No Ontological Inertia / Video Games

• In the Sega Saturn RPG Albert Odyssey, the main character's adoptive caretaker is turned to stone early on in the story. A search for a powerful healer eventually reveals that numerous other people have suffered the same fate, with the most powerful known healer unable to help them. Defeating the megalomaniac wizard who cast the curse is speculated to be the only possible cure, and in fact the aforementioned caretaker is seen fully recovered soon after the wizard is taken down.
• Averted in Anvil of Dawn. While trying to get past the gargoyle in the basement of the Dark Lantern, you can point out that the mage who summoned him as a guardian is now dead. The gargoyle says he's pleased to hear that, but he's still bound by the summons, which you have to break yourself before you can get past him.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura:
  • A few quest-based curses expire on death. One example is found early on, and the other involves the Crystal Ball quest. The Gypsy Blood curse, on the other hand, is caused by death.
  • This actually applies to a large majority of spells. Summoned monsters disappear when you no longer sustain the spell, time reverts to normal when you're no longer consciously altering it, et cetera. Actually, Arcanum makes considerable use of the ephemeral nature of magic both in its discussion of the setting's philosophies, sciences and cultures, and in its game mechanics. No Ontological Inertia is again used here with deliberate intent. Its few exceptions run the full gamut from excellent writing to dropping the ball.
• Avernum: Averted in the Valley of Dying Things scenario of Blades of Avernum. The Vale is suffering a curse in which the rivers poison the vegetation and anything that drinks from the river or eat food grown with river water. After destroying the source of the toxins, an abandoned magical waste treatment facility deep below the surface the poison already within the environment does not leach away or vanish, and the inhabitants of the Vale flee only to come back once the Vale has been magically cleansed. Even then, the land is still not as prosperous as it was before the curse.
• Baldur's Gate II: The mephit portals in chapter 1 will continue to spawn mephits until you destroy them (technically "kill" as they are treated as monsters). Then any maphit that is still left will die.
• Baldur's Gate III: One of the easiest ways to deal with a beastmaster type enemy is to focus down the master and the pet will subsequently disappear. Justified because the spellcaster is often conjuring up a summoned fey or an elemental from another plane and they need to concentrate to maintain control. Just keep in mind that necromancers are the exception to this rule, because the undead they raise aren't summoned from another plane.
• The Big Bad of BlazBlue is Yuuki Terumi, a ghost separated from his body long before the plot began because he deliberately separated since his body's built-in failsafes would prevent him from carrying out his plan. This means he doesn't have a stable existence. He solves this by deliberately acting as an in-universe Hate Sink - the hatred he receives from characters like Ragna and Kokonoe validates and sustains his life. A Discussed Trope in later games is that everything in the Blaz Blue universe has no ontological inertia - they only exist because they are being Observed. Most things are Observed by Master Unit Amaterasu, but Terumi takes a more direct route for his sustenance by deliberately antagonising everyone. The more you hate him, the stronger he gets.
• Averted in BloodRayne 2. After Rayne kills Kagan at the end of the game, she observes that his primary work, an alchemical cloud covering the land that allows vampires to walk under the sun, has not dissipated; the world remains the same vampire-ruled hellhole he turned it into halfway through the game. Rayne mentions off-handedly to Severin that she expected the opposite:
  Rayne: I half-expected everything to go back to normal once he was dead. I guess that wasn't very realistic, huh?
• Cabal has this in spades. To beat a level, you had to defeat enemies and destroy structures until a bar at the bottom filled up, at which point every remaining enemy died/blew up and every remaining structure on screen collapsed. As for the two Flunky Bosses, destroying the main target would cause all the flunkies to spontaneously explode.
• At one point in Chrono Trigger, the player is given the choice to fight and kill Magus, the villain for the first half of the game, or to spare his life since certain other characters have far surpassed him on the Villain Meter. If you choose to kill Magus, his curse on Glenn/Frog is lifted at the end of the game, whereas if you let Magus live, Glenn is still a frog at the end. This raises questions, because if Magus is alive at the end of the game, he travels back to 12,000 BC to search for his sister, after which the time gate closes forever. So what exactly happens in a scenario when Magus dies of natural causes after laying the curse in his personal timeline, but thousands of years before the curse in objective time?
  • The PlayStation version adds to the confusion with an additional ending cutscene which features a human Glenn, which plays whether or not you killed Magus.
