Mooks / Video Games

Action-Adventure

• Batman: Arkham Asylum: A large part of the game is spent either beating Joker's mooks into pulp, or slowly and silently taking them out from behind.
• The Legend of Spyro:
  • Apes are the most common and basic enemies in the first two games, appearing early, often and in various regional variants, typically as hordes of weak enemies with few gimmicks that are easily taken down once Spyro develops even a few basic abilities.
  • The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: Most Skavengers are weak enemies with no gimmicks that are easily taken down and only pose any real threat in large numbers.
  • The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: Common grublins typically appear as hordes of rather weak enemies that are easily cut down on their own but which can prove challenging in large swarms.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Zelda can be a little unclear about which enemies are Mooks. It's typically accepted that Moblins, Bokoblins, and any permutations thereof are the common minions working for Ganon/Ganondorf, and Stalfos are a safe bet, but it's anyone's guess as to whether Octoroks or Keese do or they're just mindless animals attacking Link.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: The soldiers are relatively weak enemies in the Light World, although they are a bit sharper than most mooks (investigating noises Link makes, taking cheap shots at him from under a bush, etc.)
• Overlord has a unique look on this for a video game, in that you have and command mooks to do your evil whim. And since it's a game where you play the Evil Overlord, you use a lot of them.
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice: Every faction has their own basic mooks; an army of ashigaru patrol the Ashina Clan's stronghold, Senpou Temple is swarming with Bare-Fisted Monks and dwarf assassins, etc.
• Spider-Man (PS4) has various crooks, criminals, and ne'er-do-wells for Spidey to throw down with, from garden-variety carjackers and muggers to more dangerous villains such as the Kingpin's heavily-armed strongmen, the energy-slinging mask-wearing Demons, and the high-tech soldiers under the command of Silver Sable.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants video games, if not an army of robotic nuisances, the henchmen Plankton will throw at the player often comprises of Plankton's relatives, who first appeared in Plankton's Army. While Plankton's organic subordinates aren't quite as common as their mechanical brethren, Plankton's family have still acted as common enemies in several SpongeBob video games, such as Creature from the Krusty Krab, Plankton's Robotic Revenge, Patty Pursuit, and handheld versions of Nicktoons Unite!.

Adventure

• Ace Attorney Investigations has "good" mooks, in the 99 policemen who follow Shi-Long Lang around. They tend to block your path or drag Gumshoe away when he's trying to be helpful to Edgeworth, but they're on the side of the angels and at the end of the game one of them even pulls off a Big Damn Heroes moment.
• Super Snail from QCplay has Cultists who are these robed little characters throw off their disguise once Super Snail gets close enough. Cultists of this kind can only be found when exploring a country's game board. Otherwise everything else has an individualized name and would either be a Mini-Boss or Boss and the 8 Demon Gods are your Final Boss characters.

Beat 'em Ups

• Fighting Force Is all about this based on the men that work for the evil and chaotic Zeng.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game: Almost every enemy grunt is a Foot Soldier who are easily dispatched (but can be dangerous in groups). However, they carry various weapons, and are colored accordingly so that the player can quickly identify what weapon they're going to use.

Card Battle Games

• Gwent: The Witcher Card Game: The Monster factions features many of these from the Witcher series, such as Foglets and Nekkers. Many Monster decks use tactics based around these mooks, creating as many copies of them as they can before overwhelming the opponent with sheer numbers.

Fighting Games

• Guilty Gear Isuka: The GG Boost Mode features the Zako-Dan ("Lackey Gang"): Hundreds of generic guys with Only Six Faces, occasionally using Palette Swap to look more varied. Three of them can be unlocked but besides walking jumping, throwing some punched and kicks and sometimes a special attack or two (and sometimes not even that), they are next to useless. And you can't even assign them to the A.I.
• Super Smash Bros.: The Fighting Polygons, Wireframes, Alloys, and Miis are interchangeable, generic opponents for players to fight in situations that don't warrant a match against an actual character (they were all originally called Fighting Zakos, to top it off, zako translating to "lackey").

