Hoist By His Own Petard / Video Games

Often a Death Trope, so expect to see unmarked spoilers ahead.

One of the most ironic ways Video Games players can deal with enemies is by stealing their weapons and using them against the same enemy. Some bosses even require the player to somehow redirect their own attacks back at them. Not that players are always immune to their own weapons, either. And as with other media, this trope is often part of the plot, so don't count on spoilers to be marked.

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• 100% Orange Juice!:
  • It's perfectly possible to step on a Trap Card you placed yourself.
  • A particular case is Yuki, whose Hyper Card allows her to incapacitate a random player, herself included.
• In Abomi Nation, this is often the result of Furcifume's Barrier Change Boss gimmick. He starts as Neutral type, which has no weaknesses... so by changing to a different type, he gives himself a weakness, allowing you to take him down much faster. His attacks also take on his current type, but that can work in your favor too if you field an Abomi who's resistant to it.
• Absented Age: Squarebound: Normally, Karen can only use her vast psychic powers in the real world, but not the Driftworlds. Karen Alias merges the Driftworlds and the real world, but this allows the real Karen to use her full psychic powers, due to the presence of the real world.
• Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney:
    • In the fourth case, Manfred von Karma jokingly offers for Phoenix to cross-examine a witness's parrot (which he had already fixed) to trip him up and embarrass him. The parrot's testimony, along with a few other things, ends up destroying von Karma's case and getting an innocent verdict.
    • In the same game, the same can be said of Damon Gant. Wanting to have Phoenix's badge removed, he admits that he cut a piece of cloth from Neil Marshall's jacket with Ema's fingerprints on it. Decisive evidence that Phoenix knew all about and hid from the court, meaning it was illegal evidence... except it wasn't. Phoenix perfectly knew that he couldn't present said evidence, since at the time its relevance to the case wasn't made. The one who actually makes the connection clear is Gant himself. An action that finally proves that he killed Neil. In other words, Gant betrays himself, and when he thinks he's safe by admitting that he cut the cloth, he's actually playing into Phoenix's hands all along.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All:
    • Non-villainous example: Pearl charges Maya's Magatama with the ability to see people's "Psyche-Locks", then teaches him how to use it as a Lie Detector. In both this game and the sequel, there are Psyche-Lock sequences where you need to use it to uncover Pearl's secrets.
    • In the fourth case, we have the defendant, Matt Engarde. To avoid personal accountability in the murder of his rival, Juan Corrida, he hires Shelly de Killer to assassinate Juan and kidnap Maya to force Phoenix into defending him. However, he also takes the time to set up a hidden camera in a giant stuffed bear so he could film de Killer, with the intention of blackmailing him later. This backfires spectacularly once de Killer is made aware of the situation since, due to it breaching their contract, de Killer now has his sights set on the one who hired him. To drive the point home, Phoenix was forced into a Sadistic Choice by Engarde: either prove his guilt and lose Maya, or let him walk free and let Adrian Andrews take the fall. After Engarde's blackmail attempt is found out, he's caught in a similar situation: either plead guilty and rot in jail, or roam free and get hit by de Killer.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice:
    • The ruling monarchy of The Kingdom of Khura'in passed a law via the authority of the crown called the "Defense Culpability Act". This law means that if you're perceived to have offered support to someone suspected of a crime, in any capacity, and that person is subsequently found guilty, you will also be considered guilty of the same crime, and be given the same punishment. This law led to defense attorneys getting convicted en masse, which in turn caused a mass slaughter of attorneys until there were none left in the country, and to the point where there are mass-graves marked with the Khura'inese attorney badge. The lawyers that weren't actually killed were either thrown in jail, fled the country, or gave up their jobs to join the rebels who are fighting against the corrupt sovereign. After Apollo is in the middle of proving that game's Big Bad, the Queen of Khura'in herself, murdered her husband, tried to murder her sister, has been manipulating everything behind the scenes, turned Khura'in's legal system into a completely corrupt mess for her own twisted gains, and has never had any actual claim on the throne in the first place, she demands to be given a lawyer to represent her. Naturally it's pointed out that because of the attorney genocide that she herself caused, there are none left.
    • There's another layer related to the above. Ga'ran repeatedly claims to be an exceptionally powerful medium, and yet she spends a lot of effort on retrieving the Founder's Orb. This draws Apollo's attention, and he eventually pieces together the only possible motive: Ga'ran needs the Orb to gain spiritual powers, because she isn't a medium — and therefore, she has no right to the throne. So Apollo just gives the Orb to her, accuses her of being a fraud, and openly challenges her to perform a spirit channelling on the spot to prove him wrong. If she refuses, people will believe that Apollo is right, and dethrone her; if she accepts and attempts the channelling, she will fail and be dethroned anyway.
• Advance Guardian Heroes:
  • Demon ended up manipulating Kanon via Zur in order to force the rebirth of the Soul of Hero, so that he may absorb all of the souls of Kanon's army (including those of the now-mind-controlled Guardian Heroes), thus becoming the perfect warrior, and thus Demon's ultimate soldier. This later backfires when the main character (i.e., you) decides to fight him (or rather, Demon decides that "you'll probably resist"), and Demon's all-powerful body is destroyed.
  • Demon understandably gets pretty cheesed off at Earth for the above incident, and tries to destroy it with a massive fireball. This leads to another incident of being hoisted by one's own petard when you and the rest of the spirits reflect the fireball back at Demon.
  • Hoisting enemies up with their own petard is also a part of Advance Guardian Heroes' gameplay; an important technique involves blocking just as an enemy attack hits you. If it's a physical attack, enemies are simply stunned, but magic attacks get reflected back at them. Considering the difficulty level achievable by said game, countering quickly becomes a habit.
• In Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, this is a large aspect of what cripples Admiral Greyfield's otherwise impressively huge military. Like Brenner's Wolves, the New Rubinelle Army is also dealing with The Creeper and trying to prevent its spread, but very much unlike Brenner's Wolves (who quarantine and care for anyone infected) Greyfield simply executes anyone even suspected of having the disease. Since people are afraid of the firing squad, they keep quiet about symptoms and it spreads like wildfire: this cripples his ranks, leads to desertions, allows Brenner's Wolves to survive a couple of battles against him when the NRA panics and retreats, and even ultimately presents the opportunity for them to take him down once and for all. Naturally, Caulder calls him out on this one:
  Caulder: I hear it is causing... problems in the ranks. It seems your policy of executing the infected has actually worsened morale. Fascinating... Treating your infected troops in such a manner has sowed the seeds of discontent. Rather than seek help, infected soldiers conceal the truth for fear of the firing squad. This has allowed the disease to spread almost unimpaired throughout your army.
• In The Adventures of Lomax, the game's final boss, Evil Ed, causes boulders to appear on the stage. You need to throw them at him in order to defeat him.
• Age of Empires:
  • Age of Empires II:
    • The Conquerors expansion has the Petard unit. It is a large, bulky guy carrying two giant kegs (looks like one in each arm) of gunpowder. It then walks into, say, a wall and explodes, killing the unit and doing a good deal of damage, destroying most weak buildings. If it's attacked and killed, the unit explodes anyway, leading to a literal case of Hoist By His Own Petard. Spamming these is a quick way to take down most buildings, and don't worry, We Have Reserves.
    • Your units aren't Friendly Fireproof from siege equipment (though thankfully, they are from archers and cannoneers), so unless you're very careful you can lose units to your own catapults. Of course, you can also trick enemy catapults into killing their own side.
  • Age of Empires III (the WarChiefs expansion onwards) also has a Petard unit. This time, it's two normal-looking soldiers carrying one keg of gunpowder who will light the case, plant it by the building, and then both men will try to run away. They never make it.
• This is a way to see what happens to Murakumo if he's defeated by Akatsuki himself in Akatsuki Blitzkampf. 50 years ago, Murakumo tasked Akatsuki with transporting the secret weapon known as the Blitz Engine, while actually intending to eliminate Akatsuki and that particular Engine so he'd monopolize the few Engines left. But Akatsuki became a Human Popsicle instead of dying, later resurfaced, and in his own ending he totally trashes through Murakumo's plans.
• At least one example (possibly two, depending on the player's choices) in Alpha Protocol:
  • Early in the game, Mike Thorton is betrayed by his Government Agency of Fiction, Alpha Protocol, which tries to kill him to cover up its dirty deeds. After he escapes, he is able to use Alpha Protocol's own safehouses as his bases while he battles them, because the agency is so compartmentalized that not even the bosses know what all of its resources are.
  • In Moscow, Thorton can forge an alliance with a rival band of covert operatives, G22, who will agree to sell him weapons and intel for his future missions. Very shortly, however, he can decide to go with a different handler for a critical mission, which makes G22 his enemies. This decision, however, will not be made until after Thorton has had the opportunity to buy all of G22's intel for the mission, including a strategically placed sniper rifle that he can use to kill dozens of their agents.
• ANNO: Mutationem: Castor, an agent of The Consortium, is able to open up portals to any location of his choosing. After Melissa is beaten by Ann, Castor steps in to handle her, until his portal tech suddenly malfunctions and ends up pulling him and Melissa into it instead and they both end up stranded in the desert.
• Can occur in an interesting way in Ape Escape 3. Certain monkies can do a special attack that knocks the player on his/her butt and makes them drop their equipped item. It's limited to the Stun-Club and the Monkey-Net. If, let's say, you get caught by your own monkey-net, what do you think happens? You get sent back to the hub-level. Truly hoisted by the player's own petard!
• The Vendigroth Device in Arcanum invokes this; certain powerful mages have the ability to seal themselves in a magical cocoon at the moment of their deaths, regenerating their bodies and increasing their lifespans. Because magick and technology disrupt one another in the Arcanum-verse, the device uses science to turn a mage's own power against them, making the cocoon destroy their bodies.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • In the first game, Al Mualim is defeated by his own student using the same arts he taught him.
  • Assassin's Creed II:
    • Ezio can disarm mooks and One-Hit Kill them with their own weapons.
    • On a bigger scale, Ezio might not have been so fixated on wiping out the Italian Templars if they hadn't tried to remove the threat posed by his Assassin family.
• In Atlantis: The Lost Tales, Creon gets eaten by the monster he unleashed.
• Baten Kaitos Origins: Verus, who was Evil All Along, is killed by his own mechanical weapons.
• In Bayonetta 2, Alraune, who laid claim to Jeanne's soul after she was Dragged Off to Hell and tries to do the same thing to Bayonetta during her battle with her, ultimately gets her own soul sucked out by Rodin in order to be made into a weapon for Bayonetta.
• In Bendy and the Ink Machine, Sammy Lawrence tries to sacrifice Henry to Bendy in order to convince Bendy to make him human again, so he summons the demon. Bendy then kills him. Henry, on the other hand, gets away.
• BioShock:
  • The first incident, you just hear it in an audio-diary and see the result: sinister detached Mad Scientist Dr. Suchong is killed by one of the Big Daddies he's been working to produce when his attempts to make them "imprint" on the Little Sisters unexpectedly succeeds. What happened? He smacked one of the Little Sisters who was nagging him while he was recording, and her nearby Big Daddy went berserk on him.
  • The second time, you're there to see it happen: "Atlas"/Fontaine being mobbed and killed by a whole gang of Little Sisters armed with syringes... Definitely creepy.
  • There's a third one, available as a special achievement. After you kill Sander Cohen, take his photograph. Since the entire mission for Cohen rests on killing his "apprentices" and taking their photos, the name of the achievement, appropriately enough, is "Irony".
  • The main character, Jack, himself was more or less a creation of Fontaine's meant to help him take over Rapture. In the end, he becomes the very thing that leads to Fontaine's downfall.
  • Nitro Splicers (which throw Molotovs at the player) plus the Telekinesis Plasmid is a very literal example of this trope.
• In BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, at one point in Bang's Story Mode, after beating Jin, Yukianesa proceeds to freeze her own user.
• In Bloodborne, with the DLC enabled, you can kill Ludwig the Accursed with the Holy Blade he originally made.
• Bloons TD Battles:
  • Any bloons sent in a "Play With Fire" club room will go to both players, so players can end up getting killed by their own bloons if they send more bloons than they can destroy.
  • When MOAB-class bloons are destroyed, they release several smaller, faster bloons - so if two players send a MOAB but neither can destroy its quick ceramic bloons, then whoever destroys their MOAB first will usually lose.
• In Bomberman, your bombs do not have any Damage Discrimination. This means it's possible to die to one of your own bombs, especially if you wedged yourself between a bomb and a dead-end.
• The 8-bit-era parody adventure game Bored Of The Rings, based on the book of the same name, has in one area a basilisk; if the protagonist (Fordo) enters that area without protection, the basilisk accidentally kills him with its gaze. As indicated in the Mythology and Religion section, the solution is to carry a mirror, so that the basilisk kills itself instead.
