Protagonist Centered Morality / Video Games

Protagonist-Centered Morality as seen in Video Games.

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• Deconstructed In-Universe in BlazBlue: Central Fiction. It's revealed that a Prime Field named Origin has control over the Amaterasu unit, and is therefore essentially a god, having complete control over time itself. Origin then uses its power to ensure that time only moves forward if her 'Successor', Noel, is alive and living her best possible life; any other outcome causes time to reset. Noel's best case scenario happens to involve an entire civil war breaking out and several named characters being much worse off or dead. Nine, a Hero of Another Story who had earned her happy ending, had to be betrayed and killed for the timeline to go Noel's way; When she was brought back to life, she was understandably full of Rage Against the Heavens, and began devising a weapon to destroy Amaterasu and kill Origin to make the timeline "fair" (in quotes because Nine's idea of "fair" is a world where she and her sister Celica are happy, to hell with anyone else). Furthermore, when Izanami revealed the truth of Origin's goals to the world, several people turned on Noel herself and started trying to kill her.
• This trope was used and addressed by the developers of Brink!, with the biggest example being a mission where, as the Resistance, you're trying to safeguard a vaccine from capture by Security forces. The same mission, played from the Security side, is attempting to wrest a lethal bio-weapon from the Resistance. After all, to develop a vaccine, you first need a sample of the virus. Plenty of other examples are given throughout playing both campaigns, which was an intentional design.
• Heavily played with in Far Cry Primal. At the start of the game, Takkar is working to meet up with other members of his lost tribe, the Wenja, after a saber-toothed cat kills his entire hunting party in the first 10 minutes. He then finds out that the Wenja have been scattered and basically near-destroyed by rival tribes the Udam and the Izila. At this point, the Wenja are tragic victims fighting to keep their people alive. Later on in the game, however, Takkar becomes The Beastmaster and rebuilds a sizeable village, whilst repeatedly attacking the Udam and the Izila and trying to destroy them just like they did to his people, even though all Takkar's allies view this as something worth celebrating. Takkar himself is the only character who doesn't celebrate, since he feels that something is wrong (and with the Udam, there's plenty wrong), and he extends mercy to a few members of the enemy tribes, like Dah the Udam, Roshani the Izila, and eventually, Warchief Ull's children, even when the other Wenja don't agree with him, but apart from this, the general hypocrisy is never addressed. Then again, since this is a game taking place in prehistoric Central Europe, the Protagonist-Centered Morality is most likely intentional.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Jack Moschet in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles has a Myrrh tree in the backyard of his manor (the dew of which is needed to purify a giant crystal that holds back the poisonous miasma around the party's village) and he's a monster (a gigas, to be exact) with a Hair-Trigger Temper. Both of these are apparently reason enough to break into his estate, kill his servants to lure him out, and then beat up him and his wife, even though there are over a dozen other Myrrh trees to collect from.
  • Final Fantasy Brave Exvius falls into this hard in season 2 with Sol of the Eight Sages, the ultimate Big Bad of season 1. Push comes to shove, he has the exact same goal - killing all life on the planet - as the Big Bad of season 2, Emperor Vlad. The main differences between the two are motive (Sol is a Knight Templar who thinks his acts are a species-wide Mercy Killing; Emperor Vlad is an Omnicidal Maniac Nietzsche Wannabe) and technique (the former wants to use the negative emotions of mankind to make a magical construct to destroy everything, the latter wants to use an ancient superweapon). And Sol doesn't have any sort of proper Heel–Face Turn or repudiation of his philosophy - he continually wants to destroy everything; he only has issues with the season 2 Big Bad because a) he wants to destroy everything his way, and b) he wants to be the one to kill one of the heroes himself and won't let anyone else. In fact, he specifically states on multiple occasions that he plans on getting back to his plans once the season 2 Big Bad is killed. Yet, because he helps out the heroes against said Big Bad, he's treated by the story as a positive force. He even gets an Alas, Poor Villain speech by the guy he wanted to kill when Emperor Vlad finally kills Sol.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses deals heavily in this. It's not just Byleth being a Morality Chain for whichever faction leader they choose to support, but facts about the backstory and post-timeskip war are heavily disputed In-Universe and what one character takes as gospel can be twisted, omitted, glossed over, or proven to be lies depending which perspective Part II follows, which tends to paint all the other factions in a much worse light until their routes are played and more details are connected together. It was invoked so effectively it even hit this wiki in the weeks after the game's initial release, with almost all the major characters having entries on the Unintentionally Unsympathetic page until the game's plot was more thoroughly examined and everyone turned out to have their reasons.
