Driven to Suicide/Video Games

Video Games

• Deadeus: In the Drowning Ending, the boy will go to the pier as soon as the second day after taking several heavy objects, jump into the water and drown. His reasoning is that it will stop the nightmares that have been plaguing him.
• After spending a year in a coma after The End of the World as We Know It, if you fail to save Cid in Final Fantasy VI, Celes, having lost everything, decides to climbs a cliff to leap off onto the rocks below (which, according to Cid, all other survivors in the island had done when they succumbed to despair). She survives on a miracle, sees Locke's bandanna wrapped around a pigeon's wing, and regains her will to live.
  • Shadow does this in his segment of the game's ending if you have him in your party. To sum up his motivations, he'd let a friend die a very painful death instead of finishing him himself and has carried the guilt for years with him. With the world saved, he stays in the collapsing final dungeon to die and join his friend in death. Complete with him telling his dog to go on without him. Tear Jerker, ahoy.
• God of War starts with Kratos throwing himself off a cliff, with the game being a How We Got Here. Of course, the Gods decide that You Kill It, You Bought It and therefore promote him as the new God of War. This turns out badly for them when they renege on this decision.
• House of Rules: Lady Jane was so horrified that Alexis had seemingly sacrificed everyone to revive her that she decided that she would rather drive a pair of scissors through her own throat than spend another minute breathing.
• In the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney universe, quite a few people in backstories. Redd White in particular is apparently responsible for a large number of instances of this (as the driver, not the drivee).
  • Notably subverted in Justice For All. "Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth Chooses Death." No, he didn't.
    • And played straight in the same case, regarding Adrian Andrews' former mentor Celeste Inpax, who hung herself two years ago after being dumped by Juan Corrida, after he had learned that she was ALSO dumped by his rival Matt Engarde and refused to "accept his leftovers".
    • In addition to that, Adrian Andrews attempted to kill herself less than a week later, unable to bear living without Celeste. She failed.
  • Terry Fawles does it onscreen in the courtroom in Trials and Tribulations. His girlfriend Dahlia really messed him up.
  • Also happens in the fourth game: not in any of Apollo's cases, but in the flashback segment of 4-4, the supposed murder victim, Magnifi Grammarye, committed suicide.
• In The World Ends With You, Joshua, supposedly. He's likely to be lying, but if it was suicide it didn't occur recently.
• In the Visual Novel Heart de Roommate, the gang attempt to befriend a rather lonely schoolgirl with a past history of attempted suicide. This leads to one of the darkest scenes in the game, when during a conversation with the main character on the roof she accuses him of only being interested because he fancies her and offers to have sex with him if he'll leave her alone. When he refuses she proceeds to make another offer... sleep with her or she'll scream that he's a rapist and jump off the roof, something that seems quite plausible given her past history and self destructive personality. She doesn't go through with it no matter what the player chooses, though accepting her offer leads to a rather bleak Nonstandard Game Over.
• Drakengard has two examples. The first one is Leonard, who comes home to see his family dead and his home razed by the evil Empire. Feeling that he has failed to protect them, he gets very close to cutting his own throat, only being stopped by a malicious fairy. The second is the protagonist's sister, who, due to Mind Rape, commits suicide to escape disgrace.
• One of the bad endings in School Days has this too: Kotonoha Katsura, the Ojou of the story, throws herself off a building if Makoto (in the main player's shoes) goes with Sekai instead. And she actually dies in front of Sekai and Makoto (High-Pressure Blood and all), traumatising them so badly that Makoto not only breaks up with Sekai, but swears off romance forever.
• In System Shock 2, Dr. Janice Polito was driven to suicide when she found out that she unleashed SHODAN. You find her corpse in her office, and her suicide note in the Rickenbacker church.
• In the Mai-HiME video game, if the main player gets Natsuki Kuga as a love interest, Natsuki's best friend Shizuru Fujino will go mad and kill herself.
• In the end of Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2 (and Advance too), being the 'only survivor' of the Shadow Mirror, Lamia Loveless thought that she has failed her mission, killed her teammates and superiors, and is pretty much a defective product all around, and thus she attempts to self destruct... only to be stopped by her new teammates just in time and be persuaded to live her life in the current world. She actually has more self-destruct attempts throughout the series, but only this occasion fits the trope.
