Villainous Breakdown / Video Games

Chakravartin, before and after Asura makes a fool of him.

"I... have beaten fleets of THOUSANDS! Consumed a galaxy of FLESH AND MIND AND BONE!"

— Gravemind, Halo 3

Villains completely losing it in Video Games.

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Games A-D

• Ace Combat:
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War: After losing to Razgriz Squadron, Ofnir and Grabacr Squadrons challenge the heroes a last time to ensure their last-ditch attempt at Belkan revenge, a Colony Drop on the Osean capital will succeed. By this time, they clearly have lost their marbles, ranting about how they will not be denied their revenge and cursing the Razgriz as demons. Only Grabacr 1 ends up subverting the trope, falling into the usual attitude expected from Ace Combat rivals once he's shot down.
    Ofnir 2: We will return to haunt you for all of eternity! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!
    Marcus "Swordsman" Snow: This battle is over, accept your defeat!
    Ofnir 2: We will NEVER give in!
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown: Captain Matias Torres of the Alicorn has brief moments of instability in the main campaign, culminating in his rant about Trigger having "walked all over [my plan] with his dirty boots! Over the crisp, white sheets of my bed that I had just made!" after a minor setback. But it's in the DLC missions that he really loses his shit and shows himself to be the single most unhinged individual in the entire franchise. Any facade of having a noble goal crumbles as he starts ranting about the "beauty" of nuking a million people because it's "a clean shot on a difficult target", yelling and cackling all the while for you to "PICTURE IT!" He even has the back half of his sub flooded so the tilting will aim the broken railgun, and he dies laughing as his sub explodes.
• In The Amazing Spider-Man, we find out that Alastair Smythe had escaped custody and, despite Peter wanting to go after him, Gwen keeps him back, reassuring him that everything'll be okay. Then we find out, it's not — he's found out that he's becoming something like the Lizard and he's flipped his lid, activating one of his Slayers and using it to kill himself.
• The Engineer in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs goes through a massive one near the end of the game. Throughout the game are a number of cylindrical message displays that keep workers updated on the machine's status ("Facility flooded; get to the sluice gates," etc). Towards the end, as you're Spanner in the Worksing your way down, The Engineer rewrites them to simply say "stophimstophimstophimstophimstophimstophimstophimstophim". Also, he gives a really creepy final rant on the horrors he is trying to prevent as Oswald prepares to merge with his Machine, destroying them both:
  The Engineer: I have stood knee deep in mud and bone and filled my lungs with mustard gas. I have seen two brothers fall. I have lain with holy wars and copulated with the autumnal fallout. I have dug trenches for the refugees; I have murdered dissidents where the ground never thaws, and starved the masses into faith! A child's shadow burnt into the brickwork! A house of skulls in the jungle! The innocent, the innocent, Mandus. Trod and bled and gassed and starved and beaten and murdered and enslaved! This is your coming century! They will eat them, Mandus! They will make pigs of you all! And they will bury their snouts into your ribs and they will eat your hearts!
• ANNO: Mutationem: C starts to undergo one once Ann has arrived at The Consortium's facility. With concerns that his Evil Plan could be prevented and learning Sigrid had survived his Uriah Gambit, his voice starts to shift into a demonic entity while ranting at his associates when they tell him he doesn't have a chance, to the point he attempts to overthrow The Consortium and take over for himself. After realizing Castor, the only person who could've initiated his master plan, had been defeated, he goes into a ballistic rage.

C: That imbecile Castor failed!!! AAAAHAAAAAGRH!!!

