Video Games / Insane Troll Logic

Insane Troll Logic in video games.

A major part of the Flash game Argument Champion consists of intertwining arbitrarily chosen audience likes and dislikes with equally arbitrary concepts, often relying on a word with two or more definitions. For example, you can construct a "logical" chain connecting REBELLION to CEILING. Of course, shorter chains that rely on less Chewbacca Defense reasoning get you more impressive opinion swings, but usually you'll find at least one.
In Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, French Governor de Fayet comments that former slave Adewale's murder of him is because the latter was from freed from slavery. This, while technically true, doesn't take into account that Adewale is trying to murder him because of all the abuses he endured as a slave. Not to mention the Governor having just murdered an entire ship full of slaves.
In Awful Fantasy, an infamous 2002 romhack of Final Fantasy VI by Something Awful Goons, there is the following piece of Insane Troll Logic, which makes about as much sense as the rest of the hack: "Ice cream, eyebeams — cyclops. One. One means death! AL IS GOING TO KILL EVERYONE!"
Baldur's Gate II has some of this logic coming from an actual insane troll. Here's the conversation if you try to keep a dialogue going as long as possible instead of attacking him right after he says:
Troll Cook: Hello there foodthing. You are just in time. Please just jump onto the grill over there.
Protagonist: Pardon me?
Troll Cook: The grill. That big metal thing. Jump on. Be careful, it's hot!
Protagonist: You speak well for a troll.
Troll Cook: My mother tried hard to give me good learning. She sent me to live with these hobgoblins here. They smart. Trained me how to cook real good.
Protagonist: Do you like these orcs?
Troll Cook: They smell bad, but they're okay. They can be mean sometimes. Chief DigDag sometimes cuts my fingers off and throws them onto the grill. Says they taste like sausages.
Protagonist: Doesn't that hurt?
Troll Cook: Yep. But I'm a troll. Fingers cut off. Fingers grow back. Now quit talking and start broiling! Chief DigDag doesn't like me talking to the food.
Protagonist: I'm not letting you cook me, you crazy troll!
Troll Cook: Uncle Cajum, he was crazy. Me, I'm not crazy. I'm a cook. Now get on the grill!
Protagonist: Why would I want to be on the grill?
Troll Cook: Geez. It's impossible to get good help nowadays. If you're not on the grill, how am I going to cook you?
Protagonist: I don't want to be cooked.
Troll Cook: If you didn't want to be cooked, then why did you apply for the job? I think you'll all make a tasty snack! Boys! Get 'em!
Used tragically in the climactic fight between Batman and the Big Bad in Batman: The Telltale Series, should Batman decide to reveal his identity to keep Alfred safe. The only way the villain can reconcile the truth of Batman - an admitted role model of theirs - being Bruce Wayne is by framing it as Bruce simply looking to prey on the weak.
In BlazBlue, you would think that Hazama, Kokonoe, Jin Kisaragi, or even Relius Clover could be capable of this. It's really Lotte Carmine (who admittedly actually is insane) and Ada Clover (the latter to a small extent).
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!:
- A loading screen declares that Pangolin-manufactured shields must have the highest capacity because the Pangolin company only makes shields and thus 'must have more shield to fit into every shield'.
  Loading screen: BAM! Logic!
- Nurse Nina is a fugitive on the run from one of the corporations (it's never said which one), but didn't bother to change her name when starting her new life on Elpis. Why? Because that's exactly what they'd expect her to do!
In the text intro to Chapter 74 of Caribbean Hideaway, Barley the pirate explains why a certain hideout is rather unimaginatively known as "The Cave".
Barley: Places with names tend t' get found. If it ain't got a name, it ain't a place; and if it ain't a place, it ain't gonna be found, ain't it?
Castlevania:
- In Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, Graham declares that he is destined to inherit Dracula's powers simply because he was born on the day Dracula was destroyed. Never mind the fact that there were millions of other people who were also born on that day. The sequel Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow reveals two of those other people, who also inherited a portion of Dracula's power, lending some credibility to Graham's claim. They were termed "Dark Lord Candidates" and recruited by the cult "With Light" to assume the role since protagonist Soma Cruz, Dracula's reincarnation, rejected his destiny to do so.
