Favorite video game antagonist?

Who is your favorite video game antagonist?
To date it has probably got to be any one of the lovely ladies from the fatal frame series.
Kirie Himuro, Reika Kuze, and Sae kurosawa. ( I also really love PH from silent hill, but who doesn't. )
Why do you like them?
They've all got some deep back stories, All of them except for Sakuya Haibara (who wasn't listed), had to deal with the conflict of upholding their ritualistic duties as sacrifices and being with the ones they loved. I'm a lore fanatic and Fatal frame has Copious Amounts of it.
What is your least favorite?
The origami killer (I won't say who it is though in case you haven't played it.) in Heavy rain.
Why do you dislike them?
It was just a dumb stupid reason to be a killer and the reveal was uneventful too. 'oh it is them, that person there, they did it. oh. ok. -mediocre fight scene and burning building. Sure he was a clever person, but, ?????? 'to get yer boy back you have to prove you love him by hurting yourself.... lol. ' Even though they already prove they love their son just by saying 'I would like him back sir/ma'am '. He is visibly upset his son is gone. they just have daddy issues. I'm sorry I'm being incoherent.

 

This is actually a really amazing topic!

-Who is your favorite video game antagonist?
My most favourite antagonist is Arthas Menethil from the World of Warcraft game.

-Why do you like them?
He is a really deep character, with a great background story. He is majestic, terrifying and gave up his humanity for the sake of his kingdom.

-What is your least favorite?
His sense of duty and sacrifice was taken over by him wanting revenge. And while I love tales of revenge I didn't really appreciate it this case.

-Why do you dislike them?
Because, in the end, he wants to destroy all living beings.

 

Sho Minamimoto from The World Ends With You
Mmm it's hard to fully explain why I like him without Big Spoilers but he's just a really weird dude who likes to yell about math and can turn into a lion.

Elohim from the Talos Principle
I'm not even sure this counts because seeing him as an antagonist greatly depends on your own personal interpretation of the game, and based on what happens in the hardest to obtain ending (which isnt actually the true ending?) I feel like he's not supposed to be? But either way he is a patronizing and condescending AI with a god complex.

 

If a visual novel counts as a game, then Saber from the Fate series.

Good character, good story (if you can ignore the gaping plot holes...), and tons of merch. Scale figures, Nendoroids, Azones, Dollfie Dreams...

Actually that might be a good reason to hate her, because of the pain inflicted on my wallet

 

Kefka.

 

solas from dragon age because he is so sexy!!

Ps also a amazing character

 

Villians are usually my favorite characters! I don't play a lot of video games that even have antagonists; but Glados is indeed a fun one!

 

Hah! You already took GlaDoS soo... Outside of the wonderful world of Portal (Wheatley!) um... Sheogorath from the Elder Scrolls if he counts as an antagonist?

He's a Daedric Prince (effectively gods/demons in the HP Lovecraft old gods sense), specifically embodying madness. His realm the Shivering Isles has numerous areas, mania, dementia, the fringe which in turn consist of smaller sections one of which is called Bliss. (I adore that they acknowledge that aspect of it)

As for why I like him - if it's not already obvious from the character summary, he's an absolutely mercurial character, sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrible.

I think an honorable mention should be made of the near infinite pro and antagonists in video games (especially the Japanese ones) that are essentially David Bowie!

As for least favourite... Um that one's more difficult... um if it's okay to do a real world critique for a moment probably the numerous overly sexualised female villains in the Batman Arkham series.

As for why? That otherwise rather fun game has an incredibly problematic approach to women. They're at once evil man-trapping jezebels, and pathetic incapable of looking out for themselves victims that are also there purely to titillate the assumed male gaze of the player. Whilst I enjoy a fantasy power trip as much as the next person, the fact that the guy who headed the project made the conscious choice to make the female characters more exclusionary and the game so aggressively 'not for girls' in the 21st century... Yeah it really really angers me.

 

I used to play an MMO called City of Heroes... My favorite NPC enemy faction? That would be the Circle of Thorns...


