Darker And Edgier / Video Games: P to S

Darker and Edgier Main Video Games Subpage
A - C | D - H | I - O | P - S | T - Z

---

P

• Pac-Man World 3 exchanges the colorful and cartoony atmosphere of the other games for a grayer and grittier look and feel with a story about preventing the universe from being destroyed.
• While PAGUI is set in haunted town infested with ghosts, the first game is a relatively fluffy series of misadventures about the 7-year-old Kid Hero eager to explore the spirit world. The sequel has some nasty revelations about the town's past (namely, being subjected to a massacre in the civil war), creepier enemies with darker backstories (like the ghost hag who captures souls of babies), and a massive tearjerker of an ending.
• Painkiller could be said to be the dark cousin to Serious Sam. Both are FPSes recreating the old-skool style of gunning down massed Mooks in War Sequences, but where Serious Sam's levels are bright and colourful with fantastic and cartoonish monsters, those of Painkiller are grim and subdued with hellish dark fantasy-style beasts. It is worth noting, though, that the two titles are done by different companies of different nationality (Croatian Croteam for Serious Sam and Polish People Can Fly for Painkiller), though, so this comparison may be the fault of a mind that thinks too much.
• Pandora: First Contact is this to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. SMAC's "good" factions included the humanitarian UN Peacekeepers, the peace-loving Gaians, and the anarchistic Data Angels, competing against the brutal and war-mongering Spartan Federation, the ruthless and authoritarian Human Hive and the fundamentalist Lord's Believers. Pandora has no such counterparts to the third, and the counterparts to the latter factions are outright evil: case in point, while the Lord's Believers have strongly Christian undertones and the occasional Jerkass Has a Point moment to make them somewhat sympathetic, their counterparts in Pandora — the Divine Ascension — are described as "the worst parts of Scientology, North Korea and Facebook" and their leader is a hypocritical cult leader who only formed her cult to amass power and blackmail material only to develop a genuine A God Am I complex due to surviving an attempt on her life.
• Parappa The Rapper was lighthearted and grounded in reality. The spin off Um Jammer Lammy manages to be both darker and Denser and Wackier. The wacky parts come from Lammy going through a series of unfortunate events that delay her from getting to her concert gig on time (learning how to put out a fire, fly a plane, make a new guitar from a tree, etc). The more mature themes involve Lammy dealing with the concept of labor and newborn babies and at one point, dying and being sent straight to hell (the North American version changes the scene from going to hell to being sent to an island with Lammy being alive).
• Patapon:
  • Patapon 3 is a rather mild example. The art style is much darker in this one and music has lots of heavy guitar riffs in it.
  • The sequel is notably darker, instead of leading an army of Patapon, the Patapon are left to 4 survivors who are tossed into a dimension filled with dark demons and must fight them off with masks that can corrupt them.
• Perfect Dark is a darker and edgier Spiritual Successor to GoldenEye (1997). The prequel, Zero, while still rather grimdark, moved in the Lighter and Softer direction.
• The original Phantasy Star was your standard science-fantasy affair, starting as a revenge story before turning towards saving the universe from an ancient evil. Things took a turn for the dark in Phantasy Star II, however, with the destruction of one of the three planets in the Algol system, then the subsequent destruction of the supercomputer that had transformed the hostile desert world of Motavia into a habitable paradise, followed by The Reveal that said supercomputer was made by a race of people from a planet called Earth as part of their plan to take over the system. By Phantasy Star IV, Motavia has reverted back to a hostile desert planet, with monsters running rampant and technological progress starting to regress.
• Police 911 is this to Lethal Enforcers 1.
• Seriously impressive considering that the R-Type series had you fighting the embodiment of evil from the start, but it wasn't until Delta that the graphics were advanced enough to really drive the point home.
• Mysteries of Fire Island is this to the original Wonderland Adventures. While the first game was just about finding the Rainbow Shards to stop some Non-Malicious Monster bad guys, MOFI has the protagonist shipwrecked on a Deserted Island trying to prevent a meteor shower, and most of his or her companions get frozen into ice cubes early on.
• Popolocrois Monogatari II. And the Japanese love it for it. And this is a highly colourful style, too.
• Portal 2, while still being as hilarious as the first game, has a noticeably darker and more serious plot.
