Woobie Destroyer Of Worlds / Video Games

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• ALTER EGO (2018): In the Giving in to Impulse ending, poor Es goes mad and decides to destroy the library-like world of the game and go after the Façade. She concludes everyone else is a product of her imagination. A big part of her mental breakdown is the mental stress of reigning in her impulses and a deep feeling of loneliness.
• Anna's Quest: The Big Bad is The Devil, but the villain of the in-universe story is a young girl he tricked people into casting out for a murder she didn't commit, while she was still traumatised at losing her best friend.
• Asura's Wrath: Yasha is a combination of this and Iron Woobie, who is legitimately the only one of the deities that turned on Asura that feels legitimate regret for the way they treat humanity after betraying Asura, forcing them into a Martyrdom Culture.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • Poison Ivy can be classified as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds because she is an eco-terrorist essentially because society harms Nature, her "babies", and she wants humans to stop hurting the planet. In addition, in Batman: Arkham City, she locks herself up and really just wants to be left alone when Catwoman comes in and she sees herself forced to kill her.
  • Mr. Freeze, a.k.a. Victor Fries. Enough said. Also, in Batman: Arkham Knight, it is revealed that the Arkham Knight, a.k.a. Jason Todd, is one, too.
• Batman: The Telltale Series: Vicki Vale. She was born Victoria Arkham in this game but her parents were murdered because they tried to stop Thomas Wayne’s amorality, and then she was adopted by a couple who abused her and other foster children to a horrific degree. It’s no wonder that she went insane and became Lady Arkham. Sadly, it doesn’t justify her actions or those of the Children of Arkham, whom she leads.
• BattleTech: Samuel Ostergaard is one. Every questionable decision he made was to avenge the death of his son at your hands. In the end, he has committed grotesque atrocities in the name of his vengeance, even turning a gun on his own crew. Still, hearing his final words and watching him sit, looking at a photograph, while his ship disintegrates around him leaves the hardest a little misty-eyed.
• In the "worst" ending of BioShock 2, Eleanor Lamb turns into one of these. She was almost laser-guided by her mother to become some kind of Utopia, although some fans thought that she would become an Eldritch Abomination or an otherwise unpleasant form of Life that would destroy Rapture and the Topside World. In the Bad Ending, Eleanor is influenced by Delta's murders, kills her mother in revenge, and, depending on how many of the NPCs and Little Sisters the player killed, will be allowed by Delta to absorb his mind and, we assume, his powers, or will do the same, only against Delta's will. Whether the case, she swears to punish the world, while watching a storm fall over the corpse-filled ocean.
  "There is no Name for what I am. But, with your help, they will never see me coming... (Fade to Black)"
  • Keep in mind that Eleanor watches Delta through the Little Sisters, so if he chooses to murder them, she experiences her beloved father horribly murdering her while she begs for mercy. Over and over.
• In Bioshock Infinite, Elizabeth becomes this in a Bad Future where Booker fails to save her and Comstock successfully molds her into his heir. In the end, it wasn't the mental and physical conditioning that broke her. It was the complete loss of hope and the belief that Booker betrayed her that drove her into wishing to burn the world. However, her final act is to bring Booker into this world to pass on an important clue to her past self that would change things.
• If there were any worthier candidate for the epitome of this trope, it would have to be BlazBlue's protagonist Ragna the Bloodedge. Not only did he lose his home at the hands of Terumi, but he was also betrayed by his brother, Jin, who cut off his arm simply because Ragna didn't pay attention to him enough. In addition, his younger sister had been kidnapped, and he was left to die. Then, Rachel saves him from death by turning him into a half-vampire, causing him immense trauma and making his hair turn white. Then, later, we find out that his sister is the template for a series of robotic clones, two of which are playable characters in the game. One of them, Noel, is a grown-up Saya for the most part, while the other, Nu, is a Yandere who wants to fuse with Ragna to complete herself and form the Black Beast, which turned the world into a crapsack one already. He's already flat-out stated that he hates everything because of these events.
  • Jin's desire to kill Ragna (and thus the cutting off of his arm) is due to being the World's Antibody and part of his function as the Power of Order. He is meant to be the opposite to Ragna, who is the Destroyer of the World (by being the Black Beast). However, Ragna could instead become the Protector of the Azure.
  • Noel Vermillion eventually becomes one. She was nothing more than a clone of Ragna and Jin's dead/missing little sister, Saya. Since she looks like Saya, whom Jin despises, he's cruel to her. Noel understandably doesn't know why... Making matters worse is that her best friend, Tsubaki, has been ordered to kill her as of the end of Calamity Trigger. Oh, and then Terumi gets ahold of her, mind-rapes her, and turns her into an unholy implement of destruction. All the hate and rage she kept pent up has now been amplified and directed towards the world itself. She does eventually get better, but still...
    • And these three are the good guys. It's that kind of story.
• Fou-Lu from Breath of Fire IV. He's an immortal emperor who also happens to be a dragon. He's been hibernating for the past six hundred years, during which time some not-nice people usurped his throne and plotted to have him killed when he awakens. He manages to escape the assassination attempts, mostly through turning into a large energy-breathing monster and schooling them all in the arts of pain and suffering, and then goes about trying to regain his throne. Along the way, he runs into (and is hidden by) a nice, friendly farm girl who wears a bell as jewelry, who promptly falls in love with him. He falls for her, too, though he's too much the stoic and quiet type to admit it. The Big Bads find out that she's been harboring the Dragon-Emperor, take her captive, and drag her off to one of the more horrible fates imaginable. See, they have a superweapon, called the Carronade, that uses people with very close bonds to their target as ammunition, converting their pure soul (after a good amount of Cold-Blooded Torture) into a foul and unspeakable city-destroying curse. So, the Emperor's walking through a forest on his way to his rightful palace to retake it, when he senses the powerful world-rending curse heading his way, and defends himself against it as best as he can. The last thing he sees before the force of the curse renders him unconscious is the farm girl's bell charm falling from the heavens to land in front of him. Cue insane cackling and his plans going from "regain throne" to "kill everybody".
  • A decision that is firmly cemented when he finally meets up with Emperor Soniel, who acts as if he is welcoming Fou-lu back — and then proceeds to run him through with a soul-eating sword created by his head thaumaturgist Yuna from a previous botched summoning where only the head came through. This would normally kill even a lesser being; Fou-lu is merely pissed off enough to decapitate the back-stabber with the very same sword. As if he needed any further cementing of the idea that Humans Are Bastards...
• Castlevania:
  • Dracula may be the God of Evil, Prince Of Darkness, The Anti-God, what-have-you, but one has to wonder if he would have become such had he not suffered the deaths of his two wives. His first wife's death caused him, then a Crusades warrior, to renounce God, along the way stealing the power of another vampire with the help of Death. As stated later on, several centuries later, he calmed down, fell in love with a human woman and had a son with her and might have been redeemed... had it not that some people accused her as a witch and burned her, and he snapped and declared war on humanity.
  • Soma Cruz from Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow — kill Mina, and he is going to kill you in revenge and proceed to become this, requiring Julius Belmont, Yoko Belnades, and Alucard to stop him.
• Ballos from Cave Story, who destroyed the very kingdom whose people he loved and helped out after being subjected to Cold-Blooded Torture by the king (and if the Wii version of his speech is of any indication, he may have brought the torture upon himself by recklessly allowing his power to grow), forcing Jenka to seal him within the floating island. In fact, when you reach him at the end of the Bonus Level of Hell, he begs you to kill him... or he shall kill YOU!
• Schala, from the Chrono games. In Trigger, she was abused and neglected by her mother, Queen Zeal, who went mad after discovering the power of Lavos. Schala was later caught in the Ocean Palace as it collapsed and never seen again... until Cross, when it was revealed that, since she had such a miserable life, she wished for none of it to ever happen. This let Lavos take over her soul, and turn into the Time Devourer, which threatened to destroy everything that ever existed. She finally gets a happy ending at the end of Cross, when Serge uses the Chrono Cross to free her from the Devourer and Ret-Gone Lavos out of existence once and for all.
• Nero from Ciel nosurge and its sequel is a little girl who was stolen from her home world to help humans of another one migrate to a new planet, immediately killed, then her wandering soul was rediscovered, put in a new body and used to power the Cielnotrons. All she wants to do is go home, but the ways to do that are taken away until the only way to do it is via Assimilation Plot.
• Yuriko Omega from Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. Found to possess psychic powers from an early age, she was scorned by her schoolmates, and eventually taken away from her family by the Japanese government to be placed into a weapons development program, which put her through Training from Hell to develop her inherent psionic powers, at the cost of her sanity. When World War 3 broke out, she was forced to fight by the Japanese military, who viewed her as little more than a weapon. After the defeat of Japan, she was captured by the Allied Nations, only to break out, partly to get revenge on the head scientist of the project, and partly to meet her "sister" Izumi. This sets off her campaign in the Uprising expansion. While she eventually manages to kill the scientist and get her revenge, it turns out Izumi was always planning to kill her, and Yuriko is forced to kill Izumi in self-defence. In the ending cutscene to her campaign, she is shown alone and depressed on a hillside, overlooking a city, pondering what to do.
• Crimsoness casts one of these as the Player Character.
