Bunny Ears Lawyer / Video Games

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• Barnaby "Screwloose" of Armello doesn't entirely seem to understand what's going on around him, or that he's in the middle of a fight for the throne... but he's still a talented warrior and adventurer, able to compete for the crown on weight of that alone. (His literal bunny ears are a bonus.)
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Minsc. He's quite nuts, but when he talks about kicking butt, he knows what he's talking about.
    Dynaheir: Minsc is, well, Minsc, but he hath a strong sword arm.
  • Also, none of the mages are exactly well-adjusted, with the possible exception of aforementioned Dynaheir. And even she speaks funny.
  • Kivan is also pretty quirky: he's reclusive and has attitude issues. But Kivan is also God and the game cannot be won to any kind of satisfaction without him. He's by far the best archer in the first game and his THACO defies all reason.
• Double H from Beyond Good & Evil. On one hand, he has a tendency to quote things at random from his military training manual in an UNNECESSARILY LOUD VOICE, he runs things over with his head and never takes off his armor because it makes him "feel manly", and he gets really worked up over hovercraft racing. On the other hand, he's the IRIS Network's best operative, he's good at following directions, and he's pretty strong in battle. Pey'j too — He's a Texan-accented anthropomorphic pig with a habit of swearing like a prospector, and he has an unusual special attack. He's also a brilliant inventor and engineer. And, you know, the all-mysterious and all-powerful leader of a rebel organization.
• BlazBlue:
  • Makoto may act like a big kid, but she's an Intelligence operative and quite a talented one at that.
  • Kagura from Chrono Phantasma. He's every bit as badass as you'd expect the head of the top Duodecim family to be, despite the fact his personality seems to be continually stuck between a Fratbro and a potential sex offender.
• Borderlands has plenty of nutcases to show, but there are also a few that are just as nutty as they are good at their trade.
  • Borderlands 2: Mister Torgue Flexington, founder of the Torgue Corporation, is a savant when it comes to developing explosive weapons. He is also insane, immature and a Genius Ditz par excellence, who sold his company for twelve dollars and a high five, only has room in his mind for two thoughts (one of which is always explosions), and is an unabashed Sir Swears-a-Lot which led to the stockholders of his company surgically installing a vocal censor in his voice box that results in a steady stream of Cluster Bleep Bombs.
  • Borderlands 3: Tiny Tina got a job as a professional bomb-maker. And is still insane. And literally wears bunny ears to go with her psycho mask.
• Brave Fencer Musashi there is The Leader's Force, a group of morons who consist of Ben who is so stupid it's a marvel of science, Ed who habitually stutters (even in letters, somehow) and can't be any older than about 12, and Topo who wears giant mouse ears and acts like a spoiled brat who challenges people to dance-offs. They're also the only soldiers of Thirstquencher Empire who are capable fighters and can pose a serious threat to Musashi at full power, appearing as persistently difficult bosses in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Ed and Topo also show considerable intelligence, with Ed making plans to fall back on if their boss pulls a You Have Failed Me on them and Topo coming up with a particularly clever plan to take out Musashi: Disguise herself as Princess Fillet and be rescued so Musashi will think his job is done and return home, effectively removing him from the equation completely without firing a single shot, which almost works.
• Deadly Premonition: Agent Francis York Morgan ("Call me York. That's what everyone calls me") is an FBI investigator who we first see driving a car through a heavy rainstorm while working on his laptop and arguing on the phone with his superior over his theory on how Tom and Jerry are in a codependent, sadomasochistic relationship. He is also routinely late for appointments^note which is to say, you are routinely late due to the game giving you extremely generous windows of time to show up for things, and never penalizing you for just plain taking multiple days off to pursue various side quests; York's weirdness does a good job of wallpapering over the Anti-Frustration Features that would otherwise be a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation, rambles on endlessly about old movies and their directors when he's not cheerfully discussing grisly murders and serial rapists over dinner, and goes over his every action and decision with his imaginary friend, Zach. His methods of "investigating" consist less of actual forensic work and more of chain-smoking until he gains visions of the past, and seeing visions of the future in the milk he pours in his coffee every morning. Despite all this, he's an extremely competent detective who isn't at all shy over that fact.
• The Guardians in Destiny are basically a whole faction of Bunny Ears Lawyers. Y’know all the weird stuff RPG players tend to do, like spamming dance emotes, obsessing over loot, playing dress up, and silly things like that? Here that’s not Gameplay and Story Segregation, it’s canonically what Guardians act like. There are numerous lore entries in which people wonder why the defenders of humanity do things like dance in water fountains or crash into walls while trying to do stunts on their hover bikes. Many of the NPC Guardians are just as crazy; Cayde-6 spends most of his time playing pranks and finding excuses to not do his job, Ikora Rey’s social life is a mess, Zavala is The Comically Serious to a ridiculous degree, Eris Morn is a crazy Nightmare Fetishist who may or may not be turning into a Hive monster, and Shaxx is a total lunatic who’s constantly shouting and has no priority higher than hosting sports matches in enemy territory. And that’s just some of the important ones. They’re all still extremely powerful heroes and the City’s greatest hope for survival.
• Nero from Devil May Cry 4. Much of his Jerkass attitude would've gotten him excommunicated from the Order a long time ago, such as a blue coat instead of their white uniform (although he does have their insignia stitched on it), listening to his own theme song during prayer, and colorful mouth. However, he's very good at his job in the "dirtier" side of things, and is kosher with the idea of God (in fact, he out right states it near the end of the game) — he's just not all that fond of the church he works for.