First-Person Shooters

• Deus Ex pits the player largely against humans wielding the exact same weapons the player can use. They also use the same model as the player for taking damage and dying.
  • Until the mid game, these mooks pose a serious threat as individuals, and more than three at a time is reason enough to look for a maintenance tunnel or sniper's nest.
  • The mook status is lampshaded in one mission where a mother begs you not to shoot at her son, who is one of the mooks outside. Her description is composed of elements hidden by the uniform, and chances are good you had to take him out just to get in and talk to the woman.
  • Deus Ex goes beyond lampshading and into bona fide deconstruction. Many of the game's faceless mooks have multiple lines of unique dialogue, and mooks constantly have conversations which Anviliciously drive home the point that they are real human beings who probably don't deserve to be gunned down en masse just because you don't feel up to sneaking past them or incapacitating them non-lethally.
• DOOM features not only rank-and-file human enemies (albeit under demonic influence), but a menagerie of the Legions of Hell to blast your way through, from fireball-chucking Imps and hulking "Pinky" demons to imposing Revenants and Cacodemons, all the way up to titanic Barons and bulky Mancubi.
• Halo features a wide assortment of mooks in the Covenant. Usually, the Grunts and Jackals fill the role of the common, easily defeated cannon fodder, while the Elites and Brutes fill the Elite Mook role. Games from Halo 4 onward add Promethean Mecha-Mooks.
• Left 4 Dead featured thousands of mooks in the form of the common infected - useless enemies who died in one shot.
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter: The identical nature of mooks lampshaded when Sam asks one "Didn't I kick your ass two rooms back?"
• TimeSplitters has evil henchmen in employment of the evil Khallos...EVIL, however, he does provide them with communal dressing rooms and rubber miniskirts for female members.

Flight Simulators

• Vector Thrust places an interesting spin on the Mook concept with recent updates- every pilot is classified into a Grunt or Ace difficulty level, with each category having sliders to fine-tune their competence in battle. So now players can tweak their enemy's skill level from Mooks to Elite Mooks to Bosses in Mook Clothing.

Hack & Slash

• Dynasty Warriors: Mooks are the primary resource in most games. They're technically capable of hurting or even killing your character, and they can get between you and the more important foes you're trying to take out, but their primary purpose is to die by the hundreds and provide a bountiful harvest of experience points, arcade-style power ups, morale and, above all, entertainment.
• MadWorld: Every enemy (aside from bosses and the big mooks you get once or twice per level, like Big Bull and Yee Fung) is a mook.
• Sengoku Basara: Every single soldier on the battlefield (around 600) except you and the one or two bosses exist only for you to cut down in style with your flashy skills. 99% of them don't even try to either attack you or defend themselves. However they do provide some quite amusing background dialogue.

Horror

• First Encounter Assault Recon: The Replicas and ATC Security guards are actually surprisingly competent and very dangerous if underestimated. And then you go into bullet time and devastate them with the repeating cannon or whatever ungodly powerful weapon you happen to be carrying. Mooks, mooks, mooks.

MMORPGs

• City of Heroes: In City of Villains, one of the early enemy types you encounter are a branch of the local mafia called "The Mooks." Like almost all enemy types in the game, they're an endless supply of easy beatings and experience points, with only the named bosses being particularly dangerous.
• Phantasy Star Online and its many successors have various enemies that stand between players and the end of the games' dungeons. Each different region/planet the players travel through typically have unique variants of mooks: in the original PSO, there are the wild and savage Native creatures in the Forest, the mutated Altered Beasts of the Caves, the Machines of the Mines, and the fearsome and alien Dark monsters in the Ruins.
• Warframe: The Grineer and Corpus fit into this category. The Grineer are a militant faction with billions of clones to expend, and the Corpus are a profit-mad scavenger whose armed forces consist of hordes of expendable brainwashed crewmen.
• World of Warcraft: The Bilgewater Goblins, introduced in Cataclysm, have a race of ogre-sized labourers... named Mooks.

Platformers

• Banjo-Tooie: Most levels have their own variant of the basic enemy that runs after you swinging its fists or some sort of blunt instrument: Ugger in Isle o' Hags (and a few other areas); Moggie in Mayahem Temple; Billy Bob in Glitter Gulch Mine; Jippo Jim in Witchyworld; Keelhaul in Jolly Roger's Lagoon; Guvnor in Grunty Industries; Biggyfoot in the icy side of Hailfire Peaks; Flatso in Cloud Cuckooland.
• Hollow Knight: The basic Mook family are the numerous varieties of Husks, zombified versions of Hallownest's former subjects instinctively going through the motions of their bug lives as well as trying to kill you. They're fairly weak and only possess basic attacks, and possess little practical threat even in the early game.
• Kirby: The Waddle Dees are not only completely ineffectual, they barely even have faces. Although they are adorable little guys.
• Ratchet & Clank: Every game typically has one group of reoccurring organic mooks (the Blarg, Thugs-4-Less, Tyhrranoids, Drophyds, Agorians) and robotic ones (Drek's robots, Megacorp security, ninja bots, DZ Strikers, space pirates, Nefarious Troopers).
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Goombas are traditionally the simplest and weakest enemies in the games. They appear early, often as the first enemies in each game, and take nothing more than a simple Goomba Stomp to defeat. Their attack pattern consists simply of moving in a straight line and hoping to hit Mario — they'll turn about if they hit a wall, but will otherwise just walk right off of ledges and into bottomless pits.
  • Koopa Troopas are the other primary cheap footsoldiers of the enemy hordes. Their "attacks" are the same as the Goombas' — the red-shelled ones are marginally more advanced in that they'll turn around at edges — and are just as easy to defeat.