- Also in Dawn of Sorrow: Celia's cult is dedicated to creating new Dark Lord to replace Dracula, in their belief that Good Needs Evil and thus God needs the Dark Lord, embodying Perfect Evil, to stand opposite Him so that He can embody Perfect Good. It is Arikado who disputes this in the ending, stating that forcing the rise of a new Dark Lord was unnecessary. Even if it isn't Soma due to being Dracula reborn, if the world needs a new Dark Lord, one will appear of their own accord, as was the case with Dracula himself.
One of the Soviet missions in Command & Conquer: Red Alert would end in failure if you actually completed your mission objectives. Only by deliberately losing in an oddly specific way could you progress through the campaign (also an example of Guide Dang It!).
In Dawn of War Evil Sorcerer Syndri kills a hapless cultist who brought the news of the advancing Space Marine army, explaining that the cultists was "stupid enough to personally deliver bad news to Lord Bale and we cannot abide stupidity". By that logic, had his desire been fulfilled and there had been no stupid cultist in their band, they would not have gotten the news at all and the Space Marines would've caught them off-guard. Of course, that's Chaos for you.
Jean-Luc Measurehead in Disco Elysium is a racial supremacist and hardcore believer in anthropometric-based racism, to the point he has phrenology charts tattooed all over his body. The problem? Measurehead is black and anthorpometric racism is complete rubbish that claims white people are superior. His justification is that Occidentals have fallen into weakness after stopping colonization and crushing lesser civilizations, but especially because they drink al gul, smoke tobacco and eat potatoes and don't partake in "semen retention", meaning the science is sound but his race is the superior one. Despite these shenanigans, he shows himself to be very eloquent and well-read (he's just been reading the wrong books), and is one of the only two characters in the game astute enough to convince Harry that alcohol is ruining his life.
In Disgaea 4, Fuka gives some pretty interesting arguments on why she's not actually dead:
Fuka: Even if I were dead, I'd be sent to heaven, not hell or whatever you call this place. I didn't do anything wrong to deserve this. Why would a ninth grader die anyway? If this isn't heaven, then it can't be real. If this isn't real, it must be a dream. How's that!? It's a flawless theory!
Valvatorez: You're right! It's airtight!
- Then again, it's a Disgaea game, which tends to be full of this.
Anti-Mage, from DOTA 2 who is entirely based around... well, being good against mages, was an acolyte in a monastery in which the monks living within were killed by a legion of the undead. Anti-Mage's reaction? Not to declare war on the undead, but on all magic and every mage in the world. One wouldn't even know about his grudge against the undead if it weren't for a single offhanded line he says when killing the only Zombie-based hero in the game.

In Dungeon Munchies, the extremely talented necromancer Simmer became interested and equally skilled in cooking upon realizing the similarities between the two disciplines. In her words, you're taking something that's dead, taking parts of it, then infusing it with hellfire and magic to create something new and useful.
In Dwarf Fortress, it's possible for you to convict a crime victim of the very crime committed upon them — for example, convicting the dwarf who has had his blood drained of draining his own blood. Your dwarves will actually be 'outraged at the bizarre conviction against all reason of the victim of a crime recently.' When you start looking among the world's events, you seriously have to question certain deities' reasons for letting a demon out of hell. Sure, the more evil gods of misery and blood might just want some more of it, gods of valor might want heroes to have something to destroy, but just about ANY god can do this for reasons concerning ANY part of their sphere, be it youth, knowledge, or rainbows. It's been documented at least one god did this after pondering the ineffable subtleties of fish. Perhaps the gods have their own Animal Wrongs Group up there...
Exit Fate's Father Luther explains how to spot a vampire◊:
All vampires play the organ! And if all vampires play the organ, then one who plays the organ is most likely a vampire!
