Times where His Story Repeats Itself in Video Games.
- Ace Combat:
- Early in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, Nagase is almost shot down by a Yuktobanian missile but saved when her flight lead Captain Bartlett takes the hit for her and is forced to eject over open water. Bartlett isn't found, dead or alive, for much of the rest of the game, and the whole event weighs heavily on Nagase's conscience (demonstrated in gameplay by having her stay close to your tail even when you give the squadron orders to disperse). A few months later, Nagase is finally shot down under similar circumstances, with no one to take the missile for her, but survives and emerges from the ordeal a much better-adjusted individual.
- In a very meta way, the finale of Ace Combat: Assault Horizon calls back to a particular mission of The Unsung War, where Chopper cannot eject from his crashing plane due to burnt-out circuitry, as you can only helplessly watch him die. In Assault Horizon, Guts takes a missile for you (mirroring another wingman's actions in Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War), but Bishop (the player character of ACAH), being an even more insane badass than Blaze (the AC5 PC), puts up a spectacular display of high-altitude marksmanship and snipes off Guts' malfunctioning canopy with his machinegun in mid-air, so he can bail out into the sea.
- In Blaze Union, Gulcasa loses a number of people important to him through death and betrayal. He blames this on his own personal weakness (although every circumstance was pretty much out of his control) and vows to gain the power that he needs to really protect his loved ones. Three years later, another large-scale conflict starts; whether or not Gulcasa is capable of protecting his allies depends entirely on whether you're playing Yggdra Union (he can't) or Yggdra Unison (he does).
- Tatsuya Suou's history in Persona 2. He pretty much threw the weight of the world on his shoulders and tasked himself to destroy Nyarlathotep's plans before they started so his friends wouldn't have to suffer. He failed once [1] but the world was restarted to give him another chance…he failed again.
- Devil May Cry:
- Devil May Cry 1: Dante lost his mother Eva as a child to a demon attack ordered by Mundus. In the main story, Dante nearly loses Trish as well, who is basically a demonic lookalike of Eva.
- Devil May Cry 5: The game reveals that the main driving factor for Vergil's villainous actions is feeling that his mother Eva didn't save him and favored Dante over him. As V, Vergil is saved by Trish from falling into a chasm, symbolically fulfilling Vergil's wish to have been saved by his mother.
- In Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, the Heroic Sacrifice is a recurring theme for Laharl's character. Part of his reason for hating love was that his mother, who tried to instill such ideals, sacrificed her life to cure Laharl of an incurable disease. This would later repeat itself at the end of the game where Flonne offers herself up to be punished by the Seraph so that Laharl and the others would be spared. Then, after defeating the Seraph, Laharl attempts to sacrifice his life to bring Flonne back to life, though whether he does so or not depends on the ending the player receivednote .
- And it continues to bite Laharl in Disgaea Dimension 2. His little sister Sicily tries to give up her life in exchange for the kidnapped angels, but Laharl talks her out of it. He even comments that she's just like their mother. If the player receives a certain ending, though, Sicily chooses to sacrifice her life despite Laharl desperately pleading her not to and he's so overcome with grief that he suffers a Death by Despair.
- Archer's backstory in Fate/stay night works this way, putting him in his current position at the game's beginning. As a human, Archer when he was called Shirou was unable to save people from a disaster, which eventually led to his making a contract with the world to prevent the same thing happening in his adulthood.
- Galaxy Angel: On Vanilla's route, her pet rabbit Ugiugi starts getting sick and she tries very hard to heal it with her Nanomachines to no avail. Tact learns from Dr. Kera that Vanilla was raised by a woman named Sister Beryl, who also taught her how to use nanomachines. Sister Beryl died of natural causes despite Vanilla trying desperately to save her, which left her devastated. When Ugiugi finally dies too, Tact does his best to comfort Vanilla assuring her that she shouldn't blame herself for her loved ones dying, and instead she should treasure the happy memories they shared.
- An interesting variant happens in inFAMOUS. Cole McGrath gets superpowers. Later, he married the love of his life, Trish, and they had two daughters. Then the beast came, destroyed absolutely everything (and killed Cole's family), and Cole went back in time, gave Cole McGrath superpowers, and killed Trish to make sure Cole wouldn't make the same mistake he did.
- In The Last of Us, a Zombie Apocalypse breaks out and Joel has to carry his daughter to safety through a hostile environment. At the end of the game (20 years later), he ends up having to carry his surrogate daughter to safety through a hostile environment.
- In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II, Crow Amrbrust dies in Rean's arms after Crow sacrifices himself to give Rean an opening to save the crown prince. Flash forward to Cold Steel IV and Crow is defeated again in his duel with Rean and is about to disappear for good when Rean decides he'll have none of it and demands that he live the life that he's been given, hugs him in his arms, and manages to send the energy Ordine was giving to Valimar, back to Ordine to make sure Crow lives.
- Max Payne keeps getting in eerily familiar situations where his attempts to do the right thing result in deaths of his loved ones and himself barely surviving yet another chaotic killing spree. He lampshades it regularly himself, such as this quote from the second game:"Like all the bad things in my life, it started with the death of a woman."
- The Metal Gear series deserves its own section.
- Metal Gear Solid: Snake's inability to kill Fox to ensure an easy victory, because he had learned from his mistakes of killing Fox and Big Boss in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
- The non-canon Metal Gear: Ghost Babel: Snake retires after the adventure in Outer Heaven back in Metal Gear. He comes out of retirement to deal with another Metal Gear threat in Galuade, a fortress built over the remains of Outer Heaven.
- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty: Subtle one. Otacon loses his father - and almost his sister - due to a drowning suicide by the former. If he had been there, he would have been able to save them - but he was in his room having sex with his stepmother at the time, and therefore didn't respond to his sister's cries for help. At the end of the Tanker chapter, Snake calls for Otacon to save him from drowning. This time Otacon saves him by riding a boat out onto the sea in a thunderstorm, nearly getting pulled down himself with the sinking tanker, just to pull him out of the water.
- Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops: Big Boss assassinated The Boss, but, when his old friend Python begs for him to finish him off the same way he did The Boss, he tries to save him instead.
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: Naomi dies in similar circumstances to Sniper Wolf (even the music is the same), and Otacon is overwhelmed. However, instead of grieving, he quotes the line Snake uttered after Wolf's death ("I don't have any tears left to shed"), and shakily gets on with life.
- Shadow from Sonic Adventure 2 is shocked into realizing his past after Amy Rose coincidentally uses the same phrase that the late Maria Robotnik did, and thus decides that, to make it up to Maria for the damage he's done, he'll stop the Space Colony ARK from hitting the Earth.
- Though it probably wasn't real, Shadow the Hedgehog featured a level where Shadow could have the choice to stop the G.U.N. soldiers from killing Maria.
