Family-Unfriendly Death/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • In Sonic Unleashed, Super Sonic flies straight through Dark Gaia's central eye and bursts out of the back of its head. Though you don't see much of that, you DO see Dark Gaia toppling over, crumbling apart with gallons of green blood pouring everywhere.
  • New Super Mario Bros.. The first boss is a fight against Bowser, which you win by dropping him into lava, just like in the classic Super Mario Bros....except that back in the NES days, he didn't frantically struggle to escape, fall down into the lava, and briefly resurface as a skeleton after having his flesh burned away. Followed immediately by, depending on who you're playing as, either Mario saying "That's-a so nice!" or Luigi saying "Yay for me, Luigi!" Yeah. That's. Messed. Up.
    • In Super Mario Sunshine, there are a certain type of enemy known as 'Electro-Koopas', who have electric shells, and attack by flinging their shells like a boomerang at you. How does Mario defeat them? By spraying them with water, so that when their shells come back they get electrocuted. And in a later episode at Pinna Park, Mario defeats a giant one by flipping the grate it was sleeping on, so that it plunges into the water, getting electrocuted also. Wonderful.
    • Don't forget Mario's scarily realistic drowning in Super Mario 64. In the DS remake it's changed to a more cartoony drowning.
    • A few of Mario's death sequences in Super Mario Galaxy, namely electrocuted into a skeleton, spaghettification and disintegrating!
    • That one scene in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in which Hooktail eats all the Toads in the audience, and starts chewing them with her mouth open. Sure, there's no blood or gore, but still, seeing numerous Toads getting chewed up while still alive is pretty disturbing.
    • In Super Mario World four of the seven Koopaling bosses are defeated by tossing them into lava. While Iggy and Larry get killed offscreen, Lemmy and Wendy are seen sinking into the lava and flailing. In the Gameboy Advance version of the game, there is also a shrieking sound played during these scenes. And following their defeat, their castles (where the boss fights took place) get destroyed in various ways, leaving only debris or nothing at all. One wonders how the Koopalings could come back in later games after these events.
    • Mario can suffer some pretty graphic deaths in Paper Mario: The Origami King, most notably getting shredded by a ravenous Paper Macho Chain Chomp (the screen turns black but the sound still plays), accompanied by Olivia's terrified scream if Mario's team gets ambushed and cornered by it, or getting cut in half Single-Stroke Battle-style, including the screen flashing red, only showing Mario's silhouette splitting, then focusing on Mario's two halves falling to the floor, frozen in a permanent shocked expression.
  • Considering almost nobody ever really died in the previous games in the series, the death of Marquis de Singe in Tales of Monkey Island is kind of shocking. After his immortality elixir fails him, his wounds open up and he falls into his own machine that breaks matter into its particles and spreads them around the seas. The way his scream suddenly cuts off is... unsettling.
    • Almost immediately followed by this, and without warning, Guybrush is murdered by LeChuck. Thankfully he gets better.
  • In Illusion of Gaia, the Jackal's death is quite gruesome, particularly for an SNES game. He has captured the hero's love interest, but the hero plays his flute, activating the booby trap of the room to spew a stream of fire at the Jackal, setting his body completely alight. He slowly burns to death as he tries to crawl his way along the floor to the protagonists before finally collapsing, still in flames. If you exit and re-enter the room afterwards, his bones remain.
    • Don't forget when Hamlet the Pig jumps into the fire in order to feed the villagers. To eat or not to eat... * sniff*
  • In the game Super Metroid, there is one particular boss fight which still seems almost saddening. There a is a boss creature known as Crocomire who, when beaten, falls into the acid below. He repeatedly tries to claw his way out, each time his flesh animated to be melting off of his skeleton. Soon, an earthquake occurs, and the bleached walking skeleton of Crocomire appears through a wall, making a last-ditch effort to survive before dropping dead, leaving only the skull behind. Words do it no justice.
    • Dying in Prime is greatly disturbing, and it only gets more so in the "death by Corruption" scene in Metroid Prime 3.
      • Finishing the original NES game is bound to hit the player with Fridge Horror the next time he or she plays, and dies --while one might have gotten the impression of a robot exploding to bits during a first playthrough, knowing that there's a human being in that suit turns Samus' death animation into a gory, gravity-obeying splatter.
    • Gandrayda's death in Prime 3. Since Gandrayda is a shapeshifter, as she dies, she goes through a bunch of random forms... and then turns into Samus. And Samus watches herself die.
