Happy Ending Override / Video Games

If there's a new installment in a game franchise, sometimes expect a Happy Ending Override to occur.

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#-D

• .hack//G.U. seems to have been engineered for the sole purpose of trolling fans of the original series, either as a Player Punch or a colossal This Loser Is You to anyone who accepted its message of "AI are people too" at face value. The World that we left happy, peaceful and safe in the first series has been completely destroyed by a madman (who personally killed a plot-important A.I. character from the original series in backstory), Player Killers rule the landscape of the Darker and Edgier The World R:2, all of our previous heroes are too busy with real life to do anything about the situation, protagonist Haseo turns out to have been jackass Sora from R:1 all along. Albeit in the end, the madman who destroyed most of The World R:1 servers wound up burning in those fires himself. Not to mention by the end of it, Haseo has grown up into a much better and genuinely heroic character.
• Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown ends on a fairly optimistic note with Trigger destroying Hugin & Munin and preventing them from unleashing an Robot War upon Strangereal, finally giving a chance for the continent of Usea to rebuild after decades of conflict and burying the last vestiges of Belka's grudge against Osea for their defeat in the Belkan War. However, as the game is a prequel to the events of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, whatever peace that settles in Usea will be undone by the year 2040 due to the decline in power of Strangreal's national governments and the rise of mega-corps like General Resource and Neucom.
• In AI: The Somnium Files, Player Character Kaname Date spends a good chunk of the game trying to bond with his Sour Outside, Sad Inside surrogate daughter Mizuki and officially adopts her at the end of the story. However in the sequel AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative we learn that he ended up vanishing and becoming a Disappeared Dad mere months after the game's conclusion, leaving Mizuki all alone for the entirety of her teenage years with the goal of finding him.
• The original Andro Dunos ends with the heroes intercepting a hostile alien race and defeating the alien leader, thwarting an Alien Invasion. Come by the sequel 30 years later (both in-game and real life), it's revealed that the aliens launched a second attack in the interim, and actually conquers most of Earth turning various cities into wastelands. While the original game's plot revolves around stopping an invasion, the sequel instead have them trying to reclaim earth from the aliens.
• The Baldur's Gate Saga, a game set in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons & Dragons, escalates into a conflict where you must prevent the dark god Bhaal's resurrection. After you slay the Big Bad you get the option to either take Bhaal's place and become a god or ditch it and stay mortal. Either way the game very much states that Bhaal is gone for good. One of the introductory adventures made for the 5th edition of D&D overrode this ending by having Bhaal make his return to the Realms a century after the end of the game...Killing the canonical protagonist from the games' less-than-well-received novelizations in the process. All the more annoying in that the module in question straight up retcons the end of the game, which states unequivocally that the PC and (if she's still alive) their sister are the last living children of Bhaal and that if the mortal ending is chosen (as the module assumes) they both stop possessing Bhaal's essence. The module ignores both of these points. The third game has Sarevok and Viconia, evil-aligned party members who could be redeemed in the first two games, show up as villains as well as Bhaal terrorizing the region once more.
• Blaster Master Zero has the true ending where Jason manages to destroy Invem Sophia, defeat the Mutant Overlord, and rescue Eve, resulting in Jason and Eve sitting on the hood of SOPHIA-ZERO, Jason's arm wrapped around her and ending with the implication of a love confession. Then Blaster Master Zero II starts and Eve's body is in a state of severe mutation from being infected by mutant cells left over from Invem Sophia. Your goal in the game is to remove the infection and save Eve's life.
  • It doesn't get much better in Blaster Master Zero III either. While Eve cures herself of the mutant infection, as soon as the two land on planet Sophia, they get detained by the Sophia Force. Jason breaks out, but finds out Eve went missing in between that time and has to go search for her. Also there's the fact Eve didn't actually get rid of the mutant cells, but rather she assimilated it and turned into an organic mutant-based lifeform, which made her qualified to replace Drolrevo as the new Mutant leader.
• Similar to Zelda, many Castlevania games have this happen as Dracula always finds a way to come back in time for the next game. Granted, they're downplayed examples as the games are often separated by a century or so of peace, and the Belmont clan is always prepared for when Dracula eventually returns, but as for more direct cases:
  • Castlevania ended with Simon defeating Dracula and all seemed well. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest revealed that Dracula laid a curse on Simon that would slowly kill him and make his body a host for Dracula if he wasn't revived and killed again in time.
  • Castlevania: Rondo of Blood ended with Richter defeating Dracula and saving Maria, Annette, and other maidens in the best ending, only for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to have Shaft brainwash Richter into resurrecting Dracula, forcing Alucard to save the world.
  • Averted with Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow duology. Dracula was finally killed for good before the start of Aria of Sorrow, but has reincarnated into Soma Cruz. Both games end with Soma refusing to take Dracula's throne, seemingly destroying Dracula's castle for good as well as the source of his power in the process, and while Arikado muses that that a great force of evil may one day reemerge to restore the Balance Between Good and Evil as the Big Bad of Dawn of Sorrow claims, it doesn't have to be Dracula, and his legacy is finished as long as Soma continues to refuse it. Future releases have since gone back to previous points in the timeline when Dracula was still alive.
• Chrono Trigger is the tale of a time-traveling Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who adventure across history and prevent a world-eating parasite called Lavos from destroying the world in 1999 AD. Chrono Cross is the tale of a boy muddling through the fallout from those changes to history, which includes but is not limited to: a timeline split in two, Porre growing from a minor town into an imperial power that sacked The Good Kingdom the original heroes lived in, the Reptite Future from a joke ending showing up for revenge, the heavily implied deaths of the previous protagonists, and on top of all this Lavos, or a piece of him anyway, is still alive — and now it's going to end existence, instead of just Earth. This makes Cross a Contested Sequel by some fans, who wished the happy ending from Trigger wasn't so harshly undone.
  • Players tracking down the fan-translated earlier-released alternate storyline visual novel Radical Dreamers shouldn't expect a different outcome - it was in fact one of the story elements ported the most directly from Dreamers to Cross.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert ends with the Soviets crushed and Stalin dead. In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the Allies have installed Premier Romanov as a puppet leader, but he comes under the sway of Yuri who was Stalin's secret weapon. Together they launch a surprise attack on the United States.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Uprising ends well for the Soviets and Empire, until the next campaign kicks in.
  • The Soviets defeat FutureTech and cause the Allies to withdraw from Russian soil. In the Empire campaign, the Soviets begin attacking Imperial territory.
  • The Empire expels the Soviets from its borders. In the Allied campaign, the Imperial generals rebel against the Allies occupying Japan. They are defeated but then Prince Tatsu himself rebels and he is also defeated.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and its expansion pack Firestorm is chock full of these.
  • The GDI campaign ends with Macneil, Umagon and Tratosa alive. Macneil and Firestorm die in Firestorm, and Umagon went mad from the vaccine used to treat her sickness.
  • The GDI saving their space station HQ from destruction. The station gets destroyed in Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars anyway.
  • Speaking of which, Firestorm. Early on in the GDI campaign, it was stated that Earth had less than a year before it became uninhabitable due to atmospheric Tiberium contamination; at the end of the campaign, taking place in 2032, GDI managed to gleam a countermeasure to this and developed sonic resonators as an anti-Tiberium countermeasure. By 2047, GDI is slowly but steadily cleansing and reclaiming Tiberium-infested areas of the planet...then in 2062, humanity is on the brink of extinction due to Tiberium suddenly having mutated into a hyper-aggressive strain that No Sells all forms of containment and reclamation. It's only at the very end of Tiberian Twilight that Tiberium is finally brought under control for good.
  • Firestorm ends with the rise of Slavik as the new leader of the Brotherhood of Nod. Tiberium Wars and Kane's Wrath revealed that he was assassinated a short time after and that Kane instigated the Third Tiberium War just so enough human members of Nod can die and be replaced with cyborgs, which were banned by Slavik..
• All those Alien Wars you've been fighting for the majority of the Contra series and winning? As of Contra: Shattered Soldier, it turns out that the war was actually part of a Government Conspiracy known as the Triumvirate, and that Lance Bean had accidentally uncovered the truth about it. Hence the fact that Lance became a notorious terrorist leader trying to overthrow the Triumvirate after Bill Rizer was thought to have killed Lance and destroyed 80% of the world's population.
• Through flavor text in Dark Souls II, we learn the story of Alva the Wayfarer, a knight who sought the cure for his love's terminal illness, opposed at every turn by the wicked witch Zullie. When Alva failed to find the cure in time, he renounced his knighthood in grief, only for Zullie to take pity on him and pull a Heel–Face Turn, deciding to help him in all his future endeavours. The two eventually hooked up and lived happily ever after. Come Dark Souls III, Alva becomes a hostile invader under the new name "Alva, Seeker of the Spurned", having now lost Zullie as well. He invades a second time in the DLC, and once you get past him you find Zullie's corpse which he was guarding.
