Become A Real Boy / Video Games

• Bomberman: The NES game's plot is Bomberman's quest to escape the bomb factory, thereby becoming human.
• Parodied in Borderlands 2 with the "A Real Boy" questline. A malfunctioning Hyperion loader named Mal wants to become a human — and because his only observations of humanity have been on Pandora, they're pretty skewed. After you steal some bandit "clothes" and human limbs for him, he decides to kill you, because that's all he's seen you and everyone else do to each other. In the end, you convince Mal that he's become human when he feels pain during your battle with him, as he's under the impression that robots can't feel pain and humans can.
• The villain of Comix Zone has liberated himself from the comic book he was formerly a character in but is still a 2-D drawing. In the Game Over sequence, the death of his creator embodies him in true flesh and blood, giving him the potential to Take Over the World.
• Deltarune introduces Spamton in Chapter 2, a living robotic spambot who is obsessed with becoming a "big shot". If you battle him as an Optional Boss, his suddenly somber and lucid dialog as he dies implies all he really wanted was to just not be a puppet, in more than one way; He wanted to achieve freedom and stop being someone's Unwitting Pawn, and also stop being a literal puppet. His goal goes a step beyond most examples; His Medium Awareness and talks about reaching "Heaven" imply that he wants to become something more like the player.
• Dragon Age:
  • Spirits are entities born from the thoughts of mortals that reside in the Fade, the world of dreams. Many spirits have a fascination with the physical world that spawned them, and wish to know it. Demons are that wish gone horribly wrong, thanks to being exposed to the darker facets of mortals such as desire, pride, rage, and envy. Cole, a Spirit of Compassion who took on the form of a dying mage (the original Cole), has gone further down this road than any other spirit in the franchise and, depending on the result of his personal quest in Dragon Age: Inquisition, can continue down it or turn back and embrace his nature as a spirit. According to him, spirits such as himself aren't "real". Only through contact with mortals can they become "real".
  • One possible ending of Dragon Age: Origins reveals that Shale the golem plans to seek a way to become a dwarf again, which she once was, despite her frequently expressed disdain for "soft, squishy" beings.
• Dragon Quest:
  • In the first chapter of Dragon Quest IV, Healie the healslime wants to become a human. He reasons that since he wants to become human, if he hangs around humans, he'll become one so he joins Ragnar on his quest. It actually works and he leaves Ragnar to start his own life after Ragnar joins the hero/heroine in the fifth chapter.
  • In Dragon Quest VII, the desire to become human is revealed to be a repeating situation, with several people found in towns being former monsters that decided to become human instead. However, they have a hard time fitting in, and they appreciate when the hero tells them of where they can go to follow their dreams more fully.
• Falling Fred and its sequels have Dr. Crash T. Dummy, a computer robot in the body of a crash test dummy with Ph. D. in "Kinetic Force-Educed Organ Relocation Statistics". His descriptions in various games state that becoming a human being is an earnest desire of his, and his last promotion title in Clicker Fred is even called "A Real Boy!".
• Curie, a Ms. Nanny robot in Fallout 4 assigned to medical research, finds her research efforts stymied by the nature of her physical being. The course of her personal quest line involves her being uploaded into a braindead donor synth body, resulting in an expansion of consciousness.
• Scaramouche from Genshin Impact zigzags this trope all over, throughout his long life. A puppet created by the Electro Archon and then deemed too emotional to serve his purpose, he longed to become a human through obtaining a "heart" of his own. After several tragedies left him Maddened Into Misanthropy, he abandoned this wish and instead became a Godhood Seeker, believing that divinity would at last fill the emptiness he felt inside. At the conclusion of the Sumeru Archon quest, he loses both the Electro Gnosis and his godhood, but in learning the truth of his past and confronting his own lies, he is able to obtain a Vision, and with it the symbolic heart that he always wanted.
• While part of Yomiel's deal with the blue people in Ghost Trick is for revenge, he also wants them to find some way to have an artificial life. His real dream is to grow old in a society that accepts him and die surrounded by loving family, rather than "living" forever as a ghost in isolation.
• Tio in Grandia II is an automaton with essentially no free will and no emotions. When she is told that she is free to go wherever she pleases, she doesn't understand the concept and tags along with the group. Of course, this all changes when Mareg dies. Conveniently, this also gives her a new special move in combat.
