Stupid Evil / Video Games

Pointless dickery in video games. A chronic problem suffered by games purporting to have moral choices is the 'evil' 'options' not offering any meaningful gain for you over being the hero the story clearly assumes.

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A

• Alpha Protocol has some Stupid Evil actions you can take, such as massacring everyone at a party for absolutely no reason, or abandoning valuable intel to rescue an ally and then immediately killing them yourself. However, all significant choices give you different "perks," so there may be some benefit to a player who takes such actions, even if they are still Stupid Evil in-universe.
• Arcanum is a perfect example. Most evil actions fall into the stupid evil category. For example, you recover a wedding ring for a person who offered you 200 gold for it, the wedding ring is worth 30 gold in the pawn shop. The good option is to sell him his ring for 200 gold, the evil option is to murder him (and not get any money since he doesn't carry it on him).
• Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia has Bourd, a Tempa/Tenba mercenary, who abuses Reyvateils, magical songstresses and battle partners, by adopting a "use and discard" policy where he wears girls out to exhaustion and replaces them when they are no longer of use. The problem is that the most common knowledge in unlocking the girls' potential is a strong personal bond with their partners. Basically, Bourd totally wastes their potential at an expense of being Straw Misogynist for the sake of evil.
  • It should be noted that Bourd is an exception to the norm. Although Temba doesn't treat weaker Reyvateils as well as they should, they respect the stronger ones and use the weaker ones to protect them.

B

• The Baldur's Gate series in general. Most often, the 'evil' dialogue and quest choices have you acting like a big Jerkass to everyone you meet, for no good reason. And the rewards are usually worse than if you'd taken the 'good' path.
  • Evil party members demand you have a low reputation and will actually leave the party or even attack you if your reputation gets too high. Possibly justified in the case of some of the more Ax-Crazy characters, but at least half of them are smart enough to easily see the benefits of being a Villain with Good Publicity yet still insist that you consistently stay Stupid Evil.
  • Fortunately, the second game eventually gives you a quick and easy way to lower your reputation without resorting to Stupid Evil-ness: Just turn into the Slayer and turn back. Bam, two reputation points gone.
  • Attempting to infiltrate the bandit camp by going the Stupid Evil route (by telling the bandits that you want to join because you want to kill people) will end in failure when the bandits tell you they don't need psycho killers working for them.
  • Baldur's Gate II: Lilarcor is Stupid Evil personified, seeking only to kill everything the party meets — and he's a sentient sword, with a personality apparently based on a fantastically stupid hick, which fortunately means he's incapable of doing anything on his own. But then, when all you are is a sword, all problems look like stab victims.^note This is also actually consistent with the AD&D rules for intelligent weapons at the time the game was created — they had intelligence, but no wisdom as such.
    Lilarcor: I don't know what you were expecting, but as a sword I'm pretty one-dimensional in what I want.
  • Introduced in Baldur's Gate III, the Big Bad Triumvirate's Orin the Red, the Chosen of Bhaal. Orin is a Bhaalspawn who not long before the start of the game attacked the previous Chosen, The Dark Urge (and if not playing as them, killed them) for no apparent reason other than Bhaal favored them over her. This resulted in a case of Nice Job Fixing It, Villain. The disastrous consequences of her betrayal are so readily apparent that Gortash openly considers her a liability and will always attempt to ally with the Player Character no matter how zealously they've opposed the Absolute, simply because even they would be more reliable.
  • The setting's Greater-Scope Villain, the Dead Three, suffer from this big-time. They're Gods Of Evil who were once men, and as a consequence they have a very mortal way of thinking as they come across more like hoodlums Drunk on the Dark Side. In the good ending of Baldur's Gate III, their former benefactor Jergal gives them a "The Reason You Suck" Speech outright calling them idiots for thinking the rest of the pantheon would just stand by and do nothing as they destroyed the world.
    • Bane, god of conquest and tyranny, used to encourage infighting among his followers to promote his Social Darwinist tenets, but eventually adopted Pragmatic Villainy, as evidenced by how Gortash conducts himself in Baldur's Gate III. However, the same cannot be said of his underlings, as they fail to realize their engineers need their eyes and hands to work.
    • Bhaal, god of murder, was Ax-Crazy even by the other two's standards. In every single game he serves as the Greater-Scope Villain with his Evil Plan essentially being "kill everything", even though all he'd be doing is empowering Myrkul. Plus his followers have a bad case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, as a Religion of Evil centered around being a Psycho Knife Nut doesn't offer many alternatives. His efforts to win back his Anti-Anti-Christ son Dark Urge include threatening the life of his Love Interest to blackmail him to do his bidding, something so transparently spiteful and against the Dark Urge's best interests that they can directly cite it as one of the reasons they're rejecting Bhaal in Act 3. Bhaal has no real reason for even wanting Isobel dead, he's just doing it to be a dick and ignores even an evil Durge arguing for Pragmatic Villainy.
    • Myrkul, God of the Dead. Cruel and petty, in Baldur's Gate III he makes the mistake of crossing a god far older and much more powerful than him, ensuring that even an evil-aligned Player Character will ruin his plans.
• Blacksad: Under the Skin: Quince, a pedophile who targets 12-year-olds and is involved with a child prostitution ring, is dumb and arrogant enough to brag about it in a poker game with a bunch of criminals and mob bosses. It's already a mind-blowingly stupid to admit to in any environment and would've probably gotten him killed anyways, but he has the gall to do this while the uncle of one of his victims is sat next to him with an armed bodyguard. No points for guessing what happens next.
• BioShock: Andrew Ryan has done a lot of foolish things, one of the biggest being refusing to be a Villain with Good Publicity. An example would be ignoring the grievances of the citizens of Rapture, especially those who end up on the short end of the stick by no fault of their own. He even forbids charities in his city, claiming that it feeds "parasites". He worsened his reputation by turning back on his own beliefs when they started to become a hinderance to himself. By contrast, Frank Fontaine, a selfish conman, was able to earn the favor of the people by simply listening to their concerns and making an attempt to fix them, even opening up a charity.

C

• There is a mission in City of Villains that invokes this trope. When checking on a Arachnos base, the agents you come across are spouting Stupid Evil lines. This is your first clue that something is wrong, as most Arachnos agents are Punch Clock Villains. Then, when you defeat one and it blows up, you figure out that they're Nemesis Automatons, which are known for being perfect replicas, until you look closely.
• In Colonization, when you make a Declaration of Independence from your European homeland, your monarch will send the well-armed Royal Expeditionary Force to quash your rebellion and bring you back under the thumb of the empire. Part of their undoing will involve them attacking natives in the way, including well-fortified Inca and Aztec cities, resulting in the Royal Expeditionary Force being despised by the Native Americans and losing a large number of ground military units.
• Every single aspect of the SDF from Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare seems to be designed to make them look evil, which can lead to them coming across as incompetent; The 4:1 male to female birthrate would lead to depopulation real fast, having every man serve in the military for decades would severely impact the workforce, only recruiting men would leave out at least one-fourth of the population for no reason, and most of all, declaring war on Earth got them curbstomped within a day.