• In Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, the likable prince of the previous game had apparently given up both shaving and nicety after years of being chased by the Dahaka, justified plot-wise by the poor treatment the prince receives from the inhabitants of the island, mostly monsters and a demon. The game also became more combat-heavy, and threw out the atmospheric Middle-Eastern soundtrack of the previous game for fist-pumping heavy metal. And the lesser antagonists are women in Stripperiffic outfits, one of whom is introduced with an extreme close-up aimed directly at her thong-clad ass. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones scaled back on the edgy while keeping the improved combat system.
• The Professor Layton series escalates in terms of the amount of violence with each installment.
  • The first game had precisely one death, which happened before the start of the game, setting the plot in motion. The second game was the same, but also had a more sinister feel to it, referring to things like pregnancy and murder. The third game ramps this up absurdly, involving a Bad Future ruled by a crime syndicate and a backstory involving a horrific accident. During the plot's climax, Clive's Humongous Mecha demolishes a good chunk of London, seemingly killing hundreds of people. The fourth game was significantly less dark than the third, but still had quite a bit of violence, especially during the Spectre's scenes. The animated film wasn't quite as dark as the games, but the plot was started by the death of a young girl, and the premise of the Anti-Villain's plan was very disturbing. The thing that prevents this film from matching the level of violence of the games is that, when the Crown Pettone is destroyed, it is at first implied that everyone aboard it was killed, but it is later revealed that the Evil Minions had loaded them into a submarine and sent them back to shore. Then the fifth game had a creepy masked man as the antagonist and set up things for the sixth game, where the characters battle against a terrorist organization, Layton’s birth father is its leader, Layton’s brother is one of his enemies, Layton’s assistant is The Mole raised by said organization, the backstory involves an ancient civilization that was wiped out by abused golems, and the main cast end up sacrificing themselves to save the world (it doesn’t stick, but still).
  • The crossover with Ace Attorney is dark by both series' standards. To mention one example of how hardcore this game can get: young girls accused of witchcraft are sealed inside a cage that looks disturbingly similar to an Iron Maiden, screaming and begging for help all the way, then plunged into a pit of fire. This is already horrifying by itself, but what makes it worse is the people's reactions. Because they are overly scared of witches and easy to refer to anything they don't understand as magic, they are quick to accuse any girl of witchcraft, rush their trials, and stubbornly refuse to listen to them. This leads to many innocent young ladies being burned to a crisp. Though it later turns out that the fire pit is fake and no-one convicted of witchcraft really dies, the real truth of the game is even worse. The event that kickstarted the plot was two children accidently killing the population of a village by fire. One was traumatised so badly her father tries to make up the story about witches to convince her she wasn't responsible, and the lies piled up to the point where he had to brainwash a town with drugs into thinking they were a medieval society. It's also part of an elaborate experiment funded by the British government, which has very disturbing implications. Once one of the girls remembers the truth, she attempts to kill herself. In front of everyone, and in the middle of gameplay, no less. Moreover, both Layton and Maya seemingly die at certain points in the game, and Phoenix crosses the Despair Event Horizon as a result.
  • Layton Brothers: Mystery Room is much darker than the main series games. Bloodless Carnage is averted, Alfendi has a nasty and creepy Split Personality, people actually die, and the villains are genuinely evil people as opposed to the sympathetic villains of the main series. In particular, the main antagonists are two serial killers.
• Psycho Soldier was your fairly typical and uncomplicated action game that brings us the team up of to Athena Asamiya (descendant of the original Athena) and Sie Kensou, who would become famous through The King of Fighters. Athena: Awakening of the Ordinary Life, however, introduces a more complicated storyline with dinosaurs, a Government Conspiracy, and quite the bit of Break the Cutie for Athena herself.
• Puyo Puyo:
  • While most of the series' games are lighthearted and comical, the fourth installment, Puyo Puyo~n, features a serious storyline, reminiscent of the Madou Monogatari games (the series which the Puyo Puyo characters originated from), and a Knight of Cerebus Big Bad, Satan or rather, Doppleganger Arle.
  • The seventh is similar, with an apocalyptic plot, which would similarly be used in the eighth. Both of them involved an antagonist in the form of Ecolo who threatened the entire world with destruction.
