Who Wants To Live Forever / Video Games

Franchise-specific

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy

• Defied in Final Fantasy III. The three immortal students received the gift of magic, the gift of dream, and the gift of mortality. Mr. Mortality is pissed, but the other two and their master firmly believe the ability to die was a great gift. It's later revealed the point was for him to be able to live amongst humanity, as the dreamer had to sleep all the time and the magic one was so powerful that he had to isolate himself above everyone else.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2 has Caius, who was "gifted" by Etro the Heart of Chaos due to his devotion to the seeress, Yeul. However, seeing her constant deaths and rebirths from the visions she receives made him feel like immortality was a curse, and sought a timeless world as a result. No one would ever die because the timeless world is also the world of the dead. He used that curse to his advantage where, regardless of what the protagonists do to stop him, all his plans lead him to winning in the end.
  • Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII expands on this: it turns out Caius's plan has Gone Horribly Right. Although he achieved a stop to the flow of time, he is trapped, unable to die, because the souls of the countless dead Yeuls now serve as the consciousness of the Chaos, and because many of them don't want to lose him, they prevent him from being able to die.
• According to Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus, this also affects Vincent Valentine.
• Depending on your interpretation, Fran's relationship with Balthier may also be influenced by the fact that her lifespan as a Viera is much longer than Balthier's human lifespan in Final Fantasy XII, though it is possible that Fran could be quite old in Hume years, but be close to Balthier's age in Viera years.
• Final Fantasy XI's Blue Mages probably have it the worst... for Final Fantasy at least. Blue Mages, being artificial super-soldiers developed by Aht Urghan alchemists to be employed in the 'Immortals' military unit, have to deal with soul-threating demons literally waiting to burst from their bodies for every waking moment of their career. Each member of the Immortals are ageless and able to live forever, with the only casualties belonging to Blue Mages that fail to restrain the beast within. Not to mention they're usually screwy in the head, save for important characters such as the Immortals leader, Raubahn, who is responsible for for the player character's transformation into a Blue Mage should he or she decide to become one. Still doesn't prevent the player from being K.O.'d by bunny rabbits sadly.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • The dragons of "Ostrakon Deka-okto" are stuck decaying in a poisoned Death World where no new life can survive, including their own dragonets. Because they're so long-lived, they'll be enduring this suffering for eons before they eventually expire.
  • The Plenty of "Ostrakon Deka-hepta" were actually doing just fine until Meteion asked what they lived for. Because they couldn't come up with an answer, they concluded that their life wasn't worth living, and decided to end it. For reasons not explained, they couldn't just end it on their own, and instead created a custom-designed being to end their lives — Ra-la, the Last Mercy, who roams the world and extracts the life from their bodies.
  • The Void — AKA: The Thirteenth — is a parallel dimension where the sudden infusion of Dark aether from the Ascians have thrown the laws of life and death out the window. Everything that lives in the Void cannot die in the sense that their aether cannot return to The Lifestream: whenever they suffer fatal damage, their aether is either consumed by another, or lingers until their physical form reconstitutes itself. The most powerful and long-lived entities in the Void have grown weary of what they view as an unending purgatory, and plan to invade the Source to free themselves from their pitiable existence. It is such that when two of the Arc Villain's dragons are defeated in the Source, they actually take solace in the fact that their aether is going to return to the Lifestream, and they can finally, truly die.
• Final Fantasy XV: The game's Big Bad, Ardyn Izunia, aka Ardyn Lucis Caelum was made unable to age or die as an unexpected side effect of absorbing daemons, which was done out of compassion to heal others. The Dawn of the Future novel reveals that this was planned in advance by Bahamut with the intention of Ardyn living on for a few thousand years to finally die at the hands of his brother's extremely distant heir.
• Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has the Gifted, which apart from special powers also seem to live forever (and are immune to deadly illnesses, apparently). Lennart, the first Gifted you meet when Adelle starts to accept that, pretty much became an outcast because of the whole "seeing your friends die" deal. Adelle had a similar experience when her whole village was wiped out by a plague that didn't affect her.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic the Hedgehog

• Sonic proves to be a firm proponent of this theory at the end of Sonic and the Black Knight. It may or may not have more to do with the fact that the woman who brought him into the story wanted to twist it into a Hell on earth to do so than ideology, but the conflict is still framed in a way that makes it clear where the developers of that game stand on that philosophical issue.
• The eponymous Anti-Hero of Shadow the Hedgehog is revealed to be immortal, which is why he's a 50 year old in a 15 year old body. Now then, ever wonder why Shadow is so gloomy BESIDES because of the death of his only friend? Think about it: He may not like them, but Sonic and his friends have grown on him in a relatively friendly relationship. Rouge and E-123 Omega are both his friends. Here's the problem: None of them are immortal, like he is. Although it will never be shown in game, they will all eventually age and die, leaving Shadow all by himself with possibly Omega being the only exception, and even then, machines can rust...
• Also part of the Sonic universe are small, child-like creatures called Chao, who either live forever by reincarnating over and over again or by becoming a Chaos Chao. Subverted, though, because Chao are mentally like infants forever, suggesting that they don't mind living forever.

Star Wars

Star Wars

• Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel Star Wars: The Old Republic both feature a Rakatan prisoner who spend millennia in a mind prison. His original body had long decayed, everyone he ever knew had died, his civilization collapsed and his species almost became extinct. He still desperately wishes to get out by occupying another body, since it will finally allow him to die.
• There is also Darth Sion, the appropriately named Lord of Pain, from Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. He survived the fall of Malachor by the sheer power given to him by his pain, and it has kept him alive since then. By the time you meet him, his pain and will is pretty much the only thing keeping his body from crumbling to dust. And as you might expect, his existence is agonizing, to the point that the only way to properly defeat him is to convince him that it's not worth it.
  Exile: Was your life worth living?
• Lord Scourge in Star Wars: The Old Republic was The Dragon to Emperor Vitiate, who made him immortal at the cost of his senses. He could no longer taste, smell, touch, see color, or experience emotion and his sole purpose in life became getting back at The Emperor for it.

