Instant Win Condition / Video Games

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• In most fighting games, once your opponent hits 0 life, any attacks still on screen are nullified. (In some games, you can be killed by on-screen attacks, in which case the round is a double KO.)
• In Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games, at the end of the day the only building that matters is the throne/ancient/nexus/whatever name the game calls the central building. Once a team manages to take down the defenses to this building, one sneak attack on the base by someone that can easily move about the map and/or quickly destroy buildings (commonly referred to as backdooring) is all that is needed to win, regardless of any money/experience/kill advantages the opposing team has accumulated. A(n in)famous example is the last game of The International 3, where, in the final game of the entire tournament, Alliance won the game by never fighting NaVi head-on, and instead using the teleportation abilities of Nature's Prophet and Wisp to destroy NaVi's base while the remaining heroes (most importantly, s4's Puck) stalled and then cancelled teleports, preventing an effective defense.
• Ace Combat:
  • The series has various missions where you need to gain a minimum number of points by destroying targets within the time limit. As long as you made the point limit, you could just survive till the time ran out and the mission would be accomplished... if there is no "Mission Update". Some other missions you could just go for the targets and ignore the other enemies to immediately win. Amusingly, a bug in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War sometimes causes the AI to realize how silly this is and continue attacking you after the mission has ended, even while you're unable to target or track them.
  • In Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, as soon as you destroy the last mission objective, all the other enemy forces instantly disappear. Most other games just have them stop targeting you once the mission is over, though sometimes they glitch out and you have to keep avoiding missiles.
  • There's a brief period of time between "Mission Accomplished" and actually completing the mission to be taken to the results screen, and during this time you can still crash into things and fail the mission. The original game avoided this by taking control away and forcing the player to pull up into the air, but Ace Combat 2 didn't; however, a mission accomplished was still a mission accomplished even if you crashed after control was taken away from you, and the only cost was a deduction from your cash to replace the plane. Missions in which a post-mission accomplished crash would be unavoidable normally, such as the obligatory canyon mission, just had the player immediately de-spawn once the final target is destroyed.
• An interesting version occurs in the time travel RTS Achron. One of the main win conditions for multiplayer maps is you win if all attack and build capable enemy units are destroyed at any point in time at or before the present and the other win condition is if that destruction falls off the timeline (becoming permanent). If the latter win condition is used then there is no way for the opponent to change what's happened because the events have become permanent but if the former is used you can win in the present even if your whole base has been destroyed in the past.
• The Advance Wars series:
  • Aside from the HQ Capture method of victory (particularly important in AW1's "Advanced Campaign", where the enemy have overwhelming numbers and you're basically using all your units as sacrifices and bodyguards for one Infantry-loaded APC), many, many campaign missions from Black Hole Rising onwards have you winning by destroying the enemy's superweapon du jour (unit-spawning factories, big cannons, thing that heals a lot of units at once, sometimes all three), causing them to retreat and giving you victory even when their conventional forces overwhelm you.
  • This is Lampshaded and Played for Laughs in Sinking Feeling where your instant-win condition is to sink 9 enemy battleships before they are repaired. After you manage to sink them, the enemy CO Lash goes ballistic and sics every unit she has on your troops to wipe them out as payback, only to find out that your troops decided they'd achieved their mission and retreated:
    Lash: What else is there to do now?! We attack with all our strength! They've made me mad and now they're gonna pay big time!
    Black Hole Soldier: Mistress Lash? The enemy left. It seems they've done what they set out to do and left.
    Lash: You've got to be joking! They just sank my boats and took off? I... AM... SO... ANGRY!!!
  • Capturing an enemy's HQ is also an instant defeat condition in a three- or four-way battle; it results in all their units being destroyed, no matter how many they had before.
  • Battalion Wars was pretty fond of it too. Certain levels basically end in the player trying to buy enough time to raise a flag.
• Aerobiz: Regardless of size or overall passenger totals, the first airline to meet all the goals, wins. This can lead to some odd situations where a large airline, dominating the passenger totals, profits by big margins, loses to a much smaller airline that happen to dominate their home region and expand into three otherwise ignored regions.
• Age of Empires:
  • In the original game, there are two ways to complete a mission: complete the goal that the game tells you to, or destroy everything belonging to all opposing teams, thus destroying any opposition, including units, buildings, and even just walls. Logically, this makes some kind of sense, as there's no way you can't be the first to complete the goal if you are the only one left, but in non time-based missions where your goal is to build a wonder (for example) destroying your opposition and allies does not help you build a wonder.
  • The sequel sidesteps this by including placeholder units in unreachable corners of the map, so the player can never technically wipe out a given side and are forced to complete the scenario objectives. One mission in particular is known for having the placeholder not quite hidden well enough, allowing it to be killed, preventing a massive army from spawning later.
  • There is an Aztec mission in the Age of Empires II expansion, The Conquerors, where you have to destroy the wonder in Tenochtitlan which the Spanish are somehow using to control the Aztec populace. It is possible, at least on lower difficulties, to gather all your starting units, ignore any and all enemy attacks, and march straight up to it and destroy it. You win the mission when that happens, never mind that your tiny force is surrounded in a large, well-garrisoned enemy city.
  • Age of Empires III: In the mission to steal the Spanish treasure fleet, the Spanish can't take ships back, so it's entirely possible, having five of the six ships required, to win with a tiny army even if the Spanish have destroyed your colony entirely.
• Age of Mythology has a particularly funny example in the expansion: as an invincible Titan wreaks havoc in the nearby city, the player's forces and an ally have to survive against the Titan's offspawns and other enemies. In the end, the Titan comes for the player, likely crushing his entire base...but as long as the player fulfills the objective of bringing 3 Rocs (Egyptian Myth units that act as air transports) to the ally, everything is fine and dandy. Another example from the original campaign is a Tug of War mission. When the cart that is being fought over nears the players base, the enemy starts pumping out lots of units from his base... but they give up the second the gates close behind the cart.
  • In "Supremacy" PvP games, a player will always win if they have a wonder up for 10 minutes. Even if they lost all of armies and economy, as long as they can keep its hp from reaching 0 for 10 minutes they will win instantly. This is usually considered a Scrappy Mechanic since players who are winning militarily will typically ignore building their own wonders, and then will have to start spamming out units if an enemy gets their wonder up in a defensible position.
• In Age of Wonders:
  • Killing a faction's leader unit instantly defeats them. Many single player missions can be completed extremely quickly, simply by slapping haste on a powerful unit and rushing them to the enemy leader, completely bypassing the entire map covered in enemy units. On the other hand, it also makes it ridiculously easy to lose if you aren't careful with your own leader.
  • In Age of Wonders 2 Wizards can respawn, so this must be repeated as many times as player has Wizard Towers. If you're threatened, it may give even greater incentive to build them than the main function (magical relay).
• Airforce Delta Strike has several of these. One particular stand-out is the canyon mission with the steam-rollers: fly through the gate at the end and it ceases to matter how much health your plane has when you crossed that magical threshold.
• AI War: Fleet Command and AI War 2 need you to kill the titular AI to win, but it's the only opponent that really needs to die. Even if there's still rampaging precursors, space pirates, a Gray Goo infestation, metal-eating Mega-Microbes and an indestructible fleet-munching behemoth all running around the galaxy, if the AI Overlord is dead, you still win. (In fact, it might be in your interest to keep these things running around during your war with the AI.)
• A mission is only finished in Alien Swarm when all surviving marines are in the exit area. Whether they're on fire, parasited, surrounded by shield bugs or up to their knees in swarm.
• In Among Us, if an Imposter sabotages the ship's reactor or oxygen supply and it is not repaired in time, all of the Crewmates will instantly die, resulting in an instant victory for the Imposters.
• Ancient Empires: Killing the enemy king in the first game counts as a win, even if the enemy still has a lot of units. This is no longer the case in the sequel, where commanders are a unit that can be produced from castles (albeit only one at a time and for an escalating cost), so the condition is instead capturing all enemy castles.
• In Atlantic Fleet, you can win a battle even if there are 5 torpedoes bearing down on your ship and will strike you at the end of your turn, as long as you sink all enemy ships before that or force them to withdraw. The battle ends immediately without completing the turn.
• The goal of a level in Baba is You is to touch the object labeled "WIN". You control the object(s) labeled "YOU". If the same object is labeled as both "YOU" and "WIN" at the same time at any point, the level is automatically completed. This is the only way to finish certain levels.
• Barbarian is a one-on-one swordfighting game, and one of the moves decapitates the opponent, instead of removing one of the health circles. The AI is generally able to dodge or parry casual uses of the attack.
• Has been known to happen in Double Conquest maps in Battlefield 2142. One team will have the other down to only a few tickets until defeat while still having over a hundred left themselves, when a sudden strike from behind sweeps across the field capturing all their spawn points and wiping them out. Without anywhere to spawn, all those tickets are worth NOTHING. (Of course, this is very rare as a team which ends up that far behind on tickets most likely lacks the coordination to mount this kind of counterattack.)
• Victory is instantaneous in Battle for Wesnoth when you kill all of the enemy leaders, which can get pretty intense when you're struggling against a (money draining) turn limit and trying to farm as much XP as possible.
• Battle Isle. If you manage to sneak an infantry unit into the enemy's base, you win regardless of how much troops each side has remaining. And, of course, vice versa. In some scenarios, this is the only feasible way to win.
