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  • In countless Role-Playing Games, as a result of evolving from Dungeon Crawling adventures without fully changing the gameplay, characters who are outright said to be heroes or otherwise never said to have evil or criminal inclinations are allowed to waltz into other people's houses, smash their worldly possessions, and loot them of their valuables with no repercussions, even when you do so literally right in front of them. The exceptions are few and far between.
  • Similarly, far too many Adventure Games are designed such that a Player Character written as heroic or otherwise not presented as being an Anti-Hero or a villain is required to steal other people's belongings to solve puzzles, sometimes leading to the items being destroyed outright. This is common enough that games which prevent you from or punish you for committing theft stand out for being unusual.
  • The titular Pecan Apple of Banzai Pecan. The game claims she is a paragon of justice and heroism, but her actions in the game can hardly be considered heroic. She threatens the guy she claims to love with denial of sex if he so much as kisses the big bad, gets the hots for another guy who turns out to be her future son, calls them by derogatory names, and acts like a total jerkass to them (some worse than others, such as repeatedly stomping on Bitter Almond after pressing her Berserk Button).
  • Book of Mario: Thousands of Doors's prequel, Book of Mario 64, invokes this with Mario. Throughout the adventure, Mario does many questionable and sometimes downright evil actions, but is still treated as the hero in the narrative and by the Stellarvinden, who encourage him to keep going. This foreshadows the twist that Browser is a Hero Antagonist trying to save the world and Mario is being possessed by the Stellarvinden to start the War.
  • Cross Edge has York, an arrogant, insensitive, selfish asshole who is pretty much a dick even to his own comrades, acting like he's better than them and that he doesn't need help. He's also quick to insult other people's flaws or call them useless as if he were completely perfect himself, which is far from the truth.
  • In Mobile Phone Game Cutie Riot, quest dialog mentions the player is outright killing people when completing quests, due to the player's mother being killed by monsters.
  • While Mike Dawson of the first Dark Seed was a competent hero, he has gotten so much worse in the sequel. He is whiny, constantly asking awkward questions, comes of as a Manchild at some parts, starts to act unjustifiably antagonistic near the end of the game (and has dialogue choices to make him come off as even worse of a human being), and cannot win simple carnival games without cheating! At one point, Mike even unintentionally lets a man die through his incompetence by not bringing him his medicine because Mike is too weak to push an anvil off its cooler and too dumb to just ask somebody to give him a hand with lifting it. This is supposed to be the good guy. It's even been theorized that the dev team may have it in for the real Mike Dawson and made him a Loser Protagonist on purpose. To be fair, he does succeed in his quest, but the ending leaves it all ambiguous. Make of that what you will.
  • Jack Slate, the protagonist of Dead to Rights, is implied to be one of the only honest cops remaining on the police force of Grant City, and his motive for the whole game is simply to solve and avenge his father's murder. The gameplay largely consists of getting into deadly One-Man Army gunfights and fistfights in which Slate can disarm opponents or take them as Bulletproof Human Shields, and it is not possible to disarm someone or release a Human Shield non-lethally. Gameplay cannot progress until every criminal shooting at Slate is dead. The result is that he leaves a massive body count in his wake while seeking justice for one man's death. Outside of gameplay, Slate escapes from prison (after being put there for a murder he didn't commit, mind you) in part by killing a man in cold blood technically guilty only of being an abusive psychopath who beat Slate's dog. He also only publicizes the conspiracy behind his father's death after personally killing everyone involved in it, including the Mayor of Grant City and its Chief of Police. Knowing that a violent power struggle will result from his actions, Slate, having successfully avenged his father, then abandons Grant City to its fate, deeming the Wretched Hive beyond saving.
  • In Dennis the Menace, Dennis kills a little girl on a swing at one point.
  • Charlie of Eggs Of Steel Charlies Eggsellent Adventure is shown from the very start of the game to be Lethally Stupid. He's the night watchman of the M.O.M. Steel mill, but in the opening cutscene, he's ripping pages out of his safety manual to make paper airplanes, nearly starts a fire doing so, and promptly knocks over delicate machinery that throws the whole factory into chaos while reaching for a donut. The revelations over the course of the game make his position even worse; he only got his job in the first place due to having friends in high places, and despite a fellow employee warning the managers that he was not fit for the job, Charlie accidentally kills that employee on his very first day with his negligence, and faces no repercussions.