Touhou Project

Touhou Project

• The cast contains plenty of immortals, but Fujiwara no Mokou is the only one who got hit with this trope. She impulsively drank the Hourai Elixir over a thousand years ago and was ostracized by society until she decided to live as a hermit. Then she completely snapped and mindlessly attacked anything that found her. Then she spent three hundred years in an apathetic depression. But Mokou shook it off when she made her way to Gensokyo, where she rediscovered her archenemy and fellow immortal Kaguya Houraisan. Now she and Kaguya pass the time by pointlessly murdering each other, which is probably a step up from the majority of her existence.
• Kaguya herself (the same Kaguya as from the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, by the way. Mokou's grudge stems from Kaguya humiliating Mokou's father with an Impossible Task) was exiled from Lunar society for drinking the Hourai elixir, as were Chang'e (a princess from a Chinese tale, currently kept imprisoned in the Lunar Capital) and Eirin (for inventing the elixir). Why? Well, the Lunarians are big on preventing anything impure from reaching the moon, and something that reminds them of death (or its absence) falls under that category. The mere fact that humans from the impure Earth once landed there was a major blow to them, which is why one of their enemies is Wearing a Flag on Her Head.
• Marisa Kirisame is an Immortality Seeker, but is concerned that this trope might be true (meeting Mokou might have done that). Thus she has rejected using the Hourai Elixir, since it grants Complete Immortality, and she wants to leave open the possibility of dying just in case she gets bored with life.
• A disturbingly large amount of doujin looks at the fate of Touhou residents with vast age differences, such as the aforementioned Mokou and the mortal Keine, or the Scarlet Devil Mansion's owner Remilia and its probably-human chief maid Sakuya. Called "The Tragedy of Long Life" on Danbooru, and for good reason.

Other Examples

A-C

• In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura this is stated as a reason that mature elves do not live amongst human society, "In maturity, elves tend to settle down and keep to their own; it may be that burying several generations of short-lived friends and spouses causes them to lose the taste for human company." -Arcanum manual.
• Assassin's Creed: Odyssey: Becoming the bearer of the Staff of Hermes makes the Eagle Bearer functionally immortal. Alethia warns them ahead of time this will suck, and by the modern day they've come to agree, handing it over to Layla so they can finally die. Assassin's Creed: Valhalla shows Kassandra in an interim stage of this, having spent the last fourteen hundred years or so having to move about from place to place to avoid drawing suspicion or attention. She's not in any hurry to die, but she doesn't have a lot to live for either.
• The Holy Grail in Azrael's Tear is quite wonderful. The stuff of which it is composed (grailstone) heals wounds, cures sickness, and grants immortality. It even mutates the body and warps the mind, and if you're lucky enough to be injured beyond healing and do die, you still won't really die as long as your remains are exposed to grailstone, trapping your spirit nearby as a ghost. Possibly forever.
• Discussed in Baldur's Gate III. When visiting the home of Old Soldier Jaheira and entering her basement, the Player Character can find a scroll of hers detailing a druidic ritual that would grant her eternal youth. When questioned, Jaheira states that she merely kept it as a precaution and that she firmly believes No Man Should Have This Power after having fought corrupted Immortality Seekers like Sarevok Anchev, Jon Irenicus, and Ketheric Thorm. Having found a worthy successor in the PC, she's content with Passing the Torch and leaving the rest up to fate. Barbarian Hero Karlach, who doesn't expect to live much longer herself, agrees wholeheartedly that it's what you do with the time you have that matters.
• In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Gabriel aka Dracula is hit hard by this.
  • The Big Bad (seemingly) of Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, Walter Bernhard, is a downplayed variation; he finds eternal life incredibly boring, and makes a habit of inciting hunters to come after him in a cat-and-mouse game via standard I Have Your Wife ploys (it's not a stupid plan because Walter is Nigh-Invulnerable to everything except the Vampire Killer). When Mathias/Dracula turns up near the end of the game and offers Leon Belmont immortality, Leon recalls his dead betrothed Sara Trantoul and bluntly turns Mathias down, stating "Eternity without her would be nothing but emptiness".
• Before you begin learning the truth, the initial prize of the tournament in Chaos Rings is Immortality. This is wrong in several ways: 1: You had to kill 5 other loving couples in order to get it. 2. NOBODY save one person wanted it, and were fighting for their lives, not for the prize. 3. In a rather surprising Mind Screw, even if you win the tournament, you will be given immortality, only to be sent back in time with your partner 10,000 years to the past to raise a human race that will be destined to fight a Time destroying being called the Qualia. And of course, 4: it was artificial Immortality that couldn't survive against fatal wounding.
  • A sad, cruel example of this trope are the combatants Olgar and his wife Vahti. They were the previous winners of the tournament, and to win this "wonderful" prize, he had to kill his two best friends, who happened to be the parents of his partner and wife. Then AFTER they win, they live a sad, sad life where their children age and die while they don't, and have to endure this for 10,000 years until they are SUMMONED TO THE SAME TOURNAMENT AGAIN BECAUSE THE HUMAN RACE THEY CREATED WASN'T STRONG ENOUGH, so not only did they have to kill their friends/parents and watch their children grow up and die, they have to participate in this tournament once more, this time against THEIR DESCENDANTS, who they see almost as their children. The result? Two cold, tired, sad, Death Seekers.
  Olgar: ...death is our only salvation.
• In Crusader Kings II, characters can become The Ageless through a rare event and become immune to old age and disease. However, they can still die by violent means, including by suicide. The flavour text for the suicide decision for immortals seems to be a case of Didn't Think This Through for them: "At first the prospect of eternal life seemed to be the sweetest dream imaginable. In hindsight, eternity is a very long time.''
  • The trope is referenced as the name of an event that leads to the failure of the immortality event chain.
• In Crysis 2, Jacob Hargreave is in fact in a persistent vegetative state, effectively hooked up to a speaker and able to act through computers. His life sounds nothing short of hellish, as he cannot move, and can never sleep. It is heavily implied that his situation partially informs his desperation to get the suit, but he accepts the suit's rejection with relatively good grace. He commits suicide shortly thereafter.

