All For Nothing / Video Games

All for Nothing in Video Games. Since this is an Ending Trope, all spoilers are unmarked.

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• This trope sums up the net gain of any MMO that has shut down. Spent all that time grinding characters, farming loot, hunting achievements and making nerdy friends who you have no actual contact information with? Too bad, the servers are shut down and scrapped (or even sold on the black market as stolen personal information) and all your hard-earned progress is gone forever! Doubly so if you spent any money on the game.
• In The Bard's Tale Trilogy, the first two games are about saving the town of Skara Brae, while in the third game, the town is destroyed.
• Batman: Arkham Knight has a subplot in which Batman and Robin are trying to find a cure to an infection caused by the Joker's blood, which mutates those infected into clones of the Joker, which Joker himself sent to hospitals before his death in Arkham City. One such infectee, Henry Adams, is apparently immune, and Batman believes him to be the key to a cure... but as it turns out, Henry was Evil All Along and in fact faking his immunity, and he subsequently kills the other infectees. Ultimately, there is no cure for the infection, and Batman kept Robin working on a "Shaggy Dog" Story rather than serve as an effective ally in the field; the Joker hallucination that plagues Batman throughout the game gleefully rubs in Batman's face that he went through all that trouble for nothing.
• In BattleTech, Victoria Espinosa's character arc ends this way. After performing one dog-kicking atrocity after another, betraying all her principles and loved ones, for what she believes is the greater good, the Directorate is defeated by Kamea and the Player Character and her father — who had convinced her that his was the only way — decides to surrender rather than fight to the last. Unable to come to terms with the fact that she did all those evil acts for nothing, Victoria has a Villainous Breakdown and commits Suicide by Cop against Kamea and one of your lances.
• In Betrayal at Krondor, the renegade moredhel Gorath goes to insane lengths to prevent his people from starting another suicidal war with the humans and by extension achieving peace between the two nations. These "insane lengths" include giving up leadership of the clan he's led for over two centuries and defecting to the humans, thus getting branded traitor and earning his people's hatred and his wife's contempt. In short, he gives up everything. By the end of the story, it is revealed that his efforts mostly only forwarded the villain's plan to get his hands on an ArtifactOfDoom. He lays down his life to prevent said artifact from destroying the world. Any success towards achieving peace or making his nation less war-crazed? Nada.
  • Though this was a Foregone Conclusion, since the game takes place in between two books that had already been published, with no major change to the political landscape between them.
  • There is one very delayed benefit in the last arc of the novels: Gorath's sacrifice makes it possible for the heroes to trust a delegation of Moredhel led by Gorath's youngest (And only living) son who volunteer to help keep the Dread from breaking into their universe and destroying it two centuries after his death.
• The whole story arc of Litchi Faye-Ling up to BlazBlue: Central Fiction. She does everything she can to save her dear friend Lotte. Including leaving her potential position as a prestigious scientist in Sector Seven, inflicting herself with the same corruption inflicting him (which does a number on her body), joining two Obviously Evil people that she doesn't trust for the sake of more information of how to save him (even when her other friends call her foolish for it) and by that game, somehow she's managed to find that one method to do it safely and reunited with him while being lucid and sane... and then Lotte himself reveals that he was one step ahead, already knew that method and chose by his own will not to get cured, then told Litchi to do what she should have done in the beginning: Kill his corrupted form Arakune. Which means all those risky decisions and getting herself being known as a reckless, selfish idiot by others were all for nothing.
• The Alchemy Guild from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night ended up accomplishing the complete opposite effect of what its members wanted with their horribly unethical experiments. The goal of binding children to demonic power and sacrificing them to unleash the first Demonic Invasion, was to convince the world that there were problems that only the Alchemy Guild could solve, winning the people's trust and then profiting off of it. Instead, the complicit Guild members were found out and executed, and the Alchemy Guild folded.
• Call of Duty: World at War multiplayer matches often end this way if your team loses:
  Sgt. Roebuck: A lot of good men died today. All for nothing!
• In Commander Keen: The Secret of the Oracle, Keen can unlock access to the Pyramid of the Forbidden, which takes the game's existing Nintendo Hard difficulty and ramps it up. After navigating this dungeon, Keen finds and rescues one of the captured Gnostic Elders...only to be told he's not an Elder, but their janitor. Keen is not amused.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc follows this to a T. By the time the Killing Game starts, the characters are unknowingly two years deep into an end-of-the-world scenario, meaning all of their attachments to the outside world would have been broken already. This especially hurts in the cases of Sayaka, who planned to betray you for the sake of a singing group that would have long been disbanded, and Sakura as a turncoat, concerned for a Dojo that also was likely already destroyed due to The Tragedy
• Darkest Dungeon, fitting its incredibly dark and hopeless tone, ends with one of these. The Heart, the source of the corruption is a transcendent being that is truly immortal, "killing" it only stalls its inevitable growth. One day when efforts fail and it grows fully, it will erupt from the planet's crust in what's likely to be a Class 6 or Class X Apocalypse How. The player character is broken by this truth and seeks solace in the same way as the ancestor did, with a new descendant arriving to repeat the same cycle until the world inevitably ends with the alignment of the stars. Worse, the Thing From the Stars, assuming it's not the egg form of the Heart, means that even if humanity somehow manages to truly neutralize the Heart, there will always be another Eldritch Abomination out there ready to prey on humanity.
• Dark Souls follows this to nearly a tee across all of its entries:
  • In Dark Souls you are told throughout the whole game that you are The Chosen One who is destined to succeed Gwyn and rekindle the Age of Fire, stopping the Undead Curse and making a new golden age for mankind. Then you actually Link the Fire and realize it means you get to burn for thousands of years, sacrificing your souls and Humanity to feed the Age of Fire. Also, you were actually The Unchosen One the whole time, and it was only luck and sheer determination that got you to the point where you could even make that choice.
