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  • In AdventureQuest Worlds, the hero is forced to kill Antiphuus during the Bloodtusk Ravine saga because Antiphuus was Chaorrupted - hoping that Sokrakiis would understand. Sokrakiis, Krellenos, and Khasaanda realized that Antiphuus' Chaorruption ended up leading to his murder and decided that there would be nothing to redeem Antiphuus' Chaorruptor. Little did the trolls know, was that Krellenos was indeed the one who Chaorrupted Antiphuus and became responsible for his murder.
  • In The Adventures Of Star Saver, a common enemy is a dog that only attacks once you pass it. It's invincible when it's idle, like an inanimate object. But once it starts attacking, if you shoot the dog a few times, it's dead, and you get points for it. It's just a dog, but unless you kill it or it gets stuck, it will keep charging at you.
  • King Loghaire in Arcanum is forced to banish the Black Mountain Clan and allow elves to interfere in the Dwarven justice system, an unforgivable crime against Black Mountain's honor, for the sake of preventing a war between elves and dwarves that could devastate the continent. He deeply regrets it though, and states that if given the choice a second time, he'd happily go to war with all the world for the sake of his kin's honor.
  • Solar Boy Django, the protagonist of Boktai has been forced to kill off, or very nearly do so, a member of his immediate family during each of his series three games after they are enslaved by the forces of darkness. The only thing that makes it slightly easier (or even worse) for him is that they beg him to do so.
  • Near the end of Borderlands 2, you're required to kill Angel, who is revealed to be a Siren and also Jack's daughter, and she's kept alive by the Eridium injectors that Jack has her hooked up to so she can power the Vault Key.
  • In Crusader Kings, even if you're trying not to be a total Villain Protagonist, you will have a short and bloody reign if you don't become very good at this. Assassinating honorable nobles — even children — to prevent civil wars trying to put them on the throne and arranging loveless marriages between one's daughters and brutal sadists to forge vital alliances are only the most ordinary deeds a feudal ruler must do to protect their people.
  • In Dark Souls, the Chosen Undead will have no choice but to kill Gwyn, who is arguably one of the most noble characters in the game, if there is to be any hope for the future.
    • The player has to shoot several other dogs along the way, including several NPCs who go Hollow and attack you (unless you deliberately miss their event flags). Many of these double as a Player Punch, and a few even count as a Mercy Kill. Conversely, certain actions prompt some otherwise-friendly NPCs to attack you, presumably making you the "dog" in their eyes.
  • In the... Unfortunate Soulstorm expansion to Dawn of War the command unit for the Sisters of Battle has the quote "Thou shalt not! I shall!" Stating "I'm about to do some heinous things in the defense of the Imperium." She sounds a little too happy about it, though...
  • Attempted in Devil May Cry 4. Dante's dropping into a meeting of the Order of the Sword and putting a round through the head of their leader Sanctus was meant to prevent the Big Bad from carrying out his nefarious plan. Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough, as Sanctus got better.
  • It's not necessary but highly advised you kill your infected friend Bill in Don't Escape 2, or he'll turn into a zombie by nightfall and make your chances of survival a lot tougher. The player character can choose to kill him in a handful of different ways; the most humane is giving him painkillers, then his Last Request of an alcoholic drink, and shooting him in the head whilst he's unconscious, whilst the least is slaughtering him with the axe whilst he's fully conscious, ignoring his pleas for you to stop.
  • While you can easily be a Messianic Archetype in most of Dragon Age: Origins, when it comes to the dwarven city of Orzammar, if you attempt to give it at least a somewhat happy ending in the epilogue, you will be forced to Shoot the Dog repeatedly because apparently, in dwarven society, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. Examples include: An Andrastian priest with a simple request to build a local Chantry church. Doing so will result in religious unrest in the city, ultimately leading to the priest's murder and the Chantry contemplating a holy war against Orzammar. Then, during the main quest, you'll be forced to work with the Magnificent Bastard Bhelen who killed his eldest brother Trian and let the Dwarf Noble PC take the blame, causing him to become exiled; rather than the Reasonable Authority Figure Lord Harrowmont. Because once made king, Harrowmont will prove to be an utterly ineffective leader and Orzammar will close itself off from the world and fall into political chaos. But if Bhelen becomes king, he becomes a benevolent dictator who abolishes many of the restrictive dwarven policies (like the Caste System) and opens up Orzammar to the world.