  • Madou Monogatari: The PC-98 ports of the original trilogy are easily the darkest games in the whole series, with grim, realistic enemy designs, an illusion of melting faces, terrifying new bosses, a headless (and far crueler) Schezo, Arle’s fingers bleeding after overusing a spell, Arle’s face bleeding, and even fatalities Arle can perform on certain enemies (such as burning a werewolf enemy alive).
  • Madou Monogatari S features a real Downer Ending, a rarity in the series. Puyo Puyo Gaiden: Puyo Wars features a larger scope than before, a more shonen and serious design sense than usual, and horrifying ex-human monstrosities as the main enemies. Madou Saturn featured a horrifying Eldritch Abomination villain brainwashing everything in sight, and decent amounts of drama between the heroes.

Q

• Quest for Glory IV. The first two games were pretty lighthearted even when things got serious, and after proving himself in the first game the hero always had allies close by to rely on, and his reputation frequently preceded him. Even in the third game, which was Bloodier and Gorier and slightly darker than before, the Hero still had Rakeesh and Uhura to count on. This time, he's completely cut off from everyone in a strange land where no one knows who he is, nor do they take kindly to his presence. He's then tasked with stopped an Eldritch Abomination in a very moody setting with lots of creepy characters and backdrops and plenty of tragic backstories to go around. Fortunately, it also manages to still retain the humor from the previous games, and is still considered possibly the best game in the series.

R

• Radiant Silvergun, the R-Type series, The Tale of ALLTYNEX (mainly RefleX), Sine Mora, and Akai Katana are all considered this when compared to other Shoot Em Ups.
• Ratchet: Deadlocked (and, Up Your Arsenal) was obviously targeted towards a more mature audience:
  • Ratchet's new outfit hides his tail (and head throughout most gameplay) and makes him look suspiciously like Samus or Master Chief. (Likely intended to be the latter, considering the era it was released in.)
  • Clank, although still having a major role, had his name removed from the western titles, partly to make the game seem less friendship-themed (but mostly because he's relegated to Mission Control for the entire game).
  • The humour is less reliant on slapstick situations compared to the first two entries.
  • The weapons are often considered more "realistic" than those in the rest of the series, although that does not say much (even by sci-fi standards).
  • The American subtitle is not an obvious innuendo like the previous two games.
• The original Rayman was packed to the brim with cheery, bright colours, silly characters and all sorts of silly things that make its sequel, Rayman 2: The Great Escape, look extremely grim in comparison. Fortunately, the latter also added an additional sense of mystery and wonder, and consistency, to Rayman's world, so it all works out. Afterwards, the slide is balanced in Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, which has dark visuals but lots of comedy, and pushed beyond the cheeriness in the Raving Rabbids series and Rayman Origins. Then Rayman Legends contains the same zany humor as Origins, but adds in a few dark and serious elements, as well as a whole series of levels that pay homage to Splinter Cell.
• Resident Evil 7: Biohazard takes the series back to focusing on horror rather than action. There's a lot more violence compared to previous games, the plot is immensely grim and disturbing, and the main character gets his hand sawed off in the first minutes of the game.
• The Resistance series is completely bleak from the get go and only gets worse with sequel for humanity.
• The Rise of the Reds mod is the Darker and Edgier Fan Sequel to Command & Conquer: Generals. It presents a very bleak and heavily militarized version of the 2040s where The War on Terror Went Horribly Wrong and caused the collapse of the global economy and the deaths of the millions of people across the globe. International diplomacy fails in catastrophic ways on a regular basis and WMDs used against civilian population centers has become just another part of conventional warfare. The United States fell into isolationism and has become The Atoner to the world it nearly destroyed. The EU collapsed (though not before it tried to become the Fourth Reich) after the resurgence of a militaristic Russia and it became a more centralized and autocratic alliance of sovereign nations known as the ECA. Russia is an aggressor waging war against Europe due to having its economic boom cut off, its colonies taken away, and simply seeing no other remedy for its problems at that point. China is a nakedly imperialistic burgeoning power. And huge swathes of Africa and the Middle East have become playgrounds for the GLA and other dangerous terrorist groups, who resort to very violent and completely insane methods to fight "Western oppression".
