Deconstructed Trope / Video Games

See also Deconstruction Game.

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• BattleTech (2018) deconstructs Rightful King Returns. Kamea claims that her return to power after her uncle's coup d'etat will look like the trope in retrospect, but ultimately her successes rest on her being a better strategist, politician and spin doctor, as well as even more ruthless but less cartoonishly evil, than her uncle and not any inherent righteousness in her cause.
  • The game also examines the related trope of Written by the Winners in an unusual way: Victoria Espinosa is very aware of this trope even as the "history" is being played out. They know that the difference between a tragic martyr who did ugly-but-necessary things to set their nation on the path to prosperity and an irredeemable monster is nothing more than who wins. This drives them to Suicide by Cop when said uncle realizes he's cooked and throws in the towel, as Victoria can't live with the things she's done if they were All for Nothing.
• The Battle Cats: Angelic Sleipnir's description humorously deconstructs Vertebrate with Extra Limbs. He's the eight-legged god-horse of Norse myth... but he has to spend most of his paycheck on footwear, so he's poor and has to spend his weekends staying in and gardening.
• Call of Juarez: Gunslinger: The game is mostly a playful Reconstruction of the Spaghetti Western, but the final duel is a straight deconstruction of the Showdown at High Noon. It is not romantic, or glorious, or a fitting ending to a long stern chase, but a short, messy, brutal affair that leaves spectators horrified and disgusted and the winner unfulfilled and saddened.
• Chrono Cross mercilessly deconstructs Time Travel, specifically the Time Travel used in Chrono Trigger, by asking a simple question: "If you make it so a certain event never happened, what happens to the world, and the people in it, that came to being because of that event?"
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun deconstructed Enhance Button. The processing power the Artificial Intelligence CABAL requires in general and for this operation in particular comes from human brains and the resulting picture looks exactly like one would expect: grainy, except in the parts made up which are very smooth and Oxanna also does not know who the woman on it is, only she's a mutant.
  • Also, the sequel Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars deconstructs the concept of using giant mecha in combat; the GDI phases walkers like the Titan out of service because they are way too expensive and, on top of that, extremely vulnerable to some bloke running up and slapping a demo charge on the walker's legs.
• Condemned: Criminal Origins and Condemned 2: Bloodshot does a good job deconstructing the Vice City setting of most crime games. By placing it in a Survival Horror context, it shows just how terrifying the concept of a rotting, crime-filled metropolis with a demoralized and incompetent police force could be in real life.
• Dark Souls is not kind to golden age. Neither the Dragons nor Gwyn could let go of their "perfect eras" and did everything in their power to keep it the way it was. The result? In the case of the dragons? A gigantic war that almost completely annihilated their kind. In the case of Gwyn? well...
• Darkest Dungeon shows that going into a confined, dark space full of highly-aggressive, inhuman monsters with limited supplies takes a massive toll both physically and mentally on even the hardiest soldiers. It also shows exactly what type of people would sign up for such a quest: broken, desperate, and occasionally insane people.
• Deponia deconstructs the Kleptomaniac Hero as an aspect of Rufus's self-centered personality; his tendency to take whatever isn't nailed down to further his own schemes is a major part of why he's generally disliked, not to mention that he gets thrown in jail at one point for, you know, theft.
• While Shin Megami Tensei was always a darker version of Mons (despite preceding Pokémon by several years), Devil Survivor took it to Shadow Star levels of brutality by showing exactly what kind of world would result in people gaining control of extremely powerful creatures that would follow any order.
• The Disciples series deconstructs God of Evil by showing what exactly could make a god evil in the first place. Neither of the two evil gods started out evil. They were even two of the nicest gods before their fall. Their villainy is entirely due to the callous actions of the other supposedly good gods.
• After completing the first loop of DonPachi, it's revealed that the events of the game have thus far been a deconstruction of the One-Man Army present in many shmup Excuse Plots. The player character, as part of his training, has been fighting against his own army, with his comrades willingly giving up their lives in order to help him become the ultimate Super-Soldier. And when you start the second loop, the player character has been doing this same training for the past seven years. Only when he's pretty much slaughtered the entirety of his allied forces is he finally admitted into the elite DonPachi Squadron.
  • Its second-degree sequel DoDonPachi dai ou jou is a deconstruction of Robot Girls. Set in a future crawling with Element Dolls, robot girls used as little more than slaves (of both the standard variety and...not-so-standard variety), the protagonist embarks on a mission against the forces of Hibachi with the assistance of one of three dolls. Depending on which doll you use, the ending has her choking the protagonist to death and going back in time to cause shit in DOJ's sequel DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu, falling for him despite him not reciprocating her feelings, or becoming so protective of the pilot that she has to be forcibly removed from the ship. Regardless of which doll, it's clear that your doll has gone batshit insane.
    • Finally, in DaiFukkatsu, the enemy is a series of giant robot girls, manipulated by Colonel Longhena into destroying humanity.
• Dragon Age deconstructs one major fantasy concept: The Wizarding School is more of a prison and re-education camp than a school, as it seems to be the only way to avoid devolving the world into a bunch of mage-controlled city states. It also deconstructs the Fantastic Caste System, showing exactly how Dwarven society, with its exclusion of the casteless from the labor pool, near complete lack of social mobility and strong conservative values, actually functions. Here's how: It doesn't. The dwarf realms are experiencing major brain-drain as low-caste dwarves are migrating to the surface in droves, and attempts to coerce them into staying by declaring those who set foot on the surface "lost to the Stone" and casteless are just met with shrugs. "Gold Digger" is a preferred career among casteless women, but due to how caste is inherited this has led to a population explosion among the casteless, who by tradition are forbidden to participate in the workforce and forced to turn to crime to survive. Meanwhile, the noble caste are more than willing to backstab each other and Rules Lawyer their precious honor code into a pretzel if it means hanging on to their waning power one more day, while their civilization both metaphorically and literally crumbles around them.
• Dragon Quest Builders thoroughly deconstructs the The Chosen One and But Thou Must! tropes its parent series embraces so often:
  • The game is set in a world where the hero of Dragon Quest had been groomed all his life to go on a quest to defeat the Dragonlord. He ended up taking the Dragonlord's Deal with the Devil just to have some agency over his own life and see what would happen. The game is set in the resulting Bad End Bad Future.
  • The Builder is repeatedly told they are not a hero. They aren't supposed to defeat evil, simply help get civilization back on its feet so humanity can carry on until one arrives. They eventually make the goddess Rubiss admit she doesn't know when the Hero will be born - it could be tomorrow, it could be another thousand years, and people will just have to suffer until then. The Builder realizes this makes everything they're accomplished a meaningless stopgap and decides to Screw Destiny and fix the source of the problem themselves. They're not a hero, but they can choose to be heroic.
• Dungeon Keeper deconstructs the Elaborate Underground Base. You build the base, while the enemies invade.
• The main quest of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim deconstructs Villain: Exit, Stage Left. When you first defeat the Big Bad, Alduin, he just throws a few taunts at you, then leaves. However, this causes many of the dragons serving under him to see him as a Dirty Coward unfit to rule them. Eventually, due to this act of cowardice, Alduin's right-hand dragon makes a Heel–Face Turn and helps you reach the place where you can kill Alduin for good.
