Top: The old map of Maraqua in 2000
Bottom: The map of Old Maraqua in 2009
Bottom: The map of Old Maraqua in 2009
"The kingdom you once knew has turned to ruins over the long years, and it is now your battlefield."
A work can revisit a past location or area, a place that is well-known In-Universe or in Real Life, usually in its raw, unaltered form with a few changes here and there. Alternatively, the work can reimagine it as a crumbling, desolate wasteland. Buildings are destroyed and aflame, wildlife has decayed and rotted, and barely any living lifeforms can be seen across the lifeless environment.
When a work portrays Familiar Ruins, it's usually in the form of a location that is common in the work or dates back to the work's earlier roots, only for it to be an abandoned, desolate wasteland, but still retains its core features that allow it to be recognized as the same location.
It can most commonly be used as an Easter Egg, where the Familiar Ruins can be spotted in an area that's easy to miss, or as plot significance, where the Familiar Ruins are featured as a setting of the work's plot or occur in the middle of the plot.
The Trope Namer comes from the map with the same name from the Roblox game Flood Escape 2, along with its follow-up, titled "Beneath the Ruins".
Can also apply with Urban Ruins if the location is Familiar Ruins and has an urban setting. If the location is just ruins with no relation to recurring locations and overall has no known history, then it is just Ruins for Ruins' Sake. Compare with Monumental Damage, Doomed Hometown, Ruins of the Modern Age, and Bleak Level.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Digimon Adventure: During the Dark Masters arc, Joe and Mimi's group travel through what remains of the Digital World after the villains tore up most of it to create Spiral Mountain. Joe spots the restaurant he was forced to work at back in "WereGarurumon's Diner", now abandoned and in poor condition.
- Dr. STONE: Most of the landmarks around Tokyo have been destroyed and eroded during the preceding 3700 years, leaving only the Great Buddha of Kamakura.
- Dusk Beyond the End of the World: After being shot in an Assassination Attempt against Towa, Akira wakes up after 200 years as a Human Popsicle to find himself in the After the End ruins of Hakodate, Japan, where he and Towa had lived.
- Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: Tartessos in the flashbacks of Electra is an intact city full of people. In contrast, 14 years later, the protagonists only find an empty city whose main buildings are ruined.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: In Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL Heartland City is a lively, brightly coloured, bustling city. When an alternate version of the city appears in Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, it's been reduced to ruins by the invading Fusion Dimension forces, though its distinctive architecture (especially the remains of Heartland Tower) is still recognizable.
Audio Plays
- Torchwood (Big Finish): By the end of God Among Us, the Hub has become ruined due to a combination of a flood hitting Cardiff and Yvonne and Orr using the Lens to stop the Committee. However, "Cuckoo" sees a group of urban explorers go through the now flooded ruins of the Hub. By the end of the story, the Hub becomes even more wrecked thanks to Bilis flooding the area with Rift Scar energy.
Comic Books
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The ruins of the “Invisible College” depicted in Century is intentionally designed to call to mind Hogwarts without identifying it by name, for legal reasons.
- Superman (2023): Lex Luthor guides Superman down into the tunnels under Metropolis, revealing that the city was built on top of its former iterations, suggesting that Metropolis did rebuild after incidents such as The Death of Superman and The Fall of Metropolis, but built over such broken areas.
- An unusual example occurs in The Transformers (Marvel), where some locations on Cybertron are lifted from The Transformers and depicted as ruins to show the aftermath of the Decepticon conquest of Cybertron. Of particular note is the Great Dome of Iacon.
Fan Works
- Beyond Skyrim: County Bruma was mostly spared the destruction of the Dominion War, but Cloud Ruler Temple is an exception. The headquarters of the Blades, frequently visited in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, was a priority target for the Dominion, and was sacked, and the Blades annihilated (save for Delphine and Esbern). The player may visit the dilapidated ruins, and meet the ghost of a Blade who believes he is still fighting in the Blades’ last stand.
Films — Animation
- The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: After the initial invasion of the Duplo aliens, the city of Bricksburg is reduced to a dusty wasteland with damaged streets and buildings as further attacks keep undoing the citizens' efforts to rebuild. 5 years later, the city is shown to be completely deserted after its citizens have built a new civilization called Apocalypseburg on the outskirts.
