No Body Left Behind / Video Games

As a Death Trope, this naturally involves spoilers.

Times where no body is left behind after death in Video Games.

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• Alan Wake: The Taken dissolve when they're killed. Alan gets freaked out by it.
• Alone in the Dark: In the original trilogy, defeated monsters dissolve into bubbles(or maybe it's 3D smoke).
• Arknights: People infected with Oripathy dissolve into active Originium dust upon death, which means dead Infected are a biohazard threat and requires containment or cremation to destroy the Originium in their bodies. The fate of dead Infected came up multiple times during events — most notably during the Rainbow Six Siege collab event "Operation Originium Dust" where Team Rainbow witness Doctor Miarow's body dissolving after the Rhodes Island team sealed it inside a building.
• Baldur's Gate averts this trope. Everything you kill lies there dead for the rest of the game, unless you killed it in some way that doesn't leave a body (e.g. vaporizing zombies with your enchanted mace). It is played straight in cutscenes with the Bhaalspawn (including your very character and the Big Bad), because their essence gets back to Bhaal, and their body is seen getting pulverized like in a Thanos snap. This leaves the room open for a major plot hole in the sequel though: Imoen is retconned into a Bhaalspawn too, but she can die normally and even get resurrected like every other character.
• Billy Blade and the Temple of Time: Any enemy that Billy defeats will fall to the ground and fade from existence shortly after.
• Chrono Trigger: To emphasize that he is Deader than Dead, Crono, the main character, is utterly vaporized by an attack by Lavos in the Ocean Palace of 12,000 B.C. The first immediately available sidequest involves Tricked Out Time to save him, in which a large doll in his image is substituted for the real thing right at the moment of death.
• Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly:
  • Semi-spiritual beings such as fairies don't leave behind bodies when they die. Instead, they may leave specific land-markers. The dead hawthorn tree that was uprooted in January 2023 was the "body" of the fairy that was killed by a drunk driver in 1959, but since it wasn't legally classified as a "remains", the witnesses couldn't prove that there was a body. The case was dismissed on the grounds of that and the victim being a "transient", or an unregistered citizen or "uncategorizable" being at the time..
  • Other semi-spiritual beings such as banshees can't leave land-markers, so they simply disappear instead.
• Tank and vehicle hulls in Company of Heroes stick around a good long while if they're not hit by more explosions or crushed by heavy tanks, and actually present cover for infantry to use. The Panzer Elite can use repair vehicles to get any Axis tanks back in action so long as the hull remains mostly intact too. Infantry also tend to take a while to fade, and can be 'rescued' by Medics from a Bunker to form a new squad.
• Played particularly bizarrely in The Conduit, where the enemies visibly dissolve or incinerate shortly after death — something that obviously should have an in-universe reason, as opposed to just disappearing because of engine limitations — but no-one bothers to comment it.
• Averted in Counter-Strike, as bodies of players who are killed remain on the map for the remainder of the map, and in the Counter-Strike Source are ragdolled and can be moved around by explosions.
• Crescent Prism: After the battle with Count Chroma in Chapter 1, Count Chroma and Astrid are nowhere to be found. However, Count Chroma is still alive after the time skip, making Astrid's fate ambiguous.
• In Crysis, the final function of the nanosuit involves completely incinerating itself and the downed user (your character or one of his similarly-equipped Red Shirt colleagues) from the inside out to assure enemy forces aren't able to capture information from their corpse. Nifty. The Aliens do this too, their machines always self-destruct.
• Averted in Dawn of War, partially because the Necrons can re-use their corpses.
• Destroy All Humans! gives us the disintegrator ray and the Ion Detonator.
• Diablo averts the trope: not only do corpses stay behind, the bodies of acid/poison spitters can continue to damage you if you stand on them.
  • In the sequels, there are certain techniques that destroy bodies, which is important because some enemy summoners can resurrect them.
  • Some enemies (like the Maw Beasts in Diablo II) eat and spit corpses on you.
• One of the abilities the players can gain in Dishonored is "Shadow Kill", which disintegrates the corpses of people you kill. The game also plays the trope straight in the usual way, in that bodies disappear after a while - which is noteworthy because hiding bodies is an important part of gameplay when playing stealthily. It can become extremely unnerving when a carefully-hidden unconscious body is suddenly gone on a subsequent visit to its hiding place, leaving the player wondering if someone found the body and woke that person up, or questioning their memory of hiding a body there in the first place.
