Video Game Cruelty Potential / Role-Playing Game

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A-C

• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura offers lots of cruelty options, especially to the talented mystic. One particularly glorious possibility involves charming a wolf or bear, then walking to the nearest town, entering an occupied house, and releasing your control over the wild animal (but not before leaving the house and Magelocking the doors and windows). Other fun activities include using Force Walls and Walls of Fire to trap and burn the clothes off passersby and tricking Non Player Characters into picking up and equipping armor that deals continual poison damage.
  • If you're really set on playing the game as an evil bastard, one of the required quests becomes to slaughter the entire population of a small, quiet out-of-the-way village. One of the endings you can get even involves you and the Big Bad killing every living thing on the planet.
    • Admittedly, in-game the Big Bad is correct in his belief that the afterlife is more pleasant than life, going by a conversation with a resurrected Virgil.
  • One of the better tricks is to pick-pocket some boots onto the king which makes him pass out, then rig an explosive trap on the throne and steal back the boots, The king eventually picks himself back up and sits back down on his throne…
• Avernum:
  • If you register, you can build up your army until they are super powerful… and cheerfully wipe out the majority of the towns if you so desire, and even the super powerful guards cannot stop you. You can also set the days far in advance and not bother killing off the plagues of monsters. Townies will die if you do this. Having her husband killed by monsters makes the blacksmith lady very sad.
  • This is also doable earlier on with a highly skilled mage/cleric team combo. The mage summons monsters that do chip damage to guards, meanwhile the cleric continually summons higher level shades as meatshields and mobile obstacles. Made even simpler in the sequels due to simulacrum.
• The Baldur's Gate franchise:
  • Baldur's Gate II and Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal have better-developed party members than the first game did, and of course this lets you be personally cruel on a level the first game never allowed. A few modest examples:
    • When Jaheira finds her dead husband, you can be extremely callous about it, to the point where she'll up and leave.
    • You can completely wreck Anomen's dreams of becoming a knight by encouraging a certain decision in his personal sidequest, and if you're romancing him, you can kick him to the curb immediately after he fails his Test of knighthood.
    • Viconia's romance also allows the player to take her to bed when it's clear she'd rather not. Thankfully, this ends the romance.
    • If you prefer cruelty by neglect, you can let the daughter of Jan Jansen's beloved die of disease, or allow Keldorn to kill his wife's (emotional) affair partner (she leaves, and takes their kids with her), or allow Mazzy's sister to die of poison, or leave Jaheira and Minsc imprisoned in Irenicus's lab.
    • In the expansion, if you're romancing Aerie, you can tell her to take a hike when she tells you she's pregnant with your child.
    • If you're responsible for others as part of maintaining your stronghold, you can screw up your duties in ways that cause a body count. Most of the time, this also costs you your job… unless you're a priest in the temple of Talos, which actually encourages this kind of behavior, and in cahoots with a Dirty Cop.
  • The distant sequel Baldur's Gate III is perhaps the absolute crowner for cruel Villain Protagonist choices:
    • If you save Auntie Ethel from the two men accosting her, you can later tell the young woman that Ethel is "babysitting" that nobody is coming to save her because you killed the only men who knew where she was. She tearfully reveals to you those two men were her brothers.
    • You can also tell this young woman that you have a magic wand that will resurrect her dead husband and then just break the thing in half right in front of her, before leaving the woman to weep alone in the swamp.
    • You can egg a power-mad de facto druid leader into murdering a tiefling child for no good reason.
    • It's entirely possible to kill Arch Druid Halsin at the goblin camp, for no other reason than you thought it would be funny teaching the goblin children the right kind of stones to throw at the poor, caged bear.
    • You can help a bunch of cultists and marauding goblins massacre a caravan of tiefling refugees, including small children. You can also engage in Cold-Blooded Torture of a captive prisoner described in lavish detail.
    • You can stand by and watch, or even help an Ungrateful Bastard drow throw a bunch of enslaved gnomes into a lava flow because they took too long in burying him out of some rubble.
    • Every companion has a couple of moments where you can suddenly betray them and leave them to be Killed Off for Real or even face a Fate Worse than Death, and having high Relationship Values with these characters (so they consider you a good friend) or even currently romancing them doesn't remove these choices. For instance, you can turn over Astarion to the Gur bounty hunters and send him right back to a monstrous vampire master who will continue to torture and sexually violate him.
    • You can adopt Scratch the dog and then turn him back over to his abusive owner in Baldur's Gate, who promptly locks the dog up in a cage. Even people who play evil run-throughs tend to shy away from this one.
• In The Caligula Effect: Overdose, you can join the Ostinato Musicians and help them defeat the Go-Home Club (the group where you are president that only want to return to their reality). You can also get close to the Go-Home Club's members and then do the ultimate betrayal at the end of the game, by ultimately siding with Thorn and destroying the world, all the while beating up the people that called you friend… and showing no remorse. And to unlock the bonus mode, you have to do it (along with unlocking the Golden Ending).
• In Caravaneer, you can attack friendly caravans and side with various immoral or corrupt factions. The sequel lets you do that plus enslave the people you encounter.
• Contact allows you to kill and attack just about everything you come across, from civilians to hapless livestock. You'll lose karma, though.