  • The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion loves this trope. For the Dark Brotherhood, there's the player killing everyone in the Cheydinhal base because a traitor might be there. He isn't. Then in the expansion pack, this is how One of the two dukes (so the player can replace them) and Sheogorath (due to an involuntary Face–Heel Turn) die.
  • In EverQuest II, if the PC wishes to become a citizen of an evil-aligned city called Freeport, they must follow a quest line where they earn the trust and love of a canine companion before being ordered to kill it.
  • Near the end of The Evil Within, Kidman tries to kill Leslie, a patient from a metal hospital. He suffered from a traumatic experience when he was younger and in both the original game and DLCs, people want use him for nefarious purposes. Once Kidman realizes what Ruvik and MOBIUS want Leslie for, she prepares to kill him to both prevent from being used and to stop Ruvik. She clearly doesn't want to kill him, but feels like she has no other choice.
  • In Fallout 3: the player comes across a computer simulation run by one Stanislaus Braun, who has been torturing its inhabitants for the past two hundred years. The action which nets the most karma? Activating a fail-safe which calls in simulated Chinese soldiers who arrive and kill everyone.
    • A literal example involves a glitch involving the follower Dogmeat (a dog) and the perk "Puppies!", which you get from Broken Steel. If you have the perk and Dogmeat dies, a new dog that replaces Dogmeat will show up. If you kill Dogmeat, recruit a follower, recruit the new dog, and then kill the new dog (repeating the process), you can obtain every follower in the game (normally, you are only allowed one follower and Dogmeat). You are shooting the dog for the purpose of gaining a relative army of followers.
    • Killing either the Overseer or Amata and the rebels in Trouble On the Homefront. If you fail the Speech challenges, this is the only option other than just walking away, or forcing an evacuation of the vault.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Standard procedure in Final Fantasy XIV for anyone tempered by a primal is to put them to death. Even if you could imprison them safely, their newfound devotion is making the primal stronger, and as far as anyone knows there's no way to un-temper someone. Midgarsormr manages to untemper the player from Hydalaeyn's influence, but it's implied that Hydalaeyn was already weakened to the point of removing the PC's tempering automatically anyway. Midgarsormr's and Hydalaeyn's tempering is also quite a bit more benign, as the PC is never brainwashed into servitude.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics deals many a Player Punch throughout the game. One of these is facing Milleuda, the sister of Corpse Brigade leader Wiegraf. By the time you face her in battle, the Brigade has been decimated, you know of their extremely sympathetic cause (they were commoners denied rightful pay in the last war), and you'd much rather hurry to rescue Tietra, Delita's kidnapped sister. But there's no way to proceed except to defeat her because neither the plot nor the game engine will allow any other solution.
  • The backstory of the Gears of War series has the Coalition of Ordered Governments launch a simultaneous Kill Sat attack on every city and strategic resource on the planet except for the capital city and everything around it on the granite plateau that they're built on in order to buy time to fight back against the Locust, which they had been fighting a losing battle against for the past year. This ends up killing billions but also stops the Locust offensive cold, as the COG government was given an estimate of six months before the Locust rendered humanity extinct, and fulfills its purpose as the COG, through narrowing the front to a relatively easy-to-defend perimeter instead of a massive, planet-wide government where the Locust could pop up anywhere, and allows humanity to hold out for 13 more years before finally winning.
  • God of War Ragnarök makes it clear that this is how Kratos sees killing Baldur in the previous game; as he notes in the journal, while Freya thought that Baldur might be satisfied with killing her, Baldur was clearly beyond all reason and, if spared, would simply attack Kratos and Atreus again until one party or the other was dead. So he pre-empted the whole thing by snapping Baldur's neck while he tried to attack Freya.
  • Halo:
    • In Halo 3, Sgt. Johnson says Miranda Keyes must shoot him and herself to prevent themselves from being used to activate the Halos. However, it turns into a Kick the Dog when Truth intervenes and kills Keyes himself.
