movies/tv Most Anticlimactic Villains

[Castle Bleck 19,440]

Sometimes, a villain just sucks, whether from the start or by failing to live up to good buildup; gripe about these characters here.

 

Recent:

 

The Replicator ("Criminal Minds, Season 8"):

 

Bad@$$ mystery man who, well, replicated various killings to troll both the BAU and the entire FBI. And he was pretty dang good at it, too...at least until the season finale finally revealed his identity:

 

 

Disgruntled FBI agent (played by MARK HAMILL) essentially overreacting worse than Manfred Von Karma from "Ace Attorney," complete with a sympathetic "Yanni Yogi"-like lackey in an earlier mid-season episode.

 

You didn't read that wrong: "SEASON 8" WAS ESSENTIALLY ONE BIG PARODY OF AN "ACE ATTORNEY" CASE!!!

 

Bottom line: The Replicator was MUCH better as an enigma, and not even Mark Hamill's "Fire Lord Ozai"-voice was able to redeem this character afterward.

 

Edited September 5, 2013 by Anti-Villain

[)O( Scarlet )O( 1,259]

 

 

the BAU

 

Lol when I read that, my first thought was, BAU? What the !?! Bronies Australia was on something?!?! Then I read the rest of your post and realized it was the BAU from Criminal Minds...

 

But yes I agree there are at times when in a tv show or movie where the villain just sucks...

[Scootalove 10,689]

Killer Croc was a pretty evil villain, who eats his prey when he gets the chance. That is until, they made him a laughing stock in the TV shows where he never plans a strategy.

[Golurk 468]

I don't know about anyone else, but I found Alduin from Skyrim to suffer from this, to an extent. Don't get me wrong, his concept was pretty good and he does what he does well, it's just that finally beating him has no sense of accomplishment. He just dies. You don't even do it alone, either; you have three other people helping you. You LITERALLY go to what is basically Asgard to hunt down the draconic destroyer of the world, and when you finally kill him after hunting him down for most of the main questline, he just takes the final hit and dies. No real reward other than seeing him die. It just seems to me that there should have been something more memorable there.

Alduin: good antagonist, terrible final boss.

[Discordian 6,019]

I don't know about anyone else, but I found Alduin from Skyrim to suffer from this, to an extent. Don't get me wrong, his concept was pretty good and he does what he does well, it's just that finally beating him has no sense of accomplishment. He just dies. You don't even do it alone, either; you have three other people helping you. You LITERALLY go to what is basically Asgard to hunt down the draconic destroyer of the world, and when you finally kill him after hunting him down for most of the main questline, he just takes the final hit and dies. No real reward other than seeing him die. It just seems to me that there should have been something more memorable there.

Alduin: good antagonist, terrible final boss.

I would go so far as to say that no enemy in Bethesda games are very good. It doesn't matter how awesome their story was every single enemy dies the same way. They drop to the floor and no attack or spell they use is ever going to do much damage to you.

 

If there's one thing that I hate about the Bethesda RPGs it's that they have shit for animations for...well...anything and it's something that severely needs to improve.

Edited September 5, 2013 by Discordian

[Hyper Tumble 1,483]

I don't know if you guys know who this is, but the Toiletnator form Codename Kids Next Door was best villain garbage. He was constantly getting passed off, laughed at, maimed, and neglected, all because he didn't have any real evil traits. None of the characters even took him seriously. He was just a villain thrown in for comedic value. Thankfully, he does his job well, or else KND would've failed.

[Broseph 215]

The Scarecrow in Batman Begins?

I mean, the build-up of his character and his motivations are pretty cool, and I like Cillian Murphy, the guy who plays him.
But really, how long is he in the film AS Scarecorw? Like.. 10 minutes?
He appears in his proper scary form for about 3 minutes when all the crazy gas is being sprayed everywhere, but then he's defeated easily by some zappy thing that Katie Holmes fires at him.

The rest of the time, he's just some Irish guy with a bag on his head.

[Dusknight Haze 161]

I would go so far as to say that no enemy in Bethesda games are very good. It doesn't matter how awesome their story was every single enemy dies the same way. They drop to the floor and no attack or spell they use is ever going to do much damage to you.

 

If there's one thing that I hate about the Bethesda RPGs it's that they have shit for animations for...well...anything and it's something that severely needs to improve.

 

That's the eternal problem of western RPGs. On one hand you have the overly cinematic Bioware who focuses heavily on story and characters at the cost of deeply engaging gameplay.... on the other you have Bethesda who does exactly the opposite.

 

The reason why FNV was such a superior game to Fallout 3 is because Bethesda didn't even develop it. They outsourced it.