D-F

• Deltarune:
  • The "SnowGrave/Weird" Route is this game's answer to the Genocide run from Undertale and to many people, makes you act even crueler. To wit, there is a part in the game where the player is split up from Ralsei and Susie and has to partner with Noelle, a Shrinking Violet and Childhood Friend of Kris. Noelle had previously talked about how she wanted to get stronger and the player can take advantage of this by Gaslighting her into attacking all of the monsters in the Cyber World, freezing and killing them. Noelle is clearly upset by this, but as she's forced to keep going, she slowly enters into a puppet like state where she will basically kill on demand. Even worse? Since Kris is confirmed to be separate from the player, they are forced to put their friend in that state and it's implied they are just as disturbed and upset about it as Noelle is.
  • Played for Laughs during the driving segment with Queen; you're supposed to avoid the cars on the road, but hitting them will actually amuse her instead. Unlike the aforementioned Snowgrave route, this doesn't change anything significant in the story, only causing a single inconsequential NPC to not appear in Castle Town in the post-game.
• In the Destroy All Humans! series, you can do many horrible things to the citizens such as dropping them from high heights, mind-tossing them off into the distance, burning them, drowning them, blowing them up etc.
• In Chapter 8 of Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker's Memory, you have the option to help defend the Digimon Black Market, which openly mistreats them and doesn't see them as living things.
• In Devil Survivor 2, if a character is fated for death, you can choose to either come to their aid, or, if you hate the character, you can ignore them when the time comes and allow them to die a Cruel and Unusual Death. In front of your very eyes.
• In Disco Elysium, you can play as any kind of detective you want... including acting like a deranged, bigoted Rabid Cop who verbally and emotionally abuses your partner, breaks just about every protocol imaginable, openly supports violent political uprisings, and misuses your authority to treat civilians like your personal playthings. None of that is touching on all the physical abuse you can dish out...
• In Divinity: Original Sin II, the player gains the ability to commune with the dead through Source magic. This comes with the ability to consume the dead to replenish your Mana Meter, and every single lost soul seeking your aid that you come across comes with the option to devour them on the spot. An especially cruel example would be to devour the souls of your ally Gareth's parents while he's in the middle of his Roaring Rampage of Revenge over their deaths.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • One of the very first things you encounter in the Korcari Wilds is a wounded soldier trying to make his way back to Ostagar. You can help him, of course, but why would you do that if he's as good as dead? Even better...
      Warden: We don't have time for this. Let's go.
      Alistair: "We don't have time?" What, you have an urgent meeting somewhere?
      Warden: He's already dead. See? [Slits soldier's throat]
      Alistair: Does the word "insane" mean anything to you?
    • During the Redcliffe arc, you can kill Connor (a child) instead of going into his dream and freeing him from the demon possessing him. If you're a mage and want to be even crueler, you can enter Connor's dream — possibly killing his mother to do so — and instead let the demon off scot-free for a reward. What do you get in return? Either additional magic, Relationship Values, or sex. You can sell a child's soul for sex with a demon.
    • You can convince the werewolves to slaughter a clan of Dalish elves. When confronted about this, you can give a number of reasons, like "Werewolves make for a better army" or "You guys started it". Or you can simply say "So? This way sounds like more fun."
    • Insulting or messing with your companions, like calling Morrigan a heartless shrew whenever you feel like it or mocking Alistair while he is grieving. There is an insane amount of options, and this can get really messed up if you are in a romance with them. You can dump someone whenever you want, sometimes by adding a stinging remark like "I'm just sick of you." or "Morrigan was better in bed." You can also reject someone after they confess their feelings for you in many cruel ways. Leliana's romance arc in particular allows you to cheat on her and then deny it. When she confronts you, you can be understanding and apologetic... or just brush her off, bluntly tell her you don't care, laugh in her face, or straight-up insult her.
      Leliana: I don't know if I can trust you, if I can trust the things you've said to me. What am I to you?
      Warden: That girl that tags along and is useful sometimes?
    • At the Landsmeet, if you choose to spare Loghain, you can then allow Anora to have Alistair (your companion since Ostagar and possible friend or even love interest) executed. Condemning a man who loves you to public, humiliating death? That's a level of soul-crushing personal evil worthy of Planescape: Torment. The Practical Incarnation would be proud.
      Alistair: You know, I must not have heard that right. I could have sworn you just ordered my death. What happened to you? Can you hear yourself? I'm going to be thrown on the pyre along with Duncan and all the others, am I? Nothing I did counts for anything?
      Warden: Be a man, Alistair. For once.
    • One of the worst things you can do is during the City Elf origin. Vaughn Kendalls interrupts your wedding and kidnaps all the women claiming Droit du Seigneur. By the time you reach him, one of the women has been killed and your cousin has been raped by Vaughn (and possibly his lackeys). He offers to bribe you with twenty sovereigns in exchange for you allowing him to keep the women (read:allow him and his men to rape them for the rest of the night). You can accept, but you can't even use it right away. By the time you can use it, you'll probably have more than that anyway. So you just let your cousin be repeatedly raped and can't even claim an early start on fiances to justify it.
    • On a much lighter and more humorous note, the Feastday Gifts DLC gives you a bunch of items available for purchase at one vendor that grant a massive boost to reputation with the character they're intended for and also can be used by that character for some sort of minor boost. Except for Morrigan's, which is a Voodoo Doll of Alistair. What does it do? If Alistair and Morrigan are in the party, you can have Morrigan use it to inflict a random Injury to Alistair.
  • Dragon Age II:
    • One of your companions, Fenris, is an escaped slave on the run from his blood mage master. When his master inevitably catches up with him, you can help Fenris fight him off… or you can hand him over, saying you don't need him any more, leaving Fenris so gutted by your betrayal that he leaves with the slaver without a fight. For a whole five sovereigns. It's even worse if you're romancing Fenris and Danarius makes note of his former slave's "skills"; the betrayal is so much worse when you know what Danarius is going to do to him.
    • Forcing one companion into slavery wasn't enough for you? If you have high enough friendship (or rivalry) with Isabela, she'll make her way back to Kirkwall, head through a burning city under siege and a crapton of Qunari soldiers, and beat up the Arishok's guards to personally hand the relic over to save Hawke, her friends, and all of Kirkwall. The Arishok then demands that the thief be handed over along with the relic, to face punishment — and Hawke can comply. Even the Arishok seems briefly taken aback.
    • If you're the sort who enjoys stomping people's hearts into bloody pulp, romance Anders. Listen sorrowfully as Anders pours his heart out to you, all his fears and terrors about losing control and hurting you. Sleep with him. Enjoy his declaration of love, and how the templars will never tear you apart. Then dump him, citing his performance, or lack thereof, as the reason. Alternatively, keep him, and then execute him at the end of the game. It's up to you.
    • On top of that, you can sell out another young mage to a demon. Except this one has rare powers that let him kill people from the Fade.
    • One quest has you looking for some smuggled goods for your former boss, only to run into a poor orphan boy who is forced to work for the smugglers because he needs money to care for his sisters. The game tries to guilt you into giving the goods to the boy instead of taking it back to the boss, but you can just as easily leave with the booty and leave the kid to fend for himself. In a bit of Black Comedy, a Hawke with an agressive personality will respond to the boy's pleading by callously flicking a coin at his feet and then leave without a word.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition:
    • The Inquisitor's judgments can display shades of this, particularly in the case of players with the human noble background who can confiscate all of Mistress Poulin's earnings to enrich their own family's wealth. They can also sentence Movran the Under to gibbeting for throwing a goat at Skyhold.
    • Sera can be abruptly dumped and fired from the Inquisition with a single dialogue choice long after the Inquisitor has started pursuing a romance with her.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest III: Some of the "Final Questions" from the beginning of the remake feature this. Most notable is one where you're a fire breathing monster coming out of a well in a village. You can leave peacefully, or murder everyone, including a dog and A MOTHER AND HER SLEEPING CHILD!
  • Dragon Quest V: Add Sancho to your party, then take him back to the first few cities of the game and talk to him constantly. How cruel you're being varies from city to city: in Roundbeck he occasionally gets depressed but also has untainted happy memories, in the ruins of Whealbrook and at Coburg your kids make it clear to you that Sancho refused to ever go to either place again until the Hero forces him to, but at least in Whealbrook after you talk to everyone he eventually seems to come to terms with what happened there. But in Coburg it's obvious that you're basically emotionally torturing him every second you stay there, because it's so hard for him to be in the place and speak with the people that he blames for Pankraz's death.
  • Dragon Quest VII: You can cause Loomin/Nottagen to be destroyed in the present by deciding to just go Shoot the Dog.
  • Dragon Quest IX: You can constantly recruit members and then ditch them away for good to retain and sell their gear. Even though you don't strip their equipment off first, parting with members does that automatically. Selling their basic equipments is a good way to earn a bit of extra money... if you don't feel bad about ditching your new friends, that is.
  • Dragon Quest XI:
    • In Puerto Valor's casino, there is a man who sleeps at the bar. The bartender says that the snoozing patron spends his waking hours building a house of cards, which gets ruined by someone every time he dozes off. You can interact with it and cause it to fall. Even the bartender calls you on it!
    • While galloping on the world map, you don't need to run into every single enemy and knock them off like bowling pins… but gosh darn it if it isn't so satisfying to blow away several beasties in a row!
    • The Updated Re-release adds romance options, and if you choose Serena, she'll make the Player Character his favorite stew during the ending. You have the option to tell her you don't like it and reject her offer to try again, causing her to cry a little before apologetically cuddling with you.
  • Dragon Quest Builders 2: In the explorer's islands, you can befriend farm animals to bring them into your farm... or you can murder them in cold blood and they won't even fight back. And the easiest way to do this? Befriend them first so they don't try to run away. You obtain chicken legs, beef, and lamb meat this way, and if you intend to complete your recipe list, you'll need to do this, as there's at least one recipe that requires each of these ingredients.
  • Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime: You can fire your allies or even yourself out of a cannon. Oftentimes, this is the only way to win. Special mention goes to Hooly, the Wyrtle, and other slimes/mooks who can be ordered to fire themselves out of the lower cannon, oftentimes for them to intercept the heavier hitting projectiles from the enemy.
• Normally, killing anyone within Gran Soren in Dragon's Dogma would have you be arrested. This rule does not apply after Duke Edmun has branded you as a traitor. You can now be the traitor they deserved and kill everyone for crossing with the Arisen without feeling guilty or getting jailed.
• The Elder Scrolls series has a Wide-Open Sandbox nature which allows for extremely high cruelty potential. To note:
  • Morrowind:
    • For the only time in the series, all NPCs can be killed. You can go on killing sprees with victims numbering in the thousands. Of course, you can also break numerous quests by doing this, but a quicksave beforehand will let you vent some rage and then go back.
    • Spell-making gives ample opportunities to indulge in this trope. Create, for example, a spell which will paralyze an enemy for an extremely long duration and pair it with a 1-point-of-damage-per-second spell. You can then sit and watch as your enemy is slowly burned/electrocuted/poisoned/drained of life as they are helplessly frozen in place.
    • A long duration "Drain Life" spell allows for this. Cast it on multiple victims and you have a self-sustaining means of continuous health regen while in a dungeon. This would mean that you are being sustained by the continuous suffering of your foes. Add a continuous health regenerating effect, and it's possible your enemies will survive this torture, so that you can do this over and over again. You can make this last in-game months, or years. Add soul trap, and death will only change their fate from agony to bondage within a soul gem. Molag Bal would be proud.
  • Oblivion:
    • All non-plot-important Non Player Characters can be killed, making it possible to go on killing sprees of hundreds of individual characters. Plot-important characters can only be temporarily knocked unconscious.
    • But why just kill people yourself when you can get them to kill each other? The Frenzy effect causes the target to go berserk and attack the nearest person. Because it doesn't count as an attack, you can use it in the presence of guards without committing a crime. Riots are fun. You can start a Guard vs. Townsperson brawl that can result in every non-essential Non-Player Character in the town being ruthlessly slaughtered by the very guards that are supposed to defend them.
    • To add to the hilarity, drop some weapons on the ground (whatever kind you want) then cast the Frenzy spell. All affected NPCs will run over, pick up a weapon (if they don't already have one), and then go bat-shit on the closest person, friend or foe. Made even more hilarious on the PC version where there is actually a spell (added through a mod) that can both give and revoke essential status to any NPC. Yes, it is as hilarious as it sounds having a literally unkillable beggar armed with with an enchanted Daedric longsword go on a murderous rampage. And the Grey Fox wants to help them too…
    • Poisoned Apples (which you get in the Assassins Guild quests) are a good source of fun. If you see an Non-Player Character sit down and eat, just put one on his plate. Ten seconds after they eat it and their lifeless, limp body will be hanging from the chair.
    • Create a weak, but long-duration Destruction spell, say, 3 HP/Sec fire damage for 120 seconds. To the NPCs, that's a full hour of being on fire. Be sure to call this spell "Hell".
    • In the Shivering Isles expansion, part of the main quest requires you to reactivate a dungeon used to "greet" newcomers to the Isles. After you reactivate it, you see a group of adventurers come into the dungeon and enter 3 rooms. In each of these rooms, you get to hit one of two buttons to decide the adventurers' fates. One of the buttons will brutally get them killed, while the other drives them insane.
    • Similarly, in the main game, there's one section of the torture caverns in Camoran's Paradise featuring an immortal in a cage hanging over a river of lava. There's a lever on the ground beside him. If you pull it, it dunks the cage and rises up another.
    • If you hack hand-to-hand and adjust it to a disgustingly high level, and then taunt someone into attacking, you can knock them out for three days straight. Three days later… they get up, remember that you insulted their mother, and then come after you again. You can knock them out again, and continue for as long as you want.
    • In a similar way to the hand-to-hand example above, custom fatigue-draining spells can be added to zero weight items, which when reverse pickpocketed into the inventory of essential characters, leave them paralyzed and unable to die.
    • Good fun can be had with demoralize (fear) spells, causing NPCs to run around in panic.
  • Skyrim:
    • Skyrim continues the tradition, adding shouts into the mix. Much fun can be had with Unrelenting Force, which lets you knock others a few feet into the air by yelling at them. You can shout others off a mountain, and spend a few minutes climbing down just to see how far they fell, or shout them into a river and watch them get swept away and into a waterfall.
    • Skyrim also has randomly activated finishers, all of which are quite brutal, the most prominent of which is cutting off a person's head. In order to get the player to take care of spouses and followers, none of them are coded as unkillable. Some players realized the implications.
    • Annoying NPC won't stop preaching? Hide behind him, whip a Fury spell at his annoying ass, and let the rest of the town… take care of him.
    • Is an NPC given invulnerability owing to their "essential" status? No problem. Just flog them repeatedly, so you can train up your weaponry skills. Done most easily with Ancano or Elenwen; in the College in Winterhold, it's possible to beat the former to within an inch of his life with nobody interjecting, and your followers will help you regardless of morality level, and with the latter, you can Fus Ro Dah her off a cliff so she has a painfully high fall. She'll still survive, but it's something.