• An odd variation with the opening level of Goldeneye Rogue Agent, which applies this to James Bond rather than the player character. The level is revealed to be a training simulation, which fails because the player character ends up spending so much time killing bad guys that the nuke they were sent to disarm goes off. Despite this being a far clearer reason for failing the simulation, the agent ends up terminated from MI6 solely because, for some reason, he is held responsible for Bond's "death", nevermind that there's hardly anything about the circumstances that can be blamed on him - both were in the same helicopter before it got shot down, and only the agent happened to luck out and be thrown onto more solid ground on crashing, whereas Bond was still hanging from part of the copter and thus slipped and fell several stories to his death when the floor it was on gave out.
• Iggy's Reckin' Balls is about a group of troublemakers whose hobby is racing against each other, with the winner getting to push the Big Red Button that will detonate the entire racetrack. The game itself takes them to the sacred towers of the Cho-Dama Kingdom, and despite what they're doing being sacrilege and can be easily interpreted as terrorism, the game very much wants you to perceive it as much fun as Iggy and his friends are having, with the Cho-Dama forces attempting to stop them Played for Laughs. No consequences of the destroyed towers are ever shown except for the last-place finisher getting caught in the explosion, which is also played for laughs.
• Discussed in Kid Icarus: Uprising, when Viridi accuses Pit of being a "flying munitions depot" and more destructive than her own forces. He remarks, "But I'm fighting evil. It's different. Look it up." All joking aside, this is a case where you're supposed to applaud the hero for calling the villain out, since Viridi is attempting genocide on human civilians whereas Pit is retaliating against strictly military targets.
• King's Quest:
  • Crops up only briefly in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, with a royal proclamation announcing Cassima and Alhazared's wedding. It appears in the beginning of the game before Alexander has any real reason to question the legitimacy of the marriage, but Alhazared is obviously the villain and, at the very least, is oppressing Cassima to the point of keeping her under house arrest. The narration describes Alexander as being distraught at the thought of the wedding because she'd be another man's wife. The danger she's in personally apparently doesn't upset him quite that much.
  • Kings Quest (2015) falls into this with the way Graham treats his two grandchildren. Graham is the hero, so anything he does is more or less indicated to be okay — including the fact that he clearly favors his granddaughter Gwen over his grandson Gart, to the point that he names her his heir, making her Queen of Daventry when he dies. This is despite Gart being the older grandchild, and the one who actually lives in Daventry with his grandfather. Gart himself is given a few minor character flaws, while Gwen isn't shown to have any; she becomes the player character in the epilogue of the game, meaning that she has apparently also inherited Graham's Protagonist Centered Morality.
• The Player Character from Knights of the Old Republic can be played like this if you get all the Dark Side points in the game for being a massive jerk for the sake of it and then saved the Republic, everyone will ignore all that and you're a hero.
• The Last of Us Part II: Deconstructed thoroughly. Ellie goes off on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Abby and the WLF for murdering Joel, but Joel murdered Abby's father in the past (the surgeon who was going to operate on Ellie in the first game) and as far as Abby was concerned, Joel was a deluded madman who murdered her heroic father and doomed the human race from ever finding a cure and absolutely had it coming. Ellie kills scores of Abby's comrades-in-arms in the first act to reach Abby, so by the second act when the player perspective shifts to the other girl, she is pissed, and quite understandably so.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, one of Class VII and the Courageous' goals is to bring back Crow, one of their classmates who they all see as a friend and are hoping to graduate alongside them. They are also notably sympathetic to him despite the fact that as the leader of the Imperial Liberation Front, he was a clear-cut terrorist who repeatedly targeted military lives, and endangered innocent ones (including those of his own classmates and supposed friends), in a complex gambit to weaken Osborne's position in Erebonia and eventually assassinate him. When he succeeded in the assassination near the end of the first game, Erebonia fell into Civil War in the second game which Class VII and the Courageous spend their time trying to end. In fact, Crow himself ends up cautioning Rean about this when Duke Cayenne extends him a We Can Rule Together offer. While explaining his past, Crow makes no effort to assert his righteousness, fully admitting that his crusade was little more than a gamble to get revenge, downplays his tragic past as "just another sob story", and even goes as far as to say that Osborne wasn't even necessarily an evil man for what he did. His insistence on Rean sticking to his own beliefs does lead to his own plans coming undone, but Rean and Class VII never lose their sympathy for him, or stop thinking of him as a friend.
• Early in Magic and Mayhem's plot, the protagonist gets away with killing a friendly character who helped him on The Quest just for an artifact they possessed. The narration tries to redeem him by implying that he needed the thing real bad (he didn't) and that this was instigated by a Zen Survivor advisor while the character himself was too inexperienced to counter. It is possible to play this as self-defence, however — deliberately avoid meeting the character and he'll eventually attack first.