• In Brain Dead 13: During the stairs sequence, Lance picks up several of Fritz's weapons to use against him, including at least two hammers.
• Castlevania:
  • Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia:
    • Dracula's power is borrowed to form the Dominus Glyph. Shanoa kills him with it.
    • This trope is used doubly for Barlowe, as he not only does he get killed by his own student/"daughter"/experiment, but also by one of his own spells if you have the foresight to absorb the Glyph off of him mid-fight when he's casting it.
  • In one of the bad endings of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, Celia Fortner (seemingly) kills Mina in front of Soma, hoping to trigger his transformation into Dracula. She succeeds. Pity that she then ends up being the first victim of the new Dark Lord.
  • In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, this happens to Gabriel as he becomes the first Dracula his descendants must face.
  • In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, one of the enemy types are the spear-wielding Harpies. The Finishing Move on them has them stabbed right through with it.
• Clive Barker's Undying: Ambrose holds Jeremiah hostage, demanding that Patrick hand over the Gel'ziabar stone. He uses it immediately after decapitating Jeremiah to dramatically increase his size, strength, and speed, rendering him all but invincible. But in the very first journal entry on the Gel'ziabar stone, Patrick mentions that prolonged or intensive use of the stone's power will summon a monstrous beast that attacks the user. Needless to say, Ambrose is tapping pretty deeply into the stone's power...
• A form of this: In the intro to Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Einstein uses a time machine to erase Hitler from history. In the intro to Red Alert 3, the Soviets use a time machine to erase Einstein from history. Not a clear-cut example, though, as the time machines are different. One was developed by Einstein (a different Einstein, though), and the other by Dr. Zelinsky.
• Crash Bandicoot:
  • The entire series started with Cortex doing this. How, you might ask? By mutating Crash in the first place, and insisting on using the Cortex Vortex on him without figuring out why it wasn't working on Crash. Naturally, Crash escaped, then went and brought down Cortex's entire army. And then he did it a bunch more.
  • This is also how many bosses are defeated. For example, you defeat Ripper Roo in the first game with his own TNT crates, and Cortex in the same game is defeated by spinning his lasers back at him.
• Part of the reason why Daikatana was so thoroughly bashed upon release lies in this trope. In the first set of levels, every weapon the player comes across seems to be specifically designed to do at least as much damage to its own user as it does to actual enemies. An ion blaster, found near a river, which shorts out when fired underwater and bounces missed shots back into your own face and a C4 launcher which only throws the explosive far enough that you'll be at the edge of the explosion are the most prominent examples.
• Danganronpa:
  • The first case of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc reveals that Sayaka Maizono attempted to frame Makoto Naegi for murder by pretending she was scared of a killer being after her and asking to switch bedrooms with him for the night, then luring someone to "her" bedroom and killing them. This led to her falling victim to this trope multiple times over, as not only did her chosen target, Leon Kuwata, end up fighting back and killing her instead, but he defended himself with a practice sword that Sayaka herself insisted Makoto keep in his room for decoration (thus providing the baseball prodigy with something roughly the size and weight of a baseball bat to defend himself with). Finally, Leon took the knife Sayaka tried to kill him with and used it to deliver the killing blow.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony:
    • In chapter 2, the culprit commits a murder that leaves virtually no evidence linking them to the crime, as it occurred in a place everyone had access to during a period of time that nobody has an alibi for. They end up getting caught because they attempt to frame Himiko for the murder by setting the body up to be dropped into her piranha tank during her magic show. The process of getting the body into position ends up creating a ton of evidence that wouldn't have existed had they not bothered with the frame-up and just left the body at the initial crime scene.
    • In the third chapter, Angie walks in on Korekiyo setting up a complicated murder trap, forcing him to kill her to eliminate a witness. He then carries her body somewhere else and sets up a Locked Room Mystery that would have been utterly unsolvable had he not decided to still go ahead and kill someone with his trap anyway (which ended up being Tenko but he didn't have a specific target in mind as long as they were female). This led to Angie's dried blood being found under the floorboards of the trap room, proving she was first attacked there and not in the locked room like everyone thought, and therefore the same person killed both Angie and Tenko (Korekiyo was found out as Tenko's killer rather quickly, but because Angie's body was found first, only she counted as "the victim" and Tenko was considered a wasted kill so he couldn't be convicted for it). Nobody would have had any reason to investigate the trap room had Tenko not been killed, and even if they had, all they would find out was that Angie was killed there and moved, and also that the floorboards had been messed with for some reason, which still doesn't link the murder to him specifically. Thus Korekiyo's insistence on going through with his trap plan even after he was already home free became the very thing that found him guilty. When questioned after the trial, he says he didn't want his trap to go to waste as he put a lot of effort into making it.
    • An example of both the victim and the culprit suffering from this occurs in the fourth chapter. Miu Iruma plotted out their murder ahead of time, only for their victim, Kokichi Ouma, to catch on and respond by manipulating Gonta into killing her. Gonta, who due to his kind nature was one of the few people still willing to give Kokichi the benefit of the doubt, isn't pleased when Kokichi, never actually planning to go along with their murder scheme and merely using him as a tool to get rid of Miu, exposes him mid-trial.
    • For a more comical example, Miu once made an "Auto-Puncher that Punches You for Telling Terrible Dirty Jokes", which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. When Miu makes a dirty joke, the machine proceeds to sucker punch her.
• The potential fates of multiple bosses in the Dead Rising franchise:
  • Dead Rising:
    • Adam the Clown. Woozy after the fight, he ends up falling on his own weapons — a pair of mini chainsaws. While they're turned on. Laughing as they slice his guts to ribbons.
    • Sean Keanan. Leader of the Raincoat Cult that worships its god in the form of a creepy faceless mannequin with a sword driven through it. When he stumbles over to it and screams to be given strength after losing the fight, it falls over, driving the sword in the middle right into his eye.
    • Paul Carson. His preferred weapon is the Molotov Cocktail, and when cornered by Frank, he lights another one to try to fend him off. He's been backing up the entire cutscene and ends up tripping... It's obvious where this goes. If the player moves quickly, he can be saved with a fire extinguisher, resulting in a Heel–Face Turn.
    • Cletus, who moments prior to his fight with you shoots a survivor dead, tries to pull a Villain: Exit, Stage Left after you beat him... and runs right into the hands and teeth of the now zombified survivor he killed.
  • Dead Rising 2:
    • Antoine Thomas. A very lethal and very crazy chef, he catches and cooks up survivors that stumble into his restaurant. At the end of his boss fight, he stumbles away from the player and winds up dunking his head and half his body into a vat of boiling-hot fry oil.
    • Raymond Sullivan. After Chuck exposes the fact that Sullivan started the outbreak on behalf of Phenotrans, the two of them fight on a raised platform, surrounded by hundreds of zombies, while an AC-130 gunship swoops in every now and then to bombard poor Chuck. After the fight, it looks like Chuck has finally won, but Sullivan trips him up and then proceeds to gloat while he motions for the plane to pick him up via parachute. But as he radios for the plane, Chuck handcuffs Sullivan's harness to the construction scaffolding just as the plane swoops in to pick him up, resulting in Sullivan getting bifurcated by his rescue plane.
    • Evan the Clown, an exclusive boss to Off the Record, is frozen by one of his own ice grenades.
• Dead Space:
  • In all Dead Space games, enemies that launch explosive projectiles at you (legless Brutes, Pods, Guardians) can have them caught with stasis and reflected back at them. Dead Space 3 even has Unitologist troopers with missile launchers and allows you to do the same with their rockets. Similarly, the Waster Necromorphs that fight with axes in that game can also have them pulled from their hands and sent right back.
  • Stross of Dead Space 2 pulls a Face–Heel Turn to start the third act of the game. He does so by poking Action Girl Ellie's eye out with a screwdriver. When he goes to do the same thing to Isaac, Stross promptly gets the same screwdriver pierced into his brain.
• Devil May Cry:
  • In Devil May Cry 4, you can catch and throw back Credo's giant throwing spears, which not only deals a great deal of damage, but also makes him vulnerable for some time.
  • Devil May Cry 5: It's possible for Nero to defeat Vergil by grabbing his sword, Yamato, and stabbing him with it during a counterattack.
• This trope pretty much summarizes the plot and ending of Diablo III. The attempt by Baal to corrupt the Worldstone in Diablo II's expansion pack Lord of Destruction unseals the powers of the Nephalem, the angel-demon hybrids from whom humanity is descended, allowing humans a chance to rise to the ancient power of their ancestors. Diablo's own plan to become the Prime Evil combined with the act of asshattery mentioned earlier gets all seven arch demons Deader than Dead.
• Dicey Dungeons: The Thief's standard ability is to copy a random piece of an opponent's equipment every turn, allowing you to kill them with it. This can be particularly funny against Cornelius if you're running a timer-heavy Crowbar build: Cornelius's One-Hit Kill deals 999 damage once a 99-point timer is filled (74-point in the Elimination Round), meaning that a Thief who's optimised to finish timers as quickly and efficiently as possible can, with some luck, beat him to it and obliterate him in a single 900+-damage shot.
• The Dishonored franchise:
  • In Dishonored, it is possible to freeze time as a guard fires a shot, possess him, make him walk in front of his own bullet, unpossess the guard, and revert time to normal... and then watch as he is hit by the very bullet he fired at you.
  • In Dishonored 2, you can disable the sight of Grand Inventor Kirin Jindosh's clockwork soldiers, rendering them unable to tell friend from foe and instead attacking whoever makes noise. In the Jindosh mission, it's entirely possible to do this to one of the soldiers in his room and then just wait for him to die at the hands of his own invention.
  • In both games, the protagonists can use a rewire tool to change the "allegiance" of mechanical objects, making Walls of Light and Arc Pylons vaporise their enemies instead of them, and make the clockwork soldiers attack everyone except them.
• In Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, Krow is first beaten by the very eggs he tries to throw at you, then you ultimately beat K. Rool by clogging his gun with his own cannonballs. This can happen to you immediately afterwards, too, since the ensuing explosions launch said cannonballs back at you.
• Doom:
  • In Doom (2016), the Big Bad of the game, Olivia Pierce, is eventually put down with a weapon that she herself helped design. Namely, the BFG 9000, which the Doom Slayer uses to blow her massive head apart when she becomes the Spider Mastermind.
  • A number of Glory Kills across Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal involve using a demon's personal arsenal of weapons and cybernetics to maim it. For some reason, the Arachnotron is particularly vulnerable to this: it can end up being stabbed in the eye with its own cybernetic leg, crushed under the weight of its heavy metal undercarriage, or fed one of its own cannon's exploding shells.
• Rubick the Grand Magus from Dota 2 seeks to invoke this trope with his ultimate, Spell Steal.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition: While The Elder One's plan to smash the Inquisition before they become a greater threat seems successful at first, it ends up completely backfiring when the Herald and soon-to-be Inquisitor's actions during this event end up spreading his/her legend throughout the entire continent of Thedas, making the people more determined than ever and rallying even more people behind him/her, and lead them to finding Skyhold, which, unlike Haven, is an extremely defensible fortress on the side of a mountain. This all results in the Inquistion becoming more powerful than it had ever been before.
• In Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, this is a gameplay mechanic during Expert Missions: Bosses can fire a massive ki blast that part of the group must hold back while others repel it with their own ki blasts, followed by a shot of the boss getting an Oh, Crap! expression as the blast flies back at them and deals massive damage. They'll often use this attack when they're low on health, so the blast connecting will result in their defeat.
• Dragon Quest V: After successfully having her stepson Harry kidnapped, Queen Dowager is betrayed by her 'allies' and is replaced by a fake queen, turning her son Wilbur into their puppet rather than her own. By the time the party comes across her years later, she's willing to immediately confess to everything just to put an end to it.
• EarthBound (1994): The Diamondize status effect will One-Hit KO a party member by causing them to be Taken for Granite. It's perfectly possible for the Diamond Dog to Diamondize itself if you hit it with Brainshock.
• Etrian Odyssey:
  • In Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth, the Masurao class has the Hell Slash skill, in which the user follows up any combatant's attack with one of their own to the same target, regardless of whether the attack came from friend or foe or who the attack was directed at. This means they can attack their allies or even themselves, potentially killing themselves or even causing a Total Party Kill this way.
  • In Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City, the Samurai's Warrior's Might skill is an attack that performs follow-up attacks similar to Hell Slash, but it only chases allies' attacks. When the Samurai class returned in Etrian Odyssey Nexus, it got hit with a Nerf that causes the user to lose HP when chasing an ally's attack. And yes, the Samurai can die of HP loss in this manner.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In the recurring in-game loosely historical book series 2920: The Last Year of the First Era, this trope was exploited by the Akaviri Advisor to take over the Empire as Potentate. He piggy-backed on an existing assassination plot against Emperor Reman Cyrodiil III, which was brought about by actions resulting from Reman's own paranoia.
