The Caligula / Video Games

• Vath from AdventureQuest Worlds. He enslaved the dwarves, making them work without food, water, or even weapons. He's a lousy dictator, believing that their weakness and hunger was fine with him and not even caring if they starve to death as long as they forge enough Chaos Gemeralds for him to use to hatch the Rock Roc.
  Vath: Dwarves are a hearty breed. That is why I allowed them to live as my slaves. If a few die then we are just pruning the weak branches from the strong tree.
• In the first Assassins Creed, Majd Addin is the Token Evil Teammate of the Templars, since while the rest are Well Intentioned Extremists, the better world they are striving for means nothing to him, only the rush of power and the kill. Probably best described by himself when confronted about his misdeeds:
  "I killed them because I could. Because it was fun! Do you know what it feels like to determine another man's fate? And did you see the way the people cheered? The way they feared me? I was like a god!"
• Bendy and the Ink Machine: Joey Drew's insistence on using the Ink Machine does nothing but cause trouble for his employees, and they only stay with them because he writes their checks. It's also hinted that he isn't really using the Ink Machine for animation, but for some kind of rituals and human experimentation.
• The cast of BloodStorm is nearly completely composed of megalomaniacs, all of them fighting to become the High Emperor and thus be true Caligulas. Take your pick: the pyromaniac warlord, the ice-blooded king with a superiority complex, a Hive Mind that tortures people for fun, an Amazon hoping to eliminate the entire male gender, the radioactive mutant that intrudes on the contest, the vengeance-obsessed cyborg smuggler, or the spoiled princess/assassin. The only good character enters the contest to get everyone to stop listening to the paranoid nuts and actually start fixing the planet.
• Dryst, the Mad Monarch of Iscalio from Brigandine, if the title isn't enough. On one hand, he dresses like a jester, focuses on having fun with his cronies, and if Iscalio unites Forsena, will start a civil war just for fun. On the other hand, he has quite a few of Pet the Dog moments, most of his inner circle is unfailingly loyal to him, he's definitely not stupid, and an even bigger menace on the battlefield.
• Fittingly given its name, Caligula focuses on various characters and the concept of the "Caligula Effect", a term that can be used to describe when one has a higher desire for something they’re not allowed to have. For example, wanting to see something more because they’re not allowed to watch, wanting to do something more because they’re not allowed to do it.
• In Clive Barker's Jericho, the hedonistic Governor Cassus Vicus was banished to the very edges of the Roman Empire by Caligula himself.
• For examples where the game allows you to be The Caligula, see Cruel Player-Character God.
• Darksiders II has Argul the Deposed King, the previous ruler of the Realm of the Dead who was considered a beast too mad to be on the throne that his own lieutenant, the Lord of Bones, led a coup to dethrone him. Apparently, he suffered bouts of insanity about coming darkness and that the Horsemen would come to destroy him. Despite his relative importance to the backstory, he is a minor boss that Death fights as part of an optional quest.
• King Leoric of Khanduras from the Diablo series was once a just and noble king but was driven mad by Diablo's attempt to take him over. When his Evil Chancellor, Archbishop Lazarus, kidnapped his youngest son Albrecht to be made a vessel for Diablo, Leoric lost it completely and fell into this trope's territory, having many people tortured and executed, up to and including his own queen, out of paranoia, an event that would come to be known in Tristram as "the Darkening." Leoric was slain by the captain of his army, Lachdanan, who could no longer bear to see his people suffer under his liege's madness. Unfortunately for Lachdanan, his knights, and Tristram, the story did not end there.
• King K. Rool from Donkey Kong Country. It got so bad that apparently his minions deposed him and replaced him with a robot in Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! Then you find out later that he was controlling the robot anyway...
• In Dragon Age: Origins:
  • It's mentioned that the Grey Wardens were originally exiled from Ferelden after a failed coup lead by Warden-Commander Sophia Dryden against King Arland when the other nobles begged her to depose him for being completely out of his mind. Avernus mentions having attended a feast where Arland nonchalantly presented the Teyrn of Highever's head on a platter, as a warning to the other rebellious nobles.
  • During the Arl of Redcliffe questline, Connor Guerrin has shades of this, due to being under the influence of a Desire Demon.
  • Vaughn Kendalls from the City Elf origin. A brutish, unrepentant rapist and murder who's allowed to get away with terrorising the Elves in Denerim due to being the son of the local Arl. That is, until the City Elf finally has enough.
