Laser Guided Karma / Video Games

Laser-Guided Karma in Video Games.

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• Absented Age: Squarebound: The vice-principal is antagonistic towards Mr. Minami, the Sado Club advisor, to the point of assaulting the latter on campus. It turns out the vice-principal framed the Sado Club for smoking in order to get all the members to distrust each other and leave. After Karen, Hayato, and Suzu join the club and convert it into the Sado Band Club, Mr. Minami effortlessly shoots down all of the vice-principal's arguments about the club's noise level, making the latter look like a fool in front of the student body.
• The Ace Attorney series, being an exploration of legal justice, has several examples of this trope.
  • The fact that Iris looked the other way the first time her sister Dahlia committed murder makes it all the harder for her to come forward when Dahlia tries to kill again... and this time, her victim is a person Iris actually personally cares about. To add insult to injury, Iris is a shrine maiden, and can actually recognize and understand her karma. That's why she peacefully accepts imprisonment at the end of the game.
    Iris: I've committed some sins. Sins that I need to pay for.
  • Another example is when Iris lied to Phoenix about her identity for a full 8 months, and consequently broke off ties with him because she couldn't bear to admit her guilt. Some time later, Iris is framed (by herself) so expertly that only one lawyer is willing to defend her in court... Phoenix. Even Edgeworth, a total stranger, only helps Iris on the condition that she be honest with Phoenix.
  • Had Manfred von Karma never murdered the only defense attorney to give him a penalty and then frame his son for another murder caused by his actions, he would have never actually lose a case for once and his freedom as well.
• Mihaly of Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown makes a living as the self-proclaimed "King of the Sky", coming out of retirement when it turns out the drones with programming based on his combat data are being shot down too easily and takes to the air again to reclaim "his" sky. He does this by ruthlessly stalking and chasing down planes, regardless of whether they are damaged or fully combat capable, and terrifying the poor pilots as he takes his time hounding them just so he can have the satisfaction of "seeing them at their best" before he executes them. His undoing comes when he challenges Trigger to a duel and promptly gets shot down; the injuries he sustained from the crash end up leaving him bedridden, unable to take to the skies ever again. Avril comments that this isn't really a punishment, since it means instead of dying the violent death of his opponents, he will be able to live in peace with his granddaughters, but the bitter tone in Mihaly's voice when he says how he cannot fly any more shows that he is still less than pleased with the situation.
• The player can invoke this on Alexander in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Alexander is revealed to be a Manipulative Bastard who is responsible for torturing and killing hundreds of people to harness the orb's power. He also manipulated Daniel into torturing innocent people and lied that he would protect him from the Shadow that's chasing him, and would have just left him to be eaten by it. The player can disrupt the portal from opening, leaving him to be eaten by the Shadow.
• The Player Character in Baldur's Gate II has an opportunity to deliver a sweet dose of this to some drow. S/he is infiltrating the Underdark with his/her party, on a mission to recover a good dragon's eggs from Matron Mother Ardulace. Meanwhile, her daughter Phaere is trying to usurp her mother's position, and hopes to use you and the eggs to accomplish this. You could choose to betray the mother to the daughter or vice versa — morality-wise, it makes little difference, since both of them are nasty pieces of work. However, with the right choices, you can arrange things so that both of them get their comeuppance at the hands of a demon they tried to summon.
• In Banjo-Kazooie and its sequels, the more Grunty tries to restore her body to its former glory with her vile means like kidnapping and murder, the more of it she loses. In the first game, she is old, but wants to become young by stealing someone else's youth. She becomes a skeleton. In Tooie, she wants to restore her flesh by sucking life force out of everyone, so she gets reduced to a head.
• Bayonetta 2 has Alraune, who seeks to use Jeanne's soul to gain more power for herself after Jeanne gets Dragged Off to Hell. Aside from getting her ass kicked by a pissed-off Bayonetta, who tore through Inferno just to save Jeanne, her ultimate fate is deliciously ironic: Rodin uses her soul in order to create a new weapon for Bayonetta.
• In one of the Beyond Good & Evil trailers/in-universe Hillian News propaganda videos, Fehn Digler warns that pearls are illegal to use as currency, and quotes the Alpha Sections as describing the damage the Mammago Garage (which accepts them) has suffered as "poetic justice".
• Beyond: Two Souls: During the "Homeless" chapter, a group of thugs burn down the building where Tuesday has just given birth and beat Jodie into a coma. As revealed in a newspaper article Jodie sees when she wakes up, the thugs were arrested shortly afterwards because of the smell of gasoline on their clothes.
