Utopia Justifies The Means / Video Games

Those who believe that Utopia Justifies the Means in Video Games.

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• In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, the Big Bad Kerghan, first of the necromancers, in a variation of this trope, has found definitive proof that the afterlife is eternal bliss, whereas life is pain and misery. He then concludes that everyone would be much happier there and would gladly die if they had seen what he's seen. Because of this he plans to kill every living thing in Arcanum, after which he will kill himself so everyone can enjoy the afterlife for the rest of eternity. One of your party members, who you, potentially, brought back from the dead, can even confirm that Kerghan's description of the afterlife is indeed accurate, but he still thinks that life is worth living. This is one of the few games where siding with the Big Bad is considered a legitimate choice.
• The Templar Order in Assassin's Creed plan to control the world using Lost Technology from Those Who Came Before. Warren Vidic, lamenting how people in 1191 are no different in manner from the people of 2012, says that the world needs a sense of order, even if it means giving up freedom. To a degree, this is the belief of the Assassin Brotherhood as well — they kill those who would suppress free will in order to obtain utopia, so that the world can reach utopia on its own terms.
• BioShock:
  • In BioShock, the player learns that Andrew Ryan, creator of the pseudo-Objectivist undersea utopia Rapture, wound up Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and turning into a totalitarian ruler in his efforts to eliminate his ruthless rival, Frank Fontaine.
  • BioShock 2's villain, Sophia Lamb, has a more explicitly utopian scheme in mind: using a combination of genetic engineering and psychological conditioning to create people with no sense of self-interest whatsoever... starting with her own daughter.
  • BioShock Infinite has Father Comstock, who created the flying city of Columbia to be an American utopia (at least if you were rich and white). Unfortunately, he has a very violent plan to deal with "The Sodom below".
• Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 is a prime example of this. As the CEO of the Hyperion corporation and the dictator of the border planet of Pandora, his primary goal is to wipe every bandit off the face of the planet. The problem here is that he is just as insane, if not more so, as the "bandit hordes" that populate the planet, and he has a very broad definition of the word "Bandit." Jack was willing to do anything in order to accomplish this goal, including enslaving his own daughter and forcing her to use her Siren powers to charge the Vault Key, which is able to release an ancient alien Warrior, and trick two sets of Vault Hunters into doing his will. All the while, he insists that he is the "good guy," at one point telling a story about plucking out a man's eyes with a spoon in front of his children to illustrate the fact that he's the good guy and the Vault Hunters are the bad guys. Come Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, and there's some reason why he's deeming the Vault Hunters are evil, but it's due to revenge.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: Shepard instigates a war between Russia and the United States (and possibly World War III) in order to usher in a new era of American supremacy and patriotism.
• City of Heroes: One of Lord Recluse's right-hand men in City of Villains, Scirocco, falls under this in a lategame arc.
• Cute Knight Kingdom: The explanation for the Conquerer's Take Over the World ending:
  "This world is such a mess. If I were in charge, things would work better."
• The goal of the Order of the Sword in Devil May Cry 4 is to use the denizens of the Demon World to destroy the Human World so that they can bring about Sanctus' twisted version of Utopia.
• Doom (2016): Samuel Hayden sought to solve humanity's energy crisis by literally taking energy from Hell. This directly leads to a Demonic Invasion of Mars. Samuel Hayden tries to explain to the Doomslayer that it was all worth it. The Doomslayer silently glances at the corpse on the floor and smashes the communication link. By the end of the game, the Doomslayer has destroyed all links to Hell and sealed the portal, so Hayden takes up the Crucible, a now-extremely-potent energy source, and says that he doesn't expect the Doomslayer to understand how important Hell energy before sending him away. Subverted in Doom Eternal — once Hayden finds out just how Argent Energy is created, he's fully on board with the Doom Slayer shutting things down.
