Riches To Rags / Video Games

Riches to Rags in Video Games

• Cyberpunk 2077 has this as part of the Corpo lifepath intro: you start the game as a reasonably successful Arasaka suit, only to have the rug pulled out from under you when you find yourself unceremoniously fired and forced to start over from rock bottom as an Edgerunner.
• Darkest Dungeon: Tie-in comics reveal this about a few characters:
  • The Grave Robber was a noblewoman who found herself in massive debts, and pilfered valuables from her family's graves to pay them.
  • The Leper was once a royal king or prince who chose to exile himself from his homeland to partner up with the other heroes after contracting leprosy.
• Dead by Daylight: One of the Survivors, Jake Park, fled from the pressure of his high-class upbringing to live as a hermit in the woods.
• In Disco Elysium, you can meet a homeless storyteller, who goes by the name Idiot Doom Spiral. If you ask him how he ended up homeless, he will tell that he once was a billionaire named George who ran a successful tech company, but thanks to a series of dumb, seemingly minor, and easily rectifiable mistakes, which started with him losing the keys to his apartment while going out for a jog one evening, which from there escalated into him losing his girlfriend, and then finally his company. After this, he apparently just gave up and sank into homelessness. You can in turn point out that it seems like there is a gap in his story between the points of getting locked out of his apartment, getting locked out of his office, and ending up living on the street years later, but Spiral just sort of brushes it off.
• Dragon Age II:
  • Hawke's backstory: the Amell family, of whom Hawke's mother, Leandra, is a member of, was wealthy and influential in the city-state of Kirkwall before Hawke's uncle Gamlen gambled away the money when he became patriarch since Leandra left for Ferelden. Upon returning to Kirkwall, Leandra and her children were impoverished refugees who had to rely on the begrudging goodwill of Gamlen and money Hawke made in the city's Wretched Hive to survive before a Deep Roads expedition made Hawke enough money to move on up in Kirkwall society.
  • Gamlen himself wasted all of his money chasing after a legendary artifact that could predict market fluctuations (and find spare cash on dead foes), his family left him, and he lives in a clay hovel for the rest of the game. And then his daughter turns up in Act III with the artifact. You can take your inheritance (which is the most valuable item she owns compared to her low-level gear) and disgust her, or persuade her to reconcile with her father but lose the artifact for good.
  • The first game does this with the Human Noble origin (in which the death of their family and their conscription into the Grey Wardens causes them to be much poorer), the Dwarven noble origin (in which they are disowned due to circumstances beyond their control), and the Human Mage origin (the human mage being a part of the aforementioned Amell family, who cannot ever inherit their titles due to being a mage) — depending on how you play the game, however, they can all earn back their wealth and status and then some.
• Dragon Quest V: Prince Harry was a spoiled, obnoxious prince until he was kidnapped by Ladja and sold into slavery.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening, Maribelle and Ricken's supports reveal that this is the case for Ricken's noble household. Downplayed, because while Ricken's household did lose status and wealth, they're definitely not in "rags".
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
    • Mercedes was born to a noble family in the Empire, but her house fell. Her mother married into another noble house, but the two of them were forced to leave after realizing that the head of House Bartels only wanted a Crest-bearing heir. The two of them lived in a church in the Kingdom until a merchant adopted Mercedes. Mercedes is fine with being a commoner, and has no desire to return to the nobility.
    • This trope can happen to certain noble students depending on their allegiances, the story route chosen and whoever they're paired with at the end of the game. At the end of the game, some of them will renounce their noble titles for other pursuits, or to marry their spouse of choice.
• Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life This can occur in Special Edition and Harvest Moon DS if you marry Lumina. She goes from being living in a mansion with her rich grandmother to living down the road as a farmer's wife. You can become wealthy if you are a good enough farmer but the game still treats it as this.
• Killer Instinct (2013): Tyler-John "T.J Combo" Garrett was a celebrity millionaire boxer who used secret Ultratech cybernetic implants to improve his punching power. When his cheating was caught out, he was left disgraced and lost everything he had. Now he's back in the tournament, no implants this time, to restore his honour.
• Several of the nobles' schemes in King of the Castle involve the King being deposed but not killed, often living out their days in poverty (though not always misery).
