Was Once A Man / Video Games

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• 11eyes: The Black Knights underwent an Emergency Transformation courtesy of Misao. As Misao is the only one of them technically alive, she's also the only one that can change back. It doesn't help that they're wearing the monsters of the Red Night as a sort of living armor.
• Action 52 Owns: In the remake of Non-Human, the titular creatures are horribly mutated monstrosities created when Dr. Murdon flooded a nearby village with mutagen.
• In Akatsuki Blitzkampf, this is what led to the creation of Blitztank. It begins as your typical mecha robot, but after they fight Akatsuki they start to slowly form words and trains of thoughts...
• Ao Oni: Version 6 has three of the four main characters converted into one of the monsters when they were killed.
• Arc Rise Fantasia: The Feldragons are heavily implied to all have been people of the Divine Race exposed to hozone without a dragon gem to protect them. Those that aren't Divine Race turned dragons are implied to be the results of Ignacy's experiments on Common Race people, including orphans.
• In Baldur's Gate III, the Token Heroic Mind Flayer known as the Emperor is later revealed to have once been Balduran, the legendary adventurer who founded the eponymous city with his riches only to mysteriously disappear during a failed expedition to Anchorome centuries ago. The Emperor reveals that not only did he survived the disastrous voyage, but he continued his adventures back in Faerûn until he was captured by mind flayers hidden beneath Moonrise Towers and was subsequently transformed into one of them.
• In Batman: Arkham Knight, Batman name-drops this trope when referring to Man-Bat (formerly Kirk Langstrom).
• Baten Kaitos:
  • The ultimate villain, Wiseman, is implied to have been a human sorcerer who desired power so much that he abandoned his own humanity to obtain more.
  • Malpercio was once an entire team of human heroes who sold their souls for the power to defeat Wiseman. The cost of which was to turn them all into monsters who went on a bloodthirsty rampage and were sealed away by the Children of the Earth, who viewed them as an even bigger threat than Wiseman.
  • All of the Afterlings in were once human beings who were fused with a piece of Malpercio in an attempt to create artificial Spiriters called Maledeiters. Sagi is one such Maledeiter, but he manages to make peace with his piece of Malpercio, originally Marno, and gain the same powers as a Spiriter.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine: This seems to be the case with many, if not all, of the ink creatures.
  • Sammy Lawrence for sure. By the time Henry arrives in the music department in Chapter 2, his old coworker is trapped in an "inky... dark... abyss [he] call[s] a body." He also has four digits on each hand, like a cartoon character, rather than the typical five digits of a human.
  • Chapter 4 has another definite example: in Bendy Land, there's an amusement park ride which is what's become of Bertrum Piedmont. This powerful new body of his makes for a boss fight, in which Henry can only disable him rather than kill him. There would be no telling that this monstrosity was ever human if not for the "recording" that really not and the Nightmare Face head where the motor belongs.
• In BioShock, Rapture's Big Daddies were originally humans sentenced to a Fate Worse than Death where they were heavily genetically modified, mentally conditioned, and ultimately had their skin and organs irreversibly bonded to the inside of a massive diving suit. Even the Alpha Series, who retain a lot of free will and aren't permanently bonded to their suit, are still too heavily modified to truly be considered "human" anymore.
• BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger: Arakune was once a person, A scientist named Lotte Carmine, more exactly. Litchi, an old friend of the person it used to be, hopes the original personality is still in there, but it doesn't seem to remember its previous life. Then it says her name...
• Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain: Dark Eden features several such monsters, who were twisted by dark magic into "things half insect and half mammal — human torsos grafted onto abominations of the flesh".
• Borderlands 2: The Rats are spindly bandits with cannibalistic tendencies. Their origin is shown in a series of side-missions in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!; the first Rats (referred to as Boils by the unaffected, though an ECHO message refers to one as a Rat) were Hyperion personnel infected with parasites made by a worker named Lazlo under orders from Colonel Zarpedon.
• Bound by Blades is set in a world of andromorphic animals, with a powerful evil force called the Ilcyon corrupting many warriors with weak minds or desiring power of their own into becoming monstrous abominations. Notably there's Vaeryth, a black lion hero who was corrupted into a monster, and the Orikara, an eloping forbiden couple who sold their souls to the Ilcyon only to become a pair of demons.
• The giant chicken Cooper from Chicken Feet was once a normal human being until the experiments by GOOBER Laboratories turned him into a giant chicken monster.
• Chrono Trigger:
  • Not truly a monster, but Frog used to be a human knight until being cursed with his current form. He doesn't let it get to him anymore.
  • In Chrono Cross, it's revealed very late in the game that the antagonist Lynx is actually Serge's father, Wazuki, warped beyond recognition physically and mentally by evil supercomputer FATE.
• City of Heroes has several, notably the Devoured, the Hamidon, the Rikti and, as you find out in one story arc, Malta's Titan robots.
  • The Hamidon is definitely the worst case, being an amoeba the size of a city block, created through some terrible fusion of genetic engineering and dark magic, with maybe some divine empowerment thrown in. Eldritch Abomination comes to mind.
  • The Dark Astoria arcs feature the Sentinel of Mot, who was once Marcus Valerius.
• In Cultist Simulator, several of the Hours, the eldritch gods from the setting, once were mere humans that entered to the Mansus through various means and ascended. For example, the Witch-and-Sister and the Sister-and-Witch entered the Mansus after drowning themselves out of despair, while the Colonel ascended to Hourhood by killing the Seven-Coils, another Hour. There are also many lower-ranked Mansus dwellers, like some Longs or Names, that are ascended humans. Becoming a Long (an immortal, that is) is the baseline goal of the player character, and in a New Game Plus, you can play as a follower of your previous cult, with a goal of not ascending yourself but rather elevating your master to a Name. Other DLC for the game add alternative ascension routes which transform the player into something neither human nor human-like.
• Darkest Dungeon: Several of the bosses (and implicitly the Pig Man Mooks) were once people who the Ancestor directly or indirectly turned them into an undead abomination, were twisted into form by magic or monsters, or some combination thereof. This is particularly true in the DLC expansions; the Crimson Court introduces aristocrats turned into horrible half-insect vampires, while the Color of Madness features humans turned into semi-silicate creatures by a Magic Meteor stuffed with eldritch corruption (as basically anything more sinister than a hamburger is in the world of Darkest Dungeon).
• Dawn of War: Dark Crusade invokes this with Macabee, an archaeologist who awoke things best left undisturbed and was turned into a Necron Pariah. When another race assaults the Necron stronghold, Macabee notes "I was like you, once, clinging to life and blind to the truth... deep in these catacombs, I was remade..."
