This may seem rather sporadic, but what are some of your least favorite villains in the games that you've played?

I managed do whip a list a few months ago and it wasn't as hard as I thought:

http://www.listal.com/list/worst-charactersvillains

Note: Obvious spoilers in the list linked above.

Also, if the gamer is newer and you need to explain with story details why the villain is bad you might want to use spolier tags.

He's not my least favorite or anything, but can I give the Most Overrated award to this guy?

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/ … 7-1640.jpg

Wow... to be honest while "he" is not one of my favorites I do have a lot of respect for him. Some of his actions are pretty damn cruel for a son of a submariner!

He's cruel, sure, but he's also completely 2-dimensional in his cruelty.
He is evil for evil's sake, he's a shallow attempt at copying The Joker and he's completely uninteresting if you ask me.

In a certain sense I think he's a character I don't really try too analyze to deeply so I do think you have a point... still, I know some would find my lack of "studying" him on a deeper level downright appalling.

Pretty surprised you didn't name Zeromus and Ultimecia. Oh you thought this compelling antagonist you've been dealing with all game is the last boss? Nope, we're going to throw something from out of nowhere at you, oh and those earlier bad guys are actually good too.

Hmm, but Walter Sullivan might take the cake for me. Randomly appearing, particularly in a case where it is hard to not get shot at least once (and it hurts!), plus his victims' constant harassment just made for an annoying slog through the game.

I can't comment on Ultimecia (I don't remember her at all, tbh) but I thought they handled the Zeromus swerve (and Golbez face turn) really well. I did want to take control of "full size Golbez", so that was a tease. It was much preferred to the first couple encounters with Sephiroth towards the end of disc 1, where he basically did what he wanted and all Cloud and Co. did was chit chat with him. But the final encounter managed to make up for that.

I never really felt much of anything towards Sigma from the X games. I mean, he was a boss and all that, but I actually like Dr. Wily and Co and seeing them constantly come back. Sigma was always just a lesson in frustration, just to get to end of the damn games.

Abyss from Marvel vs Capcom 2 was a truly forgettable final boss, compared to Onslaught from 1 and Galactus from 3. Capcom didn't even try with Abyss.

Also, Bowser Jr. is a joke. Koopalings all the way!

This.  A thousand times this.

You know I didn't really think of Ultimecia when I made the list... but perhaps that's because I have a pretty low opinion of VIII to begin with. Outside the combat system I didn't really care for it.

As for Zeromus I think why he didn't register is because while Final Fantasy IV is a great game I've never really been "entranced" by it. By the time I got to play and complete IV a few other RPGs had already made their impression which may have retroactively hurt it. I don't really have an explanation... but I seem to be kind of immune to the game's tasty charms for some reason. The game just feels "off" to me...

I loved FF IV, however the whole lunarian plot point seemed rather weak.  I didn't outright hate VIII like a lot of people seem to, but again manipulation from an unknown source in order to compress time (how is this accomplished and to what point?) just leaves no connection to the enemy you are facing at the end of the game.

Random musings on the "real" story of FFVIII. Thought provoking!

http://squallsdead.com/

I would have to give FF the award for most overrated series of all time.

I have to give the award for most "boring" recent boss fight to Diablo in Diablo III. Of course, it was a complete surprise that I would have to fight Diablo, since he's not mentioned during the whole story...EXCEPT for the fact that when you go into the options and attempt to change the difficulty level it says "Kill Diablo in Normal Mode to Unlock". EXCELLENT work there Blizzard! It's too bad, especially since there were some epic boss fights before Diablo.

How did I know someone was going to post this...? My friend already sent me this link... interesting theory...

It's very interesting, yet also has way too many holes.

Oh yes, I remember now...Seifer! What a totally worthless character. He starts out promising enough, as Squall's rival (especially during the opening). Then he gradually fades into total irrelevancy (like most of the FF8 cast not named Squall or Rinoa) and becomes a joke of a recurring boss fight. He had potential, lots of it, but nearly all of it wasted the further you get into the game.

He's similar to Pokey from Earthbound, but at least Pokey meshed in with the weirdness of that game (and had a backstory of an abusive upbringing, heh), despite becoming totally irrelevant at the end.

Lastly Smithy, from Super Mario RPG. Nintendo and Square put their minds together and this guy's the best they could do?

It's true Smithy doesn't really come into play into the end but I think it like a lot of RPGs I look back at... I didn't really consider Mario RPG to be particularly deep in the story line department which isn't really a strike against it given that most Mario games are platformers. I'm sure Mario RPG's story was probably kept simple on purpose as to not alienate those that might be nudged over to try it despite the change in genre.

