The Spartan Way / Video Games

• The Ravens of the Armored Core series are trained in this manner as well. Although the initial stages of the training are unknown, all applicants have prior combat experience as MT pilots and the final stage involves a literal do-or-die test against several opponents.
• Unsurprisingly, this shows up in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey as the main character is Spartan and part of the plot takes place in Sparta. However, the main character is given the option call them out on the unnecessary brutality and waste it produces, should you desire.
• Surprisingly, GDI's (the good guys') commando program in Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars, with a 22% fatality rate among the recruits and a 95% failure rate among the survivors, with the Commandoes starting off as the best the world has to offer.. Sounds bad until you realize these commandos are always in training, there is no such thing as graduation, so it's literally the 5% of the troops who are still actively serving as a Commando.
  • To make matters even more ridiculous, the Brotherhood of Nod's commando program is even worse.
• The Silencer Corps of the Crusader series of games likely have something like this; the alternative is that they are vat-born and come preprogrammed with the requisite skills. This is implied to be true for the latest generation of Silencers; the older ones are indicated to be "old-fashioned".
• Dwarf Fortress, brutal as it is, has some examples:
  • Training pretty much WAS The Spartan Way prior to 31.01; casualty rates for sparring were brutally high, and the only way to safely train was to already be a legendary soldier. Now soldiers can train individually and have access to wooden training weapons, but you can always give them steel ones...
  • The infamous community's version of Dwarven "Child Care". "It's like regular childcare, except with more dogs, and less care." The basic version is dumping children in small pits with irritable, semi-feral dogs and food, though more dementedly sophisticated methods have been dreamed up in the forums to instill physical toughness and psychological numbness.
• Field Commander does this with both sides, while A.T.L.A.S is a more humane "You need a Medal of Honor and some sort of task that makes you a damn badass" to become a grunt, Shadow Nation's training of their appropriately named fodder is rather inhumane, cooped up in tiny cells being fed food devoid of nutrients, it turns their men to insane bloodthirsty beasts as a result, and their division commanders do not treat their men well even after they are sent out to the field.
• The Deep Ground Soldiers in Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus. To the point that, when they're set free, they start a war because that's literally all they know how to do.
• In Final Fantasy VIII, the final exam for SeeD candidates consists of sending the teenage cadets into a cave to beat up a god, then inserting them into a real military engagement and sending them in small units to engage numerically superior hordes of professional soldiers. Makes you wonder how SeeDs are tested when there aren't any wars going on. (Or, perhaps, would if there were EVER not a war going on.)
• Ghost Recon Wildlands has Carl Bookhart, a former Army Ranger whose methods of training Santa Blanca's sicarios fall into this with live ammo and eating knives during combat drills. Those that manage to survive are elite soldiers for the cartel.
• God of War has one of the most literal examples of this trope. The protagonist Kratos is a Spartan himself, and although he rarely holds full discussions with anyone, he does make mentions of the exceptionally tough and hardy training of his own people. Flashbacks in God of War: Ghost of Sparta show Kratos applying this training on his own brother (by repeatedly beating the ever living shit out of him while scolding him). This is subverted in the Norse series however where while Kratos is incredibly stern and harsh towards his son Atreus and expects him to be self-reliant, he never puts him through the same experiences that he did growing up and explicitly states that he refuses to raise him as a Spartan. Not because he saw Atreus as weak, but Kratos (now Older and Wiser) believes that no child should have to go through such a thing.
  Kratos: In Sparta, we were taken from our homes as children and raised in the Agoge. We marched or we drowned. Fought for scraps or starved. Our elders beat us 'til we could not stand. At night we made our way home, alone, or were food for wolves. That is how Spartans are made.
• In Half-Life: Opposing Force, during part of the training, there's a line of three people on the opposite side of a field firing full-powered machine guns. It's not only possible to die during this part, it's kind of hard NOT to die on the first try. All this just to learn cover.
• The literally-named Spartan-IIs from the Halo franchise were all kidnapped by the military at the age of six to be put through incredibly harsh training, complemented by high-level education. By the time the trainees turned 14, they all had the physiques of 18-year old Olympic athletes and, with nothing but dart guns and stun grenades, were fully capable of outfighting adult Marines armed with live ammunition. By the end their instructor had them going up against squads who were actually trying to kill them. And that's all before they received their armor and augmentations. The incredibly stringent selection criteria to become a trainee in the first place is probably the only reason why none of them were killed before they qualified for augmentation.