• The golden (canon) ending of Dead Rising 3 has the zombie virus permanently cured by a vaccine synthesized from the protagonist's blood. There's no Dead Rising without the dead, so a new strain of the virus (that the cure won't work on) is created and spread during the beginning of Dead Rising 4.
• The ending of Dead Space 3 gives hope in a bittersweet ending, where Isaac and Carver disappear, but the source of the Marker signals, the Brother Moon, is slain. Its expansion, Dead Space 3: Awakened, reveals that while Isaac and Carver survived, the Moon they killed still awoke the rest of its kind, and managed to successfully delay them from warning Earth in time, and have already arrived ahead of them and begun to feed on humanity. And when Isaac and Carver arrive, a Brother Moon looms over their ship, attacking their minds, before the credits roll.
• Diablo:
  • At the end of the first game, the hero has defeated the titular demon, saving the one town that was in danger before, and taken it upon him (or her) self to become a living prison for the Lord of Terror. At the start of Diablo II, said hero's will has completely broken, his body has been taken over by Diablo, and he wanders the Earth releasing other demon lords so they can plunge the world into a living Hell. And that one town? Completely ravaged, and all residents but one are soon dead.
  • Diablo II ends with the new hero seemingly defeating Diablo and his two brothers by slaying them, collecting their Soulstones and breaking them, seemingly killing them for good. Comes Diablo III, it turns out some Evil Sorcerer created the Black Soulstone, a corrupted version of the Soulstones, where the Demon Lord's souls ended up after their apparent demise. In the game's climax, Diablo has the Black Soulstone implanted inside his daughter Leah by Adria, the witch from the first game who it turns out was in league with him all along, allowing him to not only come back, but also merge with both his two brothers and the four other Demon Lords, resulting in an even more powerful version of him called the Prime Evil who assaults the Heavens themselves.
  • Diablo III ended with Diablo allegedly defeated for good. He is accidentally freed right at the end of the Reaper of Souls expansion, with a good portion of humanity having been destroyed by Malthael during the expansion.
• Doom 64: At the end of Doom II, it seems like the demonic threat to humanity has been eliminated by the Icon of Sin's destruction. Then Doom 64 reveals that a single demonic entity called Mother Demon has managed to resurrect Hell's forces and it's up to you to stop it before it launches another invasion of Earth.
• Dragon Age:
  • While the main ending in Dragon Age: Origins doesn't get cancelled (the Archdemon stays dead and Ferelden still survives), a lot of the improvements you can potentially bring to other problems in the region will inevitably be made meaningless to not get in the way of future stories. Most notably, if a Mage Warden managed to get more freedom for the Circle of Magi, this will inevitably turn out to be a failure, since one of the main plot-points in Dragon Age II is the tensions between Mages and Templars, which eventually break into a full-blown war. And an Elven Warden of either origin will have their wish for better political and civilian representation for the Elven race (either a region granted to them or having an actual Elven Bann to represent them) become moot as the ruler(s) of Ferelden will backtrack giving the Hinterlands to the Dalish due to pressure from the humans living there, and the Denerim Alienage is eventually abandoned due to disrepair and bad sanitation by the time of Inquisition.
  • This can happen to the better endings for Anders and Justice in Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening, as they are inevitably driven from the Wardens in order to appear in the next game.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition has the Inquisitor defeating the Big Bad, sealing the breach for good and there’s a new Divine of the Chantry. Come the Trespasser DLC, the anchor is hurting the Inquisitor, the two nations that you helped in the game want to disband (Ferelden) or take over the Inquisition (Orlais), your party member Solas wants to destroy Thedas in order to pay for his mistake (giving the orb to the Big Bad which started the whole mess) and to save the elven race. It gets worse that you’re unable to convince Solas who later cuts off your anchor arm, leaving you crippled (though it was to save your life and there was no other option) and you’re left with the decision to disband the Inquisition and go after Solas as a small and unsanctioned shadowy group or kept it alive under the influence of a corrupt and expansionist empire.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest II: Despite the Hero defeating the Dragonlord and marrying Princess Gwaelin, while founding new kingdoms in Torland such as Midenhall and Moonbrooke, most of Alegard's towns have been destroyed, stronger monsters roam the land, and a new Big Bad makes the Dragonlord seem tame in comparison. Even rediscovering Erdrick's Sword is a letdown, as it's not that powerful compared to other equipment.
  • Dragon Quest X: The previous game ended on a somewhat bittersweet, yet happy note, when the Hero/Heroine saved Corvus from his own hatred of the Protectorate's mortals and Serena reunited with Corvus, while the Hero themselves managed to regain their Celestrain powers in order to reunite with Stella and Sterling, and defeated other evils such as Yore and Tyrannosaura Wrecks. However, all their heroics were rendered naught when the Jia Kut Clan attacked the Protectorate for the Power of Creation, causing the world's new Goddess, Luciana, to flee with the survivors to a new world, while her father and younger sister, Goddess Zenesia, fought them off before the former used a powerful curse that erased anyone and anything it came into contact with.
• Dying Light: The Following DLC's endings are this. At the end of the game, You have the choice of whether to help Mother or not. Choosing to not help her will result in making Crane drink a vial that turns him into a sentient Volatile that escapes the quarantine zone to spread the infection, And helping her results in the region being destroyed by nuclear warheads.

E-H

• In EarthBound Beginnings and EarthBound, humans are fighting the evil alien Giygas, although only the protagonists, a couple of kids, know that it's him that they're fighting, and in the first game, you don't even find that out until very late in the story. Giygas, in the first game, is attempting to enslave the human race, and his army does some pretty bad stuff. But, the heroes sing a song to him and he goes mad from the nostalgia and gives up on trying to conquer Earth. But, later, although it is only revealed in the second game, Giygas comes back with a vengeance and conquers the universe, turning it into a living hell. The End. (Don't worry, someone comes back from that future and stops it from happening in the second game.)
  • The idealistic setting of Eagleland is destroyed by the bastard humans in the late-game-revealed backstory of the Darker and Edgier Mother 3, and The Dragon from the last game perverts the hearts of the few humans left After the End. But hey, at least it's better than the universe getting destroyed, right?
• In The Elder Scrolls series, no matter how happy the ending (and the endings of some of the games are already downers or bittersweet at best), future games in the series almost always override it by showing the consequences of the events of the game on the world:
  • Following Arena, the coup is stopped and the true emperor returned to the throne, but later games show that irreparable damage has been done to the empire, sending it on a downhill path to its eventual dissolution following Oblivion.
  • Each of Daggerfall's mutually exclusive endings are shown to have happened simultaneously due to a Dragon Break. While peace is temporarily brought to the region, the Player Character is dead, High Rock's various factions (including Orsinium) eventually fall back into strife, and the King of Worms ascends to godhood only to return and cause problems during the Oblivion Crisis.
  • Morrowind may get the worst of it. As a result of the player's actions, the Tribunal are cut off from their source of divinity and two of the three are killed. When Vivec disappears early in the 4th era, the rogue moon over Vivec City resumes its descent with its original momentum, causing Red Mountain to erupt and destroy Vvardenfell along with a good portion of Morrowind. The Argonians then invade prior to the events of Skyrim, putting an end to the Dunmer way of life.
  • Oblivion:
    • Oblivion ends with the seals between Oblivion and the mortal plane closed forever, but no Septim on the throne. Wars break out, provinces secede, and by the time of Skyrim, only four remain, with Skyrim being locked in a civil war and Morrowind becoming a devastated landscape after the eruption of the Red Mountain, the disappearance of the Tribunal, and the massive, vengeful Argonian invasion from Black Marsh.
    • The expanded universe novel "The Infernal City" chronicles that giving Umbra to Clavicus Vile caused a chain of events that eventually created an evil floating city, that turns everyone under its shadow into a zombie army.
  • Only time will tell what future games have in store for Tamriel after Skyrim, but we do know that Alduin will eventually fulfill his role of ending the world one day, as evidenced by his soul not being absorbed after the Dragonborn defeats him. This defeat is only temporary. Additionally, regardless of which side (if any) you choose to lead to victory in the Civil War, the Aldmeri Dominion is still out there growing in power as the Greater-Scope Villain who will need to be dealt with.
  • The main quest of The Elder Scrolls Online ends with Molag Bal's Planemeld being thwarted, but given that the game is a prequel, all of the above events are still going to happen to Tamriel. Worse still, both Bal and Meridia confirm that stopping Molag Bal has opened the door for something worse to come about, but given that neither explains further, we don't know if the event they've described has even happened in any game thus far.