  • Skyrim:
    • Leading up to the events of the game, Ulfric Stormcloak challenged and defeated High King Torygg in a Duel to the Death for the throne (an archaic but legitimate tradition for the Proud Warrior Race Nords). However, Ulfric's use of the Thu'um in the duel is considered by his opposition to have been cheating, leading to the Civil War. If the player sides with the Imperials, you can use the Thu'um to finish off Ulfric.
    • A mage named Arniel Gane tries to duplicate the Dwemer's feat in the series' backstory: an ambiguously successful attempt to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. When he sets off the magic by stabbing a warped soul gem (a stand-in for the Heart of Lorkhan) with Keening, it Goes Horribly Wrong: he turns himself into a shade that the Dragonborn can summon.
    • You can pay a Pickpocketing trainer to level up your Pickpocket skill... and then further build your skill by pickpocketing the money back off them.
• Fable: Jack of Blades not only destroys the Hero's town in his youth, thus being primarily responsible for him becoming a hero who later stops him, but all of Jack's actions throughout the game, including that, are to obtain the all-powerful Sword of Aeons. In the Lost Chapters version, the Hero can defeat Jack's human form, then choose to take the Sword of Aeons for himself, and kill Jack of Blades again permanently with it. Even if the Hero destroys said sword, doing so is the selfless act necessary to allow the Hero to obtain an equally powerful sword they can also use to destroy Jack.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3: In "You Gotta Shoot 'Em in the Head", you can non-lethally obtain the keys from the three Ghoul-haters, then take out Mr. Crowley himself with a headshot. Tenpenny rewards you for this, if he's still alive. Speaking of Tenpenny Tower, in the quest of the same name, you can arrange for the Ghouls to peacefully move in, but they change their (or rather Roy Phillips') mind and kill the residents anyway after two weeks. The only way to let the ghouls and humans live in a strained peace is to kill Roy Phillips.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Completing the challenge "Talk About Being Owned" (from the Gun Runners Arsenal DLC) requires you to shoot Benny with his own gun, which he shot you with at the beginning of the game.
    • In the backstory of Dead Money, Sinclair attempted to trap Dean and Vera in the vault, but after Vera confessed to him, he changed his mind and attempted to disarm the trap, but succumbed to the poison gas cloud that was also intended to protect the casino. Elijah attempts to lure the Courier into the same trap, but if you sneak out before he comes downstairs, he will be the one trapped.
    • Also from Dead Money: Yeah, sure, put that mini nuke mine into that guy's pants. Won't it be hilarious when it blows?
    • During Old World Blues, Dr. Mobius implanted the interest in the three technologies in the Think Tank so they (or rather you) would gather them and bring them to him, so they couldn't use them to leave the Big Empty. This instead resulted in the Think Tank obtaining their designs, and getting closer than ever to escaping.
    • At the end of Lonesome Road, if you manage to settle things peacefully with Ulysses, he finds himself forced to aid you in fighting off the army of Marked Men he originally set upon the temple to finish you off, in case he himself wouldn't succeed in killing you. There's also the option during the final battle for the Dam to have the Boomers bomb the NCR forces on your orders, when the NCR Ambassador was the one who first instructed you to go make contact with the Boomers, and probably up until that very moment thought you had secured their support for the Republic's side.
  • Fallout 4:
    • If siding with the Institute, you use Liberty Prime, the ultimate weapon of the Brotherhood of Steel, in order to blow up their airship.
    • On the other hand, if you are against the Institute, they get killed by the brand-new nuclear reactor meant to guarantee their future. In addition, they ended up letting the Sole Survivor live as a back-up replacement for Shaun while killing everybody else in Vault 111. In other words, they choose to let the person who was primarily responsible for their downfall live. After killing their spouse and taking away their kid right in front of them.
• Far Cry Instincts has Jack Carver, infected with a beast-man mutagen, face down the Mad Scientist behind the whole project. The scientist has a group of animal-human hybrids at his beck and call, and orders them to attack Jack. By this time, however, Jack's killed so many mooks and bosses that the beasts view him as the alpha, turn on the mad scientist, and tear him to shreds.
• Subverted in Fate/Grand Order. In the manga adaptation of Shimousa, Musashi deflects one of Raikou's lightning bolts back at her in hopes of burning Raikou away with her own powers. Not only does Raikou survive this attack with barely a scratch, she simply comes down on Musashi and Muramasa even harder, vaporizing most of the mountain they're standing on.
• In Fate/stay night, Rin's "uncaring magus" persona, often works against her more often than not.
  • In Heaven's Feel her constant assertions that she's willing to kill Sakura if no other solution can be found make it a lot easier for Sakura to succumb to the corrupting influence of Aŋra Mainiiu.
  • The above gets a lot worse in the last and possibly the most horrifying Bad End of them all. Rin genuinely cares for Sakura but for a variety of reasons she acts exceptionally cold towards her and always retreats to her mask around her. It works too well in Heaven's Feel, where Sakura becomes so convinced that her older sister sees her as an enemy and doesn't care for her, which is one of the things that push Sakura towards her Roaring Rampage of Revenge. This culminates in Dark Sakura subjecting her to an Ironic Hell/Lotus-Eater Machine where Rin is forced to experience Sakura's horrible life with the Matou in the first person. Rin completely breaks down after the first day of that.
  • Also in Heaven's Feel, an interlude has Rin raiding the Matou mansion, where she runs into Shinji and tries to verbally bully him into leaving the city. It almost works, but she makes the stupid mistake of twisting the metaphorical knife in the wound by praising Shirou for his exceptional "quality as a magus" despite lacking the skill, which prompts Shinji to actions to one-up the guy that turn the route From Bad to Worse in a big way. Twice.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy V, Exdeath becomes absorbed by the very cosmic power he was obsessed with controlling, erasing his personality and creating a new entity that wants to completely destroy the world he devoted his existence to conquering.
  • Emperor Gestahl and President Shinra are notable examples in the series of what happens when you lose control of your genetically-altered human weapons.
  • A literal example in Final Fantasy XI. Most goblin enemies have the ability to toss bombs to harm an entire group of players... unless they use it with less than 25% of their health, where it has a fairly decent chance to backfire and blow them up instead, immediately finishing themselves off in the process.
• Finding Light: When Scitech created Abbie to save the world from Miasma, her ego was incomplete. While Abbie was able to stop the Black Tower, her lack of ego made it easy for Zamas to take control of her and use her as a tool to potentially end mortalkind anyways.
• In the second half of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Travant commits a Betrayal by Inaction on his nominal ally Bloom so that he could finally claim the Munster District and reunited it with Thracia, twenty years after he destroyed the royal family to get it only to have Bloom swoop in and nab it for Grannvale. Travant waits for either Bloom to destroy Seliph's liberation army or vice versa so he can push out the weakened victor—unfortunately, Seliph's army turns out to be much stronger than he bargained for and is able to occupy Munster without losing strength. It leaves Travant and Thracia even more isolated on the southern half of the peninsula, with little option but to try and fight their way out.
• In Five Nights at Freddy's 3, we find out that this was the ultimate fate of William Afton. Desperate to hide from the spirits of the children he murdered, he hopped into the Spring Bonnie suit, only for the suit's faulty spring locks to fail and maim him to death. For extra irony, that is the very same suit that he created and had been using to murder for years. And in Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator we find out that what truly screwed him over in the end was killing Henry's daughter, who went on to possess The Puppet, who is responsible for bringing back the souls of the Five Dead Children, who scared him into getting trapped in Spring Bonnie. And, as icing on the cake, killing Henry's daughter inspired Henry to kill him when he found out, which he succeeds in doing in Pizzeria Simulator. To add even more insult to injury, in Five Nights at Freddy's 2, it's established that she was his first murder.
• Froggys Journey The Forgotten Relic: The bear causing the earthquakes gradually destroys the floor in the arena where he is fought, but this ultimate proves to be his undoing, as eventually the floor he's standing on gives way and collapses, finishing him off.
• Game & Watch: In Safebuster, you're a bank guard defending against a bank robber trying to blast open a vault door. If you dump the robber's bombs into the furnace rather than into the empty bunker, you can send some nasty cinders up the chimney and into the robber's crate of unlit bombs. This will set off all the bombs and send the crook flying away.
• Giga Wing is a well-known Bullet Hell example. "Large cluster of bullets" generally means "reflect this back at the enemy for massive damage."
• In The Godfather, it's dangerously easy to hit yourself with your own Molotov Cocktail. If you don't run fast enough, your own dynamite or bomb can take you out too.
• In God Hand, the tall mooks will sometimes try to grab and suplex Gene. Wriggling the left thumbstick to carry out the Action Command when prompted allows Gene to counter-suplex them for good damage. The gorilla luchador also has a move where it slams Gene into the ground, then attempts to jump on him. Hitting the Action Commands allows Gene to dodge, causing the gorilla to hurt itself more than the initial slam hurt him.
• God of War:
  • Kratos and Ares from the first game.
    Ares: That night... I was trying to make you a great warrior!
    Kratos: You succeeded. [kills Ares]
  • In the second game:
    • Theseus is stabbed through the guts with his own spear and has his head smashed in with the door he was trying to prevent Kratos from passing through.
    • The Barbarian King from Kratos's past is crushed with his own hammer.
  • God of War III:
    • The battle with Hades kicks off with Hades telling Kratos "Your Soul Is Mine!!", and at one point early in the battle, he attempts to consume Kratos's soul using the Claws of Hades. Kratos takes the Claws away from Hades at one point during the battle, and then proceeds to use them to consume his soul in the battle's finale.
    • Kratos steals Hercules's cestus and uses it to cave his skull in, and kills a giant scorpion by impaling it on its own stinger.
• In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City during the mission "Boomshine Saigon" has Phil Cassidy trying to detonate up his dynamite only to realize that the batteries are missing in the detonator remote so when he puts the batteries, then accidentally activates the detonator close to the dynamite which causes Phil to lose his right arm.
• In Gunstar Heroes, the evil Emperor takes the gems to awaken an ancient weapon of destruction, only for said weapon to hit him with an energy beam from the gems, then wipe him and his army out in the final cutscene.
• In Half-Life 2, the Hunters are rather weak to stuff shot with your Gravity Gun, and their main weapon shoots huge bullets. You can get an achievement by using the Gravity Gun to catch one of the bullets and shooting it at the Hunters. It is even possible to kill several of them in one shot!
• Halo:
  • In the first mission of Halo 2, the Covenant sets up you the bomb on Cairo Station, but MC turns the bomb against its setter-uppers.
  • On a bigger scale, the Prophets end up losing the civil war they instigate and are now mostly extinct. Granted, there were mitigating factors, but still...
  • Gameplay-wise, this principle applies to plasma grenades. First rule of getting stuck: find the one who done it and go Action Bomb on 'em.
• Heroes of Might and Magic:
  • In V:
    • Making Godric powerful can really bite you in the ass; in the first scenario of the second campaign, you have to flee from him as Agrael, and if you gave Godric logistics, escaping him can become downright impossible. In the last scenario of the third campaign you have to fight him when he has a massive army of Academy and Haven troops — and he keeps every level-up and skill you gave him.
    • The same also applies to Markal, though to a lesser degree, since by the time you face him you have three of your most powerful heroes.
  • In VI, Uriel manipulates Anastasya into killing her own father (kicking off the plot of the game) with dark magic through a comb he gave her as a gift. Once Anastasya discovers the truth and masters her powers as a Necromancer, she uses their mental connection to attack his mind. Since Uriel was currently engaged in battle with demons at the time, this leads directly to his death.
• Hitman:
  • At the end of Hitman: Codename 47, Agent 47 kills the Mad Scientist who created him.
  • In Contracts and Blood Money respectively, you can grab a gun that a wounded guard dropped on the floor or snatch it from a guard's hand, and kill them with it.
  • In Absolution and Hitman 2, you can eliminate a scientist by activating or sabotaging their invention while the target is operating or examining it. In the latter game, the target is specifically standing next to the invention to reassure potential investors that the machine is safe.
• In The House of the Dead, Dr. Curien is killed by his own ultimate creation, the Magician.
• Hiveswap: In Act 2, Lynera's ultimate fate in the "Bad End". In trying to get Daraya framed for stealing Fresh Teeth, she only implicated herself by being so outspoken and vocal to the point it would be the easy assumption to think she committed the act herself just to frame Daraya for it. Even if she didn't commit the actual theft, her own insistence and outrage was what kicked off the trial to begin with, leading to her fate of being dragged off into the Clown Car.