    • Those Civil War quests are boring? Well, you can remind the people at Bethesda what medieval warfare is supposed to be like, and spice up your walkthrough with a little sack, pillage, and burn. Right after a camp commander orders you to attack a fort, don't go there immediately, but rather take your most crime-friendly companion (or better, install a multiple companions mod and gather a whole squad of Bloody Mummers) and harass the hold in which your target fort is. Hack everyone you meet on the road to bloody bits, plunder Khajiiti caravans, raid shops and warehouses in cities and towns, and kill many guards. Lather, rinse, repeat until you take everything not bolted down and slaughter anyone who resists (accruing an astronomical bounty), then head to the fort and capture it. The Jarl of the hold will change, and your bounty will be cleared. Repeat with the next fort. Don't forget to install a driveable wagon mod; you'll need the wagon for all that loot.
    • For bonus points, complete "A Season Unending" and give up some of your friendly holds to the enemy, then sack them as described above and retake them.
    • Tired of that annoying "Essential NPC" flag? There are so many Game Mods to remove that. A popular goal after the story is over is to use this mod to make it possible to hunt down and slaughter the entire population. One. By. One.
    • For those who played Skyrim on consoles, you can kill essential characters by repeatedly casting any "reviving undead" spells such as Dread Zombie. Their bodies will turn into ash piles and marked as dead. Beware that some important quests rely heavily on their presence. So be sure to finish all of their quests before killing them.
    • Don't feel like looking for that book Rustleif of Dawnstar asks you for? You could always just murder his pregnant wife so he has no need for it anymore.
    • You can also do some good with your cruelty. Before starting the Dark Brotherhood questline, acquire a Black Soul Gem. Kill Grelod the Kind and Soul Trap her in the gem. Then adopt one of the children from the orphanage, use Grelod's soul to enchant a dagger, and give it to the kid as a present.
    • Speaking of Soul Trap, the Dawnguard DLC reveals that all the human enemies whose souls you trapped in gems to enchant your weapons are sent to the Soul Cairn, a hellish landscape in which souls are eternally tormented and fleeing undead horrors serving the Cairn's enigmatic rulers. However, some players won't care and will continue condemning people to this horrible fate, possibly even their own friends and former spouses.
    • During the Dark Brotherhood questline, you're sent to murder the Emperor's cousin at her wedding in Solitude, and you'll get a bonus if you do so while she's addressing her people on the balcony above the court. If you just want to get the job done, you can kill her with a bow you own or with the enchanted bow provided on another balcony. Alternatively, you can get creative and crush her with a gargoyle precariously perched above her, or, for the REALLY evil, you can reverse-pickpocket a suitably powerful weapon and a Frenzy poison onto the groom and let him do the job for you.
    • Hearthfire adds a comparatively minor one: You can end up with steward, spouse, housecarl, and 2 kids for your house. Building enough beds for all of them (aside from the children, who can only move into houses with beds for them) is optional.
    • Your kids just want to adopt a pet? You can deny that to them. Or better yet, let them, only to butcher it in front of them and hear their crushed responses.
    • Any of the rape mods (yes, there is more than one) that makes the characters strip and do the nasty when a foe surrenders.
    • The game allows you to adopt orphaned children. Not just the ones that started out that way, but also children that lose their parents over the course of the game. Sounds like a recipe for heartwarming, right? Well, the game doesn't really take into account how those parents died. So if you find a kid that you just have to welcome into your household but is already saddled with parents, you could always hide behind a rock, take out your trusty bow, and rectify the problem. If done properly, your new child will never know that the head of their adoptive family was also the one that took their birth parents away from them, all because that person wanted to have this particular child for themselves. (Note that this doesn't apply to Lemkil, as even good-aligned players tend to agree that murdering the abusive asshole and adopting his daughters would actually be an improvement.)
    • When you get around to White River Watch, just outside Whiterun, the bandit camp has a blind old geezer as the 'watchman', whose confederates tend to leave tacks on his chair, humiliate him, and steal his blank (or braille) book. Sure, you could stab him in the back or shoot him in the head, if you really wanted to.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 4 allows you to steal stuff from villages. Considering three out of four (four out of five? There's also NoLegs) of your party are crazy thieves, this isn't surprising... except you can steal from the first village while you have only one character, the one who doesn't steal stuff.
• Evil Islands: At one point in Suslanger, you're required to sneak into a city chock-full of guards and ordinary city folk. Normally, killing non-aggressive NPCs such as deer, rabbits, or workers yields very low rewards. Here, however, townsfolk drop amounts of gold that can make you reconsider going on a city-wide killer spree… that is, if you don't get caught.
• E.V.O.: Search for Eden has a point in the second chapter where you are actually able to kill and devour a pair of helpful amphibians (one of whom is a child whose father sacrificed himself to save his species). Doing so causes a horrified Gaia to ask what you're doing. If you eat the meat the two provide, you're instantly killed. (That's karma for you.) You can avoid dying, though, by eating one and immediately evolving in some way, restoring your HP to full.
• Fable allows you to slaughter practically every single person in the game, save for the first city (the laws prevent you from pulling out your weapon, but you can still pound away at innocents with your fists until they're unconscious), and if you're in a city, all you get as punishment is a high fine and a banishment from the area for a couple of in-game hours. In fact, in order to get one of the best weapons in the game, you need to sacrifice an innocent to an evil god at a certain time of night.
  • Best level-up ever, or worst, uses this very mechanic in the first town. While the town proper does not permit weapons or even the mechanics behind them to work, it also makes the people unkillable. Thus, as soon as you enter the town for the first time, you can gain a huge in-game advantage through something referred to as the "Ike Turner Strategy." Step one: seduce a woman in that town (the men fight back, and can interrupt the chain). Step two: have her follow you to the adjacent area of docks, which is still part of the city so weapons are not permitted, but combat targeting and throwing punches are thanks to the boxing event. Step three: corner your immortal girlfriend in the warehouse via clever placement of crates, target her, and start swinging. Step four: pass the time. Change the TV to a movie, (maybe J-Lo's "Enough" to reduce karmic backlash) while holding the remote and tapping the attack button. In less than the two hours it would take to finish the movie, the physical XP earned (most notably from the chain of successful hits) will be enough to max physical stats on a starting character. The only penalty is a similarly-maxed out evil meter, fixable if you care to do so by killing bandits or just donating money to charity. The countless stories of spousal abuse buy-offs makes this a particularly ghoulish commentary within the game...
  • But why stop at killing? The game also lets you be an evil jerkass with business sense by permitting you to slaughter an entire village, buy up all the newly vacated property, and lease it to new tenants for cash. Murder for profit in the most literal sense.
  • It is indeed possible to kill people in Bowerstone, the city with the weapon prohibition. All you need to do is get the guards shooting at you with their crossbows and wait for some unfortunate collateral damage...
    • Why wait for the guards to do the dirty work when you can hire an armed mercenary who's inside the same city who is more than capable of killing Non Player Characters?
• Fable II takes this kind of thinking man's violence to new heights. The game has a semi-realistic economy that functions as a result of how people are feeling. In short, rampage through town to sink the economy, buy up all the property, jack the rent up to sink it lower and make money faster, and then buy goods off your abused tenants at a hilariously low price.
  • In Fable II, there's the Wheel Of Misfortune, which kills the sacrifice in a number of ways. There's one non-fatal fate: the victim is transformed into the opposite gender. (Which is, of course, hilarious.) As well, to get a special weapon that deals damage to "good" creatures, you need to sacrifice a spouse.
  • The best thing about killing your wives for a legendary weapon had to be the good points you got from doing it. Marrying a girl gives you 100 good points, x renown, and x money as dowry. Having a child with said girl gives you 50 good points. Sacrificing your wife for power gives you 100 evil points (-100 good points) and a small amount of corruption points plus money and with enough sacrifices the legendary weapon. You have a net gain of 50 good points for marrying, impregnating, and then murdering a random girl.
    • As well, you can also sell people into slavery, rob stores, extort civilians for money, abuse spouses and your dog, carry out assassinations for quick cash, and help drive at least one person to commit suicide.
  • Fable II also introduced subtargeting to the series, so shooting people in the crotch or blasting their heads clear off their shoulders are perfectly viable tactics.
  • You could kill all the adults in a town and buy back the children's affections with gifts. They don't care if you murder their parents in cold blood, if you give them toys, they will love you.
• Fallout
  • Fallout 2:
    • You can force a conman, at gunpoint, to dig-up a grave where he has buried loot. Halfway through, he sheepishly removes a booby-trapped landmine and hands it to you. A popular choice is to wait until he's finished digging, and...
    Chosen One: Hey Lloyd! CATCH!
    • A mother living in the outskirts of Vault City asks you to enter the city and rescue her husband from being enslaved. If playing as a male, you have the option to pressure her for sex in exchange, and she'll go close the curtain so their young son doesn't hear what comes next.
    • In Modoc, you can persuade mayor Jo into cutting off his finger as a way of settling a deal. You can, of course, change your mind about taking part in the deal afterwards. "Now, take your finger and saute it in a light garlic sauce. Very tasty dish!" The guy in question doesn't react well to your prank and, after bandaging his hand, attacks you.
    • Broken Hills, leading a midget down a well, and then leaving them down there with the… things.
    • Just helping the anti-mutant group in Broken Hills condemns their settlement and all its occupants. Turns out the humans can't survive so well on their own…
    • Mr. Bishop hires you to assassinate the vice president of the NCR. You could just strap an explosive to his son and blow both of them up. You could possibly get the childkiller rank for this.
    • You can destroy the nuclear reactor in a peaceful ghoul settlement, destroying the lives of dozens of peaceful mutants and poisoning the water of a nearby city, forcing them to become refugees.
    • Annoyed by all those kids who pickpocket you? Get revenge by arming the explosives in your inventory, then reverse-stealing them into their inventory (or get them to steal the armed bombs from you).
    • One must be careful with pickpockets and explosives. The pickpocketing children immediately try to fence anything they steal to nearby merchants, and explosive timers don't count down while in merchant inventories. The game, however, does remember the timer's state — buying the explosives back from the merchant will lead to a bit of a surprise.
    • The game specifically gives you the option to aim your weapon at the victim's crotch. In the very first village of Fallout 1, within 5 minutes of starting a new game, you can smash a young child in the nuts with a sledgehammer. Alternately, you could go back to that raider who used to kick your ass, and introduce his groin to your brand new powerfist.
    • Seducing a hillbilly son or daughter results in a Shotgun Marriage, unless you're a smooth talker. This hillbilly husband/wife will be entirely useless, and cannot be removed from the party. You can get a quickie divorce in New Reno… or you can sell them into slavery instead for a quick buck. You can also rent them out to a porn studio as a "fluffer" for three bottlecaps, or feed them into a hacked organ extractor (it can remove bowels), but this isn't quite so cruel. Then you can go back to Grisham and tell him that his son/daughter disappeared if you had a divorce or sold him/her to slavery. A heart attack will kill him.
    • Selling party members to slavers not enough for you? Join the slavers yourself and help enslave tribal savages. The fact that you're a tribal yourself won't bother boss Metzger, though the other tribals will be… less than happy about your new career.
    • Give Cassidy some Jet. Order him to shoot up. Watch him have a literal heart attack. When he told you his ticker wasn't so good, he wasn't kidding.
    • Murder nearly every living creature in the game, be they man, woman, child, friendly, hostile, or unawares. There is nothing stopping you.
    • In the first game, you actually can murder every single living thing in the game, including the usually-invincible Overseer if you finish the game with a low enough Karma Meter.
    • There are special ways you could sneakily assassinate the heads of the crime families in New Reno — some rather sadistic. To whit: re-arm Bishop's safe with explosives, then change the combination. Give one of the youngest Wright kids a loaded gun, which results in him shooting his own dad. Give Big Jesus Mordino any kind of chem, even a Nuka-Cola, and watch him suffer a heart attack. Steal Mr. Salvatore's oxygen tank, then enjoy the floating text as he slowly, so slowly, chokes to death.
    • Not to mention you probably got the combination to Bishop's safe by sleeping with his wife. You can also sleep with his daughter, and if you're a man and don't have a condom in your inventory, she'll get pregnant. Yep, you can literally screw that family over.
    • Though your offspring does do well in New Reno, as one of the ending voiceovers will tell you. And it even turned out to be canon in New Vegas.
    • Some of the death animations when killing foes were pure Squee as well. How about turning the foe's insides into bloody gibbage with burst fire, blowing a football-sized hole in their gut with a single bullet, slicing them apart with a laser, melting them into a puddle of goo with plasma, or crisp them with electricity — turn 'em into a neat pile of ash. And, of course, the flamer... set 'em on fire, watch them run around in flames before collapsing.
    • There is a character trait in the game that does absolutely nothing other than always causing the bloodiest animation to play when an enemy is killed (otherwise, it only happens on a critical hit). You can only choose two traits during character creation, and all the others have far more useful effects. The fact that the devs assumed that at least some players would intentionally sacrifice stat increases just to see gibs flying ought to tell you all you need to know about Fallout 2's Cruelty Potential.
  • Fallout 3:
    • You can walk out of the Vault, and arm a nuclear bomb in the middle of a major quest hub within five minutes, and get paid for doing so.
    • In a later mission, the leader of a "Matrix"-style simulation of 1950's Americana has gone nuts and begun torturing the other residents. The player is given the choice to help torture them or Mercy Kill them.
    • You can't kill children. The game won't stop you from, say, laughing at a kid you just orphaned, or sentencing another kid to certain death, abandoned and the only human in an entire town in the Wasteland. Unless you use this mod, which makes them killable.
    • In early versions of the game, you could actually, with the help of a perk called "Mr. Sandman," slit the throats of sleeping children. And they'd live, due to being unkillable. This bug even led to a method of gaining infinite XP, until it was patched out. Children are now unkillable even with this perk… unless you use the mod above.
    • It can be done in Fallout 1 and 2, and you'll even get a perk that makes people hate you for it.
    • Not only can you kill children in the first two games, but they have a full suite of death animations. Shooting a child with a flamethrower will cause the poor mite to run around screaming and burning until collapsing into a pile of ash. This was considered sufficiently gruesome that European versions of the game had to be patched to remove children entirely. Unfortunately, this was accomplished by simply rendering them invisible via deleting their graphics, breaking several quests and rendering the source of their floating dialogue inexplicable, as well as infuriatingly not stopping them from pickpocketing you. Ironically, these heard-but-not-seen children could still be killed by stray gunfire.
    • Worst of all, there's the Child at Heart perk, which makes children trust you more easily. If you don't want to be a horrid villain, this makes it easier to protect children, but if you do, it makes kidnapping children for slavers easier…
    • You can find, and turn in to be enslaved or destroyed, a synthetic human who intentionally had his mind wiped. If you do things right, he'll even beg. And you get a Perk for doing so.
    • Even better, you can get the perk AND a sweet, unique gun: Tell Harkness that they are an android, then tell him you'll kill Dr. Zimmer yourself, as otherwise you won't get the perk. You'll get his unique gun, as well as Good Karma. Next, tell Dr. Zimmer that Harkness is the android, and you'll get his perk and Bad Karma, neutralizing the Karma gain from earlier. Now laugh evilly as they wipe his memory and take him away. You could also kill Zimmer and his Bodyguard, but that's not nearly as cruel.
