What’s a good story without a good antagonist? In my eyes, no story can ever reach the heights of excellence without a suitably incredible antagonist. It’s a standpoint I hold for movies, shows, books, and also video games. Listed below are my absolute favorite villains from gaming.
10) Agent Black – Iconoclasts
Iconoclasts presents a pretty terrible world that is on the verge of collapse due to a dystopian government spun out of control and a rampant energy crisis. Agent Black is one of the top elite agents of the government, and she hounds you from the very beginning of the game. She’s a no-nonsense force of nature, defeating every single person who tries to stop her from her mission. She’s cold, calculating, and wholly devoted to her orders.
As you find out eventually, however, she’s so devoted to her orders because they’re the only thing giving her life meaning anymore. The experimental process that turned her into a nigh immortal super soldier took everything from her, including a normal life with her family. She’s wracked by continually wretched headaches, and a flashback shows that one of the protagonists actually murdered her only friend before the game began. Having to put her down after a final climactic duel at the game’s end is shockingly depressing.
9) Cia – Hyrule Warriors
Cia begins Hyrule Warriors as your typical evil sorcerer type of villain. It appears that she wants to merge all realities into one so that she can rule over them all. That’s actually not the truth at all. Her true goal begins to piece together once your travelling partner, Lana, reveals that she’s the she’s the light half and Cia is the dark half of a singular being. Cia used to be the keeper of time, forever watching over fate, and forever unable to act.
Overtime, she began to develop feelings for the hero, Link (and, I mean, can you blame her? Look at his cool scarf!). Malevolent energies manipulate Cia to the point of losing her mind, and she snaps, separating herself into two. Cia is a character who just keeps getting better as the game goes on. She puts up an incredible fight against the heroes, pulls one over on GANONDORF of all people, and is the central focus of her own story mode that really hits home how alone she is. She even grows as a person by the time the credits roll!
8) Handsome Jack – Borderlands Series
The developers behind Borderlands struck gold when they created Handsome Jack, and everyone knows it. He’s the villain of Borderlands 2, the central anti-hero of the interquel, and a major villain in the side game, Tales from the Borderlands. He’s the epitome of a villain that you love to hate. He’s irreverent, hilarious, cocky, condescending, surprisingly emotional, and always entertaining. He’s a terrible person, but he’s just so funny.
It’s actually an amazing thing that he was given so much chance to grow across three whole games. He serves as the unforgettable antagonist of his initial game, presenting an amicably unhinged obstacle for the vault hunters to overcome. The interquel details his fall from grace, which is rich with realistic character development and shocking reveals (he was genuinely a great guy before misguided heroes betrayed him), and the side game chronicles his final, futile grasps at life. Erasing him from existence at the end of Tales from the Borderlands game is the right call to make, but he certainly won’t ever disappear from the mind’s of gamers everywhere.
7) Ardyn Izunia – Final Fantasy 15
By this point, it becomes somewhat clear that I have a bit of a thing for charming, charismatic antagonists. Ardyn embodies a welcoming, comfortable demeanor, but with the ever-present threat of something much more sinister hanging above him the whole time. His voice actor, Darin De Paul, does an amazing job with each and every scene, and I was ecstatic to find out that Ardyn, a secondary villain up until a certain twist, was actually the one pulling the strings the entire time. The ending of Final Fantasy 15 is one of the best in all of gaming, and a big reason for that comes down to how shocking it is. Ardyn, the big bad, actually wins.
He only has two goals, and he accomplishes them both. His first is to end the lineage of the main hero, Noctis, as revenge for Noctis’ ancient ancestor cursing Ardyn with demonic immortality. His second goal is to break his immortality, and die. The entire game is Ardyn manipulating events up to the climactic finale, wherein Noctis must perform a holy ritual to defeat Ardyn once and for all. It works, but the cost is Noctis’ life. As Noctis had no children, his lineage has ended. Ardyn vanishes into the afterlife, his plans a success. Incredible.
6) Hades – Kid Icarus Uprising
I’ve talked a bit about how great this game is, and how awesome and hilarious the characters are, in an earlier top ten. Hades, the main villain, is a big factor in this. He steps out of the shadow of his puppet, Medusa, about a third of the way into the game, tearing apart a fake credits scroll and smiling deviously. From that point on, Hades establishes himself as equal parts deliciously hammy and powerfully threatening.
A large part of his character boils down to not just how little he thinks of anyone but himself, but also how comedically callous he is with those sentiments. One of my favorite moments of his is when he explains to the protagonist how he accidentally murdered a young girl’s parents in a case of distracted chariot driving. As he puts it, “I shouldn’t have been doing my hair”. To make things right, he simply reanimated the parents as zombies, and sent them on their way. If it was any other villain, I’d be terrified of how dark that story is, but with Hades, I just have to laugh. I can’t help it.
5) Monika – Doki Doki Literature Club
Behind the sweet schoolgirl exterior that Monika presents, lies a malicious evil mixed with a tortured soul. She’s the master of creeping horror, which plays well with the happy-go-lucky atmosphere Doki Doki Literature Club plays with for the first two hours. Through subtle hints and foreshadowed dialogue, the player begins to realize that Monika isn’t exactly who she seems. When the shocking twist occurs, so too does the other shoe drop.