Fallout 4: In the "Automatron" DLC questline, you investigate the Killer Robots unleashed by the Mechanist, and just why they are killing everyone if the Mechanist is claiming to be trying to save the people of the Commonwealth. As it turns out, the Robobrains that convey the Mechanist's orders to their robots are the ones at fault, because the Robobrains came to the conclusion that any aid they provide would be rendered moot later: if they saved someone from a raider, for instance, they might later be killed by a feral ghoul, or a Super Mutant, or simply by accident through no one's fault. Ergo, the best way to save everyone was to kill everyone. The Mechanist was never aware of what was happening because all the Robobrains reported was that they were carrying out their orders.
In Final Fantasy XIII:
- The fal'Cie are Jerkass Gods (well not actual gods but close to it) who run on Blue-and-Orange Morality, but in practice their methods are this trope. Fal'cie brand humans with mystical markings, turning them into l'Cie, servants that are bound to complete an objective, called a Focus. However, the Focus is usually only conveyed via vague visions and hallucinations, the fal'Cie sometimes state clearly what the Focus is but not always, leaving it to the l'Cie to guess what their Focus is. Completing the Focus comes with a time limit, fail and you turn into a zombie-like Cie'th. Succeed and your reward is immortality...as a crystal statue, until someday the fal'Cie has need of you again and revives you with a new Focus, with all the same restrictions as before.
- Even more troll logic can be seen in Balthandier's plan in the final chapter. Not that it stops the heroes from going along with it anyway. The fal'Cie want to be reunited with their god. In order to do that a MASSIVE number of humans need to die, as in all of Cocoon. The fal'Cie power Cocoon, and so if they were to die then Cocoon would fall to Pulse, killing all the humans and bringing the gods back to the world. The problem? They cannot self destruct, and no human can harm them, so they create l'Cie to kill them. Okay so far... but then he tells the heroes the plan to die at their hands thus killing all humans. Being heroes they refuse, so enter the troll logic. If they don't do it then he'll manipulate the human military to do it instead. WAIT A MINUTE! You just told us humans can't hurt you and only we can. What will that accomplish? No matter, we now must stop you from manipulating the human military by killing you! What do you mean it was your plan all along to make us kill you and we just said we wouldn't? YOU HAVE TO BE STOPPED!
Fire Emblem: Awakening has this from Cervantes:
Cervantes: I've not shaved since my very first battle. And have I ever lost? No! Not even once! Ergo, my moustache makes me invincible. It's science, my boy, science!
Early on in Ghost Trick, Sissel discovers that the ghost of the recently deceased dog Missile has tagged along with him into the past to prevent his death. Missile doesn't bat an eye at such a feat, reasoning that if his master can walk on two feet and he can't, he shouldn't find it weird that Sissel can walk through time and he can't. Although animals and humans are capable of communicating with each other in the ghost world, their knowledge about the world is vastly different, resulting in Missile expressing thought patterns that seem like this to us but are actually standard or even times clever thinking by the standards of an animal.
Grand Theft Auto V allows you to start a fight with someone and then call the police on them - and if they are armed it will result in them getting shot. You can use this to rob Ammunation and assist you in Gang Attacks, to name a couple.
The Great Ace Attorney features the great detective himself, Herlock Sholmes, whose thinking is often flawed. Naruhodo often has to correct his reasoning, which can border on the absurd.
In Hyperdimension Neptunia V, Noire has this hilarious reason as to why Plutia should transform into Iris Heart. Take note, this is how the dialogue was said.
Noire: (Noire Logic) Plutia HDD -> we win -> Planeptune citizens see Sadie -> freak -> Lastation wins!
The Impossible Quiz has a bucketload of this. Half the questions run on insane troll logic, the other half run on no logic at all and must simply be solved through trial and error.
Played for horror in Injustice: Gods Among Us. After his Face–Heel Turn, Superman becomes the Judge, Jury, and Executioner obsessed with ending crime at all costs. But after he killed his ally Lex Luthor on live TV and heard the growing dissent against his tyrannical rule on Earth, he rants that the people are "ungrateful" for his "protection" and unleashes his forces on Metropolis and Gotham to Scare 'Em Straight. He also justifies killing the Joker for tricking him into killing his wife Lois Lane and nuking Metropolis by claiming it was "done to save millions of lives," but everyone knows he did it in revenge, not altruism.
Jables's Adventure. Jables and Squiddy plumb the depths of the Card-Carrying Villain's depravity:
Jables: I had no idea there was a villain.
