Emergency Transformation / Video Games

• In 11eyes -Resona Forma-, we see that this is how the Black Knights were created. Liselotte thoroughly beat all of them except for George, who finished sealing her before he died, and Misao, who clothed her partners in armor made out of dark spirits, turning them and herself into Liselotte's guardians.
• In one ending in Yuri Genre Visual Novel Akai Ito, Kei is turned into the "something not human" by Sakuya to save her life after she was fatally wounded by Nushi. It's better than it sounds, because she now kicks asses for eternity alongside Sakuya. The outcome of said ending was made into a mini-game in the sort-of sequel Aoi Shiro. On the same character route is when Sakuya's power is not enough to transform Kei, so both of them become Ohashira, replacing Yumei. Quite close to being Together in Death. Yumei does feel sorry for them.
• Fatima, the Voice with an Internet Connection in the PC game Anachronox was originally the main character's secretary until she died in a car wreck. The protagonist couldn't live without her, so he had her digitized. It's later revealed that he felt he was to blame for the reckless actions that resulted in her death (and he kind of was), so he digitized her to save her life as best he could. It's implied that he feels terribly guilty about it, as she's essentially trapped in the LifeCursor.
• Rachel has done this, possibly twice in BlazBlue. First to save a mortally wounded and time-displaced Jin by installing him in the Susanooh Unit to become Hakumen. It's also possible that Ragna would have bled to death after losing his arm in the orphanage attack without Rachel biting him to transform him into a half-vampire.
• In Breath of Fire II, the party needs to fly to a particular location, but the only way any of them know to do this is by having Nina permanently transform into a giant, non-sentient bird. Just before she's about to do this, her little sister sacrifices herself by undergoing the transformation herself. Of course, this whole situation invokes a certain amount of Narm since what they're trying to fly to is merely an island whose cliffs lack a path the game will allow you to climb up.
• This is part of the plot for Bulletstorm. Grayson saves Ishi using mechanical parts of questionable efficacy. While Ishi functions pretty well physically after his transformation, he runs into some other new problems instead.
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate: When Dracula found out that the warrior he just dealt a lethal blow to was his son Trevor, he turned the young man into a vampire in an attempt to save his life - which succeeded 30 years later and resulted in the creation of Lords of Shadow Alucard.
• Characters with the "Bionic Patient" profession in Cataclysm have this as their backstory, where they underwent Bionic augmentation in order to survive an otherwise terminal illness.
  "When the diagnosis came back positive you signed up for a series of experimental bionic surgeries that saved your life. Now you're healthier than you ever were before, thanks to a suite of bionic systems powered by standard batteries. Make the most of your second chance at life."
• Bonding with a dying human host by a usually injured Kheldian is the canonical usual origin of the Peacebringers and Warshades in City of Heroes.
• Corruption of Laetitia: The half-angel Celeste is betrayed by her church and is about to be sacrificed when the demon lord whom she just defeated a scant few minutes ago offers to turn her into a demon. She accepts, and then goes on to spearhead a revolution against the church. Whether Celeste reclaims her half-angel heritage or remains a demon depends on the player's cruelty and/or kindness.
• Cyborg Justice starts on this premise. The player, as an unknown space explorer, is modified into a cyborg when their asteroid-stricken ship crashes onto an alien planet and they die on the operating table. While the robots can't save their life, they do manage to transfer the player into a robotic body. Unfortunately, the resident robots are not benevolent and try to erase the player's memory, to force them into being just another anonymous worker unit.
• Dark Souls: The game implies that the Daughter of Chaos was made a Fire Keeper as a means of magical life-support. Sucking the blight pus from her servants nearly killed her, and even in her current condition she's blind, immobile, in constant pain and endlessly giving birth to bloody, stillborn eggs.
• Given the themes of the series, this crops up in the histories for a number of characters in the Deus Ex Universe.
  • In the original game, this trope was part of the back-story for how Agents Hermann and Navarre became mech-augs.
  • At the end of the tutorial mission in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Adam gets the shit kicked out of him and then shot, brought to the very brink of death. To keep him alive, he's augmented - turned into a cyborg - by his boss and the company he works for. They replace his arms, legs and heart and stick machines into just about anything you can stick a machine in. When the gameplay kicks in again, he's very different. Notably, only the arm and chest replacements were necessary for him to survive. The rest was his employer using his contract to gain power of attorney (darkly alluded to in the intro sequence when David Sarif is heard saying "He doesn't need that"). Later in the game you find out that Jensen is the only individual whose body accepts augmentations without the need for drugs to stave off rejection, due to extensive genetic manipulation, hinting his employer (who was aware of this fact) was also having an experimental field day with Jensen as well.
