Knight Of Cerebus / Video Games

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• Ace Attorney:
  • Edgeworth, while competent, was hardly a monster. The game's first two cases featured villains who were both hammy and incompetent, while the third has a morally ambiguous but not entirely evil killer. But the fourth case brought legendary prosecutor and murderer Manfred von Karma. With a super-aggressive courtroom demeanor, demonic voice and appearance, and full willingness to cheat to win, it's a rather jarring turn from the previous case, which concerned a murder on the set of a children's TV show.
  • Justice for All: Hello Matt Engarde. The Ace Attorney series will forever be comedic, and it seems to believe very much in well-earned happy endings, but Phoenix's first truly evil client gave it a definite darker twist that never really left. They also started the trend of having sociopathic villains as the Big Bad.
• AdventureQuest Worlds
  • Sepulchure himself in the games made by Artix Entertainment that he appears in fits, seeing as how there's less humor when he's around. In contrast with many Harmless Villains working for him, he invokes fear in others and kills off many people, including the ones in the Guardian Tower he crashed his fortress into, as a show of proving that he means business. Of course, his lack of remorse in turning Fluffy into a Dracolich and causing death and destruction doesn't stop him from being an Anti-Villain with standards who loves his daughter Gravelyn so much that he becomes unwilling to kill her despite her being the Champion of Light he sought to destroy, and is trying to bring back his lost love Lynaria.
  • Chaos Lord Ledgermayne. Basically, many villains before it, especially some of the previous Chaos Lords, were lighthearted and comical in nature, and even mainly focused on Incredibly Lame Puns, big deal. Then cue the arrival of Ledgermayne, who proves to be almost invincible due to being immune to regular weapons and magics and even being able to control magic itself. And later, Ledgermayne reveals its plan to cut off all magic from Lore — all without caring about the fact that all life on Lore will die if it itself succeeds, which it is, of course, fully aware of.
  • Vordred, proves to be this as well. He shows players that he means business by using his signature spell, the Voiduminance Necrot-Morph, to turn other people, especially the very paladins he was trained to fight and destroy (after all, he is a Paladinslayer), into his undead slaves. And that's not all, his armor, which is made up of Too Many Skulls, is immune to light-based magic, and he gets even more powerful thanks to an experiment performed on him by ArcAttack with the help of the hero, plus he's the reason why Part 1 of the Doomwood saga is Darker and Edgier than the previous sagas in the game before it.
  • Bloodtusk Ravine's story is the first of the darkest out of all the Chaos Lord areas, seeing how Xing & Xang's scheme for the ravine is darker than their previous schemes were, and Krellenos also lands himself in this spot since he worked behind the scenes during the war between the Horcs and the Trolls and even murdered his own brother Antiphuus. Then Khasaanda kills and usurps her own twin brother, planning to use his powers to exact revenge on Drakath for what happened to her brothers themselves.
  • Maximilian Lionfang is even worse the moment he becomes a Chaos Lord. Killing off multitudes of innocent Darkblood is one thing, and Chaorrupting the Old Primarch and killing Logash is another, as is Chaorrupting his own pet lion and feeding Chaos energy to it to enlarge it, but the moment he wastes the very last vial of the Tears of the Mother on Drakath makes it clear that there's no cure left for Chaorruption for a long time, which only makes things worse as it indirectly sets the stage for the tragic events in the twelfth Chaos Lord saga where Alteon succumbs to his own Chaorruption, unwillingly strikes down his own eldest daughter Brittany, ends up releasing a massive three-headed Chaos Dragon that unleashes horrible destruction upon Swordhaven before it's taken down, and ultimately having to be slain when the Chaos proves too much for him, not only leaving Lionfang to blame for such a tragedy but also Drakath as well since the players vowed to make him pay for every horrible thing that happened because of him at the end of said saga.
• Scharlachrot from Arcana Heart 3 is the biggest one in the series so far. Not only does she have no comical moments, her introductions have her going berserk and trying to destroy all of Japan including herself. Even if you play her story route, where she is more mellow, she still has no comical moments.
• Yuuki Terumi from the BlazBlue series. Though already pretty dark (even when compared to Guilty Gear, which itself was fairly dark compared to other fighting games to begin with), Calamity Trigger started off pretty light-hearted, with copious amounts of humor. Once Terumi revealed himself, however, everything gets dead serious. And it continues up until his near demise at Hakumen's hand in Chronophantasma. But when he survived in Central Fiction, he's still dangerous as ever.
• Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 was elevated from an Obviously Evil Jerkass Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain Laughably Evil to this after he outright murders Bloodwing, the Loyal Animal Companion of Mordecai, one of the heroes of the first Borderlands. The same mission also shows his horrific experiments against the people of Pandora, including Tiny Tina's parents. Upon reaching the Hyperion containment facility in the Thousand Cuts, Jack sics the BNK3R on you, grimly asking you to die without a hint of backhanded laughter. Breaching through that reveals that Angel, the "AI" that was helping you on your journey and was under Jack's thumb, is actually his daughter and a Siren, who asks you to put her out of her misery. After euthanizing Angel with the help of Roland and Lilith, two other former heroes of the first Borderlands, Jack appears out of nowhere, murders Roland, captures Lilith to be used as his replacement Siren, and then loses many, if not all, comedic snarky moments in favor of angrily accusing the heroes as "child-killers" in a pure, unadulterated rage.
• In Bug Fables, the debut of the Wasp King at the end of Chapter 4 marks the moment where the game's tone becomes a lot darker. In contrast to the other villains up to that point, the Wasp King is a cruel and sociopathic tyrant, intentioned to conquer all of Bugaria and find the Everlasting Sapling to achieve immortality and become unstoppable.
• Destiny 2 has The Witness. Unlike the previous villains, they do not have any major sympathetic or redeeming traits (though due to just how little is known about them, that isn't saying much), but their presence immediately ups the stakes of the plot. They are the true enemy of the Traveler and cause of the Collapse, with the Darkness as we know it actually being a neutral power source that originates from it. The Witness' impending arrival also causes a radical shift among all factions in the system as everyone is finally forced to take a side - the Guardians finally face the entity they were created to oppose, the Fallen/Eliksni must decide between joining the House of Light or the House of Salvation, Calus decides to join the Witness while the rest of the Cabal ally with the Last City, Savathun decides to put in motion a plan to steal the Traveler so she can hide it away from the Witness in her Throne World, and the Sol Divisive become the most active Vex collective. When the Witness finally arrives in the system in Lightfall, it becomes the first villain in the series to hand the Guardians an unambiguous defeat.
• While Deltarune isn't exactly a wacky game, it's still mostly light and comedic, with the darker parts of the story mostly kept as implications. However, both chapters so far have one villian who abruptly strips the comedy from the scene and puts the game on a far darker path. In the first chapter it's the King Of Spades, a brutal and sadistic abuser who's willing to cross any line to destroy the hated lightners. In the second chapter, it's you.
• Freedom Planet is, for the most of the time, a lighthearted platform with a good amount of humor that takes inspiration from the early Sonic the Hedgehog games. However, every time Lord Brevon appears on the screen, you can be sure that everything is about to take a darker tone. All of his actions, such as beheading the King of Shuigang and then brainwashing his son, torturing Lilac and transforming Milla into a nightmarish monster, are played dead serious.
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game starts out with a lot of the same lighthearted humor of the film series, but things start to get considerably creepy when the Spider Witch turns up in the level where the Sedgewick Hotel is revisited. Like the other Node Guardians, she's murdered a lot of people, but we actually see the bodies of a lot of her victims and witness a reenactment of her leading one of her victims to his death. The lives taken by the previously encountered Node Guardians were at worst briefly mentioned, but actually knowing the full detail of the Spider Witch's crimes has quite a lasting effect on the tone of the game from then on.
• The Flood are this in all Halo games they appear in. While the Covenant are indeed a serious threat, they at least have some charm and can be endearing and entertaining, particularly in their dialogue. The Flood, on the other hand, are Body Horror Nightmare Fuel through and through. Their appearance usually marks a shift from the games being full First-Person Shooters to semi-Survival Horror.
• Laughably Evil is the standard for A Hat in Time villains, even if they are trying to beat up Hat Kid. But the game can get quite dark, and two villains are played deadly serious:
  • Queen Vanessa. A creepy spectre who only shows up in a single mission that briefly turns the game into an Amnesia-lite game of running and hiding from an implacable, invincible boss who turns anyone she can get her hands on into an ice statue. And while Hat Kid is hiding and Vanessa is hunting, the latter speaks to Hat Kid with the tone of a sweet grandmother asking her grandchildren to come play, with only subtlety of tone betraying the malice underneath. She's also responsible for the Snatcher — Vanessa was a complete Yandere who, falsely believing her husband was having an affair with a flower seller when he was buying Vanessa flowers, chained him in her basement until he died and became the Snatcher, which also cursed the once green land into the nightmarish Eldritch Location it is today.