• In Disco Elysium, not being viewed as this is something of an uphill battle. Even at his most normal, the Player Character is a Defective Detective who start out the story with waking up half-naked from a three-day drinking binge, having forgotten his identity and everything about the world he is living in, and there is the fact he has constant internal arguments with the personifications of his skills; even if he manages to keep this secret, people around him still notice that he is occasionally spacing out. The player can, however, also choose to grab this reputation with both hands and run with it. The detective can also opt in to bizarre beliefs outside of any of the skills, such as declaring himself the Cop of the Apocalypse, openly acknowledging he is an incredibly corrupt "bad addict cop", or denying all signs to the contrary and proclaiming himself a handsome, glamorous superstar cop. Kim will push past most of it and can even come to accept it when the detective's weird moments allow leaps in the investigation, though even he can be pushed too far. Even before the events of the game, this is what Harry was — learning about his past reveals he was a very competent cop, with eighteen years of service, over 200 cases solved, and a very low bodycount — only three kills confirmed — which is highlighted as especially impressive considering he serves in one of the most violent and crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city. That said, he was still a complete drunkard who worked by bouts of productivity, and displayed emotionally and mentally unstable behavior regularly bordering on outright insanity.
  • Among the alternate personalities/skills, Inland Empire and Shivers are this compared to the rest of the skills. The former is Harry's raw imagination, giving various opaque hints thanks to lateral thinking and daydreaming; said hints are always right but are so cryptic and far-fetched, requiring a lot of context and explanations to get the full picture. Inland Empire also tries to bend Harry away from learning about his ex-wife, which means learning from his past is more difficult if he listens to it. The latter is the detective's "connection" to the city and makes him able to feel things in the winds, guessing things out of thin air because "the wind said so". At high levels, Shivers allows to directly speak to La Revacholière, the soul of Revachol.
• Demon Prince Laharl from Disgaea is the heir to the throne of Netherworld, and he got some strange ideas as to what a King should do: If money is needed, it’s time to loot some noble’s mansion. Assassin love angels are potential recruits. Laughing evilly on a regular basis is a requirement. Ideal Overlord tasks are making it rain pepper so that the humans will sneeze their nostrils out or deprive children of their sleep by giving them addictive video games. Heroes should not just be defeated; enslavement is the way to go. But he is very passionate and dutiful about the job, not to mention extremely powerful, so he gets it and does a good job all things considered. His vassel Etna has not dethroned him...yet.
  • Laharl's entire command structure. Etna is a Jerkass and is openly contemptuous of his authority, Flonne is obsessed with LOVE and TV, Sicily literally tried to overthrow him, but all of them are reliable-ish, skilled, and — although he'd eat hot coals rather than admit it — his friends, so he hauls them around with him anyway.
• Snarky!Hawke in Dragon Age II can never pass up the opportunity for a joke, even in some particularly inappropriate situations. Much of the time, half of the stuff that comes out of his/her mouth is completely insane and said to no one in particular. Yet, s/he frequently uses this as a disarming tactic to put his/her enemies into a false sense of security and, of the three different possible personalities, often comes across as the most intelligent of them because of it.
  • Merrill is another example; she's a ditz girl who gets ridiculously lost whenever she goes out into the city on her own and tends to get sidetracked by daydreaming about things like having a baby griffon as a pet (ignoring the fact that griffons are believed to have gone extinct centuries ago). She's also a terrifyingly powerful Black Magician Girl.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition:
  • Frederic, Professor of Draconology. As noted in his Codex entry, he has trouble remembering his current state of dress, what day it is or where he left his quill and ink, but he knows everything there is to know about dragons.
  • Out of your companions, Sera is notably childish and immature. Her idea of a relaxing time involves throwing cookies at the inquisition soldiers, and when you first meet her she stole some guard's pants. However, she is still a very skilled archer who has some connections to the servants of nobles and is a part of a group which many nobles know and hate, yet she has remained uncaught in spite of her brashness.
• The Dungeon Master noble in Dwarf Fortress is a talented animal trainer and metalsmith who permits your fortress to train a variety of creatures you usually can't. He or she tends to also wander around the fortress, naked except for a cloak, shoes, and gloves.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The series has the Demiprinces, a form of lesser Daedra born from the union of a Daedra and a mortal. Their dual nature gives them an odd perception of the world and time itself. In addition to their eccentricities, Demiprinces have an extremely difficult time maintaining knowledge which lies outside their spheres of influence. However, they are the undisputed masters of whatever lies within their spheres.
  • In the backstory, Reman Cyrodiil, founder of the Second Tamriellic Empire, was one. Despite his various psychoses and propensities toward violence and decadence, Reman was a very effective leader. Coronated as a child, he proved to be something of a Child Prodigy which, along with his status as The Chosen One (having been born with the long lost Amulet of Kings in hand), he quickly reunited the split halves of Cyrodiil (Colovia and Nibenay) and then the other kingdoms of Men (High Rock and Skyrim). Later, he defeated the Akaviri invaders and absorbed the survivors, who swore fealty to him as a Dragonborn, into his fledgling proto-empire. Though Imperial dogma has mostly covered up or whitewashed his negative traits, he is still (justifiably) remembered as one of the greatest rulers in Cyrodiilic history.
• Elite Beat Agents. Despite their odd looks, they managed to stop an alien invasion, prevent the Zombie Apocalypse, rescue a lost puppy, and fight off a virus.
