Cosette, princess of Erusea, get a dose of this during Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. At the start of the war, she's happy to be the face of the aggressors, rallying her people and boasting how Erusian drone attacks hit only military targets. Then the Oseans start punching back, ultimately bombing government centres right in front of her, and she struggles with some harsh realities.
Ace Of Spades suprisingly enough. Players look like a mix between WW1 infantry and toy army men (having brightly-colored uniforms). Everything is voxel-based blocks, and the main gimmick of the game (the destructible environment and the ability to build) means that most maps, even if they start brightly colored and beautifully made, tend to become muddy landscapes of craters, hastily-constructed pillboxes and trenches, and corpses. It doesn't help that bullet damage is taken rather realistically; most of the time, due to the Minecraft-esque proportions players have, deaths will be very, very quick (the standard rifle is a one-hit-kill headshot, and heads are large in this game). The end result of all of this is a lot, and we mean a lot of dead bodies, grenade craters, torn-down buildings, and churned mud in what's a chillingly real approximation of WW1's landscape.
The ending shot for the first two Age of Empires games opening cinematics invokes this, with almost every soldier on both sides dead, their corpses strew about in a rather horrifying fashion.
In the backstory to Another Code, both of the Edwards brothers got drafted into World War II. Henry manged to recover despite losing an arm, but Thomas turned into a Shell-Shocked Veteran and lost his trust in others, setting up in the tragedies that would befall the Edwards family.
The snippets of story that accompany Armor Alley emphasize this theme.
I don't recognize any of the guys I'm with here, and I don't know if it's because they're green troops and all my friends are dead, or because I'm losing my mind.
Before that were the Army Men World War games. Such levels included beach landings with troops getting mowed down by the dozens, fighting in bombed out cities, and war crimes.
Artery Gear: Fusion: It’s hinted at earlier, but the story begins to take a darker turn in the later chapters. Many named Artery Gears are killed in battle, and the psychological toll of losing so many comrades is discussed openly. The politics of the various human factions comes to a head, with one human citizen being branded a wanted fugitive for trying to expose Autoluna’s corruption. Even the commander is stated to be exhausted from the constant battles in the Puppet War.
If there's one thing many of the named protagonists in BlazBlue can agree on, it's that this trope applies to the Ikaruga Civil War. Here are a list of reasons why:
While Jin Kisaragi ended the war in a matter of days once he was let loose upon the battlefield, his life was made miserable as a result of it by being Kicked Upstairs with Noel Vermillion assigned as his secretary. His memories of the war are vague due to a second dose of mindrape from Yuuki Terumi — the first instance being Ragna's Dark and Troubled Past.
The survivors from Ikaruga lost their land to the "ruthless dictators" of the Novus Orbis Librarium, with a number of them fleeing to settlements like Kagutsuchi's Ronin-gai to build anew. While Bang leads them in their labors and helps defend the people from lawlessness, even he feels the war was "a foolish quarrel in which neither side was innocent". Slight Hope reveals that not every timeline ended the war swiftly wth Jin's arrival, and Lord Tenjou Amanohokosaka's death by explosion shockwave turned the affair into a total meatgrinder that saw Ikaruga completely destroyed.
Not even the NOL is free from the sin of the war. Many neutral parties view the NOL as becoming more tyrannical as a result of the war, and the inhabitants of Orient Town are unduly resentful. House Mutsuki even voiced complaints to the war's necessity, and were delegated to the Ikaruga reconstruction effort for their trouble. Lord Tenjou's other disciple, Kagura Mutsuki, was disgusted by the utter lack of regard for the sanctity of life involved, and has been planning a coup to install the rightful heir, Tenjou's son Homura, to the throne.
While the official reports say that the people of Ikaruga violently revolted against the NOL, Makoto reveals that Ikaruga attempted diplomacy first, but the NOL insisted upon bloodshed anyway, with the intent of causing as many casualties as possible ("The more death, the better!"). Likewise, Jin reveals that NOL dissenters to the war save House Mutsuki were summarily executed for treason against the throne.
This is where things take an even darker twist than the norm for this trope: the entire war was waged by then-Imperator Hades:Izanami, ReliusClover, and YuukiTerumi for precisely three purposes — first to clean up (we mean murder) former Imperator Tenjou, second to close the net on Kushinada's Lynchpin and Nox Nyctores Houyoku: Rettenjou, and third to use the souls of the war victims to create a new Black Beast (the goal was still Kusanagi) with which to destroy Master Unit: Amaterasu, using Yuuki Terumi and Boundary Interface Prime Field Device Number Twelve (aka Noel Vermillion) as the final components; while Terumi was willing to commit to the merge for the power to destroy, the remnants of Saya within Noel were not, which gave Take-Mikazuchi the time it needed to destroy Ibukido. The Library for Chronophantasmaalso suggests that Terumifounded both the NOL and Ikaruga's backers in Sector Sevento perpetuate an everlasting war for his own benefit. With Doomsday averted and the world's seithr neutralized by Kushinada's Lynchpin, the world's only hope for survival lay not just in terminating the villains, but also preventing what's left of it from erupting into yet another large-scale conflict...
The Brothers in Arms series started with a fairly strong anti-war message and has been gaining in intensity since then. Hell's Highway is particularly not only kills off or maims established characters, but depicts PTSD (sometimes in frightening ways.)
