Motive Decay in Video Games.
- ANNO: Mutationem: C's main master plan is to acquire The Dypheus' Breath, an Artifact of Doom that harbors the power to open gateways into Another Dimension that he seeks to use for his own purposes. Later on, when C starts to undergo a Villainous Breakdown, he foregoes his original plans in favor of attempting to take over The Consortium by having his forces eliminating anyone who refuses to side with him.
- Abyss Crossing:
- There was once a blacksmith who needed to make money for his son's medical treatment, and he worked with a fire fairy to make powerful Fairy Swords. However, he couldn't become a blacksmith of the Agastian imperial court while the position is already occupied, so he had the fairy kill the previous court blacksmith. While he got the job, he was so consumed by his ambitions of creating the ultimate weapon that he forgot about his son, who died from illness. The blacksmith then uses the Fairy Sword in order to take his own life. It turns out that the fairy was the Fire Astra, which means she was unwittingly amplifying the blacksmith's ambitions due to her connection with the vice of vanity.
- Airia originally froze the corpses of abandoned children as a way to honor them, but after taking in too much magic power, she started freezing people for the sake of collecting them like art.
- Wheatley from Portal 2 spends the first act with Chell, and helps her slip under GLaDOS's radar in order to escape Aperture Labs. At the end of Chapter 5, Chell helps him take over the facility from GLaDOS. At first it seems like he's letting her go, but then he suddenly and dramatically goes off the deep end, becoming obsessed with testing to a sadistic degree and reveals he intends to keep Chell there until she outlives her usefulness, effectively becoming the new Big Bad. There's some justification for this hinted at in the game; it's implied being hooked up to the Aperture Science mainframe was what ultimately turned GLaDOS into a sadistic nutcase in the first place.
- Bowser from the Super Mario Bros. series. His original motive to kidnap Princess Peach was because she was the only one who could undo the magic spell he put on the Mushroom Kingdom. The second time is apparently just to use her as bait to lure Mario into Dark Land (or maybe to stop her from mailing him magic items). Before long, he was kidnapping her all the time for a totally predictable reason: trying to get her to marry him. It should be noted though, that Bowser is heavily affected by Depending on the Writer. Sometimes he'll kidnap Peach as his primary motive, sometimes it'll be as a bonus to his scheme of taking the Mushroom Kingdom and, on a few occasions such as Super Mario 3D World, he's not above attacking her either.
- Assassin's Creed:
- In the first game, the Templars are - for the most part - an order of well intentioned extremists who want to strip humanity of its "free will" in order to bring about peace and stability. Their motives are made even more sympathetic by the fact that the events of the game take place during The Crusades. Yet in the sequel, they have all been reduced to card carrying villains who kick dogs with gay abandon, are motivated purely by their own greed and act only For the Evulz. The only possible justification (changes in the organisation between the Crusades and Renaissance) is lost when even the present day Templar doctor who watched Desmond in the first game behaves like more of a Bond villain in the second.
- Motive Decay is possibly justified in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, as the player can actually read about the motive decay of the Templars through optional documents. It's clear that the Templars' original motive of taking away free will to create stability has decayed into a flimsy excuse for oppressing the lower class as a means of protecting the interests and prosperity of a small elite. It's true that the villains of ACII were particularly fond of kicking puppies, however. After playing Assassin's Creed: Revelations, it seems that this decay was largely limited to the Italian Templars. The Templars in and around Constantinople/Istanbul are a lot more well intentioned. Particularly the Big Bad.
- They seem to have come full circle to being Well Intentioned Extremists again for the 3rd game however.
- Also in the third game, there seems to be an implication that the same thing might be happening to the Assassins as well. At this time their motivation seems to be freedom at all costs, but Haytham Kenway snarkily points out that he remembers a time when Assassins fought for peace and that total freedom is not necessarily the same thing.
- Haytham's own motives keeps decaying as well, as noted in Assassin's Creed : Forsaken. He initially wanted to avenge his father's murder and rise in the Templar order, and then considers uniting the Assassin and the Templars upon discovering his father was an Assassin. The revelation that Reginald Birch was the man behind his father's death unleashed a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, but even after that he remained a Templar and became more bitter and violent in his old age. As a Grand Master, he works as a behind the scenes Shadow Dictator with vague goals, never explained further beyond a belief that Charles Lee should be in charge, even if Haytham admits that the latter has no political skills and less tact — suggesting that Haytham intended to be The Man Behind the Man. He becomes a pure Templar fanatic in the end, rather than the more thoughtful young man earlier in the game and the book.
