Even in video games, where heroes are controlled by the player 90% of the time, the good guys can still screw up and make things worse. Sometimes, they have to.
Video Games with their own pages:
Examples:
- Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits has a very annoying example. The guy whose life you saved at the beginning? The one you get a Game Over if you don't save? Who then helps you out on your quest? Turns out he's the Big Bad all along, and all you've been doing the entire game with both of your parties was being the MacGuffin Delivery Service, just as he planned. He takes them all, and raises the evil fortress. The world would have been much better off if you had just let the guy die when he was helpless.
- Alone in the Dark (2024): Breaking the pact between Jeremy Hartwood and the Dark Man frees Jeremy from his curse, but opens the way for the other Derceto residents, who are all Shub-Niggurath cultists, to sacrifice Grace to the Black Goat. When Edward Carnby and Emily Hartwood interfere by preventing Grace from being sacrificed, this escalates things even further by summoning an avatar of the Black Goat itself into the world.
- Taken even further in Carnby's bad ending where he claims that him breaking the pact was the Black Goat's plan all along as he joins the cult and lets Grace be sacrificed resulting in The Bad Guy Wins.
- At the end of Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, the Player Character has the option of either becoming a benevolent (or not) Deity of Human Origin, or being a Humble Hero and continuing to live on as a mortal. Due to Cutting Off the Branches, he canonically chose the latter and inadvertently paved the way for the return of the God of Evil Bhaal. Although it's not entirely his fault, as according to Word of God it was a case of You Can't Fight Fate.
- Blue Archive: During the "Bunny Chasers on Board" event, Asuna decided to show off after she drew an 'A' from the Golden Fleece's raffle. This ended up causing their target Koyuri to realize C&C were on the ship to get her. Luckily, she subsequently successfully draws an 'S' allowing C&C to do what they want. Then, at the end of the event's story, they realize they left their maid outfits on the ship, along with Asuna having gotten rid of her 'S' ticket.
- Borderlands:
- In the Borderlands DLC "The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned", you must eventually fight and kill the eponymous physician, which only leads to his zombification and taking a level in bad-ass.
- Another two incidents which Helena Pierce calls you out on: One-Eyed Jack's vow of vengeance after you destroy his stock and killing Jaynis Kobb and allowing his brother Taylor to make Jaynistown into an even greater threat.
- The entirety of Borderlands 2 is this trope because of what happened in the first game. Thanks to you opening the Vault and effectively destroying corrupt MegaCorp Atlas, Pandora has an alien element called Eridium that is very powerful in certain uses and is extremely valuable. The head of Hyperion, Handsome Jack, took over Pandora now that Atlas is no more and has capitalized on Eridium while taking credit for the find and attempts to kill the Vault Hunters from the first game. Thanks to Hyperion's presence, the people of Pandora live shittier lives due to the corporation destroying everyone's livelihoods and killing anyone that they damn well please, especially anyone that opposes them, while the company destroys the planet further with constant mining for Eridium and the search for a second Vault. Whoops!
- Within Borderlands 2: Roland and Angel both urge Lilith to not be anywhere near the Hyperion base you are assaulting in attempt to retrieve the Vault Key from Jack. This is because Jack needs a Siren to charge the key. Part of your objective becomes dealing with Jack's current Siren to make sure that, even if he gets the key back, he can't charge it. Naturally, Lilith defiantly shows up at the end of the attack. This puts her in the perfect position for Jack to swoop in, capture her, and put her right to work charging the key. Because of her arrival, all of your effort not only barely interrupted Hyperion's progress, but gave them a stronger Siren to accelerate the process. Good job, Lilith, though technically it's Angel's fault for not precisely telling her that it was a trap. Good job letting your fear of your dad ruin two lives there, Angel.
- In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, Roland, Lilith, and Moxxi are responsible for making Jack what he is in the first place. From sabotaging the Helios laser to Lilith giving Jack that "handsome" Vault scar on his face.
- Rookie from Club Penguin is guilty of this on multiple occasions. One example is when he's tricked into giving Herbert his spy phone, allowing him to escape after being caught.
- Conviction (SRPG): Despite Byin's warnings about revealing his hometown, Ire constantly declares himself the champion of Lassla village to his enemies. This results in tragedy when General Angelii retaliates against him by seeking out Lassla and killing most of its residents.
- The ending of Cyber-Lip: Congratulations, you've destroyed the Master Computer controlling the robots that are going berserk! In so doing, you've left Earth completely defenseless against an eventual invasion by the aliens that sabotaged said Master Computer in the first place!
- Dead or Alive: As shown in the Dead or Alive Ultimate intro video, Hayate, in an attempt to stop Raidou from stealing the Torn Sky Blast, elects to use that very technique on him. The minute he does so, Raidou copies the technique and proceeds to win a Beam-O-War against Hayate, resulting in Hayate suffering a broken spine... which also leads to Kasumi's Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Raidou and subsequent exile from the Mugen Tenshin Clan. On top of it all, Ayane even explicitly warned Hayate not to use the Torn Sky Blast against Raidou, but Hayate did it anyway.
- Indivisible: Ajna's rush to open the chakra gates to confront Kala causes damage to each place she goes too. After her first failed attempt to fight Kala, the being straight-up tells Ajna how she left a village defenseless, ignoring a city with the inhabitants slowly dying of poison, and having a Mutagenic Goo cover an entire kingdom. This is enough to give Ajna a wake-up call to head back and fix what she started.
- Knights of Ambrose: In Knight Bewitched 2, the scientists sent the Scitech facility back in time. While this provided the heroes with information, it also allowed villains like Shujin to use futuristic technology for evil.
- Orcs Must Die! features magical rifts which constantly summon hordes of monsters to attack them, which leads to the first game's player character deciding to seal the rifts shut in the belief that it will get rid of the monsters for good. He is entirely correct... but without the rift, humanity likewises loses its access to magic, and the threat of war and violence is simply replaced by that of drought, famine, and disease instead. Eventually, the heroes decide that the risks of magic are worth the cost and bring it back, vowing instead to build up their strength and simply defeat the monsters every time they come knocking.Master Cygnus: He'd saved the world.... but he hadn't understood the cost.
- Patapon has two off-screen examples
- Revealed in the second game Your Hero unit is the lone Patapon who broke the magical egg at the world's core and caused the downfall of the Patapon empire that occurred before the beginning of the first game.
- Right before the start of the third game the Patapons discover a large chest that they believed to contain IT. Opening it unleashed dark forces that immediately caused the end of the world and petrified the entire Patapon army.
- Portal is the Trope Namer, and contains many examples; however, when AI villain GLaDOS says the line, it's not an example of this trope. You've just destroyed one of her vital parts, and she's feebly trying to convince you that "it made shoes for orphans".
- At the start of the showdown against GLaDOS, Stupidity Is the Only Option, as the player must destroy the only thing standing between them and a countdown to death from a deadly neurotoxin. Whoops.GLaDOS: It was a morality core that they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin.
- During the end of the game, GLaDOS implies that the Combine invasion that leads into Half-Life 2 is currently taking place and the murderous AI you're fighting is the only thing stopping them from getting into Aperture Science. Given that the source of the claim is a Consummate Liar, though, whether or not this is actually happening is debatable.
- Also implied in "Lab Rat", a tie-in comic that acts as a bridge between the game and its sequel: GLaDOS may have been a nasty piece of work, but she kept the facility running. When you blew her up, you turned off the cryochambers, rendering the 10,000 subjects that were supposed to test after you dead. On the plus side, you did get to pass out in a parking lot.
- At the start of the showdown against GLaDOS, Stupidity Is the Only Option, as the player must destroy the only thing standing between them and a countdown to death from a deadly neurotoxin. Whoops.
- Portal 2:
- The climax of the game's first act sees the player give literal Idiot Ball Wheatley control of the entire facility via core transfer, which would eventually bring its destruction (and the protagonist's death) through management incompetence. GLaDOS, of course, sarcastically comments on this despite having contributed to the situation by taunting Wheatley until he smashes both of you down a nearly bottomless pit.GLaDOS: He's not just a regular moron, he's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived. And you just put him in charge of the entire facility.
- GLaDOS begins the first game as a slightly insane testing computer whose homicidal tendencies are frustrated by Restraining Bolts. Through Chell's efforts, she ends the second game completely unfettered — possibly to the point of having deleted her conscience — and unchallenged, and in charge of a weapons manufacturing facility that could be the greatest military power on post-Combine Earth. Depending on how the future of the Portal universe pans out, this might prove to have been a colossally terrible move.
- That depends on if she's telling the truth about deleting Caroline, and whether or not Caroline wanted to be deleted. And if she plans on expanding beyond testing, of course.
- The climax of the game's first act sees the player give literal Idiot Ball Wheatley control of the entire facility via core transfer, which would eventually bring its destruction (and the protagonist's death) through management incompetence. GLaDOS, of course, sarcastically comments on this despite having contributed to the situation by taunting Wheatley until he smashes both of you down a nearly bottomless pit.
- Alex Mercer from [PROTOTYPE] does everything to further the villain's plans. Where to begin? Releasing Elizabeth Greene would cause the virus to spread further, collecting the genetic material for the supposed cure turns out to be a parasite for him to be injected, and helping Cross, who is the Supreme Hunter in disguise, get to Randall.
- Quantum Protocol: According to the dev's Discord post, Queen accidentally caused Omega to lose control of his virus when she defeated him, leading to the virus hijacking a Dragoon comet and directing it towards Earth.
- In Shounen Kininden Tsumuji, Tsumuji is tricked by the Big Bad and uses his shuriken to make the Shadow Tower rise, which grants the villain the ability to enter the Demon Castle in the sky to continue his plan to rule the world.
- Spider-Man:
- Spider-Man (PS4):
- Right at the start, Peter showing up late to work at Otto Octavius's lab results in a bug that he could've fixed causing their project to fail, which in turn leads to Norman Osborn pulling their funding and Otto getting help from the villain organization A.I.M. It's not the biggest contributory factor to what happens with Otto later, but one certainly can't imagine it helped matters.
- Spider-Man: Miles Morales (a semi-sequel to the above): Miles is an inexperienced Spider-Man on his own for his first time, so he occasionally makes situations worse with his well-intentioned actions.
- When he first encounters the Tinkerer, the villain is attacking a Roxxon convoy carrying Nuform fuel on a bridge. Miles' reckless use of his new Shock and Awe powers end up destabilizing the Nuform and causing it to explode, breaking the bridge and forcing him to save all the civilians who were on it.
- When he's investigating a Roxxon base, he finds evidence that Simon Krieger murdered an employee for getting cold feet. Unfortunately, he doesn't get to use this evidence because he also decides to destroy the Nuform reactor there for personal reasons, and in the process of doing so melts the evidence. This means that the easiest way to solve the plot is gone and the Tinkerer resorts to blowing up Roxxon Plaza in a desperate attempt to hurt Krieger. The Prowler eventually has to turn himself in to testify against Krieger in order for the latter to be brought to justice.
- Marvel's Spider-Man 2: after taking a fatal injury, Harry tries to resuscitate Peter, but the symbiote that had been suppressing his illness ends up transfering to Peter. While this does save Peter's life, it also causes his illness to start ravaging his body again. In turn, Peter becomes unwilling to relinquish the symbiote back to Harry when he grows to enjoy the power the symbiote gives him. It isn't until much later that Peter realizes the effect the symbiote has on him that he removes it with Miles's help, but the symbiote soon reunites with Harry, and the combination of the symbiote's resentment at being rejected and Harry's resentment towards Peter for ruining their friendship while he wasn't himself ends up giving birth to Venom, endangering the whole of New York.
- Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions starts with about as literal an example as you can get, with the hero breaking something to kick it off. Spidey shatters the Tablet of Order and Chaos when battling Mysterio and in order to save reality, it's up to Amazing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2099, and Spider-Man Noir to find all the fragments and fix Amazing Spider-Man's mess.
- Spider-Man (PS4):
- Tekken has a massive example of this from Jun Kazama, a Big Good Action Girl who is otherwise a very wise teacher and mother to her son Jin. However, prior to Tekken 3 does Jun instruct Jin that should anything happen to her, he must go seek out and be raised by his grandfather Heihachi. Consequently, this eventually leads to Heihachi revealing his Gruesome Grandparent colours, betraying Jin at the end of the tournament and shooting him in cold blood. Which awakens the Devil Gene within Jin and kickstarts his Start of Darkness. Which culminates in Jin starting World War III by the time of Tekken 6, all in a misguided attempt to draw out the supposed "benefactor" of his family's cursed blood and implicitly die in the process. Had Jun simply told Jin to go her side of the family instead (which she admittedly doesn't seem to know about or at least acknowledge), a colossal and continually escalating mess spanning five games and counting could have been avoided. Worst still, the story of Tekken 2 shows Jun knew about the feud between her baby daddy Kazuya and Heihachi firsthand and how far Heihachi was from ideal parent material (throwing his own son into a volcano), even having tried to save Kazuya from giving into his hatred of his father. This ultimately renders Jun's decision to send Jin to Heihachi incredibly stupid, even if it was ultimately for the sake of the plot.
- Xenosaga has an epic example of this. The Gnosis, who've been rampaging throughout the known universe, killing all human beings in their path, and generally terrorizing the galactic community? Guess who summoned them? As it turns out, it was Shion herself, in a Big "NO!" moment. From Bad to Worse. When Shion finds all of this out, the breakdown she suffers causes her to have another Big "NO!", which summons Abel's Ark. This causes her to suffer a Heroic BSoD of epic proportions.
- In Trauma Team, in the last chapter, we find out that Albert Sartre killed his own daughter to attempt to stop the spreading of the Rosalia virus. Turns out that this allowed the virus to spread from her blood to flowers, to butterflies, infecting a whole city and threatening to exterminate mankind. Nice job breaking it, Doc.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link follows Zelda's instructions and manages to gather up all of the spiritual stones, the ocarina, and the Song of Time in order to pop open the Door of Time and draw the Master Sword... allowing Ganondorf to waltz in and plunder the Golden Land. Actually, you should really blame this one on the Master Sword, for not letting a kid be the Hero of Time and instead sealing him away for seven years while Ganondorf became King of Evil. Nice job breaking it, Fi. And then, at the end of Ocarina of Time, Zelda sends Link back in time to his childhood to prevent Ganondorf's rise to power. This splits the timeline in two, and while Ganondorf is successfully thwarted in the "Child" timeline, Zelda ensures that the timeline she herself is in lacks a Hero, and as such dooms 90% of the population of her Hyrule to death by drowning in The Great Flood. Nice job protecting (your own) Hyrule, princess.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: The Master Sword holds Ganondorf's power in check... so when Link pulls it off its pedestal, Ganondorf gets his power pack. Also, the Master Sword's power is a shadow of its former self to boot (though it's still more powerful than the Hero's Sword).
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The Sages pulled a good one when they failed to destroy Ganondorf and then exiled him to the Twilit Realm out of desperation. Of special note is the fact that two realms were put in imminent danger, instead of just Hyrule. Link just winds up having to clean up the mess.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Link goes through the game defeating the Nightmares, which are creating all the monsters that are rampaging around Koholint Island, and in doing so he collects the Instruments he'll need to wake the Wind Fish so that he can escape the island. Unfortunately, Koholint was just a dream the slumbering Wind Fish was having. So as soon as Link wakes him, the island and its people vaporize. This is actually shown in a poignant ending scene, while the Ballad of the Wind Fish plays. In fact, the last thing we see is Marin singing along to the Ballad while she and the world around her fade into oblivion. If you finish the game without dying once, one of the shots of seagulls flying during the end credits is replaced by a shot of Marin's Sprite flying around on wings, hinting that she got her wish of becoming a seagull and was able to leave the island.
- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: The game's story strongly suggests that life in Hyrule has become even worse since the (very) first game, because now, nobody is controlling Ganon's monsters. It doesn't help that the one thing said monsters can focus on is that by killing Link, they can revive Ganon.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, the first thing Link does is push away the barrier rock that keeps out all evil from Nayru's glade, and leads the villain, Veran (who is possessing Impa's body) in, trying to help her. The second thing that happens is that the Veran kidnaps Nayru, laughs at Link for being so stupid, and makes off with her.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Congratulations, Link! You not only managed to get your hands on the Triforce, and you used it to crush the Imprisoned into powder in such a way that he isn't coming back! Now, we all know Ghirahim is still out there, so before you pay Zelda a visit, why don't you just, you know, follow Impa's lead and blow up the Gate of Time?!
- Hyrule Warriors, as part of its homage to the franchise as a whole, plays this dead straight. The heroes knowingly remove the Master Sword from the Sacred Grounds, although in fairness, Lana (an expert on the subject) assured them there were other failsafes on the evil contained there, so long as the sword was returned before they decayed completely. Guess what they don't manage to do, and who comes back at full power?
- In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, King Rhoam tries to force Zelda into her destiny as the chosen maiden who wields the royal family's power against Ganon, scoffing at her science-minded hobbies and outright forbidding her from studying the Guardians. This bites him in two ways. For one, Zelda trying to force her powers rather than trying to develop them naturally makes her incredibly stressed out, screws with her sense of self-worth, and leaves her with a major grunge against Link for much of their relationship (as she perceived him as having a far easier time living up to his legacy): all of which kept her from awakening it in time, leaving the forces of Hyrule without their greatest weapon when Calamity Ganon resurfaced. And also, by forbidding her from interacting with the Guardians, he failed to let her leverage her research and knowledge of Magitek, which could have additionally immunized them against Ganon's Malice corruption, averting the apocalyptic scenario that leads to the time period of the game proper.
- Hilda's ancestors in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds literally break something that kick starts the plot of the whole game. Hilda's kingdom was under turmoil due to everyone killing each other for the Triforce, which grants the user power and makes any wish come true. The royal family, wanting to end the fighting, destroys the Triforce. With the Triforce gone, Hilda's kingdom of Lorule is on its way to being destroyed since it cannot sustain itself without the Triforce. Whoops! Though Hilda tried and failed to steal Hyrule's Triforce, Link and Zelda use their Triforce to bring Lorule's Triforce back, thus saving Lorule from destruction.
- SaGa Frontier: Riki's Scenario: You know those rings the elder asked you to get? It turns out that they corrupt the wish of the user, which leads to the inhabitants of Margmel disappearing, as they were not around when Margmel was born. Said rings also created Hell in Blue's scenario. Nice Job Breaking it predecessors.
- Dragon Quest:
- In Dragon Quest, the Hero fights and destroys a Golem which is blocking his entry to the town of Cantlin. In Dragon Quest III, it is revealed that the Golem that you defeated was created by one of Cantlin's townspeople to protect the town. In all fairness, though, it couldn't tell between friend and foe.
- Dragon Quest IV:
- It's implied that the thugs who kidnap and murder Rose -a crime which drives her lover Psaro into a murderous rage- only got into her tower because you figured out the defenses and defeated Roseguardian. Way to shatter that Morality Chain, team.
- Alena hands over the Armlet of Transmutation she, Kiryl, and Borya retrieved from the Vault of Vrenor to 2 thugs who have Anya, who's impersonating Zamoksva's Tsarevna, as ransom for her safety. Said Armlet is what allows the Secret of Evolution to be performed successfully, as was the case for Psaro's Manslayer form, rather than Balzack's Baalzack form, meaning Alena unintentionally made Psaro, as well as Aamon, his scheming right hand man, more powerful. In addition, Aamon's disciple, Nimzo, would later fully perfect the Secret of Evolution, leading to the events of Dragon Quest V, all because Alena didn't realize the Armlet of Transmutation's true purpose.
- Dragon Quest VII:
- Nottagen's scenario forces you to do this — by clearing the darkness from defeating Sulkk, you cause a huge man-eating plant monster, the Malign Vine, to return. Oops. You can make this even worse by deciding to kill Wiggles, resulting in the entire town save one getting killed by the Worms of Woe, though it's better to spare Wiggles, since his very presence defeats them.
- Queen Fertiti's Likeness of the Great Spirit was meant to ward off monsters. Instead, it attracted the attention Orgodemir's army long before it was completed, and led to their kingdom, Al-Balad, being targeted and usurped.
- Dragon Quest VIII: Marcello tries to pull this on the party after the heroes' defeating him also weakens him enough that Rhapthorne manages to possess him and free his body. It rings hollow, however, given he had been the one stupid enough to use the Godbird Sceptre carrying the Lord of Darkness's spirit to try and create a better world and arrogant enough to think he could fight him off indefinitely. Given a mere confrontation was all it took to weaken his will sufficiently, as evident from the possession's trademark Voice of the Legion, it's clear his downfall was a matter of "when" not a question of "if".
- Dragon Quest X:
- The Hero reunites the 5 territories of Nagaland and frees Orstov after defeating Principal Nadia. However, it's revealed that Nagaland's 5 split territories is one of the seals on Nadraga, meaning that the Hero was unwittingly manipulated by Orstov into helping Nadraga get resurrected.
- The Demon Oracle/The Hero's Sibling was trying to strengthen the seal on Jagonuba, the Great Source of Darkness and explains that if he's set free, both Astolia and the Netherworld will suffer from the Great Mismal Event. Unfortunately, Anlucia slashes through the slab, causing Illusia and Nalasia to walk in, which slightly awakens Jagonuba when he detects both his avatar body and that of his nemesis, Luciana, causing him to summon Daviyaga, one of the Seven Dark Deities.
- Dragon Quest XI: In the post-game scenario, the Hero's traveling back in time to save Veronica has an unfortunate side-effect of allowing the soul of the Dark One, Calasmos, to prevent the destruction of his own body by Mordegon and successfully resurrect himself.
- Dragon Quest Swords:
- Whoops, the Rorrim mask you just sliced in two was the only thing that prevented Xiphos' return...
- Also, thanks to the Queen, no one ever knew about the mask. Two of the hero's companions are her friggin' son and one of the heroes who helped defeat Xiphos for the first time, and even they had no clue.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- Morrowind,
- Since Anyone Can Die if you kill them, should you decide to slay a NPC that would, in the future, become important to the main quest, the game will give you a message telling you that you essentially screwed up the strings of destiny and now must either return to a previous save game or carry out the remainder of your shameful existence in a doomed universe. (There is a "Backpath" method to beating the main quest that only requires one character to be alive, but difficult to find and much more challenging.)
- Simply completing the main quest essentially "breaks" the land of Morrowind in the years that follow. While stopping a deranged Physical God from taking over the world is still quite good, the method of doing so (breaking the enchantments on the Heart of Lorkhan) cuts off the Tribunal as well. When Vivec disappears a few years later, the rogue moon above Vivec city resumes its fall with original momentum, destroying the city and causing Red Mountain to erupt, destroying most of Vvardenfell and clouding mainland Morrowind with a constant choking ash for years to come. Between the Oblivion Crisis and the Red Mountain eruption, the Dunmer are left extremely vulnerable, and their long-time enemies, the Argonians, then invade and take over what is left of livable Morrowind. Your actions, noble as they were, essentially tipped the first domino in this chain reaction.
- Worse yet, breaking the Heart's enchantments leads directly to the Oblivion Crisis, because breaking the Heart is the same as breaking the Stone of the Red Tower (a Cosmic Keystone), and weakens the barriers between Oblivion and Mundus.
- Big Bad Physical God Dagoth Ur has this going on. From his point of view and following his logic, he hates the Empire and blames the Tribunal for having "sacrificed the honor and dignity of the Dunmer race" when they acquiesced to Tiber Septim. In reality, it was only because he cut the Tribunal off from their source of divine power in the Heart of Lorkhan that they were forced to surrender to the Empire. When the Tribunal was still at full power, they helped to repel multiple Imperial, Akaviri, and Daedric invasion attempts over the course of several millennia. And even then, Vivec managed to secure a number of concessions and autonomy for Morrowind that the other provinces did not get by handing over the Numidium. Unfortunately, you don't get the chance to point this out to Dagoth Ur.