  • The Nintendo DS version adds one more ending that may avert the issue of Magus dying of old age in 12000BC: Instead, he's killed by the Time Devourer outside time.
  • Chrono Trigger also averts this trope when the heroes attack Magus's palace, an assault which ends with the whole palace getting sucked into a massive time vortex. The disappearance of their ruler doesn't end the Mystics' war against the Kingdom of Guardia as his second-in-command picks up where Magus left off.
    • The big statue of Magus in Medina Village is replaced by a statue of his general, Ozzie. Once you kill HIM, then the statue goes away and all of the Mystics in the present become friendly to humans.
• In the MMORPG City of Heroes, killing a character with summoned pets kills the pets as well. This arguably makes sense when the pets are animated stone or illusionary phantoms, but in the case of the "Mastermind" player class, this extends to autonomous robots and ordinary street thugs. Note, however, that ordinary mooks brought onto the field by such an act do have ontological inertia. However, this is subverted by a lot of NPCs that summon particularly annoying pets that are more difficult to defeat than their summoners.
• Some of the Command & Conquer games have an optional setting for skirmish and multiplayer battles that enforces this - as soon as a player loses all of their buildings that produce things (Construction Yard, Barracks, War Factory, etc.), all of their remaining defensive structures and units currently on the field will self-destruct or drop dead, forcing them out of the game. The only thing that stays around are walls.
• DanMachi: Memoria Freese: In the Winter Reverie campaign, killing the Swamp King erases the pollution it spread across the country of Veltane.
• In the finale of Day of the Tentacle once you turn off the Sludge-O-Matic - the producer of mutagenous sludge made Purple Tentacle grow arms and kicked off the plot of the game each and every chrono-clone of Purple instantly disappears from existence despite it happening after Purple already drank the sludge. Still the day is saved. Hooray!!
  • Actually Subverted because the protagonists used the Chron-O-John to travel back in time to turn off the machine before Purple drank its sludge.
• In Digimon World, it is possible for a fireball, stormcloud, or various other projectiles to vanish in midair because the user's technique was interrupted.
• Averted in Disgaea 2: According to the art book, even with the death of The fake Zenon, Veldime will in fact remain a netherworld. The people will remain Demons, the monsters that were attracted to the world under Zenon's influence will not leave, And while the landscape's transformation has been halted, what had already been changed will remain so. The book does go on to say however, that since Zenon is no longer draining the morality and consciences out of the people, they will at least stop turning evil, and points out that many changes brought to Veldime as a Netherworld were in fact positive, so things still work out in the end.
  • Invoked in Disgaea 4 : Valvatorez believes that eliminating the source of the A-Virus pandemic (Namely, Axel), will reverse the virus's effects. He's wrong (Though things still turn out A-OK when a cure is found).
• DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu BLACK LABEL allows you to trigger this. Destroying a large enemy with your shot and laser firing at once causes its bullets to vanish too, turning into point-accumulating stars and adding to your combo. Cancelling bullets en masse, especially with Red Mode activated, is the key to earning massive scores.
• Clinkz from Dota2 lampshades this aspect of healing items when picking up a regeneration rune.
  Clinkz: Does this mean my flesh will grow back?
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest: The second the final boss is defeated, random encounters vanish and the poisonous swamps are replaced with pretty flowers.
  • Dragon Quest VI:
    • Mortamor was the one who created the link between the Real and Dream Worlds, so when he dies, the link is destroyed along with him.
    • Discussed by townspeople, who wonder if the fact that the monsters don't go away after Murdaw is defeated has any significance...
• The world of Drakengard has no ontological inertia. The seals placed against the Seeds of Resurrection also hold back the "true world", in which the Grotesqueries roam free and hold dominance over all things. The world the protagonists are trying to save is a protective illusion. Thus the world that the majority of Drakengard takes place in doesn't have any real permanence: the moment all the seals are broken, the world as we've known it disappears. The sky, for one, immediately turns red. In the sequel, the change is even more violent, as the sky literally shatters. The seals were set up in the first place by dragons. They served the Grotesqueries in the true world, until the dragons wrote the seals to create a safe pocket of reality where they were the dominant species. Then humanity emerged and kind of mucked it all up.
