I Did What I Had To Do / Video Games

Examples of I Did What I Had to Do in video games.

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Examples:

Examples A to G

• Ace Attorney:
  • In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Lana Skye has this attitude about forging evidence to help convict serial killer Joe Darke. It turns out that she's actually motivated to protect her younger sister Ema from being framed by Gant.
  • By extension, Phoenix Wright forging evidence in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney just to find the truth largely because the real incriminating evidence had been removed. Taking down the person who destroyed his career and by extension removed said incriminating evidence, Kristoph Gavin, was an unintended bonus on his part.
• In Alien: Isolation, this is the overarching belief held by all the people still alive on Sevastapol Station by the time Amanda Ripley arrives. It's why they'll shoot at you on sight and ask questions later, because as far as they're concerned there's a very good chance you're just there to steal their meager supplies and kill them if they try to stop you. Axel Fielding, who you team up with at the beginning and of course who also holds this belief, even outright sympathizes with the other survivors, despite their attempts to kill him, and understands that they're driven by fear and desperation.
• Kouin in Aselia the Eternal - The Spirit of Eternity Sword uses this as a justification for his actions. He has to do what he has to do in order to save Kyouko, who has been devoured by her sword, Void.
• Used often in Assassin's Creed, during the personal conversations between Altair and his Templar victims. Actually said by both sides, with Altair explaining that he has to kill the Templars for the sake of the Holy Land, and the Templars justifying their own heinous crimes.
• In Bastion, the kid needs to destroy the petrified remains of other children who were hit by the calamity to get to a warp gate.
• Battlefield 2142:
  • The Pan-Asian Coalition leader(s) use this trope. When the European Union (and possibly also the USA) plan to colonize Africa to flee the encroaching ice age, PAC launches an unprovoked and merciless attack to conquer Africa for itself. PAC aren't considered villains in the game, since from their point of view, it was necessary for their nations' survival.
  • In the end, the EU does the same by kicking PAC out of Africa to freeze.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: Lucian orchestrated both a Fantastic Nuke against the Black Ring and a Final Solution against Sourcerers to end the threat of the Void. When challenged, he says that his actions were terrible but necessary for a lasting peace. However, the massive civilian casualties from the first attack weakened the gods and actually caused the Voidwoken invasion in the first place, and to hunt Sourcerers, he let Dallis' faction of sadistic Knight Templars run unchecked, worsening the situation further.
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, if the main character asks Alistair if the Grey Wardens are like heroes, Alistair responds that the Wardens do whatever is necessary, implying that that includes some pretty unheroic stuff. Depending on your decisions, a ruthless yet well-meaning warden may find themselves using this justification a lot.
  • This is how Loghain Mac Tir justifies his retreat at the Battle of Ostagar, abandoning King Cailan and a good portion of the Ferelden army to die at the hands of the darkspawn horde, rather than launch a flank attack to relieve them. Loghain claims the signal for his army to attack came too late, by which point Cailan had overextended his forces, and trying to save him would have just sent more soldiers to die in a pointless meatgrinder. In-universe and out, it's hotly debated whether Loghain was telling the truth or just trying to justify leaving the king, his own son-in-law, to die so Loghain could seize control of Ferelden in the power vacuum following Cailan's death and run the country as he saw fit.
  • Anders uses this as justification for blowing up the Chantry in Dragon Age II. He is fully convinced he did the right thing and will refuse to help Hawke side with the Templars no matter what.
  • Defied by Ser Ruth, a Grey Warden in Dragon Age: Inquisition. She willingly submits to the Inquisition's justice, knowing that death is the likely punishment she will suffer. When it's pointed out that as a Grey Warden she could invoke this trope, she refuses to do so. As far as she's concerned, being a Warden doesn't excuse her for murdering a fellow Warden for a Blood Magic sacrifice as so many others did. She also admits that she's done worse for less cause in the past using the Wardens' carte blanche to do anything if it means fighting the Blights to avoid punishment. Ser Ruth believes it's high time Wardens stopped using their duty to justify horrible crimes and wants her fate to set an example for them. Thus the only punishment she will dislike is being sent to the Deep Roads to die alone, because it's the only one that won't send any clear message.
  • Leliana has taken this road, with the threat so great she resorts to Dirty Business to protect her friends and allies, while hating herself for doing so.
• In Duel Savior Destiny Muriel Sheerfield is trying to kill the Messiah despite the legends because she knows that the actual Messiah awakening would be a very bad thing along the lines of an end of the world situation.
• King Logan of Fable III was a ruthless tyrant who oppressed his people and brutally exploited them to maximize the profits of his kingdom. It later turns out that he was doing all of that to build up an army to defend the kingdom against an inevitable attack by a monstrous horde of darkness incarnate. What's a few years of misery under his tyrannic rule if the alternative is the death of all life, right? Well, no. By putting in some effort the player can prove Logan wrong by turning the kingdom into a prosperous utopia all while defending it from the attack all the same.
• In order to change his own destiny, Cid Raines in Final Fantasy XIII chose to oppose and kill the party, as it was originally his focus as a l'Cie to help them. This was an attempt to make himself somewhat human again, and he shows no ill-will while doing so.
• Attempted by Lucina in Fire Emblem: Awakening. When she realizes that The Avatar is being controlled, she draws her sword and prepares to kill them on the spot to prevent the Bad Future. Chrom stops her before she can, or if you are her mother or husband, she stops herself.
• A Central Theme in Frostpunk. The game is about managing a Victorian colony surviving a post-apocalyptic ice age. Players can introduce unsavoury edicts like making children work manual labour jobs and burying the dead in mass graves. If the player is too harsh then people will lose hope and resent the leader and eventually banish him out into the wilderness to die. If the player doesn't implement any of them they will run into some serious resource problems. Later on, a massive crisis event happens when the city discovers that the neighbouring settlement Winterhome is completely dead and a faction forms to try to escape back down to London, which is also destroyed - the people of your colony are the last living humans left. At this point a new decision opens up to turn the colony into either a totalitarian dictatorship or a religious theocracy which starts out more benign but gradually becomes the same.

