Failure Is the Only Option/Video Games

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Examples of Failure Is the Only Option in Video Games include:

  • In Diablo 2 the unnamed protagonist is met with failure at every turn due to arriving ever so slightly too late to have stopped the villain from doing what they were trying to do.
    • Act 1: The hero arrives too late to catch Diablo in his new body and Andariel is successful in delaying his venture to the east to go after Diablo.
    • Act 2: The hero arrives in what couldn't have been more than a few minutes before Diablo got there and freed his brother which is precisely what you were trying to stop him from doing. They leave Duriel there to delay the character's pursuit.
    • Act 3: You make it to Mephisto mere moments before he activates the power of the soulstones on his brother Diablo and opens a portal to hell for them to escape to, staying behind himself to delay the player's pursuit.
    • Act 4: You actually make it to Diablo and kill him before he does anything too terrible but that's only because he wasn't actually trying to do anything to Sanctuary at that point. While you were messing around with Diablo in Hell Baal amassed an army of demons and is assaulting the Worldstone Keep to merge hell with Earth and destroy humanity. Maybe should have done something about that instead of killing Diablo.
    • Act5: Half way through you arrive just too late to interrupt Baal from getting an object that will allow him to walk right through the front door of the Worldstone Keep. Afterwards you get to Baal and suprise suprise he actually hasn't corrupted the Worldstone yet. You fight him and defeat him thinking that you arrived just in time to stop the world from being destroyed, but wait! Tyreal then tells you that the mere act of Baal touching the Worldstone corrupted it completely, meaning that after the fight you find out that yet again you arrived too late, this time by were minutes at the very most.
    • The entire quest you set out on in the beginning of the game turns into failure after failure, sure you destroy 5 of the most powerful evil beings in existence but not before they succeed in doing the very thing that they set out to do in the first place.
    • Let's not forget Diablo is using the body of the Warrior from Diablo 1.
  • In ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman, your first attempt at defeating the last boss is met with failure. Hence you go and train in the game's dungeons to gain the power needed to contend with the boss again, only for you to get beaten again and require more training. It goes on like this for a good long while.
  • Fable I, in trying to be evil. The fact that most missions (and all plot-critical ones) are of the "good" variety coupled with the game's sliding scale of morality meant that the player must be dedicated to being a total dick through out the entire game if they wanted to be evil. Even at the fully good side, slaughtering an entire village, normally a Moral Event Horizon, barely gets the bar halfway to neutral. Plus the only moral decision that has a serious impact on the game comes at the END and only affects whether you get the most powerful sword or not.

    In Fable the Lost Chapters, you can play past this end and ironically you get the sword either way (good/evil version of it). It's even more pathetic that in the real end you are stuck with a choice whether to put on the mask of the Big Bad and let his soul take over your body OR destroy the mask. Even if you're trying to play an evil tyrant and you decide that you don't want anyone else's soul in your body, not to mention ugly unable to be removed head gear, your Karma Meter still swings to maximum good due to your choice -- and you get that pesky halo and so on. I liked my horns and swarms of flies!
  • Super Mario Bros. featured Mario storming castles and fighting hordes of monsters, alone and with very little firepower, to save Princess Toadstool, only to keep finding out that he's stormed the wrong castle. He gets there in 8th and final castle. When he gets to the end of the final castle, he finds out there's another princess. There's always another princess, and there always will be until Mario runs out of lives or suffers from a fatal hardware or software error.
  • In most Final Fantasy games, no matter how hard the heroes try, the villain can never be prevented from becoming all-powerful. Their victory only comes after the villain has already brought the world to its knees.
    • Particularly, the plot of Dissidia Final Fantasy has an infinite number of possible worlds in which the characters are always fighting each other. When one side wins, things just start over.