• In the LucasArts Adventure Game The Dig, the team discover "life crystals," which have the ability to heal wounds and resurrect the dead at the cost of being literally maddeningly addictive, as evidenced by Brink's slow decent into insanity. Robbins makes Low promise that if anything should happen to her, he won't use the crystals to revive her. Unsurprisingly she ends up dying in the process of saving the day. If you finish the game without her, she thanks you for keeping your promise when the aliens resurrect everyone (madness free). However, if you ignore her wishes and bring her back yourself, she's horrified and immediately throws herself off a cliff. When she's brought back to life at the end of the game, she's still pissed at you for that.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins has the Dalish Elf Origin. Basically, your character becomes tainted and has to undergo the Grey Warden Joining in order to have a chance of survival.
  • In Dragon Age II, if you take your sibling with you for the Deep Roads Expedition, they will contract the Taint, and the only way to save their life is to have them undergo the Grey Warden Joining. Hope you brought Anders with you as well, as he's the only guy who can lead you to the Wardens.
• In one ending of Duel Savior Destiny Taiga becomes the Messiah and to avoid the terrible consequences this would cause Rubinas stabs him in the heart and turns him into a homunculus like herself. He seems okay with it, though it took him rather by surprise.
• The Lords of Amber Plains of Endless Legend faced a stark choice when Auriga's climate began to collapse, freezing their crops; death by starvation, or survival by binding their souls to suits of armor. Now transformed into the Broken Lords, they have a significant amount of angst over the fact that they must drain energy from living beings to sustain their bodies, betraying their vows as honorable knights and builders.
• In Ever17 at the end of two/three routes Tsugumi shares her blood with Takeshi, You, the Kid and eventually Coco. She's the hesitant one as while it's supposed to only be so they get her antibodies, it could give them the Cure Virus and make them immortal, unaging, have a Healing Factor and see in the dark. And also potentially have a bunch of people try to capture them for research... So at the end of the story about three fourths+ of the cast is immortal.
• Part of Torvald's backstory in Evolve. Left torn basically into pieces in a wrecked spaceship floating through space with all other crew dead, he gave the ship's robots one final command: "Repair me." Now he's a head, one arm, and a chunk of a torso grafted onto a robotic body that includes features like a jetpack, mortar cannons, a target designation laser, and a personal forcefield, all powered by a fusion core that burns what he eats as fuel to keep him alive.
• In the Good Ending of Fate/stay night's Heaven's Feel route, this happens to Shirou in order to save his life. Shirou is pretty much dead on his feet, with his entire body having been turned into swords from the inside out, so Ilya uses the Third Magic to transplant his soul into... something else (it's never really said what). In the epilogue, he's been put into a magically-created artificial human body, but it still needs further refinement, and Rin is seeking out Touko Aozaki for that purpose.
  • In Fate/Grand Order, Mash Kyrielight, after the sabotage of the Command Room of Chaldea by Lev Lainur, is dying due to damage sustained in the explosion, and makes a contract with a Servant that was previously summoned by Chaldea, allowing her to merge with the Servant and allow the Servant's power to pass to her. In this way, Mash survives and becomes a Servant herself. It is not until late into the main arc of the game that we learn that the Servant that Mash merged with was none other than Galahad of the Round Table.
  • Also in Fate/Grand Order, after Mysterious Heroine XX collides with Summer Okita Souji and seemingly kills her, she decides to use her Servant Universe tech to resuscitate Okita and turn her into a cyborg (also curing her tuberculosis while she's at it). Unfortunately for Okita, this only affects her summer form, and her normal form is still as sick and fragile as ever.
• F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin has a variant of this when Beckett is surgically implanted to boost his psychic abilities and link him to Alma. However, while the transformation is an emergency, it is not intended to save the patient's life, but rather to draw Alma's attention toward Beckett after she has escaped containment, in order to keep her distracted and ultimately lure her into another containment device to seal her away.
• In Front Mission, Driscoll is part of an experiment into using the brains of human soldiers to create advanced computers. After his death, he is resurrected and serves as a component in the Humongous Mecha Final Boss.
• In Gungrave, Bob Poundmax's Big Eater habits eventually caught up with him. He would have died of a blood clot in his brain if he hadn't been transformed into a Superior(an Orgman capable of free will/sentient thought). Not only did this save his life, it granted him superhuman abilities and even allowed him to keep enjoying chicken drumsticks.