• Fable II shows how normal people would eventually react to the existence of Evil Heroes. Turns out the citizens of Albion did not care for Heroes being able to just casually take on evil quests from the Heroes' Guild without taking consideration of the people they were supposed to protect. All that talk of the old Guildmaster giving Heroes freedom to choose? Apparently that freedom isn't extended to normal people. Once guns were invented they quickly armed themselves and attacked the Guild, destroying it and killing everyone inside.
• Fallout and Fallout 2 both deconstruct the Idiot Hero trope to a hilarious degree. By creating your character with an intelligence of 3 (out of 10) or lower, you are locked out of approximately 90% of the quests in the game, because almost nobody has the patience to try and figure out what you want to tell them, and absolutely nobody in an apocalyptic setting will trust you with critical objectives that affect their lives. That said, you do get to have some pretty funny dialogues as a bit of compensation.
• Too many deconstructions to list here, but a particularly important one is the motivation for the antagonist in the Fallout: New Vegas DLC, Lonesome Road. For the Courier, it was an ordinary package like any they'd normally deliver. For Ulysses, it was the package that detonated the nukes stored beneath the Divide, destroying the place he saw as his home, teaching him the power of a single person to reshape the world and sparking off a dangerous obsession. The dialog options also allow you to play out this trope entirely when speaking with Ulysses.
  • This also deconstructs the Dark and Troubled Past by showing you most of what it is, and how such a dark and destructive past affects others and can shape the world.
• Fallout 4 deconstructs Hard on Soft Science with the Institute. Being a cabal of Mad Scientists descended from the Falloutverse version of M.I.T., they have a complete lack of any manner of social scientific endeavors, instead basing their society around the creation of Artificial Humans and other hard sciences. The deconstruction comes into play in that while the Institute has plenty of answers of "Can we?", their lack of social sciences leads them to time and again choose the wrong answer to "Should we?". This has resulted in the Institute suffering through over a century's worth of terrible relations with the Commonwealth, to the point where they're generally seen as the local boogeyman instead of the force of good and progress they view themselves as.
  • Hidden Elf Village is also deconstructed with the Institute. Their initial attempt to pretend that "nobody's home" was impossible to keep up since they still require resources from the Commonwealth. This has resulted in them instead ruling over Post-War New England through The Conspiracy, and their foreign relations have only gone downhill since then.
• Far Cry 2 deconstructs badass with the player character. The enemies attack you on sight, no one bothers to check if you're an enemy or not... solution? You kill everything on sight, becoming just like them and racking up hundreds of kills, and by doing that, become the epitome of badassitude with enemies running from you in fear if your reputation is high enough. Of course, this reputation doesn't just affect enemies, it affects friendly people as well, which you need for malaria medicine...
• Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 is infamously difficult because it deconstructs the liberation plot. Namely, what would happen if the prince in exile tried to retake his throne with his Ragtag Bunch of Misfits? Leif starts with no money and almost no support, so his army resorts to theft and kidnapping. Most of the game is spent running from bigger armies, and even after Leif retakes his castle, he doesn't have the resources or troops to hold it, and has to be bailed out by his much better prepared cousin Seliph.
• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade deconstructs Attention Whore through Serra, who not only annoys her friends and prospect love interests with her demands for attention and vassalage, but acts this way because she was badly neglected and abused in the Elimine convent where she was raised, so her behavior is somewhat less about her being conceited and more about a massive cry for help hidden behind her facade. But her own behavior actually ends up pushing almost everyone away (specially Erk and Oswin), who aren't able to see her Hidden Depths until much later.
• Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones deconstructs The Ace with Ephraim. For the first part of the story, it seems he can get through anything. However, when he gets back to Renais, Seth tells him that the citizens are not cheering for his return. They're only happy because Orson's reign of terror is over. Ephraim takes this as the sign that his Leeroy Jenkins tendencies haven't been great for his people and begins to mature from then on.
  • Not to mention, Ephraim's seeming perfection is the reason why Innes and Lyon show quite the degree of inferiority complexes and covert/not-so-covert envy. In the first case, Ephraim only sees it as normal Friendly Rivalry, but Innes takes it more seriously to the point of telling Eirika that he'll only propose to her after defeating Ephraim; in the latter, it's massively Played for Drama since Ephraim adores Lyon and never ever sees him as inferior, so is struck hard (read: he's driven to tears) when he learns about Lyon's psychological troubles and how a part of them can be linked to seeing himself as inferior to Ephraim.
• Fire Emblem: Awakening has some deconstructions:
  • The Perfectionist: Cordelia. Her perfectionist nature make her quite disliked by the rest of the Ylisse Pegasus Knights for seemingly looking down upon the others, even though she only becomes that way because she seeks her seniors' approval. And then her A support with Avatar reveals that despite their teasing, the other pegasus knights really did admire her, to the point that they were willing to give up their lives for her. Being called a genius reminds her of their sacrifice, which is why she dislikes being called one. And not to mention, her "perfect" and "genius" post-mortem fame will cause her daughter Severa to have quite the inferiority complex...
  • Severa and Cordelia deconstruct Calling the Old Man Out and Anger Born of Worry. In the Bad Future, Severa didn't take kindly how her mother held an Undying Loyalty to Prince Chrom, the guy whom she once held an Unrequited Love for. At some point, she was both so upset at what she saw as a borderline betrayal to her dad and so scared about Cordelia possibly dying in the war, that she yelled at her mother for it. The result? Cordelia went out to fight, died in battle and never returned home, and Severa was totally traumatized for that. When Severa returns to the past with her friends and she's recruited by the Shepherds, she again questions Cordelia and her thoughts on Chrom... but this time it's more of a desperate facade, as she's very aware that this Cordelia isn't the same mother she lost (Timey-Wimey Ball and all) and doesn't want to emotionally connect to her only to probably lose her again.
  • King Gangrel of Plegia is revealed to be a deconstruction of The Caligula. How so? His cruel and tyrannical actions quickly turn around to bite him in the ass. After Chrom's sister Emmeryn commits a Heroic Suicide, his own army starts defecting en masse, and the next chapter you fight a group of Plegian soldiers who honestly do not want anything to do with this war Gangrel started and were traumatized by Emmeryn's death. By the time the Shepherds confront Gangrel, all but a small group of loyalists have abandoned him, and Emmeryn has become a folk heroine among the people of Plegia. Not to mention, Gangrel can be recruited into your army in the first SpotPass chapter; his supports also reveal that he did not start as a madman but as a mixture of Self-Made Man who wanted to unite the continent against Valm, but fell into Motive Decay after he went mad with power and well... ended up as the War for Fun and Profit motivated madman the group met and fought. And damn, he now regrets having been such an asshole. (Not to mention, Chrom still can't forgive him, and his potential best friend/girlfriend the Avatar does NOT trust him either at first.) His actions after being recruited ultimately do nothing to improve his reputation or redeem him in the eyes of everyone else and, unless he is romanced by the female Avatar, he spends the rest of his life hated and alone.
  • There's also a deconstruction of Cartwright Curse and Cannot Talk to Women in regards to Lon'qu. His first friend was a young girl his age, Ke'ri, who was killed by bandits while he couldn't do anything to save her. As a result, he started to believe he suffered from this trope, to the point where he developed gynophobia, in that he does not loathe women or believe they're weak — but is deeply afraid of approaching them in fear that they'll get killed because of him. Pretty much the only women he can talk to without much drama are the lady he reaches an S-level support aka marriage and the prospect daughters he may have with her.
