Shaggy Dog Story / Video Games

"Shaggy Dog" Stories in Video Games.

---

• Because the game didn't sell well enough for the planned trilogy to be complete, this is the ending for XIII. The main character struggles to get his memory back and stop the other 12 conspirators whom are trying to over throw the United States government. He succeeds in doing this, only to discover in the end that the President (who took over after the other one was assassinated) is number 1, he has the main character in the middle of the sea on his giant cruise ship and he's surrounded.
• Goldor's ending in Arabian Fight. At the start of the game he's a low-ranking guard of the Sultan, who partakes in the mission with the other heroes in saving Princess Lurana from the Evil Wizard Sazabiss. After defeating Sazabiss at the end Goldor was promoted to the Royal Commander, but due to his nature as a show-off and braggart he lose it all soon enough and is demoted to another common guard.
• Arc Rise Fantasia has one happen to Paula and Luna, the We Challenge You! sidequest involved running around all over the world searching for hidden clues, at the end of the search, the whole thing was revealed to be a prank left behind by Zamuel meant for anyone who happens upon his clues.
• In Assassin's Creed Syndicate all of the player's actions revolve around discovering the location of a powerful artefact before the evil Templars can get their hands on it. The end cutscene shows the assassins acting on this information, but they arrive too late and take serious casualties whilst allowing the Templars to escape with it.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • A bunch of subplots in Batman: Arkham Asylum can be considered this. Batman goes through a lot of trouble to save people from the escaped inmates only to return later and find out that they were killed off-screen when he was away. At some point he has to track down a doctor and once he finds her he has to carefully make sure homicidal maniac Victor Zsasz doesn't kill her, only for her to be killed by a trap less than a minute later.
  • The entire plot of Batman: Arkham City is this from the Joker's point of view. He goes through all the trouble of getting Batman captured, infected with his poisonous blood and even sending packets of his blood to the city to infect random citizens in order to make Batman comply with finding a cure. Later, at the end of the game, when Batman has the cure in hand and is debating whether or not he should hand it over, he has no better idea than jump at him from behind and stab him in the leg, which causes him to drop the vial with the cure, which breaks. As he lays dying, Batman's last words to him are him revealing that in spite of everything he's done, he still would've given the cure to Joker.
  • Batman: Arkham Knight does this with the Joker-Infected storyline. Throughout the game, we're told that Henry Adams, being the only one of the Infected not to show symptoms, is the only hope for a cure. As it happens, he's just really good at hiding the symptoms - he's just as bad as the others, if not worse. He kills the other Infected and then, on realizing Batman is even more affected than he is, kills himself. The hallucination sums it up:
  "Wait a second... if Henry had Mad Clown Disease, then that means there is no cure! You had featherhead slaving away for nothing when he could have been saving Babs!"
• BattleTech: Used as a motivation for the villain, interestingly enough. Victoria, basically from the onset, has to win. If she doesn't, she has betrayed her cousin (who was her sister in all but name), assassinated her mentor and orchestrated a massacre of civilians for nothing. At the end, when it becomes clear that she has lost, she goes into a Villainous BSoD at the knowledge that generations to come will know everything about her misdeeds, and nothing about the goals and ideals that drove her to them.
• The Binding of Isaac arguably lands here in the base game or any of its updates, but it absolutely has this with the Repentance update’s final ending. In it, the game reveals itself to be merely Isaac and his dad telling a story, and Isaac is satisfied and done with it.
• BioForge: Not at the end, but late in the game, once the hero finally learns his past identity, he concludes that it doesn't matter, as - by this point - he can never be that person again.
• In the ending of an obscure Arkanoid-like puzzle game Break Quest, after destroying all the bricks in some TV channels to disrupt the channels and stop everyone from watching television too much. You'll find out that it doesn't really change anything, as a few are still watching the TV shows, while others decide to spend their time to doing something else. In short, it ends with an Aesop that only the viewers can save themselves from certain addictions. And it's implied that television is not always a bad thing and you can't stop the technology.
• Breath of Fire IV: After Ryu and co are arrested by The Empire due to their intrusion on the imperial capital and shipped back to the Alliance, Cray is made responsible and is subsequently court martialed by Prince Morley. He's accused of not only putting the tenuous truce the Alliance has with the Empire in danger but also of losing the King's Sword, the symbol of the Alliance. The sword was actually given to Ryu by Nina early in the game and broke during a fight with an imperial officer. Nina believes if the sword is repaired and returned, the authorities might pardon Cray. Too bad the Empire beat them to the punch. Not only they returned the heirloom but also forced the Alliance to make several concessions regarding the truce. This effectively means the entire latter half of the first chapter and at least 2 or 3 hours of gameplay were rendered moot.
• In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, the true main villain’s entire character arc turns out to be one of these. He’s been on an unstoppable Roaring Rampage of Revenge ever since his sister and grandmother were cursed and turned into plants, but in the True Ending it’s revealed that the curse wore off on its own... twelve minutes after he left.
• Bunny Must Die revolves around a bunny-girl getting cursed with cat ears after getting caught in a Cattomic explosion and being convinced to go to the Cave of Devils to remove them. Over the course of the game, she's tricked and possessed by an evil demon lord, is caught in a time loop caused by the elf princess Deuteragonist, gets the crap kicked out of her until she's unpossessed, unlocks her 11th-Hour Superpower and ends up saving the elf princess from and defeating the demon lord. And then she realizes that she still hasn't gotten rid of her cat ears.
  • However, the aforementioned elf princess knows of a potion from her village that (in her own words) might get rid of the cat ears. The might still keeps this open as a Shaggy Dog Story, as we never do figure out whether it works or not.
• There are only two things that are clear from the ending of Contact: The bad guys weren't really evil, and—despite deceiving both Terry and the player—the Professor isn't either. So... why all the drama?
• The main plot of Creature Crunch is that the protagonist Wesley has been transformed into a half-boy/half-creature by Mad Scientist Dr. Drod and is guided by a Brain in a Jar named Brian to journey through Dr. Drod's mansion to find a way out and return to normal. At the end of the game, Wesley finds a way out of the mansion, but realizes that he failed to find a way to return back to normal. Brian then reveals Wesley actually had a monster costume on that he could've removed all along.
• The plot of the Neo Geo shooter Cyber-Lip has the protagonists being sent to a space colony in order to destroy an insane supercomputer who controlled an army of androids supposed to protect humanity from marauding aliens. After destroying the eponymous computer, the ending shows that your Mission Control is actually an alien spy who sent you there to clear the way for an alien invasion.
• Cyberpunk 2077 has two possible Downer Endings that result in this. In the "The Devil" ending, by siding with Arasaka to save themselves, V's betrayed (and also destroyed) Johnny, and burned bridges with some of their other friends... and after a bunch of tests it's determined their brain is too damaged by the Relic, giving them six months at most to live, assuming they reject the Brain Uploading offer. V has nightmares of Jackie and continues to be taunted by Johnny even though he's really not there anymore, both of which hammer in that it was the absolute wrong decision. And the last thing V does before leaving the space station is breaking the bullet necklace in a fit of rage and grief... they sold their soul and went against everything and everyone they stood for, All for Nothing. In the "Path of Least Resistance" ending, V decides that saving themself isn't worth having other people die, and they want to experience the end with Johnny rather than a slow breakdown; so they sit back, look over the city, and shoot themselves in the head.
