Guts, Goblin Slayer, Darth Maul, Rambo, and Wolverine. These characters have one thing in common:they can’t die or stay dead.
Dancing with death is the pinnacle of badassery,and it’s always awe-inspiring to watch them get back up and face insurmountable odds.
Sure, video game protagonists can rise from the dead and try again, but this happens mostly through gameplay mechanics. But some of these protagonists are just built different–they survive no matter how dire the situation or how many deadly injuries they’ve suffered.
10 Best Games Where You Play As Some Guy
From Gothic to Dead Space, these games will steal your heart with their unforgettable everyman protagonists.
We’ll be ranking video game protagonists who refuse to go quietly into the night.These protagonists struggle against their fate until the bitter end, and their inability to stay dead is considered canon to the game’s narrative.
We’ll be looking at characters originating from video games, so unfortunately,comic book characters like Deadpool don’t count, as comic book characters are famous for never staying dead.
Some of these characters do die at the end of their story, but only because they allow it to happen.
Spoiler Warning: Potential spoilers for the fate of these characters!
13Ellie And Abby
The Last Of Us Part 2
The Last of Us Part 2
As dual protagonists ofThe Last of Us Part 2, Ellie and Abby representthe indomitable human spirit.Their ability to survive through numerous deadly encounters makes them extraordinarily tough protagonists.
Among the gods and superhumans on this list, Ellie and Abby are, by all accounts, just regular people. Though they put each other through hell in their violence against each other, neither of them can seem to succumb to any of the injuries they’ve suffered.
Witnessing Joel’s murder at the hands of Abby and her crew gave Ellie the drive to push through her body’s limits, all in the name of revenge. She’s been shot, stabbed, and even lost body parts. Meanwhile, Abby pushes through despite being near death several times just to give her and Lev a new lease on life.
Even afterthe final fight,they don’t kill each other. While Ellie loses everything, Abby and Lev start their new life in this bittersweet ending.
Devil May Cry
Devil May Cry 5
As a son of the demon knight Sparda, Dante possesses a superhuman healing factor that keeps him alive through almost every kind of punishment, allowing him to shrug off just about any kind of dismemberment.
There’s a running gag in theDevil May Cryfranchise thatDante has a habit of getting impaled by his own swordin almost every single game.
He’s even stabbed himself inDMC5just to merge his human and demonic halves to create his newest Shin Devil Trigger form.
The reason Dante isn’t higher on the list is that there aren’t many instances where he is seen coming back from the brink of death through his sheer force of will. While he’s been impaled many times,fatal injuries seem more like mild inconveniences for him.
Not only has he been impaled by his own sword in the Netflix adaptation, but his head has been blown up, and he still survived.
11The Player
Slay The Princess
Slay the Princess
Now, you might think that this is a stretch, and that your character does indeed die an uncountable number of times—stabbed, disemboweled, pummeled, and unraveled into gory ribbons,only to come back toSlay the Princessonce more.
Technically, the unnamed player character is unkillable thanks totheir hidden identity as the Long Quiet,an immortal being that is the opposite of the Princess or the Shifting Mound. His perception of the Princess changes not only how she presents herself, but also the Voices that fill his head.
If we’re going by the textbook definition of this list, then we’d be focusing on Voice of the Stubborn, who is capable of pushing your body through its limits just to spite death. Depending on the route,every time you listen to Stubborn, your character can push through anything out of pure spite, no matter what the Princess throws at you.
Consider thefights against vessels likeThe Adversary, The Fury, The Razor, and The Eye of the Needle, to name a few.No matter how much damage these Princess variants deal to you, your character gets back up and keeps fighting.
Besides, having Stubborn egg you on and push you through the pain makes these moments all the more badass.
10B.J. Blazkowicz
Wolfenstein
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
When it comes tokilling Nazis and fascists, there’s nobody more fit for the job thanWolfenstein’sB.J. Blazkowicz. Known as Terror Billy by his enemies,Blazkowicz is the boogieman of tyranny, and a brickhouse of a man.
An American patriot on a bloody crusade against the Fourth Reich,Blazkowicz has gone through hell and back just to fight Nazis,all the while helping the oppressed and liberate his country from fascism.
In an iconic moment fromThe Old Blood, Blazkowicz can outlast a Nazi supersoldier in a stabbing contest QTE.
Not even getting beheaded by Frau Engel inThe New Colossuscould kill him, as we soon find out that his allies were waiting for the perfect moment to attach his decapitated head to anexperimental supersoldier body.With his new body, Blazkowicz becomes even more unstoppable.
Don’t let his brutish looks fool you, either, becauseBlazkowicz is a treasure trove of profound and introspective thoughts.Even after beating the game, I find myself rewatching the cutscenes just to enjoy the poetic narration.
9Ethan Winters
Resident Evil Village
Ethan Winters is the protagonist of bothResident Evil 7andResident Evil Villageand has suffered a lot of pain to survive not just the Bakers, but the constant punishment from Mother Miranda and the village’s dangers.