• Dwarf Fortress: dwarf nobles have a tendency to sentence dwarves to "hammerings" (usually fatal, but not always) when their mandates are not met.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • An example from the series' backstory is Reman Cyrodiil, founder of the Second Tamriellic Empire. Coronated as a child, history records Reman as a scary, at times psychotic, and violently decadent ruler. How decadent? He made Sanguine, Daedric Prince of Debauchery and Hedonism, so uncomfortable that he left Reman. However, unlike many examples of the trope, Reman was also an incredibly skilled and successful leader. Starting as something of a Child Prodigy, Reman first reunited the two halves of Cyrodiil (Colovia and Nibenay), and then the other kingdoms of Men (High Rock and Skyrim). Later, he successfully defeated the Akaviri invaders and absorbed the survivors into his fledgling proto-empire, where they would serve him as a foreign Praetorian Guard. Though Imperial dogma typically leaves out or whitewashes his negative traits, he is (justifiably) remembered as one of the greatest rulers in Cyrodiilic history.
  • Another backstory example is Emperor Pelagius the Mad. Born Thoriz Pelagius Septim, he briefly reigned over the Third Tamriellic Empire from 3E 145 to 3E 153 (and before that was High King of Skyrim from 3E 137 to 3E 145). Infamous for his eccentricities, he certainly lived up to his nickname. He suffered from extreme weight and mood fluctuations, and tried to hang himself at the end of a royal ball. He insisted on his palace always being kept clean and (perhaps apocryphally) was said to defecate on the floors to keep his servants busy. He would only communicate with the Argonian ambassador in grunts and squeaks, believing it to be the Argonian language. He'd frequently strip naked in public and, toward the end of his life, would attack and bite visitors. After his madness became too publicly apparent, he was declared unfit to rule and his wife by arranged marriage, the Dunmeri former Duchess of Vvardenfell, Katariah, took over as Empress Regent, as the only non-human to rule the Third Empire (the plan when the marriage was arranged was for Katariah to act as a stable, competent power behind the throne to keep things running, but after Pelagius inherited the Ruby Throne his madness soon grew out of control). Pelagius was institutionalized and died only a few years later, but his legacy as the Mad Emperor lives on.
  • This also applies to Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness. Though not nearly as dangerous or unpredictable as other Caligulas, Sheogorath does have his eccentricities, and being a god, his rare bouts of violence are all the more dangerous. As a sampling of his actions throughout the series, he has thrown a rogue moon at a city, caused burning dogs fall from the sky, gone on a rant about cheese while briefing his champion on a mission, has had people killed for growing facial hair, and has had mortals killed/maimed/psychologically tortured to win bets against the other Daedric Princes. Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion heavily features Sheogorath, with it taking place in his eponymous Daedric realm. He acts as the expansion's Big Good, while still alternating randomly between being happy and violently threatening.
  • Yet another example from the backstory is Potema, the Wolf Queen of Solitude. Starting off as a God Save Us from the Queen! Manipulative Bastard, she pole-vaults into this trope and combines it with Sorcerous Overlord, raising an army of undead monsters and turning her kingdom into The Necrocracy before she's stopped. She may have caused the abovementioned Pelagius's insanity, by regularly trying to kill him.
    I am the Queen of Solitude, daughter of the Emperor! Summon the daedra! I'll trade the soul of every last subject of mine for a little comfort!
• Count Waltz from Forte of Eternal Sonata is a power-hungry maniac who kills his own citizens by having them drink mineral power to gain magic powers and turn them into soldiers. His ambition is to conquer neighboring country Baroque and eventually gain limitless power.
  With enough power, I can make, not only Forte and Baroque but the whole world bow down before me. Only then will I feel truly alive.
• Pagan Min of Far Cry 4 is a former Triad drug lord who took over the kingdom of Kyrat and declared himself ruler of it, and it rapidly becomes clear that he is not a good ruler. Among his many atrocities and war crimes, he arbitrarily declared candles illegal and their use punishable by death, kidnapped a celebrity chef and then executed the poor guy after Ajay bails on their dinner at the beginning of the game (apparently thinking the Crab Rangoons not being up to par was the reason he ran off, rather than, you know, Pagan kidnapping him as soon as he entered the country and shooting up his bus^note In fairness, Pagan explicitly told his men to stop the bus and not shoot it, though he then murders the commanding soldier for the screw-up via repeated stabs in the throat then and there), and even once you learn that he got far worse after the murder of his daughter Lakshmana, he himself admits that was just an excuse to keep doing what he wanted.