 

Basically somebody needs to reach across the river and grab someone else, because if we combine the elements into a new IP with cinematic stories and truly emergent gameplay, then we'll be talking.

 

For now, I'll just play my Persona games.

 

In that vein, if you don't get the true ending in Persona 4, the last few bosses you fight are pretty damn boring and basically damage sponges. 

 

Also for those who have seen it, I feel like the last third of the anime From the New World was pretty anticlimactic. You have the whole first 16 episodes building up this hyperdystopian world being literally ripped apart by psychics who can't control this power and kids confronting the awful truth about the deaths of their peers... only to have some mutant rat mofos rebel. Kinda a disparity between the magnitudes of danger there.

 

Psychotic reality-warping telekinesis > mutant rats who kinda deserve to win anyways since they're basically enslaved

[GrimCW 658]

I see this is labeled movies/tv, are we taking it to games? i got more for that i can add later too

but...

 

Honestly? Sunset shimmer.. to quick to end

 

umm Bane from dark night rises... that whole movie blew, i wasn't expecting original bane, but that version.. terrible... even Natalia was a let down. Now the vixen assassin she was prior too... But honestly, how could anyone top the joker from dark knight.. i mean WOW.. as villians go.. that was just awesome!

But DKR was a bore fest from the get go.. Batman KILLED people, personally SHOOTING them breaking his own code. And most of it just played politics, and tried to hard to be some sort of come back rather than a continuation. Why did it need to come back?!

 

Megatron from the Bayformers movies.

So easy to kill REPEATEDLY, and to quick to strike without planning while getting walked all over. Made classic megatron seem like a genius , and the beast wars one like a mastermind of epic proportions. At least the old ones were strategists and militarily minded on taking out strategic targets and gathering resources to further their cause. Or were willing to retreat and continue the fight. Baytron just... died... yeah.. awesome villain.. his minions outlasted him.

Even classic megs managed to actually survive long enough to become Galvatron and then on afterwards as such. Despite getting his tail pipe handed to him by Optimus (whom he actually managed to kill instead!)

 

The gravedigger from Bones.

So much leading up to it and then.. a few pathetic mind games and it was over... wtfh? granted they came back with a couple more mind game episodes, but they had little tension compared to the original crimes. Was funny to see her head pop in the end though.. but they could've run that for another season, or at least a couple more episodes.. made a conspiracy out of it.. something.. but nope.. one episode and concluded.. anything after the original capture just turned drama... the show nose dived

Edited September 5, 2013 by GrimCW

[Discordian 6,019]

That's the eternal problem of western RPGs. On one hand you have the overly cinematic Bioware who focuses heavily on story and characters at the cost of deeply engaging gameplay.... on the other you have Bethesda who does exactly the opposite.

 

The reason why FNV was such a superior game to Fallout 3 is because Bethesda didn't even develop it. They outsourced it.

 

Basically somebody needs to reach across the river and grab someone else, because if we combine the elements into a new IP with cinematic stories and truly emergent gameplay, then we'll be talking.

 

For now, I'll just play my Persona games.

 

In that vein, if you don't get the true ending in Persona 4, the last few bosses you fight are pretty damn boring and basically damage sponges. 

 

Also for those who have seen it, I feel like the last third of the anime From the New World was pretty anticlimactic. You have the whole first 16 episodes building up this hyperdystopian world being literally ripped apart by psychics who can't control this power and kids confronting the awful truth about the deaths of their peers... only to have some mutant rat mofos rebel. Kinda a disparity between the magnitudes of danger there.

 

Psychotic reality-warping telekinesis > mutant rats who kinda deserve to win anyways since they're basically enslaved

Hell, I can even live with simple gameplay. The main problem is that none of the enemies feel like a threat, not because they are easy to defeat, but because they all behave the same way and move the same way and talk the same way and....well it goes on like that. Simple and repetitive gameplay is forgivable, making an enemy or boss that should have been awesome really lame because particle effects are attached to the character puppet and have them just clump into a mannequin heap when they die and have them run around like every single one of their lackeys and cast the same spells that you've run into everywhere else in the game....that's where I have a problem. There's no atmosphere to be had. I've never even believed that bosses, even final ones, should be hard to beat but they do need that atmosphere to feel like a boss or final boss or they turn out to be very anticlimactic.