Leggett: Well, this looks familiar.
Call of Duty lately has been sporting a coat of anti-war paint with some of its quotes. Ever knew how much a Tomahawk missile cost? War ain't cheap. Of course Call of Duty falls victim to Do Not Do This Cool Thing since you play as a badass soldier who's protecting the free world, which is kind of hard to paint as a rigorous and stressful affair while still being appealing to play. Despite that, the soldier you play as rarely survive to the end of the campaign. While the series may honor the sacrifices of the soldiers who fought, it treats the conflicts as somber affairs where the survival rate is extremely low.
However, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) on the other hand plays the trope fully straight. Farah and her brother Hadir is exposed early to the horrors of war in their youth, watching their parents get murdered by Barkov's forces and getting captured and spending most of their lives inside a concentration camp and brutally dehumanized by the Russian occupation that serves a Cynicism Catalyst for Hadir as he joins Al Qatala to attack Picadilly in London in a brutal terror attack including a civilian having a bomb vest strapped with no way to disarm the bomb followed by a ruthless house raid which sees the deaths of mothers and children being orphaned by Price's squad.
Cannon Fodder, despite being the Trope Namer for War Has Never Been So Much Fun, is ultimately this, using cutesy graphics and the cheerful intro satirically to show just how horrible your actions are and keeping track of all the Player Mooks you got killed during the game.
Naive and impulsive young Action Girl Kari of Dead In Vinland is thrilled to hear that her father Eirik once participated in a Viking raid in his youth. When she asks him whether it was exciting, he replies "Exciting, yes. Also scary, hard, violent, depressing, unfulfilling, shameful."
Dragon Age: Inquisition goes to great lengths to show the effect that the now continent-wide Mage-Templar War has been having on those involved and the unlucky people caught in the middle of all of the fighting. Most of the sidequests early in the game deals with trying to find as much relief for the refugees as possible. The worst part is that the only ones still fighting are the zealots and lunatics on both sides who don't really care if refugees are caught in the cross-fire.
It gets even worse as it depicts the aftermath of the Orlesian Civil War, which occurred in parallel with the Mage-Templar War one country over, when you enter the location known as the "Exalted Plains." What you get is, essentially, a High-Fantasy version of the First World War, complete with abandoned trenches filled with dead (and not-so-dead) bodies, ruined siege weapons, and opposing armies that have retreated from the fray and too weary and shell-shocked to care about fighting each other any more. And of course, to drive the point home, all of this lovely scenery is accompanied by ambient music which consists of a low droning sound mixed with a mournful, constant strings chord.
Elden Ring is set in a land ravaged by a civil war (aptly called "the Shattering") between demigods that ended with everyone losing. Every region in the Lands Between bears the scars of warfare. Caelid in particular has been left in total ruin due to the equivalent of a biological weapon being unleashed in the final battle of the Shattering. Even Leyndell, the capital city and the only place that still has some semblance of order, has many buildings in a state of ruin and sealed up with corpsewax. The situation being this bad is precisely why Tarnished like the player character have returned to life to try to set things right despite being rejected by the Grace of the Erdtree in the past — there are no other options at this point to salvage the Lands Between.
Enemy Front drives this point in during a cutscene where you come across a bunker filled with wounded civilians, resistance fighters and partisans, with one of the wounded begging you for water as you pass by only for your comrade to tell you to move along as a nurse takes over.
Eternal Darkness features a chapter set in a Creepy Cathedral used as a field hospital in Amiens, France, during the Battle of the Somme, with all the gruesome sights and somber atmosphere that one might expect of such a setting. It is even implied that Pius and his acolytes manipulated events towards the war just so that there would be more death to harvest. Mind, given that this is a Lovecraftian horror story, there are far more horrific things than the war in the cathedral...
Fallout has a famous quote that starts "War... war never changes." The series is the aftermath of the whole world being destroyed by nuclear weapons in two hours over the last resources left in the world. In the years leading up, both the United States and China (the only remaining superpowers) sunk deeper into barbarism and totalitarianism in order to win the war, up to and including the United States using a filmed execution as propaganda to sell war bonds. And the post-war wasteland of the United States hasn't lightened up any with the horrors of war, with factions such as Caesar's Legion from Fallout: New Vegas and The Enclave routinely committing horrific war crimes in their efforts to conquer the wastelands.
Far Cry 2 has you hunting the Jackal, who understands that the geopolitics of Darkest Africa make it impossible for any meaningful peace to be made there, and trying to fight back against this fact will simply see you consumed by the same violence yourself.
In Far Cry 3, your character begins as a young adult who's never fired a gun outside of a shooting range, desperately scrambling to survive. In the end he's approaching the same threshold of madness crossed by the villains, reveling in bloodshed and obviously suffering violent psychotic episodes.
In Far Cry 4, Ajay handles murder like he was born for it, but ends up helping the wrong people — either Sabal will betray half his comrades at the end of the war (the half that chose not to worship Sabal's religion) and begin a crusade against most of Kyrat for its 'heresy', or Amita will start forcing children to work the opium fields and fight against the remnants of Pagan Min's military-grade army. By the end, Ajay has to deal with the fact that he used 'justice' or 'sanity' as an excuse to murder people indiscriminately and have fun doing it, all because civil war has no absolutely good side.
