Big Bad Wannabe / Video Games

Big Bad Wannabes in video games.

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• Ace Combat
  • In the Japanese version of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, Gilbert Park thinks himself to be a brilliant Chessmaster, who was using the Ouroboros organization to seize command of the UPEO. However, Abyssal Dision, the leader of Ouroboros, was only using him for his own ends, and instigated the war between General Resource and Neucom to avenge his wife Yoko Martha Inoue. Then the Omega Ending reveals that the whole game was a simulation by Simon Orestes Cohen, who blamed Dision for Yoko’s death, and it's implied that he will be the one to instigate the Usean Corporate War.
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War begins with Yuktobania declaring war on Osea. Near the end of the first act, the President of Osea, Vincent Harling, tries to broker a peace between the two nations, but he gets kidnapped afterswards, leading to an escalation of the war as Osea invades Yuktobania. As the war drags on, warmongers in both countries try to keep the war going. However, both sides are completely unaware that they’re being played like fiddles by the Grey Men, in revenge for the fall of Belka.
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Rosa Cossette d’Elise is a Subversion, as she’s not really a villain. The real wannabes are the Erusean Radicals who manipulated her into declaring war on Osea, as they were looking to use their drone army to restore Erusea to its former glory. However, the technology to create the drones had come from Belka, and the AI controlling the drones goes haywire after the Usean Satellite Network is destroyed in a simultaneous A-Sat attack by Osea and Erusea, which nearly starts a Robot War against humanity.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Rieltar Anchev in Baldur's Gate. He seems to be the mastermind behind the Iron Throne's evil plans but turns out to be just a puppet for his adopted son Sarevok, whose own plans have an even darker end.
  • Lord Enver Gortash in Baldur's Gate III. A charismatic Smug Snake who pulls a Tyrant Takes the Helm on the titular city and masterminded the entire plot alongside a pre-amnesia Dark Urge. Unfortunately, the rest of his attempted Big Bad Triumvirate is too Ax-Crazy to stick to his plan and even if an evil-aligned Player Character accepts his We Can Rule Together offer he's quickly disposed of by the real Big Bad, the elder brain he failed to enslave.
  • III also has Raphael, a Manipulative Bastard demon and the son of the archdevil Mephistopheles who acts as The Chessmaster and constantly tries to manipulate the party into doing his bidding. He became the Greater-Scope Villain by complete accident as he was the one who raised Gortash into The Antichrist after buying him from his parents and inadvertently gave him the idea to steal the Artifact of Doom he needed for his plan from Mephisto. His actions throughout the story are a desperate attempt to regain control of the situation and come out on top, but the player has no real incentive to do anything he says after Act II unless they're trying to bring about Lae'zel's Heel–Face Turn. And even then, robbing him is more fun.
• Bloodborne: Yharnam is the subject of a Gambit Pileup whose plotters all managed to take each other or themselves out prior to the game, leaving the player to mop up the mess they unleashed on the city by poking Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. As such, there are no less than four of these:
  • Annalise, the Undead Queen of the Cainhurst Vilebloods, seeks to attract the attention of the Great Ones, impregnate herself with Blood Dregs, give birth to the Child of Blood and lead the Vilebloods into an era of prosperity... and that would all be be fine and dandy, if it wasn't for the fact that Annalise is a Queen with no subjects, the Vilebloods having been slaughtered down to the last by the Executioners; only Annalise's own Complete Immortality saving her from the same fate. Annalise is furthermore implied to be infertile, making the Blood Dregs worthless and making her completely uninteresting in the eyes of the Great Ones, who pay far more attention to her descendant, Arianna, Woman of the Night... Annalise doesn't seem to mind that her goals are doomed to failure though, being quite content with just waiting upon her throne.
  • Provost Willem, the founder of Byrgenwerth College, who, as the mentor of both Gehrman and the two below mentioned examples, is ultimately the source of everything that transpires in the game, both good and bad, but predominantly bad. Countless lives were lost or destroyed in his mad quest to transcend humanity and ascend to the position of a Great One through the accumulation of Insight. By the time you reach him, his students have long since turned their backs on him; his teachings, though respected for having laid out the foundations of all other factions' work, have become declared outdated heresies, and Willem himself has fallen victim to his own Transhuman Treachery as all the eldritch knowledge he's accumulated has reduced him to a vegetative state, unable to even speak.
  • Laurence, the founder and first vicar of the Healing Church, a more religiously inclined offshoot of Willem's teachings that sought to transcend humanity through Blood Ministration, whose unwillingness to heed Willem's warnings lead him to distribute the Old Blood as a simple panacea to the people, resulting in the Beast Scourge epidemic that poses the primary threat in the game. Laurence himself lost his own body to the Scourge, and his mind to The Hunter's Nightmare, long before the game even started, and his Healing Church has since become a mere front for The Choir, whose combination of Willem's teachings and the Church's research has led them to make actual advances in the field of transcending humanity.
  • Micolash, head of the School of Mensis, an offshoot of the work that began at Byrgenwerth with a greater focus on the Arcane, who, as Gehrman's opposite number, should by all means pose as the Big Bad in the game... well, if it wasn't for the fact that the Embedded Narrative doesn't even bother to mention him until it's time for your big climactic fight with him, he has become way less relevant by the time you encounter him than he imagines himself to be, and your "big climactic fight" with him, well, isn't... he's an unarmed pushover with nothing more to his name than Augur of Ebrietas and A Call Beyond who spends most of your "fight" with him running away... All that said, Micolash was still the one responsible for the Nightmare thanks to the Mensis Ritual, which — inadvertently though it might've been to his own aspirations — caused the Beast Scourge epidemic that you spend the game trying to stop to really go out of control, so in a way he is still the closest thing the game has to a main villain.
• In Bonfire, Erzsie the vampire is a Card-Carrying Villain who only opposes the Faceless Overlord for interfering with her ambitions to be an Evil Overlord. Despite claiming to be a master of The Undead, she's only as powerful as the other heroes, and her supposed minions don't listen to her. A support conversation with Zhu implies she might never have been evil at all, and that her threats to the party were all talk.
• Borderlands 2 has Professor Nakayama of the "Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt" DLC. While he's the main antagonist of the storyline, he is portrayed as a largely pathetic individual who strives to become just like Handsome Jack but isn't nearly as effective of a villain. The Main Characters and Hammerlock only agree to kill him solely because they consider him a nuisance distracting them from their hunting expedition and when the Vault Hunters proceed to kill their way past his Jack-worshiping savages, Nakayama proceeds to freak the hell out and makes it clear that he's terrified of you guys. When you finally confront him in the flesh, he accidentally trips and falls down a flight of stairs, which kills him.
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: The Lord of the Dead, a.k.a Zobek, fancies himself a mastermind who engineered the downfall of his fellow Lords of Shadow so that he could gain absolute power for himself by having Gabriel assemble the God mask and deliver it right to him. When he finally reveals his identity to Gabriel, he revels in how he manipulated the hero into doing exactly what he wanted him to do. Except the whole Evil Plan was never really his idea. It was Satans. Just as it looks like Zobek is about to get everything he wanted, Satan swoops in and explains how he planted the idea in Zobek's head so that he could get his hands on the god mask himself and invade Heaven. He then declares that he no longer has any use for the necromancer and sets him on fire.
