Kick The Dog / Video Games

The Sorceress: What did you think I was going to do with all those dragons; open a zoo?
Bianca: You said just keeping them in our world was enough. You never said you had to kill them!
The Sorceress: I don't have to kill them. It just stops them from wriggling so much.

— Spyro: Year of the Dragon

Digital denizens doing dastardly deeds in Video Games.

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• Abomi Nation:
  • Before the Final Boss battle, Furcifume reanimates all your teammates who died up to that point and forces you to fight them. That alone is awful enough, but he even uses his powers to make them blame you for failing them, which is just unnecessarily cruel.
  • After his lieutenants lose to you a second time, Furcifume kills and absorbs the soul of one, giving him enough power to enter his awakened form. That's cold, but at least it serves a practical purpose. Murdering the rest of his lieutenants immediately after, not so much.
• Absented Age: Squarebound:
  • Rumi spray paints over Karen's missing person poster to demoralize the Sado Band Club.
  • When Mr. Minami protests the disbandment of the Sado Club that he's advising, the vice-principal hits him out of annoyance.
  • Karen Alias hits and spitefully kisses Tarte, out of annoyance for the latter mourning the real Karen's apparent death.
• Ace Attorney has many examples of this.
  • In Episodes 1-5, the true Big Bad of the case is already a douchebag, however the real moment in which the player knows he is a complete Jerkass is when he says that he doesn't feel even a single shred of sympathy or emotion for Ema Skye, a girl who was targeted by a serial killer and who he framed for accidentally killing Neil Marshall by pushing him away when she mistook him for the killer, so that he could blackmail her sister to work for him lest the truth come out. Considering how absolutely sympathetic Ema comes off as when you learn all that, this makes him sound like a HUGE dick.
  • Furio Tigre in Trials and Tribulations has a moment when he mocks Viola Cadaverini's feelings for him (she works with him in Tender Lender, believing that he paid for her life-saving operation out of love and not to avoid her grandfather's wrath).
  • Dahlia Hawthorne from the same game. When she told Phoenix that the entire time they dated she secretly hated his guts, knowing full well how much of a lovesick dope he was for her, she did so just because she wanted to. This blow is softened with the reveal at the end of the game that Phoenix had actually unknowingly been dating her identical sister Iris, who actually did like him back, so their relationship had been genuine the whole time — the real Dahlia had actually spoke Phoenix only a few times, but she hated his "sniveling naivete" and was about to be sent to the gallows, so she figured that she'd get her last licks in.
  • Kristoph from Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney has one of these. In the final case, it's revealed that he is the reason Phoenix lost his badge, which he did purely out of spite, because Zak chose Phoenix over him as a lawyer.
  • In Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, Manfred von Karma dislikes his more principled colleague Byrne Faraday so much that he repeatedly derides him as incompetent, including after he's learned that Faraday has been murdered. Compare how von Karma's protégé Edgeworth and daughter Franziska actually respect Faraday.
• Ace Combat:
  • Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies has a cutscene where the Erusean invaders set up an anti-air gun post on top of a hospital in the narrator's hometown. It also reinforces Yellow 13's Anti-Villain status by having him be disgusted by this.
  • And earlier in the same game is the "Escort" mission, wherein Erusean fighters go after a pair of civilian airliners, which the player must defend.
  • Some Leasath chair forcers from Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception rain bombs on a defenseless city just because they can spare the ordnance. The Hamlet special forces unit goes as far as to unleash a biochemical agent on Santa Elva in what may be a crossing of the Moral Event Horizon.
• In Air Force Delta Strike, the OCC launch a major air assault against a lone, stranded and disabled hospital ship of no tactical or strategic value. Ruth Valentine tries to prevent the ship's destruction, but the mission is a Heads I Win, Tails You Lose mission.
• In Akatsuki Blitzkampf, Murakumo reveals to Akatsuki in his Story Mode that he (Murakumo) was quite the pup kicker in the past. And the puppy that was kicked? Akatsuki himself, since Murakumo is the one who sent Akatsuki into the fateful mission to the Arctic Pole that would make him a Human Popsicle in the first place.
• Alan Wake: The first boss-like foe is revealed to have done this, except with an axe, and to a dog that loved and trusted him, in one of the Nightmare manuscript pages, proving the Darkness is really, really mean.
  • In American Nightmare, Alan's Evil Twin Mr. Scratch kicks a dog every time he appears on the TVs in the game. His very first appearance has him strangling a captive with his own tie. "I beat some information out of him earlier, but this part? This is just for kicks." Later recordings show him slitting the throat of one of Alan's fans and taking great pleasure in stalking Alan's wife.
• In Assassin's Creed, every single Templar that you're assigned to kill gets at least one Kick the Dog moment (breaking a test-subject's legs, pushing somebody into a pile of burning books, murdering a priest out of paranoia, etc.) before you kill him.
• Assassin's Creed II goes further and gives each of the Templar assassination targets a "Kick The Dog" video profile showing why each is a very bad person (with the tragic exception of Dante Moro). The sequel to that though eschews this, being seemingly content to have Cesare Borgia kill a helpless Mario Auditore, with the subsequent sin of the Borgia regime and troops being guilt by association.
• In Baldur's Gate III, you can meet Mayrina, a young woman who is seeking a magical means to resurrect her dead husband Connor. You can tell her you have a magic wand with a resurrection spell and then snap it in half in front of her and watch her fall to the ground in tears. You can also use the wand which brings Connor back as a zombie thrall and then walk off with the shambling body of her beloved husband, leaving Mayrina distraught.
• Banjo-Kazooie involves Gruntilda, being the Wicked Witch that she is, kicking every metaphorical dog she came across. She established herself as hungry for power, starting from expressing envy over Brentilda's beauty. She later on goes from kidnapping Banjo's sister Tooty, and immediately imprisoning the Jinjos, the only ones who can help Banjo and Kazooie stop her, to creating machines that can destroy the environment. In Tooie, she finally crossed the Moral Event Horizon after destroying Banjo's house and killing Bottles, and then murdering her own sisters for their failures. All just so for the safe execution to Take Over the World.
• In The Bard's Tale, if you decided to adopt the cute puppy that the Bard will show some actual affection for — a Druid stops the group to allow their Griffith to stomp on the dog, breaking the poor thing's spine as it gave a pained cry. A literal Kick the Dog and Player Punch in one swoop.
• When Bayonetta formally introduces its Big Bad, Father Balder in Chapter 16, the scene involving him has quite a lot of Kick The Dog moments, but in particular, he tries to kill Luka by having him pulled apart by angels, something he did twenty years earlier to Luka's father once he was no longer useful to him and for trying to expose him for the evil bastard he is, before sending him out a window to his apparent death. And then he mocks Jeanne to Bayonetta's face, revealing that he'd brainwashed her, all to facilitate his Evil Plan. Needless to say, you will want to kick his smarmy ass all over the goddamn city by the time the fight actually starts.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine:
  • Three cartoon shorts were created for Chapter 3. In one, "Snow Sillies," Bendy has just made a new friend in the form of a living snowman when it melts a moment later. Then Boris eats the carrot nose and leaves Bendy crying.
  • Joey Drew was very nice and encouraging towards Susie Campbell, assuring her she would be a great voice actress for Alice — and was implied to date her — only to suddenly replace her with Allison Pendle, crushing Susie's dream of a big role making her famous. And he didn't have the decency to warn her before. Decades later, she still sobs about the things that Joey did and said to her.
  • Also one of Joey Drew's examples, in Chapter 5, there's a recording of him where he responds to a voice memo from Thomas Connor: in response to what Tom told him about the Ink Machine's creation of the prototype Bendy being a failure because he doesn't have a soul, Joey responds that they can get such an ingredient for future attempts because he "owns" thousands of them, and we're led to believe he means his employees.
  • Ink Bendy doesn't have a reason to kill Henry, but whenever he catches Henry, he does so.
• BioShock does this indirectly in an event that could also be considered a Moral Event Horizon. Dr. Suchong forces the protagonist, Jack, who was a genetically conditioned child in Rapture to snap his new puppy's neck. Jack is mentally conditioned to obey him, even though the child protests profusely. This just demonstrates how much of a huge dick Dr. Suchong was.
  • Then there's the fact that he was so abusive with a Little Sister. At least that resulted in him getting mauled by the Big Daddy. You can even see a huge drill in his belly when you find his corpse.
    • For extra dickery, the little girl referred to him as Papa Suchong.
• The 1997 Blade Runner video game features a rather egregious case, where one of the characters butchers the player's dog off-screen.
• BlazBlue
  • Hazama/Yuuki Terumi does a crapton of this on a near-constant basis. It's somewhat Justified since his existence is sustained by people's hatred of him, so going around kicking metaphorical dogs is an actual survival tactic for him. Played somewhat more literally in the fact he isn't shy about kicking young girls while they're down, and what's worse, one of the times he did this, said girl had only just then died, of injuries sustained in a Heroic Sacrifice no less. Yep, what a scumbag.
    • Here's a big one: in Wheel of Fortune, after Tsubaki loses her sight, he gives her a barbed "The Reason You Suck" Speech, telling her that she does everything she does for others only because she wants to feel needed, and she only wants to be close to Jin because she wants him to need her, that she's nothing if she doesn't feel needed and that Jin doesn't care about her. This causes her to break down into tears, at which point Hazama is satisfied with himself and happily trots off. Oh yes, and he had no reason whatsoever to do this. Poor Tsubaki was just unlucky enough to be in a conversation with him.
    • Another somewhat literal example: In Chronophantasma, if Terumi persona wins against Ragna, (who is referred to as being like a puppy or underdog by several other characters,) he walks up to Ragna's corpse, stomps it ten times, then grinds his boot into his face and insults him.