• Many of the monsters in Dead Cells were once human; some were transformed by the Malaise, and others from the experiments meant to cure the Malaise. The Concierge, for instance, was once Commander Castaing the warden, and the Beheaded himself was also once the king.
• Dead Space: Every single enemy you fight was once a human; even the significantly larger bosses are made of dozens or even hundreds of human corpses joined together into one big mass. The Lurkers are encountered just one room after a datapad with a list of the month's births, confirming that yes, these were somebody's babies before they were murdered and transformed, just like the grown-ups. The sequel introduces the Pack, a form of zombie made from prepubescent children who hunt in groups.
• Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings: According to Greed, the demons were an ordinary nation until Talagaron have used the Tower of Sin against them, turning them into immortal monsters.
• Diablo: Humans can be possessed and altered to fit their shape by the Prime Evils, through Demonic Possession. Diablo's body turns back into that of Prince Albrecht in the first game when he's killed, and in Diablo II, all the Three Evils are in the bodies of possessed humans, which turn more and more monstrous in irregular stages.
• In Dicey Dungeons, all the player characters started as humans before being transformed by Lady Luck into anthropomorphic dice, but in the Robot's case in particular, they seem to have started as a human with a trace of Obsessively Organized whom Lady Luck turned into a "robot" as part of her sick sense of humor.
• Dishonored 2's Death of the Outsider DLC reveals that the Outsider was once a young homeless boy, abducted from the streets by a cult that worshipped the Void and turned into its avatar by a ritual involving Human Sacrifice.
• Don't Starve:
  • Webber used to be a regular boy until a Giant Spider tried to eat him. The two essentially merged into a single being, the humanoid arachnid that Webber is now.
  • We're told that the monster that is the reason Darkness Equals Death used to be a woman named Charlie.
• In Doom Eternal it is eventually revealed that lesser demons are created from damned mortals. The soul of the damned suffers constant torment until it eventually transforms and leaves its host body as Hell essence. The husk left behind is twisted by Hell's natural energy into a demon.
• Dota 2: There was once a herbalist named Lesale who got stung by a very venomous reptile and in desperation, concocted an antitoxin that puts him to deep slumber. When he woke up, he's already mutated into an extremely venomous snake-ish creature. Now he's known as Lesale Deathbringer, the Venomancer.
• Dragon Age:
  • The werewolves are humans suffering under a nasty curse, more progressive ghouls are humans, elves, or dwarves in advanced stages of the Taint infection, Broodmothers (who were, rather, once women), and Golems (who were living dwarves forged into stone soldiers by pouring molten lyrium through their eyes and mouth before hammering and chiseling them into the proper shape).
  • If the Chantry's teachings are true, the first Darkspawn were this. The Dragon Age II DLC Legacy confirms them. The final boss of Legacy, the Awakened Darkspawn Emissary Corypheus, was one of the original Tevinter Magisters who tried to claim the power of the Golden City. David Gaider has also heavily implied that the Architect from Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening is also one of these Magisters, though he himself seems unaware of this and professes to not know why he's different from other Darkspawn.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest V: In one of the biggest late game twists, Nimzo is revealed to not actually be a giant, tailed red demon god, but rather a regular man who simply achieved pseudo-godhood through perfecting the secret of evolution that Psaro and Aamon were trying to achieve in Dragon Quest IV.
  • In Dragon Quest IX, King Godwyn was a human before being revived and turned into a horned demon.
  • In Dragon Quest Builders 2, one of the dogs the Builder meets in the Furrowfield Swamp is really a human girl. She was turned into a dog as part of a curse, but retains the name the Builder gives her as a dog.
• DUSK-12 is set in Chernozersk, Russia, where a mutagenic viral strain — the titular "Dusk-12" — turns most of the civilian population into mindless, mutated monsters. One of the two player character, Gorin, was also a former human used as a test subject to create Super Soldiers, only to be converted into a gigantic monster of his own; he's called an "abomination" in one cutscene.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Falmer were Snow Elves who, after losing a war against the Nords, sought refuge with the Dwemer, a technologically-advanced race of underground elves. As part of the contract the Falmer agreed to eat a fungus which caused the loss of their eyesight and became enslaved by their kin. Not only did the Snow Elves physically degenerate into something resembling Morlocks, but what the Falmer went through fundamentally changed their very souls. The no longer possess the "black" souls of sapient species. Instead, they possess "white" souls like those of animals.
  • The Dreugh, a race of aquatic humanoid octopi, were once far more intelligent. While sources conflict regarding the exact details, the Dreugh were said to have once ruled the world in a time long, long ago. Like the Falmer, the Dreugh de-evolution from an intelligent, sapient race with their own civilization has included their souls becoming white, like those of animals.
  • The series' vampires can play this on two levels. All Vampires were once mortals who have been infected with a disease that caused their transformation into a blood-sucking creature of the night, or it was a "gift" received directly from Molag Bal, the Daedric Prince of Domination and Corruption who created the first vampire. On a different level, while most vampires maintain a sense of humanity, if they go too long without feeding, they are known to go irrevocably insane and feral. These feral Vampires are referred to as "Bloodfiends."
  • Liches are another such example. Once mortal wizards (often necromancers), they have undergone a process that sacrifices their humanity and very lives to become powerful undead sorcerers. Some are able to maintain a facade of humanity using powerful illusion magic, but switch to their undead forms for combat.
  • The Ideal Masters are immortal beings who were once powerful mortal sorcerers during the Merethic Era. After finding their mortal forms to be too weak and limiting, they entered Oblivion as beings of pure energy and settled an area of "chaotic creatia", forming the Soul Cairn. The Ideal Masters are most infamous for their trafficking in souls, especially "Black" sapient souls. All souls trapped in soul gems end up in the Soul Cairn and are considered property of the Ideal Masters, who seem to possess a Horror Hunger for adding more. The Ideal Masters do not usually manifest physically within the Soul Cairn, but have been known to take the form of giant soul gems through which individuals can communicate with them, and through which they can drain the souls of approaching mortals.
  • Malacath, the Daedric Prince of the Spurned and Ostracized and patron deity of the Orcs, was once the Aedric spirit Trinimac, beloved by the Aldmer. Boethiah, the Daedric Prince of Plots "ate" Trinimac in order to manipulate Trinimac's followers, who would become the Chimer. After being tortured in Boethiah's stomach, the remains of Trinimac were "excreted". These remains became Malacath and his remaining followers were transformed into the Orsimer (Orcs).
