Cloudcuckoolander / Video Games

I'M IN SPAAACE!!!

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Cloudcuckoolanders in Video Games.

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• The AI behind AI Dungeon 2 can be quite loony with its logic and directions for the story. Things can start off fairly simple and, before you know it, your character is somehow facing off against Cthulhu on the Moon with a chain laser sword. The Verge personally describes it as "running on dream logic".
• Steven Heck from Alpha Protocol fits this well. He nearly poisons his associate with dry-cleaning solution because he can't remember where his keys are, asks a security guard about TV cooking shows before killing him, writes the single longest rambling sentence in existence in an e-mail, builds a mini-gun on a subway car "just because it might be useful later", and thinks the protagonist's middle name is "Finnegan", because a minotaur told him this when he got stoned. Although he did doubt the logic of the minotaur's argument.
• Some of the villagers in the Animal Crossing games tend to be like this — particularly the villagers with the "lazy" personalities. For example, the following conversation between two villagers in City Folk:
  Jeremiah: ... growwwlll... (Jeremiah's Catchphrase at the time)
  Lobo: Oh no.
  Jeremiah: I wonder... would a crowbar taste better if you soak it in soy milk first?
  Lobo: ARGH!

  And speaking of Lobo, he and others of his personality sometimes compare looking at a model of a room to looking into someone's home through the window. Lazy-type males still hold the crown, though, with Big Top once deciding that a snail's classification was "food" (on the basis that snails were delicious). In context, he was asked what it was if it wasn't an insect, and came up with that response.

• Artix Entertainment:
  • Cysero from many of the company's line of games (AdventureQuest, DragonFable...). While very coherent and attentive to a problem at hand, he often slips into Cloudcuckooland, which inevitably means that something weird is going to happen or is already in the works when he gets involved. Naturally for a guy who once used a black hole generator to stretch spaghetti and has a wizard's tower infested with Dirty Laundry Golems, the Alice in Wonderland parody in one game casts him as the Mad Hatter. He also has nitroglycerin sponges. Which is not as crazy as it sounds, since it's how you make dynamite! The Staff member the character is based on can be as big a Cloudcuckoolander at times, though whether or not this is his real personality or him acting like his in-game counterpart is unknown. As an example, at one con the team went to, he gave socks out to random fans and wore the bathrobe from Artix's hotel room to their panel.
  • Korin, from Mechquest, never seems to understand what's going on, he wears a paper bag over his head at all times, and although completely omnipotent, he doesn't really want to do anything at all to help save the world. Luckily, he isn't evil, so you don't have to worry about him going against you.

• Baldur's Gate:
  • The legendarily bizarre ranger Minsc and his "Miniature Giant Space Hamster" Boo.
  • Edwin is seemingly Minsc's Evil Counterpart, a self-important wizard who has a strange obsession for calling everyone monkeys and constantly talks to himself in such a way that everyone hears him — and is shocked that people can do that. Interestingly, these two hate each others' guts. Though that has less to do with their different varieties of Cloud Cuckoo-ness and more to do with Edwin being a Red Wizard of Thay and Minsc being a warrior of Rashemen — the Red Wizards are seen as monsters in Rashemen and most of them, including Edwin, live up to that reputation. Edwin won't stop mocking him about the death of his witch in the second game.
• Baldur's Gate II:
  • Jan Jansen has a long, rambling, nonsensical story involving either him or one of his many, many relatives for every situation. Some of his lines border on Painting the Medium (like talking about how ever since he was a kid, everyone he saw would glow bright red at night, which is how the game depicts Infravision for the player). The only situation he doesn't have a story for is when the party is sent to Hell.
  • The Big Bad at some point seems to invoke this trope with a bit of Godzilla Threshold when you release crazy (and dangerous) spellcasters from the asylum to confront him:
  What is this? You have released all of my tests subjects? How wonderfully mad of you. I did not expect this in the least, so dangerously risk it is.
• Double H from Beyond Good & Evil is a former military officer who constantly quotes from the military handbook and doesn't seem all that right in the head. Justified, as when you finally meet up with him, he's been in a Domz torture device for several hours and claims that his brains feels like jelly. Though there are some signs that he was like that before the torture, like having apparently begun the infiltration mission he was captured on by swimming half a mile in full body armor.
• The BioShock series:
  • In BioShock, there are about half a dozen denizens of Rapture with even a tenuous grasp of reality, and whimsy and delighted singing are common. One of the few examples where this is used to make things creepy as fuck.
  • BioShock Infinite gives us Robert and Rosalind Lutece, who talk like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, give very cryptic references, and are seemingly quite insane. They are genius physicists, and responsible for the entire plot, but they're also technically ghosts and are permanently out of sync with both time and probability in our universe. It's not too surprising that they're kinda confusing.
• BlazBlue has the ever-so-flighty Taokaka, resident Cat Girl. She often breaks the fourth wall by slamming directly into the screen and staring at the player, and can celebrate winning a match by patting her butt or running away and slamming right into a pole that strangely wasn't there before.
• Bloodborne gives us Micolash, Host of the Nightmare: his experiments with Insight have smashed his mind to little chunks of crazy, and by the time you find him he's babbling off-kilter prayers to Kos (or some say Kosm), howling like a wolf at random intervals, and cackling like an imbecile. Whether it's terrifying or hilarious is a matter of personal interpretation, but none of it makes him any less dangerous.
• Everyone in the Borderlands series qualifies as this trope. Even those outside of Pandora add to the overly long list of crazies due to the enlargement of the chaotic Corporate Warfare on several planets, and Pandora just so happens to be at its peak. Finding an Only Sane Unfazed Man on a colonized planet is a rarity; Rhys and Fiona are two of them. Here are some more specific examples:
  • Patricia Tannis is a former Dahl scientist who, after spending quite a while on Pandora, has become part this and part Ax-Crazy, though is still pretty calm about it. Her journal entries show her descent into madness as she develops a relationship with her recorder (they're just friends now) and instills a personality into the corpse of a bandit she killed (his name is Leslie and he turned to violence due to being mocked for his name). After you collect her entries for her, she requests for you to bash your head in with a rock to forget everything you heard. She returns in Borderlands 2, claiming that she ate a Siren's hair out of scientific curiosity, and that it tasted like fried pickles. The game also confirms that Tannis has Asperger's Syndrome, which barely explains half of her madness.
  • One of Roland's allies is Tiny Tina, a happy-go-lucky Creepy Child with a fondness for explosives. A side quest sees Tina holding a tea party with guests such as a large jar with a top hat and monocle on it and a larval varkid stuffed inside, a doll with a hand grenade for a head, and a bandit who sold her parents out to the Hyperion corporation, whom she gleefully electrocutes to death.
  • "Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage", a DLC pack for Borderlands 2, has the eponymous Mr. Torgue, founder of the Torgue Corporation, who's obsessed with explosions, action, and manliness.
    Torgue: That sentence had too many syllables! Apologize!
  • Psychos, as the name implies, constantly babble on about puppets and bicycles made of meat. One of them, Krieg the Psycho, is even available as a DLC player character, although he subverts the trope by having a completely sane inner self who has no control over his actions.
    Krieg: I'M THE CONDUCTOR OF THE POOP TRAIN!