Far Cry 6: While the actual revolution is more lighthearted than the rest of the series, the consequences are driven even deeper. Casualties of 'Fake Yarans' are in the thousands. Teenagers are executed for liking a rebel social media post. Chemical weapons are unleashed on the Resistance base, and then sold to the rest of the world. About a fourth of the main cast dies in humiliating or painful fashion. And even though the resistance ultimately defeated a tyrant, the best hope they had of preventing a future tyranny died, while their hero decides they no longer want to live there. In the end, the only solid change they made was tripling the export flow of a cancer treatment drug that doubles as a bioweapon.
Final Fantasy II starts off with the heroes being orphaned by war and barely surviving the siege on their hometown. Throughout the course of the game, numerous major characters and innocent NPCs are killed, including several towns that are completely destroyed with no survivors.
In Final Fantasy IX, to prevent Princess Garnet from experiencing this is exactly why Steiner doesn't want her to get involved with investigating whether her mother, Queen Brahne, was responsible for an attack on Burmecia.
Steiner: War is a terrible thing! You must never experience it like I have.
Similarly, in Final Fantasy XII, Basch tells Ashe that if he could but protect one person from war's horror, he would, noting that shame is nothing to him after the loss of his own homeland of the Kingdom of Nabradia. Larsa, too, aims for peace to protect the ordinary citizenry from the trials of war.
Final Fantasy XIV has the war between Eorzea, Garlemald, and the beast tribes' summoned primals as one of its central conflicts. As the Warrior of Light, the Player Character is at the forefront of these and other conflicts, witnessing the deaths of innocents and close friends one after another. Stormblood, in particular, shows that the wars in Ala Mhigo and Doma have not only physically ravaged the nations, but left their populace defeated and broken: it takes great effort to convince the Domans, alone, to overcome their fear of reprisal from the Empire and rise up in rebellion. Near the end of Stormblood and into Shadowbringers, the situation becomes increasingly perilous. As revealed by the Crystal Exarch, Eorzea's future was in peril due to Black Rose, a deadly chemical weapon developed by Garlemald that, combined with a massive influx of light aether from the destruction of The First, poisoned the entire planet, killing all of the heroes (including the Warrior of Light) and destroying civilization.
Final Fantasy XVI: About once per act, we get to see hundreds of soldiers slaughtering each other per skirmish before the Eikons show up, ordered around by uncaring rulers to run rampant despite the casualties their artillery-grade magical strikes inflict on their own side.
Final Fantasy Type-0 pulls no punches in showing how horrific and brutal war can be right from the start.
The intro shows the beginning of the war between Rubrum and Milites. What begins with an effective defense by Rubrum takes a turn when Milites deploys an Anti-Magic weapon, leaving Rubrum's forces (Child Soldiers at that) at the mercy of an invading army that has no qualms with shooting anyone that crosses their path, regardless of if they are wounded or surrendering.
Its opening cinematic features the graphic death of Izana Kunagiri and his war chocobo from injuries as Ace, Queen and Jack stand helplessly (and all Ace can do is weep for him). There isn't much that could make war seem less glorious than showing Machina's older brother reduced to the level of complete freakout from his pain and fear of dying.
Then it goes downhill from there... on all four sides of the war. In Rubrum thousands died (including all of Class Zero save Machina and Rem), and the ending reveals that the entire nation was left ravaged and would only recover after at least fifty years under Machina and Rem's guidance. On Milites thousands of soldiers and mechs died serving a charismatic leader who was Dead All Along, possessed by an Omnicidal Maniac, including those reduced to Phantoma by Alexander, the summoning of which required theHeroic Sacrifice of hundreds of Rubrum cadets, as well as instructor Kurasame Susaya and Alexander's main summoner, Caetuna. Lorica was totally destroyed, its king, Gilgamesh, left to wander Oriense without a purpose in life. Concordia was shaken by its queen's death, and the revelation that its (mostly ceremonial) king, long scheming for a return to a patriarchal rule, had a hand in it.
In Radiant Dawn, the war causes the Tellian equivalent of the Apocalypse, and forces many people who'd fought alongside each other in the previous game to turn on each other. When Brom, a veteran of the previous war, sees some youths in the village where he lives being riled up to overthrow their queen, who'd helped end the war, he accepts their accusation of being a "murderer," since that's what he became in the war, and he calls them out on having no idea what war is like.
Three Houses, which chronicles the outbreak of a massive war in Fodlan that forces everyone at the Officer's Academy, students and faculty alike, to chose sides and bear arms against each other, is one of the darkest games in the series. Not only do playable and sympathetic characters die on all routes, but the war takes its toll on the people, as seen in quest descriptions and Monastery dialogue.
