Love Makes You Evil / Video Games

People turning evil out of love in video games.

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• ANNO: Mutationem: C's core motivation to access Hinterland stems from his heartbreak over the loss of the woman he loved, who died in an accident years ago and left him with nothing but hatred for the world. Or at least, that's the excuse presented. It's left ambiguous how much of his destructive intentions were his own with the reveal that an outside faction had brainwashed him.
• Taken up to the EXTREME with Adele from Arc Rise Fantasia, when she becomes a Yandere vampy high priestess of a Religion of Evil upon learning that she was the hero's Unlucky Childhood Friend.
• Sophia Lamb from BioShock 2 — Not only does she say multiple times that she's trying to kill you and destroy free will because she loves all sentient life, she's willing to turn her own daughter into a soulless, brainwashed monster; all because she believes free will is evil, and by removing her daughter's free will, she is "saving" her.
  • And, it's possible for you, the player, to become this. Your main goal in the game is to get to your "daughter" Eleanor. If, along the way, you choose to make the evil choices, it's all to save her. Unfortunately, her bond with you will make her imprint on your decisions; killing unarmed bosses will make her vengeful, while killing Little Sisters will make her power-hungry.
• In BlazBlue, Tsubaki Yayoi is tricked by Hazama (who's actually Yuuki Terumi) to believe that her old school friend Noel Vermillion stole away her chance to be with her love interest Jin Kisaragi. She ends up performing a Face–Heel Turn and attempting to kill Noel. Thankfully, she gets better.
• Downplayed with Zasp from Bug Fables: he's far from being the most vile antagonist in the game due to merely being a rude rival explorer who competes against Team Snakemouth, and comes to respect and even help them out after they save his life. But if his far more unpleasant teammate Mothiva is around, he'll quickly throw all kindness out the window and become just as rude and violent as she is out of hopes of winning her affections.
• Captive (RPG Maker): It is heavily indicated that the captor's main motive for kidnapping people was to experiment on them and find a cure for her father's illness.
• Celestial Hearts: Edgar and Ash Gravehart kidnap people and steal their energy in order to revive their matriarch, Priscilla.
• Dracula in the Castlevania series suffers from this trope as many as three times.
  • First, according to Lament of Innocence, he first became a vampire to become immortal and curse God's name forever in response to his wife's death.
    • Leon calls out Mathias on this in Lament of Innocence, telling him that Mathias went against what his lover would've wanted him to do (he basically said "did you lover ask you to do this? The Mathias I know would never have loved such a woman!") Leon was understandably pissed off since Mathias' schemes led to Leon's girlfriend being killed by Walter, but was satisfied by simply fulfilling Sara's last wishes.
  • Centuries later, the death of his second true love in a witch hunt convinced him to seek humanity's extinction.
    • This would prove Leon's point again. Lisa explicitly asked for him not to hate humans. Granted, he didn't know her last words till it was too late (but, considering she's a healer who tried to help her village...), but her death is when he starts hating and killing humans. So, basically, Leon's speech could also be a call-forward to Symphony of the Night, and also a glorious note of how History Repeats itself.
  • In the Sorrow games, Soma Cruz can either resist or succumb to Dracula's influence, depending on whether or not he believes that Mina is killed. It's a trick purposefully meant to turn him into Dracula by Celia, but if it works, it backfires on her.
  • There's also Brauner from Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, who became a vampire who sought to destroy humanity because his daughters were killed during the war.
  • Add to this the number of protagonists who inadvertently contribute to Dracula's return due to the death or capture of their romantic interests, and one gets the distinct impression that the entire series could have been avoided if everyone could just get over these things.
  • Happens yet again in Lords of Shadow, only this time it's a Belmont who gets screwed over one too many times and turns into Dracula. Said Belmont gets better in the sequel... kind of.
• Magus of Chrono Trigger - he in fact doesn't give a rat's ass about world domination as is implied in the early game, and is instead single-mindedly pursuing revenge on Lavos over his sister, with no regard for the well-being of anyone else in the world.
