The Bad Guy Wins / Video Games

The Bad Guy Wins in Video Games.

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• The Omega Ending in the Japanese version of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, reveals that the whole game was a simulation by Simon Orestes Cohen, and that the Player Character, Nemo, is an Artificial Intelligence that he created specifically to kill a Brain Upload version of Abyssal Dision, because he blamed him for the death of Yoko Martha Inoue. Since the simulation showed that Nemo will indeed kill Dision, Simon creates a fresh copy of the A.I., purges the simulation, and goes on to unleash Nemo upon the world, and instigate the Corporate War that the simulation predicted to kill Dision.
• AdventureQuest Worlds:
  • Sek Duat "kills off" Zhoom and the hero and takes the lamp, afterwards blasting the ceiling of the Cave of Wanders and causing a cave-in just in case they were to miraculously climb back up... only for the Dreamdust to take effect and switch places between the lamp and a rock causing him to think he had won.
    Hero: What's his deal?
    Zhoom: I slipped him the Dreamdust. Sek Duat probably thinks he killed us and got the lamp.
    Hero: Pffff. As if.
  • The Doomwood finale's Bad Ending goes like this; the hero betrays Artix by stabbing him in the back, and with that, Vordred takes his place as the Champion of Darkness and rewards them as a traitor deserves by turning them into his undead slave and unleashes a Zombie Apocalypse on Lore. Nice work, Nigh Invulnerable villain.
• Strangely subverted in Anarchy Reigns. After the Final Boss, Nikolai has been defeated, Jack stands over him, ready to cleave him in two. Nikolai then suddenly comes back to life and impales Jack, before doing the same to Leo, killing the pair of them. He then proceeds to monologue about how he was the winner and that the winner always writes the rules. PSYCHE, Nikolai was just daydreaming before Jack diagonally bisects him and proceeds to deliver his upper torso to the authorities.
• ANNO: Mutationem:
  • In the Fission Mailed ending, C succeeds in his goal of obtaining The Dypheus' Breath after trapping Ann and using her to open a gateway to Hinterland and retrieve the artifact. Unfortunately for C, his plan succeeded too well when he ends up unleashing a supernatural abomination that brings out total destruction.
  • In the bad ending, Amok manages to break free of her imprisonment within Hinterland by fully possessing Ann's body during her Moment of Weakness to cause The End of the World as We Know It on Earth.
• Apocalypse ends with the hero, Trey Kincaid, defeating the fourth and last Horseman, Beast... only for Beast to reveal himself as Kincaid's arch-enemy, the Reverend, who then possessed Kincaid as his new host. Cue the hero getting Glowing Eyes of Doom, and the implication that the titular apocalypse will still happen, despite Kincaid's best efforts.
• Arc the Lad II. Even though the heroes win and defeat The Dark One, the titular Arc and his love interest both die, and most of the world is completely destroyed. One of the characters puts it "but at least there is something left!", but it does not change the fact that the bad guy managed to more or less wipe out 9/10 of the world's population.
• Armored Core 4 Answer plays with this on the final ending. In the first two, you're treated to fairly standard, if bittersweet epilogues. On the third, however, you wind up siding with Genocidal maniac, Old King... and dive over the Moral Event Horizon in a horrifying way: a wholesale genocide of 100,000,000 people. Being the player character...
• This is what happens if you lose all your lives or save and quit the game in Banjo-Kazooie. Gruntilda tells Klungo to activate that ugly-fying machine, and she takes Tootie's beauty. Mumbo offers to marry the witch and Tootie comes out of the machine looking like an ogre.
• Baldur's Gate and its sequels potentially count as this since you can choose your character alignment and set up an evil even greater than the villains you face, becoming a brutal psycho who enjoys slavery and blackmails poor people, or even aiming to become the new lord of murder.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • In Batman: Arkham City, as Catwoman, you can actually walk out and let Batman die. Roll credits. Subverted when the credits stop mid-way through and the game rewinds to the point before Catwoman chose to abandon Batman.
  • In Batman: Arkham Origins, not only does Enigma (aka the Riddler) get away scot free for the first and only time in the series, but when Batman confiscates all of his blackmail material against various higher-ups and criminals in Gotham he reveals that he held onto one more against the mayor of Gotham that he succeeds in getting to the press and forcing his resignation.
  • While Scarecrow fails in his plan to turn Gotham into a city of fear in Batman: Arkham Knight, and ultimately suffers a Fate Worse than Death by being injected with his own concentrated fear toxin, one thing he succeeds in doing is destroying the myth of Batman by publicly unmasking him, removing all of his mystery and with it any reason to fear him (not to mention all the legal trouble Bruce is in thanks to all his vigilante work, as well as the fact that everyone Bruce cares about is now at risk from all the thugs and supervillains Batman's brought in over the years.) This ultimately forces Batman and Alfred to blow up Wayne manor, either committing suicide or going underground and breaking all contact with his former allies.
• The Predacons campaign of Beast Wars: Transformers ends with the Predacons wiping out the Maximals and proceeding to start destroying Cybertron.
• BlazBlue:
  • All Arcade endings of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift have Terumi succeed in turning Noel Vermilion into Person of Mass Destruction Mu-12. Ready for the home console version to continue the story?
  • The Story end is also this... Turns out Mu-12 is only a distraction for Terumi's primary goal: Takamagahara. The destruction of Takamagahara means that there will be no more Reset Button. Regardless, Ragna failed his goal in killing Terumi. There's still a sequel, though not necessarily the last, which means Terumi can still win.
  • In BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, Terumi and Relius are defeated, with Terumi falling to Hakumen's Time Killer and Relius being rendered helpless and unable to fulfill his life-long goal... but Hades Izanami, the goddess of death, wins. She brainwashes Ragna into becoming her slave and launches plans to create a "world of death." Within the game itself, Rachel Alucard outright admits that Izanami won the instant she drew the Master Unit: Amaterasu out of the boundary.
• If we have learned one thing from Blizzard Entertainment's games in the past two decades, it's that Evil almost always wins. Any victory for the heroes is always only temporary and things will get much worse.
  • Diablo
    • The first game ends with the Big Bad successfully convincing the hero to make a Heroic Sacrifice and become the can seal the evil in, which in Diablo II proves to be a Senseless Sacrifice. Diablo II ends with the successful Evil Plan. In the expansion, the new Big Bad manages to corrupt the Cosmic Keystone enough to force the protagonists to destroy it. However, this paves the way for Diablo III because the keystone was the only thing preventing a full-scale demonic invasion.
    • Averted in Diablo III. Destroying the Cosmic Keystone turned out to be a good thing since its real purpose was to seal humanity's true power. The newly empowered heroes end the reborn Prime Evil's reign of terror forever. However, in the Reaper of Souls expansion, everything done in the main game was pointless cause the Black Soulstone is stolen by Malthael and eventually destroyed releasing all the prime evils back into the world. There's also the added aspect that Tyrael has gained a new fear, mixed with respect, for the Nephalem. If they are able to kill the embodiment of death, what would the world do if they ever decided to use their powers for evil?
  • StarCraft:
    • In the human campaign of the first game, Jim Raynor joins the rebel leader Mengsk and becomes a close friend with Mengsk's lieutenant Sarah Kerrigan. When victory over the Confederacy is at hand, Mengsk simply abandons Kerrigan to the Zerg, almost manages to have Raynor killed, and creates his new evil empire.
    • Things get worse as the story continues in Brood War. By the end, Kerrigan, now ruling the Zerg, has all her goals accomplished and her enemies destroyed.
      Kerrigan: At this point, I'm pretty much the Queen Bitch of the Universe! And not all your little soldiers and spaceships can stop me!
  • Warcraft:
    • The first game had two possible endings, the canonical ending is the one in which the orcs win and burn down the human city of Stormwind, while the player character, later revealed to be Orgrim Doomhammer, assumes the position of Warchief. Some portions of the human campaign are canon, though- for example, rather than being killed in a battle with Doomhammer as he is in the orc campaign, King Llaine is assassinated by Garona Halforcen.
    • Warcraft 3: The first Alliance campaign ends with Arthas having his soul eaten by Frostmourne, switching to Ner'zhul's side and murdering his father. Then the Undead succeed in summoning the demon lord Archimonde to Azeroth. Things only start turning around when the orcs kill Mannoroth (at the cost of Grom Hellscream's life) and the Night Elves kill Tichondrius and Archimonde (although the former required Illidan the Betrayer to be freed and become half-demon, setting up the plot of the sequel).
    • The WarCraft 3 expansion, The Frozen Throne, ends similar to Brood War. The final showdown is a fight between the games two main villains, Arthas Menethil and Illidan Stormrage, who race for the Frozen Throne to either save or destroy the Lich King. The game ends with Arthas claiming the helmet of the Lich King and merging its soul with his own, becoming the most powerful being in the entire world and ruling over not one, but two kingdoms of undead.
• It really doesn't matter which ending you get in Bloodborne, because there are no happy endings. If you get the easiest ending to achieve, you're kicked out of the dream and awaken to a regular Yharnam, with your character forgetting the power of Mergo or the dangers of the hunt which will persist regardless due to the eldritch terrors of the night. If you get the second ending, your character is forever trapped in the dream with the doll (who will take care of you), and you're wheelchair bound for eternity. If you get the hardest to achieve ending, the fate of the world is left up in the air as you become the new surrogate being for the eldritch gods of the world.
• This is pretty much the entirety of both the main and DLC endings for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!. Winning the main campaign just reminds you that Jack will rise to power, lots of people trying to protect the planet are dead, and he's become an Omnicidal Maniac. The DLC is even worse, as the ending is set to sad music showing every CL4P-TP unit being simultaneously destroyed by Jack's kill switch, a switch he activated after claptrap had just helped him recover the H-source and refused to join his evil counterpart because he called you his friend. You see his "friends" (minus Athena and the DLC characters who aren't present) laughing alongside Jack as he puts a bullet in claptrap and then dumps him in a landfill, the only silver lining being he didn't die and Sir Hammerlock located him and repaired him.
• Braid: Tim manages to catch up to the princess and cause her death alongside the rest of life leaving only Tim alive.
• In a chain of sidequests in the first chapter of Bravely Default, each of the Jobmasters are accompanied by Ciggma Khint, a Professional Killer who has no remorse being hired by criminals. Even though he dies by the player's hands he states that he has got all of the money he wanted to accomplish his goal: advance Eternia's medicine for his ill daughter's medical treatment.
