10 Video Game Villains Who Actually Killed The Hero
That awkward moment when you can't just respawn at the last checkpoint.
Video games and death have an extremely odd relationship. In most games, players die constantly - whether they're mistiming their jumps and splatting on the ground below, or being shot to pieces by annoyingly accurate enemy grunts - only to restart the level straight away, continuing on like nothing ever happened.
And yet, even with all that dying, most video game heroes, technically, don't even die once.
Take Nathan Drake, for example. You - yes, you - have killed him hundreds of times, whether he's getting blown up by grenades or torn to shreds by cursed mutant Spaniards, but story-wise, he's outlived every single evil warlord, pirate and rival treasure hunter that the Uncharted series has thrown at him.
In very rare cases though, the villain of the piece will actually manage to kill the hero as part of the narrative, something that's always hugely surprising to witness considering that video game protagonists generally feel invincible.
But these villains were able to successfully shatter that notion, defeating the good guys with a fatal strike and giving the story of the game a massive gut-punch moment to boot.
10. Mephiles (Sonic The Hedgehog 2006)
The last thing anyone expects from a Sonic game is that the title character will die, especially via impalement. That would be like watching a Toy Story movie where Woody is strangled with his drawstring and Buzz suffocates inside his helmet.
But regardless, that's precisely what happened to the famous blue hedgehog in his underwhelming 2006 outing on PS3 and Xbox 360.
One of the main villains in the game is Mephiles, an evil entity who is accidentally unleashed upon the world and sets about trying to fuse with a second entity, Iblis, in order to become all-powerful. Naturally, Sonic tries to prevent this, but in a late-game encounter with Mephiles, things don't go so well for our brave, speedy hero.
After Mephiles distracts Sonic by blinding him, he impales him from behind with an energy spear, killing him. This was a surprising turn because, again, nobody expected Sonic to die, and while he was brought back to life later on, his death was one of the few bold and interesting things this game actually did.