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Morality Chain / Video Games

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Morality Chains in Video Games.


  • In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, Catie is implied to be this to her bodyguard, Anonymous. Without her to protect, he’d be just another trickster running amok like the rest of his species.
  • In Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, Soma Cruz will immediately turn evil should something happen to Mina Hakuba, his love interest.
  • In Dead Rising 2: Off The Record, losing Katey in this continuity turns Chuck into a psychotic alcoholic and one of the Psychopath bosses for Frank to deal with.
  • Disgaea:
    • Raspberyl to Mao in Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice. When she dies in the worst ending, he completely loses it. He ends up fully giving in to his Superpowered Evil Side and destroys everything, including himself.
    • Flonne could also be seen as becoming one to Laharl gradually throughout Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. In the Normal Ending, when he learns that he's actually responsible for killing her, he sacrifices himself to bring her back to life, effectively inverting this trope.
    • In the Bad Ending, instead of sacrificing himself to revive Flonne, Laharl simply wanders the Netherworld for the rest of his life, holding the flower that Flonne was turned into.
    • Played straight in Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, though reversing the roles. Rozalin warms up to Adell's strong sense of justice, his family, and his determination to bring her back safely to her father. In the worst ending, unlocked by having too many ally kills, after finding out Rozalin is actually the reincarnation of the real Zenon, an extremely powerful demon overlord who sealed herself in an attempt to escape a life of violence, she judges Adell to be a creature of sin and it is presumed she destroys everyone. This, of course, is avoided in the good ending where the Adell who has lived up to his ideals is able to bring her back to her senses with the Power of Love.
    • And, in the worst ending, Adell (in addition to failing his Morality Chain duties) is forced to kill Rozalin when Zenon fully takes over. Unfortunately, her now-disembodied self simply possesses Adell and the screen goes black. Then we get to listen as Adell kills his little brother and sister while they beg and plead for him to stop.
    • If the Japanese audio is any indication, he then proceeds to eat them.
    • Visco Dotrish ends up serving this role for the wicked Swamp Witch, Metallia, in The Witch and the Hundred Knight, which is also made by Nippon Ichi. The two develop an Odd Friendship that ultimately culminates in Metallia shaking the very fabric of the dimensions to bring Visco back to life.
  • Dragon Age:
    • Dragon Age: Origins:
      • Some good aligned party members can serve as this to the player. Even those playing a more "pragmatic" Warden might decide against more cartoonishly evil actions that would drive Leliana or Wynne out the the party, due to their usefulness in combat.
      • In a conversation between Alistair and Wynne, the latter suggests that the player might be a good influence on Morrigan if the two of you are in a relationship. Depending on how you play your character, this could be true. Or not, if you prefer.
    • Dragon Age II:
      • Grand Cleric Elthina is a morality chain to Sebastian. Once she's killed, Sebastian swears to raze the whole city in vengeance if Hawke chooses not to kill Anders, her murderer.
      • Elthina is also a morality chain to Meredith who, out of deference to the Grand Cleric, is merely tyrannical rather than genocidal. This is proven by her actions after Elthina's death.
      • A Hawke who takes the romance or friendship path with Anders is this to him and Justice until the third act. Likewise, Hawke can garner enough relationship points to stop Fenris from killing his long-lost sister after she sells him out to his former master. However, Hawke can't prevent Merrill from working on the Eluvian that will eventually take out her mentor and possibly her entire clan or Isabela from running off with the Qunari relic—at first.
  • In Dragon Quest IV, Psaro is already a Well-Intentioned Extremist. But when Rose gets kidnapped and murdered by greedy thugs ...well, that sends him careening over the edge.
