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{{trope}}
{{Video Game Examples Need Sorting}}
You're out for the count. You exhausted your last life or last ounce of energy and your character is done. [[Game Over]], dude. [[Have a Nice Death]]! No problem, you'll just continue and try again, right? Not quite! The challenge is beefed up even more and [[Unstable Equilibrium|the game is even harder than it was before you were defeated]], whether it is starting without power ups or the like. This trope usually applies to games that use a health bar system or life count. If this gets bad enough, the only way to beat the game might be to start all over and do it without a game over.
Despite the high cost, this is still an example of [[Death Is Cheap]] in games where loss equals death, since it means that returning from the dead is nearly guaranteed despite its disadvantages.
The opposite of [[Death Is a Slap
▲The opposite of [[Death Is a Slap On The Wrist]]. Contrast [[Anti Frustration Features]], where dying makes the game lower the difficulty for you.
{{examples}}
* Dying in ''[[
** This also gets bad if you died while exploring deep underground since caves tend to sprawl out every which way and it's easy to get lost. Strongholds and mineshafts are no exception either.
** God forbid you die by falling into/getting hit by lava. Lava instantly destroys all your items, which means even if you ''could'' find your way back to your death place, you could never recover those tools. Goodbye, diamond pickaxe!
** Beds can change your spawn point so the next time you die, you spawn by the bed. Most players tend to build their shelter with a bed in it and store their things in a chest. However, if something is blocking the bed or the bed gets destroyed and you die afterwards, you get booted to your default spawn, which means you could wind up being miles away from your shelter and get lost trying to find your way back.
** With the addition of experience points to the game that serve as skill points for enchanting tools and armor, dying also means you lose all the experience points collected. Have fun [[Level Grinding]]!
** In the recently-added "Hardcore Mode", continuing isn't
** This gets even worse in the ''Skylands'' adventure map because the easiest way to die is to fall off one of the [[Floating Continent
* ''[[
** Softcore mode: You only lose half the money you're currently carrying. It's quite easy to avoid this, by keeping all your money stored in a chest or a safe, as your money isn't needed when you're exploring.
** Medium-core mode: You lose everything you're carrying, including items. This can be problematic if you managed to die while deep underground, as the items might be very difficult to reacquire (or might be even lost forever if you happened to drop them in lava).
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* After hitting level 10 in ''[[Dark Age of Camelot]]'', you tend to lose a good chunk of EXP for every death.
* ''[[Border Down]]'', an arcade/Dreamcast horizonal shooter, did this very, very purposefully with the Border System. When you start the game, you are given a choice of three difficulties: Border Green for easy, Border Yellow for medium, and Border Red for hard. Choosing a harder difficulty allows for a higher score, but there's one special mechanic complicating things. If you're on Green and you die, you [[Title Drop|Border Down]] to Yellow. If you die on Yellow, you Border Down to Red. And if you die on Border Red, it's game over.
** Inverted, on the other hand, with actual continues because you keep your score, keep your progress on the Stage Norm meter,<ref>Filling it lets you Border Up at the start of the next level</ref>
* In ''[[
** ''[[Wild
* The original ''[[Romancing
** [[Romancing
* In ''[[Yggdra Union]]'', retrying a map lets you to keep your card's power and character experience, but it disables you from getting +2 MVP which is more important that your levels. Also, it prevents you from getting a nice item later on.
* In the original ''[[The Legend of Zelda (
** ...and you've gotta restock potions and/or fairies, since you'll have used those up during whatever battle killed you. ''And'' you have to find your way back to where you died from (often) somewhere outside the dungeon. The dungeons are structured so that it's not as painful as starting at the beginning of the level in a more linear game, but death can be a real nuisance.
*** Unless you're playing Skyward Sword - due to the game's save system (unusual for a Zelda game, but more traditionally used in RPG's), your potions come back, because you had them when you last saved!
** In ''[[Zelda II:
*** Averted in the seventh and final level, the Great Palace, where getting a [[Game Over]] there simply puts Link back at the start of the Great Palace instead of all the way back to the Northern Palace.
** The original ''[[
** ''[[The Legend of Zelda
* ''[[Super Smash Bros
** If you used a continue in ''Brawl'', you'd get a 20,000-point penalty ''IN ADDITION'' to getting your score cut in half, making it a more serious blow to anyone going for a high score.
** The game also ''gives'' you one point for every continue, so that the high score keeps track of how many times you continued to get it in the 1's place.
* ''[[
** This trope is actually more subverted in ''EarthBound''. For all the penalties the player suffers for continuing, there is an easy fix. The ATM system means that no amount of money needs to be lost. Also, consider that you restart in Ness's house, where you can talk to his mother to recover all HP and PP, not to mention that it's right up the road from the first hospital in the game.
*** Still, the most painful thing about continuing was that you [[Unstable Equilibrium|resumed the battle that killed your party severely handicapped]] (no [[Mana Points|PP]], only one character that has to recover himself AND revive everybody else, the items you used didn't respawn). Seriously, if you couldn't beat something when fully equipped, reset was your only option. It's not as if continuing would have helped you anyway.
** In the sequel ''[[
* Especially true for hardcore [[Super Monkey Ball]] players. Want to reach the expert extra stages? That's completing anything from 30 to ''100'' difficult levels without using a single continue (the last ones of which get insanely hard).
** The epitome of this trope is Super Monkey Ball Deluxe's "Ultimate" Mode. Normally, this mode only contains 210 stages (yes, "only" 210 - all 40 beginner, 70 advanced and 100 expert stages) but has a real total of '''300''' if you factor in all the extra stages. Even if you choose to start with 99 lives, it's a huge challenge reaching the last set of stages, Master Extra, at stage 290, and this is only because the last 100 or so stages in the game will eat up your lives like no tomorrow. And even if you do reach stage 290, it's not unlikely you'll lose more than 396 lives on the following Master Extra stages.