• Nuri from Chains of Satinav believes, among other things, that jellyfish can fly, various plants are sapient, and mishandling powerful magic crystals that she has been explicitly told not to touch is a good idea. This might have something to do with being raised in a Fairy Land and having minimal contact with humans.
• In Coffee Talk, Neil and Amanda are eccentric aliens in spacesuits who are trying their best to communicate with Earthlings. As new arrivals on Earth, they have a hard time understanding its culture, which leads to some humorous miscommunication with the other patrons.
• Bella from The Color Tuesday is... a bit odd, generally acting like a lady of status from the 18th century in a game set in a parallel of the 20th. Her pretentiousness pisses Alex off no end.
• Darkest Dungeon plays this one for drama. One of the various Afflictions heroes can suffer when their Sanity Meter is topped out is becoming Irrational: Essentially, they completely snap under the pressure and start to behave extremely erratically, wandering all over the place, refusing to act, doing things at random, refusing healing for stupid reasons, and constantly rambling about nonsensical things. Their usefulness drops fast once they've gone insane in this manner.
• Agent York from Deadly Premonition. When the game itself describes him as having a "surreal demeanor", there's little doubt that he's a little off-beat. He does things such as smoke, use his laptop, and talk on the phone about Tom and Jerry... all while driving, crack jokes about eighties movies during autopsies, and of course, he's constantly talking to his imaginary friend Zach, no matter who's around to overhear. Perhaps justified, in that he's trying to protect Zach from the outside world, and doesn't want to form close relationships with people in fear of getting hurt. Acting like a weirdo is a pretty good way to do that.
• In Disco Elysium the Detective can say a variety of strange, outright deranged lines of dialogue and do some pretty bizzare things, and they will be outright forced to if you fail certain skill checks. Having a high Inland Empire skill increases this even further and turns the Detective into a borderline schizophrenic, having casual dialogue with his necktie or the corpse you're supposed to investigate, as well as think about a variety of strange conspiracy theories and 'paranatural' topics. You can also choose to avert this by (trying to) always choose very safe, very boring dialogue options, which the game will track and then put points into the Boring Cop archetype.
• Disgaea:
  • Flonne from the first game, though smarter than she looks, is also more than a little out there. For example, in Disgaea 4, she blows Artina's cover in a casual conversation, despite Artina having explicitly asked her not to use her real name while she's at work. And this happens literally minutes after she makes her appearance.
    Flonne: Nice to meet you. I'm an assassin. Whoops. I wasn't supposed to say that.
  • Subverted with Princess Sapphire Rhodonite in Disgaea 3. At first she appears to be a slightly out-of-it Rebellious Princess who is easily distracted by things that are small and cute (like Raspberyl, as Beryl uncomfortably learns). It's not much later that we get a glimpse into her head and discover that she prepares plans in her head on how to most efficiently kill anyone she meets, should the time come. Kinda like if Osaka was raised by Machiavelli.
  • In the first manga, we've got Lamington. "Do you want to talk to my bonsai?" (He constantly seems to be baking cakes...)
  • As a gullible space case who takes everything from typos to sardines extremely seriously, Valvatorez from Disgaea 4 easily earns his In-Series Nickname of "Mr. Weirdo".
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • Leliana believes that she is on a journey from the Maker, and if romanced, she describes your eyelashes as being like butterflies she wants to catch and keep in a jar.
    • Sten tries to understand your dog's inner nature by engaging in a contest of growls with it, and at the end proclaims him "worthy of respect." Unlike Leilana, he at least has the excuse of being from Cloudcuckooland (he is a staunch adherent of the Qun, which is a Blue-and-Orange Morality philosophy from the perspective of Ferelden and the player).
    • Sten himself believes that the entire Ferelden people is this, due to their unconditional devotion to their Mabari Hounds, which makes up a great deal of their culture. If the Warden is imprisoned at one point in the game and Sten and the Dog are chosen to rescue them, he starts to converse with the Dog, before realizing what he's doing.
      Sten: And now I am talking with an animal... I have been in this country too long!
  • Merrill the Dalish elf blood mage from Dragon Age II. She often blurts out ponderings that have nothing to do with anything (such as how qunari scratch their heads, or whether Isabela has a peg leg and an eyepatch when she's standing right next to her and can clearly see that she doesn't) and has absolutely no concept of ordinary social graces. Varric and Isabela adopt her as a Morality Pet. Varric even gives her a ball of string, so she can leave a trail and find her way home, after she gets lost on the way to the market and ends up in the dangerous slums. Again. She's also ended up in the Viscount's bathing chambers, and knows how deep the harbor is because she's fallen into it. If romanced, it's mentioned that she often ends up wandering into other people's gardens, picking flowers and playing with the guard-dogs. Apparently Aveline regularly has to get the charges of trespassing dropped, while Hawke has taken to paying off a lot of their Hightown neighbours and their guards, in attempt to keep the peace.

• Manah in Drakengard, when she's not trying to be actively evil, has all the charm of a cute little girl playing with imaginary friends. Except they're not imaginary — she's connected to the malevolent deities of the Drakengard setting, the Watchers.
• Archmage Rakorium from Drakensang is probably the craziest and most powerful wizard on Aventuria. He's constantly absent-minded, has an irrational hatred for reptiles of any kind, and turned a whole band of brigands to stone because he believed they were dragon worshipers.
• The museum Curator from Dungeon Maker II: The Hidden War. He's campy as all get-out, plus is lacking in basic knowledge and common sense and constantly coming up with ridiculous theories to explain things that everyone else already knows. Case in point: At one point he theorizes that snakes shed their skin because they can't use moisturizer cream, so when their skin dries out they just take it off. When he discovers the real reason (snake skin isn't stretchy and snakes will outgrow it) he treats it as if it's a major scientific discovery.
• The eponymous characters of Dwarf Fortress seem to have a rather tenuous association with reality. Even the least of them is afflicted with Angst Dissonance and a staggering lack of common sense, and others branch out into Mad Artists, axe-murderers, Upper Class Twits, and various flavors of Bunny-Ears Lawyer. Dwarf psychology works like this: My wife and child were killed by serial murderer elephants and the fortress has been attacked by a beast lost to time, but I'm happy because that dining room was really nice.
• You could make a case for the Mr. Saturns in EarthBound and its sequel. Their grammar is off-the-wall and punctuated by words like "boing" and "zoom", they have a tendency to say odd things like "Dakota" and "rice paddy" apropos of absolutely nothing, the font they speak in looks like a young child's handwriting, and one in Mother 3 busies itself by staring at the ceiling.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness, frequently displays this trope.
    Sheogorath: I've been waiting for you, or someone like you, or someone not like you.
    Sheogorath: Well, looks like the cat's out of the bag now... who puts cats in bags, anyway? Cats hate bags.
    Sheogorath: But enough about me. Let's talk about you. I could turn you into a goat. Or a puddle. Or a bad idea. I could make you eat your own fingers. Or fall in love with a cloud. Perhaps... I could make you into something useful.
    Sheogorath: I once dug a pit and filled it with clouds... or was it clowns?... Come to think of it, it began to smell... must have been clowns. Clouds don't smell, they taste of butter. And tears.

    Sheogorath's chamberlain, Haskill, confirms that the "pit full of clowns" story is true in Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion.