Examples H to O

• Halo:
  • At the end of Halo: Combat Evolved, Cortana says this about having to blow up Halo (killing any survivor who was still there) in order to save the galaxy, though it's clear from her tone of voice that she's trying to convince herself and the Master Chief, not stating her actual feelings.
  • In Halo 3, the Sangheili Shipmaster Rtas 'Vadum decides to completely incinerate a Flood-infected portion of Africa, a decision to which Fleet Admiral Lord Terrence Hood initially reacts with hostility, but is forced to realize that there was nothing else to do.
    Rtas 'Vadum: A Flood army, a Gravemind, has you in its sights - you barely survived a small contamination.
    Lord Hood: And you, Shipmaster, just glassed half a continent! Maybe the Flood isn't all I should be worried about.
    Rtas 'Vadum: One single Flood spore can destroy a species. Were it not for the Arbiter's counsel, I would have glassed your entire planet!
  • The Forerunners took some quite morally questionable actions during their tenure as the supreme civilization in the galaxy, but pretty much everyone agrees that firing the Halo Array and killing everything left in the galaxy 100,000 years ago was a justified move, given that otherwise the Flood would have overrun everything. It helps that it's made clear that this was a last-ditch plan; the Forerunners had tried all kinds of less destructive methods first, and those all failed. The Forerunners further did take precautions to re-seed life in the galaxy afterward. In fact, when the Forerunner who pressed the button is asked about his decision to do so, he says that he'd do it again if he had to, despite the fact that he himself was reluctant to do it for the longest time.
  • Dr. Halsey spends much of the series grappling with being the creator of the SPARTAN-II program, which involved kidnapping 75 children from their families, replacing them with flash clones (which swiftly died), and turning said children into deadly Super Soldiers through experimental and highly-dangerous medical treatments which kill or cripple more than half. The reason why she originally conceived the idea in the first place was that she saw them as the only way to prevent the UNSC from falling into civil war, but her journal makes it clear that she sometimes has trouble convincing herself that it was all worth it. She ultimately decides to make up for her sins by doing everything she can to help her Spartans survive. That said, she'll still pull this trope whenever people ask her about the IIs; when she's interrogated about the shady aspects of the S-II program at the beginning of Halo 4, she points out that her Spartans played a key role in saving humanity from the Covenant. This one's more of a blatant self-justification, as the interrogator quickly points out that the IIs were originally intended to fight human rebels, and the project was started long before humanity knew the Covenant existed.
• Horizon Zero Dawn: General Aaron Herres authorized and spearheaded Operation Enduring Victory, which was essentially an elaborate propaganda campaign that fooled humanity into thinking the Zero Dawn project would save them when he knew it wouldn't, and then used that as a justification to throw billions of lives into the meatgrinder to delay the Faro Plague as much as possible, despite knowing that the best case was still the extinction of all life on Earth—Project Zero Dawn was not a weapon to save humanity, it was a terraforming system meant to restore the world after everything was destroyed. He reveals this in full to the Zero Dawn recruits, and leaves behind a final message in APOLLO openly admitting that he's effectively a worse mass murderer than the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Ghengis Khan combined.
  Herres: So instead of letting what I've done sink into the murk, forgotten... I've sent a file with all the details. Let posterity judge my actions with clear vision.
  Sobeck: I'll do as you ask, General. But you should consider that, were it not for your actions... our actions... there wouldn't be any posterity to judge us.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the player can choose this attitude for the Jedi Exile when talking about the Mandalorian Wars. Kreia claims that this is also why Revan turned to the Dark Side and started the Jedi Civil War because he had to protect the Galaxy from a threat that the Republic couldn't handle.
• Little Busters!: Kyousuke is a sympathetic example in Refrain. He feels completely terrible that his actions in the previous timeline caused Rin so much damage, which he never intended. However, he is still convinced that Rin and Riki absolutely need to get stronger if they're going to survive the events of the future and he's still determined to do whatever is necessary to achieve that.