Role-Playing Games

• Bravely Default: Every organization has its own armies that fight the heroes during the adventure.
  • The Eternia Sky Knights have the Sky Archer, Sky Duelers and Sky Pikemen.
  • The Khamer & Profiteur Merchantry has the Merchantry Blades, Merchantry Mages and Merchantry Thugs.
  • The Bloodrose Legion has Legion Archers, Legion Impalers and Legion Mages.
  • The Black Blades organization have the Black Blades, Black Axefighters and Black Pikemen.
  • The Council of Six from the duchy of Eternia has the Duchy Guardsmen, Duchy Mage Guards and Duchy Pike Guards.
• Dragon Age: Origins has Hurlock and Genlock Grunts towards the end of the game. While normal Hurlocks and Genlocks are fairly mookish, the Grunts have so little HP that everyone gets to just mow them down, dying even to one shot from a mage's staff.
• Dragon Quest: Slimes are some of the most famous! Let's see... first enemy you face, starting monster in the Mons spin-offs, give 1 EXP and 1 Gold, come in many different variants including Metal Slime and King Mook, only have about 10HP ever...
• EarthBound (1994) features a minor enemy species actually named Mook found in large quantities in certain dungeons.
  • Senior Mooks, on the other hand, have powerful PSI that can drop Paula in one hit.
  • Not as conveniently named, but Foppy and Fobby are perhaps the embodiment of this trope: they are nondescript little blobs with feet, they are completely ineffectual in battle, they give massive experience compared to other enemies in the same areas, and it's unusual to face them any less than three at a time.
    • But if they're left alone for several turns, they can concentrate again and start casting powerful PSI powers, which might make them Elite Mooks, or even a lethal Underground Monkey.
    • Foppies and Fobbies aren't the only ones like this. Others include the Slugs and Mr. Molecules.
  • Mother 3 has Pigmasks, the masked rank-and-file soldiers of the Big Bad, most of which are laughably dumb or cowardly.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • While the series offers a wide variety of enemy types who fill a multitude of roles and niches, the humble Goblin race most frequently fills this role. While there are some historical aversions, Goblins are typically Always Chaotic Evil semi-intelligent humanoids who live in primitive tribal groups and are frequently aggressive and violent toward other races/species. In every main series' game to date (except for Skyrim, where the Morlock-like Falmer fill this role), Goblins can be found as low-to-mid-level Mook enemies in countless areas throughout the games.^note They also don't appear in vanilla Morrowind, but do appear in the Tribunal expansion where they are being trained in the city's Absurdly Spacious Sewer as a Mook army. Historically, in the series' lore, there also existed 8-foot tall Goblins as Giant Mooks while the standard Goblins have been used by the Altmer (High Elves) and Tsaesci of Akavir as Cannon Fodder Slave Mooks. Some Goblins in-game can be found having cobbled together (or salvaged) heavier armors, making them into more threatening Heavily Armored Mooks.
  • Many of the species of lesser Daedra are aligned to serve one or several of the Daedric Princes, and they all may be summoned to Mundus in the service of mortal conjurers. For example, the Dremora serve Mehrunes Dagon as his Legions of Hell. The more powerful lesser Daedra may approach Elite Mook status.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII: The Shinra guards. This includes Cloud Strife, as exemplified by his pitiful stats in the flashback to Nibelheim, despite being presented as a SOLDIER; they reflect his true nature as a mere foot soldier.
  • Final Fantasy XV: The Magitek Soldiers. They are actually very integral to the game's plot, being essentially daemon essence confined in a humanoid armor. The fact that they fade away in roughly the same manner as the daemons foreshadows this fact to the observant player.
• Mass Effect 3 lampshades it in the Citadel DLC, when the Big Bad orders some guards to "Slow [Shepard] down!" The guards then have this conversation:
  First Guard: Why'd he say "Slow him down"? We're allowed to kill Shepard, right?
  Second Guard: He said that because he thinks we're Cannon Fodder!
  First Guard: Oh, well... shit.
• Kingdom Hearts: Any non-Boss Heartless. After you find the Keyhole in Traverse Town, the Heartless in Traverse Town serve two purposes; acquiring munny and Level Grinding.
• Legend of Keepers by Goblinz Studios, after your possible Masters and Maug's Interns if you chose him as your keeper, unfortunately all you have left are mooks - even your rare monsters are still just mooks. The game reinforces this by having your monsters including the rare ones, having an underwhelming level limit of 4 unless you're on Endless Mode whereas the heroes you fight can be over Level 10 (when a group of 3 heroes can usually beat both groups of 3 monsters when they all are of equal level).