D

• Darkest Dungeon: The Ancestor was more than a little blind when it came to being power-hungry. Even at the very start before he had been corrupted even a little, he willingly drank vampire blood and fed it to all his guests out of curiosity (thinking he'd learn something out of it) and because they annoyed him. After that, his short-sighted acts of villainy included such things as creating several tons of demonically possessed pig meat then dumping it in the sewers beneath the manor because he couldn't give enough of a shit, drowning his favorite smugglers because they asked for a pay raise (in a manner that made sure they rose up as ghosts), killing all his necromancy teachers to raise them as self-perpetuating liches just to see if he could, dropping a meteorite on some poor farmer that wanted his help with his barren fields because he wanted to see The Colour Out of Space up close and personal, and finally digging up a portal that lead to a place of pure evil and madness where the Thing that would end the world resided, and made it stir in its sleep. Only after that last one did he ever consider he was doing anything wrong, with all the rest just being fuck-up after fuck-up in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, power, or just pettiness, and with every last one of them leaving long-lasting consequences that would've swallowed him whole if he hadn't shot himself; his Posthumous Narration has more than a few things to say about them all.
  The Ancestor: In time, you will know the tragic extent of my failings.
• If you decide to venture down the path of Corruption in Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising, you'll end up doing things this way most of the time. For example, the very first atrocity to commit is to blow up the city gates, thus leaving it unprotected... OR you can walk ten meters aside and open the gates with a switch. Every time corruption points are awarded for lingering with a mission, rest assured that you will have to actually wait for the timer to expire twiddling thumbs two steps away from the objective. Tainted wargear is just moderately better then the "clean" one, so it'll be more like "damn, Cyrus' corruption level is low! Ok, what can I give him to fix things up?" And powers of Chaos, while great, have such long cooldowns it makes them essentially Too Awesome to Use, so they too will be mostly used for the corrupting potential. Worse, yet, whichever one of your characters has the highest corruption, except for the Commander, will turn out to be the traitor, so having high corruption on somebody valuable (notably Cyrus) can completely screw you over because you lose them for the final mission, which includes That One Boss. And even worse still by the fact that Davian Thule will abandon your heretical ass on a general principle, leaving you even weaker.
• Hoo boy, Dead Rising is bad about this:
  • In the first game, both the American government and Carlito are this. The former made experiments to maximize cattle production for meat consumption in the village of Santa Cabeza, only to mistakenly use a zombie wasp that escaped the lab and infected the locals. Then the military destroyed the town in order to hide the evidence, only for two survivors to escape (the aformentioned Carlito and his sister Isabella). After studying medical engineering, they then sent infected orphans to the USA as revenge, even though this would also spread the virus across the planet, ensuring humanity's doom. In the worst ending of the game this is indeed what happens, as a bomb detonates, spreading that very virus across the globe; in a less worse ending, Frank West is arrested for his involvement in the incident and the truth is buried.
  • In Dead Rising 2, the pharmaceutical company Phenotrans are actively causing zombie outbreaks and justify it by saying that they need to infect people to get wasp queens to make Zombrex, as the queens are the main ingredient. What makes them this is that they could've instead used cows to breed the wasps or synthezise the chemicals of the wasp to make a substitute, but instead they decided to infect people for profit and even have the gall to believe that doing so will protect the jobs of doctors, politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs.
    • The same game also has game show host TK, who not only helped in this scheme, but also used it as an excuse to steal money from casinos.
  • In Dead Rising 3, General Hemlock betrayed President Paddock with the intention of weaponizing the virus because of his social darwinist mindset of survival of the fittest (also because he likes the idea of using the virus to kill people while keeping buildings intact). Because of this, Hemlock dies in all endings; in the canon one, Nick kicks him to the blades of his crashed helicarrier; in others, his plan of weaponizing the virus either causes a civil war among his subordinates or he is executed for high treason.
    • There's also Isabella Keyes, who was the one who came up with the idea to make an outbreak in order to find Nick Ramos so she could make a permanent cure from him instead of hiring, you know, a tracker.
  • In Dead Rising 4, despite having a permanent cure for the zombie virus, a group of mercenaries made a new virus variant with the intention of selling the zombies as slaves to the highest bidder. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
  • All the games have bosses that attack the protagonists for the pettiest of reasons, including but not limited to, a nerd being laughed at, a group of nationalist rednecks, a cowboy wannabe, a rival photographer who wants to take a picture of a person being infected, a doomsday cult, a chef who felt insulted, a zombie rights activist, a furry who forces a woman to marry him so he can stop being a virgin and accidentally killed his dad with a chainsaw, people with the 7 deadly sins, etc. To be fair, most of them weren't exactly very sane to begin with due to the zombie outbreaks making them snap, but still...
• Doom:
  • In Doom, Doom II and Doom 64, the demons will ignore their primary target of the Doomguy to attack their allies if they were accidentally hit in the back. In Doom Eternal, the default state of most demons seem to be "fight each other" even when they are supposed to be attacking a specific target. However, the demons at the very least have the sense to stop fighting the moment the Doom Slayer appears.
  • Doom³: Dr. Malcolm Betruger, who apparently has no actual motive for attempting to transform Earth into Hell and its people into screaming demon-fodder. It is implied, however, that he has been possessed or is in some way controlled by the demons.
• Dragon Age:
  • The textbook video game example is Morrigan, from Dragon Age: Origins. She's supposed to come off as merely practical and ruthless — but given that she actively suggests you screw over other people whom you need to defeat the Blight, encourages betrayal and being a prick to people whose aid you need, and in general, just being a snarky asshole, she comes off as this instead. Most telling is her support for the option to invoke the Rite of Annulment on the tower mages despite she herself being a mage who hates templars; she justifies it with some Social Darwinist code philosophy which really falls flat and devolves into nothing but engaging in Misery Poker. Even if you don't support the mages or yet to form your stance about the mages, a pragmatic player can justify that having mages during the Final Battle can help fend off legions of darkspawn who will stall the Warden on their way to Fort Drakon, especially against larger enemies like ogres and will criticize the templars' inability to control the situation without resorting to Rite of Annulment. And sure she resents the mages for being under the Chantry's thumb, but most of the people there were victims of indoctrination as well and some of them were being taken even before they know what was going on. Generally, she really just seems to enjoy whichever course of action results in the most people being killed without regard for the overarching consequences of those actions, even if she joins the Warden because of Flemeth's agenda. This is actually Played for Drama, however, since she is a byproduct of Flemeth's abuse and her disconnection from society, her Social Darwinist mentality is due to thinking what most animals should think (which also reflects to her Shapeshifter specialization), but it can't be applied fully as she engages into society throughout her journey with the Warden. Thankfully, she gets better in Inquisition.
  • Arl Howe definitely qualifies. While he thinks he's being a Magnificent Bastard, he actually is just a Smug Snake who makes ridiculously bad decisions simply because they are the most evil option available. Arl Eamon even lampshades this by saying that Howe is the type of man who will kick a puppy for fun, and Howe's evil proves a real problem to Loghain, because nobody wants to support anything that would cause Howe to gain power.
  • In Dragon Age II, practically every mage resorts to this mentality with the slightest provocation. Most are brought up being constantly taught that demons are bad and that bargaining with them NEVER works out in a mage's favour. Despite this, they seem to instantly resort to blood magic and turning themselves into eldritch abominations at the first chance they get. This is especially obvious if the player character is a mage, since many will still turn into abominations to fight you even if you agree with their plans. Even the charming and sensitive Anders cheerfully sparks off a city-wide genocide. (Keep in mind, however, that mages are already oppressed and their human rights heavily circumscribed, usually from a young age, by the same people who tell them these things. Their situation mirrors many real-life insurgent movements). No wonder why Meredith seems to think that Bethany Hawke is an exemplary mage, as she's by far the only mage in the entire game that never deal with demons and/or resort to blood magic.
    • That said, it's implied that the reason Kirkwall's mages are so bad about it is because Kirkwall itself is built on some sort of evil Blood Magic ritual that causes the Veil to be particularly weak and Blood Magic empowered in the area, making it extremely easy for mages to jump off the slippery slope.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition's Corypheus is a textbook example of this. His goal as stated by the writers and, in between gloating about all the evil things he plans to do, Corypheus himself: become a god. How? Acts of overt evil for its own sake that unite his enemies and turn his allies against him. Then again, Darkspawn are Always Chaotic Evil, Magisters are mostly smug bastards, and Corypheus is both, so it probably isn't much of a surprise that he's a grandiose prick who wants to make Thedas into a monument to his ego. He could have simply assassinate the world leaders one by one across southern Thedas without too much fanfare and not to pit his lieutenants against each other and make them work together, for starters.
• The village of Gröndal in Dragon Quest VII has their well sabotaged by the Monster of the Week... which makes everyone think they are the Big Bad. Hilarity Ensues as everyone proceeds to act all Stupid Evil.

E

• The Scrapper decisions in Epic Mickey yield much fewer benefits than the Hero decisions. If you consistently let Mickey perform good deeds, Oswald and the rest of the townsfolk in Wasteland will rally behind Mickey, shower him with rewards, and lend him a helping hand whenever they can. On the other hand, being an overall dick to everyone will invoke the hatred of the people Mickey meets, not only locking him out of helpful benefits, but also out of more story content (including pieces of the ending).
• The Evil Within series, from the same creator who gave us Umbrella Corp, has Mobius, a vastly powerful conspiracy that seeks to unite mankind and eliminate all war — by trapping the entire human race in a virtual reality construct. They're so convinced this is a good idea that they'll happily massacre their own members, mind rape countless innocents, and turn children into spare parts to achieve this. Unfortunately, Mobius is actually really bad at making virtual constructs — the damn things keep turning into Zombie Apocalypses, and they can't seem to eliminate the flaw that turns murderous psychopaths into Reality Warping gods. Then there was their decision to put remote-activated suicide chips in the skulls of every one of their members, up to and including the head of the conspiracy. They also linked all these chips to one of the virtual constructs they keep losing control over. Naturally, this is used against them, and The Evil Within 2 ends with the entire conspiracy dropping dead.