  • In the DLC ending, V lives... at too great a cost. Their brain is so damaged from the surgery that using combat-grade cyberware could kill them from the strain, their muscles have atrophied and all their cyberware has been replaced with fine-tuned, incredibly weak replacements, and in the two years that V was stuck in a Coma, all their friends moved on with their lives. Night City itself is slowly being crippled as well, as the NUSA prepares its final war against the City of Adventure. From there, this trope is discussed in detail with various characters, who have different views on V's situation and whether or not the life they fought tooth and nail to save is worth living anymore. But the greater story might be a titanic shaggy dog falling on Night City itself; in giving Songbird to the NUSA, they run the risk of destroying the Blackwall and allowing the Robot Apocalypse to happen sooner, meaning that everything you potentially did to ensure NUSA dominance may be completely undone by their own greed and your selfishness.
• In the D4DJ Groovy Mix event story "Clash! The Battle of the Kunoichi!", Shinobu discovers a scroll from her grandfather while tidying up the studio. The scroll is a story that reveals that her family is descended from a line of ninjas and kunoichi. Unfortunately for her and her unit-mates who got emotionally invested in the story, they discover in the last line of the scroll that the story was made up by her grandfather for an elementary school assignment, and she angrily rips it up.
• Darkest Dungeon: The ending in a nutshell: You defeated the eldritch god! Yay! Oh wait, you defeated one eldritch baby. The cocoon at the center of the earth is still alive, still pumping out eldritch essence, and destroying it would cause the destruction of the world. And it has a set incubation date so The World Is Always Doomed anyway. And you're too insane to do anything about it or protect your hamlet from ruin anymore, so you commit suicide. Just to hammer this home, a new eldritch god awakens, and another gullible soul is lured to the dungeon...
• Dead Space 3: The Awakened DLC ends the franchise up to this point on an utterly hopeless note; Isaac and Carver managed to kill the Brethren Moon at the end of the main game's story, but not before it sent out a signal to wake up the rest of the Moons. The pair make it back to Earth only to discover that they're too late to warn anyone, with the Moons scouring the planet and another looming over their ship right before the credits roll. Unless there's a Dead Space 4, which will probably never happen, then everything the series' protagonists struggled and sacrificed for was completely pointless; the Moons will wipe out humanity and return to sleep until another race comes along, masters spaceflight, and discovers the Markers so the entire nightmare can repeat itself.
• The 2002 version of Defender has a fairly sudden one. The game begins with the GSA fighting an uphill battle against the Manti's occupation of the Milky Way, with them getting pushed back to Saturn and its moons. Throughout the game's progression, you begin to defeat the Manti and reclaim each planet and moon one by one, until eventually reaching home, where the worst infestation resides: Earth. Unfortunately, it turns out the Manti Queen has embedded herself in the Earth's crust and started hatching eggs, rendering the infestation far too severe and irreversible. As a result, the GSA has to destroy the Earth by sacrificing Memory's reactor to kamikaze the moon into Earth, and Colonel Adams also sacrifices his life to make sure the kamikaze attack is successful.
• The main goal of the hero of Diablo is to rescue Prince Albrecht, who was kidnapped into the Tristram cathedral by the insane Archbishop Lazarus, before he can be used as a sacrifice to revive Diablo. By the time the hero gets there, Albrecht has become Diablo's host - the hero is forced to kill him, and then drives the soulstone containing Diablo's essence into their own body in an effort to contain him. While the original game plays this as a heroic act and the only remaining option under the circumstances, the second and third games make it clear that the hero (retroactively identified as Albrecht's older brother Aiden) was being influenced by Diablo all along. Rather than containing the demon, Aiden quickly succumbed to Diablo's corrupting influence and became his new host.
• Dinosaur Forest reveals the adventures of the Space Opera protagonist had been a hallucination from a prison inmate undergoing severe mental health treatments.
• Divinity: Original Sin II:
  • One of the possible endings turn out to be this. You trek through the whole game, surviving tons of combat and watching Rivellon torn to shreds left and right, confront the Big Bad Lucian who tells you of his plan to save the world which involves turning an untold amount of people into mindless zombies, including yourselves, and you can choose to accept his plan. If you kept one particular character alive, you can even have your mind restored, but you will still have the ending section talking to all of the various characters angrily pointing out that your choices made their efforts to help you pointless. This ending wouldn't be so bad and could be considered a sort of Nonstandard Game Over, except that the game shows that this ending is the happiest ending for the world. All of the other endings where you actually try to strive for a less tyrannical plan result in objectively worse outcomes for the world.
  • A far more egregious example is the questline to forge the Villain-Beating Artifact Anathema, said repeatedly to be the only thing capable of stopping the Evil Overlord Braccus Rex. In the actual fight after his inevitable return however, it turns out that it simply does a mild amount of bonus damage to him and irreparably shatters after one hit, making it completely useless. No indication of it being a gag by the developers or any valid story reason is given, it's just... like that. A Lethal Joke Item that's only lethal to the person dumb enough to try using it.
• The first Doom. You fight through hordes of monsters, including literally going to Hell and back... only to find on your return to Earth that the demons have already invaded. And their first victim was Daisy, your pet rabbit.
• The plot of Dragon Age II might qualify, as Hawke never instigates any events, only reacts to them. Even saving the city from the qunari doesn't really count, as the rest of the Free Marches would have stepped in soon. Regardless of whether Hawke sides with the mages or templars—and that comes down to only one decision—you can be as pro-mage as you want in the first three acts and still join the templars, the ending is still the same: Hawke on the run, Meredith and Orsino dead, war between mages and the Chantry.
  • On a related note, this is also the Arishok's journey in a nutshell: He is stuck for years in Kirkwall because he is searching for the Tome of Koslun, which was stolen from the Qunari. If you managed to keep appease him by returning it along with its thief (under special circumstances), he will loose both again and return to his homeland to be punished, demoted and replaced by Sten from Dragon Age: Origins. If you choose to fight him, he will end up dying but not before vowing his people will return. Turns out that the Qunari denounced his unsanctioned attack on Kirkwall to not risk another Exalted March with the Chantry, retried the survivors and agreed to never speak of this again, making the Arishok's dying threats hollow. Either way, his journey will end in failure.
• The endings of both Earthworm Jim games, of the comedic kind. In the first game, the cow launched by the hero in the first level suddenly plummets into the ending and crushes the newly rescued Damsel in Distress. In the second, it turns out the Love Interest, the Big Bad and the eponymous earthworm — were all cows in disguise.
• Most of the Endless Nightmare games begins and ends with the protagonist a wreck, but especially emphasized in the third game, Shrine. Your character, Carlos, spends the whole game seeking the fabled Heart of Pharaoh jewel, even working with an enemy spy named Jessica when your quest awakens the God, Anubis, to destroy everything. The game ends with Carlos defeating Anubis and obtaining the Heart of Pharaoh, only to be knocked out by falling rubble. And then Jessica arrives to pick his pockets, but eventually decides to save Carlos, again. Carlos eventually wound up outside the pyramid, sans Heart of Pharaoh, the same way he was at the beginning and Jessica nowhere in sight.
• By Word of God (there would have been a sequel-TC, but it seems to be Vaporware), the Voinian story in Escape Velocity Override is this: all storylines happened, but where all the others had a big impact in some way, the Voinian storyline is effectively rendered moot by the UE storyline — you kill one of the UE's Admirals, but Vice Admiral D'Erlon is talented enough to pick up the slack, you bomb the Emalgha's mining planet into dust, but they still maintain enough production capacity to help the UE offensive, you devastate one of the UE's colonies, but it isn't important enough to cripple the UE... all culminating in the Voinian officer you report to making references to a superweapon project sure to bring the UE to its knees, but it is too important to let humans in on the project — Word of God is said project is the Voinian Dreadnaught, which you destroy in the course of the UE story before it even reaches UE space.