• Subverted humorously in Lost Odyssey; Jansen Friedh tells Queen Ming, "I had to do what I had to do back there," and then admits that what he "had to do" was pretty much "sit there and let you save me."
• Mass Effect gives you the option to justify your actions this way several times, especially if you chose the Renegade path. Notably, a Paragon Shepard, when pushed toward this sort of action by those around him/her, will make it clear that this is a weak justification for making supposedly "hard" choices in order to avoid difficult actions to ensure a better outcome.
  • The DLC "Bring Down the Sky" really hammers this home, and also if you pick the renegade option, get the bad guy, then afterwards if you pick a paragon dialogue choice, Shepard says something along the lines of "If I have to see her face every night, I can live with that.".
    • That is, of course, right after the villain calls you out:
      Balak: You could have saved them. Who's the real terrorist here?
      Shepard: You. But you're dead. [gunshot]
  • Mordin claims this for his work on upgrading the genophage. While he claims it's the best option he still feels horrendous guilt for his actions.
  • In the DLC Lair of the Shadow Broker, Asari spectre, Tela Vasir, has a building bombed in an attempt to kill Liara T'Soni for the Shadow Broker while killing many innocents. If Shepard calls her out on this she says that she did what Spectres are supposed to do, the dirty work that can't be public knowledge. She also gives an excellent Shut Up, Kirk! speech alongside this, claiming her work with the Broker is no different than how Shepard is working with Cerberus.
    • Although in Mass Effect 3, you discover that the Spectres knew that Shepard was telling the truth about the Reapers - turning Tela into either a complete hypocrite or a foolish cynic, knowingly working with someone actively trying to screw over the galaxy's best hope for survival by turning over his/her almost-corpse over to the Collectors, rather than the aforementioned Cerberus, who - as you know by now - ended up constructing a new body for Shepard's frozen-but-completely-intact brain.
  • In The Arrival DLC after Shepard destroys an entire solar system, killing over 300,000 Batarians (s/he does this whether you're Paragon or Renegade) s/he defends the decision to Admiral Hackett who after a few minutes concedes that s/he had no other choice. He says that this will not stop the fallout and s/he will be put to trial for the deaths and war will likely come with the Batarians.
  • In Mass Effect 3, you will hear the words "Those were desperate times." a lot when anyone mentions the Rachni War and the following Krogan Rebellion in the presence of Turians or Salarians.
    • Mordin's Heroic Sacrifice at the Shroud (if you don't talk them out of it).
      Mordin: Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong.
  • When confronting a batarian who accuses Shepard of terrorism because of his/her destruction of the Bahak system, Shepard admits that s/he felt (and still feels) great guilt about it but still claims that it needed to be done.
  • The Charm outcome of the Admiral Zaal'Koris rescue mission in 3. The Admiral takes a very admirable The Men First approach and insists you rescue his men and leave him behind, but at that stage - unless you imported a bad save, no save at all, or have a good one and proceed to do absolutely perfectly in every other regard - you need him, in person, up on the bridge of a quarian ship in order to save the maximum number of lives, and with the Charm option you explain that to him. He accepts your logic, even though he's still not particularly pleased.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda has a few examples, some more sincere than others. Ryder can say this in the aftermath of Peebee's Loyalty Mission, as why they sent Peebee's abusive ex-lover, who had just minutes before been planning to kill them and loot their corpses, tumbling into some lava.
• In Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, Makoto Kagutsuchi, the game's Big Bad, justifies his crimes with this. His isolation of Kanai Ward, blackmailing of the UG, construction of his cloud machine producing the rain over the city, coverup of the Blank Week, impersonation of the WDO's Number One to kidnap and kill death row inmates for Kanai Ward's food supply, endangerment of the Master Detectives, and murder of his original self, since he's a clone of the aforementioned Number One, are all necessary from his perspective, claiming to have no choice in the matter if it's to protect Kanai Ward's homnculi.
  Makoto: I had no choice. They must eat in order to survive.

