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Would Hurt A Child / Video Games

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Just another Tuesday for Clementine.
Would Hurt a Child in Video Games.

Generally, action games with child main characters would be quite boring if nobody attacked them.
And those children aren't exactly pacifists, either.

  • In 2Dark, the bad guys are very fond of abusing, kidnapping, brainwashing and killing children.
  • Ace Attorney:
    • Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney: Kristoph Gavin attempted to murder a 12-year-old agoraphobic girl by giving her poisoned nail polish, since he knew she had a habit of biting her nails when under pressure.
    • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: Queen Ga'ran was willing to let Apollo die in a fire she started when he was an infant, while killing his father in the process. At one point she even implies she'd be willing to have her 14-year-old niece killed.
  • In Alice: Madness Returns, the Big Bad is Doctor Angus Bumby, a pedophile and sexual predator who has killed children, plain and simple in addition to enslaving them. This trope is his most defining "evil" trait.
  • Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has a horrific monster of a character who has murdered thousands of children. Two of those children were his own sons - you're playing as him.
  • Most likely unintentional and due to limited dialogue, but in a Splatoon-themed event in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, players could catch Inkling squid and Octoling octopi and give them to resident seafood fanatic Chip, who would talk about these highly-advanced, sentient people like they were little more than food. Of course, given that Splatoon takes place after the extinction of most land life, allowing sea creatures to take their place and that Inklings and Octolings tend to dissolve in water (although we've only seen that happen in combat; maybe they can swim when they aren't fighting), maybe these are just regular cephalopods that happen to look like the ones from Splatoon (not that that makes it much better, considering how your town could very well have sentient octopus citizens).
  • ANNO: Mutationem: C deliberately sent Sigrid to Freeway 42 to have her killed by the hostile wildlife after considering that her powers would be used against him. When that plan failed, he orders his attack force to eliminate her once she's brought to utilize her abilities.
  • Near the end of Armikrog, the main antagonist is revealed to be Tommynaut's brother Vognaut, who's been horribly mutated by his greed. Vognaut abducts P, the baby Tommynaut has been caring for, and plans to drain the latent power from inside her for himself; he also states that he doesn't care if the process kills her, instead saying her power is "wasted on her."
  • Assassin's Creed:
    • In Assassin's Creed II, Uberto Alberti and Rodrigo Borgia / Pope Alexander VI were the men who ordered the executions of Ezio Auditore's youngest siblings Federico and Petruccio alongside their father Giovanni.
    • in Assassin's Creed Origins, this trope is what led to the formation of the Assassin Brotherhood. A Roman member of the proto-Templar Order of the Ancients named Flavius Metellus otherwise known as The Lion would push Bayek to accidentally kill his own son Khemu while inside an Isu vault located in Siwa alongside the other members of the organization. Needless to say, not only would he go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge alongside his wife Aya/Amunet but they would get themselves entangled in the messy, complicated world of Ancient Egyptian and Roman politics which in turn led to the Battle Couple forming the Hidden Ones, the original incarnation of the Brotherhood.
    • In Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, no child is safe, as befitting a "playable Greek tragedy." The main example is the Eagle Bearer's father, Nikolaos who attempts to murder his entire family, including his young children at the behest of the Cult of Kosmos, and Podarkes of Delos, who brutally murders the children of families who break his laws and traditions, and attempted to murder his young daughter, Kyra.
  • Baldur's Gate:
    • The gnome Jeb in Baldur's Gate, who enjoys murdering street children. Unfortunately, you have to make allies with him in the first game in order to escape from prison; in the second game, however, you encounter him again, and can give him what he deserves.
    • As for the protagonist of I and II, while there is never a child enemy (with the exception of monsters and shapeshifters), attacking children results in their quick death and a considerable loss of reputation.
    • In Baldur's Gate III's Act 1 there are goblin children outside Sixth Ranger Halsin's cell who join the fight against you if you free him. You can ignore them as they'll flee, but if you don't kill them Halsin likely will. Since goblins are Always Chaotic Evil nobody cares. Case in point, if you side with the goblins they'll slaughter the children of the refugees you were supposed to protect with no remorse. Like the previous games you can kill children, but it's exceedingly difficult as The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard and will have them almost instantly return to full health if you fail to one-shot them.
  • In Batman: The Telltale Series, a flashback shows that Joe Chill attempted to kill young Bruce Wayne after murdering his parents, but is scared off by police sirens at the last second.
  • BioShock:
    • BioShock:
      • With all the Little Sisters running around pumped full of sweet, sweet ADAM, most Splicers will try to kill them if given the chance. Good thing the Big Daddies are there to protect them.
      • Also, the heartless bastard who put the girls in this situation, Doctor Suchong, is later killed by a Big Daddy after he slaps one of the Little Sisters who was irritating him.
    • BioShock Infinite:
      • Daisy Fitzroy falls into this trope when she attempts to murder a young Founder child because she says that everyone who associated or grew up around them is tainted with their ideology. This forces Elizabeth to fatally stab Daisy with a pair of scissors to save the boy. However, Burial at Sea: Episode 2 reveals that the Luteces told Daisy that Elizabeth needed to gain the ability to take a life in order to ensure that Comstock and his regime would fall, and that in order to do so, Daisy would have to stage the murder of the child so Elizabeth would be prompted to act and kill her. Daisy never actually intended to hurt the child at all, and never believed that it's the right idea to punish a child "for the sins of his father", but was willing to die for the greater good of all the oppressed people of Columbia.