• Starcraft: Gerard Dugalle commits suicide after his defeat, in remorse over his gullibility and murder of Alexei Stukov.
• If Joshua has failed to save both of his Unlucky Childhood Friends in Vandal Hearts 2, he will arrive at the parapets of his third Unlucky Childhood Friend and love Adele's castle just in time for her to say she's had enough of being used and leap off.
• Yume Nikki: After dropping the 24 effects off in the Nexus, Madotsuki wakes up from her dream, walks out onto the balcony... and leaps off the edge. Cut to black and a bloody red smear on the canvas.
• In Illusion of Gaia — Will is forced into a game of Russian Roulette using a poisoned drink. Will's psychic powers allow him him to dodge the poison, but the other player, Straw Hat, drinks the poisoned shot anyway, out of sheer wounded pride. After this, you read a letter from him telling you he had a terminal disease and was playing the Russian Glass Game so that his pregnant wife would be finacially secure after his death. He had nothing to lose by drinking the poison.
• You can talk the Big Bad Load-Bearing Boss of Fallout 1 into activating the Self-Destruct Mechanism of his Supervillain Lair, thus committing suicide, by bringing evidence that as Super Mutants are infertile, his plan to have them be the wasteland's dominant species will fail.
  • You can talk the Big Bad Load-Bearing Boss of Fallout 3 into activating the Self-Destruct Mechanism of his Supervillain Lair, thus committing suicide.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, if you tell Ranger Chief Hanlon that you know he's the one behind the bizarre intelligence reports to get the Rangers out of what he considers a Hopeless War, he'll excuse himself, announce his misdeeds to Camp Golf, and shoot himself in the head.
• In Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty, it is revealed that Otacon's father drowned himself after finding out that his wife (Otacon's step-mother) and son were having an affair. In the same game, Fortune's mother committed suicide after her husband's death and her son-in-law's imprisonment.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater, it's implied that the reason why the Cobra Unit was still utilizing their microbombs essentially delt with this trope. Similarly, it is also argued that Colonel Volgin being hit by lightning was actually intended on his part, due to the way he was reacting just before he was hit by it.
  • In MGS4, Vamp and Naomi go out this way after disabling the nanomachines keeping them alive.
• In Obs Cure 2, one of the playable characters commits suicide after his girlfriend, and most of his friends have been killed in the 'incidient' at the school. (By incident we mean the surivial horror plot.) The sequel is Darker and Edgier than the orginal, which is no small feat seeing as in the first game everyone dies in horible experiments, or a the hands of the horrible experiments, except for the playable characters.
• The core backstory of the Touhou character Yuyuko Saigyouji is her committing suicide after learning about her power evolving from controlling dead spirits into invoking the death of anything. Fortunately(?) Yukari ensured her spirit could never "cross over" completely, allowing her to continue existing as a Cute Ghost Girl.
• Tai Kaliso in Gears of War 2, after enduring an impossibly brutal series of tortures at the hands of the Locust Horde, puts a shotgun to his chin the moment it is offered to him.
• Mass Effect: not only does Fai Dan shoot himself to escape the Thorian's mind control, but no less than three other characters can also be Driven to Suicide depending on the player's decisions, including Saren.
  • His fate was frustrating for players who were at the time of the scene equipped with anti-Thorian gas grenades that would have saved his life effortlessly if not for the debilitating power of the cutscene.
    • He also shot himself because he felt responsible for what happened, so hitting him with the anti-Thorian grenades probably wouldn't have helped in the long run.
  • Also a Salarian researcher, who shot himself to escape being ripped apart by the rachni.
  • Ronald Taylor can be left a pistol with which to kill himself.
  • In Mass Effect 3, both Tali and Samara can potentially commit suicide. The former if the geth destroy the entire Migrant Fleet, and the latter because she's forced to make a choice between obeying the Justicar Code or killing her daughter.
    • Like Saren before him, The Illusive Man can also be convinced to kill himself to escape Reaper indoctrination in the Grand Finale.