• Sirus, aka Dark Emperor Griffon, from Dark Cloud 2. Originally a member of the Moon Tribe (aka anthropomorphic bunny) who loved nothing more than the flowers in the palace gardens, he was accused of trespassing. Alexandra interceded for him and made him the Garden Keeper. But then invading armies searching for the Atlamillia utterly annihilated the kingdom, leaving it a blasted wasteland, and killed Alexandra. His grief was so great that he swore vengeance on all of mankind, and started systematically erasing it from existence via Time Travel, acquiring the MacGuffin for himself so he could reduce the world to nothingness. Regardless, the player and the protagonists are made to feel sorry for him by means of flashback scenes scattered throughout Moonflower Palace.
• The Big Bad of Dark Law is King Daruk, who was also the villain of the great war that ravaged the world 300 years ago... all of this started when his kingdom got hit with a horrble famine pushing them into desperation or death and nobody absolutelly nobody, no human or god, would help them. Then he found a power willing to, a corruptor entity outside of the universe that turned both him and his subjects into monsters.
• In the Disciples series, God of Evil is deconstructed since the "evil" gods only became evil because their "good" compatriots were jerks who treated them like garbage. This does not apply to their followers. Bethrezen's Legions of the Damned are by far the nastiest faction who gleefully corrupt and slaughter in Bethrezen's name and The Undead Hordes are utterly ruthless while following Mortis' will.
• The real Overlord Zenon from Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories definitely is this trope. Overlord Zenon is the famous and well-known "God of All Overlords" for having slain about 1000 other Overlords, 99 on the day she fled to Veldime to reincarnate. She doesn't appear much, but when she does, she tries to kill everyone, because she's convinced that everyone is going to betray her. Understandable, since nearly all the demons in the Disgaea universe tend to be rather ambitious. "Everyone who has ever come close to me, has betrayed me..."
  • In Disgaea 3's "Human World Ending", after each of his party members dies one by one, Mao finally loses it when Super Hero Aurum kills Raspberyl.. Afterwhich, he effortless annihilates him and we are told he destroys the universe, and Mao is left all alone, floating in nothingness for all eternity.
• Anders in Dragon Age II becomes this by the end of the game. After a time growing up in the Mages Circle — a life stuck in a tower, bound to do whatever the Chantry asked him to — he escaped from the Templars... seven times. On the last time, he joined the Grey Wardens to escape more permanently. It's all downhill for him after that, unfortunately. The Grey Wardens consider him a wuss and mock him enough that he leaves, and then he lets a wayward Spirit of Justice — once a friend of his — into his body. All of this isn't too bad, but it starts getting nasty when he goes to Kirkwall. The sheer dark magic of the place corrupts Justice into a Demon of Vengeance. By the time Dragon Age II begins, he's constantly fighting for control over the influence of Vengeance/Justice. After all of this, his brooding is pretty justified. (He gets added points for being the constantly-hunted leader of a Mages' Rights group.) In the final act, though, he can't fight Vengeance off anymore, and essentially performs a terrorist attack on the local branch of the Chantry. Talk about a Trauma Conga Line. Ultimately, his fate is left up to Hawke.
• Dragon Quest IV: Psaro the Manslayer becomes a super-powerful, omnicidal maniac after his lover Rose gets murdered.
• In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, this is one possible interpretation of Big Bad Physical God Dagoth Ur depending on the version of events you choose to believe. If you look past the Tribunal Temple dogma regarding the events leading up to and immediately following the death of Lord Nerevar, it is possible that the Tribunal cast Dagoth away to do exactly what Nerevar explicitly told them not to do, while convincing Dagoth that Nerevar had betrayed him in the process. As with everything else relating to those events, the game never makes it clear exactly what happened, leaving it to the player to draw his or her own conclusions.
• Epic Mickey:
  • The smaller Shadow Blot is revealed to be this. His motives are just like Oswald's: he wants to be famous and loved by the people in Real Life. If you use paint, after Mickey's climactic battle with it, he gives Mickey a big hug, leading Gus to marvel: "Huh? He's actually kind of... sweet."
  • Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Much of what he does (and well, mostly what he intends on doing) is the result of neglect, jealousy, and the loss of everything he cared about (especially Ortensia) and built in the Thinner Disaster.
• Fatal Frame is filled with these, in particular the primary antagonist of each installment. The majority of the spirits encountered throughout the series were killed by a curse and now forced to suffer for all eternity, seeking to inflict it upon others. Stand-outs include:
  • Original Big Bad Kirie, a Virgin Sacrifice that lived for a decade in isolation prior to her ritual. In the final months of her life, she fell in love with a visitor to the manor......and learned just before the ritual that he had been murdered. Her heartbreak and guilt caused the ritual — which involved tearing her apart with ropes — to fail, flooding the manor with Malice and turning her into a vengeful spirit. And even after she is free from the malice, she used her own body as a seal to prevent the gate from opening again for eternity. While the canon ending had Mafuyu staying with her to help ease her pain and burden, unlike the other main antagonists who were allowed to move on or at least find true peace, she would had spend eternity guarding the gate to prevent the malice from flooding the region again.
  • Reika Kuze, the Big Bad of the third installment. After losing her entire family, she was taken into the Kuze Shrine and underwent the Tattooing ritual. This involve having the sorrow and nightmares of pilgrims tattooed onto her skin, taking up their burdens as her own. After completing the ritual, she was crucified inside a hidden shrine to dream the tattoos' pain forever... but her childhood sweetheart came to see her one last time. For this transgression, he was murdered right in front of her, and the pain caused the tattoos to overflow, cursing the manor. Unable to close her eyes or look away, she was forced to continue staring at her lover's corpse until Rei came to end the curse.
  • Ouse Kurosawa, the Big Bad of the fifth installment. As a miko of a local religion, she used her psychic powers to "glance" the hearts of suicides, allowing them to die without their burdens. When she reached her limit, she was prepared to be sacrificed as a Great Pillar to purify the lake connected to the underworld. But her heart wasn't strong enough to contain the Black Water, after sensing the slaughter of her companions and realizing she wanted to go on living with the man she loved. Until Yuuri came to the mountain to end the curse, Ouse endlessly sought out someone to ease her loneliness and heartbreak.
• F.E.A.R.'s Alma is a dead straight example of this trope. Having been driven insane by her own psychic powers as a child, experimented on and locked up since she was eight years old, medicated into a coma and locked away in a shield vault for most of her life, forcibly impregnated and then having both of her children taken away, then killed once the project was terminated, all by her own father, and then repeatedly shot at by one of her own children while trying to embrace him, it's no surprise that the second she gets loose, people die. F.E.A.R. 2 continues her rampage as she tries to get revenge on everyone who ruined her life, and kills anyone who happens to get in her way.
  • Except for Becket, who she "covets".
  • In The Point Man's defense, being embraced by Alma tends to be a death sentence.
• Practically every villain of the Final Fantasy series from VI onward is either this or else Put Them All Out of My Misery, and arguably the villains from many of the previous games and spin-off lines.
  • Final Fantasy VI: Kefka Palazzo can be seen as this, if you're feeling really generous. He was a Practically Joker Monster Clown with the Freudian Excuse of being a Psycho Prototype Tyke Bomb. Because With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, he was a Straw Nihilist who could simply find no reason to continue living after The Empire denied him the opportunity to form any meaningful bonds with others, with the insanity they bestowed on him alienating him from others even further. After a lifetime of being completely and utterly alone with everyone from civilians to his fellow soldiers terrified of him, even after the heroes attempt Talking the Monster to Death, he felt he had no choice but to be an Omnicidal Maniac. When he reappears in Dissidia Final Fantasy he's presented as even more of a Sad Clown, with his final laugh being a sobbing, sad one.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth, thanks to the revelation that he is the product of a Mad Scientist's experiment, compounded by the effect of falling into the Lifestream and being exposed to the voices of all souls not currently alive, warping his mind even more. His crossing of the Moral Event Horizon keeps him from truly being a Woobie, but then again, he is the premiere Draco in Leather Pants of the Final Fantasy series.
    • He's built up much more into this in the prequel, Crisis Core, where his two best friends turn out to be flawed prototypes, abandon Shinra, and are hunted down like animals. One goes insane and the other commits Suicide by Cop in fear of doing the same, and in a few months, Sephiroth loses the only people he could relate to and any pretense of trusting the organization that rules his life. So when Genesis and Hojo set him up for The Reveal about himself and Jenova starts messing with his head, he cracks because he's got nothing worth holding on for. Also, Crisis Core shows that prior to the Nibelheim incident, Sephiroth was a fairly decent and caring person.
    • A much more straight example of this trope is Dyne, who snapped when Shinra took everything away from him.
  • While Ultimecia may not be a future version of Rinoa, her own backstory is just as tragic. Due to being a Sorceress, she was persecuted her entire life because of the terrible actions of evil sorceresses in the past. Not only that, but thanks to history, she knows she is destined to die at the hands of a bunch of teenage mercenaries and all her plans are based on a desperate desire to escape her fate. Sadly, her actions in the past to achieve this goal caused the start of the persecution of Sorceresses in her own time. The story itself screws her over because of the subtle method of storytelling in the game, her backstory has to be pieced together from hints and comments by characters and plot events, making her seem like a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere.
