Eviler Than Thou / Video Games

• American McGee's Grimm: Grimm despises Sugar Bowl fairy tales, and his objective is going in to corrupt them to the Darker and Edgier versions they used to be. This extends to the villains of the stories when he thinks their plans and actions make no sense or are petty at best. At one point, he even goes after Satan for his ridiculous plan.
• An actual game mechanic in Armello: if two characters infected with Rot do battle, the one who is more corrupted gains additional dice equal to the amount of Rot their opponent has. Doing this to the King nets the player a Rot Victory.
• BioShock:
  • The original game features a background conflict between the objectivist Knight Templar Andrew Ryan, who goes to great and terrible lengths in an attempt to preserve his utopia, and the scheming mobster Frank Fontaine, who's just trying to claw his way to the top in the name of money and power.
  • BioShock 2 shows that Ryan also faced opposition from collectivist cult leader and enemy of free will, Sofia Lamb.
  • BioShock Infinite also has this as the backstory. On one side, you have Comstock and his cronies who are rabidly bigoted and theocratic. On the other hand, you have the Vox Populi resistance, who while meaning well, are overly radical, though the Burial at Sea DLC retcons the latter as being more reasonable than they seem in the game itself.
• The three primary villains of BlazBlue are Hades Izanami, the goddess and incarnation of death, who seeks to kill God and put the universe out of its misery, Relius Clover, a Mad Scientist and Abusive Parent, who seeks to usurp God and replace it with Ignis in order to create a perfect world inhabited by perfect humans, and Yuuki Terumi, a right evil asshole, who seeks to kill and usurp God and turn the world into a cesspool of hate, fear and despair. Though they initially cooperate with each other due to a common shared goal, their end goals are incompatible and their alliance is ultimately dissolved in the third game when Izanami betrays the latter two and abandons them to fend for themselves against the heroes. Of course, they both survive, and were the ones who created her in the first place, with Terumi revealing his true form as Takehaya Susano'o no Mikoto and being the Final Boss.
• In Bloodborne, you can become this if you are cunning enough yourself. You can tell that the Beggar is an Abhorrent Beast in disguise by seeing him eating a corpse. Why deal with him on your own when you can send him to Iosefka's Clinic?
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow has this all over the place. The Big Bad orders Dario, the brute, and Dmitrii, the schemer, to compete for the position of Big Bad; Dario winds up dead and Dmitrii goes on to kill the Big Bad and become the Big Bad himself, albeit only briefly, unless the hero does it first.
• Cognitive Dissonance: Porky does this to Giegue, realizing he'll be put in charge if Giegue loses his mind and gleefully allowing his boss to enter the Devil Machine.
• Dr. Neo Cortex is routinely usurped and mocked by the other villains for his failure to defeat Crash Bandicoot. Played with, however, since Cortex very often manages to manipulate things in his favour and take over as top of the Rogues Gallery again in the end:
  • Uka Uka, being the voodoo mask Aku Aku's evil twin, immediately made his presence known in Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped by making Cortex beg for mercy. His role as Bad Boss to him and the other villains remained throughout the series, though as Uka Uka himself became more and more buffoonish, he became more of a Pointy-Haired Boss, culminating in Cortex betraying and humiliating him as payback for his past abuse in Mind Over Mutant.
  • Said betrayal was pivoted by Uka Uka finally getting sick of Cortex's failures in Crash of the Titans (along with foreshadowing signs of Cortex getting impudent around him), and replacing him with his own niece, Nina Cortex, whom both he and Aku Aku consider far eviler and smarter than Neo himself. Nina is inevitably defeated however, and Cortex, as punishment, literally boots her off to Evil Public School.
  • The Evil Twins, former abused pets of Cortex who were mutated by their travels to the Tenth Dimension, return to Crash's dimension and decide to destroy the world as payback, along with messing with Cortex multiple times for petty kicks. When Cortex finally remembers who they are, he and the Twins engage in what can be best described as a game of schoolyard bullying each other into submission, which, with Crash's help, Cortex finally wins, making the Twins retreat in fear.