  • And in Bravely Second, it can be argued that Anne succeeded in her goals, since The Moon (and its Ba'al defense system) is gone, sent to the far end of space and time, along with The Kaiser and Agnès, leaving the way open for the true villain of the setting. That is, until New Game Plus sees the party travel back in time via the SP Hourglass to negate the events of the previous timeline and seriously derail Anne and Providence's plans.
• Call of Duty:
  • Modern Warfare 2 reveals that while the first game's Big Bad was killed, his Ultranationalist soldiers won the 21st-century Russian civil war anyway (with the Loyalists nowhere to be found afterward), and he's being hailed as a martyr, making the already pretty bleak ending of the first game even more bleak.
  • The Big Bad also wins, despite being killed at the end by the player character, in that he got the Russo-American War he'd been wanting, while the Big Bad's erstwhile ally Vladimir Makarov was allowed to escape in return for intel on Shepard's location.
    • An in-universe TIME magazine cover given out with GameStop preorders of Modern Warfare 3 declares "General Shepard Laid to Rest in Arlington," implying that his conspiracy remains a secret known only to Soap and Price — now international fugitives — and on top of that, the Russian president's daughter has vanished, causing him to stall peace talks, with Russian forces already fighting in lower Manhattan, New York City...
    • Ultimately Zig Zagged. Shepherd dies, causing a new supreme commander for the American forces to be appointed. Shepherd's main plan was to usher in a new age of American dominance, which included invading Russia and reducing it to rubble after Russia wastes all its soldiers on offensive campaigns in Europe and the US. The new commander, "Overlord", does not share this view, and ultimately when offered peace the United States takes it instead of launch a counter invasion. However, Shepherd remains a war hero revered by millions, and due to Russia's aggression the United States is very likely to be a more militaristic nation involved with more foreign affairs, which presumably includes watching Russia very closely and increasing the levels of forces in Europe.
  • Call of Duty: Ghosts has the Walker brothers trying to kill Rorke and avenge their father. Logan shoots Rorke, but he survives and ends up capturing him. The last we see of Logan is him being stuck in a jungle pit, where Rorke is preparing to torture him.
• In Calm Time, the killer (AKA the Player Character) manages to kill off all of the people they invited to their Nasty Party in a countryside house, and aside from a ghost haunting them and setting Jump Scares from time to time, they get away with it.
• Captive (RPG Maker): The Remember ending has the captor successfully chase down and kill the blonde girl. Averted in the Free ending, where she is shot by a policeman.
• Castlevania:
  • Played with and ultimately played straight with Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. Leon journeys to Walter Bernhard's castle to save his beloved, Sara, but ultimately discovers that he's already failed...Sara has been vampirized and he has to kill her. However, in doing so, he empowers the Whip of Alchemy to the Vampire Killer and destroys Walter. However, this was the plan of Mathias, his best friend, all along and he manipulated everyone in his own goal to become a vampire and defy God for eternity. He leaves behind a saddened yet still angered Leon to face Death and escapes. As this is Dracula's story about his origins, it was pretty much a Foregone Conclusion.
  • Two of the endings in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night heavily imply this. If you do not have the Holy Glasses during the boss fight with Richter in Dracula's throne room, you're forced to kill the Belmont, who laments that with his death, the Belmont Clan is finished forever. As Richter was being possessed by Shaft in order to remove the Belmonts and any other hunters as a threat, Alucard essentially does the job for him in the worst endings.
  • Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness. After you overcome the final boss you find out that he was a decoy, the whole thing was a set-up, and you've played into Dracula's hands and only aided him. A Doomed by Canon form of the trope since this is a prequel to the original Nintendo 64 Castlevania.
  • Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow features a unique occurance of this where the villain winning doesn't necessarily work out in their favor. If Soma succeeds in defeating Aguni, thereby sealing Dario's flame magic forever, but fails to wear Mina's Talisman when he goes to meet Celia in the garden, he'll willingly give in to the darkness when he's unable to realize in time that Celia merely killed a doppelganger. However, Dark Lord Soma immediately fatally injures Celia and explains that while she did indeed succeed in returning the Dark Lord to the world, his annoyance with her had him choose her as his first victim before moving on to the rest of humanity.
• One of the possible endings in Cave Story has the protagonist and Kazuma get away and spend the rest of their lives hiding out in the mountains while the bad guy completes his plan and all that stands in his way is the military powers of the world.
• Chimera Beast: Technically, both endings. The "Bad Ending" has the Villain Protagonist destroy the solar system. The "Good Ending" has you killed by the Final Boss and this leads to a win for the ecosystem you were trying to destroy.
• The Chzo Mythos ends in Chzo granting immortality to Theo DeCabe as his New Prince, who then proceeds to overthrow Cabadath and prevent him from sabotaging Chzo's plans. Then again, Chzo had been preparing for this for a long time.
• At the end of Crackdown, the Agent has succeeded in dismantling the three gangs ruthlessly oppressing Pacific City, only for Mission Control to reveal that it was all a Government Conspiracy. They let the city deteriorate into anarchy and violence, for the express purpose of allowing them to establish total control over the populace.
• In the Neo Geo game Cyber Lip, the main characters are ordered by the President to destroy a supercomputer that has turned against its masters. The twist comes in when the supercomputer has been acting against its will and the true mastermind was none other than the President himself, who is actually an alien invader in disguise.
• Cyberpunk 2077:
  • "The Devil" ending sees V cooperate with Arasaka to depose Yorinobu Arasaka in exchange for the corp's best and brightest doctors look into a cure for the damage caused to their brain by the Relic. In the end, not only does cooperating with Arasaka reveal that not even their doctors can save their life, but the success of Soulkiller and the "Secure Your Soul" project leads to Saburo Arasaka being revived in Yorinobu's body. At best, all you accomplished was maintaining the status quo in Night City. At worst, Arasaka is now more powerful than before.
  • Zig-Zagged with Yorinobu's own goals. He's revealed to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist seeking to destroy his family's Evil, Inc. from within, and in all of the game's good endings you've helped bring him that much closer to his goal. Not only is Arasaka crippled due to the loss of their Brain Uploading program but both Hanako and Takemura, the greatest threats to his takeover, are killed by Alt Cunningham (Hanako) or during Hanako's rescue/by committing seppuku (Takemura).
• Zig-Zagged in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc with the Big Bad Junko Enoshima. Her plan To Create a Playground for Evil already succeeded before the game even started, however it ended up being a Pyrrhic Victory since she didn't even get to enjoy the chaos she created as she locked herself into the Closed Circle from the very beginning as part of her follow-up plan to cement her control over the ruined world. When she finally shows her face during the final class trial, she's even more jaded and apathetic than she was previously and is downright ecstatic that Makoto has her killed off. On the bright side, with her death mankind finally ends up on the path to recovery.
• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony:
  • The first trial ends this way, though it's not revealed until much later. The Big Bad, Tsumugi Shirogane, manages to successfully frame Kaede for Rantaro's murder by bashing in his head with her own shot put ball when Kaede's Rube Goldberg device fails to kill him. Kaede is executed believing she caused Rantaro's death, and only in Chapter 6 do Shuichi and company find out her innocence. However, Tsumugi later gets her Karma Houdini Warranty in the form of K1-B0 executing her.
  • Similarly, the fourth chapter's culprit, Kokichi Ouma, gets away with murdering his victim due to manipulating Gonta into doing the actual killing (by implanting Fake Memories of the outside world being dead in the kindhearted Gonta's head, making him believe that the only way to save everyone from this truth is to win the class trial and get everyone executed). By the game rules they can't convict Kokichi for the murder without dying themselves, as the person who actually killed the victim is the only one considered the Blackened, even if everyone knows the guy was manipulated into it. To make matters worse, Kokichi actively mocks both Gonta and the rest of the class during the trial and derives sadistic glee from Gonta's execution. He never faces any comeuppance for this act either (if you don't count his "unsolvable murder" plan failing in Chapter 5 failing) due to blackmailing Kaito into killing him in order to kickstart his Thanatos Gambit, while fully knowing that it would eventually get Kaito executed.
• The endings for the campaigns in the Dawn of War expansions Winter Assault, Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, depending on which faction is chosen, include indiscriminate slaughter by the tides of an Ork WAAAGH!, the systematic extermination of all life, or the collapse of reality as the Warp crosses into Real Space. The other endings aren't that much better.
  • Dawn of War III confirms that the canonical winners of the Kaurava conflict in Soulstorm were the Orks under Warboss Gorgutz.
• Dead Space 3: Awakened: The destruction of the Tau Volantis moon triggers the awakening of the other Brethren Moons, who zero in on Earth before Isaac and Carver can warn the inhabitants, and are already devouring the planet when our heroes arrive.
• Haru's ending of The Devil on G-String sees the villain succeeding in all of his plans: The main character's home city is destroyed, all of his family is dead, his foster father is dead, the yakuza clan he was part of has abandoned him, and his job, future and reputation is ruined. To top it off, the villain succeeds at a Thanatos Gambit that sees the main character serving eight years for said villain's murder. It's still something of a Bittersweet Ending because he got the girl in the end.
• Divinity II: Ego Draconis, big time. All throughout the game you have been manipulated by the Big Bad's girlfriend for his benefit, and after fighting and losing to him, he seals you in diamond and goes off with his girlfriend to conquer the world while you helplessly watch.
  • Thankfully undone by the expansion, where you defeat the girlfriend and send the Big Bad running for the hills.
• Do It For Me: The girlfriend, in all endings except "Awake" (where the protagonist turns her in to the police), successfully perpetrates a massacre in her school and, with the exception of the "Psychopath" ending (where the protagonist kills her afterwards), gets away with it. The Villain Protagonist himself, in the "Blind Love" ending, kills the students alongside his girlfriend, and in the "Psychopath" ending, he kills her too.
• The real Big Bad of .hack//GU, Ovan, ultimately accomplishes everything he wanted. However, considering that his real goal was to make Haseo powerful enough to defeat him so that he could purge the Internet of AIDA, this isn't really a Downer Ending. And Ovan doesn't get away unscathed for his crimes either.
• In the original Double Dragon arcade game, brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee must rescue their common love interest Marian from gang leader Machine Gun Willy. Regardless of whether the player succeeds in rescuing her or not, she ends up being killed anyway in the arcade sequel, Double Dragon II: The Revenge, by none other than Willy himself. The NES version doesn't count in this example, since the main bad guy from the first game isn't involved in her death during the NES sequel and she gets better in the end.
