Gotta Kill Them All - TV Tropes

"Nine killed you. Nine shall die and be returned your loss. Nine times, nine! Nine killed you! Nine shall die! Nine eternities in DOOM!"

• In Bakuman。, the main characters show their editor, Hattori, a story idea for a series about a world infested with demon dragons that has a sword with many demon dragons sealed inside. Every time one is killed, another emerges from the sword, and if the hero kills all of them without losing the sword to them, peace will be restored. Mashiro finds the story to be old-fashioned and stereotypical, but thinks it's worth showing to Hattori, and Hattori tells them they'll have to come up with a better idea than that if they want to go mainstream.
• Villainous example in D.Gray-Man, where the Millennium Earl wants to destroy all Innocence. This may be made easier by the fact that one of the 109 Innocences is the Heart, which will destroy all the rest if it is destroyed.
• The last Story Arc in Dragon Ball GT has Goku and Pan looking for the Seven Dragons formed by the bad energies gathered by the Dragonballs, and they have to destroy them to purify the balls and make them usable again. This could have presented a bit of a problem for them when one of the "evil" Dragons turned out to actually be a fairly decent guy, and a walking biohazard that was destroying the planet. They were saved from any moral dilemma when he got defeated and absorbed by the most evil Dragon of all.
• Fabricant 100: Ashibi's stated goal is to make No 100 kill the other 99 Fabricants, with at least 7 already killed in the flashback. By the end of the first chapter, 82 remain as far as he's aware.
• Being given a Future Diary means you are now a candidate to become the next God. To claim the title, you have to be the only one left who has a Future Diary, meaning you have to kill any others you know about or erase them by destroying their Future Diaries. Oh, and there's a time limit. You have until God dies to claim the title or else the world dies with Him.
• Kurapika in Hunter × Hunter is out for revenge with a double shopping list: Kill all the members of the Phantom Troupe that killed his tribe, and then retrieve the eyes that they stole from the bodies of his people.
• In Maria no Danzai, Maria's main goal is to hunt down Okaya's gang one by one and grant each of them a Cruel and Unusual Death as payback for the death of her son Kiritaka at their hands.
• Villainous example in Naruto - the Akatsuki are seeking to collect and extract all nine tailed beasts in order to form the original ten tailed beast. The extraction process is fatal to the Jinchuriki.
• The Angels of Neon Genesis Evangelion: NERV's strategy is to kill them one by one as they invade.
• The core premise of Oddman 11 is similar to the below-mentioned Scott Pilgrim: Setsu decides to become Itami's girlfriend by defeating all of his exes (even though this time around it's completely unnecessary and the only reason everyone's going along with it is because it's "like that movie." In this case it's relatively non-violent, as the goal is just to get each Oddman to concede defeat, at which point they join Setsu's ever-growing Oddman harem.
• Rave Master uses this, where the group's quest is to destroy the Dark Bring (Shadow Stones).
• The Poseidon saga of Saint Seiya has the heroes go and destroy 7 giant pillars below each ocean, to be able to destroy an even larger pillar in which Saori is trapped. Each pillar has a guardian of course, and 5 of those guards end up dead.
• Shinzo: While the overall Myth Arc is about Yakumo trying to find the fabled city of Shinzo, season 1 also set up a plot where the heroes had to confront the Seven Generals who started the Human-Enterran War and kill them to collect their cards. This plot is abandoned halfway through by the time they get to the third major villain on the list.
• Speed Racer: In the "Race for Revenge" three-parter, Flash Marker Jr. wants to kill the three drivers and three coaches of the Three Roses Club of racers for killing his father to win a race, although Speed's intervention keeps him from getting all of them.
• In Star Driver, Takuto's goal is to destroy all of the Glittering Crux's Cybodies so that Wako will be allowed to leave the island and fulfill her dream of becoming a pop idol in Tokyo.
• A Downplaying of this trope is the central plot of Zatch Bell!. Although you don't technically kill your enemies (you just send them back to the alternate dimension where they came from), the effect is the same.

• The The Third Kryptonian: Amalak is obsessed with killing the surviving Kryptonians to avenge a Zod ancestor razing his homeworld. Since Superman, Supergirl, and Power Girl are among those survivors, three guesses how that turns out for him.
• Batman:
  • The very first story in the franchise has a businessman killed and a list indicating his three partners are also in danger. After another is killed, a third goes to warn the fourth, only to find out that man is the killer, with Batman narrowly saving the last innocent member of the group.
  • Mr. Whisper, the immortal villain of the Batman: Gothic arc, starts out by killing a group of gangsters who once tried to kill him because his crimes brought the police down on them. The only one Whisper doesn't succeed in killing himself dies at the hands of his own The Starscream.
  • KGBeast and his apprentice NKVDemon are each introduced out to kill a different group of scientists, soldiers, and politicians who they blame for the fall of the Soviet Union, with KGBeast killing seven of the ten Americans he targets, while NKVDemon gets nine of the Russians on his hit list.
  • One Annual has flashbacks to a young Bruce apprenticing under a detective investigating murders in the Deep South: the victims were part of a The Klan-like group who participated in a massacre and are being targeted by a survivor, whose catspaw assassin who gets all of them except for one who is arrested and another who died years ago.
• Crossed Gavin Land takes advantage of the Zombie Apocalypse to set out to kill the six people who got his daughter hooked on drugs (she eventually overdosed) and forced her to make porn movies, and then got Land wounded and put in prison (where he was raped and had to watch as they abducted his wife and son) for murder after his first Roaring Rampage of Revenge attempt got several innocent bystanders killed. Land succeeds in checking off every name from his list, although one was already infected, one is killed by someone else while distracted by him, and two more get the drop on him but spare his life despite knowing he will keep trying to kill them in exchange for him helping them with a plan to save thousands of people.
• The Crow, in all its adaptations, sticks with the Back from the Dead version of this.
• Jonah Hex has both set out to kill everyone who hurt him in some way or sets out to stop someone doing the same on various occasions. One notable arc has him tracking down and dispatching old Army comrades who knocked his girlfriend unconscious during a robbery and left her stranded in Injun Country to be raped and killed (although the last member of that gang is The Atoner and gets a Heroic Sacrifice).
• Minor Nightwing villain Hella is a Fallen Hero cop whose family was killed during a bombing at a Photo Op with the Dog ceremony where she was the guest of honor. She spends years Wandering the Earth and getting more ruthless before returning home for revenge, but by that point, all of the criminals involved in killing her family or covering it up are dead, imprisoned, in witness protection, or in hiding, leaving her to vent out her frustration by instead going on a rampage against the surviving officials who organized the ceremony (plus the son of the mobster in witness protection) until she can get a window of opportunity to pursue the more consciously guilty.
• The Punisher has been on both ends of this.
  • He frequently sets out to wipe out everyone on lists of gangsters (such as in one nineties arc where he gets information on every crime boss who has been too elusive for him to track down in the past and wipes out all of them in one night beside recurring characters the Kingpin and Rosalie Carbone).
  • One early arc has his old superior from The Vietnam War set out to kill everyone in his unit who both suspected and disapproved of him smuggling drugs during the war, with the Punisher being on that list and turning the tables.* Rom Spaceknight was on a quest to wipe out all the Always Chaotic Evil Dire Wraiths in the universe... or at least banish them to Limbo. He does encounter one Wraith who did a Heel–Face Turn after disguising himself as a family man and Becoming the Mask, but this Wraith gets killed by his comrades when they discover he isn't evil any more.
• The premise of Scott Pilgrim, albeit a quirky spin on it in terms of the trope and its execution. In order to date the (literal) girl of his dreams, Scott has to defeat her League of Evil Exes. In this case, "defeat" roughly translates to "inflict bodily harm until they explode in a shower of coins".
• V for Vendetta: The early issues see V killing three people who turn out to be the last surviving members of the staff of the modern-day concentration camp where he was incarcerated, with many others having previously fallen to his wrath.
• In the X-Men novel series Time's Arrow, our heroes have to take out the Time Arrows that threaten to delete parallel universes a la DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths. Or at least that's what it's supposed to look like at first.
  • In the comic storyline "End of Greys", a group called the Shi'ar Death Commandos arrive at the Grey household when there's a gathering to make Rachel Grey feel like part of the family. They proceed to eradicate all but Rachel (and Cable for some odd reason^note ) to eradicate the "Grey Genome" so that the Phoenix no longer has a host. Apparently they'd forgotten that the Phoenix doesn't have to chose a Grey as its host.

