Sadistic Choice / Visual Novels

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• Danganronpa hinges on this: are you willing to kill all of your friends in order to escape your confinement?
  • In the final trial, the survivors are forced choosing between Hope and Despair. Choose Despair? They surrender and stay in the school forever and Makoto gets executed. Choose Hope? The Mastermind dies, but they will be forced out of the school and into the outside world... which is devastated. Makoto convinces them to take the latter option, as he's hopeful that they can rebuild the world and heal it from the despair Junko has wreaked upon it.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has three choices. The survivors can either stay on the Jabberwock Islands with the members of the Future Foundation (Makoto, Kyoko, Byakuya), or escape the Jabberwock Islands as intended, which will allow the Mastermind to escape too and take over their bodies, and keep the Future Foundation members trapped, or they can Take a Third Option and shut down the virtual world, escape the Islands with the Future Foundation and slay the Mastermind... but run a heavy risk of losing all memories of the virtual world and reverting back into Ultimate Despair. After going through a Heroic BSoD, Hajime manages to overcome his indecision with the help of Chiaki, and he convinces everyone to shut down the game and destroy the Mastermind, promising them that this choice will allow them to take full control of their future. He turns out to be right.
  • The spin-off Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls keeps up the tradition. Do you, A: destroy the Monokuma robot controller, putting an end to the rampaging slaughter machines, which will also cause the brainwashing helmets being worn by thousands of children to explode, or B: not destroy it, and let the Monokuma bots continue to rampage, further riling up the already bloodthirsty mob of adults bent on killing the children? By the way, it's revealed that not just the children's lives are in the balance. Depending on what you do, a complete and utter war between various powerful parties will be started depending on the choice.
  • The climax of the final chapter of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony pits the remaining cast in one: Hope or Despair. Choose hope, and Tsumugi the mastermind shall receive punishment, but the remaining four will have to pick two to receive punishment as well (and by receiving punishment in this sense, it really means having to move on to the next iteration of the killing game). Choose despair, and K1-B0 is executed and the killing game continues. Either way, the audience is sated and Danganronpa will continue. The only option that won't allow Danganronpa to continue is by refusing to vote and giving the audience an ending they wouldn't like. However, doing so has another catch, as those who abstain from voting will be executed. Shuichi eventually talks the remaining cast into abstaining.
• The protagonist of Double Homework must either assist Dennis in his schemes to bed all the girls (including his own sisters) or have damning information about his and Tamara’s role in the Barbarossa incident come out to the public.
• In the Heaven's Feel arc of Fate/Stay Night, you have to choose between stopping Tohsaka to save the one you love, Sakura, who will inevitably go on a killing rampage, or killing said love and upholding your borrowed ideal.
  • Regrettably, choosing to kill her only leads to a bad end - right after getting told that what would happen next was probably enough for it's own route.
• In the backstory to Hatoful Boyfriend, the mother to Yuuya and Sakuya ran away with a commoner and had one chick and one egg before her fiancee had him murdered. Yuuya remembers her telling him about his "new father" and saying "But your new father says he doesn't want your brother. He says he can only feed you if you leave the egg behind." The phrasing suggests that she was only allowed to keep one of her children and elected that it be the one who had hatched already. To spare her Yuuya volunteered to throw his brother away, but kept the egg and switched it with the new one she laid, smashing the new one. Killing his unborn half brother as a child had a profound effect on Yuuya - he's not sure if he did it for his full brother or out of spite, just like the nobleman, and it haunts him. Either way, he would have had to kill his sibling or let his mother kill her son.
• At the climax of Diego's season two path in Havenfall Is for Lovers, the season's antagonist presents the player character with a choice: kill Diego with the stake and other vampire-slaying tools prepared for just this occasion, or lose her younger sister forever.
• Ikemen Sengoku:
  • In Nobunaga's route, he tries to force the main character into one by giving her his sword and then threatening to shoot her with his rifle if she doesn't kill him first, to prove to her the necessity of killing in the Sengoku period. The MC, not liking either of these choices, takes a third option by reasoning with him that he hates wasting resources and killing his lucky charm would be doing just that. Nobunaga laughs heartily at her unexpected choice, but concedes that she was successful in persuading him to spare her.
  • At the climax in Masamune's Romantic route, Kennyo is holding the female main character at swordpoint at the edge of a cliff and tells Masamune that if he throws himself off the cliff, he'll let her go, but if he doesn't, she dies. Masamune takes a third option by telling Kennyo to go ahead and kill her, knowing that Kennyo still has enough of a conscience left to be unable to kill her right away, and he and the main character use Kennyo's moment of hesitation as an opportunity to jump off the cliff together and swim to safety away from him.
• In Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, Kyle manages to unveil Dylan's identity as an agent of Nile, then tells him that any action he does afterward will screw him over; if kills Kyle, Nile has a tendency to eliminate their own agents that blown their cover, or if he leaves Kyle alone, Nile would be on the hunt for him after he ignored his orders. So he decides to leave the city at first hand.