- Oblivion:
- In the Benirus Manor quest, the undead former owner wishes to repent and can only do this if you put his severed hand back on his corpse — which is in fact a Batman Gambit, and releases a (semi-)powerful lich against you and the rest of the town/world etc.
- A subversion is shown throughout the later Dark Brotherhood quests, as the player believes that they are killing targets, when in actual fact they are systematically killing off all the Higher-Ups of the Brotherhood. 'Well done hero, nice job killing our leader'. It turns out that the Night Mother knew about the plot all along, but she figured that if her Black Hand members weren't smart enough to weed out the traitor in their own ranks, they didn't deserve to live anyway.
- In Online, though the Vestige defeats Molag Bal, both Molag Bal himself and Meridia state that this actually works to his advantage, though this is not elaborated upon. Further, at points when the player destroys his Dark Anchors, Bal will be delighted that mortals are rising to meet his challenge with greater strength, as if that were his intention.
- In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim You, the Dragonborn, aid either the Stormcloaks or the Imperials in conquering the province of Skyrim. No matter which side you help however, you have also aided the Thalmor. Basically, everyone who isn't an Altmer is screwed. With heroes like you, who needs villains?
- Morrowind,
- Dragon's Dogma has this pop up when the player least expects it: Congratulations, you've slain the dragon and reclaimed your heart! Time to return home to a hero's welcome!...hang on, why is the sky so dark and cloudy all of a sudden? Why are the monsters more dangerous than before? Why has over half of Gran Soren disappeared into a sinkhole? Why is the Duke suddenly a wizened old man ranting about you making a deal with the dragon to usurp him?
- Golden Sun: Dark Dawn brings us the raid on Belinsk, which is a chain of turning it From Bad to Worse. What began as an infiltration of Belinsk castle (orchestrated by Sveta behind the scenes), ends up a massive detour through the underground ruins to the Alchemy Dynamo. Traps are set off all the way to the entrance of the dynamo facility to keep the party on rails, but nothing compares to the end. Ryu Kou winds up using the Magma Orb hesitantly, only to be forced into going all the way thanks to Arcanus' intervention, and the end result is the raising of Eclipse Tower. Things go straight to hell after you bail Hou Ju and Eoleo out, as the sun rises and, due to the inevitable alignment, harmonizes with the tower to cause the Grave Eclipse. The beastmen who haven't fled are intercepted and killed by monsters in very short order, Volechek stays behind to atone for his erroneous judgment (and this is a ways after we learn that Sveta's his younger sister), and Briggs keeps his ship docked at the port to save the party at the cost of his life. The party — and Ryu Kou — can be forgiven due to the fact that they were railroaded into this. The Tuaparang, on the other hand, cannot. Still, fuck you, Alex.
- And in a more literal meaning of this, one of the main characters breaks the hard-to-make glider by trying to "test" it in the beginning of the game. The other two heroes and the two male kids' fathers have to save him.
- Alex also made the main characters play right into his hands AGAIN, as by using the Apollo lens, they have just helped to further his master plan.
- Way back in the first game before any of this, there's a scene in the Altin Mines where, if the party doesn't have the force gem, Garrett rages on a boulder at the end of an empty corridor. Commence boulder chase leading to boss battle.
- Metroid:
- In Metroid II: Return of Samus and its remake, Metroid: Samus Returns, the Metroids themselves — a species of highly dangerous alien creatures that subsist on other life-energies — are virtually eliminated from their homeworld by Samus; by Metroid Fusion, it turns out that the Metroids were keeping a nightmarish shape-shifting parasite in check, and now it's overrun the planet, forcing Samus to deal with it. Whoops. The remake even shows the beginnings of the X reclaiming the planet.
- Fusion also cleverly averts this trope, with the same intent as the failed Metroids above. Samus attempts a Heroic Sacrifice in order to destroy the remaining SA-X on the station. The AI "Adam" stops her, reminding her that there's still more X on the planet below.
"Adam": How foolish. Even if you are successful in destroying the station, you'll only remove the one thing between the X and total universal domination: yourself.- Again in Fusion, Samus opens the door to a secret lab where Metroids are being cultivated... allowing a replicant SA-X to waltz in and wreck it. It loops back to Nice Job Fixing It, Villain when the Metroids are let loose on the ship and start predating the X, eventually killing the original SA-X and letting Samus get her Ice Beam back from it.
- And in Metroid Prime, Samus manages to unseal the entrance to the titular Eldritch Abomination's lair and destroy it... only to have it regenerate From a Single Cell, take over her discarded Phazon Suit, and gallivant around as her Evil Twin, wreaking havoc across the galaxy in the next two games.
- Subverted in Metroid Prime Hunters. Upon finally finding the Ultimate Power, it is revealed to actually be the Eldritch Abomination Gorea. The hunters set it free, only for Samus to immediately kick its ass.
- The Chozo effectively created the entire mess of the whole franchise with the titular Metroids. According to the Chozo Memories shown in Metroid: Samus Returns, a group of Chozo arrive at the planet SR388 and encounter the planet's hostile wildlife and deadly X parasites. To combat them, the Chozo created the Metroids. While the Chozo succeeded, the Metroids turned against their masters. They sealed the Metroids underground in a hazardous purple liquid that put them and everything else in stasis while said liquid would harm anyone that entered it without showing the Chozo statues the Metroid DNA needed to drain the fluid. Not all Metroids were accounted for since the space pirates managed to obtain some and duplicate them to be used as weapons and energy storage. Had the Chozo simply fled the planet instead of creating the Metroids, the space pirates would have not obtained so much power.
- Metroid Dread alleviates some of the above. The Thoha Tribe - the Chozo that created the Metroids - called in the Mawkin Tribe to help contain the Metroids when they went berserk, and then ultimately decided destroying the planet would be for the best to ensure neither the Metroids nor the X would ever darken the galaxy. Raven Beak, on the other hand, saw what the Metroids did to his men and decided he wanted that power, ordering his men to imprison Quiet Robe before genociding the rest of the Thoha. And yet, when footage of an X on Planet ZDR was found thanks to Raven Beak and/or the captive Quiet Robe manipulating footage from an X outbreak that destroyed the Mawkin tribe, the Federation sent everything Raven Beak could ever want from them - both a means to collect a Metroid DNA sample (the E.M.M.I. units) and a host for the Metroid DNA sample to be collected (Samus herself). Though even this might have looped back to Nice Job Fixing It, Villain, as despite the rest of the game's events being All According to Plan, to the point of a Near-Villain Victory even after his Final Boss battle, getting Samus to awaken her Metroid abilities ends up being his undoing when they allow her a Heroic Second Wind to easily bring him down for good.
- RealityMinds:
- Silvana refrained from finishing the spell to exorcise Kvena because she didn't want to lose the latter. This leads to Kvena going through Sanity Slippage from the tedium of being a ghost.
- Ridgefern later discovered that balance between positive and negative essences isn't sustainable, since people can absorb essences, but won't always emit the same kind. He decides to get rid of essences in the epilogue.
- Ultima:
- Near the end of Ultima Underworld, the protagonist finally cuts down the evil Big Bad wizard... only to have the wizard reveal, as he dies, that he's been keeping an invincible demon in perpetual confinement in a chamber below, and with his death, the confinement spell will fade shortly, but not too shortly. Now the hero has to run down and find a way to banish the demon for good before it breaks loose and destroys the world. Whoops.
- In the main series, the Avatar does end up being responsible for the eradication of (almost) all human life on both Serpent Isle and Pagan, in Ultima VII Part II and 8 respectively. Also, after the fourth game, the king Lord British has the Codex Of Ultimate Wisdom raised from the underworld, which is the direct cause for the gargoyle invasion in Ultima VI. The other games in the series are simply the revenge of some ally of the previous Big Bad. Ultima IX does claim that the Avatar's quest for virtue in Ultima IV was what created the Guardian (Big Bad of games 7-9), but U9 is generally considered Canon Discontinuity anyway.
- In Ultima I, after shattering Mondain's gem of immortality and killing Mondain. Neither Lord British or the pre-Avatar properly dispose of the gem shards... let's hope no-one finds it and becomes corrupted by it becoming an evil tyrant as well as unleashing 3 demons of sin onto the world... oh crap... Ultima V.
- Happens twice in Drakengard 2. First the destruction of the Knights and their seals unleash a red dragon that intends to destroy the world. And then, when you kill the red dragon, it turns out that it was a seal for the dark gods that control the world. And the sky explodes. Whoops indeed.
- In ending four of the original Drakengard, the heroes kill the Big Bad, Manah, while she's still the instrument of the gods, killing the gods in the process. Turns out that even though the gods are evil Cosmic Horrors that want to destroy the world, they're also keeping the world in some semblance of order... And without them, giant, flying, plasma-breathing, man-eating babies descend from the sky. Really.
- It's implied that said man-eating babies are the gods, who are pissed off at their instrument being destroyed.
- Ending E's ramifications aren't immediately apparent, but give way to the events of NieR, where our world is ruined.
- In ending four of the original Drakengard, the heroes kill the Big Bad, Manah, while she's still the instrument of the gods, killing the gods in the process. Turns out that even though the gods are evil Cosmic Horrors that want to destroy the world, they're also keeping the world in some semblance of order... And without them, giant, flying, plasma-breathing, man-eating babies descend from the sky. Really.
- In the end of Half-Life 2, Gordon's attempt to stop Breen from teleporting off-world, while successful, results in the partial destruction of the Citadel — so that the Combine decide to sacrifice the Citadel (and thus destroy what's left of City 17) to open a superportal and send reinforcements to Earth.
- It gets worse in Half-Life. Killing the Nihilanth? His death throes amplify the resonance cascade, so the Combine see a giant INVADE HERE sign, so they pop through the borderworld and eventually appear in our dimension. Add to that Gordon had recently launched a satellite that allowed the Combine to open portals all over the Earth AND the fact that he also started the resonance cascade, and it becomes more difficult to cheer him on as the atrocities pile up...
- In all fairness to Gordon, he was just doing what he was told and was given no information to let him know what a bad idea all of the above was. But as retroactively learned in Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the hero who really screwed things up in the first game was Eli Vance, for being told by the G-Man to "prepare for unforeseen consequences", realising something seriously bad was about to happen and not aborting the test of the Xen crystal (which he also knew the G-Man had procured) when he had the chance.
- Prior to the announcement of the sequel, Half-Life 1's ending appeared to be that the US government had deliberately engineered the resonance cascade to provoke an alien war that, judging by the army bodies seen on Xen during G-man's final speech, coupled with him saying "the border world, Xen, is under our control now, thanks to you", ended with a military conquest of the alien world. Which is still something of a Nice Job.
- Also in Half-Life, if you get a surviving guard to reopen the entrance to the facility after the Resonance Cascade, you'll find a scientist clinging for dear life on a partially collapsed bridge between where your tram was and you. Guess what happens if you get too close? note
- Even earlier than that, you can choose to take the elevator up to the Anomalous Materials main level. However, the elevator is malfunctioning, and falls to the bottom of the shaft, with 3 scientists stuck inside being reduced to Ludicrous Gibs as a result. note
- In chapter 2 of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, you discover a large underground room containing two rebels, a vortigaunt, and Alyx. While showing you how their antlion sensors work, one of the rebels says something along the lines of "the vortigaunt says we shouldn't have to worry about antlions finding us though; they shouldn't hear us this far out unless we kill one of their grubs." This is directly after you've traveled through part of an antlion nest, likely killing dozens of antlion grubs for their heath pickups (or the achievement) along the way. Guess what happens next.
- In Mortal Kombat: Deception, Shujinko spends over 40 years collecting the Kamidogu for the Elder Gods, only to find that he had been serving the Dragon King Onaga all along when Onaga is resurrected. He then embarks on a quest to undo the evil he unleashed on the realms.
- Later, in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, Argus and his wife Delia are charged with preventing The End of the World as We Know It, setting up their sons and a firespawn of their own creation as the keys to stopping the disaster. Too bad they left their project to run its course unsupervised, otherwise the firespawn wouldn't have been captured and corrupted, one of their sons wouldn't have woken up early with a grudge and slaughtered them, and as a result, their entire plan wouldn't have been the very catalyst of the apocalypse they were trying to prevent. It's called "parental supervision" for a reason, Argus.
- Argus and Delia created a safeguard against the coming Armageddon, a powerful chestpiece. Argus was going to make it kill everyone, but Delia didn't approve, so instead it was created to randomly either kill everyone or depower them, and you never know exactly what it will do, until it's finally used and DOESN'T DO A DAMN THING. Nice job breaking it, saviors of humanity.
- According to Taven's ending, the firespawn's demise actually caused the kombatants to become even more powerful, thus ensuring Armageddon. What the bloody hell were the Elder Gods thinking?!
- It turns From Bad to Worse. Rather than having Taven win, Mortal Kombat 9 reveals that Shao Kahn was the one who got Blaze's power. Not only was Armageddon not stopped, but the Evil Overlord who wanted to merge all the realms and usher in The End of the World as We Know It was the one who ended up winning.
- Moreso in the actual Mortal Kombat 9: Raiden saving Smoke form being roboticized? They got Sub-Zero instead. Raiden kills Motaro and saves Johnny Cage? Cue Shao Kahn transferring Shang Tsung's own soul and the myriad of souls he's absorbed into Sindel, which results in her going on a rampage, killing a boatload of Earthrealm heroes, the aforementioned Smoke included. To make matters worse, Quan Chi has now enslaved the multitude of those who died in the aforementioned rampage, making them his mindless zombies. Sure it worked, since Cage and Sonya Blade survived, but still, Nice Job Getting Most Of The Good Guys Killed And Enslaved By Quan Chi And Leaving Earthrealm And Outworld Vulnerable To Shinnok, Raiden!
- After Freddy Krueger kills Shao Kahn and ends up saving the Earthrealm, Nightwolf recognizes him as a demon and sends him back to the Dreamrealm instead of killing him in the real realm — where he is much weaker...
- Mortal Kombat X has one with Hanzo, Scorpion's humanized form. The Earthrealm heroes successfully capture Quan Chi and are about to take him in for interrogation, but Hanzo decides to extract revenge on him instead. Hanzo gets into a fight with Sonya just because she was barring his path and once he defeats her, he proceeds to beat the crap out of Quan Chi before killing him. Unknown to Hanzo, Quan Chi was the only person who could bring back the heroes killed from the previous game in their human form. With Quan Chi dead, said heroes are now doomed to be revenants forever. Hope that revenge was worth it, Hanzo!
- Mortal Kombat 11: Barely averted during the Aftermath DLC as Fire God Liu Kang is about to reset the timeline, but Shang Tsung stops him, claiming that without the crown of Kronika, the Hourglass would shatter, thus dooming all of existence. This is because Fire God Liu Kang had destroyed Kronika's crown in defeating her.
- Later, in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, Argus and his wife Delia are charged with preventing The End of the World as We Know It, setting up their sons and a firespawn of their own creation as the keys to stopping the disaster. Too bad they left their project to run its course unsupervised, otherwise the firespawn wouldn't have been captured and corrupted, one of their sons wouldn't have woken up early with a grudge and slaughtered them, and as a result, their entire plan wouldn't have been the very catalyst of the apocalypse they were trying to prevent. It's called "parental supervision" for a reason, Argus.
- An extremely common way of ensuring yourself a sequel. One example is Dungeon Siege II.
- In Guild Wars, you join the White Mantle and help them located gifted people... only to find out they're using them as human sacrifices. You then gain the power to combat the Mantle and their gods by allying with others... only to have your allies release something worse to kill the gods. And then, in finally ending the situation, you cause a volcano to explode.
- Paralleling the above events was how you essentially fumbled about with the Scepter of Orr throughout the game. First the Mantle located and rescued it from the grasp of the Lich Lord, which was good. Then you stole it from the Mantle, which was also good since who knows what they would have done with it. Then you give it back to the Lich, though you didn't know at the time. And it turns out the Lich needed the Scepter to defeat the Mantle's gods... by unleashing even worse beings.
- Not to mention when you free Palawa Joko, since he's going to conquer the place about half a century after Nightfall takes place (as revealed in The Movement of the World). And seeing as the first thing he does after honoring your bargain is to start rebuilding his armies, you know what he's going to do.
- All of the events of Nightfall took place because Kormir, the greatest hero of the Sunspears, did everything she was supposed to not do. And her reward for nearly destroying the world and getting hundreds, if not thousands, of innocents brutally murdered in the crossfire is to become a god.
- There are a lot of smaller examples, too.
- Guild Wars 2:
- The overall goal of the game is to kill the Elder Dragons. After two are killed it's discovered that the Dragons are a kind of Cosmic Keystone and their death is destabilizing the magical balance of the world. If even one more dies it's possible Tyria will be destroyed. And of course not long after this revelation is made, we learn that one of the gods just so happens to have started an anti-dragon crusade in Elona.
- The Forgotten had been secretly undertaking a plan to convert the Elder Dragon Kralkatorrik to their side using the methods proven with Glint. This would have been a major coup and avoided the dangers from the first point on the list. Unfortunately the deaths of Zhaitan and Mordremoth disrupted their plans and they were wiped out as a result.
- While searching for his blade in the Mists, Rytlock discovered it next to chained spirit. The spirit offered to reignite the blade's flames and open a way out of the Mists if Rytlock would free him. Rytlock did so and didn't give the situation a second thought until he learned the spirit was a depowered Balthazar, who is now running rampant on Tyria.
- The Commander killing Balthazar saved the world, but it also allowed Kralkatorrik to absorb his magic and gain the ability to enter the Mists. Previously limited to just feeding on Tyria, the Elder Dragon began consuming the Mists themselves, risking universal annihilation.
- Lie of Caelum: Aya and Hitoshi attempt to go after the Underground Bandits on their own, but N'raijar captures them while planning to use them as hostages against Souen. The most they accomplish is defeating a prototype Frame, that that only serves to provide combat data to the bandits.
- After beating the Final Boss in Secret of Evermore, it's revealed that the hero's actions have disrupted the world's balance of good and evil, and the world will effectively implode unless it's fixed. Whoops...
- In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the Prince activates the palace's traps, only to realize too late that they will do absolutely nothing to hinder all the monsters running around and will only make his life more difficult. His Genre Blindness is lampshaded midway through the activation sequence when he asks the palace guardsman who told him to activate the defense system what, exactly, it's going to do. The guard responds that he told him, it'll activate the defense system. The Prince doesn't ask for clarification.
- Not to mention releasing the Sands of Time in the first place. And causing the creation of the Sands themselves. And then undoing that, pushing the Reset Button, and bringing back the original villain and ruining his home town.
- In the 2008 game, (another) Prince spends his entire time sealing back up an evil in a can and at the end decides to unleash it again and undo all that hard work. Subverted when explained in the epilogue that he had an excellent reason for doing that. Elika sacrificed herself to seal Ahriman away again. The problem with this is that seals can break, as was proven at the very beginning of the game. This seal will break again, and when it does, the one thing capable of truly destroying Ahriman — the power inside of Elika — won't be around to stop him. By unsealing Ahriman again on the condition that Ahriman resurrects Elika, the Prince has given the world a chance at getting rid of Ahriman for good. It's more of a potential Nice Job Fixing It, Villain in Ahriman's case for reviving Elika in exchange for his own freedom.
- Shin Megami Tensei: Persona:
- In Persona 3, the twelve shadows SEES went out of their way to destroy turn out to have been keeping the Anthropomorphic Personification of death sealed away. And yes, now it's awake and going to destroy the world, and a bunch of high school kids are going to have to try and stop it. It doesn't help that a particularly well placed Chessmaster orchestrated the whole thing.
- There's an even crueler one in Persona 4. Nice job saving your friends from dying inside the Midnight Channel, hero! Too bad the murderer is using your rescues as "proof" to make the kidnapper (and yes, they're different people) convinced that the TV world really IS safe so he'll keep throwing people in. And now they've gotten so overzealous about the whole thing that they've taken your adorable cousin inside with them. Heck, your entire team can invoke this further if you choose to condemn the seemingly guilty kidnapper and throw him into the TV... which lets a Knight Templar goddess destroy the world. You could also cement this in The Golden Updated Re-release by destroying the letter in the Jester/Hunger Social Link.
- In Persona 5 Royal, the reason Well-Intentioned Extremist Maruki is able to turn reality into a World of Silence is because the Phantom Thieves themselves subconsciously let him do it after the public gave them the power to defeat Yaldabaoth with a Combined Energy Attack, with that energy being donated to Maruki and letting him take Yaldabaoth's place.
- The majority of Assassin's Creed involves Altaïr killing various Templars who mostly are, in one way or another, helping and protecting the people of the Holy Land (in intention, anyway), even if they have committed various atrocious acts, even as he himself is trying to save the land by killing them.
- The real fun part comes at the end, where Al-Mualim turns out to be behind everything, having Altaïr kill the Templars so that only he knew the secret to how to operate the Piece of Eden and thereby giving him absolute control of the Holy Land.
- In the flash game, Fishy, you play as a fish with the goal of eating smaller fish, gradually becoming larger as you do so. If you go on long enough, the game abruptly ends, informing you that you've destroyed the pond's ecosystem by eating everything. Whoops.
- In Haven: Call of the King, Haven spends most of the game trying to find a mystical golden bell that will summon the warrior King Athelion to save Haven's people from the tyranny of alien overlord Vetch. Haven reaches the bell and rings it. Shortly thereafter, his friend Chess calls and says she's been captured by Vetch, so Haven, thinking "My work here is done," heads off to save her. Then we find out that Chess is a spy working for Vetch, and Athelion doesn't come to the bell, but rather to the person who rang it. In this case, he'll come to Haven, who left Athelion's stronghold (where the King would've been unassailable) and is now trapped at the heart of Vetch's citadel. Nice Job, Haven.
- Done double duty in Lunar Knights. Dumas was ruling over the planet using Casket Armor, the paraSOL, and bottlenecked humans all in an attempt to protect his own people from the paraSOL's Planet Eater functionality; Lucian and Aaron taking Dumas down gives Polidori a reason to fire it up. Furthermore, after taking down a simulacrum of Polidori at the very top of the Vambery, a freshly revived Dumas warns them that what they just did was akin to starting a war with the Immortals, an entire race of Omnicidal Maniacs. I want my sequel, Konami.
- Played with in the Mega Man Zero series. In Zero 3, Zero forces Copy X to go "all out," but instead of activating his ultimate form, he instead activates a bomb that was planted in his body by Dr. Weil. Results: everyone thinks Zero retired Copy X and Dr. Weil takes over Neo Arcadia, as an even less benevolent ruler.
- It got worse in Zero 4. Due to Weil becoming the ruler of Neo Arcadia, Craft decides that the only way to get rid of him is to blow up Neo Arcadia. Nice Job Killing Twenty Million Civilians Because You Let The Bad Guy Take Over, Zero.
- Before that, there's Ciel, effectively the series' female lead, responsible for creating the Big Bad of Z1, the imperfect Copy-X.
- In Mega Man 7, Mega Man finds Bass wounded at the end of Shade Man's stage. He offers him to be repaired at Dr. Light's Lab. It's soon revealed that Bass and Treble are Dr. Wily's creations after he destroys Dr. Light's laboratory, getting the upgrades for them that were meant for Mega Man and Rush.
- Star Fox 64 uses this trope in one area. When you destroy the first 4 weak points of the Meteo boss, the rear laser cannon/shield breaks off... and flies straight at you.