• Dick Tracy: The Blank is introduced killing two gangsters out to kill Junior and musing how he has more targets, and goes on to kill two more men and turn another over to the police alive (a Cruel Mercy, as the man is wanted for potentially capital crimes) before the detectives figure out the victims are members of the old Frank Redrum slot machine gang and the Blank is Redrum, vengeful for being kicked out after his disfigurement. By the time of this revelation, there's only one other gang member, Stud Bronzen, left and, while they save Stud and capture Redrum, the seemingly reformed Stud is exposed as the worst of the bunch and becomes the subject of the police force's next big case.

• In The Fifth Act, Cloud is sent back in time due to an accident with some Time Materia, and his objective becomes to kill Hojo, Jenova, and Sephiroth. Preventing Sephiroth's Face–Heel Turn works too.
• The Forgotten Past of The Earthling Saiyan: Kakarot finds a poster listing the high-ranking members of the Resistance Army and uses it to form a list of enemies he plans to kill. He crosses them out on the poster when they die, although one of them ends up becoming his ally instead.
• In Hakkōna and Kaitō Kokoro, Obake are creatures that can shapeshift into just about anything. Unfortunately, their powers made them feared by humans and massacred as a result with Kiku as the only survivor.

  Obake. A subcategory of Yōkai, supernatural creatures of Japanese Shinto myth. Obake are beings that can take on any shape, from an inanimate household object to the most ravenous of beasts. However, despite that, Obake can be of various species, possessing various base forms; cat, dog, monkey, even human are just some of them. Obake have generally lived in peace, respecting all those around them. Secluding themselves from people, they are one with nature, in perfect harmony with it and each other as they live through existences which aren't limited by the passing of time. Everything was perfect until that fateful day...

• My Hero Academia: Unchained Predator:
  • The Slayer becomes the Judge, Jury, and Executioner against the Steel Sabers, brutally slaughtering them all throughout the Steel Sabers Arc.
  • After a lull in fighting Wolfram, Miruko tells the Slayer to get ready to be shipped to Tartarus, where all the dangerous inmates of society are. The Slayer mentally notes that he would escape out of there in a heartbeat, but not before making sure all those prisoners leave in body bags.
• Paradoxus: Trisha, once she loses it after her sister’s death. She starts a vengeful rampage with one goal in mind — to exterminate every single person that has contributed to Bloom (her mother) and Stella’s untimely deaths. This, of course, includes Eudora herself.
• In Perfection Is Overrated, the goal of the SUEs is to kill all the Himes, and the one who succeeds will seemingly be rewarded with the power to change the world as she sees fit. In reality, she will be possessed by the Usurper.