D-F

• In The Exiled Prince, the second installment of the Dark Parables series for PC, the antagonist is The Frog Prince, who is still alive centuries after his fairy tale was said to have taken place. As it turns out, he's miserable because he keeps outliving the princesses he loves, and all he really wants is to die.
• In Dark Souls, anyone branded with the Dark Sign is turned into an immortal undead. All undead will slowly lose their humanity and go Hollow, becoming mindless zombies hellbent on attacking anything that isn't also Hollow. All undead characters, without exception, hate their existence and view it as unending suffering, to the point that in the third game, pilgrims from the undead city of Londor come to Lothric in the hopes that getting close to the last vestiges of the First Flame will finally allow them to die.
  Yoel of Londor: Please... undo my shackles... please... grant me death...
• Talia in Dark Watch uses this as a Battle Cry to rally the other agents into battle.
• Death Door: The Last Lord of Doors wanted to achieve immortality, so they imprisoned Death in its own door so they could get eternal life, as well as many others who followed suit, including the Grey Crow, the Witch of Urns, the Frog King, Betty, and Steadhone the Gravedigger (the latter being kind and benevolent in giving the dead their decent funerals). However, since these beings live in this way, they live on past their expiration dates that their souls and bodies become consumed by their own evil and corruption; and it is up to the Reaper itself to free their souls from their terrible fates.
• Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings: Greed states that being immortal isn't very fun in retrospect when you're being repeatedly hunted down. Especially not fun as Resurrective Immortality was forcibly inflicted by the Ancient Superweapon on regular people.
• Destiny 2: Most Guardians are of the opinion that Living Forever Is Awesome, but the Drifter disagrees heartily. Over the centuries since the Collapse, he's seen and experienced the worst of what life has to offer, leaving him firmly believing that immortality is a burden that threatens Loss of Identity. He greatly envies the survival instincts of regular people who live their one life to the fullest, while the Guardians needlessly throw away countless of theirs. His relationship with his Ghost is a distant one, treating it like a tool and refusing its assistance whenever possible.
• In Diablo II, the mage Ormus gives a short speech that's similar to the one from Vampire Hunter D during a quest related to the lost treasure of a sage who sought immortality:
  "What he [Ku Y'leh] did not realize is that there is no life beyond death. There is only life. Once it is prolonged unnaturally, it can become a living hell."
  • As a result of the same quest, Meshif muses:
    "Can you imagine having to get up to piss every night for the rest of eternity?"
• In Diablo IV, Timue struck a bargain with the Tree of Whispers, extending her lifespan in exchange for knowledge. She has long since grown weary of life, but the Tree will not let her escape their deal.
• This is a constant, omnipresent motif in LucasArts' adventure game The Dig: Stranded on a deserted alien planet, a group of astronauts discover crystals that can bring back the dead, and use it to resuscitate their fallen comrade, who turns insane and addicted to the crystals in the process. Meanwhile, they discover that the former residents of the desert planet found other means to make themselves immortal, but never found a way to undo this.
  You've showed us all the pathway back to life, to reality... to a place where some day we will die yes, but where we'll have a life before we die!
• In Dragon Ball Fighter Z, one of the wishes players can choose in the heat of battle is immortality. However, heroes tend to react with annoyance over such a wish.
• In Drakengard, Seere's pact with Golem makes him lose his "time," meaning that he will never age. This wouldn't normally be a downside, except that Seere is six years old.
• Dual Blades/Slashers: The Power Battle: Alperen is a warrior who is immortal for as long as he is holding the eponymous Dual Blades, but by the time of the games setting he has become miserable from his prolonged existence and organizes a tournament for the purpose of finding a Worthy Opponent who can defeat and kill him.
• In Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou, reincarnation is a very important point, so dying is essential to do. However, at a certain point, you have a chance at gaining immortality. If you get it, you're treated to an endless loop of all the game's images and movies, and the only way to get out is to exit the game. This is the closest to a game over in the whole game, too!
• This is the Underking's stance in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, at least for himself. Thanks to an accident (of vague details, but the Underking's fate doesn't seem to have been intended either way) the Underking is a lich-like being that cannot die unless reunited with his heart. His goal in Daggerfall is to do just that.
• In ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights, through his research of the Blighted, Faden managed to create a Deathless Elixir from the blighted flesh of Fretia the White Priestess which would turn anyone who drank it into an immortal. This allowed the newly christened Immortal Knights to fight on even ground with the ever-regenerating Blighted but most of them would lament their immortality, seeing themselves as no different than the Blighted they fought (with Ulv in particular being denied his wish for a warrior's death). This Elixir would also result in them transforming into monsters and losing their minds once the Rain started.
• A key theme of Everhood: After finding the titular Everhood, the realm of immortality, everyone has lived there for countless years ^note  one character took to counting the years in tally marks in a hallway under their home, it takes 4 real life hours to reach the end of the hallway, and people have estimated this at nearly 8 billion years, and this itself is long after they got bored and gave up on counting, and who knows how long they were there before and after they started . Most of the cast are bored out of their minds and constantly doing whatever random nonsense they can to kill time and then forgetting them due to The Fog of Ages only to do them again, or dipping into playing incredibly dangerous and immoral "pranks" because it can't be lethal, so it's all in good fun, with some of the first to arrive being the worst off, clearly suffering various mental ailments. Further complicating matters is that while there is a way to die in Everhood, this doesn't free your soul, instead turning it into a trapped Lost Spirit unable to interact with any living people and unable to move on to what comes next. Once Red regains their arm and the ability to kill with it in the second half of the game, Frog and Everhood itself asks you to Mercy Kill the entire cast, partially for the reasons above, and also because everyone has to die to free the Lost Spirits to move on. Many welcome death, and while quite a few resist because they're in the "forgot immortality sucks" phase or never hit that phase to start with, once everyone is dead and they're waiting to move on to the afterlife or the wheel of reincarnation, they concede that immortality really did end up being hell, and they're ultimately thankful for what you did.
• By Fallout 3, Harold — a ghoul who has been alive since before the first game — has turned into a Wise Tree when the plantlike growth on his head, nicknamed "Bob", overtook his body. While never quite to the point of And I Must Scream since he has the company and friendship of a small tribe that worships him as a deity that he can talk with, the fact that he is basically rooted to the ground and unable to move has made him depressed to the point that, when the opportunity arrives, he asks the Lone Wanderer to help him end his life.
• Fallout 4 has Emogene Cabot, the only member of her family who doesn't think Living Forever Is Awesome. Her private terminal details her gradual boredom after 400 years of existence.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • Scathach has no interest in actually dying, and actually seems to slightly enjoy the idea of being able to not die of old age. She just wants to stop being immortal because she's a Blood Knight, and she's realized her fights are no longer exciting since she's never in any danger.
  • Explored in Chapter 5.2 of the Lostbelt Arc, Olympus. The humans living in Olympus want for nothing, and are immortal. They will live forever (even if they are killed, the gods will simply resurrect them on the spot), and all their needs are provided for. The player meets two Olympian "children" named Adele and Makarios, who appear to be in the mid-teens but are actually over ten thousand years old, who joined up with a rebellion against the gods because they are so utterly bored that they're willing to consign themselves to oblivion rather than keep living like this.
• The final cutscene for the "Golden Freddy" mode in Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location reveals that Michael Afton is very aware that he should not be alive after both being gutted by and vomiting out Ennard.
  Michael Afton: Something is wrong with me. I should be dead....but I'm not.
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn feature Lehran/Sephiran, one of the heroes of the war in which the goddess Yune was sealed away, still alive after all of these centuries but without any of his laguz abilities because he fathered a child with the beorc Altina. He responds by inciting a war that will wake up Yune and call down Ashera's judgement on the world, destroying everything, because he thought it was the only way he could die.
  • To a certain degree in those two games, Branded/Parentless (the children of laguz/beorc unions) live far longer than beorc. Since the side they get this from can instinctively sense them (laguz), and they are pariahs in both societies, this trope ends up applying. Reference the relationship between Micaiah and Sothe once you've played through the entire game.
  • In Awakening, Tiki and Nowi agree that outliving your friends sucks, to say the least. Tiki even outrights states, referring to her friends from 2000 years ago:
  Tiki: That's why I feel a heaviness when I gaze up at night. I'm trapped down here on the earth, when all those I've loved are way up in the sky. So far way, beyond my reach... I wonder if they ever look down at me too.