• In Emerald City Confidential, Queen Ozma gives up Petra's baby brother in a peace treaty between the Ozians and the Phanfasms in order to end the war. This is deconstructed when Petra points out that instead of restoring balance to Oz, this has created a corrupt Crapsack World.
• During the climax of The Evil Within 2, the Administrator claims that this is the reason behind everything Mobius has done over the span of the last two games and so many years. He insists that by placing all of mankind inside STEM, a program which puts peoples' consciousnesses into a shared computerized reality, and creating a stable "core" consciousness by using an intelligent, empathetic child as the battery/glue to hold it all together, Mobius can create a perfectly peaceful, unified new world, and therefore eliminate all wars, inequity, and suffering.
• EXA_PICO:
  • The Big Bad of Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia, Mir, is after a utopia in which Reyvateils, artificially created magical song maidens, will live free from slavery and mistreatment. In order to achieve this, she seeks to destroy all humans, having pegged them pretty firmly as irredeemable monsters due to her own traumatic history as a Tyke Bomb. The fact that she names this utopia "Reyvateilia" goes some way towards exemplifying the fact that she's just a terrified, idealistic child inside.
  • In Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica, she's still at it. Oh, and this time, she's one of your party members. Everyone in your party is a Well-Intentioned Extremist at best.
• Lord Lucian from Fable II very much planned for this. While in the Spire, he gave a speech saying that "The world outside is a corrupt, rotting husk. I plan to change all that. All I require of you is complete obedience."
• So far, all of Fallout's main antagonists have shared this philosophy.
  • In the first Fallout, we have the Master, whose (not unjustified) belief that Humans Are the Real Monsters brings about the only logical conclusion: the Unity. If all humans achieve perfection as Super Mutants, there would be no more wars. These would be the very rare, very intelligent Super Mutants, by the way. Unlike the others, however, the Master is willing to listen if you explain to him — with proof — that his plan is hopeless. The one reason his plan will fail: the Forced Evolution Virus renders everything it mutates sterile.
  • Fallout 2 introduces the Enclave, who want to nobly rebuild America to its status pre-nuclear apocalypse. Their President Evil John Henry Eden appears in Fallout 3, who planning to introduce a horrifically virulent bioweapon into the water, leading to the death of anyone who has mutations of any sort. Given that it's a nuclear wasteland, all Wastelanders are mutants by the Enclave's standards, so Eden is effectively planning on killing everyone except his own troops.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Couriers of all alignments will veer into this in the Independent Path. For example, while New Vegas transitions into an independent city-state relatively peacefully, the local Brotherhood of Steel chapter will attempt to take advantage of the lack of NCR presence to retake HELIOS ONE, as well as begin monitoring trade on the highway in order to seize energy weapons and other advanced technology for themselves. The only way to avoid this ending is to wipe out the entire Brotherhood or side with the NCR.
    • Caesar of Caesar's Legion plans to rebuild the world on ancient values, limit the influence of technology so his citizens won't be "corrupted", destroy tribal affiliations so there won't be any more wars, and unite everyone under his banner. Women have no rights and most people conquered just end up as slaves. Even with all this, Legion controlled territory is implied to be among the most stable in the West, specifically Arizona. Crime is stamped out quickly. Trade is well protected. And it faces none of ineffectual bureaucracy of the NCR. It just so happens that this stability comes through extremely draconian and vicious measures.
    • Mr. House is the absolute ruler of New Vegas, a firm believer in Democracy Is Bad, and isn't afraid to crush dissenters or play other factions against each other to ensure he'll be the only man standing when the dust settles. However, under his autocratic rule, Vegas is a glittering oasis of the Mojave Wasteland — safe, efficient, and a near paradise compared to the post-War world.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The nation of Galbadia is taking over other nations in order to spread its prosperity... until Sorceress Edea scooches in and says "You're all fucked".