* The ''[[
* Oh, ''[[
** In ''Salamander (Life Force)'' and ''Gradius V'', you at least get the chance to respawn in place without having to go back to a previous checkpoint. This even allows you to get your Options back, if you can catch them before they float away.
* ''[[R-Type]]'' also costs you all your power-ups if you die, though it's more minor since the maximum you could have in the first place is six plus speed boosts. And it's even worse than ''Gradius'', difficulty-wise. In R-Types ''Delta'' and ''Final'', at least, you get a first-level Force device awarded automatically on the lowest two difficulties. If you lose all your lives and continue, your score gets flushed.
** Almost '''''EVERY''''' [[Shoot
*** Actually, it's a trend to make all points scored multiples of ten, with the number of continues used (up to 9) appended to the end of your score. So a score of 400,001 would reflect the player's score having used one continue.
* In ''[[Einhander]]'', playing as the secret Schabe fighter allows you to collect gunpods to upgrade your weapons from a single machine gun up to a far more powerful quad machine gun with extra missile shots. However, since you cannot choose any gunpods to start with, ANY time you die, your weapon level is reset to 1. This can be quite problematic in later levels. And in those later levels on ''hard mode''? Good luck...
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** Combine this with the occasional random [[Zerg Rush|Aggro Spike]] and [[Made of Iron]] Boss Zombie, and you've got a recipe for [[Skyward Scream]] inducing deaths.
* Amiga game ''Project X'' did this, with a Gradius-style powerup system. Dying halved all your powerups, which could mean a single death removed over ''forty'' hard-earned powerups from your stock. It didn't help that the mid-range ship started out with a gun so weak you had a hard time killing anything at all.
* In ''[[Doom (
** The same is true for other games on the Doom and Build engines. It's especially painful in ''[[Blood]]'', the only one on either engine where you don't spawn with a gun.
*** However, several console versions averted this by letting you respawn with all of your weapons. This may be to do with the lack of game saving, not only [[Save Scumming|mid-level]] but in general - essentially, it automatically reloads from the start of that level.
* In the old DOS game ''[[Descent (
** If you fail to escape a mine in time, or die while escaping, you lose all your powerups and have to start the next level from scratch. If this happens on one of the later levels...
* ''[[Grand Theft Auto II]]'' let you save in churches whenever you wanted, so long as you could pay the church 50.000 dollars. Bearing in mind that it takes a LONG time to accumulate that much money, and money is the only way to clear a stage. Either way, you would lose all your weapons every time you died or got busted, which led to lots of reloading. ''San Andreas'' averted this by letting you keep your guns if you dated certain girls.
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** ''[[Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars]]'', when you're arrested, has the police confiscate all your guns and the drugs you have on you (which might represent thousands of dollars of in-game money.) Since guns are relatively hard to acquire, and getting killed features neither of these penalties, it leads to an odd situation where, when in danger of being arrested, the smart thing to do is try to get killed instead.
*** Which, oddly, makes it more tempting to cause more ruckus around the city, since police will be more likely to try to kill you than to arrest you at 4 stars or higher. So in summary: it's more dangerous to go around with 2 stars and get busted than to get 6 stars and get blown up by a goddamn [[Tank Goodness|tank]]. Blaze of glory indeed.
* ''[[Baldur's Gate
** There still are some ways to get [[Killed Off for Real]].
* [[Roguelike
** When you die in ''[[Shiren the Wanderer|Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer]]'', you're sent back to the starting town, knocked down to level 1 and stripped of any equipment, weapons and armor you hadn't the foresight to store. This is the standard for ''most'' [[Roguelike
** [[Nethack]], normally a textbook case of [[Final Death]], has the Amulet of Lifesaving, which is an automatic continue if you had the foresight to actually wear it (which randomized appearance complicates). The problem is, it crumbles to dust when you're revived, and that gnome with the wand of death is about to zap you again---many players advocate saving the amulet slot for a source of reflection or other ways to avoid death in the first place instead, especially due to paranoia about the [[Random Number God]].
** [[ADOM]] also has amulets of livesaving, but they're extremely rare, and {{spoiler|You have to find one to save Khelavaster, and gain access to the [[Infinity+1 Sword|Trident of the Red Rooster]] and the various [[Multiple Endings|secret endings.]]}}
** In the ''[[
*** For the ''really'' unlucky or foolish, invoking <s>[[Easily Angered Shopkeeper|Izchak's]]</s> [[Easily Angered Shopkeeper|Kecleon's Wrath]] prevents any chance of a [[Big Damn Heroes|rescue attempt by other players]], and turns ''your entire inventory'' into '''''Plain Seeds''''', the item which a reviver seed turns into after it's been used. Useless and not even good for [[Vendor Trash]].
** Likewise, losing in any of the ''Chocobo's Dungeon'' games boots you out of the dungeon, and all of your cash and items on hand that aren't equipped or stored away are lost.
* In the original ''[[Diablo (
** Made easier in the sequel, where your stuff is "stored" in a corpse that only you can
** On higher difficulties, dying also levied experience penalties, 5% of the experience towards your next level in Nightmare difficulty and 10% in Hell difficulty, which would be halved if you later retrieved your corpse. These ranged from negligible (most of Nightmare difficulty, especially if you got your corpse) to the obscene (a character approaching level 99 who dies in Hell would lose a month or more of experience grinding '''if''' they retrieved their corpse; if not, it could easily be enough to just give up on grinding that character, taking the 98 and being satisfied with it).
