Bond Villain Stupidity / Video Games

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Examples A—F

• Generally subverted in the Ace Attorney series, where many of the true culprits in the cases committed murder to prevent word of some other crime they committed from getting out. In fact, given how the playable characters inevitably catch the criminals, one could argue that subverting this trope tends to backfire on them. On the other hand, when the playable characters are forced by the game to do things like be alone with the culprit and show them vital evidence, the culprit's main concern is to destroy the evidence before trying to silence the characters. Given that the evidence is what's needed to put them behind bars (without evidence, it's all but impossible to do anything to them, let alone have them arrested), this makes sense. Not to mention, at least two of those instances are interrupted by the police showing up.
• Assassin's Creed III: Charles Lee refuses to kill you in the New York prison, instead explaining how he'll frame you for their own murder plot of George Washington so you are hanged. Connor escapes. When Connor is captured at Haytham's funeral, Lee again refuses to kill him, claiming he wants to break him first. Connor escapes again, this time forcing Lee to attempt to flee the colonies entirely.
• Baldur's Gate II: Jon Irenicus stands out from the norm by averting this trope; not only does he feel no need to explain his plans to you at any point, he also make good use of sedatives to take you out rather than give you a chance to escape, and he makes sure to have you killed off properly after he no longer need you. Unfortunately (for him, at least) he decided to let his sister Bodhi deal with that. She played the trope straight, and had this interesting maze she wanted to test...
• Banjo-Kazooie: Gruntilda does this in spades. After kidnapping Tooty, by the time Banjo & Kazooie enter her lair, she's already placed Tooty in the beauty-swap machine and already has it prepared to activate. Despite this, she decides to wait until the duo are defeated before going through with it. Even worse is that she blatantly has Banjo & Kazooie progressing on a lava pit and with a one-ton anvil dangling on top of them, where she could've finished them with ease, if she wasn't more focused on running her Pop Quiz.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • In Batman: Arkham Asylum, Joker gets multiple opportunities to cleanly kill a helpless Batman throughout the game, but declines to do so until Batman truly becomes a thorn in his side later in the game. At one point, Joker even goes so far as to demonstrate that he could kill Batman easily by blowing the brakes on the elevator in which he trapped him. He decides it wouldn't be fun.
  • Hugo Strange in Batman: Arkham City. Even though he knows you are the goddamned Batman, he doesn't take the opportunity to kill Bats at the beginning when Bruce was unconscious and shackled. He wakes you up and then dumps you into Arkham City without even bothering to track you. And then he tasks an assassin to kill you, suggesting that he wanted you dead the entire time. It's ultimately subverted once the real plan comes out. Batman finds the assassin's list, and Hugo tasked the assassin with killing Bruce Wayne first, THEN Batman, KNOWING that Bruce would be incognito as Batman. The whole thing was a ploy, to keep both Batman and Deadshot in Arkham City, so he could take out everyone with his aerial strikes.
  • The Antagonist Title Character of Batman: Arkham Knight has multiple chances to kill Batman, even one moment having him point out to his soldiers the weakpoints on his armor. However, Scarecrow wants him alive so he can break him down mentally and emotionally. The Knight even tells him how stupid that plan is.
• Bulletstorm: In the final confrontation, General Sarrano has killed Ishi and has Grayson at his mercy, only for his gun to jam. Instead of simply using his leash to toss Grayson into the exposed rebar nearby, he instead decides to toy with Grayson by hurling him across the room before tossing a barrel at him. Grayson is able to regain his bearings just in time to kick the barrel back and knock Sarrano down, giving him an opening to turn the tables.
• Chrono Trigger: Dalton, upon first meeting your party: "Hm? Those clothes… You must be the ones the prophet said would come to interfere! I think I shall watch for the time being, and see how he plays his hand. Not that I suspect he'll tip his cards so easily. Ha!" This was a mistake and it was bad for everyone, considering what he does between games…
• In Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, Mission 13 has Arkham detailing his plan in manipulating the twins and his daughter into spilling their blood to undo the seal. He undid the final part of the seal by stabbing Lady with her bayonet through the leg, but it was just as easy to stab her somewhere vital and kill her, which would have prevented her from getting up and turning her weapon on him. ... It also would have stopped her from killing him at the end, too.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: Isbeil knocks out the entire Player Party with one spell in a moment of Cutscene Power to the Max. Rather than finish them off like her faction has been trying to do, she puts them in a pit, waits for them to wake up, and then starts testing painful but survivable poisons on them. She even lampshades that she didn't want to waste the opportunity, though she changes her tune when they recover enough to attack.