- The Assassins themselves are not immune to motive decay. They were originally fighting to protect free will from people like the Templars. Over time, this devolved into simply stopping the Templars no matter the cost. This comes to a head in Revelations, when Ezio helps a vengeful and power-mad emperor for no better reason than because he opposes the Templars (which he only does because he wants to keep his power). Multiple people point out that if the Templars hadn't been involved, Ezio would have killed the emperor for his crimes himself.
- Assassin's Creed Origins states that the earliest known version of the Templars, the Order of Ancients, was founded around three thousand and five hundred years ago to study the setting's Precursors. By the time of Origins, around 48 BCE, most of them seem to have forgotten this in favour of their old stand-by of "do whatever we want, and be as horrible as possible while we're doing it".
- From the beginning of the Crash Bandicoot series, Doctor Neo Cortex was motivated to Take Over the World by a combination of They Called Me Mad! and abuse related to his short stature. From Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped onward, his schemes are mostly carried out as a service to his boss Uka Uka. At other times, he either specifically attempts to get rid of Crash (lampshaded in Crash Nitro Kart when Cortex ponders how he can defeat the Bandicoots before recalling his original world domination goal) or does what he does For the Evulz.
- Fate/stay night:
- Zouken Matou's original motivation for obtaining the Holy Grail was to honor Justizia von Einzbern, who sacrified herself in order to create the Grail and was a woman he deeply admired. Furthermore, he had always dreamed of creating an utopia and to better human conditioning, even if his life and efforts weren't rewarded at all.. But over time, the deterioration of his body, senility and his frustration made him forget all of this, leaving only his obsession with immortality.
- The Grail War itself, in its first iteration, was an attempt to create a portal to Akasha, the root of all magic—the whole "you get a wish if you win" idea was just a way to draw people in and use their Servants as sacrifices to open said portal. By the modern day, even the original families who set up the whole system don't really remember that part, and focus entirely on trying to obtain that wish.
- Sigma from Mega Man X started off as wanting to take over the world to create a golden age of Reploids. Over the later games though, he eventually just wants to destroy the entire world, even saying "I will make X AND Zero MINE!". Then in X8, he suddenly switched to a goal of creating a new world populated only by his 'children', the new gen Reploids. And then there's Maverick Hunter X, an MMX reboot series, where Sigma's initial motivation was creating a new era and pushing Reploid potential.
- The Brothers of the Eternal Pyre from Palworld started out as a religious organization dedicated to the worship of fire in both its purifying and deadly forms. Under Axel, they've devolved into a group of bloodthirsty pyromaniacs.
- Pokémon:
- Neo Team Plasma from Pokémon Black 2 and White 2. After the events of the first game, their original motivation of liberating Pokémon from mankind for their own sakes was lost thanks to their leader revealing his true intentions by the end of the first game. Now they behave like an outright terrorist group that only cares about taking over Unova by force instead of following their ideals. A small faction led by N that tries to live up to their original goals still exists, though.
- Many of the members of Team Rainbow Rocket, all of which coming from alternate universes where they won, seem to be going this way in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. For instance, Archie and Maxie had semi sympathetic motives in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, but their Rainbow Rocket selves are simply part of an evil coalition wanting to rule the world.
- In Warcraft, this trend has become somewhat of a joke fan community. An increasing number of villains appearing in World of Warcraft were once heroes or otherwise well-intentioned characters who have suffered from Motive Decay, most often Hand Waved with the "insanity" excuse. How else are you going to find new storyline bosses?
- Illidan was always a mentally unstable guy with complex motives, some as a Well-Intentioned Extremist and some purely selfish, but was reduced to a brooding lunatic who attacked Shattrah City for no apparent reason even though they shared a common enemy, and seemed primarily interested in enslaving the people of Outland. Eventually his death at the hands of the players was undone, and his role in the story changed to revolve again around his desire to defeat the Burning Legion.
