Enfant Terrible / Video Games

• Arcana Heart has two:
  • Kira Daidouji, an 11-year-old child genius who got fed up with having to return to Japan to mix in with the "normal kids". Her research on ether science has allowed her to create a large watery blob, whose body she uses for combat. Sounds normal at first, but when you consider she also wants to use that blob to help her Take Over the World, you're in completely different territory.
  • Lieselotte Achenbach is a ten-year-old assassin who carries around the spirit of her presumed dead older sister in a puppet with no legs.
• Arena of Valor: At the age of 6, Iggy murders his own parents for sealing his talent in Black Magic, which made him the center of attention for kids around his age. Then he becomes a murderous fugitive responsible for a massacre throughout two cities. At the age of 14, he becomes the acting leader of the Dark Den, a cabal of Black Magic users who thrive on being as evil as they can.
• The eponymous baby from The Baby in Yellow has otherwordly powers, a collection of Creepy Doll toys, and a tendency to mess with his babysitters (like the player character) in twisted ways.
• There are two in Bloodborne, One of them is Mergo, a stillborn Great One who influenced the Pthumerian bloodline of Queen Yharnam along with Cainhurst Vileblood, and the catalyst of the madness brought by the School of Mensis. Another one is the Orphan of Kos, a child which a Great One gave birth to and the only heir from them, it's more than enough to cause havoc via mimicking a Hunter.
• In CarnEvil, the final boss of the Freak Show is a giant baby named Junior. He chases you around a giant playroom, hits you with his rattle, and vomits on you. If the machine owner finds this too disturbing, they have the option of replacing him with Deaddy, a giant teddy who fights in the exact same manner and uses the same baby talk voice clips.
• Bulleta/B.B. Hood from the Vampire/Darkstalkers series is a borderline example, as although she appears to fit it perfectly, it's sometimes implied that she's much older than she appears.
• In The Darkside Detective, Emily the Bloodwolf is a sweet little girl who enjoys playing with fire and knives, and asks Santa for a chainsaw for Christmas.
• In Dead Space, we have Lurkers, though they actually qualify more as Fetus Terrible. In Dead Space 2, we have those, plus Crawlers (instead of fetuses, these are babies old enough to crawl...and they have an exploding sac on them) and The Pack (Bratty zombie kids...they don't have body-part weapons like most other necromorphs do, but they are fast and always attack in groups).
• The Cherubs◊ from Doom³.
• In Dragon's Crown, Harpies are a One-Gender Race that does Conceive and Kill with their human mates. After you kill the Harpy that was the boss of the first quest, her nest with new-born chicks was found. Looking like baby humans with bird bodies, researchers took in the chicks to raise in order to see if they could be raised good. Unfortunately, harpies are Always Chaotic Evil and the chicks ended up eating the researchers.
• The Big Bad Manah in Drakengard, the megalomaniacal empress and feared high priestess of the Cult of the Watchers...is a little blonde girl about six-years-old. She seems to be floating in the air without a care as far as her mental state goes when you first meet her, but then she speaks. And her voice has this odd habit of alternating between a cute girl's and an evil man's. Her eyes are also naturally blood red, which is just disturbing.
• Horus from Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages is a strange example, though him being an alien probably justifies it. He resembles a fetus but doesn't quite qualify as a Fetus Terrible since he is shown in the backstory to have been born and worked alongside his most-likely-parents, Osiris and Isis. Although he claims that in the past, Isis killed Osiris, it becomes clear that Horus is Obviously Evil, with even his co-conspirators in Osiris's murder alluding to him as being the mastermind. Although he has a very deep, adult-sounding voice, he says that he is "just a child", and it's possible that by his species' standards he is still very young, albeit with the intelligence of an adult human.
• EarthBound (1994) gives us 12-year-old Porky/Pokey Minch. He starts off as just your average worst kid in the neighborhood, tries his best to be a big bad bully but just ends up looking like a loser, especially in comparison to his neighbor, Ness. Then he gets involved with Giygas. Over the course of the game, he gradually commits worse and worse crimes, while simultaneously becoming more and more powerful. These include condoning human sacrifices, stealing a helicopter from a man of high authority, dragging around Giygas's Mani Mani statues so as to corrupt all the people of the world, and doing his business on the ground without burying it. Then, come the finale, he's become Giygas's straight-up right-hand man, though because of the ambiguity of his dialogue, it's possible he's actually squarely on rank with him, if not the one now pulling the strings. After attempting to kill the party, he unleashes Giygas and very nearly succeeds in destroying the entire world just for the fun of it. And he does all this while behaving in a manner very similar to Eric Cartman.