  Pagan: Yes, yes, I murdered countless innocents. Yes, I outlawed religion. Yes, I changed the currency so that everyone’s savings were meaningless and yes, I may have gone through a period of bathing in yak’s blood and slamming rails of coke. But I’m reformed now! Look at me! Getting this country back on its feet again. Top shape, Ajay. (sound of Pagan snorting a line of coke) Top shape.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI: Kefka! He was already stark raving nuts when he was serving as Emperor Gesthal's Dragon, such as having 50 of the Gestahlian Empire's finest men burned alive by Terra to test his control over her. But when he got hold of the power of the Warring Triad and bumped off the Emperor, he got even worse.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Theodoric the First, better known as the "Mad King" and "the King of Ruin", rose to the throne of Ala Mhigo thirty years before the events of A Realm Reborn. A paranoid and power-hungry individual, he would conduct a series of purges to destroy anything he deemed heretical and a threat to his rule, including wiping out the nation's vaunted warrior monks, the Fist of Rhalgr. Anyone he deemed a threat, from the nobility to the poorest beggar, would be thrown from the roof of his palace to their deaths. Even his own wife would conspire to assassinate him after seeing the man he became. His tyranny would inspire the creation of the Ala Mhigan Resistance, who would succeed in deposing Theodoric to end his reign of terror. After the events of Stormblood, memories of Theodoric's rule and Garlean oppression lead Ala Mhigo's interim government to agree that it would never have another king to prevent history from repeating itself.
• The Fire Emblem games contain a number of them, usually as antagonists.
  • King Zephiel in The Binding Blade is pretty far off the handle. After all, the most seriously disturbing facial expression in The Blazing Blade is Zephiel's mad gaze at the end of the epilogue... and this is a game whose Big Bad has a Mad Eye with a nasty scar over it. Yeah, he's seriously whacked... and the saddest thing is that he wasn't always like that. Unlike many Caligulas, however, Zephiel is ruthlessly competent. It's just a shame that his goal is the subjugation of humanity by dragons.
  • In Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Orson is made regent ruler of Renais Castle after it is conquered by Grado. He's an interesting take on the Caligula archetype in that while he's not outwardly malevolent, he does completely neglect his duties in favor of spending time with his wife's reanimated corpse and lets the land fall to ruin.
  • Mad King Ashnard, The Social Darwinist villain of Path of Radiance. In order to be crowned king, he orchestrated a plague that wiped out a large amount of his country's population to get rid of the many nobles who were ahead of him in the line of succession. His most notable depravity was attempting to start a worldwide conflict and release a dark god on the world just because he felt like it. After touching an amulet that was established to drive most humans into a mindless killing rage, his personality remained unchanged, the implication being that he couldn't possibly become any worse than he already was. Interestingly enough, he wasn't considered to be a bad ruler by the common people of Daein, largely due to his policy of awarding high-level positions to anyone of sufficient skill.
  • Deconstructed massively by Fire Emblem: Awakening's King Gangrel, since his tyrannical and cruel actions (including his Sadistic Choice on Chrom, which will lead Emmeryn to go the Heroic Suicide way in front of the Ylissean and Plegian armies) cause his soldiers to defect en masse, and by the time he's fought he is pretty much on his own. And later, after he's recruited through Spot-Pass, we learn what made Grangrel such an ass, as well as how deeply he regrets it.
  • Garon of Fire Emblem Fates wasn't always like this, but is said to have Stopped Caring after he saw his numerous wives squabble over the succession to the throne and murder each other and his children. After that, he began executing people on the spot for no apparent reason (even in front of his youngest daughter) kidnapped The Avatar, Kamui/Corrin, as a young child and raised them in near isolation, then when they grew up sent them on multiple suicide missions and tried to get one of his sons (and the Avatar's adopted sibling) to kill them. The plot of the game is based on his desire to invade the peaceful kingdom of Hoshido and kill their queen due to the troubles in his own country. It's eventually revealed that the Garon seen during the game is actually his reanimated corpse being controlled by Anankos, and the real guy was nothing like this.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses features two deconstructions of this trope, both of which can vary depending on the story route taken, don't start off as such, and experience Sanity Slippage as a result of specific story events combined with past traumas.