- Maiev suffered from this. Her original goal was just to be a jailor and deal out justice. After 10,000 years locked in a jail guarding prisoners, her motive warped to one of simple vengeance. By the end she has become vengeance incarnate itself and only cares about dealing with Illidan. When she helps you kill him, she mocks him the entire time. It's clear that she is having fun fighting him. When Illidan is killed, all she is left left with is emptiness. She finally realized that her goal was the only thing that kept her going for the majority of her 10,000 year life (which, by the way, is going to end soon due to the World Tree dying). She leaves the battle completely broken. When Illidan returned, Maiev did as well and her only motivation seemed to be keeping an eye on Illidan. After he became Sargeras's jailer, Maiev finally found a new purpose in defending the Night Elves.
- Kael'thas in Warcraft 3 was a sympathetic character who allied with Illidan because he had no other choice and wanted to save his people. In World of Warcraft, he has become a power crazed evil overlord and demon worshipper who would gladly kill off his people to ensure the victory of the demons. One of whom is the very demon that arranged for his people's decimation in the first place. In Shadowlands he is encountered in the afterlife where constant torture for his sins has made him somewhat more sane and grudgingly willing to admit he might have made a poor choice in allies.
- Arthas has largely the same storyline — he starts out making difficult and heartbreaking decisions (the big one being killing off the entirely innocent population of Stratholme to prevent them from becoming undead minions of a big bad) and devolves into becoming a simple insane Big Bad himself. He only averts this trope because his fall into insanity was planned from the beginning, rather than something that was tacked on.
- Following the trend, the Big Bad of the fourth expansion, Garrosh Hellscream, suffered noticeable decay after he was convinced to actually act like a leader. Originally trying to uphold the traditional values of the Orcs, his actions to defend them became increasingly extreme and his Blood Knight tendencies more pronounced. His abrupt decision to nuke Theramore, despite having previously executed a general for a similar act, and his increasingly crude methods of running the Horde after that marked the end of his "to protect my people" motives and the beginning of his "I will conquer the world by any means and erect mountains of skulls" motivation.
- Sylvanas Windrunner equally fell from grace. Her initial goal in forming the Forsaken was to seek Revenge against the Lich King for destroying her home and raising her from the dead as an undead slave. Once Arthas was killed, Sylvanas committed suicide with her mission complete. But upon dying, she found that her extreme methods with the Forsaken against the Scourge damned her soul to the Maw for eternal torment. After making a deal with the Val'kyr to come back, Sylvanas' new goal became to ensure she never died again, focusing on ways to preserve the Forsaken as a race to avoid that fate. By Battle for Azeroth and as the new Warchief, Sylvanas has become a Hope Crusher who has "made life [her] enemy," and seeks to wipe out anything that would oppose her iron will. Shadowlands further explains that after allying with the Jailer, Sylvanas came to believe the cycle of life and death was cruel and unfair. The only solution she can see to this is to tear down the entire system and rebuild it from the ground up.
- Aribeth in Neverwinter Nights went from defending the city, to taking vengeance on the people who didn't actually kill Fenthick but she blamed for it, to having a vague plan to enter their citadel, to joining them and destroying the city she now blamed for the earlier spoilered event.
- While technically neutral, there's been major debate among fans on whether or not Scorpion from Mortal Kombat has fallen to this trope, all hinging on whether or not his ending in MK II came to pass; up until then, he had come back to slay Sub-Zero to avenge the death of himself and his family and clan, but according to the ending, he notices Subby spare an opponent, and deduces that it's not the same man (in fact, the guy's the original Subby's younger brother). If true, from then until MK 4, Scorpion swears to protect the new Subby as atonement, giving him a modicum of depth that proves he's not the revenge-crazed one-track-mind spectre he would be if the ending never happened. This is all rendered moot when Deception gave him a higher calling than simple vengeance, but even that was screwed up, and now he's on another revenge kick.
- Happens often to the villains of Final Fantasy:
- Zemus of Final Fantasy IV starts out a Lunarian Supremacist. By the time of the game proper, he's more into Kill All Humans. When his body is destroyed, his soul quickly becomes the personification of hatred.
- Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII initially turns evil after going mad from the (partly false) revelation about his origins and deciding to take revenge on humanity on behalf of his mother whom he believes to be a Cetra. After he falls into the Lifestream and floats there for a few years, he returns having decided that it's actually all right that his "mother" is an Eldritch Abomination (the one who nearly wiped out the Cetra), and decides to absorb The Lifestream to become a god and acquire ultimate power. Then Cloud defeated him for a second time. In almost every spin-off since, Sephiroth is little more than Cloud's archrival, obsessed with defeating him but not before MindScrewing him by pointing out how easily he can push Cloud's buttons. He did have a new plot to take over the world in Advent Children, but he set it aside in the climax for a duel with Cloud and his plan failed when Cloud beat him. The accompanying novellas reveal he didn't even have to recreate a physical body for himself to see his plan succeed, he chose to do it just to rub his rebirth in Cloud's face. At this point, Sephiroth is little more than the personification of Evil Is Cool, striking iconic poses and dropping quotable one-liners about despair before going off to duel Cloud again. The novellas justify his obsession with Cloud by explaining that his hatred was the only thing that allowed Sephiroth to maintain his individuality in the Lifestream. Sephiroth kept his ego from being absorbed by the Lifestream by thinking really hard about how much he wanted to beat the crap out of Cloud.
- Dissidia Final Fantasy has a subtle Lampshade Hanging of this—when Sephiroth senses Cloud approaching, he tells Warrior of Light he must "fulfill his obligation" and goes off to see Cloud. When they meet Sephiroth squares off to fight, but Cloud refuses because he doesn't see the point of fighting him anymore. No, really, Cloud says "Fighting you would be meaningless. I'm tired of taking part in pointless battles." By the end of the game, Sephiroth's fixation on Cloud has grown obsessive.
- Kefka's assessment of him. When what amounts to the franchise's incarnation of pure insanity has a problem with you being too motiveless, that's saying something.Kefka: Uh, what is it that you want?
- Wiegraf from Final Fantasy Tactics started off as a Hero Antagonist rebel fighting to get his men their back pay and recognition from a bankrupt kingdom. Then Ramza kills his sister in combat, and he turns his attention to getting revenge against him, and after his Death Corps is wiped out, joins up with the Shrine Knights. Then, after another battle with Ramza leaves him mortally wounded, he makes a Deal with the Devil and becomes the Zodiac Brave Velius. The next time you meet him, he doesn't give a damn about Miliuda; he just wants to burn the world and hear humans scream.
- Kirby: Meta Knight first appeared in Kirby's Adventure as a Worthy Opponent to Kirby who took part in King Dedede's scheme to protect the Star Rod from Nightmare, knowing the Meta-knights would be a valuable asset and thus encountered the pink puffball in various Let's You and Him Fight. Since then, he appeared as a Well-Intentioned Extremist dedicated to ending Dream Land's lazy lifestyle, got caught up in another Let's You and Him Fight, did his best to help Kirby save another world, and appeared as a Blood Knight protagonist.
- Fallout:
- Featured in an in-game way in Fallout 3. In the Hubris Comics building (a parody of Marvel/DC), you can find a letter to the editor from an irate fan complaining about how the new writer of Grognak the Barbarian has reduced the villainess "the AntAgonizer" from a complex, sympathetic antagonist to a 2-dimension cardboard villain. Later in the game, you can even use the argument to persuade a woman who has based her entire persona on the fiction Antagonizer character to give up her life of supervillainy.
- This happens to the west-most sects of the Brotherhood of Steel by the time Fallout: New Vegas rolls around; their motive of redeeming the wasteland has decayed into basically being thugs with power armor that "confiscate" any high-tech pre-war goodies that people outside the Brotherhood find. A maverick scribe Veronica has her companion quest center around her futile effort to avert this.
- In Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, Lady continued on her path as a Devil Hunter at the end of the game (rather than go back to a regular life) because she had "a job to do that's far from done, which is to eliminate every last demon", to ensure that monsters like her father never came about again. Seems heroic, right? Too bad you won't be able to tell. The animated series has her saying that she stays with the job, not out of a sense of heroics or a greater goal, but because she has an insatiable need to kill things. That's that.
