Last Stand / Video Games

• Conqueror's Blade: Season VIII: Dynasty features lore surrounding a heroic last stand by the Greyhair Garrison of Longting at the desert fortress of Linwu. The Greyhairs survived the siege and were introduced as a playable unit during the Dynasty season. Surprise, surprise: one of their ingame skills is called Last Stand.
• Dome Keeper: In Relic Hunt mode, when you find the Relic and bring it back to the dome, you're made to deal with a Zerg Rush of all the monsters for the run, whether you're prepared or not. Once you die, the Relic proceeds to wipe out every single monster left standing. Managing to survive the onslaught rewards the "I came prepared" achievement.
• Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core's version of Zack Fair's death has him fighting a few hundred Shinra soldiers by himself in his attempt to protect Cloud. It's sadder when you know that Tseng had commanded the Turks to find him in order to reunite him with Aerith.
• The Last of Us has a recently-bitten Tess send Ellie and Joel away so she can buy them time to escape the incoming FEDRA soldiers and kill as many as she can before she's gunned down, since she refuses to become an Infected.
• Ragnarok Online: The Gunslinger's Last Stand, gives bonus to attack power and attack speed at the cost of the ability to move (works with all weapons). May also be combined with Gatling Fever.
• Brutal Doom features numerous AI enhancements to the zombie soldiers from the original Doom. Among these, zombie soldiers (both regular troopers and sergeants) have a chance, when one of their limbs is blown off, to sit up and draw a pistol, firing off a few shots at you before collapsing. While they can't do very much damage this way, they can still kill you (particularly on the Realism Mode difficulty) if you don't notice them immediately.
• StarCraft:
  • In StarCraft skirmishes, the AI doesn't do so well with things like "saving resources" and "wars of attrition".
  • Reversed in StarCraft: Brood War. The last mission is a Last Stand of three factions against Kerrigan. And you're Kerrigan. Then, in Wings of Liberty, the last protoss mini-campaign mission is set in the Bad Future where Kerrigan was killed, resulting in the Fallen One using Hybrids to enslave the Zerg and annihilate the Terrans. The mission is a last stand mission where you fight until the very last Protoss in existence dies. The mission isn't won until you take down several thousand zerg. The Protoss went out with a bang.
• The Unwinnable by Design Sol mission series in the losing ending of Wing Commander III consists of endless waves of enemy fighters along with a Kilrathi Dreadnought fighting a desperate (and failing) battle to hold off the triumphant Kilrathi armada.
• Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, after the events of GaoGaiGar FINAL.
• Odin Sphere: Mercedes's battle against King Onyx. The forest is in ashes, Onyx feels gleefully destructive, but Mercedes decides she must be a queen to the very end and takes him down by herself.
  Mercedes: I won't stop drawing my bow...
• In Punch-Out!! for the Wii, there's a mode called Mac's Last Stand, where you have to fight random Title Defense opponents. If you lose three times, that's it. GAME OVER. Mac retires and the Career mode is locked. It really is Mac's Last Stand. Fortunately, a locked Career Mode simply means the "story mode" of that profile is over. You're still able to fight anyone anytime in Exhibition Mode (and Last Stand only unlocks after you've beaten all of the regular fighters in both their modes, so you have the run of them). The main goals of the Last Stand are to unlock Champion's Mode (where every hit on you is a One-Hit KO) and fight the Guest Fighter, which in turn adds him to the Exhibition roster.
• Red Dead Redemption has John Marston make it through dozens of towns, cities, settlements, states, and shootouts, only for it to end at his farm. The gunfight that makes up the final mission is quite frankly epic, with the player shooting an assload of soldiers and defending Marston's family. Sadly, Marston tells his family to leave and ride far away from the farm, and walks outside just before being gunned down by a large group of men shooting alongside Edgar Ross. Though it makes for a Downer Ending, it's a hell of a final fight, though. And John is indeed survived by his son, Jack Marston.
• In a rare villainous example, Suikoden II features the mad Highland King Luca Blight. To be precise, he takes on three six-member parties, countless archers, then a final one-on-one duel with the hero before finally falling.
• COD 2 Spanish Civil War Mod: The final mission for the Republicans has the remnant of the Francoist army defending Burgos, the capital of the provisionary Nationalist government.
