Talking The Monster To Death / Video Games

• In Icewind Dale 2, if you can impress a demon enough by demonstrating knowledge of his kind, he'll leave without a fight. You can also unnerve a Barghest and its brood (provided you didn't kill him earlier) from a fight by showing him the dead kitty you've been carrying around for no reason since the beginning of the game. If you also happen to be carrying a dead man and a dead woman (and have enough ranks in Intimidate), the Barghest will run off in fear because someone as deranged as you clearly isn't to be messed with.
  Yquog: You... I... But... By Iyachtu Xvim, you're SICK! You hold no concept or understanding for things alive or dead! I want no part of you, not when I'm so close to maturity! Collect all the bodies you want, sick fleshy mortal, but you'll not have mine! I'll leave this place, and you, in peace and never return, of this I swear!
  Player Character: Oh, well, okay, if you insist. Pity, though, you'd have made a fine addition to my pretty, tender collection...
  Yquog: AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!
• Planescape: Torment allows the player to literally talk some NPCs to death, including the final boss, and avoid many other enemies or dangerous situations merely by virtue of having a high enough Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma. This is largely because its world is shaped by belief.
  • And in the case of the final boss, it's an aspect of the hero himself. Convincing it to rejoin with him whether by threats, trickery, sincerity, or force of will results in a somewhat better ending than simply destroying it.
  • A flashback to one of the main character's past selves has the most literal example in an academic debate. He argues that his opponent does not in fact exist. As much as the opponent would like to object to that, he cannot find any flaws in the argumentation, and thus vanishes from existence.
• The Fallout series is famous for this. In almost every game, you can talk the Big Bad down by just telling him how flawed his plan is.
  • In Fallout (from the makers of the Planescape game above), the Big Bad, the Master, can be beaten like this. The Master is at his core a Well-Intentioned Extremist who believes he can save mankind by forcibly turning every human into a Master Race of Super Mutants, but by talking to several scientific experts on the subject around the wasteland, the Vault Dweller can learn that the Super Mutants are in fact all sterile, and can pick up a holodisk on Super Mutant anatomy containing this information as evidence. All of this unlocks a dialogue choice in the final confrontation with the Master, where the Dweller can confront him with the fact his plan is doomed to failure because of the Super Mutants' inability to reproduce and present the evidence to him. The Master despairs at what he has done when he learns that the evidence checks out and all he did was for naught, and commits suicide and initiates his base's self-destruct mechanism.
  • The final boss of Fallout 2 could not be directly talked to death, as no matter what you say he dismisses all your claims and will eventually attack. However, you can talk to his bodyguards and ask them to side with you against them, and you can also reprogram the automated turrets in his chamber to attack him. ^note  You'll probably want the extra firepower/cannon fodder. Frank's considered The toughest boss in the franchise
    Chosen One: Can't we talk this over?
    Frank Horrigan: We just did. Time for talking's over.
  • In Fallout 3, you can talk down Eden and Autumn (well, Autumn doesn't die but just walks away) in the main quest by pointing out that they've either already lost or that they can't even keep order in their own organization and have no chance at taking over the wastes.
    • Fallout 3 again, in the add-on Operation: Anchorage, the general of the Chinese forces in the simulation can be convinced to commit seppuku^note the simulation was designed by an American general who presumably didn't know Chinese from Japanese culture by passing a speech challenge. Once again, you do this by pointing out that his army is dead and his fortress is surrounded by power armor-wearing American super soldiers.
  • Fallout: New Vegas lets you convince Legate Lanius to pull back the remains of his army and retreat... if you have a Speech or Barter skill of 100. Depending on the dialogue path you take, you either bluff him into retreating or point out that this army has no chance of conquering the New California Republic even if they somehow take Hoover Dam, due to their horrific logistical situation. If you're on either the House or Independent route, you can also do this to General Oliver, convincing him to withdraw the NCR (which should be simple enough if you're already capable of talking down Lanius).
    • You can also pretty much talk down 99% of all non-random fights.
    • You can talk down Ulysses in the Lonesome Road add-on for New Vegas by using his own philosophy to single him out as a hypocrite or by convincing him of your belief in your chosen faction.
    • Ditto the Think Tank in Old World Blues, this time either befriending four of them and setting them against the fifth one or convincing them you're actually their enemy, Dr. Mobius.
    • Salt-Upon-Wounds from the Honest Hearts add-on for New Vegas can also be talked down, but only in one of the two ending quests. Otherwise, he is unceremoniously executed or runs away on his own.