    • Prince Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd is a rare example of a protagonist Caligula in the making. For most of the Academy phase, Dimitri starts off with personality traits similar to classic Fire Emblem lords like Marth, being a compassionate young man with an aversion to violence that wants to reform Fodlan through acceptance. However, he is also the Sole Survivor of a royal massacre that included his father and stepmother, which was later followed up by a genocide against the people of Duscur as a scapegoat. As a result, Dimitri suffers from Survivor Guilt and frequently has hallucinations of the Tragedy's victims demanding the heads of those truly responsible, and has episodes of sadism when confronting those he believes were involved. When he learns that his stepsister Edelgard is the Flame Emperor (whom he erroneously thinks was involved in the Tragedy of Duscur), he completely snaps and becomes obsessed with taking her head. Five years later on most story routes and after living in isolation as a fugitive, he's still violently unhinged and murdering Imperial soldiers left and right, with people comparing him to a beast. What little resistance against the Adrestian Empire there is in the Kingdom tries to rally behind Dimitri, but he neglects morale among his own troops and the people suffering in the Kingdom in favor of appeasing the dead, even making death threats towards those questioning his goals. On Azure Moon (his own story route), his allies are questioning if he's mentally competent enough to be leading the fight against the Empire, let alone be the next king of Faerghus, and only follow him because they're fighting for the Kingdom or have mutual enmity towards the Empire. Dimitri only steers away from this dark path and goes on to become The Good King when he realizes that he's only perpetuating an endless cycle of revenge, and only after one of his closest allies dies from a revenge-driven assassination attempt meant for him. On Verdant Wind and Silver Snow, however, Byleth and Rodrigue aren't around to reign in his worst impulses, which eventually get him and his followers ingloriously Killed Offscreen.
    • On Crimson Flower, Dimitri doesn't go through Sanity Slippage despite being an antagonist to the route's protagonist, Edelgard, thanks to the fact that he wasn't spending five years in isolation, but still seeking revenge. However, Archbishop Rhea goes through it instead after Byleth — whom she had been treating as a vessel for her mother, Sothis — chooses Edelgard over her, perceiving it as a betrayal, and declares them both heretics against the Church of Seiros. While the Church isn't an official nation in Fodlan, it still has its own army and a lot of political influence throughout Fodlan's culture, and is a recognized authority in Faerghus. As the story progresses, former Church clergy and even her closest advisor Seteth become increasingly worried about her declining sanity and her obsession with reuniting with her mother, to the point that Seteth and his daughter Flayn flee from Fodlan if they are spared in battle. After Dimitri is killed on the Tailtean Plains and the Empire makes their advance on the Kingdom capital of Fhirdiad, she becomes the Kingdom's regent and leads its remaining soldiers. Shortly after taking command, Rhea orders the capital to be set aflame in an unhinged attempt to take out all of her enemies (who actually offered for her to surrender) despite the Kingdom's loyalty to the Church since its founding, and during the final battle, rants about how untrustworthy humans are. However, Verdant Wind reveals that her mother and siblings were massacred by Nemesis and the Ten Elites, and their remains were used to create the Crest Stones and Heroes' Relics. The attack on the Holy Tomb was seen as a mass grave defilement against her family, and Byleth (who was chosen to not only be a vessel for Sothis but also bear her respective Crest Stone and Hero's Relic) joining with Edelgard was pouring salt on the wound.
• King Oswald Thorn of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 is more commonly known as "Mad King Thorn". As the second-born, he was not expected to inherit but did so anyway by murdering first his brother and then his father. Drought and high taxes left the people impoverished and on the verge of starvation while Thorn hosted sumptuous feasts for his courtiers. He fed people to animals for his own amusement, chopped off both hands of anyone suspected of theft, executed anyone who spoke against him, and on at least one occasion had an entire village's population skinned alive. Of his eight wives, he killed at least four personally. Thorn's reign came to an abrupt end when an enraged mob stormed the castle and murdered him. After being very "creative" with his body, it was dismembered and sealed in several boxes which were hidden through Kryta for fear he might one day return.
  • Even Oswald was fed up with his son, Bloody Prince Edrick. While Oswald did everything For the Lulz, Edrick killed for the thrill of murder and lacked the sense of humor which made the Mad King popular as a spirit. Their relationship was tense and only made worse by Edrick's tendencies to commit pointless atrocities at the worst times. Edrick eventually tried to overthrow his father by slaughtering an entire village and laying the blame on Oswald, hoping to rally the peasants to his cause. Oswald found out and had his son sealed in a sarcophagus with the intention of releasing him once he'd learned his lesson, only for the mob riled up by Edrick to storm the castle. Oswald left Edrick sealed away and had all references to his name erased from the library as a final insult.