• Call of Duty:
  • In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, downed enemies (unless slain by headshots or explosives) have a chance to pull their sidearm and take a few spiteful potshots at you before dying. A multiplayer Perk lets players do the same to each other, though be prepared to take some flak for choosing it. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 even included a Death Streak letting players do this with their primary weapons, with the added caveat that if the player is able to survive long enough while downed, they can return back to a fighting condition.
  • In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, you'll come across a Shadow Company soldier in the final mission who is attempting to hold out against you by firing a gun despite the fact that he has no bullets. He will continue to futilely pull the trigger in your direction until you slash him with your knife. Even if you don't, he dies anyway.
  • Call of Duty: World at War introduced the Nazi Zombies game mode, pitting endless hordes of the undead against four insane soldiers. Or two presidents, a Secretary of Defense, and a dictator. Or Sarah Michelle Gellar, Danny Trejo, Robert Englund, and Michael Rooker.
• One of the Survival Mode maps for Left 4 Dead (the one introduced alongside the mode) is actually called The Last Stand. To quote the map's tagline, "It doesn't end well." Subverted by its counterpart in Left 4 Dead 2; despite being named the same, it's instead a proper campaign where the Survivors are able to escape during the finale.
  • The saferoom graffiti has some thoughts on this as well. One from "Swamp Fever" in the sequel was written by the last survivor of the small bayou village: "We held out longer than Shreveport. We held out longer than Baton Rouge. We held out longer."
  • In the official storyline of The Sacrifice, Bill holds off a massive horde, including three Tanks, to let his other three companions escape on a sailboat to the Florida Keys. He manages to restart the generator before the Tanks arrive and kill him.
  • It's also applicable whenever a Survivor is downed during normal gameplay, as even if nobody is around to revive them they'll still be able to pick off attacking Infected with a pistol before they expire.
• If you've played a Hitman game, then you've done this at least once. Alarm goes off, and instead of (or at the same time as) cursing the gods for your failure, you whip out the dual silverballers and make things messy before you go.
• A substantial part of the premise of the Iron Grip games, especially the second installment (which is basically a blend of tactical Tower Defense and War FPS).
• Done a few times in Final Fantasy XI. Raogrimm holds off the Ark Angels after you defeat him as the Shadowlord to let the party escape. Aphmau's Blue Mage bodyguard protects the party from an oncoming wave of Mamool Ja, likely casting Self Destruct. Lehko Habhoka in Wings of the Goddess does the same, having hidden his mortal wound from the previous fight. And in Rhapsodies of Vana'diel you see the biggest gathering of FFXI characters ever as the Cloud of Darkness attacks the last remaining place in Vana'diel, the far eastern island of Reisenjima.
• Dawn of War II:
  • In the campaign, the final mission turns into this after you successfully complete your objectives only to have your evac craft shot down. Your units resign themselves to heroic deaths, and then Captain Angelos arrives with reinforcements, joining your side while allied drop pods rain upon the battlezone.
  • A patch introduced a full-fledged Last Stand game mode, where heroes from each faction fight together against waves of hostiles. It's been used to surprise players with an Early-Bird Cameo, as those who managed to reach the final wave found themselves facing Bloodletters and a Chaos Lord before the release of the Chaos Rising expansion. DLC also allowed players to choose a Tau battlesuit commander, even though the Tau aren't playable in Dawn of War II.
  • At the end of the Tyranid campaign of Retribution:
    Blood Raven losses: Total... They refused to retreat.
  • When the Eldar Stronghold in Dark Crusade falls, Farseer Taldeer tells her forces to escape while she holds off the attacking army on her own. Canonically she is killed by the Blood Ravens and her soul stone has been taken to Kyras.
• The final battle of RefleX is a mix between this, Mêlée à Trois and Heroic Sacrifice. Earth and the Raiwat finish off the war by destroying their last forces. The Ophiuchus, after defeating Libra and the two Kamui fighters, destroys itself and seals away the ZODIAC so that the horrific war will never resurface again.
• Halo:
  • A meta-example from Halo 2: After Microsoft shut down the Xbox Live servers for the game, the "Noble Fourteen" were players who simply refused to log off and stayed in the game, continuing the game's final deathmatch. At one point, Bungie tried to bribe them with Halo Reach beta codes, but twelve remained. The last of them was disconnected (involuntarily) on May 10th, more than a month after the official shutdown date.
