So you’ve seen my list and heard my sweary jokes, and now the whole experience is over. So what did everybody think? I’m keen for some feedback from the readership on this issue — is there a great villain I missed? Would you put things in a different order? Did I fuck something else up?
That aside, what did all y’all think about the series in general? Would you like to see more things like that?
Bowser, the giant, sinister, red-haired king of the Koopa, is probably the only villain who is instantly recognisable to nearly anyone who has ever played video games. He has appeared in more games than any other villain I can think of offhand, and it’s never a surprise when he turns out to be the bad guy in any given Mario game, but he still doesn’t get stale. Bowser has a lot of personality, and you can nearly always count on the fights to be simple but challenging and engaging. No other villain has so many different high-quality battles to his credit — Dr. Wily is the nearest competition, but he’s off by a fair few.
Beyond the fights, though, what really lifts Bowser above the crowd — what really justifies him as not only a great villain but the Best Villain Ever — is his flexibility. He is possibly the only villain who can successfully play just about any mood; sometimes he’s all business (Super Mario Galaxy, New Super Mario Bros.), sometimes he’s comical (The various Mario RPG games), sometimes he’s petty (Super Mario Sunshine), and sometimes he’s terrifying (Luigi’s Mansion, Super Mario 64), and he’s effective in all these roles. His plans range in scope from "Mess up Mario’s vacation" to "conquer the whole universe and build a new galaxy in the centre to rule from," which is quite a range, but they always manage to involve kidnapping the poor beleaguered Princess somehow, and he always fails but always rebounds.
These plans don’t proceed in any logical order — Bowser is a truly capricious character. He doesn’t need to succeed on a small level before going big. He is Mario’s arch-nemesis, but he fights alongside Mario on occasion also, and seems to be dimly aware of the fact that he depends on Mario to add meaning to his own existence — his goal is always just to beat Mario, never to kill him, and always grudgingly supports Mario whenever a bigger threat comes along. The relationship between Bowser and Mario is more complicated and sophisticated than that between most heroes and villains, but it remains in the background.
Bowser is the best villain ever because he excels in all areas. Kefka is more maddeningly evil by far, GLaDOS is more complex and seemingly real, Ghaleon is more hilarious, and Hitler is more Hitler-y, but Bowser isn’t relying on just one angle to carry him. Throughout his long and active career, he’s covered all the bases, and he’s maintained a consistently high quality the whole time.
So there you are. Now feel free to go rant in the comments about how you totally saw this one coming and so on and so forth.
There were a fair few villains I considered for this list but ultimately decided against for one reason or another. They’re all excellent, but they don’t quite qualify as Best Villains Ever. Here’s a sampling of them, in no particular order. Note that this list won’t include pictures because a) I had a hard time finding pictures for some of them, and 2) formatting the Worst Villains Ever sidebar was a giant pain in the ass.
Geldoblame (Baten Kaitos series): We first encounter Geldoblame as Emperor Geldoblame, the evil tyrant of the Alfard Empire. In the prequel Baten Kaitos Origins, however, we’ll meet him in an earlier incarnation, as a sort of all-purpose advisor and confidant for the Quaestor in Mintaka. This is where he really begins to shine; we spend all of Origins questioning every statement and every move made by Geldoblame, suspicious of all the help he gives us, waiting for a double-cross we just know is coming. And he stays cagey, albeit mysterious and a bit creepy. And the game keeps us waiting. What keeps Geldoblame off this list is that, frankly, he wasn’t very interesting in the first Baten Kaitos, but his character in Origins doesn’t stand up on its own.
The G-Man (Half-life series): The G-Man is Gordon Freeman’s overseer of sorts. Who (or what) he is and who he represents are a complete mystery, but he appears to be something of a "secret master," operating behind the scenes and orchestrating events toward his desired outcome. We first encounter the G-Man in the original Half-life, wandering around the ravaged Black Mesa complex, seemingly oblivious (and impervious) to its dangers. Through the rest of the series, the G-Man is always around somewhere in the background, watching Gordon but never letting on what he’s all about. What keeps him off this list is that, plain and simple, we’re not sure he’s a villain. He’s sinister at the very least, sure, and creepy and inexplicable, but not actually necessarily a bad guy. And I don’t think I’m being too much of a stickler by insisting that all the entries on a Best Villains Ever list actually are villains.