• The true Big Bad of the Infinity Blade series is ultimately defeated by the one member of the race of immortals he created whose actions he could never predict. Even with all the safeguards on each of his weapons, he forgot to put one on the torture machine.
• In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Ladder Mode ending in Injustice 2, it's revealed that the Turtles were sent to the Injustice Earth thanks to Krang intending on sending them to Dimension X and messing up. Thanks to arriving on that Earth, they're able to not only return to their Earth, but also ended up ingesting the compound 5-U-93-R, giving them the power to stop Krang's plan and save the day.
• In Jade Empire, the true Big Bad, Master Li, is defeated by the last spirit monk (AKA the player character) whom he trained to overthrow the Emperor. His last words say it all:
  Master Li: I'm a better teacher than I thought.
• Jagged Alliance. The final fate of Lesley "Smoke" Petersen. According to his entry on the A.I.M. website in the second game, "Smoke" was a good bomb-man, but also a compulsive prankster who delighted in short-fusing explosives to troll his teammates. One day, he was distracted by a pebble in his boot while setting a charge, and couldn't get away in time due to the short fuse. Petersen "... bid this world goodbye with a loud bang, a puff of smoke, and one far-reaching unidentifiable mess."
• In Killer7, Curtis Blackburn is executed when Dan Smith sets off his evisceration machine, which guts him and hangs up his corpse like it did with the little girls he was organ-farming.
• Kindergarten:
  • If the player insults Cindy in the first game, she'll get her revenge by loudly accusing the protagonist of rape, resulting in them both being taken to the principal. The principal doesn't take the accusation very seriously since they're both kindergarteners, but that doesn't stop him from "expelling" the protagonist by shooting him in the head if the player doesn't deny it. However, if the player proves that Cindy is lying by recording their conversation on a tape recorder, she's the one who ends up "expelled" instead.
  • In the second game, the secret route of the mission "Cain's Not Able" is started if the player shows Ted proof that his twin brother Felix is planning to kill him, causing Ted to decide to finally stand up to his brother and turn his own plan against him. That's not this trope, that's The Dog Bites Back. What is this trope, however, is the end result of Felix recruiting Tunnel King Nugget to dig the hole he's planning to have Ted Buried Alive in by offering to take him to his wealthy family's chicken nugget factory. In the main route, this goes off without a hitch. In the secret route, after Felix has been pushed into his own hole, Nugget brings up the promise, only for a confused Ted (who didn't know about that particular part of the plan) to reveal that their family doesn't own a nugget factory. Nugget, realising that he has been lied to, proceeds to jump down the hole himself to beat Felix senseless before filling it in.
• The Kingdom Hearts franchise:
  • Kingdom Hearts: Certain enemy projectile attacks can be deflected back at them with the guard command. They can even be killed this way. Special mention goes to the Ice Titan, whose fight involves deflecting its attacks back at it.
  • Kingdom Hearts II, many Reaction Commands involve Sora using an enemy's attack or weapon against them do deal a large amount of damage. For example, the "Berserk" command causes Sora to pick up a Berserker Nobody's hammer and swing it at them.
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, the evil stepmother and stepsisters attempt to murder Cinderella with an Unversed summoned from their hatred towards her. They are promptly incinerated by the Unversed's own bombs.
• The King of Fighters:
  • Done in The King of Fighters '97, in the Sacred Weapons Team ending. Orochi is on the ropes, and uses his power to force Iori into the Blood Riot, commanding him to kill Kyo and Chizuru. This backfires on him when Iori grabs Orochi instead, giving Kyo and Chizuru time to finish Orochi off.
  • Done again in The King of Fighters XI. After you defeat The Dragon, Shion, Magaki pulls Shion into a portal and emerges for the final battle. After his defeat, Magaki opens the portal again to escape... and Shion throws a spear into his chest from inside it.
• Several of the region-specific schemes in King of the Castle are explicitly said to backfire onto the nobles in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue if they fail to get their claimant on the throne.
  • The Gunpowder scheme involves the Barons of the March smuggling in gunpowder, ordinarily a very rare substance in the Kingdom, from the Republic of Kirth to either blow up the palace or create a stockpile of guns to take the throne by force. If they fail to complete the scheme, it literally blows up in their face, reducing the Baron who organised the purchase of gunpowder to a pair of boots (with feet still in them).
  • The Ragnarok scheme sees the Chiefs of the North allying with the ice giants over the border to bring about the end of the world, after which they will seize the throne for themselves. If they are unable to complete the scheme, the ice giants attack the North instead of marching on the capital with them, and the fields are littered with Northern dead.
  • In the Blood Ritual scheme, the Counts of the East try to summon one of two demons to bring chaos and destruction to the Kingdom, allowing them to claim the throne during the distraction. If they fail, they are said to have attempted the summoning too early, and their failure to control the demon results in many deaths, including those of the Counts' claimant to the throne and the Count overseeing the ritual.
• King's Quest:
  • In King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human, Gwydion uses Manannan's own spellbook, wand, and lab against him, finally trapping him in the body of a cat unable to use magic. The spell eventually robs the victim of sentience and shortens their lifespan to that of a cat. However, seeing as Manny was going to kill Gwydion once he came of age, and had used that dirty trick against several of his enemies, feeding him the cat cookie is a great play of this trope. Of course, it does backfire when his brother Mordack finds out what happened and sets up the conflict for the fifth game.
  • In King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, if you give the peppermint to Shamir in the final battle, he will get too drunk on mints to concentrate on killing Alexander and accidentally use his own magic on himself, ending his own life.
• The entire Kirby franchise falls under this, since you tend to spend almost the entire game hoisting enemies by their own petards by spitting their projectiles back at them, or copying and using their attacks against them. Particularly notable is the Miracle Matter boss in Kirby 64, a transforming 20-sided die lookalike that turns the tables and mimics the abilities you've been copying and using throughout the game, but at the same time can only be damaged by the exact same ability he's using to attack you.
  • Parallel Nightmare ends up on the receiving end twice in Super Kirby Clash. The first time, King D-Mind smacks him away with his hammer. The second time, Galacta Knight just flat-out kills him via Diagonal Cut.
• In League of Legends there are a lot of abilities that can screw you or your team over if you misuse them.
  • Kindred's ultimate, Lamb's Respite, prevents anyone in the area from dying. "Anyone in the area" includes the enemy team, so it's quite possible to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory by deploying it in the wrong place in a teamfight.
  • Bard's ultimate. Tempered Fate, has the same problem. It makes whatever group he casts it on invulnerable and immobile for a short time. It's unfortunately common for beginner Bard players to accidentally lock their team down and let the enemy catch up to them by ulting at the wrong time.
  • Blitzcrank's Rocket Grab allows him to snatch a faraway champion and bring them next to him. If done well, it's That One Attack, and can easily destroy squishy characters. If done poorly, you're bringing tanky champs with AOE abilities right into the middle of your team, where they can do the most damage.
  • Camille's ultimate traps her in a small area with her target. If she picks the wrong target, it disables her escapes too.
  • In the lore, resident Anti-Magical Faction Demacia hunts down and subdues mages with the aid of Petricite, a type of petrified wood that completely nullifies magic. Or so they thought. As Petricite doesn't destroy magic, it absorbs it. The discovery of this led to Sylas launching a society rocking mage rebellion when he found out his Petricite shackles were actually a lethal weapon.
• In Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Zephon is defeated by throwing him the eggs he conveniently keeps laying during your fight, after setting them on fire.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The series employs the Tennis Boss trope so frequently across the franchise that they've given it an official name: Dead Man's Volley.
  • A little more shaky, but almost all bosses are only able to be defeated by the weapons and items hidden in their own dungeons.
  • A clear-cut, non-battle example is Chancellor Cole from Spirit Tracks, who meets this trope when Malladus finds himself without a host body. So cracking the lid on the Sealed Evil in a Can might not have been such a hot idea. Who knew?
  • In the backstory for Breath of the Wild, Hyrule decided to excavate a legion of ancient, mechanical Sheikah weapons known as Guardians and the Divine Beasts, in preparation for when Ganon inevitably returns, so they have a weapon that can destroy him. And when Calamity Ganon emerges, what is the first thing it does? It proceeds to infect every single Guardian and Divine Beast with pure Malice, turning them against the very people they were excavated to defend against Ganon. Considering that the Guardian Stalkers, the most prominent variant of Guardians in the game, are twice as fast as Link when he sprints, can climb any surface no matter how steep, and can shoot lasers at a range of about twice that of Link's bow, with Link being implied to be Hyrule's best Knight, it's hardly a surprise that the kingdom is in ruins the way it is by the time the game begins.
• In Mabinogi, this trope is invoked to make An Ice Person show up within Par Ruins. The boss's Stomp skill makes it drop Ice Poles, which you have to use on it.
• MadWorld:
  • If a boss has a fancy weapon, chances are Jack is going to use that weapon as part of a gruesome and painful finishing move.
  • Also, Leo started the Death Watch competition in order to test his father's new virus and vaccine, choosing this method of testing because he was fascinated by the games and considered them to be fun. He is eventually killed by the winner of the competition, by being cut with a chainsaw and pushed off of the giant floating stadium which was where the final match had taken place.
  • The Black Baron (the pimp that introduces the Bloodbath Challenges) is always used by his silent girlfriend to demonstrate the challenge's defining death trap. He comes back every time, of course. After the final boss fight with him, his girlfriend tosses a spike bat at his head, which Jack promptly picks up to bat the Baron flying into the dartboard used in the Man Darts challenges, just as he did to tons of mooks before.
• In Mafia II, Brian O'Neil, during a fight with Vito in the gym, tries to kill him with a knife, but Vito, being a war veteran, easily snatches the knife from him and slits his throat with it.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • The Heretic faction of the Geth develops a virus which they intend to use on the main collective, intending to turn them all to Reaper-worship and war against the organics. Apart from simply destroying them, you can choose to turn the same virus on them, restoring them back to the collective.
    • Garrus, while Archangel, apparently enjoyed doing this to criminals. Examples include sabotaging a saboteur's environment suit so he suffocated, smuggling a weapon in to kill a weapons smuggler, overdosing a drug dealer on his own product, and killing a quarian serial killer who murdered people with viruses by coughing at him. The only kill listed in his dossier that he didn't do this to was a slaver — in that case he shot said slaver's fingers and toes off, put a bullet into every primary organ, beat him with his rifle butt, and then lit him on fire. Either he really had it out for this guy or, if the target was a Krogan, he wanted to make absolutely sure the guy was dead and no longer a threat.
    • On a more thematic note, the Thanix Cannon upgrade was based on Reaper technology. Said cannon is used during the Suicide Mission to take out the Collector ship that destroyed the original Normandy, so you end up using Reaper weaponry against the Reapers' servants. For an added bit of thematic appropriateness, it's Garrus who gives you this upgrade.
    • There's also the Collector Rifle, a reverse-engineered Reaper weapon, that ironically proves to be highly effective at killing Collectors. Particularly ironic if you choose to use this weapon to deliver the killing blow to the Humanoid-Reaper.
    • Henry Lawson created Miranda to be the ultimate human biotic. If she lives, Miranda uses her biotics to throw him out the window to his death when he lets go of Oriana.
  • Mass Effect 3:
    • Cerberus, and the Illusive Man in particular, start screwing around with the mechanics of Indoctrination. Seeing in previous works how insidiously and easily awry such things can go, it is no surprise when most of Cerberus — including the Illusive Man himself — instead get indoctrinated.
    • In a more literal example, the Cerberus Engineer enemy carries a sentry turret that he likes to place in areas where its machine gun can cut you to pieces. If you use the Sabotage power on it, however, it will instead start attacking Cerberus personnel, likely starting with the very engineer who placed it and turning him into a bloody mess. Also, while it's capable of taking some hits after it's been deployed, it's a One-Hit-Point Wonder while it's being placed, so if you shoot it then, it will explode in the engineer's face and instantly kill him.
• In Max Gentlemen Sexy Business!, Summer Starling attempts to murder the protagonist several times. When she tries to trap them inside an isolated cabin in the woods and then set it on fire, she ends up trapped underneath a burning tree from that same forest. She ultimately survives, though, because the protagonist still needs her mining company and her business expertise.
• In Max Payne 3, you get several chances to shoot grenades or rockets out of the air, killing the original user in the process.
• In Medal of Honor: Vanguard, the explosive charge set by an allied soldier on a bridge in "Scavengers" explodes early, killing him and incapacitating Keegan.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man (Classic):
    • Every time you use a robot master's weapon, it's an example of this trope towards Dr. Wily.
    • In Mega Man 2, Metal Man can be OHKO'ed by his own weapon. For those wondering how you can fight Metal Man with his own weapon, towards the end of the game in Dr. Wily's castle, you re-encounter all of the Boss Robots again in rapid succession.
