The meanest places in Video Games.
- The overseas localizations of Animal Crossing (2001) have some of the villagers, and even special characters like Tom Nook or Gracie, treat the player in the most unpleasant way possible.
- There's even a snippet of this with one of the Able Sisters — when Sable note notices the player observing the photographs behind her, she rudely accuses you of suggesting that she's married, even when there's no dialogue option that prompts such a reaction. Nothing like this ever comes up in later games, and Sable never gets that angry in any instance.
- Villagers (particularly Snooty, Cranky and Peppy Villagers) would often get upset over the smallest things you did, with their responses ranking from petty snarking to directly insulting you, which makes them come out as outright bullies most of the time (some of the insults said by the Snooty villagers even have them questioning if you are mentally disabled, as they can call you "a freak mental case" or sarcastically ask if you were "the mental runt of the litter").
- Villagers could also scam you out of your money, force an exchange out of you, lock you into a minigame where RNG could work against you, and have them take what you have, anyway. Peppy, Cranky, and possibly NORMAL villagers (The supposed nicest villagers) could outright steal your items for no reason, villagers could paint your roof a random color for arbitraty reasons (only Peppy villagers would actually ask whether you want it painted or not), Lazy villagers would call you fat and mock you over it out of nowhere, and Jock villagers could possibly make a jab towards your name when you first introduced yourself to them. The game's successor, Animal Crossing: Wild World, didn't do much to ease this hostility, but at least villagers don't wantonly scam, steal, and ruin your roof out of spite, anymore. Starting with Animal Crossing: City Folk the hostility is significantly toned down, and Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Animal Crossing: New Horizons would dial it back even more, to the point where some fans wish for a return to this trope, or at least an option to toggle the dialogue to make it "edgier".
- In BlazBlue, there are very few characters who aren't jerks or self-interested, and more often than not they're Butt Monkeys who suffer constant abuse, whether it's played for laughs or for drama. Hell, even Ragna, the resident Jerk with a Heart of Gold, gets kicked around by characters worse than he is.
- Bully: While the most jerkass characters in the game are Gary, Derby, Mr. Hattrick and Mr. Burton, Bullworth is full of it and it isn't limited to them.
- The students at Bullworth Academy are rife with the Jocks, bullies who will pick on anyone who isn't athletic enough. The Bullies who, Exactly What It Says on the Tin will pick on anyone weaker than they are (or any clique member if they stray on their turf). The Greasers are violent delinquents who'll bully or attack anyone who crosses their path, enters their turf, looks at them funny, and are one of the two cliques that will harass adults on sight. The Preps are all stuck-up rich kids who think all other people are inferior to them simply because they have less money and aren't above telling them so. Even the Nerds, who are pretty much at the bottom of the food chain, act pretty rudely to anyone who isn't one of them and will happily bully anyone weak enough for them to get away with doing so. While this can be Zig-Zagged if Jimmy has a standing of above 50%, the cliques will be rude towards each other, even if Jimmy managed to bring order to school.
- The adults at the town of Bullworth aren't any better as they will treat you, or anyone like crap for being underage, and the only way for them to treat Jimmy nicely is if he wears a decent outfit and a neat haircut. And the Townies, being out-of-school thugs and criminals, will attack anyone from the Academy on sight and, like the Greasers, will harass and attack adults as well.
- Conker's Bad Fur Day: Nearly every character is a stupid asshole. In the end, Conker resents having become king, because he hates everyone he's supposed to be ruling over.
- Dead Rising is a series of zombie games where Humans Are the Real Monsters. The bosses (which are all human) you face in the games are known aptly as "psychopaths." Besides the bosses, sometimes there's human enemies among the zombies, such as the Raincoat Cultists, the Military and the Looters. Even some of the survivors you can rescue are not immune, with some demanding bogus requests from the player. Even Frank West himself can come across as a bit of a jerk at times, especially in Dead Rising 4.
- Everyone is a jerkass in Divinity: Original Sin II. The Magisters are jerks. The Black Ring are jerks. The dwarf queen is a jerk. The dwarf rebels are jerks. The Void is definitely a jerk. The gods are jerks. The Divine is a jerk. The elf Mother Tree is a jerk. The Sourcerers are jerks. Even most of the playable characters are jerks to one extent or another. While there may be individuals that have good intentions, every single organization you encounter is responsible for atrocities. The one exception to this is the Paladins (not for lack of the game trying, mind you). Despite the game's bright design and playful narration, the setting is actually really, really bleak.
