Cruel Mercy / Video Games

Moments of Cruel Mercy in Video Games.

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• The end of the last mission in Advance Wars: Dual Strike has something like this. If the player chooses "Yes" when Jake has to kill Von Bolt, Jake is handed a gun from Hawke, who shoots the Big Bad himself if Jake can't bring himself to (if the player chooses "No"). Jake doesn't hesitate, and shoots Von Bolt's chair, which is about to revive the Grand Bolt the good guys defeated earlier. When asked by Von Bolt why he didn't kill him, Jake states that he didn't want him dead while everyone else cleaned up his mess. Von Bolt is left as the decrepit old man he is and now has to answer for what he's done.
  Jake: Welcome to natural selection, chump!
• In Alpha Protocol Mike has the option to spare whoever the final boss turns out to be, knowing they'll be dragged through courtroom after courtroom for the rest of their lives, watching while their empire crumbles.
• In Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel, Alpha and Bravo are hell-bent on killing Salem for betraying them, even though Rios insists on taking him in alive. After defeating him in the final boss battle, however, they instead decide to leave him to the Mexican authorities, who sentence him to life imprisonment.
• In Assassin's Creed II, Ezio does this to Rodrigo Borgia, the man behind the conspiracy that killed his father and brothers as a youth. At first Ezio sought revenge by fighting the Templars and dismantling Rodrigo's plans over the course of twenty years, only for him to go into hiding and eventually resurface as Pope Alexander VI, vested with virtually unlimited political and religious power to help the Templars further consolidate their control over Europe. Not that this stops Ezio, though, as he decides to take the fight to the Vatican and try to publicly assassinate Rodrigo. Ezio accidentally gives Rodrigo the Apple of Eden needed to open the Vault, the greatest dark secret of Christianity - the key to usurping God... and Rodrigo fails. He isn't the chosen Prophet, he can't open the Vault even with two Pieces of Eden. After getting his ass beaten by Ezio, Rodrigo begs Ezio to Get It Over With. Ezio responds by sparing Rodrigo, and then opening the Vault himself, seizing the destiny Rodrigo craved his whole life. The real reason is of course that Alexander VI's actual date of death wouldn't be for another few years.
  • However, in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood Machiavelli chews out Ezio for leaving Rodrigo alive since after all's said and done, the Borgia are still in power and are still major threats to the Assassins. In fact, it leads to Rodrigo's son Cesare leading an assault on Monteriggioni and killing his uncle Mario. Ezio later states that because of this, he's not going to make the same mistake twice. Meanwhile, it got worse for Rodrigo, as his role became nothing more than a figurehead for his son Cesare. Finally, when Cesare kills him (to prevent his role from influencing opposition to his cause), it was Ezio, of all people, who comes to comfort him in his dying moments, and this played as the climax of Ezio's Character Development, showing how he has transcended his desire for vengeance, having decided that everything he does, however bloody, will always be for the greater good.
• In Assassin's Creed Rogue, this is Achilles' fate. Haytham opts to kill him but Shay convinces him to spare Achilles because even a world of absolute order needs mercy to ensure peace. Haytham then kneecaps Achilles with a pistol, leaving him permanently crippled without any loyal Assassins to run the Colonial Brotherhood and the knowledge that it was all his fault for not listening to Shay. By the time he's seen again in Assassin's Creed III, he has become a lonely, cynical old man who has given up on the Brotherhood entirely. At least until Connor visits him.
• Near the end of the first Baldur's Gate, with about three battles left in the game, you can meet Sarevok's mentor, cast aside and too injured to move. He expected to die in Sarevok's ascension to godhood and go down in history as its architect, but you have the option to leave him alive to watch his plans crumble and eventually die in obscurity (without the option to surrender).
• In Baldur's Gate II, this is what unleashed Irenicus, courtesy of the elves who thought that rendering him mortal, with a short human life and stripped of most of his power, instead of simply killing him for his sacrilege, would have taught him a lesson. However, it backfired. What doesn't make this instead a case of Fate Worse than Death is that Queen Ellesime hoped for him to ultimately learn the value of life with his mortality.
• Batman: Arkham Knight: This almost happens to Batman courtesy of Scarecrow. After revealing Batman's secret identity and injecting him with enough Fear Titan to drive him insane, Scarecrow was going to let Batman leave, knowing he would try to stop the destruction of Gotham but be too broken to succeed. Unbeknownst to Scarecrow, he'd done something even worse - he turned Bruce into Joker through a side-effect of combining Fear Titan with its viral precursor Lazarus, meaning Bruce would be Forced to Watch as his insane villainous alter-ego used Batman's skill and technology to lay waste to America. Luckily, Joker is dumb enough to goad Scarecrow into undoing their combined Near-Villain Victory.