• Fallout:
  • The whole Great War, brought by a lack of resources, turned out to be this. A few weeks before the nuclear bombs fell the Big Mountain research institute had developed matter replicators that would have made lack of resources a non-issue.
  • Fallout: New Vegas allows the player to invoke this on either the NCR or the Legion. Or both. In the 4 years since the Battle of Hoover Dam, both sides have been suffering losses, trading victories and defeats, trying desperately to gain ground. Then, out of the blue, a simple Unstoppable Mailman can ruin both parties claims to Hoover Dam by either siding with Mr House or choosing an Independent route, forcing both sides to retreat.
  • Fallout 4 does this to Elder Lyons' offshoot of the Brotherhood of Steel from Fallout 3. Lyons left the BOS in the west coast, who were notorious for hoarding pre-war technology and taking it from others (sometimes by force) and started a new BOS dedicated to protecting the Capital Wasteland from Super Mutants and using collected technology for the betterment of the people. While they made a lot of headway in protecting the peace, by the events of Fallout 4, they not only revert to their tech-hoarding insular ways, but evolve into a fascist military organization that rules over the east coast like feudal lords.
  • The Jamaica Plains treasure seems like it's lifted straight out of Cowboy Bebop. Said treasure is actually something quite valuable and worthwhile: baseball history, Indy car champions, lots of red white and blue, scenery, a celebration of America. In-game however, it's worthless apart from your companions' reactions and a unique baseball bat that can be sold to Moe Cronin for bonus caps.
• While this sort of thing tends to happen during the endings of Far Cry games, it’s not just limited to those. Case in point, the ending to the Kyrat Fashion Week questline in Far Cry 4. After hunting down several different unique animals, Mumu Chiffon asks Ajay to head to his work shop and start the event off proper. But when he gets there, the workshop is in complete ruins. A note explains that Pagan Min, the game’s main villain, found out about the event and ordered his army to put a stop to it, and that Mumu has fled the country, canceling the would-be epic peacock fashion show made of Ajay's hunting trophies. ^note It’s also got a slight Plot Hole, as one of the events requires taking Min’s fortress, so unless the player sequence breaks, Min should logically be out of power.
• Fate/EXTRA's main storyline ends this way: Your desperate struggle to survive ends with you getting deleted by the Moon Cell because you're a rogue NPC. Your Servant expires because their purpose in the Holy Grail War is fulfilled. The Big Bads would have ultimately been stopped and killed by the True Final Boss anyway, making your battles with them pointless. You do defeat the True Final Boss, but you had no idea he even existed. Your human counterpart on Earth cannot be revived due to a medical condition that cannot be treated, and won't be you even if they are. The only gain is one girl you saved at the start of Week 4, and one wish that may still be subject to typical Holy Grail shenanigans.
  • Another Fate example comes from Fate/Grand Order: Caster of Nightless City's/ Scheherazade's goal is to remove herself from the throne of heroes and not be summonable again, due to having an extreme case of thanatophobia. However, she's not story-locked^note although her name is hidden until you reach a certain point in the Agartha singularity, meaning it's entirely possible that by the time you do face her, you've already summoned her.
• The first two Fatal Frame games have this as their endings.
  • In the first game, Miku spends the entire game trying to find her brother. She does, only for him to choose to stay at the gate to the underworld to ensure that the one keeping it shut won't be alone.
  • The second game has Mio spend the whole game going through the village trying to save her sister Mayu, only for her to be possessed as soon as she enters the chamber, going through with the ritual that results in Mayu getting strangled to death, making the entire plot pointless.
• F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin has Michael Becket, the protagonist, running around ruins of Fairport with his Delta Force squadmates, first to take Genevieve Aristide, President of Armacham Technology Corporation, into protective custody, and later to halt Alma's rampage and potentially stop her for good. By the end, the plan to stop Alma fails at the last minute, (you don't even get to try) with the whole squad being dead except for Becket, (and Manny and Stokes's fates being unconfirmed) because Aristide, who has spent the entire game being a manipulative Dirty Coward, screws the whole thing up to intentionally throw Becket to the wolves, all so she can have 'leverage' against the company that is trying to kill her, even though one of her own guys has already told her that any effort to actually contain Alma will not work. The entire effort is rendered pointless, Aristide, Stokes, and Manny are never mentioned again in the sequel, and Becket is raped.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy X, if the story had ended as planned with Yuna sacrificing Tidus as the Final Summoning, and having him become the next Sin, this is exactly what this would be. Thankfully, the game averts this. As it is, it needs Final Fantasy X-2 to avert a Downer Ending.
    • However, the Novel sequels, X 2.5 and -Will- throw everyone's efforts out the window. Tidus accidentally kills himself kicking a bomb he thought was a blitzball. Yuna brings him back to life but this screw up the farplane, with people being beckoned instead being brought back to life. Someone brings back Sin, and Yuna breaks up with Tidus because he's "not the same". She sets out on another journey to take care of Sin once more.
  • In the A Crystalline Prophecy add-on scenario for Final Fantasy XI was a cross between a Shaggy Dog Story and All Just a Dream. You can get some actual decent gear rewards from the missions, but the story itself would have resolved in the same manner had you not been involved, not to mention that none of the NPCs involved remember anything that happened or mention it ever again.
  • The Final Fantasy XIII-2 is REALLY CRUEL about this: due to your actions, Chaos Reigns, Caius has goaded the hero into killing the goddess Etro, and most of the human populace that you've spent making a better life for is culled so that only the most hate filled and traumatized humans thrive on a small patch of land so that they can torment the drifting souls within Chaos with their angst, creating monsters of suffering. That's right, the happy ending you won in the first act is only reserved to the bitter end for the most screwed up people that Coccoon could spit out.
  • In Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light, Aire is turned into a cat by some cursed treasure. When a black cat turns up at Jusqua's door, he realizes what happened and blames himself for ditching her for her Royal Brat ways. He proceeds to take the cat on a long trek to Urbeth, where he must raise 10,000 gold for a sorcerer to remove the curse, running around on various errands for the merchant lords and working a shop counter—then the sorcerer steals the cat when he flees the city, and Jusqua has to cross the ocean to the Grim Up North in pursuit (where he joins up with Brandt again). Then the cat escapes from the sorcerer. When Jusqua panics, Brandt is quite baffled and then blithely remarks about the time he'd spent traveling as an animal with Aire the white cat, in a completely different part of the world, before they found a way to turn back on their own. Jusqua's response to this revelation?
    "..........."
• In the Game Boy game The Final Fantasy Legend, the heroes live in a world that's a giant tower climbing to heaven. They decide one day they want to see what's at the very top. They spend the entire game climbing the tower, and eventually defeat the Creator at the gate to Heaven. Then they decide to just go back home.
• The Flintstones: The Surprise At Dinosaur Peak: Fred and Barney find their kids, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, trapped behind a flow of lava. The goal of the game is to stop the lava flow and rescue Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm. When you beat the game, it is revealed that Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm were never in any danger. All they wanted to do was roast some marshmallows, and they get mad at Fred and Barney for stopping the lava flow.
• Futurama. The Stable Time Loop has Farnsworth selling Planet Express and getting his crew killed - because Mom tossed in a sombrero. No matter what happens.
• Every entry in the Geneforge series, except possibly the last. Each game concludes its plotline with the player victorious- and usually on a hopeful note for the world at large, if you play right. But then the next game rolls around, and the world has gotten more crapsack, the bad guys more threatening, the good guys less sympathetic, and your achievements in the previous games are barely mentioned. An air of hopelessness and futility hangs over the proceedings by the end of Geneforge 3, and never goes away.