  • His partner Relius is no slouch either. He doesn't need to do it to survive like Terumi does and he's near-emotionless so he doesn't take any joy from it, but his actions have left behind a lot of violated puppies. Among his biggest kicks are turning his daughter and wife into mind-warping automatons, then getting bored and leaving the daughter halfway through the process, forcing his son to finish the job to save her life, and the prolonged and brutal mental torture he put Makoto through in her bad ending, which throws her over the Despair Event Horizon and is one hair shy of being a full-on rape scene.
  • It's no secret that Jin Kisaragi is a massive jerkass but he becomes this taken up to eleven whenever he's with Noel. He will waste no time insulting and belittling her.
• Borderlands:
  • You're told to get an important MacGuffin from a bandit leader named Krom. You know nothing about him except for that. Problem is, he's the first major villain that doesn't wear a mask, so players might think he has some secret, sympathetic past. What's the very first thing he does when you see him? Shoot a cowering Claptrap in the face and push it off a cliff. He. Must. Die.
  • A possible Lampshade Hanging of this trope occurs when Patricia Tannis tells the protagonist that their next target, Baron Flynt, stole the last Eridian Artifact and punched her dog.
• Borderlands 2:
  • Handsome Jack kicks the dog so much, you'd probably imagine he has them taped to his shoes, which makes his constant insistence that he is a hero all the more hypocritical. One of his biggest KTD moments is killing Mordecai's longtime animal companion, Bloodwing. After performing horrific experiments on her, and turning her into a massive monstrosity. And this is before we learn just what he has been doing to his own daughter Angel for the sake of getting to the Vault he wants to open, treatment so painful and horrific that she wants the Vault Hunters to kill her in order to end it.
  • Jack's girlfriend, the Sheriff of Lynchwood, did this during the fall of New Haven by killing Brick's puppy with her bare hands RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM, proving her to be just as evil as Jack.
• Breath of Fire III had a couple characters who are this fairly early in the game. Balio and Sunder are brothers who were first seen killing off your party for stealing from a corrupt mayor. After Ryu survives he will soon approach these two again on the path to Wyndia, one of them will think you're a ghost. After running around a bit his brother will approach him and to prove to him that Ryu is a ghost he will proceed the stab Ryu in the back. Afterward, Ryu will lie unconscious after a short dragon transformation and these two will capture Ryu and present him to the King of Wyndia. By the time they unveil Ryu, he will have already transformed back into his human form where these two brothers get the idea that kicking the cage several times will make Ryu transform back. After this fails both Ryu and the brothers are sent to a jail within the castle. Shortly after princess Nina will appear to free Ryu and was stopped when the brothers call for her to free her promising that they "will not hurt that kid again." After a short hesitation, Nina decides to free them and shortly afterward, the brothers proceed to kick her in the face and ran off with her for a ransom. After having to break out of the cell by ramming into it twice, you chase after the princess. Upon arriving to the scene where she is being held captive these two pricks decide to kick the princess yet again just because they are getting sick of Ryu. Both Ryu and Nina are about 10 at this point in the game.
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare makes it a point to ensure the player won't feel any sympathy for either Khaled al-Asad's revolutionaries or Imran Zakhaev's Ultranationalists. Al-Asad's troops do such pleasant things as mass-executing civilians in broad daylight, publicly executing President Yasir al-Fulani on national television, and detonating a nuclear bomb inside his own city. Zakhaev's Ultranationalists routinely murder civilians, bomb civilian villages indiscriminately, and conduct another mass execution in a village for no apparent reason except to be complete bastards.
  • The nuke starts off as a Kick the Dog moment (very dramatic but otherwise unimportant to the campaign, aside from giving the US, England, and Russia reason to cooperate) but eventually escalates into a legitimate plot point, as it serves as General Shepherd's Start of Darkness for his Magnificent Bastard villainy in Modern Warfare 2.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, General Vladimir gets a rather nasty one in the Allied campaign. After the Allies destroy a massive mind control device built by the Soviets in occupied Chicago in the nick of time, he announces that with the weapon destroyed he has no further use for the city. He proceeds to detonate a nuclear bomb, killing everyone in the city, the Allied attack force and even his own remaining troops.
• Pretty much every character in Corpse Party that's crossed that Moral Event Horizon ends up doing something that makes kicking a dog look kind:
  • Kizami doesn't so much kick a dog as much as he tries to slice open a hamster with a box cutter when he was a little kid. Then of course he stabs his "friend" Kurosaki and kicks him down a hole in the floor to the floor below, then kicks Yuka so hard it knocks her out and then proceeds to flay open Kurosaki while he's still alive.
  • Takamine Yanagihori, the Principal, tries to rape Yoshie Shinozaki and then knocks her down a flight of stairs, breaking her neck and killing her...right in front of her 5-year-old daughter Sachiko; who he then proceeds to strangle to death in front of her mother's body so she won't tell anyone. He even desecrates her body years later by cutting out her tongue.
  • Sachiko brutally murders three elementary school children...by essentially experimenting on each by seeing what she can do with a pair of sewing scissors until she kills each one.
• In Destroy All Humans! 2, Crypto panders to the Black Ninjas by saying that the Furon god Arkvoodle (Or "Darkvoodle," as the ninjas put it) is so evil that he eats kittens for breakfast, and that he's hungry now and wonders if they have any kittens. The Black Ninjas are unimpressed, saying that they eat babies for breakfast.
• Mundus' You Have Failed Me moment on Griffon in the first Devil May Cry before Agony Beaming him to death was very much a dick move, even before what he does to Dante and Trish later on.
• Diablo (1997)
  • Archbishop Lazarus does this early on by leading the people of Tristram into the depths of the Cathedral on a mission to rescue Albrecht, who it is later learned he kidnapped himself to be a vessel for Diablo, just before leaving everybody to die at the hands of the Butcher, the powerful demon that resides in the second level of the Cathedral.
  • Diablo gets in his share of evil too, driving King Leoric murderously insane because he was too strong for the Lord of Terror to possess, just before denying him peace in death by turning him into a powerful skeletal demon known as the Skeleton King.
• Diablo II
  • Andariel's treatment of the Rogue Sisterhood in general. As if corrupting captured Rogues wasn't enough, she turns Rogues that fall to her demons into skeletons and zombies, and those that resist corruption, she has horrifically tortured to death in their own monastery, many of them being put on stakes in her chamber.
  • Mephisto's corruption of the Zakarum faith, to the point of turning the entire high council into demons, is by far the most evil thing he has done.
  • Baal disguising himself as Tyrael and tricking poor Marius into handing over his soulstone to him before killing him in the sanitarium.
• Diablo III
  • Maghda starts out as a Disney-ish evil witch who is after the pieces of the Stranger's sword much like you are. But then she and her Dark Coven burn down the town of Wortham, then murder a good number of people in New Tristram, up to and including Deckard Cain, and then drags the Stranger off to Leoric's torture chambers. And she just gets worse from there.
  • Lazarus, in addition to what he did in the first Diablo, is revealed to have orchestrated the war between Khanduras and Westmarch and done much to speed Leoric toward madness on Diablo's behalf, a particularly low move involving convincing Leoric to have his own queen Asylla executed as a traitor so that no one can stop him from preparing Albrecht for possession by his master.
  • As Belial's forces are attacking Caldeum near the end of Act II, Adria insists on pursuing Belial immediately and that saving its people is a waste of time. Thankfully, neither Leah nor the Nephalem are in the mood to let everyone die. She is also very much indifferent to Leah's suffering when she has to hold the Black Soulstone together in Act III, telling the Nephalem that "everyone suffers" and that a hero is someone who suffers for a cause greater than themselves. Both of these moments serve as foreshadowing for Adria's betrayal at the end of Act III, where she uses Leah as the vessel for Diablo to be reborn as the Prime Evil.
  • As you are closing in on Diablo in Act IV, he very meanly uses the apparitions of dead characters from throughout two major games, both sympathetic (such as Deckard Cain, Marius, and others) and unsympathetic (Maghda and Zoltun Kulle) to taunt you. And the very first one that he uses? Leah. He also taunts you about how you've always been too late to stop him.
  • The very first thing you see a Death Maiden doing in Reaper of Souls is ripping the soul out of an innocent woman who's trying to get out of Westmarch, shortly before turning her and the corpses around her into Reapers to send after you. And what does this angel say as she's doing it? "Those with demon blood must die." It sets the tone quite nicely for both the expansion in general and the Reapers' mission.
  • Later on during one of the first parts of Act V, you're given a side-mission to lay a tormented soul to rest at the request of his wife, who is also a ghost. Pretty standard Diablo fare, right? Except that after you've laid said soul to rest and the couple are preparing to depart to the afterlife, another Death Maiden shows up and denies them the peace they should have in death by turning them into Reapers.
    Yomeeh: Your "eternity" ends now. All souls are forfeit to Malthael!
  • Adria's journal as you're tracking her down in the Blood Marsh not only reveals that she murdered her own father long before she joined Diablo, but the final entry lays bare that she never gave a single shit about her own daughter Leah except as a means to the end of resurrecting her monstrous master.
    Leah was never my daughter. She was Diablo's daughter in truth. I felt blessed to have given the product of my body to my master. He had no interest in me, but in the product of my womb, he found life again. I never flinched when I knew her purpose. Daughters are a cheap thing.
• Disgaea: Hour of Darkness gives us Vulcanus, a Knight Templar angel who believes Flonne has betrayed Celestia for the Netherworld. When he comes across her sleeping, he steals the amulet that is the only thing allowing her to survive in the Netherworld's toxic environment. Even though he sees himself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, if he merely wanted to kill her he could have done it right there, instead of condemning her to a slow death.