• The End Times: Vermintide released a new level, "Waylaid", to introduce the sequel — the antagonist is revealed to have survived his Disney Villain Death and lures the heroes into a trap. They escape in the prologue of Vermintide II, but the city of Ubersreik falls in their absence.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 4 combines this with Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, as the Railroad and Institute endings require you to destroy the East Coast Brotherhood of Steel, who became the de-facto rulers of the Capital Wasteland after Fallout 3 and brought peace & stability to the region. If you've played both, congratulations on potentially undoing all your own hard work.
  • The TV show, which, according to Word of God, is canon to the setting, acted as this for the West Coast portion of the series. After spending three games seeing California rebuild After the End, we learn that the New California Republic was decimated after its capital was destroyed^note there's a sign that says Shady Sands was its first capital, leaving the state even worse off than in the original Fallout.
• Flashback initially ends on a bittersweet note, with the Morphs' home planet blown up but Conrad Hart adrift in space with little hope of rescue. The sequel, Fade to Black, reveals that the Morphs took over Earth during Conrad's 50-year cryosleep.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy VII, while it's left ambiguous as to what happens to humanity is in the far future, Cloud resolved all of his personal issues and rebuilt his mind, became honest with himself about his flaws and insecurities, and gained a strong and intentionally funny personality. Come Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and Cloud is severely depressed, having strange episodes again and alienating the friends he'd long since learned how to rely on.
  • After the Belated Happy Ending of Final Fantasy X-2, this came in full force with the Final Fantasy X-2.5 ~Eien no Daishou novella and Final Fantasy X -Will- audio drama written by Kazuhige Nojima. Tidus dies (again) while he and Yuna are shipwrecked on an unknown island, and though Yuna is able to bring him back from the Farplane, it's implied Tidus may have not returned fully intact. And the Farplane has become unstable, causing the dead to return to life. That means Sin is along for the ride, too, possibly willed back to Spira because of an unknown party's desires. Sin, the aforementioned Eldritch Abomination whose thousand-year cycle of suffering and Senseless Sacrifices only ended because of Tidus' Heroic Sacrifice. And Yuna calls off her relationship with Tidus because of petty jealousy over one of his friends, in spite of their romance being a pivotal part of the last two games.
  • Final Fantasy XII has this from a game it's a prequel to. The game ends happily ever after, the tyranny of the gods overthrown and the Empire now under the management of a friendly emperor...and then you check the backstory of Final Fantasy Tactics, set in the same world thousands of years later. Turns out there was an apocalypse knocking mankind back to the dark ages and driving all the nonhumans to extinction some time later.
  • At the end of Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning and friends managed to Take a Third Option and defeat the Jerkass Gods without destroying the world, Serah returns to normal and Lightning approves of her marriage to Snow. Final Fantasy XIII-2 reveals that Lightning disappeared due to Time Paradox shortly afterwards, and Snow left to look for her, leaving Serah alone. A time traveler from the future arrives and reveals that he's the last of humanity living After the End. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is set during The End of the World as We Know It and finally concludes the dangling plot threads of XIII-2...by having Lightning vanquish an even bigger Jerkass God and usher in the creation of a godless new world where everyone is reborn.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has a lot of these due to the game being an MMO:
    • A Realm Reborn ends with the Garlean Empire repelled, Eorzea saved, and the player character and their allies hailed as heroes. The trend continues through the post game storyline, up until the very end, when Sultana Nanamo is assassinated, after which the player character and their friends are framed for the murder, betrayed by their new allies, and split up during the escape, with the PC and two of their friends forced to find refuge in the isolationist city-state of Ishgard, thus setting the stage for the expansion Heavensward.
    • Heavensward resolves the issues that popped up at the end of A Realm Reborn, Nidhogg and Thordon are slain so peace can finally be achieved between dragons and men. No one has time to celebrate thanks to someone instigating a fight between the empire and the Eorzean Alliance while also summoning a very powerful primal.
    • Stormblood ends with the empire fully driven out of Ala Mhigo and Doma. Yotsuyu is defeated and can no longer terrorize Doma. Zenos is defeated and kills himself after finally getting a battle that he always craved for. Around the middle of Stormblood, Yotsuyu returns as an amnesiac, but her cruel self eventually returns, forcing the Warrior of Light to put her down. Meanwhile, Zenos is alive and seeks out the Warrior of Light for a rematch while the Garlean Empire is preparing to attack the Alliance in retaliation for driving them out of their capture territories.
    • Endwalker prevents The End of the World as We Know It thanks to the Warrior of Light stopping Meteion from destroying the universe. The heroes have little time to rest since Golbez from the Thirteenth (or the Void) is planning to invade the Source, which puts the world in danger yet again.
• In the Fire Emblem series:
  • At the end of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, Gharnef and Medeus have been wasted and peace has returned to the continent of Archanea. In Mystery of the Emblem, Hardin pulls a Face–Heel Turn and begins menacing the continent, and Marth has to go through the same thing all over again.
  • When Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance ends, the Evil Empire has been defeated, Crimea is entering a new golden age and reestablishing ties with the laguz, and the world is by and large peaceful — even the massive Begnion theocracy seems well at ease with the world. By the time of Radiant Dawn, Crimea is being undermined by greedy nobles (including one who starts an open revolution), Daein (the aforementioned Evil Empire) is completely oppressed by the occupational Begnion forces, and Begnion itself is in the midst of a power struggle between its senate and its empress — and to top it all off, the laguz wind up going to war with Begnion partway through the game. The fact the world is now at war with someone becomes a plot point. Granted, the ending of Path of Radiance blatantly foreshadowed that things were about to get worse. Thankfully, Radiant Dawn's happy ending sticks for at least 1200 years.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 3 ends with the killer animatronics and the corrupt Fazbear Entertainment long dead, the murdered children finally getting payback on their killer and passing on after so many years, and Fazbear's Fright burning to the ground, seemingly taking Springtrap (haunted by the murderer) down with it. Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, however, dampens this severely since not only is Springtrap shown to have survived, but it's implied that he's (probably) really haunted by the killer's son, meaning the children never got their revenge, killed the wrong guy yet again, and their killer is still alive somewhere. (Though Word of God states that Springtrap is still the killer with the implication of being his son an unintentional Red Herring.)
  • It gets worse as what's described in Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, Molten Freddy/Ennard somehow absorbed the same souls that thought were at peace into itself!
  • If one believes the implication that barring 4, all the protagonists of the series are the same person, Pizzeria Simulator undoes multiple happy endings (well, surviving is as happy as it gets in this series) because the ending of this game has the protagonist dying in a fire (after already dying and coming back as a zombie).
• Inverted by Freespace Silent Threat, though for more-or-less the same reasons as this trope usually comes into play (conflict and chaos requires there being people around who can get involved into conflicts) — at the end of the original game, the narrator makes clear the expectation is that the Shivans will destroy what's left of the Terran-Vasudan colonial empires, and that's what been won is a reprieve for the now isolated Solar system. Come the expansion, and it turns out that the Lucifer's destruction had a far greater impact on Shivan coherence than expected, and that the remaining Terran-Vasudan forces in the colonies are actually winning the war.
• Gears of War:
  • In Gears of War 2, we first discover that not only has the Lightmass Bomb (which was dropped in the heart of the Locust's underground hive network at the close of the last game) failed to destroy the Locust, but that they have since redoubled their efforts (later revealed to be in desperation), and mankind has been forced back to their last bastion of defense, Jacinto. Not only that, but the Locust now have a method of sinking cities. At the end of the game, the heroes are forced to sink Jacinto in order to flood the underground networks and hopefully take out the Locust once and for all.
  • In Gears of War 3, it turns out that the Locust managed to survive the sinking of Jacinto and have migrated above ground. Also, another faction, the Lambent (Locust and other creatures created by being infected with Imulsion), has appeared and is fighting both the humans and the Locust.
  • In Gears of War 4, The Anti-Imulsion radioactive pulsar commits genocide among the Locust throughout the planet, but it works by critically overloading Imulsion itself, an energy resource nested in almost every single Locust on the planet, which also causes the Imulsion throughout the world to go critical and die screaming, causing a brand new energy crisis in a post-apocalyptic world that's now teeming with the unearthed creatures of the underworld. This game shifts the franchise from modern war to extreme environment survival warfare, as your party struggles to fight a horde of sentient beasts that make the Locust horde look like children.
• Golden Sun and its continuation ended with the world being saved by the party, everyone from the Doomed Hometown happily surviving, and the Big Bad sinking beneath the earth as a volcano erupted beneath him. 30 years later in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, the world is made up of several powerful warring nations, most people are unhappy with the protagonists of the previous games saving the world, half the original party just straight up vanished, and to top it all off, magic-eating vortexes have started popping up. OH. And the previous Big Bad is back.