  • A straight example occurs in Halo: Reach. The UNSC Pillar of Autumn has left the planet, SPARTAN-B312 having stayed behind to give them cover fire in a Mass Driver turret. More and more Covenant dropships are landing, and the enemy is everywhere. Among the last of the UNSC forces on Reach, you have one final mission. Objective: Survive.
    • While in gameplay it would nearly be impossible to last that long, canon states that Noble Six's last stand lasted for several hours. He single-handily held off an entire Covenant Army where the battle escalated to the point that the enemy started directing their tanks and airships against one soldier. After hours of constant fighting, Noble Six was finally subdued in close combat by several Elites, some of whom he took down with him as he was dying. Keep in mind, he/she was taking on multiple Ultra-class and General Sangheili in hand-to-hand combat. He/she was finally killed by a Zealot Elite from behind with an Energy Dagger. Defiant to the End, the Lone Wolf went down clawing and biting at his killers.
  • The Firefight multiplayer mode in Halo 3: ODST and Reach is basically up to four ODSTs or Spartan-IIIs using whatever they have at their disposal to fight off endless waves of Covenant that get progressively more difficult.
  • In a somewhat Laser-Guided Karma, the Covenant itself eventually get this near the end of Halo 3. With most of the army slaughtered, the empire divided in a massive civil war, the empire itself now limited to the Ark and the High Charity doomed to fall due to the Flood's infiltration, and Truth's fleet being stomped by Arbiter and his men, the remaining loyalists to Truth face the unified UNSC-Elite-Flood alliance as they scramble to stop Truth from firing the Halo rings. The Covenant throws everything they have to the alliance in a desperate attempt to stop them, including two Scarabs and multiple Wraiths, most of Truth's elite guards joining the battle and the remaining Mooks desperately massing and trying to fight them off, which leads to the level of the same name and the longest mission of the trilogy as the Alliance destroys the remaining stronghold of the Covenant for good.
• Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance sets one of these up, complete with actual Last Stand for a major character, though the player still 'wins' by surviving the massive onslaught long enough to be beamed up.
• In the flash game Steambirds: Survival, you are a British pilot, outnumbered 1000 to 1, allowing the citizens of London to evacuate before the German armada arrives, dropping a toxic gas on the city and killing them all. Done wrong, you could utterly fail and take exactly none of them with you. Done right, 50 or more German planes/airships will be going down with you.
• Dissidia Final Fantasy 012's climax is all the new characters, including fan-favorites such as Lighting, Kain and Laguna against a Mankin horde. An endless Mankin horde. Needless to say, they don't make it.
  • Though it is worth noting the actual context of the scene: The group who opted into this fight went there knowing full well that survival would be nearly impossible, that part was never a factor to them. Their only purpose here was to seal the rift in order to stop the flood of mankins so that whoever was left in the next cycle might be able to get a clear shot at actually ending the war. It might have taken all of them getting totally erased from the cycle to do it, but they DID succeed, leaving a MUCH smaller force of mankins to deal with for the survivors and contributing hugely to the success of Cosmos's final plan.
  • At the same time, the Warrior of Light is seen facing off and then fighting a massive hoard of Manequins by himself to protect Cosmos. He actually does hold out just long enough, Shinryuu resets to the next cycle just as Warrior of Light falls and Cosmos is about to be attacked.
• Mass Effect:
  • At the end of the last DLC for Mass Effect 2, a Paragon Shepard also gives this trope to Harbinger right after s/he already flipped them off again.
    Shepard: Maybe you're right: maybe we can't win this. But we'll fight you regardless. Just like we did Sovereign, just like I'm doin' now. However 'insignificant' we might be, we will fight. We will sacrifice, and we will find a way. That's what humans do.
  • Another example from Arrival has an achievement called Last Stand, earned by surviving the Hopeless Boss Fight against five waves of enemy forces coming in to put you down, in which a YMIR Mech shows up just to add even more pressure to your already-dire situation. Even if you survive, you still get knocked out, you single-handedly fighting off all the enemies while they talk about how they can't bring you down.
  • Garrus in Mass Effect 2 is forced into this scenario, when after being lured away from his squad, returned to watch the final two die and held out against the three merc gangs for several hours before Shepard arrived.
  • Mass Effect 3 is this on a galactic level, but it starts on Earth. The turians start out knowing that they cannot hope to fight off the Reapers, being constantly ground down, just holding the line while the transports escape, and you get emails during the game where people you saved in the first game such as Aresh and Kal'Reegar make heroic last stands protecting people from the unfolding apocalypse.