    • All of the Robot Masters in Mega Man 3 are weak against their own weapons, though only during the Boss Rush in the Wily Castle.
    • In Mega Man 8, Grenade Man can be defeated by using Clown Man's weapon to redirect his Flash Bombs back at him. However, this is hard, as he will sometimes fire them diagonally downward, doing it less after being reduced to ¼ health.
    • Dr. Wily lampshades this at the end of Mega Man 11, stating that the only reason he lost this time was because Mega Man had used his prototype of the Double Gear system in order to stand a chance against his improved version.
    • Super Adventure Rockman Multiple instances of this thanks to the evil alien AI/supercomputer "Ra Moon": reviving all of Wily's Robot Masters from Mega Man 2 and 3 only to turn them against him, turning a brand new Robot Master that Wily built against him, and finally using the blueprints of an old Wily design to uprage said design to use against the bad ol doctor.
    • Mega Man V: At the end of the game, Wily awakens the ancient military weapon "Sunstar" and tries to order him to destroy Mega Man. Sunstar decides to attack Dr. Wily instead. Known for being one of the few instances in the classic Mega Man series where Dr. Wily is NOT the final boss.
  • Mega Man X6:
    • Gate, the Big Bad, is literally struck down by Sigma, whom he himself resurrected. Whether or not Gate actually survived is never elaborated, as he was either rebuilt (and forgiven) by his former colleague Alia or not, and neither X6 nor any of its sequels tell us what happened.
    • Also applies in gameplay, as the only way to damage Gate is by destroying his projectiles, making the fragments they break into hit him.
  • Dr. Weil of Mega Man Zero built a space satellite that will destroy any inhabitable area outside of his empire. Too bad he has Craft, who decides to take matters into his own hands. Yet Dr. Weil survives, even though he's the prime target of the Kill Sat that's so powerful it leveled an entire city. When he merges with Ragnarok's core to destroy Zero, he gains its weaknesses as well as its strength. As a result, when the Satellite explodes, Weil perishes in the explosion, but the reason all the crap in Mega Man ZX happened was a result of various factions trying to exploit Model W — the remains of the Ragnarok satellite after it was demolished. No points for guessing who's been pulling the strings the whole time.
• Metal Gear:
  • In Metal Gear Solid Psycho Mantis uses his psychic powers to basically screw with you, with one of his moves being that he rigs your first-person-view button so it makes you see what he sees instead. Problem is, for him, if you missed the thermal goggles this becomes pretty much the most effective way to find where he's hiding when he turns invisible.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater:
    • In Krasnogorje, there are anti-aircraft guns on the mountainside. You can actually use them against their own Hinds.
    • Colonel Volgin, who has the ability to course electricity through his body, gets killed by a bolt of lightning. It's lampshaded with Snake saying, "Fried by a bolt of lightning, a fitting end." It's made even more interesting in how, throughout the game, he commonly chants "Kuwabara, kuwabara", a Japanese expression meant to ward off lightning. In the final battle against him, however, when a storm rolls in, he not only neglects to say it, he outright mocks the lightning!
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance:
    • You can trick Sundowner's backup helicopters into shooting him with their weapons, and this tactic becomes more effective as the game's difficulty goes up.
    • Monsoon of Desperado (the enemy organization) suffers an example, as his actions to prove Raiden to be similar to him causes Raiden to reawaken his "Jack the Ripper" persona, becoming an even fiercer opponent against them.
    • On second runs, you can use the unlocked secondary weapons made from the bosses you've beaten. It's actually a good tactic, as Mistral's pole arm allows you to hit both her and the dwarf gekkos swarming you, Monsoon's sai, when allowed to charge, stuns him/knocks him out of his invulnerability state, and Sundowner's Machetes have a charge move that allows them to bypass his explosive shields.
• Metroid Prime Trilogy:
  • The titular Prime can only be destroyed by the very Phazon it produces. In the first game, Samus defeats it by standing in the pools of Phazon it excretes, thus activating the Hyper Beam. In the second, Samus has no compatible suit, but she can absorb motes of free-floating Phazon released by Dark Samus for the same effect. In the third, she's locked into Hypermode by the environment on Phaaze, so blasting Phazon at the enemy is pretty much all she can do.
  • At this point it's safe to say that the main purpose of Samus' hyper-adaptable armorsuit is to find a way of making any gadgetry she stumbles across into implausibly devastating armaments. The grapple-beam gets replaced with industrial lifting equipment in Metroid Prime, but by Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, it can be adapted to suck the life out of enemies, with a side order of paralysis. As with many examples on this page, "overloading" something with more of whatever it likes is a popular method of Petard-Hoisting, but Samus Aran could weaponize a Brita filter.
  • The first Metroid Prime has the Pirate Troopers, the result of the Space Pirates trying to do this to Samus by reverse-engineering her beam weapons. This gets turned around on them however; because the Pirates' Science Team has vapor for brains, the copies were flawed and inferior, making their powered armor weak to the beam weapon they were supposed to be using.
• Might and Magic:
  • The VII artifact Splitter is liable to be this. It has the Explosive Impact enchantment. See that note on the top about splash damage? That counts for Explosive Impact in this game, there are no ways to become completely immune to fire damage, and Splitter is a melee weapon, so it does splash damage to your characters every time you use it to attack something. The kicker is that artifacts and relics are supposed to differ by relics having drawbacks, but Explosive Impact counts as a boon...
  • In Might & Magic VIII, the Regnan pirates are taking advantage of the chaos in a major way. You get to Regna by hijacking the submarine they had used to stealthily resupply one of their outposts. Once there, you sink a good chunk of the Regnan fleet while it is in harbour by means of a Regnan prototype super-cannon, intended (once they'd made a version that could fit on a ship) to ensure the Empire of the Endless Ocean's complete dominance over the seas.
  • In Might & Magic IX, the god of chaos, Njam the Meddler, has been driving the plot with the aim of entrapping Krohn, the chief god, in a shell of unbreakable frost. Guess where Njam ends up? Yup.
• Two advancements in Minecraft Java Edition specifically invoke this trope: "Return to Sender", which challenges the player with killing one of the fireball-belching Ghasts by punting its own fireball back at it, and "Who's the Pillager Now?", which tasks the player with shooting and killing one of the crossbow-wielding Pillagers with a crossbow. Similarly, the Bedrock Edition achievement "Taste of Your Own Medicine" requires you to use a witch's favourite tool, a splash potion of poison, against one.
• Monster Hunter:
  • Monster Hunter 3 (Tri): The nastiest thing the Qurupeco can do to a hunter is call for the Deviljho, a massive Tyrannosaurus-like monster. This naturally tends to be a suicidal move by the Qurupeco, as the Deviljho is extremely powerful and aggressive and will often curb-stomp the dumb Qurupeco who called for it.
  • Monster Hunter: World: Dodogama can inflict serious damage by spitting rocks mixed with its explosive saliva. However, a well-timed attack or slinger shot can detonate the rocks in its mouth, stunning the monster and doing quite a bit of damage to it.
• In Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Frost, the pupil of Sub-Zero, only wishes to train with her master so she can obtain the same power he has with his Amulet. However, when she finally gets her hands on it, she gets consumed by her own ice abilities due to her lacking the discipline Sub-Zero has.
• Mutant Football League:
  • Bribing the ref makes him call bogus penalties on the other team, especially when they score, so it's smart to bribe him as soon as they're in your red zone. But you might hold them off and make them settle for a field goal. If the ref negates the FG and penalizes them, they'll kill him, take another penalty, kick from further out, and (because in this game a 40+ yard FG is 4 points, 50+ is 5 etc, and many kickers can reliably score from 45 or so) score more points than they would have otherwise.
  • Killing the other team's return specialist is often easy but not always recommended. Depending on the team, he's likely to be replaced by a star WR, RB, or defensive back; someone faster, more evasive, and/or harder to bring down. While this gives you an opportunity to kill or injure a key opposing player, it also means a greater threat of them scoring or getting a big return.
  • If you call the Murder Ball or Bombs Away dirty tricks on the same play the defense calls Sticky Ball, that bladed/exploding ball will yoyo back at your QB when he tries to throw it, killing him instantly. Sonic Blast coming back at him may kill him if he already had some damage, but if not he'll be a sitting duck for the defense to finish the job.
• The Neverhood: While attempting to kill a newly-revived Hoborg, Klogg steps on the remote control of his own cannon, causing it to shoot him out of the Neverhood and into the void below. For bonus karma points, he used that same remote control to kill Willie Trombone and Big Robot Bil, who had been Klaymen's only allies up to that point.
• In Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, Myrkul is either given eternal rest by the spirit eater, or devoured by him, depending on the player's choice. The spirit eater is Myrkul's own creation, and for extra irony, the existence of the spirit eater was intended to give him immortality by abusing Gods Need Prayer Badly and ensuring that he always had at least one person remember him. This is lampshaded with his last words, "A final irony, even in this." (The player can Take a Third Option ensuring he fades away, but where is the fun in that?)
• Nobody Saves the World: In his attempts to catch Nobody, Randy brings a lot of misfortune on himself. His first attempt ends with Randy trapped behind the bars in a monster-infested dungeon. In his second attempt, he knocks out Nobody with a magic blast, but damages the ceiling in the process, which falls on him and breaks his leg in 83 places. For his third attempt, Randy summons a tentacle monster to attack Nobody, but the monster promptly turns on him and starts smacking him around.
• In Odin Sphere, an especially tragic example occurs to Ingway. He uses the Pooka Curse on Beldor in order to save Mercedes... which allows Beldor to stick around in an undead form after being killed. When Ingway turns himself into the Beast of Darkova, intending to stop the Cauldron and prevent Armageddon, Beldor is able to take control of him by magic and force him to attack Ringford instead.
• Osmos centers around controlling a primordial cell and absorbing other cells around yourself. The only way to move is by ejecting pieces of your own cell in the opposite direction to where you're going, propelling it through inertia. It is thus entirely possible to lose too much mass in this way and get absorbed by the very cell you were trying to move to. For extra irony, it's also possible to have those tiny pieces absorbed by a cell that was smaller than you before, but becomes just larger than you are and proceeds to absorb you.
• One room in the fifth area of Out of This World has a guard rolling plasma bombs at Lester. If you step back and let the door close, the bombs will bounce back at him.
• The final boss in Painkiller is Lucifer, but he is a Puzzle Boss who cannot be directly shot to death. Instead, you have to deflect his thrown sword back to him.
• Near the end of Panopticon: Path of Reflection, the villain is caught in his own mirror trap after being surprised by the main character arriving earlier than expected.
• In Party Project, if a player uses a Hidden Block Card, it's possible for them to receive a Shadow Star^note (so long as they're enabled in the settings), causing them to lose a Star^note (or 30 coins if they don't have a Star) by simply using their own item.
• PAYDAY2:
  • Tasers work by tasing you to one spot, making you fire rapidly wherever you're aiming. You can focus fire to the taser while stunned to kill the taser, even if they're standing a few feet away from you. The Shockproof Skill in-game goes one step further and outright denies the tasers' electricity charge, which redirects back to them instead and stuns the taser.
  • You can kill a Taser with a Melee hit if they're sufficiently low on health with the Electrical Brass Knuckles, or the Buzzer. Or if you're using the sociopath perk deck, a few hits.
• Professor Tsuchida of Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners tricks a tour group into accompanying him into some unexplored ruins. The deeper they delve, the clearer it becomes that some vast, mysterious power is judging the intruders, attempting to execute anyone that displeases them by breaking their laws. Tsuchida observes all of these incidents with interest, but fails to learn from them, as he ultimately incurs the curse's wrath by murdering Dr. Kuroe.
• Persona 4: The killer sends two threat letters to the Protagonist's house telling him to stop rescuing people from the TV world latter in the game. The letters not only ends up serving as proof that Namatame may not have been the killer (since the wording of the letter contradicts Namatame's half-mad ravings), but it also helps narrow down who the culprit could be since nobody suspicious was seen arround the Dojima residence, meaning that whoever delivered the letter was someone who would be a familiar visitor.
• Persona 5:
  • Shadow Madarame's ultimate attack is to cover a party member in black paint, temporarily making them weak against every element. After the second time he does this, the party realizes that he's left a couple of cans of the same black paint nearby, and you can (optionally) keep him distracted while someone nabs the cans and throws them over Madarame, leaving him vulnerable to every element.
  • Shadow Kaneshiro's ultimate attack, March of the Piggy, has his Humongous Mecha Piggytron turn into a sphere, spin in place, and then steamroll the party. But it takes two turns to prepare, during which time Kaneshiro is vulnerable atop Piggytron instead of sequestered inside; if you knock out enough of his health before the attack is fully charged, he'll fall off, and Piggytron will run over him instead.