  • Sumia's archetypically moe traits include her tripping around, plucking flower petals for fortune telling, reading novels, and being super cute and dorky. If one looks at them closely, they're proof of severe self-esteem problems. A good part of Sumia's supports have her acting extremely awkward towards her friends and potential love interests (like the infamous "pie baking" support with Chrom, or her causing trouble to Gaius and Frederick while trying to help them), and not to mention it's believed that her very low pools of potential boyfriends and female friends come from Sumia believing herself to be The Load and thus not approaching more people (and especially men) since she feels she's undeserving of either friendship or romantic love.
  • The C-support with Vaike deconstructs Nowi's Genki Girl trait, but from another perspective. What happens when somebody has near eternal life? Nowi, being a manakete and already at least a millennia old, chooses to spend her days happy rather than depressed by the fact that she will outlive all of her friends: she's very aware that this will happen no matter what and is frequently saddened by that (and shows it, so she doesn't qualify as a Stepford Smiler), but she ultimately decides not to waste her time crying for too long.
• Fire Emblem Fates also has its share of trope deconstructions and analysis:
  • Silas's supports with a Female Avatar deconstruct Love at First Sight. He acknowledges the absurdity of the concept, which is why it takes until S-rank for him to accept that it was the case for him for the Avatar, and even then with embarrassment.
  • King Garon deconstructs Marry Them All. He never could sever ties with a woman he'd once liked, and he ended up with a vast extended family of children from many different women. However, the ladies's infighting for his favor didn't result in a very happy home life, and while he tried to be a good father to all of his children, many of his mistresses actually murdered one another and/or one another's kids for political gain. The whole situation more-or-less only sorted itself out once most of his women were dead, and the surviving kids (his sole legitimate son Xander; Xander's half-siblings Camilla, Leo and Elise, plus "adopted" kid the Avatar) banded together). The whole thing left him the bitter tyrant he is at the start of the story... or, rather, it provided a convenient cover for his much-crueler doppelganger to neglect and abuse the remaining princes and princesses for its own ends. The real Garon was a very bitter tyrant at the end of his life, but the audience never gets to learn whether he would've gone THAT far.
  • Charlotte, the stripperiffic Girly Bruiser, is quite the deconstruction of The Fake Cutie and Gold Digger. In her past, whenever she tried to be herself with men, her The Lad-ette traits scared them away; in her supports she explains to several of her suitors and some of her female friends that she pretends to be a pure-hearted girl not just to fleece men out of their money, but because she's damn bitter after said experiences. If a rich guy does show romantic interest in her, Charlotte is scared because she isn't sure if she actually likes the guy back or just wants his power and money.
  • Princess Azura painfully deconstructs Mysterious Waif. She certainly fits the archetype, being a solemn princess with mysterious powers and a close relationship to the protagonist... But the only reason she has such a detached and aloof exterior is because of her issues, which cause her to have a hard time opening up to people. However, this often intimidates some members of the army (like Keaton, who first freaks out at her apparent emotionlessness) and causes others to view her with suspicion (like Saizo, who cannot trust her easily until at least their B support), making it even harder for her to bond with them. And for worse? her mysterious powers are slowly killing her, but she's so determined to help the Avatar's cause and save the world that she can't bring herself to stop using them, leading to her death in two of the three paths of the game.
  • The Conquest route deconstructs a Pacifist Run. The Avatar tries to prevent as many deaths as possible when fighting to the point that enemy forces are only injured when battling. He / she is told by various people over the course of the game that this is a bad viewpoint to have when fighting a war and it is shown repeatedly that avoiding all deaths in a war is impossible. Also, while the members of the Avatar's army respect this decision and abide by his / her desire to reduce bloodshed, Iago, Hans and Garon do not.
  • Nyx deconstructs A-Cup Angst and Older Than They Look: she looks like a young teenager because of a curse coming from her Dark and Troubled Past as a Creepy Child, so she hates being stuck in a body that doesn't fit with her mental age and seriously believes that she'll never be able to have a loving husband and children. Several of her potential boyfriends will have to reassure her that they love her despite this.
• Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia deconstructs Really Royalty Reveal and Rightful King Returns through Berkut, showing an oft-glossed over side effect of the "rightful heir to the throne is raised in secrecy, then returns to claim their birthright" plotline embodied by Alm. Since nobody knows that Rudolf has a trueborn son, Berkut spends his entire life believing he is destined to rule Rigel and his entire sense of self-worth comes to revolve around this fact. When Alm comes out of nowhere and takes what Berkut had every reason to believe was rightfully his, a combination of his own insecurities and Rudolf's lack of a coherent plan to help him cope leads him to complete insanity and causes him to form a Deal with the Devil to kill Alm and take what he believes he's owed, to the point he even sacrifices his own fiancée to Duma for power.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
  • Edelgard repeatedly justifies her many morally questionable actions by I Did What I Had to Do, believing that she has to go the route she has chosen. This becomes a Fatal Flaw as she becomes unwilling to compromise and refuses to accept that there might be other solutions.
  • Dimtiri is the archetypical lord who went through a tragedy, saw his family and friends murdered, and has to retake his kingdom from a Red Emperor. But unlike Marth, Eirika/Ephraim, Seliph, or other series' protagonists, the experience deeply traumatizes him and leads to either a bitter, bloody death or living the rest of his life as The Atoner with the trauma never fully resolving itself.
  • Claude deconstructs the Hilariously Abusive Childhood. Because of Claude's parents refusing to intervene when he was mocked, bullied and nearly assassinated for being biracial, in an attempt to toughen him up and teach him to fight his own battles, Claude develops serious trust issues and a love of scheming that puts people ill at ease around him and makes it extremely difficult for him to form intimate emotional bonds with other people out of fear they will reject him or try to harm him if they know the truth. He also tends to downplay his parent's mistreatment of him, such as casually describing being dragged behind a horse when he misbehaved as a boy and changing the subject when Hilda is horrified by this, so he covers up uncomfortable moments with dark jokes. His guardedness and self-reliance become a Fatal Flaw in some routes, as his Heroic Neutral stance during the war mean he is unable to rally the Leicester Alliance to form a strong enough army to hold off the Empire's forces.
