Reports Of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated / Video Games

Note: As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated in Video Games.

---

• BattleTech: You're shown the apparent death of Lady Kamea Arano during a Military Coup at the end of the Justified Tutorial. However, she narrates the Framing Device. Turns out the footage you saw of her DropShip being shot down on launch was faked by the coup plotters: she got offworld fine and spent the next three years dodging assassins.
• In the Nod campaign of Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars, Kane is believed dead before resurfacing a few missions later. As he himself lampshades, his enemies have a bad habit of reporting his death prematurely.
  Kane: Once again, the world is quick to bury me.
• In the first chapter of Disgaea 2 Dark Hero Axel is reported as dead (Adell and Rozalin just knocked him out), and he spends several chapters trying to convince people he's not. His own mother goes into mourning and then chews him out when he calls to reassure her because she thinks he's an unusually cruel prankster; even after he MCs the Coliseum battle to jumpstart his career, the newscast "lose" the footage and claims that he's an escaped asylum inmate who thinks he's Axel. Much later his producer is revealed to have been behind it all to cover up his embezzlement.
• Dragon Quest IV: When Solo/Sofia first visits the town of Casabranca/Branca (and Endor), many people s/he talks to keep acting as if s/he were killed by foes rather than Eliza/Celia, as if Solo/Sofia never existed at all!
• Escape from Monkey Island:
  • The game starts with Elaine discovering that because she spent so much time out of the government of her islands, she was declared dead and had to get re-elected.
    Elaine Marley: I'm going down to city hall to see about getting declared un-dead.
    Guybrush Threepwood: Won't that make you a flesh-eating zombie?
  • In the same game:
    Meathook: Guybrush! I'd heard you were killed by a giant clam!
    Guybrush: Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
    Meathook: Not to mention celebrated.
    Guybrush: What?
    Meathook: Nothing.
• The Fallout: New Vegas add-on, Lonesome Road adds a perk, "Thought You Died", which is basically this.
  • In the main game, you can meet up with the people that were responsible for you getting shot in the head. Most of them react in shock that you're alive.
  • In the backstory, this has happened to Joshua Graham five times. 1st Recon, NCR's elite sniper squad has reported five confirmed kills on him, only for him to show up alive each time. This has led to him becoming The Dreaded and when you meet him in the Honest Hearts DLC, Graham is indeed inhumanly durable and difficult to kill.
• Final Fantasy XII has Balthier name-check this trope when speaking of Basch, who was publicly announced as having been executed for the murder of his king but is in fact the victim of a Frame-Up and has spent the last two years being interrogated in a Hellhole Prison.
• In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the overworld narration informs the player that Dimitri is dead on two story routes. In one, he shows up as an enemy commander and survives that, until he's actually Killed Offscreen. For real this time. On Azure Moon, the Player Character is reunited with him almost immediately and doesn't have time to dwell on it, though he's undergone Sanity Slippage in the meantime. Also in Azure Moon, Dedue can suffer Big Guy Fatality Syndrome if you didn't successfully complete a sidequest earlier in the game. If you did, he's this trope.
• Halo:
  • Doctor Halsey quotes this trope in Halo: Reach. The casualty reports had listed her as K.I.A., or so Noble Team thought.
  • Near the beginning of the level "Uprising" in Halo 2, the Arbiter runs into some friendly Elite forces. He's greeted with "The Arbiter! I thought he was dead!"
  • A variation of this happens in Halo Wars 2 when Isabel first meets Captain James Cutter aboard the Spirit of Fire. ^note  Official UNSC reports said that the Spirit of Fire was lost with all hands during the Human-Covenant War sometime after The Battle of Arcadia when it was last seen. In truth: the Spirit of Fire ended up following The Covenant to a Forerunner Shield World which housed a fleet of Forerunner Ships deep beneath the planet's crust that was accidentally reactivated. James Cutter ended up sacrificing his ships' Slipspace Drive to trigger a supernova within the Shield Worlds' inner star in order to prevent the Covenant from using the Forerunner Ships against Humanity during the first game. After escaping the Shield Worlds' destruction, the crew ended up putting themselves into Cryostasis while the Spirit of Fire would slowly limp its way back into UNSC Space at sublight speeds for nearly 30 years until the ship was pulled through the Portal to The Ark and kick-start the events of the second game.
    Isabel: "James Cutter, Captain of the Spirit of Fire. You're supposed to be lost with all hands."
    James Cutter: "Not so lost, it seems."
• Heroes of the Storm:
  • Falstad Wildhammer gets to name-drop the trope for one of his Stop Poking Me! quotes as a reference to an incident where Blizzard fudged their own lore for World of Warcraft, making this an unusual meta example. There's also this gem from his bio:
    Despite wild speculation, Falstad has never been dead and anyone who claims such is a liar.
  • Medivh has a Stop Poking Me! line that differs a bit:
    Medivh: Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated. I mean, yes, I died, but people love to embellish.
• In Kings Quest (2015), a reboot/reimagining/sequel to the King's Quest franchise, King Graham banters with Mordon/Mordack, asking him how he's alive when he extinguished his fire years ago (referring to Graham using magic to summon rain to defeat Mordack while he turned himself into fire). Mordack says he was hiding under the floorboard.
• League of Legends: After respawning, the champion Ezreal says this quote, word-by-word.
• Subverted in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Link and Zelda have been presumed dead... for about a hundred years. Link was, very nearly, killed in battle, and spent that century in a healing sleep that kept him from aging; Zelda spent it trapped in the Malice of Calamity Ganon. Consequently, assuming the Hylian Champion survived his killing doesn't stop people from thinking he's dead.