• The Five Oddballs of Ensemble Stars!, who are each a Cloud Cuckoo Lander in their own unique way, but who are also all acknowledged as some of the strongest and most successful idols in the school. A few other students would also qualify, such as Souma, who frequently forgets he isn't actually an old-school Samurai, but who is such a talented idol he was able to perform a solo live in one story, which only the extremely capable and experienced Madara had ever pulled off at that point. However, the War is something of a deconstruction: both their unpredictability and their talent made them dangerous to anyone who wanted power, but both also made it easy for them to turn the general public against them, making them seem like selfish people who lived in their own world and stepped all over ordinary hard-working people.
  • Also see Leo, an eccentric with rather unstable emotions who is tolerated because he is an extremely talented composer. He, however, hates this, as he does not do well with pressure and feels like his life isn't his own because of all this.
• Most of the henchmen you recruit in the Evil Genius series tend to start at "kooky" and go very strange places from there, and usually axe-related places at that, but they also bring skills that utterly humiliate the minions you start out surrounded by. They are the most reliable asset a player can have bar none, helped by being under the player's direct control in a game where you can only issue orders to the minions by applying tags to targets.
• Much like its sister series of The Elder Scrolls, the Fallout universe tosses so many oddball characters at the audience that it could fill a Vault 10 times. Whether from the allies you add to your party, to the NPC's and Vendors you sell your loot from. Hell's bones, you can role-play your character into being a combat drug-addicted crossdresser while wiping out a Raider war-band in under 3 minutes!
• Many of your servants in Fate/Grand Order have some questionable personality traits. Such as being constantly hot-tempered, ill-mannered, pervy, crazily obsessive, or just downright insane. But when it comes to the time for them to work, they are certainly the best at what they do.
• Both Feel the Magic games are about a "Super Performance Group" known as the Rub Rabbits^note The sequel is even named after them, a group of men in literal bunny ears who run around conducting bizarre and often dangerous performances, often with the goal of helping someone impress a girl. Whether its members hold other jobs or get paid for this "service" is unclear.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Cloud in Final Fantasy VII is a weird and unpleasant person with a cool-guy-yet-jerk persona, suspiciously spotty memories and a tendency to have head-grabbing freakout episodes at strange times. He's so good at being a leader that everyone trusts him anyway, and push him to carry on even when he flat out tells them that if he does he'll end up going crazy. Even after he's revealed to have been a delusional liar who never really had any of his real credentials, the party is eager to have him back as a leader and overlook it when he starts threatening to dognap Shinra dogs or having claustrophobic panic attacks in submarines.
  • The brilliant engineer Dr. Cid from Final Fantasy XII fits this trope well—the Draklor Laboratory and the Archadian Empire as a whole manage to ignore his conversations with a not-so imaginary friend due to his skill at manufacturing airships and weapons with nethicite. Balthier, however, was not quite so tolerant.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • Godbert Manderville is a highly eccentric old man who dresses in a tuxedo with short-shorts (if even that). He is also the best goldsmith in all of Eorzea, using his considerable skills to amass a fortune that earned him a seat in Ul'dah's Syndicate and allowed him to open a highly successful entertainment establishment.
    • Players can make their characters a bunny ears adventurer by wearing ridiculous outfits and picking all the silly/nonsensical dialogue replies to make their character look weird as hell, yet still highly respected for being very good at fighting the empire and slaying primals like it was a normal Tuesday.
    • Supplementary material added in the Shadowbringers expansion reveal that Azem, the player character's past self, also had a huge sense of justice and desire to help those in need while also having strange quirks, such as saving an island from being destroyed by a volcano instead of watching it as instructed just because they found the island's grapes delicious and didn't want to lose them. Endwalker goes into this more when you're sent back in time to Elpis, before the World Sundering and contemporary with your previous incarnation, and it reaches the point that claiming to be connected to this person is taken as a one-size-fits-all explanation for everything weird about you.
  • King Edgar from Final Fantasy VI is pretty a weird guy who'll hit on any woman he sees. Despite this, he's the game's resident Gadgeteer Genius and a good ruler to boot.
• Mike Haggar from the Final Fight series, a professional wrestler turned mayor who deals with Metro City's gang problem by kicking all their asses without police assistance.
• Canas of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is a scholar who joins your army because he heard that it was going to the Dread Isle and has been trying to get there for research purposes, married his wife to learn more about magic, and reads non-spellcasting books on the battlefield. He's also the only playable character who can use dark magic, barring another character that only shows up for the final chapter, and is thus able to use the Luna tome, which ignores resistance and makes chumps out of late-game magic-wielding bosses that are otherwise pains to deal with.
• Empress Sanaki of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn is a Bunny Ears Royal. In Path of Radiance, most of her early interactions with the protagonists involve her jerking them around and forcing them to learn for themselves what's going on instead of just telling them what's up simply because she was bored. Three years later in the sequel, we see her commandeering the King of Kilvas to carry her onto the battlefield because she couldn't bear not knowing what was going on, then later learns that he's bound by a blood pact to the Begnion Senate — and that she can essentially free him from their control since her orders carry more weight than theirs do. And of course, when one of her most trusted aides turns out to be, well, not exactly evil but still responsible for all of the bad stuff that happened, she decides that his punishment is to be drowned in rancid butter.
• Since Ghost Trick has the same developer as the Ace Attorney games, it's expected that it also has a few bunny ears. Inspector Cabanela stands out as a special investigator with a spotless record and intense ambition to climb his way to the top. He also dances everywhere he goes, including up and down the stairs.