• In EarthBound (1994), defeating the Starman Deluxe causes the Stonehenge base to noisily shut down, which frees everybody from the People Jars in the last room and removes all the enemies.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Several Vampire bloodlines in the Iliac Bay region are known to have this as a weakness. If their progenitor (known as a "Blood Father") is killed or cured, the other vampires of the bloodline will lose their powers as well. This is said to include Rapid Aging, which for those who have been alive longer than their natural lifespans, leads to death.
  • Atronachs, a type of unaligned lesser Daedra which are essentially the Elemental Embodiments of the elements they represent, typically have this occur if they've been summoned to Mundus (the mortal plane) by a mortal summoner. If that mortal dies, the Atronach will vanish or disintegrate. This is also the case for a number of types of undead and their necromancer summoners as well.
• EverQuest has an odd variant of this: When player characters are killed their summoned pets disappear. However, pets of NPCs do not and must be killed separately.
• Subverted by the Fallout series. At the end of the first game, you kill the Master of the Super Mutants. In all the subsequent games, supermutants continue to be present, ranging from The Remnant, hostile to all, to contributing members of society (including one who's an NCR Ranger).
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy IV, killing a summoned creature kills the summoner as well. Played for a My God, What Have I Done? moment in the village of Mist, when Cecil and Kain discover to their horror that not only did the King of Baron's ring just burn the town to the ground, but they personally murdered Rydia's mother by killing her summoned dragon in the Cave of Mist. There is also another important plot moment with the Dark Elf who stole Troia's Earth Crystal — he cast a spell on the cavern he hid in, magnetizing the entire cavern so strongly that equipping even a hint of something metallic will completely paralyze the character in-battle, making it impossible to defeat him. But when Edward's music breaks the Dark Elf's concentration, the aforementioned magnetism immediately vanishes and the party can defeat him for real.
  • Played straight in Final Fantasy VI, with good reason. During the game's grand finale, after you've defeated Kefka, the player is shown that life is springing back all over the world — sometimes through obvious elements like flowers and grass regaining color, other times through more symbolic touches like one of the NPCs giving birth to her baby. Justified because with Kefka altering reality, existence was unraveling. With him defeated, the world slips triumphantly back into place.
  • Final Fantasy X: After the Fayth are released from their state of constant dream summoning, everything they summoned starts to fade away such as the Aeons and the people of Dream Zanarkand, including Tidus.
  • Teased in Final Fantasy XII. Amidst an intense aerial battle with the Vayne's forces and the resistance, Vaan and Co slip into Vanye's fortress. After defeating Vayne, the heroes gather together and stare triumphantly at the sky, their faces proud at their accomplishment at defeating the Big Bad. A few seconds later, a burning ship flies by, reminding them that yes, a battle is still going on.
  • Happens in a way in Final Fantasy XIII-2. Temporal anomalies referred to as "paradoxes" link different places and times together, often with disastrous consequences. By resolving the paradox, most of whatever doesn't belong is prone to disappearing. For example, when the "Mutantomato" paradox was resolved in the Sunleth Waterscape in 300 AF, Snow Villiers also vanished due to having been pulled there by that very paradox in the first place. A broader example; in Yaschas Massif 10 AF, a paradox caused a flying fal'Cie to eclipse the sun two centuries early. When our heroes go to Oerba 200 AF to resolve the paradox from that end, they end up creating a NEW Yaschas Massif 10 AF where said eclipse never happened.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Played with in Endwalker. Early in the expansion, you defeat the primal of Eternal Darkness, Zodiark. Because the primal existed in multiple places at once, its separated pieces die with it... with one exception. In the post-story patches of Endwalker, we learn that the Lifestream in the Thirteenth Shard, also known as the Void, does not work properly and, as a result, neither does death itself. This has given enemies their the opportunity to use that exception to the rule to create a new primal of incredible power with which to invade the Source and other shards.
• Averted in Golden Sun: Tret the Holy Tree is normally a kind and wise soul, but has entered an Unstoppable Rage due to Psynergy Stones, and started turning all the people in Kolima into trees, hoping to spread the curse around as much as possible so he can take as many humans down with him as he can. After Isaac and his friends bring him back to his senses, Tret laments the fact that partially because of the wound the Kolima lumberjacks gave him, he's dying and no longer has the power to undo the curse. Isaac and his friends then head to the Mercury Lighthouse to fetch some Water of Hermes, to heal the dying tree. Only then is a grateful Tret able to return the people of Kolima to normal.
