You Are Too Late / Video Games

Examples of You Are Too Late in Video Games.

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The hero may still interfere with the villain's plan, but at a high price

• Assassin's Creed III: Desmond and company unlock the Grand Temple, only to have Minerva show up and tell them that they screwed up her original plan, wasting centuries in the fight between the Assassins and Templars instead of developing the technology left behind by the First Civilization, and now it's too late to stop the impending solar flare. Juno manipulated Minerva's plans to cause this situation to happen, precisely so that she could offer an alternative: sacrifice Desmond's life in exchange for salvation — and release Juno to take her revenge on the Earth.
• The Main Quest of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion revolves around recovering the Amulet of Kings so the last of the Septim line, Martin, can relight the Dragonfires to maintain the barrier keeping the daedra from invading Tamriel. Unfortunately, nearly every step in this involves you arriving too late.
• In the Lonesome Road DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, the Courier reaches Ulysses after he has already input the launch codes for the nuclear missiles and they are getting ready to fire at the NCR. At that point, all you can do is either redirect the missiles' destination, or allow your Robot Buddy, ED-E, to stop the launch via Heroic Sacrifice.
• Final Fantasy Tactics - Not only does Ramza never show up in time to make any difference (except punch out some demons), he is played for a Unwitting Pawn for most of the game. (Okay, so he's eventually Vindicated by History, but that's centuries down the road.)
  • There is one exception: At Fort Besselat, he floods the battlefield, essentially stopping the Lion War as it reached its peak. He also would have probably succeeded in rescuing Orlandeau even if Delita hadn't staged that execution. Before that, he spirits both the Virgo Stone & the Germonic Scriptures away before the Knights Templar can get their hands on them. Granted, they eventually get them anyway, but he still shows up JUST in time to thwart the Big Bad. Whether or not he managed to save his sister is a matter of debate.
  • While Ramza fails to stop the corrupt church or the machinations of his childhood friend turned evil Delita, he does arrive in time to deal with a much worse threat, in the form of the Fallen Angel Ultima.
• Halo:
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved's fifth level, Cortana sends the player to stop an outbreak of the Flood, "before it's too late!". Turns out it is, and the only way to stop them from spreading out into the galaxy is to destroy the titular fortress world along with any human survivors still on it.
  • In the Halo 3 level "The Covenant", Johnson is captured to be used to activate the array. Master Chief is a bit too far away, so Miranda goes in after him. They almost sacrifice themselves, but Truth kills Keyes before she can carry it out, then activates the rings. MC and the Arbiter, with the Enemy Mine help of the Flood, arrive Just in Time to deactivate them.
  • In Halo 4, Chief and Cortana have to drop several layers of shields surrounding the Didact and attack him with a nuke, before he turns the Composer on earth, converting its citizens into enslaved AI soldiers. You succeed in dropping the shields... but the Didact simply says "And yet, still you fail", before firing the device. The epilogue shows that an entire city was harvested.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep - Master Xehanort has manipulated the three protagonists to all arrive at the Keyblade Graveyard and get literally owned by him and Vanitas. Terra suffers a Grand Theft Me, thereby explaining why Xehanort looks the way he does in the flashbacks of Kingdom Hearts II; Ventus's heart is split in twain after his Battle in the Center of the Mind with Vanitas, leaving his body a comatose shell, and Aqua is trapped in the Realm of Darkness for a decade after hiding her friend's comatose body in the Chamber of Repose at the heart of Castle Oblivion. All these high prices to pay for a mere decade's delay to Xehanort's plan to plunge the universe into darkness.
  • In Kingdom Hearts III, Aqua is struck by a darkness attack from Ansem, Seeker of Darkness. Combined with the effects of the Realm of Darkness in the Dark Margin, losing her Keyblade, and her despair at ever getting out, Aqua becomes vulnerable to The Corruption and became a dark version of herself, her despair manifesting as anger, bitterness, hatred, and malice against Mickey and Riku for leaving her stranded in the Dark Margin for well over a decade.
    Aqua: [uncloaking herself from shadow to reveal white hair and gold eyes] Mickey... you're too late.
• Lorelai: Lorelai manages to kill her evil stepfather and stop him from getting away with his crimes, but she arrives too late to save Bethany (her baby sister) and Zack (her possible love interest) from being murdered by him, who were basically the last two living people she cared about. She also dies by Mutual Kill in the process. However, if the player has the made the right choices along the way and connects some dots in the afterlife, they'll actually find a way to resurrect Bethany and Zack, which leads to a surprise happy ending. Of course, it's also possible for the sad ending to stick, with only Lorelai reviving in the end and moving on alone.
