Aside from the odd monologue, these video game villains don’t have anything else to throw at the main character during a fight.
Many villains become villains by force, by gathering troops, or by terrorizing the world with their dreadful strength and skills. Some villains, on the other hand, think more than they act. Even though the villains themselves lack much in the way of fighting prowess, they may be in charge of a group of bad guys.
When directly confronted by heroes, these villains, who always have armies of soldiers and machines to send out, have nothing to say except for the odd monologue.
Table of Contents
Dr. Angus Bumby – Alice: Madness Returns
Dr. Bumby acts like a kind and experienced doctor who wants to help Alice get over her ideas about Wonderland. In reality, he is a very bad guy for reasons that are too gross to explain. In order to control Alice’s mind, Bumby makes The Dollmaker in her mind and, by extension, in Wonderland. The Dollmaker is systematically destroying and putting Wonderland back together.
The Dollmaker’s creation, however, threatens Alice more than once. Bumby, on the other hand, is a normal man who never touches Alice directly, which is probably why it was so easy for Alice to push him in front of a train.
Zachary Hale Comstock – BioShock Infinite
Comstock, who was the prophet and leader of all of Columbia, had held Elizabeth captive her whole life. He wanted to turn her and her gifts into tools of righteous rage that he could use to destroy the world below.
Even though he shows up more than once to threaten Booker and Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite, he never attacks them himself. Instead, he sends forces. When Booker and Elizabeth finally face Comstock, Booker kills him out of anger. Comstock seems happy with the way things turned out.
Krelian – Xenogears
It would be an insult to say that Xenogears has a complicated story. Since then, games like Xenosaga and Xenoblade have shown that Tetsuya Takashi is a maker with a lot of ideas who isn’t afraid to throw them all into a fantasy-RPG blender and see what happens. If you like deep stories, you’ll be fine with it. If you’d rather get right to playing the game, well, maybe not.
No matter what, Krelian is the main bad guy in Xenogears. Or, he is at least one of them. In Xenogears, there are many villains, and the main characters Fei and Elhaym, along with their diverse group of friends, work together to beat many of them to death. Krelian, who is hundreds of years old and a genius, is not like this. In the last battle of the game, Fei fights something that Krelian has made fight, but you never fight the scientist himself.
In fact, Krelian’s death is… well, it’s almost peaceful. And yet, it works. It really does work.
Dr. Hugo Strange – Batman: Arkham City
Dr. Hugo Strange has been one of Batman’s most consistent enemies in both the Arkham games and the Batman series as a whole. He is totally interested in how Bruce Wayne acts as a rogue and will do anything to catch him, cut him up, and figure out what makes him tick.
Strange often uses the speakers in Arkham City to tease and draw Batman, whom he kept in the city on purpose so he wouldn’t get in the way of his plan to kill everyone who was quarantined there. When Batman meets Strange, they don’t fight. Instead, Batman just pushes Strange out of the way as he tries to stop Protocol 10. Ra’s Al Ghul is the one who kills Strange in the end.
King Logan – Fable 3
During the first part of Fable 3, King Logan is the cruel ruler of Albion. Logan used to be a fair and just leader, but all of a sudden he seemed to go crazy with power. He went out of his way to promote industry growth, force people to join the army, and squeeze the people for every penny they had.
When the main character, Logan’s younger brother, storms the castle to get rid of him, he gives up right away and makes them the new king of Albion. It turns out that Logan was only trying to build up the country’s defenses in preparation for the Crawler, which is a terrifying threat to the very existence of the world. Whoops.
Dr. Mobius – Fallout: New Vegas
Big MT’s Think Tank’s main enemy is Dr. Mobius, whose name is so common that it’s almost funny. He is in charge of an army of robot scorpions in the “Forbidden Zone,” and he is the one who put up the radar fence that traps everyone in the Big MT. But when the Courier meets Mobius, he’s a pretty nice guy. He doesn’t even remember the threats he sent to you and the Think Tank because he was high on Psycho and Mentats at the time.
