Shared Life-Meter

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Whenever a video game has a boss fight against multiple characters, the game can either have each boss with their own life meter, or it can have all the characters sharing a single life meter, with every enemy, regardless of how much they've been personally damaged, inexplicably keeling over once it's been emptied. In some games, the game will balance out the fact that the player can control more than one character by having them share a life bar.

An alternative to this is when multiple enemies technically have their own life meter, but for the sake of avoiding Multiple Life Bars they've all been combined into one giant life meter, and emptying it involves defeating any individual enemy (or it might involve one giant enemy with multiple destructible parts that have to be taken out.)

Often overlaps with Dual Boss and Wolf Pack Boss. Sub-Trope of Status Line (a display element showing the current disposition of the player, e.g. score, health, ammo, etc), Synchronization, and Shared Life Energy.

Examples of characters all getting their health from the same life bar:

Examples of this trope being used as an alternative to Multiple Life Bars.

• Abobo's Big Adventure features this when Kirby absorbs Krang and commandeers his giant robot suit. The player then has to attack and destroy the robot suit's head and right arm, along with beating Kirby himself, all of which share a life meter.
• The second boss of the Game Boy version of Battletoads has a first form with one life bar, but requiring the player to destroy multiple turrets on it before moving on to the second form.
• As of the Soulstorm expansion, the total health of squads in Dawn of War is visible (the earlier games only showed it when the squad was down to a single unit), though individual unit's lifebars are still visible.
• The fight with the twins in Dead Rising 2 works this way. Both bosses fight you at the same time and have individual health bars, but killing one of them causes the other to commit suicide.
• The second phase of the Hell Guard boss battle in Doom (2016) has the health bar displaying the health total of both Hell Guards. This can get a bit confusing in telling when it's Glory Kill time for one of them.
• Both the stage 2 boss and the Final Boss of Gamera 2000 are giant ships with a single health bar, but require the player to destroy various subsystems and basically tear them both apart piece by piece to defeat them.
• The stage 4 boss of Joe & Mac is a quartet of ichthyosaurs with the same life bar, with the player having to beat all of them to win.
• Kirby
  • The Meta-Knights in Kirby's Adventure are a boss fight consisting of a large group of Mooks, using the life meter to gauge Kirby's progress as he defeats them. Several sections of Kirby Super Star also do the same thing with the same group of enemies as well.
  • The Mid-Boss All Stars battles in The Arena in Kirby Super Star have all mid-bosses present share a health bar. After one mid-boss goes down, the next one spawns. Rinse and repeat until the health bar hits zero.
  • Battles against two mid-bosses at the same time or against twin mid-bosses starting with Kirby's Return to Dream Land have both mid-bosses share a visual health bar. After dealing enough damage to one, they remain knocked out until the other mid-boss is defeated.
  • Kirby Fighters Deluxe: The 21/29/44/61 Mini Dededes as part of the Team DDD fight all share one bar of health, even if all of them happen to go down in one or two hits. More Mini Dededes enter the battle as more of them get knocked out. Likewise, the battle against both Combo Dededes and King Dedede also has them share a visual health bar.
  • Both Pon & Con and Goldon & Silvox in Kirby Star Allies visually share the same health bar during their battles; however, dealing enough damage to one of the two knocks them out with no harm done to the other.
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: All monsters have their individual lifebars, but some monster strongholds or combat shrines also display a shared lifebar at the top of the screen.
• Mega Man
  • The first Mega Man 1 game has CWU-01P, a series of robots encased in bubbles.
  • Mega Man 2 has the Boobeam Trap and Picopico-kun in Wily's Castle, the former being a series of turrets on the walls that all have to be destroyed, the latter featuring wall panels that combine into flying robots.
  • Mega Man 4 has the Cockroach Twins, two robots fought one after the other.
  • Mega Man X1 has Rangda Bangda (which also reappears in X5), a giant robotic face that's defeated by destroying both its eyes and its floating robotic "nose".
  • The fight with the Gesellschaft in Mega Man Legends. The ship itself has one life meter, but it's depleted by destroying various weakpoints on the ship.
  • In Mega Man ZX Advent, Argoyle and Ugoyle, when fought, initially appear to have a single health bar. However, when you activate Model H and use it to Enemy Scan them, you'll see that each of them has their own health bar.
• Muramasa: The Demon Blade is...complicated about this. Bosses have two health bars, one large one and one small one (that keeps feeding the large bar whenever it's depleted while slowly depleting itself in the process.) Whenever multiple bosses are fought at once, they have separate large bars, but they all get health from the same small bar (although the small bar is then split up into separate bars, one for each boss, denoting their own portions of the health meter.)
• Muramasa'a predecessor, Odin Sphere, keeps it simpler and just sticks with the single health bar divided into chunks for each character/destroyable section.
• The Supernaut from Rework the Dead: Evil is a partial example, requiring the player to reduce it's health bar by shooting off it's scales one by one. However, the player doesn't need to remove them all to defeat it.
• The first two games in the Serious Sam series will occasionally lock Sam in an arena and hurl massive amounts of enemies that have to be killed, using a boss life meter to gauge the player's progress.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV and Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse have "Horde"-type enemy encounters, which appear as a huge mob of enemies. All of these enemies are counted as one target (except when using all-targeting attacks, which will hit the horde three times), and as you wear down the Horde's HP, the enemies decrease in number.
• Yggdra Union provides a strange example: while no actual life bars are shown (as units only lose morale when battles are over) it can become clear, through testing with Save Scumming or save states on an emulator, that every single unit in a squad has a small life bar that constantly gets depleted during battle, and that its leader always has a bigger one. Yet, certain skills treat a squad's life as a single entity. So you can use Revolution (which claims to only halve your current enemy's numbers) at the start of a battle to reduce their number from 6 to 3, or use it when only the leader is standing to make him fall faster.
• In World in Conflict, an infantry unit has a single life bar, but the health of each individual soldier is tracked separately. This is clearly demonstrated by 100% accurate attacks with no splash damage only killing one soldier at a time (such as a sniper or a heavy tank's HEAT shells). Medics can heal only living infantry, and replacements can be airdropped in to replace casualties.
• In Zexion, the enemy health meter for boss encounters tracks all boss characters or damageable parts.

