Foregone Victory

"How many players are with us today?"

Player chooses "1"

"Well then, Congratulations on winning this game."

— You Don't Know Jack 4: The Ride (A (usually) multiplayer trivia game)

"Failure is not an option." Literally.

The polar opposite of Unwinnable, Foregone Victory is a game-play state where it is impossible to fail. This is not a Breather Level or a Zero-Effort Boss, because although sections like that may be easy, you can still die/fail/lose if you actively go out of your way to do so. In this state, you simply can't fail, even if you tried. Maybe the sequence is tightly scripted and you are required and only able to perform a sequence of actions to advance, forgoing the usual failure state the game may have; or maybe the game simply doesn't have a fail state.

Because of this, Foregone Victory can technically be applied to nearly every game in existence because the stories are designed to be based on the player beating the Big Bad and resolving whatever issues that were present. Even if you get a Game Over, you can just keep trying over and over again until you win, Because Destiny Says So (unless the game has specific endings that play if you do fail and show you the fruits of your failure). For simplicity's sake, examples of Foregone Victory are for specific moments in a game where you cannot lose, even if you tried to.

Compare Newbie Immunity, for when this happens at the beginning of the game to take things easy on the player.

When a boss battle is a Foregone Victory, it is often (but not always) an Anti-Climax Boss; essentially, the Foregone Victory is to the Hopeless Boss Fight as the Anti-Climax Boss is to That One Boss.