• Downfall (Slay the Spire) is a Slay the Spire Game Mod where you play as a boss or an enemy from the base game and try to protect the Spire and its Corrupt Heart from anything that would threaten it. In the "best" ending, you have killed both the heroes and the one who keeps resurrecting them, permanently putting an end to threats against the Spire.
• Dragon Ball Xenoverse shows the consequences of the villains messing around with the history of Dragon Ball Z. So naturally, as The Hero, it's your job to fix all this. Here are some examples of such paradoxes:
  • Raditz breaks free from Goku's grasp when Piccolo fires his Special Beam Cannon. Goku is killed by Piccolo's attack, and Raditz kills Piccolo shortly thereafter.
  • Vegeta and Nappa gain such a massive power boost that they kill all of the Z-Warriors, leaving Goku alone to contend with two Great Ape Saiyans.
  • Captain Ginyu succeeds in swapping bodies with Vegeta, kills him, then swaps bodies with Goku and kills him.
  • Frieza kills all of the Z-Warriors except for Gohan, whom Goku saves by leaving his rejuvination chamber early, putting him at a disadvantage against Frieza.
  • Goku and company are defeated by a powered-up Hercule. Gohan fails to achieve Super Saiyan 2 and is killed by Cell.
  • Androids 17 and 18 kill Future Trunks (and in doing so, jeopardize Time Patrol Trunks's existence). Cell is also ready to absorb the Androids.
  • Majin Buu duplicates himself and overwhelms Goku, even as a Super Saiyan 3.
  • Piccolo is possessed and kills Goten and Trunks, shortly before Super Buu destroys the Earth.
• The first act of Dragon Quest XI ends with Mordegon destroying the World Tree and turning the planet into a Villain World, with the rest of the story revolving around the party's efforts to undo it.
• Dreamfall Chapters: At least she stopped The Static, and is still astrally projecting somewhere. And Zoe is able to help people caught in the nightmares caused by the dream machine.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: In the Evil Runi route, Gemini mind-wipes every party member except for Akira, and kill Detritus with a barrage of spells. Zazz turns out to have survived the battle and kills Akira, allowing him to use the archdemons to bring back the humans and conquer the world.
• While he's not exactly the bad guy, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall ends in this way if you give Numidium's totem to Mannimarco. And it's your own damn fault. Also, even if you go with another ending, Mannimarco still achieves apotheosis because everyone got the totem in the end. It's a long story...
  • But you do get to kill him in Oblivion so that kinda makes up for it. Granted, the way Daggerfall ended, he is just one of many alternate Mannimarcos.
• Elohim Eternal: The Babel Code: In the ending, the Kosmokraters destroy the Transmigrator much of Idin, thus removing any means to locate them and hold them accountable. In The Stinger, the Kenoman soldiers defeat Beyoz and kidnap Ruthia in order to punish Anne for defecting.
• Any Endless Game, including almost every "classic" video game ever made. Missile Command? No matter how many incoming missiles you stop, eventually your cities get nuked. Donkey Kong? Save your girlfriend? Fine, there's always another level, and eventually you run out of lives and Kong keeps the girl. Space Invaders? The aliens keep coming, faster and faster and faster... Early video games didn't tend to have formal endings and simply kept repeating the same gameplay over and over again. At some point, you die, and the villain in question still is out there, waiting for you to feed in another quarter.
  • In these sorts of games (which were not, even at the time, the only sorts of games) there often was a clear possible goal which really was tantamount to winning, such as to max out the score (which usually would happen at or around a million points), or to reach a level where the programming simply gave out, either messing up the game or automatically resetting it (often at or around the 255th level or screen^note  In 8-bit systems the digits max out at 11111111, or 255). Activision's Atari 2600 games actually addressed the infinite cycle problems clearly, specifically, and directly by giving you (sometimes multiple or even ranked) goals for scores to attain, often with specific guidelines for difficulty settings and all, for which you'd get things like patches and t-shirts as rewards for having "beaten" them, and the company's own recognition as being among the world's best gamers for having maxed out the scores.
  • In at least one or two cases, though, these games might deliberately work with the premise in an intentionally prearranged, plot-oriented "bad guy wins" scenario. One example which comes to mind is Imagic's Atari 2600 game "Atlantis", which had what may well have been the first ever video game Sequel Hook. After the inevitable defeat in which the city of Atlantis finally falls to the Gorgons when the last of it is destroyed by one of the Gorgons' waves of "Space Invaders-crossed-with-"Missile Command"-like attacks, the Cosmic Ark rises from the rubble and takes off, creating a hook for Imagic's follow-up game in which the remaining Atleanteans roam the galaxy finding the remnants of other dying civilizations to add to their own small remaining numbers aboard the Cosmic Ark.
  • Many of these games, such as Donkey Kong, Pac-Man and Dig Dug, had a Kill Screen which was impossible to beat and thus the bad guy would win there.
• The victory condition in Evil Genius and its sequel, since the player is the villain. The game's about building up their evil organization and eventually bringing society to its knees with their superweapon.
• Two of the three endings of Fahrenheit result from one of the two bad guy factions overpowering Lukas in the end. One faction are an Ancient Conspiracy that has been controlling humanity for centuries, anyway, so it's not so bad (status quo is preserved), but others are a bunch of homicidal artificial intelligences which wipe out humanity as their first move.
• On multiple occasions the hero of Fallout is given the option to voluntarily surrender to the Master's army and reveal the location of Vault 13. At this point the "bad" ending immediately triggers, showing a cutscene of your character being dipped in FEV and the Vault being overrun by Super Mutants. It's implied that this would have eventually led to the obliteration of human civilization on the West Coast, at least until the arrival of the Enclave several decades later.
• Far Cry 5 has this happen in every ending: either you choose to let Joseph Seed go, or you try to arrest him. In the latter case, The End of the World as We Know It begins as Hope County, and the rest of the country, is destroyed with nukes, with you and Joseph as the sole survivors in the town as Joseph gloats about how he Knew It All Along. Alternately, you can also choose to not put the cuffs on Joseph at the very beginning of the game and leave him alone. In either of the three cases, Joseph emerges the victor. However, come the sequel, Joseph either ends up dead or living with the overwhelming guilt of the horrible things he's done, so even though he won, he ultimately lost in the end.
• Final Fantasy
  • Although it does happen at the halfway point of Final Fantasy VI and the heroes eventually win... sort of... Kefka does manage to kill the Emperor, obtain godlike powers, destroy most of the world and reign over what is left of it for a year as a superpowered God of Magic. Not bad for a day's work.
  • In Final Fantasy VII Remake, Sephiroth convinces the party that the Arbiters of Fate must be stopped via context-less visions of the future that will happen if they "fail to stop them", thus freeing destiny up to be changed - just as Sephiroth intended. Also, the fight against Cloud during the game's finale ends with Sephiroth easily defeating Cloud. This means Sephiroth walked away at the end of Remake with the win, having gotten everything he wanted and defeating the heroes. The only reason that Remake has a Bittersweet Ending instead of a Downer Ending is because the good guys still have a chance to stop Sephiroth from enacting the rest of his plan in the next game.
  • Vayne of Final Fantasy XII wins, from a certain point of view. His goal is to conquer Ivalice, but he partially wants to do this to free humanity from the control of the Occuria, god-like beings detached from the world that rule it to their liking by granting power to the people they decide should be in charge. Vayne and Archadia overthrew that person, the King of Dalmasca (though by then, he only ruled his small city-state not the once continent spanning empire of his ancestor, the Dynast King), and Princess Ashe realizes accepting the Occuria's favor to fight back isn't worth it since it will cause more war and death. This is even remarked upon by the rogue Occuria Venat who was helping Vayne — when a dying Vayne at the end of the game laments he failed Venat, Venat comforts him that no, he succeeded enough, in casting off the Occuria's reign.
  • The ending of Final Fantasy XIII-2 has the bad guy succeed in wiping out time itself by engineering circumstances so no matter what, his plan succeeds. That said, it is followed by a sequel.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, the anti-hero Delita becomes king and the hero is banished from society or potentially dead.
    • Perhaps not so much so in the long run, à la Watchmen.
    • The Glabados Church orchestrated a conspiracy to get all the nobles to kill each other in order to create a power imbalance so they can step in and take control. They don't even need demons and they manage to take control of Ivalice for centuries and branded the heroes as heretics. On the other hand, that has come to an end when a scholar found a document calling the Church out of their corruption finally exonerating said heretics.
  • In the original Final Fantasy XIV, Nael Van Darnus shrugs off the loss of the Lunar Transmitter saying it was already too late to stop Dalamud. Even though he was eventually slain by the adventurers that would be remembered as the Warriors of Light, Dalamud was shattered, and Bahamut broke free. Even when called to Eorzea to recontain him The Twelve failed and could do nothing to stop him. Louisoux was forced to warp the denizens of Eorzea years into the future seconds before they would be consumed by Mega-Flare while he himself was forced to stay behind and die. Years later, in the final Binding Coil of Bahamut patch of A Realm Reborn, it was revealed that Louisoux didn't in fact die. He absorbed a shit ton of Aether and single handedly took down Bahamut, becoming a new Primal himself in the process. Making it slightly less of a lose for the good guys than was originally believed, but still a cataclysmic world reshaping event.
    • In patch 3.3 of Stormblood, Asahi and Elidibus-possessing-Zenos stage a Frame-Up to make Doma look guilty of causing a summoning, giving the empire an excuse to opt out of peace talks and proceed with another invasion. By the time the protagonists realise this, it's too late, and Yotsuyu uses a cache of crystals smuggled in by Asahi to turn into Tsukuyomi. While you are able to stop it and have ample evidence it was a set-up, Asahi mockingly rubs in that the Empire has all the reason they need to stop peace talks with Doma and prove they cannot stop their own people from performing summons. This sets up events that lead to the Garleans marching upon both Eorzea and Doma once more, and subsequently the next expansion, Shadowbringers.
  • In Final Fantasy XV, Ardyn was once a Messiah-like figue who cured people of the Starscourge, a Mystical Plague that turned humans into Deamons, by taking the Deamons and the disease into his own body. His reward for saving the world was to be betrayed by his own kin, the Royal Line of Lucis, who went so far as to erase all traces of Ardyn's existence from history, as well as the Gods who sent him forth on his quest in the first place, their reasoning being that he had corrupted himself by taking the Starscourge into his own body. So, with his body being rendered immortal by the myriad of Deamons it played host to, and his soul being Barred from the Afterlife, Ardyn made it his goal in life to end both the Lucis lineage and the Oracle lineage. In the end, he kills Luna, and Noctis has to sacrifice his life to put an end to both Ardyn and the Starscourge, which is implied to also be what Ardyn wants. Even his final death, was a goal for afterlife.