- Shrek Forever After: After Shrek gives up the day he was born to Rumpelstiltskin to be a scary ogre again for one day, he rushes back to his house in the swamp after noticing Fiona's face on a wanted poster for ogres, only to find it's been completely dried up and his family no longer exists.
Films — Live-Action
- Deadpool:
- Deadpool (2016): The ruins the final battle takes place in are meant to resemble a crashed SHIELD hellicarrier from the Marvel Cinematic Universe films.
- Deadpool & Wolverine: Cassandra Nova's base is a rather grim example, being in the skeleton of a variant of Ant-Man that died in the Void while at giant size.
- Hook: Peter Banning is led by his shadow to the abandoned old treehouse in Neverland where he, the Darlings, and the Lost Boys used to play. Going inside helps him remember being Peter Pan and the reason why he left Neverland.
- James Bond: The climax of Spectre takes place in the ruins of the MI6 headquarters building at Vauxhall Cross, after it (in the universe of the films) was destroyed by the villain in Skyfall.
- Jurassic Park:
- Jurassic World: Jurassic World itself is built on Isla Nublar, the same island the Jurassic Park location from the first film was built on. Midway through the film, Zack and Grey discover the original Jurassic Park Visitor Center, which has been abandoned after the dinosaur outbreak in the first film and is covered in overgrowth.
- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: When Claire and Owen travel to Isla Nublar to rescue the dinosaurs from a volcano about to erupt, their helicopter flies by the damaged monorail gate for the now-abandoned Jurassic World park. As they take a Jeep across the island, they drive through the ruins of the park's Main Street.
- The Rage: Carrie 2: Sue Snell takes Rachel Lang to the ruins of Bates High School, which was burned down at the end of Carrie (1976), to share that Carrie White used telekinesis to do it, and that Rachel, Carrie's half-sister, shares the same power.
- Return to Oz: When Dorothy returns to Oz, she discovers the faded remains of the Yellow Brick Road, and a sad chord is heard at the sight of the Emerald City in ruins, with its inhabitants turned to stone.
- The Rise of Skywalker: Rey explores the ruins of the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi.
Literature
- Aeon 14: At the end of Building Victoria, a Negative Space Wedgie causes the Intrepid to be sent 4,000 years into the future by extreme Time Dilation. In a few later stories, the cast returns to Victoria, which was destroyed by the Sirians whom the Victorians had escaped from during the FTL Wars, and dig for history and clues in the ruins.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: At the start of the series, Winterfell is a lively castle, in which the Stark House live along its retainers and servants. In contrast, the Winterfell of A Dance with Dragons, after it was taken by Theon Greyjoy and then by Roose Bolton, is a ruin Bolton had to rebuild in order to use it as a fortress against Baratheon.
- The Chronicles of Narnia: In Prince Caspian, when the Pevensies find themselves back in Narnia a year after the events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they end up on a beach near an old, ruined castle. Exploring the castle, they slowly recognize it as Cair Paravel, the castle they themselves ruled in until they went back through the wardrobe, meaning that, due to Narnia Time, hundreds of years have passed in Narnia in their absence.
- In the Warrior Cats book Graystripe's Vow, Graystripe returns to the old forest as an elder and, despite the construction that had driven the Clans out, recognizes some locations including the ruins of Fourtrees: the eponymous oak trees have since been cut down, and all that's left of the Great Rock is a pile of stone rubble, but the surrounding landscape is still shaped the same.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5 repeatedly used the same CGI establishing shots for various locations. In later seasons, two of these, the Centauri Royal Palace and the Minbari capital, were shown in devastated versions to indicate the results of, respectively, the Interstellar Alliance punitive attack on Centauri Prime in 2262 and the Minbari Civil War of 2261.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Sunnydale High School was destroyed at the end of the third season, due to a massive battle with villains on the main characters' graduation day. The series then moved on to other settings, but several scenes in the fourth season episode "Doomed" were set in the ruins of the High School, as the villains-of-the-week were trying to reopen a portal there.