• Bioshock 2: If the player harvests at least one Little Sister but chooses to spare Grace, Stanley, and Gil, then Eleanor will cite this trope when she rescues her mother Sofia in the ending, saying that living with the knowledge that her plans have been ruined and her daughter has rejected her is a much worse punishment than dying.
  • Stanley Poole's fate should you choose to spare him also qualifies. He can't hide in the booth anymore thanks to Sofia remotely opening it to goad Delta into killing him, and he doesn't appear to be the kind of person who can handle themselves in a fight. His only options are either dying of starvation, getting killed by Splicers, or drowning when the dome protecting Rapture gives way and floods the city.
• In BioShock Infinite you have the choice on whether or not to kill Cornelius Slate. If you spare him, Booker remarks it "was no mercy" since Comstock's men will arrive any second and drag him off for Cold-Blooded Torture. Sure enough, if he lives, you find him in a cell, lobotomized.
• In the opening cinematic of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, the vampire Vorador gruesomely slaughters six of the members of the Circle before their guardian Malek the Paladin can arrive to try and save them. Then when Malek is staring in horror at what Vorador has wrought, Vorador materialises behind him and apparently knocks him out (although later in the game, Vorador himself retells the story to Kain and Malek didn't, in fact, get knocked out and fought Vorador, but Vorador defeated him in open combat). He could have easily butchered Malek (and has good reason to, as Malek is a Sarafan warrior priest who exists to exterminate the vampires), but he knows Malek will suffer more if he's left to live with the disgrace of his failure and simply teleports away. And he's right — as punishment for failing to protect the Circle, the necromancer Mortanius tears Malek's soul from his body and binds it to his empty suit of armour, denying him all the pleasures of the flesh while condemning him to serve the Circle forever. It doesn't come back to bite Vorador either, as despite Malek's new status making him indestructible to protagonist Kain when he encounters the now-immortal guardian, he's still no match for Vorador when Kain calls on him for help.
• This happens in the Golden Ending of Call of Duty: Black Ops II. If the player spares Menendez, he doesn't get martyred for Cordis Die like he wanted to. In addition, all of his plans unravel, and he has to watch the people who did it from inside of his cell mock him on late-night TV.
  • This seems to be Menendez' modus operandi, along with Disproportionate Retribution and Knee-capping: take his grief out on everyone close to those who have wronged him, while leaving his actual targets to "suffer with him". Case in point, he has multiple opportunities to kill Woods for the death of his sister and flat out tells David, the SEAL commander leading the worldwide manhunt for him, that he will not kill him several times, getting more satisfaction by tricking Woods into murdering his best friend and grooming David into being the Unwitting Pawn in his plan to destroy America and the First World. Woods puts it best:
    Woods: The dead don't suffer, kid. That's why you and I are still here.
• Most of the Parasites in The Cat Lady end up dead by the end of the story, but you can choose to spare one of them: Eye of Adam, the crippled suicide cult leader who tries to goad Mitzi into ending his life. If you can talk her out of it, he spends the rest of his life in a care home, denied both the death he craves and the computer he needs to interact with the rest of the world.
• One way to avoid massive diplomatic penalties when waging war in Civilization 5 is to declare peace once your opponent is down to one non-capital city in the middle of nowhere. Not only will your opponent most likely cease to be a threat for the rest of the game, but there's always a chance another civ will simply finish them off while they're weak and take the warmonger penalty for you (bonus points if they were complaining about your warmongering earlier).
• Cyberpunk 2077: V can choose to spare the final boss Adam Smasher so he can watch as his reputation goes down the toilet from failing to protect Arasaka's crown jewel from a brain-damaged nobody, and then get systemically ripped apart by the higher-ups for (at least in The Devil ending) siding with a traitorous mole 'because it would be more fun'.
• Subverted in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade: Eliphas the Inheritor is confronted by a daemon who blows off his attempts to place the blame on his followers but instead of torturing him in good-old Chaos fashion, simply kills him outright.
  Eliphas: No! I will NOT go to the Basilica of Torment again!
  Daemon: Fear not, Apostle. The Basilica is reserved for those who may redeem themselves. You will have no such chance!
• Also subverted at the end of the ork campaign of Dawn of War II: Retribution: Kaptinn Bluddflagg sneaks up (somehow) on Inquisitor Adrastia, insults her, takes her hat, and... leaves. To the good Kaptin it is a Cruel Mercy because treating someone as Not Worth Killing is the worst insult an Ork knows, while to the Inquisitor it's simply a matter of getting a new hat and wounded pride (she'd originally tried to hire Bluddflagg to kill the Big Bad in exchange for fighting three Imperial regiments wherever he wanted. He agreed, but he wanted her hat as well, which spoiled the deal).
• In the second Digital Devil Saga, Cielo spares Earth after he fails to defeat the party for a third time, even after devouring his teammates. With this act of mercy, Earth is left alone, painfully aware of what his desire for strength has cost him, and must live to bear the weight of his karma.
• Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice: In the 'normal' ending of after defeating Super Hero Aurum, who orchestrated everything that happened in the game, the defeated boss asks Mao to kill him. Mao refuses, and instead drags Aurum home to his lab to 'experiment' on him, presumably to unlock the secret of his One-Winged Angel transformation. You see him briefly during the credit roll, and he looks... decidedly uncomfortable. This is particularly amusing in that Aurum THOUGHT he was performing a Xanatos Gambit — if he had defeated Mao, he would have been famous and revered throughout the world as the hero who slew The Overlord, and if he lost, he got the glorious death he'd always wanted... shame it didn't work out that way, huh?
  • Played with in the original, where Flonne wants Laharl to throw a fight against the ghost of a hero so that he can rest in peace after defeating a Demon Overlord, but Laharl refuses and fights with everything he has, defeating the ghost. The ghost then thanks Laharl for the battle, pointing out that the only heroic death is to fall against a mighty opponent; Flonne was unknowingly promoting Cruel Mercy, while Laharl was being mercifully cruel.
  • Disgaea 4 gives us Nemo, an Omnicidal Maniac who firmly believes Humans Are the Real Monsters and seeks to wipe out Earth (which will mean the end of Celestia and the Netherworld as well). When he finally discovers that Artina, the one example of Incorruptible Pure Pureness he ever encountered in this Crapsack World, is "alive" as an angel, he relents and tries to pull a Redemption Equals Death. Specifically, this will mean the destruction of his soul. The heroes decide that this is not sufficient punishment for his crimes, and instead give him a normal death so that he will be reincarnated as a Prinny and be forced to work off his karmic debt. They then cheerfully list the horrible labors they will have him endure for eons. In a mild subversion, Nemo accepts this and the end credits show him as a Prinny looking up at the Red Moon (signifying his eventual reincarnation).
• Dishonored has been billed as a game about assassination in which you don't actually have to kill anyone. You can do a full Pacifist Run, but the targets still need to be "neutralized" in some way or another. There's a non-lethal option for dealing with each individual target, which is often a Fate Worse than Death and possibly quite ironic.
  • High Overseer Thaddeus Campbell: Branding him with the heretic sign of his own religious order, rendering him into a social pariah. And then he catches The Plague.
  • Morgan and Custis Pendleton: Arranging a criminal to disfigure them, cut their tongues, and put them to work in their own slave mines.
  • Lady Boyle: Handing her over to a Stalker with a Crush, never to be seen again.
  • Lord Regent Hiram Burrows: Exposing his crimes to the public, ruining him and getting executed by his former subjects.
  • Averted however in the case of Daud, where sparing him is considered either a legitimate act of mercy (if you beat him in a fight) or simply sending him a message (if you pickpocket/sneak by him).
  • The DLCs with Daud continue this tradition. Bundry Rothwild: Torturing him in his own interrogation chair and then locking him in a crate of his own design that's bound for a voyage set to last for many months.
  • Arnold Timsh: Evicting him from his home, getting all of his property and assets seized by the government, and being thrown into Coldridge Prison for good measure.
  • Edgar Wakefield: Can be simply knocked out... and left to the mercy of the savage and cannibalistic captain he mutinied against.
  • While not a target, keeping Mortimer Hat (aka The Geezer) alive while crippled and on life support as a figurehead leader of the Hatters actually being run by his caretaker Nurse Trimble is not a nice thing for Daud to do.
  • Delilah: Trapping her as an inanimate island within the Void for all eternity... At least until she escapes several years later.
  • And once again, it's averted in the case of Billie Lurk, where sparing her is a genuine act of mercy.
• Dishonored 2 continues the tradition of non-lethally neutralizing enemies, often with a side of poetic justice.
  • Mortimer Ramsey: Locking him in the Empress' secret chambers with the imperial coffers and taking the key with you so there's no way for him to get out. He's found after twelve days...by Big Bad Delilah, who turns him to stone for letting you escape.
  • Kirin Jindosh: Using an electroshock chair he created to functionally lobotomize him.
  • Breanna Ashworth: Tampering with her magical device so that it drains her of her powers, rendering her useless to Delilah.
  • Luca Abele: Get his more sane and humane body double to switch places with him, who will have him committed to an asylum.
  • While the Dust District has no mandatory targets required to complete the mission, delivering one gang leader to the other alive (whether Paolo or Vice Overseer Byrne) means that the winning side will get a hand in ruling Karnaca afterwards while the losing side is clearly out of power. Alternatively, the player can choose to knock them both out and place them in crates to have them exiled to the mines.