• In Mega Man Zero 4, Zero arrives at the final boss barely in time (which is an improvement over his usual tardiness; see below) to stop the destruction of the last good land on Earth... but must sacrifice any chance at escape for himself.
• The endgame of Mirror's Edge Catalyst: Faith’s friend is kidnapped by the main villain and in the process of rescuing him she discovers not only the secret underground lab where he’s held, but learns the true goal of Kruger’s schemes (a mind-control/Assimilation Plot via nanites) and acquires the means to end them permanently (a former right-hand employee who’d been discarded and imprisoned there), neither of which she would’ve ever acquired if he hadn’t abducted her associate and forced her to go looking for him. But the mission she was actually there to achieve and the only thing she cared about, saving Noah, she was genuinely and irreparably too late for. His captors give up on their attempts at breaking him not even a minute after she gets there and has him tortured to death right in front of her, sending Faith head first into a near Despair Event Horizon.
• In Modern Warfare 2, you hear your commanding officer yell at you over the radio that General Shepherd has set you up and should not be trusted. You get the memo shortly after Shepherd shoots you and your team mate, Ghost, in the chest, and has his goons soak your bodies in kerosene and set you on fire. Thankfully, Soap and Price decide to take him out for good.
  • Still, at the end of the game Soap and Price are wanted as traitors with no real way to clear their names, the Americans have repelled the Russian invasion but at the cost of many civilian deaths and the eastern seaboard heavily damaged by an EMP, Makarov escaped, and World War III is just getting underway.
• Persona 3. The party is the Unwitting Pawn that, about halfway in, allows the Big Bad to summon the Eldritch Abomination, and find out three-thirds down the story that they've been too late to stop it ever since. They nonetheless manage to prevent the Abomination from destroying humanity, though the main character dies in the process of doing it.
• Splatterhouse: In the first game, Rick finds out that he didn't have enough time to prevent Jennifer from becoming a Tragic Monster... but he has more than enough for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.

The hero has to think of a new plan

• In the chess game chapter of American McGee's Alice, Alice has to go to Red territory to rescue the White Queen (like in an actual chess game, the Queen is the strongest piece, meaning that the benign White forces are doomed without her). But Alice arrives too late; the Queen is executed just as she arrives. Alice has to battle the Red army and defeat the Red King (the stage boss) at the Twelfth Square, and finally, set the Pawn she brought as her guide. As per the rules of chess, the Queen is restored via Twelfth Square Pawn Promotion, and the area is cleared.
• Happens in the final mission of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The SAS team plus Sgt. Griggs has met up with an American sniper team and is about to enter the nuclear launch facility to take down the Big Bad, only to watch in surprise and horror as two ICBMs lift off right in front of them. The new mission objective is to find fire control and input abort codes that will disarm the missiles in mid-flight.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 1, Stalin has a nuclear facility, and it is unknown whether any atomic bomb has been armed yet. Naturally, some of them are, in time for them to be launched during the mission. Next mission: infiltrate the command centre, deactivate the bombs in flight.
• In Diablo II, Mephisto taunts you by yelling "You're too late!" as he starts to attack you. He's correct; you're one step behind everything that happens involving the Prime Evils in the game and are basically cleaning up their messes.
• The final act of Diablo III has Diablo as the Prime Evil unleashed upon the High Heavens, making his way toward the Silver Spire to corrupt the Crystal Arch to plunge both the Heavens and Sanctuary into darkness forever. Along the way, he taunts you with how "you are too late, just as you always have been!" And indeed, when you finally confront Diablo, he has already reached the Arch and begun corrupting it. But unlike some of the other Diablo examples below, you are able to stop him from doing any lasting harm to the Arch. Hopefully.
• Just about all the endings of the original Drakengard. The canonical one plays it straightest: You're too late to stop Furiae's death and the breaking of the last seal, and have to stop Manah's final form single-handedly. The other endings are some variant of this as well (usually involving being too late to stop Furiae from kicking the bucket somehow), but with copious amounts of Mind Screw thrown into the mix.