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has the ash and corprus creatures. The former have been twisted by the magic of Dagoth Ur into humanoid abominations and the latter are infected with the corprus disease, slowly turning them into leprous zombies.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has Hagravens, a species of flightless harpy who were once mortal women. They performed a ritual in which they traded their humanity for access to powerful magic. This ritual twists their appearance into more a more bird-like form, complete with feathers, a beak-like nose, and literal talons for their fingers and toes.
  • The Elder Scrolls Online has the dro'Mathra, Khajiit who fall victim to the influences of the Dark Heart, the twisted remains of the dead god Lorkhaj, as a result of things as varied as skooma addiction and personality flaws to talking about the dro'Mathra during moonless nights. They turn khajiits dark grey with glowing blue lines across their fur, and must either be exorcised by priests of the two moons, or killed in combat.
• Everhood: Most of the entire cast of odd humanoid creatures were once human, according to notes left by one of the mages. It is not fully explained how they gained their current forms and magical powers, but it is indicated that it had something to do with them gaining immortality by ending up in the titular world of Everhood.
• Fable: The Lost Chapters implies that this is how Jack of Blades operates, as he possesses people through use of his mask until he finds another host body. His dragon form is his true form, however.
• Fake Happy End: The monsters in the tower were once humans who died in the tower. Although some of them kept their human memories and maintained their sanity, they cannot leave the tower.
• Fallen London:
  • Many of the creatures you encounter were once men. Then, in many cases, they made deals with the Masters of the Bazaar...
• Fallout:
  • The ghouls, apart from looking like corpses, aren't really very different from humans (they're more resistant to some drugs and they may live much longer), but some go mad, becoming Fast Zombie-esque "Feral Ghouls". Super Mutants are an even straighter example, as they actively kidnap humans to infect with the FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus).
  • There's also The Master, the leader of the Super Mutants and the Big Bad of the original Fallout. His backstory reveals that he fell into a vat of FEV and got stuck there for nearly a month, resulting in the horribly disfigured appearance he has when you finally confront him.
  • A specific mutant in Fallout 3 actually says word-for-word "I was once a man", but he's referring less to his mutation and more to his being fused with a tree.
  • These things look - I think they really used to be people.
  • In addition to the aforementioned Ghouls and Super Mutants, the Dead Money DLC in Fallout: New Vegas features the Ghost People, a race of insane and nigh-immortal mutants who have been so extensively mutated one could argue that they are no longer technically animals.
  • Fallout 4 gives us Brian Virgil, who was an Institute scientist who was turned into a Super Mutant. A special antidote can turn him back.
  • Robobrains are robots that were made by extracting the brain from a human, giving it a memory-wipe, and turning it into an organic computer to run the robot body.
• Far Cry 4: The Yetis of Kyrat are revealed to actually be humans mutated by the gas and spores emerging from a creepy glowing tree called "The Relic", believed by Master Sandesh to be a gift from Yalung, the Kyrati God of Evil.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy IV: In the Game Boy Advance and PSP versions, Cecil's trial in the Bonus Dungeon includes a potential encounter with a Goblin who insists that he used to be human, and that the curse on him will wear off shortly. Indeed, if you don't attack him, the battle automatically ends and a man is standing where the Goblin was (killing the Goblin causes Cecil to fail that part of the trial, of course.)
  • Final Fantasy X does this a lot.
    • All the Aeons were human, and an optional superboss is a monk named Omega whose hatred of Yevon turned him into a gigantic, four-legged monster with the power to create novae.
    • Anima, who not only looked monstrous (a chained, gap-mouth giant corpse rising out a shell) but is Seymour's human mother, who basically had turned herself into one to give him the ability to return to his father's people. Now she rages at how evil he became.
    • The fiends you fight in random encounters were once human souls. In fact, in the cutscene where the party reunites with Yuna in Home, you can see fiends forming from the souls of recently killed Innocent Bystanders in the background. And, of course, to top it all off, there's Sin, aka Jecht.
    • Yevon himself is just a giant blue, glowy tick by the time you meet him. He was definitely human at one point considering his daughter, Yunalesca, is still human. It's discussed near the end of the game that all of the summoning he did eventually broke his mind and devolved him into a mindless Eldritch Abomination that no longer had the capacity to speak or even think, only destroy.
  • Final Fantasy XIII: All of the main characters are normal humans who were turned into l'Cie (servants of fal'Cie, the providers for Cocoon/Gran Pulse), which grants them strength and magical powers, as well as resulting in them being ostracised by the people of Cocoon. Also, it is revealed early on that any l'Cie who fail their task are turned into Cie'th, deformed crystal-covered monsters who wander the world until they eventually lose their will and turn to stone. And even then they are still alive, and awake and suffering.
  • As revealed in Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, some dragons are born as a result of Ishgardian elezens drinking dragon's blood. This is particularly true of Ishgard's highborn elite, who descended from King Thordan's Knights Twelve, who destroyed the peace between Ishgard and dragonkind millenia ago when they slew Ratatoskr, drank her blood, and devoured her eyes in a bid for power, in so doing cursing themselves and their descendents.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics A2:
    • In one mission, a requester asks for help as he and his friends are trapped in a mine and is afraid he will become the ghosts that haunt the place. When you get there, you encounter a gang of ghosts and its leader weakly begs for help.
    • In another mission, a requester asks for a Potion and Hi-Potion to treat some wounds/fatigue. When you meet the person, it's actually a zombie, but has retained enough sense and control to talk to Luso normally. When the zombie uses the Potion on itself, it winds up hurting itself and Luso has to stop it from drinking the Hi-Potion. That's when the zombie realizes it is dead and was wondering why clans were attacking and people at inns throwing rocks. Later on, you discover that the zombie is actually Frimelda, a former Blademaster. She fought battles with a Paladin and over time, he grew jealous of her success as a fighter while he failed to follow in her footsteps, so he drugged her and she became a zombie. You can heal her eventually and she will join your clan.
    • One of the gifted somehow turned into a dragon, originally being a hume.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Many demonic beasts are humans that were exposed to Crest Stone energy without possessing the requisite Crest bloodline for it. Miklan, a Wake-Up Call Boss, is the first such example encountered in the story.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: This is implied to be the case with the animatronics, with hidden news posters implying that murdered children were stuffed into the animatronics' suits, and that their ghosts now possess the animatronics. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 makes the theory even more sound, with the Puppet (itself implied to be a murdered child) placing masks of the first game's animatronics over the corpses of children, while the third game outright confirms that the dead children were possessing them, while also applying the trope to the one who killed them in the first place.
• FromSoftware loves this trope:
  • Bloodborne: A disturbing number of Yharnam's citizens wind up as monsters in some way or another.