• Happens repeatedly in the Dragon Age series:
  • In Origins one and possibly both of the last two Grey Wardens are captured by Loghain and represent one of the greatest threats to his plans. Rather than simply having you executed on the spot, he has you thrown in a cell (admittedly in the middle of a fortress) with a single inept guard and all your equipment just a few feet away. If the player character doesn't choose to wait for rescue by their companions, they can escape in about five minutes without much trouble.
  • In the Mark of the Assassin DLC for Dragon Age II, the player character and Tallis get cornered by the villain Duke Prosper and a hefty number of his guards. He gloats a bit, reveals that Tallis is a Qunari, and then has Hawke and Tallis locked up in a cell. Why he didn't just have them killed then and there is a mystery. Perhaps he didn't want to ruin the carpet.
  • The Greater-Scope Villain of Dragon Age: Inquisition, Solas, a.k.a. the Dread Wolf Fen'Harel, proves to have a case of this in the Trespasser DLC epilogue, as he always saves the Inquisitor's life just as the Anchor is about to kill them. While this is justified if the Inquisitor is best of buds with or even in a romantic relationship with him, there is really no excuse for saving the one person in Thedas capable of stopping him if they are none of those things and outright threaten to kill him if left alive.
• Dragon Quest V: Ladja has the opportunity to easily kill the hero twice, and later the hero's wife along with him, the first while he's a child and doesn't know he's a threat yet, and the second when he turns the hero and his wife to stone and knows all too well, but in both cases decides to make a quick buck off the hero instead.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: In Chapter 2, Sho captures Akira and brings them to President Zazz, but the two decide to put on a game show where participants get a prize for killing them, all while Akira still has their equipment. Additionally, this gives the party an opening to hijack the broadcast to make their case to the public and turn them against Zetacorp.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  • Mostly averted with the Empire (though they are not technically "evil"). The Imperial Legion captured the rebel leader Ulfric Stormcloak and instead of taking him back to the capital and staging an elaborate trial, they immediately take him and the other captives to the next garrison where they are led to the chopping block right after getting of the cart. But even that turned out to be too much of a delay, as a dragon attacks and the prisoners escape in the chaos after just one of them had been beheaded.
  • Said dragon also averts this trope in this specific scene in that he actually is Alduin, the World Eater, and the reason of his attack was that he was looking for the Dragonborn so he could kill him before he unlocked his powers and became a threat- you read right: the game's Final Boss actually comes to try and kill you while you still are level 1, and you only escape alive because it takes him time to find you among all these puny mortals. He does, however, play this trope straight later in the game, where he will just leave a recently raised dragon deal with you whenever you encounter him before the boss fight.
  • Another example would be the various mad scientist-cum-mages who feel the need to have you fight a pet monster of theirs rather than kill you outright. Predictably, it always fails.
  • Harkon, the main antagonist of the Dawnguard expansion, makes a terrible mistake in choosing to spare the Dragonborn out of one-off gratitude if the latter refuses his offer to become a Vampire Lord; let's just leave it at that.
• Parodied in the computer game Evil Genius. The most formidable members of the Forces of Justice, called Super Agents and based on action movie protagonist archetypes who'd usually be put into such traps, cannot be killed by normal means. When they run out of health, they simply fall unconscious for a few minutes. They can only be defeated by exploiting a specific weakness. So until you figure out what their particular weakness is, your options are limited to locking them up and torturing them regularly to keep their stats down.
  • Funnily enough, the last super agent, a Expy of Bond, has no weaknesses. The only way to kill him is to end the game with him in custody, where he’ll be blasted off into space with a rocket.