- Trent Hawkins, the hero of Tyrian lampshades this happening to him. Originally starting out to get revenge on the MegaCorp that killed a close friend, he ends up getting pushed into to ever more dangerous missions often only tangentially related to anything he actually cares about. Eventually, by the end, when he realizes that he "doesn't even remember the name of his friend killed in episode one", he just decides to Screw This, I'm Outta Here.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- Ganondorf's villainy fluctuate this way. He was revealed in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker to have begun his efforts to conquer Hyrule because he wanted to make a better life for himself and his people by giving them a home that wasn't as harsh and uninhabitable as the Gerudo Desert. Unfortunately, as The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword implies, he's been latched onto as the host and implement of an ancient demon's death-curse, resulting in a rapid decay of his motives from "a better home for my people" down to "Omnicidal Maniac" in a matter of months whenever he tries - judging from what we see, the decay took place entirely during or before his first appearance in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it's just that Link (and thus the player) don't get to learn what he started out wanting until Wind Waker.
- By the time of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, set at minimum ten thousand years after any previous game, Ganon (now called Calamity Ganon) has become little more than a walking, mindless natural disaster with no sign of the human Ganondorf left, and a goal to destroy the world rather than conquer it. In the final battle, he even gives up on reincarnation just to make sure Link dies.
- Walker (and by extension, the player) experiences this throughout Spec Ops: The Line. As the situation in Dubai worsens, the Deltas lose sight of their desire to evacuate the city, which is exacerbated when Walker begins to hallucinate and direct the team's attention to destroying the 33rd. Later in the game, everything, from the words of a hallucinated John Konrad to the loading screen itself, is used to call Walker (and the player) out on this."Do you even remember why you are here?"
- The Ur-Didact of Halo starts out as a Reasonable Authority Figure who did not want to fire the Halo superweapons because he knew they would destroy billions of innocents along with the Flood. While he may have been a proud Forerunner who didn't like humanity very much, he certainly didn't want to completely wipe them out either, and even had some grudging respect for them. By the time we meet him in Halo 4, he's become a ruthless imperialist whose attempts to avoid firing the Halos included attempting genocide on humanity by turning them into droid soldiers to fight the Flood; even now, he still wants to do the same, despite there being no apparent Flood to fight. Halo: Silentium works to justify his descent, revealing that not only did the Flood drive him mad, but when he was then sealed in a Cryptum for a hundred millennia, he was awake the entire time.
- Max Payne is an unusual example of the protagonist experiencing this. In Act 1 he's mainly interested in tracking down the supplier of Valkyr and finding out who murdered his partner, but his Cowboy Cop tendencies get noticeably further out of control as the game progresses... And then he does track down the supplier of Valkyr and learns several important facts about them (starting with the fact that they murdered his wife and baby daughter as part of a cover-up) and... Well, he's not really interested in collecting evidence anymore.
- Supplementary materials for the third game reveal that the Crachá Preto paramilitary Hired Guns started out as law enforcement types going Vigilante Man in order to eliminate the crooks that the law couldn't or wouldn't touch. Then they lost their way.
- EarthBound Series: Giygas in EarthBound Beginnings was trying to destroy Earth because Ninten's grandfather George stole the PSI power from his people and feared that the earthlings may use it against them. In EarthBound, he now wants to bring all existence to eternal darkness. The creator handwaved that he went mad after the events of the first game, and the game confirms this was due to wielding vast cosmic power.
- Far Cry:
- Far Cry 2 has an example where it happens with the protagonist. You are initially tasked to take out the Jackal, but get caught up in the Civil War while trying to obtain information from both factions. By the time the player catches up with the Jackal, they decide to join forces in order to take out the leadership of the UFLL, the APR and the Private Military Contractors working for both of them and help civilians flee the country.
- Far Cry 3 covers this as well. Jason's initial motivation is to survive and escape Rook Island with his friends. When he does have an opportunity to get away, he takes the fight to the Privateers instead. In the end, the player must chose whether to play this trope straight and stay with the Rakyat and be murdered or subvert it and escape the island instead.
- Far Cry 4 explains why this trope causes The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The ringleaders of the Golden Path bicker about opposing strategies and ideologies, which goes horribly wrong as their organization grows in power. By the time the king is usurped, the remaining leader will turn Kyrat into a military dictatorship (of what kind depends on who took over the Golden Path completely).