    • Downplayed with Father Elijah, whom you cannot talk down. The most you can do is convince him to meet you face-to-face via a speech check, which gives you the opportunity to leave him trapped in the inescapable Sierra Madre vault (technically the right reputation allows convincing him that collaring you was a mistake and you should work together, but it acts as a Non-Standard Game Over).
  • Subverted in Fallout 4, as there's no real final boss to talk down no matter what storyline you end up siding with. The closest thing is convincing Shaun to hand over his personal password to help you shut down some Synths on your way, and at that point he's an old man dying of cancer and not a physical threat.
    • The DLCs however allow you to talk a potential adversary out of a fight. In Far Harbor, you can convince High Confessor Tektus to either walk away (if you're replacing him with a Synth double) or talk him into blowing up his cult with the nuke in their base.
    • In Nuka World, while not the final boss you can talk down Oswald the Outrageous either by passing a high-level speech check or giving him a holotape of his girlfriend, which convinces him to leave Nuka World and take his ghouls with him. He'll even give you his sword and hat.
• In the Shin Megami Tensei series, the protagonist can talk demons into leaving, giving money or magnetite, or becoming a minion.
• Subverted in Persona 4 Golden, where after discovering the identity of the Serial Killer and confronting him with the party, if you kept up the Social Link with him you're given the option to meet with him alone. Yu tries to talk some sense into him and rely on the Power of Trust, only to be called an idiot and be told that the version of Adachi he trusted never existed.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura also from the Fallout designers, allows the player to have a philosophical debate with the Big Bad, who is an Omnicidal Maniac. The player can convince the villain to give up and let himself be killed peacefully if they can poke enough holes into his logic.
• This is the key to achieving the Golden Ending in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The Sole Survivor has a Journey to the Center of the Mind with the evil AI AM, and have to successfully interface with the different parts of his psyche. In doing so, they give him the clarity of mind to realize that all the pain he inflicts has done nothing to relieve his own. As a result of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good he has a literal Villainous Breakdown and shuts down, allowing the Player Character to take his place and restore the Earth.
• In Neverwinter Nights and its expansions:
  • In Shadows of Undrentide, Tymofarrar is, unusually for a white dragon, not particularly hostile or malevolent to begin with, quite intelligent, and rather eccentric by any standard. It's fairly easy to talk your way through his lair without fighting him or his kobold minions. Even without the phylactery that Evil Sorceress J'Nah was planning on using to kill him, there are a number of ways to negotiate with him, not the least of which being striking up a friendship with the kobold he trained as a bard —— Deekin, who eventually becomes a companion option.
  • A variation occurs in the Hordes of the Underdark expansion: if you managed to get Mephisto's true name right before the final battle with him at the end of the game, you can use it to stop the fight before it even begins. This only works if you have his name, and with it you can do different things based on your Character Alignment and conversation options you choose, such as: order him to drop dead, order him to return to Hell, or even order him to give you command of Hell and become your either you partner or lackey. Your choices have major effects on the epilogue.
  • In the community module The Bastard of Kosigan, your character gets to hold a conversation with your recently-deceased father's ghost. Not forgiving him makes him take damage, but you can choose to forgive him completely and avoid the battle at the end.
• In Neverwinter Nights 2, you can convince a demon that merely by talking to you, it has failed in its assigned task to knock down a door, and has failed its master. Since failing its master is punished by death, it promptly keels over.
• Portal 2 reveals that Aperture's contingency plan for a rogue AI was to feed it a paradox. This would theoretically cause the AI to divert all its attention to solving the paradox and burn out as a result. Early in the third act, GLaDOS attempts to use this on Wheatley, knowing she might destroy herself as well. However, both end up surviving: GLaDOS manages to distract herself, and Wheatley is Too Dumb to Fool.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the only way to defeat Darth Sion is to talk to him in the breaks between combat. Eventually, you succeed in weakening his will to live, at which point he accepts death peacefully. Roughly:
  Exile: Sion...your life...was it worth living?
  Darth Sion: It was not. No matter how many Jedi I killed...no matter how many lay broken at my feet...the pain would not end. I am glad to be rid of this place.
• In Mass Effect, you can talk your way out of a few fights using the Charm and Intimidate skills. You can even convince the Brainwashed and Crazy Saren that siding with Sovereign will save nobody. Realizing that Sovereign has irreparably taken control over his mind and body, he pulls out his gun and shoots himself in the head.