• Many of your crew members in Granblue Fantasy qualifies as well. As you get along with them in fate episodes and over the course of events and side plots, you begin to see more and more of the eccentric tendencies of your crew. From primal beasts to archangels, you can often find a quirky and unexpected side of the characters. With that said, when properly teamed and equipped, your crew might just be the most powerful force to be reckoned with in the sky.
• Merlin of Guenevere frequently zones out at important events (including a state wedding he's one of the officiants for) and says and does seemingly nonsensical things (like handing the Queen of Britain a carrot in the middle of a diplomatic reception), but he's perhaps the most talented and versatile magic users in the game.
• Infinite Space has a few, but Lord Roth and Thomas Veil stand out the most. Lord Roth is a rather childish man who enjoys his Chick Magnet status a little too much (and puts his aide, Nele, into a lot of troubles because of his quirks), yet he is one of Regeinland's top commanders. Meanwhile, Thomas is an agent of Federation Security Network directed by Brad Lennox and a good crew member for your navigational post, who happens to be a fan of young Idol Singers, almost to the point of being a creep.
• The majority of ship girls in KanColle have major quirks that ranges from random bursts of craziness to being almost constantly ditzy, yet they are all exceptionally good at doing their jobs as long as the admiral is capable. The most notable examples being the crazily energetic Kongo sisters and Shimakaze the Cloud Cuckoolander.
• Xanadu from The King of Fighters XIV is an absolute loon who speaks in vaguely deep-sounding but ultimately meaningless nonsense, and his fighting style is one of the most deranged in the series. However, his fellow inmates have been won over by his bizarre charisma, considering him the king of the underworld as well as such a superior intellectual that his words are simply too advanced for normal people to understand. He's also apparently well-known enough in the criminal underworld for Oswald to recognize him. And despite the utter madness that is his fighting style, he's inhumanly strong enough to make it work.
• It is strongly implied that a light-side Knights of the Old Republic or Knights of the Old Republic 2 PC tolerates HK-47's Ax-Crazy discourse because he is the only thing that can translate the Tusken tongue and a rather capable warrior.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel:
  • Sara Valestein is nothing more than the hero's teacher who has no problems drinking off the clock, being messy with her room, and passes work to her students while she just lazes around. She also happens to be one hell of a bracer and is a famous A-ranked bracer called "Purple Lightning".
  • Mint is extremely clumsy, but also a talented engineer who remains steadily employed at Thors Military Academy's engineering department.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has the Yiga Clan, a group of Sheikah who felt betrayed by Hyrule thousands of years ago and broke off to worship Ganon. They are complete and utter buffoons who are so obsessed with Mighty Bananas it serves as a distraction while infiltrating their hideout, and led by a pot bellied immature Manchild who spends his days napping. That said, the reason you need to infiltrate their hideout is they will kill you in one hit if they spot you, and even when encountered one-on-one in Kakariko Village they are capable fighters who can go toe-to-toe with Link and effortlessly swing a large blade that Link struggles to wield. Even their lower-ranked scouts will deliver a pretty solid beatdown and are more dangerous than pretty much anything weaker than a Lynel. They're also shown to be a serious threat to the Gerudo, able to effortlessly infiltrate their town to steal their Thunder Helm and kill or capture any Gerudo's who even get close to their hideout, and are even able to infiltrate and threaten The Sheikah themselves. Furthermore, the sequel shows they have been able to successfully inhabit The Depths and managed to take over many locations of Hyrule, including even the Shrine of Resurrection.
• Dekar in the Lufia series hails himself as the world's strongest warrior, and proves an excellent soldier as well as a faithful protector and advisor to Bound Kingdom's prince. He's also a shameless flirt and immensely stupid, to the point where he's unable to remember how to leave a room he had just entered. He'd be Too Dumb to Live if he wasn't every bit as good a fighter as he says he is.
• MapleStory:
  • Checky, the Resistance Job Instructor for the Mechanic path, is a guy in a mascot costume as his civilian self. As one of the leaders of the Resistance, however, he continues to wear the costume head. All the time. Even while sleeping, or piloting a Mini-Mecha tank against a global organization trying to resurrect the Black Mage. He also wears a second costume, under his 'civilian' costume.
  • Hersha, the Cygnus Knights' correspondent in Ellinia, is described as a very good informant, who is also paranoid about everything. You can undertake a quest from him where he demands that you attack local monkeys and confiscate their bananas, because he's convinced they're bombs. He does, however, prove to be a reliable, thorough researcher in the Cygnus Knights' questline.
• "Ass" in Ambassador Donnel Udina in Mass Effect is an abrasive Hate Sink and Obstructive Bureaucrat, but he's mentioned at several points to be very good at what he does which is best shown in the beginning of the first game when he browbeats the Council over Saren. In the Genesis comic, Shepard himself admits that his ruthless ambition allows him to easily navigate political landmines. Although, if chosen as humanity's Councillor he navigates said landmines by throwing Shepard under the bus.
• In Mass Effect 2, this describes your entire crew with the exception of Jacob.
  • Thane seems overly contemplative for an assassin, but we learn that he has been recently diagnosed with a terminal disease, Miranda is pretty normal for a member of a shady organization aside from the Designer Baby Blues, Samara is a Scary Dogmatic Blue Skinned Space Babe, Grunt is a Designer Baby Proud Warrior Race Guy, and Garrus is a level-minded realist (quite possibly the most level-headed of all characters despite some issues in his past, and one of the only ones who literally never loses his cool). This leaves Jack and Mordin. The latter however takes this trope to its full extent.