He did build the radar fence and its defenses, but only because he knew that if the Think Tank members ever got out, they would do a lot of scientific damage to the Mojave. If you don’t give him a reason to fight you, he won’t. If you do, he won’t put up much of a fight.
Commander Tartar – Splatoon 2
Commander Tartar is a very powerful artificial intelligence that was built 12,000 years ago by a mysterious human scientist. Tartar was meant to teach the wisdom of humanity to the next race to rule the Earth, but it was disappointed by the Inklings’ and Octarians’ whims and tendency to fight.
Instead, Tartar chooses to “refine” creatures into new matter to make the perfect form of life. At the end of the Octo Expansion, Tartar tries to do this by using NILS, a big cannon that shoots ink. Whether it works or not, Tartar doesn’t do much except sit in NILS’s eye and laugh at Agent 8.
Emperor Gestahl – Final Fantasy 6
Emperor Gestahl is so proud of himself that he calls his plan to take over the world “the Gestahlian Empire.” He is obsessed with getting total power. This is not a man with many sides, but Final Fantasy 6 tries to trick you into thinking that he does at one point by having Gestahl apologize to the heroes even though he has always had bad motives.
To someone who hasn’t seen Drift Boss before, Gestahl seems to be the main bad guy for most of the game, with the funny General Kefka as his crazy sidekick. Most people know by now that Gestahl is killed by Kefka after he betrays him instead of going up against the Returners himself.
Dr. Wallace Breen – Half-Life 2
Dr. Wallace Breen used to be in charge of the study center at Black Mesa. When the Combine got involved with Xen, they made Dr. Breen the figurehead of Earth.
It’s hard to tell if Breen really believes what the Combine says. He gives propaganda speeches to the people of City 17 and makes direct threats to Gordon, both of which talk about how great the Combine is and how any attempts to fight back will fail, but he could just be trying to protect himself.
In either case, he’s just a regular guy who can’t do anything but beg and complain when Gordon finally beats his way to the top of his Citadel.
Grant Kendrell – Transistor
Grant is in charge of the Camerata, which is like a smaller version of the Illuminati and runs the most important parts of Cloudbank from behind the scenes. After getting tired of Cloudbank’s people changing their minds all the time, Grant used the power of the Transistor to set off the Process. He did this to try to make the city and its people at least a little more stable and similar.
He is shown to be a big bad guy in the first half of Transistor, but when Red finally confronts him, she finds him and his partner, Asher, dead on the ground. They had killed themselves because they were so sad about what they had done to Cloudbank.
Gristol Malik – Psychonauts 2
Malik grew up with a metal spoon in his mouth because his father was the Gzar of Grulovia. When Grulovia fell, that “spoon” became a “slightly luxurious spoon,” so to speak. He started planning a long-term way to get back at the Psychonauts and get the power he thinks he deserves.
Malik is able to control what happens in Psychonauts 2, even putting his own brain in Truman Zanotto’s head. However, when Raz and Lili question him, he just brags about how great he is before getting his head kicked. This is right before the freed Maligula really kicks him where it hurts.
The Illusive Man – Mass Effect 3
.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=740&dpr=1.5 "12 Villains Who Never Fight You Directly In Video Games 12")
Martin Sheen’s brilliant performance as the Illusive Man, the mysterious leader of Cerberus, gives the part a depth that the writing alone never quite supports. His goals are clearly to help humans, and this speciesist view is hard to sugarcoat, but he still comes across as a force for good in Mass Effect 2. He may be Machiavellian, but he’s worth working with.
All of it comes crashing down in the third game, which shows a darker, more self-centered man whose ego wins out over his beliefs (with a little help from Reaper-branded brainwashing along the way). Even though you fight his top aide Kai Leng, you never really fight the Illusive Man himself. Instead, his inevitable death is shown on the big screen.