* The old space shooter ''[[
* The Arcade modes in ''[[
* In the MMORPG ''[[Plane Shift]]'', [[Death Is a Slap
* Using a spirit healer in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' means losing 25% durability to ''everything'' both equipped and in inventory (meaning LOTS of gold in higher levels), and a resurrection sickness penalty for up to 10 minutes depending on level, during that time in which your combat skills are heavily reduced. If you just look for your corpse (or are revived by a friendly healer), death [[Death Is a Slap
** Just an interesting note, during the beta test of World of Warcraft, you suffered a 100% loss in durability to all of your items when you used a spirit healer.
*** The default 10% don't apply if you die to another player though, probably to lessen the frustration when you get killed by much higher level characters (or ambushed by another player while low on health from fighting monsters). Some classes can also [[Better to Die Than Be Killed|kill themselves to avoid that penalty]]. Finally, you automatically revive at the graveyard without penalty under some circumstances (namely, when developers foresaw possibility to die in a place you wouldn't be able to get to on foot).
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* Dying in [[Runes of Magic]] is an automatic 10% durability penalty, as well as 1/20 of your total XP needed to reach the next level in debt and 1/200th Total XP as TP debt, starting at level 10. While in debt, 70% of ALL of the XP/TP you earn goes to paying off the debt. Debt can be reduced if you have a Priest or Druid in the party to pick your sorry ass off the ground. Durability loss is still crippling to your ability to fight after one or two deaths if your gear is all overdura (101+ base dura), more so if it slips into the -20% power boost range (at about 50% durability). God forbid you slip to -80%, in which case it is absolutely impossible to kill ANYTHING at your level, as even the stats Lv50 people put on their gear is outclassed by stuff a Lv25 can get via [[Vendor Trash|random monster drops.]]
* Inverted in ''[[Triggerheart Exelica]]'', where the bosses tend to be easier, with only one form, if you continue. 'Course, it's because you forfeited your score and medals gained when you do so.
* Continuing in various [[Shoot
** In the original ''[[Gauntlet (1985 video game)]]'', your score is cut in X+ 1 when you continue (or otherwise get health from a coin), where X is the number of times you continued. e.g. if your score is 200,000 and you continued 3 times, your final score is 50,000.
** Some games will let you enter your name/initials if you achieve a high score on any credit, and some others will only allow name entry on first-credit scores. Yet more games will rub salt in the wound by either nullifying scores earned up to your current credit or recording those scores anyway but under a preset name, preventing you from marking your high score with your name.
** Similarly, some other games, like the ''[[The House of the Dead (
* Many early RPGs like ''[[
** This has continued even in modern ''[[
** ''[[
* ''[[
** Oh, it got even ''worse'' than that. Before any of THAT could happen, your ''surviving'' characters (or a whole new party, in the case of a [[Total Party Kill]]) had to wander into the maze that killed your former badasses and retrieve the bodies!
** What's more, if you take too long doing it, the bodies will have disappeared. The manual says monsters drag them away and eat them.
* Continuing in a ''[[
** The eighth game, ''Imperishable Night'', is even worse for this. Continuing costs you Time, and taking too long automatically earns you the Bad Ending. Continue once before the end of Stage 5 and you can't access Final B, the game's true final stage. Oh, and if you run out of lives in Final B ''you don't even get the chance to continue - you just get the bad ending by default.''
** On the other hand, the Touhou games are a bit forgiving: in all of the games before ''Mountain of Faith'' (ignoring the first game, [[Early Installment Weirdness|which was a completely]] [[Genre Shift|different genre]]), after losing your last life, a bunch of full-power icons fly out of you. You can grab them after expending a continue. ''Subterranean Animism'' takes the concept a step further and does this when you lose your last ''reserve'' life (so you're still alive, but one more hit is game over).
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* In ''[[Steel Battalion]]'', if you lose a VT but manage to eject, you have to buy another VT. If you can't afford one, you are fired and the game '''deletes your save.''' It also does this if you fail to eject before the VT blows up.
** The eject button is actually a dedicated [[Big Red Button]] under a flippable plastic cover. The designers' original intention was to replace the plastic cover with ''a glass pane you'd have to smash'' - making this trope literal.
* In ''[[
** Or they would hack the game to kill you and steal it.
*** And what's even worse, if you were playing the Dreamcast version, and the power went out....
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* In ''[[Gothic]]'', death is permanent, but NPCs who are not inherently hostile but whom you've managed to annoy will generally knock you out instead. This reduces you to one hit point, and if you're wielding a weapon at the time, you'll drop it - and they'll steal it, along with half your money.
** In the second game, Gothic 2, you lose all of your money instead of just half.
* ''[[
** Get a [[Game Over]] to the Boss? ALL of your power ups are gone, [[Nintendo Hard|have fun killing that boss now with only a single bomb with the weakest blast radius]] and NO way of empowering yourself. [[Unwinnable
** Hell, even continuing to the next level after beating the last takes away some of your best power ups, though technically that takes the sting ''away'' from this trope.
** In multiplayer games, dying usually causes your power ups to appear randomly throughout the stage for the remaining players to collect. As some later entries in the series give you a chance to return to the game (with no power ups) by tossing bombs from the sidelines and taking out another player, this somewhat fits the trope. Of course, the player you just killed drops all ''their'' power ups...
*** Of course, all powerups are destroyable. This means you may accidentally destroy some of your old powerups in the process of killing someone to get back into the game. This also means if you don't intend on getting back, you can deliberately destroy your old treasures to ensure no one gets them.
* The NES ''[[
** Worse, dying on any of the final bosses automatically boots you back to Act 6-1.
*** Cinematic introduction of bosses refill your life bar. Facing the same boss again after a previous failure ''does not.''