• Fire Emblem:
  • After the player defeats the last boss in Chapter 5 of Genealogy of the Holy War, Sigurd and his army are escorted to the castle to be met by the entire army being betrayed by the person who everyone thought of as a friend. Sigurd himself is executed by Lord Arvis and the army scatters to the wind, with the surviving units living out the rest of the lives in hiding or dying from one cause or another. In the 17 years following the massacre, the various countries that the group helped liberate from cruel rulers have become oppressive empires and the citizens are essentially slaves. Chapter 6 begins with Sigurd's son leading a liberation army comprised of children from the men and women who fought in Sigurd's army. It's a partial example because the player eventually wins in the end; it just takes nearly two decades before the protagonists can fix everything. As for Arvis, he may have been the winner at the end of Gen 1, but by the time Gen 2 rolls around, he's started to wish he hadn't.
  • While he's a very minor one, King Desmond of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade wanted nothing but to ensure that his daughter Guinivere would inherit the throne of Bern instead of Zephiel. It took twenty years and he didn't live to see it, but he did set in motions the events of Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, which ensured Zephiel's death and Guinivere's eventual coronation as the new queen of Bern.
  • In Fire Emblem Fates:
    • The Conquest campaign plays around with this since, on one hand, the Nohr kingdom does manage to conquer its rival realm, Hoshido, just like King Garon wanted from the very beginning... but on the other hand, Garon's true form is revealed and he's killed immediately afterwards, Hinoka survives and becomes Queen of Hoshido so she and Sakura can start rebuilding her lands, while the Avatar's Nohrian older brother Xander inherits the Nohrian throne and succeeds Garon as the ruler of Nohr, so he and the Avatar can properly begin to change Nohr from within, making it more like "The Anti-Villains Win". Plus the actual plan of the one behind Garon, the Spirit King Anankos (who is thoroughly defeated only in the Golden Path), is to destroy both kingdoms, which logically doesn't happen. And, considering how much energy he pumped into corrupting Garon for years (and then on corrupting the Final Boss, a more than mind controlled Prince Takumi), he's probably been crippled and depowered so won't be able to try anything for many years, especially not during the reigns of King Xander and Queen Hinoka.
    • The closest to this trope actually taking place in the Fates universe is... the Heirs of Fates DLC stages, the game's answer to The Future Past DLC chapters from Awakening. Anankos has taken several Fates worlds (some following the Birthright continuity, others following the Conquest one) plus their Deeprealms and destroyed them, with only one member of the second gens surviving per world, and also destroyed Shigure's own Revelations realm. The overall plot is about the survivors meeting up and stopping Anankos from doing it to the multiverse.
  • Fire Emblem Engage: This is the main idea behind the "Fell Xenologue" DLC, as it takes place in an alternate reality where Sombron wins, has killed everyone who is playable in the base game (with the exception of Mauvier, but even then, he dies later), and is responsible for creating a post-apocalyptic world. Although Sombron does eventually die thanks to alternate Alear pulling a Heroic Sacrifice, by then, he has already done pretty much everything that he wanted to.
• F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Alma succeeds in getting pregnant by you with "the Antichrist". Subverted in a sense, in that Alma isn't necessarily evil (Armacham Technological Corporation is much worse), and that the baby doesn't really do anything, and is more or less a neutral party, even by the time s/he is born at the conclusion of F.E.A.R. 3.
• In For Honor, the Big Bad Apollyon is killed but not before successfully inciting a Forever War between the three factions as she planned.
• Freedom Planet has Lord Brevon successfully invade a kingdom, behead its king despite all of the royal guard banding together to try to stop him, and successfully brainwashing his son in order to become his obedient minion. He later succeeds in obtaining the Kingdom Stone. And according to Torque, he's won MANY times before. That being said, the heroes do eventually blow up his ship, his army, and rescue the Kingdom Stone, but Brevon himself still gets away with his life. According to Word of God, he's smart enough to not return to Avalice and get back to what remains of his conquests.
• In one ending of From Next Door, the creature succeeds in capturing Namie and dragging her over to its lair, making her its latest victim and with next to no one realizing the truth about the house next door.
• At the end of Furi, you finally leave your prison, leaving the corpses of the Jailers, most of them good people, behind, and corrupting the soil as you walk on the Free world. And then you launch an alien invasion. Or not, should you choose to subvert it.
• Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar reveals that GalCiv 2 ended with the Drengin Empire conquering a good and a neutral race and pushed humanity back to Earth, encasing it in an impenetrable shield. Then it got worse. The Dread Lords convince one of the largest Drengin clans, the Korath Clan, to eliminate any non-Drengin in the galaxy, and they proceed to wipe out two of the previously-playable races.
  • Which is almost exactly the backstory of Star Control II: The Alliance of Free Stars lost the war with the Ur-Quan Hierarchy, and the remnants of humanity are stuck on Earth, encased in an impenetrable Slave Shield. A branch of the Ur-Quans, the Kohr-Ah, are preparing to embark on a campaign to eliminate any non-Ur-Quan in the galaxy. If the player takes too long, this campaign will actually begin and many of the alien races (including humanity) will be exterminated.
• God of War: Ares turned Kratos into the perfect warrior to kill Zeus and destroy Olympus as this may have happened after he was killed, but he still won as his plan in lll works.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned. Do not expect a happy ending with this one.
  • Billy Grey. While he is killed by Johnny, the damage he caused was so irreversible to everyone in his gang that nothing was ever the same again. He caused both directly and indirectly all the problems that led the Lost MC to its eventual defeat, and this domino effect is still seen five years later...
  • Likewise, Ray Boccino gets away with Jim's torture and murder. He seems to be a Karma Houdini, until he's eventually killed by Niko in GTA IV.
• The main villain of Hakaiou: King of Crusher is an alien bug who infects you with a monstrous venom, turning you from a human into a city-destroying monster. Owing to you being tired of your boring life, you then give in to the bug's urges to destroy everything in sight, where you transform from a human to a kaiju that eventually destroys New York, exactly what the alien bug wants. And as a Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending, the game ends with you transofrming back to a human... but the bug decide to infect your infant child instead. Roll credits.
• A retroactive one in Half-Life. Sure, the Xenian invasion of Earth has been stopped and the HECU have stopped killing the scientists, but Opposing Force reveals that anyone still in the facility will get eradicated by a nuclear bomb, and Half Life 2 reveals that Earth is now under the control of an Extra-dimensional empire. Since the G-Man orchestrated the resonance cascade that led to the events of the entire Half Life series up until Half-Life 2's episodes, its safe to say he (or rather it) won.
• In Halo: Reach, everyone on the planet is Doomed by Canon and the Covenant completely overruns the planet, turning it into a smoldering wasteland and destroying a large amount of the UNSC fleet. Counts double as a Pyrrhic Victory for the Covenant, who lose far more ships than the UNSC.
• In Hatred, The Antagonist gets the violent death he wanted and succeeds in taking as many people out with him as possible by nuking New York City.
• A few of the endings of Heavy Rain, to varying degrees. It's quite easy for Scott Shelby to merely make off as a Karma Houdini, if he kills whoever he fights in the final battle and also doesn't save Lauren. Quite possibly the biggest downer has all the heroes making it to the last confrontation, and dying, getting arrested, or otherwise failing, while the bad guy walks off into the rain, 100% ready and willing to kill again. You even get an achievement for it, called "So close..."
  • In fact, there's a trophy called "Perfect Crime" for engineering the perfect The Bad Guy Wins scenario, where the Origami Killer gets off scot-free with no evidence and no one alive to link them to the crime.
• The Shadow of Death expansion for Heroes of Might and Magic III ends with the Bad Guy losing, but only because the bad guy he was The Man Behind the Man for outwits him and puts him in prison and hijacks the evil plot. A case of Doomed by Canon, since the bad guy's evil plot consists of setting the stage for the war in the main game.
  • Played with in that at the end of the sixth and 'final' campaign, the evil plot the Bad Guy had been spending three of the previous campaigns setting up is stopped. It is just that there is a seventh, 'secret' campaign, with the Bad Guy having come up with a new evil plot...
• The Hex: In the Secret of Legendaria segment, the Big Bad Vallamir succeeds in destroying the world... mainly because Chandrelle allows him to do it so she can escape her role as a protagonist.
• inFamous if played as an evil Cole. By the end of the game, Cole is the strongest one left alive in Empire City, the place has fallen further in to chaos, he is at least partially allied with one of the City's main gangs, and he announces that the remaining population are his playthings.
  • And then came inFamous 2. Who cares about a little sociopathic fun and games when it turns out the Ray Plague can only be cured in Conduits by activating them (whether explosively or by The Beast) or cured in humanity by activating the Conduit-killing Ray Field Inhibitor. Guess on which side Evil Cole falls in this Genocide Dilemma.
• While he was killed early on by a widowed and grieving Superman in the opening scene of Injustice: Gods Among Us, The Joker manages to totally break Big Blue by twisting him into something as evil and monstrous as himself — the kind of result that is his dearest goal in his Straw Nihilist mindset after tricking Supes to kill Lois Lane and nuke Metropolis. To the Joker, it doesn't matter at all if he was killed as a consequence, as exemplified by his Hannibal Lecture to Superman. However, this takes place in an alternate universe to the main one, so instead of what would be expected, Superman goes through with it. At the end of the game, the mainstream Superman comments that he would've done the same thing if put in similar circumstances. The fact that things haven't changed much in Injustice 2 even shows the sickening legacy Joker left, especially with the Justice League falling apart into two opposite camps, Batman and Superman remaining on bad terms, and most importantly, the the Injustice-verse remaining a Crapsack World.
• Jade Empire has two such endings. One is the expected Closed Fist ending. The other is a Nonstandard Game Over where you surrender to the Big Bad instead of fighting him.
• The Just Dance 2024 Edition story playlist, "Dance with the Swan", ends with Night Swan corrupting Sara, Wanderlust, Brezziana and Mihaly and sailing off on her ship with them before Jack Rose can arrive to save them.
• Xehanort has a surprisingly high win streak in Kingdom Hearts. 358/2 Days — being an interquel with (anti) villain protagonists — is an in-between example. Birth by Sleep takes place at least 10 years before the first game so, yes, Xehanort wins. Chain of Memories seems to be a win for Sora but 358/2 Days gives it context and... it's at most a tie. And with 3D, Sora and Riku have managed to hold off Xehanort but Xehanort clearly has all the cards and is just slightly upset that he had to put off his ultimate victory.