• The final boss of Trilby in The Art of Theft. First he smugly taunts you about how he's going to torture you and how you'll beg to give xj unit, then he gets slightly scared after you hit the first wire. After that, he starts desperately begging for you to stop and surrender, which progresses to angrily yelling about how Trilby killed them all. Trilby escapes.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • Assassin's Creed:
    • Sibrand, a Templar who'd become homicidally paranoid as his fellow Templars were felled by an Assassin's hand, particularly since he'd learned from the Apple/Piece of Eden that there was no afterlife.
    • Warren Vidic starts out as a smug snake only to later rant angrily when Assassins attempt a break-in of the Abstergo facility and accusing the player character Desmond of having orchestrated it, despite Desmond having been estranged from the Assassins for a decade.
  • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood:
    • Sequences 8 and 9 are essentially one long breakdown/Humiliation Conga for Cesare Borgia. He loses all his supporters, kills his father, the Pope, and is betrayed by his sister, causing him to lose the Apple of Eden to Ezio Auditore, the mastermind behind his family's decline. Then the remnants of his army are destroyed by the Apple-wielding Ezio and his fellow Assassins, while the Cardinals — whose appointments Cesare had paid for — turn their backs on him, backing a family rival to succeed his father as Pope. He's finally driven out of Rome by Ezio's supporters and arrested by a general whose family he'd pressed into service, then dragged away by his former elites — they're the Papal Guards, after all. He escaped a year later and made an attempt at a comeback in Spain, under the command of a relative in France, but Ezio followed him — thanks to the Apple — and fights through his entire army alone, then manages to finally defeat Cesare in personal combat. At this point, all he can do is rant and rave about how no man can kill him, so Ezio leaves him in the hands of Fate... by dropping him off the castle wall.
    • Even his would-be Badass Boast of "If I want to live, I live. If I want to take, I take! If I want you to die... you DIIIIIIE!" counts, since it's declared when Lucrezia reveals that their father had poisoned him, this being after his father talked down to him for starting the whole mess and denied him access to the Apple of Eden or funding to continue his military campaign in Romagna. Depending on how much side content the player has done before this point, you get to see more of just how badly things had fallen apart for the Borgia regime, yet Cesare is just finding this out now.
    • Rodrigo Borgia also has this after Ezio defeated him in a fist fight and the Vault had not opened for him. Rodrigo simply screams "THIS IS MY DESTINY!!! ME! I AM THE PROPHET!!!!", only to request that Ezio kill him when his so-called destiny is denied, but Ezio chooses instead to leave him alive with the knowledge that he was defeated and that his decade-long plot was for naught.
  • Assassin's Creed III has quite a few villainous breakdowns. One from Vidic as Desmond makes short work of the Mooks sent to stop him, and killing Cross. Charles Lee also has one after Connor kills Haytham, swearing to destroy everything Connor holds dear: his tribe and the Homestead, and he's gonna make him watch.
  • In Assassins Creed IV, John goes into this when his plan to have Juno possess the PC fails when she says it's not time to take a body. He's screaming bloody murder at you about why you're still here.
• Assassin's Creed: Valhalla
  • In the Lincolnscire arc, there are three candidates to vote for ealderman: Hunwald, the previous ealderman's son; Thegn Aelfgar who's not well liked among the Danish population; Bishop Herefrith, the bishop of Lincolnshire. Voting for anyone else but Bishop Herefrith has that one be the new ealderman, and the Bishop goes mad and locks everyone in the church, revealing himself as the Crozier of the Order of the Ancients. He's followed to Anecastre where a siege is started to take him down where he's killed the "pagan" population.
• Chakravartin in Asura's Wrath has an epic one when Asura "extends his arm", but it becomes especially apparent when he ditches his magic and attempts a Pummel Duel with Asura after he lands yet another punch on him. Upon transforming into his Creator form, he regains some of his cool, only to lose it again completely when he really gets on the losing end.
• Baldur's Gate II:
  • Near the end, the protagonist finally learns what happened to Big Bad Jon Irenicus and what his plan entails. After being foiled, he comes face to face with his former lover and loses control for the first and only time in the entire game.
    Irenicus: I... I do not remember your love, Ellesime. I've tried. I've tried to recreate it, to spark it anew in my memory. But it is gone... a hollow, dead thing. For years, I clung to the memory of it. Then the memory of the memory. And then nothing. The Seldarine took that from me, too. I look upon you and I feel nothing. I remember nothing but you turning your back on me, along with all the others. Once my thirst for power was everything. And now I hunger only for revenge. And... I... Will... HAVE IT!
  • Notably, in Irenicus' subsequent appearance in Hell itself, he is once again calm, if not altogether there. For the first time, there's also a hint of uncertainty in his threats before the fight begins, given that by this point you've already thrashed him in battle a couple of times.
  • Sendai in Throne of Bhaal has a rather amusing sequence where she sends villain after villain after the protagonist, growing steadily more freaked out as no matter what she does she can't seem to stop the protagonist.
• Baten Kaitos Origins:
  • Both Nasca and Heughes have major breakdowns if you destroy their machina armas. If you opt to spare them, they go crazier, with Heughes screaming threats and Nasca brokenly pleading for a fight.
  • Baelheit is mostly calm throughout the story, but he goes absolutely ballistic when you confront him at the climax, to the point where he shoots his daughter in the face, just to make a point. And then after Verus reveals himself, he changes from the cool authority figure you've known to a demented, cackling fiend.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • In Batman: Arkham Asylum, the Riddler goes from insulting you to accusing you of cheating to threatening to blow up Gotham as you solve more and more of his riddles. Also, the Scarecrow panics as Batman manages to shake off the effects of enough fear toxins to drive 10 men insane. The climax also stems from the Joker throwing a tantrum and accusing Batman of 'spoiling my fun!' when Batman refuses to succumb to the Titan strain that Joker has infected him with and become a monster.
  • In Batman: Arkham Origins, "Enigma" — the Riddler before he took that title — gets extremely pissy as you wreck more and more of his network, insisting that the handlers and relays weren't meant for you to go after and resetting the passwords on later towers into outbursts of rage and demands that you stop. In addition, Bane is almost always calm and collected; but once Batman figures figures out Joker's plan at Blackgate and finds a way to Take a Third Option and avoid killing anyone, Bane decides that he's had enough, and pumps himself full of an unfinished chemical formula that turns him into a 3 meter high monster incapable of forming a single sentence, and loses most of his memory in the process. While he has recovered by the events of Asylum, his breakdown destroyed his body and caused permanent damage to his mind.
  • And in Batman: Arkham Knight, the Joker remnant in Batman's mind gets progressively more panicky throughout the mission where you take control of him. It's understandable, given that Batman's shoving the villain's worst fear (being forgotten) in his face again and again in a bid to shake him off for good. Earlier on, the Arkham Knight himself breaks down during your boss fight with him, as the trauma he suffered as Jason Todd comes back to haunt him. And Riddler's about as stable as he ever was, notably slipping as you solve more and more riddles, beat his last racetrack, and cart him off to the GCPD.
  • Scarecrow also gets this in the end as well. Even after exposing Batman's identity as Bruce Wayne to the world and pumping him full of fear toxin, he's quite scared shitless once Batman gets free and injects Scarecrow with his own fear toxin, making him see Batman as a flaming demon. The next time we see Scarecrow, he's a gibbering mess as he's escorted to maximum security.
  • The Arkham Knight himself becomes steadily more unhinged as the game progresses and his attempts to kill Batman keep failing. He goes from calm, intelligent attacks to throwing tanks and weapons at Batman in desperate attempts to get him. By the time Batman confronts him for the last time, he's completely lost it and tries to hunt Batman down with a sniper rifle while childishly screaming things like "STOP TALKING TO ME!". And once Batman forgives him for all that he's done and offers to help repair the damage the Joker did to him, he just breaks completely and runs away once Batman's back is turned. You don't see him again until the finale of the game, where he saves Batman from Scarecrow in an act of penance.
  • The Mooks as a whole go through this during Predator missions, as Batman picks them off one by one. They go from calmly working together, organizing searches and shouting taunts at Batman, to jumping at the slightest noise, abandoning each other, and begging Batman for mercy.
    Thug 1: We got another man down here! (Long Beat) Come on, I need help over here!
    Thug 2: Screw you! It's every man for himself!
• Batman: The Telltale Series: Batman pulls this off on his foes in the final episode:
  • If you confront Harvey Dent at the beginning of the game, Bruce is able to get close enough to Harvey and attempt an "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight, forcing Harvey to put a gun to his own head and flip his coin. When Bruce snatches it out of the air, he begs Bruce to give it back so he can find out what he flipped. However, Bruce gets rid of it (either by pocketing it or tossing it down a staircase), causing the former mayor to collapse on the ground, curl up into the fetal position, and start sobbing.
  • At the end of the game, when you confront Lady Arkham/Vicki Vale, you're given the choice of unmasking to save Alfred or try to attack. If you choose to unmask, Vicki is shocked that Bruce and Batman are one in the same, can't reconcile that they are, and flips her lid, attacking Bruce while Laughing Mad.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine: The only thing that can harm Bendy is the reel labeled "The End," which he keeps inside the one place that all other studio inhabitants are too scared to go: his hideout. When he discovers Henry listening to Joey's recorded instructions and picking the reel up, he goes One-Winged Angel. Once Henry finally gets the reel playing, Bendy looks in anger at the projected end card. Then he literally breaks down until there's nothing left of him.
• BioShock does this with both Andrew Ryan ("Does your master hear me? Atlas! You can kill me, but you will never have my city!") and Frank Fontaine ("I'm gonna splice, and splice, until THERE'S NOTHING LEFT TO SPLICE WITH!")
• In BioShock 2, Sofia Lamb spends most of the game smugly lecturing the player on her superior ethics. By the end, she's a bitter, broken woman, knowing that her own daughter has rejected her and her plan for Rapture.
• BlazBlue:
  • Yuuki Terumi tends to get rather loud when his schemes show signs of going off the rails. Murder usually follows in these cases.
    • In Carl's bad ending in CS, when he realizes that Carl is a vital piece to Takamagahara's puzzle, he orders Mu to stop her attacks, swears at the top of his lungs, immobilizes Carl, butchers Ada/Nirvana, and demoralizes Carl further before killing him. He's back to his normal composure when he's done with the butchering, however.
    • In Valkenhayn's bad ending, Terumi is having a ball slaughtering the Silver Wolf, going so far as to give him orders as if a dog ("Speak! Roll over! Play dead! PLAY DEAD, GODDAMNIT!" *laugh*), before Phantom teleports him away. Before he could turn his blade on her (or it?), he realizes Takamagahara still has him on a leash, and could reset on him if he killed Valkenhayn early, so he calms down quick.
    • In the ending to Makoto's story, while he doesn't crack up as much as the others, his voice and facial expressions once Tsubaki is away show that he is barely restraining contempt for Makoto for unknowingly dividing his plans by zero. He bursts into screaming when Rachel steals his quarry right out from under him soon after. And unlike the prior, the damage is permanent — when he sees Makoto chatting with Jin in his story, Terumi decides to introduce himself with a knife to Makoto's back (Jin parries the blow), and in Makoto's arcade mode, he is seen periodically bursting into laughter and eating Adventus.
    • In the Wheel of Fortune Drama CD, there's this wonderful moment where an extremely pissed Hakumen wills himself out of the Boundary at only 15% of his full power, and absolutely destroys both Hazama and Ignis at the same time! Hazama is left a terrified, gibbering mess, frantically crying for Relius to help him.
  • BlazBlue: Chronophantasma:
    • Terumi gets in a fight with Hakumen, who begins setting up the Susano'o Unit's Time Killer function. While Terumi taunts at how easily he can avoid it, Trinity Glassfield tethers him in place, leaving him prone to Hakumen's assault with no chance of survival. In the time he has left, all that remains is hatred towards Trinity, who he kills and tosses off a cliff before the last grain in his hourglass falls — all as one last, twisted act of revenge.
    • Also, Relius joins the fun. He's just about ready to seize the Lynchpin and fulfill the magnum opus he built up for years, and while he doesn't have Rettenjou at his command (Bang's carrying it), he has Bang's love interest (Litchi) and young apprentice (Carl) as pawns to coerce it out of his hands. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Tsubaki Yayoi (fresh off her brainwashing) and Makoto Nanaya (a separate target of Relius', who helped Tsubaki break free) run decoy duty for Litchi and Carl, and Valkenhayn intercepts Relius in turn, leaving Bang free to activate the Lynchpin on his own terms, flushing all of Relius' work down the tubes. The double whammy of his desire for perfection being undone in front of him and Imperator Librarius leaving him to his doom, Relius completely shuts down, losing his will to go on and leaving himself to Valkenhayn's mercy before Carl and Litchi intervene — the terms being that Relius will help Carl restore Ada before commencing his atonement for his laundry list of atrocities. All Relius had to say on that is that he looks forward to the last part.
    • Chronophantasma Extend adds another player to the "How hard can you lose your shit" game. During Lambda's Arcade mode, the aforementioned faces off against her 'sister' Nu-13, who is back to her old "kill Ragna" mentality, only to recognize that Lambda wants to help him, something she doesn't want. It's after the fight that this trope kicks in; Nu jumps completely off the deep end, growling a rapid-fire "kill" before declaring that "You'll all die!" and disappearing; the implication being that she has devolved from omnicidal obsession over Ragna to just plain omnicidal mania. As the fourth game is still on the horizon, only time will tell how this plays out.
    • In Central Fiction, there's a really creepy bit where Nu-13 bumps into Naoto Kuragane, who looks like Ragna. At first, Nu (who had also been expecting Ragna) flips into her "obsessive and clingy over Ragna" mentality... and then she realizes that it isn't him. Nu very clearly wasn't alright upstairs to begin with, but this drives her Ax-Crazy to new levels. She begins hysterically screaming at Naoto and trying to slice him to ribbons.
• Borderlands 2:
  • Handsome Jack has a pretty big one as his last monologue. Now, while his breakdown did start when you kill Angel, his daughter, his last desperate, hoarse rant about how he's the hero and the Vault Hunters are bandit scum in the aftermath of his whole plan falling to pieces at the last moment is definitely the climax. You can even kill him during it if you want him to shut the hell up already.
  • In the Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt DLC, Professor Nakayama's breakdown starts more or less as soon as he successfully goads the Vault Hunters into coming after him (if only just to shut him up). He then spends the rest of the DLC in utter fear of the players and freaking out as they carve their way through his forces.
    Nakayama: Did—did you just kill my elites? What the hell, those were my best guys! Oh, I am so screwed.
    Hammerlock: What a rubbish evil genius you are. Good god, man, throw us some sarcastic taunts or something!
  • In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, which is focused on Jack's Start of Darkness, while he does increasingly horrible things throughout the game, he transitions from morally shady to outright lunacy after Moxxi and the original Vault Hunters blow up his Kill Sat, He fully becomes Handsome Jack at the very end, when he absorbs knowledge of The Warrior from Elpis' vault, only to receive his huge facial scar by Lilith (that he covers with his trademark mask) leaving him with a burning hatred for Pandora, and the knowledge of a superweapon to wipe all out all the "bandits" on it.
    Jack: I'm gonna KILL her! I'm gonna kill them ALL! First, you're gonna find me a doctor. Then we're gonna wipe those bandit bastards off the face of Pandora. And then... then we're gonna wake The Warrior.
    Athena: The what?
    Jack: It's gonna be so good. We're gonna scorch the freakin' planet in fire. There's gonna be screaming... bandits are gonna die left and right... I can't wait! Hahahahaha!
  • In Episode 5 of Tales from the Borderlands, after Helios has crashed and Jack has tried one last time to kill Rhys by forcing him to choke himself to death with his own arm, Rhys begins ripping out all his cybernetics to get rid of him for good. Jack realizes what's about to happen, and starts desperately begging Rhys to stop, even dropping to his knees, saying that he doesn't want to go back to being dead.
    Jack: There's nothing. There's absolutely nothing there. Don't do this.
• Bug Fables: The Wasp King loses it the more the fight against him goes on. First he becomes desperate enough to eat a bad leaf from the wilted Everlasting Sapling, then after the final battle, he screams that his loss is impossible and starts barking orders to his own body to keep fighting.
• In Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the best ending has Raul Menendez imprisoned for life after the complete and utter dissolution of his grand scheme, up to and including his secret escape gambit — this results in him being forced to watch from his cell as Chloe goes on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and publicly mocks him, causing him to completely flip out and bash his face against the TV monitor until his forehead bleeds.
• Castlevania:
  • In Portrait of Ruin, Brauner snaps when Jonathan reveals to him that his daughters aren't really his. "Snaps" is apropos, as part of the breakdown is that he presses his cane hard enough into the floor that it breaks.
  • And in Order of Ecclesia, Master Barlowe completely loses his shit after Shanoa refuses to use Dominus, starting the boss fight where he throws spells around randomly and chews away at the scenery with wild abandon.
    Barlowe: DIE, SHANOA! HOW DARE YOU...EVEN FORGET...WHO RAISED YOU...YOU...STUPID DISCIPLE!!
  • Graham in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is another possible example, due to being Drunk on the Dark Side only to have it all ripped away from him.
  • Dmitrii's breakdown in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow is even worse than Graham's above. Just when he's ready to face off against Soma in a battle of the powers of dominance, he suddenly starts to become unstable and learns the hard way to his disbelief that the power of dominance isn't easily contained and that his soul can't withstand a power that intense. His condition only continues to get worse even after blasting Arikado out of the abyss, and the breakdown ends with him dying in a violent explosion as the demons he gained dominance over suddenly burst out of his back. Sucks to be you, Dmitrii.
• Command & Conquer:
  • In Tiberium Wars, Kane is cool, calm, and absolutely collected throughout the entire game, mercilessly taunting GDI and generally seeming unflappable, until Killian Qatar allies with GDI. His response to this is to flip the fuck out and order the player to Nuke 'em. After Killian's subsequent execution, he calms back down and resumes his usual magnificent bastardry.
  • Stalin in the first Red Alert game is like this as well, going from confident and snide to drunk and slightly unhinged, to breaking his subordinates' necks with his bare hands.
  • In Red Alert 3, the normally calm and collected Emperor Yoshiro of the Empire of the Rising Sun (who believes it is his divine destiny to rule the world) finds out that the Soviets went back in time to change their fate and that the Empire would never have existed if it wasn't for them. He then proceeds to throw a tantrum and loudly say that there is no divine destiny.
  • Anyone on Nod's side who isn't subtly assassinated gets one of these. Particular mention goes to Vega, Killian, the Nod Warlord in Rio (real name unknown), Alexa, and CABAL (to a degree, he just went batshit crazy for no apparent reason in the last mission).
  • Director Boyle, the man in charge of GDI during Tiberium Wars, has one in one of the later missions. Normally, he's a sly-talking politician who gives off an air of both class and arrogance, but nearing the end, he meets with the commander secretly and discusses (read: rants) about how Granger is trying to take his political position.
• Crash Bandicoot: Doctor Neo Cortex has had a few thanks to Crash.
  • In Crash Twinsanity, Cortex is so furious after failing to beat Crash in the first boss fight that he straight up tackles him and tries to beat him up personally, leading to a Big Ball of Violence. He's also reduced to screaming in horror in the ending when he realizes he's trapped in Crash's mind with hundreds of copies of Crash.
  • In Crash: Mind Over Mutant, he takes losing the final battle so badly that he starts bawling like a baby and throwing a temper tantrum.
• In Creepy Castle, Possessor is smug at first in scenario 2, but is losing his cool when first beaten by Butterfly (which he counters by taking control of Moth) and then by Moth escaping his control. Despite all of that, he keeps resorting to more and more extreme measures to accomplish his purpose.
• The Crusader games feature two different versions of this.
  • In No Remorse, the Silencer's continued reversals of most of The Mole's early successes results in The Mole challenging the Silencer, a bona fide Super-Soldier, to single combat. (It doesn't matter that the deck is stacked, because anyone rational would have seen the character had just walked through ten levels of decks that aren't nearly as well-stacked.)