  • Parodied to a ridiculous degree in Failman, a short point and click where you play as a superhero with Insane Troll Logic as he causes property (and bodily) damage to save cats, dolls and ducks, robs a bank and blames it on someone at a broken ATM, stops someone from robbing a bank on a movie set and... gives someone a 404 error. He's a destructive idiot playing the hero, but it's silly all the same.
  • This trope applies to the version of 50 Cent portrayed in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. Despite presumably being a multimillionaire he uses the fact that he wasn't paid for a concert as justification for shooting, exploding and murdering his way through an already war-torn country to try and recover a jewel-encrusted human skull. He behaves like a foul-mouthed thug at all times and is rude and threatening to every character he meets, even the ones who are trying to help him. The game has a special button just for spewing profanity at his victims. At the end he recovers the skull, sticks a cigar in its teeth and calls it an ugly bitch.
  • Parodied with Mog/Dungeon Hero X in Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon. Despite titling himself/claiming he's a hero, stepping on a Duelling Trap title can sometimes spawn Robber Hero X (literally just him under a different name), who can steal from Chocobo and dash quickly (by moving 2 times faster than normal) while rubbing it in your face. This comes from someone who gets upset if you steal the thief memory (or subsequent items) off him, writes a damming letter to you should the memory reach level 8 (the max job level), and doesn't do any true heroics in-game.
  • Marche Raidiju from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. After finding himself in a fantasy world, he searches for a way home, and the only apparent way back seems to involve turning the entire world back, even though his friends and brother don't want to go. Worth noting that his friends' lives are all worse in their homeworld; Marche's brother Doned cannot walk, for example. Over time, as Marche progresses on his quest, the others come around to his way of thinking and decide to go back, but Marche essentially making the decision for them and instigating a Dream Apocalypse rubbed some players the wrong way.
  • The protagonists from Final Fantasy XIII, particularly Snow, get utterly torn apart by Spoony for being this during his two and a half hour slamming of the game. Spoony constantly notes how while the protagonists just wholesale slaughter enemy soldiers without hesitation or regret and constantly destroy and blow things up (without caring who's inside, enemy or civilian) without even really knowing why they're doing it beyond vague motivations, while said soldiers are portrayed rather sympathetically as people who are trying to do what they think is right, are genuinely trying to protect Cocoon from a very real threat, have a very valid reason to be trying to stop the protagonists, and even do their best to limit collateral damage and take their enemies alive.
    Spoony: Whatever. The "good" guys have to escape on their own ship because their fight with Bartandelus caused catastrophic damage making the entire place explode, taking with it hundreds of soldiers and innocent technicians just doing their jobs protecting Cocoon from these murderous psychopaths...
  • The Eight Legends from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade. In the previous game, the Eight Legends come across as an underused plotline since we learn humans began the Scouring (an ancient war against the dragons) for no known reason after generations of peaceful coexistence but none of the characters seriously question the continent's reverence for the eight warriors who brought the decisive victory. Blazing Blade has two of them appear as characters. Athos, who even joins the party, is never treated as anything but a wise and knowing mentor figure, and Braimmond, though unsettling, is still sympathetic. Nobody, not even the dragons, questions them about being heroes of the aggressor side, not even to ask "did you have a good reason?"
  • The Frontier: General Blackthorne is made out to be a noble and compassionate military leader, while General Lee Oliver is described as a warmonger. However, for such a 'compassionate' man who 'cares about his men', Blackthorne is the first to advocate for euthanising the injured soldiers outside of Helios rather than attempting to render any medical aid, will execute any soldier who tries to leave the Frontier, and sends an entire squad to rescue one captive soldier then claims he didn't care a whole lot for the soldiers in question when many of them ended up being killed in the process of that rescue mission. So he's not quite as saintly as the story wants to make him look.
  • Chin from Hong Kong '97. After "crime rate skyrockeded" [sic] when people from China moved to Hong Kong, apparently the best solution the government could come up with is hire Bruce Lee's relative to single-handedly wipe out China's entire population. Likely including children, since it matches up with the "1.2 billion" goal the game gives. The game still treats him as some kind of hero for this.
