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Disproportionate Retribution / Video Games

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  • Ace Attorney:
    • In the fourth case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Manfred von Karma shoots Gregory Edgeworth dead and then adopts his son Miles in order to raise him to become the exact kind of Amoral Attorney Gregory despised. And to top it off, 15 years later, he tries to have Edgeworth framed and convicted for murdering the man who defended the man wrongfully accused for killing Gregory, and when Phoenix and Maya shoot that down, for murdering his own father all those years ago! All because Gregory proved that von Karma extorted a false confession from Jeffrey Master during the IS-7 incident, which resulted in von Karma getting his first ever court penalty, thereby ruining his perfect record. Ironically, Investigations 2 reveals that the forged autopsy report that may or may not have inspired von Karma to coerce the false confession that Gregory exposed wasn't his doing for once, and he was deceived about it by someone higher up in the prosecutorial food chain.
    • The Greater-Scope Villain in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, out of sheer pettiness, gets Phoenix Wright disbarred from practicing law just because a high-profile client decided to switch lawyers from him to Phoenix at the last minute. He did this by giving Phoenix a piece of forged evidence (that Phoenix didn't know was forged) that he was originally going to use to win the case himself and then tip off the prosecution about it. His nefarious scheme succeeds for the most part, but his failure to dispose of two vital witnesses (thanks to dumb luck) resulted in him having to keep a paranoiac eye on all the people involved for the next seven years, making this a Disproportionate Retribution not just for its effects on the intended victim, but also in terms of how much time and effort he spent on it.
    • In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, there is a Values Dissonance where the inhabitants of Apollo's country think that it's disproportionate that cocoon smuggling is a capital offense in Borginia. Given that the cocoons can be used to make a large amount of a deadly poison relatively easily, the punishment may well be fitting, or at least less disproportionate, in many cases. Certainly not this case, though, where the cocoon is intended to make a cure for a rare and deadly disease.
    • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice has the legal system of the Kingdom of Khura'in. A law, called the "Defense Culpability Act" makes it a criminal offense to "support criminals", thus anyone who has been deemed as offering any kind of support towards a criminal who is subsequently found guilty in court, is considered guilty too. This would be bad enough, but they're considered guilty of the same offense as the person they supported, and thus, are given the same punishment. Yes, even if that punishment is the death penalty, which the legal system (and general public opinion) is overtly okay with giving out to children.note 
      • In the same game, the culprit of the second case, Roger Retinz, once known as Mr. Reus, is completely okay with murdering an innocent person who looked up to him just to frame Trucy for it. Why? Because he had been kicked out of the magician troupe she was descended from many years ago.
  • There is one example of this found in this one stick figure flash game called "An Average-Day Adventure at School" by double-slash. At one point in the game which was, according to the game's description in the Newgrounds page, originally a project for French class, you're stuck between the choice of which stairs to descend down in order to arrive to gym class on time. If you take the west stairs, which are shiny and sparkling compared to the other stairs, you're suddenly confronted by a teacher named Miss Catherine who is "the evilest teacher the school has ever known". She expels you on the spot for it. You get expelled just for trying to go down a set of stairs.
  • Angry Birds forces this trope into being, but that's somewhat the point, since the pigs stole the birds' eggs. Even more so in the animations, where when a mosquito touches one of the eggs, the red bird crushes it to death. Repeatedly. In an additional animation, a butterfly simply brushes an egg... and gets crushed to death.
  • Shawn Flynn feels he was on the receiving end of this in Bendy and the Ink Machine. In his audio log, he complains that Joey Drew's reaction to finding that he'd painted smiles crooked on some of the Bendy dolls was to "be flyin' off the handle at [him]."
  • In Bendy in Nightmare Run, Dewey wants to kill Bendy over knocking over books in a library.
  • BlazBlue: This turns out to be the root of main villain Yuuki Terumi's monstrous traits. As Susano'o, he served as Master Unit: Amaterasu's protector for millennia. He came to resent this, however, and decided he wanted to make Amaterasu suffer for keeping him on her leash for all this time. The best way to make her suffer was to destroy her creations - which is the entire universe of the series and everyone who lives in it. That's right, he does terrible things out of hatred, but not because he hates them (mostly). It's just proxy.
  • In Bloodborne, the Retired Hunter Djura protects the beasts of Old Yharnam by moving down any Hunter who wanders into the area with a huge Gatling Gun mounted on the roof of the tallest building in the area. Not only disproportionate, but also rather hypocritical, since the reason he does this is because beasts used to be people thus he sees killing them as no different than killing people. So to protect them, he... kills people. Granted, he does give you fair warning and ample opportunity to turn back before he starts shooting. Plus, as a former Hunter himself who explicitly mentions having been to the Hunter's Dream, he probably knows you'll just respawn anyway.
  • Borderlands and Borderlands 2:
    • Between Borderlands and Borderlands 2, Handsome Jack, president of Hyperion, orders the destruction of the entire CL4P-TP line of robots, leaving only the main Claptrap we know and not love as the remaining one (and not for lack of trying). One would have thought that there was a big storyline reason for it... and then Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! came out and revealed that Jack ordered the Claptraps destroyed... because they annoyed him. That's it. Yes, they are annoying, but only someone as crazy/evil as Jack would decide that robo-genocide would be the best solution.
    • In 2, Nisha took over Lynchwood (it being a present from Jack) and has made her own set of laws. Despite each offense having a "unique" punishment, her deputy reveals that all of them end in death. This includes mouthing off to her about Jack, and all sorts of other tiny things. Jack is no better, as he deemed death is a perfectly suitable punishment for swearing and littering (badmouthing Hyperion is considered "verbal littering").
    • In the Mr Torgue's Campaign of Carnage DLC, he asks you to eliminate a video game reviewer who gave his favourite game a 6 out of 10. The fact that they are already loaded for bear before you get there indicates this may not be entirely uncommon on Pandora.
    • In Tales from the Borderlands, Loaderbot can activate "Disproportionate Response Protocol" which is basically firing his weapons in all directions at basically everything. Ironically considering they were being beset by an army of psycho bandits armed with everything from assault rifles to rocket launchers, it's actually pretty proportionate.
  • In Brass Restoration, an employee of a book store Ryo enters in Kouri's route points a gun at his head and attempts to kill him for not buying anything and for talking.
  • Bug Fables:
    • The game mentions that Queen Elizant II banned entrance to all ladybugs into the Ant Kingdom, and now only few of them are allowed to enter, with a special permission. The reason? Seventeen ladybugs were stealing aphid eggs from farmers. By the end of the game she realized that she overreacted, and reverses her decision.
    • In one sidequest, when Team Snakemouth returns Kali her stolen silk, she sprays them with her healing pheromones. Vi gets an allergic reaction and sneezes, launching herself into Kali's vase, breaking it into smithereens. Kali's retaliation? Taking control of Kabbu and forcing him to beat Vi and Leif to death.
    • In Metal Island, Kabbu can dig into a crack in the wall, and then he and the team end up crashing into Carmina's hotel room. While Carmina is understandably angry, a brutal beating is still too excessive of a punishment. Fortunately, unlike Kali, Carmina doesn't kill the team and simply kicks them out of her room should they lose.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops II: As a result of his family getting repeatedly screwed over and then killed by the CIA, Raul Menendez enacts a decades-long plan in order to completely and utterly destroy the capitalist governments and economies of all First World countries, likely killing millions in the process.
  • Catlateral Damage runs on this. Kitty's reason for destroying the place is supremely petty no matter which random one is chosen.
  • Chrono Cross: The dwarfs believe their home in the swamp is doomed because of the Hydra's demise. How do they fix it? Genocide against the Fairies. And then they have the gall to blame you for making them slaughter innocent pacifists! There's a reason nobody likes that part of the game.
  • In Chulip, if you get three crime stamps (for smoking, being seen naked, and theft), you get chained to a wall crucifix-style, in a locked cell buried beneath the Graveyard, with people treating it as if you've died.
  • Crying Suns: When the original Idaho defied his orders to nuke the planet Ganyma, Emperor Oberon didn't just put him to death. He forced Idaho's lover Rebecca to watch the execution, and then threw her into a Cryo-Prison on Lazarus IX. He did this purely out of spite, as he admits to the clone Idaho during their confrontation.