      • Elizabeth, though, unlike the above, plays it completely straight; during the climax of Burial at Sea: Episode One, she goads Booker into cranking up the temperature in the Little Sister vent that Sally is hiding in, telling him that the heat will force her to climb out, but the plot twist that this Booker is actually an amnesiac Comstock and Elizabeth came into his quiet life to kill him as part of her desire to see every Comstock dead evaporates this facade of goodwill: Elizabeth watches as Booker dies violently, and then calmly leaves Sally to burn to death in the vent, and even if she did escape, she'd still be trapped in the hellhole that is Rapture, where every splicer is out for her blood. Mitigated a bit when the beginning of Burial at Sea: Episode Two reveals that she's since been consumed with immense regret for using and then abandoning Sally, and she finally gives in to her guilt-ridden hallucinations and goes back to Rapture to save her. Even the Luteces, who are by and large emotionally nonpartisan to the events they observe, say that Elizabeth "left the child to rot".
  • Bloodborne: The entire purpose of the hunt is to kill a stillborn child of the Eldritch Abomination. Also, you may murder Arianna's Adorable Abomination baby right in front of her. She has a fatal heart attack right then and there.
  • In Borderlands 2, we meet Tiny Tina, a 13-year-old who has a serious grudge against Handsome Jack. Going further into the main story and finding scattered ECHO recordings through a Hyperion facility, we learn that Handsome Jack conducts experiments with slag on unwilling subjects abducted by his henchmen, that Tina and her parents were among them, and also that Jack is a sadistic bastard who conducts these experiments mainly because he enjoys hearing people scream in pain and terror.
  • Born Under the Rain: In an official screenshot, Odion says that they're the this of person, but the stuttering implies otherwise:
    O-Odion, the grim face of, um... death. One time I bit a small child and didn't even care!
  • Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare: During Operation Port Armor to retake the Lunar port, the team marches through a treatment area for civilians caught in the crossfire. There's an abundance of body bags showing the SDF's willingness to shoot noncombatants. Several of those body bags are clearly children.
  • A pivotal scene in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow involves the Big Bad fatally shooting a teenage girl in the chest and making her boyfriend watch. It's staged in a deliberate attempt to draw out said boyfriend's Superpowered Evil Side, which either utterly fails or succeeds a bit too well.
  • In Crusader Kings, not only is assassinating children possible, it even comes with special text to fit. It's often a simple, if brutal, way to clear up the line of succession so one's own character can inherit, and is sometimes the only to prevent, say, a civil war that would tear the realm apart and kill tens of thousands.
    • Why stop at killing children? You can blind and castrate them as well.note  If you have the Game of Thrones mod and you play as Joffrey, you can crush the Stark rebellion and treat Jon and Bran to this treatment. Goody.
    • In Crusader Kings III, when playing as a King or Emperor every so often you're forced to reenact the Judgment of Solomon. If you have the Callous trait, you're given the option to actually split the baby in half, which is an instant way to be Hated by All.
  • Cuphead: Although the Devil's Runaway Debtors are Anti-Villains, all of them are more than willing to fight the sibling protagonists Cuphead and Mugman over their Soul Contracts, even though both of them are adolescents.
  • The Nine from Dead Man's Hand would kill anyone to silence any witnesses, including children. Your character used to be one of their members, but your refusal to massacre children leads to your former comrades betraying you for the dead.
  • In Detroit: Become Human:
    • Daniel, a caretaker android, takes hostage on a balcony the same little girl he's meant to look after upon learning her parents are going to replace him. If Connor fails to negotiate with him, he won't hesitate to jump from the balcony and take the girl with him.
    • Todd Williams is demonstrated time and again to be abusive towards his daughter Alice. He'll even outright beat her to death in one scene if Kara doesn't stop him, bringing her story arc to a premature end.
    • Zlatko is perfectly fine with killing Alice along with Kara. Or rather, taking her apart, given Zlatko is into android torture and experimentation and Alice is an android.
    • The various soldiers encountered late in the story will have no qualms about shooting Alice if Kara makes certain missteps, since they'll know one way or another that she's an android.
  • Children in Deus Ex may be killed deliberately, accidentally, even by second-hand smoke...
  • Deus Ex: Invisible War may be one of only a handful examples ever to allow a player to hurt and kill children. Doing so gives a truly massive What the Hell, Hero? reaction!
  • Dragon Age: Origins is a rare game which lets a player character do this, as you can chose to murder Arl Eamon's son rather than try and help him. You might argue that it's a mercy-killing, but you're still killing a child.
    • The Human Noble origin has your character find their sister in-law and young nephew dead during the attack on the castle. By this point, it's clear the attackers don't care about hostages.
    • And we have this little gem right before the attack:
      Noble Warden's brother: Don't worry, son, you'll see a sword up close soon enough.
    • Definitely implied in the case of party member Sten, who is The Atoner after slaughtering an entire farm family after waking up to find his sword/soul missing.
  • Dragon Age II has Kelder Vanard, a Serial Killer who targets elven children. He claims that demons in his head force him to do it (while the Circle of Magi says that he's simply mad) and begs Hawke to Mercy Kill him before he hurts anyone else. Hawke can oblige, or return him to his father who refuses to get him help or send him to prison, leaving him free to strike again.
  • Bishop Ladja from Dragon Quest V, after killing Pankraz with a fireball, also has no qualms about wanting to off the hero and Henry, who are children in the first generation.
  • A side mission of Drakengard features Anti-Hero Caim slaughtering child-soldiers with about as much gusto as he slaughters everything else, i.e. a lot. The children run away and scream for their mothers as you cut them down, while Leonard and Red calls you a monster for it. And then there's that child-eating Elf cannibal he travels around with, and Leonard was originally a pedophile in the Japanese version... Yeah, Drakengard doesn't like children a whole lot.