The basic gist of Monika is that she’s a video game character who has recognized the truth of her existence, and is desperate to do anything she can to find meaning amidst her preprogrammed world and its inhabitants. This would be a tragic tale, and to an extent it is, but when she begins messing with the game’s code to cause atrocity after atrocity, I kind of lose all sympathy for her. Which isn’t to say she’s a bad villain. Far from it. When she reveals her dark intentions and speaks to you by the name of your own real life computer’s account, that cemented her place on this list.
4) Rafe Adler – Uncharted 4
Uncharted had a little bit of a villain problem up until this fourth entry in the series. The first game had a mix of weak villains, the second game’s was threatening but barebones and cliché, and the third game’s was pretty great, but also made very little logical sense. This game keeps it simple, and succeeds brilliantly. There are no supernatural curses, or ancient monsters seeking to hunt and destroy. The game is simply a story of two men racing for a treasure, unaware of the harm they’re causing to themselves and others along the way.
Rafe was born into riches and fame, and he lived an extremely privileged life. He’s got the cocky, condescending attitude to prove it (and as my brother puts it, “the most punch-able face in gaming”). However, he actually hates his parents and their money. He feels unfulfilled with his life because everything was always handed to him without him having to earn it by his own merit. He desires the treasure not for wealth, but to prove he could do it, and that his life was worth something. It’s an extremely relatable motivation, buried deep beneath his haughty demeanor. Still wanna punch him, though.
3) Dimentio – Super Paper Mario
Dimentio blew my mind as a younger kid, which was when I first played Super Paper Mario. He was one of the first twist villains I’d ever experienced, and it caught my completely off guard. He spends the majority of the game as a mildly insane jester, just as likely to attack with blistering magic as he is to spout off a convoluted metaphor (my favorite being, “and so I arrive, like an unseen dodgeball echoing through a school gymnasium”). It’s over the course of the game that his web of lies and manipulation begin to show.
His effortless charm belies his penchant for twisted darkness. He sends Mario and friends to the mushroom kingdom version of hell, he blows up himself and Luigi in a cataclysmic fireball, he participates in wiping an entire world filled with people from existence, and he comes within seconds of destroying all of reality. Background lore from the local barkeep heavily implies he’s a magician of chaos born millennia ago, who wrote a book of evil prophecy AND a book of light prophecy just so that, centuries later, Mario and friends would almost help him end the universe. That’s extremely twisted for a Mario game of all things, and Dimentio does it all with an effortlessly happy smile on his face. Even in death, he laughs.
2) Dahlia Hawthorne – Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations
Almost every single big bad in the Ace Attorney series is worth mentioning on this list, but none are more twisted and psychotic than the wicked witch herself: Dahlia Hawthorne. While appearing as frail and gentle as a flower at first, her true colors don’t take long to leak through. Her charm bends the men and women around her to her will, and before they know what’s happened, she’s either killed them or pinned someone else’s murder on them. And she just keeps getting away with it. It’s incredible how her theme song is soothing when you first meet her, and haunting by the end of the game.
For the normally T-rated series of visual novels, Dahlia’s body count and list of crimes is staggeringly high. In order, she: steals several million worth of gems from her adopted father, murders her adopted sister, manipulates her mentally disabled boyfriend into committing suicide, poisons a lawyer’s drink which puts him into a coma for five years, murders her next boyfriend, is directly responsible for one of the main character’s mother’s death, and finally inflicts a fatal wound on the same lawyer she poisoned, leading to his death. She’s unrepentant about it all, even going so far as to come back as a vengeful spirit once she’s found guilty and sentenced to death. It takes one final exorcism to put her down for good.
1) Monaca Towa – Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls
Have you ever seen what it looks like to see true darkness personified? The face of genuine, horrifying evil? If you haven’t played Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls, then you haven’t. Perhaps you should consider yourself lucky, because Monaca Towa is the single most terrifying, twisted, insane, and evil villain in all of fiction. This eleven-year-old little girl is filled with so much sadistic despair that she alone is perhaps why this game got an M rating.
There is absolutely nothing sympathetic about her. Nothing relatable. Nothing that could, by any stretch of the word, redeem her. Monaca is a demon given form. She fakes having a leg injury so she can get sympathy from others. She starts a war with mind-controlled children slaves, and murders hundreds of adults. She manipulates her closest friends into supporting her war, twisting each of their own traumatic pasts and making them into monsters (including physical AND sexual abuse). She butchers the main character’s parents, Komaru Naegi, mangling them into bloody messes.
She does everything in the name of despair, and she almost breaks the soul of the only one who can stop it. She even gets away at the end of the game (though not without getting her legs crushed under rubble). She is pure evil…but I wouldn’t have it any other way. No other villain in gaming is so intensely compelling, and so wholly hate-able.
But hey, that’s just my opinion!
The Contrarian Corner 