• It's implied in Clock Tower 3 that his incestuous obsession for his daughter (and later his granddaughter) was what originally turned Lord Burroughs into the Big Bad of the game.
• In Cursery: The Crooked Man, Count Blaise Morellus is so in love with his fiancée that he tries to lock her in their chateau at all times. When she escapes one night, his attempt to get her back leads to her death from falling off a cliff. Driven insane by grief, he accepts a cursed gift from Mother Goose and becomes the Crooked Man, kidnapping and killing young women in hopes of finding his reborn fiancée.
• In Dragon Age II, someone is kidnapping women in Kirkwall because they resemble, in some way, the kidnapper's lost love, and is using their bodies to reconstruct her. One of the victims is Hawke's mother, who shares a face with the lost love.
• Similar to the above Dragon Age II example, there is a side quest in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that involves a serial killer (Calixto) harvesting women's body parts to resurrect his dead sister.
• In European Mystery: Scent of Desire alchemist Gaston's wife was accidentally disfigured by an explosion in his lab, so he kidnaps and kills young women and uses their essence in a potion to restore her beauty. She rejects him when she finds out what he did, driving him even more insane.
• Played with in Final Fantasy IV, as no-one's entirely sure how much of Kain's betrayal is due to his unrequited love for Rosa and how much is due to Golbez's mind control. He later admits that he's not entirely sure either.
• Fire Emblem is pretty fond of this one:
  • Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem's Hardin fell into despair after finding out that his longtime Bodyguard Crush and newly-married wife Nyna didn't truly love him back, leaving him open to be corrupted by the Darksphere.
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War's Arvis came to love Deirdre (who had been brainwashed into loving him by Manfroy) so much that he killed her husband Sigurd out of fear that she might remember him (that, and Sigurd had served his purpose).
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade's Nergal originally wanted to find his missing wife, but when that didn't work out, he sought to open the Dragon's Gate and reunite with his lost children (Ninian and Nils), hence his obsession with harnessing the power of the dragons and delving into dark magic. It eventually warped his soul and transformed him into the power-mad Big Bad of the game. Averted with Dorcas; he joins a gang of bandits to earn money for medicine for his Delicate and Sickly wife, but you can have Lyn talk some sense into him, tell him that the wife is her protegé now and convince him to join her side.
  • Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones has Orson (he betrayed his country to have a chance to revive his wife Monica who died prior to the game's events., General Carlyle (Queen Ismaire's long-time Stalker with a Crush) and Prince Lyon (he adored both Eirika and Ephraim and was at the same time jealous of them since he was a Delicate and Sickly, which contributed to him being susceptible to falling under Fomortiis' thrall).
  • Path of Radiance has Ena, who was fighting for Daein in an attempt to save her boyfriend Rajaion, who was captured by Ashnard and then turned into his mount. This also causes her grandfather Nasir to betray Crimea.
  • Radiant Dawn has Almedha, who is willing to sacrifice an entire country to save her apparent son Pelleas^note her actual son is Soren after his Deal with the Devil.

• House of the Dead 3 reveals that the reason why Curien created the zombie serum was because he was looking for a cure for his deathly ill son, but eventually this drove him insane enough to become the Big Bad of the original game and (debatably) 3.
• Hyrule Warriors: This is primarily the motivation of Cia, who was originally a sorceress at the service of good to watch over the Triforce, but she fell in love with Link, and became jealous that he was always destined to be with Princess Zelda. This made her easy prey for Ganondorf's corruption, and also caused her good side to split off of her, becoming Lana .
• In Immortal Love: Letter From the Past Count D'Morten marries a string of women so that he can use their souls to bring back his true love, who died of plague before they could get married.
• In Immortal Love 2: The Price of a Miracle Baroness von Croyts tries to sacrifice several dozen people to an evil spirit in exchange for it healing her crippled son.