  • In The Elder Scrolls series, Clavicus Vile is the Daedric Prince of Bargains and Wishes. While he always fulfills his end of whatever deal he makes, he typically does so in a way that the deal maker will regret. Vile is usually accompanied by Barbas, his external conscience who typically takes the form of a Big Friendly Dog. Barbas will often try to talk mortals out of Vile's deals, much to Vile's annoyance. Following the events of Vile's quest in Oblivion, Vile manages to separate himself from Barbas. He becomes much more malevolent in his deal making, but as Barbas possesses a portion of Vile's power, Vile is left weakened and trapped within a single shrine high in the remote mountains of Skyrim. Vile's Skyrim quest rectifies this.
  • Fallout: New Vegas has Rhonda the robot, the companion of Tabitha, an insane supermutant living on Black Mountain and running a radio show. While Rhonda was around, everything was fine, but after it was damaged and shut down, Tabitha got increasingly hostile and dangerous and took over the place. She also hallucinated that Rhonda was back, except the hallucination was far more enabling of violent actions. (Whenever 'Rhonda' speaks on the radio, it's clearly just Tabitha poorly mimicking a different voice.) If the Courier manages to fix the real Rhonda, Tabitha will be tearfully happy to have her back and will leave peacefully with her friend leading the way.
  • In Final Fantasy X-2, it turns out that High Summoner Yuna has become this trope for all of Spira. The world's people aren't bad, exactly, but they've been through a lot of shit, and the only reason they haven't broken into panic-induced riots yet is that they all trust her to mediate for them. The civil war that the game revolves around preventing can be directly traced back to the time she was in seclusion for two years and refusing to see visitors.
  • In the Fire Emblem series:
    • Fire Emblem: Awakening:
      • If Tharja gets married her husband becomes this to her. While he cannot completely keep her darker sides at bay, he at least manages to keep her mildly functioning. When he dies in the Bad Future, Tharja completely snaps and becomes a very dark mixture of Abusive Parents and Crusading Widow who only sorta recovered some bits of her sanity when it was time to pull an Heroic Sacrifice for Noire.
      • Similarly, when Henry gets a girlfriend/marries, said girlfriend becomes this to him. And so does their Kid from the Future. This also counts in regards to his friends in the army, particularly Ricken: even when he still has quite the case of Blue-and-Orange Morality, Henry says that if Ricken was killed in battle, he'd go in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
    • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
      • Player Character Byleth is the only person preventing Edelgard and Dimitri from degenerating into a Knight Templar and a revenge-obsessed madman respectively. Unfortunately, there's only enough Byleth for one of them...
      • As Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes shows, not even Claude is immune to this, as without his teacher to guide him and the Golden Deer to the secrets of the Church and keep him in check, he becomes just as ruthless as the other two lords, unflinching in getting his goals done even if he has to be ruthless to achieve them.
      • Edelgard herself is the only thing keeping Jeritza's Death Knight personality in check. He notes that without her providing him a cause for which to fight, he'd probably be off somewhere wantonly slaughtering innocents.
  • Dizzy to Testament in Guilty Gear. More than a few bad endings has Testament reverting back to the misanthropic, genocidal Anti-Villain they were at the start of the series once Dizzy is harmed in any way.
  • In Half-Minute Hero, whenever something bad happens to Millennia, Beautiful Evil Lord goes absolutely berserk.
  • The mother of the villains Isair and Madae in Icewind Dale 2, although her death happened before the beginning of the story.
  • Bastila and Revan in Knights of the Old Republic serve as each others' Morality Chain, as their telepathic bond allows them to subtly influence each other towards the Dark or the Light. The ending for Lightside!Revan is actually something of a Morality Chain Tug-Of-War, with Bastila trying to use the connection to convince Revan to fall with her and Revan using it to support his "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight speech.
  • Star Wars:
    • Revan is revealed to have become this for the Sith Emperor in Star Wars: The Old Republic; after being captured three centuries prior to the start of the game, he was kept in stasis but was able to telepathically influence the Emperor and convince him to make peace with the Republic instead of destroying it outright during the Great Galactic War. However, by the time of the game his strength had begun to fail which led to the end of the cold war between the Old Republic and Sith Empire.
