I can’t be this positive for this long. I need to get my hating on. So we’re going to take a break from talking about great villains to talk about villains that are really poor. This isn’t a ranked list, and it’s certainly not comprehensive — this is just a sampling of the really shitty villains out there.
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Sephiroth (Final Fantasy VII) — Sephiroth is witheringly popular, which is excellent evidence that people are stupid. He’s a very nearly empty villain; he’s just a bad guy because he’s sort of unhinged and decides to destroy the world. We don’t really know anything about him except that he’s actually wrong about his origins, which undermines his whole "destroy the world" plan from the get-go. In fact, we’re not even sure he is the villain for most of the game, since we keep being distracted by the much, much better villains he’s constantly trying to edge out of the frame. It’s absolutely obscene that he wins the edging contest, too — Final Fantasy VII would have been a much better game if it had the courage to stick with Rufus and the Shinra. I mean, don’t get the wrong idea; it still would have sucked for countless other reasons, but at least there would be one thing it did right. |
| Metal Gear RAY (Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty) — In Metal Gear Solid, Solid Snake faces off against a giant walking battle tank called Metal Gear REX. It’s an interesting fight, since it really does a good job of seeming like the way a single infantryman would take on a giant walking tank; Snake has to dodge around its feet and take advantage of the tank’s restricted field of vision and low mobility in order to win. In Sons of Liberty, Raiden fights a different Metal Gear variant called RAY, and the fight is complete shit. Metal Gear RAY stands at one end of a big open arena and doesn’t move; Raiden just runs around until it stops shooting for a second and then blasts it with a missile. Then he does it again and again and again because there are about a thousand of them. It’s really hard to believe when you say it like this, but the game manages to take a whole fleet of giant amphibious nuclear-equipped walking battle tanks and make it seem non-threatening. |
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Shaft (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) — Ignore the fact that Symphony of the Night is legitimately one of the best games of all time. Ignore the fact that Shaft actually does some interesting things and is a reasonably fun (if remarkably easy) boss fight. No, what I’d like you to focus on here is that they called him Shaft. You know, as in Shaft. Let this be a lesson to all of you: no matter how awesome your game is, no matter how evil your evil priest is, everybody — every single player — will laugh when he’s introduced unless you take some care to make sure you didn’t give him some type of hilarious comedy name. |
| Xemnas (Kingdom Hearts 2) — Where to begin with this guy? Well, first of all, he’s just a recycling of the boss from the first Kingdom Hearts, which, given how thoroughly that boss was destroyed, seems like a complete ripoff. Secondly, he has no real personality; Ansem in the original KH was at least creepy in a teenage slasher-flick sort of way, but Xemnas is pretty much just a placeholder where they meant to insert the more interesting villain later. Also, he’s full of stupid gimmicks; there’s enough information in this post for you to determine at least one of his stupid gimmicks, and that one is supposed to be the big secret reveal late in the game. And you can seriously figure it out just from what I’ve said. He has a big evil plan, but when we find out what it is, it doesn’t really seem… all that evil. He just sort of wants a place to live where assholes with giant keys won’t attack him all the time. But the icing on the cake is that the actual boss battle — or, I should say, series of boss battles, since Kingdom Hearts 2 has boss diarrhea and never fucking ends — is both completely unintelligible and extremely lame. Bonus! |
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Tabuu (Super Smash Bros. Brawl) — First off, the fight is bullshit. I’m sorry, final boss or no, there’s absolutely no fucking excuse for suddenly adding an instant-death attack to a game that doesn’t normally swing that way (see also: the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game). But we’ll gloss over that, because that’s not the point. What the point is is that this guy is just disappointing. We fight through all these hordes of subspace and finally get into the big evil villain’s big evil lair, and it’s some freaky fighting wireframe with butterfly wings whose closest connection to a Nintendo game is this. Hey, guys, I don’t want to be telling you your job or anything, but this is subspace. Is it really too much to expect for the final boss to be goddamn Wart? |
April 20th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Best Villains Ever |
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Dr. Wily (Mega Man series)I’m going to get a lot of flak from Ghaleon for ranking Dr. Wily above him on the list, but it had to be done. Dr. Albert Wily is the sinister counterpart to the good Dr. Light, creator of Mega Man and benefactor of mankind. Wily tries several times throughout the eight original-series Mega Man games to conquer the world using his army of evil killer robots, but Mega Man always manages to thwart him in the end. The bad Doctor’s crazy hair and first name give him a more-than-passing (and less-than-coincidental) resemblance to Albert Einstein, and the sinister eyebrow-wiggle is one of the most enduring symbols of the eight-bit age. This is the character that served as the inspiration for twenty years of "mad scientist" villains, most especially Sonic the Hedgehog’s Dr. Robotnik.