• Guild Wars was made up of a series of standalone campaigns. That is, until the Nightfall campaign revealed that there had been a Greater-Scope Villain all along, the dark god Abaddon, who had orchestrated all of the evils you had faced. However, according to the official Guild Wars 2 lore, neither Tyria nor Elona has fared too well during the 200 years between games, and while native Canthan humans might be okay, it has grown xenophobic and isolationist in that time. Some of these things were foreshadowed earlier on, however.
  • After the developers decided to make a sequel, they decided to create the Eye of the North expansion to serve as a bit of a thematic bridge. While this ends with you having defeated the villain as well, it's only a servant of the Elder Dragon that would be among the villains to devastate Tyria and become the new Big Bads of Guild Wars 2.
  • The Winds of Change event in the latter days of Guild Wars introduced the Ministry of Purity, a ministry of Cantha formed to cleanse the afflicted from the Factions campaign, but whose stated ideology of security over freedom would obviously lead to the isolationist and xenophobic Cantha of Guild Wars 2.
  • Perhaps most notably of all, however, since it was foreshadowed before the decision to make a sequel, was Elona's fate. The only person who had the means to cross the Death World to reach the Big Bad was an unstoppable evil who had been sealed away. Thus, in order to save the world, you have no choice but to release that evil. While it saved the world in the long term, and Elona in the short term, it's not a big surprise to find out that it eventually doomed Elona.
• Half-Life ends with Gordon Freeman successfully killing the Nihilanth, an alien being who was preventing the scientists on Earth from sealing the portal that spewed forth endless hordes of Xen invaders. He gets employed by the G-Man and put into stasis, allowing him to rest easy after saving the world, but when Half-Life 2 begins over two decades later he's released from stasis onto an Earth which was conquered by an even more powerful alien faction known as the Combine. He later learns that killing the Nihilanth did nothing to close the portals that were bringing in aliens, and this is what allowed the Combine to reach Earth and take control of it.
• Might and Magic VIII had the main character and their party save the world from being destroyed. Then Heroes of Might and Magic IV revealed that roughly a year later the world was destroyed for an entirely unrelated reason (with some refugees managing to make their way to a new world), with only a single character in MMVIII indicated to have survived, without any of the unique cultures featured in that game having made a mark in the new world.

J-O

• The Jak and Daxter series does this with the second and third games. We leave the first game with our heroes triumphant over the Card-Carrying Villains and about to embark on a new journey into the unknown. Then in the first few minutes of the second game we discover that their journey into the unknown takes them 20 Minutes into the Future, where the idyllic natural paradise has become a Cyberpunk Crapsack World ruled by an iron-fisted dictator and under siege from a seemingly endless swarm of monsters called "Metalheads." The villains from the first game seem rather pleasant by comparison (the mooks from the first game have been turned into pets by Haven's Apathetic Citizens). After completing the game and bringing peace to Haven City, we open Jak 3 to find that killing Kor did nothing to stop the strongest Metal Heads and the city has been nearly destroyed. On top of that, Jak is exiled to the Wasteland because the city blames him for letting the Metal Heads into the city due to his connections with Krew, the real culprit (Jak is naturally very bitter about this). Fortunately, that game's Bittersweet Ending isn't soured in Jak X: Combat Racing, which shows through environmental storytelling that Haven City and other parts of the world are recovering well after the events of the main games.
• Katamari Damacy has a relatively mild example. At the end of the first game, the King announces that the sky is complete, but We ♥ Katamari reveals that actually only the stars immediately around Earth were restored, and there's still a lot of work to do.
• Kingdom Hearts ends with Sora still looking for a way to find his best friends, but the worlds, at least, seem saved. Then it turns out The Heartless are still plentiful if no longer endangering reality, new enemies are showing up, and the first universe-threatening Big Bad was only one aspect of a greater villain with a very confusing history.
  • The main trio outright lampshades this trope during II with Donald complaining that things haven't changed at all despite their actions in the first game, and Sora lamenting that they only got one part of the franchise's Big Bad. Yen Sid and Mickey have to spell out for them that the Big Bad and his Heartless invasion in the first game still had to be stopped, and the Heartless are a much more manageable threat now thanks to their actions.
  • Kingdom Hearts II ended pretty unambiguously happy, with the villain defeated and everyone reuniting with laughter and smiles. It wasn't until later games came out that the cast realized that there were still people to save, and then in Dream Drop Distance they learned that they hadn't even stopped the Big Bad at all; if anything, they had helped him. He is finally defeated in Kingdom Hearts III, but at the cost of Sora fading from existence and ending up in a mysterious Alternate Universe.
• King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human ends with King Graham throwing his hat to Alexander. King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella shows while the hat is travelling mid-air, King Graham suffers a heart attack.
• This is the main theme of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. The first game ended on a high note, with your Player Character being victorious (either as a Republic hero or a Sith Lord, depending on alignment). The writer of the sequel read all of the Expanded Universe and concluded that most of EU canon is this trope with characters fighting the same war between a Sith-backed Empire and Jedi-backed Republic over thousands of years. The second game starts with a Crapsack Galaxy that's still devastated by war, hates Jedi and Sith equally, and the Player Character is one of the only Jedi left alive. The Big Bad critiques both sides as short-sighted extremists who rely on the Force too much, and her goal is to destroy the Force itself to stop the cycle. Unsurprisingly, this is a Contested Sequel by those who see it as a spiteful Take That! against the franchise—particularly since no dialog choices permit a competent rebuttal of said Big Bad's arguments. It is possible only to respond as a Jedi or Sith might, and never to offer an alternative to all three philosophies.
  • And the override button gets smashed in and stuck on Star Wars: The Old Republic. Turns out the Jedi Council from the first game was partly right; there was a Sith Empire behind the Mandalorians, led by Villain Sue Darth Vitiate, an immortal abomination that has all of the planet eating power of Nihilus, the manipulation ability of Traya, and the immortality of Sion - with none of their drawbacks. It's revealed that the "canonical" Revan was used as his pawn. And then Revan runs off and gets his fool ass curb stomped by Vitiate. Followed by canonical Exile charging in behind him, and getting Stuffed in the Fridge with a saber to the back from Scourge for her trouble. Revan ends up as Vitiate's chew toy in a stasis chamber. And Revan and Exile made no attempt to warn the Republic that Vitiate or his empire existed and send no message back, meaning their loved ones, students, and allies spend the rest of their lives with no answers. Then Vitiate spends the next three hundred years stockpiling for war over at the Sith Empire and stomps an unsuspecting Republic. Even when the Republic springs Revan, Revan has gone completely mad, runs off to another alien factory to build droids capable of wiping out 98% of the Empire (and a significant chunk of the Republic as unintended consequences), playing right into Vitiate's grander plans to wipe out both the Republic and Sith Empire to achieve godhood. The Imperials stop that plan, but Revan comes back with even less sanity and a Literal Split Personality, leading a cult and trying to kill all life on Yavin Four (including his own descendants and the only sane leaders in the Empire and Republic) in some hairbrained plan to resurrect Vitiate and kill him once and for all. And ends up being put down like a rabid mutt by what amounts to a Dark Reprise version of the first game's crew.
  • One of the SWTOR sidequests also does this horribly to a first game quest. Assuming the Light Side path, Revan gave the Taris Outcasts the means to find and reach their Promised Land. It seems like a typical heartwarming bit, and you have hope they survived the bombing. Well...they did. The Promised Land let them survive...only for the vaccine to run out, the rakghouls to mutate so what vaccine was left was ineffective. The remaining survivors died slowly and horribly from disease, starvation, rakghouls, inbreeding, and were finished off by radiation poisoning. Enjoy the Light side points!
• Inverted in Kuukiyomi. The 99th situation of Kuukiyomi: Consider It reveals the game has a Sudden Downer Ending as "You"/player protagonist's girlfriend C-Ko dies from a fatal illness (it's not clear whether it's from a disease or from serious accident) when the flatline noise occurs after the screen fades to white. Fortunately, the sequel reveals that C-Ko actually survives despite the flatline (however, it's not explained how she survived). Both the player protagonist and C-Ko are married and have a baby.
• The Last of Us ends with Joel and Ellie reunited and continuing their journey. Come the sequel, however, Joel is brutally and violently murdered by Abby, the daughter of one of the scientists he killed, and Ellie spends the entire game trying to avenge his death, but ultimately cannot bring herself to do so and lets her go. By the end, Ellie is completely alone, with her loved ones either killed or had abandoned her and due to losing her fingers, is unable to play the guitar anymore, the last reminder of Joel's keepsake.