• Kingdom Hearts: Riku. Obsessive need to "play hero" with an unconscious Kairi + an equally obsessive rivalry with Sora = basic premise of the first game.
• In League of Legends, Viego the Ruined King brought ruination to the entire Blessed Isles in an attempt to bring his wife Isolde back from the dead, trapping everything there in a state of tortured undeath. As if that wasn't enough, upon his resurrection as an undead wraith, he took command of the Black Mist and started a worldwide campaign in order to find anything that could bring Isolde back, corrupting and destroying all in his path to further his mission.
• Legend of Mana runs on this trope:
  • In the Jumi arc, Alexandra turns on her own race to save Florina, bringing them to near-extinction in the process.
  • In the Dragon arc, Larc made a Deal with the Devil to gain more power to be able to protect his sister, Sierra.
  • In the Gate To Heaven arc, the whole plot is kicked off by a Love Dodecahedron between Irwin, Escad and Matilda.
  • There are other smaller examples that border between this and Love Makes You Crazy... or, at the very least, Love Makes You a Jerkass. Somewhat justified in-universe, as it's stated that Mana Goddess is love, and she was corrupted and turned evil.
• Luminous Plume: Emilia wants to avenge her lover, Jade, who Raven killed. To this end, she researches the Harbingers of Calamity and enacts a ritual to absorb aura from all over the island of Celis, which she hopes will give her the power to kill Raven.
• Manafinder: Azain was once a manafinder alongside Liria, but when she died in the line of duty, he became disillusioned with the constant struggle to find manastones. This made it easy for Illia to recruit him to her anti-manastone cause.
• In Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, Makoto Kagutsuchi repeatedly speaks of his love for Kanai Ward and the desire to keep the city afloat, while showing hatred for Yomi's desire to destroy it. Little does the player know, this goes as far as doing everything he possibly can to protect it, as he's actually the main antagonist of the game. Him being a homunculus caused him to empathize with the homunculus citizens in the city, and because of that, he developed a love that led him to protect them from the Unified Government by any means necessary. His every action in the game, and every oddity within the city of Kanai Ward is a direct result of this.
• Both played straight and mocked in Metal Gear Ac!d 2, where the token Evilutionary Biologist turns out to be attempting to reproduce his dead wife's brain in a little girl, bringing her 'back to life' — and is convinced that doing so would turn her into an all-three-faces-of-Eve-at-once God figure (and, just for kicks, start a nuclear war to clear out room for his kingdom). It's mocked when Third-Person Seductress Venus says it's so romantic that someone would do all that for love, after which Snake points out that it's probably the opposite of romance, and quietly marks her down as a Yandere.
• Aribeth, the initial quest-dispensing NPC of Neverwinter Nights, does a Face–Heel Turn and leads the villain's army against the city of Neverwinter in vengeance for the unjustified execution of her fiancée at the end of the first chapter.
• Love is one of the central themes in Mask of the Betrayer, the expansion/sequel to Neverwinter Nights 2. Putting aside more exotic variants like the love between man and god, the entire plot and background of the game, including the horrible curse inflicted upon the protagonist right at the beginning, occurred because Akachi and the Founder were in love. Myrkul finds it amusing.
  "Only love could be so cruel."
• Odin Sphere:
  • The King of the country of Valentine had a daughter who he treasured above all else. So much that he felt betrayed beyond all reason when she fell in love with the king of the enemy kingdom and became pregnant with twins. He made life a hell for his grandchildren, and eventually strangled his own daughter, whom he said he treasured so much he wouldn't let rain fall upon her, with his bare hands. He was killed in a magical explosion in a war, but when he reappeared years later, having bargained his way out of the Netherworld, he effortlessly reduced his confident, self-assured granddaughter to being both paralyzed and trembling with open fear—just by talking to her. He also hatches Leventhan, the Dragon which will help bring about Armageddon and does many other terrible deeds, while, at some level, hating himself for all that he's done. His self-loathing is to the point that in a candid moment, King Valentine begs his daughter's lover to crush his undead form and stop him now.