  • As one might imagine, most of Sheogorath's followers also qualify. For example, Big Head, once you give him the Fork of Horripilation he was searching for: "Happy day! Happy day! The blind shall see! The lame shall walk! The short shall tall! Forks for all!" Considering that the Shivering Isles is Cloudcuckooland, this is hardly surprising.
  • M'aiq the Lair is a recurring Easter Egg Legacy Character who fits on two levels. To note:
    • M'aiq is a known a Fourth-Wall Observer (and Leaner and Breaker) who voices the opinions of the series' creators and developers, largely in the form of Take Thats, to both the audience (given the ES Unpleasable Fanbase) and to Bethesda itself. Given his role, he comes off as very detached from the setting and many of his statements make absolutely no sense in-universe, making him appear as one of these.
    • All of his incarnations to date have at least a few odd quirks in-game as well. For example, in Morrowind, he fishes alone on a remote island while wearing a stylish but impractical hat. In Oblivion, he often enters ruins and caves (which has likely startled more than a few players) to search for calipers for five hours at a time, enters Valenwood along his route between Anvil and Leywiin, and has been known to occasionally chase deer. In Skyrim, he always has skooma on his person and can be encountered in a wide variety of odd situations, including him standing next to a burned cart, several dead human bodies, and the corpse of a dragon.
  • Demiprinces are 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. Fa-Nuit-Hen, a famous Demiprince, talks of events as happening, happened, and will-or-maybe-happening at some point, all at once. They are even considered "eccentric" by the standards of other Daedra.
  • Skyrim:
    • Riften's court mage Wylandriah in is an especially bad case of this, as she keeps launching into non-sequiturs, rambles on about pseudo-magical things without realizing that they make absolutely no sense whatsoever to anyone else (even other mages!), and somehow has the ability to "misplace" items from her laboratory across half the country, often in places that someone like her would normally have no business being in the first place. Surprisingly, she hasn't blown anyone or anything up yet... although a few NPCs fear that it's only a matter of time before she accidentally transports Riften into Oblivion or something.
    • Subverted with Cicero. He seems like one of these at first... but not only is he a lot more competent and dangerous than he looks (he single-handedly almost kills the rest of the Brotherhood when they finally push him too far), he is also completely right about how unwise it is for the Brotherhood to stray from centuries of tradition.
• Ensemble Stars! has not just one or two, but an entire team of Cloudcuckoolanders — the Five Oddballs, which describes a group of five exceptionally talented, but also exceptionally weird idols who were the student council president's main targets during the War:
  • Rei, the oldest student in the cast (being a third year who was forced to repeat a year), but who resolutely insists that he is actually an undead vampire who has been alive for decades and is injured by direct contact with the sun. Despite these strange Chuunibyou claims however, he is very intelligent, and definitely the most devious of the oddballs, directly supporting Trickstar in their campaign against the student council.
  • Wataru, a gigantic Large Ham who has No Sense of Personal Space and is constantly spouting Gratuitous French. He has the best relationship with the student council president — Eichi particularly looked up to him before the war, and afterwards, he joins Eichi's group, fine.
  • Kanata, a seemingly constantly spaced-out Manchild who adores sea creatures and constantly ends up lazing around in the school fountain, fully clothed, despite being unable to swim. He is the most passive of the oddballs, mostly avoiding the student council, though there are hints that his strange behaviour is actually put on as a coping mechanism to deal with his difficult family.
  • Shu, a Control Freak Jerkass who not only has a passion for clothing (especially Gorgeous Period Dresses), he also constantly carries around a Victorian doll named Mademoiselle whom he speaks for as if she is a separate person. He was the most deeply damaged due to Eichi's actions, being part of the previously top group Valkyrie, and loathes Eichi with a probably unmatched passion.
  • Natsume, a creepy magic-obsessed jerk who sometimes speaks in "magic language" (represented by a different font, almost always amounting to Brutal Honesty) and treats other students like rats to be experimented on. He is the youngest of the oddballs, being the only second-year, and so the others chose to protect him from the worst of Eichi's reach; in return, he adores them all.
  • Finally there's also Leo, who is often acknowledged to be a borderline-oddball: He is extremely whimsical, with an obsession with space and quite an emperor complex, and likes to use the made-up greeting "uchuu~" (which literally means "space").
• Fallout:
  • Moira Brown in Fallout 3. She apparently thinks digging a well with a miniature nuclear warhead is a perfectly fine idea, among many other zany ideas. There is a quest line in the game involving the Player indulging her cuckoolander propensity. You can also convince her to stop. You Monster!. She is actually an incredibly smart person with more of a passing relationship with normal. You can find this if you hack her comp: "Q: How to prevent raider attack. A: raider would not sit down for an interview." Despite that, she very well knows just how important the entire records of a library are, and how to make use of the knowledge.
  • Some of the less-crazy Nightkin in Fallout: New Vegas, such as Lily (who behaves as a kindly grandmother and thinks The Courier is her probably long-dead grandchild), Tabitha (Large Ham host of a radio station, though she's bordering on Ax-Crazy), and Davison (a nightkin leader worshipping a brahmin skull who speaks with a odd speech pattern).

• Far Cry:
  • Far Cry 3:
    • Hurk Drubman Jr., a Recurring Character in the games who first appears in this game. A Half-Witted Hillbilly who thinks that monkeys would make perfect suicide bombers, then tries to make up for it by stealing monkey idols from Royal Army dig sites and offering them to a "Monkey God" (and thinks that the size of the captive animals he releases is proportional to the satisfaction of said Monkey God, hence his jubilation at releasing an elephant). He even names his son in New Dawn after Blade! Presumably, this type of behaviour is a family trait, since we get to meet Hurk's caveman ancestor Urki in Primal, and he's just as out-there as his descendant.
    • Agent Willis Huntley, also introduced in 3, is a pretty weird man. Apart from being an insanely patriotic and jingoistic American, he also talks about politics, human history, and warfare like he's in an off-color propaganda reel.
    • Doctor Alec Earnhardt, the English pharmacist who lives on the Rook Islands, who is nearly always high due to taking his own drugs (though there's a sad reason for that). Appropriately, since the game is an Alice Allusion, Earnhardt is The Mad Hatter.
  • Rabi Ray Rana in Far Cry 4, the DJ running Radio Free Kyrat, the country's only pirate radio station. Rabi is a Cuckoolander Commentator who, instead of delivering up-to-date news about developments in the conflict, talks about the Zombie Apocalypse, War Elephants, how sexy he finds Amita, his own poo, and his bland sex life. Despite this, Rabi's The Heart for the Golden Path, and he ultimately doesn't go evil like Amita or Sabal.
  • Far Cry 5:
    • Faith Seed is an evil Cute But Psycho version of this. She bounces between talking about trying to kill herself and meeting Joseph "The Father" Seed like a giggling little girl. Then again, we only see Faith behave like this in a hallucination. In real life, she's a lot more vicious.
    • Hurk's cousin Charlemagne "Sharky" Boshaw, also introduced in 5, is just as eccentric as his cousin. His mind goes to some funny places when he's going around Hope County with the Deputy, and he treats everything that happens to him like one big video game. He's also a veritable Pyromaniac.
  • Selene (pronounced like "Felony") the New-Age Retro Hippie from Far Cry: New Dawn is a pretty far-out girl most of the time, due to spending most of her screen time off her head on drugs. She uses pretty creative profanities, and cautions the Captain about exploring a flooded bunker to collect her medical supplies, because "where there's water, there's crocodiles". She later amends this to "Where there's snakes, there's crocodiles. No, wait, that's water." Of course, given that you meet at least one crocodile in the flooded bunker...
  • Far Cry Primal:
    • As mentioned above, Hurk's caveman ancestor Urki. He's known as "The Thinker", and is prone to coming up with ingenious ideas on stuff to create (such as a wingsuit, ballistic armour, and bear deterrent), but due to being Born in the Wrong Century, his limited tools ensure each attempt backfires on him. Also, when you first meet him, he's throwing birds at the wall of his tent after swinging them in one hand, to try and find out how they fly (not very well, since he's swinging them). And upon being addressed by Takkar from behind, he thinks the bird in his hand is the one speaking to him instead.
    • Tensay the shaman is the most prominent example in the series. In terms of appearance, he's a skinny man covered in white Tribal Face Paint with a Mad Eye and a wolf skin hood with two antlers attached that he never removes throughout the game. Takkar first meets him doing a funny dance with his staff in his cave, he has No Sense of Personal Space when chatting with Takkar, he urinates on a mask before making Takkar put it on, and he's constantly getting Takkar to drink creepy blood potions in order to give him Vision Quests. Thankfully, Tensay is correct about nearly everything somehow, and he's always doing things in the Wenja tribe's best interests, so he's Creepy Good.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Laguna in Final Fantasy VIII. The dude says the darndest things.
    Laguna: We'll be killing two pigs with one stone!

    At one point, after throwing his True Companions off a cliff into the water below so they can escape from enemy soldiers, he looks over the edge:

    Laguna: You guys are crazy. You know how tall this cliff is?