• Far Cry:
  • Vaas from Far Cry 3 suffers from this trope badly, succumbing to it at least four times while trying to get rid of Jason Brody. First time he gives Jason a thirty-second head-start and Jason escapes. Second time Vaas gets the drop on Jason, but leaves him to die in a burning building and Jason escapes. Third time Vaas jumps Jason again, and ties him to a concrete block and throws him a pool which Jason escapes from. During this capture Vaas lectures Jason on his beliefs about insanity^note "Insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again expecting shit to change. That. Is. Crazy.", which may indicate Vaas is aware that what he is doing is just not working but is unable to stop himself. The fourth time Vaas walks up to Jason after a crash and shoots him in the chest, but buries him in a shallow grave without checking to see if he is really dead, missing the lighter that blocked his bullet. During the fifth and final confrontation between Jason and Vaas, Vaas gets the drop on Jason again and stabs him through the chest with a large knife, but something happens, the knife starts glowing yellow, and their last fight talks place in an alternate dimension filled with television monitors. Jason wins, and when he wakes up Vaas is gone and everyone says he's dead.
  • In Far Cry 5, upon reaching certain points in the game the player character will end up captured by a member of the Seed siblings. During these points rather than simply execute you they'll just give you Motive Rants while you're under their mercy. This gets averted at the end where everything is taken from the player and they are forcefully brainwashed, and we see the results in the following game.
• Set up and then defied In Final Fantasy X, the three party members who can breathe underwater indefinitely are sentenced to death by drowning in a long but open-ended underwater canal. The other party members have to walk through a monster-infested maze instead. The reason they were placed there at all and not just executed is because of religious tradition. It's called "The Path of Repentance" for a reason. However, it's revealed that the bad guys are actually aware that this isn't a good way killing the heroes and place guards at the exit.
• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade has two examples from two different villains:
  • Lord Lundgren's entire plan is to kill his brother, the Marquess of Pherae, and take his throne. He opts for the slow, subtle route of poisoning the marquess' food, which seems smart enough - at first. But even after the marquess has survived months of poisoning, even after seemingly everyone in Pherae - including the marquess himself - has realised what Lundgren is up to, even when the legitimate heir to the throne is at the castle gates, Lundgren sticks with poison instead of just walking up to his helpless, bed-ridden brother and smothering him with a pillow. The marquess survives. Lundgren does not.
  • Ephidel very much downplays this when he kills Lord Helman to stop him from talking. Instead of finishing Helman off, he just leaves him to die, and Helman survives long enough to warn Eliwood about Darin and the Black Fang. Darin is understandably furious when he realises this.

Examples G—L

• Gaia Online: Labtech 123 in zOMG kindly takes the time to explain most of the Big Bad's plan to you, as well as how to override the security system, while he waits for reinforcements.
• Gloriously averted in Grim Fandango.
  Manny: Is this where you tell me all about your secret plan, Hector? How you stole Double N tickets from innocent souls, pretended to sell them but secretly hoarded them all to yourself in a desperate attempt to get out of the Land of the Dead?
  Hector: No. [shoots him] This is where you writhe around in excruciating pain for about an hour because that idiot Bowsley ran off with the fast-acting sproutella. That slow stuff will sprout you, but it's going to take a long time, I'm sorry to say.
• In Half-Life, a pair of soldiers capture Gordon Freeman and, rather than shoot him, toss him in a trash compactor and leave without confirming his death; they were under orders to bring him to their commander, but wanted to kill him for killing their comrades and do it such that his body would be unrecoverable. Gordon ends up waking up just before the compactor starts up and escapes via conveniently stacked-up garbage.
  • Originally, a mission in the expansion pack Half-Life: Decay was supposed to explain this: the soldiers wanted to shoot him in the head and then throw his body in the garbage, but Gina and Colette end up intervening and killing the soldiers, but are not able to stop Gordon from dropping in the compactor. However, the mission was cut from the final release.
  • Black Mesa gives its own explanation as to how Gordon escapes being killed by these soldiers: they tossed him in the trash compactor with the intention of staying and watching him get crushed to death, but were attacked by Headcrabs some time before Gordon's awakening. Their remains can be found in the control room above once you climb out of the compactor.