• Grand Theft Auto V:
  • The heist Trevor arranges in Grand Theft Auto Online ends up being this for him. After getting all the product he needs for a huge drug deal (and paying off the heist crew that helped him out), it turns out the deal is a sting operation by the DOA, and Trevor is forced on the run.
  • In the offline story, The Merryweather Heist (also arranged by Trevor) became this as well. He, Michael, and Franklin all go through the trouble of robbing a massive freighter while being shot at and killing several mercenaries in the process, only to realize that the prize they stole was a nuclear bomb and they have to return it before the entire international community starts gunning for them.
    • Lampshaded by Franklin
    Franklin: So you mean to tell me this shit was all for nothin'? Man, it's the hood all over again. Fuck!
  • Like Trevor, Franklin's Best Friend Lamar had a history of this which is part of Franklin's motivation to move on to bigger & better things. As shown by the failed kidnapping and drug deal, jobs with Lamar have a habit of ending with the two walking away with nothing and Franklin mentions on the way to the second heist that his first bank job with him ended up like this as well; they only managed to secure around $2000 before a dye pack went off and made it worthless.
• In Gravity Rush, a young woman asks Kat to retrieve a letter that she accidentally dropped into the void beneath the city attached to an unthinkably large World Pillar, as it was the last letter her late boyfriend wrote to her. Kat isn't too hopeful as to the chance of finding it, but she gives it a go anyway. This takes her far, far further beneath the city than she's ever gone, to the point where she wonders if there's a way back up, even with her powers. Before long, she gives up on the letter and just keeps going down to see how far she can go. This leads to some of the most important events and revelations of the entire game. Much later, she makes her way back up, and on the way, actually finds the letter. She returns it to the woman... who has found a new boyfriend and couldn't care less about the letter. To be fair, while this journey was a few days to Kat, it was a year to the woman and everyone else in the city.
• Bridget in Guilty Gear XX was a Wholesome Crossdresser who was born into a pair of identical male twins and was Raised as the Opposite Gender to avoid being put to death over a backwards superstition by his village. Bridget's motivation for becoming a Bounty Hunter was to Screw Destiny and prove he's not an ill omen, and become more masculine to defy the given status quo. Come Guilty Gear -STRIVE-, she does a sudden 180 and decides that everything she did up until then was just Trans Tribulations, completely negating her quest to defy gender norms and the status quo forced on her. Downplayed in that her initial goal was explicitly completed in her first appearance before her decision that she was a woman in Strive.
• At the end of the second episode of Hector: Badge of Carnage you find out that you had all the needed evidence from the beginning and all you needed to do was to wait a few hours for the forensic examination to finish. This annoys Hector since it means that he did not have to drug a restaurant full of people and burn down a church.
• In Hellgate: London, the humans are trying to kill Sydonai and expel all the demons from Earth. After you kill Sydonai, Murmur appears to tell you that he use you to kill Sydonai so he can get his position, and there's no indication that the demons are leaving just because Sydonai was killed.
• The Stinger of Horizon Zero Dawn reveals that Sylens saved Hades from destruction and intends to plug him into an even bigger, more dangerous war machine. And since the Spire is still intact, Hades will probably be back with the same scheme and an even bigger army as soon as he can. The sequel revealed that Sylens spent the next few months interrogating Hades, then left him for Aloy to finish off once and for all.
• In Hotline Miami, Jacket's rampage against the Russian Mafia after he slaughters the entire Miami Police Department turns out to be this; it is revealed in the non-linear Playable Epilogue that the evidence folder was actually a Red Herring which was being used to draw Jacket's suspicions away from the real organization who organized the hits on both him and his girlfriend. In the final dream sequence of the game, Richard even tells Jacket that this is inevitably how things are going to turn out.
  Richard: What you do from here on... won't serve any purpose. You will never see the whole picture... And it's all your own fault.
• Kane & Lynch : Dog Days is this from beginning to end, with the titular duo botching an arms deal by earning the ire of one of the most powerful people in Shanghai and scrambling to escape China while being hunted by everyone, including their former allies. By the end, they barely escape with their lives, having left hundreds of victims including innocent civilians in their wake and having lost all of their contacts, including Lynch's girlfriend being brutally murdered, and have nothing to show for it.
• In Kid Kool, the goal is to save the king, who is dying, by finding the "seven wonder herbs". If the player doesn't finish the game quickly enough, the king dies before you even get to the end.
• In King of the Castle, the "Beloved" ambition involves the King triumphing over the nobles by becoming a universally adored champion of the commoners and passing sweeping reforms to improve their welfare. In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, it is revealed that the reforms were promptly undone after the King's death fifteen years later (although the peasants thought it was nice while it lasted).
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has this with Jedi Master Lonna Vash's storyline. In the base game, you find that she's been tortured to death by the Sith when you search Korriban for her. However, the The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod restores her original storyline on the Dummied Out planet M4-78, allowing the Player Character to finally meet her and get some answers. However, immediately afterwards she's killed on her way out, meaning that no matter what you do she's fated to die.
• Last Case: The Disappearance of Amanda Kane: Jack Forester never finds out what happened to Amanda, despite finding a promising lead on her. It's implied that she may have been kidnapped by aliens too, but due to how bizarre the ending was, no one knows for sure.
• The Last of Us is a 15-hour-long Shaggy Dog Story. You traverse the United States with Ellie, The Immune, so she can be experimented on. It's a trek that takes them several months during which they endure perils and hardships and watch lots of innocent people die to ensure her safety (Tess, Sam, Henry, Marlene...) And what for? For Joel to get cold feet once he learns that his surrogate daughter has to die in order to extract the parasite from her brain. Joel then decides the best kind of action is to kill the group that wanted to experiment with her and go back to his brother's camp so she's safe, screwing the whole world in the process. Although, as the Fireflies are a mercenary group first and foremost, the world would most likely be screwed anyway even when the cure is with them.
  • The sequel has an even worse one. After Joel is murdered at the hands of the daughter of one of his victims, Ellie goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge across the country only to chicken out at the last second after losing all of her friends, family, and several fingers.
• In the ending of The Legendary Axe II, you finally claim the throne from your ne'er-do-well brother, but shortly afterwards a naked assassin chick with purple hair and a scimitar the size of Shaq jumps out of literally NOWHERE and... it cuts to the credits! WHAT.
• Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work: Pretty much everything that Patti does amounts to nothing. She shoots the villain, but despite drawing a gun in the White House in the presence of the Vice President, he gets off through a convoluted Chewbacca Defense. The mob's plan to use subliminals in music falls apart not because of her efforts, but because nobody could figure out to play CDs backwards. The mob's efforts to influence the government failed when their proposed bills got stuck in committee. And both of these together cause the mob to get out of the porn business, but that doesn't mean much because they quickly find alternative ways to make money. At least she got a weekend with Larry at Camp David out of it.
• The entire plot of Life Is Strange becomes one if you choose the "Save Arcadia Bay" ending; in order to prevent a tornado from destroying her hometown, Max will be forced to travel back in time and allow her best friend Chloe to be killed, despite having previously used time travel to save her and spending the whole game afterwards trying to help her out. To make matters worse, the mystery they were both attempting to unravel (the disappearance of Chloe's friend Rachel) will end up being solved regardless when Chloe's killer gets arrested and rats out the person responsible, meaning that from a narrative perspective, there was never a good reason for Max to save Chloe in the first place.
