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{{trope}}
{{Video Game Examples Need Sorting}}
In the beginning, there were [[Nintendo Hard]] games which you had to finish in a single sitting. To make these games more fair, creators implemented "lives" so that you wouldn't have to start all the way at the beginning of the game if you
Then came game saving, a feature that allowed the player to quit and start again later more or less where they left off. ''[[The Legend of Zelda (video game)|The Legend of Zelda]]'' and ''[[Metroid]]'' were the first few to do
But some developers didn't care. They liked "lives" and wanted to keep them despite having save features. People expected them to be there. Hence Meaningless Lives.
This can be caused by the following, but not always:
* Having the ability to use [[Infinite
* Having a "game over" serve no purpose besides making you lose your level checkpoint and returning you to the title screen, where you can simply re-load your game and pick up where you left off. (Basically any time [[Death Is a Slap on The Wrist]].)
* Resetting your lives to three or some other default value every time you re-load your game.
* Having infinite continues (on console games that don't require money like arcade games).
* Having the most difficult levels have an obvious, easy-to-obtain, respawning [[
** Even worse, having two or more of these at the same place. Your continued failures will actually ''increase'' your life count.
* Allowing - or even ''requiring'' - levels to be replayed, and saving the number of lives.
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** Downplayed in the Lost Levels, as even though you can max out your life counter at 127-8 (depending on the version) in the first level, you can still easily lose them all before beating the game. Played straight in ''[[Super Mario All Stars]]'', in which ''Lost Levels'' is the only game in the compilation where the player can save his progress at the last stage he played, a benefit not featured in the other games in the compilation.
** The SNES version of Super Mario World allowed you to quickly rack up lives by replaying certain levels, but the life counter was not saved. The GBA remake saved it and also extended the life counter to three digits. It was not uncommon to accumulate hundreds of lives without even trying by the end of the game.
*** The GBA version of ''[[
** ''[[Super Mario 64]]'':
*** You get unnecessary lives, especially considering you always get four whenever you reload the game...
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*** [[Super Mario Galaxy 2]] is this to about as much degree at the first game. The hub has the usual five odd lives, as well as a infinite supply in the basement via the Chance Cube in the casino (aka, about 20 possible lives to get for about a 100 coins apiece). And the standard five from Princess Peach's letters to Mario. And the Chance Cubes in most levels. And the fact unlike most 3D Mario games, you keep any lives you gain in a level if you exit without beating it, meaning easy 1-Up farming.
**** To say nothing of the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqs7Q7jYzI4 infinite 1-Up trick] about halfway through the game.
**** If you quit the game on one save file and go to another, the number of lives you had on the other save file will be transferred to the current one. This number can range from something small, like 2, to [[media:
** [[New Super Mario Bros. Wii]] has over a dozen intentional ways to get infinite (or high numbers of) 1-ups, and they're all documented in videos in the game. In other words, the game tells you how to get them. Although getting lives is trivial, losing them holds a little more weight as 7 deaths in one level (except on hard levels) makes the Game Guide pop up which means your file can [[Lost Forever|never]] have shiny stars. Also, in multiplayer there isn't time to collect as many 1ups unless [[Completely Missing the Point|everyone cooperates]], and running out means you need to sit out the level until it's completed or everyone dies.
** ''[[Super Mario 3D Land]]'' does things similarly to ''New Super Mario Bros. Wii'', having a fairly easy infinite-life trick in the ''second level of the game''. The game even rewards you for finding the trick by letting you get over the normal maximum number of lives. Just as in ''New Super Mario Bros. Wii'' however, losing too many lives in a row causes the game to give you help and [[Lost Forever|take away]] your [[Bragging Rights Reward]] of shiny stars.
* In Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again, which was the first game in the series to even HAVE lives, losing all of them causes you to... gain five more. Yeah...
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** Not to mention the fact that at the end of every level, every 1000 force gems gives you a fairy. Since you need 2000 just to complete the level, that's two right there. Each level has, without exception, over four thousand force gems, and usually more. And that's not counting the infuriating mini-games that could get you ''even more'' fairies.
** And this was even more useless if you were playing multiplayer, where you only lose fairies if all players are down simultaneously, and that's ''extremely'' rare seeing how individually downed players will automatically revive themselves after about 10 seconds - no worse for wear. In fact, this actually makes even having ''health meters'' [[Up to Eleven|effectively meaningless]] in this game.
** Most Zelda games have a "Game Over" screen, which doesn't make you lose any progress; you just get sent to the nearest building or dungeon entrance as if you had saved and restarted. Many of them have ''inverted''
* Attempted subversion in ''Gex: Enter the Gecko'', where running out of lives would erase all your progress and force you to start again. At least, that's the theory. The problem was that the game had to prompt the player to overwrite their save file, making it incredibly easy to avoid the punishment.
* ''[[Conker Live And Reloaded]]'' would reset your lives to 3 if you lost them all and chose to retry. You were thrown back to the previous checkpoint, but since literally every new room was a checkpoint this was not much of a penalty.
* ''[[Stinkoman 20 X 6]]'' gives you three lives, but the levels have no checkpoints and you can choose from any of the levels right from the start of the game. The only points at which lives matter are the boss battles, because if you have lives left when you die to a boss, you start at the boss rather than the beginning of the level. (And a glitch makes lives worthless against the first two bosses as well, since you respawn to instant death.) At all other times, you lose nothing but a few seconds of time by just refreshing the page and going back to three lives when you die.
