History FreudianExcuse / VideoGames

* A great majority of villains in ''VideoGame/SlyCooper'' have one of these. Let's see...

* All the stuffed animals in ''DieAnstalt'' are crazy, and part of the puzzle in the game is figuring out why:

* In ''Fanfic/StoryOfTheBlanks'', we see a village where [[spoiler:everypony was cursed after they killed a mare who got her cutie mark]]. Then there came an episode of [[WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic the show]] where a disease causes an overabundance of cutie marks, with the likelihood of dying from exhaustion, and that it caused a lot of trouble back in ancient times.

* MassEffect

* ''VideoGame/{{Bioshock}}'' villains [[ZigZaggedTrope zig zag]] this trope. Most sported twisted backstories portrayed with varying degrees of [[AntiVillain sympathy]] and [[TragicMonster tragedy]], but the games do make it clear that they're insane tyrants beyond redemption.

* One was given to the recurring villain of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'', [[spoiler: Seymour Guado]]. In a nutshell, [[spoiler: Non-human dad marries human mom, but his species' xenophobic civilization doesn't like that their leader married a human, so she and Seymour are exiled to a long-abandoned temple. Mom decides that Seymour will need to be powerful to be accepted, so she undergoes a procedure that will allow him to call on her as a powerful summon beast but will also turn her into a statue while young Seymour is crying for her not to, effectively meaning he's been abandoned by both parents. Summon Beast Mommy [[http://ui19.gamespot.com/1682/finalfantasyxanima_2.jpg looks like this]].]]

* Shadow The Hedgehog has one as the main purpose for his motivation in ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure2'', due to the death (metaphorically) of [[DeadLittleSister Maria Robotnik]], he vowed vengeance against all of humanity [[spoiler: He remembers later that Maria does not want that, and wanted him to forgive humanity for there are some good people in the world]].

** The final boss is [[spoiler:Raz's and Oleander's Freudian Excuses combined, essentially a [[NightmareFuel grotesque combination of their fathers]]. ]]

* ''ValkyriaChronicles'' has Maximilian, who tries to conquer the world [[spoiler:because his mom was unpopular amongst the nobility, and then was killed.]]

* In ''Fanfic/StoryOfTheBlanks'', we see a village where [[spoiler:everypony was cursed after they killed a mare who got her cutie mark]]. Then there came an episode of [[WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic the show]] where a disease causes an overabundance of cutie marks, with the likelihood of dying from exhaustion, and that it caused a lot of trouble back in ancient times.

** Dr. Wood is a psychologist with [[TheCobblersChildrenHaveNoShoes a few issues of his own]] that culminate in him [[spoiler: succumbing to narcissistic personality disorder and starting a cult.]] This is because [[spoiler: he spent years in a display case in a pediatrician's office, watching children who wanted to play with him but couldn't.]]

* Downplayed with Kefka, who's insane because the process that made him a MagiTek Knight shattered his sanity. It's minor because it doesn't detract from his CompleteMonster status.

** [[spoiler: The Contessa]] lost her husband. [[CompleteMonster However, we are meant to believe she killed him herself]]

* ''SuikodenIV'' has [[CompleteMonster Graham Cray]], who masterminds a war and creates a WeaponOfMassDestruction... motivated by his StartOfDarkness: [[spoiler: the True Rune of Punishment, which was sealed away on Obel Island, once chose him at its host. To avoid being consumed by the rune, he chopped his own hand off... at which point it jumped to his son. Though he begged his son not to use its powers, the boy naturally ended up disobeying him... using its power to destroy the soldiers raiding their village. Oh, and the soldiers were part of a FalseFlagOperation being pulled by the Scarlet Moon Empire, Cray's superiors. Naturally, they blamed ''him'' for the incident, sending him off in shame]] to start plotting revenge. So the whole thing's just so [[spoiler: he can try and reclaim the rune, reuniting him with some small piece of his son.]]