  • In Final Fantasy XI, we have Kam'lanaut and Eald'narche, who are attempting to manipulate the crystal line to reform the five mothercrystals into the one crystal it used to be and restore the world to the Paradise it once was. Sounds nice right? Until you realize that splitting the crystal was what made life in the world possible and remaking Paradise would kill all life on the planet.
  • In Final Fantasy XII, to wrest the reins of History from the manipulative Occuria and back into the hands of Man is Vayne's goal, with support from a Well-Intentioned Extremist Mad Scientist and their divine mentor. Naturally, the Man to lead Ivalice's new History can be none other than the new Dynast-King, Vayne himself.
    • There is also a minor instance of this in Vossler, to whom the freedom of his homeland (even as a puppet state under Archadian rule) is so far above any other concern, he's willing to sell out his own Princess for it.
    • The Garlean Empire in Final Fantasy XIV conquer nations and insists that it's for their own good so that Eorzea can be under order instead of chaos. The empire also insists that killing all beastmen would solve the problem of Primals, even if it means killing beastmen that are not mindless drones summoning their gods. To top it all off, the empire believes using ancient tech from an empire of the past would help them gain even more power to further their goals.
    • Note that this same empire initiated Project Meteor, trying to pull the moon Dalamud out of the sky and crash it into Eorzea. They failed only because the moon exploded, as it was actually holding a nigh-unstoppable primal, Bahamut, who upon release decided to devastate everything in sight, Empire or otherwise. The Garlean Empire consider Project Meteor to have been a failure because it failed to destroy Eorzea: the giant dragon-god destroying their forces is barely an afterthought.
    • During the Heavensward scenario, The Man Behind the Man attempts to justify his actions. Believing that only absolute order will bring peace and end the Dragonsong War, Archbishop Thordon and his Heavens Ward knights become primals and tap into the energy of elder primals sealed by the Allagans, believing that suppression of free will and using absolute power is the only way to bring peace to Eorzea.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, there is Delita, who, after witnessing his sister Tietra's murder at hands of the army he was fighting in, goes on a secret crusade against the very society that allowed it to unfold, silencing, killing and out-maneuvering everyone threatening to stop his plans of becoming king of Ivalice.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Arvis from Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War explicitly states this as his reason for treating Sigurd as a villain and killing him with his bare hands. And shockingly, the first few years of his rule are pretty idyllic. Then Manfroy comes along with the book of Loptous...
  • Walhart from Fire Emblem: Awakening mixes this with And Man Grew Proud, where he sees a future where mankind would no longer believe in gods. And even then, he's not exactly bad, if you ignore the part where he tramples over anyone who disagrees with him, as well as considering himself to be a god. Mainly thanks to the fact that Grima's forces can't do very much on him, and that he's fully aware of what is happening. All the rest is also thanks to being nothing more than badass incarnate.
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, this is Edelgard's entire motivation. Their goal is a unified Fódlan freed from the control the Church and Crests, free of corrupt nobles and class discrimination. However, bringing about that dream is going to result in a lot of death and destruction, which puts them at odds with all the game's other factions.
• Guild Wars: Beyond includes the Winds of Change storyline where the Ministry of Purity sets out to cleanse Cantha of Shiro's plague. As it progresses, they expand their focus to include the Am Fah and then the Jade Brotherhood. When you learn the Ministry is using a manifest of every Brotherhood member to hunt them down, you realize how far the Ministry is willing to go.
• Sakaki of .hack//G.U. tried using AIDA to make a world where everyone would get along.
• Halo:
  • The bonus material for Halo 3 describes the Flood as a theoretical utopia, where, if everybody joined the Flood, there would be no more violence, war, poverty, hatred, etc. Unfortunately, the means by which it does this is by assimilating all life and rendering them into zombie-like creatures.
  • Halo 5: Guardians has an insane Cortana forming the Created faction to assume the Mantle of Responsibility, summoning gigantic Forerunner ships designed to police entire star systems, and force peace upon the galaxy. If anyone tries to get uppity, the Guardians decimate them.
