10 Biggest Video Game Villain Cliches (And Why We Love Them)

The easiest way to make a villain "complex" is to reveal that, at some point, they're not quite who you thought they were, and that they've got their own tragic backstory which brought them to this point.

Resident Evil 7's Jack Baker may seem like a murderous psychopath for most of the game, but it's revealed later that he and most of his family were actually under the control of the bio-weapon known as Eveline. Sad times.

Elsewhere, the Fatal Frame series' antagonists are typically people who were perfectly affable in life, and whose spirits have sadly been corrupted in death, while Shadow of the Colossus' titular beasts are only villains in that they stand in your way, despite being largely docile beasts who only attack when provoked.

The best example, however, is surely The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, given that players spend the entirety of the game believing her to be a Soviet Union defector.

Players even end up killing her in the final boss battle, before it's revealed that she was in fact still working for the U.S. the whole time, yet chose to fight to her death in order to bury the hatchet between the two warring nations. Ouch.

If it feels like a forced play for emotion the tragic villain reveal can be spectacularly lame, but when it has some semblance of emotional honesty, it adds crucial nuance to the antagonist.