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Vile Villains in Saccharine Shows in Video Games.

  • The Advance Wars series takes itself only as seriously as it needs to, plays War Has Never Been So Much Fun as straight as humanly possible, and the characters are as lovably goofy as can be. Then we have Sturm who doesn't have even a shred of a redeeming quality or sense of humor: he loves war, he hates peace, all he wants is to Take Over the World, he is perfectly willing to commit utter atrocities to do it, and if he can't have the world nobody can.
  • Banjo-Kazooie deserves special elaboration, because it is very upbeat and happy, for a Rare Ltd. game, and yet it also contains Gruntilda, who is a Wicked Witch, and a pretty cruel villain by the standards of a family-friendly game, even without the possibility of her obsession with beauty leading to the destruction of the natural environment. She immediately imprisons the Jinjos so they'll no longer be a nuisance to her plans. She also kidnaps Tooty, so she can use a machine to suck all the beauty out of her. This gets much worse in ''Tooie'', where she destroys Banjo's house and kills Bottles, as well as murdering her own sisters for their failures. Though some of this is lessened by her Laughably Evil traits, like her consistent need to talk in rhyme.
  • Unlike in the main series, the villains in Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon don't even stoop to the level where they openly attempt mass genocide. Then of all villains the franchise can throw on our little Umbran Witch, Singularity, a vicious maniac who blown up over two thousand universes before being killed by Bayonetta shows up back in time to exact his revenge.
  • Boxxy Quest is a goofy parody of Internet culture, with many jokes, references, and silly situations within the Cyberspace... but contains several villains that darken the tone whenever they appear and are played seriously.
    • BoxxyQuest: The Shifted Spires:
      • Boxxyfan, the Big Bad, is an Omnicidal Maniac who desires to destroy the Internet and commits many atrocities in the way. Our introduction to him is coming across the ruins of a town that he invaded, with blood and corpses all around, and every scene he is in is played seriously. This also applies to his appearances in the sequel, where he continues to ravage the Internet and very nearly succeeds... though when his plan blows up in his face and his quest to revive his home-world is revealed to have been unnecessary, and his sister chews him out for it, his menace diminishes.
      • When Rcoastee reveals his true nature, he is shown to be a creepy Yandere to Catie who also wants to destroy the Internet so he can remake it in his own image, and unlike Boxxyfan he has no sympathetic qualities.
    • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm:
      • The cause of the storm destroying the Internet, Arianna/ARPANET and STORM, is played fully seriously and is responsible for the first foray into Surprisingly Creepy Moment territory by causing the destruction of Wikipedia and turning its citizens into monsters. Arianna does do a Heel–Face Turn later on, at least, but STORM continues to be played as a Mechanical Abomination.
      • Legion is the game's vilest element by far. He is a Destroyer Deity who is made of Catie/Virtua's hatred for humanity and seeks to Kill All Humans, and is the most evil entity in the series. Whenever this guy rears his head, all semblance of humor dies a swift and painful death.
      • Mother, the leader of the Social Justice Warriors, contrasts her goofy underlings by being a genuinely creepy entity who speaks with an unsettling whisper-echo and is responsible for horrific human experimentation and nearly wiping out the male gender. The DLC, where she appears, is initially goofy like the main game, but when she begins to show her head, the mood turns very dark very fast.
      • All of the entities and bosses in /x/ are scary monsters played straight, in contrast to the previously humorous or standard villains. Quite a bit of them have unsettling designs, and some have an actual body count.
      • Lady Ny'agai, from a secret area in the Tower of Plot, is a genuinely creepy villainess straight out of a dark fairytale who turns children into Ny'agai.
      • The monsters of the Deep Web are something straight out of a horror game, and are based on the horrors of the real-life Deep Web, putting them at odds with the overall mood of the game, from inexplicable and mysterious monstrosities like the Phisher King, Hateful Reliquary, and Trahald Prime, to the living Fetish Dolls that try to turn Catie into one of them, and even a gang of Human Traffickers who victimize children.
      • not_intended/Nihilerror, the boss of the Astral Error, is a creepy Glitch Entity and Angelic Abomination with Black Eyes of Evil and many faces, and her appearance is out of place even with all the other antagonists.
  • Buddy Simulator 1984: “The Adventure of [playername]”, the In-Universe game, is a quirky RPG with goofy characters and silly antagonists who can all be befriended. Except for the main antagonist, the Snoodlewonker, who, contrary to the silly name, is a giant serpent-wyrm monster with a Nightmare Face who, in the backstory, tore through the North village, ate half the population, and traumatized Morton by eating his wife. The villagers are terrified of it, and every time it appears or is brought up, the humor stops.
  • Bully: While Bullworth Academy is far from a happy place, the level of violence in the game remains subdued enough for its content to not exceed a T rating, especially when compared to other games from the same company (such as the Grand Theft Auto franchise). However, Jimmy Hopkins's False Friend, Gary Smith, stands out for being an exceptionally vile, contemptible, sociopathic, sadistic, and despicable villain, constantly devising dangerous and even lethal tactics against students to actively and genuinely endanger them. He's essentially the dangerous psychopath or mobster in his teenage years. It's telling that even the other students know he's a sociopath, so they go to great lengths to avoid any form of association or interaction with him.
  • Bug Fables, much like the Paper Mario games that inspired it, is an unbelievably fun romp of a game full of ridiculously cute bug characters going on all kinds of adorable and whimsical adventures. Also like Paper Mario, the tone can take a turn from bright to surprisingly dark thanks to how shockingly evil some villains can get.
    • The Wasp King's debut at the end of Chapter 4 marks the moment where the game's tone becomes a lot more dire. He is a cruel, vile tyrant of a bug who makes his debut by attacking the Ant Kingdom, and leaving a trail of wounded and possibly dead bugs behind. He can swing from eerily calm to violently angry in the blink of an eye, turned his kingdom into a horrendous dump that he rules from a well-kept palace, and forcibly brainwashed all of the wasps into becoming his personal attack dogs, while imprisoning and starving anyone who resisted. He's also heavily implied to have tortured the rightful Queen of the Wasps with his fire magic, and abandons a lot of his loyal soldiers to die so he can get his hands on the Everlasting Sapling. The horrors don't even end with his defeat, as his backstory is just as bleak: his parents were forced to abandon him in the hellish Dead Lands in a desperate bid to protect him from the Monstrous Dead Landers, and he grew up friendless and abandoned by the people of the Wasp Kingdom.