• In the story mode of Granblue Fantasy, when Celeste is defeated and sealed, death returns to the Mist-Shrouded island and all the villagers crumble to dust. Justified in that they were all supposed to have decayed for a long time.
• Justified in Heretic; D'Sparil was keeping his minions in your dimension with his power, so after his death they all die or get sent back. The beings of his home plane of existence, covered in the Expansion Pack Shadow of the Serpent Riders, remain unaffected though.
• Subverted in Hidden City, where the player's character and the Detective destroys Medusa's head, hoping to revive the unfortunate attendees in the Enchanted Ball that had been petrified by the gorgon. Unfortunately, the magic that turned them into stone is too strong, and the statues remain as they are.
• Hollow Knight: The Infection is a disease that plagues the dreams of the citizens of Hollownest. It was created by The Radiance, who became furious as a result of everyone who once worshiped The Radiance completely forgetting about her after the arrival of the Pale King, Hollownest's new ruler. Once The Knight defeats her from inside the Hollow Knight, the plague vanishes. If the Absolute Radiance is defeated in the Pantheon of Hollownest, the same thing happens with the Infection disappearing except the Hollow Knight is freed from being sealed inside of the Black Egg Temple.
• Egregious in Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, where destroying a builder unit detonates any unfinished buildings that unit was working on, destroying an HQ building detonates all other buildings in the sector, and destroying the central HQ in the faction's home sector destroys everything, granting instant victory to the other side.
• According to the original plot for Killer7, managing to kill a being called the "Final" or "Last Shot Smile" would have caused the regular Heaven's Smiles the player faces throughout the game to cease existing. The Final Smile isn't in the released game, though the supplementary "Hand in killer7" material is still based on an earlier version of the story where an FBI agent, making use of a prediction machine whose probability of a successful prediction went up with each successful prediction, was manipulating the direction of the plot from behind the scenes to force the Last Shot Smile into existence and destroy it himself. Garcian Smith does end up killing the Big Boss, however, which is implied to be the sire that fertilizes all the egg-laying Heaven's Smiles - killing him will result in the eventual extinction of the Smiles, since reproduction by conversion isn't a valid long-term tactic. The sire is Iwazaru, one of Harman's (Garcian's boss) servants, who is revealed to be a clone of Kun Lan, the primary antagonist.
• Occurs in the end of Kingdom Hearts. When Sora and Mickey seal the Door to Darkness, every world and everyone that the Heartless destroyed was brought right back to the way they were before the Heartless attacked.
• Though this trope is not used in the original King's Quest III, the two remakes by Infamous Adventures and AGD Interactive avert it and play it straight, respectively. In the first, an epilogue shows Alexander and King Graham rebuilding the kingdom of Daventry from the devastation wrought by the dragon, but in the second a magic glowing pinball rebuilds the kingdom and puts everything right once the dragon is dead and the royal family is reunited.
• Averted in Knights of the Old Republic, where, if an enemy who wields the Force casts any lasting Force Power on you (or your party), such as "Plague," which slowly drains your health, his or her death will not stop the effect of the Force Power. It will run out eventually in the allotted time establish for that skill, unless you cast a Power of your own previously designed to counter it, but killing the NPC who inflicted it on you does nothing to help.
  • Story-wise, the second game reveals that taking advantage of this was part of how Revan did so well against the Republic following the Mandalorian Wars - he would deliberately target influential people on the other side, either converting them to his cause (causing their followers to follow suit) or killing them outright (leading their underlings into chaos).
• Left 4 Dead zig zags the trope with the healing items. First aid kits fully heals all wounds, but it takes a few seconds for the survivors to apply the bandages to their wounds, which instantly heals them the moment the survivor is finished. Pills instantly gives survivors a boost to their health (albeit temporarily since it doesn't restore permanent health) the moment they consume the pills. In the sequel, adrenaline shots work instantly whereas injecting anything into your body in real life would still take a while to work.
• Referenced but Averted in the Legacy of Kain series. Ancient vampire Janos Audron mentions to Raziel that the Sarafan think killing him will be the end of the vampires but adds, "We are not that fragile."