  • Jack is an uber-powerful biotic who subjects anyone she meets either to a biotic blast or a Cluster F-Bomb. She mellows out as the story plays out and, by Mass Effect 3, is slightly more level-headed and even makes a great effort to avoid swearing (unless you happen to be Joker, also an example of this trope). Mordin is a brilliant scientist with a Motor Mouth and love for "Gilbert and Sullivan". By the third game, he's close to 40 (making him an old man by salarian standards) and thinks of retiring to a house on a beach. When Shepard points out that he'd get bored collecting seashells all day, Mordin points out that he'll run tests on the seashells. He then goes out with a bang while singing.
  • Jeff "Joker" Moreau, as his nickname implies, is constantly cracking jokes and is rarely serious about anything. He also has brittle bone disease, making him physically unfit for military duty, technically speaking. He is also the best frigate pilot in the Systems Alliance, and no one who has seen him in action is going to dispute that claim.
  • Mass Effect 3 gives us Javik, who is a rude, selfish, arrogant tool who is profoundly bigoted against synthetics and describes everyone around him as "primitives". He's also the last Prothean, has keen awareness of Reaper strategy, and is a potent biotic on top of that. The Citadel DLC also adds Brooks, who is largely clueless about action away from her desk, names a security program after her cat, gets really giddy after a medi-gel overdose, and is still the only person with the right blend of tech skills and low-tech equipment to be able to infiltrate Elijah Khan's casino...until it turns out that she's been putting on an act all along, and is in fact a very competent villain who's been playing you the whole time.
• Mass Effect: Andromeda:
  • Dr. Suvi Anwar, who forgets that you probably shouldn't apply the lick test to alien rocks in another galaxy, then casually notes the effects caught off doing so to herself (inflammation and swelling). She's also good enough that Cerberus are implied to have head-hunted her for Project: Lazarus... and smart enough to turn them down.
  • Vorn, a krogan botanist. He's about as non-krogan as it's possible to be, preferring to spend his time gathering flowers for his girlfriend, and alarmingly for a krogan has no survival skills whatsoever. That said, he is a damn good botanist, and for krogan looking to make a new world (preferably without carnivorous plants this time) that's an incredibly important thing to be.
• Metal Gear:
  • The Mission Control for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater contains an overtalkative genius physician who chatters endlessly about her favourite B-movies, a James Bond fanboy Major with an obsession with his own Britishness and a thing for the paranormal, and a brilliant technician who makes useless objects because they 'look cool' and considers a human catapult a valid weapons development project (and harbours a complex about being the only normal person there). In Portable Ops, they start a UFO club. But they are frighteningly competent at throwing the entire world into a long and bitter war.
  • Hal Emmerich is both a brilliant engineer capable of designing a functional bipedal tank and enough of an Otaku to program the weapon's movements based on Street Fighter. In Metal Gear Solid he's so essential to making Metal Gear REX actually function that the Quirky Miniboss Squad have to keep him alive and programming even after disposing of the rest of the development team, and despite his oddness it takes an electrified floor, an entire hallway flooded with poisonous gas, and gun-mounted cameras to keep him in his lab. He comes and goes as he pleases, anyways.
  • Ocelot is a ridiculously superb marksman and the series' resident Magnificent Bastard who is also unhealthily obsessed with his revolvers and Big Boss.
  • Even Snake himself, a formidable warrior by anyone's assessment, has his tendency for meaningless philosophical ramblings and a rather disturbing relationship with The Box(TM). It's also implied he loves trashy action movies and women's figure skating, he's a fan of dog-sledding, and one of the Japanese-only supplemental material guides revealed that his favourite food is blueberries.
  • Really any of the boss characters count. One would assume a person's penchant for dressing in bondage and a gas mask, engaging enemies on rollerblades, or being covered in bees would make it rather difficult to hold your position in a Special Forces unit unless you were just that damned good at your job.
• Jody Crawford of Metal Wolf Chaos enjoys watching soldiers getting slaughtered by her boss's Humongous Mecha a little too much, and apparently spends her spare time wondering about how various buildings would look if they were destroyed, and somehow managed to become secretary to the President of the United States. Although considering what President Michael Wilson gets up to, Jodie probably looks like an icon of sanity by comparison.
• All the Goddess CPUs in the Neptunia series. Neptune is The Slacker par excellence, Noire is highly efficient but socially clumsy and neurotic, Blanc enjoys writing trashy fiction and has a staggering temper, and Vert is an online gaming addict and a Yaoi Fangirl. Their sisters? Nepgear is more work-oriented but easily flustered and gets distracted by machines, Uni is a military otaku with an inferiority complex next to her sister, and Rom and Ram are children. It's joked the nations could do a better job taking care of themselves... and in Megadimension Neptunia VII, we see that happen. The world falls apart, due to Gold Third's inept leadership. C-Sha tried to gently guide Lowee from the shadows, but instead let a corrupt man seize power an institutionalize a dystopian license system to quash dissent and stop social mobility. K-Sha outright ran away from ruling Lastation and allowed a corrupt mercenary group to seize power and take the nation on the warpath. S-Sha is holding Leanbox together only because she needs its resources to meet her personal goals and her short-sighted policies are causing looming problems. Only Planeptune continues more or less the same, because Histoire still has authority and B-Sha is a Surprisingly Similar Substitute to Neptune, although the former is afraid of monsters. As eclectic as they are, the Console Patron Units hold power by more virtue than simply being Physical Gods.
