Best Villains Ever #4
Chairman Drek (Ratchet & Clank)
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!