  • General Carter is little better. He adopted and raised Jennifer as a daughter, but when she sides with Gordon over him, he has Kurtis put her through Unwilling Roboticisation, then sends her against the heroes as a distraction. Despite his hatred of Gordon, Kurtis finds this disgusting, and eventually pulls a Heel–Face Turn / Heroic Sacrifice.
• Doom famously had its demons kill a bunny and stick the poor thing's head on a spike as they invaded Earth at the end of the original game. To make things worse, The Ultimate Doom reveals that the bunny in question was Doomguy's pet, Daisy. If you thought Doomguy was pissed at the demons before...
• In Double Homework, while blackmailing the protagonist, Dennis tries to convince the whole class that the protagonist and Henry are starting a gay porn streaming site in which they will personally perform together. He only does it because he likes picking on the protagonist.
• Dragon Age: Origins
  • As if his "Sound the retreat!" at the Battle of Ostagar weren't enough, Loghain's real Kick The Dog event is having his daughter locked up and threatening to let Arl Rendon Howe execute her. Given that this is Dragon Age, a realm far on the cynical side of things, he can still join your team and become The Atoner. Loghain even has several more Kick the Dog moments which the player can all use to argue against him as the whole point of the Landsmeet. Poisoning Arl Eamon? Selling his own people as slaves? Condoning Howe's torture of nobles and the purging of the Denerim Alienage? Check.
  • If a human noble!Warden confronts Howe, he'll describe every detail of Eleanor Cousland's death and what he did with Oren and Orianna's body. The player may already want him dead by this point but now he just put the last nail in his coffin. Really, Howe's just an asshole — Arl Eamon even says that Howe is the kind of guy who would actually kick puppies just to show off how much of an asshole he is.
  • Everything Bann Vaughan Kendalls and his men do to the elves of the Denerim Alienage during the City Elf Origin counts as one of these, but in particular, he makes your best friend Shianni the first elven woman he and his men rape, just because the bastard wants to make her suffer for defying him by laying him out with a bottle in an earlier scene.
  • The Warden (i.e. YOU) has many opportunities to kick the dog; some of the dogs you can potently kick include your companions.
    • In one quest Camen’s Lament gives you the chance to unite two young lovers; however, you can kick the quest-giver, the quest-giver’s love interest, and then manipulate the LI into kicking the quest-giver. You can then subtly kick the quest-giver again by accepting a reward for your "help." Or you can sleep with the LI and brag about it to the quest-giver. Really, that quest gives you an obscene amount of ways to kick the dog.
    • In the same village, a quest-giver asks you to find his wife (who turns out to be a werewolf). Save before talking to this guy, you'll want to run this conversation multiple times.
• Dragon Age II:
  • This game doesn't give the player nearly as many brutal dog-kicking moments as Origins, but he/she can still do things like hand Isabela over to the Qunari at the end of the second act, and give Fenris, an escaped slave, back to his former master Danarius during his last personal quest.
  • Your companions get a few as well. Particularly notable examples include Anders and Fenris during Merrill's personal quests where they can be quite cruel to her, and Anders alone gets a couple kicks in with Fenris such as mocking him for his breakup with Hawke in act 2 if he was romanced and, even more brutally, when he happily approves of handing Fenris back to Danarius (see above). He's the only companion that actually gains friendship points from this; everyone else sees it as a really, really, really low move.
• The intro scene to the web game Dungeon Rampage features a literal example, with Lord Dinglepus feeding a little girl's puppy to one of his orc bruiser minions.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Two (now extinct) races of Mer (Elves) took the "abusive" part of Abusive Precursors down an extreme dog-kicking path.
    • The Ayleids (Wild Elves) of Cyrodiil enslaved and tortured the Nedes (ancestors to most of the modern races of Men) in unimaginably cruel ways. Some of their most horrific treatments included: forcing them all to work naked, force-feeding them hallucinogenic drugs and watching their reactions, creating sculptures out of their bones and gardens out of their entrails, and setting human children on fire and setting hungry animals on them. Eventually, their slaves revolted, overthrew them, and eventually drove their race to apparent extinction.
    • The Dwemer (Deep Elves or "Dwarves") of all of Northern Tamriel were a very scientific and extremely technologically advanced race. For the most part, they wanted to be left alone by the other races, which would put them closer to the category of Neglectful Precursors. However, their treatment of the Falmer (Snow Elves) was about as abusive as it gets. With the once great Falmer civilization of Skyrim in ruins following the invasion of the Atmorans/Proto-Nords, some of the survivors turned to their Dwemer cousins for shelter. The Dwemer took them in, but were anything but benevolent. They genetically altered the Falmer so that they have to consume blindness-inducing mushrooms to survive. So great were their alterations that their souls turned from sentient "black" souls to "white" souls, leaving them little better than animals. Eventually, the Dwemer would attempt something (involving the heart of a dead god) which caused their entire race to blink out of existence. Now, the Falmer lurk in the old Dwemer ruins and other underground areas of Skyrim, a shattered shell of what they once were.
  • Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness, is prone to instances of this:
    • In Volume XII of the 16 Accords of Madness, Sheogorath uses a Batman Gambit to get fellow Daedric Prince Malacath to kill his own son, after promising said son's soul to Sheogorath. Malacath isn't the nicest deity around, but it's a low blow nonetheless.
    • An almost literal case with Barbas, Clavicus Vile's external conscience who takes the form of a Big Friendly Dog. For unexplained reasons, Sheogorath hates Barbas and seeks to poison him.
  • Skyrim
    • The Imperial Captain at the very beginning of the game gets one by insisting that you be executed anyway despite not being on the list of those slated for the headsman. If you follow Ralof into Helgen Keep following Alduin's assault, you get to kill her during the first battle with the Imperials.
    • The Silver Hand don't just hunt werewolves, they capture and torture them to death as well. They seem to have a hatred for regular wolves too given the mutilated bodies strung around their camps — making this a rather literal example of the trope.
    • Grelod the Kind at the orphanage in Riften gets introduced telling the children that she'll hand out extra beatings to those that shirk their duties, and spitefully telling them that they'll never be adopted. This is your cue that you shouldn't feel bad about being there to murder her for the Dark Brotherhood. The children certainly won't.
    • Your first visit to Windhelm has two Nords harassing a Dunmer out of racism and on suspicion of being an Imperial spy.
    • If you didn't hate Mercer Frey of the Thieves' Guild questline already for betraying you in Snow Veil Sanctum, you will definitely hate him when you learn about the hell he put Karliah through after murdering Gallus, the previous Guildmaster, for the Skeleton Key, as well as his robbery of the Thieves' Guild stores with that very key.
    • During the Dawnguard storyline, Lord Harkon gets one with his first words to his daughter Serana, asking about the Elder Scroll in her possession, making it clear that he cares more about that thing than about Serana's well being.
• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Sunny Day and Funny Face are such funny comic relief! Look at them avoiding chores around the mothership, being treated like flunkies, and directly attacking defenseless civilian population centers. The hero team comes across them for the first time in Italy, attacking a town of no particular strategic value. Turns out Sunny and Funny merely prefer civilian targets because they're easier to kill, and get upset when the heroes show up since they expected no "army" resistance.
• The first thing a minor villain does during his introduction in Fable II is kick the player's dog.
  • That bit-part bandit is nothing compared to Reaver's puppy-punting spree. Upon his introduction, he kills a sculptor and an artist trying to capture his likeness, sends you off to get your soul drained by ancient demons so he can stay eternally youthful, kills a character you've known since childhood, and then informs you cheerfully he's just betrayed you to the very person who...dammit, Lucien needs a new section.
    • The stories around Lord Lucien in your childhood depict him as a noble, if somewhat eccentric man. In fact, he even offers to adopt you and your sister, both homeless orphans... unless he gets exactly the result he does get from a simple test which reveals that the two of you have the blood of heroes, at which point he shoots your helpless, unarmed sister in the chest, and then shoots you in the chest, sending you out a window in a tall tower while Rose is still alive enough to hear. You get better. After this point, he becomes a fairly standard Big Bad, but at the end of the storyline he reveals that again, to try to cut off the heroic bloodline, he's personally murdered your spouse and any children you have, and then kills your dog when it takes a bullet to save your life.
  • Sometimes when a villager sees your dog, he/she will taunt your dog and then kicks the dog in the face.
  • Peter Molyneux has said in interviews that this trope was one of the main purposes of the dog in Fable 2 — the dog is designed to make the player grow attached to him, so attacks against him become the player character's Berserk Button.
  • The sequel also uses the literal meaning in the DLC. After being strapped to an electrical chair by the person who you thought was helping you, having him suck out your powers as a Hero, him transforming into an exact copy of you in order to destroy the crown, he shoots your dog with a magical fireball. Unfortunately, that was a bad idea, considering that the Hero loves that dog more than anything and after yelling "Never. Hurt. My. Dog!", breaks free of the chair and then goes on to kill him.
• Fallout 4:
  • One thing that really establishes just how morally grey this game's incarnation of the Brotherhood of Steel are is their leader, Elder Arthur Maxson, giving a long speech about how Synths are abominations even worse than the atomic bombs that destroyed civilisation 200 years ago, that they must be exterminated down to the last, and that no thinking machine could ever be the equal of a man. What makes this such a Kick the Dog is that you will have definitely met Nick Valentine and Codsworth (who are a Synth and a Mister Handy respectively, and both are sentient and very nice) by this point in the story, and they aren't even the only examples of friendly robots you will encounter.