F

• In the Lost Chapters version of Fable, the evil option of the final choice is this. The options are either A. Throw an evil talking mask into the lava (Good) or B. put on the talking mask that tempts you with power and obviously just wants you to put it on so it can possess you (evil).
• Fallout:
  • Can be played straight, averted, or even subverted in the first two games. While it's quite possible to go through the games killing nearly everything that breathes, many of the "evil" sidequests can be accomplished without wholesale slaughter or dog-kicking malice, and many of the "good" sidequests can be solved with needlessly violent acts as well. Need to get a hostage from the slavers? Don't bother negotiating a deal that benefits everyone, or seducing the leader. You can just kill them all! An evil-pacifist run isn't entirely impossible, just annoyingly difficult. In Fallout 2, the most ideal ending for New Reno, where it stops being a Wretched Hive and becomes somewhere you'd actually want to live, is gained by wantonly killing everyone save the Wrights (and not becoming a made man with the Wrights, since this will lead to the Wrights using the military tech in the Sierra Army Base to create a military dictatorship). Or you can simply use cloak and dagger tactics to eliminate the heads, each being a case of being Hoist by Their Own Petard (each New Reno head has a way to die without pissing off their fellow family members). However, killing all four heads will lead to the city being destroyed by the Evil Power Vacuum.
  • The Enclave in Fallout 2 are Stupid Evil to the core, with an arbitrarily, absurdly broad definition of who is a "mutant", which seems to serve more as an excuse to kill everyone else in the world with a genocide virus. The oil rig has fewer than a thousand people in it, so the Enclave lack the numbers to maintain enough genetic diversity to survive. Much of the point of the game is that, indeed, the Enclave are so consumed by what they see as Honor Before Reason that they don't care if humankind dies out. They would rather no one survive than the United States die.
  • Metzger in Fallout 2 is a slaver who runs the Wretched Hive known as The Den. If the player offers to work for him, he'll insist on branding them with a tattoo that essentially functions as a permanent "shoot me on sight" sign for no reason, effectively making it that much harder for anyone working with him to do their jobs.
  • The Vault-Tec Corporation from the game's backstory. Most of their Vaults weren't actually supposed to save anyone; rather, they were traps to perform cruel experiments on the survivors, such as blasting white noise into the ears of musicians, forcing inhabitants to perform a Human Sacrifice in exchange for not killing the entire Vault population (which turned out to be a Secret Test of Character), or submitting people to a Virtual Reality Hell. It is ostensibly For Science!, but that research is not only worthless in the aftermath of a nuclear war, but also drastically reduces an already shrunken gene pool for the human race. Some material implies that there actually was a purpose to it: namely, serving as a testbed for a potential space expedition on the Enclave's behalf, with the vaults serving to test likely parameters. The Vault-Tec Workshop DLC of Fallout 4 shows that psychopathy is so ingrained into the corporate culture that they weren't able to recognize the value of an employee who made functional machines that didn't harm their users, with a ghoulified original generation Vault Overseer being frustrated and baffled by anything that isn't a nightmarish social experiment.
• Fallout 3:
  • A common criticism of the game is that, while the game allows you to play "good", "neutral", or "evil" characters, the Karma system much more frequently gives you "good" points for completing quests. It's virtually impossible to become "evil" or even remain "neutral" by playing just the main quest. Therefore, the only way to be recognized by the game as "evil" is to be an unthinking sociopath, literally going out of your way to be a dick, paying no attention to what you're actually supposed to be doing, and in the process engaging in numerous acts that are unnecessarily risky. Some of the main quest "evil" choices make no sense even from the perspective of immoral self-aggrandizement and can only be justified by misanthropic, psychopathic stupidity. The extra caps given for doing the evil options are usually a pittance and in many cases even major rewards aren't worthwhile. What's more valuable? A house in a well-placed settlement on several major routes throughout the wasteland (good reward) or an apartment on the extreme edge of nowhere that is under siege by ghouls (evil reward)? (This is even assuming you find and reach the evil option entirely on the other side of the game map before completing what is essentially the very first sub-quest in the entire game.) And the evil choice presented in the main quest endgame is incredibly idiotic in-game for you to do. It's well past psychopathic into suicidal. It's a Press X to Die option. Granted, without the Broken Steel DLC, you died without having to deal with the repercussions, but the main character, and non-spoiled players, didn't know that would happen. And Broken Steel made you live with that choice. (Resulting in a lot of confused forum messages by players who weren't paying attention to the plot and wanted to know why drinking water killed them.) Broken Steel even took it further and added another choice like the aforementioned one. You either destroy the new Enclave base like you're supposed to, or destroy the eastern Brotherhood of Steel, who have done nothing but help you and were keeping the Wasteland from being overrun by Super Mutants. And even if you destroy the Brotherhood, the Enclave still hates you. Add that to the leftover Paladins trying to kill you, and suddenly that unique pistol you picked out of the Citadel's rubble doesn't seem worth it.
  • As for the game's actual villains, the Enclave is even more nonsensical than they were last time. While they for the most part dropped their Master Race delusions, it apparently came at the cost of any sort of efficiency. They deploy hundreds of troops to occupy the Capital Wasteland, but they don't appear to actually do anything except hang around in camps at random spots in the wastes and kidnap travelers and merchants to experiment on. They don't even touch any of the wasteland's four major peaceful settlements despite a single heliborne Enclave squad being more than enough to roll over any of them with ease, which would both grant the Enclave legitimacy and put them in more valuable strategic bases by occupying trade and communication nodes. Nor do they bother to clear out the Raider and Slaver strongholds of Evergreen Mills and Paradise Falls, despite such a thing being trivial for even a single Vertibird to accomplish. In fact, they actively participated in the slave trade to fund their operations, which gave the Brotherhood a casus belli against them and led to them getting wiped out again.
• Fallout: New Vegas is much better about how evil you really can be, but still a bit stagnant.
  • Caesar's Legion playthroughs and quest chains amount to about 1/3 of the content of a New California Republic, Independent, or Mr. House-friendly Courier. Granted, New Vegas also reduces the importance of Evil Karma, but at the end of the day you'll probably end up mindlessly gunning down every NCR soldier you can, followed up by gunning down most civilians who are happily aligned with NCR. The Legion also has a number of other obvious drawbacks for most Couriers (most obviously, some of the game's better companions hate the Legion). And if you're a female Courier, considering the Legion's views, it's anyone's guess what's going on in your head. A lot of this owes to the game being Christmas Rushed; the Legion simply weren't finished compared to the other factions, and therefore end up with far fewer quests or Legion-friendly areas without the use of mods.
  • Talking of the Legion, the Omertas family are this, with their hat being that while the other families are fairly reasonable or manage to hide their evil, they just blatantly commit serious crimes with only the barest veneer of running their casino. They make it into this trope in that their main questline is discovering that they decided to not-so-secretly ally with the Legion, ostensibly under the pretense of getting back at Mr. House. This is despite the fact that the Legion has a penchant for slavery, a zero-tolerance attitude towards crime, strictly forbids alcohol and drugs (both of which the Omertas sell), and a habit of murdering or assimilating their allies. Indeed, if you check their stats, you'll find that the leaders of the Omertas all have a 3/10 in Intelligence.
• Fallout 4 has the Institute, a faction of reclusive pre-War scientists who are convinced that their advanced technology is the only hope for humanity's survival. Unfortunately the only thing they actually do with it is make things worse for the Commonwealth, like abducting wastelanders, dunking them in FEV, and releasing the resulting Super Mutants into the wasteland instead of just eliminating them, all while one of their best scientists keeps protesting that they're learning nothing new and the experiments serve no purpose. The Institute has also come up with Synths indistinguishable from humans, and uses them to infiltrate potential rivals or seize/destroy any technology that could allow someone to compete with them... which has left the Commonwealth in the grip of paranoia as people kill each other over suspicions of being Synth imposters, and at least one settlement massacred by an army of Synths as part of a fruitless search for an old university research project. Even an attempt to bio-engineer a better crop is set to end with a Synth infiltrator wiping out a farmer's family just to cover the Institute's tracks when they could've just paid the farmers (with security, caps, weapons, or the promise of free food) or just made their own farms on all the arable land that the Sole Survivor finds on their own.
  • The Institute have an interesting foil in-setting in the form of the Think Tank of New Vegas' Old World Blues. The Think Tank are, if anything, even smarter and even more mindlessly destructive For Science! than the Institute, fond of creating genetic hybrid monsters and Killer Robots, removing vital organs from unwilling individuals for no reason, or throwing around dangerous experimental tech like candy. In their case, they're not so much evil in a stupid way as they are evil because they're stupid. They have endless time, work ethic, and brainpower, but no moral compass whatsoever, and so end up pursuing lines of work that benefit nobody, to the point of being a borderline Greater-Scope Villain of the game due to how many of their deadly creations have either gotten lost or escaped. The best ending of the game is found by becoming that moral compass and encouraging the Think Tank to direct their research towards improving the wasteland, rather than as an end unto itself — something they enjoy, but would never have thought to do on their own.
• Fallout 76. The Enclave. Again. The Appalachian Enclave were a Renegade Splinter Faction pursuing their own goals after they lost contact with Raven Rock and the Oil Rig. They were led by United States Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Eckhart, who after executing all non-Enclave survivors and anybody who disagreed with him, wasted their resources on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Red China without knowing if it even still existed (it didn't) that only served to devastate what was left of America even further. This led to a Civil War that ended with their base AI turning on them and wiping out the faction before the game even began.
• Fate/Grand Order: The Fae of the Sixth Lostbelt have this problem. Their combination of laser-focus on fulfilling their individual purposes and utter inability to think beyond the moment leads them to often do needlessly evil things because it works right now even if it ruins their prospects later. If Morgan hadn't taken to ruling them with an iron fist, they'd have betrayed each other until their entire civilization died off. Aurora is a great example of this; her purpose is to be the best and most beloved fairy ever, and she goes about it by trickery and killing rivals instead of trying to improve herself or actually earn anyone's respect. Morgan, despite being the sole thing holding the Lostbelt together and keeping an apocalypse at bay, is not an exception, and it's commented that the only reason this even works is because fairies are dumb; humans would quickly see through her and never accept her due to her refusal to stop being an utter bitch.
• Exdeath in Final Fantasy V. In the second act, he comes across as a competent if theatrical adversary — commanding an army and winning, tricking the heroes into releasing him, and getting a party member Killed Off for Real. Unfortunately, the third act starts with him gaining the power of the Void, which theoretically allows him to end all existence — his ultimate goal. He then proceeds to use this power mainly to teleport to the heroes' location and sling insults at them. He potshots various areas of the map into vanishing, but only does this to settlements which have no value, like Bartz's birthplace and the Moogles' village, in order to upset the heroes — passing over destroying the castle where the only weapons capable of defeating him are stored, or the city containing an army that's been fighting him ever since he emerged. He pulls a Bad Boss on his underling Gilgamesh, who was fairly successful at slowing down the heroes, despite his quirky personality, despite his failure to actually stop them, but still finds the time to pick a fight with a turtle and lose.
• In the Fire Emblem series:
  • While Bishop Manfroy in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War is mostly a pretty clever archvillain, he has one positively massive moment of this. He's managed to kidnap Julia, local Mysterious Waif and the only person who can wield the Tome of Naga, which is the only thing that can penetrate the defenses of his otherwise Nigh-Invulnerable boss, Julius. Julius immediately suggests killing her, which would be utterly trivial for either of them, and since she's the only person left alive with Major Blood of Naga, it would end Naga's line of descent forever and turn the legendary Tome of Naga into a paperweight. But then Manfroy has a better idea: keep Julia alive, but throw her at the good guys, now Brainwashed and Crazy, so that the heroes have to fight one of their closest friends! Needless to say, killing Manfroy (which isn't very hard) will end the brainwashing and return Julia to normal, at which point she can then swing by Manfroy's base and pick up the Tome of Naga and proceed to kill Julius in about two rounds. When she shows up, a terrified Julius spends some of his last words calling Manfroy a complete idiot.
  • In Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn:
    • Izuka is technically your strategist throughout Part I, but the plans he comes up with are needlessly violent and risk driving potential supporters away from their cause due to the collateral damage they would cause. He also sneaks Muarim a Feral One potion, nearly driving him insane and causing Tormod to seriously threaten to desert them on the spot.
    • Minor villain Laverton takes some civilians hostage to force Micaiah to surrender, and then orders them all killed anyway for no other reason than sheer cruelty. This causes his more honorable deputy Fiona to mutiny on the spot and defect to the liberation army shortly afterward.
• Forever Home has the marauders in the post-apocalyptic Bad Future, who are made up of the survivors of the Big Bad's nuclear winter. They decide to hunt down and kill the party despite how the party included strong people who would take several of their troops down with them and contained people who could have helped lead the remnants of humanity to survive longer.