    • The Beast Scourge that plagues Yharnam causes sufferers to behave more animalistically until they eventually mutate into werewolves. The Cleric Beast, Father Gascoigne, Vicar Amelia, and the various hunter and beast mobs all go down this route. And since the Beast Scourge is caused by the Blood Ministration ubiquitous in Yharnam, every citizen is potentially infected.
    • The Forbidden Woods has hydra monsters that parasitize humans, creating human/snake abominations. As if people needed any more reason to avoid the place...
    • Yahar'Gul uses the people their snatchers kidnap in necromantic experiments that ultimately result in horrible corpse monsters.
    • The Choir's experiments in ascending to Great One status result in alien creatures and mini-eldritch horrors like the Celestial Children, Celestial Mobs, and the Celestial Emissary boss. Potentially all the survivors you find can become Celestial Mobs, if you send them to Iosefka's clinic, where the imposter who replaced Iosefka (who herself will always be turned into a Celestial Minion, with no way for the player to save her) will use them for her experiments.
    • Nigh-ubiquitous in the DLC, where the first area is filled with Old Hunters who went mad with bloodlust, and contains the Scourge Beast forms of historical figures Laurence and Ludwig, the second area contains subjects of early Choir experiments whose heads have bloated into featureless blobs (plus the Living Failures, who are implied to be failed versions of the Celestial Emissary), and the final area features fishmen straight out of Innsmouth, who were normal denizens of a tiny fishing hamlet who were mutated when Byrgenwerth massacred most of the villagers and experimented on the rest with parasites found in the corpse of the Great One Kos.
    • And, finally and spoilery, there's the Player Character, in the Childhood's Beginning ending, where they consume 3 'one-third umbilical cord' items and choose to fight Gehrman, allowing them to fight the Moon Presence and be transformed into a baby Great One upon killing it.
  • Dark Souls: People who suffer the Undead Curse eventually lose themselves and become mad zombie-like Hollows if they lose their sense of purpose. This includes the player character. More specific examples of this trope:
    • The Witch of Izalith and several of her daughters were transformed by the Witch's ill-fated attempt to recreate the First Flame with her Lord Soul of Life and Chaos. The Witch herself and two of her daughters became the Bed of Chaos, an abomination made of roots and flames that spawned Chaos Demons. Two of her daughters escaped but became fused with Chaos Spiders. The other three avoided these fates but didn't fare much better: the eldest went mad and stays in Lost Izalith to ward off intruders, another died at some point, and the last one, Quelana, is stuck living with the guilt of abandoning her family.
    • Ceaseless Discharge the only son of the Witch of Izalith was born with sores that dripped lava. He was given a ring that eased the pain of his affliction, but ended up losing it. He eventually became a gigantic lava monster who spends his time watching over the tomb of one of his sisters.
    • The residents of New Londo and Oolacile are cautionary tales about taking the power of Dark too lightly. New Londo is infested with both the Darkwraiths, humans whose abuse of Lifedrain (the dark art of draining Humanity from other humans) has turned them into monstrous knights and the ghosts of the New Londo's citizens who drowned when New Londo was flooded to seal the Darkwraiths away. Oolacile's citizenry have all become either mad Bloatheads or phantasmal sprites of raw Humanity after trying to claim the power of Manus a primeval man.
    • Knight Artorias was once one of the greatest of the demigod knights of Gwyn. Being defeated by Manus and corrupted by the Abyss has reduced him to a shrieking broken thing who attacks like a savage beast.
    • Former God-Emperor Gwyn has become a Hollow after spending ages burning away after he cast himself into the First Flame.
  • Dark Souls II is rife with this:
    • Perhaps of special note is the case of Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin, who, in an attempt to escape the cycle of death, rebirth and mental degradation, transformed himself in a monstrous construct of tree roots and fire, not unlike the Bed of Chaos from the first game, though unlike that he retained his mind and sanity. He is, in the entire trilogy, the only enemy who drops neither regular Souls nor his own boss soul upon being "slain", even continuing to talk afterwards. While one may debate upon whether he is satisfied with the results, one cannot argue that he failed to escape the cycle.
    • The Covetous Demon used to be an ordinary man, but fell into gluttony due to unrequited love for Queen Mytha. As he ate, he became larger and more grotesque and eventually became a massive slug-like monster.
    • Mytha herself also counts due to her unrequited love for her betrothed (implied to be the Old Iron King) who loved another. In her mad quest to attain more beauty, she became a naga-like poisonous monster with a disembodied head.
    • When the Old Iron King got incinerated by the Smelter Demon and his kingdom sank into the lava, whatever was left of him encountered something deep beneath the surface and was reborn as a demonic looking lava monster known as Ichorous Earth.
    • This is on top of the usual Undead becoming mad Hollows. The most extreme example in the game is King Vendrick himself. The once mighty godlike king is nothing but a shambling naked giant Hollow (who nonetheless is still quite dangerous).
  • In Dark Souls III, a few of the bosses were originally humans (or Undead) before becoming... something else:
    • When you first encounter Champion Gundyr, he's long since succumbed to the Abyss and become infected with the Pus of Man, a writhing gigantic snake-like mass of darkness.
    • Vordt and the Dancer of the Boreal Valley and the other Boreal Knights were all turned into bestial horrors by the bewitched rings Pontiff Sulyvahn bestowed upon them. This was deliberate on his part — all of them were people he deemed politically inconvenient. It's implied that the monstrous Sulyvahn Beasts encountered as minibosses are the final stage of the transformation.
    • One of the Lords of Cinder, Aldrich, used to be a human priest. But then he had dreams of the Deep and bloated like a pig as he consumed more and more people. He is now a mass of filthy black sludge known as the Saint of the Deep.
    • Oceiros was once the king of Lothric. His obsession with the knowledge of dragonkind specifically that of the Paledrake Seath the Scaleless eventually caused him to mutate into a grotesque Draconic Humanoid bearing an eerie resemblance to Seath.
    • One of the covenants in this game, Rosaria's Fingers, allows for stat reallocation. However, you are only able to use this a few times in each game cycle. The in-universe explanation is that going through "rebirth" too many times leads to unpleasant results. Unless you like the idea of becoming a gross mix of human and grub.
  • In Demon's Souls most of the Demons are humans or other beings (alive or dead) transformed by the Colorless Fog:
    • Most of the Knights of the Round Table of Boletaria were turned into Demons — Biorr of the Twin Fangs is the only one who is still human. Longbow Oolan the archer was turned into Phalanx, a giant helpless blob still guarded by the spear -wielding hoplites who served her as a human (also turned into blobs albeit ones who still wield their shields and spears). Alfred was turned into the Tower Knight, a giant who still wields a massive shield. Metas was turned into the Penetrator, a demon knight who still wields a sword as long as a lance.