  • The Crest system is a brutal deconstruction of the Birthmark of Destiny and the social dysfunction that would entail if they were more mainstream than expected from a fictional setting, the people with them have a lot responsibility placed on them, and an entire nobility culture was built around them. Crests are usually taken as a sign of being a descendant of one of the Four Saints or Ten Elites (who were said to have been gifted Crests by the continent's patron Goddess) and most of those descendants are nobles, but not only is lineage not a guarantee for inheritance, commoners have just as much of a chance of getting them too. This leads to situations such as commoners trying to marry Crest-bearing nobles in the hopes of increasing their own social status, non-Crest-bearing nobles marrying into families with Crests, and nobles adopting Crest-bearing commoners. Children of noble lineage born without Crests can lose their inheritance to a younger sibling with a Crest, leading to violent internal power struggles. Noble children born with Crests also have high expectations placed on them and are frequently subject to loveless arranged marriages for producing more Crests or political advantages for their House. There is also at least one Crest (the Crest of the Beast) that nobody wants due to the storied past of its first human bearer, and so their descendants have experienced persecution and self-loathing in one known case. Meanwhile, the Crests of the Four Apostles were lost to history due to the Apostles going into exile after a horribly botched ritual to resurrect the Goddess, with the intent of making the Crests all but disappear to prevent the ritual from being performed again, and no public records of their history besides Rhea (being Seiros herself) and becoming Shrouded in Myth. However, the Apostles' descendants were very dedicated to making sure that their Crests are as rare as possible to ridiculous extremes (such as the implication that Noa's descendants in House Nuvelle resorted to Royal Inbreeding to keep her Crest out of circulation while preserving her bloodline), making themselves relatively isolated from the rest of Fódlan and experiencing all sorts of hardships regardless of social status, which sometimes left them with no outside allies if threatened (and this was a factor in the near-extinction of House Nuvelle). In two known cases in recent times, the desire of a certain cult to get more power out of Crests led them to perform lethal experiments on children to give them two Crests (something conventionally considered impossible), and those who survived the experiments without being crippled or driven insane have a shortened lifespan of varying length. Also, the part about Crests originally being gifted by the Goddess is a historical revision made by Seiros and the Church to cover up the fact that they were stolen by humans, ingesting the blood of Children of the Goddess like her family. Only the Crests of Seiros, the Saints and the Four Apostles were actually gifts made to combat Nemesis (nothing has been said about the Crest of Ernest); the rest were obtained by Nemesis and the Ten Elites (the latter getting a Historical Hero Upgrade) after killing Sothis and the other Children of the Goddess in a massacre.
• The Five Nights at Freddy's series deconstructs Incompetence, Inc. in the most horrific ways possible. The generally incompetent (and possibly morally bankrupt) owners of the in-universe pizza franchise are not only willing to cut corners on costs whenever possible (Meaning equipment tends to malfunction or not work at all), but don't even bother doing background checks on their employees (Which results in a serial killer murdering several children) and have a general negligence of safety for their employees and customers (They refuse to claim responsibility for the deaths of night guards caused by their own animatronic mascots, and a child is horribly maimed in a Deadly Prank due in part to no one even bothering to stop it). Not surprisingly, the restaurant is closed down after the events of the first game due to just how poorly run it is.
• In God of War (PS4), Baldur was blessed with the ability to Feel No Pain and invulnerability to all threats - physical and magical. But because of this, he cannot feel the most mundane stimuli such as pain, temperature, taste or pleasure. This lack of sense drives him insane, as well as destroying any level of empathy he possessed. He even flat out said he would rather die than to not feel anything.
• God of War Ragnarök:
  • Odin deconstructs Even Evil Has Loved Ones. He does, on some level, genuinely love his family, but he expresses it in the most possessive, toxic, and controlling way possible because of his villainy, and is seemingly caught in a loop of abusing his loved ones, regretting it, but then instantly blaming outside factors and never reflecting on how he hurt them. To put it in perspective, despite being the one to murder Thor, he seems to have a moment of remorse and tries to apologize as his son is dying, but phrases it as an abuser would ("I didn't want this"), and immediately retaliates without hesitation against Thrúd when she attacks him for killing her father right in front of her. He also seems to be fond of his two companion ravens, Huginn and Muninn, as he's genuinely upset when Freya and Atreus incapacitate one and kill the other, but this just serves to highlight how much he's dehumanized his family when the ravens matter more to him than they do. Overall, the only person Odin seems to have ever legitimately cared about was Thor's mother, Fjörgyn, who is long dead by the time of the story.
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy is brutally deconstructed when the Norns reveal that all prophecies are self-fulfilling and that there's no such thing as fate or destiny, only the wisdom to predict what people will do and the consequences of refusing to change their ways when given warnings.
    • Zeus was always doomed to be killed by his son, Kratos, because in his paranoia and fear, he treated Kratos like shit until he finally snapped.
    • Kratos was fated to destroy Olympus and despite all his efforts to Screw Destiny, that's precisely what he wound up doing because he refused to let go of his rage and stop blaming the gods for all his problems until it was far too late. To be fair, they did cause a lot of his problems, but even then, it's clear that none of the original trilogy would've happened if it wasn't for Kratos's poor life choices. The bright side is that the Norns' revelation ultimately prompts Kratos to truly screw destiny simply by becoming a better person, averting the prophecy of his death and putting him on the path to fulfilling a new one where he becomes a truly beloved protector deity.
    • Baldur died a meaningless death because Freya, whose greatest flaw is her selfishness, "blessed" him with invulnerability, giving him Sense Loss Sadness in the process, and refused to take it back because she feared his predicted death, which resulted in him going insane and antagonizing Kratos and Atreus, giving Kratos no choice but to kill him and giving Baldur the meaningless death the Norns predicted because Kratos didn't want to get involved— only being provoked when Baldur threatened to kill Atreus— and the whole damn thing could've been avoided had Freya dropped the overprotectiveness.
    • Odin's attempts to prevent Ragnarök or at least control the outcome gives the heroes a reason to fight him. It begs the question; if Odin didn't know about the prophecy, would Ragnarök have still happened? The answer, it seems, is no, it wouldn't have. Ragnarök is just the logical, easily inferred endpoint of Odin's selfishness, cruelty, refusal to change, and obsession with controlling things that can't be controlled; the destruction of Asgard and everything he cares about because his abuse drives away his loved ones and causes the Nine Realms to rise up against him.
    • Odin's ultimate motivation is a self-fulfilling prophecy in and of itself. His existence as part of what created the Nine Realms has him unsure if he is Barred from the Afterlife or if he even has one, and for all of his knowledge and foresight, he can't find a concrete answer. He is relentless in his pursuit of the answer to this mystery, culminating in him killing Brok, which in turn result in his soul being destroyed by Sindri. Ultimately, it was never a question if Odin had an afterlife— his own Laser-Guided Karma ensured he'd never have the chance to see it in the first place.
• Grand Theft Auto V deconstructs the Villain Protagonists that have frequently featured in the GTA games.
  • Michael is this character after he's already won. Having "beaten the game," so to speak, he's decided to get out of the game, enter Witness Protection, settle down, and raise a family using his earnings, but he finds "normal" life to be boring. It's implied that him pissing off a drug lord is only part of the reason why he returned to a life of crime, since it's the only thing he really enjoys and knows how to do. The phrase "getting back in the game" is even used to describe it.
  • Trevor, meanwhile, deconstructs the Video Game Cruelty Potential inherent in many open-world games through liberal application of You Bastard!, showing exactly what sort of person would run around causing death, destruction, and mayhem for his own amusement. He is violent to the point of genuine psychopathy, one scene strongly implies that he raped Floyd, and The Stinger implies that he's schizophrenic on top of it. It's not for nothing that he's the only one who takes part in the returned Rampage missions.
  • Franklin takes Carl Johnson's journey to become a successful crook. Unlike CJ, his newfound wealth only serves to alienate him from his neighborhood to the point where the end of the game only Lamar can be considered his friend as everyone else ignores or hates him. The gangbanging aspect is also downplayed, being an unsuccessful endeavor by Lamar as the Families and Ballas aren't really at odds with one another except them like in the original. Working for people on his own volition also is of little help as Devin and Haines treats him as what he is really is: a disposable tool lucky enough to be alive.