  • Another love-related emotional scar happens to the Black Knight, Oswald. Oswald is a human raised by a Fairy noble, Melvin, who he loves as a father and would do anything for without hesitation. Melvin doesn't return the feeling, and, as he's dying at the end of a failed coup, freely admits that Oswald was only an object, a tool to help Melvin gain the throne of the fairy nation. Ever after, Oswald reacts strongly — sometimes with lethal violence — whenever he thinks someone is thinking of another person, or even herself, as a mere thing.
• In Phantasmat 11: Deja Vu Dr. Ryan hypnotizes young women to the point of severe brain damage in an insane attempt to communicate with his late wife.
• In Phantasy Star II, Duram turns to crime in an attempt to collect enough money to pay the ransom for his kidnapped daughter.
• In Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, it's revealed that the reason Don Paolo hates Layton so much is over a woman at their college, though Layton was rather oblivious to the his feelings about the subject at the time. Specifically, Claire and Layton were a happy couple, and Paolo couldn't stand to see her with him. One of that game's antagonists was also driven by his feelings for the same woman, though his hatred is not so much at Layton as the one responsible for her death.
• In Reflections of Life 3: Dark Architect Jonas gives the Dark Ruby to evil deity Nox in exchange for the promise to revive his late wife Melita. Nox technically keeps said promise - by using her body as a vessel.
• One of the main themes of Rule of Rose could be said to be "love screws you up, and makes you treat others horribly". Most notably Gregory going crazy over the death of his son Joshua, and becoming the serial kidnapper and killer known as the Stray Dog, as well as Wendy whose innocent children's love with Jennifer is the sweetest thing ever, up until she thinks that Jennifer loves her dog more than her, and has him killed, and that's just the start.
• Shadow of the Colossus plays it fairly straight, depending on where in the Alternative Character Interpretation you fall. Wander's whole motivation for coming to the Forbidden Land, making a deal with a dubious sealed entity, and slaughtering peaceful giant creatures is to revive his dead love. Considering the manual states Wander traveled for 'many moons' to reach the Forbidden Land, it's an awful long way to go, suffering the discomfort of horse riding for extensive periods, for someone one hates. Regardless of whether it's due to being a relation, friend or lover, it's simply a lot easier for people to think that Wander went through all that for love.
• In Shadow Warrior (2013) the entire plot of the game is due to Hoji's doomed love for Ameonna. The pain of loving her drove Hoji into an irrational hatred of everything keeping them apart and for Ameonna herself for making him feel so much. In revenge he poisoned Ameonna so she fell into an eternal slumber, dooming the Shadow World to an eternal drought before sealing his memories in a Whisperer so he could forget the pain of love.
• Skullgirls: Cerebella's motivation is to get the attention of Vitale, heir of the Medici mafia (though it's not 100% clear whether she's got a crush on him, views him as a parental figure, or some strange combination of both). Because of this, she accepts a mission to capture Ms. Fortune, a thief who stole the Life Gem from the Medicis. In the end, after learning that Ms. Fortune swallowed the gem (which grants her immortality), she crushes her body into bits in order to extract the Life Gem from her blood. However, the last shot of her ending cinematic shows her with a regretful expression over what she had to do to earn Vitale's praise.
• In Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Penelope claims that she betrayed the Cooper Gang to Le Paradox out of love for Bentley. However, Bentley accurately points out that she did it out of pure selfishness, wanting to make billions of dollars in weapon dealings and Take Over the World using his skills. The fact that she tried to murder his Childhood Friends out of jealousy, and insulted him in private, doesn't help.
• Shadow the Hedgehog in Sonic Adventure 2. After he loses Maria, he promises revenge, and mistakes Maria's last wish for happiness, as the other way around. He tries to destroy the world, and it's only after a talk with Amy, he realises his mistake, and corrects his mistake. Shadow in his own game can go either way. If gone down the dark side, Black Doom revisits Shadow's memories of the attack on the colony, and can than change his ways, or go insane with power and destroy the world!
