Who's your favorite video game villain/antagonist?

I’m quite fond of the Villain from 7th Dragon III, ND/Allie.

[spoiler]
ND isn’t the final boss (that’s VFD) but VFD is just a collection of random things acting out on instinct. ND is the one pulling the strings,orchestrating events. She’s a good villain in the sense that by the time you fight her, you really goddamn hate her. She betrayed you, killed off pretty much all the main characters and most of the world population, used you to further her goals, and wasn’t even really working against you. She is 100% supportive of you, but only so far as she wants you to become a true dragon and abandon your humanity.

What really makes me like ND, however, is her motivations.

On some level, she’s just another villain advocating for “survival of the fittest.” But this feels a bit less of a cheap cop-out than it usually does, because they spend a lot of time hammering in the idea that Dragons are prideful as fuck. They are proud of their strength, proud of their glory, and take great pleasure in crushing those they deem weaker underfoot. ND is no different, but she views herself more as a “motherly” figure, helping new dragons come into their own. In this sense, she is aiding you in becoming a True Dragon and unlocking your true potential. The entire game she is nothing but supportive of you and your efforts, and this continues on after her villainous reveal. Even when you kill her, she has nothing but praise for you.

This is why she’s such a fucker of a villain. You need to kill her to have a chance at setting things right, but killing her simply furthers her plans. You feel no satisfaction upon beating her, because all you’ve done is taken one step closer to the abyss. All you can do is dive in and hope to stop it from within.[/spoiler]

7th Dragon III is a great little game that does a lot with a fairly generic and rushed story.

Ansem[/spoiler] from the first Kingdom Hearts, but only in the context of the first Kingdom Hearts. [spoiler]im a huge sucker for villains who set out on a path of evil because they think it’s gonna lead them to secret knowledge, and the fact that Ansem was actually wrong about the nature of the Heart is just the cherry on the cake. you get to see him devise this really elaborate but still reasonable plot to get himself reincarnated and see the fruits of his labor pay off and then BAM, you lose! cuz even the most well conducted research can still be wrong and lead to hurtful outcomes! it’s actually a really good commentary about using academia to push your own ideology and what kind of fucked up results can come from that, but that in the end, the facts of the universe don’t change just because you’ve “proven them wrong”

and then the sequels really really made him into kind of a meme and lessened the impact of his story arc by shoving so much unnecessary shit in there it’s not even funny anymore.

See, I was going to talk about how much I unironically love Xehanort, the Big Bad of the series because he’s just SUCH a dick. I can’t wait for KH III because thirteen of him being around is hilarious

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Xehanort is totally cool for being the evilest grandpa who has no need for any human morality, but in a way that retroactively weakens Ansem’s individual story arc imo. the Big X is a fucker I really wanna beat in KH3 and im 100% ready to kick his 13 asses.

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  1. James Sunderland, Silent Hill 2.
  2. Maggie Chow, Deus Ex
  3. Dude from Mass Effect 1, whatever his name was.
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Saren? Sovereign?

Ambassador Udina?

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Yeah, him :slight_smile:

I think mine is Chara from Undertale. Especially if you did the pacifist route first, which you really should have, watching as your character literally murders their way across the land, effortlessly crushing everyone in their way is quite disturbing. Especially with what they do to Flowly, and even your actual game if you choose that option Shits wack, yo.

They, I’m pretty sure Chara is nonbinary, same as Frisk.

It’s less nonbinary and more intentionally undefined, since it wants to elicit a specific reaction from the ‘enter your name’ prompt.

Goddamn it, I told myself to remember to do that and I still messed it up :frowning:

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This is my favorite answer to anything. Also yes, I’ve played PreSequel, as well as Tales from the Borderlands, which is why I made the choice I did. (Also 4 Claptr4p run is the best way to play that game, especially if you secretly hate your friends).

A 4 man Claptrap run feels like it would be chaos incarnate.

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It’s a lot like Final Fantasy XV, only with memes and a better camera.