- Slippy might be the weakest of your elite pilots, but he only makes things worse once. He charges at a boss to help you, only to lose and be sent to Titania. You make a detour to save him which gets you stuck in the easier route and bad ending. Fortunately, this CAN be prevented if you are fast.
- Subverted in Infinite Undiscovery. Upon killing the final boss, Veros, all existing "lunaglyphs" vanish from their owners and no more can be created. Subverted in that, despite granting awesome magic powers to their owners, everyone who has one is in constant danger of being turned into superpowered, invisible, genocidal monsters.
- The ultimate focus of Brave Fencer Musashi: you spend the game running around collecting the scrolls that the original Brave Fencer Musashi used to seal a dark wizard with the sword Lumina. You do this to power up the sword in the hopes of stopping Thirstquencher Empire's bid for world dominance, only to find out that the original Brave Fencer Musashi didn't seal the dark wizard with the sword, but in the sword, who was then released. Pat yourself on the back, Musashi, you earned it.
- Well, in all fairness, Allucaneet Kingdom is the mostly at fault for this, due to not properly recording just how the last Brave Fencer sealed away the Dark Wizard. Saving the kingdom is one thing, but releasing a planet-ending threat is not a good trade-off.
- Especially considering that Musashi never really had much interest in gathering the scrolls. If they'd just set him loose on the Empire itself, he probably would have curbstomped Flattski soon enough to avoid most of the woes that befell them during the game.
- There's also the moment the princess decides to bring another hero from Musashi's world to bust her out of the Thirstquencher's custody. Keep in mind the only way they even got Musashi to be their hero was that's his only means of going home. This time around she summons Kojiro, who doesn't give a crap about going home at all and only wants to fight Musashi, and who very quickly joins Thirstquencher as they have a common enemy. Let's just face it: the Allucaneet Kingdom and it's people are not the sharpest swords in the armory.
- In Starcraft, Zeratul is the first to permanently slay a cerebrate while Tassadar uses his forces to distract a Zerg contingent led by Kerrigan. However, Zeratul inadvertently creates a temporary psychic link with the Zerg Overmind. The link allows the Overmind to determine the location of the Protoss homeworld Aiur and invade. The Protoss never mention this fact however, so it's possible they didn't know how the Overmind located Aiur. Aldaris and the rest of the Conclave might have been even less pleased with the return of the Dark Templar if they had known that one of them was essentially responsible for the Zerg invasion.
- After you help Arcturus Mengsk overthrow the Confederacy, he crowns himself the emperor of Terran space and becomes just as bad as they were.
- Preventing this becomes one of the major plot points of SC 2, after it is revealed that the heroes must not kill the Big Bad Kerrigan, as she's ostensibly the only one who can stop the Greater-Scope Villain from annihilating all life in the galaxy, like he does in the Bad Future.
- Terraria:
- Congratulations on making it to the Underworld and slaying the abomination that dwells there! You're told that "The ancient spirits of light and dark have been released." What does that mean? A variety of much tougher enemies all over the world, and The Corruption spreads much more aggressively. On the plus side, there's now an anti-Corruption biome full of rainbows and unicorns. Which are trying to kill you.
- After Golem, the boss of the Jungle Temple, is defeated, some cultists appear at the entrance of the regular dungeon with a mysterious tablet. Killing the Lunatic Cultist triggers the Lunar Events, where four celestial pillars act as a last stand against the summoning of the Moon Lord, who was confirmed to be Cthulhu's brother by the devs. And what if you want to progress the game? Beat all four pillars.
- Dhaos, the Big Bad sorcerer from Tales of Phantasia, wages war against the world in general across several generations with the aim of taking a Mana Seed from the Tree of Life. It isn't revealed until after you've finally killed him that he was actually a being from another planet, on a mission to replace his world's own Tree of Life, which is dying. Oops. After everybody else is gone, though, the resident goddess transforms his body (and hers, too, depending on which version you play) into a Mana Seed and sends it on its merry way, making one wonder what the fuss was all about.
- Midway through the game, a human army, desperate to fight off Dhaos, unleashes an enormous mana-sucking weapon which has the unintended (but totally predictable) effect of killing off our Tree of Life. It's a little uncertain whom the bigger "oops" is on here, since Dhaos' whole war was about preventing humanity from bleeding out all the mana with their excessive use of sorcery. Nice job on that one, eh?
- The magitek cannon backfired on its second firing and destroyed a good portion of Midgards. Dhaos was sure that Lyzen wouldn't be a massive idiot and fire it before it was ready.
- In Tales of Symphonia, the prequel, eventually reveals that the whole magitech problem which destroyed most of mankind in Phantasia's backstory, and comes close to doing it again during Phantasia, is the heroes' fault, as the Big Bad they killed was keeping technology stagnant for the purpose of preventing humans from making Mana Cannons and using up too much mana and causing mass destruction. Ironically, they use a mana cannon to defeat him, and it is implied that it was mana cannons' use which led to him taking over the world in the first place.
- Why people keep using the damn cannons if the technology has over 8000 years of history of causing death, destruction, and suffering to all (including its users) is never addressed.
- Tales of Symphonia is full of this. Your heroic quest to save the world by reviving the flow of mana turns out to actually be stealing the mana from a parallel universe, which explains why all these blue-haired elf freaks and ninjas are trying to kill you for it. Of course, when you are nearly finished in your quest, but haven't touched Disc 2 yet, you know something's up.
- It's sort of subverted in that the party never goes through with the regeneration because of the Friend-or-Idol Decision that results from it.
- On a more personal note, the Key Crest that Lloyd gives Colette to save her soul ironically nearly kills her because while it restores Colette to normal, she is slowly being poisoned and crystalized by her Cruxis Crystal, as it lacks a few critical touches. This leads to your first Disc 2 quest.
- It even gets worse: having moved on to that parallel universe, the heroes proceed to blindly assume that cutting off the exchange of mana between the two universes will save both worlds and proceed to do so. Naturally, this nearly destroys both worlds instead. And you know that something's even more wrong when you've almost finished your second world-saving quest and STILL haven't touched Disc 2. Yes, you read that right.
- In fact, this continues right on through the final battle in that killing the boss nearly destroys the world yet again, except that the requisite Final Cutscene Awesomeness allows the hero to finally go about saving the world.
- Technically that's more Nice Job Not Fixing It Completely Hero, since the final boss was planning on taking Derris-Kharlan away with the Great Seed and leaving the world to die. Their only mistake was believing that defeating him was all they needed to do to save the world, when it was only the first step.
- In the first part of the game, Genis' visiting Marble at the human ranch is seen as a violation of the non-aggression treaty when Lloyd gets caught on camera killing the guards that saw him, enabling the Desians to attack the village. To make matters worse, Marble is turned into a monster, and sacrifices herself to stop Forcystus.
- And Nice Job Breaking It, Renegades, for taking an eternity of slapfighting back and forth before they informed their "enemy" that THEY WERE ON THE SAME SIDE.
- It could also be argued that the entire game is a severe case of this, what with Mithos the Hero who saved the world by breaking it being the Big Bad.
- Even the sidequests aren't immune to this. One sidequest has the heroes dealing with a family who lost a child when the giant tree went berserk. In fact, that was the same incident that also killed Marta's mom. Nice job ruining people's lives, heroes. Another example has the heroes helping Abyssion lift his curse by looking for the Devil Arms and having Abyssion dispose of them. Turns out that Abyssion actually had you bringing the Devil Arms to him so that he can use them to gain ultimate power. Nice job unlocking the hardest boss in the game, heroes.
- In the sequel, reuniting the two worlds in the first game has the effect of the major kingdoms about to declare war on each other.
- Averted in the sequel by meaningful relationship development, because if Emil/Ratatosk had fully won the game, it would have ended with the world being overrun by demons. But there is a Heel–Face Turn which neatly averts the trope.
- Midway through the game, a human army, desperate to fight off Dhaos, unleashes an enormous mana-sucking weapon which has the unintended (but totally predictable) effect of killing off our Tree of Life. It's a little uncertain whom the bigger "oops" is on here, since Dhaos' whole war was about preventing humanity from bleeding out all the mana with their excessive use of sorcery. Nice job on that one, eh?
- Serious Sam: The entirety of the series has its start when Captain Samuel Stone, otherwise known as the titular "Serious Sam", accidentally awakens the ancient Evil Overlord Mental during an expedition to the Planet Sirius. This leads to the Mental War, in which the alien entity destroys all of humanity's interstellar colonies and ultimately destroys Earth via Colony Drop. If it weren't for the Time-Lock, Mental would have won. Granted, Mental would have reawakened on his own and started wiping out mankind eventually, but Sam waking him up early meant that Earth did not have time to prepare for his coming.
- Fire Emblem:
- Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War: Sigurd's reckless use of military force to solve all of his problems allows him to be used as an Unwitting Pawn to conquer the continent and lay the groundwork for The Empire. Once that's all finished, Arvis pulls a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on him, massacres his army, and personally murders him. Sixteen years later, it comes down to his son Seliph to save Jugdral and clean up his mess.
- Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
- The villain-throwing-a-parting-shot version is used here when Nergal uses his own Life Energy to summon a dragon to cause The End of the World as We Know It.
- Played for tragedy twice with poor Ninian. First, the gang finds her adrift at sea with memory loss and takes her to Dread Isle... which happens to be right where Nergal wants her. He forces her to summon a dragon which ultimately ends in the death of the man they were trying to save, oh shit! Later, Eliwood goes through a cave full of lava patches to get the legendary Durandal, a sword that kills dragons. It lives up to its reputation just moments after they leave the cave... wait, you mean that dragon was Ninian?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! You really should have planned things better, heroes.
- If you, as the game's tactician, did exceedingly well when you finish the game (A-S rank), your legacy causes Bern and Etruria to go war because they desired your skilled mind so much. That's right, that S-Rank Hector Hard Mode you spent weeks over caused two of the most powerful military nations to go to war over you.
- Eliwood and Hector do this by rescuing Prince Zephiel from being assassinated under his father's orders. Guess who comes back to invade in twenty years later?
- Implied with the postgame dungeon of Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Alm and Celica's party investigates the ruins of the ancient civilization of Thabes, with slabs found throughout detailing the life and exploits of an alchemist known as Forneus. In order to progress to the lower levels of the Thabes Labyrinth, the seal placed on the alchemist's workshop by the Thabean Council has to be removed by your party. What lies within this sealed away workshop? The various forbidden experiments conducted by Forneus, including the Death Masks, prototype versions of the Risen, and an entity known as "The Creation" — a younger incarnation of the Fell Dragon Grima. If canon, this means the events of Awakening, Bad Future and all, may have never happened if not for our heroes' curiosity.
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses has a variant, depending on which path you take. At the end of the first battle of the game after having met Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude, you wind up saving one of them from an attack of the bandit boss who wasn't dead yet. Specifically, Edelgard. Guess whose secret identity is the Flame Emperor? Yep, the same "noble brat" (in Jeralt's words) you just saved. Naturally, her goal is to conquer the continent. Unless you side with her as the professor of the Black Eagles House, guess who you have to fight before the end of the game.
- Fatal Frame:
- In Fatal Frame, Mafuyu's intention to remain with Kirie at the Hell Gate to appease her loneliness and ease her suffering was self-sacrificial, but it led to more problems than solutions. His staying caused Miku immense grief and Survivor Guilt, to the point that she willingly followed his spirit in the Manor of Sleep and even ended up getting herself spiritually married to him.
- Fatal Frame II: Thanks, Itsuki! Wanting to help Yae and Sae escape the village, so that they won't have to go through the same, horrible ritual that you did with your brother, is very noble. And it mostly succeeded. Yae managed to escape, but Sae tripped, got captured, and was forced to go through the ritual herself, and it resulted in a failure and doomed your entire hometown. Granted, you did kill yourself shortly after they ran off and you likely never learned that last bit...
- In Fatal Frame III, Kaname wanted to see Reika one last time and snuck into the Chamber of Thorns. He woke Reika up just as Yashuu Kuze snuck up from behind and killed him for violating the shrine's rules. Reika reacted to this by having the Holly enter her eyes and unleashing the Rift upon the manor, which resulted in wiping out everyone within the manor and cursing all who find themselves in said manor in their dreams.
- Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse:
- Dr Haibara wanted to perform the Kiraigou, the forbidden version of the Kagura Dance, because he wanted to study the intricacies of the Getsuyuu Syndrome, in the hope that it would allow him to cure his diseased daughter. Unfortunately, the Kiraigou ended up failing and caused the simultaneously-playing, usually safe Kagura Dance to fail, too. The dancers of the latter ended up dying, his daughter Bloomed and fell into a comatose state, and it eventually resulted in a second Day Without Suffering occurring two years later.
- Souya Yomotsuki believed that the first Day Without Suffering occurred because the Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was flawed and not done properly, which he was actually correct about. He set about re-creating the Mask as best as he could. He failed to realize that the Kiraigou required not only a decent Mask, but also for a descendant of the Tsukimori clan to perform the Tsukimori song during the ritual. Without the right mask and song, the ritual was bound to fail.
- In Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water, the Matchmaker thought having a picture of Ose would be a perfect help in finding her a groom. Unfortunately, Ose had already fallen in love with the photographer without the Matchmaker ever finding out, leading to her rejecting every man who was lured to the mountain for her after seeing her picture and getting them all killed.
- In both Super Robot Wars: Original Generation games, the act of defeating the alien invasion leader activates a failsafe device that tries to destroy the entire planet.
- Also, in Super Robot Wars Alpha, you fight the Battle of the Solar System's Absolute Defense and detonate a battleship in the midst of the Horde of Alien Locusts headed for Earth. In Alpha Gaiden'', you find out that the shockwave of that detonation is going to devastate the Earth all by itself.
- The inside of the cave is a shambles after the unavoidable fighting in scenario 29 of the Earth Route in Shin Super Robot Wars. Prof. Eri Anzai nearly faints, totally unable to comprehend how the hotheaded Domon and Ryusei could ignore the cultural value of whatever was in that cave.
- In Super Robot Wars UX, ALL of the aliens respond to Denton's message which include the Festum, Vajra, ELS, Human-Machina, Skrugg, and Anticross. In Heroman's finale, it's shown that that's not the case: the Skrugg were called to the wrong Earth by the same message which called the main cast.
- Super Robot Wars V:
- In the game's backstory, after the Celestial Being's global armed intervention weakened Earth's military forces, ZAFT saw this as an opportunity and declared war, starting the Earth-PLANT War.
- Sagara Kaname's introduction of Black Technology into the UC world not only led to the invention of Arm Slaves and Lambda Driver, but also caused mobile suit technology, such as Psycommu and Minovsky Craft, to advance far more rapidly than it did in the NCC world. Because of this, wars spiraled out of control in the UC world and Earth is on the brink of destruction.
- In the Neo Geo Pocket version of SNK vs. Capcom, the bosses (the usual Geese Howard and M. Bison) unveil a clone of Iori or Ryu, whom they intend to be the first of their powered-up slaves for their world conquest scheme... and your team will be next. Once you defeat Geese and Bison, you discover that your fight caused the clone, an Orochi Iori/Evil Ryu, to be released. And, of course, the 2 cowardly bosses are leaving YOU to stop him. "Enjoy the wrath of Orochi blood!"
- In Treasure of the Rudra, during Sion's Scenario he is stuck on the Sky Islands and wants to return to Terra Firma to stop the Rudra Cult. However when he does activate the path back to Terra Firma, the entire archipelago falls, putting everyone at risk of being killed by the Rudra.
- Said Archipelago was part of the Earth in the past anyway.
- Castlevania
- Castlevania: Lament of Innocence is pretty much the episode dedicated to this trope for the franchise, albeit with a healthy dose of unwitting on Leon's part. As it turns out, everything that happens in the game is just part of a gambit by Mathias to become a vampire, in the process obtaining eternal life, all to spite the god that he fought in the name of, alongside his best friend, Leon. Mathias later would go on to become Dracula, the franchise's primary Big Bad.
- In Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, Hector's defeat of Dullahan turns out to be a vital step in Isaac's plan to resurrect Dracula a century early. ...Well, Isaac's plan as likely dictated into his brains by the lurking spirit of Drac Himself. Lampshaded:
Isaac: You've resurrected the castle! *slow clap* Hector, bravo!- Two of the four possible endings of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night involve an underinformed Alucard eliminating the Belmont bloodline by beating the stuffing out of one extremely possessed Richter. Seeing as the Belmonts are humanity's best and perhaps only hope in the fight against Alucard's infamous father... Oops.
- In Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin's true ending path, it's revealed that Brauner was the only thing preventing Dracula from being resurrected. After the players defeat him, he has a moment of clarity, explains his backstory about losing his daughters in World War II, then is promptly finished off by Death, who cackles, resurrects Dracula, and then forces you to FIGHT BOTH OF THEM AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.
- It goes back even earlier than that: Death was initially only lurking around Castlevania because that's what he does. He had no idea anything was skew-wiff until Charlotte spelled it out for him. Hence, Brauner's death when he was close to redemption, and Dracula's resurrection when he was previously still sealed and only being tapped for a power source, are directly Charlotte's fault.
- Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia does this too, doubling as a Nonstandard Game Over: if the player hasn't rescued all of the villagers before defeating Albus, Shanoa completes the Dominus glyphs and uses them on Dracula's seal, only to unwittingly kill herself and RELEASE Dracula, rather than destroy him. Whoops.
- Kirby has been known to pull this on occasion.
- In Kirby's Adventure and the GBA remake Nightmare in Dream Land, Kirby defeats King Dedede and his henchmen, repairs the Star Rod, and puts it in its rightful place on the Fountain of Dreams... where it gives the Nightmare hiding in the fountain the strength to emerge, and Kirby has to beat that, too. Oops.
- And in the true ending of Kirby: Squeak Squad, in his quest to recover his cake from the titular thieving band of mice, he defeats every villain in his path, recovers all of their stolen treasures, and opens a sealed door in his path. In front of him is what seems to be the last of their chests, the one that must contain his cake. Oops, turns out it's not one of their chests at all, but a coincidentally identical prison for an ancient evil. This decision becomes even less intelligent by the fact that he continued to chase THAT PARTICULAR CHEST thinking there was cake in it even after Meta Knight stole it from him just before he could open it. After all, Meta Knight just LOVES stealing strawberry shortcakes from people.
- In Kirby Super Star, Kirby goes out to awaken NOVA, a mysterious cosmic clockwork entity, so that he can wish for the Sun and Moon to stop fighting. Then Marx knocks him aside. Turns out he had you wake Nova up so he could use it to conquer Popstar. Crap. Then again, the Sun and Moon stop fighting so they can hold Nova off...
- In Kirby's Return to Dream Land, Kirby, Meta Knight, King Dedede, and Bandana Waddle Dee defeat Landia, purported by Magolor as the fearsome beast that destroyed the Lor Starcutter in the intro and who also tries to shoot you down again when you get to Halcandra, its homeworld. It turns out that Landia is the guardian of an Artifact of Doom known as the Master Crown, and the party removing him from combat leaves it wide open for Magolor to swoop in and steal it. However, Magolor becomes possessed by the Crown itself after being defeated by Kirby and his friends.
- In Star Ocean: The Second Story, your team investigates the Eluria Tower to find out about the demons that are attacking all the towns. Too bad that you accidentally bring the key to the "Sorcery Globe" with you. The result? Instead of the planet Expel being destroyed centuries from now, it gets destroyed immediately. Whoops.
- After you save at the final save point before Indalecio, do not initiate the Private Action with Filia unless you want to fight an Unstoppable Rage version of Indalecio that forces you to trap him. If you don't, he'll slaughter you.
- In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, on the mirror 1957 A.D. Earth, Edge hands over his ship's 100% clean energy source (exilithium), to Milla Bachtein (who by the way has captured Reimi, and has been performing obviously bad experiments on various lifeforms and extraterrestrials) to study in hopes of preventing the discovery of nuclear energy which would lead to nuclear weapons and World War III, causing the surface of Earth to become uninhabitable. After you hand it over, she locks you and your team in a cell and puts the exilithium crystal into an antimatter reactor. Upon activating, it basically creates a black hole and causes the Earth to collapse into itself after you escape. Nice job preventing World War III.
- Subverted in the final battle of Eternal Darkness. The player has to use the Villain's giant Circle of Power (which he had used to unseal his Canned Evil, Big Bad Elder God) to summon the Canned Evil God that trumps him/her/them/it, stalling the first one and letting the heroine deal with the villain himself. Upon offing him, she realizes that the god she had summoned is just as Big, just as Bad, and just as in need of resealing, at which point the grandfather (also controlled by the player at this point) finishes the job.
- ...Then possibly un-subverted with the 100% ending. Playing the game 3 times, destroying the 3 different gods, was just a Batman Gambit by the 4th god so that he could destroy the gods he was supposed to prevent from running rampant, in order to enact some kind of plot. He's already been condemned to a slow, agonizing death, and it's not made clear whether the plot is actually something bad from the ending, so it's unclear if it's returned to being played straight or not.
- Enchanted Arms takes the "Way to Go, Serge" rule and runs with it. You're being manipulated to do exactly what the Big Bad wants you to up until the VERY last part of the very last boss fight. Destroying the evil creatures that were killing everybody was exactly the WRONG thing to do. And this isn't even a spoiler because the game itself spells it out for you — constantly, from pretty much the very start. You're just not able to do anything about it. Do be fair, Atsuma is an Idiot Hero of quite high degree. In fact, in one part you're given the option of saying the thief is small, light, and nimble, or that he/she trains mice. No joke.
- Super Mario Bros.
- In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Lady Lima demands that the Mario Brothers prove their identity by repairing the castle's plumbing. That was actually Cackletta in disguise, and the broken sewer system was the only thing keeping her from getting into the Beanstar chamber. Nice job fixing it, hero.
- In the sequel, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, the titular brothers and their infant companions gather up the pieces of the Cobalt Star, only to realize that the star is actually a broken prison for the Big Bad. Averted earlier in the game. The brothers rescue Princess Peach, only for Bowser to kidnap her again, prompting the brothers and babies to go after her again. Then it turns out that the Peach the brothers rescued, Bowser kidnapped, and the brothers rescued again was Princess Shroob in disguise.
- And all those special moves and powers the Bros. helped Bowser obtain in Bowser's Inside Story? In Dream Team, he still knows all of them, and is more than happy to use them against Mario and Luigi. Whoops.
- Also used in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, by way of becoming the Macguffin Delivery Service. The Crystal Stars are the key to unlocking the Thousand-Year Door... and Mario ends up bringing all seven to the door after being told that it had opened on its own due to the thousand-year cycle having passed. It hadn't, and as soon as they find this out, the ally that told them otherwise was revealed to be Doopliss in disguise and the villains come out and open the door. Nice one. (The Xanatos Gambit was that the last Star was already in the villains' possession, and they would get the Crystal Stars regardless of who won the battle.)
- After Mario defeats Count Bleck in Super Paper Mario, it's revealed that Dimentio was using everyone as Unwitting Pawns in his own grab for the Chaos Heart, which is in the process of destroying the multiverse. After taking advantage of the Count's defeat to take it for himself, he manages to speed up the process, destroying all dimensions in the process. Oops.
- A bit more benign, but in Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Professor E. Gadd had given away the portrait that King Boo was trapped in after the first game at a garage sale, indirectly helping him escape and break the titular Dark Moon, causing the events of the game. Absent-Minded Professor indeed.
- Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War ends with Brother-Captain Gabriel Angelos destroying an artifact containing a demon... which, instead of destroying the demon with it, let the demon go. The demon merrily thanks Gabe for his help.
