Adults Are Useless / Video Games

Useless adults in video games.

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• Carl Clover of BlazBlue firmly believes that all adults are stupid, selfish, and usually outright evil. He has a very good reason for thinking like this, though. He has since loosened up after deciding there are at least two decent adults in Bang and Litchi (the jury's still out on Amane). However, with Amane being Demoted to Extra to focus on his mysticism and Litchi temporarily (albeit reluctantly) joins Carl's father Relius in pursuit of her own goals, Carl winds up tolerating his father and even adopting some of Relius' more ruthless ideals, all in the service of restoring his sister.
• Bully. Surprisingly one of the most accurate portrayals of this trope. It's set in a school, one that's plagued by bullying. Even if the student body consists of about 70 people, the adults and the four prefects seem to just stand there going, "Duuuuuuuuh" while Gary manipulates all the cliques into fighting with each other. Even if the prefects (and adults) do chase Jimmy and can be seen occasionally busting a student, it's obvious the prefects are power-hungry jerks who're oblivious to most of the stuff that goes on in the school, and so are the adults. (i.e., the nerds are able to construct potato gun turrets in the astronomy club building without alerting adults and it's implied they have no supervision, the jocks throw explosive-laden footballs at a student, the gym gets lit on fire and nobody calls the police unless you fail and nobody even mentions it afterward.) It's safe to say even if the game has a realistic portrayal of how useless adults can be in a school setting; you can probably rest easily given that if this happened in real life, people WOULD call the police and the school would be closed in a year. (Mr. Burton especially would be fired for encouraging the bullying and the implications that he sexually harassed Zoe. Which he is anyway.)
  • It's shown that Dr. Crabblesnitch actually can be a Reasonable Authority Figure, too. He just didn't know what was going on until it was too late. This leads to a couple of the (realistic) interpretations where the adults aren't necessarily useless, they just seem that way because they're unaware. Chances are, Dr. Crabblesnitch would have stepped in sooner or later; but you can beat up as many prefects as you want, even his own secretary, and merely get detention.
• The Colour Tuesday has the adults of the world at the mercy of being turned into puppets by the Others. Children aren't affected. Combines with Competence Zone.
• Defied in Conception 2: Children Of The Seven Stars. Despite a divinely-enforced Competence Zone meaning only teenagers can actually fight, it's made clear everyone knows that leaving them to actually coordinate the war effort would be an unmitigated disaster. Senior military ranks, positions of authority, mission coordinators and the R&D team are all comprised of highly-educated adults.
• Digimon Survive: Averted with the Professor, who is the only adult around. He is always willing to sacrifice himself to protect the teenagers, even though they are strangers to him. The teens are all grateful for his presence and appreciate his kindness. When he is seemingly killed, the teens are all devastated by the loss and they're left without adult supervision in this strange world. It later turns out that he has survived and he later avoids the Competence Zone because of his old monster Partner from his childhood.
• Most of the adults in EarthBound (1994) are incompetent. The police force of Onett fights Ness for trespassing and loses, not to mention how they were unable to stop a teenage gang from wreaking havoc before that. Some of the people interested in the Happy Happy cultists are too busy painting cows and buildings blue to care for their children back in Twoson. Paula's father is too worried and scared about her disappearence to try to look for her while her mother doesn't seem to be worried in the slightest, you have to free Threed from the zombie invasion because none of the adults there know what to do, The Runaway Five are continually tricked into crippling debt everywhere they go. Porky's dad in Fourside is seen riding off of his son's success, and later in the game, he's lost everything.
• Escape From St. Mary's: Adults mostly seem indifferent to your characters' pleas for help on after encountering increasingly bizarre phenomena.
• Growing Up: In Sam's route in high school, you can report him to the Coach, but he won't bother with helping you because he's too busy with his sports team while Sam will call you out for snitching on him.
• Two teenagers in a parking lot are entirely capable of starting a school on their own in High School Story. It just builds from there. When Hope is bullied on her school's website, the principal demands that she show proof of the bullying before he will do anything. This despite the fact that it's the school's website and he should be more than capable of accessing the public pages where other students were posting about her. There's also the fact that it went on publicly for months and absolutely no teachers or moderators took notice. He does finally call the police after she brings him the evidence, going from "does nothing at all" to "gung-ho borderline-overreacting" in record time.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has you play as two adults (Terra and Aqua). Of course, they fail dramatically at stopping Master Xehanort, forcing the Kid Hero Sora to finish the job over a decade later and even rescue them both in Kingdom Hearts III.