Fire Emblem: Awakening somehow manages to play this straight and for laughs at the same time. Sociopathic dark mage Henry is a former soldier for Plegia, who your party just fought in a war. So naturally, child soldier Ricken is curious about how Henry feels about fighting alongside those who killed his former allies. Cue Ricken falling into a depression while Henry happily talks about the (suddenly less sinister) bosses you fought:
Ricken: Remember a while ago, when you told me that you served under Gangrel? It made me wonder... Have you fought against anyone you knew? Henry: Yeah, sure! You've cut down a few of my former comrades. You interested in who they were? Lemme see if I can recall... Well, there's Vasto. I liked him! Always ready with a joke or quip. Ricken: That guy?! He tried to stop us when we headed east that one time. Henry: He was really excited about that posting—it was his first major command. Ha! He used to talk about his mother all the time. "Best knitter in Plegia," he'd say! Ricken: Oh. That's...nice. Henry: Then there was Mustafa. He always gave me a bag of peaches whenever I visited. He said I reminded him of his son and that I should consider myself part of his family. Ricken: ...... Henry: Oh! And Campari used to make little birdhouses for homeless— Ricken: Actually, Henry? I don't think I want to know about your comrades after all. Henry: Aw! I thought you were interested. Ricken: I was, but now everyone seems more...normal than I expected. They're not maniacs or monsters. They're just like us, except they're dead. Henry: Yep. Dead as driftwood, they are. And it was you Shepherds who killed 'em! Their friends and families are probably still crying their eyes out. Ricken: ....... Henry: What's wrong? Ricken: Henry, it's my job to kill Plegian soldiers... So I have to believe they deserve to die. But now you've reminded me that they aren't faceless blobs with axes. They have friends, and families, and... H-how am I going to fight them if I know that? What if I hesitate? Henry: You're weird. I don't see the problem here at all.
This manifests as an entire realm of the netherworld in Folklore called Warcadia, a place built from humanity's contemporary fear of death, where people go who died suddenly or without explanation end up. The place is under a constant state of warfare without reason or any possible outcome. This is quite literally meant to be a hell of an unending battle.
Fuga: Melodies of Steel pulls no punches in showing how bad the children has it in the Berman Invasion, given one of its biggest inspirations is World War II, as they're forced to confront and kill fascists soldiers who wholeheartedly believe to be in the right, witness needless bloodshed and persecution, and are all under the constant threat of death thanks to not only the advanced technologies of the Berman Empire, but from the Soul Cannon attached to their Taranis battle tank. Even in gameplay, if the Taranis' HP falls below a certain threshold, then there's a chance one of the kids will become manic-depressed with dialogue having them realize just how badly they're in over their heads.
The Gears of WarExpanded Universe had local big dude Tai, upon finding his village razed to the ground, remarking that, "Some people have said 'War is Hell.' War is not Hell, for in Hell, innocence is spared."
While the games were serious from the start, it wasn't until Halo 3 it became clear that this is the main aesop. Yes lovable main characters were killed in Halo: Combat Evolved, and Halo 2 became uglier about the situation, but that was out-shadowed by awesome playstyle, story, weapons and a badass player character. But by the time of third game, all of that were thrown right out of the window. Halo 3 was not afraid to show how shitty a three-sided war between Humanity, a galactic empire made of genocidal, fanatical aliens and a parasitic species of undead monsterswould be; Anyone can (and will) die, even main characters as Sgt. Johnson, Miranda Keyes, 343 Guilty Spark, Prophet of Truth, etc., cities are burned to the ground, billions are killed, even the most Ineffectual SympatheticMooks become ferocious, bloodthirstywarriors after they had been through wars long enough, people suffers from psychological damages from the whole thing, and not just biological creatures but also supposedly unliving machines such as Cortana (whose torture at the hands of Gravemind almost breaks her into a depressive Empty Shell), 343 Guilty Spark (whose isolation for the last 100,000 years and status as the canon scrappy becomes too much for him to handle and snaps into a dangerous killing machine), and Mendicant Bias (whose 100,000 years of overwhelming guilt because of his treason against the Forerunners causes him to possibly sacrifice himself to help Master Chief), and Master Chief, The Hero of the story, ends up in unending space without any way to get back to Earth. Plus that great civilization that was destroyed due to the 300 years war against the said undead monsters, which forced them to kill themselves in a massive sacrifice in an attempt to take their enemies with them; their sacrifice only bought some extra time.
Halo 4 begins with an examination of the incredibly unethical steps humanity took to create the Spartan-II program, especially considering that they were created to put down human rebels. Of course, Doctor Halsey, the one in charge of said project, notes that without the Spartans, the Insurrection would have destroyed the UNSC or left it even more vulnerable when the Covenant arrived, no one was complaining when they became their best and only hope against the aliens, and ONI, the very people who brought and put her in charge of the project, were performing this interrogation just as much to paint her as The Scapegoat and make Spartan-IV program much more approved in the public eye as answer an ethical dilemma.
Halo 5: Guardians starts with a Big Badass Battle Sequence for Fireteam Osiris, but when playing as Master Chief again, he's suffering from PTSD and is pushing himself too hard.
Halo: Reach. The original trilogy had the knowledge of the Halo rings as hope, or at the very least a game-changer, not the same old "stalling against an unstoppable and more technologically advanced horde of aliens who deem your entire people heretical" bullshit. Reach is exactly that bullshit, with each subsequent mission just making it more and more clear that despite Reach being the most advanced colony and the one with the greatest military presence, it will still suffer the same fate as its brethren worlds, and all you are doing is trying to save the most people you can/and or kill the most Covenant before it finally happens. In the last two missions you do (in a way) find out about the rings, and you then give it your all, with almost all of Noble Team (meaningful name) sacrificing themselves to send vital information to the last ship leaving Reach. Yay you did it, all those missions, all those kills, all the obstacles passed by a hairline, now you get your long deserved reward right? Except somebody needs to stay behind to cover the ship's escape. You are left on Reach, with scattered unorganized resistance in the distance as it's being glassed. And no matter how hard you fight, you will die. Reach is the game that shows that even if you give your all and be a good soldier, hope is not guaranteed.