- From his words, it seems that he destroyed the artifact knowing that it would release the demon, so he could destroy the demon completely later.
- Apparently he wasn't in a hurry to do that, because the demon managed to corrupt the chapter master, plunge the whole sub-sector into meatgrinder and (in all but one campaign) murder Angelos himself before being killed by some other guy.
- In Retribution (all campaigns), you have to fight a bunch of Eldar on Typhon. You kill all the Eldar, only to find later from Kyras that they were the only thing stopping an Exterminatus.... This is especially true if you're playing the Eldar campaign, as not only did you just needlessly massacre members of your own kind, but the Exterminatus destroys the craftworld (and its Infinity Circuit, dooming every Eldar soul inside inside to Slaanesh) buried under the surface of Typhon. The craftworld they were trying to protect from the Exterminatus in the first place. Kayleth especially does not take this turn of events very well.
- From his words, it seems that he destroyed the artifact knowing that it would release the demon, so he could destroy the demon completely later.
- In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, Captain Titus and his 2 comrades helped Drogan activate the experimental weapon Psychic Scourge, in hopes of turning the tide of war against the Orcs. However, the weapon ended up opening the warp gate for the forces of Chaos to pass through, creating even more havoc for humanity.
- In Star Control 2, the Shofixti blew up their own star to take down a massive Ur-Quan fleet. That's great and all, considering they've been enslaving everyone up until that point. That is, until you find out that the Ur-Quan's genocidal cousins are coming to this section of the galaxy, and the Shofixti had crippled the enslaving Ur-Quan's fleet enough so that they'll lose the upcoming doctrinal conflict.
- Played very effectively in Baldur's Gate II with Kangaxx the demi-lich. He asks you to retrieve his body, which was torn apart, but not destroyed, and hidden under the city. When you do so, he "rewards" you by making you the first people he kills. Then, if you destroy him, his skull floats up, cackles madly, and declares he's now stronger than ever. He gains insane damage resistance and can cast game-ending spells without limit on the party. The resulting battle is essentially impossible without prior knowledge, either in Guide Dang It! form or of the standard powers of Dungeons & Dragons demiliches.
- What you need is a scroll of Protection From Magic and some kind of insanely powerful weapon, like Crom Faer or Carsomyr.
- And this pales in comparison to releasing Demogorgon, the most powerful Demon Prince in the universe. And somehow, even that isn't as bad as defeating him. "Killing" a demon in the mortal realm merely banishes it back to the Abyss for a hundred years. That's right, all you did was give Demogorgon a ticket back home.
- Not as devastating as you think because the hundred-year banishment simply blocks them unless the one to defeat the demon wills it back. After the banishment ends the demon still needs to be summoned and anyone with that level of power is usually not inclined to summon a world destroying demon they can't control.
- Another BioWare example, but the "heroes" are pretty arguable. In Jade Empire, the Brothers Sun save their empire from a crippling drought by enslaving the deity in charge of rain and slaughtering her followers. Unfortunately, said deity and followers were also in charge of shepherding the dead to their rest and reincarnation, essentially damning the Empire to a slower, nastier death... and leading the middle brother onto one hell of a plan to try and force order back onto creation.
- Jonathan Kane: The Protector have the titular hero entering a Mayan pyramid while trying to locate an Artifact of Doom, and triggering a Living Statue of a Mayan warlord into attacking him. He then destroys said statue in a difficult boss battle, but it turns out said statue is a MacGuffin Guardian who's protecting said artifact in the first place. The statue's destruction allows the villains to retrieve the artifact without much effort afterwards. Nice Job Breaking the Statue, Jonathan!
- Chrono Trigger:Party: Yay! We stopped Magus from creating Lavos!
Magus: No! I was summoning Lavos so I could kill it, and you only let me finish the summoning part!
Player: Oops!- It was probably for the best. It's implied that in the original timeline (where no-one intervened), Magus only succeeded in getting himself killed by Lavos.
- Also, throwing Dalton into a dimensional rift. Against all odds, he levels up past *** and effectively conquers the world. Oops.
- Chrono Cross, aka 'Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The Game'. Not only was it bad enough in the main game to get The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés entry named after it, it it also pulled a straight up Cerebus Retcon on the original game while it was at it. It turns out that the Chrono Trigger heroes, by meddling in the Zeal Kingdom's time line, caused Schala to be absorbed by Lavos, becoming an entity that would eventually evolve into the Time Devourer, a being that would then proceed to consume all of time and space.
- To get across just how bad this is: by defeating Lynx at Fort Dragonia, Serge wounded him, at which point he swapped bodies with Serge, leaving Serge in a weakened form. The player then goes through hours and hours of Humans Are the Real Monsters philosophizing in order to destroy FATE, at which point he discovers that FATE was the only thing preventing the Dragonians coming back and erasing humanity from existence. That's right, the solution to the first hero breaking things is another hero breaking things..
- It gets worse. It turns out the Dragon God is (more or less) an extension of the Time Devourer, and defeating it hasn't fixed anything. Moreover, trying to kill the Time Devourer will just result in another NJBIH, thanks to its nature... and yet, the whole damn thing is implied to by a Gambit Roulette by a minor character from the original game to actually save all of existence. From what, the game isn't clear, but it does try to explain that all of this actually had a point somewhere. The fact the ending implies a Reset Button was smacked to stop all of this crap from happening either justifies this or makes it all the more frustrating for the player.
- To get across just how bad this is: by defeating Lynx at Fort Dragonia, Serge wounded him, at which point he swapped bodies with Serge, leaving Serge in a weakened form. The player then goes through hours and hours of Humans Are the Real Monsters philosophizing in order to destroy FATE, at which point he discovers that FATE was the only thing preventing the Dragonians coming back and erasing humanity from existence. That's right, the solution to the first hero breaking things is another hero breaking things..
- Sly 2: Band of Thieves has a headslapper of an example. Bentley tells you to invert a set of magnets holding up the separated parts of Clockwerk, since if his calculations are correct, the resulting force will tear them apart. Turns out that when you Reverse the Polarity, the parts weld together inseparably. Crap.
- In Samurai Warriors 2, in Saika Magoichi's story it's revealed that the bandit attacks are caused by Nobunaga's assassination (at Magoichi's hands), since he had kept order (and presumably bandit suppression) up while alive. Sure, Nobunaga massacred Magoichi's village for his unit being so dangerous, but...
- In Metal Gear Solid, when you finally insert the last keycard (after changing the shape of the card three times using different temperatures) into the last terminal in order to disarm Metal Gear REX, you actually end up ARMING the machine. And the keycard can only arm or disarm once. Nice job, Snake. But it's not all bad, because then you get to destroy it manuallynote . In the fourth game, destroying the Patriots AI system drove the armies of the world insane with PTSD, as SOP system suppressed traumatic emotions but was deleted all at once, and cripples every electronics-based service and infrastructure in the world. Sunny's FOXALIVE computer virus averts this trope narrowly, by preserving the essential services like water and lighting.
- Many of the other negative effects are avoided, but the PTSD is directly stated to have occurred. It is blatantly demonstrated in the FROGs, who are reduced to sobbing wrecks and might never recover. Drebin implies afterwards that in addition to the aforementioned PTSD, most of the world ended up completely bankrupt, forced to pay a monetary debt for PMC usage that was so huge that not even PMC regulation laws would stem the tide. By Revengance, PMC wars have returned and are even more advanced than ever, as the secrets and technologies held in monopoly by the now-dead Patriots are gradually discovered and used in a massive free-for-all to claim dominance in the new world order.
- In the first and second game, Solid Snake's actions in regards to destroying Metal Gear resulted in a mushroom cloud as well as an earthquake in the aftermath of the explosion in the Galzburg region of South Africa are considered this. Even moreso when, according to Kyle Schneider, the aforementioned mushroom cloud was actually from NATO's air raid bombing of Outer Heaven that resulted from Snake destroying Metal Gear, and not its self destruct device going off, highly qualify as a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero moment. The fact that he also killed Big Boss in Metal Gear 2 as well as severely wounded Gray Fox to the point that he ended up experiment, resulting in him being targeted by a governmental bioweapon by Gray Fox's vengeful adoptive sister also qualifies as well.
- In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and subsequent games, it's The Boss' death that finally push the formation of Patriots and Naked Snake's aka. Big Boss' Start of Darkness. Probably still better than the alternative of nuclear MAD between Russia and the US, though.
- In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, you are sent to destroy an oil pumping facility that has been leaking crude all over the river. Turns out this spillage was intentional, so the bad guys could contain a rogue experimental parasite that was waterborne. Your actions end up causing a national pandemic. This ends up biting you in the ass when your Mother Base gets infected with the disease from transporting child soldiers / refugees.
- There's several layers of this in Cave Story:
- Midway through the game, the hero and Curly attack a huge spherical creature and nearly destroy it. Said creature is the core that keeps the floating island in the sky. A last-second save of the core by Misery and the Doctor keep this NJBIH moment from coming full circle.
- Later, after defeating the evil Doctor who had subjugated the floating island and its inhabitants as bearer of the Crown, the hero discovers he has merely freed him from his corporeal form, allowing him to use the full power of the Red Crystal, and possess and corrupt his friends, and the island's core. Cue the real final battle with the Doctor.
- Defeating the Doctor at this point means destroying the core for good — if you flee the sinking island at this point, then the end cutscene gives several slow pans over areas of the island, and all the people still inside, before the island crashes, killing everyone inside. Way to go. But if you completed the right sidequests by this point, then you can enter the Brutal Bonus Level and fight the True Final Boss — defeating him will save the island from destruction.
- In the finale of Diablo, the hero, driven insane by delving too deep, takes the soulstone containing Diablo's spirit of pure evil and jams it into their own forehead, intending to contain the spirit. Canonically, Adrian fails spectacularly as Diablo consumes his soul, takes over his body, ravages the town of Tristram that the hero spent all of Diablo trying to save, and becomes the villain of Diablo II.
- At the end of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Tyrael is forced to choose between allowing the corruption Baal inflicted to take root in The Worldstone holding Sanctuary together, or to destroy The Worldstone completely and risk causing chaos. He chooses the latter, which utterly destroys the Barbarians as they lost their holy Worldstone, their home mountain is turned into a crater, their enemies and demons come rampaging in full force, and some break completely and turn into cannibals.
- Also, Tyrael was the one to design the soulstones, hoping they could be used to seal the Prime Evils for good. All it did, to their delight, was give them the perfect backdoor into Sanctuary after a few centuries. Not helping matters was that he was given the idea by Izual, a flawed angel who was either glitched from the start or warped by Diablo.
- The hero of Diablo III is duped into putting the souls of all seven of the Great Evils into a special Soulstone — so that Adria, the one who sent you on this quest, can use the stone to bring about the rebirth of her master Diablo, using the body of her own daughter Leah, who it turns out she had with the Dark Wanderer, a.k.a. the Diablo-possessed Warrior mentioned earlier. Oh, and because of all seven Evils being in that stone? Diablo has become the Prime Evil Tethamet, essentially a God of Evil reborn. Who then proceeds to mount an invasion of the High Heavens, effortlessly shattering divine bulwarks that lasted eons.
- Diablo IV: The hero is a pawn of Mephisto, rescued and chosen so they would inevitably further his plans. Mainly, getting him out of the small magical container he has been stuffed into by his own daughter. Neyrelle ultimately decides to use a soulstone to further contain him - but she returns the soulstone to Sanctuary, and that just sets up history to repeat itself.
- In Call of Duty 4, the United States sends in a Marine expeditionary force to dethrone Al-Asad, the dictator of Qurac. They succeed, easily steamrolling over Al-Asad's army, but his defeat only results in him detonating a nuclear bomb in his own capital, destroying a good-sized chunk of the country, along with most of the U.S. expeditionary force (including the player character).
- This is justified for two very good reasons: 1) The U.S. expeditionary force does steamroll over Al-Asad's army easily, and it can be assumed they would have controlled the capital in a matter of hours after the initial invasion, gaining control of the nuke at the same time (given the Shock and Awe nature of the attack, this was most likely the objective), and 2) who's crazy enough to set off a nuclear bomb in their home turf, killing themselves in the process? Generals planning the attack probably assumed that Al-Asad had some sanity. They were, unfortunately, wrong.
- Al-Asad was never in the city when the nuke went off. That's the whole point of the Safehouse mission. He is, according to the informant Nikolai, a coward.
- Also, in Modern Warfare 2, much of the action is driven by the Ultranationalists, under the command of Big Bad Vladimir Makarov. According to dialogue, Imran Zakhaev kept Makarov 'in check'. Guess who you killed at the end of the first Modern Warfare? Nice job, Soap.
- Not to mention how the entirety of Task Force 141, the Ranger (Pvt. James Ramirez and his squad) you play as, and pretty much the entire American military are being manipulated by one General Shepherd, who's planning to use the conflict to turn America into heroes and obtain the biggest military force in history.
- Also, a particularly chilling example in Modern Warfare 2's opening mission, "No Russian". CIA Operative PFC Joseph Allen is inserted into Makarov's terrorist cell under the guise of a Russian named Alexei Borodin. He's then ordered to slaughter an airport full of innocent civilians in order to prove his loyalty to Makarov. At the end of the mission, Makarov shoots him in the head unexpectedly, revealing that he knew Allen was a spy all along. He leaves the body there for security forces to discover, essentially framing America for the terrorist attack. The entire mission pretty much leaves you with a sick feeling in your stomach — not only because you killed innocent civilians by the hundreds, but nothing came of it and you saved no lives in the long run. In fact, you pretty much helped start World War 3 in the process. Nice job breaking it hero, indeed.
- About 3/4ths of the way through BioShock, Jack finally reaches President Evil antagonist Andrew Ryan, who is the only person standing between him and the anti-escape-pod torpedo turret controls. But Ryan's last words aren't about his deluded egomania, or a plea to live, but a horrifying Hannibal Lecture masterfully combined with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, revealing that Jack is a mind-controlled pawn whose actions are only going to hand control of the city over to the Big Bad. Oh, and he was the one who caused the commercial plane crash at the beginning of the game. To prove this, he uses Jack's control phrase to move him around the room and then give him a Mercy Kill. That's when the Man Behind the Man confirms everything Ryan just said, gloating about his plans to take over the city and claim its genetic modification serums, and sics some turrets on you.
- And in the threequel, Elizabeth wonders if her dimension-hopping and dimension-merging abuse is the reason why the revolutionaries are now more extremist. By the end of the game, their rampage has turned the corrupt-but-beautiful city into a ruined mess with blood flowing through the streets.
- In The World Ends with You, you're given a mission early in the game to make a certain pin popular. In the end, that turns out to be the key to Kitaniji's Assimilation Plot. And since you have to complete the missions or face erasure, you had no say in whether or not to do it.
- It gets worse. Once you defeat Kitaniji, you learn that he and Joshua were playing a game. The prize was Shibuya. If Kitaniji couldn't pull off his Instrumentality in one month, Joshua would erase it entirely. And guess what you just messed up? Thank heavens for the Gainax Ending, huh?
- More like thank heavens for Joshua taking an obsessive liking to Neku's ass.
- It gets worse. Once you defeat Kitaniji, you learn that he and Joshua were playing a game. The prize was Shibuya. If Kitaniji couldn't pull off his Instrumentality in one month, Joshua would erase it entirely. And guess what you just messed up? Thank heavens for the Gainax Ending, huh?
- Halo:
- In Halo 2, as the Arbiter, you are sent to kill a "traitor" who has in fact seen that what the Prophets seek will actually just trigger the Halo rings to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy.
- Made even worse in Halo 2: Anniversary's terminals, where the traitor in question is revealed to have had a great deal of respect for Thel 'Vadamee (the Arbiter in question) and planned to inform him of the Halos' purpose. He also mentioned to 343GS that his 'heresy' is the kind of thing that Arbiters are made to deal with, and that Thel would be a major candidate for such a role. He was right.
- Later, again as the Arbiter, you power down the Containment Shield surrounding Installation 05's Library — which turns out to be the only thing holding back a legion of Flood and their controlling Gravemind, resulting in them being unleashed on the galaxy. Although Cmdr. Keyes shares some responsibility for this, as she decided to take her ship into the quarantine zone, unwittingly providing the Gravemind with its ticket off the ring.
- And then later in the game, the Arbiter captures Sgt. Johnson and Commander Keyes; since only humans can activate the Rings, the Arbiter just gave the Covenant exactly what they need to trigger the Halo rings and cause the destruction of all life.
- Master Chief almost has his own Nice Job Breaking It, Hero moment in the first game — helping 343 Guilty Spark retrieve the Index and prep Halo 04 for firing, assuming it would kill the Flood rather than everything else. Luckily, Cortana is on hand to stop the process and clue the Chief in.
- In Halo 4, Chief and Cortana use what they think is a Forerunner signal relay in order to warn the UNSC Infinity. In fact, it's actually the Cryptum the Didact was sealed into to prevent him from destroying humanity. And they just released him.
- The novel Halo: Cryptum reveals that the Flood began to spread when humanity's ancient, more advanced ancestors found automated supply ships full of an unknown powder, which turned out to be genetic material. They injected this genetic material into their domestic animals, including a species called the Pheru, and it seemed harmless. A few generations later, the Flood as we know them started to appear. And since humans ate Pheru, they were infected as well. Attempts to contain the Flood bought the humanity into contact with the Forerunners, who smacked them down back to the pre-tech level modern humans think they started at. And it's implied humanity destroyed all their knowledge of the Flood just to spit in the eye of the Forerunners. The Flood proceed to nearly destroy the galaxy.
- In the Kilo-Five novels Halo: Glasslands and Halo: The Thursday War, it's shown that ONI has been forming dissent among the Elites to ensure that the Elites won't be a threat to the UNSC. But their actions have resulted in the formation of powerful Covenant remnants who seek to destroy humanity, many of whom join the Didact in Halo 4.
- In Halo 2, as the Arbiter, you are sent to kill a "traitor" who has in fact seen that what the Prophets seek will actually just trigger the Halo rings to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy.
- The main conflict for most of the Katamari Damacy games is caused by the King of All Cosmos doing something foolish (such as going on a drunken bender and destroying the cosmos, accidentally creating a tsunami and destroying a turtle's home island, hitting a tennis ball too hard and creating a black hole, etc.).
- Terranigma has a few of these — you start off the game by opening Pandora's Box, for crying out loud. You then resurrect the continents, plants, birds, animals, humans, and usher in a golden age of free trade and genius thinking... only to resurrect Beruga, a mad scientist who proceeds to wipe out the city of Neotokio with a supervirus and try to take over the world. It then turns out that this was the entire reason your old village elder sent you topside, so he could completely destroy it via Beruga. This isn't what breaks things. No, what is is that to fix all that, you get back to the underside and defeat the village elder... Who turns out to be the god of your own world and the thing keeping it and everything in it in existence. You've just destroyed your entire world, killed all your friends, and destroyed yourself. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, even if you did it Because Destiny Says So.
- In the first System Shock, SHODAN's ethical constraints were removed by the player character. Whoops. It gets better too. In the second game, you find out the fate of the virus-infested grove that the Hacker jettisoned in the first game, where SHODAN was developing an experimental mutagen. Upon crash landing on Tau Ceti V, the mutants evolved into the collective alien hive mind known as The Many, the main antagonists in the second game. Additionally, ejecting the grove also allowed a portion of SHODAN's AI to survive. This version of SHODAN nearly succeeded in using the ship's warp drive to assimilate reality into cyberspace, after the player character spent a great deal of effort helping her gain control of it. Whoops indeed.
- And in the second game, you help SHODAN against The Many in an Enemy Mine... Only to discover too late that The Many were the gray in the game's Black-and-Gray Morality, not the black you were led to believe... and with their lesser evil gone, there's no longer anything stopping SHODAN from conquering the universe. Whoops, again.
- The gardens in the first game aren't really an example of this trope, though (since as dangerous as they were jettisoned randomly off into space, they were much much more dangerous orbiting around earth). That's less an example of 'nice job breaking it, hero' and more 'nice job not fixing it completely, hero'.
- Another example that also results in a Nonstandard Game Over is, early in the first game, it's possible to activate the mining laser, which you need to do to blow it up. Except, you know, without getting it ready to blow up in the first place. Well, you've just helped SHODAN raze the Earth of life. Nice job breaking it, Hero.
- In Shantae, suddenly, a genie, which were supposed to leave the earth, leaving behind only their half-breed kids like you, who looks like the game's villain sans pirate hat and suggests you cut your hair, which is your only means of offense, sends you into a dungeon to get the last MacGuffin, which the villain is hunting to power a tank to make herself ruler of the world, but leaves you to go in alone, despite the fact that genies have great power. When you show her what you have received, she puts on the pirate hat and laughs. Suddenly, you see yourself on the ground, MacGuffinless, as she runs away.
- After you complete the last quest in Kingdom of Loathing, the council informs you that the monster attacks are due to your presence in the kingdom. They just really don't like you. And since you're stuck in a cycle of eternal ascension and reincarnation, the monsters will never go away.
- On the other hand, the Council's offhanded way of 'researching' the 'problem', and the fact that they weren't in any rush at all for the Naughty Sourceress to be defeated (they pretty much tell you they love being in power) could mean that this was a complete lie to make you reset the continuity and bring them back into power. (See WMG)
- During the 2013 Crimbo event, the player had to help Uncle Crimbo fight off rampaging warbears that are threatening to invade Crimbo Town. All the while, you help him gather parts for a "War Machine" to drive off the warbears once and for all. After you beat up the Warbear General, you find out Uncle Crimbo's machine is a giant combustion engine designed to create a localized greenhouse effect and scare off all the cold-loving warbears, something that almost certainly won't backfire like all of Uncle Crimbo's other hair-brained schemes over the last few years.
- After the first level of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, namely Peragus (an asteroid-based fuel mining facility), the asteroid blows up, and, with it, an important and abundant fuel source is completely destroyed. Although the player had to get the place blown up (or blow the place up yourself, if you want to Kick the Dog) to stop the Sith, the player will be berated by damn near everybody for creating a galactic energy crisis throughout the first half or so of the game.
- And again, later on, for Light Side players. After the Exile gathers all the Jedi Masters together on Dantooine, they tell her they need to cut her off from the Force, so she will no longer be a risk factor in the war against the Sith. In walks Kreia, who then reveals that she is, SURPRISE, still a Sith, and proceeds to Force Wave all three Masters AT THE SAME TIME, chew them out, and fatally sever their connections to the Force SIMULTANEOUSLY (again). Oops.
- She's not really a Sith. Well, maybe she is. Who the hell knows? But the game doesn't depict the death of the Jedi as a bad thing; the Exile's crew members go on to build a new order that isn't as corrupt as the old one was (until the movie era, but whatever). The Dark Side version is really a better example; the player kills the Jedi — which arguably is a good thing — but because they fell to the dark side to do it, they've unwittingly caused a chain of events that will lead to the DEATH OF ALL LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. But of course the Exile is forced to undo the damage, leading to more or less the same conclusion as the light side version: Jedi and Sith dead, with the Exile and company left to rebuild.
- On a much smaller end of the scale, you can at one point give money to a beggar. If you do so, Kreia berates you for your naivety, and shows you a vision of the poor guy getting mugged. Of course, if you don't give him the money, he goes out and mugs some other poor guy, so there's really no way to not break things.
- Back on the larger scale, way back when, the Exile destroyed Malachor in order to stop the Mandalorians. But all the deaths there lead to the events of both games, and the death of all the Jedi (which was exactly Revan's plan). That's why Vrook's such a Jerkass. Mostly.
