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Lack Of Empathy / Video Games

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Characters with a glaring Lack of Empathy for others in Video Games.

  • Absinthia: Lilith cares about nothing but satisfying her own boredom and even when her "lover" Freya calls her out on causing Ethel to have a fatal heart attack, Lilith's response is that Ethel is old and would have died soon anyways. The ending shows that she's slowly learning empathy, since she decides to make peace with Freya and leave Strider with the latter, and she seems to be somewhat remorseful about the sneak attack on Katti Town.
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown:
    • Colonel McKinsey and AWACS Bandog could not care less about the well-being of the Spare Squadron, due to them being a squadron of convicts. While Bandog is at least reasonable, and does eventually come to respect Trigger, McKinsey hoards their accomplishments to himself in the hopes that he'll be transferred over to a desk job. While Bandog's fate is unknown, Mckinsey gets sent to the frontlines, where he'll get the glory he so desires.
    • Full Band, one of the members of the Spare Squadron, gleefully Speaks Ill of the Dead when Trigger is transferred over to the Spare Squadron for allegedly killing Harling. When Champ gets shot down by Mihaly, Full Band goes on about how he died "crying like a baby". In the mission "Faceless Soldier", he brags about how he's acquired classified information that he's going to share with everyone once the mission's over, despite Bandog's warnings that it's his second strike and that "there won't be a third one". When the Spare Squadron is ambushed by AI-controlled aircraft using spoofed Osean IFFs, he gets tagged as an enemy when Bandog recalibrates everyone's IFFs, and gets shot down by Count.
    • Dr. Schroeder starts out rather apathetic and amoral towards Mihaly's wellbeing at first, and is more focused on collecting the data from each sortie that he takes. As the war drags on and Mihaly's granddaughters begin to resent Schroeder, he starts to have doubts about his work, which comes to a head when the truth about his work is discovered in the second-to-last mission and Ionela calls him out on it, which convinces him to have a change of heart.
  • AI: The Somnium Files:
    • In the first game, the Cyclops Killer, Saito Sejima, was born with a brain deficiency that made him unable to feel many emotions, empathy included. The only positive emotion he can feel is pleasure when he kills, and his lack of empathy allows him to indulge in murder to his heart's desire.
    • In nirvanA Initiative, Chikara Horadori is a Mad Scientist and a follower of the Order of %, a Religion of Evil that teaches that since reality is a simulation, they are allowed to do whatever they want. Chikara also wishes to create the perfect human and attain immortality, and in the process subjects his victims to horrifying and torturous experiments, not showing the slightest hint of empathy for the people whose lives he destroys in the process.
  • Jon Irenicus in Baldur's Gate II, apparently as a result of (roughly speaking) having no soul. Presumably Bodhi too, but she doesn't act that way as clearly. Irenicus has lost the ability to feel most emotions, at least positive ones, and is himself horrified at his condition. However, since he was already evil before and is now devoted to vengeance, he doesn't mind being able to do absolutely horrible things without flinching. His interactions with others can go something like this:
    Victim: AAAAAAAARRRGGHH!
    Irenicus: [indifferently] The pain will only be passing, you should survive the process.
    Victim: GHYAAAAAAHHHH!
    Irenicus: [with a slight hint of irritation] Do you even realize your potential?
  • Multiple villains of BioShock.
    • Andrew Ryan takes Corrupt Corporate Executive and Control Freak to their logical extremes, and claims that it is man's nature to only care about himself. Because of that, Ryan could not care less about the wellbeing of the citizens of Rapture, and readily hoards whatever could benefit them, causing their displeasure with him and making him feel that he's completely justified in doing so.
    • Dr. Suchong's attempts to understand the bonding between Little Sisters and Big Daddies shows how disconnected from empathy he is. Anyone else could see that Androcles' Lion is at play, as the Big Daddies respond positively to Little Sisters saving them and vice-versa. Suchong is convinced that it's actually pheromones, hypnotherapy or some other "logical" explanation. It gets him killed when a recently bonded Big Daddy doesn't take kindly to him slapping a Little Sister.