    • If you hate Synths but hate the Institute even more, you can twist the blade further and screw both parties over while simultaneously justifying mind rape and first-degree murder to protect society: First, get permission from Harkness to execute Dr. Zimmer and his bodyguard. Then, convince Harkness to go back with Dr. Zimmer to the Institute. Wait until Dr. Zimmer recites the reset phrase to mind-wipe Harkness. Now open fire before Dr. Zimmer can give Harkness a single command. End result: You just murdered a well-respected and sociable genius and left his robot slave a complete vegetable, constantly requesting that the now-dead Dr. Zimmer give him any command. And the rest of Rivet City will forgive you for eliminating all traces of the Institute on their ship. Legally.
    • You can do the tutorial just beating the ever-living crap out of everyone. The funniest bit? After getting the BB gun, the Kid keeps shooting daddy, who passes out just when the celebratory picture is taken.
    • There is an achievement for sticking a live grenade in someone's pocket, and the game keeps track of how many times you do it with the "Pants Exploded" stat.
    • You can use the fast travel system for some extreme sadism. Get the Experimental MIRV (a nuclear catapult that fires 8 mini nukes shotgun style), go to the center of Megaton, and fire straight up. Fast travel to Megaton and you'll be right outside the town. Wait a few seconds and walk in. The only living thing in that area is you.
    • You can take a perk allowing you to become a cannibal. Enough said.
    • In what may be the most despicable example, you can make a distraught man kill himself by jumping off the Rivet City bridge tower or even push him off yourself. Fans will gladly post videos of them nuking Megaton, but there are very few videos of said suicide occurring.
    • In Rivet City, you can give Psycho to Paulie Cantelli, causing him to fatally overdose.
    • Or have Angela seduce Diego, then massacre the wedding party.
    • Even worse than the above examples is using the Enclave's Kill Sat to blow up the Citadel, permanently betraying the Brotherhood and turning them hostile.
    • Kidnapping an innocent NPC with the Mesmetron and a slave collar so you can sell her to the slavers not cruel enough for you? If you have Lingerie, give it to her, and she'll change into it.
    • It's quite possible to threaten a child, MacCready, with horrible torment so he hands over the secret of his friend's food source.
    • And then there's Moira Brown in Megaton. She gives you a quest to help write a Wasteland Survival Guide, but if you want, you can tell her that it's a stupid idea and a waste of time, causing her to change from The Pollyanna to The Eeyore. You're even rewarded for doing this — not only do you get a special "Dream Crusher" perk that lowers the enemy's chances of landing Critical Hits, but Moira's Repair skill will go up and she'll permanently sell goods to you at a 30% discount. And if destroying Moira's life-long dream still isn't enough for you, you can completely ruin her life by nuking Megaton. She'll survive but become a ghoul, and you can tell her in the most dickish way possible, which practically sends the poor woman over the Despair Event Horizon.
  • Fallout: New Vegas
    • A child may ask you to look for their lost teddy bear, Mr. Cuddles. You can find the toy, sell it to a trader for a few caps, and then go back to the child and tell them that Mr. Cuddles is dead. Evil in its most basic form.
    • For more teddy bear fun times, there's a child slave at the Legion encampment who also asks for help getting her bear back. You can tear Sergeant Teddy in half in front of her. This even increases your Caesar's Legion reputation!
    • You can give children Psycho (a dangerous drug that causes extreme anger and aggression) or irradiated bubble gum (both of which understandably reduce your reputation with the community), and "donate" a radioactive supply cache to a refugee camp.
    • Help a grieving widow by retrieving her husband's body. Who is wearing great armor. Wear it and talk to her for the laughs.
    • In Boulder City, you could convince the Khans to let go of the NCR hostages by promising that there will be no retaliation. Once the negotiation is finished, you can have them all executed anyway.
    • Boone wants you to find whoever sold his wife to slavers so that he could kill them. You can do detective work and find out who the real culprit is, or you can have Boone assassinate anyone you feel deserves getting a bullet in the face, and just hope that your speech skill is high enough to keep him from going after you next.
    • That's just the tip of the iceberg. You can kill a man and cook him into a meal before feeding his remains to his former colleagues, crucify a man, reprogram HELIOS One resulting in the slaughter of everyone there, blow up the Brotherhood of Steel bunker before Veronica's eyes, and much more.
    • New Vegas is the only one that offers you the chance to sell your companion to cannibals because they were short a main course.
    • Joanna is a prostitute in Gomorrah, who's slowly dying from her chem addiction and her life is in danger because of the Omertas. She just wants to escape her life and live free with her lover, but the only way she can even do that is if you intervene. Naturally, you don't have to do it for free. You could take what little she has, or force her to fuck you in exchange.
    • You can sell Arcade Gannon into slavery to Caesar, someone he hates with a burning passion. Even better is that you have to choice to mock him for it.
    • One of the quests involves a woman who wants to run away from her family, but needs caps. You can typically talk her out of it, but she'll kill her mother if you choose to stay out of it. She has a My God, What Have I Done? moment, and you could further twist the knife by congratulating her.
    • You can exact revenge on the Legion for releasing a dirty bomb in an NCR held town by doing the same thing to their encampment nearby, killing everyone there including a family of slaves.
    • For consequence-free cruelty, you can attack Yes Man, whose submissive nature means that all he's able to do in response is to beg for mercy and talk about how much he deserves it. Of course, since he's an A.I., he can freely upload himself to any Securitron. Rinse and repeat.
    • There's one Legion quest that involves blowing up the NCR's monorail into New Vegas, then framing an innocent soldier so the Legion Double Agent can continue to operate in secret. One of the methods of killing the soldier, after planting evidence in his room? Distracting him with talk of a great prank you've cooked up, as you pull the pin out of one of his grenades.
    • The Dead Money add-on allows you the option of talking Dog into killing himself by breaking his own neck with a length of chain.
    • Also from Dead Money, you can trick Christine (who has developed claustrophobia from being lobotomized within an Auto-Doc) into taking the elevator and sending her to a cramped room. With the Terrifying Presence perk, you can outright force her to do so. Doing this makes her try to kill you later, however.
    • Lonesome Road has a bunch. Whenever ED-E plays his recordings for you, you have the option to tell him that you don't give a damn about his problems, that he is only a tool for you, insult Dr. Whitley (who is basically his father), and threaten to kill him. There is no punishment for this. At the end of the DLC, you can nuke the Legion and NCR.
  • Fallout 4:
    • A mild example: There are 13 potential companions, and if you max out their Relationship Values, you get a permanent perk. Some can also be romanced. So what do you do with your new BFF? Immediately drop them in favour of someone else, of course, so you can get their perk. For extra "fun", keep all your exes hanging around your home base, so that they will keep on seeing each other, and see you with your new squeeze. And you can have sex in front of your exes.
    • Similar to Fallout 3, you're able to sell a ghoul child into slavery or murder his parents in front of him.
    • You're able to withhold the cure for a deadly disease from a dying child simply because you don't want to deal with the small health penalty.
    • You can give Mama Murphy increasingly stronger Chems until she dies of a heart attack upon using Psycho.
    • A stronghold of Super Mutants is near Diamond City and their guards. It's easy to start a fight between them, then pick up the cool armor of the guards.
    • Angry at Marcy Long for reasons? Find her dead child's toys and make her carry them. Or just shoot her in the face now that they've patched out her immortality.
    • The Contraptions Workshop DLC allows you to place settlers in pillories and pelt them with various objects. You get an achievement for first putting someone in a pillory.
    • One mod adds additional manufacturing machines to the DLC. These include machines that let you break down human bodies into flesh, blood, and bone. What's more, another machine lets you process the bones into Wonderglue.
    • The Wasteland Workshop DLC allows you to construct gladiator arenas and force NPCs to fight for your amusement. You can also catch dangerous wasteland creatures and stick them in the arenas. So you can give an NPC you don't like a few scraps of cloth for armor and a rolling pin as a weapon and force them to fight against a Savage Deathclaw until you get bored.
    • The Nuka-World DLC, however, takes the cake. For the first time in the series, the player can become a Raider boss and terrorize the Wasteland. You can take over settlements for your Mooks by threatening settlers off of their land, dooming them (and maybe even their children) to wander the wastes in search of a new home and possibly being devoured by mutants, or simply killing them all. You can also use radio transmitters to intimidate settlements close to your Raider camps into supplying them with food and supplies, and kill them off even if they agree. invokedPreston Garvey will call the player out on this and refuse to follow them any further, but will still recognize them as the General of the Minutemen for plot reasons (even if you've murdered hundreds of Minutemen defending the settlements you took over by force in the process).
• Final Fantasy Adventure actually allows you to kill citizens when you're strong enough.
  Citizen: Hello there! Welcome to Topple!
  Boy: This is Topple? Wow, nice. Well where's Wendell?
  Citizen: Hello young man, welcome to Topple!
  Boy: This isn't Wendell! Where can I find it?
  Citizen: Hello young man! Welcome to Topple!
  Boy: YEEEAARRRGGGGHHHHH! *Goes Ax-Crazy and repeatedly slashes the townsperson until he vanishes and dies*
  Citizen's death quote: Hello young man! Welcome to Topple!
• In the Advance and Complete Collection versions of Final Fantasy IV, during Cecil's Trial in the Lunar Ruins, it's possible to be very cruel during various trials (like letting a kid drown, stealing a Megaelixir left at a grave, killing a soldier transformed into a Goblin despite his pleas...) and you'll get away with it. Hold it right there! There's a catch. You won't get one of the strongest weapons of the game if you do that. So, if your sense of humor is that horrid, forget casting Holy by simply swinging that sword.
  • In The After Years, you have to return the Eidolons to their senses in order to use them. However, you won't get their Bestiary entries if you do that. To obtain them, you have to kill them (the only exceptions are Ifrit and Titan, which are obligatory to recruit and you'll have their entries as well). Also, you can kill Asura and Leviathan, but you'll get their entries even if you don't. HOWEVER! Spare both of them and you won't get Bahamut's entry. This is what you can call a dilemma.
    • Another cruelty you can do in this game is kill all the Sylphs, despite the fact that you can defeat only a group to get their entry (not that makes it any better). But like above, kill all of them and you won't be able to Summon them. So weight your actions.
• Final Fantasy VI features a sequence where you can save Cid by catching fish. Fail the fishing minigame, and he dies. However, many players fail the minigame on purpose — partly because of this trope, partly because it's an annoying minigame, and partly because Cid's death is generally considered to be one of the most tragic moments of the franchise.
• Final Fantasy VII has one part where you can be a total asshat to Red XIII. When the party reaches the beach town from Junon for the first time, Red XIII sits in the shade and notices how his tail loves to bat the soccer ball the kids are playing with. You can smash the ball to Red XIII and hit him in the face, causing him to growl, but that is it. Best part is you can do this endlessly and Red XIII won't be mad at you later.
  • There is another part in the game where you get to be cruel and it's a part of the storyline: Around disc 3, after Tifa manages to escape from Shinra, Scarlett confronts Tifa and slaps her in the face. You then get to press O and slap Scarlett back over and over again until she gives up. Safe to assume that at least a few people made a separate save file just so they can go back and play the slapping mini game.
  • When you first visit the Sector 5 Slums, there's a kid talking in his sleep about his treasure in the drawer. If you open it, you get his 5 gil. When you return after the destruction of Sector 7, you can see him upset about it. However, if you leave it alone, he saves up and buys you a Turbo Ether.
  • On Disc 2, when you go to get the submarine, there are two Shinra grunts and their superior inside. These are the guys Cloud met on Disc 1 while posing as a grunt himself, and as such, you can either take them prisoner... or just kill 'em dead.
  • There is a bird's nest in North Corel with a mother cockatrice and her chicks. You can choose to leave it alone or go for a treasure, but are strongly encouraged to leave it alone if either Tifa or Aeris are in your party. If you choose to go for it, the reward is ten Phoenix Downs, but first you have to kill the mother cockatrice. And the girls will make fun of Cloud's hair.
  • You can be really nice to Aerith, or really mean. You can accuse her of being the slum drunk, leave her to fight a group of angry soldiers rather than doing anything to actually help, inform her that Tifa is your girlfriend when she's not, and after sharing a romantic date at the gold saucer, you can answer her question about whether you like her by saying that you don't. If you're feeling particularly cruel, you can go out of your way to woo Tifa, just to rub salt in the wound.
  • Shinra's TV network is broadcasting the Junon parade all around the world. If you do badly enough, the broadcast's assistant director gets fired for the awful ratings. This might even be unintentional Cruelty Potential, given that Cloud never realizes the director got fired and the parade minigame's controls are so finicky you might fail no matter what happens.
• In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, you have the ability to manipulate gravity. You use this power to toss monsters into one another and make impossible jumps. You can also use it to toss random civilians around. Some of them drop money when thrown. Old ladies are the most likely to drop Gil. It's like they want you to abuse your powers.
  • They do: There are achievements for getting an old lady who comes only when you've thrown a lot of them around, and one for throwing guards about and getting sent to prison.
• Final Fantasy IX
  • One of the Knights of Pluto wants to quit the Alexandrian army to become a writer, and asks Steiner if he can leave the Knights. Steiner can either say that he'll eventually let the knight leave, but first he has to find Princess Garnet, or he can be a Jerkass and yell at the knight, telling him he can't leave before basically telling him to get off his lazy behind and find the princess. Either way, the poor knight runs off in tears.
• Final Fantasy X: The wonderful Thunder Plains, which are constantly plagued by thunder and lightning. You can take shelter near very tall pillars designed to divert the lightning, jump out of the way of a strike with good timing, or — if you're feeling particularly sadistic — let Tidus get struck by lightning, over and over again. For as long as you want. (Unfortunately, this feature was removed in Final Fantasy X-2.)
  • Speaking of thunder... Rikku, the Genki Girl Wrench Wench, has a Fear of Thunder. Because of how targeting works in this game, you can cast lightning-elemental spells on her endlessly (as long as she has HP to burn) to see how she reacts.
    • There's also a scene where the rest of the Party tries to leave Rikku behind in the Thunder Plains. By using the Circle button to walk, the Player can join in on ditching her.
    • For that matter, you can inflict any kind of cruelty on other party members; petrification, poison, any other element... possibilities are endless. Why you'd want to is another matter entirely.
• In Final Fantasy X-2, Clasko asks Yuna to let him board the Celsius airship in order to find a spot to fill his dream by opening a chocobo ranch. The choice to deny him is labeled "Sorry, loser."
• Final Fantasy XII: There is only one enemy in the game that will not attack you on sight: A Garif hunter, who is walking around on the plains near his hometown, hunting animals for food. You have to kill him to fill out your bestiary. Multiple times. He also stands no chance against your party of mighty god slayers.
• Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII:
  • In the Dead Dunes, occasionally you come across tiny little lizards off the beaten paths, who are absolutely no threat to you whatsoever... that you can kill by attacking. With everyone killed, they either drop a Lizard Tail (for side-quests), or unappraised items (which when appraised, are good sources for gil and some rare consumable items). If you kill enough lizards, you get an achievement.
  • Soldiers wander around Luxerion, and you can fight them just like any monster, though you have to enrage them by attacking multiple times... they don't come back after you defeat them, at any point, unlike their contemporaries in Yusnaan.
  • Running around with Lightning having her sword out is normally enough to startle random NPCs; actually swinging it directly at them will often cause them to cower or flee in terror.
• The underrated tactical superhero RPG Freedom Force practically LIVES by this trope. Every building, vehicle, tree, NPC, etc. is damageable & destroyable. This is somewhat balanced by the fact that you lose experience (or "prestige") if you cause too much damage and certain levels require you to protect specific landmarks, but that doesn't make whittling down an apartment building to near-death, then punching a civilian into it from two blocks away, therefore causing the entire thing to collapse any less hilarious.