• Left 4 Dead:
  • The game almost fell into this trope by having the first campaign lead to the second one, as the helicopter pilot would have been revealed to be infected. However, the developers found out it was not a satisfactory ending, and made the four campaigns completely separate instead...before changing their minds again and releasing a mini-campaign that links the original first and second with exactly that justification. And they use it again in Left 4 Dead 2, to set up the third (now the fourth) campaign.
  • The ending to the first game managed to do this to both games after trying to tie the narratives together. At the end of the last campaign of the first game, your team is finally rescued by the military. Not some random pilot or civilian with a gun, but the ones who knows what they're doing and are backed by armored vehicles and real weapons. In the tie-in comic everything goes to hell as it turns out the military doesn't know what they're doing, and on top of that all of the protagonists are carriers — asymptomatic carriers of the virus that are unintentionally spreading the infection to everyone they've come across. And the military do not like carriers. The comic managed to conclude that the original game's protagonists do manage to earn a new happy ending (although not without some costs) by moving to a remote island where they can't infect anyone, but the second game ends with the four new guys happily rescued by the military...
• The Legend of Zelda is chock-full of this, since the centuries-spanning plot rests on three people constantly being reborn to continue their ancient, destructive conflict. It's arguably downplayed, however; about a century or so passes in-between major conflicts, thus allowing for there to be periods of relative peace across Hyrule.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker reveals in the opening credits that after Hyrule is saved in Ocarina of Time, eventually Ganondorf is freed and Link does not arrive to save the day, causing the world to become lost, and the land flooded by the gods. And in its climax; the King sacrifices the Triforce and Hyrule to free Link and Zelda from the eternal cycle of fighting the same battle over and over again, and let them have their own existence. Even that couldn't last. In the subsequent installments Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, Ganon may not be back, but Link and Zelda are back in the same roles.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
    • The game overrides many of the hopeful overtures of Zelda's decision to return Link to his original time. She had obviously intended for him to regain his lost years and live his life in peace. If The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask hadn't already obliterated any delusions of that happening, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess went a step further to confirm his lifelong Chronic Hero Syndrome, having him appear as the Hero's Shade and a mentor to the new Hero. The fact that he contributed to a thriving bloodline meant that he eventually settled down enough to have a family, but he still lingered for more than a century in the afterlife out of regret for his lost title.
    • There is also the fate of Ganondorf, arrested and sentenced to execution for attempting to usurp the throne. Seems foolproof, given that Zelda sent Link back to a point before Ganondorf got his hands on the Triforce, and thusly before gaining its powers. Except, as it turns out, he does have the Triforce of Power for an unexplained reason (even the game references how there is no explainable reason for how he has it), and with its power, survives the execution attempt, killing one of the sages before the others, in a last-ditch effort, manage to banish him to the Twilight Realm, which only delays and alters his eventual plot to conquer Hyrule.
  • The Legend of Zelda turns out to be one for the rest of the games in the Fallen timeline. No matter what kind of happy endings any of the Links got, the world eventually goes into such a state of decay that only monsters and few sparsely scattered people remain. Its own sequel even arguably does this to itself, as while Link manages to stop Ganon, his minions are still trying to revive him.
  • At the end of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, after regaining his lost memories from a century ago, freeing the Divine Beasts and avenging the fallen Champions, Link is finally reunited with Zelda and they defeat Calamity Ganon, seemingly ending its threat for good. Almost immediately at the beginning of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Ganondorf, the source of the Calamity, revives, causes Link and Zelda to be separated, and badly damages both the Master Sword and Link's arm while causing a cataclysmic event worse than Calamity Ganon.
• Every Leisure Suit Larry sequel negates the ending of the previous game in some manner, such as the Final Girl jilting or backstabbing Larry, or his memory being erased, as is the case between 3 and 5.
  • LSL 6 has it even worse, since the plot of LSL 5 was about Larry and Passionate Patti (who the series made out to be his One True Love) being separated and losing their memories as a result of Leisure Suit Larry 4 being deleted. They're reunited at the end of the game, but despite the fact that the game repeatedly portrayed Patti as feeling lonely and like a piece of her soul was missing, Patti suddenly doesn't seem interested in Larry anymore and by the next game she's completely gone without any explanation.
    • Potentially averted by Word of God: LSL 3 ends with Larry and Patti ending up in the real world and getting hired by Sierra. The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry and series creator Al Lowe have since implied that all subsequent games are just "movies" starring Larry; he and Patti are still a couple, but she doesn't appear in anything past LSL 5 because Sierra can't afford to hire her.
• Lufia:
  • The first game, Lufia & The Fortress of Doom, retroactively becomes one for its prequel, Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals. The prequel ended with the defeat of the Sinistrals and peace returning to the world, but this victory is rather tainted by the knowledge that the original game concerns the Sinistrals reappearing 100 years later and having to be defeated again. It doesn't help that said prequel's ending is really a Bittersweet Ending (although at least the world got a hundred Sinistral-free years out of the deal).
  • Lufia: The Legend Returns overrides the original game's ending (once again a Bittersweet Ending) by revealing that the Sinistrals weren't really defeated that time either, and 100 years later they're trying to destroy the world again. The Legend Returns is chronologically the last game in the series, so the Sinistrals haven't come back from that one...yet.
  • To a lesser extent, Lufia: The Ruins of Lore is another one for Rise of the Sinistrals, specifically the Gratze subplot. The subplot originally ended with Gratze Kingdom's military might defeated and their dreams of conquest ruined (and, in the remake Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals at least, a promise from the ruler of Gratze to work towards peace). Come The Ruins of Lore, Gratze is out to take over the world again, and they're even much more effective at it than they were before, earning them an upgrade to main antagonists in the absence of the Sinistrals.
• Mary Skelter: Nightmares ends on a hopeful note, with the Big Bad dead and the Dawn finally having the means to escape the Jail that dragged a massive portion of a Japanese city underground. Then the postgame shifts to the Schrödinger's Canon "Another Story" scenario in which the Blood Team comes across a second Jail while traversing the Underground Cavern. Mary Skelter 2 is suspiciously similar to the first game, only a whole lot more bleak; it is revealed that the Another Story scenario is canon, happens after the Big Bad of the first game is defeated, and the Nightmare of that area altered history to save a Blood Maiden that died in the first game's backstory. Mary Skelter 2's conflict is ultimately resolved through that game and the Embedded Precursor remake of the first Mary Skelter, and while there is much less hope for a happy ending this time around, the team nonetheless manages to escape the Jail. Mary Skelter Finale reveals that it took less than five seconds on the surface for the Dawn to be attacked by something else.
• Mass Effect: The galaxy is saved! Shepard is hailed as a hero! Humanity becomes an influential member of the council! Until the first minutes of Mass Effect 2, where the Normandy is destroyed, Shepard is killed, his/her crew disbands and the council denies the events of the first game's climax. Eventually though you work with Cerberus to stop the Collectors from building a human Reaper replacement to Sovereign and save humanity...except the Reapers are still a threat and they arrive in Mass Effect 3 far earlier than expected (regardless of your actions in the Arrival DLC).
  • On a smaller level, many of the major choices in Mass Effect 1 have little positive effect by the time they're relevant again in Mass Effect 3. Anderson gave up his Councillor post to Udina out of frustration, the Rachni Queen is captured by the Reapers (or replaced with a Reaper-made monstrosity), and the Council still doesn't believe Shepard's advice whether you saved them or not.
• Max Payne: At the end of the second game, it seemed like Max had finally come to terms with everything that happened to him. Then 3 comes along, and Max has descended into alcoholism.
• MechWarrior 4 and its Mission-Pack Sequel Black Knight were bad about this. You play as Ian Dresari in the first game, liberating the planet from the oppressive whims of House Steiner military forces and your toady of a cousin, where you're hailed as a hero for saving your homeworld. Then Black Knight turns Ian into a tyrant so that you can undo all your hard work from the first game, putting the planet back into House Steiner's hands while also killing off almost all of the cast from the first game in the process. ^note Canonically speaking, Ian's presentation as a tyrant turned out to be Steiner propaganda to justify attacking him to retake the world. The only thing that even remotely makes the second game palatable to fans of the story from the first is that the corrupt representatives of House Steiner get their comeuppance too for having just a little bit too much Chronic Backstabbing Disorder for their own good.
• At the end of Mega Man 6, after defeating Dr. Wily, Mega Man manages to apprehend him and have him given to the authorities, meaning Wily will never threaten the world again. Mega Man 7 reveals that Wily knew this would one day happen and six months later, his lab reactivates and four Robot Masters he built are released, which go on to attack the city and break Wily out of prison.