• Used by Raphael Sorel in the later Soul Calibur games, where he essentially tries to infect the world (with his plague that causes suspiciously vampiric traits) for a little girl, his adoptive daughter Amy. How far this love goes is up to you.
  • Also used by Sophitia in Soul Calibur IV her love for her child Pyrrha causes her to make a Face–Heel Turn in order to save her life.
• In Star Trek Online, this is the fate of Noye, the Big Bad of the Temporal War arc. In another timeline, he was a scientist who aided in rebuilding Annorax's Temporal Warship to battle the Iconians, tempered by his wife. However, in trying to alter time/space, the heroes, player included, accidentally created a timeline where the Borg assimilated Romulus instead of the Hobus Supernova destroying it. They attempt to reset it, but doing so altered time so that Noye's wife's race would be wiped out — in actuality, they became the Sphere-Builders — and the temporal shielding ended up failing thanks to the Borg attacks. While investigating the data inside the ship after the timeshift, Noye learned of his wife and that she was pregnant with his child when the changes occurred. He blamed the Federation for this and sought to punish them for their actions.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Jolee Bindo of Knights of the Old Republic, four thousand years before the events of Star Wars, knows that the Jedi of his time are shifting to the view that Love Makes You Evil, and having lived alone in the forest for twenty years thinking back, makes the case to the player that this isn't so.
    "Love doesn't lead to the dark side. Passion can lead to rage and fear, and can be controlled, but passion is not the same thing as love. Controlling your passions while being in love, that's what they should teach you to beware, but love itself will save, not condemn you."
    • Bindo's observation comes from some hard experience. He was too head over heels with his wife to see fault in her, and trained her as a Force-user against orders. She eventually ended up joining Exar Kun's army. He also mentions knowing Nomi Sunrider, meaning he probably also heard about what went down with Ullic.
    • Also, part of the reason Bastila turned to the dark side (at least if the player is male) was that she was terrified of falling in love with him.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, if The Exile is male the Belligerent Sexual Tension between them and Master Atris devolves into this, as she admired them before they left to fight in the Mandalorian Wars against the Council's orders and when the male Exile finally returns to her she talks to him like a jilted lover rather than a former colleague. When her apprentice Brianna returns after traveling with him, she tortures her out of jealousy with the implication these feelings accelerated her fall to the Dark Side. The male Exile can imply that he was very well aware of her feelings, and might have even reciprocated if she wasn't such a complete Ice Queen.
  • Also in KOTORII this is implied to be the case with Kreia, with Shrug of God partially confirming her true identity as Arren Kae. The reason why Kreia started questioning the Jedi Code is officially presented as merely intellectual, but considering Kae's downfall happened when she was caught with a secret affair, which the Code forbids, it might be possible that it was precisely the taste of love and human relationships what led her to start doubting the Code's tenets in the first place (or, alternately, that she actively pursued those forbidden joys due to her skepticism about the Code). Her expulsion from The Order would have only solidified this stance, pushing her towards the passion of the Sith way and ultimately driving her to seek the Sith knowledge hidden in Malachor V.
  • With the KOTORII Restored Content Game Mod, if the party is Dark Side then in the final stages of the game either Atton or Brianna depending on The Exile's gender will attempt to Murder the Hypotenuse.
