You have a protagonist serving as your avatar, and you have your stock bad guy.
Their goals are simple: money, power orevil just for the sake of it.
As video games evolved, though, we got villains who had more substantial motivations.
It takes brains to be this bad.
A good villain adds more to the story than the well-intentioned hero who takes them down.
8Asgore Dreemurr
Undertale
To understand Asgore, you have to see his side of things.
King of the underground, he lost his son to humans and had his subjects imprisoned.
The magical barrier keeping them trapped requires seven human souls to break.
Why wouldn’t he make the necessary scarifice?
A monster doesn’t have to respect humans, particularly when he’s neverexperienced their friendship.
His crown-wearing head lies uneasy though, because unlike most villains, Asgore knows he’s in the wrong.
At least he feels bad about it.
Some of the best horror games in the history of the genre contain puzzles.
They play by roguelike rules: permadeath is enabled, even once they stop dreaming.
At the outset, Albert Wesker’s goal isn’t much different from any other antagonist: world domination.
As Chris punches through boulders to get to him, Wesker rants about his end goal.
Humanity is weak, and he is poised to cull the species and let the strong survive.
Clearly, he didn’t check out the biceps on Chris though: humanity is anything but weak.
After receiving a wound while play-fighting with Sephiroth, Genesis’s body refuses to heal.
He discovers that he was part of Project G, an ethically dubious experiment to create super-soldiers.
He was deemed a failure in a genetic modification he never signed up for.
Spoiler alert: they’d all get the job done pretty quickly.
As his physical condition continues to worsen, Genesis becomes disillusioned with Shinra.
This places him several steps ahead of the conclusion that both Sephiroth and Cloud would eventually come to.
When his peaceful plea to stop them fails, Dhaos chooses violence.
When he’s defeated, even the heroes concede that his goal was just.
On closer inspection, it’s so many empty words.
It follows a dishonored Gallian Army squad as it fights against the Imperial invasion.
Many of the same gameplay elements return from Valkyria Chronicles II.
The third game’s antagonist is hardly a villain.
Dahau is an honourable man, managing an elite paramilitary group made up almost entirely of Darcsens.
When his squad outmatches the protagonists, he refuses to capitalize and kill them all.
When you shoot Dahau, he keeps standing.
Not because of superpowers or cutting-edge technology, but simply out of sheer force of will.
Go to war in the Valkyria Chronicles series.