• Kokichi Oma in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony plays with this trope. He is the Ultimate Supreme Leader, and claims to run an evil organization with over ten thousand members. However, as he is a Consummate Liar his classmates chalk it up to another lie. He spends most of the game convincing everyone he is the mastermind until Maki tries to kill him. Unfortunately, her plan goes awry and Kokichi has Kaito kill him and pretend it was the other way around, revealing he wasn't the mastermind and was only pretending to end the killing game. Later, Shuichi and Maki learn Kokichi wasn't lying about running an organization, except it was ten pranksters called D.I.C.E. who treated each other as family with a strict no-killing rule.
• Dark Souls III: The Cult of The Deep, made up of Aldrich, Pontiff Sulyvahn and the various Deacons of The Deep are one of the rare outright villainous groups in the series, with their obsession with Human Sacrifice and plans to spread The Deep throughout the world and have quite a few impressive achievements to their name, such as corrupting the Way of White, overthrowing the Darkmoon Knights and even conquering Anor Londo itself. Despite all of this though, they wind up being fairly inconsequential, serving as little more than roadblocks for the Ashen One to break through. And even then, they're not even a main target of the Ashen One, they just happen to be standing between them and Aldrich's cinders.
• In Dead Island: Riptide, Frank Serpo is The Heavy, but if not for the leverage of the Consortium keeping the local military in his pocket, he'd probably be long dead by the time the survivors reach the town of Henderson. He's also nowhere near as in control as he believes himself to be.
• Deltarune:
  • Rouxls Kaard is an interesting example. He actively desires to not be the Big Bad, but The Dragon or any other kind of minion possible. He still wants to be viewed as the heroes' "greatest adversary", who will stop them with various kinds of traps and mooks. However, he's so incompetent that he's by far the single biggest Harmless Villain in the entire game. He does Take a Level in Badass in Chapter 2 through the fact he has an actual boss fight now, but his battle is still very easy.
  • Throughout Chapter 2, Berdly firmly believes he has formed a Big Bad Duumvirate with Queen, and that she will always have his back and help him create his "Smartopia" after they Take Over the World. Too bad that he is so obnoxious that Queen doesn't even want him to be any kind of minion, much less an equal or even The Dragon; In her own words, she didn't even ask Berdly to join her, he just did. In fact, Queen spends the majority of the chapter having a truce with Kris to find Noelle and avoid Berdly as much as possible. A few scenes even show she can't do as much as pretend she respects him. When Queen gets serious and starts actively antagonizing the heroes, she shows she never needed him and could get rid of him anytime she wanted, turning him into a Brainwashed and Crazy minion. This is also a unique example where it's mixed with Heroic Wannabe, as he sees himself as The Hero and Kris as the villain who enlisted Susie to fight him and Noelle out of envy.
  • Spamton shows himself to be one during the secret "Weird Route", although he's a different example when compared to Rouxls and Berdly; he's actually very competent, but overestimated just how powerful he is. He helps Kris/the player corrupt Noelle, telling them how many enemies they have to kill in order to stay on the path, and selling them the Thorn Ring that they give Noelle to make her even stronger. He then practically usurps Queen as the leader of the Cyber World, taking over her entire mansion, locking all of her mooks in the cafe, becoming Spamton NEO and proclaiming himself to be God. He also fancies himself to be this game's equivalent of Chara, being the unseen kill-counter who appears at the very end to pull off an Eviler than Thou. Unfortunately for him, it turns out you are the Chara equivalent.
• Belial and Azmodan in Diablo III want so badly to be the Prime Evil, openly defy both each other and the rest of the Prime Evils and enlist entire armies to do so. Too bad their competition is Diablo, who doesn't even need to deal with them personally, a certain spy of his is enough for him to come on top of the rivalry.
  • Maghda also ends up being this, as even though she is only The Dragon for Belial, she believes she will rule the world alongside him once he triumphs. Too bad for her, since he considers her very much expendable and has no problem with letting her die early on in Act II at the hands of the Nephilim.
• The Division: Larae Barrett had rallied the prisoners at Rikers together, and sought to take over the city with an Eat the Rich and The Social Darwinist mentality. Joe Ferro is a Knight Templar Well-Intentioned Extremist, who turned his fellow sanitization workers into pyromaniacs to try to cleanse New York of the dollar flu. Charles Bliss meanwhile, is the leader of a Private Military Contractor, and when things went to hell, he turned against his former contractors and took over the UN General Assembly to become a Visionary Villain. All three of them are credible threats in their own right, but they are nothing compared to Aaron Keener, as he not only survives past the end of the campaign, he also has taken a virologist hostage and even took Gorden Amherst’s research and equipment to create a new plague that he intends to use to seize power.
  • In the sequel, The Division 2, Washington D.C. has been divided up by the Hyenas, who are a loose coalition of criminals that prey on the survivors, the True Sons, who are JTF forces that went rogue and believe that the weak deserve to die, and the Outcasts, renegade healthy carriers of the Dollar Flu who were wronged by the government. Like the factions in the previous game, they are all credible threats in their own rights, but the true threat are the Black Tusks who appear in the endgame. Not only are the Black Tusks better organized, disciplined, and armed than the other three factions, they also have access to Division Technology.
• Dragon's Dogma: Elysion serves as the Arisen's primary adversary through the story, being the head of the Salvation cult which venerates the Dragon and antagonizes the kingdom of Gransys. However, him and the Dragon do not possess any actual affiliation, and the latter actually 'squashes' Elysion's plans himself while stating Salvation has no role in his coming.
• Elden Ring: Mohg and Rykard both firmly believe that they're going to rule or destroy the world. They aren't even required bosses, though they are quite powerful.
  • Mohg fancies himself the head of a new dynasty (with his half-brother Miquella as consort, ugh). He is in his prime, unlike many of his rivals, is a very hard boss, combining Blood Magic with high mobility and a powerful trident, and his involvement with events prior to the start of the game still qualifies him as The Heavy, but by inadvertently killing Miquella he has managed to screw up his own plans so badly that the completion of them have become practically impossible. And, on the off-chance that Mohg may be able to revive Miquella again, the Tarnished can still kill him and claim his Great Rune before he has the chance to do so. He may still be a legitimate threat (especially if the player doesn't fight him) but he's ultimately a sidequest villain.
