As an addition to the other thread, i'd like to ask you guys who is the most evil villain in gaming. Not talking about the most charismatic, funniest or the one who was portrayed best. I'm looking for the villain that did the most vile and unspeakable things. I guess you could make a case for a villain trying to end the world, but i personally always get way more creeped out with baddies manipulating and ruining lifes on a much lower scale.
I might jump in later in the thread with my own thoughts, but really curious about what you think.
When it comes to who is the most psychologically manipulative I might have to give that one a think. But when it comes to "bad guy who is trying to end the world" I really like the final baddy in Bravely Default.
Ouroboros is devouring multiple dimensions to one day ascend and destroy the Celestial realm, which during the final fight is revealed to be the real world. By the time the game starts and you start playing as the Tiz, Agnes, Ringabel, and Edea that would go to defeat Ouroboros he has already destroyed and consumed countless other realities. The only way they win is because a celestial came to inhabit Tiz and end this nonsense before it got out of hand
The sequel kinda ruins this but I like to act like that specific retcon was never made lmao
There's also two villains from the first Xenoblade-
Both Zanza and Dickson are pretty damn terrible. Dickson especially because he only "saved" Shulk and practically raised him to revive Zanza much later.
Thought this was gonna be a thread about finding a hilarious way to play defense lawyer to an over the top evil character like Prymaid Head or something.
Xehenhort comes to mind. Dude makes children fight and put eachouter In decade long comas.
It's pretty rote, but with the additional characterization offered in The Pre-Sequel and a sidequest in BL3, Handsome Jack is undoubtedly one of my favorites. Everyone knows his story in BL2, being a smarmy bad guy who thinks you're a lowly bandit right up until you kill Angel, who he's kept locked up and pumped full of Eridium for nearly her entire life. From that point onward, he drops the affability and ego-padding, and is a full-blown snarling rage monster up until the final minutes of the game. And it works! Dameon Clarke's performance is incredibly good, and he really sells the desperation of his character, from his long-standing grudge against Lilith and Roland (which is explored in TPS) to his ambitions of planetary conquest.
In TPS, you get to see him before he became Handsome Jack, but he's really not that different from how he was in Borderlands 2. He's just better at hiding it. As the story progresses and his supposed allies stab him in the back, you start to realize the only thing keeping him from being a complete monster was that being so outlandishly cruel wasn't immediately necessary. He has zero qualms about erasing an AI's endearing personality to create an army of loader bots, and on the suspicion that he's been betrayed by a group of RND coworkers, he spaces them. On an initial playthrough, you might think, "wow, Jack's fallen off the deep end." But on a second playthrough, it's pretty clear that he's always been this deranged. Hell, Anthony Burch even stated outright that by the time you meet him in TPS, Jack already hooked Angel up to be pumped full of Eridium, and she's been that way for over a decade.
The only time in the series you get to hear Jack before he became completely deranged, it's through a questline in Borderlands 3, where he seems to just be kind of a jerk. A jerk who's kind to his wife and daughter, but still a jerk. And over the course of that quest, you get to witness his actual descent into madness, long before the evens of TPS.
Majora, I know it's obvious, he just evil for the lolz or the sake of it, other baddies do more damage but Majora is about torturing every one personally as well, and has no real goal. Like turning Kafei into a kid, who is about to be married. Could just kill him but wants to break his soul. It's very personal for him.
Joshua is a pretty heartless son of a bitch when all the reveals are done. In the end he's not that bad but the guy is a complete asshole until the final day, where he arguably continues to be an asshole. He is using literally everyone the whole time and if it wasn't for literal divine intervention he would have won and killed everyone.
Purposely doesn't sign you up for the amateur skate contest to prevent competition against him. Steals your magnum opus video of doing McTwist over a helicopter to get ahead and fuck you over. Leaves you to almost die by Russian arrest. And he's an egotistical asshat who only wants to be above others which is why he does everything. Eric Sparrow is the spawn of hell.
The Wise One in Golden Sun is not to be fucked with. At all.
Essentially all-powerful, lies about the truth of the lighthouses, probably screws over Vale in that first boulder disaster, makes your missing family a world-ending dragon because fuck you, and then doesn't even finish off the main villain at the end.
Thought this was gonna be a thread about finding a hilarious way to play defense lawyer to an over the top evil character like Prymaid Head or something.