  • Dark Souls II shows that no matter what you did in the previous entry, the Curse was never really stopped, only held back until the fire starts to fade again. You've come to Drangleic looking for some way to cure yourself of the Curse of undeath, and while you do get a treatment for it if you complete the Lost Crowns Trilogy in the form of the ancient crowns of the Sunken King of Shulva, the Old Iron King, the Ivory King of Eleum Loyce, and Vendrick's own crown, you ultimately come to the conclusion hat no matter what you do there is no cure, and you can only hope to propagate the cycle of Light and Dark long enough that someone else will find a way to cure it long after you're gone. If you completed the Scholar of the First Sin content, then you can make it a little less futile by refusing to ascend the Throne of Want and instead trying to find another way out of the cycle, but Aldia states that this is a fool's hope at best.
  • Dark Souls III seemingly subverts this in all of its endings, as the game implies that the Age of Fire can't be saved and it is going to end no matter what you do. All you can do is choose how it dies: You can either Link the Fire one last time, giving the world a spark of light to go out on. You can have the Firekeeper snuff it out so that a natural flame can take its place out of the Age of Dark. Or you can consume the First Flame itself and use its powers along with the Dark Soul to break the Curse and rise as the new Lord of the Age of Dark.
    • Then we get to the Ringed City DLC, which really shows just how pointless this whole mess with the Fire and the Dark really was: The Dark was never supposed to be malevolent, it was only made that way when Gwyn (paranoid as he was) placed a seal of fire on mankind. This act cut off their natural affinity for the peaceful Dark in the souls, and as they lost control over their own Dark the Abyss and Humanity itself grew malevolent and chaotic, leading to the Curse itself. If Gwyn hadn't been paranoid about the Dark, every single problem in the whole series could've been avoided.
• Dead Space: After two games and several spinoffs of fighting Necromorphs and crazy cultists, Dead Space 3 ends with Isac failing to save humanity. The Brethren Moons descend on Earth and destroy it along with all of humanity, thus killing the last sentient species in existence and leaving the entire known universe as only dead space.
• Deponia Doomsday, the fourth installment in the Deponia series, could very well be a textbook example. After spending the whole game trying to undo what happened in the end of Goodbye Deponia, all he did not only was undone, it might have even made things worse for him and others.
• Destiny 2 has a side quest where you investigate the Drifter. They believe he has hidden motives and might be a threat to the Guardians and the Traveler. Drifter finds out about this and gives you a choice to become his mole against the Guardians. If you decide to remain loyal to the Guardians, you will uncover various things about the Drifter's past, mainly because the man decides to help you discover it, claiming he has nothing to hide. You eventually discover his hideout and investigate it, only in end to be told that there is no evidence against the Drifter that shows he is guilty of anything and the investigation was pointless. The only things that change is the info about the Drifter fills up a lore completion segment,(which details how the probe was pointless) and you still get to do the Gambit co-op modes, but Drifter doesn't trust you anymore, occasionally calling the player a snitch.
• The original Diablo has three heroes fighting to lift the demonic curse from the town of Tristram and save the nation of Khonduras from the corruptive influence of the titular Lord of Terror. They fight their way through the corrupted cathedral, crumbling catacombs, dark caverns, and ultimately into Hell itself. Upon defeating Diablo, the Warrior plunges the crystal holding Diablo's soul into his own head, volunteering for an eternity of torment as the can for this ancient evil attempting to break free. Diablo II reveals that the Rogue was corrupted by Andarial and destroyed the monastery her people call home, the Sorceror went mad and retreated to a pocket dimension of his own making, and the Warrior (now identified canonically as Prince Aiden) wasn't strong enough to hold Diablo, and had handed the Lord of Terror a much stronger host than the 10-year-old boy he'd been inhabiting in the first game. When Diablo escaped the cathedral, he burned Tristram on his way out, slaughtering everyone who lived there, leaving Deckard Cain as the only survivor.
  • Diablo III pours some more salt on the wound by revealing that Adria the Witch was working for Diablo the whole time.
  • Then Diablo IV has multiple arch-demons from the previous games returning, showing that even slaying the Prime Evils and destroying their soulstones only provided a temporary reprieve barely a generation long.
• Dinosaur Forest reveals the adventures of the Space Opera protagonist had been a hallucination from a prison inmate undergoing severe mental health treatments.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition: In the Trespasser DLC, after saving both Ferelden (basically Medieval England) and Orlais (Medieval France) from smaller machinations of the main villain as well as saving the world twice and now finding out that the means by which the main character did all this is also killing them, both royal houses, which owe their continued existence to you, decide you're too powerful to be left alone and want to disband the Inquisition (although in different spin, Orlais wants the Inquisition to downsize, while Ferelden wants full disbandment). The Precision F-Strike by the main character describes how futile their efforts were.
  Inquisitor: DAMN IT! We save Ferelden, and they're angry. We save Orlais, and they're angry! We close the Breach twice, and my own hand wants to kill me! Could one thing in this FUCKING world just stay fixed?!
  • Made even worse when you discover that the god who erected the barrier between the real world and the dream world where all the magical creatures exist now means to tear it down and basically wreck everything all three protagonists from the last three games have worked so hard, some even dying, to save. Though at least in this case the events of the 3rd game did destroy the artifact he needed to do it- and some events that were unambiguous losses of the early games (like Corypheus being released) turned out to work out for the heroes (as Corypheus proved a massive Spanner in the Works simply by initiating the game's plot).
