Games with avoidable plot deaths

The Game Room
21

I don’t know if this counts as it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn:

In your first play-through, there’s a point where you HAVE to kill a king, you’re not given an option not to. But if you beat the game and then play through a second time, when you get to that point you have the option of not killing him and he’ll join your party.

In addition, it’s pretty standard in most Fire Emblem games that during some battles, if you get the right person to talk to an enemy, the enemy will switch sides and join your party. But if you don’t get the right person to talk to them, you’ll have to kill them off in the battle.

22

I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned yet:

In the original Resident Evil (and then, I think, in the remake for Gamecube) Barry’s death can be avoided by mixing the plant killing formula, rather than trying to shoot the thing to death. That being said, I think I enjoyed watching him die more than keeping him alive. :slight_smile:

23

I had dogmeat throughout the entire game until the mutant base. He kept walking throught the force fields. I got sick of trying to keep him alive.

I never got him killed in combat, though.

Oh, and in Deus Ex, you can actually get through the whole game without killing anything. It’s just really hard, and I’ve never tried. But I’ve heard it is possible. However, there is a chracter, you still have to fight and wound to the point the character runs away if you aren’t trying to kill the character, and at the time in the plot you are forced to fight this character, you’re usually not strong enough to win the fight. (Typically you either have killed the character already, or you know the secret that kills the character at that point without ever having to get into combat. The conversation that ends up in that’s characters death is amusing.)

24

Specifically in Radiant Dawn, you do get a choice, but the choice is between the main character killing Pelleas or a more minor character. On the second go around you get three options, the third being to not kill him.
Hoopy Frood; which character is that? I thought there was one character you absolutely had to kill; Anna, either in the plane (that or kill/allow Lebedev to be killed) or when you’ve been captured and can killswitch her. I’ve had a go at the no-killing route, and I could never figure out that one.

25

If you damage that character enough, the character will run away through the door that needs to be opened for you to escape. As soon as the character runs, you chase after.

But it’s a tough fight. I never bothered for no-kill. I just used kill switches.

Priceless.

26

Bards Tale. (the PS2 remake).

If you’re nice to the dog that runs around town, it’ll follow you about and can join you to fight. Later on the dog gets killed in battle, but you have a chance to have him brought back as a skeletal dog. Pretty cool

27

Likewise, in the most recent Nobanaga’s Ambition game, there are historical event triggers, and if you turn on “fantasy events”, you can change the outcome. For instance, in 1560, Yoshimoto Imagawa led an army against Nobanaga Oda. Oda’s army was able to ambush the invading army, and, at the battle of Okehazama, killed Imagawa.

There’s an event in the game that does this. However, if you’re playing the Imagawa family, and you have “fantasy events” turned on, you can choose not to march, which means the character doesn’t lose his life.

28

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Magus in Chrono Trigger. At some point, you face him and you have the option to fight and kill him. If you don’t, then he joins your party. I actually had no idea Magus could join your party until way after I had beaten it; I thought that fight was an essential* plot point.

*It’s hard to say what’s an essential plot point in Chrono Trigger considering it’s possible to skip to the final boss at any time after the first 5 minutes of the game.

29

Well, this actually isn’t an example of what the OP is talking about, but in Chrono Cross…

[spoiler]I’ve always thought that it was actually a weakness in Chrono Cross’s plot that it’s impossible for Kid to die after she falls ill from a poisoned dagger wound. You basically get a choice: go off on a hopeless mission to recover an antidote from an extinct beast, or give up, to the extreme disapproval of your comrades.

However, if you give up on her, it later transpires that some random person passing through just happened to have the antidote handy and used it to bring her back from the brink of death. Totally arbitrary, and it kinda cheapens the plot.

Considering that the writers of Chrono Trigger weren’t afraid to kill off the main character, and even allow you to leave him dead when it’s possible to use time travel to avert his death, it seems kinda odd that they would wuss out in Chrono Cross. It was still a great game, but it honestly could have been better if they had taken the plot more seriously.[/spoiler]

30

Again, regarding a dog

In Parasite Eve II, there’s a boss fight where a dog somehow got involved. To get the good ending of the game (which is just a short 30s cutscene), you have to kill the boss within a certain time limit to prevent the dog from dying.

31

This one’s actually the opposite, where a character usually lives, but there’s something specific you can do to make him die.

In Knights of the Old Republic, if you turn to the dark side, at the end you can kill almost your entire party. Except Carth, who many players found annoying, and actually wanted to kill him. He would always run away when you turned evil. However, if you play a female character, you have the option of pursuing a romance side-quest with him. If you do the romance, and then fall to the dark side, he still runs away. But he then comes back later, because he loves you and knows you’re not really evil and he believes the power of love can save you. Then you can kill him.

32

Arglefraster, that’s what I did.

It was oddly satisfying.

33

I actually used to have a game saved just before he came back, and loaded it up any time I needed to blow off some steam. Bad day at work? Kill Carth. Fight with my sweetie? Kill Carth. Etc. :smiley:

34

For those of you trying to keep Dogmeat alive:

If I remember correctly, there’s a way in the military base to turn the forcefields to low power, allowing you to walk through them but taking a bit of damage. The trick is to leave them at full power, then trap Dogemeat so that he can’t move. This is most easily done with a decent Repair skill.

Of course, in Fallout EVERYONE can die.

Also, Tactics Ogre is absolutely chock full of avoidable deaths. Basically, the game lets you make either one or two big moral decisions, giving you three separate possible plot paths. Depending on which one you take, who lives, who dies, who joins you, and who even shows up at all differ tremendously. Further, there are a number of characters you have to give the right dialogue choices to or else they run off or get killed. Occasionally, you also have to bring an enemy down to critical health instead of killing them in order for the “good” outcome. There’s one particularly notable avoidable death in the fourth chapter:

You sister goes a little bit nutso. If you manage to successfully talk her down, she comes to her senses and joins you. If you fail, she kills herself.

Final Fantasy Tactics is worth mentioning for the ending:

If you think about it, if you refuse to let anyone join you, then they won’t die at the end. By turning them down you could save them.

Also, it may not be quite the same thing, but the old game Exile 3 had a lot of these, in a way. Basically, the world is beset by plagues of monsters. If you take too long to solve the problems, the world begins decaying and eventually the NPCs start dying off.

35

The old Star Trek: 25th Anniversary PC game gave you points if you managed to end the missions with the red shirts not dying as usual.

(video of failures and successful moves from the game)

36

To be blunt, the ending for Final Fantasy tactics is… obscure and unclear, and there’s not much way to tell what may have happened. Suffice it to say that Garula’s interpretation is definitely not the only one, and it is heavily implied that he’s wrong.