  • The title character of Hopkins FBI is described as a "modern day hero and full time righter-of-wrongs" on the back of the package. However, the puzzle design regularly requires him to commit crimes for no readily-apparent reason, most frequently theft. In the first act of the game, the only method to stop a group of bank robbers is to use excessive force by blowing them up in their hideout with a live grenade, which also incinerates all but $20 of the stolen money. Hopkins must then steal the $20 so he can much later use it to pay for a movie ticket. Following this incident, he must shoot out his fiancée Samantha's bathroom door lock before he finds out she's been kidnapped, and must steal from her house to solve Bernie Berckson's Criminal Mind Games. Doing so also requires vandalism and destruction of property, as part of this involves melting a wax museum statue in full public view during business hours to reveal the murder victim that Berckson hid inside of it. Finally, the endgame requires Hopkins to create a clone of himself and then murder him, so that the clone, now in Purgatory, can sabotage the machine that Berckson uses to resurrect himself.
  • In Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, you are straight up killing people. No joke. A lot of people. While there are in fact people you fight nonlethally (mostly drunks and plot-important NPCs who need to survive to encounter later), most of the more recent questlines explicitly required "Enemies Defeated" instead of "___ Killed", and you often do have at least a legitimately heroic reason to get to your end destination, it does seem simply walking through a random city on a peaceful day will involve killing - ostensibly in self-defense - hundreds of people and animals. (This is a holdover from Crusaders of the Lost Idols, a previous game this was originally based on, which had a more surreal setting in which swarms of random and often abstract enemies everywhere was less jarring.)
  • Kalista, the main protagonist of The Last Resurrection, is a succubus who frequently rapes and murders people unfortunate enough to be in her general vicinity. In the novelizations made by the game's creator, she goes several steps further and murders civillians for sexual pleasure. Added to this is Kalista's maternal insest and her misandry-driven motives. You'd think she was intended to be an overly edgy '90s Anti-Hero, but the author fully intended Kalista as a hero saving the world from the Christian church (depicted here as a Religion of Evil). The only person in the whole game who ever objects to Kalista's constant rape and murder is Jesus, who is reduced to a Straw Character who himself rapes and murders people.
  • Mad Max (2015): Max's general attitude has rubbed some people the wrong way. While his dickish attitude is consistent with the films, it gets shot up extreme levels here. Ramming the Magnum Opus into Scrotus while Chum was still on the hood and killing him in the process, just to push Scrotus over the cliff hasn't sat well with everyone, to say the least.
  • Adam Malkovich of Metroid: Other M, especially in the English localization. Despite Samus having a great amount of respect for him and calling him a father figure, Adam in turn acts incredibly cold and callous towards her from the moment they first interact. Their dynamic borders on the abusive, as it often seems like he resents Samus for leaving his command years ago, and Samus feels the need to win back his approval. And while that element isn't present in the Japanese script, what is present in both versions is him being overly controlling of her actions, restricting her access to her equipment under threat of getting Federation higher-ups involved in the matter. One of his last acts is to shoot Samus in the back while a hungry Metroid is within arm's reach of her, solely to keep her from going into Sector Zero... as opposed to, you know, asking her nicely: even Samus is aggravated with him by this point, asking him why he didn't just verbally explain the situation instead of incapacitating her. It's quite an accomplishment that he can sacrifice himself to save Samus and still make it seem unforgivably dickish.
  • Monkey Island: Guybrush Threepwood is a wacky (sometimes moronic) goofball. His actions have screwed over countless NPCs throughout the series. In the second game, he nails a salesman in a coffin (who doesn't get out until 3 months later) just to steal a key, frames an innocent woman for countless crimes (which were all his to begin with) just to steal her non-alcoholic grog, and steals Wally's monocle, in which listening to Wally while he tries to look for it is just heartbreaking. Subverted when he did make amends for them in each case. He didn't mean to nail the coffin down so hard and freed the salesman in the following game, broke the woman out of prison later on, and gave Wally a replacement monocle sometime after that.