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Monokuma's punishment for breaking any of the school regulations is death. While this makes sense as a punishment for, say, murder, it also applies to things like damaging school property, entering the wrong locker room, or sleeping anywhere outside of the dorms.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: As in the first game, death is the default punishment for disregarding any of Monokuma's rules, from murder, to damaging the security cameras, to littering.
  • Dante's Inferno: A female prisoner offers herself up to Dante for sex in exchange for being freed from captivity along with her "brother" (actually her husband). Dante accepts and honors the deal, and in response, the husband kills Dante, travels all the way to Europe to find Dante's home, and kills Dante's father and lover Beatrice. Damn.
  • Darkest Dungeon: Characters who succumb to various Afflictions will attack their allies over minor slights, or just at random.
    Selfish!Bounty Hunter: One ha'penny short...Someone is going to die.
  • In Daughter for Dessert, Mortelli physically intimidates Saul over his offer to help liquidate the diner.
  • Three of the Psychopaths from Dead Rising 3 are willing to kill people over relatively minor slights. The man dressed as a monk who represents Wrath tries to kill anyone who makes any noise in his Zen garden. The morbidly obese woman who represents Gluttony brutally stabs a starving man to death with a giant spork just because he tried to eat some of the food from a buffet line that she was selfishly hoarding. The female bodybuilder who represents Pride gets so angry at Nick mistaking her for a man and repeatedly calling her "sir" that she tries to murder him.
  • Dead or Alive 4: Leifang's ending has her riding on a train. A sudden stop causes an old man to accidentally grab her breasts. Despite the fact that it was clearly an accident, she kicks him through the window into a lake under the bridge. Even if the guy survives the fall and the swim to the shore, he might have lots of broken bones. All for something that wasn't even his fault!
  • In Deadly Neighbors you send your family of three to beat up other families for "offenses" such as letting their dog poop in your yard or having a tree which blocks your sunlight.
  • The Disgaea franchise:
    • Laharl from Disgaea: Hour of Darkness; he appears in Disgaea 2 to drag Etna back to the Overlord's Castle, and if you beat him in the first battle, he BLOWS UP the world.
    • Mao of Disgaea 3 claims to kill people who eat their eggs with salt and pepper instead of hot sauce (at least until he unknowingly destroys the embodiment of his love of hot sauce), and also wants to kill his dad for accidentally breaking his Slaystation Portable, making him lose 40,000,000 hours of gameplay time. Turns out his dad is already dead as a result of telling someone about his weaknesses shortly after the aforementioned event, that he's extremely upset by it, and that he's coping with the loss by denying it happened.
    • Valvatorez from Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten launches a rebellion against the netherworld government because they were preventing him from keeping his promise of giving sardines to the prinnys he trained. Granted, there were actaully very good reasons besides that, but that was his primary motivation. Valvatorez takes his promises VERY seriously, as if the title weren't a hint. Later on, he storms the Information Bureau because they spelled "Prinny" wrong in their newspaper.
  • In one of the endings of D'LIRIUM, Ada murders her friends when they don't believe her story of being transported into a Dark World. May be justified, as it's implied that she was corrupted by the Casket and by Abel's manipulations.
  • In Double Homework, Dennis leaks major information on the protagonist (that the protagonist is a video game addict) because the protagonist interfered with his date with Tamara (which she clearly wasn't enjoying anyway).
  • The Dragon Age franchise:
    • The Rite of Tranquility eventually became this. Tranqulizing a mage involves using a specially made lyrium brand to essentially cauterize a mage's ability to use magic. As collateral damage, it renders them emotionless and will-less. Originally meant as a means to avoid executing mages that cannot or will not control their powers, it eventually degenerated into a proverbial cudgel to keep malcontent mages in line. Cullen, a former Templar, states one egregious abuse of the rite, where a mage was passing love notes to a Templar paramour (through another Templar intermediary), and got tranquilized on the trumped up charge of "corrupting the moral purity of a Templar". Cullen then said the Knight-Commander who ordered that had done the same for even lesser transgressions. It should also be noted that this incident occurred years before Knight-Commander Meredith went crazy from possessing a red lyrium idol. The egregious abuse of the rite (as well as the Right of Annulment) is one of the grievances that led to the Mage-Templar War. And that's not even getting into the tranquilizations that weren't retribution at all, proportionate or otherwise.
    • Dragon Age: Origins:
      • One of the major quests in the game involves an ancient curse that a vengeful elven leader inflicted on humans. After his son was tortured and murdered by humans and his daughter raped (and subsequently committed suicide), Zathrian was understandably enraged and sought justice. He bound the spirit of the Brecilian forest to a wolf, creating a savage creature that attacked and infected the responsible humans with lycanthropy. However, the curse lasted indefinitely and spread to many innocent humans, and the original criminals probably didn't deserve two hundred years of unbearable suffering.
      • Another major quest involves a dispute over the dwarven crown between Lord Harrowmont and Prince Bhelen. If the player chooses to help Bhelen become king, then Harrowmont is executed. While a dick move, it is explainable in that Bhelen needed to solidify his power base... except that Bhelen didn't stop there. The sequel reveals that Bhelen ordered that Harrowmont's entire family be killed as well. Only one survived and fled the country, dodging Bhelen's assassins at every turn. If Harrowmont becomes king, even after Bhelen is killed, his supporters continue to rebel against him, undermining his rule and making his reign a failure.
    • Dragon Age II:
      • It is played a little more straight in the endgame of this game after Anders blows up the Chantry. In response to a single mage who wasn't even part of the local circle's actions, Meredith orders the Right of Annulment: the death of every mage in Kirkwall, and without sanction from higher-ups, either. Sebastian even asks why it's necessary when the real criminal is right there. The irrational reaction is justified though, as Meredith had been driven to madness and paranoia by the red Lyrium artifact. It can even be said that Anders intentionally invoked this. Anders knew exactly how Meredith would react to the Chantry's destruction and Elthina's death, and there was no way his plan to get the Circles to rebel would have worked without it. Lampshaded when Hawke describes Meredith as having a tendency to add one and one and get eleven.
      • Sebastian falls deep into this trope himself. If you refuse to kill Anders, Sebastian will swear to raise an army and burn Kirkwall to the ground... even though his real problem is with Hawke and Anders, not the innocent inhabitants of the city. However by the time Dragon Age: Inquisition rolls around, he decides to annex Kirkwall instead in order to find Anders and bring him to justice. The Inquisition can either ignore him, help him, or supply Aveline's resistance.
  • Dragon Quest III: When you enter Manoza, there will be a funeral in the town for someone that was executed for bad-mouthing the king. Or, to be more precise, the fake king.
  • Dwarf Fortress kobolds are considered by much of the fanbase to be woobies, because their main reason for living is to wander into your fortress and pilfer a few things. The main response of your dwarves? Rip them in half. The imports/exports screen explains that they offer "petty annoyance" in return for "death". Someone here is getting shafted.
  • Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG:
    • The first angel boss, Eli, will appear if the player turns the light in its cabin on and off multiple times. They call out the player behind the screen decide to kill the party to punish the player's mischievousness.
    • Barbados willingly goes along with Zetacorp's orders to raze Pon Pon Village because the mayor, Runi, killed his brother. President Zazz himself is angered that he failed to kill all the residents, since he wants to eliminate anyone who could pose a threat to his power.
    • At the end of the game, the robot in Akira's apartment states that failure to pay rent is punishable by death in Zeta.
  • Eagle Eye Mysteries: The Original, Book 2, "Case of the Crazy Compass": Dave Grant slips a magnet into Alex Hane's backpack right before Alex is scheduled to go into the woods with his exploring club. Said magnet is so powerful that it disrupts Alex's compass badly enough to get him lost in the woods for hours, in the process ruining his chance to get a good grade for his explorer club and also (in hindsight) exposing him to the inherent dangers that come with being lost in the woods — and Dave did that with full knowledge that Alex would be going into the woods. And his reason for all this? Alex's science project came in first place ahead of his own.