• Life Is Strange is all over the place with this trope.
  • Principal Wells is almost guaranteed not to believe Max in any situation. If you tell him about Nathan Prescott having a gun in the bathroom, Wells will cite Nathan's family and status as an honor-roll student as reasons why this is unlikely. The worst he does is call him to the office. The action also backfires on Max, as he'll then contact her parents and accuse her of "telling tall tales". If you try to report David Madsen before class in Episode 2, Wells always finds an excuse to not trust what Max says no matter what choices the player has made. The only time he's remotely helpful is in the aftermath of Kate's suicide. Depending on your previous choices, he can be convinced to suspend Nathan on suspicion of drugging Kate and recording the salacious video of her, suspend Madsen for antagonizing Kate (but only if you have proof), or lightly punish Mr. Jefferson for blaming Kate. Chloe picks up on this, deriding him as a drunk more concerned with the school's bottom line. In Nathan's case, Wells is being pressured by his rich father, to the point that Nathan's records are outright falsified.
  • The local security guard, David Madsen, is outright antagonistic to Max and Kate, though he's at least shown intervening in the fight between Nathan and Warren after Chloe takes off with Max. He can be seen grilling Nathan in Episode 2. He does seem to mean well, it's just that he has trouble separating his prior military from civilian life. He ultimately turns out to be a subversion: David is actually the only authority figure investigating Rachel's disappearance and he's the key to defeating the villain. And his earlier pressuring of Kate? He knows she was sexually assaulted by a member of the Vortex Club and was trying to help but he was too heavy-handed.
  • Mr. Jefferson is a nice guy in Episode 1, but when confronted with cruel gossip about a student in Episode 2, he resorts to victim-blaming. He also turns out to be the Big Bad all along and murders Chloe upon his reveal. It's likely he willfully invoked this trope to manipulate Kate and clean up a possible loose end.
  • Ms. Grant is also shown to be nice, but the extent of her help so far is a petition to stop Madsen from putting up security cameras. If Max signs the petition, it will pass.
  • Could also be said of the police who have stopped investigating Rachel's disappearance. However, once Max exposes the Big Bad they immediately arrest him.
    • And in the scenario where Max lets Chloe die, they immediately come down on Jefferson after Nathan confesses to his involvement in his crimes. They also go after Nathan's father for his involvement.
• Lost Judgment: Jin Kuwana believed that school bullying was harmless, and didn't intervene when Mitsuru Kusumoto was being viciously tormented by his classmates. By the time he realized how serious it was, it was far too late, as Mitsuru had jumped off the school roof and ended up in a coma. Now, Kuwana is seriously overcompensating to make up for this mistake... by murdering every single bully who has ever driven a classmate to suicide.
• Mega Man Battle Network: All of the adults are either just standing around, willing to netbattle instead of try to fix things, or nothing. The only competent adults are either involved with the WWW (even Baryl & Colonel), Mr. Higsby (for different reasons), or Lan's dad.
  • Chaud lampshades this when he mentions that the official netbattlers are all off in la-la-land.
  • The spiritual sequel series Megaman Star Force also uses this, but since there are only a handful of people around the world capable of wave changing, including the villains, all of whom have roughly the same amount of experience, there is no logical reason why a kid can't be the most naturally gifted member of that group.
• Pokémon:
  • Even setting aside the fact that it usually falls to an 11-15 year old to save the world from destruction at the hands of the antagonists, the complete and utter incompetence at Pokémon battling displayed by most adults in this series is astonishing. Adults are so useless in Pokémon, in fact, that when the series introduced one who is conspicuously not — Leon, the champion in Pokémon Sword and Shield — he became a Base-Breaking Character for it.