  • Rykard, as the Serpent of Blasphemy, seeks to become an Eldritch Abomination that can devour the gods. He succeeded with the "abomination" bit, but his descent from legitimate ambition to depraved gluttony has led most of his followers to abandon him, with one even putting his Achilles' Heel (the Serpent Hunter spear) outside his boss arena just so somebody could use it to kill him. His few remaining followers, the Recusants, remain by his side for largely their own reasons (Patches has a crush on Tanith, Diallos wants to prove himself, and you just want easy access to Rykard so you can kill him). The only Recusant without an ulterior motive is Bernahl, who is loyal to Rykard's original ambitions, not his current ones. The only person who gives even half a shit that Rykard is dead is his consort Tanith, and even she has to admit that the fact that you managed to kill him means that, by his own standards, he was too weak to deserve to live.
  • While not optional, Godrick the Grafted is vicious, and he does consider himself the lord of all that's golden. However, he is the weakest demigod, and while a huge threat to a rookie Tarnished, he is outclassed by the rest of the powerful bosses.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: In the Hearthfire DLC, Rochelle the Red is an ordinary, mortal bandit of no particularly impressive origin who thinks kidnapping the Dovahkiin's spouse is a good idea. It is not.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • Benny, your character's would-be-killer who jumpstarts the main quest line of, thinks he's the main event, but it turns out he's barely a Disc-One Final Boss. In his defense, he is aware that he isn't the Big Bad - getting to that point was the entire point of his scheme.
  • If you see him as a villain, Mr. House is also this in the NCR, Independence, and Legion paths. You can easily kill him without a second thought about five minutes after walking into the Strip. Despite his grand plans of setting up an oppressive military dictatorship, and his ability to complete that plan if the Courier aids him, he's completely impotent without Player Character support and is only ever capable of taking action against a Courier who sides against him once in the entire game. If you opt to blow up his robot army, he'll sick four Sentry Bots on you in the bunker. But after that, you're free to go back to the Lucky 38 and kill him whenever you feel like it with little effort. Contrast the true Big Bad, Edward Sallow/Caesar, whose army is fought throughout the game, is often founding sacking towns and committing assorted atrocities, constantly sends assassination teams after the Courier, and who is personally responsible for facilitating many of the obstacles that the Courier runs across (such as the White Legs, Fiends, Searchlight Ghouls, and Omertas).
• Shinji Matou in Fate/stay night. He's an arrogant Jerkass who fights for his own self-gratification, takes out his frustrations on his sister and his servant Rider and tries to sacrifice everyone in his school just to increase Rider's power. Yet he's also a complete coward who begs and squeals for mercy the second that the tables turn on him, and he never ends up well in any route. In the Fate route he is unceremoniously killed by Illya; in Unlimited Blade Works he gets turned into a Holy Grail core by Gilgamesh, an experience so traumatic that he is scared straight; and in Heaven's Feel he is killed by Dark Sakura after abusing her one too many times.
  • Alongside Shinji are Illya and Caster; they are all presented as the main antagonists at different points in the game, only to end up overshadowed by the real Big Bad Ensemble.
• Fate/Grand Order has several of these:
  • Ashiya Douman is one of the Foreign God's Disciples. Naturally, he has an agenda of his own, namely that of becoming a Beast and Foreign God himself in the hopes of surpassing the current one. Using the Naraka Mandala along with Ibuki's power ultimately still isn't enough to measure up to the God's own vessel (Olga Marie, who is stated by the God itself to be considerably underwhelming compared to what she had intended to manifest as) and he gets pounded into the ground by Chaldea.
  • Tamamo Vitch Koyanskaya is an agent of the Foreign God who desires to become a fully-empowered incarnation of Beast IV and a Superior Successor to Amaterasu by assimilating both her boss (or at least its vessel) and the Master of Chaldea. However, the closest she ever gets to ascending is through an incomplete transformation thanks to Cernunnos's attack (cursed hair, specifically) interfering with her metamorphosis, meaning she's not quite powerful enough to accomplish her desired goal. After being defeated by the Master's team more than once, she eventually has no choice but to join them (or at least send her Light half to do so) in order to survive.
  • Aurora in Avalon Le Fae fancies herself as the mastermind behind the entire plot, and her actions do lead to Morgan's assassination, but Aurora is nothing compared to Oberon-Vortigern, the Insect of the Abyss, who has every intention of wiping the Lostbelt out of existence. When Aurora tries to escape, she gets butchered by Melusine in a classic example of The Dog Bites Back. Given that she is presumably not much of a fighter, she never faces the protagonist, so we know that would have ended just as poorly for her.
  • The self-proclaimed Final Apostle, Alessandro di Cagliostro, the Count of Despair, is built up as one of the Foreign God's most powerful and menacing Disciples as he revives the fragments of U-Olga Marie, the God's vessel, and splits her into four Elemental Olga Marie variants, each one being more than powerful enough to act as a living "Presidential" Singularity unto herself and individually threatening all of Proper Human History, plus he is the mastermind behind the Codex on Waxing Moon event, even creating his own Tree of Emptiness. However, when he attempts to hijack the Id Singularity by invading and infecting the protagonist's mind like a sentient virus, it's revealed that Le Comte de Monte Cristo (aka another form of Edmond Dantès) correctly predicted every single one of his moves and the purpose of Dantès starting the Singularity was to lure him in and have the protagonist collapse the entire thing on both Servants. The protagonist stays and fights Cagliostro personally with Le Comte's help, and even though Cagliostro pulls off a horrifically monstrous One-Winged Angel transformation, he gets utterly brutalized by the protagonist's empowered team of Avenger Servants, including Le Comte himself.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Leon the Dark Knight in Final Fantasy II is implied to be The Dragon for the Emperor throughout the game. He takes over the empire after the Emperor is killed and immediately sets about trying to crush the rebellion. Too bad the Emperor not only returns from the afterlife but comes back as the King of Hell (unsurprisingly, this inspires Leon to do an abrupt Heel–Face Turn).
  • Emperor Gestahl in Final Fantasy VI, who gets overshadowed by his Dragon-in-Chief Kefka for most of the game and finally killed by him about halfway through.
  • Final Fantasy VII:
    • President Shinra. You start out fighting his corporation that owns practically the whole planet and is slowly killing it. Then Sephiroth shows up, kills the old President Shinra in passing, and sets out to kill the Planet in a much more grandiose manner.
    • Rufus Shinra becomes the new president of the Shinra Corporation in his father's place and promises to be even more ruthless, but he can never make it past the status of a secondary menace with Sephiroth around, and in fact tries to work in parallel with the heroes against him sometimes, though never with them. In media following the game, he's mostly stopped trying to be a villain.
  • Final Fantasy IX:
    • Queen Brahne is a pretty classic example of the "overconfident weakling" variant of this trope; an apparent menace to just about every major city on the Mist Continent during discs 1 and 2, she's certainly ruthless enough to be a Big Bad. It all falls apart when she tries to backstab Kuja, the mysterious Arms Dealer who invented the magitek that made her faction so powerful to begin with, and gets herself and her entire fleet blown to smithereens by a giant dragon for her trouble.
    • Garland is an example of the "legitimate and serious threat" type. Introduced with a lot of fanfare, revealed to be The Man Behind the Man extraordinaire, and shown to be more than capable of foiling Kuja's schemes - in fact, he's technically the Big Bad behind most of the game. In the end, though, he makes the mistakes of thinking kicking Kuja's ass was enough to keep him in check thus focusing only on Zidane while completely ignoring his friends, only to end up ousted from power and killed in a rather undignified fashion by Kuja.
