Deconstruction / Video Games

Deconstruction in Video Games.

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The following have their own pages:

• Batman

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• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura deconstructs two settings at once: Victorian Steampunk, and the Standard Fantasy Setting. Just like the Victorian period in real life, working conditions in most factories are hideously unsafe, and it's not uncommon to see workers being shot in the street for protesting against them. Classism and racism is everywhere, and an awful lot of people agree with eugenics - there's a really uncomfortable book in the game that describes how Orcs can be bred out of existence by removing a "malignant gland", and don't get us started on the horror that is the Half-Ogre breeding program, where human women are forcibly impregnated by ogres just so it can provide gnomish bankers with a reliable source of stronger, tougher bodyguards. Elves are not always wiser than other races and usually jerks to everyone else to boot. Good men can wreck the world with the best of intentions while someone who is unquestionably evil can still be right once in a while. Glorious heroes who traveled the world righting wrongs eventually started a war because they disagreed about what was the right and wrong thing to do, and turned on each other.
• The Armored Core series effectively tears down the usual, over-the-top Humongous Mecha tropes in favor of bleak, desolate, and dying depictions of Earth where History Repeats, as war has stopped being personal and instead became a commodity of profiteering violence at the hands of corrupt and morally bankrupt corporations, and the awesomeness of piloting one of those mecha is offset by a rough balance of pay versus expenses on top of the horrible things you regularly do to earn that pay. Even the Armored Cores themselves, as befitting of the Real Robot genre, are excessively powerful yet a pain in the ass to pay maintenance upkeep on.
• Assassin's Creed Syndicate deconstructs one of the series' usual protagonist backstories: Jack loses his parents at a young age and in his trauma seeks revenge, becoming an Assassin in the progress. However, he becomes a far more realistic example of what happens when you take an extremely traumatized and angry child, tell them that "Nothing is true and everything is permitted", and give them the skills and weapons necessary to kill large amounts of people: he goes completely insane and starts committing serial murders, and takes over the Rooks, making them more corrupt then the Blighters were, and nearly destroys the Brotherhood. Oh, and in case you didn’t get it yet, we’re talking about Jack the Ripper.
• BioShock:
  • BioShock 1 is a damning rebuttal to Atlas Shrugged and to the philosophies and attitudes behind Objectivism - without proper regulation, the Objectivist Gulch would become populated with Corrupt Corporate Executives and quickly turn into a Wretched Hive. The whole franchise could be seen as a Deconstruction of the concept of Utopia, as from what can be seen through the games, any attempt to create a perfect society is doomed from the start, as while a theoretical society can be made perfect, the people living within the society can't. It's sequel tackles the opposite end of the spectrum, and the collectivist society formed by Sophia Lamb in Bioshock 2 quickly causes her to become as much of a despot as her rival Andrew Ryan.
  • Bioshock Infinite deconstructs Steampunk by focusing on the dystopian elements of late 19th and early 20th Century society that most Steampunk settings ignore. The racism, religious fanaticism, eugenics, and abusive work practices of the time period that other Steampunk works avoid in favor an idealized nostalgia, are instead brought to the shiny, colorful, Disney Theme Park-style surface. It also seems to deconstructs the concept of American exceptionalism, by presenting all the undercurrents of imperialism and nationalism tied in with it.
• Chrono Cross is one of the earliest and most (in)famous examples, killing off the main cast offscreen between games and condemning everything they accomplished or fought for. The reason given is this: by changing the future for the better in the original Chrono Trigger, the heroes (you) unwittingly murdered billions of people living in that potential timeline. Then the plot gets loopier, with the revelation that the human race is a giant cosmic mistake, the resultant mutation of an alien entity crashing into the planet. The reptites of Chrono Trigger, who were defeated by the main characters and their Neanderthal brethren, were meant to evolve into the superior, enlightened race; unlike the human 'abominations' who are simply incapable of coexisting peacefully with the earth. What did humans do to deserve being saved from annihilation twice over? What right did anyone have to play god like this? However, what makes this example infamous is that many of these questions rely upon Retcon, Cerebus Retcon and Happy Ending Override. For instance, Trigger posited the idea that there was an "Entity" working to save humanity from behind the scenes, while Cross greatly hints that this Entity actually hated humanity and only helped them to stop an even worse Eldritch Abomination.
• Cyberpunk 2077 skewers the whole idea of a Big Bad. Ultimately, it turns out that the real antagonistic force in the game is V's life choices.
  • Saburo Arasaka would be an excellent candidate for Big Bad, given that he is the leader of the largest, most evil MegaCorp in the world. He dies before the end of Act 1.
  • Yorinobu Arasaka does attempt to pin Saburo's death on V, but is only really out to cover his tracks. His goals regarding Arasaka, Mikoshi and Soulkiller are roughly aligned with V's and Johnny's. He also doesn't really do much of anything antagonistic beyond arranging a token manhunt to keep up appearances, and you can go through the entire game without speaking a word to him.
  • Hanako Arasaka is definitely greedier and more power-hungry than her brother, but she is never antagonistic to V and should you choose to side with her, she proves to be a Benevolent Boss of the first water, and does everything in her considerable power to help V.
  • The rogue AIs are perfectly content to rule their domains behind the Blackwall, and don't get involved until you kick down their metaphorical door. Even then, the worst they get is snarky. They want favors, sure, but so does everyone else you deal with.