• Doom:
  • Averted in the first two games, where corpses remain as 2D textures, but played straight in Doom 64 and the Game Boy Advance ports, due to performance reasons.
  • Doom³: Only demons burn away when they die. Zombies are left behind, unless you splatter them. Then they’ll disappear.
• Averted in Dragon Age: Origins, once you kill someone/something their corpse/skeleton will lay in the place you killed them for the rest of the game. Except for Abominations, they explode after you kill them, and Rage Demons and Shades, they disappear somewhere. Played straight in Dragon Age II, though.
• In Dragon's Dogma, the corpses of non-human enemies rot if you left them for a while, large enemies would decay and melt into a pile of bones. Corpses of humanoid enemies disappear instead of rotting however. The Dark Arisen expansion turns this as a gameplay mechanic, the corpses of enemies in Bitterblack Isles rot into piles of remains which stay on screen, and they allure various Necrophagus Creatures, including Death himself.
• In The Elder Scrolls series, this is the case for some vampire bloodlines. When slain, their bodies will turn to ash, which can then be collected as a valuable alchemical ingredient. This ash can even be collected off of some vampires who do leave a body behind.
• Spaceship wrecks in EVE Online last for about two hours before vanishing.
• The first few Fallout games averted this in that corpses tended to stick around for several days unless the player managed to obliterate their opponent with certain energy weapons. After the corpses decay/presumably are eaten a pool of blood remains on the spot. Generally the blood pools disappeared after some days but those that did not sometimes hid useful items.
  • In the Anchorage Reclamation simulation in the Fallout 3 DLC Operation: Anchorage, corpses disappear in blue static a few seconds after death, preventing the player from looting bodies.
  • During the ambush at the end of the Lonesome Road DLC in Fallout: New Vegas, the Marked Men always melt into goo after being killed (as when killed with a plasma weapon), to prevent memory overusage from too many corpses in the room.
• Averted in Far Cry 2, corpses tend to stick around until you leave the area far behind; then the area resets, removing corpses, replenishing supplies and guards, etc. The most obvious handwave is that the next patrol comes by, cleans up, and calls in reinforcements to restock the place, though you never see this happening. The game would quickly become super easy if everything you destroyed stayed destroyed.
• Final Fantasy:
  • This is common with character deaths in earlier Final Fantasy titles, such as with the deaths of Scott and Josef in Final Fantasy II and also with Galuf in Final Fantasy V.
  • Nonhuman enemies in Final Fantasy X collapse into pyreflies (supernatural firefly-like insects) when slain. This is because they're the souls of people not given proper burial rites. Machines explode, but their parts and human enemies are subject to Everything Fades.
• Fuga: Melodies of Steel runs with this whenever the Soul Cannon is used. During the tutorial, the Voice on the Radio states that whoever enters the chamber to power the Soul Cannon will "fade away", and the only thing left of their existence is a Tragic Keepsake you can pick up for extra experience points proportionate to the sacrificed child's level. The manga adaptation goes into gruesome details on not only how the Bio-Energy is extracted from the child in order to power the Soul Cannon, but also the amount of brutality needed for this trope to occur, as the sacrificed child is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice multiple times in quick succession while the chamber itself is heated to temperatures hot enough to eviscerate skin and bone. And it's not quick, painless, or clean either, as the entire chamber and everything surrounding it is coated in the blood of its victim.
• Giants: Citizen Kabuto handwaves this trope by revealing that the planet you're on is host to an extremely ravenous race of scavengers who live underground, constantly awaiting fresh meat: Killing enemies greets you with the sight of hundreds of them popping up all around the newly formed corpse and rapidly devouring it before vanishing back underground, leaving only a bloodstain and a power-up.
• Golden Axe is possibly the oldest game that doesn't do this: in the arcade version, every enemy you defeat fades to gray and remains on the floor like that. In most ports, however, the enemies do disappear, probably because of memory constraints.
• In Halo, this is a regular hazard with human space travel. Even when a slipspace drive is offline, nearby items and people run the risk of simply disappearing. And when the drive is active, ships have a chance of going into slipspace and never returning.
• The Haunted Ruins: Defeated enemies pop, with a popping sound, and turns into a puff of white smoke that fades away.
• Heaven Dust: Any zombie you kill in the game sinks into the ground after a while.
