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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 failed -- only when you ran out of lives. It was a good idea, and it added an extra element of strategy to the game as it made characters [[One Up|collect these extra lives]] along the way to save them up for the harder levels near the end of the game.
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 (
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.
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This can be caused by the following, but not always:
* Having the ability to use [[Infinite One Ups|cheap tricks to get many lives]] near the start of the game.
* 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
* 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).
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A [[Sub-Trope]] of [[Video Game Lives]].
{{examples}}
* Every ''[[Super Mario Bros.]]'' game since ''[[Super Mario World (
** 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 ''[[Yoshis Island
** ''[[
*** You get unnecessary lives, especially considering you always get four whenever you reload the game...
*** Even better, your reward for [[One Hundred Percent Completion]] in Mario 64 was [[A Winner Is You|99 of the bloody things]].
{{quote| '''[[Sir Ron
*** There is a 1-Up right before the [[Final Boss]] in the area where you respawn after death, so you effectively have infinite lives at that point.
** ''[[
*** This means every time you die, you'd get that life back if you start near the 1-Up spawn.
** ''[[
*** Once you got {{spoiler|Luigi}}, Peach's letters would contain TWENTY 1-Ups instead of five, making lives even more pointless with this character.
**** This might have been a nod to the fact that {{spoiler|Luigi's slippery control scheme}} made the game a bit harder.
**** Or that nobody has any faith in him to be competent on his own.
**** Or that they realize how [[Nintendo Hard|cruelly difficult]] the Shadow Luigi races are.
*** [[
**** 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:smg2_loads-o-lives_2630.jpg|utter insanity.]]
** [[
** ''[[
* 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...
* In the ''[[Mega Man (
** ''[[Mega Man Powered Up]]'' allows players to farm lives up to 9 and save quite easily in the new version. Beating the boss of the level the free life is in isn't even required (though Roll bugs you about being "a little fast"). These lives aren't totally useless, as Mega Man loves its cheap shots in jumping puzzles (see Guts Man's level).
** ''[[
*** And why does the lives counter have a leading zero if it maxes out at 9?
*** Also made those games infuriating. Looking for a boss's weakpoint? Okay, you don't have it, no big deal, just die to get to the stage select screen again. Oh, you have ''how many lives''? Get a book.
**** It's at its worst against High-Max in X6. He is [[Hopeless Boss Fight|outright invincible]] if you don't have a special weapon that can damage him.
** The latter parts of the ''[[
*** Of course, in the case of the Zero series, you were expected to clear each stage without dying anyway...as well as without getting hit, moving through the stage at top speed, killing every enemy twice, and never using any powerups ever.
** The early Mega Man games didn't let you keep your energy tanks if you decided to go dancing on the spiky floor until game over, but not to worry: if you grabbed of a copy of ''Wily Wars'' back in the day, you'd find that it had not only forgotten that little downside and also gladly saved your tanks between plays.
** A lot of Mega Man games don't restore your weapons when you die, but they do make sure to save which refills you've already picked up, so you can't pick them up again. They also love to have obstacles in the final sequence that [[Unwinnable
* In ''[[Castlevania]] II'', you literally continue from the exact same spot if you lose all your lives. The only catch is that you would lose all your hard-earned hearts.
* The original ''[[Tomba]]'' had lives... and the game saved how many you had left when you saved the game. This could actually screw you if you ran low, as the game booted you back to the opening menu if you ran out. The sequel ditched it.
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** However, the GBA ports completely remove the entire purpose of lives, allowing the gamer to save anywhere, keep his or her lives after reloading and always allowing the gamer to restart from a level checkpoint. One can get 99 lives very quickly.
*** [[Donkey Kong Country Returns]] is an aversion of this tropes, [[Nintendo Hard|without question]].
* The multiplayer-oriented ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures
** 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.
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* 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.
* ''[[
* ''[[Yoshis Island
* 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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* ''[[Glover]]''. [[So Bad It's Good|Oh lord, Glover.]] See, there was a [[Classic Cheat Code|cheat that turned you into a frog.]] In the hub, there were insects flying around. Eating them as a frog gained you an extra life. And they respawned. It's possible to ''break the life counter'' - it starts showing powers, then ''gives up'' and letters and symbols appear instead. In essence, you had infinite lives.
** You didn't even need the frog code. If you were doing [[One Hundred Percent Completion|card runs]], you'd start racking up obscene amounts of lives anyway, and you'd break the life counter about halfway through the game.
* ''[[
* ''[[
* ''[[Star Wars]]'' ''[[The Force Unleashed]]'', at least on the Wii version, is this trope. You don't ever run out of lives; instead you take a hit to your overall score when you respawn. The only significance this has in terms of completing the game is for how quickly you can obtain upgrades to your Force powers, since increasing levels of Force powers require increasing deductions to your overall score.
** The "PS360" version [[Death Is a Slap
* ''[[
* ''[[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 ''[[
* 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.
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* ''[[Spyro the Dragon]]'' has a fantastically superfluous bonus life system. In addition to a rather generous number of bonus lives scattered around as loot, you also get small orbs whenever you defeat an enemy you've already beaten. Ten of these makes a bonus life. Oh, and if that's not easy enough, sometimes an enemy will drop a full extra life instead of an orb. On the other hand, you might need them, depending how good you are at the game's jumping puzzles...
* 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.
* ''[[
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