I've already mentions this before in other threads and I might copy-paste some of my old entries to help prove my point, but I'll do that later. For now, I'll answer a rather important question:
so what kind of qualities, in your opinion, makes a villain a 'good' villain?
If I were to be personally asked this question, i can simply say this -> My favorite villain or antagonist in a video game is the one where i would personally have a very bad vendetta against. This villain should make me feel bad that he/she's alive and is making the in-game world so miserable that it kinda hurts. This gives me the satisfaction of eventually wanting to exterminate said villain/antagonist the minute I "got them in my sights".
Some examples that I have not mentioned are:
Legion and its leaders, Caesar and Legate Lanius from Fallout New Vegas. (SPOILERS)
"My conquest of the Mojave will be a glorious triumph, marking the transition of the Legion from a basically nomadic tribe to a genuine empire. Just as my namesake campaigned in Gaul before he crossed the Rubicon, so have I campaigned, and will cross the Colorado"
To me, i feel like the Legion has always been designed in the game to be the straight up villains of the story, even in the black and gray crapsack world that the Mojave Wastelands are. When compared to the rest of the factions and its respective leaders, the Legion is simply the cringiest among the bunch. Not only are they very violent individuals who seek to rule the Mojave, they are cruel against women and treat women as slaves. They build their reputation among New Vegas for being hated by the NCR and the rest of the factions with generally Good Karma. When i met Caesar, i somehow grew to know that this is the individual that I will not like, but I would be glad in putting a bullet through the minute i grow strong enough to eventually kill him and his legionnaires.
We shall see how brave you are when nailed to the walls of Hoover Dam, your body facing west so you may watch your world die."
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Vladimir Makarov from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
"All warfare is based on deception. For years, the West's hypocrisy has made the world a battlefield. The corrupt talk while our brothers and sons spill their own blood. But deceit cuts both ways. The bigger the lie, the more likely people will believe it, and when a nation cries for vengeance, the lie spreads like a wildfire. The fire builds, devouring everything in its path. Our enemies believe that they alone dictate the course of history, but all it takes is the will of a single man."
Basically one of the most ruthless villains in your typical Modern Military fantasy. This man is responsible for basically many of the events in the CoD: Modern Warfare lore, and has even caused the deaths of some of the more likable protagonists in said lore. This man is one of the symbols of pure evil that deserves to be shot, bodied, and clapped at. He truly reached his peak of evil villainy in Modern Warfare 3's single player campaign to the point where I grew to truly hate his very existence.
For a villain, he does what he does. He outsmarts the good guys throughout his existence and he truly does the job of making you feel bad that he's out there, ruining the lives of everyone. He makes you cringe, he makes you think, and he makes you feel bad that you are not on his side, but you don't really want to side with what is essentially a madman.
Satisfyingly, in the end of MW3's campaign, he gets a really satisfying death at the hands of Captain Price, one of the token good guys of CoD Lore. His demise in Modern Warfare 3 was glorious as it was. He deserved to be brutally slain like the dog that he truly is.
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Wilhelm "Deathstead" Strasse from the new Wolftenstein series:
"Captain Blazkowicz. I've heard a lot about you. We have the same name, you and I. Wilhelm, William. But...You call me "Deathshead". I don't like it. I'm a happy man, you see? It doesn't sound right in English. Say it...correctly. Toten...kopf."
a leading member of the German Armed Forces, a gifted researcher and doctor who heads the SS Special Projects Division. He is the arch-nemesis of the series' protagonist William J. Blazkowicz and doubles as the main antagonist of the new timeline of Wolfenstein games starting from Return to Castle Wolftenstein up to Wolfenstein the New Order.
There is something about Deathstead that i really love as a villain. And when i mean "love", that means I'd love to eventually tear him apart! This man, much like Nazis back in World War 2, is a living incarnation of evil. There's no hiding it. He is a shamelessly ruthless and unethical individual where his only morals are to defeat the Allied forces and let Nazi Germany rule ("OF COURSE!") and he f**king succeeds in it, setting up the events and the battle for redemption in the story of Wolfenstein. Can you imagine a world were the Nazis won WWII and the Allied forces of USA, Great Britain, France, and whoever lie in shambles, and f**kin Nazis are around? Dear lord.
Not to mention, every time you actually die, you are met with a loading screen that displays this mofo's face before you retry again.
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NORTH KOREA, or speficically Kim Jong Un in Homefront The Revolution.
"For the last two years, you have known sacrifice, and you have known loss. But, surely as dawn follows night, a brilliant sun now shines across the world."
THATS RIGHT! An entire mother f**king country or more specifically an entire republic because if we are talking about main antagonists, one cannot ignore the power fantasy of fighting the North Korean army and turning them into bloody pieces of gory kimchi.
Kim Jong Un is the leader of the Greater North Korean Republic and is the main antagonist of the Homefront video games. He is the individual who people thought was the one to not only unite the two Koreas but also make peace with the rest of the world, but in reality (in this game at least), all he did was to not only continue his father's legacy and age-old policies but also modernized the North Korean Military to become strong enough to actually annex other countries and absorb them into the Greater Korean Republic (GKR) such as Japan, Indonesia, The Phillipines, Vietnam, Brunei, East Timor, Singapore, among others.
This essentially turns the entire country, heck the entire region into an entity that we players become so invested in taking down. This portrayal of a very scary and powerful North Korea with countries absorbed into it is perfectly portrayed in Homefront: The Revolution where parts of THE US OF A is actually destroyed by the GRK and sets up the entire premise of the game. That's right ladies and germs, AN ENTIRE REGION as the villains of this story.
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So in one end of the spectrum... yeah, basically Villains whose goals are well justified according to their beliefs, and the ones that make you feel sick, feel cringy, and feel disgusted that they are there to run rampant against the world. The kind of villain that makes you feel enraged, so enraged that you become powered with a rather violent bloodlust that makes you just want to Rip and Tear said antagonist into pieces until it is done. These kinds of villains are the representatives of what you and I consider as "Icons of Sin", the very evil that somehow represent the evils and realities that we face in our own world. The big difference is that we have the power to rip them apart with our bare hands if we need to. We could wish we could do the same to the villains in the real world.
I really wish that more video games represent villains the way they were originally represented: Whatever the f**k i described them in the earlier paragraph. I really hate it when people who review games tend to justify the actions of villains with some other socio-political idealogy BS that in reality nobody gives a flying f**k about. To me, I just love it when we face against an antagonist that awakens the violent vigilante that is hidden deep within ourselves. The kind of villain that we grow to hate, and have a fueling desire to finally put an end to. That's the classic video game villain portrayal for me. They don't need to be like the "misunderstood and the actually likeable kind of character". We like villains because in the end, we desire to RIP AND TEAR them into pieces. We don't need any more Handsome Jacks or Jeremy Irons in our video games. We've had enough of villains that are likable and make us feel bad in killing them. We need to go back in the good ole days where killing villains was not only gratifying, but it was satisfying that it made us feel heroic in a bloody messy way ;)