  • Final Fantasy X gives us Seymour Guado. Having the aura (and screen time) of your typical FF Big Bad and gleefully pushing the party's buttons, he might make you think he would succeed in his Evil Plan to becoming the next Sin. But soon after that reveal, he quickly stops bearing any significance to the plot, just showing up randomly to be a dick, and thus never managing to get any sort of influence over Sin.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Emperor Varis is an example of the "overshadowed by the real Big Bad" type. He controls the antagonistic Garlean Empire and is treated as an appropriate threat as such. Unfortunately, his threat is eclipsed by the Ascians and other villains. The gulf between him and other antagonists is best demonstrated in his own family. His grandfather Solus, AKA Emet-Selch, is an Ascian himself and mockingly rubs in Varis's face how the Garlean Empire merely an engine for the Ascian's schemes, and his son Zenos is the Warrior of Light's Arch-Enemy and personally kills Varis in order to prevent him from interfering with their rivalry.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: Virtually all the human villains. The impetus for the plot is the King of Ivalice dying without a clear successor, resulting in his two most powerful Dukes, Bestrald Larg and Druksmald Goltana, each backing a different candidate for the throne and going to war with each other in hopes of becoming the Shadow Dictator behind the new monarch, and it's later revealed that the Church of Glabados is deliberately agitating tensions as well so they can look like the big heroes when they swoop in to save the day. Larg, Goltana, and the higher-ups of Glabados are all vain, pompous sociopaths who think they're strategic geniuses, making them easy pawns for the true masterminds of the war, the Lucavi Demons, who hope to cause enough bloodshed to unseal their imprisoned master Ultima.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Arvis of Velthomer subverts it by being surprisingly sympathetic in a way. While he at first starts as an amiable ally to Sigurd, he mostly stays behind the scenes while Sigurd is being accused of treason... only to pull off the biggest Player Punch ever by taking Sigurd's wife as his own, slaughtering him and his whole army mercilessly, and then becoming the next Emperor of Grannvale... only to realize after 17 years that he's been had by Manfroy. Manfroy makes his son Julius into the host of Loptous and practically turns Arvis himself into a puppet ruler and the Empire he built goes from noble to downright tyrannical. By the time Seliph comes to avenge Sigurd, it is widely known that while Arvis was a big threat beforehand, he's been reduced into a pitiful man swept by fate and the true villain and evil is Manfroy.
  • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn's Lekain is a straight example. The leader of the corrupt Begnion Senators, he's a failed The Man Behind the Man to almost every awful thing in both this game and the prequel. He's a vile, arrogant, SOB, and killing him off is truly one of the highlights of the game. Yet at the end of the day, he's not the Dark Messiah that he thinks he is and is in fact just another one of Sephiran's pawns in his plot to reawaken the Goddess Ashera. That being said, it says something that one of his few actions on his own initiative includes an actual genocide.
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening has Excellus, who fancies himself The Starscream to Walhart. In reality, he did such a bad job of hiding his treacherous nature that Walhart knew all along, and he's promptly sent to the front lines to die before he has a chance to carry out his plans. Walhart even tells him to his face that the only reason Excellus was allowed to live until that point is that Walhart found his pathetic attempts to manipulate him to be amusing.
  • Fire Emblem Heroes:
    • The initial antagonist of Book VI is Letizia, who manages to frame Veronica for treason and have her sentenced to death. Unfortunately for her, Veronica's allies are able to rally her supporters and have her released from prison, with Letizia's lies being used against her. Letizia then ends up encountering Embla, the true antagonist of the Book, who proceeds to force Letizia to become her pawn.
    • Njörðr from Book VII is the one responsible for turning Seiðr into Gullveig and clearly views himself as The Man Behind the Man to her, considering her a mere pawn for him to use as a weapon. The instant he summons her to serve as The Dragon, she promptly ages him into dust, making him The Unfought for the heroes while she proves to still be the true Arc Villain.
  • Fire Emblem Engage: An interesting variation with King Hyacinth in that he sees himself as The Dragon to Sombron rather than the Big Bad, but he clearly views himself as indispensable due to controlling the ritual to free his master and help him grow stronger. Sombron does just that… by devouring the corrupted King whole.
• Galaxy Angel: Rezom Mea Zom is this in the second installment, Moonlit Lovers. In the first game he was encountered a couple times and defeated easily by the Elsior and the Angel Wing, and six months later he returns leading The Remnant of Eonia's old forces. Little does he know he's being played like a fiddle by the game's true villains, the Val-Fasq, who egged on his pompous and gullible nature to do their bidding.
• Genshin Impact: Throughout the Traveler’s journey, they will encounter gods, monsters, horrors from the abyss, and minor antagonists who think themselves as some big shots in the world.
  • The Treasure Hoarders are a Downplayed example, as they’re little more than petty thieves who are only looking to make a quick coin. But rather than being some big bullies on the block, they’ve ended up learning the hard way that they but are nothing more than a minor nuisance.
    • In the "We Will Be Reunited" Archon Quest, the Liyue and Mondstadt branches hire a well known individual among known as the "Grand Thief", to scout out an Abyss Hideout, to try to rob it blind. When the Traveler arrives on the scene, they find that the Abyss Order had already killed the Grand Thief, proving that the Abyss doesn’t screw around with others.
    • The "Duel! The Summoner's Summit" event further shows how delusional they are in how "powerful" their organization is. Its revealed at the end of the event, that they had created a custom card back that contained a hidden message that they would relay to their members in different nations in the hopes that they would be able to pull off a heist in every nation at the same time. But because some of them got addicted to the game, they ended up losing the card backs, so they had to resort to some very traceable back alley deals to get them back, which lead to their operation being exposed by the Traveler, Charlotte, Kirara, and Cyno.
  • In Eula’s character quest, her uncle, Sherbert Lawrence, thinks he has the situation under control by working with the Fatui to reestablish the old aristocracy and restore the Lawrence clan into provenance. Once things go pear-shaped, he quickly folds like a sheet of paper, for when Eula arrives at the Fatui hideout to arrest him, he tries to cohere Eula into betraying the Knights, only for her to put her foot down, causing him to back off.
  • Despite Signora’s arrogance and deicidal ambitions, she only got as far as she did in her plans because of her affiliation with the Fatui, and the Raiden Shogun gave her a fatal reality check on how far beneath the gods she seeks to overthrow she actually is, after she was defeated in a duel against the Traveller.
  • Kujou Takayuki‘s political position of power in Inazuma makes him a potential threat, and he was in near control of the situation. At the end of the Inazuma Archon Quest, his power base almost completely falls apart once the Traveler befriends the Shogun and helps her come to her senses, which leads to his clan being disgraced, and the only thing that prevents his clan from being ousted from power in the Tri Commission was due to Ei being impressed with the resolve of his youngest son after she wiped the floor with him in her first character quest.