Gruntilda (Banjo-Kazooie): Grunty is the evil witch who lives near Spiral Mountain and kidnaps Banjo’s sister as part of her sinister plan to make herself beautiful. She speaks only in rhyming couplets, and has a habit of breaking in to make a snarky comment at random intervals while Banjo and Kazooie are wandering around her lair. Eventually the heroes fight their way through to her and end up having to play a bizarre board game over a giant lake of lava to reach Grunty; this part of the game really shines, but even better is what happens when you get through it. The fight with Gruntilda is truly exceptional, going through many phases and requiring proficiency with all the game’s different moves and abilities, as well as good strategic thinking. She doesn’t make the list because this battle, while excellent, is almost completely inappropriate for the game it’s in; Banjo-Kazooie is a very easy game for most of its run, and the Gruntilda encounter is too severe a difficulty spike which many players find offputting. If the difficulty had been matched better to the rest of the game, the quality of this fight might have been enough to pull her up onto the list.
Onyxia (World of Warcraft): For an Alliance player in World of Warcraft, Onyxia represents the culmination of about half of what you do the whole time leveling to 60. She’s behind or involved in most of the turmoil and mischief taking place in the human lands, and the event that reveals this easily ranks as one of the coolest moments in the entire game. Facing Onyxia, the first thing a player is likely to notice is how huge she is; there are lots and lots of drakes and whelps and dragonkin and younger dragons in World of Warcraft, but, for most players facing Onyxia, she’s liable to be the first fully-mature dragon they’ve seen. And it’s impressive. The mechanics of the fight are also engaging; Ragnaros is probably more visually exciting (especially given the way he makes his entrance), but Onyxia’s a better fight. What holds her back is the lack of any feeling of closure after she’s beaten; there’s a small amount of fanfare in Stormwind City, and then that’s it. No follow-up quests, no changes in the way NPCs interact with the player — nothing. And that combined with the fact that you’ll probably now end up fighting her every week to get gear for people leaves the experience seeming a bit anti-climactic.
GLaDOS serves as guide, narrator, nemesis, and only actual character in Portal. She’s the computer system that’s currently running Aperture Science, and she remains a totally unique creation in video games. It would have been easy enough to write GLaDOS as an uninspired HAL 9000 ripoff, but that’s not what Valve has done; her dialogue is both crazy and comical, and the dangerous "edge" really develops throughout the game. Early on she’s mostly funny and instructive, but by the end of the game she’s become downright menacing — I commented yesterday on the pacing put into Kefka’s design being the best, but if it has a challenger, GLaDOS is it. The acting keeps up, also, and is initially robotic but gains much more personality and human quality toward the end; by the time we actually first get to see GLaDOS it’s almost surprising that she’s actually a giant computer, since we’ve become so accustomed to thinking of her as a person. From the first words she speaks when you wake up in the pod at the beginning of the game to the chilling final strains of Still Alive, all of GLaDOS’ lines are perfect — exactly what one would expect from the creative team of Chet Faliszek and Eric Wolpaw.
Dialogue aside, GLaDOS is a very interesting villain just because we’re never quite sure how in control of the situation she is. She’s clearly not as powerful a figure in her space as the aforementioned HAL 9000 — it appears that she can’t control or even directly observe quite large amounts of the Aperture Science facility — and yet, we’re left with the feeling that she’s outsmarted us even in the end. That, somehow, we’ve played directly into her hands anyhow, even when we thought we were escaping from her and kicking her ass with missiles. The actual fight is fairly interesting (as interesting as a boss fight in a puzzle game could be expected to be, anyhow), but the best part is listening to GLaDOS’ taunts ("All your other friends couldn’t come either, because you don’t have any other friends because of how unlikable you are. It says so right here in your personnel file: Unlikable. Liked by no one. A bitter unlikable loner whose passing shall not be mourned."). It’s very rare that the thing I like the most about a video game is the dialogue and the voice acting, but that’s the case with Portal, and it’s not because the gameplay was lackluster; it’s simply testament to the overpowering quality of the game’s sole character. This, as they say, was a triumph.