* The ''[[Darius]]'' series is especially painful to die in. In games where you have gauges showing how many times you've powered a weapon, dying will reset these meters back to zero. For example, the shield powerup starts at "Normal" level, and takes 5 shield upgrades to get it to "Super". When you die at the highest level at "Normal" (as in, one more will get you to "Super"), the counter resets, and you need to collect them all over again. And in ''Darius Gaiden'', dying powers your shot down immediately to the previous level, and to the initial popgun when you die again, and the later levels become [[Unwinnable]] if you lose your wave shot. This means doing well in the initial stages crucial to survival
** Most Darius games however, make it easy for you to keep your dumb bomb upgrades, which, in Darius Gaiden, becomes a homing missile in the top level (and actually does contain quite a wallop). Also, in G-Darius, when you continue, the powerups given alternate between regular powerups and full-bar powerups for ALL upgrades. Not to mention that the shot is also given a bar powerup unlike in Gaiden, which means once you get the wave shot, you will never lose it no matter how much you die.
* The original ''[[Castlevania (1986
** While ''[[Castlevania II:
** ''[[Castlevania III:
* Some games that make you respawn in place if you continue make you restart the level instead at certain points in the game, such as the last stages of ''Aero Fighters 2'' and ''3'' or the last 3 stages of ''Varth: Operation Thunderstorm''.
* And then some games will outright disable continue after you meet certain conditions, like ''Salamander 2'' (after the first [[New Game
* ''[[
* In ''[[Too Human]]'', it first appears that [[Death Is a Slap
** [[Zero Punctuation|This has not gone unnoticed by certain people.]]
* ''Sub Mission'', a 1986 submarine game from Mindscape, pit you against an underwater warlord holding two hostages. If you failed, one of the hostages would be deleted from the disk - PERMANENTLY. Continuing Is Not Only Painful, but very quickly Impossible.
* In the ''[[Mega Man (
** True for every one except ''[[
** On the plus side, while restarting here didn't give you back your weapons energy, many players found it advantageous to die intentionally, using only the Mega Buster, when first fighting the boss so they could A. see the tactics it uses and B. make sure they've got a full health bar going into the fight.
** In ''[[
* In ''[[Baroque]]'', when you die, your level is reset to 1, you lose all your inventory items, you lose any brands or parasites applied to your character, ''and'' you lose any stat gains from sources other than level-ups. All you get to keep is any items you had the Collector hold and the Angelic Rifle. And [[Nintendo Hard|you'll die. A lot.]] How much? Much of the game's plot is told to you in conversations and cutscenes that are triggered by your character dying.
** The real kicker? This happens if you ''succeed'' in clearing the dungeon as well, which you will have to do at least a few times to get to the story's end. After a while, the game starts to feel like some [[Groundhog Day Loop]] that only applies to you.
* The ''Wizards and Warriors'' series for the NES had fun with continues. The first game allowed you to continue indefinitely, at the cost of losing all your points. The second game completely shifted that, by only giving you two continues for the entire game, although you could collect addition lives to prolong that inevitable game over. In addition, once you reached the halfway point in the game, you immediately lost one of your continues if you had two remaining. And the last level did not allow continues at all. The third game was by the far the most sadistic: three lives for the ''entire game'', at fifteen or so hours for a first playthrough. No continuing allowed. Which makes it particularly frustrating when you're at the final boss with one life remaining, and the boss ''kills you'', forcing you to start from the ''very beginning''.
* ''[[
** ''Super [[
** The [[
* The CS (PS2) version of ''[[Beatmania]] IIDX 7th Style'' had a Master Mode, which challenged the player to play through the entire songlist except for ''murmur twins''. This is a feat that takes roughly 3 hours to complete. However, failing any of the 89 songs marks your Master Mode save data as "Failed", and the only thing you can do with it is to delete it and start over.
* ''[[Dungeons
** 2nd Edition had a "limited continues" system in that someone could not be raised more times than their Constitution score, period it end of story, without direct divine intervention. The 5th level "Raise Dead" spell also cost a point of Constitution (permanently), required a relatively intact corpse, left the patient only barely alive (i.e., don't cast it in combat) and couldn't be used on Elves (canonically because they didn't have souls); the 7th level "Resurrection" did not cost Constitution, could be cast on virtually any remains, brought you back at full strength, and could be used on anyone - the only real penalty (aside from the "limited continues" issue) was that the spell could be very expensive to cast (or have cast).
*** "Raise Dead" also required a character to roll against his "System Shock" score, and "Resurrection" required a roll against the character's "Resurrection Survival" score (both scores were determined by a character's Constitution score, Resssurection was always the better of the two).
** In 3rd Edition, when a character dies, he can be brought back with a simple ''raise dead'' spell, available as early as 9th character level to divine casters. However, doing so means the dead character loses a level, death being traumatic and all (i.e., there's signal loss between here and the afterlife). If the character is 1st level, they lose a point of Constitution instead. ''Resurrection'' is no better for this, though it does allow one to work with things other than relatively well-preserved mortal remains. Only ''true resurrection'' can bring a character back without some sort of issue, and that's a spell requiring either an exceedingly powerful magic item or a 17th-level caster...and 5,000/10,000/25,000 gold pieces' worth of diamonds for each spell, respectively. To put this into perspective, an average person (a 1st level NPC) in this world has about 25 gold pieces of wealth, in total.
