Well-Intentioned Extremists in Visual Novels.
- Ace Attorney:
- Damon Gant of the first game puts the extrem(e) in Well-Intentioned Extremist. Among his acts are murdering a co-worker to get a criminal, Joe Darke, convicted of murder, the manipulation of the crime scene to make it look like an innocent girl had done the deed by accident in order to make her older sister Lana into his pawn, the murder of ANOTHER co-worker who wanted to investigate the previous murder two years later, the coercion of Lana to take the fall for THAT murder, generally making Case 1-5 a hell for Mr. Wright and much more. His reasons for doing all this was to gain total control over the police force, so that criminals who were obviously guilty (such as Darke had been) would be brought to justice, no matter what.
- Edgeworth in the first game appears at first to be an Amoral Attorney who prosecutes innocent people for the sake of his own record. However, it is eventually revealed that he honestly believed in the guilt of all the people he used illegitimate methods to try to sentence, making him this.
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies:
- Many of the students of Themis Legal Academy, aka an entire law school, become convinced that this path is the best one. This is thanks to the efforts of the defense attorney teacher, Professor Aristotle "The Ends Justifies The" Means. He makes a point to lecture students and protagonists alike that they're in "The Dark Age of The Law" where all lawyers are in danger of dooming their clients or letting criminals roam free if they don't employ his practices. Believe it or not, he's actually pretty friendly, his cynicism aside. He's also a murderer, accepts bribes from students, finds insulting his ideology worse than accusing him of murder, and not a pleasant man one bit.
- Aura Blackquill. She's not the most pleasant person to talk to, and has an intense hatred for the legal system due to the conviction of her brother, Simon. However, she doesn't actually seem all that bad... until she takes several visitors to the Space Museum (including Phoenix's own adopted daughter) hostage, and begins threatening them in exchange for Athena Cykes, whom she believes to be the true culprit of the crime her brother was arrested for. All of this was to force a retrial, in hopes that her brother's sentence would be overturned. Especially since his execution was only a day away. Luckily, Phoenix is able to earn a happy ending for both Simon and Athena, and Aura turns herself in after everything is said and done.
- The Final Boss of The Great Ace Attorney had the main goal of finally making Britain crime-free. Unfortunately, they went about it by effectively going full Death Note, building a Government Conspiracy dedicated to murdering criminals extrajudicially and propping up Barok van Zieks and his "Reaper of the Bailey" reputation as some kind of supernatural avatar of divine judgement to Scare 'Em Straight. The scary part is, it was actually working until an overzealous attempt to cover their tracks ends up blowing the whole conspiracy wide open.
- Danganronpa:
- Nagito Komaeda of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. He's essentially an Evil Counterpart to the protagonist of the previous game and the Big Good of the series, Makoto Naegi, and his goal is to become the Ultimate Hope like Makoto before him. He's a 'problem is the means' type, as his views on hope almost veer into Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad (he thinks that great despair will inevitably be followed by greater hope, so it's okay to cause problems because that will just lead to a better outcome later), a very abstract view of the people around him (except Hajime) and maybe behavioral problems caused by frontotemporal dementia. Because of this, he deliberately encourages the killing game. He later turns into a 'the problem is the goal' type, as the Awful Truth about his classmates (they're all amnesiac terrorists) gets him to kill them all.
- Kokichi Oma in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is a Contrasting Sequel Antagonist to Nagito in the sense that unlike Nagito, who was polite to everyone but was a sociopath with no regard for them personally, Kokichi willfully antagonized everyone around him but genuinely cared for them even if he refused to show it. He pretended to enjoy the killing game but despised it deep down, even sacrificing their friend Gonta as part of his master plan to end it, and like Nagito prepared an elaborate Thanatos Gambit to that end but with the intention of saving everyone rather than killing them.
- Gonta Gokuhara in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is a Gentle Giant who cared for everyone, even the less-likable ones around him, but after Kokichi exposes him to a Flashback Light in Chapter 4 his memories of the outside world send him into a Despair Event Horizon that makes him believe that killing everyone in the class trial would be preferable to them learning the truth. He goes along with Kokichi's plan to kill Miu in self-defense for this reason, but sadly forgets everything he learned after leaving Monokuma's deadly VR game due to an error.
- Angie Yonaga from the same game creates a cult centered around her deity Atua and starts enforcing her will on the other students, but her goals are most likely benevolent; she wants to halt the killing game by ensuring that no one wishes to leave the school (which requires killing someone else).
- Kaede Akamatsu, Of all characters can arguably be seen as this due to her forcing everyone through the extremely hard Death Road of Despair multiple times so they can escape, and this comes to a head when she forms a plan to kill the mastermind but ends up "killing" Rantaro instead by accident, and could have led to the deaths of everyone by not taking the First Blood Perk just to try and weed the mastermind out during the trial.
- In Spirit Hunter: NG, the Nagoshi no Gi story reveals that Yakumo amputated young girls in order to turn them into dolls and offer them to the Big Bad Kakuya, satiating her for ten years. A noble goal, but with a horrible price to pay, and nothing justifies his involvement with the Screaming Author.
- The Church in Tsukihime is portrayed this way. They can't go too overboard because they're supposed to be secret. The only reason they're not trying to kill Arcueid is because, well, she's essentially unkillable. They gave up. Supplementary materials indicate that they prefer the 'kill the evil non-human, burn the body, and cover up all the evidence' course of action, and ask questions only if they are unable to actually kill said non-human, as in the case with Arcueid, Ciel, or Wallachia.
- Zero Escape:
- Big Bad Zero/Akane from Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors & Virtue's Last Reward would be considered this from most people's viewpoints. Not really a "villain", yet not someone of pure gold either, their intentions and goals in the games are to save her own life and save the world from a fatal viral infection in '999' and 'VLR' respectively. Good goals, in anyone's book. However their methods for achieving such goals include kidnapping people, placing bombs into them, forcing them to play deadly games, blowing some people up, and in several alternative histories indirectly having caused and not prevented things such as mass-murders, bombs blowing up groups of people, mass-suicides and people having been torn from their loved for decades. Considering that the game runs on the "many worlds theory", basically making every timeline you see something that technically happened to the respective versions of the characters, it means that she was technically responsible for many horrific things. Trying to save her own life and the world is all well and good but it's one thing to go to THOSE lengths to do so.
- Zero II/Q/Delta/Brother, the Big Bad of Zero Time Dilemma qualifies as well. In the timeline that leads to Virtue's Last Reward, he killed 6 billion people with Radical-6 to have a 75% chance of killing the "Religious Fanatic", who would otherwise wipe out humanity through nuclear war. Zero II also forces the participants of the Dcom experiment to take part in the deadly "Decision Game" to ensure his own birth and to create a timeline where the Religious Fanatic will be stopped without casualties.