  • Furthermore, unlike past games, V makes no excuses for the fact that its three protagonists are all morally bankrupt. Once they've settled their debt to Madrazo, their only motivation for their continued crime spree is pure greed and self-interest... solving the problem of Gameplay and Story Segregation by demonstrating just who would casually run people over and steal cars without a shred of guilt.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, meanwhile, deconstructed the mystique of the "outlaw" biker gang. The lifestyle of the Lost Motorcycle Club is shown as being filled with slick leather jackets, tricked-out hogs, kick-ass fights, camaraderie, and badass mannerisms, just like in the movies... yet it's also a gang no different from the Ballas or the Grove Street Families, and with it comes backstabbing, death, and eventually the total destruction of the Lost as an organization due to a brutal gang war. The deconstruction is completed in GTA V, where we see that Johnny, the protagonist of The Lost and Damned, has become a strung-out meth addict who gets killed minutes after his introduction — the logical conclusion of his downward spiral at the end of The Lost and Damned.
• Grandia shows what would really happen if an 8-year-old girl was taken on an epic adventure where she has to constantly fight monsters and walk enormous distances: the physical strain of adventuring proves to be too much for her young body to handle, and she becomes very sick, forcing the heroes to waste a one-of-a-kind teleporter to send her back home.
• Gundam Senki 0081 deconstructs the young vs the old generation. If you are playing as the Federation, the male lead is at a rather old age for Gundam leads (32 years old! That is just screaming for a death wish) while all of the cast on the Federation side are pretty much adults. The Zeonic side consists of young adults who attempt to cause trouble, for a series that usually favors the younger side. The older generation defeats the younger generation in battle.
• Iji manages to deconstruct the One-Man Army trope... By making the protagonist slowly go insane from all of the slaughter, while the few enemies she tries to talk to refuse to listen to her and label her as a mass murderer. Though it's completely possible to avoid killing anyone at all.
  • The game also deconstructs the Pacifist Run. If you want the best ending where both Dan and Iji live, Iji will still have blood on her hands via indirect kills, whether it's using the Resonance Reflector to deflect enemy shots back at them, setting a trapmine to foil Asha's hostage plan with Dan (which results in the unavoidable death of a Komato soldier), or allowing Ansaksie to kill Iosa to prevent her from coming back later to kill Iji after the Final Boss battle. Iji may not be going on a murder spree, but strict pacifism in the middle of a warzone isn't going to help her, either.
  • The Komato are a deconstruction of the Proud Warrior Race. What do you think will happen when they eventually succeed (or at least are tricked into believing that they succeeded) in destroying their sworn enemy and no longer have a reason to fight? General Tor suspects that they'll eventually turn on each other.
• Killzone deconstructs the glorious D-Day style liberation in a hideous situation as it becomes obvious that with a corrupt military brass whom sold out your forces twice, that going in after recovering from a devastating attack on your planet and how putting down the leader will not make things better at all.
• While the Kingdom Hearts series as a whole has largely played The Power of Friendship straight, Kingdom Hearts III has a rather brutal deconstruction near the end of the game. Sora is a firm believer in the trope, as he always believes that together people can do anything, and regularly attributes his power to his friends and connections with them, but Xigbar points out that he attributes too much of his strength to his friends, and during the climax, he's proven right; when the other Guardians of Light are ensnared by a Heartless swarm and apparently killed, Sora breaks down hard, declaring that since all his strength came from his friends, he's worthless on his own.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords deconstructs several video-game RPG tropes such as how the main character seems to gain power by slaughtering others and how upon meeting you, the other members of your party become entirely dependent on your continued existence. It also deconstructs the Star Wars universe itself, including notions of good and evil and ideas about The Force.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, done in contrast to its previous game, takes apart Coming of Age Story. A lot of the NPCs that Link, who was once aged up into a young man, encounters are dealing with very adult issues and most, children and adults, don't know how to cope or deal with it. A father grieves for the loss of his son who is presumed missing and dead, while a child mourns for the death of his parent. A man laments that he will never know his unborn children after failing to rescue them; meanwhile a child is about to lose her father to an illness. A man refuses to show his face to his fiancée because he broke a promise while said fiancée fears he had abandoned her because he no longer loves her. Several guards are torn between doing their duty or flee for their lives. Soldiers obey orders for a war that has long ended. A woman is forced to grow up too soon after the death of her father who must run the family business that's being threatened by a rival company.
    • It also deconstructs the Unstoppable Mailman. Said mailman is such a Schedule Fanatic that he can't stop, no matter how desperately he wants to. Even as the moon is falling and the apocalypse is at hand, the mailman continues to deliver mail because "escape from the moon" is not written in his schedule. He only manages to leave Clocktown when his boss orders him to.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker deconstructs The Chosen One harshly. The legend of the Hero of Time results in the people of Hyrule believing that he will return should the time come that Hyrule is in danger again. When Ganondorf returns they continue to believe this and Ganondorf remains unopposed until the Gods take matters into their own hands leaving Hyrule in ruins. This particular version of Link also has to earn his title as the successor of the legendary hero rather that just getting it.
    • It also takes apart typical post-apocalyptic After the End stories. The game's bright and upbeat art style and music shows that life moves on. Centuries later, an old civilization will be forgotten and unmourned. A Reset Button on everything can be both a good and bad thing.
    • This Link's fighting style is a slight deconstruction of Instant Expert, involving a lot of wild swinging and exploiting openings that usually works out. Most Links are master swordsmen, but this Link is an islander kid who comes of age the same day his adventure starts, and has only ever hobby-sparred with Orca, who mostly taught him defensive fighting. Every other Link would have at least the excuse of having to fend off wildlife in the woods, but Outset island was pretty idyllic until the adventure begins.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild deconstructs Lady Land through the Gerudo. Due to culture and tradition, the Gerudo's city was entirely cut off from men. However, this posed problems for the Gerudo interacting with men, especially when they want to find a man to marry. They even need classes to educate themselves how to talk and woo men. Several Gerudo that Link encountered across Hyrule are shown to be awkward when trying to speak with him. At least one actively flew into a panic when speaking with Link, whispering to herself to remember the lessons she learned.
• Live A Live gives us Oersted, a massive deconstruction of the Knight in Shining Armor. You see, he really is a valiant, brave and chivalrous knight to the very end, always seeking to help everyone around him and following his moral code: "As long as there is one person believes in you, you can't give up". Said last person kills herself after Oersted sacrificed literally EVERYTHING to save her, right after being betrayed by his best friend and finding out that everything he believed in was a lie. Despite acting as The Hero through the whole game, in the end everyone who ever cared for him is either dead or now hates him due to a scheme by said best friend. It really shouldn't go without saying that he snaps... but in his own twisted vision, he's just helping humanity to "see the folly of their selfishness". And, once defeated, he finally realizes the mistakes on his own ways and openly admits being wrong. Noble to the very end.
• Mass Effect makes it a point to deconstruct the Planet of Hats and the Proud Warrior Race Guy in the form of the krogan, who are universally bad-tempered, violent, brutal, and selfish... and have exactly the interspecies relations this should earn them. They got themselves slapped with a nice, unpleasant Depopulation Bomb for being an entire species of jerkasses.
  • In an interesting subversion, Urdnot Wrex (one of the first named krogan we meet) not only starts out as much more mellow than his brethren but goes on to reconstruct the Proud Warrior Race culture of his kind almost singlehandedly, much to the annoyance of more two-dimensional Krogan.