  • The Empress, Arc Villain of the Nyakuza Metro DLC. Whereas the Mafia of Cooks was The Family for the Whole Family and utterly impotent, the Empress runs her criminal syndicate deadly straight, conscripting Hat Kid and forcing her to hand over any Time Pieces she gets, and has a Non-Standard Character Design much closer to something out of the Sly Cooper series than A Hat in Time. She's also seen calmly killing a subordinate who tries to steal from her, and in the end of the DLC, when Hat Kid steals the Time Pieces back, there isn't a Boss Battle — like Queen Vanessa, all Hat Kid can do is run and hide from an angry criminal kingpin with a rocket launcher while the entire Nyakuza chases Hat Kid down for a chance at the multi-million dollar reward on her head. And the Empress nearly succeeds, stopped from cornering and tearing apart Hat Kid only by the timely appearance of a pair of cops. Finally, if spoken to after the mission, while the police are investigating her jewelry store, the Empress makes it clear that it's only a matter of time before she makes another attempt to kill Hat Kid.
• The Death Knight Heroes introduced in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft's Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion. In stark contrast with virtually everything else in the game, even when taking the Old Gods into account, all of their Death Knightness is played terrifyingly straight. Even their Flavor Texts are dead-serious quotes spoken by the now-undead Heroes.
• The Henry Stickmin Series has the Warden, real name Dmitri Johannes Petrov. Unlike every other villain, including Reginald Copperbottom and his Right Hand Man, this guy has no comedic moments or any chance of being on your side. At the end of the Presumed Dead ending in Fleeing the Complex, Dmitri gives Henry an ultimatum: Return to The Wall (and stay in a maximum security confinement forever) or stay in the truck as Dmitri pushes it off the cliff. And then comes Completing the Mission. Although appearing in one route, he goes as far as to send a couple of tanks after two people, because one ruined his reputation and another one broke his teeth by hitting him with a stop sign while driving a bike.
• The Jak and Daxter series started off pretty lighthearted with Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy being a fun loving adventure game. All that changes when Jak II: Renegade came out with the introduction of Baron Praxis. The first thing the Baron is seen doing is torture Jak for two years and infecting him with Dark Eco and from there, the series takes on a much Darker and Edgier tone.
• The premise of Junkworld already made the game a Darker and Edgier title compared to Kingdom Rush, but when it gets to Big Bad Hadron, things get really dark. He is a ruthless totalitarian leading his army with an iron fist, employing kidnapping, human and animal experimentation, torture of Artificial Human and brainwashing to expand his army and spread his rule. He has no comedic moments whatsoever, no Shout-Out phrases to spout and is feared by absolutely everybody.
• The Kirby series has many instances of Vile Villain, Saccharine Show, but the only one who truly qualifies as this is Magolor from Kirby's Return to Dream Land. Prior to him, Kirby games had self-contained Excuse Plots with only the final bosses generally being creepy. But Magolor's introduction, and him pretending to be the Big Good only to betray the heroes and reveal he was using them to become a Galactic Conqueror, marks a turning point where the stories of each game would not only become more involved and dramatic, tackling darker subjects like grief and descent into madness, but would extensively reference past games as well, creating a surprisingly intricate lore.
• The Legendary Starfy: Evil, the Greater-Scope Villain of the series, is singlehandedly responsible for darkening the tone of the game he appears in considerably, and he kills Moe's dad, making him and Mashtooth, the Big Bad of the fifth game, the only villains responsible for onscreen murder. He also nearly wins until the previous Big Bad, Ogura, pulls a Heel–Face Turn on him and destroys him once and for all.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has its titular villain, a creepy and mysterious power that has an evil plan to literally destroy the whole world. Every character that interacts with Majora ends up worse off, from being transformed into a Deku Scrub, to having an entire geographic area frozen. Majora's motivations are never explored beyond an unstoppable drive towards chaos and destruction, with the central conflict of the game focusing on the impending apocalypse from the moon crashing into earth in three days. Whereas most other games in the series had their own dark villain in Ganon/Ganondorf, Majora's Mask goes an extra step by forgoing the quest for power or status that the Ganon sought and instead having Majora just want to destroy everything for no apparent reason.
