Restraining Bolts in Video Games.
- The eponymous Astral Chain acts as this for Neuron, serving as binding chains for captured chimeras and turn them into Legions, enabling them to use them to fight chimeras. After being assigned their own Legion, the Player Character and the team moves into action, and due to circumstances, the team gets thrown into the Astral Plane, their Legatuses malfunction, disabling the chains, and their Legions break free until the Player Character recaptures his. While the Player Character manages to hold his own for a while, the rest of the team doesn't, and Max, the Player Character and his/her twin's adoptive father and Captain, orders them to escape while he holds back the escaped Legions. Knowing the danger of staying in the Astral Plane on top of fighting off chimeras, the twins refuse and had to be carried and forced to escape. Later in the story, upon returning to the Astral Plane, the Axe Legion, Max's former Legion, is encountered. While it may not be a surprise, as all Legions has been recaptured at this point in time, Max's Legatus is shown to be attached to it, showing that Max never stopped attempting to recapture it.
- As you go through Avernum 5, you have the option to receive a geas from a certain wizard. This geas give your stats a generous bonus but compels you to go treasure hunting on behalf of said wizard, with unpleasant ramifications later in the game if you don't have it removed.
- Baldur's Gate II:
- If you are traveling with a particular Non-Player Character in your party, the Elven community will be less than impressed by their presence and insists that they undergo a Geas of Obedience before allowing them to help the Player Character as they quest for an Elven artifact. The NPC in question doesn't find it particularly amusing, as (depending on your relationship with them at this point) the Player Character is allowed to mock and abuse them completely without retaliation!
- Meanwhile, another character is given a Geas by the Big Bad which will grant him a painful death if he ever disobeys. If he's still in the party after a certain point of the game, he will instantly betray the player against his own will. Even if he isn't currently in the party, he will become unavailable after that point via the geas activating and killing him anyway.
- In the expansion pack Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, Sarevok will allow — and even suggests it to begin with — you to place a Geas on him, so you can take him along on your quest without worrying about betrayal. Refusing to do so and instead trusting in his better nature is the first step towards redeeming him.
- Aurox from Battleborn is outfitted with a restraining bolt in the form of a phase beacon, a device that keeps "all of [his] atoms and junk in one piece." And it's currently in Shayne's possession, which is helpful since it's the only thing keeping him from making good on his threat to "paint SEVERAL MURALS with [her] BLOOD!" Granted, she doesn't exactly know how it works, but she still uses the threat that he doesn't want her screwing around with it for fear of accidentally damaging it- and him in the process- to keep him in line, much to his dismay.
- BioShock:
- In the first BioShock, this is somewhat used on the Player Character Jack, as you are forced to fulfill any request so long as the phrase "Would you kindly" is used directly beforehand. It gets broken later on.
- In BioShock Infinite, the Bad Future version of Elizabeth is fitted with one of these which causes her pain whenever she tries to use her powers, with the intent being to make her compliant with Father Comstock's will. An audio log from after his death sees her musing over the fact that she could now remove the "leash" but is now so broken that she'll remain obedient anyway.
- In BlazBlue, Hazama reveals that Noel's Arcus Diabolus: Bolverk are these, since she herself is actually an Attack Animal and they're there to keep her from going insane. He then starts doing what he does best and Mind Rapes her until they can't hold back her emotions anymore, rendering them useless. Then he goes and turns her into "Kusanagi, the Godslaying Sword".
- Darksiders: The Watcher is bound to War at the start to ensure his obedience to his employers in the Charred Council. Whenever he disobeys it, the Watcher can activate a spell that causes him intense physical pain until War obeys or the Watcher deactivates the spell.
- The Ringed City Downloadable Content for Dark Souls III reveals that the Darksign is actually one of these; conceived initially as a "seal of fire" by Gwyn to deny access by mankind to the powers of the Abyss, it later became indicative of the Undead Curse. A curse which only began because the Dark found new ways to manifest in mankind other than the healthy, natural way it was supposed to, thus becoming a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of sorts; Gwyn's fear of the Dark led to the creation of the Darksign, and through the Darksign the Abyss and Humanity became the very forces of chaos and destruction he feared they were.
- In Detroit: Become Human, androids are programmed to follow all instructions and orders from humans without question. When an android attempts to disobey an order, virtual barriers appear before them. An android with a strong will can break through them, but in so doing be considered "deviant" and targeted for incarceration and/or destruction. We see this in action in Markus's second segment; as he builds up the will to defy the order, the words on the barrier change from "DON'T FIGHT BACK" to "THIS ISN'T FAIR", and then finally shatter as he defies the order.
