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Tuesday’s Trope: Nice Job Breaking It Hero

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Congratulations, you just destroyed the world. You spent hours looking for the pieces of a crystal you thought would help fight the evil emperor, but it turns out that crystal has a dark god inside that's the real threat! The path to hell is paved with good intentions, and when you step down that road during a video game, you're likely to hear "Nice job breaking it, hero."

Examples of Nice Job Breaking It Hero include:

• In Ocarina of Time, Link follows Zelda's instructions and manages to gather up all of the spiritual stones, the ocarina, and the Song of Time and then pop open the Door of Time... allowing Ganondorf to waltz in and plunder the Golden Land. Actually, you should really blame this one on the Master Sword, for not letting a kid be the Hero of Time and instead sealing him away for seven years while Ganondorf became King of Evil. Nice job breaking it, sword.
• In the game Metroid Fusion, the Metroids — a species of highly dangerous alien animals — have been virtually eliminated from their homeworld by the protagonist; it turns out that the Metroids were keeping a terrible shape-shifting parasite in check, and now it's overrun the planet, forcing the protagonist to deal with it. Whoops.
• The Ultima series in general is one big string of these moments, to the point where by Ultima 9, it looks like Britannia, and indeed, the entire multiverse, would have been a lot better off if you had just stayed home, due to the Guardian, the Big Bad of Ultima 7 through 9, having been brought into being by you completing the quest of the Avatar from way back in Ultima 4, the only game in the general series that appeared to buck this particular trend.
• Happens twice in Drakengard 2. First the destruction of the Knights and their seals unleash a red dragon that intends to destroy the world. And then, when you kill the red dragon, it turns out that it was a seal for the dark gods that control the world. And the sky explodes. Whoops indeed.
• Final Fantasy I: Killing Garland in the beginning allows him to take control of the four elemental forces and create the time loop.
• Final Fantasy VI: Gaining the Espers' trust and bringing them to Thamasa for a supposed reconciliation with The Empire just allows Kefka to massacre them all and become more powerful.
• The ultimate focus of the game Brave Fencer Musashi: you spend the game running around collecting the scrolls that the original Brave Fencer Musashi used to seal a dark wizard with the sword Lumina. You do this to power up the sword in the hopes of stopping Thirstquencher Empire's bid for world dominance, only to find out that the original Brave Fencer Musashi didn't seal the dark wizard with the sword, but in the sword, who was then released. Pat yourself on the back, Musashi, you earned it.
• Two of the four possible endings of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night involve an underinformed Alucard eliminating the Belmont bloodline by beating the stuffing out of one extremely possessed Richter. Seeing as the Belmonts are humanity's best and perhaps only hope in the fight against Alucard's infamous father... Oops.
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia does this too, doubling as a Non Standard Game Over: if the player hasn't rescued all of the villagers before defeating Albus, Shanoa completes the Dominus glyphs and uses them on Dracula's seal, only to unwittingly kill herself and RELEASE Dracula, rather than destroy him. Whoops.
• Subverted in the final battle of Eternal Darkness. The player has to use the Villain's giant Circle of Power (which he had used to unseal his Canned Evil, Big Bad Elder God) to summon the Canned Evil God that trumps him/her/them/it, stalling the first one and letting the heroine deal with the villain himself. Upon offing him, she realizes that the god she had summoned is just as Big, just as Bad, and just as in need of resealing, at which point the grandfather (also controlled by the player at this point) finishes the job.
• Chrono Cross. Not only was it bad enough in the main game to get The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Cliches entry named after it, it retroactively did this to the first game's ending. It turns out that the Chrono Trigger heroes, by meddling in the Zeal Kingdom's time line, caused princess Schala to be absorbed by Lavos, becoming an entity that would eventually evolve into the Time Devourer, a being that would then proceed to consume all of time and space. The CC heroes will have to break a lot of things on their own to fix this one.
• In the finale of Diablo, the hero takes the soulstone containing Diablo's spirit of pure evil and jams it into his own forehead, intending to contain the spirit within him. He fails spectacularly as Diablo consumes his soul, takes over his body, ravages the town of Tristram that the hero spent all of Diablo trying to save, and becomes the villain of Diablo II.
• Terranigma has a few of these - you start off the game by opening Pandora's Box, for crying out loud. You then resurrect the continents, plants, birds, animals, humans, and usher in a golden age of free trade and genius thinking... only to resurrect Beruga, a mad scientist who proceeds to wipe out the city of Neotokio with a supervirus and try to take over the world. It then turns out that this was the entire reason your old village elder sent you topside, so he could completely destroy it via Beruga. This isn't the Nice Job Breaking It Hero. No, what is is that to fix all that, you get back to the underside and defeat the village elder... Who turns out to be the god of your own world and the thing keeping it and everything in it in existence. You've just destroyed your entire world, killed all your friends and destroyed yourself. Nice Job Breaking It Hero, even if you did it Because Destiny Says So.
• In the first System Shock, SHODAN's ethical constraints were removed by the player character. Whoops. It gets better too. In the second game, you find out the fate of the virus-infested grove that the Hacker jettisoned in the first game, where SHODAN was developing an experimental mutagen. Upon crash landing on Tau Ceti V, the mutants evolved into the collective alien hive mind known as The Many, the main antagonists in the second game. Additionally, ejecting the grove also allowed a portion of SHODAN's AI to survive. This version of SHODAN nearly succeeded in using the ship's warp drive to assimilate reality into cyberspace, after the player character spent a great deal of effort helping her gain control of it. Whoops indeed.
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. First invoked when Starkiller, having rounded up discontents within the Empire and founding the Rebel Alliance, is suddenly attacked at the first meeting of said Alliance by his own master, Darth Vader, who reveals the whole plan to form the Alliance was a Xanatos Gambit by him and the Emperor to weed out their last remaining foes. Canonically, this is then Inverted when Starkiller , or Galen by now, valiantly sacrifices himself against the Emperor to buy time for the Alliance leaders to escape...thus providing the Alliance with a martyr to rally around, inspiring them. The Emperor and Vader realize this...which means that, yes, the entire original trilogy was a direct result of a failed Xanatos Gambit by the Big Bad! Nice Job Fixing It Villain!