* In ''SilentHill4'', we have Walter Sullivan. He's a SerialKiller who was [[ParentalAbandonment abandoned by his parents immediately after he was born]], raised by the [[{{Cult}} Order]] [[OrphanageOfFear and all that that implies]], watched his friend being forced to eat ''[[{{Squick}} leeches]]'' by a CompleteMonster, being fooled by the Order into believing the apartment room where he was born ''was'' his mom, and being spat on by the inhabitants of the apartment building. [[WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds It's at this point that one starts to wonder if his behavior really is excusable]].

* In ''VideoGame/PokemonBlackAndWhite'', N is perceived as a [[WellIntentionedExtremist well-intentioned extremist]] since he wants to separate humans and Pokémon because he thinks that humans treat the latter like tools. The reason for this is because [[spoiler:his father, Ghetsis, deliberately neglected him so that he would become what he is now. N was raised with abused Pokémon for a good portion of his life and believed that humans were evil (aside from his "subjects" in Team Plasma), setting Ghetsis' plan into motion so that he could make Pokémon illegal for everyone but himself so he could rule Unova. And Ghetsis even tells N that he's '[[CompleteMonster a monster incapable]] [[MoralEventHorizon of understanding humans.]]']]

* [[FanNickname The Shouty Guy]] from ''MondoMedicals'' apparently (as far as his insane {{Engrish}} ramblings can be believed) witnessed his father dying from cancer and this shock was at least partially responsible for his decision to begin curing cancers via [[spoiler:killing the patients]], including [[spoiler:killing the player character under pretense of curing cancer]].

* Sephiroth from ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' was raised by his father, the evil mad scientist Hojo, who regarded him as little more than a human lab rat, and was trying to turn him in to the perfect super soldier. Obviously, Hojo [[GoneHorriblyRight mostly succeeded]]. Being told his mother died giving birth to him and then finding out that his "mother" is a CosmicHorror couldn't have helped, either.

* ''Everything'' regarding AntiHero Squall's screwed-up mental state in ''FinalFantasyVIII'' can be traced back to [[spoiler:separation issues at a very young age when Ellone was taken away from him at the orphanage.]] Compounded by an apparent [[ThereAreNoTherapists complete lack of emotional support]] following [[spoiler:their separation, and by the fact that junctioning Guardian Forces during his training caused him to forget his childhood, making it impossible for him to re-evaluate his childhood trauma from a more mature perspective.]]

* ''FirstEncounterAssaultRecon's'' entire storyline is one giant Freudian Excuse in which the main villain, Paxton Fettel, sets out to [[spoiler:free his mother, Alma, who was a powerful psychic who was used as a living incubator for psychic supersoldiers since she was eight years old, and had her children stolen from her in front of her eyes]]. Incidentally, the project lead who was behind this whole round of depravity turns out to be [[spoiler:Alma's own father, Harlan Wade]].

* The point of ''{{VideoGame/Psychonauts}}'' is Raz [[BattleInTheCenterOfTheMind going into various people's minds]] and ''fighting'' their Freudian Excuses. In addition, you can break open vaults and see film-strips that detail important parts of that character's childhood, often revealing their FreudianExcuse.

* ''{{VideoGame/Xenogears}}''; Fei/Id/Grahf and maybe even Ramsus and Krelian.

* Depending on your interpretation (and which games you consider to be cannon), one possible explanation for [[MonkeyIsland LeChuck's]] evil aggression is his unrequited love for Elaine. However, later games indicate he was evil before meeting Elaine (he IS a pirate, after all). [[TalesOfMonkeyIsland Most recently]], the manipulative nature of the Voodoo Lady seems to be a possible source of his evil.

* A variation in ''GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas'', when CJ will sometimes taunt after killing someone, [[SarcasmMode 'I'm sorry, I had a difficult childhood!']]