But seriously, I'd rather pick on Necron from FFIX than Smithy. Necron comes out of absolutely NOWHERE and rips off Yoda from Star Wars.

Ugh, don't even get me started on Bowser Jr.

Sure but he at least has personality and entertaining one-liners. His immediate predecessor Exdeath is also 2-dimensional in his cruelty and mindnumbingly boring.

I agree with this one. I think that's one of the reasons I never finished Final Fantasy V... outside the fact that Anthologies didn't contain the greatest ports. The battle with Exdeath kind of felt phony to me even though the game eventually does give you a reason (beyond saving the world) to destroy him. Still, other games - and even other Final Fantasies - did it better.

Which is why I don't care about Exdeath either

Exdeath sucks, but I never felt much of a connection to FFV overall (music aside), so I can't hate. That is kind of the thing about this poll, it's hard to hate villains from games I don't have much of a connection to. I literally don't remember Ultimecia at all, but Seifer grated my nerves enough to remember him at least. Smithy sucked because I loved Super Mario RPG and I just can't picture Bowser and Mario teaming up to fight such a lame villain (they should have just let the damn Axem Rangers be the main bad guys!). And I think only communists can ever prefer Bowser Jr over the Koopalings.

And I didn't even see the Kefka discussion, but I 100% disagree. Give me his gleeful cruelty over the angst of Sephiroth anyday (and pretty much every other FF villain..or villain in general). My only complaint is there simply wasn't enough of him to be seen in the 2nd half of the game.

Seifer was fantastic. He was power-hungry, desperate and prideful, which shone through in his personality more effectively than a lot of FF villains. He gets progressively more crazy as the game goes on, despite never proving much of hassle in combat, and I enjoyed that by the end of the game, he was just chasing an impossible dream.

First-half-of-the-game Edea is the best villain FF has ever had, period. She was so sensual and vitriolic. Like every childhood nightmare you've ever had, all rolled into one. It's too bad that she and every other villain in FF8 kind of take the rest of the game off after the second disc.

I was pretty much hoping the conversation would lead to this comparison and it didn't disappoint. Yeah, I kind of Kefka more than Sephiroth because... and I know this really isn't a reason to like one character more than another... but I really think Sephiroth is overrated. Some will find that silly because Kefka probably is as well but I think it has a lot to do with Final Fantasy VI making more of an impact on me than Final Fantasy VII despite VII being my first RPG.

I just don't see this when I play the game... but I'm curious (and I'm trying not to go off topic)... if you have these views - which are the polar opposite of mine - what's your take on FFVIII's "love story"?

I totally agree with Idolores on FFVIII. Loved the characters and villains early on but felt it completely fell apart at the end. Had the exact same issue with the much-loved FFIX too. As for the love story, I had no problem with it. I really like FFVIII and it has one of my favourite FF soundtracks. It's not without its problems and I honestly don't know what happened to it all toward the end (that theory above would explain a thing or two) but I like it.

All of FFVIII's problems regarding its' narrative can be traced back to its' characters. None of the cast outside of Squall or Rinoa are given much attention. The major cast members (Quistis, Zell, Irvine, Selphie) all have interesting things going on, but their conflicts are resolved almost as quickly as they appear, and then we never hear from any of them ever again. Quistis is legitimately torn by her unrequited affections for Squall, but within minutes of the game showing us this, she simply shrugs it off as just feeling like a big sister. Irvine is responsible for a lot of the tension at the end of act 1, where we see that he has a debilitating problem with performing under extreme pressure. And then, for all the impact he has, he might as well be invisible for the rest of the game.

Squall was very difficult to care about. He was interesting in that Square hadn't given much in the way of a protagonists' true thoughts and feelings before, and it was great that his inner monologues fleshed him out, but when he's such an unlikeable jerk to begin with, it's hard for that to matter.

Rinoa also had potential. It was refreshing to see a headstrong, confident, present-minded heroine in a series where that was somewhat rare. However, it really felt to me like she was written to deliberately do stupid things to advance the plot. Her decision to confront Edea alone at the end of the first act, or he sudden decision to allow herself to be taken captive by Esthar's military seemed like they were hasty choices made by a bamboozled writing team more than decisions reached by a great amount of personal deliberation on the part of the character. I guess what I'm saying is a lot of her actions felt horribly contrived under the pretext of creating drama.