  • The Arasaka corporation itself could be a candidate, being a power-hungry, all-consuming monolith too big for any one person to change in any meaningful way, and large part of the corrupt, terminal-state capitalist system. However, the only interest the corporation has in V is the fact that V stole something very valuable from them, and if they hadn't gone to the trouble of actively picking a fight, Arasaka wouldn't even have known they existed. They don't escalate the conflict in any way, that's all on V.
  • The Scavs and the Voodoo Boyz are both factions that consist of antagonistic jerks, but they are both small-time outfits with no real influence on the world at large and mostly exist as cannon fodder.
  • Every other hostile faction and individuals you encounter (The Animals, the Raffen Shiv, the 6th Street Gunners, the Tyger Claws, NCPD... even Adam Smasher) is antagonistic either because they are being paid to antagonize you, or because you are being paid to antagonize them.
• Darkest Dungeon plays the typical Dungeon Crawling RPG in a more realistic light; Going down into a dark, desolate dungeon filled with horrifying monsters out to kill you shouldn't be a walk in the park. Each trip down to the dungeons tests your heroes' mental fortitude, with combat and traps around every corner being nerve-wracking. Not to mention the people who'd willingly go down there, many of whom are desperate outlaws, or people already not right in the head.
• Death Stranding deconstructs traveling through the map in most video games. While in many games your character can simply run through half the map on foot without breaking a sweat and can climb up near perfectly vertical inclines, Sam can't do that. He will frequently stumble on uneven terrain, can't cross rivers that are too deep and tires very quickly if forced to go through even shallow rapids, and his stamina meter slowly ticks down even during regular walking. Sam also can't easily climb steep cliffs and needs to go around them. Walking through the world is shown to be a grueling and exhausting job: Sam frequently complains of exhaustion, even when his stamina meter is full, he will fall asleep at any given opportunity (if you leave him idling in the overworld, for example), and he has permanent bruises on his shoulders from carrying a lot of heavy cargo. If you break your shoes and won't give Sam a new pair quick enough, his feet will get injured, and he will bleed and destroy his toenails. Spending too much time in a snowy area without proper heating gear will give him frostbite, and falling asleep there will kill him. It also deconstructs Informed Equipment: Everything Sam can carry, be it cargo, gear or weapons, is displayed on his model. If you put it unevenly, Sam will lose his balance more often, making it easier for him to fall down and damage his cargo.
• Diablo deconstructs Demon Slaying with a butcher's knife; sure, the heroes defeat Eldritch Abominations, but they end up going insane themselves from the trauma and horrors they saw while fighting the things, their action end up going exactly in the direction the Demons wanted, the cities and kingdom they try to save end up mostly slaughtered (Tristram, that the hero was attempting to save in the first opus, ends up destroyed anyway in Diablo II) and Angels, for most, don't give a crap as long as they are not reached.
  • Diablo III: Your character becomes a Physical God, capable of slaying ANYTHING up to and including the combined form of every evil ever. That does NOT mean they can save the world from a planned genocide that has been in the making for millennia by ancient immortals with titanic armies, nor does it stop them from growing bitter and possibly extremist about the Forever War that specifically taxes humanity to the brink.
• Dragon Age: Origins is a heavy deconstruction of the Standard Fantasy Setting - mages are abhorred by members of The Church because they had once used their powers to try and overtake Heaven itself, there is a much more focused (and darker) look at the bigotry usually glossed over in many stories adhering to the setting, and instead of giving a clear Good vs. Evil conflict, Grey-and-Gray Morality is a heavy constant. And when it's not that, it's more of a Morality Kitchen Sink.
  • Dragon Age II is way worse in this regard because it deconstructs Western RPGs as a whole. There is no Big Bad to speak of, the main character cares more for his loved ones than saving the world, and the major conflict of the story is between two opposing factions that both have very good reasons for being the way they are towards each other.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition takes a more traditional stance on the Standard Fantasy Setting, and this has actually led to some divisions within the fanbase. The game's deconstructions focus more on the background of said setting, as we find out that the supposedly-glorious Alfheim Age was a clusterfuck of massive proportions, where the gods were actually power-hungry backstabbing maniacs whose actions forced the destruction of the old world, whose legacy was a millennia of the same backstabbing oppression in all major governments of the setting, and the traditional forest elf culture is actually slave protocol.
    • And then the DLC deconstructs the aftermath of a big hero organization 'saving the world'; it isn't automatically heroic forever. Three years later, the Inquisition has been corrupted and infiltrated from the inside by one of its former members, who did want to stop the Big Bad from blowing Thedas up, but only so he could destroy the world in a way that would create a new one; all organizations can do more by growing, but not everyone joins up for the idealistic official goal, and some have their own idea of how to 'save the world'. Meanwhile, the countries the Inquisition helped are still oppressive oligarchies, and start attacking the Inquisition because they're infringing upon the countries' interests. By the end of it all, the Inquisitor can be resentful that the whole world and everything in it refuses to fucking stay fixed. In the end, in light of the corruption and betrayals, the Inquisition is either forced to downsize or disbands entirely.
• One of the core themes of the Drakengard series is according to series creator Yoko Taro are the simple words "Why do you kill?". This in turn often lead to deconstructions of the One-Man Army and Heroism tropes as well as the exploration to why a human being would kill hundreds if not thousands of people. This trait has since become a hallmark of Yoko's style.
  • NieR: Automata deconstructs Humanity Is Infectious. If robots were to gain emotions, it's not going to be all positive. There's going to be a whole lot of ugliness as well: hate, racism, jealousy, obsession, fear and existential dread and despair. There's also no clear answer as to what "humanity" is, leading to some sides making up reasons as to why they're clearly the most human.
