Beware The Superman / Video Games

• The Azure Striker Gunvolt Series is set in a world where the meta-humans called Adepts had emerged in huge numbers and destroyed most of the world order due to their reckless use of their powers either waging war amongst themselves or against non-adepts who discriminate them to varying degrees.
  • Both Dr. Kamizono and his son Copen firmly believe that all Adepts are a threat to the continued existence of muggles and wish to have them all destroyed so that non-Adepts like them can live in peace. Nova (an Adept himself) shares this view, only his goal is to subjugate all Adepts rather than exterminate them outright.
  • Eden is a representation on how non-Adepts (especially Copen and Nova) view Adepts; as a threat. Played With because they are comprised mainly of Adepts who (with the exception of Milas and possibly Teseo) were badly mistreated at the hands of non-Adepts due to their usage of powers. Tenjian and Zonda were the Adepts given the worst treatment as they grew up in a country where people like them are hunted from birth, and have since then founded Eden and took in like-minded individuals to not only exact their vengeance upon baseline humans, but also to create a nation where Adepts can all live without fear.
• In the BioShock series, genetic engineering allows people to gain fancy superpowers. But most of them eventually become hideously deformed homicidal maniacs.
  • And in BioShock Infinite, the same principle is taken up even further. The Founders are effectively Confederate supervillains who use stolen future technology and genetic engineering to build their dystopia of 'divinely-mandated' slave labor to the entire world. The Vox Populi are an equally-violent resistance who are more concerned with building a future as bloodthirsty sky pirates. The Luteces are bordering on reality warpers, able to teleport early in the game and are eventually revealed to be suspended outside of time after their deaths. Though they choose to their powers mostly for messing with Booker, the full limits of these powers are revealed when Elizabeth destroys the siphon in Monument Island. After this she is able to easily take out Songbird and teleport all three of them to an alternate Rapture. And even before this, she can summon murderous automatons and a tornado through the "cracks".
• City of Heroes has a few examples of playing with this trope. First off is an enemy group called the Malta Group, who are zealously dedicated to making sure this does not happen in a world with literally millions of meta-beings. Trouble is, their methods routinely cross the Moral Event Horizon - but what do you expect from a conspiracy of members of various western intelligence agencies, who were unhappy that they could no longer simply draft metas to do their dirty work? Then there's a small-scale example with the Rogue Isles, setting of the expansion "City of Villains", where a country of islands is ruled by super-villains. The only thing that prevents them from taking over the world is endless in-fighting and Status Quo Is God. And finally, the most triumphant in-game example is the alternate universe Praetoria, which was fleshed out in the "Going Rogue" expansion. There, alternate versions of the game's signature heroes rose to power by saving their doomed world and now rule what little is left with an iron fist.
• Dark Souls III turns Gwyn into a case of this; the Ringed City DLC reveals that Gwyn was the absolute worst possible Lord of Light, expressing a severe and completely unwarranted hate of the dark to the point he placed a seal of fire, aka the Darksign, on the Pygmies, which was passed down to their descendants, creating the Undead Curse. He also set in motion the Firelinking cycle, eventually ending the world, and through the soul of cinder acts as the True Final Boss of the entire franchise. He also took extreme measures against anyone who disobeyed him or wasn’t exactly what he wanted them to be(annexing the Nameless King from history for betraying him and forcing Gwyndolin to present as a woman for being born with talent at Moonlight sorceries), and based on how long it took for the information to be uncovered, was very good at hiding it. Light Is Not Good taken to its logical extreme; the only reason the abyss ever caused any trouble at all was because Gwyn tried to restrain it when it was never a threat to begin with.
• A major theme in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Part of the driving force behind the anti-augmentation activist movement is fear over the danger people with augmentations may pose. This can be seen in Jensen's backstory, which features an incident in which he was ordered to kill an augmented teenager simply because his augmentations made him a potential threat.