• In Dragon Quest II, most of the towns on the main continent have been destroyed, there are tougher monsters roaming the land, and there is a worse Big Bad threatening the world.
• Near the end of Dragon Quest Builders, the player learns from the goddess Rubiss that all of their efforts to restore civilization was meant to set the stage for the eventual return of the fated Hero who would defeat the Dragonlord for good and all. There is one big problem, however: there is no telling when this hero would come. Could be tomorrow, or it could be a millennium, and the people of Alefgard would continue to suffer until then. Upon learning this, the Builder decides to Screw Destiny and defeat the Dragonlord instead.
• The endings of both Earthworm Jim games, of the comedic kind. In the first game, the cow launched by the hero in the first level suddenly plummets into the ending and crushes the newly rescued Damsel in Distress. In the second, it turns out the Love Interest, the Big Bad and the eponymous earthworm — were all cows in disguise.
• ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights:
  • Silva purposely became a Guardian of the White Parish to protect her sister Siegrid from the dangers of the duty, even though she knew it would drive a wedge in their relationship, as Siegrid also wished to be a Guardian. Unfortunately, both her and Siegrid would fall victim to the Blight.
  • Melville was a sorcerer who travelled outside of Land's End to find a cure for his lover's condition. He failed and both him and his lover eventually became Blighted.
  • Julius spent his entire life trying to prove himself worthy of his father who had abandoned him. He would be the one to kill his father, the king, after finding out the extent of his father's madness in his pursuit for immortality.
  • Faden committed many horrible experiments in order to save his lover who became Blighted but not only was Faden unable to save Miriel in the end, his research would contribute to the downfall and suffering to the rest of the kingdom.
  • The King of Land's End wanted to become immortal and viewed his subjects as a means to achieve it. He would die without becoming a Blighted revenant.
• In the original Fallout, triggering one of these moments is a way to Talk the Final Boss to Death. The Master created his Super Mutant army intending it to be a "master race" that could flourish in the post-nuclear wasteland as the Unity, a harmonious society, after converting the rest of humanity into more Super Mutants. If you ask him whether any of his Super Mutants have reproduced and have the medical reports to back your point up, he realizes his "master race" is a sterile evolutionary dead-end, suffers a Villainous BSoD and triggers his lair's self-destruct mechanism.
  The Master: But it cannot be! This would mean that all my work has been for NOTHING! Everything that I've tried to- A FAILURE! It can't be! BE! BE! Be... I... don't think that I can CONTINUE. Continue? To have done the things I have done... in the name of progress... and healing... It was madness. I can see it now, madness. Madness? There is no hope. Leave now. Leave... while you still have hope...
• Far Cry 5 has the entire game. No matter what you do you get a Downer Ending, with your three choices being "give up at the beginning, the bad guy wins, and the world is probably eventually nuked", "walk away, kill your allies in a brainwashed stupor, The Bad Guy Wins, and the world is probably eventually nuked", or "resist and defeat Joseph Seed and the world is nuked and the bad guy suddenly wins".
• In Final Fantasy XIV, Zenos yae Galvus admits, rather nonchalantly, that all of his efforts in the Endwalker expansion amounted to nothing. Despite succeeding in his collaborative Evil Plan to start The End of the World as We Know It, it didn't get him the fight to the death with the Warrior of Light that he wanted, since the Warrior is now prioritizing the aftermath of his plans.
• In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, after Eldigan is imprisoned, Sigurd takes his army on a daring venture into Agustria to rescue him. This does depose some corrupt nobles, but unfortunately the resulting power vacuum only gives greater power to others, and the mission is a diplomatic nightmare that sends Agustria and Grannvale into outright war. And while Sigurd does successfully save Eldigan from imprisonment, he is soon ordered to join the war effort against Sigurd, and there is no way to see him make it out of there alive. Finally, even after Sigurd manages to protect his army against Agustria's forces, soldiers from Grannvale arrive declaring news that Sigurd's father is a traitor, leaving Sigurd no choice but to abandon Agustria and free. At the end of the chapter, he is overcome with rage and frustration, wondering aloud what all that war and killing was even for.
• In Fire Emblem Fates, Hinoka pretty much voices this trope aloud during the Conquest route in which their sibling, the player-character, elects to return to the adoptive family whose patriarch murdered their father and kidnapped them from their homeland and birth family, effectively rendering her years of training to rescue them utterly pointless. On top of that, she didn't even get the satisfaction of being the one to bring you back home before you left again - you got stranded and brought back by sheer luck, only to depart of your own accord afterwards for the people that stole you from her. Ouch.
  Hinoka: How could this happen?! What have I been fighting for all this time...?
• Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow of Valentia
  • Happens late in the main storyline. Berkut, nephew to Emperor Rudolf and heir presumptive to the Rigelian throne, resorts to increasingly desperate measures to prove himself worthy of the crown. Then he learns that Alm is actually Rudolf's son and the true heir to the empire, everything he ever fought for was a complete lie, and Rudolf knew all of this and didn't tell him. The results are not pretty.
  • A less tragic example occurs in the "Rise of the Deliverance" Downloadable Content. Clair, with Mathilda in tow, enters a Terror-infested underground ruin to obtain a magical ring that makes its wearer immune to magic, hoping to give the ring to her brother Clive. The two barely escape alive, and when Clair takes out the ring in the sunlight, she sees it disintegrate in the light, since the underground kingdom's items weren't made to withstand daylight.
• The God of War series:
  • God of War:
    • In both the original game and its prequel, Chains of Olympus, Kratos spent ten years as the gods' hitman, as they would exonerate him of his past sins. What truly drove Kratos was the hope that the gods would also heal his mind and free him from the endless nightmares and guilt of murdering his own wife and daughter in a blind rage. As it turns out, they never explicitly said they would do that, only that he would be forgiven for his sins, making ten years of servitude completely pointless.