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Examples

• Most LucasArts adventure games apply this trope all the way through.
  • Full Throttle even says in the manual that it's "lame to get beaten and thrown into a dumpster every time you made a mistake".
  • Made almost too evident in the "boss fight" at the end of Escape from Monkey Island, where both the hero and the villain regenerate health far too quickly for either one to be able to win. Not unwinnable, though. There's a trick to it. As always.
• A Famicom-only entry in the Adventures of Lolo series entitled Eggerland: Revival of the Labyrinth ends with a fake RPG battle sequence. No matter what options you pick on any given turn, it always invariably comes down to the king beating you down to 1 HP, then incessantly attacking and missing until you stumble across the trick to concluding the battle, which is to tickle him three turns in a row.
• Once you've made it to the final stage of After Burner Climax and are tasked with destroying the three nuclear warheads, you've basically already won the game, since at this point there are no more enemies who will try to shoot you. Even if you fail to shoot them down, the carrier that the missles are aimed at will shoot them down with only light damaged sustained and you'll still get one of the "enemy unconditionally surrenders" endings.
• AI War: Fleet Command and AI War 2 have the Spire's Exogalactic Transceiver. If you manage to build it and hold it without losing during its entire broadcast, while weathering the mother of all Exogalactic strikes as the AI loses every ounce of shit it had left and throws everything it has at you, you don't win instantly. Rather, a gigantic fleet of Spire ships of the sort you can only get a few at best start pouring out by the dozens; in the first game, they "merely" spawn an absurdly huge fleet with the biggest ship in the game as the flagship, while in 2 the fleet is effectively infinite. Either way, it's basically impossible to lose as the Spire Imperial Fleet cover your homeworld, and start scouring the galaxy of all traces of AI.
• The final boss in Albion seems unbeatable at first, knocking out one of your characters every turn, but the fight is won after the characters figure out themselves how to destroy the boss instantly in the fourth or so turn.
• In Bard's Tale II (of the original game series), if you'd bothered to reforge the Destiny Wand before going after the game's Big Bad, the Archmage who did it would have been transformed into a Destiny Knight. A relevant line from a poem in the manual: "Of wounds this man will never die..." ...which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Nothing the Big Bad and his personal army use will drop that character.
  • And there's nothing stopping you from making multiple Destiny Knights first, just to rub it in. (Which could actually be pretty valuable if you're exporting characters into the sequel.)
• In Barney's Hide & Seek Game for the Sega Genesis, if you leave it idle long enough, the game will play — and eventually complete — itself.
• Batman: Arkham Origins: The fight with the Electrocutioner starts and ends when you throw a punch. Being a Butt-Monkey does that to you.
• The entirety of the game Beyond: Two Souls is impossible to lose because all failures to act on the game's many Press X to Not Die sequences will either force the player to try again, or the game will simply move on. This is due to the game's creator believing that Game Over in a narrative-driven game represents more of a failure of the game than of the player.
• All of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, because the other trailer doesn't move. Unless you have the patch, where it stops, just short of the finish line.
  • In addition to that, if you push the opposing truck across the finish line by ramming it from behind, the game will either crash completely, or it will fail to acknowledge it and you will still win.
• While The Binding of Isaac has dozens if not hundreds of game-breaking combinations of items, you do still need to put effort in and, if you play poorly enough, you can still die. And then there's the combination of the Smelter and the Missing Poster. The Smelter adds a Trinket's effect to your character permanently. The Missing Poster is supposed to revive you as The Lost once and then be destroyed. However, when added to your character, it never breaks, turning the weakest character in the game into an unstoppable wraith with infinite lives.
• In BioShock, up until the final battle against Atlas/Fontaine, dying causes you to be immediately resurrected in the nearest Vita-Chamber with roughly 50% Life and Eve. Thus, if you repeat the cycle of banging a Big Daddy with your pipe wrench, dying, and being resurrected enough times, you will eventually win. That said, an option to turn all Vita-Chambers off was added in a patch about six months after the game was released.
• Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon has a 1-up drop in the room before the final boss, which is coincidentally where the last checkpoint is. Unless you actively avoid it, you are incapable of getting a game over.
• Bloody Wolf has a boss in the fifth level that you have to fight with a knife. You fight him again in the eighth level, only this time you can use your gun. He goes down with one hit.