G-I

• Genshin Impact explores immortality and the problems with it through a varied cast with lifespans of centuries or even eons, living with or apart from mortals. It adds a layer of horror with the concept of Erosion, the slow breakdown of self that immortal beings may suffer that seems to have similarities to dementia in mortals. Even the Archons are not immune to it, and deal with the threat of it in very different ways that impact the nations they rule. Many of the immortal characters are veterans of the Archon Wars, centuries of unrest when gods fought throughout the world to claim one of the seven thrones. During this era, many gods were slain and those that survived are haunted by the terrible losses they suffered, in particular the Adepti of Liyue. In Inazuma, the Yōkai are long-lived beings, with several notable stories involving the tragedy of friendship between mortals and Yokai. And then there are the pure-blooded people of Khaenri'ah, who were cursed with immortality when their homeland was destroyed by the Heavenly Principles. One survivor went mad from watching his family transformed into mindless monsters, while he himself began to suffer from Erosion. In his rage and grief, he would start the Abyss Order with others cursed by the gods.
• In Guilty Gear, the protagonist is Sol Badguy, who was turned into a powerful, immortal Gear against his will. He has sought revenge for centuries against the Big Bad who did it to him. It's implied that beyond his vendetta, poor Sol doesn't really have much reason to live, but he's a superhuman Person of Mass Destruction who can't age and is very hard to kill.
  • As of -STRIVE-, Sol's story ends with him settling his vendetta with That Man (who is actually Good All Along) and losing his Gear powers and becoming a mortal man again, albeit one with Super-Strength and Super-Toughness. He fakes his own death and spends his remaining years living peacefully with Aria, running a little shop.
• In the second Inyouchuu game, Ouka and Kikuka have been cursed with agelessness and immortality by Meiouki, and are pursuing him to have the curse reversed. In the bad endings, they remain immortal and ageless but are kept as sex / breeding slaves by him.