    • The point of God of War 1 was that Ares was planning an insurrection and had to be killed, but they had Kratos do it to prevent Ape Shall Not Kill Ape. Afterwards, they decided that Kratos had earned godhood, believing that his never-ending guilt would prevent him from going down Ares' path. It all came to nothing; Kratos was driven insane by a combination of his nightmares and finding out what the gods did to his mother and brother, waged war on the gods in Ares' place, and then went even further than Ares would and destroyed all of Greece. For extra irony, the weapon the gods commissioned to give Kratos the power to kill Ares went horribly wrong and infected them with an insanity-inducing disease, meaning the gods were already doomed from the moment they sent a mortal to do a god's job.
    • While fighting Ares, the God of War traps Kratos in an illusion where his family is attacked by doppelgängers of him. He succeeds in defending his family, only for Ares to rip Kratos' grafted weapons out of his forearms and kill his wife and child with them again.
  • God of War: Chains of Olympus: Kratos spends most of the game chasing after his daughter in the Underworld, even going so far as to give up his weapons, magic, and appearance. Then Persephone comes along and reveals that the world is about to end, and the only way for Kratos to save it is to sacrifice being with the child he fought so hard to be reunited with. Also, the game doesn't do this in a cutscene. You must take control and drive Kratos away from his beloved daughter. Talk about cruel.
  • In God of War III, Athena tells Kratos he must open Pandora's Box to destroy Zeus and spends the game trying to get to it and extinguishing the lethal flame guarding it. He rescues its namesake with the intention of offering her to the flame, but he has a change of heart and cannot go through with it. Then Zeus appears, and after the first of three final boss fights, Pandora runs to the flames. Kratos catches her and tries to prevent her from getting sucked in, but Zeus pisses him off so much he releases Pandora to tackle Zeus. The flames are gone, Pandora is dust, and Kratos opens the box to reveal... Nothing. It's empty (and has been ever since he originally opened the thing; the reason the gods Took a Level in Jerkass is because they were possessed by the evils of the box), rendering pretty much the entire game and the Pandora plotline moot. The soundtrack for this moment is even called "All for Nothing".
  • God of War (PS4) has someone else on the bad end of this trope for once. At Baldur's birth, Freya had a vision that he'd die a needless death. She went to the trouble of casting a spell on him that gave him Complete Immortality, but also drove him to insanity because of Sense Loss Sadness, becoming a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy as Kratos tries to spare him, but he proves too far gone and has to be killed to prevent him from murdering Freya (and implicitly desiring to later go after Kratos and Atreus) in revenge for his suffering. Even her attempt to save him by burning Atreus's mistletoe arrows doesn't work, because Kratos had earlier used one of the arrowheads to fix a strap in Atreus's quiver, and Baldur cuts himself on it by accident when attacking Atreus.
  • All of Odin's lies, stockpiling, and complex century-long plots are ultimately squandered due to his short-tempered antagonizing and abuse of all of Scandanavia, alienating the very people he really needed to help him. All his attempts to stop or control Ragnarok backfire because he decided to play 'Provoke The Spartan', 'Abuse the Wife', 'Attack on Giants', and especially 'How to stab someone half your size', and thus gave enough people with the power to influence the fate of Ragnarok a great motive to start it. His attempts to get Atreus to help him find ultimate knowledge also fizzle when Atreus decides he's had enough of Odin's constant lies and manipulation, and smashes the MacGuffin. And he knows it, too; his Villainous Breakdown is all a rant about how everything he worked and killed for is ruined, and demand Atreus tell him what was it all for if he and his entourage are just going to destroy it.
• Half of Gorogoa is about a boy's quest to gather five fruits in a bowl and make an offering to a rainbow-colored dragon so that he may behold its splendor. The other half is about the boy being rejected and cast down by the dragon, along with the aftermath which the boy suffers throughout the rest of his life.
• Taken at a different angle in Grand Theft Auto V, where Trevor gets Michael and Franklin to help him steal an object of his interest from Merryweather and they succeed in the heist... only for Lester to drop in and tell them that they stole a superweapon and that Trevor intended to sell it to the Chinese. Needless to say, regardless of which approach you choose the steal the thing, Trevor gets chewed out for it pretty bad. What really drives the salt in the wound was that completing the heist without Lester's intervention would have granted the crew 20 million dollars. But looking back on it, it was probably a good idea to leave it amongst the wreckage. Doesn't make the sting less apparent, though.
  Franklin: So you mean to tell me this shit was all for nothin'? Man, it's the hood all over again. Fuck!
• GreedFall: If you don't reach the Golden Ending, it's possible you wouldn't be able to find a cure for the malichor, the very thing that began your adventure. This is especially difficult without metagaming, as it requires you to be the perfect politician and even the slightest screwup can lock you into one of the other endings.
• Halo:
  • The Forerunners built seven "Halo" rings, which were galactic WMDs, in order to use them as an absolute last resort against the Flood, who had conquered pretty much the entire galaxy and foiled every advanced weapon or strategy the Forerunners had tried against them. When the Forerunners fought their last stand, they activated the Halo rings and wiped out the Flood throughout the galaxy, stopping them from taking over it... the problem was that when they did it, they not only wiped out the Flood but themselves and any intelligent species remaining in the galaxy as well, making it lifeless. Fortunately, the Forerunners had planned ahead and stored as many species as they could into a safe spot located outside the galaxy, returning them to their homeworlds after the Halos were fired. 100,000 years later, some of the Flood specimens the Forerunners had kept in storage began to break out of containment, and it took a desperate gamble by the good guys to prevent the Forerunners' sacrifice from becoming all for nothing.