  • In a similar fashion, the batarians get their comeuppance in the third game, with the survivors becoming much more sympathetic and a possible War Asset against the Reapers.
  • The geth came off as the typical evil robot mooks in the first game (along with the setting assuming any true AI is gonna turn on their creators by default), but the second and third games deconstruct the idea entirely.
• Mega Man Zero is known for its deconstruction of White-and-Grey Morality and Rousseau Was Right in the first two games by showing the tragedy that ensues from such an event. When you factor in Zero's origin as the last creation of Dr. Wily the series is also a deconstruction of Joker Immunity, Thou Shalt Not Kill, and probably a few other related tropes as well. Because Dr. Wily was not executed after Mega Man 6, or killed in the next game because of Mega Man's Three Laws-Compliant nature, he lived on to build Zero, the latter being the cause of the wars in the Mega Man X series all the way to his own. Then we have Dr. Weil, the main villain of the Zero series, who was also not killed when captured in the Zero series back story, and came back to wreak havoc.
• Metal Gear has several deconstructions of various cliches and tropes. For example it shows just how much of a tragedy the Fake Defector would be in real life, what would happen to a Tyke-Bomb when they reached adulthood (one is a bitter man almost incapable of making emotional attachments, another spent a good portion of his adulthood being controlled and manipulated), just how mentally unstable or fairly screwed up a real life Quirky Miniboss Squad would probably be (FOX-HOUND, Dead Cell, Cobra Unit) and just how disturbing and yet fairly tragic a real life cloning plot would actually be.
  • At a more meta level, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty deconstructs a lot of the tropes of video gaming itself.
  • Arguably the whole franchise is a deconstruction of the badass trope, when you consider how much the heroes suffer to get to where they are.
  • Metal Gear is based on America Saves the Day media but is significantly more political than most of it, pointing out how the lone American hero would be a byproduct of hideous intragovernmental corruption and backstabbing, imperialist foreign policy, and craven attempts to secure access to money, nuclear weapons or soft power. Even when Solid Snake is able to save the day on behalf of the Americans, it is never because the American top brass have sent him out for a decent set of reasons, and the consequences of usually end up making the world a whole lot worse later on. The franchise also loves talking about some fairly obscure real-life events in which America exploited its people or committed acts of bizarre cruelty, such as Code-Talker's explanation in Metal Gear Solid V of the way the Navajo people were exploited to mine resources for the nuclear bomb, and the terrible health consequences they suffered as a result.
• Action RPG Metal Walker deconstructs the empty overworld found in many RPGs. Besides your character and a select few NPCs with Mons, no one is outside, even in towns—because killer robots populate the landscape, even right outside buildings. Since you yourself are attacked very frequently, you can imagine why defenseless humans don't go out...
• Iva's Story in Panzer Dragoon Orta deconstructs the Littlest Cancer Patient. In a Crapsack World with Everything Trying to Kill You, predominantly run by a fairly corrupt Empire, there's just no place for a person, even a child, who is terminally ill and needs looking after, so Iva is still conscripted into the Imperial Army. When he learns the truth about his condition from a letter left by his father in his final packet of medicine, he willfully goes on a Suicide Mission to put an end to a dangerous monster threat.
• Persona 4 has many deconstructions, usually resolved by completing a social link:
  • Yosuke deconstructs the Stepford Smiler and/or Sad Clown tropes, as his Shadow calls him on the fact he's basically just bored and aimless and so he's throwing himself into anything that seems interesting for the hell of having something to do. His social link ultimately culminates in him realizing that he doesn't need to be special as long as he has friends that believe him to be special.
  • Chie deconstructs the Tomboy trope, as it's made clear from encountering her Shadow that she is quite uncomfortable with her lack of femininity. She also mildly deconstructs the Big Eater trope, as she mentions that her ravenous appetite is one of the things she finds unfeminine about herself and is thusly ashamed of. Her social link involves finding out what kind of person she wants to be regardless of how feminine it makes her, and how to realize her goal of wanting to protect people, whether they see her as feminine or not.
  • Yukiko deconstructs the Yamato Nadeshiko trope, as it's noted she feels powerless and weak, as well as not truly wanting to accept her expected inheritance. Her social link eventually has her realize that she wants her expected inheritance, rather than trying to run from it, because everyone around her wants her to be happy, and she wants the same for them.
  • Kanji deconstructs the Real Men Wear Pink trope, as his personal storyline is all about how his "un-macho" interests have led to ridicule and rejection from others, especially women, and how he doubts himself as a result of that. His social link has him coming to terms with the fact that he likes something that's considered "girly" and how that's not something to be ashamed of.
  • Rise deconstructs the Idol Singer and Kawaiiko tropes, having originally gone into the music business because of a love of singing and a desire to make friends, only to grow fearful of the idea that people only see her for her idol persona. Her social link has her realizing that the idol personality she feared was masking her true self was actually inspiring people, and that she can be Rise and Risette.
  • Naoto deconstructs the Kid Detective (nobody takes her seriously due to her age, so she has to fight to be recognized) and Bifauxnen (she only dresses like and pretends to be a guy because it's the only way she can get around the chauvinism of the Japanese police system) tropes. Her social link has her realizing that she loves being a detective and solving mysteries, and always has, and that if society says she's too young or not a man and can't do that, she'll have to convince them otherwise.
  • Exclusive to the anime, but Yu deconstructs I Just Want to Have Friends. His fight against Shadow Mitsuo foreshadows this aspect of his personality where he undergoes an existential crisis over the idea of the case being solved and his friends abandoning him. His fight against Izanami solidified this where he almost willingly succumbed to the fog so that he could be in a reality where he remain with his friends.
  • Mitsuo Kubo deconstructs Attention Whore and/or I Just Want to Be Special. He repeatedly tries to take responsibility for the murders to get attention, and even goes so far as to commit an actual murder to this end. This ends up landing him in a mental hospital.
  • Ms. Kashiwagi, the Investigation Team's second homeroom teacher, deconstructs Sensei-chan; rather than see her immaturity and behavior as endearing, her students view her as nothing more than a pathetic Attention Whore. She also deconstructs Hot for Student as her Old Maid status has left her so bitter and desperate for attention from males that she is willing to settle for anyone.
• Persona 5:
  • Sae Nijima's Promotion to Parent for her younger sister Makoto after the untimely death of their father. While Sae genuinely cares for Makoto, the pressures of managing her line of work and caring for Makoto has caused her to become jaded, bitter and cynical. She despises her father for dying and leaving his children to deal with the fallout and she is secretly terrified that either she or Makoto will die a similar death like their father in a fruitless pursuit of justice. In the main story, in a fit of anger, Sae told Makoto that she saw Makoto as a burden and later on, reveals that she was jealous of Makoto's idealistic views and how carefree Makoto's life is as a high schooler. Meanwhile, Makoto only wants to make Sae proud and wishes to have the relationship they had prior to their father's death.
  • Happiness in Slavery is deconstructed through Yusuke. Like many abuse victims, he is aware that Madarame is mistreating him and that he is plagiarizing Yusuke's work but feels that he can neither leave nor confront Madarame about this out of a sense of obligation towards the man who raised him after his mother's death. To cope with this, Yusuke continually rationalizes Madarame's behavior, hindering the Phantom Thieves' attempts to change Madarame's heart. Even after Madarame's Shadow reveals he indirectly killed Yusuke's mother, Yusuke continues to have conflicted feelings of love and hate towards his adopted father, who it is eventually revealed did care for him as a doting father would when he was younger. Yusuke's social link is about trying to reconcile these feelings.