    • And in the Alternate Continuity sequel NieR, some of the shades that Nier slaughters are actually sentient children who cannot communicate with the "humans", particularly Kalil, the "boss" of the Junk Heap area.
  • Craven from Dusty Revenge, who abducted Rondel's son as a bargaining chip to use against the heroes. As he's confronted in his throne room, as the heroes enter Craven had Rundel's son under his boot while beckoning them to enter. Slowly, or he crush the boy's skull.
  • Dwarf Fortress gives us the concept of "maternal armor". Yes, it's exactly what you'd think it is. The usual results are ...not pretty. And then there's the pragmatic lot of players who decide that having somebody lounge about in your fortress, eating your food and drinking your booze without doing any work for 12 years just isn't worth it.
  • EarthBound Series:
    • All the main protagonists in the EarthBound series are children (so obviously, plenty of the enemies that battle them will be adults), but perhaps the most notable specific example of this trope is in EarthBound when a bunch of policemen beat up the 13-year-old Ness just because he wants to leave his hometown.
    • Mother 3: Not only does Porky try to kill the 12-year-old Lucas on a number of occasions, he also takes his twin brother, mind controls him, makes him a cyborg, and ultimately is the cause of his death.
  • The sequel to Earthworm Jim upped the physical and emotional challenge by having Psycrow enthusiastically throw Peter Puppy's adorable, puppy relatives out the window from high enough to liquidate them upon impact, in order to impede Jim and give him the run of his life to save them by using a marshmallow pillow.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Dark Brotherhood assassin Gogron gro-Bolmog tells the player about a time he got hired to kill a five-year-old Nord girl at her birthday party.
      Gogron: This one time I had a contract to kill a little Nord girl at her birthday party. She asked me if I was the jester! So I said to her, "No, I am a messenger of death." You should have seen the look on her face! Ha ha ha ha! Anyway, she won't be seeing age six!
    • In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim the vampire Alva forces her thrall Laelette to murder a man's wife and young daughter as part of her plan to seduce him. Partially subverted by the fact that Laelette felt guilty about the whole situation and attempted turning the girl into a vampire and resurrecting her when that failed, but Alva had no qualms about killing the innocent.
  • EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce:
    • Dark Force's alien invasion force has no qualms about harming children or anyone else they trample underfoot. Early in the game in the mountains of China, a little girl runs out of a building she was hiding within when Undata attacks it. He immediately takes her hostage and threatens her, forcing the heroes to surrender the super spiritual water in exchange for her release.
    • Later on in Washington DC, a brother-sister pair are trapped inside a building that has Building Monkeys hunting through it for survivors. It becomes a delicate operation to confirm their life signs, send an advance team to find and keep them calm, and a rescue team to fight their way through the building to secure them. Unlike Undata who only cared about completing the magic item collection mission, Building Monkeys are designed for urban assault and would show as little mercy for the children as they did for their parents.
  • FAITH: The Unholy Trinity has a few examples of this trope, but the biggest one is the "Second Death" ritual, which involves sacrificing an infant.
  • Fallout:
    • The first two games make you a Childkiller if you killed a childnote , which would cause almost everyone, even other renounced scumbags and lowlifes, to hate you. At least the children were scripted to flee when accidentally hit, so they rarely got killed by NPCs. The 3D ones had invincible children (unless you use some mods...there is even a very famous one for Fallout 3 which allowed eating a baby in exchange for the benefit of a perk which give you rads immunity, you can see this marvelous sickness here)
    • Once you've progressed through Fallout 2 long enough in an attempt to go to another settlement, you'll get an encounter that shows an Enclave patrol led by Frank Horrigan coldly killing a small family, including an only child, which serves as an ominous Foreshadowing to their existence, who have no qualms in exterminating any being that isn't them or wasn't born in a Vault, and yes, that includes children.
    • In Fallout 3, the Lone Wanderer can, however, enslave selected children NPCs and cause the implied deaths of two others, by blowing up a town with a nuke.
    • Fallout: New Vegas:
      • Two slaver traders make a note not to do any more business with the raider leader Cook Cook, as he burned a young boy they had sold to him to death.
      • The Courier can ask a prison rioter who goes by the nickname Scrambler what he was in for. He responds that he doesn't really care enough to keep track of his crimes, but he vaguely remembers something about killing a lot of people, and that some of them probably were kids.
      • According to Ranger Andy, Caesar's Legion considers using child suicide bombers to be a legitimate strategy since everyone lowers their guard with kids.
    • Fallout 4:
  • In Far Cry 4, we eventually learn that Pagan Min's hatred of the rebels is due to them murdering his infant daughter.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Exdeath in Final Fantasy V imprisons Krile in a ring of fire and then slams her into the walls several times until she's barely conscious. (Although Krile is fourteen, she is the youngest main character and her designs all invoke Badass Adorable, making the act fall under this.)
    • Vivi and Eiko from Final Fantasy IX. The former is a child physically and mentally, but since he's a black mage "doll", adult workers in Dali promptly kidnap him and stuff him inside a box. In the latter case, Alexandrian jesters kidnaps her and perform a ritual to steal her spells. Due to an RPG format, both are defaultly subjected to physical and magic attacks, especially those from Kuja's minions.
    • Final Fantasy XIII has Hope Estheim — the youngest, most physically weak character in the game. That doesn't matter to anyone; he's a Pulse l'Cie, and therefore must die.
      • Before this, he and a town were put on a train and promptly shot at by the military when they tried to escape.
  • Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade: A given for the villains, since Roy is only fifteen and there are several other children in his army. Hugh is an odd case: he grabs Lugh by the collar because he mistook him for Raigh, who stole a rare tome from him before the events of the game and generally treats him like shit. Once he realizes his mistake, he's ashamed and apologizes, so it's less a case of "fine with hurting kids" than it is "fine with hurting a specific kid".
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: If you read the newspapers scattered throughout the game, you'll find out that some guy had the decency to kill not one, but five children. Minigames in Five Nights at Freddy's 2 suggest the death toll may be even higher than that. Five Nights at Freddy's 3 confirms a body count of at least five or six, and possibly up to eleven, kids. He's never even seen outside of minigames (where he's seen as an Atari-esque purple man) and in 3, where his corpse is seen inside Springtrap, much less named.
  • The killer from Free Icecream abducted the girl and her friend to kill them. In fact, by the time the game starts, the girl's friend is already dead.
  • Fuga: Melodies of Steel stars a group of Children Forced to Kill using a gargantuan tank to fight a war against an Imperial/Nazi Germany stand-in, and none of the named antagonists of the game have any qualms with striking these pesky kids down. Among them, Colonel Pretzel is a justified example— he usually abhors the idea of mowing down innocent civilians, but since the children are riding the aforementioned gargantuan tank and are thus able to defend themselves, Pretzel doesn't hesitate to use brute force against them.
  • Game of Thrones (Telltale): Ramsay Snow shows the Forresters just what an irredeemably evil bastard he is by gleefully stabbing the young Lord Ethan in the throat in front of them. Ethan was only around thirteen or fourteen at the time. Ramsay also takes the seven-year-old Ryon as a hostage and tells his soldiers to kill him if anyone tries to intervene.
  • In Genshin Impact, the Fatui Harbinger Dottore is infamous for his numerous experiments that involved children. Taking advantage of desperate parents, he obtained children suffering from a local illness/curse and attempted to weaponize their condition. Collei is a survivor of those experiments, and was left deeply traumatized by her experience. Likewise, there is a side-quest in Sumeru involving Dottore ordering his subordinates to kidnap children as bait to capture the Aranara. The elusive spirits had avoided capture while rescuing the children, but request the Traveler's aid in stopping the operation for good.
  • The Grand Theft Auto series draws the line at Video Game Cruelty Potential here — there are no children ever walking the streets of Liberty City, Vice City or San Andreas.
  • Gwent: The Witcher Card Game: Ritual Sacrifice's art shows Brewess marching chained children to be the victims of the sacrifice.
    • And then there's Whoreson Senior depicted looking at a painting as a battered and bruised young boy clings fearfully to his sleeve. It's his son. The abuse is what eventually makes young Cyprian break and become a monster.
  • The story behind Heavy Rain centers around the Origami Killer, a serial killer that targets boys from the ages of 8-13. He would then put the kids in a Drowning Pit and let the... heavy rain take care of them. The main plot has one of the four protagonist, Ethan Mars desperately trying to find his son, Shaun who was kidnapped by the killer. It makes replaying the Suicide Baby chapter much worse once you know who the killer is...
  • Hogwarts Legacy: Ominis Gaunt's parents demanded, when he was a young boy, that he perform the Cruciatus Curse on a Muggle. When he refused, they used it on him. Understandably, Ominis absolutely refuses to have any truck with the Dark Arts.
  • Ian's Eyes: You play as a blind kid's seeing-eye dog who has to guide him through a zombie-infested school. If the zombies catch Ian, they WILL eat him. Heck, they've eaten several of the kids already, some of whom's corpses are seen throughout the school.
  • The enemies of INSIDE (2016) have no qualms with siccing attack dogs or firing guns at the protagonist, who is at most ten years old.
  • Most of the staff in Kindergarten and its sequel.
    • The janitor is the most obvious example, being an Axe-Crazy old man who will stab children to death (or near death, in one instance) for things like correcting his spelling or just sufficiently annoying him.
    • Ms. Applegate's whole quest is this by proxy, as she tasks the player with killing off all the other students so she can go home early. She's not afraid of getting her own hands dirty either, especially not in the sequel, where she's suffering from drug withdrawal.
    • The first principal's go-to response to problem children is to shoot them in the head with his Hand Cannon.
    • Dr. Danner the science teacher also shoots children in the head if they annoy him, for example by moving or speaking during study hall, only he uses a laser gun.
    • Margaret the lunch lady is affable enough, if a bit odd, but she's also emotionally unstable and considers being beaten to death a suitable punishment for children caught in school before it starts.
    • The second principal sets of her own daughter's self-destruct function when said daughter outlives her usefulness. She also sends a bunch of mutant monsters to kill off the protagonist and his friends because He Knows Too Much.
  • Lock, Shock, and Barrel serve as bosses in several Kingdom Hearts games, and Sora (or Roxas) will have no trouble fighting them. It's justified, considering their bratty natures...
    • Anybody in the Kingdom Hearts universe will have no trouble with fighting the main characters, most of whom are teenagers,note  so they have to take all their opponents seriously, so it's all fair play. Master Xehanort even manages to kill two of them (Sora and Kairi) and steal the body of another (Terra), though all of them get revived.
