What Measure Is A Mook / Video Games

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• Played with in 2Dark, as the game considers essentially all of the people on each level who aren't bosses and who can be bypassed without killing "innocents", and adds their kills to a respectively named tally. Even when it's people like Petronelli's thugs, who are clearly involved in what's going on, or members of the cannibal family.
• Baldur's Gate: In the original game's Bandit Camp, you can listen in on the conversations the bandits have with one another. However, most of them literally amount to nothing more than them laughing at their own farts.
• In BioShock 2, two Houdini Splicers dance together in Dionysus Park. While they both immediately attack you on sight, killing one results in the other breaking combat and running over to their dead lover and collapsing to their knees in grief, You Monster!
• Borderlands 2:
  • The game parodies this mercilessly when you escort Claptrap to his ship and kill some mooks on the way.
    Claptrap: Minion, what have you done? These were people... with lives and families — I'm totally kidding. Screw those guys!
  • There is also a weapon directly referencing the xkcd strip that parodies this trope.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 reminds one of this near the end. The Big Bad is then revealed to be a rogue general who has orchestrated the events of the game as one giant Batman Gambit, and now the two main characters shoot up his private guard in a mission to take him out for sheer revenge. While the game implies that these mooks are an elite paramilitary unit handpicked by the general and not really US soldiers at this point, there's no question that most if not all signed up believing they would be doing the right thing and probably aren't even aware of their boss's behind the scenes actions. On the other hand, Shepherd's troops saw him shoot Roach and Ghost, then threw their bodies into a ditch then doused them with gasoline. Although the Player is encouraged as Mactavish to treat them such a way when Shepherd bombs a base with many soldiers STILL INSIDE. And a variation of this occurs within the Airport scene, as most people treat the civillans as faceless, even though being encouraged to feel for them (and all the other people they have to kill). Some are dragging the bodies of their FRIENDS less than 20m in front of you. On the other hand, you're playing as someone pretending to be a terrorist, it is possible to play the mission and not kill a single civilian, or you can just skip the mission outright.
• One of the missions in an expansion for Command & Conquer: Red Alert gives you a Russian Cyborg Super-Soldier who easily slaughters his way though infantry, tanks, even a battleship and the Allies' Memetic Badass commando Tanya. The cutscene afterward shows Tanya's grave... among hundreds of others.
• In Crysis 3, after spectacularly blowing up a dam, you can find a black box next to the washed-up corpses of some enemy soldiers. Playing it reveals the screams and desperation of the soldiers trying to escape the flood, with their commander frantically ordering "Stay calm!", "Keep your head above the water!", and "Save your breath!". Suddenly the blowing of the dam doesn't look so awesome anymore. And if that wasn't enough, you can also encounter another group of soldiers whose Enemy Chatter reveals that they are there to rescue any survivors and their commander instructs them to separate the dead and resuscitate those who can.
• In Cyberpunk 2077 it is possible to proceed through the game without gunning down vicious chrome fiends like Royce or exploitative bastards like Saburo Arasaka, even though you'll likely be gunning down Maelstrom gangoons and Arasaka corpo-soldiers by the dozens by the time you've met either of them. The mooks themselves are also heavily humanized with a lot of incidental background chatter that V can eavesdrop on, everything from complaining about the quality of the local food to jealous water-cooler gossip about who gets to receive new cybernetic implants. You can also steal shards containing snippets of text message logs, including some specifically designed to make the player feel bad about slaughtering everyone in the room (such as a conversation between brothers where the older brother working at an Arasaka factory smuggles a very nice gun to his younger brother, an Arasaka guard, so he will have the best protection money can buy).
• Deus Ex has several instances where the question of killing mooks is mentioned. The most memorable instance, however, is in Paris where JC encounters a couple in a café. The couple are discussing the recruitment of their son to Majestic 12. When JC enters the conversation and makes his intentions for Majestic 12 clear, the mother begs JC to keep an eye out for their son even though "those gas masks make them indistinguishable from each other". The whole game can be considered an example of this as well as it is possible to finish the whole game without killing a single mook.
  • Additionally, JC eventually defects, and the masked mooks he (optionally) slaughtered in the game's early stages become his allies. While some of them are to some degree humanized, the rest become, essentially, Red Shirts.
  • Deus Ex actually does an astonishingly good job of letting you choose whether this trope is in effect. Aside from a straight Pacifist Run, from the very start the game offers a variety of non-lethal ways to take out mooks, and up until you leave for the resistance your efforts to either cheerfully indulge in or stringently avoid wanton mook killing are noted by the game and commented on by other agents, for better or worse. Although the game was criticised for failing to distinguish between non-lethal and lethal takedowns, being unable to distinguish the difference between pepper spraying a guard and knocking him unconscious with a baton, and blowing him into Ludicrous Gibs with a GEP Gun.
  • You get bonus experience in Deus Ex: Human Revolution if you avoid killing anyone save for bosses. You get even more points if you're never seen. Given that before the Director's Cut it wasn't even possible to spare the bosses the game inverts it.
  • All three games feature hackable computers, complete with email messages to and from random, even otherwise unidentified characters that do much to humanize them — revealing bits of their personal lives, for example, or even that they have the same ethical concerns about their bosses as the player does.
    • One email series in particular in Human Revolution's "The Missing Link" DLC reveals that (1) the bad guys have a chaplain, and (2) said chaplain has been getting more and more visits from rank-and-file troopers upset and questioning the morality of what they've seen and done.
• In Act II of Diablo III you can find a journal in the middle of a mook camp, in which one of the mooks writes about how long time they've been camping waiting for you, the stories he has heard about how strong is your player character, asking himself if they even have a chance to stop you, and wondering if they are not being used as cannon fodder by their superiors.
• Dishonored averts this handily — not only are the guards humanized through idle conversations and letters("Should we meet for cigars later?" "Chances are pretty good."), they react in combat when you kill one of them ("You made someone a widow damn you!"), And there's actually a valid reason to avoid wholesale murder — the fewer city guards you kill, the less the city falls into chaos from the plague that turns people into ghouls (as the guards keep them in check.) Not even the main antagonists of the game have to be killed (though leaving them alive often involves setting them up for a Fate Worse than Death.) Should you finish the game without killing a single soul, you'll be rewarded the "Clean Hands" achievement. Even the Weepers — people so terribly infected with the disease that they are little more than mindless zombies — count toward this, because in the best ending, a cure is developed to save them.
• Lampshaded in Dragon Age II background chatter:
  Varric: You made a mistake. It happens.
  Anders: I almost killed a girl.
  Varric: You've killed two-hundred and fifty-four by my last count. Plus about five hundred men, a few dozen giant spiders, and at least two demons.
  Anders: It's not the same.
  Varric: Why? Because this one you feel bad about? Maybe that's the problem.
• Invoked in one of the casual conversations between Solas and Iron Bull in Dragon Age: Inquisition:
  Iron Bull: I don't know. Gotta wonder about anyone who fights as much as we do and doesn't have some fun.
  Solas: We have fought living men, with loves and families, and all that they might have been is gone.
  Iron Bull: Yeah, but... they were assholes.
• Extra Credits did a long-form criticism of The Division based on the dehumanization of the mooks this way. Think about it: a terror attack goes off in New York. Shadowy government agents at the President's sole command with no real oversight go in and start shooting. The mooks they face are American citizens with titles like "Looter" who are just guys running around in the chaos. There is no concerted effort to bring control back, no sensible plan to restore order, just your teams of shadowy agents dealing out the extrajudicial government-sanctioned killing of American citizens. Think through what the game is saying.