• Quina Quen in Final Fantasy IX. Seven of your team are out to save the world from the Big Bad. Your eigth member (Quina) is out to discover yummy yummies.
• Brother from Final Fantasy X-2 is about as weird as they get. Not only does he say outlandish things, he's almost always dancing in place or flailing his limbs while talking.
• Final Fantasy XIII gives us Vanille. Whether she's molesting sheep for their wool, cooing over Chocobos, or skipping around acting like a sugar-high idiot, she never seems to be much of anything beyond this trope. By midgame, it becomes apparent that while this may have been her personality 500 years previously, at present time it's mostly just an act to keep her Stepford Smiler facade unnoticeable to the rest of the party, especially Fang.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, numerous dialogue options and journal entries portray the Warrior of Light as this, coming off as a cheerfully oblivious Idiot Hero whose brain marches to the beat of its own drum. For instance, in the sidequest "Too Many Cooks", it never occurs to them that the "squishy" spices they just retrieved from a shipwreck are moldy until after they've thrown it in the soup. In another sidequest, they can respond to questions about how the (distinctly Miqo'te) criminal they're chasing could have fled the craggy cliffs of Outer La Noscea so quickly by saying that he's actually a Roegadyn. Skaetswys, a Roegadyn herself, sarcastically quips that of course Roegadyn can sprout wings and fly before wondering if the Warrior is making a stupid joke of if they're really that daft.
• Nothing describes Cinque from Final Fantasy Type-0 better than this trope. Her brain seems to work on a completely different wavelength than the rest of Class Zero, or even the rest of the world. She's also strangely upbeat for a Child Soldier sent on a massive world war. She does take her job seriously, though, and has the strength to back it up.

• Throughout the Fire Emblem franchise, there's usually at least one character per game whose behavior could be described as eccentric, especially when one considers that most of them are battle-hardened soldiers:
  • Treck from Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade takes it to a new level. Supports with him reveal all the player ever learns about his personality, but it's enough since his behavior includes: ice-fishing while not actually trying to catch anything, falling asleep in the saddle, forgetting other people's names, stating such forgetfulness is a hobby, placidly accepting his and his comrades' deaths, forgetting his own name, interrupting conversations with tangential platitudes, and dreading the possibility of turning into a horse.
  • Setsuna from Fire Emblem Fates is another shining example of this trope. She's generally rather breezy and ditzy, with one of her defining character traits being her Running Gag of falling into traps. When called out on her strange behavior, Setsuna usually manages to somehow interpret everyone's confusion as compliments. There was also the time she managed to cook an apparently-delicious meal by thinking even less than she usually does.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • The Truth from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas clearly rambles in a style suggesting that he's mad, but at the same time, he seems to know a great deal about things not obvious to CJ. He's also a stoner. And he apparently got high with some really awesome polar bears.
  • Trevor Phillips of Grand Theft Auto V is this in addition to being Ax-Crazy, which can make for some terrifying situations. He can be found starting fights with body builders because he's convinced they're stuffing their shorts with socks, waking up in the middle of the desert wearing a sundress while surrounded by dead bodies, and riding a motor-scooter down the freeway with another person on a scooter — a complete stranger whom Trevor has decided is his "scooter brother".
• Merlin of Guenevere frequently behaves in erratic, nonsensical ways, like making reference to things that haven't happened or handing out carrots to the royalty for seemingly no reason. Given the character this incarnation was inspired by, he may just be operating on a different scale of time.
• Rhyth/Mew from Jet Set Radio is definitely this; she always has something random or just plain strange to say, such as:
  Rhyth/Mew: I love everything about Tokyo — even the things I hate.
• Nugget from Kindergarten is a bit more aware of things than he first seems, but he still isn't completely there. He has odd speaking patterns, is obsessed with chicken nuggets, and has a hobby of digging holes, and a fidget spinner is enough to distract him from a missing arm.
• Kirby:
  • The titular character is just a happy-minded person who always thinks of food and sleeping. Particularly notable is Kirby: Squeak Squad, where Kirby only saves the world because his cake is missing.
  • There's also Captain Waddle Dee, who works for Meta Knight:
    Axe Knight: Kirby is moving along the base of the ship.
    Captain Vul: Not much we can do to him there... but the wind is strong.
    Waddle Dee: And it's cold.
  • Sillydillo, a member of the Beast Pack, downplays this. While he does has a goofy face, and makes a makeshift dance partner out of trash, he's still quite competent, and is also That One Boss.
• League of Legends:
  • Lulu the Fae Sorceress is a young yordle girl with a boundless imagination who went off to play with with the fairies for several (hundred) years and learn their magic. Upon returning to normal life in the rest of Valoran, she's completely cuckoo, albeit adorable, and talks in nonstop nonsense.
    Lulu: Never look a tulip in the eye!
    Lulu: Yup! That tasted Purple!
  • Jinx is what happens when this trope combines with Ax-Crazy. Her Joke animation is to take out Fishbones, which is a rocket launcher, and talk to it while she flaps its sharklike jaw up and down like a puppet, with the rocket launcher generally playing the Cloudcuckoolander's Minder and encouraging her to settle down and stop blowing things up, which she never will.
    Jinx: Smile! It's called gunplay!
  • Kled is what happens when this trope combines with more Ax-Crazy. While he runs around murdering people, he rambles about nonsensical battle strategies deployed in battles he probably was not at, and seems to genuinely believe you gain military and social rank by killing people and claiming their titles for yourself. He's also prone to long conversations with his cowardly pet lizard.
    Kled: THE BADGERS COMMAND YOUR DEATH!
  • Ivern is a very friendly version. While he was human once, it's been so long that he doesn't understand much about human life any more, and so is prone to rambling incoherently.
    Ivern: I follow only the sun! And occasionally a river. This one time, a scorpion.
  • Neeko isn't doing much better when it comes to life experience outside her remote, now destroyed tribe. As a result, she tends to parse things in ways that most other citizens of Runeterra wouldn't.
    Neeko: No more room for problems please. Only room for more cheesebreads!
  • To be strictly fair to Nunu, he is only a child, so it's perhaps understandable that he's a little off in his own world.
    Nunu: [attacking the Blue Sentinel] He's sucking up all the blue in the world! We gotta stop him, Willump!
  • Finishing off the list for now, Zoe, the Aspect of Twilight, either is a goofy child, or enjoys playing one while she Plots.
    Zoe: There are holes in reality. And...in donuts.
• If not Ellis from Left 4 Dead 2, then definitely his friend Keith. Ellis's Cloudcuckoolander status is especially apparent in Dark Carnival, where he expresses great displeasure that the survivors cannot go on any rides. In the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse. To quote his character description:
  Ellis is a mechanic with a love of life, a firm belief in his own immortality, and the ability to treat any setback as a fun dare to impress his friends.... Then the zombies had to go and spoil it. Now Ellis is looking for new things to occupy his time, and finding plenty. It turns out the zombie apocalypse is one big dare, and there's no shortage of crazy stuff he can try to impress his new buddies.

  In an amusing turn of events, in "The Passing", Ellis suddenly becomes very concerned about how he appears to others. In particular, Zoey.

• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The series as a whole has Tingle. He's a middle-aged guy who dresses in a skintight green outfit in order to emulate the "fairy boy" (Link). He's obsessed with Rupees, he flies all over the place using a red balloon, his Catchphrase is "kooloo-limpah", and he forces his brothers and employees to dress in outfits similar to his. There's a very good reason why he's in a jail cell on Windfall Island in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Agitha is the self-proclaimed Princess of the Bug Kingdom, is seemingly ignorant of the fact that most people have no particular desire to bathe in snail slime, and demands that the Legendary Hero Chosen by the Gods go fetch bugs for her ball. Oddly enough, she's one of the most popular NPCs. And apparently, she cheerfully chats with wolves, in a world where most people just run. While referring to them as puppies.
• Herbert Higginbotham from LittleBigPlanet 2 qualifies. Most of what he says makes very little sense. Even after he's cured of a mental illness, where he ranted just as nonsensically and ate everyone's socks.
  Herbert: There were these geometries, these fractal star-worms, and they were competing for my affection, and they were amazed when my eyes... were pies, and they were spinning, and cooking, and dancing in figures of eight.
• In Majesty, the two recruitable heroes who follow Fervus, God of Chaos, are unsurprisingly not wholly in touch with reality. The giggling Cultists wander your city in skins and masks, referring to your bounties as "pretty flags", dragging their retinue of charmed monsters, and even Leaning on the Fourth Wall by pointing out the star that appears when they level up. As for Warriors of Discord, they are mad Blood Knights who are as disconnected from reality as they are brawny—they howl like dogs and cluck like chickens in battle (or when fleeing it).
• Many of the lines said by Et from Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy are out of context with the current party's conversations.