  • The Institute do this all the time. Examples include kidnapping wastelanders to test the FEV on them essentially for shits and giggles and then releasing the converted mutants into the wastes rather than euthanising them, replacing the patriarch of a wastelander family with a synth plant to monitor them and the settlement they live in with the intention to wipe them all out should the synth be exposed, occasionally attacking your settlements and other neutral civilians, ordering all of the other inhabitants of Vault 111 besides Shaun and the player character to be left to suffocate to death in their pods, sabotaging the formation of the Commonwealth Provisional Government and leaving the Commonwealth in the state it's currently in, and wiping out the entire population of University Point just because a girl stumbled upon a cache of pre-war military technology buried under the town. They're not very kind to their synths either — they're threatened with brain-wiping if they show signs of developing autonomy, they're not even considered to be actual people, and in one scene as you're touring the Institute, an asshole scientist wants to have a Gen-2 scrapped for having a faulty cleaning chip instead of, you know, having it sent for repairs. Before then capping it off by expressing his hope that "something useful" will come out of it.
    • One location, the Sandy Coves Convalescent Home, houses several non-hostile Mr. Handies as well as a bunch of house cats. Once you're further in, a synth patrol will show up and kill every "hostile presence" unless you stop them. Yes, that includes the cats.
  • In a way that involves dogs, X6-88 really doesn't seem to like Dogmeat and actually wants to put him down if the dog is injured. He'll even disapprove of you using a Stimpack on Dogmeat, saying that they should save it for important people: you and him. Strong also disapproves of this and wants to eat the injured Dogmeat.
  • When Paladin Danse is discovered to be a synth, Cait is one of the few companions (aside from MacReady and Strong) to not help defend Danse, assuming the worst and deeming him a traitor. She, like Elder Maxson, will stop referring Danse as "he" and only as "it". Especially telling as characters that Danse was nothing but rude to (Nick, Curie and Hancock) will still stand up for him at this point.
    • Near-literally, Cait is the only companion besides X6-88 who shows a dislike for Dogmeat, even derisively calling him a "dirty little mole rat". Even the aforementioned Paladin Danse, whose interactions with the others range from condescension to outright hostility, has a soft spot for the wastelander dog.
  • If you take out the Institute with the Minutemen, Proctor Quinlan will applaud you for using them as "cannon fodder" and can't seem to grasp that you led them instead of the Brotherhood because you had faith in their abilities as their General.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • The first act you witness the Van Graffs committing is executing one of their own employees, in order to intimidate a business partner trying to negotiate a better price for their services.
  • Jean-Baptiste does this in one of the quests the Van Graffs give you. He orders you to bring Cass to him. If you do so... Well, here's the result. Why does he do it? Good question. He even says that they and the Crimson Caravans have forced her out of business (through immoral means, mind), but he still wants to kill her because it would be fun. Since he requires your help to accomplish the deed, you're pretty much kicking the dog too.
  • Also, one of the possible answer to Doc Mitchell's word association psychiatric examination for dog is "kick", and "human shield" for "mother". He'll then state that sometimes through these procedures you learn things that you'd rather not know about.
  • Also, you can kick an opponent with the ranger takedown, allowing you to kick dogs.
  • In the Old World Blues DLC, one of the Think Tank scientists, Dr. Borous, had a dog named Gabe, who was apparently his best and only friend. Gabe was very loving towards Borous, even when Borous began to feed him chems and perform cruel experiments. The player actually fights Gabe at one point (turned giant from Borous' chems), and if they take his food bowl, Borous will show remorse for the death of his once-beloved pet.
  • Your first encounter with Caesar's Legion is in Nipton, which has been made a ghost town because they've not only slaughtered everyone, but crucified the Powder Gangers that had set up shop there. And that's only the beginning — when they aren't massacring and enslaving entire communities, the monsters entertain themselves by raping women, giggling and joking about how much they enjoy raping women, molesting children, watching slaves fight for their lives, eating human flesh, committing human sacrifice, taking teddy bears away from children to make them cry, executing the sick and weak, taking potshots at Ghouls, telling passersby that they deserved to be lashed to a cross, and gushing about how much they will enjoy rampaging west and slaughtering their enemies.
• Fate/Grand Order gives us a supremely heinous one on the part of Lev Lainur toward the end of the opening singularity. Not only is this guy responsible for the sabotage of Chaldea's Command Room and the Rayshift experiment via a bomb (killing a good number of Chaldea's reserve team and requiring Mash Kyrielight to form a contract and become a Demi-Servant simply to survive herself), but the bomb that he used was placed directly underneath the feet of Olga Marie Animusphere, the Director of Chaldea, meaning that poor Olga was Dead All Along, doomed to vanish as soon as she returned with the heroes to the modern era. And because this just isn't enough for Professor Lev, he then proceeds to go the extra mile by sending poor Olga on a crash-course into Chaldeas itself, which has the effect of tearing her apart on a molecular and spiritual level, and essentially dooming her to "infinite living death" — one of the worst fates ever suffered by a Nasuverse character, and one that poor Olga doesn't even come close to deserving. It is little wonder that many players of FGO hate Lev Lainur with a passion.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Kefka from Final Fantasy VI kicks the dog on more than one occasion throughout the game, but probably the most notable instance of this is when he kills General Leo. It wasn't enough for him to simply cast an illusion copy of himself for Leo to vanquish, or even to kill Leo and burn the village. No, he just HAD to also project an illusion of Gestahl "admitting" that he set Leo up to collect more espers before killing him.
  • In Final Fantasy VII, Tseng lets you know he's a bad guy when he backhands Aerith. Where this becomes more cruel is a later reveal that Tseng has a Villainous Crush on her.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, Seifer actually goes and kicks a mongrel the first time he's in the party.
  • In Final Fantasy XII, Vayne crosses the line when he seizes power. While Drace has opposed his authority and openly rebelled, proving Vayne couldn't trust her, there was no need to have her killed... And even less need to command Gabranth, which he refers to as a dog, to kill her himself in order to prove his loyalty. That was really cold and cruel, since Gabranth and Drace were comrades, and perhaps even friends. One scene, two dogs kicked.
  • Gabranth does this quite a few times? Frame his own brother for murder? Check! Torture him for two years? Check! Try to goad Ashe into a rage by describing how he murdered her father? Check and mate.
  • There's also this gem from Dissidia 012: Final Fantasy, specifically Kefka's treatment of Kuja after the latter is defeated/killed by Lightning:
  Kefka: Oopsie! Someone went and lost, didn't he? (Kefka approaches a keeling Kuja) You know what they say about second place: Completely pathetic! (Kuja fades away in clouds of darkness) Meh. Don't sweat it, a little thing like that's not gonna be the end of you. Should be the end of that rebellious phase of yours, though! The next time you fight, it will be study time! (mimes writing) All over again!
  • In Mobius Final Fantasy, Garland grabs a Moogle and hurls it off into the distance.
• In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, The Vamp Sonia sends her daughter Nino and teenage contract-killer Jaffar to kill the Prince of Bern for Lord Negal. She also gives Jaffar an order to kill Nino, then justifies it Hannibal Lecture style by saying that the Prince's killer must be killed to avoid panic in Bern. Nino and Jaffar don't go through with it, and actually defect to your side after a Quirky Miniboss Squad member runs her mouth about Sonia's plan in front of Nino.
  • Even worse was the fact that she just promised Nino that she would hug her, just once, if she finished the mission. Worse still, she kills her foster father and reveals that she killed her entire family of mages when she was a baby, by using her as a human shield. Wooooooooow, Sonia.
  • And from the same game, just in case you didn't know that Prince Zephiel's father Desmond was one huge bastard, they show him ordering a baby fox to be killed. A baby fox! A baby fox Zephiel had given to his baby sister Guinevere! And Guinevere was Daddy's favorite!
  • Ephidel, instead of kicking the dog, stabs an old man to death after the other questions him.
• Deconstructed in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn with the minor boss Laverton. He takes several civilians prisoner and threatens to execute them if Micaiah doesn't surrender, and then orders them killed anyway when she complies. This callous act of utter cruelty causes his subordinate Fiona to mutiny and join the liberation army shortly afterwards.
• Fire Emblem: Awakening:
  • Dalton, who spearheads the Empire of Valm's invasion of Ylisse, kills an unarmed civilian for annoying him shortly after arriving.
  • Excellus, a tactician for Valm, is one of the cruelest characters in the game. After the party defeats and kills Yen'fay, who serves Valm, Excellus shows up to tell Yen'fay's sister Say'ri(who fights for the heroes) that Yen'fay only joined Valm to protect her, just for the pain it will cause her.
• Fire Emblem Fates
  • Just before the final battle of the Birthright route, King Garon expresses only mild surprise when told about his children Xander and Elise's deaths, remarking that the former was "quite a capable pawn," and not even mentioning the latter. Corrin, their adoptive sibling is outraged.
  • On the Conquest route, Nohrian mage Zola lures the Hoshidan royals into a trap, captures them and plans on executing them all. He wonders out loud whether Sakura, the youngest of the royals, will cry when her turn to die comes.
  • In Niles' C-Support with Camilla, he, one of the biggest jerks among the playable cast, alludes to being okay with leaving a lost puppy out in the cold.
• Ghost of Tsushima:
  • In a flashback, during an argument with a young Jin, Ryuzo told him that Lord Shimura did not want him and would replace him as soon as he has his own biological heir. Considering Jin was orphaned and Shimura was his father figure, it was a harsh thing to say and Jin almost runs away because of it.