  • Radical Eremites in the Sumeru Archon Quest declare themselves to be the greatest adversaries of the Akademiya and the Dendro Archon under the belief that their god will soon be resurrected, and enact revenge for Rukkhadevata's apparent betrayal of the Scarlet King. In reality, the story of the Scarlet King’s resurrection is a propaganda campaign by the Akademiya to cover their tracks, combined with the fact that the Sages are collaborating with the Fatui to create what they perceive to be a suitable replacement for Rukkhadevata.
  • Matriarch Babel’s plan from the beginning was to gain access to the Eternal Oasis to try to make the Tanit even greater than what it is, even going so far as to say that she will overthrow the Dendro Archon. Once the Traveller and Jeht find out that she tried to get them both killed when she no longer needed them, they effortlessly defeat her, and wipe out her clan.
  • Neuvillette’s character quest is kicked off when an inmate from the Fortress of Meropide named Domenico had sent a threatening letter to the Melusine that busted his criminal activities. When confronted, he ultimately turns out to be nothing more than a push over, as unlike other arc villains in the game, he doesn’t even get a domain full of Mooks for the Traveler and Neuvillette to fight against, and is given a harsher punishment than his current one.
• God of War III: Gaia is a Titan who leads the Second Titanomachy against Zeus and the Olympians with the aid of Kratos, only for her invasion to be crushed by the Olympians during the early stages of the game. After the initial battle goes poorly for her, Gaia deems Kratos as expendable, and abandons him to his fate. By the time Kratos climbs his way back up Mount Olympus, Gaia is hanging on to the mountainside, begging for his help. Instead, Kratos forces her off the mountainside, sending her to her apparent doom. During the Final Battle between Kratos and Zeus, a Not Quite Dead Gaia shows up and attempts to kill them both, only for the two to evade their attacks and continue their battle in the body cavity containing Gaia's heart, where Gaia can no longer interfere. Said battle results in Kratos using the Blade of Olympus to stab through Zeus and into Gaia's heart, killing Gaia once and all. Zeus, on the other hand, takes several more steps for Kratos to finish off.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto III: Salvatore Leone is reduced to this. Despite the fact that he's the most prominent don in Liberty City, he's barely a footnote to Claude, with his assassination being incredibly early in the game. Furthermore, Catalina (the real Big Bad of the game) and her large drug cartel has resources that even Salvatore can only dream of.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Eddie Pulaski believes himself to be equal to Frank Tenpenny and tries to form a Big Bad Duumvirate with him. Tenpenny is quick to shut him down and remind him that he is superior.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV: Jimmy Pegorino likes to think of himself as a crafty and respected kingpin (even attempting a chess metaphor at one point). His dream is to muscle his way onto The Commission in Liberty City and put his family on the map, but it's made pretty clear from a real kingpin that won't ever happen. In reality, Jimmy is boss of a small, amateurish, disloyal crew that only has one competent member who is constantly sidelined and disrespected for being half-Irish. Even the ULP Contact tells Niko that the Peg is a joke. He's no match for Dmitri Rascalov or Jon Gravelli in terms of ruthlessness and influence, and his trust in the former ultimately gets him a bullet in the brain, which is either from Dimitri or Niko depending on the ending. Niko lampshades this just before killing him in the Revenge Ending:
    Niko Bellic: Big talk. You wanna know something funny?
    Jimmy Pegorino: Not really.
    Niko Bellic: The Commission. The old families. I know some of those guys. And they... thought you... were a fat fucking joke.
    Jimmy Pegorino: Whatever.
    Niko Bellic: A joke! Huh. (starts laughing)
  • Similarly, The Mafia as a whole have been reduced to this level in GTA IV and GTA V. While they still tout themselves as being major forces in the American underworld, they are no match for the expanding influence of The Mafiya, The Cartel or The Triads and the Tongs, let alone Merryweather Security or the frighteningly corrupt US government agencies.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned: Brian Jeremy. Originally serving as Billy's secretary, he tries to take control of the Brotherhood following Billy's arrest and Johnny becoming the new President. To his credit, he succeeds in convincing most of their gang to turn on Johnny and his actions effectively cripple the Lost MC, leading to its eventual demise. With that said, he is pretty much dealt with in the next mission after his attempt, since Johnny is tipped of his hideout by Ray Boccinno and goes on to finish him off long before the plotline is over.
  • Grand Theft Auto V: Martin Madrazo is, in a lot of ways, the traditional GTA gangster that defines the Big Bad throughout the games. The big difference is, Martin Madrazo is what you get when two of your playable Main Characters are a short-tempered former bank-robber who tears down million-dollar houses belonging to your mistresses just to get at a guy that was sleeping with his wife, and the other a homicidal maniac who falls madly in love with your wife after he kidnaps her (and tears out your ear when he sees how you've been mistreating her). With his resources, he was pretty close to having been the Big Bad of the whole story. Sadly, he simply can't catch enough of a break to be a proper antagonist compared to Merryweather Security CEO Devin Weston or corrupt FIB agent Steve Haines.
  • There's also Stretch, the low-level hoodlum who thinks he's the overarching villain of Franklin's life. The impact he has on the plot at large is minimal, mostly because his antics only go so far as tricking Lamar repeatedly, with Franklin and his allies being the only reason Lamar survives. His irrelevance is lampshaded by Franklin when Trevor brings him up and Franklin asks if they want to throw him in along with all the other villains they're planning on taking out to prevent further issues (including the aforementioned corrupt CEO and FIB agent).
• Sakaki from .hack//G.U.. He turns out to be an arrogant jerk who does manage to cause a lot of trouble in both the second and third games but is known to just be a secondary threat who serves as a distraction from the one who's really the source of the World's problems.
• The King of Fighters:
  • Clone Zero is one. He wants to destroy NESTS and take over the world on his own using a Kill Sat called the Zero Cannon which is powerful enough to destroy a city, but his plans for world domination end in failure.
  • K9999 as well, especially for those who like Foxy and Kula. He backstabbed and killed Foxy (at first), laughed about it to Kula's face, seriously traumatizing the poor kid, then he retreats, away from any retaliation... then Foxy was later revealed to be Not Quite Dead. Hoping for a rematch for what he did to them? Not a chance, as starting from The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match, due to being a blatant ripoff of AKIRA's Tetsuo Shima, K9999 was eventually retconned into a different person, Nameless, who had a different backstory (and a much more sympathetic one at that). Except not, as he does make a surprise return in XV as "Krohnen", although by that point he doesn't quite count anymore.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Maleficent spends the majority of the first game as the apparent mastermind behind the Heartless invasion in a bid to assemble the seven Princesses of Heart and gain dominion over all worlds. However, Sora's battle with her makes her a Disc-One Final Boss, and she dies exposed as an Unwitting Pawn to the game's true Big Bad, Ansem—and, as later games reveal, Master Xehanort—who directly caused the insurgence of Heartless in the first place. After she comes Back from the Dead in Kingdom Hearts II, she spends the majority of the franchise plotting on the sidelines, trying to stay one step ahead of the villains, but ultimately accomplishing little to nothing in the end.