  • In No Regret, the Resistance strikes a major blow after the sixth mission. The LMC strike back in the next mission, but not as effectively as they'd hoped. Chairman Draygan decides to bring in an entire troop carrier of elite soldiers... and the Resistance shoots it out of the sky. He then tries to blow up the Lunar base, while he's on it. The Resistance stops the reactor overload, and he's told by the WEC's President that he's not getting off the moon until he gets the situation back under control... so he pulls all troops back to the headquarters, leaving the majority of the Lunar base under Rebel control, and starts fortifying. He then tries to take the Silencer on in single combat, which works about as well for the bad guys as it did in the first game.
• The Devil from Cuphead doesn't take your breaking his deal too well. As the second phase of his fight progresses on he gradually grows angrier and more frustrated. By the final phase, he has lost all composure, is reduced to pitifully crying parryable tears, and no longer has the strength or will to summon anything other than a lone poker chip on the only remaining platform. Upon defeat, his pride is completely shattered and he can only clutch his head in pain.
• Dawn of War Soulstorm:
  • As the Chaos stronghold mission progresses, Carron, supposedly a powerful Chaos Lord of the Alpha Legion, actually breaks down crying as his shrines are destroyed and the enemy advances, culminating in him snivelling and whining some nonsense about flowers and fleeing the battle. What makes this worse is the fact that he's a Chaos Champion of Khorne, who detests cowards and wants warriors to die in the heat of battle and bloodshed. Contrast with Eliphas the Inheritor, who remains serene and mocking throughout, Lord Crull, who remains psychotically insane throughout, and Lord Bale, who merely gets angry when Sindri betrays him. That said, when he gets angry, Bale gets really angry.
    Lord Bale: SSSSSSSSSIIIINNDRRRII!!
  • In Retribution's Tyranid campaign, when the ascended Azariah Kyras is about to be defeated, he has a short one.
    Kyras: You will choke on me, Great Devourer!
• Comrade Black from de Blob. He really starts to freak out near the game's end.
• From Dead to Rights
  • The first game ends with a climactic battle with Jack Slate against Dick Hennessey and his personal army. Hennessey begins all too confident that Jack's about to die, that his Government Conspiracy has done its job, and he'll leave ruling all of Grant City... and then a news broadcast pops up to reveal that Jack had already ousted him and his co-conspirators right under his nose. Combined with Jack blowing up Hennessey's attack helicopter, he doesn't enter the final battle on a good note.
    Hennessey: What did you do?
    News Anchor: Central amongst those implicated is Lieutenant Dick Hennessey of Grant City's Anti-Crime Squad, and the target of many who feel that his strong-armed tactics fell beyond the law...
    Hennessey: WHAT DID YOU DO?!
  • From the Continuity Reboot Dead to Rights: Retribution: As the game approaches the endgame, we see Redwater really starting to lose his patience from just how much Jack Slate is foiling their evil Police State operation. He otherwise manages to keep his composure in preparation for the inevitable storming of the GAC base, apart from his eloquent rallying of his troops.
    Redwater: Gentlemen. We... are fucking failing! Finally, after months of planning, the city signs us off and we're fucking it up! A single man and a fucking dog put Beta base out of commission. That same man and his fucking dog took back the 87th Precinct with the help of traitors within the GCPD! This is unacceptable!
• Deus Ex: Bob Page in the final mission. ("Go ahead! Blow this place sky-high... You might get rid of ME, but you'll take down Aquinas, the power grid, the whole electronic infrastructure. Is that what you want? Are you completely nuts?"). It gets better. He goes from smugly taunting JC, to attempting to bribe him with increasingly desperate offers of power and money, and finally outright begging him to stop. Merely suggesting that Helios will join with someone other than Page sends him into a raging fury, which is a stark contrast to how he was taunting you just a moment before you speak with Helios.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Devil May Cry 2: After fighting Dante, Arius has an utterly ridiculous one, seen here.
  • Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening:
    • Through most of the game, Vergil acts as an Aloof Big Brother and Evil Twin to Dante, remaining menacing and softspoken even as he shoves a katana into Dante's gut. He then tries to open the portal to the Demon World with the Perfect Amulet and his own blood. When that fails since Lady's blood is also needed, something Arkham left out on purpose, Vergil's composure cracks.
      Vergil: Why isn't this working?!
    • Likewise, Arkham after he's defeated by Dante and Vergil and left severely wounded. He comes across his daughter, Lady, and rants about he should have the power of a demon and that what Sparda did was no different from his actions (namely, sacrificing a human woman. However, Sparda did it out of reluctance since he loved his sacrifice, and she went with it willingly and it was for the good of mankind. Arkham did it purely for his own selfish ends). He begs Lady to help him, and she responds (much to his shock) by putting a bullet in his head.
• In the backstory of Diablo, King Leoric is possessed by Diablo and effectively starts having a Villainous Breakdown while he's still a good guy. He doesn't remain good for long when that happens. He starts getting increasingly paranoid and less sane, until finally when Diablo leaves him, unable to take over completely, he's a raving madman who has to be killed by his own most loyal knights.
  • Diablo himself has one in Diablo III; around the middle of the boss fight with him, he loses patience and uses one of his ultimate attacks on your character: trapping you a Realm of Nightmare where, according to him, no one ever managed to escape from. When you still manage to get out of it, he completely loses it:
    Diablo: NOOOOO! This wretched light must be eradicated!
• Dice and the Tower of the Reanimator: Glorious Princess: The Reanimator believes all humans are violent, greedy, and bigoted beings. In a fist run, Bambooblade proves her wrong by sparing all of her minions, causing her to be enraged at his idealism and to fight more aggressively.
• Overlord GAIA from Digimon World 2. He was able to (though not perfectly) form coherent sentences when he is first encountered. However, he seems to break down after Akira defeats his first form.
  Overlord GAIA: I... am the most powerful... the most powerful... the most powerful... the most powerful... the most powerful...
  Akira: Is it still capable of fighting?
  Overlord GAIA: I... am ultimate... I... ultimate... I... ultimate...
• Disgaea:
  • Both the fake and real Overlord Zenon in Disgaea 2. Fake Zenon's starts with Etna thoroughly handing him his ass, and then peaks when Axel broadcasts his location to everyone in the multiverse, sending nearly every single Overlord to his front door, ready to rip him in two. As for the real Zenon, hers begins when Adell makes it clear that he has no intention of fighting her.
  • Nemo in Disgaea 4 starts off as a Magnificent Bastard, but his facade starts to crack after the Kazamatsuri family settle their differences (mostly) in a heartwarming scene. Then he absolutely loses it at the end of chapter 9, after his plan to destroy the Earth by crashing the moon into it fails, signaled by him going Laughing Mad.
  • Majorita from Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance doubles down in the "how hard can you lose your shit" contest.
    • Chapter 10: With the rebel Overlords at the entrance to Toto Bunny Castle moving to destroy the Devouring Kris at its heart, Majorita pops out and summons Usalia's zombified parents, figuring she wouldn't have the nerve to strike them down. While Majorita is proven right, the two reject her orders to kill them, uttering with all their strength a final request to fight. Majorita gets angry and fires at Usalia, urging them to jump in front of her and eat the shot in her place. Outraged at this act of defiance, Majorita summons an assload of zombies to kill the party where they stand.
    • Chapter 11: Right at the Devouring Kris' landing site, Majorita jabs both Usalia and Red Magnus with a blood-coated knife in an attempt to control them via Broken Faith Magia. While the two hold out due to their newfound camaraderie, Christo proceeds to heal them where they stand with angelic magic. Her last gambit undone in full sight, Majorita evokes another zombie horde as she soars straight into Unstoppable Rage territory.
• Implied in Donkey Kong 64. King K. Rool, the de facto Big Bad of the franchise is incredibly unhinged in this game. After suffering defeat at the hands of the Kongs in Donkey Kong Country, having his and the Kremlings' ancestral home sunk to the bottom of the ocean in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and being encased in a giant egg at the end of Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! he does what any reasonable person would do: try to blow up his enemies with a death ray. His minions are constantly afraid of him throughout the game, and it's implied he even has some of them killed for making mistakes. He even becomes willing to risk his and his henchmens' lives at the end of the game just so he can destroy Donkey Kong Island.
• Doom (2016) has the Final Boss, the Spider Mastermind, having been resurrected through Olivia Pierce, slowly breaking down over the course of the battle. At first she is lucid, throwing all of her arsenal at you while even flipping herself upside down, fully in control. However, as time goes on and as her brain-head gets more bruised, she starts to lose strength, her walking turning into hobbling until she can no longer stand, essentially throwing blasts of lasers and whatever she's got left. By the time her health is out, she screams as her mech shorts out, and simply accepts her death by the hands of the Doom Slayer and the BFG.
  • In Doom Eternal, two of the Hell Priests have this. Deag Nilox, in his short screentime, panics immensely as the Slayer tears off his head, and Deag Ranak has it worse, even begging for his life after the Doom Hunter fight.
  Deag Ranak: Th-th-th-the beast! D-d-does he not seek...enhanced POWER!? Gifts, to aid him in his... NOBLE conquest! Perhaps, in exchange for my-
  [he is Killed Mid-Sentence]
• Dragalia Lost has this in the main story with The Other's plans being thwarted for once. The demon known as Morsayati had spent much of the story possessing Euden's sister, Zethia, and offers him a deal. He'll let her go if he's allowed to take his body over. That's when Beren, the Fifth Scion, makes his way in during the soul swapping process, and absorbs the Demon's soul into himself. Had Euden gone through, other events have shown that the Other would use him to reign terror with his ability to control dragons.
  • The Agito Offensive are brutal enough as Optional Bosses even on Master, but their Legend forms, the moment they go Berserk, have them take an even bigger breakdown since they're just about sacrificing sanity for power just to kill their most hated enemies.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • Teryn Loghain slowly loses it throughout the game, but really flips out if you turn the Landsmeet against him. He calms down again after you kick his ass and is even willing to accept execution since he now believes that the Grey Warden really can defeat the Blight.
    • Arl Rendon Howe has a very subtle one (unusual for someone voiced by Tim Curry) if you had the Human Noble Origin. When he tries to taunt the Player Character about how he slaughtered his/her family and erased their names from history, the Human Noble can strike back saying that it has made him/her stronger and that he can't hurt him/her anymore. This pisses Howe off, to say the least.
      Howe: It seems you have made something of yourself after all. Your father would be proud. I, on the other hand, want you dead...more than ever now.
    • His breakdown carries over to his death, which makes his final words oh so much more satisfying for players who tired of his constant arrogant tone:
      Howe: MAKER SPIT ON YOU! I...deserved...more...
  • Dragon Age II:
    • Knight-Commander Meredith Stannard grows progressively more fanatical about disrupting the city's mage population throughout the course of the story, and it culminates at your final confrontation with her. It's then that she reveals Certainty, the special red Lyrium sword fashioned for her from the very same artifact that you uncovered in the Deep Roads years earlier, which has slowly poisoned her mind and contributed to her Sanity Slippage. She becomes so crazed that Cullen, her highest-ranking knight-captain, abandons her command and tells her she's gone too far, taking the remaining Templars with him. This causes her to feverishly accuse them all of being traitors to her cause, and then she attacks. She has a moment of doubt near the end of the final battle in which she questions whether she is doing the right thing, but quickly shakes it off.
    • During the second chapter, Mother Petrice (the Chantry priest who believes the ends justify the means to get rid of the qunari) tries to set you up for killing the viscount's son. When you kill the fanatics she sics on you, she brings in the Revered Mother and tries to spin it to make you a monster. The Revered Mother will have none of her shit, quietly calls her out, and tells Hawke to fetch a guard. The look on her face as she realizes that the Chantry as a whole does not support any actions necessary to oust the qunari is wonderful. Then a qunari kills her. And everything goes to hell.
    • In the Templar path, Orsino snaps, sacrifices his fellow mages to use their corpses for Blood Magic, and indulges in a bout of maniacal laughter right before he uses the bodies to turn himself into a Harvester golem. In the Mage path it's more of a Despair Event Horizon. However, Orsino's moment of mania can be ruined if Bethany is in the Circle and Hawke convinces her that Orsino supported the man who killed their mother.
  • Over the course of Dragon Age: Inquisition, Corypheus has each of his plots thwarted in turn by the Inquisition. Solas, an advisor with a wealth of wisdom, has a choice quote describing his breakdown by the time the final showdown occurs. Corypheus, who had spent much of the story scorning the people of Thedas for showing faith towards abstract deities like The Maker, turns to his own source of faith in his failing moments, appealing to the Old God Dumat — if he's still out there — to come to his aid.
• DragonFable:
  • Sepulchure had everything go according to plan and never getting mad throughout Book 1. Then Drakath stabs him in the back with his own sword so he can steal the Ultimate Orb's power for himself. Sepulchure does not take it well.
    Drakath: I will not be denied my kingdom again.
    Sepulchure: *Cough* You think this will stop me, fool?! I will not be killed by the likes of you, worm...
    Drakath: Perhaps it won't stop you, but it gives me a head start. (starts absorbing energy from the Ultimate Orb) It— It's magnificent!
    Sepulchure: Your living body cannot handle the power! I will watch you burn and then spit on your ashes!
    Drakath: Fluffy! To me!
    Sepulchure: NO! AARRGGHHHH! The castle explodes.
  • And to add insult to injury, shortly afterward, the Mysterious Stranger reveals that he (it?) was manipulating Sepulchure the whole time, declares that he has outlived his usefulness, and offs him.
  • Vath, the 3rd lord of Chaos in AdventureQuest Worlds, is a Smug Snake who enslaved the dwarves to have them forge enough Chaos Gemeralds to hatch the Rock Roc. Then when the hero points out that the dwarves were already freed by him/her and are winning the war against his drow soldiers, Vath loses his cool. Cue Red Eyes, Take Warning. And after the battle, he's pissed at the hero for a reason why the dwarves chose him/her as their champion. Thinking he/she's overconfident, he stands back up, calls his Chaos Dragon Amulet, and angrily attempts to command Stalagbite, his dragon that he enslaved, to get to his feet and destroy him/her. The hero uses this as his/her chance to use Accidental Aiming Skills to throw the Legendary Sword of Dragon Control at his Chaos Dragon Amulet, destroying them to Vath's sudden despair. Stalagbite regains control of himself and proceeds to attack Vath. Cue Oh, Crap! from Vath himself.
  • Kitsune, the 4th lord of Chaos, counts as well. He's a Magnificent Bastard who's a Shout-Out to the Shredder, cares deeply for his Yokai brothers and sisters, is rarely cruel, and uses his Chaos powers to place Daisho under a spell and claim Yokai Island for the Yokai and restore it to its former secluded sanctuary. Then, the hero uses the Hanzamune Dragon Koi Blade to seal the rift pouring a waterfall of Yokai flooding the island out back up, which is something Kitsune didn't expect. He sees the hero as more of a problem than he first thought and decides to re-open the rift after dealing with the hero himself.
    Kitsune: I can see that hero is more of a problem than I first thought. I cannot allow anything to interfere with my plans. The rift must be re-opened... but first I have to deal with this LEGENDARY DRAGON myself.
  • After the battle, the hero points out that the residents of the island still respect and honor the Yokai while Kitsune himself got greedy. Kitsune boasts that his Yokai brothers and sisters have always been superior to humans and starts running around invisible. The hero, while rapidly swinging the sword around, at one point accidentally tears open a rift in front of Kitsune to his horror, and he screams "No! Not like this! It can't end like this! I won't go back to the Yokai world!", lets loose a Big "NO!", and gets sucked into the rift, after which the hero closes it back up.
  • Ledgermayne, the seventh lord of Chaos, isn't too happy that the hero is interfering with its plans to sap all magic from Lore by destroying the Mana Golem. It attempts one last time to convince the hero to return to his/her home and trouble it no more and not attempt to fight it with the Supreme Arcane Staff with the shards of the Chaos Focus Gem that it shattered earlier accepted into it. The hero points out that Ledgermayne left a few shards of the gem behind and shows it the staff itself. Ledgermayne sees it as fascinating and realizes that the hero can't be dissuaded from the self-destructive course, as it called it. It decides that the hero must be dealt with as the hero challenges it to a fight. After the fight, the hero prepares to use the staff to finish off Ledgermayne. When the staff doesn't work, Ledgermayne decides it's wasted its time on him/her and attempts to kill him/her with one last attack, but Drakath appears and focuses his Chaos powers into the staff, replacing the shattered gem and allowing it to blast Ledgermayne. Ledgermayne lets out a Big "NO!" and becomes converted back into the raw mana from which it was made.
  • 26,000 years prior to the End of All Things event, a portion of the Frostval events, Kezeroth the World Ender sought to bring about the end of the world by freeing the ancient beast Quetzal from its icy prison that floated among the stars. His plan to do so was foiled by Elim, and when that happened, the hulking juggernaut normally full of Dissonant Serenity lost his composure big time, taking his anger out on Elim because his whole life that he had waited for the night that Quetzal's comet was to be brought down to Lore had been wasted, using his massive warhammers that he wields with ease to beat him to death in a murderous fit of rage. In the present, he loses his composure again after finding that Quetzal, whom he had been given a second chance to free and unleash upon Lore, had been beaten down by "a handful of pitiful heroes" as he calls them, afterwards using the Sword of Hope that they were going to use to finish their job of finishing off and destroying Quetzal for them. This act really shot him in the shoes because, had he not done so, Quetzal would have regained its strength anyway.
  • Over the course of the Thunderforge saga, Chaos Lord Maximilian Lionfang was confident that he could use the Tears of the Mother to destroy Drakath. Little did he know that he was mistaken; Drakath is complete Chaos, which means that the Tears cannot hope to affect him. When he wastes them on Drakath anyway, and discovers to his shock and disbelief that he is immune to the Tears, he grabs the hero and threatens to kill them in cold blood in his own murderous fit of rage.
    Lionfang: IMPOSSIBLE! Those were the REAL Tears of the Mother! I saw it in your mind! What have you DONE?! I'm SICK of your tricks and lies! YOU DIE NOW!
  • And now, Drakath himself gets to join in on the fun. To start things off, the hero comes back to the land of the living as the new Death, and during the first half of the confrontation, rips one of his wings off, forcing him to summon Desolich to him and sic his Chaos monsters on them while Chaorrupting some Skyguard to distract them. He scrapes the side of the mountains with his sword and causes an avalanche in an attempt to kill them, and soon afterwards kills Stalagbite, who was helping them in the battle. As they fight, Drakath kills Khasaanda and Escherion, and after they move back to the Chaos portal, he transforms into his Prime form and attacks one more time, ripping off the hero's wings and booting them off the top of Mount DoomSkull, and in a desperate attempt to flee them, enters the Chaos Gate. But, upon doing so, he lets out a Big "NO!" upon discovering what the Chaos Gate is doing to him, and they follow him into the Chaos Realm where he spends the last moments of their showdown screaming at the top of his lungs that victory belongs to him and him alone.
  • Count Maxius, an Affably Evil vampire who's A Father to His Men, snaps when you knock out his beloved butler Barnabus. From there, he drops all his affability and flies into a rage so huge that he turns into a much more monstrous form as a result. And once you defeat him in the second battle, he screams that his defeat should not be happening before he achieves Critical Existence Failure as his own sacrifice for his own ritual that he was originally planning to use to bring himself back to Lore.
• Dragon Quest V: As the Hero continues to unravel the Order of Zugzwang's plans, Ladja becomes more and more obsessed with killing the Hero himself.
• Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages might lead you to believe at first that between your two sinister handlers, who each clearly have ill intentions for the world should you choose to help them at the end, Kether and Malchut, that Malchut would be the one to have the villainous breakdown because of her more emotion-based pleading about peace and love with you compared to Kether's more seemingly calm reasoning. However, while Malchut does make increasingly grandiose declarations that nature should take back Earth over technology, Kether loses it at the very end as he tries to convince you why you should choose to help him create the world as he sees fit, ending by screaming about how there is no truth except chaos. He shuts up afterwards and gives you his last Tarot card, but he has clearly demonstrated that he is not fit to rule the world.