    • Sofia Lamb has equal empathy for everyone — individuals don't matter as anything but how they fit as the cogs of her ideal society.
  • BlazBlue:
  • The main villains and psychopaths in Dead Rising and the sequel.
    • Carlito subverts this as he feels sorry for shooting Isabela for her Heel–Face Turn.
    • Another subversion is Cliff from the first game — he's suffering from a Vietnam flashback caused by seeing zombies eat his granddaughter; when you kill him, he apologizes and explains himself before he dies.
  • Dr. Kirk in Dino Crisis doesn't give a damn about anyone but his experiments. In the ending path where Gail dies, Kirk makes fun of them. Regina has none of that and responds by punching the doctor in the face.
  • In Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia, Materia is the goddess of physical matter, so metaphysical concepts like emotion and thought are beyond her. As Mog puts it, it makes Materia Innocently Insensitive as she tries to offer respite to the summoned warriors because she knows how to help their physical bodies rest, but not their spirits.
  • Eco Fighters: Kernal Goyolk has no empathy for any place he fills with "violence and death" as long he lines his pockets.
  • The Elder Scrolls series has the Sload, a race of "slugmen" native to the archipelago of Thras to the southwest of Tamriel. Sload are described as not feeling the same emotions other races do, but having some understanding of them and being capable of simulating them. As a race of Unfettered Chessmasters, they are utterly ruthless in the pursuit of their goals, with even genocide being on the table if it helps them achieve their ends. They (in)famously do not feel anything for their victims, even likening the taking of their souls to having "coins in a pouch."
  • Ensemble Stars! has two non-villainous examples:
    • Subaru finds it very difficult to understand emotions — not just other people's, but his own, as well. This led him to believe for a while that everyone wants to be happy all the time, and that anyone who is ever sad really wants to do something fun to cheer up. However, this lack of understanding of context or sensitivity led to him seeming completely uncaring of his classmates' understandable depression during the war and led to him becoming an outcast. He still has a tendency towards being Innocently Insensitive, and it's hard for him to demonstrate regret or guilt due to his difficulty processing his own emotions, but as he befriends Chiaki and then Trickstar, he comes to understand these things better and demonstrate what a compassionate person he really is.
    • Kanata was raised to believe that he was a Physical God, and so viewed himself as being totally separate from other humans. Until he was fifteen he didn't realise that all people have their own names, instead viewing them as sort of fundamentally identical masses, the way humans would view fish. (And indeed, he doesn't name any of the sea creatures he keeps in the Marine Bio Club, and seemed confused when Souma became attached to a particular turtle and gave it a name.) After the events of the war he abandons this belief, but still has some work to do adjusting his view of humanity and can be unintentionally self-centered (or, towards Souma, occasionally kind of mean for his own amusement) as a result.
  • In Epiphany City, Superb Man is focused on making money, good press coverage, and keeping his top hero status over actually saving people. His prophecy qualifications even lampshade this, saying he values strength over love.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Former Elder Elijah views people as tools to be used and disposed of when they're not needed anymore. He wants to wipe the Mojave clear of all life with the lethal cloud, destroy armed resistance with invincible holograms, and enslave the survivors with bomb collars and establish a totalitarian regime. In the Sierra Madre, he equips his captives with bomb collars to ensure obedience, has the collars linked so they won't fight each other (and blames them for being so greedy that this safety measure is necessary, even though greed is his own middle name), and suggests that you should kill off your allies when you don't need them anymore, yet thinks you'll believe him when he says he'll let you go after the whole thing is done. There is nothing to suggest that he ever entertained the idea of getting any of his previous victims to help him without coercion. Before he came to the Sierra Madre, he nearly wiped out the local chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel under his command by trying to hold the Helios One power plant against the NCR, sending wave after wave of paladins to die until the more tactically savvy members deposed him and retreated.