J-L

• The flash game known as Kill Me is about an immortal superhero who can resurrect after death. He has to navigate a warehouse containing an highly toxic elixir that will... well...
• Heinrich in Knight's Contract was made immortal by Gretchen right as he carried out her execution. He's spent the following century searching for a way to end his immortal existence since living with the guilt of what he did during the witch hunts and being hunted as an abomination has become too much to bear. His initial reason for agreeing to work with the revived Gretchen is that she agreed to end his immortality when her mission is complete. The end of the game has him changing his mind, deciding that he'd rather keep fighting evil alongside her.
• In Legacy of Kain, vampires were given a three-fold curse of bloodlust, sterility, and immortality by their enemies, the Hylden. Because they are no longer part of the natural cycle of birth, death and rebirth, the Elder God has come to regard them as unnatural and seeks their extinction. some of the more religious vampires are known to have committed suicide in an attempt to regain his favor.
• Lost Odyssey may be the most well fleshed out video game example of this trope in recent memory. Main character Kaim Argonar (and supporting immortals Ming, Seth, and his wife Sarah), realize fully and consciously that living forever sucks, and the game is wholly capable through the many unlockable Dreams of a Thousand Years (essentially short stories with some aural assistance) of convincing the player that it sucks too. Kaim has lived for a thousand years, and he's watched hundreds of loved ones die, including his own children, and killed thousands of enemy soldiers in battle. Worse yet for him and the other three "good" immortals, the main villain is the only other immortal on the planet and a power-hungry maniac hell bent on using his eternal life to control the planet. Worse still for the 4 "good" immortals, he's pretty savvy as to how their immortality works: they cannot be killed. Period. Kaim survives a meteor impact at the beginning of the game, and the others have all survived one catastrophe or another. So the villain does something even worse: to each of them, he uses their most beloved friends and family, and his considerable power and, through a combination of mind control and supreme manipulative ability, inflicts psychological pain worse than death, after which he seals their memories, rendering them (in their own words) "walking corpses" who have no purpose in life and can only wander, fight, work, whatever, burdened by the knowledge that they'll never get to go to the afterlife and the emotional pain of the losses he inflicted on them. After all of this the game's ending subverts the theme, as Kaim and two of the other good immortals settle contentedly into their immortal lives, reasoning that eternity isn't so bad after all. It helps that two of them are married to one another, and the third, although her husband is mortal, is a queen with a whole country to keep herself busy with throughout the centuries to come. All this was enabled by the Heroic Sacrifice of the fourth immortal who pulled the aforementioned Big Bad back into their home dimension where they aren't immortal- their immortality in the main world is due to differences in physical laws.
• Love of Magic: The ultimate fate of most immortals is to decide there's Nothing Left to Do but Die. Chloe talks about how she finds things to keep her interested in living, most of the time.
  Chloe: I've always been quite good at keeping it at bay: taking pleasure in the small things, because I know all I'll ultimately find in the big things is frustration. Over time every brilliant political scheme looks the same... but there is always new joy to be found in a perfect glass of Scotch, the smell of freshly brewed coffee, or the beauty of an exquisite sculpture.
• Ayano from Luminous Arc 2 considered immortality to be a cursed. Although she initially becomes one with the help of the Big Bad, Mage Queen Elicia, it doesn't take long for her to realised that life itself became pointless without death.
  • In contrast, Elicia has a reason. Althea points out that Elicia just wants to stop the suffering in the world, but her method is wrong and makes more people suffer.
  • After they defeat her Shadows. Ayano finally feel the pace of time again.
• In Lunar: The Silver Star and its sequel Lunar: Eternal Blue, the character Nall, the White Dragon of Althena, is forced to deal with this trope. In the first game, Nall is a party member; he becomes good friends with all the heroes. He returns for the sequel as an NPC, eventually revealing that he misses his old friends deeply. He helps Ruby, the Red Dragon, face the fact that she will outlive her friends too. This affected Althena too, until she finally figured out a way to stop it by reincarnating as Luna. Lucia is due to either live Nall's life, or Althena's. It isn't clear which she's going to be stuck with. Still, the goddesses seem to have a choice, where the dragons don't.

