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== Fighting Games & Beat 'Em Ups ==
* In ''[[Battle Fantasia]]'''s story mode, continuing after defeat will start you with a full level on your MP bar. This continues up to level 3, after which you are given infinite MP.
* The campaign mode of ''[[Dissidia Final Fantasy]]'' is set up almost like a board game: You move your character's piece around the various boards, expending 1 Destiny Point per move, interacting with [[Mook|Mooks]]s, bosses, treasures, and the like. Destiny Points are depleted, though some boards give you opportunities to recover some, and are linked to bonuses for clearing the board and for Story Points, the overall score at the end of the board. Story Points are awarded based on the percentage of the character's remaining HP (90% health is worth 90 points), number of engagements (10 points per) and number of remaining Destiny Points (again, 10 per) and penalized based on number of retries (minus ten per) and a Destiny Point total in the negative numbers (again, minus ten per). The final boards of the game's final story mode have neither Destiny Points nor Story Points, meaning that the player can challenge the [[Final Boss|Final]] [[SNK Boss]] as many times as they need to in order to finally win without great penalty. Nice of them.
* The ''[[The King of Fighters]]'' series, starting with ''KOF 98'' allowed you to continue with a slight advantage upon losing (such as reducing the enemy's health to 1/3 its normal length or starting you off with a full Super Meter).
** Though against the [[SNK Boss|final boss]], it doesn't really help much.
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* The ''[[Devil May Cry]]'' series invokes this in later games. In the third game, dying a few times on normal mode unlocks easy mode; in the fourth, dying to a boss three times in a row automatically gives it a handicap in future fights.
** Which can actually feel pretty insulting to some players, especially since the fourth game doesn't tell you it's handicapping the boss until after you beat it and doesn't allow you to refuse. This can ironically frustrate some gamers even more.
* Any time you die in ''[[Drakengard]]'' 2, you're allowed to keep whatever experience points and gold you acquired before dying -- thedying—the [[Game Over]] screen outright tells you "Select 'Yes' to retain your experience points."
* The ''[[God of War (series)|God of War]]'' games will traditionally offer you a chance to drop down in difficulty if you're consistently dying in the same area again and again...which falls apart when the difficulty levels only change ''combat'' difficulty, and you're far more likely to die repeatedly on the ''platforming'' sections. If you continue from the same checkpoint enough times in a row with low health, it also begins respawning you with slightly more health each time.
* In ''[[Diablo]] II,'' when you die, you respawn in the nearest town with no equipped items or gold. To get your items back, you need to go back to where you were killed and recover your own corpse. This is often unfeasible, especially on higher difficulties, because the enemies that killed you are still hanging around your corpse and now you have no weapons to defeat them or armor to survive them. Thankfully, you can restart your game and your corpse will appear in town with all the items intact and only the gold gone.
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** In patch 3.3.3, quest items in your bags/bank are highlighted with an orange-yellow border so you can find them among dozens of other items, some of which have the exact same icon.
** In the ''Cataclysm'' expansion, most new dungeons were given a ''teleporter'' that allowed you to skip to various points in the dungeon if you wipe and have to run back in, and this feature was also present in some raid dungeons. For example, in Grim Batol, once you defeat the second boss, the drakes near the entrance will fly you to the end of his hall, and after defeating the third boss, the drakes will take you to where you fought him.
** Many bosses in various dungeons have a mechanic to reset them. Normally, hostile [[NPC|NPCs]]s in dungeons will pursue fleeing players until the players are dead or have left the dungeon. If a group gets wiped out to the last man by a tough boss, regrouping can be a slow, annoying process. Fortunately, some bosses will not pursue fleeing players to the ends of the earth. Instead, they'll despawn when pulled out of their throne room and reappear in their starting point a few minutes later, so any surviving players may have a few minutes to resurrect their fallen teammates in peace, saving a lot of time and aggravation. Note that some bosses don't do this, and some bosses trap players in with them when the encounter starts, meaning that there's ''no'' middle ground between victory or death, so this may be a [[Good Bad Bug]].
** The total lack of any anti-frustration features is why the archaeology secondary profession is so loathed. No ability to focus on digsites you want. You only get 4 digsites a continent and what site you get after clearing one is determined purely by RNG, no relation to how many rares or commons you have completed of a race even if you have all of them it won't stop them from appearing just as frequently. The digsites you get on a continent are selected from a handful of preexisting sites so on a continent that is "balanced" toward a particular race this can be aggravating. There are only 4 continents and each continent has at least one race exclusive to them (Outland has Draenei and Orcs, Northrend has Vykrul and Nerubian digsites which exist off Northrend but are exceedingly rare, Kalimdor has Nightelves which again are exceedingly rare outside this continent and Tol'vir and Eastern Kingdoms has Dwarves) so you don't have an option to leave if you want a particular race. Also Troll digsites are common enough in Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms and Northrend that they just get in the way.