Kefka (Final Fantasy VI)Kefka is fucking evil. He’s evil and he’s crazy and he’s hilarious and he’s not nearly as annoying as you’d expect from that picture. Kefka is probably the best-paced villain in all of gamedom; he starts out as an annoying little twerp you outsmart and humiliate while escaping from Figaro, and he mainly stalks around having funny dialogue and not being any threat at all. And then you get to Doma castle, where he goes against explicit orders from his commanding officer and poisons the water supply — not because it’s necessary or even expedient, but just because he wants those people to die slow, agonising deaths. He thinks it’s funny. It’s not long until he’s slaughtering an entire species of sentient beings just for laughs — laughs and power. Always power.
Back in 1994, when Final Fantasy VI first came out, this kind of evil was totally unprecedented in video games. Compare the villains from Final Fantasies IV and V, both of whom were evil wizards from space who didn’t have any real character traits other than "cackling." Kefka is always around, always a step ahead of you, and always more evil than you think he could be. That laugh — the insane cackling Kefka laugh — haunts you throughout the game; just when you think things are beginning to work out, you hear that laugh, and then everything goes to hell. The best part, though, is that after dogging you and outsmarting you from Doma through the Floating Continent, after conquering the whole world and gaining the power of a god, Kefka remains wholly absent from the second half of the game. We know he’s there, up in his tower, but he stays unseen and unheard until the very end when you actually go in to get him. This is perfect; the first half of the game builds a complete understanding in the players’ minds of how evil this dude really is and how urgent it is that we stop him, and then the second half allows him to be remote and sinister. As a result, he never gets overused, and the feeling of satisfaction when you finally get your revenge is impossible to overstate.
Chairman Drek is the ruthless, greedy ruler of the evil Blarg race. The Blarg’s homeworld of Orxon has become so polluted that they need to find a new home — or, as Drek has planned, make one. So he’s literally tearing the galaxy apart, removing the choicest sections of various other inhabited planets and fusing them together to make the new Blarg planet.
Drek is a teriffic villain because he’s so cool and calculating while he destroys whole planets; he cheerfully announces to the populace of a planet that they’ve been chosen to participate in the creation of a new world — sure, they’ll all be killed in the process, but "sacrifices have to be made." Then he signs off and tells his work crews to hurry up and wreck the planet already, and heads off to crack jokes and make sarcastic comments at his shadowy hired muscle. Drek is a very obvious villain — at no point in Ratchet & Clank is there ever any confusion about that — but very effective due to his extreme evilness and high comic value. The way he’s built up through the game we have no trouble believing him when he announces that he personally polluted planet Orxon so the Blarg would have to buy real estate on the new planet from him, and that he plans to repeat the whole process again to make even more money.
The fight also is worthy of the buildup; it goes through multiple stages and is definitely the hardest thing in the game. Much like we observed last week, the only thing better than gunning down an evil dictator is gunning down an evil dictator in a giant robot suit, and that’s exactly what happens. So he giant-robots around and we run around him and try to figure out the best method of shooting the shit out of him, and then we grindboot around and try to figure out the best method of shooting the shit out of him, and sooner or later his shit is well and truly shot and he gets killed so thoroughly that Insomniac still hasn’t figured out a way to get him back into a game. It’s sort of a pity, but at least they have integrity!
I’ve run a fair few of my villain profiles so far, and, in the last sidebar, I talked a mountain of shit about some of the baddies that don’t make the cut. This time around I’m going to go into more detail about why some villains succeed where others fail.
The single most important thing your villain has to be is memorable. Whether it’s because he’s funny, or because he’s scary, or evil, or campy, or maybe just because he does that thing with his eyebrows, the players need to be able to pick your villain our from the crowd. If your villain is likely to get forgotten or obscured by other baddies the players would rather be fighting instead, you’ve already lost the battle. Make the villain count!
Your villain needs to be clearly defined. The players need to know what he’s up to and why they need to stop it — don’t just tell us some garbage like "holy shit, time compression!" and expect us to care. Tell us what it is and why it’s bad. It’s important that we have some clear comprehension of why we’re fighting against this guy and it’s not just something we’re doing because, hey, we’re bored, let’s kill somebody.
Last, the fight should be a good one. Sooner or later your players are going to have to deal with this guy, and if you’ve spent the game building him into a really significant baddie, it’s just going to be a letdown if beating him is easier than getting to him. Make the fight detailed and exciting and hard, but, for God’s sake, do not make it some type of bullshit minigame or perhaps an extended cutscene with button-presses. The final battle should be something memorable; something that’s really interesting and that the players enjoyed and thought was satisfying.