But what really sells Wily is the battles. Every Mega Man game ends with the climactic fight against Dr. Wily, and he always has different tricks up his sleeve. He builds all kinds of crazy tanks, brings all manner of attacks, and sometimes even transforms into something odd, like a green floaty alien. The fights are multiple-stage affairs that really test the player’s skills and do a marvellous job as the climax for their games; they really do seem fitting as a final boss. And wouldn’t you just know that the Doctor’s always weak against whichever weapon is the most difficult to use? If he’s up in the air, it’ll be the one that hugs the ground. If he’s on the ground, it’s the one that shoots upward. Without fail.
April 19th, 2008
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Darien |
Best Villains Ever |
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It’s baseball season again, gang, which means that those of you who like to bitch when I write about baseball best get all y’all’s bitching irons warmed up. Not that it’s a huge hurry. I don’t have a hell of a lot to say about baseball in April unless something hilarious happens. And Alfonso Soriano’s hop to the DL doesn’t quite count.
So I’ll just link to my favourite player’s profile and leave it at that.
April 18th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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Dan has a post up about fantasy and imagination. It’s a good read; go check it out and come back here.
I know exactly what he’s talking about. Frankly, if I’m sitting here in the middle of the night, and I’m reading a spooky book or playing a spooky game or possibly watching a spooky movie, well, I can get sort of worried about monsters or murderers or traps or aliens or what-have-you myself. When I get up to go to bed, I have to go through the library to get there, and there’s a big closet in there; it’s dark and spooky, and it’s a bit hard to avoid a few nervous glances toward it. I mean, sure, I know there are no headcrabs hiding in there waiting to jump on me and turn me into a shambling, moaning zombie, but in the right frame of mind, I do worry about it very faintly.
Since I’m capable of enjoying my fantasy moments and indulging in the imaginary, I reckon this makes me able to accept the world as it is. I don’t need to think the world is coming to a giant flaming end in order to get my dramatic kicks — I can instead pretend that it is, and then go pretend I’m saving the day with my jumping powers or futuristic portal gun or spear and magic helmet. But I’m surrounded by people who seem to have the short end of the imagination stick, and so can’t tell the difference between reality and their own fantasies. People who believe in acupuncture, chiropractic, magnet therapy, herbal remedies, and dousing. People who believe in UFOs, conspiracies, and flying Chinese monks. People who believe that the experiences they have when they’re altered by their personal illegal substance of choice are in fact more real than reality.
These people, as Dan implies, take politics very seriously, and hardly ever read about anything else. But they don’t just take it seriously, they take it personally — anything bad that happens to them isn’t just coincidence, it’s deliberate malice perpetrated upon them by villains. Villains who, as chance would have it, always seem to have been sent by whichever political party the victim believes to be the source of all evil in the world.
When I was in college, I was out walking at about three o’clock one morning, and when I came around the corner of the art building I saw something anomalous. Something I couldn’t explain. There on the wall across from me was a giant shadow — a humanoid shadow, but with a very tall head and inhumanly long fingers. The shadow appeared to be beckoning at me, and tracing it across the grass revealed that it terminated suddenly, with no apparent source. This, of course, was very abnormal, and I was quite concerned all of a sudden about invisible aliens attacking the campus — all I could think of was that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the invisible aliens that still cast shadows. Since I was low on ideas and a bit freaked out by all this, I went back to my room pretty quickly.
But I went back the next morning, and it was obvious what happened. The clue was at the beginning of the story, when I said it was the art building — what I had seen was an art project. A giant plastic "shadow" stretched across the lawn and up the side of the building. In the light of day it was obvious what it was, but in the dark, with only the distant streetlights for illumination, it was very convincing. I experienced the phenomenon Dan alludes to very strongly here — I knew there were no such things as invisible aliens (and I sure as hell knew that anything invisible wouldn’t cast a shadow), but I had sufficient imagination that, when faced with the suggestion of it, it frightened me. But my conviction that such a thing simply couldn’t be was enough that I was inspired to search for the real solution, and, sure enough, I found it.
I think I just implied that imagination is prerequisite for science. You know what? I agree with me.
April 16th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Bullshit |
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Revolver Ocelot (Metal Gear series)At first, Revolver Ocelot appears to be just another one of the Metal Gear series’ bizarrely-named boss characters; only belatedly do we come to realise that Ocelot seems to be the one character holding all the cards. He double-crosses and triple-crosses everybody else so many times that we can never be sure where his loyalties really lie, and he always seems to be the man pulling the strings behind the scenes of every conspiracy.