Xehenhort comes to mind. Dude makes children fight and put eachouter In decade long comas.
This dude (Zenos from FFXIV) is willing to drag innocent people into unneccessary conflicts just to find "the perfect sport", i.e. someone who can put up a fight against him. Politics, history, allies, enemies, they don't matter to him in the slightest. What makes him more evil than the likes of Kefka in my eyes is that he doesn't even destroy things because he's crazy or whatever, he just doesn't care. He just wants to become ever more powerful, and doesn't even acknowledge your existence unless you happen to get in his way.
Can't remember all the specifics but for me Dahlia Hawthorne (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy) is pretty high up there. Poisoning, manipulating and murder. She's got it.
Also a shoutout to my boy Damon Gant (same series).
I see him being more as a catalyst to put the events of 6.0 in motion than an actual piece on the chessboard.
Now that the emperor is dead, there's going to be huge chaos and a civil war in Garlemald. Zenos doesn't really play into any of that. Maybe we'll fight him again one more time, but I wouldn't even be surprised if we didn't. He may even be dead before 6.0, with the way the post-ShB story is going.
But yeah he's boring as hell in Stormblood and probably the biggest reason for me that the Ala Mhigan half of that story is so dull.
Literally mass shooter with no regards to human life. There's no ambition, there's no conquering the world, there's no ''I'm try to evolve the human race'' or anything like that. At the end of the game you cause a nuclear explosion that kills everyone in the entire city and that's literally it.
Purposely doesn't sign you up for the amateur skate contest to prevent competition against him. Steals your magnum opus video of doing McTwist over a helicopter to get ahead and fuck you over. Leaves you to almost die by Russian arrest. And he's an egotistical asshat who only wants to be above others which is why he does everything. Eric Sparrow is the spawn of hell.
Tech bro has a startup in robotics. The company eventually starts creating military robots that have learning AI, and use bio-matter as fuel. If this wasn't bad enough Ted decides they should not be hack-able, even by themselves. The predictable happens, and the robots go outta control and wipe out virtually all life since that's their source of fuel. The last remaining humans realize the world is fucked and decide to come up with a plan to bootstrap the planet once the killer robots go away. The humans of the future will be cloned from archived DNA, and they will be educated using archives filled with all of humanity's knowledge up to this point. Well that was the case until dumb ass Ted purposely deletes the whole thing. So yep that's it, not a single living thing on earth and no record of humanity left at all. Thanks Ted.
There's a certain character from Red Dead 2 who takes joy in the suffering of others, will stab anyone in the back to get their own way or to save their own skin, and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
They genuinely make my blood boil just thinking about them.
probably some faceless investor who has interests in most of the biggest gaming companies and whose money singlehandedly contributes to a sizable percentage of worldwide human suffering.
Sylvanas Windrunner. Raises people from the dead against their will into a world she knows hates them, allowing them the "freedom" to do as they please, when the reality is that means serving under her as they have nowhere else to go. That's assuming that once risen they don't go insane from the shock of being undead or are so decomposed that they're mindless. It is an existence of unending suffering as well. Has her underlings perform horrible, cruel experiments on innocents to advance development of her blight, essentially a chemical weapon, which she has used many times. Commits a genocide unprovoked against a race of elves by burning them all alive on their isolated world tree where they live to "protect" her faction by striking first in a conflict that doesn't yet exist*. In battles that would follow uses the blight even on her own troops, and in general throughout her story shows a casual disregard for anyone outside of herself (and I guess Nathanos). Has referred to her faction of undead as "arrows in her quiver". Continues to commit atrocities on the innocent peoples of Kul Tiras in the current expansion. Seemingly just wants to kill as many people as possible at this point.
* this is arguable but it was an absurd escalation regardless of where you stand on things.
Cases could be made for other Warcraft characters as well, it's a setting with many horrific individuals but Sylvanas is the most current one. Also I just don't know as much about villains that came before I started playing the game. I'm sure someone better versed in the lore than me could make a case for Arthas.