Squiddy: I bet he's the one who kidnapped the princess.
Jables: Let her go, King Squid!
King Squid: I didn't kidnap any princess.
Squiddy: Then where is she?
King Squid: My plan doesn't involve the princess.
Squiddy: Yet you kidnapped her anyway.
Jables: That's evil.
King Squid: ...
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle: Josuke Higashikata's stand, Crazy Diamond, is able to return people and items to a previous state. For his level-2 Limit Break, he heals his opponent back to full health, reasoning that it would make for a fair fight, then proceeds to use Crazy Diamond to pummel the opponent like a punching bag.
Kid Icarus: Uprising: One of Hades' many uses of insane troll logic is to twist Pit saying how he doesn't want to get out of the Womb Level 'the old fashioned way' into meaning Pit hates life.
Hades: Unfortunately for you, there's only one way out!
Pit: NOOOO no no no please don't do that!
Hades: Obeying the call of nature is part of the cycle of life. Tell me, Pit, why do you hate life?
In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Master Xehanort wants to bring full-on Balance Between Light and Darkness to all Worlds. So throughout the series (both directly and by proxy), he performs countless Black Magic experiments and Complexity Addiction schemes that clearly benefit only the Realm of Darkness while simultaneously harming the Realm of Light. Never mind the fact that said Worlds, being in the Realm of Light, are naturally Light-leaning anyway.
- A flashback in Kingdom Hearts III: Re𝄌Mind both explains his reasoning and shows the gaping hole in it that he always ignores. Xehanort is convinced that people's hearts are inherently weak; accusing their light of being a farce, he claims that they repeatedly steal power from each other and delude themselves into thinking they've earned it, using "hollow reasons as justification", and would plunge the whole World into chaos with their uncontrolled darkness if they kept this up. His solution was to become the master of darkness itself, purge all those weak hearts and their false lights, and harness the original light of Kingdom Hearts to maintain order in the new, empty world. Given what he apparently witnessed on his world tour, it's an understandable world-view... but then he arbitrarily decides that his OWN heart is somehow different, and over the course of the next 75 years does EXACTLY what he'd accused all those "weak-hearted" people of doing. Why? Because he can sense where he's meant to go and what he's supposed to do. Stable Time Loop or not, this is far from a rational basis for a decision, and one gets the impression that his whole worldview was partially created by projecting his OWN flaws on everyone else.
In L.A. Noire, Cole accuses someone of hiding the fact that their friend was raped because when Cole asked her to describe her friend she didn't mention the fact that they were raped. This is made worse by the fact that the player needs to think to do this themselves during this character's interview, something which is highly non-intuitive for more reasons then just the insane nature of the accusation.^note
The description of the Stone Mask in the 3DS remake of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is this. Putting on the mask allows Link to become as plain as a stone, so, the game reasons, since nobody pays attention to stones, you're practically invisible.
In Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, Dekar had the brilliant idea of sewing his coat to his own shirt, just so he could take both of them off at the same time. Even better, he doesn't remember this until after he offers his coat to Tia when they're on a cold mountain.
In Mass Effect:
- A Renegade Shepard can give Administrator Anoleis the evidence of his own corruption and say:
  Shepard: You refused to testify. Obviously you hate justice and deserve this.
  Lorik Qi'in: What insane breed of logic is that?!
- "Hey everyone! This store discriminates against the poor!
- An indoctrinated Hanar reasons that if his race worships the Protheans and the remaining Protheans were converted into the Reapers' slaves, the Hanar must worship the Reapers. Shepard might refer to this as "insane jellyfish" logic.
  Shepard: You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!!
  Hanar: Therefore, as a faithful servant of the Enkindlers, we too must serve the Reapers.
  Shepard: You. Big. Stupid. Jellyfish!
  Kasumi: You know, I support religious freedom for all species, but that's just crazy.
- Ka'hairal Balak blames Shepard for the downfall of the batarians, because by stopping him at Terra Nova Shepard "forced" the Hegemony to accelerate research efforts on a Reaper corpse, therefore creating more indoctrinated batarians to sabotage Khar'shan when the Reapers came.