• Compare Robot Unicorn Attack to the sequel. The original is fabulous, while the sequel is darker. They're both over-the-top parodies, as well; The former the embodiment of Ultra Super Happy Cute Baby Fest Farmer 3000, the latter diving headlong into grimdark demonic heavy metal territory.

S

• Sacred Earth - Alternative: While Sacred Earth - Promise is a mostly optimistic and light-hearted game where no one dies, this game's demo starts with Konoe fighting her corrupted friends as a form of Mercy Kill. It also takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting where the majority of the world was destroyed through a mysterious "despair." While Promise ended fairly happily, Alternative ends with the True Konoe killing and absorbing the replica Konoe, and then destroying the world in a failed attempt to revive her family.
• Telltale's Sam & Max: Freelance Police games went from being a collection of lighthearted (but satirical) stand-alones in the first two seasons, to the much more serious and epic Season 3, The Devil's Playhouse, which (while still a total comedy) had a strong overarching plot, was less satirical, and deconstructed the Black Comedy stuff into more serious and emotionally-affecting Black Comedy. It went down really well with the fanbase, though.
• Samurai Shodown started getting gradually darker starting with the third game. Whereas the first two games were fairly lighthearted (aside of the occasional killing of your rival if you give the last slash in the right moment and spot), and the protagonist role is split between a fairly easygoing guy who just likes to get in fights (Haohmaru) and one of the poster-children for Moe characters in video games (Nakoruru), the third features the Kid Hero Shizumaru with a Dark and Troubled Past who may or may not be suffering from Demonic Possession. Further games would start introducing characters like a psychotic vengeful spirit (Basara Kubukiri) and a giant man-eating youkai (Kusageredo), while the games also started getting Bloodier and Gorier, featuring staight-up and personalised fatalities starting with the fourth game. The sixth game actually reversed all this, though, removing all fatalities and blood (though it all came back for the next installment.)
• Sengoku Basara is a game series that's known for being ridiculously over-the-top with all its character designs, Engrish, attacks, plotlines, ham, silly humour, cheese and the tendency to ignore actual history. Everything was exaggerated, and it was awesome in its own way. Then along came Sengoku Basara 3, kicking the previous poster boys out of the way and taking over with new serious plotline. Capcom also decided to be more history-accurate, making them NPC/killing off important characters along the way. Result? Previously "LET'S PARTY!" -characters overrun with angst.
• The rest of the games in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise often feel like this to fans who started with Persona 3 and 4, especially with the latter. Within the franchise itself, Persona 2 and Digital Devil Saga 2 are much darker than their predecessors. "Not that Digital Devil Saga was happy to begin with..."
• Within the later Persona titles, Persona 5 goes considerably darker than Persona 4 and its spinoffs, with characters receiving visible, bloody injuries, regular use of Body Horror, the heroes being Anti-Hero thieves, and antagonists who play entirely on natural fears. For example, an early game plot point involves one of your potential party members' friends being physically abused by one of her teachers, including implied sexual abuse, to the point she leaps to her death off the top of a school building, in full view of all her friend and other classmates. The ending is still more optimistic in tone than the decidedly bittersweet conclusions of Persona 2 and Persona 3, with the protagonist accomplishing his goals and surviving the plot.
• Shovel Knight: The "Specter of Torment" DLC is this to the main game. While Shovel Knight had a consistent tone ranging from upbeat to serious, Specter of Torment carries a more grim and morose tone what with the lead character being Undead and caring out the Big Bad's orders. Sean Velasco, the designer, compared the base game tonally to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and the DLC to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
• The Sims Medieval is darker than the older Sim games as it breaks the three rules of Simology which is no religion, no murder (you can kill people in swordfights and executing them) and no alcoholism. It also introduces some things such as breastfeeding, for instance.
• Sin and Punishment is this for Nintendo as a whole, as they wanted to produce a game that would appeal to the teens-and-up audience that Nintendo is notorious for not catering to, especially in Western markets where older gamers prefer their games to be more "badass" than "cute".
• Sly Cooper had a major shift between the first and second game. The first had Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot-like gameplay with a slightly darker story, while the second had actual thieving, a "spice" smuggling business, an evil FBI authority that tried to brainwash Carmelita, and so much more. The to-date final installment of the series features Penelope, a supporting character, being revealed as a Hans-esque sociopath who's trying to mold Bentley into her slave, and infamously ending on a Downer Ending cliffhanger.