    • King Allant himself became a powerful Demon, and unlike the others this was something he chose. Though when you meet him in the end of the game, the loss of the Archdemons you slew and the lack of souls they sent to him and the Old One has reduced him to a pathetic crawling slug.
    • Even the dead aren't spared these transformations. The Old Hero was a disgraced warrior whose remains turned into a Demonic gigantic version of who he was in life thanks to the Colorless Fog.
  • Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice continues this trend. It is seen repeatedly that the pursuit of immortality has led to many people forsaking their metaphorical and literal humanity. Then there are the Shura, people who give into their hatred and bloodlust, becoming demonic horrors in the process. The Sculptor eventually becomes the Demon of Hatred, and Wolf himself can become a Shura in one ending.
  • Elden Ring: In the lore, engaging in too much Dragon Communion (eating the hearts of dragons to gain spells, such as summoning their various breath weapons) turns one into a Magma Wyrm, a low form of dragon that can't fly and instead crawls around on its belly. The lore of one Magma Wyrm, Theodorix, implies that he was originally a Troll and a hero of the war against the Giants.
• Genshin Impact: Chapter I Act IV reveals that the monsters that form the Abyss Order were all humans from Khaenri'ah, who were cursed with Immortality and left to erode after their nation was destroyed by the gods. It is later clarified that this also applied to Hilichurls, who were originally common citizens of Khaenri'ah, and the Black Serpent Knights, who used to be Khaenri'ah's Royal Guard.
• Golden Sun: The people of Bilibin wanted to build a castle out of wood for their queen. The tree that they put their axes into turned out to be sapient, and cursed all of the villagers of Bilibin and Kolima to turn into trees. Fortunately, this gets undone after his Heel–Face Turn.
• Guilty Gear: The titular Gears are created by applying a number of gene sequences from various animals into a base organism, with magic thrown in to empower it further. Although some animal-based Gears can evolve into human levels of intelligence, most sentient Gears are human-derived, and human-derived Gears are the only ones who can maintain any semblance of humanity at all as far as physiology is concerned. The main character, Sol Badguy, is one of these human-derived Gears. He thinks he's a monster. He's not.
• Your character from Hakaiou: King of Crusher. You start off as a regular human and an office drone, but an alien bug injects some kind of monstrous venom transforming you into various monstrous forms, culminating in you becoming a Not Zilla that destroys the entirety of New York.
• Half-Life 2:
  • Stalkers are humans taken prisoner by Combine forces for acts of rebellion or "simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time", according to Alyx. Their organs and genitalia are removed and their blood replaced with a saline solution, a metal plate welded over their "face" and a strong implication that they are rewarded for good behaviour with artificial limbs so that they can walk.
  • The Combine soldiers are humans who have underwent memory replacement and had most of their organs replaced with cybernetic implants. The soldiers rise in rank by giving up more and more of their humanity. It's implied that all of the Combine's bio-weapons have similar origins.
• Halo:
  • Halo: Combat Evolved: Captain Keyes, when you eventually find him. He's been absorbed into a massive Flood organism, retaining enough sentience to contact you on your commlink through sheer force of will. Not to mention the fact that the Master Chief needs his neural implant, requiring him to punch through what was left of his face into his brain. Hell, any human (or Covenant, if you consider alien races) that the Flood infects could be considered an example of this.
  • In Halo 4, we find out that most of the Promethean Knights used to be human, who were harvested by the Didact to be made into weapons.
  • As noted in "Literature", Alpha Halo's Monitor 343 Guilty Spark used to be human.
• In inFAMOUS 2, the swamp monsters were once humans, transformed by Bertrand. Bertrand himself can also change into a gigantic monstrous form.
• Specimen 7 from In Pursuit of Greed is a mutant monster who used to be a human engineer working for the Janex Corp, but a malfunctioning birthing tank in one mission somehow turns him into a grotesque, feral monster. He eventually decides to abandon his human life behind and join the Hunters after realizing the combat potentials from his mutation; in his profile the only traces of his human side is his face.
• Kingdom Hearts: The Heartless and the Nobodies are composed of different parts of souls of people. While most are mindless, some retain enough sentience and knowledge of their past lives to lament their fate.
• In King's Quest VI the Lord of the Dead was a man long ago, chained to the throne of the Underworld and enslaved as its ruler. The throne and his witnessing of unending tragedies slowly drained away the man's humanity and transformed him into something beyond comprehension.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • Rakghouls all used to be human before being bitten and infected. The player gets to meet some Outcasts and a terrified Republic soldier before they transform. Other parts of the EU use the rakghouls again, only this time there's a deranged Dark Jedi with a talisman that instantly transforms non Force-Sensitives into them. An old clone trooper holds out longer than most, but doesn't quite manage to kill her.
  • Invoked to describe the unusual nature of Darth Nihilus. Although he's been implied to be a Negative Space Wedgie, or even the hero's Enemy Without. All depends on who you listen to.
• League of Legends:
  • The Sunborn are a species of humans from the empire of Shurima transformed by divine power into godly beings, all of whom are rooted in Egyptian Mythology. You have Azir (a falcon), Nasus (a jackal), Renekton (a crocodile), and Xerath (a being of pure energy).
  • Orianna, The Lady of Clockwork; originally just the normal daughter of an eccentric inventor with a case of Chronic Hero Syndrome, her venture into Zaun fatally poisoned her body, and her body parts were slowly replaced with machinery until she became entirely of clockwork to save her life. This tragically had the consequence of removing chunks of her humanity and identity, and the sorrow of her transformation isn't lost on her.
    Orianna: When a moth emerges from its chrysalis, does it remember its life as a caterpillar?
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past:
    • All the NPCs in the Dark World, as the Dark World has the effect of transforming anyone who enters it into a form that matches his personality. Link, due to his innocent nature, is transformed into a pink bunny rabbit without any means of protecting himself.
    • In the manual, it's stated that Ganon was once a man called Ganondorf, the leader of a tribe of thieves before gaining the Triforce and becoming a giant Pig Man. We get to see his Gerudo form in Ocarina of Time, and Ganon generally serves as Ganondorf's One-Winged Angel form in later games. In Breath of the Wild, Ganon has become so powerful that he's now an ancient, bestial mass of dark energy, said to be malice incarnate.