* [[Star Wars: The Old Republic]] implemented a whole list of these in patch 1.2, including being able to access vehicles in certain areas, being able to jump right past orbital stations when returning to your ship, and in general cutting down on the [[Fake Longevity]].
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* In the ''[[DJMAX]]'' series, beginning with ''DJMAX Portable Black Square'', if you hit the wrong key for a note, you will still get the full percentage for it, but only get 80% of the points. The inclusion of this has proven very controversial among fans, because now you can full-combo or get 100% on a song without even hitting the right buttons at all.
* A new feature added in the sequel to ''[[Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan]]'' was the ability to continue a song once after failing, rather than having to start over from the beginning. However, this can only be done on the easiest difficulty, and not on the [[Final Boss|final song]].
* Newer releases of ''[[Pop N Music]]'' and ''[[Pump It Up]]'' will always give you a second stage even if you fail your first one.<ref>unless, in ''Pop'n'', you're playing in Cho-Challenge mode</ref>. This allows you to utilize the first stage to practice more difficult songs or songs that you are not confident that you will clear.
** This is also true for ''Drummania'', ''Guitar Freaks'' (as of V6, at least, but probably earlier) and IIDX (at least as of Sirius, and again, probably earlier).
** In ''[[DJMAX]] Technika'', you can run out of [[Life Meter]] on the first stage of Pop Mixing and still get a second stage. On the second stage, running out of life won't end the game immediately, but you won't get a third stage. On stage 3, running out of life is an automatic [[Game Over]]. The same, however, cannot be said of ''Technika 2''.
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*** There is also the short "re-draw the fonic glyph" minigame, where Tear will do it for you if you fail. Unlike the above example, however, you rob yourself of [[100% Completion]] this way (at least unless you do it right [[New Game+|the next time]]).
** In ''[[Tales of Symphonia]]'' too, you have to do an ice puzzle across a geyser. If you mess up, the character with the highest affection will save Lloyd, and then Kratos will do the puzzle for you.
* In the ''[[Baten Kaitos]]'' games, dying to a boss will allow you to modify your decks and start the boss fight over from the beginning, as opposed to kicking you to the title screen like normal deaths do. You'll be thankful for it; bosses in these games are ''hard'' and tend to have long-winded [[Exposition Break|Exposition Breaks]]s before the fight.
* In ''[[Pokémon Colosseum]]'', if you fail to snag a Shadow Pokemon from an enemy trainer, you had to refight that trainer - in the case of bosses, with noticably improved teams. In the sequel, ''Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness'', a failure to snag resulted in said Shadow Pokemon being stolen by Miror B, a preferrable fight because a) his team was considerably weak throughout the entire game, save for what is essentially a [[Bonus Boss]] fight for [[One Hundred Percent Completion]], and b) his battle music was one of the best tracks in the series.
* In ''[[Chrono Cross]]'', you can run away from literally any fight in the game. If you're losing to a boss, you can escape, and while some of them will just [[You Will Not Evade Me|draw you back into the fight]], it'll at least reset your elements and give you a chance to heal.
* The various ''[[Shin Megami Tensei]]'' games have as a central mechanic the fact that you can fuse [[Mons|demons]] together to get new, more powerful demons. Only recently, in ''[[Devil Survivor]]'', did they add a feature to let you look up fusion combinations for certain demons instead of [[Guide Dang It|working it out with a fusion chart and a guide]]. It also finally allows you to choose inherited skills instead of leaving it up to the whims of the [[Random Number God]].
* In ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'', there are several weapons and upgrades that you can pick up during missions, as well as items required to complete minor [[Fetch Quest|Fetch Quests]]s. If you miss the opportunities to get these items, then they become available to purchase on the Citadel, so they are not [[Lost Forever]] or [[Unwinnable By Mistake]] (with the exception of a few secret weapons).
* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls]] Skyrim'' you have a limited inventory--itinventory—it is loosely based on the amount of stuff your character could feasibly carry, divided into units--sounits—so your character starts with a capacity of 300 units, and gold ingots "weigh" one unit, a heavy armor helmet weighs maybe five units, so on and so forth. Every item in the game you can put into your inventory has a weight--includingweight—including bees, flowers, and ''butterfly wings'' (thus making Skyrim a place where steel ingots and five butterflies weigh the same). There are only three exceptions to the weight rule: Lockpicks, of which you'll burn five or more per high-level lock, easy. Arrows are also weightless, so being a bad shot isn't so painful. And lastly, the game's currency is also weightless. Thank Divines.
** Quest items also weigh nothing despite having a weight value (particularly helpful as quest items cannot be dropped), although this can actually lead to problems. If you pick up a common item that's also used in a current quest you can't drop any of them until the quest item is removed by the game (for example, returning the item to it's owner).
* When you're infiltrating the Shinra Headquarters in ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'', you have to try and sneak past several patrols of armed soldiers. If they see you, you're forced into a fight. However, if you botch it four times, you'll have ended up killing all the guards and you can just continue on.
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