• In The New Order Last Days Of Europe, an Alternate-History Nazi Victory mod for Hearts of Iron IV, Russian warlord Nikolay Krylov (Rurik II), claims to be the second coming of Rurik, the semi-legendary founder of Russia, and models his domain in Kemerovo after Kievan Rus'. Despite his numerous quirks, he is still a competent military commander with a long history of service to the Soviet Union and the Central Siberian Republic and also a fair ruler who knows how to pick the right sort of people for a job.
• A good deal of the commanders in the Nintendo Wars series. A spectacular example is Javier, who wears plate armour all the time in a modern WWI to WWII-styled setting and acts like Don Quixote, and is a Boisterous Bruiser to awesome effect. For the record, his specialty is using the Communication Towers to boost his units' defense to ridiculous heights; useless when no Com Towers are on a map, outright broken and usually banned from competitive play when a map has Com Towers.
• Amaterasu from Ōkami isn't really in touch with events most of the time, and acts more like a dog than a goddess. Usually she's in the habit of taking naps or trying to play fetch with ancient and priceless artifacts during long conversation. That said, she's a highly capable fighter, and her use of brush techniques demonstrates both a quick sense of thinking and a good amount of cleverness; when seeing her on her A-game, it's hard to argue that her position at the top of the gods' hierarchy is undeserved.
• In the world of Overwatch several characters dress in costumes simply impractical or just silly for their job, but are allowed to keep them simply by virtue of being so god damn good at what they do. After all, if Cassidy's one of the fastest guns in the West, does it matter if he dresses like a cowboy? Or if Reinhardt wants to dress in Power Armor with a rocket hammer, pretending to be a crusader and generally Leroy Jenkinsing all over the place, who's going to stop the 8 foot tall, 6 foot wide, musclebound German? And does it really matter if Widowmaker wears shiny purple spandex if she can hit a target at impossible range and see through walls?
• Andreas Maler, the main protagonist of Pentiment, can be played as an Eccentric Artist, but even without deliberately playing it up, Andreas's vivid lucid dreams and the fact that his inner thoughts are all portrayed by famous theological, literary and historical characters means he's not entirely normal. Despite this, he is still a smart, artistically talented man who is capable of solving the murders in Tassing.
• Persona:
  • All the teachers of Persona 3 that the protagonist has as his personal teachers seem to be this. There's Ms. Isako Toriumi, the homeroom teacher with an almost "L"-like addiction to sweets (especially cake) and to playing MMORPGs as a l33t-speaking alter ego, in which guise she grants the Hermit social link and even forms a crush on the player. There's Mr. Edogawa, the school nurse with his over-the-top obsession with mysticism that causes him to insist on making the player drink useless potions for treating ailments and who derails any class he subs for by giving lectures on magic. There's Mr. Edo, the history teacher who always wears his Sengoku-era samurai helmet and geeks out about samurai all the time — like constantly complaining about having to teach history prior to the Sengoku-era, because there's no samurai to talk about. And then there's Ms. Miyahara, the math teacher who spends most of the class just gushing about the aesthetic beauty of numbers. They're all shown as very knowledgeable, and they're all various shades of Cloudcuckoolander.
  • Yasogami High in Persona 4 has only two kooky teachers, and they're pretty tame compared to the ones from the previous game. Mr. Moroi, a literature teacher who likes to teach with a little hand puppet of himself, and Ms. Sofue, the history teacher who always wears an Egyptian pharaoh's headdress and carries a ceremonial crook. She's actually the sister of Mr. Edo from Gekkoukan High School above, though unlike him she has a love of history in general instead of being fixated on one era, and so she carries out her lessons with general enthusiasm.
  • Persona 5 brings us Tae Takemi, who runs a back alley clinic in Tokyo, dresses like a goth, and has a very morbid sense of humor. In spite of these idiosyncrasies, she is actually one of the most brilliant doctors in the country, and as you forge a bond with her, she'll provide you access to her own homemade medicines, all of which are very beneficial during your ventures into the Metaverse.
• Mimi Meers in Pocket Stables technically wear bunny ears. She also starts off with very well balanced and decent stats.
• A surprising number of human characters in Pokémon fall into this. If you're a highly-skilled Trainer and treat Pokémon with kindness, people are going to look up to you and respect you for it. This means that even some rather extreme eccentrics are able to reach respected positions as Gym Leaders, Pokémon Professors, Trial Captains, Elite Four and even Champions.
• Psychonauts gives us Milla, Sasha, and Ford. Milla appears to be mentally stuck in the 1960s, Sasha is a borderline emotionless stoic with an irrational hatred for tacky lamps and Ford is... well, special. Despite this, they form a crack team of psychic spies unparalleled by all.
  • Really, all the kids at the camp are this trope in training. They're all (presumably) going to grow up to be Psychonauts, and there's not a normal one among the entire bunch.
  • There's also a subversion or inversion of Crazy Is Cool going on here as well, as the game is set on an Indian Burial Ground stated to mentally destabilize everybody in its vicinity. The sufficiently curious will discover that all of the kids (including the protagonist) have serious problems (many aren't far from homicidal or suicidal behavior), and that the adults may even have accumulated more (over their longer lives). Their competence, power, and control are the reason why they're Bunny Ears Lawyers: the available alternatives are far worse. As demonstrated by the game's plot.
• Lemres from Puyo Puyo is most well-known for having an addiction to sweets and often giving out candies to other characters. That certainly seems bonkers, but Lemres also happens to be a famous, competent, and powerful warlock who is popular enough to have appeared in magazines.
• The doctors in Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc. They're recommended as exceptionally good doctors, and are shown to be at least reasonably competant, but their behaviour is decidedly odd, and their methods even more so.