• In Battle Stations Clan war, no matter how many members of the opposing team are able and willing to fight or how many defenders you've overrun, the battle is won when one side's fort is sunk.
• In both Battle Zone 1998 games, destroying the enemy Recycler will result in an instant win, as the Recycler is irreplaceable and is the only unit capable of building the Scavengers and Constructors. In Instant Action mode, the AI will instantly win if the player is killed - as the player is actually commanding from the field (rather than being a Non-Entity General) while in one of the Hover Tanks, walkers, or in a command bunker, dying is a very real possibility if the ejection system fails to take you back to safety. Enabling the respawn option will prevent this from happening, however.
• Some mission and quest challenges in Billy vs. SNAKEMAN have "automatic jutsu victory": if you use a specific jutsu, you will win it no matter how poor your successes are. It's not stated outright, but there's either a logical thought to it (A horde of enemies attacking everywhere? This calls for a clone jutsu!) or the description references the solution in some other way (The enemy says his attack goes to eleven? How about "Rock On: Spinal Tap"?). There's also the Flying Thunder God Jutsu, which allows you to complete one non-quest challenge with a difficulty not higher than 100 each day.
• In the NES classic Bionic Commando (1988), stages are considered completed when the reactor is destroyed. Doesn't matter if you're swarmed by enemy soldiers, a huge guard drone is bearing down on you, or a cyborg soldier is slapping you around with his own grappling hook; shoot out the power core and the level is won, with all defenders disappearing upon its destruction.
• Besides the normal win condition of reaching the finish line in Board Game Online, there are a few other ways to win:
  • Escaping the Pyramid with the Pharaoh's treasure.
  • Combining the Sausage, Eggs, Bacon, and Spam items to make the English breakfast.
  • There's a 1/1,000,000 chance of you getting a random event (Called, aptly, ONE IN A MILLION) which causes this.
  • Removing 100 Enchantments with Queen Alexandra's Birdwing.
  • Getting 7 stacks on Spear of Destiny.
  • Scoring 13 kills while having the Jason's Rage buff
  • Using a Charged Deluminator that has absorbed at least 50 turns of fire
  • Using the Catapult to launch a coconut, and hitting at least 16 players with it.
  • The Wild Modes "Hungrier Games" and "Hungriest Games" require you to eat a certain amount of food.
  • The Wild Mode "Massacre Arena" requires you to gain Kill Points by scoring kills and not dying.
  • And lastly, the Wild Mode "To Infinity and Beyond" requires you to gather the Infinity Stones and complete the Infinity Gauntlet.
• In Bridge Builder Series games, if the last vehicle reaches its destination, the level is completed, regardless if the bridge was single-use only.
• Bug Fables: In the Spy Cards minigame, the special effect for the card of the Final Boss is simply "Win this round." Regardless of the opponent's setup^note No opponent has this card in their deck so mirror matchups are not an issue, this gives a free point. The cost is that it requires the maximum amount of TP to play as a card can have, and only one of them can be in a given deck.
• In The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, in both the NES and Game Boy versions, if an enemy kills Bugs, he can still beat the level with no penalty if his death animation collides with the final carrot of the level.
• In the BYOND Game Space Station 13:
  • The traitor can be on the shuttle, surrounded by security officers and high personnel with tasers, and (if the objective doesn't require solitary escape) they will win the round when the shuttle leaves.
  • If the entire nuke team (usually 3-5 people) or the wizard dies, the crew instantly wins. Even if they use the 'suicide' verb.
• In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a player that gets a Kill Streak of 25 can call down a Tactical Nuke onto the map, which instantly wins the rounds for his team. This happens even if the rest of his team are complete bullet sponges, and would otherwise lose the round collectively.
• City-Building Series:
  • In Pharaoh, some missions have vastly reduced requirements, such as having a certain population and completed monuments. Meaning the city could be an urban hellhole of plague-infested slums bereft of basic sanitation, food, or maintenance services rife with criminals, enemy armies can be rampaging throughout the land, but the second you send the tomb is ready for its occupant you can hightail it out of there.
  • In Zeus: Master of Olympus, colony missions only require you to set aside a certain amount of goods for the parent city, meaning you only need to set up a few industries and a few dozen people to operate them. It's possible to simplify this even further by asking allies for the goods in question before sending them off, and the colony will continue to produce goods in subsequent levels.
• The Cavern of Transcendence trial in City of Heroes becomes incredibly easier if you have a teleporter who also has stealth. You have 90 minutes to complete the mission, much of it taken up fighting your way through tunnels to the door of the cavern, then a huge roomful of monsters between the door and the eight obelisks that have to be clicked at the same time. A stealth porter can get quickly through the tunnels to the door and then teleport the team. Once inside the chamber, the porter can then run to each obelisk and teleport a team member to it. Once they are clicked simultaneously, trial over, go team! It's entirely possible to complete the entire thing without having to engage in any combat, and often then only if a spawn of monsters is too close to the cavern door when you enter to allow the team to wait for the porter to do his thing. This is even easier in City of Villains, as Stalkers have access to Hide at level one. In most non Escort Missions, you only have to clear out the last room, and even then that's only for newspaper missions. It's balanced out a bit by the fact that ambushes can see through Hide... while escorts can't.
• In Civilization, you can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat (and your rivals) simply by accomplishing a victory condition — any victory condition — before they do. Enemy at the gates? Get that ship to Alpha Centauri and you win. Another Civ about to colonize the stars? Stomp him flat and conquer the globe. Diplomatic and cultural victories are also possible in the later games, allowing even Civs with weak militaries and backwards technological development to come out ahead of their competition. Alpha Centauri also included an economic victory by cornering the global energy market. Domination victory is achieved when only one player still has their original capital, so you win if you take their capital even if the enemy has 15+ cities spitting out military units and is about to take it right back next turn.
  • Even weirder is the space race victory in the Civ I, Civ II, the Beyond the Sword expansion for Civ IV, and Civ Rev. You win when the spaceship reaches Alpha Centauri (not just when you launch it). If your opponents wipe you off the map in the time it takes to get there, you still lose, even though your colonists will still arrive at Alpha Centauri. Or conversely, if your opponent has already launched the spaceship, killing him quickly (nukes are your friend there) will stop him from winning. In some cases you may be able to complete a faster spaceship, and beat him there.
  • It can get even more absurd, but not less fun, in the mod Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, which focuses on accomplishing specific historical goals, quite a few of which involving building something or researching a specific technology. For instance, as the Mayans, the Aztecs and Europeans may have reduced you to maybe five squares of Central America, but as long as you researched calendars and build the Temple of Kukulkan, you'll automatically win if you live to 1745.
  • Civ IV's cultural victory conditions are a great example of this trope. A strong alliance can burn all but three of your cities to flames (and be about to take care of the last three), but if you can reach "Legendary" culture levels in those three cities, instant win.
  • Civilization VI took steps to at least tone this down, making it easier to see the end coming in time to do something about it. Domination was carefully reworded to require the one civ to control every opponent's capital simultaneously. The Space Race now involves three separate phases, and every player is notified when a phase is completed (after all, a space launch is difficult to miss). Culture and Religion victories are the result of a gradual spread, with ways to undermine the leaders or defend yourself as long as you're paying attention. That said, the finish line is ultimately crossed with a single action in every case.
    • On the other hand, VI had the AI tweaked so that other Civs will likely declare war on you when you're about to win, which can highlight the oddity more when you launch the mission to Mars while the enemy is about to smash your spaceport to bits.
  • In Civilization: Beyond Earth, it's even more prevalent. The Domination victory has remained unchanged, but the other four victories all involve going through several steps and building a giant, destructible, wonder on a tile near your city. Every player in the game is informed of every other player's progress, so every game can end with every player making a rush to assault the player who made the most progress towards victory.
  • In the Alien Crossfire Expansion Pack to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the Progenitor factions have an additional victory option, if they manage to build and power a certain number of Subspace Ansibles for a specific number of turns, they will send a signal to their homeworld and summon their entire fleet. Presumably, the fleet then wipes every other faction off the face of Planet.
• In the Command & Conquer series (and many similar games), many missions just involve getting to a particular MacGuffin. Once you're actually at it, even if half the enemy army is about to converge at your position in what will surely be a one-sided victory for them, the mission ends and you miraculously escape off-camera. Except for that one mission in the first game where you have to escape with it: Nod mission 6.
  • This ends in tragedy in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, where lose conditions are checked even after the victory banner is shown; one Allied mission requires using Tanya to destroy a few key buildings in a Soviet base, and Tanya can be overrun and killed if you complete your objective without clearing out the enemies (especially attack dogs) nearby — the victory banner is shown and cheering starts, then Tanya dies and the Mission Failed banner appears over the victory banner and you must start the mission over.
    • The popular Mental Omega Game Mod features a plot example in the form of the Epsilon Army's titular Mental Omega Device. It's a step-up from even the Psychic Dominators from vanilla Yuri's Revenge , being a global-scale Mind-Control Device. If Epsilon manages to finish and activate it, the world is finished and free will is almost completely eradicated, with them winning on the spot. By the end of the Act 2 campaigns, Epsilon's rapidly mounting losses against the vengeful Soviets and desperate Allied expedition ensure that it also becomes their only feasible win condition.
