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Bad Powers Good People / Video Games

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Examples of Bad Powers, Good People in Video Games

  • Asheron's Call introduced Void Magic late in its run as an alternative to War Magic. Despite being a dark themed school of magic it wasn't considered any more evil than the other four schools (War, Life, Creature, and Item)
  • Baldur's Gate II:
    • The good-aligned Bhaalspawn including good PCs and Imoen. Good people... whose divine heritage leaves them capable of transforming into unholy killing machines with a burning desire to slaughter everything nearby. Even when you can keep control of the slayer form, it still dings your Karma Meter.
    • Also, there's Cernd, a druid who can transform into a werewolf. In the Forgotten Realms setting, werebeasts are usually Chaotic Evilinvoked unless they find a way to control it, but Cernd is very mature and easygoing, and actually one of the most peaceful characters you can recruit. Just don't get him angry.
  • Baldur's Gate III:
    • There is nothing stopping you from being a warlock, or a cleric of an evil god, but still acting in a heroic manner. The same goes for the scary psychic powers you can unlock by absorbing mind flayer tadpoles.
    • Deconstructed to hell and back with Wyll, who is a Folk Hero who is beloved by the common people of the Sword Coast as the "Blade of Frontiers". He is also a Warlock whose powers were granted to him by a Deal with the Devil, and the devil in question, Mizora, is NOT a very nice person. Wyll, on the other hand, is a compassionate young man dedicated to doing good, even with powers that come from a wicked source. His patron forces him into morally questionable territory and he has to sacrifice much to ensure he keeps these powers, leaving the question open as to whether it's all worth it.
    • The Oathbreaker Knight is a former Paladin who lost his holy powers and replaced them with necromantic magic after breaking his Oath (albeit for a very good reason). He personally believes in this, stating that an Oathbreaker's wicked powers can be used in the service of good, which the player can choose to do as an Oathbreaker, themself.
  • Ysuran from Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II is a necromancer who draws magic power from the Shadow Weave, but he's on the side of the good guys and is even described as possessing a strange desire to help everyone he comes across. Downplayed by the fact that he learned his powers while working for terrorists, but has forgotten his past due to a magical accident.
  • Malpercio from the Baten Kaitos games. Despite making a Deal with the Devil for dark powers, they're just normal people who are desperate to stop something far worse. By extension, Sagi could also qualify, seeing as how he gets his power from a chunk of Marno, the latter being a part of Malpercio.
  • Bayonetta and the entire Umbra Witch clan from the Bayonetta franchise fall into this. They make contracts with demons, basically selling their souls to go to hell (called Inferno in this game) when they die, and in turn gain the ability to summon said infernal demons to slaughter their enemies (normally angels). They can slow down time with the express purpose of using this ability to combo and kill their foes while they can't defend themselves, and can even summon horrible torture devices to kill their opponents as brutally as possible. Even so, they are never depicted as evil for a couple of reasons. First, they're needed to represent The Sacred Darkness opposite their counterparts and fellow guardians of the Eyes of the World, the Lumen Sages, who possess light-themed versions of their powers. Second, angels are decisively not on the side of humanity, while a few demons (but far from all) are suggested to be much nicer than you'd think.
  • BlazBlue:
  • Miriam from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was implanted with magic crystals that empower her with the ability to control supernatural demonic forces, at the cost of her body slowly crystallizing if her powers are used in excess. Despite this, she is a kind, brave and just woman who uses her powers to protect those she cares about.
    Miriam: Our power doesn't make us good or bad. Our choices do.
  • Boktai:
    • After his Heel–Face Turn, Sabata becomes this. Though he has almost exclusively evil powers, using a gun powered by darkness and hate and having a body imbued with dark mater, he fights for the sake of all humanity for no reason other than "screw the will of the galaxy." In the second game he even develops some non-evil powers that reflect the moon.
    • Similarly, when Django is turned into a vampire he becomes this. Even in spite of not being fully conscious and basically running on instinct, and even in spite of running around sucking the blood of enemies and hiding in a coffin from the sun, he still makes his way through a dungeon, slays the Immortal ruling it, and drags them back to the Pile Driver to purify them. After being cured and retaining the ability to change between human and vampire at will, though, using his darkness powers too much will earn you a worse ending — the game implies if you use them too much you'll get Drunk on the Dark Side and become Bad Powers, Bad People.