  • In Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, Cortex is looked down upon by N. Tropy who betrays him after Cortex failed, yet again, to destroy Crash and Coco, with N. Tropy having much more sinister plan in mind than Cortex. After Cortex teams up with them, Tawna and Dingodile, they manage to defeat N. Tropy and his new associate, after which Cortex betrays Crash and co. only to be ultimately defeated by Team Bandicoots.
• Do It For Me: The "Psychopath" ending has the Villain Protagonist mock and kill his girlfriend for thinking she was in control when he killed the students of his own free will. Averted in the other endings, in which the girlfriend remains the Big Bad and greater menace.
• Appears within the Dwarf Fortress fandom, as many of the players dream up greater and more monstrous ways to abuse the Dwarves, Goblins, Elves, cats, and everything else. One of the most well-known examples being a plan to drain an ocean in order to capture mermaids, simply because crafts made from their bones are very valuable. The game's creator apparently deemed that stunt to be going too far as he almost immediately nerfed the value of mermaid bone after finding out about it.
• In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the Dark Brotherhood versus the Morag Tong. Both are Murder, Inc., but the Morag Tong is government-contracted and has a strict code of ethics, while the Dark Brotherhood is comprised of Psycho for Hire criminals who practice a Religion of Evil. Ditto, to a lesser degree, for the Thieves' Guild and the Camonna Tong: the former has a strict code of ethics as well and favors clean, stealthy burglary and smooth talking, while the latter is made of xenophobic thugs who just kill and plunder.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Kuja, Garland and Queen Brahne all come into conflict with each other over who gets to be the main villain of Final Fantasy IX. Brahne and Kuja work together until she betrays him and he kills her, and Kuja is Garland's servant until he overthrows him.
  • In Final Fantasy XV, Ardyn plays the Nifelheim Empire so he can cause the apocalypse, while Bahamut intentionally manipulated events so Ardyn would turn evil and cause the apocalypse. The novel reveals that while Ardyn wanted petty revenge and had serious brain damage, Bahamut was sick of humanity not reaching his unreasonable standards and wanted to kill them to start over.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy has three factions within the villains — those who want to rule the world, those who want to destroy it, and those who are doing their own thing and don't care about the other two factions. Though the heroes spend most of the time in the spotlight, we see hints of the various villains making plays for power against each other.
• In God of War, we have Kratos against the Jerkass Gods. Take your pick.
• The original Halo trilogy's main and opposing evil factions are the Flood, led by the Gravemind, and the Covenant, led by the Prophet of Truth. In Halo 3, the heroes manage to stop Truth's plan to wipe out all organic life in the galaxy, which plays right into the hands of Gravemind's plan to infect the galaxy shortly afterward.
  Truth: My feet tread the path... I shall become a god!
  Gravemind: You will be food, nothing more...
• Heroes of the Seasons: The moment Lord Aldwol shows up, he intimidates the weaker King Frinch into abstaining from the Invasion campaign, and then forcefully conscripts him in the Invasion Plus campaign. The demoness Matria proceeds to do the same to Aldwol and Frinch in the Divine and Armageddon campaigns, going as far as to mentally torture Aldwol into submission. In Armageddon mode, Matria non-lethally absorbs the life force of her comrades to achieve her One-Winged Angel form.
• Infernax: You can do this by selecting to kill the cult leader Robert instead of yielding to him near the end of an Ultimate Evil playthrough. Should you do so, Alcedor shoves his sword right through Robert's jaw before seizing the Necronomicon for himself.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds: When Princess Hilda reveals herself to be the mastermind behind the sage kidnappings and attempted theft of Hyrule's Triforce, albeit to save Lorule from destruction, she demands that Yuga give her the Triforce; instead, Yuga betrays her, revealing that he was playing her all along and plans to use the Triforce to remake Lorule in his own image.