  • Kuja in Final Fantasy IX and Seymour in Final Fantasy X are Put Them All Out of My Misery types, and thus their examples fall under that page. Seymour was waaaaay too far gone to Take a Third Option, however.
  • Shuyin in Final Fantasy X-2 fits this trope to a T, being subjected to a thousand years of non-stop visions of him and his girlfriend being murdered until two years before the start of the game. It's quite understandable that he'd want to use Vegnagun on a world that basically made his existence hell...
  • It's implied that this affects Kefka Palazzo in Dissidia Final Fantasy during his surprisingly touching final scene in which it is implied that the reason Kefka became an Ax-Crazy Nietzsche Wannabe was because he's so damn insane, he thinks there's nothing worth living for except destruction. Terra herself says that he was destroying to try and fill his "broken heart".
    • While you don't find out exactly why Garland betrayed Cornelia, his actions in Dissidia are said to be motivated by him pitying Chaos and Cid of the Lufaine. Also, One Man's Monologue depicts him lying paralyzed in the destroyed parallel world for several days and clearly shows that he felt regret about his time loop shenanigans in hindsight.
  • Caius Ballad. He was tasked by Etro to forever guard over the Seeress of Paddra (Yeul), and 'blessed' with Etro's own heart, making him immortal. Which means he's had literally millennia of the same cycle; Yeul dies young, is reborn, dies again... etc. By the time the game starts, his mind has become so warped by the pain of her thousands of deaths, that he believes Yeul's cruel existence must be put to an end, and that stopping time itself from existing (after all, how can a seeress have visions if there's nothing to see?) is the only way to truly save her.
  • Bahamut and the remaining Meracydian dragons would certainly qualify for this as well. Forced to be summoned for thousands of years, his followers prayed to Bahamut for salvation — not knowing that Bahamut himself was imprisoned and tortured alongside them. By the time Bahamut destroys Eorzea in the opening cinematic, he has literally endured hundreds of lifetimes worth of torture. By the end of the Binding Coil storyline, you start to realize that the opening theme of the game, Answers, was more about the Meracydians than modern-day Eorzeans.
    • Answers Opening Chorus: "I close my eyes, tell us why must we suffer? Release your hands, for your will drags us under. My legs grow tired, tell us ere must we wander? How can we carry on with redemption beyond us?"
    • In the endgame of Stormblood: Yotsuyu, the cruel Boomerang Bigot viceroy of Doma, has lived in hell for practically all of her life. Her mother died when she was young, leaving her in the care of her relatives. Her aunt hated her with every fiber of her being. She was forced into marriage with an abusive drunk, then when he died in debt, was forced to pay off those debts in sexual servitude before being recruited into the Garlean military, where she took out her rage on her own countrymen. She was believed dead near the end of the game, but actually survived, albeit with amnesia. It seemed for a time she would finally get a chance at happiness as the childlike "Tsuyu", unburdened by memories of abuses both suffered and inflicted...until her foster brother Asahi forcibly resurfaced her memories and manipulated her into performing a summoning and becoming the primal moon goddess Tsukuyomi. During the battle, she realizes her power came from her suffering, inviting phantoms of those who hated her to strike her down, until a vision of Gosetsu tries to save her. She laments, however, that she is beyond redemption as the primal influence robs her of her agency. Then after Tsukuyomi is defeated, Asahi shoots and hits her until he gets his Karmic Death at the hands of Yotsuyu in her dying moments.
    • The Big Bad of Endwalker and the Greater-Scope Villain turns out to be one of these. Meteion is part of an empathic Hive Mind made by a researcher named Hermes, with the goal of Meteia being to go to other worlds and establish contact with the life on them. Tragically, Hermes never prepared Meteion for what happened if things out in space weren't as happy as he envisioned. Every world that the Meteia found with sentient life had either been driven to extinction for a variety of reasons, or were actively in the process of going extinct and well past the Despair Event Horizon. This resulted in the Hive Mind absorbing all of these dying civilization's despair and agony, giving rise to a being who believed that life itself is nothing but pointless suffering, and that it's an act of love and mercy to cause a total universal extinction event by wiping out what societies are still alive, sealing off the flow of life into her nest so reincarnation can no longer happen, and speeding up Universal Heat Death just for good measure. At the end of it all though... Meteion is just a scared child who was forced to experience horrors she was never prepared to deal with, and when the Warrior of Light manages to give her a happy answer and show why mortals would live even when they will inevitably die, she frees all the captured souls she was hoarding and (possibly) dies at peace.
• Zephiel from Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade and The Blazing Blade was a talented youth who did his best to win approval from his father, the king of Bern. But the harder he strove, the more distant his talentless father grew, and the fact that he was born from a loveless marriage didn't help either. The final straw came when the king poisoned his heir's drink, several years after a first assassination attempt failed. Zephiel's closest retainer, Murdoch, came up with the idea of faking his death to get him out of there. However, the king opened the casket, causing Zephiel to finally snap and stab him. According to his half-sister, Guinevere, Zephiel never smiled again. Years later, he (now king of Bern) was stirring up quite a bit of trouble in neighbouring countries, trying to offer the land back to its rightful owners because Humans Are Bastards. He had to be killed... with his crestfallen sister's help, no less.
  • Another example is Prime Minister Sephiran of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn. He was once a great hero, one of four champions of Ashera, Goddess of Order, in her war against Yune, Goddess of Chaos. He was a kind man, and a member of the most peaceful race on the continent, the heron laguz; indeed, once Yune was subdued, he defied Ashera's order to kill her and simply sealed her away. As Ashera thereafter proceeded to thereafter seal herself, he promised her that Tellius would see no war for the next thousand years, with the goddess adding ominously that if that promise were broken, she would destroy the world. Sephiran married a fellow hero and started a family, a family that would found the greatest country on the continent, which, given his absurdly long lifespan as a heron, he would continue to serve in high positions all his life. Everything appeared to be going fantastic for him. Then, nineteen years before the main story a Smug Snake subordinate of his assassinated the country's beloved empress and pinned the crime on the herons, all but four of whom were wiped out in the resulting genocidal war. Sephiran resolved that a world in which that could happen simply didn't deserve to live, and resolved that he would create a war so devastating it would wake the goddess and bring doom to all life.
• The Five Nights at Freddy's franchise heavily implies, and later confirms, the animatronics are this. To be specific, they're actually possessed by the Purple Man's victims, who are simply children who want to avenge their deaths. However, later games confirm that the animatronics themselves are sentient, and do not like all the horrors they've been forced to take part of. Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location all but spells it out with Circus Baby, who not only was forced to kill a little girl due to her programming, but also convinces her fellow animatronics to combine into one and then wear Eggs' skin so that they can escape. All this, simply because they don't want to suffer anymore.
• General Nathan Sheridan, the Big Bad of Fracture. When you read his back story you find out he sacrificed his career in the Atlantic Alliance military, his reputation, his friends and family all for the sake of his daughters, who were diagnosed with a rare genetic disease which couldn't be cured by conventional means. Desperate, he moved to the Republic of Pacifica, where there is no ban on genetic research. There the best geneticists worked tirelessly in a race against time to save them, but their efforts were futile and his daughters died within weeks of each other. And just to twist the knife in a little deeper six weeks after their deaths a cure was found. His wife divorced him soon afterwards and the rest of his life collapsed around him. Determined to make sure what happened to his daughters never happened to anyone else, he starts building an army the likes of which the world has never seen before to remove the ban on genetic research by force.
• Elden Ring: The Nomadic Merchants. They were once a thriving culture in their own right as the Great Caravan, but when they were accused of heresy, they were all rounded up and buried alive en masse. Their despair at their fate and hatred for the Golden Order for the atrocity attracted the Frenzied Flame to the Lands Between, which (if your character so desires) can lead to the world being burned to the ground.
• Yomiel in Ghost Trick. He was falsely accused of giving secrets to the enemy and scared into thinking that he had no hope of acquittal, so he stole a police officer's gun and broke out of the police station, taking a little girl hostage out of panic. A shard of the just-crashed Temsik meteorite penetrated his back, freezing his body at the moment of death and severing it from his soul. By the time he finally pulls himself together and returns home, his fiancée has killed herself because he's been officially reported as dead. Yomiel is forced to wander the world alone, unable to die but not truly alive, separated from the rest of humanity. The isolation nurtures a darkness in his heart, making him want revenge on those who put him in that position, but he still desires most to have some way to lead a human life. His only friend and companion over those ten long years was a cat... and while trying to manipulate Lynne into shooting his shell, Yomiel accidentally kills him. Even his victims feel sorry for him when they find out his story.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Victor Vance from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. His attempt to improve his situation and that of his family is often undermined by circumstances beyond his control. At first, he is nothing more than an honest, upright, and decent man simply doing his job in the army. However, Martinez's corruption and his brother's greed, combined with the fact that he becomes entangled in a world of violence and organized crime in Vice City after being expelled from the army due to Martinez, pave the way for him to become the most powerful drug lord in the city. Nevertheless, a part of his humanity is still there, with both Pete and Louise being his Morality Pets.
  • Niko Bellic from Grand Theft Auto IV is decidedly the most tragic protagonist in GTA. He is a veteran of The Yugoslav Wars with a history of parental abuse and having experienced and committed a series of war crimes during that conflict. His dual consciousness and contradictions, as well as his internal conflict between revenge, finding a better option for himself in America, or being caught in a wave of murders and organized crime, are largely the focal points of his story.
