Not necessarily the antagonist of the game but just someone in the game with questionable, if any, morals and enough charisma to get you totally vested in the game any time they’re on screen. I’ve talked a lot online about how much I love about Delita in Final Fantasy Tactics. How he’s cunning and brutal and very count of monte cristo without the failing in the end. Who are yours? Vergil? Protoman? Sagat?
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Isn’t it beautiful? It’s almost tragic. When life ends, it gives off a final lingering aroma. Light is but a farewell gift from the darkness to those on their way to die. I’ve been waiting, Snake, for a long time. Waiting for your birth, your growth, and the finality of today.
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I wanna say Maleficient from Kingdom Hearts, but that might be just because she’s one of my favorite Disney villains anyways. It’s a shame that she’s slowly loss relevance to KH’s weird, beautiful mess of a plot
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The Jackal (Far Cry 2)
The Ratchet and Clank rogues gallery is one of the most charismatic and well performed in the history of the medium, period.
From the Supreme Executive Chairman Drek, to Quark, to Nefarious, to Emperor Tachion of the Cragmites, all of them are just so entertaining and the voice acting behind them is fucking spectacular.
That is, until the remake of the first game. I don’t care that Paul Giamatti was available, that is not my Drek, dammit…
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Vergil and Arkham from DMC3 were both brilliant. Honestly the Kamiya Directed DMC’s don’t get enough credit for their stories, DMC3 in particular. Which isn’t a put-down on DMC4 btw, The Fucking Pope was a fantastic old-fashioned scenery-chewing baddie, perfect for 4’s turn to a more light-hearted action territory.
Kamiya in general does a bang-up job directing his villains. Balder makes one hell of an impression considering how little time you get with him in Bayo 1.
And while we’re on Platinum, let’s not forget The Boy himself:
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The Jester reveal in DMC 3 is still stuck in my head and I can picture the entire cut scene playing out in my head. Such a great scumbag.
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Luca Blight - Suikoden 2
Kefka - Final Fantasy VI
Revolver Ocelot/Liquid Ocelot - MGS Series
Pyramid Head - Silent Hill 2 (it’s more what he represents but he’s pretty cool on his own too)
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My boy Skull Kid.
Not Majora, nor his mask, but Skull Kid. This is a pretty important distinction. Majora’s Mask makes it clear from the outset that Skull Kid isn’t possessed, his will overwhelmed. He still very much has the impish, playful personality of any of the skull kids you encountered in Ocarina. The key difference is that he has a chip on his shoulder and a huge amount of power.
It’s crucial that Skull Kid is pretty much that—a kid, with all the powerful emotions but none of the nuance and maturity those emotions develop through age and experience. He HATES the giants for abandoning him, but doesn’t understand how he drove them off, or how they didn’t even really abandon him. He wants to HURT people, and understands that he is hurting them, but doesn’t get what that means: how that hurt is felt, its consequences, its moral consequences, etc. Having studied developmental psychology, I’m reminded a ton of how the physical immaturity of the brain affects how children comprehend those ideas at younger ages.
So the greatest and scariest villain in any Zelda game (and any video game as far as I’m concerned) isn’t a power-hungry thief or sorcerer but an angry child who basically found his dad’s gun. He’s ready to bring about the apocalypse for the pettiest of reasons, and the key to stopping him is getting his friends to come back.
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only some of them are true villains but I luv the prosecutors & the hostile witnesses in the first 3 Phoenix Wright games…most of them are super memorable characters & have great stories/gimmicks/puzzles to unravel. they’re a huge part of what makes those games such a joy to play, both inside and outside of the courtroom parts.
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Teemo from League of Legends! 
This cute little guy was one of the first 40 champions the game launched with on October 27, 2009. To understand what makes him a great villain despite being in a game that effectively contains no story or plot, you need to examine the way his playstyle and character have evolved as a collaboration between Riot developers and the player base that learned how best to abuse him.
Dubbed “The Swift Scout”, Teemo’s design centers on information disparity, guerilla warfare, and map control. While his capabilities have changed somewhat over the years, these core themes hold true today. He runs quickly, hides in bushes or plain sight while stationary, poisons and blinds opponents with blow gun darts, and hides invisible toxic mushroom land mines all over the place. These abilities were most likely designed to be an innocuous blend of DotA’s Techies and Venomancer with a dash of stealth, all wrapped up in an adorable aesthetic, but they combined with play patterns to create a character that got referred to as “Satan” so frequently that Riot eventually made him a little devil skin.
It’s important to understand that Teemo isn’t actually that effective or powerful a champion, and outside of patches where specific items were overpowered or low rank play, he never has been. He isn’t any more likely to win than a “less annoying” character, but the community finds the WAY Teemo fights to be so obnoxious as to be meme-worthy, and Riot loves it. They shorthand in game units of distance using his collision size, they release statistics about how many times he’s been killed in-game each year, and they even make new employees wear his goggled and feathered hat during their initial training/onboarding to mark them as company “newbs”.
This narrative of mechanical gaming hatred was built up organically, by people that play him invisibly holding still somewhere ridiculous, sacrificing Gold and XP just to surprise the other team. His name passes between gritted teeth every time his blinding dart nullifies attacks that should have been his doom. His reputation as a force of evil grows with every kill he gets when a wounded player steps on a mushroom, even though he’s nowhere near them. Players overextend themselves to try to punish his playstyle so consistently that his smugly punchable little face grants him a sort of hidden psychological passive taunt, to the point where you can build survivability instead of damage items and draw completely inappropriate amounts of fire from the enemy team.