  • In EarthBound (1994), Ness is taken to the Onett Police Station, where he is forced to fight a bunch of police officers and their captain, just for trespassing.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Throughout the series, the various City Guards have a tendency to aggressively seek you out if you commit a crime, whether it's mass murder or stealing a something worth a single gold. With the exception of Arena, it is Downplayed in that they will at least attempt to arrest you first (unless your bounty is exceptionally high, generally 5000+, at which point you'll be marked as "kill on sight"). In Daggerfall, it can be averted. You always get a trial in which you can defend yourself, or have the Thieves' Guild or Dark Brotherhood intimidate the judge into letting you go if you belong to those factions.
    • This trait, along with Evil Is Petty, is possessed by many of the Daedric Princes, which is fitting for a group of mostly Jerkass Gods. Examples from within specific games are listed in those entries below. For examples in the backstory or in-game literature:
      • Molag Bal is the Daedric Prince of Domination and Corruption. One of his most infamous acts (and that is really saying something) was to perpetrate the first rape, turning the innocent woman into the first vampire, who proceeded to rape and kill the nomads who cared for her, bringing undeath into Mundus (the mortal realm) — simply as a "Screw you!" gesture to Arkay, the Aedric Divine of Life and Death and one of Molag Bal's many rivals.
      • During a wager between the Daedric Princes Vaermina and Sheogorath, they conspired to see which of them could most effectively ensnare a famous artist. Vaermina used grotesque nightmares, driving the artist to make terrifying and disgusting art that made him wildly popular through Bile Fascination. Sheogorath, meanwhile, did nothing at all, driving the artist to madness when his inspirations disappeared, and as a result he began creating angry, blasphemous art that insulted the gods and authority figures. Eventually the artist insulted the wrong petty king, who had him publicly executed.
    • Morrowind:
      • The Ordinators, Church Police for the Tribunal Temple, consider their Indoril armor sacred and will attempt to kill the Player Character on sight if he or she wears it.
      • Some of the Guilds and Factions have hair-triggers when it comes to expulsion for the Player Character. For some actions, like attacking a fellow member or stealing something which belongs to the organization, this makes sense. However, attempting to sleep in an "owned" bed belonging to another member of the organization can also get you kicked out. There is no warning that the bed is owned, and attempting it once can get you kicked out. For some, like House Redoran and the Tribunal Temple, you can only rejoin one time if expelled, meaning a second expulsion will be permanent. For sleeping in the wrong bed.
      • Incompetent Mages Guild Archmage, Trebonius Artorius, has a bit of a petty steak in this vein. A side quest given by a member of Vivec's Office of the Watch, who insulted Trebonius while drunk and suddenly came down with a mysterious magical rash, asks you to convince Trebonius to undo it.
      • The main quest of the game involves this for the Daedric Prince Azura. Thousands of years ago, she was one of the "good" Daedra that was worshiped by the Chimer people. Their leader, Lord Nerevar, was her faithful servant and champion. Following the disappearance of the Dwemer, the Chimer were left in the possession of the Heart of Lorkhan and the Dwemeri Tools of Kagrenac needed to tap into the Heart's divine power. Azura, through Nerevar, told the Chimer to never use these "profane" tools. There are many different versions regarding what happened next, but we do know for sure that Nerevar was killed and the Tribunal (and Dagoth Ur) used the Tools on the Heart to become gods, neither of which Azura was happy about. In retaliation, she (possibly) turns the Chimer into the modern Dunmer, with ashen gray skin and blood red eyes. She also promises that Nerevar will be reincarnated to cast down the "false gods" of the Tribunal. The main quest of the game is all of this coming to fruition. Following the events of the game, Morrowind is plunged into chaos, and it is largely destroyed by the subsequent Oblivion Crisis, Red Mountain eruption, and Argonian invasion. Despite it all, Azura comes out of it as even more beloved to the Dunmer people, with their "New Temple" religion centered around her.
    • Oblivion:
      • An in-game book details a bard who made a comedic ballad about a certain general. How did the general react? He had the bard mounted on the front of a battering ram being used in a castle attack!
      • In the Shivering Isles expansion, Sheogorath has outlawed the growing of beards, punishable by death.
    • Skyrim:
      • Skyrim adds the possibility of the offended party sending a trio of hired thugs or an assassin after you if you commit a crime against them. This even includes stealing near-worthless items or assaulting their chicken. Possibly Justified as people living in small and remote farming villages rely heavily on their livestock for income and food. Even worse, that assassin is from the Dark Brotherhood. This means that a simple farmer from a backwoods town can perform a ritual (The Black Sacrament) to contact the Brotherhood, and then pay the world's most powerful assassin's guild money to hunt down and kill the poor sap that stole a tomato off their kitchen table.
      • The Dragonborn can respond to the clerical error that nearly saw them lose their head on a chopping block by joining the Stormcloaks and driving the Empire out of Skyrim, possibly fatally fracturing it in the process. They may also join the Dark Brotherhood and kill the Emperor.
    • Online gives an example for Meridia, typically considered (along with Azura, see above) one of the "good" Daedric Princes and associated with Life Energy, Light, and Beauty. When a group of Ayleids built a city above one of her shrines, she responded by destroying it with roots, burying it and all who lived there beneath the ground.
  • Elohim Eternal: The Babel Code: In the ending, Joshwa insists on using the Transmigrator to reach the Kingdom of Heaven against the Kosmokraters' orders. Although the Kosmokraters could simply just destroy the Transmigrator themselves, they also detonate enough infernos to split Idin in two in order to collectively punish all Idinites and Cainites for the party's disobedience.
  • In Emily Enough, the eponymous character has all rights to her story stolen in a scheme where she was promised release from the asylum she was held in as bait. She decapitates the person responsible off-screen during the game's ending. To be fair, they were Too Dumb to Live, as before the game starts, she killed her parents and servants for less.
  • Fable II has assassination missions where the reasons for the assassinations include "He thinks he's so funny", "very overdue library book", "selling chocolates half-eaten", and "random draw for the week".
  • Fairune 2 has big bad Morphoglia take her job of monitoring the Gate a little too seriously. Want to cross, but don't know your name? You must be erased from existence.
  • Fallout:
    • It's said that in 2075 (two years before the Great War), both the House of Representatives and the Senate voted unanimously to impeach the President of the United States for jaywalking. Whether they had other reasons for doing so or the entire federal government was just being Lawful Stupid is left unclear.
    • In Fallout 2 mob boss John Bishop had a boy skinned alive just for getting his daughter drunk. However he's a neglectful husband and father, and doesn't particularly care for her or his wife, just that somebody infringed on his perceived territory. If the Chosen One does the work he asks them to do, he calls it even and doesn't even mind that he gets one of them pregnant.
    • Fallout 3: "Oh My God! The doctor just left the Vault! Oh! I know! I'll have his assistant killed, plunge the Vault into mayhem, cause many more deaths, forcefully interrogate my own daughter, and sic my men to go shoot the doctor's child on sight! That'll show him!" On the other hand, the Overseer is a massive Control Freak and has a Vault-sized ego. The sheer act of opening the vault doors to leave must have insulted him so much he simply lost his shit. Vault 101 is officially listed as one of the "Experiment" Vaults, the experiment being "Control freak Overseer with much more outright power than the other vaults".
    • Both games have examples of horribly disproportionate retribution by the AI.
      • If you so much as take a TIN CAN from their property, some NPCs are prone to react with lethal force.
      • Turning off the King's radio is a crime punishable by death by a gang.
      • Letting people in Cavavans go if they don't fight counts as harassing in the Fallout world.
    • Fallout: New Vegas:
      • Jeannie Mae Crawford really didn't like Boone's wife, because the girl thought Novac was a dump and wanted to take Boone to New Vegas instead. So she arranged to have both the girl and her unborn child sold into slavery to the Legion. Once you find out about it, it's immensely satisfying to arrange for her to be shot by Boone. You can also talk afterwards to Cliff Briscoe and say you killed her for a petty reason as well.
      Courier: I killed Jeannie May. Do I still get my discount?
      Cliff: Ki- killed her? Why would you do something like that?
      Courier: She missed my wake-up call.
      • Get tired of those NCR troopers wishing for a Nuclear Winter? At the end of Lonesome Road, you can give them one.