• Castlevania:
  • In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, a priest locked himself in a small fortress with a powerful artifact that could've been used to save his village from vampire attacks for his own personal protection. Almost immediately after the main character takes the artifact from the priest to use against the vampires, the priest gets torn apart by vampires who seemed to have been waiting for the moment they could kill him.
  • In the original series, a now-retconned plot point revealed Alucard to be Trevor Belmont's father. This would have meant that Dracula had been getting taken down by his own descendants, generation after generation. This twist was later applied in a slightly different way to the sequels of the Lords of Shadows universe, as Trevor and Alucard are the same person.
• In Bravely Default 2, Prince Castor of Savalon betrays the party and reveals his only objective was seizing the Water Crystal, which led him to killing his father and imprisoning his brother when they tried to stop him. After being cornered by Seth and company, he falls to his death after backing up against a piece of railing that he himself had broken earlier when chasing his father to kill him.
• Early at the fair in Chrono Trigger, Crono has the opportunity to help a little girl find her cat, and to eat a random man's lunch for HP. A few sequences later, though, he needs character witnesses, and every Good or Evil act comes back up... not that it will matter. Sure, being found innocent nets you a couple Elixirs, but Crono will still get sentenced to execution.
• What happens to Kizami in Corpse Party. After hurting animals, killing innocent people and even kicking Yuka, he ends up getting attacked by Yoshikazu, dragged to Sachiko, and turned into an anatomy model.
  • One of the Wrong Ends of Blood Covered hits Ayumi hard when she decides that she wants to escape with Satoshi but leave Naomi in the cursed school. First, she destroys Naomi's paper doll scrap, which causes a series of events that results in Ayumi losing her scrap. Later on, she kills Naomi to get a replacement scrap and Murder the Hypotenuse at the same time. Shortly afterwards, she discovers that Satoshi has fully darkened (something that, unbeknown to her, she indirectly caused), making her actions All for Nothing. Then she realizes that she's the only one left alive... and the ritual to escape the cursed school requires at least two people, meaning that by killing Naomi, she just killed any chance to go back home.
• In Crash Team Racing, the Golden Ending features "Where Are They Now?" Epilogues for the characters. Although Nitrous Oxide escapes from Earth unscathed, he is so distraught by his defeat that it takes him years of therapy to even think about racing again and, when he does, decides to ride a unicycle and ends up in an accident so gruesome it "can't be detailed in the epilogue".
• One of the choices at the end of The Dark Meadow is to corrupt your daughter's soul in exchange for a longer life. If you decide to cross the line, your character will land in a mental asylum for the next 17 years of his life. Have fun!
• One of the PvP factions in Dark Souls, the Darkmoon Blade, is all about this. When players kill other players and NPCs, they accumulate sin. The Darkmoon covenant is a covenant specifically based around hunting down those with a large amount of sin.
• The Dead Rising franchise:
  • In the first Dead Rising, Frank comes across a paranoid gun shop owner warning another man to stay away, while the other man is asking him to let other people use his guns. Finally, the shop owner shoots the man with a shotgun, blasting him out of the store. After defeating him in a mini-bossfight, he staggers out of his shop blubbering and terrified, only to run headfirst into the zombie of the man he killed.
    • For additional irony, he kills a man for asking to use the guns in a gun shop. When he's defeated by Frank, he exclaims: "You're gonna kill a man just for some guns?!"
  • In the sequel, Dead Rising 2, Chuck comes across an unhinged CURE (basically a zombie rights group) supporter in a bathroom. He's been keeping a zombie around to spread the disease because he thinks it's a blessing of sorts. Shortly after you beat him, he stumbles right into the bathroom stall he was keeping the zombie in, and is bitten. Rather than become a zombie, he opts to slit his own throat.
  • Dead Rising 3: The bosses are based on the seven deadly sins, and die accordingly: The mad monk is so angry he commits suicide out of rage, the organ harvester is stabbed with his drug syringes until he hallucinates his organs being harvested by zombies, the lazy heir dies of a heart attack from lack of exercise, the bodybuilder is crushed to death by her trophy collection when she tries to lift it, the snuff pornographer overdoses on his phallic-distributed gas, the ex-dietary bulimic slips on a puddle of spilled food and chokes on her vomit, the looney fanboy is killed by his idol in self-defense^note unless you decide to spare him. And in all endings, the Final Boss will always lose, even if the protagonist dies — because starting an uprising with zombies was never going to earn them good PR.