• The finale of the main campaign of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The original plan to relight the Dragonfires to keep the forces of Mehrunes Dagon at bay is rendered moot when Mehrunes Dagon and his army finally break through and appear in the capital. In the end, Martin Septim shatters the Amulet of Kings and sacrifices himself to become an avatar of the dragon god Akatosh and banishes Mehrunes Dagon back to Oblivion. Sadly, Martin does not survive the ordeal.
• In God of War (PS4), after Baldur kidnaps Atreus and escapes to the Temple of Tyr, Kratos arrives a second too late to stop him from starting the opening sequence for the Bifrost Bridge, which has been locked to Asgard. Aware that he can't stop the Bridge from opening, Kratos takes his chances and opens the Bridge early, which sends everyone present deep into Helheim and buys Kratos and Atreus enough time to get away from Baldur while they search for a way out.
• In The Legend of Zelda games:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, you are too late to save Zelda from being sent into the Dark World, forcing you to venture into it yourself to save both her and the other maidens.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: After Link tracks Zelda down to Eldin Volcano, he learns that she has been captured by Bokoblins and taken inside the Earth Temple so that Ghirahim can collect her. Once Link reaches the end of the temple, however, he finds that Zelda has already been rescued by Impa before Ghirahim could take her. But instead of a happy reunion, Impa sends Zelda ahead to her next destination while she remains behind to admonish Link for being late. While Link is left fuming at her words, he clearly recognizes that Impa is right, and resolves to try harder next time.
    Impa: It took you far too long to get here. Looking at you, I fear the goddess is mistaken in her choice of agents. If this failure is any indication, you have no hope of defending Her Grace from those who would seek to assail her. Do my words anger you, boy? Do they sting? Let them. If I had not come when I did, your Zelda would already have fallen into the hands of the enemy. The truth of it is you were late. You were late, and you failed to protect Her Grace.
  • Hyrule Warriors: The first time you start the Termina Map, there's only three hours remaining before the Moon crashes. You don't have nearly enough time to make any real progress, so the Moon will crash and reset the map. Fortunately, after this, you are given a 72-hour cycle to work with.
• The entire first half of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. They go to get the Dream Stone to stop the villains getting it, but Bowser and Antasma get there first and take it anyway. They go to stop their plan on Mount Pajamaja, the villains succeed in putting the world to sleep, powering up the Stone and using it to conquer the island/world. They try and save Peach by hiding her in the Dream World... and they fail again, because Bowser was savvy enough to switch her out for a decoy while they were hiding from the Dream Beats. The rest of the story is the heroes coming up with a new plan to make up for the first half.
• In Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny, when Jubei finally confronts Demon King Nobunaga, Nobunaga immediately tells Jubei that he is too late and that Nobunaga has completed the final step of his plan, animating a giant golden statue. (Considering that you could only learn of this plan through a couple of notes left laying around, players who either didn't find or pay attention to these notes could conceivably have no idea what Nobunaga is talking about). Fortunately Jubei gets an 11th-Hour Superpower from the MacGuffins he has been collecting, enabling him to take Nobunaga down in a not terribly difficult boss fight.
• In Persona 5, midway through the Hierophant Confidant, Youji Isshiki will threaten to report the protagonist to the police for attacking him, despite the fact that Youji fell down while trying to hit Futaba. The protagonist and Futaba go to Mementos by themselves to change Youji's heart, but on the next event, it turns out that Youji already filed his report, and two social workers show up to investigate the incident, and determine whether Sojiro is adequately taking care of Futaba. Luckily, they're reasonable enough to realize that Youji's report was a lie, and neither Sojiro nor the protagonist did anything wrong.
• In Star Gagnant, after VILLAN is defeated, he reveals with his dying words that it's too late and the Master Core will continue to evolve and destroy the Earth. The player then fights and destroys the actual Final Boss: The Master Core itself.
• In Super Paper Mario, the sixth chapter fits perfectly. Sammer's Kingdom is consumed by the Void before the party can reach the Pure Heart. Then the heroes venture into the white void that's all that's left of the Kingdom, and recover the Pure Heart... though it's been turned to stone and isn't restored until some time later. And the Kingdom is restored at the end of the game.
• In an early quest for a Forsaken character in World of Warcraft, the player is told by Sylvanas to find and slay Lord Crowley in order to convert him, a task that, if successful, would assimilate all of Gilneas into the Forsaken and into the Horde, while disposing of competition to her lands. Unfortunately, Crowley and most of his subordinates have made a deal with the Worgen, joining them for mutual protection. (Worgen cannot become undead, and while this was a Morton's Fork for Crowley, he saw it as a preferable one). The player arrives just as the ritual is finalized, and cannot do much except flee. (The player's goal is, of course, Doomed by Canon.) Sylvanas is forced to use an alternative strategy to oppose Crowley, eventually kidnapping his daughter and using extortion to get him to leave.