"There is no secret. No conspiracy. Your assumptions were correct, there is no conspiratorial web, no plotting groups of masterminds hellbent on the enslavement of humanity. There is only the ragged march of CHAOS, ALL THE WORLD IN CHAOS. ALL HAIL DISCORDIA!"

Games E-H

• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Dagoth Ur spends most of the final battle in Morrowind smugly mocking you as he shrugs off all your attacks, asking how you expect to kill a Physical God. Then you give him an answer by ignoring him in favor of attacking the MacGuffin that gives him his powers (and is the only thing keeping him alive). Initially, he doesn't realize what you're attempting to do, but when he does, he loses it:
  What are you doing...? (sudden realizes) WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! FOOL! STOP!!!
  • In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Alduin helplessly shrieks in protest as his body slowly crumbles after you strike the final blow, since he can't accept the reality of his impending death. His voice even seems to go an octave or two higher as he screams "I AM UNENDING! I CANNOT END!" in the dragon tongue.
• The Rhombulan leader goes through this at the end of the last stage in Elite Beat Agents:
  Everyone on Earth, all at once: Jumpin' Jack Flash, it's a gas gas gas! Jumpin' Jack Flash, it's a gas gas gas! Jumpin' Jack Flash, it's a gas gas gas!
  [The crowd glows and a giant laser beam shoots up into the sky]
  Rhombulan Leader: STOP! STOP!
  [Two other laser beams shoot up into the air]
  Rhombulan Leader: THE-MUSIC! STOP!
  [The laser beams merge together to form an even bigger laser beam]
  Rhombulan Leader: STOP! STOP!
  [The giant laser beam is now approaching the Rhombulan mothership]
  Rhombulan Leader: STOP! THE-MUSIC! STOP! STOP! STOP!
  [The beam hits the mothership, completely obliterating it]
  Singer: It's a gas! [Big Rock Ending]
• Fallout:
  • In Fallout 3, should you not have John Henry Eden self-destruct, taking the whole base with him, then, during the very last quest, if you tune in on the Enclave radio station, the "stress" (if AIs can get stressed, that is) of the Brotherhood of Steel having just launched an assault to retake Project Purity from the Enclave with the Brotherhood's most elite squad, as well as a giant practically indestructible robot, has caused the normally calm, almost Affably Evil "President of the Enclave, President of the United States, President of your hearts" into an even more sinister voice. Just read the transcript.
    Eden: We stand now, at the precipice. Our great nation once more threatens to crumble, to topple into the sea of lawlessness and despair that have ruled us all for over two hundred years. In short, my dearest America, we. Are. At. War. Even as I speak these words, fearless Enclave soldiers are fortifying their positions at the great water purifier. Bracing for an inevitable assault. The Brotherhood of Steel, in their arrogance, has claimed Project Purity as their own. They would steal the Enclave’s work. Steal America’s water. It’s only a matter of time before the traitors march on the purifier, and attempt to take it by force. Let them come. Wave upon traitorous wave will crash upon the Enclave’s walls. The Brotherhood of Steel will fail. All those who oppose the Enclave will fail. I am President John Henry Eden, and this is my pledge: No one no one, WILL TAKE THIS GREAT NATION AWAY FROM ME! *Eerily calm* God Bless the Enclave. God Bless America. And it just repeats over and over again.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Benny is completely smooth and calm throughout most of the story, until you kill his four bodyguards at The Tops, resulting in a priceless Oh, Crap! and his fleeing in desperation. He gets another if you have him crucified by the Legion.
    • Similarly, if you completely deny Mr. House the Platinum Chip, he flies into a rage about how far he's come and how he's not letting some random courier screw up his plans. He'll then tell you that you don't have to fear him, just the Securitrons in the room. Also, if you bust into the control room and confront the real Mr. House, all he can do is rage helplessly and ask you why you would destroy Vegas' last hope. You can go further. If you tell that you did it because you "just didn't like him" and decide to cut him off from his control systems while leaving him alive, he will have two more breakdowns. The former he finds insane and the latter he finds unbearable, as it would leave him cut off from the world (before succumbing to any infections the Courier had given him).
    • Father Elijah from the Dead Money questline also has a very impressive Villainous Breakdown if you seal him in the vault forever.
    • Doctor Klein from the Old World Blues DLC will fly off the handle in different ways depending on how you choose to confront him. Panicking if you tell you're going to attack, begging for mercy if you impersonate his adversary Mobius, or growing increasingly outraged if you befriended his colleagues earlier and they come to your defense.
• Far Cry 5: While Joseph Seed does mourn his family members, he's more or less composed... until you kill his final sibling. Then, he has a full-on bawling meltdown, with a runny nose. He gets another one if you spare him in Far Cry: New Dawn.
• Far Cry 6: Anton Castillo becomes angrier and more deluded with each district you liberate; when you march on the capital, he loses his mind completely and begins planning a redesign of a city he's already lost, then kills off his family before committing suicide.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The series has a long history of Villainous Breakdowns. Kefka Palazzo, for example, had his after having attained godhood, mercilessly tortured the world and its remaining inhabitants for a full year in an attempt to make them all realize the futility of Life, Dreams, and Hope. When the heroes finally confront him and proclaim that dreams will always be worth dreaming, life will always be treasured, and hope will always be there to keep them going, even through the hardest of times, he announces that he has just about had enough of their insolent persistence and intends to go for Apocalypse How, Class X and beyond.
    • Listen closely to Kefka when you actually fight his final form: He laughs even longer than usual (by about 5 seconds) after saying "Life... Dreams... Hope... Where do they come from? And where do they go...? Such meaningless things... I'll destroy them all!!"
  • In Final Fantasy VII, Professor Hojo starts off as a calm, composed, and ruthless scientist. As the game goes on, however, he gradually starts to begin getting more and more unhinged, ultimately culminating in him going completely insane, willingly attempting to destroy Midgar to help Sephiroth, and going so far as to inject himself with Jenova cells, fighting the party as a pseudo-Eldritch Abomination, all while giggling madly. And as Dirge of Cerberus shows, death did not help his mental state. If anything, it made him worse.
  • Each encounter with Seifer in Final Fantasy VIII shows him edging a few steps further along a downward spiral; he starts out proclaiming himself a heroic knight pursuing a romantic dream, and ends up trying to sacrifice his former girlfriend to an insane sorceress in order to bring about The End of the World as We Know It, purely because by that point he felt like he'd gone too far to turn back. His slow breakdown is reflected visually by his long white coat, which starts off as a Badass Longcoat but is tattered and shredded by the last encounter. Unlike most villains, Seifer gets better; during the ending cutscene, Seifer's coat is back to the way it started out.
  • Final Fantasy IX's Kuja spends a good portion of the final part of the game hopelessly insane with rage upon discovering he's mortal and will eventually die, and was just a temporary tool of The Man Behind the Man (and that the protagonist Zidane is essentially a far more advanced model of what he was supposed to be). Kuja ends up blowing up one world and very nearly blows up another in quick succession.
  • Final Fantasy X features one from Grand Maester Mika after the heroes defeat Climax Boss Lady Yunalesca, since she told the heroes that a summoner has to die to summon their Final Aeon, and that this Final Aeon will become the next Sin, ensuring the cycle of death and destruction continues across Spira for all time save for the brief moments of the Calm where Sin is reviving. Since the Climax Boss was the only apparent way to stop the Eldritch Abomination Sin, Mika basically goes through the Despair Event Horizon and screams at the heroes about how they've now doomed the world of Spira to destruction. By that time, the heroes already have another plan in place to stop Sin, which Mika refuses to hear in favor of just yelling at them. However, the heroes have so categorically rejected the idea of Mika's false hope, along with basically turning their backs on the Corrupt Church of Yevon, that Mika's ranting does little to dissuade any of the heroes from continuing.
  • Final Fantasy XII has Vayne. After the rebel forces and his own brother Larsa beat him up, he goes One-Winged Angel and orders Larsa's bodyguard Gabranth to protect Larsa while he deals with the rebels: Gabranth decides to help the rebels defeat him instead. Beaten a second time, all Vayne has to say at this point is "BURN IN HELL, GABRANTH!" as he tries to strike him down. Vayne then limps away, bemoaning that his plans and empire are crumbling around him.
  • Garland of Final Fantasy in Dissidia Final Fantasy has one just before the last fight with the Warrior of Light in his "Destiny Odyssey". Garland talks about the cycle of battle and how he and the Warrior of Light will always be in conflict. The Warrior responds with pity for Garland, who he then vows to save. Unfortunately, Garland does not take that well, yelling much louder than usual in the ensuing cutscene fight.
    Warrior of Light: Garland...I pity you.
    Garland: ...Pardon?
    Warrior of Light: You are bound by the chains of destiny and steeped in despair. And for that, I pity you. Indeed we have repeated our battles time and time again. You could say we have been caught in the cycle of battle. But now that I know the truth, I can overcome it. All that is left to do now is fight to end the cycle!
    Garland: You can defeat me here, but that would only be another step in the cycle!
    Warrior of Light: Whatever destiny the world may hold for me, I will never give up! This battle will come to an end, and I shall save you, too!
    Garland: You? Save me? I have heard enough nonsense!
    [...]
    Garland: This is the cycle, of battle! We will never come to accept one another. We shall always be in conflict!
    Warrior of Light: Destiny ends here!
    Garland: End it, if you can!
  • Final Fantasy XIV
    • King Thordan from Heavensward loses his composure after he sees that the party has withstood the Ultimate End limit break. The would-be god king is reduced to a desperate old man wildly swinging his sword about, screaming in utter disbelief, and questioning just who, and what, the Warrior of Light is if they could survive the divine wrath. When the Warrior of Light recounts the battle to the Wandering Minstrel, the Minstrel opts to leave out Thordan's breakdown for the sake of telling a better story.
    • The Final Boss of Endwalker goes through this towards the battle's conclusion. The Endsinger is momentarily surprised when the Warrior of Light and their allies survive a devastating attack meant to "seal the fate of the universe" using dynamis as a Level 3 Tank Limit Break. The Endsinger just rewinds the clock on the attack to use it again, and fires again. But thanks to the prayers of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, this second attack does absolutely nothing. When the Scions tell the Endsinger how they'll never give up hope, no matter how bleak it may be, the Endsinger is reduced to desperate flailing and screaming about the meaninglessness of life and how "none should hope for better" anywhere. It's only after the Endsinger is defeated and reduced down to her base form of Meteion that she finally calms down long enough to just listen to the Warrior of Light. And only then, after hearing from the Warrior that it's the little things that make life worth living and that teamwork and unity are what make the world a brighter place, does Meteion finally snap out of her Straw Nihilist mindset.
  • Ultima from Final Fantasy XVI. Throughout the most of the game he remains calm and stoic, his voice rarely leaving a monotone. But during the final battle Clive’s constant resistance to becoming his vessel, coupled with the realization that Clive is now capable of matching him in power, causes him to completely lose it. He spends the entire fight ranting about his superiority as his attacks become increasingly frenzied and desperate.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • When William Afton is cornered by the ghosts of the Missing Children in Five Nights at Freddy's 3, he drops all composure and panics, scurrying into his old Spring Bonnie suit, hoping to keep himself safe... which spells his utimate downfall. As the springlocks impale him, he's left to do nothing but collapse to the floor, bleeding in pain.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location: Ennard's aggressiveness on Night 5 can be seen as this. During the night, Circus Baby tells you to come to the scooper room to destroy her body. By defying Her/His/Yes orders and going to the private room instead, you have effectively derailed Ennard's plans of wearing your skin, making it hellbent at getting you into the scooping room; even if it has to drag you there kicking and screaming.
  • Scraptrap's face when being burned alive at the end of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator says it all. It doesn't help that his old friend Henry tells him that Hell will be waiting for him when he's done.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach:
    • Roxanne Wolf starts off as a Narcissist who prides herself that she will find and capture Gregory before any of the others. But as time goes on and as Gregory keeps avoiding her, she starts losing her composure and tries to reassure herself that she's not a loser. [[spoiler:But when Gregory hits her with a go-kart in Roxy Raceway and takes her eyes, she snaps. With her own pride and beauty shattered before her own eyes (which she doesn't even have anymore), she becomes a sobbing, faceless mess going on a blind rampage to kill Gregory for destroying her.
    • Montgomery Gator started off as aggressive and sapient, breaking down walls and being immune to the Faz Camera or Fazberblaster. But when he gets crushed and loses his legs after his boss fight at Monty's Gator Golf, he gets reduced to dragging his destroyed body around and screeching in pain when hit by the Fazerblaster and the Faz Camera. By the time of the Ruin DLC, he's regressed into a full-blown Feral Villain, crawling around to kill anyone who dares to approach him.
• In Freedom Planet, Brevon loses more and more of his composure as the heroes continue to unravel his Evil Plans, and frantically becomes more and more obsessed with killing them above all else. By the time his power suit becomes severely damaged over the course of the final fight against him, he's completely and utterly snapped, quickly moving around the area and throwing out multitudes of attacks with great rapidity while snarling crazed threats. In Milla's story, after his armor is damaged, he shouts at her in a rage that she's pestered him long enough and attempts to choke the life out of her with his own hands.
  Brevon: Rrrgh! You've pestered me long enough! (grabs Milla by the throat and attempts to choke her to death) Say goodbye!
• In the Gears of War trilogy, Myrrah suffers this in the third installment. In the first two games, she is a detached, enigmatic figure. She is always cool and collected, even when Marcus storms her throne room. However, in the third game, she has lost her composure after being pushed to the brink of extinction, sneering and taunting Marcus at every opportunity. By the end of the game, she goes from just taunting Marcus, to a full-on desperation attack on Adam's super-weapon in an attempt to keep it from killing off the Locust.
• The Getaway: Charlie Jolson decides to pull a Taking You with Me after his plans are foiled and activates a bomb while he and all his enemies are still on board the ship the bomb's on. He then proceeds to sing Land of Hope and Glory, making no attempts to leave.
• God of War (PS4): Baldur fully believes he'll kill Kratos and Atreus in their final fight with him, and even genuinely thanks them for removing his immortality when even Odin couldn't. When Kratos activates his Spartan Rage and turns the tables on him, it suddenly dawns on Baldur that he could actually lose after having nothing new to throw at them, reducing him to screaming at the two of them.
  Baldur: WHY! WON'T! YOU! DIE!?
• God of War Ragnarök:
  • Heimdall spends the later phases of his fight in one. He first freaks out when Kratos proves able to actually hit him, rattling him enough that he can't dodge the Draupnir Spear, and completely falls apart after he realizes that Kratos spared him out of pity, at which point he forces Kratos to take action by threatening Atreus, resulting in one last phase where he completely abandons the idea of dodging in favor of relentless aggression.
    Heimdall: You... do not get to decide. MY. FATE!!
  • Odin completely drops his fatherly, affable facade after Atreus destroys the mask that he's been trying to assemble for the entire game, closing the rift that may or may not have had the answers he committed countless atrocities to obtain.
    Odin: No, no, NO!!! Why did you DO THAT? What was it all FOR? You choose to be nothing?!
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: Ricardo Diaz is always a few steps away from going off the deep end, but he dies impotently begging Tommy and Lance for mercy.
  • Mostly subverted with Sonny, who does lose his temper whenever things don't go his way, but still maintains enough composure to be a threat to Tommy, even though he ultimately plays into the latter's hands.
• Officer Tenpenny in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a huge Smug Snake that constantly taunts CJ and forces him to do his bidding at every turn. At the last quarter of the story, Tenpenny is extremely agitated due to the DEA and FBI gunning for him since someone is leaking info to them about his involvement with the gangs in Los Santos and the murder of Officer Pendlebury. When he finds out that Officer Hernandez was the snitch, he knocks him unconcious with a shovel in a fit of rage before leaving the scene to calm himself. Towards the very end, Tenpenny is back to his smug self again, but CJ can tell that Tenpenny is barely holding it together and is very paranoid. The final scene has him getting into a traffic accident, mortally wounding him and he uses his last breath to rant and rave over how things were better under his control.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: After spending most of the game hounding Niko and Roman while remaining untouchable, Dimitri Rascalov finds himself screwed big time in the Revenge Ending, when Niko tracks him down and slaughters his way to him. Dimitri's last words are him groveling for mercy to no avail.
  • Jimmy Pegorino, despite his Butt-Monkey status, can get dangerous. When he finds his bodyguard has been ratting him out to the feds, he goes berserk, even threatening Niko with a gun. In the Revenge ending, he really flies off the handle when Niko sabotages his drug deal, trying to murder him at Roman's wedding.
  • Eddie Low goes through one when Niko off-handedly insults him, ranting about his past atrocities before trying to hack Niko to death. It doesn't end well for him.
  • Jeff is already walking a fine line regarding sanity, but when Niko refuses to spy on his second wife, he loses it, thinking she's cheating on him, forgetting to look both ways in the process.
  • Elizabeth Torres is already under pressure from having the feds close in, but cocaine makes her temper even worse. Too bad Manny and Jay found out too late.
• Grand Theft Auto V: In Ending C, after our three main characters kill everyone who have wronged them, Trevor kills Devin Weston's bodyguards before kidnapping him, tying him up and locking him in the trunk of his car. As Trevor drives, Devin tries bribing him with lots of promises like lots of money and influence. However, Trevor doesn't buy it and decides to do him in anyway. Upon realizing for once that he's unable to use his wealth or connections to force someone to work for him, Devin impotently throws a temper-tantrum.
  • Trevor himself goes through these when met with some severe setbacks. When the Merryweather Heist that he plans leads to the crew stealing nuclear weapons that they can't reasonably sell, he'll either smash his head against a wall or angrily scream out profanities at the top of his lungs. When the drug deal he arranges in the Online Mode fails due to him being caught in a bust, he's reduced to pathetic weeping at the foot of a tree.
  • Trevor undergoes another one at the end of the game. After getting some medicine for a possible hallucination of his mom, he finds her gone and begins weeping uncontrollably.
• Oh man, Sakaki of .hack//G.U. goes through this TWICE. Doesn't help that he's really a kid pumped full of something he really shouldn't be, but he had it coming.
• Half-Life 2:
  • Doctor Breen tries to dissuade Gordon over the monitors during "Our Benefactors", each message more forceful or imploring than the last, before he outright begins pleading for Gordon to stop. Over the first half of "Dark Energy", we meet him in person, and his Affably Evil demeanor starts to slip, showing how arrogant, cowardly, patronizing, and childish he really is. Then, as the Reactor Boss battle goes on, his taunts become increasingly juvenile, until he realizes he's losing and switches to frantic and desperate.
  • In Episode One, the Vortigaunts manage to break through the G-Man's power and rescue Gordon, which makes the G-man's Smug Snake exterior slip just a little.
    G-man: We'll see... about that.
• By the end of Halo 3, the Gravemind has gone from calmly taunting the Master Chief with visions of Cortana and statements of his complete inability to stop the inevitable to rampant screams and roars of protest — though it kind of makes sense, as the Chief is about to fire Halo right in his face.
  • Even then, when the Flood are about to be eradicated, Gravemind suggests that all the Chief will succeed in is delaying the inevitable.
  • Gravy's breakdown actually starts in the previous level. He taunts the Chief as you move through a extremely Flood-infested High Charity, then goes to threats, then to demanding that you die, then to outright enraged yelling.
  • The Prophet of Truth also goes through this. As the humans and Elites (who are now working together) get closer and closer to beating him (having annihilated his forces over the course of the game), his preachings as the Chief and the Arbiter come closer and closer to his location get less religious and "ascending to godhood" to more "THIS IS ALL THE HERETICS' FAULT!!!". His last words are "I...AM...TRUTH! THE VOICE OF THE COVENANT!" after he's finally cornered with the Covenant completely destroyed and the Chief shuts down the Halo rings.
  • Neither Gravemind or Truth can compete for the "honor" of "The Best Villainous Breakdown of the Halo series" when facing 343 Guilty Spark. While both Gravemind and Truth started yelling around, they didn't do anything physically toward the player. Spark, however, starts shooting lasers from his red, formerly blue, eye at the player and messing up his power-armour, while screaming "UNACCEPTABLE! UNACCEPTABLE!! ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE!!!" or "THIS RING BELONGS TO ME!!". And he kills Sergeant Major Johnson in his fit of rage.