• Fallout:
  • In the original Fallout, the mooks consist of violent criminals (desert raiders or urban gangsters) who Kick the Dog for laughs, mad ghouls who have all the sentience of a rabid cheetah, and ordinary men and women who were forcibly mutated and brainwashed by the Master into Super Mutants. And you kill all three indiscriminately. Appropriately enough, after you kill one Super Mutant, you can find his girlfriend in another room, sobbing inconsolably and cursing your name (in Fallout 2, many of the surviving Super Mutants have settled down following the Master's death and aren't quite so hostile). On the other hand, in Fallout, you can avoid killing anyone, even setting off an evac alarm when you blow up an enemy base.
    • Plus, the Super Mutant-ization process typically reduces them to a beast-like state, and many or all of them have been brainwashed by The Children prior to being dipped.
  • Fallout 3 has plenty of raiders, mercenaries, slavers, Super Mutants, and Enclave soldiers that constantly respawn for you to kill and are indistinguishable from one another. In the case of raiders, the majority are torturers, murderers, and rapists, so it's hard to feel any regret for decapitating them with a chainsaw and placing their head on a pedestal for all to see. This still does occur near the end of the main campaign, when the player faces off against The Dragon and has the option of sparing him. Sparing him is treated as a moral and noble action by others you speak to, despite the fact that you've slaughtered several dozen of his soldiers to get to that point. To be fair, said Dragon was painted in-game to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist with some Kick the Dog moments to compensate, and a comparatively sane goal. The main reason you are fighting him is that he happens to be loyal to The Enclave. On the other hand, have this option taken, you can spare two Mooks along with The Dragon. Otherwise, they are doomed.
    • At the end of Broken Steel, you invade the Enclave's main base, killing a number of scientists along with their soldiers. Tragically, it is revealed in Fallout New Vegas that one of those people was ED-E's creator.
    • The tutorial has a pretty textbook case of this: you can spare the Overseer, or kill him. Naturally, killing him is bad karma and results in Amata going "Who appointed you judge, jury and executioner?", sparing him is good. But those security guards the Overseer sent after you? No such luck.
  • Fallout: New Vegas plays this trope straight at the conclusion of its Honest Hearts expansion. If you choose to destroy the White Legs, you'll find Joshua Graham holding their leader at gunpoint, and you have the option to tell Joshua to let him go or kill him, with either choice affecting your karma and the ending. That said, not only did you and Graham mow down dozens of mooks to get to this point, but Joshua executes two kneeling-in-surrender White Legs himself. In this case, it's less about saving the villain as it is saving Graham from his own rage. Salt-Upon-Wounds is stated to be doomed either way.
  • Done very subtly through Enemy Chatter in Fallout 4. During battles with groups of raiders, Gunners and other human mooks, if you kill one of them, their comrades will actually cry out in grief and horror, almost as if they'd just watch their friend or even their lover be mowed down in front of them. It really puts a damper on your One-Man Army moments.
  • Problem is, however, the Gunners and the raiders will attack you on sight, no matter what you do. Most of the time, you are just acting in self-defense whenever you run into them. You aren't given any real reason to pity them because their entire role in the game is to attack you and loot your body for cool shit, or to raze your settlements to the ground for the lolz. If anything, the humanizing moments bring their cruelty into sharp relief by showing that they're perfectly capable of valuing human life, yet nevertheless are utterly merciless and brutal toward the innocent settlers they prey upon.
  • Another raider, Red Tourette, has stepped up her raiding to pay ransom to another raider gang, who have kidnapped (and, it turns out, killed) her little sister. She's treated no differently from any other raider, and you massacre her band on sight.
• Far Cry 4: Let's go through this in ascending order:
  • On top of the usual slaughter of mooks, many side quests require you to kill lower-ranking enemy officers.
  • Big Bad Pagan Min has three lieutenants. Only one must be killed, one must be imprisoned, one can be killed or spared.
  • Pagan Min can be killed or spared in the final confrontation. Killing him gets better loot, sparing him gets a better cutscene, which humanises him a little.
• In Final Fantasy VII, the protagonists storm an underwater reactor under the city of Junon. They have to take the elevator to get there — and it's presently occupied by a girl, and two random Shinra mooks who are desperately trying to work up the courage to speak with her and ask her out. When they discover Cloud, though, they're bound by duty to try and stop him, and a brief battle ensues. The girl is horrified and laments the soldiers' death; Cloud and company don't even flinch. Similarly, another squad of Shinra soldiers tries to stop the invasion and scream "For Junon!" as they rush Cloud, and meet the same fate as their compatriots. The fact that Cloud himself was a faceless, nameless grunt a few years ago doesn't seem to bother him at all.
• The Tonberries embody this concept throughout the Final Fantasy series as a whole: Their signature move, "Everyone's Grudge", also known as "Karma", most commonly does damage propotional to the number of enemies the character subjected to the move has killed.
• In Final Fantasy Tactics, there's a battle where you're fighting a bunch of squires. One of them remarks that they all "have families they would like to be able to go home to." Ramza does try to convince them not to fight and just let each group go on their way, but then one of them recognizes him as "the heretic wanted by the church" and they decide that they'd like to get the reward for capturing him. Ramza then cuts them down without a second thought.
• Appropriately for a game where the Cycle of Revenge and the humanity of the enemy are major themes, Final Fantasy XII plays with this at several points:
  • Most of the Marks you kill are essentially large animals or magical constructs gone berserk and murderous, but one is a cactoid that has become a desert bandit. It's not even clear early on that cactoids are sapient, but later a whole group of cactoids takes half of a human village hostage to demand the return of their relative. It seems that the cactoid they're looking for is the same one you killed, causing the other villagers (and the player) to react with a My God, What Have I Done?. You can then find the missing cactoid alive, but it still puts your earlier quest in a very different light.
  • The Urutan-Yensa are stated to be entirely hostile to humans, but it's also noted that this is mostly because the Rozarrian Empire invaded their lands to drill for oil and you also meet an Urutan-Yensa who attempts to overcome the language barrier to ask for your help against a giant tortoise known as the Urutan Eater.
  • You'll probably fight plenty of faceless Imperial soldiers, but there are also plenty you can speak to in the towns, some of whom are quite nice and reasonable people (such as Gibbs and Deweg, the two guys guarding the path from Nalbina to the Mosphoran Highwaste). There's also quest-giver Sherril, an Imperial soldier you meet in Rabanastre who has paid out of their own pocket for a bounty on the head of the Wyvern Lord because they suspect it's going to attack the city and kill people. Sherril points out that they may be an Imperial, but they care about Dalmascans.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 averts this by giving you the option to capture Mooks and bosses alive ^note  and not even the Final Boss is exempt from this . It also allows you to steal their stuff, giving you incentive for being merciful, as the path to many of the Game-Breaker items is by sparing them.
  • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn: One chapter in Path of Radiance has you fighting rebels fighting against an underground slave ring, and you are rewarded for killing as few as possible; in another, a villager mentions you killed her son in the last battle. In the early parts of the sequel Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, the perspective is flipped to that of the enemy country from Path of Radiance, Daein, humanizing it and its inhabitants during their struggles after the Mad King’s War and tyrannical occupation by larger, formerly neutral country Begnion.
