10 Great Video Game Villains Who Were Totally Wasted
These villains all deserved so much better.
Few video games can truly achieve masterpiece status without giving players an all-timer villain to set their sights on - an antagonist who they probably love to hate, and can't wait to angrily dispatch at game's end.
But establishing an awesome villain is one thing - sustaining that awesomeness across the entirety of the game, all the way to the climax, is a whole other matter altogether.
And while a film only needs to do it for, say, two hours, a video game might need to hold your interest in taking said antagonist down for many dozens of hours - a far trickier feat as evidenced by these 10 video games.
These games all quickly established attention-grabbing villains who could've been destined for GOAT status, yet at one point or another, they ended up being completely wasted.
Perhaps they disappeared for too long after a strong introduction, or the final boss fight against them was just a crushing letdown.
Whatever the reason, these villains had all of their early promise summarily squandered, and many players are still damn salty about it to this very day...
10. Frank Fontaine - BioShock
The moment that BioShock's true villain reveals himself is absolutely unforgettable, when we learn that our support character throughout the game, Atlas, is actually the uber-criminal Frank Fontaine.
Fontaine faked his own death, established himself as Atlas, and orchestrated a devious plan to kill his rival Andrew Ryan, leaving him free to take control of the underwater city of Rapture.
It's a superbly executed twist which instantly establishes Fontaine as one of gaming's most fascinatingly Machiavellian antagonists, so it's a shame that the end of the game sees him devolve into something decidedly less interesting.
When the player reaches Fontaine's lair, Fontaine injects himself with a ton of the mutagenic material ADAM, transforming him into a laughable-looking golem-thing for the final boss fight.
It's the sort of immensely lame character design we tend to call "AI created" these days, and to make matters worse the fight itself is a woefully unimaginative slug-fest that's doing nothing even remotely imaginative mechanically.
The Friday afternoon energy is strong with the end of BioShock, which leaves such a lackluster impression of its Big Bad that it almost undoes everything that was so brilliant about him beforehand.