Of course, in Halo Wars Spartan Red Team tries to make this trope work for them:
Homefront portrays war as savage, brutal, and inhumane affair where good people die for no reason, as well as driving home just how easy and potentially horrific friendly fire incidents can be in one of its more intense and memorable sequences. It also makes the point that, as horrible as war is, sometimes there really isn't a better option.
Killer7 — Word of God states that one of the messages of the otherwise unfathomable Killer7 is about the futile, cyclic nature of war. Emphasized by the ending: the entire conflict between Harman and Kunlan is nothing but a game meant to help the two immortals pass the time. The two have even switched roles.
In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, it is shown that the war in the previous game has had absolutely devastating consequences for the Republic. Most of the playable characters, including the protagonist, are Shell Shocked Veterans who have lost family, friends, limbs, and sense of self. Throughout the game you meet refugees, embittered ex-soldiers, and traverse planets that are still physically and culturally ravaged five years after the war's end while the galactic government collapses slowly.
In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV, pretty much nobody who hasn't been brainwashed by the curse of the Great Twilight actually supports the impending war between Erebonia and Calvard. They know that regardless of what happens it would cause massive casualties on both sides and the populace already starts to feel the effects of it throughout the game as Erebonia's young to middle age male population is drafted en masse, ripping men from their wives and children and robbing small towns of their economic lifeblood.
Land of War - The Beginning, a game depicting the German occupation of Poland, repeatedly drives the message in by showing bombed-out cities, depicting trench warfare with serious realism, and showing the casualties of war in it's cutscenes. Your narration during gameplay where you're shooting Germans even have you lampshading it.
Aim, shoot, kill, reload. The cycle repeats to no end. I cared less and less that the shots were aimed at other living beings... ...I have to stop seeing them as people. Wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise...
Lost Odyssey, when a completely immortal guy has lived for 1000 years just to see mortal people killing each other in war, you can really feel how much it makes him want to be freed from it. Yet he can't.
Mass Effect 3 is built around this trope. When you see a soldier both frustrated and heartbroken over a woman who keeps inquiring about her son, you'll understand why. The levels are all war-torn worlds that used to thrive with life, but now appear as wastelands with corpses everywhere. Some of the missions even make you watch the homeworlds of your friends getting desolated so you can share their pain. The turian homeworld, Palaven, has fires that can be seen from the planet's moon, possibly in actuality a place where the crust has been blasted away exposing the lava beneath.
From the very beginning, as the Reapers are laying waste to Earth cities, you rescue a young boy and put him on an evacuation shuttle, only to watch as a Reaper calmly blows it out of the sky. For the rest of the game, Shepard is haunted by nightmares of the boy being consumed by fire.
Javik occasionally talks about how the war went in his cycle, commenting that over three hundred years of galactic war leads to unthinkable atrocities. In one specific case, he says that the Densorin sacrificed their own children, presumably on a planetary scale, in an attempt to appease the Reapers. It didn't work, and just made their annihilation easier. Notably, he is also the only squadmate not surprised by the truth about Sanctuary. He also cautions Shepard on this:
"You still have hope that this war will end with your honor intact. Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls, and ask the ghosts if honor matters. (long pause) The silence is your answer.
Mass Effect: Andromeda has the Initiative stumbling into the kett-angara war, which has been going on a good eighty years or so, and it's made clear the angara have had a hell of a time. It started with their leaders being abducted and killed, and their military crippled, and if it hadn't been for the Moshae, they'd have been screwed. The next eighty decades have been a long ground war as the kett have pushed on every front, with most of the cities on their former homeworld reduced to rubble, and the survivors chased across the frozen wastes of Voeld. Even Jaal, normally a good-natured person, gets incredibly harsh when casually asked how the angara "make do". Every day, they face the possibility that someone they know or love will be killed.
While Men of War doesn't directly reference the trope, the very realistic game engine quickly creates this effect as a natural consequence of the gameplay. By the end of a single match or mission, the map often looks like a moonscape. Infantry hit with a tank shell disappear in a puff of red mist. Machineguns tear apart entire squads during attack. Crews of damaged vehicles may emerge, burning and run shrieking towards their inevitable death. Artillery tears the landscape apart, ruining homes and sending bits of soldiers flying across the landscape. Tanks can crush bodies into mush, push burned-out wreckage out of their way, and generally act as unstoppable behemoths as they rumble towards you (and quite often, you won't have proper anti-tank weapons).