    • In The Force Unleashed, for Starkiller Jedi Master Kota and his Love Interest Juno served as this. He went back and forth between supporting the Empire and Rebellion but ultimately has a Heel–Face Turn as a result of Kota treating him like a person unlike Vader and Juno showing him warmth for the first time in his life. His clone in the sequel turns on Vader as well due to his Genetic Memory of her.
  • In La Pucelle, the Dark Prince became such when his love interest is killed. Even after Amnesiac Dissonance, he reverts to such when someone who looks like said love interest is in the same situation that killed his original love, and reverted completely when he witnessed the original event again. In Ragnarok, Croix (The Dark Prince) himself is a Morality Chain for Overlord Priere.
  • Inverted in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Midna spends the first third or more of the game thinking only of her own world and recovering the things that she needs. The selflessness she discovers in the personalities of Link and Princess Zelda, however, become a Morality Chain for her which develops over time, to the point where she cares more about them than she does about herself.
  • A Paragon Commander Shepard in Mass Effect plays this role to nearly any character with an ounce of anti-heroic traits. Notable examples are Garrus, Liara, Jack, Miranda, and Aria T'Loak.
    • Matriarch Benezia joined up with the bloodthirsty Spectre Saren to act as this. Unfortunately it backfired spectacularly and she ended up becoming an Evil Matriarch and The Dragon.
    • It is possible to play a Renegade Shepard as a ruthless killer who later tempers that instinct as they romance nice people such as Kaidan, Liara or Thane.
  • In Planescape: Torment you meet a devil called Fhjull Forked-Tongue. He made an angel called Trias enter into a Deal with the Devil with him, hoping to corrupt Trias to evil. Unfortunately, Trias was better at contract manipulation, and Fjull got stuck with the short straw: By the contract, he is bound to be good for as long as Trias is alive; breaking the contract would mean his death. Trias, on his end, does not have to fulfill any part of the contract for as long as Fjull is still in the process of fulfilling his own stipulations (in other words, Trias gets off scot-free until Fhjull willingly becomes Lawful Good, at which point Fhjull wouldn't want Trias to fulfill his part of the bargain). Although forced to be good, Fjull is still allowed to be bitter about it, which he is. Oh so very much.
  • In [PROTOTYPE], Dana acts as this to Alex Mercer. In fact, the only reason the protagonist is doing what he does, such as trying to cure/destroy the Redlight Virus, Elizabeth Greene, and Blackwatch, is because he doesn't want anything to hurt her, including his own mistakes. Otherwise Manhattan would be a ultra-infected pus-filled swelling of truly gigantic proportions shortly before it wound up an irradiated wasteland. It's pretty telling that the only missions when he's not fighting his enemies or seeking information about himself are about protecting specifically her, and how rampantly the infection grows during those times.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog, the memories of the titular Anti-Hero are haunted by his friend Maria who was murdered 50 years prior. Due to false recollection, he spends the majority of the first game (and, depending on your options, some of the second) avenging her death by attempting to destroy humanity, but after a revelation in both cases, he remembers her last wish to bring peace to her people.
    • One of the odder cases, in that Maria is not so much the thing keeping Shadow on the side of good as she for a long time the only thing motivating him to do anything at all - good or evil. His belief that she wished him to avenge her motivates him to attempt to kill everyone on the planet - including himself - by bringing a Space Station he lived on out of orbit. His belief that she wanted peace for all motivates him to save the planet from the station, but entirely for her sake without pretence that it's his own goal or even morality that he's following. After which he may even have attempted to kill himself by falling into the atmosphere. Maria isn't so much the morality chain keeping him on the side of good as she is the morality chain giving him any sort of morality at all. Without her input he could be considered almost amoral and certainly apathetic.
    • Rouge The Bat takes up the role as Shadow's Morality Chain in Sonic Heroes and Sonic 2006. In the former, an amnesiatic Shadow follows Rouge's lead more than anything and in the latter it's Rouge's constant friendship that keeps Shadow focused on the task at hand without giving in to Mephelise' visions and influence.