- Drakengard
- Let's see: the person you control is a murder-happy sociopath who likes to stab people after they're dead. Multiple times. He has a pact partner in a red dragon that frequently insults humankind. Your allies are the protagonist's sister, a seal against unspeakable evil who wants to sleep with her brother, a bard child friend who turns evil a makes a pact with a black dragon that ate the protagonist's parents, a pedophile, a child eater, a racist whiny useless old man, a kid who, in one timeline, sics his pact partner golem to squash his sister like a fly for slapping him twice, and a bunch of incompetent and possibly cowardly soldiers. And these are supposed to be good guys. The bad guys are a bunch of evil soldiers and monsters that eviscerate everything in sight and have no problem to nuking entire countries.
- Drakengard 3: Zero lived in a world that loved to rape and abuse her, until she snapped and turned into a mass-murderer. Her sisters are all Cute But Psycho brainwashing overlords that range from Well-Intentioned Extremist to Ax-Crazy. Their retainers are all some combination of perverted and depraved. The knights insist on murdering whoever their overlords tell them to. Faeries do nothing but insult humans all day. Dragons either have no self-control or don't care.
- NieR: Automata: Fourteen. Robot. Wars.
- Fallout in a nutshell. Practically 90% of the people you talk to are rude, hostile, and/or have a chip or more on their shoulder. And that's not counting the various raiders, slavers, serial killers, drug dealers, gang lords, con-artists, mercenaries, mad scientists, sentient monsters, and trigger-happy psychos who will try to murder you because you poked their radio. This all stems from an alternate-timeline fault, where society never evolved past the 1950's, causing the Cold War to escalate and radicalize both sides until they were secretly ruled by delusional psychopaths that gleefully launched WWIII.
- Fate/Grand Order: In the Sixth Lostbelt, the Land of Faerie are filled with The Fair Folk that are a nasty combination of Chaotic Stupid and The Unfettered, as they each have a purpose they must fulfil at the cost of absolutely everything else, including other fairies. Most of them manipulate and backstab at their own whims. And if there's any other faeries trying to be helpful and moral... they get killed horribly for daring to deviate. The fairies are such assholes that the Lostbelt would've been destroyed a long time ago if not for Morgan's tyrannical rule, and as soon as she dies, that's what happens. It's a Lostbelt that is chock full of unsympathetic bastards as opposed to other Lostbelts where there are still sympathetic people struggling to survive.
- Golf Story could well be renamed to Asshole Golf. Your coach makes his introduction by refusing to give you the time of day and gives you the challenge to prove your skill only to shit-talk you even though you shot better than all of his students. His students aren't much better, trying to lord their apparently-superior skills, and even after one of them, Lara, warms up to you, she still has an excessively competitive mindset with you. When you finally compete in a tournament, your wife is there to shame you and seriously hope you fail at your efforts, and when you do win, the camera crew is focused entirely on the two runner-ups and well over half of your winnings go towards your wife, your coach, and various others. It's a wonder the protagonist doesn't become a Spree Killer by the end of the game.
- The whole Grand Theft Auto series is probably the most famous example. Not only are the games filled with criminals (violent or otherwise), but Rockstar manages to make even the Innocent Bystanders seem like assholes via the snatches of dialogue we get to hear from them.
- Best illustrated during "Madd Dogg's" opening scene when the man himself wants to commit suicide after his rhyme book got stolen, his manager being killed, and selling his mansion to a Vago lieutenant. Whereas CJ urges him to stop and calmly come down to talk, two bystanders egg at him to jump and tell off CJ for wanting to interrupt Madd Dogg's suicide because they've already made a bet out of it. CJ can only lament on how cold San Andreas would be.
- In Grand Theft Auto V, Michael's family, though not criminals (except arguably Jimmy who smoke intoxicants), are definitely jerks. Amanda prides of cheating on her husband, Tracey proudly make money by showing herself, and Jimmy isn't only addicted to intoxicants, but also a kleptomaniac himself. Michael's levelheadedness only went a little before he's forced into yet another crime by circumstances that lead to the whole family leaving Michael for awhile.