  • The third game loves this trope. The characters listed here? That's not even half the number that this can happen to.
• In one of Silent Hill 2's Multiple Endings, James drowns himself so that he can be Together in Death with his wife, Mary.
• Setsumi from Narcissu. Probably justified that since she had terminal disease, she's going to die anyway, and she doesn't want to die at home or in the hospital.
• Shiraki Aeka from the visual novel Yume Miru Kusuri: A Drug that Makes You Dream. Delinquent tough guy takes a liking to her, which profoundly enrages his girlfriend, the alpha female of the school. Said alpha female gets most of the class to bully/torment Aeka in various ways, such as shocking her with a disguised stungun during class, leaving used filthy janitor's rags on her desk, ripping up her tuition money, tampering with her textbook, etc. This drives her to attempt suicide in her route's bad end (and all other routes, where the main character expresses regret over not trying to help her).
• Archer, AKA Emiya Shirou of Fate/stay night, except as a spirit existing primarily outside of time he's actually incapable of death, so his suicide plan is killing Shirou so that he can't make the contract with the world and become Archer, hopefully canceling himself out of existence. Several characters point out, including himself, that this is very unlikely to work.
• In Dead Space several members of the USG Ishimura crew who already haven't been turned into Necromorphs commit suicide; examples include the man who headbutts a bulkhead until his head is pulped, the woman in the medical bay who severs her throat with a surgical saw, and a woman in Doctor Challus Mercer's evil Unitology Room Full of Crazy who blasts her own head off. Also Isaac's girlfriend Nicole killed herself via lethal injection before the game began; Isaac just doesn't realize it until the end.
• Many, many examples can be found in The Suffering. At the beginning of the game, for example, several inmates in Cell Block T hang themselves following the earthquake.
  • In a vision of the past, a military commander shoots himself rather than face a court-martial.
  • Another flashback reveals that in 1681, three little girls hurled themselves off a cliff after realising that their seemingly harmless prank had resulted in the execution of eleven innocent people. Unfortunately, they don't stay dead.
  • Hermes Haight, the prison's most infamous executioner, killed himself in the gas chamber; according to his poisonous ghost, this was the final step in a very long obsession with learning what his victims felt.
  • A heroin addict blows his brains out with a shotgun, apparently unable to "weather the low."
  • Three inmates in solitary confinement at East Baltimore Correctional committed suicide rather than spend another six months alone in the darkness.
  • It's revealed that inmate Ranse Truman tried to slit his wrists with a sharpened spoon after spending a few months on Carnate Island and exploring its unique history. When you meet him in the second game, he appears to have tried to cut his throat at some point.
• In Robot Alchemic Drive, Nanao kills herself if the building where she works is crushed too many times.
• HK-47 of Knights of the Old Republic fame jokes about this in the sequel, however he cannot self-terminate.

HK-47: Statement: Oh, yes. My master had quite the collection of tortured individuals that seemed unable to confront their basic personality conflicts. Let me cite some specific examples. Mockery: [mimicking Carth's voice] "Oh, master, I do not trust you! I cannot trust you or anyone ever again!" Mockery: [mimicking Bastila's voice] "Oh, master, I love you but I hate all you stand for, but I think we should go press our slimy, mucus-covered lips together in the cargo hold!" Conclusion: Such pheromone-driven responses never cease to decrease the charge in my capacitors and make me wish I could put a blaster pistol to my behavior core and pull the trigger.

• If you go bankrupt in Theme Park, the game shows a cutscene of the park owner jumping from a window while a family photograph fades, and Chopin's Funeral March plays. Though it turns out he was actually jumping out of a first-story window, as he turns around, grabs the windowsill, and pulls himself back up. As it was a game for all ages, even joking about suicide was pretty controversial. Hell, it even describes what will happen if you go bankrupt in the manual. It's actually pretty creepy. For goodness sake, watch at your own risk.
  • The Mega Drive/Genesis version contains only a still image of that scene, which happens to be the park owner in mid jump.