  • The Shogun ordering Shimura to kill Jin. While Shimura may disapprove of Jin's "dishonorable" tactics, he still cares for Jin as if he was his own son. It can be overheard from gossiping samurai that the Shogun is not pleased with Shimura after losing control of his nephew and failing to capture the Khan. The Shogun labelling Jin a criminal and giving Shimura that order is essentially ordering a father to kill their own child or make a father watch as their child kills him.
• In the God of War series, Kratos does this a lot, Video Game Cruelty Potential notwithstanding.
  • Kratos' very first Kick the Dog moment is also an Establishing Character Moment: when a Hydra attacks the ship that Kratos is on, it chows down on the ship's captain who has a key that Kratos needs. After killing the Hydra in badass fashion, Kratos climbs inside it to retrieve the key. The ship captain thanks him profusely for coming back for him, only to receive this cold response: "I didn't come back for you." And then Kratos rips the key off him and sends him down into the Hydra's gullet for no reason at all. Ladies and gentlemen, our hero.
    • In the Valhalla DLC of God of War Ragnarök, Kratos (now Older and Wiser) reflects on this particular action as one of his biggest regrets since unlike his other deeds there's no real justification for it: He was just pointlessly cruel to a helpless old man.
  • You can even literally kick Cerberus pups — and in the third game, you can even get an achievement trophy called "Obedience School" for doing this to 50 pups.
  • And as assholish as Kratos can be, his enemies are even worse. Ares, Zeus, Baldur, Thor and Odin, his primary nemeses in the series, do much to earn Kratos's (and the player's) hatred throughout the games. The other gods are not much better.
  • God of War Ragnarök has Heimdall, who not only is casually rude to most people he interacts with, but kicks his mount after Kratos kills it in Heimdall's boss fight, apparently out of annoyance with it for failing him.
• The announcers in Gradius Gaiden will give you words of encouragement if you run out of lives early on, but later on, they rub your defeat in your face with more disparaging comments:
  "Poor boy..."
  "Get outta here, forget about it!"
  "Hahahahaha!"
• A literal case is mentioned offhand in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: General Skarr's line for starting a match is him gleefully saying that he kicks puppies.
• In .hack//G.U., there's Atoli who spends most of the series as the game's resident dog being kicked by everyone in Haseo's Rogues Gallery. Even Sakaki, who found her on a suicide website and convinced her to play The World rather than kill herself.
  • Not just in-game, her real-life self also gets kicked by almost everyone, including her parents.
• King Bohan from Heavenly Sword is incredibly cruel towards his own son Roach, who just wants to make him proud. During the fight where Nariko faces Roach, Bohan threatens to kill his pets if he can't take her down, which sends poor Roach into a panic.
• Homefront, the KPA does this all the time, whether it's shooting up a child's parents in front of him (and possibly the child himself), or the mass graves, or massacring civilians with or without provocation, or destroying a town in retaliation.
• In the Homeworld mission "Return to Kharak" your entire planet has been annihilated in a massive firestorm, leaving the only survivors a group of colonists floating in cryogenic stasis. The only enemies in the mission are attacking them, and will completely ignore your attacking fleet in favor of destroying the helpless civilians.
• In Jak II: Renegade, the Krimzon Guard — a fascist organization led by Baron Praxis — that holds Haven City in the grip of oppression at least seems to have a redeeming trait in that they keep it safe from the monstrous Metal Heads. Then, partway through the game, you find out that they've been bribing the Metal Heads to make ineffectual attacks for them to thwart — rather than staying quiet until they can stage an effective assault — in order to justify their brutal rule as necessary in face of this danger. Because, y'know, just being fascists who tortured the main character for two years didn't make them bad enough.
  • And in the first cutscene after Jak escapes prison, you get this little gem.
    Krimzon Guard: By order of his eminence, the Grand Protector of Haven City, Baron Praxis, everyone in this section is hereby under arrest for suspicion of harboring underground fugitives. Surrender and die!
    Daxter: Ahh, excuse me sir, don't you mean surrender OR die?
    Kor: Not in this city!
• Kingdom Hearts: Almost all the Organization XIII in it's original and true incarnations does this. Everyone from the wimpy Demyx to the complete bastard Xehanort. Xaldin's whole role was to kicking the Beast into despair, Xigbar attempted to snipe Sora's head off for no reason, Vexen had experimented on Living People, Luxord attack the Port Royal with the help of The Heartless and the remnents of Barbossa's crew, Zexion's into Mind Rape, Axel betrays many of his comrades with no remorse, Marluxia was so evil that Sora himself showed rage for his cruelty and no remorse when he wasted him, Larxene who spent most of her time kicking down both Sora and Namine, Saix kidnaps Kairi and then force Sora to kneel to see her only to refuse just to make him angry along with his cruel treatment on Xion in Days, Vanitas snaps Ventus's toy in half in front of Aqua, Dark Riku corrupts the original Baymax before sending him against Hiro & the others, Young Xehanort mocks Sora before going back to his timeline, Ansem corrupts Aqua into a Xehanort clone, Xemnas steps on Lea's hand before calling him useless traitor, Terranort strangles Aqua & Ven to near-death and Xehanort kills Kairi just to provide a motivation for Sora to fight. How did these people gain their leather pants!?
• In the pre-match cutscene before fighting Saiki in The King of Fighters XIII, Saiki killed Mukai when the latter requests to let him handle the fighters instead.
  • Goenitz also had one of these moments in KOF 96 when he injured Chizuru Kagura to then step into the battlefield and challenge the heroes. In one of the mangas, he also gives a Breaking Lecture to Mai when she's in the middle of an Heroic BSoD, then beats Chizuru and Kensou within inches of their lives; in another manga, he got Iori bound in a Crucified Hero Shot and made him go intermittently into the Riot of the Blood when he was completely defenseless, despite the pleas of Kyo's girlfriend Yuki.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, if The Exile manages to get their Robot Buddy T3-M4 to open up about his mission to Bring Help Back for Revan, poor T3 is rewarded with a burst of Force Lightning from Kreia for seemingly no reason. She knew that T3 was Revan's droid, and the only entity which he chose to take with him into the Unknown Regions. When she attacks T3, she hisses "Betrayal!" in reference to what T3, Revan, and you have done: T3 has betrayed Bastila's confidence by revealing his true mission to the Exile, Revan long ago betrayed her own teachings by placing his trust in machines rather than in flesh and blood as she had taught him, and you have betrayed her presently, just as Revan did, by putting your faith in T3. It's clear that her fury is directed at multiple entities, and T3 is only the unfortunate recipient.
• In Layton Brothers: Mystery Room, the culprits are given particular moments where they're shown how horrible they truly are to make them particularly detestable. Key examples include:
  • Goldie, who gets a "new man" while her husband's murder is still being investigated that she literally treats like a dog, complete with a leash (although it seems to be consensual). She even brings him into her interrogation, prompting Alfendi to ask her "friend" to wait outside. Later in her interrogation, she starts going on about how she's owed the insurance money from her late husband's death and it's gonna make her loaded. Lucy becomes particularly irate at how she seems to care more about the money than the fact her husband was killed.
  • Strapping already had an affair on his to-be wife, Gloria. After Gloria ends up getting shot dead, he seems more interested in flirting with the detective constable investigating her death than he does anything else, which he does, many times, and every time said detective constable, aka Lucy, tries shooting him down. The actual kick the dog moment though, comes when the truth behind Gloria's death is revealed, something that makes even Strapping himself distraught: her heart was broken due to the affair, so she killed herself in an elaborate suicide.
  • De Bonair, on top of killing a popular radio DJ, murdered a completely innocent 18-year-old woman to boot. The case wastes no time empathizing that said woman was at the happiest moment of her entire life at the moment when he went and murdered her out of nowhere, and how terrifying it must've been for her. The kick the dog moment comes after his guilt has been thoroughly established, when Alfendi asks him if he even knows the name of the woman he murdered. He gets it wrong. Lucy is not happy at this, and says that he really is a total scumbag. It makes the fact that he was ultimately caught out by said woman's effort to indicate to investigators that she was murdered with her final strength all the more simultaneously satisfying, and bittersweet.^note He tried making it look like a suicide, by holding the poison in a perfume bottle and putting it in her hand. She was bewildered, but she wanted to leave some kinda mark that she was killed so she used her last effort to fling the bottle at a nearby wall. The culprit ends up calling the container a "perfume bottle" before even forensics had managed to work out what shattered pieces originally were.
• The Ocarina of Time version of Ganondorf has so many of these moments that it is hard to pinpoint which is his Moral Event Horizon:
  • Killing the Deku Tree for refusing to hand over the spiritual stone of the forest.
  • Blasting Link to the ground with an energy blast, for refusing to tell him where the princess went.
  • Causing the Hyrule Castle Town to become a charred wasteland populated by the undead, which leaves unstated how he did it, but judging by other actions of his in the game one could reasonably assume he burned it to the ground.
  • Attempting to feed all the Gorons to a dragon in the fire temple, as a "warning to those who would oppose" him.
  • Freezing nearly the entire Zora population under the ice.
  • Letting Bongo Bongo loose to cause a fire in Kakariko village.
• The Legend of Tian-ding has the revelation of Shimada's true nature to Matsumoto at the end, by mortally injuring a farmer who attempts defending his home and stomping the man to death, much to Matsumoto's horror. And to rub it in, Shimada then orders Matsumoto to lead the massacre of said village and burn it to the ground, enough to make Matsumoto pull a Defector from Decadence.
• LEGO Universe has a rather brutal example, upon the rather idiotic creation of the Maelstrom, the first thing the one Spiderling did was crush a puppy with its leg. It gets repaired though, don't worry.