- Balak and the entire Batarian Hegemony seem to be fueled by it, such as the rationalization of the Terra Nova incident, which is; Back when humanity first went into space, they settled worlds which the batarians had "claimed". The batarians went to the Citadel Council to protest, and the Council were unmoved. The batarians promptly severed all diplomatic ties with the Council and attacked human colonies. They had the gall to be outraged when humanity didn't take this and retaliated. Skip forward twenty years later, and the batarians are galactic pariahs, and Balak feels dropping a massive asteroid on a planet will fix this. When Shepard points out this makes no damn sense and the batarians are the ones responsible for their current status, he brushes them off by saying they're choosing not to listen.

Many puzzles in McPixel require this to succeed. To put things in perspective, the first rule of playing this game is this: If the solution you have in mind makes sense, there's a 75% chance it's wrong. The remaining 25%? It works, but not in the way you were expecting it to. Although after a couple levels it's almost second nature.
The game Metal Wolf Chaos features propaganda news reports that define a True American as "anyone who supports the idea of having the families and friends of terrorist sympathizers murdered in the streets" rather than "anyone who is a citizen of America".
At one point in Paper Mario you find some instances of Duplighosts impersonating your partners and you having to Spot the Imposter. The third time the Duplighosts that appear to try and impersonate Kooper instead appear impersonating other npcs in the game, including Luigi, while insisting they are Kooper. The one impersonating Luigi tells you that you should believe he's the real Kooper because you should trust your own brother.
In Persona 4, the true killer claims that he didn't kill the victims, he only threw them into the TV world, which then was responsible for their deaths. This despite it being pointed out that he knew what would happen to Saki Konishi after Mayumi Yamano died in the TV world. Also, noting that the world is influenced by people's thoughts, suggests that everyone outside, including the investigation team, is responsible, presumably saying this as a way of playing mind games with them.
The whole setting is full of this in The Outer Worlds thanks to One Nation Under Copyright and everyone being completely indoctrinated in corporate loyalty. For example, at one point you can overhear a conversation between two workers about a third worker being gone. He was the guy who made the wanted posters for Phineas Welles. Corporate security had orders to round up anyone with a connection to Welles. Making the wanted posters is "a connection." Both of the workers think this was brilliant.
Pokémon Black and White:
- The Animal Wrongs Group, Team Plasma. Especially the grunts and their tendency to explain themselves along the lines of 'we're abusing this Pokemon to help it!'
- One of the Team Plasma members in Chargestone Cave has this line to offer after she is defeated: "It's bad for ordinary Trainers like you to use Pokémon. It's good for us members of Team Plasma to use Pokémon!"
Portal: In the second game, when you reunite with GLaDOS she calls you a monster for killing her, even though she's the one who tried to kill YOU — unprovoked, at that — in the first game. That is, it was her duty and task to terminate you, the subject, and your turn of the table defied that purpose and even dared to cause a sophisticated AI to cease functioning.
Resident Evil 6: Simmons' idea of preventing a disaster that might have happened should the President make the truth behind the Raccoon City Incident public was to cause an actual disaster by infecting the entire city of Tall Oaks with the C-Virus, including the President himself, and then nuking it to cover his tracks. Leon and Helena even lampshade this.
Sam & Max Hit the Road wouldn't be a '90s puzzle-adventure game without a few moments of this, such as:
- Combining a severed hand, a broken golf ball retriever, and a fridge magnet to create a device to extract a mood ring from the world's largest ball of twine;
- Using a wrench to loosen a giant ceramic fish so that you can crawl into it and be mistaken for a real fish by a fisherman literally five feet away from you who saw you do all of this, so that you can be stolen from his pile of caught fish by a helicopter pilot who ALSO mistakes your giant fake fish for a real fish, so that you can be dropped onto (sigh) the same goddamn giant ball of twine in order to snip 91 yards of twine off of it.
Spider-Man (PS4) has J Jonah Jameson resort to this to put the blame on Spider-Man. Sometimes, he makes a good point (arresting Fisk left a power vacuum for a new, more destructive gang to step up, for instance), but most of the time, it's just plain looney. For example, when a caller from out of town recounts her experience of having the tour bus she was on hijacked and taken hostage, and Spider-Man saved her, Jameson points something out: do they have bus hijackings back home? No. Do they have Spider-Man back home? No. Thus, Spider-Man is the cause of bus hijackings. QED.