      Final Fantasy II also deserves special mention, because even when the heroes actually succeed in killing the BBEG, he just takes over Hell and comes back stronger.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance plot is about you trying to destroy the world, your friends, your cripled brother and even the in-game police tries to stop you, the final battle is againts the materialization of "all the dreams and hopes of the world", they all fail hard.
    • Final Fantasy XIII-2: as revealed in the secret ending, all possible timelines lead to Caius winning. Realizing this sent Lightning over the Despair Event Horizon and she voluntarily crystallized herself.
  • Penumbra: Black Plague features a scene where you accidentally kill someone while hallucinating that they are a monster trying to kill you. You have to go through with it, refusing to do so gets you a Game Over.
  • In the Cavia game Drakengard the protagonists endeavor to prevent the seals that hold the world together from being broken, however they always seem to show up just a few minutes too late. Then there's the endings...
  • Present in the ending to Kane and Lynch, where the two possible endings to the game involve Kane abandoning his allies to save Jenny, proving in her eyes that he's every bad thing she thought he was, or Kane going back to save his allies and getting Jenny killed..
  • Deus Ex features the fairly unique (for an FPS) feature that your actions in-game modify the storyline and how characters interact with you. However, you are still limited to the same basic story-for example, no matter how badly you want to play the part of cold-blooded assassin working for the hideously corrupt UNATCO, you are forced by your brother to go to a captured NSF base and send a distress signal. This action immediately causes you to be considered a rogue by UNATCO and all the agents will become hostile. It's required to advance the storyline and cannot be avoided.
  • Kana: Little Sister - Goal: save your most important person from succumbing to her illness and live happily ever after. There is actually no real way for the player to win in the end. In most endings the protagonist's (adopted) sister dies despite his efforts, whereas in the one ending in which she survives she decides to leave him after a while. The only difference is the measure of defeat.
  • DEFCON. Goal: Win a nuclear war. You may have spotted the problem already. Hell, even the tagline: "Everybody loses...but maybe you can lose the least!" (Paraphrased, anyway...). The website is even named www.everybodydies.com.
    • One of the best examples of this comes from a metagame strategy known as the "Star of India", a formation that you play with as Asia when fighting 1v1 against Russia. You're aiming to get 99% kills on Russia, but to do so you're completely sacrificing 90% of your population (ie. all of eastern Asia and Japan) to do so.
    • If it has a win condition, you can win it. Definitely qualifies as a Pyrrhic Victory in most instances, but failure is most definitely not the only option.
  • FEAR. Goal: To stop Alma's shenanigans. Two games in, and she's only made things much worse. As an icing on the cake, the people who could do something about it manage to be even worse than Alma (I am looking at you Genevieve Aristide).
  • Grand Theft Auto IV: Niko Bellic. The end game gives you two choices for endings: Choice one is to work with the main bad guy, in which case the game punishes you for compromising on your values, and Niko's cousin Roman is killed as a direct result. Choice two involves getting your revenge and killing the main bad guy, in which case Niko is punished for choosing revenge, when the one woman Niko might love, and his one chance at salvation (Kate Mcreary) is killed instead. While Niko gets revenge on the murderer either way, it's implied that he will NEVER find peace.
  • While it is possible to get happier endings in the first two Fatal Frame games, the endings where you fail to save your brother/sister are the canon endings.
  • Mega Man X spends half of his time destroying Mavericks, and the other half trying to put a stop to the war. A hundred years later, war is still in full swing. In fact, the war only ended at the end of the Zero series, long after his "death". There's a reason why fans think of him as The Woobie...
    • A more literal example comes in the first few minutes of the first game, when you fight Vile. The fight is scripted so it can only continue when he kicks your ass. It doesn't matter if you know his pattern and somehow dodge his attacks, or if you shoot him with your Infinite Ammo plasma blaster . . . to continue the game Failure Is Literally The Only Option!
  • Dwarf Fortress literally has no win condition. Just an astonishing number of lose conditions. There is a reason the official motto is "Losing is Fun!"
    • There is only one actual lose condition: everybody dies. And many, many ways to get there.
  • Fallout 3 - the quest Tenpenny tower is about getting a load of intelligent ghouls into Tenpenny tower and gives you two main options, let in a load of feral ghouls and get all the human residents killed or the peaceful solution, where you convince the management let the intelligent ghouls move in. Unfortunately many of the human residents get killed which ever you pick as there is a 'disagreement' shortly after you leave.