  • The training of the young war orphans who were to become the Spartan-IIIs was arguably even harsher, considering that most of them were expected to see action by the time they turned 10-12 years old.
  • Averted with the Spartan-IVs, who are adult volunteers transferring from other branches who receive more standard (though still rigorous) training. The fact that they weren't trained this way may partly explain why they are notably inferior to the IIs.
• In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: Soldiers of the Heliopause are trained from the ground up by being made to beat up anyone they consider weak. New recruits are also hazed by stronger members as part of their initiation rites.
• The Rakkor tribe in League of Legends, being expies of the Spartan had this way as a ritual as they worship the arts of war. However, they have another reason why they revel in it: Their food supplies were constantly strained so they only have foods for the strong ones. Those who completed the training will turn out to be utter badasses who lent their services to anyone who wants war, but they'll only accept when the side they fight for is outnumbered by one to ten. This is very much exemplified in the champion named Pantheon, considered a paragon to this tribe.
• Mousehunt has the Marching Flame, who train scouts like this:
  "Training scouts in the art of hand-to-hand combat is a bit unique in the Marching Flame, though. Rather than spending months on the training grounds, they throw them directly into the first wave of the battle. If they survive, maybe they'll be promoted to something more. If not, there will always be another to step up in its place."
• The war between the ARKS and the DOLLS in Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis involves the former training at intense levels within assorted facilities across the surface of planet Halpha so they can fight the latter. The whole thing was what three hundred years of combat experimentation by Zephetto amounted to, all of it being his ongoing war game to prepare ARKS for the return of the Starless, which annihilated ARKS at large five hundred years prior to the events of the game itself. He immediately dismissed the notion of going easy because he was strained for time and needed the results desperately to save humanity from extinction, and yet the entire first generation of new ARKS defenders was wiped out to the last, and the second - from his perspective - failed to yield the levels of photon sensitivity required to fight on. The player character is part of the third generation - the last generation before the Starless are scheduled to return.
• Solstice Warriors in Sea of Stars are isolated from their communities at a young age when their powers manifest, are trained in strict and unforgiving regiments, taught etiquette with controlled knowledge of the outside world, and made to sew their own protective garments. While this is brutal, you can't argue with the requirements when you consider they are sent into battle with society-wrecking eldritch abominations that stand to become apocalyptic threats if left uncontested. Moraine coming back alone after accompanying a couple dozen Solstice Warriors into battle against the Dweller of Strife shatters Erlina and Brugaves' faith in the order, yet Moraine taught them - and, later, Zale and Valere - in a similarly strict fashion, if not moreso, simply because they are so few in number that someone has to take a stand against the Fleshmancer's creations, against which the Solstice Warriors' solar and lunar magics are the only real advantage.
• The Spartan faction in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Not only are they named after the Spartans, their leader's big quote is "Superior training and superior weaponry have, when taken together, a geometric effect on overall military strength. Well-trained, well-equipped troops can stand up to many more times their lesser brethren than linear arithmetic would seem to indicate." Naturally, their training methods are revealed to be quite brutal, as yet another quote tells about a Spartan training officer breaking a recruit's arm to make him relearn his sloppy combat techniques.
  • It is shown to be even more brutal than that in Michael Ely's Centauri Dawn novel, where children that were weaker than their peers were taken outside and had their throats cut by their teachers. The only exception ever made was for Victor Santiago, Colonel Corazon Santiago's son. By all rights he should've been killed as a boy, but his mother protected him (even though it went against their rules). Later, though, he manages to rally the Spartan troops in their hour of need to fight off the mind worms.
• System Shock 2, has one option in the player's character creation being a survival course with a "21.2% mortality rate". This actually seems quite low, considering it takes place on Io, the moon with 400 volcanoes.
• The Mantid of World of Warcraft are born from massive clutches laid by their Empress. To cull the weak, each clutch is sent to assault the Pandaren defenses to the east, resulting in a bloody slaughter for both sides. The surviving swarm-born return to their empire with trophies of their victories and are given a position based on their achievements.
• XCOM: Arguably, X-COM soldiers aren't recruited from "the best of the best". Some are complete cowards who will panic and run at the first sign of danger. They get all of their combat experience from live combat exercises, often against aliens with roughly twice their number and better weapons. Training soldiers will be a pain until you at least get Laser Weapons, Medikits and Personal Armor.
  • The trope really comes into play when in order to refill your ranks of veterans, you throw a squad of rookies against the aliens, knowing that some of them will die, in the hopes that the survivors will be tougher.

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