• Mega Man X8: When he went Maverick, Gigabolt Man-o-War started displaying shades of this. His attack cries have him should food names, or some Gratuitous English in the Japanese version. His intro also has him deny his nature as a Maverick, and claim that he is in complete control. And his death cry? "Oh yeaaah!!!"
• Miis with the "Airheaded" personality in Miitopia tend to be this. They easily get distracted in battles and sometimes attack the wrong enemies, or worse, play with them. However, it does have its advantages, as it can distract the monsters for some time.
• Many in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has a tendency to dip into this. SIGINT will actually ask if he's the only normal one around.
  SIGINT: Aw, hell! This FOX unit is a nutfest!
  • Para-Medic, one of the Mission Control characters, is definitively a Cloudcuckoolander, deciding that the person she never saw before (actually the player character wearing a Latex Perfection mask) must be an alien — "A Venusian, not the crab kind."
  • The creator of the above mask decided that making a mask blink is more important than making the mouth move.
  • Naked Snake discusses how being in the box brings inner happiness.
• Mutant Football League's color commentator Brickhead Mulligan. He's a little off-kilter because he took a lot of bad hits in his MFL career, suffered adverse reactions to league-mandated performance-enhancing drugs, and had half his gray matter replaced with cement (it was cheaper than the brain surgery). Demonstrated spectacularly when a joke about Montezuma's Revenge leads him on a three minute long tangent about hotel towels.
• Nancy Drew:
  • Sonny Joon, the series' Unseen, is probably this trope, judging by his coatimundi phobia, UFO obsession, and generally weird doodles.
  • Rentaro from Shadow at the Water's Edge shows signs of this, particularly when he's gushing about his love of numbers or mimicking the expressions of deer.
• Neverwinter Nights 2:
  • Aldanon is a wizard equivalent for the absent-minded professor stereotype, exhibiting qualities like lapsing into rambling doublespeak with metaphors abandoned halfway, changing subjects mid-conversation, forgetting his own orders, or mistaking a prison cell for his own house. At one point, he begins listing off a number of RPG tropes that he claims your team will have to perform, complete with "reforge the broken key" and "acquire some rare, arbitrary items." Only to be almost immediately shot down by one of his servants, whom he had commissioned to do the exact thing he supposedly needed the arbitrary items for. Then he congratulates himself on a job well done.
  • Grobnar is another example. He is a gnome bard with a tendency to go off on tangents about his mouth and his codpiece and with a lifelong quest to find supposedly deific beings known as Wendersnaven that are apparently undetectable and all-powerful.

• This trope accurately describes Nintendo as a company. To fans and gamers, they're both brilliant and frustrating at the same time. Fun and confusing, smart yet oblivious. They often cling to traditional ideals, defy all means of conventional wisdom, and make ridiculous leaps in logic to fit their often bizarre practices and decisions. Love them, or hate them, Nintendo is one fascinating corporation.

• Amaterasu of Ōkami doesn't seem totally 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.
• Paladins:
  • Bomb King is an abusive, dictatorial, power-mad monarch, but wouldn't be out of place as an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain in a Saturday morning cartoon. He assumes that everyone else exists only to serve him, shouts a cheerful "Goodbye!" before making an enemy explode, and doesn't pass up any opportunity to mention how superior he is. None of this makes him any less dangerous in-game.
  • Grohk is an orc shaman who is completely off his rocker, with bizarre euphemisms and vocal inflections on the most ordinary of call outs. He believes that he's a snowman when stunned, wonders if he can eat items he's purchased, and giggles and snorts at random. It says something that having blue skin is the least bizarre thing about him.
• Papers, Please has Jorji Costava, a rather inept illegal immigrant who seems to come from a different planet than everyone else; he starts by believing that Artstozka is so awesome that he doesn't need a passport to enter and gets worse from there. He shows up with an obviously forged passport from a fictional country drawn in crayon next, then constantly fails to produce other important entry documents, or show horribly outdated forms of entry. In spite of what should be growing frustration, he's incredibly happy despite being turned away or being arrested when you catch him smuggling drugs, which he gleefully admits to. While Jorji is a strange individual who doesn't act quite like everyone else, he's very likable, and in several endings he proves to be your salvation.
• Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows: Pâquerette has an odd single-minded obsession with bunnies. When saddened by the thought of having to release the bunnies, she again gets excited by the idea of re-capturing them.
• Persona:
  • Persona 4:
    • The protagonist can be that. Options when talking paint the protagonist as someone with a quirky sense of humor that enjoys killing the mood or going off in non sequitur. Albeit it can depend on the medium the story is being told, portrayals of him tend to lean that he is at least somewhat quirky when not incredibly weird.
    • Of the main party, there's Yukiko Amagi. Outwardly a Yamato Nadeshiko, she later reveals a very strange sense of humour, puts starfish and chocolate in curry, and enjoys telling bizarre ghost stories. To put it in perspective, the rest of the cast usually reacts to Teddie's terrible jokes with groans. For Yukiko, odds are 50/50 whether she bursts into hysterics or misses the joke entirely.

• Persona 5:
  • Yusuke Kitagawa, an apprentice painter who joins your party, is obsessed with making art, to the point where he doesn't really care about most other things. He doesn't even blink over the fact that Morgana is a talking cat. He justifies remaining with the Phantom Thieves by saying that the Eldritch Location of the Palace will allow him to find interesting subjects to paint. And in an example of Gameplay and Story Integration, his idle animation has him framing his surroundings with his fingers as if he's looking for a new subject, regardless of the situation.
  • You also have the option to play the Protagonist as completely insane, as there's a weird or joke response option in most Dialogue Trees. For example, while you're trying to get into Kamoshida's Palace:
  Ryuji: What's this weird eye app on your phone?
  Protagonist: It's a cute eye.

• Ignus from Planescape: Torment has a single-track mind and a wisdom score so low that, Statistically Speaking, he is barely considered sentient. He basically lives in his own cloudcukooland and only occasionally comes down to talk to The Nameless One due to a personal connection he shared with one of your prior incarnations. Played for Drama to an extreme degree, as he is an Ax-Crazy Pyromaniac, and his single-track mind is entirely focused on fire and the potential for everything around him to be ignited. If The Nameless One wasn't around to control him, Ignus would default to trying to burn the world down for no other reason than that it isn't currently on fire.
• Plants vs. Zombies features Crazy Dave, who speaks his own language of incomprehensible mumbling, wears an upside-down pot on his head, and has the Catchphrase "'Cause I'm craaaaaaaazy!"
• Pokémon:
  • Wigglytuff from Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness is the leader of the Pokémon guild, but is unbelievably flighty, oblivious to villains and their plans, and also really, really strong. With a Berserk Button when he doesn't get his favorite food Perfect Apples. Oh, and he's an Idiot Savant of sorts, able to spot things no-one else can when it comes to exploration.
  • Pokémon Black and White: Bianca, one of your childhood friends, is a milder case, being flighty, airheaded, very clumsy, and overall very, very naive. Justified in that she has a... questionable home life and is quite sheltered.

• The Portal series:
  • GLaDOS, despite being an all-powerful AI, seems to have a very loose grip on reality. She regularly makes childish insults at the player in later portions of Portal and tries to convince you that one of the puzzles is impossible to test your resilience in an atmosphere of "extreme pessimism." She also instructs you to take the infamous Weighted Companion Cube (a box with hearts on all its sides) with you on one of the tests, then asks you to euthanize the inanimate object at the end by dropping it in an incinerator. And guilt trips you over it.
  • Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture Science. A man with no practical understanding of science, his inventions are nothing short of insane and counteractive to whatever purpose they were designed for, which isn't helped by his enthusiasm for pointless experiments and SCIENCE!.
  • Portal 2:
    • The Space Core.
      Wheatley: Let go! We're in space!
      Space Core: Space?! SPACE!!! [launches itself through the portal leading to the Moon] SPAAAAAAaaaaaaa...
    • The Fact Core could probably qualify as well:
      Fact Core: The square root of rope is string. Cellular phones will not give you cancer. Only hepatitus. 89% of magic tricks are not magic. Technically, they are sorcery. Error. Error. Error. File not found.