• 5 Card Stud: After a card shark is caught cheating, he is taken out and lynched by the drunkards he was playing against. Soon afterwards, the men who were in the lynch mob start being murdered, one after another; all by hanging, strangling, or smothering.
• In 7 Men from Now, Ben Stride's wife was killed during a robbery performed by seven men. Stride is now aiming to kill those seven men in revenge.
• The Assassination Bureau: Ivan Dragomiloff challenges the fellow leaders of the eponymous organization to track him down and kill him before he kills all of them (only Popescu comes close) after feeling they have become too greedy and ruthless after the group started out in Well-Intentioned Extremist mode.
• The Shaw Brothers classic The Avenging Eagle revolves around an escaped assassin of the Eagle Clan, who's targeted by his twelve ex-comrades, and in order to survive must kill all twelve of them over the film's entire runtime before confronting his ex-mentor, once he had killed everyone.
• In Billy Madison one minor character is shown to have a neat little list titled "people to kill". Notable in that we discover this when he's taking the eponymous character off it after he called on the phone to apologise for bullying the former in high school years ago.
• In the 1945 pirate flick Captain Kidd, the title character keeps a list of accomplices he intends to eliminate. The first time the list appears, he's adding back a name he'd already crossed out, because the man he'd previously left marooned on a coral reef has turned up alive.
• As members of the same larcenous, former military unit are murdered in Charade, the question remains whether they are being targeted to avenge their abandonment of a comrade or because someone wants all of the loot they stole. It's both.
• In Cold Pursuit, Nels Coxman goes seeking revenge on the people responsible for his son's death. Initially, he only has one name, so he hunts that man down and forces the next name in the chain out of him before killing him. He then repeats the process with the next name in the chain, and so on.
• In Curse of the Headless Horseman, the Horseman is seeking the eight gunmen who caused his death. He may have killed eight stuntmen in the theme park after mistaking them for the gunmen, but this is not made clear and, like so many other plot points, is never mentioned again after it is first brought up.
• In Death Rides a Horse, Bill hunts down his family's killers one by one, knowing each of them by a Distinguishing Mark.
• The second and fifth Death Wish movies have Paul focus most of his vigilante efforts on whittling down specific groups of criminals who brutalized and killed his loved ones.
• Dick Tracy, Detective: Splitface sets out to kill the jurors who convicted him of murder many years ago, although witnesses and an extortionist divert most of his attention and he only gets around to killing two of them before his capture.
• In Even Lambs Have Teeth, Katie and Sloan escape from their imprisonment, stock up at a hardware store, and go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge through everyone responsible for their kidnapping and sexual abuse.
• Every Last One of Them: After finding out what happened to his daughter, Hunter becomes obsessed with identifying those responsible and killing all of them.
• This is half the plot of Faster (the other half being those chasing Driver).
• Final Score (1986): After Richard's wife and son were killed, and he finds out the identities of the killers responsible, he then proceeds to write down their names on a sheet of paper - Alfred, Hengky, Markus and Dony - and sets out to hunt them all down, in order, crossing their names each time he killed one of them.
• In Frankenstein Created Woman, Hans's soul forces Christina to kill the three men who murdered her father and framed him for the crime.
• In Gone with the West,Jud escapes from prison and resolves to kill Nimmo and all of his gang, who had robbed his stagecoach, burned his farm and killed his wife and son and framed him for the crimes.
• Good Guys Wear Black (1978): An old CIA friend of Walker tells him that someone has taken out two members of his old special forces team as part of a cover-up. Two others Walker goes to warn are nonetheless killed in front of him, although the one guy he doesn't personally go to protect is ironically implied to survive.
• If you don't kill all Gremlins, you'd better try to get them all next time they come around. In the first film, one manages to get away and breeds a whole army by jumping into a pool. Then nearly succeeds a second time after the rest of his brethren are all wiped out.
• The Immortals from Highlander. In the end, There Can Be Only One. Some, like the protagonists, are content to coexist peacefully for the time being, but the evil ones are constantly coming out of the woodwork to cause trouble.
• Ive Be Waiting For You: A local legend says that the witch's ghost will return one day and kill five descendants of the town Founders who had her burned at the stake, and in the present, it seems as though the five high-school-age descendants (their parents are seemingly immune from the curse) are about to learn the truth of that curse. In the end, it turns out there are six living teenage descendants, not five, and only two die, but the Gainax Ending hints a second killer is about to pick up where the first left off and go after the Jerkass survivors.
• In 1990 Kid the eponymous character is killing his parents' murderers. Making it look like accidents. Subverted: he doesn't kill the last one — the mayor — he just tells the story to his children and they leave him. Alone in a town that hates him and is no longer afraid.
• The Bride of Kill Bill literally has a list. She sets out to kill the members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad who attacked her on her wedding day, murdered her fiancé, beat her into a coma, and put a bullet in her head.
• This is the basic premise of the film Kill List — two Professional Killers are given a list and contracted to kill everyone on it.
• In Kind Hearts and Coronets, Louis Mazzini, black sheep member of the D'Ascoyne family, kills off six members of the family in order to become the Duke of D'Ascoyne. Bonus — the six D'Ascoynes (plus two more who save Louis the trouble by dying on their own initiative) are all played by Alec Guiness!
• The Man Who Came Back: After escaping prison, Paxton returns to Thibodaux determined to kill everyone who was involved in the lynching, his Kangaroo Court, and the death of his family.
• The Man They Could Not Hang: After being brought back from the dead, Dr. Savaard sets out to murder the jury who convicted him (save for the initial holdouts), the detective who arrested him, the police surgeon who wouldn't let him finish his experiment, the district attorney who prosecuted him, the judge who sentenced him to death, and the nurse who betrayed him.
• The Mummy (1999): Because each of the men who opened Imhotep's tomb is magically linked to his resurrection process, his skeletal body regains some but not all of its flesh and blood each time he drains one of them of life, meaning that even when the last one surrenders the treasure he took from the tomb, Imhoptep still has to kill him.
• Nevada Smith: After his parents are murdered, Max Sand sets out the kill the three men who murdered them; despite not even knowing their names.
• The first four Franchise A Nightmare On Elm Street films have undead Serial Killer Freddy Krueger working through killing all of the teenagers whose parents were in the angry mob that lynched him.
• In The One, Yulaw is going around The Multiverse and killing his doubles in order to make use of this 'verse's Conservation of Ninjutsu. By the time the movie starts, he has succeeded in killing 122 of his doubles and kills another in the opener. With each kill he becomes stronger and faster, to the point where he can outrun a car and use police motorcycles as clubs. Yulaw believes that by becoming "the One", he will achieve godhood. There's only one version of him left, but Gabe Law has no intention of going down quietly, especially since his strength and speed are at Yulaw's level.
• One Foot in Hell: As part of his revenge scheme, Mitch Barrett is determined that all three men who hindered the purchase of his wife's medicine will die, and know why they are being killed before they die.
• The premise of Parting Shots, where the main character Harry Sterndale, a cancer-ridden photographer with only six weeks to live, plans to kill a number of people who made his life a misery.
• The killer in The Rawhide Terror is determined to kill all of the renegades, and leaves a countdown of how many are left on his rawhide Calling Card.
• Rimfire: Is the Vengeful Ghost of The Abilene Kid killing everyone who found him guilty or was otherwise involved in his execution? Or is there some other connection between the victims and a more mortal killer at work?
• In the film Shadowzone, John Doe inflicts this on all but the main character since he wasn't involved in the experiment that unintentionally brought him to our dimension. John Doe also didn't kill any of the test subjects, or Bingo the monkey.
• Some Guy Who Kills People: An offhand comment gives The Sheriff a "Eureka!" Moment that all of the victims in a recent chain of homicides were on the same basketball team (and are being targetted for their cruel bullying). Only one surviving player still lives in town, and the cop don't arrive in time to save him.
• In Stiletto, Raina is determined to kill all of the men involved in her sister's rape.
• Ten Dead Men: Ten men took away Ryan's life. Now ten men have to die.
• The Terminator: Because Skynet has little information about Sarah Connor's 1980s whereabouts other than that she lived in Los Angeles at the time, as soon as he arrives to the past era the Terminator simply looks up "Sarah Connor" in the phone book and goes down the list killing anyone with that name - it even gets him labelled the "phone book killer" by the media.
• Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead: A mob boss orders the brutal executions of everyone (besides himself) even remotely involved in a botched attempt to scare away his son's ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend after the girlfriend is mistakenly killed.
• In Thirteen Women, Ursula is determined to kill (or otherwise destroy) the thirteen women she blames for ruining her life.
• Tombstone - After Wyatt Earp's family is attacked by the red-sash wearing Cowboys, he declares, "From now on, I see a red sash, I kill the man wearing it."
• In Underworld U.S.A., Tolly vows to kill the four men who beat his father to death, and embarks upon a 20 year campaign of revenge. In the end, all of them die as a result of his actions, although he kills none of them directly.
• In Vicious Fun, Carrie keeps a notebook on her of all the serial murderers she plans to kill, organized by state.
• Young Sherlock Holmes sees several people dying who were involved in unintentionally provoking a riot in colonial Egypt that was violently suppressed by the Army. The son of two dead bystanders promised to get revenge once he grew up and is now doing so, with the last few survivors being able to piece together what he is doing but not being able to do anything about it besides watch their backs a bit closer.

• The horror-action themed gamebook, Blood of the Zombies, have you escaping a castle full of zombies, and you must kill every single zombie on your way out - otherwise the moment you escape, the book states that several surviving zombies make their way to the countryside, infect the local populace, and in the next morning, you end up having an army of zombies barging into your inn and killing you on the spot. There's 333 zombies in total, so happy hunting!
• The third Sorcery! book, The Seven Serpents, pits you against the seven titular monsters, which you will encounter during your trek throughout the Baklands. Subverted that you're not required to kill all seven of them, but merely to cross the Baklands without dying, but by killing only two or three serpents you'll be penalized at the end of the book. Killing all 7 during your quest, however, will boost your SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK stats to a new level and reward you in the fourth book with a clue (which makes the adventure a whole lot easier).

