Fission Mailed



Phoenix Wright has lost, the trial has ended, and the judge has declared "Guilty". That One Boss smashed Link into powder and his fairies haven't done anything. Sonic the Hedgehog doesn't get there fast enough and Doctor Eggman wins. But don't worry—a key witness has burst into the room just in time, the princess has magically rescued you from afar, or you can go back in time and try again. The player hasn't failed their mission after all.

Fission Mailure is whenever it appears you have lost the game, sometimes so far as to present an apparent Game Over screen, but in fact you had to fail in order to advance the plot. The title comes from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, where there was a rare clue: what popped up was not the authentic "Mission Failed" screen, but rather a spoonerized version.

A variety of But Thou Must!. If very few clues are given, this is often one type of Guide Dang It. Fission Mailure often occurs on a fake Final Boss. Hopeless Boss Fights in general are a subclass of this trope. Contrast Kaizo Trap, which is when you look like you've won, but your "victory" is actually impending death.

Not to be confused with any conjunction between nuclear weapons and the postal service. Or between nukes and chainmail.

See also Failure Is the Only Option.

Examples of Legend

 * The Trope Namer occurs when Raiden and Snake are fighting through Arsenal Gear in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. At one point, the screen flashes white, indicating that Raiden has been killed, but instead of "Mission Failed", the text reads "Fission Mailed", the options read "Emit/Continent" instead of "Exit/Continue", and the action continues in the corner box that normally shows Raiden's cause of death. A few seconds later, the game goes back to normal.
 * You can mail your fission at any time in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater by taking the fake death pill, which sends you to a fake Game Over screen, except your inventory button still works, allowing you to take the revival pills.
 * The first Metal Gear Solid had Psycho Mantis, a boss with an attack that pretended to turn off the console. There was the big green "Hideo" in the top right corner as a giveaway, but this was another level of Interface Screw; it had a similar font and positioning as the "Video" input indicator on Sony Trinitron model televisions that were made at the time.
 * Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has both a tribute to the Psycho Mantis encounter in the form of Screaming Mantis (and in the Codec conversations about how to beat her when the player can't properly control Snake) and, and the infamous Snake can actually complete that part with.

Action Adventure

 * Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen actually starts with a Fission Mailed—the protagonist leaves the tavern right at the beginning of the game and is promptly set upon by an endless horde of bandits, who will kill you no matter how good you are. Then you come back as a vampire, and slaughter all the (now finite) bandits.
 * In Cave Story, after defeating, you will be trapped in a flooded Boss Room and have no option but to let your Oxygen Meter run out. After it runs out, rather than the standard Game Over screen, the screen goes black, then you wake up to find that
 * In The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games, if you destroy (either by cutting them down, throwing them or what have you) enough signs then talk to the NPC that runs a sign shop he'll get particularly angry and give you a warning, if you break more signs and talk to him he'll make the Capcom logo flash on the Game Boy screen momentarily as if the game had reset, and you receive a ring which notes your hatred for signs.
 * Halfway through Clash at Demonhead, you face the Big Bad in a Hopeless Boss Fight. To proceed, you must allow yourself to be killed and choose to "Continue".
 * A common theme in the Assassin's Creed games:
 * In Assassin's Creed, Al Mualim stabs Altaïr with a dagger in the second Memory Sequence for his failure at the Temple of Solomon (where he broke all three parts of the titular Creed). The game returns to the White Room of the Animus, just as if Altaïr gets desynchronised. However, Altaïr awakens in front of Al Mualim's desk, in shock that he has survived. It turns out that Al Mualim intended for the stabbing to be a "spiritual" death, effectively giving him a blank slate and allowing him to continue serving as an Assassin... except now he has the lowest rank and has lost almost all of his skills and items.
 * In Assassin's Creed II, The next game reveals that
 * Happens twice in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, first when then when
 * Super Metroid's giant Metroid pops up, is unavoidable and quickly drains your life. When you're at 1 energy, it remembers you're its mother and backs off. Health Refill station is in the next room, enjoy!
 * Super Metroid does this again in the incredibly creepy final boss fight, just a few minutes after the Giant Metroid event. The boss is almost dead, and it uses its most powerful, unavoidable attack. You're left with hardly any energy left—and Samus just sits on the ground, panting. While said unavoidable attack is being charged again...
 * If you don't have at least 300 health when Mother Brain blasts you with her "hyper beam" (which happens automatically when you've dealt enough damage to her), the beam will actually kill you.
 * Similar situation for the final battle in Metroid Fusion.
 * Similar situation for the final battle in Metroid Fusion.

Action Game

 * Very briefly appears in the original Tomb Raider. At the completion of a level, Lara must jump into a well, which turns out to be much too deep for a survivable fall. Lara goes into her "death scream", then lands in the water. But the game goes on to the next level quickly enough not to worry players unduly.
 * As long as you land in water that's deep enough to swim underwater in, you can fall from any height and survive. Whether or not this is a programmer oversight is left to the players to decide.
 * In Gunstar Super Heroes, the GBA sequel to the Genesis game Gunstar Heroes, Black's dice maze includes a new room. In the Japanese version of the game, upon entering this room through sheer (bad) luck, you are treated to a message that claims that failure to complete this challenge will cause your game file to be erased and if you think you can't do it, you should press Start+Select+A+B to reset the game and start the stage over from beginning. Next, you have to frantically blast through the floor of a seemingly endless vertical shaft while a literal representation of your game file crashes down from above. In the (extremely) likely chance it eventually catches up to you and crushes you, it turns out that the game was only kidding, but even if you survive, you still have to redo a large portion of the level. The US version has the same room, but the effect is lost because there's no message and the tombstone graphic has been altered so that the text in it refers to your character instead of your save file, although the location is still called File Crasher on the map.
 * Batman: Arkham Asylum has an example that will probably walk straight into legend. At a certain point,
 * Furthermore, if you try to
 * In Wiz'n'Liz, one of the available spells (which you have to try out to find the effect) does "Game over! ...Just kidding!"
 * In Ninja Gaiden Black, during the cutscene after the second boss, Ryu is killed by Doku with the Dark Dragon Blade, but resurrected by the falcon spirit.