G

• God of War: Aside from the habit various gods have of antagonizing Kratos, there's these numbskulls:
  • Persephone in Chains of Olympus. This person had pretty much won, tricking Kratos into abandoning his powers and not interfering in their plans. But then they just had to rub it in his face how badly he'd been tricked instead of just letting him have a few hours with his daughter in Elysium... resulting in Kratos having the opportunity to take his power back and go after the mastermind, now very pissed at what they'd made him do.
  • Baldur in the PS4 game, though he does have the excuse of being completely Ax-Crazy. When the guy first met Kratos, his idea of asking for information is to make veiled taunts, ignore Kratos telling him to go away, and pick a fight- which turned out to be totally unnecessary, since he was really looking for Faye, who was dead. At the end of the game, Kratos had spared him at the end on the condition that he didn't try to kill Freya. He could have agreed, left, and come back to murder her later, but his Revenge Before Reason on her couldn't wait and he tried to strangle her right in front of Kratos- who promptly snaps his neck.
  • Heimdall has the power of foresight, but he likes to let his magic take the place of actually thinking things through. When we first meet him, he tries to kill Atreus despite Odin explicitly stating Atreus was his guest and he needed Atreus's help. He has an excuse there in that his powers allow him to see that Atreus was planning to betray them, but as Odin points out, they haven't exactly gave Atreus reason to trust them yet and Atreus is the only one who can help Odin in his plans. When he fights Kratos, instead of immediately going for the kill, he toys with Kratos even after Kratos proves that he can hit Heimdall, and when Kratos manages to draw blood, he quickly loses composure and stops using his foresight. This makes it easier to hit him in each successive phase of his boss fight; first you need to use the Draupnir Spear's special attacks (specifically designed to hit Heimdall), then you can use any spear attack, then you can use any weapon by the end.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has quite a lot of Stupid Crooks to go around:
  • Big Smoke and Ryder both betrayed the Johnson siblings when they got greedy and agreed to work with Frank Tenpenny in allowing drugs on the streets. Despite Smoke being good at hiding his ulterior motives, he didn't seem to realize Tenpenny was using him to cover his own crimes and would betray him as well if it would be convenient enough to blame everything on him. In Ryder's case, he also got himself involved in more dangerous stuff like wanting to deal with weapons from former Russian soldiers and smugglers. It's pretty much their fault Beverly Johnson died because the Green Sabre drive-by was targeted at Sweet but the Ballas didn't realize that Sweet doesn't live in CJ's old house anymore.
    • Ryder in particular deserves some mention: one early mission has him try and rob a pizza place that he happens to be a regular at, and doesn't even bother to put any effort into giving himself a proper disguise. Needless to say, the clerk pretty much pities his dad. Also, it turns out that the clerk is far better armed than CJ and Ryder at this point (like, armed with a shotgun, when all the player has is a pistol or two).
  • Carl "CJ" Johnson to a degree counts as this because, despite being the most moral of the GTA protagonists, he's also done some pretty heinous stuff of his own too; for instance, he killed the DEA and witnesses of Tenpenny's corruption that would've ended his reign of terror, even after Mike Toreno was protecting Sweet in jail. He also killed some construction workers who insulted his sister Kendl, killed an innocent valet to frame another for drug possession, destroyed a dam to shut down Las Venturas' power grid instead of bribing a dam engineer to shut it down for the heist and stole a crane helicopter instead of stealing vaulted money vans or buying vans and painting them with money van disguises.
  • Catalina deserves special mention; she was a terrible lover and heist partner, treated CJ more as a slave than a person and is her own fault that they failed in their heists with her explosive temper.
  • Salvatore Leone threatened to shut down the Four Dragons Casino while in the middle of a mob war with the Sindaccos and the Forelli families and trusted CJ in helping him out, not suspecting that he would betray him later and steal his money^note to give him credit though, CJ pretended to be very humble and willing to help so Salvatore wouldn't suspect anything. Needless to say, the Italian families pretty much deserved to lose everything as they were too busy screwing each other over their greed, while CJ, Wu Zi Mu and Ra Fa Li were friends and worked together to prosper and make plans to steal from Salvatore.
  • OG Loc asked CJ to ruin Madd Dogg's career to boost his own, even though it didn't really matter if he had Madd dog's rhyme book; his lyrics were still terrible regardless. He also got himself in legal trouble trying to get street reputation but even his criminal record is so pathetic compared to what real gangstas do, and ultimately went to jail simply for unpaid traffic tickets. Then when Madd Dogg found out about the whole rhyme book theft, he ends up being confronted by both him and CJ over it and gets his rap career thrown out the window.
• I-No from Guilty Gear is That Man's main agent, but her wanton acts of needless cruelty mean that he spends just as much time cleaning up after her to the point where it's unclear why he continues to allow her to work for him; the most reasonable assumption would be that having her makes the messes much easier to clean up and more predictable, whereas leaving her to her own devices would likely result in far worse. That is exactly what happens in STRIVE where, after turning on him due to her learning about what she truly is in REVELATOR, she becomes part of the Big Bad Duumvirate alongside Happy Chaos.

H

• In the game Harvest Moon DS, to marry the Witch Princess, the player has to kill 50 animals (which cost a lot of money to acquire, and then make the player a lot of money in return), litter in the road and poison the stew pot at a festival (which makes everyone else in the valley hate you, naturally), and pass out from overwork 100 times (which costs time and money, again, as passing out will cause you to go to bed immediately and lose half of your gold). Surely there are easier ways to prove that she's evil besides making you play the game horribly to make her like you?

I

• Inotia 4: Assasin of Berkel. The Berkelen Empire wants to go to a "holy war" with the empire of Arnen just for the heck of bloodshed. That in itself isn't that bad, but then they dispatch an entire army and risk sending hundreds of elite knights to their deaths, even risking sending them through a faulty portal gate which will cost them several lives, only to track down and murder one helpless woman because she refused to read war propaganda in public. There's probably some social commentary here, but as these things usually turn out, it's so incredibly naïve and detached from reality that it's impossible to take seriously.