• Phantasy Star IV deconstructs the idea of The Chosen One with Chaz. Being informed that he's one of the Protectors of the Seal, destined to defend Algo from the forces of evil, he outright rejects it, saying that mindlessly following the orders of an uncaring, distant god would make them no different than the story's villains.
• Amongst many tropes it skewered, Planescape: Torment deconstructed the standard RPG trope of your character always being the center of the story by turning the story into a personal quest for identity rather than a standard 'save the setting from Evil Overlord X while most people sit by and watch'. Furthermore, The Nameless One leads the outfit because all the joinable NPCs are bound to you by the Mark of Torment, interlocking their destinies with your own; they could not leave you even if they wanted.
• Red Dead Redemption II:
  • The Van der Linde gang is a deconstruction of Undying Loyalty and Family of Choice. Dutch found and took in many of the members when they were young (Arthur, John, Tilly) or when they were at the lowest point in their lives (Bill, Javier), acting as a Parental Substitute for many of them. In turn, the gang are fiercely loyal to him and see each other as a family. However due to Dutch's Ambiguously Evil actions, it's uncertain if he saved them out of the goodness of his heart or manipulated them to use them as pawns. Dutch also wanted to control all aspects of the members and didn't like it when anyone questioned him (Hosea, Arthur, John) or if they even showed hints of having loyalty to someone other than him (John towards Abigail and Jack). Despite this, many foolishly continue to follow his every word, even when they all notice Dutch's Sanity Slippage and Dutch's schemes get members and innocent people needlessly in danger or killed. This would split the gang into two sides, those who continue to blindly follow Dutch and become hostile to those who don't and those who realize Dutch is too far gone and their attempts to protect the gang from Dutch have them seen as traitors to the gang. All of this eventually cumulates with the gang imploding on itself, becoming mistrustful and openly aggressive to each other, some members finally leaving the gang out of fear for their lives and Dutch betraying Arthur and John on separate occasions to die. By the end of it, the once great Van der Linde gang is no more.
    • It's best seen what Undying Loyalty to a person who is undeserving of it regarding Dutch to his adopted sons Arthur and John. This is Arthur's Fatal Flaw as he will continue to follow Dutch's lead even if he openly disagrees and disapproves with Dutch's actions and flat out knows better. This loyalty cost Arthur opportunities to leave the gang and live a happier life and if Arthur had stopped obeying Dutch earlier, it's possible his tuberculosis would not have progressed as far as it did. Same with John, who continues to remain in the gang out of some sense of loyalty to the man who raised him even if John knew there were strong implications that Dutch had abandoned him to either rot or hang in prison.
  • The concept of One Last Job and escaping to live in peace afterwards. After the botched Blackwater heist that was meant to be the gang's last job, Dutch plans One Last Job after another to replace the take. But by doing so, the gang only gets into more trouble and dangerous situations, constantly being on the run and with the authorities closing in on them and the cycle continues. Micah is the one to point out that the gang is simply too large to continue effectively evading the law and for any last job, no matter how big, to provide for two dozen people comfortably and get them all out of the country safely. Some members of the gang eventually realize that they will never see any of the money and that Dutch really doesn't want to stop being a criminal despite what he says.
• In Resident Evil, Chris Redfield's Promotion to Parent for his sister Claire after their parents died in a freak accident when she was fourteen. Chris was given new responsibilities suddenly and he became overprotective over her, training her in firearms and combat skills from a young age and apparently often bossed her around. Even though Claire loved her brother, she still harbored some bitterness over his parenting as an adult.
• Shadow of the Colossus: Easily the most famous and most influential aspect of the game is how it handles the idea of a Boss Battle. The Colossi are unique, glorious creatures, each with their own physical and behavioral quirks, and are great opponents to anyone who challenges them. The problem is that they're not monsters. They're not villains. They're just territorial creatures that would be of no threat to anybody if you would just leave them alone. The tragedy of their deaths is highlighted by "End of the Battle", a sad song that plays whenever a Colossi is killed. When all of the Colossi are defeated, our hero Wander is transformed into a Colossi lookalike attacked by archers, followed by a scene of Controllable Helplessness where, in order to roll the credits, Wander must die. That's right - as punishment for what they've done, Wander, and by consequence, the player, both function as the game's Final Boss.
• Sonic Inflation Adventure mocks and deconstructs the idea of the Self-Insert Fic: When the nameless and faceless protagonist wakes up in the body and universe of Sonic the Hedgehog, he instantly takes the opportunity to indulge in his lecherous desires with the female characters of the franchise, but every time you try to indulge in sexual acts that the typical author of a self-insert fanfiction would do, it always ends horribly. The protagonist's dialogue choices constantly out him as a sex addict who doesn't really care about the girls he fucks beyond their physical appearance, implying that the people who make these kinds of games don't actually care for the characters, they just want to get their dick wet by seeing a woman they find attractive partake in sexual activities. The third game reveals the self-insert to be a depressed loser stuck in a job he hates, and sees the Sonic franchise as a place of escapism.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • E-102 Gamma's storyline in Sonic Adventure was an unexpected deconstruction of Eggman's robotic mooks...or more specifically, the fact that Eggman's robots are powered by animals. (Well, technically, Gamma was an Elite Mook, but whatever.) After seeing Amy's flicky in the Egg Carrier's prison chamber, his power source's memories and emotions began to conflict with his programming, eventually leading to his seeking out and destroying the other E-100 models (and himself) to free the animals inside.
  • In Sonic Frontiers, we see a deconstruction of Status Quo Is God: After years of them sticking by Sonic's side, Tails, Knuckles and Amy realizes there's so much more they can do and see and they just can't do it while sticking by Sonic's side (or constantly guarding the Master Emerald in Knuckles' case). Tails in particular realizes he can't grow stronger as Sonic's sidekick and decides to strike out on his own. Even Eggman changes as he comes to treat the AI Sage as a daughter and, in the Golden Ending, resurrects her after her Heroic Sacrifice.
• Soulcalibur VI deconstructs Badass Normal...twice (at least as far as the story goes):
  • Seong Mi-na, in any story where magic didn't exist, would be a fearsome warrior lady. Being Locked Out of the Loop ends up with her suffering a humiliating defeat by the alchemist Ivy.
  • Newcomer Groh also suffers a Curbstomp Battle. Though unlike with Mi-na, he was aware that magic existed. This didn't prevent him from being nearly murdered by the magically infused Nightmare due to how freakishly strong the latter is.
• The Stanley Parable is a massive deconstruction of video game tropes, specifically tropes that involve narrative in video games. Even attempts to break the game are deconstructed in a humorous light.
• Cody from Final Fight's appearances in Street Fighter deconstruct the Blood Knight. He went to jail despite saving Metro City from the notorious Mad Gear gang, even despite his connections with Mayor Mike Haggar. He's apparently lost the will to fight for any meaningful reason, and claims to do it simply because he wants to relieve his intense prisoner boredom.