  • Trevor Philips from Grand Theft Auto V. Implied to be one. Given all the misfortunes that he has gone through his life, it is not difficult to imagine that much of his traumas contributed to his Ax-Crazy behavior.
• The Ur-Didact from Halo was the military commander of the Forerunners and led them in a war against humanity 110,000 years ago that took the lives of all of his children. During the war, the Forerunners had discovered the existence of the Flood and begun devising plans to counter a resurgence. The Ur-Didact proposed shield worlds, huge mobile fortresses that could be dropped in and out of slipspace to combat Flood infestations while also acting as safe havens for species that are threatened by the Flood, while his political rival, the Master Builder Faber, proposed the Halo array, which would be used to cleanse systems of Flood by killing all sentient life within the desired area of effect. The Ur-Didact staunchly opposed the array, viewing it as an affront to the Mantle, the Forerunner's belief system that forms the basis of their civilization, since it involved killing off large numbers of lifeforms. His opposition lead to the halting of the construction of shield worlds, the diminishing of the rate the Ur-Didact belonged to, the Warrior-Servants, and his exile inside a Cryptum. 10,000 years later, he was awakened from his Cryptum during the final years of the war between the Forerunners and a newly resurgent Flood army by a pair of humans and a Forerunner manipular called Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting. When he discovered that a Halo ring had been test-fired by the Master Builder near Charum Hakkor, destroying the Precursor technology there because it is vulnerable to the Halo array due to the technology being based on neural physics, freeing the Primordial, a surviving member of the Precursor species that were responsible for seeding life across the galaxy and were hunted down by the Forerunners when they rejected the Forerunners' claim to the Mantle and control of the galaxy, with whom the Ur-Didact had conversed regarding the nature of the Flood while the Primordial was held in stasis on Charum Hakkor, he performed a brevet mutation on Bornstellar, imprinting his personality and memories on him in the process, as a precaution in case he was captured or killed. As the Ur-Didact feared, he and his companions were captured by the Master Builder and he was abandoned in a Burn, a Flood-infested system, where he was subjected to Mind Rape by the Gravemind, which now incorporated the consciousness of the Primordial. The Gravemind intended to cause extra havoc within what remained of the Forerunner ecumene by returning the Ur-Didact to Forerunner space, where he was interrogated about his encounter, forcing him to recount his experience and causing him yet more suffering. He then began turning to more desperate and extreme methods to counter the Flood. This included a failed mutation of his body to try to make him immune to infection by the Flood, leaving him disfigured. He then turned to using the Composer to convert Forerunners into digital form and rendering them immune to the Flood. While the Ur-Didact's Promethean comrades willingly subjected themselves to composition, he believed that the reason that the Forerunners were unable to halt the Flood's advance was due to a lack of numbers in his new Promethean army. He then decided to compose the remaining humans that his wife, the Librarian, had collected as part of the conservation measure, believing that humanity's enslavement would redeem them of the crimes of their ancestors during their war with the Forerunners. This enraged the Librarian, causing her, one of the few people he didn't resent, to imprison in him in a Cryptum with the intention of healing his mind to be healed through meditation in the Domain, a vast repository of knowledge that was mysterious to the Forerunners. His actions also indirectly lead to the Librarians death since she was forced to return to Earth to collect new human specimens to save their species, leaving her stranded within the galaxy when the Halo array fired. Unfortunately, the Domain was protected by Precursor technology and was damaged by the firing of the Halo array, meaning the Ur-Didact was unable to access the Domain, culminating him in being subjected to yet another insanity-inducing event for the next 100,000 years due to being limited in his ability to interact with anything outside his Cryptum. By the time he had been set free, the rest of his species had exiled themselves from the galaxy, meaning all the people he knew and cared about were either dead, had resettled on distant worlds, or were merely digital essences that made up what remained of his Promethean army. He also discovered the species he now came to loathe, humanity, was rapidly becoming prominent again with some help from the plans the Librarian had put in place for when the Forerunners had reseeded the galaxy. The Ur-Didact would then attempt to finish what he started by trying to compose the rest of humanity as well as try to regain control of the galaxy in the name of the Forerunners. After this failed, he decided to try to fire a Halo ring near Earth to eradicate humanity. This lead to his eventual defeat at the hands of the Master Chief, resulting in him being subjected to the composer and being contained on the Composers Forge, the planet Clinquant. Because his mutation seemingly rendered him immune to the composer's effects, he was not composed in the way that normally happens.
• The Origami Killer, aka Scott Shelby in Heavy Rain is the way he is all because his own father was a complete bastard who regularly abused him and his brother both physically and verbally and ultimately convinced him he was worthless, and then to top it all off was forced to watch his own brother drown and said dad refused to help him. And his mom, the nice parent, apparently contracted Alzheimer's and all but lost her mind so she couldn't take care of him anymore. And now he drowns children and puts their fathers through sadistic tests all in the deluded hope that they can save them and that the kids can have fathers that are worthwhile and will always be there for them, something he never had.
• Iji has Iosa the Invincible. A maniacal Blood Knight even by her species' high standards, her lust for carnage began when the Tasen Alpha Struck her home planet, killing every living thing on it except for her. Afterwards, she desired nothing more than the extermination every last Tasen in existence.
  • Iji herself can become one of these, depending on the player's actions. Indeed, Iosa is portrayed as her Evil Counterpart because their histories (and possible subsequent actions) are almost identical.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Subverted with the Final Boss of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. Xion has been one of main character Roxas's two best friends for the year he's been alive, and finds out that she is an imperfect Replica of Roxas that's been absorbing Sora's memories. The knowledge causes her much grief, but after Xemnas reprograms her to absorb the rest of Roxas's power, she appears to be Brainwashed and Crazy, turning One-Winged Angel to attack Roxas and saying that she needs to absorb him to be complete. When she's defeated, she gets a gutwrenching death scene where she says goodbye to Roxas and dies in his arms, seemingly only now herself again, and gets the even sadder fate of being Ret-Gone from the memories of everyone who knew her. However, reading the character's Secret Report reveals the truth: the reprogramming hadn't really taken, Xion was actually pulling a Suicide by Cop to do what she thought was best for Roxas. As explained earlier in the game, if she lived, it would've kept Sora from ever waking up again and would eventually kill Roxas. In dying, she stopped the Organization from continuing to use her as a weapon, gave Roxas back the power she'd unintentionally drained from him, and would help Sora wake up with his memories restored. Ultimately still playing the "Woobie" part straight.
  • The novels for Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep paint Vanitas as such. He's a vicious and cruel villain in the present day, but the backstory he's given would've made it impossible for him not to be. As the living darkness extracted from Ven's heart, he really just wants to rejoin with Ven to put an end to the suffering he experiences from his unnatural existence. Here his creation of the Unversed is depicted as both painful and involuntary for him; he hates the Unversed and destroys them, but he feels their pain when they die and since they're the embodiment of his negative emotions, this creates more Unversed he hates, making a vicious cycle. To add to that, for four years he's put through Training from Hell by ruthless Master Xehanort and has no one else, and at the same time that's going on, he's also sensing Ven's happiness through their connection as Ven makes friends in Terra and Aqua and is treated like a son by Master Eraqus. Vanitas becomes resentful and bitter of Ven's friendships, which is why he goes out of his way to be such a bastard about them in the game.
• The King of Sorrow from Klonoa fits this trope perfectly. Long story short, he ends up being ignored by the entire world for representing an emotion that everyone hates. He goes mad and, as an act of vengeance, decides to unleash sorrow all across Lunatea, which, judging by the reactions, will cause quite a bit of destruction.
  • He outright says that he plans to destroy the world when you reach him in the Terminus of Tears and it's pretty clear that he's gone Ax-Crazy.
• Several characters from League of Legends fit this trope.
  • Veigar: A member of a notably short and cheerful race, he was driven insane from isolation while imprisoned in Noxus. He then spent years learning dark magic, and vowed to end conflict by bringing all nations to their knees.
  • His new retconned backstory is even worse. He befriended several Noxian mages only for all of them to be slaughtered by Mordekaiser. Mordekaiser then kidnapped him, cursed him to be unable to return to Bandle City, and forced him into servitude using powerful dark magic both to extend Mordekaiser's life and to torture others. Centuries of this resulted in Veigar's body and mind corrupting and him forgetting his entire past life. Even when Mordekaiser was defeated, Veigar was unable to break free of his influence and continues to practice evil, though fortunately for those he encounters he is a Minion with an F in Evil who's mostly interested in duking it out with worse threats.
  • Varus: The guardian of the pit of corruption whose village was burned and family was killed by invading Noxian forces. Overwhelmed by regret and fury he absorbed the power of the pit of corruption, failing the sole task he was given in the process, in an attempt to gain the power he needed to exact his revenge.
  "Beware a man with nothing to lose"
  • While Noxus seems prone to create this sort of character, they aren't without their own woobie.Urgot was once a proud, fearsome soldier of Noxus who threw himself into the fray until the day his hands were too mangled to hold a weapon. He was awarded for his loyalty by having his hands replaced by blades and given the role of High Executioner. While following a group of soldiers on a mission, he was going to get the opportunity to kill Jarvan IV, the prince of rival nation Demacia but before he was given the chance he was chopped down by a Demacian soldier named Garen Crownguard. Robbed of the grandest moment of his life, Urgot's sheer anger and hatred was the only thing that made him survive being rebuilt as the necromantic cyborg he is today.◊
  "Existance is torment."