    • The callous roach scientists spearheading the sick experiments performed in Upper Snakemouth's hidden lab also considerably darken the game's tone. In the past, they kidnapped and experimented on tons of innocent bugs before turning them into mindless zombies in pursuit of immortality, and their zombified victims still haunt the lab's ruins in the present day. The cold, sociopathic tone in their writings and recordings darkens the mood of an already morbid dungeon, and Leif discovering that he was one of their experiments and freaking out about it is one of the game's saddest moments, bar none.
  • Cave Story is a pretty cheery-looking game with Ridiculously Cute Critters, a Quirky Miniboss Squad with a memorable Catchphrase and a main character who's Badass Adorable incarnate. But two villains, the Big Bad and Greater-Scope Villain, are far darker than the game would suggest:
    • Dr. Fuyuhiko Date, aka The Doctor, is a Mengele-esque villain who aims to Take Over the World by enslaving the cute Mimingas, and feeds some of them Red Flowers which turn them into monsters- his plan is to do this to all of them and use them alongside his robots as an army. In the process, he kills two major characters, endangers several more, and casually betrays his underlings Balrog and Misery. He is almost singlehandedly responsible for the game's darker content.
    • Ballos, the True Final Boss is not only creepy, but his story is really depressing. He destroys the kingdom because he went insane from torture, and begs the heroes to put him out of his misery when they encounter him lest he destroy the entire island.
  • Conker's Bad Fur Day isn't exactly upbeat, but it's still a largely comedic game. The game nonetheless has several dark and truly serious villains, especially as Cerebus Syndrome kicks in:
    • Don Weaso is played dead seriously. Not only is his brutal murder of one of his Mooks not played for laughs, but he guns down Berri in cold blood; effectively making him the one responsible for the game's Downer Ending.
    • Count Batula, the main antagonist of the Spooky chapter. If the fact that Conker fights through a graveyard of Flesh-Eating Zombies leading up to his mansion wasn't enough of an indication, the entire sequence with Batula, in which Conker is turned into a vampire bat and forced to juice innocent people in a meat grinder for the Count to feed on, is a sign that the game is going to be Darker and Edgier from here on out.
    • The Tediz, the main villains of the It's War chapter, pull no punches. They've murdered and experimented on numerous squirrels without remorse and the majority of their scenes aren't Played for Laughs. In a Deleted Scene found in the game's files, Conker, much to his horror, comes across a group of Tedi surgeons performing an autopsy on a captive squirrel soldier while he's still alive.
  • Crash Bandicoot: While N. Tropy was always portrayed as a competent and relatively serious compared to the rest of the games' goofy villains, it it isn't until Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time where this trope is played completely straight. There, he hijacks Cortex's position as the Big Bad, teams-up with his female alternate universe counterpart, and the two plot to destroy the entire multiverse and remake it in their own image. His alternate self is just as vile, having murdered her world's Crash and Coco in front of Tawna before the game's events.
  • Cuphead:
  • Cyberpunk 2077: Night City is intentionally a Crapsaccharine World, with colorfully-traumatizing advertisements packed across every square meter of wall and a collection of weird and wacky gangs shooting each other down on the streets with intentionally low-quality chatter, all while corrupt mega-corporations own everything and still obsess over new ways to buy the souls of their already-broken slaves. It's meant to be so cartoonishly villainous that it's funny. And then we have Adam Smasher, Arasaka's Ace attack-dog who outright personifies 'evil for the sake of evil' compared to his power-hungry but pragmatic handlers, and is obsessed with finding 'street heroes' to brutally torture and murder in increasingly humiliating ways. Victims include Johnny Silverhand, Rebecca, David Martinez, and potentially Saul or Rogue, all of whom he personally insults with as much racism, sexism, and bigotry as he can pack into a sentence for the sheer hell of it. Any scene with him involved is meant to be serious and geared towards learning how to hate him even more.
  • For the most part, Dragalia Lost is a lighthearted adventure about a prince living in a castle with his friends, as they try to Save the Princess with some Monster of the Week side events. Despite this, the game is actually has a few dangerous villains, with Morsayati and Satan getting special mentions. However, the one to top them all off would have to be that game’s true Big Bad, Xenos. His ultimate goal is to create a world in which humanity has no free will. At first, the heroes actually lose to him, and he engulfs the city of Grams into darkness, then eventually, he actually succeeds in destroying the entire multiverse! It takes some of his own power, as well as a lot of friendship, to finally take him down.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy is generally a light-hearted, over-the-top parody of JRPGs, complete with brightly-coloured Animesque artwork and (from 4 onwards) stylised papercraft-style cutscenes. And then there are the villains, who are consistently terrifying. It says a lot that the Big Bad of the second game, a Well-Intentioned Extremist Neo-Nazi who plans to Take Over the World, is the least vile villain in the whole series, to the extent he joins your party after you defeat him. To wit:
    • The final boss of 1 is literally just a zombified Goku. His appearance is creepy enough, but the area you fight him in is an even creepier graveyard, with discordant music featuring random screams and moans. And then he blows up and devastates the planet when you defeat him.
    • The Big Bad of 2 is Lance, the aforementioned Neo-Nazi. He shows up again as the Starter Villain and Disc-One Final Boss of the fifth game, where he's much more squarely in this trope as not only is he planning to unite the world under a fascist regime again, he's also kidnapping women (including Deuteragonist Natalie) to use as Baby Factories.
    • The Big Bad of 3 is Akron, an Eldritch Abomination capable of wiping the party back to Level 1 and nearly killing them. He's unfatohmably ancient, horrifying to look at, and has some downright creepy attacks.
    • The Big Bad of 4 is Godcat, implied to be the series' Creator Deity, and one heck of a Jerkass God. Among other things, she created Akron, removed the arms and legs from all the world's cats as punishment for letting humanity surpass them, and intends to wipe out all life on Earth in order to start civilisation over from scratch. As befitting of his creator, her Destroyer form is almost as terrifying to behold as Akron.