• Battle Royale is similar to The Hunger Games in that it involves a group of young people being forced into a game where the objective is for each of them to kill their competitors and to be the last boy or girl standing. In this case, the number of kids who are still alive is noted at the end of each chapter.
• The Boys from Brazil: A cabal of Nazi fugitives killing everyone on a list of middle-aged men with no apparent connection is clearly an example of this trope but spends a while baffling the heroes about what the motive is.
• In the second half of the book, sentient car Christine seeks to run down all of the delinquents who vandalized her over a grudge against her owner.
• Daniel X - The whole premise of the book series. Danny essentially has a big wanted list of alien criminals on Earth, and surprise surprise the one that killed his parents is number one on the list. The entire series basically revolves around him killing off or capturing the aliens on the list one by one, making his way to the one who killed his parents.
• Jack Vance's The Demon Princes quintology has the protagonist tracking down each of the 5 beings who destroyed his Doomed Hometown and enslaved all the survivors except for him and his grandfather.
• In the original novel Dracula, the vampire hunters have to track down and destroy the 50 boxes of earth Dracula transported to London from Transylvania and scattered throughout the city so that he will have no safe haven to go to when the sun rises or to change his shape.
• Hannibal: The eponymous character spends his Start of Darkness hunting down Nazis from the band who killed his sister. Some try to hunt down him first, but this doesn't go well for them.
• Harry's quest in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows have him searching for Voldemort's Horcruxes, which keep him alive while they are intact.
• In The Hunger Games, twenty-four adolescents are thrown into an arena to fight to the death until only one is left alive. Throughout the book, the main character frequently recounts how many competitors are left (although she only kills a few of them herself).
• William W Johnstone often played with this in earlier books in his The First Mountain Man, The Last Mountain Man, Eagles Series, Blood Bond, and The Last Gunfighter books, with protagonists frequently vowing complete and bloody revenge against a large band of outlaws who have done some horribly bloody and/or It's Personal atrocity and having a Long List of names of people involved be given near the end. Nonetheless, it is rare for them to actually kill everyone on their list, as they will frequently be unable to track down everyone (the author liked to keep certain villains around as Sequel Hooks that sometimes never materialized) and/or let various henchmen Screw This, I'm Outta Here! or surrender out of pragmatism to make the odds better, an appreciation for some Pet the Dog act of a villain, or simply because they feel tired of killing after wiping out so many of a villain's comrades in such a short time.
  • The first two The Last Mountain Man books provide a notable example when Smoke Jensen sets out to kill everyone who helped kill his brother and later his father. After making several kills, he falls in love and decides to give up on his feud before taking out the three leaders to focus on marriage and fatherhood, but his remaining enemies send henchmen who kill his wife and son, making him wipe out the hitmen in the climax of that book and finish his original vendetta (with extra fire) against the men who sent them in the second book.
  • In the first half of Scream of Eagles, Jamie Ian Macallister goes on the warpath to kill the approximately fifty surviving members of the Miles Nelson outlaw gang who killed his wife during a raid on their town and spends about two years gradually taking them out in groups of two to six at a time. Five members of the gang are killed or arrested on other jobs before he can get to them and Jamie does take one man who won't fight back prisoner and turns him over to the police (mainly because the man's wanted for crimes that will likely get him executed anyway), but there are still two fugitives left at liberty when he calls off his hunt to go home. One is a Young Gun likely to get himself killed soon anyway (which does indeed happen) and the other is Nelson himself, as Jamie's plan to save him for last to make him sweat backfired when local lawmen uncovered the fake identity Nelson was using to lay low and he escaped from them without leaving any other clues for the increasingly tired Jamie to use to track down where he is now.
  • In the first Literature The Loner book (a spinoff series to The Last Gunfighter written by Johnstone's niece), Kid Morgan sets out to kill about a dozen men involved in kidnapping his wife for ransom and then killing her anyway, and, after killing the last three in the climax, spends the second book going after their mysterious employer. The climax of the first book also reveals that his brothers-in-law had the same idea and were also out to kill all of the kidnappers but kept arriving just behind him and are only able to personally help kill the last two kidnappers. While Morgan is prepared to spare some of the kindappers (and their boss) who didn't personally pull the trigger and send them to the hangman's noose or prison for life, each of those people makes an ill-fated attempt to take advantage of this mercy to surprise and kill him and dies in the ensuing fight.
• Louis L'Amour has some of his heroes out to wipe out a villainous group more aggressively than simple self-defense when practical.
  • Nine people are involved in the rape, robbery and murder of Val Trevallion's mother in Comstock Lode. His father killed two of them before being killed himself, and Val sets out after the others when he grows to adulthood, although several are killed by one of his friends.
  • Subverted in Flint, where Gaddis is one of the two survivors of the nine men shot down in an attack by the Kid at the Crossing after they shot down his Hitman with a Heart mentor, Flint (who was alive but in bad shape when the Kid carried him away). When someone who is clearly Flint or the Kid (it is the latter, but he has taken to calling himself Flint to honor his mentor) comes to town, Gaddis is convinced that it is to get revenge, but the new Flint has let go of that grudge a long time ago and becomes downplayed Fire-Forged Friends with Gaddis.
  • The Back Story of Kiowa Trail saw Conn Drury hunt down the three men who tortured and killed his mentor. He never found one, but soon after that man shows up in the present, two people who know about Conn and his old vendetta get a letter from Conn saying, "First there were three, now there are none."
  • Will Reilly sets out to kill the three men who murdered his Parental Substitute in Reilly's Luck. These Hands Have Killed horror at killing the first murderer makes him abandon the feud for years, but, after other adventures give him It Gets Easier feelings, he is ready to hunt down the other two years later.
• Labyrinth of Evil: When the Jedi try to find out information about Darth Maul's ship, they learn that everyone involved in building or delivering it has been killed, save for three people they have to scramble to save.
• The League of Frightened Men: A group of a couple dozen former university students now living in different walks of life hire Wolfe for help after Paul Chapin, a classmate who was badly injured undertaking a dare they gave him, starts sending them ominous letters after two of them die in apparent accidents and another disappears. This is subverted with the reveal that he was responsible for neither death (nor an actual murder that occurs later on and is meant to hide an embezzlement) and the missing man is actually in hiding to frame Chapin. Chapin merely dropped hints about playing this straight to frighten his old enemies.
• The first Walt Longmire book has a high school student who got off with a slap on the wrist for rape being murdered, with there being three (less sadistic or unrepentant, to varying degrees) co-defendants who are also in danger. One is quickly put in protective custody, but the other two are camping in the mountains, leading to a race between Sheriff Longmire and the killer to find them.
• Subverted in the last act of The Last Juror by John Grisham. It looks like a recently released rapist and murderer has started assassinating the jurors who convicted him, but actually only three are in danger: the three who deadlocked the jury on whether to impose the death penalty, making it possible for the killer to eventually be paroled and driving the boyfriend of his victim into a murderous frenzy.
• Matthew Scudder: In A Long Line of Dead Men: Over half of a club of originally thirty-one men have died over about thirty years, and while some died naturally, there is a killer whose hobby is killing a club member every few years over a sense of envy and insecurity.
• Serge Storms:
  • Various books have Vigilante Man Serge targeting multiple members of a criminal gang throughout a book, but Gator-A-Go-Go and Tiger Shrimp Tango might be the ones where he is the most ruthless and focused on making a clean sweep.
  • In Atomic Lobster, Tex McGraw sets out to kill everyone he blames for either his imprisonment or the death of his relatives in Triggerfish Twist. He only succeeds in killing his own former lawyer, cutting off his own hand at the beginning of his quest as a form of Burning the Ships hinders his effectiveness, and he and the cousins he takes to kill Jim Davenport find themselves on the wrong end of this trope when Serge starts killing all of them to protect Jim.
  • The Russian villains of No Sunscreen for the Dead are intent on wiping out everyone in Florida with inside knowledge of their Cold War spy operations (although at least four survive).
• In A Madness of Angels, each section of the book consists of Matthew tracking down and killing or defeating the head of one of the subsidiaries of the Tower, until the climactic scene where he fights the head of the Tower itself. More or less.
• Joe Pickett: Scenes from the killer's P.OV. in Blood Trail eventually make it clear the killer is targetting five specific hunters rather than just killing hunters at random and still has one to go by the final act.
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: Sofia has to kill every last attacker before she's acknowledged as having saved the elven city of Yurnia. That's over 97000 invaders. She gets a System counter for them, ensuring that not even one survives.
• One The Shadow arc involves him killing leaders of The Syndicate called the Hand and crossing a name off a list whenever he does so. He does originally leave three members alone while fooled by their Falsely Reformed Villain act but quickly learns better.
• Arya Stark from A Song of Ice and Fire has her (in)famous death list, with the names all of people that hurt her, her family, her friends or are just evil (which makes a lot of names). One of the overarching elements in her plot is the mentioned list and how she crosses the name from it. To make it even creepier, she calls it "a prayer". It becomes a literal prayer after she joins the Faceless Men.
• Spike And Dru Pretty Maids All In A Row: Decades before going to Sunnydale, Spike and Drusilla are hired to kill all of the Potential Slayers who could be called to replace the current Hunter of Monsters if she falls to end the Slayer line, sadistically picking off several of them before the survivors are all gathered to a guarded location where Spike and Dru's client then launches a (fortunately unsuccessful) attack meant to kill them all. A similar plot was later used with a different villain for a present-day storyline in Season 7 of the then-ongoing series).
• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch novels, Iliana Ghemor is on a mission to kill every version of Kira Nerys in the multiverse .