* {{In The 1st Degree}} has artist James Tobin charged with first-degree murder and grand theft. The interrogation tape of Yvonne Barnes suggests that Tobin ended up doing these things because his wife Helen divorced him. However, she did that because she apparently got fed up with his ways. This would indicate that Tobin may or may not have much of an excuse for what he did.

* It's a fairly common theme in the ''MetalGear'' series, but especially in [=MGS4=]'s "Beauty and the Beast Corps." Their crippling post-traumatic stress disorder is apparently the key ingredient to being cybernetically enhanced elite troopers.

* Dr. Koppelthorne in ''MetalGearAcid 2'' primarily did the stuff he did because he wanted to revive his wife who was killed.

* Just about ''everything'' regarding AntiHero Squall's screwed-up mental state in ''FinalFantasyVIII'' can be traced back to [[spoiler:separation issues at a very young age when Ellone was taken away from him at the orphanage.]] Compounded by an apparent [[ThereAreNoTherapists complete lack of emotional support]] following [[spoiler:their separation, and by the fact that junctioning Guardian Forces during his training caused him to forget his childhood, making it impossible for him to re-evaluate his childhood trauma from a more mature perspective.]]
** Not to mention [[spoiler:Ultimecia, whose whole motivation behind her evil is being feared and hated for something she hasn't even done and doesn't know she's going to do yet.]]

** According to [[WordOfGod Takashi Tokita]], this was originally written down in the script, but three-fourths of the script were removed in the Super Famicom version, and it wasn't until they made the DS remake that they could implement it in. In other words, the DS remake was actually more of a directors cut.

** Dimitri had been rejected from the art community (of course, it wasn't that good to begin with).

* One was given to the recurring villain of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'', [[spoiler: Seymour Guado]]. In a nutshell, [[spoiler: Non-human dad marries human mom, but his species' xenophobic civilization doesn't like that their leader married a human, so she and Seymour are exiled to a long-abandoned temple. Mom decides that Seymour will need to be powerful to be accepted, so she undergoes a procedure that will allow him to call on her as a powerful summon beast but will also turn her into a statue while young Seymour is crying for her not to, effectively meaning he's been abandoned by both parents. Not to mention that Summon Beast Mommy [[http://ui19.gamespot.com/1682/finalfantasyxanima_2.jpg looks like this]].]]

* Prince Luca Blight from ''SuikodenII'' is one of the nastiest, evilest, and most badass villains ever conceived. He makes some pretty good attempts at subverting InfantImmortality, even. He also kills an entire unit of his own country's soldiers (The 'Youth Brigade', even - kinda' like heavily armed boyscouts), kills his father, usurps the throne, starts a war, and unleashes some SealedEvilInACan to depopulate a large city completely. However... [[spoiler: When he was 6, he watched his mother being raped by soldiers from the country he's invading in the present, while his father ran to hide in the capital. The kidnap-rape wasn't just a random act of malice by enemy soldiers, it was ordered done by the then mayor of Muse. Even though the Highlands and Jowston were indeed at war, they weren't invading anything, they were non-combatants. Luca's mother died nine months later, which was when his little sister was born. The little sister, who grew up to strongly resemble her mother and thus serve as a living reminder of the horror that he'd witnessed all those years ago. He was basically seeking revenge on both his father, and the country he blames for the events.]]

* Basically the entire point of ''{{VideoGame/Psychonauts}}'' is Raz [[BattleInTheCenterOfTheMind going into various people's minds]] and ''fighting'' their Freudian Excuses. In addition, you can break open vaults and see film-strips that detail important parts of that character's childhood, often revealing their FreudianExcuse.

** Big Boss himself had to endure several of his allies being exploited by the government, sometimes just being sold out to their enemy to cover up their secrets, and he had been used to kill his mentor just because they didn't want to abort a mission to steal the legacy from the enemy and yet avoid nuclear war (and that's just going by the abridged version of the true reason for his being recruited to kill The Boss, In the unabridged version, it was deliberately set up that way specifically because they feared her charisma and planned her death from the beginning, and even manipulating a sadistic GRU colonel into firing on his own countrymen and create an international controversy just to have the excuse to have her killed.), and even his own friends use him for things, even taking his DNA and cloning him without his consent. It's no wonder why he would end up founding Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land.