  • Mother 3 gives us a strange subversion: Porky is back, and while it's revealed near the end of the game that he's physically aged himself thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, he still has the exact same mind he had as a pre-teen boy. He also wants to kill every person in the entire world other than himself just because it's his idea of fun.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has two examples:
  • Babette appears to be an ordinary twelve-year-old girl. As you'll find out if you join the Dark Brotherhood, however, she's actually a three-hundred-year-old vampire with a taste for human blood and a pet frostbite spider. She's also one of the most skilled alchemists in the entire province, a skill which she puts toward the brewing of potent poisons for her fellow Brotherhood assassins.
  • Nelkir, one of Jarl Balgruuf's children, seems to be a fairly ordinary spoiled brat like his brothers and sisters... until you start the quest 'The Whispering Door', and discover that his sullen attitude is more due to the fact that he's been serving Mephala, the Daedric Prince of Plots and Secrets, for some time. Once you've spoken to Mephala yourself, Nelkir will help you open the door where Mephala's artifact is hidden, even recommending that you kill the court wizard Farengar for the key, since 'no one will miss him, I assure you.' As a bonus, the quest was supposed to have an ending scene in which Balgruuf's children were all corrupted by Mephala and murdered him.
• Independent adventure game Emily Enough features this as the player character: Emily decides, at her birthday, to slaughter her family. The rest of the game features her trying to get out of the asylum she ends up in. Emily herself seems quite comfortable with her new profession, too.
• Fallout 3:
  • Betty. She's the mistress of a Lotus-Eater Machine that would be a utopia if it wasn't for the fact that she likes to sadistically torture people to relieve boredom. And she forces you to help her. Thankfuly, there's a good end to this saga, which is thankfully fairly obvious (even if the code required to do so isn't), in which you permanently kill her prisoners-which nets you good Karma. Betty is revealed to be the avatar of a 100+-year-old Mad Scientist.
  • In the same quest (and the entire game with a proper console code/mod) you can be one yourself. The biggest example perhaps being to kill Timmy's parents, and then brag to him about it.
  • There's also the in-world, pre-war Urban Legend of the "Pint-Sized Slasher" An unknown kid in a clown mask with a kitchen knife, going around killing adults. Whether he exists or not is up for debate, but Betty (Mentioned above) uses the legend for her own twisted enjoyment while you are in Tranquility Lane. You can find what is supposed to be the Pint-Sized Slasher's mask in the Point Lookout expansion (In two locations, no less!)
• Mary from Ib is a rather powerful supernatural example of this trope. However, she's actually a 400+-year-old painting who was created by the artist Guertena.
• In JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain, the villainess is the Spoiled Brat daughter of a great Professor — think Veruca Salt with access to buttons that can destroy the world.
• Invoked in Legacy of Kain with eponymous character in unconventional way. At Kain's moment of birth, the Guardian of Balance within the Circle of Nine, Ariel, is murdered by the Hylden Lord, who is imprisoned by the Pillars of Nosgoth and thus possessing Mortanius, the Guardian of Death. The Pillars of Nosgoth are maintained by the Circle of Nine and are linked to them spiritually, and are responsible for the well-being of Nosgoth. Ariel's lover Nupraptor, the Guardian of Mentality, finds her dead, and knowing that could have only been killed by a member of the Circle of Nine, curses all Guardians of the Circle of Nine with his insanity and grief caused by Ariel's death, causing the Pillars of Nosgoth to be corrupted, putting Nosgoth in peril. The catch is that Ariel was murdered just as Kain was born, as her position as the Guardian of Balance meant that Kain would succeed her as the Guardian of Balance, so that when Nupraptor found her dead and cursed the Circle, Kain would also be cursed from infancy, and would thus damn all nine of the Pillars to collapse. Kain, however, was resurrected as a vampire after being killed by assassins thirty years later, and through the manipulations of Moebius the Timestreamer, the Guardian of Time within the Circle of Nine, ends up becoming the Last of His Kind by the end of Blood Omen. Therefore, at the end of Blood Omen, Kain is given a choice of either saving Nosgoth but damning the vampire race to extinction and releasing the Hylden, or refusing the sacrifice and keeping the vampire race alive while also imprisoning the Hylden, but dooming the Pillars to an eternity of collapse and turning Nosgoth into an eternal wasteland. As a result of all of this, Kain embarks on a millennia-long Xanatos Gambit Roulette to Screw Destiny, by keeping the Hylden imprisoned, the vampire race alive, and Nosgoth restored, all without having to sacrifice himself.