(A boss-class Death Mage and his pair of Ice Thorn minions, just hanging out in the Shard-)

I loved those guys enough to make player characters versions of a couple of "semi-reformed" former Circle magi. Including a Dark Defender named Nemissary (a former Death Mage), who now exists in doll form.

Why did I like them? They were great fun to fight because of the varied abilities across each type of goon. Between a dozen or so distinct mage types, four different thorn caster flavors, the assorted demonic things like Blade Princes and Lashers, all of the types of Possessed Scientists and the army of different minions, there were a lot of different combinations to face. They also had a backstory that was interesting (Long story short.... they're fifteen-thousand year old body-snatching mystical ghosts from a Long Lost Civilization, pretending to be ordinary cultists-) and some really entertaining named NPCs.

 

What a great idea for a thread! I haven't played all these games, but all their villains sound interesting (and/or irritating, as the case may be, lol). Ha, Tom Nook! I have to respect his ambition, actually. Plus, he never charges you a late fee on your mortgage, even if his business practices are otherwise a little...questionable? XD

Aw, I haven't played TWEWY since it came out, so probably about ten years ago? Sho was a fun villain in a game full of fun characters. I haven't finished The Talos Principle (I'm not so great at those kinds of puzzles), but now I want to try again so I can learn more about that AI.

Sheogorath! Mercurial is the perfect way to describe him, really. (The whole "Cheese for everyone! Cheese for no one! That's just as good, if you don't like cheese!" line was hilarious, but he really does change his mind on a dime and it's not always over something so trivial.) He's the most classically "fey" character I've ever encountered in a video game-- not necessarily evil, but there's something inhuman about him and he's definitely not safe to be around. He's fascinating, and the Shivering Isles were the best designed area of the game, imo. Mania is sooo pretty.

Aww, I really miss City of Heroes. The Circle of Thorns was pretty cool, and looks like it would make for good rp opportunities for the player characters. My SO and I had a pair of villain characters that were our babies, lol. His was a sorceress who could manipulate gravity, and I played a 1940's style gangster who just ran around in a pinstripe suit punching anyone who got too close to his magical lady. It was great fun! I've yet to find a game that let you have that much control over who your character was, and I was sad to see it go.

It's hard to pick a favorite of my own, but I guess I have to follow my heart and go with Ganondorf from the Legend of Zelda series. He's just the perfect wicked sorcerer, and he's got so much style and theatricality. For a few games, he was starting to develop a sort of pathos, too, that I liked. His triforce piece evidently represents benevolence (one of the three big Shinto virtues, alongside wisdom and courage), and I love the idea that his own bitterness and frustrated ambition twists what could be his power to do great good into...what he ends up doing. XD I was actually really disappointed that he's just a mindless evil blob in Breath of the Wild.

For my least favorite, that's even harder, but I've been replaying Grim Fandango lately (which I highly recommend, it's my favorite adventure game ever). Hector LeMans isn't a bad villain, per se, but Domino Hurley outshines him so much as an antagonist, Hector ends up feeling less important. A mob boss is all well and good, but he can't hold a candle to that one awful coworker who makes your life miserable in a thousand little ways. It's like how Dolores Umbridge gets a more visceral reaction out of some Harry Potter fans than Voldemort does. Domino's sleazy and two-faced and just the worst. Sorry Hector, but you can't reach that level of personal loathing and I end up forgetting you exist half the time, so you're my least favorite.

Somehow, this turned into talking about two favorites instead of a favorite and a least favorite. Hector gets brushed aside in my heart again, the poor guy!

 

Just for giggles (and as a blast from the past-), this is my City Screenshots thread over on the Titan forum. XD
Seems like as good a spot as any for these Screens...

Best MMO ever, in my opinion... and yeah. A lot of good roleplaying fun. (Although I spent more time roleplaying Kestrel and Cardinal... the winged Stalker and Mu Adept in my avatar picture... than I did with Nem. Those two also exist in doll form, along with Palrah, my favorite tank. XD)

 

Ah, Cap au Diable, it's good to see it! One of my favorite villain-side zones for some reason. Maybe it's the music?

