8 Video Games That RUINED Great Characters

5. Joanna Dark - Perfect Dark Zero

Rare's spiritual successor to GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, introduced the world to Joanna Dark - effectively a winning cross between James Bond and Lara Croft, per her expert spy skills, calm under pressure, and wry wit.

But Joanna underwent a most obnoxious makeover for 2005's prequel Perfect Dark Zero, and while characters are of course expected to be different in prequels, Joanna neither looked nor felt like the same person.

For starters, she was redesigned to more blatantly appeal to the lads' mags crowd - slender with long, red hair, and a personality one might deem more stereotypically feminine. 

Essentially, she went from a distinctive, iconic heroine in the original game to a generic PS360 mascot in the prequel.

And for reasons that still aren't really clear, Joanna's accent was also changed from British to American. 

Now, it doesn't help that Perfect Dark Zero just isn't a very good game any way you slice it, but its worst crime was cynically pandering to trends with its Joanna redesign.

And that's all she wrote for the character, as the recently in-the-works reboot - which would've seemingly restored Joanna's original characterisation - was cancelled last summer.