• Skull Kid from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was devastated when his friends, the Four Giants, had to leave him. The people of Clock Town also rejected him due to being tired of his pranks, leaving him all alone apart from the fairies Tatl and Tael. Then he found Majora's Mask and was possessed by it, gaining god-like power in the process which he uses to curse the people of Termina and drop the Moon on them.
• Oersted from Live A Live, in the Middle Ages chapter. His story begins when he wins a tournament to gain a princess' hand in marriage and, in doing so, earns the accolades of the people, only for her to be kidnapped by the Lord of Dark the following night. What seems to be a standard "save the princess" plot is soon turned on its head as the hero, Hasshe, who last slew the Lord of Dark, is killed when fighting against it with the rest of Oersted's party. Then, the Lord of Dark seems to assault Oersted in the night, only for it to turn out to be the king of Lucrece, who had been made to look like it — a fact discovered only after Oersted kills him. Now treated as a demon by the townspeople, Oersted returns to the Archon's Roost to save the princess, the one person who might still believe in him, only to encounter his best friend, Streibough, who seemed to have died in battle with the Lord of Dark along with Hasshe. Turns out, he had orchestrated everything to make Oersted an outcast out of jealousy of the latter's success. On top of that, after Oersted battles and kills his old friend, the princess appears, accuses Oersted for not trying to rescue her when he had been trying to do so all along, professes her love for Streibough, and kills herself. With no one in the world now who doesn't loathe him, Oersted snaps and declares that, if the people want to think of him as a demon, why, then that's exactly what he'll become...Odio, the Lord of Dark. He then proceeds to slaughter every last person in the kingdom and send several incarnations of himself across time to test the virtues of humanity, thus starting the game's events.
• Vayne in Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis, after he discovered the truth and failed to take it well. Faced with the problem of honestly thinking that the best thing for the world would be if he were to disappear, while at the same time desperately not wanting to face the loneliness he lived with before coming to Al Revis, he decides to take the school and everybody in it with him.
• Durandal, an AI from the Marathon trilogy, was deliberately threatened by his creator in order to drive him to Rampancy (as part of an attempt to safely study the process), made to open and close doors for hundreds of years in order to stifle his creative development and slow his Rampancy, and was probably about to be experimented on more when he entered the "anger" stage of rampancy, secretly contacted hostile aliens and drew them to Tau Ceti to enslave or kill every single human on the colony or in the ship. Though he becomes less of a woobie later, when he turns into a badass Chessmaster.
  • He brought the Pfhor as a distraction so he could get loose. Once that was done, he started working on stopping them, freeing their slaves (admittedly, to work for him), and helping the Security Officer do that which he does so well. The extermination of those on Tau Ceti IV was not intentional.
• Morinth of Mass Effect 2 claims to be this, stating that she never wished to be born an Ardat-Yakshi (the Asari equivalent of a succubus). Possibly subverted if it was ultimately her choice to screw and kill the galaxy's population, in that order, as opposed to her being controlled by an addiction that she never asked for in the first place.
  • Jack. She's probably the most powerful human biotic in existence and certainly one of the most powerful biotics of any species in the galaxy. Her backstory includes being stolen from her mother as an infant, brutally tortured and experimented on by rogue Cerberus scientists, used, abused, watched the only person she ever truly cared about die to protect her, and who knows what else. Yeah. Her life sucks. Good thing Shepard can help her deal with it and provide some measure of comfort.
  • The Overlord DLC adds a new one. Simply naming who it is would be a spoiler, but anyone who's played it will know which character it is.
  • The ending implies that the Collector General is one. He's probably been controlled by Harbinger and the Reapers his whole life and was forced to do terrible things, all to aid in the galactic extinction cycle that claimed his own race. When Harbinger releases him as the Collector Base is being destroyed he sadly lowers his head in what appears to be remorse and doesn't even attempt to escape the explosion behind him, even though he easily could.
• Elpizo from the Mega Man Zero series exhibits traits of this trope, being sentenced to death for discovering records about a past catastrophe in the ruined library he was ordered to examine. He escapes this fate, only to get lots of people killed while leading a failed assault on his former rulers; this drives him to obsession and megalomania, and he decides that he wants to re-enact the aforementioned catastrophe.
  • In the sequel series Megaman ZX, Prometheus and Pandora, despite appearances, are very much this. They spent a long time fuming at the fact that they were made to be slaves for Albert's Game of Destiny, the punishment for disobedience being their lives. Prometheus's last words, after he kills Albert and before he and Pandora are royally owned by Model W, were a long rant about how pointless Albert's goal was, and that he might as well destroy the whole world thanks to the pain of what he and his sister had to endure. It's unclear what happened to them afterwards.
• The King of Planet FM from Mega Man Star Force. Everybody, including his family, wanted to kill him to overtake his throne. As a result, he stopped trusting people. He destroyed Planet AM and almost Earth, because he thought that the people there would want to kill him as well.
  • Jack and Queentia from Star Force 3 also fit this trope like a glove. They were once the prince and princess of a small, but prosperous country, which was attacked by neighbor nations for their advanced EM technology. And it just went downhill from there...
  • You could probably also say this for Burai/Rogue, also in the 3rd game. After the first time you fight him on your way to fight Jack Corvus, he may have shared his backstory, saying something along the lines of "Go ahead and save him. Later on, he will betray you."
• Big Boss, of the Metal Gear series, had a life that could best be described as a Trauma Conga Line of absolutely epic proportions. First off, in 1964, he is forced to kill the only woman he had ever loved, the woman who had served as his mentor and mother figure for more then fifteen years, all because somebody in the U.S. government held a grudge and set her up. Ten years later, Big Boss comes up with the idea for an "Outer Heaven". A place where soldiers can live free from the manipulations of governments, and be given the honor and respect they deserve. Along the way, he decides that The Boss abandoned her soldiers virtues, and therefore him as well. This Outer Heaven is promptly destroyed, and Big Boss watches hundreds of the men and women he loved as brothers and sisters die in front of him, and he is sent into a ten year long coma After returning to action, Big Boss strives to take revenge and build his Outer Heaven, gathering a formidable army, and also nuclear weapons, only to be foiled and crippled by his very own son Solid Snake. Big Boss is then held unconscious, a prisoner in his own mind for over ten years. And when he is finally able to return and come to peace with his son, he dies soon after. All things considered, its a wonder Big Boss didn't snap sooner then he did.
• Fortune and Vamp from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (with a little more emphasis on the Woobie bit in the former case and the Destroyer bit in the latter). The former endured the deaths of everyone dear to her, and as such is a Resenter and Death Seeker who happens to cause a lot of carnage with her BFG. The latter was the victim of terrorism, having to resort to cannibalism in order to survive in the ruins and developing a troubling immortality in the process.
• Melissa Bergman/MB in Metroid: Other M. Her only crime initially was occasionally disagreeing with the other scientists on the Bottle Ship, but for that, they decided that she had to have her emotions removed from her. She saw this as betrayal by her beloved mother figure, and as a result, everyone got horribly mauled by monsters.
• In Miitopia, The Dark Curse, who stole the face of countless Miis, Was Once a Man that was royally ignored by everybody and came to hage his own face, which he deemed uninteresting and blamed for his loneliness. He shed his face away and soon the rest of his body faded, leaving a bitter and envious soul behind.
• Aribeth from Neverwinter Nights. She starts as a heroic paladin and your main ally, beloved by all and considered a national hero. Then the people of the city you and her worked your asses off to save force the government to execute her innocent lover for being an unwilling pawn in Desther's plans. And the government had no say in it, the townspeople formed a mob and forced Fenthick's execution. In the next chapter, Aribeth is so filled with despair that the Big Bad is able to manipulate it into hatred and rage, turning her against the titular city (and the player). Aribeth is especially pitiful when you face her in the finale, as, with her lover dead and feeling of betrayed by Neverwinter, you can tell that she feels she has nothing left to lose.
  • The King of Shadows himself, the Big Bad of the Original Campaign. He started out as the greatest hero of the ancient realm of Illefarn. Then he volunteered for a horrifically painful ritual that turned him into a construct of pure magic, the Guardian, to make an effective deterrent to Netheril. Then the Netherese wizard Karsus tried to usurp Mystryl's place as god of magic^note Not actually, according to the source material — Karsus himself arguably fits in this trope — but when you're borrowing power from the goddess of magic and the consequences end up being he death and magic being permanently reduced, who'd believe you were actually just trying to save your people and thought you were making a Heroic Sacrifice? and all hell broke loose. The Weave was interrupted and the Guardian faced destruction. He chose to continue his vigil over Illefarn by drawing power from the Shadow Weave. That's when he became the King of Shadows. Illefarn tried to destroy him and only succeeded in binding him outside the Material Plane.
  • In Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer:
    • Akachi the Betrayer, who, as punishment for defying the gods by trying to rescue his beloved's soul from the Wall of the Faithless, is turned into the Spirit-Eater curse, an Eldritch Abomination driven only by hunger and the instinct to possess bodies and devour spirits, always eating but never satiated.