  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon has a chapter that ends with Marth enlightened by a villager that most people working for enemy nations are not completely rotten and some instead would prefer to fight for his cause, if not for their nations' tight grip on them. The conversation ends with Princess Nyna imparting words of wisdom to Marth: "Not all evils are wrought of evil purposes. Perhaps this sounds naïve, but... A true leader needs to look at his opponent and see more than just an enemy."
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening discusses this in Henry and Ricken's B support. After Henry tells Ricken about some of his fellow Plegian soldiers Ricken becomes depressed, realizing he can't see the enemy as faceless blobs with axes anymore. Henry, on the other hand, doesn't mind. He even thinks Ricken's weird for caring so much.
  • Discussed in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, when crown prince Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd of Faerghus, in his support conversation with his instructor Byleth, laments the fact that each enemy soldier that he cuts down in order to keep the peace on the continent is a person, with their own loved ones. He sadly recounts a story of a locket containing a woman's picture he found on a dead soldier.
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, if you come across a notorious space pirate and defeat his entire crew without destroying his spaceship, you may get an option of saving his life and getting him to join your crew, along with getting some of his loot. No word is ever given on saving his henchmen. Or all those other space pirates, rebels or obstructive bureaucrats you might have killed without second thoughts.
• It's discussed in Fuga: Melodies of Steel, where the main characters are all Children Forced to Kill soldiers of an invading army in order to save their families who were captured. Even though they accept that violent conflict is inevitable to get their loved ones back, overall they do not like the reality of having to kill enemy soldiers, acknowledging that many of them likely have their own families and hoping the war ends in peace for both sides. On the other hand, there are several points in the game where enemy soldiers are shown surviving even if the vehicles they were in explode, and the children let them go. So even if War Is Hell and there are bound to be casualties regardless, you're not necessarily killing all of them that cross your path, but you still have to fight them.
• Commented on in Ghost Trick. One of Sissel's powers is saving the lives of others by changing their fates. However, he defeats hitmen Jeego and Tengo by dropping heavy objects on them, crushing them apparently to death (we even see Jeego's body comedically flattened against a rolling wrecking ball). Sissel muses whether, if he killed Tengo, he'd then have to go back and save his life. He doesn't. In fact they're not mentioned again, even in the epilogue.
• GoldenEye (1997). It's perfectly fine to shoot soldiers, who have no say in what they're doing and are really just being paid to defend whatever complex. Even the ones who are just standing in a bathroom stall taking a whiz. But kill a scientist, who is actively involved in creating weapons of mass destruction, and you fail the mission. To be fair, the missions where scientists are in military installations (like Facility and Missile Silo), where the scientists could be compelled to work, and the fact that the West has interests in getting them to defect rather than killing them, which also justifies this.
  • If the film or reality are any indication, the troops posted to the complex, and the scientists directing the work, almost certainly consider it an enviable posting in terms of salary, benefits, etc. Otherwise, the complex wouldn't remain a secret for long, and what would keep them from sabotaging the machinery and getting everyone killed? As with Bond himself, they may simply be following orders.
    • Having them defect or captured off-screen, however, would be justifiable.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas follows this trope in order to Follow the Plotted Line. CJ is told by some corrupt cops that if he leaves town, they'll pin the murder of another cop on him. Thing is, during the game you can murder cops and civilians by the dozens with your comeuppance being...respawning at the police station or hospital less 10% of your money.
  • Tenpenny and later Toreno stonewalls any attempts to put CJ away for good. And besides, it's knocking out a few fellow officers off the ladder.
• Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned feature this as part of Protagonist-Centered Morality. For Johnny Klebitz, the character Jim Fitzgerald was a close friend and an important ally. For Niko Bellic, they were a nameless enemy that got killed in a minor level.
• Guild Wars Beyond: Winds of Change — Having spent the better part of a decade at war, your character is increasingly bitter about the thousands he has killed and the pain it has caused to their loved ones and companions. One guard even muses he has spent so long treating a gang as a faceless enemy he never believed any would be there save to act as villains.
  • Seen earlier but not expanded on during the Nightfall Pogahn Passage mission. While disguised as a Kournan, it was possible to overhear the enemy talking about how Varesh was a visionary who planned to bring prosperity to all the nations. Most telling was one who talked about how his poor family had been promised fertile land in Istan for their role in the war.
• In Half-Life, both Mook and One-Man Army are Deconstructed; sneaky players can listen in on the Army as they have weird self-hating conversations about slaughtering hundreds of scientists who expected them to RESCUE them — and later their rage at the player, who they believe was the mastermind behind the invasion and have been slaughtering their comrades wholesale. On the other hand, one of the Marines laments having none of the scientists fight back.
  • There's also the Opposing Force expansion pack for the original game, where you play as a HECU marine. While said Marine is comatose for most of the original game and wakes up just as the military begins pulling out, your allies are all trying to work together to pull out.
  • Half-Life 2 and its expansions generally gets around this; Antlions are non-sapient Alien Locusts while Combine Overwatch soldiers and Synths are brainwashed cyborg Slave Mooks and implicitly non-sapient as well. It's played straight, however, with the Civil Protection officers. Despite the fact that they're explicitly not brainwashed and are drawn from the same population of civilians that you regularly interact with (some having joined simply for better food and housing), they're still slaughtered en masse by Freeman without a second thought. The game dehumanizes them by giving them all the exact same voice (not shared by any of the civilians, notably) and making them all faceless.
• Halo centers on The Covenant waging a genocidal war against humanity, so it makes sense that no one ever bothers to seek nonviolent solutions. Still, the various alien mooks do display affection for each other. The Grunts are particularly prone to lamenting when you kill one, which will either make you pity them or amuse you.
  Grunt: Brother! No!
  Grunt: He was my best friend!
  • Brutes operate in packs, are angered as you kill your way through them, and will swear vengeance. Some of their comments are clearly Played for Laughs:
  "He was my lover!"
• In Heavy Rain, one of the protagonists is given the choice of getting a crime boss you just interrogated his heart medication or leave him to die. Unless you're a really bad guy, you'll probably save him. On the way out you step over dozens of his guards, whom you killed on your way in. You might say they were shooting at you, but that's not an unusual reaction when someone drives a car into the house you're paid to protect.
  • This might qualify as Fridge Brilliance as it turns out that the character in question is the main killer of the game and is searching for a father willing to go to lengths to protect his son unlike his father over his late brother. And covering up events protecting his son is exactly what the villain in the scenario was doing.
• Hitman inverts this trope in most missions. Agent 47, being a Professional Killer, is expected to kill only the people he's hired to kill. Murdering guards will lower your reward for the assassination and will give you an unfavorable rating.
• Iji completely averts this trope. How and which identical mooks you kill actually affects how the enemy sees you (though they do still all mostly attack on sight after the third level).
  • According to the logs, this may be because they still don't know who you're fighting for.
  • In fact, there is one specific faceless mook early in the game who has an effect on the plot near the end — whether or not you kill her determines whether in sector nine Iji will have a crisis of faith as she finds the log of a close friend of hers or find a log stating how the two of them found a safe place to flee to and will become two of the only three Tasen who are capable of surviving the end of the game. There will be no evidence at all that this mook was different from the others until you've reached sector nine (or more likely, read some of the earlier logs after reaching sector nine on a previous playthrough), and you have to infer which one she was. The mook in question is all by herself and little threat and can be easily killed or easily run past (and thanks to the truce won't attack you at all if you've followed the pacifist path up to that point), so it's probably a fair bet that most first-time players will kill her for her nano if they're playing a killer and spare her if they're playing a pacifist.