  • Once again, it's subverted with the case of the Crown-Killer, in which you cure Alexandra Hypatia of her Superpowered Evil Side and Aramis Stilton, where ensuring that he doesn't go mad in the past changes history for the better. Delilah's fate is debatable since you trap her in the Void once again, but this time in a world where she'll forever live out her fantasies of being Empress.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins itself allows you to do this to several characters, to include Sten (though the option is less about outright killing him, and more about leaving him in his cage to die later), Jowan, Zevran (who enters into a "service contract" with you afterwards), and Loghain, in exchange for him serving you and the Grey Wardens, no less. There are other potential instances, such as Branka, though the cruelness of them comes down to YMMV.
  • In Dragon Age II, there is a way to do this to Anders. He fully expects to be executed and die as a martyr after blowing up the Chantry and enticing a full-on civil war between the Templars and Mages, and if released from custody will try to die in battle anyway if you side with the Templars. But if the Champion has a full Rivalry meter with him, s/he can convince Anders that he must atone for what he did, freeing him and keeping him in the party while you help the Templars exterminate every mage in the tower. Siding with the mages makes the mercy less cruel, but the "martyrdom would be the easy way out" aspect is still there. Writer Jennifer Hepler stated in an interview that she believed this fate would be "poetic justice".
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition, continuing with the tradition, has this for the Grand Duchess Florianne. One option is to spare her life and sentence her to serve as the Inquisition's jester, denying her all her wealth and fancy clothes, ruining her reputation, making her a laughingstock in both Orlais and the Inquisition fortress, and forcing her to wear flat shoes.
• Near the end of Dragon Quest VIII, Angelo saves Marcello from a Disney Villain Death. Given that he had just given a massive "The Reason You Suck" Speech to a crowded amphitheater that veered into Evil Gloating, then was possessed by Rhapthrone and resurrected the demon's body in front of said crowd, leaving his ambition, reputation, and everything he'd spent his entire life working for in tatters... yeah, death would've been kinder. Getting saved by the half-brother he despised was just another kick in the side at that point.
• In the canon ending of Drakengard, Caim doesn't kill Manah after defeating her, instead opting to personally drag her around the entire country and tell everyone that they meet that everything that has happened was entirely her fault (well, figuratively 'telling': Caim's mute. Presumably he uses Sign Language, or 'interpretive brutal murder'). Caim, being Caim, is making a traumatized formerly-possessed 6-year-old with abandonment issues walk from village to village in the cold and the rain, just so that everybody she meets will hate her, and this is in character for him. In the end, she stabs him in the eye and jumps off a cliff to escape. When they meet again in the sequel, she utterly freaks out at the sight of him.
• In Drakengard 3, after Zero kills Four, Decadus begs to die alongside his former mistress. Zero tells him that she kills her sisters and takes their men as her own and expects him to be prepared for a busy night. Granted, things end up working out for him in the end.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, Cass' companion quest involves taking revenge on two groups of people who wiped out her caravan. Cass initially wants to take a direct, violent approach, but you can instead offer to uncover evidence of the conspiracy and pass it along to the NCR. Though Cass is initially disappointed, she'll decide that the NCR's legal procedures will do more harm to her enemies than a faceful of buckshot ever could.
  • Once you pop Mr. House out of his life-support chamber, you'll have three options for how to deal with him — simply killing him, setting his equipment to electrocute him, or putting him back inside but cutting him off from the rest of his systems. The last choice is considered the worst since exposure to outside microbes will leave him to slowly die over the course of a year, trapped in a coffin-sized canister and unable to do anything but watch while you dismantle everything he's accomplished.
  • At the end of the Honest Hearts DLC, you'll get to help decide what the vengeful Joshua Graham does with his enemy, White Legs warchief Salt-Upon-Wounds, after crushing the rest of his tribe. Graham is all too happy to execute the tribal for his crimes (which include butchering Graham's hometown), but if your Speech skill is high enough you can exorcise his inner demons and bring some measure of peace to his soul by convincing him to let Salt-Upon-Wounds go. The ending narration reveals that despite their leader's survival, the White Legs never recover from their defeat, abandoning him and leaving him a sad, pathetic wreck of a man.
  • It's easy to overlook, but if you read the terminals left at the H&H Tools building and pay attention to the game's backstory, you can see that Mr. House did this. He was cheated out of the family hardware business by his half-brother, but started his own robotics company and became one of the most powerful industrialists on the planet. House all but took over Pre-War Vegas and dismantled the company that was his birthright on the stock market... except for that last store on the outskirts of Las Vegas, so that his half-brother would be around to see how successful House was. From the building's log entries, it's clear the experience drove him quite mad.
  • According to Mr. House, sparing General Oliver in an Independent Vegas ending either with House or you in charge counts as this. He will be forced to go back west humiliated and empty-handed as a scapegoat for leading thousands of soldiers to their deaths in an unpopular war with his chance at a political career completely destroyed. House even calculates a probability of him committing suicide from it all. The same goes for President Kimball if he's still alive, though House notes a much smaller chance of suicide.