Man, this just makes me miss the game worse! XD I wish I'd kept track of my own screenshots, but it's so bittersweet just to see anyone's characters. You really could make anything you wanted, and it wasn't hard to end up with something really cool! I gave up on MMOs altogether after I got bored with Guild Wars 2 and Wildstar (and the rp servers petered out), but if a City of Heroes 2 ever got announced I think I'd be tempted back. I could resurrect my super-strong 40s gangster, and my lava golem, and my cryokinetic trucker gal, and...

 

Sheogorath is from the Elder Scrolls game series in general. I don't remember if he's seen in Morrowind, but I think he's in some of the lore books. He's got a quest in Skyrim if I remember right, and I haven't played enough of Oblivion, but it wouldn't surprise me if he's in there too.

Anyways, to answer the antagonist question: Sephiroth. I honestly doubt that'll ever change, because Final Fantasy VII was a formative part of my early-adult life, and I totally understand why he became the villain he did... also, he's smokin' hot. xD

 

I do love GlaDOS...

There are a lot of antagonists I like purely because I enjoy their visual design, particularly in fighting games. I don't play many of them/play them often, but sometimes there's that one character who, regardless of how much I may hate going up against them, I love their look. I believe I remember loving Dist in Tales of the Abyss even when fighting him, too...


Antagonists I hate, though...

GALE FROM ROGUE GALAXY. Look, the personal betrayal aspect always stings, and those are often the antagonists I feel the most strongly about, whether I hate them with a burning, or love them and wish they could come back to the fold... but with Gale, it's entirely because his boss battle is such a pain and I hate it so much.

Also I've got a list of world leaders from Civ V that I dread seeing come up as a neighbor... Suleiman always starts out really buddy-buddy with you and then starts tearing up your allied city-states, though, so I can't stand that guy. We were bros, and then you had to try to take over the world! Well... okay, look, yeah that's everyone's objective, but leave the city-states out of it! (well and no one wants to be next to Gandhi when he goes nuclear, but I'd rather deal with that than Suleiman or Attila or Genghis Khan, any of those city-state annihilators)

 

I'm surprised no one's actually brought him up prior to this but Sephiroth from FFVII. Iconic, really. Though I intensely love Rufus Shinra and the Turks as well, and they're like.... well they're bad guys but they're also sort of ok guys?

I also have a soft spot for Seifer Almasy from FFVIII and Sydney Losstarot from Vagrant Story. Specifically Xemnas from Kingdom Hearts 2 since the whole Ansem/Xehanort thing is a rabbit hole you can fall down. Asch from Tales of the Abyss is so tragic.

I'm excited the new Castlevania animated series is so good so far because I love Dracula from any of the Castlevania games.

 

Oops sorry guys - yeah Sheogorath features in several Elder Scrolls games, hence the non-specificity. I rather enjoy the questline where he sneakily turns your buddy insane over a course of months, and then offers up the choice of you getting her back sane and whole but miserable, or her staying with him happy but completely lost to herself.

 

@KlanceKlanceRevolutn
Dist is, per my memories, pretty fun-- one of those very flamboyant villains, but also really tech savvy instead of just being a brainless beauty type. Plus he had personal history with one of the party members where they parted ways over conflicting ethics, which made him way more compelling.

The Civ series Gandhi thing is hilarious-- it was originally a bug, because he had the lowest possible aggression setting in order to make him peaceful, if you did anything that would decrease his aggression, it rolled back around to ALL THE AGGRESSION. But people liked it so much that the devs included it as a feature ever since.

 

Oh my gosh I searched "Tales" to see if anyone in these 2 pages of responses had a favourite Tales antagonist. I didn't expect to find someone who specifically loved Dist! I don't know why I love him so much (he's deifnitely my fav antagonist from a game). Maybe he is just the right amount of cool looks and weird to me.

 

I love solas! He is a sexy egg. I can't wait for another one to go up against fenharel. I felt so betrayed.

 

I keep going for happy madness over miserable sanity, though I keep meaning to choose the other option on one of my playthroughs... But when she was herself she was bullied horribly by her parents, family, friends, colleagues and her only solace was academia and her books. And she was aware of her situation.

I dunno. The choice isn't quite as black and white as I'm making it out to be - your other companion on the quest line makes it very obvious that he thinks you chose the selfish option if you let her go off with Sheogorath; the Daedric plot lines in the Elder Scrolls are always more than a bit twisted!

