More Than Mind Control / Video Games

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• In Assassin's Creed II DLC Bonfire of the Vanities, it's revealed that this is how the Apple of Eden works: It amplifies the individual reasons each victim has for agreeing with the Apple's wielder up to the point of zealotry.
  • Al Mualim outright states in the first game that The Apple is "temptation given form".
• In Bugsnax, anyone who eats the titular critters while bearing any insecurities of any kind will have those insecurities inflated to absolute extremes. As the Bugsnax offer brief yet satisfying reprieve from these insecurities, those that eat them will feel compelled to eat more and more of them regardless of the amount of food-related Body Horror they inflict upon themselves until all that's left of them is an inert pile of food destined to become more Bugsnax.
• With as many Mind Control plots as Castlevania has had, they eventually had to try this to freshen it up a bit. Hugh in Castlevania: Circle of the Moon and Maxim in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance are clear-cut cases, and there are others with room for debate.
• This how promotion works in one of the main villain factions in City of Heroes- Arachnos. Arachnos has an army of psychics who all broadcast a psychic hive-mind that subconsciously reinforces loyalty to Lord Recluse. Said hive-mind is their training method, screening method and primary form of communication, but only the high-end soldiers get a chance to join and if you don't join, you don't get a promotion - making submission to it entirely voluntary. Getting that promotion means willingly giving up your cognitive ability to refuse orders from the man at the top.
• While magic powers are involved, this is part of the "taking" procedure in Destiny.
  Oryx: You are a Vandal. You slip through life like a thief. Trying to hide from everything greater than you — lest you be reduced, again, to a dreg. You have been taken. Come out into the light. You will never be diminished again. No one will ever rebuke you with a blade. What Captain disciplines you? What obedience has been burnt into your lungs? You do as your Captain commands. You wield the weapon you are given. You teach the Dregs and make sure everyone pays their share of the loot. But nothing is yours. You have no space to call your own. You deserve a place of safety. You deserve to be alone with yourself. There is a knife for you. It is shaped like [this place is mine]. Take up the knife. Make it your companion. Take your new shape.
• Inuart in Drakengard falls under this. He's tied to a post and mind-raped with his own innermost thoughts until he finally gives in to the Big Bad's control. He even gains cool glowy Mind-Control Eyes.
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, a Desire Demon has brainwashed a Templar into believing he is living an idyllic family life, and she considers the arrangement to be mutually beneficial. You must choose to either let the Templar continue his wonderful delusion, or free him. Which means killing him. The demon will not release him, and he fights you to protect his imaginary family.
  • Dragon Age II features a much more personal example of this trope. During "Night Terrors", you go into the Fade to save a mage boy, and in the Fade you find a Desire Demon and a Pride Demon fighting over the chance to possess him. Depending on who's in your party, they can convince your friends to turn on you in exchange for something they want. It is hinted that they accept due to both the demon's magic and their own desires.
  • It's stated many times that demons can't tempt you with something you don't really want. No matter how unwilling victim seems to be there is always an element of this trope.
  • The creepy red lyrium idol you find in the Deep Roads brings out the worst personality traits of those who possess it. The second he touches it, Bartrand's ambition takes over and he leaves you all to die rather than share the loot you just found. When Meredith acquires it, her anti-mage paranoia goes through the roof. It also drives them insane, with a side order of superpowers.
  • In Dragon Age: Inquisition, when Erimond is accused of brainwashing the Grey Wardens (via Corypheus's False Calling) into helping the Big Bad, Erimond claims that brainwashing wasn't necessary; he just suggested a possible (and Obviously Evil) solution to the False Calling, and their own flaws did the rest. In this case, he is correct; the False Calling does nothing more than fooling the Wardens into thinking they were being Called (and it's likely that a thorough investigation of the phenomenon would've revealed the lie), and Cole confirms that it was the Wardens' own fears that drove them, and nothing more.
• During Mia Touma's route in Duel Savior Destiny after an incident beneath the academy, she disappears and reappears in the enemy camp unable to distinguish who her former allies are. After this is broken through, though, it turns out that the mind control on her was just to keep her from causing damage since she really is on their side. If anything, she has simply been manipulated rather than being under genuine thought altering changes.
• The Elder Scrolls: It may be standard procedure in Morrowind and Oblivion, where the only school of magic not governed by a magical attribute — Illusion (which includes various forms of subtle and direct mind control) — depends on your Personality.