*** This can be sidestepped though as the game contains a spell called 'Revivify' which is a level 5 spell like Raise Dead, but only costs 1,000 gold worth of diamonds to cast and doesn't make you lose any levels or stats. The catch is it must be cast within a round of death, and you come back close to dying again so unless healed quickly that's exactly what you'll do. It also contains a spell called Revenance which is a level lower and doesn't have any cost. It brings the target back with half HP (but you can just heal them) and they will get minor bonuses against whoever killed them. The window is wider for this spell, at a round a level (a round is six seconds). The catch? A minute a level later, they die again. But as nothing stops you from bringing them back, most forms of death can be efficiently dealt with via Revivify and possible Revenance. This actually isn't a [[Game Breaker]] as by the time you can reliably use these, you'll mostly be dying from things these spells can't bring you back from such as instant death spells and having your body vaporized.
* The official Living Greyhawk campaign for third edition ''[[Dungeons
** 4th edition just applies a -1 to almost all rolls until the character reaches 3 "milestones" (basically, six encounters, including noncombat ones). There's also a cost for materials, which gets more expensive for higher level characters (500 gold pieces for levels 1-10; 5,000 for 11-20; and 50,000 for 21-30).
* In ''[[Ultima Online]]'', when your character dies, you have to wander around as a ghost until you find a shrine, player, or NPC who can resurrect you. When you get resurrected, you would generally have none of the inventory you were carrying when you died (i.e. armor/weapons/spell reagents), be at very low health, and if you wanted to get your stuff back you would have to return to your corpse before it rotted away over the course of fifteen minutes. If you died alone in an isolated or dangerous area or got killed by another player, you usually wouldn't be able to make it back in time, would simply die again before you could recover your possessions, or would return to find your corpse looted of all its valuables. Thankfully, there were a few exceptions - "blessed" items would stay with your ghost instead of your corpse, and the game more recently implemented "item insurance" that made items temporarily blessed in exchange for being a gold sink. (Coincidentally, this happened about the same time that they ramped up the importance of having high-end equipment ''a lot.'')
* Korean MMO driving game ''Drift City'' inverts this: missions become slightly easier if you fail them. A time limit adds an additional second or two, number of crashes permitted increases by one; whatever the conditions are change slightly in your favor.
* Death in MUDs places you back at a spawn point in your character's home town, which could be far, far, far from where your corpse, and everything on it, will be left. This is accompanied with a loss of about half the advancement made since last level, which may be bad enough, and of course, all gold. Even in MUDs with a storage system for contingency equipment, it's not going to be your optimal equipment, because that's what you'd be sensibly wearing at the time you risked your life and lost it. If no storage, then you go scrambling naked, perhaps across deserts and swamps for double the fatigue cost and half the movement speed, along the path you'd cut earlier when you set out which is now peppered with random threats, and back into the maw of death that had already gobbled you up when you were in top condition with your best equipment. And who would you expect to find standing over your remains, should you survive to make it back, but the same damn bastard who killed you? This is assuming the area isn't populated with corpse eaters to eat your corpse and scavengers to collect all your inventory and scatter it all four corners of whothefuckknows. Yeah, continuing is painful.
** Depending on the MUD, death can range from this to [[Death Is a Slap
*** This has spawned one of the most useful player organizations, the Rescue Recovery Unit (RRU), who upon death, can be called to retrieve your corpse, rez you with a specialized priest spell (basically, you get back some of those unused XP) and some are powerful enough to retrieve you from even a dangerous zone.
** In the MUD ''[[Tibia]]'', the penalty for dying is ten percent of your ''cumulative'' experience, as well as your backpack, which probably contains thousands of gold worth of runes and loot, as well as having a ten percent chance of losing each item you're wearing. This can be avoided by wearing a one-use amulet that probably costs more that any one thing you're wearing anyways. Oh, and every single one of your skills also decreases. At higher levels, players can watch half a dozen levels and a month of their lives go to waste in a single moment of lag.
** In the MUD ''[[Retro Mud]]'', this is both averted and played straight. Usually, death only penalizes you up to a maximum of 500k to 1 million experience and an easily removed scar. For comparison, a high level player will have probably spent 150 million or more over their career. The "usually" is because that minimum only applies if you don't have enough for your next level, which means that if you have a lot of experience on hand, you can lose much more. Also, you also have a chance to take statistic damage (or lose training, which costs even more experience and gold), which is greater if you have a lot of scars. The damage is easily treatable...but if it's not, your next death may make it permanent. Finally, it's possible to lose levels from experience loss, and if you lose three levels you are force reincarnated. This starts you over and forces you to choose a new race and class, although you keep most of your experience. The tax for the force reincarnation is extremely high: that 150 million you spent? Cut about 15 million off that, and reduce that by a third. NOW it's hurts.
** ThunderDome has always been proud of it's [[Nintendo Hard|brutal difficulty]], and death is no less easy. Death can result in permanent Constitution loss, until your character has too little Con to even log in; Con-death. The chance and amount of Con-loss increases with age, as does the cost of buying back that Con, to the point that after buying up to maximum at great expense your next death could still be permanent. Without Con-death, continuing leaves you naked to run through hazardous mobs and hostile environments to retrieve your gear. But mobs can loot your corpse themselves, meaning you'd sometimes have to gather groups of high level players to help retrieve it. Other mobs can eat your corpse, leaving your gear scattered and unidentified for other players, or scavenging mobs; if you die around both wandering carnivores and scavengers, no-one would be able to find where all your gear could possibly wander. Then there are [[Death Traps]] that make your corpse completely inaccessible, since you'd die again entering the same room. And then dying in a river could wash your body all the way out to the ocean, where even players with the vast-and-difficult-to-acquire skillset and equipment to survive deep sea diving wouldn't be able to guess where to start digging.
* In the ''[[Metal Slug]]'' series, you lose credit for any Prisoners you rescued beforehand.