    Admiral Steven Hackett: Never before have so many come together from all quarters of the galaxy. But never before have we faced an enemy such as this. The Reapers will show us no mercy; we must give them no quarter. They will terrorize our populations; we must stand fast in the face of that terror. They will advance until our last city falls, but we will not fall. We will prevail. Each of us will be defined by our actions in the coming battle. Stand fast. Stand strong. Stand together. Hackett out.
  • Grunt has one in Mass Effect 3, against a group of Reaper-modified Rachni. Bonus Badass points because if you secured his loyalty, he survives. And asks if you've got anything to eat.
• Jaffar does one of these in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade to aid Nino in escaping. The role of the player is to attempt to subvert this trope.
• Sol: A History (a fanmade Freespace 2 campaign that takes place in the Sol system while it is cut off after the events of the first game) begins with the Terran fleet preparing to make a last stand against the invincible destroyer Lucifer. As the Lucifer is destroyed in hyperspace, the last stand is averted.
• Protection Warriors in World of Warcraft have an ability called Last Stand that can be used as this trope. It boosts your HP for 15 seconds, but when it wears off, you lose all of the HP it gave you, meaning if you're not healed, you're at 1 HP and the next hit is fatal.
  • In the quest "Last Stand", the player does this with several other characters against a horde of werewolves.
  • Kilrogg Deadeye has a special mechanic "Vision of Death" which causes players to witness the moment of their death: A hopeless last stand against the Burning Legion as Azeroth burns. Each demon killed grants a stacking buff; after killing 20 demons or dying the player returns to the battle.
    • Kilrogg himself is making a last stand as years ago he saw the vision of his death. He knows he is destined to die against the players but won't make it easy for them.
  • In the Legion expansion, during the attack on the Exodar, you have Nobundo's Last Stand, a quest where you and several Non Player Characters hold the line against seemingly-endless waves of demons while the demon commander gloats between throwing increasingly-strong waves of troops at you.
  • Back in III, there's Sylvanas facing Arthas. She knew she didn't stand a chance against him as the undead closed around Silvermoon, her strategies to try to stall him failed. Too bad for her that Arthas had another, far crueller fate in mind for her.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Link's final memory shows him in a desperate last stand against a pack of Guardians. He fights to protect Zelda, but is badly wounded and his Master Sword is dull and rusty from overuse. He collapses from his wounds, and he and Zelda would've died if she hadn't awakened to her latent power which shut down the Guardians, giving her time to have Link taken to the Shrine of Resurrection to recover so he can continue the fight against Calamity Ganon later.
  • The Akkala Citadel, location of the Akkala region's tower, also featured one, that you can find about from a nearby NPC; when Castle Town was destroyed, what was left of the royal army fell back to the citadel to make their last stand against the Guardians. It's evident that they were all killed, but the number of wrecked Guardians strewn all over suggests that they made their killers pay for it.
• Plants vs. Zombies has a Mini-Game named Last Stand where you are given 5000 sun to build fortifications to defend against five waves of zombies. You can only obtain small batches of additional sun in between waves of heavy onslaught. Survival modes could probably be seen as this as well, especially Survival Endless.
• In the finale of Dead Space 2: Severed, mortally wounded Gabe Weller fends off a tide of necromorphs while forcing open an airlock so his pregnant wife Lexine can escape Titan Station.
• Umineko: When They Cry Episode 2. Rosa's Dying Moment of Awesome. Proof that she does care for her daughter, despite everything.
  • Also, all of Episode 8. The Fantasy side and the Ushiromiya family ally against Erika and an endless army of demon goats.
• Jaou, one of the Fourve in Tales of Xillia, stays behind to hold off the enemy forces to let Gaius and his comrades escape. Having been gravely wounded beforehand, there was no way he could possibly survive...though he actually succeeded in killing off all the enemy footsoldiers with a single attack containing all the strength he could muster, before getting killed by a cannon mounted on an aircraft overhead.
  • Jaou in all his glory
• The defense of your castle at the end of Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening can be this if you went to help protect the city instead. If you've done your administrative work properly, as in getting your troops properly equipped and the castle repaired, it isn't.
  • In the base game, this is pretty much the whole point of the Legion of the Dead, whose members have forsaken the safety of Orzammar for glory or to regain their lost honor, in order to venture into the furthest reaches of the Deep Roads to hold back the endless hordes of Darkspawn. They do not cease fighting until they are either dead or physically unable to keep moving.
