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.
 |
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. |
 |
 |
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! |
 |
 |
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 |
no comments
No comments yet.