• Destroying all targets in a mission or destroying a boss in Copy Kitty destroys all remaining enemies and enemy projectiles. Even if Boki still manages to get killed, it still counts as a win. Reaching a wave in Endless Mode that's a multiple of 5 also allows the player to start again from there even if they get killed right before the wave transistion.
• In Counter-Strike:
  • Counter-Terrorists can win a round in hostage maps by rescuing all of the living hostages on the map. The key word here is living. If things got hairy, you could (as a CT) rescue just one hostage (out of 4 or 5, depending on the map) and let the rest die in the crossfire (or if you are truly sadistic, off them yourself). Once that happens, the CTs will win the round for rescuing all the living hostages. Terrorist teams often counter this "strategy" by offing all of the hostages at the beginning of the round, turning the round into a deathmatch - though many servers will auto-kick players for killing too many hostages.
  • In bomb defusal (DE) maps the bomb being set and going off before it can be deactivated counts as a terrorist victory even if their entire team is dead, which makes sense as the goal is to destroy what needed destroying. There's even an achievement for winning a round while your entire team is dead in Source and Global Offensive. Conversely, the CTs automatically win, no matter how many enemies are still alive or if they're the last man standing on their team, if they can disarm the bomb once it's been placed, which makes slightly less sense since there doesn't seem to be anything stopping the Terrorists from just killing the rest of the CTs and re-arming the bomb.
  • CTs will win the round if the Terrorists fail to plant the bomb in time. Terrorists can have all five members alive and control of the bomb site, the bomb can be a fraction of a second away from being armed, but as long as one CT is alive, even if they are on the other side of the map or not even at their keyboard, the CTs win. It's not like the CTs failing to defuse in time where the bomb will detonate - if the bomb is armed just a tenth of a second later, what does it matter? The arbitrary timer results in a loss. The bomb will even arm after time if it's close enough, but the CTs already won by having their last man run and hide.
• Creeper World:
  • Creeper World 3 and Particle Fleet have warp inhibitors and Precursors respectively. All enemy structures in a level are destroyed once either structure is gone.
  • Creeper World 4 adds Hold and Reclaim objectives, where the player can win by reclaiming a percentage of land from the Creeper or keeping it out of somewhere for a set time.
• Defender of the Crown:
  • In the original game, the only requirement to win the war and become king is to have all three Norman castles under your control. While uncommon, it's possible to win without possessing every territory, and, although rare, win with one or even both of the other Saxons still in possession of their home castles.
  • In the very unlikely event that one of the other Saxons claims all three Norman castles, he becomes king, which actually leads to a Nonstandard Game Over: the game chides your efforts as "less than spectacular" and you're exiled to the outer Hebrides in Scotland.
• In most battles in Devil Survivor and its sequel, victory calls for defeating all enemies. In major boss battles, however, once you kill the boss, all other enemies will disappear.
• The Disgaea series has the seldom seen "Stage Clear" Geo Effect, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin (though you have to end your turn first). There are also two Instant Lose Conditions, the "Game Over" Geo Effect (that, naturally, the enemy AI will make a beeline towards) and, in Disgaea 2, the "Game Over“ Dark Sun effect.
• Doom:
  • Sometimes it's explained as the Level Goal being an elevator or an exit door, but then there are situations where the Level Goal is a lonely switch in the middle of a room, and it's not explained how pressing it lets you instantly escape from a giant horde of monsters surrounding you on all sides.
  • In Classic maps, if the "exit" tile is a teleporter you must reach instead of a switch that you must press, you don't even have to be ALIVE to win. As long as your dead carcass slides across that tile, the game will treat it as a win. Some user-made maps require this, in order to force a Bag of Spilling for the next level.
• In sailing sections of Dubloon, reaching destination causes every monster at the screen to go out with a bang poof of smoke.
• Dynasty Warriors:
  • Defeating the enemy leader has this effect. Your own army can be utterly demoralized, all allied officers dead, and your commander on his last legs, but as long as the enemy commander goes down first, you score a win. Very useful if playing the commander.
  • 4, in particular, had a number of stages that definitely qualified. The biggest ones are the Nanman Campaign, where the regenerating gates and constant morale loss mean that your side's going to get massacred in very short order if you don't rush to the enemy camp and put down the leader quickly, and Battle of Jian Ye, where you're required to do this four times.
• In EarthBound (1994), if one of your characters has taken "mortal damage", you still have a chance to finish the battle before he collapses. In fact, all damage to your characters is applied by having your HP steadily decrease, and the higher your "guts" value, the slower it goes. Which is quite handy when one of the enemies explodes on death: you'd better kill him last.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion:
  • The game has gates to the hell dimension of Oblivion opening everywhere. The Oblivion worlds are full of enemies, but the best way to win is just to make a break directly to the top of the large tower and grab the Sigil Stone. Which makes sense, because a portal to Oblivion collapses completely once its Sigil Stone is removed, and the player character and any of his or her friends will end up safely on the grass where they originally entered the portal. The daedra that were in that area of Oblivion, no longer have a means of getting from their world to ours and are thus no longer a threat.
  • The final mission requires you to escort Martin Septim to the Temple of the One during a huge demonic invasion. To win, all you have to do is get yourself inside while Martin is alive. Even if he's a whole block behind you and surrounded by enemies, he will enter the Temple as soon as you do, triggering the ending sequence.
• Energy Breaker: the usual goal for a battle is "defeat all the enemies", but some have "ally makes it to goal" or "defeat the boss" as additional goals, which will clear the battle regardless of how many enemies are left.
• In the military battles of Exit Fate, victory is achieved by taking out the army leader - once they fall, all their troops call for retreat, so you can snatch up a desperate victory just by aiming for their group. (Although not defeating the other units will result in a reduced efficiency score and likely net you a worse reward.) The same thing applies to your army, so keeping your protagonist out of direct fire is a good idea.
• Many four and five-star "Civilian Displacement" missions in Fable II. As long as you don't stick around and fight, the baddies won't stick around, either.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings often requires you to take advantage of this. One particular mission does it twice.
  • Many battles in Final Fantasy Tactics just require defeating one specific enemy. If you can do that, even if you're down to your last man and the next enemy barrage will definitely kill him, you automatically win.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics A2 you have to follow the judge's rule for the match to get bonuses and sometimes to win at all, but since it doesn't acknowledge a law being broken until the turn it was broken on ends you can break the law without penalty as long as you end the fight on that turn. The game also has multiple kinds of win conditions, depending on the battle. Some fights force you to endure waves of enemies for certain amount of rounds while others require you to weaken a specific enemy. Satisfying the win condition is all you need to do and nothing else matters.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has every dungeon use boss battles and they sometimes have the boss summon backup. If you can defeat the boss, you automatically win while the backup just vanishes into thin air.
• In Final Legacy, your job is to destroy the enemy's missile launchers, no matter how many ships are in the ocean. They win by either killing the player or destroying all the cities the player must protect.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Seize missions have the objective of capturing the throne. If you do this, the level is cleared and all the enemies that might have been chasing you will just decide you aren't worth the trouble any more. Smart players will kill everyone for the EXP first, though.
  • "Defeat Boss" missions end the moment the boss's HP hits 0. Great for speed runs.
  • Then there are the "Defend the Throne/NPC" missions, off course when the designated amount of turns over a handful of Redshirts appear and scare the enemy off. In many of these missions, should the player manage to defeat the Boss(es) of the map and/or rout the entire field, the player automatically wins and the mission ends, even if this particular condition wasn't mentioned. It's still smarter to let the turns run out and milk the mooks for EXP, gold, and items though.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • In the first Five Nights at Freddy's game, as long as the player can make it to 6 AM, they will win. It doesn't matter if the power has gone out, all four animatronics are on the loose, and Freddy is in the middle of playing his jingle right outside the door before he kills you; 6 AM means a guaranteed victory. The later games take it even further by enabling you to win even if an animatronic is in the middle of jumping at your face to kill you. Generally, this is justified by Free-Roaming Mode only being enabled from midnight to 6 AM (i.e., your shift), so when the clock ticks over, they can no longer move.
  • Ultimate Custom Night provides the series' one subversion of this trope: Funtime Foxy. Funtime Foxy's M.O. is to jumpscare you if you aren't looking at his camera at the start of a specific hour (his 'showtime'), and if that hour is 6 AM, Funtime Foxy can still jumpscare you if you aren't watching him.
  • A fanmod named Five Nights at Vault 5 will instantly turn off all robots and alarms and clear off all of your radiation if you successfully reach 6 AM, regardless of whether your radiation was about to reach lethal levels and a robot was in the middle of charging at you.
• In Freedom Fighters (2003), a potential Bolivian Army Ending can immediately be reversed as long as you can raise the American flag at the end of the level.
• In Freelancer, it is mentioned near the end of the game that Rheinland forces have obliterated most Kusari resistance and have almost conquered the House. However, once you win the game, everything returns to normal and the Rheinlanders go home. The Rheinlanders were under the control of the alien Nomads, and once the Nomads were defeated by Trent's activation of the hypergate, their control broke.
• Frozen Synapse: A number of missions involve eliminating one specific target, which is lucky if you have a shotgun vatform running around the back while the rest of your troops get blown to pieces; even if your last unit goes down, taking out the objective wins you the mission if that happens first.