  • Nadia Grell in Star Wars: The Old Republic agrees with Jolee three hundred years later, and writes the following message to the Player Character if he chooses to romance her:
    I've been meditating on something. If we marry and start a family — yes, I know things are hectic right now, and there's a lot of decisions to be made, but if we ever do — I wouldn't want to keep it a secret. Almost everything I've studied about the "perils of love" seems to be written by Jedi who've never experienced it themselves. They talk about "uncontrolled passion" and the "fear of loss" like they're poison. But these Jedi never discuss devotion, patience, and compassion. Love's taught me more about those than the rest of my training combined. Those Jedi just dismiss love as "obsession", when love's the opposite and they don't seem to know it. If the Masters are going to claim that emotional attachment is flat-out wrong, I want to know that they've experienced it, and still think that way. Love can make a Jedi less selfish, more humble and more devoted. We're the proof. I wouldn't want to hide that from anyone. — Nadia
• In Super Paper Mario, Big Bad Count Bleck was once Blumiere, a young noble of the "Tribe of Darkness" whose romance with a human girl, Timpani, was ended abruptly by his father, who banished Timpani to the farthest reaches of the multiverse. So enraged and despondent was Blumiere that he turned into an Omnicidal Maniac, devoted to bringing about the end of all worlds by carrying out the prophecy in the Dark Prognosticus.
• Sword of Paladin: Downplayed. When Emilia sacrifices herself, Alex, who is in love with her, silently grieves her death and feels guilty he couldn't save her. While he doesn't turn evil, his grief is one of many factors that allow Ragnarek to possess him.
• The main villain of Tales of Symphonia: Divided the world in two and kept both halves in Medieval Stasis for four thousand years while using their populations to make Powered by a Forsaken Child style Metaphysical Fuel so he could fulfill what he thought was his beloved Dead Big Sister's last wish. And on the side, he tried to bring her back; creating an evil religion that sacrificed and experimented on countless more people in order to get her a body compatible for her use. When she finally does return all he gets out of her is a (rather justified) What Were You Thinking? speech before she voluntarily returns to the land of the dead, which sends him completely off his rocker.
  • Then in Dawn Of The New World, there's Decus who joins an Evil Organization to chase after Alice, who doesn't like him one bit, until he dies to protect her. Then she realizes that she did love him, and in a fit of rage fueled by The Power of Love and Metaphysical Fuel, she manages to wield his BFS to fight the new hero, Emil, only to die moments later.
  • This is contrasted to Marta who was the one who killed Alice in the attack above trying to defend Emil. She stops in horror wondering if she's the same as Alice as they'd both went to commit murder for the one they loved. Emil calms her down by pointing out that she did it specifically to save his life while he was being attacked, but Alice did antagonistically by lashing out in revenge.
• Leon Magnus in Tales of Destiny steals the Eye Of Atamoni and a flying dragon, then betrays the party leading to his death, all in an attempt to keep his maid, Marian, safe after she's abducted. He never regrets his decisions, stating he could bear any curse as long as it was for her sake.
• The main villain of Tales of Hearts accidentally engineered a parasite that drained his entire planet of life and was stopped by the sacrifice of one of his closest friends, and wants to re-awaken that parasite thinking that he can bring her (and his planet) back. Actually, it'll just eat more planets, but he's too crazy to notice.
• In the second episode of Trauma Center, Patrick Mercer's whole reason for researching Neo-GUILT is to find a strain that allows for quick regeneration and bring back his comatose wife Tracy. When Bythos doesn't work as expected and puts Tracy's life in danger, Mercer refuses to give up and tries another strain, the dreaded Aletheia, by first experimenting it on Ms. Mayuzumi. Once again, this fails horribly, and Mercer ends up getting killed by U.N. soldiers when he tries to bring everyone down with him.
• In the PlayStation game Valkyrie Profile, Lezard Valeth kidnaps his old teacher's husband, turns him into a hideous monster, gets the monster to kill said teacher, murders multiple elves to make a homunculus that appears to be around ten years old, and tricks one of his old classmates into killing themselves by becoming a Human Popsicle, so that he can force the main character to incarnate into flesh and marry him. When that doesn't work, should you earn the best ending, he deliberately kills himself to turn into a spirit being like those the main character leads about, allies himself with a vampire, kills the main character's older sister, and ensures Odin has no chance of surviving The End of the World as We Know It. To top it all off, he gets away with it all, even though he doesn't succeed... this time.