The villain's plan is his own undoing

• So far in AdventureQuest Worlds, the hero always arrives too late to stop the Chaos Lords from summoning their respective Chaos Beasts and breaking one of Drakath's seals (in one case, he/she actually gave the item sought by the first lord of chaos, Escherion, to him so he could use it to free the Lake Hydra, and in another, Discordia was actually a fake Chaos Lord so he didn't have his own Chaos Beast - the real Chaos Lord, Kimberly, on the other hand, used her power of rock to send him/her back in time where her Pony Gary Yellow was enlarged and brought to life). He/she defeats the Chaos Beasts anyway, though.
• Dead Rising. Carlito dies if you continue the main storyline, but he has already destroyed one American city and has planted walking children zombie bombs with host families all over the country.
• The third ending of Drakengard. Manah gets the closest to succeeding in her plan — only to get defeated by the dragons, who suddenly decide that enough is enough and that humanity has to die before they end up dooming the world.
• Basically the plot of Final Fantasy V. Exdeath continues his winning streak right up until he is consumed by the Void he was trying to control. Then the heroes beat him.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link's first serious task is to free the Great Deku Tree from a potentially fatal curse. While Link kills the boss that was the source of the curse, the Deku Tree was doomed before Link even started. The Deku Tree knew this all along, he just decided to make the best of a bad situation by getting Link started on his quest. It's later revealed that the Deku Tree reincarnated seven years later.

No twist; it's genuinely too late

• In Assassin's Creed II, Ezio arrives at the Doge's palace too late to stop Carlo Grimaldi poisoning him, and though the Templar is killed, the Doge dies anyway and another Templar, Marco Barbarigo, is installed as the new Doge. For now, anyway.
• In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, you are too late to prevent Yaga-Shura from burning down Saradush and slaughtering its inhabitants. At least you get to add him and his army to the tally of people killed during the siege shortly afterwards.
• Subverted in Chrono Trigger, in that you arrive too late to prevent Marle from being deleted from the timeline, but you are Just in Time to prevent the event that deletes her. I hate time travel.
  • Played straight if you get killed by Lavos, who continues in his near-destruction of the planet, and text displays on the screen reading "But the future refused to change."
• Diablo:
  • In Diablo (1997) the first game]], when you finally confront the Archbishop Lazarus, he informs you that you are too late to save the child — perhaps redundantly, as the child in question is present and quite visibly dead, having been used as a Human Sacrifice. The realization that the child isn't the kidnapped Prince Albrecht you're looking for provides a Hope Spot until eventually you defeat Diablo himself, revealing that he was possessing the Prince to take physical form. Due to a bit of More than Mind Control, your character then decides it would be a brilliant idea to contain Diablo's soul in their own body, and jams the Soulstone into their head, eventually becoming the Dark Wanderer and Diablo's Final Boss incarnation in the sequel.
  • The second game features the player trying to chase down Baal and the Dark Wanderer, respectively, Acts II and III both end on this note. Duriel, the Act II boss, taunts you saying:
    "Looking for Baal?"
  • Mephisto points this out as well when you confront him at the end of Act III:
    "You're too late! Ahahahahaha!"
  • It happens again — twice — in the Lord of Destruction expansion. You have to stop Baal from getting to the Worldstone or all is lost. First, you fail to stop Nihlathak from handing over the Relic of the Ancients to Baal so he can bypass the Ancients and get to the Worldstone Keep because he's already handed it over by the time you reach him. Then you battle and defeat Baal, only to learn after defeating him that he's already corrupted the Worldstone, forcing Tyrael to destroy it to keep humanity from being enslaved by Hell (although given the Worldstone's true purpose, this inadvertently sets up the happiest ending in the series).
• In Divine Divinity, the final quest is stopping the Demon of Lies from releasing the Lord of Chaos in the world of Rivellon. No matter how fast you are, you can't stop the ritual and the Demon of Lies will taunt you with these exact words.
• Dragon Quest IX sets you on a quest to stop a magical contagion with the aid of Dr. Phlegming. Everyone afflicted by the contagion becomes perfectly healthy once the heroes seal the curse...save for Dr. Phlegming's wife, Catarrhina, who passes away while the heroes and her husband are off to stop the contagion.