• In Dragon Age, this is the Tevinter Imperium to the rest of Thedas. Due to their destructive actions supposedly leading to The Maker shunning mankind and the creation of the Darkspawn, the rest of the Mages in Thedas are forced to enter the Circle, due to the overwhelming fear of what they would do if they were free and left to their own devices.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition reveals the elven gods were super-mages who were so drunk on power that they declared themselves gods and purged anyone, even the moderate super-mages, that dared contradict them. One of the last (relatively) sane super-mages had to resort to turning magic off (mostly) to stop them from nuking the planet, which had the side effect of collapsing civilization. And now he wants to undo that, which would be okay if not for the total genocide of all non-elf peoples.
• Pretty much why half the Final Fantasy baddies go bad.
  • Final Fantasy VI: Kefka is noted to be an extremely powerful mage from an experimental procedure, who goes insane, acquires the power of a god, and destroys the world.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth and Genesis both go mad when they discover their true pasts and become evil supersoldiers of unrivalled power bent on killing many, many people.
  • Final Fantasy VIII: Ultimecia knows she's doomed to die because her entire life is part of history, so she tries to screw over all existence to prevent it.
  • Final Fantasy IX: When Kuja learns he hasn't got long to live, he destroys a planet and then attempts to destroy all of creation. Inverted, in that he was already evil.
  • Final Fantasy X: The high king of a magocracy summoned an Eldritch Abomination and bound it to protect a simulation of his capital city at all costs - a thousand years later, half of civilization is stuck in the dark ages and said high king is an eldritch parasite, completely removed from humanity yet still in control of its destiny. His dragon is a half-human outcast who watched his mother sacrifice herself to give him immense supernatural power as a child; he engages in frequent Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and his ultimate goal is to kill everything.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: The main Chessmasters of the game - the Ascians - were a race of incredible arcanists capable of bending and shaping reality itself, who lost their empire after a series of catastrophes that shattered their society and — eventually — the world itself. Their end goal is to rejoin the disparate shards of the world and regain their former power, though of course doing so puts them at odds with the remaining mortal races, whom they see as lesser than and a necessary sacrifice to bring back their world.
    • The Garleans also have shades of this, though in their case their supremacy comes from them being technologically superior to the other Eorzean races, whom the Garleans view as primitive natives that rely on crude and barbaric magic rituals that will drain the land dry. The irony is that the Garleans themselves are dependent on technology because they are incapable of using magic themselves, though it's barely even a Freudian Excuse as far as the Garleans' judgement of the other races go.
  • Final Fantasy XV: Ardyn was a legendary exorcist traveling the world and exorcising demons. Then the king of Ardyn's country got jealous because he was worried that the masses would replace him with that travelling miracle-worker, and had Ardyn arrested, mind-raped, and demonically possessed. And since that made him into an unkillable half-demon banned from the afterlife, he's fixated on ending the world because there's nothing else left to do.
• Happens in Freedom Force. Time Master rebels against his mortality by trying to destroy time.
• Literally in the Injustice universe, which revolves around an alternative-universe Superman installing himself as the ruler of Earth after The Joker tricks him into killing Lois Lane and their unborn child, which triggers a nuke that destroyed Metropolis. Driving this home, the resistance is headed by the Badass Normal Batman and most of the heroes with superpowers are with Superman. A far cry of what he used to represent, Superman now only believes in lies, injustice, and the authoritarian way. The Injustice series also provides the trope image with Superman wearing a darker, edgier version of his usual outfit.
• Kingdom Hearts: As a Keyblade Master, Xehanort is supposed to be a guardian who protects the worlds and the universe itself. Instead, he's become Drunk on the Dark Side and uses his power as a Master to spread darkness and chaos wherever he goes. His megalomania grows to the point that he convinces himself that he is The Chosen One, and that it is his duty to wipe away the current universe and start anew.
  • Foreshadowed as far back as the first game, where King Triton wants nothing to do with the Keyblade and orders Sora to leave his world, claiming it brings nothing but ruin.
• LEGO Batman: The game has a version of Ultraman who abuses his powers to rule the world.
• In Mass Effect 3, the Extended Cut version of the Control Ending has shades of this, particularly with Renegade Shepard. While the Reapers are no longer harvesting worlds, they've being controlled by an AI with the same morals and ethics as Shepard. While Paragon Shepard vows to serve as a benevolent guardian and guide into the future, spreading hope and peace, Renegade Shepard vows to rule over the weak with strength, seek out and correct the mistakes of the past... and destroy anyone who threatens the peace.