• The Legend Of Tian Ding has a Flunky Boss, Ding Peng, whose sole attack is to spam the area with an ever-increasing amount of mooks. The moment Ding Peng is defeated, all his mooks collapses and dies.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • A common pattern has Link visit a new area, find something wrong with the local environment, slay the boss monster inhabiting the nearest temple, and collect his reward from the grateful townspeople when their lake is refilled, their mountain quits erupting, their well quits sending out shadows to stalk them at night...
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • Wizzrobes create elemental Field Power Effects during combat. If the Wizzrobe is slain, the effect instantly vanishes.
    • Large quantities of Malice, a toxic substance created as a physical manifestation of Ganon's hatred and evil, can be found across Hyrule. All of it disappears when Ganon is defeated, as evidenced by its conspicuous absence from the previously Malice-drenched Castle Town.
• In Makai Kingdom, anything that has been created by being written down in the wish-granting Sacred Tome will suffer the same fate as the page it was written on should the tome be damaged. Spilling coffee on the book is probably not a good idea — burning it is even less so.
• All minion attacks and a large number of hero abilities in Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign create countdown tiles that, when the specified amount of turns have elapsed, trigger the character pulling off a special ability. The countdown tiles can be destroyed like normal ones, or they can all be instantly wiped off the board by their owner being downed.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite: Averted. After Ultron Sigma is defeated, the Convergence between the Marvel and Capcom universes remains in place, contrary to what the heroes were expecting. Because the Reality Gem was damaged by Thanos earlier in the story and can't be used at full power anymore, there's no way to separate the universes, meaning that there's now a permanently merged Marvel vs. Capcom universe.
• Mega Man Battle Network: In any battle, as soon as you kill the last enemy, you're invincible; all onscreen attacks will either disappear or pass right through you. This is true even in Network Transmission, a sidescrolling homage to the classic series. Examples abound in the plot of the games too: when you beat an enemy NetNavi, whatever havoc it's created in the real world is harmlessly defused.
• In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the final boss is a load bearer of galactic proportions — upon defeat, not only is the boss's planet destroyed, but so is all Phazon throughout the entire galaxy, instantaneously, and in suitably explodey fashion. This is because Phazon is alive and the planet in question was the very source of it. The final boss had essentially hijacked into the planet's "brain" to control all the galaxy's Phazon and with their death caused the death of the planet, which killed off all the Phazon.
• Might and Magic VIII: Day of the Destroyer has this, complete with sunshine, rainbow and birds flying.
• Miitopia: After the Dark Curse was defeated and its power was vanquished forever, all of the monsters disappear and the stolen faces go right back to their original owners.
• In Minecraft, Ghasts' fireballs vanish when they are killed. This can save you from being hit with one if you kill them fast enough.
• Mortal Kombat 3:, as defeating Shao Kahn revives all the people who died in the game's opening apocalypse (presumably having their souls taken only rendered them mostly dead). This wasn't the case in the very first edition of Mortal Kombat 3, which suggested that most of humanity remained dead even after the game ended, but that changed in all the subsequent editions, presumably to make further Earth vs. Outworld sequels easier to write.
• A rather ridiculous example of this is mentioned in Shang Tsung's Mortal Kombat: Armageddon bio: Supposedly, his master, Shao Kahn, has a contractual stipulation with anyone who pledges allegiance to him that, if Shao Kahn ends up biting the dust, so too will they, which also means he's able to revive his minions should they die due to this link. In a minor subversion, however, it's apparently treated as an unsubstantiated rumor among Khan's allies, hence why Shang Tsung had no compunction about slaying him with fellow sorcerer Quan Chi's help at the beginning of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. A minor point of argument with this among fans is exactly who will be affected by this trope should Shao Kahn be Killed Off for Real.
• Invoked in Myth: The Fallen Lords: defeating the Big Bad will make all of his generals to be left powerless, as he bound each of them to himself to ensure their obedience to his will. They draw their power through these links, and were the Big Bad to be killed they would all be powerless and the armies of the Dark would explicitly collapse. This is why the protagonists ultimately decide not to return to their homeland, deemed impossible to hold, attempting instead to strike the stronghold where the Big Bad is located to directly kill him.
• This one's a plot point in OFF: Whenever a guardian is killed, his zone, and all its inhabitants, in one of them's words, "fall into nothingness, never to return".
• This is how the plot of Painkiller: Overdose is set up, beginning with the angelic/demonic hybrid Belial being released from his imprisonment upon Lucifer's defeat at the end of the original game.