    • Unless you Take a Third Option and kill the Ghoul leader just after you arrange the peace. You'll get some evil points, you'll 'fail' the quest and the other ghouls will turn hostile, but you can escape without killing the normal ghouls and the massacre will be averted. How killing the murdering, psychopathic ghoul leader is a bad act will forever remain unknown.
  • Pretty much every classic arcade game. Or any Endless Game. In the old days, success was measured by the score. The ultimate goal was to be The Best, i.e. have the top score on that machine. There were things like kill screens and rollovers, but those were unintended glitches.
  • Alone in the Dark 2008: Take your pick of allowing Sarah to be possessed by Lucifer, or killing her and having Carnby become the embodiment of Lucifer himself and unleashing the forces of Hell on the world.
  • The first act of Modern Warfare. After your failed attempt to capture Al-Asaad, the city where most of your missions took place gets nuked and You Are Too Late to escape it. And Price's attempt to snipe Zakhaev will inevitably be non-fatal. Attempting to capture Zakhaev's son for information will always end with him committing suicide when cornered.
  • Modern Warfare 2 also pulls this multiple times. In "No Russian", your character will be shot at the end - and the Russians will blame the attack on the United States based on your body being the only 'terrorist' body recovered. Attempting to rescue "Icepick" will fail as he will have died before you reach him. Finally, infiltrating Makarov's safehouse and copying all the information on his computer will result in your entire team getting wiped out except for you and Ghost - who are promptly shot, covered with gas, and set on fire by General Shepard, who was apparently supposed to extract you.
  • Resistance 2: All your efforts against the Chimera are in vain. Then they succeed at turning you into one of them.
  • Dragon Quest VIII: The Big Bad Rhapthorne needs to kill the descendants of the seven sages that sealed him away to be free. The party arrives in time to save three of the seven, fighting a Boss Battle that they have to win each time, only to fail anyway thanks to Cutscene Incompetence.
  • Academagia: Many adventures and events within the game will fall into this. Especially when all the options are either red, or, (gulp) purple.
  • Halo: Reach. You are Doomed by Canon.
  • Little Busters: Rin's bad end is mandatory before you can reach her better end. And then there's Saya's route...
  • StarCraft 2 has an apocalyptic mission in which you will eventually be overrun no matter what you do. In order to "win" the mission and advance the plot, you must kill a sufficient amount of enemies before this happens.
  • Inverted with You Have to Burn The Rope. Though the Grinning Colossus shoots projectiles which knock you back, there is no way to actually die.
  • The main goal of World of Warcraft is presumably to end the war between the Alliance and Horde. Whether one side wins or the two sides come to a peaceful conclusion and finally decide to stop killing each other is up to the individual person. However neither option seems all that obtainable. Any progress either side makes toward the former is washed away by Status Quo Is God, and the two sides will never reach peace as long as a good number of the faction leaders despise each other enough to want to kill each other more than anything else. Essentially the war has to continue or there won't really be a game anymore. However the massive amount of Enemy Mine toward common enemies makes it look a little weird that the two sides would continue to kill each other despite how counterproductive it is, so the Conflict Ball and Idiot Ball are juggled around quite a bit to keep things going.
    • There's a reason the name of the game has the word "war" in it.
  • At the beginning of Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, it's possible for Kain to wipe out all of his would-be assassins, even without a Game Shark, if proper caution is taken. However, all the exits out of town are blocked off, and you'll just have to walk in and out of a building to respawn the enemies and let Kain die like he's supposed to.
  • In Ace Attorney series, any true culprit will fail to get away with their crimes if Phoenix Wright is involved as the defense attorney in court. Lampshaded further in the 3rd game's final case by Mia and Wright who told Dahlia Hawthorne that all the crimes that she has ever involved in has ended in failure.
  • Multiple fights in the story of Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories are Hopeless Boss Fights unless you've gotten levels you wouldn't realistically have on a first play-through. Some of these fights, while winnable if you power-level or in New Game+, cause a Nonstandard Game Over for your trouble.
  • In the downloadable game Which, the door to freedom opens only for one. There are just you and a woman-like being with a knife.
  • In Project Starfighter, you cannot capture the transport in Poswic. It will always escape, and you will have to chase it down and destroy it.


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