  • Brent Halligan from The Mystery of the Druids is a mostly ineffective jerkass of a Scotland Yard detective whose time prior to the game's events was spent loafing about, wasting all his money on pizza and gambling, playing practical jokes, and unsuccessfully flirting with his department's data analyst rather than actually trying to solve murder mysteries. As if that didn't already make him unsympathetic enough, his charming actions during the course of the game include poisoning and robbing a homeless man for change to use a payphone, stealing a French fisherman's expensive rod and bucket just to scrape salt off a ferry, and at the end, stabbing the female lead in the stomach (not without reason, but this was severe overkill just to screw over the villain). The game even lampshades Halligan's behavior as 'designated' at several points- basically everybody at Scotland Yard hates him because of his past buffoonery, including trying to arrest Prince Charles for the murder of Princess Diana, and making dozens of random long distance calls on his office phone. He also spends a large portion of the game solving puzzles in such unethical ways that it's very easy to imagine everybody he meets later hating him in much the same way that his co-workers already do.
  • Paperboy: The Paperboy forces non subscribers to subscribe by delivering papers to them anyway...through their windows.
  • Persona 4:
    • The reason why Yosuke is such a Base-Breaking Character. He is perverted to the point of misogyny (right after a girl he had a crush on was murdered and learning that said girl hated him), and his tendency to make fun of Kanji's insecurities make him look like a huge homophobe. However, unlike the former, he never faces karma for the latter.
    • While Yosuke is no saint, Chie's treatment towards him doesn't paint a pretty picture of her either. She'll often assault Yosuke (and the protagonist and Kanji on some occasions) for minimal offenses, even if he apologized beforehand, she mooches off of him, and she charged money to Yosuke's credit card for an expensive suit for Teddie without asking him.
    • The rest of the Investigation Team may not be as bad as Yosuke and Chie in the Jerkass department, but they still have their moments, like Yu and Kanji coercing the girls into competing in the beauty pageant, the infamous Amagi Inn scene, and the times they took swipes at Kashiwagi and Hanako for their looks (though the latter case is more forgivable given that Kashiwagi and Hanako aren't exactly pleasant people themselves). Another point against them is their tendency to make short-sighted decisions that end up causing more problems.
  • Persona 5: Morgana, being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold can come off as this, especially before his character development; he outright claims to only be using the Phantom Thieves, and tends to tease Ryuji a lot, which, while potentially meant as friendly ribbing, comes off as straight up bullying to some.
  • The "protagonists" of the movie labyrinths in Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth are quite questionable. Which is the whole point, as the idea is to derail these movies into something with a sane moral code and they are aspects of Nagi's own inability to see her own problems as well as Hikari's borderline suicidal self-loathing.
    • The first movie is a superhero movie, but the superhero in question is a figure resembling Kamoshida. While he is not a rapist like the real one, he hasn't done anything for the city in his movie reality other than terrorizing the citizens and forcing them to worship him.
    • The second movie is a dinosaur movie about weak herbivore dinosaurs trying to survive from being preyed by carnivorous dinosaurs. Sounds right and the movie does build up the carnivorous dinosaurs as villains. In reality, the herbivore dinosaurs are Greater-Scope Villains that ostracize anyone who doesn't follow them. If you are a dinosaur and tell the Hive Mind to fight the carnivores, they will make your life hell.
    • The third movie is probably the most questionable. It is a Sci-fi robot movie that has an AI as a protagonist. This should ring red alarms; A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Not only that, the AI is out to remove a robot with personality, whose crime is nothing other than to like flowers and grow emotions. And to top it all off, the AI looks like Ikutsuki, which unbeknown to S.E.E.S at that time, is exactly as evil as the AI.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando: Angela Cross. After The Reveal, she's treated as a misunderstood hero who's been thwarted by unsuspecting dupes. Though she was a Well-Intentioned Extremist, her crimes up to this point include kidnapping and holding Clank hostage, repeatedly trying to kill Ratchet, harassing store clerks for kicks, and generally just acting like an actual villain. Though we learn she was forced to resort to extreme measures to stop Fizzwidget from releasing the Protopet in its current state, her actions cross the line from extremism to villainy quite easily.
  • Nilin of Remember Me, the noble terrorist who kills her way through Neo-Paris on the word of someone she's never met, even after declaring how much she doesn't like or trust him. She ends the game having released all the stored memories in the Memoreyes database to their owners, declaring that we need our memories, even the painful ones, to be ourselves... except she also declares she has the power to play God by editing people's memories to be whatever she wants, at least one instance of which being implied to result in the bombing of a hospital.