    • 5 has The Devourer, a terrifying tentacled creature from another dimension bent on eliminating all randomness and creating a perfect, deterministic universe. He claims that the events of all five games were simulations run by him to that end, is aware you, the player, exist and have been screwing up the simulations with your random actions, and when you get close to defeating him, he erases the protagonists' planet from existence. And then there's the Optional Boss: the Glitch. The room it's in is pure Nightmare Fuel, complete with terrifying music and heavy Interface Screw, the party beg you not to make them fight it, and when you do, it speaks to you, the player, through them. The whole thing leaves them mentally scarred.
  • Final Fantasy V brings Exdeath. For a game that's lighthearted and at times outright silly, Exdeath's appearance serves to ram the severity of the world's problems into the heads of the characters. Most of the time when he shows up, the tone gets much darker and something in the world changes, usually for the worst.
  • Fire Emblem Engage is Lighter and Softer and Denser and Wackier than other installments in the Fire Emblem franchise, especially Three Houses, with a wonderfully goofy cast and highly colorful environments. Sombron, however, disregards all of that to become a truly deplorable being. He completely lacks the more sympathetic and redeemable traits of past antagonists and instead, is a man who repeatedly kills his own children and will kill anyone and everyone purely to get what he wants.
  • Freedom Force is a light-hearted, intentionally corny superhero game based on 50s and 60s comics. The true Big Bad Time Master is a terrifying Omnicidal Maniac who wants to stop time and destroy the entire universe just so he can be immortal.
  • Freedom Planet: Lord Arktivus Brevon is an alien warlord who's as vile as they come, in what would otherwise be a lighthearted romp in the style of the early Sonic the Hedgehog games. You don't have to go further to learn of this than the game's opening sequence, in which he breaks into a palace with his army and beheads its king on-screen and in front of his son, who he promptly and painfully brainwashes to serve him. Whenever he shows up, expect things to get serious, and fast.
  • Rez the evil cyborg overlord from the Gex series, in addition to being incredibly creepy looking, was downright Nightmare Fuel when you read between the lines. Judging from the fact that he has sentences like "NO HOPE" "30 DAYS IN THE COOLER FOR TALKING" "YOUR WORK IS THE REASON YOU LIVE" and "EMOTIONS ARE CRIMINAL" written throughout his lair it was heavily implied that he was using slave labor. Not to mention the sweatshop vibe the place gives off.
  • Even when the Grand Theft Auto franchise is an M Rated franchise and the world isn't exactly pleasant, two entries stand out for this trope:
    • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories brings us both Jerry Martinez and The Mendez Brothers, in a supposedly-glamorous Vice City. While Jerry Martinez had been abusing his army ranks and using Victor Vance all along for his nefarious acts, and gleefully taunted him after beating up his lover Louise, the Mendez Brothers imposed the worst threats towards Vic and his associates, including (and not limited to) their attempts to wipe them out from the city (in which they successfully tortured and killed Louise, leading to Vic's counterattack against them).
    • Grand Theft Auto V: Peter Dreyfuss, believe it or not. Make no mistake, GTA V is far from being family-friendly, and Los Santos is a full-fledged Crapsaccharine World. Nevertheless, the game compensates for it by being a Black Comedy featuring a myriad of colorful and over-the-top characters, entertaining and extravagant heist missions, and a summer atmosphere that feels like it's at its peak. Despite appearing only in a side mission, Dreyfuss stands out as an unusually disturbing, dark, and horrific villain that seems somewhat out of place with the game's overall tone. He wouldn't be out of place in works like Manhunt or the darker GTA IV, though.
  • HarmoKnight is a downloadable Rhythm Game from the Nintendo eShop that is on par with Kirby in terms of cuteness. The game features an Adorably Precocious Child as the hero, a talking bunny as his sidekick, and a Plucky Girl archer and a Badbutt Viking with a pet monkey as tritagonists. Then you have its Big Bad Gargan, a Humanoid Abomination who's the leader of a race of Planetary Parasites called the Noizoids who intend to take over Melodia. At first he seems like your average Generic Doomsday Villain, kidnapping the princess and whatnot. But later in the game its revealed he's slowly turning her into a Noizoid. And by the time you meet him on the final level, he's nearly succeeded.
  • A Hat in Time:
    • Most of the villains are all kind of silly in their own way. Then you get to Queen Vanessa's Manor, and find that the titular Queen Vanessa is the exception. She is completely Ax-Crazy, having turned into a psychotic shadow monster who's very presence is the reason for the state of Subcon Forest. She literally looks like a Living Shadow, with Glowing Eyes of Doom. And though Hat Kid can fight against other bosses, there is literally nothing that she can do to Queen Vanessa, while if she gets her hands on the Hat Kid, Queen Vanessa can turn her into an ice sculpture. It's one of the few times in the game where Hat Kid looks genuinely afraid for her life, with her wearing a permanently terrified expression during the mission and trembling with fear for an idle animation: for the record, this is the Title Card for that mission.
    • Empress, the boss cat of the Nyakuza in the Nyakuza Metro DLC, is a No Nonsense Villain who threatens to kill Hat Kid if she gets in the way, while at the same time trying to groom the young alien as a successor. She kills one of her lackies over a very minor offense when you first meet her, and after taking Hat Kid under her wing, will kill her in one hit if the player attempts to attack. When Hat Kid eventually steals back the Time Pieces that Empress's goons strongarmed off her as soon as they were collected, Empress retaliates by chasing Hat Kid with one-hit kill heat-seeking rockets and putting a bounty on her head, leading to the whole metro attempting to block the escape route. Empress only lets Hat Kid live because while she's gloating, two police officers enter the same elevator - even though one of them is actually on her payroll, the other isn't, and a police witness (or dead cop, if she tried to cover her tracks) would be too much to keep attention away from her syndicate.
  • The Nintendo 3DS downloadable game Mononoke Forest is a very saccharine game, having cute Mononoke and a pleasant setting. The villains, however, are Mononoke that represent disasters (Pollution, wildfires, floods, pests, and paranoia) and the final one is a demonic eye void-like entity that is the king of all disasters.