Addendum: One more worst villain ever!
How did I forget this asshole? No, he’s worse than you think. You haven’t seen him move. Or heard him talk. Isaac is pretty much a gay raver who somehow found himself transported back to the fifteenth century to do battle with the world’s first hardcore metal fan. He is the most repulsive villain in all of video games, and by that I don’t mean you’ll want to kill him so much as you’ll want to shut the game off so you won’t have to watch him prance around and overact any longer. At least the game wasn’t particularly any damn good anyhow so it won’t be a big loss if you do.
When you’re a Zelda game, all roads lead to Ganon. No matter what the game’s on about, no matter how hard it tries to pretend otherwise, sooner or later it ends up Ganon. So what I’m saying is that it ends up pretty predictable who the villain’s going to be. It’s also rather predictable what his plan is: he’s going to get the Triforce and then make some wishes and probably take over the world. Honestly, it’s hard to play a villain for serious drama in the tenth Zelda game when he’s the exact same villain with the exact same plan that’s been in the other nine Zelda games, and even moreso when he doesn’t really have any character to speak of. Oh, hoo har, he’s an evil one, he is. But that’s really all the character we ever get to see.
Enter The Wind Waker. This game was almost universally reviled by Zelda fans, which is because people are morons. Don’t get me wrong; it certainly had its faults, but Wind Waker was like a breath of fresh air for a series that was growing stale, both in gameplay and in art design. Especially, however, it gave us a fresh take on an old villain. Ganon really shines this time around; he gets a bitchin’ new look that makes him look a lot more like the evil warlock he supposedly is than like Judd Hirsch’s evil twin brother, he gets good dialogue that really fleshes out his character, and by the end of the game we really almost feel sorry for the guy, even though we know he’s the same old evil Ganon he’s always been. He even has lines that indicates that he really doesn’t want to hurt Link and Zelda; they have something he needs, and he does intend to get it, but he’s perfectly content to do them as little harm as possible. Here’s a video of the scene in question. Major spoilers involved, and I apologise for the minute-long bullshit epeen titles and the several moments of idiot commentary, but it was the best clip I could find. This is Ganon how he should be done. You see that moment when the rain starts? Chilling.
Conker’s Bad Fur Day is full of great, surreal moments, and probably the surrealest of them all is when you fight your way past the scouse dung beetles into the giant dung heap and you see this hopping boggly-eyed piece of corn. "Hey! Sweet corn!" Conker yells, and then you run around in the dung heap throwing all the corn into the center. Once you’ve done it all, this giant, brown… thing bursts up out of the river of dung and announces his presence: lo, for it is the Great Mighty Poo. As surreal as that is, it’s completely trumped a few seconds later when the dialogue scene pauses while the background music vamps a bit and it slowly dawns on you that he’s going to sing.
And sing he does. It’s a truly intense experience; the fight revolves around it, as the Poo sings a verse, and then vamps for a while while Conker runs around grabbing rolls of toilet paper and throwing them into his mouth until he breaks down and gets flushed away. I mean, it’s not exactly shining gameplay; Conker wasn’t known for its gameplay. It’s basically cutscenes punctuated by minigames, and that’s the case here as well. But it’s really odd and funny, and, hey, sweary. Can’t ask for more than that!
Adolf Hitler was the final boss of ID software’s classic shooter Wolfenstein 3D. What not many people realise, however, is that he’s actually based on a real person. The historical Hitler was the chancellor, and then führer, of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Under Hitler, many reforms were enacted in Germany, including the restoration of the country’s military, the reinvigoration of the economy, and the state-sponsored murder of millions and millions of people because they didn’t agree with the party line or were perhaps the wrong race or religion or maybe related to somebody who was the wrong race or religion. He is the best boss monster history has ever produced, and, in a startling coincidence that I didn’t even actually plan, it’s his birthday. So, you know, happy birthday and all that.
In Wolfenstein 3D, ID Software realised and tapped the boss-monster potential in Hitler like no game before or since. They understood that if there is any experience producable in a video game that turns out quite as vicserally satisfying as mowing down Hitler with a machine gun, it’s mowing down a giant armoured robot Hitler with a machine gun. The fight itself is relatively straightforward and bland, but it doesn’t even matter — it’s Hitler. This is really the one case in video game history where the simple fact of the villain trumps anything else the designers could add to it.
