All the above awards go to the cover for Madonna’s new album. Seriously, have you seen it? I’ve seen some bad album covers in my day, but that’s even worse than the classic Beatles butcher cover. If you haven’t taken a good long look at it yet, you need to do it now.
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.