  • The Calling is a longstanding tradition for Senior Grey Wardens, where they embark into the Deep Roads, with the intention of taking down as many Darkspawn as they can before they are finally slain. While many younger Wardens believe this is to avoid their eventual death from the Taint, in reality, they do this in order to die as themselves rather than undergo ghoulification.
  • One path in Dragon Age: Inquisition has a Bad Future segment end with the local versions of companion characters making one of these as the Inquisitor and a new friend desperately try to return to their own time. They Hold the Line just long enough.
• Assassin's Creed: Revelations: Yusuf has one offscreen. Near the end of the game, the villain sends a horde of templars to kidnap a woman to use as leverage for the keys to Altaïr's library. When Ezio happens upon the scene, he finds Yusuf lying lifeless in her house, on the other end of a carpet of dead Templars. A quick count tallies up at least fifteen dead Templars left in the shop, and that's not counting any that he wounded or that managed to get away unscathed.
• In The Lord of the Rings Online, "Last Stand" is a signature skill of the Captain class that prevents the Captain from being defeated for its duration. What really makes it fit the trope is another Captain skill, "In Harm's Way" that redirects incoming damage from the rest of the party onto the Captain. Enforcing the trope further, the default duration of Last Stand is five seconds shorter than In Harm's Way.
  • Lord of the Rings Online has a few missions where the player temporarily takes control of a character in an encounter from the books. Several of these are Heroic Last Stands where the win condition is not to actually defeat the enemies, or even to survive, but simply to do as well as the character canonically did (for example, holding off the enemies long enough to allow another character to escape or finish a task). Examples include the Chamber of Mazarbul in Moria and the Falls of Rauros.
• In the Lonesome Road DLC of Fallout: New Vegas, if you manage to talk down Ulysses in the finale, he'll tell you that the Marked Men of the Divide will be coming in as part of his original plan to kill you. He'll then offer to team up with you to make a final stand against all of them.
• The Tarka from Sword of the Stars are noted in the supplementary materials to view last stands as one of those incomprehensible human customs they can never understand, since from their moral point of view it's essentially a form of grieving. Their logic goes that you can only gain honor in battle by winning, and if you're losing your best option is to cut and run in an attempt to come back another day. If you commit yourself to a last stand not only do you prevent yourself from erasing the stain on your honor later, you're also making the opponent gain less honor from his victory by lessening it at the cost of your own life.
• Last Scenario features Felgorn, an Atoner for the other side who demonstrates Heroic Sacrifice and One-Man Army during his last stand against two-hundred soldiers that ended in a tie.
• FTL: Faster Than Light's final sector, The Last Stand. The last bits of The Federation's fleet holds off the Rebel fleet, but you can subvert this trope by destroying the Rebel Flagship. If the Flagship reaches the Federation base and stays here for three turns, it's an instant Game Over.
• The X-COM series is about humanity's final stand against alien domination. In each game, it's clear that the organization is the last line of defense against any alien attack, as individual country efforts are ineffective at best. In the original 1994 game, it's a last stand to remain in control of humanity's fate, as failure results in humanity being enslaved. Future games in the classic series are darker, with the aliens skipping the "enslavement" and going right to utter annihilation, sometimes even blowing up the planet.
  • XCOM 2 is unique in that the last stand failed: aliens are in control of Earth, and XCOM is a guerilla organization trying to stop the aliens from killing humanity to harvest our DNA and physiology despite having lost. Less of a last stand, and more of a Last-Second Chance.
  • XCOM: Chimera Squad is Lighter and Softer, making the Chimera Squad's last stand be against the forces of chaos that want to turn humanity into racist conquerors that subjugate the integrated alien races rather than peacefully coexisting. Failure means City 31 falls apart into chaos, representing the inability of humans and aliens to coexist and cooperate.
• Partly subverted by The Ur-Quan Masters (AKA Star Control II). At the beginning, humanity has, indeed, been defeated, trapped beneath planetary shields in "Fallow Slavery", and the small detachment of humans left in a space-station outside the shields are nice and obedient to the eponymous Ur-Quan masters. (It helps that they can't maintain life support without Ur-Quan assistance.) Until the player character shows up with a Precursor spaceship. Then they rebel, and put together The Alliance with great speed, before taking on the Ur-Quan directly. The Ur-Quan specifically chose to use planetary shields to avert this trope. Any race too courageous to agree to serve them would end up trapped in an impenetrable force field. This allows the Ur-Quan to win against enemies who were too dumb to know when they're beaten. If you talk to Commander Hayes, he reveals that Earth kept the war going right up to the point where Ur-Quan ships were positioned in orbit, ready to glass the entire planet.
