10 Biggest Video Game Villains With The Smallest Screentime
These huge baddies were barely in the game at all.
One of the great advantages of a video game over, say, a movie, is the absolute freedom that developers have to tell a story on a larger canvas, allowing them to flesh out their heroes and villains alike in ways that a single film just can't accommodate.
And while many lengthy games take the opportunity to spend a ton of time with their antagonists before the end credits roll, there are also those games which lend a shockingly scarce amount of screen time to their Big Bads.
It's often said that brevity is the soul of wit, and yet, sometimes developers give their large-scale antagonists so little physical presence in their game that fans might start to question it.
And that's certainly the case with these 10 video games, each of which gave puzzlingly little time to a villain who defined not merely this single game but perhaps the franchise as a whole.
Though each villain made an undeniably tectonic impact that shaped perhaps the entire events of the series' story, we barely got to interact with them directly at all, if ever...
10. Ted Faro - Horizon
In Horizon Zero Dawn, Ted Faro is the man responsible for the Faro Plague, as the robots he created ultimately eluded his control and drove humanity to the brink of extinction. Later, Faro also sabotaged efforts to stem said plague.
Faro is as a result one of the series' primary villains and one of its most important characters overall, and yet, he's not really in either game.
In Horizon Zero Dawn, we only glimpse Faro through holographic recordings and audio logs, and in sequel Horizon Forbidden West, we learn that he's managed to extend his lifespan to 1000 years, albeit while being turned into a cancerous mass of mutated flesh.
But because developers Guerrilla Games didn't want to lean into the horror aspect too much, we never actually see Ted's gnarly new form - merely a hologram showing a rough silhouette.
On one hand it'd probably never live up to the grotesque imagery we can each conjure in our own minds, but on the other, it's baffling that the person responsible for the entire story of both games is basically MIA for all of it.