Adventure Game

 * Many, many times in the Ace Attorney series. In one especially egregious case in the third game, winning the trial comes down to pressing a single statement in a particularly drawn-out testimony. Any selection you make leads to Godot informing you that you've failed to find anything substantive—but if you figured out the right one, Phoenix will point out the contradiction a few moments later. If, that is, you haven't already loaded your last save. (This crops up again, which, considering the game's huge amount of Foreshadowing, may be intentional.) In the first game, the Judge even pronounces your client guilty at one point (going through the Game Over sequence) before suddenly being interrupted with new information and the case continuing.
 * The particular case in the first game, with the Game Over sequence, the only indication that you're supposed to let the Guilty verdict continue is that you weren't penalized. In fact, if you haven't been penalized at all, it will seem very weird, as the judge doesn't give you another chance, and you don't lose one of your markers. Also, the fact that you can't do anything to prevent the supposed Game Over. For someone playing through the first time, these vague indications are very easily overlooked.
 * Unless you've failed before. One indicator is that, during the Judge's typical spiel, it cuts to Wright, who sweats and says something like "This doesn't look good... I'm sorry..."
 * Also in the first game, while not a Game Over itself, there is a point in the 5th case where after failing to find something to convince the Judge about your points, he is ready to penalize you and your life marks show up (it could be a Game Over if you only had one mark left and the penalty was issued) to make it seem like he was for real. Cue in someone who prevents this from happening.
 * There's also a fake Game Over in the 3rd game in the 3rd case where it shows Phoenix losing his case to Winston Payne, his client getting a guilty verdict, and the courtroom doors closing. Given that it's the opening Cutscene and you haven't even touched the controls yet, this isn't fooling anyone.
 * In general, if it looks like Wright/attorney says "I've got nothing..." and the screen starts to black out, expect someone to yell "Hold It!" or for the chime to ring in and Wright suddenly realizing a contradiction.
 * In Quest for Glory III, leaving a campfire burning in the savanna will give you a Have a Nice Death message stating that you have gravely upset Smoky The Elephant, and you are provided with the usual options to restore, restart or quit. Picking any option will make the game admit that it was a joke and send you on your way.
 * In The Secret of Monkey Island, wandering too close to the edge of a cliff cause Guybrush to fall off and a game over screen parodying Sierra's Have a Nice Death tendencies to appear... and then Guybrush pops back up ("rubber tree").
 * In Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, there was a scene where Guybrush was suspended over a cauldron filled with acid. When you took too long to get out, you fell into the acid and died—only to be reminded that you can't die in a story you are yourself telling.
 * In The Curse of Monkey Island, at one point Guybrush has to mix alcohol with medicine and drink it, causing him to instantly pass out. The other characters then assume that he's dead and the game is over, going so far as to comment on how it's supposedly impossible to die in a LucasArts game. Guybrush then finds himself buried in a crypt, and the fake credits (complete with a hokey score counter) stop rolling as soon as he regains consciousness.
 * In Sam & Max Hit The Road, if you use the wishing well at Bumpusland, Sam says "I wish this game was over." You get a "The End" message and the screen fades to black, then Sam says "Hold it! Get back here!" and the game continues.
 * In Omikron: The Nomad Soul, as the name would imply, dying at certain points (not a difficult feat) results in the player's soul merely transferring to a hapless passerby. In fact,
 * In King's Quest VI in the Minotaur's lair, there are many rooms with deadly trap doors, and one with a not-so-deadly trap door. If you, like many, restored every time you started to fall, it took a long time to realize you had to fall into one of them.
 * There was also the bottle that shows up on the Isle of Wonder. Take a swig, and it appears as though Alex drops dead. Seeing as your typical KQ game had Everything Trying to Kill You, this seems to be another trap... until Alex wakes up.
 * Also, some of the places where you observe cutscenes of your demise (or failure) are visitable while you're alive later in the game, such as the underworld.
 * In Riven, you have to enter the trap book you're carrying to prove to Gehn that you're sincere. After you enter the book, the screen shows the view through the "link window", with Gehn deliberating if he should or shouldn't enter the book. Then, Gehn finally decides to enter the book, catapulting you out... on the opposite side of the prison bars.
 * Apparently, the designers wanted to make the delay longer, but people thought the game had crashed and force quit it.
 * If you enter the book at the wrong time, of course, you get a Downer Ending that's more like a disguised Game Over.
 * When you first enter the Rebel Age, you are discovered and knocked out by the rebels. When you come to, you get to helplessly watch as you are transported by boat to the "Hive".
 * Classic text adventure Heroine's Mantle has this. There's lots of foreshadowing (if you pay attention), and it fits well with the game's theme of sacrifice.
 * In the first levels of Fahrenheit (2005 video game) (aka Fahrenheit (2005 video game)), getting busted by the police usually means a Game Over for Lucas. However, at some point, Lucas gains enough badassitude to turn what starts unraveling as a typical go-to-prison-for-life Game Over scene into a spectacular Escape Sequence with mad kung fu powers, hanging off flying helicopters, and leaping onto moving subways.
 * In The Adventures of Willy Beamish, one of the puzzles near the end requires you to get captured by the villain and nearly drown. The first several seconds appear exactly the same as the actual failure of the puzzle, but letting the game over screen play out.
 * The flash game A Small Favor referenced this trope, in a way. There was a Mission Failed ending that was only possible by using the postal service to mail a nuclear bomb. Kongregate made it a 15 point badge, so in a way it's a success only through failure.
 * In the Sega CD title, Snatcher, you come to a point where, while, you can look around for women and try to get them to go out with you. After a few of them, Gillean tries to use his position as a Junker to get close to one. However, the woman assures Gillean she doesn't need protection, as she's actually a snatcher herself! The noise for the motion indicator/snatcher warning sounds, and in the text at the bottom, you see, "Game over...?" After a few seconds, Gillean gets back up and is informed by Metal Gear that he passed out, and, provided he's alright, they should get back to the mission.
 * In Heavy Rain, any of your main characters can die, but the story will go on regardless. One potential death sequence actual features the terrified death screams of your heroine.
 * Then again, there are sections that look life-threatening but won't actually kill your character if you fail. And can't die at all before the final showdown at the old warehouse.
 * In Amnesia the Dark Descent, most of the time when you die a short piece of advice will appear on the screen before the game reloads at a recent checkpoint. In one case, you go through a door only to run into multiple monsters and find out the door you just came through has been locked. When you die, the game tells you to "sleep" - and rather than go back in time, you wake up in a cell that you must escape.
 * In the final episode of Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People, if you walk to close to Munchox/The King of Town, he'll knock Strong Bad away. A text pop-up will then appear, stating that you have died... but then Strong Bad stands up and says he always ignores those text boxes. Proving he has no luck with scorpions, he can also be killed if he gets too close to some scorpions while holding scorpion food. However, he had to touch a "video game checkpoint" in the area just to reach the scorpions in the first place, and it will always instantly revive him. Otherwise throughout the games, you cannot die, and you can never lose.
 * "Go West" from The IGF Pirate Kart is a text adventure which you win by repeatedly going west, with any other scenario resulting in your character dying 'a terrible, terrible death'. In the last room, if you try to go west, you get the same Game Over, only at the bottom it asks "Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT, UNDO the last command, or GO WEST?" Choosing to Go West wins the game.