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance features a huge variety of mooks to fight tied to the area and supervillain you are fighting with: Dr. Doom has his Doombots, Ultron has his Sentries, Loki has his Trolls, Ice Giants and Dark Elves allies, demons for Mephisto, A.I.M. for MODOK and so forth.
• Octopath Traveler has 'em by the truckload. Mercenaries, sellswords, lackeys, associates, bodyguards, you name it. They are one of the most common type of enemies fought in the game.
• Pokémon: Almost without exception throughout the series, the actual leaders of any criminal organization are a genuine threat... but the legions upon legions of grunt-level members are a bunch of nameless goofballs who are played almost entirely for laughs and are minor obstacles at best.
  • It helps that they seem to just blindly recruit people off the streets. The Mooks of Team Galactic don't even know what they're being terrorists over. In fact, the trope is lampshaded after you defeat a Team Galactic Grunt when he seems to taunt you with the standard Evil Gloating, saying, "You cannot begin to comprehend the goals of Team Galactic!" Then he pauses, and adds, "Of course... they really don't tell Grunts like me much about them either..."
  • Since Generation II, all trainers are named — except for the evil teams' grunts. The sole exception to this are the Cipher Peons; it'd be almost impossible to distinguish one from another otherwise.
  • In fact, the games expect you to defeat every single grunt because they give good EXP. The bosses at the end are at the level where you'd need to train so you can beat them. (And they tend to be Dirty Cowards who often spill their guts and give you information if you beat them, even though the protagonist is just a kid, necessary because looking through computer files or journals for that sort of thing isn't the point of this game.) This is especially true in the first few games and their remakes.
  • The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series games have the Sableyes to Dusknoir, and Aggron, Arbok, Magcargo, Magmortar, Mismagius, and Rhyperior to Darkrai.
• Shadow Hearts:
  • The original game features the hapless Japanese soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel Kawashima's command.
  • Covenant introduces Sapientes Gladio's Steel Claws and Paladins, the thugs hired by the mayor of Le Havre and the Iron Soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army.
  • From the New World has the belligerent bums that attacked Johnny at the very beginning of the game and the countless mafia goons during the gang wars in Chicago.
• Sunless Sea has unnamed zee-beasts and pirates by the boatload that regenerate when you dock at London.
• Two Worlds II: Among the thousands of mooks, there is a mook who's actually named "Mook" — a deliberate wink, especially considering the amount of other in-jokes in the game, and the fact that Mook-with-a-capital-M has two partners named "Lenny" and "Charlie", and the faces of the three look somewhat similar to those of a certain other trio who happened to have the same "MLC" initials.
• Valkyria Chronicles puts a lot of effort into giving Mooks a bit of dignity; the enemy soldiers all look the same, but some of them have specific names and are notably more badass than average and are worth remembering, your militia squad is colorful and full of personality, and there's a scene in one chapter devoted to the death of a single faceless enemy Mook who dies in the protagonists' arms, forcing them to realize that the enemy is human too. This doesn't extend to all the ally Mooks, who get slaughtered en masse and no one gives half a damn.
• Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader: There's a lot of lower level enemies with suspiciously small health bars, due to the game's momentum system require a lot of easily killed goons to tear through to gain said momentum.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt features a wide variety of mooks. Bandits can be found all over the countryside, and depending on player level and the difficulty can be taken down with one hit. Monsters aren't safe either, with common monsters like Drowners and Ghouls going down easily.
• Wizardry has "Mooks" as a playable race. They're pretty tough.

Run & Gun

• Contra: The running enemy grunts in the original game. The quantity of these grunts increases each time you complete the game.

Shoot 'em Ups

• Touhou Project: Sock puppet-like ghosts called Bakebake serve as the main unambiguous mook, both within the earlier PC-98 games and many fan spin-offs. Notable for the fact that they don't physically fire bullets at lower difficulties, they're by far the least threatening opponent, trumped by even the Red Shirt fairies. Fairies themselves have been described as perfect mooks, combining colossal stupidity, laughable weakness, and Resurrective Immortality into one suicidally confident package, though the fact that they're cutesy female nature spirits in appearance and the heroines themselves are often nominal heroes can make it easy to sympathize with them (excepting that that ''one'' fairy), and more often than not they're not actually serving anyone in particular when attacking.