  • In the sequel, he goes back in time, captures the soul of the first game's protagonist's sister, uses it to capture the soul of the king of the gods, and steals a Cosmic Keystone to create a new world, all to get the attention of the goddess he's obsessed with. Although this time he doesn't get away with it.
  • You could make a compelling argument that this happens to Lenneth, despite it being portrayed positively and causing the best ending:
    • If Lenneth doesn't pursue her love of Lucian, then everything goes incredibly well and you win Ragnarok with no casualties.
    • If she does pursue her love, Loki manipulates Lucian into inadvertently creating a backdoor for Loki to take over the universe by using Lucian's love for Lenneth, causing her to also screw up by having a fit from unexpected perceived betrayal, and then Loki kills most of the gods and destroys all of creation.^note It got better though, which is the only redeemable factor. Even so, despite being less spectacular the consequences from the B-Ending are far less destructive than the love story A-Ending.
  • Freya's Undying Loyalty and unrequited love for Odin are why she's an accomplice to all the horrible nightmares he perpetrated on Midgard, mainly of Odin being a thief who stole an integral artifact necessary for preventing Midgard from turning into a Crapsack World, and uses Fantastic Racism to justify Odin's crimes against the living. Eventually Lenneth calls her out on this, stating that her love for Odin was just like the love between the many 'mere mortals' she ruined to please him.
• Viking: Battle for Asgard: Rakan fell in love with Freya and was subsequently rejected by her. In her defense, the narrator explains that mortals are rather fragile creatures and a relationship with a God would probably kill them.
• The Big Bad of Arc One in Wizard101 is Malistaire, who used to be the professor of the Death school of magic before his wife Sylvia, who was the professor of the Life school, passed away from illness. He was selfless, highly skilled in his school of magic, and deeply admired across the Spiral, but he went off the deep end soon after she died and went on a mission to bring her back by any means necessary, enacting a plot to steal a book of powerful magic in order to awaken the Dragon Titan, who had the power to bring back the dead. In the process, he's left multiple worlds across the Spiral in violent chaos, which you'll now have to traverse and repair to eventually get to him and stop his plan, because the Dragon Titan is extremely dangerous and will quickly lay waste to the land again if awoken.
• In The World Ends with You, Beat becomes a Reaper at the end of the first week, believing that he can become the next Composer and bring his erased sister Rhyme back. His evil is limited to attacking Neku a few times, as he never erases any other players. His disgust over what the Reapers want him to do leads to a Heel–Face Turn.
• A quest chain in World of Warcraft has you track down old journals and records and undelivered letters to piece together how one Stalvan Mistmantle fell for a girl he'd been hired to tutor and murdered her, along with her whole family, when she didn't requite him. In the new expansion, one of the wishing coins you can fish out of the Dalaran fountain seems to indicate he first looked for a Love Potion:
  "You mages refuse to provide me that which hastens the inevitable fate of two people in love, when only one is too naïve to see it. I wish you all ruin."
  • The root of Fandral Staghelm's descent into evil is the death of his son in the War of the Shifting Sands. Xavius thus manipulated him into grafting a corrupted twig onto Teldrassil by using an image of his son.
    • Tragically repeated in the latest patch. One of the more prominent flame druids, Leyara' backstory reveals that she was in love with Fandral's son, as well as the bearer of their child, and the dual losses of both to tragic circumstances made her insanely vulnerable to following Fandral right down into the depths of Ragnaros-based corruption.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and further elaborated on in Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed, this is a major part of what drove a prior incarnation of Noah to join up with Moebius. Having watching his loved one die right before his eyes through multiple short lifetimes, he was convinced by Z that it was pointless to continue to resist. As such, when Z offered to make him Consul N if he would destroy the City he and Mio lived in and had a son to stop the rogue god-like AI Alpha from destroying all of Aionios and kill Alpha's host, who happened to be his own great-granddaughter Na'el, he accepted after Z also added he would revive Mio as Consul M for further incentive. While he did have regrets over it, eventually he let the guilt and love warp into a twisted sense of entitlement.

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