• At the end of the "Resist" ending of Far Cry 5, the player is trapped in a bunker with Joseph Seed, who decides that rather than killing you for wiping out his cult and killing his siblings he's chosen to "forgive" you and that he'll instead try to brainwash you while the two of you wait out the radiation topside. By the time of Far Cry: New Dawn, Seed has successfully brainwashed the Deputy into becoming his personal enforcer "The Judge".
  • At the end of Far Cry: New Dawn after his new cult has been wiped out and the player is forced to put down his son after mutating into a horrible mutant, Joseph decides that all he's ever done was cause suffering in the name of God and begs you to put him out of his misery. If you don't shoot him, he'll fall to his knees and scream "Release me!" repeatedly, now forced to live with the guilt of his actions.
• Forever Home: General Barclyss of the Tren army captures a group of Auria's soldiers, and then has all but Corporal Slash brutally slaughtered in an arena, all out of spite towards the corporal for refusing to join him. When the party breaks Slash out of the prison, the latter is clearly traumatized from listening to the screams of his comrades.
• In Grand Theft Auto IV, you can do this to Darko Brevic, the man who betrayed Niko's old army unit. When Niko meets him, he is a drug-addicted, guilt-ridden wreck, who confesses to having sold out his unit's lives for a mere $1000 dollars in order to fuel his drug addiction and begs Niko to kill him. The player is thus given a choice: if Niko shoots Darko, the latter thanks him with his dying breath and the former ends up not feeling any better. If Niko spares him, he remarks that letting Darko live with his addiction and guilt is the bigger punishment, and Darko utterly loses it. Ironically, if the player chooses to spare Darko, Bernie (the other survivor of Darko's treachery) will call Niko congratulating him for having overcome his desire for revenge.
• GUN has Colton White trapping Magruder and listing all the possible ways he could kill him like cutting his fingers, slitting his throat, or jamming a cross into his good eye, in order to make him pay for his crimes such as the murders of his biological parents, his adoptive father, his love interest and his friend's mutilation. Instead, he decides to leave him there as the entire cave is collapsing because of the explosives Magruder were throwing to kill Colt.
• Gyossait: the game's Checkpoint system is based on this. The titular goddess has planted special trees around the world that resurrect the main character when something kills him. Not out of goodness, but because she wants to see him suffer instead of dying.
  "I shall wear your pain like the finest shawl, and dance before you in it."
• Deconstructed in The tale of Elwin and Shaera. The Hero defeats Lord Harke, then despite all of his crimes, spares him and locks him up, but not before delivering a long speech about how he's been humiliated and broken. Harke then somehow gets the guards to send false news of Elwin's death to Shaera, knowing that she will commit suicide. It didn't work, but it has proven that Harke is just as dangerous as a prisoner as he was with an army behind him.
• In Hitman: Absolution after interrogating Lenny Dexter, 47 has to deal with him in some way. While he's given various different ways to kill him, the easiest and perhaps cruelest way is to simply drive away and leave him in the middle of the desert, letting the heat and the vultures do his job for him.
  • In Hitman (2016), Hokkaido mission, 47 can deal with Erich Soders via a great variety of Cruel and Unusual Deaths... or he can simply destroy the extremely rare replacement heart Soders betrayed the ICA for, condemning the latter to a slow death in a hospital bed since there's no way of getting another heart in time.
  • In Hitman 3, when confronting the target of the final mission rather than simply kill him 47 can inject said target with a memory-wiping solution that effectively wipes the target's identity, causing them to lose all the power they've been chasing throughout the games. It's notable that while Arthur Edwards is completely nonchalant about being killed, he panics when faced with the above fate.
• In Iji you can bypass the second battle with Asha instead of killing him in a duel to the death. You end up crushing his ego so deeply that he kills himself in despair.
• In Ikemen Sengoku, almost all routes end with Nobunaga capturing the Big Bad Kennyo and choosing to keep him alive as a prisoner in Azuchi Castle's dungeon rather than kill him, much to Kennyo's furious despair because it means he has to live out the rest of his life in the castle of his hated enemy without ever being able to fulfill his dream of taking Nobunaga's head or even die as a martyr for his followers. The one route that inflicts this the most on Kennyo, however, is Kenshin's Romantic route where Kenshin symbolically tears open his monk robes and gives him a Breaking Speech on how he just gave him the cruelest punishment he could — forcing him to live without even being able to cling to the last remnant of his faith for comfort.
  Kenshin: You're not in my hands anymore. You'll be a guest in Azuchi's dungeons. There, you will spend every day looking down at your tattered cassock. I took the last thing you wanted to hold onto — that's my revenge on you.
• In Knights of the Old Republic, the Jedi Council spares Darth Revan's life, only to completely overwrite his personality in order to make him into their pawn.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
  • You can do this to Atris, leaving her to be driven insane by the hissing of Sith Holocrons, shortly after she's learned that she's actually evil and has been beaten within an inch of her life.
