Psycho-Pass has everything one could want out of a compelling crime drama; complex characters, high-octane action, moral dilemmas, and, of course, enough desk slapping to make Law & Order proud. However, it also has everything that an anime fan could want from the Berserk series, which is sadistic characters and the heavy violence that goes with them. With a title that literally has “Psycho” in the name, Production I.G. had to deliver. As much as any fan can love detectives Akane Tsunemori and the body-pillow salesman that is Shinya Kogami, what really sells this series is its historied rogues gallery, comprised of some of the most despicable and haunting villains known to anime kind. With Season 3 having been recently announced, it’s just about time that we run down what exactly made Psycho-Pass famous, as we go over the series’ most sadistic villains.

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10 Misako Togane

This one ranks pretty low for being one of the few characters in the series without an actual kill count. However, she scores plenty of assist points, as she is essentially responsible for one of the series’ main villains and a part of the ever morally ambiguous Sibyl System. Misako Togane was a leading scientist on a secret government operation responsible for artificially creating someone with a clouded psycho-pass, i.e. someone that is pure evil. And who better to breed under such an operation than her own son? Good ol’ Momma Togane would often be seen bringing new, adorable puppies to her growing boy just so that he could chase and kill them—and she’d do it with a mother’s warm smile, too.

9 Masatake Mido

Who says online relationships aren’t real? Probably doctors and whoever wrote the Masatake Mido episodes of Psycho-Pass. Mido is just one of those people who not only spends too much time online but also becomes way too invested in its artificiality and escapism. In the series, Mido is a serial killer who becomes so invested in his online icons and their personalities that he starts to judge their real-life users. However, if he deems the actual people unworthy of their online personas, he kills them with religious scrutiny. Adding a few more layers of disassociation and latent voyeurism, Mido would subsequently take over their online accounts, replicating their speech and mannerisms with haunting accuracy.

8 Koki Mima

While only being a pawn in a much wider, more devious plan, Koki Mima ranks high on this list, as he actualized some of people’s worst fears for a hostage situation. Imagine being trapped in a building during lockdown as a grown man waves a metal baton, making you and everyone else strip. Every now and then preaching the gospel of liberating oneself from the modern conventions of mental health, that same man indiscriminately and indifferently beats a random person. It’s a terrifying, helpless situation. However, we would later learn that Mima was only acting as part of an experiment to kill Inspector Risa Aoyanagi, not only showing that his crazed outbursts were just an act but that he was willing to kill several people just to prove an idea.

 

7 Toyohisa Senguji

During the middle of Season 1, Psycho-Pass reaches one of its more blatant metaphors, as they premiere Toyohisa Senguji, a rich and influential figure who literally sacrifices their humanity to become a cold killing machine. This character has not only become so bored with the concept of humanity and physical bodies that he actually fox-hunts people to make a point that being a cyborg is so much better than being a weak, feeble human. To add to his pretention, he also named his robot hunting dogs Lovecraft and Kafka.

6 Kozaburo Toma

Toma has a special place in the series’ heart, as he is a major part of Season 1’s background and its infamous Specimen’s Case. While the series itself doesn’t give too many details on his crimes, the main idea was that Toma killed a few people, made artistic statues out of their bodies—a major influence for later in the list—and would place them in random, public areas of the city. In a series twist, it also turns out that Toma would become a part of the Sibyl System, as he was able to do the above without clouding his own hue which… makes sense.

However, it’s revealed in the prequel novel Psycho-Pass/Zero: The Monster with No Name, that Toma actually has a much deeper, more horrifying history. Enraged that his sister had become a prostitute, Toma would kill several of the men that she slept with, later killing her and stuffing her body in a refrigerator to talk to on occasion. He would do all of this while living with the rotting corpse of his overdosed mother. This one’s not a rabbit hole. He’s a rabbit abyss.

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5 Kirito Kamui

To clarify things, Kamui isn’t exactly a villain, as he is villains, being the collective embodiment of over 100 personalities surgically sewn together. Heads up; that wasn’t a metaphor. Secondly, though he is the main villain of Psycho-Pass 2, Kamui actually loses points for not having any malicious intent in the series and even being somewhat of a humanist and altruist. However, he makes up for that in spades by being the plotter and instigator of several, grizzly massacres, such as the one involving Koki Mima. And within the same vein, he would do so just to resolve his own identity crisis about what it’s like being a bunch of people at once. Kamui ranks high here because there’s probably a bunch of other ways to do this without killing a bunch of people.

4 Rikako Oryo

Rikako Oryo is someone who takes heavy influence from Kozaburo Toma, her father’s gory art pieces, and someone coming up later in the list as she gruesomely replicates the body statues of the Specimens Case. However, while she doesn’t have as deep and dark of a background as Toma, she ranks higher because this is a list on sadism, and her murders in the series are arguably more sadistic. In the series, she seduces her female classmates, entrancing them with quotes and ideas from Shakespeare’s child-friendly Titus Andronicus, and, after sleeping with them, murders them and turns their body into one of her statues. In this case, other people had to suffer for her art.

3 Shogo Makashima

Shogo Makashima is the criminally asymptomatic, main villain of Season 1 and the major conspirator/influencer of its other villains. Look no further for proof of Makashima’s resolve and downright brutality than in “Saint’s Supper,” where he forces Investigator Tsunemori to helplessly watch as he murders one of her best friends, persuading her to abandon her indecisive Dominator for an indiscriminate shotgun. Makashima manipulates and enables Season 1’s villains and several people in Japan to commit heinous crimes so that he can test the judgment and infallibility of the Sibyl System and society’s modern perceptions of mental health, trying to get the system to burn itself down. It’s one thing to massacre a lot of people, but it’s another to get the same people to do it on their own.

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2 The Sibyl System

While initially seen more as an organization/network, Season 2 made it a point to designate Sibyl as an accountable entity. As such, Sibyl gets to be a named villain on this list and for good reason. The Sibyl System is comprised of the integrated minds of people deemed asymptomatic within their psycho-pass, many of which are murderous criminals, essentially rewarding people for being sociopathic murderers. On top of the crimes of these individuals, Sibyl the entity has committed several heinous crimes in its attempt to hide its own anonymity, murdering those who get too close or refuse integration as well as commissioning the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Investigator Tsunemori’s grandmother just to cloud her psycho-pass and subsequently kill one other person who disagrees with them. Cornered on its own philosophy and history, Sibyl even eliminates a few of its more unsavory minds during Season 2 as a lateral means of improving its own judgment.

1 Sakuya Togane

On a list with killer cyborgs and an actual collection of sociopathic minds, the top of this list is an individual who was literally born to be sadistic. Born and raised from the experiments of his mother Misako Togane, Sakuya is the Enforcer/inside man for Sibyl that is known for setting records with his psycho-pass. Aside from murdering puppies and attempting to do the same with his mother—adding a little Norman Bates to the mix—Sakuya is known for eliminating enemies to the Sibyl system and being used to literally corrupt other detectives so that they can become latent criminals. As such, he was involved with the kidnapping and murder of Investigator Tsunemori’s Grandmother, often declaring in the series to paint Akane’s hue “black.” Beyond being someone who was bred and paid to torture and murder people, Sakuya Togane also has some of the most cartoonishly sadistic smiles in the series, screaming loudest in the series' history, “I’m the bad guy!”

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