    • Carmilla the Crying Witch, one of the Immortals from the first game, is revealed to be this in the third. Her backstory is she was once a human who was shunned for her unnatural powers, which The Count took advantage of to turn her into a monster, and while "good" might be a touch too strong since she's mostly just motivated by her love of Sabata, she basically does whatever she can to support him and becomes a full ally in the third game.
  • Borderlands Most of Moxxi's guns have some sort of Life Drain like effect but aren't considered evil. A downplayed example as she is more of an Anti-Hero than a straight up good guy. Also, as the series' Ms. Fanservice who Really Gets Around, it could be a Stealth Double Entendre since her weapons all "suck" HP from the enemy.
  • Castlevania
    • Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow:
      • Soma Cruz has Dracula's main power of controlling monsters (and stealing their powers). It turns out that Soma is the reincarnation of Dracula. It's up to the player to determine whether he turns evil.
      • Genya Arikado is specifically noted to have similar dark powers to Soma, but is very strongly on the side of good. He's actually Alucard under an alias—more on him below.
    • Alucard from Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, among other entries, is Dracula's dhampyr son. As such, he inherited many of his father's abilities, including Dracula's signature Teleport Spam (with dark meteors and fireballs). However, he sides with humanity in memory of his mother, Lise, and in fact took the moniker of Alucardnote  to show his opposition to his evil father.
  • In City of Heroes and its sister game, City of Villains, players can create heroes with skeletal wings, dark miasmic powers that suck the life from the enemy and hide allies in shadows, and the ability to nuke whatever's left until it glows.
    • The Going Rogue expansion allows characters to freely switch alignment. So you can have a demon summoning hero or an empathetic villain.
    • Canon character Infernal is a controller and binder of demons, who looks a lot like one himself. He's firmly with the good guys, though his Mirror Universe versionnote  shows us how easily his powers could corrupt him.
    • There are quite a few characters like this. Positron is basically a nuclear bomb in a tin can. Desdemona (Going Rogue's Poster Girl) is a reformed demon summoner. Sea Witch can summon the ghosts of the dead to do her bidding, yet spends most of her time fighting the evil Cage Consortium. Oh, and every Warshade ever.
    • An extra odd variant of this trope is with the "villain" Scirocco. Scirocco received his powers from a magic sword, but because he was not The Chosen One, a booby-trap curse went off on him preventing him from using the sword's powers for what was in his heart. The curse-makers assumed that anyone who'd steal the sword would try to use it for evil, no one counted on the thief being good, so Scirocco's every attempt to use his powers for good goes horribly wrong. He became a villain because if he can't do good directly he at-least wanted to be a good influence on the forces of evil; A sad case of this trope crossed with You Can't Fight Fate.
  • The Occultist in Darkest Dungeon draws power from the Heart of Darkness itself to use against its forces, including summoning demonic tentacles and being possessed by it in some virtues and afflictions. Overlaps with The Dog Bites Back and Dark Is Not Evil.
  • Donovan Baine in Darkstalkers is a Dhampyr, or half-vampire. As such he is a powerful foe owing to being a creature of the night, and is shown in the questionably-canon anime to be a very powerful and resilient character. However, he laments over his 'cursed blood', looks after an emotionless psychic orphan, appears to be a pious Buddhist monk and generally does what he can to help protect humans from the less benevolent Darkstalkers. All of this with a demon broadsword as tall as he is on his back. Hsien-Ko and Mei-Ling (Lei-Lei and Lin-Lin in Japan) are lesser examples.
  • Diablo:
    • Necromancers in the franchise are an order devoted to maintaining the Balance Between Good and Evil, but because Hell has the upper hand 90% of the time, in practice most of them are strictly heroic. Many NPCs are uneasy about a necromancer PC — especially those with dead friends who might get reanimated — yet he's firmly on the side of saving the world from the Prime Evils.
    • The Witch Doctor in Diablo III has scores of horrific powers, and a fascination with the macabre. However, he or she is genuinely nice, heroically inclined, a Warrior Therapist and a lot more personable than The Stoic other classes.
  • The player can follow this path if they choose in Dishonored. The Enigmatic Empowering Entity, The Outsider, occasionally bequeaths powers like teleportation and summoning swarms of rabid rats to those he finds "interesting," just to see what they would do with them. The frequency of those gifted immediately abusing their powers, like Daud (professional assassin) and Granny Rags (insane ritualist), is so high that the Outsider is considered the local Anti-Christ. Despite this, the player character Corvo Attano can refrain from using the more horrifying powers and instead pursue a non-lethal, low chaos run, to which the Outsider will comment on in a confused yet approving manner.