An entire League of Legends subculture basically exists to fall in love with hating Teemo.
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One thing I’ve always found interesting about the major Ace Attorney villains is that, with the exception of aa5’s villain, their primary motivation is almost always pettiness? Like, they want revenge, but revenge over really minor stuff, especially compared to how some other culprits in the series are portrayed as more sympathetic (6-3 comes to mind). For example, the villain of the fourth game ruined a man’s life and killed two people because he lost a job opportunity? It’s a weird throughline that I don’t think was even intentional.
Probably plenty to list, but I absolutely love everything about Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower, from the lore to the confrontation itself to the design of the character and her music:
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There’s been a lot said about Junko Enoshima and Nagito Komaeda from the Danganronpa games that I won’t regurgitate here. I want to highlight Hiyoko Saionji, who was an unrelenting bully to her classmates, especially to poor Mikan. In real life she’d be the dirt worst, but in the game her cheap shots were so funny and brutally accurate that she became one of my favorites. I wasn’t sad to see her go, but I definitely wish we got to uncover more of her backstory. We only ever got small hints of what seems like some deep-seated self-hatred that we could’ve helped her overcome.
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Shittiest dad, maybe only topped by his dad
just reminded me SNK didn’t mess around when it came to baddies
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Frau Engle from Wolfenstein: The New Order. She’s abhorrent, her ideology is abhorrent, but she makes for one hell of a compelling villain in the same way Hans Landa did in Inglourious Basterds.
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I really love most BioWare villains.
Jon Irenicus, Saren, The Illusive Man, Loghain, Meredith, hell even Coryphaeus has some moments honestly.
I don’t know that any of these villains are particularly deep or good but man I still really enjoyed the moments they have.
Obsidian are also really really good at villains. Caesar, all the villains from Alpha Protocol, Kreia
I don’t have compelling arguments for why I like them beyond just that I did like them but whatever
I can’t really think too far back into the past at half past four, but as far as recent villains go, I found Grynewaht (FFXIV) to be my favorite from the recent expansion, weirdly enough.
[details=Stormblood Spoilers Under the Cut]There’s something compelling and kind of fun about the kind of character that thinks he’s on the level of you, the protagonist, only to be proven wrong time and time again. Seeing him evolve, and how the difference between you is made evident as story progresses, was actually pretty interesting to watch. He goes from being a person that seems to be a legitimate threat to a guy you realize you can curbstomp time and time again. The player reaction quickly becomes one of almost humorous boredom every time he comes at you, because you know he’s going to fail. There’s no choice for him but failure. That’s just his lot in the story, but he doesn’t know that at the start.
Later, he realizes he can’t beat you as he is and it starts to eat away at him more and more. It makes a lot of sense when you look at him through a wider lens and realize that Grynewaht’s literal only talent is knowing when to get the fuck out of dodge and live to fight another day. And despite this, he keeps coming at you. He honestly, legitimately thinks he can kill you if he keeps trying. It’s an interesting viewpoint for an NPC in an MMO to have, because that’s how it works with the players. If you wipe once, you just keep throwing yourself at it and breaking to pieces in new and interesting ways until you finally win.
The second he ends up with Yotsuyu, he’s trying to find ways to get back to fighting the player character. Part of that is because he honestly views you as a fated enemy, and part of it is probably because he knows if you defeat him, he can still run. Being stuck in Doma puts him into a corner he can’t escape from. There’s no way for him to survive, and that’s made evident when Zenos says he’s straight up going to kill all the Imperials in Doma if it falls to the rebellion.
So, backed into a corner but with you fighting your way into Doma Castle, he sort of loses himself both to the knowledge that failure means death and the desperate, hopeless desire to beat you. Grynewaht allows himself to be transformed into a horrifying amalgamation of man and technology just so he can have a chance at defeating you. Or, at the very least, dying and taking his “beloved enemy” with him.
And he fails.
It’s amazing.[/details]
I wanted to like Fordola and Yotsuyu more than I did, but after Yotsuyu’s bad sympathetic backstory and Fordola’s kind of honestly bad character design, I found it really hard to like them at the start. I still don’t like Yotsuyu and I’m not particularly jazzed about what SquEnix plans on doing with her character in relation to Gosetsu, but whatever.
Fordola got really, really good later on in the story and I hope that she shows up more throughout the expansion.
Zenos can fuck off. He was really boring and his nihilist shit was kind of whatever. Every scene with either Yotsuyu and Zenos or Fordola and Xenos came off as really gross and semi-sexual and it was kind of the worst fucking thing ever. That’s the sorta shit I wish got a trigger warning slapped on it.
I really liked the idea of Sin in Final Fantasy X. This humongous force of nature that ciclically forces people to confront their own mortality over and over again.
The Boss from MGS3 was amazing.
I really like Viola from Zone of the Enders in retrospect.
Also has anyone played Skies of Arcadia? It was one of the best JRPGs on the Dreamcast and was later ported to the Gamecube. I really liked Belleza, Lord Galcian and Ramirez.
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RAMIREZ ! always forgotten but he’s clearly UP there
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