• The LEGO Adaptation Game series is a barrel of laughs and fun to play, although every now and then there is a villainous exception.
  • In LEGO Star Wars, the Emperor doesn't abide by this rule; he rarely has any funny scenes to show, minus one with his alter ego and he's more or less played seriously in comparison to the rest of the games.
  • LEGO Batman 2 has Lex Luthor, who destroys the Batcave and nearly destroys Gotham city for petty reasons, and isn't Played for Laughs as much as the other villains, with most of his humour being The Comically Serious stuff.
  • LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham has Brainiac. While not without his comical moments much in the way that Lex does, his introduction ends up shifting the genre from typical superhero/supervillain conflict to intergalactic crisis, overshadowing Lex and the Joker and shrinking the Earth. Moments where he mind-controls the heroes stand out as among the darkest in the entire franchise, in particular when he brainwashes Batman and nearly kills Robin, or when he enlarges and brainwashes Superman, very nearly crushing Batman onscreen. Aside from Brainiac, the level with Indigo-1 is among the darker moments of the campaign, since it shows her sociopathic nature when the Heel–Face Brainwashing fails, and very heavily implies that she's murdered Abin Sur's daughter as in the comics.
• Each Arc Villain of Live A Live is one of these. While the chapters of the game usually start off as fairly lighthearted in tone, the moment the chapter's villain first appears usually coincides with the moment the chapter's story suddenly begins to take a more serious tone. The most notable of the bunch by far is Odo, the villain of the Prehistory chapter. After going through the otherwise entirely comedic romp that is this chapter, Odo's sudden appearance near the end suddenly brings on a much darker tone to the story. Even more so if the player plays through the chapters in chronological order, as doing that will mark Odo's appearance as the first moment in which the serious storytelling that becomes more and more prevalent as the story progresses begins to rear its head.
• The Repliforce from Mega Man X4 effectively kickstarted the themes of how the term "Maverick" can be abused to truly horrific levels (though how much of it was earned due to the self-destructive idiocy of the Repliforce is up for debate), as well as showing a firsthand look at the tensions between Reploids and Humans, both of these themes playing a major role in future X games as well as being the main theme of the Zero and ZX series.
  • There’s also Doctor Doppler and the other infectees, who showed how powerful Sigma was and how his influence could spread into even innocent individuals like a plague, blurring the Maverick definition for the first time.
• Mega Man Zero has Dr. Weil and Omega. While the Zero series was already the darkest of the franchise to begin with, Weil is far more of a menace than the villains of the first and second games. Zero 3 gets much darker with their appearance, the usual 8 bosses are now brainwashed by Weil to become downright evil, and he starts inflicting far more acts of evil than any Mega Man villain before him. And he is not misguided or a Well-Intentioned Extremist like Elpizo, and isn't evil because he puts Reploids above humans like Sigma, or humans above Reploids like Copy X. He is an irredeemable, selfish monster who want humans and reploids alike to suffer under his rule.
• Memoria Freese: Things were already serious in the Date A Live crossover campaign Ais Catastrophe before the false Kaguya Yamai appeared after she turned Ais into an Inverse Spirit but it was only later revealed that she was behind everything that happened so far. Not only does she beat out Kurumi as the most "evil" Spirit, the humor level drops at the very moment she reveals herself. From there on, the story is dark and horrifying with psychological torment and creepy scenarios. And by a far extension, she's also one of the most vile foes Bell and Shido faced, making her name in both worlds of Date A Live and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?.
• The Ptolemaic Army in Metal Slug 5 and the Invaders in Metal Slug 6. Also, the Final Boss of 5, a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere known as the Evil Spirit Incarnate, is much Darker and Edgier compared to the usual bosses that appear in the series and is actually very menacing.
• Games in the Mother franchise tend to be mostly lighthearted and whimsical and that all promptly goes to hell whenever you meet the villains: Giygas in the first two games and Porky in the third.