• FTL: Faster Than Light ends the game in victory if you defeat the Rebel Flagship. Even if half of your ship is on fire, the other half is oxygen-deprived, one more hit would take your ship out, and your sole remaining crewmember has less than 10% of their health left. Even if your ship is in the middle of blowing up, so long as the Flagship runs out of hull integrity before the game summons the Game Over screen. Justified, in that the Rebel Flagship holds the top command of the Rebel Fleet and destroying it deals a major blow to their command structure, and the overall goal of the game is to defeat the Rebels by blowing up said Flagship, not necessarily to save your own hides.
• F-Zero does this to a ridiculous degree. You finish the race as soon as you cross the finish line on the final lap no matter what condition your vehicle is in. This means you can lose all of your energy and slide across the finish line while exploding. As long as you don't fully explode before crossing the line, you can win and then die immediately afterwards.
• This Let's Play of Galactic Civilizations II describes an attempt to wriggle out of a deathtrap via Technology Victory:
  This will result in many research centers, and a plummeting economy, but we'll be dead or Gods in thirty weeks, so what are the loan sharks going to do? Pray threateningly?
• This trope can be invoked in Game Builder Garage through some clever programming. The Interactive Lessons themselves contain one particular instance: Extra Checkpoint 50, "Perplexing Paradox", is easily solved by connecting the Button Nodon to the Puzzle Clear Nodon and then pressing the relevant button in the game preview.
• Before they were patched out, there were a few ways to get out of bound or otherwise bypass the gates in the remake of Gauntlet, and then flee for the exit.
• In Genjuu Ryodan, capturing the main building (usually the castle) of the opponent's side instantly clears the map which is being played in.
• In The Godfather 2, an enemy Family is defeated once you take over their Compound. There will be no Remnant running around trying to take back territory, unlike the first game; all will be Killed Off for Real even if you did not use the kill conditions. Balanced in that you need to take all their fronts first to unlock the Compounds.
• GrimGrimoire: You can theoretically end the Hold the Line missions early by destroying enemy runes, but this becomes practically impossible in higher difficulties.
• Collecting the last star in Glider PRO makes you a winner, even if something else kills you at the same time.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Your Wanted level will be reduced to zero immediately upon finishing many missions. This can lead to a case where you have a dozen police cars surrounding you as you reach your objective, then all of them decide "Oh, he won. Let's go get some coffee."
  • Also works by going into a Pay 'N Spray, even when the damn Army is chasing you (unless you have a vehicle they won't touch, or there is an APB on the mission vehicle). You'd almost think Chief Wiggum was leading the police in those games.
  • And then you have Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, while Pay 'N' Spray will remove your wanted level with a fresh coat of paint, they'll outright refuse to do so while there are any active cops or police cruisers in the vicinity. Police cruisers make up about a third of the traffic on Chinatown Wars take of Liberty City, and your chances of actually getting anywhere near a Pay 'N' Spray without cops trying to ram you off the road approach practically zero. Still, heat magically disappears if you trigger a mission, complete a mission, or walk into your safehouse and rest for six hours even in full view of the police, as it has from San Andreas.
• Granblue Fantasy:
  • Sometimes, the objective for an Arcarum map will be written as "None", allowing you to freely explore the nodes or simply move to the next map.
  • In some scripted event and story battles, reaching a certain number of turns will automatically end the fight and proceed with the next episode of the chapter.
• Guilty Gear features "Instant Kill" attacks that, when successfully executed, end the round in victory. The first game in the series takes this to its logical extreme: if you successfully execute an Instant Kill, you don't win the round, you win the whole damn match.
• Halo: Reach:
  • In the level "Long Night of Solace", destroying the Phantoms attacking Anchor 9 will cause all the other enemy starfighters to flee, even if they still outnumber you.
  • Several levels, like "Exodus", are won by pressing a button, so a clever player can sneak past a lot to activate the device even if a horde of enemies are surrounding it.
  • In the level "The Pillar of Autumn", destroying the Covenant battlecruiser will end the level regardless of how many Phantoms are surrounding you. On the more punishing difficulties like Legendary or Mythic, destroying only the cruiser becomes the only reliable way to complete the level.
• In Hap Hazard, collecting the last bomb will end the level with a victory. Doing so also adds two seconds to your clock, which is absolutely necessary in order to complete the game within the time limit (not that this is specified in-game anywhere).
• Hearthstone:
  • In tournament settings, the player with the higher health total wins if the turn limit is reached. Control Warrior mirrors will often come down to both players scrambling to gain as much armor as possible rather than trying for lethal, as the deck isn't built for sustained damage.
  • Uther of the Ebon Blade is a paladin Hero card with a hero power that summons a 2/2 Horseman. If you control all four horsemen at the same time, your opponent is instantly destroyed. This would normally take four turns (assuming the opponent couldn't deal with the tokens), but there are decks that exist that summon all four in one turn.
  • If Mecha'thun dies while you control no minions and have no cards in your hand or deck, you win the game. There is a popular Warlock strategy that draws through their entire deck as fast as possible then summons Mecha'thun and casts Cataclysm, which discards your entire hand to destroy all minions.
  • The priest Questline Seek Guidance requires you to play a 2-cost, 3-cost, 4-cost, 5-cost, 6-cost, 7-cost, and 8-cost card throughout the game. If you can do that, you're awarded with Xyrella the Sanctified, who shuffles the Purified Shard into your deck. The shard is a 10-cost spell that instantly destroys the enemy hero.
  • The Return to Naxxramas set added a second shoutout to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse who also have an instant-win effect. When Rivendare, Warrider dies, he shuffles Blameaux, Korth'azz, and Zeliek into your deck. If all four have died, you win the game. It's easier said than done, since each minion is an understatted 6-mana 6/6.
• In the Heroes of Might and Magic series, many missions can be won even after all the player's cities have been captured (which results in the player being given 7 days to capture one or face game over). The quickest strategy of completing Mandate of Heaven in Heroes of Might and Magic III is to take Castle Darkmoor, build it up as a Necropolis town, leave after getting a sufficiently large army and before the other factions take an interest in capturing it, then head to capture the Hive before the 7-day deadline results in game over.
• The puzzle game Hexic HD usually runs until you get bored, the timer runs out, or a bomb goes off. However, if you surround a piece with pieces that are all the same color, that piece turns into a Starflower. If you surround a piece with six Starflowers, it turns into a Black Pearl. If you surround a piece with Black Pearls, the game immediately ends and you are informed that you've won by "Black Pearl Flower". This is, naturally, much easier said than done.
• In the Hitman series, when you get to the escape point for a level, you're home free, even if there were a million cops and security guards shooting at you at the time.
• In Homeworld each side owns a single Mothership and the Instant-Win Condition is to destroy the enemy one. Whether it happens a mere second before the enemy fleet destroys your Mothership doesn't matter.
• Almost literally in ICO: you can try to beat the Shadows into submission with your length of wood, but bringing Yorda to the stone gates will prompt her to open them —which instantly dispels all Shadows from the area.
• The Jackbox Party Pack: In Monster Seeking Monster, if the Zombie manages to infect every other player in the game by the end of the last night, it triggers a Zombie Apocalypse, and the Zombie wins regardless of how many points they have at the end of the game.
• Jade Empire has a sidequest in which you debate an Outlander, in which you make arguments to sway the judges to your favor, and must get the majority on your side by the end of your debate. However, if you manage to get all of the judges on your side at any one time, you immediately win the debate.
• jubeat has a variation of this. Once you hit 700,000 points (out of 1 million), you've cleared the song, though the song will keep going to the end. If you really want to, you can goof off or rest once you hit 700k rather than aiming for a higher score.
• Jumpman. The goal is to collect all bombs in a stage. Even a small fall will cause you to plummet to the bottom of the screen and die on impact, except if this plummet happens to pass through the last bomb; this counts as a stage victory.
• In Killer Queen, there are three ways for a team to win: Economic Victory (have a full stash of berries in the base), Military Victory (kill the enemy's queen three times), and Snail Victory (ride the snail all the way to the team's goal). As soon as any of these three conditions are met, the team wins, even if their enemy has a blatant advantage on the other two conditions (example: your team wins by Economic Victory with one queen life left and about to be double-pronged by an enemy Warrior and Queen and the snail just pixels away from the enemy's goal).
• Left 4 Dead has safe houses that are basically level goals. As long as one survivor makes it inside and shuts the door, the survivors live to see the next level, even if 3 of them were killed. Same rule applies for reaching the escape vehicle. The sequel uses the same rules.
• After getting off the Great Plateau in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which only takes about a half hour at a good pace), there's nothing technically stopping you from proceeding straight to the final boss. It doesn't matter if you haven't recovered any memories, completed any shrines, retrieved the Master Sword, or freed any of the Divine Beasts; once you get the paraglider defeating Ganon is the only mandatory quest to beat the game.
• Legends of Runeterra:
  • As soon as a player's Nexus drops to 0 health, the game is decided even if there are other things left to play out. This also means the order in which a player's units attack or block in combat is important, as it can make the difference between surviving with healing from a Lifesteal unit or dying before you can do so.