Beat'Em Up

 * Maximum Carnage pulled exactly the same trick.
 * The game X-Men for the Sega Genesis asks you to fission the mail; you need to hit the "Reset" button on the console to continue the game at one point. If you were playing the game on a Sega Nomad portable, you got boned because the Nomad has no reset button. There is reputedly another way to get past this segment, but it's so obscure that, if it exists, almost no-one knows about it.

First-Person Shooter

 * During the last level of Call of Duty 4, your squad is attacked by a Hind while escaping from an enemy base. You are given an RPG launcher and told to fire on the Hind, but
 * And then there's the
 * Which is somewhat a subversion also, since it gives you back the control of your stumbling character, making you think you have a chance of making it out alive after all. Only to kill you again few moments afterwards, this time for good.
 * In Call of Duty 2, at the beginning of the first mission in the American campaign, you are quickly and relentlessly thrown to the ground by your landing-craft exploding behind you, complete with the slow-motion movement, the sounds of the game dulling, being unable to move, and finally the slightly shrieky tone that usually signifies death... until your Sergeant grabs hold of you and screams soundlessly at your face.
 * The Prologue mission "Crew Expendable" of #4 has a similar scene with Captain Price.
 * In World at War, this happens to your character fairly often compared to earlier titles. It really only feels like it a couple of times, though; in most instances, it happens at such a point where your inevitable rescue seems very predictable.
 * It happens even more in Modern Warfare 2. Culminating in
 * In the first playable portion of Far Cry 2 the story requires the player to be gunned down.
 * However, if you escape, you collapse from the malaria and open your bottle of meds, only to find that it's empty and collapse on the ground.
 * After you finish half the game, . Regardless of your decision,   Then, while stumbling through a sandstorm, you "die" again, but are saved by.
 * During normal gameplay, if you have a buddy in "rescue-ready" status, you get saved by them if you get "killed" by enemy forces. If your buddy isn't on standby for you, you die for real.
 * Seeming to die is so common in that game that.
 * Or so it seems.
 * In a cutscene in the beginning of Project: Snowblind,, the screen suddenly becomes filled with static for a few seconds, as if something had broken.
 * Deus Ex featured a mission where if you get killed, you get captured and wake up in a prison cell. Once your HP drops to zero, the ordinary death animation is cut short by a new level loading, presumably so players don't have enough time to reach for the "quick load" button. If you manage to avoid death all the way to Battery Park, you get an option to surrender or fight against NPCs and a huge mech, most of which ignore damage. The game has a quirk whereby if you go through a certain apartment window at any time during this mission, it figures you abandoned your ally and he won't appear in future missions, even if you already escorted him to safety and backtrack to the window.
 * Only  ignores damage, seeing as he's somewhat important to the plot. You can kill all the other mooks and even the mechs if you're packing enough heat.
 * In Doom, at the end of the first episode, you go into a teleporter and are "killed" by a group of monsters. Then you find yourself on the lost moon of Deimos, which happens to have been transported into the Hell dimension.
 * A quirk in the ACS used in Hexen (and, through porting, ZDOOM) allows for a level transition while the player is dead. Normal behavior for that situation is to "respawn" the player on the new level. With enough delicate scripting, it is possible in ZDOOM to note the entire inventory of a player before instant-killing them with a scripted death and then force a level transition to the next level, which would then give them their entire inventory back. Fission Mailed indeed.
 * The F.E.A.R. games do this at several points, usually using Interface Screw in the process. For example, at one point your motion slows down, Alma starts walking towards you and the walls burst into flames. You try to run, then an explosion blows you out the window. Your teammates think No One Could Survive That, but the Pointman is mostly unscathed.
 * Another major example is the final Mind Screw battle at the end of Project Origin, while Alma is.
 * Happens at the beginning of Half-Life 2. You are beaten severely by Civil Protection officers, and the screen blacks out. Soon after, you hear Alyx Vance kicking the shit out of them, and you wake up to a cheery "Dr. Freeman, I presume?" Several Fission Mailed instances are set up later in the game and throughout its Episodes, displaying overwhelming odds which are actually easy to overwhelm or evade if you know what you're doing, and the . Similarly,
 * This is a callback to the first game, where one segment ends with you walking through a door—the screen blacks out, there are sounds of a scuffle, and then a HECU grunt is heard radioing in that "we got him." The next sequence begins with you escaping custody.
 * In BioShock (series), immediately after, the Little Sisters appear and guide you into a crawlspace to evade . There is a hole in the crawlspace, which you cannot avoid, and you appear to die before.
 * In Jedi Outcast, the player must 'die' during his first encounter with Desann.