- A Hat in Time: Every named character tries to kill Hat Kid at some point or another in the game, the exceptions being minor NPCs and DJ Grooves if the player makes the Conductor win the film contest (which is designed to be harder than helping DJ Grooves win, where he'll be the boss of that chapter instead). This is used as a plot point since Moustache Girl wants to rid the world of "bad guys," but in the process, rewrites time to become a harsh dictator. This makes everyone finally team up against her, working with Hat Kid to take the Time Pieces back and repair the timeline. Unsurprisingly, following this Moustache Girl tries to kill Hat Kid as well, even though they started the game as friends.
- The creator of Helltaker has cheerfully noted that none of the cast are very good people—they are mostly demons, after all. The only member of the cast who's a genuinely nice person through-and-through is Justice, with all the others having at least one or two big-time jerk moments (most of them will murder the titular character for a single crude remark, and said titular character is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold at most).
- Kid Icarus: Uprising is a place populated by Jerkass Gods. The gods harp about how much Humans Are Bastards and how they always destroy everything they touch, and while we only ever see three humans in the game directly and they are shown to be decent well, Gaol is when she's not Brainwashed and Crazy, it's a plot point that humanity breaks down into a world-wide war over nothing but rumors of an all-powerful wish-granting artifact that doesn't even exist. As for the gods, they are no better. One god sank a city into the ocean just to teach humans a lesson, a goddess plots to erase humans completely to make way for an organic paradise after getting sick of watching humans fight each other and ruin the environment, another god pretty much betrays his brethren to a hive-mind alien race, and the Big Bad just likes to ruin everyone's day and collects souls both to make monsters and as a snack. Even Palutena, the game's Big Good, sees being an asshole at times as part of her duties as a goddess. The one who suffers from all of this is Pit, who the gods enjoy making jokes of.
- Naughty Bear is a Villain Protagonist who goes from a mere troublemaker to a nightmarish boogeyman whose methods veer on sadism. The other bears are no better as they are shown to be complete jerks and are responsible for Naughty becoming who he is, and still continue to be so despite the titular bear doing good things and saving them from an alien invasion. The only bear who isn't a jerk is Dr. Juggles and unfortunately he gets Driven to Suicide by him at the narrator's urging.
- Persona 5: Everyone that is not a Phantom Thief, a Confidant or has a positive connection to one of the people previously mentioned is highly likely to be an unbearable asshole: The school the protagonist attends is full of Gossipy Hens who do nothing but spread Malicious Slander about him and his friends, everyone in the city looks down on them for little to no reason, and the less we talk about any of the people targeted by the Phantom Thieves the better. This is in the end subverted at the climax target after the biggest asshole target has been taken care of: The whole people of Tokyo (the scope of this World of Jerkass in question) becomes the Phantom Thieves' next target where it turns out that they're assholes because they're just plain slothful and prefer being told what to do rather than thinking for themselves. In the end, it's later revealed to be a machination of the Big Bad to rig his cosmic game so things go his way and justifies him to 'bring ruin to the world'. The Phantom Thieves and their allies than had to rally the whole town to cheer for them, because they're the ones risking their asses for the world despite the rejection they get. It worked: These assholes finally get ahold of themselves and start cheering for the Phantom Thieves to defeat the Big Bad. Once that's all done, however, it becomes A World Half Full: The ratio between the 'becomes nicer' people and the people who still insist being Jerkasses (in terms of the acknowledgement of the Phantom Thieves) becomes 50-50, forming a true balance.
- Postal: The Postal Dude is a Deadpan Snarker who's not above making death threats over things like getting his petition signed
, and could easily be a Villain Protagonist with the right playstyle. Meanwhile, everyone he meets is either some kind of jerkass that is either just rude, actively makes his daily errands difficult in some manner, or worse off, decides that Murder Is the Best Solution regarding whatever group or place he happens to be visiting, be it the game development studio he's collecting a paycheck from or the library he's returning a book at. - The Nowhere Islands become this over the course of Mother 3. At first it is the ideal place for people to live in; everyone is nice to each other (with the exception of resident assholes Pusher and Elmore) and the concept of money doesn't exist. After Hinawa's death and Fassad and the Pigmask army introduce currency to Tazmily village and modernize it by making people get Happy Boxes, which resemble TVs, we see three years later that the once-friendly villagers have become colder, with Lucas and his family receiving the All of the Other Reindeer treatment for refusing to modernize their house and getting a Happy Box, and the elderly being thrown in a run-down retirement home where their relatives rarely come to visit.