  • If Fiora manages to kill four enemy units without dying, she instantly wins the game for her controller. She does get the Challenger keyword to let her pick her fights, but Fiora's 3 health (increased to 4 upon Level Up) means you'll have to put in work to keep her alive using buffs and combat tricks.
  • Star Spring is a Landmark that wins the game at the end of the turn if you've restored 22 or more health to any number of things while it's in play. It also contributes to its own win condition by healing your damaged units for 1 health apiece before checking the win condition.
  • The Bandle Tree is another Landmark that generates units from Regions you haven't played during the current game, and it wins the game at the start of the turn if you've played units from all 10 Regions. A later nerf to the card changed the win condition so that The Bandle Tree has to see you play units from all 10 Regions (meaning your Bandle Tree has to be in play for the whole time).
• In Lethal Enforcers 3, once you or your opponent reach the goal, the area ends, even if there are enemies still standing.
• In the SNES strategy game Liberty or Death, if neither the American army nor the British army defeat the other side by the year 1820, the game will end automatically with King George III's death. This means that you win automatically if you're playing as the American army (or instant defeat, if you're playing as the British).
• In LittleBigPlanet if you die after activating the Scoreboard (like say, the level creator decided to place a Trigger Explosive right under the Scoreboard, connected to a Proximity Switch so it goes boom when you step on the platform), you won't lose the game even if you were on your last life.
• In Live A Live, some battles can be won by defeating a specific enemy, which will cause the other enemies to instantly vanish.
• In all three Luminous Arc games, where defeating XXX is enough to grant you the victory even if you have just one party member left. In two late-game boss battles in Luminous Arc 3, however, defeating the target without defeating a certain other enemy/enemies on the battlefield would lock you out of the good ending.
• VS. battles in the Magical Drop series can be won either through the traditional method of outlasting your opponent, or by scoring enough points to meet the point quota, at which point you win even if you're one balloon-shift away from getting wiped out.
• Mario Party 9: In single player mode, you go against either one or two AI characters on the board and losing to them is an instant loss to you, even if you finish in 2nd. However, some boards put you with one or two friendly AI characters and if those characters win the game instead of the evil characters, you still clear the board, even though you didn't win.
• Mass Effect:
  • A lot of Mass Effect 2 fights against major enemies (not simply bigger enemies, but strong enemies that are part of the plot) will include many other enemies that you can forget about. The moment the major enemy is killed, the battle is over. Also, on the final mission when you have to escort a tech expert through a series of pipes. Hitting the last switch in the mission ends it instantly (triggering a cutscene). Regardless of how many enemies are still present.
  • In Mass Effect 3, during the climactic battle at the end of Priority: Tuchanka, all that matters is activating the maw hammers. It doesn't matter if you're arse deep in Brutes when the second hammer goes down - the moment that hits, Kalros appears, kills the Destroyer-class Reaper, and presumably you and your allies withdraw in the chaos. On a storyline level, this is what everyone hopes for the Crucible project - since the Reapers cannot be defeated in a straight fight, due to all their advantages, the goal is to complete the Crucible, find the Catalyst, and thereby kill the Reapers without needing to bleed the entire galaxy to death in a straight-out war. That's the theory, anyway; nobody's quite sure how the Crucible works or what it will do. As it turns out, it's a lot more complicated than that - the Crucible's main purpose is to upgrade the Reaper's controlling intelligence, the Catalyst, so it can handle solutions to its purpose that are less bloody than "kill and/or enslave everything", allowing you to choose one. Still counts; successfully deploying a completed Crucible, unless you pick Refusal, allows you to end the Reaper war by wiping out all synthetic life including the Reapers, taking control of the Reapers yourself, or kicking off The Singularity and leaving them with no motive to continue slaughtering people.
• Mega Man:
  • In Mega Man X2, the battle with Agile takes place in a room with Spikes of Doom in the bottom, but if you kill him while in midair on top of them, you won't die when you fall on top of them afterwards. This is the easiest to accomplish by performing a Shoryuken on him.
  • Mega Man X has a boss with a spike pit at the bottom, but in that case, the spikes instantly crumbled as soon as you dealt the final blow. This boss returns in Mega Man X5 but now projects Hard Light spikes that shut down when you defeat it.
  • A minor variation occurs in the Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force games: When the last enemy on the battlefield is defeated, you lose control of Mega Man during the victory fanfare and are invincible during that time, even if a time bomb explodes a split-second after the last enemy is taken out. Up through Star Force 2, projectiles and bombs would remain on the battlefield in the background of the victory screen, but you'd still be immune to them. However, winning a battle by the skin of your teeth reduces your reward for victory, and in extreme cases will replace your reward with a mercy HP refill.
• Some missions in Mercs of Boom can be won even if you're down to a single surviving merc with 1 HP. If the win conditions are met (e.g. survive for 5 turns), your still-standing mercs will start cheering, even if they're surrounded by enemies about to slaughter them.
• Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops has this in spades. For the most part, it doesn't matter at all if you're detected, as long as you get your ass to the checkpoint, you win. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain avoid this by turning off the end-of-level checkpoints during Combat Alert, forcing you to hide if there are still enemies pursuing you; though, in the case of MGSV, getting far enough away from an outpost can instantly end a Combat Alert, and that's usually where you need to be to clear the mission anyway.
• Most of the boss fights in Metroid Prime will be instant victory to you, regardless if the boss's summoned help were left standing. While the same rule applies in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, two boss fights in the former take place in hazardous areas where there's no safe zone to recharge in, making it possible to kill That One Boss and then die to the toxic atmosphere afterwards.
• Mirror's Edge ends with Faith climbing to the top of the Shard (which at this point is swarming with cops chasing after her to take her down) to rescue Kate before she's taken away via helicopter. When she gets to the roof she finds a good half-dozen armed guards and Jackknife hauling Kate into the helicopter. After kicking Jackknife out of the helicopter and crashing it, all the armed guards on the roof that would've gunned down Faith and Kate mysteriously vanish, and instead of dealing with the logistics of Faith escaping from the top of a skyscraper swarming with armed officers while escorting a far less agile Kate, the game decides to just have the two embrace and roll credits while glossing over their escape off-screen.
• In Mutant Football League, a team will be forced to forfeit if all 5 of their quarterbacks or Line Bashers are killed. Injuring the last two quarterbacks on the team will also result in forfeit during their possession of the ball, as the game mechanically recognizes that the offensive line doesn't have any viable quarterbacks on the field. You can also force a forfeit if all eligible receivers are killed, but this is a lot harder and more rare because most teams have about ’’16’’ between the running backs, wideouts, and “bruise receivers” (tight ends) on the roster and WRs often don’t take many hits before they go down. Even more rare is for all of the offensive linemen to be killed, which requires a lot of bad luck and a field with landmines and sawblades.
• In Nectaris, if one army captures the other's base camp, they win the battle instantly. The usual way to attempt this is to load an infantry unit into a Pelican and fly it past enemy lines.
• In Net Storm: Islands at War, the objective is to immobilize the opponent's High Priest, capture him with a transport unit and bring him back to your island to be sacrificed. While doing so, the only units that must survive are your own High Priest and the transport while carrying the enemy priest, and the only building that must remain standing is the sacrificial altar.
• In Outpost 2, every mission is a race against time. If you're playing as Eden, the bacterial nightmare called the Blight encroaches on the map and starts destroying your base, consuming it entirely if you dawdle, resulting in an automatic mission failure. Plymouth faces a similar threat from volcanic activity: If you take too long, you'll get swamped by lava. The thing is, even if the Blight or the lava is just a tile or two away from your Command Center, if you can otherwise fulfill the mission conditions, your colonists are all packed up and ready to escape before the disaster consumes everything. There is a constant requirement across all base building missions in the Outpost 2 campaign is to be sure you have enough evacuation transports constructed for your current population, and have materials for the new colony already loaded into trucks and ready to leave at a moment's notice. If this isn't the case, either by not building them or the transports somehow getting destroyed, victory will not occur. Indeed, in the closing missions, you're reminded to keep your population at a steady figure, too, lest people be left behind. Not to mention, a big part of one mission is a non-optional mercy objective to kidnap/rescue the enemy's children, since you're leaving behind the other colony to die.
• Due to the "war score" mechanic, almost every game Paradox Interactive makes has this to one degree or another. It doesn't matter whether or not the enemy has a force that can pummel you into the ground if brought fully to bear (or even if the majority of your army is wiped out); if you can seize an early lead in the war by taking provinces quickly, you'll often come out better off at the peace table than you were before. The later EU III versions work differently, countries consider whether they have armies left to fight. Which can lead to silly situations itself - a huge army will mean that your enemy may not surrender, even if you, e.g., control all of Spain, but Spain has still a huge army on Mallorca, though without any ships to move them.
  • Starting in Crusader Kings 2, warscore is calculated based on a variety of factors. Capturing an enemy province means very little if they have 60+ provinces, and beating down their 1500-man army won't even earn you a percentage point if they have a 15,000-man army heading your way. However, if that 15,000-man army is a continent away, or can't actually reach you, it won't be factored in^note which is important when the country you're fighting calls on allies: if it will take them quite some time to reach the battlefield, you still have a chance to win even if they control a vastly more powerful army, and defeating a numerically superior force with better tactics is also worth much more warscore than just trumping the enemy with bigger numbers yourself. That being said, if you get to 100% positive or negative warscore, the war is over immediately (your opponent will offer surrender terms immediately, or immediately forces you to surrender). In the rare event that one side captures the enemy ruler in battle, it immediately sets the warscore to 100%, allowing them to win the war immeidately regardless of any other factors.