    • Blind the Thief, the only boss (and the first boss in the series) besides Ganon and Agahnim to actually be given any backstory. He was originally a human man who lived in the Light World, and was the leader of a gang of thieves, earning the nickname "Blind" because he hated sunlight. He was likely brought to the Dark World by a greedy desire for the Triforce, like many others, but the effects of the Triforce turned him into a red-skinned, fire-spitting demon, completely loyal to Ganon.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time mentions that Hylians eventually transform into Stalfos when lost in The Lost Woods without a fairy to guide them. You actually meet a lost man in the woods who appears oddly gaunt and skeletal (although he looked like that before he went into the woods), and when you return from his fetch quest with what he wants, he's gone and a Kokiri informs you he has become a Stalfos and seems positively joyed to claim eventually everyone lost in the forest will someday turn. In addition, children who are lost in the woods are said to turn into Skull Kids. They're usually shown as more tragic enemies, considering that you're able to talk with them as a child.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The Twilight turns normal humans into spirits, Link into a wolf, and does not seem to affect magic users. Spirits (and Twili) will eventually transform into the inconsistently named "Twilit Messengers" (better known as Shadow Beasts or "those screaming things that guard portals").
• In Little Samson, Kikira the Dragon Lord, Gamm the Rock Lord and K.O. the mouse were all human once, but were transformed for various reasons. This is All There in the Manual and is nowhere brought up in the game.
• LunarLux: In Chapter 4, Nickle reveals that General Saros forcibly transforms people into Murks for the sake of his antimatter experiments.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: At the end of The Gears of Destiny, the Unbreakable Darkness, the Eldritch Abomination that the cast had been fighting against for the entire game, is revealed to have once been a human named Yuri Evelvine.
• Mass Effect: A major part of the Reapers' modus operandi. It begins with their Husk grunt troopers in the first game, which are augmented by variations and husks made from alien species in the others. There's the revelation in the climax of the Suicide Mission that Reapers are made by pasting up sapient species and implanting them in metallic superstructures — and their next target is humanity.
  • The Collectors in Mass Effect 2 were originally Protheans the Reapers transformed into slaves.
  • In Mass Effect 3 basically every major sentient race (save the quarians) gets their own monster version that they can be turned into. Add a couple of cross breeds for the charm.
  • From Mass Effect: Andromeda, there's the kett, who take captives they find "worthy" and exalt them, turning them into more kett. Several angara, on learning about this, are horrified at the thought they have spent the last several decades inadvertently killing their kind. And after all the horrific alterations done to their bodies, there's nothing of the original being's DNA left beside a few minor strands.
• Miitopia: The Dark Curse once was a regular Mii that was ignored by the others because of its dull face. In rage and envy, it shed its face away, and soon after lost its body to become a blue soul-like thing that steals other Miis' faces as revenge.
• Minion Masters: Some Voidborne used to be humans corrupted by dark magic like the warlock Karkoffs.
• The Apoptosis in Monster Girl Quest! Paradox RPG were originally humans, monsters or angels who were mutated into their current grotesque forms.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Scorpion was once Hanzo Hasashi, the leader of the Shirai-Ryu clan of ninjas. When their rivals, the Lin Kuei, slaughtered them, and their leader Sub-Zero killed him, he returned as a wraith fueled by a burning desire for revenge.
  • After exacting his revenge on him, the elder Sub-Zero goes through something similar, becoming the wraith Noob Saibot. The oni Drahmin also plays this trope straight.
  • There's an interesting subversion with Quan-Chi, who is a demon that gradually became more and more humanoid.
• Neopets: Some characters, like Edna the witch (now a green Zafara) and the Island Mystic (now a yellow Kyrii).
• Nexus War: Pretty much everybody. Demons, angels, undead, and several others. All were once human and have become utterly inhuman. Just about the only characters that don't fit this trope are Eternal Soldiers.
• Nier has this as the case for Shades, officially known as "Gestalts": the souls of humans that were extracted from their bodies in response to a world-ending plague. Those responsible for this soul extraction intended for the Gestalts to be transplanted into artificial bodies known as Replicants. Unfortunately, the Replicants gained sentience of their own and came to mistake the Gestalts as monsters. Not helping matters is the fact that extended time outside of a body causes the Gestalts to eventually go mad and devolve into violent monsters.
• In Octopath Traveler, this turns out to be the case for Redeye, H'aanit's final boss. He used to be Graham Crossford, a traveling apothecary. Due to being descended from a sorcerer who helped seal the Gate of Finis, Lyblac tried to use him in a ritual to revive Galdera. Graham got away before the ritual was complete, but transformed into Redeye and soon lost his human mind afterwards, except in rare circumstances.
• Octopath Traveler II heavily implies that the Dark Entity, Ochette's first boss, is a mutated version of Temenos's friend Roi. He disappeared after trying to destroy the Darkblood Bow, which Petrichor later has in her possession, and she helped Harvey mutate Mahina or Akala into the Darkling. The Dark Entity also repeats part of Roi's last conversation with Temenos after Ochette defeats it.
• The Genesis game The Ooze has you playing as a scientist who's been turned into a puddle of (highly vulnerable) green ooze. Collect all the DNA helixes in the game (five per level portion) to change him back.
• Parasite Eve 2 is a more nightmare fueled version than usual: every single one of the monsters in the game were people who worked on the "Second Neoteny" project, which was a project intended to transform large numbers of humans into monsters. Humans who volunteered for the project. This makes the monsters even more horrifying, since once your attention has been called to it, you can easily see how they were altered from their original human form. Made even worse when it is revealed they used the heroine's DNA to make start the process to begin with. So even the monster-part came from a human as well.
• Patapon: Scorpiton is Makoton, who sold his soul to a devil to avenge Aiton, a Zigoton you killed during the first half of the game.
• Persona 5: Despite having no memories before waking up in the Palace, Funny Animal Team Pet Morgana believes he must have been a human who was twisted into the form of a cat by the collective unconscious, and wants to search the Palace to find a way to restore himself to his true form. In the end, he was never a human at all, but an Animalistic Abomination the Big Good created from the collective positive desires of humanity to stop the Big Bad.
• Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh reveals that the Hecatomb was a human being^note To be more specific, the real Curtis Craig that transformed into a monster - one that retains only vaguely human-like characteristics.
• Pokémon
  • According to the Pokedex in Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, a boy with Psychic Powers woke up one day transformed into a Kadabra. This can be presumed to extend to the rest of its evolutionary line.
  • Pokémon Black and White has the Ghost Pokémon Yamask (and, by extension, Cofagrigus), whose mask is its face from when it was human. Its Pokedex entry states that 'it sometimes looks at its mask and cries'.
  • In a similar manner to the Legend of Zelda examples above, Pokémon X and Y gives us Phantump, who, according to the Pokédex, is formed when the spirit of a child who died after getting lost in a forest possesses a tree stump.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon adds first-generation Ghost-type, Gengar, to this list, stating in its Moon dex entry that Gengar was once a human who has become so lonely, that it kills other humans and steals their souls in order to make itself a travelling companion.