• The third level of Eternal Darkness. Anthony is corrupted by the evil magical scroll intended for Charlemagne, and he slowly becomes more and more zombified as you progress through the level, desperately trying to find Charlemagne and warn him that conspirators want him dead. At the end of the level, Anthony staggers into a room to find two of the evil monks standing over the king's corpse, slumped in a chair. Really, Eternal Darkness features a few examples of this sort of thing, but Anthony's is probably the best one.
• Final Fantasy. Constantly.
  • In Final Fantasy IV, you arrive too late to prevent Anna's death. And Golbez from collecting the crystals. And the summoning of the Giant of Bab-il. FF4 is quite full of fail on the part of the heroes.
  • In Final Fantasy V, you arrive too late to prevent the end of the universe but the universe reboots.
  • In Final Fantasy VI, you arrive too late to prevent the poisoning of Doma. And The End of the World as We Know It.
  • In Final Fantasy VII, you arrive too late to give Yuffie what-for because she's already been kidnapped. Or to save Aeris, or to save Sector 7, or to save Cloud's hometown, or (possibly) to save humanity from Meteor and/or Holy, or...
  • In Final Fantasy IX you are too late to prevent Brahne's attack on Lindblum.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, you arrive too late to prevent St. Ajora's resurrection.
• In The Godfather game, you arrive too late to prevent Sonny's death and can only avenge him by fighting his killers and finding the man responsible.
  • And earlier on, you also fail to prevent your girlfriend's death. But like the previous example, you also have to find and kill the responsible.
• Guild Wars 2 has Scarlet Briar invoke this trope with her dying breath. The players killed her, but she still succeeded in her goal of rupturing a leyline to wake the sixth Elder Dragon.
  Scarlet: You fools. You think my death... saves you? Too... late...
• Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death: Judge Dredd attacks the Death Cult's hide-out at the docks to stop the resurrection of the Dark Judges, but their leader has already completed the ritual giving them physical bodies and taunts Dredd thus. The monsters escape, but the player can still shoot Death's priest.
• A variation in the backstory of League of Legends: The Emperor of Shurima, Azir, promises his slave and friend Xerath that he will free him some day. He then appears to back down on this promise, leaving Xerath to slowly develop a burning hate of his master. Xerath eventually sets in motion a scheme to assassinate Azir on the day of Azir's Ascension ritual. On the day, Azir turns to Xerath and announces that not only is he free, all slaves in Shurima are now free. Xerath watches horrified, as the villain realises it is too late to stop his own plan.
• This can (and a lot of the time will) happen in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Because every event in the game is on a timer very often Link will find himself unable to stop Sakon getting away, not being able to stop aliens stealing the ranch's cattle and in the worst case failing to stop the moon colliding into Termina and eradicating all life. It can be a severe Player Punch to rush to an event in progress only to be too late to intervene.
• Master of Magic intro movie. Non-villainous example, but still:
  Tauron: Old man! You seek the spell of mastery!
  Merlin: You have come too late... my work has already met with success.
  Tauron: If that is the truth... then your work must stop.
  (large fireworks ensue)
• In Mega Man Zero the title character is exceptionally bad at this. In Zero 2 he chases Elpizo during the failed attack on Neo Arcadia to save him, only to find the Four Guardians standing over his body. Later in the same game he is again chasing Elpizo, this time to stop him from killing X. He arrives just in time to watch Elpizo destroy his friend's body. In Zero 3 he tries to stop a missile from destroying a human inhabited part of Neo Arcadia...doesn't quite make it in time. And in Zero 4 he is standing at the boss door when Ragnarok fires, destroying Neo Arcadia.
  • Of course, this does make the vengeance a bit sweeter when you beat the boss in question.
• The rule of thumb of anything concerning Revolver Ocelot of the Metal Gear series, the moment you're even minorly involved, you're helping his plans along and you won't know it even if you could read minds. Old Snake stopped Ocelot and prevented JD's nuking, but since it is Ocelot, it was either part of the plan or he had a contingency for such an occassion. In the end, your ultimate goal is achieved, which is to say you accomplished Ocelot's objective, which is to liberate the world from The Patriots' control.
• In Modern Warfare, the climax of the U.S. assault on the unnamed Middle Eastern country occurs when the player's marine squad fail to find Al-Asad in the broadcast center, while a simultaneous attack by SEAL Team 6 has found a live nuclear bomb in his palace. An epic scene ensues when every unit still in the city scrambles to make it onto helicopters and out of the blast radius, but the SEAL team fails to defuse the bomb and the player's heli is knocked out of the air by the blast wave.