• Original The Longest Journey was this so much, it hurts: April goes on an epic quest, discovers that she is supposed to become a Physical God to Save Both Worlds, sees all her friends and acquaintances killed or maimed in process, screws up all her previous life... only to discover that she was, after all, only mistaken for The Chosen One and is, in the end, not really needed anywhere. Of course, one could argue that she did save the Twin Worlds but... The sequel Dreamfall: The Longest Journey gives us a rare glimpse of how the protagonist of a shaggy dog story acts after their meaningless quest. April is understandably depressed and cynical. The series then doubles-down on the shaggy dog aspect by having another character be told throughout the entire game to SAVE APRIL RYAN, only to show up just in time to see April stabbed to death.
• In The Lost Crown, you can have Nigel collect photos and recordings of various hauntings, as well as find the legendary Saxon crown. In the end, he not only has to return the crown, but all his hard-sought ghost evidence is sabotaged.

• Mass Effect 3: There are cases where the resolutions to various sub-plots either get overwritten by the impact of the original ending or are completely ignored from having any real resolution explained.
  • Saving galactic civilization is rendered moot when the relays explode- without them, galactic society can't function as practical FTL is now gone. The Victory Fleet can't even get back to their home sectors.
  • All of your True Companions? Well, they're stranded on an unknown planet now with no way out due to the Normandy crash landing there.
  • The Citadel explodes, presumably killing every single lovable character there in all the sidequests you did.
  • The most visible case involves the Geth War. The most popular ending, Destroy, kills all geth and any other AI in the galaxy as a sacrifice to take out the Reapers.
  • Via Inferred Holocaust, saving Earth becomes this, since not only will the destruction of the relays ensure a new dark age, but the entire Citadel blowing up above the planet will result in very bad things for the people below.
  • The Expanded Cut DLC retconned a lot of the endings, removing, among other things, the Normandy crashing (well, it still does, but it gets repaired quickly and the crew leave to reconnect with the rest of the fleet), the relays exploding (now, they simply break apart and are easily repaired, letting galactic civilization go on), and the Citadel blowing up (it doesn't blow up in the Synthesis and Destroy endings, as opposed to the original endings, where it did). However, it added a new ending that is a true Shaggy Dog Story: The Reapers win, meaning that essentially all the crap Shepard goes through was for nothing. At least in this cycle.
  • Amusingly enough, one of the original endings still exist in the Extended Cut... as the Destroy ending you get when your preparations have been poor. The accompanying narration is also fittingly bleak.
  • The Extended Cut, depending on your choices, can also turn the Rannoch arc into a Shaggy Dog Story. If you choose to side with the geth, all the quarians are wiped out. Then, if you choose the Destroy ending afterwards, all the geth are wiped out as well, leaving Rannoch as a ghost world.
• In retrospect, Might and Magic VIII moves towards this. You save the world... which is then destroyed for unrelated reasons a couple of years later (likely as little as one or two).
• In the Modern Warfare mission "Heat", you fall back from the enemy's counteroffensive to a planned landing zone at a farm, only to find out that it's too heavily guarded by SAM sites, then you have to trek back down the hill you just surrendered to the enemy to reach the new LZ.
• While Mondo Medicals was a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story, the sequel, Mondo Agency, settles for just a plain old Shaggy Dog Story instead, with the player going on a mission to stop an assassination attempt on the president and ending up accidentally killing him themself and getting fired.
• Both of the first two Monkey Island games deploy this trope comedically.
  • The Secret of Monkey Island:
    • Chapter one has Guybrush trying to complete The Three Trials so he can get some alone time with Elaine. As he finishes the third trial, he returns and discovers that Elaine has been kidnapped by LeChuck.
    • The second half of Chapter one has Guybrush buying a ship and assembling a crew to sail to Monkey Island. After he does so, the ship turns out to be in terrible condition and the crew turns out to be extremely lazy.
    • The third chapter has Guybrush attempting to infiltrate LeChuck's pirate ship and rescuing Elaine, only for LeChuck to leave Monkey Island and return to Melee just before Guybrush gets there.
    • The final chapter involves Guybrush attempting to rescue Elaine, only for her to escape the villain's clutches on her own, and he bungles her attempt to destroy LeChuck. On top of that, Guybrush spends a lot of time searching the potion which can destroy ghosts: but the potion is actually root beer, which can be found in the vending machine on the very island where the game began!
    • And if that's not enough, the titular Secret of Monkey Island is never revealed. Two games later, LeChuck admits that not even he knows what it is.
  • Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge is about Guybrush searching for a legendary treasure, except it was All Just The Overactive Imagination Of Two Children Playing Together. Maybe.
  • Arguably the entire point of Return to Monkey Island, which reveals several long-held mysteries only to make it clear that they're not as worthwhile that they were thought to be. The Voodoo Queen finally reveals her name! It's Corina. It's not particularly hard to find out either, you just ask. You finally get the Secret of Monkey Island! It's a T-Shirt. Lampshaded by Guybrush towards the end of the game. Endings are never satisfying when they've been built up to legendary status. What's important is the story and the journey, not the resolution.
• Mortal Kombat: After the Earthrealm warriors and their allies spent thousands of years trying to stop Shao Kahn, The Emperor of Outworld, from taking it over and adding it to his empire, Mortal Kombat 9's opening reveals that Shao Kahn wins the final battle of Armageddon and becomes GodEmperor of ALL realms, while every other character is dead. Right before he is killed Raiden sends visions to his past self in order to prevent this and defeat Kahn, creating an Alternate Timeline and causing a Continuity Reboot.
  • Kitana's ending in the sequel both alleviates and worsens the dog killing. Turns out she survived, united the realms and defeated Shao Kahn returning to be Queen of her realm. But it is now only a vision and the timeline is in many ways worse then the original.

• At the end of Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, the foreman you were trying to save is taken away screaming by the Hidden Ones. Tethers' superior doesn't care about this in the least since the eraser factory is open again... despite the fact that the President (the factory was the main eraser supplier for the White House) didn't even notice the eraser shortage. This is averted in the sequel where you go back to find Isaac Davner and finally solve the mystery of the Hidden People.
• The main campaign of Neverwinter Nights 2 feels like this. The player goes through a long meandering plot involving at least three different fake big bads before defeating the actual Big Bad, and then Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.
  • Although actually, most of the characters, including the player, survive, allowing for the sequel Mask of the Betrayer. However, one of the endings of that is also a Shaggy Dog Story, as you send the curse back into the world, after you were given it in the first place for the sole purpose of getting rid of it. Fortunately, the other three endings do have varying degrees of meaning to them.
  • A better example is your trial for the Ember massacre. Whether you're found innocent or guilty, the losing side appeals to trial by combat. The developers themselves have admitted you shouldn't have to fight Lorne if you were found innocent.
  • Then there's the Third Crusade, depending on how invested you are in bringing down the Wall of the Faithless. Two of your companions are bound for it, and another was kicked out of one of the Realms' "heavens" for trying to go against it. Agree with Kaelyn, gather Akachi's old generals, storm the City of Judgment... and then Kelemvor shows up and goes "Nope."
• Persona:
  • Persona 4 Golden: The Accomplice Ending turns the entire game into this. It requires you to betray all your teammates by destroying the key evidence that solves the mystery and letting the real culprit walk away scot-free. This effectively renders everything that happened, all the pain and strife the Investigation Team went through, completely moot. And the real kicker is that not only the culprit laughs at what the protagonist did, they make it very certain that they will be in contact with him for the rest of his life, ensuring this way that the main character will be under their heel forever.
  • Persona 5:
    • The Phantom Thieves target Okumura to get him to reveal the identity of the Black-Masked Criminal behind the Mental Shutdown cases plaguing Japan. Unfortunately, said criminal causes a mental shutdown in Okumura immediately after his boss fight by killing his shadow to prevent his identity from being revealed. To add insult to injury, the real Okumura doesn't suffer any ill effects from his shadow being killed until after the deadline to complete his palace passes, meaning the player may have to wait several in-game weeks before they realize all their efforts were for naught.