** Continuing doesn't directly reduce or reset your score, and that for once isn't necessary; missing out on prisoner and ''huge'' finish-stage-with-a-Slug bonuses are big enough penalties. And then at the end of the game, you're shown how many continues you used up.
* Dying in ''[[Contra (
** And worse, ''Super Contra'' (arcade) had the weapon upgrade system, where you must collect two of the same gun to get its full power, and the powerups were fewer and farther between.
** Contra 4 does this as well: rare good weapons, rarer powerups, one hit kills, and a brutal difficulty mean that beating the game on the "real" (read: insanely hardcore) difficulty entails just [[Nintendo Hard|quitting to the title screen if you take any damage in the first 30 minutes.]] Beyond that, it's anyone's guess.
** Newer installments of the ''Thunder Force'' series have a similar penalty. Amongst veterans of the series, switching to a less useful weapon in a near-death situation isn't just a trick; it's common sense.
* ''[[Soul Blazer]]'' takes away all of your gems (MP) when you die. This is very minor until the very end of the game, where you can't hurt the final boss without magic.
* ''Space [[Bubble Bobble
* Flash game ''Monsters Den'' and its semi-sequel ''Book of Dread'' penalizes players who let their whole party die, by removing an item from their inventory and the least expensive item from each character's equipment. At early points in the game, and depending on your luck and resource management, enough deaths can make the game absolutely impossible to progress further in.
* If you die in ''[[
** You only lose skill if your ship gets blown up and then your escape pod gets blown up. (And this can only happen through [[
*** Still hardly a slap as it can take a good long while to get a new ship, all the modules, rigs, and consumables back together.
** And if you are flying a Tech-3 ship, you ''will'' lose from 1 hour to 5 days of skill training, even if your clone is perfectly up-to-date.
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** The trope plays straight in latter games where Mastery system exists. Failing a mission strips off another opportunity to get a mastery, and thus going to the Hard mode. In some of the games, they leave you with any experience and gold you've gotten, but in some games they don't.
* In ''[[Maple Story]]'', once you leave Maple Island, dying takes off 10% of your EXP bar. This is not to be taken lightly, as you need massive amounts of [[Level Grinding]] just to gain one level.
* There's a 10% EXP loss (which becomes 8% after level 24 and caps at 2400 per death) when you die after a few levels in when playing ''[[
** However, the above is what happens if you choose to NOT continue (return to homepoint). If you are revived or use a Reraise effect, you regain a value of exp and can regain levels (50% restored for Raise 1, 90% restored for Raise 3). However, upon being raised, you are Weakened, and your HP and MP are at fractional maximums for five minutes. If you are killed and raised again while weak, you go into an unnoted Double Weak status, which applies further penalties. Recovering from Weak can make or break some major fights (though some strategies in longer fights actually have scheduled party wipes at the battlefield entrance to buy time to reraise and full heal for the second half).
* The last mission of ''X-Wing: Alliance'' has you flying through the framework of the second Death Star. Not only is this the hardest stage in the game (flying and tight spaces don't mix, people), but the obstacles randomize every time you restart.
* Losing your weapon in later levels of ''[[
* In ''[[Streets of Rage]] 3'', for every 40,000 points you score in one life, you earn a star (3 max) which upgrades your dash attack. Losing a life takes away one star, and you have to gain 40,000 more points to get it back. Made even more frustrating that the [[Difficulty
* The [[Darker and Edgier]] ''Bomberman: Zero Hour'' had a 100-level single player mode, where you, in each level, effectively played Bomberman-style deathmatch against various other AI-controlled Bombermen/women, but you had a health meter. You could regain health, but ONE death alone would be enough to send you back to the title screen with no saves whatsoever.
* The [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]] ''[[
* Every single [[
** In ''[[
*** However, Sonic Heroes has the clearest example of this trope in the
** ''[[Sonic Unleashed]]'' is even more brutal. While score is reset, the time ''isn't''.
*** In the nighttime stages, score is even more important than usual. Sonic is slow as a Werehog, which means your time bonus is pretty useless. A death takes such a heavy toll on your score, that most levels in the game can be S ranked purely by not dying, regardless of any other effort placed on killing enemies or getting score. On top of that, dying will bring you back with an empty unleash meter.
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** The second add on had a similar idea with the 'relic of the reaper' both of these could become expensive if you died to often.
** However, you can always save and reload.
** ''[[Neverwinter Nights 2]]'' completely averts this trope, however. Death is truly a [[Death Is a Slap
* One of the ''[[
* Later instalments in the ''[[
* ''[[
* A glitch in the final boss of ''[[Jak and Daxter|Jak 2]]'' meant that, though the game was saved when you reached the third phase, dying would take you back to the first - with all the ammo you had when you started that phase. Thus, every time you die on the third phase, your ammo would deplete for further attempts. Only one kind of ammo can be restocked during the fight, and it is for a generally weak gun, thus the boss gets increasingly difficult the more you fail at it.
* ''[[
** Exception to this: dying in lava. Unless you could recruit the help of a necromancer - which was frequently expensive - your corpse was just lost.
** Exception 2: Dying in some high tier zones (Plane of Hate, for example) virtually meant you had lost your corpse, since there was almost no way to survive entering it without dying, if naked. The only possibility was to use a two minute window to resurrect a couple of people, and try to hold out against three minor enemies (every single one capable of destroying an unprepared raid), while resurrecting the rest of the people. The problem is that you have no way of knowing when that two minute opening occurs, so this was mostly a luck-based mission.
*** Veeshan's Peak was even worse, since not only could all the aforementioned problems happen, Verant Interactive deliberately upped the difficulty by disallowing the [[Game Master
** Everquest's penalties for dying slowly got less severe until they finally did away with corpse runs all together. The exp loss can still be pretty painful, though.