• The Professor Layton games are filled to the brim with these. For example, we have Brock from The Last Specter. His house gets destroyed and he laughs.

• Psychonauts:
  • Dogen Boole is spacey and a little odd. He's obsessed with hats, and rates the ones the other kids wear on their Character Blogs. On Kitty Bubai's profile, he goes off on a random tangent on how he got ringworm from a cat once.
  • Subverted with Sheegor, who is under the delusion that her kidnapped pet turtle can talk and has the answers for everything. When you finally rescue her turtle, after it just sits there for a while... it actually does start talking and its plan does solve everything — at least for the moment.

• When you first meet the Moontouched Girl from Pyre, she can't even remember her own name; it seems she doesn't consider it all that important. She was exiled from the Commonwealth ostensibly for vagrancy, but actually for being really weird — and for telling the truth about its corrupt rulers. She hears the words of the long-dead Scribes, but has a tenuous understanding of their meaning, and her grasp on the physical world is even vaguer — despite the horrors she witnesses and endures in her backstory and during the game, she can't understand people except through her optimistic filter, and assumes that even the villains are nice people. Although this should be a crippling deficiency for social interactions, when the more liberal New Order arises at the end of the game, the Moontouched Girl becomes a hugely popular religious figure, showing her followers how to be excellent people.
• Rakesh from Roommates thinks anything can be a good excuse for art... or a good place for art... or a good medium or tool for art. There's absolutely nothing wrong with cutting into the kitchen wall to give it some added life, for example, and covering himself with paint in order to redecorate his bedroom is all in a day's work.
• Rune Factory:
  • Mist from Rune Factory and Rune Factory Frontier is prone to saying odd things about the weather, turnips, and the world in general. Some of it doesn't make sense to anyone until later.
  • Rune Factory 3:
    • Persia does the same... only she talks about squid. She's also prone to randomly bursting into song. The song's title is "Die, Giant Squid!", too.
    • While we're on the subject, Evelyn has some of this in regards to her fashion (cabbage and fish are her favorite decorations).
• RWBY: Arrowfell: Moss lives in a cave, but believes he lives in a town and is its mayor. He tries to convince Team RWBY that his town is a tourist attraction and the highlight of a tour will be Duck Rock, which is a rock. Shaped like a duck. Team RWBY struggle to deal with him and end up beating a hasty exit as soon as they're able.
• The Secret World features a great many wild and eccentric characters — some of them mentally ill, others just logical consequences of ending up in an Urban Fantasy environment where All Myths Are True.
  • Templar scholar Iain Tibet Gladstone is always rambling on about some weird voyage he took in his adventuring days, discussing the merits of using illegal drugs to travel through time or visit Hell, or lecturing on weird and implausible history. Much to the exasperation of his handlers, he's also an alcoholic, has a habit of licking cane toads, and often forgets to put his clothes back on after meditating skyclad.
  • Gladstone's opposite number among The Illuminati, Dr. Charles Zurn, is also pretty out-there: a frazzled barbiturate junkie with a long history with MK-ULTRA, rarely a minute goes by without him saying something off-the-wall. In his introduction alone, he offhandedly asks the guards dragging you away if they've ever seen anyone void themselves after exposure to pink noise, jokingly pretends to be Dr. Christian Szell while having you Strapped to an Operating Table, spins around wildly in his swivel chair, and takes several hits out of a suspicious-looking inhaler. Plus, when your mental training simulation is over, he also asks you if you've ever seen a jaguar tripping...
  • The Illuminati leader, the Pyramidion. This guy spends two thirds of his time spouting loosely-connected public service announcements and context-relevant memes. The remaining third is usually pretty sensible, however, so he remains frighteningly effective despite this.
  • The Fallen King, a street prophet ranting to passers-by in London. However, despite his weird puppet antics and bizarre tirades, he may be more than he seems. In fact, he might have some supernatural ability, given that one of his speeches apparently sends the player back in time to the Tokyo Incident.
  • Dave Screed, a Conspiracy Theorist in Brooklyn. While he's dead right about fearing the power of the Illuminati, the man's paranoia has left him eccentric to the point of all but ceasing to function. Among other things, he's convinced that Pac-Man is a vision of how the Illuminati see the world, he believes that his girlfriend is an Illuminati robot sent to spy on him, and he's so terrified of the world changing in his sleep that he's resorted to increasingly dubious means of remaining conscious: vitamin supplements, energy drinks, nicotine gum, Pop Rocks, hair spray... Oh, and for added fun, despite his paranoia, he doesn't see anything odd about being photographed in conversation with you. Said photographer is actually Leah Cassini, the Illuminati Syadmin.
  • John Galahad, a homeless man claiming to be the Arthurian character Sir Galahad. For good measure, he speaks in a very flowery, archaic dialect that only makes his trouble adjusting to modern life all the more bizarre. The Secret World being what it is, nobody can tell if he's the real Galahad or just a Don Quixote-style madman.
  • Deputy Andy Gardener tends to ramble off in very odd directions about human sacrifice and dead kittens mid-conversation, apparently due to being traumatized by the Zombie Apocalypse in Kingsmouth, though conversations in calmer times prove that he's also a little bit of a doofus in his own right.
  • Headmaster Hayden Montag of Innsmouth Academy is obsessed with the occult, fixated on the morbid, and almost completely clueless when it comes to normal human interactions: his literal-mindedness means that he's been known to completely overlook sarcasm, his love of disturbing magical trivia has been known to traumatize listeners, and his inability to recognize potentially offensive content in his lectures has resulted in him being retired from the Reparation Committee — and even today, he's still not allowed anywhere near grieving parents. Plus, his attempts to appear more personable only make him seem even weirder, given that he apparently "auditions" certain words for future conversations.
  • Nassir, the resident Mad Bomber of the Marya. A fan of Hollywood action movies and Bollywood musicals, he often peppers his dialogues with references to Rocky Balboa, Die Hard, and Taxi Driver, and can often be found dancing around with an AK-47 in the background... when he isn't playing catch with live hand grenades, of course.
  • Played very darkly in the case of Rada Nastase, a Morninglight VIP trapped up in the Carpathian Mountains. Like many examples on this list, she tends to ramble on with very little connectivity or context, but it's because she's being drugged by her Morninglight "handler", Adrian Zorlescu. Plus, the stress of being trapped in a lodge besieged by vampires and with only the increasingly-abusive Zorlescu for company hasn't done wonders for her sanity. As such, she tends to sound a little vague and ephemeral at the best of times — ie, when she isn't being made to shovel down pills and chug wine straight from the bottle; in bad times, she can only whimper that "these people aren't my friends" and burst into tears.
  • Kurt "Buster" Kusczac, a tank driver traumatized by the arrival of the Filth in Tokyo, is now convinced that he's in charge of a squad of imaginary soldiers and can often be heard discussing strategy with imaginary officers. Plus, he believes that the Black Signal can be warded off with Christmas carols.
  • Yuichi Nakahara has ended up as one of these following his disastrous time with the Fear Nothing Foundation and the emergence of the Filth. Now dressed in a bizarre homemade outfit with no pants, he refuses to remove his "space hat" for fear that the vampire squids will eat his brain if he ever takes it off, and reasons that because he made the hat in the first place, it's a part of him. Also, he has a habit of spouting Little Known Facts when he's under stress — meaning that he spends most of his time rattling off trivia. Notable given that his situation is played just as much for tragedy as it is for comedy: his sister Harumi fears that he's actually in the process of withdrawing from reality under the strain, and at times doesn't seem to know if she exists or not. Plus, Yuichi is almost incapable of looking after himself and likely in serious need of psychiatric care — which, thanks to the ongoing state of emergency, he isn't going to get anytime soon.
  • Despite being a Cloud Cuckoolanders Minder to Yuichi, Harumi is a good example of this herself. Hyperactive, fun-loving, and seemingly unfazed by the fact that the Filth has consumed the city, she often geeks out over the sight of you, asks for demonstrations of your powers with incomprehensible sound effects, spouts off advertising jingles for Bingo Cola, and attempts to achieve digital omniscience via hacking.
  • By far the most spectacular human example of this in the game would have to be Daimon Kiyota. A firm believer in Success Through Insanity, Kiyota has made a conscious decision to be a Cloud Cuckoo Lander in order to make himself perfectly adaptable: on top of using a lot of 1920s-era slang, he also tries to tell the future with the aid of a Pachinko machine, casually chows down on an apparently lethal plate of fugu, calls in favors that result in his allies throwing half-empty bottles of whisky out of windows for no clear reason, bombards the players with lectures that even he doesn't entirely understand, and randomly cartwheels and moonwalks around his office. Plus, these antics not only net him results but actually give him a serious advantage over his opponents, much to their bewilderment.
• Shockwave 2: Doctor Yamada, who was stranded alone among hostile aliens who would kill him at first sight. When he's discovered, he's been dissecting one every now and then For Science! and has learned how to turn a bone in their reproductive organs into an earpiece for humans that amplifies sound. Despite being less than stable at first glance, he is just grateful to be rescued and joins the crew.

