9 Video Game Good Guys You Knew Were Villains All Along - Commenter Edition

9. The Illusive Man - Mass Effect 2

He may have rebuilt our hero Shepard after an unfortunate run in with a Collector Ship, which seems like a pretty good guy thing to do, but The Illusive Man is incredibly suss from the jump.

We couldn’t decide if it was the creepy eyeballs, Martin Sheen’s performance, the association with the shitty pro-human group Cerbereus, or the shady ass name that really did it for us, but at no point did we expect this guy to be a chill team player. You have no choice but to take on his missions and do his dirty work in Mass Effect 2 and, to be fair, it doesn’t feel so insidious when he’s helping you build a sweet team and stacking you with the resources to do so. Still, when Mass Effect 3 came along and it became clear that The Illusive Man’s motive was to use Reaper tech to grow an army and ultimately control the Reapers themselves, no one was terribly surprised. If killing off a bunch of civilians didn’t tip you off he was bad, the fact that he allied himself with bloody Councilor Udina should have. Ew. Even if he was indoctrinated, there’s no excuse for that.

Of course his bad guy turn is a little less impactful if you, like me, chose the Control ending but, uh, try not to judge us Blue Ending people too much.