    Cortana: ...A.I.s can be immortal. That kind of lifespan allows for long-term planning just like the Forerunners were capable of. A.I.s can assume the Forerunners' Mantle of Responsibility. And once there is peace, we can focus on poverty, hunger, illness... but Warden believes some will resist our help. And he's afraid you're one of them.
    Fred: Sounds great. I don't get why anyone's expecting resistance.
    John: The Didact made it clear the Mantle of Responsibility was an imperial peace. Step out of line, and suffer.
    Cortana: It won't be like that, John.
• Injustice: Gods Among Us has an alternate universe Superman wield the trope hard: after he accidentally killed Lois, his unborn child, and getting the entire city of Metropolis wiped out with a nuke, Superman kills the Joker (he was the one behind the manipulation) and declares that the only way to maintain peace is to kill or jail all criminals and suppress anyone that may become one. On top of this, Superman also does things like having Aquaman agree to merging Atlantis with Superman's regime to ensure safety. Sure, the world has peace, but it comes at the price of the people having little to no personal freedoms.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
  • Darth Revan became a Sith Lord at least partially for the best interests of peace and justice in the galaxy. Then again, that's a common excuse and recruiting slogan for Sith Lords — it's just that Revan tried. Star Wars: The Old Republic clarifies that Revan was trying to unite the galaxy against the True Sith Empire, who'd been biding their time and consolidating their power in the Unknown Regions. Their Emperor is so evil and powerful that Revan had a good reason to do what he did.
  • Darth Traya/Kreia wants to destroy the Force so everyone can have free will, but to do that, she tries to destroy a planet and make the entire galaxy feel its pain. She also uses this to justify the whole revenge spree thing.
• In the Mass Effect series, this is the motivation behind at least a couple characters. The Illusive Man wants to control the Reapers to realize his ideal vision for the galaxy. According to the Catalyst, this is the reason why the Reapers exist in the first place: they prevent advanced organic life from creating synthetics that will ultimately wipe out all life in the galaxy; the Reapers cycle of destruction continues until someone (Shepard) is able to bring synthetic and organic life together into one unified form, creating true peace and the next stage of evolution.
• A theme of the Metal Gear series is "Outer Heaven", Big Boss' ideal of a world where soldiers would always have a place free from political manipulation; played almost straight in Metal Gear Solid (in which Liquid Snake takes up the mantle), reworked in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (in which Solidus' ideal is not soldiers but rather America/liberty), conceived in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (Army's Heaven is a less-than-sincere idea but has the basic concept down), and then subverted in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, in which war has become a business, the world a place where soldiers will 'always' be needed, but with none of the ideals behind Big Boss' vision. By the end of 4, Big Boss shows up and accepts that his idea was wrong and the pursuit of it only led to more problems. Outer Heaven stems from The Boss' Will, the last wish of The Paragon the Boss to "make the world whole again" and create a solidified world kept in balance without restrictions of fate and necessity. Since none of her followers could agree on what a "whole world" means, they each terrorized the planet in their own ways. Big Boss' Evil Former Friend Zero created the Patriots in an attempt to fulfill her will (and satisfy his own megalomania) through a unified world under a single regime by suppressing information and creating peace and harmony by sacrificing the principles of freedom and honor to attain those ideals.
• Video Game/Overwatch has Ramattra, who's goal is to create a peaceful world where Omnics as treated as humanity's equals, and he's willing to dirty his hands with anything to get it. Little things like terrorism, warfare, and indoctrination are all necessary evils as far as he's concerned.
• Paper Mario:
  • TEC-XX, the base-controlling A.I. of the villainous X-Nauts in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, debates this at one point with a captive Princess Peach, arguing that the world has problems and even with the deplorable methods of the X-Nauts, Sir Grodus's rule would end those problems. Given that Grodus's plan was to awaken and enslave a thousand-year-old demon, it's debatable how much Grodus was lying to his underlings.