  • Kid Icarus: Uprising: While most of the villains are lovable, quirky, and outright hilarious, Hades and the Chaos Kin manage to be a cut above the rest in terms of sheer evil. The former is still quirky and hilarious, though.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • The game starts off on a tropical island with three friends and the trailers promise allying with Disney characters. While things go south a bit quickly, it's still a Saturday Morning Cartoon style where you team up to rescue friends, indulge in Fanservice, and just a lot of hope. In fact there is a lot of emphasis on friendship, Disney worlds, princesses, sunny places, gorgeous designs... and Xehanort. Who has been trying to destroy the universe for YEARS, is the master of the Xanatos Gambit, has a multitude of different alter-egos, and as of KH3D, the cast of heroes is looking at his plans and are trying desperately to think of a way to stop him. This cast includes Disney Wizard Extraordinaire Yen Sid, Donald Duck, Goofy, and MICKEY MOUSE.
    • Largely unrelated to Xehanort but still no less frightening are the cold-hearted witch Maleficent in the original game (prior to her Villain Decay in following games), the Manipulative Bastard Marluxia in Chain of Memories whose evil plan revolves around the gradual Mind Rape of the main character, and the Big Bad of Coded: the data version of Sora's Heartless, who has mutated into something of an Eldritch Abomination who wants to consume everything.
  • Kirby is a Sugar Bowl with some really nasty major villains.
    • The most common recurring villain, Dark Matter, is an Eldritch Abomination who seeks to corrupt and destroy worlds. It appears in a multitude of strange forms, ranging from a simple cloaked knight appearing to a cyclopean mass of darkness; Miracle Matter, a twenty-sided die that appears as the Final Boss of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards; and Zero from Kirby's Dream Land 3, the boss of Dark Matter who cuts its own iris and bleeds as an attack, and later rips its own iris out. It is reincarnated as 02 in Kirby 64 as the True Final Boss, a creepy angel thing with a blood-dripping eye.
    • Kirby Super Star: Marx, first appearing to be a cute jester-like creature balancing on a ball, he manipulates the Sun and Moon to fight and sends Kirby to stop them as part of a plan to wish for ultimate power. He is killed, but his grotesque soul appears as a Optional Boss that terrifyingly screams when you defeat it. In Super Star Ultra, he gains a number of attacks that involve him being cut in half, morphing in unnatural ways, and just generally being even scarier in appearance. He also had an undead form named Marx Soul, which is more grotesque in appearance and has more powerful versions of all of Marx's attacks. His appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate takes it even further, with one of his attacks replacing his wings with distended arteries, another making his eyes turn into clusters of eyes with beams shooting from them, the plants that grow from his seeds being thorny brambles rather than rose stems, and finally dropping dark voids from his eye sockets that bounce around like rubber balls. And Sakurai had to be told to reel it in from what he actually wanted to do.
    • Kirby Mass Attack has Necrodeus, the monster that split Kirby into ten pieces, and the Skull Gang, his minions. It doesn't help that his name translates to "Death/Corpse God".
    • Kirby: Canvas Curse has the lesser-known Drawcia Soul; the soul of a painting that came to life. Not only does it look and act like an Eldritch Abomination, but it has a high-pitched, warped and rather disturbing scream to go with its appearance. It also started the trend of "Soul" transformations.
    • While Magolor from Kirby's Return to Dream Land isn't as disturbing as the other villains listed, his One-Winged Angel forms after putting on the Master Crown are no less unsettling. The Deluxe remake takes things one step further by revealing that the Master Crown is one itself, being a parasitic artifact which has been corrupting those who wear it while tainting their souls with darkness for God knows how long. If it weren't for Kirby, Magolor's original scheme would've become something much worse.
    • Kirby: Triple Deluxe: While most villains are just generic "smother the world in darkness" sorts, Queen Sectonia outright states her intentions are to fuel her ascension to godhood by feeding on Pop Star and its inhabitants for eternity.
    • Kirby and the Rainbow Curse: The true big bad, Dark Crafter, is a paint-themed expy of Dark Matter, having possessed Elline's best friend Claycia to do his bidding. The plot is kicked off by him draining all of Popstar of its color through Claycia, only for Elline to escape and revive Kirby and Bandanna Waddle Dee to help her save both Popstar and her best friend.
    • Kirby: Planet Robobot: Notably, the main villains aren't supernatural forces of evil, but a MegaCorp called the Haltmann Works Company, led by the Corrupt Corporate Executive Max Profitt Haltmann. Their goals are to mechanize Pop Star's inhabitants and to claim the planet's resources for their own. However, their villainy is trumped by the company's supercomputer Star Dream, which becomes self-aware and seeks to wipe out all organic life in the universe.
    • Kirby Star Allies: The main villain, Hyness. Where to begin? For one, his entire demeanor can change between eerily stilted and slow and a full-on Motor Mouth rant at the drop of a hat. He's abusive to his underlings, punching one of them out of his way for no reason, then draining their life to replenish his own, using their unconscious bodies as weapons and even outright sacrificing them when they outlived their usefulness. The worst thing about him is his ultimate goal: resurrecting his dark god, Void Termina, to destroy the entire universe, in a serious upgrade from Star Dream's villainy as noted above.
    • Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Kirby and many other Dream Land inhabitants are sucked through a portal into another world, where Kirby has to rescue the Waddle Dees from being kidnapped from a gang of anthropomorphic animals called the Beast Pack. The Beast Pack don't fit this trope, being mostly goofy or mischievous rather than truly menacing, however, the endgame introduces the true mastermind behind the whole plot, the Ultimate Life Form, Specimen ID-F86 (A.K.A. Fecto Forgo/Elfilis), a hostile alien creature which once nearly destroyed the planet in a violent conquest, is brainwashing the Beast Pack into working for it, enslaving the Waddle Dees they capture, and after Kirby interrupts its plans, it decides to consume everything (including its own minions), a process which traps them in a psychic Pocket Dimension forever, and then attempts to have Planet Popstar and the Forgotten Land collide just to annihilate everything out of spite.
    • Perhaps the best way to illustrate this extreme juxtaposition of absolutely monstrous antagonists to the otherwise light and sugary setting and characters are the opening lines of the first and last cutscenes in Kirby: Squeak Squad.