• The Dead Space franchise:
  • Near the end of Dead Space, you desperately fight to put an artifact back in place on a pedestal to neutralize all the alien monsters on the planet. Then The Mole shows up and steals it away, mocking you. Not five minutes later, said Mole is smashed into paste by the monster that would have left everyone alone if the artifact hadn't been disturbed.
  • In Dead Space 2, Daina Le Guin dies about 20 seconds after you find out she was a Unitologist using you the whole time.
• Disgaea 5 has karma force-feeding Majorita more humble pie than she can stomach. At the game's onset, Majorita is running a manhunt for Usalia after cursing her, taking over her Netherworld (Toto Bunny), exploiting it for manpower, killing her parents, and raising them as zombies to torture her further, on top of committing all sorts of atrocities in Void Dark's name. Over the course of the game, not only does Usalia devolve the curse into her Overload and take back Toto Bunny, but Void Dark uses his own Overload to throttle Majorita's out of her before killing her and reviving her as a zombie. Even the post-game is unkind to her; Majorita does come back to life as a living being... but she had to prepare one of her own curses in advance to do so, and the curse in question requires her to "fulfill the wishes of the one who hates her the most", and Majorita knows exactly who that is and what that entails. As one of Seraphina's skits would say: Karma is a bitch, plip!^*Delicious carrots, kill and recycle!
• Dishonored has an entire achievement revolving around eliminating your targets non-lethally, aptly named "Poetic Justice". High Overseer Campbell, the most corrupt member of his order, can be branded with a special brand that makes him a public outcast, the corrupt aristocrats Morgan and Custis Pendleton can be abducted by a street gang, who will shave them, cut out their tongues, and put them to work in their own silver mine, and Lady Boyle can be delivered to her stalker. The crowning example, though, is Lord Regent Hiram Burrows. By playing his audio diary over the city's PSA system, it exposes his role in not only the empress's assassination but also the rat plague that's been devastating Dunwall, for the whole city to hear.
• Dragon Age: Origins:
  • In the Dwarf Noble origin, Lord Harrowmont is a Reasonable Authority Figure who will support your character if you were falsely accused and puts his political career on the line to try and save your life (although he ultimately fails because your accuser was one step ahead). You later return to Orzammar and find him deadlocked in a battle for the throne with your accuser, and have the option of handing him the crown.
  • If you spare Loghain and allow him to live, he's a Grey Warden and is being shipped off to Orlais after Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening. Loghain hates Orlais.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In Morrowind, Mages Guild Stewardess Ranis Athrys has a very With Us or Against Us, Join or Die attitude toward any mages who do not join the Mages Guild. Several of her quests involve convincing some of these outside mages to join the Guild, and in most cases, simply killing the outsider mage satisfies Ranis. During the quest to root out a Telvanni spy, you can lie and say that Ranis is the spy. She'll be immediately expelled from the Guild.
  • Skyrim:
    • The sidequest villain Arondil, who is a Necromancer and a necrophile. After being kicked out of Dawnstar for lusting after women there, he decided to retreat to the tomb of Yngvild and start kidnapping women, murdering them, and raising them from the dead with magic so he could keep them as undead Sex Slaves. If you've been to Rannveig's Fast previously and encountered the Apologetic Attacker ghosts there, you know that ghosts are fully conscious but unable to control their actions. One of the best ways the player can dispose of him is, instead of confronting him directly, to simply run back to his chamber and remove the soul gem controlling the ghostly women — doing this causes them to go berserk and tear him to shreds.
    • Between Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, the Dunmer (Dark Elf) people get hit with this. The post-Red Year invasion of Morrowind by the Argonians is a result of the Dunmer's own centuries of raiding Black Marsh for slaves. Admitted by a member of House Telvanni in a posthumous letter to his son:
      Lymdrenn Telvanni: "The irony of our demise glows brighter than Masser on the summer solstice. We brought this upon ourselves; the Argonians simply answering a rallying cry incited by a millennia of suffrage imposed by my kind."