The Narrator from The Stanley Parable uses this in the Confusion Ending to choose which of two doors to go through ^noteBoth doors lead to the same room. ;
The Narrator: Okay, so I know that each door has to lead somewhere, which means that somewhere, the place where we're trying to go, there must be a reverse door that leads here, and that, in turn, means that our destination corresponds with that counterinverted reverse door's origin, so, starting from the right, let us ask: "Will taking the right door lead us to where we're going?" And since the answer is clearly "yes", then by all accounts, the door on the right is the correct one. Another victory for logic.
The Spathi from Star Control 2 use this to justify their fear of an "Ultimate Evil" that surely intends to destroy them. They have never found any evidence that such an evil exists, which means that it must be hiding just outside the range of their most powerful sensors, which is proof of its nefarious intent.
- It should be noted that when they figure out how to open and close the slaver system-isolating forcefields the Spathi break their alliance and put a shield around their own planet to be safely shut off from the rest of the universe.
Early in Suikoden V there is a tournament to decide who will get to marry the Prince's sister. One group of people decide it's their patriotic duty to get a foreign competitor kicked out of the tournament. They do this by picking a fight with him so he will get disqualified when he kills them. When the Prince tries to stop them they figure that the real Prince would never try to stop such obviously patriotic people, therefore the Prince must be an impostor!
- Later on, Queen's Knight Childerich slaughters a group of innocent civilians in a town his army had liberated from The Prince. The reason? They didn't try to stop the Prince from fleeing the city and so that made them "traitors" to the Crown.
Fizzie from Sunset Overdrive employs this trope when trying to convince people to drink the soft drink Overcharge. At one point, he advises the Player Character to drink Overcharge while they're climbing a building because climbers need oxygen, Overcharge has carbon dioxide, and dioxide is twice the oxygen!
Team Fortress 2: It is, at times, hard to tell the difference between Soldier's brain and a large bag of rabid weasels that has just been violently shaken. As a result, it's rare for him to say anything that does make sense. At one point he claims that the law will be on his side when he commits murder, because he's Merasmus's old roommate, and he's homeless, which entitles him to kill Merasmus's new roommate, Tom Jones.
In Tropico 4, this is Sunny Flowers' reasoning behind wanting El Presidente to demolish all newspapers: "Did you know that paper is made from trees? Trees are your friends. Do you want to read the news on the corpses of your friends?"
In Touch Detective 3, Inspector Daria and Mackenzie are both stumped as to why someone has been going around the town stealing nothing but people's bananas. Inspector Daria suddenly "reasons" that, because the thief stole everyone's bananas the thief must not have respect for people who like bananas, and because a sentient Banana-Man would naturally like bananas, the thief's objective is absolutely not to use their stolen Bananas to make a sentient Banana-Man. Mackenzie is absolutely bewildered by this. The irony is that Inspector Daria's logic is also an inverted Bat Deduction, as the thief's objective actually is to make a sentient Banana-Man.
Alicia's breakdown in Valkyria Chronicles is basically this trope getting out of hand in the mind of one person. She decides she is an inhuman monster, and ultimately tries to kill herself. The girl she used to be is dead, and she can never live a normal life again because her only future is one as a killing machine, exploited for her powers. None of this is even slightly true.
The St. John family in The Walking Dead are revealed to be cannibals. When Lee discovers Mark and his missing legs, he confronts the family about it. Their response? The walkers do nothing but eat everything, so it's up to humans to make sure things do not go to waste by eating people themselves when they die. The problem with that logic is Mark was previously shot in the shoulder with an arrow and was in no danger of dying at all, and they had to butcher him alive because zombie meat is poison. Before Lee or his group can question the family further, they take Lee's group as hostages.
The Corwids of Zeno Clash are all a bit nuts, but among the maddest is Helim, who decided he wanted to be invisible. So he started plucking out the eyes of every creature that could see him.

Insane Troll Logic / Video Games

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