  "I don’t fault you for not seeing the big picture, Captain. After what was done to me, it took me a while to understand what I needed to do so that I could be whole again. But when I meet the Prophets, they’ll see inside me, just as they did with your Emissary. They’ll understand what I need to get my life back. And I’ll use the Soul Key to find every other Kira that has laid claim to a piece of my soul".

• A proxy version of the trope occurs in the Star Wars Expanded Universe book Star Wars The Rise And Fall Of The Galactic Empire after the insurgents of the planet of Ivera X seize the abandoned Imperial treasury and use it to hire a bounty hunter to bring back all of the Imperial politicians and officers involved in the bombing of a major city to Ivera X for immediate execution.
• In The Wheel of Time, although not necessarily required, Rand & Co. are killing off the 13 Forsaken one by one since they are trying to release the Dark One. Their efforts are largely negated by the fact that most of the Forsaken are actually resurrected by the Dark One via a method of putting their souls into living bodies, something the good guys don't find out until just before the end of the series. As such, most of the baddies are truly killed in the Final Battle.
• In the Warrior Cats novella Mapleshade's Vengeange, after Mapleshade's kits drown, she decides that for each one of her three kits, she's going to kill one cat she blames for their deaths. In her delusional grief she has dreams of the kits crying out for her, and each time she kills someone, one more of the kits in her dreams seems to be at peace.
• In The White House Connection by Jack Higgins, the plot follows the mother of a soldier captured by the IRA and drowned in a cement mixer out to kill her son's murderer, The Mole who sold him out, and several Irish-American businessmen funding that cell.

• The entire premise of Arrow at the first season; Oliver Queen even has a literal list to work from and cross names off of. At the start of Season 2, he finds himself somewhat at a loss without the List to give him motivation and guidance for his vigilante activities (however new criminals filling the Evil Power Vacuum quickly make that moot).
• The nineties show Brimstone features a policeman brought back from hell (it's complicated) by the devil to return a number of escapees to hell the hard way (killing them, though the vast majority are only vulnerable in the eyes.)
• Castle (2009):
  • In "Once Upon a Crime," women involved in a hotly-and-run are being killed, although the culprit, who fakes an attack on herself, is one of them, out to kill the others rather then be outed as the driver.
  • Witnesses from an old Serial Killer case start turning up dead in the order they testified in "Scared to Death," leading to a race to find and save the third one.
• In Crisis on Infinite Earths, Lex Luthor steals the Monitor's Book of Destiny and goes on a rampage across The Multiverse in order to kill every single Superman in existence. He changes his tactic after meeting and sparing the Clark Kent of Earth-167, who has given up his powers to have a family. Instead, he forces the Superman of Earth-96 to fight the Superman of Earth-38. Except all this was the Monitor's plan in order to help the heroes find that version of Superman.
• Dead Man's Gun: In "The Healer," Dalton Coe comes into town looking to get revenge on the surviving members of a group that whipped him and ran him out of town for falling in love with a girl seen as above his station, although he is ultimately convinced to spare the last (and only remorseful) one.
• This is part of the Thinker's plot in The Flash Season 4. He provoked the heroes into freeing the Flash from the interdimensional prison in the Speed Force, unleashing a wave of dark matter on the passengers of a bus in close proximity of the opened portal, turning them into metahumans. And the Thinker wants to steal the powers of all these "Bus-Metas" and add them to his own, in a method that also involves taking their lives.
• Forever Knight: "Can't Run, Can't Hide" has Vietnamese vampire Tran out to kill the U.S. soldiers who massacred his village. He spends 23 years doing so, waiting years between some killings to give the survivors plenty of time to worry and unsuccessfully try to figure out who's killing them, which causes the last two to become a Crazy Survivalist and The Atoner. Once the last one commits suicide, Tran has nothing left to live for and does the same.
• Arya Stark in Game of Thrones recites the names of the people she wants to kill every night before she goes to sleep. She's nine years old when she first starts doing this. Unlike other examples of this trope, not everyone on her list dies at her hand, given that there are ongoing wars and power struggles in Westeros. Others she decides not to kill.
• Sylar to other superpowered people in Heroes, although it's more like a combination of both this and Gotta Catch Them All.
  • And in season 2, Adam Monroe targets the original founders of the Company as part of a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Kamen Rider Decade has the titular hero being told that, in order to avert the collapse of The Multiverse, he has to travel to the realities of the last nine Heisei Kamen Rider series and kill all of the heroes. He refuses, of course, and helps the Riders. It turns out that the collapse proceeded apace, accelerated by the villains but inevitable with or without them. When Decade was provoked into going to his Superpowered Evil Side, slaughtering all Riders as Decade Fury, the worlds, no longer being forced together by the Riders' powers, were all restored to their original states - including the slain Riders. It turned out plan A was the right one and Everybody Lives in the end.
• Kamen Rider Drive has to kill all 108 Roidmudes to save the world from their rampage. It is as simple as it sounds. Individual numbers get crossed out on a checklist as the story goes on.
• Ziggzagged in Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Kamen Rider Chronicle can end only if a player clears all the games it consists of and clearing a game usually means defeating its Bugster. First stage Bugsters are simply video game characters, so defeating them is the only way. Second stage Bugsters are video game people and can be reasoned with. CR Crew uses a picture overview of all games to plan their next steps rather than as a "we have to kill so and so" list.
• In one episode of Law & Order, the detectives are investigating a series of murders when they find a hit list in a car abandoned by the killer. It's a list of important people in a specific murder case from years before ... and one of the names is Jack McCoy.
• Uther's Roaring Rampage of Revenge against magic users in Merlin probably counts.
• Miami Vice: "Victims of Circumstance" sees a killer out to kill five Holocaust survivors who can testify against a war criminal, getting four of them.
• One Monk episode has members of a civil suit jury being killed one by one: not over the verdict, but because one juror found evidence of a murder during a tour of the accident scene and turned to blackmail, with the killer not knowing which juror is the blackmailer and deciding to kill them all.
• Murdoch Mysteries: Several episodes, such as "Bad Medicine," "Werewolves", "The Curse of Beaton Manor," "Twisted Sisters" (which overlaps some with Serial Killings, Specific Target), "The Ghost of Queen's Park," "The Talking Dead" (which includes One of Our Own in danger), "I Know What You Did Last Autumn," "I Still Know What You Did Last Autumn," and "The Ballad of Gentleman Jones" feature everyone involved in some real or perceived (and often fatal) wrong against the killer or a loved one turning up dead. "Bad Medicine" "Twisted Sisters", "Werewolves," "The Ghost of Queen's Park," "The Talking Dead," "I Know What You Did Last Autumn," and "I Still Know What You Did Last Autumn" all leave behind at least one frightened survivor who the killer never managed to get to and who faces potential jail time and/or disgrace over their secret being revealed in most of those cases. Interestingly, the culprit in "The Ghost of Queen's Park" wasn't actually trying to kill anyone, just scare them with a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax, but ended up triggering accidental if not well-deserved Fright Deathtraps.
• In the NCIS episode "The Meat Puzzle", the team discovers that the butchered corpses that Ducky and Palmer have been piecing together over several previous episodes are the judge, prosecutor, and jury foreman from a rape-murder case several years before. One other critical person from that case is still alive: the chief witness for the prosecution, Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard.
• Person of Interest: Several episodes have Team Machine receive a list of 3-5 people being targetted (some of whom are usually killed before they can intervene) rather than the usual one, like former communist agents in "Foe," people who found a bag of illicit cash in "Number Crunch" and Mafia Dons in "Flesh and Blood."
• Joe Pickett: In addition to the story arc adapting Blood Trail from the book (which also adds two more targets to the list), Nate finds a list of people being targetted by his old special forces boss with the names of himself, his wife (who is supposed to be long dead), three recently murdered comrades, two comrades who have avoided being killed, his new girlfriend and best friend in Saddlestring and two other men with the same last name whose reasons for being on the list and current status aren't stated.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: In "The Conscience of the King," a man who wants Kirk to help him identify a murderer they both knew is killed, and it turns out everyone else who could identify the killer besides Kirk and another Starfleet member was also murdered.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the episode "The Darkness and the Light", a murderer is targeting Kira's old friends in the Bajoran Resistance, and taunting her with every kill. When Kira confronts the murderer, she learns that he was a simple Cardassian servant to a Gul who was severely injured in a bombing of said Gul's residence, suffering both physical and psychological scars. Other Cardassian non-combatants were killed or injured in the bombing, and the murderer was exacting revenge against everyone who played a part in the bombing, making a point all the while of not harming the innocent, including the O'Brien's child — whom Kira is currently carrying, and whom the murderer intends to save (in his own twisted logic) by performing a hasty C-section before finishing off Kira.
• Supernatural:
  • The ghosts in episodes like "Route 666," "Mannequin 3: The Reckoning," and "Halt & Catch Fire" are out to kill everyone involved in their deaths with various degrees of sympathy (the ghost in the first of those episodes was a murderous Klansman, the one in the second a kind-hearted Deadly Prank victim, and the third the driver and passengers in a hit-and-run, with the survivor being the most remorseful) as the Winchester Brothers try to intervene.
  • In "Party On, Garth" the brothers must try to stop a ghost from killing all of the children of two men who the ghost of their late business partner wants Revenge by Proxy against after they ruined his livelihood.
  • When the Angel Balthazar changes history to prevent the sinking of the Titanic, the ramifications of this only last one episode as Atropos of the Fates launches a crusade to murder everyone who would have never been born or who is only alive because of indirect actions of those extra survivors and their descendants.
  • Recurring Character Lily Sunder is introduced having killed most of the Angels from the garrison that killed her husband and daughter, with repentant main character Castiel being one of the few left.
• Touch (2012): Sinister Minister Guillermo is obsessed with killing the Righteous 36, people who see the world in numbers (which he considers blasphemous), but only succeeds in killing four of them, including himself, before dying.
• True Blood: One season 5 subplot involves an Ifrit tracking down War on Terror vets who gunned down several villagers in a drunken fight, while offering to spare any one of them who kills one of the others.
• Walker, Texas Ranger:
  • Season 9's "Legends" sees the Big Bad of the episode, Michael Viscardi, going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against everyone responsible for convicting his father, Samuel Viscardi, a noted Dallas mobster, for a number of serious crimes his organization committed. His targets include the jurors, the judge, and to top everything off, the prosecuting attorney, Alex.
• Omar from The Wire is found to have a list of people from the Stanfield Organization he intends to kill. He only had a chance to cross out one name...