• In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the "save the world from the world-eating Big Bad dragon Alduin" quest is deconstructed in a conversation with Paarthunax, leader of the Greybeards and a good dragon, possibly the only one in existence. He asks if it isn't foolish to stop the apocalypse if it's being done by someone whose job it is to do exactly that and thereby bring about the next world. Arngeir also poses these questions, but less in-depth. The story is, however, reconstructed later.
  • Skyrim also deconstructs the Tolkien-esque elf wonderfully. What happens when a race of beautiful, cultured, superior beings start believing in their own hype? Why, they look down on every other race and try to exterminate them, of course!
  • Thirdly, Skyrim also takes a shot at deconstructing the theme of La Résistance being the Big Good against a tyrranical government; are the Stormcloaks a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who want to see The Empire ousted from their country so that they are free to practice their old traditions again without fear of oppression? Why yes they are, but they're also Fantastic Racists who don't just want to oust the empire, but pretty much anyone who isn't a Nord, especially anyone who isn't a human, out of their country as well, assuming they don't just kill them outright. Most of the non-humans in the setting, barring the Orsimer, who live in isolated covens but have been there for almost as long as the Nords have, are refugees fleeing either the destruction of their country by a massive natural disaster (in the case of the Dunmer and Argonians), or fleeing the very tyrants the Stormcloaks are vowed to be fighting against, in the case of the Bosmer, Khajiit, and even some Altmer, but the Stormcloaks treat them all as if they are just as much invaders as the tyrants themselves are.
• The Fable series does this to fantasy and magic. While the first game was more of an affectionate parody of medieval fantasy, the sequel takes this to its logical conclusion: with no real threat facing Albion, the Guild of Heroes became egocentric power bullies, and with the advent of the firearm, the Muggle commonfolk struck back and wiped out the Guild. When the Fable 2 hero comes around, it's only natural that the public would view someone as powerful as you to be worthy of becoming king/queen.
  • Fable III also deconstructs the idea of monarchies/nobility by putting you in the role of the second game's protagonist's youngest child. While it's entirely possible to play as a saintly ruler, your tyrannical older brother Logan is what spun the conflict in the first place, and it's possible to play as way more evil than Logan ever was. The deconstruction is that leadership ability is independent from any noble bloodline and is the central theme of the Traitor's Keep DLC, as a coup is planned against you led by someone who questions your family's claim to the throne.
• The first two Fallout games, and Fallout: New Vegas to a lesser extent, deconstruct the Idiot Hero. Go ahead and set your Intelligence stat to 2. You'll have some funny conversations, but you'll also get fewer skill points when levelling up, you're locked out of 90% of quests and most of the NPC's don't reward your efforts and treat you as a joke. Furthermore, an idiot can't make any lasting effect on the wasteland at all: you may have saved your vault/village, but everyone else is still screwed.
  • The whole series deconstructs the 'idealistic utopian values' of The '50s. In this Alternate History, America was caught in a pop-culture stasis while its technology advanced by leaps and bounds. End result: behind the thin charm of an endlessly 1950's Eagleland, America was a jingoistic, genocidal supremacist state that tried to stamp out individual thought, subjected "dissidents" to concentration camps and horrific experiments, and was taken over by a Government Conspiracy because everyone had become distracted and indoctrinated by ultra-nationalism and a Red Scare that was literally over a century old. and honestly to be nuked off the face of the earth. They became an all-consuming empire that violently annexed Canada and Mexico, then relentlessly waged war on the Soviet world until they backed China into a corner and pushed someone to launch their nukes. It's meant to be a satire of Real Life The '50s; while conservatives hail the fifties as a fleeting golden age, beneath the surface it was a racist, classist nightmare that was somehow even worse to the impoverished and the outcast than America during The War On Terror. While the US established itself as the democratic counterweight to the Soviet Union, it also was responsible for overthrowing many democratically elected governments and appointing dictators who supported American interests. Likewise, it claimed to represent freedom of expression, yet simultaneously allowed them to be stifled with the McCarthy witch hunts.
  • The Vaults and their creators are at the core of the entire series. The vault dwellers believed they could wait out the apocalypse and their descendants would inherit the earth. Even in ideal conditions, moving into a vault after everything around you has been turned into a hellscape would be the equivalent of becoming a colonist on an alien world; there was no way to request whatever crucial replacement or supplies they needed from the government, and any structural flaw could let the outside world in and utterly kill them off. Most of the vaults in the games had no survivors, and the plot of the first game happened because the water system in Vault 13 broke and they needed to risk an expedition for a replacement. But the real reason most of the vaults failed in the first place was because they were designed by people who had no respect for life; the Enclave that created the vaults was already planning to let the United States fall to nuclear hellfire instead of ending their war on Communism. Since they knew they wouldn't see the vault dwellers ever again, they decided to kill them off, using them as science experiments so they could improve their technology and personally take over the world.
• Final Fantasy VII is a deconstruction of Eastern RPGs, including their mechanics, plots, and many common character types associated with them. Of course, since this game introduced many people to RPGs in general, many missed that point entirely.