      • Hell, the NCR aren't shy about this trope one bit. Steal trash off the floor of the cafeteria and the whole of Camp McCarran will descend upon you like the wrath of an angry god. It's explicitly said that they hate being the police force of the Mojave, so they decree that any and every crime is punishable by death.
      • Should the player choose to, he/she can turn the entire Mojave into a barren wasteland, devoid of all life, as revenge for the attempt on his/her life at the beginning of the game
    • The Super Mutant Behemoth known as Swan in Fallout 4 was once a night janitor working at MIT who got caught stealing cigarettes. Rather than receiving a conventional trial for his misdemeanor, the scientists kept him under "house arrest" for a month while exposing him to an experimental strain of the Forced Evolutionary Virus. Initially the virus increased his intelligence to the point where he was able to study its effects on himself, but his mind eventually began to deteriorate as his body mutated, turning him into the powerful enemy the Sole Survivor has to contend with in the present day.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy VI has an early scene of Kefka burning down Figaro Castle. Why? Because Edgar was unhelpful and mocking when Kefka arrived to ask him to hand over Terra, who had run away from him earlier. And this isn't counting the fact that Figaro and the Empire had a peace treaty going on.
    • Final Fantasy VII:
      • In the first disk, the rebel group AVALANCHE infiltrates and destroys two Mako Reactors. AVALANCHE consists of Cloud, Barrett, Tifa, Wedge, Biggs, and Jessie. Six people. What does the Shinra Corporation do? Crash a sector of the city onto them while framing them for it. They even fail to kill half of the group. Indeed, at least two of the three were killed by Shin-Ra soldiers before the plate came down (as they tried to prevent Shin-Ra sabotaging the plate support).

        Worst of all, the reason Barret took over the reins of AVALANCHE in the first place was because his hometown was burned down by Shinra... because one of their reactors there exploded and there was ONE person in the town who had been against the reactor being built, and he wasn't even home at the time. So if you trace it back far enough and take the death and destruction totals into account, the Shinra corporation killed several villages' worth of people because one man once said that Mako reactors were a bad idea. And in a sick twist of fate, it's possible that they murdered an entire town and destroyed their own reactor intentionally to piss said guy off because he's implied to be a Cetra descendant and singling out any of his family for Mako experiments would be a net profit.
      • Sephiroth himself. "I was created from an Eldritch Abomination because of a Shinra experiment, and my mother was their surgical masterpiece? Whelp, time to personally butcher the families of everyone who claimed they cared about me, and then raze down the towns they live in." Massacring villages seems to be a theme in this game. Veers off into Motive Decay because the real Sephiroth was stuck in a five-year hell of defying the lifestream, which required him to concentrate on a few core aspects to preserve a fraction of his personality. Turns out that meant his hatred for Cloud accidentally killing him mutated into a thirst for planetary obliteration and mass-soul devouring, and his original belief in his superiority as a Cetra was radicalized into a god complex when he found out Jenova is his mother. That's not strictly true — he was injected with Jenova's cells in the womb — but he doesn't find out the real truth.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has a mission involving this. The Lang Bros. (back when they were with the Arbiters of Death) were enjoying drinks at a bar when something causes the drink to spill. One of the brothers ganked the guy responsible, and when others came to restrain them, they subsequently got slashed. Then the Arbiters of Death themselves got involved, and were shanked for their efforts. All of this gone over in detail to Clan Gully. There's Serious Business and then there's this.
      Luso: You knifed nearly thirty guys over a spilled drink?! You're a threat to society!
    • Many of the villains in Dissidia Final Fantasy:
      • Kefka is the worst.
      • When Kuja freed Terra from Kefka's mental control and later attempted to assist some of Cosmos's warriors in defeating Chaos, Kefka decided to wait until Kuja was killed during the cycle so he could tamper with his memories upon being revived in the next.
      • Killing the Cloud of Darkness after it told Laguna how to close the door to the rift.
      • Using Sephiroth's desire to get back his memories as a means to punish Cloud for simply not wanting to take part in the 12th cycle.
      • Once Chaos learns the war of the gods was orchestrated by his father, who now wants him dead, he decides to destroy the world itself.
      • Shinryu aids Chaos in the final battle with the Warriors of Cosmos as revenge for Cid backing out of their deal. First by lending Chaos his power, and later by trapping Cid in a nightmare realm he created.
  • Karma really is a bitch in the Dark Side ending of The Force Unleashed. Instead of helping Kota, Galen gives into his desire for revenge against Vader and after winning, still tries to help Kota, so really, he's not even evil, he just had a moment of weakness. The result? Palpatine kills everyone except Galen, whom he crushes with his own ship and then rebuilds into his apprentice, promising to discard him the moment he outlives his usefulness. Considering how you get away scot-free in other morality Star Wars games such as Knights of the Old Republic, it does seem like Starkiller is something of the universe's Butt-Monkey.
  • In Freedom Wars, the Panopticons have turned the very act of being born into a capital offense, netting offenders a one million year prison sentence! It doesn't end there, either: just to name a couple of early examples, the mere act of taking more than five steps in your prison cell without having earned the right to adds another ten years to your sentence; and don't you dare go losing your memory, or you'll have to start your sentence over from one million years!
  • In Galactic Civilizations, there's some background history about a race called the Xendar. Manipulated by another race, they attacked a Human colony world — a minor one. The Humans retaliated with an all-out galactic campaign of destruction that all but annihilated the entirety of the Xendar race. Said "another race" are actually the Drengin. After humans went from "no military to speak of" to "huge fleet" in a matter of months in order to destroy the Xendar, the Drengin freaked out, being the only alien race to recognize the danger of humans.
  • The titular God of War from the first game drives Kratos into killing his own family, which unfortunately snowballs into most of the gods being brutally murdered and essentially plunging the entire planet into an uninhabitable wasteland. Really, Ares's dickery only snowballs into a brutal battle that probably levels half of Athens, which was going to be destroyed anyway. Zeus killing Kratos results in the rest (which is still Disproportionate Retribution on Kratos's part).
  • The Grand Theft Auto series:
    • In the "Deconstruction" mission of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, CJ finds out that some construction workers have been calling his sister Kendl a hooker. CJ's response is to head over to the construction plant to "teach them some respect." How does he do this? He smashes up their portables with a bulldozer, and then traps the foreman in his own porta-potty, pushes it into a hole in the ground with the poor bastard still inside, and then commandeers a cement mixer and uses it to bury him alive. And all the while he's doing that last bit, the poor guy is screaming "OH GOD, WHY?!" This is also pretty ironic since earlier in the story, Sweet tells Kendl right to her face that she's dressed like a hooker.
    • In Grand Theft Auto IV, Niko's responses are more or less proportionate to the wrongs inflicted, but one of the talk show hosts is not so discriminating.
      Bas Rudden (as himself): Bas doesn't believe in an eye for an eye. Oh no, Bas believes in an eye for two eyes. Or maybe two eyes and an ear. Or two eyes, and an ear, and a spleen, and maybe a new shirt because this one is covered IN ENTRAILS!
    • In Grand Theft Auto V, there are a few examples of this trope:
      • Apparently Michael de Santa's response to catching the tennis coach sleeping with his wife is to drive to a rich house he thinks is owned by the tennis coach and pulling the whole thing down by the beams of the deck.
      • The next mission begins with Michael being unable to watch a movie due to Jimmy loudly trash-talking someone on his game, and getting ignored when he asks him to keep it down. Rather than turning off the TV or the game console, as you'd expect, Michael responds by picking up a chair and smashing the screen (which he most likely paid for).
      • Trevor Philips has just learned that Michael has been lying to him. Turns out Brad is dead, and Michael ratted him out to the feds ten years earlier. Response? Trevor abandons Michael to be tortured by Mr. Cheng and his men.
      • Let's not forget what happens during one of Trevor's rampages. As Trevor is walking through Los Santos, he comes across some soldiers attempting to repair a jeep. The soldiers notice Trevor is Canadian and start to make fun of his accent. Trevor's response? Grab a freaking grenade launcher and blow away any soldiers that come across him.
  • Hiveswap expands on the horrifying nature of troll society shown in Homestuck; apparently Xefros could be legally executed for literally dreaming about disrespecting the Heiress.