• In FASA's Earthdawn, in order to kill a Horror one must first kill its physical body, then travel to the astral plane and kill its astral body.
• Liliana Vess from Magic: The Gathering made a Deal with the Devil - well, several devils - for eternal youth and beauty and power and all that good stuff, in exchange for which the demons would get her soul. Then she decided that, while the youth and beauty and power were all well and good, she'd also like to keep her soul. Cue Liliana going and hunting down each of the demons to permanently terminate the contract. One of the demons, Griselbrand, was trapped in a magical vault on the plane of Innistrad. Good thing for the people of Innistrad that when Liliana shattered the vault, she also freed their archangel Avacyn...
• The ultimate goal of the Necrons in Warhammer 40,000: by exterminating all life (including bacteria), they close off the Warp (an alternate dimension essentially made of emotion), the only power that can stop them. Fortunately, most of the Necrons are still dormant.

• The Chaos Saga of AdventureQuest Worlds has the protagonist setting out to take down the Thirteen Lords of Chaos to stop Drakath from destroying Lore. Things get complicated when not only does King Alteon of Swordhaven become the Twelfth Lord of Chaos as a result of tragic events brought on by the Chaorruption he suffered at the very beginning of the saga, but the final Lord of Chaos turns out to be YOU!
• The Assassin's Creed series basically embodies this trope. From the main plot of every game revolving around assassinating a group of villains, to the optional sidequest of killing the 60 Templar Knights in the 1st game.
• In Battletech, most missions have specific objectives (destroy a particular target, escort and defend a target until it extracts, etc), but destroying all your opponents will almost always results in a mission victory (snatch and grab missions, for example, make it clear that defeating the enemy forces allows your dropship to pick you up without opposition). Some missions give the enemies unlimited reinforcements, however, requiring a different path to victory.
• The six dragons in Chrono Cross. Well, you can get by without beating the Black Dragon, but that's only if you fail to do it the right way.
• The goal of Crackdown is simply to kill about 20 different gang bosses, and a skilled player could simply charge off and get to work immediately upon starting a new game. Of course, leveling up your skills and finding new weapons will help out a lot.
• In Dark Souls, the player needs to collect the remaining Lord Souls to open the way to the First Flame. How do you get the Lord Souls? By killing the badass gods you see in the Action Prologue.
  • Similarly, in Dark Souls II the player needs to kill four specific bosses in order to get their Old Souls (which are the remnants of the Lord Souls from the previous game) to open the door in the Shrine of Winter and reach Drangliec Castle, and in Dark Souls III, the player needs to gather the Lords of Cinder together at Firelink Shrine to gain access to the First Flame again, but since none of the Lords will cooperate, simply killing them and gathering their souls will suffice.
• Deathloop requires protagonist Colt to kill all eight Visionaries in a single day to break the time loop he's stuck in. This is made extra complicated by them deliberately spreading out so he can't reach them all in time.
• EL Tejon from Dead Man's Hand (2004), the Anti-Hero outlaw who used to be a member of The Nine until he's betrayed and left for dead after refusing to massacre women and children. After escaping from a prison, El Tejon's quest have him hunting down all The Nine to kill them all.
• This is the premise for Destiny 2 Forsaken expansion. After Cayde-6 is killed attempting to end a prison break, the player character goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Uldren Sov and his Scorn Barons.
• The first half of Doom Eternal has the Slayer hunting down and killing the three Hell Priests who are overseeing the demonic invasion of Earth, and whose life force is powering it via their Dark Ritual. With each Priest that falls, the demonic consumption of Earth is reduced by a full third, with the deaths of all the Priests needed to stop the invasion. Then the Khan Maykr, who is also overseeing this invasion, gets pissy at the Slayer for killing the Priests and decides to unleash the Icon of Sin upon Earth to complete the consumption, meaning the Slayer now has to kill both her and the Titan.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • In Morrowind, killing all of Dagoth Ur's Ash Vampire lieutenants was intended to have this effect. Each one killed is supposed to dramatically weaken Dagoth Ur during the final battle of the main quest. However, due to a programming error, this does not happen. Killing them all does still have the benefit of looting their powerful, enchanted Unique Items which are permanently missable if you complete the main quest without killing them all.
  • Skyrim has an example of this as a side quest. Eight powerful Dragon Priests are scattered throughout Skyrim, each one bearing a mask with special perks. There's a shrine that can be decorated with each mask as well. Naturally, you must hunt down and kill all eight of them to restore the shrine. Your reward for this is another mask.
• The Fable series:
  • The "Gnomes Are Evil!" sidequest in Fable III. Due to a magical spell gone wrong, 50 garden gnomes were given sentience and then teleported all over Albion. You have to hunt them down and shoot them, which transports them back to their owner. Fortunately the gnomes are foul-mouthed, annoying little jerks.
  • Fable II is similar, with 50 foul-mouthed stone gargoyles who you must shoot.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The four elemental Fiends from the first game.
  • And the ninth.
  • Also, a sidequest involving the eight dragons in the sixth, and the advanced versions in the Updated Re-release.
  • In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII it is possible to hunt most of the monsters to extinction. The final one of each breed is bright pink, tougher, and has better drops. There is an extermination side quest.
• In the final mission (itself a Roaring Rampageof Revenge) in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, you and your squad hunt down a series of targets until you get to the Big Bad, which is then smashed by a train.
• Going for 100% Completion in Grand Theft Auto IV? Among other things, you'll need to kill all ten most wanted criminals on each island (Broker/Dukes, Algonquin, Alderney), and you'll also need to kill all two hundred pigeons scattered across Liberty City.
• Grand Theft Auto V ups the ante with the final mission. What do you do when you are blackmailed by two of your worst enemies to kill one of your companions, and you will die if you don't comply? Why, you simply have to Take a Third Option and kill everyone who opposes your band. These consist of a corrupt federal agent, two rival gang bosses, and the tyrannical CEO who’s been the worst of the lot.
• Half-Life 2 has an achievement where you need to kill 333 Antlion grubs. It's easily the most infuriating achievement in the game.
• The idea of the Hitman series is to kill the targets in the level as an elite-assassin clone known only as Agent 47.
  • Hitman (2016) has the Patient Zero campaign, specifically the third and fourth missions, which requires you kill 3 random militia members who've been infected by a Death Cult doctor, who you also have to kill. This is done with a sniper rifle in a Colorado military camp, while the other mission has you going around a high tech hospital in Hokkaido, Japan to make sure the virus doesn't leave the hospital facility.
  • There's also the Sniper Assassin missions in the World of Assassination trilogy, where you're given specific targets to kill. And also their bodyguards because hey, you're here and have the ammunition.
• In the Conquest Ending of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, Nepgear is forced to kill the other seven CPUs and CPU Candidates just to power up a sword to finally defeat Arfoire. However, in doing so, she ends up playing right into Arfoire's hands. The remake has her realize how out of character this is, and she destroys the sword instead, leading into the Holy Sword Ending.
• The evil path in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is hunting down and assassinating what is left of the Jedi Council.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: The Gold Skulltulas. Good luck finding the whole hundred of them. Also doubles as Gotta Catch Them All as you must collect all the tokens they drop as well. Same case in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, though the hunt is restricted to two Bonus Dungeons.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has sixty Poe souls for you to collect in a side quest by killing Poes. They're almost everywhere and some are only visible at night.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: After defeating Calamity Ganon and reloading your save, Kilton challenges you to find and slay every single one of the overworld minibosses. This is easy enough for the Moldugas, of which there are only four in a single area of the map; not so much for the Taluses and Hinox, of which there are forty each scattered throughout Hyrule. Defeat all of a single type and Kilton gives you a medal as proof of your accomplishment.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: After completing all raid quests as well as all overworld boss slaying quests, Gralens will give you special medals for defeating all specimens of the overworld bosses (excluding Phantom Ganon). The respective amounts of specimens for Molduga, Talus and Hinox remain the same as in Breath of the Wild; there are 40 Froxes, 40 Flux Constructs and 13 Gleeoks.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Battle of Aces has the Dark Pieces and Materials, beings formed from the remnants of the Darkness of the Book of Darkness that must be taken down lest the Darkness of the Book of Darkness return.