• Halo 4: The Ur-Didact, newly released Sealed Evil in a Can, is a Nigh Invulnerable Sufficiently Advanced Alien with powers of levitation, teleportation, and telekinesis. Does he use these powers to quickly kill Master Chief and then resume his evil plan? Nope. Instead he just renders Chief helpless during his lengthy monologues then tosses him away, giving the Chief another chance to stop the villain. Only at the end of the game does it occur to the Didact to teleport to the Chief and kill him himself, and even then he wastes time by suspending him over a chasm and then choking him instead of just dropping him immediately. Then he takes his sweet time yet again even after you've been freed and shoved a grenade in his chest. The guy simply does not learn, does he?
• In Hitman 3 The Starscream of the Ancient Conspiracy, Don Archibald Yates, plots to have his co-conspirators Tamara Vidal and Fake Defector Diana Burnwood executed so he can rise through the ranks. The former he simply has shot immediately, but for the latter he makes a big show of marching her to his room so he can kill her personally, buying 47 enough time to get the drop on him. And when they actually do arrive, he decides to do some Evil Gloating to boot.
• In Horizon Zero Dawn, the minor antagonist, Helis, failed to kill the protagonist, Aloy, three times. Despite being a strong man, it seems that Helis was not willing to kill Aloy by himself because he didn't make sure that Aloy had been killed after he defeated Rost in the proving, and captured Aloy alive in Project Zero Dawn facility, saying, 'Still alive...Good.' In the final battle, when Helis finally tried to finish off Aloy by himself, Aloy defeated him and soon executed him. It was said that Helis had a crush on Aloy but there weren't enough proofs.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV, Giliath Osborne, the Evil Chancellor of the Trails Series has the heroes on the ropes at least twice and yet on both occasions, he lets them go. Prior to IV, he's shown to be a pragmatic villain who actually ends up geting what he wants at the end of II (winning the Civil War and crushing the Noble Alliance) and III (have someone kill the corrupted Divine Beast of Earth and spread the curse of Erebonia all over the world) but then he pulls off questionable moves where he just lets go of the heroes. He is doing this on purpose as his true goal is to get rid of the curse of Erebonia from the face of Zemuria for good.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Justified in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past... possibly. The maidens are a major threat to Agahnim's plans, since they are the only ones capable of sealing Ganon or countering his evil magic. This obviously raises the question of why Agahnim only teleports the maidens to the Dark World instead of killing them. The first maiden explains that this is because they are also the only ones who can unseal Ganon, so he has to hijack their powers to free himself from the Dark World. However, one of the maidens implies that Ganon already siphoned all the power he needed from them, which does raise the question of why he's still keeping them around.
  • Zigzagged in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Though Zant was smart enough to take the Fused Shadows from Midna and Link, he merely curses Link to stay as a wolf permanently rather than killing him outright. When he meets them again at Arbiter's Grounds and sees that Link is still alive, he shatters the Mirror of Twilight and scatters its pieces across Hyrule. But he doesn't actively stop them from reclaiming them, however. Before that, he animates Stallord to kill Link, and then promptly leaves without even bothering to make sure that Stallord actually beat him.
  • Throughout The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Ghirahim constantly screws around and toys with Link in each of their confrontations, which allows Link to repeatedly interfere with his plans. By their final showdown, Ghirahim is well aware of this, and outright kicks himself for not just killing Link when he had the chance:
    Ghirahim: If only I'd put you in your place from the very beginning!
  • Hyrule Warriors: Ganondorf manages to steal the Triforce pieces from the heroes, but does not bother to kill them. This is what allows the Hyrulean forces to strike back.

Examples M—R

• Max Payne 3:
  • Neves does it twice in the same act. First, while Max is holding the detonator to begin demolishing the building both are standing on, he can't resist boasting about all the powerful people he's connected to; Max proceeds to execute the demolition sequence after telling him "Well your powerful people won't help you out of this one, buddy!" Finally, the second time, Neves has the upper hand with a Hand Cannon and Max disarmed, but he just stands there gloating long enough for Raul Passos to jump him with a Boom, Headshot! and save Max from the crumbling building with a chopper rescue.
  • Inverted where Max has Becker at his mercy and slowly strangles him rather than just give him a 9mm headache. This gives Victor Branco time to show up. Max does it again immediately by holding off on disarming the newcomer until the first villain is recovered enough to stun him, allowing both villains to escape. Somewhat justified in that Max is extremely angry and a simple kill shot is too good for Becker, and he's honestly a little surprised at the appearance of Victor, and it takes him some time to process that before he makes his move.