The Metal Gear series is about many things, but its most fundamental theme is that there's nothing glorious about war, and everyone involved suffers a lot, one way or another. It does so by playing its tropes so straight they end up deconstructing themselves once they get to where they're going; Child Soldiers, for example.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty rejects the glorification of soldiers like the previous Metal Gear protagonist by having some New Meat go through similar trials and come out emotionally scarred.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is an unflinching look at war and what it does to its soldiers. The Big Boss is forced to assassinate The Boss, the greatest hero of World War II and the single most important person in his life, all because factions of the Philosophers are fighting over money. The core message is that there is no such thing as an enemy in absolute terms, and that our allies today might be our enemies tomorrow. This is because our enemies are human beings, just like us. The game hammers that point home with the subtlety of an anvil, but it's a very effective message regardless.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots shows how bad things can get if war isn't Hell. The nanomachines inside people suppress the psychological and physical stress that brutal warfare normally inflicts on them, and the entire world has become engulfed in a pointless War for Fun and Profit. When the system goes off-line for good, all the soldiers in the world collapse and become sobbing wrecks as the trauma the nanomachines suppressed catches up to them.
Human experiments that suffocate the victims with incisions centered around the throat? Check. Dozens of small villages wiped out by fallout from bioweapons research? Check. Mind-raped supersoldiers who aren't even considered human on both sides? Check. Combat with child soldiers? Check. Obligatory rape scene? Check. Zombie Apocalypsenote plague directly caused by unregulated bioweapons research? Check. Forced to euthanize squad members that are subject to said Zombie Apocalypse? Check. And a few other items that are less realistic but still horrifying products of war.note Giant Mecha designed as one big nuclear weapons factory and tactical deployment unit? Check. Insane adolescent psychic? Check. Literal WALKING INFERNO OF PURE HATE? Check!
The Great Asian War between the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere and the rebelling Asian nations led by China, is a war between so many nations and peoples that the final death toll is stated to be higher than OTL World War II, and far eclipsing it in sheer brutality. And if Japan is victorious in the war, it is stated to lead to the Rape of Nankingbut on a national scale to crush the very idea of Chinese identity. Thankfully, the canon ending is Japan losing the war, leaving China utterly devastated but free at last.
We get a second coat of Call of Duty anti-warpaint in the Modern Warfare series. Fancy dying in the Middle East from a nuclear explosion? How about you and your unit being killed so close to completing your objective? Or infiltrating a terrorist cell for the CIA where you have to gun down people at airports, before being killed as a spy? Or your commanding officer betraying and killing you? Or the world entering a third world war and you being branded a traitor for killing the people responsible?
NieR: Automata: The player characters are soldiers of YORHA, the spec-ops killing machines of an expendable all-android army, fighting a proxy war for the humans they've been programmed to worship. Their enemies are the Machines, an endless robot legion with disposable bodies but easily-preserved minds, fighting a proxy war for an alien race that seeks to purge humanity so they can take their magic-saturated world for themselves. As the war drags on, detractors on both sides come to understand the pointlessness of their conquest and try to build their own lives in the space between battlefields. But the war has gone on for so long and saturated so much that every attempt at peace fails; violence is too ingrained in both androids and machines and every attempt to speak of matters beyond war is peppered with suicidal combat. By the end of the game, it's revealed that perpetuating the Hell that comes from war has become the purpose of maintaining it; with both humans and aliens wiped out, the AI rulers have found that they still can't move on and replace their masters. In committing atrocities fueled by war, they hope to evoke enough emotion that the otherwise soulless robots will achieve true sapience that does not require worship of their creators. This has not worked out, but they cannot see any other viable choice. Not that they aren't planning to dispose of the android population once they can finally install sapience in themselves...
Pizza Tower has a level on the last floor that embodies this trope: WAR. And by god, does it embody the trope well. Out of all the other levels so far, they have been relatively easy to complete (that is, if you're not going for P-Ranks). Not this one. WAR will absolutely push you to your own limits and knowledge of the game, forcing you to make tight maneuvers all the while the whole level is an entirely Timed Mission; Something that no, not even going into the secrets will save you from, unlike in Pizza Time where it is briefly paused for you to finish the secret. If you're not focusing on just how hellishly difficult the level is, you'll see all sorts of Nightmare Fuel in every nook and cranny you find. In the Title Card, Peppino is seen screaming his lungs out in pure horror and anxiety that WAR has to offer, while a Peppino Clone charges in with a demented Slasher Smile, completely unarmed and willing to kill Peppino in that state. The level itself is an absolute warzone, of course, with the first section being an underground bunker, the second section including bombs falling from the sky, and the third section being a lab with all sorts of godawful things in it; One of which, a combo meter at 20071. If one were to consider this specific combo meter as counting casualties, then there would be at least 20,000 inhabitants of this warzone that were killed in action. To put it short; This level truly embodies this trope.
While Red Orchestra never outright says it, the game never flinches from the fact that combat was often short, terrifying and brutal. In the game, you are a nobody. You are replaceable, and your death is only very rarely actually worth anything. Death is random, impersonal, and inevitable. If you're under fire, the first thing you'll see is your vision go fuzzy and gray, and if you're unhurt, the only option is to run for the nearest cover, get your head down, and hope that the enemy won't hit you when you poke your head out to look for a muzzle flash, and those are very hard to pick out. Often bullets come out of seemingly nowhere and cut down a squadmate or the player character with no warning, artillery strikes turn everything in a large area into bloody carcasses with unidentifiable stumps, and if you do end up close-quarters combat, you'll have maybe half a second at most to consider your options and then act. A single bullet to the head or chest is the end, and often a hit in an appendage will leave you bleeding to death if you don't get out the bandages quickly. In the event of a person nearby being hit, it's rare that they'll die cleanly and quickly — they might scream their lungs out, gurgle through the blood in their throat as they slowly bleed to death, or even beg for their mothers. And there's nothing you can do about it. Stalingrad was not a fun place to be in the latter half of 1942.