• Halo's Covenant Prophets tend to fall in this category, especially the main trio in the original trilogy. The Hierarchs, in particular, know the whole Covenant thing is a load of crap. They just want to genocide humans because the humans are inheritors of the Forerunners, and proof that the Forerunners were physical beings and thus proof that their religion is all lies. Truth really stands out, as by the end he's clearly a complete psychopath. The canon scientific name for the Prophet species is Latin for "Worms of Treachery." Also, what the main three Prophets are Prophets ''of'':
  • The Prophet of Truth is a blackmailer. He blackmailed the other two into taking power alongside him and blackmailed his way into power in the first place. He's also a Consummate Liar and a total psychopath. He's more than competent at politics, as he makes a few pretty bad calls military wise which, as Rtas' Vadum points out; completely screws over the fleet's opportunity to thwart the Chief's assassination of Regret because he always disliked Regret and uses the assassination to gain more power.
  • The Prophet of Regret is hot-headed, stubborn, and impetuous; the only thing he ever regrets is being blackmailed by the Prophet of Truth.
  • The Prophet of Mercy is a merciless fanatic who himself ends up being shown no mercy by Truth.
• The player of Hamurabi can be compared to Caligula if he starves enough of his citizens.
• In the backstory to the Homeworld series of RTS games, the Taiidani Empire fell under the control of a particularly... 'unstable' ruler, who then proceeded to compound the problem by massacring all his rivals and decreeing that all future Emperors would be clones of him. The insane policies 'he' carries out during the course of the game lead to the empire being overthrown after the insanely efficient Hiigaran fleet kills 'him'.
• The Emperor of Chimer in A House of Many Doors is a textbook paranoid-schizophrenic, constantly executing subjects and changing his mind. In a House filled with Crapsack Worlds, Chimer's citizenry stand out as being significantly worse off than their neighbors, with highlights such as the Mycena Free State (which exports a drug manufactured from mycena brain stems) and the circus city of Harlequin. Even Chimer's questline rewards are a Luck-Based Mission, as the Emperor will reward or punish you on a dice roll independent of your choices and results.
• Zant from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess plays this trope to a T. Originally serving in the royal household of the Twilight Realm, Zant believed that rulership would pass on to him when the time came. However, his own people soundly rejected him, aware that he was an ambitious man who above all else resented that his people were trapped in the Twilight Realm "like insects in a cage". They knew that, if someone like Zant took the throne, he would only repeat the mistakes of their power-hungry ancestors; the very same mistakes that got them banished to the Twilight Realm in the first place. Zant did not take this rejection well, and was consumed by hatred and despair. It was then that he was approached by Ganondorf (who had been banished to the Twilight Realm himself after his failed execution): he posed as a god and offered Zant the power to take the throne by force. Zant accepted the offer, and promptly turned against his own people, enslaving them to his will and turning them into mindless Shadow Beasts, and banishing Midna, who had become ruler in Zant's place. He then used his new power to escape the Twilight Realm and invade Hyrule, engulfing the kingdom in Twilight after his Shadow Beasts stole the light from the Light Spirits. When he confronts Midna as she tries to gather the Fused Shadows in order to reclaim the throne, he even has the gall to call her a traitor and ask her why she would betray her King.
• Kirby: King Dedede is a heavily downplayed case of this. He is a selfish, greedy, and gluttonous king who likes causing mischief. But he is also a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who genuinely cares for his kingdom and soldiers.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: Yomi Hellsmile is the Ax-Crazy director of the Amaterasu Corporation Peacekeepers, and to simply call him insane would still understate the atrocities he commits in regards to Kanai Ward as a whole. The entire reason Kanai Ward is a Wretched Hive at all, where even Amaterasu Corporation's CEO himself is a criminal because of Yomi, is thanks to his ruthless "leadership" of the citizens. In reality, he's just a Jerkass who only cares about himself, but he's so out of touch with reality that he's convinced himself that he's the city's savior.