  • Halo 4's terminals reveal that the Ur-Didact was sealed into a Cryptum in the hopes that prolonged meditation would restore his sanity. However, as detailed in The Forerunner Saga, he would need access to the Domain during his slumber to help heal his mind; instead, the Domain ended up being destroyed when the Halos were fired. The result? The guy had nothing but his madness to dwell on for 100,000 years, which meant that he was still insane when he was finally released.
• Hiveswap: In Act 2, Joey and Xefros undergo multiple trials and tribulations throughout the game: having the first station blown up right in front of them, searching for ways to blend in with the Trolls, traversing through the dangerous Alternian wilderness, puzzling and fighting their way through multiple train cars filled with highbloods and violence, until they finally reach their goal to reroute the tracks to get there faster. And then the train gets attacked by a monster and the tracks collapse into the ocean while Xefros and Joey are in between cars.
• Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number: No matter what you did, in the end nothing matters as 50 Blessings assassinates the presidents of both the USA and Russia, causing Miami and Hawaii to get nuked by Russia, killing off all the remaining characters.
• Judgment: The crux of the murders in the story involves a cure for Alzheimer's that saw several-billion Yen be diverted from other ventures just to see it through, a number of men (including doctors and police officers) lose their sense of morality by letting innocent and not-so-innocent people become unwitting guinea pigs for the sake of fame and glory, and an innocent woman murdered in cold-blood just to keep it a secret. By the end of the game, pretty much everybody involved is either dead or arrested, as the cure was more like a toxin that no amount of testing or funding would have helped perfect.
• In the sequel to Kid Klown In Crazy Chase, titled Crazy Chase 2, in the bad ending, Black Jack forces Kid Klown to push his car, and then requests a kiss from Princess Honey...only to be told shortly after that she preferred Kid Klown to win instead of Black Jack, thus rendering the victory of Black Jack (and your failure to beat the final level) null and void as his face literally falls to pieces.
• The Last of Us Part II: By the end of the story, Ellie's quest for revenge is left unfulfilled as she could not bring herself to kill Abby when she had the chance. Jesse is dead, Tommy and her are both permanently maimed (missing eye and lost fingers respectively), and, depending on your interpretation of the ending, Dina has left along with JJ. The moral of the story is Vengeance Feels Empty.
• Haschel's quest to find his lost daughter in The Legend of Dragoon has been ongoing for twenty years and once or twice during the story, he gets a clue that might lead to her (such as bandit who knows a martial arts only taught in his village). By the end of the game, Haschel realizes that his daughter has been dead for eighteen years, but at least he's been traveling with her son for some time.
• Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name: The Big Bad has been plotting for years to rise to the top of Japan's yakuza, and sees the weakening of the Omi Alliance in the modern day as his big chance. However, as the main character points out, the same weakness that made the coup a possibility means that the power and prestige the Big Bad craves simply aren't there anymore, even for those at the top, and that he would become nothing more than a pawn in the hands of politicians and police.
• Mafia II: Happens multiple times to Vito, just to hammer in a lesson that crime doesn't pay. All of his attempts to score with the Mafia end up backfiring in some way, leaving him worse off than before. After his biggest score (dealing drugs), he loses all the money he's made along with his friend, gets indebted to a Loan Shark, and has the triads and other crime families out for his blood.
• Mario Party 3: Subverted. After EVERY challenge the player asks, they beg the Millennium Star to make them the greatest superstar in the universe, only for him to confess he's a fraud and flies away, and your character completely sulks dumbfoundedly thinking the whole journey was a wasted effort. Then the real Millennium Star appears and reveals it was watching the player the whole time, returns everything to normal, and promises them they are the greatest superstar in the universe.
• Mass Effect 3:
  • James Vega's backstory; he sacrificed a colony to get crucial information that might help defeat the Collectors, only for Commander Shepard to do it him/herself, and make the sacrifice meaningless. This story got expanded into a fully fledged animated movie, Mass Effect: Paragon Lost, which shows just what Vega went through during that incident.
  • The Geth being largely peaceful makes the entire Quarian-Geth war completely pointless. Unusually, getting the Quarians to realize this trope is actually the best thing that can happen, as it means peace is an option. Additionally, forcing the two groups to make peace (essentially allowing them to rebuild the Quarian homeworld together) is essentially rendered moot if one picks the "Destroy" option at the game's end (as all of the geth are destroyed, anyway). You can go further and wipe out both civilizations, turning Rannoch into a wasteland. And in the worst ending, if you choose the Destroy Ending with a low rating, the system is too wrecked and it causes the Mass Relays to effectively self-destruct extremely violently in blast waves which are entire star systems or galactic arms in size, ending the Reapers but either nuking galactic civilization back to the (cultural) dark ages or simply eradicating all complex life forms from the galaxy entirely. Symbolically, this means that Shepard's final solution to the entire Reaper conflict is to destroy anything worth fighting for so that nobody wins. Forever. You Bastard!.
  • A lot of angst for all characters comes from the knowledge that everything the Protheans did to win their war ultimately failed to prevent their extinction, and that there is every chance the same thing would happen in their cycle. One of the characters actually prepares knowledge for the next cycle in case they fail, and in one of the endings, it is the next cycle, not the present one, which ends up ending the threat of the Reapers.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty: The Escort Mission with Otacon's half-sister Emma will fail if you let her die at any point. Complete the mission? She gets killed anyway by Vamp right before she's able to reunite with Otacon, adding yet another unfair event to all of the previous times he's experienced anything unfair.