Interactive Fiction
"Or have you? No... this isn't quite the end. You see an intense blue-white light at the end of what seems a tunnel, and drift toward it until you realise that you are staring, dazed, into the light of the slide projector, and have not moved at all."
 * Infocom's Enchanter a point where you have to "die" so that your "corpse" can be brought to another location, and then you get better and wake up there. While it's a bit of a Guide Dang It puzzle, it's not quite the usual for this trope, since it's something the player has to deliberately set up using an auto-revive effect.
 * The sequel Sorcerer starts you off in an incredibly deadly landscape full of monsters. Then you wake up. Naturally you'll have to go to the same place in person later, this time inexplicably less deadly.
 * Inverted in Frederick Pohl's Gateway. The player must stop the evil robotic aliens by placing a virus in one of their watchtowers - after completing two virtual reality segments, the player is lead to believe that the virus worked. The player is returned to Gateway where the game continues with nothing out of ordinary to attend to - except a message on their telescreen telling that they're still in a virtual reality.
 * In the interactive movie Star Trek: Borg, your character had to be assimilated by the Borg in order to get past a certain point in the story.
 * In Curses, putting something of the right size into the slide projector transforms it into a Portal Picture. Entering the pictures projected by the Grim Reaper, Drowned Sailor or Fool tarot cards gives the standard ***You have died*** message, followed by:

MMORPGs

 * Forum Warz Episode 2 ends with your character's (apparent?) death, then goes on to state that your character has been deleted, your account has been deleted, and that your IP address has been blocked so you can't make a new one. In fact, every IP address has been blocked so nobody else can play again, and the game servers are being physically destroyed.
 * World of Warcraft pulls one like these at Icecrown Citadel. In your fight with, your whole raid will . However, this is supposed to happen, and in a Deus Ex Machina moment, . The fight is basically won once this happens, as long as the players don't
 * When the fight was first available, the game actually DID let you release. Whether it was intended or not, it got hotfixed fairly quickly, in creepy Leaning on the Fourth Wall fashion. Currently, if you click the release button, it won't let you, and you'll get a creepy message that . Interestingly, you still automatically win the encounter if you don't accept the scripted resurrection. If no one in the raid accepts, . This takes roughly about an hour to accomplish, though, given the boss' massive health pool.
 * There's a quest where you need to kill yourself to talk to the ghost of the architect of Blackrock Depths. He'll tell you how to craft a master key to the doors in the dungeon. Made somewhat more obvious since Cataclysm as the game drops you off right next to him so long as you're in the general area of Blackrock Mountain.
 * The first time you come face to face with Akama, you discover that instead of being The Dragon, he is actually a deep cover mole. In order to preserve his cover, as soon as he hears one of the demons coming he kills you. You then have to lie there dead and listen to their conversation; he brings you back to life once the demon leaves.
 * There's yet another quest chain in Zul'Drak where you're transported into the ghost world, complete with you in ghost form. Of course, you're not completely dead, just separated from your body, and when you die there, your corpse will be at where you entered the area instead of where you died.
 * You do this in Howling Fjord as well, as part of the prep chain for Utgarde Keep. You end up confronting the Lich King while in spirit form, and he kills you while you're already a ghost. You have to corpse run and rez to hand in the quest afterward.
 * Fission Mailed is used even more extensively in the Cataclysm expansion, released in December 2010, which makes heavier use of cutscenes in general. In one such quest, you fight a big monster called Iso'rath from its inside. To get the next part of the quest chain you have to die.
 * One of the new quests in Azshara has you searching high and low for a missing blue dragon. It turns out he's off having an affair with one of the Spirit Healers (the creepy blue and white angels that preside over your spirit when you die in-game) which means that in order to meet him you have to... you guessed it... die.
 * The boss Mandokir the Bloodlord will randomly decapitate party members (both in his original raid encounter and in the new heroic encounter), killing them and displaying the standard time to release. However, chained spirits will resurrect fallen players.
 * Since the forsaken are zombies this happens to the character just before you start playing, in fact the very first npc you encounter as a forsaken tells you that they though you might not wake up after all.
 * The year 2009 Crimbo event in Kingdom of Loathing did this. Don Crimbo was unbeatable, but losing to him was followed by a Talking Your Way Out scene.
 * RuneScape: In one quest, you die. Three times. And go to the Viking Fremennik afterlife. Oh, and that prince/princess you were engaged to and possibly got married to a few minutes ago? Yeah, they're both dead for good.
 * The Lord of the Rings Online: If you play as a hobbit, you will get knocked out by bandits within the first few minutes of the tutorial.
 * Also, if inevitable eventual deaths count, then the fight with Sambrog in the barrow of Othrongroth is a Fission Mailed. He keeps healing himself when he gets to a certain health level, during which he's untargetable. The only objective is to survive until Tom Bombadil gets there.
 * The free-to-play MMO Jade Dynasty contains a quest that requires you to "understand the secret of life and death". No other indication is given in the quest description of how to do this. The way to complete the quest is, of course, to die.