  • Evil Ryu is a deconstruction of the same trope, but from a different approach. Ryu himself is a Nice Guy who only wants to be the better martial artist, but within him there's a horrifyingly powerful aura known as the "Satsui no Hado", which can potentially corrupt his whole mind and heart to make him a mindless killing machine. Evil Ryu is the incarnation of that Superpowered Evil Side, starting in the Alpha games as a cockier version of him and evolving in Super SFIV into a nightmarish and purely evil being; therefore, SFIV!Ryu is shown to be deeply distressed at the prospect of giving into this massive power that will be his perdition. When it almost happens in the Ties That Bind movie, he's driven to a short but very intense Heroic BSoD.
• Suikoden III deconstructs the Mayfly–December Romance of many characters, most notably the Flame Champion as he gave up his immortality by retracting the True Fire Rune in his body so he can age with his loved one, but the act caused his body to break down and eventually die.
• Deconstruction, along with subversion, is a prominent focus in the plots of the Tales Series games.
  • For example, Tales of Symphonia starts out as a Cliché Storm, but it quickly begins deconstructing tropes. The most ripped-apart trope being The Chosen One; it shows what a shitty life a person would have if they were expected to save the world, and the psychological effects such a title and life would have on them. In this case, both of the chosen's become stepford smilers, with Colette always covering up her problems because she doesn't want to worry people, and Zelos covers up his suicidal tendencies with his apparent stupidity.
  • Tales of Berseria takes a hatchet to the idea of The Needs of the Many being anything less than morally repugnant. Shepherd Artorius and his Abbey rule the world with this as their absolute philosophy, and it's thoroughly demonstrated that no matter what people think, following this code makes Artorius an inherently abhorrent person, murdering his own family for a ritual, consigning whole villages to die of starvation because relief supplies are an economic loss, and sacrificing his own exorcists, all without a second thought because it furthered the welfare of "the many". Sure, Velvet is no saint, but at least her endgame isn't the elimination of all free will in the name of an efficient society.
• The Trails Series deconstructs the Kid Hero archetype that most JRPG games play straight. Most playable characters tend to skew as teenagers, most of the adults are very competent at their jobs in comparison. Thanks to their inexperience and lack of authority, the kids lose far more than they win and need to be frequently bailed out by their adult counterparts. Unless the younger characters have received specialized combat training which frequently is depicted as traumatizing or are flat out used to harsher living conditions, (just ask Renne, Joshua, or Kevin), they won't be able to catch up with the adults, no matter how many special powers and abilities they may have compared to years of experience. Ultimately this results in a case of The Bad Guy Wins more often than not, leaving the protagonists to scrape by with personal victories at best while only making a dent in the villains' plans.
• Until Dawn deconstructs Big Brother Instinct. Josh's character traits of "complex, thoughtful, loving", especially in regards to his sisters, actually bring out the worst in him. Losing his sisters caused him to be driven to madness and fixated on getting revenge on his friends who caused the prank. Josh's "prank" was far more traumatizing on his friends and after stopping his medications, he quickly loses the rest of his sanity.
• Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume is a deconstruction of Roaring Rampage of Revenge and Powered by a Forsaken Child. The moment Wylfred, the main character, gets his hands on an item that can give him power to take revenge on the one who killed his father. Thing is, the thing grows in power by eating souls of the dead. This leads to Wyl killing his best friend in one of the first chapters due to not fully understanding how the item works. Oh, and you can only sacrifice souls of those who trust you. While there are ways to get around killing your allies, you're openly encouraged to kill them (and even need to do so to unlock certain routes)! Also, the person Wyl wants to take revenge on? Not only is it not her fault for why Wyl wants revenge, but she's the only reason he's even alive. Even the best ending has Wylfred's father condemned into that universe's version of Hell because of Wyl's actions.
• Viewtiful Joe, while in homage to lots of things, has a particularly interesting Deconstruction of Trapped in TV Land. Joe doesn't demonstrate it, but Captain Blue certainly does; the game shows that he got caught up in his fantasy in Movie Land, showing he went insane because he couldn't visit his wife or daughter, and eventually tried to destroy everything. It shows that being Trapped in TV Land sucks, and isn't really something to take lightly.
• Stiff Upper Lip in We Happy Few is taken to the logical extreme where everyone in Wellington Wells is forced to maintain a cheerful facade in the face of disaster. They do not take kindly to anything that is sad or troubling, especially if it reminds them of A Very Bad Thing, and they will brutally attack and/or murder anyone who isn't on Joy. They are so dependent on taking their Joy and remaining blissfully ignorant than face the fact there is a major food crisis and people are starving to death.
• Wintermoor Tactics Club gently but very pointedly deconstructs several ideas with a single plot element, with the most focus on the idea of the Barrier Maiden, but also taking potshots at Sadistic Choice, Passing the Torch, and Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Situation: Principal Enfield tells the party that he has a ritual that will keep the Gatekeeper Statue bound to the party. Doing this prevents it from summoning its demonic master and taking over the world... but will also destroy the party's futures, since they'll have to devote everything to their club and each other, using their bonds to keep the thing at bay until such time as they must pass the statue on to someone else. It's the only way.
  • Deconstruction: Alicia, the party leader, simply won't do it. As she and the party point out, they've only got Enfield's word that this is the only way to stop the thing. He's tried to destroy it and failed... but the party is much stronger than he has ever been. He's just one guy, after all, while the Tactics Club is a multi-man party that's already proven themselves against both every other club in the school and against the statue's own cult. Further, it's not going to solve the problem, just kick it down the road; Alicia would rather take the bet they can actually fix it, now, than risk it breaking free later when they're weaker. The party simply beats the statue and its demon master to death- singlehandedly preventing Armageddon, and tossing Enfield's Barrier Maiden plan out on its ass.
• X-COM deconstructs the monster and alien-fighting cartoons popular during the '90s where you had an elite team of heroes able to travel anywhere in the world in order to fight cheesy villains and win despite having inferior technology and numbers. Then look at X-COM, who travel the world in a Cool Plane to fight goofy-looking aliens... and suffer a high fatality rate, have barely enough funding, and have to desperately struggle just to get good enough weapons to fight 3/4 of the things that keep coming down.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown also deconstructs a lot of the tropes that X-COM set up: you can't capture alien weapons easily, because they explode when you kill the alien using them. You can't just do some basic research and understand how alien tech works, you need to build a solid basis for understanding and then build on it until you're able to safely replicate the technology. The sequel also deconstructs the "heroic organization saves the Earth from overwhelming powerful alien invaders" by making it so that the second it looks like XCOM is a threat, the aliens attack and destroy the organization, letting them take over the world easily.
• Yakuza: the series deconstructs the entire concept of Civil War. Most games in the series feature some form internal conflict in the Tojo Clan. In the first games, this is mostly treated as a bog-standard Plot Device to get the ball rolling but the later games in the series show more and more of how much a decade or more of near constant internecine warfare has weakened the Tojo Clan to the point that when Yakuza: Like a Dragon rolls around, the Tojo Clan has been driven from their traditional home territory by less powerful but more cohesive and decisively led groups.
• Yggdra Union deconstructs tsunderes with Kylier by giving a realistic reason to her constant bitchiness towards Yggdra instead of a simple Love Triangle. She resents Fantasinia and its royal family as a whole for their Fantastic Racism towards her people, displaying a little Fantastic Racism herself. Not to mention the deconstruction of the resistance, how in spite of Yggdra being not vilified, her weapon has caused more pain and suffering to the empire than what the empire does. And the Sadistic Choice(s) she must make.

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