No Antagonist / Video Games

• Animal Crossing. The conflict is simply "you're living on your own and have to pay for your house." The worst folks you have to deal with are the occasional mean neighbor or sly salesman.
• Antichamber: There's something that can be interpreted as an antagonist (the black cube/ghost), but doesn't really do anything visibly bad.
• Arknights: Almost every main story chapter and side story is driven by violent conflict of one type or another, but the Ideal City: Endless Carnival side story unusually features no antagonistic forces, with all the tension coming from personal issues or environmental damage. Even the boss of the event is just representing robots trying to help Stitch get away from Gavial.
• Much of the entries in the Atelier Series don't have an antagonist, as the plot usually revolves around proving one's self or reaching goals.
• Beecarbonize's conflict is about trying to mitigate the effects of climate change before it irreversibly destroys Earth. While there are various smaller conflicts caused by certain groups, they're not presented as villains, but rather as careless or ignorant people, who don't realize that their actions are causing or contributing to environmental destruction.
• The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ reveals in its final ending that nothing in the game is real. Mom isn't trying to kill Isaac, nor is he actually fighting Satan, or himself, or any of the other bizarre bosses. The entire game is a Dying Dream by Isaac after his self-loathing causes him to commit suicide by suffocating himself in a chest.
• Bread & Fred: The game's Excuse Plot doesn't provide any antagonists or villains. All the other penguins and NPCs are quite friendly and helpful, even if Deadpan Snarkers whenever the player characters fall near them. The only opposing force is the mountain itself, making it a 'penguin vs. nature' kind of conflict.
• Calendula: Unusually for a horror game, the antagonist is simply a series of non-sentient glitches that are messing with the game menu and preventing you from playing the game. The story itself is also rather vague, but despite the scary apparitions that appear, none of them actively hurt the player, and ultimately the conflict is a baby trying to be born.
• Badeline is set up to be the antagonist of Celeste but she's revealed to be a manifestation of the heroine's insecurities and in the end, there is no antagonist at all in the game.
• The Interactive Fiction story A Change in the Weather is about escaping from a dangerous situation with purely natural causes. There's nothing that can be pinpointed as an antagonist besides nature.
• Chest: The war with the demons already ended when Zong imprisoned Demon Lord Rora in the Nether, and the rest of the game is just an easy-going journey to look for the people who transformed into treasure chests.
• Copy Kitty plays around with this trope. The entire game is a simulation meant to train Boki's Power Copying abilities by pitting her against a simulated version of a real in-game Construct army her kind are fighting against. Thus, while there is technically an antagonistic force and even a Big Bad, none of it is real, and the closest thing to a real force of opposition in-game is Savant, Boki uncle and the creator of the simulation, who doesn't mean Boki any harm in the long-run. All of this goes out the window in Boki's hard mode campaign, however, when it's revealed that the Cybers, the Greater Scope Villains and leaders of the out-of-simulation Constructs, are spying on Boki's training, and one of them finally decides to hijack the simulation and fight Boki themselves as the Final Boss. Savant's campaign, meanwhile, has even less of an antagonist, as he's simply bug-testing his own simulation and the Final Boss of both of Savant's campaigns are friendly duels between Savant and one of his allies.
• Dear Esther: The story concerns a single man's attempts to come to terms with a terrible event in his past. He is the only person on the island and even the event that drove him to solitude was just a tragic accident.
• Fez. The main conflict of the game is collecting cubes and saving reality from being torn apart.
• Gone Home: Although it seems that you are exploring a haunted house, it turns out to be a love story and a Coming-Out Story about your sister and her girlfriend. While their story certainly features antagonists, the player character herself has none.
• Goodbye Volcano High: There aren't any antagonistic characters in the game, only the impending end of the world and interpersonal conflicts.
• Some games from the Grow series have a conflict that isn't caused by a villain or by anyone at all:
  • Grow Tower where the objective is turn the sun on like a lamp.
  • Grow cannon where you must help a sleeping guy to wake up after he screwed himself by breaking his alarm clock.
  • Grow Nano vol.2 where you must help someone put a fallen baby bird back into it's nest.
  • Grow Nano vol.3 where you must heal a man who got sick by natural cause.
  • Grow Cinderella where like in the original tale, you must help Cinderalla prepare herself for the ball. Unlike the original tale, there is no indication that Cinderella's evil stepmother and stepsisters exists.