• Supreme Commander's President Riley fits this trope in spades, many times going out of the way to inform you in the campaign briefings, and even during the last mission how the UEF will never surrender. Perhaps subverted slightly in that the enemies are actually other factions of humans, and that by the time the Seraphim roll around, he's already dead.
• In Dead Lock, the human faction is mainly known for its prowess in the realms of trade and diplomacy — greatly suited for winning the game in peaceful ways. But if they're forced into a fight, they have a special weapon too — all Human Infantry can use the 'Berserk' command in battle, injecting themselves with Super Serum that whips them into a frenzy, granting them the incredible strength and durability they need to take on vastly more powerful alien foes. Unfortunately, any survivors will either be killed or crippled for life by the drug's body-altering effects. Even the Tarth find this fanatical dedication to be downright disturbing.
• Elite Beat Agents and the second Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan game feature this as a penultimate level. The final level involves some truly epic Sprit Bombs. Heck, EBA's second-last song is "Without A Fight"!
• The villain equivalent of this is The Helghast from Killzone. They know to a man they cannot win, but they keep fighting for their home.
• In Legaia II: Duel Saga, this is the reason why humanity defeated the Kabel in the ancient war, according to Chief West Wind. The Kabel had the power of magic, but they had lost their human spirit. Humanity retained its fighting spirit and will to survive, and was able to overcome the superior foe and endure.
• In Might and Magic X Legacy, though your party does not engage in one, while exploring Dunstan's memories in the Tomb of Thousand Terrors, your party observes the dwarf of the group attempting this to buy time for the other remaining three party members to escape. Notes that you find along the way also talk of the same scenario and mention he managed to put up quite the fight.
• The Advent Rebel's Eradica Titan in Sins of a Solar Empire has its ultimate ability which makes it more powerful the more damage it takes and when its health finally runs out it gets 2 minutes of invulnerability before being destroyed.
• The Total War series has this as a mechanic. Normally, soldiers fight until their morale crumbles and they run away. However, if they cannot retreat (being encircled or on a wall), they switch to "Fighting to the Last Man", and will fight until the last one falls. With a melee damage bonus and reduced fatigue.
  • Total War: Warhammer III: Represented by Kislev factions having a mechanic that makes their units unbreakable for thirty seconds, which often kicks in when they've taken enough army losses (which is normally an Instant-Win Condition for an army's opponent).
• In Hatred, the Villain Protagonist known only as Not Important is a nihilistic Death Seeker who's out to take as many people with him to the grave as possible before he dies, so he begins his genocide crusade which ends with a Suicide by Cop just before he nukes the entire town.
• Mission 45 in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Everything about this basically screams 'your last stand together'; the opposition against you, the BGM that plays during so, but most predominant of all: the inevitable, heartbreaking departure of your deadliest ally.
• In the Star Trek Online mission "Battle of Caleb IV", the 23rd Century Player Character invokes this, attacking an entire fleet of Klingons to get their former captain/now admiral and the rest of his fleet to safety. The history books say that you and your crew are killed in this fight. Agent Daniels thinks otherwise.
• In Evolve's ambiguously canon Deepest Dark mission shows the last stand of the hunters. After being stranded on Shear and reduced from twenty to just a handful by the Hybrid, the few remaining hunters take up their weapons and delve into the nest of the Queen Gorgon to kill her and destroy her brood.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • In the series backstory, in the old Nordic religious tradition, the Top God and War God Shor was served by two other gods as shield-thanes, the brothers Stuhn and Tsun. According to that religious tradition, Tsun pulled one of these defending Shor against "angry foreign gods". While they eventually got to and slew Shor, it was at great cost. Tsun continues to serve Shor in Sovngarde, guarding Shor's Hall of Valor and testing warrior spirits for their worthiness to enter by battling them in single combat.