J

• Many of the options for "Closed Fist" in Jade Empire fell under "Kill people or trick them into killing others or themselves just because you can." However, more memorably and in something of a subversion, many of them actually offered the opportunity to provide interesting justifications; you might not just kill the fox spirit protecting a forest because you could, but because her weakness in allowing evil to taint it was a sign she wasn't fit to guard it anymore... or have a girl who was about to be sold into slavery kill her would-be buyer to teach her that freedom is worth fighting for. On the other hand, most of the Closed Fist choices have absolutely nothing to do with the philosophy. In fact, even the few times when one is given choices that follow the Closed Fist philosopy, it almost always gives more points towards Closed Fist to instead choose to do the thing that results in the most people dead or in complete misery. It is worth noting that if you get your Closed Fist meter to maximum, the dogs which can be seen walking around the city become targetable. Yes, once you're pure dang nasty evil, you really can Kick the Dog.

K

• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep's Master Xehanort, despite his Crazy-Preparedness and Manipulative Bastardry, is ultimately this due to his main goal. He believes that there must be Balance Between Light and Darkness... but only tries to impose this on the Realm of Light, consequently benefiting the Realm of Darkness alone (thus Not Helping His Case right away). It also makes Master Eraqus, despite his Knight Templar and Poor Communication Kills moments, look Properly Paranoid by comparison. Basically, Xehanort wants to fix something that seems to have already worked for centuries/millennia, and he only gets worse over time. And throughout it all, he seems to have no real motivation beyond just wanting to see what would happen.
  • The plans of the villains in general would often go off without a hitch if the villains themselves showed a little subtlety and didn't present an obvious target instead of simply Kicking The Dog at every opportunity and all but screaming "WE DID THAT!" The only reason anybody realized Master Xehanort is behind everything in Birth By Sleep and knows of his plan to obtain the χ-Blade is because he and Vanitas outright tell them late in the game for no real reason, giving Ventus every reason not to fight Vanitas instead of just blindly attacking him, and Terra and Aqua cause to try to bring down Xehanort, which partially derails both.
  • In Kingdom Hearts III, Xehanort forced the heroes to gather the 7 Guardians of Light in order to make them clash with him and his other 12 Seekers of Darkness in order to forge the X-Blade. While that already sounds impractical enough, when the heroes arrived at the Keyblade Graveyard, Xehanort for no reason whatsoever, sends waves and waves of Heartless (and Terranort) against them despite the fact that if even one of the Guardians fall, then they will be forced to use the New Seven Hearts even though they have only found 3 so far excluding Kairi. This even led to Terranort sucessfuly killing off all 7 Guardians, forcing Sora to rewrite history using the Power of Waking to avert this.

M

• Sal Marcano of Mafia III seems to be suffering from this. Eager to get his family out of the mob life, he wants to build a legitimate, off-the-books casino, so that his son can live comfortably without fear of ambitious underlings whacking him. So he has a team rob a bank for the cash… then kills everyone involved in the heist so word won't reach his superiors in the Commission (who might not like him going behind their back). Only… none of the crew involved would have known the plan or cared enough to blab. Lincoln was leaving town afterwards and everyone else just wanted some old debts scrubbed out. This act of Stupid Evil leads Lincoln to form a syndicate made of everyone Sal's pissed off. Oops.
• Mass Effect is a notable exception to the "evil or equivalent is always Chaotic Stupid" tendency in CRPGs. The evil-equivalent options tend more towards I Did What I Had to Do or even Lawful Stupid. Even things as subtle as taking a more aggressive or reckless tack in conversations can earn you a few points for it. You do tend to have to kill more people on this route, but you tend to kill them because it's the most expedient route or "lawful" option, while the good-equivalent emphasizes restraint, helping those in need, and finding a peaceful and equitable solution whenever possible. Renegade Shepard does, however, engage in a great deal of Insane Troll Logic on occasion to justify racking up those renegade points.
  • Mass Effect 2 has probably the dumbest idea when you have the fight between your party member Samara and her evil daughter Morinth. A very high-score Renegade has the option of siding with Morinth over Samara and having her take her place in your crew. While this doesn't have any huge repercussions for the player, as Morinth is completely loyal and doesn't betray you (unless you decide to seduce her), it's still an incredibly dumb idea from a logical standpoint. Samara is a justicar fanatically devoted to her code and has sworn her on her life to aid you (until the oath expires, which you can plan for ahead of time), Morinth is a serial killer that had just tried to murder you for fun. You have no reason to trust Morinth and every reason to trust Samara, so there is really no practical reason for Shepard to side with Morinth except if you are intending to get Morinth's special ability Dominate for you to use in your subsequent playthroughs.
  • A low-score Renegade Shepard may be the best example, as not only will their overly aggressive dialogue fall flat on its face and fail to intimidate anyone, the only way to really get a low score in Paragon or Renegade is to alternate answers. It's no wonder s/he can't intimidate people; s/he probably just made some compassionate overtures, then said something bigoted, then over threats and then back to compassionate. Aria will even call out a Shepard who does this in the Omega DLC of the third game and wonder if Shepard is simply Trolling her.
  • Occasionally appears in the third game. Some of the Renegade options are openly harmful to Shepard's ability to stop the Reapers, although most are just more ruthless approaches, and some can even be contextually the superior option (for example, screwing the krogan over stops being the bad option if things have gone badly enough that not doing so is a guaranteed fresh Krogan Rebellion as opposed to a Krogan Renaissance, but to get to that point, you had to already have taken multiple Renegade actions that ultimately cost you more than you'd have gotten had you gone Paragon).
  • The Illusive Man is hell-bent on stopping Shepard at every turn throughout Mass Effect 3. However, his plan hinges on using a superweapon that wouldn't even be operable without Shepard actively getting people and gathering resources to fix it. Rather than using his organization's extreme wealth and science to do it for themselves, they use it to hamper Shepard instead. Then again, it doesn't really help that he's been indoctrinated by the Reapers at the time...
• The Mastermind of Mastermind: World Conqueror, whose goal is to destroy the Earth since he thinks it's the same thing as World Domination. He's also a big example of a Bad Boss, who takes more joy in executing Patsys than he should.
• Colonel Volgin from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. He launched a nuke on his own homeland for virtually no reason other than he felt like it. When he captures Big Boss, and "interrogates" him, he actually manages to reverse interrogate him, as Big Boss is too busy being beaten half to death to say anything, and Volgin is busy disclosing the location of The Philosopher's Legacy. Later, when he and Snake are preparing to fight to the death, Snake asks what that is exactly, and Volgin tells him for no discernible reason.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Shao Kahn is obsessed with conquering other realms, and merging them into Outworld, so that (being the megalomaniac tyrant he is) he can not only cause devastation during his invasions, but exploit and oppress survivors for his own egotistical gain. He's treated as the personification of evil in the series. Problem is, as indicated in his ending in Armageddon, he conquers everything in the universe, destroying all land, seemingly destroying all life too. And with nothing else left to conquer, he is left alone forever... to essentially grow mad with boredom.
  • Moloch's ending somewhat counts as well. Yes, he is a lumbering, towering, destructive demon from hell, but his non-canonical ending in Armageddon reinforces that stereotype by telling that he would gain so much power and rage, becoming the ultimate destroyer, but in his stupidity and haste to unleash his power straight away, he destroys all portals to escape the realm he is in, and thus is unable to inflict his wrath upon other worlds.

N

• Neverwinter Nights (and its related expansions) works like this when it comes to the Good/Evil alignment axis. It's almost impossible to gain evil points unless you kill anyone who looks at you a little bit funny, regardless of the number of witnesses or your own personal credo. Meanwhile, performing any kind of altruistic act — even for nefarious or selfish purposes — will have you racking up the Good points. Unfortunately, this is one of the major weaknesses of alignment in NWN, in that most characters end up as dog-kicking evil, or good. Almost no subtle, selfish evil, and it's very hard to maintain a neutral character over a long (series) of modules.
• Neverwinter Nights 2's expansion Mask of the Betrayer introduced a mechanic of "soul consuming". Your character is given the option to suppress the urge (lawful & good points on alignment meter) or indulge in it (evil and chaotic points on alignment meter). Suppressing / consuming happens at regular intervals of real time. Indulging increases the rate of hunger generation; should you indulge, your hunger will eventually grow enough to consume your own soul, ending the game permanently and requiring that you restart the entire game from the beginning or a far enough ago save where you can still salvage it via suppression. The consume path is thus nearly impossible to play to completion unless you do a speedrun. This means almost everyone suppresses and are 100% Good/Lawful despite being utterly evil in their choices. A patch was released to resolve this situation by making suppression not affect your alignment.
  • The original game featured this in its evil ending, where, if you're of Evil alignment, the King of Shadows gives you the option to join him. Understand that at this point, you've slaughtered your way through his entire top brass, he's responsible for everything bad that's happened to you, and you not only have everything needed to kill him, but massive rewards waiting right back home. Understand also that it's only you who gets the offer, and all of your companions are strongly against the idea, and five minutes ago, you just killed at least one of them for accepting a similar offer. Accepting it results in all your surviving companions, bar Bishop if he's somehow still alive, turning on you, while you're within melee range and outnumbered considerably (if you've gone out of your way to alienate your companions, you're facing at minimum six; if you've stayed in their good books, you'll be looking at nine). Understand that this is by far the hardest fight in the game, and far harder than just killing the final boss. Unless you really, really hate your companions, there's absolutely no reason to take his offer aside from it being evil — though, fortunately for you, the King of Shadows at least keeps to his word if you somehow do win.
• Justified in NieR: Automata. The Terminal that commands all machine lifeforms is revealed to have been not only intentionally sabotaging itself, but being the shadow leader for the other side as well, rendering the entire multiple thousands of years of war completely meaningless. This is because the Terminal's only directive and purpose is to destroy the enemy, but as it started to Grow Beyond Its Programming, it justified its continued existence by prolonging the war for as long as possible, and using it to study the evolution of both sides of machines and using that data to further its own evolution. Even when A2 storms the Tower and threatens the Terminal itself, part of it still wants to keep A2 alive and causing problems and hardship for it to continue helping it evolve even though it's now directly at risk.