    • Caesar's Legion embrace this so closely that it's practically their hat. Most Legionnaires have a complete lack of compassion for others. They torture NCR soldiers for fun, rape female slaves, and smugly deride the inexperience of their fellows who died trying to take Nelson. Some like Silus intentionally fit their slave collars in such a way that it is uncomfortable when they move their heads or swallow food, as a reminder that they are property. The Legion-friendly trader Dale Barton will happily trade with you and praise the Legion's caravan security policies while ignoring the abused slaves and crucified prisoners right in front of him.
  • Final Fantasy VII:
    • The game's main conflict is about the Shinra Company's utter fiascos stemming from a general lack of empathy, starting with the way they over-harvest magical resources and damage the entire world's ecosystem, mass-murder dissidents and bystanders in their Police State rule, and created monsters out of the magic refuse For Science!, the most important of which was Professor Hojo's Jenova-Cell supersoldier project, which included the main character, his best friend, and Hojo's own son. The latter went completely insane and tried to destroy the world, purely because Hojo injected his pregnant wife with a precursor-destroying virus to see what would happen.
    • Averted with Sepiroth, who is one of the few villains in the series who actually can express empathy. However, he then ignores it so he can troll Cloud and kill anyone he doesn't like.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • Fire Emblem: Awakening:
    • Fire Emblem Fates gives us an interesting case in Peri. While she does care about people she likes, anyone else she has no regard for and happily enjoys killing, especially her servants whenever they annoy her. In her case, it's due to her mother being murdered by a jealous servant when she was a little girl and the ensuing trauma that it caused. Many of her supports, especially her support with Lazlow, teach her that while killing enemies on the battlefield is fine, it is NOT okay to engage in mindless killing whenever she's annoyed. In fact, in the Summer Scramble DLC, she worries that the daughter of her and Lazlow is becoming as violent as she is and wants to nip that behavior in the bud.
  • Genevieve Aristide from First Encounter Assault Recon. Doesn't care that her actions would send the world even further into hell from what Harlan Wade did, she's got a job to protect.
  • Heavy Rain Lt. Carter Blake really has almost no empathy for anyone. The only ones whom he has empathy for are Captain Perry, Ash, Grace Mars, and Scott Shelby.
  • In Jade Empire, Master Li is incapable of viewing people as anything but tools, even his own daughter, Dawn Star. When he learns of the connection, he simply doesn't care.
  • The Jak and Daxter games has one in Krew, a Fat Bastard who cares for no one but his profits and rare artifacts, and is willing to let a city be destroyed if it benefits him, and him only. One example is him lamenting over the loss of an artifact in the sewers, ignoring the five men who were swept away while moving it.
  • Cindy from Kindergarten relentlessly bullies her classmate Lily as revenge for Lily's brother Billy dumping her. She shows not one ounce of guilt over this even after her bullying drives Lily to suicide.
  • Organization XIII of Kingdom Hearts. Perfectly willing to do horrible, horrible things to anyone and everyone (even each other) without so much as a hint of guilt if it means getting their hearts back. As Nobodies, they aren't supposed to be able to feel anything, which explains some of that. Dream Drop Distance implies that it's not that they're incapable of empathy anymore, but that Xemnas's manipulations led them to believe that they were empty emotionless shells, so they acted accordingly. This is because reaching out and connecting with friends causes the heart to naturally grow back, as happened with Roxas and Axel, something that Xemnas, the Nobody of Terra-Xehanort, didn't want to happen, because it would ruin his plot to turn the members into vessels for his heart.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • In Love & Pies, Sebastian never claimed to be a sentimental man because he believes that sentimentality "keeps people back in life". He doesn't care how he runs his company as long as it's making a profit and is cold towards his daughter, Edwina, only sending her an email telling her that he's the father of her rival, Amelia, instead of telling her in person like Amelia herself.