** In ''Everquest 2'', there was originally a variation on corpse runs for "life shards". You would slowly regenerate 50% of your lost exp, but to regenerate the other 50% you had to go retrieve your life shard from where you died. This mechanic was removed fairly early on, some time between the first and second expansions. Now all that happens is a rather pitiful 0.5% regenerating exp loss per death and damaging your armor by 10% forcing you to pay to have it repaired.
* ''[[
** In 2-player mode, when someone loses their last live, only the stages cleared by that player will have to be done again. This can lead to some interesting situations.
* Any character using the Blaster in the ''[[Super Star Wars]]'' games will lose the upgrades for it if a life is lost. This can make completing the level much harder since the default Blaster is extremely weak.
* In ''[[Shinobi]]'' for the Sega Master System, dying would cause your life meter (which could be extended to almost insane lengths) to reset back to its default, and you'll also lose any weapon power-ups you've obtained. This can be particularly annoying in the levels with the bottomless pits. Good luck fighting those dive-bombing enemies in level 5-2 with a crappy life bar!
* The ''Shards of Alara'' expansion in [[
** Couldn't you just float mana for combat tricks though? It seems impractical against rush decks, sure, but against something like old school control which relies on usually one creature as a kill condition, this is pretty darn good. And it practically murders combo decks, since they rely on some sort of one shot (damage or mass decking).
*** You could float mana, but given that you're most likely to die on someone else's turn, you might get off one instant if you're lucky. The problem is, as stated above, aggro just swings again, control just laughs (having spent most of the game trying to keep you more or less in the position you just put yourself in), and combo can probably still aggro you to death if it's done right.
* The [[From Software]] game ''[[
** You can get your souls back if you can reach your original corpse on your next life, but if you die AGAIN before reaching it, they are gone for good.
** Demon's Souls is both this and [[Death Is a Slap
* ''[[City of Heroes]]'' has a slap on the wrist version with XP Debt, which can be seen as your "hospital bill." Until you earn enough XP to pay it off, you only keep half of the XP and the other half goes towards paying off the debt. However, there is no XP debt before level 10 or in certain areas, and deaths inside missions give only half the debt that you'd get dying outdoors. Also any Patrol XP that you've earned while offline will pay off the debt passively, and Patrol XP that you already had saved up will pay off the debt before you even get back up. Originally, XP Debt was cumulative, so each death would increase the amount of debt to the point that XP Debt could be equal to your current level, and further deaths felt like a step backwards.
* ''[[Star Fox (
** Of course, that's assuming you didn't come into the fight with only one wing and on your last legs. In certain highly difficult levels (such as Area 6) you might be in no shape to fight the boss ''anyway'' the first time you get there, so dying just gives you a refill.
** Continuing is especially painful when facing the improved Star Wolf on Venom. Couldn't beat them with the best firepower upgrade? Try doing it with your weak default laser. It doesn't help that you are immediately thrown into the fight.
* In some of the ''[[
* In [[The Elder Scrolls]] games you can't continue after you die, but there's a lesser outcome: you are caught by the guards doing something illegal and get sent to prison. That leads to the loss of some stats (which may or may not be a problem, there are a lot of stats and you usually don't use them all) and the loss of all your stolen items ([[Kleptomaniac Hero|which may be a much bigger problem]]).
** You can get the items back, though, from the "evidence" chests scattered throughout the various Legion garrisons in the world.
** In Oblivion, you could actually use this to raise the level cap. Losing points didn't change your level but regaining major skills would allow you to level up. Once you max your skills, it's the only way to level anymore.
* ''[[Zombies Ate My Neighbors]]'' does this for ''passwords''. As you progress, you gain a password to use to continue from that level if you decide to play later. However, continuing from a password won't keep all the guns and items you collected, so the only way to make some real progress is to start from the first level ''each time you want to try to beat the game''. The game also has 40+ levels for you to clear. Good luck!
* After continuing in ''[[Alien Soldier]]'', any increase of maximum ammunition and health goes away. You pretty much need the extra capacity in order to survive.
* Due to [[Final Death]] (and a bit of [[Video Game Caring Potential]]) in the ''[[
** And don't even think about resetting in 6, 7, or 8 in order to try and save that character. Since the game auto-saves after each combat result (including the random number seed), you'll just end up watching them die the same way all over again. The only way to save them is to restart the entire level from scratch.
* Both ''[[
** But ''[[
** This isn't technically correct. In the original game, score was based on total health. If both teams made it to the saferoom the one with the highest health, including first aid kids and pills, would get the highest score. In the sequel, score is based on distance and the tie-breaker being which team did more damage as the Infected. It's possible for a team to reach the saferoom with less health than their opponents but still win if they took most of that damage from Common Infeceted (which haven't been summoned by a Boomer), Friendly Fire etc, and not directly from the other team.
* In ''[[Resonance of Fate]]'', if you are defeated, you can chose to "continue and restore HP" (which costs you some money), or "continue and restore Hero Gauge" (in case you were foolish enough to enter a serious battle with a less than full
* In ''Cho Ren Sha 68k'', dying makes you lose all your powerups (and resets your bomb counter to 3, which is good if you have less than that but bad if you have more), not to mention your score is reset if you continue. Worse, lives, bombs, and your shield all count for points at the end of a level. Worse still, while in the earlier levels the triple-item trick (sit in the middle of a small ring of three items for a few seconds to get all of them) is simple, doing this without using a bomb or your shield in later levels is all but impossible. The levels are already hard enough when you have sufficiently upgraded, but the powerups (which are much less frequent now) are much harder to get to without dying and losing them, thanks to your weaker gun and lack of a shield.