M-O

• The asari of Mass Effect 'only' live around a thousand years, which is considerably longer than most organic species in that setting. They are philosophical about outliving friends and lovers, saddened but not devastated by the experience, but there are two occasions where different asari express a little of this trope. Matriarch Aethyta talks about a millenium-long lifespan giving her a view of the galaxy as always violent and full of tragedies and failure, with good news being the rare exception, about suddenly finding that she's lived long enough that no one else remembers things she was there for. Liara, realizing that the previous cycle's Reaper invasion took centuries, says that she's only a hundred and nine and she could live to see this entire thing through. The Extended Cut's Refusal ending suggests that she does. Shepard can tease her for the 'only', and she'll admit that it's a strange thing to complain about. She used to feel sorry for shorter-lived species, but now she has come to believe that it's something of a mercy for them.
• This is The Punishment for Dr. Weil of the Mega Man Zero series, in addition to eternal exile to the wasteland that he created. Apparently, the ones who gave him this punishment weren't counting on him coming back, seeking revenge. In Zero 4, his regenerating cyborg body lets him endure getting hit with the city-leveling Kill Sat laser of Ragnarok head-on, getting blasted by Zero after merging with said Kill Sat's core for a powerup, getting blasted by Zero again after fusing with the remains of said Kill Sat and then the entire station burning and tearing apart in the atmosphere from the failed Colony Drop he tried...and in Mega Man ZX, it turns out his consciousness survived inside the shattered remnants of Ragnarok as Model W for over two hundred years.
• Monster Girl Quest/Monster Girl Quest Paradox RPG: Despite it's H-game themes, it has some pretty somber moments in which some characters express deep regret of living a long life. This is especially true for poor Sphinx as she's had to live hundreds of years without her beloved husband that was the first King of Sabasa who refused his wife's offer to be converted as a monster so that he could die peacefully as a regular human being, although she does reconnect lovingly with her descendants at the end of part 3 of the original MGQ Trilogy. Paradox has a very saddening moment in which the party is wondering why there's a sole stone grave in the meadow in which Gnome makes her desert oasis at. The truth is revealed in a later cutscene in which it details Gnome made an unforgettable friend with a child, that ends tragically when she eventually becomes an elderly woman and dies of old age, with Gnome remaining physically unchanged due to her nature as one of the four elemental spirits that makes her immortal, although she still forever remembers her dear friend even after many countless years pass, hence the sole grave stone in her meadow...
• Porky Minch, the main villain in Mother 3, is an odd, but particularly powerful, example of this. Screwing with time travel has aged him, previously a child no older than 13 or so, past the point where he can die naturally. For one reason or another he is stuck in the time period that the game takes place in, and although he pretty much rules what is left of the world, he's still, in the end, a little kid who wants his mom and the closest thing he had to a friend, Ness, giving the viewer sympathy towards a character one has been built up to loathe both for his actions in the previous game, and for the terrible atrocities the player experiences first hand in this game.
  • The entire plot is also caused by a large and convoluted attempt to destroy the world, leaving Porky the only thing left alive in it, giving him the closest thing to death he can possibly achieve, but in the end he is trapped inside an inescapable capsule forever, which achieves essentially the same effect.
• Mystery Case Files:
  • In Broken Hour, it turns out Harold and his daughter Meredith both are very unhappy about the immortality provided by their mechanical hearts. Meredith wanted to die because of her beloved children's deaths, and the heart was implanted on her just when she was about to join her children in death. She went completely deranged as a result, and sees her "life" as a string of meaningless broken hours during which she is alive and her children are not. Her father is not happy either, as seing his daughter in this state is heartbreaking. He even refers their eternal life as a curse.
    • Although this doesn't stop them from murdering countless innocents to keep that immortality. Meredith seems notably very enraged when the Master Detective is shutting off the machine powering her Immortality Inducer.
  • Given Richard Galloway's last words in The Black Veil, it seems he did not like his immortality as much as the player thought through the game...
  Richard Galloway: "Dear Master Detective, if you only knew what a curse it is when death comes for everyone but you..."
• In the Neverwinter Nights mod Shadowlords 5 one of the tests given by the villain, whose obsession was life at any cost, was to preserve or destroy the machine ensuring that everyone residing in a certain idyllic little hamlet had eternal life - whether they wanted it or not.
• Claude from Octopath Traveler II is an immortal man who is tired of his immortal life, so he forms the Blacksnakes from impregnating a lot of women in his life and forces its members to kill each other so one of them could be strong enough to kill him, and become his "masterpiece" in the process.
• Odin Sphere has the Pooka's Curse, which causes the afflicted individual to become a rabbit-like creature that never ages. The Pooka want to remove the curse so they can become normal mortal humans again. In the unlockable final scene of the game, this trope is part of a conversation between Cornelius and Velvet, when they are finally given the chance to return to human form. Cornelius notes that if they stay in Pooka form, they'll live forever. Velvet replies by explaining the reasons she wouldn't want to live forever, convincing Cornelius to return to human form as well. The curse is broken, and they embrace.

P-Q

• In Planescape: Torment, the player character cannot die (unless he pisses off a god or some other damn fool act), but instead returns to the starting point - the Mortuary, or sometimes some other location - every time his health drops to zero, and regenerates there. The catch is every time he cheats death, another person somewhere in the universe dies in his place. Plus there's the whole memory-loss thing—you start out the game with a case of complete amnesia, and eventually find out it's because if you die in the Fortress of Regrets, where The Transcendent One lives, he wipes your memory to stop you from trying to make yourself mortal again. In every past life you tried to uncover your identity, eventually wound up facing The Transcendent One, got your memory wiped, and started again from square one. The goal of the game is initially to recover the Nameless One's memory, and eventually to cure his immortality. The Nameless One's brand of immortality is so awful that explaining how it works will convince Vhailor to stop trying to bring the Nameless One to justice if he finds out his true identity, since he believes that the Nameless One is already being punished enough.
• In Pokémon X and Y, AZ is a Death Seeker who has been Walking the Earth for 3,000 years after killing hundreds of Pokémon just to revive his best friend. In X, After Lysandre's plan is foiled and AZ's machine is drained of energy, Lysandre declares that while he can no longer use it to kill everyone, it still has enough energy left to make someone immortal. He promptly decides to curse the player and their friends with immortality so they'll see what the world becomes without his plan to "save" it (in Y, he threatens to kill them).
• Pokémon Legends: Arceus: The author of the Old Verses laments several times how their Mission from God requires them to outlive all their loved ones, even when the entirety of Hisui becomes depopulated of humans, until their mission is complete.
• In Poker Night 2, the conversation at the table can move to immortal jellyfish and what an unfulfilling existence they must lead. Claptrap finds himself depressed by the notion that, as a robot, he's functionally immortal as well. Sam reassures him that someone will kill him eventually, to which Brock personally attests.
  Claptrap: You know, as long as I get fresh batteries every couple hundred years, I'm pretty sure that I'm effectively immortal. That's really depressing!
  Sam: I wouldn't worry about it. The way you're going, I'm pretty sure someone'll put you of your misery long before the ennui of immortality kicks in.
  Claptrap: Promise?
  Brock: Trust me, I'll pull the trigger myself.
• In Portal 2, GLaDOS makes a comment about how after Chell dies, she will consider working on reanimation, implying that she will force Chell to be her test subject forever.
  • Though on other occasions the insane computer gloats about how she'll outlive Chell.
  • An alternate version of Cave Johnson underwent a similar version of the procedure that created GLaDOS, making him not only immortal but super-intelligent. He quickly becomes bored with living, especially because his conscious now working at CPU-speed means diversions such as reading a book now takes him mere seconds and so does re-writing said book to try and stay occupied. He's also upset that he can no longer scratch his nose, and ultimately turns homicidal out of frustration.