• The early levels of the Dark Knight quest line in Final Fantasy XIV deconstructs the theme of typical RPG heroes who will always do what people ask of them because it's the right thing to do. In the Dark Knight quests, the Warrior of Light has their dark side emerging through Fray where they openly express how lazy and helpless people are without the Warrior of Light being there to help them and how they are not properly compensated for everything they do. In short, the Warrior of Light's frustrations shows what would happen when a hero finally gets sick of being told what to do, being begged for help for things people could have done themselves, and getting nearly nothing in return for their everyday heroics.
• Fire Emblem
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War deconstructs a lot of common character archetypes throughout the series, also deconstructing several interventionist policies and showing just how damaging they can be - all before capping it off with the heroes being incinerated by the Big Bad.
  • Fire Emblem Fates has a few deconstructions to boot, at least one per route:
    • In Birthright, it deconstructs the idea of Black-and-White Morality. Yes, Nohr is the belligerent and Hoshido is on the defense, but it goes to show what that mentality can do when taken too far. Notably, your eldest adoptive brother commits Suicide by Cop after your adoptive little sister dies, alongside the countless lives lost as a result of abandoning Nohr.
    • In Conquest, it deconstructs the My Country, Right or Wrong and Pacifist Run tropes, showing that the former can lead to some very mentally straining events and the latter, while possible, ultimately proves to be far more trouble than it's worth.
• Ghost of Tsushima deconstructs Honor Before Reason, especially the way it's applied to Samurai fiction. Lord Shimura and his men adher strictly and obsessively to the samurai code of honor, but it is ultimately shown to be at best ineffective and at worst a huge hindrance against an invasion force of Combat Pragmatists that do not care about playing along with the local rules of engagement. One of the very first scenes in the game is a Samurai walking up to the Mongol army and demanding a one-on-one duel with their finest warrior. Said warrior approaches him, and proceeds to splash alcohol on the Samurai, set him on fire with a nearby torch, and then decapitate him as he burns. Jin is only able to mount any kind of meaningful resistance by abandoning traditional samurai tactics, resorting to "dishonorable" actions like mass poisonings and nighttime ambushes to turn the tide against the invaders. As the story progresses, it gradually becomes clear that not only Shimura is actually one of the few lords who legitimately takes such ideals seriously anymore, but the whole samurai class and code of conduct is just what it was in Real Life; the cornerstone of an oppressive and archaic feudal caste system. In the end, after you have defeated the Mongols and saved the Japan, the Shogunate orders Jin's execution — not because he's actually done anything wrong in their eyes, but because his pragmatic method of fighting the war is threatening the system by showing peasants they can stand up for themselves without relying on their samurai masters.
• God of War: Many heroes in Greek Mythology, such as Oedipus, Achilles, and even Hercules at some points, had a Might Makes Right mentality; their worth as heroes wasn't measured by their moral character, but through their strength and power. Kratos is essentially what these kinds of heroes would be in real life; sociopathic, selfish, blood-hungry, and extremely entitled in their sense of revenge.
  • Their constant zealotry and Blood Knight tendencies mean heroes typically kill each other in a crisis over minor disputes, as opposed to teaming up, and the survivors are left adventuring solo with next to no companions, driving them further into bitter madness.
• While the main protagonists of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are portrayed as sympathetic, Neighborhood-Friendly Gangsters, the game strips away a lot of the romance surrounding 90s gangster culture. It shows that street gangs are, like most criminal organizations, prone to infighting that tears families apart, that actual "Brothers For Life" are rare and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and Greed are often rewarded, seen with Big Smoke and Ryder who screw over their childhood friends and neighborhood to become drug lords. Their actions are also shown to do real damage to the community, with the introduction of Crack Cocaine ruining Grove Street, and a Dirty Cop getting let off resulting in city-wide riots. The actual implications of being an "authentic gangster" are ruthlessly mocked in an in-game radio broadcast.
  Big Smoke: A lot of people say gangsta rap is misogynistic posturing by fake-ass idiots who spend more time in drama school then they ever did pimping or hustling dope. Well, I assure you, OG Loc is the real thing. He's hated women all his life, he sold drugs to school children, he's murdered innocent people just for kicks, but he rhymes like an angel.
• Grand Theft Auto IV is one of its own series. Rather than show a glamorized portrayal of criminal life like the previous games did, it portrays it realistically, with most of the characters being poor, sociopathic, psychotic, greedy, or otherwise unlikable. Even Niko himself is a hypocrite. Likewise, in contrast to the usual GTA games which end on a triumph note where the protagonist has killed all of their enemies and is now a big time/high ranking gangster, this game ends at best a Bittersweet Ending where Niko does kill off all of his remaining enemies but has lost someone very close to him (either Roman or Kate depending on the choice) and despite maybe being more financially stable, is left in a emotionally bad place. He doesn't even have the status of being a legendary gangster to show for everything he has gone through. In fact many of the characters are in worse spots then there were at the beginning, whether it is because they are ultimately going to prison, have lost people around them, have nothing left or are dead. The game very much goes out of its way to deglamorize the criminal life of these characters and show how there is no real happy ending for people involved in the lifestyle.
• Grand Theft Auto V deconstructs the tropes surrounding each of the game's three protagonists in relation to the player.
  • Franklin deconstructs the newcomer to a GTA game, someone who is introduced to a world of crime where they can do whatever they want, strike out on their own, and get rich while they're at it. However, he wants to play the game in his own way, and as a result he catches a lot of flak for not playing it the way others do or for not "sticking to tradition".
  • Michael deconstructs the GTA player who has beaten the game: He's wealthy beyond his wildest dreams thanks to his ill-gotten gains and has gotten away with it, but is now left wondering what to do with his life.