I actually kinda like Claptrap despite him being designed to be the character to hate. I dunno why, something about the little robot makes me want to protect him considering everything he ever tries to do blows up in his face. He can’t help but hurt those he cares about because he’s such a klutz and I just feel bad for him.

As for favorite villain? That’s kind of a tough one, I tend to enjoy well-written and sympathetic villains that are only the bad guy from circumstance, those that could very well be the hero of the story if it were told from their point of view. However, I will say that I enjoyed Ulysses from Fallout: New Vegas quite a bit.

[spoiler]Something about finally meeting the mysterious courier who you’ve probably thought about since being told that he turned down the package when he saw your name on the list is really satisfying. A man who, to paraphrase his own words, “Walked the same long, lonesome road that you walked.” and who has been to all the places you end up going to in the DLCs searching for answers. He wants a better wasteland, just like you. Depending on how you’ve played your character and the choices you’ve made, it could be that you’re just as cynical as he is. Or maybe, you believe there really IS a better way. A way that he will challenge. He will put you through hell to get to the end of this dusty, irradiated route. You have nobody but a little robot buddy to keep you company. Fallen soldiers, ghoulish and twisted beyond humanity from rage fill the barren roads. It doesn’t matter what side they were on in life, in their suspended death they can only feel pain from just how badly they were irradiated. The radiation is quite literally the only thing keeping them from falling apart. They’re corpses walking on borrowed time. And then you find out that missile silos dot the landscape. You learn exactly why Ulysses is so pissed at you. YOU delivered a package that led to the destruction of a community that YOU built. And he’s been watching you ever since. Silently judging you. Now, obviously the Courier is meant to be your avatar, but learning that they had some backstory before the game threw me for a loop. A lot of the time in open-world RPGs you tend to wonder exactly how your character learned to do all these things. Sure, you can create your own backstory, but I think the fact that what little is canonical about the Courier is something of that magnitude hits the player pretty strongly. The Courier was a leader, not necessarily by choice but because they had the skills needed to keep people safe. And now all those people they cared about are gone. The worst part is that they probably carried that guilt every single day until Benny shot them in the head. Sure, their brain was mostly intact, but who’s to say they didn’t lose those memories like they presumably lost most of their skills?

Then, you finally make it to the end of the road. Ulysses is ready to just wipe the slate clean and start over. The moment of truth comes when you either fight him in one last showdown… or you convince him to stop. If you’ve found all the recordings he left behind, you can convince him not to go down that path of darkness. A man who stood by Caesar’s Legion in its infancy until he couldn’t take the atrocities. A man who saw the destruction of his family, his friends. A man who saw some of himself in you, and then was outraged by the one fatal mistake you made. Someone who has been all over the place and found no good answers. In the end, I think he just wanted someone to stop him. He wanted someone that could make him believe that there can be peace in the wastelands. And if you do convince him that wiping the slate clean isn’t the answer to the problem, you’re rewarded with a pretty badass survival fight. The two Couriers, back-to-back, fighting off hordes of the burned ghouls together. It felt far more satisfying than Liberty Prime shooting lasers, or Martin Septim just curbstomping Mehrunes Dagon. It was just two characters of an equal power level duking it out together to save the Mojave Wasteland. And that shit was fucking rad as hell.[/spoiler]

Also he has a really nice voice :V

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Claptrap defense force here, I will not judge, only agree with you, on you smol robit opinions.

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It probably helps that his DLCs tend to be the most fun of the bunch. Maybe not the best, but they’re certainly wild rides.

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Ok everyone, sometimes the right answer is the most obvious one.

I present the award of best villain to:

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Oh man, I forgot about this video. I love that Bowser is a good dad. (He must go through so many phones with those claws.)

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Honestly I’m quite fond of Mr. House. He can easily seem like a heroic character, and he promises a lot including not only completely restoring society but promising space travel as well, but there is one thing that makes it obvious what he’ll actually do - Mr. House is completely full of himself. He’s a dictator, a capitalist, and life in and around New Vegas proves that he is actively making things worse for the common man. You can even debate with him about his views and he’ll continue to try and make himself look good.

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