    • A more tragic example happened to Miranda's father in the first game. He was turned into a Flood Proto-Gravemind, and the Chief had to kill him to get his neural lace and prevent the Flood from obtaining vital information.
  • In Jade Empire, towards the end of the game, you learn the secret of how the Emperor created Death's Hand and that you can use the same technique to bind him to you instead. After learning this, you're lectured on how this is the worse thing you can do to a person. You can still choose to do it and given how powerful a warrior Death's Hand is, it's pretty tempting. It really stops having the "justifiable" credentials when you then have to bind your fellow party members if you want to keep him over their objections. From the character's point of view, it's easy to see how this might look like the only way to win, but really...
  • In Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg, extralegally ordering the assassination of Huey Long is the only way to avoid the Second American Civil War.
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, enforced by the main party using a fake Scar Ghost in an attempt to snap Simba out of his hesitance. Through it, they call him a "do-nothing king", claim he'll lose all his friends, and will leave a legacy as "King Simba the Doubtful", all because he's "worried by a silly ol' ghost". This results in Simba giving a Big "NO!" and killing the fake ghost.
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Master Xehanort's plan to restart the Great Keyblade War, which would devastate and reshape the universe at large, hinges around Ven, one of Master Eraqus's students, and Vanitas. When Master Eraqus realises just how close Xehanort is to achieving his goal, he's willing to kill Ventus - except Xehanort sees this coming and arranges for Terra to catch him in the act.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic, the Jedi are forced into a situation that leads them to decide to totally brainwash someone. It's almost the only option when a dangerous enemy in possession of knowledge the Republic desperately needs falls into their hands in a comatose state, and they have to keep him from turning against them while getting their hands on that knowledge.
  • In Lusternia, the Vernal Gods use a child marked as food for Muud as bait to capture him, and as a living seal to keep him permanently trapped. To ensure she never commits suicide, thus freeing him, they trap her in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
    "This is a terrible thing we do," whispers Tzaraziko. "It will be forever remembered as our greatest crime."
    "There's no other choice," says Urlach, and none are left to argue.
    Summoning their magics, the shining ones circle around the child and Muud. The child screams as Muud begins sinking into the swamp, pulling the child with him. Steam rises up around them, thick and putrid, billowing in the air like cancerous clouds. Slowly, they sink deeper and deeper into the ground and away from the world above - where it will be forever silent and dark.
  • Mass Effect:
    • Virmire in the first game — you will have to leave either Kaiden or Ashley behind.
    • During the Arrival DLC mission in Mass Effect 2, Shepard learns that the Reaper invasion is imminent, and s/he needs to buy the Alliance and Council time for humanity and its allies to have a hope of surviving. To slow the Reapers, Alliance operatives have rigged an asteroid to ram a Mass Relay, destroying it and forcing the Reapers to travel for months or years to get to the next one. However, the destruction of the Mass Relay will inevitably obliterate the entire system, which contains a Batarian mining colony with a population of about 300,000. In addition, the Alliance is likely to take the heat politically, since the Batarians recently caught Alliance personnel poking around their system. With only hours to spare before the titular arrival and no other options, Shepard presses the button.
    • This also has the potential of occurring in several of the loyalty missions — notably Mordin and Miranda's — however, in those instances, Shepard can persuade them not to do it.
    • In the Overlord DLC of ME2, Paragon Shepard warns Gavin Archer that if the latter comes after his abominably-treated brother, Shepard will shoot on sight.
    • One of the endings in Mass Effect 3 can count for this for the Geth and EDI.
    • The "quadruquel" Mass Effect: Andromeda has a few optional moments to gun down canines too. While rescuing the Moshae for the Angaran Resistance, you are given the opportunity to destroy a Kett Exaltation facility, though at the cost of the prisoners held within as you cannot evacuate them before you are overwhelmed by kett reinforcements. The alternative is to leave the place standing and rescue the prisoners, though the game never follows through on its mention of coming back later to destroy the base.