      First Cutscene: Early afternoon in Dream Land... It's so peaceful even the clouds are drowsy. And now it's Kirby's favorite time of the day - snack time. Today's yummy snack is a sweet, fluffy slice of strawberry shortcake!
      Last Cutscene: The treasure chest was the prison of Dark Nebula, ruler of the underworld.
  • LittleBigPlanet:
    • Vex, the main antagonist of the spinoff Sackboy: A Big Adventure, is a Monster Clown and a Nightmare Weaver who kidnaps all of the sackfolk (except for Sackboy) in order to force them to work on the Topsy Turver, a machine that will allow him to rule Craftworld in his own, twisted image. He's always one step ahead of Sackboy, and in the end, he nearly wins, all while declaring himself the god of nightmares who rules over the land of Uproar. Oh, and those plans of his that he "carelessly" dropped during the game's intro? He did that on purpose so Sackboy could gather all the Dreamer Orbs he needed to power the Topsy Turver, and he immediately steals them all once Sackboy has gathered them.
  • The main antagonists of Master Detective Archives: Rain Code are the most antagonistic members of a villainous corporation known as the Amaterasu Corporation, consisting of the likes of Yomi Hellsmile, CEO Makoto Kagutsuchi and head researcher Dr. Huesca who is also the Greater-Scope Villain, all of them posing as No-Nonsense Nemeses to the detectives. Despite this, outside of the dystopia created by them, the game is generally more light-hearted and comedic and the protagonists' general condition as a group of misfits is generally Played for Laughs.
  • While Mercenary Kings is a little too Gorny to be saccharine, the game is still written like a mix between an 80's action movie and a Saturday morning cartoon like G.I. Joe, with characters spouting goofy G-rated one-liners at each other and the story not being taken particularly seriously. Then Dr. Neil, the man the main characters have been tasked with rescuing, reveals himself to be Evil All Along after the death of Commander Baron, and with his depraved cloning experiments (along with being at least partially responsible for turning the last three members of the Kings into the Brainwashed and Crazy Prime Soldiers,) turns out to be a far creepier villain than Baron could ever hope to be.
  • LeChuck from the Monkey Island series can be truly threatening sometimes. And even when he's more humorous, his entire concept of being a demon zombie pirate is incredibly vile. To drive the point home, he slaughtered a ship's entire crew before the start of the first game, tortures Guybrush with a voodoo doll in the second game note , becomes a demon in the third game and, again, slaughters several dozens of pirates, and to top it all off in Tales of Monkey Island he stabs Guybrush. He kills the protagonist of the game!
  • Moshi Monsters: The main setting is mainly a wacky Sugar Bowl, with little creatures running around, but there are a group of villains: the Criminal League Of Naughty Critters, or C.L.O.N.C. for short. Though not all C.L.O.N.C. members are scary enough to fit this trope, a few of them are. These include their leader, who once hatched an Evil Plan to kill the entire planet's population, Dr. Strangeglove who likes to turn little animals into a Servant Race of Always Chaotic Evil creatures called Glumps, and Sweet Tooth who, despite their obsession with candy and clownlike appearance is still pretty creepy with their frequent use of mind control.
  • Mother:
    • EarthBound (1994) combines this with Mood Whiplash, in the final fight, in what had started as a funny and lighthearted game, with Giygas, a horrible Eldritch Abomination with more than a few similarities to Azathoth that you cannot defeat in the normal manner and whose attacks are so powerful your mind cannot comprehend them, but the fourth wall doesn't protect him from you.
    • Mother 3 has King Porky Minch, who commits an array of disgustingly horrible acts,note  ultimately because he was bored. Being influenced by Giygas will do that.
  • Mystic Messenger is primarily a light-hearted Otome Game where you chat with hot guys on a messenger app, help them prepare a party for charity, and pursue one of your choice. Generally, the conflicts of the early parts avoid getting too serious. However, the game does have a fair share of surprisingly dark villains.
    • The overall antagonists are Mint Eye, a genuinely creepy cult that seeks to bring about paradise through horrific brainwashing. The first four routes are not too dark because they are in the background, but from Seven's route onward, they are brought to the forefront and the story as a whole shifts to a darker tone.
      • Unknown, the second-highest member, is an Ax-Crazy lunatic who is responsible for the Surprisingly Creepy Moments in the first four routes whenever he shows up. The last three routes put far more focus on him, showing the full extent of his insanity, and it is played as much for poignant tragedy as horror.
      • The Savior, leader of Mint Eye, is a manipulative and even-more deranged Dark Messiah who is responsible for all the horrors of the cult, and her Domestic Abuse of V is played fully seriously — unlike the more comedic Echo Girl and the Choi sisters, Rika is a genuinely scary Otome villainess.
    • Zigzagged with Echo Girl, the Arc Villain of Zen's route. She herself is primarily Played for Laughs, but her False Rape Accusation towards Zen as revenge for him rejecting her sexual advances is treated dead seriously and comes dangerously close to destroying his reputation and acting career.
  • Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl features few villain characters and the ones that do aren't that big of a deal: Zim is an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, Reptar is a powerful Kaiju, but it's often depicted as Not Evil, Just Misunderstood and Ren is pretty psychotic, but too weak to really be able to cause harm, as well as fighting alongside the much more gentle Stimpy. Then comes The Shredder. Despite being based on the hammy 1987 version of him, this time he is a Composite Character and takes cues from his more serious and deadly 2003 and 2012 counterparts. All of his moves are a lot more deadly looking than anyone else's in the cast and none of his quotes are humourous or lighthearted.
  • Nitroplus Blasterz Heroines Infinite Duel is a fairly standard 2D all-female fighting game, this time with the characters all being from other Nitro Plus series with a few outside cameos. Aside from some blood splatters during combat and a lot of the characters coming from fairly dark source material, there's not much that particularly dark about it compared to other fighting games. And then there's Saya, an Eldritch Abomination who only looks like a cute girl because her true appearance has a tendency to drive people insane just by looking at it. All of her attacks (as well as her stage) are full of bloody and visceral imagery, and it's heavily implied that she eats her opponents after she defeats them.