• Metroid Prime: Dark Samus, as a being with all of Samus' skills and abilities combined with her own Phazon powers and deceptive cunning, is a frightening reflection of how terrifying our heroine would be if she ever turned to the dark side.
• No More Heroes:
  • A recurring antagonist throughout the mainline games is Destroyman, a superhero-themed contract killer who really puts the "ass" in "assassin". He returns in the second game as a pair of cyborgs after being bisected, and in the third game has a subplot where he's a hired terrorist trying to Take Over the World with mass-produced copies of himself.
  • No More Heroes III also has Prince Jess-Baptiste VI, aka FU, and his gang of intergalactic criminals. They "jump on" the superhero craze of America by rebranding themselves as superheroes in FU's scheme for world domination, becoming the Galactic Superhero Rankings. Their first action as "superheroes" is to blast a hole in Santa Destroy, and before declaring themselves superheroes they hit a city with a Wave-Motion Gun.
• Persona: Some major antagonists aren't gods or monsters, but people who were given Persona powers and used them for evil.
  • The Killer in Persona 4 can enter the Midnight Channel world and make others enter by pushing them into the TV. After they accidentally discovered that they could do this, and moreover that the Shadows in the TV would kill the person eventually, they used their power to become a Serial Killer who couldn't be caught by conventional means.
  • The Black Mask in Persona 5 has the same ability to enter the Metaverse as the Phantom Thieves but uses it to prop up The Conspiracy by acting as the ultimate hitman, killing people's Shadows to completely shut down their brains.
• Throughout the Pokémon series, the player is able to strike up a bond with incredibly powerful Legendary Pokémon thanks to their kind heart and skill as a Trainer, thus giving them a massive advantage over other Trainers should they choose to use the legends on their team. Black and White show what happens when a villain manages to win the loyalty of a Legendary through their pure heart. He defeats the Champion and nearly separates Pokémon from humans entirely. Anthea and Concordia tell the player that the villain in question is dangerous because of his innocence and kindness, which makes him able to bring out the full power of pretty much any Pokémon but doesn't guarantee that he's in the right.
• Star Wars:
  • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords runs a lot with this trope. The galaxy is in ruins after what's been called "The Jedi Civil War," with trillions of casualties across hundreds of planets. Many of the NPCs the Exile encounters neither know nor care about the difference between Jedi and Sith. (As one party member puts it, "Just men and women fighting about religion while the galaxy burns.") Kreia points out that the Republic and the Empire themselves are little more than proxies for the Force Users' never-ending religious warfare, and the Exile is her means to try and stop it all by destroying the Force itself.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic doesn't go as far as that second game, but the Force Users are still at their religious war, and doing horrible things to one another and the galaxy with trillions killed in the crossfire. The Sith Emperor takes the cake. As the most powerful known Force User of that era, both immortal and immoral, he has orchestrated centuries of warfare, including the current conflict and even the protagonists of those last two games, to further his goal of being the only living thing in the galaxy!
    • Driven home in the expansions. Force-wielders can be kind, respectful, responsible, wise, and generous, or they can be conquerors, killers, and hypocrites. It is an MMO, after all. Just like in the movies, though, some Force-wielders are depicted as an unambiguous good, such as the disguised one that Republic players meet and secretly work for on Tatooine.
• The genocide run of Undertale runs with this as its main point, almost to the point of being a Deconstruction. The twist comes in that it's you, the player who is the superpowered villain. From an in-story standpoint, humans are overtly stronger than monsters and are limited only by their desire (or lack thereof) to kill, which gets stronger as your EXP (i.e. Execution Points) go up. The entire tone of the game changes from a morally ambiguous narrative where both sides misunderstand one another, to one where you are overtly and incontestably the evil party. Thematically, the entire point of this path is to deconstruct the video game concept of grinding by making you realise just how cruel and psychopathic you'd have to be in reality to go around senselessly killing creatures to get stronger. It's also exacerbated by the fact the player character's ability to save and reload is an explicit in-universe power, meaning that a particularly cruel player is capable of undoing missed opportunities to kill or even go back in time and kill a monster they've already killed again; the final boss of the route lampshades this if you do it.

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