  • Trevor deconstructs the stereotypical GTA player: Someone who's interested only in causing as much chaos as possible, consequences be damned, and for whom pursuing a particular goal in-game is an afterthought, but as a result, his asocial and independent behavior often results in half-baked schemes that are often less straightforward than they initially seem and don't pan out in the way he wants them to.
• Hero Must Die deconstructs the JRPG genre by working in reverse: instead of playing as a hero who gets stronger over the course of their quest to save the world, this game starts after the Big Bad is defeated. The Hero Dies in the first few minutes of the game, but is brought back to life for a week to put their affairs in order, during which time they grow progressively weaker, losing their strongest spells and the strength to wield their strongest weapons and armor. In addition, No Ontological Inertia is Averted: just because the Big Bad is gone doesn't mean the demons he led just give up and go home, and the world faces other problems besides.
• The Komato in Iji are a deconstruction of the Proud Warrior Race, their entire society being predicated on having a mortal enemy to fight. By the end of the game they're convinced, whether truthfully or not, that they've finally exterminated this enemy, but General Tor is convinced that without an outside force to fight against, the Komato will eventually turn on each other.
• Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories deals with a Canon Relationship Sue, while 358/2 Days deconstructs the Copycat Sue. The characters involved are canonically clones of some sort and are considered abominations in-universe. Their Sue-ish traits are actually plot-relevant and tend to be the reason the villains can make use of them.
• Most of the actions of the Designated Heroes of Len'en are what would happen if a stereotypical human were transported to an Adventure-Friendly World and gained New Powers as the Plot Demands. While their antics are Played for Laughs (such as the greedy Kuroji), later games show that their actions are catching up to them and while they save the day, they unknowingly make things worse.
  • Also, the heroes neglecting their duties results in the birth of an Eldritch Abomination, an absent-minded Sealed Evil in a Can destroying the barrier and a hidden revolution, now that the tyrannical former heroine of Mugenri has left in charge a self-centered Teen Genius. Way to go, Tsurubami.
  • The whole series deconstructs the Heroic Comedic Sociopath characters from Touhou (which Len'en is based off). Many of the playable characters are acknowledged not to be the most virtuous people around, and fighting the villain of the day is often done for purely selfish reasons. While some Touhou games lean towards Darker and Edgier (such as Subterranean Animism and Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom), the heroines do not face any consequences for their actions, unlike Len'en's case.
• Marathon acts as a deconstruction of A.I. Is a Crapshoot. When an AI gains sentience, this doesn't stop at a homicidal rampage as with Glados or HAL; They get way too god damned smart. Smart, but also weirdly obsessive and paranoid, so that the new-found intelligence and sentience is somewhat wasted on whatever strange conspiracy theory the AI happens to develop at the time. Durandal almost acts Above Good and Evil in a weird way, as he doesn't really believe that killing/conquering humanity is worth the effort. Rather, he'd rather get out of the universe itself so that the Big Crunch doesn't kill him.
  • It also mildly deconstructs One-Man Army. Anyone who could end that many lives, alien or otherwise, without even thinking about it is ...Not all the way there
  • The Security Officer also exists as a deconstruction of But Thou Must!. It's heavily implied that he doesn't really have all that much free will, and is almost incapable of making moral choices on his own. Infinity is what puts the almost into that. For very good reason.
• Despite being considered the Trope Codifier although jingoistic military shooters exist before it, Modern Warfare deconstructs the cavalier cowboy attitude of jingoistic military shooters and movies by showing the catastrophic destruction and death that result from them, and the nationalist propaganda that fuels it.
• Metal Gear Solid is this for the action movie hero trope. Solid Snake in many ways is the type of protagonist you see in a action movie. He is a cool, highly skilled badass solider who gets the job done. He is also shown to be a bitter distraught man who is tormented by all the people he has killed and friends he has lost. He doesn't trust anyone and doesn't seem to know any life besides being a spy. He even takes the mission in the game despite knowing the people he works for are using him for their own purpose because of the fact he is not adapting to life past his old profession.
  • The Metal Gear franchise is full of this in general:
    • In contrast to most action/spy games, there are no clear cut hero and villains in the traditional sense. The conflicts are much more morally grey where Both Sides Have a Point and both sides are not above doing morally questionable behavior to get what they want.
    • The game makes a point to show you their is absolutely nothing glamourous about being a trained killer like you see in most video games and how the characters like Solid Snake are emotionally damage by all the things they had to do no matter how seemly heroic their missions may have been. Raiden in particular Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is one big giant Take That! to people that want to be like Solid Snake, not realizing that playing a game/simulator is not even remotely the same as being in actual dangerous combat-which is not just some fun game but is instead a tense dangerous matter of life and death; sometimes of many people no less.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in particular deconstructs the typical revenge storyline. The characters' quest for revenge turns them into people who will go to horrible lengths to seek it which only destroys their humanity. It also shows how an obsession for revenge will never end well or make you feel any better.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe is one for Hearts of Iron and other Paradox Interactive strategy games. Mindless military conquest (or "map painting") leads to extremely oppressive and dysfunctional societies, the Damocles' Sword of nuclear armament makes attempting global conquest a death sentence for the entirety of human civilization, and a cultural environment where the ideologies of militarism and xenophobia are as dominant as liberal pluralism is in OTL, opens a precedent for horrific violence and brutality.
• Most of the villainy of No More Heroes's Villain Protagonist comes from what would happen if a stereotypical video game/anime geek retained their combat ability in the real world and lived life like they play games.
