9 Video Game NPCs Everyone Wished They Could Kill
5. Kai Leng For Most Of The Game - Mass Effect 3
Kai Leng, or Captain Plot Armour, is conceptually a pretty cool bad guy. He’s an assassin in a gun-riddled sci-fi universe who chooses to fight primarily with a sword. Badass. We can even sort of get over the fact that he’s an evil xenophobic bounty hunter working for The Illusive Man because that just makes us want to kill him even more.
Which would be great. If we could. But we can’t. Because this guy has the Excalibur of Plot Armour.
A lot of video game bosses and minibosses have plot armour in that a game will let you engage them one on one only for you to get away or for them to get away so there’s a rising tension in knowing you’ll meet again when you’re stronger. Largely this is executed well as you generally feel underpowered in your first meeting and you’re relieved to have scraped through to live another day. This isn’t the case with Kai Leng as, despite his assassin credentials, the dude is absolutely take-downable. The only reason you can’t flatten him when you have an encounter is that BioWare won’t let you. It doesn’t help that he feels totally out of place, there’s very thin character motivation even in the fleshed out book version, and he’s generally just a big dud.
After you really should have beaten him on Thessia he has the gall to hit you up and say you’re not as weak as he thought and act like he could have taken you. Yeah, you get him eventually but he’s unkillable for long enough to throw him on the list.