• Mega Man Zero: The first game's Big Bad who made a recurrence in Zero 3, Copy-X, was intended to be a hero for Neo Arcadia in place of X and is esteemed as such by the humans for making Neo Arcadia a paradise, who believe that he is the original X. It's a shame that in order to do that, he decided the easiest thing to do was to genocide reploids on even the flimsiest excuses for being Mavericks in order to conserve energy and resources. Also, in the same series, we have Dr. Weil in Zero 3 and 4, known in history for starting the Elf War, which resulted in the annihilation of a large percentage of humans and reploids and the creation of the Crapsack World the series takes place in, and he's incredibly insane. This resulted in him being sentenced to exile in the wastelands he created in an undying mechanical body. Once he succeeded the Neo Arcadia throne after sabotaging Copy X Mk. II and blaming it on Zero, he started to oppress both Reploids and humans because he believed they deserved to be punished for banishing him out into the world he created. It got so bad that in Zero 4, some human refugees (who were brave enough) fled from Neo Arcadia to get away from him, and Weil retaliated by attempting to destroy Area Zero, — the only other habitable place left on Earth — forcing all humans to live under his oppression. Even his Dragon, Craft, realized how insane he was that he fired Ragnarok on Neo Arcadia in a (failed) attempt to kill Weil.
• Minecraft: Story Mode: Aiden wants to be this in Episode 5, by hurling spawn eggs everywhere and ordering people around. Jesse puts a rather prompt end to this charade.
• Mogeko Castle has Moge-ko, a deranged sadistic hedonistic narcissistic cannibalistic rapist as a tyrant who rules over the fourth floor of the Mogeko Castle, who leaves the floors resident Mogeko's as broken shells simply by being on the same floor as her. Anyone, human or Mogeko, who Moge-ko gets her hands on is utterly screwed, as being killed quickly is the best fate they can receive.
• Mortal Kombat's Shao Kahn. He cares about nothing but holding absolute power, driven by an ambition based solely on ego and a lust for conquest and power. He even promoted infighting and competition amongst his minions in a "divide and rule" policy to the point where the Centaur and Shokan races went to war with one another to curry his favor (and thus gain more power), and as long as he holds absolute power he doesn't really care about laws beyond "what Shao Kahn feels like" and how his people live their day to day lives, though it tends to be pretty miserable, desperate and violent thanks to how sadistic and brutish he is. Come Mortal Kombat 11 and it's shown that pretty much everyone in Outworld is sick of him, and he ultimately meets his fate in battle against Kitana, who herself has a long-standing grudge on him. Come Mortal Kombat X he is replaced by Mileena Khanum, who claims she's Shao Kahn's heir after his death. This is dubious as she's a clone of his adopted daughter, and it gets worse from there. She continues Shao Kahn's militarization, came this close to having half the Outworld characters executed, and refused to ally with Earthrealm when Netherrealm (which is literally Hell) started making moves against both. She was eventually deposed by Kotal Kahn, and while Kotal has problems his main focus is rebuilding Outworld after years of Shao and Mileena's neglect.
• Porky Minch from Mother 3. He passes himself off as a great hero, despite corrupting the once vibrant world into an industrial wasteland and using anything and anyone he can get his hands on as his personal playthings. In the end, he reveals his plans to awaken the Dark Dragon and destroy what is left of civilization, all for a quick laugh.
• The New Order: Last Days of Europe: Plenty of lunatics with a country at their command are around, what with this being such a Crapsack World. Himmler tends to stand out as one, though it's somewhat eclipsed by the sheer, unrelenting evil of the man to act on the ideas he has.
  • Among all the possible rulers, Sergey Taboritsky has everyone beat out in terms of pure madness, with what looks like crippling schizophrenia and general psychosis. He's plenty cruel, but he's also convinced the ideal model of Tsardom is something resembling Himmler's own "The nazis are too liberal for me" Burgundian System. Oh, and he thinks Alexei Romanov is the true Tsar and just in hiding for well over fifty years instead of getting shot dead as a child, and he's just paving the way for his glorious return. And if he reunifies Russia, it gets worse as the strain of having to deny reality's increasing pressure on his government drives him to greater, hallucinating depths of craziness, all represented by a ticking clock. And when the clock strikes twelve, he finds himself scribbling pure gibberish, shivering in the corner of his room, only to be struck dead by a vision of his Tsar returning, only to turn into a pile of bloodied bones that he just cannot deny; his Tsar is dead, and in being forced to realize it, he outright drops dead. His empire of nightmares follows him down to hell not long after, as the sheer insanity he imposed upon the nation has seemingly driven most of Russia's remnants either mad with despair, or just mad in general.
  • If the Aryan Brotherhood are the ones to unify Russia, it can result in a coup where Shultz kills Vagner and assumes control. At first seeming like A Lighter Shade of Black compared to his predecessor, his true insanity is revealed when he takes up the name Velimir and transforms Russia into Hyperborea — a brutal, neopagan, Slav-supremacist warrior state. While Vagner merely wanted to rule Russia and ally with the Nazis (a goal that of course would never ever happen), Velimir's goal is to conquer the false German-Aryans to the west, take back the Slavo-Aryan ancestral home of Palestine, crush the weak races of Asia and the "Jewish citadel" of America, and assert the Slavo-Aryans as the masters of the world even if means launching a nuclear holocaust.