• Averted twice in the Parasite Eve series. The first is after the death of Eve. The Ultimate Being she was trying to birth is born despite it's mother melting into a pile of goo and serves as the final boss. The second is revealed in Parasite Eve 2. Eve's monstrous creations did not all drop dead after Eve or the Ultimate Being are destroyed and wreak havoc across the U.S for several years.
• It doesn't matter how many world governments you've toppled, or how much of humanity you've destroyed. The second the cure in Plague Inc. is completed, it's immediately deployed world wide, killing you in days.
• In Persona 5 Strikers, If a Monarch surrenders and releases their desires by taking off their crown, the Birdcage will be destroyed, and anyone they brainwashed by Changing their Hearts will automatically be snapped out from their fervent adoration towards them and will act as if the brainwashing never happened. This does not destroy the Jail unlike Palaces, since the Jails are considered a part of EMMA's servers. The only way to completely destroy the Jails is to destroy EMMA herself.
• In Pokémon Black and White, when the event Zoroark is defeated/captured, the clearing it is in fills with flowers and much more pleasant-looking trees. Justified because the Zoroark had not actually changed the clearing, it was using its powers of illusion to make it appear otherwise.
• Portal Reloaded: If you change the present in any way, even so far as to just tap a storage cube once, everything in the future is instantly corrected to where it should be. This can be a bit annoying, especially if you try to make a tower using a present and future cube.
• In some video games, projectiles cease to exist if the enemy that fired them is destroyed. In some other ones (such as Shoot Em Ups), the projectiles turn into "happy things" that are attracted to the player to give points. But don't count on either behaviour.
• In Mushroom Hill Act 2 of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the green grass on the ground turns into brown leaves and the sky turns a strange color at the start of the level. The effect gets worse as you progress though the level. At the end of the level, you find a satellite dish broadcasting some type of signal. Destroying the dish will instantly revert the ground back from brown leaves to green grass and make the sky (and the rest of the stuff in the level) turn back to its correct color.
• It's a slightly odd moment in Sonic Adventure 2 (amongst other games) when you realise that destroying an enemy causes all of its projectiles that are coming towards you to mysteriously disappear.
  • Not to mention that after Eggman blew up the half of the moon with the Eclipse Cannon, in got better in later events showing the moon after the cannon was put out of commission. It's especially jarring in Sonic Advance, where the final boss fight takes place on the moon.
    • According to Word of God, Eggman restored the moon (somehow) after the game as an apology for his part in his grandfather's scheme.
• In the story mode of Sound Voltex III: Gravity Wars, if Grace corrupts a resident from NEMESYS, defeating them and reminding them of their past will restore them back to normal and they will simply forget what they were doing in the first place.
• In the creature stage of Spore, you can hunt species to extinction by killing a specified number of them. After you do so, the survivors will spin off into the sky and disappear.
• In Super Mario Bros.:
  • In many games, including spinoffs, any enemies in boss battles will immediately vanish once the boss is defeated. In Super Mario World this extends to sprites in general, if you're riding a Yoshi in a battle, the Yoshi vanishes once the boss is defeated as well.
  • Mario Party DS: DK destroying the Minimizer reverts the playable characters back to normal size.
• At the end of Super Robot Wars Compact 3, Alkaid says that there's no worry. Once he dies, the dimensions should return to their rightful state without his power tugging at it. These people should be sent home. Alkaid then notes that he has no regrets about his life and to meet Folka and his new way. In the end, he gives Folka his thanks to which Folka says that the same goes likewise. Alkaid then dies with the Raha Extim exploding and there is a flash, sending everyone back to their homeworlds.
• Averted in Sword of the Stars. If you attack a planet and kill all the population, any planetary defenses will still be active and need to be destroyed before you can take over. Sometimes you can even kill just the "imperial" population, leaving (most of) the "civilian" population intact. (Basically killing anyone directly related to the faction who owns the planet, but leaving everyone else.) If nobody moves in to grab the planet after that, they will just declare independence and become a neutral party until someone muscles in on them again.
• Tales of Xillia reveals that, if Maxwell dies, the schism that separates the world of Rieze Maxia and Elympios will disappear.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • Killing a Demoman will cause all the explosive traps he's laid to disappear. There's even an achievement for removing a certain amount of traps by killing the Demomen that made them.