• In the original Halo trilogy, Cortana generally seems content being an AI. By the time Halo 4 rolls around, she shows signs of wanting to be human. This could be caused by the fact that she's entering rampancy which will end with her insanity and death. This statement sums it up best:
  Cortana: I can give you over forty thousand reasons why that sun isn't real. I know it because the emitter's Rayleigh effect is disproportionate to its suggested size. I know it because its stellar cycle is more symmetrical than that of an actual star. But for all that, I'll never actually know if it looks real... if it feels real.
• Daniella in Haunting Ground is a homunculus who cannot feel anything, and believes she is incomplete. Daniella pursues Fiona because she believes that the Azoth within Fiona's womb can change this. Word of God later revealed that Daniella is actually human. She was kidnapped as a child, experimented on, and abused by Lorenzo and Ricardo.
• In Ib, the little girl Mary turns out to be one of the paintings come to life in the demented gallery. She desperately wants to escape so that she can live as a normal human with Ib and Garry and be their friend. Too bad there's no way she can go about it without Garry getting hurt.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • The motive of most members of Organization XIII is to get their hearts back. The leader, though, wants to become a "great being". They are a bit unusual in that they were once human and want to be human again, rather than being artificial and wanting to become human. Ultimately, it's revealed that they could naturally regain their hearts over time and were never truly inhuman.
  • The Riku Replica in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories definitely qualifies, even more so in the remake, being a clone of a main character who's had his memories altered into making him think he's the real deal when the truth comes out and he encounters the person who he's a replica of he goes as far as trying to kill them so that he can get out of their shadow and become his own person.
  • In Kingdom Hearts III, Namine, Roxas and Xion finally become humans thanks to perfected replica bodies that are 100% human, and Sora using the Power of Waking.
• League of Legends:
  • Ahri is based on a kumiho — the Korean version of the nine-tailed fox, one known for both being predatory and desiring to be human. Appropriately, she has this as her goal in her pre-Continuity Reboot backstory. She was a nine-tailed fox that wanted to be human, so she absorbed the soul of a dying human mage during a battle and gained human form. However, she didn't see this as really being 'human', and wanted to go so far to be human in more than just form. As she absorbed more human souls and became more like a human, she also gained a conscience and realized that what she had done was evil.
    • Downplayed in the post-Continuity Reboot story — while she still gained a degree of humanity and conscience over time by absorbing human memories, she no longer seeks to become human. Her new goal is to find any traces of her lost Vastaya tribe.
  • Gwen was once the childhood doll of Isolde, wife of the Ruined King. Following Isolde's death and the Ruination taking place, a fragment of her soul managed to find its way back to Gwen and imbue her with life magic, granting her a human body. With that, Isolde also grants Gwen her own love of life and a perpetual curiosity to see the world and experience new sensations.
  • An inversion to this trope is Orianna Reveck. She starts off as an ordinary human girl living in the toxic environments of Zaun. The pollution of the city eventually makes her ill, and her father, a mechanic, has no choice but to replace every component of her body with machinery, turning her into a Full-Conversion Cyborg of sorts. Finally all that remained was her heart, but she had no choice but to transplant that into her father to save his life. Even with a human soul remaining, she's stuck in a state of existential uncertainty if she truly has humanity left in her.
• Batreaux of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is this scary-looking (but friendly) demon-like creature that wants nothing more than to be a normal Skyloftian, and begs Link to get Gratitude Crystals that he hopes will allow him to transform. Successfully get enough, and he can be found in the local bazaar in a humanoid form... though he still looks slightly demonic.
• The manual for LEGO Stunt Rally describes Mega Hurtz as "a slightly haywire robot who wants to be human" and says he's racing to earn money for upgrades to make him more humanlike.
• Defied by Legion in Mass Effect — they're not human or even particularly human-like, and are perfectly fine with this, even expressing bewilderment that humans view individuality as a beneficial thing. Until Mass Effect 3, in which the choice ends up being, bluntly, become full individuals rather than a consensus of interfaced programming nodules, or die horribly, although you do get to choose which happens.
• Persona:
  • Aigis in Persona 3, which is the crux of the story for The Answer in FES. After being repaired of her injuries from her battle with Ryoji, Aigis finds her own humanity toward the end of 3, but in The Answer it is revealed that Aigis slowly rekindles her urges and will of losing the side of humanity and the penalties a living being must face upon the protagonist' death. Her will and wishes to remove her side of humanity manifests as Metis, whom is known as her "sister" who doesn't want to be left alone. At the end, the sisters reconcile and merge into one being, returning all of Aigis' humanity.