  • Kreia loves this tactic. She is quite happy to sit back and let her enemies know in great detail how badly they screwed up, but she won't destroy anyone or anything she can use, which means she'll spare them and then recruit them into whatever agenda she cares to run. It's why she advises you against killing the Jedi Masters, as it's more satisfying to make them see that they were wrong about you. Let's see, Vrook. You're on this rock that hates Jedi, but makes an exception for me because I saved the place and you didn't. Have fun. Oh, Zez-Kai, you're a broken coward living in a Wretched Hive, surrounded by every Crapsack World trope in existence and you can't manage to pick up your lightsaber and do a thing about it while I did. I'm getting stronger and will kick the Sith's arse while you sit and mope. Meditate on that for a while and get back to me.
• In Mass Effect 2, Archangel's (AKA Garrus) loyalty mission involves hunting down The Mole who betrayed his squad. When you meet the guy, you see he's an absolute mess, wracked by guilt. Subverted in that sparing his life is the nicer option — you just have to convince Archangel that killing the guy won't make him feel any better and that they both have to live with what happened that day. Letting Archangel kill him as planned, meanwhile, is played as an incredibly cold-blooded and mean-spirited move if you don't try to talk him out of it first.
  • There's an incident in Jacob's loyalty mission as well: you find Jacob's father shipwrecked on a planet with eventually deadly vegetation having set himself up with a harem of partially brain-damaged women from his crew (and besieged by the hyper-aggressive brain-damaged men thereof). The Paragon path has you bring him back to stand trial. The Neutral option is to let him go... having destroyed his camp's defences on the way in, so the feral crewmen can tear him apart. The Renegade option has you leave him, while Jacob hands him a mostly empty pistol.
  • In the second game, Aria's predecessor as the most powerful figure in Omega is kept around as a supposed adviser, but the truth is that she keeps him around as her personal trophy, with his new nickname "The Patriarch" being a Stealth Insult since to an asari it is a nonexistent and meaningless word to reflect his complete lack of power. However, it's possible to either give him some bit of comfort by either agreeing to deal with assassins coming for him on his behalf (giving him some semblance of actual power) or to convince him to deal with them himself (which at least lets him die as a krogan).
  • Aside from this, there was an instance in the Mass Effect DLC ''Bring Down the Sky" that allowed something similar. If you opt to let some hostages die in order to capture batarian terrorist Balak, you can either kill him outright or spare him. Doing the latter means taking him to the planet he'd tried to destroy to stand trial...which, incidentally, was where the hostages came from.
  • In Mass Effect 3, a sidequest revolves around a batarian terrorist (not Balak) who committed a variety of destructive acts in revenge for Shepard wiping out a batarian star system in the "Arrival" DLC of the previous game. Badly wounded from an attack on the Citadel by Cerberus, he lies in the hospital of the refugee camp and asks you to Mercy Kill him. Shepard can either turn off his life support or invoke this trope and call the nurse to come to his "aid".
• At the end of Max Payne 3, Max leaves the Big Bad alive to suffer from the massive, utter loss of everything he'd been working towards — his power, money, status, and prestige — not because of Cruel Mercy, but so that the public can know the full extent of what happened and have someone to rightly blame for it. But, just for good measure, Max gives him some immediate karma by stomping on the villain's leg, breaking it so badly that the bone sticks through his skin. It's also worth noting that the Big Bad doesn't last a week in jail before being found dead, and while the authorities rule it a suicide, it's heavily implied to have been a Vigilante Execution as retribution for his many crimes.
• Dr. Weil's punishment in the Mega Man series for starting the Elf Wars is to be converted into an unaging cyborg and be exiled to wander the wastes created by the destruction the Elf Wars caused. Seeing as he eventually went on to become the shadow dictator of Neo Arcadia and the Big Bad of the Mega Man Zero series, this probably wasn't the best idea.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain:
  • At the end of Mission 31, Big Boss and Miller come across Skull Face crushed under a collapsed radio tower, who begs them to finish him off. Instead, Big Boss and Miller elect to blow off Skull Face's arm and leg with his own lever shotgun and leave him to die slowly as revenge for Skull Face causing the destruction of MSF during the events of Ground Zeroes. Ultimately averted, as just after they have done so and are turning to leave, Huey shoots Skull Face in the head.
  • After Huey is confirmed to have betrayed both MSF and the Diamond Dogs, Venom Snake lets him live... but exiles him from Mother Base, forever known to the world as the failure he is. As one last act of spite, Venom Snake has Huey exiled on a small life raft, forcing Huey to throw his treasured mechanical legs overboard to stay afloat.