    • Another scenario in Andromeda involves a hostage situation with a Roekaar cell who kidnapped a human infected with a cross-species disease that, conveniently for the former, does not affect angara. You are given two choices: either kill the Roekaar cell leader and the innocent infected woman to stop the Roekaar from having such a virus at all, or let the cell leader walk away. The sample is said to be too degraded to be of use, but SAM is uncertain to the scan's integrity.
  • Zero had to make this decision at the end of Mega Man Zero 4. Confronted with the monster that was Dr. Weil, the latter boasts how a hero like Zero would never bring himself up to kill a human like Weil, or else he would forever be branded a Maverick. Fortunately, Zero does not care. — An unfortunate mistake Weil has made, since Zero was not created according to the Three Laws of Robotics anyway.
  • Metal Gear:
  • Throughout Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Samus is forced to fight and kill Rundas, Ghor and Gandrayda in order to save them, in a manner of speaking, from their total Phazon corruption. Possibly doubles into a Kick the Dog moment immediately afterwards, as an incorporeal Dark Samus appears and absorbs their bodies into its own.
  • Might and Magic VI has the main characters release the Big Bad of Heroes II, leaving him free to restart his scheming to gain the throne of Enroth. There is a very pragmatic and logical reason for that: he's the only one around that knows the Ritual of the Void, and you need to learn said Ritual to keep the world from blowing up in the process of saving it. Compared to The End of the World as We Know It, Archibald Ironfist on the loose is a much better option.
  • The SAS and TF 141 spend a lot of time shooting the dogs in Modern Warfare, especially Captain Price.
  • Poor Devlin McCormack in The Orion Conspiracy. He had to shoot a number of dogs. First he had to destroy a ship with Rowland in it. He had to explain to Meyer that the ship contained cocoons that would have hatched into xenomorphs disguised as humans. He could not afford to let such deadly creatures end up on Earth or spreading anywhere else. Also, he points out that the xenomorphs on the ship would have killed Rowland anyway. Devlin did what he had to do. However, that is nothing compared to what happens later. Ward ends up going berserk, and Devlin finds him in a corridor with Ramen and Brooks. He tried to negotiate with Ward, but Brooks jumps Ward, resulting in the deaths of Ward and Brooks, as well as heavy machinery falling on Ramen, pinning her to the floor. Not only that, but the corridor gets damaged to the point of being in danger of depressurizing shortly. Chandra appears and decides that he loves Ramen enough to stay and die with her. Devlin ends up having to seal off the doors to the corridor on both sides. Yep, four people end up dead...and Devlin feels horrible about it.
  • In Planescape: Torment, this is the reason for everything the Practical Incarnation has done. He may be arrogant and manipulative, but the thing is, if he hadn't done these things, you would have never been able to regain your memories and find the Transcendent One.
  • Sonic Battle: Emerl. A machine designed to be the most powerful warrior ever created, and your — indeed, everybody's — closest, most innocent, childlike friend. His warrior side wakes up after he witnesses a Wave-Motion Gun attack of incredible power, destroying his original personality and overloading him into a supercharged death machine. There's nothing you can do for him, save defeat him and let him die.
  • Played straight, averted, subverted and all-around deconstructed to hell and back in Spec Ops: The Line. All of the many, many, many horrible things that happen throughout the game are done by people who claim to be doing it for the greater good or consider the acts a necessary evil. In almost every case, they're just deluding themselves.
  • Splinter Cell:
    • In Double Agent, one of your earlier "karma choices" is to decide whether to shoot the pilot of the helicopter that the terrorist organization hijacked, as an act of loyalty to the terrorists. If Sam decides to instead hesitate and stay loyal to the government, Sam's only friend in the organization does it instead in a last-minute decision to save Sam's face. Said choice then leads to Sam being made to choose between killing Lambert or killing Jamie; choosing the former option secures Sam's cover long enough to kill the villain and save the day with ease, whilst choosing the latter serves to risk the entire mission as of then, as well as thousands of lives just to maintain his moral code.
    • The above example is made even worse when Word of God revealed in Conviction that not only Sam killing Lambert is canon, but that Lambert did everything in Double Agent to protect Sam's daughter, thus only adding to the guilt of killing a friend on a whim.