• In The Last of Us Part II, Abby is a Villain Protagonist who becomes Ellie's enemy number one after she brutally murders Joel, and later Jesse. Despite not feeling any better for doing so, and subsequently losing several friends due to Ellie's rampage, she ultimately escapes her conflict with Ellie in one piece and became free to achieve her goal of reuniting with the reformed Fireflies. Meanwhile, Ellie loses almost everything important to her, including her ability to play Joel's guitar from losing two fingers, Tommy and Jesse, and her relationship with Dina. With everyone close to her either dead or now despising her for her actions, Ellie is left completely alone in the world; which, for one final gut-punch, happens to be her worst fear.
• League of Legends: The game has several skin lines representing worlds where one of the game's villains gains a big win: the Blackfrost line shows a universe where Lissandra had the power to conquer the Freljord, the Ruined skins show other champions twisted by Viego, and the largest, the Battlecast line, shows a world dominated by Viktor's "Glorious Evolution".
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter: The whole story is about preventing the Nebulous Evil Organization Ouroboros from getting a wish-granting device called the Aureole. And while the Big Bad of that game does indeed get killed, Campanella makes off with the Aureole, and the events of the third game are Just as Planned by them. This is revealed in depth within Star Door 14 in 3rd.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel series is infamous for these because of the length of the Erebonia arc in the Trails Series. The first game ends with Crow utterly trouncing Rean in their Divine Knight fight, forcing Valimar to retreat and Rean leaving his friends and classmates behinds to their fates. The second game ends with Osborne actually revealed to be alive and winning the Civil War as stated by Trails to Azure and Rean is forced to become Erebonia's national hero such that Rean becomes the government's unwilling lapdog. The third game ends with Rean playing into Osborne's hands by killing the corrupted Nameless One, the only thing that kept the curse from spreading all over Erebonia and beyond, being unable to prevent Millium's death, and getting himself captured by Osborne. And while the fourth game finally gives Rean a complete and decisive victory, an argument can be made that Osborne still managed to obtain his objective: get rid of the curse of Erebonia for good.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has this happen twice:
    • After a third of the game, when Link opens the Temple of Time to get the Triforce, Ganondorf reveals that he manipulated Link and Zelda into opening it for him. The whole second third of the game starts with him actually getting to the Triforce and using his third of its power to rule Hyrule for seven years. Link, sealed away in the temple and released as an adult, spends the rest of the game rescuing the Six Sages and overthrowing Ganondorf.
    • When Nintendo released an Official Timeline for the Zelda series, there were no fewer than three canonical timeline splits resulting from the game. In one of them, Link is defeated by Ganondorf, although that's also the only timeline in which the royal family of Hyrule eventually gets the whole Triforce after reclaiming it from Ganon in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. ^note The first four games released in the series, along with the Oracle games, fall within this timeline.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
    • While the game ends with Demon King Demise defeated, he curses Link and Zelda's kin to constantly be faced with the constant onslaught of the Demon Tribe and monster armies. The English version additionally implies that he commands his hatred to be born into a mortal form similar to Hylia, which will be the evil Ganon. Because of Demise's curse, there will always have to be a Link and Zelda to fight the evil, which will always cause catastrophe for Hyrule before being defeated.
    • On a smaller scale, the acting main antagonist Ghirahim puts unsealing his master Demise as priority one, with Link's goal being to stop that from happening by destroying Demise first. While Link manages to use the Triforce to kill Demise, Ghirahim instead travels back in time after capturing Zelda to unseal him there, which he manages to accomplish.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Hilda gets what she wanted: a Triforce for Lorule to save it from crumbling into nothingness. Downplayed as she's not really the bad guy by then, having accepted that saving Lorule at the cost of condemning Hyrule to destruction isn't worth it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has this as the main plot: Calamity Ganon succeeded in essentially destroying Hyrule 100 years ago, and Link lost his life trying to protect Zelda from the Malice-controlled Guardians hounding them. All of this happened before the game even starts, with Link waking up in the Shrine of Resurrection After the End and learning how Calamity Ganon defeated them and what he must do to save the world before he's free to complete the world's full destruction.
  • Hyrule Warriors has a slightly minor example. While Ganondorf does ultimately get defeated in the end, a good part of the last third of the game is Ganondorf systematically beating down the heroes and managing to take over Hyrule Castle and obtain all three pieces of the Triforce.
• Live A Live has a possible one. After the Medieval Chapter, you can choose its protagonist Oersted, now known as Odio, as the final protagonist. Unlike with the rest of the characters, his version of this chapter is different in that you play as the Lord of Dark through all his incarnations in a inverted Boss Rush in where you kill the main characters of the rest of the chapters, ending with Odio and his incarnations as the true victors, and with him wandering alone through Lucrece, giving you the Sad End. Alternatively, if in the other characters' version Odio wins the final battle against the other protagonists (as Purity of Odio in the original; any of his forms outside the Boss Rush in the remake) Odio can trigger Armageddon, ultimately ending all existence, and getting the Armageddon ending. Neither of these is a Nonstandard Game Over, both are actual endings. Did we mention the rest of the game probably had made you cry many times before?
• Dreamfall. The Empire hunts down La Résistance to its secret base and wipes everyone out. The heroine gets impaled on a spear and is killed. The Knight Templar who's just undergone a Heel–Face Turn gets arrested for treason. All prominent members of La Résistance are seen either unveiled as The Mole or charging into a Bolivian Army Ending. Meanwhile, while the other heroine is busy saving the world via astral projection, a miscellaneous villain takes advantage of her helpless physical state to inject her with a lethal amount of a coma-inducing drug. WATI Corp unveils the brain-sucking product, which you've spent the entire game trying to destroy, to great public acclaim, and the last shot shows the enormous evil villainous tower surrounded by ominous lightning. The end. Cue credits.
• Losing in Luigi's Mansion 3 has Luigi trapped in a painting along with Mario, Princess Peach, the Toads, and even Professor E. Gadd. Yes, even the benevolent professor is trapped, meaning he and Luigi can't save anyone anymore. And King Boo turns to the player and chuckles with eerie background music before the screen fades to black and the "Good Night!" text appears. It's probably one of the bleakest game over cutscenes and screens in Mario history.
• Magical Tetris Challenge: Donald, Goofy, and Minnie's stories all end with them giving Pete something he needs for his Evil Plan. Only in Mickey's ending does Pete actually lose.
• Maniac Mansion: In some endings, Purple Meteorite becomes a celebrity rather than sent to the moon via the Edsel. Averted in one ending where he gets arrested live on air by the Meteor Police.
• Managed to beat Bowser Tower in Mario Party: Island Tour? Well too bad, the real Bowser says the player managed to only beat a bubble copy of himself in the final boss minigame, and then he will always knock you right off his tower, asking the player can always come back to challenge Bowser in the tower.
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2: Kraven the Hunter successfully accomplishes his goal of dying in battle to a formiddable opponent without regard for the costs to New York or his own organization. As he falls to an enraged Venom, his last words are "Thank you."
• In the Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut, you're given the option to refuse the Catalyst's choices. If you do, the Reapers destroy the entire galactic fleet and go on to harvest the galaxy like all the other times. Though it is heavily implied that the next cycle is able to stop the Reapers thanks to the information in Liara's time capsules.
• Master of Orion 2 canonically ends with the player successfully warping into the dimensional bubble the Antarans are attacking from and destroying their homeworld. Master Of Orion 3 reveals that this was actually just a military staging post, and by attacking it the younger civilisations proved themselves enough of a threat for the Antarans to start taking them seriously, explaining why the game once again begins with all the playable civilisations only owning a single planet and just discovering FTL travel.
• The Bonne family in Mega Man Legends ultimately succeeds in stealing the treasure (a massive refractor) they were seeking on Kattelox Island. That said, they ended up losing pretty much everything, including their main ship, in the process, and it's heavily implied in the sequel that selling said treasure was in large part the only reason they were able to get back on their feet after everything was said and done.
• It's heavily implied that Sigma's goal in Mega Man X8 was ultimately to ensure that he and his ideals live on in the New Generation Reploids, all of which bear his Reploid DNA in their Copy Chips. Thus, even though he may have finally been Killed Off for Real, and Lumine claimed he was The Man Behind the Man, Sigma had already won from the moment Lumine decided that he and the New Generation Reploids are the future of Reploidkind, and that both humans and old-gen Reploids need to just lay down and die.
• In-universe, prior to the beginning of the Mega Man Zero series, Dr. Weil instigates what is described in-universe as the most destructive war in recorded history, and was banished from the only known surviving human civilization after the war's resolution. In Mega Man Zero 3, Dr. Weil returns from exile as part of a hidden plan to gain control of Neo Arcadia. To aid in this plan, he resurrects Copy X, the former ruler of Neo Arcadia (killed in the first Mega Man Zero game), and installs him as a puppet ruler, with the bad ol' Doctor as Copy X's "advisor" Approximately half way into the game, Zero fights Copy X again, with the exact same results as the first time they fought. As the revived Copy X tried to access his Armed Phenomenon form, a fail-safe that Dr. Weil secretly installed activated, which took out Copy X. Almost immediately after, Dr. Weil invokes Article 8 to become the undisputed Dictator of Neo Arcadia. Even after the defeat of Omega and the escape of the Mother Elf, Dr. Weil still remains in power, something even the Original X notes before he fades away into Cyberspace.
• Subverted in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. While Revolver Ocelot is the target for most of the game and does succeed in his plans, it's revealed that him succeeding in his plans have backfired in creating a "new Wild West" and actually made the world a better place.
  • The Metal Gear Solid series actually hints a few times that in the ending of the game, the bad guys (or rather, the ones behind the scenes) are actually the ones who always win. In the first Metal Gear Solid game, Revolver Ocelot managed to retrieve the REX data for Solidus Snake. Metal Gear Solid 2 makes it a bit more apparent (as in, previously, as well as the later games, it was only revealed in The Stinger, with Metal Gear Solid 2 making it more apparent before the Stinger that the bad guys did indeed win), with the Patriots actually succeeding in their plans in regards to the S3 plan, the repercussions of which are made apparent in Metal Gear Solid 4, and the Patriots are heavily implied to be the true villains of the game, instead of Solidus.
• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge features a rather morbid ending. Even though it's been retconned, the ending at the time shown us that Guybrush was cursed by LeChuck to imagine he is a child at an amusement park, while LeChuck looks sinisterly with glowing eyes. Elaine is standing above the hole waiting for possibly an eternity for her true love who will never wake up from his curse.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • According to the beginning of Mortal Kombat: Deception, the ending to Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance had the eponymous Enemy Mine between Shang Tsung and Quan Chi actually succeed in killing our heroes. Unfortunately, they don't get to revel in the fruits of their labor, as they immediately turn on each other, then get wiped out trying to defend against the Un-Sealed Evil in a Can, Onaga.
  • The backstory of Mortal Kombat 9 answers this question: Who is the canonical winner of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon? The answer is... Shao Kahn. Though Shao Kahn is eventually killed, possibly permanently, in the game proper, it comes at a high cost. Earthrealm is in ruins, and most of the heroes are dead. All according to the plans of Shinnok and Quan Chi. Raiden surviving the entire ordeal was the only thing that didn't fall into their plans.
    Raiden: Our story has ended. Centuries of battle, meaningless. Shao Kahn has consumed Earthrealm.
  • While Shao Kahn was the canon winner of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, it was a Downer Ending for him; he ended up in a Victory Is Boring situation and was eventually driven mad. In fact, this tends to happen in a lot of character endings in the Mortal Kombat franchise; whether the character is good or evil, "winning" does not guarantee a happy ending for that character as they either suffer betrayal or pyrrhic rewards.
  • The conclusion of Mortal Kombat 9 goes From Bad to Worse in Mortal Kombat X. Most of the fallen heroes are resurrected as revenants, a civil war breaks out in Outworld between Mileena and Kotal Kahn, and Raiden has to contend with an invasion from Shinnok, who was orchestrating of all the events of Mortal Kombat 9. Though he is defeated at the end, Shinnok does manage to break his arch-enemy Raiden by twisting him into something as evil as himself. Raiden, now corrupted after purifying the Jinsei, decides to go on the offensive after the events of Mortal Kombat X.
  • In Mortal Kombat 11, if you lose the first round against Kronika in Story Mode, she succeeds in setting off a Time Crash and rewinds history back to the dawn of time. While Liu Kang can still beat her at this point, the fact that his friends and loved ones are all Ret-Gone makes it a Pyrrhic Victory. If you lose to Kronika at the dawn of time, then a Non-Standard Game Over will happen, as Kronika beheads Liu Kang, and declares her start of New Era. Played even straighter in Aftermath, as one of the two endings for that story mode lets you play as Shang Tsung as he wipes out his last remaining competition for the Crown, seizes the Hourglass and defeats his longtime nemesis Liu Kang, who set Shang's position up to take him down only for it to backfire horribly if the player wills it.
• Momo's Muramasa blade ending of Muramasa: The Demon Blade has Jinkuro near death but now back in time before he ended up in Momohime's body. With the knowledge from his time during the game, he manages to pick a better time to take the body of her fiance and ends up becoming her husband. Granted this is debatable because of the Black-and-Gray Morality, but Jinkuro is still pretty self centered and will kill anyone who gets in his way, now he just has a Morality Chain.
• Naufragar: Crimson: The Big Bad, Hyo, seeks to extend his lifespan through any means necessary, whether it be through stealing ancient magical coins or stealing the life energy of his old friend, Athena. In the penultimate dungeon, Hyo succeeds in killing Athena and gaining the ability to move independently of Kyo. The game ends with the rest of the party still trying to find him.
• The first and second playable Breaths of Nexus Clash ended on this note, with victories for the dark gods of Violence and Chaos respectively. What's worse, this is implied to be the most common outcome in the backstory. However, the cycle continued and the most recent Breath was won by a much more sympathetic god.
• By the end of the Golden Ending for Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Zero (Akane and Aoi) has achieved their goals. Thr four people behind the first Nonary Game die, Past!Akane gets saved and they get away with everything.
• Odin Sphere if you get the bad ending. Everyone dies, but the antagonist sought that in the first place.
• OFF: If the player chooses to side with the Batter, they will succeed in killing the Judge and effectively erase the rest of existence. If they side with the Judge, he pointedly defies the Batter his victory, even if there is little left of the world to save by that point.
• Paper Mario:
  • The start of the game has Bowser steal Peach's castle and proceed to kidnap her, only for Mario to show up as usual. Using the successfully stolen Star Rod, after he imprisons the Star Spirits in cards, Bowser becomes invincible and stomps Mario in battle, making it the first time in Bowser's history that he was able to defeat Mario in a fight. Since this happens in the beginning of the game, it's not truly over for Mario as he does recover from his defeat. Mario later gets an opportunity to battle Bowser again, this time after he rescued the Seven Star Spirits.
  • In the Non-Standard Game Over before the Final Boss in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario can choose to become the Shadow Queen's servant and the world is lost. Cue Game Over screen.
  • Similarly, the player can refuse to help save the world at the beginning of Super Paper Mario, and receives a Nonstandard Game Over as The Multiverse is consumed into the void. And this is before the player even gets control of Mario!
• In PAYDAY: The Heist and PAYDAY 2, you play the role of a robber and you're always taking big scores with your crew. The police and SWAT are always called in to prevent you from stealing money, valuables, or whatever else you're after because, well, stealing is wrong in the first place. The crew will always get what they want and even if everyone is apprehended by the police, Bain will always get the crew bailed out to try again later.
• In Peasant's Quest, Rather Dashing seeks revenge against Trogdor for burninating his cottage. When he approaches his lair, Trogdor reveals that he cannot be killed because he is indestructible. After congratulating Rather Dashing for making it further than any other peasant, Trogdor burninates him.
• Persona:
  • Nyarlathotep gets to make the Moral Event Horizon his bitch in Persona 2: Innocent Sin when everything on Earth save for Sumaru City is put through Class 6 Apocalypse How after Maya Amano is killed by Maya Okamura. Not that he was sapient enough to qualify a Moral Event Horizon to begin with. Persona 2: Eternal Punishment is all about trying to stop him from doing it all over again.
  • Persona 4 Golden has the Accomplice Ending, wherein you befriend the villain and help cover up his crimes by destroying evidence. Unlike the game's other bad endings, you have to be trying for this one, and the game actually insults you for pursuing it.
• Phoenotopia has this, although it's not the Kobolds who win — it's actually the Galactic Federation. Billy is bound to curb-stomp them with the Phoenix Weapons whenever he deems it appropriate, but he's arguably even worse.
• Physical Exorcism Series
  • Extra Case: My Girlfriend's Secrets: In the tenth and final ending, Nya restores Marty's memories of all the previous loops, all for their own amusement. The trauma turns Marty into a Yandere who will do anything to protect Sally's secrets.
  • Case 03: True Cannibal Boy: In the epilogue, Marty succeeds in killing Lily as part of his insane plan to give Sally a new body. This was also due to Nya and Jade's manipulations, with both finding this tragedy entertaining.
• A possible ending for Pillars of Eternity. The entire game's plot is a gambit by Thaos and Woedica to restore the latter to her full godhood by devouring the souls of hundreds, if not thousands, of unborn infants. It's entirely possible for this plan to succeed, albeit with Thaos dead and the player accepting Woedica's We Can Rule Together.
• Pokémon:
  • The returning Big Bads forming Team Rainbow Rocket in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon all come from alternate universes where their respective games' protagonist(s) never existed, allowing them to succeed in their goals, which run the gamut from taking over the world, remaking it, or flat-out murdering everyone in it.
  • The main villain in Pokémon Sword and Shield, Chairman Rose, technically succeeds in his plans. However, since he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist trying to solve an upcoming energy crisis, this is a downplayed trope and seen as a good thing. Rose mainly takes the villain role because he's too impatient to wait until after the championships to attempt his plan, endangering thousands of lives, and because he had no backup plan for when Eternatus went berserk.
• At the end of Red Dead Redemption, Edgar Ross betrays John, leading an attack by a U.S. Army unit on his home, ultimately killing him. While Jack can take revenge and kill Ross in the Playable Epilogue, John ultimately goes down in history as a vicious outlaw and Ross as a hero who brought peace and justice to the Old West.
  • Bonus points for Edgar Ross, as the epilogue implies that Jack Marston is heading down a path that mirrors his father's, which is exactly what John was hoping to avoid for his son.
• At the end of Red Dead Redemption II, while he's ultimately killed by John, Micah Bell ultimately has a much better fate than most of the main cast. While John, Dutch, Bill and Javier are doomed to their fates in the first game and Arthur succumbs to tuberculosis, Micah not only got away with betraying the Van Der Linde gang, but managed to maintain his depraved lifestyle and becoming a bandit boss in his own right for 12 years afterwards before being brought down by John (and he's more amused than anything in his final moments).
• Red Faction: Armageddon has this at the beginning of the game. Adam Hale and his Cultists destroy the Terraformer, rendering the surface of Mars uninhabitable and driving everyone underground.
• Resident Evil: Regardless of what the protagonists accomplish, Albert Wesker, almost every time, still manages to stay one step ahead and keep his plan in motion - until Resident Evil 5, where he finally goes down. Killed by his own virus, no less.
• Resistance, particularly 2. The Chimera have laid waste to America and the rest of the world, despite their fleet being nuked they have reserves, and Hale became one of them. Word of God promised that they would stamp out what is left of humanity in Resistance 3. Which made the actual ending of R3-in which Joseph Capelli foils the Chimeran plot to freeze Earth and in doing so turns the tide of the war in humanity's favor-both surprising and all the more awesome.
• Why are Defiant Ascended being sent back to the past in Rift? Because after having run riot over Telara, Regulos is about to snuff the last tiny corner that's still more-or-less habitable...and you have to stop that from happening.
• Robotron: 2084: Aside from the fact the game itself is not winnable, the game's sequel, Blaster, reveals that you have failed to save the last human family. According to its opening demo, "The year is 2085 and the Robotrons have destroyed the human race. You escape in a stolen space shuttle. Your destination: Paradise. A remote outpost 20 million light years away. Does paradise exist? Can civilization be started again? These questions will be answered at the end of your journey. But first, you must BLAST... OR BE BLASTED!"
• At the end of R-Type Command's first act, the human fleet gets assimilated by the Bydo, and you command the bad guys for the rest of the game, culminating in The End of the World as We Know It for the humans.
  • Subverted actually. At the end of the Bydo campaign, you and your fleet realize what you've become and get chased off by the still very much active and numerous Space Corps.
