Discussion Main / TheRuinsICaused

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Examples need to be culled, or description needs to be expanded, started by BrightBlueInk on Jul 4th 2011 at 11:40:05 PM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Out of curiosity. Is there any particular reason why the games depicted in the collage are all SNES games, or is that just a coincidence?

Krieg wasn't even the coolest villain of his own arc. He wasn't even the second-coolest villain of his own arc.

Took out examples that are ambiguous as to provenience from Watching Troy Burn or The Ruins I Caused. Please add them to any page they fit on.

• This is a common ending to episodes of Slayers in which Lina uses Dragon Slave.
• Cave Story places you on top of the entire island, which is Ruins-esque, right before the final boss, and you have to escape by jumping off the edge right after. If you get the best ending, one of the cutscenes that plays during the end credits shows Misery standing at this same spot, looking at the clouds below.
• The ending of 6 Days A Sacrifice.
• Gears of War one and two both end with The Squad in a king raven, flying over the lightmasss bomb collateral damage and Jacinto, respectively.
• Samus does one of these at the end of Metroid Prime, watching the destruction of the Artifact Temple from atop the hull of her gunship.
• In Arc the Lad II, the party end up above the ruin of The Empire capital, the tragic part is that not only are Arc and Kukuru, the two first playable characters, dead, but you just discovered that the whole quest of the heroes was a giant Batman Gambit from the Big Bad: to be released, he needed a human to willingly break his seal, and made sure that the King of Romania was certain that Arc & Co, who spent 120 hours of game time destroying his empire bit by bit, wanted to kill him, so when they finally reached him, he opened the Can of the sealed evil, destroying the world the heroes were trying to protect.
• A rare example at the beginning of a game. In Mass Effect, there's a cutscene that can be triggered on Eden Prime, showing the three-member squad party standing at the balcony and looking over the ruins left in Sovereign's wake.
  • Mass Effect 2 plays this very straight with the destruction of the Collector base as the Normandy flies out in triumphant fashion.
• One of the pieces of artwork commissioned for the Global Guardians PBEM Universe was of Achilles (leader of the titular team) overlooking the ruins of a Paris neighborhood after a supervillain battle knocked over the Eiffel Tower onto it.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Doing cleanup because the trope is highly misused. This trope is about someone surveying the destruction he caused himself. Watching the ruins someone else caused is Watching Troy Burn. Some of these examples are unclear, so they're here to use in the future.

• Near the end of the flashback to the Ishbal War in Fullmetal Alchemist, Scar looks down on the ruins of the Kanda District and swears revenge on the state alchemists for destroying his land and killing his family.
• Trigun uses this in the second episode, after the water supply under a mansion explodes from a stray bullet in the preceding fight
• The manga version of Chrono Crusade has a flashback where Aion and the other sinners are standing on a cliff, overlooking the debris of their crashed ship and the results of the battle that gave Chrono the title "Slayer of a Hundred."
• In Beelzebub, Himekawa gets one when looking over the ruins of his destroyed apartment building. Just to be clear, the entire building was his.
• Pretty much anytime Hellboy or the B.P.R.D. defeat one of the Ogdru Hem, they have a scene like this afterwards to show just how hard a fight it was.
• During the Firebird Suite of Fantasia 2000, the nymph looks horrified from atop a cliff to see her forest destroyed by the firebird's volcanic explosion
• In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the crew of the Enterprise gather on the bridge to watch the Mutara Nebula slowly transform into the planet Genesis right before their eyes.
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features an especially impressive scene of this kind at the end.
• Remake of The Time Machine, wherein at the end the time traveller, his new girlfriend in the future, and all the other Eloi are standing on a high hill looking down over the jungle as the entire local Morlock cave system is obliterated by temporal energy from the self-destructing time machine in the depths of the caves.
• This more or less describes the ending to Fight Club.
• From Dusk Till Dawn closes with a shot of the survivors driving away from the vampire-infested roadhouse. As they depart, the view pulls back to show that the roadhouse sits at the tip of an old Meso-American pyramid, half buried in the side of a cliff, and surrounded by hundreds of wrecked cars from the vampires' previous victims.
• Alien Resurrection ends with two characters overlooking the crumbling remains of Paris.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Heralds Of Valdemar universe, upon returning to their homeland after the Cataclysm, the Kaled'a'in find a glass-floored crater where it had been, and look down from the cliff walls into it.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer ends with the heroes standing on the edge of the giant pit which used to be Sunnydale.
• Doctor Who: The Doctor, Donna, and the Roman family on a hill, watching as Mt. Vesuvius explodes in "Fires of Pompeii."
  • In "Cold Blood," the Doctor, Amy, and company run out of the TARDIS just in time to see the giant drill in the bottom of the valley explode.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: At the beginning of the episode "Best of Both Worlds," the Away Team is beamed down next to the edge of a crater that used to be a city.
  • In part II of that ep, the famous "Graveyard of Ships at Wolf 359" scene.
• Mega Man X through X3 all used this in one way or another.
  • As well as most Mega Man games in general. How many times has Skull Castle gone kablooey, again?
• In Romancing SaGa, the party you have chosen overlooks the ruins of Isthmus Keep as the last event in the ending.
• The endings of many, many Castlevania games. Except more often than not, the castle is still crumbling as the Belmont-of-the-Day looks on from a distant cliff.
• Halo ends with Cortana and the Master Chief hustling to the back of their longsword to watch an entire artificial world being blown to pieces.
  • Again in Halo 3 with the Arc.
  • Inverted in Halo: Reach: While everyone gets into the last ship, you stay behind to provide cover fire and watch it disappear into the sky, presumedly the last human on a planet pretty much completely annhilated by the Covenant.
• Sonic Adventure ends with everyone overlooking the flooded ruins of Station Square.
• Present in spirit in Super Smash Bros. Brawl's "Subspace Emissary," which ends with everyone standing on a cliff overlooking the sea, staring at a big "X" in the sky where the Island of the Ancients used to be before it was completely destroyed by dozens of subspace bombs going off simultaneously.
  • It's probably both a reference to a) the Japanese name of Brawl, Super Smash Bros. X, and b) the ending of the Kirby Super Star game Revenge of Meta Knight, which also counts as an example with the ruins of Battleship Halberd. According to Squeak Squad, it got better.
• Portal ends (well, nearly) with the PC staring at the remains of the Aperture Science building.

Edited by lu127 "If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer Hide / Show Replies