• The "bad" ending of Breath of Fire IV involves Fou-Lu absorbing Ryu and turning into an invincible dragon before fighting the rest of your party. The player at this point actually controls the dragon in a fight against the party. The dragon isn't quite invincible, but it takes very little damage and fully heals each turn. It is technically possible to lose this battle, but only if you use Focus twice, attack yourself, and get a critical hit. (Your reward for this is the normal Game Over screen.) Your only other choice is to completely annihilate your former friends before watching the rest of the bad ending play out.
• In Bust-A-Move 2, when playing against Packy (the electric cat), it's possible to win by simply not touching the controller.
• In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the Richter vs. Dracula fight is a Foregone Victory, as even if you get your lifebar completely depleted, Maria runs in and casts a spell on you that makes you invincible for the rest of the battle, but the specifics do affect the stats of the main character Alucard. In general, the quicker the battle is beaten and the less damage Richter takes, the better the initial stats for Alucard.
• The protagonist of Double Homework will end up with a girl (or two) in his life: no ifs, ands, or buts.
• You can't die in the Fake Action Prologue of Dragon Age II, which takes place before Varric narrates the real story. It serves to show Varric is an Unreliable Narrator.
• In EarthBound, when your party's total Offense score is greater than that of the map enemies by a certain amount, they'll automatically win any battle they get into.
• Bob the Killer Goldfish from Earthworm Jim. Doing anything kills him.
• In Fallout 3, the player is approached by an inexperienced would-be raider who's a little too clean cut, who attempts to mug the player for small change. Whether you pay him off, blow him off, or threaten him, he cowers like fire is raining down on him. Sometimes he makes a half-hearted attempt to run, whether he's actually attacked or not, leaving one to wonder whether it's more merciful to leave him alive or dead. This is one of a few shout outs to the Mad Max series of movies — if your perception is high enough, you can call him out on the fact that the sawn-off shotgun he is using to threaten you is unloaded.
  • The Final Battle is also a foregone victory, since you have on your side a giant indestructible nuke-throwing Humongous Mecha. All the player has to do is stay alive until you reach the Memorial, which you can all but guarantee by hanging back and letting the robot do the work.
• Can be invoked in most sports games, such as FIFA Soccer, by players entering the game as one team, but then switching to the other team either pre- or mid-match and intentionally scoring own goals.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy V, when you fight Exdeath as Galuf alone, you can't lose — even if your HP goes to 0, which it's pretty much guaranteed to do, nothing happens. Galuf dies after the battle either way, though. This is one of those rare examples where the battle is a Foregone Victory but is nowhere near being an Anti-Climax Boss.
  • Final Fantasy VII
    • You can't lose the final one-on-one duel between Cloud and Sephiroth. Either you hit him with Omnislash, or you automatically counter one of his attacks (which do a set percentage of your HP in damage and can't kill you) with a standard strike, which is enough to finish the battle: in fact, this version of Sephiroth has 0 HP, so even if you attack him and don't do any damage, he still dies.
    • During the flashback scene from five years ago, Cloud is at level 1 and dies easily, but he is partnered up with Sephiroth, who is CPU-controlled, doesn't take any damage, and uses very powerful spells. Any battle that you get drawn into during this flashback is un-losable.
  • In Final Fantasy X, the final boss is fought with the party permanently given Reraise, to cause them to immediately recover if defeated.
    • It doesn't help the poor Big Bad's case that he heals himself for exactly 9999 HP after anything happens in the battle and he lacks immunity to the zombie status. STOP HURTING YOURSELF! STOP HURTING YOURSELF!
    • This also applies to the string of battles against all your Aeons before him. Seeing as there's no chance to save after the difficult fight with Braska's Final Aeon, this is probably the programmers taking mercy on you. Controllers would be broken if people could lose at the end of a Sequential Boss fight that long.
• Five Nights at Freddy's 3: The first night has no animatronics and is more of a night to let you get used to the controls. It isn’t until the second night that Springtrap shows up and the game really begins.
• The first stage of "Hero 30" mode in Half-Minute Hero does this... to a point. If you run out of time, the Time Goddess will revive you and encourage you to keep going (in fact, you need to do this at least once to advance the story). However, if you let time run out more than three times in that particular stage, you'll still receive a Game Over.
• After Harry takes the Felix Felicis luck potion in the video game version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you fight a duel in which your opponents can't hit you and brew a potion which can't overheat. The gameplay, of course, returns to normal after the potion wears off.
• In Hollow Knight, once you've reached Zote the Mighty (if you saved him before) in the Trial of the Warrior, you've already won it, because there is no way to damage yourself on the arena, and Zote himself cannot damage you at all.
