Or why it's more fun to kill someone who really pisses you off.

by Wisdom 

After a bit of a hiatus from writing editorials--stemming more from laziness than anything else--I came across the recent debates concerning villains in RPGs. I'd planned to write something concerning our videogame nemeses earlier this year, after I'd written about my chagrin at the lack of true heroes in RPGs, but that was lost in the swell of... let's just say other things came up. Anyways, having not yet seen a view I endorse, I've decided to add a bit of my own flair to this little discussion. And if I'm lucky, I'll be able to throw in a few heartless jibes while I'm at it.

I'll be the first to admit that glorification of the villain is growing out of hand. In this sense, I completely agree with Cloudslash--as a group of people who play entirely too many video games, we've become obsessed with the badass. The boy-done-good no longer appeases our "edgy, mature" outlooks... to really appreciate a game, there has to be some oppressive, dark theme lining its interior. Heaven forbid we take any pleasure in championing the cause of good--dammit, if I'm paying for a game, I want to be some torn badass who's in it for: a.) women, b.) revenge, c.) money/power/respect, or d.) killing God or some other sacriligeous theme. (Because sacrilege is mature, and darn it, we're a mature bunch of gamers, right?)

And that's completely ridiculous. People love Sephiroth because he's a mysterious, evil dude. There's been plenty of talk about even admiring him, for giving in to his darker impulses and satiating his primal side. And there's no question that he's an ineffable badass. But is this a reason to admire him? Well, aside from everyone loving psychotic mass murderers, no, it is not. People, Sephiroth went insane. Leaving aside the fact that he died in Nibelheim, by Cloud's hand, five years before FFVII began, Sephiroth's personality was that of an unstable, power-hungry man. What sort of villain is that? Yay, yet another idiot wants to eat the world. At least he didn't make excuses about it: Sephiroth was downright crazy. What's there to admire or idolize in that? I respect characters that have found balance with their violent urges, who are capable of causing a revolution within reasonable bounds. Sephiroth just went on a killing spree. He wasn't trying to change anything at all, unless by changing something you mean killing everyone, including himself. (Summoning a big-ass rock to crush the world has that strange side-effect of killing whoever's on the world, regardless of who summoned the thing.)

Most villains in video games follow this path. Very few villains have complex motives: Kefka was crazy. Zeromus was angry because he was evil. EVIL. Ooooh, there's a new one. Oh, the injustice: be evil, get locked away, exact revenge... this is our innovation and inspiration? Emporer Doel of Legend of Dragoon: evil. He wanted to nuke the world and recreate it in his image. Why? Just because. Ultimecia didn't even have a motive. Hell, Ultimecia was like a cameo in Final Fantasy VIII. Kuja wanted to be more powerful. Oooh, now if THAT isn't "edgy" and "complex," I don't know what is. All of these characters were badasses and had plenty of style... who the hell cares? They aren't complex or deep. People like them because they're evil. Somehow between the 16-bit era and the 128-bit era we decided that evil was cool as hell, and good was overplayed. Wow, look at that villain, he just killed an entire town! Mmmm... sexy evil badass, show me your cruelty! It turns me on in mysterious, forbidden ways.

Every now and then, badasses have legitimate motives. Deep villains are much more fun to fight against, because when you have a badass who's not only COOL and EDGY because he's TORN and CONFLICTED while being INCREDIBLY DARK AND EVIL AND SEXY, but also manages to have a reason for being said way, you can grow to really hate that villain. I wanted to smash Krelian's teeth down his throat. With a cannonball. Lined with spikes. But at the same time, I respected Krelian. As much as I was horrified by what Krelian did, I couldn't help but admit that the man was brilliant. Krelian was looking for something more. He truly believed that what he was doing was the key to furthering evolution. He wanted exactly what Fei did--to free humanity from all of their limitations. And he showed no pity for killing thousands of innocents, because he considered them necessary sacrifices. He didn't just haphazardly decide to start conducting debilitating experiments because he was bored. He had a legitimate, if incredibly twisted and disturbing, rationale for doing so. Ghaleon falls into the same vein. He thought humanity needed a goddess to unite them; in reality, all Ghaleon represented was an incredibly empathic pessimist. He saw the pain and the suffering people subjected themselves to without moral leadership: to him, the idea of free will was unthinkable. People were idiots, and without Althena they had no chance of saving themselves. (The more I talk about him, the more he sounds like Lucifer before the fall.) So he did whatever he had to in order to bring about Althena's resurrection. This isn't to say he didn't have a healthy stroke of evil in him: he fully planned on ruling by Althena's side, and he wasn't exactly merciful to towns he didn't like. (coughcoughVanecoughcough) But these villains incur more than digust and disbelief: not only was I horrified at what Ghaleon was doing, but I understood why he was doing it. (I mean I really understood, by the way. I understood why Sephiroth ate Nibelheim, but I wasn't exactly impressed.) I was somber when I beat both of those games, because although I knew I'd done the right thing, it wasn't a happy occasion. Ghaleon and Krelian were multi-faceted. They were villains, yes, but they are not the one-sided coins that our friendly Sephiroths and Ultimecias are. Both Ghaleon and Krelian were brilliant, intensely driven men, and I regretted that we saw different paths towards humanity's salvation.