It's hard to feel anything in Squall and Rinoa's relationship. Their entire interaction together throughout the game felt manufactured, and to be honest, that's how I felt about the vast majority of the story.

Edit: Anyways, video games are still a relatively new medium, and the human understanding of love is something that probably won't ever be fully realized. With that in mind, I can't really hate FFVIII for at least attempting to break the mold by having the focus be on creating a believable romance story, cocked up or no.

Yup, that is exactly my issue with the cast. We can toss in the orphanage bit as well. What I never got was...Rosa/Cecil was fine. Locke/Celes was fine. Even Cloud/Tifa was fine. I didn't understand why the producers needed to force a love theme for this one when it just kind of happened naturally in the other games.

I always found it interesting that the one game with the love story front and center completely bungled it whereas the other games pulled it off to varying degrees of success. I especially liked FFX's take on it.

I get what you're saying here... but to a certain degree almost all role-playing games do this... so I can't really fault VIII for this. Most characters have their own little subsection of the game focused on their story and after they they just tag along.

Perhaps one of the only exceptions I can think of is Wild Arms yet you only have three people in you're party the whole game. I know Rudy is the main character but personally I thought all three kind of unofficially shared the spotlight. However, I probably shouldn't go on about Wild Arms because when I get started I never stop. Love the hell out of the first two games....

With a lot of JRPG's, the storytelling (or the pretension thereof) takes a backseat to gameplay (see Grandia, Mana series, Xenoblade, Pokemon, etc). The same can't really be said of Final Fantasy, whose pedigree is based almost entirely on the strength of their narratives. When an FF game has a story or set of characters that don't match up to previous entries, people tend to feel it more strongly than they otherwise would, and it can affect the game as a result. Are FFVIII's characters any worse than standard JRPG fare? No, not really. However, are they a noticeable step down from the cast of FFVI, or even VII? Most definitely, and that's where the discrepancy lies.

This is just me talking, though. I think the game is impressive for polarizing Final Fantasy's fanbase enough to incite discussion nearly 15 years after it's release.

I find FFVII and FFVIII (and X to a degree) to have similar flaws, that is, constant focus on the main characters and minimal on the cast around them. Coming from FFVI, there really wasn't much of that. You could beat the game with seeing very little of Terra (who starts out as a main character and then kind of fades). The problem with that whole approach of focusing on the main character too much is you better be able to tolerate that character or the game goes downhill quickly. In FFVII's case, I thought the gameplay was solid enough to distract me from the narrative flaws (I've gone on record as saying the materia system is one of the best JRPG sub-systems of all time, in the amount of freedom it gives you...It's not dissimilar from building a Magic deck), whereas junctioning and sucking spells out of enemies wasn't (the grid from X is in a similar boat, it starts out cool than got really tedious).

I guess what I'm trying to say is its' possible to see too much of a character in games and when that happens, you REALLY have to like them. I thought Chrono Trigger, FFVI Star Ocean 2 and the Suikoden games (I, II and V) all struck a much better balance than FFVII/VIII/X did. That said, my worst RPG cast is the one from Wild Arms 3. Despite cool designs (including a potentially great female lead) they're about as exciting as a lineup of cardboard cutouts the entire game.

I really noticed this when I played VI for the first time as well. Terra does start out as the main character... but the further you get the less it feels that way, even when you start regrouping in the second half of the game.

Personally Wild Arms 3 is where the series started to fall apart to me and it really has a lot to do with this even though the gameplay not evolving was a big problem as well. Virginia did have a lot of potential but like most female leads it just fizzled out to me. The same thing happens in Xenosaga with Shion. I just couldn't focus on Shion when a certain NPC was just WAY more interesting... and then at about the halfway point your forced back into worrying about the games playable characters which only reinforces my theory the game is more fun to watch than play.

But seriously... not to sound sexist but is there even an RPG with a good female lead because I have yet to play it.

Valkyrie Profile 1, Popful Mail and Phantasy Star 1. There aren't many that come to mind.

Aya Brea from Parasite Eve

I didn't think about that since it's kind of an action PRG. I have all three games but have only played the first... which hasn't aged so well in some respects IMO. Really wish they'd remake it... it be a good way to get the franchise back on track if they didn't screw it up. However, I doubt SE wants to pay the royalties to the book's author.

Still, I DO like how Aya is portrayed in the first game however. Kind of was annoyed with her showing so much skin in the third game. I kind of like how they didn't sex her up in the beginning.