What's your favorite gaming villains?
Nanomachines, son!
Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Rising.
His first and only significant appearance is during Rising's last level, but he somehow managed to be the best part of the game. He's compelling, charismatic, and somehow manages to have a point about the military war industrial complex despite being the villain of a Platinum game.
Heck, he's probably the most memorable villain of the entire Metal Gear franchise.
This thread is just about your favorite gaming villains, no need for them to be recent.In more recent years there just haven’t been that many villains I’ve found all that compelling. So it was a bit of a surprise when Fu came about in No More Heroes 3, though in retrospect they’d already had each of the bosses in Travis Strikes Again being as impressive as they were as well. But Fu really takes the cake with just how much in his level of immaturity and naïveté and insecurity that Travis has grown in contrast.
Going off of Grasshopper’s other games, I’ve really enjoyed the Silver Case series, but it’s way harder to pinpoint a villain there, especially in the second game. I suppose it’s Kamui on the cover, sure, but I find the real crux of things to be about him being a scapegoat for society’s problems as a whole and that it’s kind of telling what happens to each of your associates in the aftermath - especially Nakategawa, he was a real asshole.
Something a bit more silly, not as much depth but still cool and stylish: DJ Cyber in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. Don’t want to spoil how it all turns out with it being a much newer game but I especially enjoyed how the game sort of took the trappings of how Jet Set Radio worked and used them to subvert expectations of just how it would go. Really surprised me in a good way.
It’s been real interesting trying to analyze how some modern games go about this, some games like Bioshock with Andrew Ryan or Far Cry 3 with Vaas starting a bit of a trend where the bad guys themselves are more of the focus. I think I liked the idea of Comstock a bit more than the actual execution, but that can be said about Infinite as a whole really. I did like Joseph Seed quite a bit more with the sort of obvious allusions to Jim Jones and such, but unfortunately the way FC5 and even New Dawn ended kind of ruined it for me, one with an unsatisfying cliffhanger and the other on a wet fart of a boss fight.
There was a time I thought Halsey might become a villain in the Halo series, what I thought they might have been setting up with their weird spartan ops thing. Gravemind, they’re ok, Prophets pretty good if not kind of typical, but the Didact really left a sour taste in my mouth with being a generic, shallow Vader sort of knock off. So I thought, well Halsey was already interesting having been in charge of kidnapping child soldiers, controversial to say the least, and now being hunted down for treason or whatever. So I was unpleasantly surprised by sharp turns in the story for awful stuff like the Warden or Locke, etc. So much potential not even bothered with.
MGS series has a lot of loony villains, both big and small. Psycho Mantis is pretty popular, for good reason. I’m partial to Grey Fox myself. Can definitely get behind Fatman’s philosophy. The Fury and his f-bombs are great. Sundowner is just fun. But really you can’t go wrong with Ocelot. Even with how mgs4 kinda jumped the shark, I can sort of see the parallel to his own mother and her ideology and how it’s kind of twisted to try and reach the same goal, and what all he had to sacrifice to achieve that. Lastly I’m wondering if you can count Strangelove, considering her initial hostility, but either way I found her one of the better parts of Peace Walker. It’s too bad the last game had someone as stupid as skullface but that’s what you get when the more talented writers left the series.
One more that comes to mind is the masked man in Mother 3. Certainly other fun and interesting villains in the series, but this one I feel really resonated in a different and deeper way. That being said, it’s been a long time and it’s not so fresh in my memory now. But I think it’s a really beautiful way of showing how grief can affect people so differently, especially the circumstances and with those who you have to support you.
Going off that, not as much to say about him but I have a soft spot for Asgore in Undertale. Sans, too, for that matter. Well actually pretty much most characters in it and Deltarune are good.
And now I’m thinking of it I have to mention Pokemon I guess. Not so much in the first two gens(though I do like the rival and what they did with Team Rocket in gen 2), or all the gens I skipped. But the last boss in Scarlet I found one of the better ones. Really sucks I can’t say much without ruining it.