• Jasper Batt Jr. in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle starts the game's Darker and Edgier tone off by the delivering the head of Travis' friend Bishop through his apartment window. There's also the revelation that all the CEOs of Pizza Butt Travis killed in the first game were all his family members, and he's merely perpetuating the Cycle of Revenge between the two of them. Once Travis actually meets him face-to-face, however, the game actively defies any attempt at serious drama by making him the single most ridiculous boss in both games, to the point that Henry even bails out after his Big Damn Heroes moment because the fight is just getting too silly for him.
• Octopath Traveler: While some Travelers have dark storylines from the start, others start off fairly light-hearted until these characters come in:
  • Ophilia's story has Mystery Man and Shady Figure, two followers of a dark Cult that worships the local God of Evil, and the villains of the third chapter. Despite their rather silly-sounding titles, Mystery Man and Shady Figure are when Ophilia's story takes a much darker turn. In spite of her adoptive father falling seriously ill, Ophilia's pilgrimage begins on a hopeful note as she travels Orsterra in her sister Lianna's place so that the latter can remain at their father's side, renewing the light of the Sacred Flame to the land and its people, and helping others in need such as the three children in Saintsbridge. Then, in Ophilia's third chapter, these two kidnap a child and hold her for ransom, and are the introduction to the Galdera-worshipping cult that serve as the antagonists and make the rest of the plot very dark and serious.
  • Cyrus' story has Gideon, the villain of the second chapter. Cyrus' first chapter is relatively light-hearted and humorous, and its antagonist, Russell is just a thief trying to pay their gambling debts and eventually Heel-Face Turns. Gideon on the other hand, is a sociopathic, cloaked scientist who kills several innocents so that he can extract their blood to use in dark magic, and begins the transition to more serious threats for Cyrus to overcome.
  • Alfyn's story has Miguel Twinspears, the villain of the third chapter. Alfyn's story starts off fairly light-hearted, with him travelling to treat the sick and suffering. Then he encounters Ogen, who refuses to treat a wounded man called Miguel because he believes that "some lives are not worth saving", which clashes with Alfyn's belief that it is a healer's duty to treat whomever they can. Alfyn's story really takes a darker turn when Ogen's perspective is proven right; Miguel is a thief and a murderer, and after Alfyn treats him in Ogen's stead out of the kindness of his heart (and a naïve belief that he will Heel–Face Turn), wastes no time betraying Alfyn's trust, kidnapping a little boy to hold for ransom and then wounding him in anger at his crying, forcing Alfyn to kill Miguel to save the boy's life. The entire incident continues to haunt Alfyn for much of his fourth chapter, and raises serious questions of whether "some lives are not worth saving".
• The main Pokémon games started off light on plot, with the goal To Be a Master being the main plot and the local evil teams mainly serving as just another obstacle in the protagonist's journey to become the regional Champion. Then came Cyrus and Team Galactic in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl had a plot much larger in scope and a larger dark presence on the plot than the prior villains, heralding the Cerebus Syndrome that started in that game. Ever since, future games have put much more emphasis on their story and later main villains have matched, if not exceeded, his dark presence.
• Poppy Playtime: CatNap, full stop. While Huggy Wuggy and Mommy Long Legs weren't exactly lighthearted or comedic, their chapters contained at least some forms of levity, such as the room full of rejected toys and Marcas using a deliberately exaggerated version of Jacksepticeye's natural Irish accent for his tape. CatNap, on the other hand, is the nightmarish villain that has used his nightmare-inducing gas to cause a player to hallucinate horrible things, consistently stalks him throughout the facility, killed the rest of Smiling Critters while leaving one to a Fate Worse than Death and is the closest in hierarchy to Big Bad himself. His final encounter is also a more complex Hold the Line Boss Battle that involves a horrific skeletal form, ton of duplicates and intense electric charging. His death, where he first gets electrocuted, then burned by his own gas lit aflame and finally allows himself to be killed by Prototype, is also horrific.
• Puyo Puyo:
  • The series Big Bad, Dark Prince Satan, in the first arcade game. Whenever he appears in cutscenes, he's depicted in a barren wasteland with constant lightning striking, contrasting the typical field the other characters are in. The cutscene before you fight the Dark Prince takes it a step further, with ominous music and the Dark Prince swooping down from the shadows. Battling him also has a sense of tension, due to the more intense music that plays and the sound effects sounding like explosions. To top it off, throughout the whole game his normally goofy personality is downplayed, becoming The Comically Serious at best, due to Arle accidentally calling him Santa. The second game is the first one that depicts him as the Laughably Evil Harmless Villain he's better known as.