[Megas 28,092]

General Scales from Starfox Adventures and both Letz Shake and Dark Star from No More Heroes. All three of them seem very threatening for the duration of their screen time(or in case of Scales, the entire game) only for the "true bad guy" to up and kill them(Andross, Henry Cooldown and Jeane respectively). It only bugged me when it happened with Scales/Andross though because at least Henry and Jeane's fights were awesome

Edited September 5, 2013 by Megas75

[Discordian 6,019]

General Scales from Starfox Adventures and both Letz Shake and Dark Star from No More Heroes. All three of them seem very threatening for the duration of their screen time(or in case of Scales, the entire game) only for the "true bad guy" to up and kill them(Andross, Henry Cooldown and Jeane respectively). It only bugged me when it happened with Scales/Andross though because at least Henry and Jeane's fights were awesome

General Scales was originally going to have a fight I think but they cut it out for whatever reason. At the very least I wish it wasn't as simple as "Attack him and go into cutscene"

 

 

I know I was blown away to find Andross still alive though cuz I whipped him a million times in the true ending of Starfox 64.

 

Edited September 5, 2013 by Discordian

[Dusknight Haze 161]

Hell, I can even live with simple gameplay. The main problem is that none of the enemies feel like a threat, not because they are easy to defeat, but because they all behave the same way and move the same way and talk the same way and....well it goes on like that. Simple and repetitive gameplay is forgivable, making an enemy or boss that should have been awesome really lame because particle effects are attached to the character puppet and have them just clump into a mannequin heap when they die and have them run around like every single one of their lackeys and cast the same spells that you've run into everywhere else in the game....that's where I have a problem. There's no atmosphere to be had. I've never even believed that bosses, even final ones, should be hard to beat but they do need that atmosphere to feel like a boss or final boss or they turn out to be very anticlimactic.

 

I can agree with most of this. I disagree about the simple gameplay part though. What's the point of playing a game with bad animation technology and lack of cohesive atmosphere if you are also trudging through an oversimplified mess with few options?

 

The engagement in Skyrim and Fallout, while low in combat itself, is massive in terms of approaches to combat. I just think that the plots and, like you said, atmosphere could be better.

 

Let's just hope TES VI is better. Word on the gaming street is that it's going to be freaking massive, probably all of Tamriel, with a new engine (finally), but no one knows when it will be released, and may have a 4-7 year dev cycle, which is pretty sad. Hopefully by then Bethesda will know how to animate characters in, well, a video game, lol.

[Discordian 6,019]

I can agree with most of this. I disagree about the simple gameplay part though. What's the point of playing a game with bad animation technology and lack of cohesive atmosphere if you are also trudging through an oversimplified mess with few options?

 

The engagement in Skyrim and Fallout, while low in combat itself, is massive in terms of approaches to combat. I just think that the plots and, like you said, atmosphere could be better.

 

Let's just hope TES VI is better. Word on the gaming street is that it's going to be freaking massive, probably all of Tamriel, with a new engine (finally), but no one knows when it will be released, and may have a 4-7 year dev cycle, which is pretty sad. Hopefully by then Bethesda will know how to animate characters in, well, a video game, lol.

I know it sounds weird to some people but I don't play video games for gameplay. It's probably the last thing I look at when playing a game. As long as the game can be beaten and I can see the story that's all that really matters.

 

That's not to say that I don't enjoy good gameplay when I find it though. In particular I love when JRPGs have interesting ability systems or have good puzzles like the Wild Arms series.

[GrimCW 658]

 

Let's just hope TES VI is better. Word on the gaming street is that it's going to be freaking massive, probably all of Tamriel, with a new engine (finally), but no one knows when it will be released, and may have a 4-7 year dev cycle, which is pretty sad. Hopefully by then Bethesda will know how to animate characters in, well, a video game, lol.

 

 

Skyrim had an all new engine with a helluva good animation run for a change. Sadly Bethesda isn't keen on animating, sooo.. didn't help to much. But compared to previous it is amazing...

[Krys9 456]

This topic got me thinking and the one thing that keeps popping up is General Scales, General Scales. So as you can tell I think General Scales was super anticlimactic and was a huge missed opportunity. I played through the game hoping to have an epic battle between Fox Mccloud and Scales only to be directed to a really lame cutscene of Scales giving up a Krazoa spirit because Andross told him to. Ugh.

[Discordian 6,019]

This topic got me thinking and the one thing that keeps popping up is General Scales, General Scales. So as you can tell I think General Scales was super anticlimactic and was a huge missed opportunity. I played through the game hoping to have an epic battle between Fox Mccloud and Scales only to be directed to a really lame cutscene of Scales giving up a Krazoa spirit because Andross told him to. Ugh.

I'm almost certain the Krazoa Spirit was forced from General Scales. He didn't seem very willing to give up the power it likely gave him.

[Krys9 456]

I'm almost certain the Krazoa Spirit was forced from General Scales. He didn't seem very willing to give up the power it likely gave him.

 

Either way it was still a poor excuse for a "battle". I mean c'mon! You know how great it would have been to actually be able to beat him up after all that. 