And the Rising Storm expansion now introduces flamethrowers for the Americans and knee mortars and booby traps for the Japanese. Now, only a soft whistling noise or a barely-audible click might precede the violent explosion of the guy standing next to you, or even you. It's really down to personal opinion which is more terrifying: the loud whooshing that means an artillery barrage is about to kill you and there's nothing you can do about it, or the fact that, at any time, anywhere, you could suddenly become a red mist and you will have no idea until it happens. Usually shrapnel will kill you through rice-paperwalls or the viewport of a concrete bunker as easily as it would without anything to go through at all. Banzai charges make your screen go gray as though you were taking fire and make you shake so much you can't keep your rifle steady. Many times you will sit there, helpless, as a murderous Japanese soldier sprints towards you and bayonets you. Even further, the flamethrowers literally burn anybody they touch on all exposed areas. After the first time you see a person set on fire, the screams will never leave you.
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is set in the even more hellish Vietnam War. So take everything about Rising Storm and crank it up all the way: getting shot from an unknown location was bad? Now everyone has access to automatic weapons, oh, and we're in the middle of a dense jungle. Think artillery fire was nightmarish? Well, now you can also call in to drop Napalm fire from bombs, wait for planes to fly by and the soldiers shooting at you now only have their screams of agony. Enemies bunched up inside a building? Throw a White Phosphorus grenade and see what it happens. Some maps even include a claustrophobic network of tunnels, where both factions have to fight over tight tunnels were you can only crouch, and if you are playing as the southern forces, you lose the use of their primary weapon and must crawl through the dark with just a handgun. Good luck.
If you're not careful, you can do all of the horrible things above to your teammates.
Rengoku: Even before the Great Offscreen War have become the Machine War, it's described as "endless grief and desolation". Nobody even remembers how it started or what it was for.
Demonstrated by the town of Noringia, which has been heavily bombed and looted by Tierran forces, should you explore the town, you see that starvation and poverty is rampant amoung the refugees still living there.
In the final battle, If you successfully repel the Antari assault, the aftermath shows you surrounded by the corpses of the majority of your men, possibly including your Staff Sergeant, and most of the survivors badly wounded, at that point, a horribly maimed Cazarosta suggests piling the corpses into a makeshift barricade to repel the next attack, War Is Hell indeed.
While Sonic Forces doesn't delve too frequently into how awful Eggman's war for control of the planet is, it's made explicit multiple times the heroes have suffered casualties— most notably, the Avatar's backstory involves them being the Sole Survivor of a group of soldiers that Infinite effortlessly slaughtered, and their character arc for the game is about them learning to overcome the fear and trauma of such.
Spec Ops: The Line: The protagonist and his men become increasingly violent, unstable and shell-shocked as the story progresses. It doesn't help that both sides of the conflict, the CIA and the Damned 33rd Infantry Battalion, are busy killing each other — and civilians — in a hopeless struggle to reassert some sort of order in Dubai's ruin. Later in the story, the Damned 33rd begin to use whitephosphorus on insurgents. The player then uses white phosphorus on a refugee camp, unknowingly. The CIA blows up the city's only water supply, dooming everyone in order to keep the world from learning about what happened in Dubai. Nobody comes out of the story looking good. Or sane. Or, in some endings, at all. The worst part is that the situation didn't have to escalate that far. The main reason it did is because Walker, and by extension the player, wanted to play hero. What makes this whole situation even more tragically senseless is that it isn't even set in a war. This is a simple recon mission gone horribly wrong. All Walker had to do was report on the situation and leave. Walker treating it like a war story and acting like a hero fighting a war anyway makes everything worse.
Skyrim has this in spades. Many Great War veterans are haunted and scarred psychologically as well as physically, fighters on both sides of the Civil War are becoming this way too, many characters have lost family members, people who were once close friends are now bitterly feuding, and many communities are either trampled in the struggle (Dragon's Bridge) or left to fend for themselves because most of the manpower and resources are going to the war (Riverwood, Shor's Stone).
Brunwulf Free-Winter: There's no glory in war. It's just something they tell soldiers so they'll risk their lives.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: The bounty hunter companion Mako has a few observations about the nature of war on Balmorra, expressing fear at becoming another forgotten corpse in a no-man's-land battlefield, then commenting on the horrible nature of trench warfare, with people crammed into a hole in the ground with no where to go while artillery rains down on them.
War is always the main theme of the Suikoden series. Many characters get involved in different wars, and more often than not they end up traumatized in a way or another.
Pilika, a sweet and joyful little girl, who, in rapid succession, lost her hometown, her whole family, and nearly her own life at the wrathful hands of LucaBlight, an psychoticprince who delightfully enjoys butchering men and women like pigs. All Riou and Jowy could do was nuisance him a bit, get swept away with his sword, and watch helplessly as he was about to kill her, while Jowy could do nothing but yell helplessly at him to stop. They were saved at the last second by an explosion caused by your allies, and escaped during the confusion. However, this last event finally break the mind of Pilika, making her mute for nearly the entire game.
