It saddens me that circumstances are forcing me to include Samus Aran on this list. For decades, she's actually served as one of the few beacons of hope within Nintendo's arsenal; an example of the rewards gamers bestow upon studios when they decide to actually take risks with character development. Samus has always been a lightning rod for surprising turns. The reveal that the space-suited hero you had been playing as in the first Metroid was actually a woman took everyone by surprise, and empowered a new generation of female gamers. Since then, the Metroid franchise reinvented the gaming mechanics to bring us Metroid Prime, a huge risk that shifted gameplay to a first-person perspective. It paid off quite well. There have been 11 games in total, but it only took one to completely sour our experience with the wickedly-cool bounty hunter. Metroid: Other M ruined the character of Samus by giving her a character that was the complete opposite of the cool, unattached bravado we had always assigned to the masked hero. By giving her a (terrible) voice, Nintendo managed to undo the decades of progress they made with a character we now have to only partly love.