• Psymon Stark from the SSX series. Apart from a noticeable facial tic, Psymon's... condition is just that; he's had a long history of mental illness ever since he tried to jump some power lines on his bike. His in-game dialogue only makes his lack of lucidity all the more apparent, with lines like "Knock knock who's there!?" and "Oh sweet, sweet pain...", and his gold medal cutscenes show him yelling things like "You're all crazy!" or "Hurt me, hurt me!" Overall, he's a natural disaster just waiting to happen, and spectators, competitors, and event organizers alike all anxiously watch Psymon compete in fear that this is the year he'll go too far. Oh, and his signature move, the Guillotine, is so suicidally dangerous (as you might expect from the name) that you'd have to be crazy to even think it up.
• Emily in Stardew Valley often qualifies for this trope, being a somewhat strange woman who loves crystals, making clothes, and also having very odd dreams. She even designs a type of 'dress up therapy', which while effective for some, can be considered a very odd concept. She also can be fairly oblivious, as she seems completely unaware of Clint's very obvious romantic advances.
• In Star Trek Judgment Rites, the Enterprise encounters a ship full of mental patients attempting to land on top of a Federation colony. The ship's passengers range from the mostly-sane (Moll) to the dangerously paranoid (Tuskin), the child-like adult (Jakesy) and even the outright delusional (the "King"), none of whom have any idea where they're from, why they're on the ship, nor where it is going. To make matters worse, the most unhinged of them all is the ship's computer, known as the Phays, who simultaneously recognizes Kirk and the others as outside visitors while also spending most of its time trying to convince them to eat something as though they were mental patients too.
• Street Fighter IV:
  • Sakura with most of her victory quotes, such as asking Chun-Li if they could switch outfits for a day for fun. After beating the snot out of her.
  • Rufus, with his victory quotes often being nothing but random ramblings about his life, confusing opponents for Ken, or occasional Lampshade Hanging on character traits like Chun-Li's hips. Again, after beating the snot out of people.
• The Suffering gives you a drugged-out and half-naked teenager out of his mind, begging you (who he thinks is his father, in his overdose-laden delusions) to protect him and help him to safety.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Booster from Super Mario RPG is a very weird guy, doing things like riding a train only to walk back to where he came from, personally handing you a key to a room he presumably doesn't want you entering once you've solved a puzzle, taking a long time to notice Mario standing right in front of him, or being confused by the salty liquid coming out of Princess Peach's face, despite previously experiencing Ocular Gushers himself. Despite being set up as the bad guy who kidnapped Peach and forces her to marry him, once his wedding is interrupted and Peach is rescued, he's still perfectly satisfied since he got to eat cake.
  • Many characters in the Mario RPGs are somewhat like this, but maybe the biggest case is the Pixls from Super Paper Mario (except Tippi). They don't get much dialogue, but each one has an opening speech when you first meet them that is full of random questions and nonsensical language which has little to do with your quest at hand. One of them even asks you whether you like Internet shopping, which he shouldn't even know what it is. This tips slightly over into Fridge Horror when you realize that they probably got this way because they have been imprisoned in chests for hundreds or thousands of years and have most likely been driven to insanity.
  • The Mario & Luigi series on Nintendo's various handhelds features Fawful, a nonsensical weirdo who on the surface looks and sounds like a goofy bumbling minion, thanks to his swirl-eye glasses, giant grin, and tendency to speak in a combination of terribly mangled English and absurd similes. Go a little further and you'll discover that he's a Mad Scientist and The Chessmaster of all things. He exists in his own bizarre little world about 80% of the time, but he's still proven himself to be more terrifyingly competent and effective than the better portion of Mario's Rogues Gallery.

• Princess Peach can come off this at times in Super Mario Bros., her home series, but it's most pronounced in the Subspace Emissary from Super Smash Bros. Brawl. She takes a casual stroll atop the Halberd while it's being bombarded by an Arwing, and doesn't even flinch until the gun battery she's standing by is blown to smithereens. Less than a minute later, she keeps Fox and Sheik from tearing into each other... by offering them tea. Oddly, she's simultaneously a voice of reason and sanity: most of the trophies attack each other on sight, often for no clear reason, whereas Peach actually tries to keep them focused on dealing with the Subspace Army.
• The gran from Survivor: Fire: This is a woman who cooked brownies at two in the morning, then when they burned, stayed in the burning kitchen until her grandson (the player character) came to the rescue.
• Tales Series:
  • Colette Brunel from Tales of Symphonia often falls under this, especially during the skits...
    Regal: Why does the subject of the conversation seem to go out the window when talking to Colette?

    ...or during post-battle dialog.

    Sheena: And don't come back!
    Colette: I don't think they can come back.
    Sheena: You're becoming more like Lloyd, aren't you?

  • Grune from Tales of Legendia takes the cake — she doesn't even realize that she's fighting for her life, instead thinking that everybody's on a picnic. Somewhat justified in that she's got Laser-Guided Amnesia and can only remember her name (just barely) and how to speak, but still.

• A lot of the cast of Team Fortress 2 goes into this:
  • The Soldier's version of history includes the dubious fact that Noah was actually Sun Tzu, the animals were bought via fight money, and after they were on the boat, Sun Tzu beat them all up. ("And from that day forward, anytime a bunch of animals are together in one place, it's called a zoo! ...Unless it's a farm!") This was discovered during a Drill Sergeant Nasty speech to a collection of severed heads. He also joined the World War II effort — stopping in 1949 only after hearing that the war had ended. Further evidenced in the webcomic following the War Update, where the reason he is fighting the Demoman is because he managed to get fooled by an obviously faked message using the Demoman, in which he apparently reveals the Soldier's status as an actual civilian. Even after acknowledging that the voice sounds robotic, he still buys what is said. The domination taunts added by the same update are also very telling of his state of mind. He has a number of taunts where he refers to the Sniper as "Bilbo Baggins" or some variant thereof (the joke being that Sniper is Australian, and Lord of the Rings was filmed in New Zealand). Although the reveal from the comics that Sniper actually is from New Zealand makes this one an example of The Cuckoolander Was Right. Expiration Date takes it up to near-Talkative Loon levels. Among other things, he takes a bizarre glee in putting bread in the teleporter, and, for no obvious reason, wants the Spy's idea bucket.
  • The Heavy is under the impression that both his BFG (lovingly called Sasha) and sandvich are people, and talks to them a lot.
  • The Pyro. Nobody has a clue what he (or she) is saying, but they wear a number of odd hats (including a propeller beanie and one of the Engineer's rubber gloves), wield weapons like a rake and a mailbox, and "Meet the Pyro" shows that they view the mayhem they create as them blowing bubbles in a cutesy Sugar Bowl full of diapered cherub versions of their enemies.
  • In the comics, the people of Teufort have been rendered this way due to lead poisoning. Mayor Mike, in particular, does things like building a collage of things related to the forthcoming execution of the Scout and Spy and covering it in pregnancy-related stickers because those were all he had to hand, and it turns out near the end of that issue that he randomly ordered one of Teufort's residents to call himself Guiseppe and speak in a pseudo-Italian accent. The Soldier's mental instability is implied to (partly) be due to drinking the same water (or at least it made it worse), judging by his surprised reaction when Miss Pauling mentions that this is the reason she gives the team bottled water. Either that, or he's so crazy that lead poisoning has no discernible effect on his sanity.
• Tekken:
  • Bob Richards, especially in his Scenario Campaign stage, where he will accuse anyone standing with Alisa (whether they are men, women, girls younger than her, bears, or wooden dummies) of kidnapping her, mindless of her protests.
  • Lili de Rochefort expresses her affection for Asuka Kazama by making up convoluted schemes to get her into a fight. She also usually thinks in terms of what she can have and what she cannot have, people being included in the first category.