  • In Mass Effect 3, the Illusive Man can be made to realize that he too is indoctrinated and his actions are doing far more harm to humanity than good. He eventually admits the painful truth and chooses the exact same solution as Saren did... if you got all the pertinent reputation checks while talking to him throughout the game, and picked the Charm option at the final dialogue check.
  • In The Citadel DLC in Mass Effect 3, Liara attempts to invoke this trope. When the mercenaries you're fighting complain that her drone is annoying with the way that it keeps telling them how badly they're going to lose, she orders it to lower their morale by being even more annoying.
• Inverted in one chapter of Disgaea, where the monsters, knowing that Laharl is Allergic to Love, bombard him with happy and cheerful sayings, sapping his powers for the duration of that battle.
  • Amused by this, Flonne even joins in with her happy message of eternal love. The irony of the moment is that Laharl wouldn't have been impaired (as badly?) had Flonne NOT joined in. The monsters are just saying it, Flonne REALLY believes it.
• The Mediator class in Final Fantasy Tactics has the "Death Sentence" skill, which kills its target in three turns if successful.
  • There is also the much milder skill "Mimic Darlavon" ("Daravon" in the previous localization,) which simply puts the enemy to sleep by droning on and on and on, like the tutorial-dispensing Professor.
• Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has a Clan Trial where you need to chase off some monsters. Not with spells and swords, but picking the right interaction (stare down, threaten, etc).
• This is a staple of the Mother series.
  • EarthBound Beginnings: In the final battle, Giygas cannot be physically harmed. In order to beat him, Ninten and his party must sing the lullaby once sung by Giygas' adoptive human mother. Unable to cope with his emotion, Giygas flees the planet.
  • EarthBound (1994): Giygas has gained so much power since the last game that he is now a mindless Eldritch Abomination. It is impossible for the Chosen Four to physically harm him because there's nothing physical to harm. Instead, Paula must use her near-useless Pray ability to summon the aid of everyone they met on their journey, even the player. Overwhelmed by emotions, Giygas is vanquished.
  • Mother 3: Heartbreakingly subverted. The final boss of the game is The Masked Man - formerly Lucas' brother, Claus. Lucas cannot bring himself to hurt his own brother, so he must guard and heal himself until his mother's voice tells them to stop fighting. Claus, no longer Brainwashed and Crazy, commits suicide to stop Porky's influence over him, and dies in his brother's arms.
• Baldur's Gate
  • Early in the first game, you can encounter an evil cleric named Bassilus and his army of skeletons and zombies. If you pick the right threads in the Dialogue Tree, he loses control over his undead minions and they all fall apart, making the fight against him that much easier.
  • In the sequel, you eventually meet a Spectator (a non-evil Beholder) who is magically bound to guard a box containing an item you need. The most obvious solution is to kill him, but with a high enough Wisdom, you can point out to him that the wizard bound him to guard the box, not the ''contents'' of the box. . .
  • Several examples in the second act of Baldur's Gate III.
    • One mini-quest involves intercepting a cultist convoy in order to loot a Moonlantern, since the blessing you're given isn't enough for the stronger parts of the Shadow Curse. You're led to fight them alongside the Harpers, but you can also talk to the Drider holding the lantern and convince him that it is the will of the Absolute to give you the lantern and then walk into the Shadow Curse unprotected.
    • In the ruined tavern, the bloated bartender invites you to drink with him and tell him stories of your adventures. You can either make Constitution Saves to avoid the ill effects of drinking the offered Gargle Blaster, or Sleight of Hand checks to avoid drinking it entirely. Either way, impress him with your stories for long enough and he'll eventually drink so much that he bursts.
    • In the old tollhouse, you find a toll collector made of solid gold demanding all of your gold. You can either point out that there's no-one left to actually give the tolls to, or convince her that you're there to replace her. In either case, she freaks out and breaks apart into the gold she's made out of.
    • In the hospital, an old surgeon and several of his nurses are "operating" on someone by gruesomely murdering them, believing that this is Shar's cure to the presence of life. Pass a Religion check and you can point out that the recipients of this cure have to be willing, with which he agrees but notes that his nurses still need practice. From there you can convince him to have his nurses practice on either him or each other; choose the latter and he offers to reward your wisdom by giving you the same cure, to which you can reply that you'd rather do it on yourself and would like him to give a demonstration.