• Wheatley from Portal 2 becomes Drunk with Power after taking over GLaDOS's body. He stuffs GLaDOS's consciousness in a potato and punches both her and Chell down an elevator shaft, into Old Aperture. When they return to the top layer of the facility, Wheatley explains that he has to perform tests, as when he does, he gets a feeling of extreme euphoria, and if he doesn't, he gets an "itch" that slowly becomes unbearable. As a result of this itch, he gains a Hair-Trigger Temper and a complete disregard for Chell's wellbeing. Combine that with his complete disregard for the nuclear core which will melt down if it doesn't get vented properly, and he's probably the most dangerous villain of both games.
  Wheatley: So you're gonna test. And I'm gonna watch. And everything is gonna be just... fi-
  Announcer: Warning. Core overheating. Nuclear meltdown imminent.
  Wheatley: SHUT UP!!
  GLaDOS: I think we're in trouble....
• Radiant Historia's King Victor was by all accounts pretty bad, to the point that his son and his brother actively rebelled against him, but he has nothing on the stuff his second wife pulled once she gained the throne. Queen Protea managed in only a few years to turn the country into a police state where dead bodies littering the alleys are a common sight and half the population is starving to death, while she spends her time lounging around the palace and ogling choir boys. Then, when La Résistance gets uppity, she has the entire city lit on fire.
• Nero himself in Ryse: Son of Rome is a fat, corrupt tyrant willing to hire a bunch of barbarians to kill Marius' family out of pure jealousy of his father, and his sons Commodus and Basileus aren't much better. Commodus is a Miles Gloriosus who thinks "A God Am I" and starts a war with the Britons out of pure sadism, while Basileus is a hedonist who Would Hit a Girl.
• Salt and Sanctuary:
  • Lenaia, the Queen of Smiles. Following the death of her husband, the gregarious king Adnan, she began to spiral into violent madness as she fell under the influence of the Black Widow. Her epithet as Queen of Smiles was earned by her habit of cutting a Glasgow Grin into the faces of the many, many people she had executed for increasingly frivolous and nonsensical reasons before hanging the corpses up as decoration. She also had a variety of bizarre phobias including cats, twins, gourds, sea foam green, and the number 14. Her list of phobias was ever-lengthening, and each new fear was accompanied by a massive escalation of tantrums, jailings, banishments, and executions.
  • Quan In, Sun King of Kulka'as is a downplayed example. He was a great and proud ruler for much of his life, but his twilight years were spent in paranoid madness, hiding in the Ziggurat of Dust and violently lashing out against imagined demons.
• General Mikiel of both the 1989 and 2014 Strider, the leader of the still-Communist Kazakh Federation, though only a Puppet King to his lord, Grandmaster Meio.
  • In the classic game, he's such an oppressive and corrupt dictator that his reckless government has not only left the country in economic ruin but pushed the populace to rise against him in the form of a resistance army that plunged Eurasia into civil war. In fact, all this mismanagement is what made the Striders give Hiryu the mission to eliminate Grandmaster Meio in the first place.
  • In the 2014 retelling he's even worse: now he's constantly speaking over the city's speakers to remind citizens of the punishment for crimes such as rebelling against Meio, fiddling with technology, breaking curfew, even disembarking slowly from the subway. Most notably, he spent a huge sum of money and resources in building a giant Cool Tank that's Awesome, but Impractical, since no one except himself can actually drive it. And why he build it? Because he wanted one for his collection of weaponry.
• Anybody who has ever played Suikoden II for more than five minutes knows that Prince Luca Blight may even dwarf Caligula himself in the Ax-Crazy psycho department. This is a man who had his country's equivalent of the Boy Scouts murdered to restart a pointless war, and when burning entire towns to the ground for the hell of it, would round up, torture, and slaughter every single villager one by one personally while laughing merrily with a sadistic smile on his face. Deconstructed when shortly after he becomes the king, his own subordinates help the heroes ambush him as they know that he is too insane to be trusted with so much power.
  Luca: Do you want to live so badly!?!?!?
  Villager: Y-yes! I'll do anything!
  Luca: In that case, act like a pig.
  Villager: Huh?