  • In Homeworld, the protagonist race builds a mothership, takes it on a test drive, and comes home to find their planet incinerated and 300,000,000 people dead. Why? They violated a 4000-year-old ban on interstellar travel, which they weren't even aware of. This case has some interesting Fridge Logic. The planet was being watched carefully for 4000 years to be attacked the moment the inhabitants tested a stardrive... but not closely enough to tell that the civilization had long since forgotten they were prisoners in the first place, or destroy the mothership before they could test it. Perhaps the attackers were making an example.
  • In Hacknet, Bit was killed for hacking into the Entech mainframe while being on Entech's payroll. Entech's CEO tried to stop the assassination (he just wanted Bit arrested and his computers smashed up), but couldn't.
  • Jet Set Radio:
    • In this game and Jet Set Radio Future, the response for some errant graffiti is initially little more than police shakedown. Just a few levels later, though, the police start sending tanks, mecha, and later a private trenchcoat-wearing assassination force. When that doesn't work either, they decide they're going to burn a section of the city to the ground just to draw you out.
    • In-between chapters, DJ Professor K tells a story of how Captain Hayashi freaked out and trashed a patrol car. And why, you may ask? Because he sent another officer to get his favorite mint candy, and came back with coffee flavored instead.
  • Played for Laughs in Jurassic Park: The Game with Jessica, who was sent to the park to be with her dad because she was caught stealing. If you pick the dialogue option fittingly titled "This totally isn't fair", she sarcastically remarks on how her "punishment" for petty theft was to be trapped in a crumbling Amusement Park of Doom that's overrun with dinosaurs who are killing people left and right.
    Jessica: So if this whole trip was, like, set up to scare me away from shoplifting... mission accomplished.
  • Many characters in Kindergarten:
    • Annoy the janitor too much in the very first area of the game, and he'll stab you to death with his mop. This is neither the first nor the last time he'll do that. He'll also beat Monty so bad the boy's stuck in a wheelchair the next game for correcting his spelling.
    • The principal's go-to response to children being sent to his office for any reason other than asking about Billy's disappearance is to shoot them in the head with his shotgun.
    • It's possible for Cindy to stab you to death if you fail to be a dutiful and obedient husband while the two of you are playing house, or if you show Ms. Applegate her dead dog without getting rid of her (as she will think you killed her dog and will kill you in revenge).
    • Buggs's quest revolves around you murdering Ms. Applegate after Buggs gets sick of her trying to expel him. This one may be slightly more justified though, considering how being "expelled" works in the school.
    • In the sequel, Felix employs Nugget's help in having his twin brother Ted Buried Alive by lying to him that his affluent family owns a nugget factory. After the mission is completed, Felix asks if it would be okay if there wasn't actually a nugget factory. Nugget replies that if this were true, he would "bury the rich boy with his rich brother." Nugget takes his nuggets very seriously.
  • Kingdom Hearts series:
    • In Kingdom Hearts II, tampering with Ansem's computer, even by accident, will result in you being zapped into the computer itself and then thrown in its prison, while the power is cut off, preventing you from escaping through a terminal. And, according to the manga, your punishment is death.
    • And in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], Riku's reaction to being tripped over and tapped on the back by a Holey Moley is to kill it, muttering that "they just never want to make this easy".
  • In King's Quest V, the shady innkeepers are perfectly willing to knock you out, tie you up in the basement, and presumably kill you just for "looking like a real troublemaker." How they stay in business with such a policy is anyone's guess.
  • The plot of Kirby: Squeak Squad is kicked off by having a slice of cake stolen from Kirby. He automatically assumes it's King Dedede's doing and proceeds to raid his castle and beat him up over it, then spends the rest of the game chasing the Squeaks across Dream Land when he realizes they're the true culprits. Although to be fair, Dedede does steal and hoard food — in fact, his very first villainous act was to steal all of the food in Dreamland, and everyone except him would've starved if Kirby hadn't beaten Dedede up and got the food back.
  • Knight Bewitched: An NPC in Northshire spreads false rumors about Gwen stealing blood because she refused to go on a date with him.
  • The Bounty Hunter Calo Nord in Knights of the Old Republic is known to murder people just for trying to strike up a conversation with him. The Player Character can be subject to this as well if they don't take the hint when he starts counting to three.
  • In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, it's revealed that Osborne's Start of Darkness happens because he warned his fellow officers in the military who are of noble descent to not start the Hamel Incident when he found out about their plan. They responded by burning down his house, killing his wife, and nearly killing his son Rean who was impaled in the chest by a wooden splinter. The only reason why Rean survives is because as revealed in Cold Steel IV, he had to make a Deal with the Devil with Ishmelga and thus transplants his heart to Rean's.
  • The Legend of Zelda
    • In general, the games have pigs and chickens overreact to Link hitting them: They suddenly become some sort of rampaging super farm animal and hunt you down. And inevitably, kill you. Though considering that you usually have to hit them several times in order to get them to attack you, it could be considered self-defense.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has a pair of brothers that got into a petty argument, which resulted in one brother sealing the other brother in his own room just so that he wouldn't lose the fight. He does decide to make amends after you blow up the wall to free the other brother.
    • If you steal from the shopkeeper in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, get ready to be hadoken'd to death if you dare re-enter the shop.
    • Ganon's reaction to Zelda entering his lair while holding a lit lantern in Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon.
      "You dare bring light into my lair?! YOU MUST DIE!"
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
      • While Zant has legitimate reasons to resent Hyrule for keeping his people prisoners of the Twilight Realm and to criticize his own people for lacking desires, he still started his conquest because he was refused the throne to Midna. While the consequences of her rule is never shown, Zant's emotionality led him to brainwash his own people (and making them killed by Link and Midna in the process) and to a significant number of deaths and destruction, the most significant one being the destruction of Kakariko Village which is only ruins when you arrive and only has three survivors from its previous population.
      • If you steal from Trill's shop, he will peck you to death if you come back.
      • The Postman can be seen feeding letters to goats if he considers the handwriting to be poor.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
      • Magda, a young woman standing outside the Hila Rao Shrine on Floret Sandbar, will attack you if you step on her flowers three times.
      • Some disguised Yiga Clan members won't try to attack immediately when talked to, instead offering to sell Link some bananas. Refusing will anger them and cause them to assault Link. Granted, even if you buy all 99 of their bananas, which cost 99 rupees each to begin with, they will still attack you.
  • In LEGO Harry Potter, Voldemort kills Snape because he ate the last cookie. This is because there was no way to convey the reason he killed him in the book (he thought he was the master of the Elder Wand) in a game that doesn't have any spoken dialogue.
  • In Liberal Crime Squad, when death penalty laws goes Arch-Conservative, any crime is punished by death penalty. Murder. Arson. Kidnapping. Assault. Vandalism. Disturbing the peace. Loitering. And if you add Arch-Conservative police regulations law, the death penalty is no longer applied, because the Death Squads will execute any criminal caught on the spot. Without trial.
  • In Lollipop Chainsaw, Swan triggered a Zombie Apocalypse because he was bullied in high school and Juliet "dumped" him (in reality, he never spoke to her before triggering the zombie apocalypse).
  • Manafinder: A lot of the exiles happened over actions that offended the nobility or made King Vikar paranoid, regardless of how heinous said actions actually are. Since exile means being stuck in the wilderness with powerful and feral monsters, this means the Kingdom of Manahill is essentially sentencing people to death over petty reasons.
  • In Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, the CCK's response to graffiti is just a liiiiiittle over-the-top, with heavily-armored, gun-toting goons shouting things like "Art IS a crime!" while gunning down graffiti artists. Justified to an extent, because at least one graffiti artist in the city has major dirt on Mayor Sung.
  • In The Longest Journey, if you speak to the FreeAccess Terminal (or FACT) in the hallway outside April's room, it will inform you that a voice interface is not installed and offer an upgrade. When April realizes that a voice interface is already present but only used for sales purposes, she mentions that it's not her terminal. The terminal warns her not to speak to it again if she doesn't want a visit from the Fair Use Bureau... who are authorized to use deadly force. That's right, talking to a Free Access Terminal that's not your own can get you shot. This is just the first indication that April lives in a Crapsack World dominated by ruthless Mega Corps.