  • Also, the next level has you crawling around in the aftermath of the nuke. Then you die.
• Nosferatu: If you continue more than eight times, you can still kill Nosferatu. It won't matter, though: by then, he will have already turned your girlfriend into a vampire, and you will go on to be her first victim.
• In one sidequest of Ori and the Will of the Wisps, a Moki father who has just arrived in Wellspring Glades sends Ori to check on his family back in the Silent Woods. Unfortunately, by the time Ori arrives, The Corruption has already turned them to stone, and upon hearing the news, he returns home to be petrified alongside them.
• Stocke of Radiant Historia often finds himself in this situation, considering that the game is one long chain of Set Right What Once Went Wrong across two different timelines.
• In Rainbow Six Vegas 2's Act 3-2, Bishop's squad arrives too late to prevent the detonation of the gas bomb in the Arena, and all you can do is listen to the screams of the dying hostages behind the locked door.
• In Rift, the Defiant player characters are too late to stop Regulos thanks to the Guardians smashing the Defiants' capital city to tiny bits. The player character is simply buying enough time to get themselves to a time machine that will give them a chance to make sure the Bad Future they're in never starts. They succeed but mere moments after stepping through all of Regulos' minions slaughter the remaining Defiant stronghold since they had to power down their defenses in order to give the time machine enough juice.
• Downplayed in Scrap Metal Heroes with Mobius' plan to overthrow humanity by controlling the world's robots with a computer virus. When you confront him in the final mission, he states that the process of uploading the virus has already started. While you do defeat him and stop him from overthrowing humanity, the computer virus launches anyway, halting most of the world's robots and throwing the world economy into chaos.
• Can be averted in Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair, when the group rushes to the basement to try to save Kotoba. If you make even one mistake, you will take too long and Kotoba will die. If, however, you make all the right choices, Kotoba will barely pull through, and you'll earn an achievement.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic has a nasty one on the Consular's arc. A senator is captured from your ship. Your Mad Scientist companion and his holographic assistant do an epic job of tracking the kidnapper's location. Crippling his ship, you and the Senator's daughter (and, at that point, unofficial Padawan) burst in as a pair of lightsaber-packing Big Damn Heroes. Not only are you too late to save your Padawan's daddy, but the kidnapper is a Sith so screwed up and broken he can't recall his own name, and the Big Bad leaves him a broken and babbling wreck on the floor once he's expended his use. So, the Senator's dead, you get no useful information from the kidnapper, and your pupil commits a Dark Side act by killing what's left of daddy's murderer before you can stop her.
• Can cause a Non-Standard Game Over in The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo if the player waits too long to call for a ride home. Their mother takes at least an hour to arrive, and the titular uncle arrives at midnight to devour the player, so if they haven't called their mother by 11:00 pm, they're in for a world of hurt.
• When the teens in Until Dawn realize the danger they're in, they call the forest rangers. Naturally, they can't arrive until dawn, when the storm lets up. When they finally do, every threat has already been neutralized in some way or another. Depending on how many of the kids survived, the rangers might not have anything to do but put out a fire.
• The Watchmen Video Game shows this quite often:
  • Rorschach and Night Owl come to stop a jail break, the guy escaped 5 minutes before they could get there. Also the power comes on and Dr. Manhattan arrives too late.
  • They arrive to late to save the FBI agent from revealing where he was to meet the reporters on the Watergate scandal.
  • They try to save Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from being killed, they are already dead when they arrive.
  • They go to save Violet Greene from the sex trade, they already have her convinced to stay when they finally arrive.
• Wizard101 has a few cases of this trope, for the Malistaire arc this is the case for three of the five worlds involved. But a truely shocking one happen for the chapter where the player explores Azteca and completely fails to stop the villain. The villain succeeds in destroying Azteca with a comet resulting in the deaths most of its inhabitants.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon: The party is tipped off about an attack on Seiryu Clan HQ late in the game, and arrive too late to save Ryuhei Hoshino from being assassinated by Jo Sawashiro. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth twists the knife on this a bit further — even if Ichiban and his friends did beat Sawashiro there, Sawashiro wasn't actually the one to kill him. Ryo Aoki had sent a different hitman to do the job in case Sawashiro had doubts, and Sawashiro took the fall for it.