G-K

• Genshin Impact:
  • Played with. There is a daily commission quest where the player is tasked by Timmie to feed the ducks. There is nothing stopping the player from killing them after feeding them, but if you do, Timmie will exclaim that he "saw what you did to those poor ducks!" and that he would tell his mom on you. Come back another day and you will receive another quest where his mother decides to call you out on this and you have to make him his favourite dish to make it up to him. Of course, you can be sarcastic about it too when you hand it to him. Either way, you'll get the achievement "Taking Responsibility for Your Actions" and 5 Primogems.
  • Speaking of Timmie, there will be a flock of pigeons that accompanies Timmie on his usual location. Players would discover that these pigeons will get scared and scatter away on their first encounter with Timmie, in which he gives them hell for scaring the pigeons as they're the only company he has while waiting for his father. The problem is, those pigeons also served as a good location to farm fowls for cooking so naturally players started to kill Timmie's pigeons for the easy fowls. It didn't help that any time there's a new character released, many players would take them out for a "test run" to see how fast and effective they are on killing his pigeons.
  • The daily commission quest "Clean Up At Dawn II" requires you to help the Dawn Winery maids in cleaning up the piles of leaves that are mixed in with the haystack. Anemo abilities are the preferred way to do this, and the maids will appreciate your help. However, you can actually burn a haystack using Pyro abilities. While doing so instantly completes the quest and still gives you the rewards, the maids will call you out on it, fearing the possibility that they will be fired by Adelinde.
  • You can also attack, but not kill, the pets in Mondstadt by freezing them or sucking them into the whirlwind and sending them flying. Most players tend to do this accidentally while trying to find a way to pet them, an option that doesn't actually exist in the game as of current, and Hilarity Ensues. If you happen to drop them into the water, however, they'll never respawn again.
  • Some of the dialogue options for the Traveler can be quite cruel. A prime example of this is at the end of Childe's story quest where, after using his Foul Legacy Transformation to effortlessly defeat a horde of Ruin Guards in a Curb-Stomp Battle, is left limp from the strain, and one of the options you can choose for the Traveler to say is to off Childe right there simply because he's a Fatui Harbinger. It only takes family talk to convince them out of it, given Childe's own protective feelings towards his younger brother Teucer, but the malice is there for the player to choose at their own discretion.
• GLITCHED: Rather than choosing to save Gus when he gets hit with the glitch, you can opt to leave him to his fate. Your save file will get corrupted as well if you do this and trying to continue the game from that save will result in a black screen with random sprites floating down the screen. Better start a new game and save Gus!
• Golden Sun:
  • In the prologue, you encounter a guy who's apparently wounded and asks if you think he's going to die. Answer "no", and he realizes he's not actually hurt. Answer "yes", and he dies.
  • The game turns off Random Encounters in Sol Sanctum once everybody in your party reaches Level 3. You can avoid this by getting Jenna killed before she hits the cap; she's not going to be in your party much longer, anyway. Might want to loot her stuff before she goes, too.
  • Ignore those oddly-placed trees in Kolima Junction. Actually, those trees were people, and because of your neglect, an innocent girl just got washed away downstream to an unknown fate.
  • You can drop a crate on one of the Kibombo guards in The Lost Age and watch him flail around underneath it.
  • Dark Dawn brings Slap Psynergy to the table. Its main canon uses are bopping statues on the nose, slapping sleeping things to wake them up, and knocking Djinn and friendly pirates down from high places. Said pirate is understandably peeved with us for doing so. You can also ring the emergency gong in Tonfon, sending the city into a panic, and then blame a guard for the false alarm.
  • Dark Dawn also has two locations where you can see seemingly-inaccessible Mercury Djinn. The trick, as it turns out, is hitting them with Fireballs so they dive in the water to cool off, and then you either drain the water or find a local fisherman to get the Djinni for you (by catching it on a fishhook).
• .hack//G.U. gives you Chim Chims, whose only purpose of existence is to get kicked by the players and have their cores used to open some doors in the dungeons. It doesn't stop there... you can try to run into those little critters with your steam bike, and the game even rewards you for it.
  • And don't forget the Lucky Animals. They can be even cuter than the Chim Chims. And you're rewarded for kicking/running over them by the Lucky Animals themselves giving you special bonuses for being fast enough to kick them, such as item sets, money, temporarily increased stats, and a few saves from game over. Kicking the Unlucky Animals doesn't really give you any bonuses; it just rids you of any negative effects they give you if you don't.
    • It's worth noting, however, that most of the Lucky Animals are actually happy for you if you can manage to kick them.
    • Hell, there's a sidequest to kick all the lucky and unlucky animals, for which you get even more rewards. Same with kicking as many Chim Chims as possible. Kick the Dog in its most literal sense.
• In Jade Empire, many of the Closed Fist options are downright cruel, especially the final choice of poisoning the Water Dragon's body with blood from your rebelling companions. The scene is actually a Tear Jerker, as the Water Dragon sadly looks on while you pour the blood into the machine. You then cruelly take her power.
  • A very poignant example happens in the first chapter, when you have to help your injured fellow student Kia Min get back in fighting shape. (Smiling Mountain offers you a Technique if you can top the record for most opponents defeated simultaneously, and you need her to get the numbers high enough.) Min wants you to see a merchant and get a healing ointment to fix her up, but you can instead get a cheaper version that just acts as a anesthetic. If you do, Min will think she's healed and agree to participate in the challenge, but will quickly get knocked out - and she ends up aggravating her injury and crippling herself in the process, ensuring she'll never be able to practice martial arts for the rest of her life. Which turns out to be very short, since she'll get killed when the school is raided later on, due to her injury. You can even tell her afterwards that she has only herself to blame for entrusting her recovery to someone who might have their own agenda (since it's to your advantage that she's too hurt to fight effectively in the challenge) and that she could have solved her problem on her own if she actually tried. This is all entirely in accordance with the Closed Fist philosophy.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • You can not only run up and smack the Queen of Hearts (who "dies" in one hit) with your Keyblade and she falls in the battle with the card guards, but you can also make Captain Hook's day miserable. You can simply light his pants on fire and cause him to run around in mid-air. Or knock him off the ship and watch as he yells "YOU'LL NOT GET ME OTHER HAND!!!" before he almost hits the water. Even more satisfying when you light his pants on fire and he puts it out right over the water. Goofy is also the perfect height for you to throw barrels right into his face.
  • Captain Hook serves as this again in the boss fight against him as Ventus. If you can get Hook to the edge of the arena you're fighting him on, he'll occasionally try to keep his balance to avoid falling into the water around you both, where the crocodile is currently swimming. If you hit him while he's off balance, he'll fall into the water and take minor damage as the crocodile bites him, causing him to run back onto dry land. However, he'll immediately start swinging his sword wildly shortly after recovering... Hook is also one of a surprisingly high number of bosses in this game who lack Contractual Boss Immunity, so you can freeze him in place with a Stop or Slow spell to inflict even more misery on him without reprisal.
• In Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], should one of your dream eater allies get KO'd (and you usually have to try to get this to happen, since they're generally Made of Iron), a timer will start ticking down, and if it expires before you revive it, the dream eater will fade away, and leave behind a dream piece. The dream pieces left behind in this fashion can be ones that aren't currently available through other means, meaning you can potentially create some new types of Dream Eaters much earlier then normal by repeatedly sacrificing other ones (Namely, the ones generated by AR cards, which are easily replaced).
• Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning allows you to toggle friendly fire so you can freely slaughter helpless villagers, one of the loading screen tips even encourages you to do it. And of course there are the obligatory dialogue options that let you blackmail/extort people.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • You can destroy a personal assistance droid on Dantooine in the first game, then tell its distraught owner that it's still out there somewhere so that she'll run into the fields searching for it and get killed by the wolves in the process.
  • Then there is the whole Sandral-Matale feud, which, depending on how you played it, could have a happy ending — or you can let every NPC involved in it kill each other. The latter option becomes an amazing example of Comedic Sociopathy.
  • Outside the Sith Academy on Korriban, you will see a student, Mekel, making a bunch of hopefuls stand at attention for days, with the promise that the last one left can enter the Academy. Needless to say, Mekel is just doing this for shits and giggles. You can convince some of them of the truth. But it is so much fun to convince one of the poor saps that he has, in fact, won, and that his last challenge is to attack the guard by the gate. Goodbye. Zaalbar, despite his Light alignment, finds this amusing. Evil really DOES taste good.
  • The ultimate example is near the end of the game if you choose to become evil. You get the opportunity to force Zaalbar to kill Mission.
  • On the Sea planet Manaan, you've been asked by a worried father, Shaelas, to find his young daughter. Depending on your actions on the quest, you'll be afforded the option to shake him down for extra credits for his information, before finally telling him "I killed your daughter, Shaelas. And I'll kill you if you tell anyone about this. Now give me those credits!"
  • The final test of the Sith Academy of Korriban would leave the player character alone with the academy master, Uthar, and his assistant, Yuthura. If you suck up to Yuthura enough over the course of the academy's initial tests, she asks for your help in betraying her master during the final test. With him dead, the two of you will share power at the academy. You can accept, and then go rat her out to Uthar, who rewards you by advancing you further through the academy tests and gives you poison to plant on Yuthura, so that she will be weakened during the final tests. The fun part is going back to Yuthura, showing her the poison, and telling her what happened. She will chide you for endangering the plan, but give you some poison of her own to use on the headmaster. The really fun part is going ahead and using the poison on both of them, leaving them to come to the slow and horrible realization during the final test that they've been triple crossed. Then you kill them. It's even better to first lecture them about how their betrayal-happy ways made them way too easy to fool.
  • The best part about being an absolute monster of a dark sider is how gleefully HK-47 reacts to your cruelty. Get your dark side score high (low?) enough and he'll come right out gushing over you and the number of new ways that the exile has taught him to be cruel. The dark side conversation option is something to the effect of "Stick with me, and you'll learn a few things," to which he replies "Oh yes, Master, I already have."
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
  • After you defeat Master Atris, you have the option of letting her live. Or killing her. Which, granted, is pretty standard in KOTOR. However, for the sake of sheer cruelty, locking her in a chamber with Sith Holocrons for the rest of her life, letting her go gradually insane is the recommended choice.
  • Never pass up the chance to ensure the untimely yet amusing demise of some thugs on Nar Shaddaa in the sequel, even while Light Side.
  • The front for The Exchange on Citadel Station has only one guard. He won't let you in if you haven't got to the right point in the story, but you can still kill him. If you leave the area and come back, you'll find he's been replaced, and you can kill him too. Coming back a third time, you'll find there's no replacement and you have to use the intercom.
  • You can find a trapped Mandalorian on Dxun; his blaster rifle is broken and he's trapped on a hill along with remote explosives and surrounded by huge hungry creatures. You can help him, or just blow him up with his own explosives.