- Farscape: The episode "Eat Me", takes place in a diseased, decaying sister ship of the Living Ship that most of the show takes place on, with the scenes shot on the same sets in distressed form.
Tabletop Games
- Magic: The Gathering loves doing Call Backs in this style. One of the most well-known is the fact that the card Academy Ruins
explicitly depicts the Tolarian Academy several centuries after its destruction.
Video Games
- Ace Combat:
- Inverted in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War and Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War. The maps of three missions in the former game are reused in the latter game.
- The first being Stier Castle, where in The Unsung War, the Wardog/Razgriz squadron rescue Osean President Vincent Harling from the Grey Men, and in The Belkan War, Stier Castle is where Galm Team and Crow Team engage a flight of Belkan bombers armed with nuclear weapons in one mission, while in another mission, Stier Castle is where Galm Team engages and destroys the XB-0 airship.
- The other map is Mount Schirm. In The Unsung War, one mission has Blaze conduct a reconnaissance mission towards a decommissioned Belkan base located near Mount Schirm, and discovers that the Grey Men were collecting tactical nukes that were stored in the Yering Mine, with the very next mission having the Razgriz squadron assault the base to prevent the Grey Men from collecting anymore tactical nukes, and in The Belkan War, Mount Schirm is one of the locations where a large group of Belkan soldiers decide to hold up after they refused to accept Belka’s surrender to the Allied Forces.
- Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown: In the mission "First Contact", the Spare Squadron rescues Strider and Cyclops squadrons from Erusean attackers, with Full Band cryptically saying that they were "investigating the ruins". Said ruins were none other than Stonehenge, which Trigger and the LRSSG defend in the mission "Stonehenge Defensive", which is the exact opposite of the mission "Stonehenge Offensive" in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies.
- Inverted in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War and Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War. The maps of three missions in the former game are reused in the latter game.
- The Rapture depicted in BioShock 1 and BioShock 2 is a damp ruin full of debris and crazy Splicers, unlike the city depicted in the prequel BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea, where Rapture is depicted as a functional settlement full of sane people.
- Chrono Trigger: Due to the game revolving around time travel, this occurs a few times. The Tyrano lair first appears as a dungeon in prehistory, but can be found again in the present during the late game.
- Dark Souls III: In the Ringed City expansion, the Ashen One fights the first boss of the DLC, the Demon in Pain and the Demon from Below and later the Demon Prince in the ruins of Firelink Shrine from the first game in the series.
- Diablo (1997): The game takes place in the somewhat forlorn town of Tristram, a small village well removed from civilization where the largest building in town, the cathedral, has suddenly been overrun with monsters and demons, putting the town's few remaining inhabitants at risk of being overrun. The player character succeeds in venturing into the deepest recesses of the labyrinth beneath Tristram, ultimately taking them to Hell itself for a confrontation with the Lord of Terror himself, the titular Diablo. However, come the first act of the second game, the player is sent to revisit Tristram... except now it is a burning ruin, seemingly destroyed by Diablo in an act of revenge for the town's role in defying him during the first game.
- Dragon Quest III inverts this: the locations you go to, such as the Tower of Rubiss, the town of Damdara and Charlock Castle, are in excellent shape. It's only in Dragon Quest that they are in ruins after centuries of neglect and the recent terrors of the Dragonlord. The HD-2D remakes make the connection more explicit: the Shrine of Rain is in fact the ruins of the Tower of Rubiss, and the Shrine of the Spirit is where the Token of Erdrick (also known as the Charm of Rubiss) is found, half buried in the poisonous swamp that's overtaken the area it used to be in.
- Eternal Darkness is all about this. The player controls characters that revisit locations years later that a previous character visited:
- Dr. Lindsey visits in 1983 the Cambodian temple where the player once controlled slave girl Ella (set in 1,000 AD), now overrun with nature.
- In Roberto Bianchi's (set in 1460) and Michael Edwards's (set in 1991) chapters, the player revisits the West Asian ruins of the City of the Ancients, previously visited by Karim (in the 6th century) and Roman centurion Pious Augustus in 26 BC.
- American journalist Peter Jacob takes shelter in a French Cathedral in 1916, during World War I — the same cathedral that monk Paul Luther visited in 1485 and Anthony, King Charlemagne's squire, died in 814.