• Enforcer No. XV of Ouroboros in The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky isn't called the Angel of Slaughter for nothing. Renne turns out to be one of the most disturbing members of the group, relishing in describing the horrible ways she kills people and treating it all like a game. It's also a Deconstruction, as it's later revealed she only became that way due to suffering horrific trauma when she was even younger, and the main character desperately tries to get through to her. She does eventually perform a Heel–Face Turn, but it takes a lot of effort.
• Mad Father: The eponymous character's psychopathy began with killing small animals as a child. Then it got worse. It is also implied (and then revealed on a second run) that Aya was this throughout the game. Notably, this is also the reason why her aforementioned father wanted to make her into a doll; he couldn't stand the thought of his daughter being 'dirtied' like himself.
• Played straight in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, with a very, very deadly Child Soldier known as The Frank Hunter to the mercenary community, because of his habit of approaching his targets with nothing except a knife and an innocent cuteness that made it impossible for them to strike back. He later ends up becoming Null, and Gray Fox, who is the Cyborg Ninja.
  • More implied, but equally straight, the same series brings in a government cloning project to develop exceptionally gifted children who could be raised into brilliant soldiers — this project created the main character and two Big Bads. The name of the project? 'Les Enfants Terribles'. It's not an example of this trope at the time the series takes place, though, because the trouble starts when the Enfants are all well into their thirties. We'll have to hope for Metal Gear Kids.
  • Liquid is a confirmed Enfant Terrible, as he led a group of child soldiers in Africa and managed to steal Sahelanthropus as part of his revenge against Big Boss well before his teenage years in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Solidus may also apply, seeing how he was implied to have led a unit in the Liberian Civil War as a teenager (although in his case, everyone wasn't an adult).
  • Raiden, who was raised to be a child soldier after his parents were murdered by Solidus, and placed in a unit of young boys that fought in the Liberian civil war. His nicknames were 'Jack the Ripper' and 'White Devil'. Carnage ensues in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance when he starts tapping into his 'Jack' mindset, especially considering he's a super-powerful cyborg instead of a preteen.
• Danny and Demi from The Outfoxies. Conjoined Twins separated by a train accident (never mind that conjoined twins are always the same gender), they took to contract killing. In their ending, they use the money they got from their assignments to buy a lot of cake, purchase, shave, and tattoo a small dog, and set fire to Disneyland.
• Overlord II's Witch-boy would be this, if he were cute to begin with. At best he's sort of Ugly Cute... At least to Kelda.
• Baby King from the Richman series looks innocent, but is often known to be sadistic at times. This is most prominent in 4 where the cutscenes show her attacking other participants for fun.
• Iris Zeppelin in RosenkreuzStilette is a cute little girl who also happens to be a Godhood Seeker and the mastermind behind the RKS rebellion and subsequent war.
• Wendy in Rule of Rose isn't pure evil, but she is the sweetest of the orphans capable of charming a delirious serial killer into dog-like obedience. She is also completely in love with the protagonist Jennifer, and the feeling is mutual, at least up to a point. Unfortunately "sharing" is a concept she has no use for.
• The Little Ones of The Secret World. Also known as the Gaki, they're creepy, semi-spectral children with a movement pattern borrowed from the Weeping Angels, and they will kill you if you let them get too close. According to the lore, they can be found all over the world, and possess a wide variety of possible origins: some are the ghosts of children lashing out in rage over their untimely deaths; some are the larval form of a very specific breed of demon; and a few are just shapeshifting predators that just happen to get off on killing people while dressed in the form of children.
• Shaw's Nightmare has evil babies as an enemy. Plus they can also fly!