• Not even an obscure series like Snowboard Kids can escape this trope, with the DS installment gutting nearly everything that gave the earlier games their quirky charm for the sake of appealing to teenagers. Neither the critics nor the small but dedicated fanbase were amused, which ultimately spelled doom for the franchise.
• Sonic the Hedgehog has a few examples, for a light-headed series like this:
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles, despite being very bright and colorful, is terrifying in many ways compared to the previous games that were more on the whimsical side. The very first level, taking place in a jungle, has one of Eggman's mechs napalm the whole jungle, forcing you to press on in what is now a firestorm where even the blue skies in the background is replaced by an orange haze from the fires. If you are playing Sonic 3 alone, the Final Boss battle has the skies grow dark as menacing music plays for the fight. (The same music also plays for the second to last boss fight in the complete version of the game.) Sandopolis Zone Act 2 takes place entirely inside a pyramid, with ghosts floating around you who grow bigger and more menacing as it gets darker, until they grow demonic horns and start spawning and attacking you from all directions nonstop. The Lava Reef Zone boss battle has you falling into a volcano with the Death Egg ominously looming high above you face down with a creepy shading. As soon as you land on a platform just a few feet above the lava, huge blinding death rays shoot out of the Death Egg's eyes, burning parts of the platform and igniting the volcano, forcing you to escape through a burning inferno. If you collect all Chaos/Super Emeralds in the complete game, the climax of the battle between Sonic and Eggman takes place in outer space with Super or Hyper Sonic giving chase as this music plays. Should Sonic run out of rings here, he dies by falling to the Earth. Knuckles' final boss fight itself isn't horrifying, but the background event during the fight is; Angel Island is tilting side to side as if it's struggling to stay in the air and is slowly falling down as the fight drags on. The 10 minute time limit you usually get for each level also doubles as the time limit for the island before it falls down completely. Yikes.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog CD has Bad Future versions of each of its zones, and creepy unlockable artwork. Also, the American release had some very scary boss and game over music, in contrast to their upbeat counterparts from the JPN/EUR release.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball is based on Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) and features a much darker aesthetic than the main series games. One of the bosses actually shows the animal robotization process in horrid detail.
  • The Sonic Adventure series goes beyond Sonic games prior to it in intensity as the games adopt a more realistic and cinematic feel. The first ends with the large-scale destruction of a modern city by a creature reacting to atrocities committed by an ancient civilization led by a tyrannical leader who was also an abusive father. The second surpasses that by dealing with use of "weapons of mass destruction" (and yes, they are actually called that in the game) to threaten whole countries, a military conspiracy involving the deaths of numerous innocents in a space colony, and threats to the survival of the world from anguished people with a vendetta against it. A case can be made for this game's 'Final Story' being the grimmest part of any game in the Sonic series. Gerald Robotnik's diary detailing his reaction to the loss of his granddaughter Maria is pure horror, containing such lovely lines as "I lost everything, I had nothing more to live for, I WENT INSANE!" (this part is helped by the fact that Gerald's voice actor was actually really good).
  • Shadow the Hedgehog takes place during an alien invasion with Sonic's rival Shadow suffering from amnesia and caught in the middle of a four way conflict between Sonic, Eggman, the military, and the aliens. The game expands upon the space colony incident from Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow can choose to be Good, Evil, or Neutral with branching endings and a Karma Meter based on the missions you choose to complete. The game is also a Third-Person Shooter hybrid and features Shadow uttering mild swear words like "damn" and "hell" when he gets hit.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) attempts to toss Sonic into a hyper-realistic world, where he protects a princess who is the container of Iblis, one half of Solaris, a time god from Eggman. Along the way, he, Shadow, and Silver deal with a conspiracy where it is revealed in the final storyline Sonic dies to upset Elise to release Iblis ancient monster from her body, allowing that and the other villain, Mephiles, to merge to form Solaris, slaughtering the space-time continuum in the process. And then Elise kisses Sonic, reviving him with the power of the Chaos Emeralds, and restoring the space-time continuum from the damage dealt by Solaris, in the process.