• Hardspace: Shipbreaker: At the end of Chapter 3, you get a mission in which you and every other shipbreaker in the station trash their ship of the day rather than salvage it, destroying it as much as possible, as a protest against LYNX's awful practices in general and administrator Hal Rhodes' tyranny in particular. They expected Hal to get the point and come to the table for negotiations. They didn't expect Hal to lose his shit so completely he wrestles with Weaver for control throughout the entire thing, rant about how LYNX owns everyone involved and should punish them in horrific ways, and finally almost gets Kaito Killed Off for Real by deleting his backup data and turning off his suit the moment he threatens to throw a valuable reactor into the furnace. This absolute shitfit is recorded and leaked to the media, forcing action against LYNX and getting Hal himself demoted back to menial work.
• Heavy Rain employs this trope if Ethan doesn't show up at the warehouse of the final chapter, but Madison and Norman do, either together or separately. The Origami Killer flips since such a scenario goes against all of his plans and hopes — his entire motive was to find a father willing to go to any lengths to save his son.
• Henry Stickmin Series: In Completing the Mission's Jewel Baron route, Reginald undergoes one after his Right Hand Man is killed. Up to that point, he was far more composed, but after that, you can hear the frantic fury in his voice as he demands that the Station's superweapon be fired on Henry, causing the normally-unflappable man at the controls obvious surprise.
• Alaric gets a good one in Heroes of Might and Magic 5: Tribes of the East, upon learning that "Isabel" was really the demon Biara in disguise.
  Alaric: Y-your Majesty?! A DEMON!?! What!? How!?! Who... No... no, I must confess...
  Biara: You have pledged your life to a daughter of Urgash! Ahahaha... You have served me well.
  Alaric: *highly panicked* Corrupt the sacred corruption? Yes, Elrath forgives demons that kill demons, Am I a demon? NO! I'm Alaric! High priest of the Light! THE BLOODY RED LIGHT! AHAHAHAHAHA!