* ''[[OgreBattle Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis]]'' is an entire game of FreudianExcuse for a villain that the player has to play through.

* In ''VideoGame/PokemonBlackAndWhite'', N is perceived as a [[WellIntentionedExtremist well-intentioned extremist]] since he wants to separate humans and Pokémon because he thinks that humans treat the latter like tools. The reason for this is because [[spoiler:his father, Ghetsis, deliberately neglected him so that he would become what he is now. N was raised with abused Pokémon for a good portion of his life and believed that humans were evil (aside from his "subjects" in Team Plasma, of course), setting Ghetsis' plan into motion so that he could make Pokémon illegal for everyone but himself so he could rule Unova. And Ghetsis even tells N that he's '[[CompleteMonster a monster incapable]] [[MoralEventHorizon of understanding humans.]]']]

* Just about everyone in Gospel of ''MegamanBattleNetwork 2'', gradually getting more and more sympathetic.

** Just about the only members who ''don't'' have a FreudianExcuse of some kind are Arashi and Dark Miyabi. considering that Dark Miyabi was a PunchClockVillain and Arashi wasn't...that says a lot.

* For all the evil that he did afterwards, Ganondorf from ''TheLegendOfZelda'' series had a fairly understandable reason for his desire to conquer Hyrule and claim the Triforce: [[spoiler: His people were trapped in a lifeless desert, forced to steal from others just to eke out a life. Seeing his people in such despair, and then seeing a land in spitting distance that was rich, prosperous, and inhabited by people who didn't even realize their good fortune, made Ganondorf understandably VERY angry. Supplemental material like the official Nintendo Comics, and brief mentions in Ocarina of Time, hint that Ganondorf actually tried to invade Hyrule the old-fashioned way. When that fails and he is forced to swear fealty to the Hyrulian king, he turns to searching for the Triforce as a second option.]]

* The NintendoDS remake of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIV'' gives this to Golbez. [[spoiler: His father was killed by the town for teaching magic, his mother died giving birth to [[TheHero his younger brother, Cecil.]] The hate he generated was enough for Zemus to manipulate him into stealing the crystals.]]

* One was given to the recurring villain of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'', [[spoiler: Seymour Guado]]. In a nutshell, [[spoiler: Non-human dad marries human mom, but his species' xenophobic civilization doesn't like that their leader married a human, so she and Seymour are exiled to a long-abandoned temple. Mom decides that Seymour will need to be powerful to be accepted, so she undergoes a procedure that will allow him to call on her as a powerful summon beast but will also turn her into a statue while young Seymour is crying for her not to, effectively meaning he's been abandoned by both parents. Not to mention that Summon Beast Mommy [[http://ui19.gamespot.com/1682/finalfantasyxanima_2.jpg looks like this]].]]

* ''{{VideoGame/Xenogears}}''; Fei/Id/Grahf and maybe even Ramsus and Krelian.

** In ''SilentHill2'', [[spoiler:Eddie used his humiliating childhood traumas to excuse his violent methods of coping with the way people look at him]]. And by "violent", I mean [[spoiler:''murder'']].

* The good-aligned path in ''[[BaldursGate Baldur's Gate: Throne of Bhaal]]'' is to accept that Sarevok, BigBad of the first game and [[spoiler: the protagonist's half-brother]], could just as easily have turned out like the protagonist and vice versa had their childhoods been swapped.