  • Iji actually apologizes after her first few kills. Her dialogue will also change the more (or less) she kills.
• Kirby Fighters Deluxe has a special pause screen description for the thundercloud Kracko, which gives a sympathetic view to an otherwise character-free Recurring Boss.
  "YOU...! Did you think I'd forget? The time you smashed into me with your Hi-Jump! That time I was betrayed by Helpers! Or when I was replaced by that mechanical cloud! I-I... sniff... there's something in my eye..."
• In The Last of Us one of the reasons why the Hunters are hunting down Joel is to avenge their fallen friends.
• The Last of Us 2: While the countless human enemies you face in the game are realistically detailed and their names are even cried out by their comrades upon their death, they have no story significance like the characters who die or are threatened in cutscenes.
• The Legend of Spyro: Spyro kills countless apes easily throughout the first two games, yet at the end of The Eternal Night he hesitates to kill their king, Gaul, who is the highest up the chain of evil he's encountered thus far, is planning to release the ultimate evil Malefor, and is directly responsible for Cynder's corruption when she was inside her egg. You'd think Spyro would be less merciful after being affected by dark energy. Only once Spyro's clear Gaul will kill him otherwise does he finish him off.
• Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy has Punis. They're capable of human language, thoughts, etc, and are friendly, gentle creatures; if you're playing Raze's path, you even get a party member, a cute little girl, who was raised by Punis. Except Puniballs (not what you think... probably) are an ingredient in synthesizing, and how do you get those Puniballs? Why, killing Punis in random encounters! Including adorable Baby Puni, who have little pacifiers and everything. Might want to add that Punis look like blue Flan-type monsters, only with a happy little smiley face.
• Marathon: There's no sympathy at all for the thousands of Pfhor you kill through the games (only one has been explicitly referred to, and that was as "that pile of chitin and fluids cooling on the floor behind you"). In the Marathon 3rd party scenario Rubicon, however, the player comes across a certain terminal after killing a whole lot of Enforcers. (The kind of mook seen in the picture.)
  • Infinity turns the But Thou Must! nature of the series and this trope on its head, at some points pitting you as a pawn in an internecine Pfhor power struggle cutting down Enforcers and Troopers alongside Fighters and Hunters, at other points as a slaver ruthlessly mopping up uncooperative humans.
  • In one of the early missions of Marathon 2: Durandal, you encounter a Sph't compiler at a terminal, who quickly notices you and is summarily dispatched. What was he programming? A message for you, apologizing for his incapacity to resist the compulsion to kill you, and forgiving you for your inevitable response. He encourages you to make haste and fight hard, for the sake his fellow Sph't, yet to be freed.
• MARDEK: Emela asks this very same thing. She questions the morality of killing henchmen, remarking on how they have lives, and possibly families of their own, that she and her crew are tearing apart. She even exclaims "A killer killer is still a killer" (if you kill a killer, you're a killer as well), confusing the main lead. Her fellow teammates tells her to put it out of her mind, since as soldiers, this is part of the job.
  • Judging by one of said teammates' comments, that little speech got to him, too. Also, the speech was brought on by a semi-accidental Unfriendly Fire Shoot the Dog moment when Saving The Villain.
  • However, it's also explicitly stated a few times that most of the monsters in the series are made of "Miasma" which randomly forms into monsters to attack you, and have no mind or soul. It goes on to say that this solves a whole lot of tricky ethical questions.
• In The Mark of Kri, murdered bandits will crawl, squirm, or even cry on the ground for a little while after being killed, unless Chunky Salsa'd. It's not fun to watch.
• Mass Effect loves this:
  • In Mass Effect you encounter a situation on The Citadel where you shoot up a bar full of mooks to get to a local crime boss. After clearing the first encounter, you go to the next one, where you have a choice of talking it through with the guards. You can explain that you just killed a roomful of people to get there and they should leave if they don't want to die too, instead of killing them. The first room of mooks open fire on you the moment they see you whereas the second just make threats (and are clearly terrified), excusing this somewhat.
  • The vast majority of mooks in the first game are geth (who individually have the sapience of a dog, and are Always Chaotic Evil besides, so killing them is of course totally fine), brainwashed beings like the rachni or creepers (who you, of course, can't negotiate with), or generic Space Pirates and criminals who shoot you on sight. Other enemy factions, such as the ideologically motivated biotic terrorists or the Punch-Clock Villain mercenaries on Noveria, you can generally at least try to reason with, sometimes successfully. A single group of terrorists from Bringing Down the Sky DLC will try and negotiate with you, citing they came here for a slave raid, not to crash an asteroid into a planet. You can treat with them and let them leave, or cite the fact that they're slavers as reason enough to kill them. The Big Bad of the DLC you can ultimately execute, or turn over to the local authorities to stand trial; but the various mooks he has with him you simply kill.
  • On a planet called Noveria, you can blast your way through over a dozen asari commandos only to have a tear-jerker scene with Matriarch Benezia. The commandos are Brain Washed And Crazy, so negotiating with them wouldn't be possible anyway, but their deaths being casually ignored is still playing this straight.
  • Helena Blake, the biotic extremists, the Dantius sister feud, Wrex's family armor, and quite a few more side quests all feature remote bases where you can kill tons of nameless antagonists without so much as an explanation before getting to the end and either making a Bioware-style moral choice regarding the villain or else advancing your relationships with your crew.
  • In an early mission of Mass Effect 2, you infiltrate a Villain Team-Up in order to recruit their intended target, a vigilante who's been sabotaging their operations. The first half of the mission is spent peacefully walking among the mooks you will later turn on and kill, and you can even strike up a conversation with a handful of them. Although you can also use the opportunity to sabotage their equipment and murder a mechanic you catch alone while you're there.
  • Mass Effect as a franchise uses some dehumanization of its major antagonists to justify the trope at times. In the first game, the geth aren't people or even real artificial intelligences (not until Mass Effect 3). In the second game, the Collectors are similarly dehumanized with Mordin even saying they don't have souls, though the (multi-species) mercenary/pirate groups you spend most of the game fighting aren't. And in Mass Effect 3, we get a trifecta of this: the geth are still just virtual intelligence until they can no longer be fought, Cerberus agents are thoroughly dehumanized due to being brainwashed Slave Mooks, and the Reapers' minions are artificial cyborg-zombies controlled by Eldritch Alien Locusts. The only enemy mooks who even have free will are the CAT6 mercenaries in the Citadel DLC; in that case, their slaughter at the hands of your team is Played for Laughs. Glyph does ask them to surrender at one point, noting how low their chance of survival is, but that's it.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda: There's a version of this with the kett — at first, they're just mooks who open fire on you and cannot be talked down; you have the option to try to resolve things peacefully when first meeting them, but you will fail. Halfway through the game you learn those kett were once angara, and Jaal (an angara) is horrified to realize the full implications of that. Eventually, he has to be told that there's nothing that can be done to reverse the transformation. It makes the kett higher-ups all the more monstrous. They turn whoever they capture into more kett, claiming it's a blessing or that they're "family"... and then use them as throwaway grunts, who are biologically brainwashed into a state of fanatical loyalty to the people who did this to them.