• Most of the NES and SNES Mega Man (Classic) games have the titular character hunting down Robot Masters to take their powers and eventually fight their evil master, Dr. Wily himself.
• Metroid: The various Metroid evolutions in Metroid II: Return of Samus and the remake Metroid: Samus Returns. An ever-present counter shows how many Metroids are left to kill. This becomes more disconcerting as the Metroids start to mutate, resulting in a mini-boss encounter with each one. At one point, the counter jumps from one to nine (the forty-seventh and final Metroid is, of course, the dreaded Queen). Ironically, the game concludes with a Metroid hatchling imprinting on Samus; rather than snuff out the dangerous species once and for all, Samus allows it to follow her as she begins a peaceful climb back to the surface.
• This is the goal of every Monster Hunter game, since the majority of quests ask you to kill a certain monster, which you can carve afterwards to get useful parts to build armors and weapons with. There are occasions where you're asked to capture a monster alive, but it's a rarer occurrence.
• The members of the United Assassins Association in No More Heroes and No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, and the members of the Galactic Superhero Corps in No More Heroes III. As the main character, Travis has to murder the top ranked assassins in the nation (or the top ranked assassins in the galaxy, in the third game), one by one, to rise through the ranks and gain the top spot for himself. The second game bumps this up to 51 (whereas the first and third stick with 10), but you only end up fighting around half of them in a total of 15 boss fights.
• In Ōkami, there are four sidequests in which Amaterasu is tasked to defeat a group of enemies. The enemies can be identified by having exorcising arrows inlaid in their bodies. They're in Shinshu Field, Taka Pass, Ryoshima Coast and Kamui.
• The Outfoxies: Seven hitmen were contracted to kill seven art collectors. Each one was also hired to kill one of the other hitmen. You're one of the seven. You don't know who has your contract. Answer? Kill all six of the others.
• The initial goal of SEES in Persona 3 is to defeat the twelve Full Moon Shadows that have been popping up ever since the protagonist first joined the party. Unfortunately, in doing so, they release the herald of Nyx, the Anthropomorphic Personification of death, who had been split in twelve by Yukari's dad 10 years ago, with one of the pieces sealed inside the protagonist by Aigis.
• Phantom Doctrine: Most missions allow you to kill enemies or sneak past them, according to your personal preferences and the needs of the moment. If you are attacking a conspiracy cell, however, then you have to kill every enemy on the map.
• Though you don't actually kill them, the whole point of the main series Pokémon games is to defeat the Gym Leaders in each city by knocking out their Pokémon, so you can defeat the Elite Four and subsequently, the regional Champion. The Frontier Brains can qualify as Optional Bosses in regards to this goal, though.
• A non-lethal example in Rabi-Ribi, where in order to use the Stone Stele to travel to where Miru's gone and rescue her, Erina needs to meet up with an increasing number of spellcasters for each expedition and convince them to help out. Unfortunately, various circumstances result in Erina having to fight every one of them at least once before this happens. Erina doesn't need to defeat and recruit all of them to beat the game, but she will have recruited at least the majority of them by the end.
• Romancing SaGa 2 has the Seven Heroes, while Romancing SaGa 3 has the four demon lords.
• The Desert Treasure Quest in RuneScape involves running around the whole continent and defeating four guardians who hold four diamonds you need to access an ancient pyramid, where the eponymous treasure is located.
• S4 League's Chaser mode. Each round, one player is randomly designated as the Chaser and has to kill all of the other players, who have to defend themselves until the time runs out. The Chaser gets bonus points for killing whoever has the most points of anyone alive, and gains extra points if they kill every opponent which also deprives the victims of any points (15 if alive when time runs out, 5 if dead but other players survive).
• A few of the Saints Row games have the Hitman series of diversions, which will give you a list of targets to kill, along with instructions of how to draw them out. Each kill nets you some money and respect.
  • The first three games are all about defeating three rival gangs and claiming their turf for yourself. In the first two games, you slowly slaughter your way up the chain of command until you've capped the gang leader, while in the third one of them eventually declares "Screw This, I'm Outta Here!" and flees, while another only dies in one of the endings.
• There are 666 Dragons in 7th Dragon; the amount listed in the corner of the screen at all times. You don't have to kill every last one but doing so activates the Bonus Dungeon.
• Wander's goal in Shadow of the Colossus is to kill all 16 Colossi in the Forbidden Land as that is the only way to revive a girl named Mono. Every time a Colossus is killed, a statue representing the Colossus in the Shrine of Worship is destroyed.
• Being a homage to martial art films, the premise of Sifu is that a young 20-year old martial artist must hunt down the five individuals responsible for massacring their dojo and killing their father.
• All the Sinjid games require you to do this. Battle Arena tasks you with killing every monster in the game (something you can only fully achieve on Terminator mode, since the lower difficulties end after a certain amount of levels), Shadow of the Warrior tasks you with killing every human enemy to prepare for a war (and getting 100% Completion requires killing every monster found in the game, which is no easy feat), and Sinjid tasks you with killing all the warlords loyal to the Shogun to end another war and get the protagonist's captors to free him so he can continue his initial mission to find his master's true killer (he was falsely charged with said master's murder and they agreed to let him go if he helped them).
• The only way the characters in SINoALICE can have their wish granted and have their Authors brought back to life is by collecting Lifeforce. Said Lifeforce can only be collected by killing beings that have been granted life through stories, which includes Nightmares and the Characters.
• In Sonic Adventure 1, E-102 Gamma's story following his rebellion against Robotnik is to find and "liberate" his fellow E-100 series robots. "Liberate" in quotes because he destroys them and frees the captured animals powering them. The last one to die is, of course, Gamma himself.
• The main objective of Arena mode in Team Fortress 2, your team's goal is to kill everyone on the opposing team while they try to do the same to you. Whichever team still has at least one player standing at the end wins. To a lesser extent, the "Prime Cuts" achievement requires you to use the Classic sniper rifle to score a killing headshot on at least one member of each of the nine classes in the game in one match, leading to most players hunting this achievement to keep a running list of classes to cross off as they get the desired kill. This is no small feat because there is no guarantee you will even see all the classes in one match.
• Halfway through Trials of Mana, the eight Benevodons are released into the world, and the heroes are forced to go out and slay each one of them. Of course, that just plays straight into the villain's plan.
• The Genocide/No Mercy route in Undertale, which leads to the worst ending, requires you to systematically hunt down and kill every last monster in an area. If you miss even one you get shunted into a neutral ending instead.
• The third Way of the Samurai game includes a secret ending, which is achieved by killing every single person in the town. It's a bit more complex than most examples, owing to the fact that they must be killed in the right order to avoid accidentally triggering a different ending.
• To some extent, the four sentinels in Wild ARMs 5. They're guarding four towers that have to be destroyed before you can fight the Big Bad Volsung.
• In XCOMUFODefense, the victory objective for most tactical battles requires you to kill every alien on the map. The only maps that don't require it are the second last map, which requires that you get as many soldiers as possible to the exit point, and the last map, which only requires that you find and kill the alien brain to win.
  • XCOM Terror From The Deep mixes things up a bit by giving you different objectives, but you can almost always succeed by killing every alien on the map. The exceptions are the first phase of an alien base assault, which requires that you get your soldiers to the exit point, and Synonium Device missions, which require that you blow up a certain device. The final map will not end when all aliens are killed, but instead will end when you destroy all the revival devices.
  • In both games, you can abort the mission and retreat at any time, but unless you've killed enough aliens or gathered enough artifacts, it will count as mission failure.
• Most individual missions in XCOM: Enemy Unknown are played this way: to succeed, you have to kill or disable every alien in the zone. There are a couple of Escort Missions where you just have to get one character to the exit area (possibly with a couple of tasks on the way), and to win the final mission and the game, you just need to kill one particular alien (though it's hard to get to him without killing almost every other alien on his ship).
  • Averted in the sequel, though: if aliens start calling in reinforcements, you have to run.