* In ''DragonQuestVIII'', Marcello, manipulative JerkAss extraordinaire, is revealed to be the child of an affair between a sleazeball noble and his maid. When the noble's wife gives birth to a son, who happens to be Angelo, the noble ousts both the maid and the young Marcello without a penny to their name, just to cover his tracks. Marcello's mother soon afterward died of ''sheer despair'', leaving Marcello alone to struggle to survive in the world, eventually joining the clergy. However, throughout his time in the clergy, most of the higher ups constantly looked down upon and outright insulted him just because he was of common blood, despite the fact that he quickly became a prominent figure in the church's Templar branch. All of this resulted in what Marcello is in the game proper: A bitter, condescending, [[AmbitionIsEvil overly ambitious]] prick who blames Angelo for everything he went through, and while this is technically true, he takes his bitterness over it ''way'' too far.

* [[FanNickname The Shouty Guy]] from ''MondoMedicals'' apparently (as far as his insane {{Engrish}} ramblings can be believed) witnessed his father dying from cancer and this shock was at least partially responsible for his decision to begin curing cancers via [[spoiler:killing the patients]], including [[spoiler:killing the player character under pretense of curing cancer]].

* Many people online should at least have some awareness of the AllegedlyFreeGame ''VideoGame/AdventureQuest'', and its prequel ''VideoGame/DragonFable''. Both games are full of puns (we aren't kidding, even the designers and game characters lampshade this) and are generally very comedic in nature, but the way they create their villains are a lot more mature than they let on.

** Sepulchure used to be a legendary hero in the ''VideoGame/DragonFable'' timeline, but then he lost a "loved one" and apparently began to fall, and fall, and fall...until he goes from being a FallenHero to a class-A BigBad.
** Ironically, Sepulchure actually treats his daughter with lots of love as a baby in ''VideoGame/DragonFable'' ... speed up to the MMO ''VideoGame/AdventureQuestWorlds'' where Gravelyn is not only an adult, but is also evil. She has no Excuse.

-->'''The Sniper''': Wait, back up. What'd these folks do to me again?

-->'''The Director''': Exactly. A victimized professional killer.

* Just about everyone in Gospel of ''MegamanBattleNetwork 2'', gradually getting more and more sympathetic.
** Speedy Dave who was trying to protect the natural world. It's more left to the viewer's imagination; but it's probably easy to assume the rapid modernization of the world caused him to lose his home or a childhood site he loved to visit.
** Princess Pride of Creamland. Creamland was one of the first nations to go online, but was soon ignored by other bigger nations that went online later.
** Gauss Magnus was born to a poor family. His brother was adopted by a rich family, but not him. Then his parents became ill and died, leaving Gauss with ''nobody''. So he worked hard to get rich and break the society from within.
** The leader, [[spoiler:Sean]], was [[spoiler: orphaned in a plane crash. Despite inheriting a fortune from them, he was forced to live with cruel relatives and was ostracized by society. He also mentions that he was being picked on, too. The internet was the only way he was able to make friends, so he played at being an adult and made net-friends in everyone else, who came together to form Gospel.]]
** Just about the only members who ''don't'' have a FreudianExcuse of some kind are Arashi and Dark Miyabi. considering that Dark Miyabi was a PunchClockVillain and Arashi wasn't...that says a lot.

** Dub the turtle is obsessed with exercise because [[spoiler: he was lost at an airport, and was unable to catch up to his owner because of a moving sidewalk.]]

* Most of the major villains in ''DarkCloud 2'' (''Dark Chronicle'') have one of these; notably [[spoiler: Dr. Jaming, Gaspard, and Emperor Griffin himself.]] The only exceptions are [[MonsterClown Flotsam]] and [[spoiler:[[SealedEvilInACan Dark Element]]]].

* The professor Layton series, variant from game to game:
** Don Paolo because Layton apparently stole Claire from him. Frankly, Claire wasn't even interested in him anyway.
*** The rage fit he got is also what caused his hair to stick up in that peculiar way it does.
** Anton in the Diabolical Box, because his wife left him.
** [[Spoiler:Clive.]] in the Unwound Future, because [[Spoiler:the scientists destroyed his home and killed his parents.]]
** Descole may be the first aversion. Seriously, WHAT IS THAT GUY'S PROBLEM?