  • Jake from Ride to Hell: Retribution always solves his problems in ridiculously complex and needlessly brutal ways. At one point, he murders several truckers to steal their truck, runs over two dozen police officers, and blows up a power plant with the truck and kills everyone inside just to cut the power to an electric fence that was in his way. The story treats him as, at worst, an Anti-Hero.
  • The protagonist of Road Avenger, who causes what is probably millions of dollars in collateral damage and kills a few innocent people in his attempt to avenge the death of his wife, which was caused by him swerving into a rock in the desert to avoid the chaotic biker villains.
  • Valdo, the protagonist of Secrets of da Vinci: The Forbidden Manuscript, is an admitted forger and con artist; he lost his previous job for making a copy of a painting and selling it as the original. He also, depending on player choices, has no problems with breaking and entering, lying, theft, and seducing the woman in whose house he's staying.
  • Simon from Simon the Sorcerer is this. Many things he does are morally questionable, though in the first game he was at least sympathetic to most NPCs. But as the series progresses he becomes more sexist and intolerable. In fact his very first line (If you don't count the opening credits) is him stating that he's bored, so he thinks about putting his dog through the dryer cycle.
  • Patroklos Alexander from Soul Calibur V is shown killing an innocent man simply because he "looks pale and filthy" and might be a Malfested, and then smugly mentioning there's no way to prove it within the first six minutes of the Story Mode. He's a bigoted Jerkass whose rejection of his sister after she saves his life causes her to fall under the control of Soul Edge, as well as a Hypocrite who blindly obeys the orders of the Big Bads despite saying he follows his own fate. Making matters worse is that his Character Development is so scattershot that the fans barely recognize it, as well as the fact that he gets away with killing his sister due to an Ass Pull of epic proportions. On character popularity polls post-launch, Patroklos was dead last of the "major" characters and generally reviled among quite literally the entire playerbase. It was so bad Soul Calibur VI hits the reset button so Patroklos has yet to come into existence and revealing the timeline where he exists as his above mentioned personality was an explicit Bad Future that horrifies his aunt Cassandra, who swears she won't let it play out that way.
  • StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm: Kerrigan has been accused of this by some fans; while there is no denying Mengsk is an evil bastard who needs to be overthrown and she is more than justified in her hatred of him, a lot of her actions during the campaign, such as killing the Protoss on Kaldir, routinely ordering her brood mothers to invade Dominion planets or attacking Protoss soldiers and innocent bestial races she seemingly has no beef with at all for the sake of Abathur's experiments, feel excessive and villainous, painting the conflict in an Evil vs. Evil light rather than the Black-and-Grey Morality it was supposed to come off as. Granted, she is supposed to be an Anti-Hero, and she does get mostly better as the campaign goes on, but there is a lot of debate on how justified the multitude of death she caused trying to reach Mengsk was, and some consider he was right to call her out for it. This caused an Author's Saving Throw to be done in Legacy of the Void, making Kerrigan more outwardly heroic in that game.
  • In Star Trek Online's Delta Rising expansion, the Kobali are introduced as a peaceful race under attack by a race of brutal conquerors, the Vaadwaur. They quickly prove untrustworthy, however, repeatedly lying to the player about mission-critical information. Also, their method of reproduction, what amounts to necromancy, has drawn a lot of rape comparisons on STO's forums, and they have a habit of forcibly retrieving anybody who remembers their previous life and tries to leave. All the while acting Holier Than Thou like the Federation on a bad day (see the main franchise entry in Live-Action TV). As a couple posters put it, they demand respect for their own culture but offer none in return. In comparison, discounting their leader Gaul, The Heavy of the story arc, the Vaadwaur as a whole are really just your standard Space Nazis (they've drawn many comparisons to the Klingons and TNG-era Romulans and Cardassians, all of whom the Federation managed to have a detente with) and their primary grievance with the Kobali is that the latter are holding thousands of Vaadwaur Popsicles and using the failed tubes, along with Vaadwaur battlefield casualties, for reproductive stock.