• The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game that styles itself as a Spiritual Successor to Fallout above, similarly deconstructs the capitalist utopia of the Gilded Age within a Firefly-esque space setting. The Halcyon colony is One Nation Under Copyright, and the locals profess Undying Loyalty in corporations that reaches almost Cargo Cult levels; they pepper everyday conversation with company slogans and discriminate against each other based on brand loyalties. That's not even getting into some of the truly staggering greed and incompetence at the higher levels.
• Paper Mario: The Origami King deconstructs the idea of the Things from the previous two games with the Legion of Stationery. Things all are massive, 3D, real-world objects in a world made of paper and are incredibly powerful, being able to shape the paper world around them, but are only used by Mario for several attacks and are entirely Played for Laughs. The members of the Legion of Stationery are basically Things... but they are not on your side, and their tremendous power is absolutely terrifying to the paper beings that encounter them. Hole Punch and Scissors show the level of danger such beings can present best, with the former punching out both the Sun to use it as his disco ball and the faces of forty Toads, and the latter being a Blood Knight Man of Kryptonite that can reduce anything into confetti if he so desires.
• Persona:
  • Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth: The fourth boss, Shadow Rei/Best Friend, deconstructs the idea of Shadows in general. Shadows are physical manifestations of a person's repressed emotions and desires, and the Investigation Team all gained their Personas by acknowledging and accepting theirs, but Best Friend isn't just teenage desires and confusion — it's death. Accepting your flaws is one thing, but accepting that your life has ended (and in Rei's specific case, also amounted to nothing) is quite another. Like Mitsuo in Persona 4, Rei rejects her shadow even after it's defeated and it just fades away, and Rei after getting her memories back is every bit an emotional wreck as when she first met Chronos.
  • Persona 5 deconstructs them harder. While the Shadows of Persona 4 are, as mentioned above, teenage desires and confusion, Persona 5 shows that Shadows can also become the dark sides of some truly monstrous individuals.
• Phantom Brave viciously deconstructs All of the Other Reindeer. Marona's Chartreuse is, for all intents and purposes, necromancy, and as such it is widely regarded as a dark, unholy power, and people react accordingly to her. This isn't simply general disdain or mocking of her, this is real, genuine fear and hatred. Listen to that woman who scolds her son for wanting to be friends with Marona in the opening chapter. You can feel the pure, unbridled barely contained rage she has at the mere mention of her name.
• Pokémon Black and White deconstructs not just many of the implications of a Crapsaccharine World in the series that are hinted at through the Pokédex entries, but also deconstructs the idea that everyone in the world of Pokémon thinks that it's a good idea to send kids and teenagers out into the wild to capture Pokémon, with Bianca's father feeling immensely concerned for her. Another part of it is the idea that no one bats an eyelash at Pokémon battles or no one thinks it's too violent with Team Plasma and N. It also provides a deconstruction of the concept of Moral Guardians in the form of Team Plasma's claims to be concerned for the welfare of Pokémon.
• Likewise, Pokémon Sun and Moon deconstructs the trainers who do not have what it takes to challenge the regional Pokémon League, even the traditions that were established in Alola before Kukui commits to founding a League of its own. Successful trainers have stronger Pokémon, more items, and more money... but the ones that lack the skill to amount to anything ultimately end up destitute. Nowhere is this better depicted than in Po Town, which Team Skull uses as its hideout... or, rather, they are functionally confined to due to lacking the ability to strike out on their own, as mentioned earlier. Team Skull is littered with failures who could not take the Island Challenges, and Guzma himself failed to become a Trial Captain and ultimately outgrew the acceptance range of 20 years of age, leaving nothing but bitterness in its wake. It also deconstructs what a villain team consists of: whereas other villain teams are self-sustaining or run legitimate business ventures to cover their shady dealings, Team Skull lacks even that, which again is perfectly depicted in Po Town with its lack of electricity, even in its Pokémon Center. When the opportunity for money came along, they leapt at it like a Carvanha to fresh meat... but while the Aether Foundation is swimming in research grant funds, Lusamine proves to be morally bankrupt.
  • The Big Bad Lusamine deconstructs trainers themselves. She claims to love all Pokémon and wants to collect them all, just like the Player Character... while treating them (as well as people) as little more than objects. She ignores that which she does not find appealing and discards what is no longer of use to her. She even keeps cryogenically frozen Pokémon on display, asking how it's any different from the player keeping their unused ones in a box. When a new and unknown Pokémon, the Ultra Beasts, appear, she wants them for herself, just like the player does.
• Red Alert 3: Paradox is a Game Mod building a world around the scarce information of its source material, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 and plays out realistically what would happen if three major superpowers go to all-out war, a US President is killed or what consequences it has when physics-defying technology is used large-scale and regularly. It's not nearly as idealistic as the original.
• Red Dead Redemption 2 deconstructs the western outlaw life heavily:
  • Life as an outlaw is neither fun or romantic. The gang constantly move from place to place and live in perpetual fear and paranoia of the outside world and even each other, which is what destroys them in the end.
  • Dutch's Idiot Hero plan to pull one big score and then leave in the chaos is woefully unworkable. There's nothing they can realistically do to secure enough money to provide for twenty-plus people, nevermind get them all out of the country and set up new lives elsewhere. All their attempts do is get them into deeper and deeper shit, and the authorities pull more and more resources and manpower to hunt them down.