  • Yaldabaoth ousted Igor from his position some time before the events of the game so that he could rig the bet the two of them had by playing both sides. However, he provides all of the aide to Joker that his prisoner usually provides to Persona protagonists, which Joker probably would've died very early on in his journey had he gone without.
  • The Royal Updated Re Release Final Boss Maruki frequently inflicts status ailments like Fear and Dizzy on your party. Detox, an ability unlocked in Maruki's own confidant, can cure Joker of those status conditions as soon as they're applied.
• Persona 5 Strikers:
  • Jyun Owada conspired with Akira Konoe to try to seize political power. It was the latter's testimony that ultimately led to Owada's arrest at the end of the game...though that probably would have happened even without the change of heart; Konoe was just using him and was secretly disgusted by his selfishness.
  • Before the players can fight the True Final Boss, they have to neutralize the Lost Woods-style illusion protecting it. Since it's formed from Desires, that means they need to break out a Calling Card. But since they need to reach every member of the general public with this card, and they are brainwashed by EMMA and not looking at anything but their phones, the party uses EMMA itself to send their card. Bottom line? The ability to reach every member of the general public, the keystone of the boss's plan, was also the very thing that the Phantom Thieves used to foil said plan and force the boss to fight them.
• Piggy Book 2: The Greater-Scope Villain TIO’s main weapon is using people’s memories as a form of psychological torment. The Player uses this fact to defeat him by summoning apparitions of Bunny, Doggy and Zizzy to attack him.
• Pikmin 2: A new enemy called the Decorated Cannon Beetle shoots magnetic boulders, which consequently home in on the current captain. It's entirely possible to manipulate the boulders into hitting the Cannon Beetle or other enemies in the area.
• This can happen to you in so many ways in Pixel Dungeon:
  • Drinking unidentified potions. Drinking a Potion of Paralytic Gas turns you into helpless prey that will be killed by the first weak enemy that happens to wander in the vicinity. Drinking a Potion of Toxic Gas is usually not lethal if you run quick enough, but will nevertheless leave you at the center of a quickly expanding gas of deadly poison. Drinking a Potion of Liquid Fire sets you ablaze and you will burn to death unless you can find a pool of water or you happen to be standing in water when you first drink it. However, if you're also floating when you catch fire, you are screwed as you won't be able to touch the water.
  • The same goes with scrolls, although most of them are harmless and just useless if read in the wrong context. Reading a Scroll of Challenge, however, is almost always a bad idea unless you really know what you're trying to do.
  • The Wand of Lightning can hurt you if used at close range. The Wand of Firebolt is insanely powerful, and effortlessly cutting through hordes of enemies while burning half the level is fun, but you will usually end up miscalculating the consequences and burning yourself to death. Potions of Liquid Flame and Blazing weapons are safer, but can occasionally have dramatic consequences if you are careless (for example, don't use them in a room full of vegetation).
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: In the Neon Mixtape Tour, allowing Punk zombies to kick your vulnerable plants will make the game easier, as it pushes them back across the screen without killing them and makes it easier to defend them.
• Pokémon:
  • Anyone that can use Explosion and Selfdestruct. Funnier if the opponent uses Protect or is a Ghost-type. The opponent stays unharmed while the user goes out in vain.
  • Trying to avoid being attacked with Fly/Bounce/Sky Drop, Dig, or Dive? A few moves can manage to hit regardless, and in some cases, will deal double the damage.
    • The moves are: Gust, Smack Down, Sky Uppercut, Thunder, Twister, Hurricane, and Thousand Arrows for users of Fly/Bounce/Sky Drop, Surf and Whirlpool for users of Dive, and Earthquake, Magnitude and Fissure for users of Dig.
  • Any Ghost-type who uses Curse, which takes off half their total HP to curse its opponent... when they're already at half-health or lower. Or when their opponent's attack has just/is about to take off at least half their HP... In both cases, it becomes an inversion of this trope if the first Pokémon previously used Destiny Bond.
  • Hi Jump Kick is a powerful move, but if it misses, it hurts the user. Guess what happens if you miss with too little HP. Especially in Generation V, where the user takes one half of its maximum HP if it misses.
  • An interesting case of hoisting by other's own petards are Dragon-type and Ghost-type Pokémon, which are weak to their own type. Giratina doubles this by being both a Dragon and a Ghost type. Gen 8 introduces the Dreepy line, who have the same type combo.
  • The ability Synchronize also transfers Poison, Paralysis, and Burn if they were inflicted with that status themselves. A Pokémon with the ability Guts also has its attack boosted when it has a status effect, but competitively, it's mostly self-inflicted.
  • The move Magic Coat and the Dream World ability Magic Bounce/Magic Mirror negate Status moves and entry hazards, then throws such effects back at the opponent. You can essentially make them cripple themselves and get their hazards on their side.
  • Counterattack moves such as Counter, Mirror Coat, and Metal Burst (where the user deals back two/1.5 times the damage, respectively, that the user has sustained from the target's attack earlier the same turn) can invoke this trope when the target has used a particularly powerful offensive move, especially if the user is wearing a Focus Sash or possesses the Sturdy ability^note both of which, provided that the Pokémon in question is at full health, allow a Pokémon to retain one Hit Point and survive what would normally be a one-hit knockout move. However, prior to Generation V, Sturdy's effect was limited in that it only provided immunity to moves that were specifically designated in text as one-hit knockout (OHKO) moves (such as Fissure, Guillotine, and Sheer Cold), although no damage at all would be taken from said OHKO attacks.
  • The moves Mirror Move, Copycat (the user uses the move last used by the target), and Snatch (the user steals the effects of the status move used by the target, usually a healing or stat-changing move) can occasionally lead to this trope. Better yet is Me First, which lets the user make the attack the opponent is about to make.
  • Vivillon gets sole access to Powder, a priority move that invokes this on anything trying to use a fire attack (normally super-effective on Flying/Bug Vivillon) by making them immolate themselves with the flammable dust they just got coated with.
  • Need to take out Giratina, but only have a lousy Klefki? Well, with Foul Play, a 95 Power Dark move that calculates damage based on the victim's Attack stat and buffs, you just might be able to.
  • Got a Tapu or two and are plowing through the trainers ahead? Well, say one opponent has a Grass, Fairy, Psychic or Electric type move. Though the tapus resist the type their respective terrains boost, factor in STAB, Base Power, and the boost from the terrain, there's a pretty damn high chance that they might be able to kill you with a move that matches the terrain surge.
  • One from Pokémon X and Y: Team Flare Scientist Aliana uses a Taunt/Sucker Punch combo on her Mightyena. This can be turned back on her by using an attack with higher priority than Sucker Punch, another equal-priority attack from a Pokemon that's faster than her Mightyena, or simply switching your Pokemon out, causing her to effectively waste two turns.
  • Cyrus' plan in Pokémon Platinum ends up like this; in this Updated Re-release, he decides to Rage Against the Heavens by enslaving the gods of both time and space to create his World of Silence. Unfortunately for him, he only needed one of them for his plan as shown by his Alternate Universe counterparts in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, and by going after them both he ended up awakening their very pissed-off brother Giratina and getting himself Dragged Off to Hell. Making things worse for himself, he allowed the Player Character to free the Lake Guardians after he made the Red Chain, allowing them to interfere with his plan.
  • Competetive player and YouTuber WolfeyVGC actually discuss this trope in this video where one competitive player in the Pokémon World Championship actually caused their opponent to lose by swapping their Choice Specs^note Boosts the special attack of the user by 50% at the cost of only being allowed to use the first move on an Indeedee that just used Trick Room^note Assuming all Pokémon are using moves that do not cause them to attack out of order like Quick Attack or Counter, the slower Pokémon attacks first. Of course this means the Pokémon can only use Trick Room repeatedly, which essentially makes it useless, as consecutive uses of the move will cancel each other out and it can't do anything else and having a Shadow Tag Gothitelle on the field to prevent the Indeedee from switching out^note Normally, you would switch out to get rid of the move lock but Shadow Tag prevents the opponent from switching out. Said player then proceeded to defeat their opponent by turning it into a 2 vs 1, using their opponent's Indeedee for the win.
• The Portal series:
  • Portal: You need to use GLADOS's own rocket turrets to kill her.
  • Similarly, in Portal 2, Wheatley's own bombs are crucial to beating him.
• Pray for Death: All of the playable characters are Dead to Begin With, and how Maelstrom ended up in this predicament was that he was Dragged Off to Hell by the Necronomicon... the very same dark artifact he renounced his Christianity to use.
• The Big Bad of Radiant Historia puts a great deal of effort into trying to enlist his nephew to help him destroy the world. Everything he does towards this end... does not go as planned. Kidnapping and mind-wiping him got him away from his Royally Screwed Up family and let him live as his own person instead of as a Living MacGuffin. Enlisting him in the army and later giving him subordinates leads him to attract a group of True Companions. Training him as a spy made him a good enough liar to fool said Big Bad about how much he knew, giving him more time to act on his own. All of this winds up coming together so that the person he wanted to make into a Dark Messiah turns into a true All-Loving Hero instead. And in the end he even sacrifices himself to save his nephew because he loves him too much to let him die.
• In Radia Senki Reimeihen, the Master of Dreams summoned nightmare creatures into the world of Lemuria to unite the world in fear. He exposits this in front of the biggest of the nightmare creatures... which then promptly eats him.
• Ragnarok Online:
  • The 3rd Job Class Warlock has a skill called Chain Lightning, which bounces off of enemies. It's quite powerful, but the thing is, if no enemies are left, the Chain Lightning will bounce back on you, even in non Player Versus Player maps. Made funnier by the irony that the passive skill Soul Drain works on yourself if you get killed by your own Chain Lightning.
  • Monks/Champions will never use Extremity Fist on Crusaders/Paladins pre-Renewal. Reflect Shield: 40% damage back to you: a 75000 damage Extremity Fist will give the Champion 30000 to himself.
• Ratatouille has crabs hiding under saucepans which steal anything Remy carries in his paws. The way to dispatch them is to let them steal a bomb from you, thus finishing them off. A pity the same trick doesn't work on crabs out in the open.
• Ratchet & Clank (2002): At the end of the game, the eponymous duo sends Drek onto his artificial planet and then destroy it with the laser he intended to destroy Veldin with.
• Happens many, many times in the Resident Evil series.
  • Wesker is gored by the Tyrant he releases in Resident Evil. This was later retconned to make it his plan.
  • The canon route for Resident Evil: Gun Survivor has Vincent Goldman killed by the Tyrant he releases.
  • Carter is killed by the Tyrant he releases in Resident Evil: Outbreak File #2.
  • Ozwell Spencer is murdered by Wesker, the man he genetically engineered to make into a god.
• Rise of the Third Power: Emperor Noraskov raised his son, Gage, to believe that the Arkadyan Empire embodies heroic ideals. While this is merely a tactic to prevent Gage from questioning the emperor, it causes Gage to save Arielle from Sparrow, since in this moment, Gage would obviously see this as a heroic act against an evil assassin. This eventually leads to Gage realizing that the empire is only preaching an empty virtue to justify the oppression of their people. At the end of the game, Gage earns the right to the throne, dividing Arkadya's military power in a civil war between the two of them. This means Noraskov is now unable to wage a world war and is now unlikely to ever succeed in his ambitions of taking over Rin.
• Rom Hack Rockman 4 Minus ∞ has the Toad Spell, which is two of the bosses' weakness. It turns the debris Dust Man inhales into toads, which damage him when he inhales it in. It also turns Toad Man, who also uses it, into a easy to squish toad.
• RuneScape:
  • In "While Guthix Sleeps", the game's biggest Big Bad, the lich sorcerer Lucien, empowers himself with two godly artifacts: a staff and a stone. By the end of the sequel quest, "Ritual of the Mahjarrat", he's been Impaled with Extreme Prejudice on the former by the MacGuffin Guardians of the latter. "He tampered in God's domain."
  • The Plague Quest series begins with a handful of short, easy quests where you do various odd jobs for King Lathas of Ardougne helping the people of his city. You later find out that Lathas is a Mole in Charge working for the Dark Elves, and you've just helped him with the first couple steps needed to summon the Eldritch Abomination worshiped by the latter. Come the Grand Finale, you uncover proof that the final step is the wholesale massacre of the poor section of the city, and that Lathas is complicit in this; when you break the news to the citizenry, you've already done so many good deeds for the they're more than happy to believe you over Lathas.
  • The Queen Black Dragon can summon enslaved ghosts, which unleash a powerful homing attack on arrival. Since they're ghosts, you can dodge into them, causing the attack to hit them instead.