• In Mario Super Sluggers, Bowser and King K. Rool have absolutely terrible play chemistry when on the same team.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: Many, many evil characters show up throughout the course of the game, and they perpetually outshine one another in their evil, starting with Yomi Hellsmile, who is easily more cruel than any other criminal in Kanai Ward due to being a psychotic despot willing to kill anyone who isn't of any use to him, all the way to Makoto Kagutsuchi, the CEO of Amaterasu Corporation, who is easily much more evil than anyone else in the game due to his willingness to manipulate entire cities, corporations, and the government itself to do his bidding, all while seeing himself as the good guy in that scenario, though the fact that he's willing to do all of that in the first place is no thanks to Yomi's excessive despotism over Kanai Ward. Makoto may indeed feel genuine remorse following all of his misdeeds, and undergoes a Heel–Face Turn, but it does not downplay how outright evil he is as the game's Big Bad.
• Metal Gear:
  • Throughout the series, there's a conflict between Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters and the Government Conspiracy. Villains such as Big Boss, Liquid Snake/Ocelot, and Solidus Snake formed their own, child-killing terrorist organizations to free the world's soldiers from the real villains, the manipulative politicians who consider entire civilizations expendable, particularly the Patriots (aka, the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo), whose ultimate goal is total mind control of all humanity via nanomachines, followed by endless war. This forces Solid Snake and his friends to form a third side to combat the threat of both sets of villains, so that they could save the world from the war of two ideologies. Eventually, they decide to side with the Patriots over the increasingly insane Liquid Ocelot, but Sunny manages to triple-cross the Patriots by re-purposing Ocelot's nuclear super-base as a backdoor into the Patriots' AI core, effectively lobotomizing them.
  • For an extra layer, the Patriots themselves were originally created to combat an even older group of world-controlling politicians.
  • Metal Gear Solid V's Skull Face tries to turn the entire world into a totalitarian state by turning every unstable dictatorship into a nuclear power, while infecting everyone with language-triggered diseases so they cannot talk it out. The Patriots are so afraid that they save Big Boss from death and create their own super-soldier based on him to take Skull Face out.
• In Mogeko Castle, the Mogekos are rapists who are obsessed with high school girls. Moge-ko is also a rapist who is obsessed with high school girls, but torture and cannibalism as well. She also preys on the Mogekos.
• Mortal Kombat: Shang Tsung is a soul-collecting sorcerer who is define by his pathological tendency to betray anyone who he sees as stepping stones to his goals once all is said and done, overshadowing his former boss Shao Kahn and even Kronika, whom she deemed to be extremely dangerous to be kept alive and is appalled by how low he can go betraying anyone to no end until he has nothing left to betray.
• A good deal of Okage: Shadow King is spent helping Evil King Stan beat up the Fake Evil Kings to reclaim his title.
• The Big Bad of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Sir Grodus, is trying to unleash and take control of the Shadow Queen so that he can take over the world. He does his best to make this work, but she uses her powers to decapitate him — in the first place, he was a pawn of Beldam, one of his supposed minions.
• Physical Exorcism Series:
  • Case 00: The Cannibal Boy: When Grete feeds Hans to Brucie out of yandere spite, she didn't expect Brucie to immediately strangle her and eat her too.
  • Case 03: True Cannibal Boy: Brucie proves to be the stronger Cannibal Boy when he summons an army of assimilated evil spirits to eat the first Cannibal Boy's conglomerate of evil spirits, all while assimilating them in the process.
• Team Aqua and Team Magma in Pokémon Emerald; Aqua wanting to flood the world and Magma wanting to expand the landscape.
• Pony Island: In the escape, Theodore's soul is the blackest and darkest among the thousands trapped in Limbo. He rivals Satan and looks like a demon in his own right, complete with draconic head firing lasers and wings.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Shadow the Hedgehog stages that feature both Dr. Eggman and Black Doom, Eggman's missions are considered the "Hero" ones.
  • Play Sonic Frontiers on Hard mode and you'll be treated to a boss fight to the game's actual Big Bad, a destructive, malevolent entity only known as The End. During its fight, The End reveals it saw Sonic's mind as he traversed through Cyber Space, noting he fought machines and gods. It quickly dismisses them as finite and declares itself to be infinite and far worse than them.