• If the Final Boss of Iji is allowed to charge his ultimate attack, a Wave-Motion Gun normally mounted on spaceships, he'll stomp the ground to pop you into the air before firing. If this hits, Iji's injury cry is suddenly cut short as she's hit with a weapon used to strip the atmosphere from planets, leaving nothing behind. The boss music even stops to emphasize how over the fight really is.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts II has Organization XIII who dissolve into black dust-like particles when defeated. It's usually very dramatic, and for at least one, tearjerking.
  • This happens to the Organization members in Re:Chain of Memories too, and for the same reason.
  • This is because Organization XIII, being humanoid Nobodies and thus walking bundles of nothingness, return to the nothing from whence they came upon dying. However, The Stinger of Re:coded reveals that if you killed that person's Heartless before killing their Nobody, their complete self would be reborn. Indeed, several Organization members return as their original selves in this manner come 3D.
• Due to censorship, this is cranked up to eleven in the Australian version of Left 4 Dead 2, with bodies often disappearing before they even hit the ground.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Mostly played straight, save for two instances:
    • Redeads. When you kill one, it doesn't vanish into flame like every other enemy, it just sort of crumples. This gets especially creepy when now, every other Redead in the area will hobble over to their dead comrade, probably to eat them. Or mourn for them, which is strangely also a horrifying concept. If you remain for a while, however, the Redead's body will seemingly sort of... melt away.
    • King Dodongo is the only boss whose body remains after the fight, as he rolled into the lava pit in the center of the room and his corpse got stuck inside the cooled lava. It's still there if you return to the Dodongo Caverns as an adult seven years later In-Universe.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The Garo Ninjas, seemingly by their own unknown Badass Creed, are required to ensure that they leave no body behind. Common Garo Robes solve this by setting themselves aflame while the more hardcore mini-boss, Garo Master, decides not to take any risks, pulls out a bomb and blows his failing body to dust.
    Garo Master: Die I shall, leaving no corpse. That is the law of us Garo.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • Defeated enemies vanish in a burst of purple smoke while slain animals disappear in a puff of dust, in both cases only leaving behind their various Organ Drops.
    • The Monks in the shrines disintegrate into green particles, clothes and all, after Link has solved their puzzles and obtained their soul orb. Implicitly, they have fulfilled their duty and are now ready to move on.
    • Downplayed with Yiga enemies, who do not appear to die when defeated and instead teleport away, leaving behind their weapon, Rupees, and bananas.
    • This is subverted only by horses, who ragdoll onto the ground upon death and only vanish after a while. In a game where every other creature disappears, seeing your once-companion in a lifeless state like this is rather disquieting.
• Averted and played straight in Marathon. Most of the Pfhor varieties and three of their slave races (the Lookers, Wasps and Hulks) leave corpses, as do the automated defense drones and humans. The exceptions are the S'pht, which dissolve when killed, and in the first game, the Pfhor Juggernauts, which explode with incredible force that vaporizes them (and does a lot of damage to anyone not on the far side of a wall). Marathon 2 versions apparently leave remains though.
• Both played straight and averted in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. When killed, the elite FROG soldiers immediately dissolve into dust. However, when a normal soldier is killed, his body remains and must be disposed of to keep other soldiers from discovering it.
• When Samus dies in the original Metroid she explodes into pieces. In most other games in the franchise a game over shows this happening to her Powered Armor. In Metroid Prime Samus' plasma beam is powerful enough to completely vaporize enemies.
• In Minecraft, all mobs explode into a puff of smoke when killed.
• Minecraft: Story Mode:
  • Mobs and animals vanish upon death and leave behind their drop the same way they do in Minecraft proper.
  • Subverted with humans and the Wither Storm, as when it's finally killed in the end, its remains fall to the ground. It also leaves a unique black Nether Star behind.
• It's not at all unusual for slain enemies in NetHack to leave a corpse; it will rot over time but not vanish immediately and may have a variety of uses, though not all of them are necessarily always safe.
• Nexus Clash explains this trope with Death Servitors employed by the local death deity to gather player-character corpses and carry them away from the battlefield. Lich necromancers can bribe the servitors to deliver the corpses to themselves instead.
• The Ninja Gaiden reboot has defeated enemies melt into bloody ooze.
• No More Heroes. In the English/uncensored version, the enemies, after being cutting in half, while stay for a few seconds before disappearing, giving enough time for blood geysers to erupt, where as in the Japanese/censored version, they just turn into dust right away. This is noticeable for the bosses. In the English version, the bosses won't disappear after dying. They'll just sit there, gruesomely dead, where as in the Japanese version, the bodies will turn to dust when needed. Special notice goes to Holly Summers, whose head gets blown off. In the English version, the head is gone and you bury her. In Japanese, well, it's like in the cartoons where the character has black ash all over their face. And you still bury her.