• NieR is a deconstruction of this. The main character is, as far as he is concerned, simply killing monsters and anyone else that stands in between him and his goal of curing the disease of a close relative, and this is (at least initially) portrayed in a positive, sympathetic light. In reality... his actions doom the entire human race, because he never stopped to think about the consequences of his actions or make any attempt to think or ask about things outside that limited frame of reference. And the "monsters" aren't monsters, they're the remnants of humanity.
• Odin Sphere switches between the points of view of different characters, and the way Ingway looks depends heavily on who is the focus at the time. Ingway is first introduced as a massive asshole who cast a Pooka curse on Cornelius so that he couldn't be with his sister. Then Mercedes meets him when he's been transformed into a frog and the player gets to see his more heroic side, and then he becomes a Jerkass Woobie for Velvet's story, when his and her backstories are revealed.
• Freeware RPG Paradise Blue has the player on the side of La Résistance as they plan a coup d'etat against the current king. At no point in the game does the narrative try to explain why the resistance leader should be king, and in fact the current king doesn't seem to be that bad of a guy; the only real major flaw he has is that his second in command is a complete asshole. The resistance are the good guys simply because the protagonist is working for them.
• Defied in Phantasy Star IV, with Chaz's Calling the Old Man Out speech. The Great Light created life in Algo for the sole purpose of keeping the Sealed Evil in a Can in its prison, but Chaz asserts that if they mindlessly obey the Light's plan, there's no real difference between the servants of Darkness and the servants of Light except for which side of the bars they're on. Chaz ends up rejecting the whole Light vs. Dark thing altogether, and decides to fight to protect the people of Algo instead.
• This is a major facet of Alicesoft's flagship Rance series. The titular protagonist considers rape, theft and murder to be unforgivable offenses... just as long as he isn't the one doing them, in which case they're acts of absolute, unquestionable justice. On a more mundane level, he's quick to criticize others for behaviors or ideas that he is equally as guilty of having, only to completely deny it when someone points his hypocrisy out to him. This is all very intentional and Played for Laughs, as Rance is a borderline Sociopathic Anti-Hero and all of his allies are either Extreme Doormats, Horrible Judges of Character or rational people who have resigned themselves to mostly tolerating his behavior due to their understanding of his incredible strength. Kichikuou Rance's plot begins with Rance marrying Lia and becoming the king of her country. Naturally, he becomes an awful tyrant. A minor event in the game consists of him enforcing a new set of laws across his country, which consist of:
  • 1. Those who assault women will be executed. (The King is exempt)
  • 2. Married men that get involved with other women will be executed. (The King is exempt)
  • 3. Prostitution businesses are prohibited. (Except the King’s favorite ones)
  • 4. Girls must value their chastity, and stay virgins until marriage. (Unless the King takes it)
• Remember Me doesn't really care too much about anyone but Nilin and the people she cares about personally. No mention is made of the people who are killed as a result of her tampering with memories except for the one she feels guilty about, or the people who are about to be suddenly flooded by horrible memories they once deleted at the end of the game. One level ends with her flooding Paris and aside from a cutscene where she feels guilty about it and a few people yelling at her through their windows as you run across the abandoned vehicles resting in the water, nothing more is ever shown from it and no one ever brings it up again.
• Saints Row 2 is where The Boss is at their most Villain Protagonist-y, and no small part of that is their beef with Maero and the Brotherhood. The Boss initiates the feud themselves simply due to being offended by an unfair alliance deal from Maero, resulting in an escalating Cycle of Revenge that results in Carlos' death and The Boss killing, crippling or otherwise victimizing some rather sympathetic characters simply for associating with The Brotherhood, whether directly (Maero's girlfriend Jessica is clearly a decision-maker in the gang and is more or less directly responsible for Carlos' death) or not (Matt is a musician and tattoo artist who is only technically associated with the gang because he happens to be Maero's friend).
  • The reboot is really bad about this. Unlike the original series where Protagonist-Centered Morality works because the gang knows they're sociopathic criminals and love it, the reboot's Saints are painted as down-on-their-luck youth who had to resort to crime because student loans suck that much and the story has them only go after Asshole Victims like other gangs and capitalist scumbags to make their actions seem more clean, never mind collateral damage and whatever mayhem the player is causing, with only a few flimsy gameplay restrictions to hold them back. The reboot makes the Saints out as "the good guys" because they're at least better than the other criminals, but glosses over the fact that at the end of the day they're still criminals who went into crime solely to satisfy their ego and profit.