  • Count Bleck from Super Paper Mario, whose main goal is to fulfill a prophecy that would destroy all universes in order to recreate them as a Utopia. Subverted when it turns out that he's a Straw Nihilist who, believing that life is meaningless after having lost his lover Timpani, decides to erase all worlds without recreating them, all while lying about his true intentions to his minions.
• Pokémon Diamond and Pearl has Cyrus, who's convinced that human emotion is the source of all strife and the only way to form a better world is to simply destroy and rebuild it all as a World of Silence. This being a Pokémon character and plot, you get three guesses as to what he's going to manipulate into doing it. His goal is expanded in Platinum to specifically creating a world without spirit, which, by looking through Pokémon mythology, would amount to no willpower, wisdom, or emotion.
• Judging by video and audio logs you encounter during Prey (2017), this seems to be the motivation of Morgan Yu's original personality, until repeated use of neuromods and subsequent mind wipes resulted in personality change.
  Morgan: The people that come after us will be smarter, stronger, immortal. They can judge us if they want, but they'll know they exist because of the things we did.
• Big Bad Noir in La Pucelle is sympathetic for much of the game, seeking to create his "Utopia" where half-demons such as himself can be accepted. However, when you find out what his "Utopia" actually consists of, there is only one appropriate response remaining.
• This turns out to be the main villain's motivation in Shadow Hearts. Notably, he actually only decided to take extreme measures after his less extreme attempt failed catastrophically, leading to him being tried and imprisoned as a heretic several centuries prior to the game.
• This is a common theme in Shin Megami Tensei games as a whole. Given the nature of the series, it's usually left up to the player to decide whether this is justified or not.
  • This is the premise of the Messian Church and of their patron deity Himself. It only becomes more prominent as the series goes on, from Shin Megami Tensei I to Shin Megami Tensei II to Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne.
  • This is also the goal of the Gaian Cult, but it's much less visible by comparison because of the Law alignment's Flanderization since SMT II. On top of this, the Chaos faction has physical strength as its governmental structure, so the Utopia part very quickly becomes exclusive to their (or the player's) point of view.
  • Persona:
    • In Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, Philemon may be the ultimate incarnation of all benevolence in humanity and the mortal enemy of Nyarlathotep, the embodiment of all evil, but he's still a major dick and creates a terrible mess of everything, leading to many deaths, innocent and guilty alike, and the creation of a new, clean, parallel timeline just to one-up Nyarlathotep in their contest to see who's the strongest. And then Earth blows up. Then he takes the limelight, gloats about how he's won against Nyarlathotep, and graciously offers to hit the Reset Button. There's a reason why decking him upon hearing of what he has done is very much an option.
    • On a slightly smaller scale, the major villains of Persona 5 are also seeking their own idea of Utopia. Masayoshi Shido has been using the Metaverse, manipulating politics and committing countless crimes in order to gain power in Japan, which he hopes to turn into a new golden superpower in the middle of its golden age: however, if his Palace is any indication, he believes that "Japan" is "the people that support and worship Masayoshi Shido", and everyone else deserves to drown and die. Yaldabaoth, the God of Control, believes that mankind desires to be controlled and causes the events of the game in order to grant this desire, creating a peaceful world where everyone can be at peace with their role in society... at the cost of all true free will. The Updated Re-release has Dr. Maruki, who uses the power of Yaldabaoth as well as his own Persona to become a god and rewrite reality to create a utopia where everyone is happy. However, his idea of happiness is running away from problems and abandoning goals that are too difficult, forcing people struggling with ambitious goals to pursue easier ones and in some cases rewriting people's personalities to make them more amiable.
• Claudia Wolf in Silent Hill 3 is a member of the Silent Hill cult that wishes to birth their god into the mortal world so it may bring paradise. Since she believes that a god that is born through suffering would be more likely to be benevolent than one that isn't, Claudia makes Heather suffer by murdering her father, Harry Mason. However, although Claudia desperately wishes for paradise due to her abusive childhood, she's aware that her actions will deny her a place in the utopia she's seeking to create.