    • For the game's story itself, it's both Invoked and Defied. The Invoking comes from that, you spend a big chunk of the story not to actually reform corrupt people, but playing into the Holy Grail / Yaldabaoth's plan of making sure he becomes the sole God of this world who rules over the ignorant masses through engineering their apathy, and everyone you changed the hearts of end up becoming one with "the public", praising the Grail just like the other inmates. Even worse, later on he makes the public believe that the Phantom Thieves didn't exist, and anyone who was a member of the Phantom Thieves literally stopped existing in pain. Despite this, you could Defy this by making it clear that he should be gone and reform the rest of humanity by taking him down instead.
• In Pillars of Eternity, several of the companions' personal quests end in disappointment and a lack of resolution, fitting into the theme of not letting the past hold you back and determine the present and future:
  • Edér never does find out why his brother joined Waidwen's army. He does come to terms with it, choosing to believe his brother did it for the right reasons, though he's still a little bitter about it.
  • The tablet Kana's been looking for was destroyed a LONG time ago, and the scholar is undead and is hardly the role-model that Kana thought him to be. He manages to find some solace in the fact that he knows the truth, at least, and decides to look for a new way to spread his beliefs instead of relying on something from the past to prove his point.
  • The reincarnated elder Sagani spent five years looking for is a stag, and she gets there just in time for him to die. She at least notes that she finally gets to go home when all is said and done, and that's enough, though she can be haunted by it forever after.
  • Zahua's vision quest reveals nothing except what he already knew all along: that the Tacan people and its culture are gone and there's nothing he can do about it. The vision is simply telling him that he needs to let go of the past.
  • Durance is forced to admit that Magran betrayed him and his fellow sorcerers for creating the God-Bomb, despite the fact that Magran told them to create the God-Bomb. All his attempts to atone and regain her acceptance are for naught. He either tells her off and finds a new path, or resolves to turn everyone against the gods.
• This happens in Pirates: Legend of the Black Buccaneer, but only for the Bad Ending. The hero Francis Blade is on an adventure seeking Pirate Booty in the Devil's Triangle, and befriends Pirate Girl Vanilla who's on her own quest. Depending on Francis' actions, he can choose to escape with Vanilla at the end with all his newfound wealth, or abandon Vanilla with the treasure. Choose the latter and the epilogue reveals Francis would eventually lose all his money to gambling and wine and is back to being a nobody; the former choice instead grants Francis and Vanilla a Babies Ever After ending.
• While Portal ended with Chell killing GLaDoS (kind of) and escaping the Aperture Science compound, a later update added a Sequel Hook where she's simply captured afterwards and dragged back inside for more experiments.
  • Portal 2 ends with Chell finally being freed for good, but in a world that's at best uninhabited and at worst under the control of a genocidal alien regime. GLaDOS learned to feel compassion over the course of the game by realizing she's part human, but in the end she deletes that part of herself, leaving her more sociopathic than ever. The multiplayer campaign is about gaining access to a vault full of living humans in stasis (up to this point humanity was presumed extinct), but after finally doing so, GLaDOS kills them all within a week via her cruel "experiments." And Wheatley, who became drunk on power after all the trouble he and Chell went through, is stuck in outer space with no way home.
• Presentable Liberty has this in spades: by the end of the game, the player character's friend dies by electrocution when trying to break them out of prison, the baker down streets commits suicide minutes before you can reach her as she believes no one is left alive in the town, your caretaker realizes the daughter that was held hostage to ensure his compliance is long dead and lets himself waste away from illness, and even your captor later dies from the same virus he had unleashed upon the world. All this while your character can do nothing except pace around their cell and play video games to pass the time.
• Prince of Persia:
  • Prince of Persia allows you to play to the end after you run out of time, to find the Princess's room empty, with her either dead or married to Jaffar.
  • Prince of Persia (2008). To wit: Elika, much to no one's surprise, is forced to use her own life force to restore Ahriman's can... But the Prince, in a true example of Love Makes You Crazy, proceeds to destroy said can to revive Elika, releasing Ahriman in the process... And given Elika's dialogue upon waking up, she probably hates him now. * cue audience going "Bra-vo"*
  • When you pick up Elika's body and slowly walk outside while carrying it, the credits start rolling. When you put Elika's body back down outside the temple, the credits stop. The official strategy guide for the game even states outright that this is a good place to stop if you don't want a bad ending. The player still controls the Prince, but there's nothing left to do aside from destroying the tree of life and freeing Ahriman - which the player must do themself, without any coaching from the game. Doing so leads to the downer ending where The Prince frees Ahriman and revives Elika, who responds to this by asking "Why?"
  • The epilogue expansion turns this around. The prince does not believe that Ahriman can be properly sealed anymore so the choice ultimately came down to fight Ahriman now with Elika and Ormazd's help, or fight him later without them. Elika still thinks he's an idiot for making that choice.
• Puyo Puyo:
  • In her story in SUN, Arle goes out to stop Satan from enlarging the sun large and making it abnormally hot. Once you beat Satan, Carbuncle appears and makes the sun large again.
  • In 15th Anniversary, the characters compete to win a wish-granting medal, but most of them have their wishes messed up somehow. Examples include Klug, who wishes to be in a magazine if he's popular, not realizing he says "if he's popular" when he's not, Yu and Rei who simultaneously wish to swap places with each other for a day, with the wishes cancelling each other out, and Sig, whose wish for new insects to be in the forest is just straight-up refused simply because the medal doesn't like bugs.
• While Red Dead Redemption ends with Shoot the Shaggy Dog, Seth's missions end with this trope. You go through a lot of trouble to uncover the treasure he demands you help him find before he helps you attack the fort. The treasures turns out to be...
  Seth: A glass eye?!? IT'S A GLASS EYE!
  • The whole revolution in Mexico, as would be expected when it's spearheaded by a playboy megalomaniac. Reyes got what he wanted...
  • The entire story (and everyone who died in it) was a local politician attempting to erase his gang past and get military credit before the big election, by ordering assassinations on his former brothers-in-arms including John. Then he gets impeached.
• Claire's situation in Resident Evil 2 and in the remake. She went to Raccoon City after not hearing from her brother for some time and unwittingly got stuck during the zombie outbreak. Afterwards, she found out that Chris had already left weeks ago, leaving behind either a diary or a strange letter detailing his leaving or "vacation" to Europe. Meaning Claire traveled all the way here and was trapped in a highly dangerous, zombie-infested zone for nothing.
• Played for laughs in Rex Nebular And The Cosmic Gender Bender. The titular protagonist is sent to a Gendercide-ridden planet to retrieve a valuable vase. Over the course of the game, he loses his ship, destroys a large city, causes the deaths of several people, kills a small dog, suffers through repeated bouts of gender-bending, and gets kicked in the nuts, not to mention averting several deaths by a hair along the way. In the end, he accidentally breaks the vase in front of his customer while arguing about payment. Which they had already agreed on, note.
• Robo Aleste does this with a touch of Doomed by Canon: Humongous Mecha-piloting ninja Kage battles the enemies of Oda Nobunaga and defeats their extra-dimensional leader, only to find out Nobunaga is the true threat. Kage flies back home to confront him, only to find that Akechi Mitsuhide got to him first.