• Sam & Max Hit the Road hangs a big old lampshade on this in its intro.
  Sam: [holding a bomb] Where can I put this so it doesn't hurt anyone we know or care about?
  Max: Out the window, Sam! There's nothing but strangers out there.
  [Sam tosses the bomb out the window. A loud explosion can be heard outside.\
  Sam: I hope there was nobody on that bus!
  Max: Nobody we know, at least.
• This gets ridiculous in Sands of Destruction, where you're trying to destroy the world, which is perfectly acceptable. The ferals, most of whom treat humans poorly, are the bad guys, occasionally trying to stop you when you do something they don't like, such as killing their kid and stealing from them.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Rather than an accident of writing, this is very much the point of the mainline Shin Megami Tensei series, and its tactical spinoff Devil Survivor. The idea of these narratives is that the Protagonist is not just finding his own path in the world, but is ultimately defining the ideology that the new world will follow after it is reborn in the fire and destruction of the current one. Is the Protagonist acting like a seemingly charitable, messianic, but ultimately authoritarian and oppressive leader? He's steadily aligning himself with the policies of YHVH and Law. Is he taking selfish, self-serving actions that others find cruel or dismissive? He's just expressing a bent for the ultimate personal freedom that Lucifer and Chaos represent. By the end of the games, it's the Protagonist's morality that rules and defines the new society, whether humans, angels, or demons are around to enforce it.
  • This is particularly evident in Shin Megami Tensei IV, in which the Neutral alignment (considered in-game to be the only unambiguously good, desirable, and hardest one) is not based on rejecting the extreme views of Law and Chaos as in previous installments, but rather on keeping a "balance" of Lawful and Chaotic actions. Where traditional Neutral factions, and the Freedom path of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, align naturally with current morals and ethics in the real world, and therefore the Protagonist's morality is beholden to "our" real-world value system, IV eschews this option and defines its Protagonist's morality as exhibiting authoritarian and anarchist beliefs in equal measure.
  • Persona 5: In the updated true ending of Royal, a date with the player's romanced confidant on White Day is added. However, the protagonist completely forgot to schedule a date and as a result pretty much everywhere he could've taken her is completely booked. Sojiro says he'll bail you out, and gives you the number of a fancy restaurant to call and tells the protagonist to bring up his name. The restaurant initially says they're booked... until you bring up Sojiro at which point the employee says he'll get you a reservation right away. Morgana smiles and says that Sojiro's connections came in handy. However, the narrative completely glosses over the fact that someone who had a reservation because he didn't wait until the last minute now doesn't because Sojiro, and by extension you, is just that important. Up until this point, this is something you'd expect from pretty much any of the villains, because Persona 5 is satire about how Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! is not only Truth in Television in Japan but seen as a morally correct way to think.
• Splatoon plays this for laughs in its competitive multiplayer modes. The "good guys" are always whichever team the player is on, and the "bad guys" are always the other team.
• Tales of Graces: Richard has been possessed and turned into a merciless psycho king. However, because Richard is a friend to the party, they can't just kill him before he ruins or ends anyone else's life. They need to save him! There is also the fact that if they killed him, they'd be killing the last King of Windor and even if he wasn't Asbel's friend, Asbel would be committing regicide and Lhant would be screwed. Sadly, this is never explored in game.
• Tales of Symphonia:
  • A very minor one in the synopsis of the plot thus far, found in the game's menu. After the ambush atop the Fuji Mts. the game claims that the Renegades stole the Rheiards from you. I guess we're ignoring that the party stole them from the Renegades in the first place?
  • Sheena also provides a minor example: after Kuchinawa is revealed as a Double Agent one of the things she and her village is worried about is that the secrets of their village may have been leaked, and at another point she mentions that her village takes great effort to keep itself as secretive as possible. All the while though, she and her village actively spies on every other group in the entire game (even the other world of Sylvarant through The Renegades).
  • When Lloyd calls out the Big Bad for sacrificing the Great Seed in order to revive Martel, Yggdrasill retorts that Lloyd did the same thing when he abandoned the dying world of Sylvarant to save Colette. Lloyd has no rebuttal to this.
• Team Fortress 2: The "Meet the [Class]" promotional videos are all shot from the RED team's perspective (except for "Meet the Spy", which plays more like a Mook Horror Show instead), so only RED team's classes are impossibly heroic, badass, and loyal. In-game voice responses and taunts also suggest that both RED and BLU teams have this sort of mindset.