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 2 features an amoral, greedy little twerp named Myron, who thinks he's hot stuff because he invented the highly damaging and highly addictive drug known as Jet and thus is the key for consolidating the Mordino crime family's power in New Reno. Except in practice he's just a petty drug dealer and given an alternate interpretation of a Series Continuity Error made in Fallout 4, it's even possible he never actually invented Jet, he just reverse-engineered a pre-War drug and took the credit. Whatever the case, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue reveals that only a few weeks after the end of the game, he was fatally stabbed to death in a sleazy bar by a Jet addict and the Wasteland immediately forgot all about him.
  • Subverted in Fallout 3. Mr. Crowley gives the player the quest "You Gotta Shoot 'Em in the Head", in which he hires them to kill four supposed Ghoulophobes. He stipulates that they must be shot in the head as a sort of ironic nod to the false belief that ghouls can only be killed that way. He also mentions that three of them have keys that he wants. His actual goal (discoverable via a speech check) is more materially motivated. One of his targets, Alistair Tenpenny, hired Crowley and four other mercenaries years ago to retrieve a rare weapon from Fort Constantine. The heist ended with one of them dead and Crowley also presumed dead. Crowley wants the keys from the surviving mercs in order to enter Fort Constantine and take a valuable suit of power armor. As for Tenpenny, that's played straight; he really is just a bigot who deserves to die.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • In the downloadable content Dead Money, you spend most of the time trying to access a secret pre-war fortress of technology for the insane former elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, Elijah. At the end of the DLC, when you finally access the Sierra Madre Vault, you have the option of talking him into coming down, then simply leaving. Elijah will walk into the vault and try to access what's inside. Then he'll accidentally trigger an event on the computer that traps him inside. There's no way out of there now, he's trapped in there until he dies.
    • The hordes of nightmarish Ghost People are victims of karma. The entire construction crew that was building the Villa around the Casino was pulling a scam; they were cutting every corner possible to make the flimsiest, least safe town ever constructed, and saving a ton of money in the process. Partially as a result of their shoddy construction, a dangerous toxic cloud began building up in the ventilation systems. After the bombs fell, with no one to turn off or repair the vents, the Cloud spewed out unstopped for centuries, and the construction workers can be found shambling around the Villa in a horrid parody of life, still wearing their hazmat suits.
    • The hazmat suits themselves are also part of the whole karma play. In order to get back on the costs of the Villa's creation, the client got in contact with a group of crazy amoral scientists, who used the Villa as a test lab for their newest creations, one of them being the hazmat suits, which were made of an experimental material and could seal people inside them because contact with the cloud quickly corroded the seals. This means that while the guests and staff all died horrible but comparatively quick deaths, the workers who were trapped in the cloud were unable to get out of the suits because of the client having to get back money that the workers displaced, and as a result, they became the Ghost People.
    • Caesar's Legion don't like women very much, and will tell your female Courier to her face that she should Stay in the Kitchen. She can potentially: Kill the frumentarii and all his bodyguards in Nipton; kill all the elite Legion assassins sent to do her in; wipe out the slaving camp at Cottonwood Cove; slaughter various Legion patrols; lead the NCR to take the town of Nelson from them; repel an attack on Bitter Springs; destroy the Fiends and kill all their leaders, and dig out the Legion spy at Camp McCarran. After you reach Vegas itself, she can kill Alerio after he tries to give you the Mark of Caesar, foil the Omertas' plan to attack the Strip, sever the Legion's alliance with the Great Khans, unite all the factions of the Mojave against them either under the banner of the NCR or under an Independent Vegas, upgrade and activate an entire army of elite killbots sitting right underneath their main fort, personally rampage through their base, slaughtering their troops by the truckload and even possibly killing Caesar himself, and even launch nuclear strikes at their cities out East. Several characters, such as NCR First Sergeant Astor, relish in the irony of one woman single-handedly breaking the backs of an entire civilisation of hardcore rapist misogynists.
• Final Fantasy:
  • You have a sort-of example with Tonberry enemies, which cast a spell called "Everyone's Grudge" (varies from game to game) which does damage that scales with how many of their friends you've murdered.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has a good few, given its nature as an MMO. To name one example, Teledji Adeledji, one of the leading Monetarists of Ul'dah, is a massive Smug Snake with delusions of grandeur. His mask of concern and generosity fully comes off during the final cutscenes before the Heavensward expansion, as he gloats to an utterly shattered Raubahn about Nanamo's (assumed) death by poisoning. This was an unwise idea; Raubahn, assuming Teledji was responsible (which he wasn't, admittedly, but had tons of motive), rushes him in a colossal rage and chops the little bastard in half, to the delight of nearly every player.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance: The demise of the Big Bad Ashnard. An unlockable cutscene in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn reveals that the man who was in charge of strategy for the battle where he lost was the son he abandoned as an infant, all grown up. Additionally, the man who kills him was the person who, through being nice to said son, gained his Undying Loyalty forever. If Ashnard hadn't abandoned his son, the two of them likely wouldn't even have met, let alone be working together to cause his demise.