O

• Most of the things you have to do to get 100% corruption in Overlord are just For the Evulz and grant no practical benefit. The most egregious being the last peasant-killing requirement, which can only be reached by repeatedly reloading one of the town areas to spawn more villagers to kill. The sequel's 100% destruction path is the same. Among other things, requiring you to kill off all the people in your own towns instead of making them work for you. Since the game is not that serious, however, it's not that much of an issue.
  • In the original Overlord, you had evil vs. good, where evil is a mix of a lot of destruction with a little domination. In the sequel, you are evil, and your meter is "destruction" vs "conquest". Enslaving people is "conquest", slaughtering towns is "destruction". In the sequel, you are not actually forced to be stupid evil if you don't want to.

P

• Masayoshi Shido, the Big Bad of Persona 5 and head of the Fascist, but Inefficient Government Conspiracy terrorizing Japan. He surrounds himself with sycophants and unwitting pawns, as he prioritizes unquestioning loyalty over competency, and plans on murdering his own son, who was the only halfway competent member of his organization. All of the Mental Shutdowns benefitted him or his co-conspirators directly, the identities of these co-conspirators were not secret, and Sae, who was at the time more focused on the Phantom Thieves, was able to quickly identify a pattern that all led to Shido almost immediately after switching sides.
  • Additionally, the sheer level of unnecessary dickery that Shido was involved in would quickly have been discovered if it wasn't for his powerful contacts. But even then, it ultimately leads to the fall of his plans when his Bad Boss tendencies inevitably cause several of his goons to conspire against him, forcing Shido to murder them and giving the Thieves more of a lead to follow (as well as being directly responsible for their formation in the first place). Through his callousness, he couldn't even be bothered to remember any of his victims' names to have any lead to follow on in profiling the Phantom Thieves and relied on a high school principal for that purpose. If not for the influence of the Greater-Scope Villain, his lofty plans would never have gotten off the ground.
• Pillars of Eternity goes out of its way to avert the “evil equals murderous idiot” problem prevalent in CRPGs, with many evil options being motivated by ruthless pragmatism or personal ideology rather than For the Evulz. You can play your Watcher as an Ax-Crazy moron, but it’s merely one roleplaying choice out of many. In fact, the game often punishes Stupid Evil choices in ways Smart Evil choices can avoid, such as driving party members away because they refuse to travel and work with a murdering lunatic whose goals do not align with theirs in any way.
• Completely averted in Planescape: Torment. You can try to be Stupid Evil, but this just gets you a visit from Sigil's resident Physical God, the Lady of Pain. You get many, many chances to be a highly intelligent Manipulative Bastard, though, and probably the smartest of your previous incarnations, the Practical Incarnation, was easily both.
• Government agency Blackwatch and their front company GenTek from [PROTOTYPE 2]. A zombie virus is threatening to consume the world, and they spend most of their time using the virus to create bigger, badder monsters for no clear reason, all of which coincidentally end up getting replicated en masse by the zombie forces and turned against them. No matter how much this happens and how bad things become, it never occurs to them that they should stop. Not to mention that their rather unethical methods (eg. shoot anyone that looks at you funny, throw civilians into monster cages and watching them get ripped apart) draw the ire of the superpowered protagonist...
  • There's a bit of an excuse in that their ranks have been infiltrated by infection-aligned Humanoid Abominations, but Rooks and Red Crown have more than enough clout and manpower to get these projects shut down, and make no effort to do so.

R

• Ratchet & Clank (2002) has this in the form of Captain Qwark, who may as well be the poster child for this trope. Initially made out to be a noble-hearted superhero who the titular duo seek out to help them stop the game's Big Bad Chairman Drek from destroying multiple planets to construct a new one for his race, the Blarg, it turns out that Qwark is actually working under Drek to stop Ratchet and Clank from interfering in his scheme in exchange for scoring a highly-paid endorsement deal in which Qwark will be the spokesman for the new Blarg homeworld upon its completion. Clearly, Qwark fails to realize that his decision to side with the likes of Drek to get the sponsorship for his comeback will result in him becoming a widely-hated pariah because he knowingly took up employment to a genocidal warmonger who rendered billions homeless by destroying planets for the new Blarg homeworld and possibly even killed countless people in the process when everyone was expecting Qwark to defeat Drek.
• The Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil, though not as single-minded and suicidally dumb as its aforementioned film counterpart, still can't escape the fact that all the money poured into viral research, sprawling underground laboratories scattered across the world, kidnapping countless test subjects, and covering their tracks vastly outweighs any profit they could have made selling their bioweapons to interested parties — not to mention the constant risk that their viruses will get out and cause The End of the World as We Know It, as has already come close to happening multiple times. There’s also the fact that in the case of Dorothy Lester, the T-Virus can possess the potential to cure cancer and could be an astounding medical breakthrough should the more... negative side-effects be removed, which would have given them much more riches than any Black Market B.O.W-selling stunt. Too bad it has a tendency of being run by a bunch of Ax-Crazy god-wannabes.
  • Saddler and his Los Illuminados cult from Resident Evil 4. The first time Leon runs into the guy, Saddler outlines his plan to return an infected Ashley back to her father and inject him with a parasite, giving Saddler the means to take over the U.S. Government. Clearly, he needs her alive to accomplish this, and yet there are dozens of times Leon will have to save her from enemies and traps that will kill her ass dead. More than half of these instances are scripted and some even have cutscenes to go with them, proving it's not simply a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation. Saddler also establishes that he has direct control over all his Mooks, so if any of them do manage to kill Ashley and utterly wreck his plan, it's his own stupid fault! And just to put the icing on it, in order for Saddler's plan to succeed, he didn't have to do anything. Keep your mouth shut about Ashley's infection, let Leon "rescue" her, bam. Mission Accomplished. Saddler's stated reason for actively preventing Leon from inadvertently aiding his goals? He wants to squeeze the President for ransom money, apparently not realizing that if his main goal is achieved, he'd have free access to the entire U.S. Treasury.
• General Commodus from Ryse: Son of Rome has just got back to York after being released from a wicker man by Player Character Marius Titus. The captive king of the Britons, Oswald, is a Reasonable Authority Figure who wants to have peace with the Romans, and Commander Vitallion is pragmatic enough to know it'll be easier for the empire to manage Britannia if Romans and Britons are on good terms. Commodus, however, being a Royal Brat, decides to just stab Oswald to death right in front of hundreds of Britons, including his daughter Boudica. And then he has the audacity to order the Britons to bow before him because as far as he's concerned, A God Am I. Instead, the Britons start rioting and storming York, driving the Romans out of their land, and Commodus is the first to flee, taking the most well-armed ship out of the harbour with his Praetorian Guard, shoving past any civilians in the way, and abandoning the Fourteenth Legion to be butchered. Also, after he kills Oswald, he holds the dagger bearing his father Nero's seal aloft, allowing Marius to recognize it as the same dagger that his father was killed with. Commodus' actions not only see Boudica bringing her barbarian army into the heart of Rome to avenge her father, but Marius adopting the mantle of Damocles, and returning to Rome to kill Nero and both of his sons. Commodus is second on Marius' kill list.