- Fable Series: In Fable I, the protagonist's hometown Oakvale is a prominent location throughout the game. By the time of Fable II 600 years later, it's fallen into ruin as the monster-haunted swamp Wraithmarsh due to Reaver sacrificing the town to the Shadow Court. Theresa muses about Oakvale's fall over Mission Control, having lived through it all.
Theresa: ...and now the marsh has engulfed the village, and Oakvale is nothing but a bitter memory.
- Fallout 4: The game begins in the town of Sanctuary Hills on the very day the bombs dropped, showing a bit of the world that was lost to the Great War. After the player leaves Vault 111 in the present day, the nearest location is none other than Sanctuary Hills...the derelict ruins of it, to be specific.
The Sole Survivor: [During the game's ending] The Commonwealth. My home. Ripped apart, and put back together.
- Fez Inverts this, as the player first encounters the ancient ruins of Zu City, before traveling to the past when Zu was in its prime.
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy X: The party visits what is left of Tidus's homeland, Zanarkand, which had been turned into a sacred holy land a thousand years after it was destroyed by Sin as the final stop on Yuna's journey as a summoner.
- Final Fantasy XIV: The Garlean Empire's capital, Garlemald, is seen numerous times in cutscenes throughout the story's expansions as a massive, highly-advanced city beyond the scope of any other in the modern world of Hydaelyn. Its size and grandeur illustrate the wealth and power the Garleans have attained in their conquest of the star. But when it's time for the Eorzeans to fly to Garlemald in Endwalker, it's been reduced to a burnt husk of its former self due to the civil war that broke out following Varis' death. Players can walk around Garlemald's remains and see how its gleaming streets and towering spires have been reduced to rubble. Meanwhile, the Garlean palace, the seat of its power and where Varis plotted his schemes against the Eorzean Alliance is converted into the Tower of Babil, an Eldritch Location composed of a horrific patchwork of machinery and living matter.
- Five Nights at Freddy's:
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach:
- The game takes place in a new location called Freddy Fazbear's Mega Pizzaplex, but one of the endings reveals that the Pizzaplex was built on top of the remains of an old Freddy Fazbear's Pizza location, specifically the one from Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, which was set on fire at the end of that installment.
- In the Ruin DLC, essentially a sequel to the original game, the Mega Pizzaplex has been left abandoned for some time after a supposed earthquake caused too much damage to be repaired by the time Cassie enters it at the start of the game, turning it into the titular ruin that Cassie must navigate.
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted 2: After completing 15 levels, it is revealed that the player has been wearing the virtual reality VANNI Mask from the Security Breach: RUIN DLC the whole time. Once the player takes it off, they are shown to be in the ruined Freddy Fazbear's Pizza underneath the Pizzaplex.
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach:
- Flood Escape 2: The Trope Namer. There are two maps in the game named "Familiar Ruins" and "Beneath the Ruins", where the setting takes place in a destroyed state of Flood Escape Classic's facility, and progresses with the entire facility crumbling down and being flooded with boiling lava.
- Hades II: The final area of the Downward route is Tartarus, which served as the first area of the original game, albeit now modified to bear iconography of Chronos, Titan of Time. This includes the House of Hades itself, which serves as the arena for Chronos's first phase.
- Jak and Daxter: In the first game, the duo begin their journey from Samos' hut. In the following game, they're sent to protect a sacred site from enemies at Dead Town, discovering that it's actually Samos' hut in ruins, realizing they're in the future.
- Kingdom Hearts:
- Kingdom Hearts I: While subtle, End Of The World—a dark realm that's all that remains of worlds destroyed by the Heartless—contains numerous artifacts showing fragments of what they used to be in the Volcanic Crater sub-area, such as the ruined cottage of the Seven Dwarfs, trees from the enchanted forest and Maleficent's thorns from Sleeping Beauty (1959), and a distant silhouette of Beast's castle.
- Kingdom Hearts III: In the last battle against Xehanort, Sora/the player is made to fight underwater in Scala ad Caelum. Under the main castle there is an inverted destroyed castle, which is implied to be the Foretellers' castle from Kingdom Hearts Chi.
- Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-: Played With; Aqua passes by the ruins of the worlds of Cinderella, Snow White and Aurora, which were destroyed by the Heartless off-panel between this game and Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. However, some areas of these three worlds were not available/visitable in Birth By Sleep:
- In Cinderella's world, Castle of Dreams, the town in front of the castle is not visitable, but it's implied that it exists.
- Aqua visits Dwarf Woodlands, entering the Queen's castle patio, her dungeon and the Mirror room, but cannot access the Dwarves' Mines. In 0.2, she revisits sections of the Queen's Castle and the mines.
- The forest part of Aurora's world, Enchanted Dominion, is back to normal at the end of Aqua's visit. In this game, she runs across a version of the world that is entirely covered with thorns (implied to be Maleficent's doing). Maleficent's fortress is also visible at the end of the Forest of Thorns section, but not visitable.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Link obtains the Master Sword from a pedestal in a clearing deep in the Sacred Grove, surrounded by the ruins of an ancient temple. He must revisit the clearing and go through a magic doorway that takes him back in time, revealing that the ruins were once the Temple of Time from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The lobby and pedestal rooms are laid out just the way they were in Ocarina of Time, though now there is an extensive dungeon area past the pedestal room.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Being set 100 years after the Great Calamity, Link could stumble on several Familiar Ruins:
- The biggest example is Hyrule Castle and its nearby town. In many previous games, the castle stood proud and strong and the town was vibrant. In this game, the town is in complete ruins while the castle, though mostly intact, has fallen into disrepair with several broken staircases and walls.
- The Ranch Ruins is based on Lon Lon Ranch, and is implied to be the remains of it.
- Life Is Strange 2: If Max chose to sacrifice Arcadia Bay in the ending of Life is Strange (2015), the ruins of said town can be seen towards the ending of "Roads", when Brody stops for a break while getting Sean and Daniel to safety.
- Lunar uses this to demonstrate the passage of centuries between Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar: Eternal Blue:
- In the first game, the floating city of Vane has a stand-off against a towering mobile fortress called the Grindery, and both structures are grounded by the battle. The second game shows Vane never returned to the sky and instead became a rundown shadow of its former self, while the Grindery became a spire of overgrown mechanical ruins called Taben's Peak.
- The first game's Very Definitely Final Dungeon is Althena's Fortress — a massive ancient spaceship which originally brought people to Lunar. At the end of the game, the entire ship crashes down over the sea and disappears from sight. By the time of the second game, a holy city called Pentagulia has been built on the water's surface above the crash site, including a secret method to access the ruins of the fortress below. And then, right after those ruins are explored, the giant Big Bad Eldritch Abomination descends and pulls the ancient ship out of the sea, still mostly intact... for a few moments, before he swallows the entire structure and crushes it, destroying the storied ruins once and for all.
- Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy: Due to the fall of Al-Revis, the Mana Ruins from the first game have been split into the Deep Ruins and Deep Sea Ruins.
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: In Act 4, Snake returns to Shadow Moses Island, the cutting-edge nuclear weapons disposal facility which was the setting for his and Liquid's first encounter: now abandoned, obsolete, half-buried in the snow, and still bearing the scars from nine years ago.
- Minecraft: In the Legacy Console Editions, the TU69 tutorial world includes an Easter Egg where the preceding TU46 tutorial world's remains can be seen underwater. The revamped Mini Game lobby from TU51 onwards also has a hidden area that leads to a ruined version of the old lobby from TU36.
- Myst V: End of Ages: In two of the endings, you can revisit Myst Island. It has fallen into disrepair due to 200 years' worth of neglect and decay.
- Pikmin 2: Some of the game's areas are the area explored by Olimar during the events of Pikmin changed by the passage of time to the point of being barely recognizable, with barely a couple of familiar spots remaining to prove as such:
- The Awakening Wood are the Forest of Hope, with Olimar openly stating as such in his journal entry for the Geographic Projection before opting to rename it due to how different he found it.
- The Perplexing Pool is The Distant Spring, with a large concrete area having emerged where only small islets and water originally were and a large body of water in its middle having seemingly evaporated.