  • Marluxia is the Arc Villain of Chain of Memories, trying to turn Sora into his puppet via Naminé's memory manipulation so he and Larxene can usurp Xemnas and take over the Organization. Come 358/2 Days, it's revealed that Xemnas, Xigbar, and Saïx were all fully aware of his treachery and sent him to Castle Oblivion to single them out for execution at Axel's hands.
• Mass Effect:
  • Elanos Haliat from a side-quest in the first game. He traps you underground with a nuke as part of a gambit to get back in charge of the Terminus Clans, who your character helped defeat during the Skyllian Blitz. He leaves you enough time to disarm it, takes his gang out in one last-ditch attempt to kill you, and ends up getting killed in the resulting firefight. Doubly humiliating if you managed to run past him and his men and get into your Awesome Personnel Carrier, in which you case you can take out the entire group with one shot from the main cannon. Though it's harder to do it that way since it's far away and you have to run straight through enemy bullets. His ignorance is doubly so if Shepard is an Infiltrator. After claiming to know everything about Shepard, he sets up his camp at the bottom of the mountain that he trapped the expert sniper in. Guess how that ends.
  • Cerberus. Any other time they would've made excellent Big Bads, being a powerful and wealthy human supremacist group scheming willing to do monstrous things to get the job done. However, with the Reapers coming to destroy civilization, they're nothing more than a stubborn nuisance that think they're a bigger deal than they actually are; Illusive Man seriously thinks he can control the Reapers. Shepard and the Normandy crew aren't even in that big a rush to deal with them until they steal the ancient VI that the crew needs to finish the Crucible. Once that happens the Alliance gets fed up with their antics, quickly tracks them to their base, and lets the Normandy crew more or less wipe the organization out except for the Illusive Man himself, who fled like a coward once he realized Shepard was coming. As if the group couldn't get any more pathetic in the grand scheme of things, it's revealed in the finale that the Illusive Man and likely the rest of Cerberus got themselves indoctrinated by foolishly overexposing themselves to Reaper tech while attempting to study it. They would've never even gotten the chance to be a big threat because the Reapers wouldn't let them. Apparently, a group like Cerberus does this every cycle.
  • Linked to Cerberus is Kai Leng, who fashions himself as Shepard's ultimate archenemy and greatest challenger. He's actually nothing more than the Illusive Man's pet assassin who largely ends up being more trouble than he's worth due to his poor impulse control, inability to hold back his bigotry towards aliens, and obsession with Shepard. The former two traits end up robbing Cerberus of a potentially vital ally, as he ends up murdering an Asari who turns out to be the daughter of Aria T'Loak, one of the most influential and powerful gangsters in the galaxy. The only battles we see him win decisively are against enemies who are already weakened (Thane and possibly Miranda) or didn't get the chance to fight back (Captain Kirrahe). When Shepard finally confronts him he gets beaten like a chump and is pathetically stabbed and killed while making a final effort to kill Shepard.
  • From Mass Effect: Andromeda, a side-quest has Elora, an asari who wants to play gang-lord. She claims she will do what the two major gangs of Kadara "don't have the balls for". Said plan, by the by, is "blow up all the colonies". As in the colonies trying to make the planet she's on liveable. Most of the people working for her can't stand her, or just think she's a stupid kid in way over her head, just going along with the scheme for their own reasons. Ryder can sabotage her "plan" without ever even meeting her, and either way the head honcho of Kadara finds out. If Sloane Kelly's still alive, Elora is disappeared. If the Collective is in charge, she gets shipped off to Elaaden, never to be seen again.
• Mac from Mega Man X3. He used X's trusting nature to sucker-shot him with a stun bullet and captures him easily. Then Zero arrives and it only takes several shots and maybe one or two swings of the Z-Saber to kill him for good.
• Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark: The drow calling herself Valsharess, "Empress", has made a decent start at Taking Over The World in conquering much of the Underdark and extending her attacks even to the surface, something almost unheard of for the subterranean drow. She's, naturally, presented as the Big Bad, and the game also makes a point to stress how exceptional she is. Unfortunately for her, she's only become so powerful by somehow enslaving a Dimension Lord who's arguably the second biggest Chessmaster in a place with such a level of scheming it makes the drow society look like a picnic. Inevitably, the Archdevil Mephistopheles manipulates her to bring in the Player Character to kill her and let him free, leaving him to lead a much more credible bid at Taking Over The World in the final chapters.
• Persona:
  • Persona 3
    • Strega is a group of rival Persona users that initially try to stop SEES from killing the Full Moon Shadows so that the Dark Hour will not end, but prove woefully ineffective at this. They fail to stop the protagonists a single time, and while Chidori abducts Junpei, she did so under the mistaken belief that he was the leader. Their only notable successes are killing Shinjiro and almost killing Junpei. In the endgame, they shift focus to trying to serve as heralds for Nyx, but they have no impact on the plot. It doesn't help that until Persona 3 Reload, they were some of the easiest bosses in the game.
    • Late in the game, it turns out that Shuji Ikutsuki, Chief Director of Gekkoukan High and the Chairman of SEES, has been manipulating SEES for his own ends, namely, destroying the Full Moon Shadows so that they will re-fuse into Death and bring about the end of the world. The party confronts him as soon as they realize that killing the last Shadow didn't stop the Dark Hour, and while he tries to sacrifice them to Nyx, he ends up being killed that night. To make matters worse, his plan to rule the world couldn't possibly have worked.
  • Persona 4:
    • Subverted by Taro Namatame in the worst ending. He is revealed to be the one behind the kidnapping and his last acts ends up killing Nanako, though not a party member, but still a very well beloved character. The player can opt to throw him into the Midnight Channel where he will be killed by his own Shadow (which clearly DOES pose a worse threat than him alone...). The better endings, however, averts this as Namatame turns out to be a Tragic Hero manipulated by the true Killer.
    • Played straight with Mitsuo Kubo, a mentally unstable student who propagates himself as the culprit behind the string of murders in order to gain attention, and who the party believes to be responsible for a short time. In fact, Mitsuo only kills one person, Mr. Morooka, and it is revealed that he was thrown into the TV world by the Killer to further his own goals; Mitsuo spends the rest of the game presumably in prison.
  • Persona 5 has the Traitor AKA Goro Akechi, the Sixth Ranger Traitor who serves as The Heavy throughout the game. He is savvy to use his power to access the Metaverse to set up a clever scheme to not only further his own career as an ace detective but also to get revenge on his father Masayoshi Shido. Unfortunately, he gets defeated midway through the game’s climax by the Phantom Thieves, and apparently dies in obscurity where no one would remember him. What’s worse is that he doesn’t realise that Shido already knew of Akechi’s imminent betrayal and plans on getting rid of him once Akechi has served his purpose. To add further insult to injury, Akechi was merely another Unwitting Pawn alongside the Protagonist of the true Big Bad.
