1. Bowser
The Mushroom Kingdom is ruled by a non-democratic monarchy enforcing a strictly divided class system, favouring those Mushrooms who faithfully serve the Princess by giving them natty vests. As far as we can see, Bowser and his Koopa Clan are attempting to bring about a coup that would give equal power to the underprivileged Goombas – who are presently confined to dangerous, cramped ghetto areas.
Above: Ghettoes are the same all over the world: they stink
Admittedly, their methods are hardly the sort of thing Ghandi would advocate. But when a pair of goons are brought in to violently put down the rebellion – doubtless to keep Brooklyn’s mushroom resources healthy – Bowser seems less a villain and more the sole heroic holdout against a dodgy Cold War-esque power-bid.
Above: Viva La Revolucion!
2. M. Bison
There’s no end of sob-stories of all the horrors Bison’s Shadaloo Empire is apparently responsible for: killing Chun-Li’s dad, running some sort of drugs and/or weapons empire out of Thailand and harnessing forbidden psychic powers to enable the cheapest move in the damn game.
Above: Oh, eff off
But honestly: how many of these folks’ stories really check out? Guile, a psychologically scarred war vet, is clearly projecting his horrific wartime experiences onto Bison. Cammy, a longtime amnesiac, by definition cannot be relied on for accurate testimony as to Bison’s malfeasance. And look at the class of “evildoers” he surrounds himself with: blissed-out monks and smiling moms.
Those tourists look happy enough to be funding the death-by-psychic-annihilation business. We’d stay at Shadaloo.
3. Atlas
(SPOILER ALERT: if you are either of the two people not yet aware of the plot of BioShock, we advise you read this instead of the next entry.)
When we say “Atlas”, we of course mean the guy he ends up being: cheery old faux-brogue-sporting old black-market-running old Frank Fontaine. But how bad a guy is Fontaine? Well, he did save your life repeatedly in the game’s first half, as well as making the hugely perfunctory tutorial sequence marginally less of a trial than it could have been.
Above: Would you kindly take the exposition machine?
Fontaine’s main shtick is soon revealed to be getting you to kill your dickhead dad, Andrew Ryan. Well, good: Ryan displays precious few positive traits in his scant screentime, and Rapture doesn’t look like it’s been a fun place to live for quite some time. Ryan’s empire is a waterlogged, dystopian wreck: at least Fontaine’s honest about it.
4. Maester Seymour
Rare is the Final Fantasy villain who can’t be seen in a sympathetic light. Partly this is due to the series’ increasingly ridiculous plots, which loop about themselves so convolutedly that it’s all but inevitable that at some point, the bad guy will be given some sort of “out” for his nefarious misdeeds. And partly, it’s because they’re all so damn pretty!
Above: You’re among friends. It’s OK to admit you would hit that
But Seymour, in particular, is incontrovertibly An OK Guy. All he wants is to save us from a huge floating cyst that periodically lays the world to waste. Sure, his plan does involve a little genocide, but here’s the thing: Even by Final Fantasy standards, X’s plot is- a nonsensical mess. You could teach college classes in understanding Final Fantasy X and every student would fail. If Seymour’s solution is the most expedient way of working out who is and isn’t dead/a dream/the Messiah, more power to him.
Above: We say, kill ‘em all and let Sin sort ‘em out
5. Mad Gear
The Mad Gear Gang, designated bad guys of Final Fight, are apparently made up of every single person in town apart from Mayor Haggar and his two young friends. The gang is eventually revealed to be run by a wheelchair-bound billionaire in the Business District. Haggar beats the tar out of him and hurls him out the window.
Above: A fair match, is what that is
If everyone in town is in this gang, is it really a “gang,” or just “the populace”? Aren’t private citizens allowed to provide stimulus to a woefully underfunded community? If the Mayor is so politically inefficient that his only means of managing unsanctioned outreach initiatives is to throw cripples out of windows, is it any wonder people have to kidnap his daughter to get his attention? Frankly, Mike Haggar is just a terrible mayor.
That’s more like it.
6. Shang Tsung
While the original Mortal Kombat had Shang Tsung as the ultimate boss – and a pretty anticlimactic one at that – later games would relegate the bearded sorcerer’s role to that of henchman for Kombat 2 boss Shao Khan. As the games’ plotlines became increasingly self-referential, the character became somewhat pathetic, forever conjuring up crazy get-rich-quick schemes to try and get out of his thankless soul-stealing job.
As if that weren’t sympathetic enough, consider that the original game – in which Tsung was malevolent enough to be worth a damn – tasked the nefarious wizard with gathering, in one remote, inaccessible location, a sizeable assortment of criminals, sociopaths and bloodthirsty wackjobs. That, at the very least, means you have to give him credit for keeping them off your streets.