• Fatal Frame II plays with this between its original version and the remake. The original version portrayed Mayu as being completely under Sae's control, though with hints that she was not as helpless as initially shown. It didn't help that the few in-game hints were very subtle or only found in supplementary reading material. But then the remake made the entire thing much more ambiguous, making it difficult for the player to tell if Mayu's creepy obsession with her twin Mio, and desire to go through with the Crimson Butterfly ritual, was mostly because of Sae or if she always had been like this, and Sae possessing her merely amplified it.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Played straight and then subverted in Final Fantasy IV. Kain was under mind control, but only because of he wanted Rosa to love him instead of Cecil; then later when Golbez tries it again, Kain claims that he no longer holds power over him... After which he steals the crystal and takes off.
    • The second scene makes much more sense in the re-translated DS version.
    • Also in the DS version, using the pause menu to read Kain's thoughts in the final dungeon shows that Zemus tries this one last time on him as the party descends, trying to make him hate Rosa this time for loving Cecil.. He fights it off easily.
      Kain: <People's hearts are not toys for you to trifle with, Zemus!>
    • In Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, Kain acts similarly to how he acts when under mind control in Final Fantasy IV, but explicitly denies (over and over again) that he's under any form of mind control at all... and he's really not. However, he's not quite Kain, either. He's Kain's dark side incarnate. The real Kain is traveling under the guise of the "Hooded Man", and acting more heroically than he'd ever done in the past.
    • For that matter, Golbez himself is also under More than Mind Control by Zemus. Basically his own self-loathing was taken advantage of and then expressed toward the rest of those of the Blue Planet.
  • Sephiroth's control over Cloud in Final Fantasy VII works a little bit like this - it magically exploits Cloud's obsession with getting revenge in order to bring him close and make him deliver the Black Materia.
    • It goes so much deeper. He's also manipulating Cloud through his loyalties, through his identity confusion, through his low self-esteem, and through the Jenova cells in his body (Re: Reunion).
  • Sorceress Edea possessed by Ultimecia in Final Fantasy VIII turns Seifer into her half-crazed attack dog by playing on his long-held romantic dream of becoming a sorceress' knight, his lingering memories of Edea being his surrogate mother when he was a child, and his complicated rivalry with Squall, plus a dose of genuine magical influence over his emotions.
• Fire Emblem:
  • While Gharnef from Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon usually operates on literal mind control, he didn't need to use any on Michalis. He just manipulated his ambition to convince Michalis to kill his own father.
  • Lyon in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, although this is seen only in Ephraim's route. The Demon King played up on his feelings of inadequacy and envy for the twins of Renais, twisting his noble intentions of saving the people of Grado with his desire to prove himself strong by defeating them.
  • It happens to Prince Takumi in Fire Emblem Fates, more exactly in the Conquest route. He first becomes 'infected' by accidentally falling into the gap between the dimensions and landing in Valla, which is under Anankos's rule. The possession first takes his already existing resentment and distrust towards the Avatar and, if they choose Nohr over Hoshido, slowly twists it into homicidal hatred that begins to consume everything else about Takumi's whole self. Throughout the route it becomes worse and worse until chapter 23, where after the party defeats him for the last time and kills his friends and retainers Oboro and Hinata, Anankos forces him to commit suicide so he can take over Takumi's body entirely. In the last chapter Takumi is nothing but a corpse held up only by Anankos' possession, forcing the party to Mercy Kill him.
• Riku from Kingdom Hearts embraces the trope wholeheartedly. Supplemented with plenty of scenes detailing his friend Sora's apparent betrayal. Also an example of Not What It Looks Like.
  • He also continues this in Kingdom Hearts II by fully embracing the dark control in order to put Sora's mind back together. So not only does he stay under the mind control, but ends up reversing it and using it for his and Sora's benefit. Without the other occupant of his mind knowing that. Nice job man.
  • Organization XIII does this to Sora in Chain of Memories with the help of illusions and Fake Memories.
  • Zig-zagged in Birth by Sleep. Maleficent hits Terra with a spell, and when he comes to his senses someone has released Princess Aurora's heart from her body. He blames Maleficent, who claims that she only brought to the surface a part of himself he'd been trying to hide. Then it turns out that Terra was right the first time - Maleficent was lying to him as part of Xehanort's plan to make him insecure and isolated. Terra never learns this himself, unfortunately.
• Knight Bewitched: Ruth ends up a victim of this due to Gwen's curse, which causes her to go along with any suggestion Gwen makes as long as it uses a specific phrase. According to Malady, this curse won't work unless Ruth already has a desire to follow through with the suggestion in the first place.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • Darth Malak does this to Bastila Shan through the power of Being Tortured Makes You Evil.