  • Dragon Age:
    • Dragon Age: Origins
      • Jowan is a blood mage, but while he does cause a few problems—most notably poisoning Arl Eamon—he also shows regret for his actions and expresses a desire to fix his mistakes. If sent into the Fade to fight the demon possessing Connor, he will never consider making a deal. Or if told to leave, he'll take on a new name for himself and help others escape the Blight. According to Word of God, Jowan was supposed to have been a companion to the Player Character, but was downgraded to just a NPC due to time shortage.
      • The Mage Warden can quite happily learn blood magic and run around turning enemies into messy red stains, backing this up with a heavy focus on Entropic magic (which includes spells based around fear, death, and weakness), but they can also be a Friend to All Living Things who tries to solve problems diplomatically, only resorting to blasting people into goo when that fails.
      • Also, in the Warden's Keep DLC you can make use of the research of a Grey Warden blood mage who has learned to unlock power from the taint in a Grey Warden's blood. If you choose to do this you get a couple of nifty tricks for your character based on their class.
      • You can make friendly, snarky Alistair a Reaver in the first game, or play one yourself, and if you unlocked the specialisation in a previous play-through you don't even need to taint the Holy Grail equivalent with dragon blood to do so. Reavers are warriors who have powers gained from malevolent spirits which are based around creating auras of pain and drinking the souls of the slain.
    • Merrill of Dragon Age II is a practicing blood mage, demon summoner, and is the only mage on the team incapable of healing others. Despite this, she's unfailingly kind, sweet, and naive, and wishes no harm to anyone, having turned to dark powers in the hopes of using them to aid her clan in regaining their lost glory. Outside of gameplay, she never expresses a desire to use said demons and blood magic on people; she mostly turned to those avenues for utilitarian purposes. This also ties into Merrill's Fatal Flaw. Merrill knows that she would never use blood magic for nefarious purposes, so she doesn't understand why no one is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt despite the art's long and ugly history.
    • Dragon Age: Inquisition introduces Dorian, a magister who defected from Tevinter because he got tired of the corruption and slavery. Being generally kind and noble, if a bit arrogant and snarky, doesn't stop him from being a practicing necromancer, though unlike Blood Magic it isn't completely taboo so much as it is simply seen as somewhat creepy (though certain companions take issue with the idea of binding spirits to one's will).
    • Most Mages in Thedas would argue this is the case, despite the Andrastian Chantry and Qunari's claims to the contrary. While there are always going to be a few who abuse magic, most want nothing more than to be allowed to practice their magic freely and live in peace. Just because they can throw fireballs at people, doesn't mean they will. Sometimes, the treatment of mages can cause them to become exactly what the others expect/fear of them. An escaped Qunari mage in Dragon Age: Redemption, when caught and asked why, explains that after being told all his life that he was a dangerous, destructive thing he decided to ''accept'' that truth.
    • The Grey Wardens are revealed to owe their success to this. During the Joining Ritual, they willing imbibe Darkspawn blood in order to take the Taint into themselves, granting them increased strength, stamina and complete immunity to the Blight spread by the Darkspawn as well as the ability to sense said Darkspawn. Sadly, this comes at the cost of only giving them roughly thirty years left to live, before they eventually succumb to its effects.
  • In Dungeons & Dragons Online, a player can build a mage character as a necromancer and slowly become a lich over time as they reach max level... and be Lawful Goodinvoked all the way. In fact, it's impossible to be any moral alignment but good or neutral, though lawful and chaotic are still open.
  • Elden Ring:
    • The Tarnished can be this trope if they utilize the various Blood Magic, Scarlet Rot, and Frenzied Flame incantations and weapons you can find. All three powers draw from Outer Gods who, though not exactly evil, are very bad influences on the Lands Between, but in the hands of the Tarnished they're weapons like any other. The Frenzied Flame can also help you save your companion Melina from having to sacrifice herself, though you'll be locked in to a Downer Ending if you don't purge the flame from yourself before the final boss.