  • Mass Effect:
    • According to Javik in Mass Effect 3, gambling was punishable by death in the Prothean Empire. However, Javik is a confirmed Troll, so take it with a grain of salt.
    • Mass Effect 2 potentially features an inversion at the end of Thane's loyalty mission. His son Kolyat tried to assassinate an extortionist, anti-human political candidate. The Paragon route through the mission is to save both lives, then talk C-Sec Captain Bailey into offering community service as Kolyat's punishment for two attempted murders (the candidate and his bodyguard). Bailey is understandably incredulous, but Shepard convinces him.
    • The defining moment in Kaidan's backstory is the result of two of these in quick succession. First, Kaidan's girlfriend decided that she wanted a drink of water without getting a nosebleed, and reached for a glass physically instead of biotically, so their Drill Sergeant Nasty broke her arm. Then, when Kaidan tried to help her, the same Drill Sergeant Nasty beat the ever loving crap out of him before trying to knife him to death. Kaidan instinctively lashed out and broke the bastard's neck.
    • When the Alliance made First Contact, it was with the turians. A turian patrol vessel stumbled across some human explorers trying to activate a dormant Mass Relay, which is rather understandably a crime in Citadel space after asari explorers accidentally unleashed the Rachni on the galaxy. When this happened, the turians hailed the human ships, and attempted to explain the situation and the laws that they had no way of knowing about... Ha ha, nope, they promptly blew the humans away, then happily went to invade the first human colony they could. Only a narrow stalemate and asari intervention prevented the turians from going Total War on the Alliance. It was only afterwards that they realized it was a war they would have lost. The Turians were stalemated with their mandatory service military, while the Alliance had an equally massive volunteer military, with a huge civilian population that could be militarized through the institution of a draft. It's implied that the asari and salarians all but Dope Slapped the turians for not considering that humans were an uncontacted species with no way of knowing about the Citadel or its laws.
    • Mass Effect 3: When terrorists invade the ship, James Vega is most concerned that they messed with his weights. Garrus cheerfully points out that this is one of the few situations where he can get away with killing the people who messed with his weights.
  • Arguably, the titular hero from Max Payne is guilty of this, though to be fair, he was really only after three people (four, if you include Gognitti), and everyone else just didn't have the sense to get out of the way. And B.B. was stupid enough to GET IN THE WAY ON PURPOSE.
  • Metal Gear:
    • In a special movie for Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops Plus, a Yellow Genome Soldier ends up winning a race despite the fact that not only was the race meant for GA-KOs and not humans, but he was supposed to act as a referee/race starter. Campbell and Raiden, under Old Snake's command, then repaid him by shooting two RPG-7s at him while he was savoring the victory.
    • On a more serious note, it's hinted that Julie Emmerich thought that the correct response to being neglected by her husband was to seduce/sexually abuse his 14-year-old son. This ends up driving him to suicide, but that was probably unintentional.
  • Mike Shadow: I Paid for It!: What does Mike do after the machine refuses to give him a drink? Why, he beats the hell out of it. He could just cut his losses or stop as he earns enough money to simply buy another drink at a different machine, but nah.
  • Monkey Island:
    • In Monkey Island 2, the game (nearly) ends with Guybrush maiming LeChuck and pulling his mask off Scooby-Doo style to reveal... his brother, Chucky! You can ask him one of two questions regarding his motivation for hunting and torturing you relentlessly across two games. One of the questions garners the response that when you were both children, you stepped on and broke his favorite toy.
    • In The Curse of Monkey Island, Captain Blondebeard stabs a patron in the back for complaining about his chicken.
  • The Western-themed 1866 mod for Mount & Blade features bounty hunting quests triggered by Wanted Posters, requiring to capture or kill a suspect. The posters mention their crimes, which include "chewing gum in line" and "spitting on somebody's shoes".
  • Played for laughs in The Nameless Mod. In a side mission for the World Corp storyline, you have the option of helping Zero Presence assassinate a priest later in the game. The reason for the hit is because the priest has tried to steal Zero's pork chops multiple times.
  • The entire premise of Need for Speed Hot Pursuit (2010) is this. What's that? You're driving 2 miles over the posted speed limit? Prepare to have your vehicle's electronic systems jammed up so you'll be forced to drive over a spike strip so the police can push you off the edge of a cliff. That'll teach you a lesson about speeding! What's that? You ARE driving at the posted speed limit? CALL IN THE HELICOPTERS!
  • The CEO of MegaCo Pizza in Ninja Pizza Girl sends hordes of ninja to harass Gemma at every turn and later goes even further by burning down the PizzaRiffic restaurant. Why? Because PizzaRiffic was eroding MegaCo Pizza's local profit margins by almost 0.01 percent! A cutscene shows that the losses in revenue were so tiny that they were first mistaken for a smudge on the earnings chart.
  • Nitrome Must Die is about two people destroying Nitrome Towers and wiping out every living thing there, all because the company made too many bad games.
  • This trope is the entire premise of Octogeddon. The titular character is an octopus with obvious anger issues which gets offended at petty things while watching videos on the Internet and decides to retaliate... by destroying cities and monuments around the world.
  • Octopath Traveler:
    • Near the beginning of Primrose's story, her Only Friend Yusufa volunteers to distract their cruel "master", Helgenish, while she leaves the tavern to pursue Rufus, one of the three men who murdered her father when she was a child. However, Yusufa is found out, and Helgenish's idea of an appropriate punishment is to murder her.
    • In Therion's backstory, his partner Darius eventually betrayed and tried to murder him not only because he was offered a powerful position in a criminal gang, but because he couldn't stand Therion having independent ideas and disagreeing with him.
    • Near the end of Tressa's story, Esmeralda tries to murder Tressa for trying to retrieve her notebook that Esmeralda herself stole, even after she admitted that the notebook turned out to be of no use to her.
  • In Paper Mario: The Origami King, the titular antagonist, King Olly, outright hates Toads. What did they do to him, you ask? His creators, the Origami Craftsmen, wrote a message hoping he'd become a great king on him, but he thought it was a "careless scribble". And since he can't tell Toads apart, he wants to obliterate every single Toad to make sure he gets the one who scribbled on him.
  • This is the main premise of Party Hard. You're trying to get some sleep, but your noisy neighbours are keeping you awake with their rowdy partying. What's your solution? Why, kill them all, of course!
  • A lot of the actions your crew does in PAYDAY: The Heist are questionable at best, but one thing they do during Diamond Heist is downright unnecessary. If the codes to the vault fail, you are then told by your supporting heister that you need to capture the CFO so he can use him as a bargaining chip with the CEO to get the codes. Sometimes, the CEO refuses to negotiate and doesn't care what happens to the CFO. What does the crew do next? Kick the CFO out of the helicopter and have him crash land through a glass dome before smacking into the floor. All of it was done just to show the CEO that your crew isn't messing around and this is done before you go hunt down the CEO's son, something that could have been done without killing the CFO.
  • Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners: It quickly becomes apparent, at the tour group's expense, that according to the ruins, all crimes regardless of severity must be judged equally. This results in petty crimes such as shoplifting and telling lies being considered equivalent to more severe ones such as rape and murder, to be met with the same result: death.
  • Persona 4: A comedic example occurs when Yosuke signs the girls up for the school Beauty Contest, and they retaliate by signing the boys up for the school crossdressing contest which as Yosuke points out, is far worse since they'd have the entire school laughing at them instead of fawning over them. Events like this are a Running Gag, as the male team members (particularly Yosuke) are often the victims of violent Unprovoked Pervert Payback at the girls' hands between missions.
  • Pikmin 2: The President tells Olimar that, if his debt can't be paid off in time, the debt collectors will bury him in Hocotate Swamp.
  • Pilgrim (RPG Maker): As punishment for bullying Akemi, Master Alice kills the three bullies by pushing them off a building, then sentences the ringleader to eternal torment. Though she didn't do this out of any care for Akemi, but becuase Inago (Akemi's sister) asked her to stop the bullies, and to exercise her sadism.
  • Plok: The Fleas steal Plok's flag and antagonize him about it. After getting his flag back, Plok decides that to save himself the trouble of possible future thefts, he'll exterminate their entire species, including their queen. And assuming you beat the Fleapits levels, he doees just that. Genocide in response to petty theft is a bit much.