• At the end of Half-Life 2, Doctor Breen is protesting being put into a "host body" as the only way to survive teleportation. Speculation is that he is one of the slug-like Advisors that attacks Gordon and Alyx throughout the Episode sequels. Although he probably dies when Gordon damages the teleporter.
• Heroes of Might and Magic:
  • Gauldoth Half-dead from the fourth game. During the Armageddon which destroyed the old world he attempted to save himself by undergoing a ritual of lichdom. Because he was only an apprentice necromancer, he emerged from the ritual with one half of his body as that of a living human, and the other half zombified.
  • In the sixth game, Moander's backstory states that he was poisoned with manticore venom, but managed to acquire a vial of namtaru spider venom ^note Namtaru spiders are worshiped by necromancers, and their venom is used in the rituals to create liches and vampires, and drank it thinking it would give him eternal life. It did... but the combination of the two venoms ravaged his body and seared most of his flesh, giving him the appearance of a living skeleton.
• Graham escapes from Caldaur in the Fan Remake of King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne, by warning him that his still-human wife is on the verge of death. Upon hearing this, Caldaur immediately leaves so he can turn her into a vampire and stop her from dying.
• This happens twice in the Mary Skelter series.
  • In Mary Skelter 2, Jack is near death due to both taking a hit from Blood Skelter Alice and then taking the brunt of the ensuing fall into the Underground Cavern for Little Mermaid. Even after all that, all Jack can think about is how he could've protected Alice if he were stronger, complete with a constant repetition of a strained "Alice... Protect...". The Jail, being the incredibly empathic Genius Loci it is, turns Jack into a Nightmare to give him the power he wished he had, subsequently saving his life.
  • Meanwhile, in Mary Skelter Finale, Clara is given a critical injury by one of the Genocide Pink, and needs a blood transfusion to survive. The aforementioned (and here, not a Nightmare) Jack is the only one nearby with a matching blood type, but no one could've predicted that by performing a successful blood transfusion with a Blood Youth as the donor would give the recipient their powers. Lo and behold, Clara is now a Blood Maiden with Blood Youth-like purification abilities.
• The titular character of the Mega Man Battle Network series was born with a fatal heart defect and used as the guinea pig for his father's and grandfather's experiments in Brain Uploading. Ten years later, he was given as an "AI" partner to his own twin brother. This plot point was never brought up taken out completely in the anime.
• Metroid:
  • Happens to Samus in the intro of Metroid Fusion. After being attacked by an X Parasite, she's transfused with Metroid DNA to stop the infection. This gives her both immunity to infection and the ability to absorb X Parasites at will since Metroids are the X's only predator, but the drawback is that she also inherits with the Metroids' weakness to cold. Metroid Dread reveals her body has actually been integrating the Metroid DNA, to the point that at the end of the game she transforms into what is effectively a humanoid Metroid, complete with the ability to absorb energy from her targets.
  • Metroid Prime Trilogy: The Metroid Prime does this at the end of the first Prime game when, in its dying throes, it grabs Samus in an attempt to assimilate her just as it had done to various technologies to form its original exoskeleton armor. Samus breaks free, but it rips the Phazon Suit off her, and by fusing with that and traces of Samus' DNA it becomes Dark Samus, the major Big Bad of the trilogy.
• In Myths of the World: Black Rose, the unnamed protagonist and her partner Simon track down the vampire Benjamin with the intention of slaying him and discover his sire Rose is also in the picture. But then it turns out that Rose has Simon under mind control and he fatally wounds the protagonist with his crossbow. Then Benjamin turns the protagonist into a vampire herself to help defeat Rose and restore them both to humanity. ^note  Except for defeating Rose, this all happens early enough not to constitute a spoiler.
• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: Dr. Letz Shake, an unfought assassin in the first game, returns for the sequel, saying that this is how he survived being sliced up by Henry. Depending on whether you assume this Letz Shake is the original machine or its operator, he's either referring to putting his brain inside the machine or simply making it mobile.
  Dr. Shake: After near fatal decimation, I had no choice but to take this modified form.
  • In the same game, Destroyman is revealed to have been rebuilt into a cyborg. Rather, two cyborgs.
  • Inverted in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes with the character Eight Hearts, who gained a new form after his dying partner gave him his powers, thus transforming him so that he could avenge his death.