Games I-P

• In Ib, after Mary hears through the Tattletale painting that Garry discovered she's not real, she'll start Laughing Mad before running out the room both her and Ib are in, begin stabbing a mannequin head, walk around aimlessly, and talk about random things when Ib interacts with her.
• White Face in Imscared is never quite confirmed to be the main villain of the game, as much as he likes to cause mischief and plot to outright terrify the player along with HER. For the most part, he's just a lonely entity who wants the player to stay so that they can play with him. However, the Door ending to the game sees the poor guy go through a tremendous mental breakdown — in both a fit of rage and a last attempt to get the player to save him from dying, he resorts to spitting out vicious insults and violent jumpscares at the player.
• In Injustice: Gods Among Us, Regime Superman starts losing it when Batman Prime is rescued from Stryker's Island by the Insurgency's Batman and the other Prime heroes, the Watchtower blows up in his face courtesy of Insurgency Deathstroke's sabotage, and the Lex Luthor of his world turns against him and attempts to kill him. When Supes murders Lex on live TV and and he hears everyone's shock and disgust, he flips his lid and decides he's going to bring Metropolis and Gotham to the ground, then bounce over to the mainstream world and do the same there. When Regime Shazam calls him out on it, Supes grabs him by the neck, freezes his mouth shut, and murders him by firing his heat vision through his skull.
• Tobin from In the 1st Degree. If you, the prosecutor, did a very good job playing the game, then Tobin will be called to the stand. You are trying to drive Tobin into this. There is some trial and error involved, but if you do it right, you get to watch Tobin completely lose it in front of everybody right there in the courtroom. When that happens, you know you have won.
• Erol started Jak II: Renegade as Baron Praxis' cruel and confident Dragon. However, his creepy obsession with Jak caused him to snap and drive into a shipment of Dark Eco in an attempt to kill Jak. He then comes back as an Omnicidal Maniac bent on destroying the world.
• Just Cause 3: Di Ravello acts confident and Affably Evil, even with Rico Rodriguez cutting through his army and destroying his bases. It's not until Rico destroys the Bavarium bomb the General was shipping does Di Ravello flip his shit, screaming and beating one of his men to death in a fit of rage.
  Di Ravello: LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!
• General Adams from Killzone has one when one of his lieutenants informs him that the player's squad has destroyed an important bridge, leveled a supply base, and killed an entire platoon. He then introduces the lieutenant's head to his desk. Repeatedly. And not very subtly.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Zexion in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, what with the better animation, new and modified scenes, and quite good voice acting. The deceptive Zexion, who hates getting his hands dirty, has been spending the game flinging his comrades before him to take the fall. He slowly grows more insecure as everyone else dies, and he completely loses it as Riku sees through his tricks and defeats him in combat.
  • Also in Chain of Memories, Larxene, the sharp-tongued Alpha Bitch, who just as soon dishes out abuse as take it, really loses it when Sora defeats her once and for all. To say she is a Sore Loser is an understatement.
    Larxene: No... Nooooo!! I refuse to lose to a bunch of losers! I... I'm fading?! No, this isn't... the way I... I won't...ALLOW...!
  • Master Xehanort in Birth By Sleep is a completely composed Chessmaster who only raises his voice in joy at how well his plans are going, and in battle is very laid-back and not particularly aggressive. Until he finally takes Terra's body as his own and seconds later is attacked by a newly-formed Lingering Will. This is the first time in the game he's truly pissed ("Your body submits, your heart succumbs, so why does your mind resist?"), and the resulting boss fight has him constantly pounding away at you in your face with no mercy as opposed to casually hanging back and flinging spells as before.
  • Though Xehanort's initial fury might not be so much an issue of Sanity Slippage as wanting to finish Terra once and for all. He was seeking to possess Terra before and probably consciously held back his more damaging attacks. Also, after being old for a while, he may have wanted to test out his new youth powers.
  • Hades is known to snap if things don't go his way or when somebody insults him to his face. Usually, he often calms down immediately after his snappings, but in his final showdown against Sora, he doesn't; when Sora, Donald, and Goofy released Auron from Hades' mind control, and so saved Hercules' life, Hades got pissed but remained in control, but when his attempts to kill Hercules by throwing Meg into the River Styx failed, and the heroes start laughing at Hercules' joke afterward, he began screaming: "HOW DARE YOU GET A HAPPY ENDING?! HOW DARE YOU?!", and went ballistic on them by screaming and throwing fires everywhere. When Hades goes ape-shit, you know all hell is about to break loose — and it makes for one awesome boss fight. And when he loses once and for all, he really becomes a Sore Loser:
    Hades: This... isn't... HAPPENING!
  • After spending the majority of the games as a laid back snarky troll, Xigbar loses his composure for the first time in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] when the sight of Sora's declaration of friendship along with a representative of them appearing led him to become afraid for the first time to the point of high-tailing outta there and leave Xemnas to deal with him. What makes this even more jarring is that knowing who Xigbar truly is, makes one wonder whether or not this is an act or that he truly loses his cool because presumably it didn't go according to his plans.
• The King of Fighters:
  • Rugal Bernstein has a healthy helping of TWO of these, in 94 and 95. In 94, beat him and in a rage, he blows up his own aircraft carrier with himself on it. In 95, beat him and as the Orochi power consumes him, he screams in indignation at his fate (compounded by Iori telling him he wasn't of the bloodline, so he couldn't control it).
    "Even with my new power, I lost. What? My body.....????? NO! To meet such a fate! But I'll be back... YOU JERKS!"
  • Goenitz in 96 subverts this in almost all of the endings; even when he's beaten, he retains a Smug Snake demeanour. It's played straight in the Kyo/Iori/Chizuru ending, however, when Kyo and Iori deliver the coup de grace on him, he screams out, wondering why there's no wind blowing.
  • Then there's Clone Zero in 2000. Once beaten, he tries to kill everyone in his hideout with the Zero Cannon... which isn't working. He's constantly asking why it won't work, all while hammering the activation button repeatedly.
  • Igniz in 2001 + defeat = Indignant rage + A God Am I = Colony Drop
  • And finally, Saiki in XIII. Once he's beaten whilst in control of Ash Crimson's body, he tells Ash they can start over and tells him to go through the gate of time...only for Ash to do absolutely nothing whilst Saiki is telling him to go through, degenerating into screaming at him, and when the gate finally closes, Saiki's begging for his existence, crying that he doesn't want to die before he vanishes, a victim of a Time Paradox.
• Kirby:
  • After defeating King Dedede in Kirby's Dream Land, he lands in front of the Extra Mode unlock screen and throws a violent tantrum before running off to get his Revenge. Once you beat Extra Mode, though, he enters a different breakdown. He does another one in Kirby Battle Royale; when Kirby beats him and just as he 's about to win the Cake Royale, he flips out and sics his ultimate creation, the Dededetroyer Z, on the pink hero just to ensure he doesn't win.
  • And of all places — Kirby Super Star, as Kirby's systematic demolition of the Halberd is accompanied by running commentary from Meta Knight and his crew, with increasing alarm. In Ultra, this also happens with Marx in The True Arena. After being defeated by Kirby and presumably dying at the end of Milky Way Wishes, his limp body absorbs pieces of Galactic Nova, and the already-Ax-Crazy Marx turns into the even more unstable Marx Soul. And upon defeat, Marx Soul screams his lungs out.
  • Queen Sectonia in Kirby: Triple Deluxe quickly loses her sanity and composure the more times she loses to Kirby. She keeps her grace after being beaten back the first time, but the second time, she gets so pissed off that she tries to squeeze the life out of Kirby. Once Kirby gains the Hypernova ability to finish her off, she flips out and sends everything she has at him. Then, when she comes Back from the Dead as Soul of Sectonia in the True Arena, she loses her mind and is hellbent on killing the pink puffball at all costs. By the final phase, she finally snaps and is reduced to a sadistic Laughing Mad Planimal with only her vanity to cling onto. And not only that, according to the Japanese and Korean versions, now that she can't recognize her former self anymore, she's outright begging for Kirby to finish her off!
    • Similarly, Taranza goes through one when Kirby defeats Masked Dedede's Revenge. Shocked to see that he kidnapped the wrong hero, he panics, and summons Queen Sectonia to protect him... only to be blasted off the balcony for his failure.
  • Happens to President Haltmann from Kirby: Planet Robobot after being bested by the titular pink puff. After his ranting, he attempts to get revenge on Kirby by activating Star Dream... only for his secretary Susie to steal the mind-control cap from him.
    • His secretary, Susie, also goes through one after defeating Mecha Knight+; after she and her company's toughest creations all get defeated by Kirby, Susie finally gets frustrated and tries to attack Kirby again before President Haltmann stops her.
  • Lord Hyness of Kirby Star Allies goes into a super-fast, blink-and-you-miss-it-on-second-thought-just-go-on-Youtube-to-see-it rant when you confront him. And once you blast his hood off and reveal his true face he completely loses it, failing to form a coherent word after that and giving up on using magic in favor of just smacking the hell out of Kirby with his allies' drained corpses, not to mention generally twitching and flailing like a marionette on high-end stimulants.
  • Super Kirby Clash: Being defeated by Team Kirby twice and being swatted off into the distance by King D-Mind pushed Parallel Nightmare off the deep end hard. When Team Kirby finally catches up to him at the Dreamscape, his armor is tattered, his Slasher Smile has turned into a Slasher Scowl, and worst of all, he's given up on taking over the Dream Kingdom in favor of finally defeating Team Kirby. It gets even worse in the final few battles against him in the Party Quests, where the final fight with him has him outright state (in the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese versions) that his one goal now is to kill Team Kirby at all costs.
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land:
    • During the second phase of the Forgo Dedede battle, he drops his dual hammers, and rather than getting back up and getting a new weapon, he lets out a terrifying roar and goes outright feral. He then starts Running on All Fours like an insane boar, and is left with nothign to fight back but his own brute strength, charging at Kirby and furiously punching the ground to create pillars of fire. All of these are signs that Dedede's mind has finally shattered to pieces from the painful Mind Rape he was forced through for the entire game.
    • There's also Leongar. In his second phase, he goes absolutely ballistic as Fecto Forgo tightens their grip on his mind, causing him to assume a Primal Stance and resort to violently chomping at Kirby.
    • After Kirby defeats Leongar and rescues Elfilin, Fecto Forgo loses their patience and throws that along with their carefully laid-out plans away in favor of assimilating and consuming everything, proceeding to absorb Leongar and several members of the Beast Pack without a care for them, turning into a frightening-looking amalgamation of slime and writhing animal faces as a result, and chasing down both Kirby and Elfilin through the hallways just to get to the former. After Kirby rescues Elfilin again, Fecto loses it completely and decides to try to make Popstar and the new world collide with each other, not caring about how many lives will be lost as a result, just to settle their petty grudge against Kirby. When they return as Chaos Elfilis at the end of the Ultimate Cup Z, all they have left to hold onto is their persistence to fail. These callous reactions could all be justified; according to the Japan-exclusive Perfect Support Guide, being split apart from Elfilin, who represents their compassion, conscience, and intelligence, not only caused Forgo to regress into their larval form, but also lose their ability to reason, which means that Forgo has been reduced to a figurative and literal Psychopathic Manchild.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • Interestingly inverted, where Big Bad Darth Malak, previously a madman, seems to come to his senses only as he lies dying after his final battle with the player character. He goes from arrogant shouting of his own greatness to quiet acceptance of his failings and inability to ever surpass Revan.
  • Darth Nihilus suffers one in the second game when he attempts to feed on you, only for it to backfire and injure him because you're a hole in the Force just like he is. He starts visibly/audibly panicking and dies pathetically at the hands of your party, proving him to have been a mere mortal rather than the terrifying Eldritch Abomination he had pretended to be.
  • Colonel Tobin is in the middle of a breakdown when you encounter him for the last time, having realized that Darth Nihilus never actually cared about him and his homeworld and merely used Tobin as a pawn. The realization breaks Tobin so utterly that when he runs into the party, he doesn't even bother trying to fight or flee, he just asks you to hurry up and kill him.
• Last Scenario:
  • The Big Bad's whole motive is being powerful enough that he doesn't need to rely on other people, since he was helpless to protect his hometown from being destroyed. When the heroes defeat him for the second time (the first time he wasn't really trying and seemed quite pleased to find a Worthy Opponent), he takes it so badly that he loses consciousness for days. When he wakes up, he learns that he only managed to get away thanks to the Villainous Valor of the Quirky Miniboss Squad, and one of them was forced to perform a Heroic Sacrifice. Not helping, guys.
  • The fact that two of the seven people in the group that defeated him are his surrogate mother and his overprotective little brother, the exact people whose attempts to protect him gave him that complex in the first place, also didn't help.
  • Speaking of the spoiler, Helio has a breakdown himself. While not as rabid as some other examples, he breaks his cool demeanour long enough to scream his head off at Ethan and inject himself with Psycho Serum during the aforementioned (Villainous?)Heroic Sacrifice.
• Left 4 Dead's AI Director is in charge of spawning the zombie hordes that players fight through. Once the rescue vehicle appears at the end of a campaign, the Director will throw everything it's got at you, quickly overwhelming any player who doesn't get on the vehicle quickly.
• In Legacy of Kain, the true Big Bad of the series, the Elder God, starts freaking out when it sees that all of its machinations throughout time have spectacularly failed to stop the appearance of the one true threat to its power: the purified Scion of Balance, Kain, wielding the legendary Soul Reaver.
• The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: Malefor has a rather subtle one at the end. His final confrontation with the heroes has him being Faux Affably Evil and toying with them, taking great joy out of manipulating their emotions with his Hannibal Lecture. But then, Cynder manages to break free of his control thanks to The Power of Love she has for Spyro. The result is Malefor getting enraged for the first and only time in the entire series. Throughout the rest, he's been a calm, cunning, and extremely effective Chess Master who is always in control. The first time it changes is the first time he loses his cool and gets angry.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Link's Awakening features the Nightmare flipping out upon its destruction and the triggering of the Dream Apocalypse.
    Nightmare: This island is going to disappear...our world is going to disappear...our world...our...world...
  • It's subtle because it all happens almost entirely non-verbally, but The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask features the final fight against Majora's Mask. The strange Moon Child wearing the Mask considers the subsequent fight to be a game of "good guys against bad guys" with Link as the bad guy running away. Its second form, Majora's Incarnation, further emphasizes that it views everything as a game by dancing about in a goofy manner. But stunning it results in it pounding about on the floor in a manner reminiscent of a child throwing a tantrum, showing that it is starting to realize that it is losing the "game" it started. It finally loses its cool entirely, as evidenced by it transforming into the aptly-named Majora's Wrath and no longer fighting in a goofy or playful manner.
  • Ganondorf is surprisingly calm and calculating in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker; killing Link isn't even a priority for him anymore. This all changes when the King of Hyrule snatches the completed Triforce from right in front of him and uses it to sink Hyrule once again. Ganondorf's response is to let out some insane Evil Laughter, afterwards mocking the King's wish to "give Zelda and Link a new world", and proceeds to attack Link and Zelda. Which is even more insane when you consider that without the Triforce of Power (which left him to form the full Triforce), there is no doubt he is going to die. If Ganondorf had defeated Link and Zelda in the final battle, then he would have drowned with Hyrule.
  • Zant goes through a rather sudden breakdown when you battle him in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, changing from a very calm Evil Overlord to a spastic, shrieking mess in the blink of an eye. He went through something similar in the game's back-story, after being denied the throne to the Twili Kingdom, which may explain the sudden breakdown when you face him; it was always there and he was just holding it in (which wouldn't be that hard to do, since everything was going his way and he had no need for a breakdown... until Link and Midna storm his palace and break down his front door, that is). His breakdown can be observed during the battle itself. His fighting style (when he's not mimicking other bosses) is already rather crude and childish, but it grows more and more frantic each time he gets hit. By the end of the fight, his Teleport Spam and sword swings are wildly unpredictable.
  • Skyward Sword could almost be called Villainous Breakdown: The Game. Watching Ghirahim slowly go from toying with Link to utterly hating him is something to behold. In the end, he finally breaks and assures Link that in the final battle, he will die this time. It doesn't help that Ghirahim is trying to sacrifice Zelda to revive his master when he breaks down, either.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, the Big Bad, Hilda, breaks down more and more as the final boss fight goes on. As the cognitive dissonance of sacrificing Hyrule to save her own kingdom takes its toll on her mind, and as said plan crumbles, she goes from an outwardly-calm Well-Intentioned Extremist to a desperate and broken state. Thanks to the help of Ravio, she gets better.
  • In Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, Astor gets increasingly psychotic as the heroes keep thwarting his "prophecy", cumulating in a rant that he's Ganon's Chosen One and an ill-fated attempt to order Ganon around.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Ganondorf essentially throws a massive fit upon being bested by Link in his Demon King form, leading to him using the forbidden art of draconification to turn himself into the Demon Dragon to get one last shot at killing Link. However, as draconification completely destroys the mind of anyone undergoing the process, he's at best a Clipped-Wing Angel and an Almighty Idiot.
• At the end of the School Stories side-quest in Lost Judgment, Koga, the leader of the Neo Keihin Gang, has had his entire criminal empire reduced to nothing within an evening by Yagami and a bunch of high-schoolers. Including the Professor herself, Itokura, who’s decided to switch sides and betray him. The side-quest ends with him diving into a lake and laughing maniacally about restarting his empire overseas, apparently fully intent on swimming all the way there.
• Assuming an incompetent Control Freak game developer could really be considered a "villain", Ishmael from The Magic Circle suffers one. It's apparently been slowly but surely building up over the years he's sunk into making the game. And then, right when he thinks there's a chance that he can salvage his life's work, he's betrayed by his newest intern Coda (helped by your efforts to free the Old Pro) and becomes a total laughingstock at E4. Ishmael snaps, goes on a tirade about how much gamers suck for using games to escape from reality, then falls to his knees begging you to turn off the camera.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect:
    • "I am Sovereign, and this station is MINE!" This is the machine-Cthulhu who gave Shepard and those with him/her that drippingly contemptuous and arrogant lecture earlier about the inevitability of its plan succeeding. Sovereign is, at this point, on the cusp of victory when Shepard denies it access to that final, endgame-starting console. Three measly, puny, chatty organics have thrown the Spanner in the Works of the millennia-in-the-making plan where nearly everything before worked as expected. Sovereign is furious. It also helps that Sovereign is a real Smug Snake (albeit an unusually competent one) up to that point.
    • Sovereign also briefly lost it earlier in the game, but it's very subtle. When Saren learns that Shepard has used the Prothean Beacon, the interior of the room turns red and Saren has a very out of character tantrum. Since he's being indoctrinated, one can infer this was due to Sovereign briefly taking control and venting his frustration through him. In fact, you can even hear Sovereign's voice faintly underneath his.
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • A minor villain near the start gets increasingly frustrated at her troops as Shepard gets closer to her ("There are three of them. THREE! Anything can be killed if you'd just do your damn jobs!").
    • At the end, you have the option of majorly screwing the Illusive Man over by destroying the Collector base instead of listening to his suggestion of preserving it. In the conversation with him afterwards, he reveals his true colours and abandons any notions of being Affably Evil.
      Illusive Man: Strength for Cerberus is strength for every human. Cerberus is humanity! I should've known you'd choke on the hard decisions, too idealistic from the start!
      Illusive Man: Don't turn your back on me, Shepard! I made you! I brought you back from the dead!
    • Oddly enough, if Shepard fails to survive the mission after defying the Illusive Man, he is far more measured in his assessment of Shepard's decision. Though he still claims Shepard was too idealistic, he doesn't seem to be as angry about what's happened, and calmly concludes that the mission was a success regardless.
    • Archangel's recruitment mission has you decimating the three united mercenary gangs that have united to take him down. All the gang leaders have their own little variant, but Tarak gets in the best one: he pilots the gunship Archangel had shot down before the mission started, screams that he "thinks he can screw with the Blue Suns", and plants a missile in his face.
    • In the Paragon ending for the Overlord DLC, Doctor Archer desperately and frantically tries to justify putting his brother through the titular horrific experiment. When Shepard angrily rebukes it and states that he/she intends to take David away so he can get treatment, Archer finally snaps and pulls a gun. Needless to say, it doesn't work. The real kicker is that Dr. Archer has been arguing that David should remain with him so Archer can look after him. What does he shout when Shepard tells him he's taking him away to be treated? "No! Stop! He's too valuable!"
    • One could argue that the Overlord DLC as a whole is an Antivillainous Breakdown on the part of David.
    • In Lair of the Shadow Broker, the Shadow Broker has an excellent breakdown when Liara taunts him with information about his past despite him being unknown to everyone else in the galaxy. He picks up his desk and throws it at Liara, Shepard, and whoever else is there with them.
    • In Arrival, Harbinger, who is generally unflappable even when you're about to blow the Collector Base to smithereens, actually becomes aggravated.
      Harbinger: Shepard.... you have become an... annoyance.