- Randal's Monday: Murray is perhaps the only character who remains good for the whole game. Most other characters already start being complete jerks and show it during the occasional Kick the Dog moment. Even characters who start sympathetic stop being so by the end of the game: Elaine progressively becomes more arrogant and smug as the history gets rewritten and she becomes more attractive, and Sally outright pulls a Face–Heel Turn when she gets the ring.
- The Saints Row series runs on the trope; though it takes in a more comedy-based, somewhat absurdist direction than Grand Theft Auto; while the average citizens are apathetic jerks, every named character is more often than not a larger-than-life, cartoonishly evil villain. It even acknowledges the amorality of the Villain Protagonist Player Character, by having other characters frequently accusing them of being a sociopath, to which the Player Character always retort that they like to think of themselves as more of a "puckish rogue".
- Relating to the above, ANY Shin Megami Tensei game could also count. Most of the time, the plots boil down to a war between a Knight Templar, a Social Darwinist and an Only Sane Man. Also, the Only Sane Man almost never has supporters.
- The Sims normally isn't this, but The Sims 4 adds a celebration of day-long brawling, and Neighborhood Action Plans (driven by vote) can have effects like limiting access to water, "Sharing is Caring" where everybody is free to steal stuff, and "Roughhousing Encouraged" which is definitely this.
- Spec Ops: The Line: No one involved in the Dubai conflict are truly good, as nearly all of the factions end up committing war crimes by the end of the game, including our supposed hero, who ends up dooming the entire city as a result of his own delusions.
- Super Mario Sunshine: Most of the Piantas of Isle Delfino are apathetic jerks who insult Mario and treat him like a criminal (some of them even grab and throw him for no reason) after being Easily Condemned at a Kangaroo Court just because his face is similar to the one of that on a poster (and ignoring the blatant differences between Mario and Shadow Mario, who was revealed to be Bowser's son in disguise midway through the game, and the fact that Mario wasn't even on the island when the crimes took place and there are multiple witnesses who can attest to that, one of them being Peach, a literal princess). One of the many problems of Isle Delfino is the disappearance of the Shine Sprites, causing the island to fall into darkness, and yet many of those Shine Sprites are in possession of the Piantas, and they don't bother to willingly return them.
- World's End: The Valelands are something you DON'T want to visit when you go on vacation as literally every character in all of the three chapters of this game are either some flavor of jerkass, Ax-Crazy, or Affably Evil at best. In fact, here are the initial trio of OUR PROTAGONISTS:
- Tevoran, a complete loon who comes up with idiotic plans that might get everyone killed. His plans surprisingly work almost always.
- Ysabel, a hot tempered woman who will attempt to kill anyone that pisses her off. Which is effectively anyone.
- Ivan, a tobacco addict whose addiction managed to nearly get him killed by a pissed off Ysabel. He's rather lazy and indolent as well as having a severe gambling addiction.
- Touhou Project has the vast majority of characters having at least a few jerk traits, down to the protagonists (Reimu is blunt as a sledgehammer and Brilliant, but Lazy to a fault, Marisa is a compulsive thief who attacks other people for fun). Part of the reason the series generates conflicts so often is that most of the characters are happy to beat each other up if no other reason than an empty spot in their schedule.
- Like a Dragon: Outside of the main cast, around 95% of the thugs you encounter is a piece of shit who will try to extort money or start a fight for petty offenses or just for the hell of it.
- Zettai Hero Project: The Final Boss is threatening to destroy the world? Don't worry, The Unlosing Ranger will save us! Yeah, and we'll have it as a sensational televised event! Huh? Who's this weakling? The Unlosing Ranger's successor? Wow, what a wimp. And he got killed in one shot too. Why would the Unlosing Ranger rely on a total loser like him? His family treats him like crap over a misunderstanding after he protected his sister from a Serial Killer? Serves him right for being weak.