• Zero of Mega Man X fame gets his own series where, despite all the sacrifices, things get worse. To put this into perspective, the best thing that happens to Zero here is that he finally knows what he's fighting for, and it takes four earth-shattering games and Zero's own death for him to receive closure. Even then, the (comparatively) Lighter and Softer Mega Man ZX sequel series essentially overrides Zero's own Bittersweet Ending once the heroes start delving into the intrigue since Mavericks and world-destroying threats still pop up. It's ultimately downplayed, however, as the 200 years of (relative) peace between Zero and ZX are all but stated to be the best times humans and Reploids have experienced in ages, so Zero's sacrifice still has meaning. Even Legends, which sets things really far back, is set thousands of years after ZX and long after all the previous protagonists have passed on.
• Metal Gear:
  • Despite the absolute existential horror Raiden experiences in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, he ends the story with his sanity intact and reconciles with a pregnant Rosemary. Come Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Raiden's been physically mauled to the extent of needing a new cyborg body, he's openly angsty instead of being covertly angsty, and Rosemary leaves him for a sham marriage to Colonel Campbell so that she can protect the family from the Patriots. After overcoming all that and reuniting with Rosemary and his son John for real this time, Raiden is now working as a PMC in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance because his cyborg body looked too unnatural for him to find civilian work. By the end of the game he's once again on a quest of revenge to end his personal war, forgetting everything Snake had taught him. It is worth noticing, though, that unlike the prior examples mentioned, Jack doesn't lose Rose and John again. He still cares very much for them and provides for them with all the money he gains.
  • Also, in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, the Plot Twist ending you get after the ending credits and dramatic logo show, with Paz manning the giant Metal Gear you fought so hard to disable. It's likely that many players wholeheartedly believed this was an easter egg at first, soon to discover that it actually showed a great deal of Paz's character the player wasn't aware of before.
  • This can even be said to go back all the way to the original Metal Gear Solid as that game ends with Snake successfully killing his clone and riding off into the sunset with Meryl/Otacon for a life of peace in Alaska. Come Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty the world's now under threat from Revolver Ocelot and Snake is once again fighting to stop Metal Gears from being used to take over the world. It's then taken to the absolute extreme in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots which shows Snake as a tired old man still struggling in a fight against Liquid Ocelot, all alone in the world except for Otacon and Sunny.
• Misao ends on a fairly bittersweet note where the protagonist successfully soothes Misao's soul and things go back to relatively normal. Then in Truth it turns out that she was Not Quite Saved Enough and things go back to hell.
• Happens in Modern Warfare 2, where Shepherd, Soap, and Price all ask why they fought the last war against the Ultranationalists, if things just became worse afterwards.
• The older Call of Duty games that take place during World War II all end with the Allies victorious and the fascists defeated, and the endings of the very first game and World at War are pretty highly optimistic about the future. But anyone who knows anything about the Cold War or who played Call of Duty: Black Ops will know that the future is anything but sunshine and rainbows.
• In Mortal Kombat 11, the Aftermath DLC renders the original good ending where Liu Kang rebuilds the timeline with Kitana non-canon, as the normal ending where Liu Kang defeats Kronika at the Dawn of Time is canon. This is because when Shang Tsung appears, he tells Liu Kang that he destroyed Kronika's crown in defeating her. If Liu Kang is chosen in the final battle, then it is sad, affirming his ending more strongly, as he has to watch all his loved ones suffer and die, and he rebuilds the timeline so that he trains the Great Kung Lao so that his defeat at Goro's hands does not happen.
• In Odin Sphere, the first four books end on a victorious note for the hero involved: Gwendolyn affirms her love for Oswald and steps out of her father's shadow, Cornelius saves Velvet and confirms she still loves him despite his curse, Mercedes defeats Odin and wins the war for the fairies, Oswald saves the sleeping Gwendolyn from Onyx and affirms his conviction to live for her and himself, and Velvet saves her brother Ingway's life and receives the translated prophecy of Armageddon. Several of these are overwritten by actions in the other characters' stories (Gwendolyn in particular defeats Mercedes and takes back the Ring Titrel to deny the fairies what they fought for, and briefly causes a Despair Event Horizon in Oswald that she needs to fight tooth and nail to fix) and all of which goes out the window once the final book aptly titled "Armageddon" begins.

P-Y

• Persona 3 ends with deuteragonist Aigis finding a purpose in life with protecting the protagonist and smiling at the rest of her friends as the hero falls asleep in her arms. In the epilogue The Answer, added as part of the Updated Re-release, the protagonist actually died, and Aigis seems to have lost herself since. The rest of the group is depressed and irritable, torn asunder after the hero's passing. Another way to look at it, however, is that since the original ending of the game already very heavily implied that The Hero Dies (with the protagonist being unusually tired for multiple days on end, and Aigis suddenly breaking into tears during her final speech as if she knows what's going to happen), The Answer is all about the party finding closure and moving on after his death.
• Persona 5: In the final arc the Phantom Thieves explicitly call it their last job, and comment how appropriate that targeting god and Saving the World is their final work. Furthermore, one of the key points for it was to destroy Mementos so the Metaverse cannot be used again by anyone and them disbanding. Cue the expansion chapter, the sequel and many other spin-offs. In Persona 5 Strikers Lavenza even feels sad by the reunion.
• The original Pikmin ends with Captain Olimar surviving his visit to the Pikmin planet and with the help of the titular creatures, successfully gathering the missing parts of his spaceship, the Dolphin, so he can return to his home planet, Hocotate. Pikmin 2 begins with Olimar returning to Hocotate only to find out that Hocotate Freight is up to its eyeballs in debt and inches from bankruptcy, as Louie's ship was attacked by a space bunny while delivering a load of golden pikpik carrots (This is a lie. He actually ate the carrots and made up a story). To add insult to injury, the Dolphin had to be sold to pay off part of the debt. When the bottlecap that Olimar brought back from the Pikmin planet is revealed to be worth a considerable amount of money, the President of Hocotate Freight sends Olimar back to the planet in search of the rare treasures it's now known to hold, alongside Louie and a sapient ship.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Red and Blue (and their remakes), after being defeated as the final Gym Leader, Giovanni decides to disband Team Rocket and make amends. In Pokémon Gold and Silver (and their remakes), Team Rocket resurfaces, once again causing havoc while trying to contact Giovanni to lead them again. In the case of the remakes, a special event reveals that Giovanni isn't even done with Team Rocket and was actually working on getting stronger in the meantime.
  • At the end of Pokémon Colosseum, Cipher is stopped and their creation of Shadow Pokémon brought to an end. Five years later, in Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, Cipher returns, hijacks a cargo ship containing a number of Pokémon, and use them to create more powerful Shadow Pokémon, including the ultimate one, XD-001 Shadow Lugia.
  • At the end of Pokémon Black and White, the player character managed to defeat Team Plasma, foil Ghetsis's true plans, and make N realize that humans and Pokémon can coexist together. Come Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 and Team Plasma has returned, now divided into two factions. While the old Team Plasma is making amends for what they did in the previous games, the new Team Plasma throws out the liberating Pokémon aspect and embodies world domination/destruction. Also, Ghetsis has returned, leading the new Team Plasma, has captured Kyurem, and plans on using it to freeze the world and take every Pokémon for himself.
• Portal:
  • A new ending was patched in to justify Chell being the star of the sequel. Instead of successfully escaping, she is dragged back in by a robot and locked away in one of the hypersleep chambers.
  • In an inversion, the credits of the first game have GlaDOS singing about still being alive despite you killing her, learning from the experience, and being eager to find new test subjects to practice science on. The second game ignores this, showing that not only did you really kill her, but she was reliving her death repeatedly in a simulation. Till you went and woke her back up, anyway.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time ends with the Prince successfully undoing the events of the game by using the hourglass to rewind time. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within takes place seven years after and we learn that doing so he disturbed the flow of time and has been hunted by a creature called the Dahaka. Also the Prince has become a much more self-centered and violent person. The interquels Battles of Prince of Persia and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands provide some context of how all of this happen.
• Resident Evil does this very frequently:
  • Resident Evil's endings have Chris overlooking a city with a newscast in the background showing Umbrella being exposed for their crimes while Jill is in her room relaxing. Resident Evil 2 overrides these endings by having Umbrella getting away with what they had done and the zombie outbreak has now spread to Raccoon City itself. The remake of the first game avoids this by having Chris or Jill simply pose in their ending pictures.
  • Resident Evil 2 has its endings show Leon assisting with the military cleaning up the city while Claire is seen on a lone road with her motorcycle and Sherry, implying the two of them are having a good time going cross country. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis overrides the endings with its own ending plus epilogues; Raccoon City nuked to oblivion, Leon being forced to either work for the government or have Sherry's fate decided by them, and Claire abandons Sherry and Leon to find Chris.
