Without throwing any shade on any specific real-life military force, as a regular consumer of fiction, I can’t help but notice the frequency with which militaries take on the antagonistic role.
The military is supposed to protect and serve the interests of its country, but in many stories across all forms of media, games included, you have militaristic forces that are corrupt, incompetent, or full-on evil, and making it everyone else’s problem.
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A powerful military does make for a good antagonistic faction. It’s armed to the teeth, well-organized, and its structure can seem nebulous to an outside observer, which makes it difficult to unseat.
If the military itself isn’t the primary antagonist, then at the very least, it’s the events instigated by the military, either from within or by its government, that end up setting the wheels of disaster spinning. Not only are there quite a few games where these kinds of events go down, but they run the gamut of genres and tones.
For the purposes of this list, the protagonist must be ostensibly allied to the military in question. Basically, they have to be a citizen of the military’s country, a former member of the military, or the military must be present to render some manner of aid. Just being attacked by an enemy country’s military is nothing unusual.
Spoilers for some of the following games ahead.
Zombifying Wasps? Just Cover It Up!
Dead Rising
Unfortunately, one of these wasps got loose and ended up infecting someone in Santa Cabeza, sparking off the first zombie outbreak. Not looking to take the heat for this crime against humanity, the U.S. Special Forces proceeded togun down everyone in town, infected and uninfected.
The only ones spared were the lead researcher, Dr. Barnaby, his vital staff, and unbeknownst to the soldiers, a couple of survivors who would one day instigate the Willamette Outbreak.
The Commander of that unit, Brock Mason, is called in again later in Dead Rising to mop up the Willamette Outbreak. When pressed on the Santa Cabeza incident, the only particular remorse he shows for any of those events is that he let Carlito and Isabella escape alive.
8Beyond Good & Evil
Alpha Section Is Totally Legit
Beyond Good & Evil HD
On the main setting ofBeyond Good & Evil, the planet Hillys, there are actually two main military factions. The first is the Hillyan Army, and those guys are fine. They’re stationed around major population centers and act as public security.
The other major faction, however, is Alpha Section, an interplanetary mercenary group waging a lengthy war against the DomZ. It’s these guys that we have a problem with.
Alpha Section arrived on Hillys following several devastating DomZ attacks, almost immediately instating martial law. The organization wrested control of the planet from the Hillys government and Hillyan Army, which is why the army’s troops are stuck on beat work.
No one can really tell them to go away because, in spite of everything, they do fight off the DomZ attacks. Or at least that’s what their official media presence tells everyone.
In actuality, all of this is an elaborate hoax. Alpha Section has been colluding with the DomZ, leading them to populated planets they can raid and ransack in exchange for the DomZ life-extending mutation technology. Once Jade spills the beans, the Hillyans promptly rise up and kick Alpha Section off their planet.
7Beyond: Two Souls
Militarize The Afterlife, Great Idea
Beyond: Two Souls
A common trope in stories where the military screws up involves scientists uncovering some means of accessing a phenomenal force of nature well beyond human reckoning. Almost immediately, some knucklehead in the military says, “let’s weaponize it! What could possibly go wrong?” A lot, hypothetical knucklehead. A lot can go wrong.
InBeyond: Two Souls, the United States military funds and oversees the Department of Paranormal Activities' research into the afterlife, or the “Infraworld,” as they like to call it.
Nathan, one of the lead researchers on the project, just wanted a way to reconnect with his deceased wife and daughter. His chief overseer, General McGrath, just wants a way to capture and utilize the many hostile Entities that prowl the Infraworld as a weapon to cement the U.S. as a dominant global superpower.
Shock of shocks, this turns out to be a terrible idea. While Nathan is the one who loses his marbles and tries to merge reality with the Infraworld, the research only got that far because McGrath and his men forced it to progress despite the very obvious risks.
Which Military? Throw A Dart
Misuse of extreme military force is a recurring theme throughout theFalloutseries. Whether it’s the Enclave or Brotherhood of Steel, someone is using old-world tech and weaponry in a way they probably shouldn’t be, and will probably continue to do so in perpetuity. War never changes, and all that.
Even before the Enclave and Brotherhood, though, there’s another military that we need to take to task here: the one that instigated the war that ruined the Earth all those years ago.
The problem is that we don’t know preciselywhichmilitary was the first to push the launch button and kick off the first and last bit of mutually-assured destruction, but you’re able to bet it wassomeone’s military. Really, you could blame any of them, and you’d probably be at least partially right.
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It’s worth noting that, according to the live-action Fallout TV series, the bomb drops were actuallyorchestrated by Vault-Tecso they’d have an excuse to lock a bunch of people away in a big eugenics experiment.
Even so, they wouldn’t have been able to pull that off without some degree of cooperation from one or more militaries, so some military in the world is still technically culpable.
5Prototype
Make A Mess, Clean A Mess
It’s important to remember sometimes that there’s a fine line between “good guy and bad guy” and “protagonist and antagonist.” Case in point,Prototype’s protagonist, Alex Mercer, is definitely not a good guy, considering he’s a literal man-eating mutant abomination.
That, however, does not automatically make the military faction opposing him, Blackwatch, the good guys, especially considering this is all their fault.