  • PokĂ©mon:
  • When, in Portal 2 Wheatley, during his Face–Heel Turn claims Chell is selfish for having him sarcifice so much to get to GLaDOS's mainframe, GLaDOS — who has been disconnected from her body and fully immobile — interjects, weakly pointing out that it was Chell who did all the work. Wheatley snaps at her, saying that if that was the case, it was about time he did something. He drags GLaDOS into the maintenance pit, all the while she's screaming in terror. Only after his angry monologue to Chell do we find out what happened to her.
    (oven ding)
    Wheatley: Ah! [a claw moves closer to the player, holding a potato] See that? That is a potato battery. It's a toy. For children. [claw turns, revealing GLaDOS's optic on the potato] And now, SHE LIVES IN IT!
  • Clive Dove from Professor Layton and the Unwound Future went off the rails after his parents were killed by an unfortunate lab accident, going so far to create a gigantic underground futuristic version of London, built a giant mobile fortress, put up a great farce, and tries to blow up the real London with said machine. He attempts to justify it by saying that it's teaching the government not to callously disregard ordinary people (since Bill Hawks managed to not only avoid responsibility for his failed time travel, but reached high office).
  • Rain World has two examples in Artificer's backstory. At first she looks like a psycho slugcat, but as you progress in her story, her playable nightmares reveal that she was once a loving, happy mother of two young slugpups, until the day that one of them innocently took a pearl out of a Scavenger stash for no other reason than because children like shiny things. This simple accident, easily remedied by returrning the pearl, angered the Scavengers so much that they hunted down and murdered Artificer's blue pup. They continued to harry and hound her, to the point that one of their explosive spears separated her from her green pup, causing the youngster to fall into a bog full of carnivorous leeches and drown when they were pulled down. Artificer goes mad with grief and rage, and in turn she pursues retribution above and beyond what she suffered, hunting and killing Scavengers in her Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Not just the ones responsible, but all Scavengers everywhere, waging a one-slugcat genocide against the entire species. Later parts of the timeline show that she succeeded, as the Scavengers are far fewer in number in the future and never return to their former prominence, eventually dying out.
  • Rave Heart: The Draconians, on Prince Eryn's orders, kidnap and imprison Prince Chad for speaking out against Arcturo's arrest. This is despite him having little political clout to influence the outcome of the trial.
  • Rayman Origins: An undead granny launches an invasion of the world and has everyone imprisoned because Rayman and his friends are snoring too loudly.
  • Red Dead Redemption:
    • A somewhat heroic version of this: Remember how in the beginning, you were shot in the first attempt to enter Fort Mercer? Well, now, you go in with a gatling gun and proceed to blast Williamson's men into pieces.
    • Another example from this game comes at the very last mission Remember My Family. You don't have to kill just Ross. You can kill both his wife and brother in entertaining ways before finally going to deal with Ross himself.
  • Ride to Hell: Retribution:
    • During one mission, the protagonist Jake has to overcome an obstacle in his way. So he runs up to a bunch of innocent truckers. Kills them. Steals their fuel truck. Drives it across a highway, killing several dozen policemen trying to stop him. Drives it into a power plant. Kills the innocent workers there, and blows up the truck to destroy the plant. What obstacle requires such a massive mass murder? A 2-meter-high electric fence in front of a farm.
    • The big reveal at the end of the game on why the leader of an opposing biker gang wants Jake's family dead and has sent legions of his goons after him: he didn't like his father.
  • In Robopon, in the second game, Cody accidentally helps flood Delica Kingdom with a fishing rod. The punishment? Death by hanging. If not for a conveniently-placed time machine, the game would end there.
  • Saints Row 2's Brotherhood missions, full stop. Worse, it's pure tit-for-tat Disproportionate Retribution. From peace talks where Maero, the Brotherhood leader, offers Boss a 20/80 split out of respect for his accomplishments (as well as a realistic appraisal of the situation in light of Boss' fall from grace note ), Boss spits in his face and declares war over the implied insult. Boss opens by injecting Maero's tattoo ink with radioactive waste, Maero escalates by dragging Boss' second-in-command to death behind his gang's trucks, Boss then ruins Maero's rocker friend's career by burning his hand with a pyrotechnics display and locking Maero's girl in the trunk of her own car, then putting it last in a line of cars Maero would later crush with his monster truck. He even stays to gloat, tossing Maero the keys to the car just as the ganglord recognizes it. And all of this only comprises about half of the Brotherhood missions.
    • The Boss is watching a news report about Johnny Gat's court hearing early on in the game, when some random jerk at the bar orders the bartender to switch channels. When the Boss protests, "I was watching that!" the jerk replies "I guess you're not anymore, are ya, bitch!" The Boss then decides to knock the jerk over by hitting him with his own bottle.
  • Saints Row: The Third:
    • Zimo's apparent forgetting which of the two DeWynter sisters he slept with was enough for him to spend who knows how long saddled up in a human pony show.
    • A lot of the assassination missions are this. Some clients want the target dead for playing music they dislike near their favorite club or being better than them at a video game.
    • Killbane snapping Kiki DeWynter's neck because she pressed his Berserk Button one time too many (she called him "Eddie").
  • Saints Row IV:
    • Yes, Zinyak, blowing up the Earth along with seven billion inhabitants is a totally justified response to the Boss escaping the simulation hellhole you put him/her in.
    • On the radio, Zinyak can be heard on the Classical station, threatening his underlings with death for calling Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor "the Dracula music".
  • Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse:
    • Max's superego, AKA the narrator, wants to destroy New York City just because he was ignored by Max.
    • Sam and Max torture Leonard and then keep him tied up in their cupboard feeding him only spiders for two seasons for stealing a sandwich.
    • From the comics:
      Bartender: [to Sam] It's for you, McGruff.
      Sam: [to Max] "McGruff"? Did you hear what he just called me? I hate that! Let's sneak into his room at night and drain all the fluids out of his body.
  • In Sands of Destruction, Porcus Rex attempts to eat a child just because he ran into him.
  • School Days has become famous for endings where at least one brutal murder takes place among the three teenage main characters — either for sleeping around or just for being the hypotenuse.
  • Sharin no Kuni: The opening of the game has the main character witness a female trainee get shot through the head for arriving late to an exam, and that's just the beginning. What's worse is that she really should have known that would happen. Everyone undergoing that training is supposed to have been living with that threat for years. It's also implied in the endings that the shooter in question is egging Ken on since Special High Class Individuals is a pretty easily abused system.
  • If you shoplift in a Sierra game, the shopkeeper will kill you. In Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), "shoplifting" includes bringing your purchases to the register and attempting to pay with a bill the store can't make change from.
  • Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
    • Unhappy citizens are called drones in-game, and when they grow too much they can cause revolts in your bases. The normal ways of treating drone riots is building facilities that increase happiness, or sending in some units for police duties. But you can also decide to do nerve stapling to turn citizens into calm and loyal members of society. The game considers it an atrocity, and you are subject to sanctions if other factions get to know what you did.
    • You can use a planet buster (the in-game nuke) to deal with a simple frontier trespass, that could have happened also by accident. Against a faction that has even a treaty with you and would be glad to instantly remove any unit in your territory if you used the diplomatic channel. With no penalties if the planetary council voted to repel the UN chart against atrocities.
    • The AI might declare full scale vendetta (including the use of atrocities against you if they are allowed and the faction is aggressive enough) as a retaliation for just simply infiltrating their datalink and getting discovered. Imagine a total war igniting between Usa and Ussr just because of spies taking photos of Nato bases.
  • In The Sims:
  • In Snatcher, Gillian Seed's marriage to Jamie, the woman Elijah Modnar was in love with, causes him to cryogenically freeze Gillian with the intention of leaving him there forever, and to wipe out half of the world's population with a designer virus.
  • In Sonic Lost World, the Deadly Six decide to use Dr. Eggman's newest invention to destroy the world simply to get revenge on Eggman for enslaving them.
  • Because of how the game mechanics work in SpyParty, a sniper might put a bullet through someone's head for actions that would be completely innocuous in real life, like taking a long time to read a book, mentioning a particular food item, coughing, or even standing around doing nothing.