• Elven Lacryment. The lead character is on a quest to rid the world of the orcs that destroyed her village.
• Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer! from Girl Genius has this as his primary goal concerning sparks. Yes, including himself (last).
• In Homestuck's Intermission, the Midnight Crew make it their mission to infiltrate Felt Manor and kill every member of the Felt in the process. The only one spared is Snowman, and only because of pragmatism— If she's killed, the universe is destroyed.

• Percy, of the Vox Machina campaign from Critical Role, has a self-made enchanted pepperbox pistol, the barrels of which are engraved with the names of those he intends to kill for revenge. Appropriately, this pistol is named "The List", and as Percy kills each name on it, it vanishes from the barrel. It turns out to be a conduit for Orthax, the demon that Percy unwittingly contracted with, and as Orthax tries to gain more of a hold on him, he starts putting new names on the barrels. Only when Scanlan destroys The List is Percy set free from Orthax.
• After some goofy meandering in episode one of Girl Chan In Paradise, Kenstar's goal is to fight Galacticamaru by defeating his 32 Captains/Bushido Blasters/Taishos/Bushido Captain Blasters/Captain Taisho Bushido Blaster Busters. No respect is paid to the task, as Galacticamaru is defeated offhandedly early in Episode 3 (by Yuusuke, no less,) and after defeating 4 of them Yuusuke gets annoyed by the whole ordeal and beats all but one of them with a single kick.
• The Holders Series - of course, it's a tossup as to whether the results of bringing them together or preventing them coming together are worse, and if they are all destroyed they will "unite in the destroyed state", so it's rather a no-win situation.
• The Dark Generals in Sailor Nothing.

• Blue Eye Samurai. The title character has suffered Half-Breed Discrimination all her life, and as there were only four white men in Japan around the time she was born and she's not sure which of them fathered her, Mizu resolves to kill all of them to get revenge for the suffering she endured. She has tattoo on her arm with four spaces, one of them already filled in when the series starts, revealing that she has already killed her first target.
• The Men in Black: The Series episode "The Head Case Syndrome" has the Men In Black trying to track down an anti-alien Conspiracy Theorist who blames the MIB for bringing aliens to Earth and uses a time-travelling device to erase the five founding members of the organization from history. Agents J and K eventually track down his home and find the list he uses to mark off who's next, just as the fourth name of five fades out of existence and leaves only K.