Of course, we can’t overlook the bizarre cowboy routine either. He dresses like he came straight out of the old west, and he fights with a pair of antique revolvers; making things even more obscene, he’s actually Russian. This is a character fully strange enough for any winking gimmicky "ironic" game, but he’s played totally straight; the game never really seems to consider him a figure of fun even though you wouldn’t think a sixty-year-old Russian cosplayer would be able to get around it.
It’s this combination of Illuminati secret master and crazy old man obsessed with his cowboy fantasy that makes Ocelot stand out from the crowd. He’s clearly neither completely sane nor completely mad, but he’s certainly highly intelligent and dangerous, and willing to do whatever it takes to get what he wants. That’s pretty much the definition of an effective villain.
April 16th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Best Villains Ever |
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Ghaleon (Lunar series)The Lunar series of video games stands apart from the other fantasy worlds it’s quite frankly exactly the same as because of one thing: Ghaleon. Or, more specifically, Ghaleon as performed by John Truitt. This is a perfect example of voice acting being so bad it’s a selling point; the original Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue on the Sega CD (and their Playstation reissues) are vastly superior to the other Lunar games exactly because of the character of Ghaleon. The dialogue and performance are completely over-the-top, which serves to elevate a banal, paint-by-numbers plot about an evil wizard conquering the world well above what it should be worth.
We’re talking performances like this. Seriously impressive stuff. The Lunar games are playable enough in their own right (though Eternal Blue is a touch on the stupidly-hard side), but Ghaleon’s the selling point. He’s what you’ll remember about the games long after all the dragons and goddesses and legendary heroes and stupid hats have faded from memory. On top of that, he’s the only villain I can think of offhand who has his own internet advice column. What more can you ask for?
April 15th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Best Villains Ever |
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Over the next few weeks I’ll be running this article series I’ve been thumping around for a little bit on the ten best villains in all of video games. "Best" is such a nebulous term, though; what does it mean? It means villains that really stand out from the crowd for one reason or another. Maybe they have really excellent character, or maybe the fight is completely badass, or maybe they’re really funny. Can be any number of things.
I’ll call out villains either by series or by specific game, depending on whether it’s one particular appearance that’s noteworthy or if the villain’s entire body of work is top-class. Periodically throughout the list I’ll intersperse fun villain-related tidbits, edging slowly up to the big reveal at number one. Will it be awesome? I’m told it will by people who know these things e.g. not you i.e. me.
April 14th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Best Villains Ever |
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I have some reviews wroten for Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Portal; they’re fairly wordy. To cut to the chase, I liked them both. If you want more details, click the magic interlinks!
April 13th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Games, Meta-meta |
one comment
Gamasutra is ripping us off, what with their article about licenced games and its mention of — what? — DuckTales on the NES as an example of a good licenced product. I’d like to thank the whole world for liking the podcast enough that even the legitimate press is stealing from us.
April 12th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Games, Meta-meta |
no comments
So, having played Portal, Super Mario Galaxy, and Metroid Prime 3, I’m noticing a trend: fall damage appears to be going out of fashion. Those who are familiar with what I’ve written over the years will not be surprised when I say that this is a trend I wholeheartedly support. Fall damage is probably the foremost example of developers placing realism ahead of fun, and that’s especially true in a 3D world — as I’ve alluded to before, one of the most entertaining things to do in a 3D world is jump from really high places.
The otherwise completely wretched Goemon 64 was at least one up on Super Mario 64 in that respect — there was a part where you can literally jump off the peak of Mount Fuji and land on the ground at the base and not get hurt. Similarly, in Mario Galaxy, Nintendo has finally reversed its weird policy of making Mario jump preternaturally high but land not well at all, and he can take tremendous falls without more than a pained expression. And Portal? Portal is pretty much all about falling tremendous distances in all directions. Wouldn’t it just be perverse to penalise the player for falling?
In other news, Portal’s good, but you already know that. The one real negative I’ve been able to latch onto is that it’s desperately short, but that’s not as big a weakness as it may appear, for reasons I’ll explain in my forthcoming review, to be released in the dark, post-apocalyptic days of probably tomorrow. Having played it, it puts a new perspective on the bit I’m always hearing from my World of Warcraft buddies about how I sound like GLaDOS over vent — I’m now even more sure it’s a compliment. So, thanks, guys!
April 12th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Games |
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