  • Satan / Dark Prince becomes this again thanks to Doppelganger Arle in Puyo Puyo~n. While most end bosses in the series tend to fit the comedic tone of each game, Doppleganger Arle’s appearance and theme are much more serious and somber compared to the rest of the game, and her motivations (wanting to kill Arle out of pure jealousy) and actions (using Satan's power to capture Carbuncle and lure Arle into a trap) were also taken more seriously as a result, being a stark contrast from what's a rather light-hearted series for much of its existence.
  • In Puyo Puyo 7, Ecolo tried to do what no other Puyo Puyo antagonist had done: bury the entire world in Puyo. Thankfully, however, he had softened up in future installments due to his amnesia.
  • Rafisol from Puyo Puyo Chronicle is a notably big one from one of the SEGA-era titles, to the point where she could even go as far as to be considered the first true case of this in SEGA's run of the series. She's effectively a manifestation of hatred who only desires destruction, and if not stopped, could have destroyed Ally's world (with the implications that her destructive power could spread to other dimensions). But unlike Ecolo, this desire for destruction is played completely straight. On top of that, she's the only antagonist in the series that has assaulted another character during a cutscene. Becomes subverted in the post-game campaign though, with Character Development showing that she just wants to be loved by others.
  • Squares from Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 is yet another instance of this trope coming into play during SEGA's run of the Puyo Puyo series. His actions cause the game to feature a relatively dark story. In addition, his constant threats to erase the cast from existence aren't something to take lightly, considering how he very much has the power to do just that. Like Rafisol before him, this too gets subverted after the main cast reaches out to him and gets him to see reason, leading him to stop what he was doing and join them for reals.
  • The PC-98 release of Madou Monogatari 1 ends with a brawl against a disgusting-looking lich named Fudoushi, and when he presented that horrifying illusion of melting faces, you knew that this was definitely not going to be your lighthearted Puyo fare.
• Quake IV doesn't start off too lighthearted to begin with as casualties are shown occurring frequently, but the unexpected appearance of a New Makron leader during a major operation already going wrong marks the point of the story when things go horribly wrong for the heroes, the risk of losing the war becomes very high, and Matthew Kane is captured and forced into Unwilling Roboticization.
• While Radiant Silvergun starts off fairly lighthearted with the pilots joking around, once the Stone-Like is unearthed the following scene and it starts its rampage, the plot quickly turns upside down and it only gets worse from here on out.
• Malice in Riviera: The Promised Land. Her first appearance is part of a very dark scenario, but the game returns to its lighthearted self when she leaves. Her return marks the shift of the game to its main themes and the serious core of the series.
• Romancing Saga 3 leaves the gameplay mostly up to the player by having a bunch of sidequests to do in pretty much any order they want, with most enemies being either dangerous wild life or human thieves, with the backstory of the Sinistrals and the terror they had plunged the world into centuries ago just a note in the opening. And then heading into Vanguard leads to some of Forneus' minions entering the peaceful town at night and murdering an innocent couple, revealing that the Sinistrals themselves may not be at large, but they and their minions pose a genuine threat and the focus shifts on the big goal of closing all four Abyss gates, to prevent the Sinistrals from resurfacing.
• RosenkreuzStilette serves as a clone of and a tribute to the Mega Man franchise, with various nostalgic moments, some amounts of humor, a cast of cute girls, and an Affably Evil Big Bad. Then once Iris shows her true colors, things go south very quickly. You don't even have to go any further than the beginning of the side game Rosenkreuzstilette Grollschwert to see for yourself as she starts said story off by killing a random priest for the heck of it, and that's saying something. The sequel starts off with that same darker tone and never lets up.
• Lucien becomes one for RuneScape by killing Hazelmere, Cyrisus, and four other heroes. Sliske takes it to an even higher level by assassinating Guthix , starting Gielinor's second God Wars.
• Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus:
  • Four of the members of the Fiendish Five have personality quirks, Freudian Excuses and other subtle elements lending a hint of comedy to them villains though they may be. Not Clockwerk. He's cold, ruthless, nearly kills Sly and Carmelita and generally comes across as much more genuinely threatening than the rest of the Fiendish Five... to say nothing of other villains in the series.