- Arguably the entire ending is this, since all the player manages to do is preserve a cycle of brutal, wasteful war between two ancient religious orders with childishly simplistic moral codes who are both pawns of the same self-destructive or just plain dickish Sentient Cosmic Force. Although New Jedi Order makes it clear that if Kreia had won in the end, the alternative would've been much worse.
- And again, later on, for Light Side players. After the Exile gathers all the Jedi Masters together on Dantooine, they tell her they need to cut her off from the Force, so she will no longer be a risk factor in the war against the Sith. In walks Kreia, who then reveals that she is, SURPRISE, still a Sith, and proceeds to Force Wave all three Masters AT THE SAME TIME, chew them out, and fatally sever their connections to the Force SIMULTANEOUSLY (again). Oops.
- And the conga line continues on Star Wars: The Old Republic. Y'see, giving the Outcasts the map to their Promised Land was the canonical Light Side option. All Revan (you) did was condemn them to a slow death being picked off by disease, starvation, and rakghouls, then finished off by toxic waste.
- The second (and much more epic) Nice Job Breaking It. Republic players get a flashpoint where they break Revan out of an And I Must Scream magical prison. What does our newly liberated "ally" do? Cook up an army of Killer Robots that will hunt down and kill anyone with even the slightest trace of Sith ancestry. This equates to about 97% of the Sith Empire's citizens and probably several trillion Republic citizens, such as companion characters Kira and Sgt. Dorne. So much for maxing out your Karma Meter in the first game. It's BioWare — No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
- And for Imperial players: on Belsavis, the player character rescues the Dread Masters, thinking they'll help turn the tide of the war. Then they betray the Empire and become the Big Bads of the endgame (for both factions).
- The Sith Warrior storyline has you rescue The Emperor from a trap set by your Evil Mentor, and you're promoted to being The Dragon. It isn't until much later you realize that you've been working as the right-hand man to an Omnicidal Maniac, and the postgame basically consists of you cleaning up the mess you caused and finishing what the Hero of Tython started.
- And this continues in Knights of the Fallen Empire, when you killing the Emperor (or distracting him long enough to get backstabbed) means his jealous, daddy-issues son takes over and turns the Zakuul Empire into a galaxy-ruling hellhole. The majority of Zakuul calls your character out for assisting in a coup d'état that replaced their God-Emperor with The Caligula that glassed six hive planets as an interrogation tactic. You can usually say in defense (to their denial) that their "benevolent" emperor is actually a soul-devouring galaxy-destroying Eldritch Abomination, but then you break it even further when Scorpio betrays you, hacks her way into the eternal throne, effectively giving her command of the legendary Zakuul battleship fleet, and literally gives all of Zakuul's non-battleship policies to Arcann's even more psychotic little sister Vailyn.
- Jedi Outcast: Kyle Katarn, incensed at the thought of his love interest being murdered, uses the power of the Valley of the Jedi to reconnect to the Force so he can take revenge. However this also causes the Big Bad to track him to the location of the Valley, allowing the Big Bad to empower his followers with the Force, setting the rest of the game in motion. Oops.
- Shadowverse:
- Some of the cards can have a really negative effect that can backfire on you if played inappropriately. Most visible with Bloodcraft's self-damaging cards that can allow the opponent to have lethal damage on you if played at the wrong time.
- Mismanagement of the board (as it can only hold a maximum of 5 cards) can lead to embarrassing misplays. Many a Forestcraft player has to remain aware not to play Crystalia Tia
as their fifth card in their area, lest they lose out on the large token she summons. - Dark Alice is unkillable, but her revival has a side effect of banishing every Shadowcraft card in your deck, hand, and area. Running her without building your deck correctly can result in your entire deck being obliterated.
- Two of Dragoncraft legendary followers have Mechanically Unusual Fighter "high risk, high reward" mechanics that would normally would be seen in Bloodcraft:
- Jerva of Draconic Mail is a 5/5 9pp follower that grants the player a permanent Support Cannon like effect that deals 5 damage to an enemy follower or deals 5 damage to the enemy leader if no enemy followers are on board. On the other hand, Jerva permanently set your maximum defense to 10 for the rest of the match, which can be very detrimental against classes that have access to strong Storm followers (for example, Sword) or followers that can potentially kill you in one turn (i.e. Iniquitous Lindworm). On the other hand, Dragon as a class have access to some of the strongest board wipes in the game, which almost guarantees a proc of Jerva's effect into the enemy leader, hence preventing the follower from being Awesome, but Impractical.
- Zooey, Arbiter of the Skies. She is a follower with 6/5 attack with Storm note . However, she has an effect that deals damage to your leader until your defense drops to 1, but has a shielding effect that negates all damage to your leader until the start of your next turn, meaning that your opponent can react appropriately should Zooey fail to close out the game as soon as possible.
- Jerva of Draconic Mail
- SoulCalibur IV borders on this in Siegfried's ending — destroying the evil weapon which corrupted his soul, he creates a 'utopia'... but it's unclear if he knew this would mean turning the entire world into crystal, wiping out all life. Nice going there, Siegfried.
- Tales of Vesperia plays with this, actually, in that invoking the trope is entirely optional (thus, yes, Stupidity Is Not the Only Option). When the party collects the first Fell Arm in an optional sidequest, they decide to collect the rest (as is Tales tradition) in order to keep the dangerous weapons from falling into the wrong hands. Those wrong hands? The final boss, who, if you collect all of them, absorbs their power and gains an extra form that is seventeen levels higher and that much more difficult. And yes, once the sidequest is complete, it is necessary to beat him to finish the game and watch the ending. Nice job breaking it, player.
- It's also played straight when Estelle uses her healing artes on Belius, which unexpectedly drives her insane, forcing the party to put her down and raising tensions among the major guilds, enough for many more people to die undeserved deaths.
- And then there's another variation with Alexei, whose plan to obtain enough power to rule the world accidentally releases the Sealed Evil in a Can capable of eating the entire world, the Adephagos. Nice job breaking it, villain.
- In the background for City of Heroes, Back Alley Brawler took his superhuman war on drugs all the way to South America and Afghanistan, using superheroes to raid drug cartels and burn poppy and coca fields directly to stop the flow of drugs into American cities. Unfortunately, the Evil Power Vacuum was filled with a Psycho Serum called Superadyne, and government research into that led indirectly to the Alien Invasion. Oops.
- In the PS2 game Vexx, you start off the game being told by an old man called Darby to collect Wraithearts to power the Rift to travel to new worlds. After you collect a certain number of hearts, it's revealed that Darby is actually the Big Bad, Dark Yabu, in disguise, and had Vexx collecting Wraithearts for him so HE could use the Rift and unleash his pet Shadowraiths on all the worlds. Your objective remains the same, however.
- Tale Of The Abyss. Granted, Luke didn't know any better, but try telling him that while he was in the midst of his Heroic BSoD.
- Pretty much everything the party does for the whole game is an example of breaking something and desperately trying to fix it.
- An early one is done as background for the food stealings occuring in Engeve. Mieu, a Cheagle, went to a forest further on where Ligers live. He accidentally caused a fire, which destroyed the ligers' home and made them move into the forest where the Cheagles live. The Ligers threaten to eat the Cheagles if they don't bring them enough food, so the Cheagles began to steal food from Engeve to appease the Ligers.
- Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. First invoked when Starkiller, having rounded up discontents within the Empire and founding the Rebel Alliance, is suddenly attacked at the first meeting of said Alliance by his own master, Darth Vader, who reveals the whole plan to form the Alliance was a Xanatos Gambit by him and the Emperor to weed out their last remaining foes. Canonically, this is then inverted when Starkiller, or Galen by now, valiantly sacrifices himself against the Emperor to buy time for the Alliance leaders to escape... thus providing the Alliance with a martyr to rally around, inspiring them. The Emperor and Vader realize this... which means that, yes, the entire original trilogy was a direct result of a failed Xanatos Gambit by the Big Bad! Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!
- Fallout 2. In a random time-travel incident, you go back in time to Vault 13. The only thing you can do is look at the Vault's Water Chip. And break it. Nice job! However, this was established to be a non-canon Easter Egg.
- The spinoff Fallout Tactics has every enemy faction's leader bemoaning that your aggression is dooming everyone, that you can't possibly stop the Menace from the West. Not that they explain what it is, or refrain from opening fire on you just the same.
- How about the "Tenpenny Tower" quest of Fallout 3? Some ghouls, victims of Fantastic Racism, are trying to move into a luxurious tower, but the humans living there will have none of it. If you don't feel like slaughtering either party, you can convince the prominent members of the human community to either relent or move somewhere else, thus letting ghoul and human live together in harmony. Come back a few days later, and the ghouls have executed all the humans over a "misunderstanding."
- It becomes even more ridiculous when if you kill the ghouls afterwards you lose Karma. Losing karma especially with the leader that practically gloated over the fact that all the humans had died horribly seems to be a bit much...
- Actually, if you shoot said leader in the head the instant the ghouls start moving in, you avoid the slaughter of the humans. Still Black-and-Gray Morality, but it becomes a case of 'murder one guy to spare dozens' instead of 'tolerance leads only to death'.
- You can also kill the leader of the ghouls and two of his followers (this completes the quest) without incurring a karma hit if you basically taunt them into attacking you first ("Anything you want to say before you meet your maker?"). You basically take an extremely unorthodox path to a best-of-both-worlds ending: Gustavo and everyone in Tenpenny Tower love you, jerks and otherwise "bigots" as they are, and they're indeed no longer in any danger. It's a shame that most of the truly nice ghouls are all the way on the other side of the game map.
- It becomes even more ridiculous when if you kill the ghouls afterwards you lose Karma. Losing karma especially with the leader that practically gloated over the fact that all the humans had died horribly seems to be a bit much...
- In Fallout: New Vegas's Lonesome Road add-on, the Courier finds out that they accidentally set off the nukes in the Divide that turned it into a Death World. To proceed with the quest requires you to launch another missile that rains down more nuclear havoc on the region.
- In the quest "Come Fly With Me", you can sabotage the Bright Follower's rockets so that they crash. However, as told in the epilogue note, the crash contaminates Novac with radioactive fuel, rendering it uninhabitable.
- The "Independent Vegas" (read: anarchy) ending is only marginally better than a Legion victory, as regardless of whatever good intentions the player may have had the region devolves into chaos with the Followers of the Apocalypse overwhelmed by all of the new victims.
- In Fallout 4 the Player Character can turn on the East Coast Brotherhood of Steel and destroy their leadership. What many fail to realize, however, is that in doing so you've just crippled the Capital Wasteland's de-facto government and destabilized the region that served as a major exporter of water and technology.
- The hardest ending to get in Demon's Crest involves Firebrand taking on the usurper king Phalanx before getting all the crests. The resulting abbreviated boss fight (Phalanx doesn't get to transform) satisfies Firebrand's desire for revenge, and he takes off. But then we learn that "With the defeat of Phalanx, the Demon Realm lost all order and fell into anarchy. Many now ask if living under the rule of Phalanx would have been worse than the hell they are now confined to..."
- Exmortis 2 has you free the Earth from the reign of the Exmortis horde... only for their leader, who set you up for this mission to begin with, to take their place as ruler. And, to rub it in, he says this:Lord Vlaew: So, Mr Hannay, for your role in this, I commend you. For your part in this, I applaud you. And, for your help in this, I offer you a gift...
(Suddenly, you're face to face with Vlaew, and the screen goes black. A scream echoes from nowhere.)
Lord Vlaew: A quick death. - Odin Sphere is the story of five different heroes who completely and royally screw everything up. Cornelius escapes the netherworld and allows the evil and completely batshit insane undead King Valentine, who plans to bring about the end of the world, to escape with him, and later doesn't finish off the baby dragon that will grow into the final Disaster of Armageddon that will finish off the world despite being told straight-up that's its purpose. Gwendolyn rescues her husband from the Queen of the Dead, and by killing her inadvertently sets free an insane, nearly-unstoppable undead monster to take control of the Underworld and attack the world of the living as another Disaster. Mercedes saves her kingdom by destroying the Demon King's most powerful weapon that was made specifically to fight against the forces of the apocalypse, and she also neglects to turn off the dangerous superweapon that can drain life from the world that Odin just turned back on, which Valentine later proceeds to command to do just that. Oswald kills two of the last four dragons in the world, who might have been able to help, and in the process completely ruins Velvet's attempt at keeping the ring that can control the doomsday machine safe and out of anyone's hands plus he spares the life of King Onyx out of pity for his unrequited feelings for Gwendolyn, which allows him to hold a grudge and still fulfill his role to later burn the world as one of the Five Disasters. Velvet goes through all the trouble of trying to stop Armageddon, but in failing to kill Ingway after he uses the Darkova curse, she allows one of the Five Disasters of Armageddon to come into being which also causes the previously mentioned undead monster to eventually go on a rampage. In their defense, there's a lot of Because Destiny Says So involved.
- King Gallon wouldn't have done a single thing during Armageddon if it weren't for the combined efforts of the heroes and Ingway. Aside from Gwendolyn killing Odette, if Ingway hadn't turned into the Beast of Darkova to try and stop Valentine, Gallon wouldn't have been driven into finally becoming an Omnicidal Maniac by the same curse. If Ingway hadn't also cursed one of the Three Wise Men with the Pooka curse, he wouldn't have had the immortality that came with it, allowing him to retain his power in the Underworld and let Gallon free. If Mercedes hadn't destroyed Odin's psypher, he could've fought off Gallon's forces as soon as they emerged.
- Legacy of Kain is made of this. At the end of Soul Reaver 2, Kain discovers that his "edge of the coin" is precisely what the bad guys had been hoping for. Fortunately for him, they weren't quite as omniscient as they thought.
- Raziel eventually discovers this for himself, when he finally defeats Kain, recovers the Heart of Darkness, and uses it to restore Janos Audron...only to hand Janos on a silver platter to the Hylden as an incorruptible vessel, and getting rid of Kain in the process.
- Even getting to Janos Audron means allowing the Sarafan vampire hunters passage to the sanctuary.
- In fact, just about any Temporal Paradox invoked in the series invokes this trope. This stretches back all the way to the first game, where Kain travels back in time to murder King William the Just before he can become the threatening Nemesis, only to cause vampires to be persecuted and hunted down to extinction when he returns to the present.
- Deus Ex likes to pull this one on the protagonist. Throughout the game, you destroy everything the enemy has in the way of assets. Generally, this comes back to bite your ass and chew with gusto. Let's take a look at a few.
- You retrieve the terrorists' stolen medicines against a deadly plague, and their leader is dead, possibly by your very hand. But wait, they were the good guys, and you just stopped the medicine from getting to a guy who could use it to make more.
- You blow up the machine the Big Bad uses to make the plague. The same machine you needed to make the cure.
- You save one ally only to lure him into a trap. Unwitting Pawn, thy name is JC Denton.
- You retrieve schematics to build your own cure making machine, and the big bad uses you to rebuild his own plague maker. Nice job fixing it, hero.
- You redirect the bad guy's nuke at himself, and incinerate innocent US soldiers without even inconveniencing the big bad.
- Well, for one, you didn't have to fight through half the US army just to get to him...
- Sonic The Hedgehog:
- In Sonic Advance 3, Sonic and friends do not need the Chaos Emeralds to defeat Eggman. But, they can get them anyway. And, if they do, and if Sonic is the one to defeat Eggman, then Gemerl steals the emeralds and goes super. This forces Sonic to do the same to beat it.
- This was played in Sonic Adventure where Knuckles was tricked into fighting Sonic. During their fight, the two collided with each other, resulting in Sonic fumbling the two remaining Chaos Emeralds (one of them being green, which Knuckles thought was a piece of the Master Emerald). This gave way for Dr. Eggman to steal them and power up Chaos into his fourth form. So Knuckles allowing himself to get tricked by Dr. Eggman resulted in a Physical God powering up. Considering that this was the second time Knuckles was tricked, Sonic wasn't impressed:Sonic: "Smooth move, knucklehead!"
- In Shadow the Hedgehog, the title character gathers the Chaos Emeralds... which the Big Bad uses to start stealing the earth's energy. Oops. Hell, Shadow's entire backstory is one big example. Professor Gerald attempts to create the Ultimate Life Form by allying himself with the Big Bad (Black Doom) to cure Maria, then decides to double cross him by building the Eclipse Cannon. Unfortunately, the UN realized that what Gerald was doing was wrong and sought to stop him. The end result saw Maria killed by GUN soldiers, leading Shadow and Gerald to proclaim vengeance on the world. How do they do that? Gerald rigs the Eclipse Cannon (and thus the Space Station ARK) to initiate a Colony Drop once the weapon is armed with all seven Chaos Emeralds. And who's the wonderful person who does this? Why, Gerald's own grandson, Dr. Eggman, of course!
- In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Mephiles' role as the villain may be entirely the fault of Shadow. When he and Silver went back to seal away Mephiles and Iblis respectively, it appeared that Mephiles was simply trying to escape the lab. However, Shadow pursued him anyway and sealed him in the Scepter of Darkness for ten years; long enough to make anyone go Ax-Crazy.
- In Sonic Colors, when Sonic destroyed Rotatatron/Globatron, an arm got lodged into a nearby structure, which turned out to be part of the mind control cannon. When Eggman tried to fire it, the cannon backfired. The resulting energy created two things: a Nega Hyper-Go-On black hole that consumed the amusement park and, if evidence is correct, the primordial essence known as the Time Eater. Basically, Sonic caused Sonic Generations to occur by destroying the first boss of Colors.
- Sonic Lost World:
- The basic plot gets started because Sonic rushed into a fight without proper intel:
Sonic: Gone! (kicks the giant seashell Eggman was holding into the distance) Eggman's shell is gone! Ha ha!
Dr. Eggman: That was a mistake...
Sonic: Whatever! When is it a mistake to take your toys away?
Dr. Eggman: When it's the only thing keeping six angry zeti from controlling my mechs, you moronic hedgehog!- Later in the game, Sonic ends up almost triggering a trap, but gets Tails captured instead.
- In Sonic Forces, "Episode Shadow" reveals that Eggman taking over the world was pretty much caused by Shadow humiliating a mercenary and telling him how weak he is. He flips his lid and joins Eggman, becoming Infinite.
- In DragonFable, Nythera kills and usurps Warlic using the potions you helped her create. Then she goads the Elemental Lords into attacking Falconreach. So, thanks to your efforts, Warlic is apparently dead and some of the most powerful beings in the world are going to attack your town. Nice going, hero.
- He got better.
- Destroying the Super Mega Ultra Darkness Dracolich seems like a good idea. Until it turns out doing this weakens the elemental planes of Darkness and Fire. To make a bad situation worse, Warlic uses too much of his power while creating the light shield and splits into a frail old man and a physical manifestation of his power, which takes on the form of his scary-ass Omnicidal Maniac dad. Nice job breaking it, guys.
- Gears of War 2: A certain piece of collectible literature reveals that the Lightmass Bomb that was intended to destroy the Locust stronghold only served to destroy the Kryll's breeding grounds, and had the side effect of awakening the dormant Riftworm which the locusts used to literally undermine the last remaining safe city on the planet.
- In Act 3, Niles' AI advises Marcus and Dom not to mess with the main computer. They do, which wakes up the Sires, causing you to have to
flamethrowerCHANESORR your way out of the place.
- In Act 3, Niles' AI advises Marcus and Dom not to mess with the main computer. They do, which wakes up the Sires, causing you to have to
- In Bomberman 64, the White Bomber travels to the 4 anchors of the Big Bad's floating fortress to destroy its barrier, allowing our hero to confront Altair and prevent him from draining the planet's life force using the Omni Cube. However after stopping Altair, your own ally, Sirius, who was using you to distract Altair and destroy his defenses, steals the cube for himself and begins draining the Planet's life force at a much faster rate. And as an added bonus, he promises to completely destroy the planet afterwards. What a pal.
- Used again in Bomberman Hero. Bomberman keeps the last remaining Data Disk safe from the Garaden Empire, collects the other three that they already have, and then returns them all to Princess Millian... who turns out to be Natia in disguise, allowing them to revive Bagular.
- Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! has two similar cases of this. After confronting the Big Bad who is possessed by a demon, the demon will take advantage of the fact that Bomberman has gathered the elemental stones needed for his full resurrection and siphon the energy from them to regain his earthly form. Depending on certain choices you made previously, the goddess Mihaele may appear after this battle and attempt to use the stones to seal the demon away for good. However, the demon counts on her to try this and ends up sealing her away and absorbing the stones' full power to become an unstoppable god of chaos and destruction.
- In Lunar: The Silver Star, Alex needs to get the fourth piece of the legendary Dragon Armor to challenge the Magic Emperor, but the zombified Black Dragon is in his way. He and his allies kill it, but there were only four dragons in the world, and the previous three were already dead by the time Alex got to them or killed right in front of him. Cue the Big Bad's voice gloating that Alex just made it impossible for himself to become a Dragonmaster. With the Black Dragon dead, there are no Dragon Tribesmen left to protect the goddess Althena, allowing him to turn her into a Person of Mass Destruction.
- Probably happened one way or another in Shadow of the Colossus. If you ask one faction of the characters and fanbase, the player's character nearly unleashed an ancient and powerful demonic entity that was thankfully sealed again by the Hero Antagonist. If you ask the other major faction, the antagonist murdered the player's character and resealed a neutral or even good ancient and powerful entity who was about to fulfill Their promised half of a deal to revive someone who was sacrificed, all while thinking he was doing a good thing by sealing a demon and stopping a curse. So, either the main character thought he was a hero but broke it by being a Villain Protagonist, or the antagonist only thinks he's a Hero Antagonist and broke it.
- Ōkami: Amaterasu and Issun go off to stop the raging Water Dragon and end up going inside it. There they get the Plot Coupon-y Fox Rods, but in the process end up killing the Water Dragon (who is then revealed to be the now-deceased king of the Dragon Palace). Upon escaping from inside the dying Water Dragon, you come across Rao, who you then give the Fox Rods to, but it's only once you've returned to Queen Himiko's palace that you find out that Rao is Ninetails - an impostor who killed the real Rao months ago. Now having the Fox Rods (whose paws you were trying to keep the Fox Rods out of), Ninetails promptly kills Queen Himiko, and reveals that because you killed the Water Dragon, there's now no way to reach Oni Island, and with Queen Himiko dead, the location can't be predicted. If it wasn't for Himiko having pulled a successful Thanatos Gambit to pinpoint the location of the island one last time, and the queen of Dragon Palace being able to turn into a dragon like her husband to reach it, the game would have ended in a Sudden Downer Ending.
- Jak and Daxter. Having bested the Big Bad, Jak moves a huge warp gate back to Sandover Village. When opened, it releases a Horde of Alien Locusts, leading directly to the reign of Baron Praxis, the betrayal of Damas, every game after that... And this happened in the first two minutes of Jak II: Renegade. And it's always happened, thanks to a Stable Time Loop. His role in revealing the location of the Tomb of Mar, and opening the main chamber, letting Baron Praxis steal the Precursor Stone, which if broken open will destroy the entire universe. And then there's the end of Jak X: Combat Racing, when his victory in the races permits Rayn to become the biggest crime lord in the world. Yeah, Jak does this sort of thing a lot.
- The Age of Mythology Titans expansion is about Kastor being tricked into destroying all the safeguards the gods had put in place to keep Kronos in Tartarus. Of course, while the player knows this, Kastor doesn't, making going along with the mission objectives the only option.
- In Dragon's Lair 2, Dirk the Daring is responsible for quite likely the single biggest hero breaking in HISTORY... or at least the first: He gives Eve the apple, while trying to fend off her advances, an annoying cherub, and two hungry snakes.