Space-Management Games

• Evil Genius takes the further step of explicitly telling you that Construction Workers are expendable and can be used as cannon fodder; they're still necessary, though, as they're the only ones who can build new rooms.

Stealth

• Metal Gear: Due to the nature of the series, each title has its own set of mooks, such as the Genome Soldiers in the original Metal Gear Solid, the Gurlukovich Mercenaries in Metal Gear Solid 2 and the PMCs in Metal Gear Solid 4.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: The enemy soldiers (GRU or KGB or Spetsnaz, or some combination thereof) are so disposable (at least on the lower difficulty settings), at one point a bunch of them die to killer bees, while their leader (a plot-important character) simply kills all the bees that come near him. With his guns. By twirling them in the air. Snake, meanwhile, has to jump to probable death, to avoid certain death. Needless to say, he survives as well.
  • Metal Arms: Glitch in the System absolutely delights in its mooks, the "Mils" giving the player myriad ways of delighting in their dismemberment, forced-heel-face turns and immolation, all to the sound of their high-pitched screaming. After the first few levels, they essentially become Video Game Cruelty Potential popcorn. To their credit, though they are persistent, and will continue fighting on (ineffectually) even with only one leg and a half-attached arm to their name. Even if it means dropping a grenade at their own feet and blowing themselves up with it by mistake. Yeah, they're not too bright either.
    "Not me, not me! Shoot the droid!"

Strategy Games

• Total War: Warhammer: Every faction possesses a few units of basic line infantry intended to absorb the brunt of enemy aggression instead of more expensive and elite troops. The (in)effectiveness of the poor rank-and-file depends a lot on the faction: Dwarfs have it best as they nearly all have heavy armour and finely-crafted weaponry, plus every single Dwarf from the lowliest coal miner or goat cheese merchant to the High King himself is a trained warrior; Chaos Marauders are also quite strong as they are effectively daemon-worshipping, six-foot-tall vikings; the Empire possesses one of the most disciplined and well-equipped armies of the setting; Orc Boyz and Goblins come in good numbers but lack the armor and leadership to really form a reliable battle line; the Vampire Counts rely on zombies and skeletons, which are quite inferior in terms of combat stats but are cheap and never break ranks or retreat, plus they are scary so they can be good for breaking the enemy; and Bretonnian peasants and Skavenslaves can't even claim that, they are pathetic in combat and aware of just how expendable and outmatched they are so they'll run if given so much as a mean look.

Third-Person Shooters

• Fur Fighters: The mooks come in a couple of different shapes and sizes but it's generally three different types of Bear, a Peacock, an alligator, an armadillo, a Guns Akimbo Dingo, and a cow with different clothes depending on the level you're in, with polar bears standing in for the Elite Mooks.
• Grand Theft Auto: Most of the time, the mooks just magically appear after a cutscene with no real explanation why they're there other than an out-of-hand implication that they're working for an antagonist that was in said cutscene. There are even entire missions where the whole point of the mission is to kill a specific collection of mooks.
• Splatoon: In the single-player campaigns, the basic Octarian mook is a sapient severed octopus tentacle with a face and legs operating a makeshift hovercraft. In Salmon Run, the basic Salmonid mook is an amphibious salmon wielding a Frying Pan of Doom.

Turn-Based Tactics

• Jagged Alliance 2 has two grades of these in the Big Bad's military: constabulary "admins" and Army "regulars". Both wear fatigue pants; the admins wear yellow shirts (and are unseen after only a few engagements), while the regulars "enjoy" red-orange tops. Towards the end of the game, these two forces give way to the "Elite Guard".
• Sunrider has the PACT Mooks and their Pirate Grunt equivalents. They are the weakest enemy units in the game, with little health, no armour, no shields, little flak and only a weak laser and submachinegun for weapons. Sunrider Liberation Day beefs them up slightly, but even then they’re cannon fodder.

Other/Unsorted

• Prince of Persia: Most of the challenge that isn't about avoiding the ubiquitous instant-death traps is in engaging in sword fights with guards. Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame has sword-wielding, bird-masked Mooks in the temple levels.
• Vietcong 2: The short Vietcong campaign is something of a subversion of this. You spend a few levels playing as a young Vietcong soldier, then the campaign's ending shows your character as one of the countless nameless mooks your American character mowed down in the main American campaign.

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