    • The Demigod Malenia was "blessed" in utero with Scarlet Rot, which when unleashed is a fearsome power capable of devastating entire fiefdoms. Unfortunately for the Rot, Malenia herself is a noble person who considers the extra power not worth being a Walking Wasteland and has struggled to repress the Rot for her whole life, only ever losing control twice: once in the backstory when she faced Radahn, and for the second phase of her boss fight.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
    • The Dragonborn is considered the ultimate Dragonslayer due to their ability to devour the souls of slain Dragons to gain their knowledge and power, as well as their instant mastery of the Thu'um which allows them to reshape reality to their will. Over the course of the game, they learn Dragons Shouts that allow them to freeze or ignite enemies, tear their souls out or bend them to their will.
    • Serana in the Dawnguard expansion, who despite being a Vampire Lord and Necromancer, is one of the friendliest and most loyal companions in the game.
  • Fate/Grand Order:
    • Ereshkigal, Sumerian Goddess of the Underworld, is portrayed this way. Being a death goddess, her powers tend to revolve around death, disease, cold, etc. She is also often shown with souls being placed in cages. Ereshkigal herself, however, is actually a caring and dutiful goddess who genuinely wants the souls under her dominion to be happy. Those cages are actually comfortable housing, despite their appearance. The event focusing around Ereshkigal is all about how she desperately wants to do nice things and make the Underworld of Kur a nice place, but absolutely none of her divine powers enable her to actually do that.
    • The Foreigner class are Heroic Spirits fueled by the Cthulhu Mythos. They're nearly all on your side and will use their Lovecraftian Superpower to defend Earth and Proper Human History from alien gods' invasions, including their own patrons.
  • Final Fantasy
    • Blue Mages (and various equivalents) in several games can learn attacks & magics that are unique to enemies (pretty much Bad Powers by definition), but are the good guys. Special mention goes to the Blue Mage in Final Fantasy XI, who are Super Soldiers of the Aht Urhgan empire who are created by having the essence of a monster implanted in them and have to struggle to hold onto their humanity as they continue to devour monster essence to learn their spells. If they fail to hold onto themselves, they fall to the monster within and turn into a Mindflayer, with older/stronger Blue Magi in-story often throwing themselves into battles they hope will kill them or being assassinated out of fear they've become so strong that they could cause massive loss of life if they turn.
    • The powers of the Dark Knights usually involve inflicting suffering, bear such ominous names as "Charon" and in at least one game were shown to have the ability to drive their users insane, but plenty of good guys in the series fall into this class.
    • Black Mages also fall into this, as their powers all revolve around attacking with elements, poison and various other maladies. This is particularly prevelent in Final Fantasy IX, in which Vivi is persecuted against at times because of his similarity to Kuja's army of black mages, for which he was the prototype.
    • Final Fantasy VII: Vincent Valentine is a former-Turk-turned-victim-of-a-mad-scientist who, as a result of said lunatic's mad science, can transform into a Demonic Werewolf, Frankenstein's Monster, a Hockey Mask and Chainsaw Slasher Villain and Chaos, a devil whose purpose is to kill all things on the planet. Though he is obviously a tortured soul with a lot of emotional baggage, he is still firmly on the side of good and teams up with Cloud and his Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to save the world.
    • Final Fantasy XIV:
      • The Arcanists' Guild is a scholarly society devoted to the mastery of Geometric Magic. Said magic manifests partly as summoning familiars or dealing Non-Elemental damage, but its most popular use is spreading plague and infecting crowds of enemies with crippling diseases.
      • The Hero's Gauntlet dungeon pits the player against phantasms of Warriors of Light from other shards against them, who only seek to destroy darkness. One such encounter is against a Necromancer, who despite the dark origins of such powers is trying her damndest to prove that she too can be a hero.
      • The Endwalker expansion introduces the Reapers, a group of assassins armed with Sinister Scythes who've made a contract with the Voidsent in exchange for being able to draw upon the powers of said fiends. As Voidsent are Life Draining abominations native to the void, a world shard that was swallowed by a tide of darkness, you may expect the Reapers to be monsters who just happen to fight worse monsters at best... In actuality, they were just simple farmers (hence the scythes) who made the deal with the Voidsent out of desperation in order to be able to defend themselves against outside aggressors and Fantastic Racism back when Garlemald was still a country of scared refugees surviving in hellish frozen wastes instead of a Magitek empire. Also, you can become a Reaper, making you the edgiest saviour of the world in the entire Final Fantasy franchise.
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade has Canas, who invites himself along when he hears that your army is going to the Dread Isle, is insistent that "dark magic" is a biased term, and is rather nice given that the main villain is a (seemingly) textbook example of Bad Powers, Bad People. He's very kind (if absent-minded), is clearly in love with his wife, and offers to teach one of the younger members of the army to read when he learns that she can't.