• In Mortal Kombat 9, it is revealed that everything the heroes did to defeat Shao Kahn in Mortal Kombat 3 was for naught. Shao Kahn would have been stopped anyway by the Elder Gods for trying to merge realms without a victory in Mortal Kombat. To make it worse, Shao Kahn's defeat would set into motion events that would lead to the end of all realms.
• Not for Broadcast: You, yes, you can apply this on Day 296: The Heatwave. You can choose not to play Jeremy's VHS tape, dashing his chance at going out in glory. Then, you can further censor what he says about Advance's secret project underground right before he is gunned down or arrested. Even if you do play the tape, it turns out that it's Alan James leading Disrupt, the one person Jeremy doesn't want to see, and then you can further add insult to injury by censoring anything against Advance before he pulls the trigger on himself or is arrested by Advance.
  • One major ending branch ends with Alan James going crazy and attempting to suicide bomb the NNN with the prime minister in it. He succeeds in taking revenge on the prime minister, but utterly fails otherwise. If the bomb goes off, you and everyone in the building die and the real bad guys get away with making the country their sex-slave. If the bomb fails, then Europe either falls into total anarchy or is usurped by a military dictator. In short, everything the grassroots of Disrupt did to create a better government (or at least take over for themselves) ended up just making everything worse.
• In No Umbrellas Allowed, you can let Prof. Choi stay in your shop for several days to work on the cure for Fixer. He eventually gives you a prototype for it while he works on one that both cures and protects you from it, only for AVAC, who banned umbrellas to force artificial rain laced with Fixer upon the populace, to suddenly lift it at the start of the final week. Choi gets frustrated that his hard work got wasted, and he gets suspicious of the organization's motives. He then tells you to report him so he can get "captured" by them to infiltrate CARI, which is developing a stronger version of Fixer.
• Papers, Please: Over the course of the game, EZIC plots and plans to overthrow the government of Arstotzka. At one point, you are asked to assassinate a specific person who may jeopardize EZIC's activities. If you go through with the assassination, you are arrested and put to death for murdering someone who was, in the eyes of the law, an innocent civilian, and EZIC is forced back underground due to your replacement at the border checkpoint refusing to work with them, rendering their efforts for naught. The way to progress the EZIC storyline is to leave the person alone, and although EZIC is still troubled by the individual, at the very least, they can still continue to support you.
• Persona 4 Golden: The Accomplice Ending requires you to betray all your teammates by destroying the key evidence that solves the mystery and letting the real culprit walk away scot-free. This effectively renders everything that happened in the game, all the pain and strife the Investigation Team went through, completely moot. And the real kicker is that not only the culprit laughs at what the protagonist did, they make it very certain that they will be in contact with him for the rest of his life, ensuring this way that the main character will be under their heel forever.
• Persona 5:
  • Haru joins the Phantom Thieves because she wants to atone for her father's actions and redeem him. This ends up for naught as her father is murdered by The Conspiracy and Haru spends the rest of the game having to cope with the guilt. To make matters worse, her Confidant also reveals that she's still stuck in her Arranged Marriage with her fiancé- getting out of that marriage had been her ulterior motive for changing her father's heart, and her father's Shadow had promised to cancel the marriage after being defeated.
  • The Black Mask, fitting his sin of Emptiness, faces this in almost every regard. Not only was Akechi's betrayal of the Phantom Thieves and attempted assassination of Joker rendered pointless because he had inadvertently blown his cover early in the game, allowing the Phantom Thieves to outsmart him a fake Joker's death, but his plan to ruin his father, Masayoshi Shido's life for abandoning him and his mother, and Japanese society for their treatment of bastard children was doomed to fail. Shido was aware his plot and planned to kill him once he out lived his usefulness. And even if Shido hadn't, Yaldabaoth manipulating the public to worship Shido would've rendered it pointless. Akechi realizing that his Father was aware of his plot spurs him to sacrifice himself to a Bolivian Army Ending to ensure the Phantom Thieves can steal Shido's heart and bring him to justice (which they ultimately do).
• Red Dead Redemption II:
  • Arthur Morgan sacrifices his life to help John Marston and his family escape from the collapsing gang, helping them get a better life. The first game, however, shows that it's become all for nothing when Edgar Ross eventually has his army gun John down.
  • Chapter 3 has the gang involved in a feud between two families as they believed there was gold involved. For some time, they play both sides in order to intensify the feud and steal the gold. Unfortunately, both families catch on and this would lead to Sean getting killed and Jack kidnapped. What makes it worse is that there is no gold, meaning Sean died for nothing.
  • The bank robbery in St Denis is meant to be the gang's One Last Job. But things go downhill quickly once the Pinkertons were tipped off of their plan and surround the bank. The ensuing firefight results in Hosea and Lenny's deaths, John being captured and some members being forced to flee the country. And during the Guarma chapter, all the gold stolen from the bank was lost at sea, rendering the heist pointless.
• Rengoku:
  • Purgatory has no spectators, they've went extinct centuries ago. So all ADAMs are fighting each other simply becuase they don't or can't question the program.
  • Virgil wanted his ADAMs to replace humanity and has waited for them to grow self-conscious. Humans eventually went extinct for unknown reasons regardless, while the ADAM units got forever stuck in the tower, failing to grow. The only ones with own ego turned out to originally be humans with amnesia.
• By the end of Road of the Dead, Evans City was nuked under the orders of the US government in a desperate last bid to contain the outbreak there. It failed, and all Sherman has to show for it is a destroyed city, an entire military unit stationed there wiped out, not to mention that the outbreak was occurring in multiple cities. Cocheta practically drops this trope to Sherman when it became clear that the Evans City personnel were killed off for nothing.