  • A Shoot the Dog scenario in The Legend of Dragoon. The Moon Child is a being of legend that is born when the Moon That Never Sets glows red every 108 years. In legend, the Moon Child is said to be a holy being that will bless the world and create a utopia by gathering the three Moon Objects. However, the Moon That Never Sets also signifies the coming of the Black Monster, who seeks to kill the Moon Child due to its hatred and kills it every time it is born. It is said that the Black Monster can't stand the Moon Child's holy light. As the story unfolds, it is revealed that the Moon Child is Shana, who is actually the soul of the 108th species, the Virage Embryo; a being that threatens to annihilate the world. It's body and soul were separated to prevent this outcome. It is also revealed that the Black Monster is Rose, who was stalling the monster's resurrection by killing the Moon Child every time they were born for 11,000 years. note
  • In the Trails Series, the D∴G Cult, a group properly introduced in The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure, were an infamous organization known to kidnap children across the entire continent and use them in their Gnosis experiments. Some of their noteworthy victims include:
    • Renne, who was kidnapped by the cult from a friend of her parents and experimented on, but was later lent to a child sex brothel called "Paradise", for financial support. In order to cling onto her sanity, she absorbed the personalities of her fellow captives to numb herself to the pain. The brothel was destroyed when Ouroboros Enforcers Joshua and Loewe raided it, finding her as the only survivor. The trauma she suffered enabled her to later become an Enforcer.
    • Tio Plato, who was rescued by Guy Bannings during the extermination efforts. she was subjected to human experimentation as well, and this led to her gaining sensory receptivity that assisted her later in life when she joined the Special Support Section.
    • Ennea, who was rescued by Arianrhod and Duvalie and later joined the Stahlritter in gratitude to them.
    • Van Arkride, who was adopted by a member of the cult at the age of 7 and was subjected to traumatic, but mostly nonlethal, experiments. He eventually managed to escape by the age of 14.
    • Quatre Salision, who was actually the child of two members and was experimented on to become a "divine vessel." He was found sometime after the cult collapsed and ended up getting adopted by Professor Latoya Hamilton.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • FunFrock in Little Big Adventure 2 initially uses kidnapped children in order to force the wizards to co-operate with his scheme. When Twinsen invades his lair, he decides to drop the children into a volcano in order to make Twinsen cross the Despair Event Horizon.
  • Love of Magic: We don't know exactly what the previous owner of the King's Dragon was doing, but it involved a young boy and shackles.
  • In Luck be a Landlord, the General Zaroff symbol, and also the Bounty Hunter symbol if you have Zaroff's Contract, will not give any lenience to the Toddler symbol—it will be destroyed like any other person-type symbol.
  • Manafinder: The criminal justice system of the Kingdom of Manahill is perfectly fine with exiling criminals, rightfully accused or not, along with their children, knowing that the monsters outside of Manahill will most likely eat them.
  • Max Payne's motivation for his Roaring Rampage of Revenge in the first game is the murder of his wife and baby daughter by junkies.
  • Metal Gear uses this rather a lot, either to demonstrate the generalized war setting or as Kick the Dog for the villains:
    • Solid Snake (or rather, the player) in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is actually given the option of murdering orphaned war children in Zanzibar Land, and despite being raised in a soldier nation, apparently they don't have orders to attack Snake or sound an alert (they just seem to just give advice and talk to him), although it does result in his health going down.
    • In the (albeit non-canon) radio drama for Metal Gear Solid, Solid Snake and Mei Ling argue about whether there is a significant difference to killing child soldiers and regular soldiers. Solid Snake mentions that he doesn't see a difference, which indicates that he is not above killing child soldiers.
    • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Solidus Snake's depth of evil is characterized with how he used to be a warlord with an army exclusively made up of child soldiers (called the Small Boy Unit), killing their parents and then sending them off to die in the Liberian civil war. In the same game, the evil of the Patriots is highlighted by their kidnap of Olga's child, who they use purely to keep Olga under control.
    • Metal Gear Ac!d concerns two outrageously evil Mad Scientist characters who kidnapped several hundred children and forced them to fight each other to the death to find out which one had the greatest potential. The one who won was then made into the operating system for an extremely powerful new form of Metal Gear. The trauma of performing this experiment was so great that one became practically a Card-Carrying Villain to deal with it and the other (who had taken on the work under a Code Name) repressed all his memories of it and went off to go and live in Alaska, returning to his previous identity of Solid Snake. Or so it seems.
    • The main villain in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops has a child soldier who looks quite old but, if you look at the numbers, cannot be older than twelve - Null, a soldier who is kept in total sensory deprivation and essentially tortured into repressing all of his memories after every combat with the idea that this will make him a 'Perfect Soldier'. The villain's open exploitation of and the physical violence he uses towards Null to control him is one of the many reasons he is profoundly unsympathetic. Null was also a child soldier earlier in life, as well.
    • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance revolves around a villain who is literally stealing the brains of homeless children to create disposable killer cyborgs. This is horrible enough that it allows Raiden's gleefully murderous behavior to be intensely sympathetic in comparison.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes contains a fairly gratuitous scene where Big Boss strangles a teenage boy to get him to stop shouting.
    • Downplayed by Venom Snake in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, who will tranquilize or otherwise knock out child soldiers, but will fail a mission if he uses lethal force.
  • Metro: Last Light has its fair share of children dying or dead. Most notable examples are the bombs that forced people down into the Metro, as well as the synthetic Ebola epidemic that Korbut released on the neutral stations that takes out every man, woman and child there — not to mention the executioner mop-up crews that are sent in to set the place ablaze and kill absolutely everybody.
  • At the beginning of Mia's Reading Adventure: The Search for Grandma's Remedy, when Mia attempts to exit her grandmother's bedroom to buy some medicine, Romaine beats Mia into unconsciousness, allowing him to steal the Sparklies Mia was about to use to buy the medicine.
  • Monster Loves You!: The game contains scenarios where you can eat baby animals... and even human children. While that certainly will increase your Ferocity stat, it certainly won't help you get most of the best endings.
  • In the 2017 edition of Night Trap, when the Augers corner Lisa's kid brother Danny from behind, they will not hesitate to capture him and drain him of blood if you don't do something. (Just so you know, this is one of the three Game Over scenes that didn't make the final cut.)