    Darth Malak: Torture? No, dear Bastila. You misunderstand. This is but a taste of the Dark Side to whet your appetite. When you finally swear loyalty to me, it will be willingly.
  • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: Kreia. To everyone, including the Player Character. Technically, both Player Characters, as she was Revan's original master. She rarely has to use any kind of push from the Force (which she hates), but instead enjoys using a combination of bribery, blackmail, and shamelessly being Metaphorically True, to get people dancing to her tune. You know she's a manipulative, Magnificent Bitch, but she engineers the situations so that there really isn't an option other than doing things her way.
  • The Emperor of Star Wars: The Old Republic was intentionally neglectful to his children, subjecting them to suicide missions and experimenting on them with Sith magicks, until they snapped (or in Thexan's case, died), only showing some hint of acknowledgment the moment they crossed the Moral Event Horizon. He still put trigger phrases in them, though.
• Mass Effect:
  • Indoctrination can range from this to straight-up Mind Control, but the Reapers prefer the former to the latter whenever possible. The more force the Reapers use to control their thralls, the faster their mental processes degrade, making them less useful. Saren was carefully manipulated into believing what he did was for the greater good of both his people and the galaxy, and even then he was aware that Sovereign could be indoctrinating him and was secretly afraid that might be the case, though by then it was too late. Other indoctrination victims in the series have their desires warped into a way to serve the Reapers while believing themselves to be autonomous, or even in the case of the Illusive Man and Cerberus opposed to the Reapers and fighting against them.
  • Apparently, it's also the modus operandi of Ardat-Yakshi, who have the ability to influence entire villages, much less lonely artists.
• While Shadow of Mordor plays it more like traditional mind control, in Shadow of War, Talion and Celebrimbor, thanks to the power-up of the New Ring and later on, the Ring of Power formerly worn by Isildur are able to exert a more subtle form of the wraith's Domination power that allows branded Orcs to retain their personality, to the extent that they are capable of showing genuine loyalty. There are a myriad of factors, however, like getting killed too often, hitting them too many times, or even simply inverting the Domination power to shun them, that can cause them to break free and return to serving Sauron.
• Neverwinter Nights:
  • Morag does this to Aribeth in the original campaign by throwing all of her doubts and fears back at her in incessant nightmares until she finally falls under the lizardperson's domination.
  • Towards the end of the expansion Hordes of the Underdark, the Big Bad Mephistopheles does this to all your party members with short but well-prepared Breaking Lectures, prompting a Face–Heel Turn from each just before the final battle. You may persuade each one back by being more convincing than he, but depending on the circumstances and your abilities, it may be impossible. This is an archdevil we're talking about here, after all. Deekin is a notable exception, he doesn't require a roll or special skills to stay with you, just an assurance that you're his friend. Aww...
• Persona 5: In Royal, this is how Maruki's actualization powers work. By peering into the hearts of others (be it through a counseling session or directly peering into them through Mementos), he's able to see what others want in order to be happy and uses his actualization powers combined with his powers as the new God of Control to alter reality in a way that they have what they wanted in order to be happy. In the case of the Phantom Thieves, what they wanted is to live normal lives as normal people with none of their past traumas holding them back. Since Joker was the only one not completely affected due to his trauma having little to do with why he became a Phantom Thief in the first place, he had to talk to each of them to get them to remember everything they went through together, and even then it took a serious amount of doubt from each of them to break free of the actualization and rebel against Maruki.
• Psychonauts 2: Introduced in this game is the Mental Connection power, which can be used to rearrange connections between two stimuli or ideas in peoples' brains (and also platforming). Those of you well-versed in Psychology may note that what we call a "personality" is just a series of connections between neurons that govern how we react to information and stimuli. This is something Raz learns the hard way, as well as Psychonauts second-in-command Forsythe when she was younger.
• Radiant Arc: Derek accepts the Morians' offer of power and receives Seperus's sword. This sword has a mind of its own and slowly corrupts him by playing on his desire to one-up Linky and keep Lexie for himself.
• Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: Although Evelin's fungus control may seem to be blatant Mind Control and Brainwashing, in Ethan's Hive Mind conversation with Jack Baker, Jack expressly states that this is not the case.
• Shin Megami Tensei. Lucifer. Let's just say this thing about the man - listen to him, but always fear him. No matter how much of your friend he likes to look like. Manipulative and deceitful in the extreme, he may always be looking out for humanity - but you gotta realize he's still very much a Fallen Angel, and he's still looking for converts for his army...
