20 Smartest Video Game Villains Who Deserved To Win

18. Ryo Aoki - Yakuza: Like a Dragon

The Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise certainly doesn't want for absurdly over-prepared criminal masterminds, and the series' greatest example thus far is Ryo Aoki from Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Aoki had such disdain for the yakuza that, as the son of criminal patriarch Masumi Arakawa, he faked his own death, changed his name, and reinvented himself as the Governor of Tokyo, where he forms the right-wing organisation Bleach Japan in an attempt to clean Kamurocho of the Tojo Clan's influence.

But Aoki also used the Omi Alliance to help eliminate his rivals and advance his own political standing - basically the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy in action.

There's holding a grudge and then there's... whatever the hell this is. 

Driven by his traumatic upbringing in the shadow of Japan's criminal underworld, Aoki sought to both erase his past and wipe out the yakuza in one fell swoop, but he was ultimately exposed and paid the mortal price for his biblical levels of duplicity.