  • Fire Emblem Engage has Veyle (at least when she's in her right mind). She's the daughter of the Fell Dragon Sombron with all of the evil zombie-raising, dark magic-slinging powers that implies, but she's firmly devoted to peace. It doesn't get any more "Bad Powers, Good People" than bringing back the recently deceased Alear as a zombie so they can continue to fight Sombron.
  • Several class options for the player character in Grim Dawn use dark powers. The Occultist is a devotee of the Witch Gods that can summon hellhounds, inflict plagues, or conjure flying eyeballs that explode in splashes of acid. The Necromancer summons skeletons or amalgamations of corpses and has an arsenal of spells based on decay and draining the life of enemies. Any version of the Taken still fights to save what's left of humanity from the Aetherials and Cthonians. Even the Taken's specific powers count, as both their unnatural strength and ability to open Riftgates is a leftover of being possessed by an Aetherial that left before you died.
  • Dark Magic, despite not being in and of itself evil, has a very bad reputation in the world of Guenevere, making the heroic sorceress Morgana (and potentially Guen herself) examples of this trope.
  • Guild Wars:
    • Guild Wars:
      • Necromancer NPCs tend to be either morally ambiguous, or have a somewhat skewed view of right and wrong. The Master of Whispers, however, is a genuinely heroic and wise old man in charge of a secret, ancient organization dedicated to watching for and battling forces of evil. The fact that he fights using plagues, curses, and the corpses of fallen enemies is irrelevant.
      • And of course, Necromancer is a valid PC class. There are no alignments, no Karma Meter and no moral choices, so the necromancers are just as heroic as all the other players (and in cutscenes, no one seems disturbed by the Bonehorrors, Bonefiends and Vampiric horrors that follow you around.)
    • Guild Wars 2 plays this trope even more straight. The Necromancer class is still just as valid in the Player Character's hands, but there are even more necromancer NPCs that are shown to be perfectly good, heroic, and well-adjusted people who just happen to fight using plagues, dark rituals, and undead minions. A necromancer named Trahearne even serves as the Big Good in the Personal Story.
  • In Guilty Gear Slayer is a very powerful vampire that sometimes drinks his wife's blood dry (in front of his foes) and the founder of the Assassin's Guild, but he used his powers only for good, even the guild originally before he retired was meant to put down evil people. After retirement (mostly in Accent Core story-line) he guides and advises other characters. Also his wife can't die so he can't suck her to death even if he wanted to. And he's a really nice guy all in all.
  • Hexen: The Cleric is one of the main heroes and a pious man of the cloth, yet his power set includes sucking the life force out of his enemies, burning them alive, and summoning a horde of angry ghosts to rip them to pieces.
  • In Hogwarts Legacy, even though you can play the Student as a selfish jerkass, they're still firmly on the side of good. The game has no Karma Meter, meaning that learning and spamming the three Unforgivable Curses at any enemy unfortunate enough to cross their path won't change a thing about their moral disposition. It's helped by the fact that you simply can't target anyone that isn't an Asshole Victim. Additionally, one of the most moral characters in the game defeated the Greater-Scope Villain with the Killing Curse.
  • In Kingdom Hearts, Riku ends up in this dilemma after being released from Ansem's control in the first game. He assumes Ansem's form and dark powers again after 358/2 Days's events in order to capture Roxas, knowing full well he may be screwing himself by doing so. Thankfully, it's resolved by the end of II.
  • League of Legends:
    • Nasus is actually a good person, but uses powers considered evil. For starters, he brings death, steal's people's life, gets stronger when he kills people with an attack, desecrating ground with spirit fire, and aging them to slow them down.
    • The Grey Order consists of rebel Noxians who broke off from Noxus due to its evil, and study dark magic without malice. Their representative Champion is Creepy Child Annie who certainly looks terrifying and uses dark magic to inflict fiery death upon her foes, but is, if not outright good, certainly not evil.
    • Kassadin has the powers of the Void, the same power coming from the Cute Monster Kog'Maw that drove Malzahar evil. However, he only gave into the Void powers to protect Valoran from the Void creatures.
    • Zac is a bioengineered Blob Monster Living Weapon designed by Zaun, the city-state that produced such charming people as Singed, Warwick, and Viktor. He looks like Flubber impersonating Majin Buu. Personality-wise, he's Superman.