  • Even though he doesn't hijack the second game he's still this since once his parts reassemble it gets much darker and after becoming one with his body.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Adventure gives us Chaos, a bizarre water monster that gets bigger and freakier every time they get a Chaos Emerald. Unlike the Laughably Evil, Dr. Eggman, Chaos has no motivation beyond destruction of everyone and everything around him. And no, they are not a Generic Doomsday Villain as their backstory revealed them to be a Tragic Monster and nearly causing The End of the World as We Know It, including the near genocide of the entire Echidna race. It all culminates in him reaching his ultimate form, laying waste to an entire city (one of the game's main settings) and threatening to wipe out modern civilization. Chaos was a drastic departure from what came before and set the stage for similar antagonists and final bosses in subsequent games.
  • Similar to Chaos, Shadow and Professor Gerald's introductions to the series in Sonic Adventure 2 also heralded a much darker tone, arguably even more than its predecessor. While Chaos was a tragic figure, there was only so much emotion they could convey due to being The Voiceless and mostly taking a backseat to Eggman for a bulk of the game until the climax. After Shadow is released by Eggman in another bid to conquer the planet, he quickly proves to be Sonic's superior in almost every way, something even Eggman couldn't achieve at the time. By the time of the game's climax, its revealed that Shadow was operating under the orders of Gerald out of a twisted desire of revenge for the death of their family as a result of a Government Conspiracy, and plans on destroying the entire planet out of retribution. This trope gets downplayed somewhat later as Shadow transitions to being an Antihero, but his attitude and personality doesn't change one bit.
• Spookys Jumpscare Mansion starts off as a lighthearted parody of the horror genre’s overuse of Jumpscares. Then Specimen 2 shows up, and all the subsequent Specimens after show the player how how horror is actually supposed to be scary.
• Spyro the Dragon has its fair shares of loud villains who are evil but still have humour. That cannot be said for the Sorceress and the Sorcerer, who are both no-nonsense villains who have no regards for others. The Sorceress' plan was to kill 150 baby dragons for a spell to achieve immortality and The Sorcerer's plan was to drain everyone including children of their magic not caring if they're hurt and leaving them in an alternate reality. The Reignited Trilogy gives the Sorceress a more pompous silly air to match the other villains, but her actual plans and their menace remain unaltered.
• Street Fighter: M. Bison’s debut in Street Fighter II began a period of more epic stakes and tone, with his machinations such as the Dolls and Psycho Power, along with him having killed Charlie. Akuma also qualifies, for introducing a more personal threat to Ryu, as both the source of the Satsui No Hadou and having (apparently) slain Gouken.
• Super Smash Bros.
  • Near the end of the Subspace Emissary in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the introduction of Tabuu represents that heralding of the Darkest Hour, as he singlehandedly defeats the near-entireity of the playable cast before creating the Subspace Maze. Were it not for King Dedede's forward-thinking, it could've been The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: The World of Light story mode begins with Galeem, the new Big Bad, unleashing a universe-shattering attack that defeats almost every playable character in the base roster (save for Kirby) and destroys the rest of the reality, leaving behind only a small patchwork dimension filled with spirits that Kirby finds himself in. Halfway through, the stakes are raised further with the appearance of Dharkon, who is even more of an Omnicidal Maniac.
  • The trailer for Sephiroth invokes this, as he is introduced cleaving Galeem in half, conjuring a storm of corrupted Lifestream energy while declaring his intent to bring despair, and capping it off with seemingly impaling Mario all the way through, complete with Shadow Discretion Shot. Granted, it's just a convincing fake-out — by means of him hooking a brace on Mario's overalls with his sword — but it does the job in showing that despite Smash having a reputation for slapstick and humor, Sephiroth is not playing around.
• Wadanohara has plenty of Arc Villains, with the game slowly becoming darker and the stakes being risen higher after each other. While Orca and Princess Tostasu were by no means pushovers, the game was still this adorable underwater adventure. This all changes when Sal/Syake-san is revealed as the traitor, shifting the game into a complete horror overhaul with plenty of Nightmare Fuel and Gorn cropping up. Sal himself is a loathsome villain, going as far as trying to rape Wadanohara and tries to kill her and Samekichi when she rejects him.
• Zigfrak: The appearance of any of the Guardians is usually a sign that the story has become more serious in tone.

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