In Tales of Zestiria, every time war breaks out between Hyland and Rolance, those with the most sense are concerned because they know it's ultimately just going to create a lot of problems for everyone and result in a lot of death. Everybody that can even remotely be considered to be on the player's side is working for peace in some way.
It is stated often and sometimes shown in Tears to Tiara 2. Hamil considered accepting the enslavement of his entire people to avoid war. Saul was willing to let slide agents from The Empire buying slaves and dead bodies to prevent war. Until Hamil points out to him that he's only prolonging the inevitable, which he knew, and said agents took Artio which would cause war to erupt anyway.
The entire This War of Mine is all about this trope. With the war raging all over the city, supplies continue to dwindle, forcing the survivors to starts scavenging for their needs. However, as the war continue to get worse and food getting scarcer, the city descends into anarchy with rampant crime, looting, and soldiers of both side committing all sort of war crimes. Forcing the player to take more morally dubious choices. You are a group of survivors of a Civil War trying to survive, however you have to deal both with the rebel army and the military while trying to scavenge for anything to survive. Choices will be made whether you will raid an elderly couple for their belongings while they beg you to stop or not, hand over precious medicine to children or not, or either play hero and try to rescue a woman who is about to be raped by a drunk soldier or use it as a distraction to gather materials to survive the Civil War.
Stories takes a much more somber and depressing tone as even in the main game your characters can eke out a victory and moments of hope. Stories has so far has A Father's Promise and The Last Broadcast and neither of them ends happily for the survivors involved. In Father's Promise, Adam suffers from cognititive dissonance from the trauma of losing his daughter and wife and goes through a futile quest to save her. In The Last Broadcast, the common trope of your characters defying the military actually results in consequences as Malik dies telling the truth about the massacres rather then the military ignore the messages like how your survivors confronting the military never results in any repercussions.
Most if not every entry in the Total War series has some degree of this (compare Medieval II: Total War to the first one for example) , though Total War: Rome II really drives the point home. "How far will you go for Rome?", if that's not enough, Total War: Attila manages to surpass its predecessors in its bleackness by not only being the most realistic of all the games before, but by its very setting, the Late Antiquity, just before the fall of Rome.
Both Transformers: War for Cybertron and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron graphically shows players how the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons has violently decimated all life on the planet and rendered it inhabitable to live on in the future. It was because of this war that forced all transformers to abandon their home and desperately search for a new place to live in, leading them to Earth.
Trenches (2021): A survival horror game set during World War I, which would be horrifying enough, but the player character is losing his mind while being pursued by monsters in empty trenches filled with smoke and fog. The photographs and letters found along the way illustrate the soul crushing experience the soldiers went through while there. The protagonist even quotes dead as the only witnesses of the war's end. What makes it even more horryfying and heartbreaking is that the monsters are actually corpses of the protagonist's wife and children, whom he murdered in PTSD induced psychosis before also killing himself. This place is his personal hell.
ULTRAKILL takes the trope to a new level (remember that the game takes place in Hell) by having level 7-2 in the Violence layer be a recreation of the Final War, which culminated with humanity building Humongous Mechas (nicknamed "Earthmovers") that effectively served as walking fortresses the size of a city. Several Earthmovers can be seen in the background of the level, but only when distant explosions light up the backdrop. Constant streams of bullets can be seen closer to the level proper, which is full of Guttermen and Guttertanks dropping from the blackened sky. War is Hell, and Hell Is War.
Valiant Hearts is set in the World War One, so this trope is not suprising. At one point you need to hide from machinegun fire behind a pile of corpses, as you are watching your friends die one by one.
While the Vietcong series doesn't demonize war, its hard difficulty, not to mention its focus on realism screams this trope at the top of its metaphorical lungs.
Valkyria Chronicles despite the fantasy elements is pretty strong in terms of the anti-war tone. Two superpowers are locked in a brutal conflict that has reached over 10 million in casualties on both sides as the Darscen faces brutal discrimination for their supposed role in the Great Calamity thousands of years ago. This has resulted in forced labor and genocide, this eventually pushes one of their members to start a resistance movement that gets used by the Empire and pushed to a point where the leader unearths weapons from the Great Calamity to use as an act of defiance. Meanwhile, the Valkyria, who supposedly saved humanity don't fare much better, being treated as experimental guinea pigs meant to be living weapons on one side and the other sideuses them as a power source and in a desperate situation, used as a living bomb to wipe out the Empire, unaware that it will result in a genocidal war with no way to stop it. Even after both sides have signed a ceasefire did little to stop the bloodshed as Gallia is forced in a violent civil war where the experimentation has extended to the regular population and Lanseal Academy where the whacky school antics is the center stage of such experiments and later the target of a devastating attack.
in the Resistance expansion, where the protagonist Viktor tries to convince his friends against going to war with the occupiers. He's a recently retired professional soldier who has seen too much death and suffering to count, so he warns them that their desperate fight to liberate their homeland of Nogova isn't going to be glorious or easy at all. But even though he's against the idea of fighting at first, he gets tangled up in the worsening situation and eventually decides to lead the Nogovan resistance cells (because if he didn't, things would probably end up even worse). And to hammer the point of the trope home, the end of Resistance' storyline is anything but cheerful. The resistance fighters only manage to win at a terrible price and with heavy loses.