10 Video Games That RUINED Amazing Villains

Making a truly iconic and memorable video game villain sure is hard, but once you've pulled it off, fans will relish seeing the baddie return time and time again in an inevitable glut of sequels.

However, sometimes developers don't quite seem to appreciate the brilliance they're sitting on, and so, whether in a sequel or a remake of the original game, they throw out everything fans actually liked about the antagonist.

Perhaps the villain is downgraded from a badass into a total wimp, maybe they're unceremoniously killed off or given a bizarre personality transplant, or they've simply strayed too far from what fans fell in love with in the first place.

These iterations of once-classic villains left fans totally and utterly baffled, wondering what the developers were thinking with these narrative and design choices, which were most often done for cynical reasons or, sometimes, no discernible reason at all.

Fans were forced to watch some of entertainment's most beloved and iconic baddies get turned into laughing stocks before their very eyes, ensuring they would never view them the same way ever again...

Black Mask is one of the most beloved foes in Batman's rogues gallery, and Rocksteady's Arkham games seemed like a fitting venue to give him his fair due.

Yet perhaps no other Batman villain can claim to have been so thoroughly wasted and eventually ruined throughout the franchise.

His mask makes an Easter egg-y appearance in Arkham Asylum as the answer to one of The Riddler's challenges, before he has a cameo in Arkham City where he's attempting to fend off Hugo Strange's guards.

Black Mask seemingly has a more substantial role in prequel Arkham Origins, yet it's soon enough revealed that it's The Joker in fact posing as him, effectively providing a segue for yet another Joker-centric Batman game.

And finally we have Arkham Knight's Red Hood DLC, where the Red Hood fights his way to Black Mask, only for the villain to beg for his life before Red Hood throws him out of a window to his death.

That's not only literal assassination but character assassination - in the comics Black Mask was a savagely intimidating and calculating mob boss, but throughout the Arkham series and especially in Arkham Knight's DLC, he's reduced to a pathetic triviality who dies a coward's death.

Black Mask had the potential to be a more grounded villain compared to the more campy, theatrical Joker, and yet Rocksteady threw it all away.