7. Ganon
Utilizing sorcery, demonic possession and brute force in his never-ending quest to conquer Hyrule, Ganon has come a long way from his early days as a brutish pig-monster who couldn’t even get people to spell his name right.
Above: That’s it, you’re Gannon-Banned!
And, much as John Milton found when dramatizing the fall of Satan in Paradise Lost, the more you write about what a dick someone is, the more sympathetic he becomes.
Above: Oh yeah, English Lit humor FTW
Ocarina of Time was the first time the character had been properly fleshed out, making him even harder to hate. As the heir to a banished race of desert thieves, Ganon is basically born into misfortune. While the people of Hyrule dwell in lush grasslands and opulent castles, Ganon and his tribe are stuck in arid desert for all eternity, all because some pointy-eared little punk wants to play Save the Princess.
Above: Hark at Mister Big Hero Guy
8. Solidus Snake
A politician dedicated to stamping out the conspiracy that threatens to propel the world into perpetual warfare? It’d be plain unpatriotic not to have time for Solidus Snake. Even after he falls from public favour following the events of Metal Gear Solid, Solidus is still waging war on the shadowy Patriots by any means necessary.
Above: Or maybe just stealing this, there’s a new and original idea
When it turns out that Solidus Snake’s ultimate ambition can only be realised with Raiden out of the way, what does our boy do? He unleashes seven shades of unholy fury, physically brutalising and psychologically tormenting the effete little whipping-boy within an inch of his life.
Above: Gaming’s finest hour
Knowing how much love the average gamer has for Raiden, that pretty makes Solidus Snake some sort of patron saint.
9. Paxton Fettel
You know what? If F.E.A.R. was serious about psychopathic cannibal supersoldier Paxton Fettel being such a terrible guy, F.E.A.R. wouldn’t send the guy’s own brother to liquidate him. That’s just asking for complications. If Mario went rogue tomorrow, we would not send Luigi to bring him in. Doesn’t make sense.
Above: Oh right, like you wouldn’t play the hell out of this
Yeah, and you know what else? If Paxton Fettel was the deadly renegade he’s made out to be, his ultimate motivation would turn out to be a little more malevolent than looking out for his hard-done-by momma. Did anyone truly, irredeemably evil ever do their dastardly work out of love for their dear old Mom? For the sake of argument, we’re saying no.
Shut up.
10.Yggdrasill
While Machiavellian half-elf Yggdrasill causes no shortage of problems for Tales of Symphonia’s Ragtag Band of Heroes, it’s revealed midway through the game that his secret identity is actually that of (spoiler, obviously) Mithos, the legendary hero of the game’s world. This is kind of like if the guy who kept stealing your parking spot at the mall turned out to be Abraham Lincoln.
Above: A Reasonable Comparison
Even without this somewhat crucial factor in place, Yggdrasill’s most dire misdeeds – which are hardly up there with repeated carpark-stealing anyway – are done in the name of resurrecting his martyred sister and/or combating the systematic racism that continues to plague the game’s worlds. So the guy saved the union between realms and is a tireless fighter of racial intolerance. And it’s your job to kill him. Nice one, champ.
Above: An image that summarizes the plot of Tales of Symphonia as well as anyone has ever done
11. Kane
The Command & Conquer series’ designated personification of war, Kane seems bent on blowing shit up all the livelong day. We could take the easy option here and point out that that one of his first recognised gigs was as adviser to Joe Stalin – any enemy of Hitler’s is a friend of ours, right? – but we’ll give you more credit than that.
Above: Apparently developer Westwood thinks Stalin was a Klingon
After all, Kane’s entire schtick is the betterment of mankind. Whether it’s a newly-discovered element or a salvaged alien technology, Kane and his chums in the Brotherhood of Nod are all about finding out long-term ways to make human life better. They just happen to have plans that invariably involve making a lot of human lives an awful lot worse, at least in the short term.
The very immediate short term, in some cases.
12. Meta Knight
In the surprisingly intricate continuity of the Kirby series, Meta Knight is a recurring character often presumed to have the same basic aims as Kirby. This is not quite fair to either party: Meta Knight actually has aims, which usually involve saving the world, defeating evil, opposing injustice - you know, the standard good-guy folderol. BOOOO-RING.
This would be fairly unremarkable, except that Meta Knight is invariably the bad guy, whereas the figure the games focus on – the character played by you, the guy tasked with taking down the heroic Meta Knight – is an animated marshmallow whose entire mission statement boils down to “eat things; spit them out to make room for more eating.” It’s like if Batman picked a fight with a morbidly obese shut-in, and you were supposed to root for the shut-in.
http://www.gamesradar.com/f/the-12-most-misunderstood-videogame-villains/a-20091001102755474083/p-3
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I COMPLETELY & IRREVOCABLY AGREE!
Especially the Bowser bit, its OBVIOUs Princess Peach has an affair with him!!