  • Fire Emblem Fates has a Running Gag wherein Setsuna tends to fall into pits and get stuck in traps. When paired with Jakob, Jakob constantly expresses his frustration for her getting stuck in pits all the damn time and for having to rescue her from them. Naturally their "A" support begins with Jakob stuck inside a pit, and Setsuna rescues him. (...after she jumps in with him.)
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, those who slither in the dark experimented on Edelgard and her siblings when they were children, killing all of them but her to imbue one of them with the Crest of Flames to turn her into a Laser Guided Tyke Bomb. In all of the routes but Azure Moon, she's able to get revenge on them — after conquering Fodlan, she directly turns on them in Crimson Flower, and in Verdant Wind and Silver Snow, she gets the last laugh from beyond the grave thanks to a letter from her Dragon Hubert alerting the protagonists to their existence and allowing them to put a stop to their plans for good.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • This is the ultimate fate of the Purple Man in Five Nights at Freddy's 3. He found himself haunted by the children he murdered and, in a desperate attempt to hide, hopped into the Springtrap suit. However, the Springtrap suit is prone to having its mechanical parts snap back into place and when the Purple Man hopped inside, that's what happened, crushing and maiming the man to death.
  • The Circus Baby's Pizza World animatronics of Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location were designed to kidnap and kill children by the aforementioned Purple Man (a.k.a. William Afton). This ends up biting him in the backside when his own daughter is Eaten Alive by Circus Baby. In a twist of irony, she's the only confirmed victim of the animatronics prior to them being locked underground.
• Golf Story: A few times during the prologue, Lucky can be witnessed stealing from a food-truck. On the final hole, he becomes a stage hazard while he runs from hostile geese attracted by all the food he stole.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto IV has this. At one point late in the game, you can choose to either help a man who once betrayed you with a large heroin deal (you're ordered to do so by a mafia boss), or just kill the guy for revenge. Whichever choice you make though, you end up paying for it dearly. If you help with the H deal, not only do you get double-crossed again, but your cousin gets killed. If you go and kill the guy who betrayed you, the mafia boss that ordered you to work with him comes along and shoots your girlfriend. During a wedding. The mission that follows this lets the player get their turn at inflicting some Laser-Guided Karma, thus subverting Heads I Win, Tails You Lose.
  • Steve Haines in Grand Theft Auto V is the quintessential government scumbag that these kinds of games love to produce. Most of the jobs that the three protagonists end up doing for him revolve around him doing something against the IAA to get funding for the FIB, which includes torturing an innocent man that did nothing to deserve it, shoot up the office with a sniper rifle resulting in the deaths of multiple agents, and various other activities that culminate in them bombing the FIB headquarters in order to remove incriminating information that they have on him. This later turns out to not be enough, as he's led into a setup that results in him getting shot in the leg. This isn't the end, though, as in the game's Golden Ending he's killed.
• Kindergarten:
  • If you're careless in ratting a student out, this can happen to you. If Cindy is present when you present a dead dog in Nugget's cave to Ms. Applegate, she will be enraged thinking you've killed hers and will kill you. And then Ms. Applegate will give her a gold star for getting rid of you.
  • In the secret ending of Kindergarten 2, Ted Huxley starts getting dusted Infinity War-style. His twin brother Felix openly cheers at this, remarking that it saves him the trouble of doing it himself, and Ted dies having just found out that his own brother never cared about him. Then the second wave of deaths comes and Felix suffers a far messier fate, using his final words to beg Ted to come back.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Riku suffers for his deal with Ansem with a Trauma Conga Line that lasts up till the end of II.
  • Much like Riku, Terra gave into the darkness and paid for it. Although Terra's consequences in comparison were much worse, to the point of being Disproportionate Retribution.
• Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 absolutely love punishing egotistical behaviour on higher difficulties. The game actually actively spawns Special Infected next to people that wander off on their own to scavenge some pills or who think they can survive on their own. Chargers in particular have a reputation for this. Rumour also has it that "teabagging" a downed or dead teammate spawns a couple of hordes which home in on you.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, at the end of the first game, Crow assassinates Giliath Osborne by shooting him in the heart. In Cold Steel II, Crow is impaled through his heart by the Disc-One Final Boss. He even acknowledges this as karma.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In a franchise that allows and even encourages wholesale pot destruction, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword manages to sneak in a bit of this. In one of Skyloft's houses lives a woman who says she's an antique collector. Break her stuff and she'll make you pay for it.
  • This also happens in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. If you break any of the sparkling pots on the first floor of the auction house, the owner chastises you and makes you pay off the damages. But if you don't have any Rupees? He'll shout so hard, you'll get flung out the door!
• Little Nightmares:
  • The Janitor is a Super-Persistent Predator to Six, especially in his Lair. He is ultimately defeated because of said Lair, as his rooms are disorganized and unkempt, allowing Six to evade and distract him, and in his persistence to capture Six, he ultimately loses his arms and with them the ability to do his job.
  • By the end of the game, Six gains cannibalistic darkness powers and eats the owner and clients of the cannibalistic restaurant the game takes place in.
• Mari and the Black Tower: The nymphs become suspicious of Abbie and Mari for being immune to the miasma, so they exile the duo instead of heeding their warning to leave the forest. Later, it turns out Abbie can cure miasma poisoning, which means the nymphs doomed themselves by kicking Abbie out.
• The Mass Effect series is full of it. For instance, in 2, should Shepard leave Zaeed to die in the fire, he comments, "You started this fire, Zaeed. It makes sense that you'd burn in it."
• Wily's plot in Mega Man 10 is to infect all robots with the Roboenza virus, using the promise of a cure to lure any robots that haven't been driven berserk by it into serving him. By the time you defeat him, it turns out that Wily's fallen ill himself (possibly with actual Influenza) and needs to be taken to a hospital.
• The Metroid franchise:
  • At the end of Metroid II: Return of Samus, Samus spares a baby Metroid that imprinted upon her as its mother. In Super Metroid, the Metroid returns the favor by not draining Samus to death, and then sacrificing itself to save her life in the fight against Mother Brain, triggering the mother of all Mama Bear moments from Samus, who, by the way, now has the Hyper Beam.
  • Another cross-game example: Remember those cute critters that taught you how to shinespark and wall-climb in Super Metroid? At the end of Super Metroid you can take some time off your busy schedule of escaping the self-destructing planet and help them reach their own ship (it's the small dot flying away from Zebes in the ending cinematic). These critters appear again in the middle of Metroid Fusion trapped in a research habitat, and Samus saves them once more; after which, they return the favor by saving your ship from the rampaging Omega Metroid, allowing you to escape the doomed space station.
• In Middle-earth: Shadow of War, one of the Uruks you recruit as part of the campaign, Bruz, betrays you and takes control of a fort you just captured. Later on as part of the story, you shame Bruz, breaking his mind like a twig until he is reduced to a shell of an orc complaining about how he never wanted your fort. If you find him later, you can not only recruit him back into your army, but assign him as overlord of one of your forts, forcing him to protect it, even as he keeps crying about how much he doesn't want the fort.
  • More humorously, to promote the Nemesis System, the "Eat it, Jerry" TV Spot has the titular old man being harassed by an equally decrepit Uruk named Noruk who torches his mobility scooter and then performs the Title Drop. The video then goes backwards through time from that point with Noruk destroying vehicles that Jerry has owned through the decades including his retirement yacht and his car, always followed by him saying "Eat it, Jerry!". It concludes with a much younger Jerry defeating Noruk in the game by killing his mount and then saying, "Eat it, Noruk." whilst his fallen foe glares at him through the screen.
• Minecraft: When a Griefer laying TNT on someone's build accidentally sets it off while still on the scene, often through an accident with the flint and steel.
• Sirrus and Achenar rightfully fall prey to this in Myst. After pulling off their scheme to trap their parents in books, they wind up trapped in prison books themselves. To extend the karma even further, in Myst III: Exile, after trapping Saavedro for 20 years, Sirrus and Achenar remain in their respective prisons for the same amount of time.
• Octopath Traveler II:
  • The town of Oresrush spends eight years under the thumb of Giff, its greedy mayor, following Roque's departure. After Partitio defeats him and gets the town's wealth back in the hands of its people, Giff is reduced to a small-time laborer until his debts to the town are paid off.