• Scourge: Outbreak ends with the players seemingly defeating the Scourge Queen, only for the subsequent cutscene to reveal said Queen is a decoy - the villain, Dr. Reisbeck, has the real Queen with him as he beats hasty retreat. Cut to weeks later - Earth has now been conquered by the Scourge's monsters in a massive, unwinnable Bug War, and Dr. Reisbeck is ready to hunt down the player characters. Cue credits.
• Issue #11 of The Secret World ends on a confirmed win for the Morninglight and the Black Signal (AKA John): the Black Signal might not have been able to trick you into assassinating Lilith, but he was able to keep the two of you distracted long enough for the Nephilim to capture Lilith. For good measure, with his mission completed and his personal bogeyman slain, John is now able to escape Tokyo and begin plaguing the world at leisure; for good measure, he actually thanks you for all your help via a black lore entry just before going on his merry way. Meanwhile, with the biggest threat to their continued existence out of the picture, the Morninglight are able to continue their plans for awakening the Dreamers, and for the time being, there's no way of even touching them.
• Shantae: Risky's Revenge ends with, well, the villain Risky getting her revenge by stripping Shantae of her genie half. The sequel, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, reveals that this was a Pyrrhic Victory, as the genie half of Shantae was absorbed by Risky's Tinkerbats, who grew powerful and overthrew her, forcing Risky into an Enemy Mine situation with Shantae.
• In the various Shin Megami Tensei games, choosing to side with Law or Chaos can get you something like this. Generally, a Law or Chaos ending will permanently solve the given game's conflict, but at a steep cost that the game makes it clear is very much not worth it (which tends to be humanity's free will in Law and its peace in Chaos).
  • A canon example happens in the interim between Shin Megami Tensei I and Shin Megami Tensei II — The Hero has been killed alone in a secluded cavern, the peace he hoped to forge has been shattered by the Messian Church, and God's preparing to fire the Megiddo Arc to annihilate all life on Earth.
• Walter Sullivan wins in the "21 Sacraments" ending of Silent Hill 4: The Room.
• Slender and Slender: The Arrival. The first game ends with The Slender Man finding you and your camera freaking out with his faceless features hanging on the screen. The second is far worse. Depending on which ending you get, you still lose. One ending has the player locked in a room with a charred, rotting corpse and a tape recorder on the ground. The recording has Kate and CR agreeing to kill themselves to stop the spreading of the Slender Mans influence, however Kate gets cold feet and runs away. CR then utters his apologies and sets himself on fire. Once the recording ends, the door bursts open and a figure attacks and kills you. If you think that ending was bad, another has the player being thrown off the tower while they're still conscious and the camera battery flashes before they die. Either way, The Slender Man wins and you die.
  • The new ending changes it up. It is revealed that it was the remains of Charlie Matheson Jr. that burst the door open and attacked you. After a blackout, you wake up in the basement of the burnt house from the prologue, with Charlie watching you. You collect two collectibles and go upstairs to find Kate crying in a corner. However, should you get close to her, she will instantly transform back into The Chaser and kill you. The final shot is your feet dragged off camera. Roll credits.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Sonic Riders, Dr. Eggman wins the final race and technically beats Sonic. However, the treasure he sought out turns out to be just a carpet, making the victory empty for Eggman.
  • Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood ends with Eggman having taken over the world.
  • Sonic Forces plays this straight with the introduction of Infinite, who utterly curbstomps Sonic. This victory allows Eggman to conquer the whole world (or at least according to the in-game status bar, over 99% of it).
• In Soul Nomad & the World Eaters, Revya achieves this in the Demon Path. Well if you call killing two gods and destroying all reality "winning".
  • Revya apparently does, as the character's last words are "Who cares. It was fun."
• Star Fox 64: If you do not succeed in defeating Star Wolf in Fichina before the bomb goes off, destroying the Saucerer in Katina, or taking out all six missiles in Sector Z before they reach Great Fox, then you get depressing music and an out-of-place "Mission Complete" (if you succeed with doing what these levels ask, it says "Mission Accomplished" instead) as the level ends. It does alter the path you're allowed to travel, though. In the Fichina stage, Wolf even lampshades this by saying "Looks like WE win today, Star Fox!" The third one is the only loss you can't recover from, since it sends Star Fox to the Bolse satellite level, which is the start of the path to the "bad ending" with Big Bad Andross surviving with the Final Boss being a robotic double.
• A somewhat notorious mission in Star Trek Online has the player captain and their officers played for suckers and ordered to commit war crimes by an Undine infiltrator, who gets away clean at the end. Despite numerous clues as to what's really going on, there's no way to stop or avoid this other than dropping the mission or not taking it in the first place.
• In Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, after the player has completed the story missions, an alternate final level is revealed, where the player takes on the role of Anakin Skywalker (Darth Vader) fighting Obi-Wan Kenobi. When the player completes this level, there is a cutscene where Anakin jumps from the moving lava river platform, lands behind Obi-Wan and runs him through with his lightsaber. He then goes back to the landing platform, where he meets with Emperor Palpatine, flanked by a number of clone troopers. Palpatine then says, "Excellent work, my apprentice. There are none left to oppose us. The galaxy is ours now." and hands Anakin a new lightsaber. Anakin activates it and runs The Emperor through. The troopers barely respond, only raising their guns a little, but stand down as Anakin says to them, "No... the galaxy belongs to me!"
• In the Endor DLC of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, the evil clone of Starkiller stops the Rebel strike force from destroying the shield generator protecting the second Death Star, and also kills Leia and the rest of the main cast after having already killed Luke on Hoth. Palpatine then declares this the end of the Rebellion.
  Palpatine: [chuckles evilly] A great day, Lord Vader. Today marks the death of the Rebellion... and the birth of a new era of peace... for the Empire.
• Sunless Skies: The Clockwork Sun is heavily implied to be The Dawn Machine from Sunless Sea and has insinuated itself into Albion at the highest level, as you will see if you deliver your port reports to the authorities of London. In other words, The British Empire is currently run by a malevolent, mind-controlling, man-made God that imposes its own will on the population... And there is nothing you can do about it. And if you thought the Revolutionaries of both Fallen London and Sunless Sea were the bigger villains of the setting, well there's bad news for you too: Eleutheria is an entire region of space where the Liberation of Night is going ''swimmingly'', with all the horror it implies.
• This is probably the best way to describe the ending of Sunset Over Imdahl. Hoess, at least, falls in battle, but he'd already planned to die, and his masters remain unharmed as everyone in Imdahl either dies of the plague, or is slaughtered and dumped in a mass grave. Lohn predicts that Hoess's cause is lost in the long term, but there's no way to know without a sequel.
• Super Danganronpa Another 2:
  • Trial 3 has an interesting case in that the Blackened of this cases, Kanade Otonokoji, is found out and sentenced to death, but like Junko she faces her end happy because she'd achieved everything she'd wanted to. She displays zero shame in revealing her true psychotic Serial Killer nature and coming clean about all of her crimes (even those she'd committed well before the Killing Game began), she spitefully burns a valuable piece of information right in front of the surviving students, she learns that she was successful in turning her twin sister Hibiki into a puppet, and best of all for her, she's able to get off on watching her twin sister mentally and emotionally break under her despair as she's sentenced to die alongside her. During the execution, Hibiki gets her head torn clean off right in front of Kanade, who goes into a fit of maniacal laughter just as she's hung to death.
  • In Trial 5, for the first time ever in a Danganronpa work, Mikado Sannoji successfully manages to get the remaining students to vote incorrectly, allowing him to fulfill his plan and subject them all to a mass execution. It's narrowly subverted however; the only reason any of them survive is because the simulation crashes and they're all logged out of the Killing Game just in time. Plus as per the norm, he cheated as the case should have been ruled a suicide and killed him off too, but as the A.I. Is a Crapshoot mastermind he could change the rules on the fly.
• At the end of SUPERHOT, the System succeeds in brainwashing the player into its hive mind, and has them spread the word about the game InUniverse (and likely out of universe) by convincing their friends to play it.
• Super Mario Odyssey opens with Bowser actually defeating Mario in combat and taking Peach to their wedding on Honeylune Ridge, also destroying Mario's cap in the process. Thankfully, Mario then meets Cappy and goes on to defeat Bowser in the end.
• In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, there are two possible bad endings. If you only defeat one of the two Eldritch Abominations, then the survivor will brutally kill the loser. Afterwards, it will proceed to unleash a World-Wrecking Wave that either remakes the world in light if Galeem wins, or destroys it in darkness if Dharkon wins. In order to get the Golden Ending, you need to defeat them both at the same time.
• In Swamp Sim, Even after you collect all eight onions, Sherk pops out of nowhere and kills you.
• Tekken:
  • Tekken 7: The Mishima Saga storyline ends with Kazuya Mishima defeating his father Heihachi in a fight to the death, ultimately leading to the latter's permanent demise. With no one left standing in his way of world domination and the Mishima Zaibatsu finished for good with Heihachi gone, Kazuya would go on to invade other nations that are actively defying his reign of terror, setting in motion the events of the eighth King of Iron Fist Tournament.
  • Tekken 8: The "Despair" ending again has Kazuya and G Corp win out at the expense of the heroes, with Kazuya taking down the last hope against him, his son Jin Kazama, proceeding to throw him off a cliff to Make Sure He's Dead, and then stamping out all remaining resistance, allowing him to continue ruling the world with an iron fist with nobody able to stop him.
• Thing-Thing: The fourth (and final storyline) game in Thing Thing series of flash games ends this way, with Project 154 trapped in a gas-filled room (ensuring their health will not regenerate) and pitted against an endless onslaught of enemies until their eventual death. Naturally, the CEO of Systems Corp. gets away with his crimes scot-free, and 154 never even meets him face-to-face.
• In Touhou Project 12: Undefined Fantastic Object, the antagonists are a group of Youkai trying to free a powerful magician who has been sealed away in the Demon Realm for centuries. Despite (or perhaps because of) the protagonist's interference, they succeed...except their mistress turns out to be a really nice person who just wants to live out her life in peace.
  • Touhou 8: Imperishable Night might also count, as while Kaguya and Eirin were defeated by the protagonists and the moon was restored, they still succeeded in their primary goal of evading the Lunarian envoys.
  • Suika, the Final Boss of Touhou 7.5: Immaterial and Missing Power, did canonically defeat the main character in the end. But then again, Suika isn't exactly a villain, even if she is a bit bitchy in this game.