• Resident Evil: the series is so weird that most people who're not too crazy to be competent count as this to some degree.
  • The STARS team were definitely... unconventional in general, with their Non-Uniform Uniform and general casual behaviour towards each other. Chris is noted to frequently disobey orders but "it always leads to better results so he hasn't faced any serious penalties yet". While in later games he's much more serious and responsible (while still having Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right! tendencies), it's implied that while he was at STARS he had a tendency to mess around, it's outright stated that "Chris, Joseph and Forest usually get into some kind of trouble when they hang out together", and he brings his electric guitar to work. He's also the best marksman at the RPD. Rebecca is 18-years-old and seems naive and harmless but is a genius who already has a degree. Barry is a loud, hammy Boisterous Bruiser (made worse — or better? — by his narmy and badly translated dialogue in the original game) but a weapons expert. As for Wesker... well, see below.
  • It might not be immediately noticeable because he's the Big Bad of most of the series, but try and imagine what it would be like actually working with Wesker. By his own admission in one of his reports, he's such Insufferable Genius (especially when younger: he apparently learned to tone that down enough when necessary to manipulate people and get the STARS team to trust him), he had a PhD by the age of 17. While at STARS, he had a reputation for being able to solve cases no-one else could, but also for being very secretive about his past, and supplementary materials state he was known to smile when in dangerous situations. In the first game you can find him shooting bees, and he also describes the Tyrant as "beautiful" and thinks fighting an Ivan "should be intriguing". Let's not forget the famous Sunglasses at Night that he always wears. Photos from his time at Arklay also show a certain disregard for the dress code◊ (the man on the far left is even side-eyeing him).
    • After getting superpowers he becomes hammier and weirder, mostly to show off and taunt his opponents: he'll pause to slick back his hair or answer phone calls in the middle of a fight, T-poses and spins around after beating Chris up in Code Veronica, throws his coat away in Siberia just to look dramatic, and in Umbrella Chronicles the game at one point switches from first to third person for him to do a Pistol Pose. In Resident Evil 5, he throws his sunglasses at Chris to distract him during a fight. It works. He also makes puns such as "Your Umbrella has folded", "your future hinges upon this fight!" (while kicking Chris through a door), or in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 "zombies to truly... marvel". Not to mention that in Resident Evil 5 he spends the entire game wearing tight black leather with a collar like he's in The Matrix. Of course, by 5 he's gone way past this trope and into full-on crazy supervillainy (lampshaded by the heroes), trying to take over the world, kill 6 billion people and become a god... and he nearly succeeds.
• Because of how diverse the cast is in Reverse: 1999, oftentimes grabbed from whoever could be saved from the catastrophic Storm, there are no shortage of talented but eccentric individuals.
  • Regulus is a Money Dumb Buccaneer Broadcaster whose main goal in life is to broadcast her rock music to London, regardless of what the law says, and she also constantly gets up to other selfish mischief like property theft, illegal street races, and evading arrest. She is also a brodcasting equipment and general technology wizard, capable of hijacking radio waves all throughout London, hacking into security systems, and understanding foreign technology like the magical teleportation floppy disks the St. Pavlov Foundation uses. The last is especially prominent as she only had her first example in a few minutes yet was able to both decipher its function AND hijack it for her purposes.
  • An-an Lee is a modern-day Hong Kong exorcist, combining traditional Chinese spirit techniques and modern technology into new, better ways to give the restless dead and their living victims peace, alongisde new benefits like harnessing the energy of spirit reincarnation as an alternative power source for batteries, boiling water, and roasting meat. She is also the "Honest John" of her Honest John's Dealership, constantly trying to sell her exorcising products and services at "reasonable" prices for potentially made up hauntings, hijacking a magazine interview about her to try and turn it into an unlicensed commercial, and generally giving off the aura of a desperate hack despite the legitimacy of her skill and business.
• Saints Row: The Third:
  • The Mayor of Steelport is often stated to be the only person capable of keeping a city of rampant gang violence, homicidal maniacs running wild and hosting game shows, and general insanity functioning with any kind of stability or sanity. He is also Burt Reynolds, and still loves going out and solving violent disputes personally.
  • Kinzie Kensington is a paranoid conspiracy theorist whose sexual proclivities frighten even the Boss. She is also a brilliant hacker who can give Matt Miller, leader of a gang of cybercriminals known as the Deckers, a run for his money.
  • Miller himself is no slouch when it comes to hacking. He's also a goth and a massive Nyte Blayde fanboy.
  • The Boss falls into this a lot, but never more so than in Saints Row IV. Whether it's singing along to the radio on the way to a fight, pretending to shoot things with a sniper rifle while on lookout duty, installing stripper poles in the renamed White Crib, proclaiming yourself "the patron saint of America" (even if the accent you use is French or Cockney), blowing up statues of the bad guy just out of spite, doing a striptease routine at the most ridiculous possible moment or bestowing all rights to the Nyte Blayde franchise to a teammate after fighting through their dubious-quality virtual fanfiction, you get up to some fairly ridiculous stuff, but at the same time you prevent nuclear disaster by climbing up a missile in flight, parlay that into becoming the President of the United States, and then bring an interstellar empire to its knees through an unequalled gift for killing stuff.
• The leading lady of Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, Gemini Sunrise, is a southern belle who is absolutely enamored with Japanese culture and has a tendency to get lost in her own head. She's also a highly-skilled swordswoman and one of the most talented members of the New York Combat Revue.