    • The Founder, the definition of Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. She inflicted the Player Character with a soul-eating curse and set into motion events that threaten the very fabric of the Forgotten Realms, all to save her lover from the Wall of the Faithless.
• King Valentine in Odin Sphere throws a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum in the final book by using the Cauldron to turn Leventhan into a really pissed-off Sheng Long, which ends up destroying him along with the rest of existence. Granted, he got broken pretty hard before and during the story, beginning with being forced to kill his own daughter because she had an affair with the king of an enemy country, then dying horribly, along with most of his kingdom, after being betrayed by his own son, enduring endless torture in the netherworld, and escaping it only to be spitefully denied the complete destruction he was so desperately seeking, by the dude who started the whole thing by shagging his daughter, no less.
• Ori and the Blind Forest: At first, Kuro the giant owl, seems like a classic case of Dark Is Evil as her goal is to take away the the light of the forest of Nibel so she and other being of darkness can reign supreme. However it couldn't be further from the truth: Kuro's children were killed by the light of the Spirit Tree and all she has left is an unatched egg, since she doesn't want her child to suffer the same fate, she made the vow to destroy the light and make a world where she would never live in fear of losing another child.
• Persona:
  • In Persona 2 Innocent Sin, Joker's true identity is Jun Kurosu, a kind-hearted child from a broken family, whose greatest source of joy was the time he spent playing with his best friends... three of whom then brutally murdered the other right in front of him. This didn't actually happen, but thanks to a heavy dose of Mind Rape, Jun is completely convinced that it did. As part of his plot for revenge, he becomes twisted into Joker and steal the existences of countless people across Sumuru City. Mass terrorist acts are committed in his name and he gets a lot of people killed. All of this, as it turns out, originated from the Big Bad, who was using Jun in order to prove that humanity are doomed to destroy themselves. When Jun finally snaps out of it and regains his true memories, he's utterly broken by what he did and spends the rest of the game as The Atoner.
  • Strega of Persona 3 is a trio of this, all of them being artificially implanted with the powers of Persona by the Kirijo Group and forced to take drugs that shorten their lifespan in order to control their powers. The leader, Takaya, later embraces Nyx coming to destroy life, proclaiming that his fight against SEES is him fighting for his way of life.
  • Big Bad Adachi in Persona 4 was a Sour Outside, Sad Inside Straw Nihilist who became the way he was after being screwed over by everyone in his life. His parents forced him to stay inside and study all the time while never letting him have any friends, he was reassigned From New York to Nowhere by his last boss over minor infractions, and the resulting Small Town Boredom alongside his Friendless Background, (initially mild) sociopathic tendencies, and superiority complex caused him to Go Mad from the Isolation and decide that humanity is worthless. While it sounds like a classic case of Evil Is Petty on the surface, he's actually one of the more realistic depictions of a Serial Killer; his toxic line of thinking is a real trap that real people fall into all the time with often tragic results. After his defeat and surrender, even the Investigation Team starts to pity him which helps bring about his Heel–Face Turn.
• The Hecatomb in Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh is revealed to be the original Curtis Craig, thrown into the alien world when he was young by PAW and forced to grow up in a hostile alien dimension. He wants to destroy alien Curtis and kill his friends out of revenge.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: Cyrus, as revealed in Pokémon Platinum, was motivated by a childhood full of emotional neglect (if not more) to destroy the universe so it could be recreated without emotion entirely, to end the suffering it caused.
    • Interestingly, you hear about this from his grandfather, who was well aware of the Parental Neglect and regrets not helping him, implying that it's possible Cyrus could have turned out normal if his grandfather had stepped in.
  • In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, the reason that Munna and her gang are working to ensure that the world's foreseen destruction comes to pass is that all of them had suffered terribly at the hands of others (exactly how isn't elaborated on) and believe that a new world free of injustice and pain can be created after the end of the current one.
  • In Pokémon X and Y, AZ had a uniquely-colored Floette that he loved with all his heart, then it lost its life fighting in a war with other Pokémon. He single-handedly built a machine to bring it Back from the Dead, but even after doing so he couldn't bring himself to forgive humanity for costing his Floette its life in the first place, so he modified his machine into an instrument of destruction and ended the war by ending thousands of other lives. The Floette was apalled by his act and abandoned him, leaving him to grieve for the next 3,000 years.
• As of Portal 2, GLaDOS becomes this. After all, she was originally a human, Caroline, forcibly uploaded into a mechanical shell, and, because she was (understandably) resistant to the orders of the people who did this, was also subjected to Mind Rape due to the cores they forced onto her, hearing voices all her life, and soon killed every living thing in the facility.
  • Wheatley becomes this. At first, he's your friend and guide, helping you escape Aperture, but when he connects to GLaDOS's body and becomes in control of the facility, he goes mad with power and betrays you. But during the final battle with him, if you listen long enough, he begins ranting. He hysterically claims that you've been using him and that you plan on running off with GLaDOS once you could escape. He even accuses that you didn't catch him when he disconnected from his management rail ^note Which is unfortunately true..., which he honestly believed would kill him! And worst of all... he's crying...
• In Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, it turns out Future Luke is not Luke, but Clive. He lost his parents thanks to a time-travel incident gone wrong, which interestingly also killed Professor Layton's girlfriend, and the person responsible is now the Prime Minster! Thanks to a nice old lady's fortune, he decides to build a Humongous Mecha to level London and rebuild it. Interestingly, Latyon actually prevented him as a kid from going back into the burning building on the day of the incident and, while he doesn't know why, got the Professor involved knowing full well he'd ruin his plans. As if he wasn't a fangirl magnet already...
• Radiant Historia: The true Big Bad turns out to be Heiss, the previous Sacrifice, who was less than amused by the fact that his asshole of a brother got to be king (and do a terrible job of it) while he was expected to die to hold off the end of the world. His exploration of the various possible futures just led him to the conclusion that the world sucked so much he might as well destroy it, so he up and left. The fact that King Victor's reaction to this was to kill his brother's favorite nephew to get himself a new Sacrifice probably didn't help.
• Ratchet, of the Ratchet & Clank series — he's a walking class 1 at the very least, though he manages to avoid wallowing in his existential angst and/or loneliness pretty well by keeping busy.
  • Alister Azimuth fits this even better, being effectively an older, more cynical, and more ruthless Ratchet. To the point that he very nearly destroys time itself in a misguided attempt to correct his own mistakes.
• Jack Krauser is retroactively implied to be of this trope in Resident Evil 4, as Darkside Chronicles explains that his reasons for turning to Wesker was because that was the only option left for him to do the thing he did well at, fighting, after his mission with Leon resulted in him being fired from SOCOM due to an arm injury that never recovered.
• Elliana from Rivals of Aether only wanted to be able to fly and join the Air Armada despite the fact that she is a snake. After being mocked for her initial failures, but still pressing on until she was able to do the impossible, she was rewarded with another violent rejection despite getting through her evaluation. Now, with her own Mini-Mecha, Elliana vows to destroy the Armada.
• Kyrie from Sands of Destruction is a unique example of this trope in that he is more than capable of destroying the world (it was what he was created by the world itself to do, after all), but he doesn't want to do this in the least! His power brings about many a Tear Jerker in the game.
• The Secret World features one of these as the Arc Villain of the Facility dungeon in Transylvania: a Soviet-era cosmonaut-in-training by the name of Halina Ilyushin, she joined the space program in the hopes of fulfilling her childhood dream of going to space... and for her trouble, she was transferred to Facility 9 and submitted to the torturous experiments of the Red Hand in their attempts to create a "Phantom Cosmonaut." She was given mind-bending doses of pure Anima, her friends and fellow test subjects died one by one, and things only got worse once the scientists brought the Filth into the mix; in the end, she was the only surviving Phantom Cosmonaut — a Humanoid Abomination of mingled Filth and Anima. And after all that, she never got a chance to see the stars: once the Filth experiments got out of control, the program was shut down and the terrified scientists were forced to seal the Facility shut with her inside, leaving her alone except for the base computer. For the last few decades, she's been trying desperately to fulfill her ambitions — even using the Filth to create Replacement Goldfish of her old comrades just to assuage her loneliness along the way — until she ultimately made a deal with the Dreamers just for a chance to see the stars. Needless to say, her boss dialogue is nothing short of heartbreaking:
  Why do you ground me?! I TRAINED FOR THIS! THEY MADE ME FOR THIS!
• Serious Sam: It's strongly implied Mental is this, as while he and his armies literally destroy entire worlds, he is the last of a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, and ended up going insane from loneliness so that he just wants to destroy everything.
• The Shadow Hearts series has a few Big Bads of this nature, but Masaji Kato from Covenant takes the cake. Having the woman you love being executed for treason? Bad, really bad. Managing to clone her, doing your best to make her clone remember everything so that you can finally be happy together, only to have to kill her again, and this time permanently, just as she starts to love you too? OUCH. No wonder he snapped after this and tried to create a new world by destroying the current one... Even the protagonists feel sympathy for him as the final battle starts.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV introduces the White, who are quite literally the Anthropomorphic Personification of Humanity's despair over being pawns in the Order Versus Chaos Forever War. They are quite tired of it all as they believe everything plays into God's hands; they only want everything to go back to eternal nonexistence. So they have this giant Magical Particle Accelerator built and a group of heroes suitably traumatized in hopes one of them will just go off the deep end, and as a living creature, give the universe a final death by breaking their machine and unleashing a chain of black holes to end the Multiverse for good.