  • ZigZagged with Sonic Lost World. The dialogue is much harsher than previous games, with multiple references to mutilation, genocide, and death. Over the course of the game, Sonic's party is steadily picked off by the Deadly Six, who take every opportunity to taunt him about it, leading Sonic to come dangerously close to the Despair Event Horizon. These all clash greatly with the game's graphics, which are the most brightly-colored and cartoony graphics ever seen in the series.
  • Sonic Forces takes place during a war where Dr. Eggman had succeeded in taking over the world and Sonic ends up being captured as a result. Dr. Eggman's dragon Infinite, proves to be an even more heinous character than previous villains in the franchise.
  • Sonic Frontiers is even darker than Forces since features enemies that are some of of the creepiest in the series with the open zone music being more passive rather than bombastic, and a regular story element of the game is watching the last days of the Ancients through the Kocos reliving their final moments, and who are explicitly Deader than Dead and were killed off to the point of the cast strongly averting Never Say "Die" repeatedly. It's to the point that the Big Bad is an Eldritch Abomination that destroys and consumes entire planets and civilizations.
• Soul Series:
  • Playing the first few games of the series, you would think that the Soul Calibur is the "good" sword to the evil of Soul Edge, right? Not as of IV — Calibur turns out to be just a Light Is Not Good Knight Templar version of Soul Edge, seeking to create a World of Silence. Several good characters also gain darker personalities and motivations: Sophitia, in a cruel twist on Mama Bear, is forced into defending the evil sword she was previously sworn to destroy to save her daughter's life; Maxi, a funny and plucky fellow, becomes driven to the brink of madness by his quest for revenge against Astaroth and nearly takes up Soul Edge himself; Taki becomes a cold bitch who murders Siegfried to prevent his attempt to create a utopia going horribly wrong; and Siegfried himself is shown as becoming increasingly insane and suicidal, his ending resulting in Soul Calibur locking all of humanity in crystal stasis, not to mention killing him.
  • V is set seventeen years after the events of IV and deals with the widespread slaughter and persecution of those who are and are accused of being "Malfested". Sophitia is implied to have been murdered by Tira, and her two children, Patroklos and Pyrrha, are the focus of the story. Several other characters have disappeared from the story, their whereabouts unknown. Soulcalibur VI reveals through the surprise appearance of Original Timeline!Cassandra that the events of V are a Bad Future that the characters in the past should try to avoid.
  • Yoshimitsu in VI is by far the darkest iteration of the character yet. Though still a strange fighter, his Chronicle is the story of a man whose people were slaughtered and nearly falls into the moral abyss in his quest to avenge them, only narrowly stopping himself before he falls. In his own words, "(his) hatred has turned him into a demon" and it's entirely possible he wasn't speaking figuratively.
• The unofficial patches for Spacebase DF-9 by Derelict games brings the game into this territory. The villain is switched out from "Space Pirate Megafleet" to "Malevolent Dictator of the Galaxy", it turns your security guards murderous (kills civilians who break down into a tantrum instead of just incapacitating them, no questions asked), and introduces raiders who try to trick you into letting them approach your base. Also, lots of gratuitous body horror.
• Spec Ops: The Line is an example of this both for the Spec Ops franchise (of which it is a kind of Continuity Reboot) and for the modern military shooter genre in general, for which it serves as a Genre Deconstruction by examining in detail the brutality and horrors of war that more straightforward entries in the genre tend to overlook.
• Past Spider-Man games had massive destruction, but no notable deaths, or saved the dark stuff for alternate timelines. Spider-Man (PS4) sees realistic terrorist attacks and bioweapons deployed, which cause the respective deaths of Jefferson Davis and Aunt May.
• Splatoon:
  • Splatoon 2 is this to the first Splatoon. Its plot involves Callie having gone missing and her cousin Marie trying to find her. Simple enough, until it turns out that Callie has been kidnapped and brainwashed by the Big Bad of the previous game. But that has nothing on the Octo Expansion DLC; the list starts with "you have a bag of cyan ink strapped to your back at all times" and goes around the block to "you and Captain Cuttlefish narrowly avoid getting blended into primordial ooze" to "the Final Boss requires you to save the world from a giant statue of a human head with a Wave-Motion Gun designed to wipe out civilization as you know it".