  • In his "opus", series' recurring character St. Jiub the Eradicator recounts his quest to eradicate the much reviled Cliff Racers from Vvardenfell. As he was hunting a lone Cliff Racer, it led him into a trap where hundreds of Cliff Racers suddenly descended upon him. Jiub believed this to be his Last Stand, fighting for two days and slaughtering hundreds of Cliff Racers. Jiub finally collapsed, exhausted and wounded. Ultimately Subverted, in that he would have died there if not for the timely rescue of the Dunmeri Physical God Vivec, who was so impressed with Jiub's actions that Vivec declared him to be a saint.
  • During the 4th Era Great War between the crumbling Cyrodiilic Empire and the Aldmeri Dominion, Emperor Titus Mede II made a strategic withdrawal from the Imperial City in order to regroup with fresh reserves in the north. Only the Eighth Legion is left in defense of the city. They perform a heroic last stand on the walls of the city, winning them great renown, but it ultimately falls to Dominion forces under Lord Naarifin. Naarifin captures and sacks the city, committing many atrocities on the city's populace. A year later, in the Battle of the Red Ring, the Imperials get their revenge as they repulse the Dominion forces from Cyrodiil and capture Naarifin, who is hung from the top of the White-Gold Tower but kept alive to suffer for 33 days.
• Undertale: The Final Boss of the Genocide route is a last stand with a twist: it's the boss doing the last stand. The boss is aware of the player's ability to load and save the game and as such knows that he cannot win, but fights anyway in the hope of making the player give up. Given the extreme difficulty of the boss fight, it's not really that much to hope for.
• Radiant Silvergun: The entirety of the game has the pilots of the Tetra and the three Silverguns waging one against the Stone-Like, which killed absolutely all life on Earth prior to the beginning of the game. At best, the two Player Characters transported back in time, get destroyed by the Stone-Like, and the Creator uses the DNA of them to repopulate Earth in the same past, in hopes that humanity will learn from its mistakes and not invoke the wrath of the Stone-Like. The cycle repeats.
• Horizon Zero Dawn. With the Faro Plague having destroyed most of the earth, the last remnants of the world's militaries enact operation Enduring Victory. They arm every single remaining human that can still hold a gun and tell them that they need to buy time for Project Zero Dawn and humanity's salvation. They lied, and there was no salvation. Zero Dawn was meant to Fling a Light into the Future, an AI that would reseed earth with life. The current generation of humanity had no hope of survival.
• Metro: Last Light: The final mission consists of a last stand. After you finally reach Polis and are helped by the Baby Dark One to force Moskvin to reveal the Red Line's plans to take over D6 and use its supplies to take over the Metro, you rush to the Spartan's military bunker, D6. The rest of the mission consists of an epic last stand where you fight off hundreds of Reds (in a metro system that only has around 50,000 people, mind you!) with only a few dozen of the most elite fighters in the Metro tunnels. Mid-fight, you are seriously wounded and have to fall back to the second line of defense. But oh no, Artyom (that's you) keeps gunning down multiple reds with his gun while downed! and you know what comes after you retreat to the second position? AN HONEST TO GOD HOMEMADE MINIGUN. More Dakka in action, baby. You use your guns to kill a bunch of shield-bearing reds protecting a guy with a flamethrower, then DESTROY AN ARMORED, MISSILE SHOOTING TANK WITH AN ANTI-MATERIEL RIFLE. Eventualy, Miller reveals that there are only biological weapons in D6; the food, guns, and medicine were a lie. D6 is a biological warfare bunker. Miller also reveals D6 has been prepared to blow up if they fail at their defense. Just then, the Reds reach your position with an armored train. Miller's legs get torn off from impact (although in Metro Exodus he has prosthetics), Ulman is killed, Khan is (probably) wounded and nearly everyone is dead. In a final act of fuck you, Artyom drags himself to the switch and the game counts your moral points. If you don't reach a secret amount, you get the normal/bad C'est La Vie ending, where Artyom flips the switch and all of D6 blows up, the spartans pulling a Taking You with Me and killing nearly all the Red Line's army and Korbut himself. This is ultimately averted if you get the Redemption/good ending though.
• Akane: The entirety of the game is about the titular character facing off against neverending waves of Yakuza until she dies.
• PAYDAY 2: The aced version of the "Swan Song" skill invokes the trope, as it gives a player who would normally be downed six seconds and Bottomless Magazines to kill as many enemies as possible before they have to be revived.
• Vermintide II: If he's the last living member of the team, Markus will comment that he "always wanted a heroic stand", and then correct himself to say that actually he did not want one, but that's what's he got and he's just going to have to got through with it.

---