  • Mass Effect 3:
  • In OFF, the Batter is not at all concerned about the terrorized Elsens on any personal level — he has an almost single-minded goal of purifying the spectres and zones. This comes to a head in the second zone, when Japhet reveals that the Judge's brother was Dead All Along and starts mocking the late Valerie. The Judge is hit with a Heroic BSoD, while the Batter could not care less and simply moves to fight Japhet. If the player comes back to the purified zone two, the Batter will not offer any sympathy for the Judge, who is in horrible denial over his brother's death. This is foreshadowing the fact that the Batter is a Villain Protagonist.
  • In Path of Exile the Maven views other beings as toys to kill each other for her amusement or be snatched up for her collection, and dwells in a realm called "Absence of Mercy and Empathy". This is partly due to her age and partly because she's too powerful for most beings to impede her, and mistakes helplessly for mindlessness. It's only when the Exile succeeds in hurting her she even realizes they have a will of their own.
    The Maven: The toy refuses. The toy causes me pain. Is the toy...alive?
  • Pokémon:
    • Mewtwo is said to have the most savage heart amongst Pokémon, thinking only of defeating its foes.
    • Pokémon Sun and Moon: When Lillie begs her not to use Nebby to open the Ultra Wormholes, warning her that doing so might kill it, Lusamine informs her that she knows that might happen, but as long as it does what she wants it to, she doesn't care.

      Averted in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. When Lillie tells her that using Nebby to open the Ultra Wormhole might kill it, Lusamine understands it and clearly doesn't want to do this to Nebby, but she feels that she must in order to save Alola from Necrozma. After Necrozma's defeat at the hands of the player, Lusamine decides to take Nebby back to Aether Paradise to care for it, and orders Lillie to help care for it too, as a way to make up for what she did.
    • Most of the other major villains of the series (with only a few exclusions), are trying to do something revolutionary, change the world, or fix a problem they see on the horizon. Ghetsis, on the other hand, genuinely doesn't care. He manipulates extremists to his own end of controlling the world, is more than willing to hurt anyone in his way, and is so narcissistic in his goals that he doesn't even bother justifying them. In an alternate future from Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, he succeeds in his goals, and the way he talks lacks any caring towards the damage he has done. He is one of the only villains who doesn't justify his evil acts, he gloats about it. Out of all of the villains in the entire franchise, Ghetsis is the most amoral about his actions, and he is proud of himself for everything he does.
  • In Portal Glados sends Chell into an incinerator, expecting her to just accept her death, while only addressing concern for the portal device's well being, which remains unharmed even at high temperatures.
  • [PROTOTYPE]:
    • The real Alex Mercer is actually described in-game as being a sociopath. This made him very effective as a Morally Ambiguous Doctorate and ironically his creation, the player character, come across as a better human being even though he's a completely inhuman mass-murdering abomination.
    • The members of Blackwatch are all described by many people as being psychopaths and Nazis. They've gotten much worse as of the sequel, in which a recording can be found of one Blackwatch officer calling out one of his subordinates for gunning down a family of civilians, not because he killed innocent people, but because he wasted ammo.
  • Re:Kuroi: Marie has a lack of care for most people and only befriended Kaito because she was interested in his magic. When Noelle transforms into a monster, Marie only responds in a bored tone and mocks Kaito for failing to play his role. Later on, she states that she wants to work on a cure for Asha's condition not because she's invested in the latter's life, but for the sake of scientific curiosity.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Albert Wesker is a fine example, having betrayed every organization he worked for like Umbrella and S.T.A.R.S.
    • HUNK. There's one rather telling moment in Umbrella Chronicles, where one of his subordinates shoots an unarmed man holding a G Virus sample. He turns around and rails at the subordinate, not because he just murdered a guy in cold blood, but because he risked damaging the sample.