• Kohaku in Tsukihime in Hisui's route. The True End she succeeds. The Good End Shiki saves her at the cost of some of his lifespan. Either way, she points out that she has nothing left to live for anymore and did not really want to do what she did.
• In Myst III: Exile, if you make the crueler choice at the end, it is implied Saavedro kills himself.
• Semolina from Magical Starsign allows herself to be eaten by a heterotrophous plant. It's partly Heroic Sacrifice, but mostly this.
  • Note that if Semolina didn't, Sorbet WOULD have. Yeah...
• The second Oddworld game has several kinds of Mudokons working as slaves for the evil meat-making corporation. Inbetween others there are hyperactive ones who you have to slap to snap them back to sanity, and depressed mopey ones who need to be cuddled to bring up their spirits. But slap a depressed one and watch as he goes over the edge, and repeatedly hits himself in the head until he dies.
• Intentionally done to the local priest, Minase, in Suika. And he deserves it too. First, he strangled his insane wife to death, which... might be overlookable. She was nuts. But then he comes across his daughter, kills her with a shovel and buries the two together. He puts his other daughter, unconscious and badly bleeding in the hospital and doesn't even recognize which of his daughters she is. When Akira finds all this out, he confronts him and recommends suicide.
• In the The Thing video game, if your teammates get scared enough, they will pull out a pistol and shoot themselves in the head.
• In Resident Evil Outbreak, certain members of your team will commit suicide if they have a gun and have been cornered by zombies or have incurred too much damage. Also, in the first level, you can recruit a sick (infected) security guard named Bob; if you help him up to the roof, he says something akin to the hunger being too painful and that he can't go on, then blows his brains out.
• This happens if you scare the teddy bears enough in Naughty Bear.
• At the end of Toshiko's series of missions in Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories, which she has Toni perform against her husband Kazuki in revenge for neglecting her, culminating in his death, she realizes that she has lost everything, and commits suicide by defenestration as Toni watches.
  • In The Ballad of Gay Tony, Tony tries to shoot himself, but the gun ends up being empty.
• At the end of Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow, Shen Rei shoots himself to prevent his capture and interrogation.
• Ethan Mars from Heavy Rain kills himself in three of his possible endings. They all require him to survive the main storyline but fail to rescue his son, Shaun.
  • Jayden will kill himself via drug overdose if he survives the storyline but Shaun dies.
• Final Fantasy XIII has Sazh almost doing this after his 6-year old son got turned into crystal, and upon learning that his partner Vanilie was involved with his son's fate.
• In Turgor the Nameless Sister does this about in the half of the game. Some of the Void dwellers think it was murder, a Heroic Sacrifice or simply a Senseless Sacrifice.
• In Obs Cure II, Kenny drives Corey to kill himself right before the Final Battle, just to twist the knife.
• Fire Emblem:
  • This was the ultimate fate of Priscilla and Raven's parents, Lord and Lady Cornwell in Fire Emblem: Blazing Blade. For worse, Raymond/Raven believes they were murdered, thus fueling his Revenge..
  • Also, it's hinted that Ninian and Nils seriously considered killing themselves at some point, driven into despair after being summoned, captured and hunted down by the Black Fang. Thankfully, they don't go through it.
  • The English ending of the Blazing Blade game after the death of his wife Karla, Bartre entrusted their daughter Fir to his brother-in-law Karel and killed himself.. That, however, is considered as non-canon since it goes against the Binding Blade game, where the character said to kill themself is alive and well.
  • In Genealogy of the Holy War, Arvis and Azelle's father Lord Victor of Velthomer commited suicide when Arvis was a pre-teen and Azelle was a little boy. Arvis starts raising his half-brother from then on.
  • In Fire Emblem Awakening, Henry's solo ending states that he disappeared. It has been interpreted as him commiting suicide.
  • The Heroic Suicide version has been used thrice, with Emmeryn from Awakening and both the Rainbow Sage (in one path; in others, he dies of old age) and Prince Ryoma from Fire Emblem Fates killing themselves as Heroic Sacrifices to help the heroes. Emmeryn is found alive, albeit brain-damaged, in a Spot-Pass chapter.