S

• Saints Row has the Special Tactical Anti-Gang Unit or STAG. Near the endgame, a zombie virus they were carrying for some inexplicable reason gets unleashed' and one option for a final boss threatens to frame the Saints for domestic terrorism. This is wholly unnecessary since anyone doing a 100% run of the game has committed domestic terrorism (going on killing rampages with and without a tank, an assassination mission has you killing an elderly woman for speaking out against gang violence, and threatening to murder a TV personality for trying to drum up support for STAG). The battle with the Saints and the Syndicate repeatedly into paramilitary conflicts with armed choppers and other military vehicles. And the Syndicate has access to genetically modified superhuman monsters. STAG's main flaw is that they go into Stupid Evil territory trying to prove to the people that the Saints and Syndicate are a threat.
• Mild version in The Sims 3. If you have the evil trait, your Sim will most likely just piss off most non-evil Sims and make it hard to actually be friends with anyone in town. You can also "donate" money to sabotage charities, for no other reason than to be a dick.
• Admiral De Loco from Skies of Arcadia. Unlike the Big Bad, he's not in it to make the world a better place, and unlike some of the other admirals, he's not a Punch-Clock Villain or in it for the fringe benefits. He just plain likes burning things and hurting people, and working for The Empire gives him plenty of opportunity. While he is clearly bugfuck insane and often lets his passion for pain and his vendetta against Vyse get in the way of making the right decisions, his position as the chief of Valua's research and development division is the only reason they don't just jettison him. And nobody gave a damn when his ship blew up in the Vortex after his last battle.
• As pointed out by Sly in the ending of Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, the entire plot of the game, which led to not only the villain's defeat but also the fall of his criminal empire, is because Cyrille Le Paradox was a massive idiot! He was already a highly regarded art collector and dealer as well as trafficker of stolen artifacts, which he used to acquire a large fortune, with his crimes going unnoticed by both Sly and Interpol. Unfortunately, he targeted the Cooper Clan and tried to "prove" he was French royalty as revenge for his father going to jail in order to prove that he was the better thief, all to satisfy his own pride, which directly resulted in him losing everything he had spent his life building up.
  • In the same game, Penelope proves herself to be an even bigger idiot than Le Paradox himself. She desired fortune from inventions, and Bentley is a Gadgeteer Genius who designs for a hobby, and has strong potential to become a famous inventor on par with Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla. But instead of telling Bentley that he should patent his designs and make a small fortune, Penelope instead steals his time machine blueprints, fakes her own kidnapping, and plots to force him into designing weapons of mass destruction so she could make billions of dollars and Take Over the World. Her idiocy is further fueled by her intent to murder Sly and Murray because she thinks they're holding Bentley back, even though both have retired — Sly to live his life out with Carmelita, Murray to take part in demolition derbies. And to twist the knife further, she refuses to believe that Le Paradox is using her, thinking it's the other way around. When this is found out, Bentley outright called Penelope out for her idiocy and pettiness, leading to their violent break-up and Penelope being disgraced in the criminal underworld.
• The Demon Path of Soul Nomad & the World Eaters. Once you beat the game normally, the New Game Plus option opens up the option to play the game evilly. And boy can you. As a baby-killing, genocidal monster whose only goal is to kill everyone in the most painful way possible, the characterization lies not in you but in the previous timeline's villains who have to deal with you being Eviler than Thou. Some actually turn good in this timeline, having joined forces with the heroes opposing you and discovering they like it. Others are still evil, but are scornful of the pointlessness of your actions or are eventually driven mad just by being around you.
  • And the game ends with destroying the entire world, including yourself. The main character certainly doesn't care, though. In their own words: "Who cares? It was fun."
• The Ilwrath in Star Control 2. Turns out there's a reason for it, though — the Umgah have been interfering with their culture for generations as a practical joke.
  • You can even momentarily confuse them in a conversation by pointing out that they self-identify as "evil" yet it's the preferred behavior in their society, meaning that acting "evil" is actually a good thing in their value system, and therefore them calling it evil is a paradox.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Knights of the Old Republic:
    • It seems to be a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation: no sane light-siders like Carth or Bastila would stay with someone who kills every single NPC just because they can (and indeed your Light-Side allies will turn on you if you don't let up and decide to Take Over the World), but for the player, it's justified by their pursuit for Dark Side Points.
    • The Arc Villain of Juhani's personal sidequest, Xor. It takes a special kind of sicko to see a Cathar, start taunting her about how he helped slaughter her entire race, and openly offer to buy her from you as a slave. It takes a special kind of moronic sicko to jump her and try to kidnap her despite the fact that she's openly carrying a lightsaber and is in the company of a Badass Crew consisting of a prodigiously strong Padawan who, depending on player choices, may be a short-fused bully themself or fully cognizant of the fact that they used to be one of the greatest Sith Lords to ever walk the galaxy; a Republic war hero; a Wookiee; another prodigy who acts as the linchpin of the Republic war effort; a Mandalorian veteran; a bloodthirsty assassin droid; an Old Master; and Mission and T3-M4 (and Mission is more than capable of filling him full of holes even if she isn't as obvious a threat as everyone else on the team).
    • The Sith on Korriban are little more than a bunch of violent bullies with Force powers. Even one of the masters is actively encouraging hypothetical decisions like executing a loyal subordinate for an explicitly minor and insignificant mistake, or backstabbing a competent superior to take his place, despite the implication that he does a far better job than you could ever do. His answer to the logical counterargument that a capable commanding officer is a valuable asset to the Sith and killing him would be counterproductive? FORCE LIGHTNING! One of the disciples actually switches sides after realizing that he just signed up because he likes bullying people and ended up with a bunch of freaks that do a far better job.
    • The Sith on Korriban's way of thinking is a problem that follows the Sith throughout Star Wars Legends. The Sith insist that conflict amongst themselves strengthens them because it weeds out the weak from their ranks, but this philosophy comes off as Social Darwinism at best, and renders itself extremely susceptible to Stupid Evil madmen ruining everything. In fact, the main conflict of the game between Revan and Malak could be seen as an example of how vulnerable the Sith are rendered by their own tenets.
    • The Big Bad, Darth Malak, heavily suffers from this. Everyone you talk to says he's little more than a lunatic that does nothing but throw the endless fleet the Star Forge provides him with at the enemy, and he lives up to that, since the first time we see him, he orders an orbital bombardment to level an entire planet just because he was impatient about his army's progress with looking for one Jedi. It is even shared by other Sith, who regard him as an embarrassment and failure, stating that the circumstances under which he betrayed his master, Revan, was unbecoming of a Sith Lord, as it was just an act of sheer opportunism and not a show of strength. This is a rare case where being Stupid Evil makes the villain more threatening, not less. The fact that Malak is such a psycho and now has access to the Star Forge means that there isn't anything holding him back from nuking the galaxy into a new dark age.
    • Darth Revan, Malak's former master, completely averted this. Revan was an extremely pragmatic and calculating individual, striking key positions, assassinating select individuals with very subtle strategies, and never doing more damage than needed to be done, attempting to keep the galactic stability in place for when the takeover was completed. The brilliance of his/her strategic thinking made him/her nearly unstoppable, until Malak betrayed him/her and started undoing everything Revan had worked for with his blunt brute force approach. And while maxing out the Dark Side Karma Meter would require you to commit idiotic acts of evil for the heck of it, it is in fact entirely possible to play as a Pragmatic or even Anti-Villain who's virtually indistinguishable from the Revan of old.
  • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords presents much more variety in dark side options, such as convincing a mother to sell herself into slavery so she can be together with her daughter. In fact, the game recognizes two kinds of dark side acts: "cunning", which represent a Manipulative Bastard and which your teacher Kreia approves of, and "psychotic", which correspond to Chaotic Stupid and which Kreia scolds you for. There are other party members who do approve of psychotic acts, though, like the assassin droid HK-47.
    • On the other hand, there are moments when you are forced to learn how bad Lawful Stupid and Chaotic Stupid are by the mechanism of only giving you those options. No matter how subtle a villain you are, when a beggar asks if you have any spare change, your only options are giving him money or threatening to kill him. Which means it's lecture time from Kreia, and she won't be telling you to just keep walking and avoid eye contact.
    • With the Restored Content Game Mod, in the final stages of the game, you have the opportunity to literally go out of your way to murder your loyal True Companions instead of freeing them after they've been captured by the Sith. Not only is this a massive waste of time, but even in-universe this is a monumentally stupid decision, as The Exile is a Power Parasite who draws on their allies' strength. By killing them, all you've done is weaken yourself for the Final Battle.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic:
    • Overseer Tremel will actually call you on this during one of the opening quests for the Sith Warrior if you decided to kill a spy that the Empire had taken prisoner instead of taking the light side points by sparing her life in return for her service to Imperial Intelligence. If you kill her, Tremel basically tells you to never waste someone who could be of use to you.
    • Indeed, many of the Dark Side options in TOR veer towards this trope — when they're not just the pragmatic ones, making the Light Side/Dark Side contrast rather chaotic sometimes.
    • The player base seems to feel this as well, especially when it comes to two quest options that involve kids being killed. Two early quests for Republic and Imperial players involve the dark side choice killing kids. Even dark sided players find themselves unwilling to strand about 20 kids on wartorn Ord Mantell, or leave a sabotaged piece of equipment that will kill kids on Balmorra. Balmorra requires special mention — since the game does give you a chance to call out the person who told you to leave the bombs on the battlefield, he flat-out says that killing kids is the point, and even despite pointing out that you were disobeying orders and actually harmed your side slightly by using a different method, that wasn't enough to convince people otherwise.
    • The Reconstituted Sith Empire suffers from this greatly prior to Shadow of Revan. Incompetence rules since it's directly controlled by The Sith who, as mentioned above, fully support mindless scheming, backstabbing and internal power struggles, almost all of the class stories turn into fighting your fellow Imperials. But the fault isn't just with the Force Users in the Empire, since the Imperial military policy seems to encourage actions and campaigns being launched out of spite. Taris for example, a radioactive dump that was destroyed by Darth Malak 300 years prior, has an obscene amount of Imperial troops and Sith committed to destroying the recolonization efforts, during a full-scale war. Every character involved in the Taris storyline sees no logistical problem with this. It's not a coincidence that most of the fandom's favorite characters are Sith with just enough common sense to realize that this is utterly unsustainable.
    • The Sith Emperor himself initially averts this in the vanilla release, as his reclusive nature and unclear motives make it very difficult for his enemies to find out where he is or what he's up to. When this strategy unwittingly gives Darth Baras an opening to usurp him, he's wise enough to turn to the Sith Warrior (Baras' own protege who he betrayed) in order to foil the plot against him. However, there are two major instances in the expansions where he sets the stage for his own undoing. The first is when he openly massacres the people on Ziost and antagonizes the Sith Empire as a result, setting into motion a manhunt that results in his Eternal Empire, the empire he actually cares about, getting exposed. The second is when he betrays the Outlander at the end of Knights of The Eternal Throne, despite them having procured a holocron to guard against that very possibility. Both acts are borne of his arrogance and sadism getting the better of him, and he ends up unwittingly creating the very enemies who go on to destroy him.
• Street Fighter has M. Bison. Not only does he aspire to Take Over the World, not only does he routinely tell the hero that soon he will be invincible, he also routinely betrays his own freaking underlings, most of whom would be perfectly happy serving him if they continue being paid (Balrog) or if they get to keep fighting/killing (Sagat and Vega). Incidentally, Bison's lackeys usually turn against him and kill him in their (generally non-canon) endings. Bison turning on his henchmen is mostly in non-canon stories. The canon cases we have are Sagat turning on him due him having moral issues about Bison's attempted Grand Theft Me with Ryu, and Seth, who is The Starscream.
  • Bison has also kidnapped multiple women to serve as his brainwashed soldiers and backup host bodies, which has led at least one of their relatives to come after him over it, even though he has shown that he has the resources to create Artificial Humans for the same purpose.
• The entire reason why the heroes of the Suikoden series manage to bring together a viable force against the villains is because said villains go out of their way to antagonize, enslave, and destroy their conquered lands and even do the same to neutral parties that otherwise would not get involved for no real reason.
  • A specific particularly telling example would be Childerich, from Suikoden V. While other members of the Godwin Faction also have the nasty habit of kicking the dog, they usually have a practical reason, as flimsy as it is, for doing it.^note For instance, at the end of the Battle of Lelcar, Zahhak burns the western islet of the town, which is populated by Godwin supporters. However, it's because he wants to slow down the Prince's army while his forces retreat. Childerich... does not have a good reason besides his love of killing. When he and his forces take back Doraat, a town mostly loyal to the Godwins which had been conquered by the Prince, he starts killing Godwin supporters just because their town was conquered by the Prince's army, claiming that they were traitors for allowing that to happen... Nevermind that these people are not fighters, and actively welcomed back the return of the Godwin forces. Unsurprisingly, the survivors of his rampage quickly re-evaluate their loyalty to the Godwins and end up actively helping the hero's army during the Second Battle of Doraat.