Examples of both types at once:

• The Last Remnant has this for the squads you build to fight enemies. An especially lucky enemy roll could leave five characters badly injured but alive... ,sharing all of one HP. Conversely, some enemy attacks can KO individuals without doing much damage, couple that with healing spells not automatically reviving fallen units and you can end up with a single wakeful character while the other four are KO'd.
• Touhou Project would have one lifebar for bosses involving multiple enemies before Yousei Daisensou ~ Touhou Sangetsusei, which made each have an individual one. However, the actual mechanics are very inconsistent:
  • The very first such fight, Mai and Yuki from Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square, is actually a subversion, as despite sharing a lifebar, you just need to defeat one of them to continue the fight, which leads to a not-quite-empty lifebar when that happens.
  • Averted with Four of a Kind in Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil; defeating the clones simply makes the pattern easier.
  • Prismriver Sisters in Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom all share the same lifebar, although which one you shoot during first Spell Card influences who shows up for the next two patterns. Somewhat similarly, Yuyuko's giant fan serves as extension of her, partially transferring damage to her. There's also the Extra and Phantasm Stage bosses, which summon their underlings as part of their eight Spell Card, but they cannot actually be harmed.
  • Similarly to Yuyuko above, attacking boss's familiars in Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night damages the boss ever so slowly.
  • The final boss of Great Fairy Wars (i.e. Yousei Daisensou) pits you against all three Fairies at once for most of the fight. However, you only need to shoot down the leading fairy; attacking the other two simply makes them leave and make the pattern simpler.
  • Seiga Kaku summons her underling, Yoshika Miyako (the previous stage boss) to help her in Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires. However, defeating Yoshika usually only distracts Seiga for a while as she revives Yoshika. Miko does the same during her fight for a specific Spell Card, but they can't be hurt and exist to make shooting Miko down harder (since she herself does nothing for that pattern).
  • Zig-Zagged in Extra Stage of Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character; while you fight both Tsukumo sisters at once in Extra Stage, you have to shoot down both only for their first pattern, with the remaining two being defeated when either has their health depleted..
  • The final Spell Card in Extra Stage of Touhou Kanjuden ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom puts you against both Junko and Hecatia; however, only one has to be defeated to clear the fight (and is in fact recommended, as only whoever gets attacked intensifies the attack, as per Extra's final attack standards).
  • Several patterns of Mai Teireida and Satono Nishida in their fights in Touhou Tenkuushou ~ Hidden Star in Four Seasons put you against both of them, but you are required to shoot down only one of them (with the defeated one using their Spell Card in solo endeavor, similarly to Prismriver Sisters).