• Randal's Monday: The business bum.
• Red Dead Redemption: Dutch van der Linde. While the man is a major threat for the civilization, his plans for the future will never work because of how society works, and he is just a depressed, angry old man murderously venting his hatred towards a world that would never accept him. Deep down even he cannot resist the wonders of the modern world, as seen by his choice of weapon and his decision to escape a robbery with an automobile.
• Resident Evil 6: While Derek C. Simmons is The Heavy of the game, seeing as it was his obsession with Ada Wong, as well as his independent experiments with Carla Radames' C-Virus, that directly led to Carla's Start of Darkness and the game's entire plot, he has largely lost his focus by the game's actual beginning, being relevant to the plot only in Leon's campaign- and even then, his only major role is to fall into Carla's trap as she planned, get infected with the C-Virus, and get killed off by Leon and Helena.
• The Sakabashira Game: Once The Corruption turns him into a Horror, Insufferable Genius Evan hypes himself up to be the ultimate challenger to Alex. While he puts up a good fight, he's still outshined by Ceci, The Dragon to the proper Big Bad, who is the actual Final Boss.
• Serious Sam 4: After taking down Lord Achriman, Sam and his teammates finally reach the Holy Grail to use against the Alien Invasion. General Brand then reveals himself to have been Evil All Along and takes the Holy Grail, actually an Artifact of Doom, for himself so he can switch sides and survive the invasion as a servant of Mental. He seems set up to become the Final Boss of the game, only for the actual final boss to take a good look at him, reject his offerings and flick him away like an insect.
  • Even when he was presented as the sole villain of the standalone Expansion Pack Siberian Mayhem, Brand's plane is shot down halfway through. He's believed dead for the rest of the game, only to suddenly ambush the party right before the Final Boss fight with him.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne has Serial Killer Sakahagi, a ruthless Manikin who has a bad habit of skinning other Manikins alive before killing them and draining them of their Magatsuhi and leaving them dead. At a certain point in the game, he obtains a powerful MacGuffin and uses it to brainwash an army of Fairies. He then proceeds to cut off Chiaki's arm off-screen, though she survives, before engaging the protagonist in a battle where he is killed. Ultimately, he fails due to an inability to create his own Reason due to a lack of humanity and not nearly measuring up to the power of Kagutsuchi and Lucifer.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV has Tayama, the Yakuza kingpin who has taken control of Tokyo After the End. The city's entire population fears and respects him, he acts as the main antagonist for the second quarter or so of the game, and he has a stable of incredibly powerful demons and numerous Moral Event Horizon crossings to his name. As his arc continues, however, we discover that all of said demons hate him, only fighting for him because he has their Soul Jars, he's a massive coward if he's deprived of them, and that of all the antagonists in the game he's by far the least "in the know" of the finer points of the plot.
• Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time: Penelope sees herself as the Big Bad of the game, with the intention of backstabbing the actual Big Bad Le Paradox and taking over his operations, and conquering the planet with Bentley as her partner. Not to mention that everything bad that has happened in the game is her fault, since she provided Le Paradox with the blueprints that allows him to time travel. But in the end, she's just another one of his puppets, and once she's gotten Sir Galleth's cane, Le Paradox betrays Penelope to Interpol, and she's disowned by the Cooper Gang.
• Sonic the Hedgehog villain Dr. Eggman has evolved into this starting in Sonic Adventure, since he constantly tries to use sealed evil in cans but fails to learn that Evil Is Not a Toy, so he constantly helps his enemies defeat it before unleashing the next evil. Sonic Colors rectified this though, as he does his old-fashioned scheme of using his Mecha-Mooks to defeat Sonic. Except in the DS version, where he unleashes a brainwashed and Nega-fied Mother Wisp.
• The third time you meet Mysterio in Spider-Man 2 you find him robbing a convenience store. As he turns to confront you, his health bar appears next to him, filling up completely not once, not twice, but three times, granting him (apparently) far more health than any other in-game character. Then, it turns out, a single punch does him in.
• Arcturus Mengsk from StarCraft is a major threat, but he is unfortunate enough to have villains like the Overmind, Kerrigan, the UED and Amon as his competition. As a result, he gets to be the Big Bad in storylines focusing on the Terran in particular and when Kerrigan decides to go after him, but in the franchise as a whole, he is constantly overshadowed by a bigger threat.
• Star Fox: Assault: Following Andross' final defeat and death at the end of the previous game, his bumbling nephew and former-weakest-Star-Wolf-member Andrew tries to take over as the new Big Bad, leading the remnants of Andross' forces against Corneria from a goofy-looking starship designed to resemble Andross. As to be expected, he lasts a grand total of one tutorial mission before his "army" is routed, he himself gets his ass kicked by Star Fox, and then finally has his ship shot down by an Aparoid. When he next appears in Command, he's been reduced to a lowly privateer working for the Anglars.
• Many games with The Empire, such as Suikoden always have some guy like this at first who targets you or your loved ones because he's a jerk; plotwise in order to keep your characters in an adversarial relationship with said Empire. Once you've managed to beat him; you are now deep into "Enemy of the State" territory and will be dealing with the full might of the Empire.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Bowser is this in the various Role Playing Games (save for the first Paper Mario, Sticker Star and Paper Jam), in which he is always upstaged by the day's Big Bad. Often, he is even put into a hero position to stop the villain.
  • In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Grodus, the leader of the X-Nauts, succeeds in resurrecting the Shadow Queen, only for her to destroy his body and nearly kill him. It's then revealed that Grodus and his entire organization were played for fools by Beldam, leader of the Shadow Sirens, simply by her saying that the Shadow Queen would serve Grodus upon her revival. With that one lie, the organization ends up unwittingly working for her.
  • At the end of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Fawful expresses his desire to crawl out from Cackletta's shadow and become a villain in his own right, but is promptly defeated and blasted away before he can do anything about it. In Partners in Time, he's been reduced to a mere shopkeeper who rambles about his hatred of the Mario Bros. and plots revenge, but he is unable to put his plans into motion and is completely overshadowed by the threat of the Shroobs. By the time of Bowser's Inside Story, however, he finally manages to subvert this and take over the show by succesfully taking over both the Mushroom and Bowser Kingdoms and unleashing the Dark Star.
  • In Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, Antasma falls into this, being kicked aside by Bowser once he gets the Dream Stone's power back.
• Wilhelm von Juergen from Super Robot Wars: Original Generation (or, more precisely, The ODE System that absorbed him)... is practically the very epitome of this trope. His debut in the OVA involves effortlessly capturing the new Aggressors (Lamia Loveless, Arado Balanga, Seolla Schweitzer and Latooni Subota) plus Kusuha Mizuha, because all of them are not in any mecha. Then, while Lamia eventually resisted him, he still manages to overrode her mind one time before Kyosuke plugged her out, while the rest of his captives are subdued by the rest of the EFA and restored. Then, in Original Generation Gaiden, whereas while once Lamia resisted he couldn't override her mind, instead he apparently killed her off, now while she was battered and naked on Alt Eisen's arm... only for seconds later (after the rest of the EFA weaken him) get killed off (and reabsorbed) by Duminuss. To add insult to injury/death, Duminuss "revives" her, then later Axel brought her back to her normal self, rendering Juergen's "victory" pointless.