• A Little Lily Princess: When the Mistaken for Thief incident from Becky's route gets cleared up, Miss Minchin prefers imposing one such choice to Sara and Becky to admitting she made a mistake: either Sara stole the money Becky left with her for safekeeping, or Becky gave the money to Sara. If Sara stole the money, Becky gets it back, but Sara gets sent to the proper authorities. If Becky gave Sara the money, then Miss Minchin is entitled to it because Sara is in debt towards her. She doesn't allow for a third option, which is a problem because the situation itself qualifies as one.
• Presented by Bethany and Steve to the protagonist and title character of Melody. Either the protagonist resigns as Melody’s manager and leaves town with Bethany, or Steve smashes the guitar which is a keepsake from Melody’s late mother.
• In the final case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All, after you learn that your client Matt Engarde was the one who ordered assassin Shelly de Killer to kill Juan Corrida, you are, towards the end of the final day of the case, forced to decide the verdict of the trial. Oh, and your sidekick Maya is being held hostage by de Killer, and the only way he will release her is if you get a Not Guilty verdict for Engarde. But if you do that, an innocent woman who has been hurt immeasurably due to Engarde's actions will be convicted in his place. The way to win is to Take a Third Option and convince de Killer over a handheld radio to abandon his contract with Engarde, freeing Maya and letting you give Engarde his justly-deserved Guilty verdict. In the process, Engarde gets his own unpleasant choice — go free and get killed by de Killer, or plead guilty to murder and spend the rest of his life in prison.
  • The thing is, before you can Take a Third Option, you have to choose, at two points, which option you'd go with. In the first instance, the judge is willing to declare a verdict on the spot, and you're given the option to either encourage him, or prolong the trial. However, regardless of your decision, Phoenix cannot bring himself to get the verdict announced, and he will prolong the trial instead. In the second instance, you're asked to either declare your client "Guilty" or "Not Guilty", but Franziska barges into the courtroom before Phoenix can go through with either choice. If you manage to successfully take the third option afterward, you're explicitly told that the second choice was really about the kind of person you were.
  • Moment of Awesome and Funny at the same time if you convince the judge that Engarde is innocent after all of that plays out. Convincing de Killer to end his contract with Engarde involves proving to de Killer that Engarde recorded the hired hit and was saving the tape for blackmail if need be. Once he realizes that he's been deceived, De Killer reiterates that trust between himself and his client is the most important thing in the world to him, and if a client were to betray that trust, he would hunt them down to the ends of the earth to get his revenge. Before the verdict is handed down, Edgeworth reminds Engarde that De Killer is both very angry at him and very good at what he does. If you convince the judge that it's best for Engarde to go free, Engarde freaks out and demands to be put in jail on the off chance that he might be even a little bit safer behind bars. Very satisfying. It's also worth noting that in the sequel to Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, Edgeworth and company encounter De Killer, and he's completely occupied with a new contract. Considering both how De Killer can make his way into very secure locations and that we never hear of Engarde again after his verdict is handed down, we can make a reasonable assumption about what became of him.
• In Spirit Hunter: NG, if Kaoru and Seiji are both alive at the end of Kubitarou's case, then Kakuya will force Akira to choose between them by sending a lightning strike down on their location. The character that Akira chooses to save first re-appears in the Demon Tsukuyomi case, while the other is stuck in a coma until the end of the game.
• Your Turn to Die is all about this, with Sara and the other participants forced to contend with various deadly games, with the worst of the lot asking them to determine who dies through a majority vote — with the added wrinkle that one among them has been placed into an even more precarious position. Much like in Werewolf (1997), some of the players have hidden roles, and if someone in a particular role gets the most votes, they'll win... at the cost of everyone else getting executed (save one person of their choice). But if they don't get the most votes, both they and whoever got the majority vote will die.
  • The climax of Chapter 2-1 effectively asks the player to choose between two different survivors... and it's not the immediately obvious pair you're initially presented with, either. What it really hinges on is whether or not you're able to solve the last puzzle in time.
  • Chapter 2-2's final choice is even worse: do you sacrifice Nao and Sou? Nao and Kanna? Or do you save Nao and yourself by sacrificing everyone else?
• Common throughout the Zero Escape franchise, but the final game, Zero Time Dilemma, is pretty much entirely based on these with the "Decision Game" repeatedly foisted on the characters. Probably the most sadistic example (and the one which got boxart prominence in Japan) is the one forced upon D-Team in the Incinerator Room. Phi is trapped in the incinerator with a time limit before it activates, while Sigma is restrained in a chair with a revolver pointed at his head. To unlock the door to the incinerator, Diana must fire the revolver, which is half-filled with blanks and half-filled with live rounds. She can either save Phi but have a 50% chance of killing Sigma, or guarantee Sigma's survival but guarantee Phi's death. In the timeline where she fires a live round, she is so distraught about killing Sigma that she wordlessly takes the revolver and shoots herself with it immediately after.

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