• The Harvest Moon franchise doesn't have any sort of overarching Big Bad or central figure causing any trouble. The conflict comes from managing your farm's time between growing crops, raising animals, meeting the townspeople, going to festivals, and falling in love. The only HM game that has a clear antagonist is DS/DS Cute, where the Witch Princess accidentally turned the Harvest Goddess to stone in the former and the Harvest King turning her to stone because of an insult directed at him in the latter. Every other game is just about a peaceful farming life in which your goals are set up by yourself, like maximizing your profits and getting married.
• There's no person or cosmic phenomena to get in your way in Heavenly Bodies. The greatest obstacle in the game is you and how unused you are to moving around without the Earth to center you.
• Ikenfell: It's deconstructed. There is an antagonist, but their behavior and goals are purely benevolent. Despite the evidence that suggests that an Eldritch Abomination called the Dark Fold being the game's antagonist, it turns out that it's long gone. However, Headmistress Aeldra legitimately fears that it's still alive. Fueled by said fears and years of suppressed guilt and self-loathing, Aeldra causes more than a few problems out of paranoia. The season of magic changing is being held back by Aeldra, out of a refusal to let the past die and for magic to change. Safina found this out, and attempted to stop Aeldra from holding it back because a refusal to let magic change would mean The End of the World as We Know It.
• Infocom's Infidel has a Villain Protagonist, but there's no hero matched against him — just a dangerous environment and his own stubborn determination to cross it.
  • Other Infocom games with No Antagonist include The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984) (hero vs. unpleasant coincidences), Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It (hero vs. supernatural contagion of puns and wordplay), Planetfall (hero vs. disease), and Suspended (hero vs. natural disaster).
• Journey (2012): You are a traveler in the desert walking towards the distant mountain. You meet fellow travelers who help you and dangerous creatures that hinder you locally, but there is no overarching opposing force that prevents you from going on.
• Jumper Three has no antagonists for Ogmo to deal with, just abandoned ruins full of the usual spikes, electricty currents, crumbling floors, and native creatures that are eager to help Ogmo in finding a new home.
• Kerbal Space Program: The only obstacles to your progress are your own design or piloting mistakes.
• While King's Quest I and II have random foes for Graham to defeat, there's no central antagonist behind the whole thing. The AGD Fan Remake of II fixes this somewhat by promoting the witch Hagatha to a more prominent role, giving her more involvement in Valanice's kidnapping, and introducing The Father as Hagatha's Man Behind The Man. The Father also has a bigger role as, when defeated at the end of the game, he places three curses on Daventry that result in the events of the other five games, becoming a Greater-Scope Villain in the process.
• Ignoring the Boss Rush modes, two modes from Kirby Super Star and its remake lack actual villains:
  • The Great Cave Offensive is basically Kirby falling into a hole and trying to escape with as much treasure as possible. While there are four major bosses, with Wham Bam Rock's defeat unlocking the ending, none of them have a plot role, and the mode ends with Kirby escaping.
  • Meta Knightmare Ultra in the remake is just a speedrun through the first five main modes as Meta Knight. Even when some sort of plot formulates towards the end, neither NPC involved (Nova and Galacta Knight) is antagonistic - the first simply grants a wish, and the second just exists for a unique final battle for the mode.
• Kirby's Dream Buffet is one of the few games in the series not to feature villains of any kind, not even Kirby's arch-rival King Dedede. It simply presents itself as a race/eating competition between multiple different Kirbys, where the goal is to eat as many strawberries as possible to win.
• Kuru Kuru Kururin: The GBA games do not have villains to speak of and the closest they get is Kururin Paradise having a group of magicians who challenge the player to minigames.
• The plot of The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince centers around the Wolf (as the titular Liar Princess) trying to fix her mistake by leading the blind prince to the Witch so the latter can heal the former's eyes. The only opposition are the hostile creatures of the forest, and the endgame revolves around the Princess and the Prince trying to quell the Witch's rage after they accidentally destroyed her collection. The closest thing the story has to actual villains would be the prince's parents, but they are offscreen, minor characters whose only action^note Locking up their son in a tower out of disgust for his facial injuries merely serves to motivate the Wolf more to set things right.
• Lil Gator Game: The main conflict of the game is that Lil Gator is sad that their older sister is too busy to play with them. There isn't any actual villain, and pretty much everyone in the game is a good person.