  • Not helping matters is that in some universes, YHVH designed Lucifer to be this trope from the start. Why spend all that belief energy brainwashing converts into worshiping only you, when you can create a straw villain whose main schtick is being as deceptive and manipulative as possible, and then present yourself as a simple answer to all of humanity's questions? Of course, there is much brainwashing involved, but mostly for the peons, while the human generals have bought into the lies and worldview of an extreme and maintain said brainwashing themselves.
• In Shining Resonance, this trope is why Diva Magica songstresses are, A) not automatically evil, and B) necessary to keep the world functioning. Their job is basically to follow dragon hosts like Yuma around and lull 'the dragon' back to sleep when the host loses control and goes feral. Notably, this version of Power Incontinence is never related to what the host actually wants. It's not some sort of repressed-but-logical anger, it's genuinely not wanted. Which is good, because Diva Magica aren't actually strong enough to override free will. Even with the host Fighting from the Inside to help them, hypnotizing a dragon into not blowing up cities is hard. But it is definitely the dragon's desire, not the host's- when Yuma returns to sanity, he's pretty grateful for the Diva Magica's work. And in a later scene, Excella has a nasty shock when her attempt to sing an enemy dragon into declaring allegiance to her fails completely. Neither the dragon or its host was on board with that, and Excella's presumption otherwise almost gets her killed.
• In Something Unlimited (NSFW), Lex Luthor can use devices to outright control superheroines into working at a strip bar or a bordello, but ones he adds to his personal collection are instead coerced to submit over the course of a couple of weeks.
• Soulcalibur V's Pyrrha is subject to this at the hands of Tira. She ends up fighting her own brother repeatedly because she thinks she's doing the right thing letting herself be used by Soul Edge.
• In Super Robot Wars: Original Generation, Duminuss implements this to Lamia. Basically, other than very strong programming to keep her on check, she's implanted with information that her friends abandoned her out of glee after being shot down to near death by Wilhelm von Juergen and would've rot to death if she wasn't saved by Duminuss, and in short, they're treating her like a disposable doll. This combination reverts Lamia into thinking that she's a disposable tool for war, her old mindset.
• In Tales of Xillia, Mila was created as a decoy to be "The Maxwell". However, she believes she is Maxwell.
• In Tales of Legendia, Shirley is Brainwashed and Crazy by Nerifes, but still has her free will. She is thus driven to schizophrenia as her Nerifes-controlled side fights for a dark cause while her normal side fights against it. Eventually, Manipulative Bastard Maurits catches on and tricks the part of Shirley that is free into submitting to Nerifes completely.
• In Tales of the Abyss this is how Curse Slots work; they agitate hidden emotions and memories, using them to manipulate the one marked with it. This puts the fact Guy has been attacking Luke, and only Luke, when the Curse Slot is active in a very dark light. It ultimately turns out he originally came to the Fabre Manor for a Revenge by Proxy plan and does, still deep inside, bear the grudge against the Fabre House that makes him want to kill Luke. That said, he's changed since then and his friendship with Luke is genuine now.
• Zigzagged with Arthas, a recurring character in the Warcraft franchise. Arthas was the victim of his own impulsive and rash decisions through Detrimental Determination, and he was subject to manipulation by outside forces like the voice of Ner'zhul. But whether Arthas was more guided by the former or the latter ends up Depending on the Writer. The human campaign of Warcraft III establishes that Arthas was certainly not blameless in his fall from grace — his own impulsiveness, recklessness, and willingness to do evil actions in pursuit of his goals meant that Arthas and his lust for power were always going to doom him, one way or the other. But Arthas was losing his mind by the time he picked up Frostmourne, which stole his soul and allowed Ner'zhul to directly manipulate him, yet the Silver Hand paladins act as though Arthas willingly betrayed his people after was corrupted into a death knight. Rise of the Lich King clearly depicts Arthas in the moment his soul is claimed by Frostmourne, with Ner'zhul's whispers directing his action. Conversely, the same novel suggests that Arthas was capable of independent thought and rationalizing his actions as being his choice. The question of just how mind controlled Arthas was is left ambiguous, likely on purpose, but Ner'zhul seemed to deliberately give Arthas more autonomy to let him think he was in control, as opposed to the situation Sylvanas or other Forsaken were in.
• This is how the Mindflayers' control is depicted in Baldur's Gate III. If saved from her fate, Minthara describes the absolute and the tadpole working together in her mind so as not being compelled to act against her will, but feeling ecstatic to serve.

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