- Another protagonist example is in Lunarosse. Both Corlia and Yliandra have pretty simple motives that they keep up through the whole game, which amount to "Keep my land safe and blow up the other empire". And the Greater-Scope Villain has his goal of "Manipulate everyone and blow it all up". However, the Mnemosyne Company - who are the good guys - lose track of their original goal, which is to get out the dream world they're all stuck in and go home, and keep getting embroiled in the conflict between the empires. Initially, it's just to manage things to keep them from destroying everything until they figured out their own goal, but this just results in further escalation until both empires are whipping out their equivalents of tactical nukes on each other. This results in you picking one side or another, but if you decide to Take a Third Option, Channing will call them all out on how far they've deviated from their goals and they'll go back to that.
- Kingdom Hearts: Master Xehanort was initially a Well-Intentioned Extremist, believing that the universe was too full of light and believed a balance between light and darkness was the way for a perfect world to exist. His solution — begin a Keyblade War to engulf the worlds in darkness, and when he wins and claims the power of Kingdom Hearts, he can remake it in his image of balance. Nowadays, however, he's become Drunk on the Dark Side and merely wants power and knowledge for their own sake.
- In Kingdom Hearts III, we learn where Xehanort's desire for power began. His best friend Eraqus was pretty much guaranteed to become a great defender of the World, and Xehanort, in one of his VERY rare moments of sincerely admitting his limits, nonetheless promised to remain beside him. But to become strong enough to keep up with Eraqus, he resorted to attempting to master the power of darkness. In the decades to follow, "remain beside the World's defender" was twisted into "BECOME the World's defender", and it only got worse from there. Layer upon layer of ambition and delusion obscured Xehanort's original motivation. It was only at the very end of his life, when all his power and planning was reduced to nothing, that Eraqus was able to help Xehanort realize this.
- Fire Emblem:
- In Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, Medeus the Earth Dragon king was essentially a military dictator who just happened to be a dragon, who wanted to subjugate the world for power and party as revenge for how humans used to oppress the dragons. By the time of his resurrection in Mystery of the Emblem, he's become a Shadow Dragon and a straight-up Omnicidal Maniac with little characterization. Though since the series establishes that dragons who live too long without sealing their powers eventually go mad, it's possible there's an in-universe justification for this. From the same games, Gharnef was originally The Starscream to Medeus, whose main goal was to gather the legendary weapons, trust Marth to kill off his competition and take over himself. By Mystery, he's Medeus' loyal Dragon who just wants to resurrect him for, again, Omnicidal Maniac reasons. It's possible Came Back Wrong via the Darksphere is to blame here.
- Nergal in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is a justified In-Universe example. Play through most of the main storyline, and he comes across as a Generic Doomsday Villain who wants to open the Dragon's Gate and release the dragons on the world For the Evulz. Hidden sidequests only available in Hector Mode reveal that he was once a kind, loving father who was married to a dragon. When his wife was captured by enemy forces, he sent their two children through the Dragon's Gate for their safety while he went to rescue her but was too late to save her. Afterward, he sought to reopen the Dragon's Gate to be reunited with his children. He studied Dark Magic extensively to find a way to do this, which unfortunately slowly eroded his mind to the point where he's left with an all-consuming desire to open Dragon's Gate at any cost without remembering why. It's also heavily implied that he's Nils and Ninian's father, which makes the fact that he uses them as pawns in his schemes, and even causes Eliwood to unwittingly kill Ninian, without any qualms very sad in retrospect.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening's Gangrel turns out to be this if you recruit him in his SpotPass chapter. Gangrel heard of Walhart's conquest of Valm, which worried him. Hoping to counter Walhart's inevitable war against the continent of Ylisse, he sought to unite the three countries of Ylisse, Plegia, and Ferox under his own banner, but the thrill of power and his self-imposed rush to start his unification plan twisted Gangrel's mind, turning him into the war-hungry sadist we see in the main story. He expresses regret about this to both the male Avatar in their support conversations and to Emmeryn in their Hot Spring Scramble conversations together.
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
- Dimitri loses the plot in all routes save Crimson Flower and has to be reminded there's something worth living for on his own route, in contrast to his Knight in Shining Armor ideals.
- Rhea goes insane, either through grief and betrayal in Crimson Flower or overuse of her powers in Silver Snow. The Immaculate One has to be incapacitated by force, although she can live to tell the tale in Silver Snow.