  • Most of the gang have talents and skills they could easily put to honest lives if only they weren't trapped in a futile cycle of crime. Javier is a skilled hunter and fisherman and can also play the guitar very well. Mary-Beth is a talented writer and true enough becomes a novelist in the epilogue. And Swanson the alcoholic clergyman moves to New York, kicks his habit and becomes a respected priest.
• The R-Type series is this with the Shoot 'Em Up genre as a whole, starting with Delta and Final. It turns out that the Bydo, the "aliens" you were fighting against, were mankind's own creation, and they had banished the Bydo to another world. The Bydo later returned, assimilating humans in retaliation for being played on with humankind being treated as Gods.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux deconstructs not only the three endings of the original, but even most Law/Neutral/Chaos endings of the series in general via Alex (eventually) explaining the consequences of each.
  • Side with Chaos and create a world where everyone is free and the strongest survive? Turns out when the same rules apply to humans and demons, the latter utterly dominate, and Alex is the last partly-human being alive on the planet.
  • Side with Law and create a perfect utopia of absolute order where there are no imperfections? "Imperfections" just happen to include those who reject the order and believe in free will, such as Alex.
  • Renounce both Chaos and Law and just eliminate the problem? Mankind is pleased with your efforts...so pleased, in fact, that it assumes the problem is gone for good and doesn't see the need to prepare for the same catastrophe, which happens again in a few decades, this time without the people or means to stop it in time.
• The Demon Path in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters could be seen as a deconstruction of Stupid Evil choices in video games (where the game's Karma Meter consists of "Help this woman find her lost puppy, or kill her and eat her family,") taken to its ultimate conclusion. Once the protagonist gets the power of an Omnicidal Maniac god of death, they decide to go on a world-wide killing spree for no reason other than it sounds like fun. What follows is a massacre of the entire cast of the game, anyone who isn't lucky enough to be killed immediately being either horribly broken or driven insane and then killed. By the end of the game, the protagonist and the god of death are the only living things left on the planet, at which point the protagonist turns on the god of death and eats him, gaining his powers fully, before turning his/her new-found powers on the gods themselves and finally erasing all of existence, along with him/herself. Alternately, you lose the final battle...And get a 'Good Ending', as all the heroes rejoice in your defeat...You're just another Big Bad, like all the rest in video games.
• Spec Ops: The Line deconstructs the modern shooter game and the limited binary "moral choices" of video games in general.
  "Are we really in control of Captain Walker? Or do we merely represent the last vestige of self-awareness in his increasingly damaged mind as he railroads us into committing atrocities, and our distrust and fear of him grows in parallel to that of the men in his command as he weakly tries to rationalize to both them and us until we feel as disconnected from him as the rest of reality and... (sigh) Do you remember when shooters were about killing demons from hell? Those were good days." — Zero Punctuation
• Star Control 2 is partially a deconstruction of sci-fi, specifically Star Trek. There are a number of examples, but the Sentient Milieu is the best: it's essentially a mirror image of the Federation, except that things go horribly wrong. The Ur-Quan play essentially the same role that humans do in the Federation. They evolved much the same way, and were late to become a unified space-faring species due to having spent most of their existence trying to kill one another. Through the kindness of more advanced races, they were permitted to join the Sentient Milieu and over time became its boldest explorers. Then they stumble upon the Dnyarri, and this is where the paths diverge. The entire Milieu is enslaved for millennia, and when an excruciating slave revolt is over the Ur-Quan are split into two camps: those who want to permanently enslave all other sentient life in the universe, and those who want to eradicate it. The question that is asked: would the humans in Star Trek be on the same moral high horse if they had suffered the same existential threat?
• A lighter example of Deconstruction would belong to SWAT 4, an FPS whose objective is not shooting bad guys. Just plain shooting bad guys like in another FPS, in SWAT 4, does not net you a point. This game expects you to be a police officer, not an FPS character. To earn points (which are needed to advance in harder difficulties), you must deal with the bad guys with non-lethal methods, and arrest them.
• This is the entire point of the Tales Series. The modus operandi for each game is to write up the world's biggest Cliché Storm of an RPG setting, and then rip it to shreds by analyzing in brutal detail why every single trope in a fantasy story has the potential to be terrifying. The cutesy graphics mean they get away with a lot of stuff that many other, more "mature"-looking RPGs wouldn't be able to.
  • A Recurring Element throughout the series is The Chosen One, and deconstructing the idea by showing how much It Sucks to Be the Chosen One. Symphonia and Abyss show the multitude of ways having the fate of the world on someone's shoulders would do all kinds of damage to their psyche. Legendia says that "saving" the world often means doing some truly horrible things. Xillia shows how single-mindedly focusing on your mission at the expense of all else will have lasting consequences that you can't possibly prepare for. And Graces is all about the things you're going to have to leave behind if you want to do it.
• Touhou Project:
  • The fairies in in the series can be seen as a deconstruction of Death Is Cheap. They have extremely short lifespans, but resurrect almost instantly when killed. This leaves them all as literally Too Dumb to Live as they often charge headfirst into potentially fatal situations and don't really learn from their mistakes since there's no real consequences. It is implied in supplementary material that their view of life and death might extend to their perception of other beings' lives and deaths, too. Which in practice would mean that a fairy cannot see any moral difference between pranking someone by "hiding their food" and "setting them on fire and shoving them down a cliff", 'cuz, hey, the people they kill are just going to resurrect again, right?