• The Secret World has the leader of the ultra-capitalist Illuminati, The Pyramidion. He speaks in a calm, evenly-paced tone, and clearly knows everything worth knowing. He just has this peculiar habit of peppering his dialogue with odd Public Announcements and context-relevant memes...
• You can make one of these in The Sims by giving a character the Childlike and/or Insane Trait and either combining it with the Genius Trait or just advancing their career, knowledge and skills through hard work. You can then have a character come home from their job as CEO of a multinational company and play with children's toys or yell at thin air.
• Professor Doctor from The Stretchers is a genius inventor and tinkerer responsible not only for the De-Dizzler 3000 which cures people of dizziness but also for the various upgrades the ambulance obtains throughout the game. He's also incredibly casual, both in dress code and demeanor, and he has a rather dim view of email.
• Super Robot Wars is essentially an entire cast of this trope in every game. The only OG character who doesn't have shades of this is Russel Bagman, who's easily the most "Normal" member of the team. Ironically, this makes him stand out to many fans. The entire rest of the team is varying flavors of bonkers, but also so good at saving the world from all manner of threats that even accidentally killing the President of Earth only gets them slapped with an excuse for a Bag of Spilling between games.^note There are extenuating circumstances, but still, that's some impressive job security.
• Emperor Peony IX of Malkuth in Tales of the Abyss is by far the most competent and effective monarch in the story, not to mention about the only person who can get the better of Jade in a conversation. He also keeps his five pet pigs loose in his bedroom, and likes forcing the main characters into different outfits so much that he's responsible for no less than nineteen costume titles.^note Six swimsuits, six final battle outfits, seven Power Rangers expy cosplays, and Jade's Battle Master costume, minus one because the swimsuit he picked for Tear was apparently so embarrassing she refused to wear it.
• Raven from Tales of Vesperia. A "fishy old man" who acts lazy, flirts with the ladies, and apparently likes sleeping on the beds in jail, finding them comfortable. Not only is he a right hand man of Don Whitehouse, a super competent warrior and commander, but he's also Captain Schwann, a highly respected and powerful knight captain in the Imperial Knights.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • There's the sometimes friendly, sometimes cold sniper that keeps his urine in jars, the Husky Russkie that talks to his guns, the one-eyed, alcoholic Demoman who swigs whisky while tossing bombs, the Scout whose big ego makes one wonder how he gets anything done on a team, the insane overly patriotic Soldier who likes to play drill sergeant to his collection of severed heads and discuss the war with cardboard cutouts (Though he never actually joined the army, instead going on a killing spree in Germany after the war had ended), a textbook Mad Scientist, and The Unintelligible Pyro that never removes his/her full-body flame-retardant suit. However, they're very good at what they do and must be well worth their salaries. The Engineer and the Spy are the only ones who seem entirely focused on their job.
  • The Demoman even lampshades it in his Meet The video, pointing out that as someone who constantly works with explosives, the fact he hasn't blown himself up yet attests to his skill.
  • As first shown in "Meet the Pyro", the Pyro is a BEL among BELs. They're not at all in touch with the real world, which they imagine to be a Sugar Bowl, even when causing death and destruction. When they're burning things, they're spreading bubbles, flowers, and magic. When they split an enemy's head open with an axe, they're feeding them a lollipop; when using their flare gun, they're blowing bubbles. They also see their enemies as chubby cherubs, wings and all, which prompts their "kindness". You also get a promotional "Pyro's goggles" that let you see the world as they do. Everybody is laughing even as they get shot, blood is replaced with random items such as gears or balloons, and fire with sparkly rainbows and happiness. To top it all off, you don't get "dominated" and get "revenge", they "become best friends" and "break up". However, as any player will tell you, if you are close to them, expect to be dead soon. Very, very soon.
• The World Ends with You gives us Sho Minamimoto. A Mad Mathematician, who always speaks in mathematical terms, makes junk heaps he calls 'art', and is very egotistical. However, he's one of the youngest Reaper Officers to become a Game Master, and excels in all areas of leadership — except cooperation. He's also one of the toughest buggers to beat in the game. The Secret Reports reveal that he was working with a Fallen Angel, who picked him precisely because of this — since everything Sho does is unusual, no unusual behavior prompted by the Fallen Angel would be worth investigating further.
• Undertale: In a meta-example, Played With in the Genocide route. By some standards, the route's limitations are pretty strict; In order to progress with the route, you have to exhaust the population of each area's random encounters before killing the boss and have to kill every unique encounter. However, the First Human won't fail you for a variety of otherwise seemingly-obvious failstates; For example, sparing lesser enemies individually doesn't matter, so long as they aren't uniques (like Snowdrake) and the kill quota for the area still is fulfilled. In addition, they won't judge you for never using anything other than your starting equipment or so much as comment on you utilizing inane techniques to get encounters faster, like holding the up and down arrow keys at the same time to cause the protagonist to enter what seems like a siezure. You are this to them; They're willing to excuse your confusing behavior due to your efficiency at slaughtering every Monster you can get your dusty hands on.
• Yakuza: Goro Majima is to all appearances an Ax-Crazy nutter with the impulse control of a sugar-high toddler and a tendency to obsess over strange and largely irrelevant things. However, this is pretty much all appearance. Beneath the surface lies an extremely dangerous man, capable of dismantling lesser men by the dozen and made all the more dangerous by his impulse-driven and mercurial nature. Beneath that lies a savvy and perceptive businessman who stayed in the top echelons of the Tojo clan for three decades, and ran several highly profitable legitimate businesses on the side.

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