Above the Ruins: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

 

Or perhaps you're an Ace Operative, tasked with infiltrating and then [[Stuff Blowing Up|destroying]] the base of operations of the Nefarious Nine Eye Army. You get in, you get out, and you set enough explosives to make the [[Tokyo Fireball|Great Tokyo Fireball]] look like a firecracker. You're tempted to [[Unflinching Walk|just walk away]], the flash will blind you and people a mile away, but ... you've got [[Cool Shades|shades]], and who doesn't want to look at their handy work?

Effectively, this trope is when a character brings destruction to a rather large structure and escapes, typically by the skin of their teeth, in time to manage to get a good view from above of the destruction taking place. [[Scenery Gorn]] tends to ensue.

 

 

While both tend to involve looking down from a height at scenery, this is not to be confused with [[The World Is Just Awesome]].

* ''[[Trigun]]'' uses this in the second episode, after the water supply under a mansion explodes from a stray bullet in the preceding fight

* This is a common ending to episodes of ''[[Slayers]]'' in which Lina uses Dragon Slave.

* The manga version of ''[[Chrono Crusade]]'' has a flashback where Aion and the other sinners are standing on a cliff, overlooking the debris of their crashed ship and the results of the battle that gave Chrono the title "Slayer of a Hundred".

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

 

== [[Film]] ==

* During the Firebird Suite of ''[[Fantasia 2000]],'' the nymph looks horrified from atop a cliff to see her forest destroyed by the firebird's volcanic explosion

* ''[[Patlabor]] [[The Movie]]'s'' ending is on the ruins of a megastructure the protagonists tore down on a clear morning after the storm. A very pure use of this trope.

* Remake of ''[[The Time Machine]],'' wherein at the end the time traveller, his new girlfriend in the future, and all the other Eloi are standing on a high hill looking down over the jungle as the entire local Morlock cave system is obliterated by temporal energy from the self-destructing time machine in the depths of the caves.

* ''[[Alien Resurrection]]'' ends with two characters {{spoiler|overlooking the crumbling remains of Paris.}}

* The page quote refers to a scene at the end of ''[[Battlefield Earth]]'' where we are treated to a scene of essentially shell-shocked cavemen staring at the ruins of the (not dome shaped) dome that had been the base of the bad guys.

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' ends with the heroes standing {{spoiler|on the edge of the giant pit which used to be Sunnydale}}.

** In "Cold Blood", the Doctor, Amy, and company run out of the TARDIS just in time to see the giant drill in the bottom of the valley explode.

** In part II of that ep, the famous "Graveyard of Ships at Wolf 359" scene.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* In the credits of ''[[Live a Live]]'', you can see the heroes overlooking Lucretia.

* The endings of many, many ''[[Castlevania]]'' games. Except more often than not, the castle is still crumbling as the Belmont-of-the-Day looks on from a distant cliff.

* ''[[Halo]]'' ends with Cortana and the Master Chief hustling to the back of their longsword to watch an entire artificial world being blown to pieces.

** Again in Halo 3 with the Arc.

* Inverted in ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'', where the game starts off with this particular trope, before the 30-40 hour long flashback that is the game up to that point.

* ''[[Donkey Kong Country]] 2'''s ending has Diddy, Dixie and DK watching Crocodile Isle collapse into the ocean as the sun sets.

** It's probably both a reference to a) the Japanese name of ''Brawl'', ''Super Smash Bros. X'', and b) the ending of the ''[[Kirby]] Super Star'' game {{spoiler|Revenge of Meta Knight}}, which also counts as an example with the ruins of {{spoiler|Battleship Halberd. According to ''Squeak Squad'', it got better}}.

** If you get the best ending, one of the cutscenes that plays during the end credits shows Misery standing at this same spot, looking at the clouds below.

* ''[[Gears of War]]'' one and two both end with [[The Squad]] in a king raven, flying over the lightmasss bomb collateral damage and {{spoiler|Jacinto}}, respectively.

* Samus does one of these at the end of ''[[Metroid|Metroid Prime]]'', watching the destruction of the Artifact Temple from atop the hull of her gunship.

* In ''Arc the Lad II'', the party end up above the ruin {{spoiler|of [[The Empire]] capital}}, the tragic part is that {{spoiler|not only are Arc and Kukuru, the two first playable characters, dead, but you just discovered that the whole quest of the heroes was a giant [[Batman Gambit]] from the [[Big Bad]]: to be released, he needed a human to willingly break his seal, and made sure that the King of Romania was certain that Arc & Co, who spent 120 hours of game time destroying his empire bit by bit, wanted to kill him, so when they finally reached him, he opened the Can of the sealed evil, destroying the world the heroes were trying to protect}}.

* The ending sequences for several characters in ''[[Street Fighter|Street Fighter IV]]'', feature Guile, Chun Li and Abel overlooking the still smouldering ruins of S.I.N. labs from a nearby cliff, after narrowly escaping alive.

* The ending of ''[[Chzo Mythos|6 Days A Sacrifice]]''.

* The NES ''[[Ninja Gaiden]]'' games were fond of this trope. In Ninja Gaiden II, the [[Evil Overlord]]'s lair collapses bit by enormous bit.

* In an episode of the web fiction serial ''[[Legion of Nothing]]'', the Grand Lake Heroes League visits the old lair located under the mansion of Red Lightning where the original Heroes League (the parents and grandparents of the current team) had to fight Red Lightning (a former good guy turned super-villain) in an all-out battle that burned down everything inside the cave. The characters comment that all these years later the burn and scorch marks look brand new.

* In a slight twist to the trope, the first part of the season finale of the web fiction serial ''[[Dimension Heroes]]'' shows the ''[[Big Bad]]'' and his henchmen watching the destruction of the city they helped bring about with smug satisfaction.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Action Adventure Tropes]]

[[Category:Spectacle]]