Has any video game protagonist ever done more damage than Eike from Shadow of Memories?

Do not step on a butterfly. Never make contact with your past or future self. Avoid having sex with your own grandmother. Don't kill the person who will eventually invent the time machine you're currently using to travel through time and kill the person who will eventually invent the time machine.

These are only a few of the common sense rules required to be a polite time traveller and to stop yourself from tearing apart the fabric of spacetime itself.

To some degree, all participating characters in a time travel story break these sorts of rules. Mistakes happen, conflicts arise, people buy sports almanacs. In fact, you could argue that if time travellers were able to follow the tricky rules of cause and effect and cause that result from chronal jiggery-pokery, there'd be no interesting story to tell. So they're all criminals.

Few can match the sheer incompetence, the overwhelming stupidity and recklessness, of Eike Kusch. May god have mercy on anyone unfortunate enough to live in his timeline.

Shadow of Memories (known as Shadow of Destiny in North America) is a 2001 PlayStation 2 video game about a man who keeps getting murdered. In the opening scene, Eike walks down the street and gets stabbed to death. He wakes up in a strange void, with a strange voice telling him that he died, and offering him the chance to reverse his fate. Eike accepts, and is given a futuristic tablet computer that can propel him to various points in history.

Eike doesn't ask where he is, or why the time machine is a leather-bound iPad, although he does briefly hypothesise that the voice is literally Satan. This does not stop him taking the deal.

This is how the game develops; Eike stops himself from dying, and is immediately killed by some other set of circumstances. The solutions to his own death become increasingly elaborate, eventually extending all the way back to 16th century Germany and significantly overlapping his own timeline.

How he goes about solving these problems is completely unhinged. To avoid getting stabbed in the back, he steals either a shop sign or a frying pan, and hides it under his jacket like a medieval knight's chainmail. He stands near a juggler. He prevents the planting of a 500-year-old seed so the murderer can't hide behind a tree. In one late-game scene, Eike realises he will be pushed off a roof to his death, and his solution is to tie a rope to the roof and grab it on the way down rather than try to figure out who wants to kill him.

Beyond self-preservation, Eike constantly endangers the timeline for frivolous reasons. You can feed a dog in 1584 a piece of meat from 1902, which seems like a huge health hazard. A little girl in the 1900s wants a cat, and Eike is able to simply take a kitten from the present day and give it to her.

Did you ask her father if he wanted to be responsible for an animal, Eike? Does that cat have an untold number of 2000s-specific diseases and microorganisms that you've now unleashed in pre-World War Europe? You little shit?

In Chapter 3, activating the time machine unexpectedly ferries a young waitress from the local café along with the main character. They both end up in 1582, where Eike immediately witnesses women being persecuted and threatened with being burned as witches. He scares the people of the town by showing them his cigarette lighter and cell phone, he tells multiple people about being a time traveller, and he makes almost no attempt to find the girl he accidentally kidnapped. Hopefully she doesn't get executed for heresy, I suppose.

Spoiler: she does not, because Eike leaves her in the past for two years. When they finally meet up again, she explains that she has been living her life in the 16th century, presumably having an absolutely horrible time in the wake of the recent world-wide influenza pandemic and living hundreds of years before the commonplace existence of indoor plumbing. Eike has very little response to this, apart from asking her if she'd like to come back to the present day.

Let's not paint Eike as a monster here. He isn't some sinister villain, spreading greed and malice across history; he's an idiot. An empty head keeping a human body afloat.

More than that, he may have one of the smallest brains in the history of video games. What else are we supposed to think about a person who gets stabbed to death multiple times, and never once considers finding the murderer. The man is such a peculiar combination of cotton candy brain and infuriating passivity. Nothing sinks in, no event ever leads him to question the meaning of anything, no plan ever has more than one step. Eike Kusch is the intellectual equivalent of a plank of wood.

The inside of Eike's head is just static and sand, which makes him the most dangerous kind of person to have access to the spacetime continuum. Primarily because he will just do anything that anyone tells him to do. A mysterious voice tells him to mess with time itself, and he just does it; when the voice turns out to be a suspicious trickster that has existed for thousands of years, he just kind of thinks that's fine, probably. On confronting one of the people trying to kill him, Eike just listens to the man being sad for a bit, and then leaves, as if he forgot that he was pushed off that building a few minutes earlier. The alchemy-poisoned spirit of an old woman asks him to help her crush her own son to death in a building collapse, and he just does it, with no further questions and not enough brains to experience remorse.

Homunculus—the aforementioned semi-phenomenal, nearly-cosmic time fairy—eventually reveals that he manufactured many of the game's events to facilitate his own escape. Or creation? The game is a little confusing on this point, and also every other point.

It asks for the time machine to be returned, and Eike does this immediately, as one might hand back a pen they borrowed. Sure, Eike, give the Literal Time Machine back to the powerful spirit creature who kidnaps children, controls the time stream, can erase people from existence, has committed countless murders, and could destroy the world with a stray thought. Seems fine. Good work, you soft-boiled egg of a man.

Outside the context of time travel, someone as free of judgement and deductive reasoning would almost be admirable. Would that we could all float through life like a half-filled helium birthday balloon, unbothered by worldly concerns and the knives in our backs. But put that sort of wobbly nincompoop in charge of the fate of the world, give him a machine that folds reality, and the potential for damage reaches infinity. Suddenly there are cat diseases rampaging across Europe, teenage boys building steam-powered time cubes in medieval towns, untethered genies, stolen babies, and 16th century alchemists dating their own daughters.

Letting this dumb man travel through time is like handing a nuclear bomb to a baby. I'm not saying it would have been safer to let Eike die at the start of the game. No, wait, I am saying that. For the good of the timeline, some people really do need to be stabbed, set on fire, hit with a pot, injected, stabbed again, thrown off a building, poisoned, and hit by a car.