• In the Bad Ending of Pikmin, Olimar does not repair his rocketship in time and his supply of whatever it is he breathes instead of oxygen runs out, so the Pikmin save him by transforming him into one of them. Especially interesting, since it is actually foreshadowed in the game!: One of Olimar's journal entries states that he would actually want to become a Pikmin, since his boss is not exactly a nice guy. He however suddenly changes his mind, when he remembers having a family waiting for him.
• Attempted by Cave Johnson in the backstory of Portal 2. When he learns he is dying from moon rock poisoning, he has his engineers research a way to transfer his mind into Aperture Science's central computer. It's unsuccessful because he dies before they can perfect the process. (They instead use it on his secretary Caroline, but that's not an example because there was no emergency involved.)
• In The Quarry, Laura can offer to infect Ryan with the werewolf curse to allow him to survive a serious stab wound. Since the healing factor kicks in before the physical transformation, this can sufficiently heal him before the curse can be ended.
• In Quest for Glory II, Julanar is a woman who, while fleeing from brigands, is discovered by a djinn who transforms her into a tree in order to save her from her pursuers.
• Resident Evil 2: Big Bad Dr. Birkin, after being fatally shot by Umbrella agents, injects himself with the G-virus, transforming him into his monstrous One-Winged Angel form.
• Asellus, of SaGa Frontier is run over by a carriage before the game starts and given a Vampiric Blood Transfusion Mystical Blood Transfusion by Charm Lord, turning her into a half-mystic. In addition, Red is turned into a Super Hero after the first battle with Shuzer, as he would have died otherwise.
• Subverted in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne: The blond child gives the Protagonist a Magatama that turns him into the Demi-Fiend during The End of the World as We Know It. It's a subversion because it was previously stated that the Protagonist would have survived with or without becoming a demon.
• When Black Cat is badly injured following their second fight in Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, Spider-Man can choose to either give her to S.H.I.E.L.D. for medical treatment (Red Suit path) or bond a symbiote to her (Black Suit path).
• In StarCraft, Protoss warriors who are mortally injured are transplanted into Dragoon exoskeletons, where they can continue to fight. However, they volunteer for this, and so tend to be pretty stoic about it. Their people praise them for their devotion. In the sequel game, dragoons are no longer used and protoss warriors are rebuilt as Cyborg/Powered Armor warriors called immortals. And they look fucking badass.◊
• A variant on this trope is a recurring theme in the Suikoden series: True Runes are almost always acquired by someone who needs to use its power to escape from a deadly situation, put up a decent fight against an overwhelming foe, or keep the Rune itself out of the hands of those who would misuse it. They often learn to regret this decision.
• In Super Paper Mario, Tippi was originally a human, and was turned into a Pixl by Merlon in a desperate attempt to save her life.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, you can give some of your blood to Heather, a young girl dying from a traffic accident, in order to save her life. While this is physically beneficial (she survives and recovers quickly, as well as becomes stronger and healthier), it also makes her develop a psychological bond with you, essentially acting like she's drugged / in love with you and can't be without you (and your blood). She also does a few questionable things to appease you, ranging from giving you her money to luring home a guy and locking him up in the bathroom as a "meal" for you. If she stays with you past a certain plot point, she'll get murdered by the Sabbat for the explicit purpose of punishing you. It can be avoided by ordering her to leave you, never come back, and try to forget everything. Either option is, according to many players, completely heartrending.
• Warframe:
  • The warframe Dagath was originally a Dax who, after being severely injured from a trap her lovers set up in an attempt to kill her beloved horse, was turned into a warframe to save her life.
  • The Glassmaker glassed himself and hid in the Cephalon Weave to escape the Tenno coming to kill him during the Tenno rebellion.
• In The World Ends with You, after Rhyme is erased by a noise, Mr. H Quickly puts her soul in a pin, turning her into an adorable little squirrel noise thing. She gets back to normal eventually.
• World of Warcraft: Cataclysm:
  • Many of the surviving humans in Lordaeron who remain loyal to the Alliance voluntarily take up the worgen curse to immunise themselves from being raised into undeath by their arch-enemies, the Forsaken.
  • The whole naga race is the result of an Emergency Transformation.
• Happens early in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, when the Titan Azurda (aka "Gramps") takes massive damage rescuing the party. In a humorous scene, everyone thinks he is dying, but he is simply reborn in a young body. A far less humorous example happens before the events of the game where Jin is forced to become a flesh eater so he won't return to his core crystal and lose his memories (and likely become Amalthus' blade when you think about what happened to Haze).