- The Third Street Saints from the Saints Row series. They start off as a vigilante gang formed to end the gang violence polluting Stilwater, only to end up engaging in the same criminal empires those gangs controlled once they've been wiped out. They end up collapsing when the Playa is blown up on a boat. By the events of Saints Row 2, its revealed that the Playa survived and the gang is revived to take out the three new gangs who took their place... so the Playa-turned-Boss can Take Over the City again. And that's not to mention that the gang ends up going from powerful criminals to nation-wide celebrities who milk their former gangster image to becoming the leaders of the USA. Somewhat justified by the fact that the Playa/Boss was always motivated purely by profit and power, and doesn't care what methods or image is used to gain it, going as far as having partnered up with Ultor after spending the last part and DLCs of Saints Row 2 at war with them.
- Its revealed that this is exactly why the gang ended up collapsing in the first place. Julius Little, the gang's leader in the first game, realizes the Saints are like the other three gangs, particularly the Vice Kings. When asked by The Mole of the organization to end the Saints, he does so by trying to kill the Playa before running away. Unfortunately for Julius, the Playa was merely put into a coma and realizes the truth, before deciding to kill Julius. In the end, the Playa, now Boss, executes Julius for his betrayal, fully cementing the fact that they don't care about any of the goals he established, only using the Saints as their method of gaining power.
- The Vice Kings were originally set-up by Benjamin King in the 1970s to fight off the growing power of Los Carnales. However, King later lost interest in gang-banging and turned to using the gang's large empire to make money. In the events of the first game, King has lost all interest in gang-banging, causing his allies to betray him and seize control of the gang themselves.
- Danganronpa:
- Junko Enoshima in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is motivated purely by the fact that only despair, her own or others, can sate her extreme boredom caused by her being the second smartest person on Earth (first until Hope's Peak's mad science created Izuru Kamukura). The AI copy she created of herself that appears in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair wants to steal the cast's bodies and then the bodies of every single human being on Earth. There's no logical reason for this change in motivation, as the other AI copy of a person we've seen had their personality entirely, and continued down the path of character development that the original had been going down.
- Tales Series:
- Tales of Destiny: In the original game, Miktran/Kronos wanted to use Belcrant to destroy the Er'thers and revive the Aetherian people with clones once that had been achieved, believing the Er'thers had slaughtered his people after winning the war. In the remake, his motive isn't nearly as well-explained and he comes across as wanted to laser the planet For the Evulz. He also gained even more hatred for the Er'ther population.
- Used positively in Tales of Berseria. Velvet's one goal is Revenge, with "Kill Artorias" bolted to the top of her to-do list and everything else either being progress toward that goal or utterly ignored. She will ruthlessly do anything, sacrifice anyone to kill the Shepherd. After Innominat tries to make her give in to despair by making her violent acts appear All for Nothing, she reconciles it all by changing her view of things. She's still determined to kill Artorias, but now because he needs to be stopped.
- Mass Effect: Andromeda: Sloane Kelly, leader of the outcasts and exiles from the Initiative, who left because she disagreed with Director Tann's shabby treatment of the krogan. When they wound up on Kadara, she was determined to at least try and make a go of the place. Then it turned out the water was pure poison to the touch, and she gave up on that. By the time Ryder gets there, she's gone from this to a short-tempered, fee-collecting, drug-dealing tyrant who throws people who annoy her out into the wasteland to die.
- Portal Runner: Rage is Brigette's loyal hench-bot, yet he continues to aid the Martians after they betray her with no explanation.
- Ratchet & Clank: Dr. Nefarious's original motive was Fantastic Racism; as a robotic Mad Scientist, he desired to destroy organic life and conquer the galaxy in the name of robotkind. As the series progressed and he was continuously beaten by Ratchet and Clank, his goal to lead his fellow robots to a bright future increasingly fell to the wayside in favor of trying to destroy them specifically (admittedly so he can conquer the universe without them in his way). This is lampshaded in Rift Apart, when Nefarious meets his alternate universe counterpart Emperor Nefarious, who was never beaten by Ratchet and Clank's counterparts and resultantly never lost sight of his real goal. This, combined with just being more competent in general, led to him actually succeeding in conquering his own reality, and he is simultaneously bemused and mortified to meet his mainline counterpart.