    • Speaking of Arrival, the indoctrinated Amanda Kenson starts panicking after Shepard wakes up, and only gets worse as Shep tears through the Project guards, eventually becoming a shrieking tantrum-throwing mess once Shep confronts her at the reactor core.
  • Mass Effect 3:
    • In the endgame, the Illusive Man has one after Shepard and Anderson make him realize that he's indoctrinated. He goes from calmly trying to persuade Shepard of the virtues of controlling the Reapers to...
      The Illusive Man: NO! I'm in control! No one's telling me what to do!
    • Indoctrination, according to the Codex, causes higher mental functioning to decay, eventually leaving the victim a "gibbering animal". Apparently, while on the way, it has humans pass through a "whining child" stage.
    • While most commonly interpretated as an example of The Bad Guy Wins, the Glamour Failure when Shepard chooses the Refuse ending could be considered this; the Catalyst is freaking out as it realises that its destruction is assured, even if this cycle's inhabitants will be the Doomed Moral Victors of a Pyrrhic Victory, and it will die on the terms of those who shun it and all it stands for, rather than ending the cycle on its own terms.
    • During a mission in ME3, if you killed the Rachni Queen back in ME1, then you get to meet a Reaper-created clone of her. She requests that you release her, so that she can give you assistance to defeating them. It's recommended that you don't, as she'll kill most of the Engineering Corps, and remove herself from your War Assets. If you take the smart desicion, and leave her to die, she FLIPS OUT, screaming through dozens of dead krogan at her offspring to kill you.
    • Your clone, in the Citadel DLC, gets steadily less stable as their plan falls apart, moving from calm and self-assured to screaming at you.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda:
    • The Invictor, the boss of the kett on Eos, starts out as a Smug Snake, broadcasting his threats across the radio, once he realizes Ryder's around. As Ryder gets through his base, and his many, many, many henchmen, he goes from threatening to Kick the Dog (if there were any dogs he'd left unkicked) to losing it, as Ryder's about to put their foot in his ass.
    • Aroane, the Arc Villain of Drack's Loyalty Mission. He starts it off relatively composed (for a guy who has a krogan after him), but as the mission goes on, he keeps upping the reward for killing Drack and Ryder as they just. keep. Coming.
    • Aksuul, at the end of Jaal's Loyalty Mission, when Ryder and Jaal have thwarted his plan to frame the Initiative, and Jaal points out how full of crap Aksuul's being in front of all his followers, naming some of the good things Ryder's done. Eventually, all Aksuul can do is yell "stop defending them!". Then he tries pointing a gun at Jaal.
    • The Archon, at the climax, as Ryder and their friends, along with the entire Heleus Cluster, power through his armies. His boasting gives way to angry ranting about all the horrible things he's going to do to everyone once he's done, and declaring humans don't get to be exalted anymore.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: Yomi Hellsmile, after Makoto brings evidence of his crimes straight to his face, desperately tries to beg his subordinates to arrest everyone, with none of them listening to his orders, and they arrest him instead. He then angrily vows that he will return before being dragged away.
• Max Payne:
  • Nicole Horne in the first Max Payne. ("What do you mean, 'he's unstoppable'?")
  • Vladimir Lem from Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. ("What the fuck is wrong with you, Max?! Why won't you just die?!")
• Mega Man:
  • In Mega Man 11, Block Man has a gigantic Humongous Mecha form that he'll use halfway through the fight with him. Once you destroy it, he's reduced to hurling blocks as his only attack. During this phase, he'll scream at Mega Man.
    Block Man: BREAK ALREADY!
  • Mega Man Zero
    • At the end of 1, Copy X starts the final battle utterly confident, telling the remaining Guardians they're no match for Zero and ordering them to leave so he might fight Zero himself. He proudly boasts he's the hero not even the original X could be, and then shifts to his Ultimate Armor. Once Zero soundly beats him and states the original X was stronger than this, Copy X's pride can't take the insult and he furiously tells Zero to shut up and witness his true power. Once he falls again, Copy X can only mutter in disbelief how he, the "hero", lost, and triggers a self-destruct sequence for a final Rage Quit moment.
    • In 2, Phoenix Magnion undergoes a minor one during his boss fight, starting out with casual, almost bored-sounding Boss Banter, but as the fight goes on and he loses more and more health he becomes more annoyed, and then outright angry towards Zero.
    • Also from 2, Elpizo starts out the final battle Drunk on the Dark Side thanks to finally getting the Dark Elf, declaring that he's going to kill Zero before going on to Kill All Humans. When he loses, he's in utter disbelief that he lost despite wielding the power that nearly destroyed the world and yells for the Dark Elf to give him more power. She does.
    • Possibly the biggest one yet in Mega Man history is the series Big Bad Dr. Weil in 4: After his right-hand man Craft has gone rouge after realizing his mistakes and fired Ragnarok upon Neo Arcadia to kill Weil which led to more than 10 million deaths of humans and Reploids but failed to kill Weil due to his regenerative body which made him immortal. He appears at the end of the final stage in a horrifying reveal as a cyborg with the left side of his face damaged showing a menacing robotic red eye with his teeth bared in insanity showing how much of a monster he really is in the inside. Weil rants about his past of his forced possibly painful conversion from a normal human into an immortal cyborg and banished to the wastelands of the world that he had created after the Elf Wars as punishment a century ago and then declares that he will use Ragnarok itself as a Colony Drop to destroy Area Zero to kill off what's left of life and nature in the ruined world despite possibly losing his own life as well. And after Zero defeating his first form, he is still alive and somehow loses it even further, furiously yelling at Zero if he really can kill a human like him before painfully fusing himself with all of Ragnarok to become a monstrous abomination as a last-ditch effort before being defeated at last that has him screaming about his defeat and swearing to his arch-nemesis as he finally perishes along with Zero.
      Dr. Weil: To die... by the hands of a damned puppet... Perish... PERISH FOREVER!!!
• Colonel Volgin of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater becomes increasingly erratic and paranoid as Snake progresses. By the end of the game, he's degenerated into a full-blown ranting lunatic, driving the Shagohod through his subordinates and laughing maniacally. It gets better: up to that point in the game, he'd occasionally mutter 'Kuwabara, kuwabara' to himself (being a superstitious chant to ward off lightning storms). Cut forward, and he laughs in the face of a brewing storm. Guess how he met his end?
• Although there isn't much room for it in the Metroid series (outside of possibly Prime's Pirate logs), the 1994 Super Metroid comic features one of these later on, when Ridley is informed of Samus's progress. He actually leaves the planet and abandons his command, telling his informant that they should all just listen to Mother Brain instead.
• The two villains from the Modern Warfare series have both done this. In the first game, Imran Zhakaev tried to start a global war, starting in the Middle East. After his son commits suicide after you have him cornered, he tries to NUKE THE EAST COAST as payback. In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Shepherd's plan goes perfectly until Soap and Price escape the trap he laid for them at the boneyard. Cooperating with Makarov, the two find Shepherd's hideout and go on a rampage through it, thwarting every attempt made to stop them, Shepherd finally resorting to BLOWING UP THE BASE with his soldiers still inside in order to kill them.
• The Mother series:
  • This happened to Giegue in between games. At the end of EarthBound Beginnings, Ninten and his friends sung to him the lullaby Maria used to sing to him. After being defeated this way, he vows to return. By the time of EarthBound (1994), he became so powerful that not only did he break down mentally, but physically as well, and he now needs the Devil's Machine to keep his form.
  • The fan midquel taking place in between those two games, Mother: Cognitive Dissonance, goes into detail of said breakdown. Giegue's lack of mental well-being is evident from day one as he is more violent towards his enemies, including those he believes to be "traitorous", and a close look at his skills list during his tutorial battle shows that he can slip into madness at will to regain PP. It reaches its boiling point during the final battle when Giegue finds out that Niiue, his positive emotions and memories exiled from his mind and personified, is still alive. Giegue is reduced to begging Niiue to leave him and then ranting to kill everyone just to be left alone. His emotional state led his PSI powers into physically tearing and stretching him apart and mushing with the fabric of Magicent. This ultimately led to what we see him as in EarthBound: Giygas.
• Myst:
  • Myst IV: Revelation: "No, you fool! My performance was perfect!"
  • Saavedro of Myst III: Exile comes pre-broken due to being trapped on two small islands in Narayan and J'nanin for upwards of twenty years. He breaks again when the player manages to deactivate the outer ice shield that's isolated him from the rest of Narayan, allowing him to see that at least one city has survived and possibly his family with them, but he can't get to them without the player's help and a third time when the player stabs him in the back and traps him between the two ice shields. "No! NO! No, no, no, no, no, no, no..."
  • From Myst V: End of Ages: "You ... IDIOT! Moronic lump of filth! You are nothing! Puh! AHHHHHH! I needed the power! I needed it! D'ni needed ME! You threw it away to this witch and her legion of scum, the demon slaves! You have released the slaves as masters! You've turned the small to great! Curse the Maker..."
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted:
  • At the end, Cross, the cop who's been after you for the whole game, gets one (even though he's not really villainous). Bonus points for being a Shout-Out to The Professional:
    Cross: I want every single unit after this guy.
    Partner: ...everyone?
    Cross: EVERYONE!!!
  • In fact, he then calls you in the middle of the ensuing chaos (you're being chased by every police unit in the city with no chance of proper escape) to rant about how he's going to take you down, and it's surprisingly not at all calm. In the sequel, Carbon, he ends up quitting the police department to become a bounty hunter, just so he can take you down.
  • This also happens to Razor, the game's main antagonist. At around Stage 14, he's so determined that you're working for the police that he gets the feds to be on the lookout for your car, thus sending you to heat level 5. And at Stage 15, he calls you just to accuse you of selling him out. This eventually culminates into him refusing to give you the keys to your car when you eventually defeat him.
    Razor: I know what's your game, punk, you're selling us out! Big surprise! I don't know how, but ya are! And for that, you're gonna pay! You're gonna burn!
• The Neverhood: When you meet Klogg for the first and last time, he's haughty over his status as the Neverhood's king, and tries to sweet-talk his little brother Klaymen into putting on the crown so they can rule the Neverhood side by side. Once it becomes clear that Klaymen wants to return the crown to the Big Good to revive him, Klogg loses it and attempts to stab the newly-revived Hoborg just to keep his status as the king.
  Klogg: DIE, YOU OLD FOOL!
• NieR has Popola do this after Devola dies.
  Popola: NO ONE STOOOOOOOOOOPPPPPSSSS! EEEEEEEEEYYAAAAAAAAAAAGHGGHHHH!
  • That same thing happen to Eve from NieR: Automata after 2B kills Adam.
    Eve: Why...? Why did you have to die...? It's not fair! My only brother... Damn them! I'll kill them... I swear I'll kill them all!
• Nintendo Wars: Done by Caulder/Stolos of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin/Dark Conflict, pleading for help as he dies in the destruction of the Owl's Nest. The NA Version makes the breakdown even more apparent:
  Caulder: N-no... NO! What have you done?! I'm...I'm dying... I'm DYING! I have killed so many clones, but I am different! I am unique! I am ALIVE! Help me! Please! Someone! Help me! I don't want...to die...
• In Obsidian, the Bureau Chief, the villainous Obstructive Bureaucrat who has continually insisted on your following the impossible rules of the Bureau Realm, gets so furious from all your rule-breaking that his face even turns into an old stand-by test screen for TVs, then shuts off for a few seconds. And even then, he still is forced to give you information about Max.
• Octopath Traveler absolutely loves this trope! As there are a few examples in the original and the sequel:
  • When Ophilia talks Lianna out of wishing for her father's resurrection by reminding her that the memories she made with him remain with her, and dispels the dark flame, Mattias goes berserk and tries to feed Ophilia to it.
  • Lucia makes a We Can Rule Together offer to Cyrus. He refuses on the grounds that Lucia wants to hoard knowledge for the sake of her own ego, instead of sharing knowledge with others. Lucia does not take his rejection and subsequent "The Reason You Suck" Speech at all well.
  Lucia: ... Enough. I've given you plenty of opportunities to make a move — any move! — but clearly we are going nowhere fast. If you would rather die without discovering the truth, so be it!
• Octopath Traveler II:
  • After beating his first phase and shattering his Plague Doctor mask, Trousseau flies into a rage, demanding to know why Castti is fighting so hard to save people who are just going to continue suffering and experience pain and loss until their inevitable deaths.
  • Not that he was stable before, but Harvey loses it when Osvald stands defiant in the face of his source of the One True Magic during their battle, roaring Osvald's name in pure hatred.
  Professor Harvey: I will use whatever it takes to defeat you! OOOOOOSVAAAAAALLLLLLD!
  • When it becomes clear he can't weasel out of his deal with Partitio on a technicality, Rogue Briliante starts ranting on how the steam engine is to belong to him and him alone, that the deal is null and void, and it culminates with him fleeing the crowd of journalists and attempting to brute-force his way out of the deal.
• Paper Mario:
  • Not an entire game, but during Chapter 2 of Paper Mario 64, this happens with Tutankoopa as you progress further and further through the Dry Dry Ruins.
  • Chapter 4 of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has the smug Doopliss throw a tantrum after Mario finally figures out his name.
    Doopliss: NO! NO! NO! NO! WHY? WHY WHY? WHY? HOW? HOW? HOW? HOW?
  • Subverted in Chapter 5 of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door; most of the dungeon has you hearing moaning messages from Cortez in the same vein as those of Tutankoopa (complete with a gradual breakdown), but when you arrive at Cortez's chamber, he says that he's sick of putting up that ruse, since "Pirates don't moan!", and starts showing his real personality — which is about what you would expect from a pirate king and hasn't been broken down at all.
  • The end of Super Paper Mario has Dimentio giving up on rebuilding the world in his image and just setting the Chaos Heart to destroy everything and leave nothing behind, laughing like a maniac as he finally dies.
  • Midway through the final boss battle of Paper Mario: The Origami King, Olivia tells King Olly that paperkind isn't as bad as he thought, but the latter snaps and transforms. Then it gets even worse right before the final phase of the battle.
• Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners: The deeper Professor Tsuchida drives Dr. Kuroe and the tour group into the pyramid, the clearer it becomes to them that they're dealing with a Manipulative Bastard. Yet he maintains control up until the point that he witnesses Kuroe standing in front of Pharaoh Khufu. While this is a completely innocuous sight to everyone else, Tsuchida completely loses his mind, revealing that the whole reason he was so driven to delve so far into the ruins in the first place is because he expected the Pharaoh to judge Kuroe guilty and strike him down. He even saved Kuroe from an earlier judgement because he expected that he'd face a crueler punishment later on, and seeing otherwise causes him to completely flip out.
• Persona:
  • After spending two entire games as a masterful, unflappable manipulator, Nyarlathotep in Persona 2: Eternal Punishment starts to lose it after the party penetrates the numerous illusions and mind games he scatters throughout his lair. He's reduced to incoherent screaming by the end of his boss fight, still convinced he's unbeatable.
    Nyarlathotep: I WON'T ACCEPT IT! INVINCIBLE! INVINCIBLE!
  • Adachi in Persona 4, despite being a Smug Snake, keeps his cool right up until the protagonists find him. Even then, he manages to remain composed enough to berate and mock them. However, when he is repeatedly called out for being nothing more than a criminal, he finally breaks down and starts cursing and yelling at the protagonists, telling them "[They] have no idea of what kind of shit I've had to go through!" And then he summons his Persona and the boss fight begins.
  • In Persona 5, your targets' Shadows will generally start to lose it more and more as you come closer and closer to beating them. Additionally, once you beat the first phase of the traitor's boss fight, he completely stops caring about his boss's plan and falls into a murderous rage, to the point that he decides to use his powers to make himself go berserk.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Platinum: Cyrus might apply, especially in the Distortion World. He spends half the game saying he's disregarded all emotion, seeing them as weakness and useless. One can't blame him for losing it, being dragged into that world by Giratina.
    • There's this, which he says before he utterly demolishes your team in the Distorion World:
      Cyrus: Why should I run and hide from the world and have to wait quietly? My aim is to rid our world of the vague and incomplete thing we call spirit. By freeing ourselves of that, our world can be made complete. That is my justice! No one can interfere! I won't lose! Not to that shadowy Pokémon! Not in any worthless world!
    • And when you do manage to defeat him, he has this to say.
      Cyrus: ...Don't think that you can defeat or capture that Pokémon. This bizarre world is none other than that Pokémon itself! Capturing it or defeating it will make this world disappear! Very well! Do what you will! Rather than repairing the world, you're going to destroy it for me! Do it. You inherit my legacy.
    • Plus this, once the player defeats/captures Giratina.
      Cyrus: That Pokémon... That shadowy Pokémon was captured/defeated?! Your doing so means that this irrational world will remain in existence! Does that make it impossible for me to create a new world? Even if I made new Red Chains, the new world can't be made! Why?! What compels you to protect the two worlds? Is spirit, a vague and incomplete thing, so important to you?!
      Cynthia: ...The places we are born. The time we spend living... The languages we speak... We are all different. But the presence of Pokémon unites us. We share our lives with our Pokémon and our happiness grows as we all become greater than we were alone. That is why we can battle and trade with anyone we choose...
      Cyrus: Silence! Enough of your blathering! That's how you justify spirit as something worthwhile?! That is merely humans hoping, deluding themselves that they are happy and safe! The emotions broiling inside me... Rage, hatred, frustration... These ugly emotions arise because of my own incomplete spirit!
    • And finally, we have this last bit of cold fury after the initial Motive Rant and Villainous Breakdown. It can't only be described as cold fury, as it implies that he is threatening the player character to A Fate Worse Than Death.
      Cyrus: ...Enough. We will never see eye to eye. This, I promise you. I will break the secrets of the world. With that knowledge, I will create my own complete and perfect world. One day, you will awaken to a world of my creation. A world without spirit.
  • Pokémon Black and White:
    • Ghetsis undergoes one of these after the player has caught the legend and defeated N — Ghetsis's very manipulative plan all hinged on N beating the player, and making everyone give up their Pokémon as N was raised by him to believe that they should be separate. The truth is, Ghetsis just manipulated him all his life, just so he could be the only person to have Pokémon and be able to rule Unova. He calls N an inhuman monster, which is called out by Alder and Cheren, who noted his hypocrisy. He gets even worse after you beat him.
      Ghetsis: I AM PERFECTION!!!
    • It gets worse in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2. When he's first encountered on the Plasma Frigate, Ghetsis appears to have become something of a mad hermit, sitting in a secluded security office giving signs of Owellian surveillance linked around the ship. Toward the climax of the game, he attempts to use Kyurem to freeze the protagonist alive, and by the end, multiple defeats at the hands of the protagonists and the destruction of his life's work have utterly broken Ghetsis, reducing him to an inaudible, non-functioning vegetable. Wow.
  • Lysandre has one in Pokémon X and Y after you defeat him for the last time. He collapses, then starts yelling in rage, and then attempts suicide. It's never shown if it succeeded or not.
  • Lusamine has a truly disturbing one in Pokémon Sun and Moon. When you confront her in the alternate dimension, she grows increasingly fanatical, belittling and disowning her daughter and insisting that she remain there forever with Nihilego before finally fusing with the Beast and attacking the player. After you defeat her, she lies in a pitiful heap, utterly broken by the ordeal.
• Portal:
  • In the first Portal, GLaDOS goes from smug superiority to snide insults to outright seething hatred over the course of her Boss Battle. Her voice gets more emotional and less coherent as you progress: getting chunks of your brain yanked out and incinerated will do that to you.
    GLaDOS: Stop squirming and die like an adult or I'm going to delete your back-up! STOP! Okay, enough, I deleted it, no matter what happens now, you're dead! You're still squirming around a little but believe me, you're dead! The part of you that could have survived indefinitely is gone! I just struck you from the permanent record.
  • Wheatley from Portal 2 suffers from this in the Final Boss fight. He starts off rather calmly, engaging in Boss Banter and acting extremely intimidating. After bursting the Conversion Gel pipe, he gets pissed, which is when his sanity starts to slip. But it's only when you attach the first and second core to him that he really starts to lose it. He starts spouting paranoid delusions, using the fact that you didn't catch him at the beginning of the game to accuse you and GLaDOS of only pretending to be enemies to use him, and that the events of the entire game were all a ploy to dispose of him. But the thing that makes this so heartbreaking is the fact that while he says that, he's crying.
    Wheatley: [voice breaking] Oh, it's all becoming clear to me now! Find some dupe to break you out of cryosleep! Give him a sob story about escaping to the surface! Squeeze him for information on how to find a Portal Gun! Then, when he's no more use to you, he has a little "accident!" Doesn't he?! "Falls" off his management rail?! DOESN'T HE?!
• In Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, when the war machine began to explode:
  Clive: This isn't happening. It can't end this way. IT WON'T END THIS WAY!
• Crimson 1 in Project Wingman. If Hitman 1/Monarch shoos his squadron away by almost shooting one of his wingmen down on their first encounter, he'll merely attribute it to luck as a lowly mercenary like him can't possibly be that good. Comes Operation Cold War and Monarch, now known as "The Crown" to the Federation, trashes their air force including almost all Crimson planes to the point their higher-ups order a full retreat and Crimson 1 has to be reined in, begging his officers to stay. After the destruction of Prospero, Crimson squadron ambushes them, with Crimson 1 rambling about how mercenaries like Monarch caused all the death and destruction the war caused and laughing his ass off once shot down. This culminates during the battle for Presidia where, having stolen the PW.MK1 and cordium warheads, Crimson 1 destroys the city just to have a last battle with Monarch, all the while lamenting how the Crown made him do it and cycling between insults, threats, delusional reassurances and fits of laughter during their last battle.