  • Killing an Engineer during Sudden Death (and possibly Arena) will make all his buildings explode. Note that this does not happen in any other game mode, where the Engineer can then respawn and go back to his hopefully still standing buildings. Also, if an Engineer switches to another class, all their buildings will disappear. This is probably an Acceptable Break from Reality because otherwise someone could build a sentry, switch to a more deadly class, and still get sentry kills.
  • A now fixed bug made so that any missiles fired from a sentry that got destroyed after they were fired became neutral entities, allowing potential griefing Engineers to kill allies.
  • Engineers who switch between the Gunslinger (a mechanical hand that gives him 25 extra HP and replaces his normal sentry with a combat mini-sentry) and any wrench will have their sentry destroyed, presumably to keep him from having the Gunslinger's benefits and a level 3 sentry gun at the same time. Previously, switching melee weapons at all destroyed all his buildings, forcing him to have to start again from scratch.
  • Averted with weapons who make the enemy bleed, burn, or otherwise lose health over time like the Pyro's flamethrower or the Spy's Sapper, that continue to damage away at enemies even after the user has been killed.
• Tyranny:
  • Pointedly averted with Kyros' Edicts, who take on a life of their own once Proclaimed: Once Proclaimed, an Edict cannot be stopped, even by Kyros, and will not fade until certain conditions laid down during its Proclamation are fulfilled. During one point in the game the Player Character gets to see across Terratus' surface, which is still littered with unfulfilled Edicts and the aftermaths of fulfilled ones, and you realize Edicts don't siphon magic from their environment, they add magic to the environment. Landry theorizes that the same factors that make people into Archons also feed Edicts: The older they get and the more fear and awe they instill, the more they grow and in turn the more fear and awe they inspire.
  • This trope very much comes into effect with Graven Ashe's Aegis, however. If they are killed during the endgame, all the wounds and pain his Aegis had taken from the Disfavoured are returned in full force, instantaneously killing or crippling the majority of its members.
• The stealth shooter Vampire Rain takes this trope up to eleven with the Nightwalkers being completely dependant on the vampire who sired them. This becomes a gameplay mechanic about halfway through the game, when killing certain vampires will destroy all the vampires sired by that particular vampire in the level. This is used as a plot point, when the protagonists destroy the four head vampires, purging the city of their bloodlines completely.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines mocks the "head vampire" variant, as that's really not how the game it's based on works. You can find a neonate who's lamenting his undead condition and seeking a cure; you can either let him down easy or try to con some money out of him by saying it only works if you kill the head vampire with a stake of "holy rosewood" (which you just happen to have).
• Warlock: Master of the Arcane averts this. When a faction is defeated, all their units and cities remain in the game, but are now considered "neutral".
• Many games rely on First Aid kits to heal the player. Picking one up tends to cause evidence of prior injuries to instantly disappear. This goes back at least as far as Wolfenstein 3-D, in which the player could actually regain a lost eye.
• The same effect applies to hunters and warlocks in World of Warcraft. Whether it happens with NPCs tend to vary on whether they are normal units (where they almost never disappear) or bosses, when they frequently do.
  • Played straight with the shaman class and their totems (elemental talismans dropped on the ground that buff players or debuff/damage enemies). When the shaman dies, the totems vanish.
  • Averted with buff or debuff spells with lasting effects cast on friend or foe (including heal-over-time and damage-over-time spells). They remain in effect until the spells wear off or are specifically removed, or the recipient dies. They do not wear off just because the caster dies.
  • Subverted in the Wrath of the Lich King. The initial invasion is planned to defeat the Lich King and then wipe up the remaining Scourge after his fall. It is subsequently revealed that the Scourge will not simply die with the fall of the Lich King, but instead will become even more dangerous without the control Arthas imposed. Even if he is slain, somebody must assume the role of the Lich King or the Scourge will overrun the world.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: When a Driver dies, their bonded Blades return to their Core Crystals. Eventually the Core Crystal will begin glowing with light and can be Awakened again, but the Blade will have their memories reset to zero again. The fact that this renders it absolutely impossible for Blades to have a culture of their own is one of the key components of the plot. The only exception are Flesh Eaters, Blades who have taken in human cells to be able to exist without a Driver. Unfortunately, that has its own problems.

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