• By the beginning of Sakura Wars (2019), it's clear that the efforts of the original Combat Revues were all for naught since the demons have returned to attack Tokyo and the Imperial Combat Revue is now a shell of its former self, at least until Sumire Kanzaki contacts Seijuro Kamiyama to lead the team.
• There are a couple of incidents in A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) where the Baudelaires' efforts are wasted. Their escape from Olaf's house fails due to Olaf somehow catching the children as they crawl out of the escape hatch. Their efforts in protecting Josephine also fails due to their rescuer being Count Olaf and he pushes Josephine's boat away from his, thus resulting in her being eaten by the leeches you fought so hard against.
• In Silent Hill: Homecoming, four families were allowed to leave Silent Hill and its cult at the cost of sacrificing one child per family every fifty years. However, the latest round of sacrifices fail when the Shepherd family refuses to kill their sole remaining child after the one they intended to spare dies in an accident. This pisses off the three families who each did their newest sacrifice for what turns out to be no reason, and results in the supernatural presence of Silent Hill reclaiming its former members.
• Discussed near the end of Spider-Man: Miles Morales. During the final battle, Simon Krieger points out to Phin/The Tinkerer that even if her plan to avenge her brother by blowing up Roxxon Plaza had gone off as intended (instead of almost destroying Harlem), it wouldn't have affected him or Roxxon: The plaza is fully insured, Roxxon would've spun some good publicity out of the tragedy, and Krieger himself is in a safe location where he can't be harmed. While Krieger does end up facing consequences a few weeks later, ultimately none of Phin's actions had anything to do with it.
• Before the events of Star Stealing Prince occur, many people are hit by this, but Relenia... oh poor Relenia... She's told by Snowe's asshole parents to guard the Sepulcher, which is used for their own greedy ends, and just to stick the knife in further, she refused initially, due to her precious daughter obviously taking more priority over something so stupidly unnecessary, not to mention she lost both her parents and husband whilst arriving at the island due to their poor conditions back then, leaving her daughter as the only memory left of her previously-content life. So to coerce her to guard the Sepulcher, they put a memory-altering spell on her daughter, then her daughter asks who she is, thus having her forget who her mother is and then the King and Queen have her daughter be raised by a foster family instead. At this point she's so saddened by this event that she doesn't refuse to guard the Sepulcher afterward. Only after facing down said asshole parents does Snowe's group discover the truth that Relenia's duty of guarding the Sepulcher was pointless, literally wasting years of her life for nothing. The only saving grace is that she, along with the others affected by the spell placed on Snowe, including her daughter, have prevented them from physically aging before said rotten link is severed. After some time passes she happily reunites with her daughter in such a heartwarming event that it truly brings tears to many a first-timer's eyes...
• At the beginning of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, you are on a planet trying to get past the Sith fleet that has the entire planet blockaded. Along the way, you are given chances to help people or hurt people (generally, being good costs a lot of money, while being bad gets you money, and this is the only place in the game where credits don't grow on trees). At the end of the sequence, the Sith carpet-turbolaser the entire planet, killing effectively every person you helped or hurt or didn't help or hurt in the first quarter of the game, making your decisions moot.
  • In Star Wars: The Old Republic you find out that your efforts actually helped a small group survive the orbital bombardment and they form a new society. However, as you progress in the quest line, you discover recordings that recount how the new tribe was ultimately wiped out due to radiation poisoning and constant attacks by monsters created by a plague.
  • Taris just can't get a break. In the same game, the Republic classes' side of Taris sees the Republic working to rebuild the planet and make it habitable once more after Malak destroyed it three hundred years ago, which players can choose to help out with. The Imperial classes' side of Taris, which they visit at a later point in game, sees the Empire invade and destroy the Republic's reconstruction efforts, undoing everything that the Republic (and Republic players) had accomplished.
  • Dantooine also suffers from this to a certain extent as it also is attacked by the Sith just before the Leviathan captures Revan and his/her companions.
  • In the sequel of the first game, the light side path has you traveling across the galaxy to locate the surviving Jedi Masters so you can recruit their aid in fighting the new Sith menace. But when you finally gather them all together, they promptly declare you to be a bigger threat than the Sith (due to your status as a Force Wound) and try to cut you off from the Force—at which point they are interrupted by Kreia who proceeds to kill them all, making your original quest completely pointless.
• In the backstory of Stray, humanity originally built the Walled Cities as temporary shelters to hide from the collapse of the global environment. Sadly, even with all the effort invested to make sure they were completely sealed from the Outside, they still suffered extinction due to a plague they contracted while within, leaving only their robot companions to inherit the Cities.
• Tales of Berseria has its Wham Episode cause one of the main characters to think this way. Velvet learns that her brother Laphicet was a willing sacrifice instead of being murdered by Artorius. And throughout the game, Velvet was remorselessly killing people and leveling cities in order to avenge him, which has now been rendered pointless. This realization causes Velvet to completely lose it.
• Tales of Xillia 2:
  • The Kresnik clan works towards gathering the five Waymarkers to reach the Land of Canaan and complete Origin's Trial, which will guarantee humanity's continued survival and grant someone one wish. However, if they turn out to be from a Fractured Dimension, collecting the five Waymarkers won't do anything, since the Land of Canaan only exists in the original Prime Dimension, and there is rarely any indication before that they're not the "real" world. A Fractured version of the protagonist, Ludger, is subjected to this realization after having watched the little girl he befriended and journeyed with die retrieving the last Waymarker, so not only did she die for no reason, he can't even use his wish to save her.
