random. Oddly, these were same bars that were expended to perform both combat and non-combat actions, meaning that spamming special attacks in battle could easily reduce the bars to critical levels if you lacked buffs to reduce special costs. The mind bar was also the only one that couldn't be healed in battle, which gave classes with the ability to specifically target it an understandably huge advantage in PvP.
• Spaceships in Stellaris can have up to three health bars. They always have a hull bar, and can be constructed with armour and shields. Shields regenerate automatically, while armour and hull regeneration is restricted to refitting at starbases unless unlocked in the technology tree. Ship-mounted weapons are generally more effective versus one kind of defence and less effective (or even useless) against another, so tactically-minded players can design ships that can punch far above their listed military strength when used against the intended targets.
• The Streets of Rage series tend to give the bosses these, and, depending on difficulty level, some of the lower-level Mooks as well. Streets of Rage 3 threw on a couple more layers for the English release.
  • In the first game, a boss' life bar would not empty, but it would go through different color shades to indicate damage. Once their life bar turned orange, it then depletes as normal. The last two games has enemies with multiple life bars work the same way as the player's life bar where once it fully depletes, the next one pops up.
• Petey Piranha in Super Smash Bros. Brawl holds 2 cages, each one with a life bar, to defeat him you have to destroy either of the cages while attacking him directly lowers both cages bars equally. You can abuse this fact by positioning yourself so your attacks hit both him and one of the cages simultaneously.
• Your character (and enemies) in Sword Dancer can have multiple colored life bars: the first being the classical Yellow seen in Fighting Games and Beat'em ups, then Blue, Green, and finally White. There are some items that double your health bar for a single battle.
• The Syphon Filter series has a health bar that's intentionally obscured by an armor bar. When armor is depleted, your health is damaged directly. Notably, armor was much tougher than health, as the same amount of damage to completely reduce your health to zero will only take off about half of your armor. Headshots bypass armor directly and are always instantly fatal.
• Team Fortress 2 features temporary HP called "overheal", bestowed by the Medic's Medigun and certain Life Drain weapons. Overheal slowly depletes over time (how fast it depletes depends on your maximum HP; full overheal will always be gone after 20 seconds).
• In Thexder, using the shields activated a secondary (temporary) meter that could absorb 100 HP of damage, while your main Life Meter was impervious to damage in the meantime.
• Bosses in Touhou games have multiple life bars. Whenever one is depleted they switch to the next attack pattern.
• Vega Strike has sectored regenerating shields, then sectored ablative armor, then hull. Each hit to the hull has a chance of causing Subsystem Damage. "Non-lethal" EMP weapons don't kill the hull and can disable a ship so it can be captured.
• Viewtiful Joe has layered health bars.
• Warcraft III: The Phoenix turns into a Phoenix Egg on death, which can't move or attack. If left alone, the egg quickly becomes a new Phoenix with full health (to prevent it being a complete Game-Breaker, it also has negative regeneration, meaning it will go back to egg-dom if left to its own devices).
• Warframe has life bars split between health and shields. Eximus units additionally possess a special health type called Overguard that appears as an overlay atop their regular bar; it must be fully depleted before they can take normal damage, and renders them immune to crowd control while present.
• Wing Commander has shields and then various part of the ship damaged and repaired separately.
• The Wonderful 101, in the same vein as Bayonetta, can also have bosses with multiple life bars. Most bosses have somewhere around five to ten layers of health. If you see a boss that has a purple life bar, then get ready for a really long battle. The final boss's health bar has eleven layers.
• The bosses of The World Ends with You each have two layered health bars, a yellow one with more health and a green one with less. Bosses generally Turn Red at around the start of the green bar.
• Yakuza:
  • Most bosses of the series have at least 2 or 3, while tougher bosses can have up to 6. Subverted in 6, where all bosses have a single large health bar.
  • The Final Boss of Yakuza 5 has 9. Jo Amon in most games has even more than that, and life bar colors start getting weird when you have that many.
• The X-Men Origins: Wolverine Licensed Game had layered hit points for Wolverine: he had a standard life meter, and a "Vitals" life meter underneath that, representing his internal organs. The main difference is that his internal organs regenerated health more slowly.
• The shields in Zombs Royale.io act as a second health bar, once the player obtains them through drinking the corresponding potion.

Webcomics

• DICE: The Cube That Changes Everything: When Mio inspects X's Mars King robot, it shows a stack of 9 health bars. It's still taken down with a few hits from the Time Cutter.
• In Problem Sleuth, Demonhead Mobster Kingpin not only has multiple life bars that constantly refill, but can spawn more of them indefinitely. He still loses.

Web Original

• NES Godzilla Creepypasta:
  • The last boss in the Boss Rush of Extus, the Chimera, has two life meters with 20 bars of life each.
  • Red's Final Form takes things a step further; having three life meters with 23 bars of life each.

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