• Shin Megami Tensei V gives us Sahori Itsukishima, a student at Jouin High who is subjected to regular bullying by her fellow students; the background is that she was once a student coach on the school sports team who pushed her teammates a bit too hard in training, she really wanted them to succeed, and the bullying is how they repaid her efforts. Good news: a voice in the darkness is willing to give her the strength to stand up for herself. Bad news: it's Lahmu, who is seeking his Knowledge in order to become a Nahobino and finds it in her, and is willing to gorge himself on every student between him and her; once he finds her, he wraps his tentacles around her (physically or otherwise) right away and never lets go, and the bullies are the only ones who he kills at her request. Suffice it to say she is not coming back to school whether she wishes it or not.
• Silent Hill:
  • Alessa Gillespie is another textbook example. She was burned to the point of near death but kept alive in excruciating pain, force-fed experimental hallucinogenics, and forcibly impregnated with God. This was all done by her mother.
  • Claudia from Silent Hill 3 falls under Put Them All Out of My Misery, however, since they wanted to rid the world of pain and suffering in general.
  • Walter Sullivan from Silent Hill 4 may count. He's just a little kid who wants his mom back. Plus he was raised by a cult of manipulative bastards.
• All three factions from Sins of a Solar Empire to an extent. The Vasari literally destroy whole planets while running from an enemy that practically wiped out their race. The TEC Rebels want to wipe out the aliens and "deviants" who nearly wiped ''them'' out. The Advent were just a peaceful collectivist/religious/hive-minded society on a desert planet. And then along came the Trade Order, who banished them from their homes for a thousand years for "deviancy."
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Chaos in Sonic Adventure and Shadow in Sonic Adventure 2, both of whom watched a girl they cared for be brutalized (and in Shadow’s case, killed) by cruel authorities seeking to use their powers for evil.
• Soul Series:
  • Siegfried Schtauffen in the original Soul Edge and Soulcalibur, and partially in Soulcalibur II prior to his quest for redemption. A teenage bandit who accidentally beheaded his own father during a raid, Siegfried completely lost his mind and set off in search of his father's "true killer." On recovering the Soul Edge from the defeated Cervantes De Leon, the Evil Sword completely consumed the fragile mind of the boy, transforming him into Nightmare. Whilst most characters fall under the thrawl of the Soul Edge on possession of it, it is implied the sword influences them to do evil, corrupting them with its power. In Siegfried's case, his immature and unstable mind allowed the sword to transform him into an extension of the sword itself. Eventually as the sword is weakened by its defeat at the end of Soul Calibur, Siegfried's will begins to reassert itself until he is finally able to break free and begin his quest for redemption.
  • Pyrrha, the daughter of Fallen Hero Sophitia in Soulcalibur V, starts out as an innocent, drifting Woobie with no home or family of her own; being kidnapped by Tira at a young age followed by the demise of her mother resulted in her spending the next seventeen years of her life searching aimlessly for somewhere to belong, regularly attacked and forced to kill or be killed due to Tira's manipulations to make her a suitable heir to Soul Edge. When she finally reunites with her long-lost brother Patroklos, however, things finally seem about to get better for her. Then Patroklos finds out Pyrrha is Malfested when she taps into her Superpowered Evil Side to save him from the Big Bad, Nightmare. The still gentle and mostly-innocent but now utterly terrifying Pyrrha turns to Patroklos in concern to make sure he's OK only for Patroklos to point his sword at her in the midst of a Heroic BSoD, finally running away from her in horror. Pyrrha, heartbroken, decides she can never trust anyone but Tira and willingly takes up Soul Edge to escape being alone. The resulting entity Pyrrha Omega, is extremely violent and deadly compared to the frightened and naive Pyrrha, but she screams as much in pain as in rage while she fights, and doesn't seem so much to be possessed by Soul Edge as she is madly lashing out at everything, thinking the entire world is her enemy and desperately needing to do something, anything to escape her pain.
  Pyrrha: Stop hurting me... stop rejecting me... stop killing me!!!
• Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man (PS4) is a big one. He was partners with Norman Osborn on a project to cure genetic diseases, which ended up creating a deadly bioweapon by accident as well as giving Mr. Negative his powers and killing his parents in the process, causing him to leave and start his own lab where he began mentoring Peter. At the start of the game he was just a kind old man and helped Peter design the Advanced Suit after learning his secret, until Norman used his authority as Mayor to take away his grants and confiscate his research in an attempt to strongarm him into coming back to work for Oscorp. He continued his work on mechanical prosthetics regardless, later revealing to Peter that he has a degenerative neurological disorder that would cause him to lose control of his motor functions within a year, adding to his desperation. He finally finishes his mechanical arms, which are controlled by a faulty neural interface that drives him insane. Despite Peter's warnings he continues using it, causing him to snap and sabotage Osborn's reelection campaign by releasing the bioweapon they created as well as all of New York's inmates, and forming the Sinister Six to destroy Oscorp. After Spider-Man defeats him, he tries to convince Peter to give him another chance and not to let the police take his arms. Despite everything, it's hard not to feel bad for him as he cries out for Peter while he turns his back on him.
• The Ur-Quan of Star Control. After spending thousands of years psychically enslaved by evil toads who force them to exterminate whole species of their friends, and finally clearing their minds only long enough to revolt by putting themselves through unspeakable agony, anyone would be in a bad mood. The nice ones want to forcibly subjugate all sentient life in the galaxy. The rest want to eliminate it altogether.
• StarCraft:
  • Sarah Kerrigan killed her mom (and a whole mess of other folks) by way of a psychic accident, watched a kitten die of cancer, was forced to choose between killing her mentally ill father or her sadistic headmaster (she just broke his gun) and decapitate a rebel leader (and steal his head), was experimented on, and was betrayed by her father figure. Then she got infested by the Zerg after Arcturus Mengsk betrayed and left her alone to defend against the oncoming Zerg horde. Is it any wonder that she's a little crazy?
  • Ironically, the one who made her that way also qualifies. The Overmind was forcibly enslaved by the Dark Voice into trying to commit genocide against the Protoss with the full knowledge that he and his Zerg would be wiped out once they did their job. Kerrigan was meant to be the one hope they had of breaking the Dark Voice's hold.
• Dr. Lantis of Star Ocean: The Second Story. He loses his daughter, his last surviving relative, and goes insane from grief and rage. Because of this, he wants everything gone.
• The Iconians, the Big Bad for Star Trek Online's first five years, were this, something that Jean-Luc Picard postulated. They were a simple, peaceful, yet very advanced race whose only real flaw was being just a little on the arrogant side. However, various races wanted their technology and when the Iconians refused, they decided to up and bomb them back to the Stone Age. Even worse, thanks to time travel shenanigans, the human-Romulan hybrid Sela killed a few of them, setting them on their destructive path of revenge.
• The 501st legion from Star Wars: Battlefront. Even though they're the Emperor's elite troops, somehow, you can't help feeling sorry for the narrator (who's quite obviously a Shell-Shocked Veteran), even when you're gunning down Rebels on Yavin 4.
• Suikoden III had this with Luc. In the first 2 games, he's a moody jerk who doesn't seem to have much motivation in participating in wars as his Parental Substitute mre or less drops him off. 15 years later, he concocts a plan to destroy his True Wind Rune in a major case of crossing the Moral Event Horizon. The reason? Turns, out he was a defective clone of another rune bearer who wanted vessels to collect all 27 of them. Even worse is that his rune gives him visions of an apocalyptic wasteland. He thinks that if he destroys the rune, he'll effectively kill god and change fate. This has caused many fans to categorize him as a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• The main antagonist in Super Paper Mario, Count Bleck, who wanted to use the Chaos Heart to undo and redo all reality because he was heartbroken by his one true love. Except it actually turns out that the "redo" part is a lie. He's that messed up by the loss of his love.
• Duminuss from Super Robot Wars Reversal, an artificial being (not sure of what she actually is, as she is only seen as a trippy eye glyph with a feminine/shota voice... and several Humongous Mechas) whose only wish is to know her purpose. Her creator shunned her, and then she killed it. Actually, her creator, Dark Brain, didn't die. He just implanted that memory into her for the lulz and left her. She shifts dimensions and invades the EXCELLENCE team labs searching for a time machine, to ask her creator for her purpose. She constructs 3 children, who are loyal and fight for her. Then Duminuss is destroyed, and her children kill themselves to bring her back. Then the heroes kill her again. She explodes, crying over how she'll die without ever knowing what was her true purpose. Unfortunately, Original Generation Gaiden threw this out of the window and made her an unrepentant Jerkass...
  • It's hinted that this isn't the same Duminuss, and Dark Brain created multiple ones to do his dirty work. If it wasn't messed up like R's was, it makes sense that it's not the same.
• Tales Series:
  • Mithos Yggdrasill of Tales of Symphonia definitely qualifies. As a kid, all he wanted was to make a world where humans and elves could live in harmony. After his sister was brutally murdered by the very humans she saved for being a half-elf, he completely snapped. He went on a conquering rampage, accidentally found a means of becoming an all-powerful immortal, then grew addicted to his newfound godhood and spent the next four thousand years segregating the world (literally) so he could gorge on the power of souls. His ultimate plan was to resurrect his sister by breeding sacrifices who would be indoctrinated with a Path of Inspiration, with the intention of disposing of mortal life and replacing them with machines when he succeeded.