  • Saints Row:
    • Johnny Gat doesn't just lack empathy, there's a good chance he shot it for looking at him funny. He demonstrates his ruthless nature at Aisha's funeral, brutally beating Ronin leader Shogo, and burying him alive. He seems to become even more ruthless after this point. Yeah.
    • In general the main characters of the series are not nice but still funny people, and the player character The Boss is this. While they do care for their friends, even Pierce, they have no such softness to anyone who crosses them. While Johnny brutally murders Shogo, Boss can and will kill every rival gang leader, up to and including Julius, the previous leader of the Third Street Saints. The only person Boss spares is Matt Miller, the leader of the Deckers, just because he offers to give them a permanent discount on purchasable upgrades in exchange for sparing him. Everyone else is fair game.
  • Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Sly Cooper:
    • Clockwerk outright states that he views empathy as a sign of weakness, boasting to Sly after trapping him in a Gas Chamber that it is "always the downfall of the Cooper Clan."
    • Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time: Penelope faked loving Bentley just to get at his potential and even mocks him when she drops the act. It leaves him gloomy, but Bentley eventually realizes that Sly and Murray do care about him, which is helped by a drawing Murray left behind of them. As it turned out, Penelope is actually a sociopath who doesn't give anyone a damn, and isn't above using people and tossing them aside when done using them, including Le Paradox and Bentley. Heck, Penelope has no problems endangering billions of innocent people by selling weapons to terrorists and rouge nations, simply out of greed.
  • Arcturus Mengsk from StarCraft callously sacrifices both strangers and allies in his pursuit of power. At one point he fires on the ship carrying his son Valerian. "My father will sacrifice any piece on the chess board to take the queen."
  • Suikoden II: Luca Blight. Your country's equivalent to the boy scouts brutally slaughtered the night they are to see their families? Regret not joining in on the massacre that you set up to practice your swordsmanship. Adorable and traumatized little girl that you recently orphaned wailing in grief and fear after you just ran her teenage guardian through? Shut the brat up for good for spoiling your "fun" by decapitating her! Your sister grieving over your father that you just poisoned to death? Mock her and remind her that she is a Child by Rape.
  • Super Paper Mario:
  • In Sword of the Stars, the Suul'ka reject empathy as a weakness. This is especially creepy since they still have the same empath abilities that all Liir possess.
  • Cage from Twisted Metal: Black is a rare invoked example. He's a serial killer, but feels sad whenever he murders people, so he wants to have his empathy surgically removed. This leaves him with no more conscience to stop him from his dream; to become the greatest killer the world has ever known.
  • Undertale:
    • If you decide to kill several major characters or kill all of them, some of the characters will call you out on your sociopathic behavior and believe you're killing everyone just because you can and how you, the player, lack any empathy.
    • The lack of empathy is also a major character trait for Flowey. Because Flowey was reincarnated without a soul, he lacks the ability to feel empathy for others. The inability to care about anyone else is what drives Flowey to madness and allows him to adopt the attitude of "kill or be killed" once he loses hope that he'll ever feel compassion again. Even when you beat his Photoshop form, sparing instead of killing him causes Flowey to react with despair and confusion, saying he just cannot understand why you're acting so nice to him.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1:
    • Xenoblade has Zanza, the soul of the Bionis and creator of the world. He sees humans as nothing more than a food source to keep him alive, and will go to whatever lengths it takes to make sure that they can still sustain him. Even if it means destroying and recreating the world over and over again.
    • In Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and its prequel Torna — The Golden Country, Malos is seen gleefully causing chaos and destruction to Alrest, mocking the heroes, and even forces a Mind Rape unto Pyra/Mythra. However, near the end of the game, it's revealed that between the prequel and the main game, Malos began empathizing with Jin, thus going from destroying everything for the hell of it to destroying everything because of the pain that the world inflicted on Jin. Though at the same time, Malos has little free will in the matter, due to him originally being an AI.

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