  Luca: I said ACT LIKE A PIG!!!
  Villager: Y-yes! All right! *on four, making pig noises*
  Luca: Hoo hoo hoo ha ha ha!! This is so fun...
  Villager: So does that mean...''
  Luca: DIE, PIG!!!!!!! *slashes villager to death*
• King Bowser from Super Mario Bros. comes off this way in the RPGs. But he's not this way in other games. King Croacus in Super Paper Mario. Justified as he was driven insane by poisoning.
• Yggdrasil in Tales of Symphonia: Because his sister was killed, he's striving for an age of lifeless beings, thus misinterpreting his sister's wish of a world freed of discrimination and tyrannizing the world. Even when his own sister — temporarily resurrected — tells him how wrong his plans are, he refuses to listen, thinking she's rejecting him, and simply goes crazy.
• Undertale: In the Neutral Route where Toriel and Undyne are killed, Mettaton becomes ruler of the Underground, turning it into a Cult of Personality. Anyone who does not worship him "goes missing".
• Viva Caligula from the [adult swim] website is built around being a crazy tyrant and killing everyone you meet in creatively horrible ways.
• Emperor Vorios the False, AKA the Mad Emperor from WildStar. Managed to drive this universe's version of Rome into the toilet—and the Dominion was complete with unstoppable military force, wide-reaching territory, and almost infinite resources!
• By the events of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, King Radovid, the ruler of Redania, one of the last surviving kings of the Northern Realms since Letho's regicides, and one of the game's main antagonists, has fallen into something of a rut. He often gibbers unintelligible nonsense about chess, war, and murder to himself, and he orders the local Corrupt Church to engage in tortures, pogroms, and executions of mages within his kingdom. At the start of his reign, Novigrad was a prosperous city with 200 known magic users residing inside its walls, but this number gets reduced to only about 30 survivors who manage to hide in Triss' Underground Railroad and eventually flee on a boat to Kovir with the help of Geralt. Played With in that outside his murderous psychosis, he's quite a skilled strategist and politician, able to unite the North under him and beat the Nilfgaardian empire to a standstill and eventually win the war if he isn't assassinated — this is Truth in Television as many insane individuals have occasional periods of mental stability among outbreaks of irrationality.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: As the Queens of Keves and Agnus are actually robotic duplicates that serve as little more than their mouthpieces, Moebius — publicly the Queens' Consuls — are the real rulers of Aionios, and the vast majority of them are amoral hedonists who are effectively the main reason Aionios is a Crapsack World. Under their rule, most of Aionios's human population are given only 10-year life spans (which are started as 10-year olds) and are expected to live those ten years fighting a Forever War that's only purpose for existing is providing a never-ending source of entertainment for Moebius. The Consuls also regularly abuse and belittle the Colonies they are assigned to oversee (sometimes subjecting their soldiers to Uriah Gambits) and they'll harvest the lifeforces of any Colony that reaches Gold Rank (after having encouraged them to do so). Before the Homecoming system was established 1000 years before the game takes place, the Consuls would just execute any soldier that made it to the end of their ten-year lifespan via beheading under the pretense of it being a ceremony. It's also revealed that many of the Consuls turned to sociopathic hedonism to cope with both the trauma of seeing all of their deaths in their past lives fighting in the Forever War in addition to alleviating their boredom in their immortality and the never-changing world (while some like Triton found less destructive ways to satisfy their cravings or didn't want to become Moebius in the first place like M, others like D were murderous lunatics even before becoming Moebius). Meanwhile, their leader Z made Aionios the way it is because he's actually a living personification of humanity's collective desire for a status quo and interpreted that desire in one of the most insane ways possible.
• Lord Dimwit Flathead, the most well-known (and infamous) ruler of the Great Underground Empire in the Zork series, was particularly known for his excess — a coronation ceremony that took thirteen years to organize and carry out, the 3000-gated Flood Control Dam #3 (which served absolutely no purpose whatsoever), the creation of a subterranean desert mountain in a cave below his castle, and a 98% tax rate (and on the day of his death he proposed to adopt all his subjects and cut off their allowance to raise taxes to 100%) instituted to pay for such grand civic works. His last work was to be the creation of a new continent shaped in his likeness. Fortunately for mapmakers, he died before the project could be started. With the possible exception of Wurb, the last Flathead king, Dimwit's successors were arguably worse. They kept the 98% tax rate, but rather than spending it on massive construction projects, they spent it on extravagant parties and long vacations for the royal family.

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