People who struggle with their own shortcomings in Video Games.
- On Deltarune at the end of the Final Boss battle of a Snowgrave Run, Spamton begins taunting you for calling for help from your friends. However, each turn, it becomes increasingly obvious he's bitter about his own past and ends up chastizing himself:Spamton: WHAT!? YOU'RE CALLING FRIENDS!? YOU THINK YOU CAN BEAT ME WITH YOUR FRIENDS' [Magic]!? GO AHEAD, [Kid]... CALL ALL YOU WANT! NO ONE WILL EVER PICK UP! GO AHEAD AND [Scream] INTO THE [Receiver]. THE [Voice] RUNS OUT EVENTUALLY. YOUR [Voice] THEIR [Voice]. UNTIL YOU REALIZE YOU ARE ALL ALONE! THERE WILL BE NO MORE [Miracles] NO MORE [Magic]. YOU LOST IT WHEN YOU TRIED TO SEE TOO FAR.... ... YOU LOST IT... YOU MAKE ME [Sick]! MUTTERING YOUR [Lost Friends] NAMES AT THE BOTTOM OF A [Dumpster]! NO ONE'S GONNA HELP YOU!!! GET THAT THROUGH YOUR [Beautiful Head], YOU LITTLE [Worm]!
- Ryo in Digimon Survive is a Dirty Coward and Sour Outside, Sad Inside Japanese Delinquent who acts as The Load for the first few chapters of the game, refusing to make an effort to cooperate with the others and instead choosing to wallow in self-pity and fear. If the player fails to help him overcome his fears, he has a psychotic breakdown and dies from running straight into the Fog of Doom. In the Golden Path where he survives, he reveals himself to be rather insightful and develops into a voice of reason that helps keep the others grounded.
- Final Fantasy IV: Kain Highwind blames himself for being possessed by the Big Bad, feeling that he wouldn't have been susceptible if he hadn't already been both resentful and guiltridden over Cecil and Rosa's relationship. He openly encourages his friends to kill him if he's possessed again and sequesters himself on Mount Ordeals in the end as he considers himself unworthy to join their celebrations. He does make peace with himself later... seventeen years later.
- Kratos is the ultimate source of many of his own problems, though it takes him a long time to admit it. By God of War (PS4), it becomes apparent that while he hates all gods, he hates none as much as himself for his Jumping Off the Slippery Slope Never My Fault complex and role in the Cycle of Revenge. He even admits, when pressed, that he is a monster. In a sense, while the game itself has no real Big Bad, his own past as the Ghost of Sparta gives him so much shame, especially over his Patricide and role in the end of the Greek era, that it can be seen as the real villain of the game itself.
- Working through and ultimately past this is Kratos' primary arc in God of War Ragnarök. He even manages to extend a hand of forgiveness to Thor after defeating him, instead of killing him. Which is undermined by Odin immediately killing Thor, but Kratos' willingness to change is what matters for his arc.
- Played for Laughs with Riamu Yumemi from THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls, a neurotic Hospital Hottie inspired by the Japanese menhera subculture based around mental health awareness. She's a Mood-Swinger who frequently switches between being arrogant and haughty to a Shrinking Violet, plays up her mental illness for attention, and feels as though her career's crashing to an end even though she's one of the more successful idols.
- NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD: The main obstacle to Ame attaining a happy and successful life as a streamer is her own psychosis. If she lets her stress, affection, or mental darkness get too high, she loses sight of her goals and falls into a spiral of insanity. P-chan can certainly help her along and abuse her, but since P-chan is nothing more than an Imaginary Friend for Ame, this is still Ame doing it to herself. And while she does have a few Freudian Excuses concerning her parents and primary school, ultimately, she has to break out from her psychosis on her own, and there's no easy target to put the blame on.
- In Octopath Traveler II, Harvey's ultimate downfall happens because of his major obsession with "beating" Osvald. Harvey is a brilliant scientist and mage, with several people (including Osvald himself!) admitting how intelligent he is. However, due to his jealousy over Osvald's research into the One True Magic, Harvey decides that he not only needs to one-up Osvald, he also needs Osvald to know that he one-upped him. So instead of taking any of several opportunities to just kill Osvald and be done with it, Harvey always lets Osvald survive just so he can show off what he's done with his research. This leads to Osvald killing Harvey, and to Osvald finally figuring out the real source of the One True Magic; in other words, Harvey's massive inferiority complex caused Osvald to properly discover the very thing Harvey wanted to get credit for.
- Persona likes to play this around a bit. Usually, the biggest enemy of most of the characters are in fact...themselves. This category will only pick out the more notable examples.
- Persona 4 has Tohru Adachi, who appears as a textbook clumsy detective. In reality, he is the Serial Killer of Inaba who throws adolescents into the TV to be killed by Shadows for the sole reason that he was bored and his life was nothing but misery. But he fails to see himself as anything other than a superior human and others as worthless garbage.
- Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth proves that not only humans but real gods can fall into this. Exactly why did the entire thing in the game start? It's because he began to grow mercy when he saw a girl called "Niko" who died of a terminal illness and was unable to live in a meaningful way. As a result, he sealed all of his and Niko's memories and his merciless side away then created a Yasogami High School Lotus-Eater Machine to soothe her pain. Obviously, this didn't end well.
- Persona 5 has Akechi, with a similar mindset as Adachi. His life was miserable because his mother was a prostitute Shido impregnated, who later killed herself. He grew to hate Shido for abandoning his mom, and decided the best way to get revenge would be to make Shido Prime Minister of Japan- and then ruin his career by revealing himself as Shido's bastard child. To do this, he served as Shido's metaverse muscle, ruined many lives to get Shido's conspiracy off the ground, and betrayed the Phantom Thieves... when he "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot by joining the Thieves and stealing Shido's heart (or doing it himself before the Phantom Thieves came together), and Shido was aware of his plans and was going to take him out before he could drop his big reveal. He has a Villainous Breakdown when this is pointed out.
- Futaba Sakura is her own worst enemy to the point where her treasure is herself, and she has to steal her own heart to complete her palace and become a full-fledged Phantom Thief. Her self-esteem issues as the result of her mother's suicide (actually a murder by mental shutdown) have made her a shut-in and resulted in the main 'boss' in her palace being a construct representing her belief that her mother hated her. Her Shadow isn't the boss because she was repressing her positive emotions and self-respect, while allowing her negative feelings to overwhelm her.
- In Royal, we also have "Kasumi Yoshizawa," who is not Kasumi Yoshizawa but her sister Sumire Yoshizawa. It turns out that Kasumi virtually outperforms her in gymnastics in any way and this caused her to go into suicidal depression courtesy of jealousy, eventually accumulating into a depressive fit that nearly got herself accidentally thrown into traffic a month before your journey started, with Kasumi sacrificing herself to get Sumire out of the way. This merely caused Sumire's mental health to obviously worsen with Survivor Guilt and her father had no choice other than to send her to Maruki, in which she actively told him to turn her into a copy of her dead sister. (He made her think she's Kasumi instead because that's the biggest extent he can do at that point.) The catch is she isn't as worthless as how she perceives herself as, since it's pretty clear she can go into the charts during gymnast championships even if not consistently perfect and unlike Kasumi, she can actually cook quite well. Unlike the others, her very own oppressor is not corrupt authorities or celebrities, it was nobody but herself.
- Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth has Hikari, who got through a Trauma Conga Line since primary school which basically consists of her getting targeted, humiliated and rejected by people for having No Social Skills with the exception of her father, which caused her to end up with catatonic depression. Since her father taught her the things that seemingly made her All of the Other Reindeer, she began to think that everyone hated her and she had become an embarrassment for him because she was being different, making the Trauma Button moment where her father expressed genuine concern on her using the exact phrase that was used before people flipped out especially traumatizing, since that actually convinced that even her father hated her. In reality, nobody but a few jerkasses did, and her father never changed at all.
- Red Dead Redemption: Dutch van der Linde has spent his life fighting against a lot of things, but ultimately the only enemy he ever had to worry about was himself. The second game, focusing on his gang in their prime, shows Dutch's descent from the cultured and charismatic leader of a feared gang to the lone terrorist he is in the first game, and ultimately it's all due to Dutch's bad decisions. Sure, there was The Mole, Micah Bell, but all they did was kiss up to Dutch and egg him on for some of his more boneheaded moves; it's Dutch who decided to ignore the gang's Only Sane Men in favor of the ass-kisser, Dutch who overestimates the gang's power and takes stupid risks that stop paying off early on, and Dutch who drives the gang away with his increasingly erratic behavior. For all the threat the Pinkertons present, ultimately they basically stand by while Dutch self-destructs. And when you confront Dutch in the original game, he commits suicide because he's realized his endless crusade against civilization was pointless.
- The biggest flaw of YHVH and the Great Will throughout Shin Megami Tensei is that they do not realize their flaws. They believe that their Millennium Kingdom and absolute authority are the best for humanity, and they are too ignorant to know that they aren't doing anything other than suffocating people's thoughts. This is especially obvious in Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, since YHVH's ego is so large there that he fails to see any other non Judeo-Christian deity as anything other than lowly demons and filth; Yet, he's being exposed as nothing other than a demon himself by a bunch of human kids!
- Spec Ops: The Line has Martin Walker. Although he regards Konrad as a kind of arch nemesis who has to be stopped at all costs, the further the game progresses and Walker continues to do heinous acts in pursuit of stopping his alleged arch nemesis, it becomes clear that Walker himself is his own enemy and not Konrad. It is made clearer when the real Konrad turns out to have been dead the entire time, and the Konrad who was an antagonist was a hallucination.