• The Golden Ending of Ghost of Thornton Hall can be interpreted this way. Nancy has the choice to save the culprit, Clara, rather than let her burn to death. However, this means that Clara will have to face justice for possibly unintentionally killing her cousin and reveal the truth to her family. Clara implores Nancy to leave her behind to die, but Nancy responds that she deserves to pay for her mistakes.
• In Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, if you shell out the absurd amount of money for Mephistopheles's True Name, you not only get to skip the final boss fight, you can bind him to your service afterwards — including the option to force him to serve as a chambermaid in an inn for all eternity.
• New Legends have the You Can't Thwart Stage One opening level. The main villain, Xao Gon, killed your father the Emperor, and as one of Xao Gon's lieutenants, General Kuun, asks if he should remove your head, Xao Gon tells him to spare you... so you can be Made a Slave in his prison camp. Complete with "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
  "Leave him his kingdom in ashes. It is a shame that your father did not share the vision I have for the New China... you (Prince Sun-Soo) shall become a symbol of treason, and spend your life living with the pain of extinction. That of your family, and your kingdom."
• In the backstory of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Staunton Vhane made a huge but well-intentioned mistake that resulted in a tremendous loss for the crusaders. Queen Galfrey was going to have him hanged for treason, but after seeing how the crusaders were howling for his head and generally acting like the demons they were supposed to be fighting, she assigned him to serve in a penal legion instead. Although it was meant as genuine mercy, Vhane eventually perceived his sentence as this, as despite working for 70 years to earn redemption he continued to be despised by nearly everyone. It's no big surprise when he eventually joins the demons for real.
• In PAYDAY 2, one of the heists, contracted by Vlad the crazy Ukrainian, involves stealing a tiara meant for the bride of his enemy, Dmitri, completely ruining the wedding. When the heist is concluded, Vlad cheers, "I could have killed wife, but why give him dead wife for short time when I can give him nag wife forever?"
• Persona 5: Ann Takamaki ultimately spares the Starter Villain, who'd been trying to coerce her into sleeping with him, and outright sexually assaulted her best friend when he lost his patience. She does this not out of kindness, but so he'll have to suffer a lifetime of shame and punishment for his sins.
• Heavily implied to be the reason Zero from Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors didn't kill Hongou despite having killed all the other people who planned the First Nonary Game. Hongou was the one Zero hated most, and that's why he was to suffer most by being tried and forced to live out the rest of his days in prison, knowing he was completely defeated.. Word of God confirms that (if "I think that's what happened" counts as confirmation).
• In the trailer for Portal 2's co-op mode, GLaDOS provides a voice-over that ends, "Don't disappoint me..." Beat "...or I'll make you wish you could die."
• In the epilogue of Red Dead Redemption, you play as Jack Marston as he's searching for Edgar Ross in order to avenge his father's murder. Eventually, you'll encounter Ross's family, who end up guiding Jack straight to Edgar himself. At this point, you can either commit a Revenge by Proxy and murder the entire Ross family...or let them live and just eliminate Edgar himself. Doing the latter forces the family to live with the untimely death of their loved one, just like Jack has been all these years. To add insult to injury, they'll also live knowing that they led Edgar's killer straight to him.
  Jack: And don't worry about a thing. I'm sure your husband will be just fine.
• Red Dead Redemption II: After you find out Jeremiah Compson was a slave-catcher during the Civil War days and once sold a woman and her child back into slavery for twenty dollars, you are free to shoot him for some positive karma... or you can just walk away and leave the sobbing old man to live out the remainder of his miserable years as a destitute drunk before he dies an unmourned nobody.
• Saints Row 2: in the Brotherhood storyline, The Boss attacks Maero's tattoo artist Matt during a live performance with his band and lets him live, but not before using the pyrotechnics on the stage to burn his guitar-playing hand.
• In Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, Sly asks Clockwerk, the owl who killed his father, why he spared Sly himself as a child since he was part of the Cooper family. Clockwerk explains that he let Sly live because he wanted to prove to the world that without the knowledge of the Thievius Raccoonus, which he stole after murdering the last fully trained Cooper, the Cooper line was nothing.
• In Starcraft, Kerrigan exhibits this on Zeratul after he kills his Matriarch who demonstrated that she was Kerri's thrall.
  Kerrigan: "I said you are free to go. I've already taken your honor. I'll let you live because I know that from now on your every waking moment will be torture. You'll never be able to forgive yourself for what I've forced you to do. And that, Zeratul, is a better revenge than I could have ever dreamed of."
  • She also showed cruel mercy to Mengsk:
    Kerrigan: "I think I'll leave you here, Arcturus, among the ashes of your precious Dominion. I want you to live to see me rise to power. And I want you to remember, in your most private moments, that it was you who set me loose in the first place."