• Love & Pies: In the Rival Season Pass, Edwina prepares her slingshot to hit a bird's nest, but Mei stops her because it's illegal to harm Appleton's animals. Edwina then claims that she was just going to scare them away before she can build Global Megacorp MegaWarehouse on where she destroyed the town's historic gatehouse, but Mei fixes up the clocktower and relocates the nest there instead, frustrating Edwina.
• Luminous Arc begins with the player in command of a group of Church soldiers hunting "Witches" — until it turns out that some of the Witches are actually friendly, even willing to help break a curse that has turned one character's arm into a dragon claw. Unfortunately, a superior officer appears to remind your party of its duties, ordering you to attack the Witches. The characters poignantly struggle with this moral conflict...for about 10 seconds, at which point the knight gets fed up and decides to kill everyone, incidentally revealing that he had been planning to kill the party anyway once they disposed of the Witches. And if THAT wasn't enough, when the accompanying bishop asks him not to kill the cursed character, the knight's response is: "We only need the arm to do experiments on, right?".
• LunarLux: In the finale, Saros offers to return Thomas in exchange for Nickle's anticores. When Nickle agrees, Saros reveals that he already stole the anticores and that he never had any intention of doing a hostage trade. He just wanted to savor the party's anguish. Later, he gloats about trapping Thea Grey in the Phantom Realm and leaving her for dead in front of her family.
• In Maniac Mansion, you can put a hamster into a microwave, set it on and the rodent will explode in a bloody mess. You can even give the remains to the original owner...
• Mass Effect is quite fond of this trope. Saren shoots keepers (which can't fight back) when he attacks the Presidium. He also attacks a peaceful human colony then tries to utterly destroy it, just so he can use the Beacon. The sequel gives us Warden Kuril, who casually guns down the prisoners in his care and orders vicious beatings and is eventually revealed to have a sideline of selling choice prisoners into slavery.
  • In Mass Effect 3, after Thessia falls to Reaper forces, Shepard is emotionally devastated, convinced that s/he failed and that it was all his/her fault. Kai Leng, who you've probably got plenty of reasons to hate by this point, rubs it in by sending Shepard a message backing that up, telling him/her that Thessia fell simply because s/he wasn't good and strong enough to prevent it.
  • Hell, Shepard him/herself can do this on occasion, mostly in the third game, In particular, there's one part where Samara will attempt to kill herself so she won't have to kill her daughter. If Shepard doesn't prevent this, then s/he has the option of killing the daughter anyway, simply because she might be a threat later on.
  • Clone!Shepard from the Citadel DLC is full of vicious comments to give to Shepard and his or her crew, some of which strike pretty damned low.
    "Like you, Garrus Vakarian. You're nothing but a burnt-out cop past his prime."
    "Like you, Dr. T'Soni. You're nothing but a college cheerleader pretending to be a soldier."
    "Like you, Tali'Zorah vas Normandy. I'm not sure whether to kill you with a bullet or just take off your helmet and cough."
    "Like you, Major Alenko/Lieutenant-Commander Williams. I would have picked the other one on Virmire. Ashley/Kaidan-something?"
  • The Citadel DLC Big Bad also throws Shepard's hamster cage (with the poor hamster still inside) in the trash can, with a note attached requesting it be sent to an animal shelter to be euthanized. Needless to say, Shepard is pissed.
    Shepard: "Please send this to an animal shelter for proper disposal, as a warship is not an appropriate..." Oh ho ho...that is not okay.
• Max Payne:
  • In the first Max Payne game, Max mentions that Vinnie Gognitti, who's cowardly and inept enough to be a borderline Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, takes out his frustrations on underage addicts and call girls. This ends up being Offstage Villainy, but it's mentioned during the second game's recap of the first.
  • The very first thing you see UFE do in Max Payne 3 is finish off some downed crooks you just took down at the end of the first mission, shooting them right there and then instead of arresting them. Considering that these guys are supposed to be cops, this is a very bad sign. They later turn out to be murdering homeless people and harvesting their organs.
• The Mega Man series has some examples:
  • Mega Man (Classic):
    • In Super Adventure Rockman, Shadow Man mocks Quick Man when the latter sacrifices his life to save Rockman as he realises what's happening. Shadow Man gets his comeuppance when he gets torn to pieces by the gunfire Rockman unleashes from his Mega Buster in retaliation.
      Shadow Man: What a show he put on for my blade!
      Rockman screams in a rage and readies his Mega Buster.
      Rockman: Shadow Man! I will not forgive you! Come! Victory or defeat!
      Shadow Man: You can only escape death once! (Shadow Man jumps back and readies his Shadow Blade.) This is your final burial!
  • Mega Man Legends:
    • In the Japanese dub, when you reach a scene where you have to get the dog Paprika away from Tron, players have the option of just merely kicking the dog, causing him to scamper away. In the English dub, however, players only have the option of "telling" the dog to go away.
    • Mega Man also had the option to kick cats and shoot birds in the Japanese dub which would slowly cause him to turn "evil": his armor would get darker and if you made him evil enough you'd trigger a hidden cutscene where Roll, in her sleep, worries about all the horrible things Mega Man is doing and would ultimately cause her development costs to double, while doing good things like giving her presents would turn him lighter again. This can still be done in the English dub, but only by kicking soda machines to steal drinks, kicking garbage into the Jetlag Bakery, or stealing money.
    • This is also your warning that Mega Man Juno is no joke. While the Bonne Family were willing to give threats, steal, and destroy the town itself, they drew the line before actual murder. When Juno announces his plan to "purge all the island inhabitants", the Bonnes are disgusted by this and come to Mega Man's aid.
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has Senator Armstrong pull a literal version of this, where he kicks Blade Wolf away shortly before the final battle. Sort of understandable, as Blade Wolf had just given Sam's sword to Raiden to help him.
• Minotaur Hotel: The main thing that decides which route you are in is how many times you send Asterion to the valley. Never send him to the valley at all and you're most likely going to get the main route. Send him once and you'll get the Lukewarm route. Any more than that and you'll get the Ruthless route. Why is sending Asterion to the valley such a terrible thing? The valley is filled with terrible monsters, and they will go after Asterion regardless of what he does. Convincing him that you won't ever send him to the valley in the main route is a big reason why he becomes very friendly towards you.
• Fassad spends a great deal of his on-screen time in Mother 3 electrocuting the adorable little monkey Salsa.
• The Neverhood: The Clockwork Beast has an entire system devoted to detecting and retrieving bears. It uses this to rip the head off Big Robot Bil's teddy bear.
• Nintendo Wars: The tenth mission of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin sets three "civilian" units (in gameplay terms no different from regular ones) directly in front of the enemy. Two of these units can escape, but there is no way whatsoever to save the third. The game goes to these lengths to set up a dogkicking moment for the Beast, who proceeds to slaughter the doomed unit for fun. With a War Tank. (For reference, that's the strongest ground unit in the game. The target is an Infantry — the weakest ground unit in the game... before taking into account it's a civilian in story terms. Talk about swatting flies with a cannon.)
• Most of the later assassins in No More Heroes enjoy kicking the nearest canine. Since the viewpoint character isn't exactly a friend to all living things, this is probably there to justify the bad guy's eventual gory deaths.
  • Number 2, Bad Girl, states that she feels no remorse about killing anyone while slaughtering clones for fun, Number 3, Speed Buster, kills a major trainer in a rather messy manner, and Number 7, DestroyMan, cheats so consistently it's remarkable.
  • As a twist, a good bunch do not kick the dog, however. In comparison...
• In Octopath Traveler II, Deputy Cubaryi casually mocks Temenos at the end of his third chapter for being upset over Crick's death. While she'd already been snide before then, the worst thing she'd done was basically just be kind of rude and complain about Temenos getting in her way. This sends her way past the line and lets the player know that Cubaryi has few to no redeeming traits.
• Odin Sphere: Occurs with Onyx during the Armageddon chapter on the True End route. Right when Mercedes is mourning Ingway's death after discovering his corpse, he comes over and gleefully teases her over the fact that her forest has been burned to the ground, ignoring the fact that she's grieving her lover in favor of making her feel even worse. Goes on to become Shoot the Dog in the ensuing boss fight.
• In Overlord, you have a tower, which, naturally, is your base of operations, housing an armory, a forge, even a private chamber for your mistress. It also features a jester, (a brown in a jester's outfit, kinda like a toned-down Monster Clown,) who will laud your various accomplishments, and whom you can kick in the head. It serves no purpose, has no effect on your corruption meter, and if you do it enough, the jester will cower in fear of your mighty boot, and later comment on how mean you are to jesters. But you are supposed to be an Evil Overlord, and the fact is, the game lets you do some pretty, ughh, heroic deeds. So you need to kick the jester, to prove to yourself that you're still evil.
• Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire: Maia is originally presented as your bog-standard no-nonsense sniper lady, which is mostly true. However, it soon becomes apparent that Maia is horrendously racist against Huana, to the point that she actively disapproves of you giving murdered Huana you find a bare minimum of what is Due to the Dead instead of looting and leaving the bodies to rot, and makes jokes to your teenage Huana party member's face about their home village (that was in the path of the Big Bad) being destroyed.
• Pokémon Red and Blue: Mafiaesque Team Rocket was the lightest villain group in the games, bar none. It didn't prevent from doing it lots of times. Whacking a few Mons, running a casino and the Viridian Gym as legitimate business ventures, taking over a city, intermeddling with the Lake of Rage, and hijacking the Goldenrod Radio Tower were pretty big for their day. The worst of their crimes was killing a mother Marowak in Lavender Town. And yet compared to more recent organizations they're still small fries.