    • Rundas as well. Most enemies in these sort of games tend to explode or something after they're defeated, but he was impaled by icicles.
  • Space Quest III did this too, with enemies carrying gel guns that would trap you in a solid block of a Jell-O-like substance. Very cartoony! Then Sierra's trademark Have a Nice Death screen pops up, and mentions that there are no air holes.
    • Not to mention most of the SQ series' deaths were particularly graphic for Sierra standards. SQ 3 alone has Roger suffer a fatal cut to an artery leading him to slowly and painfully bleed to death, not to mention Explosive Decompression or getting half his face blown off.
    • Or get shredded by a garbage shredder. Or falling to death.
    • Really, Space Quest was really "nice" about these. The first game opens with Roger being the only crew member still alive aboard the Arcada. Just LOOK at the corpses around the deck. Most were gut-shot and/or bled to death from multiple blaster wounds. There's also the grell, where you're chewed up and swallowed by the creature. Dehydration, Explosive Decompression, having your head dissolve from an acid pool, run over by motorcycles, Body Horror at the hands of the Pukoids...the list goes on.
  • The Kingdom Hearts series stopped being a kid's game the minute Sora enters the second District of Traverse Town and watches as a Heartless eats a man's heart.
    • The moment when Sora smiles, and then proceeds to impale himself with a keyblade, killing him. What really rubs the salt into the wound, though, is the fact that Kairi regains her heart, and wakes up just in time to see Sora toppling over, dying.
    • There are two villainous deaths in Chain of Memories that qualify as well, though not because of gore. Zexion and Vexen (whom we'd even been invited to feel somewhat sorry for) both died defenseless, pathetic, and begging for their lives to be spared. Even worse, their deaths are both orchestrated by someone allegedly on THEIR side, and the manner of their deaths is, well...Depending on which version of the game you go by, Vexen was either stabbed to death by Axel or burned alive, and Zexion had the Riku Replica sicced on him, and was strongly implied to have been somehow consumed by it.
    • Ironically for the series' tone, Jafar and Scar's deaths in Kingdom Hearts II are completely family friendly in contrast to the examples in their movies above...
  • Marx Soul in Kirby Super Star Ultra. After you beat the snot outta him, he blows up... then reappears briefly only to split in half while screaming with an equally horrific facial expression. And then both halves explode and so does the boss arena afterwards. And this is immediately followed by Kirby reigning cheerfully triumphant as the champion of The True Arena...
    • In Kirby's Dreamland 3 there's Zero who, in a final attempt to kill you, rips off its own iris, which is constantly bleeding and after taking enough damage bleeds even more and explodes.
      • Zero's return in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards as Zero Two is almost worse when you give it some thought. To push it into the state where you can damage it, you need to repeatedly impale its eye with the Crystal Shards, releasing clouds of blood. This stuns it in pain long enough for you to open fire on its bandaged wound from Dreamland 3, which makes it writhe in agony.
  • Eric Chahi seems to have a thing for horribly violent death. While this is merely somewhat shocking in games that might plausibly have been for older players, being ripped limb-from-limb by living shadows in the very Disney-esque Heart of Darkness is quite jarring.
    • And that is just the beginning of the list of horrific deaths the player character can suffer.
    • Out of This World: Getting bitten by deadly switchblade slugs? Check. Being crisped by the enemy's Frickin' Laser Beams? Check. Scalded to death by steam pipes? Check. Drowning? Check. Mauled by the Shadow Beast? Check.
  • The reason why everyone who still claims The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker was a "kiddy game" because of its graphics is pretty likely to get Gannon Banned: Ganondorf's death by being impaled with the Master Sword through the jewel on his forehead by a 12-year-old kid was arguably even more brutal than his chest-impalement in The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess.
    • Even though The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time is Rated-E, the death of the third boss, Barinade, is particularly gruesome. Huge boils begin to form all over it's body and it explodes in a burst of green blood and flesh. And none of it disappears after you kill it. Before leaving you can run around the room and see all of the gore splattered on the floor.
      • Ocarina Of Time really established this as a series tradition for baddies in general and Ganon in particular. The last controllable action in the whole game involves Link slashing at Ganon several times -- with the necessary blood flying around -- before jamming the Master Sword into his face.
    • In The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword, Ghirahim's death is perhaps the most disturbing one in the entire series. He starts out by inverting the Crucified Hero Shot, being lifted up by the Demon King Demise. Then the hilt of a sword starts to appear from the core in his chest. Demise then pulls it out, while Ghirahim laughs maniacally, almost as if he wanted it to happen. Ghirahim then begins to fade away and is absorbed into Demise's sword.