• StarCraft has Nova Terra. She becomes a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds as a preteen after her entire family is killed in an attempt to capture her. She was being captured because of her strong psychic powers. She ends up in the Ghost Program, which naturally has a Training from Hell regimen complete with thorough Brainwashing. After murdering quite a few people on the government's orders though, Nova starts to get back her former personality. This process is helped along by a few friends, and the Protoss leader Artanis. Eventually, she ends up joining a rebellion against the government. After the successful rebellion she overhauls the Ghost program to well...make it not abusive, since she has learned from the Protoss that there's no reason it needs to be. Even as an adult, the effects of her childhood abuse are evident though: she retains many childlike mannerisms, and a simplistic sense of morality.
• Star Wars Legends: Vitiate from Star Wars: The Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic tortured his mother for six months before killing her and then gathered an army that marched to the capital of his world where he was declared the Sith leader at 12. Subverted with his children, who were generally normal but were corrupted into insanity by their father's abusive machinations.
• Occurs occasionally in Super Robot Wars, but most prominent with the leader of the Inspectors: Wendolo. Killed his own brother and threw away his Quirky Miniboss Squad without shedding a tear, felt no shame in desiring to enslave humanity and reduce them to mindless killing machines (Incidentally the exact same plan as that of the Balmarians, who were the sworn enemy of the Inspectors' superiors), refer to humanity as nothing more than a cancer that needed to be eradicated, and doing it all with a smug grin on his face.
• Thief: Deadly Shadows arguably fits the trope with Gamall although since she's actually using the form of a girl she killed many years previously, Lauryl it may be an "in name only" example.
• King Avira from Tomato Adventure is still a toddler like most other residents in Tomato Kingdom, but he is a very ambitious person who wants to take over the world. and he kidnaps DeMille's girlfriend Patharan. Though his actual identity is the head of Patharan's favorite toy robot, which explains why he's obssessed with Patharan.
• In the Total War series, one of the entourage members an assassin can get is an apprentice. The flavour text describes this trope.
• Downplayed with Flandre Scarlet from Touhou Project. She is really 495+ years old but has the mentality and emotional maturity of a child. One of her main gripes is that whoever she tries to play with, except for other uberpowered Big Bads and main characters, tends to end up a splatter in the wall.
  • Rumia, being a man-eating Darkness Youkai is this, too... or would be if it weren't for the fact that she's far too moronically inept to actually catch a human. (Word of God has it she regularly blinds herself with her darkness powers and then flies headfirst straight into trees.)
• Undertale has two potential cases:
  • The Player Character, a child just fallen into the Underground, can be played this way if you have them kill. After the fight with Toriel, Flowey reacts to their actions thus far in the run and has special comments if they first spare Toriel and then reload to kill her and see what happens, or if they reload to keep killing her, where he'll call them disgusting ... or if they kills her three or more times, admit that they kind of remind him of himself. Note that unlike the player character, Flowey at least has the excuse of being soulless. Before the Final Boss, the player character faces judgement from Sans, who (like Flowey) knows about their ability to reset time and evaluates their actions to see how many they've killed in this run. Interestingly, killing only a FEW monsters seems to anger him more than killing TOO MANY monsters. If they have a moderate amount of kills, he gives the benefit of the doubt and assumes that they were acting in self-defense, closing by asking them not to do it again or encouraging them to do better. If they're over LV 14, he calls them out for being a bad person who kills people to steal their money, but seeing how close they are to going all-out evil (AKA the Genocide Route), tries to goad them into resetting and not killing anyone. But with only a few kills under their belt, he knows that they have the skill to survive against anyone and resolve things peacefully, and are cold-bloodedly picking and choosing who to kill just to see what'll happen, which disgusts him more than almost anything else. It IS worth noting however that it is debated whether the actions of the player count as the player character's in-game with the meta aspects of the game being merely clever winks at the player, or if the game is fully acknowledging the player as a separate entity from the player character, with the player character being puppeteered and forced to kill against their will.