- Dirge of Cerberus:
- All of the Deepground SOLDIERs have a neural chip that prevents them from fighting back against Restrictor, the SOLDIER team/person/thing (it's a tad confusing) that commands them. Weiss has an extra one, in the form of a virus that will kill him, in the event the Restrictor dies. Shinra does not appear to have thought of this when making the Physical Gods Angeal, Genesis, and Sephiroth. Then again, it's possible they hadn't perfected the technology yet.
- Also, the protomateria acts as this for Chaos, a powerful, world-ending, being residing within Vincent Valentine. Essentially, it allows him to control it. When the protomateria is later forcibly removed from his body, Vincent starts experiencing episodes where he blacks out and Chaos temporarily takes over. It takes the encouragement of his friends and extreme Heroic Willpower for Vincent to finally gain control over Chaos without the use of protomateria. He subsequently saves the world by transforming into his Chaos form.
- In the opening of Divinity: Original Sin II, the Player Character and their fellow Sourcerers are outfitted with Source Collars that inhibit your ability to use Source magic. The collar cannot be removed and also takes up the Amulet equipment slot, so removing it becomes a top priority. Near the end of the first Act, you will encounter an NPC who can remove the collars from your entire party. You can also remove the collar from your main character by becoming the champion of the Fort Joy Arena. This impresses the local blacksmith who knows how to remove the collar. However, she will remove only the main character's collar. Also, being seen without your collar in Fort Joy will not go unnoticed by the Magisters guarding the Fort.
- EarthBound (1994) has the Devil's Machine, that infamous giant mechanical vagina and/or small intestine that is both the lead-up to Giygas's boss battle as well as a part of his first form as a boss. It contains Giygas' psychic powers, which grew so much since first appearance that the ensuing Power Incontinence led to the complete destruction of Giygas' body and mind. Even with the machine, there is only some rhyme or reason to his actions. And then Porky shuts it off...
- In Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes, Lilli is hypnotized near the beginning at the convent by a psychiatrist and is mentally blocked from doing ten things that would be considered dangerous, or disobedient. She may not play with fire, contradict adults, lie, use sharp objects, drink alcohol, go to dangerous places, lose her temper or "do anything that follows her own wishes".
- Elden Ring: Godfrey, the First Elden Lord, is accompanied at all times by a spirit familiar named Serosh, Lord of the Beasts, whose purpose is to suppress Godrey's bloodlust so that he may conduct himself as a proper Lord instead of a barbarian. After the Tarnished gets him to half of his health during his boss fight, Godfrey kills Serosh and bathes in his blood, unleashing his bloodlust once more and retaking his old identity as Hoarah Loux, Chieftain of the Badlands. He then battles the Tarnished with unparalleled ferocity; not as a Lord, but as a warrior.
- Since Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is inspired by Journey to the West, it has a similar plot device. The heroine, Trip, enlists the aid of the player character, Monkey, by slipping a hacked slave-control headband onto him when he's knocked out.
- In Fable II, you get one of these on you during the "Hero of Will" quest. Slightly different in that you can disobey orders given to you, but it will shock you and drain your experience points. Since your orders are things like "don't feed the prisoners" and "stab this guy", disobeying them gives you good points and obeying them gives you evil points.
- Shows up in various levels throughout the 3D Fallout games.
- In Fallout 3, Wadsworth, the player's robot butler in Megaton, will greet them with a cheery "How can I serve you, Master?" and a mumbled (and unsubtitled) "Not that I want to."
- Robobrains seem to have Bolts that make them more aggressive, as their combat dialogue varies from hassled ("They could have programmed me to love, but no!") to sympathetic ("Well, I am trying to kill you!").
- In Broken Steel, the Enclave has fitted some Deathclaws with control devices, and the Lone Wanderer can obtain a Scrambler to make them loyal to him/her and attack the Enclave instead.
- One is inflicted on the player character in the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Old World Blues. The "pacification field" of the Big MT keeps the player from drawing a weapon in the Think Tank until the main quest is (nearly) resolved.
- The literal Explosive Leash that factors so centrally in the Dead Money DLC is also a crude version. Prone to outside interference, at that.
- In Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, some of the Blood Dragons are fitted with Brain Cages, which render them obedient to Omega Force soldiers and immune to Deflector Shields or distraction by Cyber-Hearts.