    • In the penultimate dungeon, you come across an Orthon who was forced into a rather shitty contract with Raphael, a demon of the Nine Hells, to kill anyone who enters a temple of Shar, and to let none who know of the contract live. If you pass several Persuasion checks, you can convince the Orthon to kill everyone who knows of the contract, including his followers, his pet Displacer Beast, and finally himself.
    • Downplayed with the Act 2 Final Boss; while passing certain Persuasion checks the first time you face him won't avoid that fight, passing one more check the second time you face him will let you skip the first phase.
• In Flight of the Amazon Queen, you encounter a gorilla blocking your way; you can get rid of it by telling it that it doesn't exist. (And even if it existed, it has no business being in South America when gorillas only live in Africa.)
• Final Fantasy X has a Talk option suddenly appear during the last boss battle that allows Tidus to talk down his father, Jecht, who "is" Sin. It doesn't beat him or do any damage, but it takes down his Overdrive meter, which in his soul-crushingly painful sword-wielding form is more than worth spending a turn on.
  • But it only works three times, after which it's implied that Jecht has lost consciousness, if not control, of his Final Aeon form. From there, one's only option is to open a can of whoop-ass.
  • The option also appears for certain party members in the first three fights with Seymour, granting them a boost to their statistics as well as some amusing Boss Banter.
• Possible in a roundabout manner in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: by exploiting Ubermann's lust for power so that he uses the ascension machine on himself.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours. Inverted. Become sufficiently awesome (Balls points) and you can talk women into joining your harem. Health benefits (resistance to damage, etc.) later follow.
• In Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny, Dampierre's finisher just has him telling the opponent a sob story and ends with them giving him a coin while they go off to cry. Even on characters like Lizardman, Nightmare and Astaroth.
• Alpha Protocol has a lot of situations where talking to the right people beforehand can make certain fights much easier (for instance, being friends with Steven Heck can make Brayko a lot easier to fight), but the only boss fight you can outright talk your way out of is the rematch with Conrad Marburg if you didn't kill him in Rome, which requires high reputation or the piece of evidence that proves Parker was the one who cut him loose during his Deus Vult days.
• In Dragon Age: Origins, wandering through Denerim's market may lead you to be confronted by a royal knight who fully believes Loghain's lies that the Grey Wardens murdered the king (it was really Loghain leaving him to die) and demands that you face him in honorable combat. With a good persuasion skill, you can make him question why the Wardens would want the king dead, and, unable to think of an answer, he agrees to back off.
• The final showdown with Tolwyn in Wing Commander IV is this. You need to make the dialog choices to get Tolwyn to trip up and reveal all his dirty deeds, so the Great Assembly will vote against his call for war, and he will hang himself in his cell during the final cutscenes.
• Deus Ex:
  • A variation in the original Deus Ex. You can bypass two boss fights by discovering their killphrases before confronting them.
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution gives you the opportunity to use diplomacy to overcome some situations. Unfortunately, the main bosses can't be beaten this way. In an inversion, once you public disgrace Isaias Sandoval you have the option to talk him out of killing himself and into helping you.
  • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided: Certain antagonists can be talked out of fighting you. The Final Boss can't be talked down but it's possible to obtain a Killswitch to take him down.
• There is a nice final boss fight beforehand, but this is how the Big Bad Lambda in Tales of Graces is ultimately defeated. Following Asbel's eager Patrick Stewart Speech, Lambda agrees to give humans a chance, merges with Asbel, and becomes dormant.
• In Star Wars: The Old Republic, at the end of the first act of the Imperial Agent story, the agent can do this to the Big Bad by pointing out that a) his plans require their cooperation, which they're not going to give and b) if he kills them, their allies will retreat with knowledge of his identity and plans, which will bring the Empire and Republic alike down on his head. Left with no winning play, the Big Bad surrenders and is forced to bargain on their terms.
• The premise of The Logomancer is that all "battles" are actually like this. They still play like typical JRPG conflicts, though.
  • There is one point where this is done literally, and the "a JRPG without killing" tagline is proven wrong: Stanislav Anarkum's Malformed Thought, the Final Boss. Winning the battle involves convincing it to kill itself.
• Citizens of Earth includes so many cases of this that "verbal" is actually one of the elemental types. The first character you recruit is your mother, who attacks by giving monsters a lecture.
• A major aspect of Undertale is the ability to talk your way out of every fight, although it does not actually cause the thus "defeated" monsters to die.