• Mass Effect 3: In the Citadel DLC, the Mysterious Figure disposes of you and your squad by locking them in inescapable storage chambers in the Council archives with about an hour's worth of air. Granted, it would have worked if the Figure hadn't forgotten about Glyph, and direct applied violence had failed several times before in that DLC, but it's still not a particularly smart move. Shepard him/herself notes that a bullet would have been quicker and far more reliable. Actually somewhat justified due to the aforementioned failure of direct applied violence - when Shepherd and their squad get locked up, they're trapped by essentially impassible barriers that prevent them from simply being shot, but also keep them from casually mowing down everything in their way as they have done thus far.
• Lampshaded in Metro 2033 by Ulman after they save Artyon from being executed by Nazis because the executors stood there talking instead of just shooting him.

Ulman: That's what I like about the bad guys. There's always a lot of discussion before they get around to pulling the trigger.

• Metal Gear:
  • In the original Metal Gear Solid this actually is all part of the villains' plans. Because the DARPA chief was "accidentally" killed by Ocelot, the terrorist didn't have the second part of the code to activate Metal Gear, so they needed Snake to progress through his mission and use an alternate means of activating Metal Gear (by making him think they'd already activated it, and that inputting the code would disable it). So locking Snake in a cell patrolled by an inept guard was all part of the plan.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Colonel Volgin's torture of the protagonist results in him not only giving his interrogatee a ton of information about his motives that he didn't know, but unwittingly revealing this information to three other people who are all secretly plotting against him.
• Played straight for most of the Monkey Island series, with LeChuck dreaming up more ludicrous ways of dealing with Guybrush.
  • In Escape from Monkey Island. LeChuck points out to his villainous cohort that leaving Guybrush alive has always cost him in the past... then they do it anyway. By dumping him on an "inescapable" island that he's escaped from several times.
  • In Tales of Monkey Island, however, it gets subverted twice. When LeChuck reveals he was the Fake Defector, he kill Guybrush by simply skewering him with a sword. When Guybrush returns in zombie form, LeChuck goes for a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to try and kill him. When Guybrush asks why LeChuck isn't going for his usual overcomplicated plan, LeChuck informs him he's learned from his mistakes.
  • But he's back to form in Return to Monkey Island, where he keeps suggesting that his crew kill Guybrush before second-guessing himself. At one point, he tries to deal with Guybrush by tossing him overboard and sailing off - apparently forgetting that Guybrush is famously able to hold his breath for a very long time. Eventually...
  LeChuck: Damn you, Threepwood! I should have gotten rid of you the first fifty-eight times I had the chance.
• In Scorpion's chapter of Mortal Kombat X, after Shinnok is freed from his amulet, he has several former enemies completely at his mercy, but while he orders D'Vorah to take Johnny Cage hostage (as he sees him as a potential threat) he just leaves Sonya, Kenshi, and Scorpion behind, letting them live for no discernible reason. This allows Sonya to inform the younger Earthrealm warriors of Shinnok's plan to absorb the Jinsei which leads to his defeat
• In Princess Peach: Showtime!, Grape attacks the Sparkle Theater, captures all of its Sparklas, traps the Theets in plays her minions are distorting and/or sabotaging, and locks everyone else out... and yet even when Peach starts fixing things, she never tries to eliminate her. It's when she tells Light Fang that she wants to "review their performance" that hints at what her true game is - she wants to create the "most decadent tragedy", and is letting Peach go about her business uncontested in order to build up to what Grape believes is her inevitable fall. The reason everything falls apart is because she has no idea who Peach really is, but almost nobody in the Sparkle Theater knew about her, either; to them, she was just another patron. And while Grape did indeed get the tragedy she craved, the heightened fall from grace it brought about happened to be her own.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil 4:
    • This happens when the village chief nearly strangles Leon to death but lets him go when he sees he's been injected with a Plagas egg, knowing that he'll eventually succumb to the parasite's control. He later admits in a memo that he gravely underestimated Leon's capabilities and that at the rate he's going, he'll probably destroy the whole village before the Plagas takes over.