• In Portal 2, it's revealed that GLaDOS is less of an artificial intelligence and more of a human one; having been the product of Brain Uploading the consciousness of Cave Johnson's secretary, Caroline. Cave originally intended to upload himself, since he was dying, but told his staff that if he died before they finished figuring out how to do it, they should do it to Caroline instead, whether she was willing or not, so that she could run Aperture Science in his place.
• Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones: The trope's name was used word-for-word by the Prince to describe the giant, jawless boss he has to fight. And just like said boss, most of your enemies from the first and third game from the series are this.
• Quake: In Quake II and Quake IV, the majority of the enemies you face are people who have been captured and forcibly turned into cyborgs. Some aren't even turned into troops, they just get their limbs hacked off and used as scenery (but they still twitch and bleed when shot). In Quake IV, this happens to the player character, and you get to see it happen, from his point of view. Curious?
• In Quest for Glory IV, the survivors of a cult dedicated to the Dark One were mutated into grotesque, tentacled monstrosities called Chernovy that are still recognizable as having once been humans. Their high priest is much more thoroughly mutated, although if you use the "look" icon on him, the narration notes that you can see that he had once been a man too.
• Ratchet & Clank: Dr. Nefarious; despite the fact that he was once human, he hates humans with a passion, calling them "squishies" and other derogatory names.
• Rengoku: The flashbacks show that the ADAM bosses in the second game were human mercenaries of Captain Gram's squad with a strong bond. They were once given "AI cell suits" by Deucalion for "testing", and were told they just have good shock-absorbtion. Mars got consumed by it, while Gryphus has killed Lycaon and Minos for power. The others have killed each other thinking they can counter Gryphus and eventually he got 8 cells, but was shot by transformed Gram. And now all of them are ADAMs.
• Resident Evil: Virtually all monsters (with the exception of a few based on animals) are humans infected with various viruses or parasites. The Tyrant series are a special case in that they're human-based, but are in fact clones of Ozwell Spencer's Dragon Sergei Vladimir that were experimented on via surgery and viral infection.
  • Resident Evil 6: The Ustanak deserves special mention for being one of the few people who willingly became a monster if it meant curing his unusually frail body, and for still being conscious enough to be quite pleased with the thing he turned into.
  • Lisa Trevor from Resident Evil (Remake) was Umbrella's first "successful" human experiment, leading to their development of the T-Virus in the first place. Her story is easily the most depressing and disturbing in the entire franchise, as you find notes she left that steadily get less coherent until she's nothing but an insane rambling monster, and there's enough hints of there still being a little bit of the young girl she once was inside her as she still manages to do things like live in an old shack, play with homemade dolls, and even light a fire. Tears will be shed if, rather than fight her, you pacify her by letting her claim her mother's remains.
  • In Resident Evil 4 (Remake), it's revealed that this is the case for the two Verdugo that serve Salazar. One of Salazar's servants experimented with gene-splicing human and arthropod DNA together, with the Novistadors being an early iteration of the project and the Verdugo being the final product. The red-cloaked Verdugo that chases Leon was originally a castle servant named Isidro Uriarte Talavera while the black-cloaked Verdugo was Salazar's housekeeper.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Digital Devil Saga: The victims of the Demon Virus all used to be humans. After infection, they gain a demonic side capable of manifesting through their bodies, spanning the whole range from a lowly slime to a gigantic dragon; either way, it hungers for the flesh and blood of man. It's necessary to keep the demon well fed and content, or it will slowly start eating at the infected person's mind, devouring the human identity and leaving the starved, crazed demon permanently in charge.
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: Crewman Norris begins hearing voices as you begin exploring Sector Bootes, and then he reaches for the sector's central tower, the Palace of Pleasure. Next time you see him, he's being experimented upon, and the transformation ain't pretty. Worst part is, you can see how he slowly loses his mind as you traverse the sector.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne: The Hito-Shura. Ordinary High-School Student one moment. Godslaying badass Humanoid Abomination the next. Despite relatively few physical changes (only a horn in the back of the head and glowing full-body tattoos) Word of God is his entire body has become a demon's — the horn is actually a primitive brain or sensory organ allowing him to truly interact with demons, and the tattoos are actually subdermal streams of demonic lymph.
• Snow Bros: According to the NES port, Nick and Tom were once human princes before being cursed into becoming snowmen. Only in the Golden Ending is their curse explicitly shown being lifted.
• Sonic Unleashed: Although not originally human, Sonic's were-hog form is an example of the original mind/new body version.
• Soul Series:
  • Necrid, Tira, Nightmare/Siegfried, Calcos/Lizardman, Algol, Charade, and the SCII Berserkers are all people corrupted by Soul Edge.
    Talim: What are you? ...you're human, aren't you?
  • Siegfried manages to become human again in the third game, and his armor lives on as the new Nightmare.
  • Raphael becomes infected with Soul Edge's evil and becomes some sort of vampire-like entity.
  • Cervantes, as a one-time wielder of Soul Edge, has been twisted into a ghost/zombie pirate. He becomes human once more in Soulcalibur V.
• Spore: When using the Fanatical Frenzy unique ability of the Zealot stereotype, all inhabitants in the world targeted turn into members of your species no matter what they used to be before.
• StarCraft: It's fairly common for the Zerg to turn people into members of their Swarm.
  • Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, used to be a fairly normal human woman before becoming the Zerg's Hive Queen.
  • Infested Terrans are former humans who were taken by the Zerg and turned into horrific abomination suicide bombers. In StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, an even more mutated form called "Aberrations" appears in a few missions. These get upgraded to a controllable unit in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm.
  • The unique Zergform Izsha, who serves as Kerrigan's equivalent of an adjutant and who can be charitably described as a "chitin-plated naga with claw-tentacles for hair", is eventually revealed to have been a Terran woman, a medic named Amanda Haley, who was mutated into this new form by the Queen of Blades when she sensed the woman's psionic potential.
• Strange Terror From The Deep: Almost every monster in the game is either a mutated human or the ghost of one, and they seem angry at humanity as a whole, hunting the player down and killing them mercilessly.
• Stray (2022) has a relatively benevolent example in B-12. Once a human scientist, they uploaded their brain in a desperate attempt to escape the plague killing off their kind. However, something went wrong and they got trapped in the electronic system long enough to lose their memories and sense of self. By the time the cat rescues them, they've convinced themself they were a robot similar to those now living in the City. Nevertheless, they remain a steadfast ally in the cat's quest to escape back to the Outside.