(also she is more complicated than this and has a tragic backstory, I recognize I'm not giving her her dues here but I don't think you can honestly look at how her actions have shaked out over the past several expansions and not see her as horrifically evil)
Tech bro has a startup in robotics. The company eventually starts creating military robots that have learning AI, and use bio-matter as fuel. If this wasn't bad enough Ted decides they should not be hack-able, even by themselves. The predictable happens, and the robots go outta control and wipe out virtually all life since that's their source of fuel. The last remaining humans realize the world is fucked and decide to come up with a plan to bootstrap the planet once the killer robots go away. The humans of the future will be cloned from archived DNA, and they will be educated using archives filled with all of humanity's knowledge up to this point. Well that was the case until dumb ass Ted purposely deletes the whole thing. So yep that's it, not a single living thing on earth and no record of humanity left at all. Thanks Ted.
I'm gonna disagree. I know I haven't played HZD in a while but I don't know if I would describe him as actively evil. His problem is that he can't see the bigger picture beyond his decision making - he has the "what I say is correct" mentality most billionaires / rich techbros have.
He's a complete fucking dumbass who fucked us up monumentally, but he was he was repentant from what the game implied, and there wasn't malicious intent in the second action. my take on that was that it was him overcompensating in a "the future shouldn't make our mistakes, its better if we don't set them on our path by burdening them with our history". I personally don't agree with that line of thinking at all... but I don't think it was malicious pin the way you see motivations of other game antagonists.
...If this was a thread on evaluation how bad the outcome of someones actions were... then yeh I'd give him the crown without a doubt though.
Literally mass shooter with no regards to human life. There's no ambition, there's no conquering the world, there's no ''I'm try to evolve the human race'' or anything like that. At the end of the game you cause a nuclear explosion that kills everyone in the entire city and that's literally it.
That's kinda why I think making OTT evil villains in games is kinda lame. Personally I thought Zenos was decent for his part in Stormblood, especially towards the end, since FF has never really done a villain where their entire motivation is basically driven by apathy, but yeah, they did some things after the fact with him that were less good.
- Kills for the thrill of it. He gets pleasure out of doing it.
- Made his first kill at the age of 12 by stabbing a lady multiple times (who he thought) was heavily pregnant.
- His methods of killing include: strangling, shooting, stabbing, slicing two people in half with a giant saw blade, and repeatedly bashing a women's face in with a large rock.
- Killed his own father by chopping him up into little pieces and then stuffing his remains into a giant vase.
- He puts some of his victims on display (tying them up at a park on a merry-go-round /dangling them on a giant hook through the mouth at a restaurant).
- Carves out his victims eyes and eats them. Yes, you read that right! He eats his victims eyes.
- Came up with the idea of blowing up a power plant so his father could make a major profit with realestate.
- Steals some of his victims bodies by swapping his consciousness with theirs and essentially becoming a parasite in a new body.
Didn't Xenogears's Krelian turn 90% of the world's population into zombies, then harvest the zombies and Soylent Green them to the remaining survivors? That's probably not exactly right but it's along those lines I think
It's pretty rote, but with the additional characterization offered in The Pre-Sequel and a sidequest in BL3, Handsome Jack is undoubtedly one of my favorites. Everyone knows his story in BL2, being a smarmy bad guy who thinks you're a lowly bandit right up until you kill Angel, who he's kept locked up and pumped full of Eridium for nearly her entire life. From that point onward, he drops the affability and ego-padding, and is a full-blown snarling rage monster up until the final minutes of the game. And it works! Dameon Clarke's performance is incredibly good, and he really sells the desperation of his character, from his long-standing grudge against Lilith and Roland (which is explored in TPS) to his ambitions of planetary conquest.
In TPS, you get to see him before he became Handsome Jack, but he's really not that different from how he was in Borderlands 2. He's just better at hiding it. As the story progresses and his supposed allies stab him in the back, you start to realize the only thing keeping him from being a complete monster was that being so outlandishly cruel wasn't immediately necessary. He has zero qualms about erasing an AI's endearing personality to create an army of loader bots, and on the suspicion that he's been betrayed by a group of RND coworkers, he spaces them. On an initial playthrough, you might think, "wow, Jack's fallen off the deep end." But on a second playthrough, it's pretty clear that he's always been this deranged. Hell, Anthony Burch even stated outright that by the time you meet him in TPS, Jack already hooked Angel up to be pumped full of Eridium, and she's been that way for over a decade.
The only time in the series you get to hear Jack before he became completely deranged, it's through a questline in Borderlands 3, where he seems to just be kind of a jerk. A jerk who's kind to his wife and daughter, but still a jerk. And over the course of that quest, you get to witness his actual descent into madness, long before the evens of TPS.