    • In Ada Wong's campaign, Ada gets knocked out by a Tranquillizer Dart. Instead of killing her immediately, the villains put her in a conveniently slow death trap. Naturally, Ada wakes up just in time to escape from it.
  • Resident Evil 5 shows this in Wesker, who apparently toys with Chris rather than kill him outright. Various cutscenes also depict him grandstanding and effortlessly smacking Chris around, but never bothering to, say, pull out a knife and stab him. One boss fight against him even ends with him simply scoffing and strolling out of the room. Though the general long-term goal is for Chris to end up dead at some point, he doesn't seem to care if Chris is surviving at any given moment and mostly just relishes in tormenting him. Up until the fight in the bomber, where he finally cuts the crap and starts putting much a more serious effort into killing Chris. A single mistake from that point on is practically guaranteed to be fatal to the player. Once his plans are in ruin, he finally realizes he shouldn't have dicked around so much:
    Wesker: I should have killed you years ago... Chris!
    Chris: Your mistake! It's over, Wesker!

Examples S—Z

• Saints Row IV: The Big Bad Zinyak does this to the Boss. Even though the Boss has shown how dangerous he can be to Zinyak's forces, and Zinyak has shown he can easily defeat the Boss in one-to-one combat. He decides that it's better to "break" the boss through a simulation. Considering the Boss's and the other Saint's fierce determination, you can see where this is going. Doesn't stop Zinyak from making the struggle as difficult as possible though.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Doctor Eggman's specialty. Constantly hatching up crazy world domination schemes and brilliant inventions, he tries to kill Sonic time and time again to the point that his Villain Song in Sonic Adventure 2 has him declaring his yearning of victory over the blue hedgehog. And in many cases, he does trap the blue blur or get the perfect opportunity. Except time and time again, his inventions have a glaring weakpoint, his Evil Gloating leaves himself wide open for retaliation, there's a significant issue that Sonic can take perfect advantage of, or he flatout spares Sonic in his few moments of victory which bites him in the ass rather quickly every time.
  • In the 8-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Eggman actually rescues Sonic from falling to his death — in order to try killing him his preferred way, in a Sarlacc pit. Justified in that, at this point, Sonic was supposed to have one of the Chaos Emeralds on his person, so letting him fall into a pit of lava would definitely put a bit of a wrinkle in Robotnik's plans. Said Sarlacc pit is also one of the hardest boss fights in the entire franchise.
  • In Sonic Adventure, Eggman ambushes Sonic and Tails as they leave Casinopolis. He sprays them with Knockout Gas instead of deadly poison gas, steals one of the two Chaos Emeralds they're carrying, then just leaves them there to wake up instead of finishing them off. Arguably justified in that he spends most of the game using the heroes as a MacGuffin Delivery Service.
  • A glaring case would be the beginning of Sonic Unleashed. Eggman lures Sonic (in his Super Mode) into a trap, and uses the chaos energy to split the Earth apart in his efforts to unleash Dark Gaia. With Sonic now in his werehog form and weakened at his feet, Eggman's response is to.. drop Sonic out of an airlock along with all the depowered Chaos Emeralds. Sonic survives the fall with no issue (which Eggman entirely expected but didn't care for), while the Chaos Emeralds that avert the infamous Bag of Spilling serve to let Sonic both put the world back together and simultaneously regain his Super form for the Final Boss. Orbot, one of Eggman's personal robots, points out this major oversight, to which Eggman attempts to (poorly) proclaim it was for the sake of a challenge.
  • Zavok of the Deadly Six in Sonic Lost World. Instead of personally supervising the roboticization of Tails, he and Zomom just leave him all alone in the lab. Being The Smart Guy he is, Tails successfully modifies the machine he's bound to his own advantage.
  • Sonic Forces has two instances:
    • The villains finally have Sonic in their clutches, but instead of killing him, they instead choose to imprison him aboard the Death Egg for six months, which allows Sonic to eventually break out and stop them. Zavok mentions that Eggman wanted to show Sonic his completed empire before jettisoning him out into space. (In other words, they wanted to rub Sonic's failure in his face, then kill him.)
