Justified Extra Lives: Difference between revisions

 

A form of [[Gameplay and Story Integration]].

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Shadow Man]]'', killing Mike LeRoi sends him to Deadside just like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, once there, he becomes Shadow Man, whose powers include the ability to cross back over to certain locations in the world of the living.

** [[Chakan The Forever Man]]'s immortality works similarly. He can be killed, but it just brings him to his inter-dimensional hub where he can go right back to where he was.

* ''[[Aliens Infestation]]'' for the DS has you controlling a four Marine fireteam, one soldier at a time. If one Marine is killed, another will take their place. There are a couple of wrinkles: if your fireteam is short a member or two, you can find other Marines to join your fireteam throughout each level (They'll refuse if you already have a full fireteam.) Also, if a Marine gets incapacitated by an alien, they're dragged off to a nearby lair instead of killed, and can be rescued. {{spoiler|If they are mortally wounded again, however, an alien will burst out of their chest.}}

 

* In ''V2000'', the manual makes the player one of a number of pilots who fly drone craft remotely. Stocks and manufacturing capacity are both limited, so priority is given to those pilots who prove the most effective against [[The Virus]] and penetrate the furthest into its domain. A magnificent example. One that falls apart as soon as hidden trophies start giving lives, but magnificent.

* The way ''[[Alien Shooter]]'' describes extra lives is this: the scientists have finally found the method to dodge death, so [[Chekhov's Gun|they give you several in the beginning]] and several additional lives during your mission, after you pay them loads of money.

* ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]'' for the NES gives the player control of each of the four turtles one at a time. If they run out of life, April O'Neil/Splinter will inform you that they "got caught." This turns out not to be a euphenism - if you're down a turtle, you can find them tied up in a chair and rescue them in certain spots.

 

* ''[[Tex Murphy]]'': Overseer presented the entire story as a flashback, with all player deaths handwaved by Tex: "Of course, I'd have to be an idiot to do ''that''. Here's what ''really'' happened."

* In ''[[The Secret of Monkey Island]],'' protagonist Guybrush Threepwood can die (if you're really, REALLY trying to). However, in ''[[Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge]]'', the premise is that Guybrush is telling a story to Elaine, so any death would be inconsistent with the fact that he's alive enough to tell about it. Still, in one scene, Guybrush is hooked up to a timed death contraption. If you fail to deactivate the machine within the allotted time, he drops into a vat of acid, at which point Elaine reminds him that he's telling a story. The game then returns you to the beginning of the contraption scene.

* The premise of ''[[Shadow of Destiny]]'' is your character using time travel to prevent his death; if you fail to do so you can just go back in time and try again. Note that it ''is'' possible to die permanently, {{spoiler|by running out of time in the final level, touching your past self, or failing to return to the present when your time machine tells you to.}} You can still reload your saved game, though.

 

* ''[[Alien vs. Predator]]'' on the [[Atari]] Jaguar had the Alien able to lay eggs in Marines. If you died, you would continue from the new alien that was hatched.

* In ''[[System Shock]]'', this has to be turned on for each area by finding its BS-tech resurrection chamber. Initial incursions may be short and cautious until the chamber's discovery creates a bridgehead.

* Portal2: While this is averted in the single-player campaign, the co-op gives a justification. The players are robots; upon "dying" their data and personalities are transferred to a new body and plunked back in with their buddy. The choice of using robots was actually to avoid [[Fridge Logic]], and the horror of seeing a human character die in hundreds of really painfully creative ways.

 

* ''[[Spider and Web]]'': In this interactive fiction game, the framing story is that you are a captured spy being interrogated. If you died in your retelling, the interrogator would be cross with you and make you start over.

 

* ''[[EVE Online]]'' explains this with clones. And actually goes for more realistic approach - when your ship has been blown up, you survive in an emergency escape pod. If you manage to get away in that, you only lose the ship and cargo. If the pod has been blown up as well - then the clone justification comes into play. You lose all the implants your original body had and all the skills that you have learned after you have updated your clone.

* The MMORPG ''[[Shadowbane]]'' explained the ability of characters to come back from the dead as something terribly wrong, but consistent throughout the world. Nobody could permanently die. [[Who Wants to Live Forever?|At all.]]

* [[Fusion Fall]]: [[The Grim Reaper]] is on your side, so he just revives all casualties at the last checkpoint.

 

* ''[[Prince of Persia]]: The Sands of Time'' is presented as a story the titular character is telling. If you die, he'll say something along the lines of, "Wait, no, that's not how it happened, may I start again?", allowing you to try again.

** which leads to some interesting [[Fridge Logic]] when you think about it. "So I scaled the wall, jumped off just as the platform retreated, and fell thirty feet onto spikes, killing myself in a gruesome manner. Wait, hold on, that doesn't sound right, let me start again..."