  • Kirby:
  • The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: After being exposed to Malefor's corruption in the first game, Cynder was given the powers of Fear, Poison, and Shadow to go alongside her natural Wind element.
  • In Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, Shepard can learn Dominate, which Mind Rapes an enemy into fighting for you for a short time. Paragon Shepard is just as capable of using it as Renegade Shepard.
  • In Mega Man Battle Network, a combination of Karma Meter and Gameplay and Story Segregation means that no matter how many Dark Chips you use, Mega Man's personality stays exactly the same. He is always the hero, even if he relies upon his Superpowered Evil Side in every battle.
  • In the Metroid series, Samus is characterized somewhere between good and neutral. In Metroid Fusion she's infused with some Metroid DNA and gains some of their vampiric ability allowing her to absorb the X Parasites. In Metroid Dread, her Metroid nature becomes fully realized as she learns to drain the energy from other monsters and bad guys.
  • Talion in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor / Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a undead Ranger brought back to life by Celebrimbor, an Elvish wraith with the power to brainwash his enemies and take control of their minds. Both work together to protect Middle-earth from Sauron's evil forces, mainly by brainwashing his orcs and turn them against each other. However in the second game, Celebrimbor is revealed to have gone mad with power and plans to rule Middle-earth himself by enslaving Sauron rather than destroying him making him a case of Bad Powers, Bad People. Talion on the other hand becomes a even stronger example of this trope when he turns into an heroic Nazgûl when he is forced to take a Ring of Power to survive without Celebrimbor since he refuses to be on board with his plan, replacing most of his blue colored wraith effects with a sickly green glow associated to undeath and gaining the ability to summon revenant warriors. While he succumbs eventually and finally turns fully into an agent of the Dark Lord, he delays Sauron's armies even as what is effectively a Lich long enough for the Fellowship's journey to begin.
  • Moonrise: Any of the supernatural creatures in Moonrise can easily kill, maim, and perpetuate harm...but they choose not to, for the most part.
  • The Lich in Nexus Clash is a necromantic arsenal of doom that rots everything it touches (and sometimes even a few things that it doesn't). The Revenant is a vampiric warrior class that can drain the life and soul of victims and go into a blood frenzy. Despite this, it's possible to attain angelic levels of goodness while playing either class.
  • NieR: Emil is even-tempered and very gentle, but he also possesses a set of cursed eyes that instantly petrify anyone he looks at. He lives alone in a remote mansion with his faithful butler because he's afraid of accidentally petrifying anyone he gets near. Eventually, however, he finds a certain amount of joy in using his powers to aid your quest, stating directly that it's nice to be able to put them to good use for once. Then, later on, he merges with his monstrous 'sister' and turns into a terrifying, floating Grim Reaper lookalike, with devastating magical powers, and a face that can turn strong men pale. And he's STILL one of the nicest people you're ever likely to meet. He might accidentally destroy a few villages when he loses control of his destructive might, but he'll feel REALLY bad about it afterwards.
  • Phantom Brave: Marona is the most kind-hearted necromancer ever.
  • Pokémon:
    • Dark-type Pokémon are called "Evil" in Japan and their attacks largely consist of inflicting pain or simply cheating. However, it's established canon that any Pokémon is only as bad (or good) as its trainer.
    • The lake trio in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl games are said to be able to steal people's memories, control their will, and remove their emotions, and, in fact, this is what the main villain was using them for — but they end up helping you save the world, and then go back home peacefully so you can catch them. Though to be fair, those are really just outgrowths of their original abilities as the respective incarnations of Knowledge, Will, and Emotion used as defensive weapons.
    • Absol are a friendly species who are well-known for trying to stop disasters, but get the blame for them at times (mainly by the elderly). They also have an unfortunate aura that kills fainthearted people who look at them when Mega Evolved, which is why they're generally non-violent and despise Mega Evolution.
  • Alex Mercer of [PROTOTYPE] has an entire skillset based around the concept of eating people and using their biomass to fashion weapons. To get to the bottom of the conspiracy, he eats people involved in it. If he needs a disguise, he eats someone and assumes their form. The aforementioned eaten people are in his head. He's still the closest thing the game has to a hero, though, because at least he's trying to stop the infection threatening to destroy Manhattan, and the Government Conspiracy is even worse than he is.