• String Tyrant: How does Pygmalie make more servants? She transforms those that the mansion summons into inanimate minions. Which means just about everything the player fights used to be human. Happens to Mary
• Sundered: Hysteria was once a human soldier named Emmett Nelson, who was captured by the Eschaton cult and transformed into a giant undead cyborg Spider Tank as punishment for slaughtering the cult's women and children.
• In Super Robot Wars Z 2: Hakai-hen, the Dimesional Beasts are people who were fused with their mecha by Gaiou. The Reveal comes in 49.
• System Shock 2: The Many. It's really unnerving to having your enemy viciously assault you while screaming for you to run away or put them out of their misery.
• Undertale:
  • We have Flowey the Flower, who was once Asriel Dreemurr, the child of Toriel and Asgore. He basically Came Back Wrong without a soul, and went mental as a result of being unable to feel emotions and from Medium Awareness. To make matters worse you can't save him: He gets a brief respite in the Golden Ending of the game where he gets to briefly be Asriel, but is doomed to fade away.
  • There are also the Amalgamates, which at some point were SEVERAL different monsters. The monsters had all died and were the subject of Dr. Alphys' experiments to harness the power of Determination within monster souls. Instead of allowing the souls to persist after death however, it brought the monsters back to life. However, because monsters are mostly magical and can't handle high concentrations of determination, the monsters injected with determination started melting together into gnarled, melty masses of monster parts while still maintaining at least some awareness of their situation.
  • The First Child who fell into the underground was originally a human that really hated humanity. Their attempt to take revenge on them turns them into an Ambiguously Human Omnicidal Maniac and is now an extension of the player on a No Mercy run, an avatar for the player's desire for power. It should be noted that a human cannot absorb a human's soul, yet in order to play the game after a Genocide Run, you need to sell your soul to the First Child.
• Utawarerumono: Almost all the characters have animal ears and tails, aside from the protagonists Hakuoro and Haku. However, those animal-eared creatures are not humans. Instead, the real humans are semi-liquid red blobs/jellies. A long time ago, once-human Hakuoro fused with an ancient God right before the former's death, and he entered a slumber for centuries, until he was found and awakened by scientists. After he learned that they dissected his wife and child for experiments to achieve immortality, his rage and despair activated the God within him, who turned all of humanity into red immortal blobs.
• View from Below: Mortals that die become lost spirits, who will either maintain their existence as a spirit if they hold out hope or turn into demons if they give into despair.
• Warcraft: This is fairly common.
  • Notable is the Demon Hunter Illidan Stormrage, who, after using a demonic artifact to gain power, was transformed into a demon.
  • Illidan's got nothing on, well, every race on Azeroth AND beyond. Firstly, those that play it straight:
    • Naga used to be Night Elf Highborn who were transformed by their queen, Azshara, when their city was sunk into the sea during the Sundering.
    • The Broken, the Lost Ones, and the Eredar are all degenerated versions of the Draenei who were mutated by over-exposure to fel energy. The funny thing about Eredar is that they're physically not all that transformed; they look demonic because their ancestors already looked about like that, as do the good guy Draenei now.
    • The Forsaken were the humans who were stricken with a plague of undeath.
    • The Fal'dorei are demonic Spider People who were originally elven Shal'dorei. The fountain of arcane energy they drew upon exploded, twisting them into their current forms.
  • World of Warcraft also inverts this when we discover that the Curse of Flesh caused mutation in many, if not all, of the Titan's creations. Earthen became dwarves, mechagnomes became regular gnomes, and Vrykul became Humans. These are all inversions since the transformations go from "monster" to man.
  • There is a theory that Night Elves (from which all other elves are descended) descended themselves from Trolls who were exposed to the arcane energies of the Well of Eternity, once more inverting the trope. This is confirmed in the new Chronicles book.
  • All but a small few of the demonic races were once regular beings that became so tainted by fel energy they eventually became full demons, usually caused by direct interference by the Burning Legion as an assimilation plot. Many night elves became full demons in the form of satyrs and many other races became part-way demonic such as chaos orcs and the felblood elves through similar corruption. The eredar are an odd case because the majority of the species became demons after siding with the Legion while a minority fled and became draenei, which is different because the previous cases had mainly the minority of their race become demonic. Only a few races like the Nathrezim are confirmed to be originally demonic.
• In Wario Land 3, all the monsters in the game were humans transformed by the Hidden Figure.
• War of the Monsters: Kineticlops, an Energy Being made of electricity with a single floating eyeball, is revealed to have once been a human security guard in its origin story. A flying saucer crashed into the power plant he worked at, and its fuel blast plus the surrounding electricity ended up transforming the poor guard into a monster.
• Witch Hunter Izana: Many of the lower-tier enemies are identified in the bestiary as originally being the inhabitants of Scrier's island, now so transformed into monsters as to be unrecognizable. Very nearly happens to Quinn.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown strongly implies that most of the alien enemies you face are genetically-engineered Battle Thralls bred from races the Etherials previously conquered and enslaved, and they intend to do the same to humanity if they win. In the Bad Future of XCOM 2, the first enemies you fight in the tutorial levels are the result of them following through on it.
• X-COM: Terror from the Deep has the Bio-Drones, whose UFOpedia entry reveals that they're actually made from living human brains that had been tortured to submission.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1:
  • The Face Mechon are eventually revealed to be Humongous Mecha piloted by Homs put through Unwilling Roboticization. It's implied subtly early on by minor antagonist Xord, but it doesn't really hit until the party cuts one open... only to find Fiora, the protagonist's supposedly-dead childhood sweetheart inside. It also explains why the Monado can't hurt them: the Monado can't hurt Homs, and Faces are Homs.
  • After beating the final boss (and if the area preceding the final boss wasn't a clue of it already), Alvis reveals to Shulk that Zanza was once a human scientist (human as in you and me, not Homs) who wanted to become a god. Meyneth was also a scientist working with Zanza.
  • Inverted with the High Entia, who were once Telethia created by Zanza and given intelligence and human-like bodies by him. Upon the moment of Zanza's return, he releases large amounts of ether, turning the High Entia (except for half-Homs High Entia) back into Telethia.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: With the revelation that the world was Earth All Along comes the realization that the monstrous Guldos, along with Klaus, are the sole surviving original humans.
• Yo-kai Watch: Several Yo-kai used to be humans before their death. Manjimutt and Dandoodle have a similar manner of death: getting drunk after losing their job and then being crushed by something that fell on them next to a toy poodle. This allowed them to merge with said toy poodles, giving Manjimutt and Dandoodle the appearance of poodles with human faces.
• Zork Nemesis: The player can eventually uncover that the titular demonic antagonist used to be Lucien Kaine — the Thief from the first game, before he was afflicted by the alchemists' curse.

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