Platform Game

 * I Wanna Be the Guy is so nefarious as to fake a Windows operating system error message... What makes it worse is that the error actually happens sometimes while playing the game; it's a known bug, and the game made the absolute best of it. Of course, since the window is clearly from Windows XP, a person using a newer or older version of Windows or another OS or selected the classic theme entirely won't be fooled.
 * In a further use of this trope, it is possible to die after delivering the finishing blow to some bosses. The death animation and message will play, but if you wait, the boss will die in the background and you will appear unharmed on the next screen. Nefarious in that if you hit 'r' as the screen instructs you to, you will never know that you could have just waited and beaten the boss.
 * An example of this is
 * The only way to get the Flame in Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame is to be killed by the Mook on the same screen and ignore any indications to press keys to continue.
 * In Futurama the Game, the first level has a forced Fission Mailed—Fry has to grab a hammer and be crushed to death. Then, after a game over screen, Farnsworth brings Fry back with the Reanimator. The Game Over itself is then lampshaded when Leela asks what death is like.
 * In La-Mulana, there is a gas-filled area of the Twin Labyrinths that you enter from the Temple of the Sun. You can survive in there for 30 seconds. If the time runs out, Lemeza goes through his death animation... and reappears back in the Temple of the Sun, just outside the Twin Labyrinths, alive as if nothing happened.
 * In the comedic Sonic the Hedgehog fan game When Tails Gets Bored, right before the final level, there is a cutscene that starts with a reproduction of the game's Game Over screen. As it turns out, this is because Sonic is frustrated with the game and refuses to continue.
 * In Eversion's later worlds,
 * Mirror's Edge pulls one in the final level, where Faith kicks down a door to find  and then get punched in the face by a PK soldier. The Fission Mailed comes when
 * Earlier in the game Faith is forced to fall about three stories through a glass roof, landing on her back. At first it looks like Faith died, but then in the cutscene she gets up immediately and runs off.
 * Not a straight example, as it's not a requirement, but something similar to this can happen in the Donkey Kong Country games. Player characters' hitboxes remain active throughout their defeat animations, meaning that it's entirely possible to take a fatal hit on your last life, but fall onto a hundredth banana during this animation, getting that life back.
 * The final boss Turns Red during the Fake Kredits.
 * In Super Scribblenauts, after a message appears onscreen saying "Try again. The Starite has been destroyed". The only button there says "No way". After pressing it.
 * In Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, Then a cutscene shows, and then the real battle begins.

Real Time Strategy

 * Hostile Waters has a example that narrowly avoids being annoying. The first time you see a helicopter with the scientist you were supposed to rescue take off, it means you failed the mission. When the same happens several missions later, it's just a scripted event.
 * In Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II's final mission,
 * In Command & Conquer: Red Alert you have to capture the Chronosphere for Stalin, but it explodes the in the cutscene after you capture it. Then you are ordered to be shot. Then the blame is (accurately) pinned on someone else and you're reinstated.

Rhythm Game

 * An In The Groove custom marathon uses this. The screen even says "Found Railed".