• In Ōkami and Ōkamiden, your enemies turn into flowers when you kill them. Instead of spurting blood, they will literally shoot pure flowers from their veins. Issun explains this in the first game as "When a demon is exorcised, the gods power can return, and nature thrives." This doesn't explain how the flowers the Demons leave behind disappear too.
• In Onimusha games, whenever you slay a Genma the corpse will dissolve almost instantly, leaving souls behind. Enemies killed with a Issen Counterattack will usually fade away faster. Bosses tend to last a bit longer, usually long enough for a cutscene to play, after which you can absorb the usually generous amount of souls from them.
• In Paladins, Lex's ultimate instantly kills and vaporizes enemies out of existence if they are sufficiently wounded. Enemies that aren't sufficiently wounded will just take some damage and be slowed.
• Zig-zagged in Parasite Eve 2. Monsters melt into evaporating puddles of goo whenever you kill them, but in the last part of the game, the stage becomes populated with killer cyborgs, and their bodies do not disappear, even if you leave the room and come back later.
• Phantom Brave averts this with defeated units simply keeling over on the ground, meaning that you have to manually destroy the body of fallen enemies to get them out of the way. Of course, this means you can revive your units mid-fight, alongside any neutral units.
• Pikmin: Mostly averted in the games, since collecting dead creatures' bodies is the primary way to grow new Pikmin. The trope is somewhat both lampshaded and justified in the second game's Piklopedia entry for one of the bosses that does actually crumple to dust upon defeat, where Olimar notes how frustrating it is to have no study samples from that family of creatures due to its mysterious self-destruction upon death. Played straight to a very creepy effect in the Final Landing site Formidable Oak in Pikmin 3, where every defeated enemy collapse into puddles of golden liquid that swiftly evaporate.
• Pokémon:
  • From Red and Blue till Black 2 and White 2, whenever a Pokémon faints in battle, its sprite falls down from its position, leaving nothing behind. The 3D games starting from X and Y avoids this for trainer's pokémon by having the pokémon recalled back into their pokéball once they play their fainting animation. For wild pokémon, the trope is still in effect but they now shrink until there's nothing left.
  • In the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series, fainted Pokémon fade into nothingness, occasionally leaving behind any held items.
• Averted in Primal. Corpses remain permanently, unless Jen is killed before passing the next Checkpoint. Then the corpse vanishes when its monster is respawned. There aren't enough monsters per area create an overload of corpses. Corpses also have energy for Scree to drain and may contain objects necessary to continue.
• Justified in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and its sequels, as most of your enemies are made of sand. This doesn't stop Shahdee (who appears to be a normal human) from vanishing in a flash of light after her defeat.
• Rave Heart: Unlike most of the other races, Errans do not leave a corpse behind when they die.
• In the Resident Evil series, the Plaga parasites cause the host's body to break down chemically upon death, meaning it dissolves soon after it hits the ground. The C-Virus has a similar effect, except the corpse ignites to cinders due to the heat buildup typical of the T-Veronica virus that was used to create the C-Virus.
  • The remake of Resident Evil for Nintendo GameCube pretended to avert this to give you a nasty surprise. Any zombie killed remains behind, unless you burn the corpse or destroy the head. Later on it turns out they're Not Quite Dead; about an hour after killing a zombie it gets up and starts running around as the more powerful and deadly Crimson Head. Other enemies play it completely straight and vanish once you leave the room.
• Since Shadow of the Colossus only has 16 enemies anyway, and they're too spread out to risk piling up, the corpses of killed Colossi remain throughout the whole game, and you can even have flashback-styled fights with ones you've already killed. The small creatures, however, such as lizards, disappear after you kill them.
• Whenever someone dies in The Sims, they transforms into an urn (if inside) or a tombstone (if outside). As long as the urn/tombstone isn't deleted, the sim's ghost will occasionally came around at night. Some pre-made lots come with tombstones and are thus already haunted.
• This is actually a plot point in Sonic and the Black Knight. Knights of the Underworld disappear when they are killed. When Sonic kills the corrupted King Arthur, his body disappears the same way, revealing that he wasn't the real King Arthur.
• In Sonic Lost World, when Zazz, Zomom, Master Zik, and Zeena were defeated in Lava Mountain, they exploded in a puff of smoke.