The original Blacklight virus that infected Mercer was created by genetic research company Gentek on commission from Blackwatch, a black ops arm of the United States Military. While Blackwatch’s shtick is supposed tocontainbiohazards, they also dabble extensively in bioweapons of their own, particularly the prototype Redlight virus and the Blacklight virus that followed it.
Yes, the Blacklight infection that impacts New York City in the game is technically Mercer’s fault, but if Blackwatch hadn’t ordered its creation, that wouldn’t have been a problem.
It definitely didn’t help matters when they began gunning down civilians en masse and firebombing city blocks to try and cover it all up. Part of Blackwatch’s creed is “no one is safe, nothing is sacred,” which you definitely don’t want to hear from an arm of your country’s military.
4Tales Of Vesperia
Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition
InTales of Vesperia, the Empire is positively lousy with corruption, mostly within its military and aristocracy. Its lone bright spot in the eyes of the people is the Knights’ Commandant, Alexei Dinoia, head of the Royal Guard. Alexei seems like a fair-minded man who wants to help the downtrodden and eliminate corruption, and technically, he is. He just picked areallybad way to go about it.
Alexei is the main antagonist of the game’s first half, having co-opted the Royal Guard as his own personal military to overthrow the Knights and Empire from within. Alexei, having both grown jaded with the corrupt aristocracy and concerned with the world-damaging effects of Blastia, sought to unseal the ancient weapon Zaude and use it to intimidate the world into following his designs.
This was accomplished through an elaborate conspiracy of blastia theft and assassination, which inadvertentlygot Yuri and company involved.
However, when he finally arrives at Zaude and attempts to unseal it with a knock-off of the legendary sword Dein Nomos, Alexei realizes his colossal screw-up: Zaude isn’t a weapon, it’s a barrier holding back a world-consuming monster. A barrier he just broke. Whoops.
3Metal Gear Solid 3
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)
Following the failure of Operation Virtuous Mission in the introductory arc ofMetal Gear Solid 3, legendary soldier The Boss, alongside her Cobra Unit, defects to the Soviet Union and utilizes the Shagohod to launch a nuclear missile.
Obviously, the United States government and military couldn’t allow one of their greatest soldiers to run rampant with such a dangerous weapon, which is why Naked Snake was deployed to Tselinoyarsk for Operation Snake Eater.
As Snake learns in the game’s climax, though, this was a massive hoax orchestrated by both the military and The Boss herself. The original point of Operation Virtuous Mission was to help the U.S. obtain the Philosopher’s Legacy from the Soviet Union, an enormous slush fund gathered by multiple global powers post-World War II.
To secure the Legacy, as well as provide a smokescreen for all of this, Boss was ordered to make herself a villain in the eyes of the world, public enemy to the United States and nuke-brandishing monster to the Soviet Union. All this terror and death just so a few powerful people could get a big stack of cash. A tale as old as time, truly.
2Spec Ops: The Line
They Could’ve Sent Help
Spec Ops: The Line
InSpec Ops: The Line, Captain Walker and his unit are deployed to the city of Dubai, which had been consumed by a massive sandstorm.
Several weeks prior, a passing U.S. military unit, the 33rd and its leader Colonel Konrad, entered the city to search for survivors of the storm, disobeying orders and deserting their posts in the process. The 33rd imposed martial law on the survivors, digging their heels in and continuously defying radio orders to leave.
The U.S. military managed to loosen their position by sending in a Black Ops unit to covertly rile up the populace, but following an announcement that the 33rd would lead a caravan of survivors out of the city, everything went silent, hence the need for Walker and his men to investigate.
As the game itself likes to hammer home, there are any number of military personnel who could’ve put a stop to all this before it got out of hand. Konrad could’ve obeyed his orders, sure, but the military could’ve worked with him to evacuate the populace rather than sending covert agents to agitate the situation.
Sadly, it’s not really a winning situation for anyone involved, which is kind of the point of the story.
1Sonic Adventure 2
Never Shoot Shadow’s Sister
Sonic Adventure 2
One particular bit of military culpability has been memed into immortal status because it occurred in the kind of game you’d never expect to see such a thing:Sonic Adventure 2. It’s even beenadapted to the big screen in live action. That’s how well this screw-up has been immortalized.
Prior to the events of Sonic Adventure 2, Dr. Gerald Robotnik had been tinkering with genetic research aboard the Space Colony ARK. His granddaughter, Maria Robotnik, was up there with him, as she had a debilitating health condition he was looking to treat.
With the help of the alien Black Doom’s DNA, Dr. Gerald’s research ultimately bore fruit in the form of Shadow the Hedgehog, who lived happily with the doctor and Maria for a time.
However, the international military force G.U.N. launched a raid on the ARK out of concern that its researchers were manufacturing weapons (which they technically were, but they were for fighting aliens).
All of the ARK’s residents and researchers were killed, save Shadow, who was placed in cryo-sleep, and Dr. Gerald, who was imprisoned. Driven mad by the death of his granddaughter, Dr. Gerald reprogrammed Shadow’s memories to seek revenge and installed a failsafe in the ARK to have it crash into the Earth.
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