• Max Payne 2 plays with this; it is possible to overhear two mooks having a conversation about the theme park you're all in. One will even spoil the other, and the latter will get pissed at him. After that, they just stand there until you kill them or they see you. It's also possible to come across one mook playing a piano beautifully while the other watches. The two are part of a squad sent to kill everyone in the building, and the second they see you, both try to kill you. It's worth noting the mook playing piano is doing so while the owner's corpse is propped up on top of the instrument.
  • The Enemy Chatter in the original game paints the mooks as actual people with lives and families — who just so happen to all be remorseless bastards.
• In Mega Man Zero, Zero stops short of killing the Guardians when you first fight them, with no explanation offered. Granted, you find out later that they're Hero Antagonists, but their subordinates, who are similarly just doing their job, are all fair game for bisection.
  • The Guardians also apply this as What Measure is a Red Shirt. In the second game, Harpuia chooses to spare Zero when Zero is at his mercy, even though he spent the previous game retiring Resistance soldiers left and right. Later on, they also let Zero leave with Elpizo after slaughtering his entire army.
• Although it doesn't come up in gameplay, in Metal Gear Solid, Snake's practically self-hating codec conversations reveal that he does take this trope to heart, although it is infused with some I Did What I Had to Do.
  • It's discussed in Metal Gear Solid in a way that simultaneously plays it straight and justifies killing mooks. Master Miller urges Snake not to feel bad about killing enemy soldiers because "they knew the risks, just like Snake", reminding him that it's not personal and that they wouldn't hesitate to kill Snake either even if they felt bad about it.
    "Don't feel guilty about the soldiers that died from your bullets. They knew the risks they were taking, just like you."
  • In terms of actual gameplay, this trope is reversed from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty onwards. If careful, it is possible to avoid killing or even being seen by any of the mooks in the entire game. Not so for the bosses, who must be fought and (in most cases) killed because it's necessary for the story to progress.
  • In the non-Canon Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, Pyro Bison actually cites the player's current Mook body count on that save file as proof of Snake's murderous tendencies in a What the Hell, Hero? monologue. Does create some Values Dissonance given that the Psycho for Hire boss also describes how glorious burning someone to death with a flamethrower is.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater features a good aversion when you face The Sorrow — who, rather than fight you as the other Cobras did, makes you wade through a river occupied by the ghosts of every single person you've killed in the game up to that point, each one of them having injuries and making statements reflecting the method in which you killed them.^note  The bare minimum at this point are four enemies, namely The Fear, The Pain, The End and The Fury, as their bodies explode no matter what after their boss fights.
    • Before that, you can befriend the guard in the Groznyj Grad cells by throwing the food he gives you back out to him. He then shows you a photo of his family and tells you a little about his history. Unfortunately, Snake gets on bad terms with him after proposing the guard let him out.
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker actively encourages the player at every turn to avoid killing enemies. Paz will plead for you to spare the lives of the men gunning for you over the radio (and balk when you do kill them), and every single human soldier in the game can be defeated, brought back to your base and added to your army.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, each soldier has their own dogtags, having their name and info on it, and every different member has a unique one. Raiden becomes angsty after your first kill as well, feeling bad about it. You will even get called out on killing too many seagulls. That said, this is also the game that added the tranquilizer pistol, realistically allowing the player to complete the entire game, even the forced-combat sections, without killing a single person — except, again, the bosses that are scripted to die from their battle with you.
  • Kill enough mooks in Metal Gear Solid 4, and Snake will have a flashback to when Liquid accused him of enjoying the killing in the first game, and will throw up in disgust.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance takes a thorough look at this. Raiden establishes early on that he believes the PMC cyborgs he fights against made their choice to oppose him, and didn't deserve mercy for throwing in with the types of people his enemies were. Later, he's forced to face the fact that underneath their emotional inhibitors, many of the Red Shirt enemies he's been cutting down had no real choice at all, being manipulated by the same system he was trying to protect people from in the first place. Raiden is deeply disturbed by this. Jack... isn't.
• Partially averted in the ending of the first Metal Slug, where a paper airplane is shown flying over past stages full of the bodies of mooks you slaughtered. Towards the end, you see a grave with a crying woman standing before it.
  • Or, if you finish the game with two players, you could see them relaxing and having a time doing stuff other than being, you know, evil.
  • It's exacerbated if you know the backstory. The whole war is a result of General Morden's Roaring Rampage of Revenge after his son was killed in an attack that the hideously corrupt military higher-ups knew about. His soldiers followed him out of loyalty.
• Metro: Last Light: The game offers the choice of killing or sparing two major NPCs, and your companion will comment on your choices. On the one hand, this is given more dramatic weight than all the times that you killed enemy Mooks. On the other, these two men are worth one point each on the Karma Meter, and listening to the right NPC conversations is also worth one point each.
• If you've seen the capabilities of Milo and Kate with the Project Natal technology, you won't be surprised to see this kind of thing happen in future games. The game demo has shown that AI can be programmed to be almost indistinguishable from a normal human, which could lead to some very poignant moments in a game: Talking to another randomly spawned ally in Call of Duty and hearing him give his views on the war or talk about his family, and then watching as a rogue grenade promptly takes him out. Or an enemy begging for his life after watching his squad get slaughtered and allowing you to talk to him just like you would a real man pleading to be spared. The humanizing aspects that modern AI technology is demonstrating could be enough to make you question the senseless killing of mooks.
  • Or not.
• In Mortal Kombat X, both the Red Shirts and Mooks are slaughtered casually with nobody caring, not even the folks on the same side. The story opens with Johnny Cage making small talk with the helicopter pilot; who's decapitated minutes later like he was nothing. A fight with Scorpion later, Cage reacts to another soldier's decapitation with an "Ew!" and tossing the head aside. Later, Quan Chin kills one of his own soldiers just to get the attention of the Earthrealm warriors. Even for a game like this, it's pretty grim.
• NieR: You will hate yourself when you learn what the Shades are.
• NieR: Automata invokes this in regard to the Machine Lifeforms. 9S says at multiple points in the game that they are merely mindless robot weapons, and that there is no rhyme or reason behind what they do. Then you see them trying to emulate human behaviors, found pacifist settlements, start religious cults, and so on. As you soon learn, this is because the Machine Lifeforms and the androids of YoRHa aren't so different after all.
• NightFire is pretty good about this:
  • The third mission centers on you trying to get to an extraction point while being pursued. Drake's men continue to be fair game, but killing the local cops results in mission failure.
  • The mission "Night Shift" revolves around you infiltrating Drake's building at night. The security guards are considered innocent people who must be avoided or subdued nonlethally. Anyone in a suit is apparently aware of what Drake is up to, and as such can be killed. They may or may not be Yakuza members as well.
  • "Phoenix Fire" once again puts you in Drake's corporate building, this time fighting your way out. Anyone with a gun is still fair game. There are also women in the building who are simple employees, and killing them makes you fail the mission. (Frustratingly, if an enemy Mook kills one of them, the game acts like you did and you still fail).
  • In most, but not all, missions, you get additional points for forcing mooks to surrender and/or non lethally subduing some. You have to want the points however, and figure out how to do it.
• Ninja Gaiden 3. The major theme of the story is an attempt to make Ryu come to terms with the fact that he's a destructive One-Man Army that kills all in his way brutally and mercilessly. Consequently, the Updated Re Release all but completely removed those bits as a result.
• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle deconstructs this when it's revealed the whole plot is a revenge scheme against Travis for killing the Final Boss's father and brothers in a number of side missions during the first game where they appeared as mooks only discernible by their lack of hair.