  • A couple examples from Octopath Traveler II:
    • Trousseau from Castti's story kills off an entire village, which naturally includes the children. In fact, the kids are the first victims of the plague Trousseau inflicted, with the adults dying because they went out to look for the children.
    • Harvey has no problem with using the blood of Osvald's daughter Elena in one of his experiments; this was part of his end goal all along. Osvald was going to come after Harvey anyway, but this gives him an extra motivation to do so.
    • Thurston, one of Roque's employees, threatens to hurt a child after the latter could not pay the taxes. Fortunately Partitio stops him in time.
    • After becoming the king of Ku, Mugen orders the massacre of Ku and all the countries it takes by force in order to stop anyone from revolting, and this includes children.
  • A horrifyingly sad example can be found in the game Off, where in the penultimate battle, The Batter kills Hugo, who the games describes as "a little boy" (who is also his creator). Being so small and feeble, he's not able to fight back at all, making the so-called "battle" very short.
  • In One Chance, if you spend the last day where everyone is alive and well at home then helping to create a cure, a scientist will try to murder you as all the other had already died. If you block the attack, he will run away. Returning home however, you find the bodies of your wife and kid, along with the coworkers' corpse.
  • In Overwatch's cinematic trailer, Widowmaker shows no qualms about trying to shoot two kids.
  • In Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, it is possible to shoot Lucy, causing her to cry. However, Pac-Man will not be happy with the fact you shot Lucy, and this even counts as a death, one that doesn’t involve a situation that Pac-Man is on the receiving end of.
  • Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners: Professor Tsuchida, alongside his assistant Dr. Kuroe, may not be guilty of directly hurting children, but they are guilty of child endangerment. More specifically, they rope up a nearby tour group into exploring Khufu's tomb, with Tsuchida fully intending for them to get killed by the traps inside. Among the group is 9-year old Rin Tsukihara, and if you're not careful, she ends up the first casualty.
  • In Persona 3, Takaya, wanting to prevent S.E.E.S. from destroying the Arcana Shadows, approaches Shinjiro and Ken during the October Full Moon, and demands to know who is helping S.E.E.S. find the Shadows (it's Fuuka, the Mission Control, who is elsewhere). When Ken lies and claims that he is the one with that ability, Takaya prepares to shoot Ken with his revolver, but is stopped by Shinjiro's Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Persona 4: The Culprit, Tohru Adachi, is implied from the letters that he may have had a hand in exposing the six-year-old Nanako to a situation where they'd be kidnapped as well, or at least knew she was going to and did nothing to help her. On the other hand, he took it badly when Nanako (initially) died and the fact that he had to insist that "it was Yu's fault" to himself implies he regretted getting her involved and was trying to blame Yu for failing to save her rather than admit his own fault.
  • PokĂ©mon
    • Early on in PokĂ©mon XD: Gale of Darkness, a thug working with Cipher called Zook threatens Michael and his younger sister with a Shadow Zangoose. And in the end Grandmaster Greevil's son Ardos attempts to talk his father into blowing up the base with Michael still on it after his defeat. Needless to say, it doesn't work.
    • In PokĂ©mon Black 2 and White 2, Ghetsis has no qualms having Kyurem attack the player character with huge freakin' icicles. To note, the player character is roughly 13-16 years old. Good thing N showed up to save them at the last second. In PokĂ©mon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon he makes a comeback and holds Lillie hostage after being defeated and threatens to kill her unless the player surrenders their Pokemon. The player can choose to refuse, and even if the player refuses, Ghetsis is about to carry out his attempt to kill Lillie, but Colress appears and sends Ghetsis back to his original timeline.
    • In PokĂ©mon X and Y, after the player and his/her friends thwart Lysandre's plans he attempts to either curse them with immortality or simply kill them with his Doomsday Device, depending on which version you're playing, including the vaguely 12-14 Shauna and 11-13 Trevor.
    • In PokĂ©mon Sun and Moon, after defeating her a second time, Lusamine, having fused herself with the Ultra Beast Nihilego, completely snaps and proceeds to try and physically attack her 11 year old daughter (and the player). Thankfully, Lillie's able to stop her with Solgaleo/Lunala's help.
    • In PokĂ©mon Scarlet and Violet, while it's unclear how much its because Professor Sada/Turo didn't think about who would try to shut down their time machine, or whether they just didn't care, but the AI protocol they designed to keep their time machine running has no qualms about sending dangerous Paradox Pokemon to battle against a child, or when that fails, sending out a highly aggressive Koraidon/Miraidon when the kids can't even send their own Pokemon out to fight back.
  • While it's never actually shown, in Portal 2, during the section where Wheatley steers your Relaxation Chamber through the Relaxation Center, you can see shipping labels on other rooms, which (among other things) label the occupant of that chamber as either an adult or a child. This implies that there were children in the Relaxation Center, meaning GLaDOS had probably used children as test subjects in the past. Considering the deadliness of her tests, children probably also died horrific deaths at her metaphorical hands.
  • In Postal 1, the Postal Dude attempts to massacre an elementary school but has a mental breakdown and misses all of his shots as a result before being arrested and placed in a mental hospital. However, the remake changed it to a church and he's somewhat less ruthless in later games (which are devoid of children similarly to the GTA example above).
  • Blackwatch from [PROTOTYPE] are big fans of this — their intro cutscene even shows a preschool-age girl sprout a bullet hole while they chant about how "nothing is sacred."
  • Subverted in Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, as Luna turns out to be a robotic puppet built to resemble a child. Still, Ratchet didn't hesitate to destroy its tractor-ship and send it falling to its death.