  • Punishing: Gray Raven: The power to control the Punishing Virus is generally associated with the antagonists of the game, the Ascendants. However, two unambiguously heroic characters are known to have this power; Liv, in her Empyrea frame uses it draw the Punishing Virus out of the infected, while Noan has been known to use it to force Corrupted to commit suicide in order to protect other soldiers.
  • This is discussed in The Reconstruction—the "Noxious" element is directly opposed to the "Holy" one, and it's generally perceived as purely destructive, so the PC who specializes in it tends to worry about whether it will corrupt him. He's one of the nicer folks around, though, and eventually, he decides that Dark Is Not Evil.
  • RuneScape: After the player character is forced to learn Necromancy, they make a conscious effort to differentiate from their usually-evil peers by asking the dead for their assistance instead of forcing their cooperation, and leaving them alone if they should refuse. While even Death himself is a bit skeptical of this approach, the dead prove to be more than willing to lend their power to the player in order to fight against Rasial, who is attempting to enslave all of the dead in order to bring about The End of the World as We Know It. After the player character defeats him, they point out to an incredulous Rasial that they won because they did not fight alone. Rasial begrudginly admits that the player's approach to Necromancy was something he never even considered trying in thousands of years, and concedes that this makes them the superior necromancer.
  • The Shin Megami Tensei series has Mudo skills, which are based on darkness and can be used by both demons and humans.
    • You can become one if you gun for the Freedom ending in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne: you have the power to call forth myriad demons and unleash an Unholy Nuke on command... and intend to use that power to save everyone from themselves and to ultimately restore the world to how it was before.
    • Persona 3 has another example in one character who's closer to bad purpose good people. The entire reason for his existence is call Nyx to bring The Fall. However, due to gaining human form by means of a particular event ten years prior to the game, he is willing to at least try to delay The Fall even though he thinks that it is inevitable either way.
    • From Persona 5 you have the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. While the thieves themselves are all genuinely good people who want to improve the way things are in society, several times they bring up the moral implications of using their powers. Stealing a person's distorted desires is more or less akin to brainwashing their targets into confessing to whatever crimes they committed. While mucking with a person's head like that is certainly questionable, and quite possibly deadly should it go wrong, the people they target are often so ludicrously detestable in character, and so entrenched in positions of power and respect that they're normally untouchable, that stealing their hearts is pretty much the only way they have of getting them to take any responsibility for their actions.
  • Clarissa "Claris" Snowflake, from Sakura Wars (2019), is the latest in her family to wield the magic power of libromancy. This causes a great deal of distress for Claris, as libromancy has a long and bloody history of use in the service of warfare and destruction, while she is a gentle young woman who simply wants to write stories. It takes some convincing to finally let her realize that even though her power may be evil in origin, she could use it in the service of the greater good.
  • Alessa Gillespie's powers are pretty much as far toward the "bad" end of the power spectrum as you can get. The character, though, is actually trying to prevent the end of the world, by destroying herself before she can birth the Order's god. Her goal makes her the antagonist in Silent Hill 3, but even there, the only person who she seems to want to harm is herself.
  • Kerrigan in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is a former Fallen Hero who was, in the previous games, one of the most reckless and vicious villains. After being partially turned back to normal at the end of the previous opus, she is now more of a sympathetic Anti-Hero who actually tries to be a better person. Her powers still consists in unleashing a Horde of Alien Locusts to slaughter her enemies, though.
  • Star Wars:
    • In both Knights of the Old Republic games, a character CAN choose powers that go against his/her alignment, but the cost to force power will be greater unless you have high Wisdom and Charisma score. This goes both ways; as healing powers cost more to a dark-sider.
    • Jolee Bindo in the first game is a well meaning Grey Jedi who can use dark force powers just as well as light, but that's because he's neutral aligned with a slight leaning towards light. Even then, his high Charisma score makes up for it.
    • The Jedi Exile in the second game is revealed over the course of the game to be a living Wound in the Force, capable of unwittingly creating Force bonds with people and drawing the Force from those around them to empower themselves, akin to a Force black hole. Despite this, according to Revan and Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Jedi Exile is held to have canonically remained on the Light Side.
    • Light-side Sith are perfectly viable in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and can be kind, honest, and honorable people whilst still utilizing the Dark Side and its gifts of Force Lightning and rage-driven nastiness in combat. Lord Praven is a notable example in the Jedi Knight storyline; he's an honest and honorable Blood Knight willing to give the player character an even chance of stopping his plot. It is possible to redeem him after beating him. A later expansion also allows Jedi characters to use Sith combat styles without issue.