• In Mass Effect 2, Shepard actually was dead for two years, which leads to trouble when they return to the Citadel and is picked up by the security scanners as being dead. Fortunately, a friendly C-Sec officer changes the records without making Shepard jump through all the hoops they would normally have to go through. It is mentioned that folks fake their own death fairly often as a tax dodge — possibly a Shout-Out to a gag in The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy where Hotblack Dessiato is apparently spending a year dead for tax reasons. You can also have them keep you out of the system so to security, you don't exist. Several characters will, naturally enough, comment on this when you meet them again. Wrex (assuming he survived the first game) gets a good one:
  Wrex: What brings you here? How's the Normandy?
  Shepard: Destroyed in a Collector surprise attack. I ended up spaced.
  Wrex: Well, you look good. Ah, the benefits of a redundant nervous system!
  Shepard: Yeah, Humans don't have that.
  Wrex: Oh. It must have been painful, then.
• Invoked in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel Middle-earth: Shadow of War: because they were created as soldiers by Sauron, orcs are actually very hard to kill unless straight-up decapitated. As a result, it's a game mechanic that orcs who have been promoted to Nemeses can heal up from presumed fatal blows you dealt them in your last encounter and return to fight you again. They can even survive getting severed in two! In Shadow of War, your own Branded Orcs can likewise potentially shrug off killing blows and return to service.
  • The trope arguably also applies to the main character, who is dead, but keeps getting back up to seek revenge anyway.
• In the original Ninja Gaiden trilogy, Irene Lew is thought to have been killed in the opening of the third game. She shows up later on and she is not very happy with her former boss trying to kill her.
  Irene: Did you think that I would die that easily?
• In No Umbrellas Allowed, Yujin Oh, the former journalist who became the founder of AVAC, was reported to have died in 2069, but is revealed in the last two weeks to be alive but Fixed during the game's events. AVAC has been monitoring him in the Fixie residence, but they lied about his death and refused to talk about him out of shame for his actions, which is why Merry warned you against selling anything owned by Yujin. In truth, Manjo Moo, the current AVAC leader, tried but failed to kill Yujin for trying to expose the organization as a fraud, so he imported Fixer from Bluebird for personal gain and silenced Yujin with it.
• Overwatch employs this trope for no less than five of its playable Heroes:
  • Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes were last seen caught in an explosion that destroyed Overwatch headquarters, resulting in the two being declared dead. They survive to this day as Soldier: 76 and Reaper, respectively.
  • Tracer was thought to be gone after the prototype fighter jet she was flying had its teleportation capabilities malfunction and cause the craft and her to vanish until Winston saved her with technology that prevents her from jumping about the space-time continuum.
  • Hanzo was forced by his organized crime clan to kill his younger brother Genji, and Genji was thought to be dead as a result. In reality, Overwatch saved his life, giving him a new cyborg body. The revelation that Genji is alive leaves some rather deep-seated issues within Hanzo, who had been paying respects to the presumed-dead Genji every year until Genji in his new body showed up.
  • Ana was counter-sniped in the eye by Widowmaker during a crucial rescue mission and was presumed to be killed. Declaring this her greatest failure due to the personal circumstances of her mistake, she decided it would be better if the world thought she died, keeping her survival and recovery a secret.
    • In the same comic, Ana is surprised to see Widowmaker at all, as she had been presumed dead after her disappearance following her (Widowmaker's) husband's death. Ana quickly deduces that Widowmaker must have killed her husband and disappeared, before being interrupted by the aforementioned shot.
• Persona 5: To expose the traitor among them and to learn who was behind the mental shutdowns, the Phantom Thieves devised a plan to use Sae's Palace as a means of helping Joker fake his death by having the traitor (a.k.a. Akechi) kill a cognitive Joker. After learning who ordered the hit, they hijack the airwaves of the world to reveal the truth and to send a calling card to the Big Bad, Masayoshi Shido.
• Resident Evil: Albert Wesker and later, Jill Valentine both fall under this trope; Wesker in Resident Evil – Code: Veronica and Jill in Resident Evil 5.
• In Spec Ops: The Line, Col. John Konrad gives an interesting inversion of this trope. As it turns out, the real Col. Konrad had taken up residence in one of Dubai's towers, and eventually, out of depression over the failure of the evacuation of Dubai's people, committed suicide. The Konrad who has been speaking to Cpt. Martin Walker was just a figment of his imagination, and the moment Walker finds Konrad's corpse, the imaginary Konrad walks up to the body and gives it a genuinely amused look, before stating with a smirk:
  "Konrad": It seems that reports of my... survival... have been greatly exaggerated."
• In Spyro: Year of the Dragon, Spyro goes through a portal and ends up in a faraway land where dragons were thought to be extinct. He replies with "Rumors of our extinction were greatly exaggerated."
• In Super Robot Wars 30, choosing the Earth route at the start of the game reveal that Amuro Ray and Char Aznable had died due to the events of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack. Early on, you end up picking up Char, back in his "Quattro Bajeena" alias, and a little later, Chan Agi along with Amuro.
• In Syphon Filter 2, Jason Chance is assumed by Gabe to have been killed. He emerges as the final boss.
• Team Fortress 2: Whenever Scout is revived in a Mann vs. Machine map using the Re-Animator, he has this to say:
  Scout: Reports of my death were BULLCRAP!!
• At the end of the first season of The Walking Dead, Lee watched as Kenny is surrounded by a group of walkers and is presumed to have perished. In the next season, Clementine is surprised to meet him again as she was told about his fate.
• In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Ichiban Kasuga's death is reported in the news after the explosion that Reiji Ishioda set off to kill Kasuga and himself, but he reveals himself to be alive at a rally for Ryo Aoki's election.
• In Zombies, Run!, Runner 3, Simon Lauchlan uses this phrase exactly when Runner 5 leads Runner 4, Jody Marsh, to the believed dead runner to avoid capture by the ministry.

---