  • Micah Bell from Red Dead Redemption II. In the epilogue, he's wanted for several crimes including murdering a little girl, he also tried to kill Cleet, one of his gang members, when he objected to him killing said girl. It's heavily implied that, if he survived, he would kill John's family as well.
  • Resident Evil:
  • Return to Krondor: Played straight. In the first chapter, a ten year old girl who is a thief and an orphan living in the streets truly does not want to go to The Order of the Yellow Shield, a group that owns an orphanage. That is because men who pretend to be members of The Order of the Yellow Shield lure kids like her to a sweatshop. At this sweatshop, they work the kids hard, hurt them, lock them up in cages, as well as giving them food that have live rats and squirmy things in it. She also says about how the bad children (i.e. kids who refuse to work or try to run away) just disappear and never come back. Investigating the sweatshop reveals that everything she said is true. You will find a cage with kids locked in it, and depending on your decisions, you will find the bloody corpse of a child in one of the boxes next to the entrance door. James will be very unhappy with that discovery and refer to the owner of the sweatshop as a "child-killer". A camp of goblins sacrificed a boy, cutting him in two, and they were going to do the same to baby twin girls. Vampires killed and converted kids as well as adults to vampires. Ghouls are explicitly said to feast on human flesh — and that would include children. There is also a priest who is devoted to Sung the Pure named Father Roweland who is trying to help children recover from a fatal disease, but he causes the fatal "disease". He actually killed a little boy with evil spells, and was going to do the same to a little girl with an evil amulet magically disguised as a good amulet, as well as evil spells. A woodcutter, his wife and child disappear, but the woodcutter and his wife (not really his wife) sacrificed their child (not really his child) to try to power up a Nightstone. The Nightstone is found on a small skeleton, which could very well be the child's remains. Bear also used explosives to set an orphanage on fire while escaping Krondor — with the kids still in it.
  • Skull Girls: Black Dahlia, the Medici mafia's top assassin did not even hesitate to put a bullet through the head of fourteen year old Sienna Continello and actually taunted the poor girl's mother while doing it. She also threatens to kill the also fourteen year old Peacock in the latter's ending, but in that case it is more justified as Peacock had been slaughtering her way through the Medici stronghold up to this point.
  • Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik, the Big Bad of Sonic the Hedgehog. He not only shoves little animals into robots, but his worst enemies also happen to be children. Even not counting Sonic himself (who is often placed at 15, though he's implied to be younger in the first few games), he is fighting 8-year olds and 12-year-olds on occasion (heck, Cream from the Sonic Advance Trilogy is only 6). They are children with Superhuman abilities, and rather mature-acting children at that, but still.
    • On the Game Gear, Eggman truly pumps this up a notch in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. It is implied that Tails dies at Robotnik's hands if you fail to collect all the emeralds before Scrambled Egg Zone.
  • Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion:
    • Spooky's origin reveals she was a little girl who wanted to scare people, but was unable to due to being so cute. Unfortunately, when she finally found someone to scare, it turns out he suffered from PTSD, and the fireworks she used caused him to shoot her dead.
    • Specimen 6 was once a simple merchant who drowned along with his puppets. However, the children of the townspeople that destroyed his puppets and killed him began disappearing, replaced with dolls. Considering what he does to the player when he kills them, this doesn’t bode well for the missing children.
  • Spyro the Dragon:
  • Super Mario Bros.:
  • In Slender: The Arrival, the particular antagonist, Slender Man, abducts a young Charlie Matheson after exploring a beach and ending up in a forest section with no visible escape. The scene in which he abducts him is particularly haunting, as both him and his parents scream out loud to each other, though Charlie is trapped from the Slender Man's tentacles. The game reveals that he had turned Charlie into a mindless proxy who screams like his former self, but is purely hellbent on harming, and even possibly murdering, the player as well as being a pawn for the Slender Man. Charlie's physical appearance, looking like that of a thin gray zombified corpse, implies that Slender Man's transformation of Charlie truly did harm him to his former self .
  • The chicken worshippers from Tak and the Power of Juju have no qualms about dealing the killing blow to the youthful protagonist, a boy from a neighboring tribe.
  • The plot of Tales of Berseria is kicked off when Big Bad Artorius Colbrande ritually sacrifices protagonist Velvet Crowe's younger brother Laphicet as part of a plan to resurrect the Empyrean Innominat and remove free will from humanity in order to save it from daemons. A late-game Wham Episode complicates matters by revealing that Laphicet a. was incurably and terminally ill, and b. volunteered.
  • Mars and his soldiers in Tales of Phantasia. They kill everyone in Toltus, including Chester's little sister and a random girl whose corpse you can examine.
  • In Temtem, the members of the Belsoto Clan see the teenage player as an enemy combatant and treat them as such, especially after they're forced to join La RĂ©sistance on the island of Kisiwa. One of the higher ups, General X, shoves The Rival Max off a ledge to seemingly fall to his death after he tries to leave them and after the ensuing Hopeless Boss Fight against him says he'd feed the player to his mons if he didn't have to retreat.
  • ThanksKilling Day: The game is about a child trying to escape from a killer dressed as a pilgrim. By that point, the killer has killed one other kid down at the docks.
  • The Tiamat Sacrament: Ry'jin and Gyle slaughtered all residents of Ildria's castle, including the children.
  • In Tyranny, Kyros' laws make this illegal; the young are to be protected. At least, if they're citizens of Kyros' empire; non-citizens have no rights. In the Blade Grave, on the other hand, ending the Edict of Storms, which will otherwise continue to devastate the land and kill thousands, requires the eradication of the entire Regent bloodline. Including an infant still in her crib. Forcing the Fatebinder to suffocate the child or have a companion end their life... unless they can find an alternative.