  • Arietta the Wild from Tales of the Abyss. First, her family got killed during the Hod War, and she's left to be raised by the Ligers. Then she got handpicked as a Fon Master Guardian for Ion, but quickly lost her position to Anise, not knowing that the Ion she loved is dead, and the current one is only a replica. Then, her mother got killed. And later, just when it looked like she may pull a Heel–Face Turn, Anise lets Ion get killed, which revokes everything Arietta thought about changing sides. Then, she challenged Anise for a final duel and... she's not even told about the truth about Ion, leaving her to die miserably and not realizing the reality.
  • Paraiba in Tales of Hearts, though on a smaller scale. After she absorbs Kohak's sadness spirune, she tries to flood a town.
  • Lambda in Tales of Graces, as well as Richard, thanks to More than Mind Control.
  • Artorius Collbrande in Tales of Berseria, after suffering a Despair Event Horizon due to the loss of his beloved wife and unborn son, sets the protagonist on her Roaring Rampage of Revenge in his quest to strip the world of all emotions.
• Jin Kazama shows some signs of this in Tekken 6.
• Touhou Project:
  • Flandre Scarlet. She may be completely bonkers with the power to blow up the world, but she is still a cute little girl who has never seen the light of the sun and probably never will. Many fans want to hug her, even though they know it will inevitably end in a shower of blood and gore.
  • Yuuka Kazami is also Cute and Psycho, and she is one of the most powerful youkai in the series (second only to Yukari). However, her Back Story is what makes her into this. Before the events of Lotus Land Story take place, Yuuka was in a deep sleep... and was harassed by a nightmare-inducing demon who refused to let her wake up. FOR SIXTY. YEARS. STRAIGHT. She did posess the Master Spark, but that doesn't help in a nightmare. Especially not one that you are not in control of. Also, ZUN calls her "youkai moe~".
  • Junko is a pure spirit — made of pure resentment at the Lunarian princess Chang'e, and mounted an invasion of the Moon just to get at her. Why? Back in the day, there were too many suns in the sky, threatening to burn all life on the planet. Chang'e's husband shot down all but one of them, but one landed on Junko's son. She's been harboring a grudge for thousands of years since then.
• All of the Camerata in Transistor turn out to be this to some degree. Sybil Reisz was a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing before the game, but after the Process run amok, she ends up assimilated and driven completely insane. Grant Kendrall just wanted to stop everything in Cloudbank from changing so damn much, and his husband Asher was only supporting him. When he sees what he's wrought on the city, Grant opts to take the coward's way out. Asher stays for a while longer to halfheartedly justify himself to Red before doing likewise. Royce Brackett is the least sympathetic out of all of them, though he does help you reign in the Process before turning on you out of necessity. Even then, he has a moment of genuine remorse when his way home vanishes for good.
• The Masked Mage, from Trials of Mana. He was Belgar, the Oracle of Shadows. Contrary to what his title might imply, Belgar was a wise and righteous man who watched over the Holy City of Wendel in tandem with the Bishop of Light. The tragedy began when a sick girl showed up seeking his healing prowess. Feeling helpless upon realising that it was an incurable disease, he turned to The Dark Arts in search of a way; however, the girl passed on before he could find one. Belgar continued his research and subsequently started dabbling in necromancy. The dark arts gradually began tainting his soul and the Priest of Light had to exile him from Wendel. By the time Trials of Mana begins, he had become the vengeful Masked Mage, one of the potential big bads. It's such a Tear Jerker when you play the prequel and see what a good man he actually was.
  • General Baxilios or Cecilia from Heroes of Mana is another example. She was going to have a baby with Yurchael but then suffered a Tragic Stillbirth which caused a rift in their relationship and gave Anise's Mirror the perfect opportunity to take advantage of Cecilia's vulnerability and turn her into Anise's vessel and ulitimately taking full possession of her and transforming her into the Goddess of Doom who is the Final Boss of the game. It's a big Tear Jerker when what remains of Cecilia's good side speaks to Yurchael and reveals this at the climax of the final battle before telling him that only the Mana Sword can destroy Anise's Mirror. In the end all Yurchael can do is mutter her name as she fades peacefully.
• Undertale:
  • In the True Pacifist route, this is how Asriel Dreemurr turns out. He had spent so long in the Flowey form, unable to feel emotions, but really just missed his "best friend", the first Fallen Child. After Frisk snaps him out of it and saves him, he realizes the first Fallen Child wasn't that great a friend.
  • This is also what happens to the Fallen Child in the Genocide Route, if you go by the theory that they weren't evil. They could only watch as you went around killing monsters and so destroys the world in the end because, since they also hated humanity, they had nothing to live for.
    The Fallen Child: There is nothing left for us here. Let us erase this pointless world, and move on to the next.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Depending on how charitable you feel, the darker members of the Forsaken may fall into this trope. They were once decent, devout humans and elves before being infected by the Plague of Undeath, killed, resurrected into undeath, corrupted by the Lich King and forced to massacre friends and family, and after finally breaking free of his control they were rejected by their faith and persecuted and hunted down by any remaining friends, family, and acquaintances. That so many of them snap with apocalyptic fury is certainly understandable, but some players feel that the monstrosity of their deeds overrides their sympathetic qualities. There are still reasons the Forsaken are considered the Token Evil Teammate of the Horde, after all, including their penchant for obscenely lethal plagues, doomsday weapons, and tendency to experiment on living test subjects.
  • Sargeras, the creator of the Burning Legion, was so traumatized by the evil of some of the demons he fought against as the pantheon's chosen warrior that he decided that any universe where such things were allowed to happen was flawed, its attempts at Order pointless, and should be remade.
    • This has since been revealed that Sargeras found that the Old Gods were corrupting planets growing baby Titans, and if allowed to be born could possibly allow the Void Gods to enter reality. He destroyed the corrupted planet and the child within rather than risk the destruction of reality. Unfortunately Azeroth is incubating a baby Titan.
  • Despite the fact that he wants to destroy the world because he doesn't like how mortals are using magic, Malygos can count because, let's face it, his life sucked before he ultimately snapped. He was betrayed by his best friend, Neltharion (aka Deathwing, who had been corrupted by the Old Gods), who then went on to wipe out almost all the other blue dragons, coming very, very close to making Malygos the Last of His Kind. He later supposedly regained his sanity (after being exposed to some volatile magical energies from another planet).
    • Maly's prime consort Sindragosa could also qualify. One of the blue dragons murdered by Deathwing, she wasn't only enraged by his betrayal, but she assumed ALL Dragons (including her mate) had betrayed her when they wouldn't answer her cries for help returning to Dragonblight. She died very emotionally damaged. Mix in some Scourge corruption when the Lich King resurrected her to be his, umm... Dragon and she's angry enough to help extinguish all life on Azeroth.
  • The writers can't seem to agree on whether or not Ner'zhul is this. In the original canon he was a borderline cartoon villain who got more than he bargained for; in Rise of the Horde and Beyond the Dark Portal he's portrayed as a Reasonable Authority Figure who is tricked into aiding genocide and the corruption of his people and unable to stop it once it's set in motion, later suffering for his actions and those as Warchief of the Horde of Draenor by being made into the Lich King, a state of eternal torment and damnation that only deepened his bitterness and status as a Fallen Hero.
  • Kaelynara Sunchaser, a minor quest antagonist from Warlords of Draenor. At first her draining a crystal mine of its magical energy at the expense of destroying the mine and everyone in it seems to be just regular old blood elf magic-lust at work. Then you find the "Tear-stained Letter" on her body, which reveals she was dismissed from her mage instructor's service in an incredibly cruel, callous fashion with the none-too-subtle message that she was of no use to anyone and which implies her actions were a desperate attempt to prove him wrong, casting her actions in a new, tragic light. It verges on Unintentionally Sympathetic since the NPCs don't offer her any sympathy and seem to dismiss her as simply a cautionary tale. His sheer cruelty towards her also turned her master into The Scrappy for many.
  • Argus the Unmaker was an infant Titan at the core of Argus, home world of the Eredar. After Sargeras recruited the Eredar, Argus's soul suffered constant torture for eons as the planet around him was torn apart and infused with fel energy. By the time of Legion he is nearly mad with pain, his mind finally submitting to Sargeras just before the players arrive. He is born as an insane and powerful Titan dedicated solely to fulfilling the will of his tormentor.
• In Xenogears, we don't know for sure how many times Fei and Elly reincarnated Themselves, but for 10,000 years, the scenario has been mostly the same: they find each other, fall in love, and when they seem to be about to have a little marital bliss, they die a horrible and painful death. If you had the painful experiment he was subject to in his childhood, Fei end up with a multiple personality disorder, with TWO of his personalities wanting to destroy the world: one is able to exist independently and jump from body to body, and the other one is a Person of Mass Destruction. And that's not all: Krelian, a friend of Fei in a previous life, is another woobie ready to destroy the world if it allows him to be "reunited with God". With that many Physical Gods and Magnificent Bastards on the same planet, you can guess that the Xenogears world is not the most pleasant place to be.

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