• Homeworld can vary between this and Unwinnable depending on how good the player is at the game. If the player successfully minimizes casualties and maximizes the number of ships they salvage, it is possible to have a fleet which greatly outguns any enemy fleet by the end of the game. Conversely, if the player isn't very good, their fleet is likely to be greatly outgunned itself.
  • When Dynamic Difficulty appears in Homeworld, it tends to bite you in the ass to educate you. In an early stage, you can build many cheap, weak fighters or a few more durable but more expensive corvettes. If you trigger the stage's enemy encounter with a large fleet, the enemy will also be more numerous - except they will only employ the more durable craft, often to painful effect.
  • Homeworld 2's dynamic difficulty, on the other hand, varies in the opposite direction. It bases the difficulty on the ships you finish the previous mission with, meaning that scrapping everything but your factory ships just before winning is actually beneficial. Balcora Gate is particularly difficult if the player goes in with a large fleet. You are required to defend three Bentusi power modules on the eponymous gate. If you started the mission with a full fleet, the attackers are fully capable of destroying them before your capital ships can get into range.
• In Jade Empire, your fight against Death's Hand when controlling Sun Kim is this. Do try to win, though, because there's more reward, including binding Death's Hand as your follower, if you so choose.
• Just Shapes & Beats: The final part of the Final Boss has your character get an 11th-Hour Superpower from two of the MacGuffin triangles, and gains the ability to actually attack with laser beams and a Wave-Motion Gun. They also become immune to damage (although they can still be hurt, they won't lose health), and by then it's just a matter of blasting the Big Bad to bits.
• In Kingdom Hearts II, after successfully getting past Xemnas's Multi Shot attack consisting of Sora and Riku blocking a massive barrage of lasers, the ensuing cutscene results in the Final Boss being left permanently stunned at 1 HP. At this point, the only thing left for the player to do is hit them with any finisher of their choosing.
• In Kirby's Epic Yarn, all of the boss battles are effectively Foregone Victories, as Kirby cannot die in the game. However, the challenge comes in collecting—and retaining—enough beads to get higher rewards when the battle ends. Getting hit causes Kirby to drop half of his beads, and if not picked up, they disappear after a few seconds.
• At one point in episode 14 of Knight's Contract. where you are separated from Minukelsus and searching for him, it's impossible to get a Game Over, since Heinrich is immortal and there's no partner he's required to protect.
• In Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, your character Raziel travels back in time to fight the final bosses. This results in a Stable Time Loop, making Raziel invincible, as the bosses have to die in order for Raziel to become a vampire in the first place. Long story short, it is literally impossible to lose the final boss fights.
  • Which is good, because they're far and away better fighters than anything you've faced throughout the rest of the game, and would easily kill you if you weren't invulnerable. Especially when the Final Boss is none other than Raziel himself.
• You cannot lose in a LEGO Adaptation Game. Ever. You just get re-assembled down a few thousand studs. If you have no studs... you lose nothing and still get re-assembled.
• In Mega Man Star Force 3, after defeating the Crimson Dragon for the first time, Mega Man goes One-Winged Angel and engages it again. His HP can't fall below 1, so it's impossible to lose, and despite the boss getting a towering 8000 HP, using his ultimate attack — which he's guaranteed to draw after a few turns — will end it instantly.
• Losing the first fight in Miitopia is impossible: the Slime can only attack and deals 2 damage, and you can only attack too, and deal 2 damage as well. The Slime has 6 HP while your Mii has at least 8. Do the math.
• Certain M.U.G.E.N characters are able to win before the battle even starts by exploiting the system, or even altering the game's coding via a variety of methods.
• The Ember trial in Neverwinter Nights 2 sounds like a tough test in which you literally have to fight for your life with your social skills. But whether or not you win the trial (you get a Bragging Rights Reward if you do), the end result is the same: a Duel Boss fight.
• OneShot: Not the 2014 original, which has Save-Game Limits, but the 2016 Updated Re-release on Steam lets you save at any time, and closing the game doesn't kill Niko anymore, meaning he can't die at all. Doesn't do much to help with the oppressive atmosphere though.
• Penny Arcade Adventures episode 2 featured Charles, the Sissy Boss Fight. Despite his 10000 HP, he goes down in three hits and is utterly incapable of doing any damage whatsoever. Played for laughs since this fight is basically a distraction while Tycho is ransacking the office next door.
• Persona 3:
  • The final battle against Nyx is completely scripted; barring one or two swipes at the boss that makes no difference, you have a predetermined response to the boss' attacks round by round and win automatically on your fourth action when you're forced to activate the Combined Energy Attack.
  • From the FES edition's The Answer, the first "boss", Metis, is impossible to lose to. She stops attacking you after your HP is down to a certain amount.