Role-Playing Game

 * Ultima IV. Many players Rage Quit and reloaded when their boat was sucked into the whirlpool, since the game went black and you got the same initial text that you got when you died. Except - it's actually a portal to another world under Britannia. D'oh!
 * Demon's Souls ends the tutorial with a boss fight that will result in your death (if you defeat the boss, you'll be able to get a few things before a later boss punches you in the face via cutscene). Thus setting up the gameplay mechanic of recovering your body after you die.
 * And prepares you for the many, many, many, hopeless battles ahead.
 * Some particularly skilled players found that it is possible to beat the tutorial's boss. Then a dragon shows up to finish the job.
 * Paper Mario does this four times:
 * The first battle in the original Paper Mario is a fight against Bowser that you have no choice but to lose, since he is made invincible by the Star Rod.
 * In Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, when the player fights in the battle arena, the player must lose to the (invincible) Armored Harriers in order to continue. Doing this causes a Yoshi to join the party. He can defeat the Harriers by spitting one at the other.
 * Also in that game, Mario fights a Duplighost named "???" who turns into a purple Mario. Upon "winning" the fight, we see that Mario and "???" have switched bodies. You can only set things right by finding out "???"'s real name,.
 * In Super Paper Mario, you really do die at one point, but then continue the game in the afterlife.
 * In Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time, the player must lose to the Shroobs in order to get the Baby Mario Bros. to join the party.
 * Reaching 100% on the d-counter in Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter normally means Game Over. However, the attack necessary to defeat the final boss will fill it to 100%, and this is in fact the only way to win the game.
 * Pretty much all of the Breath of Fire games except the first one require a Fission Mailed at some point. Some of them more obvious than others. And if you need a list:
 * The prologue in Breath of Fire 2 pits you, at age 6 with a stick, against The second strongest demon in the entire game. Before that you also face a bird enemy who is way too strong, but your father saves you before you mail your fission.
 * The Hopeless Boss Fight against Balio and Sunder in the third game. Also another against
 * In Breath of Fire IV, at some point in the middle where the player must lose to a general. Also sort of subverted in that the one of the final decisions in the game.
 * The final and only boss in the Playstation version of Azure Dreams must bring you down to zero hit points in order for you to win the game. This is a particularly nerve-wracking example, since normally being defeated in battle causes you to lose all your precious equipment and have your save overwritten, and the player is actually capable of escaping the battle.
 * In Mega Man Battle Network 3, your first fight against Bass cannot be won, because he is surrounded by an impenetrable aura. He eventually defeats you, but instead of a game over, the next cutscene appears with Bass standing over Megaman in victory.
 * Notably, if you bring over items from another game, which would have to have already gone far past this point in the plot, you can remove Bass's barrier and take out his HP. Bass will keep going.
 * The Amiga classic Captive had an occasional blinking "Droid link failure - Guru Meditation" message pop up on the screen of the "briefcase computer" the player was using to control the Battle Droids—a spoof of the Amiga's notoriously user-unfriendly critical errors that almost always required rebooting the computer.
 * EarthBound has the party kidnapped by zombies in the hotel in Threed... and then the scene suddenly cuts to the town of Winters.
 * Mother 3. Let's just say that The End isn't the end.
 * Also, the fight against the mechanical lion in the chimera factory.
 * Subverted. You can kill it, it's just really, really hard.
 * Final Fantasy II: The first battle is extremely one-sided, and ends with the entire party being killed... then revived in a nearby castle, which kickstarts the plot.
 * Final Fantasy III: When you first get to fight the Darkness, there's no way to keep her from vaporizing you and cutting your HP to zero. Don't waste a shuriken - you're not going to win, as she's too powerful at the time and it's pretty important to the plot.
 * Final Fantasy IV: The first real boss fight with Golbez starts with him paralyzing the entire party and summoning a dragon that proceeds to use a Death attack on each of your party members. Just as he is about to finish off Cecil, the Mist Dragon appears out of nowhere to defeat him and cure Cecil. Right after, Rydia (who summoned the Mist Dragon) rejoins the party mid-fight and the battle continues. Of course, the game also has it's fair share of Hopeless Boss Fights.
 * Note, however, that this fight comes immediately after a rather difficult Puzzle Boss fight. If Cecil is dead at the end of that fight, you won't have time to resurrect him before Golbez paralyzes and kills your entire party, causing a genuine Game Over.
 * That was just a particularly buggy fight all around. Golbez might kill every party member except Kain (rare), every party member except Yang (even rarer), or just simply kill everybody outright (regardless of whether or not Cecil was actually alive at the beginning of the fight), resulting in one of the most surreal game overs in video game history. Depending on how difficult the previous fight was - or whether or not you had remembered to save before looting the place senseless - it's also probably one of the most aggravating.
 * At one point in the game, the hero Cecil is forced to fight his old friend Kain. Kain is pretty much unbeatable in a normal game, having approximatley 60,000 HP, and using attacks that are way too damaging to survive. But if you really crank out the level-grinding or use a cheat device to max out your stats and equipment, you can burn through all that HP and cause Kain to be "killed" on the battle screen. Cecil does the victory dance, but there are no rewards for winning, and when the game exits back to the normal field screen, Cecil slumps over in defeat while Kain stands triumphantly over him . . . essentially, the same thing as if you had lost.
 * In the fight against the Dark Elf where you can't use any weapons and armor made of metal, you have to lose so Edward plays on his harp weakening the Elf.
 * If you're not playing the DS version and reequip all your metal equipment before the battle (since you know it's throwaway), you're all paralyzed, so it's a Game Over. (The DS version goes directly to the weaken cutscene if this happens.)
 * At one point in ''StarOcean: The Second Story, your party is ambushed while you're transporting a weapon meant to destroy the Disc One Final Boss. You inevitably lose and you and your party's unconscious bodies are tossed into the sea. It gets better though.
 * At one point in Ys IV: Mask of the Sun, Adol is "killed" by the Clan of Darkness.
 * Mass Effect 2 has one of these in the opening sequence - after rescuing Joker aboard the exploding Normandy, Commander Shepard is flung into space where s/he asphyxiates and dies. The game then cuts to the Mass Effect 2 logo, before continuing on to Shepard's revival thanks to Project Lazarus. What makes this example particularly clever is that, in Bioware's pre-release demonstrations, it was strongly implied that this particular scene was avoidable. So the game's biggest followers get a real shock.
 * Happens again with the Arrival DLC if
 * Mass Effect 3 does it one last time.
 *  Tales of Phantasia, at least in the PS version, had a puzzle in Moria Mine where using the Sorcerer's Ring on a certain candle will cause an arrow to fire from a wall and seemingly kill you, as the "Game Over" music starts playing. Cless, however, gets back up and mentions that (dying from an arrow) would never happen.
 * In the SFC version, you just lost hitpoints.
 * The fight against  qualifies, but it is possible to win with some extra grinding/Infinity Plus X swords available elsewhere (It goes up to Infinity Plus 5!)
 * In Tales of Symphonia, there are two Fission Mailed battles . Both battles allow you to lose and still continue the game, but you can also defeat them. The first battle can be beat with a bit of grinding, but the second would take a major amount of leveling to pull off (probably approaching Level Cap).
 * Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, the sequel, features a few of these as well..
 * In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, one of the side quests requires you to
 * Similarly in Oblivion, there's a quest where you have to let a NPC kill you. This time though the game explicitly tells you what you must do.
 * In Chrono Trigger, when you face Lavos, your party will get your asses handed to you and, but this will only start you on the next part of your quest.
 * You can actually defeat Lavos there, either with a New Game+ or with a crazy amount of grinding. Doing so will earn a different ending.
 * You can also.
 * Inverted in Baldur's Gate - Throne of Bhaal: At one point, your highly advanced group meets a low-level group of NPCs and can hire them to clean up some minor monsters. After the NPCs are finished, a short sequence starts when they try to attack your group and are instantly slaughtered by the main character's Demon Form. Then, the game reloads to the point before the NPCs returned, as if you had just done a reload, and the NPCs reappear, just take their fee and leave.
 * Actually, it's the leader of the group of NPCs that reloads the game.
 * Played With in Planescape: Torment as the player avatar always comes back to life after dying and occasionally must die to advance the plot, but you aren't always told when this is what's going on, and dying, while not permanent, is still fairly annoying from a gameplay standpoint, so it's to be avoided most of the time.
 * In the prologue to Golden Sun, the 14-year-old versions of Isaac & Garet have to fight Saturos & Menardi. As the villians are experienced Adepts, the heroes inevitably lose within no more than a turn or two. This leads into the "Three years later..."
 * Happens three times in Terranigma, the first two being optional. The first time you go into a poisoned room that has Ark doing his fainting animation but he is thrown out. The second happens the first time you try to cross a certain desert, giving the standard game over text (however the town music is playing all the time). The only obligatory time is when you meet, which plays the fanfare with the text and it's implied it actually kills Ark.
 * Fallout: New Vegas has a mission in which after finding 50 Sunset Sasparilla Star Caps, upon telling Festus that you've won the contest, he proceeds to give you the prize: . After which, you immediately fail the mission. If you complain about your crappy "prize" however, Festus will direct you to a better prize:
 * In Arc Rise Fantasia, the first boss fights against Ignacy, and much later, play out like this. It's impossible to win both fights, so you have to let them kill you to advance the plot. The two fights against would count; except in the first fight, you CAN defeat them, but it is very difficult to do so, and the plot continues on whether you win or lose (though you lose out on getting a Rogress if you lose). In the second fight, while it's impossible to win, if you lose you get the standard Game Over; the key is to stall out the fight until it ends on its own after enough turns have passed.
 * In Persona 4, during the final battle with, it's impossible to kill her. Even if you knock down her health bar all the way, she'll wipe you out with an instant kill spell, at which point Rise will freak out, just as she does when you lose normally. However, the power of the Social Links you've built will kick in and give you the Eleventh-Hour Superpower necessary to beat her.
 * Also played with earlier on with Shadow Rise. When she uses Supreme Insight, none of your attacks will hit her. The battle will still continue for a few more turns until you're treated to a cutscene of you and your team about to die
 * In Persona 4, during the final battle with, it's impossible to kill her. Even if you knock down her health bar all the way, she'll wipe you out with an instant kill spell, at which point Rise will freak out, just as she does when you lose normally. However, the power of the Social Links you've built will kick in and give you the Eleventh-Hour Superpower necessary to beat her.
 * Also played with earlier on with Shadow Rise. When she uses Supreme Insight, none of your attacks will hit her. The battle will still continue for a few more turns until you're treated to a cutscene of you and your team about to die