  • Resident Evil 5 has the series' Big Bad Wesker finally killed off and the corrupt TRICELL corporation dismantled, ending the Uroboros project. Resident Evil 6 reveals that there was yet another terrorist group (called Neo Umbrella) that aim to control the world with the C-Virus. The U.S. President turns into a zombie and the majority of China gets turned into zombies by the C-Virus.
  • Resident Evil 7 has Ethan and Mia making out alive after defeating Eveline with Chris rescuing them. Four years later, they move into Europe and have a baby daughter named Rose. In Resident Evil Village, their house is raided by soldiers led by Chris himself who kills Mia and kidnaps Rose, much to Ethan's shock. However, Rose ends up being in possession of four lords led by a mysterious cultish leader who wants to use the child for their own ends. Ethan has to fight his way to save his daughter.
• Sacred Earth - Alternative: Downplayed. At first, this game seems to feature the world of Sacred Earth - Promise on the verge of doom, though its exact timeframe is unknown. In the ending, the world is destroyed, but it turns out Miltiades is in a different universe and is still intact. However, the Celestial Tree threatens to destroy the entire multiverse, which means while the Downer Ending of this game doesn't immediately ruin the happy ending of Promise, it will destroy Miltiades eventually if nothing is done to stop the tree.
• Inverted in Scarface: The World Is Yours. At the end of the original film, Tony had lost everyone close to him, his drug empire was in ruins, and he himself was killed in a last stand against Alejandro Sosa's minions. In The World Is Yours, he survives the attack on his mansion, spends three months recovering from his cocaine addiction, and returns to take back his empire and get revenge on all of the people who crossed him in the past.
• Shin Megami Tensei II was rather brutal to the ending of its predecessor, revealing that the peace its hero brought lasted only ten years before it was overthrown, and he himself assassinated, by the forces of the Archangels. II's ending appears to stick for its own timeline, except possibly for the main character, as a person resembling him showed up in another timeline, claiming to have been hit with a seriously nasty curse.
• At the end of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey's Neutral route, you blow the Schwarzwelt to kingdom come and end the demon invasion. Sounds like a happy ending, right? Redux reveals humanity learned jack shit from the experience and went right back to its warmongering ways. When the Schwarzwelt came back for round two, humanity was unable to stop it, leading to the apocalypse. Now Alex has come back in time to kill your ass in the hopes that doing so will fix everything.
• The best ending of Silent Hill ends with Harry and Cybil defeating the cult's God and escaping the town with a reincarnation of Cheryl in hopes of living a better life, an easter egg from the game's intro also implies that Cybil and Harry formed a family together. Jump to Silent Hill 3, Cybil is missing ever since the first game, Harry dies shortly after the prologue, the reincarnation of Cheryl/Alessa is being stalked by the cult and she still has the God feeding on her hatred within her.
• Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves ends with Sly and Carmelita becoming a couple, as well as Bentley and Penelope. Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time brings the Cooper Gang back together, and confirms that Sly was faking his amnesia - but also reveals that Penelope is a heartless Gold Digger who used Bentley for her own financial gain, and responsible for Le Paradox's time travel plot threatening to erase the Cooper Family from existence, while the end of the game shows that Sly is lost in time (trapped in Ancient Egypt with no way to return to the modern era) after his battle with Le Paradox, leaving Carmelita heartbroken. Murray is about the only person that doesn't come off any worse, except for the fact that one of his lifelong friends is now missing. What makes this worse is that Word of God from Sanzaru Games confirmed there are no plans for a sequel in spite of the massive Cliffhanger; most fans disowned the game in response to retain the happy ending of Honor Among Thieves.
• Soma Union: Despite all of Heart and Soul's efforts to save Soma in the previous game, this game has Soma destroyed and scattered across space. It's revealed that while they defeated Form and Dissonance's Absolution form, that was only a portion of the real Absolution, whose completion caused the current crisis.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ends with Sonic defeating Dr. Eggman at his Death Egg and escaping just before this one explodes. The Golden Ending also has Sonic and Tails in possession of the Chaos Emeralds, having gathered them throughout the game. Sonic 3 & Knuckles reveals that Eggman and his Death Egg survived as a result of this one crash-landing on Angel Island. The aftermath of this was the island getting knocked down into the sea, and Eggman tricking resident guardian Knuckles into thinking that Sonic was planning to steal the Master Emerald. The game starts when Sonic and Tails arrive there only to find the place infested with Eggman's Mecha-Mooks, and an antagonistic red echidna who immediately steals the Chaos Emeralds from them and proceeds to impede their progress as they fight Eggman and attempt to stop him from repairing and relaunching the Death Egg.
• Space Quest V: The Next Mutation ends with Roger having proven himself a capable captain (albeit of a small garbage scow), hooked up with his life's true love (thus ensuring his Kid from the Future will save/will have saved his life in IV), earned the respect of his crew and saved the galaxy from an infestation of mutants. At the beginning of Space Quest VI: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier, he finds out the hard way that saving the galaxy doesn't discount you of the crimes of having an affair with a high ambassador, blowing up one of the Federation's ships, purposefully sabotaging another, and murdering one of your superiors when a military war court demotes him back to a janitor.
• Implied in StarCraft II: In the sequel trilogy's first installment, You rescue a bunch of colonists from the Zerg and resettle them on a world called Haven which, although near Protoss space, seems out of the way and safe enough. Surprise, surprise, it's not long before said Protoss, led by an Executor named Selendis show up on the doorstep and inform you that their scanners show Zerg spores infesting the colonists and that they intend to burn them all just to be sure. After fighting off the Protoss and taking care of the spores, Haven is left to itself. Come the trilogy's third installment and resident Big Bad Amon has mind-controlled a good majority of the Protoss, Selendis included, and is using their immense armada of spaceships to destroy every single human world he can find. Haven and its colony is never mentioned, but it likely shares the fate of countless other unnamed planets that were Killed Offscreen.
• Starlancer involves the player thrust into a desperate war between The Alliance and the Coalition on the side of the Alliance. While the Coalition's sneak attack deals a heavy blow to the Alliance, the multiple successes by the player's squadron (including destroying countless enemy ships and the Coalition flagship) seem to indicate that the Alliance may yet prevail. Then Freelancer happens, a game almost completely unrelated to Starlancer except for the intro, which reveals that the Alliance-Coalition war lasted for another century, with the Coalition being the inevitable victor (unless you count the original E3 trailer). There was absolutely no reason to make Freelancer a sequel of Starlancer, as it has completely different gameplay and takes place 900 years later. Not one character or news report in Freelancer mentions either side or the war, despite the intro's emphatic "We will never forget". Thanks for ruining the game, Chris Roberts!
• Star Trek: Armada ends with The Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans allying to stop a massive Borg invasion, which is barely stopped and ends on a typical upbeat Trek note. Guess what? The Borg are back in the sequel, stronger than before. The Cardassians also decide to attack the Federation for no reason, even though they should still be devastated from the Dominion War. And Species 8472 randomly decide to wipe out everyone else, despite Janeway earlier convincing them that the Federation means them no harm.
• There's a certain degree of this in Star Trek Online as well.
  • The Klingon/Federation Alliance, which Kirk's crew fought so hard to establish, is broken (though that was foreshadowed, every live action Star Trek that went that far into the future had the Federation and Klingons on bad terms); the hope of reconciliation with the Romulans that Star Trek: Nemesis ends on is destroyed along with Romulus (although admittedly, that's more due to the Star Trek XI movie); The Mirror Universe is back in the hands of an evil Terran empire; Voyager's defeat of the Borg in the finale (though much later the game revealed that it really did do significant and lasting damage to the Collective) and the tentative peace with Species 8472 are shattered...even one-note villains like the Breen and Devidians are up in arms. The only thing that hasn't been completely destroyed from the series is the establishment of Democracy on Cardassia, but there are a lot of left over villains from DS9 who are set on destroying that one, too. (This isn't necessarily a bad thing for an MMORPG setting, however, and the fall seems to make logical sense if you read the backstory of the intervening 30 years.)
  • The Legacy of Romulus free expansion/season/thingy partly overrode Star Trek XI and the related overriding of the Nemesis Romulan reconciliation hope — there is no real chance of a reconciliation with the Romulan Star Empire after the events of the game...but the rising Romulan Republic (which by the end of their storyline is well on their way to being the single strongest faction in what used to be Romulan space) is quite conciliated and is in fact even allies with the Federation (and the Klingons. They are neutral on the Federation-Klingon War until later plot developments that make it a moot point).
• At the end of Strider (Arcade), Hiryu has defeated the Grandmaster Meio and put a stop to his plan to eradicate all life on Earth to repopulate it with his own created humanity. In the sequel Meio has not only survived the encounter, but in the 2000-year interval between games he was able to complete his plan, and the world is now populated by a new humanity that worships him as their creator and have turned Earth into a polluted, disease and war-ridden wreck on the verge of self-destruction.
• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island ended with the Baby Mario Bros. finally reunited and brought to their parents. Yoshi's New Island, released two decades later, reveals that the stork brought the baby Bros. to the wrong parents, and while correcting his mistake, the stork and baby Luigi are once again captured by Kamek while baby Mario ends up in the care of a new group of Yoshis. Cue Sequel Reset.
• The ending of Tales of Itzkeria is pretty happy — Itzka and his friends defeat the evil (or is he?) Darius, ending his guild and his ambitions of world domination. Conveniently, the Emperor gets a heart attack, and Itzka is appointed as his successor, finally bringing peace to the land! Aside from the unfortunate implication that Laura will die soon due to her accelerated aging, as revealed in the true ending]] there is nothing to indicate the finale is anything but happy. Jump forward to the sequel, where it's revealed that, within 20 years, Itzka has become a ruthless dictator who's not above burning cities (ironic, considering the burning of his hometown jump-started the plot of the first game) and slaughtering all inside just because they dared to oppose him.
• Happens in the second and third games of ToeJam & Earl:
  • The ending of the first game has ToeJam and Earl returning to their home planet of Funkotron from their crash-landing on Earth after reassembling their rocket ship. All the Funkotronians welcome them back with open arms... then the beginning of Panic on Funkotron reveals that earthlings have stowed away on their ship with the inhabitants trying to fend off the invasion.
  • The ending to Panic has ToeJam and Earl celebrating after they ship the earthlings back to Earth. Then the third game reveals that the twelve Sacred Albums of Funk have been stolen, likely by the earthlings ToeJam and Earl had previously captured.
• Tokyo Xanadu: In the eX+ Updated Re-release, the After Story chapter is added after the Epilogue/True Ending of the original game. While Shiori was revived due to the Nine-Tailed Fox retconning reality, this also brought back the Twilight Apostle in a much stronger state than when it was fused with Shiori. The Twilight Apostle proceeds to trap the XRC, Shiori, and other NPCs in a fake Morimiya in order to challenge them, and eventually plans on destroying all of reality. While the XRC does manage to beat the Twilight Apostle and save both Shiori and the world, Rem states that they'll eventually have to make a choice again.
• After two games' worth of suffering through physical and emotional trials, Travis Touchdown finally manages to score with Sylvia Christel, abolish the UAA for good, and become the legendary #1 assassin. Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes starts seven years later, with Travis living at a trailer somewhere in Texas. Turns out that being the best assassin around meant that challengers would want to claim his title and hurt the family he started with Sylvia, so he went into a self-imposed exile. To top it off, the father of one of the assassins he's slain wants to avenge their death and manages to find him in Texas, kicking off the plot.
• 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.
• Undertale, being the game that it is, implies that the player can do this. If you re-open the game after getting the Golden Ending, Flowey begs the player not to reset the game, stating that doing so would wipe out everyone's memories and take them right back to where they started, negating their happy ending.
  • The player can fully Subvert it if they go for the Golden Ending again, Downplay it if they go for a low-violence Neutral run, or play it straight if they go for a high-kill Neutral or the Genocide route.
  • If the player goes for the Golden Ending after ending a Genocide Route, the ending plays normally, until the very last shot of the game, which implies The Fallen Child has taken over Frisk's body and is going to murder all your friends.
• In Valkyria Chronicles, Welkin and Squad 7 managed to defeat Maximilian, destroy the Marmota, and drive The Empire out of Gallia. In addition, Princess Cordelia was revealed to be a Darscen rather than a Valkyrur, which would suggest that better treatment for Darscens would begin. Two years later, in Valkyria Chronicles II, it turns out that Cordelia's decision to make her Darscen heritage public had caused a rift between the people of Gallia, with the faction that opposes her forming the Gallia Revolutionary Army, throwing the country into another war while also hunting Darscens and creating Artificial Valkyria.
• Warcraft:
  • The first game was an early example of this; the Orc and Human campaigns seemed to be treated as alternate universes; on the one hand, the Humans prevailed and defeated the Orcish Horde. On the other, the Orcs razed Stormwind Keep and killed the human king. Tides of Darkness, the sequel, revealed the Orc campaign was made canon. Tides Of Darkness was itself treated similarly; this time the expansion, Beyond the Dark Portal, revealed the Alliance victory to be the canonical one. (Blizzard would switch tactics with StarCraft and abandon this technique for Warcraft III, wherein they actually subvert their earlier use of the trope by clarifying that elements from both Horde and Alliance campaigns from the previous games happened—for example, the death of Medivh (Human in I) and Gul'dan's betrayal (Horde in II)—but the Orc ending mission for I and the Alliance ending mission for II canceled out the opposing side.)
  • Warcraft III ended with The Alliance, the reformed Horde and the Night Elves finally putting their different aside and joining forces against the Burning Legion, defeating their leader Archimonde allegedly for good and saving Azeroth. Come the extension Frozen Throne, it turns out the Scourge took advantage of the Legion's defeat to become their own faction and a new threat on Azeroth, while a human Knight Templar attempted an unprovoked offensive on the Horde, reigniting the hostilities between Orcs and Humans. Things get even worse in World of Warcraft, where not only do the Alliance and Horde get more and more aggressive toward each other, to the point of regularly grabbing the Conflict Ball, but the Legion is back again.
  • The World of Warcraft: Legion expansion ends with the people of Azeroth ending the threat of the Burning Legion for good with a surgical strike on Argus. Now the world can live in peace, right? But no, at the start of the next expansion, Battle for Azeroth, Sylvanas, as Warchief of the Horde, invades the night elf lands and burns down Teldrassil, and in response the Alliance invades Lordaeron, putting the two factions at war again.
• X-COM:
  • The first game ends with humanity defeating the aliens, taking all their stuff, and blasting into space. The second game steps on that last part and sets us against a different bunch of aliens that was lurking on Earth the whole time. The third game is set in an extremely advanced and self-sufficient megalopolis - built that way because the defeat of those other aliens blew the Earth's environment into tatters. At the same time, though, both Interceptor and background material reveals that, while Earth is still the center of human activity, it is no longer the only bastion of humanity. Mars has been settled, and there are a number of colonies in a far-off region of space called the Frontier. This means that humanity's contact with the aliens allowed us to, eventually, spread through space.
  • The Spiritual Sequel series UFO: Afterblank is just weird: the second game is based on the first game's Bad Ending, but it went horribly wrong for the bad guys, so it's cool.
  • Averted in the successor series because the developers felt it would have cheapened the victory of Enemy Unknown, so instead XCOM 2 follows the Bad Ending: The Aliens discovered and rushed the XCOM base before XCOM even discovered laser weapons, capturing the Commander. XCOM: Chimera Squad averts it altogether, following from the Good Ending and showing a world that is rattled but strong and recovering.
• Xenoblade Chronicles: Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 both ended with an optimistic outlook where "in this new world all life will walk towards the future, hand in hand." However, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes place in the world of Aionios, which was created when the worlds of Bionis and Alrest were fused together. It consists of nothing but an absolutely unnecessary Forever War between the nations of Keves and Agnus, every citizen a short-lived incarnation who gets conscripted into a war they aren't expected to survive. The cherry on top is that this is being perpetuated by Queen Melia of Keves and Queen Nia of Agnus, heroes from the first two games. Ultimately subverted, or at least downplayed. Aionios is the result of a flawed fusion between the worlds, an "Endless Now" where people won't have to confront the uncertain future, and was technically a mishap involving the machine that would have safely split them apart once more after they initially collided. Also, Melia and Nia aren't villains but rather the Big Goods, with the actual villains having used robotic duplicates of them to perpetuate the war that keeps the Merged Reality together. Once the heroes finish the reboot, splitting the worlds again, we see that they are able to continue with barely a hiccup. It's unclear if Aionios ended up having any impact at all. Even better, the prologue DLC Future Redeemed shows that the heroes did manage to save the new lives born inside Aionios, and the worlds are able to safely merge again as they were always intended, so everyone will find each other once more.
• Yakuza 5 ends with Saejima and Majima reuniting, the Tojo Clan saved from internal and external threats, Akiyama has avenged the death of one of his best clients, and Haruka chooses to abandon her idol career to live a peaceful life with Kiryu in Okinawa. Yakuza 6 opens immediately after all this and shows the fallout; Saejima is arrested and sent back to jail once more for being a fugitive of the law, Kiryu is also sent to jail for his actions in 5, Akiyama is forced to shudder Sky Finance and go into hiding, Haruka's name is smeared in the tabloids and she runs away to escape the pressure, and new villains arise hoping to exploit the Tojo Clan's weakness for their own gain.

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