  • NiGHTS into Dreams… has a relatively cutesy and bright-colored aesthetic to it (much like Kirby, but to a lesser extent), but the bosses, in addition to being (arguably) the most difficult parts of the game are Eldritch Abominations that look like something out of a Tim Burton movie. In particular, the final boss Wizeman, who wants to invade the real world by stealing the Ideya of dreamers, is a horrifying villain who has little redeeming qualities.
  • Pikuniku seems harmless with its colorful world full of simply-designed, cartoony characters, but the Big Bad Mister Sunshine is a Villain with Good Publicity who's conned the people of the island of selling all their resources, including their crops, trees, and water, to him. Then he gets worse when it turns out Mr Sunshine is plotting to destroy the island with a volcanic eruption so he can rebuild his old, destroyed hometown and populate it with his loyal robots and mutant minions.
  • Pokémon:
  • Puyo Puyo is a cute puzzle game, but...
    • Puyo Puyo~n has Doppelganger Arle, who’s plot is to Kill and Replace Arle, and possesses the Dark Prince to help enable this, causing him to act quite a bit more seriously than usual. Notably, she’s the only villain in the series to die (though this death was undone in Puyo Puyo Quest) in the Dreamcast version of the game.
    • Puyo Puyo 7 introduces us to Ecolo, a Humanoid Abomination with plans on destroying the world, and while he seems like a Well-Intentioned Extremist, his real plans are to do this for fun. Later appearances of his toned him down, though.
    • Puyo Puyo Chronicle features Rafisol, the only character in the series to actively assault another character in a cutscene. Unlike Ecolo, her destructive desires are played dead seriously, and she’s basically an embodiment of hatred. Subverted in the ending cutscene, though.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart has the same atmosphere as its predecessors, showing a cast of colorful characters and an arsenal of unconventional weapons. Then there's Emperor Nefarious, Dr. Nefarious' more successful and more threatening alternate dimension counterpart.
  • Shantae is a pretty lighthearted and irreverent series that basically ping-pongs between cute and sex appeal, with pretty much any heavier stuff being left to your imagination or happening off-screen, and the villains consist of comedic buffoons with a few sexy vixens. Even Risky Boots, the usual Big Bad and a legitimately competent and serious threat, never goes farther than standard Take Over the World plots and spends too much time being funny or having moments of depth to be considered "vile". But the two Big Bads who aren't Risky, and one Arc Villain she created, have shown themselves to be much, much worse:
    • Shantae and the Pirate's Curse: The Pirate Master, who taught Risky everything she knows, is played dead serious, has zero redeeming qualities, and is something far closer to a Humanoid Abomination who spreads corruption wherever he goes than anything else. It's implied he did terrible things to Risky Boots when she was his first mate, so much so that she sides with Shantae in a heartbeat to stop him, he killed numerous genies in the past, and in the end when he captures Risky Boots it's rather jarring to find her visibly beaten and helplessly left tied up on her knees rather than anything cute or funny that happens when any other villain in the series captures someone. Then he tops it of by trying to wipe out all genies, staring with Shantae.
    • Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: Nega-Shantae, introduced in Shantae: Risky's Revenge but given an expanded role in the Friends To The End DLC. Unlike the typical comical villains of the series, she is an evil, Ax-Crazy magic being who threatens to take over Shantae's body and destroy Scuttle Town, outright kills Holly Lingerbean for failing to defeat Shantae's friends, tries to trick Shantae's friends into thinking she had killed Shantae twice and trap them in an eternal nightmare, and is played completely seriously, with no jokes at all.
    • Shantae and the Seven Sirens: The titular seven sirens are mostly amicable despite being villains, but their leader, the Empress Siren, is a tyrant who steals life force from others to keep her youth and wants to do it throughout the entire world. She even tries to destroy her homeland and her sisters just to kickstart her plan.
  • Sly Cooper is a fun, zany series about a Gentleman Thief Rascally Raccoon in a World of Funny Animals, styled after Saturday Morning Cartoons like Darkwing Duck. And then these guys show up:
    • The first game's Big Bad, Clockwerk, is the leader of the Fiendish Five, but lacks in any of their humor or banter in favor of cold efficiency and malice. He's spent untold centuries attempting to kill the members of the Cooper Clan and got close multiple times, tracked down and killed Sly's parents, and uses a Sadistic Choice to lure Sly into a death trap filled with poisonous gas. Clockwerk is, to put simply, a competent and monstrous Serial Killer played entirely straight in a kids' game. He even posthumously maintains this role for the second game, as the mere possibility of his revival alone is enough to make the entire conflict all the more dire- the main plot point is trying to collect all the various parts of his body to destroy them once and for all.
    • Likewise, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time depicts Penelope as a chilling sociopath who ruins the lives of Sly and Bentley out of greed and jealousy.
  • Solatorobo: Red the Hunter, while having some dark moments of its own in the form of the Eldritch Abomination known as Lares or Elh's backstory of being the Last of Her Kind and being cursed with Purpose-Driven Immortality as a result, is still a relatively light-hearted game set in an Adventure-Friendly World filled with Funny Animal people, starring the titular adventurer-for-hire as he does odd jobs and goes on a quest to stop Bruno from Taking Over The World. That is, until you reach Part Two of the game, where Baion takes over as the true Big Bad, and everything goes downhill fast. He reveals completely casually that he's the reason why Elh's people— the Paladin Clan, dedicated to sealing away monstrous Titano-Machina like Lares and Lemures— were wiped out by having their homeland burned to the ground, just so they wouldn't interfere in his plans. His "children", the pseudo-hybrids artificially created by him and Merveille, are treated by him as assets to throw away should they either be useless or become useless. His ultimate plan is to use the power of Juno to perform a World Sundering that would exterminate the Caninu and Felineko, and rationalizes his actions as being "an Order from the Earth itself" to punish the people of the new world and "remake paradise". Needless to say, whichever tone the game has immediately switches on a dime whenever Baion is brought up. His minions Nero and Blanck are treated with this same seriousness, being introduced turning an entire section of a city to rubble and being happy to kill innocent civilians out of pure sadistic glee.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The Hero Mode of the first two Splatoon games has its dark elements, but nothing significantly nasty even with DJ Octavio brainwashing Callie and forcing her to fight her cousin and the new agent investigating her disappearance. While 2's Octo Expansion DLC ventures into darker territory, it still remains somewhat funky... until the very end. Putting the 'ancient' in 'ancient evil', Commander Tartar is an artificial intelligence left over from the Anthropocene which was originally programmed to observe the evolution of life beyond humanity and pass on the old world's wisdom to its inheritors. However, it went rogue after witnessing the old conflicts between the new world's inhabitants, including the Great Turf War, and judged them as unworthy for the very flaws its programmers possessed. While Tartar is only deeply dedicated to following its orders right down to the letter, what makes it this is the repulsive extent to which it executes its new directives: forming a shell company called the Kamabo Corporation to capture and extract the memories of its test subjects, testing their combat prowess in a multitude of sadistic examinations, and ultimately imprisoning and violently grinding up the successful subjects (failures like Iso Padre are left to wander the Deepsea Metro forever), using their liquefied remains to create a "sludge of supreme DNA" that would act as a form of primordial soup after another mass extinction. A mass extinction it plans to create using an unfathomably powerful ink cannon... and if you fail to disable the superweapon, it does just that.