  • Splatoon 3 initially seems like it's up to the more lighthearted antics of the first game's campaign, but then your character finds themselves in what was the last bastion of humanity before they wiped themselves out for good, which the game's Apocalyptic Logs proceed to describe far more directly and in detail than previous entries. Additionally, the Big Bad this time around is attempting to drop a rocket on Earth in order to spread a virulant ooze that will effectively destroy almost all currently existing life on the planet, with the baddie himself being the Sole Survivor of another one of humanity's doomed attempts to preserve life from pre-apocalyptic Earth.
• Spyro the Dragon: The classic series has a very comical, lighthearted tone, and follows a cute dragon fighting hilarious freaks who mostly run away from him, and you regain health by collecting butterflies. Its spinoffs deviate from this to various degrees:
  • The Legend of Spyro:
    • In general, the series is much darker than the classic one. The first game begins with the Dragon Realms already in the middle of a long war, where Spyro and Cynder's entire generation were slaughtered as eggs, and the series afterwards follows a long, difficult quest to prevent the return of an ancient, monstrous evil. However, the first two games retain a cartoony art style, and various jokes, humorous banter, Punny Names and goofy character designs offset the more serious moments.
    • The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon is this compared to the Legend trilogy as a whole. It drops the first two games' cartoony art style for a much more realistic and detailed one, uses far less humor than its prequels, gives much closer attention to the war and devastation caused by the villain, and one character burns to death — yes, offscreen, but still. Malefor alone is much darker than most of the Classic villains and is an Omnicidal Maniac trying to destroy the world.
  • Skylanders returns to the lighthearted side for the most part, although it retains a greater focus on storytelling and more serious and threatening villains.
• Star Fox:
  • The series continuously bounces between this and Lighter and Softer. The lighter games are Star Fox 64, Star Fox Adventures, and Star Fox Zero, all containing amusing dialogue spoken in rather dire situations. The darker games are Assault (following Adventures) and the original SNES game to a degree; in the latter, virtually no humor exists, and when your wingmen are shot down, they're Killed Off for Real. The former features a Hive Mind assimilation plot leading to the end of the universe as we know it, and rather painful sacrifices on the parts of Peppy and the Star Wolf Team, but they manage to survive. Command is somewhere in the middle; cheesy dialogue and story with rather questionable Multiple Endings.
  • Star Fox 2 is dark by the fact that interplanetary ballistic missiles are used to destroy Corneria. To top it off, the game is on a time limit of sorts. Don't take out the missiles, and Corneria is hopelessly glassed.
  • The original Dinosaur Planet is this compared to Star Fox Adventures, featuring a lot more on-screen death, moral ambiguity, and an overall gloomier and more somber atmosphere and tone.
• Star Wars: Republic Commando is dark to the point where some people complained it wasn't very Star Wars-like. For starters, no Opening Crawl is present, and there is blood and gore in heavy levels for a T-rated game. It's a first-person shooter in which you play as a clone trooper, and the scale, far from epic, is outright tiny.
• Streets of Rage isn't a lighthearted series by any means since it involved fighting gangs and beating them with weapons like bats and pipes. The third game takes the edge up a few notches by making the graphics more gritty and realistic, making the soundtrack more subdued, and having the plot involve terrorism by destroying a city with bombs. Should you fail to beat the Final Boss in time, the bombs go off and, if playing in the Japanese version, you get to see a picture of the aftermath. The Japanese version is even darker due to The Syndicate wanting to Kill and Replace a general with a robotic duplicate in order to instigate a war between two countries and the bombs from the English version are nuclear bombs in the Japanese version. Even the introduction shows the city getting enveloped by the nuclear bomb's flash!
• Super Robot Wars had a slightly Darker And Edgier tone with Z being that a famous hero of an original franchise is given an evil spinoff. You can't save both psycho girls from Gundam and the bad ending route is possible again. This is as far as they go.
  • It only gets really Darker And Edgier if you pick Setsuko's route. Rand's route has several Camp elements and mostly considered light hearted. But Setsuko's route is just throwing you lots and lots of Break the Cutie moments to the poor heroine, and in the end... she doesn't get completely better...
  • It is darker compared to past games. There are personality issues and infighting with nearly all the members or your team for most of the game, you are duped and betrayed several times throughout the game. The villain who does the worst things is arguably the kindest since he isn't a psycho in it for the evil. Also your team at one point splits into factions and tries to kill each other with no Brainwashing involved. And the ending is bittersweet as some people are lost. It's pretty dark.