- The goal of Fruit Mystery is to feed the animals at the zoo. The zookeeper doesn't approve, to put it mildly.
- Kingdom Hearts:
- Kingdom Hearts II:
- Sora is tricked into removing the lock that Zeus placed on the Underdrome. Hades is pleased.
- Donald accidentally stepped on the keyboard of the system of the Master Core Program which leads to his and Sora's and Goofy's arrest and being transferred into the program.
- In Birth By Sleep, it's Aqua of all people who does it. The mess that happened throughout the series? She indirectly caused it by creating Castle Oblivion, and saving Terranort, who becomes the Big Bad that we know of through a Grand Theft Me, instead of saving herself. Yeah. Really nice job breaking it hero. Turns out she also made another blunder by deciding against making a young Sora her apprentice in the hopes that he wouldn't have to fight his friend as she had. While this is sensible, as a result, only one Keyblade was sent for two potential users and both Sora and Riku came into conflict over it anyway. Had she marked him, they both would have gotten blades and Sora and Riku could have been allied from the start.
- The other two weren't much better. Ven learns that due to his connection with Vanitas, them fighting or coming into contact with each other will create the X-blade, which is so horrible his own master is willing to tearfully kill him rather than risk its creation. Ven's response? Hide himself away and let his more experienced friends deal with it? Nope, he charges right off to fight Vanitas anyway, which of course creates the X-blade. He manages to destroy it, but only by causing massive damage to his own soul, forcing him into a 12 year coma. Meanwhile, Terra learns that his mentor is evil and was prodding him into using darkness-based powers to further his evil plan. Does Terra promptly stop using darkness because that's what Xenahort obviously wants him to do? Nope, he tries to fight Xenahort with the darkness instead, which leads to Xenahort taking his body from him. Like Ven, Terra manages to salvage a total disaster at the last minute by having his armor and keyblade move on their own and KO Xenahort, stopping his current plan, but Terra's still short one body now.
- In Kingdom Hearts, Donald turns away Riku after Sora offers for him to join their team. This results in Maleficent manipulating Riku enough for him to join her side and by extension, made him Face–Heel Turn and creating a long and enduring path for his Heel–Face Turn.
- Kingdom Hearts II:
- RuneScape:
- In the first game, the quest 'Spirit of Summer' ends with the spirits telling you that Summer's great plan to defeat the Big Bad turned into this trope: instead of hurting the Spirit Beast, you just made it stronger, starting the sequel, 'Summer's End'.
- And in the quest 'Enakhra's Lament', you get enlisted to build a statue and end up solving the puzzle in a temple, ending with you liberating an entrapped spirit and attempting to capture his nemesis, who breaks out and they both flee. Then the guide throughout, Lazim, is furious at you because he wanted to learn from the Mahjarrat spirits, but you freed them, effectively ruining his chances. This makes Lazim Too Dumb to Live — wanting to learn is fine, but actually believing that they wouldn't kill him in a second was stupid.
- RuneScape is fond of this trope. In another quest, 'Priest in Peril', the bad guys get you to kill a Guard Dog that was preventing them from polluting the Paterdomus temple and the Salve River. Said temple and river are the only things that's keeping the evil in Morytania from invading.
- Another one: the quest 'Shadow of the Storm', where you are told to help summon the demon Agrith-Naar so you can kill it for good (being in its own dimension gave it more power), only to find out that the demon was already in the world, and trapped in a much weaker human form, and you actually sent it back to its own dimension and freed it of being trapped in human form. Nice Job Breaking it, Player.
- And see, in the end of Summer's End, you've destroyed the Spirit Beast... and now it's in the physical realm and even MORE dangerous. Oh, Crap!.
- During the quest Temple of Ikov, you are given the choice to follow this trope. A frail hooded man named Lucien will ask you to retrieve an artifact known as the Staff of Armadyl. After running through a few trials, and finally reaching it, you are now forced to kill several guardians of the staff (who are dressed in a way that almost obviously makes them good guys), and then, upon gaining the staff and bringing it to Lucien, he thanks you by taking it and then laughing maniacally. It's probably worth noting that this is the same staff that Lucien will later use to kill a lot of your friends and mentors. And then after killing those friends and mentors during While Guthix Sleeps, the player goes to the Stone of Jas and destroys the beings defending it, allowing Lucien to walk in and steal it himself.
- Happens at least twice in Neverwinter Nights 2, both times being of the Stupidity Is the Only Option variety. After you've defeated the leader of the Githyanki who have been trying to kill you since the beginning of the game, she reveals that the silver shards she was willing to kill you for were needed in order to destroy the Sealed Evil in a Can...and now the world is doomed. The same thing happens after you've defeated Ammon Jerro and destroyed his source of power — it turns out he's not the Big Bad the game tried to make you think he was, and now you've foiled his plans of trying to save the world, too. If only these people would, say, share their motivations instead of just trying to kill you all the time.
- For most of Silent Hill, Harry runs around the town finding and neutralising the Marks of Samael that Dahlia claims are causing "the darkness" to encroach upon the town. Of course, they're actually Seals of Metatron, placed by Alessa to prevent the power behind the darkness from increasing in strength, not only causing the two worlds to collide in an even more nightmarish monument to Chaos Architecture, but weakening Alessa enough for Dahlia to capture her and use her in the ritual to birth "God", resulting in the death of Harry's daughter and the permanent transformation of Silent Hill into a malevolent Genius Loci. Thanks a lot, Harry.
- In Crackdown, you, the Agent, end up being a massive Unwitting Pawn who took down all crime syndicates so the Agency could roll in over their former territory and control the city without complaints. Keep in mind the Agency had bankrolled the gangs in the first place to cause a bigger panic. Nice job creating permanent martial law, hero. Although since you can play the game as a Sociopathic Hero who mows down pedestrians without much trouble, you just might not care.
- In the sequel, Pacific City is plagued by mutated monsters that even the Agents have a hard time dealing with. Why? Because when the Agent whacked a Shai Gen Mad Scientist, he inadvertently released the mutants in said scientist's lab.
- Killzone:
- Happens twice in Killzone 2. The first time, Rico ignores Sev's plan to rescue the rest of their squad and the scientist, resulting in Garza's death. The second time, Rico ignores their orders to arrest Scolar Visari and Visari's warnings of what would happen if he died, resulting in a large Helghast fleet arriving to what's left of the ISA invasion force.
- Killzone 3 as well. The protagonists attempt to destroy the Big Bad's doomsday-device toting space cruiser utilizing stolen fighters. The crippled ship attempts to power down its destabilized warp drive and land, and Sevchenko destroys the ship with a nuclear missile... Setting off its warp drive and payload of unstable missiles, setting off a chain-reaction that eradicated all life on Helghan. Made worse by the fact that the missiles that triggered this kill by causing living things to explode violently. So yeah, they mass-murdered over 90% of an entire civilization, made one of humanity's only resource-rich planets near-completely uninhabitable, and forced the ISA to surrender half its assets (namely half of planet Vekta) as compensation for violent war crimes. A winner is you!
- Paladin's Quest for the SNES begins with a particularly huge example. On a dare, the Player Character, a thirteen year old student Spiritualist (the setting's term for a magic user), sneaks into the abandoned and spooky tower on the school campus. When he reaches the top, he pushes a big shiny button. This awakens Dal Gren, a biomechanical terror from ancient times that nearly destroyed the world about 10,000 years ago. Said monstrosity immediately knocks the poor sap unconscious, lays waste to the magic academy, kills everybody else there in the process, and flies off to destroy the rest of the world. Um, oops?
- This happens in The 7th Saga after you manage to recover all of the Runes. Turns out the king who sent you on your quest was actually the time traveling Big Bad Gorsia in disguise. The runes he sent you to find were the seals on his powers, which you practically handed to him on a silver platter. He rewards you by blasting you so hard you go back in time thousands of years. Then he goes back in time also to get revenge on the hero who defeated him the first time. Yes, the reward for all of the Level Grinding up to that point is finding out that the world would have been better off if you had just let that first wandering monster eat you.
- Though it should probably be pointed out that only one of the possible characters is actively trying to be a hero, the others are in it for personal gain. Hell, one of them is a demon who wants the power to rule supreme.
- The three factions of Supreme Commander spend the whole game fighting over control of Black Sun for their own purposes; no matter who seizes control of it in the end, firing it opens a rift between this world and the quantum realm, allowing the Seraphim to start a rampage of human extermination across the galaxy continuing on the expansion.
- In Bleach: Shattered Blade, the main plot takes place as a result of the destruction of the Sokyoku, which releases an ancient arrancar that was sealed. In the story mode, the main character gathers the pieces, which results in their coming face to face with the arrancar in the last battle.
- In The Conduit, Mr. Ford spends the first half of the single-player campaign trying to stop Mr. Adams, but ends up unintentionally giving the President of the United States evidence to turn over all executive power to Adams instead.
- While it does help your cause: beating the Milkman Conspiracy level in Psychonauts restores the milkman's previous, sealed-away identity...which is that of a psychotic arsonist.
- Prior to the events of Shoot 'Em Up Battle Garegga, the Wayne brothers are given a contract to develop new advanced vehicles and weapons for their government. One year later, the government tries to Take Over the World. The brothers then set off in two Super Prototypes and spend the entire game fighting the war machine they helped create.
- Guybrush Threepwood of the Monkey Island series has a nasty habit of invoking this trope, from willingly surrendering a piece of the Ghost Pirate LeChuck's body to Largo LaGrande so that he can resurrect him in Monkey Island 2, and proposing to Elaine Marley with a voodoo-cursed ring that freezes her into a golden statue in The Curse of Monkey Island, to screwing up a voodoo spell and spreading LeChuck's evil voodoo pox all over the Caribbean in Tales of Monkey Island.
- It even happens in the first game. Guybrush hears of Elaine being kidnapped, so he rushes off from Melee Island to Monkey Island in a ship to save her. Not only did LeChuck come back to Melee Island to actually do the ceremony where LeChuck plans to forcably marry her, but it turns out that Elaine had both long since freed herself and enacted a plan to destroy the Ghost Pirate. Replacing the supposed bride with a stack of monkeys that were going to use the root beer needed to destroy LeChuck on him. A plan that Guybrush bursting in to stop the wedding ends up ruining.
- Speaking of Tales, this spreading of the Pox of LeChuck is followed by Guybrush's use of the MacGuffin Esponja Grande to absorb and remove the pox from everyone in Chapter 4, curing them completely, so that LeChuck can obtain it for himself, killing Guybrush in the process. Nice job curing everyone and getting yourself killed, Guybrush.
- And in Chapter 5, when Guybrush (as a Ghost Pirate) finds a spell so he can escape the Crossroads and return to the living world, he opens up the rip in the Crossroads and inadvertently (along with LeChuck's hypnotized monkeys) lets the villain use La Esponja Grande to harness the voodoo power from the Crossroads, creating other rips and becoming the Demon Pirate God of the Caribbean who turns a willing Elaine into his demon bride. Nice job making LeChuck more evil, Guybrush! However, creating other rips lets Guybrush find a way to repossess his own corpse and shrink the sponge in order to free Elaine from LeChuck's influence. So nice job negating your breaking it and averting the destruction, Guybrush.
- This has been the premise for the other classic LucasArts game, Day of the Tentacle. Though there was a request for a rescue from Green Tentacle, Bernard also frees Purple Tentacle, who gained a thirst for power, which is why their creator Dr. Fred tied them both up in the first place. Purple Tentacle runs off to resume his conquest, leaving Bernard bearing the realization of his mistake.
- In Quest for Glory, this happens at least once each in Trial by Fire, Wages of War, and Shadows of Darkness. In these cases, the Stupidity Is the Only Option trope is averted, as the Hero is either being magically forced to help villains, or could not possibly be expected to foresee the results of his actions.
- In Trial by Fire, you are mind-controlled into helping the Big Bad find and retrieve the artifact he plans to use to conquer the world. Failure to fix this will in some cases lead to a 'Game Over' message concerning the look of surprise on the Big Bad's face when he realizes he bit off more than he can chew.
- In Wages of War, the peace conference you spent the entire game arranging goes catastrophically sour and has the exact opposite of the intended effect.
- In Shadows of Darkness, our hero is once again dominated into helping the villain, this time through the use of a geas, a magical means of forcing certain behavior. By the time the terms of the geas are complete, the Hero must initiate the Apocalypse in order to avert it.
- Shadows of Darkness has a more minor one as well; the innkeeper's daughter is missing and assumed dead, and (being a hero) you have to rescue her. Unfortunately, the child is currently a vampire in the service of "Aunt Trina," the above-mentioned villain, and they actually like each other; resurrecting Tanya and bringing her back to her parents is what pushes Trina's Berserk Button and ultimately leads to her geasing you. Oops.
- Regardless of your actions in Shin Megami Tensei if..., you always eventually discover that the Demon Emperor turned Akiko and Ryuuichi into stone statues. However, your choice of partner influences which themed worlds you enter during your quest; if you enter the Wrath world, you witness Ryuuichi's futile attempts to rescue Akiko, then eventually come across their statue. The Demon Emperor baits you with "Smash the statue and you might save them!" Even if you don't bite, your partner leaps at the chance, resulting in a sadly very literal example of "Nice job breaking it, hero..."
- Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army has an even worse variant - the villain has been introducing advanced technology to Taisho Era Japan, including magical parasites and cybernetic undead mooks, finally culminating with the development of a weapon of mass destruction in the form of a Transforming Mecha battleship. The problem? It's an attempt to make Japan Take Over the World before the events of the Great Destruction take place, so the timeline of the horrific Crapsack World that is Shin Megami Tensei II is negated while there is still hope.
- In Shin Megami Tensei IV, you're tasked with releasing three prisoners kept sealed in Kagome Tower. Long story short, before long you might wish you just had left them there to rot.
- Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse has Odin tasking you with unsealing the "Ark", a MacGuffin that he claims will greatly benefit Flynn, the messiah of Tokyo and Mikado, if opened up. You do so and...the Divine Powers are unsealed, kidnap Flynn, and decide to get in on the existing war between Merkabah and Lucifer. Not that saying no would've helped, as Dagda will force you to unseal it if you refuse. You are later called the hell out on this by the people of Tokyo and branded a traitor either way (Opened it of your own will? You shouldn't have messed with something you don't know about. Dagda made you do it? As his lackey, you're not worthy of the people's trust.), only given a second chance thanks to the generosity of Skins and Fujiwara. Perhaps worst of all, the entire reason this sequence of events happened is because you accepting Dagda's offer to come back to life at the start of the game is what spawned this Alternate Timeline of SMTIV. If you had said no and stayed dead (in fact, the game gives you this option), then the Divine Powers wouldn't have been unleashed, Flynn would've succeeded in his mission much sooner, and thousands/millions less people would've died, i.e. what happens in the Neutral route of SMTIV.
- Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception offers you a few opportunities to "break it". You can ignore the Miller Unit poised to take over Port Patterson, forcing you to have to backtrack to save it. You can ignore the Hamlet Unit and whatever they're planning, forcing another backtrack when they take over Santa Elva and end up dealing with That One Level. You can let Leasath transport planes get to Griswall by going after jammers first, allowing the enemy superweapon to get a nasty upgrade. At the final crosspath, the game forces a Sadistic Choice on you that will strengthen the Fenrirs in the final missions one way or the other.
- Wario Land:
- Wario Land 3 has Wario collecting various pieces of treasure for the entire game, to help a hidden figure in an ancient temple (and presumably, escape the pocket universe in which he's trapped). However, after you collect all the pieces of treasure, a music box song plays... then it turns out that the hidden figure who's been manipulating Wario is Rudy the Clown, the game's Big Bad. Cue final boss battle.
- Wario World has the entire plot started by this. It's Wario's plundering of a black diamond deep in the jungle that unleashes the ultimate evil... the Eldritch Abomination/Artifact of Doom that's the Black Jewel itself, which proceeds to turn his entire castle into a parallel universe filled with monsters. Granted, the narration at the beginning of the game points out that at the time, the legend of the Black Jewel had completely been forgotten, so no one alive at the time knew that such a thing even existed.
- In Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, Tony Stark's What the Hell, Hero? plan to use nanite controlled villains forms Voltron with Captain America's Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, when the latter frees them all from their pens to create a distraction in a fight allowing their neural network to form full sentience, and start taking over the world Grey Goo style.
- In Mercenaries 2, the player character is originally hired by Ramon Solano to break a friend of his, General Carmona, out of captivity, so Carmona can launch a coup and install Solano as the new President of Venezuela. The merc successfully does this, which causes immense suffering, sparks a war between the United States and China, and Solano screws the merc out of their paycheck. Guess which reason the merc decides to take out Solano for. Hint; it's the paycheck.
- Pajama Sam 2: Thunder And Lightning Aren't So Frightening: Sam breaking into World Wide Weather to stop a thunderstorm leads to him accidentally breaking their Weather-Control Machine, causing chaos in the factory and on earth with the weather everywhere going completely whack.
- Pokémon:
- At the end of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Big Good Captain Cyllene declares her intent to record the exploits of the Player Character for posterity. This directly resulted in her Identical Grandson Cyrus attempting to use their knowledge to become a god in the present and remake reality In Their Own Image to create a World of Silence. And in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon it's shown that in at least one Alternate Universe, he succeeded.
- Pokémon Mystery Dungeon:
- In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers, you and your partner Pokémon, along with the rest of Wigglytuff's Guild, help to track down Grovyle, the thief who was stealing the Time Gears, the removal of which was stopping time in areas around the world and causing Pokémon to go berserk. After he is caught, you and your partner are dragged into the future by Dusknoir, the Pokémon who had practically become a mentor to the two of you. As it turns out, Grovyle, Dusknoir, and you are all from the future (though only Dusknoir knows about you being one of the future folk at this point). Grovyle was gathering the Time Gears in order to bring them to the Temporal Tower, the place from which Dialga controls time. Because the Time Gears had somehow been scattered, Temporal Tower began to crumble, along with Dialga's sanity, to the point that in the future from which you, Grovyle, and Dusknoir once resided, Dialga has become Primal Dialga, a being whose only concern is self-preservation, at any cost. Oh, and did we mention that by you stopping Grovyle from completing his mission, the three of you have now been trapped in the future with very little hope of returning?
- In, Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon, the hero, their partner, Archen, and Nuzleaf all ascend Revelation Mountain to prevent Krookadile from getting his hands on the spring water that cures people that have been turn to stone. He has to break the seal on the water but finds out that Krookadile didn't even want the water but was actually being paid by Nuzleaf. This entire time Nuzleaf, who the hero trusted as a father figure, was only using him to break the barrier on the spring water to gain its power and prevent anyone from saving his petrified victims. He immediately turns the hero and their friends to stone, plunging their souls into the Voidlands.
- This shows up a few times in Dragon Age: Origins. One notable example is the "Summoning Sciences" sidequest. One of the spirits you summon during the quest is "The Trickster". Later, the Chantry Quest Board has a quest called "Unintended Consequences", which requests that someone stop whatever is killing people on a certain trade route. When you accept the quest and investigate, it turns out that the Trickster you summoned is the one killing people. Oops. Somehow it doesn't feel right accepting a reward for cleaning up a mess you started.
- Happens in the Mage Origin, where you help your friend escape and destroy the only means the Templars have of tracking him, as he's suspected of practicing forbidden Blood Magic and is facing down the Rite of Tranquility, which renders the subject an Empty Shell. It's only when you get caught that it turns out that he did learn blood magic and has no compunctions about hurting people to get away.
- Due to the Grey-and-Gray Morality and tricky politics in Orzammar, it's all too easy to make things worse in the long run. Picking the "honorable" Lord Harrowmont to be the new king leads to Dwarven society being even more isolationist and bound to its caste system (screwing over the casteless). Picking Magnificent Bastard Bhelen (emphasis on "Bastard", especially if you picked the Dwarven Noble Origin) OTOH, will end isolationism and the abolishment of the unfair caste system. Also, helping one dwarf to open a Chantry branch in Orzammar may seem like the right thing to do at the time. In the epilogue, this leads to him being murdered by other dwarves who don't approve of his efforts, which leads to the Chantry seriously considering launching an Exalted March (read: Crusade) against Orzammar.
- Near the end of Dragon Age II you gather the components that Anders claims he needs to finally separate him and Justice/Vengeance. They are actually spell components he needs to blow up Kirkwall's Chantry, an act that kills off the only people who could have brokered peace between the Templars and the Circle mages in Kirkwall. Congratulations Hawke, you just helped a terrorist murder innocent people in order to start a war. Of course, it's also a no-win situation due to extreme use of Stupidity Is the Only Option: you can't prevent this from happening no matter how you behave.
- Hawke and company also broke it earlier when they discovered the Primeval Thaig and the cursed lyrium idol. And Isabella broke it before the game even started when she stole a sacred Qunari relic. And in the end, no matter which side Hawke takes, his/her actions inspire one side of the Templar-Mage war.
- Oh, and just for dessert, in the DLC, he accidentally helps Corypheus, Dragon Age: Inquisition's satanic Big Bad, escape from its prison!
- The post-credit scene in Dragon Age: Inquisition reveals that it was Solas who gave Corypheus the Foci, via some of his agents. Unaware of Corsypheus’ ability to cheat death by soul jumping into the nearest Blighted creature, (being able to twist it into transforming into his own form), he expected Corypheus to use it, and power it back up to full strength, with the resulting explosion resulting in Corypheus’ death, and allowing him to reclaim his repowered orb. Unfortunately, Corypheus could simply possess another body, and after the ritual was interrupted by the Herald, the ritual resulted in the Breach and smaller rifts, rather than whatever Solas originally tended. And this kicks off the start of the game proper, the Herald emerging from Breach, alive, and with the Anchor in their hand. Between the Anchor, and Corypheus being alive, results in the Foci being destroyed while attempting to destroy Corypheus for good. All because Solas awoke from his centuries long slumber, after creating the Veil, severely weakened, and unable to power it up himself, and allow him to tear the Veil back down, after witnessing the results of creating it in the first place.
- He has a bit of a problem with this. The Tresspasser DLC later reveals that millennia ago, Solas created the Veil separating the Fade/Realm of Dreams from material reality, in order to seal away the Elvish Gods who would otherwise have destroyed the world. Turns out that in the context of a civilization whose technology, healthcare, and civil infrastructure was all rooted in use of and connection to the Fade, this was an insanely bad idea, and the elves are still slaves and refugees reeling from it thousands of years later. Naturally, he plans on doing something to correct this, since he is rightfully horrified by the ramifications of his actions... and freely acknowledges that correcting his previous "nice job breaking it hero" error will also ruin everything, destroying the current civilization and populace. Dread Wolf, please just stop trying to help!
- In Planescape: Torment, in order to learn the whereabouts of your mortality, you must free the angel Trias from his imprisonment beneath Curst, a town populated entirely by liars and betrayers. Sounds good, right? After all, freeing an angel is a good deed, right? Wrong. When you get back to Curst from your next destination, you discover that Trias has turned the entire town into one big human sacrifice, causing it to slide into the prison plane Carceri, where all of the inhabitants are being slaughtered by demons. Why? Because the lives of the townsfolk are a payoff that will allow him to raise The Legions of Hell and invade and conquer Mount Celestia. Wow, did you ever screw up.