[Dusknight Haze 161]

Skyrim had an all new engine with a helluva good animation run for a change. Sadly Bethesda isn't keen on animating, sooo.. didn't help to much. But compared to previous it is amazing...

 

Skyrim's "Creation" engine was not new. It was a highly revamped and updated version of Gamebryo, merely written over enough to be considered a new engine. You can clearly tell that the rendering of graphics is extremely similar to Gamebryo. The physics were also done in Havok, like almost every game nowadays since it's considered so superior to everything else.

 

I never understood their problem with animating. Animating is not nearly as difficult as writing the code, since you're just scripting movements in the code you already wrote. It's more of a pain in the ass tedium than anything, since it requires a large volume of really easy work, and they definitely had the budget to pay people to do it...

 

Either way, it was still a good game. Just wasted potential in the graphics and atmosphere department, I think we can agree.

 

Anyways, back to the topic, another anticlimactic villain is Breen from Half-Life 2. Don't get me wrong, Half-Life 2 is easily my favorite or second favorite game of all time ever, but there really isn't even a boss battle. It's kind of pathetic, actually. 

[Discordian 6,019]

Either way it was still a poor excuse for a "battle". I mean c'mon! You know how great it would have been to actually be able to beat him up after all that.

Oh I'm not disagreeing, I was just pointing that out.

 

Sometimes I look back and think: What would Dinosaur Planet have been like? Would it have been any different story-wise?

[Krys9 456]

Oh I'm not disagreeing, I was just pointing that out.

 

Sometimes I look back and think: What would Dinosaur Planet have been like? Would it have been any different story-wise?

 

Are you speaking on behalf of actually including a battle segment rather than just a cutscene? If you are then I don't really think it would have affected much because if Fox would have defeated General Scales then the Krazoa spirit would probably leave his body and Fox would obtain it that way. Then on his way to go rescue Krystal he would run into Andross and you know what happens next. This is all an assumption of course if instead they included a battle element to it. To put it more simply you could have a fight scene then after it's over, the cutscene with Andross would just play and the story would continue that way.

[GrimCW 658]

Since we are adding game villains...

General Raam from Gears of War.

If you've ever played the PC version you've met the original Brumak, and THAT was a boss battle.

Raam after that was just lame.. No wonder they cut it!

 

And the Didact from Halo 4.. i mean come the *(&@ AWWWN!.. massively powerful alien in control of insane tech that can do all sorts of insane things, and he died in a freaken short as sin QTE.. He literally makes the general scales thing seem tolerable...

 

 

 

Skyrim's "Creation" engine was not new. It was a highly revamped and updated version of Gamebryo, merely written over enough to be considered a new engine. You can clearly tell that the rendering of graphics is extremely similar to Gamebryo. The physics were also done in Havok, like almost every game nowadays since it's considered so superior to everything else.

 

 

Hey if the Quake engine mod that was used for Half Life 1 could be considered new and "unique" than so can Creation

But if we're going that route, than ID has been using the same engine since Quake 1 updated and enhanced over the years....

Among other engines.. So no real new engines have come out since CryEngine?

 

and TBH i like PhysX better.. but not sure if it does ragdolls.. just everything else.

Havok IMO has always sucked.

Edited September 5, 2013 by GrimCW

[Solar Cloud 493]

Lord Lucien Fairfax. You go through Fable 2. You fight many of his henchmen and bandits. And how does it end?

 

You attack him once and he just falls off. All that just to take him down in one hit. How lame is that?

 

[Dusknight Haze 161]

Hey if the Quake engine mod that was used for Half Life 1 could be considered new and "unique" than so can Creation

But if we're going that route, than ID has been using the same engine since Quake 1 updated and enhanced over the years....

Among other engines.. So no real new engines have come out since CryEngine?

 

and TBH i like PhysX better.. but not sure if it does ragdolls.. just everything else.

Havok IMO has always sucked.

 

1. True. There's never a real reason to start from scratch. But there are always new engines every year, just never any that reach the notoriety of others. I'm also sure that Frostbite came out after CryEngine.

 

2. PhysX is nice, but the overhead is obscene. Source-modified Havok is not only superior in computation, but it will definitely destroy all other physics engines once Source 2 comes out next year, I can guarantee you that.

 

3. I have another example to add to the pile: The creator of SAO in SAO. While I appreciated the curveball the story through and the

"forgiveness" he is given

 

it was still a bit of a letdown. The ALO end was a bit more dramatic and better in that respect.

[Katana 298]

Far Cry 3. Let's just say that the game doesn't quite "bookend" itself appropriately. The game begins with your brother being shot by Vaas, and you attempting to escape the island. It ends with...characters you met about 1/3rd of the way through the game.