  • Stellaris specifically averts this as well: if you concentrate only on stomping enemy fleets, warscore will plateau very quickly. To win a war, you have to destroy orbital stations, conquer or desolate enemy planets, and prevent them from doing the same^note Warscore increases based on the percentage of damage done to someone's empire as a whole. An empire with a small standing fleet but massive production capability will suffer very little from having their standing fleet destroyed, but much more from having their production base crippled through planetary invasions. The fastest way to increase warscore is always to successfully conquer planets, but for massive empires with multiple colonized planets, each individual planet has less of an effect. However, if you do enough damage to get your warscore high enough to enforce your war demands (which could be anything from 1% to 100%), then the enemy will immediately surrender and declare you victorious, unless they have enough military might to swing the warscore back in their favor within a couple of in-game months (thus preventing a player from smashing a small patrol fleet and having the enemy surrender when the enemy still has a much bigger fleet farther from the front line). The player can still enforce demands, however.
    • Stellaris, however, has an Instant-Win Condition in the form of the Aetherophasic Engine. If your empire builds it, it is an instant victory... As your empires successfully invades the Shroud, becoming Physical Gods, and cause the destruction of the entire galaxy.
• The various Punch-Out!! games, in addition to the instant knockdown methods against every boxer, often have secret outright instant K.O. tricks you can use to quickly win matches. Glass Joe can be taken down instantly if you counter his taunt either with precise timing or with a Star Punch, Piston Honda goes down in one shot if you counter the Honda Rush with a body blow, and King Hippo's first knockdown is also a guaranteed knockout. These were all carried over to the Wii version, with additional ones such as being able to take out Bald Bull by countering his charge with a three-star punch (but only if you've not taken a hit), as well as landing a star punch against Mr. Sandman after his Berserk attack.
• In Resident Evil 5 When fighting against both Wesker and Jill Valentine, all you have to do is survive for 7 minutes. Even if you're on the cusp of death, once those 7 minutes go by, Wesker leaves. You still have to break Jill out of her mind controlled state, but that's easier than fighting a guy who can dodge a shotgun shot to the face at point-blank range.
• Richman series has some:
  • Richman 7 Expansion's single player mode has different winning conditions for each character, from owning most houses or coupons by the end of time limit, or make everyone bankrupt as usual. Of course, you can always win if you make everyone bankrupt in time in a ruleset that doesn't require it.
  • Richman 8:
    • If playing as Miss Money and choosing Arabia as her 2nd stage, she can instantly skip the level by landing on the same tile as Salonbus for two times. Salonbus will offer her a chance to win this round.
    • On Kimchi's 2nd stage, after a few turns, the Monster will appear and Kimchi will fight and befriend it, while scaring away everyone else, though this is scripted.
    • Princess Sarah has her trait entirely based on this; whenever she goes bankrupt, goes to hospital or jail, the host will offer a chance to immidiately win the round. She can refuse it, though, and you will want to refuse it if you haven't collected her swimsuit puzzle pieces yet.
• Rise of Nations:
  • The game declared victory if you were holding enough territory. So, even if there was all-out war and the balance of power was constantly shifting, if you could keep just enough land for a few minutes (or had the Wonder building that meant instant assimilation), you won immediately.
  • If you have the "World Government" (at the end of the Civics tree) tech online, you can skip the several minutes of waiting, bomb a few convenient targets, and then snatch them. World Gov skips the timers entirely.
  • Or if you build enough Wonders to get enough Wonder Points. Apparently you can conquer the world with art.
  • In the Conquer the World campaigns you can purchase a territory adjacent to another nation's capital which grants you an army, then attack the capital immediately afterwards. If you win, you get the money back and every territory that nation had before you do this!
• Possible in Rock Band:
  • All you have to do to pass a song is finish it, but if somebody fails out, the band has to save them within a reasonable window of time or everyone fails. This can happen twice, and the third time is an inevitable band failure... unless it happens close enough to the end for the song to complete (including the second or two it takes to transition from the song's end to the score screen) before that. It happens when a Big Rock Ending is involved, as the moment the Big Rock Ending hits, EVERYONE that was failed out is revived and the performance meter is removed.
  • Also obvious in any song in the older games (Rock Band 2 and earlier), where the crowd would boo your band loudly, until you hit the invisible point that ended the song (which is usually well after the last actual note of the song). Then they would suddenly switch to cheering.
• In the Razor Rendezvous mission of Rogue Squadron II, the mission is automatically completed once the Star Destroyer is destroyed even if you did so by crashing into the bridge Arvel Crynyd style.
• Saints Row:
  • The Saints stores in Saints Row: The Third. You walk into a store and instantly your wanted level disappears. Why? Because your (invisible) boys are guarding the store and it is Saints territory. Which is enough to scare off tanks and APCs sent by someone who openly declared war on you.
  • In Saints Row IV, you can't lose your wanted level by hiding in your cribs anymore: Zinyak had the foresight to remove them from the virtual recreation of Steelport. On the other hand, when you become wanted, a Golden CID appears. Chasing it down and destroying it will instantly remove your wanted level and send any police or Zin attacking you away. Same for if you max out your wanted level and subsequently destroy the Warden.
• In Scribblenauts you'll frequently watch Maxwell go through his death animation or disappear down a bottomless pit, but it's alright, because he touched the Starite before dying, so the victory screen pops up. It holds true in one of the puzzle levels of world 4: You have to destroy everything to make the Starite appear, but you can also just use a nuke or something similar and hope to touch the Starite before losing the level.
  "Even if I fell into the lava, if I had the star I'd still win, with an agonizing flesh-vaporizing victory dance."
• In the Silent Scope games, a headshot instantly kills the boss regardless of how much health he has left. As bosses got more durable and/or harder to hit, the importance of headshots grew in importance; some (Cobra, Monica, The Collector, Sho & Kane, Shadow, Charly) are next to impossible to beat any other way.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • A curious case comes in Sonic the Hedgehog CD. Ordinarily, if you miss even one robot generator in the past, you're hard locked into the bad ending, but if you manage to collect all of the Time Stones, all Zones, including your current zone, zones you've already beaten (including ones you missed the generators in) and zones you have yet to reach, will all automatically be set to the Good Future, guaranteeing you the good ending.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). In Crisis City, Sonic is being chased by a tornado made of fire, yet hitting the end of the level causes Sonic to stop and do his victory pose while his score tallies. As this happens, the aforementioned tornado is still visible in the background, and it just stops chasing Sonic for no discernible reason. "I don't feel like chasing you any more."
  • Sonic Adventure 2: When fighting The Egg Golem as Eggman, it's possible to kill the Golem while falling to your death in quicksand.
• Spore: In the Civilization Phase, certain abilities allow you to immediately conquer the world and advance immediately to the Space Phase. Depending on your civilization's type, this can take the form of Fanatical Uprising (forcibly convert all other cities to your religion), Global Merger (buy out all of the other cities), or ICBM (nuke all of the other cities).
• Starcraft:
  • One of the early Terran levels in the first game requires you to survive for a set amount of time. You can still win even if all you're completely overrun and all your units and headquarters are destroyed, as long as you take one random building and fly it to the corner of the map. In Starcraft II, there are also three missions where, after satisfying the instant win condition, you get to bypass the mostly intact Protoss base between your forces and the artifact fragment. On two of these, this is the most likely way to finish the mission.
  • In a few StarCraft II missions where the main objective is not "wipe out all enemy forces" (specifically, some of the Tal'darim missions), the mission can be won by wiping out all enemy forces, at which point Matt Horner calls in to let you know the enemy is in retreat. Cue victory screen.
  • One mission in Heart of the Swarm has the protoss sending ships and escorts to send word out to the Golden Armada, and Kerrigan having to take them out to prevent that. The ships are launched from docking bays at regular intervals; should the docking bays be destroyed, you win on the spot.
• In Star Fox Guard, because only robots in the Combat Class are capable of destroying your tower, the main objective of each mission only dictates that you eliminate all those ones. Once you destroy the last Combat Class bot, the mission instantly ends in success, regardless of whether or not there are any Chaos Class bots remaining.
• Victory in Stellaris is usually a slow war of attrition. As of the Nemesis DLC, though, taking the proper perks allows you to construct the Aetherophasic Engine, a device built of dark matter (which is obtained by destroying entire solar systems). Finish constructing it and flip the switch, and your civilization ascends to godhood, instantly winning the game... while causing every remaining star in the galaxy to become a black hole.
• Several bosses in the Streets of Rage games will have minions summoned in for backup. Beating the boss is the only way to clear the stage, so any enemies left alive either simply walk away or they die with the boss.
• This trope sees abundant use in the Super Mario Bros. series.
  • In Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels, jumping behind Bowser and touching the axe destroys the bridge and sends him tumbling into the lava pit below. Basically, if you reach Bowser with a Mushroom or Fire Flower, you've already won, as you can just take a hit and then use your Mercy Invincibility to run right past him.
  • In Super Mario Bros. 2, this only happens when the boss of the current world is defeated. In any other level, completion is only official when your character enters the Mask Gate, as the level is technically still active after the crystal opening the exit is grabbed.