    • It's even taken far enough that Aigis' brain is fried at the end of The Answer, and by all right she should be a robo-vegetable, but somehow comes out of it just fine. As a bonus, because Aigis becomes a Persona main character, she has to have the power to equip all of the Persona's the player's managed to acquire thus far... which means the plot sets her Persona, which evolved to reflect her character growth, aside so she can fill her lost love's shoes, encapsulating all the worst issues with this trope through Gameplay and Story Integration: she became human by falling in love with the protagonist, and so once he's gone, she loses it altogether, and has to mimic him until she finds something else to rebuild her humanity on.
  • Teddie in Persona 4. He's a cartoon character living in the TV world, but wants to join the rest of the cast in the real world as a human. He doesn't go through the typical sudden-onset humanity that is typical of the trope, though, until he gets his own Persona just before the halfway point and then manages to manifest a human body.
  • Upon being thrown into the TV world, Labrys of Persona 4: Arena created a replica of Yasogami High in which she could try to live out this trope, forgetting that she wasn't human to begin with. The plot of Story Mode is centered on rescuing her before her Shadow kills her for it.
  • Morgana in Persona 5 is a cat, cartoonish in the Metaverse but realistic in the real world. He's convinced that he Was Once a Man, and aids the party to find a way to become human. Turns out he was never human to begin with and realized that long before he actually admitted it out loud, but spends much of the game in denial before finally coming to terms with it in the end. However, in the Royal Updated Re Release, he becomes human in Maruki's false reality but rejects it along with the others because Misery Builds Character.
• Phantasy Star IV:
  • Averted in that the androids of the party, Wren and Demi, are both hundreds of years old (Wren is actually closer to a thousand years old) and perfectly happy being androids with feelings, having presumably awakened to their emotions some time ago. Some fans speculate that Wren actually built Demi as a companion for himself, which is why she's small, cute, and more emotionally developed despite being some six hundred years younger than him.
  • Played straight with Rika, an artificial humanoid; the player can watch her slowly grow up over the course of the game (including a childish phase and a know-it-all adolescent phase, before arriving at maturity). At one point, she even describes the difference between being informed of things and encountering them in the real world, but none of the things she counts among them are romantic love, and in fact her first experience with displays of human emotion is mourning the death of Alys.
• Done in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2. New main character Lamia Loveless is a cyborg spy for a villain group. She was taught how to socialize and everything, but aside from that, like all 'W Numbers', she is supposed to lack a personality due to intentional programming. Unfortunately for the bad guys, all the W Numbers seen obtain a personality of their own, even if it only causes them to sacrifice themselves to save their masters...
• Unusually enough inverted with Kogasa Tatara, an umbrella tsukumogami from Touhou Project who, due to her failures with scaring people, her failures with babysitting, and her failures in general, considered going back to being a real umbrella again so that she at least could be of some use... the depressing implication being that she thinks people would appreciate her more if she was dead.
• In Undertale, you encounter an angry ghost inhabiting a training dummy. If you go through the game killing everyone you meet, the ghost becomes so enraged that the built-up emotion causes it to fuse with the dummy and become corporeal. This makes it so happy that it fulfilled its life-long dream that it will immediately spare you. If, while playing on a Nintendo Switch, you spared the dummy in a Neutral/Pacifist run, you can later find the ghost leaves the dummy and inhabits a life-sized anime Cat Girl doll, Mew Mew, still trying to fuse with her new body. Sparing her again and talking causes her to begin fusing.
• Valkyria Chronicles: Subverted with Alicia, who is convinced that her powers mean she isn't human. She's wrong, naturally (it's all in her head), but she's so dedicated to defining herself by bad examples that the only way she can deal with them is by rejecting them completely in favor of becoming Welkin's wife.
• World of Warcraft:
  • While a majority of the Forsaken have resigned themselves to undeath, there are many who see their existence as a curable disease or curse and long for a return to full life.
  • In the third expansion, Cataclysm, the Worgen of Gilneas have developed a cure to allow them to retain their humanity while transformed into their Werewolf forms, but are still looking for a way to get rid of the curse completely.
• KOS-MOS from Xenosaga skirts with this trope on and off, but eventually she becomes humanized, albeit through a somewhat supernatural mechanism.

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