• Subverted frequently in No One Lives Forever. The player can listen to conversations between mooks which are often fairly long and go into a wide variety of subjects, including, quite often, their personal lives. The player almost always has no choice but to kill them during or after the conversation. How are those German guys going to start a band now?
  • It's possible for the player to use nonlethal weaponry in the second game, however, making it possible to fight the mooks without killing them.
• The background comic for Ana Amari, Overwatch's support sniper has her thinking on the families of the Talon agents she is taking down, but mentally counters that with the fact that if she hesitates, her own friends die.
• Averted at one point in Paper Mario: Color Splash. While on the Sunset Express, Mario meets a Shy Guy who delivers a brief soliloquy, pointing out to Mario that "every obstacle you've experienced has been the result of our hard and thankless work". While the Shy Guy seems to regret the life he's chosen, he knows there's no backing out of it, and notes that the next time he meets Mario, it'll probably be as an enemy. Later on in the game, if you defeat a certain Shy Guy on a trapeze:
  Shy Guy: Mario... it's me, remember? You listened to my story that time on the Sunset Express. If it had to happen this way, I'm glad it was you...
  [the Shy Guy explodes in a shower of items]
• Perfect Dark, being an FPS, has tons of mooks to mow down. No moral problems on shooting the folks intending to ventilate the President or your personal friends. But many levels take place in regular old buildings, where it is fairly obvious that the guards were just hired hands. You CAN knock them out and disarm them with your fists, but with the exception of a single named villain (who has a key card you need that stops working if she dies) and one objective that requires you KO someone (so they can be interrogated), not expected or required. In an aversion, the Alaskan base guards, Air Force One staff, and Secret Service are all treated as innocents, who you may not kill. It is also pointed out in a conversation that while it is unknown how much of the NSA is involved with the conspiracy, any ones you encounter are involved enough to be fair game.
• Pikmin: Invoked on the player's part. Over the course of a game, you'll send wave after wave of Pikmin to their inevitable doom, and when they're gone you'll just pull up more without thinking about it. One of the songs released to promote the game, however, is a tearjerking, melancholy ballad from the Pikmin's point of view in which they're resigned to their fate.
  We'll work together, fight, and be eaten,
  But we won't ask you to love us.
  • Olimar, the main character of the game, shows shades of remorse as well. In his closing day remarks, he mentions how he feels bad about the fate that ultimately follows when Pikmin are left at the end of the day outside of the pod (they'll get eaten), and expresses outright guilt when all of his Pikmin followers have been destroyed, lamenting on how his absolute carelessness got his followers killed. Furthermore he has a song in response to Ai no Uta that shows that he does care about his little alien plants. It's just... well...
  • At the same time, it's very possible, and even a common self-imposed challenge, to get through every Pikmin game without letting a single individual Pikmin die. It's also possible to avoid killing most enemies if you're careful, save for those that either hold items required for story progression or otherwise prevent you from getting to them — doing so will require you to work with a much smaller Pikmin army, however.
• Portal's turrets shouldn't invoke this, as they're just mass-produced robotic gun turrets. But their cute characterisation, saying things like "I don't hate you" when you knock them down made more sensitive players feel guilty, and that was before they start saying "I'm different." Also, in Portal 2 they are said to feel very real pain, according to Wheatley.
  "All simulated, of course, but real enough to them, I suppose."
• Rainbow Six: In the first Vegas game, Marcelo happens to be a well-known member amongst the terrorists. You kill him when you arrive in the mines (he wears a blue shirt), and Irena points out that it wasn't very smart. After that, terrorists often mention Marcelo during combat.
• Featured in Red Dead Redemption when bounty hunting. Bounties brought in alive give bigger cash and honor awards — but the bounty's gang of mooks are worth jack squat alive or dead. Which was often Truth in Television.
• In MMORPG Runescape, this is parodied when in a quest cutscene an NPC guard openly acknowledges that the guards are killed all the time with no one complaining. His partner is horrified, at least until someone comes and kills both of them.
  • This is also lampshaded in the Vengeance! saga, to an extremely depressing effect. In the saga, you start off as following a party of adventurers that is working to fight through a dungeon. After fighting through the first room, the focus shifts, and you take control of one of the warriors they failed to finish off. This warrior is very pissed off because you killed her brother. She then proceeds to kill every adventurer in the party one by one.
• Lampshaded and statistically measured in Second Sight. Each mission gives you a "morality" score, which starts at 100% and drops each time you kill someone (but not when you trick one mook into killing another one). The player has the option of sneaking past some mooks, and most can be knocked out with tranquilizers. Oddly enough, fisticuffs are lethal.
• Sengoku Basara plays this trope to the hilt. The various warlords you play as playable characters fight each other for practically no reason and are on quite cordial terms even as they're busy smacking the crap out of each other — the hundreds of people KOed every battle are never even mentioned. In one case in Samurai Heroes, Ieyasu consents to an alliance with the Hojo clan after the clan's messenger — the ninja Kotaro Fuuma — has butchered his way through Ieyasu's guards and doesn't seem to give it a second thought.
• Sin and Punishment has the Armed Volunteers, a military group devoted to defending against the monstrous Ruffians. Unfortunately, they're also creating martial law in Japan, so Achi's group labels them as their enemies. Once one of the main characters becomes a giant Ruffian, they mobilize, and the other main character's next mission is wiping out their entire military, a military that most of them joined specifically to protect humanity. If that wasn't enough, Achi laughs at their pathetic deaths, providing an early clue that there is something wrong with her.
• In Sonic Adventure, one of the storylines revolves around one of Eggman's robot Mooks, E-102 Gamma. It plays around with this trope a few times, and ends with one of the most poignant moments in the series.
  • The Sonic series is actually generally an aversion. Robotnik's Mecha-Mooks (in most games) are actually Sonic's animal friends that have been brainwashed and put in a robot body, and by destroying their robotic shell the player is actually freeing them. The most straightforward explanation for Gamma's story is that he becomes self-aware and targets his friends for this reason.
  • Played straight by Shadow in Sonic Forces, however, albeit just offscreen. At one point we join Shadow during a flashback during which he's just outright slaughtered the Jackal Squad mercenaries, only for their captain to confront him attempting to take revenge. Shadow beats him down, but lets him live and teleports away with an insult. This proves to be a mistake, since said captain then becomes the powerful villain Infinite to soothe his ego.
• Spec Ops: The Line deconstructs this trope multiple times, seeing as your squad, well, massacres other American soldiers due to a tragic communication error. You can overhear some random conversations between enemies as they take breaks between patrols. Typically, they're sympathetic and even a little charming, and you're going to shoot them dead anyway because you're playing a shooter game. This is also invoked (to the point of parody) by The Radioman when your squad starts killing the last few soldiers guarding his compound:
  The Radioman: (soldier dies) He was just three days away from retirement! (soldier dies) Well, there goes our fantasy football league. (soldier dies) He had...um...a dog? I didn't really know him that well. (soldier dies) Okay, you can have that one. That guy was an asshole.
  • Later, you come across a shrine to the dead, with their names listed on a wall. Additionally, one of your squadmates is crossed out, as he has been killed. The game simply leaves the wall in the room for you to notice it without ever calling it out, but if you look at the memorial, you can see the name and rank of every American soldier the protagonist killed up to that point. Ouch.