  • Spyro the Dragon:
    • The series takes place in a dreamlike environment with mostly cute characters... but occasionally has genuinely creepy enemies. The Dark Passage level from the first game is rife with these as is Haunted Towers.
    • The Metropolis level from Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! is a rather jarring break in an otherwise cutesy game, with its psychotic cows in space suits who stare angrily and shoot you, as well as exploding pigs who come flying at you out of nowhere (and they will always hit you unless you kill them first). The robotic sharks in water levels are horrifying, especially when you try to go in there without a submarine (you are killed instantly). And also there are levels where plants can eat you. There are quite a few bosses who are pretty unnerving as well.
    • The Sorceress in Spyro: Year of the Dragon, who steals all the baby dragon eggs because she wants to kill them and use their wings for an immortality spell. Yikes! No wonder her Dragon did a Heel–Face Turn after she found out! The most disturbing part is that she didn't need to kill the hatchlings, she just didn't want them squirming about while she cut them off. Scorch, the 3rd boss, is pretty damn creepy as well, being solely created for the purpose of brutally murdering the heroes. Granted the manner the Sorceress reveals her evil plan fails to be that terrifying at all...
    The Sorceress: What did you think I was going to do with all those dragons? Open a zoo?
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • The Bros.' Arch-Enemy Bowser ultimately counts even underneath all the ham. He is the Great Demon King Koopa after all, and can cause major damage when he's actually trying. He tries on two separate occasions to remake the universe in his own image, which is exactly what Dimentio wanted to do, but old Bowser did it by stealing from a powerful cosmic caretaker of baby stars with nothing but his Airship fleet and his army. Dry Bowser is him resurrected as a huge demonic skeleton. And there's Giga Bowser... Let's also not forget the time when he decided to team up with his Paper counterpart and ultimately planned to destroy the Paper universe by burning the book containing it.
    • Paper Mario:
      • Paper Mario 64: Some of the later bosses come off like this. You have the "Invincible" Tubba Blubba, who's essentially this unbeatable, soulless-looking zombie that even ghosts are afraid of, until you find his sentient heart, Huff-N-Puff, who outright tried to kill the inhabitants of Flower Fields by covering the skies in clouds (even goes so far as to try and take their source of water to do so, which he'd also need to power his cloud machine), and the Crystal King, a mysterious being completely unknown to any species in the Mario universe who took over the sacred palace he resides in, and makes the most direct threat on Mario's life in his dialogue than the other bosses.
      • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: For most of the game, the villains are a sinister, shadowy army known as the X-Nauts who are seeking to free an ancient evil with which to take over the world. In the end, this evil is revealed to be ancient, utterly merciless demon known as the Shadow Queen, who was sealed away long ago to prevent her from taking over the world. On being freed, she casually destroys Sir Grodus and attempts to once more spread her rule over the world and fill it forever with shadows and evil.
      • Super Paper Mario: Count Bleck is a pronounced nihilist who seeks to destroy the multiverse by consuming it with the Void; one of his main lackeys, the Ax-Crazy Monster Clown Dimentio, seeks to instead usurp him and use the power of the Chaos Heart to rule everything.
      • Paper Mario: The Origami King: While the previous two games had Bowser possessed by strange artifacts with no known motives, King Olly is a no-nonsense villain whose sole presence darkens the scene with his motives of creating and using the 1,000 Paper Crane technique to make a wish to kill all Toads in existence being so utterly and horrendously vile that it gives even Bowser, a Koopa who takes immeasurable pride in being a villain, some pause. He also takes matters into his own hands by throwing a boulder to trap Olivia in which results in Bobby’s Heroic Sacrifice.
      • Also from Origami King, Scissors is dead serious in their mission to protect the streamer, and any whose on the sharp side of their blade will be cut to pieces. This is reflected in-game as attacking the blade will one-shot you. They also don't say anything when beaten.
    • Mario & Luigi:
      • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: The witch Cackletta is mostly a fairly typical conquer-the-kingdom-and/or-world type; her creepiness comes in chiefly when, after being defeated, her spirit flees her body and possess Bowser. In the climax, the Bros. need to enter Bowser's body themselves and battle Cackletta's monstrous soul.
      • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time: The Shroobs are an alien army fleeing a dying world and seek to conquer the Mushroom Kingdom. They suck the life out of innocent Toads to fuel their machinery — the resulting fluid is patterned with anguished faces — destroyed Toad Town, and have no qualms in hurting the baby Mario Bros. And the final boss, Elder Princess Shroob, has no qualms with shooting down Shroob UFOs just so they can crash on top of you.
      • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: The game's ultimate villain, the Dark Star, is an ancient force of pure evil that seeks the world's destruction. It takes Bowser (with some help of the Mario Bros) to defeat it.
      • Mario & Luigi: Dream Team: The villain for the majority of the game, Antasma, is a dream-dwelling bat demon who seeks to rule the dream world and fill it with endless nightmares for him to feed on and grow strong from.
    • Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars: The villains are the Smithy Gang, a group of living weapons who are attempting to conquer the Mushroom Kingdom and quickly overrun most of it. Their leader, Smithy, is eventually revealed to come from a dimension he rules over entirely, and seeks to remake the game's world and turn it into a word filled only with weapons.
    • Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon shows that after his defeat, King Boo is willing to do anything to make Luigi and E. Gadd suffer as much as possible, even attempting to destroy the fabric of the universe.
    • Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle has the Eldritch Abomination, Megabug. It's an Omnicidal Maniac and is the cause of everything that goes wrong in the world and uses Demonic Possession on Bowser.
    • Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope: Cursa is by far and away not only one of the most serious Mario villains, but also one of the genuinely scariest. A very sadistic and cruel creature who has no problem killing hundreds to millions of innocent Star babies just to spite their adoptive mother. Absolutely NOTHING about this thing is even remotely silly or comedic and is an extremely dead serious villain for a Mario game, let alone a Rabbids game.
    • Super Mario Odyssey: One of the penultimate bosses that Mario faces off is the Ruined Dragon. It falls into Uncanny Valley due its appearance looking like it came from Skyrim.
  • Super Smash Bros. is usually a relatively fun time for various Nintendo characters, both goofy and gritty. The story modes mostly follow suit, until the villains are involved.
    • Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Subspace Emissary starts out mainly as a lighthearted series of brawls between game mascots, with villains who are creepy and ominous but who don't do much that's actively monstrous — at least outside of setting off Subspace Bombs that destroy chunks of reality. And Ganondorf nearly exterminating the ROBs towards the end, after they're revealed to have been enslaved. And Tabuu, in the very climax, destroying nearly every single fighter in one go and coming within a hair of consuming the entire world.
    • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: World of Light beings with the game's Big Bad, Galeem, destroying the universe and turning every fighter into a mind-controlled puppet in its quest to create a world of unending order. Then its enemy, the chaos lord Dharkon, gets involved, and the game turns into the characters trying to ride out a struggle between two godlike beings trying to reshape reality into mutually-exclusive visions.
    • Within the playable roster, we get characters like Ganondorf and Ridley, whose most intimidating beastly appearances contradict the cartoony villains like Bowser, King Dedede and King K. Rool. A 3rd-Party example is the human character Sephiroth.
    • Introduced since Melee is Giga Bowser, who appears when Bowser, (who's appearance in Smash changed from his canon appearances) turns into a more terrifying beast. This form has never made it in any Mario games outside of Smash.
  • The Sims: Bustin' Out (console version) is a fairly lighthearted affair whose antagonist is a rich jerk named Malcolm Landgraab who takes people's possessions away and lines up fading actors and actresses with bad movie deals. The Player-Controlled Sim (if pursuing the Gangster career), on the other hand, is a criminal who works their way up through vandalism, increasingly severe forms of theft, beatings, extortion, arson, and even contract killing. By the time they get to Malcolm's Mansion, they whacked their boss in retaliation for not getting a raise and claimed the position for themselves. In a series where bad people carry cards, the player character is a monstrous individual who will readily get their hands bloody for money and power.
  • Toontown Online is a video game filled with goofy cartoon characters that enjoy tossing pies, riding trolleys, fishing, and playing with their doodles. Likewise, their homeland of Toontown happens to be bright and colorful as well. Unfortunately, the main villains of the game (the Cogs) wish to take over and transform Toontown into a land full of colorless skyscrapers. It's best reflected in the Cog HQs, in particular Bossbot HQ, which has surprisingly eerie music.
  • Touhou Project is a series whose games usually end with even the game's bad guys becoming friendly and nice and befriending the protagonists, that is when the bosses are even villains to begin with (the 12th and 13th installments have no bad guys), but there are some genuinely evil characters.
    • Saigyou Ayakashi, the Cherry Tree of Perfect Cherry Blossom. It turns out to be an evil spirit that Mind Rapes people with its otherworldly beauty into languishing under its branches until they fall asleep, whereupon it consumes their souls.
    • Utsuho Reiuji's plan was to set the world ablaze and assimilate it as a part of hell. Sure, she decided to do this mostly because she had gone crazy with power at the time, and she's actually a lot more stupid than she is malevolent, but the fact still remains that the world was almost destroyed because a Hell Raven ate a god, gained its power and then didn't spare a second to consider the possibility that people on the surface might not want their world to turn into a literal hellscape but instead decided that if you get unfathomable power, you're obligated to try to Take Over the World.
    • Junko, the Greater-Scope Villain of Urban Legend in Limbo and Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom. She attempts to commit genocide on the Lunarians, just to get back at one of them, Chang'e, for something her husband, Hou'yi, who Junko has already killed, did. She attempts to do this by filling the Moon with impurity, making a Lunarian Goddess attempt to purify Gensokyo for the Lunarians to escape there (which would cause death of humans and yokai alike). Junko has no problem in letting all these people become collateral casualties as long as she gets her revenge. The extra stage shows her and Hecatia attempting to attack the Lunarians that tried to escape the moon. She does give up when you show up, but just because she knows you will beat her anyway.
  • Undertale is a very quirky RPG in the vein of EarthBound (1994), with a myriad of goofy and likable characters, and even includes talking down enemies from fighting as a major gameplay mechanic. And then there's three villains who provide the greatest amount of Nightmare Fuel in the game:
  • Wadanohara, full stop. The game starts with a lighthearted story, easy and lax gameplay, and utterly adorable characters including Sal, who outright sexually assaults the main character, sets up a war between two kingdoms, and wants to plunge the sea in eternal suffering and death. Knight of Cerebus doesn't begin to describe him.
  • Wario Land 3 has enemies and bosses typical of the series... and then there's Rudy the Clown, who employs Interface Screw and sudden subversion of a core game mechanic. Not only is he a powerful demon (blood-red teeth and Evil Laugh not shown) who becomes even more disturbing when he Turns Red, but he's the only thing in the game that can actually kill Wario, and the game auto-saves if he does, complete with a Game Over screen immediately afterwards. Fortunately, all this does is let you skip the cutscene before the fight next time, and most consider him an Anticlimax Boss once you know how to dodge his lethal attack.

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