  • Spyro the Dragon (1998): Gnasty Gnorc turns all of the dragons to statues after one of them called him a simple creature who is no threat to anyone, though what really set him off was being called ugly.
  • Star Wars: Bounty Hunter has a number of extremely harsh sentences for minor offenses. As the bounty hunter Jango Fett, the player runs through a handful of locations tracking down bounties or sources of information in his overall mission. Mixed in with the enemies and bystanders are minor bounties, wanted dead, alive, or either. Some of them are real scum: murder, arson, kidnapping, political assassination, etc. Some are not: bounties that are wanted dead (including those wanted dead or alive) include a Gamorrean who killed the animal he threw as part of a competition, a Jawa who is begging outside of a shop owner's store, a Gran who painted slang on some transports, and perhaps the best example yet: a death sentence posted by Sebulba on a man for betting against Sebulba in a podrace.
  • Stellaris: Let's just say that Stellaris players have a not entirely undeserved reputation for absurd pettiness. The traditional response to a rude diplomat insulting your race is usually systemic genocide culminating in finishing off the offender's homeworld with a Colossus.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
  • In Third Super Robot Wars Z: Tengoku-hen: Sidereal goons go into the bar where Nono works and demand to be treated to food and drink. Nono gives them the stink eye, so they offer to level the entire city and slaughter the occupants. Lal'C gets annoyed and asks them to step outside and summons Dix Neuf.
  • Sword of the Stars: Anybody who antagonizes either the Liir or a Peacekeeper vessel is in for a world of pain.
  • In Tomato Adventure, anyone who doesn't like tomatoes is labeled a "dropper" and is forced to live in Kobore Village, and has no permission to leave the village (except for one week during the Tomatoversary) until they learn to like the food.
  • Tower Madness: The Greys are trying to abduct your sheep so they can make a new scarf for their emperor. Your response? Zapping them, frying them, blowing them up, and nuking them, including the emperor himself! All because they wanted some wool without paying for it, but still...
  • Dollface from Twisted Metal: Black gets this treatment. One day, she accidentally spills coffee over her boss's paperwork. What does he do in response? He seals her face into a White Mask of Doom, and locks it in place with a one-of-a-kind key to make sure she could never free herself from it. To make it even worse, the mask is causing brain damage to her psyche.
    • Also from Black is No-Face, a small-time boxer who lost a match and can only afford a Back-Alley Doctor to fix his beaten-up face. Unfortunately, the doctor bet a large sum on Frank winning the match. So in retaliation for the doctor losing money he wagered, he ends up mutilating the boxer's face and stitching his mouth and eyes shut.
  • Kyros's Empire from Tyranny is fond of this as a way to make examples of rebels. Not only are Kyros's armies, especially The Disfavoured, fond of mass crucifixion of anyone who rebels and setting fire to any villages suspected of aiding rebels, but Kyros has access to Edicts that allows entire countries to feel the Overlord's wrath should anyone displease them.
  • Until Dawn:
    • The plot itself is kicked off in the prologue when Mike and his clique choose to "prank" Hannah by getting her to undress, while they are filming her without her knowledge. Why? Hannah has a very obvious crush on Mike and flirts with him. So they pull this, instead of simply telling Hannah to knock it off. This ends with Hannah and Beth both dead after they fall off a cliff into a cave, though that wasn't part of the prank; it was an accident that still left them dead.
    • After the prologue, the scheme of the Big Bad is basically a night-long Trauma Conga Line for the above prank. While Hannah's prank was cruel, the teenagers did not intend for Hannah and Beth to die from it, and some are regretful of their actions. They do not deserve to be mentally and psychologically tormented and traumatized and fearful for their lives and their friends. In particular, Sam and Chris didn't have anything to do with Hannah's prank, but suffer the brunt of the wrath by being placed in multiple Sadistic Choices and being supposedly made to watch Josh die.
  • Warframe: Ballas, one of the highest members of the ancient Orokin Empire, did this a lot.
    • He joined the Sentients and helped kill off the entire Orokin Empire because the high council had his lover executed. While the Orokin deserved it, this particular motivation isn't enough to justify it. In fact, Ballas was on the council that condemned his lover, but he voted to have her executed because he couldn't compromise his political persona.
    • A Dax soldier discovered his plans. Rather than just having the soldier quietly removed, he infested him with the Technocyte Plague, turning him into a warframe constantly wracked with physical pain, and then forced him to murder his own son, knowing that this event would become the only thing he could remember forever.
  • In one of the scenarios in Wargame: European Escalation, an East German Border Guard defects to West Germany. He kills two of his fellow border guards in the escape. East Germany wants him back. West Germany says no. Enter World War 3, stage East.
  • In the game Watch_Dogs, Aiden Pearce's quest to get vengeance for the death of his niece is actually a satirical look at the vengeance plot. The chaos and violence is played up to a ridiculous degree after about the halfway point of the main storyline, examples being; nuking the power grid of Chicago, kidnapping and torturing the man who accidentally killed his niece, completely ruining the lives of many people, including his only family, the list goes on....
  • In Waxworks (1992), a witch tried to steal a chicken from one of your ancestors. She gets her hand chopped off for her trouble. In retribution, she cast a curse on your family bloodline in which whenever twins would be born, one would be forced into evilness and have to serve Beelzebub forever.
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt:
    • One of the early Witcher contracts involves exorcising a noonwraith from a well in a destroyed village. After doing some digging, the player can learn that the wraith was the ghost of a woman who insulted the local lord by making fun of his dead son, leading to him sending men to hang her from the well, murder everyone in the village, and raze it to the ground for good measure. The same lord was also said to have once killed a man for not taking his cap off quickly enough.
    • In the Hearts of Stone expansion Gaunter O'Dimm kills a drunk who interrupts a conversation with Geralt by freezing time and then inserting a wooden spoon into his eye handle-first. When he unfreezes time again the poor man is dead before he even hits the floor.
    • In the Blood and Wine expansion Geralt meets a noblewoman who was cursed to turn into a wight and live alone for nearly a century for the crime of refusing a strange beggar (who was very heavily implied to be Gaunter O'Dimm in disguise) food.
    • The main story of Blood and Wine involves this. Syanna, the sister of Duchess Anna Henrietta of Toussaint, orchestrated serial killings of a group of knights that mistreated her in the past that were performed by her vampire lover, who she tricked into being an accomplice by leading him to believe she was kidnapped. This was, of course, all part of her master plan to assassinate her sister. Why? For the heinous crime of forgetting about her after she was banished (which was all in her imagination, as the Duchess did look for her). And she manages to pull it off in the end unless Geralt gets them to reconcile, in which case they all live happily ever after (except for the scores of civilians and soldiers that were murdered by a vampire army as a result of Syanna's actions).
  • World of Warcraft: This comes up a lot with Garrosh Hellscream and his followers.
    • In the prequel comic for Cataclysm, Garrosh declared Mak'gora because Thrall told him not to act rashly like his father did.
    • A Tauren Chieftain and his wife kill a general for murdering their son and framing a school of innocent children? Krom'gar has the wife killed and their entire village burned down despite you explaining the situation.
  • Yandere Chan: What's that? You've forgotten Mia's name? Oh... that's so cruel. So cruel that you deserve to be stabbed to death for it! Are all people as unbelievably cruel as you? You want to share lunch between Mia and your other four friends? What's that? She poisoned you? Serves you right. You decided not to have lunch with Mia at all? You ought to be stabbed and thrown out a window for your heartlessness!
  • Yandere Simulator includes non-fatal methods to get the rivals out of the way. But the only reason why Yandere-chan is dead-set on getting rid of her rivals? They dare to like Senpai, too.
  • Yes, Your Grace:
    • While Lorsulia's cat Dusty gets killed regardless of route, one choice made by King Eryk dictates whether or not the killer goes the extra mile of sending him a scarf he forced Lorsulia to make with Dusty's fur: the extra action is be performed only if Eryk confronts Ivo about the fact that he's abusing Lorsulia after the Royal Trial.
    • The reason Dusty is killed in the first place qualifies as well: Ivo simply gets tired of Dusty leaving hair everywhere.


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