  • In one case, it's even used on the Player themself, where Papyrus makes an earnest plea about the human child/Player's behavior and that you can be a great person if you just try, offering his friendship in spite of admitting after the fact that he was a little afraid of being killed should the Player decide to spare him. Even if killed, despite showing some surprise at being reduced to a talking head, he'll use his last moments reiterating that he knows you can do better. Because of this, many Genocide Runs have ended with Papyrus before even reaching Undyne or Sans.
• The "boss battle" of Chapter 1 of Strawberry Jam involves Jam trying to convince the King into giving up his goal to make everyone work in his caramel factory.
• In Torment: Tides of Numenera, there are a number of enemies that the Last Castoff can deal with this way. Most prominently, very near the end, they can convince the Specter to delete himself. There's also the way the Specter and the Sorrow play with this: they try to convince the Last Castoff to accept death, which the player can accept. The Sorrow even makes a decent argument for it, leading to a proper ending and not a Non-Standard Game Over.
• Tyranny's branching paths allow enemies to be turned into allies and vassals, forcing them to swear loyalty to the evil empire of Overlord Kyros. The most triumphant example of this is likely having Tunon, the Archon of Justice, bend the knee to the Fatebinder, up to that point one of Tunon's own agents and on trial for treason mere moments before.
• From Pillars of Eternity:
  • Enforced in The White March DLC, where the final confrontation with the Eyeless must be resolved through dialogue in one of the game's Gamebook segments.
  • Conspicuous by its absence with the Final Boss of the first game, with Big Bad Thaos having become so thoroughly convinced of the rightness of his cause and the necessity of the atrocities he's committed along the way that he absolutely cannot be talked down and will try to kill the Watcher one final time. Hero Antagonist Eothas in the sequel is also noteworthy for being physically unstoppable, succeeding in his ultimate ambition, and very likely having won over the player to his point of view regarding the necessity of destroying the Great Wheel, bringing an end to the cycle of reincarnation and the power of gods over mortals within the setting. The Watcher can't stop Eothas, but they can at least make Eothas think about how they can best help Eora move on from the end of the Great Wheel.
  • Invoked by this name in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, specifically in the Beast of Winter DLC, where the Watcher is able to persuade the ancient Dracolich Neriscyrlas to succumb to the entropy and oblivion offered by Rymrgand, the god of cold. When you get back to the nearby village and the townsfolk ask what happened, the Watcher has the option of simply saying "I talked it to death."
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker, being true to its tabletop roots, allows you to talk with enemies and possibly gain their allegiance throughout the game. This trope is present when dealing with the Big Bad Nyrissa, who can be convinced that fighting you simply wouldn't be worth it.
• In Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, the final confrontation with Deimos can end with you convincing them to stand down and return to your family as your sibling. This requires you to choose dialog options in your previous encounters that convinces them to doubt the cult as well as assuring your mother that you will save them.
• In the final level of The Outer Worlds, just before confronting the Final Boss you have a final conversation with your chosen antagonist (which varies depending on whether or not you side with Phineas or The Board) where you get the chance to convince them to give up, thereby letting you completely bypass the actual boss fight (a robot that they sic on you), though this requires passing multiple skill checks. It's slightly more literal if you're confronting Phineas, since talking him down culminates in him shooting himself.
• Played with in the climactic "Tribunal" in Disco Elysium, where you confront a group of unstable mercs engaging in a stand-off with the local militia. You cannot actively talk them out of backing off and it is made very clear that they'll accept nothing other than bloody satisfaction. However, by carefully choosing your words and arguing with their leader, you can potentially throw them off their guard and thus leaving them open for when you decide to take a shot at said leader, thus taking him out of the fight and leaving the others in disarray that results in minimizing the casualties.
• In The Forgotten City, after collecting all the tablets, you get an audience with the God of the Underworld, who created the city as a wager to see if humans are able to not commit a single sin for a year to prove they are worthy of ascension. Using what you've experienced, you can prove that his definition of "sin" is far from perfect and that he was given an impossible task in the first place, giving him no more reason to trap the people in the city. The other more brute-force method is killing his wife Proserpena and taking her crown, and show it to him on the next time loop saying you'll keep doing this until he relents.
• The final boss battle in Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse has this as part of the first phase. YHVH is omnipotent, making harming it very difficult. However, by denouncing YHVH and denying its divinity, one can peel away parts of its protection. This aspect of the fight received a great deal of criticism for feeling too much like a Persona final battle instead of the main line.

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