  • Played for Drama in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. The former teachers and staff at the Academy of Adventure did nothing about the bullying Team Star's leaders went through, and when they banded together to fight back against their bullies, the deputy of then-Director Harrington deleted all records of the bullying happening, which likely contributed to Team Star getting a negative reputation after their former bullies started transferring to different schools. As a result, Harrington fired the deputy and resigned alongside the entire teaching staff; the current teachers have all been teaching for only a year and a half when the player arrives. By contrast, Clavell does his best to avert this trope, going undercover to figure out why Team Star acts the way they do so that he can help them.
• Psychonauts: Pretty much every adult at Whispering Rock will be of little direct help once the serious trouble starts. Agents Nein and Vodelo get sent away on some unrelated mission, Coach Oleander is a villain, and Agent Cruller can't leave his HQ because his mind is too fractured and keeps devolving into the custodial staff roles he has all over the camp if he tries to leave. Although Cruller does play a decent Mission Control, providing useful tactics and advice. After freeing Fred Bonaparte (who's actually an orderly) from his psychological issues, Raz assumes he'll help get rid of Crispin (who's actually an inmate) and avoiding the need for a disguise. Fred decides to take a nap instead. (After you've gotten past Crispin, Fred will show up and chase him away. At least this means you'll be able to use the elevator again without a disguise.)
• There are a whole two adults in the Rose Garden Orphanage in Rule of Rose, and the one with actual authority is a problem, not a helper, with his implied sexual abuse of the teenaged residents, and while the cleaning lady is more observant, it doesn't matter since the Police Are Useless and won't listen to her, and she gets murdered for her troubles.
• Shin Megami Tensei generally downplays this; while the protagonist and their closest friends tend to be teenagers, several games also include adults as party members and allies.
  • The Persona games are probably the straightest examples, and even they add a few wrinkles:
    • Actually subverted in Persona 2. A third of the playable cast of Innocent Sin (Maya & Yukino) are adults, & are some of the party's stronger members (Yukino however was playable in the first game). Eternal Punishment however takes it a step further. The only playable character who can be considered a child is Innocent Sin's main protagonist, Tatsuya Suou.
    • While the people doing the fighting in Persona 3 are all teenagers, the game also features adults who are in on the masquerade to some extent; they do their best to help you outside of the Dark Hour, but can't do anything directly. Also, one of the first tier Big Bads is an adult. A relatively mundane example involves Fuuka's homeroom teacher, who looks the other way when she gets bullied, and actively covers up her disappearing for ten days, all to protect his reputation. Justified for general adults due to how the Dark Hour itself functions where they will either be in a coffin which keeps them unaware of the events, or will be killed by Shadows promptly if they are not in a secure location. Additionally, for the ones that can experience it, they lack powers and the ability to produce a Persona is so rare that SEES originally only had three members and it had a high cost to get even that many.
    • Justified in Persona 4 where the conflict occurs in a dimension that the police have no access to; the only adults who know about TV World are the antagonists. This trope applies because they simply had no way to know what's really going on; the police close the case when someone falsely admits to all of the murders, and even late in the game when you are straightforward about your "extracurricular activities", your uncle, Ryotaro Dojima doesn't believe you. When you receive a threatening letter, Naoto advises against telling Dojima about it, saying that doing so would result in you being put under surveillance, thus preventing you from actually working to save the victims.
    • This is a major theme in Persona 5. Most of the adults you deal with are this trope at best, and at worst they are outright evil bastards who routinely abuse their power to get away with everything from sexual harassment to outright murder. It ultimately comes down to your teenage protagonists to set everything right. At the end of the game, one of the adults, Sae Niijima (whose aid is necessary to avoid the worst ending), acknowledges this trope and vows to defy it; it's noted that although you got the bad guys to confess their sins, it's her job as a public prosecutor to ensure they actually end up behind bars. However, several of the Confidants who help the heroes in their endeavors are working adults who are quite capable at what they do, only really faltering in their social link arcs due to themselves being victims of unfair treatment by other adults. On at least one occasion, an adult trying to look out for you is unintentionally useless due to lack of awareness because the teacher she is pressuring is working a second job to pay off people blackmailing her, and due to the complex social circumstances, her feelings of guilt, and the fact that her blackmailers can use her second job against her to get her fired from her teacher job, she feels trapped and unable to tell her the truth. Her attempts to protect the students act as a hindrance to truly helping this Confidant that can only be helped in secret to avoid social and societal consequences that are undeserved.