• In Metroid: Other M, we learn that, when Samus was a federation soldier, Adam sacrificed his brother, Ian, to ensure that everyone onboard the ship he was commanding didn't die. Later he sacrificed himself to ensure that Samus didn't get herself killed going into Sector Zero.
• In most of the Myst games, there is an antagonist who goes into a monologue like this, most notably Gehn at the end of Riven and Escher at the end of Myst V.

• The Nintendo Wars game Advance Wars: Dual Strike has the player, as Jake, be presented with a choice: Either he can kill the Big Bad, who is draining the life force out of the entire planet in order to extend his own life, and has (presumably) killed millions if not billions of lives in doing so, or he can sit and watch as the villain wipes out all life on the planet to extend his own life just a little longer. Maybe this would trouble a normal kid, but Jake is a military officer who has just fought a war to get to this point, and has ordered the deaths of hundreds, if not tens of thousands of enemy soldiers and made decisions that inevitably lead to his own units' deaths. In fact, you are graded upon the efficiency with which you mow down your opponents and minimize sacrifices. If you, for some reason, decide not to save the world, Hawke will do it for you... you coward.

Examples P to Z

• Portal: "Aperture Science - We do what we must, because we can."
• Red Alert 3 has the President of the United States say "Well, since you don't have the guts to do what needs to be done, I'm gonna wipe those Soviets off the face of the Earth myself! And you can't stop me! If my heart stops beating, the weapon fires!"
• Rise of the Third Power: Rashim criticizes Reyna for taking advantage of Rowan's crush on her to get him to take the Resistance's suicide missions. Reyna is ashamed of having to do so, but states that this is necessary to stop Emperor Noraskov's ambitions.
• At the end of Episode 4 of Sally Face, Ashley says that Sal was found by the police muttering, "I had no choice, I had to do it, there wasn't any other way," to himself over and over after being forced to kill everyone in Addison Apartments in order to prevent The Red-Eyed Demon from being able to find a new host to inhabit.
• In Spec Ops: The Line, the eponymous line is crossed several times by several people who invariably fall back on this as an excuse. A major theme in the game is that people who use this justification are largely deluding themselves, including Captain Martin Walker, the protagonist himself, who starts actually having delusions, and Colonel John Konrad, who killed himself when he couldn't convince himself of it anymore.
• In A Study in Steampunk, you play a doctor in an expy of Victorian Britain (specifically, an expy of Watson). At one point, you're tasked with dealing with a cholera outbreak. If you want to save the most lives possible, then you have to harden your heart and treat absolutely nobody until you've found the contaminated water pump. Leave that sick baby to die; going out to nurse him will mean other people die because you delayed in making that map of the outbreak.
• Subverted in Starcraft I: Mengsk invokes this in the first campaign after very questionable choices with heavy side-effects, such as using psi emitters to lure billions of zerg to destroy confederate forces, regardless of the civilian casualties caught meanwhile. Although he states that he will do whatever is necessary to save humanity, in the vein of a Well-Intentioned Extremist, in the end it turns out that he exploited everybody and his goal was just to take revenge on the Confederacy no matter the others lives ruined and to rule the sector or see it burnt to ashes around him).