• Manifold Garden: The dark slime and anti-cubes are the closest thing to an opposing force, and they aren't hostile in any way.
• There are no true villains in the game, My Singing Monsters. However, there are some conflicts that happened in the lore like the Continent splitting up into separate islands. The closest one to being a villain is to beloved that a mysterious entity stealing the monsters music according to the MindBoggle element sigil.
• Nancy Drew Haunting at Castle Malloy is the only Nancy Drew game to fall into this trope and not have any culprit. As it turns out, the kidnapping that drives the plot was actually an accident and the "culprit" was trying to help the victim... and is a 70-year-old feral woman flying around on a jetpack. It Makes Sense in Context.
• NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD: There is no outside character trying to keep Ame from achieving happiness and success as a streamer- in the end, Ame is Her Own Worst Enemy and the antagonist is her own psychosis. P-chan can abuse her, make her exacerbate her mental issues, and even give her a Suicide Dare- and Ame herself emotionally manipulates and abuses P-chan in some routes- but as the Omega Ending reveals, P-chan is her Imaginary Friend, so Ame is still abusing herself. The closest thing to an outside antagonist are mean commenters, trolls, and cyberbullies who play a role in dragging her mental state down in some routes but are more of a nebulous outside threat. And the cause of her issues is her Abusive Parents, but they never appear and are only occasionally referred to.
• OPUS: Echo of Starsong lacks any sort of villain or even antagonistic force. Even the United Mining Corporation is more of an oppressive presence than something actively antagonistic. The real threat is really the characters' own personal inner demons.
• Unless you count the indeferrent plague and human frailty as a Big Bad, Pathologic plays this pretty straight.
• Pikmin (2001) is a man versus nature story about Captain Olimar being stranded on an alien planet. The only enemies and bosses are non-sapient fauna of the planet who are either just hungry or try to kill Pikmin through some Bizarre Alien Biology reason. Even the Final Boss is ultimately another, if exceptionally large, hungry creature. Sequels would introduce more antagonistic forces (the All-Devouring Black Hole Lone Sharks, the Red Leafling, and Louie to an increasing degree per game), but the first game is entirely Olimar against beasts trying to repair his ship.
• Potion Permit: While some of the residents are cold towards you and are slower to warm up to you than the others, there are no villainous characters in the game. The main conflict is the Chemist trying to rebuild Moonbury's trust with the Medical Association after the latter unintentionally caused environmental damage to the island when they studied the local flora to improve their medicine.
• The Atari 2600 game Pressure Cooker. You're working at a fast food restaurant and the conflict is in keeping up with the flow of burgers before they all fall off the chute and not get the orders wrong. There aren't even any other visible characters besides yourself.
• Return to Mysterious Island is a survival story, so nothing living hinders Mina except for some territorial monkeys and security robots she accidentally activates while exploring. It's technically Nemo's fault that she's trapped on the island, but he genuinely never anticipated that his invention would backfire in the way that it did, and does his best to help her (even though he's dead).
• Completely possible in the main entries of The Sims, as you can create whatever kind of Sims you like and can craft whatever kind of "story" you want. Want a world where there's no bullies, jerks, villains, or romantic false leads? Knock yourself out; if you decide to go that route, then the biggest obstacle in your sim's day-to-day happiness will be themselves as you try to keep them from starting fires and starving to death. However, there are certain un-changeable NPC's (mostly in The Sims 2) that are programmed to occasionally be nuisances to your sims, such as the burglars, Mrs.Crumpplebottom, or the Unsavory Charlatan.
• Sky Odyssey has no villains or bad guys to fight. Hostile Weather, mechanical breakdowns, and rough terrain challenge the player, but none are obviously characters.
• So Far is about fixing an environmental problem. The main obstacle is the story's odd language; there may or may not even be any other characters.
• Downplayed in Stardew Valley. Much like Story of Seasons, the central conflict is about maintaining a farm, but there is competition in the supermarket chain JojaMart. Even so, a player can completely ignore the conflict going on between JojaMart and the local mom-and-pop shop if they choose. The most antagonistic person in the setting is only promoting JojaMart because it's his job, and even he can rescue a player should they faint in the mines.
• The worst things that the cat and B-12 face off against in Stray are the Zurks and Sentinels, and those are merely the result of humanity's flaws negatively affecting the life of their robotic successors in the Slums and Midtown respectively. The central conflict is less about fighting them and more about surviving long enough to return to the surface world.