  • The first firefight after the white phosphorus incident begins with a soldier screaming, "Murderers!" Given that Walker just gruesomely burnt an army of mooks alive with white phosphorus rounds and got almost fifty civilians caught in the crossfire, it's hard to blame him.
• The personal emails that you sometimes find, alongside useful passcodes, security information etc, in dead or unconscious guards' computers in Splinter Cell can be a bit of a guilt trip. In the first mission of Chaos Theory, one of the guards you can grapple and interrogate instead tells you how he knew something like this would happen ever since his family was killed by Americans, and how he's prepared to die so he can meet them again. And he doesn't even have a name. It's a little disturbing, actually; even Sam is creeped out. Averted in Conviction though.
• This is probably one of the biggest complaints of new-to-MMORPG Star Trek fans about Star Trek Online. Since about 98% of the enemies in the game are members of other sentient species, and there are (at the moment) no alternatives to destroying them en masse, first-time RPG players often complain on the forums in a shocked state about the number of Klingons they just vaporized. The fact that several missions involve being tricked or manipulated into slaying innocents doesn't help in most cases.
  • The trickery runs you into What the Hell, Hero? territory when you slaughter a base of Romulans on the orders of an admiral who turns out to be a member of Species 8472.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic provides many textbook examples of this trope. There are a large number of cutscenes in which a villain falls defeated before the player character, who must then spare the villain's life if the character wishes to adhere to the Light Side. Killing the villain will move the character toward the Dark Side. And yet, wantonly slaughtering hundreds of low-level minions on the way to the villain is of no consequence, as far as the Force is concerned. In fact, going out of your way to slaughter low-level minions, as many players routinely do just to gain experience and loot their bodies for money and equipment, seems to be of no consequence.
• Textbook use of this in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Using the dark side to kill hundreds, maybe thousands of stormtroopers fighting for their lives? Awesome! Trying to strike down Vader or Palpatine in anger? Bad apprentice! Bad!. Granted, the stormtroopers were shooting at him, but considering how little threat an individual stormtrooper poses to Starkiller versus how killing Vader and Palpatine is the only feasible way for the rebels to win makes one wonder why Galen never considers using his force-lightning to non-lethally incapacitate the stormtroopers or picking up a blaster to use with the stun setting.
  • The novelization does have the apprentice's pilot/love interest tell him that one of the TIE pilots he casually slaughtered was an old friend of hers, and killing's not so easy when you know who's under the helmet. But as soon as he apologizes she tells him that it's okay, she hadn't talked to that friend in years, and it never comes up again. Well, sort of. At one point the apprentice looks at Vader's plan to get all the rebel leaders in one place, which involved sacrificing thousands of loyal Imperials, and thinks that those lives mean nothing to Vader and the Emperor. Even though those loyal Imperials meant nothing to the apprentice either, and he killed a good percent of them anyway. Though admittedly the stormtroopers were genuinely on Vader's side, whereas to Starkiller they were either obstacles or genuine enemies.
  • With that said Vader himself is actually a known subversion of this trope. While he knows that his troops are expendable and can be replaced, he acknowledges the fact that they are actual people underneath their helmets. Hence why his Stormtroopers are so loyal to him, he is always fighting on the front lines with them, and he never orders them to do something he himself would not. Just don't, you know... fail him.
• Zig-zagged in Super Robot Wars: original generation. Your battalion cuts through what amounts to an intermediate army of mooks without mention, then there's one that's portrayed as sympathetic, but he joins your battalion and you go back to killing an army of mooks without a second thought.
• In the final mission of Syphon Filter 2, Gabe Logan and Jason Chance have a Circling Monologue in which Chance calls Logan out on killing hundreds of agents over the course of the game who were just trying to do their job.
  • Though in balance to this, the Syphon Filter series had several missions where you were forced to avoid killing certain enemies, even assisting them in battles despite the fact that if they saw you, they would shoot you on sight. Syphon Filter 2 especially loved doing this with escaping the airfield guarded by military police, the Moscow club and streets with Russian police, and avoiding as well as assisting the NYPD in the streets of New York. Interestingly, the Russian gulag guards are all expendable, implying that they measure lower than the other enemies that are just doing their job.
  • And in one particular example, there was Teresa's flashback mission in Syphon Filter 3 of her time in the ATF dealing with a Survivalist compound, where at first you work for the ATF alongside the "FBI" (who are actually NSA), but soon switch over to the Survivalists when you realize the NSA's more devious intentions of a Waco-style cover up.
• Played with in Tales of the Abyss. Most of the party has no qualms with cutting down a dozen mooks who get in their way (even the 13-year-old girl), but The Hero Luke goes into a brief Heroic BSoD after he first kills an enemy soldier. Afterwards, it's mentioned that whenever he kills someone, visions of their death haunts his dreams, and he has a unique victory dialogue against human enemies.
• In Tenchu, the player can often hear the mooks utter some lines while hiding in the Shadows. That includes lines as "The doctor said I should stay away from dangerous business for a while" (said by a Ninja of all people) and "I need to cut down on my drinking, or my wife will be mad at me again". Though that might not be intentional. You could feel sorry for mooks getting murdered seconds after saying "I'm sure tonight will be completely uneventful".
• The first two Thief games make a point of averting this. On the hardest difficulty, you must never kill. Even at easy difficulty, there are some major guilt trips awaiting the kill-crazy thief. Ironically the most effective of these is a spider. His name is Longdaddy, he is avoidable and the owner of the garden he lurks in is overjoyed at the work he puts in keeping his garden free from pests.
• This is a minor theme in the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider. While not apparent at first, later portions of the game show that the Solarii forces that Lara massacres her way through are regular people stranded on an island they can't escape, and do everything to survive — just like her. If you return to previous areas, to hunt for collectibles, for example, you'll often find Solarii patrolling around and talking about, say, trading smokes for a book or looking for a pet rat called "Sprinkles" that has escaped one guy's pocket. What makes it all the more tragic is that these people can't be reasoned with and, more often than not, have to be killed to advance the game.
  • This even extends to the reactions of the enemies in combat. When their allies are killed, they don't scream insults or curses at you. Instead, they scream out "NOOOOO!" as their comrades fall, or beg them to get back up. There's even a moment late in the game where a rather large Solarii accuses you of having killed Vladimir. At no point is a Vladimir introduced — he was just one of the faceless mooks to you.
• Transformers: War for Cybertron and Transformers: War for Cybertron take a few moments out to, er, humanize the robots you encounter in the course of a mission, both on your side and on the opposing faction. While you could go in guns blazing into every encounter, waiting a while and playing stealthily will let you overhear things like Decepticons complaining about their faction's leadership, or Autobots wondering why some of the installations have No OSHA Compliance.
• Trimps: Advancing through the world requires sending your Trimps to battle, which inevitably results in their deaths. But you'll just breed new ones, anyway.
  You look behind and see your kingdom. You have gems, a colony, and territory. You wonder if enough Trimps have already fallen in battle. After contemplation, one word falls out of your mouth as you begin to move forward. 'Nah'
• In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Drake has the Lazarevic at his mercy finally, and he tries to tell Drake that "We're not so different, you and I". This immediately makes him unable to pull the trigger on him, despite having no problems killing hundreds of human enemies throughout the game.
  • It also acts as something of a subtle Shut Up, Hannibal! to Lazarevic, whose entire world view is based upon being The Unfettered.