    • As Starcraft II showed, however, that part really didn't stick: Four years later, the Dominion has become the dominant power in the Korpulu sector and Kerrigan is nowhere to be found. The campaign ends with Mengsk almost succeeding at 'fixing' his mistake. In Heart Of The Swarm, Kerrigan has also learned from this and just kills Mengsk...or at least tries to. Even with his home planet invaded and him alone while confronting Kerrigan, Mengsk still nearly kills Kerrigan again, until Raynor interrupts the party.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic:
  • Several characters (particularly the Imperial faction) have this as an option. For example, sparing Nomen Karr as the Sith Warrior means sending him back to the Jedi Council as a humiliated fallen Jedi while leaving Tarro Blood imprisoned as a Bounty Hunter means denying him an honorable death and letting him go down with the ship you're about to blow up.
  • Light-sided Imperials often use this as a justification to their crueler allies for leaving people alive. They wouldn't be able to get away with just leaving them alive for moral reasons, but have to come up with a pragmatic or evil reason to do so.
• In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Starkiller spares the life of Maris Brood after defeating her. Senator Bail Organa protests, but Starkiller says that she isn't free, the memories of what she had done will haunt her forever.
• Near the end of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, Jango Fett faces down his arch-nemesis, Montross. Aside from doggedly attempting to kill Fett and steal bounties from him, Montross was personally responsible for the deaths of both Fett's foster figure and a later mother figure. After Fett beats Montross in their final duel, the defeated man gasps that he deserves a better death than this. So Fett leaves him alive, ignoring his pleas that Jango finish him, and Montross is subsequently given the extremely ignominious death of being torn apart by feral cultists.
• The Colossi Planet Killer weapons in Stellaris include the World Cracker, Neutron Sweep, Divine Enforcer, Nanobot Diffuser. And then there is the Global Pacifier which isolates the planet from the rest of the universe with an impenetrable shield.
• Also by Valve, in Team Fortress 2's Meet The Medic, the disembodied head of the BLU Spy being stored in the fridge says "Kill me." The Medic replies with, "Later..."
• Briefly mentioned in Titan Quest when the Yellow Emperor reveals that the Telkines are rampaging around to free Typhon, strongest of the Titans. The gods banished all other Titans after defeating them, but bound Typhon in nigh-unbreakable chains beneath a mountain so for all eternity he would be chained to what he desired most but could never have.
• Near the end of Episode 2 in The Walking Dead, when zombies start swarming the farm, you can have Lee spare Danny after he is caught in a modified bear trap with no release latch (Which he made himself) as he presumably either bleeds to death or gets chewed on by the zombies. You could also spare Andrew after he has a Villainous Breakdown after realizing his mother has died, and is begging for a Mercy Kill from Lee.
  • In Season 3, you can choose to not finish off Badger after he suffers a fatal blow to the torso with a shotgun. He later succumbs to his wound and revives as a zombie.
• Towards the end of the War Within-quest in Warframe, the player is given a choice to either kill one of the Twin Queens, order Tenshin to do the dirty work, or just let her be. Even though sparing her gives the player alignment points towards the Sun (representing mercifulness and empathy as opposed to the ruthless and cruel Moon options), it's arguably even more cruel than killing her outright because, without the scepter that allowed her to Body Swap, she is doomed to suffer a slow, lingering death in her decaying body. The option to spare her outright states "Let her rot".
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, this is a possible fate for Whoreson Junior. Between having three other major crime bosses after him, his secret backing from King Radovid being pulled, and Geralt and Ciri slaughtering all his men and destroying his underworld empire, Whoreson ends up hiding in the Bits, trying to get by as a beggar and having children taunt him and throw rocks at him.
  Ciri: On the way here, I didn't know what I'd do. Killing him was definitely an option.
  Geralt: Still want to?
  Ciri: No. This is worse.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Baine Bloodhoof inflicts this in the Expanded Universe novel The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm. Baine wants to take bloody vengeance against Magatha Grimtotem ( Who is 90% responsible for the death of his father Cairne) and Garrosh Hellscream (Duped into being the other 10%). However, he also knows perfectly well that doing so will only cause division and civil war. Instead, upon defeating Magatha's attempt at a Grimtotem coup, he personally smashes her Shamanistic totems (an affront to the elements that would take a great deal of apology and abasement for Magatha to be forgiven for) after offering full pardons to the quarter or so of Grimtotem Tauren who would swear allegiance to the Horde. As for Garrosh, he puts aside Garrosh's role in events because the Tauren need the protection the Horde can offer.
  • Attempted with Garrosh by denying him a warrior's death. Unfortunately, he breaks free and tries to take over the world again.
• Ys: In the Esteria arc, Dalles is an Evil Sorcerer who has a habit of sparing the playable character right after doing something horrible to their loved ones, all so he can savor their despair and mock them for their powerlessness. His worst (albeit non-canon) moment is in Hugo's route of Ys Origin, where he slowly petrifies Epona and shatters her in order to make Hugo suffer, despite having the power to finish off the protagonist whenever he wants.

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