  • The Modernization scheme sees the Barons of the March putting together what they claim are much-needed military reforms, whipping their soldiers into an elite, well-equipped fighting force... who promptly march on the capital. If the Barons' scheme reaches its final stage, they can vote to either attack the capital or force the King to abdicate; if they choose the latter and the King accepts, they live out their days peacefully on a farm miles from anywhere, and few people are said to miss them.
  • The Excommunication scheme entails the Grandees of the South putting together enough "evidence" for the Church to condemn the King as a heretic in a Kangaroo Court, after which they are thrown out of the Palace and end their days begging on the streets until dying from an infected blister.
  • The object of the Witch Hunt scheme is for the Grandees of the South to gather "evidence" that the King is a heretic unworthy of the throne. If the scheme advances to its third stage, the Grandees can vote to either burn the King at the stake or coerce them into abdicating. If they choose the latter and the King gives in, they are forced to join a monastery and take a vow of silence.
  • The Conspiracy scheme hinges on the Patricians of the Coast taking advantage of the Kingdom's financial troubles by giving them a loan with such rapidly increasing interest that it cannot possibly be repaid. If the scheme reaches its final stage, the Patricians can vote to bleed the Kingdom dry or offer to cancel all debts in exchange for the throne. If they choose the latter and the King agrees, they spend the rest of their life as a sheep farmer, ten miles from the nearest village. After adjusting to getting up at dawn every day to muck out stables, they ultimately decide their new life has its pleasures.
  • The Subterfuge scheme, to which multiple regions have access, revolves around forcing out the members of the King's inner circle (the Treasurer and the Chancellor are pressured to resign, the Spymaster disappears without trace, and the Marshal comes down with a mysterious illness that is said to be terminal) and replacing them with members of the regions' nobility, who can demand that the King abdicate immediately in favour of their claimant in exchange for a modest stipend to live in obscurity on a remote farm (as in the Modernization and Conspiracy schemes). If the King accepts, the outcome is the same as it is for the Conspiracy scheme, with the King leading a meagre but happy existence herding sheep.
• In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, there's a rich man and a poor man, both of whose daughters (named Mila and Maggie respectively) have been kidnapped by the Big Bad. You rescue the daughters about halfway through the game, and the rich man gives his fortune to the pirates who took the credit for their rescue, while the poor man makes his fortune selling rare necklaces his daughter brings home.
• Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven deconstructs this trope. At the game's final epilogue, Tommy explains that it's great to find a balance in things. Because the person who wants it all risks losing absolutely everything while the person who wants nothing will get exactly that. Likewise, come Mafia II, the main protagonist, Vito, has always fancied moving up in the mafia world and finally got everything he wanted.... only to finally lose it all after his house is torched by the O'Neill gang.
• In Psychonauts2 the Big Bad thinks he's an example of this and is scheming to get back his former lifestyle. In truth he's still living quite well, but he's so used to a ridiculously high living standard (eating caviar by the bucketful) that going down to "just" a high living standard (eating caviar from cans) is unbearable to him.
• Dutch van der Linde lives quite comfortably by the standards of his chosen lifestyle in Red Dead Redemption II, having a nice tent, luxuries like a gramophone, and very stylish clothing. However, he only has most of this due to living off the "donations" of his gang, who actually go out and work while he generally lies around thinking up poorly-designed plans. These, combined with his increasing paranoia and mental instability, end up destroying the gang, and by the events of Red Dead Redemption, Dutch is living hard off the land as really nothing more than a mountain man.
• Zoe of Road 96 comes from a very wealthy background, the perks of being the daughter of the Minister Of Oil. Now she's a broke runaway like all the other teens running for the border. Though she's actually happier on the road.
• In Thief: The Dark Project, Garrett meets a strange man named Raoul. Once the wealthy owner of the local opera house, Raoul took to living in the sewers after losing ownership of the opera house.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: Because of the events of the second game, the Lodge of Sorceresses has been disbanded and most of them have gone into hiding. Triss Merigold has gone from being the court advisor to King Foltest of Temeria to leading an Underground Railroad from a seedy ramshackle apartment in a bad corner of Novigrad, hiding from the city witch hunters. Keira Metz is similarly left posing as a common village white witch in the countryside outside the city (and being Keira Metz, she hates every minute of it).

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