 

@Momiji I just really enjoyed that mix, yeah-- he had a lot of goofy traits and the whole vain prettyboy thing but then he had actual depth... I probably had a couple of party members I'd have gladly swapped if only I'd been able to recruit him (which wouldn't be the first time I found myself wishing I could recruit a villain just because I enjoyed them more than some of my heroes)

@KlanceKlanceRevolutn Tales of the Abyss! It's been a long time now since I've played it, but I remember really enjoying it.

 

I've only really played FFVII and FFXII. There are so many games I haven't even heard of. I'm sadly out of the loop.

The most obvious villain from FFVII is Professor Hojo. He is the epitome of an evil mad scientist, even doing horrible experiments on his own son, which became a villain in his own right - Sephiroth. Hojo was a despicable creep, who cared nothing for human life. Of course he was backed by the ultimate evil - The Shinra Electric Power Company. I don't count Sephiroth and Genesis as the villains they are supposed to be, because they were victims of Hojo's experiments, and so they had no choice in their fates.

Hojo doesn't turn my blood cold like the villains of FFXII however. These villains really give me nightmares - Gabranth and the other Archadian Judges, Vayne Solidor. Makes me glad I don't live in that world.

 

Oh, wanted to add to what I said above - I haven't played FFXIII-2, but the villain in that game is actually quite a hottie. Caius Ballad. Square Enix sure knows how to make beautiful villains.

 

I have a great big mushy need-to-sit-down-and-have-a-cry soft spot for The Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3, though I suppose when you take her entire story into consideration, she's more like the game's deuteragonist.

 

Most of my favorite antagonists aren't full blown villains once their back stories are really delved into. (Sephiroth from FFVII, Janus/Magus from Chrono Trigger etc) I've always been a huge fan of sympathetic villains and a lol of times if I can't care about the 'bad guys' I'm less likely to get invested in a game.

 

I agree with you TwistedRiver. I love the emotional involvement possible with sympathetic villains. Sephiroth, Genesis, etc. I also love flawed heroes, like Cloud Strife. I like when any character has more human flaws and characteristics. It keeps my interst a lot better than if they were just one dimentional cookie-cutter heroes or villains.

 

SHODAN from System Shock 2 hands down.

 

Generally, I tend to like the villains more but I guess I'm kind of shallow, because I only like them if they are pretty or visually appealing (I have weird taste though!).
It mostly applies to anime, because when you are playing a game you tend to get more emotional attachment to the main characters as those are the ones you get to play as.
My favorite character of all time is Sephiroth from FFVII, hands down but I like a lot of Final Fantasy villains generally because they do tend to be aesthetically pleasing to look at
(the exception would be FFXIII-2-3 & FFXVs villains, I don't like them for some reason, I don't care for their looks either). I have two different Minimee head sculpts of Sephiroth, and
one full 14"-ish doll. However, I hope to be able to make a 1:6 custom figure of him one day, as having a 1:3 complete resin doll just doesn't seem plausible (the body would be a pain in
the *ss to get, I doubt I could ever justify a custom one and the aesthetics of this hobby are still far too off). So, yes, Sephiroth is pretty much my biggest obsession. DX

I am also quite fond of Asch The Bloody from Tales Of The Abyss, and Seymour Guado, but for the most part I like villains from anime and video games if I find them pretty.
I justify their actions because they are good-looking, but I also tend to favor them if their pasts are traumatizing or they suffered major hardships. (I wouldn't justify them if they were
real people, but then again, there is no way any of them could be real). I love the monsters from Silent Hill as well, but they are more like natural obstacles than actual villains;
I can't say I favor many of the actual villains from SH, except for Walter Sullivan, but I find Henry Townshend a bit prettier than Walter so I like them both equally, I'd say.
I also like Ruben/Ruvik from The Evil Within but I don't like him more than Sebastian either; although I do find him more visually appealing than Castellanos but only after he's disfigured (I'm a weirdo!).
There are probably a lot more villains that I'm forgetting to mention, but it would probably be faster if I said which I didn't like.