• Super Kiwi 64: The driving conflict of the game revolves around the kiwi and his buddy (the pirate parrow) being stranded in a remote island and needing gems that act like energy cells to refuel the airplane that will take them back home, with the only "enemy" being non-sentient robot guardians. The Doomsday storyline does have a villain in the form of the Robot Melon King.
• More often than not, a Super Monkey Ball game is simply about Aiai and the other monkeys feeling hungry and traveling to floating platforms to grab bananas, with no further plot. In the first two games, there weren't even any other characters besides Aiai and his friends.
• The Talos Principle: You only interact with two other characters, and while either or both of them may seem deceitful, neither of them want you to fail, nor will they take any steps to impede your progress. Apparently Subverted in the Tower Ascent ending, where Samsara will actively try to keep you from climbing the tower. Milton is just programmed to insert doubt in the simulation and encourage critical thinking, and Elohim is simply reluctant to be defied, knowing that will end the simulation and quite possibly kill him, but he never actually turns hostile and congratulates you should you succeed. Samsara does try to prevent you from climbing the tower, though that one is functionally an antagonist to The Shepherd more than to the player, as the obstacles she throws up never render the puzzles unsolvable.
• Tomodachi Life, being a life simulator with Miis, has no villains. Any conflict in the game is a result of a fight between two of your islanders.
• Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar: The goal of the game is to become the eponymous Avatar. While a fair part of that quest involves the traditional Dungeon Crawler, there is no villain and most of the work involved in completing the quest involves simply acting virtuously.
• Some Uncle Albert games have a problem that the player must solve that isn't caused by a malevolent person.
  • In Uncle Albert's Magical Album, the player must save Tom, who was accidentally locked inside the album with the treasure by Uncle Albert.
  • In Uncle Albert's Fabulous Voyage, the player must repair the album because it's rotting due to old age.
• This is officially the case for Uncommon Time according to the Developer's Room, but while it's definitely true for the final movement, which just involves the protagonists going on a Fetch Quest to succeed at the World Tuning, Teagan fits the role pretty well during the first half of the game. The Herald of Winter, Alto's subconscious hatred toward the world, could also count as an antagonist, as she's the reason why the first World Tuning fails, and in fact directly causes The End of the World as We Know It if she achieves dominance over Alto's will.
• Uru involves the player character exploring the history of the fallen D'ni culture, so unlike the rest of the Myst games, there is no opposition here.
• VVVVVV: The conflict is the crew being separated from each other after their ship crashed, and Captain Viridian having to rescue them all. The main source of death is obstacles, and while there are enemies to dodge, none of them seem to be sentient or have any relevance to the plot. The final challenge is an escape sequence rather than a boss fight.
• WarioWare is noticeable for not having any antagonists for its characters to deal with (well, except for Kat and Ana in the first game and Mona in Touched, amongst others). Most of the time, they're just trying to do something relevant to their jobs/interests as you clear their games. In fact, the closest thing that the series has to an overarching antagonist is Wario himself, and even then it's mostly because he's taking advantage of his friends' efforts. WarioWare Gold averts this trope for once by having Wario be the true Big Bad of the game. He's the one who stole the golden pot from Luxeville in the first place, prompting Lulu to chase him back to Diamond City as well as kickstart the entire plot involving the Wario Bowl, which was in fact a scam that he had set up to cheat the player out of their money as they went through the games, only to deny them their prize once they finally get to confront him. All this plus Wario getting Drunk on the Dark Side prompts the player to fight him for it.
• Welcome To Boon Hill is about walking through a cemetery and learning the stories of the people buried there. There's no zombies, ghosts, or any spooky stuff going on there.
• There's no Big Bad in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. The Damsel in Distress has been that way for centuries and the person who bewitched her died the moment he cast the spell. Link is given his quest by Impa simply because the Birthmark of Destiny appeared on his hand. While there are enemies in the game who want to kill Link to resurrect Ganon, they have nothing to do with the actual plot, and the dungeons Link must conquer are actually guardians created by the forces of Good to protect the Triforce of Courage. Even at the end of the game, the final confrontation with Shadow Link is a test set up by the old man that guards the Triforce and wants Link to prove that he's overcome his evil side.
• Zoo Tycoon, being about building a zoo, doesn't really have an antagonist to confront, though at times you could make an argument for the guests.

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