R-T

• RealityMinds: Kvena was initially fine with her situation as a ghost, but goes mad because there are very few people who can interact with her. She eventually starts antagonizing Silvana in order to goad the latter into exorcising her.
• The Secret World:
  • The mysterious hermit Khalid suffers from a mild form of this; he doesn't angst frequently about his immortality, but he does bemoan the fact that while his brother has escaped into death, death escaped him. Apparently, what gets him down about eternal life is the fact that it gets so repetitive - and sooner or later, you can't help noticing that the same horrors keep cropping up.
  • Having been forced to spend eternity preventing Akhenaten from ever awakening, the Sentinels are not having much fun with their immortality: as if being made into statues and giving up all mortal attachments wasn't bad enough, they're also stuck in the middle of an isolated valley with nothing to do and nobody to talk to except each other - and occasionally their father Ptahmose. Needless to say, arguments and breakdowns are very frequent among them. Easily the worst-affected is Moutemouia, who was forced to abandon her own children in order to become a Sentinel; driven to terminal depression by the strain of her duties, she's latched onto her youngest brother Houy as a substitute for her own long-dead children, and reflects that without him there'd be nothing to stop her from just... letting go.
  • Octavian suffers heavily from this: having been made immortal during his seventies, he's had to live with the same aches and pains for the last two thousand years; the fact that he's had to see so many of his friends and loved ones die - sometimes at his own hands - has only driven him deeper into misery, and his failures weigh very heavily on him. As such, he refuses to get involved in the players' quest, on the grounds that the incoming apocalypse might finally be able to kill him, and it takes an intervention from the players and Emilia to make him start caring again. For good measure, it's established that this trope was intentional from the very beginning, as Octavian was actually cursed with immortality by Lilith as punishment for ruining her plans.
  • A surprise bit of lore in Issue #14 reveals that the Stationmaster is actually suffering from this, having been hiding his depression with his usual Stiff Upper Lip.
  We see the Stationmaster. The tremors disturb his careful order. But he carries on. He keeps calm. He works as he has always worked, as he always will work. Our kindly Sisyphus. You cannot even see the tears behind his smile. "How much longer?" he asks, when no one is looking. And the silence answers forever.
  • Lorraine Mailard of The Park is revealed to be suffering very heavily from this during the 2015 Halloween mission "The Seven Silences." Having been press-ganged into becoming a Council agent and forcibly bonded with one of the Bees, she's been suffering near-constantly from the feedback; plus, the fact that The Park ended with her being forced to murder her own son has left her crushed under the weight of her own guilt. Needless to say, she's spent the last thirty years gripped by suicidal depression, but because she's Bee-imbued like the players, she just keeps coming back. The crux of the mission involves Lorraine becoming the first of her kind to successfully commit suicide for good... but unfortunately, the ending might have just undone that.
• In Shadowverse, Urias' shadow voices his fears that there will be nobody worthy of sating his desire for battle, leaving his long life an empty one.
• In the Shin Megami Tensei multiverse, there is one God and one Lucifer, but an infinite number of constantly-recycling worlds. Generally, denizens of the worlds are stuck in their home plane, as per God's design, and only demons defy His Will by moving among worlds through the interconnected Interdimensional Sewer System of Hell (Labyrinth of Amala or whatever). But there is one person that Lucifer knows about who is not a demon, but nonetheless moves throughout these multiple dimensions. This person is cursed by God to witness the destruction and rebirth of every world. He is immortal, but has no memory of his original life and is incapable of changing anyone's fate. Fanon, supported by a lot of in-game evidence, suggests that he is Aleph, the main character of the second game, who committed the ultimate sin by punching God in the face.
• Elh of Solatorobo wishes she could age like her friends. She gets her wish as a result of the final battle.
• In SoulBlazer, the Big Bad Deathtoll is a believer of this and want to teach it to the hero apparently by killing him again and again. It might explain his actions in the game.
• In Soulcalibur III, one of the fighters and the main mover of the plot is Zasalamel, who discovered the secret to eternal Reincarnation but at this point is tired of life. He pulls a vaguely defined plan to use the combined power of Soul Edge and Soul Calibur in an attempt to end his endless cycle of lives. This is because he found out in one of his lives that getting Soul Edge wasn't enough. He was just corrupted and enslaved by the sword before being killed normally. His reincarnation is also coupled with a soul-rending agony that he is put through every time he comes back; which seems pretty often to a man of such advanced age. This is inverted in Soul Calibur IV, when while being resurrected, Zasalamel glimpses a vision of modern civilization, and decides that he wants to live to see all of humanity's accomplishments for himself. He then starts seeking a way to become truly immortal, rather than just reincarnating all the time (because the aforementioned soul-rending agony still sucks even when Living Forever Is Awesome). The cutscene of him being a rich big shot in modern New York City shows that he eventually succeeds.
• In the Suikoden series, one of the side effects of possessing a True Rune is being preserved at the age at which you acquired the rune. Some people revel in their immortality, while others, (like Ted) view it as a curse. The mysterious Flame Champion, bearer of the True Fire Rune, decides to seal it away for 50 years so he can marry and grow old with his sweetheart, Sana. (The fact that the Rune had gotten out of control and blown up a large portion of the countryside might have had some part to play in that decision as well). This didn't work out so well for the Flame Champion, as he died while still young a few years later. Whether this was a result of sealing the Rune or natural causes is unspecified.
  • Given that the True Runes are supposed to be aware and possess the nasty tendency of not only snaking on your OWN soul if you happen to get killed at some later point but many having unfortunate side effects as well. Like Soul Eater taking the souls of friends who die near you, Sun driving you insane, Punishment eating your soul^note a particularly nasty one, since while it does stop the host's aging like other True Runes, they don't get a chance to enjoy that since most bearers have their souls eaten within a few years at most, Blue Moon turning you into a vampire (though the current bearer is a fairly nice one), and so on. It's no wonder that some people come to view it as a curse.
• Sunless Sea: For the most part, the Immortality ambition runs on the opposite trope. However, right near the end, one of the final options to reconsider your plans brings up the fact that Immortality begets envy, and leads only to disaster from those who don't have it. If it weren't so, you wouldn't be there besieging the most powerful faction in the Neath shelling their rulers' palace to nothing (with the rulers still inside) in order to claim it from them. Immortality envy effectively lead the Seven, and you, to effectively destroy the entire Presbyterate, after all. Your captain can then decide they'd rather have a pleasant, long life than actual immortality, and betrays the Seven in order to make the besieged Presbyterate give them their own kingdom in thanks.
• In Sword of the Stars the Liir are immortal but grow continuously and eventually get so large that gravity can't support their bulk, and for some reason would rather commit suicide than live forever. It's because a group of very old Elders who became known as the Suul'ka (loosely translated: lord of winter/enemy/monster) enslaved their children and forced them through an industrial revolution to develop the technology needed to survive in space for eternity The living weapon the Liir created to fight them, The Black, is another example. It is another Liir Elder who uses the same technology as the Suul'ka to live in space. The Black has sworn itself to wiping out the Suul'ka before allowing itself to die.
• Sophie in the PS3 port of Tales of Graces. Her knowledge of the fact that's she's immortal, and will thus outlive the friends she's grown to cherish begins trouble her greatly during the f arc. She eventually finds peace in this fact once she adopts the view her friends will never truly die as long as she remembers them.
• While technically ageless rather than immortal, Kratos Aurion from Tales of Symphonia doesn't seem too happy about the situation. To be fair, that's partially due to guilt over everything he and Cruxis have done with eternal youth, as well as grief over losing his family. The other ageless characters don't seem nearly as bothered by it. Interestingly, Tales of Symphonia also lacks the elf immunity clause, with Genis sadly reflecting in a skit how he's going to outlive all his friends.
• Total Annihilation: Kingdoms: Garacaius was the immortal ruler of Darien, he grew tired of being immortal and gave up his immortality and sailed of to the land of Creon which he made it into a Steampunk nation to build his crypt.