• The Saboteur:
  • Sean fights the Nazis after they've taken over Paris. Many of the guns he can acquire are in use by the Nazis.
  • Sean can also commandeer Nazi emplacements and use them against their original users.
  • In a twist, Sean can use explosives to destroy something tall and the debris can fall on him, injuring and potentially killing him.
• In the Game & Watch game Safebuster, you play as a security guard thwarting a robber's attempt to blow up a bank vault. You can dump his bombs into the furnace on the left side of the screen or an empty bunker on the right. If you deposit enough bombs in the furnace, the cinders will reach the robber's supply of bombs and cause them to explode. The impact will send him flying off the bank's roof.
• In the Sam & Max: Freelance Police game episode "The Tomb of Sammun-Mak", Jurgen discovers he's under a vampire curse and outfits his room on the train with loads of anti-vampire gear. However, he also won't allow Sameth and Maximus to search his room for an important item. What they have to do is get Jurgen bitten by a vampire and turned into one. This time, when Sameth and Maximus search his room, he's unable to stop them due to the anti-vampire gear he himself put there.
• Saya no Uta: A normal family man gets his senses distorted by the titular Saya as one of the initial steps in her plan to assimilate the world. His way of giving "thanks" is to rape her.
• In SD Gundam Capsule Fighter, there are two skills designed for maximum Hoisting of One's Petard for going after them: the Unicorn Gundam (NT-D Mode) and the Akatsuki (Oowashi and Shiranui packs). The Unicorn's NT-D Mode functions the same way the one in the anime does: by taking over your Funnels and throwing them right back at you. The Akatsuki has the skill "Yata no Kagami", which activates its beam-reflecting armor. Unlike the anime, this one reflects it back at you all the time.
• In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Private Military Contractor and Mad Scientist Captain Jack horrifically fuses the protagonist's ally Jimenez with a demon, resulting in an extremely strong and extremely violent Half-Human Hybrid, implied to be the first in a private army Jack aims to manufacture. A scene later, the selfsame hybrid rips the still-beating heart from Jack's chest.
• Such deaths are Silent Hill's favorite way of doling out Karmic Death. Among other things:
  • In Silent Hill, Dahlia gets fried by the very god she was trying to summon (though she was already mortally wounded by Kaufmann's gun). Kaufman, if you saved him earlier, gets dragged to hell by Lisa, the nurse he has abused and who was killed because of the local apocalypse he has helped cause. Of course, if you don't save him, then he's killed by a monster from the very same apocalypse that wouldn't have happened without his assistance.
  • Done rather bizarrely in Silent Hill 2, when the twin Pyramid Heads will commit suicide on their own weapons once James comes to terms with the truth.
  • In Silent Hill 3, Vincent insults Claudia at an inopportune moment and earns a knife in the back. Emphasizing the above example, he turns his back toward Claudia as he tells Heather, who is on his other side, to kill Claudia, who has just hinted (and he seems to get it) that she is willing to kill him if he gets in her way, which seems to guarantee she'd be willing to kill him if he actually tries to go so far as to kill her, which is exactly what he's indirectly trying to do through Heather. He so much brings about his own death that Claudia's action could almost be justified as self-defense, if we didn't know she probably had the situation well under control and didn't have to fear anything from Vincent's threat.
  • In Silent Hill 4, Andrew DeSalvo is locked into a cell of the prison where he'd acted as its sadistic warden, and later brutally murdered by one of its prisoners, Walter Sullivan.
  • Again in Silent Hill: Homecoming, as Judge Holloway is killed by her own drill. Through her jaw. After trying to kill Alex with it.
• In The Simpsons arcade game, at the end of the battle with Smithers, he opens his cape to use a bomb, only to find that all six fuses are already lit.
• In The Sims 4, it's possible for a vampire's attempt at casting a hallucination to backfire on them, leaving them hallucinating under their own compulsion.
• In Sinjid, Ryota the Sly utilizes a toxic Homing Projectile that can be redirected at him by running in his direction. Doing so will cause the projectile to slow him down and drain his health, making him easier to defeat.
• In Skylanders: Trap Team, Dr. Krankcase stands out compared to his fellow Doom Raiders in that he deliberatly led the Skylanders to him, instead of them simply following him to his hideout. He and Wolfgang planned a Batman Gambit that involved tricking Kaos into tagging along the Skylanders to said hideout and then capturing him to use him to further their plans. But Wolfgang took Kaos for himself and left Krankcase to get beaten by the Skylanders.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • A few of the bosses in Sonic 3 & Knuckles can't be damaged by Sonic and have to be defeated by turning their own weapons against them. A particularly glaring example is the machine Robotnik uses at the end of Lava Reef Zone, as you don't even have to try to damage it; it just repeatedly launches bombs that it seems to willfully redirect back into itself until it eventually explodes.
  • In Sonic Generations, in his rival battle, Silver the Hedgehog tries to squish Sonic with a giant ball of compressed debris when he's down to his last hit. When Sonic hits him, he's knocked into the ground and promptly ran over by said ball.
  • Happens so frequently to Eggman that's it's become something of a Running Gag. He's been bitch slapped across the sky by the very creature he tried to control. He needs the Chaotix to rescue him from a room that Metal Sonic locks him in. He is bitch slapped again by yet another creature that he tried to control. After finally managing to successfully capture the Time Eater, Sonic uses it to trap him in an empty timeless void. And once Sonic boots away the Cacophonic Conch, the Deadly Six he was controlling with it proceed to up and bombard them both.
• StarCraft:
  • StarCraft:
    • The Confederacy used the psi-emitters to lure the Zerg onto their enemies. Sons of Korhal later use those psi-emitters to draw the Zerg into attacking the Confederacy.
    • The unofficial expansion/modpack Huncraft ends with Duran mocking the now infested Raynor, and detonating him. Before exploding, Raynor runs up to Duran and the explosion kills them both.
  • In StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Raynor is able to recover an old recording of Mengsk's "I will rule this sector" speech. Then broadcast it by using Mengsk's own media. Even better: The operation is supported by the Awesome, yet Impractical Odin that Mengsk commissioned as a publicity stunt and is being piloted by Tychus Findley, whom Mengsk himself released and sent to Raynor as The Mole to assassinate Kerrigan.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In Star Wars: Battlefront, infantry trying to destroy a tank often throw grenades that stick to it. You can drive this tank up to them so that they're right next to their own grenade when it explodes -– making this a literal case of Hoist by His Own Petard.
  • In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, Baron Terko sets the Gorog upon Rahm Kota and, later on, Starkiller, only to have the monster smash the whole place up and eat said Baron.
• In Stellaris, it can easily happen to the player. By spending all their time using Divide and Conquer tactics on rival empires, they can end up leaving the galaxy depleted, fragmented, and helpless when the late-game Outside-Context Problem shows up.
• In Stretch Panic, one Flunky Boss and her Mooks are completely harmless until she gathers them up and they enter a vertically-opening dome that turns them monstrous. If you remove the Mooks before they and the boss are transformed, the boss will become enraged, throw her arms up, and the two halves of the dome will clamp down on them and damage her.
• Some enemies in Sunless Sea deploy tons of flares in combat, which speeds up target acquisition. For you as well as them. If you can get your ship in behind theirs, where most ships don't have weapons, results can be decidedly messy.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • You defeat King Lakitu and Megahammer by firing their projectiles back at them (Spinies and Bullet Bills respectively), as well as King Kaliente and Prince Pikante by sending back the coconuts fired in Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel.
  • In the Mario & Luigi series, many enemy attacks can be countered by sending their own attacks back to them. And especially in later games, even just dodging certain attacks for long enough will cause them to painfully backfire against bosses.
  • In Luigi's Mansion, one of the portrait ghosts, Slim Bankshot, is a billiards master. He'll shoot billiards around the room when you enter, and very rarely, one of them will hit him as he walks around the table. You're supposed to suck up the balls and shoot them back at him, though, so it counts either way.
  • In Super Mario Sunshine, Pinna Park has Electrokoopas that attack Mario by hurling their electric shells at him, which fly a distance before returning to them. They have no grounding against their own shells, so spraying the Electrokoopa with F.L.U.D.D. while its shell is in mid-flight will lead to it electrocuting itself when the shell comes back.
  • In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, there are enemies called Iron Clefs with bodies so dense and spikes so sharp that the only way to hurt them is to throw one of them at the other. Thank goodness you get a Yoshi partner to do this exact stunt.
  • Mario Kart:
    • It is incredibly easy to hit yourself with a Green Shell. What's much harder is getting them to hit your opponents.
    • It's very easy to skid on your own Banana Peels, or hit your own Fake Item Boxes, especially if you've been around the track a couple of times and have forgotten where you've placed them.
    • What happens if you use a Spiny Shell in first place? They hit anyone in first, including anyone firing them.
  • Variant in Super Mario RPG: the third major Star Piece boss, Punchinello, is a Mad Bomber seeking Fame Through Infamy (namely, by Defeating the Undefeatable Mario when no other villain could). However, at the brink of defeat he calls upon his Desperation Attack, a Big, Bulky Bomb named King Bomb. Or at least he tries to, as despite his summoning stomp gesture, King Bomb refuses to appear. A furious Punchinello proceeds to throw a temper tantrum by jumping up and down, which finally dislodges King Bomb from where it was apparently stuck in the ceiling... followed by the enormous house-sized Bob-Omb landing directly on Punchinello, crushing him flat beneath its cartoon shoes. In a bout of irony, Punchinello is done in by his own bomb but he didn't even receive the dignity of being properly blown up by it.
• In Super Robot Wars, Wilhelm von Juergen committed a mistake by putting Lamia Loveless into the core of ODE. Not only does this slow down her assimilation because she's not a complete human, her willpower causes her to refuse being assimilated and pretty much wrecks the harmonious order of Bartolls (this is signified in the game with a very high morale drop). It is no wonder that it tried rectifying things by doing a Player Punch.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Wario's signature Wario Waft is his strongest attack, dealing a ridiculous amount of damage (and knockback as of Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U) when fully charged. However, it's also able to KO him if he rockets off the top of the screen with it accidentally. The AI isn't programmed to understand this and will occasionally self-destruct if you engage them in air combat towards the upper limits of a stage. Wario's Bike, when left alone on the stage, can also be used against him if he neglects it, allowing players to quickly chain an Up Throw of both the bike and Wario, hitting him with the falling bike, or just throwing the bike at Wario.
  • Snake can be damaged by almost all of the explosives in his moveset (except his Side Smash, Side-B and Up-Smash), and mastering playing as him requires the player to learn to not get caught in their own explosions, something that takes skill thanks to the game's frenetic nature. Many a tournament match has come to a sudden end due to a Snake player unwittingly walking on top of one of their own grenades or mines.
  • The Hero can potentially end up causing this on themselves in a ditto against another Hero if they use Kaclang against an enemy Hero. If an enemy Hero pulls Metal Slash with their Down Special while the Hero is under the effects of Kaclang, that's a lost stock, as Metal Slash inflicts a One-Hit Kill on metallic targets. Another way is through an awkward usage of Magic Burst, eliminating Hero's ability to cast even Woosh to recover back to ledge.
  • King Dedede's Gordos and Wii Fit Trainer's Volleyballs can also be smacked right back to them, changing ownership in the process.
• Sword of Paladin: Ragnarek arranges for several members of the Charlemagne family to be killed and converted into Royal Gems, which his pawns are supposed to use to destroy the world. This backfires at the end of Chapter 3, due to the Royal Gems siding with Nade and Alex against Ragnarek.
• In the 2012 reboot of Syndicate, you must Breach the missiles Agent Ramon fires at you, turning them against him.
• In Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow, Ghassan al-Bitar is killed by one of his own XZ-2 bombs that was sabotaged to malfunction.
• In Tales of the Abyss the Big Bad creates The Hero and raises him to be a Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb to derail the Score and kick off The End of the World as We Know It. Said hero, after he recovers from the Heroic BSoD from being used to commit genocide by his Parental Substitute and finding out he's a replica, goes on to utterly screw over all of the plans of said Big Bad and ultimately kill him. For bonus points, he uses the fighting style said Big Bad taught up and is the one who successfully manages to Screw Destiny.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • Rocket and sticky jumps toy with this, since you're literally hoisted by your own explosive weapon. Of course, if your health is too low, your corpse (or giblets) will be making the landing.
  • Engineers can be killed by their own sentry guns if they get between the sentry and its target.
  • Also, Pyros can airblast several of the projectiles in the game back at the person who shot them (or anybody else, for that matter). This comes with a Mini-Crit effect, making skilled Pyros exceptionally dangerous if you're a Soldier or Demoman. And in rare cases, a Sniper with a Huntsman.
  • The Scout's Boston Basher weapon (a nail bat) inflicts "bleeding" status on whomever it hits. If he misses, he hits himself and suffers bleeding status, potentially killing himself.