Shoot'Em Up

 * Done similarly in the Trouble Shooters (Battle Mania in Japan) game for the Sega Genesis, where the credits begin to roll and a boss interrupts them; the game doesn't actually end until the stage after that.
 * In the Azdagari string of missions in Escape Velocity: Override, at one point, a Zidagar photographer takes pictures of a secret base and attempts to escape the system in a ship. The mission you're given is to destroy it before it escapes. If you succeed, you get congratulated and you eventually get the mission again. You need to fail the mission, however, for the story line and mission string to advance.

Simulation Game

 * In Animal Crossing, once you piss off Mr. Resetti enough by abusing the reset button, he says he will erase all your data and will cause the screen to go black. A few seconds later, the screen returns to normal, and Resetti says "Gotcha!".
 * In the Harvest Moon series, most of the games since Back To Nature (PS) will trigger the credits sequence once you get married. But the game starts right back up as normal once they finish. Exceptions include For Girl (BTN's Distaff Counterpart) and if you're playing as Tina in the PAL version of Magical Melody. In those cases, the game actually does end there.
 * The NTSC version of Magical Melody still ends at marriage, if you marry Jamie.
 * A variation on this happened in the early missions of Starfleet Academy. The early "tutorial" missions spend quite a bit of effort expressing how you should always follow orders, and failure to follow orders will result in a failed mission (which they do). Then, however, . Given the mission's otherwise fairly mundane presentation, it's likely very nearly all players fell into this the first time around. Not only that, but disobeying orders as a requirement never comes up again.
 * Both Free Space games loved this. There are quite a few missions were you could fail some or all of the (usually mission-critical) primary objectives and still successfully finish the mission. These tend to be scripted storyline events, however: The Freespace games like to remind you every so often that it's the middle of a war, and in a war, you don't always win...
 * Fan mission designers usually take the same route, and occasionally get headaches when a player uses cheats to beat a mission they were supposed to lose and then complain about the game being broken. Some wiser mission designers will make joke scenarios occur if this happens, to make it clear to these players that this was not the way the mission was supposed to go.
 * In Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader's Razor Rendezvous mission, you can successfully complete the mission by suicide-ramming the Star Destroyer's bridge, just like Arvel Crynyd in Return of the Jedi.
 * In Trauma Center, this happens
 * Hilariously,.

Stealth Based Game

 * In Hitman: Blood Money,

Survival Horror

 * Eternal Darkness has not only a fake "game over", but a fake "stay turned for the sequel" screen, a fake BSOD, and a fake "Game Deleted Successfully" screen, with a blank saved game list.
 * As well as the infamous "Controller unplugged" fake error message.
 * Ghost Hunter, on PlayStation 2: When Lord Hawksmoor has you realise that there is absolutely no way out of your predicament, and possesses your partner to shoot you dead, the game returns silently and sadly to the main screen.
 * The dark dead-end alley sequence in Silent Hill 1, where Harry has to be "killed" by the demon children to proceed. Then he wakes up in the cafe, not much worse for wear.
 * Silent Hill 2: Maria's  serve as a sort of Fission Mailed as well, as triggering them outside of scripted events causes a Nonstandard Game Over.
 * The Nightmare Amusement Park in the beginning of Silent Hill 3, where Heather gets run over by the roller coaster at the end. Heather can also "mail the fission" at any time during the nightmare by being killed by the enemies or jumping into a Bottomless Pit.
 * The interactive nightmare at the beginning of Silent Hill 4, where The All-Concealing "I" is accosted by a Victim in first person perspective. (It's actually .)
 * And the beginning of Silent Hill Homecoming.
 * And once more, with Harry again in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
 * Dead Space App has one in Chapter 11: After killing the brute and walking around, the battery low icon appears and then another brute appears out of nowhere before the screen goes thwip - nightmare sequence in a marker-desert comes back on. Excessively scary if you haven't charged your iTouch for a while.

