See, I believe there's a miscomprehension here. Effective villainy isn't about being annoying or hated. True, he's your enemey, but this is also a gameto entertain you. If the villain is not COOL, if he is just one groaning pain in the neck without much going for him, then he is what we call in the writing industry a 'flat character'.
On the other hand, if your villain has the right amount of schemes, monologuing, powers, purpose, and lunacy...he might be a winner. In games, this is actually quite hard to figure out sometimes. From the Persona series, I might have chosen Nyarlathotep or Nyx or Shadow Hippie Jesus...but that didn't hit the right chord for being a big ole' villain. Instead, I chose classic.
I chose Final Fantasy 5, with the black mage of destruction X-Death, otherwise known as Lord Exodus.
According to the game, the world OF the game used a kind of ancient tree to seal up its amalgamated evil spectors, the key to a dark dimension, the Void. All the worst evil was contained there, but that evil seeped out a force and condensed it into a lifeform, an armored foe who commanded a fair deal of black magic, creatures, and intelligence bent towards releasing the fullness of that corruptive monstrous evil. They beat him, and in order to prevent his schemes from ever succeeding, the world was split in two - held this way by two sets of four element crystals on each world - and he was incarcerated forever by the power of one set while the other set remained on the side with the tree.
That is...until the game started up, and Exodus began to stress the crystals' power to the breaking point.
How good at villainy do you have to be to force your own prison to break while inside of it during a time where you're to be supposedly powerless? One crystal after the other was broken, in total defiance of any of the heroes' actions, releasing more and more of his power until...pop! He was free and able to return to his domicile, where he practically manipulated the heroes into breaking the only guardians of the other crystals for him and then shattered those crystals, re-merging the worlds back together and opening the Void...
Exodus gets my vote because he very sneakily brought the plot to this stage, and threw in some random violence just for kicks. And to what end? To what end? Only the power to render any person, place, or thing VOID while in command of millenia-old abominations and villains. And believe you me, how many villains can you think of that - in the end - decided to destroy all of existence and had the POWER to do it?
Short list, right? But that is what Neo Exodus, that merged abomination of all the evil, tried to do. That's VERY effective...
On the other hand, if your villain has the right amount of schemes, monologuing, powers, purpose, and lunacy...he might be a winner. In games, this is actually quite hard to figure out sometimes. From the Persona series, I might have chosen Nyarlathotep or Nyx or Shadow Hippie Jesus...but that didn't hit the right chord for being a big ole' villain. Instead, I chose classic.
I chose Final Fantasy 5, with the black mage of destruction X-Death, otherwise known as Lord Exodus.
According to the game, the world OF the game used a kind of ancient tree to seal up its amalgamated evil spectors, the key to a dark dimension, the Void. All the worst evil was contained there, but that evil seeped out a force and condensed it into a lifeform, an armored foe who commanded a fair deal of black magic, creatures, and intelligence bent towards releasing the fullness of that corruptive monstrous evil. They beat him, and in order to prevent his schemes from ever succeeding, the world was split in two - held this way by two sets of four element crystals on each world - and he was incarcerated forever by the power of one set while the other set remained on the side with the tree.
That is...until the game started up, and Exodus began to stress the crystals' power to the breaking point.
How good at villainy do you have to be to force your own prison to break while inside of it during a time where you're to be supposedly powerless? One crystal after the other was broken, in total defiance of any of the heroes' actions, releasing more and more of his power until...pop! He was free and able to return to his domicile, where he practically manipulated the heroes into breaking the only guardians of the other crystals for him and then shattered those crystals, re-merging the worlds back together and opening the Void...
Exodus gets my vote because he very sneakily brought the plot to this stage, and threw in some random violence just for kicks. And to what end? To what end? Only the power to render any person, place, or thing VOID while in command of millenia-old abominations and villains. And believe you me, how many villains can you think of that - in the end - decided to destroy all of existence and had the POWER to do it?
Short list, right? But that is what Neo Exodus, that merged abomination of all the evil, tried to do. That's VERY effective...