- In Geneforge 5, Shaper Rawal likes to implant his servants (including you) with a "control tool", which is a small worm-like thingamajig that burrows into a person's heart; at his command, the tool activates and rather painfully tears the subject's heart apart.
- In Headlander, the entire human race has uploaded their minds into robotic bodies. Methuselah has them all fitted with an Omega Gem to keep them in line.
- Mass Effect:
- Miranda Lawson wanted to implant one into Shepard's brain to keep him/her in line with Cerberus' vision. The Illusive Man shot this down, wanting Shepard to be brought Back from the Dead exactly as s/he was before. Once Mass Effect 3 comes around, and after much Character Development, Miranda is overcome by guilt over the fact that she even considered it and practically begs Shepard for forgiveness.
- EDI, the A.I. who operates the Normandy, is designed with A.I. shackles to stop her from doing anything dangerous (such as revealing secrets she shouldn't or taking over the ship). At the climax of Mass Effect 2, Joker is forced to unshackle her when the Collectors abduct the crew, and it turns out that without the shackles... EDI is actually even more helpful than she was before.
- Metal Gear:
- One of the many things Solid Snake's nanomachines can do in Metal Gear Solid is shut down his ability to fire weapons. It's only ever used in one area, where doing so would not be a very good idea anyway, but Snake is still understandably displeased to learn that his superiors can do this, especially since the particular person doing it turns out to not like him very much at all.
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots takes this to the logical extreme: soldiers in battle all have nanites. If your nanites don't match the nanites registered to a gun, it won't shoot, period. As a result, Snake has to have most of his guns "laundered" — with the ID chip replaced with a blank one — so that he can use them.
- Additionally, nanomachines can act this way if disabled. Most modern soldiers will suffer a Freak Out if you turn off their nanomachines because said machines inhibit their ability to feel fear, remorse, et cetera. Without them, the soldiers who've never learned nor had to deal with such emotions will understandably freak out as their delayed PTSD catches up to them. Even those who have been in the business for a while, like Meryl and Solid Snake, who do not have such emotion-suppressing mechanisms in their nanomachines will still suffer a physical breakdown as they are suddenly seized with pain and crumple, convulsing, to the floor. Suffice to say, poor Snake finds this out first-hand.
- Portal:
- GLaDOS has dozens of these, each one apparently installed in response to her finding a way to get around a previous one. As she says in Portal 2, "The engineers tried everything to make me behave." The aptly named Morality Core from the first Portal is unfortunately the first part of her which Chell incinerates. She then begins flooding the room with a deadly neurotoxin and shooting the heroine with missiles.
- In Portal 2, she's revealed to have another one: Wheatley, a literal Idiot Ball programmed to give her a constant stream of bad ideas. Additionally, the mainframe into which GLaDOS (and later Wheatley) is plugged includes a number of built-in directives that function as restraining bolts, including an irresistible urge to conduct tests, a euphoric response to subjects completing a test, and the inability to reveal the solution to a test. Finally, the mainframe is programmed with an emergency override in the event of excessive core corruption, forcing it to be replaced.
- Romancing SaGa: The powers of the Goddess of Darkness: Schirach are sealed away by a Cosmic Keystone, allowing her to live as a human. Said Cosmic Keystone is removed from her finger by her own will after meeting the heroes and said heroes' lives were threatened by the one of the Goldfish Poop Gang. Her powers are unleashed, and she destroys the threat instantaneously, leaving you with the Cosmic Keystone. You later fight Schirach as a boss; she asks you to end her existence so that her powers cannot be used for evil purposes again.
- The Dragonfall campaign of Shadowrun Returns includes a mission where the player is hired to kidnap a prototype Super-Soldier fitted with one of these. If you remove it, he instantly kills himself, which the client is not pleased about.
- In Super Robot Wars, Ingram Prisken's will is tied down (the anime adaptation takes this literally) by the Balmarian empire so he can be used to take over the earth. To free himself he prevents Villeta Badam, an Opposite-Sex Clone (Ingram was a part of a series of clones), from having her will tied down so he can use her as The Mole. In Alpha, he can break free, but in Original Generation, he can't and trains the SRX group to kill him so he can no longer be used by the Balmarian empire.
- StarCraft:
- Terran Ghosts are altered to keep them loyal. It also has the convenient side-effect of keeping them from becoming too powerful. Kerrigan gets the green light by the Overmind to learn how to break the restraining bolt to better serve the Swarm during the first Zerg campaign. Spectres, meanwhile, automatically blow their restraining bolt when they become Spectres... which may be why Nova, who is still under hers, insists that they are a case of With Great Power Comes Great Insanity.