• The final battle against Izanami in Persona 4 is similar. After you beat the boss twice, you find out The Battle Didn't Count either time, and then have a scripted second rematch always ending with a similar Combined Energy Attack. The Main Character doesn't die this time, though.
• Unlike its predecessor, the whole of Pikmin 2's single-player mode is a foregone victory. Your skill only determines how fast and how much of a victory it is. You can take as long as you want to gather 10000 pokos, and in the rare case that you lose all your Pikmin you'll get a free one from each onion the next day. Even then, it's possible to get so many Pikmin throughout the game that you'll almost never be in a position to lose them all.
• In Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, you cannot lose against Zigzagoon/Poochyenna when saving the life of the Professor at the beginning. Even if you just use the Buff/Debuff move against them over and over... it will flee, like a scared Latios.
  • Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire's Delta Episode brings us Rayquaza and Zinnia at the top of Sky Pillar. Due to plot reasons, you have to capture the former, and it will respawn until you do. Afterwards, want to purposely lose to Zinnia so you can save before going to space and fighting/catching Deoxys? Tough.
  • Also played with in Pokémon Black and White: you can actually faint Reshiram/Zekrom, but the dragons just get back up and fight you again until you catch them. And you don't get any XP.
  • In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, you cannot lose the fight against the Paradise Protection Protocol's Koraidon/Miraidon. Even if you ignore the hints dropped by your allies, your own legendary will "tough out" any attacks that would knock it out, and if you faff around too much, the legendary will automatically Terastallize and use Tera Blast on its own, which will always win the battle.
• The final battle in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity is of this nature. Being defeated in the first phase of the fight results in you being revived whether you have Reviver Seeds on hand or not. In the second phase, while defeat results in you being sent back to a rest point, you can return to the boss immediately (As opposed to having to repeat a portion of the prior dungeon like with every other boss), and it'll retain all of the damage you cause to it, meaning that victory is simply a matter of persistence.
• Beating GLaDOS in Portal 2 is this, and also a Zero-Effort Boss. Of course, anyone who's read the chapter list, or even the achievements, knows that this isn't anywhere near the end of the game.
• In Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, the final boss fight with The Dark Prince combines a Hopeless Boss Fight and a Foregone Victory. After you defeat the Vizier, you think all is well, but then the Dark Prince tries to take over your body. It turns out that he had his own intentions for defeating the Vizier: as a sand monster, the Dark Prince wanted the Vizier dead so he could rule the Persian empire instead. Then you have to chase the Dark Prince through a platforming obstacle course that's all in you mind, what the game calls the Mental Realm. The thing is, though, should you slip and fall, since you don't have the Sands of Time anymore, you simply respawn from the top of wherever you fell with no penalty. Apparently your mind is pretty psychedelic too.
• The final battle of Rune Factory 3: Micah faces off against Aquiticus, Dragon God of Water. Aquiticus will eventually unleash an un-dodgeable, full-screen attack on you. But you'll notice you're not going down, even after your hit points are at zero. Once you rush up and hit Aquiticus, the battle ends and he'll reveal the whole thing was a Secret Test of Character, seeing if you'd give up and abandon your fiancé, whom he kidnapped to bring you in. During the Playable Epilogue, you can fight Aquiticus for real and in the Bonus Dungeon's final level, you can fight Aquiticus at his full power.
  • The fourth game's final boss zig-zags between this trope and Hopeless Boss Fight. The first part against Ethelberd is non-scripted; a regular boss fight. The second part is him powering up, resulting in a Hopeless Boss Fight. The third part is having Ventuswill beat him up, which is this trope. The fourth part is them performing a Fusion Dance, and the fifth part is either this trope or a Hopeless Boss Fight depending on whether or not you have Venti's Charm in your inventory. If you do, the next part is this trope, as your friends will keep restoring your HP if you get hit.
• The duel between Blue and Rouge in SaGa Frontier. It isn't unlosable, but if you do lose, you get to play the remainder of the quest as the boss instead because the actual purpose of the duel is to unite Blue and Rouge into one person. Said person has the winner's name and body, but the same personality regardless. There is a benefit to winning the fight, however: in addition to doubling the mental stats because of the combination, you get to keep any physical stats you've trained as well.
• The Warm-Up Boss battle against the Mantis Ant under Potos Village in Secret of Mana is impossible to lose. Every time you get knocked out, the mysterious man from the bar brings you back to full health.
• SegaSonic Popcorn Shop, assuming no technical errors get in the way, is designed to not have any losing condition. The gameplay is divided into two halves, the first of which instructs you to turn a crank to help Sonic outrun the pursuing Dr. Eggman, and the other half involving turning the crank to finish cooking the popcorn. Even if you don't turn the crank at all, though, Sonic will automatically dodge all of Eggman's hammer attacks during the chase, and he will eventually turn the crank to cook the popcorn himself. The popcorn ultimately will end up getting cooked and delivered to the player no matter what.