Turn-Based Strategy

 * The first boss battle in Disgaea 3 ends in a Fission Mailed/Heads I Win, Tails You Lose situation, as Mao and Almaz have defeated the Overlord's hand, but it sprouts new fingers and wipes the floor with them, inducing a "Game Over (?)", while proceeding to the next chapter anyway. Because Mao refuses to let the game end like that.

Turn Based Tactics

 * In Transformers G1 Awakening, the player is facing the Big Bad with the only controllable unit being Optimus Prime. This appears to be the Final Boss fight, except there's no way for Optimus to beat Shockwave on his own. He has to lose. This appears to be a loss, until reinforcements arrive that revive Prime and help him end the war.
 * The original Jagged Alliance has an assortment of randomly picked exit messages, one of which is an error message explaining the game failed writing the player's quick save (to avoid Save Scumming, the only way to save the game during battle is to exit the game) followed by "just kidding".

Visual Novel

 * Fate/stay night has a hilarious false Bad End, complete with false Tiger Dojo. Tell Saber there'll be no food today if you want to see it.
 * Fate/hollow ataraxia continues the tradition when Shirou and Shinji sneak into Sakura's room to read her diary. But on a more serious note, due to the looping gameplay it's okay to get killed. In fact, you're going to get killed because you can't progress otherwise. Just ignore the Dead Bad End screen that pops up and continue playing.
 * Princess Waltz gives you a "Bad End" halfway through the game, at which point you need to go back to the title screen and choose to play its second half.
 * It is impossible to get the True Ending of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on the first playthrough.
 * In Katawa Shoujo, the good ending to Lilly's path does it's best to make you think you've gotten a bad end, up until the very last scene. In fact, the bad end is exactly the same as the good end except that it ends earlier.

Other

 * In Die Anstalt, a patient's progress bar going red usually means that you screwed up their treatment and need to reset their mental state with electroshock therapy. For Dub, however, this is actually a required part of his therapy; many players, not knowing this, kept on trying other methods until they realized that letting his progress bar shoot way down and then shocking him was the only way to continue his therapy.
 * Fisher-Diver has a nightmare sequence after the first day. There' player has got no fishing tools, will move slower and slower as the time goes on and is eventually bitten death by wireframe fish.

Anime and Manga

 * Not a videogame, but Mahou Sensei Negima had a Bad End screen after.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! in season four. Yami goes through three would-be-losses near the end. One is when, against Rafael, he apparently loses for the second time. However, this is just a recall in animation to the first time he lost, and instead, survives an attack with 10 life points left. The other two are against Dartz. When the Seal of Orichalcos starts to enclose around Yami, he manages to repel it twice.
 * In Eyeshield 21, in the Fall Tournament semi-final, the Deimon Devilbats lose the game and everyone believes their dream of going to the Christmas Bowl is over ... Until Hiruma reveals that they can still go there if they win their consolation match.

Tabletop Games

 * A Dungeons & Dragons adventure, Vecna Lives!, has the PCs run through a dungeon playing high-level pregenerated heroes... who are promptly slaughtered by the godlike villain, whereupon the players' own low-level characters pick up the adventure.
 * Likewise, in the adventure Death Triumphant, the conclusion of the Grim Harvest trilogy, the party of heroes manage to infiltrate Azalin's castle with the intention of stopping him from using the energy of thousands of souls harvested throughout the trilogy to unseal the can he was stuck in. As it turns out, they don't quite make it in time. The flavor text is meant to suggest that everybody's dead. However, it turns out that the unleashed energy has turned the party, along with everybody else in a twenty-mile radius, into various forms of the undead. Which does technically make them dead, mind you, but...
 * The Tomb Of Horrors has illusions and traps galore, but the most insidious of these (serious spoilers)
 * The Mutants and Masterminds adventure "A More Perfect Union" uses this to great effect. The players are given generic police officer characters and told to investigate reports of shouting coming from a house in the suburbs

Web Comics

 * The Touhou webcomic Touhou Nekokayou parodies this with an pun in this comic.

Web Original

 * The season 2 finale of Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series was set up as one of these.
 * Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Special Edition has a few examples of this, contributing to the Mind Screw.
 * First, in Hill Top Zone, Docfuture successfully defeats Metal Sonic but gets a Game Over screen anyway. After getting three such Game Overs, he suddenly advances to the next level with no explanation. It's suggested that Tails was deliberately causing these, just to screw with Docfuture.
 * In the final video, Docfuture beats the Unexpected Shmup Finale and the ending cutscene starts playing... then Sonic falls out of the sky and lands in an underwater level. An underwater level with no air bubbles, and no choice but to drown. This case was definitely caused by Tails screwing with Docfuture. It's followed by a cutscene where the boss of a prior level returns and explain that Tails turned against Docfuture because of mind control, and that he's now been cured, so the game can be completed.

Western Animation

 * In an episode of Daria, Daria and Quinn are driving out to the middle of nowhere to bail Jane and her brother's band out of jail. At one point they pick up a cute drifter who flirts with Quinn before they drop him back off. A little while later, Daria panics when she realizes he stole their bail money. Cue the "We'll be right back" scene...which suddenly cuts back to the show as Quinn explains what really happened: she spent the money to buy him things.
 * In the two-part Season 2 finale of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, at the end of the first part it looks like Twilight Sparkle falsely accused an innocent Princess Cadence of being evil, and disrupted the wedding to boot. Twilight Sparkle's chastised by her friends, her brother, and by her mentor, and it looks like Twilight Sparkle has just screwed everything up and alienated everyone she ever cared about...only for Princess Cadence to seemingly drag Twilight Sparkle to hell. End Part 1! In Part 2, it turns out that