  • The Bad Ending of the game, twofold. If Ludger refuses to allow his brother, Julius, be sacrificed in order to reach the Land of Canaan, he'll kill the rest of the party to prevent them from trying. Not only does this render the entire game's journey to Canaan pointless, and guarantees at least one of the villains will win, the reason why Julius is so willing to sacrifice himself is that he's already dying anyway. Sure enough, Ludger saves him from being sacrificed, only for Julius to continue suffering the transformation that will eventually kill him. At the very least, both of them are at peace with this result.
• Terra Invicta: One faction's philosophy is hopelessly flawed and doomed to fail abjectly, especially if they come out on top. It's the Protectorate, who believe humanity cannot win a war against a star-faring species, and so must reach a dignified conditional surrender. They fail to offer anything a superior attacker couldn't take, and the Hydras exploit the Protectorate's terror to pressure them into handing over everything the Hydras wanted and doing the hard work of subjugating humanity. The only "consolation" the Protectorate leadership have is that they're still given power over mankind, at least for so long as the Hydras are content to let them. The Servants, the subversive Cult who want Earth to join the aliens' empire, actually find these same terms excessively humiliating and successfully negotiate for better ones.
• Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation has Lara accidentally releasing the evil god, Set, after she steals the Amulet of Horus from his tomb. To prevent Set from fully manifesting, Lara has to gather the various pieces of Horus's armor and place them on a statue to summon him to fight Set. At the very end, Set arrives anyway and destroys Lara's only shot at summoning Horus. Lara seals Set away, but she winds up being Buried Alive when the pyramid's chamber collapses around her.
• In Ultima VI, the Avatar prevents the complete fulfillment of the False Prophet prophecy, as the Gargoyle world is not destroyed, and peace is established between Britannia and the Gargoyles. In Ultima IX, the Avatar destroys the Gargoyle colony Ambrosia, fulfilling the prophecy anyway.
• A bit of a running theme of Uncharted, where Nate walks away with either nothing, very little or even losing something valuable of his (assuming you don't count him picking up the Treasure collectibles). A consistent trope is that he never gets thing he spent the whole game searching for, although he's more about the chase than the reward. Walking away from an expedition with no treasure and just a clue to a new location also pushes the characters into feeling this way about things.
  • In Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Nate initially has nothing by the end and intentionally left his ring with Sir Francis. Subverted when it's revealed that Elena recovered the ring for him and Sully stole a boat from the pirates who stockpiled a crate full of Spanish gold.
  • In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the Chintimani Stone is revealed to be just amber, and is immediately overshadowed by the sap from the Tree of Life that grants fast healing powers. Both are destroyed with the city they're in. Being a bleaker game, there are also many smaller instances of this trope, such as Nate going out of his way to carry a wounded Jeff only for him to be shot in cold blood by the villain when they're cornered, or fighting armoured gatling gunners and even a helicopter up a train to rescue Chloe, only for her to tell him he wasted his time as she was upset about the earlier incident.
  • Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception has Nate walk away from Iram of the Pillars having lost his ring for good, and Sully only scavenging a few coins this time. Mid-way through the story, Nate fights through hordes of pirates in a stormy dock and a shanty cruise ship to try and rescue Sully, only for it to be revealed that the pirates never had him.
  • In Uncharted: Golden Abyss, the Spanish treasure hoard turns out to be radioactive, meaning possessing it at all would be deadly.
  • Uncharted 4: A Thief's End:
    • Nate decides that it isn't worth it to go after the pirate's hoard. Sadly, his brother Sam can't resist the allure and Nate has to go back and save him from the booby-trapped pirate ship. However him doing so gives him some of the pirate treasure he can slip to Elena, giving Nate and Elena some coin to start a new legal life of hunting down history and treasures that is shown to make them very wealthy by the end time of the epilogue.
    • This also turns out to be the fate of Libertalia. Henry Avery intended it to be a utopia for pirates to live without society's rules. The problem being, a society made up of people who rob and plunder for a living was doomed from the start. When they realized they'd been conned into having their money stolen, the populace rose up in revolt. Avery and Thomas Tew saw the other pirate lords ready to fight for the treasure and poisoned them all to get it themselves...then ended up killing each other over it. Thus, the "utopia" ends up becoming a mass graveyard lost to time.
  • Finally averted in two ways in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, where the Tusk of Ganesh is obtained for keeps by the heroes, but they decide to legally hand in to the local authorities rather than sell it. Still counts from Sam's perspective however as he was rather hoping for the extra money.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines becomes this in a meta example. Due to its place in the Old World of Darkness timeline, Gehenna is literally right around the corner when the game ends. Then again, White Wolf's official stance on their canon is that if we don't like an aspect of the lore, we're free to ignore it...
• WarioWare Gold: Played for laughs in the ending. Lulu finally recovers her village's toilet from Wario, which is a golden pot that Wario mistook for a shiny crown. When Lulu returns with the pot, she discovers that the village elder had replaced the pot with a more high tech pot that has a bidet, effectively making her quest to retrieve the old toilet a complete waste of time.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon; after nearly a decade and six games trying to keep it afloat following the civil war in the first game, the first few chapter of Like A Dragon show that the Tojo Clan has collapsed and been driven out of Kamurocho by a corrupt alliance between the government and the Omi Alliance. Even this ends up a hollow victory, as the Omi disbands near the beginning of the third act of the game, thereby ending the two biggest yakuza clans in Japan.
• Yandere Simulator: Ryoba initially thought all her efforts to not get caught eliminating her rivals came down to this as she got arrested for Sumire's death anyway and the ensuing publicity ensured that she couldn't approach Jokichi the way she wanted to, and had to resort to kidnapping him. She eventually concludes it wasn't all for nothing, though, as she picked up a ton of knowledge that she can pass on to her daughter when it's Ayano's turn to find her senpai.