* [[Donkey Kong Country Returns]] uses balloons as extra lives like the original trilogy, except this time the game shows your Kong being carried back into the stage by the balloon if he dies.

 

* The game ''[[Sacrifice]]'': The game missions are narrated by the hero. Failing and restarting them makes the hero turn out to be an [[Unreliable Narrator]] and say, ''Of course, that's not what really happened. Let me start again...''

** In addition, dying isn't much of an issue because your patron deity's got your back (or your soul, at any rate) and will restore you to life once your mana has recovered to 25%. As long as your [[Keystone Army|Altar]] is intact, a wizard can't die, and thus the main way to win in ''Sacrifice'' is to desecrate your opponent's altar to keep the wizard from reforming.

 

* In ''[[Neverwinter Nights]]'', a character who dies is pulled back to the nearest temple of Tyr and gets a lecture from the head cleric about how they almost lost him/her that time.

** In the Shadows of Undrentide expansion, you get a magic ring that does the same thing (but pulls you to Drogan's house instead of a temple) in the first chapter, except it has limited charges (depending on how many Focus Crystals you have)

* ''[[Phantasy Star II]]'', unlike most western RPG titles, literally ''does'' have your characters dying for real if they're slain in battle. You then have to go to a Cloning Lab to have the dead character cloned into a new being possessing the old one's abilities and memories. {{spoiler|This also happens in canon at least once, as your entire party is killed in the crash of Gaila with the planet Palma, but Tyler had everyone cloned.}}

 

* ''Stargunner'' tries to explain its extra lives by claiming that they're actually some sort of warp devices that activate automatically when you die and proceed to "teleport you to the closest compatible parallel dimension".

* Ray series like [[Ray Storm]] and [[Ray Crisis]] have varying degrees of justification. On Ray Storm, you can clearly hear the radio voice upon your death(s) saying "Ray 2/3 to continue present tactics." Yes, it's not so much that you have extra lives, it's that [[We Have Reserves]]. Ray Crisis, on the other hand, takes place inside an immersive AI construct of a cyborg called Con-Human, and your fighter really is a virus designed to wreak havoc. Presumably then, your lives are the number of times the virus can regenerate after the Antibodies have killed it.

* ''[[Hellsinker]]'''s manual says that extra lives are due to the [LIFE] system, which excised the concept of being alive, and split it into seven parts. Of course, this being ''Hellsinker'', it's not clear how seriously this is meant to be taken.

 

 

* ''[[Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater]]'' is presented as an apparent simulation of historical events, so if you die (or take certain actions), it creates a "Time Paradox", as that's not what "really" happened, and you have to try again.

* In ''[[Assassin's Creed]]'', the player character is plugged into a machine that accesses your ancestor's memories. When you die, it's called "memory desynchronization", and you have to access the memory again and do it the way your ancestor did it; i.e., the right way.

*** Considering most injuries would either severely cripple or kill him, he'd pretty much have to do it in a perfect go.

 

* In ''[[Brute Force]]'', a dead player is replaced with a clone created for the purpose. This is expensive.

** Lampshaded in a few places, such as when your [[Mission Control|commander]] tells someone to prepare a backup clone just after ordering you to jump through an untested teleporter without knowing where it will go.

* 'Lives' in ''[[Total Overdose]]'' are called 'rewinds', and results in the action winding back from death to allow more survivable choices—sort of like an instant internal [[Retcon]]. If the player is painted irreversibly into a corner anyway, that just displays how many ways the character can die, until you're out of rewinds.

 

* The flash game ''[[Dino Run]]'' calls lives "time shifts".

** And the game pause "time freeze". (Is there a trope for this?)

* The recent platformer Liferaft: Zero's protagonist is a female text subject with TONS of her clo- sisters backing her up, all eager to go out and get that [[Iconic Item|candy]].

 

* The ''[[Destroy All Humans!]]'' series replaces each dead player character with a sequentially numbered clone.

* ''[[Crackdown]]'' features clone replacements. In fact the "Extract" option just instantly kills your character and pulls up the menu to choose where you want to respawn. It's only the loss of your current progress towards the next upgrade level that prevents it being a better method of transport than driving to get across town.

* ''[[Spore]]'': The Cell and Creature phases show that every time you die, you emerge as another member of your species, ready to continue. The Space phase explains extra lives as a combination of "advanced cloning technology" and "emergency consciousness transferal", having you re-emerge as a freshly-cloned pilot with a rebuilt ship after dying.

** If you happen to explode on you own planet, the pieces of your old ship will still be falling from the sky as your new ship flies up through them.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* ''[[South Park]]'' does this with Kenny, who was killed off every episode for about six seasons before getting around to explaining how he kept coming back.

* In ''[[Garfield His 9 Lives]]'', God decides to give more lives to [[Garfield (Comic Strip)|Garfield]] and Odie because he thought their last life (blown up by an alien fleet) put them in an "unfair position".

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]