    • In Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Kyle specifically tells you that Force powers aren't inherently good or evil, it's how you use them that counts. For some reason, this doesn't keep Luke and him from berating you if you do decide to only use the "Dark" powers. That said, Kyle himself openly uses Force Lightning as a light-sider. The Player Character, Kyle's apprentice Jaden Korr, is established in Crosscurrent to have a natural affinity for the Dark Side (like Master Mace Windu) which becomes a significant source of angst for him. Kyle eventually helps him move past his self-doubt and realize that his usage of the Dark Side is only a problem if he lets it become one.
    • The Force Unleashed shows this in the form of Galen Marek/Starkiller. Granted, he starts out bad as Vader's secret apprentice, but as the game goes on, he finds himself fighting for the very side he was sent to destroy and declares himself to be a Jedi in the end. Even so, he frequently uses Force Lightning every few seconds, and in the sequel, he (or rather, his Genetic Memory clone) gets the ability to max out his power by tapping into his fury, and using it to channel his attacks into unstoppable blasts.
  • Street Fighter:
    • While not evil in itself, the Satsui no Hadou roughly translates as 'the surge of murderous intent'. The known practitioners are all good (Ryu and Ken), not true users (Sakura based her style off of Ryu's), have perfected it to the point where the desire to kill is suppressed (Gouken) or morally neutral (Akuma/Gouki, who is driven to be the best fighter in the world, and will not kill a weak opponent, but will not hesitate to utterly destroy a strong one).
    • There is also the Psycho Power, which is stated to be pure negative energy. Its creator, Ingrid, is a decent person, if something of a Little Miss Snarker. M. Bison, its most notorious user, on the other hand...
      • Ed and Falke, both genetic clones of M. Bison, have the ability to use Psycho Power. They, however, use this against Bison and his plans, as they both harbor resentment toward him.
  • Suikoden:
    • The Soul Eater Rune - as its name suggests - consumes the souls of friends and foes alike, but both of its known wielders are good guys through and through. At the end of the first game, Windy attempts to take the Soul Eater from Tir by force, but it refuses to accept her as it's master, even though, as she said herself, she was its ideal host, reveling in death and destruction, just like the Soul Eater. The Night Rune allows the existence of night creatures like zombies, but it's also only been used by good guys to slay vampires and such. Finally, while the Moon Rune, with its ability to bestow vampirism, has been used for evil purposes, its original bearer used it to save people who traveled into her forest and allowed the vampires she created to thrive without the need of blood.
    • The Rune of Punishment burns through a lot of bearers and does have a few 'bad guys' for bearers...but it isn't picky, and overall, its bearers tend toward unfortunate bystanders with varying degrees of innocence before an Artifact of Doom fused itself to their hand.
  • The clothier in Terraria fights by hurling Hellfire bolts shaped like skulls. He will only use it against enemies that threaten him or other friendly NPCs.
  • Oleander from Them's Fightin' Herds uses a Tome of Eldritch Lore with a Eldritch Abomination trapped inside of it. Even though she uses dark magic to fight in combat and is shunned by her land as a result from it, she is still unambiguously good.
  • Vampyr (2018): Jonathan E. Reid is a doctor turned into a vampire who uses his powers to save London from an mysterious epidemic, regardless if he is played as an good or bad vampire. Even more so when it turned out he was sired by an vampire Eldritch Abomination with the explicit purpose to save London from disaster.
  • Vermintide II: Sienna's DLC Career has her switch from pyromancy to necromancy — Black Magic that steals souls, desecrates the dead, and corrupts most users towards evil. Nonetheless, she insists she's "still your Auntie Sienna", fighting to protect the world from the forces of Chaos... and ignoring the ghostly voices that urge her to do terrible things.
  • Ashley in Wild AR Ms 2 gains the power of the evil Lord Blazer very early in the game, and spends most of it determined that evil power can be used for good reasons.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Warlocks, Shadow priests, death knights, and demon hunters all make use of darker forms of magic (fel, void, and unholy).
    • Void elves have their very beings infused with the force that grants Shadow priests their power, but they're generally all good people.
  • Kasandra from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 radiates bad luck wherever she goes, but the ensuing calamities (things which she has no idea she's actually behind) only strengthen her profound optimism and eagerness to help people out.

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