L-N

• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II, if you choose to turn down the request for the final quest, helping Anton meet back up with Sharon, the choice to refuse is labeled, "See ya, sucker."
• A mild example occurs in Legaia II: Duel Saga. In the town of Yuno, there is a small child building a massive snowman. Lang has the option, when the kid isn't around, to go up to the snowman and knock it down; the kid is visibly upset at his hard work being trashed, but sets off to rebuild it. Do this enough times, and the kid calls Lang out on this, and Lang receives the title of "Bully".
• You can complete the Bakumatsu (Ninja) Chapter of Live A Live by either doing a Pacifist Run and avoiding unnecessary kills (I.E everyone except the undead creatures and monsters you encounter. Bosses fall into said categories) or becoming death incarnate and murdering every NPC in the level, including women and harmless merchants. Either way will reward you with a powerful weapon for you to use in the final chapter.
• Loser Reborn: On the left side of the castle, the only way to recruit the western class characters is to brainwash them via headpatting after doing something bad to them.
• In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, it's possible to convert Luigi's HP to money as soon as you get the Hammer techniques. With Mario on front, have Luigi hit him with the hammer. Now try to do a High Jump. While Luigi is doing the High Jump, have Mario jump. Luigi jumps back in shock, he loses 1 HP, and you get 1 coin. Great way to grind for coins. You can keep doing this as long as you want until Luigi is left with 1 HP. Even then, you can just use a few of your 30+ Mushrooms on your inventory to recover Luigi's HP... only to have Mario hit him in the crotch again.
  • Before you get the Hammer or Hand techniques, it is still possible for the brother in the back to hit the one in the front with these moves. Luigi/Mario will then look back in anger. It's tons of fun to do, and you don't even lose HP for doing it.
• Mass Effect:
  • You come across an asari commando who was betrayed by the leader she was devoted to, fed to a giant sentient plant, and (out of thanks for freeing her) gives you the critical Plot Coupon you need to keep going? Nope, sorry, she's too dangerous to let live. Bullet to the brainpan.
  • There is little that is more satisfying than punching out an annoying reporter on live galactic television.
  • That fanboy who you meet in the Citadel and wants to help you out? Point a gun at him, so he'll piss his pants and run crying. (Surprisingly, this is also one of the correct solutions. Not being cruel enough or not being nice enough when dealing with him will end badly.)
  • It's probably not considered very cruel, but the game offers you the chance to let Fist live, or murder him as being "too dangerous to be left alive." What probably makes it more cruel is that none of your companions object to his death, and if you bring Wrex with you, you don't even get the choice (since Wrex has a bounty on Fist). Same situation with the warehouse workers who hesitate when you show up.
  • The renegade Shepard is generally a pretty terrifying person. Apparently pushing people up against walls/sticking guns in their faces is a normal way to end arguments.
  • A subplot on Noveria involves a Corrupt Corporate Executive even by the standards of the planet, an Internal Affairs agent investigating him, and a Cool Old Guy turian with incriminating evidence against the executive. You could give the evidence to the agent and convince the turian to testify… or you could sell the turian the evidence, then tell the executive about the agent, who then calls her into his office to fire him, and they both kill each other. With Shepard calmly standing right outside waiting for them to finish.
  • Noveria offers the opportunity for Paragon Cruelty Potential, with an asari representative who asks you to place a spying device on a businessman she's investigating. You can agree to help, tell the businessman what she's planning (so he can feed her false information), then tell the representative what you've done, correctly deducing that her employers are not going to be happy with her. For even more fun, tell her that you've done what she asked and end up getting paid by both of them.
  • A bunch of innocent colonists have been taken over by a powerful being, and are forced to attack you against their will. You're given a device that can deal with them harmlessly, and their friends beg with you several times not to kill them. Even if you run out of the device (it attaches to your grenades), melee attacks will render them harmless. So of course, the most reasonable course of action is to go in guns blazing and kill every last one of them.
    • And at every dialogue prompt up to this point, you can choose to tell your team, in essence, "Fuck saving them, that'll take too long. Shoot to kill!"
  • Mass Effect is one of the only games (at least until 3) in which you can casually commit genocide, executing the last Rachni in existence. Who it should be noted was imprisoned, tortured, experimented on, and had her children taken from her and turned irreversibly insane. You have to select the option twice, and one of your squadmates will desperately plead for you not to do it, just to be clear how much of a bastard you have to be to do this.
• Mass Effect 2 picks up right where the first game left off in allowing you to be as much of a renegade/bastard as you want to be.
  • One of your squadmates, Samara, is an Asari justicar who will ask for your help in tracking down a dangerous fugitive who also happens to be her daughter. If you feel that said fugitive doesn't deserve to die for their crimes, then if your paragon or renegade score is high enough, you can choose to kill Samara instead, and the fugitive takes her place on your team.
  • This video shows what can happen if you pick the absolute worst options throughout the first two games (including, but not limited to, screwing around and letting the captured Normandy crew members die, romancing Liara, who eventually becomes the Shadow Broker and cheating on her with Garrus, alienating the entire Krogan species, killing Samara and letting Morinth take her place, letting Garrus [and most of your other specialists] die on the suicide mission, and letting Zaeed die after the SM by killing him during his loyalty mission). The end result is that the only people left to help you save the galaxy are a computer AI, a pilot and an amoral serial killer who has a tenuous loyalty to you. Almost everyone else is dead. Good going.
  • Something that was featured in a promotional trailer for the game was the ability to Renegade Interrupt an uncooperative mercenary by pushing him through a window... on the upper floors of a skyscraper.
  Mercenary: I've got nothing more to say to you. (Renegade Interrupt prompt) If you t-
  (Shepard steps forward and shoves the man right out the window)
  Mercenary: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
  Shepard: How about "goodbye"?
  • Downloadable squadmate Zaeed gives you a quest to hunt down a man who double-crossed him. Zaeed sets a fuel refinery on fire in the process, and keeping in mind that dozens of workers are trapped inside, renegade Shepard will reprimand him only by saying, "Hey! The next time you plan on blowing something up, tell me you're going to do it first!"
  • The fanboy from the first game makes a triumphant return in the second. And instead of pointing a gun at his face, you can actually shoot him. In Shepard's defense, he really was asking for it. (If you think shooting him is a bit harsh, you can also knee him in the crotch.)
    • You can then stick up for him to the people who were setting him up and lie to him about what a good job he did setting up a really abusive relationship with your fan. Then see below for how you can continue treating him.
  • That reporter from the first game? You have to opportunity to punch her again. "I've had enough of your disingenuous assertions."
  • Some players take advantage of Anyone Can Die to kill off characters, despite it obviously being detrimental to do so. If you intentionally choose not to upgrade the Normandy or do any of your crew's side-missions, it is possible to kill everyone in the final mission — including Shepherd him/herself.
  • Analysis: Defenceless herbivores are no match for guided missiles.
    • The Galactic Humane Society would like to remind you that animals are people too.
  • Many of the Loyalty Missions allow Shepard to help the squad work through their emotional baggage... or make it worse. Force Jack to become even more violent and murderous, let Garrus and Zaeed become obsessed with vengeance, deny Kasumi the one thing she has that remains of her lover, deliberately fail Samara's and Thane's missions (which also makes it's impossible for them to be Loyal to you). The Renegade option to Tali's mission, publicly exposing her father's experiments, in particular is incredibly cruel not only on a personal level, leaving Tali absolutely devastated, but also dumps the Migrant Fleet into political chaos and makes it impossible to peacefully resolve the Quarian/Geth war.
  • Jacob's Loyalty mission ends with confronting the monster responsible for everything that happened there after the crash. You could bring him in to custody, or leave him to face the consequences of his actions. But the most delicious option is to leave him with a half-charged pistol; not enough to defend himself, but enough to give him the option of ending it himself.
  • Properly understanding the mechanics of the Suicide Mission allows you to get various squad-mates killed in a variety of ways. The most pointless being those lost if you didn't properly upgrade the Normandy, or if you chose the wrong biotic specialist for the Long Walk.
• Mass Effect 3 makes cruelty a lot less entertaining. The list of people you can kill — you, personally — can include Mordin, shooting him in the back to stop him from curing the genophage; Wrex, after he finds out you sabotaged it; the Virmire Survivor (or you can let your squad-mate do it); one of Samara's daughters; Legion, if you let the quarians wipe out the geth, in which case you can shoot him four times. Preventable suicides are Samara and Tali. Avoidable deaths that you can ensure through negligence include Miranda and Jack. Renegade Shepard goes from being an amusing jerk to a monster, and most of the cruelty options also cost you war assets.
  • That situation where Shepard can heartlessly gun down Samara's daughter? That's only possible if you allow Samara to commit suicide in front of you, which she flat-outs says she only does to ensure her daughter's survival, thus making Samara's death pointless. There is absolutely no reason to do this except to be pointlessly cruel.
  • In the Leviathan DLC, you find a severed Husk head. You can activate the experiment it's a part of and it sends a powerful electric shock into it, where it screams in pain. Do it enough times (at least the first time you come to the lab) and it will explode.
  • With the "right" choices and assuming you don't botch the Crucible, you can get at least 7 races wiped out. The Rachni (kill the Queen in the first game, or don't rescue her/her replacement in the third), the Krogan (sabotage the cure, and kill Mordin so he can't try to fix it after the war assuming that's even an option), the hanar and drell (save Jondum Bau over disabling the virus used to deactivate the Kahje homeworld defenses), the Quarians (side with the Geth), the Geth (choose the Destroy option), and the Reapers (again, Destroy, though the Reapers at this point deserve it).
  • And if you botch the Crucible? Everyone is screwed.
  • You do get funnier options in the Citadel DLC, when you can blow up the stock at a used skycar dealer's and listen to him yelling "NOOOOO" over the loudspeaker. This doesn't even earn you Renegade points.
• Exploring in Might and Magic 2, you can stumble across a peaceful goblin village... and choose to attack. It was filled with standard goblins, but as many as the game could handle, and with the right spells you could kill them with ease, essentially committing genocide.
  • When the series went 3-D, it became possible to also annihilate friendly villages as well, including the eventual release of a spell called Armageddon that wiped out everything except your party.
  • Dark Messiah has the standard "personal" methods of killing things: cutting them up with blades, bludgeoning them with staves, shooting them with arrows, setting them on fire/electrocuting/blowing them up/freezing them solid with spells, stabbing them in the back... and that's before you start exercising the game's specifically designed capacity for creative killings. Almost every single object may be hurled as a weapon (by hand or with the telekinesis spell), that freeze spell can make charging enemies slip and slide... off the cliff, charm spells will make them attack each other, and there are a disturbing number of spiked walls that seem to serve no other purpose aside from being something convenient for kicking enemies into as a change of pace from kicking them off ledges or into bonfires or fireplaces. Of course, since you play the spawn of a demonlord and the game forces you to choose between which of the two love interests you want to kill, this is only to be expected.
• In Might and Magic 6, if you're going for Master Dark Magic, you can head to Free Haven and cast Armageddon for an instant evil party. Just make sure you hotfoot it to Paradise Valley before going to a castle...
• In Might and Magic 7, it's quite easy to bait a pack of monsters into a town and watch them slaughter the helpless peasants. Not only that, but in the tutorial mission, you get rewarded for doing this. Normally, you have to buy a lute for 500 gold and you can accept a magic wand in exchange for performing a later favor for the mercenary guild. Get the NPCs who offer these two things killed by monsters and you can loot the items from their corpses.
• Neverwinter Nights:
  • The module Aribeth's Redemption allows the player to continuously needle Aribeth about Fenthick, and being the lawful good suicidally depressed Elvish former paladin she is, she sits and takes all of your insults as if she deserves it.
  • The evil options for every Optional Sexual Encounter in The Bastard of Kosigan. And the evil options for dealing with the prisoners in the Inquisition's basement in Cologne.
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer has so many cases of this, as you're required to eat souls to survive and much of the conflict comes down to how much you get into it. Particularly famous ones include eating the souls of friends or family of your companions (or eating their souls and crafting them into magic items), sending a family of merchants or a mentally unstable teenage girl to the hands of a tribe of cannibals, burning down an entire forest and consuming its kindly spirits along the way, converting the corpse of a wise bear god into an undead abomination, lying to your companions and having them be so devoted to you that they ignore it, betraying the entire main plot of the crusade into the afterlife, killing an angel and leaving his daughter mortally wounded to be devoured by demons, and turning yourself into a god-killing abomination.
• NieR: Automata:
  • The game allows you to attack and kill any machine lifeform you encounter, even if they're not hostile (though killing certain plot-critical ones, or killing too many NPCs in Pascal's village, will trigger a Non-Standard Game Over). The Amusement Park in particular is easy game for this. The entire place is crawling with machine lifeforms, but aside from some enemies on the roller coaster and the stage boss, all of them are more interested in celebrating and having fun than attacking the player. Meanwhile, 9S constantly urges 2B to go on the attack because he doesn't trust them, and if you set 9S' companion AI to be more aggressive, he'll do it for you.
  • There are a number of other Non-Standard Game Over endings that are reached by abandoning certain missions and characters at certain points, including 9S abandoning his mission to provide backup for 2B at the start of the game, refusing to come to the aid of Pascal's village when it comes under attack, and leaving an injured 9S to die in the Copied City. You have to do all of them if you want the achievement for getting every ending.
  • 9S can equip a chip that causes hacked robots to scream in agony as they explode. It has no practical use, and only exists to make the player feel like an evil bastard. It also fits oddly well with 9S' Sanity Slippage and increasing hatred and nihilism over the course of the game.