  • One of the major theories is that Chara, the first child who fell into the Underground, wasn't very nice, to put it mildly. Taken altogether, what we learn about them paints an unflattering picture: they are admitted in the True Pacifist epilogue to have not really been the greatest person by their best friend and adopted brother Asriel who says the player character is the kind of friend he wishes he always had, "laughed off" accidentally poisoning their adopted father Asgore (with some fans even speculating that it wasn't an accident at all), might be deliberately manipulating Asriel judging the VHS tapes we can listen to (we only hear Asriel's half of the conversation), and hated humanity enough to commit suicide painfully for a Thanatos Gambit that involved merging their soul with Asriel's and collecting six more souls, implicitly by killing six other humans - their stated goal of trying to free monsters would make them more of a Well-Intentioned Extremist, but some fans theorize that this was secondary to their true goal of wiping out the village they hated or reinstigating another human-monster war. It's often theorized that they might have used Asriel's body to carry their old body into the village to deliberately instigate a fight and force Asriel to kill, and that when attacked by the villagers, rather than using their combined power to fight back in self-defense, they wanted to stamp out the entire village and possibly the entire human race. If the player elects to follow the Genocide Route by meeting the requirements (upon which Flowey gleefully remarks that you're not quite human before seemingly identifying you as the child "In fact... You're <Name>, right? We're still inseperable, after all these years..." and wishing to resume the plan to "destroy everything in this wretched world"), the spirit of the Fallen Human seems to progressively possess the Player Character (and hijacks the narration, if you don't believe they are also the Lemony Narrator seen in other routes), after becoming more powerful as the Player slaughters Monsters including their own former family with no apparent scruples, and kills their own former best friend in a particularly cruel way despite him begging for his life and having helped them (it's also worth noting that the player DOESN'T deliver the final blow to Sans, Asgore and Flowey, the player only presses forward to continue their dialogues when suddenly they get hit, which lead many to believe that the Fallen Child is now in control and did it on their own). At the end, they appear as a smiling Creepy Child who erases the game world itself, force you to give them your soul if you want them to bring back the world, and will forever haunt any Golden Ending you get afterwards with the implication that they kill everyone again. However, competing theories hold that the first human was misguided but not evil in life, that the "unhappy reason" to climb the mountain was to escape from an abusive household which made them misanthropic and that they are soulless and influenced by the actions of the player in death. Even after he's had his realization that they weren't the greatest after True Pacifist, Asriel believes that he is talking to them when the player is about to reset and seems to be assuming that they are worried about monsters now that they're on the surface with humans, implying that he at least believes their affection for monsters was sincere. The first human themself claims that "you" (either the player character or the player themself) were the one who taught them the purpose of their reincarnation in Genocide, implying your influence made them cold and murderous, and is actually outright confused by your actions if you complete another Genocide, which suggests that they do not have as much control in the Genocide route as was previously believed.
  • And rounding out the trio, Flowey himself is a clear-cut example with the way he insults and bullies the player character in-between trying to kill them, and The Reveal that he is actually the soulless reincarnation of a child, the sweet and adorable prince Asriel. Reborn with the power to reload his progress or start the game over when he dies, he was no longer capable of empathizing with others due to coming back without his soul, and while experimenting out of curiosity with his new power to rewind time, he grew bored with all the other characters always acting the same when he tried to be friends and make everyone happy - so he eventually began killing them just to experience something new, causing him to go off the deep end. By the time we meet him, he's a completely Ax-Crazy, hugely sadistic little creep who wants to steal the protagonist's soul as part of his plan to become God, escape the Underground, and expand his twisted "game" to the surface world.
• It's not hard to interpret the kid from the Box10 Whack Your... games to be one of these, considering what he does to the burglar and his teacher for giving him detention.
• World of Warcraft has Wrathion. He's manipulative, cruel, genius...and he's only two years old. Yes, he is a dragon, but Blizzard even said that other baby dragons are not like Wrathion. Wrathion is the way he is due to all the experiments performed on him when he was still in the egg. In Pandaria, Wrathion is portrayed as the Only Sane Man alongside the bickering Horde/Alliance/Shado-Pan factions.
  • In the 'Siege of Orgrimmar' raid, where, after the player defeats Garrosh Hellscream, putting Troll leader Vol'jin in charge as the new Warchief, Wrathion reveals that he was rooting for the Alliance to win, having put effort into making sure they had their chance to dismantle the already-damaged Horde, becoming very angry that it didn't happen the way he wanted, and swearing that something bad was coming and he only wanted to prevent it. It turns out though that Wrathion's best intentions still backfired horribly, and end up leading to the bad thing he was trying to prevent happening.
  • In 'Battle for Azeroth', Wrathion is working to save Azeroth, the Titan soul hidden inside the planet, from dying (as a result of the bad thing he foresaw and then accidentally caused). Wrathion is definitely a good guy, but Good Is Not Nice is very much true in this game. He does have a soft spot for new Alliance leader Anduin Wrynn, after the time they spent together in Pandaria.

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