    • Averted in the spinoff Persona 5 Strikers with the playable inclusion of Zenkichi Hasegawa, a police inspector who actually ends up joining the cause of the Phantom Thieves. As a cop, he also ends up averting the Police Are Useless trope typically present in the series.
  • The series also has several games which outright invert this:
    • Digital Devil Saga: With only two exceptions, the cast are exceptionally skilled doctors (Heat), scientists (Serph and Gale), and nurses (Argilla).
    • In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, the playable character and his crew are all highly-trained military personnel.
• Sir Basil Pike Public School, a game about bullying, has the uselessness of adults as one of its central themes. There's no situation in the entire game where actually going to an adult for help will get you anything but a headache. At best, he'll tell you that it was a good idea, but he doesn't have time to listen to your crap right now and you should solve your own problems, at worst, he'll babble a warped version of the Judgment of Solomon that has no answer.
• Strongly featured in the Touch Detective series. The most competent ones often turn out to be psychopaths.
• The Trails Series subverts this trope as much as possible while still keeping its younger viewpoint characters relevant. There are several competent, more experienced adults that can and do show up the younger characters, every step of the way in skill and practice. Which is exactly why they stay out of situations their Bracers/police/soldiers in training can work with on their own. A student can't truly learn to rely on their skills if they had to depend on their mentors to get by. However, when they decide not to hold back, they frequently reach Story-Breaker Power levels of competence. This is also one of the reasons why the overall villains of the series, Ouroboros easily get what they want as almost all their members are competent adults. They also aren't afraid to weaponize adults' vulnerability and trust toward children, as the Black Fang and the Angel of Slaughter demonstrate with chilling effectiveness.
  • By Cold Steel IV, the three protagonists of the various arcs are all adults and are very competent compared to their younger years with the three leads being experienced protagonists.
  • Sky the 3rd and Reverie are notable in that they feature protagonists (Kevin and <C>, respectively) who are experienced adults right from their introduction, the latter actually boasting the title of "oldest protagonist in Trails.
  • Daybreak noticeably has most of its playable characters be in their twenties or older, including protagonist Van. Only 4 are still in their teens, one of whom (Aaron) only barely qualifies due to being 19.
• Zig-zagged in Twisted Wonderland. In the main story, Yuu and the other students are the ones running around the school solving the conflicts of each arc, despite the fact that Overblot is an incredibly rare and grave condition that could lead to the deaths of the students and destruction of the school should the rampaging victim go undealt with. Even after multiple Overblot cases within the school year, Crowley still seems content to let the students handle each problem and goes as far as threatening them with dorm budget cuts or retention if they refuse, and the other teachers hardly show up at all. Averted in the case of Leona who after his chapter has reluctantly helped deal with the problems, though other adult students like Malleus and Lilia have yet to be seen doing anything useful in the main story.
  • Crowley's uselessness is lampshaded by the dorm heads at the beginning of the Fairy Gala event, with them pointing out that, as headmaster, he should be the one trying to fix the weather issues that are plaguing the college instead of foisting the responsibility off on them. This also happens on other occasions with pretty much the same results.
  • Crewel attempts to be of use in the Scary Monsters event by preparing to use magic on the misbehaving visitors before he is stopped and scolded by Trein, who believes that a magic user initiating an attack on normal humans would damage the schools reputation, especially since he's a teacher. While he disagrees, Crewel relents and Crowley once again uselessly leaves the students to deal with the situation.
• Yandere Simulator zig-zags this. If a teacher is called to a murder scene by a student, but Ayano has successfully cleaned up after herself and disposed of all the evidence, she will assume it was a prank, scold the student and leave. Similarly, the police won't conduct further investigation if multiple calls come from the school in a short space of time thanks to the Headmaster bribing them to stay away from the school after his and the school's reputation was nearly ruined by an unsolved murder that took place in 1989, which Ayano's mother Ryoba was responsible for. Otherwise, the police can quickly pick up on any evidence Ayano leaves lying around and arrest her. Similarly, if a teacher ends up any pools of blood, bloody weapons, dismembered limbs, or especially dead bodies, she will call the police and guard the suspicious element, and if the teachers know that you committed a murder, then they WILL apprehend you.

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