  • The Rockstar game State of Emergency was originally supposed to center around an amoral character who incites riots and freely takes part in destruction, mayhem and death. Rockstar, perhaps in trying to head off controversy, decided to switch the premise to a band of proletariat heroes fighting For Great Justice against an evil MegaCorp... Without making any changes to the core gameplay of destroying property and killing hundreds of people. One GameFAQs user review explains the problem quite well:
    Of course, there's some lame attempt at a story to justify killing dozens of law enforcement officers, namely that these are BAD law enforcement officers. They're corrupt law enforcement officers, and they need to die to release the grasp of the corporations on mainstream America in the future. Just like 1984, minus the hair bands. Unfortunately, the story is incredibly poor as it is, and feels only like an afterthought to make people think that the targets of your violence are deserving of it. Like when you throw a grenade into an unquestionably evil-owned restaurant.
  • Alphonse Lohrer in Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis in that he works for the evil Lodis Empire that seeks to take control of the island of Ovis even though he does question Rictor's motive of taking the spear Longicolnis for the Empire. He is revealed to be Lancelot Tartare, a main antagonist in the next chapter, Let Us Cling Together.
  • Tales of Vesperia plays this trope interestingly: Flynn isn't unsympathetic nor completely ineffectual, it's just that he keeps being lauded for feats and accomplishments that were actually done by Yuri and Brave Vesperia, making it a literal case of "Designated" Hero. His issues over this are what lead to the requisite Tales Series Duel Boss fight against him.
    • Yuri himself is considered by some to be this: a hero with a bizarre, inconsistent, "it's okay when I do it" moral code; and rarely if ever being called out on his inconsistencies. Whether you agree largely seems to depend on whether you think the writers did this intentionally, or perhaps if you consider his inconsistencies to be incredibly subtle character development.
  • Pretty much the entire party in Tales of the Abyss falls under this due to a simple, spoilered fact: Luke, the one they place the most blame upon and whom they spend a good chunk of time berating over his various failures, is actually seven. Add to that all the secrets so many of them know, the fact a good chunk were pegging on to the spoilered fact for some time before The Reveal and Wham Episode, and they tend to not look much better than the Anti-Villain bad guys they face off against.
  • Tomb Raider: Lara Croft, big time (and increasingly so as the series goes on). Between the first and third games, Lara goes from killing endangered species (though they do attack her) and human enemies with a "saving the world" license to killing MPs, security guards, homeless and tribesmen in their own village with the flimsy excuse that she's looking for an artifact. Taken to its limit by the sixth game, where she kills dozens of policemen and security guards, breaks into the Louvre and contaminates evidence in two separate crime scenes. All to clear her name of a single murder.
    • Robot Chicken parodies this quite well. With a sketch showing Lara entering a tomb, in which the monsters inside are extremely friendly and are all too willing to politely hand over their treasures. Regardless she shoots everything she sees to oblivion without saying a word. And Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation flat out calls her evil.
  • Touhou Project:
    • Reimu Hakurei can definitely fall into this category. Reimu often only saves the day (if you don't let Marisa do it instead) because she's forced into it, since she's often the only one who can, and the one people can pressure into solving the problems most easily. Sometimes, however, like in Mountain of Faith, Reimu attacks people she knows are not doing anything bad, and are actually goddesses just trying to carve out a niche for themselves (mind, their methods are dangerous to Gensokyo as a whole, not that they knew). In Undefined Fantastic Object, you can explicitly choose for Reimu to go "investigate" the treasure ship not because she is worried about Gensokyo, but because she wants to loot the treasure. Later games and additional material give her a grudgingly growing social conscience, slowly making her more receptive to the needs and wishes of both humans and youkai.
    • The Cute Witch and The Rival, Marisa Kirisame, falls even more into this trope, as an unabashed Kleptomaniac Hero who often saves the world by accident while trying to loot the final boss's house for valuables. In Imperishable Night, she even outright introduces herself to the Big Bad as a "burglar", much to her partner's dismay (who was actually trying to stop the Big Bad, and talked Marisa into helping her do it).
    • Sakuya Izayoi and Youmu Konpaku, who sometimes help Reimu and Marisa save the day, really aren't that much better either: Sakuya is the Ninja Meido of the local vampire mansion and is explicitly the one who "prepares the meals" for the rest of the residents there. Youmu, in the meantime, is the Battle Butler and gardener of Yuyuko Saigyouji who, while she's a fair bit more upstanding than the denizens of the vampire mansion, is still a pretty sketchy character... And why does either Sakuya and Youmu ever actually venture out into the world to save the day? "Because my mistress told me to."