  • In StarCraft, Tassadar is forced to burn and sterilize the Terran planets that have been infested with Zerg, because it is the most effective way to kill the Zerg. After a while, Tassadar refuses to shoot any more dogs and disobeys his orders. Whether true or not, this is also Arcturus Mengsk's stated reason for everything he does.
  • Georg Prime in Suikoden V does this to Queen Arshtat and becomes a Hero with Bad Publicity as a result.
  • In Tales of Vesperia, Yuri is defined by this trope as a vigilante, putting him at odds with the more law-abiding Flynn. Near the end of the first arc, Yuri murders Ragou in cold blood and tosses his body into a river, because in Yuri's eyes, his target was very close to escaping justice for their horrendous crimes. Later, Yuri repeats this feat with Cumore, who was sending people into the desert to die basically because nobody cared to stop him from doing it by giving his target a choice between drowning in quicksand or being impaled on Yuri's sword. Yuri also shoots a few dogs in the prequel movie, when Repede's father Lambert is possessed by a monster, forcing Yuri to kill him.
  • The Walking Dead (Telltale) has the player make painful choices of choosing to save one character over another or let one character die or not.
    • In 400 Days, Vince has the painful choice of shooting a convicted rapists, or a con artist in the leg, to free themselves from their chains.
    • Clementine has a near literal run in with the trope name. She has the option to either put a dog out of its misery after it is impaled on a broken pole, or leave it there to bleed out. It did try to kill her, after all.
  • One of the most iconic moments of Warcraft III is the Culling of Stratholme, a mission where the noble prince Arthas is forced to destroy an entire city of his own innocent subjects as they are all infected with the plague of undeath and will soon rise from the dead to slaughter the living. While this action is defensible, if unsavory, it makes him so furious that he begins pursuing revenge at all costs and is the start of a downward spiral ending with the loss of his own soul. Things get worse from there.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader: Many Iconoclast and Dogmatic choices come down to killing someone (sometimes as a Mercy Kill) that proves a threat to others even if they don't mean to be.
      • The conclusion of Chapter 1 sees the Player Character having to choose between rescuing survivors of a planet that is being converted into a Daemon World, or de facto conducting an Exterminatus which will kill everyone still alive but prevent the likely larger threat of a Chaos foothold in your sphere of influence.
      • Notably, you can do this to your own party members: When Idira, in her grief, summons a warp entity pretending to be Theodora, the player can choose to execute her for this. As she's an unsanctioned psyker losing control, several party members recommend it and it is the dogmatic procedure. The game even gives the player a lot of ways to do this. From having Argenta snipe her, shooting her themselves. You can also tell Idira you won't kill her, reassure her that you'll find a way to help her regain control, wait for her to pass out, then order your crew to toss her out the airlock.
    • Practiced very realistically in an audio log of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Following the ork invasion, the human forces of the Forgeworld are drowning in wounded and without enough supplies to treat them all. A veteran doctor who is well-acquainted with battlefield triage begins coldly, bluntly ordering her subordinates not to waste any time or medication on civilians who don't look like they're going to make it, and save all their supplies and attention for healthier patients. While the others are initially horrified, they quickly realize she's right. In fact she starts euthanizing them because she knows the Orks might soon overrun the field hospital; there is no way to move them all and (Orks being senseless, inhumane alien savages who live for the thrill of inflicting violence) the fate of any helpless human who falls into their hands will be ghastly indeed.
  • In Wandersong, the Goddess Eya plans to perform this trope on a universal scale, sending a "Hero" to kill the Overseers (the universe's Elemental Embodiments) to destroy everything and allowing herself to start over. This is due to the world slowly becoming increasingly (and irreversibly) corrupted and distant, influencing the Overseers to turn into insane monsters that also spawn monsters, both of which attack anyone they see. Their corruption/deaths also cause the Earth to start becoming more of a Death World as things like the wind, sea, and even stars degrade from their insanity/absence. The plot also clarifies this is far from the first time Eya has done this (though it implies this time is the worst it's ever gotten before everything reset), and everyone involved has resigned to this fate because they believe that it's just how the universe works. It also happens again in the ending if you skip the chapters via intentional Sequence Breaking, as it means you no longer have the connections with people for the regular Clap Your Hands If You Believe ending that breaks the cycle.

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