  • In Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, clearing a stage will usually cause all remaining foes on screen to spontaneously transform into coins. The remaining games merely turn the enemies into earned points when the flagpole is touched, though if enough of them are gathered at once, they will turn into extra lives.
  • In the 3D games, no matter the situation, as long as you get to the Star, Shine Sprite or flagpole without dying, you're fine. It doesn't matter if in the middle of an island sinking into lava, the bottom of the ocean with hardly any oxygen, or in the case of Super Mario 64, doing a victory dance on a bottomless pit/the middle of the sky^note this one was changed in the remake.
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2 takes this to the extreme. Many of the Green Stars actually require you to leap to your death. As long as you can manage to collide with the star along the way, you're golden.
  • Kaizo Mario World, the Trope Namer for the Kaizo Trap, goes out of its way to avert this trope. Unless you've taken care to cover the pit beyond the finish line, grabbing the flag will cause Mario to happily walk to his death.
• In the Super Smash Bros. games, you can still win in many situations even if you're careening towards certain doom so long as your enemy does so first.
  • One method that invokes this same technicality is to swallow the last enemy as Kirby and fall off the side. For some reason, the enemy in Kirby's belly will count as having been defeated first, leading to an instant win with Kirby some minuscule distance away from his own death. His "throw" moves work similarly.
  • Bowser does it better. He can grab an enemy and body slam them into the floor. If you move in midair to over a pit during this attack, Bowser can end up pulling the enemy along on a suicide dive, the enemy dying a moment before Bowser.
  • In the original, this bug only worked on The Dragon Metal Mario, but other enemies could be beaten using a variation.
  • It can be done in some manner by DK, Diddy Kong, and Ganondorf, etc.
  • In Brawl, a bug in the code can result in either an instant victory or Sudden Death, depending on controller order. The "Suicidal KO" rule used in tournament play fixes this.
  • A situation universal to every Smash Bros. game, combination of characters, and rulesets is that if the remaining characters have all been sent flying, whoever gets KOed last wins. Thus, someone who got punted first could still win the match as long as the game has declared everyone else KOed before him or her (as the length of time between the final blow and declaration of a KO can vary depending on the stage, the direction of the launch, and the location of the final blow).
  • This got particularly frustrating if both fighters were knocked off the top of the screen, which resulted in either a star KO or a screen KO. The former took twice as long as the latter, meaning whoever got sent flying first might narrowly win if they got lucky with their defeat animation. Later games treat the top of the screen as a normal blast line on the final stock.
• A common case in Supreme Commander, where the default victory condition is 'assassination'. If you kill your opponent's Armored Command Unit, they're wiped out. Many games are ended by a single large wing of strategic bombers punching through a layered defense, or a single nuke, aimed to take out a single unit.
• Surgeon Simulator 2013 does this with impunity. Ribs completely shattered? Lungs on the floor? Stomach detached? Down to double digits of blood left? It's instant victory when you slap the replacement heart in the patient's chest! The game even lampshades it:
  "Looks fine to me. I'm sure he'll live."
• Team Fortress 2:
  • In the final moments of control point and payload matches, the pushing team is often outnumbered, surrounded, and dying left and right. But once the objective is complete, all opposing players are disarmed and fall prey to those they had been killing just seconds before. Taken to the extreme, one side could be losing the fight badly and still win if someone sneaks by enemy lines. In fact, the Spy and Scout have achievements for doing so.
  • This happens quite often on Dustbowl. The second capture point in each part falls extremely quickly to a spy or scout sneaking past the defenders if they get too bold and fight too far away from it.
  • Inverted against the player in Mann Vs Machine mode. It doesn't matter how badly you're steamrolling the robots' spawn point, if a single Scoutbot sneaks behind you with the bomb, you're done for. The humans do still have an instant-win condition against the robots, just one that's tough to exploit. If, for example, a wave consists of 30 Soldier bots and unlimited "support" Scoutbots, killing the 30th Soldier bot causes the Scoutbots to drop dead instantly, no matter how much of the field the Scoutbots control.
• In the single-player campaign for Telepath Tactics, a few maps will grant you an instant win the moment you move Emma to a certain space, which can make them trivial if you stock up on adrenaline pills. This is a little weird in the mines entrance battle, where logically any remaining troops should be nipping at your heels in the next battle. Decapitated Army is also in effect for most Boss Battles.
• In the first few missions in Thief: The Dark Project, if you're playing on the easiest difficulty, the mission ends a few seconds after you finish the objectives - you don't need to escape from the place you're robbing. This has some absurd consequences: in mission 3 ("Down in the Bonehoard"), if you time it right, you can grab the MacGuffin, then jump down a very deep pit... and somehow survive, since the mission ends in victory before you can reach the bottom and die. Another example is mission 2, where you can lock yourself in a cell moments before fulfilling the mission objective and... well, to quote the Thief anti-walkthrough:
  And suddenly, with the situation at its most bleak, with Garrett imprisoned and the only way out blocked by a horde of murderous hammerites determined to smash his skull, Garrett wishes himself out of the jail cell and escapes. As if by magic.
• In Thief II: The Metal Age, one of the requirements of the mission "Casing the Joint" is that Garrett cannot be seen, and cannot harm any guards, since his goal is just to study the layout of the mansion in preparation for the next mission, and anything that could result in security being tightened would throw a wrench into the plans. However, if you've completed every other objective and reach the streets, the mission is won even if a guard spots you just before, since the mission doesn't fail immediately.
• The Core Design era of Tomb Raider generally has the level end once Lara reaches the end level trigger that brings up the level statistics. Even if Lara is being hounded by a pack of enemies and is on her last sliver of health, as long as she crosses the proverbial finish line, you'll win and start the next level with full health. Certain levels may require Lara to defeat a boss instead in order to complete the level.
• In the Total War games:
  • When assaulting an enemy settlement, you win by either destroying the entire enemy army or by holding the settlement's central plaza for a certain amount of time (which generally translates to having at least one of your guys within the plaza's boundaries and no enemies). Even if there's a ginormous enemy reinforcement army approaching, you will still win as long as it fails to reach the plaza in time to disrupt the timer.
  • Standard battles also have timers. It is entirely possible to have a single unit of some kind left during a snow/rainstorm hide out waaaay at the corner of the map, and win due to time out. (In clear weather it's simple enough to just search the forests then the corners, but in snow/rain visibility falls to nothing and so long as you turn off the AI engagement the enemy can walk right by you and not notice you.) In campaign, this only works on defense.
  • In the campaign maps, it doesn't matter if the opposing faction has several huge armies coming to curbstomp you, the minute you take out their last city they're instantly wiped out, since presumably they're so distraught by the loss of their leadership, they can't do much of anything, let alone reestablish the nation. In some games as armies will stick around to cause misery to you, but because they have no source of income they have to act fast to regain any kind of foothold.
  • In Rome: Total War: Barbarian Invasion, destroying a barbarian's last city will spawn several armies as the group leave in search for new lands... normally yours.
  • Averted in Total War: Warhammer II's Eye of the Vortex campaign. Completing the final ritual activates The Final Battle, where the other factions gang up on you - and despite the deck being stacked in your favour, this can still be a hard fight. (This battle itself is an example, being a Timed Mission you win by running down the clock, justified by siezing control of the Vortex and ending the battle by fiat.) Conversely, if another faction completes their ritual first, you automatically join the other factions in a last-ditch effort to break their hold on the Vortex.
• In Touhou Project games, draining a boss's health enough to make her move onto her next attack pattern will cause all bullets from the current attack to turn into items. The same applies to all on-screen enemy bullets upon reaching a boss. Earlier games would also give you a brief moment of invincibility during the explosion animation at the end of each boss's last Spell Card, though this was removed starting with Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith, making it possible to die after beating the final boss.
• Total Annihilation. In the campaign and the default multiplayer settings destroying a faction's Commander would instantly detonate every single one of their units and structures- effectively a shortcut to the more plausible 'destroy all enemies'.
• Trackmania: Your time is recorded when you reach the finish, even though the track ends there and you usually fly off into oblivion or faceplant something solid immediately after crossing the finish line. Some track builders purposely place a ramp or obstacle there to make the inevitable post-finish crash all the more spectacular.
• In Ultimate Chicken Horse, your goal is to reach a flag in the level while dodging hazards, but as long as you reach that flag you win. Even if you were getting shot full of arrows after reaching the flag that knocks you away (and possibly even off a ledge) if still counts, and likewise you still get victory points if you die but your corpse manages to reach the flag (although the points awarded are not as much as reaching the flag alive).
• The Assault gamemode in Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004 consists of two phases: in the first round, the Red team assumes the attacking role, and the Blue team the defending role. After the first phase ends (either by objective completion or time running out), both teams switch roles, with the Blue team attacking and the Red team defending. In this round, the Blue team wins if they complete more objectives than the Red team did in the first phase, in case the first phase ended with the Red team not managing to complete every objective, regardless of time left for the objectives to be completed.
• Valkyria Chronicles uses this.
  • Most missions are won if you seize the enemy's main base. A fun strategy is just running a scout into the base, grenading any troops there, and winning, regardless of the (likely rather poor) tactical situation the rest of your army is in. The game practically encourages this, since the only factor affecting your end of mission rating is how quickly you won- kills, casualties, nothing else has any relevance to your score.