  • Much hyped in the continuity is Pokémon Diamond and Pearl's Team Galactic, who slid right up the Sliding Scale of Villain Effectiveness by bombing Lake Valor, extracting the gems from the Lake Trio, and using the gems to shackle Dialga and/or Palkia in an attempt to rewrite reality. Unfortunately for them, the Mooks are plain dumb, the Lake Valor explosion was pure shock value, and the lion's share of bad intentions come from emotionally stunted Cyrus, who believes that living spirit is an imperfection that needs to be scrubbed away. If it weren't for his leadership and the effectiveness of the commanders, even the Rockets would have someone to laugh at.
  • Cipher makes Poochyena kicking, if not molestation, its modus operandi. In the events of Pokémon Colosseum, they were running all of Orre from the shadows of the criminal underworld, with even its most affable Admin, Miror B., holding the mayor of Pyrite Town around his pinky while distributing Shadow Pokemon shipped from the Under to people at the Pyrite Colosseum. Dakim was the enforcer who put everyone else in line, Venus was the pretty face that kept the people of the Under out of Cipher's affairs with her gaudy entertainment programming, and Ein corrupted the stolen Pokemon that Team Snagem and other criminal organizations paid Cipher as tribute for use as weapons. The place was hell on earth in a near-literal form until Wes waged his two-man war, and five years later during the events of Pokemon XD, changes in personnel aside, Cipher's at it again, and the loss of support from Team Snagem is merely a setback to their greater operations.
  • Pokémon Black and White:
    • This is done with Team Plasma. Initially, Team Plasma's goals sound like they are actually reasonable. Players might originally find themselves intrigued by them. However, in the player's first direct encounter with Team Plasma's grunts, they are kicking a Munna, hinting that their intentions may not be all that genuine. It gets worse from there, with two grunts stealing a little kid's Pokémon and later Bianca getting her Munna stolen; it becomes clear very quickly that Team Plasma are just as bad, if not worse than Team Rocket with the added bonus of being myopic Hypocrites.^note It should be noted that some of Team Plasma genuinely believe that they're doing the right thing, while others are clear-cut human monsters. The ending is a long series of Kick the Dog moments, from the grunts in N's Castle rubbing in how Ghetsis has been manipulating the hearts of Unova's citizens to a scientist referencing how they're going to release all of the Pokémon stored in the PC boxes. Then, after you beat N, Ghetsis hurls insult after insult at both him and you.
    • Ghestis's insults even cross over into Moral Event Horizon for many; Ghetsis wasn't even a Tautological Templar like many of the Plasma Grunts, he was just a power-hungry jackass who invented this rhetoric in a bid to take advantage of people's better nature and take over the world as the only trainer left. He then proceeded to emotionally cripple his own son as a step in this plan and gloats about it to you while rubbing in N's face that he never actually cared about him and considered him a pathetic failure of a human being.
• Portal 2: The first thing GlaDOS does when she wakes up is crush the personality core Wheatley who's been helping you. Keep in mind this is before he takes over the facility and tries to kill you.
• It's the first thing you see the Postal Dude of Postal 2 do after he gets out of his trailer on Monday morning. And then it gets better. It's that kind of game.
  • You can even get an achievement trophy for kicking 30 dogs and killing 10 dogs with a kitty-silenced shotgun.
• The Strogg in Quake II get theirs with what they do to human prisoners of war in the Detention Center; the captives you free have been implanted with a device that causes them horrible and endless pain, such that the only way you can free them from it is to deliver a Mercy Kill.
• Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II:
  • Dutch:
    • In the first game, he holds a bank hostage and shoots an innocent woman in the head just to spite John. He also tells John straight to his face that Jack might not be his son since Abigail used to sleep with other members of the gang.
    • The second game has him abandoning Arthur and John on different occasions to save himself or as a way of getting them out of the way. It's strong implied that he left John for dead after the last heist purely to spite Arthur who insisted for Dutch to allow John and his family leave the gang.
    • He kills an innocent girl during the Blackwater heist for apparently no reason. He also kills the Guarma guide when she demands more money when Arthur indicates he could have easily disarmed her.
  • Micah:
    • He terrorizes a traumatized Sadie when they first meet her.
    • He is the only member to have any problem with Lenny, Tilly and Charles based exclusively on their race. This is including Bill who is the most foul and surly one next to him.
    • Invoked literally with Cain the dog when Micah kicks the poor dog. When Cain disappears from the camp at Beaver Hollow, it's heavily implied Micah killed the dog.
    • At one point, he has the audacity to mock Jack while doing it in front of John.
    • He frequently mocks Arthur for his deteriorating condition due to tuberculosis.
    • In the epilogue, he is wanted for killing a family, including a little girl. He also gleefully tells John during their confrontation that he would be "paying a visit" to Abigail and Jack once he was finished with John.
  • Agent Milton:
    • He kills a captured Hosea out of spite. He doesn't even give them a quick death but shoots Hosea in the chest so they would die slowly and in agony.
    • When he finds the gang hiding in Lakay, he fires a Maxim gun at the house, not caring there are non-combatants and a young boy inside.
  • Catherine Braithwaite:
    • She kidnapped Jack and gave him to The Mafia to spite the Van der Linde gang who had stolen her moonshine.
    • She also had her own daughter locked up in a wooden shack because she was mentally unstable and physically deformed.
  • Arthur:
    • Thanks to the Dialogue Tree, the player can have Arthur verbally abuse almost everyone in the game, from John to Sadie to Lenny and even to little Jack.
    • The game also allows plenty of opportunity to robbing innocent townsfolk to antagonizing homeless veterans to literally hitting dogs.
• In Reigns, When you get to the years; 666, 1332 and 1998 (which are all multiples of the Number of the Beast), the royal dog, Rex, will moan in despair, which gives you two options; 'Pat the dog' or 'Kick the dog'. Both choices lead to the 'Diabolus' ailment. Another example of Red Eyes, Take Warning.
• Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles has Alexia Ashford murder Alfred — apparently, simply for not waking her up from cryo sooner. Quite a switch from her personality in Resident Evil – Code: Veronica.
  • It also had HUNK telling off his teammate over the radio who was injured and pleading for help. True he would have never made it to her to help her, but he didn't have to respond and remind her "This is war. Survival is your responsibility."
• In Robopon, Bisco proves he's a jerk by stealing a kid's ice cream cone, threatening Lisa, and calling Cody's Robopon a piece of junk and his grandpa senile.
  • Dr. Zero traps Princess Darcy in a mirror because Prince Tail lost to him and to Cody. In the second game, Zero installed kill switches in his cyborgs to destroy them if they lose. They're sentient creations.
  • Mr. Wild steals Cody's Dosbot that a nice little girl gave him and uses it when you battle him, forcing you to scrap it.
• Saints Row series: Throughout the second game, Boss, the character you play, does a lot of this. This goes to show you that s/he's losing out his/her sense of morality, all because of the explosion that s/he survived from.
• The Secret World
  • Adrian Zorlescu is introduced right in the middle of doing just this, namely menacing the clearly-traumatized Rada Nastase with a knife. For good measure, he's been keeping her drugged to the gills to keep her from either leaving or confessing anything.
  • Lilith, fresh from revealing her true identity in a gleefully hammy speech, is suddenly interrupted when one of the Nursery's test subjects staggers into the room. Humming a lullaby, Lilith reaches out to stroke the little girl's cheek... and then snaps her neck. For good measure, just to make sure you can't follow her while she's kidnapping Emma, Lilith promptly saws your legs off!
  • The Black Signal indulges in this from time to time, usually by assaulting unsuspecting citizens with a Breaking Speech or two For the Evulz. In "The Pagans," for example, he deliberately seizes upon Ricky Pagan's Heroic BSoD as an opportunity to crush his hopes, destroy his heroic identity, and remind him that his friends are all dead — all through a speech transmitted through Ricky's beloved boom-box. Later, diary entries found in the underground clubhouse reveal that he bombarded the trapped kids with all the details of what was happening to their friends and families out in the ruins of Tokyo; eventually, one of the kids was so desperate to blot out the voice that he went so far as to drive a corkscrew through his ear and into his head, dying horribly as the Black Signal laughed uproariously at him.
  • The Bogeyman of Atlantic Island Park got an entire spin-off game to do this: in The Park, he spends the entire story tormenting Lorraine and Callum for little more than his own sick amusement — especially given that he'd made it clear that the two of them couldn't be used to fuel the Park. Mind-raping Lorraine with horrific illusions and the emotion-distorting influence of the park itself, he essentially gaslights her into the role of the villain in his own narrative; and as if this wasn't bad enough, just when it looks as though Lorraine might be able to rescue Callum, the Bogeyman seizes control of her and forces the young mother to stab her child to death with an ice-pick.
• Friggin' Archangel Michael does this to Blob Monster Abaddon in Shin Megami Tensei II, promising to restore him as an angel in exchange for swallowing Valhalla District, an act which killed the entire populace. To make it worse, Michael lied.
• In Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, during a briefing in the "Cold Alliance" episode, Bentley remarks that he saw bad guy General Tsao "kick a puppy, twice!" Tsao also shows himself to be a misogynist when Sly confronts him about his plans to marry the Panda King's daughter in a Shotgun Wedding.
  Sly: She doesn't want to marry you!
  Tsao: She's a woman, she doesn't know up from down.
  • Ironically enough, the Panda King got a moment of his own in the first game when he caused a village to be destroyed by an avalanche when testing out his fireworks.
  • Later in the third game, Pirate Captain L'Fwee threatens to behead Bentley after he kicked the poor turtle out of his wheelchair.