  • There's another, slightly strange instance of this early in Uncharted 2; in the early museum break-in level, there's a scene where Harry offers Nate a pair of pistols. Nate is horrified by the prospect of shooting at the innocent guards until Harry reassures him that they're just non-lethal tranquillizers. Shortly after this scene though, there's an in-game sequence where Nate, hanging from a ledge, tosses an unsuspecting guard off the roof and hundreds of feet down the cliff below. Harry makes a quip about the guard's demise, and the two proceed as though nothing had happened.
    • If you look closely enough you will see that the guard lands in water and swims away, although given that the games normally avert Soft Water, even the developers admit this is a cop-out.
    • Shown in Penny Arcade's comic Ambiguitas.
  • Penny Arcade also dealt with the seemingly suicidal Uncharted henchmen in Working Conditions.
• Discussed and explored heavily in Undertale.
  • If you kill Random Encounters while sparing Toriel, you will get called out on it.
    Flowey: "So you were able to play by your own rules. You spared the life of a single person. [lists off each monster] Think about those names. Do you think those monsters had friends? Do you think they had families? Each one could have been someone else's Toriel. Selfish brat. Someone is dead because of you."
  • If you kill Random Encounters after the Ruins but before Undyne, she will call you out for one of them.^note Unless you killed Papyrus. That will really piss her off. Killing even a single monster makes Undyne unwilling to be your friend after you beat her, and killing one after becoming her friend leads to a rather dark ending.
  • The best ending requires you to not just avoid killing any bosses, but any random encounters as well. Killing a large number of random encounters but no bosses gets you roughly the same ending as killing their beloved hero (though most of the endings where you kill major characters are still darker than that).
    • This trope is inverted in the ending where all the bosses are killed, but no mooks, as among all the neutral endings save the one where every enemy is spared, it's considered to be the best for the remaining inhabitants of the Underworld. Sans even comments on this. This is the "dog ending".
  • Every monster, even the lowliest of slime monsters, has a personality and can be interacted with to end the fight nonviolently.
  • Several seemingly "random encounters" are unique monsters that only appear once, and you'll be called out by one of the bosses if you kill them. One random encounter is replaced by a friend who is "looking for [him]" if you kill him, and you later meet his father and in the pacifist route, his mother. Another monster only shows up once and is later revealed to have been friends with several of the bosses if you dig hard enough into side content.
• Lampshaded in Universe at War: the Novus faction has the Ohm Robos, dirt-cheap Mecha-Mooks who have a self-destruct attack. Their info card states that they know they're completely expendable... and they have no problem with the logic.
• Variation in Valkyria Chronicles: You get bonuses for killing the Aces, who actually do have names, but the game treats them like miniature boss fights and they have no lines. Then Selvaria's DLC came out and let you play as the Empire. The player character's face is never seen. This comes with a bit of a gut punch when you realize that you're playing as Oswald the Iron, one of the Aces that you probably gunned down with glee.
  • In one cutscene Welkin and Alicia come upon a wounded enemy soldier who's calling out for his mother and tend to his wounds. He dies the next morning, but the enemy general who finds them decides to allow them to return to their unit rather than having his men shot them, as a sign of gratitude, even if their compassion had been in vain.
    • The Gallian military doesn't get that much compassion. Squad 7 is built on Video Game Caring Potential and the enemies have the above scene to remind us how they're human too, but the complete annihilation of most of the army proper doesn't have any attention paid to it except how tragic it was for the person who caused it, and how without the army, it's up to Squad 7 to save the day. A Million Is a Statistic, indeed.
  • Zigzagged with Squad 7, for the first 70 members they have individual quirks and backstories that you can unlock and each of those 70 have deaths that matter (they get a dying cutscene accompanied by sad music). If you manage to get enough of Squad 7 killed, you get a never-ending supply of generic mooks that can be killed without consequence.
• Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume plays with this — the protagonist (and by extension, his comrades) are actively encouraged to kill every foe they face, and brutally beat every trace of life from them while they're at it. The protagonist acknowledges what he's doing is morally questionable at best, but considers himself too far gone to care. Depending on the path the player takes, this can come back to seriously bite him in the backside.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: Zig-Zagged with a Karma Meter that penalizes the Player Character for causing needless death... unless you're killing Mooks in a combat-enabled zone. So, it penalizes your Humanity to kill a random police officer to uphold the Masquerade; but not to slaughter your way through a legion of hapless security guards to reach the Big Bad's fortified sanctum, only to spout a few insults and walk away.
• In Vampyr (2018), Jonathan can practically kill any generic enemy that comes across his way without any consequences, even biting them mid-combat (you are specially encouraged to do so as a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire since this is the only way you can gain XP). But if Jonathan feeds on any civilian NPC, there will be negative consequences that affect everyone else. For example, if he bites Nurse Hawkins, the Pembroke Hospital will suffer with one of their staff dying. But if you kill her boyfriend, she will abandon her job, join the Guard of Priwen, and is later found as a generic enemy that can be killed with no consequence. What makes this trope especially jarring is that the Guard of Priwen (one of the main enemies Jonathan fights in the game besides other vampires) aren't necessarily evil themselves, just interested in saving London from the vampire threat and when you fight and defeat their leader, you have the option of sparing him or turn him into a vampire.
• Averted in a pretty unique way in Watch_Dogs, you can run a scan on any person you find in the game, including the mooks you face. It gives names, occupations, annual income, and little quirky facts about them you might be able to use to your advantage. Some are in fact family men who plan on picking their kids up from soccer practice once they finish their shift, or are going through a mortgage problem. On the other hand, some are in fact wife beaters, affiliated with racist groups, and involved in child pornography, making gunning them down all the more satisfying. So in fact you can make sure everyone you kill actually is an Asshole Victim.
• The World Is Not Enough tries to avoid this.
  • The first level is set in Lachaise's bank. Mooks in suits you can kill, even though it is unclear how involved with Renard they are. The bank's security guards however are treated as innocents, who you may not kill. On higher difficulties, you'll occasionally face both types at once, complicating the fight.
  • The level "Night Shift" has a Dramatic Irony variant. You're warned that if you get spotted outside your room at night, the guards will "mistake" you for an intruder and "accidentally" kill you. At this point in the game, Bond still thinks Elektra is the target and not the Big Bad, so you can't kill any of her people.
• World of Warcraft subverts this with two mooks, one each for the Alliance and the Horde. When you kill the Alliance one, you find a letter on her corpse. Turns out she was forced to fight for the bad guys, was sabotaging them from the inside where she could, and she loved her daddy. Much the same applies to the Horde one, except the letter is addressed to his sister.
• This trope is mentioned at one point in Xenogears by a random NPC in Kislev, which is for a portion of the game portrayed as the Evil Empire to Aveh's Kingdom:
  Unnamed Kislev soldier: Even nameless soldiers have lives to live. Remember that...
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has the scenario where the mooks are often the soldiers of Keves and Agnus, to which Ouroboros belonged before they themselves were liberated from the Flame Clock. Early in the story, Noah actually expresses an intention to kill as rarely as possible, and it's implied through dialogue that even when soldiers are defeated in gameplay their lives are spared. Occasions where the party and their allies are required to kill soldiers attacking them (who may or may not be given distinct identities) do come up, but these are still portrayed as moments of significant tragedy.
• In Young Souls, hero twins Jenn and Tristan are saddened the first time they kill a goblin general, despite never showing regret over the hundreds of goblin mooks and dozens of bosses they slaughtered on the way there.

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