The sad thing is, however, that even our heroes are falling into this trap. While there's nothing wrong with having a badass as the hero, I think it's ridiculous how people will develop a fanatical following for heroes with "dark, turbulent pasts" and then call the hero who's fighting to really save the world "lame and uninspired." People, it is much harder to resist temptation than to give into it. Any hero who can maintain a pure heart in the midst of a struggle that is challenging everything he's ever believed in is a hell of a lot tougher than some pansy who is tortured by his stained past. People always idolize Kain in Final Fantasy IV, because he was the dark, mysterious warrior. I love Kain as well, but I loved Cecil and Edge more because they fought where others would have given up. The same applies to FFVII: Cloud lost his childhood home to Sephiroth. Barret's life was destroyed by ShinRa. You think it was easy for them to fight for that? Although many people love to believe that revenge is the greatest motivator, try and imagine what Barret and Cloud were getting themselves into. ShinRa ran the world. As far as revolutions go, you don't get much more extreme than that. While I appreciate the added depth a conflicted supporting character can bring to a game, they are no more special than the true heroes.

And the heroes are just that: heroes. They commit no atrocities, as some of the editorials have claimed. The heroes offer people what the villains don't: freedom of will. While I will be the first to agree that murder is murder, under any circumstances, the heroes never force anyone to die. (Barring Barret's terrorist actions, which he later admits were wrong.) Allowing someone the a legitimate choice (not join or die, a la villainry) immediately strips away the "atrocity" status from any of the actions the heroes must commit. Cloud never stormed into a ShinRa barracks and randomly started executing sleeping soldiers. He went to stop ShinRa from draining the Earth any further, and the ShinRa troops chose to stand against him. And yes, he killed them, but at no point did Cloud do a "Yay, I'm a cold-blooded killer" dance. (And yes, Sephiroth does do one of those.) The heroes are forced to undergo the necessary evils to accomplish their mission, but they glean no pleasure from it, and most importantly they never refuse their adversaries the chance to repent. One of the most poignant examples of this lies with the Turks: when Tseng stands ready to die, the heroes don't laugh at him and skip away happily. They never chose to fight against any of ShinRa's subordinates. Cloud's beef was with the officials responsible for the slow destruction of the earth. And at the very end of the game, when the party meets the remnants of the Turks, you are fully allowed to walk away from the impending fight. This does not give us sufficient grounds to compare the acts of the villain to the acts of the hero. The heroes do what they must to save the world, while the villains do everything they can to destroy it. Their motives and their methods are completely different, even if they happen to share the same outcome to a specific encounter. (I.E. in either situation, someone ends up dying.) And as a matter of point, I'd like to note that Vyse, being a Blue Rogue, never stole from merchant ships. Blue Rogues only stole from Black Pirates, or Valua, since Valua was EVIL and EDGY at the time.

It disappoints me to no end that villains, because of their sleek, asthetic nature, are taken more seriously and considered more mature, than most of the heroes in modern RPGs. A few of the villains deserve credit where credit is due, but on the whole, I agree with Cloudslash: as plot devices, cool villains are a plus, but their over-idolization speaks very lowly of our capacity, as gamers, to appreciate true depth.