  • Touhou 13: Ten Desires is similar to 12 in that the cause of the incident is a revival that you fail to stop. Unlike 12, Miko turns out to be a somewhat dubious person.
• In Transformers: The Game (Console), Megatron succeeds in killing off Optimus Prime and using the AllSpark to conquer Earth and sits upon the Lincoln Memorial as his new throne. In addition, Blackout, Starscream and Barricade killed off Bumblebee, Jazz and Ironhide while the rest of humankind is doomed.
  Megatron: Finish this planet. We are done here!
• Triangle Strategy: In every ending except the Golden Ending, at least one of the two Big Bads (Gustadolph Aesfrost and Idore Delmira) will succeed and get away scott-free with their evil deeds:
  • In the Liberty ending, Benedict convinces Serenoa to ally with Aesfrost to take down Hyzante, resulting in Gustadolph getting everything he wanted: destroying Hyzante, spreading his freedom ideals throughout Norzelia, and getting away scott-free with the murders of Dragan, Regna, Frani and the invasion of Glenbrook. Meanwhile, Idore loses his position with the fall of Hyzante, but manages to escape capture despite being the brains behind the Hierophant, and is last seen aligning with Roland, who wants to create a resistance movement to overthrow Serenoa for his negligence to the downtrodden.
  • In the Morality ending, Gustadolph sees his country descend into chaos from Serenoa and Frederica's Slave Liberation (which resulted in Idore's death), and enters a civil war with his uncle Svarog for the murder of Dragan. It's implied Gustadolph will come out on top anyway due to having Benedict siding with him to protect the Wolffort demesne.
  • In the Utility ending, with Hyzante conquering all of Norzelia due to House Wolffort working for them, Idore becomes the de-facto ruler of the continent.
• If we assume Calypso winning can be considered fitting this Trope in the Twisted Metal series (given that pretty much everyone is evil, although he's the Big Bad), he will usually triumph in the end and screw over the winner by perverting his or her wish. (The key word is usually. With the exception of the third game and the reboot, there are a few endings where someone gets the better of him, although, in the reboot, his victories are all cases Karmic Justice.)
• Tyranny uses this as its starting point; with the Fatebinder's help, Kyros has conquered the entire known world. Whether or not the region most recently added to the empire stays part of it ultimately hinges on what the Fatebinder does after a rebellion breaks out.
• Undertale has some fun with this. The first time you try to go for the Neutral ending, Flowey shows up after the Final Boss to seize control of the six human souls and ascend to godhood before crashing the game. While the game does continue after that and the player does ultimately beat him, his Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory ensures that he will always keep coming back on every playthrough to deny the player the happy ending they want — he's savvy enough not to try fighting you again, since he lost the first time when the human souls rebelled against his control, and since they also have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory he knows they'd just do it again, but he still takes them away from you and ensures you can't use their power to cross the barrier. And don't think you can stop him by killing him after the boss fight — his death looks ripple-proof at first, but if you defeat Asgore again he'll reveal that, just like anyone else in this game, he got better when you reloaded to before you killed him.
  • The Genocide route has a completely different villain winning, and possibly one of the biggest villainous victories in all of fiction. By completing the Genocide route, the player fulfills the First Child's desire to kill everyone and everything in the game, culminating in the First Child killing the last two surviving characters themselves and then "killing" the player before erasing the entire world and once again crashing the game. The player can go back, only to find that the game is reduced to a black void, and in order to do anything else they player has to sell their soul to the First Child, which taints the rest of the game in such a way that, no matter what the player does, even if they achieve the Golden Ending, the First Child will always win in the end. FOREVER. Unless you delete that innocuous-looking system_information_963 file in your save folder.
• Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth: This is essentially what happens at the end of the Yamato civil war. Raiko is defeated, but reveals that he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist who merely wanted to teach the people of Yamato to learn independence and to make it a stronger country and not rely on the gods for help. During the process of the war, Anju had grown from a Spoiled Brat to a highly capable leader in order to oppose him. In the finale after being defeated by her, he gracefully admits his defeat and acknowledges that Anju would ultimately accomplish what he was originally aiming for and make Yamato a stronger nation.
• Velvet Assassin: Violette fails to kill her target, gets wounded, and hospitalized in the process. While the villagers protect her, her location is eventually revealed to the Nazis. When she escapes the hospital, she finds the Nazis exacting horrific punishment on the village that protected her by rounding up the villagers, locking them into a church, and setting it on fire. Violette attempts to rescue them but fails and the leader of the attack was the guy Violette failed to kill.
• Any video game ever that allows you to take on the role of a Villain Protagonist. (At least, that's the player's goal.)
  • Especially a game like Overlord, where no matter where on the moral compass you end up, the bad guy (you) wins.
  • Holds true for Streets of Rage where in two-player mode, if one player accepts the offer from the Big Bad to join him and the other player refuses, both players then have to fight to the death. From there, the surviving player is made the offer one more time. If the player says no and succeeds in defeating the Final Boss, the player becomes the new criminal overlord.
  • Both the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat series frequently gives the player the choice of playing an evil character, with an appropriately nasty ending if they beat the game. In fact, this is true of the vast majority of fighting games in general.
  • Not always. Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X, for example, has a subversion: if the player chooses Vile, they can't win the game, only finish it; the final battle is a Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, so they're still defeated in the ending cutscene. This is because X retaliates with his Arm Cannon, and Vile dies when the shot pierces his back, causing a total Downer Ending for Vile.
  • Akatsuki Blitzkampf also follows this, as it's set in a dystopian Crapsack World. Murakumo and Mycale/Perfecti attain world domination and/or destroy of all or some life on earth (surely at the expense of Akatsuki's life), Anonym is subjected to a Grand Theft Me by Mycale right after defeating Murakumo... and in a subversion Adler ends up Out-Gambitted and with his hands empty.
  • Ninja Master's - Hao Ninpo Cho has Oda Nobunaga's ending, in which he manages to go Taking Over The World for himself and for Haoh, the demon that has possessed him for the last years. Likewise, Kamui's ending has him killing Nobunaga and, following his Right Makes Might mentality, deciding to take over the nation and use Nobunaga's demonic sword to do so.
  • Shakedown: Hawaii ends with the corrupt CEO and his allies getting rid of the three equally ruthless characters who have opposed him and reestablishing Feeble Co. as a major corporation. He even wins an award while the rest of the public are none the wiser about his behavior.
• In Ending 1 and Ending 2 of VOCALOID no Natsuyasumi -Final 4 Days-, Miku and friends fail to stop the villains from hijacking the Main Computer at Crypton HQ and broadcast their "Cat Virus" to every computers and phones in the world. The virus also shown infecting their system.
• One of the major surprises in The New War for Warframe is that the Sentients outright win the titular conflict — Erra personally kills Teshin, the Lotus is cast into the Void, and after being stabbed In the Back by Ballas while grieving, the Operator follows her into the Void. The majority of the quest takes place after the Sentients finish conquering the system and create the empire known as Narmer, with Ballas as The Emperor.
• WarGames Defcon 1 have the player choosing between NORAD, the humans, or WOPR, a rogue supercomputer trying to wipe out all of mankind. Choosing the latter campaign and the players will have the best ending being destroying the rest of NORAD's defenses, allowing WOPR to enslave mankind.
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt:
  • Subverted in the Golden Ending. The Emperor Emreis manages to successfully Take Over the World without Radovid standing in his way, but he quickly abdicates the throne to Ciri, leaving the world in good hands.
  • Hearts of Stone, unless you talk to Shani and the professor before the final quest, the "default" ending of the expansion has Gaunter O'Dimm outwit Olgierd, claim his soul and walk away happily, though he does grant Geralt a boon (a magic saddle for Roach, a horn of plenty which gives unlimited food, an endless bottle of strong vodka, a considerable sum of money or some advice about Ciri that helps the player avoid the bad ending of the main story) for his trouble.
• In The Witch's House, the witch, Ellen, succeeds in stealing Viola's body, killing her, and taking her father for herself to gain the love she always wanted.
• Wizard101 has a shocking example considering its target audience. Morganthe uses the magic of Celestia to control the ancient comet Xibalba so it would crash into Azteca. After defeating the minion she leaves to play with you, the entire world of Azteca has shards of ice from Xibalba crashing into it and your main guild for the world can hope that maybe some might survive and to use the tale of their destruction to inspire the Light. This comes as a huge shock since although the arc villain may have completed their goal in most previous worlds, never had the villain caused much a permanent effect on the world after the player left.
• At the end of Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant, the titular Dark Savant pulls a Hostage for MacGuffin on your party. If you don't give him the MacGuffin, your party dies. If you do give it to him, well, now he has the Cosmic Keystone that is going to let him become all-powerful. Cue the Sequel Hook.
• Wolfenstein: The New Order has this at the very beginning of the game, and not just with any old bad guy, but with the worst bad guys of all...
• The World Ends with You is a strange example. Turns out that Joshua was the Composer and was planning to destroy Shibuya, possibly the world. Neku had ended up being Joshua's proxy in a game he had with the supposed Big Bad. Kitaniji was trying to save Shibuya through an Assimilation Plot while Neku was used to defeat him to win for Joshua. The interesting part is that Joshua has a Heel–Face Turn. He taught Neku a lot about other people during their week together, but Neku taught him a lot as well, cemented when he couldn't pull the trigger on Joshua, despite knowing how he was used. As a result Neku is a better person and alive again with his friends while Joshua allows things to continue as they did before.
• In World of Horror, if the Doom Track reached 100%, then the Old God that the player is trying to stop wakes up and causes The End of the World as We Know It.
• XCOM 2 opens 20 years after the Alien Invasion won during the events of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and extraterrestrials now rule the Earth.
• Xenosaga: Wilhelm technically won, having brought an evolution of the collective subconscious.
  • However, it's subverted because this can be considered a good thing for everyone overall since Wilhelm himself exists solely as a protector of humanity. His massive Gambit Roulette would've made him win no matter the outcome. He's just that good.
• Part of the backstory of Yandere Simulator: the reason Yandere-chan even exists is because her mother (arguably the Greater-Scope Villain), succeeded in killing at least one rival and kidnapping her Senpai. This game being what it is, too, any ending where Yandere-chan succeeds in getting Senpai would count as this. 1980s mode specifically explores this example: no matter how Ryoba chooses to eliminate her rivals for Jokichi's affections, unless the player is deliberately going for the non-canon F rank in which Ryoba is convicted of murder, she'll get away with murdering Sumire and, having been thwarted in her attempt to confess her love to Jokichi, will kidnap him.

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