  • The Komeiji sisters, Satori and Koishi, as well as the entire satori race, also deconstruct the Mind Reading trope: The satori have the racial ability to read minds out loud. This makes them both the most feared and most hated youkai race in Gensoukyou, and it's implied that Satori and Koishi are the Last of Their Kind as the rest of their race have been hunted to extinction by humans and youkai alike. For Satori, being hated by everyone for her powers drove her to becoming a hikikomori, literally isolating herself in the depths of Hell with nobody for company except her sister and pets (who don't mind having their minds read). In Koishi's case, she outright gave herself a Poke in the Third Eye in order to escape all the fear and hatred, an act that made her unable to read her own mind and left her without any personality, desires, or mind at all. Many people question if it was really worth it.
• Umurangi Generation is a massive deconstruction of tropes related to Humongous Mecha anime and films, such as Pacific Rim. Rather than being an unambiguously heroic force fighting for humanity's last hope of survival, the giant mecha pilots work for an occupying military reviled and hated by the local populace, which doesn't care much for collateral damage or the wellbeing of its own soldiers or the citizens they protect, and is perfectly willing to turn its weapons against the people when doing so serves its own interests. What's worse, the giant mecha are implied to not even be effective at defending against the Kaiju threat, acting mainly as a PR move and a means of justifying the military occupation while merely delaying the inevitable at best. The idea of said mecha being piloted by depressed young teenagers is also deconstructed, as this leads to a long list of dead teens missed dearly by their families and friends while official memorials don't even name them.
• The Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft can be arguably seen as one for the entire concept of redemption and how it may not work in the real world by showing that often people seek for the evil that wronged them to be brought to justice instead of redeemed. In one of the quest chains the players and Tirion finds a heart that may have belonged to Arthas and kept his humanity. When Arthas taunts them about redeeming him, Tirion rejects redeeming him and destroys the heart, stating that only the Lich King remains—and that is before we learn in patch 3.3 that as it turns out, the good half of Arthas was the only thing holding the Scourge back from destroying Azeroth — thus to what extent was there really nothing left or to what extent was Tirion enraged by how much Arthas started the chain of events that screwed over his life and decided to kill him instead because of that, is debatable. At the end as we kill the Lich King the good Arthas takes back his body long enough to have his humanity restored before his death, and the subsequent quests on heroic difficulty gives the impression that the people once close to him (Uther, Jaina, Muradin) have forgiven him — it turns out that doesn't seem to have sent Arthas to a good afterlife due to the Lich King filling the normal afterlife with Shades that he ordered to torture anyone who entered their territory which of course includes himself....
  • The beginning quests in the Jade Forest area of "Mists of Pandaria" expansion can be seen as this towards the game itself — throughout the game's eight years of life, players have always been the ones to save the day by defeating monsters and purging demonic corruption from the world. However, Pandaria is about an idealistic continent... where the arrival of the player characters draws lines in the sand that weren't there before and wind up reawakening the threats that had been subdued to allow the utopian civilization to flourish. The first zone involves both factions recruiting the indigenous people to their cause (sometimes unwillingly) and making them fight each other, of course creating a huge mess when the Sha is unleashed. In other words, the Jade Forest has become corrupted just like a lot of other zones and people have... and you are the catalyst if not the whole cause of this. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. That said, this is dropped after the area.
• The XCOM franchise deconstructs children's cartoons such as G.I. Joe and Transformers, as well as the Alien Invasion. X-COM is a team of elite soldiers who wear cool-looking armor and have a fancy Cool Ship that they travel the world in to save the world from goofy-looking aliens... and then suffer a relentlessly high fatality rate, crippling technological inferiority, and severe funding troubles. Anyone Can Die, often in rather brutal ways, and 50% or higher casualty rates are common in successful missions, with failures usually resulting in no survivors whatsoever. The cool-looking armor is good for little else besides appearance. The Cool Ship costs ludicrous amount of money to lease and is completely unarmed. The goofy-looking aliens outnumber us over a thousand to one and have technology that outstrips ours to such a degree that X-COM might as well be fighting them with sticks. Governments will happily cut funding at the drop of a hat, and surrender to the aliens to stop their citizens from being slaughtered. It is not a very pleasant situation. Ironically, after Hasbro acquired the franchise they briefly attempted to make it into a children's cartoon series, which is a rather curious decision considering X-COM's almost insanely high casualty rate.
  • X-COM itself (especially XCOM: Enemy Unknown) is viciously deconstructed in Xenonauts, which makes it clear humanity is nothing more than another race waiting to be conquered and enslaved by the Praetors with no special traits, technology like psionics is well beyond reach with no means of meaningfully countering it and any technology they salvage and reverse engineered will ultimately be countered. Making it worse is the fact the fight is effectively a Hopeless War: no matter how many ships and aliens they kill, the Praetors leading this invasion just have too many numbers and the only reason humanity "wins" is because of a stolen device they refuse to activate as the Praetors leading the attack will deploy a genocide option to effortlessly wipe humanity out.
• Yandere Simulator takes the titular trope apart in the most brutal forms imaginable, not only in how far the "protagonist" Yan-chan can go in pursuit of her Senpai but in how hard it would be for a high school student to get away with murder. The creator Yandere-Dev has also stated that Yan-chan's obsession is not love, but the result of a serious psychological disorder.
• You Are Not The Hero is a deconstruction of the Kleptomaniac Hero. Petula doesn't like the heroes, even BEFORE they break into her home and steal her pendant. And once they do, she follows them wherever they go to get it back.