* Originally ''[[
* ''[[
** Injury Kits are hard to come by?
* The NES game ''[[Silver Surfer (
* In ''[[
* [[Chicken Invaders]] (like Space Invaders, only with a really silly plot involving chickens) causes you to lose all powerups when you die.
* In both [[Donkey Kong Country (video game)|the original]] and [[Donkey Kong Country Returns|the new]] ''Donkey Kong Country'' games, everything is easier when both Kongs are free. However, when you restart from a checkpoint, you start off with only one Kong. Unless they were generous enough to place a DK Barrel right next to the checkpoint, you're gonna have to grin and bear it and try making it through the difficult segment again with just the one.
* The ''[[
** Even worse, in the first game, at a point where you will only have one or two Waters of Life (assuming you've been searching ''all'' the random boxes and barrels you come across), you can die and get sent back to a fairly out of the way village. While this usually wouldn't be too much of a problem, as reviving is fairly cheap at that point in the game, everyone in the village, including the healer, is currently a tree. So you'll have to trek a loooooong way back to get those characters healthy again. [[Up to Eleven|You better hope all the enemies you encounter are willing to let you run on your first attempt...]]
** But to be fair, you can just reset the game, and since you can save anytime and anywhere, it's pretty much always the better choice. Unless you forget to save often, but one could say you deserve it then.
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** Example: A player with the title of "Fighter" has 5000 EXP, a little bit more than enough to earn the rank of "Adept". If the player loses his/her life at that point, their EXP level would reset to 3500, the minimum required to reach the rank of Fighter.
* This is particularly evident in Warblade, an obscure shmup. Players will often survive for many hundreds of levels, and then lose all their lives at once. This is mostly because some powerups, including the ultra-expensive Super Autofire and Alien Lock, are destroyed, your weapon is downgraded one tier, and all of your other stats (except, oddly, Bullet Speed) take a minor beating. It's no wonder that, even though it's certainly not [[Bullet Hell]], shields are the items you buy more than anything else.
* Oh, ''[[Henry Hatsworth in
* Even the [[Harvest Moon]] series dabbled in this (thankfully, only once). In ''HM DS'', if you passed out from exhaustion - this usually happens in the mines where creatures attack you and the best weapon against them eats lots of energy - when you woke up the next day half your gold would be gone, and your fatigue gauge would be half-gone.
* Getting killed in ''[[The Goonies (
* In ''[[Mount
* In the Free to Play MMO [[Spiral Knights]], if you die you have three options: get resurrected by having another party member sacrifice half of their HP to give to you, spend Energy (which can be bought with real money but slowly regenerates naturally) or just give up and return to the Lobby. Spending Energy seems okay for the first 2 or so deaths, but each time you die, the cost doubles...the decision to turn back after already spending lots of energy on multiple revives during [[That One Level]] is a difficult one, indeed.
* In ''[[
** [[Duke Nukem 3D]] is slightly more
* Unlike most [[Shoot'Em Up]] games where your [[Smart Bomb]] stock got refilled when you died, ''[[Heavy Weapon]]'' makes you ''lose'' all your Nukes on death. Good luck fighting a boss without them...
** Even worse was when you got destroyed via a [[One-Hit Kill]] when you had full shields. You also had to collect those back too!
* In the NES adventure game ''[[
* In the NES version of ''Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'', if Indy dies after collecting the Sankara stones, he will lose them and have to track them down again before he can move on to the next level.
* Losing a life in ''[[
* In ''Wai Wai World'', it costs 100 bullets to revive each dead character. This isn't too much of a chore unless everyone dies, and continuing only gives you Konami Man, Konami Girl, and half the bullets you had. (Much like hearts in ''[[Castlevania II:
* ''[[Super Star Wars]]'' is [[Nintendo Hard]] to the extreme so dying will set you back a lot. Death means any blaster upgrades and health upgrades are lost.
* Dying in ''[[
* Dying in ''[[
* ''[[Final Fantasy:
* ''[[Urban Dead]]'' is an odd case where death can be either meaningless or excruciating. Die as a survivor, and you have to play as a zombie until you can be revived by another player. For players who like playing both sides this is no problem. For others, depending on the climate of the place where you died you may be able to walk two spaces to a designated revive point and be up in a few hours or you may have to trek across two suburbs, spending two AP per move since you're probably a ''low-level'' zombie.
** Zombies used to have an extremely nerve-wracking
* In ''[[
* ''Strike Gunner'' (SNES): Your main weapon on hard mode is a single Vulcan that fires so slowly that your chance of getting a [[Game Over]] in the first few seconds dramatically rises to 95%. And when you die once, all the main weapon upgrades that you collected are lost and you go back to using that weapon.
* In the unlicensed NES game ''Crystal Mines'', your miner robot starts off with a blaster that can only fire one shot and has a very short range. There are upgrades in the game which you can collect that permanently increase the blaster's range and amount of shots it can fire as well as bombs that can destroy obstacles and enemies. However, as soon as you die once, all those upgrades and bombs you collected are lost which leaves your robot in worse condition than if it hadn't been killed.
* In ''[[Gears of War]] 3'' Horde Mode, you can continue at the current wave after a [[Total Party Kill]]. However, it resets to the condition that your defenses and money were at the time you died, so each time you are spending a little more money and starting off a little less defended. On any wave higher than about 25, surviving more than one restart is nigh-impossible.
* In ''[[
* ''[[Kid Icarus: Uprising]]'' is a boarderling case. Dying bumps your difficulty level down (and you loose some hearts, but they're really easy to get anyway), which would normally be considered [[Anti
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