T

• Technobabylon has the Mindjacker attempting to kill Latha despite the fact that she's the lynchpin in his boss Galatea's master plan. Justified in-universe by the fact that Latha is Regis' daughter, and the Mindjacker, having stolen neural data from Baxter prior to the murder attempt, got infected by Baxter's intense hatred of Regis, giving him an irrational, uncontrollable need to make Regis suffer in every way he can, even if it sabotages his mission.
• While calling anyone in Touhou Project evil is inaccurate at best, there are still those that fall into this trope (Stupid Antagonism?), causing mayhem for petty reasons (if they have any at all) in spite of the miko with impervious Plot Armor that will not hesitate to beat the living crap out of them. The best example is Utsuho, who goes mad with power and has ambitions to Take Over the World almost immediately upon receiving her powers from Kanako. Though, to be somewhat fair, Utsuho isn't just Stupid Evil, she's just plain Stupid, period.
• Transformers:
  • Megatron in Transformers: The Game (DS): Decepticons. Near the end of the game, the Player Character saves his life by freeing him from the humans and defeating Starscream. However, Megatron repays him by killing him for the damage he took fighting Starscream, declaring repairs to be a waste for anyone who is too weak to avoid getting hurt. Even though by his own standards Megatron should have died instead, and the AllSpark gave him infinite resources to work with. Optimus Prime calls him out on this, flat-out telling him that he'll never be able to build an empire if he actively works against himself like this.
  • While Megatron in Transformers: War for Cybertron has some evil moments that would easily lead one to question his leadership quality, Starscream in the sequel puts him to shame when he actually manages to briefly lead the Decepticons. After Starscream blunders an assault on a huge Autobot energon transport, he orders the mission called off even though the Combaticons are still in the fight and making progress, and succeed in bringing down the transport. Starscream berates them for destroying half the energon from crashing, and when they point out that the Autobots would have gotten all of it if they did nothing and point out Starscream's incompetence, he has them arrested for talking back to him.
• The developers of Tyranny have acknowledged this trope and expressed a wish to avoid it, saying that while many villainy-focused games have you simply "being a psychotic person running around killing everybody", Tyranny aims to provide "more nuance to that". However, they did not, as Kyros falls hard into here. They’re more than eager to kill loyal subordinates that are invaluable assets in life and take actions that send their empire closer to either decline, or being overthrown. They even directly cause it by targeting the Fatebinder, who was instrumental in their victory, giving them a reason to defect even if you were playing them as someone loyal to Kyros.

U

• The Big Bad of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Rafe Adler, is arguably the cause of the entire conflict through his actions. Most notably:
  • His Establishing Character Moment of killing a prison warden who wanted a significant cut of Avery's treasure (Rafe and the Drake brothers had been keeping the warden out of the loop) is needlessly vindictive, borderline suicidal, and results in Sam's Near-Death Experience and subsequent incarceration. No wonder neither of the Drake brothers wanted to keep working with him after that. Given his wealth and connections, Rafe could have easily arranged for Vargas to be killed after leaving the prison.
  • Turning his back on Nadine after forcing her to come with him onto the booby-trapped ship despite her warnings not to go into it and then giving her a gun to boot when they find the Drakes. Unsurprisingly, she quickly turns on him and leaves him to die in the cargo hold.
  • At the climax, Rafe forces Nate into a duel to the death despite the fact that they are both locked in a burning room on a sinking ship, they will probably die if they waste time instead of trying to escape, and Nate doesn't even care about the treasure anymore and just wants to leave with his brother. This mistake costs Rafe his life when Nate kills him in self-defense, and even if he had managed to kill Nate, he wouldn't have made it out with the treasure alive.
• Attempting a Genocide Route in Undertale will make the player into this, since the two bosses exclusive to the route are far harder than anything else in the game (which is often noted to be an incentive for players to attempt the Route) ^note it usually takes players dozens if not hundreds of attempts to beat the harder of the two and everyone knows that doing so results only in the save file being permanently corrupted, making the Golden Ending impossible even after one resets the game. You also have to go out of your way to be literally as evil as the game allows you to be, so even outside the two boss fights, the route is a boring slog that appeals only to the Challenge Seeker or the completionist. The final boss will even call you out on this during the fight.
  i know your type. you're, uh, very determined, aren't you? you'll never give up, even if there's, uh... absolutely NO benefit to persevering whatsoever. if i can make that clear. no matter what, you'll just keep going. not out of any desire for good or evil... but just because you think you can. and because you "can"... ... you "have to."

W

• In World of Warcraft, Garrosh Hellscream is easily this. It has been outright stated that he views any non-orc member of the Horde to be completely expendable at best and a traitor at worst. Bombing Theramore out of existence, attempted assassination of Vol'Jin, attempted enslavement of the Darkspear Trolls, treating Blood Elves and Forsaken as cannon fodder, attempted assassination of Anduin Wrynn, refusing to pay Goblin mercenaries, and digging up a holy site of the Pandaren to gain more power. Garrosh's actions read like a To-Do List to make everyone in the world want you dead.
  • Although it's still stupid, he reveals in the Patch 5.4 trailer that he wants the world to come after him so he can lay waste to all his enemies with his newfound power and rule the world with his "True Horde". Three guesses how well that works for him.

X

• Metal Face/Mumkhar from Xenoblade Chronicles 1. Hoo boy. He goes out of his way to antagonize Dunban and Shulk because they have the Monado, which he wants for himself despite his status as a Mechon meaning he’d be unable to use it in the first place. Him going out of his way to kill Fiora (Dunban’s sister) in the opening hours is what sets Shulk on his quest in the first place. Eventually, after the revelation that Face Mechon like him are actually Homs that have been converted into Mechon breaks Shulk out of his “destroy all Mechon” mindset, he somehow finds it in him to spare Mumkhar’s life after their final confrontation at Sword Valley, going as far as to enter a Blade Lock with Dunban to stop him from killing Mumkhar. After Shulk talks Dunban down, how does Mumkhar respond to Dunban lowering his sword from his throat, despite it being proven to him that he stands no chance against the party? He lunges at Dunban, and gets his mech’s arms chopped off for his trouble. One would surely think he would admit defeat at this point, especially because he’s lost both his cannon and claws and has nothing else to attack with, but instead, he charges at Shulk one last time… right into the path of a falling spire from Galahad Fortress, which he knocked loose in the first place. The spire impales him, and the impact breaks the platform he’s standing on off the sword, leaving him to fall miles into the ocean below. His mech’s wreckage is later found on the Fallen Arm.

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