O-Q

• Octopath Traveler:
  • Excluding any quest-relevant NPCs, you can freely beat the crap out of any NPC you come across with Olberic or H'aanit's Path Actions. You can even go as far as beating up a pregnant woman.
  • Therion can steal from most NPCs as well; you can have him take a memento from a widow or candy from children.
  • In Victor's Hollow, there is an Orphanage Matron standing in front of her orphanage, blocking the door. There's nothing stopping you from beating the daylights out of her to gain access to the orphanage. Inside are two children (who you can steal from, things including a glass marble, and a stuffed toy) there's also a chest in there. The contents of the chest? A bag of coins. Let that sink in for a moment.
  • In Sunshade, there is a woman who is guarding a door. She came to the town to find her mother, but the woman tragically died before they could reunite. Inside is the the dress her mother left her. It is possible to Challenge/Provoke her and take it too.
  • You can also send a bunch of wild animals or animated skeletons to smash people, or recruit random villagers to have them attack enemies for you.
  • As an added bonus, with a few exceptions, this doesn't actually hinder things — it makes for a particularly hilarious form of Gameplay and Story Segregation.
• Odin Sphere: It's always to your advantage to slaughter animals that you personally raise from birth. Most notably are chickens, which, upon being hatched, grow up and lay eggs as you feed them seeds. Once you've gotten all the eggs you want from them, you can then kill the bird, harvest its meat, and turn it over to a Pooka chef who will in turn cook a succulent meal that will raise your stats.
• The Outer Worlds: First things first, you can kill everybody, including allies. But an evil Unplanned Variable is really encouraged to be more creatively monstrous in their villainy. Actively sabotage the Halcyon colonies so they'll descend into anarchy and starvation! Sell out the kindhearted scientist who saved your life for a quick buck! Reforge the criminally incompetent Board into a genuinely evil and fascistic dictatorship! Emotionally abuse your crew members! Turn communities against each other! Trick a snobby woman into being beaten to death by robots! Murder Parvati's girlfriend or Ellie's parents right in front of them and then browbeat them for objecting! The sky is the limit.
• In the Paper Mario games, there's the Whacka, an absolutely adorable little guy and a member of an endangered species. If you hit him with your hammer, you get the Whacka's Bump, which is a fantastic healing item. Go back and do it enough times, and you'll eventually have killed the last Whacka.
  • And then there's that toad in the station that talks about the cute little Whacka and how she wants to protect it or something. Little does she know that you plan on killing it. Once Whacka's dead, she still won't even know what just happened, and comment on how she hasn't seen him in a while, clueless the whole time that his last remains are now part of a delicious meal. He'll also explode in the first game like a defeated enemy, and even drop a few coins or even flowers (if drop-rate increasing badges are equipped).
  • The game literally asks you: "How do you sleep at night?" However, you need at least two of them to get 100% Completion.
  • Much later in the game, a few scenes will happen where, after using a companion's skill, several copies of them will appear all claiming to be the real one. Hitting the real one by accident would be understandable (at which point the remaining Doppelgangers attack). However, with Kooper, rather than bringing back some duplicates, is surrounded by very poorly disguised monsters. You can still hit Kooper, though, and he'll call you out on it.
  • In Super Paper Mario, if the player talks to Whacka, he'll remark that he doesn't think anything can ruin the nice day. That's before Mario showed up with his hammer. It's made worse after he dies: his Cragnon friend comes looking for him, and gets pretty depressed when she finds out he's gone. Tippi says the girl's heart is about to burst.
  • Try talking to him after you've hit him a few times. With each whack, he gets steadily more incoherent and confused… So even if you don't outright kill the poor thing, you've probably given him irreversible brain damage. Is 100% Completion really worth the cost of your soul? Especially since you don't actually get anything for it?
  • In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, you can push your partners into water or even spikes; and the best part is that they don't lose any HP from it, unlike when Mario falls into them.
  • Also in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, after beating Doopliss for the first time, he steals Mario's identity, and your partners follow the fake Mario, leaving you alone as a mere shadow. When you fight Doopliss at the end of the chapter, your partners are helping him and attacking you. You must defeat Doopliss, but you can also attack and beat your four partners.
• The Persona series:
  • Persona 2's initial protagonist, Tatsuya Suou, is canonically kind of an asshole. Play the game right, and he becomes a nicer person for his experiences. That said, you can also play it wrong. Want to slap your kindest party member while she's having a trauma-induced panic attack? You can do that. Want to cheat on two of the dateable party members with the third? Yeah, you can do that too. Want to kill the headmaster of your school? Totally allowable. Most of the cruel options will instantly lock you out of some of the best Personae in the game, but those last two have no in-game consequences at all. Killing the headmaster does tweak the plot slightly, but not seriously, and it can be argued that he was dead anyway and the other option would have resurrected him. That said, you still confirm his death.
  • Persona 3:
    • Not only can you date all five eligible females at approximately the same time, you *have to* if you want to max out all the social links. (Persona 4 allows you to advance social links with female characters via platonic friendship, 3 doesn't.) There's one scene that calls the player on it, but there are no actual negative consequences so long as one is careful about timing meetups with the various girls.
    • A non-romantic example is the social link of a small child whose family is breaking apart. After one of her parents hits her, the player is provided with the option to tell her that everything was all her fault (possibly the most sadistic example in Persona 3).
    • Persona 3 also includes an aversion, in that, if you act like a total dick to your Social Link members, you can get punished by "reversing" a Social Link, preventing it from advancing (though this isn't permanent). If you're too cruel to them, you can also break the link permanently.
  • Persona 4:
    • The game allows you to cheat with all six datable girls at the same time. And get away with it. Completely.
    • In Golden, however, there is Valentine's Day. All of your girlfriends will invite you out. You can only spend time with one (or reject them all). However, your four party member girlfriends still give you chocolate, but it's very obvious that they can tell something's up.
    • You can still get away with it on Valentine's, if you only date one of the original date options, and then Golden's new addition Marie. Marie's Valentine's scene takes place at a different time to the others, so you don't have to turn anyone down and you still get away with it. For added fun, max Margaret's Social Link and she'll kiss you.
    • The Big Guy Kanji has a massive and obvious crush on Naoto, but there's nothing stopping you from stealing her for yourself.
    • You can also wait until the last possible day to save the kidnapping victims. Your party members will not be happy. Do it to Yukiko, for instance, and Chie will become extremely worried about her. The worst is the last victim, who is generally described as Video Game Caring Potential incarnate. Wait until the last day to save her, then tell a party member that you don't feel like going into the TV to save her. They are horrified and ask you what the hell is wrong with you. This is especially damning because it's counterproductive — party members will have much less time free to Social Link with you if someone is still in the TV, which makes maxing their Links harder, which can prevent you from getting their Ultimate and Tier 3 Personae later on, as well as locking you out of some amazing Personae for yourself. The only reason to do this is to be a jackass.
    • You can kill Nametame. Doing so gets you the Bad Ending, but you can totally murder an innocent man in cold blood. You can also spare him… then betray him and everyone else by siding with the killer, getting you an even worse ending and causing Nametame to be jailed for crimes he never committed.
    • Persona 4 Golden also adds a new ending. Once you discover who the killer is, you have the option to protect him and destroy the last piece of evidence linking him to the crime. To put it into perspective — The true murderer gets away completely scot-free, an innocent man gets sent to prison, two women's murders remain forever unsolved, and everything that investigation team has suffered and endured together over the past year has been rendered completely and utterly pointless, because of you.
  • Persona 5:
    • It continues the tradition by letting you date nine girls at once, four of whom are party members (plus one more in the Royal version). What makes it really cruel is how you get to this point. You act like a charming, gentle hero, who comes in to rescue them from the worst things in their lives and let them be free from people who are making their existences miserable, only to reveal yourself to be just as much of a dick as the people who hurt them. Two of the worst are the formerly-suicidal girl who you help through her debilitating social anxiety and the girl whose father tried to force her into an abusive arranged marriage, but they're all pretty horrific. This time, though, you do not get away with it scot-free…
    • Yuuki Mishama's Confidant always ranks up, regardless of your choices. You also have a lot more Jerkass or snarky dialogue choices in his interactions, and you can choose them without punishment. He's The Friend Nobody Likes to the Phantom Thieves, so it makes sense.
• Pillars of Eternity lets you indulge in an astounding amount of evil and offers delightful variety as well. Betray friends for a quick buck, set the Crucible Knights on the path to becoming brutal fascists, exploit loopholes to murder people lawfully, help the local mob take over Defiance Bay, make a deal with a kid for info then break your promise to him (or better yet, beat it out of him), insult and belittle your party members at every opportunity, let a warehouse manager be murdered by gangsters, bind people’s souls to objects or places and condemn them to A Fate Worse Than Death, and many more.
  • It’s worth noting that the way reputation works in this game means that if you act like an evil prick, people will actually notice and some who know of you will be terrified of you. This, of course, can be exploited for more cruelty.
  • The sheer amount of time you can devote to ruining your companions’ lives is almost disturbing. The most notable examples are probably destroying Kana’s idealism and sending him home a broken disgrace (there’s literally no reason to do this other than shits and giggles) and driving Aloth to suicide by kicking him out of the party after he admits he’s part of the Leaden Key.
  • The quest “Blood Legacy” deserves special mention for the sheer horribleness of an evil Watcher’s actions in it; not only can you sacrifice one of your party members to Skaen for a freaking stat bonus, but you can also help Mind Rape a pregnant teenager (who’s also a rape victim by the by) to turn her into Manchurian Agent as part of a cult's deranged plot to destroy her family.
  • In the White March expansion, you can leave the main quest unfinished, letting the Eyeless army ravage the lands out of pure laziness. Doing this leads to a hilarious Brick Joke in the epilogue where the Eyeless will swarm your keep and kill you because you ignored the problem like a dumbass.
• Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire picks up right where the first game left off:
  • Instate a brutal imperialist regime, enforce a long-held and horrifying caste system, help pirates plunder the seas and plunge Deadfire into anarchy... Just picking which faction to side with can result in shocking evil if you make the right (or wrong) choices.
  • You run into that Skaen cult again and they once again offer for you to sacrifice a party member to him, only this time your motivation is even pettier; you don't even get a permanent bonus, just a single use item. On that note, one the party members in this game is Maia Rua, the sister of Kana from the first game. If you sacrificed Kana to Skaen the first time, you can tell her what you did straight to her face, describing her brother's death in nauseating detail. Even worse, her duties force her to work with you anyways; she hatefully spits that as soon as Eothas is dealt with, she's coming for you.
  • During the "Beast Of Winter" quest, you can escape from Rymrgand by throwing Ydwin under the bus and trading her for your freedom. This one's so nasty that the rest of your party flips the hell out if you do this, one the few times they all unanimously object to something you do. Ydwin herself is crushed by her friend betraying her and bitterly says she's disappointed in you. You can also try this on Vatnir, which is just as awful and gets similar reactions from your party.
• You can be an evil bastard in Planescape: Torment. Especially to Dakkon. "Oh hey, this chick is suffering but can't commit suicide and you're their culture's euthanasist? And you swore a life debt to me? Torture her to death."
  • Or you could always constantly remind him of that debt. In every conversation you have with him, no less.
  • Or to Morte whom you had once pulled from the Pillar of Skulls, and get an in-game opportunity to put him back in exchange for information you can pay for in other (much less evil) ways.
  • The same can be done to other party members. Including your current love interest.
    • In fact, the game actually encourages this kind of personal, soul-crushing malevolence over random violence. If you start just killing at random, the Lady of Pain will show up shortly to inform you that you are not top dog in her city, but there is no major penalty for ruining other's lives with just words.
    • That is part and parcel of the Clap Your Hands If You Believe nature of the setting. However, Video Game Caring Potential pays far, far better in the game. Kindness to Dakkon, Morte, and company can buff them to Game-Breaker status, allow you to use a morphable shape-changing Infinity Plus One weapon, and bolster the status of your allies through hidden mechanics regarding their loyalty. On the other hand, the Entropic Blade isn't that much worse than the Celestial Fire and you obtain it by being a complete monster. Even better example of utter cruelty: Dakkon's people used to be slaves and a huge part of their beliefs center around their escape from that slavery. A certain evil book will empower you with various spells for doing evil acts, including selling a party member into slavery. Hmm. Dakkon, come here a minute, I'd like you to meet someone...
  • Strangely enough, the most evil and chaotic act in the game is to let Coaxmetal out of his prison tower. Doesn't seem that bad until you remember Coaxmetal is both the best blacksmith in a good chunk of the planes, able to make weapons that can kill the unkillable, and an insane golem that believes the universe's eventual entropic demise should come faster. And you just set him loose upon an unsuspecting Modron population. Chaotic because you just ensured the universe will get a bit of a mauling, and evil because you caused all this destruction in exchange for a nifty weapon.
• Pokémon:
  • In general, you can do things like raise a Mon's happiness/Amie level(s) all the way to max, and then put them in the PC forever / release them; release freshly-hatched (newborn) Pokémon; or dump Pokémon like your starter (who most players get attached to over the course of the game) or Korrina's Lucario (who is said to quickly get attached to your character) in the PC, and no one will ever be aware of this or call you out on it.
  • Generation 1: In Pokémon Snap:
    • you can use Pokémon Food and Pester Balls to stun and/or drive Pokémon out of their hiding spots, just so you can take their picture. Taken to an extreme in Rainbow Cloud, where, in order to get a good shot of Mew, you need to nail it with dozens upon dozens of Pester Balls in a row, so that it stays stunned long enough for you to get a nice close-up picture.
    • This gets worse with the Electrode in the Power Plant, which will explode when hit. You're basically forcing the constantly smiling Pokémon into hurting themselves for no reason.
  • Generation 2 and its remakes:
    • In Pokémon Gold and Silver and its remakes, a random Non-Player Character in Cianwood City says that your rival scared him into giving away a rare Pokémon. He then gives you another, a Shuckle, to keep safe. You're free to do whatever you want with his Pokémon, use it in battle, breed it, even release it. To add to it, if you talk to him again later in the game, he'll say that he thinks it's OK for him to have his Pokémon again, but if you don't give it back, he'll tell you that what you're doing is basically stealing, making you no better than your rival. However, he will let you keep it if it has high friendship/happiness.
    • Also in HeartGold and SoulSilver, you can have your lead Pokémon walk behind you and follow you wherever you go, including places they would naturally never want to be, which leaves the door open to some Poke the Poodle. Such as splashing in puddles with a fire Pokémon. "Quilava looks angry!"
    • The happiness system. Most things, from walking around with it in your party to giving it stat-boosting medicine, will increase a Mon's happiness, which can result in them evolving; on the other hand, you can also decrease their happiness by letting them faint in battle and giving them bitter medicine. Especially seducing with the Revival Herb: it resurrects your fainted Mon with full health. Besides the Max Revive and Sacred Ash (which only exist in limited quantities), it's the only item with this power.
    • The move Frustration becomes more effective the more your Mon hates you. While that in itself would make it qualify for this trope, you really have to go above and beyond in being mean to your Pokemon to get any use out of it. First, friendship is absurdly easy to raise. Doing just about anything with your Pokemon will cause it to like you more, including walking while having it in your party. And second, a move called Return exists, which is identical to Frustration except it gets stronger by making your Pokemon like you more. Taken to unfunny levels in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 with Ghetsis' Hydreigon, who has that move, at really high power too...
    • Consequences of the (un)happiness stat have no impact on anything, really. The only exceptions are HeartGold and SoulSilver, where you could speak to your Mon and it would display a speech bubble, sometimes with an unhappy face.
  • Generation 4 and its remakes:
    • One technique that crosses with Elite Tweak involves abusing a side effect of the ability Compound Eyes as of the fourth-generation games — it increases the likelihood of wild Mons carrying a held item. Nearly everything with the ability is a Squishy Wizard or Glass Cannon, plus very few things with the ability are all that good at using Thief or Covet (in order to steal said items). The solution? Knock out the Compound Eyes user, and have the second in the lineup something that can use Thief or Covet well (and if it has Frisk to tell you what the wild Pokémon are carrying, all the better). Given how much time the poor Bug is going to be spent knocked out, it becomes a great candidate to use Frustration, as described above.
    • PokéPark Wii: You can dash Pikachu (and the three starters of Unova in the sequel) into smaller mons and send them flying a few feet into the air. Most times out of ten, the victimized Poké will cry its little eyes out if it's one of the adorable ones. However, it's also averted with some. Dash or Shock a Pokémon like Scyther, and they will knock six bells out of your character.
  • Generation 5:
    • Pokémon Black and White introduced Audino, a pseudo-replacement for Chansey. They're these adorable little pink, rabbity critters that can be encountered in nearly every patch of grass in the game under the right conditions^note Rustling grass. They also have an insanely high experience yield, and can use Heal Pulse to restore your HP, so you can use them for grinding.
  • Generation 6:
    • While the Pokémon-Amie feature in Pokémon X and Y allows for plenty of Video Game Caring Potential by letting you feed and pet your Pokémon, it also lets you do things to upset them, such as petting them in a spot they dislike, hitting them, or dropping their food on the ground (Which provokes certain species even more then usual if they're hungry). You won't be punished for doing it in any way, either. This can also be done in Pokémon Refresh for the Alola games.
  • Generation 7:
    • Pokémon Sun and Moon introduces the SOS Battle mechanic, allowing wild Pokémon to call for help and turn the fight into a two-on-one, repeating for as long as they are allowed. The further down an SOS chain you go, the more likely it is for a Pokémon to have its Hidden Ability (which can't be obtained in other ways) or be shiny. Also, a Pokémon is more likely to call for help at low health. Exploiting this mechanic means beating on a scared wild Pokémon and keeping it on the verge of fainting to bait out others of their species, and then knocking out any Pokémon that comes to help if it doesn't have the ability or Palette Swap you want. Depending on how you see it as cruel to the Mon, you can give it the Harvest ability^note 50% chance to restore a used berry every turn, 100% chance under harsh sunlight or extremely harsh sunlight and a Leppa berry^note Restores 10 PP to a move with no PP left. Essentially, this would keep the Pokémon alive forever as it would never struggle to take itself out., making it so they are Forced to Watch.
    • Even more evil is to chain given species to bait its predator. Some Pokémon can be only caught by being called by another species entirely, which in some cases is its prey. Two such Pokémon, Sableye^note From Carbink and Mareanie^note From Corsola can only be caught this way. When they do show up, they will attack it at the first opportunity.
  • Generation 8:
    • As with other Pokémon games, Pokémon Sword and Shield allows you to revive fossils. Unfortunately, Dr. Cara Liss is a paleontologist in the Victorian vein, and the fossils she revives at your request are nightmarish mish-mashes of two species, three out of four of which have an existence comprised primarily of pain and suffering purely from the Body Horror that is their very being. Just obtaining a Dracovish, for instance, counts as horrific cruelty, given that it involves creating something that can't swim but can only breathe water. Ultimately subverted considering that you're not the one who revives them and that they seem to be able to stay outside the Poké Ball without any problem… and possibly the only reason they can live is that they have a trainer to take care of them. On a side note, the anime further subverts this as Dracovish is shown to be able to both swim and breathe outside water.
    • You can use a Gigantamax Meowth's G-Max Gold Rush and an Amulet Coin to get a lot of money out of multiple encounters during the Champion tournaments or the Galarian Star Tournaments, and best of all, whenever you beat someone like this, it looks like they're having a crisis over the fact you just stole their entire bank account.
  • Generation 9:
    • The plot of the first half of The Treasure of Area Zero ends with you capturing the legendary Pokémon Ogerpon — however, in the process you end up alienating Kieran, who hoped to befriend the Pokémon only for it to pick you instead. Naturally, a number of players promptly put Ogerpon on their teams and used it to battle Kieran in the second part of the DLC just to taunt him. He even has special dialogue if you send it out.
      "You've got some nerve... Bringing out the ogre NOW of all times?!"
  • New Pokémon Snap:
    • The mechanic of hitting Pokémon with fruit to annoy and stun them returns.
    • There's a spot in the seafloor level where you can stun Alomamola with a fruit long enough for a Frillish to carry it away presumably to eat it.
    • You can throw fruit to a Squirtle and a Wingull will knock it into a whirlpool.
    • Several times exist where you can lure bird Pokémon into zooming in to scoop up Magikarp or Finneon.
    • Bonk Trubbish at the lab and it’ll use poison gas on the Eevee in front of it.
    • You can splash water on Sudowoodo in the same level, and it really doesn’t like that.
    • Bonk Pancham or Bulbasaur in the forest level to make Drampa mad.
    • You can lure a couple of different Pokémon into punching other Pokémon and then the punched Pokémon will retaliate against the puncher.