For a video game protagonist who issupposed to be just some guywho wants to save his wife and daughter,Ethan Winters is incredibly resilient and seems to have a hard time dying despite the constant injuries he suffers.He’s been stabbed, impaled, and dismembered, and yet somehow he still puts himself back together witha little bit of healing fluid.
It turns out thatEthan has been technically dead all this time,infected by the mold back whenJack Baker killed himinResident Evil 7. This explains his superhuman regenerative abilities and his one-track mind to rescue Rosemary from Mother Miranda’s clutches.
It isn’t until the end of the game that Ethan finally lets go and sacrifices himself to blow up the Megamycete. Then again, his consciousness still lingers as he serves asRose’s guide in the DLC.
Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Nothing keeps a video game protagonist alive more than the desire to avenge the death of their loved ones, and Talion fromShadow of Mordoris one of them.
After watching his family die at the hands of Sauron’s Orc forces to summon the spirit of Celebrimbor, Talion is then ritually sacrificed along with his family. Butinstead of dying, he and Celebrimbor inadvertently merge, becoming an unkillable wraith.
Death is a minor inconvenience for Talion and is implemented extremely well in the game’sNemesis system.The game remembers when you die, and even promotes the Orc that killed you, making him even stronger than before.
Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II
Warhammer 40k’s Space Marines are infamous as inhumanly deadly and resilient pinnacles of the Imperium’s bioengineering,capable of surviving all kinds of injuries fatal to a normal person. But in thegrimdark distant future, even an Astartes couldfall victim to the inevitable end.
There’s a running gag within the Warhammer 40k community that named characters in the franchise, like Calgar and Guilliman, have plot armor so thick that they can’t die or stay dead. This applies even more when these characters have their own mini-figurines.
This is most especially true for Lieutenant Demetrian Titus, a Primaris Space Marine of the Ultramarines and the protagonist ofSpace Marineand its sequel. His plot armor is so thick throughout the stories of both games,he has survived situations where any other Space Marine would have met a gruesome end.
While he’s from a franchise that isn’t originally a video game, Titus’s first appearance is in the firstSpace Marinegame.
Titus’s main feat of resilience ishis extraordinary resistance against Chaos corruption and the mind-bending effects of the Warp, which is basically space cosmic Hell.
Not only that, but he also survived brutal torture by the Inquisition and fought through insurmountable odds while being in the Deathwatch before returning to his Chapter duringSpace Marines 2.Titus is the epitome of plot armor.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Fextralife Wiki
Almost every protagonist in Soulsborne games is canonically immortal; the Undead inDark Soulsliterally can’t die,Bloodborne’sHunter is constantly resurrected by the Moon Presence, and the Tarnished can’t die inElden Ringbecause the Rune of Death was stolen.
With that said, it’s tough to single out a protagonist for this list. But the protagonist whose immortality ties into the lore and gameplay the best would beSekiro, as you can revive even when you die in combat.
Much ofSekiro’slore and plot revolves around immortality.Sekiro’s liege lord, Kuro, has blood that renders him effectively unkillable and is the last of an immortal bloodline through the Dragon’s Heritage. Because Kuro gave Sekiro some of his blood, the shinobi can resurrect at will.
The only thing that can kill an immortal is the Mortal Blade, and because it’s a flawed version of Kuro’s blood,Sekiro can only resurrect so many times before he and the surrounding NPCs suffer from stagnation caused by Dragonrot.
What’s more unkillable than the son of the god of the dead himself? In Supergiant’sroguelike hack-and-slashHades, you play as Zagreus, who is the son of Hades and Persephone, and his immovable desire toescape the underworlddespite dying over and over.
The unending cycle of death is a theme inHades. Not only is Zagreus blessed (or cursed, depending on your perspective) with the ability to rise from a pool of blood in the underworld every time he dies, buthis drive to escape the underworld keeps him fighting through his father’s defenses over and over.
To Zagreus,death is an obstacle that stops him from reuniting with his mother and uncovering the truth of his birth.Even after the events of the game’s story, Zagreus continues to escape the underworld just for fun.
One must imagine Zagreus happy.
Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat 11
Now we’re approaching “local man too angry to die” territory, and we begin with Scorpion, the iconic mascot of theMortal Kombatfranchise.
Of course, almost every single character in the franchise has died at least once, but in the games until the timeline reset inMortal Kombat 1, Scorpion has always been Hanzo Hasashi,an undead revenant who rises from the dead to avenge his family’s murder at the hands of Sub-Zero.
Scorpion’s “protagonist-ness” is debatable, as Liu Kang has been a more textbook definition of “protagonist” for much of the franchise. But as the de facto mascot and most prominent character in the franchise, calling him anything other than a main character and protagonist is a bit of a disservice.
Depending on when he died, Scorpion is either resurrected by Quan Chi’s necromancy or returns from Hell by sheer force of will, always coming back whenever there’s a chance that he could kill Sub-Zero and anybody responsible for his family’s death.
While his backstory has since been changed inMortal Kombat 1, Scorpion’s identity has always revolved around his refusal to die or stay dead.