  Kerrigan: Just promise me we'll never do anything like this again.
  Mengsk: We will do whatever it takes to save humanity. Our responsibility is too great to do any less.
• Starcraft II Heart Of The Swarm: straightly addressed by Raynor and Kerrigan when the former discovers that the latter nullified all of his effort to return her to human form, by turning zerg again (although in the primal form, which allows her to stay outside of the evil influence of Amon). He is quite angry, while she feels heartbroken:
  Raynor: Sarah? No...
  Kerrigan: I had to get you out...
  Raynor: What have you done...?!
  Kerrigan: What I... had to...
• In Tactics Ogre, if your player goes down the Law route, in which you kill a bunch of innocent people, this will be your response to people like Vice, who challenge your methods and cynical view.
• Faldio from Valkyria Chronicles justifies his shooting of Alicia to activate her Valkyria powers as needed to save Gallia. Unlike most examples of this trope, he felt guilty after he had a chance to think about his actions which led to his Heroic Sacrifice at the Marmota.
• Warcraft:
  • Said word-for-word by Tyrande Whisperwind in Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne regarding the freeing of Illidan Stormrage to fight a greater evil. She does later suggest that she regrets this decision, though.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Said word-for-word by Alexstrasza in response to killing her brother Malygos to end the Nexus War after the raid defeats him. She then says that he had to be stopped, but he was once a hero, and she will mourn his loss.
    • Jaina Proudmoore says this in response to expelling the Sunreavers from Dalaran after finding out that Garrosh used the city's portal network to steal the Divine Bell from Darnassus.
• The bright, colourful and friendly Exiles of WildStar have done some terrible things to survive in a galaxy controlled by their worst enemies, the Dominion.
• We Happy Few: The citizens of Wellington Wells attempted to justify the Very Bad Thing they did to drive the Nazis out of England during World War II by saying it was the last thing they could do. This case is notable as it completely failed, forcing everyone to take their Joy to prevent society from collapsing from sheer ''guilt''!
• Father Bat in Wizard101 clearly regrets having tried to kill Mellori, but he justifies his attempt on the basis that Grandfather Spider wanted Mellori's Semi-Divine power to help him complete his plan, so it would severely damage his plan (perhaps even beyond repair) if something happened that would permanently keep Mellori out of Spider's reach.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown: While the morality is never explicitly discussed, the reality of Dr. Vahlen's interrogations of captured aliens (none of whom survive the experience) is clearly justified as this. As abhorrent as Cold-Blooded Torture of prisoners of war is, it is necessary to save humanity from enslavement at alien hands.
• Liberated soldiers (including the main characters) in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 will often invoke this when justifying their lives of warfare prior to being freed from the Flame Clocks; since their continued existence was dependent on constantly replenishing the Clock's reserves through killing and fighting was all they'd ever been brought up to know, they'll often insist it was an understandable necessity. As the game goes on, some people start to have less conviction in referencing it, and the party speaking to a few later NPCs even question how hastily they'll let themselves off the hook with it.

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