Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile). Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.
To Erik: Who's the best video game villain?
Okay, time for the standard disclaimer: This is simply my opinion. It's based on my own personal experiences playing video games and the impact they had on me. Because this is my blog, that obviously means that my opinion is correct and yours is wrong, and if you want to dispute it, fine, but you won't win.
Neener-neener.
Now, video games have several different types of villains. You have your huge, cosmic threats. You have your powerhouses that you have to get stronger throughout the game to beat. You have your manipulators, who fling unimaginable forces in your path. You have total joke villains (see: Bob the Goldfish).
But who's the best?
That's...difficult to say. Let's look at a few options.
Oh, and spoilers might follow.
I'm going to do my best to stay away from any cosmic level threats or beings who don't really care about me so much as trying to blow up the planet or something along those lines. Typically, any characterization those characters (if any at all) is stripped away the moment we get the final boss fight anyways. Besides, if I was including them, I'd automatically have to go with Lavos from Chrono Trigger, a monster so bad you have to fight it through time, because he's so powerful that he was able to nap for billions of years and still kick your butt without trouble right after waking up.
Anybody who read my playthrough of The Walking Dead might think I'd pick "The Stranger." Honestly, The Stranger is probably one of the video game villains who got the biggest reaction out of me from any game I played. In a game that's all about making decisions, when the time came to decide if I wanted to kill him or not, the fact a choice was involved never crossed my mind, I simply mashed the controller until I ended him.
However, despite the fact that he did what he did, that in itself doesn't necessarily make him the game's "villain." He was simply the latest threat to my character and Clementine, but his presence was pretty much unknown up until the fourth episode. By that point, my character had failed so much at trying to keep people alive, that it was me that was worn down just as much as Lee.
While it is a truly memorable ending battle, I don't really consider him to be that great a villain so much as a man who caught me at my weakest moment and exploited it. He didn't get me there, he just took advantage of an opportunity.
I once also mentioned Carmen Sandiego, and she is also a truly great villain. Always one step ahead of you and requiring all of your brain power and intelligence to simply keep up on, she is both one of the most honorable villains I've encountered and one of the most frustrating, because she won't hesitate to rub your nose in your failures. But, again, she's almost a cosmic level threat in the fact that she doesn't even really care about you too much while you're trying to stop her, and almost finds you amusing while she's simply doing her thing. Sure, you're catching all of her minions, but if they were worth keeping around then they wouldn't get caught, right?
Then, of course, there's GlaDOS from Portal and Portal 2.
I'll admit it, I seriously considered just putting her name down, dusting my hands off, and walking away from the keyboard. This machine is not just insane, but is completely focused on two things: science and your death. Her mocking jabs, her blatant lies to try to lead you to certain doom, and her twisted manipulations to make her even more dangerous lead to what I consider to be one of the best games of all time in that the first game was, essentially, one giant boss stage, and the second just took everything and increased the intensity by eleven.
There are other great villains I've faced in video games, such as Dracula in the Castlevania series, Ganondorf from the Legend of Zelda games,
Not Albert Wesker, though. I hated him, but for entirely different reasons (namely: being a total idiot). Also, I'd probably never really be able to pick any bad guy from a Final Fantasy game because at a certain point their stories just stop making any damn sense whatsoever.
Well, okay, maybe one villain from Final Fantasy:
Garland don't shiv, ya'll.
I was debating saying The Joker from the Batman games, but I kinda disqualified him for being a comic book villain first.
There are two villains, though, who I distinctively remember and come up whenever I think of villains who were terrific, even if one of their games wasn't.
#2 is The Jackal from Farcry 2.
Yeah, okay, so he doesn't look like much, I admit it.
However, in a game where you contract malaria within the opening credits, almost die, and wind up being saved by the man you were sent to kill...well, that hooked me from the get-go. Add on to the fact that the man you're sent to hunt knows who you are and why you're there and still saves your life, well, I knew I had to find out more.
As I said, the game itself isn't great. The ending's a bit weak, and it's a bit hard to understand how some of the AI works in the enemies you fight (or why they can bulls-eye you from past the curvature of the Earth with a pistol when there's a mountain between you and them), but I pushed through simply to learn more about a man wanted by the U.S. Government for instigating rebellion in third world nations and selling guns to both sides of the ensuing war.
Once you learn more about him, you start to connect with him. You start to understand his thinking. There are times when you encounter him again and wind up having a conversation with him (including when he saves your life a second time) that lead you to wonder if perhaps he's a necessary evil in that part of the world, or if you were truly a good person, you'd help him instead.
As I said, the game is far from perfect, but a character who has you ready to believe that convincing large numbers of people to murder each other is the best choice for the people of the nation definitely belongs on this list.
As for my number one choice, well, beware, massive spoilers follow. I wasn't so worried about the last one because I think I'm one of six people who played the game through to completion.
#1 is Master Li from Jade Empire.
Imagine, if you will, an old man who discovers you as a baby, raises you in his quiet village, and teaches you how to defend yourself but tries to set up a life for you of peace, tranquility, and serenity. Now imagine a huge evil force sweeps across the land, killing most of the people you know and taking your father/teacher/friend from you.
You fight your way across a kingdom, making friends, growing in power, and discovering the truth of your birth. You discover the massive energies that are yours to command, and use them to topple the evil government. At which point the center of your life, the rock on which you were always able to lean against and would never budge in even the most dire times, the man you owe your entire existence to... kills you to steal your power.
In what might be the GREATEST example of "just as planned" I've ever seen in a video game (beating out even Bioshock's classic twist, but not quite up to David Xanatos from Gargoyles levels), it turns out that it was all one huge lie. You weren't saved, you were stolen. Every moment of your training, of your education, and of your upbringing was directly solely towards one goal and one goal only: for this man to use you to seize power, then kill you and take it for himself. He never meant anything he ever told you in kindness or concern, and any nurturing he ever did was done with the thought of one day taking your life in the back of his mind.
It's huge in scope since you're fighting to keep unbelievable power out of a man who wouldn't hesitate to crush anybody who stands between him and it, but it's personal in the fact that, for all intents and purposes, he's the only family you have.
When the twist was revealed, it was one of those times where I just sat there stunned, waiting for the game to make sense again, and when it didn't I was so full of a sense of being betrayed I think I played straight into the night to beat the game and pay the man back for what he had done.
No comments:
Post a Comment