  • The Town with No Name: The Man With No Name barely does anything that can be considered heroic. Most of time, he just dicks around doing nothing and doesn't even look for his sister, which is supposedly the reason why he is in The Town With No Name in the first place. He is a jackass to everyone he meets in the game and he even has the option to attempt to kill the Clint Eastwood expy. When you get the alternate ending, he shoots a child just for getting his name wrong.
  • Until Dawn: Mike can comes across as this to some, as he is presented as a mostly heroic individual regardless of his actions in the story that make him appear less so. He was a major part in the prank that led to Beth's death and Hannah's disappearance. Mike is also singlehandedly responsible for Josh's demise by leaving him tied up in a shed by himself after falsely accusing him of murdering Jessica which gets him captured by a Wendigo and then either does nothing to prevent the Wendigo from killing Josh or he lets the Wendigo drag Josh deeper into the mines and then selfishly leaves him to die and expresses no regret for it afterwards. He also, of his own volition, points a gun at Emily out of fear of her turning into a Wendigo and can potentially kill her, with no one ever bringing this up later unless he does kill her.
  • Valkyria Chronicles 4: Captain Morgen (an NPC) is depicted as being wise and kind, despite him being fully aware that his ship is Powered by a Forsaken Child and that the child will be used as a Fantastic Nuke to destroy the enemy's capital without warning. He never shows any moral reservations about any of this. When the player characters find out, they do have some reservations, but only a Deus ex machina stops them from completing the plan.
  • Pick a protagonist from the Whack Your... series. Any of them. Though arguably justified, since the whole series runs on Catharsis Factor for those frustrated with their jobs, their teachers, or their computers.
  • In some World of Warcraft storylines, you are this trope.
    • Some storylines are well-supported by lore and interwoven into the game in every way possible, but others are just Excuse Plots to loot gear from a new type of enemies in a new setting. For example, in the Mana Tombs dungeon, the enemies that Player Characters fight are simply graverobbers. Players fight them as mercenaries on behalf of a rival trade consortium. Graverobbers are obviously not nice people, but they're hardly the Legion of Doom players are supposed to be fighting across that ruined world. Meanwhile, the major "good" factions, the Alliance and the Horde, are openly examples of Gray-and-Grey Morality.
      • This is actually lampshaded by a new rare spawn mob in Duskwood, who questions why graverobbers like her are considered absolute scum, while the player character she's fighting has most likely looted the gear and weapons they're wearing right now from a dead body.
    • It's lampshaded at some point, but then ignored again. You get hunting quests in more than one place from a dwarf called Nesingwary and his son to kill various kinds of animals for gear rewards. Then in Northrend, Nesingwary's minions are evil poachers who massacre animals and whom you have to kill in turn for some druids. These "loot-crazed" hunters have dialogue indicating that they're trying to collect 20 Bear Asses to get some new piece of gear as a reward, just like you did. And then you can meet Nesingwary himself again in a different area, and he dismisses all moral questions in passing with one sentence and sends you out on his quests again.
  • The Argon Federation in X3: Albion Prelude. We're supposed to think they're the good guys, even though, for all the information the game gives us, the Terran Conflict turning into a hot war was entirely their fault: an Argon character from X3: Reunion suicide-bombed Earth's Torus Aeternal, killing millions of Terrans instantly (let alone the people killed by deorbiting debris). This was a 30th century equivalent of 9/11 taken to the next level; the Terrans' current Roaring Rampage of Revenge is self-defense.
    • However, a rather extreme case of All There in the Manual turns it into a rather dark shade of Grey-and-Gray Morality. According to the encyclopedia in the X-Superbox, over the preceding decade the Terrans had deployed a spy network into the Community of Planets with the intent of influencing the future course of their governments. This network was eventually discovered by the Argon Secret Service and the Federation understandably considered it an act of war. The Terrans' edge in military technology forced the Argon to take drastic measures such as artificially intelligent warships in order to give their navy a fighting chance. Since the Torus partly served as a shipyard and orbital defense station for Earth, destroying it opened the way for the Argon to attack Earth directly. It's still an atrocity, but at least it makes military sense.


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