- The Wistful Wild were born from a combination of the Impact Site and the Final Trial, the very first and last areas of the previous game. The landing site is the arena where the Emperor Bulblax was previously fought, down to the same sideways tire rim surrounding it, whilst the last cave's entrance is located where the first part of the Dolphin was recovered.
- Pokémon:
- Pokémon Gold and Silver:
- In Generation I, Pokémon Red and Blue, the player has to visit Cinnabar Island to acquire the Volcano Badge from Blaine. In Generation II, the player can access Kanto after fighting the Elite Four, and fight Blaine for the Volcano Badge, but not on Cinnabar, since a volcano erupted and reduecd the settlement on the island to just a Pokemon Center. Blaine can instead be found in the nearby Seafoam Islands.
- Inverted with the Power Plant; in Generation I, it was abandoned and wild Pokémon could be found inside. In Generation II, it has been refurbished and manned by humans with no wild Pokémon inside.
- Pokémon Legends: Arceus: Inverted. In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, the climax of the Team Galactic plot plot takes place in Spear Pillar, a ruined temple on Mt Coronet's summit. In this prequel game however, the Sinnoh Temple is intact and players get to see it in its pre-ruins glory before it is destroyed into the ruins of the original game during the climax of the story.
- Pokémon Legends: Z-A: The player goes to the ruins of Lysandre Café and the Lysandre Labs, which were previously visited in Pokémon X and Y, to learn more about Team Flare, why Grisham seeks to battle in the ZA Royale, and AZ's involvement in the creation of the Ultimate Weapon. In the five years since X and Y, the café has become a mess, since no one bought it up due to its associations with a terrorist organisation, whilst the Labs have become derelict and filled with Pokémon.
- Pokémon Pokopia has a Ditto go through a variety of ruined settlements in search of humans. It is eventually revealed that they used to be the formerly intact towns of the Kanto region from Pokémon Red and Blue, humanity having left the planet and leaving them to deteriorate over time. For example, Bleak Beach is the remains of Vermillion City, now a flooded, decaying town.
- Pokémon Gold and Silver:
- Portal 2: In the first chapter, "The Courtesy Call", after Wheatley uses your Relaxation Chamber to perform a "manual override" on a nearby wall (read: smashing through it), you find yourself back in the same Relaxation Vault you started the first game in, and pass through several of the same test chambers — except now they are rusted and falling apart, and plants are growing through holes in the ceiling. At the end you reach the ruins of the Central AI Chamber where you battled GLaDOS in the first game, and after she is accidentally reactivated, she drops you down the shaft you previously used to dispose of her personality cores into the (now largely inactive) incinerator room, from where you climb up to the Victory Candescence Pit into the remains of Test Chamber 19.
- Resident Evil Requiem eventually moves the story back to Raccoon City, thirty years after the events of Resident Evil 2 (Remake) and Resident Evil 3 (Remake), which ended with a thermobaric strike that leveled the NEST Facility and a large part of the city before being sealed up and left to rot. While Leon moves through the parts of the blasted downtown, the trope is fully in effect when he has to revisit the decrepit Raccoon City Police Department, which has most of its floorplan mimic the prior games, save what's inaccessible due to rubble. The end result is a somber tour that lets players see the game's iconic landmarks, like the Goddess Statue, the Library, and S.T.A.R.S office, now reduced to sad shadows of themselves.
- Sailor Moon: Another Story: Both played straight and inverted in the part where the Sailor Guardians go to the past. When you arrive, you can go to the Moon Kingdom and see what it looked like when it was a populated, living city. Later, when you return to the Moon after talking to Queen Beryl at her castle on Earth, you find that all the buildings have been destroyed and ruined when Queen Beryl's forces attacked it. Inverted with two present-day underground ruins in Canada and Nepal that are visited earlier in the story. If you visit those places during the trip to the past, you can see what they looked like as populated towns.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Sonic the Hedgehog (2006):
- Crisis City can be attributed to this, as it is a destroyed version of Soleanna created from a future timeline where Iblis destroyed the city.
- The final level, "End of the World", is a Marathon Level featuring desolate versions of the majority of the previous levels from the game's story that the cast must traverse through to collect the Chaos Emeralds and save Sonic before the world succumbs to Solaris's control.