• It is impossible to die against Mysterio in Spider-Man 2. He does not attack or move, and one punch will defeat him.
• Star Fox Adventures:
  • Krystal's "battle" against the galleon right after the first Cutscene is unlosable; any hits you take simply result in screeching by the CloudRunner. No health is lost. There's no health meter until you're actually on board, as a matter of fact. You do, however, have to attack.
  • When you finally confront General Scales near the end of the game, the fight ends immediately and he gets Hijacked by Ganon the moment either of you manage to land a hit.
• Somewhat subverted in Suikoden II. There is a boss fight during the quest in which you recruit the main character from the first game. It is possible to lose this battle. However, you almost immediately enter another battle against the same boss...in which the main characters from the first two games will nuke it with the most powerful spells, instantly killing it. So even if you lose the battle, you still beat it.
• The final Argument Armament against Mikado Sannoji in Super Danganronpa Another 2 is practically impossible to lose, as Sora is given infinite health and bullets.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2: It's impossible to lose to Bowser's final form at the end of his Final Boss battle. Still, it's enough to scare the crap out of you when he rises up again just as you think you've finally beaten him.
  • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: The first battle is a classic Mario vs. Bowser showdown. All Mario can do is attack for a minimum of 1 damage, and Bowser does a maximum of 1 damage with his fire breath. Both Mario and Bowser have 10 HP, and Mario goes first. It is mathematically impossible to lose this battle. The second Mario & Luigi game's first battle is also impossible to lose, but due to a change in the battle system (the double jump), it's possible to lose against Bowser in the beginning of the third game.
  • Paper Mario 64: At the end of the game, you fight Kammy Koopa as Twink, with Peach as a helper. The battle is completely scripted. Once you win, Mario gets the ability he needs to be able to win the final boss fight.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door:
    • It's impossible to lose the first fight against Lord Crump, as you can only attack (doing so a maximum of 5 times defeats Lord Crump, while Lord Crump has 5 HP, an attack power of 1 and Mario has 10 HP) or Defend (which makes Lord Crump do no damage at all). This particular fight has no luck element to it at all. It isn't even possible to lose if you whittle down your HP before the match by jumping into the water, as your HP will automatically be reset to 5 when you enter the battle.
    • There's a badge which, when equipped, will allow you to auto-win battles if you successfully first-strike sufficiently weak enemies. You don't get loot drops or experience points when this happens, but if the badge takes effect at all, your gains on all counts would be so paltry it's hardly worth the trouble.
  • Mario Party 9: The boss minigames will always end with the boss being defeated, as there's no way for all of the players to lose. Instead, victory in these minigames has more to do with scoring more points by attacking the boss more often than the other players.
• In Tales of Arise, the final battle against Vholran becomes this once you have reduced his HP by half. Alphen will become super-powered and be able to constantly dish out punishment. Even if his HP is reduced to 0, he can still keep fighting, and eventually his HP bar disappears entirely.
• In Tales of Xillia 2, Ludger ends up having to fight either Jude or Milla in a duel. Whether you reduce their HP to zero or have the same done to you, the outcome ends up being the same: your opponent will unleash their Mystic Arte, at which point you'll automatically retaliate with your own and win the battle.
• Undertale
  • It's impossible to lose against the True Final Boss because your character simply refuses to die every time their HP gets knocked down to 0.
  • On the No Mercy path, most bosses die in one hit from tens of thousands of HP in damage, but special mention must be made to Mettaton NEO, who not only dies in one hit as well, but doesn't even bother to attack.
  • Any of Mettaton’s challenges are impossible to lose (he later reveals that they were scripted so that you’d always win). For example, during his quiz show, answering incorrectly will cause him to take away half your health, and if you have 1 HP left, he will skip to the final two questions. Alphys answers the first for you, and Mettaton will accept any answer you give for the second.
  • It is impossible to die while fighting Papyrus. If your health drops to 1 HP, Papyrus will end the fight and capture you, but since he’s very ineffective at his work, you can just exit it and restart the fight with him. Additionally, he will offer to skip the fight if you get captured three times.
• In the bad ending of the main path in Vanguard Bandits, Falkner hypnotizes Bastion into serving him by using a special property of his Zulwarn ATAC. In the following fight, Bastion's party makes up the enemy ranks, but they are completely unable to defeat Falkner and rarely attack Bastion. The fight is almost impossible to lose, though if you're not careful you might get killed by one of your higher-level allies; even if the player chooses not to act, Falkner will completely wipe out the opposition.