U-W

• The Hearts of Stone expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt introduces Olgierd von Everec, an infamous nobleman-turned-bandit who is a Type I immortal but seems rather indifferent to the whole affair. It's revealed early in the story that he cut a deal with a shady traveling merchant to restore his family's sagging fortunes so he could marry his beloved, and they could "live every day like there was no tomorrow". Unfortunately for him, the man who granted his wish traded in more than just knick-knacks, and his wish was granted to the letter. By living every day as if it were his last, he quickly grew bored with life and lost the ability to feel any emotions, which led to the collapse of his marriage and an eternity of being unable to feel joy.

X-Z

• Albedo from Xenosaga. His descent into madness starts the moment he realizes that he is special in his immortality and would outlive all his brothers.
  • Albedo also displays well the problems of having immortality from birth, as he is unable to even comprehend such things as death and pain. This gave him a childishly sociopathic worldview, he seemed genuinely terrified when he learned that other people died when you tore their heads off.
• Yggdra Union has poor Nessiah, a very sad example of this trope, who never wanted to live forever—his immortality is his punishment for not wanting to fight in Asgard's wars, despite the fact that his powers would have made a drastic difference in them. Even if he dies, he is painfully resurrected shortly afterward, and at the outset of the game, he's been trying to free himself from the nearly-unbreakable chains which control his immortality for over a thousand years. He never manages it.
• Zork: Grand Inquisitor
  • Dalboz of Gurth casts an immortality spell on himself, but is forced to endure being immortal when the Zork Underground Empire becomes abandoned. The player can even find his diary, in which he writes about the ways he tried to kill himself, one being "Stabbed myself through the heart; just ended up with heartburn."
  • In a way, being totemized counts as this: as a totem, you are completely immortal (two Game Over scenarios describe your totemized character surviving in the depths of space or on an alien planet despite the lack of breathable atmosphere, others mention that you are still "alive" hundreds of years later) and indestructible, but you can still feel pain and are immobile, so even if nothing really bad happens to your totem (like being thrown into a pool of acid in hell), the mere boredom of waiting for millennia becomes unbearable torture. And this is the punishment for all crimes under the Grand Inquisitor's rule, which is applied thousands of time per day (there's a handy "X people totemized today" sign that continuously counts up).

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