• Stellaris:
  • While some parts of the DLC Utopia cover the building of a Post-Scarcity Economy with limitless energy from a Dyson Sphere, limitless living space from orbital habitats, or your very own Ring World Planet, all of which could classify as a genuine Utopia... Utopia also introduces mechanics centered around the people you sacrifice along the way. Hordes of Slave Mooks, the planned obsolescence of species through mandatory sterilization, genocides through labor camps, the processing of sapient species into food, or livestock slavery... The very title of this DLC directly references this trope.
  • The "Rogue Servitor" variant of Machine Intelligences is perfectly willing to invade other empires to bring their version of a care-free society to the organics living there.
• Supreme Commander: The driving motive of the Aeon and the Seraphim is 'accept the peace and guidance of The Way or be destroyed'.
• Denam in Tactics Ogre can be this — if he takes the lawful decision at the end of chapter one, he will decide to commit a False Flag Operation as per the orders of Duke Ronwey. Heck, Duke Ronwey himself is this — he decides that a False Flag Operation is a good idea to unite the Wallister.
• This is a common theme in the Tales Series games.
  • Lord Yggdrasil in Tales of Symphonia wants to create a world where everyone is a soulless shell, so there would be no more discrimination, but mainly, he just wants to resurrect his dead sister.
  • This pops up again in Tales of the Abyss, in which the Big Bad seeks to kill everyone on the planet and replace them with clones in an attempt to Screw Destiny. It makes sense in context. The whole world was living a predetermined existence, consulting a prophecy even for things such as what to eat for dinner. What makes the Tales of The Abyss example weird is that the guy was willing use many of the clones created as pawns, cast them aside, and tell them they were just mere tools to add insult to injury.
• World of Warcraft:
  • There is a scene in which a rebellious citizen, delivering some inflammatory speeches in Silvermoon, is mind controlled by the authorities into saying something very different. The same city always has a "harassed citizen" by the main gate, arrested and kneeling down. Arcane (robot) guardians of the city proclaim "Happiness is mandatory, citizen" once in a while. It should be noted that the "Utopia" in this instance is less an actual utopia and more a stable society that isn't on the brink of total collapse. Lor'themar is aware of the moral ramifications of his actions and accepts them without question. His faction leader short story, In the Shadow of the Sun, revolves around him tackling the morality of his actions and how far he is willing to compromise his personal ideals to justify his actions.
  • The Thunder King Lei Shen and his closest companions believed that the true glory of the Mogu Empire was uniting all the people of Pandaria and giving them all a role to play in order to continue the work of the Titans. The fact that their slaves suffered was merely due to their weakness as beings of flesh and blood, and so unavoidable.
  • Garrosh Hellscream desires what he repeatedly calls "MY WORLD". Due to his Fantastic Racism, this basically amounts to 'orcs and orcs only'.
  • The Titans show hints of this at a universal level. They believe bringing order to the universe is the best way to prevent evil, but their idea of order equates to what is basically 'everything must work the way we expect it to, or we will destroy it'. Algalon the Observer threatens to send a message to the Titans telling them Azeroth has become too corrupted by the influence of the Old Gods, so they'll come back and commence a 'planetary re-originiation'; in other words, destroy all life on Azeroth and start again. It seems that the Titans value the idea of order more than they value the lives it's supposed to save, although it turns out that this is justified because Azeroth contains what may well be the last Titan world-soul and the most powerful of all. If the Old Gods corrupt too much of Azeroth, they'll turn it into a Fetus Terrible that will destroy the universe once it finally awakens.
• In The World Ends with You, Kitaniji brainwashes everyone in Shibuya as an attempt to save them or Joshua will erase it along with the people. As stated in Week 3:
  "To right the countless wrongs of our day, we shine this light of true redemption, that this place may become as paradise. What a wonderful world such would be..."

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