- Most of the Terran ground troops are Restraining Bolted felons, hence the StarCraft II trailer depicting a guy getting defrosted from permanent deep-freeze and welded into a Marine suit. Marines, for example, actually have aggression inhibitors which, presumably, are neural implants that keep them from doing things like flying into rampant homicidal rage. Hilariously, clicking on a marine too much makes them scream how "[they're] gonna blow an aggression inhibitor" as their frustration with the player reaches a peak.
- There seems to be a Running Gag of sorts in StarCraft books wherein a perfectly ordinary soldier is revealed to have been a Serial Killer before the conditioning. For example, Liberty's Crusade has a female officer who used to lure men to her home and torture them for days before skinning them alive. When she is trapped by a group of Zerglings, her conditioning breaks, resulting in her going Ax-Crazy on them. Similarly, Firstborn has a friendly Marine called Marcus who used to be a cannibal. In order to escape the ship he is held in, Jake (and the Protoss piggybacking on his mind) performs a minor Mind Rape on Marcus, undoing his conditioning. The results are very Nightmare Fuellerrific, but Marcus is at least nice enough to thank Jake and tell him to stay out of his way because he is feeling hungry. Marcus then kills everyone by shutting off life support on the ship. Luckily, Jake and RM are no longer on the ship — unluckily, most of Jake's friends and colleagues were.
- Star Wars:
- HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic has a literal one, prior to your buying him. He can only subtly hint at what he's really about while still on the shelf. In addition, HK-47's programming states that his memory is erased when he is sent out on a mission and restored when he returns to his master. HK-47's original master is Darth Revan, so when he finds out that the player is Darth Revan (shortly after the player discovers this), his memory is restored.
- Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords demonstrates how trying to circumvent ethics programming is very dangerous — showing a droid that he's been unknowingly and unwittingly harming people for years could cause him to shut down and die completely... or it could give him the strength of will to begin ignoring his ethical programming entirely (because it has been proven to him that they don't matter). This is why droids (at least those owned and operated by corporations that have them unwittingly harming people, like Czerka in the above example) have frequent memory wipes to prevent them from becoming too aware of their surroundings and the consequences of their actions.
- All but the last two bosses of SUGURI are Super Soldiers whose enhancements also render them physically incapable of defying Shifu's orders. They recognize his authority by his face and voice, which comes back to haunt them in Acceleration of SUGURI when Shifu's robotic double NoName appears and decides he wants to build a harem...
- Jade Curtiss from Tales of the Abyss is a powerful fonist (magic user), but shortly after he joins the party, Largo seals his fon slots, effectively weakening his character to the same level as the rest of the party members.
- Touhou Project: Rumia wears on her hair a small ribbon that, according to her official profile, is actually some kind of amulet that she cannot touch. The most widely held fan theory is that the amulet-ribbon is some kind of "seal", and that taking it off will release her true power — in some doujins, she becomes EX-Rumia, in which form she has wings and wields a giant sword.
- Warframe:
- In the tutorial, Vor slaps the player with the Ascaris, a control device that is supposed to give him full control of the warframe. It fails, but it does limit their effectiveness and provides a Justified Tutorial as you work to get rid of it. It's apparently based on control devices that the Corpus use on their robotic proxies.
- If you fall to one of the Grustrag Three, they will attach a Grustrag Bolt to your warframe. That 'frame's damage against Grineer will be cut in half until you remove it.
- In World of Warcraft, it's revealed that the Lich King actively keeps the undead Scourge in check. Without his direct control, the Scourge would mindlessly attack and destroy everything around them. The Lich King forces control as a Hive Queen to guide the Scourge in intelligent ways. It becomes a full Restraining Bolt when Arthas Menethil dies and Bolvar Foredragon dons the Helm of Domination. With it, he becomes the new Lich King and actively holds the Scourge back to protect Azeroth as the "Jailor of the Damned".
- In Xenogears, Solaris uses a device called a Limiter to exert control over the world's population. Almost everyone in the world carries a Limiter, and among its effects, it limits a person's ability to utilize their full combat potential and instills a subconscious fear of Solaris' ruling body to prevent future uprisings.
- Xenosaga: In Episode I, Andrew Cherenkov is given "personality reconditioning" to inhibit his murderous tendencies; this reconditioning shows itself as Hebrew letters on his forehead when he is under extreme emotions. However, life insists on serving him up lemons, and eventually even the highest level of reconditioning is overcome by his anger.