    • Shadow and Rouge themselves serve as E-123 Omega's chains. Without them, he'd just be a rogue Eggman robot destroying anyone and anything to get closer to Eggman for his revenge, but they keep him grounded and a big part of whenever he joins the heroes to save the world is because they asked him to help.
    • Amy Rose is this for E-102 Gamma in Sonic Adventure. It's through his interactions with her that he's able to break away from Eggman's influence and gain the free will needed to save his animal friends trapped inside the other E-series robots.
    • Sonic ends up being this for Jet somewhat. Sonic's Chronic Hero Syndrome and their rivalry with each other drives Jet to do heroic things at times when he'd either not be bothered or be wanting to do something morally questionable himself.
    • Tikal is this for Chaos, earning his trust by helping him watch after the Chao and trying her best to maintain relations and peace between the Chao colony and the Echidna empire. She ultimately fails in her job, however, when the Knuckles tribe attacks shrine of the Master Emerald, slaughtering all the Chao and mortally wounding Tikal, which sent him into a blind rage wherein he nearly destroyed the world before Tikal could seal him away in the Master Emerald.
  • In StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Jim Raynor is this (to some extent at least) for Sarah Kerrigan. When Kerrigan thinks Raynor's dead, she goes back to the Swarm so she can exact vengeance on Mengsk, and she becomes rather ruthless in pursuit of this goal. When she later finds out that Jim is actually alive (shortly after getting herself re-infested as a primal zerg), her ruthlessness dials back somewhat, to the point that when she finally does arrive at Korhal to exact her vengeance, she tries to avoid civilian casualties (at the request of Valerian Mengsk). Kerrigan never completely turns evil (even at her worst, she seems to have more of a moral code than she ever did as the Queen of Blades), but she's definitely a worse person when she thinks Jim's dead than when she knows he's alive.
    • Kerrigan herself is this to the rest of the Swarm now that she's regained her humanity. Zerg on their own view every other living thing as a threat to be destroyed or assimilated so Kerrigan steers them away from innocents and refuses to let them attack allies once they're finished being useful.
  • Sword of Paladin: Captain Eagle admits he was tempted to steal from the innocent in order to survive as a pirate, but refrains from doing so because he wants to be a good influence on Will.
  • The Walking Dead (Telltale):
    • Clementine can be this for Lee, depending on how the player chooses to portray him. Lee's not a bad guy, just fairly flawed and capable of doing sometimes necessary and terrible things. Generally a lot of your options boil down to doing the smart (or at least understandable) thing, or doing either what Clementine wants you to do or what will make Clementine happy.
    • She also manages to be this for the rest of the team at various times. To name just one example, when Kenny learns it was Ben who was responsible for the death of his wife and child, he and Christa both coldly vote to leave Ben behind. After Clementine insists on a vote and votes in favor of keeping her friend in the group, and insists that they don't leave their friends behind, Christa changes her vote and abstains instead.
    • Come Season Four, after AJ shoots Marlon when he wasn't a threat anymore, it's your job to figure out whether or not you want to brush it off and tell him that he did the right thing, or make it clear to him that he's now a murderer and he needs to make it up to everyone. Your choice sends ripples through his attitude going forward, and the more he learns about killing and human cruelty, the more you have to decide how callous you want to let him become.
  • In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the night elf Leyara is a key member of Fandral Staghelm's Druids of the Flame, who answer to the malevolent Old God-aligned Ragnaros the Firelord. She goes down this path after her daughter Astaria is slaughtered by Horde raiders invading their village, and is aggrieved by Malfurion's belief that inter-faction warfare is too much of a distraction from saving the world being torched by Ragnaros. The fact that Leyara is Fandral Staghelm's daughter-in-law also seems to have something to do with her downward spiral, given that Fandral had previously kept Malfurion trapped in the Emerald Nightmare and has become Ragnaros' new right-hand man.


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