  • Any and all 'defeat enemy commander' missions. Useful in the games where you can kill Aces to claim their bonuses (especially Randomly Drops weapons) and get the mission done as soon as possible to save time.
• Warcraft III:
  • The game has the custom map Defense of the Ancients: Destroying the World Tree or Frozen Throne is all that counts. It does not matter how many times the enemy Heroes get killed if they succeed in bringing down your main building. Kills and gold help, but if you happen to get a carry into the enemy base while they aren't looking, good game. Balanced in that you have to destroy all buildings in at least one lane before you can kill the Throne.
  • In one case, this is actually used for But Thou Must!: Once you acquire Frostmourne in the final human campaign mission, insurmountable waves of enemies begin to spawn, overwhelming your base. Since it's only Hero Must Survive for Arthas, most players will just abandon the camp and have Arthas go solo the major antagonist necessary to win. It turns out that's exactly what the Lich King intended, and this time the allies stay dead and Arthas is corrupted.
  • Even if you have enough resources to build 100 bases consisting of all the available buildings, have enough workers to do so 10 at a time, and your army is fully teched with three Level 10 Heroes (and is unstoppable compared to the opponent's), you will lose once all buildings go down. As a result, some players mass Siege Engines or Raiders and send them to sick on the enemy's bases in an "all or nothing" attack.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Dawn of War has this in the "Control Area" and "Take and Hold" victory conditions. The former involves holding over two-thirds of the Strategic Points, while the latter involves holding half of the harder-to-defend Critical Locations, but in both cases the idea is the same - if the timer runs down to zero, victory is achieved regardless of who has the bigger and stronger army.
  • The reverse is possible in Dawn of War 2. While most games are based on holding points, it is possible to destroy the enemy base before the points all tick away, allowing an outmaneuvered player a (very difficult) alternate win condition. Note that it's mostly difficult because of the toughness of the bases; even with a few heavy tanks and the personification of the god of murder beating down on one, it takes nearly two minutes to destroy an undefended base, which is an eternity in a game whose rounds typically last 10 minutes or less.
  • The siege of the Space Marine stronghold by the Tau in the Dark Crusade. The objective is to destroy their main Stronghold. Since the Tau Commander, if properly upgraded, is an invisible jet-packed one-man-tank, he can cut the "sieging" and "storming" parts, sneak to the enemy base and raze the building single-handedly from a vantage point (just keep in mind the map is littered with Servo Skulls, who can turn the Commander visible again). That's it. One building. And despite that the whole SM army is still intact they will let out a mighty BAWWWWWWWWWW as their Captain suddenly drops dead, admit defeat, and barrage their own positions with orbital bombing so that they don't fall in your hands. Suckers.
  • The same happens when playing Necrons vs Imperial Guard or, if slightly harder to pull off, Space Marines. All you need to do is destroy the Imperial HQ, but access is blocked due to a large river. Conveniently there are some small patches of land and your Necron Lord can teleport. Better yet, he resurrects wherever he is slain and topping even that he can become an immortal Death God for a short while. So you teleport, kill the enemy HQ to death and go elsewhere to kill stuff.
  • The Imperial Guard are notorious for their ability to just skip anything in a Stronghold during a campaign. They have the best artillery in the series, and they have a way to pierce the Fog of War and upgraded Earthshaker shells that can heavily damage whatever it hits. The game even tells you exactly where the objective is on the map. All the Guard player has to do in a Stronghold is fight to within Earthshaker range, and fire the shells until the target is a smoking crater. Entire armies will rout because their main headquarters/figurehead got taken out by precision artillery from a mile away.
• In the Wing Commander games:
  • It's not always necessary to kill every last enemy to win the mission. In fact, in a few missions you get chewed out if you engage in unnecessary bloodshed. This is quite common for the strike missions, particularly against the Kilrathi starbase at the end of Wing Commander I. You can also do this in Secret Missions. Plot a course straight for the Sivar, afterburn towards it and after wasting it get out of dodge. Only need to worry about a few fighters around the Tiger Claw.
  • The plot of Wing Commander III assigns the player to an outdated carrier taking part in various missions while the confederation is slowly losing the war and while bigger ships fight in more important battles. Cue the development of Confed Secret Projects, which can end the war instantly if they can get to the right strategic location. Naturally, the final mission of the game has Commander Blair sneaking onto the Kilrath capital world with a small strike force to deliver a lethal blow and end the war that's been going on over 50 years (and 3 Wing Commander titles).
• One of the victories in a standard World of Tanks random battle is capturing the enemy base. Even if you are alone in capturing, most or all of your team is dead, you have one hit point left, as long as you are in their base for the required time, you win, even if there is no way you could possibly hold the base. In the Assault mode, the match ends instantly in a defending team win once the timer hits zero, even if the attacking team was one second from capping the base and the last defending tank is hiding in a corner of the map with 10 HP.
• World of Warcraft has this as a standard for most boss encounters. It doesn't matter how many adds he has active, how much of the room is on fire, or how many of you have been turned in his mindless, twisted slaves - so long as the boss dies, you win.
  • In the Halls of Stones instance, there is a gauntlet called the Tribunal of Ages, where you have to protect Brann Bronzebeard from getting roflstomped by mecha-dwarves as he's tinkering away at the security system. You have to live for 5-7 minutes of constant mobs, that spawn faster and faster and even avoid huge purple bombs of pain and a laser beam. When all of these at once, you can be seconds from achieving victory, have all of your party members die, and yet you still win if Brann manages to subdue the security system and use them to destroy the mecha-dwarves.
  • Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest battlegrounds may also count. The enemy might be swarming your base, attacking your general, but as long as your team manages to kill their general even a split second before yours dies, you win.
  • There's also Wintergrasp, where every 2.5 hours the attacking team has 30 minutes to storm the defenders' keep at the north end of the zone. If the attackers break through the three layers of walls and reach the sphere at the center within the time limit, they instantly win. But at the south end of the zone are three towers; if the defenders destroy all of them, they gain a hefty damage boost and 10 minutes are shaved off the attackers' clock. If there are less than ten minutes left, the defenders get an Instant Win.
  • Hellfire Assault involves stealing ammo to fire cannons at a fortified gate. So long as you can get enough ammo into the cannons to fire, it doesn't matter if only one person is alive being chased by dozens of enemies - you win.
• World of Warships has a mode called Airship Escort, tasking players with sailing under a zeppelin and getting it to an evacuation zone. More than one match of Airship Escort has been lost because one team spent all its time attempting to kill one or two especially dangerous or annoying enemy ships and forgetting that they need to sail with the airship. Because the airships can only be slowed, never stopped, it is posible for a team with one surviving player to win if they were crafty enough to speed their airship along and slow the enemy airship down such that tthe enemy can't make up the difference in time.
• In Wrecking Crew '98, pulling off a 9x chain combo will unleash a "Kanbank" attack, which is a giant falling Bowser crate that OHKOs the opponent and can't be dodged.
• Several missions in XCOM 2 require you to rescue (or capture) a VIP: as soon as the VIP is on the Skyranger, you win, even if your squad gets wiped out afterwards (though most players will probably consider that a lose condition anyway). The same is true of the Blacksite missions, which involve getting a specific piece of physical intel back to the Avenger: as soon as the soldier carrying it is on the Skyranger, victory is assured.
  • In the original 1994 game, the final mission to Cydonia requires the player to destroy the alien brain to win the scenario. Squads blown apart by blaster bombs and you no longer have the numbers to clear the map? It's possible to have the survivors rush the brain before they get shot down/zombified and claim victory.
• X Moto is a 2D moto racing game where you need to avoid touching wreckers or touching walls with your head. Most levels are user-contributed.. and the default game rules play the trope straight.
  • Some levels play it too straight to the extent of lampshading - like a "Jump to Death" level where you can save time by doing an unsurvivable jump with a slim chance of touching level goal before dying.
  • Some levels avert the trope by setting alternative victory condition of "having done X" where check for "X is done" is only performed when you are in relative safety.
  • Some levels subvert the trope by making teleports that look like level goal.. It is not too dishonest - these points usually have to be reached anyway, but going headlong down the cliff doesn't work here.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monster Coliseum, destroying the Symbol game piece will net a win regardless of how many monsters are left on either side. You can also win by destroying all of your opponent's monsters.
• In Z, the objective was to destroy the opponent's fortress by a) direct assault b) destroying all of the enemy robots or c) getting a unit inside the enemy fort. You could have a strong army and most of the map claimed, but it's all for nothing if a bunch of snipers sneak past your defenses, take out the turrets on your fort, and casually stroll in.
• In Zero Time Dilemma, if you win the coin flip at the beginning of the game, Zero honors his deal, releases you all, and the credits roll. You win the game with zero effort on your part.
• In Zork Zero, the Double Fanucci card game can be won instantly if you undertrump three cards after the Jester discards a trebled fromp. In fact, this is the only way to win, inasmuch as the rules are never stated in the game or instructions and are impossible to deduce from the Jester's commentary (i.e. there aren't any). (In an oddly-placed bit of realism, the game does allow some way to block this - it isn't automatically possible to do three undertrumps in a row following the discard - but the Jester isn't trying to stop it.)

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