  • Undertale:
    • Every monster, except Alphys (who doesn't fight you until she becomes a lost soul), the shopkeepers and a couple of other NPCs, tries to kill the Kid Hero at some point. Justified, first of all because Magic, the monsters primary means of attacking you, is also their primary means of expressing themselves, secondly because they need your soul to leave the Underground, and thirdly because monsters are not exactly on friendly terms with Humanity to begin with.
    • Flowey stands out in this regard. He doesn't try to kill you at the intro because of the same reason as the other monsters. He just does it for shits and giggles.
    • Asgore may be willing to hurt children, but he clearly hates doing it. When he faces the main character, he refuses to look them in the eyes out of shame.
    • Toriel downplays it. She does attack you, but only because she doesn't want you to leave and get killed by other examples on this page. The fight is actually very hard, though not impossible, to lose, because once your HP gets low her projectiles start to avoid your soul. If you check her stats, you can see she has very high attack power and thus is clearly holding back when fighting you.
    • If you get to the restaurant event while playing through on a non-Genocide route, you learn that Sans was prepared to kill you the moment you left the Ruins, and only a promise to Toriel stayed his hand. Despite the "Just Joking" Justification, the vibe in the room makes it clear that this was no joke. And should you pursue the Genocide run? You will learn how true it is.
    • On a No Mercy Run, the player is required to attack more than one clearly juvenile monster who is never fought otherwise. Examining the Monster Kid will show the message "Looks like free EXP". Even though he is saved by Undyne Taking the Bullet, you must attempt to attack him to complete the run.
    • Deltarune: The King threatens to throw Lancer, his own son, off the castle and to his doom, then assails the school-age protagonists with his spade projectiles.
  • The player character in Untitled Goose Game has no qualms about harassing or tormenting children as he goes about his business.
  • Season 2 of The Walking Dead (Telltale) has Bill Carver, who is not above hitting Clementine just for staring him down and at one point orders Carlos to smack his daughter with full force for talking while he's giving a speech. In his eyes, the next generation must be raised to be stronger and tougher than the last. His minion Troy is also not above rifle-butting Clementine in the face if she tries to stop Carver from beating the hell out of Kenny.
    • One game over sequence suggests he's not above killing Clementine either.
    • After Clementine, Kenny and Jane were betrayed by the rest of the group, one of them, a Russian named Arvo had no qualms about shooting Clementine in the shoulder with a rifle, even if she prevented Jane from robbing him in the previous episode.
    • Season 3 has Badger, who shows himself to have no problem with murdering children in cold blood including Javier's niece Mariana, which the majority of players agree makes bashing his skull until the remains are unrecognizable in Episode 3 all the more cathartic.
  • A Walk in the Woods: The monster kids scattered around the woods will kill you if they can get close enough.
  • Fallout's spiritual predecessor Wasteland allows you to attack some mutant kids at Highpool who laugh at you for falling into a stream. As you kill them, more kids will appear and the atmosphere will get more and more creepy, ending with a puppy crawling into a dead child's arms. You're then attacked by the Red Ryder and his Red Ryder Air Rifle (with compass in the stock), and once you kill him the camp suddenly looks as though it had been abandoned for years.
  • Alhazad from Wild ARMs has no qualms about conducting horrific experiments on the residents of Court Seim for his own amusement. Most of said residents are orphaned children.
  • The Witcher 3 offers a vast amount of morally repugnant characters, but one ranking relatively high on the list would be Jonna. A local man named Lothar goes to Geralt for help lifting a curse from his young son that was slowly killing him. After doing some investigating, Geralt learns that Jonna, the local herbalist, cursed Lothar's son after Lothar refused to continue cheating on his wife with her in an attempt to win him back. Geralt can either transfer the curse to Jonna, killing her, or convince Lothar to go back to her so she would lift it herself.
    • Geralt can overhear a background conversation between raiders in the village of Fyresdal in Skellige, where one raider threatens he'll kill the other's son if the latter doesn't personally kill all prisoners they take on their next raid, ironically as punishment because the raider being threatened couldn't bring himself to kill a Nilfgaardian soldier who was the same age as his son on their last raid.
    • The Blood and Wine expansion gives us Orianna, a Higher Vampire who runs an orphanage like a wine cellar. Whenever she wants blood, she feeds on a child. Her defence when confronted by Geralt is that she never goes so far as to actually kill the children and makes sure they are well-treated.
  • World of Warcraft: Elisande's loyalists in Suramar lock any criminals or "dissidents" in cages on display around the city. Unable to feed their arcane addiction, they slowly Wither. Some of the cages contain children.
  • XenoGears: Bishop Stone talks about Billy and Primera as proof of Racquel's "defilement" by Jessie, he probably wouldn't have minded if his Wels killed them along with her. He has no issues trying to kill Billy after, who is one the younger main characters.
  • In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, given the fact that everybody in the world (as far as they know) is physically between the ages of ten and twenty (chronologically between the ages of one and ten) and locked in a Forever War, this comes with the territory for the two opposing sides. A flashback of the main characters when they were much younger depicts them being caught up in a battle with enemies that have no qualms attacking them, and one sidequest features a sequence of youthful soldiers recently killed off. Future Redeemed shows how this is an attitude the soldiers will apply towards the naturally born children of the City, with at least one young girl included in the massacre of an attempted new settlement.
  • The entire plot of Yakuza 6 is predicated on the local criminal element being willing to kill an infant. Unfortunately for them, that infant is under the protection of Kazuma Kiryu.
  • Zombie Playground: There are zombie kids in the game who are all too willing to attack your character, a child.

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