  • Given the nature of of the series, all of the non-OG games have some of the participating series' villains reduced to this. However, the stand out example definitely goes to the Maremaia Army. While the movie itself has been one of the most commonly used series in the franchise, it's main antagonists are never a credible threat. Typically they're an Unwitting Pawn for another team of villains like the Martian Successors or Neo Zeon, and even if they aren't, they're always dealt with fairly early in the game. In Alpha Gaiden (their first appearance no less), not only are they taken out before even the Starter Villain (the Titans remnants), but depending on the route split the player chooses, they're defeated offscreen
• Tales of...
  • Saleh from Tales of Rebirth is at first shown and described as a powerful enemy general, with a reasonless penchant for destruction and disgust on anything that is 'good'. Every time Veigue tried to approach him during the first half of the game, he spends his time outwitting and overwhelming Veigue... in cutscenes. However, he is never seen in battle on solo compared to his partner Tohma, he's usually fighting with a friend. Veigue defeats him rather easily, and following Tytree's "The Reason You Suck" Speech, it would seem that Saleh would try to get his threat level higher. Unfortunately, he spends most of his time after that just annoying Veigue with words on how he's going to crush their 'power of hearts', without actually kicking ass, and when he's actually fought the second time (with all his allies, nonetheless!), he's beaten just as easily. In other words, Saleh barks as if the power of evil will triumph all the time, but he couldn't back up with actual prowess.
  • Grand Maestro Mohs from Tales of the Abyss thinks that he has the God Generals of the Oracle Knights wrapped around his finger, under the belief that he can bring about salvation through Yulia’s Score. In reality, the God Generals were only using him for their own ends, mostly to keep the party at bay while they carried out their plan to destroy the world, and they leave him to die when they no longer needed him.
  • Barbos, the leader of the Blood Alliance, is the main antagonist in Act 1, of Tales of Vesperia. Act 2, reveals that Commandant Alexei had been using him to set up a node for his blastia network to resurrect Zaude, which he sought to use to recreate the world in his own image. However, Zaude turned out to be a seal to keep the Adephagos at bay, and Alexei dies admitting that he was a fool.
  • Tales of Graces: Cedric, Richard’s uncle, is the main antagonist of the first act of the game. He tries to have Richard assassinated to prevent him from reclaiming the throne of Windor, but due to Richard serving as the host body for the real Big Bad, Lambda, he fails, and is killed at the hands of his nephew.
• Delphi from Trauma Center. Played up as a nihilistic bio-terrorist group that sees modern medicine as unnaturally prolonging people's lives. To that end, they do end up creating the parasites that form the threat of the first two games... and completely fail to kill any real number of people. In one outbreak in Under the Knife 2, the current head of Delphi ends up turning the television off during a report happily pointing out that despite their best efforts, not a single person was killed. Compare to Trauma Team, where untold thousands of people are killed completely by accident, with no Big Bad behind Rosalia whatsoever. Pretty pathetic showing for such a feared organization.
• Undertale: In the Genocide route, Flowey tries to form a Big Bad Duumvirate with the Player Character. He realizes a little too late that they're more powerful and eviler than him.
• Gul'dan of Warcraft goes back and forth on this, especially now that the World of Warcraft expansion Warlords of Draenor has introduced an alternative version of the timeline he existed in.
  • In Warcraft II, he was the Big Bad Wannabe, because even though the backstory had him manipulating practically all events, he suffered a setback when Orgrim Doomhammer (representing the player character from the first game) killed his puppet Blackhand and took his place as the ruler of the orcs. Gul'dan eventually betrayed Doomhammer, searching for ultimate power within the Tomb of Sargeras, only to become a boss in the second game and be foiled again. Gul'dan was still about the most formidable villain in the story — it was just that he had the misfortune of being pitted against the player.
  • In Warlords of Draenor, a time-travelling orc stopped Gul'dan's plans at a much earlier phase, when he was trying to make the orcs drink demon-blood to form the Horde as it was originally known. The warlord Grommash Hellscream refused, imprisoned Gul'dan, formed the Iron Horde which was about the same as the old Horde but killing everyone because they wanted to rather than due to an alliance with demons, and became the new apparent Big Bad for the expansion. However, this time Hellscream was the Big Bad Wannabe because Gul'dan took advantage of the heroes' fight against the Iron Horde to first escape and then compel the remaining orcs to ally with him and the demons to gain the power to turn the tide of the war. By the time of the final patch cinematic, Hellscream is in chains and Gul'dan is gloating over him, including how he's not as good as a villain. "You have no vision."
• Grazel from White Knight Chronicles. He's a White Hair, Black Heart boy who believes he's the reincarnation of an evil emperor, is the ruler of said emperor's empire in the present day, and he becomes the Pact-maker of Adolmea, the strongest of the five Knights. All of that should make him a formidable villain. Unfortunately, he's ultimately just a pawn to his own Evil Chancellor Ledom, who is, in fact, a time traveling chessmaster servant of the past evil emperor. Said Evil Chancellor is arguably the true Big Bad of the game since his scheme to revive said emperor is what drives the plot. He succeeds too, at the cost of his own life. The revived emperor then unceremoniously kills Grazel after the latter refuses to accept his Wannabe status and charges him.
• EXALT in XCOM Enemy Within is a Nebulous Evil Organisation based around Transhuman Treachery, seeking to use Bio-Augmentation and alien technology to Take Over the World... while in the middle of a full-scale Alien Invasion by better-equipped beings already halfway to doing so themselves. EXALT's tech tree will only expand to laser weapons and a few genetic augmentations, but by then, XCOM will be fielding MEC troopers, gene soldiers of their own, and even plasma weapons, which far outstrips the capabilities of the laser weapons. By the late game, EXALT devolves into a nuisance at best, and can be wiped out pretty easily by a well-equipped squad in their base assault mission. In said mission, Bradford and Shen end up mocking them for being cheap knockoffs.
• The Gazel Ministry from Xenogears certainly seem like intimidating presences, given that they head up the main enemy faction, Solaris, in place of the frail Emperor Cain, wear creepy black cloaks, and frequently interrupt the plot to have meetings with each other about vague technobabble that won't make sense to the player for dozens of real-time hours. Around midway through the game, however, it becomes apparent that the true "power behind the throne" in Solaris its chief scientist Krellian, who is manipulating both the Gazels and Cain for his own goals. Indeed, it turns out the true Gazels died centuries ago and the ones seen in the game are AI backups of their minds made by Krellian, who did so because his master plan requires a Lost Superweapon that only they know how to activate. Once Krellian manages to push the Godzilla Threshold high enough for them to activate it, he thanks them by almost literally pulling the plug on them.

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