And don't forget that you have the option to free Coaxmetal in order to get the Entropic Blade. Of course Coaxmetal is the living embodiment of entropy who just wants to bring an end to the multiverse. - In Devil Survivor, you have a choice of five ends, four of which directly aim to solve the problem of the oncoming war between demons and angels (or be a part of it). Then there's the fifth option: choosing to support your increasingly panicky White Magician Girl Yuzu and the Action Survivor Determinator Honda to desperately escape the Special Defense Force blockade and evade judgment. Hooray, you've managed to kill innocent civilians, shirk your duties, and live another day! ...right? Ha. Metatron, angelic second-in-command to God Himself, sends you an email from heaven and tells you that you have just damned mankind to an endless hell where demons roam free and only the strong survive. The entire point of God's Ordeal was that mankind needed to prove it could reject the temptation of demons. And as the reincarnation of Abel, you're pretty much the defining person to exemplify humanity; i.e. it all depends on you. To clarify, God is supportive of you even if you use demons to make Japan a world superpower, or decide to break the game and banish the demons without divine intervention, and he's even willing to accept your decision if you become King of Demons and lead them against Him, and He's not okay with this. Believe it or not, being The Chosen One means something.
- Even the Gigolo (a.k.a. the Norse god Loki) chews you out for taking this route, and he was only involved for the lulz.
- Super Smash Bros.:
- In each installment of the series, though mostly the first two, the single-player mode ends with the player character killing their creator and the entire Smash Bros. world being destroyed.
- Also, in Melee, the player turns Bowser into a trophy, unleashing Giga Bowser as the final boss of Adventure Mode.
- The Adventure mode of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has bad endings caused by attacking and defeating one of the adventure's two competing villains on their own, leaving the other to consume the world before any further action can be taken.
- At the end of Toe Jam And Earl, the guys are received as heroes for surviving a visit to the most dangerous planet in the known universe: Earth. That is, until it's discovered that a large number of Earthlings followed them back and are trashing the planet. ToeJam and Earl set out to solve the problem themselves, presumably to avoid being punished for it.
- In the original game, if you play a two-player game and one player opens a total bummer present when both characters are near each other, the other character will say "Thanks a lot" before they both die.
- Splinter Cell: Conviction:
- Destroying a light, if noticed by enemies, will result in them using their flashlights. Subverted as, depending on the situation, it may be a worthwhile tradeoff.
- Conviction also has a stereotypical Gonk nerd and Sam Fisher fanboy who gives him his goggles, which are needed to bypass all the security tripwires he designed the algorithms for. Nice job being a huge Metal Gear/Resident Evil fan, Poindexter.
- In Wild ARMs 2, it's not the hero who breaks it, it's the Magnificent Heroic Bastard. Irving spends the entire game orchestrating the plot to save the world, making many "necessary sacrifices" along the way, up to and including sacrificing himself and his sister to give a physical body to the Eldritch Location threatening to consume the universe. While this succeeds spectacularly, it has the unfortunate side effect of tearing the heroes apart emotionally. And the main character happens to have a demon sealed inside of him that feeds off of negative emotions. A demon that Irving put there to give the hero a Super Mode. D'oh!
- In Dungeons And Dragons Heroes, you spend the bulk of the game unlocking and traveling through several rift portals in order to combat the Big Bad's minions in various worlds. However, when you finally face the Big Bad, he reveals that because you unlocked all the rifts, he was able to regain his full power. Whoops.
- The entire premise of Epic Mickey. The plot started because Mickey just had to mess around in Yen Sid's studio.
- In The Adventures of Rad Gravity, you spend the entire game trying to defeat the wizard Agathos, who is trying to prevent you from linking up the benevolent supercomputer network. Then when you finally beat him, you learn that he was a good guy, that linking up the supercomputer network will be catastrophic to the galaxy, and that the evil mastermind has been your ship's helpful onboard computer, Kakos, the whole time.
- Mass Effect 2: What, now? You sold Legion off to Cerberus? Congratulations, now no one will stop the Reaper Virus from overtaking the normal Geth, turning them all into Reaper minions. The bad Geth are now 20 times stronger. And even worse, Legion's absence makes it impossible to avoid genocide of either the geth or the quarians in the third game.
- Taking down Saren and Sovereign at the end of ME1? Good work, Shepard — now the Reapers are interested specifically in your species. Cue the Collectors raiding human colonies... and then, the events of ME3...
- This might go without justification as Shepard deliberately releases all prisoners of a maximum security space station just to recruit a peculiar squad member. Mind you, every single one of the prisoners were mentally unstable bloodthirsty psychopaths, though they are almost all eventually recaptured. To rub salt in the wound, Shepard receives a thank-you letter from a Serial Killer Evil Gloating about how his next murders will be committed in their name.
- The post mission summary after collecting the Reaper IFF notes that, in addition to said IFF, Shepard also enabled Cerberus to gain considerable data about how people are turned into husks. It's not until near the end of the next game that it's discovered what they intended to use that data for, and to say it's not pretty would be a colossal understatement: they built a concentration camp disguised as a refugee center for the purpose of turning unsuspecting civilians into husks, which would both give them a ready supply of troops and provide insight into how to go about controlling the Reapers themselves.
- Mass Effect 3 can lead to several Paragon decisions turning around and biting you in the ass. For instance, telling Kelly Chambers to stay on the Citadel and help Cerberus victims gets her killed when Cerberus invade the place. Sparing the second Rachni Queen, if you killed the first one seems like a great idea, too, until it turns out she's indoctrinated and attacking your war assets.
- The worst ending is a prime example. The Crucible misfires, wiping out Earth, and that may be preferable given that all endings destroy the mass relays, cutting off Earth from any aid, making sure that instead of dying immediately, it'll die slowly. Nice job. The Extended Cut changes this so that in all but the absolute worst Destroy ending (which you can only get if you deliberately play the game badly) the relays are only damaged, not destroyed, and the galaxy is shown rebuilding itself.
- The Extended Cut adds the choice for Shepard to refuse the choices presented to them for the Crucible. How badly does the hero break it in this case? It results in the Reapers wiping out all galatic civilization once again. They're eventually stopped by the civilization of the next cycle…who don't pass up the opportunity to use the Crucible against them.
- Heroes of Might and Magic IV reveals in its introduction that all the effort the heroes put into Might & Magic VI, Heroes III, Might & Magic VII, and Might & Magic VIII was a complete waste of time because Gelu decided to wield Armageddon's Blade in single combat against a barbarian carrying the Sword of Frost. Turns out that the clash of those blades causes the complete and total destruction of the entire planet! Well, nice job causing an Earth-Shattering Kaboom, Gelu. Dunce.
- Might and Magic VII has an example internal to the game itself: the first few player quests are about rebuilding Castle Harmondale and being recognised as Lords of Harmondale (you got the the title in the tutorial, but you're advised that no-one really takes it seriously). You succeed... which leads to Harmondale becoming an important prize again, triggering another Timber War between two of the 'Good Guy' nations. Granted, if your characters decide to take the opportunity to align with the Path of Dark this leads to, the war itself is a perk, it's the fact that it (in terms of plot, if not in what it can actually lead to in-game) puts your rulership over Harmondale at risk that's the problem.
- It turns out that by running from the zombie outbreak and preserving their own lives, the survivors of Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 have been aiding the spread of the infection. Oops.
- Heavy Rain has Scott saving Lauren from drowning in his car. However, if Scott survives his encounter with Ethan/Norman/Madison by virtue of successfully killing whoever managed to reach the warehouse, Lauren will find out that he is the Origami Killer and kill him.
- Dante's Inferno: Dante must break large links of chain in order to progress through the Inferno. Satan later reveals, "My salvation for breaking the chains of Judecca."
- ''The Legend of Spyro': Poor Spyro just wanted to save the girl he loved from getting turned evil and the villain from being unleashed. Then, after killing that game's Big Bad, he freezes them in time to protect them from a collapsing mountain. Turns out that Cynder was being unknowingly used by the Dark Master to lure Spyro to the Well of Souls because he needed Spyro there to get free. And by freezing himself and Cynder in time, it let Malefor run rampant for three years unchecked and awaken a planet-destroying monster. Though in Spyro and Cynder's defense, Malefor may have just lied to screw with their heads.
- NieR has a pretty big one. No matter what ending you get, Nier destroying the Big Bad causes the Gestalts to effectively die out. No Gestalts, no Replicants. No Replicants, no humanity. In Nier's defense, though, there was no way either he or the player themselves could possibly have known this. (Indeed, this is only revealed in a Japan-only infobook, and the same source goes on to describe a small Hope Spot in regards to ending D.)
- It's actually even worse than this. Nearly all of your plot-advancing actions ensure that humanity will die out, and all the sacrifices made to stop this are now worthless. The only exceptions are some random odd jobs that are completely optional. NieR is "Nice Job breaking it, Hero" — the Game.
- In Illusion of Gaia, there's the subquest of collecting 50 red jewels, littered all over the world, to get the jeweler's "secret". Turns out the secret is that the jeweler is actually one of the endbosses from the kind-of precursor Soul Blazer. And collecting the jewels restored his power. Oops...
- Thankfully, there is little consequence either way. It's just a boss fight: a pretty tough one given that you don't have the same set of moves the other game's hero had.
- .hack: Kite just wants to save his friend and everyone else who's being put into comas by Phases. Destroying Phases actually results in The World (where the comatose people's minds are currently located) becoming more and more unstable, followed by the entire Internet nearly getting wiped out.
- Haseo wants to save Shino from her coma caused by AIDA. Eliminating AIDA doesn't bring her back from her coma and creates Cubia, which will wipe out the entire Internet via sheer size.
- Aura is the one who broke it first, by leaving The World. This caused CC Corp to try and restart the original AI creating algorithm of Harald Hoerwick's code to create a new Ultimate AI. This lead to a failed Batman Gambit between Jyotaro Amagi and Jun Bansyoya, which destroyed The World (R:1) and caused the release of the captured Eight Phases of Morganna. This caused the creation of The World R:2 and the reintallation of the Harald Folders, which fuelled the generation of AIDA from the loss of Aura. This allowed Tri-Edge to kill Aina and infect Ovan, which caused Ovan to follow through with a Xanatos Gambit so that Haseo could get strong enough to destroy him. This put Ovan into the unfortunate position of letting Shino get PK'd, causing Haseo to turn into an Ax-Crazy Broken Bird, and that caused immense frustration for everyone (especially Tabby and Atoli). Finally, Ovan's plan would cause just what Jun feared by creating a new Cubia; and, Yata, who was working off Jun's notes and should have known better, let Haseo go through with it, blinded by their mutual obsessions with Ovan. Everyone broke it!
- Haseo wants to save Shino from her coma caused by AIDA. Eliminating AIDA doesn't bring her back from her coma and creates Cubia, which will wipe out the entire Internet via sheer size.
- The protagonist Lazarus Jones from GhostHunter basically couldn't keep his hands to himself and pressed a switch which freed all the captured ghosts in the ghost array (kinda like the original Ghostbusters). Then poor Jones had to take up the job of re-capturing them.
- The Zork series is full of these, but the best example is in Zork Zero, where you have to fill in some bottomless pits to get past a specific area. Oops, you let out the infamous evil creatures of darkness... grues. Thanks.
- Ecco the Dolphin managed to save his pod in the first game... but accidentally broke the timestream in the process. Good job, dolphin, now go fix it before the aliens take over.
- Mystery Case Files
- The Master Detective in the series is no stranger to this. Their determination to returning to Ravenhearst for the second time, due to finding Charles and his son causing trouble again, allows Charles to re-kidnap Emma's, Rose's and the twin's spirits and imprison them in his nightmarish underground prison.
- But most the most distressing one was when, trying to help the spirit of Madame Fate, they freed Alister Dalimar from Madame Fate's Crystal Ball in Fate's Carnival, something that will take four games to repair.
- In the very beginning of Singularity, the protagonist is dragged back in time and saves a Soviet scientist from a burning building. Not only does this advance a dangerous project far beyond where it would have gone, but the man becomes the game's primary antagonist and the ruthless dictator of the world.
- Even his attempt to fix what he'd broken breaks the world. If the player chooses the good ending and goes back in time to kill himself as he saves Demichev, he reawakens at the beginning of the game with his memories intact, and multiple clues indicate that the good scientist used his Time Manipulation Device to unite the world...under Soviet rule.
- Clive Barker's Undying: First Patrick discovers that, by using the Scythe, he's been unwittingly collecting the souls of the Covenant siblings for Jeremiah. When he tries to fix that by killing Jeremiah at the Standing Stones, he creates the necessary sacrifice to bring forth the Undying King. Oops.
- Rather, "Nice Job Breaking it, God" in Jericho. His first creation, before Adam and Eve, was a terrifying nightmare that was neither dark nor light, male nor female; embodying everything and nothing. So he decides he doesn't like it and throws it in the Abyss like an unwanted puppy. Naturally, it is unhappy with this and spends all of its existence trying to escape and wreak havoc.
- In Strife, you are given a choice of missions early on by the corrupt governor. One is to investigate and destroy a tap connected to the local power main. What you aren't told is that it's your La Résistance power tap which prevents the rebel base from being discovered. Blackbird, your Voice with an Internet Connection, is quite unhappy with you afterwards.
- Dead Space 2: In his attempts to survive the second necromorph outbreak, Isaac makes quite a mess... first they dig the codes out of Isaac's head to make a new marker, then he and Elie drive a giant drill though the originally necromorph-free government sector, then he takes down a barrier stopping them getting to the marker, triggering a convergence event, then due to massive damage, the main reactor overloads and explodes, destroying an entire city. Oh and this is the second time he's been the pawn of a manipulative marker.
- RPG Shooter: Starwish has a particularly large-scale one in its backstory. The plan was to briefly turn the star of an inhabited planet into a gateway, long enough to pull through another planet whose own star had been destroyed, saving the latter planet and its people. Instead, the star turned into a black hole, wiping out the former planet and everyone on it.
- A variant is attempted about two-thirds of the way through the game. It succeeds, but only afterward does the instigator realize this has released the Big Bad, who starts going after the planet she had been trying to return to all along. She is not happy about this.
- And then there's the main character's Be Careful What You Wish For, which is both smaller (a child's angry wish) and larger (motivates the Big Bad to destroy all sentient life).
- In Dungeons & Dragons Daggerdale, defeating the Big Bad Rezlus paves the way for your "ally" Nezra's Cyric loyalists to take over the tower. She is at least gracious enough to give you a chance to run.
- Albion. While looking for a guide to lead you to the passage that takes you to the Toronto, you have the option to break out a dangerous serial killer with a ridiculously bogus excuse for why she was locked up from prison. The first thing you find when returning to the city is a crying little girl whose mother was killed by an evil lady. There's a reason walkthroughs will ignore the prison.
- The Umajo Prison. Don't go there. Seriously, it's not worth it. Or if you're really so curious, whatever you do, do NOT free Nelly. Let the murderous bitch stay in her cell.
- The first half of Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando is spent chasing down a thief who stole an experiment from MegaCorp. Then, after that mission's accomplished, they then learn that the "experiment" is a blue, furry ball of ferocious death that Megacorp (which is unknowingly under the control of a comeback-obsessed Captain Qwark) plans on mass-selling across the galaxy. Oops, indeed.
- In The Orion Conspiracy, Devlin is forced to do this. He is being chased by a xenomorph, and he sets a trap in the engine. He lures the xenomorph onto an exposed power cable, only to find out that the xenomorph is too tough to be killed outright by electrocution, and that it was only stunned. So he ends up opening up fuel containers, making a Lampshade Hanging on how unsafe this is, spills liquid gas onto the xenomorph, and runs off, while the xenomorph ends up on fire and explodes. Unfortunately, Devlin finds out shortly afterwards that by doing this, he wrecked up the engines of the space station, and that the station is now in danger of falling into the black hole nearby. Now he has to fix this! Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, indeed!
- In The 3rd Birthday's ending, it was revealed that Eve Brea's desire to save her sister Aya from death caused her Overdive ability to awaken and took control of Aya's body to fend off the SWAT team. This caused Aya's soul to shatter and eventually creates the beings known as "Twisted". Eve's weakened body also gave birth to the "High Ones", whom will engage in a future doomsday war with the Twisted as well as humanity.
- In Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, it is Lara Croft herself who unwittingly releases the Egyptian god Set from his sarcophagus. Needless to say, he's not happy and bent on bringing about the apocalypse.
- Arc the Lad has one even earlier, in the first game. The token female character puts out a three-thousand-year-old flame that has been burning on a sacred mountain in order to escape an arranged marriage. We find out that this flame had been keeping the Big Bad's cage sealed away, which led to the entirety of this game and its sequel trying to recover and reseal this cage, called the Arc. In the end, they failed anyway and the Arc is destroyed.
- The Reconstruction. Dehl leaves Havan behind at the end of chapter 5, who then proceeds to slaughter the Watchers and take over the world. Dehl also allowed Havan to get the Chekhov's Gun that drove him to do that in the first place.
- Also, Tezkhra accidentally makes the final boss go One-Winged Angel.
- Dehl broke it before the game even started; he brought the Blue Plague to the mainland via Moke, though it did abruptly end the revolt, saving some lives...which were probably then taken by the Plague anyway.
- And Father Sikohlon broke it even before that by creating the Plague in the first place.
- L.A. Noire has one in Wham Episode, "Manifest Destiny". Cole cheats on his wife for Elsa. This is bad news because he gets suspended and demoted to Arson, thanks to Roy having followed him.
- Even more dramatically. His actions in World War II have started two things. Courtney getting jealous of his success that he is going to rob the US Coolridge for morphine, and Ira going crazy after he is ordered by Cole into burning the civilians in a cave.
- In the 2007 Conan game, the title character broke the seal statue that imprisons the Big Bad Graven at the beginning of the game and the hero has to stop him throughout the whole game.
- Red from Solatorobo tries to stop a gang of sky pirates stealing a warehouse in a sidequest (not the cargo of a warehouse but literally the entire building), but he completely forgets that destroying the air ship using explosives would be counter productive.
- You release a girl from a dungeon in Fantasy Quest, thinking her the princess you're seeking. You quickly learn that you're wrong, but later info reveals that she's actually a mass murderer. She was in PRISON after all...
- In Fable, specifically in the lost chapters version, at the end of the game the player must collect several souls in order to open the way to the final boss Jack of Blades, whose true form is revealed to be a huge dragon, which you must defeat. Sounds like a good idea, right? However, killing the final boss is in fact completely unnecessary, as even Jack states that he would remain sealed up and never able to escape if the player had never opened up the path to him in the first place.
- Given that unless he is killed he will still be free to screw the world up through his mask, even if you didn't free him, he would still be out there causing suffering to everyone.
- In Fable III after you defeat Logan and take the crown, you then discover that he was actually being such a tyrant so as to protect the kingdom from a much larger threat in The Crawler.
- In Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2, you can toss around huge explosive effects that, in the series the game is based off of, are capable of destroying the planet. Consequently, if you hit your opponent with one while they are standing on the ground (or if you miss them entirely), you are treated to a lovely cutscene of the Earth (or Namek, if that's where you are fighting) getting hit by your planet-killer attack, and the rest of the battle is fought on the surface of your dying world complete with fire and earthquakes. Nice job breaking it. Although, as this is an on-the-rails fighting game, the planet will be back to normal in the next stage.
- In Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, if you complete all the three objectives, you prevent World War I and the rise of Nazism and Communism. If you complete just one or two, you make the world much worse, with either Nazis or Communists taking over Europe.
- In AdventureQuest, your character unknowingly sets the tyrant King Awethur free from his imprisonment in one quest. One of the NPCs even says "Nice job fixing it, hero."
- In The Last Stand: Union City, the game ends with you and Jack and Co. blasting open the wall into the last uninfected area in the city. A unstoppable horde follows quickly. To make matters worse, you actually have to kill some of the defenders on the way in, basically ensuring the entire base will be killed.
- The aim of Lollipop Chainsaw is to defeat all of the Dark Purveyors and stop the Big Bad before he can perform his sacrificial ritual, right? Well, how's this for a twist? The sacrifice turns out to be the Dark Purveyors that you kill, as well as the Big Bad blowing his own head off in order to offer himself as the final sacrifice for opening the gate between Earth and Rotten World, allowing Killabilly to cross over. Damn.
- In the Valkyrie DLC for the iOS game Galaxy on Fire II, your character Keith Maxwell is hired by a mysterious woman named Alice to do various tasks for her, paying you huge amounts of money for them. Eventually, however, you realize that she's actually the sister of your Love Interest Carla, who wants to steal Khador's instantaneous FTL drive and sell it as her own invention. So, Keith decides to go to Alice's Space Station and confront her about it. He ends up letting it slip that he has a Khador Drive on-board his ship. Alice quickly confiscates it, as well as the coordinates of the Deep Science space station (where Khador's lab is located), which she plans to destroy to remove any competition. Oops.
- Overlaps with Evil Is Not a Toy in Immortal Souls. At one point, the lead heroic vampire character finds himself having to escape from a base full of fellow shadow creatures that the Hero Antagonist Templars also captured to study. He decides to free them, thinking they'll help distract the Templars. Which they do... but they also attack him, as it turns out they're too evil/mindless to be grateful or even care. Oh, and they also go back to attacking the normal humans which the Templars were partly trying to protect by capturing the monsters. Well, whoops. The Templar leader even asks, "Are you happy now?"
- In Kid Icarus: Uprising, Pit and Palutena end up doing this twice:
- First, in chapter 10, "The Wish Seed", they kill the Phoenix, thus allowing Hades to set his master plan in action by tricking the humans into going to war.
- Then, in chapter 13, "The Lunar Sanctum", they destroy the titular Lunar Sanctum. It isn't until several chapters later that it's revealed that the Lunar Sanctum was actually a prison for the Chaos Kin, and Pit's attack allowed the creature to escape, after which it possesses Palutena, nearly eats her soul, and traps Pit's soul in a ring for three years while the whole world goes to Hell.
- In one of the chapters of Heroes Chronicles, the "hero", Gelu, goes out to destroy the Sword of Frost with the Armageddon's Blade. However, doing so will destroy the world, so it's up to the player character to find the Sword before Gelu does. At the end of the chapter, you find out that Kija, a barbarian who wants to give said weapon to her husband Kilgor, got to it first and took it. Guess what happens next.
- To be more exact, Gelu is entirely correct in that the Sword of Frost can be destroyed by Armageddon's Blade. His mistake is in assuming that it is as easy as that, rather than the complex ritual it actually requires if you want to avoid the world-destroying consequence.
- In Divine Divinity, the Divine One defeats the Demon of Lies but fails to prevent him from summoning the soul of his God of Evil incarnated in an infant boy. The Divine One couldn't bring himself to kill an innocent baby and he tried to raise the boy Damian as his son. Tragically, the sequels show that it didn't work out. Worse, even after the Divine One realized Damian was evil, he could not bring himself to kill him. The world suffered because the Divine One couldn't help but think of Damian as his son.
- Spec Ops: The Line could very well be called "Nice Job Breaking It Hero: The Game". Throughout the game, everything that protagonist Captain Martin Walker does makes absolutely everything worse. In his attempts to be a hero, Walker massacres countless American soldiers, launches a white phosphorus mortar strike on enemies and civilians alike with horrific results, and destroys the water supply of Dubai, condemning the entire city and all its people to a slow death. By the end of the game, he is bluntly told that everything would have been better if he had just stopped.
- In The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes breaks Master Poisoner Schielman out of prison in order to properly interrogate him about the Hate Plague poison...only for Moriarty's men to pick him up before he gets a chance to. Whoops.
- In Saints Row IV, the alien villain drops the protagonist into a simulation, warning him/her that he will destroy the earth should he/she escape. He/she does. He does. Congratulations.
- This action actually turns into a bizarre double case of "Nice Job Breaking It, Hero" and "Nice Job Fixing It, Villain", as the villain following through on his threat is explicitly cited by the game's narration as what drives the Saints to ultimately and utterly defeat him. Had he not, pragmatism would have led the Saints to eventually take their partial victory and leave it there.