• Sacred Earth - Alternative: Konoe goes through hell by fighting all of her friends-turned-monsters, but believes that doing so will allow her to regain her memories and prevent the end of the world. Unfortunately, Konoe turns out to be a replica, and all of those memories never truly belonged to her. Worse yet, True Konoe kills her and absorbs her, allowing the former to destroy the world anyways. True Konoe's villainy is also an example of this trope, since her reason for destroying the world is to revive her family, but despite her newfound power, she fails to bring them back.
• In Serious Sam 2, after fighting through 5 monster-infested worlds, battling your way through Mental's horde and defeating the final boss, Sam finally makes his way to Mental's throne room and guns him down... only for it to be a trap that Sam narrowly escapes while some british commentators express their disappointment. The after-credits make it even more painful when Sam shows the medallion to the Sirians, only for them to place it alongside another couple dozen completed ones, making the entire game pointless.
  After-credits voice 3: I've never seen a more stupid ending to a game!
• In Shadowrun Returns, your main objective is to receive an inheritance from your old pal Sam by solving his murder. After a convoluted plot involving a serial killer, a religious cult, a hive of demonic insects, and the family dramas of some rich elves, you catch the culprit only to discover that Sam was straight-up lying to you. He had no inheritance to leave, and just wanted to see if you cared enough about him to bother. But at least you saved Seattle from being overrun by the insect queen and if you played your cards right, you got said rich elves to give you a lot of money and/or a cushy job.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Team Dark's story in Sonic Heroes ends this way for Rouge; she only teams up with Shadow and Omega because she believes that Dr. Eggman has a secret treasure that she's intent on finding. When the Egg Emperor is defeated, she finds that the treasure is a surplus of robotic clones of Shadow, whose status as the original Shadow that fell to Earth at the end of Sonic Adventure 2 was previously brought into question (though later confirmed to be the case in the canon ending of his own game).
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). A lot of levels have absolutely no story relevance, with the biggest offender being Sonic's campaign, 90% of which is spent saving Elise, only for her to get captured by Eggman again in the next scene. Furthermore, the whole story feels like one for the player since in the end Elise pulls out a Cosmic Retcon.
• Star Control: In the third game, you have to fix the Ultron again - only to discover, that the Utwig have suddenly found spiritual enlightenment and no longer need the device. The captain has a meltdown, as they spent up to months finding a way to fix the thing, only to discover that the very people who once considered species-wide suicide over it have suddenly decided to give the useless ball of metal back. Thankfully, it's implied that whatever artificial intelligence was in the Ultron forced the Utwig to grow up and stop worshipping it, because the Ultron itself turns out to be a very important component for the project needed to win the game - something that would cause problems if the Utwig were still suicidally desperate to reclaim it.
• In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Imperial storyline on Taris (a planet which was basically wiped out by orbital bombardment in Knights of the Old Republic) apparently happens sometime after the Republic storyline- but in the same place. Which means that after your Republic character single-handedly saves the Taris restoration project, you go back with a Sith character and learn that everything you did has been completely undone. Notably, Republic characters have the option of sending a Jedi to teach a group of Force-sensitive rakghouls how to use their abilities, nicely subverting the rakghouls Always Chaotic Evil characterization in the process. Imperial characters can go to this same group, defeat the Jedi, and convince the rakghouls to go straight back to evil.
  • The same happens in reverse, but on Balmorra. While Republic players are busy saving the recolonization effort(s) on Taris, Imperial players are taking over Balmorra and securing its weapon production for the empire. However, someone might go on with a Republic player and watch as everything the Imperials did to secure Balmorra is essentially undone, as the Imperials are run off the planet.
  • Speaking of Taris, it's the first level of Knights of the Old Republic following the introductory tutorial. The player spends anywhere from three to six hours at least running around doing various quests on the planet, only for the previously mentioned orbital bombardment to make all of it meaningless, as all the characters you just helped are now dead.
    • Particularly heartbreaking when it's revealed in Star Wars: The Old Republic that the group of refugees you guided towards "Sanctuary" in Knights of the Old Republic all died on their way there.
• Episode 3 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People starts with Strong Bad's game console breaking. He then sets out to form a "Battle of the Bands" to raise the repair money. After getting all the local bands, having to enter himself with two characters he hates, and barely managing to etch out a win, he spends all his prize money on the machine, only to find there was a piece of cheese wedged inside, and all he had to do was pull it out.
  • Episode 1 also qualifies: while Strong Bad achieves his original goal of beating the snot out of Homestar, his briefly successful efforts to ruin Homestar's life - specifically, turning him into a publicly disgraced criminal fugitive without a girlfriend - are undone by Strong Bad himself when he has to kick Homestar out of his house.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario Party 3: With decent players, an average game of "The Beat Goes On" consists of over three minutes of pressing the same buttons as the previous players and no one receiving anything for it.
  • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: The second half of the game reveals Peach's voice was never stolen to begin with — it was Birdo's voice that got stolen. Peasley heard of Cackeletta's plan beforehand and warned her, but she beat Mario to it before Peach could tell the truth.
  • In Paper Mario: Color Splash, you first encounter a train called the Sunset Express in an early area called Marmalade Valley. It's held up because it's prepping for its final voyage, and because some archaeologists are using it. The next fifteen or so hours of gameplay conspire to make sure the Sunset Express won't reach its final destination. First, Mario has to break the tracks to progress the story, which peeves off the conductor. Then you have to gather up the twenty-four Blue Rescue Squad Toads to fix the tracks, a task that spans several areas and pretty much all of the next two "chapters" of searching for both the Blue and Purple Big Paint Stars. After the monumental effort of hunting them down, and after the Toads use their own bodies to make new tracks for the train, what happens? A Thwomp falls from the sky out of nowhere to crush the train. This is, of course, Played for Laughs.
  • WarioWare Gold: The plot involves a little girl named Lulu attempting to get to the stadium where Wario is so she can take back the treasure (a chamber pot) that he stole from her village. In the epilogue, she discovers that her village bought a modern toilet for them to use while she was gone.
• In the Super Robot Wars X verse, after Lelouch enacts his Zero Requiem in his world, rather than the world obtaining peace, the Mariemeia Army rises up and makes another attempt to go to war.
• Tales of the Abyss has one particularly long sidequest that involves helping two soldiers on opposite sides of a war get together romantically. After the war is over, they're planning to get married...and then the man gets killed in a bombing that kicks off a new section of the plot.
• This Is the Police: No matter what you do, what choices you make, who you side with, the ending is the same. Jack loses his job, off-handedly discarded by either Chaffee or Rogers, fails to reconcile with his wife, fails to make something out of his connection with Lana, is banned from his favorite club, and fails to change anything in the corrupt system. He at least gets to keep the money he made for himself, but it gives him little consolation as it was never about the money, while everything truly important to Jack was taken from him.
• Touhou Project has this in several storylines. Several times, the incidents Reimu and Marisa set out to stop are just some people they don't know temporarily doing something fairly harmless for personal reasons, and didn't bother to tell others, and the plot would have been resolved if nobody had ever tried to resolve the incident. Of course, since there's a climactic (if pointless) battle, and Defeat Means Friendship, the only real result of the story is "Reimu meets new friends".
  • Touhou Suimusou ~ Immaterial and Missing Power features a plot based around finding out who was causing mysterious parties to take place. When they find out it was just a Hard-Drinking Party Girl oni looking for an excuse to get drunk, they just go ahead and have the parties anyway.
  • Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night involves exiled lunarians trying to hide the Earth in a bucket, but failing at making it work properly, so they were going to just abort the plan, anyway.
  • Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View revolves around a very large cast of playable characters, many of whom don't even care about the event or want to stop it, anyway, finding out that the incident is a natural occurrence and harmless to begin with.
  • Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith's plot is a new shrine appearing on top of the youkai mountain and telling the Hakurei Shrine that they'd be absorbed. Not a major incident, but certainly cause for some concern. Except that when you get to the god of the shrine they turn out to be perfectly reasonable and the whole 'you will be assimilated' thing was her miko being over-eager.
  • Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object has youkai subordinates of a sealed priestess rescuing her... but she turns out to actually be fairly nice, and was sealed for wanting humans and youkai to get along. Since the modern era is one of peace to begin with and the totality of her plan is establishing a temple, the characters don't really mind letting her go free.
  • Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires sees hordes of divine spirits appearing. It turns out that this is a side effect of someone powerful reviving... and she finishes doing so before the PC gets there.
  • Silent Sinner in Blue is probably the most egregious example, as the entire thing is a giant Gambit Pileup where one of the plotters decides at the last moment that she'd rather just get drunk than actually achieve her objective, and steals the lunarian's booze instead of their legendary treasures.
    • Silent Sinner in Blue is a Shaggy Dog Story. The overall story, Touhou Bougetsushou, is not. The full ending is in Cage in Lunatic Runagate, where it turns out that this was all a plot to put the fear of youkai (mostly Yukari, really) into Eirin, and the sake was a perfect choice for doing that.
• At the end of Ultimate Spider-Man, you as Peter Parker/Spider-Man have to fight Eddie Brock/Venom to the finish to keep him from killing Bolivar Trask, the man who apparently had something to do with both of your parents' deaths and get your hands on the file which tells you the truth about the incident. During the cutscenes after beating Venom, Eddie tracks down and murders Trask in prison anyway.
• Valkyria Chronicles 4 has a comedic example - during a flashback, the real Kai deserts, having his sister Leena take his place. Nobody's going over the paperwork closely enough to notice the obvious difference, but eventually "Kai" is called up for a marksmanship demonstration. Clade and Raz, knowing Leena can't hit the broad side of a barn, sneak into the field and make simultaneous shots to create the illusion she hit... and afterward, it turns out Leena is actually a crack shot. She'd just trained with ironsights, and so didn't recognize the scope on her military rifle had been intentionally misaligned. Once a squadmate fixes them she effortlessly lives up to her new reputation.
• Every ending of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume is some variant of this. For summary purposes, the hero Wylfred has made a deal with the dark goddess Hel that will help him slay the other goddess Lenneth, who he blames for the death of his father. He's still just an ordinary guy—in no ending can he actually kill her. The degree to which the trope applies varies, however: ending B is straight-up shaggy dog, with absolutely nothing achieved. In ending A, Wylfred decides on his own to give up on vengeance, and kills a powerful servant of Hel. Hel herself remains untouchable, despite the revelation that she was responsible for all the suffering and death that occurred after the first fifth of the game. C fits into another trope...
• In the Wacky Races NES game, every chapter ends by rendering all of Muttley's efforts completely pointless. The blow is softened by the fact that he did destroy the rest of the cast's cars.
• In West of Loathing, this trope is lampshaded by putting a Shaggy-Dog Story, with an actual shaggy dog in it, inside a location called "Shaggy Dog Cave". The elaborate and detailed story is engraved on a long series of plaques, spaced out within an otherwise featureless cavern. As expected, the story ends with the characters finding what they were looking for, taking it, and leaving. To make the point even firmer, the shaggy dog in the story is a meaningless detail. And to top it off, the cave itself has no payoff—after all, they already took the treasure save for an El Vibrato monolith that can't be seen without a special item, which itself can only be used once per game.
  • The Necromancer sidequest requires you to travel all across the West investigating undead activity to locate the Necromancer's tower. When you finally find the tower, you climb your way to the top, facing a series of increasingly difficult encounters with the Necromancer's undead minions, until you see that the Necromancer himself has become so weak and decrepit from the use of dark arts that he's no longer capable of moving from his chair, and disintegrates with a single touch. Subverted if you have Doc Alice as your partner, in which case she'll shoot the Necromancer herself or if you learn all seven Nex-Mex skills, in which case you can choose to take the Necromancer's place.
• Winnie the Pooh: In the "Preschool" PC game, Pooh wakes up wondering what today was; he concludes it must be Eeyore's birthday and the goal of the game is to win party supplies from each of the games played. In the ending cutscene however, Eeyore reveals it's not his birthday, and Pooh got the date wrong and the whole party seems like a wasted effort, until Christopher Robin decides to still have the party in the player's honor for helping everyone and getting it all together.
• World of Warcraft:
  • There is a questline in the Dread Wastes where a group of pandaren brewers are attempting to use mantid amber^note which has healing and lifegiving properties in this universe to brew a new variety of beer. The questline is long and complicated and involves gathering two special blades, enchanting them with a specific spell that only sprites can use, and venturing into the heart of mantid territory to do all of this. In the process, you even free one of the Klaxxi Paragons. And after you go through all this trouble, what's the reaction to this radical new variety of beer?
    Sapmaster Vu: Yeah, this is pretty horrible.
  • The Horde war campaign in Battle for Azeroth ends this way. The player hunts down a long-lost shipwreck to revive its captain and the lost Prince of Kul Tiras as Forsaken, recruiting another dying human along the way. The captain is senselessly killed without ever saying a word on-screen but the player succeeds in stealing a powerful Kul Tiran artifact. In the follow-up to the campaign, the Alliance steal the artifact back and it ends up being destroyed while the recruited human is executed by Sylvanas and the Prince escapes from Horde custody, rendering all of the player's efforts pointless.
  • Both factions in Battle for Azeroth recruit their new allies to secure fleets capable of waging war on their enemy. The Zandalari fleet is destroyed by sabotage while the Kul Tiran fleet is destroyed by Azshara, without either fleet having actually fought anyone.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X: One sidequest ends like this: A Nopon merchant sells a woman a lotion that causes her hair to fall out, so she forces him to go gather ingredients to make a cure. The Nopon ultimately manages to somehow strand himself on a floating island, necessitating the player character rescuing him and collecting the ingredients for him. By the time you get back the woman who lost her hair remembered that she's currently using an artificial robotic body, and simply got new hair from the maintenance center, ultimately rendering the entire quest completely pointless.
• One of Goro Majima's side-stories in Yakuza 0 is a comedic example. Majima meets a boy who has a "bag phone" (a very early version of the cell phone) who offers him to use the bag phone instead of a pay phone. Except the bag phone has a very short battery life, so Majima has to run to the store to get some more batteries. Then, lugging around the heavy bag phone hurt the boy's shoulder, so Majima has to get him some medicine. Then some punks attack the boy, and Majima has to fight them. Then it turns out the punks broke the bag phone when they attacked the boy. So he has his mom buy him a new bag phone. Finally, Majima gets to make his phone call... but he forgot who he wanted to call.
  • At the end of the Real Estate Royale subplot, Kiryu has taken down the Finance King, revitalized Kamurocho, and made himself a fortune. Then he gives it up to go back to being a Yakuza, leaving the Finance King's former lieutenants in charge. Even if they decide to turn over a new leaf, the game takes place in December 1988. Kamurocho has less then a year before the Japanese real estate market crashes, sending the country into a decade-long recession that it still hasn't fully recovered from today. All Kiryu's work revitalizing the neighborhood was for nothing.
• YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG has a dual layer of Shaggy Dog Story. Firstly, Alex finds out the world will end at the turn of the millennium, and all the effort he and his friends put in trying to solve the ongoing mysteries and train for the final batle is completely for naught since their reality gets erased regardless. Secondly, he eventually finds out that everything that was revealed in the story was just a lie of the original Essentia to convince him to kill the original Alex and give her control of reality.

---