• A weapon in Team Fortress 2, a knife called "Your Eternal Reward", allows a Spy to backstab someone, cause their corpse to silently vanish, then immediately assume the victim's appearance, thus blending in near-perfectly with enemies who are left unaware that their real teammate is dead.
  • The 'futuristic space gun' weapons available to the Soldier, Pyro, and Engineer either incinerate or disintegrate enemies on death, leaving behind no remains (the effect is very similar to Half-Life 2's AR2 secondary fire). Unlike the Spy's knife, these are very loud and visibly obvious weapons, and are also shown in the kill feed.
• Oddly, this happened more often as the Tomb Raider series went on, despite the technical progress: in I and II, enemies pretty much never disappear; III had them disappear after you had turned away for a little while; in The Last Revelation and every subsequent game corpses always disappear right in front of your eyes after a few seconds. However, Underworld has been confirmed to be averting this.
  • In Rise of the Tomb Raider when the Deathless Ones are defeated their bodies vanish in a cloud of dust.
• Total Annihilation: Destroyed units leave behind beaten shape of themselves, blocking way for other units and fire. Fortunately, they are easy to destroy. Or they can be recycled for resources, but this takes a lot more time.
• Total War: Warhammer: When killed, most units drop dead as a corpse and remain where they fell for the duration of the battle. However, incorporeal or magically summoned beings don't usually leave physical bodies behind — for instance, the bodies of slain demons vanish in a burst of flames or colored smoke while a wisp of energy returns to the Realm of Chaos, while Kislev's ice bears dissolve into nothingness.
• Undertale: Monsters disintegrate into dust when they die. Sometimes, dust can be found on items, suggesting that if it didn't belong to a monster that had died, it belonged to someone who killed a monster. In a No Mercy-run, Papyrus will comment on your dusty state.
  Papyrus: THE WAY YOU SHAMBLE ABOUT FROM PLACE TO PLACE... THE WAY YOUR HANDS ARE ALWAYS COVERED IN DUSTY POWDER...
• Both averted and played straight in the Unreal series, which is normally powered by the sheer momentum of its Ludicrous Gibs, but has "gore settings" that can be adjusted all the way down to "bodies are indestructible and digitally disintegrate when killed."
• Subverted in Vagrant Story. On the island of Lea Monde, where the main game takes place, everything does fade as part of the black magic infiltrating every part of the ruins. In the prologue to the game, which does not take place on Lea Monde, the bodies of enemies do not disappear.
• Warframe: Enemies killed by certain types of damage (usually corrosive, viral and radiation) will dissolve into nothing upon death. Fortunately for players, this does not affect Nekros' Desecrate ability and he can still reroll the bodies for more drops.
• War Thunder:
  • Zig-zagged with tanks, as destroyed husks remain on the map and their players can respawn and still find the wreckage of their previous vehicle in the same spot where they were killed, except when they disconnect or leave the match - in which case the wreckage explodes and get cleared.
  • Averted with aircraft, as they are rendered until they crash, and if the pilot is snipe-killed but the rest of the vehicle is not damaged, it can potentially glide away until the match ends, even if you disconnected.
    • Aircraft can lead to bizarre situations when they are shot down but the pilot is not killed, as you remain in-game and can control the vehicle until you inevitably crash or decide to bail out: sometimes it can be "destroyed" yet still be partially flyable, to the point that an able or lucky player can even kill an opponent while being registered as "dead" by the game. For many years there was also a Loophole Abuse when the "dead" aircraft could manage to glide to the enemy airfield and strafe reloading opponents while not being targeted by anti-air defenses, as they didn't register it as officially in battle, after many complaints by the playerbase this was then patched out with AAA firing anyway. "Killed" aircraft with enough speed and stability left could even manage (with some difficulty) to land to the airfield, repair and take off again, something that in realistic battles was NOT properly intended to be possible for airplanes registered as "dead" (after late 2022 updates nerfed this possibility, the game forces a bail out when you land while being counted as "dead").
  • Exaggerated with ships: when destroyed they always quickly sunk and disappear, even if in some cases it would be reasonable to see wrecked vessels partially submerged for some time or float for awhile while upside down.
• In The World Ends with You, whenever somebody in the Underground is Erased, they dissolve as a cloud of visible static. Accordingly, the fact that you do find the body of Sho Minamimoto has caused a whole forest of Epileptic Trees on whether that character actually died or not.
• The Outsider aliens from XCOM: Enemy Unknown are a Justified Trope (being made of Hard Light) as well as a Played for Drama example: no body, no Alien Autopsy.

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