R-T

• In Robopon, you can sell your Robopon just to make some cash.
• In Soul Nomad & the World Eaters, the game allows, and sometimes even encourages, you to do things to the various Non Player Characters in towns and villages, such as stealing from them, beating them up, kicking them in the face, or forcibly conscripting them into your army. This is all menu-based, meaning the game is basically suggesting to kick people for no good reason. And let's not get into the Demon path, which basically calls you a wuss for all that.
• Starfield: The Vanguard questline contains a boss battle at the New Atlantis starport. Two security guards will offer to help you. If you accept their help they will probably die, but you can loot a Disc-One Nuke off their bodies.
• In TaskMaker and The Tomb of the TaskMaker, you can kill any NPC with a Neutral alignment. This includes shopkeepers, guards, etc. And if you're feeling really cruel, use a Restart Place spell to reset the location and do it again… and again… and again… The former game takes off a small amount of points, while the latter doesn't have a points system.
  • You can also do this with Good-alignment NPCs, but killing them will take off a lot of points and knock down your Spirit (or just knock down your Stamina in the sequel). Also, there are two Good-alignment characters in each game who will render you permanently drunk, deaf, and blind if you kill them.
• Trapt, a game which consists of setting a complex series of traps to kill enemies. Said traps are rather cruel, especially 'Dark Illusions', environmental traps which require a bit of set-up, which can, for example, send someone through the clockwork of a music box, complete with bone crunching sounds.
  • All of the Deception games, really. Skewering young girls on deadly wall spikes is pretty common... especially since then you can harvest their bodies.
  • If you're just skewering them on wall spikes, you'll get very few points or XP. No, you should have them skewered on wall spikes, then drop their bodies onto launchers which throw them across the room into the jaws of bear traps in which they are hit by giant swinging axes and knocked screaming into human-sized incinerators. Ahem. In case you're worried about the "young girls" bit, it's ok — you're a girl, too.
• Trick & Treat: In the Extra room, after reading about how to trigger all the ways to kill Amelia, Amelia responds in fear, implying that the player will try to trigger all the ends:
  ............
  (I'm scared.)
• Tyranny is basically "Video Game Cruelty is now legal and mandatory by order of Overlord Kyros, The Game". The "evil" path involves working with the racist / sexist / hypocritical yet-somehow-heroic rebels, so the "good" path involves completely screwing them over. Here are some of the horrible, horrible things you can do:
  • Conscript civilians into gangs by forcing them to fight their brothers / children to the death.
  • Give a dying woman a note for your allies then push her off a mile-high tower so it gets to them at the bottom.
  • Burn down a university with lava.
  • Give complete control of an industrial city to a conscienceless gang of murderers just for a stupid hat.
  • Purge / enslave an entire sector of beastmen.
  • Damn an entire agricultural sector to decay and famine.
  • Set off a magical chain-reaction that kills most of an entire regiment and drives the survivors mad.
  • Outwit a gang overleader and select a replacement who will proceed to screw every single gang member over.
  • Join the rebels and then promptly betray them so they're forced to hail you as their new dictator.
  • Throw the entire region into anarchy and reign over what survives.
  • Kill a baby.
    • Let your psycho companion murder a baby for you.
    • Kill a baby while her mother is Forced to Watch.
    • Return a mother and her baby to their father who promptly disowns her for breeding with an inbred noble.
    • Give a mother and her baby to a Magnificent Bastard with rape-happy schizophrenia who utterly hates their ancestor.
    • Spare the baby so she will be indirectly responsible for the next century of magically-induced hurricanes on her estate and people.
    • Exile a mother and her baby so she is left with ultimately nothing.

U-Z

• Especially prevalent in later Ultima games: as complexity increased so did the twistedness of clever players. One example that leaps to mind, in Ultima VII one can bake bread. Stay with me here, one of the ingredients is a bucket of water. For some odd reason, the game lets you use buckets of blood as well. More twistedness, the first bucket of blood you can find is at a murder site, and the son of the murdered man can join your party. You can, without the game realizing the implications, feed this son bread baked with the blood of his murdered father.
  • There are entire internet communities devoted to finding out the evil things you can do in Ultima.
  • One of the few good things players had to say about the ninth installment was that little thing involving Lord British and the poisoned bread. Watch here.
  • In Ultima III you can drum up some quick, easy cash by creating new characters for the party with the express intent of selling all of their equipment. Or, if you want to raise the stakes higher, there's a place in a town where you can donate blood (reduction of hit points) and you get payment for it, so before you delete the naked characters, you can sell almost all of their blood for cash.
• Undertale:
  • The Genocide Route as a whole counts, but Papyrus's fight is a particularly stark example. There is absolutely no reason to kill him. In fact, the only way to do so is to deliberately ignore his offer of mercy, and attack him after he's already spared you. Made even worse by the fact that no matter what you've done so far, he will never try to hurt you himself.
  • There's one cruel act you can only do when not on the Genocide Route. Fleeing from Undyne into Hotland causes her to collapse from heat exhaustion. There's a nearby water cooler you can use to cool her down...or you can dump all the water out onto the ground in front of her. The game outright calls you sadistic for doing this.
  • One of the cruellest things you can do on a Neutral route is to befriend Undyne (which can only be done if you've been completely pacifist until that point) and then kill someone. She does not take it well.
  • Whichever route you take, you also have a particularly cruel way of killing boss monsters: spare them until they reach their most vulnerable point (usually right before sparing them again would end the battle), then backstab them by fighting them, for a One-Hit Kill. Do that, and the game will pull no punches in making you feel like a piece of shit.
  • Resetting the game after the Pacifist Route. The monsters are freed and the barrier is broken. The monster race look forward to an uncertain but hopeful future as friends of the humans above ground, and everyone is happy. But there's only one small problem: You. And no, not the Player Character, you. You hold the power to reset the world, and take away the happiness you brought everyone. And you can then play a Genocide Route, and no-one will know that the nameless child wandering through the Underground slaughtering them all was, once upon a time, their best friend. And, by everyone, we really mean it. Not even the Player Character will remember. The only people who will remember are you, possibly Sans, and if you did a Genocide Run before a True Pacifist Run, the Fallen Child.
  • Despite the fact that most of the worst things you can do will punish you accordingly by forcing you onto the Neutral route(s) at best, there's some things you can perfectly get away with even on the True Pacifist Route if you're feeling nasty enough. For instance, you can still attack monsters as long as you don't outright kill them, being rude to Papyrus will simply make him assume you're insulting yourself, you can eat a piece of a snowman right in front of him, and you don't have to step in and save Monster Kid when they fall off a bridge. (The latter two do tell you off in the Playable Epilogue if you do this, but otherwise there's nothing making you do it.)
  • An oversight makes Monsters still spawn in Hotland and the Core after you have delivered Undyne's letter but before entering the True Lab, the latter locking you into the Pacifist Ending. You can kill enough monsters to go up a few levels and still acquire the best ending of the game, though this gives you no notable benefit except lasting a bit longer against the Amalgamates (as the final boss fight in the Pacifist route is impossible to lose). This was patched in later versions of game, which would turn off all encounters after you deliver Undyne's letter.
• In Valkyria Chronicles, you can either let your troopers rush towards the enemy for a suicidal (and admittedly, stupid) move, or sock a rocket right in the enemy's face. Your choice.
  • Ramming people with tanks does nothing but punt them around like a rag doll and make them scream in agony. If you want to be outright cruel to a mook? Stock up 20 CP and spend them all to just ram a poor guy into a wall with the Edelweiss. He won't die, and likely will be stuck there for him to die by your Gatling gun on his turn. Oddly enough, the "ran-over by tank does zero damage" thing applies to enemy tanks, so if you want to be mean without losing troops... get your redshirts ran over by the Batomys.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines makes it very possible to have a bloody rampage, slicing hobos to bits with a fire axe, snapping the necks of club kids, and eating hookers for a late night snack, but discourages this in two ways. One, killing innocents (as in, anyone not trying to kill you,) even when feeding reduces your Humanity, the game's Karma Meter. Having a low Humanity makes you more likely to frenzy, where you lose control of your character and try to drain any nearby juicebags dry. Also, any use of obvious supernatural powers or feeding when people are watching results in a Masquerade Violation, which results in Vampire Hunters following you around. Also, if your Humanity drops to zero, or you stack up five Masquerade Violations, it's an instant game over. However, there are limited opportunities to regain both Humanity and redeem your Masquerade Violations, so you can get away with this to a point. Plus there are enough opportunities for plot assisted cruelty as well: sending a hapless TV Show Host to be devoured by a flesh-eating Vampire, enticing a naive thin blood to attempt to assassinate the president, and arranging for a young woman to have her blood slowly drained and sold to local Kindred are just a few of them. All of these do cause your Humanity to drop though, so it's a fine line.
  • However, with the judicious application of console commands (namely vstats get humanity 10 and debug_change_masquerade_level -1), you can keep your Humanity and Masquerade Violations at non-game-ending levels as long as you want, allowing you to terrorize the good morsels — erm, citizens — of the greater Los Angeles area to your little black heart's content.
  • Also, in one of the missions, you're supposed to rescue a kidnapped person in a spa/brothel. Once done, this room becomes a free zone for killing, feeding, doing whatever you want. It's a bug, but it's awesome
  • It's also worth mentioning a few of the clan-based vampire abilities, such as forcing the target (or targets) to commit suicide, attack their allies, get eaten by a swarm of insects, or have their blood boiled while they are alive. Have fun splattering the walls with blood and organs.
• Fallout got it from its spiritual predecessor Wasteland, where you can butcher basically everybody for kicks. The most memorable example is murdering all the kids in Highpool because a few of them laughed at you. You'll likely shoot one of them on accident anyways, thanks to a scripted sequence where he points what turns out to be a toy gun at you. While the former is not canon, the latter most definitely is; Highpool still exists in the sequel, but is on bad terms with the Rangers thanks to you shooting that kid... who is also actually still alive and looking for payback.
  • One fun thing to do in the sequel is to walk right up to the decommissioned atom bomb kept in one town and detonate it, killing yourself and everybody else in a miles-wide radius For the Evulz. Its a Non-Standard Game Over obviously, but so worth it just for the Black Comedy.
• In The World Ends with You, equip Holy Light + Visionary Blend + Regen threads. Use Joshua (for extra fun, remove all his threads) on max level in Easy Mode and set the partner AI to Manual. Scan for and fight Jelly Neocoustics. Then pass the puck to Neku and watch in horror (or glee) as Joshua is repeatedly stunlocked by the jellyfish as Neku watches in the bottom screen, never being able to die because of the Regen and the Subconscious. For added fun, put your DS on AC power and the carnage goes on forever.
  • After completing the game, you can go back to Week 2 and use the Rhyme Pin to attack Reaper Beat. It's funny because they're siblings who love each other. It's impractical to do, but still.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon: You knock enemies into traffic with an attack that's powerful enough to do so. You even get a trophy for it! There's also nothing that'll stop you from playing in traffic yourself, either...
• In the Card Battle game Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal Duel Carnival, you can challenge a lot of folks from the anime who don't normally duel, like Yuma's kindly grandmother, Nelson's mom, and all manners of young children. Most of them are incredibly easy and have cards that most duelists wouldn't be caught dead with, and you may feel like a big rat after pounding them with direct attacks. In addition, Yuma's storyline requires you to duel Haruto (although he's actually got an okay deck) but if you're a fan of the anime, you won't like yourself if you manage to win by a Curb-Stomp Battle (And he still likes you for "playing with him" after you do).

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