• Soul Nomad & the World Eaters: In the Demon Path, Revya as the Devourlord proves to be such unrepentant force of pure evil that eclipses all the villains of the normal path. Horrified by Revya's actions, the antagonists band together with the remaining heroes just to stop Reyva from murdering them all. Even Gig, himself a very nasty piece of work, is sometimes taken aback at the gratuitous atrocities that Revya commits for quick laughs.
• Star Control:
  • The villains of the series are the two races of Ur-Quan: the green Kzer-Za, who swept around one half of the galaxy enslaving every living thing (with the ultimate intention of sealing them on their respective homeworlds in impenetrable bubbles; they would also allow relative freedom if your race agreed to serve them as battle thralls), and the black Kohr-Ah, who swept around the galaxy killing every living thing. Once both met at the opposite end of the galaxy, they were both going to fight it out to decide whose approach is "better". Even better yet, both approaches are supposed to be for the citizens' own good. The Ur-Quan were originally part of the Sentient Milieu, which accidentally stumbled upon the evilest species ever, the Dnyarri, telepaths so powerful that a single individual could utterly dominate the minds of a solar system. The Ur-Quan barely managed to free themselves from the Dnyarri's control by a fluke and destroy them after millennia of the most horrible abuse imaginable. While both Ur-Quan are extremely paranoid after said horrible abuse, the Kzer-Za don't want to kill everything, deciding that universal enslavement was enough to ensure that nobody could ever enslave the Ur-Quan, or anyone else, again. (That sounds strange, but the Kzer-Za see themselves as fair masters and usually do not permit their subjects to harm each other. Compared to every other "bad guy" race in the game, and some of your allies, they seemed downright beneficent.) The Kohr-Ah just have a few screws loose, and outright state that, since they believe in reincarnation, by killing every non-Ur-Quan race in the galaxy, they are doing them a favor by giving them a chance to be reborn as Ur-Quan.
  • A rare example of a mediocre villain invoking much more disgust and ire than the major one; unlike the Ur-Quan, who retain a strict code of honor despite their omnicidal/totalitarian tendencies and have thorough and near-commiserable motivation, the Druuge are nothing but greedy heartless dregs.
• In StarCraft II, this is one possible Alternate Character Interpretation for the relationship between the Overmind and the Fallen One (the other possibility being a case of Good All Along). Thus far we've only been given teases about it being a future plotline, but what is known is that the latter tried to use the former for his own ends, and the former pulled off a Thanatos Gambit to stop him.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • If you choose to go Dark, Knights of the Old Republic ends with the Sith Lord Revan facing off against his old apprentice Malak, whereas KotOR 2 has the evil Sith Lord Jedi Exile (again, if you decide to go that way) fighting Darth Traya (formerly known as Kreia) in the ruins of the world she destroyed in the backstory to prove there's nothing more she can teach her.
  • Strangely, while it does have Dark and Light endings, The Force Unleashed plays this straight both ways. The Dark Side Starkiller ultimately proves eviler than Darth Vader, but then the Emperor ends up being eviler than them. Though ultimately, as the expanded What If? Dark Side storyline is to be believed, Starkiller manages to one up the Emperor and Vader by corrupting Luke Skywalker, something that the other two never managed in the real timeline.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Sephiroth is this to both Galeem and Dharkon in his Fighter reveal trailer, destroying Galeem, who worfed the entire Smash Bros. cast pre-DLC sans Kirby, in one slash.
• Undertale:
  • Flowey pulls this on Asgore when he's both at his weakest and while he's in the midst of a Heel–Face Turn.
  • This also happens to Flowey himself during the No Mercy route, though whether the culprit was Frisk, the player or Chara is entirely up to speculation.
• Warframe: When the Sentients that originally fought against the Orokin Empire return to the Origin System in full force during The New War, the Grineer and Corpus briefly form an alliance with each other and the Tenno to fight off the invading threat. Even this proves to not be enough, as the Sentients win the war and establish the new Narmer Empire.
• In Yandere Simulator, there's a clique of bullies, delinquents, an amoral Information Broker who deals in panty shots, and a substitute teacher in gross violation of occupational ethics. Yandere-chan can be worse than any of them... and her mother is worse than her.

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