  • Captain Stenvar, the guard captain that got Osvald falsely imprisoned, admits that Harvey paid him off and got quite rich as a result. Osvald spares Stenvar after his boss fight, but not before setting fire to all of his ill-gained riches.
• Ōkami: Amaterasu (the sun goddess in the form of a white wolf) spends 90% of the game doing small kindnesses for others, even though it seems incidental to her main quest to defeat Yami, the god of darkness. Mid-battle, when Ammy is at her lowest and darkest, everyone she helped starts praying for her, boosting her to full power and making the final stage of the fight a glorious victory lap.
• Persona 5:
  • Most of the major targets end up foiled at the hands of the same people they tried to prove their dominance over, but none get it as bad as Masayoshi Shido. A Corrupt Politician who spent his entire political campaign assassinating or ruining the lives of anyone who ever inconvenienced him, he's personally pissed off every playable character (save Morgana) by the time you fight him. He compares his campaign to an unsinkable ship and justifies his actions with "a small leak will sink me", not realizing that his pettiness created enough leaks to sink the ship he's so proud of. But the big one is before the game starts when Joker comes across him drunkenly assaulting a woman and tries to stop him. He tries to punch Joker, but trips and falls flat on his face, then when the police arrive he uses his political power to charge Joker with assaulting him. This results in Joker being convicted in a Kangaroo Court and sent to Shujin Academy, which results in the creation of the Phantom Thieves. His entire campaign is ruined because an insult to his pride that he trampled on and forgot about came back and dismantled his entire operation.
  • Yamauchi, one of the few corrupt adults who doesn't get his heart stolen, plans on using Takeishi's mother, the president of the PTA, to help him become coach of the track team, making her son captain to secure her cooperation before making him suffer a Career-Ending Injury to make way for a better captain. Once Mrs. Takeishi finds out, she and the rest of the PTA get together and thwart his plan.
• Phantom Brave: At one point in the game, Marona is hired to stop Raphael from wreaking havoc in a village, only to discover that it was an impostor using his name. After the job is complete, the person who offered the job uses Loophole Abuse to cheat Marona out of her pay, stating that, regardless of who was actually behind the trouble, the job explicitly said to stop Raphael. As it turns out, the real Raphael, who showed up during the fight and helped Marona stop the fake, overhears the entire exchange and promptly goes on a rampage through the town for real. To further add to the karma, Marona refuses to stop Raphael when the man asks her to and leaves.
• Pilgrim (RPG Maker): In the My Sister end, Alice gets stabbed to death by Akemi just as she is about to take Akemi's soul.
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: The shopkeeper Kecleon has a random bazaar in dungeons selling various goods that can be picked up and he'll ask for payment. You can easily steal them if you want, but karma will have a funny thing to say about that: Literal endless waves of super high-level Kecleon with high speed swarm the floor, all with a direct bead on your location, and proceed to curb stomp you. And if you thought you could sneak a few stolen items past the respawn, the Kecleon will replace every last item with worthless plain seeds. "Thank you for coming, I'll see you in hell!". In the first installment, this scenario even has its own theme. However, doing this is also the only way to recruit a Kecleon; just make sure your team leader has the Friend Bow equipped.
• Punch-Out!! (Wii) has Aran Ryan, who has two signature illegal moves: a headbutt and, in Title Defense, a glove on a rope that he uses when he gets knocked down. Countering the former with a 3-Star Punch or the latter with any Star Punch will KO him instantly.
• In The Reconstruction, Yacatec is a slave trader who sells his own race into slavery, but he's revealed to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold due to Love Redeems. After the apocalypse, his wife is murdered, and he himself is enslaved by the si'shra.
• In the prologue of Resident Evil 4, you can choose to rescue a stray dog from a bear trap. Most players do this solely due to the dog's Woobie-ness, to be rewarded when he jumps into their fight with El Gigante, distracting him and making the fight easier.
• Runescape: The quest "Let Them Eat Pie" revolves arround the player character helping to deal this out to Rolo the Stout, a pompous and morbidly obesse merchant who's buying up all the food in the area to sell at an overly inflated mark-up to the local war refugees. The player bakes and serves Rolo a disgusting pie and steals his seal while he's puking his guts out in order to forge a letter to his underlings to open up the food stores for free to the refugees. After the player experiences Rolo's overinflated ego while serving the pie, they "thank" him as they leave for reassuring them that he deserves everything that's about to happen to him.
• Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins: If the River Girl legend is true, then the Princess of Varamere used a love potion to seduce Titus I and lead him to betray Archiphea. However, she ended up betrayed and subjugated as one of his demon lords, which might not have happened if it weren't for her love potion.
• In the scenario of "Battle of Okehazama" in Samurai Warriors 2, a dying Yoshimoto threatens Dark Lord Nobunaga with a speech about Karma that will eventually find him and make him suffer a painful defeat. Nobunaga's answer?
  Nobunaga: ...I cannot wait.....
• Especially common in adventure games by Sierra such as Quest for Glory and King's Quest, being based on The Hero's Journey and Mega Crossover Fairy Tales respectively. Kill a rare flower? You'll eventually get turned into one. Fail to stop a cat from attacking a rat? Well, now who's going to chew through your ropes?
• The Mystery of the Mooil Rig Downloadable Content for Sunset Overdrive provides a fairly blatant example with Corrupt Corporate Executive Gwyneth, who attempted to turn the rig's workers into OD after they threatened to unionize. Shortly after her introduction, she is smashed into paste by a tentacle from the DL Sea Monster. Her bloody remains even spell out the word "Karma" on the deck of her ship.
• The Talos Principle: Humanity as a whole received this when it suffered extinction due to a virus released by global warming.
• In Undertale, Sans weaponizes this against you in the Genocide Route, along with breaking practically every rule in the battle system. At one point in the fight, he'll offer to spare you and give you a hug, saying he knows there's some good in you somewhere. He's damn lying. What makes this Laser-Guided Karma is this is the exact same way you killed his Nice Guy brother Papyrus earlier in the game. If you are on the Genocide path when you meet him, he always spares you right away, hoping to turn you around. And you killed him in one hit. You Bastard!^*Unless you subscribe to the idea that Sans's spare is a Secret Test of Character; he knows that even if he kills you, you'll just reload to fight him again, and next time you won't fall for his trap, should you reach that point again. But, if there really is some good in you after all you won't reload, and instead start the game over, hopefully for a more merciful run this time around where his brother, and everyone else you killed, are spared instead. He does say as much after he mocks you for falling for it.
• WarioWare Gold: After Wario has stolen Luxeville's golden pot, which is really the village toilet, made all of his friends do all the work for his video game tournament and attempted to run off with all of the money as Wario Deluxe, Karma comes back to bite him... hard.
  • First, the Hero of Luxeville, Lulu, defeats Wario Deluxe with the help of the player and steals back the toilet.
  • Then, all of Wario's employees arrive and he attempts to run away with the money, only for Young Cricket to catch him and dangle him off the ground by the overalls.
  • Lastly, upon finding that he already spent most of the money, all of the employees divide what little money remains between themselves.
• World of Warcraft: When the Alliance and Horde tried to halt the Legion at the Broken Shore, it was a disaster for both. Heroes were slain, the armies were destroyed, and survivors were forced to limp back home while the mostly-unscathed Legion was laughing in their faces. Then came patch 7.2, known to players as Round 2. As the intro shows, the tables have turned, with dozens of troops from all the class orders and races, including some that aren't even technically part of the Alliance and Horde, joining the players as they bum-rush the beachhead of the Broken Shore, pushing the Legion back a good 1/3 of the zone in a show of unity not seen since the Battle for Mt. Hyjal. All the while, demon commanders are shouting This Cannot Be!, and Khadgar is celebrating the rousing success, proving once again that nothing stands in the way of a united Azeroth. Come the Shadowlands expansion, there's a lich in Maldraxxus named Scrapper Minoire who sends players to a group of brokers in order to acquire a potion that will give her an unfair edge against her opponents in the arena. Upon drinking the potion, she instead transforms into a helpless slime, and is forced to forfeit her spot due to her newfound condition.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Moebius N attempts to break Noah's spirit by forcing him to watch as Mio reaches her Homecoming and dies. N, having once been a previous instance of Noah, had watched Mio die before him time and time again, and chose to join himself and his Mio up with Moebius in order to gain eternal life with her. However, M had never consented to this, and elected to swap bodies with the current instance of Mio in order to die in her place. Upon realising that it was his Mio who ended up perishing, N undergoes a Freak Out and loses all will to go on until Z pushes him back into action for the final act.
• In Yakuza 2, Kazuma helping out a fun-loving old lady with item quests will allow him to learn some useful fighting techniques, and eventually discover that she is in fact the former martial arts instructor of a Triad leader he fought in the first game.

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