      • In a more indirect manner, there are the Lanayru robots across Lanayru desert. With the Timeshift Stones activated, they're perfectly functional in their mining operations and other activities. With the Timeshift Stones deactivated, however, they immediately revert to their current rusted state.
  • In Brave Fencer Musashi, while two of the members of the Goldfish Poop Gang got pretty standard deaths, Toppo, arguably the least harmless of the bunch (and of the antagonists period), is the one with the most brutal demise. After a fairly lighthearted game of "Simon Says", she gets brutally shocked by her own stage, screaming in pure agony, and finally spends her last moments painfully writhing and bleeding out. Yeah, the endgame is much darker then the rest of the game.
  • Master D's head exploding in Bionic Commando.
  • NARC. Yes, even the NES version.
  • Mother 3. All creatures/enemies are defeated, broken into pieces, returned to their senses, etc when they are beaten. At least until the last boss. Suicide by electrocution, anybody?
  • A beta version of the SNES platformer Ardy Lightfoot has Catry, the vulpine boss of the fourth level, sporting a ninja costume (and a slightly more pronounced bustline). On the flip side, her final fate in the bowels of the next level's giant worm is as a half-digested corpse (as opposed to a skeleton in the final Japanese version and just lying prone on the ground in the U.S. version).
  • The original Frogger was limited to drowning or being flattened by a car/truck, and maybe the occasional alligator. Other games in the series got a little more creative-- Frogger 3D (the PS 1 and PC game, not the 3DS game) alone had: being mauled by a dog, falling into lava, crushed between spiked walls, getting run over by a lawnmower, and so forth. Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge also had deaths such as being inflated and popped like a balloon, and getting cut in half, with visible blood. Makes you wonder what the hell the ESRB was thinking when they gave that game an E rating.
  • One of the games on the Genesis version of Action 52 was a Frogger clone. Instead of a frog, you played a dog. Get hit by a car, and the dog gets decapitated and his guts pour out.
  • The transformed Double literally slicing apart various reploids in Mega Man X4 complete with blood gushing from their wounds for some reason.
    • The same game has Zero getting Flashback Nightmares of him surrounded by bloodied corpses (his victims when he first awoke as a Maverick), with blood on his hands as well.
  • Death by electrocution or burning in Dark Castle and its sequel, which is accompanied by a bloodcurdling scream.
  • A Boy and His Blob: To defeat the frog-like enemies you must transform Blob into a coconut which will make the enemy eat him. Then call the Blob back, he'll burst out of the enemy, making him explode. Granted, it's a blob, but it's still kind of grisly.
  • Deaths in the C64 Friday the 13th game are accompanied by a bloodcurdling scream and a disturbing image such as a knife in someone's head.
  • The player character's death in Last Alert is especially gory.
  • Gillan's death by Diagonal Cut in Valis II, and the mage boss's death (complete with Blood From the Mouth) in the TurboGrafx-16 remake of the first game.
  • Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds has a Dummied Out Indulgent Fantasy Segue where Luther gets violently attacked by a Psycho Electric Eel.
  • The PSN game Super Stardust HD has some enemies that heavily bleed red blood upon being killed. And this is in an E-rated game by the way.
  • Wax Works is pretty much built on this.
  • Little-known PS 1 platformer The Adventures of Little Ralph has this in spades, especially near the end. The main character is transformed into a little kid. For most of the game, the deaths are of the simple 'falling over' variety. Then, you get to the Temple stage, where you can get impaled on spikes (complete with blood splatter), crushed by a giant piston (complete with blood splatter), burnt to a crisp, or electrocuted. Arguably the worst one is where Ralph falls into a pit of giant maggots, sinking in slowly and disappearing, only to have his skull then pop out, stripped clean of all flesh.
  • Some of the boss 'deaths' in the Donkey Kong Country series, but especially in Donkey Kong 64. The most over the top and probably traumatising one has to be after the second Dogadon battle where the dragon flies into the wall with a loud splat, flies up and explodes into light, falls back down in the lava and resurfaces while flailing around on fire and screeching, before sinking back in with smoke rising from it. See at the end of this video
  • In World of Warcraft, the cutscene showing the events at the Wrathgate was far more graphic than just about anything else in the game.
  • The Metal Gear series is rife with this:
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