  • You actually can save both crazy Gundam girls if you plan carefully. Compare it to SRW A, where you are forced to choose between Master Asia and Gai Daigoji and can't save both no matter how hard you try. The storyline of Z is still dark as far as SRW games go, though.
  • Super Robot Wars Z2 continues the dark trend with some Doomed by Canon to boot!
• Super Smash Bros. in general is darker than some of Nintendo's cuter franchises by way of featuring them in a fighting game. To count the examples;
  • The first game was a cartoony fighting game with cute Nintendo characters and cartoony sound effects, and the artwork was done in a comic book style. The sequel, Melee, is not as cartoony, has more realistic sound effects, the characters have more realistic appearances, and truly villainous characters are playable for the first time (not counting Donkey Kong); it also introduced twisted and bizarre bosses like Crazy Hand and Giga Bowser. The second sequel, Brawl, goes as far as to portray the characters as more aggressive, even the happy-go-lucky ones like Yoshi and Mario. Two of the newcomers have stuff that may be considered "inappropriate" for a Nintendo game: Wario with his potty humor flatulence attack, and Solid Snake not only comes from a game series known for its violence, one of his grab attacks is actually similar to a garrotte take-down, and his Final Smash is a grenade launcher.
  • In Melee, Adventure Mode is a short 12-level story in which the selected character goes through various different universes, fighting characters in each of them. The whole Adventure Mode in Brawl, in comparison, is a very intricate 31-level campaign that consists of the Subspace story, where mysterious villains detonate shadow nukes in order to draw large pieces of the world into a mysterious void. The first enemies you meet crawl out of a black mass, looking eerily like zombies at first. Some cutscenes are very dark, such as the one where Ness is kidnapped by Wario in an abandoned park, the one where the ROBs look sadly down because they have to blow themselves up in order to trigger the nukes, the one where characters get possessed, and the one where Tabuu takes out all the heroes in one attack. And finally, Ridley from Metroid manages to top even his primary appearances in violence, by grabbing Samus and then grinding her against a wall in an attempt to crack her Power Suit. Her head rattles violently back and forth, and she is clearly helpless. This move was wicked enough to later make a canon appearance in Metroid: Other M.
  • The Adventure Mode for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has one of the darkest opening sequences in the series history, such that it has drawn comparisons with Avengers: Infinity War: all of the characters face off against a mysterious entity known as Galeem and its army of Master Hands, only for the hands to suddenly convert into energy bolts and launch out at the heroes, wiping out almost the entire playable cast and every other living being in the entire universe. The Sole Survivor is Kirby, who just barely managed to escape with a Warp Star, but now he finds himself alone in a desolate universe, his trophified friends used as templates to make an army of Puppet Fighters for Galeem to force disembodied spirits into servitude. That alone is dark enough, but it's not even getting into the second half of the story mode that sees the story and title of Big Bad getting hijacked by Galeem's dark counterpart Dharkon, who is quite possibly one of the most terrifying-looking villains that Nintendo has ever created, and the two bad endings you receive if you defeat Galeem or Dharkon but not the other. The losing Big Bad is violently finished off by the surviving one, who then goes on to destroy the heroes and the rest of the world. Galeem's ending is more of a Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending where Galeem finishes what he started, this time with not even Kirby able to escape. Dharkon's ending features a shot of Mario silently dropping to the ground (either in despair or dying) all alone as the universe around him decays and falls into eternal darkness.
• Syphon Filter was already rather dark to begin with, but Logan's Shadow especially turns up the angst factor, with the IPCA shut down, Logan sent on a botched mission by corrupt bureaucrat Robert Cordell, Lian accused of treason by Cordell, and Logan's and Teresa's possible death at the end. Ironically, it has a T rating, as opposed to the M rating of previous games.
• System Shock has a very early '90s cyberpunk aesthetic with lots of bright colors and a bumping Industrial Rock soundtrack. Tri Optimum isn't an evil corporation yet and aside from Edward Diego their personnel are reasonable and helpful. System Shock 2 is a straight-up Survival Horror game, everything is dark and grey, Tri Op is a predatory Evil, Inc. who literally own America and most of the globe, and technology seems to have regressed significantly.

---