- Most of Awakening 5: The Sunhook Spire involves freeing the enchantress trapped within the title building, which is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier — only to discover that the enchantress erected the barrier herself in order to prevent the goblin villain's warships from landing on the Spire.
- In the backstory to Sword of the Stars, mankind's fervent counterattack on the Hivers, who were then in an interregnum and broken up into mutually hostile clans, led to them becoming a united force once again.
- In Quest Fantasy, this is one of the main themes. HERO's mission given to him by the king led to bringing the S O U L into this world, and the game guilt trips you for this immensely, but the prequels reveal that several other protagonists also inadvertently set up his arrival.
- The hero party in Dead Island needs to find food for some of the remaining outposts of survivors, and the best place to get large quantities of food is the supermarket, but it's been taken over by bandits who have barricaded themselves inside. A sewer tunnel connects one of the outposts to the supermarket and is the only way in, and the only way to get the guard of that entrance to let them pass is to give him alcohol. In hindsight, maybe letting the only guard on duty get drunk was a colossally stupid idea.
- Everything bad that happens after New Guy's first night in South Park in South Park: The Stick of Truth is the New Guy's fault for crashing the UFO and getting the toxic sludge that turns living things into Nazi zombies all over the town. Had he just taken the Anal Probing like everybody else, none of this would've happened.
- In the Bring the Crunch DLC for South Park: The Fractured but Whole, after defeating the alien warrior and the possessed Nathan and Mimsy, Mintberry Crunch reveals the alien actually had a very good reason for going after him. The alien, and his whole family, are all escaped cotton slaves of Mintberry's. Mintberry, seemingly oblivious to how wrong what he did was, leaves, leaving the rest of the team to realise they just killed a slave who simply wanted freedom.
- Rolf's actions in Phantasy Star II end up the case of doing things too well they go out of control.
- The team comes up with an idea to put a veil on a kidnapped girl named Tiem to protect her until they deliver the girl to her father (a serial killer with a Freudian Excuse), just to have her killed by the man himself because he doesn't recognize it is her under the veil.
- The team investigates the Climate Control Center to prevent a drought caused by a system malfunction. They kill the controller unit, Neifirst, causing the water level to overflow the lake and almost flood the entire planet.
- The team defeats Mother Brain, the sole control of Motavia's evolution, to save Motavia from technological domination over men. As the result, they causes the "Great Collapse", which, as described in Phantasy Star IV, the disaster which wipes out 90% of humanity and completely annihilates their civilization and environment. Ouch.
- In the obscure iOS game Hack RUN, you end up repelling an alien race that was trying to enslave mankind. Too bad that in the process, you attract a different alien race that will probably destroy mankind once it reaches Earth. Oops.
- The first set of missions in Gunpoint has you delete the security footage that shows you were present at the scene of a murder. When you're done with that, the resident Woobie will request that you prove that she did not commit said murder. Here's the thing: The only proof that she was not the only one at the crime scene has been destroyed. By you. And then she commits suicide because she doesn't want to be a burden.
- Undertale:
- In the True Pacifist ending, Flowey flat-out tells you it's your fault he's stealing everyone's souls, because you making friends with everyone moved them to assemble to help you against Asgore.
- The Genocide route's Final Boss, twice over.
- On a meta level, Sans makes your boss fight against him unfairly difficult, explicitly in hopes of making you Rage Quit and hopefully reset to try for a different, less murder-y outcome. Instead, the fight's reputation as the most difficult one in the game got many fans interested enough to give it a go, and since Sans won't fight you unless you've killed everyone else in the Underground, it resulted in many more Genocide runs than would've happened if so many players didn't want to fight Sans.
- In-Universe, the explanation for why the Final Boss doesn't just fight you earlier is at least in part because Sans wants to honor The Promise he made to Toriel (which he'll explain in non-Genocide routes), and hopes you'll back down before he needs to deal with you. All this accomplishes is giving you free rein to slaughter more monsters of the Underground and becoming far more powerful by endgame, meaning more lives were lost that could've been evacuated with the others, Sans ends up breaking that promise anyway, and if you beat him, you're now strong enough to kill him and the other two route's final bosses without effort before bringing about the destruction of the timeline Sans had predicted and been trying to stop. On non-Genocide endings that still have a high body count and include Papyrus among those killed, Sans will blame himself for not taking action to stop you.
- In A Witch's Tale, Liddell releases the Eld Witch, an evil being who was sealed away by Queen Alice thousands of years ago.
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction, the ritual to revive Reshef involves sacrificing the spirits and negative energies of defeated duelists. Meaning all those duels you fought in the game were helping him... as well as the duels you likely lost to get that far.
- In The Witch and the Hundred Knight, Metallia's quest to destroy all Pillars of Temperance to free the swamp within so that she can travel without risking her health is at the expense of the entire world because she is unknowingly assisting the big bad Niike in its resurrection since it relies on the swamp for its revival.
- In Tomodachi Life, if you allow a marriage between two Miis to reach critically low levels thanks to the Random Number God, one of the two Miis of that couple will suddenly (and completely out of nowhere) go "Things aren't going so great between me and (sweetheart/spouse)..." implying they want a divorce. If they do divorce, both the Mii that requested the divorce and his/her former spouse instantly gain a very large bar of sadness, and their house is demolished, forcing them to premaritally move back into their apartments, leaving an awkward gap in the houses of Mii Homes.
- In Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, Wilfre openly tells the villagers that if they restore color to the world and defeat him, all Raposa will die. Of course Mari decides to do just that anyway, and the world of Raposa ends up being destroyed.
- Of course this might actually be for the better, as it implies that Mike wakes up from his coma. Of course, it could also mean he dies. Sequels might tell which one it is.
- In Dark Souls, an undead's will is only as strong as their drive to whatever they aspire to, and this drive is what keeps them from hollowing out. Thus in both Dark Souls 1 and 2, it's possible to help an NPC side-quest, perfectly well-intentioned in the act... and the fact that you just helped finish their Ghostly Goals meant they had nothing left attaching them to their human life, causing them to go hollow and necessitating killing them in self-defense, whoops.
- In Back to the Future: The Game, Marty does it again. In 1931, he delivers a subpoena to Arthur, his grandfather to produce evidences for the investigation on Kid Tannen, his Jerkass Bad Boss. This gets Arthur killed and throws Marty's existence into jeopardy.
- He goes back to the past, saves Arthur and tells him to keep a low profile. This prevents Kid Tannen from getting ever arrested (Arthur was supposed to play a great part in it.)
- Marty goes to the day Kid was supposed to be arrested and, thanks to Edna Strickland, young Doc and Arthur, he's finally arrested. This makes accidentally Edna and young Emmett fall for each other, preventing the events of the movies from ever happening.
- After beating Isa & Kachi in Sin and Punishment: Star Successor, it becomes quite clear that you helped Achi, the villain of first game, by killing her opposition!
- In Stellaris, messing around with certain late-game technologies like jump drives and sentient AI can have truly disastrous consequences for the rest of the galaxy. It's precisely for this reason that it could potentially cause Fallen Empires to take notice.
- Uplifting a primitive species with the "Militarist" and/or "Xenophobe" ethics is also something that could quite easily come back and bite you in the ass. Alternatively, attempting to sneakily annex a primitive civilization in their Atomic Age could result in your spies screwing up and triggering World War III.
- Speaking of primitive civilizations, the "First Contact" expansion added a random event where a pre-FTL society you're spying on discovers a species of hyperintelligent mollusks that slowly begin turning them into a Hive Mind. You can choose to intervene and save their free will by introducing a bioweapon targeting the parasites, but there's a small chance it can jump species and begin devastating the people you were trying to save. This can work in your favor however, as if you choose to aid them through the plague and they survive they begin to see your empire as their messiahs.
- Bravely Default in spades. The main characters set out to awaken the four crystals across the world in hopes to stop a great catastrophe from happening. Turns out doing that CAUSES said catastrophe as awakening each crystal chains the world to the last. The party awakens several different worlds, allowing the big bad to show up and destroy all the worlds one by one.
- Legend of Mana might as well be called 'Unintended Consequences: The Game'. For example: In the Jumi storyline, the player character's actions directly allow Sandra to steal almost all the Jumi cores she needs to summon the Giant Space Whale From Nowhere which has simply wanted to ascend all along. Sandra thought that it would create a Teardrop Crystal. Nyooope. Thankfully, the final twist lets the player get away with it.
- One Chance has this as the premise. You assume the control of John Pilgrim, who had created a pathogen that wipes out cancer by eating the affected cells. Problem is, that the pathogen instead starts to wipe out every cell on the planet and causing mass extinction.
- In Chapter 13 of Project X Zone 2, you find yourself at the Fetus of God and start hearing a voice calling for help and has only 8 minutes before he's absorbed into the dimension. Upon freeing the captive, it turns out to be none other than Lord Raptor, who had nothing left but a head after his defeat in the first game.
- Xenoblade Chronicles:
- Xenoblade Chronicles 1: You know Zanza? The nice giant who unlocked the Monado's power to enable you to hurt Faced Mechon? Turns out that wasn't really him, but Arglas, who Zanza was possessing. Arglas used to be a good friend of Egil, a Machina of the Mechonis. However, when Arglas found the Monado, Zanza took control of him and used his body in order to wage war against the Mechonis. Later, you find out that Zanza habitually and cyclically exterminates all life in order to recreate the world they live in for his own personal gain so he can remain a god.
- An early story beat in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 involves Rex knocking down a water tower in Torigoth to neutralize Morag and Brighid's fire powers and make their escape. Talking to people around Torigoth later on shows that many of them are angry about the damage done and how hard it makes to get water, and one sidequest even sees the people of Torigoth attacking the party for how much harder it's made their lives.
- In the backstory of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Future Redeemed, Shulk uses Alvis's Core Crystal as a battery for Origin, a joint project by Melia and Nia to fix what remained of Bionis after Zanza's defeat and Alrest, Rex's homeworld, by separating them after the Intersection fused them together. Unfortunately for Shulk, Melia, and Nia, the people of both worlds liked the fused world since they could be together forever and ever, creating Z and the Moebius, from their fears of the fused world, Aionios, going gone.
- inFAMOUS 2: During an attack on the Militia, Cole rescues Kuo from a hidden underground chamber, where she was transformed into an Artificial Conduit. He uses his powers to free her from her bonds, but in doing so, he awakened the now superpowered Vermaak 88, causing them to break out and run rampant around New Marais. And as he rode the elevator with Kuo in his arms, Cole wonders if he had overdone it a bit.
- Bayonetta ends with the destruction of the Right Eye of the World as it used to revive Jubileus, the creator. In Bayonetta 2 we discover that while destroying the Right Eye was needed to destroy Jubileus, it upset the light and darkness because the right eye controls all the light in the mortal world, and without it, demons are free to wreck havoc. Nice going, Bayonetta. The destruction of the Right Eye is later corrected when the past version Father Balder, the villain from the first game, who turns out was good all along is brought to the present day. And since he is the physical manifestation of the Right Eye, balance is briefly restored. However, Loptr needs both the Right Eye, and Left Eye to fulfill his plans. So Loki destroys the two eyes and gives their power to humanity, maintaining the balance.
- In the Homeworld series, it's heavily implied that the only thing holding back the Vaygr was the Taiidan Empire. Then the Kushan had to go and kill The Emperor, while La Résistance blew up the cloning facilities, destroying the Emperor's DNA samples and preventing any possibility of a legitimate heir to be grown. The Empire collapses, and, a century later, the remains of the Taiidani are absorbed into the Vaygr Armada.
- At the end of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, the XCOM manages to topple the Outsider Empire in The '60s. Fast-forward five decades, and the resulting power vacuum has allowed an even worse enemy to grow, expand, and, eventually, attack Earth in XCOM: Enemy Unknown and, canonically, win and enslave humanity.
- Happens to the titular character himself in Cuphead: Thanks to his greed for the Devil's treasure and making a wager for his and his brother Mugman's souls by playing a game of Craps against the Devil himself (in spite of his brother's warnings not to) and losing, they plead for their lives to be spared and are being forced to do his bidding by collecting the Soul Contracts of those who lost to him. Cuphead is truly the one who got them in a pickle in the first place. Although his brother Mugman was willing to gamble in the Devil's casino at first, he only stopped upon realizing the dangers of taking the Devil's gamble, though it was too late by that time. Though if it weren't for that, the brothers wouldn't have been able to collect the Soul Contracts which would let them get close to the Devil, beat the ever-loving tar out of him, then burn all the contracts and free the Inkwell Isle residents from eternal servitude to the Devil.
- Randal's Monday: Randal is directly at fault for everything that happens in this game, including Sally becoming evil.
- In Environmental Station Alpha, the researchers send a robot to prevent loss of human life in a place they cannot communicate to, but it just happens that the cause of the station's disaster is a virus capable of infecting all technology, who is able to take control of the robot and use it against mankind.
- Text-based H-Game Corruption of Champions has one in the "Demon Factory" dungeon, a factory spreading The Corruption to the entire region. When you reach its controls, the two good choices are to either stop the building, or blow it up. Turning the controls off stops the corruption, but you get a warning that demosn could easily come back and restart the factory. Blowing it up... flood the surrounding lake with all The Corruption that was inside the factory, effectively instantly corrupting it. This prevents the factory from being restarted later, but it also means that the goddess who was hiding there (the lake being her last refuge) has now been corrupted into becoming a demon thanks to you. Which was the whole reason the demons had built the factory there in the first place.
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III has Rean trying to put the Divine Beast of the Earth, the Nameless One, to sleep to ruin the bad guys plans for it. Instead, he manages to kill the Final Boss in his rage which was the only reason why the curse of Erebonia hasn't spread throughout the empire. End result: everyone wants to go to war against Calvard. As a bonus, the bad guys captures him after he exhausts himself plus he's now suffering amnesia from the curse unleashed by said beast.
- Assassin's Creed Origins: At the end of the game, Amunet and Brutus kill Julius Caesar. The end result? Civil war, followed by the rise of Augustus and the creation of the Roman Empire.
- LEGO Marvel Superheroes 2: Team Thor run into Man-Thing and fight it, accidentally destroying the Nexus of All Realities it was guarding, and allowing Kang to finish making Chronopolis.
- The actions of the crew's heist on No Mercy hospital in PAYDAY: The Heist rears its ugly head in PAYDAY 2 five years later after the sequel was launched. The crew has gotten so infamous that a mysterious group they cross paths with kidnap Bain. By the time you rescue him, he passes out from his injuries he gotten from his torture and Lock reveals that the man has a virus that is killing him. Said virus is the exact same one that the crew stole from the first game for the group that caused the whole mess in the sequel. Chains notes that he didn't like the whole deal to begin with since Bain wanted a mysterious book his contact had.
- In Until Dawn, Mike refused to believe Josh's insistence that he had nothing to do with Jessica's disappearance/death. Though considering Josh had just revealed he was the Psycho, putting Sam, Chris and Ashley through several traumatizing "pranks", it's understandable why Mike wouldn't believe him. He tied Josh up in the shed and left him there alone when he ran back to the lodge to check on the others. This would lead to the Wendigos capturing Josh, who has the cable keys. Mike would then leave the group to get the cable keys to leave the mountain, which in turn, would cause the others to chase after him, putting everyone in danger and potentially causing the deaths of some. Mike's actions also had the unintended consequence of resulting in Josh to either being killed by his own sister or transform into a Wendigo.
- The whole mess behind Resident Evil 2 could have been prevented if the Umbrella soldiers didn't shoot William Birkin or had actually killed him instantly. Instead, they mortally wound him, grab the G-Virus samples, and bail while William is Not Quite Dead and uses the last of his strength to inject himself with the G-Virus to revitalize his body. The remake keeps the scene in and adds another part where Anette clearly saw William inject himself with the virus. Instead of killing her husband, she is unable to bring herself to kill him since she still loved him. In both cases, William mutates into a horrible monster that helped spread the virus across the city.
- The original backstory of Toontown Online involved Scrooge McDuck ordering Gyro Gearloose to create the Cogs, who are accidentally activated while their AI programming is not yet ready, causing them to start replicating themselves out of control and take over ToonTown.
- Valkyria Chronicles 4 provides a devasating example of this. In Chapter 7, while moving towards the rendezvous through the cold, one of the soldiers notice a path leading to an Imperial supply depot which connects to Gallia. Claude then decides that they should sabotage it to slow the amount of supplies going towards the force invading the small country. They do succeed in their mission, but as they find out, it comes with a very steep price. They arrive at the rendezvous, only to see a majority of the Federation Army had been wiped out by the Imperial forces, with Squad F among the list of casualties. Minerva spends a good amount of time holding it against Claude, and the latter doesn't even try to deny it.
- Invoked in Gradius IV. At the end, when you defeat Gofer, he proudly states that your defeat will cause his body to break up into pieces and spread throughout the universe, and that each of these pieces will be reborn into a new incarnation of him, and gloats that one day, you'll regret killing him in the first place. However, this is never explicitly followed up on at any other point in the series.
- The page quote hails from Star Trek Online. In the mission storyline "Cold War", the player Captain (no matter if they're Federation, Klingon, Romulan or Jem'Hadar) try to race the Breen commander Thot Trel from finding the Preserver Archive, which is rumored to have dangerous weapons. He ends up following the Captain around as he solves the puzzles and points out where the Archive is. The page quote is him mocking you with this trope! Hilariously, it's all for naught - the Archive is just pretty much a library. No weapons of all. Trel doesn't take this well at all.
- The storyline "Klingon Civil War" is caused by this: The player character and J'Ula are framed by Chancellor J'mpok in unleashing a superweapon at Khitomer. The two of you discover evidence and present it to the Klingons to prove your innocence. You do just that, but now the Klingons don't trust J'Ula OR J'mpok, so they go on their own and J'mpok dissolves the Great Houses to claim himself the one true Emperor of the Klingon Empire.
- The King of Fighters: In XIII, Ash manages to stop Saiki and save the world by erasing himself (and by extension Saiki, who was occupying his body at the time) from existence via Cosmic Retcon. Then it's revealed that this broke the space-time continuum and created the Big Bad of XIV, Verse.
- Verse becomes a recursive example in XV, where it's revealed that its defeat at the hands of Shun'ei released all of the souls inside it, consequently bringing their owners Back from the Dead. Among them are newcomer Dolores and the aforementoned Ash. What makes it this trope then? Well, Yashiro, Shermie and Chris were brought back as well, as were Orochi (albeit as a spirit, and he was thankfully sealed away prior to the events of XV) and Rugal Bernstein (in his Omega Rugal form, no less). As if all this wasn't bad enough, the endings for Team Awakened Orochi and Team Samurai respectively confirm that Goenitz and Mizuki Rashojin were also resurrected by Verse's defeat, and it's implied that the same happened to Krizalid and Igniz.
- Rise of the Third Power:
- The Resistance kidnaps Arielle in order to show her evidence of the Arkadyan Empire's treachery and have her report back to Cirinthia. This makes it easier for the Arkadyan Empire to frame them for the Cirinthian royal family's assassination.
- Arielle rarely appears in public and just does the bare minimum for her royal duties, which makes it harder to her to reclaim the throne after Arkadya has most of her family assassinated.
- Natasha and Aden insist on blowing up Selene's ships to secure their escape, despite Rowan insisting that doing so goes against the pirate code. This causes Selene to escalate her own tactics to the point of threatening to bombard Angelico just to force Rowan to confront her.
- Wonderland Adventures: Mysteries of Fire Island
- At the end of the game, the heroes have found what they belive to be the Star Key and have returned to Wonderland and activated what they think is the Sky Machine. Immediatly, the Ice Trolls arrive and reveal the reason they have been attacking the heroes the entire game. It turns out that the fake Sky Machine was a device left by the evil Z-Bots before they were exiled to their home planet. The fake Sky Machine would transmit the coordinates of Wonderland to the Z-Bots, leading them to invade Wonderland.
- During the Episode Eve event of A Nightmare in Evermore for Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds, your player character meets a young girl who wants their help handing out candy to the little kids of Evermore. Come the actual event, you find out that the young girl was the "Dream Witch" and the "candy" was actually dream seeds which have sent the kids into dreams that will never end if you don't enter the dreams and wake them.
- Densetsu no Stafy: Starfy himself is the one responsible for setting Ogura, the game's main antagonist, loose at the start of the game, by accidentally dropping his jar into the ocean. And, just before the New Game Plus, doing it again!
- The New Order Last Days Of Europe: A United States player who gets George Wallace elected President is presented with a wide array of social initiatives. Most of them are inarguably racist, ultimately calling for permanent nationwide segregation. It's possible, however, to ignore all of those and focus on social initiatives that move towards inevitable integration. While this is the right thing to do on its own, doing this pisses off the racist elements of the right wing, causing them to throw their lots in with the Yockeys. If not handled carefully, taking this path can lead to the worst possible results for the United States.
- Grey Area (2023): The route to the hidden ending has Hailey destroy the Goddess of Ichor's Orb... then learn it was actually the anchor holding reality together. Even after collecting all of the pieces, this doesn't fully restore everything to normal, as her mom turns into a monstrous figure, making this a case of Earn Your Bad Ending.
- God of War:
- Opening Pandora's Box to kill Ares also resulted in the other gods getting infected by their evils, with Zeus becoming a paranoid and ruthless wreck dedicated to keep his throne by all means necessary, and Athena masterminding the destruction of the Greek Pantheon to rule as its sole goddess.
- God of War III: Kratos's pursuit of revenge brought forth the apocalypse with the near-destruction of the Greek Realm with the deaths of the Gods unleashing natural disasters they had been holding back.
- God of War (PS4): Kratos hid his heritage out of shame of what he did to Greece, but unfortunately for his son Atreus, it meant that he was unaware of his godly status and ended up falling sick due to not realizing his true nature.
- Ghostbusters (1990) for the Sega Genesis has the group reassemble a tablet and place a gem in the center before decoding the tablet, opening a Hellgate in the center of the city that leads to the World of Evil. The Mayor begs the Ghostbusters to solve the problem, and they accept, while quietly agreeing to not mention how they were the reason the hole appeared in the first place.
- Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: The detectives were sent to Kanai Ward to solve the overarching mystery of "Kanai Ward's Ultimate Secret" and the "Great Global Mystery" under the orders of Number One of the WDO. This is what Makoto Kagutsuchi, the Big Bad, wanted the titular Master Detectives to do in truth, as he was actually using them as part of his agenda to overthrow Yomi Hellsmile of the Amaterasu Corporation Peacekeepers, and after they all oppose Yomi in one way or another, Yakou's murder of Dr. Huesca eventually seals everyone's fates when Makoto is given that opportunity thanks to Makoto and Yomi's scheming, in turn leading Makoto to dispose of the detectives after they're no longer useful to his other goal of killing and replacing the true Number One of the WDO (Yuma Kokohead), as Makoto is actually his clone.
- One side quest in Yakuza 0 implies that Goro Majima helped cause The Lost Decade after he had a talk with a politician about taxation policy.
- Nobody Saves the World: The reason The Calamity is present in the first place is because Nostramagus wanted to test out his new wand and, unsatisfied with merely killing were-slimes with it, summoned The Calamity with the Dragon Lord's Tome. This backfired immediately, with The Calamity taking Nostramagus' body and memories, and it would have also taken his life if not for Astrolabus's Heroic Sacrifice.
- Miasma Chronicles: After you defeat Quendyl Zen, he says that you have ruined everything, because he was going to purge the Miasma. This is not in line with his previous actions.
