Video Game Cruelty Potential / Visual Novel

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• Ace Attorney:
  • In general, it's quite easy to accidentally put people down, especially when your assistant can read your mind or face, as shown in the fourth case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney if you answer "Yeah, you're useless".
    Maya: I know... I'm no good for anything, am I, Nick? If I can't call my sister, I might as well not be here, right?
    Phoenix: Um, well, actually... [thinking] (You don't know law, you don't have any trial experience or techniques... Yeah, you're pretty much useless... but I can't say that!)
    Maya: It's okay Nick. You don't have to say anything. Your face said it for you.
    Phoenix: [thinking] (Whoops!)
  • In the third case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All Acro turns out to have killed Russell Berry accidentally while trying to kill Russell's daughter Regina because she accidentally put Acro's brother Bat in a coma and is so naïve that she doesn't even understand what she's done. At the end of the case, Regina asks if Acro is going to come after her. The "correct" answer is to say "No," and to show her some evidence, but's there's no real reason you can't say "Of course he is!" and send her off in tears.
  • Halfway through the case, you'll run into Franziska during the second investigation phase. For every irrelevant piece of evidence you present to her, she whips poor Maya as punishment. You can do this as many times as you like without any repercussions.
  • In Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth Case 5, you run into the Steel Samurai, who reveals himself to be Larry Butz. If you present the wrong evidence to him during the one investigation phase that lets you talk to him, Larry refuses to look at your evidence because he's too busy staring at Franziska. Franziska promptly offers to "sear her image into his mind for eternity" by sending him on a "Whippity-Whip-Trip" into unconsciousness. This is probably the one time in which presenting wrong evidence in an investigation phase can be pretty satisfying... and hilarious.
  • The first game's fourth case had two examples of this with the Butt Monkeys of choice being Lotta and/or Larry. At some point, Gumshoe will offer you either a dog (Missile), a fishing rod, or a metal detector to fish for Gourdy to find key evidence for your case. The correct choice would be the metal detector, but the two other options can lead to this. For Lotta, the player can take the fishing pole, which Maya will use in the lake to fish for Gourdy, only to trip and fall, causing Lotta's cameras to react and waste more (very expensive) rolls of film than you already wasted earlier in the case. For Larry, the player can take Missile, who will react automatically to the aroma of Larry's Samurai dogs the minute you get into the park, let alone the crime scene, causing the aptly-named poochy to run like a missile and chow down on all of Larry's hotdogs, making him lose his (at this point, already doomed) business. For added butthurt, you can also show Missile to Larry after the puppy ate his entire revenue.
    • Lotta still gets misfortune even if you don't get the item. If you don't get it, Maya sneezes, setting off the camera anyways.
    • Another minor example from the same case: When you first start the case, Edgeworth refuses to let you defend him. After running around and gathering evidence for a while, Phoenix and Maya return to the Detention Center to speak with Edgeworth again. At this point, Edgeworth relents and asks Phoenix to defend him. The game continues regardless of your choice, but you can always choose to troll Edgeworth and tell him "Sorry, you missed your chance!", scaring him half to death and prompting both him and Maya to yell at you for your cruel sense of humour.
  • In the third game's second case, examining the ceremonial sword will prompt Maya to strike Phoenix on the head with it. You can keep examining it, letting Maya repeatedly strike Phoenix on the head with it. One can only wonder how hard that head is...
  • Ace Attorney Investigations 2 has the logic chess battles, which give you the opportunity to say needlessly cruel things to your adversaries. In particular, you can tell a broken down Sebastian that he's a failure as a human being. Take a wild guess as to what happens...
• Boyfriend To Death: You can attack Ren in the basement if you have a knife during Strade's route; Strade will be very pleased with you.
• In Coffee Talk, you can deliberately serve the wrong drinks to your customers, and in Episode 2, there's an achievement for making Riona walk out on you for not getting her orders right too many times.
• In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, there is an additional mode that works like a dating sim. At certain points during those modes, the students will end up talking to the main character about their pain, fears, frustrations, vulnerabilities, and insecurities all on display, while the only available command involves agreeing or disagreeing with these internal reflections. Depending on the context, it's possible to make the main character of both of those games say some incredibly mean things to the other students.
  • In the following game, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Shuichi's Free Time Event with Tenko Chabashira will either end with Tenko knocking Shuichi out cold, or if you're feeling extra sadistic, tell her to shut up.
• Darkly parodied and sort of deconstructed in Doki Doki Literature Club! when Monika makes fun of the horrible things that happen to other characters because she thinks they're just game characters anyway so it doesn't matter. The creator has pointed out she's missing the point that this is the kind of game where the player gets attached to the characters, so she expects you to laugh along with her. Also inverted because now it's a character doing it and the player meant to feel uncomfortable.
• In Katawa Shoujo, most dialogue choices aren't unsubtle enough for you to really do anything awful on purpose, but the single choice in Shizune's route, explicitly giving you the opportunity to cheat on her with Misha, her best friend who is also in love with her, certainly takes the cake.
• Just playing Long Live the Queen is cruel, because your cute little magical girl princess is going to die an awful lot of horrible deaths. However, you can also use her to commit acts of gleeful wickedness against other characters. Among other things, you can force a woman into marriage, abuse the servants, ramp up punishments in hopes of discouraging assassination attempts, execute people at random, and reduce a woman to tears by blaming her for her daughter's death. The game actually has, alongside the various in-game stat meters shown to you, a hidden Cruelty stat which, if sufficiently increased, allows you to do even more awful acts, up to and including sacrificing your thirteen-year-old cousin to a kraken^note this can alternatively be done without already being a vicious bitch if you learned certain information during that playthrough, but if you don't have that information and you haven't made the protagonist sufficiently callous, she will refuse to do it or murdering your own father.
• Minotaur Hotel: The whole point of the Ruthless route. You can be an absolute dick and perform several Kick the Dog moments towards Asterion, which will cause him to eventually realize how doomed his situation is.
• In the third Purrfect Apawcalypse game, you play as a Villain Protagonist who's sadistically murdered others in previous games so you naturally get a lot of options to be cruel, including but not limited to: making a dog girl violently sick by putting chocolate in her cake, severely injuring another dog by putting nails in the baseball you throw to him, stalking the cat boy who rejected you and killing him so that you can get your body back from him (long story there), and even summoning a God of Evil to start the apocalypse.
• The game Sprung gives the player character mace which has absolutely no purpose within the game except for the player to spray it in people's eyes and see them cry. Becky also gets the equipment necessary to set somebody on fire (this does result in a game over).
• Syrup and the Ultimate Sweet: Between eating the candy girl in your basement, handing that candy girl off to your rival who's slowly eating her into nothing and refusing to help, and telling your rival that you hate her, there's a lot of it. Although it all leads to various downer endings.
• Half of the fun of playing Winter Shard is the freedom it gives the player to be the evilest, sickest bastard imaginable if they want to play Frederone like that. It won't get you anywhere near the True ending, though.

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