Games R-W

• In Red Dead Redemption II, when encountering a dying Arthur who tells him that he gave up everything for Dutch and that only John was able to leave the outlaw life and not the rest of them, Dutch has a My God, What Have I Done? moment of clarity when he realizes how wrong he has been. For the first time ever, Dutch Van der Linde, who always knows what to say and when to say it, is completely lost for words. All he could do is stutter " I ... I ..." as he comes to realize all the lives he has permanently ruined, including his own. After being on the verge of a Villainous BSoD for so long, Dutch finally crosses it, not with a bang but with a whimper.
• Resident Evil:
  • Another Capcom example in Resident Evil 5, when Wesker's overconfidence allows him to get injected with an overdose of the virus he uses to control his superhuman abilities, causing him to lose control and composure. When the heroes stop his scheme at the last minute, he exposes himself to the Uroboros virus, mutating into a menace full of one-hit kills and screaming "CHRIS!" with vindictive rage. As Wesker had been a Magnificent Bastard for something like nine games to this point, it was quite a remarkable breakdown.
  • Wesker's breakdown arguably started when he found out he was just a manufactured sock puppet of Ozwell Spencer. He goes from being an enigmatic Man Behind the Man subtly aiming for power in the shadows to declaring himself to be a god and inflicting a bio-organic weapon on the entire world.
  • Ramon Salazar in Resident Evil 4. Though his calm and jovial demeanor is intimidating at first, eventually, after repeatedly being foiled in his attempts to kill Leon, he snaps when Leon saves himself from the pit trap in the throne room, and shrieks at one of his lackeys to "KILL!"
  • Resistance, the online co-op game that came with Resident Evil 3 (Remake) has the masterminds slowly go through this during the play sessions. First, they're very confident, bragging about how the survivors are wasting their time. As the survivors clear the rooms, their confidence starts to crack. And if the survivors are close to clearing the third and final room to freedom, the different masterminds fully goes into their version of this trope: screaming, ranting, and not understanding how they're losing with such power, and the survivors being nothing more than human lab rats in a maze.
• RosenkreuzStilette:
  • Iris gets a Villainous Breakdown in the form of laughing madly as she finally figures out where Spiritia got all the energy she destroyed her Iris Machine with. While Lilli wonders what's wrong with her, this is also where Tia hits her with a You're Insane!: "Iris, have you lost your mind!?"
    Iris: Ah... I get it now! So that's what's going on! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
  • In Rosenkreuzstilette Grollschert, the game's alternate mode, she also gets one when Grolla gets to confront her in battle again in the final stage. Iris gets an Oh, Crap! look on her face and says "...Impossible. There's no way a simple commoner can set foot here..." Grolla asks her how special she thinks herself to be, and that's where she finally reveals that she's a reincarnation of Rosenkreuz, blessed with absolute power and unparalelled brains, claiming to be a child of God himself. Grolla doesn't care if she's a god, a human, or even an insect — her blade is telling her to spill her blood anyway, and she's compelled to comply. She implies that she's always willing to rip her apart just the same. Iris doesn't take that too well. "You pompous maggot...! I shall show you the limits of a commoner!"
• In the Adobe Flash game Road of the Dead the unnamed military commander responsible for keeping Evans City and its' zombie infection under quarantine grows increasingly exasperated as the game progresses. As the situation continues to deteriorate and the protagonist continues to evade his patrols, the man begins to lose his grip on the situation at hand and begins giving incoherent and pointless orders, including diverting more and more resources toward stopping a single man from escaping the city. Fortunately, he is relieved of command and replaced with the more level headed General Sherman before his breakdown could get any worse.
  Soldier: Unit 11 to base! Brighton Bridge is completely overrun! We need a new fallback position. Now!
  Unnamed Military Commander: Uh...set up defense at the Chinatown Plaza!
  Soldier: Sir? We just came from there!
  Unnamed Military Commander: Uh... Goddammit! Just move north! Just move freaking north!
• In RWBY: Grimm Eclipse, Dr. Merlot suffers a minor Villainous Breakdown at the end of Chapter 9, after you transmit his location to Beacon and then fend off the enemies he sends to kill you. He recovers, but gradually loses it again during the final chapter as you tear through his facility. Towards the end of the final boss battle, against a mutated Deathstalker, he starts begging it to hang in there and finish you off already, and when you defeat it, he loses it completely and sets the facility to self-destruct in a last-ditch attempt to stop you.
• NSE Director Hanson has one at the end of Second Sight: normally a self-assured and frustratingly patient villain, he begins to lose his cool when John Vattic manages to infiltrate his underground base, to the point of snarling "I'm tired of picking through this crap!" when asked to review Project Zener's files again. This is taken a step further into near-megalomania while observing the battle between Vattic and base security, as he is clearly very excited about the demonstrated uses of psychic powers. However, the final stage of his breakdown is when he realised that Vattic and the other psychics have managed to kill every last soldier at his disposal, and when he discovers that while the window he's hiding behind is bullet and psi-proof, the frame supporting it isn't. In a matter of seconds, he goes from a smirking, self-satisfied manipulator to a frightened and helpless tourist surrounded by mutated psychic children who want to eat him alive. His last words say it all:
  Hanson: No... no, stay back... what do you want?! Stay away from me! I said STAY AWAY! Don't touch me — AH, YOU BIT ME, YOU LITTLE BASTARD, YOU AAAAAAARGH NOOOOO AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGHHHH!!!
• The Secret World:
  • Upon being defeated by the players and losing Excalibur to Cassie King, Freddy Beaumont lapses into desperate bravado, panicky threats, petulant whimpering, and frantic appeals to his status as A Norse god before finally being shut up with a single kick to the face.
  • Tanis, having lost a key client in the form of Said and finding herself unable to convince him to reconsider, actually goes so far as to put a gun to Said's head out of sheer desperation. And when the ancient mummy casually shrugs off her bluff, Tanis resorts to offering literally everything the Phoenicians have on offer — including the Spear of Destiny — only for Said to dismiss her offers and walk off in disgust, leaving Tanis alone in the alleyway, humiliated and alone.
  • Dr Klein grows steadily more frustrated with players as they progress through the Ankh, until by the final boss battle, he's resorted to screaming "PHILLISTINES!" at the top of his voice, lambasting the players for their "small-mindedness" in refusing to allow him to unleash the Filth upon all of Egypt.
  • In another dungeon-based breakdown, Halina Ilyushin begins cracking up as you start spoiling her childhood dream of going to space, and demands to know why you insist on ruining everything even as she assaults you head-on. Then she starts altering herself with infusions of the Filth, and the breakdown gives way to utter insanity.
    Halina: The gold turns to black! The blood keeps coming! Blood and whispers! Screaming stars impale me with beauty! The anthem of dreams!
  • During your final visit to the Dreaming Prison, the Dreamers subtly panic as they realize that you're in the perfect position to stop them from escaping, and begin hastily trying to wallpaper over any previous disagreements they had with you — and though their Creepy Monotone wavers only slightly, it's clear from the begging for mercy that they're scared. For good measure, actually strengthening the lock on their prison results in them throwing a temper-tantrum.
  • Lilith does not respond well to being rejected by Emma, especially after her attempt to just kidnap the girl ended in failure, and ultimately degenerates into increasingly Yandere-ish threats before trying to make a grab for Emma — and getting blasted back through the portal.
  • The Black Signal (AKA John) suffers one of these right in the middle of torturing the players by forcing them to relive their memories; having spent most of the session as his usual gleeful self, he suddenly panics when he notices Lilith on the mental projector, hammering his Trauma Button so violently that the projector reverts to a test pattern, and actively begs players to take him away from the memory of the encounter — apparently believing that even the memory of Lilith might be able to kill him.
• Shantae (2002): Risky Boots doesn't take it very well when Shantae destroys that fancy prototype steam war-machine she'd spent the whole game building. She goes from a relatively harmless and kid-friendly villain to a shrieking mess who pulls out a cutlass and tells Shantae how she'll slice her to ribbons and dance on her runny innards. Yeesh.
• In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Mastema, one of the Law representatives, acts very politely throughout the game, and remains this way on Law and Neutral. When you encounter him on Chaos in the final dungeon, he continues acting calm and polite. Soon after, however, he completely snaps and reveals that his goals are much more selfish than the typical Law representative. Instead of simply creating a World of Silence, he wants to please YHVH in order to transcend angelhood, no matter what he has to do, which includes playing on a woman's insecurities to turn her into his pawn. This scenario is the only one where he attacks you, and after beating him, Lucifer shows up to personally call him out, leaving a dying Mastema cursing Lucifer. Shin Megami Tensei IV plays with this — Mastema is portrayed much more ambiguously, and this time, it's the forces of Law who want him dead. Here, he remains calm throughout the fight, though after beating him, he essentially reprises his speeches in the Chaos route of Strange Journey. Given the DLC quests, it's unclear if it's the shock of betrayal by Flynn or this trope.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse has quite a few, but two take the cake:
  • At the end of the penultimate dungeon, Krishna, having lost as Vishnu, loses it completely, either ranting about how he will keep trying to bring salvation to humanity or looking in disbelief at how Flynn is dead. In his final moments, he realizes how all of his plans are foiled as either Flynn or Nanashi finishes him.
  • During the final battle, YHVH is much calmer than he was in II. Once he's demonized, however, he reverts right back to his old self, revoking his offers of forgiveness and ordering the parties to praise him.
• Shin Super Robot Wars: During the final Space Route scenario, Laodecia starts disbelieving this is happening to him, thinking this is a nightmare he'll wake up from as soon as he returns to the Helmoze...except he can't, because the ship fires its main gun and reduces him to particles.
• In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, when fighting a war with an enemy faction and pushing an enemy back and taking over their territory, the opposing faction leader will begin sending you messages. They start off with the usual rounds of offers for peace, maybe trying to extort a technology or money out of you for a ceasefire. Then they'll offer a general ceasefire. Then, if badly losing, they may offer an unconditional surrender. Or, if they're more erratic, you get to witness a gradual Sanity Slippage as the faction leader keeps sending you messages telling you that they will completely wipe out your faction, that Planet isn't big enough for both of you, and that s/he'll crush your [insert derogatory description here] followers under his/her might, and will keep on spouting that over and over until you finish them off.
• Ramirez, Skies of Arcadia's Dragon, really doesn't take it well when his boss, Lord Galcian, bites it.
• Sly 2: Band of Thieves has a very nice example in the form of constable Neyla. All through the game, she plays everybody off of everybody else in order to get what she wants. The more you foil her plans and gather the Clockwerk parts for yourself, the more short-tempered and less composed she becomes, until in the grand finale, she's screaming with rage, swearing to hunt you down and kill you in your sleep.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Sonic Adventure, when Tails beats Eggman to the missile in Station Square, Eggman loses all sense of Large Ham-ness and, when he returns with the Egg Walker, he hisses out "You fool. Away. Before I make mincemeat out of you." The breakdown had actually taken place earlier, when his plan to destroy it via Chaos was foiled and his Egg Carrier was destroyed. Just after this, he had attempted to nuke the whole city (and by extension himself) with the aforementioned missile out of spite.
  • Metal Sonic in Sonic Heroes suffers from one throughout the Final Boss fight against Super Sonic and the powered-up Tails and Knuckles.
    Metal Sonic: Sonic... I was created for the sole purpose of destroying you. But, I could never seem to defeat you! That is why I transformed my body with my own hands!
    [...]
    Super Sonic: [after scoring the first hit] Hmph! You thought you could beat me by transforming into some sort of monster?
    Metal Sonic: But, that was in the past. Now, you're nothing more than a speck of dust to me.
    [...]
    Metal Sonic: [after taking the third hit] See me as I am, no longer afraid of anything! I shall become the ultimate overlord, ruling as the world's most supreme being!
    Metal Sonic: [after taking the final hit] Guoooo! Why! I had it all! I am the ultimate overlord, Metal Sonic! I am the real Sonic!
  • In the ending of Sonic and the Secret Rings, Erazor Djinn taunts Sonic about his immortality and how he can come back again and again... until Sonic pulls out his lamp, reversing Erazor's grin. After Erazor is forced to bring back Shahra and reverse the damage he's done via two wishes, Sonic makes the third wish, to seal him in his lamp forever. This is where Erazor REALLY breaks down:
    Erazor: Shahra, I know you're there! Please, stop him! We can start over, the two of us! I swear it! I swear it...! THE WORLD IS MINE! I CANNOT BE DENIED BY THAT FILTHY RAT! WHHHHHHYYYYY?!?^note Sonic's wonderfully calm response was to correct Erazor that he was in fact a hedgehog, not a rat.
  • In Sonic Colors, Eggman suffers from one right before the Final Color Blaster. It's notably the first time he's been reduced to complete incoherence in the games.
    Eggman: You. You... You...! Yooooouuuu!! YOU HORRID LITTLE HEDGEHOG!!!
  • Eggman again in Sonic Lost World (but only in the 3DS version).
    Eggman: I'm sick of you getting in the way EVERY SINGLE TIME!!
• Played for Laughs (or maybe not) at the end of South Park: The Fractured but Whole, when Cartman's plan to take over South Park is foiled and exposed by the Freedom Pals, Cartman, in his Mitch Connor persona tries to fool the townsfolk by telling them a bizarre backstory of his evil origin about his "dad" been fucked by someone, only for his "mother" to show up, revealing herself as the perpetrator of said backstory. Enraged by the reveal, Mitch then proceeds to attack his "mother", killing her and himself in the process, ending this personal story for good.
• Spec Ops: The Line plays with this trope near the end, when Walker discovers the main villain, John Konrad, was Dead All Along and undergoes a Heel Realization and having a chat with Imaginary!Konrad before either shooting him or killing himself. It's not made clear if it's this trope or if we are seeing a Heroic BSoD.
• Starcraft II:
  • Arcturus Mengsk after Raynor broadcasts his controversial recordings to the Dominion:
    Mengsk: YOU jackals think you can come here and question ME?
  • Kerrigan also suffers this during the final battle. In the beginning, she's smugly taunting them, but as the Terrans continue to hold off the Zerg, drive her back, and the artifact increasingly gains power, she starts to scream angrily.
  • Mengsk's continues further in Heart Of The Swarm. By the end of the game, in addition to his Villain with Good Publicity status being shattered by Raynor as mentioned above, Kerrigan has turned from an Evil Overlord who didn't see him as worth killing to an Anti-Hero focused specifically on killing him, she has become more powerful than she ever was as a villain, she is invading his home planet with her Horde of Alien Locusts, and unlike Raynor, she doesn't give a crap about his propaganda. As a result, he loses his temper and goes with more and more extreme measures to protect himself, to the point of nuking his own city.
  • Duran also loses it after Kerrigan starts to win. At first, he's smug, but after Stukov weakens his sources of power, he starts angrily screaming and ordering his men to take them out.
  • Amon loses his composure over the course of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void to the point that in the final battle, he's just screaming insults at Kerrigan.
• In Star Fox 64, the alternative way to beating Mechbeth in Macbeth (namely, rerouting the train) has the pilot desperately trying to stop the train. He loses it when he's about to slam right into the supply depot, causing the depot to explode along with the train, obviously killing him. On the other hand, this is less a mental breakdown and more genuine and legitimate panic, since the brakes failed on him and he anticipated what was about to happen.
  • Star Wolf don't take their defeats well. Especially on the hard route on Venom.
  • Area 6 shows Andross' men slowly losing their composure as you breach their best defenses.
  • Andross himself shows signs of this, but only in the hard route, where he replaces a calm taunt with yelling "Now you will feel TRUE pain!"
• In Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, Luther Lansfeld undergoes this. He starts off as a smug chessmaster, having calculated what the party will do and taking countermeasures. When he is finally confronted as the Final Boss, he's undergone major Sanity Slippage, remarking that the party and the inhabitants of the Eternal Sphere are nothing but data and fabrications, and that he, as their creator, has the right to delete everything. He deteriorates yet further after being beaten once, deciding to go ahead and delete the entire universe in his madness. Even in death, he cannot fathom the idea of one's creation surpassing the creator.
• Star Trek Online:
  • General Hakeev, a Romulan working for the Tal Shiar and especially the Iconians who has been gleefully kidnapping people of all races and experimenting on them. In the mission "The Colosseum", you escape the titular location, find a derelict ship, and attempt to contact your ship when Hakeev and other Romulans surround you with Disruptors trained on you. However, when he gives the order to fire, you're rescued just in time, leading him to let out a Big "NO!" in utter frustration. It gets worse in the next mission, "Cutting the Cord", when your ship and the Remans lead by Obisek invade Hakeev's Tal Shiar base, running rampant across the place. When you catch up to him, he's begging Empress Sela to just bring the Iconians over now, but Sela has had enough and bails out. Even worse, your final fight with Hakeev is a massive Anticlimax Boss fight because he's so far gone. In the end, Obisek (or, if you're playing the Romulan story side, you) put an end to Hakeev's madness by shooting him in the head.
  • Thot Trel of the Breen missions. He spends the entire mission length trying to figure out the secrets of the Precursors, believing they have incredibly powerful weapons. He's able to take his own copies of the star chart of where the Precursors are and heads into where the source is. However, when both the Player Character and Thot discover the truth, that the starchart was leading them to a massive library and a number of cryogenetically frozen Precursors, Thot flips out and demands the entire place dropped on everyone's heads.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic:
  • The Bounty Hunter comes across Tarro Blood, their main rival, and the cause of all their problems, in the final leg of the Great Hunt, captured and left to rot in the brig. He requests a last battle to determine who gets to win the Great Hunt. You could do this, or you could leave him there. This sets him off, causing him to pound against the containment field of his prison, screaming about how he's the future of the Mandalorians.
  • In the finale of the Sith Warrior storyline, after defeating Darth Baras in front of the Dark Council, he ends up dropping his normally calm and collected demeanor and is reduced to angrily yelling at the Dark Council to take him seriously.
• In Street Fighter V, Urien has a pretty remarkable one at the end of Gill's Story "The Emperor Doesn't Look Back". After getting defeated by Gill, Urien becomes incredibly angry and frustrated at his failure and asks why he can't defeat Gill, who responds to him that it's all due to the prophecy, and when Urien threatens to destroy it, Gill delivers a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Urien that causes him to suffer a complete psychological breakdown, culminating with him trying to shut up Gill and calling him a bastard. This proves futile, though, as Gill concludes his speech to Urien by explaining to him that will let his brother live the way he likes once he accomplishes the prophecy before leaving, which leads to Urien calling his brother's name to no avail, ultimately leaving him screaming in helpless rage.
  • In the same game, Seth has clearly devolved into a perpetual case of this. Having been killed off with his plans foiled in the previous game, his resurrection in V really tore apart his sanity, with his only purpose in life left being to hunt down and exact revenge on M. Bison... but since Bison is already dead by the time he came back, all Seth does is track down lingering traces of Psycho Power — which he hallucinates as Bison — and mindlessly attack those. The hellish state he's in is mostly played for unnerving tragedy, and there are several times during his berserker rampage and endless boasts about being "king" where he's clearly completely broken and sounds like he's genuinely on the verge of tears.
• In Sundered, the Shining Trapezohedron goes through one if the player commits to the Resist path and starts destroying the Elder Shards in the incinerator. The normally calm and collected Trapezohedron becomes increasingly angry and verbally abusive with every Shard you destroy. If you destroy them all, the Trapezohedron will betray you during the final boss fight and go Laughing Mad as it rants about making you pay for refusing its help. Once you defeat it, it caps off its breakdown with a combination of a This Cannot Be!, a Big "NO!", and a Shapeshifter Swan Song.
  Shining Trapezohedron: (Maniacal laughter) Eshe, my little pawn... You refused my help, and now I shall crush you! The creature you see before you is my true form! You will regret... EVERYTHING!
• The Clockwork Sun from Sunless Skies is having a protracted one. It thought itself immortal, but on arriving in Albion found itself slowly breaking down. Now it spends its dying days spewing light that slowly vitrifies things (Or quickly, if you insult it) and brainwashing its engineers.
• Super Mario Galaxy: Mario reaches Bowser in time for the final confrontation, with the latter telling Mario how he and Peach will rule over the entire universe with a great galactic empire at their fingertips that will last forever. After being punched into the sun, Bowser soon emerges from the rocky remains, groggily moving forward until he stumbles onto his knees and sees his entire galaxy and space empire in shambles and finally screams towards outer space his disbelief over his defeat.
  Bowser: NOOOO! My galaxy! My empire! This can't be happening...
• Aim from Super Robot Wars Z 2 has a real breakdown when Asakim uses the Truthful Goat to force Aim into revealing his past and face the truth, weakening him enough to be Killed Off for Real.
• System Shock has something similar in the second game after the final boss fight, where SHODAN goes from taunting and mocking the player to attempting in vain to bargain for her life.
• Mithos Yggdrasill in Tales of Symphonia combines this with Laughing Mad when his older sister Martel tells him he was wrong to try to find her a new body, and that she was horrified and saddened by the things he'd done.
• In Thief: Deadly Shadows, the Hag breaks down weeping and begging the Keepers surrounding her to stay away after Garrett activates the Final Glyph and destroys all Glyph magic, reducing her to a powerless old woman.
  Gamall: Back...back with you!...Old...so old...(breaks down weeping)
• The deity in Tower of Heaven:
  "How dare you... How dare you continue to live? Is it merely to spite me?"
• Trails Series has a few that have villains breaking down after the heroes beat them.
  • ''The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: George Weissmann has a breakdown after the heroes defeat him even with the power of the Space Sept-Terrion in his hands and forces himself to retreat. Then he has another breakdown immediately when Kevin uses the Salt Bolt on him, the same thing that devastated his homeland two and half decades ago, permanently killing him.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II has Duke Cayenne breaking down badly after Osborne shows up in front of him alive and well, and declaring that he's won the entire Civil War that was brewing throughout the game especially since the previous game showed him being assassinated with a sniper rifle.
• The Transformers games developed by High Moon Studios have one in each game.
  • In Transformers: War for Cybertron, Megatron conquers Cybertron, disposes of the Autobot leader and corrupts Cybertron's core with Dark Energon, enabling him to spread his will throughout cybertron in his favor. Optimus Prime and the Autobots manage to free many Autobot prisoners in the Decepticon capital, Kaon, and purge the planet core of its taint, forcing the planet to shut down for millions of years. While the Autobots are preparing for evacuation, escape shuttles are suddenly shot down by Megatron's secret weapon, Trypticon. Earlier in the game, the former gave Optimus and the Autobots the ultimatum to leave the planet, or be destroyed but after his previous defeats, he justifies his prevention of the evacuations for defying him.
    Megatron: I told you, to stay and defy me was to die...and NO ONE defies Megatron!
  • In the sequel, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, the Autobots successfully completes their escape shuttle, the Ark and hurries towards the space portal before it closes, with the Decepticons in hot pursuit and a battle ensues. During the battle, Megatron and Optimus Prime engage in a duel to the death, and just before the winner can be decided, Both vessels are sucked into the unstable vortex with both leaders trying to make the other lose each other's grip. Megatron then angrily screams his frustration for being denied a total victory over the Autobots as they are pulled into the vortex and the portal shuts down.
    Megatron: NOOOOOOOO! I WILL NOT BE DENIED!
• Trials of Mana:
  • Goremand, the right-hand of the Masked Mage, is a Braggart Boss who doesn't take very kindly to getting his ass handed to him on a plate near the end of Kevin/Charlotte's story.
  • No matter who the Big Bad you're facing is — whether it be the Dragon Lord, the aforementioned Masked Mage, or the Dark Majesty — just when he thinks he's victorious after knocking out the entire party with a display of his power, Faerie turns out Not Quite Dead as she launches a painful magical attack on him and revives the party so they can prepare for the final fight for everyone's future, including her own. The Big Bad loses his shit and futilely attempts to discourage them from keeping on fighting, and when Faerie tells them that "the sword in our hearts called hope will never disappear", he only loses it even more and, through a Badass Boast, vows to destroy whatever hope he can find in the planet before the start of the final fight. Once the party delivers the final blow to him, he is left screaming in complete and utter disbelief that he lost during his final moments before suffering a Critical Existence Failure.
    Dragon Lord: Silence! I will destroy any sword you wield! You must understand how powerless you are against a supreme god!
• ULTRAKILL invokes this trope with Gabriel, an angel who does battle against V1 twice during the robot's rampage through Hell, breaks down the first time after his first defeat.
  Gabriel: What...?! How can this be? Bested by this...this thing? You insignificant FUCK! THIS IS NOT OVER!
  • This breakdown even lasts until his second battle, where he's still seething and describes his threat to V1 To the Pain. Unusually, however, you actually end up beating him so hard he loops back to saner than he started.
    Gabriel: Machine...I will Cut. You. Down. Break you apart, splay the gore of your profane form ACROSS THE STARS! I WILL GRIND YOU DOWN UNTIL THE VERY SPARKS CRY FOR MERCY! MY HANDS SHALL RELISH ENDING YOU HERE! AND! NOW!!!
• Uncharted: The Lost Legacy has Asav growing increasing frustrated and irritated by Chloe and Nadine interfering with his plans for terrorism. When the duo (trio if you include Sam who helps here and there) mess up his bomb train's travel path he yells "My cleansing would've been beautiful!" in absolute anger. He then tries to finish the duo (Not including Sam who is in the jeep) in hand to hand combat.
• Undertale:
  • Your Treacherous Advisor Flowey has this happen in most of the Multiple Endings to some degree. He acts pretty smug for most of the game, certain that he's better than you, convinced that Murder Is the Best Solution and that being nice is worthless. Flowey also knows that even if he isn't better, he can just exploit the Save Scumming powers he shares with you to beat you anyways.
  • During the final boss of the Neutral story, this is double subverted. He fakes a freak out a few times after you seemingly win, then mocks you and loads a save. However, right after that, the souls he was using stop obeying him, and he has a genuine freak-out where he starts screaming in terror.
  • He also has a different sort of breakdown after the Neutral boss fight is over. If you spare him in the Neutral ending despite all the awful things he's done, thereby proving you're not the monster he insisted you are, Flowey suffers a total nervous breakdown. He devolves into childish insults and threats before just screaming "I CAN'T UNDERSTAND!!" then running away, sobbing.
  • The true final boss in the Pacifist ending gives Flowey his most complete breakdown of the game. As Asriel, he spends the entire fight taunting you about the hopelessness of your situation and how the people you're fighting for won't remember you even existed. When he's proven wrong yet again, his breakdown due to freeing the souls of your friends and then calling out to his own reduces him to a Motive Rant where he begs to just win so he doesn't have to feel alone anymore. Only after this breakdown fails does Flowey/Asriel finally, truly admit defeat.
    Asriel: No! No! I don't need ANYONE! Stop it! Get away from me! Do you hear me? I'll tear you apart!
    So, please... stop doing this... and just LET ME WIN!
• In Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, Lezard completely loses all composure at the very end of the game, after Alicia absorbs the three valkyrie spirits and becomes the Valkyrie herself, taking Lenneth's spirit beyond his reach. Despite the insanity displayed by this character throughout the series, that is the only time we ever see such a complete loss of control.
• Prince Lacroix of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines suffers breakdowns in four of the five available endings.
  • In the Anarch or Lone Wolf endings, after being slashed half to death by the PC and left for dead in his penthouse suite, he finally opens the Ankaran Sarcophagus with the key that the PC was kind enough to leave him. However, when the lid sides back, he discovers that the Sarcophagus has been filled with explosives, all set to detonate in ten seconds; Lacroix has just enough time to let out a long drawn-out burst of maniacal laughter before he vanishes in a fireball.
  • And in the Camarilla ending, the PC refuses to give him the key; after Lacroix's attempts at dominating you fail, he falls to his knees, begging and sobbing for you to give him the key, raving about the imminent destruction of all vampires in Los Angeles. He eventually falls silent when your new Camarilla allies arrive to arrest him.
  • And finally, if you side with the Kuei-Jin, he completely snaps, ranting and raving at the PC long enough to keep him from opening the Ankaran Sarcophagus before your new "allies" arrive and give both exactly what they deserve.
  • Andrei the Tzimisce suffers his own breakdown when the PC meets him for the second time, ranting and raving about Gehenna and accusing the PC of being a puppet, before transforming into a monstrous war-form and attacking in a frenzy.
    Andrei: I will do it myself, if I must... and you, you will be purified. It is the blood he is speaking through, the blood of all the pawns... IT ALL MUST BE PURIFIED!
• Nef Anyo at the end of Warframe's Glast Gambit quest has one when he realizes the machinery that allowed him to cheat the Tenno and Ergo Glast out of their index bets is no longer working and the Tenno, being absolute murder machines, are mopping up his brokers. He slightly regains his compusure after you beat him, but only to make a desperate attempt to up the ante to try and get a rematch, which Glast denies the first time, and doesn't even respond to the second.
• Two breakdowns happen in Watch_Dogs from two different characters. Iraq goes through one as Aiden tears through his gang in his hideout. Damien has one in the final mission when Aiden decides to put all of Iraq's blackmail data on the web rather than sell it to him.
• World of Warcraft:
  • There's a memorably subtle example in the form of Algalon The Raid Destroyer. Algalon, while not exactly a villain, spends most of the fight explaining with a polite and calm voice why the planet must be destroyed. As for what happens when you defeat him... well, let's just say the monotone flies out the cosmic window.
    Algalon: I... Have... Felt... NOTHING!
  • Kael'thas Sunstrider, who managed to hold onto his compousure through one defeat and disfigurement, finally snaps when you defeat him for the last time in the Magister's Terrace:
    Kael: My demise accomplishes nothing! The master will have you! You will drown in your own blood! The world shall BURN! [screams]
  • Ragnaros, the Elemental Lord of the Firelands, is quite confident that he'll be burning down all of Azeroth until a dozen or so plucky adventurers come in and start kicking him around.
    Ragnaros: No, nooooo... this was to be my hour of triumph...
  • He adds a bit of petulant hypocrisy to the mix as well in the last phase, ignoring the fact that he's invading another world with the intent to destroy it.
    Ragnaros: Agh, outsiders! This is NOT your realm!
  • Deathwing the Destroyer has one of these at the end of Cataclysm, in that after having his protective armour torn off and shot through the chest with the Dragon Soul, followed by falling into the Maelstrom, he begins to break down and fall apart, sprouting molten tentacles from all over his dissolving body. Alongside this, he loses the last vestiges of sanity completely, devolving into a screaming, raving monstrosity attempting to destroy anything near him.
    Deathwing: You have done NOTHING! I will tear your world APART!
  • After defeating all four tentacles...
    Deathwing: I AM DEATHWING! THE DESTROYER! THE END OF ALL THINGS! INEVITABLE! INDOMINABLE! I! AM! THE CATACLYSM!
  • It happened to Deathwing a bit earlier, too. In the time between Day of the Dragon and Cataclysm, he went from a Magnificent Bastard who infiltrated kingdoms as a human noble to an Omnicidal Maniac, because of the Old Gods whispering at him.
  • Kel'thuzad has one if you kill his cat.
    Kel'Thuzad: No!!! A curse upon you interlopers! The armies of the Lich King will hunt you down! You will not escape your fate...
  • In the Frozen Throne expansion for Warcraft III, Anub'arak has a little one when he and Arthas get confronted by the Forgotten One. He gets better, and then he and Arthas kill it:
    Anub'Arak: This Cannot Be!... Look to your defences, Death Knight! Fight as you have never fought before!
  • Arthas has a reverse breakdown at the end of Wrath of the Lich King when Frostmourne is shattered and his own soul is released along with all of the others the blade stole. He regains his sanity right before dying in the arms of his father's ghost.
  • In the Siege of Orgrimmar, Garrosh becomes a Willing Channeler for Y'Shaarj, and begins raving screaming about "MY WORLD" before falling unconscious with a rather tear-jerking This Cannot Be!.
  • Gul'dan in the Nighthold starts off with a smug little speech about how the faction leaders died (and while they did die, they definitely did not "beg for his life" or "die screaming from poison") before the fight proper starts... and then, as the raid continues to pound in his Titan-device empowered face, he slowly loses it as his worldview of himself as an unstoppable force of darkness and evil is shattered as the raid simply refuses to die when arrayed against his might.
  • During the War of Thorns event Sylvanas lost her smug composure when a dying Night Elf told her she could not kill hope. In order to prove that wrong, she burned Teldrassil and the inhabitants of Darnassus while forcing the Night Elf to watch. While she offers a logical explanation for why it was necessary in the accompanying novel it seems far too petty to be solely driven by logic.
    • This is revisited in the "Reckoning" cinematic when Saurfang challenges Sylvanas for leadership of the Horde. Sylvanas is smug and confident in her victory until Saurfang gains a second wind and begins listing all of Sylvanas's failures and how she cannot kill hope. She loses her composure and rants about how the Horde and its people are nothing, destroying the loyalty of the Horde to Sylvanas and forcing her to flee.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1:
  • Metal Face, aka Mumkhar, is never exactly sane, but he completely loses it after being defeated for the last time at Sword Valley. After Shulk convinces Dunban to spare him, Mumkhar makes one final lunge at Dunban, screaming at him.
    Mumkhar: You always had to have the last word! JUST DIE!!!
    (spire from Galahad Fortress falls and impales him, sending the platform he’s standing on falling from the sword)
    Mumkhar: No! NO! NOT LIKE THIIIIIS!!!
  • There is also Zanza during the final boss battle, in a great case of Gameplay and Story Integration. At the beginning, he is extremely self-assured and arrogant, before gradually losing it as the battle progresses, and finally being reduced to a terrified wreck as Shulk is about to finish him off.
    Zanza: (at the beginning) I shall wipe you from this world and bring forth its demise!
    Zanza: (when Shulk breaks the first vision tag) Did you just…NO! HOW CAN YOU STILL HAVE VISIONS???
    Zanza: (before the second phase begins) You mere vessels dare to oppose the will of a god? Then I shall obliterate EVERYTHING with my UNIMAGINABLE POWER!
    Zanza: (before the third phase) Can it be? A Monado?
    Fiora: It is not only you who has the right. Every living thing has the freedom to choose the path they walk, and that is the future!
    Zanza: A third Monado has appeared. How can this have happened? YOU ARE MERE MORTALS!
    Zanza: (beginning of the third phase) Your existence cannot be permitted! I will destroy you!
    Zanza: (75% HP left) Impossible! How can such power dwell within you???
    Zanza: (50% HP left) I AM A GOD! ALL THAT IS AND SHALL BE! YOU ARE NOTHING!!!
    Zanza: (25% HP left) I cannot…NO! I WILL NOT LET YOU LIVE!
    Zanza: (when defeated) No…it cannot be!
    Zanza: (upon seeing the kanji on the True Monado which means it can kill gods) T-that symbol…
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Consul N has a massive one when he realizes that his wife, Consul M, swapped bodies with Mio shortly before Mio's lifespan ran out as part of a Thanatos Gambit to both assist the heroes and make Consul N have a Heel Realization. The former plan works, but the latter doesn't, with N simply having a Freak Out. Making matters worse, N was attempting to break Noah's will by forcing him to watch Mio die, only for the exact reverse to end up happening, making it a case of Laser-Guided Karma.

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