  • A particularly cruel example in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time is Penelope insulting Bentley behind his back, stating that's "he's kinda cute when he's being dumb"^note In this case, she was meaning Bentley was choosing to aid his best friends, whom she is plotting to murder out of jealousy, in another heist instead of helping her invent weapons to sell on the black market for billions, and using the money to Take Over the World, unaware that he was in the rafters and heard everything, confirming their relationship was abusive. She ends up kicked out of the Cooper Gang, and a fugitive actively hunted by Interpol for countless crimes.
• In Snatcher, a pair of the titular Ridiculously Human Robots attempt to search Katrina's house for a list of Snatcher-run hospitals hidden there. When they fail to find it, they slaughter her dog, Alice, gut it violently, and throw it through Katrina's window, entrails hanging out. In the original Japanese, uncensored version, it's still twitching.
• In Sonic Rivals 2, Silver, who had taken a level in jerkass after the events of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) were erased, had stolen Tails' rings in order to regain energy for his ESP. He even called him a half-pint after that.
  • The first clue that Metal Sonic isn't messing around in Sonic the Hedgehog CD is a hologram of him tormenting the local wildlife for absolutely no reason.
• Soul Nomad & the World Eaters:
  • At one point you meet Hawthorne, an influential merchant; his daughter, Tricia, is an archer who joins your party. But then you find out that Tricia is the most recent of about half a dozen "daughters" Hawthorne bought from a child slavery ring, the others all having "disappeared" sometime before their 17th birthdays. It does make you feel a little better about Hawthorne being killed in front of you. This plotline only gets worse in the Demon Path.
  • The Thurists (cultists who worship a World Eater) infect towns with a deadly plague because their "god" tells them to. But the real Kick the Dog moment comes where Kanan reveals that 10 years ago she killed young Danette's parents. Then he laughs about it.
  • Levin, whom you originally believe is your ally, attacks Layna, reveals that he's a World Eater and reveals that he killed his sister Euphoria. Then, to add insult to injury, he resurrects Euphoria just long enough to rub in the fact that she was a soulless puppet and Endorph was a chump for falling for her. On top of the shaming and asskicking Gig and company dish out before this insult, he wins the grand prize from Endorph afterward — one Psycho Burgundy to put him to final rest.
  • Gamma and Joules' entire Hannibal Lecture, which is followed by their attempt to devour Feinne purely for power.
  • The entire Demon Path is basically an endless sequence of dog-kicking for the main character, but one in particular stands out: At one point, he saves the life of a child solely to later murder him in front of his sibling, for maximum psychological effect.
• In the John Woo game Stranglehold, Big Bad Mr. James Wong is shown early on to be an utter bastard when he reveals during his meeting with Tequila that he intimidated his own daughter Billie into breaking up with the Cowboy Cop on pain of death eighteen years ago while she was still pregnant with their daughter Teko — and ordering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Tequila on top of it. Eighteen years later, after charging Tequila with the task of rescuing her and Teko from the Zakarovs and the Golden Kane, Wong decides to stick the knife in by ordering Tequila's own partner Jerry to betray Tequila by murdering Billie after Tequila took out Damon Zakarov and trying to kill him as well, both to protect his syndicate (Damon had threatened to force Billie to reveal everyone on the payroll of her father's syndicate in order to keep Damon from killing Teko) and to deny Tequila the woman he loved forever in true rat bastard fashion.
• It doesn't take long for Suikoden II to establish Luca Blight's cruelty. To start, he uses the massacre of the Unicorn Youth Brigade (which he planned himself as part of a False Flag Operation) to rekindle the war between the Highland and the City-States as an excuse to Rape, Pillage, and Burn everything in his path. During one of these pillages, he kills an innocent woman after forcing her to beg for her life and walk around like a pig. When he attacks the mercenary fortress, he kills Viktor's young assistant Pohl and is stopped from doing the very same to Pilika, the young girl Pohl was protecting, with Pohl's murder scarring her for life.
• In Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2, Archibald Grims (a recurring enemy character for the first part of the game) merely comes off as a minor Jerkass. It's not until you've fought him a few times that you find out that he actually is a sociopath — his solution to digging up a rumored lost-technology giant robot is to bomb the area, blasting away the sand covering the robot as well as the pesky civilians who were digging it up the hard way. A subordinate even tries to reason with him, and Archibald seems to consider for a moment.
  "I see. Yuuki, are you trying to say you don't like unnecessary bloodshed?"
  "Not in this situation, Sir."
  "What a shame. But I do. Especially from non-combatants!" (Cue maniacal laughter and screamy civilians)
  • Axel Almer also performs this when he tore Alt Eisen's arm just so he can get a trophy and proof for beating his nemesis. This only happens in the GBA version, though. In the remake, he just does that as a precaution if this Kyosuke is the same with Beowulf.
• Sword of Paladin: Berienstahl forces the party to fight copies of Chris, who they previously had to kill after she became corrupted by Lilith's Royal Gem.
• Tales of Symphonia has several; all of the Desian Grand Cardials get at least one involving doing some manner of nasty stuff to an Innocent Bystander, and Mithos gets a particularly anvilicious one when he's revealed as a villain by nearly killing one of his former True Companions and kicking him while he lies defenceless on the floor while laughing evilly.
  • This game also features a literal version of this trope as Colette kicks a dog after having lost her humanity at the Tower of Salvation. This is not done to portray her as a Heel, but to underscore the fact that her personality is gone, as she is the game's dog lover.
• If the vicious and violent Sync the Tempest isn't bad enough for you in Tales of the Abyss, just wait until he speaks to Anise in Ion's voice after Ion's death. That was a low freaking blow.
• Bloody Mary in The Wolf Among Us after shooting Bigby with a silver bullet, she sadistically stomps his arm, breaking it beneath her boot.
• In the backstory of Them's Fightin' Herds, Tianhuo violently bullies another foal, solely out of spite. No Freudian Excuse or misdirected anger here — just an arrogant sadist who thinks she's better than everybody else. It's intended to show the breadth of redemption, because Tianhuo becomes a genuinely good person later on. Even people who do evil for the sake of evil can change... given the right shock.
• In This War of Mine, you might encounter bandits or Sociopathic Soldiers while scavenging. Just in case you have any qualms about killing them (if you can), they will have convenient conversations about the evil things they've done. Highlights include murdering a priest, robbing a humanitarian aid transport, and letting a captive die of starvation.
• Three months before the events of Time Crisis 5 began, Robert went rogue on the VSSE, killing Christy, the Damsel in Distress from the second game, offscreen, and framing his ex-partner Keith for the murder. Christy also happened to be Keith's girlfriend.
• The Nazis in Wolfenstein: The New Order do this all the time, though of course as they're the biggest bad guys ever, you don't really need much prompting. When they aren't merely exterminating people on the basis of their race, they're enslaving D-Day survivors, slaughtering disabled patients in hospitals along with the nurses for trying to protect them, demolishing old monuments like Mount Rushmore, executing football players for scraping German players, and planning to build labour camps on the Moon. Frau Engel does this early on when she forces B.J (who is American with Jewish and Polish ancestry) into a racial purity test and threatens to execute him if he fails it, then (no matter what the outcome) just laughs and tells him that the whole thing was just a little game on her part. And then there's Deathshead who keeps one of B.J's old comrade's brains alive and self-aware for over a decade and plugs them into a giant murder-bot just as a big middle finger to poor B.J.
  • Done more literally in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus by B.J's abusive father Rip at the start of the game. Rip manages to be the most awful, racist and cruel piece of shit in a game with actual damned Nazis in it, 'nuff said. When he finds out B.J has been hanging out with an African-American girl (and no, he does not use the term "African-American" when he refers to her), he beats B.J and his mother and kicks his little dog too. Then to teach B.J a lesson he drags B.J out into the shed in the back garden and forces him to shoot the dog; if B.J intentionally misses, he mocks B.J and takes the shotgun and does the job for him. In case you really didn't get the message then that the man is a piece of work, later you find out that he sold out his wife to the Nazis. Because she used to stand up to him.
• The World Ends with You: Mitsuki Konishi, resident passive-aggressive Baroness crushes Beat's cute pet Noise into a pin just minutes before we found out said pet Noise was Rhyme after being Blessed with Suck so that Beat could resurrect her in human form...All with a grin on her face, before proceeding to use the pin as Beat's "entry fee." As she's dying, she cryptically hints that while Rhyme's memories of Beat were Beat's entry fee, Rhyme's were something else, thus making her point that while Rhyme was most important to Beat, Rhyme didn't feel the same way about him.
• World of Warcraft: Choose a blood elf in The Burning Crusade, and you're required to kick many dogs (or cats, as it may be.) Play a death knight in Wrath of the Lich King, all you do under the Lich King's control is kick dogs — oh, and kill your best friend.
  • Also in the opening cinematic, a blood elf cuddles with a small magical creature, only to destroy it so she can absorb its mana.
  • At the Argent Tournament, a woman takes the confessions of champions from both factions. An undead champion informs her that he punched a penguin in the face just so he could see her expression when he revealed it.
  • The bombing of Theramore is a kick the dog moment for Garrosh. Prior to that, he had been characterized as a hothead who was quick to act and not quick enough to think, but he at least had a concept of honor. Theramore totally changed his characterization by portraying him wanting to conquer Kalimdor at all costs, and willing to *dishonorably* kill anyone who stands in his way. He made it appear to his allies that he wanted an honorable military victory at Thermaore, only to lure all of the alliance commanders/forces into the center of the city (by feigning a withdrawal) where they were hit by what amounts to a magical version of a nuke. This was the authors attempt to make him into an unlikeable character (since we fight him at the end of Mists of Pandaria).
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monster Coliseum, losing to an antagonistic duelist will have them mock Yami Yugi mercilessly. Probably the worst of the lot are Bandit Keith and Seto Kaiba.

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