* ''[[
* Many 3D platformers had this. ''[[
* ''[[Banjo-Kazooie]]''. 1-Ups (Banjo trophies) are easy to find, and they reappear every time to return to their area (Spiral Mountain has two 1-Ups, for example). Of course, they serve little purpose, since if you lose all of your lives, you simply get sent back to the entrance to Gruntilda's Lair. Death itself was far from a slap on the wrist however, practically anything collectible beside Jigsaw Pieces had to be re-obtained all over again (in the original version; the Xbox Live Arcade port changed this). ''Banjo-Tooie'' ditched the lives completely.
* ''[[Ghouls And Ghosts]]'' (at least, the Genesis version) has infinite continues, making what was a near-impossible game merely really really hard.
* ''[[Sonic Unleashed]]'' for the [[
** ''Sonic Rush'' and its sequel, in modern 2D platformer fashion, still allow you to amass more lives than you'll ever need.
** ''Sonic the Hedgehog 4'' (the Wii version, at least) is a huge example of this. A mediocre player could end up with over one hundred fifty lives at the time of beating the final boss.
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* Averted in ''Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy''. The game saves your progress as you go ''and'' allows you to stock up to ten lives at a time (which can be repurchased or refreshed altogether on buying a new ship). However, if you manage to run out of lives, the game resets your progress completely and forces you to start over.
* Averted in the original ''[[Rayman]]''. It had both lives and saving, but the lives were justified because the levels were [[Nintendo Hard]], long enough for your level checkpoints to feel precious, and it had ''limited continues''.
* Averted in both ''[[Prince of Persia]]'' and ''[[
** It's worse than that in
** The first ''[[Prince of Persia]]'' game does have "Meaningless Time". Death restarts you at the beginning of the current level, so there is no reason at all not to reload your save file, getting your time back as well.
* In the PSP game ''[[Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?]]'', your character starts with 1,000 lives and the game consists of 10 levels. The game can be pretty hard at times, but you won't ever expend the 1,000 lives you start with, with most people losing somewhere between 100 and 300 over the course of the entire game.
** Speak for ''yourself'', [[Verbal Tic|dood]]! Seriously though, the game also allows you to learn an ability that allows you to attack enemies with your life stock (That is to say, ''launching'' the other Prinnies at them).
* Lives are not quite as meaningless in the original ''[[Crash Bandicoot]]'' as they are in future installments. Loading the game or using a password resets your lives to 5, and [[Nintendo Hard|you're going to need as many as you can get]]. However, collecting the green gem opens a shortcut in the level "Castle Machinery", which will take you to the exit in 10 seconds and give you '''25 extra lives'''.
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* ''[[R-Type]] [[Compilation Rerelease|Dimensions]]'' offers an "Infinite Mode" in which you have infinite lives and respawn in place (contrary to every other ''R-Type'' game in existence, save for ''[[Gaiden Game|R-Type Leo]]'')...but you have a life counter that goes ''up'' every time you die, and the object is to complete the game with as few deaths as possible.
* Averted in ''[[MediEvil (1998 video game)|Medievil]]'', where your "lives" are Life Bottles - extra life bars. Dying causes you to empty one, and if your health bar is full when you get a health pick-up, it overflows into any empty Life Bottles. Kind of like a succession of renewable Zelda fairy bottles.
* With the easy availability of emulators for older gaming systems, complete with the ability to save and load a state at any time, even games in which lives were once desperately needed for success have fallen prey to this. Games in which you could save only at certain checkpoints now have those checkpoints as Meaningless Saves.
* [[Older Than They Think]]: The NES version of ''Section Z'' gives you three lives every time you begin the game. You lost a life and five energy points every time you physically touch an enemy, forcing you to restart the stage. However, losing all your lives does nothing other than resetting your score and forcing you to restart the section where you died and the only way to truly "lose" is to lose all of your energy, which happens every time you're hit by enemy bullets: in such cases, you simply warp back to the very first section of your current stage.
** The Famicom version was actually released for the Disk System and thus had a save feature. Losing every life and getting a [[Game Over]] is the only way the game prompts the player whether he wants to continue or save his progress to resume another time.
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* In ''Street Fighter 2010'', losing all of your lives simply takes you to the continue screen, where you can restart on the very same stage anyway. The only real penalty for using a continue is that your score is reset.
* ''[[Wolfenstein 3D]]'' likewise has lives, 1-up pickups, and score that gives you lives in a first-person shooter where you can save at any point. Apparently, Id Software needed time to shake off the platform game conventions while working on the predecessor of today's FPS's.
* [[''NES Remix'']] resets your lives at the start of each stage and has [[Death Is a Slap on The Wrist]] since you'll simply to sent back to the start of the current stage in the event of a game over (and if you don't care about rank you can just restart the substage you were on). However, it also has meaningless in a far more sinister sense, any [[1-Up]]s you pick up will do absolutely nothing.
* ''Sweevo's World'' had a bug that allowed Sweevo to lose two lives at once in some circumstances, at least in the [[ZX Spectrum]] version. If this happened on his last life, the life counter (which normally only went to five) wrapped around to 255.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Video Game Rewards]]
▲[[Category:Meaningless Lives]]
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