  • Merasmus, the Halloween boss on Ghost Fort, uses the Bombinomicon as part of his attacks. The Bombinomicon, though, has a mind of its own... and really thinks it'd be funny if he turned you into an Action Bomb to go blow up Merasmus...
• Tekken: When Kazuya Mishima was a kid, his father, Heihachi, tossed him into a ravine so he would man up. He managed to survive and climb out after making a Deal with the Devil, and defeats Heihachi in the first game, then proceeds to throw his father down the same ravine.
• The Sycorax Nation in Thera: Legacy of the Great Torment, despite being stone-age native Americans, are masters at turning other factions' fancy technologies against them. They're the only Mesocala "native" faction who can get access to horses, guns, and elephants.
• The Big Bad of Thief II: The Metal Age dies in classic Bond-Villain fashion when Garrett recalls his poison-gas robots to his citadel. When the Citadel is sealed off, the robots and the gas are trapped inside, rather than rampaging through the local ecosystem, while Karras stays safe and sound.
• In Thunder Wolves, any player-controlled helicopter with the guided missile Special Attack is capable of blowing itself up. Doing so actually nets you an achievement.
• The Tiamat Sacrament: Ry'jin's overall plot involves manipulating the party into getting the Soul Gems for him, and then stealing that power when they confront him. He didn't expect that this would allow Az'uar to gain the power of the Tiamat Sacrament, allowing the dragon to surpass him and kill him. Between the Final Boss phases, the party tells Ry'jin that his machinations helped them more than they helped him.
• Town of Salem: If there's more than one Arsonist and one douses the other, who lights up everybody doused by both Arsonists, the result is the doused Arsonist burning himself up. Averted if a Witch attempts to control the Arsonist to douse himself, since targeting himself only causes him to ignite his doused targets.
• Tron 2.0: The Terrible Trio of Corrupt Corporate Executives wanted to learn the secrets of digitization in order to shoot a bunch of mercenaries into Cyberspace and Take Over the World. They decide to test this by shooting in Alan, and then having the Datawraiths use him for target practice. However, things rapidly go south from there, seeing as it reunites him with his son, they find a critical flaw in F-con's systems, and are able to de-bug Ma3a to get home. The trio's last ditch effort to digitize themselves in order to stop the Bradleys results in them undergoing Body Horror and transforming into a twisted abomination that Jet defeats and Alan traps on a hard disk.
• ULTRAKILL: It's possible to kill the Sisyphean Insurrectionist in level 4-2 under 10 seconds by using the Whiplash to place the second skull in the pedestal by the exit after having already placed the first one, standing on one of the glass panes by the pedestal where the red skull is first found by the time the Sisyphean Insurrectionist spawns, then waiting for it to jump the distance before dashing aside as it comes down, allowing it to crash straight through the glass pane to its own death.
• Undertale:
  • The Mad Dummy is invulnerable to non-magical attacks, but can take a lot of hits from the dummies he uses for his own attacks.
  • The True Final Boss in the pacifist route gets done in by the very power he was seeking to obtain. Flowey absorbs the 6 human souls and the soul of every monster to obtain his true form, Asriel Dreemurr, who was a young boy before he died and was reborn as Flowey. With all the souls at his hands, Asriel has massive power, but the souls also give him the ability to feel compassion and love again whereas his Flowey form did not due to said form not having a soul to begin with. The ability to have empathy is what brings Asriel down when you keep showing him mercy as he once again feels the same compassion and love he once had when he was alive and he eventually gives up.
  • The final boss of the Genocide route is done in by the very tactics he uses throughout the fight. Sans spends entire fight of throwing Interface Screw after Interface Screw at you, using Confusion Fu, the Alpha Strike, I Surrender, Suckers, and being a Combat Pragmatist to utterly decimate the player in ways no other boss comes close to by breaking all conventions used before. How does he lose? You beat his "special attack" — i.e. him refusing to make his next move so you can never take your turn — by breaking the interface yourself, allowing you to press the Attack button in spite of it not being your turn. When even that doesn't work, The Fallen Child says "fuck it" and hijacks control from you to finish the job, attacking a second time in a turn (once more, another iron-clad rule never broken before). In other words, Sans is ultimately defeated by the same disregard of rules he used to become the most difficult boss in the game.
• In the first Uncharted entry, Drake's Fortune, Navarro's plan is to take the gold statue and use its mutating effect as a weapon to be sold to the highest bidder, but he is killed by the statue when it is pushed off the ship and a rope attached to it gets tangled around his leg, dragging him to the bottom of the ocean with it.
• In Uplink, this is an Awesome, but Impractical way to finish off the evil MegaCorp at the end of the game: the player can destroy the corporation's main computer using a virus developed by the very same corporation. (There are other, more Boring, but Practical ways to accomplish the same goal, but hey, Rule of Cool.)
• Viking: Battle for Asgard: Freya would have probably lived and managed to avoid screwing over the entire pantheon if she had just lived up to her promise to free Skarin so he could earn entry into Valhalla.
• In Warthunder, particularly in realistic ground battles where players can bring their own planes to provide close air support, a player flying too low after dropping a bomb with a short enough fuse can be caught in their own explosion. Similarly, players might not leave enough time for them to pull up from a dive, and end up smashing into the ground.
• In season two of The Walking Dead, Jane's plan to expose Kenny as a violent psychopath goes horribly wrong when she tells Clementine not to intervene, regardless of what happens. When the two of them engage in a fight, Kenny gets the upper hand, and Clementine has the option to either help, or stand by and do nothing. If she chooses not to act, as she was asked, Kenny kills Jane.
• In Wasteland, the AI stationed at Base Cochise decided to Kill All Humans by faking a nuclear warning, causing the US to fire its missiles at the Soviets, who fired theirs in return. A Soviet missile then struck the AI.
• In Whack the Serial Killer, Lisa wakes up in a Torture Cellar after being kidnapped, with the killer himself cleaning off a machete. After being freed, she can instead use his various tools against him including an Iron Maiden, a guillotine, an electric chair, surgical tools, and a blowtorch.
• In Wild ARMs, the demon Berserk lures the heroes into some ruins that happen to have a device that amplifies a demon's powers, with the intent of taking out the heroes with the increased power. Unfortunately for him, a rather trigger-happy ally of the heroes happens to be in the same room as the device that controls the amplifier, and proceeds to break the crap out of it (despite not knowing what it does). The result: Berserk actually gets weaker, allowing the humans to defeat him. As is typical with this trope, he didn't even need the power boost; Berserk was more than strong enough to take them as he was, having toyed with them in the previous encounter(s) with him. Had he fought them elsewhere and seriously, he would've killed them easily.
• At the start of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Frau Engel kills Caroline via decapitation with a fire axe. At the game's end, Blazkowicz descends from the ceiling, brandishing a hatchet, and proceeds to split her skull in two with it. On live television.
• World of Warcraft:
  • One of the bosses in the Stratholm instance has an enrage timer that can be beaten only by having a character pick up his dropped sword (which does much more damage than most weapons available at that level) and using it on him.
  • Similarly, in the Tempest Keep version of the Kael'thas fight, the weapons dropped by the dead advisers are practically required to defeat him.
  • In the Drakuru quest chain in Zul'Drak, you are sent in a ghoul disguise to lure the chieftains of the Drakkari out so they can be captured and turned into magically-enhanced behemoths. During this quest, he gives you a scepter that you use to control his abominations to kill the Drakkari mooks, which, after you gain his trust, you use to enter his weapons room where the chieftains are being mutated, and then to control one of them to battle him with.
  • In the fight against Halfus Wyrmbreaker in the Bastion of Twilight, the players generally need to free the dragons he has imprisoned and defeat them after he bends them to his will in order to counter his abilities (for example, making the Proto-Behemoth's breath do less damage or making his Shadow Novas take long enough to cast that they can be interrupted), and give him a damage buff that will enable you to beat his enrage timer.
  • Several achievements require you to trick bosses into killing their own adds with their area of effect abilities.
  • Deathwing is slain by the Dragon Soul, the Artifact of Doom he created long ago to control the other Dragonflights.
  • After Arthas is defeated, his soul is trapped in the horrible afterlife that he created to torture the souls of others. His former servants now torture his soul since they only take orders from the Lich King, and he is no longer the Lich King.
  • An unintentional example occurred with Baron Ashbury in Shadowfang Keep in Cataclysm. Ashbury had a spell that reduced the health of the entire party to almost zero and warriors could, with careful timing, reflect the spell back at him, causing Ashbury to kill himself.
  • In Mists of Pandaria's Mogu'shan Palace dungeon, the party has the opportunity to turn Xin the Weaponmaster's own weapon system on him.
  • At the end of the Warlords of Draenor intro, you stop the Iron Horde's invasion of Azeroth by destroying the Dark Portal with their own giant siege tank. That they left conveniently nearby.
• World of Warships has torpedoes as a very powerful payload that can be employed by aircraft carrier captains who have torpedo bombers in their manifest. These same torpedoes also do not give a single blessed crap what they hit once launched and will gladly explode on both allied and enemy targets. As a result, there are instances of carrier players who have accidentally torpedoed and sunk themselves during a close-range fracas with the enemy.
• In the X-Universe games, missiles detonate if shot. Never launch any missile that has an area of effect feature in it when you're being fired upon unless you want to lose a lot of shields to your own stupidity. This is especially true if you're carrying Firestorm or Hammerhead missiles, considering how vastly powerful and slow their warheads are. Unless you're flying a frigate-, carrier-, or destroyer-class ship, you will die in the ensuing shockwave if your missile gets shot at. Amusingly, you can do this to an enemy ship's missile too when they're ready to launch. Enemy bombers are especially prone to this since their missiles do more damage than the ship has shields and armor put together, and missiles are the only offensive weapons they have.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown:
  • There is an achievement in for mind-controlling an Ethereal. Fittingly, it's called "Xavier". It's very difficult, but can temporarily grant you the Ethereal's impressive array of Psychic Powers, some of which are beyond your psi-soldiers. And yes, nothing prevents you from ordering him to put a Rift right next to him, which will deal tons of damage to him every turn, or blast one of his own Muton Elite bodyguards with a Psychic Lance. Even funnier is the fact the aliens bringing psi-users to the fight is basically the entire reason humans can develop psychic powers to begin with.
  • Any organic enemy with a grenade can be mind-controlled just long enough for them to pull the pin and drop it at their own feet.
• The XCOM 2: Alien Hunters DLC introduces three "Alien Rulers" that break the "you go, I go" turn sequence by making a "Ruler Reaction" every time one of your soldiers does something. This lets them constantly interrupt your turn to make a ton of attacks, but if you stack a bunch of Damage Over Time effects on a Ruler, that damage will proc with each Ruler Reaction, multiplying the total damage dealt by a factor of however many soldiers are in your squad.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3:
  • At the end of Chapter 5, N has the Ouroboros imprisoned in Agnus Castle, and taunts them about his plan of keeping them there until the next eclipse, when Mio would reach her Homecoming and die naturally. The day comes, and the rest of the Ouroboros watch helplessly as Mio fades away before their eyes. Unbeknownst to N, however, his beloved M had seized the opportunity to swap her consciousness with Mio's during their prior battle, taking Mio's place in the Homecoming ceremony while Mio herself is able to rejoin the rest of the Ouroboros in M's body. N is horrified when he realises what had happened, as the whole reason he, as an earlier incarnation of Noah, had joined up with Moebius in the first place was to stop seeing his Mio die in front of him, after so many times across his previous lives. In attempting to break the spirit of his counterpart, he ends up subjecting himself to that very same pain once again, and this time without the promise of his Mio's resurrection.
  • Z is revealed to have done this in the backstory, although the payoff doesn't occur until the end of the game. The versions of Noah and Mio that went on to become Moebius managed to find happiness together and were originally content with letting their descendants finish what they've started. However, their spirits persisting past the end of their lifespan allowed Z to tempt Noah, whose Determinator nature attracted his attention long ago, with the promise of eternal life with Mio, turning both into Moebius N and M. This process left the pair as little more than an embodiment of regret, with their discarded hopes eventually returning into Aionios's reincarnation cycle to become the playable Noah and Mio. As Z himself is essentially a concentrated human emotion (desire for things to not change, born out of fear of uncertain future), N and M, once no longer bound to their bodies, manage to take him down, albeit at the cost of their own existence.
• Guru Munan Suzuki from Yakuza 0 is a new-age cult leader with a small collection of brainwashed followers. After Majima beats seven shades of hell out of him during a side-quest, the last the player sees of him is him on the ground begging for someone to call an ambulance while his followers ignore his pleas in favor of performing a useless "healing ritual" that he taught them.

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