• All of Wario Land 3 except the final boss is impossible to die, all damage simply knocks you back to a different part of the level. It doesn't matter how often Wario gets hit, he just bounces back.
  • It's the same idea with Wario Land II, but he does lose coins when he gets hit in that game, so that probably counts as "losing" (or rather, winning less), because Wario is greedy by nature. It's impossible to get a Game Over in this game, however.
• The Venice campaign in the first game of Wing Commander: The Kilrathi Saga cannot be lost even if you fail every mission. So all you have to do is survive in order to win. You could win it by returning to base immediately after each time you take off.
• In the tutorial battle of "Wizard101", the player (a new student to the academy) is tasked with fighting 2 dragons. Although the player character gets a few selections of spells to choose from, the result is the same. Additionally, even though different schools get different amounts of max HP, the enemies still use different strategies (or may even pass) if an attack would knock you out. Additionally, nearly all spells do different amounts of damage than what they will actually deal after the tutorial. For instance, later game attacks that would deal 400 to 600 damage easily would deal around 90. Everything is also very scripted, the timer is not present, and interface elements like passing and fleeing are disabled. You can't even right click to discard cards to softlock yourself. The same applies to Diego's tutorial battles, which place you against a dummy which will either always pass, or use spells related to the tutorial at hand (for instance, using a shield when the he explains how shields work).
• During the Inevitable Tournament in Xenogears, one of your opponents is Dan, a young boy who blames you for the destruction of the Doomed Hometown. Compared to other fighters in the tournament, he's effortless to beat. If you're feeling charitable, however, you can also simply defend and heal, and he'll eventually forfeit the match and give you an unique, surprisingly strong piece of armor.
  • There's also the sequence where you rescue Rico from his execution. The arena monster is a Rankar Dragon, just like the one you fought and defeated near the beginning of the game. The arena dragon has pretty much the same stats as the first one, and therefore will probably die in one hit from your considerably-upgraded-since-then Weltall.
• The Final Boss of Xenosaga II is a Duel Boss battle between Jr. and Albedo. It is impossible to lose this battle, as even if Jr. runs low on HP, Albedo will just heal him. This is because Albedo wants Jr. (his older brother Rubedo) to kill him because he may be the only being in the entire universe that can truly end his life, so he commits Suicide by Cop with Jr./Rubedo pulling the trigger.
• Yoku's Island Express is an action-adventure/pinball hybrid where you cannot die or permanently lose access to any item or part of the map: the only real penalties for failure are losing a negligible bit of in-game currency, or having to climb back up the obstacle you fell from.
  • Justified in that this is likely an Anti-Frustration Feature meant to counter the fact that, like any pinball game, it's entirely possible to "lose" a ball through no direct fault of the player's. Attaching a traditional lives system to the pinball mechanics would've made the game much more frustrating, if not rage-inducing.
• In the game Evolution: The World of Sacred Device, you cannot fail the tutorial. Once Mag is reduced to low enough HP that the next attack will kill him, and even if Linear is down, you can use the defend command over and over to try to get yourself killed, but the enemies will always miss with their attack. No matter what, you cannot die in this fight.
• In Epiphany City, the final battle with Superb Man is impossible to lose; no matter how many times you fail or are attacked, Lily keeps going.
• Exgal, the extra stage boss of Copy Kitty is effectively beaten once you copy all three of its attacks, as it becomes impossible to lose health and a single combination shot will kill it instantly. Its hard mode version Aekros draws the fight out a little longer, but you're just as invincible once you reach the same point.

Non-video game examples

• In an animated example, Kirito from Sword Art Online says this is why stat-based RPG games are unfair. If a sufficiently high-level character (such as himself) fights against those with a sufficiently lower level (such as the Titan's Hand guild), then it is impossible for him to lose. He lets them hack and slash for a full round, no defending or dodging, but his auto-heal ability restores the damage immediately. SAO Abridged also points this and has more fun with it than its source material.
  Kirito: There's just one thing you didn't account for. My numbers- displays his level onscreen -are bigger than yours! Funny thing, really. Get to a high enough level, and you're basically untouchable. My wounds heal faster than you can make them. We could do this all day, and you would not be any closer to beating me- not that it wouldn't be fun. But I've got good news! See, there's no need to wonder where your God is! Because he's right here! And he's fresh out of mercy.

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