• The Tomb Raider series has Lara Croft killing lots of guys in her quest to find artifacts. Tomb Raider (2013) lampshades this by making Lara repeatedly apologize and angst over killing other island survivors and even the animals she needs to eat to survive. Parodied in a Robot Chicken sketch which points out that Lara also has an unfortunate tendency to kill large numbers of endangered animals (like the famous tigers) purely for her financial gain. Zig-Zagged with earlier games in the franchise; Tomb Raider I only features a handful of human enemies, all hired guns, and the first two survive multiple gunfights with Lara before dying. Tomb Raider II features a doomsday cult Lara guns down by the boatload and a Save the World plot. Tomb Raider III has her shooting her way through a U.S. Military Base to steal a relic, and the danger to the world doesn't kick in until she collects all the artifacts. In Anniversary a remake of the original, she only kills one person and this has a serious effect on her, but in the other Crystal Dynamics-helmed games, Legend and Underworld, she goes through mooks by the dozen.
• Undertale is a massive subversion of this trope. If you kill anyone, including common monsters, you will be called out on it. You've killed that Snow Drake in a random encounter near the beginning of the game? Meet his parent near the end. To drive the point home, one of the characters lampshades it.
  Alphys: Watching someone on a screen really makes you root for them.
  • In a way No Mercy run aside, the game is at its worst if you kill common monsters but spare the major characters because they matter to you personally, Flowey calls you out on killing others but sparing Toriel when, in his own words, they could have been to someone else what Toriel is to you. It also puts you on the fast track for the worst of the neutral endings.
  • Somewhat played straight with Undyne, who is the first character you come across making a sincere effort to kill the player character, who is a child. While you will get called out for killing anyone, in self-defense or not, Undyne is never outright called out for trying to murder a kid, even if you're playing a Pacifist route and said kid has never hurt anyone. In fact, befriending Undyne is a requirement in order to get the game's Golden Ending.
• Valkyria Chronicles:
  • Selvaria, being a Valkyria, is a terrifying enemy who remorselessly slaughters thousands of Gallians, but only until we find out that Alicia is one too, and once she has a connection to the protagonists, her villain status immediately begins to wane. The heroes are much more upset about her capture than they are about the castle full of soldiers she obliterates, the player is expected to feel much more for her than her victims, and the plot pays so much more attention to her that the fact that her capture was a Wounded Gazelle Gambit is never even addressed by her survivors.
  • Selvaria herself tends to embody this trope on her own, in conjunction with Squad 7's Plot Armor. She's being exploited for her powers and only kills mooks that no one cares about, so the story treats her like a tragic figure who is good at heart, but isn't in control of her own destiny. Then she spares Squad 7, thus sabotaging Maximillian's assured victory at the last minute, but she kills those thousands of soldiers anyway. The way the story plays out, the tragedy is that she committed suicide, not that a sizable portion of Gallia's entire population was just murdered during a truce.
  • Faldio shoots Alicia to awaken her Valkyria powers, which stops Selvaria from destroying what's left of the Gallian military and winning the war. Although no one disagrees that his plan worked when no one else had any other ideas, the story utterly condemns him for choosing the many over the one because the one is a main protagonist and the many were mooks, and while he's punished for treason, the story shows us he was wrong because his plan to save the day required harming a main character instead of just trusting that they'd figure out a way themselves. It's especially notable that he openly states that it's because no one had a solution that he even went to such lengths to begin with, and in the end, the plot proves it was necessary. The narrative nails this one home at the end when he commits a completely needless Taking You with Me with Maximillian, explicitly to atone for believing in power instead of his friends... who don't object, try to talk him out of it, or even indicate that they accept his apology, even though they're openly offended that someone would dare physically strike Selvaria.
  • Geld had been committing war crimes since the first war and the Empire apparently knew about it, but wasn't punished for it until, as luck would have it, he was caught by Captain Varrot, who only stayed in the army to find him and get revenge for torturing and murdering her lover. Evidently the Empire didn't mind him torturing and killing prisoners and civilians until Varrot took the high road.
  • The only Imperial soldiers given any sympathetic treatment are the one that dies in Alicia's lap, and the captain of his unit who lets Alicia and Welkin leave in peace instead of killing them while they're alone in the woods without backup; it's supposed to be a way of showing that the Imperials are similar, but since they go right back to acting like assholes for the rest of the game, it seems that the only way the Imperials can be good people is by being good to the lead couple.
• You Are Not The Hero tries to deconstruct the Kleptomaniac Hero idea by having you play someone who had her house looted by so-called "heroes", chasing after them to get her stuff back. As most reviewers pointed out, however, the game doesn't do a damn thing to stop or even discourage you from taking anything that's not nailed down along the way, making it seem like stealing is wrong if and only if you're doing it to the main character.

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