After Combat Recovery

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In Video Games with Life Meters or Hit Points and a distinction between "combat" and "non-combat" (e.g: RPGs), your characters may be automatically healed (even for free) after winning each battle. While this eliminates the threat of Mooks wearing the player down before an upcoming boss battle, the game's designers will have undoubtably made the monsters more aggressive to compensate, forcing the player to exercise greater strategy when even everyday foes stand a legitimate chance of taking them down.

This does not include other methods of "free" healing, such as Regenerating Health, healing Save Points, leftover healing items or so on. Compare and contrast After Boss Recovery, for cases where free HP recovery is limited to boss encounters only.

A more common variant is to revive dead or "knocked out" characters after a battle, generally at 1 HP.

Please only list examples that play this straight, as aversions are too many to list.

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Games that heal fully after battles:

• The first Mega Man Battle Network game. It had a chapter (Elecman's) where this not happening was a big deal.
• Live a Live.
• The Spirit Engine 2.
• The Way.
• The Final Fantasy Tactics series, including Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and Final Fantasy Tactics a 2.
• Devil Survivor.
• Final Fantasy XIII automatically heals you after each battle and also lets you retry the battle if you die instead of issuing a Game Over. It makes most of the random encounters much tougher and require a lot more thought and strategy than you might be used to from earlier entries in the series to compensate for this.
  • Much tougher is right, the enemies on Pulse are bloody brutal...
    • Although there is a way to grind stupidly easily, if you can find it.
• Cross Edge and Record of Agarest War partially use it. While fighting on the map, you are fully recovered after every battle - but inside dungeons, you are not. You also don't get free resurrections, so whether it was on the map or in a dungeon, you'll need to head back to town to bring the dead back to life.
• Dragon Age uses an interesting variant in that party members heal back to full health after a battle. If they were incapacitated they suffer a random lasting injury that afflicts them with a penalty to stats until taken care of or they return to a party camp. Also, the after combat healing is not instantaneous. It's possible, though unlikely, to bumble into another battle before the characters have finished healing, halting the healing process.
• The World Ends With You, although in the case of chained battles, HP recovery occurs after completing the entire chain, instead of between individual battles.
• Legend of Mana.
• In Resonance of Fate, you'll recover all scratch (but not always direct) damage and Hero Gauge bezels after combat if you win. If you ran away, however, scratch damage and the Hero Gauge level carries over to the next fight unless you rest first.
• A variation occurs in Wild Arms 2, where you have a "vitality" gauge in addition to your HP gauge. After battle, your vitality gauge would be reduced to restore your HP gauge, healing you to full if (and only if) you have enough vitality. Crystals could be picked up in dungeons to restore vitality and the vitality gauge would be restored to 100% after a level up. In general, you'd have more than enough vitality to not need healing items between battles.
  • Wild Arms 5, on the other hand, plays it straight.
• Enchanted Arms, at least for regular damage. The VP system is designed to give you a reason to still finish battles quickly.
• Chrono Cross, if the player has any healing elements left over after battle, the game will offer to use them for instant healing.
• The Last Remnant does this too; all unions will be restored to full health after a successful fight. Just as well, as there's no retreat option.
• Disciples blocks this with the Empire units. As Empire you can have healers within your squad, who are able to heal your units every turn, without using any mana-type resource. The catch - this healing is only available in-combat. Outside of battle, only potions, paid healing in towns and world map spells (which use resources) will work.
• Romancing SaGa 2, 3, and Minstrel Song uses this setup along with free post-battle resurrections, but only with health points: LP is lost every time a character is KO'd and attacked while they're down, and once it hits zero that character is gone for good.
  • So as Unlimited Saga and Saga Frontier series.
• Happens in the Super Robot Wars series. Unfortunately, the game automatically takes money from you to repair wrecked units, and money spent reviving teammates is money not spent making your teammates better through upgrades.
• In Fire Emblem all units are healed between each chapter (each chapter contains one battle). Does not make up for Final Death, but it helps.
• Red Steel, at least the second game.
• Though this does not usually occur in the Pokémon games, Diamond and Pearl feature short period where you are teamed up with another trainer exploring an area. After every single battle, your partner will heal your team completely, making the trip through the area unbelievably easy because it's nearly impossible for all of your Pokemon to get knocked out.
• Mass Effect 2 restores all ammunition after each mission, along with life and shields if they aren't already at full. Likewise, Mass Effect 3 restores all ammo and medigel after each deployment.
• In Baten Kaitos Origins, all your characters are fully restored at the end of each battle. Given what a big Sequel Difficulty Spike Origins was, you'd need it.
• The Xbox Indie RPGs Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World restore all of your characters' HP after battles, but only a portion of their MP (with more being restored the faster you complete a battle).
• In Heroes of Might and Magic IV, after a town siege the winning side has all heroes restored to full health, reviving if necessary. This happens just in time so the heroes in question can gain experience from the battle, as well as excusing you from Hero Must Survive if a storyline character was killed.
  • Every entry in the series heals all creatures to full health and mana (or ability charges) after each combat. They also restore the catapult to the hero (and depending on his skills, other siege weapons are also restored)
• Tabletop Game example: The Dresden Files RPG normally removes all stress (the game's equivalent to the Hit Point) at the end of every 'battle' situation, be it a physical, mental or social 'battle'. This compensates for the fact that characters have very low stress values to begin with and that the only way to 'heal' in-combat is by buying off stress with penalties called 'consequences', which don't go away at the end of combat. This isn't always the case, though. The rulebook allows that stress may remain if, for example, a character goes from one fight to another without having the time to stop and catch his or her breath.
• In the Chaos Rings series, you recover your HP, but not MP, after battle, so you're still forced to go back to town if you ran out of MP or use an MP recovery item.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, your companion(s) health is restored at the end of the fight (assuming they survived it).
• Riviera the Promised Land, though getting K Oed in battle results in a temporary penalty to max HP.

Games that only revive KO characters after battle:

• Chrono Trigger
  • Also in its followup, Chrono Cross.
• The Shadow Hearts series
• Knights of the Old Republic
• Final Fantasy X
• Legend of Dragoon
• Lost Odyssey, and normally only up to 1 single HP, so hurry up and heal, folks.
• Mass Effect 1
• Rogue Galaxy. If the teammate is nearby, the player will even see the normal revival animation.
• Persona 3 and 4
  • Also the first Persona, although they leave KO'd characters with 1 HP, leaving you to spend SP or healing items.
• Breath of Fire series, albeit in III and IV the character also receives a 10% cumulative penalty against their maximum HP, up to 50%, meaning they can quickly be rendered unable to take a hit (curable only by the Trauma Inn, not the free campsite available anywhere).
• The Mario and Luigi games.
• Dubloon restores any character who died during the battle to 1 once the battle is over.
• Skies of Arcadia
• The MARDEK series.
• The Epic Battle Fantasy series.
• The children arc in Dragon Quest V, with characters getting knocked out rather than killed.
• Lufia the Legend Returns.
• Marona in Phantom Brave is revived with 1 HP if she is defeated during a multi-stage battle (like a Random dungeon), but her Phantoms manage to win the battle.Justified in that she's the only one deployed at the start of the battle.
• Age of Mythology does this with the main characters. After Combat in that case means that a friendly unit is nearby and no enemies.
• Endless Frontier revives K Oed party members with 1HP after battle. Given that standard Mooks start doing 500 or so damage a round by level 5, this is a token gesture at best.