- Sonic the Hedgehog CD: Traveling to the future of any zone without the Time Stones or destroying the Robot Transporters will greet you with a run-down, metallic version of the zone, with the leftover environment having dark or grey colors and the rest being obscured by mechanical steel and pipes. This can be prevented by collecting the Time Stones or destroying the Robot Transporters in the past.
- Sonic Forces: One of the many locations in the game and the Sonic franchise as a whole, Green Hill Zone, has parts of the environment more washed out and desert-like, and the entire ocean gone, with nothing but the shifting sand taking its place.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (2006):
- Star Wars: The Old Republic: One of the worlds that can be visited is Taris, the very first location from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. In that game, Taris was subjected to planetary bombardment by Darth Malak in an attempt to kill his enemies before they could escape. Several locations from KOTOR can be visited while on Taris, and one quest helps reveal the Downer Ending that befell some NPCs from that game as well.
- Super Metroid: Not long after you land on Zebes, you explore the ruins of Tourian, which you destroyed in the first Metroid game.
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Mushroomy Kingdom stage, satirizing the trends of the time it was released, reimagines World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. 1 as having been long abandoned and completely overtaken by desert.
- Tales of Zestiria: Artorius's Throne, the final dungeon, is the ruined remains of The Empyrean's Throne which appears in its former glory in Tales of Berseria.
- Undertale: The messy room hidden in Papyrus's sink which leads to the encounter with Mad Mew Mew in the Nintendo Switch version are the remains of the Dog Shrine from the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita versions of the game.
- Warcraft III: Maiev pursues Illidan across the sea to some uncharted islands, then realizes she recognizes the place from before the Sundering thousands of years prior (and unbeknownst to her, raised from the seafloor by Gul'dan during the Second War).
Naisha: Mistress, we followed Illidan's course due east as you asked, but these strange islands do not appear on any of our maps.Maiev Shadowsong: I suspected as much. These islands must have been formed only recently.Naisha: What makes you say that?Maiev Shadowsong: The ruins all around us, Naisha... I recognize them. This was once the great city of Suramar, built before our civilization was blasted beneath the sea ten thousand years ago.Naisha: But how could... Are you suggesting that these islands were somehow raised from the seafloor?Maiev Shadowsong: Perhaps, though there are few powers left in the world capable of raising islands from the deeps.
- Zigzagged in Warriors Orochi, where some battlefields resemble ruined locations from Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. This is very much deliberate, as the series revolves around various characters from various games finding themselves trapped in a strange mish-mash world.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: This game's world, Aionios, is a weird mashup of areas from Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and as such features ruined remains of places like Uraya or Morytha from 2, which combined with Makna Forest from 1 to Maktha Wildwood.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories: The first part of the game has the player controlling Prince Atem in ancient Egypt, but after Heishin revolts and takes over, Atem is put into stasis in the Millennium Puzzle, where he's found by Yugi in the modern day. Later in the game, Yugi is able to send him back to his own time. Every sub-area from the first part of the game can be visited after this, but everything in them has been destroyed.
Webcomics
- Darths & Droids: The planet Naboo is a major location in the Episode I adaptation, reappearing in Episode II. In Episode III, the main characters learn that the planet has been attacked again but get distracted hunting rumours of a rogue Jedi; as a consequence, the invasion succeeds and Naboo is smelted for resources, reducing it to a Lethal Lava Land for the final battle.
Web Original
- Neopets: Maraqua was an advanced Underwater City early in the site's life. However, the pirate warlock Captain Dread destroyed it with a magical hurricane in August 2001. The area was inaccessible for years, but in 2004, the storm settled down enough for its Underwater Ruins to be visited in preparation for a coming story arc focused on the survivors.
Western Animation
- Justice League: In "Hereafter", Superman is apparently disintegrated but actually flung into the far future, where he eventually encounters the ruins of Metropolis (including the damaged remains of the memorial that had been raised in his honor) and what's left of the Justice League's watchtower.
- Thundarr the Barbarian: Many episodes show the group encountering the ruins of famous current-day landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty. Princess Ariel always explains the historical significance to Thundarr and Ookla (and by extension the audience).