  • Additionally, in Fates several people either kill or try to kill themselves: Flora (after her boss fight) and Xander (via letting the Avatar win what would've been be a Duel to the Death if he hadn't accidentally killed his half-sister Elise when she tried to stop them) in Birthright, Takumi (in the Psychic-Assisted Suicide way, coming from the Bigger Bad) in Conquest, and Gunter (after being released from the same Bigger Bad's Demonic Possession) in Revelations.
  • In Three Houses, the Golden Deers' Marianne von Edmund tells Byleth in her supports that she had been suicidal for years until she met them in the Officer's Academy. All the times she's seen praying at school? She has been praying to the Goddess to take her away. . It's also believed that if Byleth chooses another House and doesn't recruit her, she does kill herself; the ending she gets if she fall in battle before the Time Skip, in which she runs away from Garreg Mach on her own, implies that this could be the case.
• Late in Valkyria Chronicles II, when the Rebels actually succeed in completely taking over Gallia, the sheer hopelessness of the situation causes Lanseal's headmaster to have a mental breakdown that ultimately culminates in him shooting himself in the mouth.
• Shadow Warrior has a humorous version: the standard mooks that shoot Uzis at the player character seem to have a high enough sense of honour that they'll take their failure to kill him in the only way a honourable warrior would: by eating their gun and shooting half their skull off.
• In the epilogue of Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, Aqua ends up all alone in the realm of darkness and seriously considers fading into the darkness. She thankfully snaps out of it due to Terra and Ven's keyblades appearing, but if they hadn't...
• Mamiya Shinzo commits suicide out of guilt and possibly as atonement in several endings of Kara no Shoujo, possibly after killing his son Shinji, who is the second serial killer.
• Claus, aka the Masked Man, commits suicide at the end of Mother 3.
• Because of a certain split-second image in a certain scene in Luigi's Mansion of all games, it is speculated by some that Luigi may have committed suicide and that his appearance in said game is him as a ghost.
• Rehm in The Reconstruction after passing the Despair Event Horizon, though he isn't even able to finish it; some Nalian Officers find him and sell him into slavery instead.
• In Demon's souls, mistress Astria will be kill herself, only if you manage to kill her loyal guard first, and considering the game it's actually the easier path as it's only him, becoming an Anticlimax Boss depending on how you take out the guard, you can wear enchantments and stand just out of his sight of you and make a cloud of poison to slowly kill him.
  • Also, Ostrova, son of the king, will be driven to this no matter what, if you don't kill him first anyway, and you have to face his vengeful/sorrowful spirit a second a later, people's bad side being able to materialize as black phantoms, actually just dark red with a black motif.
• In Sword of the Stars, Liir Black Swimmers who have had to put enemy civilians to the torch usually pilot their spacecraft into nearby stars after hostilities conclude.
• In Hatoful Boyfriend it is revealed that Nageki killed himself five years ago.
• In Katawa Shoujo, it's all but stated that Rin Tezuka might end up doing this, since in her route she becomes more and more self-destructive in her despair to get enough inspiration to create art, whioch does not mix well with how she cannot exprress herself unless it's through art itself. Also, that same route says that the husband of her sponsor, Sae Saionji, was a talented artist who also commited suicide, for exactly the same reason.
  • Something that's kinda overlooked by fans during early playthroughs is that Shiina Mikado aka Misha also has suicidal tendences. In Shizune's route, during a talk with Hisao, she tells him "Wouldn't it be better if I disappeared...?"
• In the 2012 reboot of Video Game/Syndicate, it's possible to hack other people's DART chips to force them to kill themselves.
• In the pirated game The Lion King 5 Simba, Timon and Pumbaa will do this on the game over screen.
• Persona:
  • Subverted in Persona 3 — Yukari is seen pointing at her head with a gun, but in reality it's her Evoker (made from an actual gun) and she's trying to gather her guts not to kill herself, but to summon her Persona through it.
  • One of the most shocking moments in the early Persona 5 plot takes place when Ann's best friend Shiho throws herself off a school roof after having been raped by her Sadist Teacher as revenge for Ann's refusal of his sexual advances. She survives, but barely.