• The Touch Detective games has Penelope, a banana-loving girl who is a Cloudcuckoolander to the point that her very hair is soft and fluffy and cloud-like. A good example of her air-headedness is displayed in a conversation between protagonist Mackenzie and shopkeeper Daisy.
  Daisy: Well, she's been pretty quiet lately. But, I really didn't give it any thought. I mean, it's Penelope. She could wake up and say, "I'm not talking today!"
  Mackenzie: She's done that. In fact, she didn't talk for a week.
  Daisy: Really? Even to herself?
  Mackenzie: Well, she pantomimed to herself.
  Daisy: She pantomimed to herself!? She's madder than a hatter.
• Touhou Project:
  • Being a Cloudcuckoolander seems to be an inherent aspect of living in Gensoukyou. When Sanae, a human that was transported to Gensoukyou, is introduced in Mountain of Faith, she's fairly reasonable, but by Undefined Fantastic Object and Hisoutensoku, she's as unstable and unpredictable as everyone else, as well as being upgraded to player character status. Gensoukyou: the land where common sense is a weakness.
  • Yuyuko is out of touch with reality even by the series' standards, as well as an Obfuscating Stupidity version of this trope. She seems to do everything based on whimsy or her base needs and also seems to have a hard time paying attention to what's right in front of her or how others are reacting to her. It really doesn't help that she has been slowly losing her memories over the past millenium. She's sometimes shown to be extremely smart and perceptive, though. In both Imperishable Night and Ten Desires, she's shown to have figured out exactly everything since the beginning, and in the Spin-Off manga Silent Sinner in Blue, she manages to troll Yukari, of all people.
  • Another "even by Touhou standards" candidate would be Kotohime from the PC-98 game Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream, whose primary character traits are compulsively collecting random stuff and being delusional and thinking she's a police officer. Her danmaku abilities are never explained. She also displays the "uncanny understanding of the plot" aspect, as her victory quote to Chiyuri is to start reciting the Periodic Table of the Elements (despite living in Gensoukyou, where magic reigns supreme and science is heresy), and she recognizes the electrical equipment in the hypervessel.
  • Moriya Suwako often gets this treatment in fanon due to her bizarre fighting style in the fighting games and that she fights the player character out of boredom in Mountain of Faith.
  • Komeiji Koishi is, as noted by another character studying her danmaku, apparently airheaded and prone to saying random stuff. This is later revealed to be because she's essentially an Empty Shell due to closing her third eye; while she can talk and interact with people, all her words and actions are performed entirely subconsciously, and she no longer has a real personality or desires.
  • The Spin-Off gag manga Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth shows Kaguya Houraisan to be one as well. She frequently comes up with strange ideas in her spare time (and gets bored of them as easily, too) and doesn't seem to think much of abusing the Earth Rabbits... or Reisen. In one instance, when her Arch-Enemy Mokou challenges her to a duel, she ignores her completely and asks for tea.
• Many people in Tropico lives in another planet, but your personal secretary Penúltimo really takes the cake. Worst of all, either his advice turns out to be right or it actually works because the entire world is just crazy.
• Undertale:
  • While the game counts many crazy folks, the Temmies take the cake: they are all named the same (except for Bob), speak in a strange way, have their faces separated from their bodies, and always vibrate in battle. Their shopkeeper, who works to go to "cool leg", is the only one in the game who buys you your old items (something others consider economically suicidal) and when she has enough money to pay her rant, her body goes while her face stays in the shop. Her craziness takes creepy proportions after she obtains her degree, when she develops the most powerful armor in the game, whose price decreases every time you die.
  • Papyrus is a Hot-Blooded Cloudcuckoolander, being a self-assured and enthusiastic skeleton who, while helpful and well-meaning, tends to do and say some surreal stuff (even by the standards of this game).
    Papyrus: I WISH I HAD EIGHT LEGS... SO I COULD WEAR 4 PAIRS OF HOT PANTS.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines allows you to play one in the form of a Malkavian. Funny dialogue choices, even funnier if you've played the game before and know what the dialogue is normally like (and realize that the character is able to see the true plot in advance, but doesn't comprehend it). You also get the chance to have an argument with a stop sign. ("No, you stop!") And you can even spread your insanity to other people, like convincing a guard that you're a keyring so you should be given the keys. And it works. While Malks in the setting are expected to be genuinely insane and often veer into The Mad Hatter territory, in the game it is downgraded to this trope. Speaking nonsensically, Breaking the Fourth Wall, and using Insane Troll Logic as a combat ability are the only non-normal things that PC Malkavian will do, and in other aspects he/she could be just as logical and reasonable as any other PC. It's just that his/her logic is not of the normal kind.

• World of Warcraft has a ton of these:
  • Anything with Budd Nedreck present. "I'M A MANATAUR!!" anyone?
  • Every single quest Harrison Jones gives, especially the one where he pointlessly destroys an ancient Egyptian-like temple.
  • Tirion Fordring might not seem like one at first, but the guy makes you fight and kill his own people, unrestrained monsters, and demons in his own personal Thunderdome for no apparent reason. He also makes you "beat each other with pointy sticks" aka joust, quite possibly the most hated quests in the game. In another example, the guy also puts two people who won't hesitate to try and murder each other (Garrosh and Varian) within a few feet of the other one while observing his special games. He claims that this is to promote peace, but he has an encounter that does exactly the opposite with your faction fighting the other faction, for no reason at all! Perhaps his Trauma Conga Line messed with his head?

• Xenoblade Chronicles X has Mia, the last character you can recruit for your team in the game. She's a goofball and a ditz:
  • Best seen in her "Suspicious Minds" heart-to-heart, should the player choose to chatise her and try to knock her out to prevent her from breaking into the Sakuraba building!
    Mia: [at female Rook]] Stop right there, Missy! I know that look. You... you were planning to MURDER me! Well over my dead body will you murder me.
    [Rook silently explains she was just going to knock her out]
    Mia: What?? Well that's equally as bad! All my planning would be for nothing because of your foolish foolishness. Look, you're just gonna have to trust 'ol Mia.
  • Also, if you suggest she get a pet cat during her "Animal Shelter" heart-to-heart, she asks:
    Mia: Huh?? What do you mean a cat would "suit me"? Is it because I like playing with yarn? Because I do. But really, who doesn't enjoy a ball of yarn? Or is it because of my name? You know — Mia? Meow? Mia-EYOOOW?
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: ZEKE! VON! GENBU! Bringer of Chaos! He’s actually a deconstructed example. Zeke didn’t start out this way; after his father didn’t approve of his lifestyle, he ran away from home and has since been a wandering nomad. Years of isolation, aside from Pandoria, has loosened a few of his screws. Once he joins Rex and the gang, he starts to open up and become more down to earth, even if he still has his fair share of quirks.

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