    • Infinite gets a moment of this after his first boss battle. After defeating Sonic, Infinite arrogantly deems him Not Worth Killing and leaves. Eggman later chews him out for doing so, correctly predicting that Sonic will continue to be a threat to their operations as long as he's still alive.
• Spyro: Attack of the Rhynocs: Ripto has the Professor completely at his mercy for the entire game, yet does nothing aside from hanging him over a lava pit. He doesn't try to kill the Professor until Spyro's got him backed into a corner.
• Star Wars:
  • Occurs in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords when the party is trapped in force cages and a bounty hunter sneaks in to kill you. Even though he could overload the cages to kill you all effortlessly, which your teammate actually suggests, he turns the cages off so he can try to defeat two Jedi and one scoundrel in a three-to-one hand-to-hand combat. Although the dialogue and voice-acting does seem to suggest that this was the bounty hunter's original plan, and Atton's goading bruises the guy's ego enough to change his plans. (Which is still pretty stupid.)
  • Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast: Despite absolutely brutalizing Kyle Katarn in their first duel, Desann leaves him alive for being Not Worth Killing and even goes the extra mile of pointlessly antagonizing Katarn by pretending to kill his girlfriend Jan, which naturally prompts Katarn to power himself up at the Valley of the Jedi and go hunting for revenge. Which was Desann's plan all along. He's not stupid, he wanted Katarn to return to the Valley of the Jedi so he could follow him there and take control of the Valley, intending to use it to not only supercharge his own (already very impressive) Force abilities, but also empower his army into Force-wielding super soldiers that can overwhelm the Republic.
• Tomb Raider:
  • When Lara obtains all pieces of the Scion in Tomb Raider I, she is ambushed by Natla's goons and all her guns are taken. After Natla takes the Scion for herself, she orders her men to kill Lara. Lara quickly breaks free from one of the henchman's grip and they just stare at her as she runs and jumps into a river below the cliffside. It's only then that one of the mooks bothers to shoot at her. Natla rightfully calls them morons. The remake rectifies this by having the henchmen quickly attempt to kill her, though Lara escapes anyway.
  • In Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara is captured by Trinity soldiers, who proceed to lock her in an ancient crumbling prison and leave her there without posting any guards. As if that wasn't dumb enough, they also leave her equipment right outside her cell (along with a set of jail keys), which ultimately results in one of the quickest jail cell escapes in video game history.
• This trope is such an essential element of Touhou Project, with horrifically powerful beings fighting the player character with slow moving, colourful bullets instead of wiping her from existence, that ZUN created intricate justifications for as part of the backstory to Gensoukyou. Not only would killing Reimu do Very Bad Things to Gensoukyou (though the other main Player Character Marisa has no such protection), not only were the Spell Card rules implemented specifically to prevent that sort of destructive violence (though we don't know if there are any punishments for breaking them), but its denizens are mostly very old, very bored individuals that view fighting as an excellent hobby, and killing their opponent would prevent future encounters.
• Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark: Rather than doing something about the outraged Autobot leader in front of him, Lockdown chose to monologue about the greatness of his evil plan.
• Double Subverted in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: Near the end of the game, Lazarevic has Drake and Elena held hostage. Lazarevic's right-hand man Harry Flynn suggests shooting them immediately, but Lazarevic wants to wait until the gates to the lost city of Shambhala are opened just to drive the fact in that he beat Drake. As soon as they're opened, he immediately has his men prepare to open fire on them, looking like waiting didn't really matter and he's actually subverting this trope - only for Shambhala's guardians to start attacking everyone, giving Drake and Elena a chance to escape.
• In World of Warcraft, Lord Walden in the Shadowfang Keep dungeon uses a spell called Asphyxiate that will reduce the entire party's HP to one, but because he's an arrogant hunter he decides to "make it a bit sporting" by casting a spell called Stay of Execution that heals both him and your group (in normal, it's a burst that heals him a little but heals your party to full, in heroic it's a channeled spell that you interrupt when you think your healer can take it from there).
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! BAM, Marik lampshades and averts this, freely admitting to his role in hijacking the B-Sec Hologuards... and then he tries to kill you, pointing out that he wouldn't let you just walk away after telling you his secrets.

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